If you pay attention to health and fitness trends, you’ve probably seen the words ‘intermittent fasting’ pop up plenty of times in the past year.
For the uninitiated, the term describes a method of scheduled fasting in order to condense food consumption into a smaller part of the day. It’s beginning to gain popularity among celebrities—with many of them claiming it’s helped them shed unwanted weight.
Lots of questionable fad-diets involve fasting, but intermittent fasting pertains to be a healthier alternative; scheduling the majority of your carbohydrate intake into a smaller section of each day (usually around eight hours).
As of October 2019, Jennifer Aniston is the latest star to express her love for the diet. The 50-year-old actress revealed that she doesn’t eat breakfast and only consumes liquids like coffee and celery juice in mornings, consolidating the majority of her eating into the final part of the day.
Scroll down for every female celebrity who’s discussed the benefits of intermittent fasting.
(Disclaimer: As with all diets involving fasting, you should consult a healthcare professional before undertaking any kind of restrictive eating schedule.)
Gisele Bündchen
In her book Lessons, Bündchen revealed she follows the popular 5:2 version of intermittent fasting, which involves eating normally on five days of the week and restricting calories to 500-600 calories on the remaining two.
While the fasting window is up to the individual, the Brazilian supermodel explained she fasts until lunchtime two days of the week to allow her body time to rest and digest.
Elsa Pataky
Spanish star Elsa Pataky started incorporating intermittent fasting into her diet and exercise routine after being put on to it by her husband Chris Hemsworth.
“[Chris], he got me into fasting. So I’ve started fasting now, I was always like ‘Hmmm, I don’t know!’, and it’s really hard, but then I started reading about it,” she said in an interview in December 2019.
“Although, I was like ‘I don’t want to lose weight’—because it’s a great way to lose weight, if you need to lose weight—but you won’t lose weight if your body doesn’t need to. And I learnt that, doing it.
“But I read that it was amazing for anti-ageing, so I was like ‘I’m in! I’m in!’ [laughs]. So he started it, and then I followed.”
Jennifer Aniston
Aniston disclosed her penchant for intermittent fasting in October 2019, saying since starting, she’s “noticed a difference” in how she looks and feels.
In an interview with Radio Times, she said: “I do intermittent fasting, so there’s no food in the morning.” Instead of having a large breakfast in the A.M., Aniston told the magazine: “Today, I woke up and had a celery juice. Then I started to brew some coffee, but I don’t drink coffee that early.”
Kourtney Kardashian
In 2018, Kourtney Kardashian explained that she’s a fan of intermittent fasting in a post made on her official app.
Kardashian, who founded the health and lifestyle website Poosh in 2019, wrote of her diet: “I wouldn’t eat past 7 p.m. at night and then I would wait to eat breakfast the next day until after my morning workout, which would be around 10:30 a.m. to 11 a.m.”
Halle Berry
In November 2018, Halle Berry revealed her love for intermittent fasting via an Instagram story post.
Speaking with her personal trainer, Peter Lee Thomas, Berry revealed that she fasts most mornings and eats her first meal of the day around 2 p.m., saying: “Not that I don’t get nutrients and vitamins and minerals [during that time]… I just don’t sit down and have a meal.”
Scarlett Johansson
Johansson followed a gruelling diet and workout regime for her physically demanding role as Black Widow in The Avengers, and it shows.
In April 2019, prior to the release of Avengers: Endgame, Johansson’s trainer, Eric Johnson, told Harper’s BAZAAR U.S. that the actress fasted for around 12 hours each day. “That was a general guideline—at moments we pushed beyond that to 14-15 hours depending on the filming schedule,” Johnson added.
Reese Witherspoon
Witherspoon hasn’t explicitly used the words “intermittent fasting” to discuss her diet, but told Radio Times in 2019 that, like her Morning Show co-star Jennifer Aniston, she only consumes fluids (i.e. coffee and “green juice”) in the mornings.
Vanessa Hudgens
In May 2019, actress Vanessa Hudgens revealed that she’s a fan of the popular 16/8 variant of the intermittent fasting diet—meaning that she eats between eight hours of the day, and fasts for the remaining 16 hours.
In an interview with POPSUGAR, Hudgens said she’s already seeing benefits from the diet, saying that when she started, she had “way more clarity, and I was more energised and felt even stronger in my workouts”. Despite feeling better, Hudgens warned of the diet: “It’s rough, it’s no joke. I’m not gonna lie and say it’s easy.”
Mindy Kaling
The Office‘s Mindy Kaling has apparently tried an intermittent fasting diet, if a humorous tweet she made in 2018 is anything to go by. Referring to the popular ’16/8′ variant of intermittent fasting, Kaling tweeted: “16:8 more like 16 hate.”
