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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

This is only tangentially related, but I've been practicing intermittent fasting for the past year, and I cannot recommend it enough -- it honestly changed my life. I feel better, I sleep more regularly, I have more energy, and my mind is more alert. I only eat from 12PM to 8PM. IF is also supposed to have an impact on your microbiome, reduce inflammation, and encourage autophagy (especially in the brain).

PS: Please talk to your doctor before you make any major dietary changes. I'm just some guy on the internet. And I'm most definitely not a doctor.

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As a counterexample, I tried to fast from 8PM to 11PM and it triggered a starvation response in me and 4 days in, it made binge on what ever I set my eyes on. I do a bulk of moving around in the morning. So maybe I should do it in the evening, may be like a 7AM to 5PM. I am a woman. So the physiological differences may also come into play. I dunno.

I am just adding this comment because, invariably articles on food & health results in comments about intermittent fasting with glowing reviews. It really does marvels for some/many. There are also cases like me for whom it does seems to hurt. Maybe I am approaching it wrong. Just adding my anecdote for a balanced view.

  I tried to fast from 8PM to 11PM

I hope you meant 11AM.

Yes.

> I am a woman. So the physiological differences may also come into play. I dunno.

I looked into IF and decided against it for that reason. The documentation on it recommended longer feeding windows for women to the point that it didn't seem like intermittent fasting - it was just eating breakfast an hour later. I just looked it up again now [1] and I guess it does have to do with our hormones. Either way, I appreciate you speaking up to balance out the raves.

[1] http://paleoforwomen.com/shattering-the-myth-of-fasting-for-...

Your body needs about 2 weeks to adapt. Also, for instance, even though it's recommended to exercise while fasting, it's recommended to do the exercise right before eating. So that may have something to do with it. Try the 7am to 5pm thing, but give it 2-3 weeks.

Also, I think some studies show that the fasting period begins after 12h (others say 8h), but it's much more pronounced after 18h. So the more you fast, the better. But take it gradually the first few weeks.

As for binge-eating, you can also try eating normally every other day or every 3 days, especially in the beginning. Then the next day or two try to "compensate" and eat less in those fasting periods. But it's important to keep a low-carb diet, because a high-carb diet is also what makes you hungry more, and looking for sweets, too (and proven to lead to many chronic diseases).

IF doesn't need to be every day, you can do it 3 days a week and also enjoy many of the same benefits.

As for the starvation response, it's really important to ensure your feeding window includes all of the needed macronutrients along with your calories. Doubly important if you're training/exercising regularly.

Female hormones are also tied to fat intake, so I'd speculate that ensuring you're ingesting enough fats is probably more important than for men too.

I second this. I too started intermittent fasting ( 16 hours fast, 8 hour eating window) and can confirm benefits that OP has mentioned. I too noticed better sleep, increased energy and reduced GI inflammation (poop better lol).

I started delaying my breakfast later and later until I was able to eat "breakfast" at 1 PM. I work out (boxing or weights) in the evening at 6 to 7 / 7:30 PM 5 days a week atleast, so my last meal for the day is at 8:30 or 9 PM. I don't eat any meat.

1 added benefit is that you also lose body fat and become lean because it seems that we start burning fat after 12 or 13 hours of fasting.

Initially it was hard, I was feeling hungry, but once you get used to it, you don't miss it. If you are a morning person, do your fast from 5 or 6 PM to 9 or 10 AM. If you are evening person, then do it like me, i.e. fast from 9 or 10 PM to 1 or 2 PM (next day).

Also don't worry about whether you'll have energy for your workout. You get used to it.

In a similar situation I've felt subjectively less hungry / performed better if I take some branch chain amino acids in the AM. Dunno if this makes the IF "invalid" -- I never felt significantly different during an IF. But commuting on my bike, I frequently felt weak if I was fasting, and BCAA stopped that. YMMV.

Anything besides water breaks the IF period.

While BCAAs do break your fast, that's not entirely true. For example, green tea, black coffee, ACV, and likely others do not break your fast.

This is a pretty hardline approach.

Most people allow for coffee and tea without sugar or cream.

If there are no calories you're not breaking a fast in my opinion.

BCAA's do have calories so I would say they would break a fast though.

Pardon my ignorance, but how does the research account for the benefits of caloric reduction? How do we know if it's the disciplined fasting, or if simple caloric reduction is part of the equation?

That information would help me decide whether I have to be strict about no eating. Much of the advice I've seen amounts to allowing some leeway in small caloric inputs.

I tried IF, but I couldn't find a schedule that worked. I work out with high intensity at 5am. So I want to start eating then to maximize nutrient intake. This made "lunch" at 9am and "dinner" at noon. I'd find myself lethargic for the morning workout.

I've only eaten at 12 noon and 8pm for years, but just because that's lunch and dinner and I don't eat breakfast.

I wasn't aware it could be called fasting.

Why do you think breakfast is called 'break fast'?

