In my experience, it's exceptional in America. This may be due to constant indoctrination that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day". Also, modern food processing has put all sorts of late-night snacks at our fingertips.
Given the amount of disagreement, I'd expect it is common enough but with some multimodal distribution tied to culture, geography or job type, so that the two modes don't notice each other. Happens with lots of stuff. My N=1 is that I probably know fewer people who skip breakfast (to include calories in coffee) than I do people who do 20:4 fasting. I like how I felt on 20:4 but it is easy to fall off of for social reasons, and womce I do, the blood sugar related cravings come back so I need a 48H water fast to get back into effortless 20:4.
Hard to imagine skipping breakfast, lunch, coffee/tea w/milk & cream, and all snacking during the day, everyday is normal outside America. Isn't burned bread with beans or butter for breakfast a thing in the UK?
16:8 means if your last calories are before 10PM, you wouldn't eat anything at all until after 2 PM. And this would be every day, not every other day.
It’s more common in parts Europe than you’d think I guess, with the last calories around 8-9pm until 1pm (or 11pm until 3pm a bit southwest of here) there are variants around that of course and I’m less sure how common this is everywhere in Europe, but where I’ve lived a lot of us eat like that. It’s not some fad just a long held habit, not sure where it came from or why so many of us seem to do it here.
That said, it is changing by the day and I see more teenagers snacking at odd times.
> sounds like a very normal day for lots of people
That's the issue with your statement. I didn't survey "lots of people" and neither did you. I can't find any data to back it up, but I do see a plenty of surveys about breakfast consumption.
I find it very hard to believe people are restricting their calories within 8 hours everyday, naturally just based on the conversations I've had with people. Even in this thread people say they've tried it, and found it to be too difficult.
It's simple: People enjoy eating. People eat when they're bored, because of habit, or socially. No reason to believe they abstain from those things 16 hours a day.
It's not like all of that 16 hours is sleep. On average, more people are getting less than 7 hours of sleep.
Fasting is not an on/off switch, but too many calories (>10-20) in a short amount of time pushes you out of a fasted state. It's very likely people are snacking or drinking calories within those hours after waking, and before lunch.
Also, some people will often over eat one day, and then under eat the next. This could help get through a 16 hour fast a few days every week. I think those times are usually over represented when self-reporting these habits.
