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30 Days of Alternate-Day Fasting – 10lbs of Body Fat (Before & After)

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One YouTuber spent a month eating everything he wanted every other day — and still lost 10 pounds of fat.

Brendan Jones, who runs the fitness channel Goal Guys, decided to test one of the harshest versions of intermittent fasting on himself: alternate-day fasting, or ADF. For 30 days he alternated between feeding days, when he ate normally within a set window, and 36-hour stretches of eating absolutely nothing. He filmed the whole thing, tracking his body composition and gym performance along the way.

• Jones alternated normal “feed” days with full 36-hour fasts every other day for 30 consecutive days.
• He lost roughly 9 to 12 pounds of body fat over the month.
• His body fat percentage dropped by about 4% in four weeks.

Mechanism of the Protocol

Alternate-day fasting isn’t the same as the more familiar 16:8 intermittent fasting schedule that limits eating to an 8-hour window each day. In its true form, ADF has you eating without restriction for roughly 12 hours on one day, then abstaining from food entirely for the next 36 hours before the cycle resets. Jones ran the strict version — no calorie floor on fasting days, just water and black coffee until the next feeding window opened.

That 36-hour stretch is the part that trips people up. It’s not a single skipped meal; it’s a full day-and-a-half without food, twice, sometimes three times a week, for an entire month. Jones documented the mental and physical grind of that stretch as much as the results themselves, noting how the first several fasts hit noticeably harder than the ones toward the end of the 30 days.

The Numbers Behind the Transformation

By day 30, Jones had shed an estimated 9 to 12 pounds of body fat and cut his body fat percentage by close to 4%. For a month-long trial, that’s a rapid rate of fat loss — the kind of drop that typically takes six to eight weeks on a more moderate calorie deficit. He tracked the change using consistent body composition measurements throughout the challenge rather than relying on the scale alone, since weight swings on a 36-hour fast can be misleading due to water loss and glycogen depletion.

Nine to twelve pounds of body fat gone, and roughly a 4% drop in body fat percentage — in just 30 days of eating everything every other day.

Muscle, Energy, and Gym Performance

The core question Jones set out to answer wasn’t just whether ADF burns fat — it was whether the extreme fasting windows would eat into lean muscle along with it. He kept training through the month, monitoring how his lifts held up on both feeding days and the days following a 36-hour fast, since strength retention is the real test of whether an aggressive cut like this is worth the tradeoff. That question sits at the center of most body recomposition discussions — losing fat is easy if you don’t care what else goes with it.

Energy levels, unsurprisingly, weren’t flat across the month. Jones described the fasting days as manageable but taxing, particularly in the back half of each 36-hour stretch, while the feeding days brought back both appetite and workout capacity fairly quickly.

ADF as Extreme Fasting

Compared with time-restricted eating or even a 24-hour fast once or twice a week, alternate-day fasting sits at the far end of the intermittent fasting spectrum precisely because of that recurring 36-hour no-food window. It’s the same territory explored in pieces on eating just one meal a day — the idea that longer gaps between meals can accelerate fat loss, but at a cost in day-to-day comfort and social flexibility that most moderate fasting protocols avoid.

Jones wrapped the 30 days with the fat loss numbers holding up and his training performance largely intact, but he was upfront that the protocol isn’t something he’d recommend running indefinitely — a 36-hour fast every other day for a month is a stress test, not a lifestyle, and the real number that mattered to him wasn’t the 10 pounds lost but whether he could still hit his normal lifts on day 29 the same way he did on day 1.