Meal timing strategies appear to lower appetite, improve fat burning
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
I used to snore like crazy, probably had sleep apnea but was too afraid to go get tested since my grandmother died from becoming dependent on the machine and her lungs failed. Now I don’t snore at all. My wife sleeps better, I sleep better; win win!
I haven’t exercised at all and I don’t count calories. My biggest diet changes have been cutting out soda entirely and I try to keep my carbs under 100g a day. Many days I’m under 50.
It’s honestly been amazing and I’m glad that I did it now while I’m still young and will be able to physically play with my kids in the future.
One of the other big wins has been physiological and my relationship with food and the feeling of hunger. Living in America, and especially here in the south, food is a religion. Stopping whatever is going on to eat is never looked down on. Snacks all the time, large comfort food meals, etc. While the community aspects around food are a good thing, our dependence on it as a society has crossed over into causing more harm than help.
After starting to fast, I’ve learned that hunger is just another feeling, like being too hot or too cold. Sure, it can be uncomfortable, but it won’t kill you and we can tolerate it a lot longer than we think.
Right now, I’m in the middle of a 7 day fast where I’m only drinking water. Every week I normally fast 48 hours twice a week and then one meal a day for the other 5 days in the week. My relationship with food has morphed and now I’m totally in control of my body. Skipping a meal is no problem and I have no ill side effects.
I’ll wrap this up by saying that I still enjoy food, a lot! When I do eat for my one meal a day, I can easily eat a large salad and a burger and a side. My favorite pastime is going to the movies and eating a meal and a large bucket of popcorn with my wife. Some days though, I eat a “normal” portion and call it good. Sometimes I have dessert. The difference is now that I can manage my love of food in a sustainable way for my body.
Happy to answer any questions. AMA.
Exactly! I've done intermittent fasting for many many years, it works for me. I've told people, "You know how a workout 'hurts so good'? Learn to think that way about hunger/cravings. Consider it the same way you would consider a workout pain, as progress not punishment".
This is what I exactly tell people. It's the only way to sustain it.
A few weeks ago I decided to try 8/16 IF, which basically means I don't eat past 10 pm (mornings are not a problem, I wake up late and never need breakfast). I'll usually wake up around noon, have my first meal at around 3 or 4, then have a small meal at 9 or just before 10 and that's it for the day.
This has made a very big difference. I have already lost 2 kg without even thinking about it. It helps a lot that I will eat a small meal before I'm hungry (at 9), wheras before I'd wait until 1 am when I was starving and then would eat a large meal.
It has also made compliance a breeze by just not giving me a choice. I'm unable to say "I've eaten a lot today so I shouldn't have this snack too", I would just think "eh I'll have this snack and eat less tomorrow", only for the cycle to repeat the next day. Now, if it's past 10 I don't eat anything, simple.
I definitely recommend this to anyone with compliance problems. I can also 100% relate to your hunger statement, which I learnt the last time I dieted, years ago. Being hungry just means that my body is burning fat, and I can go 30+ hours between meals without really any ill effects.
Another way to look at it that I've found effective: think of food cravings as an adversarial agent. Your body is blackmailing you: if you give me food, I'll make this craving go away. Trick is, the food you're probably craving -- chips, soda -- don't make the craving go away. They make it worse. Once you notice that you're body doesn't actually make good on its promises to make the cravings stop it's easier to not give in to its demands. And that actually makes the cravings stop. It's no different than dealing with any other bully.
You need a laundry list of nutrients, and if your body is short of any one of them, it'll crave something that might have it. If it has it in insufficient density, it won't care that it needs to also get an extra 500 Kcal along for the ride - it needs to satisfy each item on the list.
I've seen this behavior in both cats and people -- feed them better quality food, and their cravings & weight go down as the full set of nutrients is found in fewer calories.
