My experience with IF has taught me that I’m much better at complete denial, rather than moderation. So if I want to reduce my caloric intake it works better for me to say No to everything for 16 hours and only eat for 8, then to try to just eat less and in moderation all day.
It also applies to carb and other reductions. If I allow myself any bread, sweets, etc, I will eat too much. It’s easier for me to eat 0, then it is to only eat a little.
Same here, years of people telling me drastic diets are "unhealthy" etc. kept me from playing to my strengths of just doing the extremes for long periods of time instead of fighting constant urges while balancing them with a moderate calorie intake.
I think most (healthy) people should try fasting for 5 days to see how your body responds. It won't kill you, but many people are terrified of the thought of not eating for 12 hours.
I once fasted for about a week while suffering an illness that wouldn't let me keep any food down. I only drank water during that time. To my surprise, after several days of not eating, my hunger disappeared completely. It was scary, but also eye-opening. The experience taught me that hunger is not the "you require food right now in order to survive" signal that everyone thinks it is.
What a coincidence! Today is my 5th day of fasting. I've only been having water and coconut water[0] (one or two glasses a day).
The first few days which were a little tough. From midway through the third day onwards, I started feeling absolutely fine. There is an overall feeling of lightness. And, of course, the amazing experience when I have that glass of coconut water is truly indescribable!
Yes, that's true for me too. I've been practising 16:8 IF for almost ten years now and this is definitely one of the reasons it works. I eat big meals consisting of traditional foods. I see others people's "diets" that don't work and they are always weird foods that aren't actually nice and weird portion sizes that aren't satisfying.
The other thing I've realised is it doesn't have to be about watching the clock every day. What I actually do is just eat lunch and dinner every day and that's it. It doesn't really matter when those meals are, which means I can adjust easily to accommodate socialising, for example. The diet that works is easy to adhere to. If you have to think about it every day and shape the rest of your life around it, it will not work (unless you're a professional athlete maybe).
I'm doing exactly the same since almost 1year, but still I'm not seeing much benefit from it. Like I still have belly fat, I wonder how do you eat when you break the fast and how do you avoid binging? I'm not gonna lie, after 15-16h I start to feel hungry and as soon as the fast finish I tend to eat something pretty caloric & fatty (ie: cheese or nuts)
Since I'm in sync with everyone else in this, ie, it's easier for me to shut my mouth completely than to eat in moderation, I'm guessing there's some biological drive behind this.
Maybe that happens because we, as animals, have our bodies more adapted to eat as much as we can while food is available than to risk losing that opportunity for another unknown meal in the future. That to say that it is a hardwired behavior we have, a survival strategy that makes sense in the wild.
Problem is we don't live in that environment anymore. So, I think fasting works because our bodies trigger another natural response, that of focusing our senses to the search of food, kind of accepting that food is not available. Thus, it's easier to simply not eat at all instead of trying to eat moderately.
Its why pregnant women are told not to drink alcohol at all. The reality is that the liver is amazing and can remove low levels of it so well that a small amount of drinking is fine. The problem is that it's really hard to a) effectively communicate what the safe level is b) get people to stick to it. It's much easier to avoid it entirely.
Well, it has to be in the blood first to get metabolized by the liver, so the unborn gets some. But as you say, a little wont probably matter. I was shocked how big an effect licoriice has (finnish study), before I read the stud, I thought they found something signific but not relevant. Reading the study changed my perspective and i am wondering why there are no warning labels
I've literally measured a glass of wine for someone who then told me the measure must be wrong rather than admit they had always drunk three glasses rather than one. (Person was not pregnant and is not someone that would be described in any way as having problems with alcohol.)
Yet another data point. Lot easier on will power reserves to fast at a stretch. All it takes is one nibble of something and I find myself returning to the tin for more.
My problem is, I still would have 8 hours in which I must exercise restraint. Packing away 4k calories in a single meal is trivially easy. There is no way to avoid the need for restraint and moderation.
This must depend highly on where your calories come from, because for most people it really isn't that easy. Even bodybuilders will switch to liquid diets to try to pack that much away. If you're consuming lean protein, fibrous vegetables, nuts and pulses, 4000 calories in a sitting is far more difficult. Think of how many apples you can eat in a sitting, and consider that a single apple is 52 calories.
