> The study was small, just 19 people. All the participants were overweight and had a cluster of risk factors (elevated blood sugar, elevated cholesterol levels and high blood pressure) that put them at higher risk for Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. A larger study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is underway to examine daily fasting in people with metabolic syndrome.
No. This is a preliminary study of a new fasting method. There is no-one who is deliberately spreading this on social media to advance their own political situation.
I wasn't overweight, but started doing IF as part of a larger life shift as a way to improve general health. I ended up losing weight because of the lowering of calories through skipping a meal, but I kept most of my muscle.
The biggest adjustment is that I work out most mornings, and felt I needed food prior. After a few days it became no factor. After doing IF for the past year+, I'm almost never hungry in the morning.
The biggest positive change for me though, was my morning mental sharpness. The hours between my workout and lunch time have become the best hours of the day for anything requiring mental acuity.
This is a weird title. Isn't this basically just trying to eat regularly with a reminder to avoid really bad habits such as eating right before going to bed?
For example, eat dinner at 6-7pm and that's your last food intake for the day and then eat breakfast around 7-9am. That's roughly a 10/14 set up. In my mind this isn't "fasting". It's just living life normally based on your sleep schedule.
> eat dinner at 6-7pm and that's your last food intake for the day and then eat breakfast around 7-9am. [...] It's just living life normally.
That sounds like the eating habits of my thin friends, not the habit of my overweight friends. 70%+ of the USA is overweight. Time to rethink "normal".
For example, I can basically guarantee that the few people I know with bodies that I'd classify as "pretty good" don't drink any Coca Cola.
They don't just drink a little bit. They drink none. And they have entire lifestyle patterns that conspire to keep them thin and fit, not just a few sliders tweaked.
I think acknowledging this is crucial to changing your health trajectory. The difference between a fit person and the average HN user isn't just a small twist of some variable knob. It's a whole collection of good practices beyond limiting portion size.
I think the parent post is saying that it is weird this is called "intermittent fasting" while it boils down to not even skipping breakfast: just having 3 meals a day.
There's subtle differences here. What this title refers to is commonly referred to as "time restricted feeding" or in humans "time restricted eating" if you are curious to learn more, google for a pod cast with Sachin Panda and Rhonda Patrick. They get into the details of this style of dieting at a mechanistic level really well.
Basically doing this over the long run will make you live longer, have a healthier metabolic system, lose weight, have healthier glucose levels, etc.
I'm on a mixture of TRE and intermittent fasting, and let me tell you, it works. I do it for longevity and energy. Weight management is just a bonus since now I can eat more of what I want without gaining weight since I am doing it in a smaller number of hours in the day.
I don't doubt any of that, I'm just confused on why 10/14 needs a special label or is defined as fasting.
If you goto sleep at 11pm and don't eat until 8am the next day, do you classify this as a 9 hour fast assuming you ate something 5 minute before sleeping?
At some point things are just "normal" based around your sleep schedule. Or to put it another way, if you drink water with breakfast at 8am but then don't drink anything for 3 hours, would you label that 3 hour time span as a "self imposed hydration cleanse"?
I don't understand your point. The study asked people to (typically) eat during 10 hours and not eat during 14 hours, hence the 10/14 labelling. This resulted in a moderate weight loss, about 8.6% less calories/day were consumed.
You're suggesting that other schedules might also work and that 10/14 is "normal". Whether it's normal in the statistical sense or not is an empirical question (the answer is probably "no"), and whether other schedules would have the same effect requires another study.
Maybe intention is the difference here. The "normal" people are simply running on routine with no designs to stick to that routine should a disruption appear. By actively intermittent fasting, you are declaring your intentions, likely with a specific goal in mind.
10/14 is the typical time restricted feeding window. the other most common is 8/16, and if you go lower you hit 6/18 which is considered intermittent fasting. These numbers matter in the context of clinical trials for various definitions. If you wish to remain naive to the subject feel free to ignore my initial comment. I gave you everything you needed there to figure it out for yourself.
That's actually a selling point of this method. Another way to put it is: Skip breakfast. If you eat at 10 pm last, skip breakfast and eat again at 12pm lunch the next day that works.
with time restricted eating it is typically recommended to have your last meal by 6 or 7 if you intend to sleep by 10pm. There are a number of health consequences to eating so late. The one most people care about has to do with the pancreas receiving melatonin and slowly beginning to shut down for the night, so when you eat late it has a lower insulin response than it would otherwise leading to more calories being stored as fat instead of being used as energy. There are some metabolic consequences as well.
> In my mind this isn't "fasting". It's just living life normally based on your sleep schedule.
I forget where I heard it first, but someone out there said that all this 'keto', 'intermittent fasting', 'atkins', etc. isn't new. It's just that men are now doing something that women have done for centuries, but since women were the ones doing it, the men needed a new name for the exact same thing such they they didn't seem effeminate. Men needed to call it something other than 'going on a diet'.
> What makes you think that eating before bed is "really bad"?
I don't know, I don't have any science behind that decision. I just remember tales of my parents and people saying not to eat a lot right before sleeping and then looking at people around me who routinely eat late at night and they were heavier than others (not in every case, but most).