(Different topic, also very big on intermittent fasting, ensuring that there are frequent periods where the body recovers energy from fat stores)
I noticed one study a long time ago just about flavor. Basically, rats, being fed standard rat chow, with nutrients and calories kept constant, both groups had full access to the food. Group A had one flavor, Group B had six flavors. Group B gained a lot more weight. So, merely restricting flavor choice will reduce your inclination to eat, and conversely, food engineers creating foods with lots of flavors will increase food and eating...
I'm a bit of a fat bastard myself and I think what I've come to realise is that for a huge segment of the population eating just works fine and they can adjust diet to tweak this or that relatively easily. For the rest (like me), my relationship with food is broken and stuff like IF or keto or whatever are patches to deal with that underlying brokenness. It always works for a while, but it always go to shit eventually.
> Certain foods, particularly those rich in sugars and fat, are potent rewards [23] that promote eating (even in the absence of an energetic requirement)
If the subjects are used to carb- and sugar-heavy diet, the hormonal spikes will be very stressful on the body.
They also mention fat-heavy foods, but I suspect they are referring to foods high on both fat+sugars, not a green salad with copious amounts of olive oil.
It's so strange. My whole life I hadn't given sodas a second thought, but that reward signal is strong. I don't think I ever want to go back.
However, I'm quite lucky in that I don't really get hungry very soon, if I don't eat. It's quite a weird effect; if I eat in the morning, I'll be hungry throughout the day, but if I skip breakfast (or even lunch), I'll only get hungry towards the evening.
So I just skip breakfast (almost always) and lunch (when I want to lose weight). Greatest diet hack I've ever discovered (actually, psychological hack).
I think that's actually a pretty normal effect, though perhaps not usually as pronounced as "only get hungry towards the evening". You don't normally get hungry while asleep, so I think one of breakfast's purposes is to kick-start the metabolism, with the side-effect of getting hungry afterwards. Especially if you're on a diet and are sticking to small breakfasts, making that meal counterproductive.
We have a tendency to finish all the food that's put in front of us. So many times we continue to eat even if we are not hungry. So by reducing the plate size we end up eating less.
I've actually had fights with my dietician who insisted I eat breakfast as soon as I wake up, and wouldn't hear any of my links to published research, or even arguments of "if I'm not hungry, why eat extra calories that will just make me even hungrier?!"
Just skip breakfast and eat the first meal when you're hungry (don't wait until you're starving, or you might overeat). You're literally not missing anything.
I only eat lunch (at noon) and dinner (at 8pm), pretty much like clockwork. It's very rare that I eat outside of these times during the work week. I don't snack through the work day, and I very seldom snack at home on work evenings. But I still end up eating too much; lunch + dinner is more than I need. I'm thinking about paring it back to just dinner (perhaps 2 days a week starting out), since that's the most important, socially.
I didn't have any problem sticking with my normal 60kg weight until I got over 35 or so, now I'm up to 70kg or so and I can feel my body fat jiggle as I run up or down stairs - an alien feeling to me.
Yeah, I put on 10 kg as well once I hit 33. I don't know what happened, everything I've read said your metabolism doesn't slow down until much later, but I exercise more and eat less than I used to, yet I put on a bunch of weight that I can't easily lose.
I'd love to figure out why that is, but I can't find anything.
I remained trim eating 4000ish calories a day of junk food from about age 15 to age 22 or so. Attempted to crash diet to a strict 1400 calories a day to make my comes-and-goes six-pack a bit more permanent. Kept it up for about two months. Nothing (more or less) happened. Stopped since it wasn't working. Promptly put on ten pounds. Have struggled to keep my weight under control ever since.
Metabolisms are weird.
I’ve noticed it’s much harder to do in the summer as that cold beer at the end of a hot day is ever so enjoyable.
Everyone should try lactose-free milk just once just to see how very sweet it is. It has the same sugar content as regular milk, but regular milk’s lactose is a form of sugar that we don’t taste as strongly.
I don't personally notice lactose-free milk as being any sweeter than regular, and it doesn't look like galactose is any sweeter than lactose?
