7 ms·

Notes: - In mice. - Tested 16:8 pattern. - Sustained consistently for nine weeks. - No exploration in this study of the effects and/or benefits from the gen

Notes: - In mice. - Tested 16:8 pattern. - Sustained consistently for nine weeks. - No exploration in this study of the effects and/or benefits from the gene expression. N=1 but I've been doing ~16:8-ish along with strict keto for the past five years and the net benefits for me have been transformative in fitness (Weight: -100+ lbs, BMI: Obese->Fit), long-term health (A1C, LDL/HDL, Trigs, BP, resting heart rate all from bad to great), cognitive acuity and emotional stability. First 12 weeks required serious effort/focus to transition habits, palette and metabolism (must RTFM and be rigorous) but after that it's been surprisingly easy to sustain long-term, requiring no will power or conscious effort. Other surprising experiential learnings: Dietary intake impacts long-term mental/emotional states FAR more than I ever suspected. Food & taste prefs I had since childhood are not innate. Many things I loved no longer even taste good. Hunger pangs and cravings are driven by my blood sugar cycle. Once I stabilized that I no longer get hungry or feel food deprived/obsessed. (<--- all N=1 of course.)

yonibot 4y ago
N=1 and also probably too many variables to learn from this - keto itself is already a massive lifestyle intervention. Did you restrict calories as well? Exercise?
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  most everyone sees body changes when using time-restricted eating WITHOUT any dietary changes. There’s no need to go keto like OP to see results.
- mrandish 4y ago
  I started IF only after I had been doing keto for about six weeks. At that point it was frankly easy because I wasn't getting hungry or having cravings anymore. I can't tease out how much IF contributed but I'd already lost a remarkable amount of weight on just keto. In general, I'd recommend only making one significant change at a time. Calorie tracking and restriction pretty much comes with strict keto. Transitioning to keto rigorously requires detailed tracking of every molecule that goes in your mouth (with a food scale and measuring cups), at least for the first 12 weeks. I tracked constantly for about 6 mos until it was automatic for me and I knew every food and portion I typically encounter at a glance. It's hard at first but only tracking part way is the #1 reason for failing to get results. I didn't do any exercise at all while losing weight, in fact while changing diet I was more sedentary than my usual slug-like activity level due to work and life factors. For me, exercise has always been hard, unpleasant and inevitably makes me hungrier. N=1 but that's what worked best for me and my weight loss was dramatic and super fast (>100 lbs in 8 mos).
karim79 4y ago
Out of curiosity, and if you don't mind me asking, what is your daily carb intake while doing keto?
hellosputnik 4y ago
Is your 16:8 restricted to a full meal or did you consume or drink anything outside of the 16:8? After-work drinks? Coffee?
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  black coffee and plain tea are acceptable according to everything I’ve read, probably because they are close to 0 calories and certainly not nutritional calories if >0. So I drink them. Unfortunately there’s no way to know if you’re still in a fasted state after that coffee. You can test blood sugar with a pinprick and that is a marker, but not a guarantee. To summarize: absolute safest is water only.
throwawaycities 4y ago
There are also studies showing both keto diets and fasting can alter the microbiome and attributed changes in gene expression to changes in the microbiome.
sometimesno 4y ago
16:8 is utterly unremarkable. A huge percent of people skip breakfast and then have dinner before 8pm. This is a normal, bog standard eating pattern.
- snozolli 4y ago
  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.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Agreed. 16:8 is not normal in America in 2023. Most people pay absolutely no attention to when they eat - only what they eat.
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      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.
  - piqi 4y ago
    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. 12:12 might be more common, but not consistently.
    - 4y ago
kayoone 4y ago
I had similar improvements without fasting and without keto. I do 16:8 on some days but it's mostly to help me manage my weight. I strongly believe most of the fasting benefits come from the fact that it makes managing weight easier. Calorie restriction and tracking my macros has helped me tremendously not only loosing weight but also understanding nutrition and what works for me and what doesn't. I am a 40 year old Software Engineer and fitter and stronger than I have ever been. I do quite a bit of high intensity cardio (cycling) + weight training and my recovery and peak performance suffered a lot when I tried keto for a few weeks, it also tanked my hormone levels. I still focus my carb intake on times around training but generally don't restrict.
- kbrisso 4y ago
  You need to stay on it for months to become keto adapted. I would say 6 months minimum, after that the energy swings go away and you generally have a lot more energy. You can also add MCT oil. The problem with keto is eating enough calories.
  - otoburb 4y ago
    >>You can also add MCT oil. If you use MCT oil it would be best to start slowly and not on an empty stomach because it can cause stomach aches otherwise.
    - PcChip 4y ago
      also note that it eats through some plastics I found that it dissolves red solo cups
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  For me the benefits seem to be a lack of carb cravings, and my fullness indicator turned on for the first time in my life. That was with 20:4 though, and no keto.
  - eganist 4y ago
mywacaday 4y ago
What RTFM do you recommend?
tomcam 4y ago
Are you available for a consultation? My contact is in my profile and of course I’m happy to pay.
croossin 4y ago
