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Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

Anecdote:

I tried intermittent fasting for 11 months with very, very little to show for it. I did the 18 hours off and 6 hours of eating plan. I have also tried a strict vegetarian diet for 6 months with no real changes in blood work. My Cholesterol didn't move to the dismay of my PCP and myself quite frankly.

Biology: I am a professional Firefighter that ran 1000 miles and bicycled 250 miles during this time frame. My sleep isn't always consistent which may have played a role due to my profession. I also drink two beers (Karmeliet, Chimay are stocked in my house) with dinner when I am off. So I drink roughly 8 - 10 beers a week. I probably could do better with calorie counting, but frankly it seems futile so long as I like the way I look naked, lol.

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Have you also tried going a whole day without eating, say 8pm as your last meal and then no eating until 2 days later at 8am, basically 36 hours.

Doing that once a week or so is pretty effective. There's a whole host of benefits to longer fasts as well. Helps so much with appetite control, resets your hormones, plus autophagy, etc.

Not sure why this has been downvoted. This is absolutely correct and verified by dozens of studies.

Can you please link a few? I’m compiling material.

Totally this. Of course Anecdata etc etc. I lost almost 40 lbs this year with 5-2 and exercise 3-4 times a week and have been able to maintain my goal weight doing 6-1. I don't eat anything crazy when I am eating. Just less carbs and more protein. I am also vegetarian.

How do you know it wasn’t just the exercise and fewer calories?

The fewer calories are part of the idea...

I guess they don't know for sure, but from the OP:

> Intermittent fasting seems to confer health benefits to a greater extent than can be attributed just to a reduction in caloric intake.

Any tips on scheduling exercise when you are starting out on 5-2?

I'm curious how you feel when you skip the usual meal time. When I start feeling ~hungry and willingly avoid eating, I naturally feel "stressed" but I can sometimes channel the void into another activity. It's as if going full head on this other topic 'feeds' my brain chemically.

How do you keep productive doing this? When I fast for more than 16h, my ability to focus decreases a lot. I don't have this luxury as a software developer. Sure I can fast in the weekend, but holy sh*t, my weekends aren't for suffering. It's the time I spend with my family.

Perhaps check [1] for practical tips. (I found this link through the page on gwern.net someone else linked to).

[1] https://gettingstronger.org/2010/11/learning-to-fast/

in my experience, sleep is the first problem to be solved. If a person can't get good quality and quantity of sleep nothing else helps. First sleep then meditation to tame the chronic stress response.

nothing else - fasting, diet, exercise etc helps before sleep.

btw alcohol and caffeine screws the quality of sleep.

Can poor sleep interfere with weight loss?

Yes, one is you will ha e less will power to resist sugar

Interestingly, I cut out sugar really strictly a few months back, including no fruit. A side effect is that I didn't nee caffeine to kick start me at work in the mornings.

Lack of sleep increases insulin resistance[1]. Insulin resistance can negatively influence weight loss AFAIK.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100505091632.h...

Yes, see Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker:

The upshot of all this work can be summarized as follows: short sleep (of the type that many adults in first-world countries commonly and routinely report) will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption (especially of high-calorie foods), decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.

Interesting. I alternate periods of good diet to periods of less healthy diet. I have been sleeping less than 6h a day fir for most of my adult life. 6h of sleep for me are ideal. But when I do regular relaxations (20 min) I can easily sleep 4.5h with no problems.

I had periods in the past when I sleep less 3 hours for 5 days and end up "recovering" with a 9h sleep during the weekend. I was not at my best though.

I never noticed any particular patterns between my weight and my sleep.

In the last month though lack of sleep and more carbs seem to start generating joint pains (hopefully it is just temporary).

Exercise and meditation can help with sleep, so I guess those two should come first?

I was vegetarian for about a decade and during that time my cholesterol was too low such that my doctor recommended "nuts, beer, wine, and hard liquor" as a way to boost my LDL. I saved the voicemail he left and it was a running joke that I had a prescription for the bar. The moment I started eating meat again my levels went back up.

My doctor has always said I was overweight but in the last couple years I added an extra 30lbs due lack of routine exercise. This summer I started doing intermittent fasting from 9pm-noon and quickly lost the extra 30lbs of weight but I seemed to have plateaued and haven't lost anymore. I'm 6'5" and my ideal weight is 190lbs, I have always hovered around 200.

Might I ask what reason your doctor gave? To my current knowledge there's no blood LDL too low / blood LDL is not an adequate tool to judge any deficiencies.

