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Comment by hoopism | Hacker News Reader

Constrain eating to a 12 hour window? It has to be more nuanced than that... no?

I usually skip breakfast (bad, I know) and eat lunch at noon. So does my window stay open till midnight? My expanding waist line is questioning this.

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> I usually skip breakfast (bad, I know)

Can you explain why? Research has disproven this notion.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2014/06/04/ajcn.114....

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2014/06/05/skipping...

I can't... I just believed the hype.

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.”"

I believe eating breakfast is an indicator of a healthy lifestyle. Eating breakfast doesn't make you healthier, lose more weight, or exercise more, but the type of person who eats breakfast is more likely to exercise and eat healthier meals throughout the day.

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

>Two studies in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association backed up this finding. Though they were funded by cereal companies, dietitians say they underscore the message - breakfast is important to weight loss.

I'd be very careful here. While studies funded by private interests are probably not tampered with, the results generally are through reporting bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporting_bias#Reporting_biases.... Basically, these cereal companies can keep funding studies and publishing the ones that serve their economic interests - the scientific world is rife with this kind of crap (seriously, this isn't a conspiracy theory, it's the norm). There are other studies that directly contradict the cereal-company ones btw: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/is-breakfast-overra...

Ok, so there's nothing inherently wrong with eating breakfast. That being said, I'm not sure anyone can say that people who eat breakfast are "they type of person who is more likely to exercise and eat healthier meals" -- WebMD makes no effort to substantiate their claim at all with any references. That, and the fact that, at least here in the good ol' US of A, there is an enormous problem with obesity, diabetes, and a host of other metabolic-related illnesses. I bet if anyone counted, they'd find that an extremely vast majority of those people eat breakfast everyday. Anecdotally speaking, almost all of the people I know who skip breakfast are absolute physical specimens when it comes overall health and physique (That doesn't mean there aren't those who fit that criteria who DO eat breakfast, just a personal observation)

There has been a lot of research around periods of fasting, and Martin Berkhan has done a lot of work parsing out nonesense (poorly designed studies, etc.) on this particular topic. This specific article might be something you should check out regarding the cortisol awakening response, and why people who eat breakfast generally tend to weigh more than their intermittent fasting counterparts: http://www.leangains.com/2012/06/why-does-breakfast-make-me-...

I find I can't eat soon after waking up - I'm simply not hungry at the start of the day and I find I get indigestion if I eat irrespective of that (which happens occasionally due to well meaning people nagging me to have some breakfast).

This means that I usually (on working days at least) miss breakfast. I don't have any particular health problems that might relate to this so I presume that this is healthy enough.

For thousands of years, most Indians(as in from India) ate twice a day. The 1st meal was usually between 10 am to 1 pm. The 2nd meal was before 7 pm(sunset).

I used to be overweight(my eating window was about 14 hours) and then I switched to a strict 2 meals a day diet(8 hr eating window) -- the 1st meal at 10 am and the second before 7 pm. Add a lil bit yoga and walking, I lost about 10 kg in 6 weeks.

Indian Ayurveda books talk about not eating/consuming any food after sunset.

My intern is Indian and he said his parents only eat once a day, but that they are relatively religious. Is that common?

Not common at all.

Older folks (presumably retired) can get away with eating a whole lot less. Piety probably provides the means and structure to keep the 1/day in place.

Its not common but some of the older people tend to follow this.

Theravada Buddhist monks follow the rule of not eating after midday. Some cheat by drinking lots of juice.

If you're looking to work on your eating practice, I suggest eating when you're hungry and only when you're hungry. Don't eat at any particular time of day. Make sure you're truly hungry. Some of us don't even know what that feels like anymore because we eat so often.

As a further challenge, try to stop eating as soon as you no longer feel hungry (and be sure to eat slowly). Some of us don't stop until we've finished our massive portion regardless of how full we feel. You may be surprised to see just how little food you need to consume in order to satiate hunger.

I gathered that you'll only start to feel sated after about 20 minutes after starting to eat, so yeah, eating slowly would definitely help. Of course, limiting portions to what you actually need instead of a seemingly infinite stack of food will also help.

I'm a practicioner of intermittent fasting, and I've found that an 8 hour window is ideal for eating my meals, with a 16 hour fast. I can eat like shit on occasion and it doesn't do a thing to my physique. It's been pretty sustainable; I've been doing it for a good 4 years now. You might give it a try!

