Houston woman says intermittent fasting helped her achieve her weight loss goals

HOUSTON – Some experts say eating small portions frequently throughout the day is the best type of diet, but intermittent fasting is the opposite concept and the National Institute on Aging claims it could make you live longer.

A recent study in mice showed increasing the time between meals made mice healthier overall and live longer compared to mice who ate more frequently. A local Houston woman said it worked for her to achieve major weight loss.

Tika Collins has been training for bodybuilding competitions for five years.

“I am a nationally ranked physique competitor,” Collins said.

Collins also trains other people to look their best and knows it's a struggle. Personally, she's been on and off diets to get to her competitive body weight, until she found a diet that helped shed the pounds she just couldn't get rid of with workouts alone.

“I had tried everything from dieting, doing two hours of cardio, and nothing seemed to work," she said. "So, once I researched intermittent fasting, I actually incorporated it into myself and my diet and my workouts and everything I was doing and I lost about 30 pounds in two months.”

When it comes to intermittent fasting, there's several ways to do it, according to Healthline:

- The 16/8 method: is skipping breakfast and restricting your daily eating period to 8 hours, such as 1-9 p.m., then you fast for 16 hours 

- The 5:2 method: is where you consume 500-600 calories on two non-consecutive days of the week, but eat normally the other 5

- Eat-stop-eat: is fasting for an entire 24 hours, once or twice a week

Collins practices the 16/8 method.

“If you have the eight hours, you can eat a meal every two hours and I just think that works for people's schedule better,” she said. “Basically, like if you hit a plateau and you just have that stubborn fat, like ‘OK, I’ve been working out, my legs are getting toned, my arms are getting toned but this right here doesn't want to go away,' those are the people that I recommend that type of diet to.”

Collins said this diet is not good for some people, such as people who have suffered from an eating disorder, or diabetics since the illness requires healthy fuel to keep blood sugars in check.