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Comment by rikelmens | Hacker News Reader

Aligns with many recent studies on better insulin sensitivity in the AM, and showing how early meals help sync internal circadian clocks (there is one central and many peripheral).

"Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper."

P.S.: If you practice time-restricted eating (intermittent fasting), it's better to skip dinner than to skip breakfast.

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| "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper."

Sadly this is the exact opposite of how I prefer to eat :/

Excluding the occasional Saturday mornings when I enjoy making a big breakfast of waffles, pouched eggs, etc for family/friends. Those are great, but for the most part mornings I’m ready to get on with the day and don’t want to spend time over a stove.

Same here, in fact I'm so not used to having breakfast that any time I try to I have awful nausea.

Dinner time, after work and chores is the best time to cook, eat, socialise and take our time enjoying some food.

> I'm so not used to having breakfast that any time I try to I get an awful nausea.

This is likely just force of habit. Force yourself to eat something light - just a yoghurt or a piece of fruit - in the morning for a few days, and the nausea will likely go away.

I might force myself, or just keep doing what feels best :-)

After all, if one needs to lose weight there are many more effective tools than just forcing oneself to have breakfast.

My intent is not to convince you to do anything, rather to point out that "I never do X and feel bad when I do X" shouldn't lead one to the conclusion "doing X is bad for me".

These anecdotes are interesting. While they might fly in the face of science, they provide strong evidence that there is no one size fits all.

The biggest issue with almost any kind of diet is that it takes gargantuan force of will to actually stick to. So I think that if one finds any kind of healthy (calorie and macro-nutrient-wise) eating regimen that they can follow, better not trying finding something else on the premise that it might be more effective.

> better insulin sensitivity in the AM

I think it's more accurate to say "After a fast" .

Next study needs to shift these windows by 6 hours. I suspect it will show nothing to do with circadian rhythm and everything to do with fasting/non-fasted eating.

I don’t think After a Fast” is accurate in the context. ‘In the AM” is referring to the Dawn Phenomenon[0], isn’t it?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_phenomenon

I'm lazy to dig it up, but there was a study comparing people skipping breakfast and skipping dinner. The conclusion was the insulin sensitivity was higher from AM - to early PM (breakfast + lunch), than from early PM - evening (lunch + dinner).

It may be more effective to do time-restricted eating with no dinner, but for many people (with kids, for example), this is not practical. I've done 17/7 for about a year with good success, usually from 7p to noon. It allows me to eat dinner with my small kids, and that has made it feasible for my family.

I've not done 17/7 or 16/8, but I've done 1/0, i.e. alternate day fasting for quite a while. Compatibility with social life aside, I find it much harder to sleep after not having eaten for 24 hours, and it didn't get significantly easier to fall asleep after a few months. My sleep would also be lighter, so I'd wake up more often from some random noise.

I don't know how much this plays a role in 17/7 etc, but if it does, skipping dinner might make sticking to it harder than skipping breakfast.

Also "Eat your breakfast, share your lunch with a friend and give your dinner to your enemy."

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