Intermittent fasting works – not only for weight loss but also for heart health

I think most (healthy) people should try fasting for 5 days to see how your body responds. It won't kill you, but many people are terrified of the thought of not eating for 12 hours.

The other thing I've realised is it doesn't have to be about watching the clock every day. What I actually do is just eat lunch and dinner every day and that's it. It doesn't really matter when those meals are, which means I can adjust easily to accommodate socialising, for example. The diet that works is easy to adhere to. If you have to think about it every day and shape the rest of your life around it, it will not work (unless you're a professional athlete maybe).

Maybe that happens because we, as animals, have our bodies more adapted to eat as much as we can while food is available than to risk losing that opportunity for another unknown meal in the future. That to say that it is a hardwired behavior we have, a survival strategy that makes sense in the wild.

Problem is we don't live in that environment anymore. So, I think fasting works because our bodies trigger another natural response, that of focusing our senses to the search of food, kind of accepting that food is not available. Thus, it's easier to simply not eat at all instead of trying to eat moderately.

These are my 5 cents.

If it's a Monday or Wednesday, no I can't eat it. Else, I can.

This works so much better for me than counting calories every day, the "cheating" is eliminated.

Its why pregnant women are told not to drink alcohol at all. The reality is that the liver is amazing and can remove low levels of it so well that a small amount of drinking is fine. The problem is that it's really hard to a) effectively communicate what the safe level is b) get people to stick to it. It's much easier to avoid it entirely.

It has a ton of info - Martin Berkhan is really first person who popularized 16:8.

One of advises there is that you can have black coffee with some milk, because milk is really low on calories.

Also, from his site again, 10g of BCAA pre and postworkout does not change expression of fasting markers in blood. 10g of BCAA is ~40 calories. Put differently, it is equal to two teaspoons of sugar.

And, to finalize, he recommends 14:10 regime for women.

I always wonderered how much ok it really was. Dreaking coffee will activate some digistive processes, and make the liver work. So you are not exactly fasting.

I never could find a study comparing with, and without coffee.

The idea that you need a special kind of coffee to do intermittent fasting is IMHO a very bad idea: it sets an unnecessary barrier to entry, and it misses the main point: it's about what you don't eat, not what you add to your intake.

I guess it depends on how you choose to define your "technical" terms. For example (https://www.bulletproof.com/diet/bulletproof-diet/bulletproo...): "The technical definition of “fasting” describes not consuming a single calorie. When your body isn’t burdened with the task of digestion all day every day, it has a chance to carry out cleaning and repair processes that make you healthier. This cleanup and repair process is called autophagy. Depending on your diet, intermittent fasting can also put you in a fat-burning state called ketosis.[2] Learn more about the benefits of intermittent fasting.

The good news is that there’s no scientific reason to completely restrict calories to reap the benefits of intermittent fasting. If you only consume fat (no protein or carbs) during your fast, you won’t interrupt autophagy. You’ll also stay in the fat-burning state of ketosis."

(I have no opinion on any of this except that I'm amused by hobby nutritionists.)

Another part to why fasting can be difficult for people is as your inflammation level goes down, so does the depressant-numbing effect, so you will feel whatever digestive pains and irritation some of the foods you're eating may be causing you more clearly; this coincides with most people commenting how their thinking and senses become much sharper as they deepen into the length of a fast. If you're regularly eating foods you don't realize are agitating your GI tract, any that are causing inflammation, then the potential for fasting to be an enjoyable and easy endeavour for upkeep - weight loss or maintenance - will go down.

Edit to add: There may also be mild to severe dis-ease progression, damage/injury to the GI tract from lifelong lack of awareness (being numbed from eating foods that are harmful to you by some of the foods you may/likely have been eating) allowing the damage to progress. You may then be exposed and feeling this pain and then eating again is how you numb feeling it as strongly. Likewise there are bacterial infections that will benefit from fasting, cutting off their food supply greatly - much like why fasting can be beneficial for cancer growth - however, h.pylori bacterial infection for example causes nausea only on an empty stomach - and so that could be why some people are constantly driven to eat, not only to numb themselves but also to reduce nausea without realizing what's actually going on. That's why I also recommend microbiome stool testing. Also, if you underlying physical pain and injuries, reducing the inflammation from food will also increase your perception (and reaction to) to that physical pain - and so until you get that underlying pain treated then you'll be in a more agitated, less numbed state as well.

All of what I said above is ultimately why a practice of non-violence is necessary, non-violence towards others but also non-violence towards yourself: be gentle on yourself. I feel it's also important to state that all of this learning is a practice, an experiment you run through with yourself to understand yourself more and how things like food affect you, how breath affects you, how the mind affects you.

I think food to most people is a little bit like religion: everyone wants to believe that their knowledge of nutrition is correct, and that anyone doing anything differently must be wrong.

I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that the candy industry, ahem, the breakfast cereals industry's ads and sponsored "research" is behind that.

Opening Wikipedia on Kellog's (first guess of where I might find sources on this):

> The FTC had previously found fault with Kellogg's claims that Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal improved kids' attentiveness by nearly 20%.

> In 2016 an ad telling UK consumers that Special K is “full of goodness” and “nutritious” was banned.

And from one of the sources on ftc.gov:

> At about the same time that Kellogg agreed to stop making these kinds of false claims in its cereal ads, the company began a new advertising campaign promoting the purported health benefits of Rice Krispies, according to the FTC. On product packaging, Kellogg claimed that Rice Krispies cereal “now helps support your child’s immunity,” with “25 percent Daily Value of Antioxidants and Nutrients – Vitamins A, B, C, and E.” The back of the cereal box stated that “Kellogg’s Rice Krispies has been improved to include antioxidants and nutrients that your family needs to help them stay healthy.”