Same here. I can't moderate, but just cutting things off is no problem. I've been doing 16:8 for a year where I haven't eaten a single thing outside the 8 hours, but I haven't really seen any difference.
> How do you start? Agatston told me to start by skipping one meal a day, usually breakfast. (Yes, you can have black coffee in the morning, into which he adds ghee, a type of clarified butter, and coconut oil to reduce hunger pangs. It’s not your typical cup of coffee.)
This may be ok to start with, though black coffee by itself has the ability to kill hunger without these crutches.
Adding ghee or coconut oil in black coffee means it’s no longer effectively zero calories, and this is not technically fasting. Same with adding sugar to it. You can skip breakfast and have black coffee, black or herbal teas and water — all these are effectively zero calories.
One point this article doesn’t address in the 16:8 scheme is the frequency of eating within the eight hour eating window. Is it ok to have three meals and snacks within that window? Should it be two meals with a good gap between them? I’m sure these variations also determine if it works for weight loss or other benefits.
Intermittent fasting with 16:8 makes it easier to consume lower calories. Weight loss typically follows if activity levels are maintained the same or increased (to compensate for a lower basal metabolic rate).
It has a ton of info - Martin Berkhan is really first person who popularized 16:8.
One of advises there is that you can have black coffee with some milk, because milk is really low on calories.
Also, from his site again, 10g of BCAA pre and postworkout does not change expression of fasting markers in blood. 10g of BCAA is ~40 calories. Put differently, it is equal to two teaspoons of sugar.
And, to finalize, he recommends 14:10 regime for women.
> This may be ok to start with, though black coffee by itself has the ability to kill hunger without these crutches.
I always wonderered how much ok it really was. Dreaking coffee will activate some digistive processes, and make the liver work. So you are not exactly fasting.
I never could find a study comparing with, and without coffee.
What I've read in this area all comes back to "whether or not black coffee breaks the fast depends on the goal of your fasting", i.e., weight loss vs something more specific.
[Likewise for other things people don't always think about like vitamin / supplements.]
There is more info in [1][2] but tl;dr:
- Fasting for metabolic health/weight loss: likely does not break a fast
- Fasting for gut rest: does break a fast
- Fasting for longevity: likely does not break a fast
> you can have black coffee in the morning, into which he adds ghee, a type of clarified butter, and coconut oil to reduce hunger pangs. It’s not your typical cup of coffee.
The idea that you need a special kind of coffee to do intermittent fasting is IMHO a very bad idea: it sets an unnecessary barrier to entry, and it misses the main point: it's about what you don't eat, not what you add to your intake.
I found that particular quote confusing since adding ghee and coconut oil (e.g., bulletproof) make it very not black coffee and also a food one cannot eat during IF without breaking the fast / foregoing the longevity benefits of fasting [1]. It was weird that the author included that reference here.
> Adding ghee or coconut oil in black coffee means it’s no longer effectively zero calories, and this is not technically fasting.
I guess it depends on how you choose to define your "technical" terms. For example (https://www.bulletproof.com/diet/bulletproof-diet/bulletproo...): "The technical definition of “fasting” describes not consuming a single calorie. When your body isn’t burdened with the task of digestion all day every day, it has a chance to carry out cleaning and repair processes that make you healthier. This cleanup and repair process is called autophagy. Depending on your diet, intermittent fasting can also put you in a fat-burning state called ketosis.[2] Learn more about the benefits of intermittent fasting.
The good news is that there’s no scientific reason to completely restrict calories to reap the benefits of intermittent fasting. If you only consume fat (no protein or carbs) during your fast, you won’t interrupt autophagy. You’ll also stay in the fat-burning state of ketosis."
(I have no opinion on any of this except that I'm amused by hobby nutritionists.)
