Effects of short-term fasting on cancer treatment

But what if the patient just fasts? Without asking the doctor's advice, and just politely saying "Yes, I hear you, but it's my decision and I think the risk is worth it" when the doctor explains the pros and cons.

Also, from your example if you're one of the 100, then fasting is in fact advisable.

I understand that purely for legal reasons we can't advise doctors to recommend fasting as a general guideline without gold-plated evidence. However it should be noted that just because the risk has not yet been perfectly quantified does not mean it is entirely unknown.

For my part if I ever contract any sort of cancer, I will never reject a potential treatment on the grounds of "well we know it's low-risk in healthy populations, and given what we know of the biology it seems like there's some potential effectiveness. But we don't have a gold-plated-chocolate-coated mass population double-blind study for your specific cancer yet, so I'd advise against trying it".

Taking minor, well-thought-out risks is the least one should do when fighting for one's life. It's a good thing doctors aren't financial advisors, or they'd tell you to avoid the S&P 500 index fund and stick to your 2% savings account.

But it's hard. Doctor's have personally attacked me over and over, to the point where I don't bother going to them anymore. I would show up to appointment after appointment asking for help with no clue as to what I had, and doctors and nurses were very quick to anger. I didn't question their intelligence. I didn't tell them theories about what I thought I had. All I did was try to describe what my body felt like. I think they thought I was faking to get drugs or something, but I really don't know. I never asked for any drugs. It was a nightmare.

But I wasn't just referring to fasting. It's incredibly difficult to do anything that isn't approved by a doctor. Even lab tests is a huge battle unless you pay out of pocket via mail order.

One key point so far for anyone who hasn't watched yet: the fasts involved here are long (multiple weeks) and treatment that you do under medical supervision, and it needs to happen properly, meaning along with it you need proper exercise, getting your blood tested, and various other things, in some cases even including classical medication (possibly even larger doses)... so in general it's not merely "just don't eat for N days and you'll get cured".

1. Calories in/out control weight

2. Not everyone's digestive system is exactly the same, thus some small variance exists in how many calories we each absorb from various foods. This variance is very small, but maybe some exceptional outliers exist with very strange conditions here that could dramatically affect digestion. Don't justify your weight on this, you are most likely not the outlier and are just eating too much :p

3. Insulin levels and other hormonal conditions could affect the ability to lose fat. Again, this assumes major imbalance, most likely due to medical conditions like diabetes or hashimoto, etc.

4. The body needs what it needs. So a diet is more than just weight loss. You need a balanced diet, not necessarily balanced in foods, but you do in nutrients. It doesn't take much of anything though.

5. Certain foods have extra curricular effects that can be good or bad. It really depends in the food and your body. Intolerance, allergies, carcinogens, antioxidants, and many others. You can think of food as medication that is micro dosed, and with possibly immeasurable long term effects.

Also, it does seem that trans fat affect heart disease, as well as sugars. And it is the interaction between both which creates a high risk scenario. That's why both diets work. Ideally, you even cut out both, which is what Keto often does, it favour healthy fats and cut out sugars.

P.S.: Sorry, I wish I could put down my sources, but I wasn't keeping track. This is the current synthesis from memory of the many studies I read over time for fun in the last 3/4 years.

As someone who lost 95kg within 2yrs And subsequently regained 40 over the next 10... That's not what it was for me.

Calories were always directly linked to me gaining or losing weight.

The difference was mainly in what happens after i've eaten the sugar calories. It's gonna take a few minutes or hours and I want to eat the next serving.

Sugar just... makes you eat more, both short and long term. If it's 2k today, it'll be 2.2k tomorrow and so on.

This is just not true. Anecdotally I know multiple obese vegans, but that aside at the end of the day it's calories burned vs calories consumed.

Generally speaking 1 lb = 3,500 calories[1]. What you're essentially arguing is that the caloric measurement of vegetables is wrong, that they're over-estimated, and you can secretly eat "kilograms" of extra vegetables and not get fat.

You gain weight from taking in more calories than you burn. You can take in too many calories from vegetables. It all depends on your lifestyle.

[edit: 3,500 calories, not 3,000. Sources: https://www.google.com/search?q=3500+calories+1+lb&oq=3500+c...]

The body doesn’t negate over eating when it’s a lifestyle.

What? Yes, but calorie wise it's the same. You mix up IIFYM-critique points with calories.

> Going back to the vegetable example, you could eat several kg of green vegetables every day and continue to lose weight.

Because they have close to no calories.

