Fasted FASTED

Intermittent fasting schedule

A 20:4 schedule is a four-hour eating window — 4pm to 8pm on the default here — with twenty hours outside it. Four hours is one large meal and something either side of it, which is the point at which the schedule starts deciding your day rather than fitting into it.

Four hours is one large meal and something either side of it, and at this point the schedule is deciding your day rather than fitting into it. Two things get harder in the same step: eating enough protein, which is the thing most people on short windows fall short of, and eating socially, because four hours a day misses most of the times other people eat. Neither is a reason not to run it. Both are reasons to plan the window around the meals that matter rather than around a number.

Pick the schedule and the hour you want to eat first, and this page prints the week, a sheet for the fridge and a calendar file your phone will keep. Every schedule below is on this page already, with its times worked out — nothing here needs a form filled in before it will tell you anything.

Your week

20:4 — 16:00 to 20:00

Days

Leave a day unticked and it prints as a day off, with no event in the calendar file.

Mon
16:00 to 20:00
Tue
16:00 to 20:00
Wed
16:00 to 20:00
Thu
16:00 to 20:00
Fri
16:00 to 20:00
Sat
16:00 to 20:00
Sun
16:00 to 20:00
Eating window
4h
Fasting
20h
Fast runs
20:00–16:00
Days
7/7

Every day. Nothing is fixed here — every field above overrides the default, and the default is the hour the window closes minus the window itself.

Put this week in your calendar, or on the fridge

The calendar file publishes 4 weeks of eating-window blocks from today, one on each day you ticked. Because the address never changes and the events are built from the day it is read, a calendar that subscribes to it instead of importing it once never runs out — it fetches again about every 24 hours and always has 4 weeks ahead of it. Each block is marked transparent, so it draws as a bar without reporting you busy, and the times carry no time zone: if you land in another country your window is still the same hour on the clock in front of you.

Download the calendar file Quiet version Print the week

The quiet version, and why it is here

A calendar gets shared — with a partner, with a team, with whoever at work can see what is in your day. Somebody else's screen is not the place your eating gets disclosed by a tool that never asked, so the quiet file titles every block with the hours and nothing else. It names no schedule, carries no description, no link and no mention of this site anywhere in it. Same blocks, same times, nothing legible about why.

To subscribe rather than download

In Google Calendar, use Other calendars → From URL; on iPhone, Settings → Calendar → Accounts → Add Account → Other → Add Subscribed Calendar; in Outlook, Add calendar → Subscribe from web. Paste this address:

Put this planner on your own site

The widget below is free to embed anywhere. Paste this and it carries the credit link with it — the link sits outside the frame on purpose, because nothing inside an iframe is visible to a search engine.

Every fasting schedule, with its hours

Six schedules, gentlest first. The times beside each one are its default — the hour the window closes, minus the window — and every one of them is a link that loads the planner already set to it.

12:12 — 08:00 to 20:00

A 12:12 schedule is a twelve-hour eating window and a twelve-hour gap — breakfast at 8am and the last mouthful by 8pm on the default here. Nothing outside the window but water, black coffee or plain tea. It is the mildest schedule on this page and the one most people are still running six months later.

Fast: 12 hours, 20:00 to 08:00. Suits: A first schedule, a week with early starts, or anyone who has been eating from 7am to 11pm and wants the smallest change that is still a change.

14:10 — 10:00 to 20:00

A 14:10 schedule is a ten-hour eating window — 10am to 8pm on the default here — with fourteen hours between the last meal and the first. It keeps a real breakfast and still moves the evening meal earlier than most people were eating, which is why it survives a working week better than a tighter window does.

Fast: 14 hours, 20:00 to 10:00. Suits: Anyone who wants breakfast, works early, trains in the morning, or found sixteen hours made the afternoon miserable.

16:8 — 12:00 to 20:00

A 16:8 schedule is an eight-hour eating window and a sixteen-hour fast — most commonly noon to 8pm, with nothing but water, black coffee or plain tea outside it. On those hours you are asleep for seven or eight of the sixteen, so what you actually give up is breakfast and anything after dinner.

Fast: 16 hours, 20:00 to 12:00. Suits: The default, and the one with the most written about it. It fits an ordinary working day without moving lunch or dinner.

18:6 — 14:00 to 20:00

An 18:6 schedule is a six-hour eating window — 2pm to 8pm on the default here — leaving eighteen hours between the last meal and the first. Two meals fit inside it comfortably and three do not, so most people who run it treat lunch as the meal that moved rather than the meal that vanished.

