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Comment by bargainbin | Hacker News Reader

The takeaway here is that if you do “alternate day fasting”, that is you eat normally on one day then do not eat all the next, you will lose weight.

I can’t believe that losing 3.5 days of caloric intake would result in weight loss. In other news, water is wet.

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Alternate day fasting normally means you eat up to 500 calories on your fasting day, but then eat more than usual on normal days. So on average if you eat 500 one day and 2500 another, that is no different than eating a restricted diet of 1500 every day. The finding here is that the former results in slightly more weight loss than the latter. That restrictions in calorie intake will result in weight loss is a given.

> eating a restricted diet of 1500

Keeping this up is hard, many fail. Alternating normal eating with IF days is easier to do.

No, the takeaway is that it results in more weight loss than intermittent fasting and whole-day fasting.

Or if you just ate 50% less calories 7 days a week perhaps.

My understanding is that, yes, the weight loss results end up being similar — but that the story is not so simple (or linear) because "true" fasting activates certain metabolic pathways (e.g., mTOR) that mere calorie reduction does not, and that those pathways have different effects, such as autophagy and others that increase lifespan in different ways.

As other commenters and TFA have pointed out, that “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting

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