Eating 2000 kcal of vegetables is the same as eating 2000 kcal of bread and meat.

He associates fasting, kale and "super nutrients" with this lifestyle transformation -- when it's just about reducing calories.

If his argument was, "It's hard to count calories, if you stick to this approach you'll automatically cut your take without having to journal every sip of OJ" -- then yes, I wholeheartedly agree.

There is some evidence that fasting can be good but people are so different it's hard to generalize-- others will over-eat in their feeding window. For some micro-meals throughout the day is a better technique to managing their hunger and keeps their metabolism up.

There's no one-size-fits-all technique. My main point is, when reading about "How I lost weight, it's so amazing" is caveat emptor.

That's the easy part of your regime. No meat, no dairy, no refined carbs is the hard part.

Actually no meat is easy, the other two are harder for me.

I didn't "dismiss" these, of course these are useful techniques that help people. My point is to not associate non-scientific properties to having kale smoothies or avoiding carbs.

Losing weight is great. Many ways to do it. To say there are such things as "super nutrients" distorts the real process at work here, which is reducing over-eating.

As for a calorie being a calorie, you're misunderstanding my argument. I'm not saying all _foods_ will have the same impact on you biologically. Of course not. Human biology is extremely complex and people should eat a balanced diet.

But what happens too often is people confer special, almost mythical properties to foods or nutrients (like kale, or omega-3 fatty acids, or plant-only diets, or carbs, etc) when the most fundamental process is calories in vs calories out.

Yes, it's possible to lose weight and still be unhealthy (just eating 1500 kcal of McDonalds per day, e.g.), but most health benefits associated from dieting come from weight loss, not isolating particular properties or compounds or ingredients.

Not trying to take anything away from what you accomplished, just trying to sort out where the health benefits are coming from: it's weight loss. From reduced caloric intake.

Personally, I like fasting. In an era when food is available 24/7 I think it helps teach self-discipline and clearly reduces the likelihood one will overeat.

I also like vegetable-heavy diets. Clearly good for you. But to say kale smoothies have "super nutrients" is not scientific. While it's tempting to confer special properties on the foods which have helped transform your life, most likely these are just methods to reducing over-eating.

Congrats again.

The second sentence here is the reason why the first sentence is exactly wrong. The best way to maintain the calorie deficit necessary for weight loss is if you can find a way to not feel hungry while maintaining that calorie deficit. But that calorie deficit is absolutely the most important goal of a weight loss plan, and is a necessary and sufficient condition for its success.

You would be shocked how many calories restaurant food has (usually >1k calories in a single dish -- no matter what kind of restaurant -- and probably more in the US). Personally, I would've assumed this is the more likely primary factor for your weight loss (combined with the fact you probably eat less food overall because you only have two meals when doing IF). You could try going to restaurants again for a few weeks and see if you start gaining weight again.

But, if it works for you -- it works for you.

Jokes aside, I feel we all underestimate how much eating out and/or socially forces you to eat more than necessary. Personally when we're cooking, we rarely go overboard. When you eat out, it's so easy to eat more than what you need.

Given that calorie counting (or rather, being in a caloric deficit) emphatically does work[1] (it's roughly just a matter of thermodynamics), I would (respectfully) argue that your research was insufficient.

It is true that the vast majority of people underestimate their calorie input, and there are some special cases (such as diabetics) where calorie counting doesn't give you the results you expect (insulin resistance increases the amount of energy required to "burn" a certain amount of fat because insulin is used in fat expenditure). A disturbing amount of weight-loss studies depend on subjects to self-report the amount of calories consumed -- which almost always invalidates the conclusion (people always underestimate their calorie consumption, doubly so when they've just started a diet!).

However, for the vast majority of people, the standard formulas for total daily energy expenditure[2] are more than accurate enough for accurate weight loss (especially for people who are >15% body fat -- once you get really lean there are other considerations when trying to reduce body fat). They definitely aren't perfect, but they're usually accurate to around ~5-10% (more than enough to get a good idea of how many calories you should be consuming, and how much of a deficit you need to be in in order to lose a certain amount of fat at a certain rate).

> Certainly, I always struggled with a calorie-restricted diet, so I knew that if I always felt hungry, anything I did wouldn't work.

Did you change what kinds of food you ate when eating with caloric restrictions? Usually you want to eat very low-caloric-density foods like broccoli (your body's "fullness" reaction is determined by the volume of food you eat, not the nutritional content). A common mistake is that people will try to eat the same types of food (high-caloric-density), just less of it -- this is a recipe for disaster because it will lead to inevitable hunger tautologically (not to mention most high-caloric-density food has lots of sugar which triggers an insulin response -- causing more hunger after you've eaten it).