If you really do want to drink that much milk, and are worried about blood sugar, you should try lactose-free milk - it's just milk that has the enzyme lactase added to it, which breaks down the lactose to galactose, and also results in a bit less sugar overall (to something like 3.5%). I can't tell the difference, taste wise.
(I replace my fancy beer cravings with fancy water)
Warning: Don't take too much salt all at once, because that can trigger a regurgitation..
If that were true (it's not), there are all sorts of important "electrolytes" that are not in table salt (Calcium, Potassium, Magnesium, etc).
The reason your technique resolves your dizziness is likely a combination of placebo and hydration.
Your body isn’t stupid. You won’t turn into a ball of fat if you fast regularly. Cavemen and even animals have long feast/famine cycles. Our bodies are designed to store fat and burn it when food is scarce.
Now if folks are already in a healthy weight, then yea, extended fasting isn’t necessarily something you want to do a lot of, but for obese people, we have plenty of fat to keep things rolling as long as other essential nutrients are supplemented via multivitamins.
After that, I’m not sure what I’ll do. The “healthy” range for my height is a bit lower than 200 but I imagine I’ll cut back on the intensity and focus on reinforcing new habits that I’m starting to form.
Already I’m making better food choices which is a huge first step but my portion control is not great. My drastically cut eating schedule let’s my eat a ton in a short period but I want to stop doing that eventually.
It’s a daily grind though; hard to deal with as a software developer that is used to brute forcing any problem I have.
Overall though, I’m excited for the future and happy I’ve learned this lesson while I’m still young and before I have kids.
Wait, what ? Could you expand on that ?
Well, she knew that she wasn’t supposed to sleep without her machine, so every time she got in bed, she’d put it on. This meant she was maybe spending 16 hours a day with this thing pumping air into her lungs. Now compound that with a sedentary lifestyle and a poor diet over a couple of years and it makes sense.
Her last days were spent in a hospital on a ventilator and every time the doctors tried to remove it for her to breathe on her own, her lungs just could not keep up.
Obviously this is a special case. Many people use these machines with no ill side effects, but for me, since it’s so personal, I have an admittedly irrational fear of them. For me though, I’d rather not need it in the first place if I can avoid it.
This also only happened a few years ago so it’s still fresh for me.
Thanks for sharing that. I have a CPAP and your account is one more point to something I have been suspecting for a while now, especially in the last few days.
The biggest benefit to me from IF isn't the weight loss, it's the increased energy level. I don't know how it works, but I have way more energy, consistently, after routinely fasting.
Feel free ask any more questions if you want. If this is too open of a forum for you, my DMs are open @DaronSpence on twitter.
Personally, one of the first things I had to learn when starting IF is to be okay with hunger.
Then, I had to learn what was real hunger. Because of IF I don’t get hungry when I wake up in the morning anymore. But after a week on a holiday with breakfast as a norm, it’s as if my body expects food in the morning and gets hungry just because.
Took some time to reconcile what I experienced with what I was taught growing up, that hunger was bad.
Things that help: - Drinking water - Drinking Coffee - Gentle exercise (something like a walk)
I would like to hear more details on this. Being a CPAP machine user I have never heard of this (lungs failing) before.
Well, she knew that she wasn’t supposed to sleep without her machine, so every time she got in bed, she’d put it on. This meant she was maybe spending 16 hours a day with this thing pumping air into her lungs. Now compound that with a sedentary lifestyle and a poor diet over a couple of years and it makes sense.
Her last days were spent in a hospital on a ventilator and every time the doctors tried to remove it for her to breathe on her own, her lungs just could not keep up.
Obviously this is a special case. Many people use these machines with no ill side effects, but for me, since it’s so personal, I have an admitently irrational fear of them.
Well, she knew that she wasn’t supposed to sleep without her machine, so every time she got in bed, she’d put it on. This meant she was maybe spending 16 hours a day with this thing pumping air into her lungs. Now compound that with a sedentary lifestyle and a poor diet over a couple of years and it makes sense.