What is often not acknowledged or even mentioned is that many people have difficulty with fasting because they are addicted to food - either addicted because of euphoric and opiate numbing effects that wheat specifically can cause, or from the numbing of sugar and carbohydrates - as inflammation has a depressant effect on the nervous system. The addiction to food is also self-medicating. If people don't realize this then they will struggle more than they need to. Reducing food intake if you're dependant on that breakfast with wheat and sugar-carbs to numb your nervous system, to calm your current emotions and perhaps pressure from past unhealed/unprocessed trauma, then as you reduce your food intake you're going to get exposed to withdrawals, as well as start being able to feel what's underlying - and you may not understand it nor know how to process it; this is certainly why intermittent fasting is perhaps healthier, gentler, and more sustainable for people to succeed at - as it won't apply or re-expose them to as much pressure with the quelling-numbing effects of many if not most foods.
Another part to why fasting can be difficult for people is as your inflammation level goes down, so does the depressant-numbing effect, so you will feel whatever digestive pains and irritation some of the foods you're eating may be causing you more clearly; this coincides with most people commenting how their thinking and senses become much sharper as they deepen into the length of a fast. If you're regularly eating foods you don't realize are agitating your GI tract, any that are causing inflammation, then the potential for fasting to be an enjoyable and easy endeavour for upkeep - weight loss or maintenance - will go down.
Edit to add: There may also be mild to severe dis-ease progression, damage/injury to the GI tract from lifelong lack of awareness (being numbed from eating foods that are harmful to you by some of the foods you may/likely have been eating) allowing the damage to progress. You may then be exposed and feeling this pain and then eating again is how you numb feeling it as strongly. Likewise there are bacterial infections that will benefit from fasting, cutting off their food supply greatly - much like why fasting can be beneficial for cancer growth - however, h.pylori bacterial infection for example causes nausea only on an empty stomach - and so that could be why some people are constantly driven to eat, not only to numb themselves but also to reduce nausea without realizing what's actually going on. That's why I also recommend microbiome stool testing. Also, if you underlying physical pain and injuries, reducing the inflammation from food will also increase your perception (and reaction to) to that physical pain - and so until you get that underlying pain treated then you'll be in a more agitated, less numbed state as well.
All of what I said above is ultimately why a practice of non-violence is necessary, non-violence towards others but also non-violence towards yourself: be gentle on yourself. I feel it's also important to state that all of this learning is a practice, an experiment you run through with yourself to understand yourself more and how things like food affect you, how breath affects you, how the mind affects you.
Having done keto for a long time I can only recommend two options besides Tea.
1. Become a weird coffee person and put some nerd energy into it so black coffee doesn't taste disgusting on it's own. James Hoffman on YouTube is a great way into this.
2. Eschew the coffee and take a teaspoon of MCT Oil before your can of zero-calorie Energy Drink (Coke Zero Energy is my favorite atm).
It may be dirty and people are going to tell you Aspartame is evil and is going to make you hungry(it really might, but you are still hours away from your window so black/white discipline is easy to keep alive), but for me it worked much better than dreading the coffee in the morning.
For years I haven't been eating breakfast long before the IF craze. Mostly out of laziness. Buying all the ingredients, making sure they don't expire, preparing the food etc. is quite some time, so I gradually dropped the habit with no adverse effect. I live alone, but oh boy when people learned that I don't eat breakfast they'd get so defensive and try to tell me how unhealthy it was and how I must be underperforming because of that etc... I even got back to eating breakfast and intellectually felt good that now I'm more of a healthy normal person who does the socially acceptable normal things.
After all the IF articles I immediately went back to no breakfast with no guilt.
It's crazy how much of this stuff is in our head. The body is really really adaptive! If you get used to eating breakfast and suddenly skip it, you will feel like shit. But that doesn't mean your friend who never eats breakfast also goes through that every day. Or, if you always wake up at 9 AM, you may be shocked at those morning people who wake up at 4:30 AM. But probably if you followed their exact routine incl the evening routine, you'd find after a few weeks that it's not too bad. Surely there is a genetic component to it as well, but we underestimate the power of adaption and habits.
And most importantly, don't be so defensive when someone tells you about a strange habit of theirs while they are visibly healthy and well adjusted. Eating disorders and sudden drastic changes are of course cause for concern, but many people have a crabs in the bucket mentality and feel personally attacked when someone does something for their own health.
Ha, I've experienced the same thing. I'm a healthy weight and don't have any obvious health issues, but people keep telling me how bad it is that I don't eat breakfast. I've even had people tell me "yeah, you might look fine on the outside, but you're unhealthy on the inside", or imply that I'll run into health complications further down the track if I don't change my habits now.