Fast: 18 hours, 20:00 to 14:00. Suits: Someone already comfortable on 16:8 who wants a tighter window, or anyone whose day genuinely has no room for a midday meal.

20:4 — 16:00 to 20:00

A 20:4 schedule is a four-hour eating window — 4pm to 8pm on the default here — with twenty hours outside it. Four hours is one large meal and something either side of it, which is the point at which the schedule starts deciding your day rather than fitting into it.

Fast: 20 hours, 20:00 to 16:00. Suits: Experienced fasters who have already run 18:6 for a while, and whose day has one meal in it that everything else can hang off.

OMAD (23:1) — 19:00 to 20:00

An OMAD schedule is one hour of eating a day — 7pm to 8pm on the default here — and twenty-three hours outside it. The fasting half is simple; the hard part is that a whole day of food has to fit on one plate, and the commonest thing that happens on OMAD is under-eating by accident.

Fast: 23 hours, 20:00 to 19:00. Suits: People who genuinely prefer one meal, and who are willing to check what that meal has to hold rather than assume.

Fasts of 24h, 36h, 48h and 72h are not on this page and that is deliberate: an extended fast is one event with a start and an end, not a window that repeats every day, and a calendar file that put one on a Tuesday every week would be publishing a schedule nobody described. The extended fast planner takes those hour by hour.

When should the eating window be? The trials disagree

This is the question behind most of the searches that reach this page, and the honest answer is that nobody has settled it. Three large randomised trials have asked it directly and they do not agree with one another. All three are below, with what each one actually measured.

A twelve-week randomised trial put 116 adults on either a noon-to-8pm eating window or three structured meals a day. The difference in weight lost between the groups was not statistically significant, and the fasting group lost significantly more lean mass. Lowe DA et al. Effects of Time-Restricted Eating on Weight Loss and Other Metabolic Parameters in Women and Men with Overweight and Obesity: The TREAT Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Internal Medicine, 2020;180(11):1491-1499.

A fourteen-week randomised trial gave 90 adults the same calorie restriction, and put half of them on an eight-hour window finishing by 3pm. The early-window group lost 2.3 kg more. Jamshed H et al. Effectiveness of Early Time-Restricted Eating for Weight Loss, Fat Loss, and Cardiometabolic Health in Adults with Obesity: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Internal Medicine, 2022;182(9):953-962.

A twelve-month randomised trial in 139 adults compared calorie restriction inside an 8am-to-4pm window against the same calorie restriction with no window at all. The two groups did not differ significantly on weight, body fat or any metabolic risk factor measured. Liu D et al. Calorie Restriction with or without Time-Restricted Eating in Weight Loss. New England Journal of Medicine, 2022;386(16):1495-1504.

What every one of those trials did find is that the people who kept to the schedule got the result the schedule produced. That is an argument for choosing hours your week can hold, not an argument for a particular hour. If you want the case for each side of the morning-and-evening question laid out properly, Best Time Window for Intermittent Fasting: Morning vs Evening is the page for it.

What this page will not tell you, and why

A schedule tool that quietly leaves out the answer people came for reads as an oversight. Here is what is missing on purpose.

“This window will make you lose weight.”

No schedule on this page has been shown to cause weight loss on its own. Every trial that found weight loss on time-restricted eating found it alongside eating less, and the largest trial that controlled for that found no difference at all. The window is a structure for eating less, not a mechanism.

“This is the optimal time of day to eat.”

Nobody knows. One large trial favours an early window, two others found the window position made no measurable difference once calories matched. Anyone telling you there is a correct hour is ahead of the evidence.

“Keeping the same hours every day matters more than the hours you pick.”

It is a reasonable thing to believe and it has not been tested against the alternative in a trial. What is known is that adherence predicts the result in every study that measured it, which is an argument for a schedule you can keep — not proof that consistency itself does something.

“A longer fast is a better fast.”

The trials comparing window lengths head to head are small and inconsistent, and none of them establishes a ranking. Going from 16:8 to 20:4 is a real cost in food, protein and company; it has not been shown to buy a proportional return.

The window is the timing. The rest of the question is what goes in it

A schedule tells you when the kitchen is open and nothing else. Two things decide whether it works. The first is what is allowed outside the window, and the answer genuinely changes with what you are fasting for — a splash of milk that is irrelevant to a weight goal is not irrelevant to a blood-glucose one. The checker answers that item by item for five different goals. The second is the first meal, which is where a short window most often goes wrong: the refeed planner sets out the order and the size by how long the fast actually was.

16:8 Intermittent Fasting: The Most Popular Schedule Explained is the long-form version of the most common schedule here. If your week does not have the same shape twice, Intermittent Fasting for Shift Workers: Making IF Work Around Any Schedule is the one to read before setting the days. And What to Eat During Your Eating Window covers what the window is for.

