9 ms·

Why Intermittent Fasting Has So Many Health Benefits

64 points by isaacmurasaki 4y ago

sph 4y ago
Intermittent fasting is so over-hyped. What it means is usually skipping breakfast. Big deal. I've been intermittent fasting, eating only around 2pm for lunch, and 7pm for dinner, for more than 10 years and I've managed to get quite overweight. Not IF's fault, just pointing out that it's neither worse nor better for your diet. Eating one fewer meal doesn't stop one from making bad food choices, or doesn't change how much energy you burn through and hunger you feel. Only OMAD might be a little worthy of that hype because it is often physically impossible to overeat your daily caloric expenditure in one sitting, but as a recovering binge eater, I've seen first hand how ultra-processed hyper-palatable food makes it very easy to eat >3000 kcal in one meal. That said, I agree that breakfast is a silly idea for us office workers. I personally do my best work in the (16) fasted hours between waking up and lunch, so much that I tend to have lunch as late as possible these days. You certainly don't need to eat 3 times a day for sitting on a chair 12 hours. Let alone that most idiotic, first-world idea of needing to eat "at least 5 small meals" around the clock never to feel hungry. Well, stop eating low-fat carby food and you won't feel hungry 5 times a day.
- profstasiak 4y ago
  My grandma never smoked and still got cancer. Not smoking is so overhyped
  - User23 4y ago
    I believe smoking increases your risk of getting lung cancer by about 20%[1]. It's definitely significant, but plenty of regular smokers manage to die from something else. I'm pretty happy about the repression of public smoking though, because I find the odor of cigarette tobacco revolting and also prefer to not have my risk of lung cancer even moderately increased by second-hand smoke. Annoyingly, it's hard to find good figures on relative risk for smokers and non-smokers, probably because of the current public health fad of dissembling to attempt to encourage desired behaviors. All I can find is that for the total population lifetime chance is 1/15 for men and 1/17 for women[2], with some weasel words about smoking increasing risk, but no actual quantification. Edit: I appreciate the replies, but note that none of the sources cited actually list any meaningful quantifiable data. So I dug a bit more and found this[3]. It indicates that the effect is largely dose dependent and only really shows up in smokers of ten years or more. While p=.05 might fly for psychology studies, it's not a convincing bar for serious science. On the other hand the decade and longer smokers show a very respectable p=.001. For the heaviest smokers it looks like a bit over a 5x increase. Assuming continuity, there also exists some level of moderate smoking where my proposed 20% increased risk is accurate and even more limited levels of smoking where the risk is not appreciably higher than not smoking. In fact the data indicate that former smokers who quit for more than ten years actually have lower risk of lung cancer than never smokers! Surely that's some kind of noise, but it still goes to show. [1] It's true that most people with lung cancer are or were smokers. But it's also true that most people with lung cancer are over 65, and they're from a period where most everyone was a smoker or exposed to smoke regularly. That's a pretty major confound. Over the next few decades we should get better data due to the relative decline in smoking making the effects of choosing to smoke clearer. [2] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/lung-cancer/about/key-statistics.html https://www.cancer.org/cancer/lung-cancer/about/key-statisti... [3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/484996 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
    - goda90 4y ago
      I think you misinterpreted 20x as 20%. CDC say smoking increases your chances of getting lung cancer by 15-30 times[0] vs someone who doesn't. [0]https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/basic_info/risk_factors.htm https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/basic_info/risk_factors.htm
    - tayistay 4y ago
      Dunno where you got the 20% stat, but it’s totally wrong. From cancer.org: > The risk of lung cancer for people who smoke is many times higher than for people who don't smoke. The longer you smoke and the more packs a day you smoke, the greater your risk. MANY TIMES