I think food to most people is a little bit like religion: everyone wants to believe that their knowledge of nutrition is correct, and that anyone doing anything differently must be wrong.
Delicious breakfast gives me great mood boost for the rest of the day, so I prefer to skip dinner, or at least have it early enough to have at least 7 hours before sleep.
> get so defensive and try to tell me how unhealthy it was and how I must be underperforming because of that etc.
I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that the candy industry, ahem, the breakfast cereals industry's ads and sponsored "research" is behind that.
Opening Wikipedia on Kellog's (first guess of where I might find sources on this):
> The FTC had previously found fault with Kellogg's claims that Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal improved kids' attentiveness by nearly 20%.
> In 2016 an ad telling UK consumers that Special K is “full of goodness” and “nutritious” was banned.
And from one of the sources on ftc.gov:
> At about the same time that Kellogg agreed to stop making these kinds of false claims in its cereal ads, the company began a new advertising campaign promoting the purported health benefits of Rice Krispies, according to the FTC. On product packaging, Kellogg claimed that Rice Krispies cereal “now helps support your child’s immunity,” with “25 percent Daily Value of Antioxidants and Nutrients – Vitamins A, B, C, and E.” The back of the cereal box stated that “Kellogg’s Rice Krispies has been improved to include antioxidants and nutrients that your family needs to help them stay healthy.”
> The expanded order against Kellogg prohibits the company from making claims about any health benefit of any food unless the claims are backed by scientific evidence and not misleading.
I, too, heard from my parents that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day!" and that I shouldn't skip it, and you can rationalize it with "sure, it's the first thing, a good start is half the work" or something. But that's not the same as reading the original research or at least doing a cursory search online -- something that my parents aren't used to questioning; and if they look it up, confirmation bias might play a big role.
So I don't think you can fully blame the people that got defensive about this, though I am sorry you had this experience.
To end on a more positive note, the European Union requires food to only make preapproved health claims. It feelt a bit like censorship or at least overreach when I first heard of this and I read that the number of claims made reduced very significantly (also correct claims, since it's now expensive to prove it truthful) if I remember correctly, but I guess this does stop a lot of this misinformation, at least within the EU. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_claim#European_Laws)
He lost 45 lbs, that’s what probably removed his sleeps apnea. Not because of some other magical ability of intermittent fasting. One of my friends also lost a lot of weight and his apnea went away, he went off of his CPAP machine.
You're probably correct, in that losing a lot of weight greatly improved his health. That said, losing weight is freaking difficult, and if intermittent fasting is a path towards that, it'd be very useful.
I've done a lot of fasting. The results seem pretty good. Pulling it off is non-trivial.
At this point, we need "magical", because nothing else has really seemed to work in general for losing weight.
(And no, didn't read the article, because paywall.)
That's far from sure at this point. Yes, HN is a hotbed of intermittent fasting propaganda [1], which may make it seem like there is general agreement. But you'll find other communities pushing other diets as the one true diet, so... more research is needed.
[1] Note, for example, that the submitter subtly but crucially changed the title, which in the original says "works for many" (emphasis mine).
Weight loss is in theory very simple - just eat less. In practice, however, doing that is extremely hard (for a lot of people), as it goes against our upbringing and evolutionary and social pressures.
The key of any weight-loss diet is that it somehow hacks our brain so that we end up eating less. But everyone’s brain is different, so different hacks work (or not) for different people. That’s why you have so many diets - fasting, intermittent fasting, keto, paleo, zero carb, low fat, food separation diet, ...
Personally, intermittent fasting hasn’t helped me lose weight (might have helped me maintain it though). So far, the only thing that has helped was very strict calorie counting, but that was accompanied with severe emotional/mental discomfort (constant hunger). I’m now experimenting with one-day fasting (turns out not eating, for me, is associated with less hunger than eating too little, go figure ...), we’ll see how t goes.
I agree that IF is for me the easiest way to lose weight, people should really give it a try. But in regards to the need of something magical because it’s difficult, as someone who has lost a lot of weight and stopped smoking, the latter was orders of magnitude harder. Wanting to smoke a cig was like being tempted by a cookie AFTER a fast. Also controlling my weight is child’s play compared to building muscle with a good muscle/fat ratio.
