Ok, first, you are NOT intermittent fasting. You are skipping breakfast. I have written extensively about that topic and also did a video on it.
Here are the key points:
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To qualify as intermittent fasting (as in having the physiological benefits of fasting) you need to be fasted for at least 16h. What you are doing is what most people claiming to be doing intermittent fasting are doing… you have an 8 hours eating window (for example eating from noon to 8pm) and thus conclude that you are fasted for 16 hours. That is not the case. Being fasted is not the time spent not eating. It’s the time between the moment you have digested and absorbed everything from your last meal and the next meal. If your last meal ends at 8pm, you are not fasted at 8:01…you are not fasted at 9, 10 or 11. In fact, if the meal was of a decent size you will likely not be fasted for at least 6 hours after your meal. So you end up fasting for maybe 8-9 hours.
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Fasted time when you are awake and active is more effective (to get the physiological benefits from fasting) than when you are sleeping. If most of your fasted time is when you sleep and you only have like 6h fasted while awake and active (from the moment you wake up to your first meal), it is much less effective than true intermittent fasting, like described here:
- The article above has a schedule where you only have a feeding window at the end of the day (up to bedtime). So that gives you around 12h of fasting while awake.
Anyway, that doesn’t mean that what you are doing is not going to work. It’s just incorrect to think that you are intermittent fasting. It’s an easy mistake though, because people like to market that as intermittent fasting because it’s the “easy way” to do it and still make you believe that you are part of the group.
Now, to the real question. Can it work?
Sure, if you don’t increase the carbs and fat content of the two remaining meals. What typically happens though (skipping breakfast is probably the no.1 fat loss strategy in the gen pop since the 1960s… which is NOT a good sign considering that the success rate of dieting in the gen pop is less than 10%) is that when you skip breakfast, it typically lead to overeating in the later meals.
Another issue, if you are interested in being muscular, is that it will be hard to get enough protein in 2 meals. You might end up losing muscle in the long run.
In that sense my recommendation is to add the shakes. Protein itself can’t really be stored as fat so adding the shake will not slow down the process and might help with muscle mass and satiety.