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Comment by dhimes | Hacker News Reader

Once again I'll post my contra-indications. I tried intermittent fasting twice; the second time I got my doc to go along with ordering a second blood test after six months. My glucose and cholesterol were both worse. I gained a few points.

FWIW, I skipped breakfast most of my adult life, but after having kids (well, my wife actually birthed them) I remained overweight. Exercising and using fitbit to monitor calories is what brought things back under control for me, and I now eat breakfast.

I've always been a workout guy, but adding fitbit to the equation changed the way I think about food. For the better.

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Keto diets are notorious for this -- some people are, apparently, genetically unsuited to extremely low carb diets and their body responds by ballooning cholesterol levels and possibly some other issues (has been a while since I read about it). So they recommend that people getting on that particular diet do both self-monitoring and blood tests.

You could be experiencing some form of that. A lot of these ideas are very poorly studied and may be missing negative effects that occur in a minority.

This is the one thing you don't see in all those analysis about intermitent fasting: Hard data about cholesterol, triglyceride and other blood levels. It would be good to have a large randomized trial with say 16/8 no-breakfast fasting which monitors those numbers.

When I was exercising a lot(30-60 miles going per week) I unintentionally did time restricted eating and it seemed to work well for me. I tried it again years later while only doing moderate exercise and it caused me to start falling asleep after meals while I didn't see any positive effects like weight control. It took months to recover from the post meal sleepiness.

Time restricted eating isn't, to my knowledge, well supported my evidence in humans(Dr. Brad Stanfield covers this here: https://youtu.be/zC9_g01disc). So much misinformation these days in dietary science. Lots of frauds and scammers (i.e. David Sinclair) are pushing dubious claims derived from poorly designed or irrelevant studies.

I tried it when I saw a recommendation from the (US) National Academy of Sciences to look into it more because the anecdata looked promising. I agree with you: The result of looking into it more doesn't seem as good as the promise.

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