These would be people who would eat dinner at let's say 6-7pm but then eat something decently sized (sandwiches, left overs from dinner, ice cream, etc.) again at 10:30pm then goto bed around 11pm-midnight.
They also probably routinely eat in the morning too!
I think we can safely put put not eating before bed in the same bucket as eating lot of small meals throughout the day. It's not that those things are universally good or bad. It's just that both strategies help some people eat appropriate amount of food, but are totally useless (or worse) for others.
I don't think there's anything inherently bad about it. One thing I've heard as a reason to avoid late-night eating is that willpower tends to decrease as the day goes on. Therefore late at night, you might be more likely to give in and eat those super-high-calorie foods, like a bowl of ice-cream or greasy takeout. It's not that eating a bowl of kale at midnight is worse than eating one at lunch time.
If you're in the first world then chances are you've already 2000+ calories today and don't really need more. You're hungry before bed because your blood sugar is falling, and all those extra calories will do is push you over the limit for the day, aka extra calories lead to fat.
I think you are making the assumption that eating before bed implies an extra snack, but it could just be that you have dinner shortly before going to bed.
RESULTS:
During sleep, casein protein was effectively digested and absorbed resulting in a rapid rise in circulating amino acid levels, which were sustained throughout the remainder of the night. Protein ingestion before sleep increased whole-body protein synthesis rates (311 ± 8 vs 246 ± 9 μmol·kg per 7.5 h) and improved net protein balance (61 ± 5 vs -11 ± 6 μmol·kg per 7.5 h) in the PRO vs the PLA experiment (P < 0.01). Mixed muscle protein synthesis rates were ∼22% higher in the PRO vs the PLA experiment, which reached borderline significance (0.059%·h ± 0.005%·h vs 0.048%·h ± 0.004%·h, P = 0.05).
Yes. Aside from increasing odds of acid reflux, the digestive process raises core body temperature. Typically body temperature must go down for optimal sleep.
Isn’t it just as likely that the 8% reduction in calories gave all the benefits? I briefly read the study and it didn’t seem like they had a reduced calorie group without time restrictions. Thoughts anyone?
If this strategy works to encourage people to accidentally consume fewer calories, isn't that good enough? I don't think this was about the mechanism about the weight loss, but merely that the behavior pattern ended up encouraging it.
> If this strategy works to encourage people to accidentally consume fewer calories, isn't that good enough?
Depends. I'm sure for some people it does work. I don't understand those people, because I, like many people who put on a whole lot of weight, am a food addict. Give me only an hour in which to eat, with no other restrictions, and I will find a way to shove as much food into my maw as I can. I know this from experience.
It makes much more sense to just track calories directly and stop lying to yourself.
"lying to yourself" seems unduly insulting. Maybe other people are tracking calories, and TRF is how they stay within a budget. Even if they are tricking themselves, what's wrong with that? We all hack our own reward-response mechanisms all the time to achieve all sorts of goals. If it works, it works, and what's the harm? Why condemn that as less "honest" than whatever you do to work around your own limitations and achieve your own goals?
Making people feel bad about the methods they choose is real-world harmful. Maybe "advice" like yours won't actually kill anyone, but people who become discouraged by that drumbeat of negativity could experience some ill effects. Be glad that what works for you works for you, but please stop pissing on everyone else.
If you count calories, then any additional strategies are fine, but I know from experience that not counting calories and relying on other strategies as an abstraction leaves too much room for self delusion about your intake.
Maybe, but my feeling is that they are trying to attribute the benefit to intermittent fasting (which may be the mechanism! I have no ideas (and neither do they!))
I’m of the opinion the calorie reduction is the primary catalyst for health improvements. Over and over our assumptions about nutritional timing have been wrong, eg breakfast should be the biggest meal of the day, don’t eat after 8pm, etc. The body adapts to whatever circumstance it encounters and if that circumstance repeats itself, it adapts extremely well.
But so much of eating for those (like me) who are subject to binge eating and being overweight, the time restriction brings about a means of control that can help replace the compulsion that contributes to overeating. And that time control brings other positive side effects such as calorie reduction, a smaller window to exercise control over food quality, and education on food discipline.
I’m not an expert, but I think intermittent fasting generally falls into the same category as going vegetarian or going carnivore or avoiding gluten: the result is almost always a healthier overall diet and more manageable calorie load than what the person was eating before. But the gimmick, which is mostly just a means of control and introduces discipline, takes most of the credit.
I think you've nailed it in your last paragraph. If you are thinking about what and when you eat, you are probably thinking more about your diet than you previously did.
A lot of people experience similar changes when they write down everything they eat in a food journal. They aren't necessarily changing the types of food they eat, but thinking about it more decreases mindless eating.
If they measured only weight loss, then yes, it's due to the reduction. But it's important to note that the reduction wasn't forced on them -- it arose "naturally", meaning intermittent might be an efficient strategy to lose weight (e.g. the person wouldn't have the burden of tracking calories).
That's regarding weight loss alone. Various health and cognitive benefits are usually talked about in the context of intermittent fasting, and that seems to arise from being fasted rather than from being in a deficit.
