Eating less and more than needed on alternate days prolongs life (2006)
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Has anyone done studies with Buddhist monks in Vipassana tradition? They have rule not to eat after midday. Obviously many of them cheat different ways but if you can find the hardcorce monks and monasteries, you would have several thousands (possibly tens of thousands) subjects who have already been following the regime for several decades.
Perhaps I'm biased because this is what I naturally do.
Only eating before 1pm would be absolute torture for me!
I find I'm actually more successful at counting calories on this schedule. I think it's easier for me to completely abstain during the fasting period, and I'm less tempted to snack with lunch and dinner so close together. I've been planning and allocating my calories like I never have before, even though I've tried many carb- and calorie-counting schemes in the past.
I'm also toying around with taking a little MCT oil in the morning to help with cravings and mental focus and give me a little keto boost. It's unclear to me whether or not this defeats the purpose of the fast. Many people seem to think it's fine ("fat fasting") and maybe even a good idea, but I'm not yet convinced one way or the other.
That's all, been doing it for about 17 years now and it works great. Although I drink coffee throughout the day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxM_CLsvieE
He also had Gary Taubes on and that was a treat
there is starting to emerge a small, fringe group of people that believe calories-in-calories-out is a complete myth (or, more specifically, calories-out is a complete unknown given current understanding of metabolic science), which pretty much sends people into apoplectic fits of rage when they hear about it. even if it turns out to be a complete troll, it's great entertainment watching the science develop/debate.
Diet patterns and periodic fasting has other wealth effects.
Those individuals with high energy extraction and low metabolic rate will find it very difficult to eat as little as required to balance the energy equation without constant hunger and living with excessively small portions. While this is achievable, it is hard and failure is frequent...especially given all the other challenges in life. So naturally, asking whether and how these modifiers can be adjusted is pressing. There is a lot to learn, but thereare known factors that can influence these factors. For example, co tinued cold exposure leads to activation of brown fat that generates heat, which dramatically raises metabolic rate (e.g. Californian's feel cold in 12°C weather, but someone in New England would wear shorts in that weather). Interestingly, cold weather increases gut caloric absorbancy to compensate for these expenditures..(sorry Id provide references, but I dont have it bookmarked on my current device).
So as an "old student" I learned that there was no meal at 5pm. Instead we had hot water with lemon, I think we were allowed to eat a fruit :)
You get used to it pretty quickly.
That said, they have an AMAZING breakfast that is very filling.
And.. you sit for long periods so you can't assume the results are practical for "lay man" day jobs and activities. Could be for programming jobs...
Religious groups don't generally make good research subjects due to the fact that it's hard to set up control groups and their population varies too much from the regular joe.
I'm also a somewhat experienced Vipassana practicioner. An annoying thing I noticed with regard to meditation was that since Hofmekler's diet is essentially about "overeating" at night, both late night and early morning meditations became much harder for me.
Intuitively I still feel that Hofmekler has got many things right. It's actually surprisingly easy to follow after about 5-6 days of adjustments.
Here's an article on the method by Hofmekler: http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2012/09/14/...
My frugality hero Jacob Lund Fisker (author of "Early Retirement Extreme", a fascinating book about radical saving and beyond) also follows Hofmekler's diet: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-we-eat.html
For some reason, I suppose I read it somewhere, I though that for ketosis you need 36 hours.
Where can I learn the science of ketosis. So I can be more data driven regarding my health.
https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/wiki/keto_in_a_nutshell https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/wiki/faq
Effects in long-lived mice: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exger.2013.06.009
Protective of the aging heart: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.freeradbiomed.2009.10.003
Benefits without calorie reduction: https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1035720100
In nematodes, looking at signaling: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature07583
And so on. There is a lot more out there on this topic:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=alternate+day+fast...
Researchers still have a very long way to go in order to understand the calorie restriction and intermittent fasting responses completely. In order to do that one pretty much as to have a complete map of cellular biochemistry. Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen; decades is a very reasonable expectation, I think, based on watching progress in understanding sirtuins over more than a decade, which is just one very thin slice of a very large problem. Practical rejuvenation based on repair of damage after the SENS vision (such as via clearing senescent cells) will be a going concern well before researchers can fully explain calorie restriction in the context of age-related changes and cause and effect in the operation of mammalian biochemistry.
