Lessons Learned from 1 Year of Intermittent Fasting
jamesclear.com
jamesclear.com
This is largely because I love to feel very full and to eat a lot, and also because I work much better with black and white rules than with shades of grey that rely on willpower.
I currently do 20:4 fasting: I started eating each day around 12:30, have a huge meal, take a siesta, and then eat some more, stopping usually by 15:30. Sometimes I eat more at the first meal, and that’s the only meal of the day.
I’m losing weight (by calorie counting), but in contrast to previous diets I don’t feel like I’m going without, I don’t feel so hungry, and most importantly, I don’t find myself at 7-8pm thinking “I wonder if I could justify going over my calories just sliiiightly” because I’ve started the fasting app on my phone.
Getting to 16:8 was hard. Going to 18:6 from that was easier. 20:4 was pretty easy, and then going to one meal a day (or 23:1) wasn’t any effort at all, other than it’s uncomfortable to ingest 2,300 calories in one sitting unless you significantly amp up the fat you’re eating.
I’m only really hungry each day from about 10:30 to 12:30, which is the time I use to exercise and then go for a long walk, so it’s very manageable. Not at all hungry in the evenings, and I don’t wake up hungry either. As someone who thinks of themselves as ALWAYS HUNGRY this has been interesting.
Let alone if everyone would adopt a meat only diet it wouldn't be sustainable. The meat industry is already a major contributor to biosphere destruction.
Dr Wareham (heart surgeon) on eating meat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX58PyQwrcI
Dr Neal Barnard on debunking meat myths https://www.pcrm.org/news/news-releases/plant-based-doctor-d...
Ex special forces guy explains why the meat industry is not sustainable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUMGBwgGYWw
The Inuit or any other tribes live with Nature and preserve it.
We don't - we do the opposite.
Hence why accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels is key.
But suggesting to switch to a meat only diet to be healthy is not a solution to our climate crisis. In fact it would worsen it.
The issue is our consumption habits and how much GHG and pollution it creates - mostly by the West [0]
So a more concerted effort to transition away from relying on meat to feed the world is one step we can make [1]
Energy is another, which is happening slowly, EU for example is now accelerating the use of more sustainable energy sources - renewables and nuclear.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211025-climate-how-to-m...
[1] https://www.research.ox.ac.uk/article/2019-09-03-planning-fo...
We can't feed the world with a meat only diet.
There are other diets that are more sustainable.
People who switched to a meat only diet usually cut out junk and highly processed food - of course you're seeing a more positive change.
Don't eat highly processed food, reduce saturated fat and reduce sugar intake.
You can't disconnect the two unfortunately.
Here is an interesting graph from IPCC's data showing the impact of various diets on green house gas emissions. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7
Any human who eats mostly lean meat or any other food with more proteins than the sum of fat + carbohydrates, dies soon.
Always find a doctor that affirms what you've already decided. It works for me because im smart and decide the correct thing.(its very hard and lucky to be)
You can find a doctor that tells you to do vegan,keto,carnivore,sad diet, etc etc. Which doctor will you "find"? Will you listen to the first doctor? The opinion of the most doctors?
What is your logic on which doctor you will listen to?
Do you really want to feel less hungry by replacing carbs with fat/protein?
Fasting seems to purge your system and your body gets used to digesting sometimes and being clear other times.
Also it seems fasting has aging benefits. Lowering calories leads to longer lifespan. And fasting might be one of the only ways to metabolize senescent cells (autophagy)
Complete abstinence is easier than the perfect moderation.
--St. Augustine"multi hodie facilius se tota uita ab omni concubitu abstineant quam modum teneant non coeundi nisi prolis causa, si matrimonio copulentur",
St. Augustine did not refer to the desire of humans for food, but to the desire of men for women (where "moderation" was understood to mean that the desire must be satisfied only with the purpose of making children "nisi prolis causa").
16 hours no eating - 8 hour eating window
Sleep counts as not eating.
Precisely, do what works for you. I have one big dinner every 48 hours after working out, and either an egg, a piece of fruit, a cereal bar or a yogurt for all other meals.
This works well for me, yet colleagues think I am crazy, and here on HN I have been accused of having an eating disorder [1].
>> You see, it’s basically impossible to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. To lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you take in. You need to have a net calorie deficit.
>> To build muscle, you need to eat more calories than you burn. You need to have a net calorie surplus.
Not true, can be done, you can find examples on the internet.
There is no need for a caloric surplus to build muscles. Muscles are build from amino acids, not "calories". The body "eats up" muscles LAST: it will go through your fat first.
And if you are fat then you have "excess calories" in your fat: where do you think those go? Evaporate in thin air?
Eg look up Bryan Johnson: he built a lot of muscle while consuming 2k calories, which is 25% deficit for a guy of his height and weight and he still build muscles.