Agreed. Another additional benefit in my opinion is that when restricting your feeding window, it’s much easier to control cravings. When “free-eating”, it’s easy to just continue to snack.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
How did you test your A1C?
- fragmede 4y ago
  They're available OTC, eg. https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/walgreens-at-home-a1c-test-kit/ID=prod6248361-product https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/walgreens-at-home-a1c-test...
karaterobot 4y ago
> One group was given free access to the food. The other group was restricted to eating within a feeding window of nine hours each day. Small correction: 15:9 pattern, if this writeup is correct.
manmal 4y ago
To give another N=1, I don’t feel good on a 16:8 split. At least not when the eating window starts at noon. Long term (18 months) this zapped my energy and I lost a lot of muscle. Yes, weight loss was phenomenal, but I gained all of that back in the phase of exhaustion that followed. What has worked better for me was longer fasts, eg 48h, max once per week. And lately I‘ve been experimenting with skipping late dinner (no food after 6PM) which is kinda hard but seems to work for improved sleep and digestive health. I usually have visible bags under my eyes, those tend to be greatly reduced when I eat an early or no dinner.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- notyourday 4y ago
  > Long term (18 months) this zapped my energy and I lost a lot of muscle. Yes, weight loss was phenomenal, but I gained all of that back in the phase of exhaustion that followed. Muscle loss is an adaptation to loss of load on the muscle. Internet trope of "you lose muscle when you lose fat" is just that - a trope. If you were 100lb heavier, your muscles were loaded with extra 100lb. Should you lose the 100lbs, if you do not engage in the appropriate resistance exercises to provide equivalent of additional 100lb load, your muscle mass will decrease
Beaver117 4y ago
Also N=1, I did 16:8ish for a year and had no signficant change. It wasn't until I changed the type of food I was eating and tracking calories that I lost weight. But I still do 16:8 often because its a habit now.
kaitai 4y ago
What's interesting to me is that there is strong support from data that skipping breakfast causes many people to eat more later, in particular eating more carbs/sugar/snack foods. I have to wonder to what extent a planned 16:8 window where you're conscious about having a good "break-fast" meal is different than simply running out of the house without a meal plan in place. It is very clear from the data that simply "not eating breakfast" does not lead to better outcomes. I also find it interesting that the gender of the mice was not specified. If we're talking about hormonal profile changes, this will matter. When intermittent fasting was very popular, a number of women in "the scene" with a vested interest in making IF work noted that while initially it was great, they eventually started experiencing adverse effects, and often felt better on a 14:10 window instead. Agree with you on the last paragraph re: your experiences. I've needed to substantially change what I eat due to some health challenges, and blood sugar is huge. Protein in the morning (rather than something like oatmeal) is key for me. A dozen eggs a week and my hereditarily-high cholesterol went down, too. Sorry oatmeal folks!
- esperent 4y ago
  > there is strong support from data that skipping breakfast causes many people to eat more later, in particular eating more carbs/sugar/snack foods. There's a big difference between skipping breakfast one time and habitually skipping breakfast. The body adapts. You no longer feel hungry in the mornings and you develop new eating patterns - since most people doing IF are focused on health, these are likely to be healthy eating patterns that don't include lots of sugary snacks. Apparently this adaptation takes the form of the liver learning not to expect breakfast after waking and producing glucose at that time, although I have not personally checked the research on this. I've been doing IF 16:8 for about a year now. I rarely eat processed sugar (except a good croissant a few times a week). Even some fruits like ripe mango taste too sweet to me now. From personal experience and discussing this with other people, if your fear is that you'll end up getting so hungry that you'll stuff your face with junk, it's not a valid fear beyond the first week. To avoid this I would suggest easing into it. Eat breakfast an hour later for a few days, then two hours later, and finally combine it with lunch.
exfatloss 4y ago
[dead]
kuhewa 4y ago
I think it was 15:9 and since it is in mice it's hard to say but I reckon thats the equivalent of more like 24+ hour fasts in humans.
Rury 4y ago
I have been doing similar for about 3 years now, with similar results, but one thing that has been problematic with for me... is my bowel movements just don't seem to function well when I'm doing keto. The only thing that seems to fix them is milk+cereal... (fiber from veggies don't seem to quite cut it). So I kind of alternate between periods of keto, and a normal diet. How do you do strict keto?
- justinlloyd 4y ago
  Very low carb keto is known to stop you up, if that is what you are referring too. I didn't get any issues, but I kept my carbs a little higher than my wife who regularly did have issues. A small glass of salty water fixes it. Don't venture too far from a bathroom after ingesting.
justinlloyd 4y ago
N = 1. 18:6 for me. 2PM to 8PM, with occasional falling off the wagon due to social obligations or just simply forgetting to eat and then realizing I need to eat. I have noticed if I eat sugary snacks with my last meal that I get ravenously hungry much earlier the next day. There are some days where I unintentionally forget to eat until 4PM or so. I tried 16:8 but it never seemed to have any effect on weight loss for the 2PM to 10PM range. And my weight would creep up with that regimen. I suspect that might be related to late night hormonal changes in the human body preventing the digestion of certain types of food. I should try a 16:8 with 12PM to 8PM at some point and track the results.