A point well worth emphasizing. Probably would help if more people interested in such stuff (whether academics or private enthusiasts) started to recognize the importance of the biochemical side and striving for an ever more complete understanding of it, rather than piling epidemiological and observational long-term "study" upon study.. these are valuable, too, granted, but just like in software development, I suspect there's a lot of castles being built on profoundly muddy/slippery/incomplete foundations
"Since May 2003 we have experimented with alternate day calorie restriction, one day consuming 20-50% of estimated daily caloric requirement and the next day ad lib eating, and have observed health benefits starting in as little as two weeks, in insulin resistance, asthma, seasonal allergies, infectious diseases of viral, bacterial and fungal origin (viral URI, recurrent bacterial tonsillitis, chronic sinusitis, periodontal disease), autoimmune disorder (rheumatoid arthritis), osteoarthritis, symptoms due to CNS inflammatory lesions (Tourette's, Meniere's) cardiac arrhythmias (PVCs, atrial fibrillation), menopause related hot flashes." (Emphasis mine.)
Are they still talking about mice? Or experiments on people?
It seems that eating 3 meals a day, every day, like clockwork, is not the best strategy overall (to say nothing of perpetual snacking in between). I think some signal starts to show above the noise in the data, indicating that our metabolism is optimized for a less regular schedule - or at least a schedule interspersing times of abundance with intervals of constraint.
If that's the case, then we have to simulate and replace the external constraints of Stone Age yore with voluntary restraint.
imho the next step is to learn how to measure in much greater detail (and on a personal level) where thresholds for immune, organ, hormone, etc responses occur. Then use that to design and customize diets.
Essentially I wanna capacity plan my carb/sugar intake to keep it just about 20% shy of of triggering an insulin response. That's just one potential example.
I don't think that's the proper way to think about it.
It's more probably that what is going on is that fasting was unavoidable for our ancestors, and the body evolved for that to be a period where some kind of repair action was activated. Without fasting something doesn't happen.
That something is probably related to autophagy.
Broadly speaking, somewhat accurate, but in the details it can vary greatly. Digestability, resources required to be mobilized for certain foods vs others (enzymes, how much stomach acid & how often etc), and certainly insulin among other "signaling hormones" are crucial factors. In mammals insulin especially is almost always a quite potent "stress/damage" agent ---observe the capacity of human pets to develop diabetes (not exactly something a wolf in the wild could ever catch, even when absent abundance of prey animals munching some berries or fallen apples in the applicable very short season)--- even wild pigs are nowhere near as fat as our agri-breeds, and practically all mammals given abundance of their preferred natural food choices, eat a high-fat diet (in herbivores this is effected by a radically more potent microbiome of bacteria and other microorganisms converting cellulose and most-not-all other carbohydrate into chiefly short-chain fatty acids, plus synthesization of some vitamins/etc for that mammal) --- my point? "Eating is doubly stressful for humans" if we consider the foods we have invented since the dawn of agriculture, namely (A) quickly and easily digested carbohydrate loads (B) available year-round, and (C) 24/7 --- a real triple-whammy for the mammal. OTOH we're quite robust mammals (systemic damage only really gets noticed/troublesome with age! it's amazing the assaults human bodies can handle for so many decades, whether we're talking foods or other substances) on the whole IMHO and we're quite a bit "better at fasting" in a way (we can utilize more ketones for longer and more efficiently esp our brains, no other mammal could fast as long as we can, indeed if you're 200-300+lbs with a handy source of just-the-water-soluble-vitamins you can easily fast a year, as an interesting pre-1971 study investigated before "ethics guidelines for research" were.. "cultivated") which could well mean that it has less pronounced / fewer of such "benefits" as is the case for MICE!
Well now.. what was my point just now..
Why bothering?
Life a normal life, do a little bit of sports, try to reduce stress etc.
Will not change my diet or eating habbits.
I suspect part of the problem is that if anyone ever admits to skipping breakfast they're shamed and guilted about as much as if they'd started the day by doing lines of cocaine. The breakfast nazis are out in force, and they push this idea on people when they're very young (even though breakfast is mostly a scam made to sell sugary grains).
Anecdata, but I only started to lose weight and feel healthier when I switched to only eating when I was hungry. Most of my eating had been to adhere to US social norms or combat boredom (while not great, diet soda worked to fight the latter until I got used to the idea that I didn't need to be consuming stuff). For all the "education" out there, "you don't have to eat if you're not hungry" is shockingly rare advice.