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    it actually is in some way. first of all, Worldwide, 15–20 percent of men with lung cancer are non-smokers while over 50 percent of women with lung cancer are non-smokers [1], so if you are a woman, chances are similar. Secondly, former smokers and current smokers have similar risks of getting lung cancer. Last, but not least, once you get it, survival rates are similar for non smokers, former smokers and current smokers (in similar groups of course). [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7431055/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7431055/ EDIT: it is overhyped because not smoking is in the public discourse treated as a cure, but it's not, especially if you are a woman. In USA, for example, black men have higher chances of getting lung cancer than white men, but black women risk much less than white women. So it's like saying that being a black woman saves you from lung cancer. Risks are expressed as probabilities, people too often don't get it.
    - wlesieutre 4y ago
      > Worldwide, 15–20 percent of men with lung cancer are non-smokers while over 50 percent of women with lung cancer are non-smokers 50% seems like a big number but it's a pretty meaningless statistic if women overall smoke less than men. It just means that when you have few smoking-related cancer cases, the other cases make up a larger percentage. Using that ratio to justify "you might as well smoke, 50% of women with lung cancer were non-smokers" is... not a good use of the statistics. As a thought exercise with made up numbers, suppose that you have 10 people, 1 will naturally get lung cancer, and everyone who smokes will get lung cancer. If 4 men smoke and get cancer, that's 5 with cancer and 1 of them was a non-smoker. 20% are non-smokers. If 1 woman smokes and gets cancer, that's 2 with cancer and 1 of them was a non-smoker. 50% are non-smokers. In this scenario you can say the exact same statistic about "50% of women with lung cancer are non-smokers" and brush it off as not a big deal even though 100% of smokers are getting cancer. That's not a useful number to be looking at to judge the risk of smoking vs not smoking.
      - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        > 50% seems like a big number I don't know why I thought that linking a scientific paper reporting accurately all the data would be helpful to the discussion. Not my opinions my friend. > but it's a pretty meaningless statistic women overall smoke less than men That's not how epidemiology works. The fact that black men in USA have ~20% higher risk of getting lung cancer, despite being less than white men, says anything to you? No, they don't smoke more. No, risk of getting cancer is not linked to how many cigarettes you smoke in a lifetime, once a smoker, the risk gets higher and stays higher for as long as you live, even if you quit. > even though 100% of smokers are getting cancer they are absolutely not! See why I say non smocking is over hyped? Because it leads to ideology, which is not the same thing of being informed.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pieter_mj 4y ago
    Radon victim?
- verdenti 4y ago
  OMAD (one meal per day) genuinely works with the only caveat being that you need to make sure you’re getting all your nutritional requirements for the day. This means having a larger single meal and taking multivitamins for me. Also I avoid all processed foods, especially processed meat. I’ve been doing it for two years now.
  - 1270018080 4y ago
    What does "genuinely works" mean?
    - verdenti 4y ago
      Lose weight for the most part with tangible results over a relatively short time. This is in contrast to something like just skipping breakfast.
- bryans 4y ago
  Nobody ever said that intermittent fasting would prevent you from becoming overweight. If you still overeat, you will still gain weight. It's not magic. You're being hypercritical for no reason and without knowledge of the topic.
  - weakfortress 4y ago
    [dead]
- rybosworld 4y ago
  "Intermittent fasting is so over-hyped...I've managed to get quite overweight. Not IF's fault, just pointing out that it's neither worse nor better for your diet." This is a strange take. For one thing, intermittent fasting is not a diet. IF is also not about eating less than you did before. You can, and many people do, eat the same number of calories as they did before. Eating more or less calories should be a separate decision made in the context of what you are trying to achieve.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  So many non-conclusion in nutrition. My father has subscribed to 3 cardiologists they are somewhat 70% overlap and left 30% non-consensus. Read some papers (only read abstract mostly). When I read all of these I only treat it as raw data, listen to your own body is closer to the truth. Debugging your body is kinda not fun since it takes a lot of time in iteration. I found my brain burn a lot of energy even if I just sit for a couple hours. So breakfast is needed.
- taylodl 4y ago