Her last days were spent in a hospital on a ventilator and every time the doctors tried to remove it for her to breathe on her own, her lungs just could not keep up.
Obviously this is a special case. Many people use these machines with no ill side effects, but for me, since it’s so personal, I have an admittedly irrational fear of them. For me though, I’d rather not need it in the first place if I can avoid it.
This also only happened a few years ago so it’s still fresh for me.
Well, she knew that she wasn’t supposed to sleep without her machine, so every time she got in bed, she’d put it on. This meant she was maybe spending 16 hours a day with this thing pumping air into her lungs. Now compound that with a sedentary lifestyle and a poor diet over a couple of years and it makes sense.
Her last days were spent in a hospital on a ventilator and every time the doctors tried to remove it for her to breathe on her own, her lungs just could not keep up.
Obviously this is a special case. Many people use these machines with no ill side effects, but for me, since it’s so personal, I have an admittedly irrational fear of them. For me though, I’d rather not need it in the first place if I can avoid it.
This also only happened a few years ago so it’s still fresh for me.
After 3 weeks of IF and healthier eating, that number had already dropped below the threshold to just pre-diabetes. Within 3 months I had reversed that as well. This was all verified by bloodwork.
Now it is true, when you eat, even when not doing IF, insulin spikes. That’s how our bodies process food. During extended fasting, your body will become more sensitive to insulin so it is important that when you eat again, not to stuff yourself with high carb foods that will only exacerbate that.
Now how much you’d have to eat to do hurt yourself, I don’t know, but I guarantee the first time you break a fast with just a bit too many carbs you will feel it. The first time was enough for me!
I didn't start it for the mental side effects, but I haven't noticed any strong negatives during my day job. I get 4-6 hours of meaningful work done and then my brain is about finished like most days.
Many people who do IF actually suggest working/playing to keep your mind off the hunger as it's easier to ignore when you're busy.
How much obesity and depression could be prevented or alleviated just by making sure people could get a decent night's sleep?
There's some body chemistry where being sleep deprived can manifest itself as hunger. I forget the details, but I read about it in "Why We Sleep"[0].
When I had a sleep study done, the pre-study questionnaire seemed to have more about depression symptoms than about sleep itself.
I'm around 40 .. since ever in summer around 60 .. 63 kg in wintertime around 67kg.
The only thing I try to avoid is eating dinner at all. I drink softdrinks with sugar, eat chips, icecream, chocolate and for lunch just a standart menue.
20 years ago I was over 70kg and tryed to cook healthy dinner menus for myself .. my weight just went up ..
For me, it was the other way round. When I used intermittent fasting (in the form of the 5:2 diet) to get my weight under control, I stopped snoring like a rhino, and my sleep improved. As did my wife's. :-)
More anecdote: trying to fast of the weight without exercise was miserable. My weight plateaued, and I was permanently cold. Doing some sensible exercise solved both problems. Diet or exercise? False dichotomy.
We likely had it much worse than the average person, but I think about the same thing: most of my friends have sleep problems to some degree, and I can't imagine they're not getting a milder form of the psychological symptoms that plagued me
It's amazing how low our standard for news is when it comes to things like weight loss.
That is, ignoring the fact that experiments without a control group can be hardly considered valid at all.
I recently started to diet for the first time ever. Never really needed it, but getting older, I noticed my weight steadily increasing despite regular exercise and finally decided to change.
I always skipped breakfast, but I became a bit more strict about timing and snacking at night in order to align with IF. Switched my diet to a lazy keto (basically adkins) diet - still don't track calories, just intentionally reduced carb intake to below ~25g net per day and increased fat intake. Occasionally I have a cheat meal.
Down 35lbs in ~2.5 months.
Side effects: I feel like my energy levels are much more consistent throughout the day, but also very discernable. Which is to say, if I'm working out, I can really feel it when I run out of gas. Related, I can't lift as much weight as I could, but that is expected while I'm actively trying to lose weight. I feel like there's a bit more mental clarity, but that could be related to energy levels.