> The expanded order against Kellogg prohibits the company from making claims about any health benefit of any food unless the claims are backed by scientific evidence and not misleading.

I, too, heard from my parents that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day!" and that I shouldn't skip it, and you can rationalize it with "sure, it's the first thing, a good start is half the work" or something. But that's not the same as reading the original research or at least doing a cursory search online -- something that my parents aren't used to questioning; and if they look it up, confirmation bias might play a big role.

So I don't think you can fully blame the people that got defensive about this, though I am sorry you had this experience.

To end on a more positive note, the European Union requires food to only make preapproved health claims. It feelt a bit like censorship or at least overreach when I first heard of this and I read that the number of claims made reduced very significantly (also correct claims, since it's now expensive to prove it truthful) if I remember correctly, but I guess this does stop a lot of this misinformation, at least within the EU. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_claim#European_Laws)

> It's crazy how much of this stuff is in our head.

Likewise the idea that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" being ingrained in American culture despite lacking a scientific basis [1].

[1]: https://thefastingmethod.com/tyranny-breakfast-lose-weight-v...

I've done a lot of fasting. The results seem pretty good. Pulling it off is non-trivial.

At this point, we need "magical", because nothing else has really seemed to work in general for losing weight.

(And no, didn't read the article, because paywall.)

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-sur...

Interestingly, the researcher doesn't discuss skipping breakfast. I've been skipping for several years with a somewhat uneasy feeling and a growing phobia for diabetes. I'll probably try the 3pm/7pm to 7am fast instead; maybe my body doesn't tolerate skipping breakfast as well as I would like it to.

There was a small study here where:

>recruited three men, ages 40 to 67, with type 2 diabetes ...

>Eighteen days into the study, all three men lost 10 to 18 percent of their body weight, trimmed their waist circumferences, no longer had to take insulin, and reduced their oral medication. (Two of the three men completely got off their medication during this time frame.) https://www.everydayhealth.com/type-2-diabetes/diet/intermit...

So hopefully it's ok though n=3 is not many.

Regardless, good on you for getting better.

When I work an all-nighter (36+ hours without sleep) I don't have much of an appetite the next day and so tend not to eat anything. Because I'm not eating I'm also not drinking much, which I like because I'm prone to slide into a salt+soda spiral. But if I don't force myself to drink fluids I often end up with a raging headache.

I'm not much of a breakfast eater and during periods when I drink a lot of caffeinated soda I often get headaches from the caffeine withdrawal, especially on the weekends as I tend to only drink soda when working.

Additionally: I think this probably has more to do with the person. My mother is outright miserable without breakfast, which makes sense. She is hungriest early in the day. She doesn't have much issue completely skipping dinner or eating very little the rest of the day. I'm the opposite. Eating too early means I simply eat more food that day - and I'm not even hungry the first hour or two that I'm awake. I don't see a point in eating when I'm not hungry, so I generally don't. It is much easier to simply skip food early in the day, snack on something small for lunch (cheese and bread, fruit, etc), and have a nice dinner.

"there's no magic to IF"? Well, literally speaking, I tend to agree. For example, I've never actually made out any mustachioed magical monkeys monkey-patching methods in Ruby on Rails.

Seriously though, I think I disagree with the intent behind your sentence, which I interpret as downplaying the difference between IF (intermittent fasting) and CR (calorie restriction). Based on reading the Obesity Code, my understanding is that IF leads to substantially different biological responses relative to CR.

This diagram below, or something similar to it, is a nice way of understanding the core principles in The Obesity Code by Fung which promotes IF. Sustained durations of fasting help lower insulin levels for long enough periods that insulin resistance itself can lower. (CR doesn't do this, to my knowledge.)

  ASCII Diagram version of
  https://thefastingmethod.com/wp-content/uploads/HOT-Fatty-Liver2.1.jpg 

                         ┌────────┐                       
  ┌───────────┐          │  high  │          ┌───────────┐
  │  glucose  │────┬────▶│insulin │────┬────▶│  obesity  │
  └───────────┘    │     └────────┘    │     └───────────┘
                   │                   │                  
                   │                   ▼                  
            ┌────────────┐      ┌─────────────┐           
            │  insulin   │      │    fatty    │           
            │ resistance │◀─────│    liver    │           
            └────────────┘      └─────────────┘           
                                       ▲                  
                                       │                  
                                       │                  
                                ┌────────────┐            
                                │  fructose  │            
                                └────────────┘

> Synthesis All 27 IF trials found weight loss of 0.8% to 13.0% of baseline weight with no serious adverse events. Twelve studies comparing IF to calorie restriction found equivalent results. The 5 studies that included patients with type 2 diabetes documented improved glycemic control.

This phrasing is too easily misinterpreted.

Saying "works" leaves ambiguity between outcomes (i.e. weight loss results) and processes (i.e. metabolic mechanisms and changes). If you said "IF showed similar results as CR in treating obesity" that is consistent with the paper.

Second, saying "exactly like" in the context of statistics is an effective way to invite criticism (and not the constructive kind).

From the key points on the front page:

  > The heterogeneity in the current evidence limits
  > comparison of IF to other weight-loss strategies.
  > Intermittent fasting shows promise as a primary care
  > intervention for obesity, but little is known about 
  > long-term sustainability and health effects. 
  > Longer-duration studies are needed to understand
  > how IF might contribute to effective weight-loss
  > strategies.

I think if you tried to eat 3 meals in 8 hours you'd eat smaller meals. Otherwise you'd be stuffing yourself full.