I had someone ask me today what a condensed eating window is. I imagine a few people wonder about it, so I decided to do a quick and hopefully simple explanation of it here.
Depending on the intermittent fasting diet protocol you follow, the condensed eating window , is simply to the time you take in food.
Let’s take a couple of examples that use this process.
The Fast 5 Diet
The fast 5 intermittent fasting plan, works on a 19 – 5 protocol. So you fast for 19 hours, and have 5 hours in which to eat. So your condensed eating window on this plan is simply 5 hours.
Leangains
The leangains plan works on a 16 – 8 plan, so in this case the condensed eating window is 8 hours and you fast for 16 hours.
There is no fixed rule for this eating window, again, you can either follow a plan the like ones I mention here, or simply adjust it to something you feel comfortable with. I have played around in the past with a condensed eating window as small as 3 hours, again, usually between 5 and 8pm on Mondays and Tuesdays. There are no hard of fast rules here.
Not all intermittent fasting plans have a condensed eating window, for example eat stop eat works on a 24hr fasting period, so no food is consumed during that time. So there you go, a condensed eating window is just a period of time you eat between fasts.
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