It's just mentally hard to do. Like sleep, sex and other physical needs, food is wired pretty deeply in our heads, and changing our behavior in regards to it takes a lot of mental and emotional effort. And most people have a lot of other things more immediately important in their lives that take mental effort, so they eat more than they should, even if they know the consequences.
You either cook everything yourself and weigh every ingredient. Or you buy totally packaged meals (Lite 'n Easy, etc), or you buy fast food (And even then, the calorie counts in fast food are... inaccurate at best).
If I go to the corner shop and get a sandwich I have no idea what's in it and there is no accurate way to estimate.
While it's good to be aware just how energy dense foods are (like muffins... aka breakfast cakes) there is no method that I'd consider both achievable for the average person to consistently do AND accurate enough to be considered 'counting' as opposed to washy estimates.
You take things apart and weigh them, or make good estimates based on total weight. You don't need to be very accurate, anything within ~25% error is fine. You just need to be very consistent.
The USDA has a great database that provides you all the raw materials (and many of the packaged composite items) to use, and once you've eaten a thing and recorded the values, you can simply reuse them infinitely. One ham sandwich, if you're consistent about it, is a given calorie intake.
The key is what that lets you do: It lets you analyze your intake versus body composition and weight, determine whether you're eating too much, too little, or a bad ratio, and then make slow changes over time to fix that problem.
If you're like me right now, you're overweight. Okay, look at your calorie count, reduce it by say 5% or 10%, wait a month, see how your body composition changes, and reanalyze.
With this method you don't need to be dead-on-balls-accurate with your calorie counting, only consistent and reasonable.
You don't have to be perfect (or honestly even that precise) but it's immensely helpful to do the exercise for a few weeks to dial your brain in. When you calorie reduce at the same time, you grow razor-sharp appreciation for foods that you can eat a massive amount of that provide few calories. When you're hungry, a choice between a muffin and a tray overloaded with vegetables and turkey slices becomes a lot more clear.
I've often wondered if an app that has me take a picture of everything I eat in a day and then sends me a collage of all yesterday's consumption by email in the next morning would be a suitable replacement for calorie counting. I wonder if the process of taking my phone out to photograph things before I eat them would cause me to more carefully consider my choices, and the private shaming the morning after on days I don't do well would serve as a behavior modifier for the day.
uh, why not? i'll do it right now for you off the top of my head, which anyone can do after they look them up for a while.
100g of white bread = ~ 250 calories / 2 tbsp of mayo = ~ 200 calories / 4 oz of deli turkey = ~ 100 calories / 1 tbsp mustard = ~ 10 calories / 2 slices (2 oz.) of cheese = ~ 240 calories / 2 slices of tomato = ~ 20 calories / 1 slice of lettuce = ~ 5 calories / 1 bag of chips = ~ 280 calories (probably on the bag)
there. 1105 calories total. is that perfect? no, but is that useful? yes, a whole lot more useful than "it's too hard, so i might as well not do it."
as an aside: this is why people are fat. a sandwich and a bag of chips is insulin-spiking can easily be over 1k calories, and most people would probably guess it's 300 calories, and 'not fattening', whatever that means.
throw in a soda and you've got a recipe (literally) for disaster.
Besides, 140 calories is a lot, considering it has about the same calorie density as milk and the number of great drinks available to you at 0 calories, like black tea, green tea, coffee and plain water.
Soda is sugar only, always, so it's much easier to throw your daily balance of carb/protein/fat off with soda than any other drink (e.g. milk).
How is that counting? That's my point.
You're getting a vague idea of what you're eating but it is in no way calorie counting.
No, that's exactly calorie counting in the real world.
This is not advanced math or chemistry lab, and you don't need to get to even 80% accuracy for everything. Just to be consistent and get a good feel.
If you're going to get hung up on the term calories let's call them approximate calories (or ACs) instead. If I eat mostly the same foods all the time I can use reasonable guesses to get the ACs in each food. Foods I eat infrequently will probably have a greater deviation between my ACs and the actual calories but that doesn't matter much because I don't eat them very often. Foods I eat frequently will probably have less error and the error doesn't matter much as long as I'm consistent with the numbers.