yonibot 4y ago

N=1 and also probably too many variables to learn from this - keto itself is already a massive lifestyle intervention. Did you restrict calories as well? Exercise?

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
most everyone sees body changes when using time-restricted eating WITHOUT any dietary changes. There’s no need to go keto like OP to see results.
mrandish 4y ago
I started IF only after I had been doing keto for about six weeks. At that point it was frankly easy because I wasn't getting hungry or having cravings anymore. I can't tease out how much IF contributed but I'd already lost a remarkable amount of weight on just keto. In general, I'd recommend only making one significant change at a time. Calorie tracking and restriction pretty much comes with strict keto. Transitioning to keto rigorously requires detailed tracking of every molecule that goes in your mouth (with a food scale and measuring cups), at least for the first 12 weeks. I tracked constantly for about 6 mos until it was automatic for me and I knew every food and portion I typically encounter at a glance. It's hard at first but only tracking part way is the #1 reason for failing to get results. I didn't do any exercise at all while losing weight, in fact while changing diet I was more sedentary than my usual slug-like activity level due to work and life factors. For me, exercise has always been hard, unpleasant and inevitably makes me hungrier. N=1 but that's what worked best for me and my weight loss was dramatic and super fast (>100 lbs in 8 mos).

karim79 4y ago

Out of curiosity, and if you don't mind me asking, what is your daily carb intake while doing keto?

hellosputnik 4y ago

Is your 16:8 restricted to a full meal or did you consume or drink anything outside of the 16:8? After-work drinks? Coffee?

