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Comment by daneel_w | Hacker News Reader

Would be interesting to see another study with people who do both breakfast skipping and skipping late-night eating.

When I was in my 30s I was a typical woefully sedentary "IT potato" with more than a few extra kilograms around the waist, but today in my early 40s I manage to stay slim and free from diabetes despite being just as sedentary, and I'm convinced that my intermittent fasting is contributing to it:

These days I wait with breakfast until around lunchtime, and I have my last meal for the day between 6 and 8 o'clock in the evening. That is, instead of the usual pattern of eating during nearly two thirds of the day (16 hours) and fasting (sleeping) during one third (8 hours) I've turned it around so that I fast two thirds of the day, while still consuming the same amount of calories.

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Congrats on the weight loss!

I think the connection between intermittent fasting and BMI is already well understood: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6832593/. In addition, I frequently see incredible transformations on the IF subreddit. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that our bodies were not designed to be consuming calories every waking hour.

I eat generally once a day, and it just makes managing food much easier. It took a long time to switch but now it takes much longer to get hungry, which means that if I overeat for any reason (say a party or celebration), I can just delay my next day's meal for few hours after usual date and make it smaller so I'm still not all that hungry (and annoyed) in the evening.

When I get ravenously hungry in the morning (which is around 10-11 AM for me, the blessings of remote flexible work) I just get a coffee or a cocoa and that gets me by to the normal meal time (12-14).

I also tried to cut quickly metabolizing food like bread which just makes me hungry earlier.

Yeah, I think I'm getting good results by having a line of 7 as the latest I'll eat. The after 10 snacks were obviously bad, but it is impressive how invisible they were to my attention.

For me, I was in good shape in my 30s. Then the weight started to creep on.

Now I've been having my first meal after lunch, exercising more by walking and snacking less. Too early to tell how it goes long term.

I'm trying to be a little flexible. So if it's 9am and I'm hungry, or I know I'm heading out the house for a busy morning, I'll eat fruit or vegetables. But no bread.

I was pretty sure this is the normal way of intermittent fasting. Otherwise most people i know would almost be doing intermittent fasting all the time.

How did you eat before, if i may ask?

Same foods, same amounts, but the time span was more typical and covered about 14 hours starting with breakfast around 9 in the morning and ending with a small snack around 11 in the evening (though never close to bedtime).

What I do now is to simply compress the same consumption (including the small snack after dinner) so that it fits in a span of 7 hours on average. I'm flexible with it since some days and schedules call for other plans. My goal is not complicated: eat nothing for an unbroken stretch of roughly 16 hours per day.

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