Let's say I decide I want to lose weight. I can start off with the general rule that for a male of my age, build and activity levels I need about 2500 calories a day to maintain weight. Since I want to lose some weight I'll set my daily AC allowance at 2000. After a couple weeks I check how the weight loss is going. Am I losing weight too slowly? Drop the ACs a bit. Am I losing weight too quickly? Increase the ACs a bit. Keep checking and adjusting every couple weeks until I'm happy with the weight loss.
This approach works in the real world. I do weigh and measure some of my food but if I had to weigh everything down to the last gram to make sure I ate exactly 1947 calories per day for ideal weight loss I'd quit pretty quickly.
I've had far more success just keeping a simple food diary and going "wow I eat a lot of cakes" and cutting them out.
I have a theory that 'calorie counters' are shockingly inaccurate (one other poster mentioned a 25% margin is 'fine'!) and their success comes from the very act of attempting to quantify what they're eating being a defacto food diary.
Accurate or inaccurate is only meaningful related to the task and its requirements. 25% can be totally acceptable margin of error for the task. We use even bigger margins in lots of ventures (determining which startup will have a succesful exit to fund, for one).
And yes, the mere act of quantifying helps. But quantifying with even 25% error is still better than just writing down "ate 5 cakes", especially if one doesn't eat too many repeats of the same food.
Not sure in what reasoning one can complain for a method with 25% margin of error (say), but be OK with a method like "5 cakes" which still applies quantification, just in an even more vague and hazy sense.
5 cakes is much worse than 5 carrots, for example, but with merely writing down how many you ate, you have to rely on a far more relative guesstimation of their relative harm than you would be if you were counting their calories and being off by 25%).
One method implies rigour and the other one is honest about what it is setting out to do
Everybody said it's a quick ballpark figure / back of the envelope style calculation.
The mere fact "cake bad, carrots good" everybody knows. It's not much information concerning "Did I ate too much today?". One can have a caloric budget and stay within it (more or less) without having to be perfect in measurements (or sticking to carrot because it's easier to know its light).
The point remains, though, that it really doesn't matter how accurate or precise you are, simply that you're gathering data and using it to make measurable changes in your diet.
Your way is perfectly fine too! The nice things about calories (just like money) is that they're a universal medium of comparison, so you can compare your cakes to steaks. But if you simply want to look at a category and say "I am eating N of these, I need to eat N-1 to lose the weight", that's perfectly functional!
The thing I hate is when people make totally non-empirical diet changes, and then lament that they aren't losing weight. You just have to measure and adjust.
The above poster talking about the deli sandwich mentally breaking down all the ingredients... I'm happy to be proven wrong but I simply don't believe you can do that with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
I suppose this is turning in to quite a pedantic argument about the definition of "count". I'd call what everyone has said they're doing more accurately a "calorie estimating food diary".
My initial post was genuinely curious about how people can be so accurate when eating foods from a variety of non pre-measured sources. It turns out they're not being accurate.
You are just overestimating both the difficulty and the degree of accuracy required.
While at the same time, still relying on even more vague terms, to determine if you ate too many cakes etc (as per your other example).
I can't believe people are defending such poor data collection practices. You'd be all over it if someone else was selling their results based on such inaccurate data but in this case it's fine?
If you're going to call it counting you need to be accurate.
The mechanism is simple: they reduce their caloric intake, because they can track how much they eat. More or less: it doesn't have to be perfect, nor is it "atrocious" if it isn't. And you can easily just round the numbers up ("I calculated 500 for this thing, but let's say it's 600 just to be safe").
You seem to believe that any kind of "back of the envelope" / "ballpark" calculation is useless. Or that people only eat complex multi-part meals with no nutricion information, and have to gauge everything from zero all the time.
It turns out like everything, that's a tricky thing to study. When people are aware that their meals are going to be scrutinised they change what they eat for the duration of the study.
I wasn't able to find a recent study that investigates people's ability to estimate calories and the variance in their estimations.
> You seem to believe that any kind of "back of the envelope" / "ballpark" calculation is useless.
I do think that anything above a "good, bad, not sure" estimate is probably going to be so inaccurate as to not be worth the effort. However the act of trying to count calories itself promotes a mindfulness of what we're eating and that can induce change.
So for me it is a very small minority of food that I can't get an exact number on and I've been weighing and entering things enough that for those edge cases I can usually do a decent job at eyeballing serving sizes.
Calories are never an exact numerical science anyways, even if you did weigh everything precisely. You really don't care if you have a margin of error of 50-200 calories if you are lower than your goal most days. You still loose weight.
