One of your body’s main goals is to save and store calories so you won’t starve to death. Fat chance. It’s a real miser and it will slow your metabolism down to achieve it’s goal. That’s what it does. You go on different diet strategies and it works for a little while, but once your body catches on, it’s over. You plateau, stall out, then go back to what you were doing in frustration. Your body is a smart cookie, forgive the pun.

What a lot of folks are doing these days, is called intermittent fasting. You don’t necessarily change the amount of calories you’re taking in, you are changing the pattern with which you take them in. This throws your metabolism off and causes you to burn fat and drop pounds. When the body doesn’t know what to do, it starts burning calories. We like that.

Think of any major life change you’ve experienced: a new job, a move to another location, or an emotional separation, (the worst) even a promotion will give you a metabolic spike. Anything that could change your eating patterns. But then after a bit, things return to normal, and so does your waistline. We don’t like that. Plus, it confuses and demoralizes the hell out us.

On my six day drive out west, I dropped 11 pounds just sitting behind a steering wheel. My caloric intake didn’t change, my eating patterns did. As my metabolism went up, my pants fell down. I liked that.

If you examine some of your previous experiences, you might come to the same conclusion: You need to keep your body out of the loop. So to speak.

In a nutshell, here’s what folks are doing. Remember the word intermittent. A few days a week, let’s say you eat your last meal at 6:00 pm. You go to bed without a snack at 10:00 pm and sleep until 6:00 am. You might have a little black coffee or green tea in the morning and hold off eating until 10:00 am.

That is a 16 hour, intermittent fast my friend, and you have just hit your metabolic panic button. Battle stations! We are burning now, baby. Hold on to your drawers.

Now you have an eight hours window to eat your two or three meals for the day. Don’t get crazy just eat normally. Repeat if necessary, or hold off and try it again in a few days. Intermittently.

That’s the latest craze in a nutshell. The moral of the story is to always keep your metabolism guessing. This is one good way to do it.