"Some people say that intermittent fasting is just another way of restricting calories."

Wow, Watdanby, quite the story and congrats!! It's wonderful that you and your wife had each other for support and to do this journey with!

I'm no expert, but I thought I might expand slightly on your comment above. Yes, there is caloric reduction in fasting, but the key aspect is a metabolic shift. Your body preferentially will use glucose as fuel. Only when the supply of readily available glucose gets low enough does the body shift metabolism and start burning fat. And technically (as well as not a good thing), it will eventually go to using protein if not enough fat (lipids) are available. Fasting induces that shift. In general, it takes a good 8 and more like 12 hours to reduce your glucose supplies to start that shift. It's that shift to using more fats that makes the difference. That is also the idea behind the Keto diet. Simplistically, with the diet you are trying to make so little sugars available that you trigger lipolysis (fat metabolism). Ketones are a breakdown product of fatty acids, hence the name Keto diet.

The duration is not as critical as just getting to that point of burning fat, although, obviously the longer the greater fat burning your get. You can also enhance it by restricting or eliminating carbohydrates at the last meal or exercising to burn glucose and push towards lipolysis.

I say this to encourage folks to not feel you have to try and do whole day or three day fasts. Try skipping breakfast (and lunch maybe) two or three times a week. Take small steps first to get the feel.

Lakedog

PS Going to get on my soap box. You see ads all the time about keto supplements. I don't understand them. Most state they have ketones in them, but why would that help? Ketones don't drive lipolysis, they are a breakdown product generated by it. You can buy test strips to measure ketones in your blood, but who cares if that goes up because you ingested ketones, it's your own production of them that reflects what you want. Oh well, marketers......