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Comment by ericabiz | Hacker News Reader

There's a documentary (free on Amazon Prime) called "Fasting" that touches on this same hypothesis. Basically, our bodies are wired to eat late morning to early evening. Calories consumed outside of those hours are much more likely to turn into fat.

Optimum eating window is somewhere around 11AM or noon for most people to 6PM at the latest. When people reduce their eating window, without counting calories or doing anything else, they often lose weight. This is gaining popularity as "intermittent fasting."

I definitely recommend the movie if you want to learn more--it kept me engaged the entire time. I've also done 2 cycles of ProLon (mentioned in the movie and has significant scientific backing) to boost my own immune system, so I'm a believer in fasting as a health benefit.

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Interesting recommendation, thanks. I'm curious about the evidence for this "wired to eat" model w/r/t time restriction. It obviously seems plausible, especially in light of this study. But "without counting calories" isn't the same as "while eating the same way", and this seems likely to greatly alter eating habits.

It pushes away from eating high-cal, low satiation breakfast foods, or overlarge restaurant portions at night. It limits idle or social snacking at night, and might push people towards high-satiation "real" meals midday instead of quicker options.

More broadly, energetics studies find that people under-correct for almost all energetic changes, including meal skipping and alternate day fasting. Eating 11-6 commonly means skipping breakfast and tea/snacking, which we expect people won't fully compensate for.

It wouldn't surprise me if circadian-friendly time restriction was genuinely better for us than other changes, especially via not eating late at night and thereby sleeping better. But I'd still expect the weight-loss result to come more from the disruption than the timing.

What exactly is ProLon? Is it just moving your feeding window to 11am-6pm?

I searched on Google but the first few links offer no insight except the impression I might have to pay money to learn more.

Its the commercialization of this:

A Periodic Diet that Mimics Fasting Promotes Multi-System Regeneration, Enhanced Cognitive Performance, and Healthspan

https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)...

You can do it yourself without any kind of kit, if you count calories. I've done it 7 times so far. Due for another one soon.

  This is gaining popularity as "intermittent fasting."

No, the proper term for this is "time-restricted feeding".

Thanks for pointing out the distinction here.

Regardless of how we define each term, there's a notable difference between normal eating within constrained hours and unsustainable/varied patterns between days. The "metabolic switch" rationales for periodic/daily fasting don't apply to time-restricted eating, nor do some of the insulin/glucose theories, but the circadian ones work for both.

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