- I'm a pretty big fan of riced cauliflower blends, which you can get in basically any frozen foods section. Great replacement for rice. A quick easy meal is ground beef + a half bag of riced cauliflower stir fry mix.
- Another quick meal - Trader Joe's green vegetable foursome plus chicken. Add tons of butter, salt and garlic.
- Another quick meal - 3 or 4 egg omelette with shredded cheese topping. Put it on top of a bed of greens, and add some guac or an avocado.
- I make shoyu eggs pretty regularly to snack on.
- I snack on nuts and beef jerky a lot.
- If I'm not feeling very hungry, I'll eat an Adkins meal bar instead of anything bigger. Adkins stuff cuz its convenient, available in a lot of places, and low carb.
- After a workout, I'll drink a muscle milk pro series shake (the premade type, specifically because its low net carbs). Currently looking for better options that aren't just straight whey mixes.
- Adkins also makes some nice low-carb candy type things that I also grab when the notion strikes.
Lastly and probably most importantly, I drink a ton of water and have an increased salt intake, because cutting carbs leads to retaining less water and dehydrating easier. You just feel thirsty a lot more often. Drinking more water just so happens to also help you feel more full
Good for you! Is this just from dieting? Or is there an exercise routine in here?
Some numbers: "[...] linear trend of 52 kcal/d [...] for every 10% decrease in the contribution of carbohydrate to total energy intake"
----------------------- Now on a personal note, as someone who always lived with nutrition plan (and macro tracking for the last years) since 17, I think it's highly unlikely that you take < 25g carbs/day (During bulking phase I dont manage to get under 300g per day).
Here’s my M-F routine :
7am: weigh myself, text results to my father
Breakfast: Nothing, but I drink a flat white just because I want to.
Midday: large bowl of plain unsweetened Greek yoghurt (no additions, which is key - the addition of fruit or other things is what sets off my sugar-loving monkey brain to go seek more). This is low carb yet filling and satiating. I tried out every single one available in my area until I found the one I could settle with. Sometimes I eat a low carb chocolate, ive found a bunch in my local area which I like.
Afternoon: sometimes go for coffee again and add a snack to that
Dinner: whatever I want, which is nice, but generally it doesn’t involve anything deep-fried and is mostly home made. Sometimes it’s a rice dish, sometimes pasta, sometimes meat with veg.
After this meal I’m free to eat whatever I want. If I want to eat dessert, I can, but just need to remember ... I’m texting my weight to my dad tomorrow.
Weekends I can eat anything at any time but also need to remember that Monday is coming and I will be weighing myself. So, I indulge a bit but not TOO much.
There’s no real exercise component here, just the occasional run every week or two.
I’ve also learned not to self-shame. If you fall off the horse, don’t whip yourself into a lather. Just say ‘ok, it happened, tomorrow is another day. Let’s keep going.’
At first, I really struggled at around 3-4pm and was constantly snacking bad things. The thing that’s has helped has been to focus on redirecting my behaviour instead of stopping it. Which is why I now know every single place within a 5 mile radius that sells low carb snacks, the price of each one, and which is my favourite. I also started drinking kombucha for when I have that urge to drink something. One small snack (always less than 10g carbs) is generally enough.
The BEST thing about this above routine is how little mental energy it takes. I don’t track carbs besides paying attention to labels in the act of purchasing, I don’t have to think about lunch, don’t have to whip myself into exercising.
Each week has gradually become easier in terms of maintaining habits. I now know I’ll keep the no-breakfast plus plain yoghurt for lunch routine, but at some point I’ll need to stop losing weight .. so..
I've never seen that strategy, but... wow. I'd imagine the accountability that creates is pretty serious.
I had a good run with IF but have backslid. I had a routine similar to yours but maybe stricter (I was making weight for a weight-class sport so had to move quicker).
