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Comment by kreutz | Hacker News Reader

Intermittent fasting is a form of calorie restriction

It's not, but the title is extremely misleading. You MUST be in a calorie deficit to lose weight. What the study shows is that simply by doing intermittent fasting, people naturally tend to eat fewer total calories per day, and can end up in a caloric deficit.

Please people, do not simply think that intermittent fasting makes you lose weight. If you still have a propensity to eat junk food or just a lot of food even in fasting windows, you could still be gaining weight or staying at maintenance.

Good to note it's not impossible to be in a calorie deficit and not lose weight. Lipedema for instance makes it impossible to lose fat on the legs and arms. Hard to get a diagnostic for it too. Other than that your comment is right, you can also not lose weight when doing IF, it's all about calories in calories out.

Personal take here -- I try to time-restrict eating. I'll brush my teeth right after dinner and essentially close off eating. Git commit. Git push. Done.

The nice thing about this is how it prevents snacking at night because you're in an "off" state that is binary. I cant trick myself into thinking a tiny bit will be OK, because any tiny bit wrecks the binary state of fasting.

Hate to be that guy because I know what you were trying to say, but not really, not necessarily. You can avoid eating for the first X hours of the day and then gorge yourself on a huge meal and be in a caloric surplus at the end of the day.

In the case of this study, the comment is accurate

As someone who has been doing, IF for 11 years and has moved to OMAD (more or less) I’d say…not really

Yeah, you might gorge yourself on occasion and have one our two day surplus, but it’s not something that anyone would regularly do because it’s not only uncomfortable, but it also messes with your gut. So in function while you’re correct, it is possible theoretically to ingest the same calories in a tiny window of eating as somebody who eats throughout a whole day, your body can’t process food that quickly and will give you significant gastrointestinal distress

OMAD it will always be pretty hard to eat a lot. But, for slightly more accommodating feeding windows, people can still eat plenty especially if they have higher density foods

While your point is valid, the researchers in the paper cite evidence from other studies that intermediate fasting reduces calorie intake.

I think the OP has a pretty reasonable point, intermediate fasting, restricts calories to certain hours, calories restriction in general restricts calories to a quantity.

Probably worth exploring the citation to know how well this holds.

“Evidence shows that limiting the eating window to 6 to 10 hours within a 24-hour period naturally reduces energy intake by 200 to 500 kcal/d”.

I linked to full txt above if you want to dig

Intermittent fasting that leads to weight loss is a form of calorie restriction.

Well said!

(There are zero studies that show that time restricted eating causes a greater weight loss effect compared to other eating plans when calorie deficit is equated between the groups)

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