The whole fast, in four tools

These four were built to sit together. One plans the window, one answers what may go in while it runs, one handles the meal that ends it, and one covers the fasts too long to be a daily schedule.

  • Plan Fasting Schedule Planner — you are here. When the window is, every day of the week — with a calendar file and a sheet.
  • Hold Does It Break a Fast? Whether a thing breaks the fast, item by item, for five different goals.
  • End How to Break a Fast What to eat first when it finishes, in what order, by how long you fasted.
  • Longer Extended Fast Planner A single fast of 24 hours or more, planned hour by hour.

How the schedule is worked out

Two inputs and one subtraction. You choose a protocol and the hour of your first meal; the window is that hour plus the protocol's eating hours, and the fast is everything else. Six protocols run from 12:12 to 23:1, each one a pair of numbers that add to twenty-four, and every pair is the pair the Fasted app itself ships — the list is pinned to the app's own protocol catalogue and a test fails the build if the two ever disagree.

The default first meal is derived rather than typed. One anchor sits in the configuration, the hour the window closes, and every protocol's default is that hour minus its own window: eight in the morning on 12:12, ten on 14:10, noon on 16:8, two in the afternoon on 18:6, four on 20:4, seven in the evening on 23:1. Eight at night is the anchor because dinner is the meal people plan the rest of the day around and the one they are least willing to move, and a default that puts the last mouthful there leaves an ordinary evening meal inside the window at every protocol. It is a default and not a recommendation, and every field on the page overrides it.

Days of the week are a filter over the same window rather than a second schedule. A day you leave out is printed as a day off with the row still there, because a week plan with Wednesday missing is a plan somebody has to count on their fingers, and it produces no event in the calendar file.

The calendar file publishes four weeks of events from today, one block on each chosen day, and it is written as individual events rather than a repeating rule. That is a decision about honesty rather than a limitation: a recurrence rule with no end date says forever, and nobody subscribing to a schedule has agreed to eat between these hours indefinitely. The times carry no time zone at all, which in the calendar specification means local wall-clock time wherever the file is read — somebody who flies to Denver wants noon in Denver, not seven in the evening because noon at home said so. Every block is marked transparent, so it draws as a block without reporting the reader busy.

What is not worked out anywhere here is which hours are better than which. The three largest randomised trials of time-restricted eating disagree with each other, two of them finding no advantage to the window's position once calories were matched, and this page prints all three rather than picking the one that sells a schedule.

Where this comes from

  1. 1. Effects of Time-Restricted Eating on Weight Loss and Other Metabolic Parameters (TREAT randomised trial) — Lowe et al., JAMA Internal Medicine, 2020
  2. 2. Effectiveness of Early Time-Restricted Eating for Weight Loss, Fat Loss, and Cardiometabolic Health — Jamshed et al., JAMA Internal Medicine, 2022
  3. 3. Calorie Restriction with or without Time-Restricted Eating in Weight Loss — Liu et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 2022
  4. 4. RFC 5545 — Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar) — Desruisseaux (ed.), IETF, 2009

Nothing on this site is medically reviewed — it cites its sources so you can check them. Read our editorial policy. Method last checked 31 August 2026.

Why a file beats a picture of a table

Search for a fasting schedule and every result hands you the same thing: an image of a grid with hours written in it. It answers the question and then it is over, because nothing about it survives the moment you close the tab. The schedule has to be remembered, and it has to be remembered on the day you are least able to — the third Wednesday, when the week has gone sideways and the decision is being made at half past eleven in a corridor.

The thing that already reminds people about time is the calendar they carry. So the artifact here is a real one: blocks in the calendar you already look at, drawn as blocks rather than fired as alarms, showing at a glance whether the window collides with the meeting at seven. It renews itself. Nobody has to come back to this page for it to keep working, which is the only test of a tool that matters.

The sheet exists for the other half of the same problem. A fridge is where a household schedule is actually read, and a printed week is the version somebody else in the house can see without being told.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a 16:8 fasting schedule?
Sixteen hours without food and an eight-hour window in which you eat — most commonly noon to 8pm, though the hours are yours to pick. Outside the window the usual allowance is water, black coffee and plain tea. The arithmetic is friendlier than the number sounds: on a noon-to-8pm window you are asleep for seven or eight of the sixteen hours, so what you are actually giving up is breakfast and anything after dinner. Every other schedule on this page is the same idea with the window made longer or shorter — 12:12 keeps twelve hours, 18:6 keeps six, OMAD keeps one.