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
black coffee and plain tea are acceptable according to everything I’ve read, probably because they are close to 0 calories and certainly not nutritional calories if >0. So I drink them. Unfortunately there’s no way to know if you’re still in a fasted state after that coffee. You can test blood sugar with a pinprick and that is a marker, but not a guarantee. To summarize: absolute safest is water only.

throwawaycities 4y ago

There are also studies showing both keto diets and fasting can alter the microbiome and attributed changes in gene expression to changes in the microbiome.

sometimesno 4y ago

16:8 is utterly unremarkable. A huge percent of people skip breakfast and then have dinner before 8pm. This is a normal, bog standard eating pattern.

snozolli 4y ago
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.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Agreed. 16:8 is not normal in America in 2023. Most people pay absolutely no attention to when they eat - only what they eat.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    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.
- piqi 4y ago
  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. 12:12 might be more common, but not consistently.
  - 4y ago

kayoone 4y ago

I had similar improvements without fasting and without keto. I do 16:8 on some days but it's mostly to help me manage my weight. I strongly believe most of the fasting benefits come from the fact that it makes managing weight easier. Calorie restriction and tracking my macros has helped me tremendously not only loosing weight but also understanding nutrition and what works for me and what doesn't. I am a 40 year old Software Engineer and fitter and stronger than I have ever been. I do quite a bit of high intensity cardio (cycling) + weight training and my recovery and peak performance suffered a lot when I tried keto for a few weeks, it also tanked my hormone levels. I still focus my carb intake on times around training but generally don't restrict.

kbrisso 4y ago
You need to stay on it for months to become keto adapted. I would say 6 months minimum, after that the energy swings go away and you generally have a lot more energy. You can also add MCT oil. The problem with keto is eating enough calories.
- otoburb 4y ago
  >>You can also add MCT oil. If you use MCT oil it would be best to start slowly and not on an empty stomach because it can cause stomach aches otherwise.
  - PcChip 4y ago
    also note that it eats through some plastics I found that it dissolves red solo cups
galangalalgol 4y ago
For me the benefits seem to be a lack of carb cravings, and my fullness indicator turned on for the first time in my life. That was with 20:4 though, and no keto.
- eganist 4y ago

mywacaday 4y ago

What RTFM do you recommend?

tomcam 4y ago

Are you available for a consultation? My contact is in my profile and of course I’m happy to pay.

croossin 4y ago

Agreed. Another additional benefit in my opinion is that when restricting your feeding window, it’s much easier to control cravings. When “free-eating”, it’s easy to just continue to snack.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

How did you test your A1C?

fragmede 4y ago
They're available OTC, eg. https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/walgreens-at-home-a1c-test-kit/ID=prod6248361-product https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/walgreens-at-home-a1c-test...

karaterobot 4y ago

> One group was given free access to the food. The other group was restricted to eating within a feeding window of nine hours each day. Small correction: 15:9 pattern, if this writeup is correct.

manmal 4y ago

To give another N=1, I don’t feel good on a 16:8 split. At least not when the eating window starts at noon. Long term (18 months) this zapped my energy and I lost a lot of muscle. Yes, weight loss was phenomenal, but I gained all of that back in the phase of exhaustion that followed. What has worked better for me was longer fasts, eg 48h, max once per week. And lately I‘ve been experimenting with skipping late dinner (no food after 6PM) which is kinda hard but seems to work for improved sleep and digestive health. I usually have visible bags under my eyes, those tend to be greatly reduced when I eat an early or no dinner.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
notyourday 4y ago
> Long term (18 months) this zapped my energy and I lost a lot of muscle. Yes, weight loss was phenomenal, but I gained all of that back in the phase of exhaustion that followed. Muscle loss is an adaptation to loss of load on the muscle. Internet trope of "you lose muscle when you lose fat" is just that - a trope. If you were 100lb heavier, your muscles were loaded with extra 100lb. Should you lose the 100lbs, if you do not engage in the appropriate resistance exercises to provide equivalent of additional 100lb load, your muscle mass will decrease

