I’ve found the science behind fasting to not be compelling, or to be conflicting, however, fasting is working well for me at the moment.
This is largely because I love to feel very full and to eat a lot, and also because I work much better with black and white rules than with shades of grey that rely on willpower.
I currently do 20:4 fasting: I started eating each day around 12:30, have a huge meal, take a siesta, and then eat some more, stopping usually by 15:30. Sometimes I eat more at the first meal, and that’s the only meal of the day.
I’m losing weight (by calorie counting), but in contrast to previous diets I don’t feel like I’m going without, I don’t feel so hungry, and most importantly, I don’t find myself at 7-8pm thinking “I wonder if I could justify going over my calories just sliiiightly” because I’ve started the fasting app on my phone.
Getting to 16:8 was hard. Going to 18:6 from that was easier. 20:4 was pretty easy, and then going to one meal a day (or 23:1) wasn’t any effort at all, other than it’s uncomfortable to ingest 2,300 calories in one sitting unless you significantly amp up the fat you’re eating.
I’m only really hungry each day from about 10:30 to 12:30, which is the time I use to exercise and then go for a long walk, so it’s very manageable. Not at all hungry in the evenings, and I don’t wake up hungry either. As someone who thinks of themselves as ALWAYS HUNGRY this has been interesting.
> I’ve found the science behind fasting to not be compelling, or to be conflicting, however, fasting is working well for me at the moment.
Precisely, do what works for you. I have one big dinner every 48 hours after working out, and either an egg, a piece of fruit, a cereal bar or a yogurt for all other meals.
This works well for me, yet colleagues think I am crazy, and here on HN I have been accused of having an eating disorder [1].
While I completely agree with this sentence in reference to food, in the original text from "De bono coniugali" (On the Good of Marriage), which contains words that are omitted in the English translation:
"multi hodie facilius se tota uita ab omni concubitu abstineant quam modum teneant non coeundi nisi prolis causa, si
matrimonio copulentur",
St. Augustine did not refer to the desire of humans for food, but to the desire of men for women (where "moderation" was understood to mean that the desire must be satisfied only with the purpose of making children "nisi prolis causa").
Let alone if everyone would adopt a meat only diet it wouldn't be sustainable. The meat industry is already a major contributor to biosphere destruction.
Always find a doctor that affirms what you've already decided. It works for me because im smart and decide the correct thing.(its very hard and lucky to be)
Yes, it is. But can be the opposite too. It depends on you.
You can find a doctor that tells you to do vegan,keto,carnivore,sad diet, etc etc. Which doctor will you "find"?
Will you listen to the first doctor? The opinion of the most doctors?
What is your logic on which doctor you will listen to?
Last time I checked the Inuit didn't have a large scale meat industry that kills billions of animals each year and that pollutes and destroys our biosphere and uses huge amount of resources.
The Inuit or any other tribes live with Nature and preserve it.
Lol. How you kill the animals, or how many has NOTHING to do with what you're actually eating. If Inuits killed 10,000 animals and only ate 5 of them, parent's comment would still be true.
Parent wasn't talking about the climate or sustainability at all. My point is that that's not what the conversation is about. The parent was talking about _health_, not climate. Sustainability of meat industry is irrelevant completely to healthiness or non-healthiness of being a human carnivore.
Tried keto, lost a little bit of weight at first, but then found it very easy to over-eat and gain weight. Was tracking with pee sticks pretty religiously. The carnivore diet sounds unhinged to my naive ears.
Ditto. I'm more than two years into it an honesty I'd be dead without it. And eating this way I naturally fall into an "intermittent fasting" schedule, because that's all I want to eat.
I think that fasting is completely different than keto/carnivore.
Do you really want to feel less hungry by replacing carbs with fat/protein?
Fasting seems to purge your system and your body gets used to digesting sometimes and being clear other times.
Also it seems fasting has aging benefits. Lowering calories leads to longer lifespan. And fasting might be one of the only ways to metabolize senescent cells (autophagy)
>> 8. Losing fat and gaining muscle can both be done, just not together.