> the person wouldn't have the burden of tracking calories
Reducing the window of time in which you can eat is effective at cutting calories but it isn't a panacea and it's important the cause for the effect is communicated. Otherwise we'll get the "no, I can eat 3 servings of cake with dinner, it's before 8pm".
I have not read the study, but when I heard this on the radio the researcher specifically said that the weight loss was because of the reduction in calories.
The part that is interesting is that by instructing people to have their last meal earlier they naturally reduced their caloric intake without being instructed to do so.
Right now I'm doing 16/8, with 3 full meals a day, and I also spend one day a week in full fasting.
IMHO, the current status of nutrition is very divergent, almost every habit is backed up and discouraged at the same time by more than one study. There seems to be some agreements (about sugar, for instance) but the rest is not clear at all. And on top of it, you have to take into account how your own body reacts to a particular habit. Seems that trial/error is the best option for now.
No expert here, but I think fasting can sometimes trigger disordered eating in some people. Binge eating, etc. People are just so varied and so is nutrition.
I haven't seen anything for healthy individuals. There are some studies though that have found negative effects for pregnant women and unborn children.
It also depends on what type of fasting you're talking about; Here's a video about "alternate day fasting" that shows it can mostly be good, unless you already have high cholesterol or are diabetic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKFWvYtm6Ck
(check out the recent videos on that channel as well - he's just done several videos covering scientific studies about all types of fasting!)
There are papers showing negative side effects (bulimia, eating disorders), but a point easily overlooked is that if you are not mentally prepared, it's a though ride.
I have been skipping breakfast for the past year. This works for me when nothing else has.
I started a new job which is highly unpredictable and involves a lot of last minute travel. Due to the stress, lack of sleep, etc I had gone from 165 -> 180 pounds in 8 months. All fat.
After 3-4 months of morning fasting I am down to 165 pounds again. No change in workout routine. I generally stop eating around 8pm local time, and have my first meal around 11 or 12pm.
The best part is I can eat whatever I want still - burgers, pizza, etc. No restrictions.
I am wondering if female metabolism is fundamentally different. My wife tried the same diet and it just hasn’t worked for her. She gets too hangry whereas I find myself in a flow-state by mid morning.
Dr Peter Attia has done some great podcasts and YouTube presentations on the science behind fasting for the curious.
> Dr Peter Attia has done some great podcasts and YouTube presentations on the science behind fasting for the curious.
As someone who wasn't overweight, it was Dr. Attia with his guest Rhonda Patrick who finally got me to try IF for general health. I highly recommend listening to his podcasts.
I greatly enjoy Peter Attia's podcast, especially as someone with no medical background. It's really helped me to learn a lot about the human body and how it functions in a way that's actionable for improving health.
> I am wondering if female metabolism is fundamentally different. My wife tried the same diet and it just hasn’t worked for her. She gets too hangry whereas I find myself in a flow-state by mid morning.
Maybe she should try eating breakfast but skipping dinner. Different people have different metabolic "styles."
I have a hard time skipping breakfast and it doesn't seem to affect my weight very much, but when I consistently skip dinner (which is socially hard to do in my situation) I do lose weight - rapidly.
It's like, I feel terrible on keto, but my wife swears by it. Everyone is different.
This has worked pretty well for me and my own weight loss (and maintenance) journey. When I eat outside of my own 9-10 hour window it usually ends up as a meal that I overindulge in and subsequently regret.
As more anecdata, I find myself voracious between 8 and 9 AM, again between 11 and noon, and then between 4 and 5. After that I’ll throw back a decaf coffee or two but don’t normally crave food. When I ate whenever I was hungry I was all over the place and simply ate too large of a portion of anything and everything except breakfast.
I have another one, which I followed now for a while. My intention was less about weight loss, but I'd argue it still helps:
Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner like you'd normally do. But in between meals, follow a strict zero-calory intake. This way, you have 4-5 hours of zero calories between meals. Thus:
- only water is allowed
- if you want to drink coffee, drink it right with/after a meal
- if you want to eat chocolate or snacks, they have to come after a meal
I noticed that this has several effects:
1. For me, it's easier to do than intermittent fasting, because my family eats three meals.
2. Most people gain weight because they snack all the time or drink stuff with sugar (or coffee with milk).
3. I actually became hungry after 4-5 hours. A feeling I haven't had in a while.
4. I can't eat lots of snacks or chocolate, because I'm full from a meal.
You're saying this based on what exactly? I've heard that coffee/caffeine is most effective at boosting sharpness when your stomach is not empty. (I'm under the impression now that there is more than one reason why coffee after a meal is the recommended way to take it, and not understanding how whether you take it with milk plays into it... could you elaborate?)
Not the parent poster, but I understood this as "black coffee has almost zero calories". This was the only restriction I explained in my post. This is not about boosting the effectiveness of coffee, but simply cutting out all calories between meals (except possibly for neglectible amounts as in tea or coffee).
Ah, thanks for the clarification. My understanding about the effects of caffeine is not based on anything other than hear-say from people who seemed to have done their research better than I have, but from what I did hear, caffeine on an empty stomach may have opposite the intended effects, making you actually more confused instead of boosting focus.
Anecdotally after hearing this myself, I have tried to make it a point to take coffee less often when on an empty stomach, and it does seem to help with focus-depletion.