Beaver117 4y ago

Also N=1, I did 16:8ish for a year and had no signficant change. It wasn't until I changed the type of food I was eating and tracking calories that I lost weight. But I still do 16:8 often because its a habit now.

kaitai 4y ago

What's interesting to me is that there is strong support from data that skipping breakfast causes many people to eat more later, in particular eating more carbs/sugar/snack foods. I have to wonder to what extent a planned 16:8 window where you're conscious about having a good "break-fast" meal is different than simply running out of the house without a meal plan in place. It is very clear from the data that simply "not eating breakfast" does not lead to better outcomes. I also find it interesting that the gender of the mice was not specified. If we're talking about hormonal profile changes, this will matter. When intermittent fasting was very popular, a number of women in "the scene" with a vested interest in making IF work noted that while initially it was great, they eventually started experiencing adverse effects, and often felt better on a 14:10 window instead. Agree with you on the last paragraph re: your experiences. I've needed to substantially change what I eat due to some health challenges, and blood sugar is huge. Protein in the morning (rather than something like oatmeal) is key for me. A dozen eggs a week and my hereditarily-high cholesterol went down, too. Sorry oatmeal folks!

esperent 4y ago
> there is strong support from data that skipping breakfast causes many people to eat more later, in particular eating more carbs/sugar/snack foods. There's a big difference between skipping breakfast one time and habitually skipping breakfast. The body adapts. You no longer feel hungry in the mornings and you develop new eating patterns - since most people doing IF are focused on health, these are likely to be healthy eating patterns that don't include lots of sugary snacks. Apparently this adaptation takes the form of the liver learning not to expect breakfast after waking and producing glucose at that time, although I have not personally checked the research on this. I've been doing IF 16:8 for about a year now. I rarely eat processed sugar (except a good croissant a few times a week). Even some fruits like ripe mango taste too sweet to me now. From personal experience and discussing this with other people, if your fear is that you'll end up getting so hungry that you'll stuff your face with junk, it's not a valid fear beyond the first week. To avoid this I would suggest easing into it. Eat breakfast an hour later for a few days, then two hours later, and finally combine it with lunch.

exfatloss 4y ago

[dead]

kuhewa 4y ago

I think it was 15:9 and since it is in mice it's hard to say but I reckon thats the equivalent of more like 24+ hour fasts in humans.

Rury 4y ago

I have been doing similar for about 3 years now, with similar results, but one thing that has been problematic with for me... is my bowel movements just don't seem to function well when I'm doing keto. The only thing that seems to fix them is milk+cereal... (fiber from veggies don't seem to quite cut it). So I kind of alternate between periods of keto, and a normal diet. How do you do strict keto?

justinlloyd 4y ago
Very low carb keto is known to stop you up, if that is what you are referring too. I didn't get any issues, but I kept my carbs a little higher than my wife who regularly did have issues. A small glass of salty water fixes it. Don't venture too far from a bathroom after ingesting.

justinlloyd 4y ago

N = 1. 18:6 for me. 2PM to 8PM, with occasional falling off the wagon due to social obligations or just simply forgetting to eat and then realizing I need to eat. I have noticed if I eat sugary snacks with my last meal that I get ravenously hungry much earlier the next day. There are some days where I unintentionally forget to eat until 4PM or so. I tried 16:8 but it never seemed to have any effect on weight loss for the 2PM to 10PM range. And my weight would creep up with that regimen. I suspect that might be related to late night hormonal changes in the human body preventing the digestion of certain types of food. I should try a 16:8 with 12PM to 8PM at some point and track the results.