>> You see, it’s basically impossible to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. To lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you take in. You need to have a net calorie deficit.
>> To build muscle, you need to eat more calories than you burn. You need to have a net calorie surplus.
Not true, can be done, you can find examples on the internet.
There is no need for a caloric surplus to build muscles. Muscles are build from amino acids, not "calories".
The body "eats up" muscles LAST: it will go through your fat first.
And if you are fat then you have "excess calories" in your fat: where do you think those go? Evaporate in thin air?
Eg look up Bryan Johnson: he built a lot of muscle while consuming 2k calories, which is 25% deficit for a guy of his height and weight and he still build muscles.
Looking at muscle gain as "calorie surplus" is ridiculus. Look up frutarians: they eat shitload calories from fruits but are totaly skinny, no muscle mass at all.
Muscles are built by having high testosterone. If you have low T it won't matter how much protein or "calories" you eat: you just won't built muscle easily.
>> You see, it’s basically impossible to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. To lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you take in. You need to have a net calorie deficit.
It can be done. I have done it. Over the past several months my weight has been roughly constant (-1 kg). My body fat % has declined and I've added significant amounts of muscle in the chest, shoulders, arms, legs, and back, to the degree where people who haven't seen me in a while make comments.
The recipe for this has been a minor decrease in overall caloric intake, a huge increase in protein consumption, and resistance training (mainly compound lifts) 2-3x per week.
It depends on a lot of factors and varies per person, but table stakes if you want to add muscle as a male include eating more than 120g of protein every day. A gram of protein has 4 calories, so that's 480 calories in protein per day. Since the male RDI for calories is 2,500, there's plenty of room to get the protein you need plus go on a diet.
It definitely can be _harder_ to build muscle on a low calorie diet. Bodybuilders go through cutting and bulking phases for a reason. They're dealing with the extremes of human biology where things are a lot harder. The concept of "beginner gains" exists and I'm sure that's what mine have been, I was in pretty bad shape, there were a lot of relatively easy wins (still are!).
But yeah it is not impossible. Just tons of protein from efficient sources (whey is basically 100% protein, lean meat, fish etc.). Which you don't need to go bonkers on calories to get.
>> To build muscle, you need to eat more calories than you burn. You need to have a net calorie surplus.
>Not true, can be done, you can find examples on the internet.
>There is no need for a caloric surplus to build muscles. Muscles are build from amino acids, not "calories". The body "eats up" muscles LAST: it will go through your fat first.
Per the latest science, discussed at length in this podcast, and despite any anecdata, this is false. You cannot synthesize muscle without adequate protein (aprox. 1gr per lbs of bodyweight) and a caloric surplus unless anabolic steroids are used. If you have sources for your claim of body recomposition other than ancedata please do provide it.
I do a watered down version of this and have still seen great results. I try to eat only in a 11-12 hour window each days, which for me means only between 8am-7pm. More energy, less food craving, better sleep.
I started this after reading a book The Circadian Code which describes all the science behind this (written by a real scientist). Having a deep understanding of the mechanism was the boost I need to give this a fair try. The book explains why study participants who ate the same food, but in restricted hours, had better results. A broader discussion of circadian rhythms explains why eating during all waking hours negatively impacts sleep and energy levels.
Whatever works for you is awesome and you should absolutely keep doing it.
However, I have to remind others that there is really no scientific authority worth anything on nutrition. The digestive system is still far too complex to understand systematically, and statistical studies have far too many confounding factors to have true predictive power.
We of course understand some elements based either on particularly strong effects (e.g. that a deficit of vitamin C will lead to scurvy), or on very basic physics (your net weight gain is based on calories eaten vs calories consumed), but that's about it.
Even the CICO model only holds as a principle, or in highly intrusive clinical settings - we don't have any practical way to actually measure how many calories are extracted from food, nor how many calories are being consumed by your activity - especially since for anyone not doing professional sports, the bulk of their calorie consumption comes from internal processes as far as we can tell.