In portuguese, its "morning coffee" ;)

Because historically people would fast for religious reasons, eg Lent, and a rich meal after that period would be a break-fast. A meal like eggs, pancake, bacon might form a break-fast. Then as ordinary people grew richer they'd take a rich meal of similar form much more often, habitually in the morning. Finally all morning meals became known as breakfast, even the ones that resemble a traditional fasting diet (oatmeal and water, or dry bread, say).

Am I close?

Modern usage of "fast" tends to mean not eating at all. Historic British usage would be most associated with the Lenten fast I'd imagine.

Yeah, I can understand the difficulty behind something like Ramadan but 12 to 8 seems typical among those who skip breakfast. As someone who sits around mostly I never saw the need to eat so much.

I've done this for probably 20 years now, but I just call it "I don't eat breakfast."

Now I have a cool name for it though. Thanks!

It seems to make sense: first, American breakfast is essentially a giant dessert, optionally with a pile of fat on top, so it doesn't seem particularly healthy.

But mostly, eating in the morning seems to get my body thinking about food, so I'm actually hungry for lunch a lot earlier than if I had skipped it. Normal days I eat lunch around 1pm if I remember. "Breakfast" days, I'm starving at 11:30am.

I never realised I got to describe myself as "fasting" though.

I "accidentally" started doing this about a year ago-- after big dinners the night before, realizing I wasn't hungry and shouldn't eat just because it was "time to eat." Gradually, I realized that I'm not really hungry in the morning. I have a cup of black coffee (inconceivable a few years ago) and some water.

Then I have a healthy lunch with low carbs. This was the original reason for changing my diet-- I was getting really sleepy in the middle of the afternoon and I realized it was the carbs.

Then I have dinner, which I try to keep reasonably healthy but I'm not too stressed about it.

Benefits are better energy throughout the day, no "hangry" episodes where my blood sugar falls off a cliff, better mood, and it's much easier to insist on being healthy for one meal a day than 3. I can even work out right before lunch and be fine. YMMV.

P.s. Also cool that I now can call skipping breakfast a fancy health term. ;-)

So anybody that regularly skips breakfast now adheres to an IF diet? It cannot possibly be that important if the only difference between your eating schedule and the norm is that you omit breakfast and midnight snacks.

> It cannot possibly be that important if the only difference between your eating schedule and the norm is that you omit breakfast and midnight snacks.

And yet it is[1]. To borrow from Nassim Taleb, humans have a terrible habit of undervaluing small incremental change and overvaluing large sweeping change.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3106288/

Well TIL that I have been “intermittent fasting” for my entire adult life.

Edit: your linked article is a study on rats which intermittently fasted for periods of 24-48 hours. That is a very far cry from what you have described.

> Well TIL that I have been “intermittent fasting” for my entire adult life.

If you snack at night or until midnight (or drink any sugary drinks at night), as many casually do, no you haven't. You'd need to make sure that calories are completely restricted when the feeding window closes.

Check out this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8238506 done on adult men -- with that said, IF hasn't been studied much. My original post is purely anecdotal. YMMV.

That's a pretty huge assumption, I've never snacked at night and I can't understand why anyone would.

Could you describe this in more detail? When do you stop eating, and for how long?

I stop eating at 8PM and don't eat until the next day at 12PM (so my "breakfast" is actually at lunch). My fast lasts ~16 hours daily, giving me an 8-hour feeding window (my friends always make fun of that term).

We're already used to an 8-hour fast (sleeping), so it's really not a huge lifestyle change. I don't do anything fancy with calories or macronutrients, anymore. I did when I was going to the gym more regularly, but it's really time-consuming measuring everything, so I just eat basically whatever. I do, however, try to limit my intake of processed foods and red meat.

Do you allow for coffee (or tea) in the mornings, or is it just water?

Coffee and tea are allowed during the fast. I've been drinking a lot more tea recently (I'm not a huge coffee drinker). There's a certain threshold where your body kicks into "metabolic" mode. The exact figure varies, but I think you want to avoid eating > ~50 calories[1] or your digestion kicks in and your fast is ruined. A cup of tea or coffee, for example, is around 3 calories. Even milk, in small quantities, is probably fine. It goes without saying that sugar is not allowed.

[1] My figures are probably wrong. Someone feel free to correct me.

Any thoughts on the old adagium dat breakfast like a king, ...? Skipping breakfast - no dips in the morning?

I've never been a breakfast person :P

I think this was a recent phenomena - from marketing in the 40's. https://priceonomics.com/how-breakfast-became-a-thing/ Also, before this, what some people refer to as the father of modern marketing, Edward Bernays, used one campaign to make bacon and eggs the center of a hearty American breakfast.

So essentially you are just skipping breakfast?

And limiting late night meals. It's important that you have a long enough fasting window.

If you regularly eat until midnight, you'll have to skip lunch as well.

https://medium.com/the-mission/the-sweet-spot-for-intermitte...

According to Jason Fung the sweet spot is 18 to 24 hours of fasting for fat loss and autophagy benefits. A 48hr fast shows better results for autophagy but the question of sustainable life style then emerges for the 48 hr schedule.

I fast for 20 hours everyday eating once in the evening. My anecdata confirms that it works for fat loss and improved morning concentration and better sleep.

