Why Intermittent Fasting Isn’t Effective or Healthy

Diet research and publications seem to always want exactly one option for everyone.

> Several studies, on the contrary, found an association between delayed eating (i.e., spending many hours during the day without eating) and increased risk of developing episodes of overeating and binge eating.

For people who try intermittent fasting and end up overeating, sure, they should try something else. And if many people who try intermittent fasting end up overeating, it should be included in discussions about intermittent fasting. But just because it doesn't work for everyone doesn't mean it doesn't work for anyone.

Really what people need are a list of options that work for some people with indicators on how you know it's working and maybe what sorts of things might indicate it will work for you before you try it.

The key thing is finding something that meets your needs and that you can stick to.

I can't speak to health benefits beyond the weight loss. But I started an IF diet about a year ago and later combined it with calorie restriction and lost >25 kg with that in total. That brought me from almost obese to smack middle of normal weight. I can say that I tried quite a few things in the last 10 years and this is the only time I had so profound success.

I might be wrong, but I think the weight loss alone (of course if I can keep it) should bring some health benefits. I also didn't want to start with sports while being overweight. I know enough people who aren't even overweight having joint trouble very likely from that. I also don't like the thought of having to do more of something (anything) to account for an otherwise unbalanced calorie budget. If anything I want to simplify my life and IF and calorie restriction seem like a good way to accomplish that.

I can confirm though that I had episodes where it was hard to stop myself from 'unplanned' eating. But it became more an exercise in self control, basically telling myself it is never too late to stop eating and the thought 'now it doesn't matter anymore, just continue' is illogical self-deceit. After some time it was basically during the few seconds it took to grab food that I could convince myself not to go ahead.

Spitting out food and making myself puke were strictly off limits. Whatever landed in my mouth had to be swallowed. I know people that had to deal with that and it seems to be a degrading experience.

I don’t find this article especially convincing:

- I am entirely unsurprised that starving a random group of people for 6 hours led to overeating at a buffet but I’m not sure this result can be extended to mean that IF doesn’t work.

- he does say that there is evidence that there are studies that it works in the short to medium term, implying but not saying that it doesn’t also work in the long term.

- he conflates IF with all other dieting and then refers to studies that say dieting doesn’t work. That’s crazy broad. Eating within your calorie budget with the right nutrients is also a “diet” if you want to stretch meanings.

- mentioning IF as a cancer treatment up front is a little disingenuous. Presumably there are folk who ascribe a great deal of benefits to IF that should be treated with some scepticism and that’s ok. If all it does is help some people manage their weight, awesome. It doesn’t need to also treat cancer.

- it’s great that there is evidence that regular meals and CBT-E works. Doesn’t mean other things don’t.

I’d like someone to do a study on the impact of articles like this. Any kind of eating discipline is entirely mental, so if you’re going to create doubt, it’s probably a good idea to be careful with your arguments.

One can be on intermittent fasting and eating regularly. I ate at 12, 14.30, 16.30 and 19.30 every day. Also anecdata (i.e. sample size of 1), but IF helped me tremedously with both weight gain and loss, at different times in life of course.

Yeah, I'm going to take my own experience from years of long water fasts and IF than this thanks.

That's the key part:

> In conclusion, there is no robust evidence that intermittent fasting produces additional clinical benefits, compared to healthy and regular eating patterns. Instead, there is some evidence that delaying eating increases the risk of developing episodes of overeating and binge eating. For these reasons, it is inappropriate to recommend intermitting fasting as a healthy eating practice.

So "no robust evidence" vs. "some evidence". I wonder what the difference of these two indicated levels of evidence is and how it could be measured by any sort of KPI.

All in all, it reads more like a strong opinion than anything that is clearly backed up for any side.

Disclosure: I am on non-regular 8/16 IF diet. And I have to admit that I tend to binge-eat at times before my shift starts.

This article doesn't cite any sources and just seems to be the author's elaborate explanation of his own opinion that intermittent fasting is an unhealthy behavior.

I overate during my non-fasting window for the first month. Over time, my appetite gradually reduced to something much healthier. I didn't want to eat more even when I could. It just happened naturally. This became a real lifestyle change for me and not some temporary fad diet effect. I've been doing it almost a year and I can chart and predict my weight loss reliably with the BMR formula.

The key to any diet change is constant observation on changes happening within the body and on one’s behavioral patterns. If one observes that one is binge eating after a fast, my suggestion would be to slow down and ease into it.