  > Intermittent fasting is so over-hyped. What it means is usually skipping breakfast. Big deal. Not quite. Intermittent fasting is, typically, eating in a restricted time range in the day, usually an 8 hour period. As you point out, most practitioners skip breakfast. As you also point out it's also possible to overeat. Eating between 11am - 7pm works well. You can have a late morning snack, a mid afternoon snack, and a normal dinner. No snacking at night. No consumption of alcohol outside of this eating range. What IF isn't about is gorging yourself during the window when you're able to eat. The goal then isn't just about when you eat, but also paying attention to what you eat, and how much you're eating.
- aulin 4y ago
  IF works while it's a stressor. Does it still work if you've been doing it non-stop for 10 years?
snapcaster 4y ago
Why would our body behave like this? why would gene expression, hormones, etc. all benefit from IF? I'm having trouble understanding if this is just a "fluke" that IF has all these benefits or if it serves some evolutionary purpose? Also, more speculatively I wonder if the food we eat is even worse than we already know it is and these studies are basically observing what happens when "poison ingestion" for lack of a better word is temporarily halted
- randomopining 4y ago
  Yeah its to use energy more efficiently when we are under stress
- retrac 4y ago
  Something approximating intermittent fasting, was probably an extremely common condition for humans to experience, until the development of agriculture. In a mobile culture without access to lots of salt, there are few ways to preserve food. You eat what you find as you find it, as much as you can. Then you go hungry until you find the next big score. Hunters may go many days or weeks between large kills or a group reaches a more promising foraging ground, everyone scraping by on minimal nutrition like dried jerky and plants collected on the move. But doing that for a few weeks, or even months, is just fine, if everyone was well-fed at the start, anyway.
- yummypaint 4y ago
  Think of IF as excercise for your cells' different metabolic pathways. People are able to live without ever walking or running, and some do, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to never excercise. I know some people who have NEVER in their lives gone more than ~12 hours without a meal, and all of them are ~30 years old but with the standard array of contemporary american health problems more typical of people in their 40s. Our ancestors certainly entered ketosis at least occasionally. It seems like a drastic change to switch to never using that cellular process over a span of just 1 or 2 generations.
drpoop 4y ago
You should eat regular meals so you poop at the same time each day. Meals trigger mass peristalsis which helps cause a bowel movement. When you start messing with this you start causing constipation, which then leads to haemorrhoids. If you are 30yo+ you know that you cannot rely on nice soft stool anymore by just doing whatever you want with your diet. I really think people don't talk about this enough. It's funny that these studies don't address any kind of side-effects like this.
- ericmcer 4y ago
  I did a two day fast and it took a few weeks to get back to normal. Weirdly cutting out carbohydrates also seems to lead to constipation. The current view seems to be fiber = pooping well, but that has not really played out in my experience.
  - ambicapter 4y ago
    Cutting out carbs will drop a lot of water from your system (from my layman's perspective). Drinking more water won't fully replace it b/c of loss of sodium (again, from a speculative standpoint).
  - woke_neoliberal 4y ago
    Note that most dietary fiber comes from carbohydrates (fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, seeds). Fiber is largely carbohydrates (and some proteins) you can't digest. Focus on soluble fiber. You could try a Phyllium supplement. Also important to feed the bacteria in your gut - they need carbs.
  - triceratops 4y ago
    How did you get enough fiber without carbs? That seems contradictory.
    - JimtheCoder 4y ago
      Not poster, but chia seeds, ground flax meal, unsweetened coconut and cocoa powder are super high fiber sources that are low in net carbs. I can easily get 40g of fiber with close to zero net carbs per day eating this type of stuff...
kradroy 4y ago
"circadian rhythms can be found in every cell" - seems vague. The info-nibble doesn't detail some of the downsides of IF - like how difficult it can be to practice it in social life (married? good luck telling your spouse you're not eating with them for months/years/ever). I did the 18-6 and 20-4 cycles and it worked. However, I gained back all the weight when I stopped due to my partner pleading daily for months to "eat like a normal person" again.
- positr0n 4y ago
  What was your schedule that it didn't work with your spouse? I know couples where one does IF and they just eat dinner together, but that's the only meal most couples/families eat together anyway.
