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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

It can be good advice with additional conditions. For example I now eat whenever I feel hungry but only for the half of the time that I'm alive. For the other half I just don't eat at all. The only exception I make is for tea and occasional coffee with milk.

One day I'm eating only till 4PM and the next one after 4PM and so on.

Already lost 10 pounds in 2 months from being slightly overweight with no additional lifestyle changes and almost effortlessly because it's surprisingly easy to distract myself from eating for few hours.

I think we are tuned to eat when we want but also to the food not being available all the time.

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Do you believe it has helped to vary the eating window (one day before 4pm, the next day after)? What do you believe would happen if you kept it the same every day (e.g. eating only before 4pm)?

Fasting window would be shorter so probably you'd eat more calories and lose less weight. With alternating scheme you always get at least 24h fasting periods between your eating periods regardless of your sleep schedule.

This has been very helpful to know, and I'm going to try out this intermittent fasting scheme.

Question: do you have any system or hack for keeping track of whether it's a < 4pm or > 4pm day? If you do, please share. I have a habit of mindless eating, and will likely not remember to avoid eating at my prescribed times.

I was afraid that I'll lose track too because I don't pay much attention to what day it is, but it turned out to be easy. The days that I can eat in the morning feel very different from those that I can't. But if it doesn't work for you you can eat in the morning on even dates and in the evening on the odd ones. A skip on month change is going to be insignificant and will result in shortening of a single fasting window per month at most.

By the way, if you are close to your healthy weight when doing this aim to reduce your weight so that your BMI is between 22.5 and 25. This is the area of lowest mortality. There's no point to go lower.

Once you get there you can either abandon alternating, shorten fasting window or just lessen restrictions on fasting periods like allowing eating certain type of foods, like raw vegetables or fruits or nuts so that your weight is maintained.

Thanks, I've been doing it and have seen some encouraging results (weight-loss, less cravings, more tolerance for hunger).

> reduce your weight so that your BMI is between 22.5 and 25. This is the area of lowest mortality. There's no point to go lower

Thanks. I doubt I'll have to ever worry about going below 22.5 :-). I'm at 28 right now. Gonna be a huge fight to get to 25.

I started at 26 and got down to 23 in about 2-3 months with this method.

Good luck to you. I feel like being stubborn about keeping it going and able to distract yourself for few hours when hungry are keys to positive outcomes.

> It can be good advice with additional conditions. For example I now eat whenever I feel hungry but only for the half of the time that I'm alive. For the other half I just don't eat at all. The only exception I make is for tea and occasional coffee with milk.

You're effectively saying "It's good advice if I ignore it half the time", with your positive outcome stemming from the time spent ignoring it and not eating altogether.

It's silly and harmful advice. Feelings are inherently irrational, we shouldn't advise people to act on them.

When it comes to diet, what you eat largely governs how it makes you feel. The "feeling hungry" part is emergent, root cause largely being the diet.

After consideration, I think you are right.

I think the essence of this advice is to avoid eating for social, customary or emotional reasons.

So what I wrote basically is totally unrelated because, you can get away with all of that and eat for any stupid reason if you restrict yourself to doing it just half of the time.

No, he/she is not right. See my rebuttal here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144113

You have taken my initial comment in isolation and twisted it into something negative which was not at all what i meant. Diet is an implicit requirement as i mention in my previous comments here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40978488. Also see others here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42138469

> Feelings are inherently irrational, we shouldn't advise people to act on them.

This is silly and wrong. Emotions and Feelings are fundamental to Mental Health and by extension to Physical Health. See the research by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and her book How Emotions are Made.

The Mind at Work: Lisa Feldman Barrett on the metabolism of emotion - https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/work-culture/the-mind-at-wor...

> The "feeling hungry" part is emergent, root cause largely being the diet.

This is silly and puts the cart before the horse. Raw Hunger is the root cause and search for food is the consequence from it. Humans have evolved to eat and digest a wide variety of foods but if you only eat harmful ultra-processed food as a lifestyle choice that's on you and needs to be changed. In addition to a proper diet, one should only eat when feeling raw hunger which can be helped with techniques like Time-Restricted Eating/Intermittent Fasting etc.

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