Does “skipping meals make you live longer”?
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What we all need is not another fad diet or fasting strategy or super food, but rather a process that looks like a flowchart so an individual can achieve certain goals. I'd be shocked if we ever found a one-size-fits-all diet, but there should be some kind of process to design a good diet specific to an individual, using feedback from measurements like weight, blood sugar, vitamin levels, energy levels and mood.
Want to lose weight? Try fasting for a month. Then stop and try calorie restriction for a month. Was one easier? Did one help you lose more weight? Make adjustments to the more effective one and keep going.
Want to have more energy? Pick a group of healthy foods eat only them for a week. Then, pick a separate group and do that for a week. Journal every day so you can make comparisons about how you feel and how much energy you have.
Wondering what foods are making you feel tired/sick? Pick a handful of vegetables and eat them for a week, then slowly add in the usual suspects that might be sapping your energy. When you find the food that's slowing you down, cut it out of your diet permanently.
Want to save money on groceries? Find the foods that are working best for you and swap out cheaper alternatives or buy in bulk.
I have no idea what the process should look like, these are just possible examples, but a process is what I want.
Is there a solution to this self-induced (the market gives us what we want) madness?
100%
> What we all need is not another fad diet or fasting strategy or super food, but rather a process that looks like a flowchart so an individual can achieve certain goals.
I really don't think that's going to help. What you are treating as an engineering problem is mostly a human problem. Unless a human is psychologically programmed in a way that isn't counterproductive, few if any processes are going to allow them to improve their health or lose weight on their own.
A lot of times when people "fast", firstly they often aren't actually fasting, but secondly they are often doing so because they see it as a shortcut to gorge their brains out on whatever food they want when the time comes for them to refeed. They may lose some weight, but at a certain point they reach a new set point where they aren't going to see further improvement with the same input, and they're dumbfounded because they didn't take any time to question their original assumptions about losing weight. Giving these people a flow chart probably won't do any good. For a select few, maybe it will.
I've talked to enough people trying to lose weight, and are mystified by hitting plateaus, that I don't think they're going to have the discipline to follow a chart. People get fat not just because of the food but for a variety of psychological issues, and it just so happens those underlying issues manifest in quenching sadness, depression, and anger with addictive junk food. If someone is stuck in victimhood mentality, when they get stuck they'll make excuses to not actually do the hard work of researching, taking measurements, writing down notes, and making adjustments. Instead they'll whine, find excuses to continue eating junk in some capacity, and eventually move on to the next "host" diet fad their pathology can prey upon. It's not uncommon for people to cheat on their diet plan and to not mention it when they inquire with others, only for it to be revealed once too much time has passed. Humans have this strange penchant of being able to lie to themselves as well as others. Try coaching someone who is morbidly obese and there's a good chance you will eventually find out they were having a "cheat day" every other day with a large milkshake.
Those who actually can make a long lasting change need both a reality check and to be honest with themselves. In my opinion, it really doesn't matter that much what particular approach to take with weight loss as long as it involves keeping insulin levels relatively low. Fasting, vegan diet, carnivore, paleo, whatever. Someone who is serious about their weight loss and sheds the victim mentality will be already be able to observe, reflect, and act without a flow chart.
If you are chronically sad, depressed person with low self esteem and learned helplessness, then everything will be a silver-bullet until suddenly it's not, and a cycle of making excuses to break guidelines will just repeat.
Almost everyone could benefit from it, but it is not an easy diet process to follow. Much can be learned from it though.
In Mice.
This isn't true though, it's not the amount of calories you consume but the amount of calories your body actually accesses out of those consumed.
If most of the calories you consume simply pass through or get consumed by the parasites living in your large intestine, calories consumed can exceed calories expended by you while still losing weight.
The researcher who discovered the general role a pancreas plays in weight gain back in the 1800s had dogs living normal lives after removing their pancreases. Except no matter how much food they consumed, they continuously lost weight, and eventually died as if they'd starved to death. He discovered their urine was sweet after seeing flies were more attracted to their urine than the normal; without pancreas-created insulin the fat cells wouldn't store the energy, it was leaving the system in the urine.
