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Comment by a3w | Hacker News Reader

The timing of when I eat changes, if I gain weight. Eating pizza after jogging? Fat on belly.

Eating as much pizza as I want, but going to bed after on empty stomach after running, or putting the running in the morning while doing about 12 to 16 hour slots of intermitted fasting? Hello, six-pack.

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Can we all please acknowledge that intermittent fasting is just a form of calories restriction? If you ate a pizza after jogging, but that was all you ate all day, your results would probably be different as well.

Does it matter? Intermittent fasting is a form of calorie restriction I can be successful at, eating 3 tiny meals a day is one I fail at.

It does because you framed it as a matter of timing.

The timing makes me lose weight. The mechanism by which it does so is a black box.

But this black box has "you eat less calories" written in whiteout across it.

But it doesn’t matter to me. One method makes me so miserably hungry 24/7 that I quit after a few weeks of agony, the other makes me forget all about food entirely.

This seems to bother people, who always tell me to do it the “right” way, which to them apparently means using willpower to endure endless suffering.

That's fine, you can live in your world of magic. I don't care for intermittent fasting, it been easier for me to calorie count, but both of our systems are CI/CO. If we can acknowledge the core concept is that weight loss is done through caloric restriction we can then expand that to more implementations, because, as you've pointed out, the "right" way is very personal.

No one in this thread cares about this being the "right" way, they care about being accurate in what we're discussing.

Intermittent fasting, keto, carnivore, sugar diet, etc., all work when they work because it is caloric restriction.

Yes, it does. Because for somebody else, the three tiny meals might work, and intermittent fasting doesn't, and it would equally be good at the result.

Reduced calorie intake is just an added benefit.

The main point of intermittent fasting is keeping your insulin levels low for the longest time possible, increasing insulin sensitivity, and forcing the body to use stored fat for energy.

Reduced calorie intake is the bit that makes you lose weight. Increased insulin sensitivity is a result of weight loss. "forcing the body to use stored fat for energy" is the mechanism by which weight loss happens.

That is a pretty interesting observation. I always thought it was solely on the amount of calories consumed vs burned. For example, you burn ~2500 through just living, if you eat a pizza that contains 3000 calories, no matter the time at which you eat it, will you not still gain fat?

Calorie counting works, but "use this one weird trick to target belly fat and achieve six pack" sells books.

Its all anecdotal all the way down, so here's another grain of salt to add to the pile.

(Calories in - calories out) is correct enough to be the single most reliable metric, and will serve you right 99% of the time. My "one level deeper" understanding is that there are a few transfer functions applied to calories in. So of the technically available calories you eat, how much does your body absorb. Then, when the calories are biologically available, how does your body spend them?

So the idea would be, if you eat the pizza at the right time you reduce calories in. Either you will digest less calories, or your body will allocated them differently at different times of the day.

Unfortunately these things aren't really measurable so it's very hard to separate from hearsay.

>solely on the amount of calories consumed vs burned.

It is, but CI\CO as advice doesn't take in to account that you aren't a machine and we aren't calculating gas mileage. The system is both adaptive and reactive. CI and CO changes based on the situation, and you have no way to accurately measure.

That's why you don't worry about Calories Out. You measure Calories In daily and then your weight at a sample rate that's long enough that it averages out most weirdness - probably weekly. If your weight is going up, reduce caloric consumption.

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