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Comment by richardanaya | Hacker News Reader

If that’s all you think IF is you are way off the Mark.

No, it's correct.

Most people define IF as eating within a 12 to 6 hour period each day. For most people this is literally just skipping breakfast and eating lunch & dinner.

That's only if you already don't snack as after dinner. I already skipped breakfast, so in my case, intermittent fasting was really just about not eating anything after dinner.

How?

Actually doing IF is more like, you have a 6 hour window a day in which you eat, and you eat nothing outside it. For most people that's much more restrictive than "skipping breakfast."

That said, not everyone agrees on the method. Some will skip entire days intermittently, so, this whole discussion is shaky overall, but, definitely agree that "skipping breakfast" is not IF.

“Skip breakfast and eat an early dinner. Don’t snack.”

Eating only 12:00 to 20:00 can be achieved for a lot of people by only skipping breakfast and not snacking in the evenings and still falls under the (broad) banner of IF. It's quite a popular variant.

Intermittent Fasting (at least as I've seen it practiced) generally lasts more than one meal. Sometimes more than one day. It really flushes out your body, which can sometimes make you feel a whole lot better.

Can you explain what you mean by “flushes out your body”?

There’s a huge variety of variants of intermittent fasting.

Which one is the orthodox or most effective one for a given general population ?

16/8 and alternate day are the most studied and popular to the best of my knowledge and seem to have pretty similar results. As said, there are countless variants out there.

For me personally, „skipping breakfast“ comes close enough as an oversimplification in practice.

The one I've heard most about is 16:8, which would mean e.g. first meal being lunch at 12 and last one dinner before 20, resulting in a 8-hour eating window, and a 16 hour fasting one.

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