Looking at muscle gain as "calorie surplus" is ridiculus. Look up frutarians: they eat shitload calories from fruits but are totaly skinny, no muscle mass at all.
Muscles are built by having high testosterone. If you have low T it won't matter how much protein or "calories" you eat: you just won't built muscle easily.
It can be done. I have done it. Over the past several months my weight has been roughly constant (-1 kg). My body fat % has declined and I've added significant amounts of muscle in the chest, shoulders, arms, legs, and back, to the degree where people who haven't seen me in a while make comments.
The recipe for this has been a minor decrease in overall caloric intake, a huge increase in protein consumption, and resistance training (mainly compound lifts) 2-3x per week.
It depends on a lot of factors and varies per person, but table stakes if you want to add muscle as a male include eating more than 120g of protein every day. A gram of protein has 4 calories, so that's 480 calories in protein per day. Since the male RDI for calories is 2,500, there's plenty of room to get the protein you need plus go on a diet.
It definitely can be _harder_ to build muscle on a low calorie diet. Bodybuilders go through cutting and bulking phases for a reason. They're dealing with the extremes of human biology where things are a lot harder. The concept of "beginner gains" exists and I'm sure that's what mine have been, I was in pretty bad shape, there were a lot of relatively easy wins (still are!).
But yeah it is not impossible. Just tons of protein from efficient sources (whey is basically 100% protein, lean meat, fish etc.). Which you don't need to go bonkers on calories to get.
whoa, TIL. So you can never have muscle loss if you have excess fat?
>Not true, can be done, you can find examples on the internet.
>There is no need for a caloric surplus to build muscles. Muscles are build from amino acids, not "calories". The body "eats up" muscles LAST: it will go through your fat first.
Per the latest science, discussed at length in this podcast, and despite any anecdata, this is false. You cannot synthesize muscle without adequate protein (aprox. 1gr per lbs of bodyweight) and a caloric surplus unless anabolic steroids are used. If you have sources for your claim of body recomposition other than ancedata please do provide it.
I started this after reading a book The Circadian Code which describes all the science behind this (written by a real scientist). Having a deep understanding of the mechanism was the boost I need to give this a fair try. The book explains why study participants who ate the same food, but in restricted hours, had better results. A broader discussion of circadian rhythms explains why eating during all waking hours negatively impacts sleep and energy levels.
As opposed to...? That's not very different from everybody's eating window.
However, I have to remind others that there is really no scientific authority worth anything on nutrition. The digestive system is still far too complex to understand systematically, and statistical studies have far too many confounding factors to have true predictive power.
We of course understand some elements based either on particularly strong effects (e.g. that a deficit of vitamin C will lead to scurvy), or on very basic physics (your net weight gain is based on calories eaten vs calories consumed), but that's about it.
Even the CICO model only holds as a principle, or in highly intrusive clinical settings - we don't have any practical way to actually measure how many calories are extracted from food, nor how many calories are being consumed by your activity - especially since for anyone not doing professional sports, the bulk of their calorie consumption comes from internal processes as far as we can tell.
For an example of how little we understand of the digestive system, until maybe 10 or so years ago, no one had thought to look at the role of the gut microbiome in nutrition (beyond extreme cases, such as radiation treatments killing it off entirely). We had known for a long time that there is a significant role of some kind, but no one had taken time to quantify it, nor to look at inter-personal differences that may be attributable to it. Even today we have very little information, beyond some hints now that it plays a huge role in nutrient absorption.
For another example, we have little to no idea how diet is controlled by the brain+gut, such as what causes some people to be perfectly content with salad, others to crave meat and fat, and still others to prefer carbs and other sugars (not to mention extremely specific cravings people sometime have that correlate with actual nutrient deficiencies, leading to extremes such as eating dirt for anemia).
Overall, there is no way to follow the science on nutrition today. You have to experiment with your own body, find something that works, and stick to it.
Exactly, no one seems to understand this. People think that their doctor must know everything about it, because they're a doctor.
This will absolutely not be true in all cases. If you have certain health issues, no, it's not all in your mind that you need to eat at certain times.
Having said that, even if you have serious medical stuff going on, fasting or semi fasting can be useful. If you aren't well enough to just not eat, eating a lot less for a day or part of the day can have some of the same benefits with less risk/drama and may help you get to the point where fasting is viable.
So carbs and protein will stimulate insulin but pure fats is different. If 1 gram of sugar is 4 calories then 50 calories is 12.5 grams of sugar. Ingesting 12.5 grams of sugar from what I read will disrupt autophagy and your fasted state by stimulating insulin - maybe more if you have any insulin resistance.
+1 on this - I’ve strangely found I am more focused (office job) when I’m fasting. I have a black coffee and get on with the day. It even saves me a little bit of time, given me even more productivity hours.