This illustrates the role hormones play in energy storage/release. Everyone's hormone levels are different, and how they respond to different foods varies, it's all very subjective, sex, and age-dependent. So even within those calories accessed via the GI tract, there's hormonal variability in what gets stored vs. used vs. excreted.
Calories consumed only sets an upper bound; if you consume less calories than expended, you will lose weight. It's not a symmetric relationship like your statement assumes.
The fact you don't absorb it all doesn't change the principle in any way. It just mean you need to recalibrate. But since you can't measure EXACTLY how many calories you're actually eating anyway or that you can predict EXACTLY how many calories you need with a calculator, you need to calibrate anyway. So really not absorbing all calories changes literally nothing about the calorie counting method.
The biggest advantage of calorie counting is it's more reliable than looking at the balance everyday because a ton of stuff will make you a few pounds heavier/lighter at any time it fluctuates too much. The scale doesn't move for weeks and people panic but really it was just random and then they lose 5 pounds on the 5th week and they think "omg, i must have lost all the weight at once because i ate that one apple!" You just can't use a scale short term. But all you have to do is count the calories, believe in the process, and if after months it doesn't work, you adjust your estimate of how many calories you burn and change your diet based on that.
Instead of believing the process and waiting for months to see if it works, you can weigh yourself every day and look at the moving average. That will let you ignore the natural daily fluctuations, but still give you regular feedback.
In my experience, that regular feedback really helps with the motivation to keep doing the calorie counting.
I've also heard the argument it's worse for women because weight changes with the menstrual cycles, so then you really have to look at the very least one month of data.
Let me quote: Orexin (/ɒˈrɛksɪn/), also known as hypocretin, is a neuropeptide that regulates arousal, wakefulness, and appetite.[1] The most common form of narcolepsy, type 1, in which the sufferer experiences brief losses of muscle tone (cataplexy), is caused by a lack of orexin in the brain due to destruction of the cells that produce it.
And another quote: Orexin-producing cells have recently been shown to be inhibited by leptin (through the leptin receptor pathway), but are activated by ghrelin and hypoglycemia (glucose inhibits orexin production).
To have a good sleep you probably need relatively high glucose level.
- Wake up 6 - 6:15am - Espresso shot around 8am - Regular sized but healthy meal at 11:30am with a small pastry walk 12:30pm - Regular sized but healthy meal at 5:30pm - Little dessert 7pm - Sleep at ~11 - 11:30pm
Highly recommend, as OP have had essentially nothing but positives including preliminary weight loss, easy weight management, higher energy, etc
All along this journey a thing that's been going on is while I'm eating less and less, I have to be careful to eat better and better food. I simply don't eat enough to waste much eating "crap." By eating less and less "crap" and needing to focus on nutrient-dense food I've basically stumbled into what is called the MIND diet.
I would assume that this is the biggest contributor. Being consciously mindful of what you eat and how much you eat is extremely effective. But I say this for the benefit of others, and not to diminish your own efforts; if a regimen is working for you, then don't worry about analyzing and just keep at it! :)
> Fasting decreases gallbladder movement, which causes the bile to become overconcentrated with cholesterol.
^ https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas....
I believe the "eating makes you tired" is a hibernation reflex. Mammalian bodies are designed to pack on calories when food is plentiful in order to survive an upcoming winter. The tiredness is for the body to process the calories into stored fat. Of course, with modern technology, there is no such thing as that food winter, and we never deplete what we had the instinct to store.
For me I think the fasting window just gives me an easy to follow schedule without having to make all those tiny little decisions. Once you get used to it, having your body tell you it's hungry gets easy to ignore (plus a 2pm lunch reduces the temptation for a mid afternoon snack). I don't feel any different TBH! YMMV.