Dr. Jason Fung (he is on youtube) found that his patients who fasted during Ramadan had improvements to their metabolic health. After Ramadan, he would have to adjust their meds. This evolved in to him advocating fasting for his diabetic patients and has reversed people's diabetes. Bottom line is that it really works and gets results...and it is easy for people to follow.
> Typically, people would go for an 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. eating window
This is something I don't get. After sleeping 8h, you're in a fasted state, having done the "hard part" that is not eating for several hours. So breakfast/lunch should be the easiest meals to skip.
It seems like this would be the easiest approach but the second part of the article talks about the importance of syncing body clocks with daylight hours. If that argument has merit then we shouldn't be skipping breakfast but missing dinner.
I think the concern is more about night time binging (i.e., people who eat a late dinner are also more likely to stay up long enough to eat a midnight snack).
I don't understand what you are saying here. It seems to me like you would expect hunger to increase over time after eating. Thus putting the part of your fast with the highest hunger intensity into your sleep time seems considerably easier than intentionally being awake for it?
I.E: If I skip dinner earlier I am effectively adding hours of minimal hunger experience but if I skip breakfast I am adding hours of maximal hunger experience.
> It seems to me like you would expect hunger to increase over time after eating.
This actually isn't the case at all. Thirst works this way: the longer you don't drink, the thirstier you get. But hunger tends to subside after a while if you don't eat, and comes back at the next normal meal time.
Once one adopts a routine like this, it's becomes so much easier to efficiently condense that 10 hr eating window into a 2-1 hr one for more of those "gains". Combine that with a low carb lifestyle and you essentially get yet another free multiplier.
I've recently started doing 23h fasts. It's the easiest diet so far. As soon as I come back from work, which is around 5pm, I eat whatever I want. Then no eating until I come back from work next day. It's also nice not to think about food all day.
Assuming you do not have a metabolic disorder of some sort (which may be the case, but you'd need a doctor, not the internet, to diagnose it):
Try switching to fat+protein (and zero carbs), and see if it keeps you satiated longer. Many people find that carbs make them hungry again quickly, even if eaten with fat or protein.
That's not a good thing, btw. It shows you're addicted to constant blood sugar hits. Getting through a day or two of agony and fasting would probably help you out in the long run.
I've forgotten the details, but I believe the described pattern is characteristic of some metabolic disorders. Considering that, I'd recommend talking to a doctor before going straight to fasting.
Honestly, this is a habit that a lot of people (that I know) do without even realizing it. All you need to do is skip breakfast (maybe replace with a black coffee since they wont skip caffeine) and you almost certainly fall into a 10/14 TRE regimen.
The main risk in a study like this is that (1) with inclusion criteria but (2) without controls, you’re susceptible to reversion to the mean.
Imagine that your weight fluctuates by about 3% every few days. The risk is that by imposing a cutoff for inclusion, you are more likely to identify people at the top of their usual range. So, the natural decline as they oscillate around their normal weight will look like a treatment effect.
Adding controls without intervention would be helpful to identify (and control for) this problem.
Unrelated, but also, I note that 6 people were excluded because they already eat for fewer than 10h/day.
I wonder if there is something like a Hawthorne effect for diets that would explain why almost any dietary change leads to some weight loss. Simply changing when they eat seems to make people ingest fewer calories.
I'm not aware of a formal name for it, but there's certainly a hypothesis floating around that weight loss diets mostly work by altering the way that people pay attention to food. That is, the behavioral effects of being "on a diet" explain most of the weight loss while the particular rules and theory of any given diet explain little of the weight loss. It's sort of like the dodo bird verdict [1] for diets. It would be interesting to know if any studies have compared "real" and "placebo" diets to estimate this effect; searches mostly come up with references to a book called "The Placebo Diet" which seems related but I'm not sure it directly addresses the empirical question.
In this case compressing the period of time within which you eat reduced calorie intake. That is totally unsurprising, as it means odds are higher that you'll still feel full at any point during your eating window.
Having done intermittent fasting, it's totally possible to get to the point that you spend most of your eating window hating food because you keep feeling like you've just had a massive meal. That you end up eating less then isn't so strange. It boils down to whether or not you manage to stick to the schedule, but one of the nice things about an intermittent fasting schedule is that it's never long until you can eat, and that makes compliance feel easier for at least some people.
The sample of people is really small (n = 19), so I would definitely take this with a grain of salt. I’ve personally found fasting to be an incredibly effective method of weight reduction, however I was fasting for upwards of 20 hours a day. If you view the world from a basic calories in vs. Calories out lens, what is the best way to reduce calories in... just don’t eat. I find it a lot easier to not have the option to eat than to have the option to eat but having to eat less. I would be interested to see how the rest of the HN community sees fasting
It's also easier not to eat than burning off the excess. With my complexion, it takes about 5K to burn through 1 Snickers bar. I do run and I find easier not to eat that bar than to burn it, so for people who don't exercise themselves it should be a no brainer.
I wish it was easier to monitor what goes on inside our body. E.g. digesting works differently if you have some kind of intolerance, allergy, diabetes, whether you have enough muscle mass or not... We treat it as a black box, give blanket statements with a self-selected sample size, and hope that it works for everybody, which it rarely does.