For an example of how little we understand of the digestive system, until maybe 10 or so years ago, no one had thought to look at the role of the gut microbiome in nutrition (beyond extreme cases, such as radiation treatments killing it off entirely). We had known for a long time that there is a significant role of some kind, but no one had taken time to quantify it, nor to look at inter-personal differences that may be attributable to it. Even today we have very little information, beyond some hints now that it plays a huge role in nutrient absorption.
For another example, we have little to no idea how diet is controlled by the brain+gut, such as what causes some people to be perfectly content with salad, others to crave meat and fat, and still others to prefer carbs and other sugars (not to mention extremely specific cravings people sometime have that correlate with actual nutrient deficiencies, leading to extremes such as eating dirt for anemia).
Overall, there is no way to follow the science on nutrition today. You have to experiment with your own body, find something that works, and stick to it.
If you work long hours or have other obligations it's fun to see how far you can take it. I've fasted 24h+ a couple times, and often fast 16-20h if I skip breakfast and then work a 10-12h shift that day. I've never done well eating 3 meals a day and have always drifted towards OMAD style eating naturally.
Thinking you need to eat every 3 hours or six meals a day or always have breakfast or whatever it is that you’re convinced you have to do to survive … is all mental.
This will absolutely not be true in all cases. If you have certain health issues, no, it's not all in your mind that you need to eat at certain times.
Having said that, even if you have serious medical stuff going on, fasting or semi fasting can be useful. If you aren't well enough to just not eat, eating a lot less for a day or part of the day can have some of the same benefits with less risk/drama and may help you get to the point where fasting is viable.
He says he drinks 8 glasses (~2L) of water a day by noon. This is not an overly excessive amount, but it is not normal. The kidneys can remove 1L of water an hour[0], so make sure not to drink more than that or you will be at risk of water intoxication.
Well written and basically coincides my experience. One comment is point #10 what breaks a fast - I would be more strict with what breaks a fast and also it depends on what your goal is. For a daily 18 hour - goal being weight loss/maintenance and protecting insulin sensitivity - I will sometimes have ghee or coconut oil (pure fat) in the morning or in between a meal - but strictly no carbs or protein. If I were doing a strict 3 day fast purely for autophagy I would not have any ghee or coconut oil. I would just be consuming water, electrolyte supplement, potassium and magnesium, sometimes a pinch of salt - zero calories.
So carbs and protein will stimulate insulin but pure fats is different. If 1 gram of sugar is 4 calories then 50 calories is 12.5 grams of sugar. Ingesting 12.5 grams of sugar from what I read will disrupt autophagy and your fasted state by stimulating insulin - maybe more if you have any insulin resistance.
> My best work is usually done when I’m deep into my fast.
+1 on this - I’ve strangely found I am more focused (office job) when I’m fasting. I have a black coffee and get on with the day. It even saves me a little bit of time, given me even more productivity hours.
This is exactly my experience too. A couple of days into consecutive fasting and around 15 hours into my fast it’s like my brain gets kicked up a gear and everything is sharper and quicker. It’s almost like taking a stimulant tbh.
This is largely because I love to feel very full and to eat a lot, and also because I work much better with black and white rules than with shades of grey that rely on willpower.
I currently do 20:4 fasting: I started eating each day around 12:30, have a huge meal, take a siesta, and then eat some more, stopping usually by 15:30. Sometimes I eat more at the first meal, and that’s the only meal of the day.
I’m losing weight (by calorie counting), but in contrast to previous diets I don’t feel like I’m going without, I don’t feel so hungry, and most importantly, I don’t find myself at 7-8pm thinking “I wonder if I could justify going over my calories just sliiiightly” because I’ve started the fasting app on my phone.
Getting to 16:8 was hard. Going to 18:6 from that was easier. 20:4 was pretty easy, and then going to one meal a day (or 23:1) wasn’t any effort at all, other than it’s uncomfortable to ingest 2,300 calories in one sitting unless you significantly amp up the fat you’re eating.
I’m only really hungry each day from about 10:30 to 12:30, which is the time I use to exercise and then go for a long walk, so it’s very manageable. Not at all hungry in the evenings, and I don’t wake up hungry either. As someone who thinks of themselves as ALWAYS HUNGRY this has been interesting.