  - kradroy 4y ago
    My spouse eats dinner late, like 8:30-9:00pm. So on the 18-6 or 20-4 we wouldn't be able to eat dinner together unless I ate a really late lunch.
- aulin 4y ago
  No need to get that extreme... with 14-10 you start eating at 12 and stop at 22, so you can share the two main meals with your spouse, even breakfast if you just drink your unsweetened black coffee with her.
  - number6 4y ago
    So just skip Breakfast?
    - doctorwhat 4y ago
      Yes. Don't "break fast" in the morning. That's enough to get some benefits and very easy to do.
blastro 4y ago
I feel like it gives my body a chance to "clean up" instead of constantly having to deal with the meal I've just swallowed.
- aitchnyu 4y ago
  I semi gave up a year back, but I did a lot of self reflection on my eating after trying IF. I skip breakfast and run 6 km a few times a week, but I eat for a timetable without feeling hunger pangs for weeks at a time. Now I eat less calories and allow myself to be hungry.
  - blastro 4y ago
    Another beautiful side benefit of regular fasting: you can skip meals when necessary, while traveling, for example without really any negative effect. It seems small, but compare that to people who absolutely fall apart if they haven't ingested carbs in the last 2 hours... it's a powerful adapation.
asow92 4y ago
Keto and intermittent fasting have changed my life. Over the past several months I've gone from 285 to 250 pounds and feel amazing. I don't feel hungry and meals satiate me enough to forego snacking. I feel mental clarity while coding, but can burn out if I over exert myself exercising (probably due to a lack of glycogen stored in my body). I like to think of it as a cleaner sustained burn rather than on-demand raw power. Is there a lot of hype around this? Yes, but everyone's physiology is different, and this combo for whatever reason agrees with my body far more than eating high amounts of carbohydrates at random times throughout the day ever did. edit: I can't understand why someone would downvote this. I'm just trying to share a positive anecdote about my life.
- ed_elliott_asc 4y ago
  I agree with you (and didn't downvote) but I wonder if you were downvoted for praising keto when the article is about IF?
  - asow92 4y ago
    My theory is that keto pairs well with intermittent fasting because it helps curb food cravings during fasts. Sure, you can do IF without keto, but you might have a difficult time with it and might be more susceptible to cheating.
  - aulin 4y ago
    In /r/keto they say "first rule about keto, you don't talk about keto". There is a certain stigma about it as it's commonly associated with extreme fad diets. Keto posts typically get quite a lot of hate on generalist communities (like HN and reddit outside of the low carb subs) or even IRL.
    - asow92 4y ago
      Is it that extreme though? It seems reasonable to assume that our ancestors would have been in and out of ketosis frequently in pre-history, meaning that our physiology should well adapted to this state of being.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
1270018080 4y ago
This website is dubious, the article looks like it was written by a bot, so I looked at the original paper. The actual science studied TRF (time restricted fasting), not intermittent fasting. Which is eating over a 8-10 hour period per day, and that is just... normal eating? Skipping breakfast is all you need to do.
WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
Tossing another data point out there. I've a son who's worked a physical job for 4 years and started IF two years ago. Starting at ~300lbs, he went to ~200lbs in 4 months and has been <200lbs since. His first meal is a late day lunch; the sort of food he eats hasn't changed. It may be my genetic line has a disposition to sharply lose weight. In 2021, I went from 225 to 192 in one month (panic + light eating).
cliff_badger 4y ago
Can I ask, who in the hell agreed to be part of this study? "After seven weeks, tissue samples from 22 organ groups and the brain were taken at various periods during the day or night to examine their genetic makeup." They are doing major surgery (multiple times by the looks of it), including removing brain tissue...
- voisin 4y ago
  > For their research, the scientists looked at two groups of mice.
  - ro_bit 4y ago
    If I was a mouse I still wouldn't agree to that
  - cliff_badger 4y ago
    Thank you, I missed that. I assumed it was humans.
anotherevan 4y ago
This Huberman Lab podcast episode may be of interest here: Effects of Fasting & Time Restricted Eating on Fat Loss & Health https://hubermanlab.com/effects-of-fasting-and-time-restricted-eating-on-fat-loss-and-health/ https://hubermanlab.com/effects-of-fasting-and-time-restrict...