E.g. there are conditions which require you to eat small meals throughout the day, which obviously is in conflict with fasting...
I have been intrigued with IF for a few years now. While i think in theory I think it sounds great I also find it difficult to believe that you can strictly stick to a 9-9 diet every day. While on my own I can stick to such, but I will often be asked out to eat later in the evening or for drinks on the weekend which takes place outside of my fasting times. Does anyone have any suggestions for this?
I can usually plan for events that would normally be outside my eating window and adjust timing accordingly. But ultimately, I don't beat myself up about it if, say, one day a week I can't get things perfect due to social constraints.
As someone who has worked hard to lose and keep off about half my bodyweight, I believe I've got a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't and, frankly, it really irks me that people advise these kinds of tactics. Time restriction alone is not sufficient. I can easily (very, very easily) down 10k Calories in under an hour. By some delusional people's metric, that's a 23 hour fasting period and should work great. I can assure you from experience that it does not result in weight loss.
This sort of advice is, at best, a highly abstracted trick for just plain eating fewer calories. You're better off just tracking the calories directly, especially if you're a food addict.
Edit: To everyone disagreeing, find me a single study that shows anyone gaining weight on a long term caloric deficit. For comparison, here's a nutrition professor losing 27lbs eating Twinkies at a caloric deficit: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
You're being downvoted by people who don't agree with you. That doesn't mean that you are wrong. According to dang this is actually encouraged. [1] [2]
I don't think it's a good practice to downvote things you don't agree with, but apparently HN's current approach is that it is (and it's always been that way).
I think time restriction AND caloric restriction matter. Yes, a narrow eating window reduces the odds of overeating. But it also gives the body a chance to lower insulin levels during the fasted period, lowering the potential for insulin resistance. This is why it's bad advice to eat many small meals throughout the day--it keeps your insulin high at all times, never giving your body a chance to actually burn fat and likely resulting in reduced metabolic rate when done concurrently with caloric restriction.
> I can easily (very, very easily) down 10k Calories in under an hour.
But would you want to? Maybe you would, but most wouldn't because appetite doesn't just increase linearly over time. The idea with TRF is that even if people eat 500 extra calories at dinner that still has less effect than 1000 calories' worth of breakfast, lunch, and/or snacks, both in terms of raw calories and in terms of varying metabolic effects. Even if it were just a highly abstracted trick for just eating fewer calories (it's not), people might find it easier to stick to than having every meal but eating less at each. Motivation matters.
You're right that time restriction alone is not sufficient. Neither is calories counting alone. How much you eat, what you eat, when you eat all matter. Any diet that focuses on only one - any one - won't work for some people, or at all. Let's not try to counter bad advice with more sample-of-one bad advice.
Again, sample of one. Great that it worked for you. Doesn't mean it will work for everyone, even if they can stick to it. Science is not made of anecdotes.
Edit (responding to your ninja-edit): there might not be any examples of people gaining weight if they stuck to a long-term caloric-deficit plan, but there are millions who gained weight when they couldn't stick to one. And be careful about criticizing them for lacking willpower or whatever, or someone might wonder about the willpower aspect of being unable to keep from eating 10K calories in a single sitting. People are different, with individual strengths and weaknesses. That's why statistical evidence outweighs anecdotes.
With all due respect, I wager you've got a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't for you. There's no silver bullet, and the effectiveness of dietary interventions is very individualized.
For instance, I've got a friend who manages to stay thin by always eating throughout the day, but never more than a handful of food. This wouldn't work for me because once I start eating, it's very difficult for me to stop.
By the same token, simple caloric restriction (calorie counting) doesn't work for me, because I just hate tracking my food intake, so inevitably I give up on it.
However, for me, time restricted eating is like magic. I simply don't start eating until a bit later in the day, and everything else takes care of itself.
So it could very well be that this is the wrong diet for you but that doesn't mean it's completely without merit.
I know some chronically thin people who eat many small meals throughout the day, but they get very cranky very soon if they don't get to eat within a few hours. It's like they don't store fat at all.
I have the opposite experience. I find it virtually impossible to consume 2,000 calories at once, so I don't have to spend a single second thinking about diet or exercise; I just eat once a day and can guarantee weight loss / maintenance. Eating under 2,000 calories is obvious. You don't fast so that you can eat more, you fast so that eating less doesn't feel so terrible. Everyone already knows they have to eat less calories to lose weight.
> By some delusional people's metric, that's a 23 hour fasting period and should work great.
No one thinks you can fast and eat 5 days worth of food every day and lose weight.
It's interesting that they pick 14/10 when most of the "people" hyping IM push for 16/8 or 18/6, It would be nice to see studies that show any benefit of the longner fast window. I have a feeling the longer time has some kind of competition component to it.
Perhaps there is a little competition component, but the idea is to stay longer in the ketosis state. If you're doing 18/6, then your body will be in a fasting state for a longer time, and the belief is that the longer your body is in that state, the more benefit you will reap.
Anything that reduces how much calories you take in without reducing the calories you burn, is going to make you lose weight.