I'm a last year med student who eats plant-based himself and my physician was very pleased with my very low cholesterol levels.

Blood cholesterol is not 100% necessary to provide your cells with colesterol as they can produce their own. In fact blood cholesterol medication exploits the fact that cells produce a good chunk of the cholesterol they need themselves. PSCK9-inhibitors prolong the half-life of LDL-receptors in the cell membrane and thereby increase the endocystosis of LDL particles which in change leads to SREBP1-mediated reduction of the cell's own cholesterol production. If virtually all blood cholesterol was taken up you would have very low levels of blood LDL but that would not translate to a deficiency at a celular level.

Here's a NEJM published study where blood LDL was reduced to a median of < 30 mg/dl and in some indiviudals even to < 10mg/dl with a positive outcome, way beyond current targets: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa1615664

Here is another study by the same author concluding that starting lipid medication at levels as low as 63 mg/dl might have positive outcomes: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/30073316/

On a side note, from what I've read I thought nuts did not lead to a higher cholesterol but if anyone has a study proving me wrong I'd be glad to read it as I haven't spend much time researching the effect of nuts.

I went in for an annual physical and had blood taken. He gave me a call a few days later and it went to voicemail. He left a message saying the results were online and the only thing he saw as problematic was that my LDL was really low. He said being that I was vegetarian, nuts, beer, wine, and hard liquor were probably the best sources.

I didn't call him back to inquire further, and it wasn't mentioned in any subsequent physicals. I don't have a medical background and wasn't aware low cholesterol was even potentially an issue. Until your comment it didn't even occur to me that it served a purpose in the body, I just assumed it wasn't supposed to be there.

Unfortunately the voicemail has long since autodeleted itself.

This was also around 2008 if that matters.

  my doctor recommended "nuts, beer, wine, and hard liquor" as a way to boost my LDL

Did that doctor describe a mechanism of action how hard liquor could be of benefit? Sounds like a quack to me, frankly.

Liquor is a source of good cholesterol so I suspect drinking it? That was my impression.

Liquor has zero cholesterol.

Only animal products have cholesterol.

Like I said, I'm not a doctor and don't have a medical background. I was just sharing an experience I had.

There seems to be research indicating hard liquor and wine positively impact cholesterol levels: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00219...

If you're calling bullshit then call bullshit, but I'm not qualified to answer technical questions about cholesterol and don't feel like being cross examined so that you can feel smug.

So, I guess you won the internet?

Did you still drink beer when doing IF? I think it may be worth trying IF again then without he beer consumption. Beer contains carbs and will thus increase your insulin levels and the alcohol will delay processing of carbs in your liver thus delaying the onset of fasting.

Also vegetarian diets are often carb-heavy and a major health benefit of fasting is the absence of carbs.

I am more of a multi day fasting person tbh. Fasting for two days and three nights surely is successful with me.

Yeah... there are no nutritional absolute truths unfortunately. Some people have high LDL that is relatively resistant to lifestyle intervention, probably due to genetics. At least there is the option to take a cholesterol lowering drug.

I don't know the size and strength of the beer you are drinking, but maybe you could try cutting that out.

Both beers are usually 0.33l and ~5-9% alcohol depending on the type (I'd guess the 7-8% versions are the ones in question).

Ditto.

I tried intermittent fasting as an alternative to relatively fastidious calorie counting and ended up slowly gaining weight due to snackier food choices which I equalized with biweekly all day fasts. I'm sure I can make it work but I prefer meal prep and having regular energy levels throughout the day which gives me much more flexibility in terms of other fitness goals, i.e. I had a much narrow window of performance at gym under IF and I stopped mostly because my it got in the way of gym scheduling.

I feel like going on IF without some kind of carbohydrate restriction (ideally, ketogenic diet) is a bit like alternating between stepping on the brakes and on the accelerator, i.e. not as healthy or effective.

Beer can be high in sugar, especially Belgian/Abbey beers that often include glucose syrup in their ingredients. Something I discovered with horror as they are some of my favorites :/

EDIT: clarification, don't want to imply that IF without carb restriction is bad, just probably not as effective.

None of the great trappist beers contain glucose syrup. Maybe you're mixing it up with candi sugar.

> I have also tried a strict vegetarian diet for 6 months with no real changes in blood work.

Interesting.

Were you a junk food vegetarian? Were the carbohydrates high glycemic? Or did you eat a ton of dairy?