64 points by isaacmurasaki 4y ago

sph 4y ago

Intermittent fasting is so over-hyped. What it means is usually skipping breakfast. Big deal. I've been intermittent fasting, eating only around 2pm for lunch, and 7pm for dinner, for more than 10 years and I've managed to get quite overweight. Not IF's fault, just pointing out that it's neither worse nor better for your diet. Eating one fewer meal doesn't stop one from making bad food choices, or doesn't change how much energy you burn through and hunger you feel. Only OMAD might be a little worthy of that hype because it is often physically impossible to overeat your daily caloric expenditure in one sitting, but as a recovering binge eater, I've seen first hand how ultra-processed hyper-palatable food makes it very easy to eat >3000 kcal in one meal. That said, I agree that breakfast is a silly idea for us office workers. I personally do my best work in the (16) fasted hours between waking up and lunch, so much that I tend to have lunch as late as possible these days. You certainly don't need to eat 3 times a day for sitting on a chair 12 hours. Let alone that most idiotic, first-world idea of needing to eat "at least 5 small meals" around the clock never to feel hungry. Well, stop eating low-fat carby food and you won't feel hungry 5 times a day.

profstasiak 4y ago
My grandma never smoked and still got cancer. Not smoking is so overhyped
- User23 4y ago
  I believe smoking increases your risk of getting lung cancer by about 20%[1]. It's definitely significant, but plenty of regular smokers manage to die from something else. I'm pretty happy about the repression of public smoking though, because I find the odor of cigarette tobacco revolting and also prefer to not have my risk of lung cancer even moderately increased by second-hand smoke. Annoyingly, it's hard to find good figures on relative risk for smokers and non-smokers, probably because of the current public health fad of dissembling to attempt to encourage desired behaviors. All I can find is that for the total population lifetime chance is 1/15 for men and 1/17 for women[2], with some weasel words about smoking increasing risk, but no actual quantification. Edit: I appreciate the replies, but note that none of the sources cited actually list any meaningful quantifiable data. So I dug a bit more and found this[3]. It indicates that the effect is largely dose dependent and only really shows up in smokers of ten years or more. While p=.05 might fly for psychology studies, it's not a convincing bar for serious science. On the other hand the decade and longer smokers show a very respectable p=.001. For the heaviest smokers it looks like a bit over a 5x increase. Assuming continuity, there also exists some level of moderate smoking where my proposed 20% increased risk is accurate and even more limited levels of smoking where the risk is not appreciably higher than not smoking. In fact the data indicate that former smokers who quit for more than ten years actually have lower risk of lung cancer than never smokers! Surely that's some kind of noise, but it still goes to show. [1] It's true that most people with lung cancer are or were smokers. But it's also true that most people with lung cancer are over 65, and they're from a period where most everyone was a smoker or exposed to smoke regularly. That's a pretty major confound. Over the next few decades we should get better data due to the relative decline in smoking making the effects of choosing to smoke clearer. [2] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/lung-cancer/about/key-statistics.html https://www.cancer.org/cancer/lung-cancer/about/key-statisti... [3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/484996 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
  - goda90 4y ago
    I think you misinterpreted 20x as 20%. CDC say smoking increases your chances of getting lung cancer by 15-30 times[0] vs someone who doesn't. [0]https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/basic_info/risk_factors.htm https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/basic_info/risk_factors.htm
  - tayistay 4y ago
    Dunno where you got the 20% stat, but it’s totally wrong. From cancer.org: > The risk of lung cancer for people who smoke is many times higher than for people who don't smoke. The longer you smoke and the more packs a day you smoke, the greater your risk. MANY TIMES
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  it actually is in some way. first of all, Worldwide, 15–20 percent of men with lung cancer are non-smokers while over 50 percent of women with lung cancer are non-smokers [1], so if you are a woman, chances are similar. Secondly, former smokers and current smokers have similar risks of getting lung cancer. Last, but not least, once you get it, survival rates are similar for non smokers, former smokers and current smokers (in similar groups of course). [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7431055/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7431055/ EDIT: it is overhyped because not smoking is in the public discourse treated as a cure, but it's not, especially if you are a woman. In USA, for example, black men have higher chances of getting lung cancer than white men, but black women risk much less than white women. So it's like saying that being a black woman saves you from lung cancer. Risks are expressed as probabilities, people too often don't get it.