The whole trick in helping people lose weight is finding a way people can easily keep doing that without any expenditure in willpower. That's the big problem with every single diet: it requires discipline and willpower. The less of those it requires, the easier it becomes to stick to the diet.
I'd go a step further: That seems to be the problem with the very idea of a diet. The connotations are all wrong. The idea that it's going to be an expenditure of discipline and willpower is intimately wrapped up in the concept, and it's downright depressing to contemplate doing that indefinitely.
I would guess that it's a lot easier to achieve success if you try to play a different mental game, where the goal is to change your habits in a way that makes a different way of eating the default state instead of something that requires a constant effort. Maybe decide that certain kinds of foods are only for when you're eating out? Maybe buy a rice cooker so that whole grains are more convenient to prepare? Maybe find other motivations entirely? Chip bags and the like aren't recyclable, so my home consumption of junk calories dropped off precipitously after I decided to make a concerted effort to limit the amount of plastic packaging I'm sending to the landfill.
Exactly. Don't follow a diet, but structurally change your eating pattern. Long ago, after a year of eating mostly pizza, I switched to eating mostly stir-fry vegetables. My food still wasn't very varied, but that meant it required little effort and willpower. And it was still a lot healthier than pizza. Lost 5 kg in 5 weeks.
Then I met my wife and she didn't want to eat just stir-fry vegetables, so now I'm heavier than ever.
"Anything that reduces how much calories you take in without reducing the calories you burn, is going to make you lose weight”
Nitpick: it will lower the derivative of your weight against time, but will not necessarily make it negative.
To lose weight, you need to reach a point where you take in less calories than the calories you burn.
Double nitpick: in theory, you can lose weight while taking in more calories than you burn, by replacing stuff in your body by other stuff that store more energy per gram (I don’t know how realistic this is, but you can definitely lose volume without losing weight, by replacing fat by muscles)
I occasionally use intermittent fasting for weight control, and the reason it works for me is because time-restricted eating makes it easy to consume less food. If I skip breakfast, and sometimes lunch, after a couple days I don't get hungry in the morning anymore, and I simply eat what I want the rest of the day, which ends up being significantly less.
I have had much less success with things like calorie counting and portion control. Those diets felt like constant self-denial, and I would inevitably end up fudging the numbers to allow myself to eat more, or would eventually just break down and binge.
So if your point is to say these numbers aren't that interesting because it's "really" just the caloric deficit doing the work here, I would say that could very well be right. But there are a lot of ways to get to a caloric deficit, and time-restricted eating has particular benefits over many of those methods.
My experience is the same. TRE/IF are much easier to adhere to then typical caloric restriction diets or more extreme diets like Paleo or Keto. Skipping a meal is something I get used to after a few days, constantly depriving myself every meal is so damn hard.
Yeah I made a serious go of Keto a couple years ago for about 4 months, and I had really good results with it, but there were a ton of drawbacks as well. Once I got adapted, I didn't have major cravings for carbohydrates, and I felt pretty good on a day-to-day basis, but every time I "cheated" and had a bite of cake for a colleagues birthday or something, I would crash and burn and basically go on a bender of compulsively eating carbs until I could get myself under control. Then it would take another week or so of willpower testing to get myself back on the wagon. Basically it felt like a very all or nothing thing.
There were a couple "weird" things as well. For instance, it affected my sleep, athletic performance and even though I was eating a ton of fiber and taking magnesium supplements, my regularity suffered to a massive degree. The other thing was that my weight rebounded fairly quickly after going off of it.
Basically, Keto seemed like I was doing something sort of extreme to my body, whereas fasting is just simply not eating sometimes, and feels very natural. Also you never have to order off-menu items, or explain why you can't take the cookie somebody baked for you.
this was my experience with keto as well, every time I had to requit carbs I had to go through a multi day to week long carb withdrawal/craving cycle, and the binge risk was so high.
cutting weight is only useful if it isn't going to instantly be regained, especially when you are making so many sacrifices to lose it!
The point of pretty much all intermittent fasting schedules is being "basically forced diet".
While I agree it'd be interesting to see if there are additional benefits vs. the same reduction without the time constraint, a large part of the reason why some people prefer intermittent fasting is that some feel it is easier to comply with. E.g. you only need to exercise self-control for a relatively low number of waking hours.
I've done it in the past, and it was remarkable how easy it was to end up eating less when you compress it in a smaller time window; most of your hunger ends up happening outside of your eating window, towards the end of your fasting period, so you just need to hang in there and count down the time, which for me at least was easier than most other ways of dieting I've trued.
Read somewhere that starving for a longer period of time, something like 14-16 hours, will lower your insulin levels and activate autophagy. So it's not just about calorie restriction.
Its not a "get somebody to do something". Getting someone to loose weight is a lot like getting someone to stop doing drugs. If they dont want to do it, you are pretty much screwed unless imprisonment is an option. You yourself stick to your diet or you dont.
I think the question pushs on an underlying issue, namely how many people start up with plateau breakers and torture themselves instead of following a simple diet.
So the question is, what is this intermittent fasting? Is it just a psychological trick to get you to stick to your diet? Is your brain tricked into wanting less food or are you tricking your body into loosing more weight? As far as i understand it, its more then just a mind trick to stick to your diet. That is where the comparison with the - 8,6% reduction would come in great. But i doubt you would get much information with just comparing the absolute losses instead of looking at the individuals and how far they are into weight loss.