Problem with vegetarian diet is it allows for eating cheese and eggs which are full of cholesterol. I've been vegan for a while and my blood work has improved dramatically. Also, just being vegan/vegetarian doesn't mean anything unless you also eat well; lots of vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes and whole grains. I'm guessing 8-10 beers a week didn't help, full of sugar.

  cheese and eggs which are full of cholesterol

Dietary cholesterol doesn't generally affect serum cholesterol in the absence of dietary glucose.

The benefits of this diet seem to come from lowered blood sugar and a capacity to produce ketones that affect cellular signaling in various ways. The fact that you were doing so much aerobic activity tells me you probably had low enough blood sugar and high enough ketone synthesis rates that the dieting was redundant. Most people don't work out aerobically like that.

Vegetarian diet still allows for milk and cheeses which can be very high in fat and cholesterol.

Pretty cool that we have a firefighter here on HN! What led you here?

You could try 5/2 fasting (5 days eating, 2 days fasting)

Assuming this is accurate, your lifestyle is not typical. Others trying intermittent fasting and/or vegetarian diet will surely see benefits in blood work.

You don't know this and you can't claim this.

> will surely* see benefits

* may.

A) We don’t actually know this, because clinical trials extensive enough to prove it have never been done. B) There’s a lot of variation in humans. Betting that all people will respond the same to any intervention is a bad bet. Case in point: some people survive gunshot wounds to the head.

Sometimes, things are just things. Folks can have high cholesterol with a healthy diet, for example. This is because diet is only part of the picture and a partial method of getting cholesterol. You might just be someone that produces too much (or too little).

Same with blood pressure, for example. You might just have it. or a medicine or stress might be to blame. And with things like vitamin D - you might not ever make enough to be healthy.

Fasting might put you in the hospital! I know a relatively young dude that tried it for religious reasons and wound up hospitalized. He's in his early 30's now, but that was years ago. Some folks cannot tolerate going such periods without eating (diabetics, for instance): They aren't really seeing benefits in blood work.

These aren't really outliers either, but more a reminder that there is variation in humans and we can't make such blanket statements for things like diet. At least not with our current information, doubly so when we consider how much of our research has been tainted by food lobbying and other interests in the last 100 years.

The hype around intermittent fasting is nothing more than the novice effect & the diminishing returns kick in pretty fast.

As someone who still practises IF, I have been wondering if many of the immediate benefits (weight loss, low cholesterol, reduced inflammation markers, etc) are mostly apparent in sedentary, obese people. IF might work brilliantly for them because it's a psychologically "easy" shortcut to fixing a terrible diet.

For those of us who are already lean + good diet + high activity levels, I'm not convinced that IF really brings much to the table. I'm still doing 16:8, but only because I was eating breakfast in the morning out of habit, rather than hunger.

When I lose weight, I actually switch back to a regular (5/day) meal plan and reincorporate breakfast. That's the best way I've found to lose fat while maintaining muscle and energy levels. My biggest problem with losing weight on IF is that I have a tendency to binge during the eating window. Eating something small every 3 hours is the easiest way I've found to keep this urge in check.

I think the anti-inflammatory benefits are very real. Digestion is a taxing process, especially so with our modern western diets that are high in protein, sugar, and fat. There are anti-inflammatory diets that might work with similar results, but I imagine fasting is a much more fool-proof way to get the benefits.

The other benefits are more dependent on the individual. Like you, I tend to binge. But I also weigh myself every morning. If my weight is drifting up I find that it is easier to cutback on calories when I am only interacting with food for a limited time during the day. So yeah, it is a bit of a hack, but I think calling it a psychological shortcut sells it short. A typical modern western meal can easily be more than 1000 calories. And in a time when most folks work sedentary jobs, there is really no reason they should be eating 3 square meals a day plus snacks. From a diet perspective, intermittent fasting is basically just getting people to skip one of those meals a day. Maybe a good alternate name would be the '2 square meals diet'.

When I do IF it lowers my blood pressure (the only thing I can easily measure). I am pretty healthy, I cycle reasonably hard for 20 minutes twice a day (to work and back) and often more. I eat fairly well and am not overweight. Without IF my blood pressure hovers around the borderline for hypertension (my family has a history). With IF it drops to healthy levels.

Interesting. Are you controlling properly by measuring blood pressure during the eating window?

Nope, I never thought to. I don't measure on fasting days though, just fairly randomly.

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