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Comment by strbean | Hacker News Reader

What window do you eat during? I've seen lots of focus on eating only in the morning, but much of my life I naturally had low appetite in the mornings and mostly only ate dinner. That also coincided with being young and having an insane metabolism. I haven't actually intentionally implemented intermittent fasting, but I've considered it, and I'm strongly biased towards favoring a "dinner only" window from that experience.

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I typically do a Noon to 8 PM eating window, which works for me. I agree with you, much easier to skip breakfast than to skip dinner. Also, I do more social eating for lunch/dinner.

> being young and having an insane metabolism

curious, how young do you mean? Human metabolism doesn't really change during adulthood until old age:

> Fat-free mass–adjusted expenditure [...] remains stable in adulthood (20 to 60 years), even during pregnancy; then declines in older adults.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5017

An afternoon window is ok. I’ve done IF eating on a 12pm-8pm or 2pm-8pm schedule and it worked just fine.

I read a study some years ago where they compared two groups of people either skipping breakfast or skipping dinner and found that the group skipping the breakfast had higher inflammation levels. The actual cause was unknown. I also read that when skipping breakfast your metabolism kind of stays in sleep mode (burning less calories) until the first meal.

So not skipping breakfast might be the healthier, more effective protocol.

Unfortunately I cannot provide the sources right now, but I guess a web search will help the interested.

A web search suggests that the "skipping breakfast slows metabolism" idea is actually a myth.

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