> torture themselves instead of following a simple diet.
What exactly is a "simple diet"? Not eating certain foods? Limiting portion sizes? Research shows that traditional diets have extremelly low compliance rates.
I'm not an endocrinologist, but as far as I understand, but as far as I understand, part of the effectiveness of IF is related to Ghrelin, a hormone associated with hunger. Basically, Ghrelin is a hormone which is correlated with the feeling of hunger, and it tends to come in waves around your normal meal times. So if I normally eat at 7:00 AM, I will get a wave of Ghrelin at that time every day. But Ghrelin has the property where, if I don't eat within that period where the hormone level is peaking, eventually it will subside whether or not I have eaten. Also if I skip that meal time for a few days, eventually that peak will decrease in magnitude or will go away all together.
So this is part of the reason why IF is effective: it's actually reducing the total amount of physiological hunger I experience in a given day.
>What exactly is a "simple diet"? Not eating certain foods? Limiting portion sizes?
Determine how much calories you get to eat a day to not gain weight. Not to loose weight but also not gaining weight. Once you are capable to hold your weight and understand what gets you how many calories, you reduce. Dont hurry, just get a bit under. Its a marathon not a sprint. No one martyred them self to death in a few month with 200 kcal less a day.
>Research shows that traditional diets have extremelly low compliance rates.
We also have an extremely high rate of jojo eaters. If you never learned to stick to your sustaining energy level when eating, you will go right back up again once you stop with something like intermittent fasting. Or do you really want to do that for the rest of your life? The sad reality is people get just enough motivation to try one of those mystic new fades and are emotionally wrecked when they cant handle the strict regime. Or they keep going and treat them self afterwards. There is no shortcut around learning to eat right, they would have been better off to slowly get their problem under control instead of a desperate hail mary. There is no short term fix for your problem you need long term change. Once you get a stable intake, sure try intermittent fasting to loose more quicker. But remember that you are not going back to before but to your sustaining level. That part isnt optional you arent just dieting you are changing your food intake permanently. If you never learned to just watch your calories and tricked yourself into loosing weight you are screwed. I dont see how intermittent fasting can be seen as a first go to. You need to introduce a diet before you can change your diet. In other words, not "just a few more month" but "Congratulations, this is the new normal now."
> Determine how much calories you get to eat a day to not gain weight. Not to loose weight but also not gaining weight. Once you are capable to hold your weight and understand what gets you how many calories, you reduce.
So you mean calorie counting? This sounds easy, but in my experience it's very difficult to be compliant. You actually have to weigh your food and keep a record of what you're eating. And how do you do this when, for instance, you're someone's dinner guest and they've done the cooking? It's not impossible but it's a lot of work.
> you never learned to stick to your sustaining energy level when eating, you will go right back up again once you stop with something like intermittent fasting. Or do you really want to do that for the rest of your life?
I will tell you how it works for me. In general I get by with "intuitive eating" - in other words I just eat what I want, with some loose guard-rails in place, like I try to eat mostly whole-foods I cook for myself, and I try not to snack between meals.
I also track my weight daily, and when I see it start to increase beyond some normal fluctuations - which might happen, for example, during the holidays, or when I've been having more work lunches out than usual - I do intermittent fasting (essentially skipping breakfast) for a couple weeks to get things under control. This has been a very effective strategy for me for a few years now, and it doesn't take any significant effort or book-keeping.
Moreover, fasting is something which has been a cultural practice across the globe since the beginning of time. Many religions include ritualized fasting as a part of their practice, and I have heard Hindu people talk about taking a day off eating "to balance the body" as though it is a common-sense thing to do.
I'm not saying IF is the one and true solution to weight management, but I do not see fasting as more or less an artificial "fad" than portion control.
Calorie counting isn't that hard, and it's not really necessary to weigh your food or be precise. I've done it successfully for a few months. I think the trick is to do it for some time until you relearn certain habits. Like to take two slices of bread instead of three or four, or to not snack on nuts which are high in calories. And for me, to avoid beer. So it's more about becoming aware of how many calories certain foods have, and remember which ones to avoid most of the time.
Counting calories isnt the point, its keeping track of your weight and being able to hold it outside of a diet phase. Learning to stop gaining weight. What works for you works for you, thanks for the explanation. I unfortunately have come across to many people who didnt consider the longterm aspect. You are just finally getting yourself up and loose that weight and then everything will be great and "oh man i cant wait for this to be over". That stuff so often ends sad.
>Getting someone to loose weight is a lot like getting someone to stop doing drugs. If they dont want to do it, you are pretty much screwed unless imprisonment is an option. You yourself stick to your diet or you dont.
Right, so the question is, how can you design such a study where control calorie intake and get people to adhere to it? The only way you can do it is to lock them in a facility where their intake and exercise are strictly controlled, which is either too expensive or not ethical or both. It is basically impossible to conduct such a study, let alone being able to issue effective recommendations based on it if your hypothesis is supported by the study.
I think that's an extremely simplistic/dismissive view. Especially the "just a trick". And suggesting that the main reason people don't addictive behaviours is because they don't want to.