If calorie counting and exercise aren’t working, it’s time to go to the doctor. You may have a hormonal imbalance or something. It affects more people then realize it.
For anyone interested in weight loss and heart health, please remember that both are impaired by not getting enough sleep. Studies have shown that you're way more likely to over eat if you get less than 7 hours of sleep a night.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how humans evolved and how differently we do some things. Is there consensus on the eating patterns of prehistoric humans?
My understanding of how humans evolved to eat is pretty limited, but I would guess unintentional intermittent fasting would have been commonplace in humans over the past few hundred thousand years.
There seems to be consensus that eating a large variety of foods is great for you, but is shifting your eating pattern, or even grazing, better than eating at the same time, the same amount, every day?
Does your ancestral background impact how frequently you eat? Similar to how some cultures are lactose intolerant due to historically not having access to cows, could similar issues present based on how frequently we eat?
I’d love to find resources that have dug into those topics if anyone has recommendations.
In general animals exposed to nature live shorter, not longer lives. It might be worth investigating, but I've not seen anything to suggest we might become healthier by restricting our diets to food available to effectively poor people. Besides the obvious not eating food that we already know is unhealthy and eating significantly more calories than we need.
I wish I had data from before but after I attempted intermittent fasting I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. It's possible I had it before, I alas haven't had blood work done for a few years prior. I changed my diet, never attempted fasting again and the 6.8 HbA1c dropped to and stayed steady at 5.3 almost immediately.
I've been worried about this as well. A lenghty Harvard blog post from 2018 indicates that a 8-hour 7am-3pm feeding period gave better health-related results than an 12-hour 7am-7pm feeding period. In other words, 'timing is key':
Interestingly, the researcher doesn't discuss skipping breakfast. I've been skipping for several years with a somewhat uneasy feeling and a growing phobia for diabetes. I'll probably try the 3pm/7pm to 7am fast instead; maybe my body doesn't tolerate skipping breakfast as well as I would like it to.
That link doesn't seem to have much evidence, just some speculation that it might increase risk.
There was a small study here where:
>recruited three men, ages 40 to 67, with type 2 diabetes ...
>Eighteen days into the study, all three men lost 10 to 18 percent of their body weight, trimmed their waist circumferences, no longer had to take insulin, and reduced their oral medication. (Two of the three men completely got off their medication during this time frame.) https://www.everydayhealth.com/type-2-diabetes/diet/intermit...
Interesting... that sort of makes sense to me maybe because by going for longer periods of time without resupply (and carbs / sugar), seems like you'd be putting more strain on your systems to keep yourself in equilibrium (blood sugar and otherwise) longer, wearing out that capacity more quickly.
There is also antifragile[1] theory of fasting - body metabolism needs randomness to prosper. So the idea is to not only do intermittent fasting, but also do it randomly, randomly change your food habits, etc. Of course, even with randomized food rations you need to keep them healthy.
Readit News
It also applies to carb and other reductions. If I allow myself any bread, sweets, etc, I will eat too much. It’s easier for me to eat 0, then it is to only eat a little.
I think most (healthy) people should try fasting for 5 days to see how your body responds. It won't kill you, but many people are terrified of the thought of not eating for 12 hours.
The first few days which were a little tough. From midway through the third day onwards, I started feeling absolutely fine. There is an overall feeling of lightness. And, of course, the amazing experience when I have that glass of coconut water is truly indescribable!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_water
I don't really understand it though... Between 'too heavy' and 'too light' exists 'just right', and it's pretty hard to miss...
The other thing I've realised is it doesn't have to be about watching the clock every day. What I actually do is just eat lunch and dinner every day and that's it. It doesn't really matter when those meals are, which means I can adjust easily to accommodate socialising, for example. The diet that works is easy to adhere to. If you have to think about it every day and shape the rest of your life around it, it will not work (unless you're a professional athlete maybe).
Maybe that happens because we, as animals, have our bodies more adapted to eat as much as we can while food is available than to risk losing that opportunity for another unknown meal in the future. That to say that it is a hardwired behavior we have, a survival strategy that makes sense in the wild.