For the time restricted feeding (TRF) kind of intermittent fasting, one could start at 14:10 (14 hours fasting and a 10 hour eating window) and build up to 16:8 or beyond. What matters is what works for you. Intermittent fasting may also interfere with social activities like sharing a meal with others during your fasting window. Give yourself a break, enjoy those moments and get back on track.

There is no one single diet that works for everyone or even works for the same person all the time. Micro-adaptations can go a long way in building sustained habits that get ingrained.

I follow something from 16:8 to 18:6. I haven’t seen any weight loss unless I cut down on calories a lot. But I’m comfortable with this eating pattern and feel better in the night when I stopped eating by around 6 in the evening.

One has to take the perspective of the author into account here. He's a psychology MD and seems to have a lot of experience with people with major eating disorders such as bulimia.

I find it quite convincing that for this type of patient, regular eating patterns can help to restore a healthy approach to food as they are starting with extremely unhealthy eating habits to begin with.

The conclusion, as formulated in the title, does seem to generalize these findings a bit too much. At least it lacks evidence on how generally healthy (maybe somewhat overweight) people who attempt IF as a dieting measure tend to develop unhealthy longterm eating habits.

Yeah, the whole idea of fasting is moderation. So if you over-eat yourself, that defeats the purpose.

We (modern people) probably eat to much, so some kind of self discipline, either fasting, or avoiding sugars should be beneficial.

I think it’s just not for everyone. I did it for a bit, and it never really worked for me. The most extreme one I did was “no food on monday” which was really hard and made me feel like shit. Then on tuesday I would overeat as my first meal and feel like I was going to die.

What seemed to work more was to delay meals and wait until I was actually hungry to eat. Also never finishing my plate (which is super hard as I was raised to finish a plate) works quite well. Also going to sleep hungry works well. That’s how I work.

I lost 11kg on 8:16 IF

But I also , cut out all sugary drinks, cut back on sugary foods and am trying to be mindful of my eating habits in general.

I seem to have plateaued at the 11kg loss (from 96kg to 85kg). I suspect I'll have to be a lot more active to lose more... but I find that a deliberate focus on exercise often means I lose control of eating habits.

Forgive me if I read the article wrong, but maybe this has to do with randomly changing diet having a negative effect?

I think optimal diet is subjective. Reason and experience are more important than other people’s data alone.

> a laboratory experiment found that participants deprived of food for six hours consumed significantly more calories at the buffet compared to subjects in the one-hour food deprivation condition.

You don't say.

IF isn't a diet, it's a lifestyle. Of course you're going to fail at it unless you commit to a complete lifestyle change.

I married into an family of Southern Italians who moved to the United States and like quite a few cultural groups (such as Pacific Islanders) for whom the Standard American Diet is death on a plate.

I went to a family party a while back and the biggest topic of conversation was that many people had been diagnosed with Type II diabetes. I was asked if I had it and I wasn't ready to confess that I'd just gotten a 6.7 A1C myself. (I lost about 8% of my body mass and haven't read above 5.8 since)

The rest of us are dying from diabesity, but the the media runs a constant drumbeat about anorexia because they people in the media aren't representative of the cultural diversity of the country. My Italian relatives aren't newspaper reporters, magazine writers, or professors.

Some ethnic groups disproportionately go into the jobs that tell stories for the rest of us, so the stories that we're told are about their problems, not about our problems.

On top of that, people who work in the storytelling industries tend to be self-centered. In a working class family, troubled daughters smoke cigarettes, get pregnant, etc. In a storytelling class family, anorexia initially looks like the kind of "self development" that the storytelling class prizes -- it takes a while to see the self destruction it entails... So it's a way a person in that situation can "create a crisis" that their family can relate to.

Also I think storytelling class families are more vulnerable to media images because their own members write the text that goes next to those images. Ordinary people have some protection from images of Olga Sherer and Kim Noorda because they know these images are illusions that are sent out from New York and Los Angeles.

Those images wash over the rest of us and are automatically discounted in our minds because we know they come from "another world". If your mom or dad has the byline for the article that occurs next to the model and you just might get invited to a party where these people appear, you don't have the cultural protections that you get just from growing up in Iowa, Alabama, etc.

This movie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Year_Itch

is about encounters between a middle-aged book publisher and a young and beautiful model that might at first seem as improbable as a Japanese harem anime, but it's not an improbable match if you see the pair as coworkers in the same industry. (You would live in the same apartment building and otherwise consort with people "in your class")