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Comment by JackMorgan | Hacker News Reader

I'm taking an EMT class now and it's extremely sobering how many horrifying ways to die are directly caused by one of: high blood pressure, obesity, or smoking.

We're in the cardio module now, and about 3/4ths of the class is already talking about signing a DNR. Death from one of those three is often long and extremely painful. We've got so many ways we are legally required to keep the body "alive". There's a lot worse things out there than death.

Keep fit out there folks. If you don't know where to start, check out intermittent fasting 16/8.

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IMO fasting won't help the majority of the population since their diets tend to consist of foods that are designed to be highly consumable at volume. While the theory of time-restricted eating implies you will eat less, you can still easily exceed your TDEE in calories.

Skip the fasting; exercise and eat real whole foods. It's pretty difficult to do both of those things and not lose weight.

That is way too hard for a lot of people. The simple "eat/no eat" is not a bad way for people to start on their way to better health.

If forcing oneself to just walk for 20 mins (thats a lazy 1km, I've managed to walk cca 3km 2 weeks ago with broken foot and ripped ligament through wild forest) is too much, good luck with convincing anybody with such mentality that now is the real "no eat" time, consistently.

Fasting isn't about eating less.

I put up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39387450 partly because it's surprising how many ways to die are voluntarily exacerbated.

If you don't know where to start, just fucking move.

Exercise alone almost never reduces body fat percentage long term. Calorie restriction of some sort and getting the body to burn fat via fasting/keto is required for most people.

Exercise definitely does improve tons of factors, even if it is not an effective way to lose weight on its own. There is also, as I understand it, some degree of distinction between weight loss and weight gain prevention: while the saying "you can't outrun a bad diet" seems to hold true for people actively trying to lose weight (something I can personally understand, when I'm in a running training block my appetite is unreal), there's also a lot of evidence showing lower rates of obesity in more densely-populated areas, where people naturally walk more, and evidence of improvement when people move from low density to high density areas, which suggests there's a component of just moving around in daily life that can be a factor:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9378543/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6747269/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.23634 https://academic.oup.com/edrv/article/43/6/966/6532493?login...

Just do both and get the benefits of thinning out _and_ mental boosts from exercise.

Your body will burn fat in caloric deficit. No keto required.

Fit and fat is much better than unfit and unfat.

High blood pressure and obesity appear to be part of the same metabolic syndrome.

I am all for fasting, but it won't make your death necessarily less painful. The best you can hope for is to live a decade longer and possibly make use of the progress of medical science.

(It is possible that we will have a breakthrough in longevity. In that case, well, it makes a LOT of sense to be alive to see it.)

> We've got so many ways we are legally required to keep the body "alive".

Could you say more about this? I've heard of rib breaking CPR but curious to know about others.

The rib breaking is very real. And 93% of the time it only traumatizes the giver and adds more suffering to the receiver who dies anyway. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/29/1177914...

There are also "humans are space orcs" devices like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventricular_assist_device that can keep blood circulating even when the heart cannot.

Or this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_positive_airway_pre... that can push all the blood in your lungs from congestive heart failure back into your arteries, only for the lungs to start to slowly fill again, drowning them slowly.

Not saying these measures are bad or that we should withhold care, but there is very much an attitude of "keep alive at all costs" to modern medicine that can be hard to witness and potentially traumatizing for caregivers.

With a terminal family member, what I found counterintuitive was that we had to take measures to avoid insane practices rather than the practitioners having to ask before doing something insane.

How is that considered fasting?

Eat breakfast at 9, lunch at noon, and dinner at 5.

That's just a normal day.

Depends on where you are in the world, dinner at 5 would be really weird in a lot of places. Most restaurants would not even be open for another 2 hours

Even if you eat at home saying you have to eat before many people are off work seems like a rather arbitrary restriction for the sake of 2 or 3 hours. And I say that as someone who does sometimes eat earlier and often don't really have 3 meals a day.

The body doesn't significantly start burning fat for fuel until glucose stores are exhausted, which on average takes at least 12 hours of fasting. Every hour after is running on "fat batteries", so a few extra hours is the difference between zero fat burned and several oz of fat burned.

Well it's not weird anywhere in the US. Skip breakfast for a snack at 10 and push dinner to 6 and it's pretty average.

Fasting is not eating.

But sure, let's just change the meaning to "scheduling when I eat".

Dinner has to end on or before 5. No calories from 5PM to 9AM.

That's not a fast, it's just eating less.

> Fasting is the abstention from eating and sometimes drinking. From a purely physiological context, "fasting" may refer to the metabolic status of a person who has not eaten overnight (see "Breakfast"), or to the metabolic state achieved after complete digestion and absorption of a meal.[1] Metabolic changes in the fasting state begin after absorption of a meal (typically 3–5 hours after eating).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting

It's a place to _start_, once a person can handle that consistently, then more strict protocols like 18/6 or 23/1 are easier to do consistently.

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