Problem is we don't live in that environment anymore. So, I think fasting works because our bodies trigger another natural response, that of focusing our senses to the search of food, kind of accepting that food is not available. Thus, it's easier to simply not eat at all instead of trying to eat moderately.
These are my 5 cents.
If it's a Monday or Wednesday, no I can't eat it. Else, I can.
This works so much better for me than counting calories every day, the "cheating" is eliminated.
Its why pregnant women are told not to drink alcohol at all. The reality is that the liver is amazing and can remove low levels of it so well that a small amount of drinking is fine. The problem is that it's really hard to a) effectively communicate what the safe level is b) get people to stick to it. It's much easier to avoid it entirely.
Deleted Comment
Does it take must restraint to just eat like 2K calories in a 8-hour span?
Never had much problem with that during IF, and I used to have a BMI of over 35, so I was quite the eater...
This may be ok to start with, though black coffee by itself has the ability to kill hunger without these crutches.
Adding ghee or coconut oil in black coffee means it’s no longer effectively zero calories, and this is not technically fasting. Same with adding sugar to it. You can skip breakfast and have black coffee, black or herbal teas and water — all these are effectively zero calories.
One point this article doesn’t address in the 16:8 scheme is the frequency of eating within the eight hour eating window. Is it ok to have three meals and snacks within that window? Should it be two meals with a good gap between them? I’m sure these variations also determine if it works for weight loss or other benefits.
Intermittent fasting with 16:8 makes it easier to consume lower calories. Weight loss typically follows if activity levels are maintained the same or increased (to compensate for a lower basal metabolic rate).
It has a ton of info - Martin Berkhan is really first person who popularized 16:8.
One of advises there is that you can have black coffee with some milk, because milk is really low on calories.
Also, from his site again, 10g of BCAA pre and postworkout does not change expression of fasting markers in blood. 10g of BCAA is ~40 calories. Put differently, it is equal to two teaspoons of sugar.
And, to finalize, he recommends 14:10 regime for women.
Excuse me? One cup of milk has about the same as, or a lot more, calories than a cup of Coca-Cola. 149 for whole milk (91 for skim). 98 for the coke.
I always wonderered how much ok it really was. Dreaking coffee will activate some digistive processes, and make the liver work. So you are not exactly fasting.
I never could find a study comparing with, and without coffee.
There's a difference between working a bit and a lot.
Go up in the night, go some steps to the toilet. -- Or go out running 10k. Then back to sleep. Repeat reach night.
Coffee or a big meal.
[Likewise for other things people don't always think about like vitamin / supplements.]
There is more info in [1][2] but tl;dr:
- Fasting for metabolic health/weight loss: likely does not break a fast
- Fasting for gut rest: does break a fast
- Fasting for longevity: likely does not break a fast
[1]: https://www.zerofasting.com/does-coffee-break-your-fast/
[2]: https://www.dietdoctor.com/can-use-cream-coffee-fasting
The idea that you need a special kind of coffee to do intermittent fasting is IMHO a very bad idea: it sets an unnecessary barrier to entry, and it misses the main point: it's about what you don't eat, not what you add to your intake.
[1]: https://www.zerofasting.com/does-coffee-break-your-fast/
I guess it depends on how you choose to define your "technical" terms. For example (https://www.bulletproof.com/diet/bulletproof-diet/bulletproo...): "The technical definition of “fasting” describes not consuming a single calorie. When your body isn’t burdened with the task of digestion all day every day, it has a chance to carry out cleaning and repair processes that make you healthier. This cleanup and repair process is called autophagy. Depending on your diet, intermittent fasting can also put you in a fat-burning state called ketosis.[2] Learn more about the benefits of intermittent fasting.
The good news is that there’s no scientific reason to completely restrict calories to reap the benefits of intermittent fasting. If you only consume fat (no protein or carbs) during your fast, you won’t interrupt autophagy. You’ll also stay in the fat-burning state of ketosis."
(I have no opinion on any of this except that I'm amused by hobby nutritionists.)
Sounds like Goop-grade quack science to me. :-)
While true, it's also a lot like calling the Internet a "photon transport mechanism".