I've been using MyFitnessPal on and off throughout the years and have always been able to consistently gain or loose weight (depending what I am aiming for) even when relying highly on estimates. This is just my experience though.
Basically, you need a feedback mechanism like your actual weight. Counting calories is not about actual calories it's a way to cut back if your not getting the results you want.
Surely it would be better to just eat your fruit and veggies, and avoid excessive cheese burgers and thickshakes.
Consuming consistently similar foods provides a ballpark guide even if it's not perfectly accurate. You don't need perfect accuracy. For example, I know that a piece of cooked chicken breast of a relatively normal size, is going to be within an acceptable margin of error of N calories. I can calculate what a purchased turkey & swiss sandwich represents calorie wise, in a wide enough ballpark to make it completely meaningless as to whether it's a perfect count.
If you buy prepared food like that, the easy way to deal with calorie counting is to use an aggressive margin of error. Allocate more (possibly a lot more, user choice) calories to that meal than you think it probably represents. You won't die from under-consuming 50 or 100 calories because you guessed wrong to the high side. If you go the route of allocating a lot more calories to it, it simultaneously acts as encouragement to prepare your own food instead when possible.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/why-calor...
This is the study that comes close -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
I'm only skeptical because we just barely changed the "11 servings of bread" pyramid...so, who knows.
I've taken up 24 hour fasts once a week, and have seen a ton of benefits. From increased mental clarity, to weight loss, and body overall feels better.
I kicked it off because I'm big into taoism and it supports my practices.
You could try intermittently adding cold showers to support your weight loss. (The benefits of cold showers I've seen are a ton, and I'm not totally sold on that it is consistently good for everyone.)
Or you could attempt ketosis style diets on the days you are fasting. That would be as simple as when you are intermittently fasting, to eat fats only, instead of protein or grains.
Good luck!
I should but from a weight loss maximisation objective, it appears ketosis is the way to go. Planning to start and document that beginning April.
Do I have to starve myself now or is there an age where the benefits really start to kick in?
Most longevity research targets older people because they are the group that is most interested.. and unfortunately by that time it's mostly too late to do anything significant, so of course the best thing is to start now.
If anything you'll benefit more by starting now, because as you get older your body becomes more difficult to change (for lack of a better phrase)
At any rate, forget the research, focus on yourself.
The most important thing you can do is get regular exercise. Use your body, let your body naturally work it's way to better health. A sedentary lifestyle will kill you quicker than anything else.
Second most important thing (IMHO) is trying to limit the amount of stress in your life. Get out of stressful situations, focus on yourself, meditate, don't let yourself get bothered by things that you can't change or aren't worth your time. This is not only good for yourself mentally, but will help your immune system, lower your body's inflammation levels, etc.
If you do these things you'll be well on your way to living a long healthy life. Then you can add whatever other health recommendations come along your way, olive oil, the occasional glass of red wine, etc.
It's like looking at all the classrooms in the US and picking the one with the best grades. Then noticing that there is a higher than normal occurrence of the letter "M" in the students' names. Finally we conclude that using the letter "M" in your child's name will lead to a better outcome in their schooling.
Like I said, I haven't read the paper, but I've seen so many similar studies with biased sampling (or with absolutely no mention of their sampling techniques) that I'm highly suspicious.
While it is interesting (and possibly merits further study), I don't think you will find an answer to your question in your lifetime, unfortunately. Experiments that would provide good results will take a long time, if they are ever even attempted.
Also, If i had adopted it at ~20 years old, would that mean I could have potentially lived up to ~140 years old? That seems an extreme lifespan extension.
Am I the only one for whom this ends all kind of warnings?
First, how can eating less than required to maintain mass be healthy? Second, "confers near perfect health" seems like a hell of a claim.
Because you don't need to maintain the full adult mass you carry. In the end you'll find a new balance, albeit skinnier. It's not like you'll end to 0 pounds.
In other words, the "normal adult weight maintenance" target weight is not that normal, and not optimally healthy.
Define healthy? They may lose muscle mass / strength but still get sick less and live longer.
In my mind it makes some sense that slowing down your metabolism moderately could make your body "last" longer... but this is just me trying to make sense of things and I'm far from an expert.
0. https://www.thestreet.com/story/12846402/4/ranked-the-10-hig...