I have been working back up to it that way, but consistently plateauing at about 20% below my previous peaks.
I do plan on changing my diet once I'm at a place I'm happy with to be a bit more friendly towards weightlifting goals.
> Even with all being low carb 25g is very easy to attain unless you are very strictly tracking macros.
It really isn't that hard. Not sure what to tell ya. I read the labels on things and keep a mental count every day. It's much easier when you're only eating one or two meals a day and not snacking.
Sometimes I'm over 25g, sometimes I'm under. Being perfectly 25g every day isn't required; there isn't anything specifically magical about the 25g line, since the actual goal is inducing mild ketosis in the body and everyone's body is different. 25g is my guideline, but I don't feel bad about it if I'm a bit over.
Personally I only eat one meal a day, stopping all calorie consumption by 11am. I'm in the 2nd day of a 3 day fast; it's definitely an exercise in discipline, but so worth doing. Fasting's stress on the body invokes a "survival of the fittest" response on the cellular level; in which under performing cells are cleaned out. Some news out of USC has stated that a 72 hour fast leads to an "entire reset of your immune system" [0]. Pretty interesting stuff for health-conscientious folks.
[0] https://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regene...
40 years old, 170 lbs down to 135 lbs, slow and steady just by eating a conventionally healthy low fat diet and adhering to CICO.
No wacky meal timings. No eating/avoiding an entire macronutrient to excess. Most calories came from whole grains, whey, and fish, and I made sure my belly was full most of the time with vegetables.
I drank wine nearly every day, and popped a square of Dove chocolate for dessert most meals. I even ate fast food a couple times a month.
Hunger pains and exhausting days in the gym? You bet. But it wasn't difficult, and I still got to eat my favorite foods - just less of them.
CICO works. Studies like this are interesting, but almost certainly just tweaking the margins for most people.
More recently, I became too physically active to maintain that diet and returned to eating 3-4x a day. My metabolism has steadily returned to baseline since then. It took about 6 months but it is now essentially back to normal.
I was already skipping breakfast most days, so waiting until lunch to eat wasn't a big deal. But Stopping at 8pm was tough. I'm usually up until 1-2am, so not eating for the last five or six hours of my day was tough.
Their IF (or eTRF) groups stopped eating at 2pm each day. Presumably they went to bed a earlier than you, as their breakfast was at 8am, so shifted by your two hours that would mean no food after 4pm.
I'd have a hard time doing that. In a way, dinner is a reward for the day's accomplishments for me. I'm not saying it's impossible to adapt to that, but I'd rather work out more than fast for 16 hours every day.
The weight gain/loss/plateau seems to correlate with the insulin presence in the blood system, and meals eaten later in the day tend to generate higher insulin response compared to exact same meals eaten mid-day.
Basically fasting for around 16 hours a day is good for health. From the evolutionary perspective--that invested in a human body 200K years--the way we eat today is broken. And our body can't adapt to a new pattern--evolution is a slow process that requires many thousands of years. Not to mention like adapting to changes in a food consumption we see in the last 50 years. A human body during 200K years of evolution was not prepared to eating a lot. Viceversa--it was build to eat less. It needs to store energy and to use stored energy and only after that to store again. That's a natural cycle and functions that our body needs to execute. Nowadays we just store energy 24/7:
"Emerging findings from studies of animal models and human subjects suggest that intermittent energy restriction periods of as little as 16 h can improve health indicators and counteract disease processes. The mechanisms involve a metabolic shift to fat metabolism and ketone production, and stimulation of adaptive cellular stress responses that prevent and repair molecular damage."
Article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4250148/
Here are also interesting patterns of daily and weekly food consumption from this research including the common eating pattern of food consumption upon which the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and associated chronic diseases has emerged.
Image: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4250148/figure/...
If you eat when you're hungry, you will naturally eat less. I always have a good breakfast, and thus start to feel hungry around 3pm or 4pm. I eat then, and usually I don't feel hungry until I go to bed, and I never eat late in the day, simply because digesting at night is a bad idea.