I found out about all of this from http://leangains.com. The guy has some really good reads and he always provides the science/citations from medical journals.

What window times do you use? I want to try this but I can't seem to cut out night eating.

I've done IF as well for extended periods of time (I quit mostly because I wanted to gain weight). The most common schedule is to skip breakfast and eat a late "lunch". I.e. if you wakeup at 8am, have your eating window be between 4pm and midnight. If you have a less flexible schedule, there's really not much harm eating just one really big meal after work, together with some more snacking (preferably high-protein) before bed.

In my experience, it's much easier to fast the first half of the day and do social eating in the evening and go to bed full, than doing the opposite.

As another poster mentioned, fast during the morning hours and you should be fine. There is no problem with night eating, I do it all the time. I fast while I'm at work -- keep moving around, keep yourself oriented on tasks, and the next thing you know it's 2 o'clock. Most days I try to get a 16 hour fast in, but it all depends (Lunch meetings with clients can sometimes throw a wrench in things)

Something similar seems to have worked for Paul Krugman:

"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...

i also thought about doing 2 days of calorie restriction based on a bbc show by michael mosley (linked from the article below), who claims it's the optimum for health and weight, but could only sustain it for 2-3 weeks. he also suggests 3 minutes of intense workout is all you need (2nd link), as it's the optimum for the health benefits of exercise.

fasting: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-19112549

exercise: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-17177251

Also do IF, and I'm glad someone repped Martin Berkhan for the work he's done trying to dispel some of the myth associated with extended fasting. For anyone who gives a shit, there are several articles on http://www.leangains.com/ that show that it's not just the fact that it's harder to overeat when you have a limited feeding window -- but that there are hormonal effects elicited from periods of fasting that can be leveraged to enhance not only your physique, but your overall health.

The mice constrained to eating high-fat high-sugar food in a 9 hour window still gained weight, but the importance of this is that they gained less weight than those mice whose constraint was a 12 hour window, despite eating the same amount of calories.

So try eating the same amount of calories as you do now, but in a smaller time window and you might lose weight.

Men generally have better results with 8 or 6 hours windows. It's usually recommended that women have a 10 or 8 hour window, though I don't know the specific reasons.

There are a few diets that recommend an "all you can eat" 4 hour window, but recommend only going that route if you don't have the discipline for a 8 or 6 hour window.

Also note that studies have shown that it takes more than 24 hours of fasting for people who are diabetic or prediabetic to have similar results to those who show no signs of diabetes fasting for only 12-16 hours.

I've skipped breakfast for years. Actually, I only eat when hungry. I felt bad about this until Dr. Dean Adell said he did the same thing. I know the studies say breakfast is important. Dr. Adell admitted, but told people not to follow his eating habits, that he mainly ate at night. He said he did eat a balanced dinner with vegetables and fruit. I think he said he snacked during the day, and drank a lot of coffee. I'm getting a physical today--I hope my blood numbers come back normal? Oh yea, when I was younger I drank too much, smoked, took drugs, but was never a Foodie. (I'm hoping that saved me?)

It's not a magical license to eat as much as you want! It's still very easy to eat a surplus of calories during the day even if you're doing intermittent fasting.

I currently eat during an 8-9 hour window (12pm-9pm) but mostly because it's much easier for me to stay satiated over the whole day when eating like this and keep my total calories down.

Use something like MyFitnessPal to track your calories, set a calorie goal for each day (below your maintenance level) and you will be amazed how easy it is to lose weight (or gain weight if that's your goal).

Also, there's nothing wrong with skipping breakfast.

Skipping or eating light for breakfast has worked miracles for me. While agreed that it is definitely not a license to eat however much you want, there are some convincing arguments that eating in this pattern (particularly delaying carbohydrate intake until the evening hours) creates metabolic inefficiencies that cause more of the consumed energy from the diet to be "wasted", perhaps giving a person a couple hundred calories of leeway in their diet and still see effective weight control. Check out some the work of John Keifer, his opinion on this is fascinating, particularly his rants on his podcast: http://body.io/category/podcast/

That's a 12 hour window for mice. Humans have a slower metabolism than mice, so I suspect that to get a similar effect we'd have to use a longer time period.

Some people claim that a 24 hour fast once a week does wonders for them. It's all just anecdotes at this point though.

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