Largest Study of Its Kind Identifies Health Benefits of Fasting | Hacker News Reader

Largest Study of Its Kind Identifies Health Benefits of Fasting

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26 pointsRickJWagner13 comments

Here is the link to the actual paper and post on HN.

Alternate Day Fasting Improves Physiological and Molecular Markers of Aging

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20812636

The key here seems to be that you physically don't have enough time and "space" to make up for the long hours without food.

It seems like it'd be way less painful to just count your calories.

Every diet method seems to try to avoid doing so. Modern tools make it easier than ever. You will not lose weight unless you run a calorie deficit.

Starving yourself every other day is a way to do it, but it also seems like an unnecessarily painful way to do it.

The key issue for me here is that I still can't easily get a more or less accurate calorie count for a random meal in a restaurant near my workplace. Because of that I need to stick to a very limited menu which feels so depressing that I prefer ADF over it. Is there a solution I miss?

Yes.

Eat less during the day on the days you go to a restaurant.

This is one of my favorite features of Soylent and the like. If I drink 2-3 bottles a day, I know I can have one avg sized meal and/or snack and still be under a reasonable daily calorie ceiling.

though it definitely doesn't solve your limited menu point, I've always found getting 70% or so of my calories from soylent to be way more sustainable than eating the same regular foods every day.

My method is to take anything from the restaurant that you order and don’t eat half of it. Most restaurant food is about double the portion you need.

Or just find a really similar food item in your calorie tracking software of choice.

There are two issues here.

1. Losing weight

2. Health benefits. Like clinical intervention in diseases driven by inflammation as mentioned in the article.

There is some evidence that healthy person not losing weight would get other health benefits as well. The basic research is seems to be quite convincing. Animal studies show that intermittent fasting or calorie restriction helps. The caveat is that the effect diminishes when the size of the animal increases. It's unclear how beneficial following these regimes as normal diet would be for humans. That's why it's not recommend yet.

I've tried this a while back, and found it near impossible. The fasting days aren't too bad; hungry but with a lot of energy. The eating days however are killing; your breakfast is bound to be huge, after which you feel bloated and sluggish. The rest of the day I tried getting in sufficient amount of calories, which always failed, making you feel lazy and full all day. At the end, I usually managed to get in 130-140% of daily advised calories on the eating day, which starts taking it's toll after 5 or 6 rounds.

This kind of diet also ignores non-eating related properties of a meal, i.e. a time to socialize, take a break or a it just being a routine activity. The day that I'm not eaten felt pretty weird, it's surprising how strong the habit of eating is.

If you aren't already, try not eating carby breakfasts. Meat and eggs are my goto.

If you are doing alternate days or weekend fasting high or even moderate carb diet is a no go because of this exact reason.

Pretty much high protein/fat and limit carbs to 0.5-1.5g per kg of body weight anything else would pretty much fuck you up.

Since you are taking about double caloric intake on non-fasting days you also really need to pay attention to the GI of your carbs because otherwise your blood sugar levels will be spiking hard.

If I am reading correctly it looks like the alternate day fasting group had less total caloric intake per week. Which might be the key thing here. As usual.

This site is full of the clickbait crap that HN commenters like to think themselves superior to. But one article pandering to their beliefs about fasting and it’s at the top of HN?

Also, if you fast for 3 days you can rebuild your immune system [1].

[1] https://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regene...

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