If you experiment with such things, make sure you get the whole picture and is otherwise healthy. Ask anyone with diabetes why.
Another part to why fasting can be difficult for people is as your inflammation level goes down, so does the depressant-numbing effect, so you will feel whatever digestive pains and irritation some of the foods you're eating may be causing you more clearly; this coincides with most people commenting how their thinking and senses become much sharper as they deepen into the length of a fast. If you're regularly eating foods you don't realize are agitating your GI tract, any that are causing inflammation, then the potential for fasting to be an enjoyable and easy endeavour for upkeep - weight loss or maintenance - will go down.
Edit to add: There may also be mild to severe dis-ease progression, damage/injury to the GI tract from lifelong lack of awareness (being numbed from eating foods that are harmful to you by some of the foods you may/likely have been eating) allowing the damage to progress. You may then be exposed and feeling this pain and then eating again is how you numb feeling it as strongly. Likewise there are bacterial infections that will benefit from fasting, cutting off their food supply greatly - much like why fasting can be beneficial for cancer growth - however, h.pylori bacterial infection for example causes nausea only on an empty stomach - and so that could be why some people are constantly driven to eat, not only to numb themselves but also to reduce nausea without realizing what's actually going on. That's why I also recommend microbiome stool testing. Also, if you underlying physical pain and injuries, reducing the inflammation from food will also increase your perception (and reaction to) to that physical pain - and so until you get that underlying pain treated then you'll be in a more agitated, less numbed state as well.
All of what I said above is ultimately why a practice of non-violence is necessary, non-violence towards others but also non-violence towards yourself: be gentle on yourself. I feel it's also important to state that all of this learning is a practice, an experiment you run through with yourself to understand yourself more and how things like food affect you, how breath affects you, how the mind affects you.
1. Become a weird coffee person and put some nerd energy into it so black coffee doesn't taste disgusting on it's own. James Hoffman on YouTube is a great way into this.
2. Eschew the coffee and take a teaspoon of MCT Oil before your can of zero-calorie Energy Drink (Coke Zero Energy is my favorite atm). It may be dirty and people are going to tell you Aspartame is evil and is going to make you hungry(it really might, but you are still hours away from your window so black/white discipline is easy to keep alive), but for me it worked much better than dreading the coffee in the morning.
After all the IF articles I immediately went back to no breakfast with no guilt.
It's crazy how much of this stuff is in our head. The body is really really adaptive! If you get used to eating breakfast and suddenly skip it, you will feel like shit. But that doesn't mean your friend who never eats breakfast also goes through that every day. Or, if you always wake up at 9 AM, you may be shocked at those morning people who wake up at 4:30 AM. But probably if you followed their exact routine incl the evening routine, you'd find after a few weeks that it's not too bad. Surely there is a genetic component to it as well, but we underestimate the power of adaption and habits.
And most importantly, don't be so defensive when someone tells you about a strange habit of theirs while they are visibly healthy and well adjusted. Eating disorders and sudden drastic changes are of course cause for concern, but many people have a crabs in the bucket mentality and feel personally attacked when someone does something for their own health.
I think food to most people is a little bit like religion: everyone wants to believe that their knowledge of nutrition is correct, and that anyone doing anything differently must be wrong.
I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that the candy industry, ahem, the breakfast cereals industry's ads and sponsored "research" is behind that.
Opening Wikipedia on Kellog's (first guess of where I might find sources on this):
> The FTC had previously found fault with Kellogg's claims that Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal improved kids' attentiveness by nearly 20%.
> In 2016 an ad telling UK consumers that Special K is “full of goodness” and “nutritious” was banned.
And from one of the sources on ftc.gov:
> At about the same time that Kellogg agreed to stop making these kinds of false claims in its cereal ads, the company began a new advertising campaign promoting the purported health benefits of Rice Krispies, according to the FTC. On product packaging, Kellogg claimed that Rice Krispies cereal “now helps support your child’s immunity,” with “25 percent Daily Value of Antioxidants and Nutrients – Vitamins A, B, C, and E.” The back of the cereal box stated that “Kellogg’s Rice Krispies has been improved to include antioxidants and nutrients that your family needs to help them stay healthy.”