The primary reason why people lose weight when doing intermittent fasting is because they consume less calories as a result (you would have to actively stuff your face to get the same amount of calories in 8 hours). Have you tried counting calories now that you intermittently fast, and compared it to how many calories you ate beforehand? You might be surprised to find that's where the real change lies.

All of that being said, feel free to do whatever works for you. Personally, I found it easier to count calories and eat higher-density food. Then again, I usually skip breakfast so you could argue that I also intermittently fast.

> I know it sounds crazy that you can eat as much as you like and still loose weight but it happened.

I very strongly doubt this is true, purely due to thermodynamics. If you ate 10k calories every day (with intermittent fasting) you would gain weight (if you don't believe me, try it for a month and see what happens -- you should gain a few kilos a week depending on your existing weight). I would guess it's more likely that you simply felt that you ate more (but actually started eating less). Do you weigh your portions of food (most people are awful at estimating even how much mass of food they eat, let alone the caloric content)?

[1]: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/does-calorie-counting-w... [This goes through common tropes in papers which are often misunderstood to say that calorie counting doesn't work.] [2]: https://tdeecalculator.net/

I've worked around this a few ways. One, it takes 10 minutes to get the the gym. I also have to get up, brush my teeth, put clothes on, etc... Second, when I do any workout, I warm up. Walk on the treadmill, then some stretching, and finally warm up to the weight I'm going to use.

I've never had an issue, except now that I'm older it can take longer to get going :)

There are some important "carninutrients" that are in animal products, like vitamin B12 or taurine or carnitine. But you can find them in supplements and energy drinks.

But there's also a lot of downsides to meat. If you don't cook meat properly, you are at risk for salmonella or e coli, and other horrible pathogens. But if you do cook meat, there are all manner of carcinogenic chemicals that are formed, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, heterocyclic amines, and advanced glycation endproducts.

Meat also often contains antibiotics, natural and artificial estrogens, nitrosamines, and high densities of bioaccumulated pesticides.

And traditional corn-fed animal products contain an imbalanced ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids, and other possibly less-optimal levels of nutrients like CLA.

There's been a number of reports describing farmed fish as some of the most toxic food sources on the planet. It's definitely changed my attitude towards defaulting to a fish option at restaurants where its provenance is unknown or at best ambiguous.

My goto has become canned wild sardines in water, consumed similarly for omegas in an otherwise mostly plant-based paleo-like diet.

And the workers' perspective depending on the source of the chickens.

Well, can't hurt, right? :)

> That's not a logical way to think about things. When I go out for a run, I don't think "I have to run every day for the rest of my life otherwise it's worth going". I don't think anyone would ever exercise if they followed that logic.

I was being hyperbolic but when it comes to eating habits, if you stop the change, you will sooner or later get back to square zero.

If it's a time bound diet, it only works for the short term. That, for me, is the biggest issue of all. The thought of having to fully commit to a change like this if you want to actually get lasting results.

It's not like exercises where you get to a state where you are healthy and as long as you don't completely stop, you're fine. With food if you go back to bad habits you lose everything you achieved in the blink of an eye. At least that has been my experience with multiple types of diets.

I only added that side-note because I believe the majority of our SOCIETY wants to LOSE WEIGHT (nothing to do with veganism) to look better under the guise of healthiness.

Which is fine, I guess. I just hate the pretending.

So how could this have been achieved? It could partly be inaccuracies in weighing, difference in body weight from food contents in digestive tract, water contents etc. The alternative is an increased energy expenditure which could partly account for it. Of note, generally consuming less than 1200 calories a day regularly is thought to be harmful on the basis that it is difficult to get minimum necessary nutrients in this time.

If I have made a mistake in my calculations, someone let me know.

I wouldn't be surprised to know that some oncologists put patients on meds to induce/increase appitite. But, from what I know of the chemo drugs I studied, anti-nausea is pretty much a given.

It may also be a factor for some who don't have much mass to lose and maintain a healthy weight. My oncologist kept up with me throughout the process and asked how I felt as it related to the weight-loss, red blood cell counts and all of those other blood tests. I probably could have gotten those meds too, if I asked. But, I was kinda against putting even more drugs in my body at that point.

Made me realize how odd cancer was.. how oddly efficient it is in its chaos.