  - wlesieutre 4y ago
    > Worldwide, 15–20 percent of men with lung cancer are non-smokers while over 50 percent of women with lung cancer are non-smokers 50% seems like a big number but it's a pretty meaningless statistic if women overall smoke less than men. It just means that when you have few smoking-related cancer cases, the other cases make up a larger percentage. Using that ratio to justify "you might as well smoke, 50% of women with lung cancer were non-smokers" is... not a good use of the statistics. As a thought exercise with made up numbers, suppose that you have 10 people, 1 will naturally get lung cancer, and everyone who smokes will get lung cancer. If 4 men smoke and get cancer, that's 5 with cancer and 1 of them was a non-smoker. 20% are non-smokers. If 1 woman smokes and gets cancer, that's 2 with cancer and 1 of them was a non-smoker. 50% are non-smokers. In this scenario you can say the exact same statistic about "50% of women with lung cancer are non-smokers" and brush it off as not a big deal even though 100% of smokers are getting cancer. That's not a useful number to be looking at to judge the risk of smoking vs not smoking.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > 50% seems like a big number I don't know why I thought that linking a scientific paper reporting accurately all the data would be helpful to the discussion. Not my opinions my friend. > but it's a pretty meaningless statistic women overall smoke less than men That's not how epidemiology works. The fact that black men in USA have ~20% higher risk of getting lung cancer, despite being less than white men, says anything to you? No, they don't smoke more. No, risk of getting cancer is not linked to how many cigarettes you smoke in a lifetime, once a smoker, the risk gets higher and stays higher for as long as you live, even if you quit. > even though 100% of smokers are getting cancer they are absolutely not! See why I say non smocking is over hyped? Because it leads to ideology, which is not the same thing of being informed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pieter_mj 4y ago
  Radon victim?
verdenti 4y ago
OMAD (one meal per day) genuinely works with the only caveat being that you need to make sure you’re getting all your nutritional requirements for the day. This means having a larger single meal and taking multivitamins for me. Also I avoid all processed foods, especially processed meat. I’ve been doing it for two years now.
- 1270018080 4y ago
  What does "genuinely works" mean?
  - verdenti 4y ago
    Lose weight for the most part with tangible results over a relatively short time. This is in contrast to something like just skipping breakfast.
bryans 4y ago
Nobody ever said that intermittent fasting would prevent you from becoming overweight. If you still overeat, you will still gain weight. It's not magic. You're being hypercritical for no reason and without knowledge of the topic.
- weakfortress 4y ago
  [dead]
rybosworld 4y ago
"Intermittent fasting is so over-hyped...I've managed to get quite overweight. Not IF's fault, just pointing out that it's neither worse nor better for your diet." This is a strange take. For one thing, intermittent fasting is not a diet. IF is also not about eating less than you did before. You can, and many people do, eat the same number of calories as they did before. Eating more or less calories should be a separate decision made in the context of what you are trying to achieve.
Existenceblinks 4y ago
So many non-conclusion in nutrition. My father has subscribed to 3 cardiologists they are somewhat 70% overlap and left 30% non-consensus. Read some papers (only read abstract mostly). When I read all of these I only treat it as raw data, listen to your own body is closer to the truth. Debugging your body is kinda not fun since it takes a lot of time in iteration. I found my brain burn a lot of energy even if I just sit for a couple hours. So breakfast is needed.
taylodl 4y ago
> Intermittent fasting is so over-hyped. What it means is usually skipping breakfast. Big deal. Not quite. Intermittent fasting is, typically, eating in a restricted time range in the day, usually an 8 hour period. As you point out, most practitioners skip breakfast. As you also point out it's also possible to overeat. Eating between 11am - 7pm works well. You can have a late morning snack, a mid afternoon snack, and a normal dinner. No snacking at night. No consumption of alcohol outside of this eating range. What IF isn't about is gorging yourself during the window when you're able to eat. The goal then isn't just about when you eat, but also paying attention to what you eat, and how much you're eating.
aulin 4y ago
IF works while it's a stressor. Does it still work if you've been doing it non-stop for 10 years?

