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Comment by arkadiyt | Hacker News Reader

> Meal skipping has become an increasing trend of the modern lifestyle that may lead to obesity

I believe them that this is correct but does anyone know why? I thought all the "intermittent fasting" folks were losing weight?

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This is the problem with all weight loss and dieting studies and anecdotal evidence. Nothing is ever fixed or set in stone. Some people lose weight with lots of small meals. Some lose weight with one big meal. Some find low carb works, others eat carbs and lose weight. Human metabolism and body weight regulation is very complicated and doesn't readily yield to simple rules or heuristics (beyond CICO).

Even CICO is not straight forward. It is a dynamic system. Eating more can cause increased metabolism and easting less can slow the metabolism.

It's not that complicated. Eating more leads to greater body mass, which requires higher caloric intake to sustain. Eating less leads to the opposite.

If you gain 20 pounds, then you need to eat more relative to your previous weight in order to maintain your current weight (including that extra 20 pounds). If you lose 20 pounds, you have to eat less to maintain that new weight.

I've lost weight eating more while maintaining the same exercise routine. You can try to feel better with any "well actually" you can muster. I increased the same kind of food I always eat and lost weight.

Sounds like a miracle. Good for you

Not a miracle - there are actually lots of anecdotes like this. Typically from people who aren't currently or never have been fat. Turns out if your fat regulation works fine, eating more doesn't necessarily cause fat gain, especially if you're lifting or otherwise stimulating muscle growth.

It's totally more complicated even long before that. Not eating "enough" (and you don't get to define this, your body does) leads the body to drastically reduce calorie burn, leading to "starvation mode" and the accompanying symptoms.

If, on the other hand, you manage to eat a lot of calories without activating certain biochemical switches (like one poster here mentions), you can build a lot of muscle without gaining too much fat. Some bodybuilders achieve this (allegedly even without steroid use).

The body is a dynamic system even before lean body mass changes come into play, on the order of 2-3 days.

Would you be able to provide a reliable source for your statements? I've heard certain segments of the population make claims about "starvation mode" but none that have been substantiated with any scientific evidence or conclusive studies.

I also scanned through the comments looking for this poster you say who talked about eating without activating certain biochemical switches, but was unable to find it. Where is this purported comment?

Source: tried it lots of times, you can find out yourself in about 3 days. Just start doing a water fast right now and see how long you can go :D

I was referring to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34383428

I can't give you any good reason why this happens with "intermittent fasting" in particular, but I can tell you that it follows a similar pattern to every other fad diet. Almost everyone who follows them starts controlling what they eat, focussing on losing weight and they generally succeed in doing so for the first ~6 weeks. Then for whatever reason, a small number continue to lose weight and the remainder (the majority) plateau and inevitably fall off and give up.

There are those who these diets work for, and some of those near religiously insist that it's simple and it should work for everyone and that if it isn't working then that's probably down to some personal failing. But the truth is that this is a pattern and it's not specific to any given diet, and it's not necessarily down to someone doing something wrong. For all that we think we know about diets, fat and weight - we haven't quite cracked weight loss and it's certainly not as simple as measuring calories in/out.

as far as cracking it I heard there's a drug now that pretty much solves obesity but insurance isn't covering it well. Wegovy maybe? Or Mounjaro? Maybe both: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04505-7

Yeah so that would be a little odd. There’s been a lot of talk about how most spending in healthcare is down to “obesity” and a lot of scaremongering about how that is growing. So you’d think if they had a solution to that, it’d be getting a lot of support.

It sorta suggests that obesity isn’t one of the main costs in the US for healthcare (I suspect it isn’t) and that there isn’t a pill that will ”fix” obesity (I suspect there isn’t)

Intermittent fasting and "meal skipping" can be different, as Intermittent fasting does actually require more than just skipping a meal.

It is a process for caloric reduction, if you skip 3 eggs in the morning, but then eat 6 eggs plus a sandwich at lunch you are not going to lose weight.

Normally while doing Intermittent fasting, you need to fast for 16 hours or more (not the 8-12 that meal skippers normally get) and often Intermittent fasters will do a single sensible meal and then snack with low carb snacks during the rest of the eating period.

One can easily get 16 hours by skipping breakfast. I eat dinner at 7pm and skip breakfast and eat lunch at 12 pm. That gives me 17 hours fasting. I guess skipping lunch doesn’t give you same gap.

> Compared with 3 meals/d, meal skipping increased energy expenditure. In contrast, higher postprandial insulin concentrations and increased fat oxidation with breakfast skipping suggest the development of metabolic inflexibility in response to prolonged fasting that may in the long term lead to low-grade inflammation and impaired glucose homeostasis.

So, it sounds like short-term fasting is a good way to stress the system. Long-term stress might lead to bad outcomes though?

I believe one of the benefits is that, compared to the typical 3-means-plus-17-snacks diet, it actually gives the body some time to destress from constantly eating and digesting.

Kind of like working out is good, but only if you give the body enough time to overcompensate between workouts.

E.g. if you snack on sugary stuff every few hours, your body will quite literally never get blood glucose under control except during your sleep, which is basically the definition of Type 2 diabetes.

I think they're talking, less about intermittent fasting as an intentional diet, and more about people who just "don't have time" to eat breakfast and skip it habitually. They say the diets were "isocaloric."

