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Comment by Gatsky | Hacker News Reader

Intermittent fasting has a nice advantage - nobody can make any money off of it. This gives it an inherent legitimacy. Contrast all other fad diets, and essentially every supplement ever sold.

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Surely people can make money around it. You cannot sell a void [0] but you can very effectively sell void consulting and magazines.

[0] even this is debatable

I was brainstorming with a friend about creating an alternative social environment to replace restaurants for fasters, but couldn't come up with any good ideas.

restingrants, a place to sit quietly and vent

La Croix bar?

We call the cafes. They can serve coffee, tea, etc, have people talk, listen to music, etc.

I’d love to see a cafe (in my area at least) with a very social “hacker” vibe. Used books on all walls, electronic parts to build with, chess sets, events and meetups. A place a kid could come with $15 bucks and find a good tutor maybe (corkboard for community postings, jobs, clubs)

I was reading about how back in the day original coffee houses were a meeting place for socialites and thinkers alike to share ideas. I’d love to see that sense of community nowadays,I feel like it’s missing in the US and would be celebrated, but maybe it’s just my nerdy idealization.

>I was reading about how back in the day original coffee houses were a meeting place for socialites and thinkers alike to share ideas.

Some still are in Europe at least. But they're closing down here as victims of modern lifestyles. We had (until the 80s) 4-5 cafes here where everybody who was everybody in culture frequented -- including different generations (20+ to 70+ year old people).

Some problems:

1) real estate prices in city center makes it impossible to keep renting for such a purpose or (if the cafe owner also owns the building) more profitable to sell the place and have it be made into a clothes shop or similar.

2) rising rents or (in other cases) deterioration of city centers, means that many intellectuals, playwrights, musicians, writers, academics, etc chose to move in other neighbours, which makes it more difficult (especially with added traffic) to frequent the same city center cafe anymore.

3) some owners just die and their kids are either clueless and turn the place into some "trendy" BS losing the clientele, or want to sell it and move on, or they simply don't have kids to pass it on, and nobody gets the legacy they've created (though sometimes new people step it who respect the original vision -- sometimes even after a few years of the shop being closed).

Yeah that makes perfect sense, it is a bit sad to hear that even Europe is losing this part of the culture. We change with the times, of course... I do agree with your point about influencers moving out of city centers and towards more affluent suburbs, it would be interesting to see if there is a market for this after all closer to these areas. Nowadays as you said though, it’s not likely the ROI would surpass that of a retail location or well established franchise sadly.

Are there any study cafes/coworking places where you live? Those usually charge for time. That’d be the primary competition, as well as possible reference business model.

Yes, that would be great. This is a real problem for me. Especially because I don't drink coffee, either.

Sauna-like locations, specifically something like tepidāria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tepidarium would be my idea. Warm rooms, water and salts being offered.

> replace restaurants for fasters

A "restaurant for fasters" is called "buffet": fasters need to eat a lot in between their fasts (assuming that fasts are frequent).

> Surely people can make money around it.

I think I just saw an ad for an app on YouTube that is supposed to help you with fasting. You could market zero-calorie electrolyte tablets, or break-fast bars / tubes / whatever to give you the optimal recovery to "non-fast" mode. You could market protein or vitamin supplements to counter the fact that you're getting 2/3 or 1/3 of the nutrients, but probably still requiring the same amount of some nutrients.

I think there's lots of opportunity for the creative to make money from this fad. :-)

>Intermittent fasting has a nice advantage - nobody can make any money off of it.

I think the Abrahamic religions figured it out already...you create holy days like Yom Kippur, Lent, Ramadan and make fasting a mainstay of the traditions. Boom, not only can you make money on not eating, but you can simultaneously take credit for all the actual benefits of the fast itself.

I would disagree here. You're assuming that Abrahamic religion solely integrated fasting for credit purposes. Whatever you think of religion, you can at least give them a point on that.

This is patently false.

Martin Berkhan created a very lucrative coaching platform with Intermittent Fasting: https://leangains.com/

Many books have been written on IF for profit:

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Fasting-Intermittent-A...

https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Stop-Brad-Pilon/dp/177511080X/ref...

And countless others.

I think there is a distinction to be made. You can explain IF to someone in 5 minutes and they can do it tomorrow. That’s how I heard about it. Nobody owns the idea.

Taking your example, Lean Gains is a niche application for men trying to improve their physique, and it includes exercise and motivational components. This is pretty different to the Atkins diet for example, where the book is the diet, and they don’t really exist independently.

Are you sure ? Targeting fasting people with ads at the right time of day is probably very lucrative. You can probably be sure that once algorithms pick-up that if some fasting people are more prone to click on ads they will push more people to try intermittent fasting regardless of the effects on health.

How can that be lucrative?

It's just leveraging the information you have on the user. That's what marketing companies do all day long. Bidding for ad spots in the marketplace and putting the right product at the right time in front of your eyes. Putting the ad of a local restaurant in front of a hungry man will result in more clicks than if the man is not as hungry, and more clicks than putting a pair of shoes.

You can probably also up sell your products if you detect your customer is not playing his A-game. A hungry mind will typically explore less options and be more prone to risky behavior. It's probably something inherited from thousands of years of evolution, when you are hungry and there is a potential reward you take more chances, you don't think and you go get it.

I don’t think it’s that different from other diets. The money is in books and consulting. People also need to know what to eat when they aren’t fasting so there is an opportunity there.

IF is actually very binary, you just don't eat when you're fasting and eat whatever you want when you're not. (But try to keep it under 600 calories if you're a man, 500 if you're a women. And of course the healthier the food the better, think fish, greens, etc.) It's that simple.

I like OP's point, this diet works and it can't be sold to people en-mass which causes confusion when different retailers put their own little spin on things. Most fad diets are confusing, hard to follow, and sold to you. IF is none of those things.

I think you are underestimating the capabilities of marketers to create products and then selling them. I also don’t think IF will be healthy if people eat whatever they want during non fasting time.

Fasting is not a diet .. it's whatever diet limited to time .. and yes there are tons of 'diets' that say they work better with fasting and sell crappy books about it ..

Eating proper food that isn't processed, putting the effort in to cook my own meals, eating lots of vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes etc, also has a nice advantage to it. Fasting is another fad for people who don't want to put the effort in to eat well.

> Intermittent fasting has a nice advantage - nobody can make any money off of it

I’m already seeing ads on Instagram for an app that’ll tell me exactly when to fast.

Also I use an app that allows restaurants to offer me discounts for eating at unusual times, and it’s big in the city I live in.

How can I make a fasting cookbook? The fasting gets results. What I like about fasting is that a person can't get into an argument on the Internet with a troll about what foods a person can eat and which are not apart of the diet. Are potatoes Paleo or not?

So they don't sell supplements but they will peddle you books, lecture tours, and even special foods at massive cost. It's like any other diet industry past the first glance.

Nobody makes money off flat-earth and anti-vax conspiracies, either. Of course, anyone can write a book about their experiences on X fad.

There's plenty of money in writing conspiritainment.

Constantly see Keto fad diet woo woo posted here.

IF sells black coffee...

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