> The expanded order against Kellogg prohibits the company from making claims about any health benefit of any food unless the claims are backed by scientific evidence and not misleading.
I, too, heard from my parents that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day!" and that I shouldn't skip it, and you can rationalize it with "sure, it's the first thing, a good start is half the work" or something. But that's not the same as reading the original research or at least doing a cursory search online -- something that my parents aren't used to questioning; and if they look it up, confirmation bias might play a big role.
So I don't think you can fully blame the people that got defensive about this, though I am sorry you had this experience.
To end on a more positive note, the European Union requires food to only make preapproved health claims. It feelt a bit like censorship or at least overreach when I first heard of this and I read that the number of claims made reduced very significantly (also correct claims, since it's now expensive to prove it truthful) if I remember correctly, but I guess this does stop a lot of this misinformation, at least within the EU. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_claim#European_Laws)
Me too, and I've been slightly wondering how they got that idea -- when nowadays I don't eat breakfast and still feel fine
> breakfast cereals industry's ads and sponsored "research"
How interesting, makes sense, maybe the answer
> It's crazy how much of this stuff is in our head.
Likewise the idea that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" being ingrained in American culture despite lacking a scientific basis [1].
[1]: https://thefastingmethod.com/tyranny-breakfast-lose-weight-v...
I've done a lot of fasting. The results seem pretty good. Pulling it off is non-trivial.
At this point, we need "magical", because nothing else has really seemed to work in general for losing weight.
(And no, didn't read the article, because paywall.)
That's far from sure at this point. Yes, HN is a hotbed of intermittent fasting propaganda [1], which may make it seem like there is general agreement. But you'll find other communities pushing other diets as the one true diet, so... more research is needed.
[1] Note, for example, that the submitter subtly but crucially changed the title, which in the original says "works for many" (emphasis mine).
The key of any weight-loss diet is that it somehow hacks our brain so that we end up eating less. But everyone’s brain is different, so different hacks work (or not) for different people. That’s why you have so many diets - fasting, intermittent fasting, keto, paleo, zero carb, low fat, food separation diet, ...
Personally, intermittent fasting hasn’t helped me lose weight (might have helped me maintain it though). So far, the only thing that has helped was very strict calorie counting, but that was accompanied with severe emotional/mental discomfort (constant hunger). I’m now experimenting with one-day fasting (turns out not eating, for me, is associated with less hunger than eating too little, go figure ...), we’ll see how t goes.
The magical part is sticking to it though.
If you’re so inclined, Google the exact article URL, then click the first result that matches.
How so ?
Source: "Why we sleep" by Matthew Walker.
Update: he has. His reply can be found here: https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/
My understanding of how humans evolved to eat is pretty limited, but I would guess unintentional intermittent fasting would have been commonplace in humans over the past few hundred thousand years.
There seems to be consensus that eating a large variety of foods is great for you, but is shifting your eating pattern, or even grazing, better than eating at the same time, the same amount, every day?
Does your ancestral background impact how frequently you eat? Similar to how some cultures are lactose intolerant due to historically not having access to cows, could similar issues present based on how frequently we eat?
I’d love to find resources that have dug into those topics if anyone has recommendations.
I wish I had data from before but after I attempted intermittent fasting I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. It's possible I had it before, I alas haven't had blood work done for a few years prior. I changed my diet, never attempted fasting again and the 6.8 HbA1c dropped to and stayed steady at 5.3 almost immediately.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-sur...
Interestingly, the researcher doesn't discuss skipping breakfast. I've been skipping for several years with a somewhat uneasy feeling and a growing phobia for diabetes. I'll probably try the 3pm/7pm to 7am fast instead; maybe my body doesn't tolerate skipping breakfast as well as I would like it to.
There was a small study here where:
>recruited three men, ages 40 to 67, with type 2 diabetes ...
>Eighteen days into the study, all three men lost 10 to 18 percent of their body weight, trimmed their waist circumferences, no longer had to take insulin, and reduced their oral medication. (Two of the three men completely got off their medication during this time frame.) https://www.everydayhealth.com/type-2-diabetes/diet/intermit...
So hopefully it's ok though n=3 is not many.
Regardless, good on you for getting better.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13530973-antifragile