Only by way of anecdotal experience, but if I skip a meal (or worse, two) I tend towards massive overindulgence at a later meal, and I don't have an innate sense for calorie intake estimation. So I will often end up eating far more calories at the later meal than I might have skipped in the earlier one.

Not at all scientific, just 2 cents.

Same here. I find it too easy to overeat at night, during dinner and after.

This is common with people struggling with Obesity, often it is due to dehydration as people eat a lot of salt with their dinner and then stop drinking water so they do not have to urinate at night, the result is signals of hunger late in the evening

In my Experience, the best combo is One should stop eating by 6pm, and have 8-10oz of plain water between 6pm and 8pm...

//not a health expert, but my own experience this is not medical or nutrition advice...

Yeah, I have observed this in my personal noom data. Super interesting. Couple of caveats/exceptions for me- there is a level of diminished calorie intake on a given meal that does not trigger huge compensation on an immediate later meal, around 100 calories or so (for me). I can compensate a little bit but I don't feel unsatisfy-able, like I do when I skip, which leads to overcompensation.

Also, one event of skipped dinner and winding up at, like, 1500 calories for the day can result in normal eating the next day for me if I drink an extra heavy amount of water. But I have to be conscious about it.

In general for me skipping and intermittent fasting is extremely unpleasant and ineffective. Eating 400-500 calories every 3-4 hours- 1800-1900 in all- is far more scalable and enjoyable to maintain or lose a little.

I do believe that extended fasts can be good (for me) but I can't do them and participate in any activities, whether family or work or whatever. An extended fast would need to be a solo week vacation.

In my anecdotal experience, that's much more of a factor if my prevailing diet involves carbs - especially simple carbs/sweets. It feels more like a drug addiction I've briefly experienced withdrawal from before regaining abundant access.

On a more keto/low-carb style diet it's a much different experience, for me.

Can confirm, same for me

I have been doing intermittent fasting (eating only on a window of 6 hours per day), for the past two years

At the beginning I had the same issues as you, and arrive at meal time craving for food.

After the second week though the cravings started to disappear and with it the issue of overeating on that meal. I still eat more on that single meal than in the past, but not that much.

Every person reacts in different ways, but my guess is that when the body is used to continuously process food skipping a meal is a big deal, while in the other case is just part of the routine.

Based on my own personal experience (and, to a lesser degree, some other sources I've read online), intermittent fasting (IF) leads to the opposite of obesity.

With a smaller eating window (e.g. less than or equal to 8 hours in a day), there is a greater likelihood that less food will be consumed. This relies on CICO (ie. calorie consumption being less than TDEE). I read the linked abstract but there was no mention of number of calories consumed by the test subjects; I estimate that this would be the most critical factor with regard to weight loss.

As far as the claimed likelihood for type 2 diabetes, it seems to run counter to everything I've read about IF. When a person restricts their eating to a smaller window of time, their body's insulin resistance decreases, thereby lowering the likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes.

For me, not for health.

I work from home, we home school kiddo. That means they're not up and around until 11am or noon.

For me, I fall out of bed and jump on Zoom meetings, because I'm in a different time zone from most of my team. I don't get clear of meetings until around noon, when I can eat. My family's late schedule keeps me up late, hence falling out of bed and into Zoom.

Probably not the healthiest, and definitely not "intermittent fasting" with deliberation.

I don't believe them that this is correct - almost all the studies I've seen point to the opposite.

Here's a review of related RCTs that comes to the opposite conclusion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8469355/

I’m not sure that’s the case from your linked meta-study. As usual the summary hides the nuance and issues in the individual studies. I went though a bunch of them, and to give my own summary lacking nuance: not convinced.

Looking at the linked studies that went for more than a week, we have this one for instance that appears to show good results for IF:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6682944/

Except it’s a trial on 10 people in an already severly pathological situation. That might apply to some of us, but it’s far from a generic study.

Or this one, which reports memory issues from IF (an also only targeted subjects with obesity)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7146388

Or this one, which showed improvement through the trial, but with no significant distinction between the two method tested, which could mean the effect could be from the observation of the subjects themselves:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29778565

Most of the study were interesting, but no brazing praise of IF really.

Anecdotally only, I know I come home absolutely ready to murder a steak and a beer etc if I skip lunch. I think it's because you really need to use your mind and not your sentiment of fullness to check yourself afterwards, it just takes a while to register you are full but you are in hungry-eating mode.

> > Meal skipping has become an increasing trend of the modern lifestyle that may lead to obesity

> I believe them that this is correct but does anyone know why?

This would have been better written as "Because the modern lifestyle may lead to obesity, meal skipping has become increasingly popular".

My best guest, and this is pure speculation, is that skipping a meal makes people believe that they can eat whatever they want for the other meal(s) of the day. As such, they eat awful food and never develop good eating habits.

I did OMAD (one meal a day) for a while and when I was researching it, many places encouraged this behavior. The idea being that if you skip 2 meals, even if you eat like garbage for your one meal, you won't be able to eat as many calories. This worked for me, I ate whatever I wanted for dinner and I lost ~20lbs in a month, but my cholesterol levels increased so I put a stop to it. Then, I put the weight right back on because, well, I never actually changed my eating habits -- only the frequency.

They are saying that a "modern lifestyle" may lead to obesity and type 2 diabetes. They are not saying that meal skipping leads to that, but rather it's a reaction to it.

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