A 12-Hour Window for a Healthy Weight

I feel that I'm out of "the momentum phase", because I've never maintained a diet for over a year, until now. However, I realize that I may be deluding myself on that point.

I think that the key to my success is eliminating all but portion control. I don't count calories, or anything else that would make more work for me. All of those things are the things that would make my diet cease to work over time. Now I eat whatever I want, but keep processed foods to an absolute minimum.

Growing up, my nickname used to be "Trashcan", because I would finish everything on my plate, and then eat whatever my dining partners didn't from their plate. I still do, but I take it as leftovers, and eat it for breakfast or lunch the next day. I used to relish being stuffed to the point where I couldn't move. I still very occasionally overeat, but now it's more of a sick feeling that I despise.

Your "eat only before midnight diet" (which I've never heard of) is related to what I expected to read when I saw the title of the article. I thought this article was going to be about which twelve hours were the best for eating and staying slim.

I strongly suspect that if they followed up this "constrain all your meals to 12 of the 24 hour day and fast the other 12", with tests that compared results of different 12-hour segments, they would end up finding that eating during segments containing lots of daylight, such as 7am-7pm, would be superior to 12-hour segments with a lot of darkness, such as 4pm-4am.

I hope they do this followup, and if my folk-wisdom-derived speculation is correct, then "eat your last meal before X:00pm" wouldn't be a diet, per se, but a sensible constraint to include in any reasonable diet.

I rode an exercise bike after dinner while watching netflix until I ran a 1000 calorie deficit and the weight fell off. I also follow his strength training guide for the laziest possible workout that still yields impressive gains. http://matt.might.net/articles/hacking-strength/

For motivation I have an instagram account that ghost follows personal trainers and competition athletes to see what they eat, as now I lift a lot. @erindimondfitness is a good one, since that's one of the few trainers I found that doesn't shill 'detox' and other pseudoscience.

I know at the end of the day ultimately we are responsible for our own actions, but there is nothing in this country to make it any easier on ourselves.

That being said, I haven't tried calorie counting in years, but the problem was that I was just too lazy to look up each item, guess the weight, and calculate the calories. I think I had a Palm Treo at the time, and was using something on that to track things, but I would always forget to enter the calories.

Basically, after years of figuring myself out, I think I "know thyself" enough to know that that won't work. I do have a knack for remembering non-time-related things, so I've leveraged that to just remember portions. I can look at a plate, and know exactly how much to eat so that I will feel full 15 minutes later after I stop eating. I don't worry about the calories, just the ingredients, so limited processed food.

If you employ a caloric restriction diet, you must do something to keep your metabolism from down-regulating, by whatever means that works for you. Otherwise, you will get stuck at a weight-loss plateau that is probably well above your goal weight, and further restricting calories from there might just worsen your situation.

You can't push on a string. Don't consume fewer calories than you burn; burn more calories than you consume. It's a fine hair to split, but be aware that they are not two independently controllable variables.

"I have some recent experience along those lines. Yes, I’ve lost a fair bit of weight over the past two years (no special forcing event, just the approach of the big six-oh), and learned a few things about myself along the way. ... But what has worked for me is severe caloric restriction two days a week. In case you’re wondering, it’s actually very unpleasant. But periodic suffering seems to suit my personality."

Of course, he goes on to say he has a fitbit, does daily cardio, and tracks his weight, so I'm not sure how he's teasing out the confounding variables.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/this-dieter-is-d...

EDIT:

The links you provided debunk the notion of weight loss being impacted... but health seems to still have some potential links.

"The last point that Dhurandhar brings up is an important caveat: There are very good studies that suggest that skipping breakfast does influence our health in other meaningful ways. For instance, it’s well known to affect metabolism, since it forces the body to stay in a fasting state for a longer period of time. Last year, a study found that skipping breakfast was linked to coronary heart disease, presumably because the extra time fasting leads to a rise in a group of factors that together increase heart risk. “Prolonged fasting,” says study author Leah Cahill, “leads to increases in diastolic and systolic blood pressure, blood concentrations of insulin, triglycerides, free fatty acids and LDL-cholesterol, and to decreases in blood concentrations of HDL-cholesterol.”"

This link mentions a few studies that "show the healthiness of breakfast". Instead of forcing people to eat breakfast or not eat breakfast, it studies about 4,000 people and their daily habits. Some anecdotal takeaways is that people who eat breakfast are more likely to exercise, and women who eat breakfast typically eat less calories in a day. http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/lose-weight-eat-breakfast

Thanks

Yup. Directly from the article.

I'm not convinced that the system wouldn't adapt over a longer time period to allow for higher throughput removing the effect

We know that humans are not capable of converting 100% of food's available energy. What if your body is less capable of breaking down certain types of food right after you wake up? what if consuming a large portion of your daily diet in once overwhelms your body's ability to digest it. Science may have solved those specific questions, but pretending that the complex bag of chemical reactions in the human digestive tract is entirely governed by two simple summation variable seems naive. Please forgive any formatting errors. I'm typing this on a tiny little phone

But was caloric output the same? Maybe the shorter time window made the mice more active?

Appetite is at best correlated with weight, not a causal relationship.

> "[...] calories in vs calories burn [...] is not actionable"

I don't see this. The pretty clear action item is to eat less, which while not easy, seems obvious. Can you explain this more?

Maybe those people who are naturally skinny are doing 2800 a day and the fat people are 2200. 300 extra a day will add up to some serious weight gain in the long term.

Not to mention, maybe 21yr old you was at 2500cal but 35yr old you is only 2300.

So many people blindly carry on as if they're either average or young, wondering why they're still gaining weight. Then they'll start saying silly things like the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to dieting...