Many people say "low-calorie diets" extend lifespan, but I highly doubt, because once you reach a low enough bodyfat you actually experience lots of negative effects (which are actually similar to a high bodyfat). Maybe it's correlation, because the people who eat lower-calories have a lower natural metabolism which makes them age slower? But fasting isn't the same as low-calorie.
Anecdotally in my experience fasting really does help short-term: I have more energy and better mood and feel "lighter". Maybe because my body doesn't have to spend energy digesting food.
But if I fast too long or often I start to "crash". And once I start eating I usually also "crash". The latter is probably because I usually eat a big meal, but if I don't eat a big meal I would continue dropping too much weight and cause the former. Fasting also screws up my digestion, because when my digestive system restarts it starts slow and gets backed up more easily - the same meal breaking a fast leaves me bloated and lethargic, which I handle fine after a while of eating regularly.
This doesn't make sense. He's comparing 28% lifespan increase on calorie-restriction vs 11% on fasted, and then wildly jumping to "fasted is NEGATIVELY healthy"
Fasting is a helluva lot easier than calorie-restriction, and I'd take a gain of +11% lifespan increase.
I can step-out of any diet or behavior change and just say that if CaloriesIn < CaloriesOut, you win.
But there are context-specific benefits to different implementations.
I'm not saying you're wrong; you're right; but you don't want to end up stuck in a loop of depression thinking: Everything is The Same and Nothing Matters because everything possible can just be represented by Objects (or No Objects) with Relations (or No Relations) creating a graph on which everything else is generated (graphs concatenated with graphs).
That said, thinking about how to manage eating is alien to my personality, so the OMAD habit is a way to eat for pleasure while cultivating one less comorbidity.
There's a reason why we have chi-squared and T-tests, and an entire branch of math dedicated to statistical analysis for empirical studies. (And please don't quote Mark Twain, someone always does...)
That being said, I think the meta-analysis of decades of research is showing diet science is complicated a/f. It would not surprise me of we ultimately can create bespoke diets since we all are complex machines and different environments.
For anyone who's never heard, Michal Pollan has 7 great rules, but there's one golden rule:
"Eat food, Not too much, Mostly plants."
Here are the more "controversial" 7.
1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says.
2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.
3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.
4. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.
5. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'"
6. Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks.
7. Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.
Aww man, what's wrong with Costco?
A review of the research covering a fair number of human and animal studies and proposed mechanisms. I feel like the twitter thread above is missing a bit of context, this isn't just a couple of studies.
- It's moderately well-accepted that fasting for short periods such as 8-23 hours in humans is not at all metabolically equivalent to fasting for longer periods such as 1-7+ days in humans. I'd personally believe you could get some interesting (potentially beneficial!) effects by fasting for a week here and there due to mTOR, but we're obviously lacking the level of evidence we'd want to confidently make this claim. Regardless, intermittent fasting can help in other areas, so it doesn't mean it is useless.
- As is always the case, there's some other studies to consider: for example this one a few days ago that showed (in mice!) that fasting periods specifically were what drove lifespan increases, and that caloric restriction without any change in diet schedule did not improve lifespan: https://twitter.com/LammingLab/status/1450121276270514181 (many studies 'accidentally' combine both of them and end up with a partially confounded result. there's also some literature contrary to this, but it's an additional data point).
- As far as fat loss goes, there's some papers that show that intermittent fasting (that is, alternate-day fasting in this case) is worse than eating daily(a recent summary of one from Peter Attia: https://peterattiamd.com/is-alternate-day-fasting-superior-t...). This study precisely manages calories in participants, so one reason this could not apply to an individual is that eating patterns obviously influence how much you eat and of what.
- One of the best points from this thread is that translating results from mice to humans is hard and nontrivial, and there's many reasons for this that go beyond the obvious fact that, well, they're very different organisms. Similar to how translating the proper dose of a supplement may be difficult, translating the time period(s) of various effects and interventions is also difficult!
My takeaway as usual is that science is pretty hard, so exercising healthy skepticism is generally the right option, especially in areas that involve nutrition/diet/biology, since this is even harder than many other areas of science.