How large (calorically, macros if you know) are your evening meals?

I rarely exceed 2000 calories.

I am small framed (68 kg), what they'd call at the gym "skinny fat". I'm in my mid-forties with noticeable fat around the abdomen. I have never been obese to be concerned about fat accumulation but I have vowed to never grow older AND fatter. :-) I've been doing IF as habit now with some success not only because of my work schedule primarily being in the morning but also because I have to dash out of the house for school runs after the emotionally exhausting work of herding cats out of bed (food in the throes of such trauma doesn't appeal to me). Also, I can get 6 hours of concentrated work done when I know I have no breakfast to think about before fetching the boys from school.

I have noticed accelerated loss of fat (I have fat calipers to measure) when I remove bread, pasta, rice and nuts for three consecutive days of the week.

I'm not the person you are asking but I can chime in because I also IF.

For me, I simply eat one meal a day, it's really that simple. For me it's almost always dinner, but if I'm super hungry during the day I'll eat lunch and skip dinner.

I am amazed at this. I eat 3-4 times a day, and often go to bed hungry and wake up hungry. I eat quite a lot, but am still quite skinny (on the other hand, I run 2-3 times a week and I never heat my apartment, which might be reasons for my appetite).

I might give IF a try, but am afraid that I will be in eternal hunger.

You might be surprised. Our body's have a circadian rhythm that regulate hunger. After a couple weeks of IF your body stops expecting food in the morning. When I ate breakfast, I was ravenous by 10am, now that I fast I don't start thinking about food until noon.

Even if it doesn't work for you, it's easy enough to try for a couple weeks.

What is it like living without heat? My heat went out in my apt for a week recently and although coming out from a hot shower was noticeably unpleasant the rest of my routine was unaffected since I'm normally wrapped up in cozy blankets on the couch anyways. I'd be very interested in the caloric impact of living without heat too.

Can recommend. Not sure about physiological benefits (although by common sense it should at least help with dental health), but it feels great to be able to control food intake like that. And first meal of the day tastes much better.

I tried for a while but didn't find many benefits (other than, of course, having more time). And sometimes I told myself that "maybe I don't feel good today because I'm fasting", and I rather avoid those thoughts by having 2 or 3 boiled eggs or a banana in the morning.

And now that I'm trying to eat 160-200 grams of protein every day, eating all of that in a small window is kinda tiring.

Is there a reason why you aren't drinking a portion of your protein through whey powder?

That helps but I'm afraid to get too much of my requirements from whey. And its expensive and not filling. Currently I'm having only 1 or 2 scoops (30-50g of protein).

I just skip breakfast and eat lunch and dinner as regular ... trying to opt for the healthy options most of the time. Works out great so far.

For me, intermittent fasting would basically mean just skipping breakfast; after that I have lunch at around noon and dinner at about six, outside of that I don't really eat (maybe in the weekends). So yeah, before going full IMF (?), try sticking to just eating three times a day, sticking to regular, traditional eating habits.

  I only eat from 12PM to 8PM.

The proper term for that strategy (which I follow as well, but I need a smaller window, generally 6 hours) is time-restricted feeding, or TRF.

Intermittent fasting generally refers to periodic fasts of 1600 kcal/day or less spanning multiple days, such as the Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD).

Is that a typo or do you really consider a 1600 kcal/day diet a fast? Wikipedia lists 500-600kcal as usually being allowed on a 5:2 intermittent fast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting

Do you drink coffee before then? I could probably do this diet most days (I've done many days within a 10 hour window) but I 'start the clock' early if you count black coffee, since it's something I start every morning with.

EDIT: See you answered that question. I should get back on this.

I 'CTRL+F' for coffee, but only see it mentioned in your comment. Where else was it mentioned?

How do you still fit in around 2.5k cals in the short time where you do eat? In other words, how do you ensure that you maintain your weight while fasting?

I imagine one has to force feed quite a lot in in that period.

> I imagine one has to force feed quite a lot in in that period.

It's 8 hours, so I have plenty of time to eat two, three, or even sometimes four times. What IF cuts out is the late-night snacks that I think are most detrimental.

IF is based on the idea that nutrient timing isn't important partially because digestion is along process that you have little control over.

The idea that late night snacks are bad for you is based on the idea that nutrient timing is important, that you are sedentary at night so you don't want to eat then. (This idea has lost most of its support recently and now eating at night is seen the same as eating during the day -- your body doesn't care when you eat).

These two ideas are fundamentally at odds with each other. I find the IF people to be a strange bunch with a lot of contradictory ideas.

>IF is based on the idea that nutrient timing isn't important partially because digestion is along process that you have little control over.

What? No, IF is based on the premise that periods of fasting are physiological beneficial and/or it decreases total calories consumed overall.

Not sorely based on that idea, but IF definitely relies on the idea that nutrient timing isn't important. Its almost definitional.

How long did it take for you to observe the positive effects of IF? I tried it for 1 or 2 weeks last year, but didn't observe any benefits.

I'm not sure how you were sleeping, but my sleep patterns got better almost overnight. Wish I had a Fitbit to track it.

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