When should my eating window be?
Nobody can tell you honestly, and the trials disagree. A twelve-week randomised trial in 116 adults put one group on a noon-to-8pm window and found no statistically significant difference in weight lost against three structured meals a day — and significantly more lean mass lost in the fasting group. A fourteen-week trial in 90 adults, with calories matched, found an eight-hour window finishing by 3pm lost 2.3 kg more than the same calories eaten later. A twelve-month trial in 139 adults found an 8am-to-4pm window added nothing measurable on top of the calorie restriction both groups were doing. That is genuinely mixed evidence, and anyone naming a correct hour is ahead of it. What every one of those trials did find is that the people who stuck to the schedule got the result, which is an argument for picking hours your week can actually hold.

Do I keep the same hours every day?
It is easier, and that is the honest reason rather than a physiological one. A fixed window is one decision made once; a moving one is a decision every morning, and the decisions are what people run out of. Nobody has tested a fixed window against a moving one in a trial, so anyone telling you consistency itself does something is guessing. The practical answer most people land on is a fixed window on the days their week is fixed and a later one on the days it is not — which is why this planner lets you set the days as well as the hours, and prints the days you left out as days off rather than hiding them.

Can I put my fasting schedule in Google Calendar or Apple Calendar?
Yes — that is what the calendar file on this page is for. It publishes four weeks of eating-window events, one block a day on the days you chose, and because the address stays the same and the events are generated from today forward, a calendar that subscribes to it never runs out. The events are marked transparent, so they show as a block without reporting you busy. If your calendar is shared with anyone, use the quiet version: it titles each block with the hours alone and names no protocol and nothing about fasting anywhere in the file.

Which fasting schedule is best for beginners?
12:12 or 14:10, and the reason is not that they are gentler versions of the real thing. They are the two most people are still running six months later. Sixteen and eight is the schedule with the most written about it, and it is a perfectly reasonable place to start if your mornings do not need breakfast — but the trials that measured adherence all found the same thing, which is that the schedule someone keeps beats the schedule that looks better on paper. Starting at twelve hours and moving the first meal later by half an hour a week costs nothing and ends up in the same place.

What can I have outside the eating window?
Water, black coffee and plain tea are the three nobody argues about. Past that it depends on what you are fasting for, and the answer genuinely changes — a splash of milk that is irrelevant to a weight goal is not irrelevant to a blood-glucose one. The checker on our other page answers that item by item for five different goals, and says which answers are measured and which are folklore, rather than repeating the fifty-calorie rule that no study has ever produced.

Does this schedule work for night shifts?
The arithmetic does — set the first meal to whenever your day actually starts and the window follows. What nobody can tell you is whether the result is the same, because shift work moves the body clock and eating out of phase with it is one of the few areas where the circadian evidence is genuinely suggestive rather than mixed. The planner will hand a night-shift worker a schedule and this page will not pretend it knows what that schedule does. Setting the days as well as the hours matters more on a rotating pattern than it does on any other.

Where do 24, 48 and 72-hour fasts fit?
Nowhere on this page, deliberately. An extended fast is one event with a start and an end, not a window that repeats every day, and a calendar file that put a 48-hour fast on a Tuesday every week would be publishing a schedule nobody described. The extended fast planner handles those four lengths hour by hour, and the refeed planner handles the part that matters most about them, which is how they end.

Go deeper

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16:8 Intermittent Fasting: The Most Popular Schedule Explained

Learn how 16:8 intermittent fasting works, what the science says, and how to build a sustainable 16-hour fasting routine. Complete guide with meal timing tips.

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Best Time Window for Intermittent Fasting: Morning vs Evening

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Intermittent fasting for shift workers requires a different approach. Here's how to make IF work on night shifts and rotating schedules without fighting your body.

More Tools

Fasting Calculator

Calculate your ideal fasting and eating windows based on your schedule, sleep time, and lifestyle. Get a personalised daily timeline.

Does It Break a Fast?

Check any food, drink or supplement against five fasting goals — weight loss, ketosis, autophagy, gut rest and a strict clean fast. The calories, the reason, and an honest "nobody knows" where that is the answer.

How to Break a Fast

What to eat first after a fast, in what order, and how much — by how long you fasted. Eight lengths from 12 hours to five days, a printable plan for each, and the refeeding criteria said plainly.

Run the schedule on a timer that knows the protocol

Fasted holds ten protocols from 12:12 to 72 hours and times the fast you are in, with notifications at the halfway mark, the metabolic phases and the finish. It keeps no weekly calendar and no food log — the calendar file on this page is the half the app does not do.

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