snapcaster 4y ago

Why would our body behave like this? why would gene expression, hormones, etc. all benefit from IF? I'm having trouble understanding if this is just a "fluke" that IF has all these benefits or if it serves some evolutionary purpose? Also, more speculatively I wonder if the food we eat is even worse than we already know it is and these studies are basically observing what happens when "poison ingestion" for lack of a better word is temporarily halted

randomopining 4y ago
Yeah its to use energy more efficiently when we are under stress
retrac 4y ago
Something approximating intermittent fasting, was probably an extremely common condition for humans to experience, until the development of agriculture. In a mobile culture without access to lots of salt, there are few ways to preserve food. You eat what you find as you find it, as much as you can. Then you go hungry until you find the next big score. Hunters may go many days or weeks between large kills or a group reaches a more promising foraging ground, everyone scraping by on minimal nutrition like dried jerky and plants collected on the move. But doing that for a few weeks, or even months, is just fine, if everyone was well-fed at the start, anyway.
yummypaint 4y ago
Think of IF as excercise for your cells' different metabolic pathways. People are able to live without ever walking or running, and some do, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to never excercise. I know some people who have NEVER in their lives gone more than ~12 hours without a meal, and all of them are ~30 years old but with the standard array of contemporary american health problems more typical of people in their 40s. Our ancestors certainly entered ketosis at least occasionally. It seems like a drastic change to switch to never using that cellular process over a span of just 1 or 2 generations.

drpoop 4y ago

You should eat regular meals so you poop at the same time each day. Meals trigger mass peristalsis which helps cause a bowel movement. When you start messing with this you start causing constipation, which then leads to haemorrhoids. If you are 30yo+ you know that you cannot rely on nice soft stool anymore by just doing whatever you want with your diet. I really think people don't talk about this enough. It's funny that these studies don't address any kind of side-effects like this.

ericmcer 4y ago
I did a two day fast and it took a few weeks to get back to normal. Weirdly cutting out carbohydrates also seems to lead to constipation. The current view seems to be fiber = pooping well, but that has not really played out in my experience.
- ambicapter 4y ago
  Cutting out carbs will drop a lot of water from your system (from my layman's perspective). Drinking more water won't fully replace it b/c of loss of sodium (again, from a speculative standpoint).
- woke_neoliberal 4y ago
  Note that most dietary fiber comes from carbohydrates (fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, seeds). Fiber is largely carbohydrates (and some proteins) you can't digest. Focus on soluble fiber. You could try a Phyllium supplement. Also important to feed the bacteria in your gut - they need carbs.
- triceratops 4y ago
  How did you get enough fiber without carbs? That seems contradictory.
  - JimtheCoder 4y ago
    Not poster, but chia seeds, ground flax meal, unsweetened coconut and cocoa powder are super high fiber sources that are low in net carbs. I can easily get 40g of fiber with close to zero net carbs per day eating this type of stuff...

kradroy 4y ago

"circadian rhythms can be found in every cell" - seems vague. The info-nibble doesn't detail some of the downsides of IF - like how difficult it can be to practice it in social life (married? good luck telling your spouse you're not eating with them for months/years/ever). I did the 18-6 and 20-4 cycles and it worked. However, I gained back all the weight when I stopped due to my partner pleading daily for months to "eat like a normal person" again.