And overeating is extremely addictive. Quitting smoking is dead easy compared to reducing calorie intake. Apparently the 14 hour fast thing works in regulating this addiction in ways that other diets genuinely don't (especially in terms of staying power). Pretty much by definition, addiction is something that happens in the complex interplay of physiological and psychological.
As i understand it, intermittent fasting is a lot more then a mind trick to let you stick to your diet. Its a plateau breaker. Once you are really far into your diet and hit a brick wall, despite the reduction, try a plateau breaker. They apparently actually work, and i am really interested in why. Differently put, I was hoping for medical research here, not psychological.
Yes, I believe any diet that "works" is just the diet happening to make it more manageable to reduce calories below expenditure. A similar diet I've read about is one meal a day. The basic idea is that you can eat whatever you want, but only one time per day (within reason). Most people can't eat their total daily calories in one sitting before feeling uncomfortable. Thus, you lose weight.
> I personally tend to accumulate weight very easily if on a day I have very few high-calorie meals.
Are you saying that if, on a given day, you have a couple high calorie meals, then you are likely to accumulate significant weight by the time you step on the scale the next day?
As far as I understand, it's very unlikely you will see true body compositional changes from one day to another. If you see a jump on the scale, most likely it has to do with water retention and not any kind of real persistant weight gain.
>> this seems to be standard effect of many dietary fads, i.e. they end up enforcing compliance with a low calories regime.
> Which is a good thing!
Not really; actually, it's a bad thing.
In the long term, people trying fad diets generally go back to the old habits.
Going through a diet cycle is always risky, as the metabolism is affected. When one stops a diet, one increases the food income, and needs to be very careful, because for a period, the body will consume less and accumulate fats easier.
If one went through a fad diet, they're more likely not to have enough discipline, and consequently, more likely to get the weight lost and more.
Net effect: more fat on the body and less muscles. This is the yo-yo effect. It's real.
Additionally, fad diets tend to de-emphasize the importance of sports (as they oppose to the very traditional diet regime of "eating less and doing sports"), which cause an impact on the muscle mass.
I meant that if your new eating regime helps you keep calories down, it's good. I didn't mean that you should try keto or if or paleo or WW or whatever for a month and then stop.
If you are actively trying to lose weight in any way, and then go back to old habits then it's bad for you, even if you got the diet from a medical doctor.
If instead you start using any kind of low-calories diet, and can keep it up, then it doesn't matter if it's only because of low calories or because of some other physiological effects.
I am not sold on the idea that dietary fads de-emphasize sport.
> Additionally, fad diets tend to de-emphasize the importance of sports (as they oppose to the very traditional diet regime of "eating less and doing sports"), which cause an impact on the muscle mass.
That'a interesting, because I've read several places that exercise is almost antagonistic with respect to weight loss. Basically doing sport increases appetite, and it's really easy to eat more extra calories than you burned during a workout. On the other hand, diet alone can be very effective at managing weight.
intermittent fasting works wonders for the body. Most people I know do 16/8, 16 hour fast with 8 hour eating. the ones who lost the most weight do 20/4. Now... you still have to control what you're eating. it does no good to fast and then eat 5000 calories.
The weight loss is cool and all but it seems like a bad idea to just start doing this method until there's a long-term study about the effects this has on your body. What if you stick to it for a few years and ruin your body? 12 weeks is not nearly enough for conclusive results.
If we weighed the known effects of being overweight against the possible harmful effects of intermittent fasting, in all likelihood there's no debate at all.
People have been going on intermittent fasting schedules for centuries.
Ramadan being a good example.
This is also by no means the first study into intermittent fasting.
While we certainly don't know every detail about what the optimal pattern is, the idea that you might "ruin your body" by limiting your eating to a 10 your window seems far fetched.
Ramadan isn't a constant diet, though, it's only for a month in a year. I'm talking about doing intermittent fasting as a regular daily diet. But, yeah, maybe I worded it a bit too severely.
I can't imagine maintaining a ten-hour eating window for years would have any negative effects. That's basically "breakfast at 9am, dinner over by 7pm". I hardly even consider that a restriction.
It can be done and only start is hard. I speak from experience - since around 2012 I eat only from ~21 to ~midnight, each day every day. I also meticulously note my meals in a "calorie notebook".
I am healthy, thin and I love food.
Sometimes I think I would be a good test subject, heh.
They intentionally did a very mild form of intermittent fasting to mitigate the risk of bodily damage, there are people who adhere to 2 day a week fasts, and the like
I'm sorry but these kind of studies tell you nothing.
I've done the "San/Khoikhoi" approach to eat and fast. I've done the "eat small amounts" frequently. All of these have their virtues and under any such (whilst being sensible) you'll probably live to an averaged healthy 80. Edit: If you have a disease that puts you way below average, then you probably already have personal recommendations via the scientific literature (or no recommendations).
What these studies do do is make you panic about your current habits. The oldest woman a while ago was an Italian woman who ate two eggs every morning until she died some time in her 110s. I don't know if that means you should eat eggs.
Stress about your diet at this point is more likely to be an issue that the actual diet. That is now if you don't have Kwashiorkor.