Having lunch around noon is weird because I eat without being hungry.
Fasting gives the chance for the body to engage in autophagy which is the breakdown of old or broken cells into their components and reused to repair the body. Fasting takes you to a state of ketosis, where your body switches to fat-burning for fuel. Note that it takes 2 weeks for the muscles to fully adapt to using fuel as the source, so athletic performance will decline for that period.
Depending on how fat-adapted you are, it can take anywhere from 3 to 5 days to get past the point of hunger & cravings. It becomes much easier to maintain the fast after that. That means for most people, day 2 or day 3 are the hardest days in the transition.
Warning: if you stop at the hard point of the fast after multiple attempts, it will get progressively harder to stick to it and get through (as that will train the body's hormone for cravings to peak at that time).
Mostly just drink water. Tea or coffee is allowed but no sugar or milk.
And take the water with some electrolytes. Can be a bit of table salt, or get more complicated by adding other salts like magnesium, potassium, etc.
For a fast longer than a week, it is also good to have bone broth which brings in some extra nutrients like phosphorous.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
The fact that you've done it really has no bearing on whether it's actually healthy, and I'm going to go ahead and assume that the doctors you spoke to said the equivalent of "it won't kill you but I don't recommend it".
There is actually a lot of evidence saying anything up to about 40 days on water is fine for a healthy person, although beyond 50 days there is rapid and irreversible damage.
There are whole populations who used to live on 800kcal/days for years.
And for the record, my family doctor’s reply was “just make sure you start eating if you feel any ill effects, don’t go more than a month” - when I came to see him after about a week inquiring if my loss of appetite was something I should be worried about (because thinking and looking at food made me NOT want it, but I was feeling perfect - even better than perfect).
From your response you are likely uninterested, but reading the work of Valter Longo on fasting would probably enrich you.
Also, there’s a huge difference between reducing intake (to e.g. 900 of 500 kcal) which leaves most people hungry and irritated, and going down to essentially zero, which - past the 50 hour mark or so - does not. The doctors you consulted likely have no experience at all with the latter regime in which the body functions completely differently, and which seems like a natural “can’t find food right now” mode.
No, the doctor does not have a vested interest in lying to me. They're HMO doctors, this is but one facet of their job, and they're doing it because it needs medical oversight. Hell, the program itself was offered effectively at cost (it's in the HMO's interest to have healthy patients, so they charge just enough for the program to cover their expenses rather than treating it as a profit center).
In a perfectly healthy person, extended fasting is probably fine. Medical supervision isn't because it's particularly dangerous for perfectly healthy people, but because nobody is perfectly healthy and complications can arise with pre-existing undiagnosed conditions.
The reason I have found it effective is that it's simple to follow. I don't need to count calories, I don't have to learn too much at all, I simply don't eat outside of my hours. Given I've now found I don't feel hungry most days until I start eating, it means I eat less.
Now the net result may simply be less calories, that that's not as simple as 'calories in calories out', because I'm consuming less as a consequence of the timing, not by consciously eating less. This may be an odd distinction for people who can diet, but for those of us who struggle with weight, it's crucial to success.
I mean, I'm interested, but I want to see further research before I call this a real result.
But it's absolutely true, the minute some scientific study is posted there are 50 people writing comments that they believe it because yesterday something similar happened to their aunt etc. It's something I've never quite figured out.
The big benefit I think is that people are... well people. If you do the same thing to an atom it will respond in the same way, while people may respond differently depending on any number of factors.
Appetite is known to be heavily entangled with psychology. People eat to celebrate. They eat to celebrate or because they are sad, because they are tired, because they are stressed out, because they are bored or maybe because they passed a bakery.
Case studies can help us understand how all these things interrelate and how to design studies that avoid pitfalls.
You are by far much more at risk of falsely believing something because your heuristic for believability is wrongly associated with skepticism.
