Yes, absolutely! It is a very useful tool to boost ketone levels and fat burning. But it’s best to take it easy when you first start out on a low-carbohydrate diet. 

Every time we eat, we trigger insulin production. Insulin production is not limited to only when we eat food containing carbohydrates. 

Intermittent fasting is a great way of allowing your body to switch from being a sugar burning system into a fat burning system. 

How to start intermittent fasting on a low carb diet 

First of all…. 

No snacking! Start with 3 meals a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner.  

If you’ve been used to snacking throughout the day, cut these snacks out and add a little bit more fat to each meal to allow you to go longer in between meals without getting too hungry.

Once you’re comfortable getting through each day without relying on snacks, then you can start to push out eating your breakfast each morning by one hour.

So, if you are used to eating breakfast at 7am each morning, then push that meal out until 8am. 

If this proves a bit difficult because you are on your daily commute to work by then, then you can create a snacky breakfast to take with you, either to eat on the way or once you have a convenient time. 

Again, as you get comfortable, keep pushing this first meal of the day out until you are able to go through until 12 noon before requiring to eat. 

Congratulations! You’ve just eliminated one meal – pushing your break-fast until lunch time! 

This is a brilliant way to heal insulin resistance. The time in between dinner the night before and lunch next day, as the next meal, is getting longer and you intermittent fast for a good 16-18 hrs.  

Now ideally, the time between lunch and dinner gets shorter.

For example, if we eat lunch at noon, do not eat dinner later than 6pm. So from 6- 7pm when you finish dinner, you have time to intermittent fast until next day at noon when you eat the next lunch. That is 18 hours of fasting.  

There may be times that you have to move this schedule around of course. Life will always throw dinner parties, holidays and unexpected moments your way, but it’s better just to have a mindset of the 80/20 rule.

Stick to your plan 80% of the time and allow 20% for when your eating plans are rescheduled. Most of the time, you can still stick to 2 meals per day just by shuffling things around a bit. 

After a while, you’ll find that you never really get overly hungry. When the body runs on ketones, which are the by-product of fat burning, we have very stable blood sugar levels. No more ups and downs throughout the day.

Ketones are the original fuel sources of the brain. Originally, our bodies were designed to run on ketones, not glucose.  

Carbohydrates from grains were introduced to us way when humans started agriculture. Before that, we used to eat what we could find as plants, fruits, roots, nuts and we would occasionally hunt for larger sources of protein.