positr0n 4y ago
What was your schedule that it didn't work with your spouse? I know couples where one does IF and they just eat dinner together, but that's the only meal most couples/families eat together anyway.
- kradroy 4y ago
  My spouse eats dinner late, like 8:30-9:00pm. So on the 18-6 or 20-4 we wouldn't be able to eat dinner together unless I ate a really late lunch.
aulin 4y ago
No need to get that extreme... with 14-10 you start eating at 12 and stop at 22, so you can share the two main meals with your spouse, even breakfast if you just drink your unsweetened black coffee with her.
- number6 4y ago
  So just skip Breakfast?
  - doctorwhat 4y ago
    Yes. Don't "break fast" in the morning. That's enough to get some benefits and very easy to do.

blastro 4y ago

I feel like it gives my body a chance to "clean up" instead of constantly having to deal with the meal I've just swallowed.

aitchnyu 4y ago
I semi gave up a year back, but I did a lot of self reflection on my eating after trying IF. I skip breakfast and run 6 km a few times a week, but I eat for a timetable without feeling hunger pangs for weeks at a time. Now I eat less calories and allow myself to be hungry.
- blastro 4y ago
  Another beautiful side benefit of regular fasting: you can skip meals when necessary, while traveling, for example without really any negative effect. It seems small, but compare that to people who absolutely fall apart if they haven't ingested carbs in the last 2 hours... it's a powerful adapation.

asow92 4y ago

Keto and intermittent fasting have changed my life. Over the past several months I've gone from 285 to 250 pounds and feel amazing. I don't feel hungry and meals satiate me enough to forego snacking. I feel mental clarity while coding, but can burn out if I over exert myself exercising (probably due to a lack of glycogen stored in my body). I like to think of it as a cleaner sustained burn rather than on-demand raw power. Is there a lot of hype around this? Yes, but everyone's physiology is different, and this combo for whatever reason agrees with my body far more than eating high amounts of carbohydrates at random times throughout the day ever did. edit: I can't understand why someone would downvote this. I'm just trying to share a positive anecdote about my life.

ed_elliott_asc 4y ago
I agree with you (and didn't downvote) but I wonder if you were downvoted for praising keto when the article is about IF?
- asow92 4y ago
  My theory is that keto pairs well with intermittent fasting because it helps curb food cravings during fasts. Sure, you can do IF without keto, but you might have a difficult time with it and might be more susceptible to cheating.
- aulin 4y ago
  In /r/keto they say "first rule about keto, you don't talk about keto". There is a certain stigma about it as it's commonly associated with extreme fad diets. Keto posts typically get quite a lot of hate on generalist communities (like HN and reddit outside of the low carb subs) or even IRL.
  - asow92 4y ago
    Is it that extreme though? It seems reasonable to assume that our ancestors would have been in and out of ketosis frequently in pre-history, meaning that our physiology should well adapted to this state of being.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

1270018080 4y ago

This website is dubious, the article looks like it was written by a bot, so I looked at the original paper. The actual science studied TRF (time restricted fasting), not intermittent fasting. Which is eating over a 8-10 hour period per day, and that is just... normal eating? Skipping breakfast is all you need to do.

WarOnPrivacy 4y ago

Tossing another data point out there. I've a son who's worked a physical job for 4 years and started IF two years ago. Starting at ~300lbs, he went to ~200lbs in 4 months and has been <200lbs since. His first meal is a late day lunch; the sort of food he eats hasn't changed. It may be my genetic line has a disposition to sharply lose weight. In 2021, I went from 225 to 192 in one month (panic + light eating).

cliff_badger 4y ago

Can I ask, who in the hell agreed to be part of this study? "After seven weeks, tissue samples from 22 organ groups and the brain were taken at various periods during the day or night to examine their genetic makeup." They are doing major surgery (multiple times by the looks of it), including removing brain tissue...

voisin 4y ago
> For their research, the scientists looked at two groups of mice.
- ro_bit 4y ago
  If I was a mouse I still wouldn't agree to that
- cliff_badger 4y ago
  Thank you, I missed that. I assumed it was humans.

anotherevan 4y ago

This Huberman Lab podcast episode may be of interest here: Effects of Fasting & Time Restricted Eating on Fat Loss & Health https://hubermanlab.com/effects-of-fasting-and-time-restricted-eating-on-fat-loss-and-health/ https://hubermanlab.com/effects-of-fasting-and-time-restrict...