I read this in the original paper, “Participants were randomly assigned to follow either the control schedule (eating between 8:00 am and 8:00 pm; 12‐hour daily eating period)”
Other than the N is on the lower side, how’s this way of setting up a control group insufficient?
The hardest bit is that it can be pretty hard to get an evening meal in before 7 (we do try to cook), and if its after, I pack the dinner for the next day's lunch and sit down with the fam to chat while they eat.
> Methods
> Eleven adults with overweight practiced both early time‐restricted feeding (eTRF) (eating from 8 am to 2 pm) and a control schedule (eating from 8 am to 8 pm) for 4 days each.
That quote doesn’t give the sample size (number of people studied and in each group) though?
"a respiratory chamber -- a room-like device --"
It's not a lack of appetite though, if I decide to pursue a large meal in this condition, my enthusiasm is high and I'll eat enough food to feed a family of four if I let it happen.
But I've noticed if I instead eat more processed foods, especially refined carbohydrates, while trying to exist in this calorie deficit state similarly to my fruits/veggies/nuts mode, I'm miserable, irritable, and constantly craving more food. And it's not some mild craving, it's like craving an addictive drug.
I hadn't considered if timing played any significant part in these experiences, what seems very obviously significant was the types of food.
Also, here's a short video by him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIuj-oMN-Fk
I hypothesize the weight of a person, factors from "the mealtime" to the "time of sleep" and for storage of calories compared to used calories.
Similar, I hypothesize the timeframe from meal to meal factors into the storage of calories compared to used calories.
Furthermore, I hypothesize the individual metabolism of the person factors from the development years by the childhood to adulthood corresponding to the active lifestyle of the individual.
Lastly, I hypothesize the individual metabolism of the person factors from the composition of the gut bacteria. (Fasting could help reset the gut bacteria to a healthy state)
If you dont live next to a grocery store this is a good thing. Because you get to exercise and get fresh food every day.
If we could cure lack of discipline and laziness then we would be good. But we cant (challenge placed) and there will always be people that are looking for a trick rather than putting in the work to be healthy.
When watching Game of Thrones is more important than your health (exercising) then health is not something you get to have. Its not a mystery.
Articles like these suggest you can be healthy without being active. This is false (challenge placed).
In my experience the goal is to align your unconscious desire for food with your bodies daily need.
Any attempt to control your hunger through conscious willpower will fail, because that approach reinforces the mind's belief that food is the reward.
Instead, first you must get familiar with the feeling of true belly hunger. Most people don't know what this is. Usually you eat due to mind / heart hunger which is the "craving for pizza" or "i'm starving" feeling. You are eating because of habit, reflex or emotional need.
Belly hunger is the cramping and headaches you get when you are truly at caloric deficit. Once in a while It helps to go running without calories to push yourself into hypoglycemic sensation. You will get dizzy and fatigued. Once you eat you will feel like you just did narcotics.
Now that you know that feeling of belly hunger, you should have that feeling daily (if only mildly). Keep reducing your portions until you hit that feeling regularly. Avoid seconds or having snacks nearby.
Eventually belly hunger becomes your signal to eat rather than mind hunger . And when you serve food you will serve portions that will satisfy the belly hunger and not your emotional needs.
Once you are at this point you'll be on autopilot. The other side effect is that avoiding eating will become more rewarding since you will enjoy the belly-hunger feeling (since it's natural), and the bloated feeling will elicit disgust.
When I was overweight, overeating brought intense relief and pleasure. Now the sensations are inverted and overeating makes me feel deeply disgusted (like eating a rotten apple).
tl;dr Align your hunger reflex with your biological need for food by treating your body as a dog that needs to be trained to associate hunger with positive emotions and overindulgence with negative ones.
Edit: stop PMing me asking for pictures and blood test results. HUGE invasion of privacy
No thanks. There's no way you're enjoying what you're eating if you're stuffing more food down your throat even before your stomach has a chance to digest.
No concrete conclusion here, just a general warning about believing in monocausal silver bullets, I guess.