> The mean (SD) reduction in energy intake was -313 (509) kcal/d for TRE, -197 (426) kcal/d for CR, and -16 (439) kcal/d for controls
So — the time restricted eating group reduced calories more than the group that counted calories; but the resulting weight loss has the same cause: reduced calorie intake compared to before.
If there’s a take away here, it’s possibly that adherence to a calorie deficit using a time restricted eating plan is easier than adherence to the same calorie deficit by explicitly tracking calories.
If you can adhere to a calorie deficit through other means, you won’t lose weight faster by adding intermittent fasting while maintaining the same calorie intake.
I've done both. I can attest that intermittent fasting, at least for me, is WAY more sustainable ... and actually makes maintaining a calorie deficit easier too.
Hunger is a weird thing. People tend to assume that if you don't eat you'll just get hungrier and hungrier. The reality is that hunger comes in waves. If you can ride out a wave of hunger for 30 - 45 minutes it goes away. And the longer you don't eat, the less hungrier you get. I think this is because those waves of hunger tend to correspond to your eating habits. So if you're accustomed to eating lunch, you feel hungry around lunch time etc.
After a period of adaptation, when this just becomes the new normal, you can find that when it comes time to eat you just don't want to eat all that much either. It's weird, but cool, and seems to work well for a lot of people.
Then there is metabolic adaptation, which is thought to be the biggest contributor to people re-gaining any weight that they've lost. What happens is that after dropping around 10% of your body mass, your body kicks in a survival mechanism whereby it lowers your resting metabolic rate to adapt and try to slow the weight loss. This means that two people who weigh the exact same, one of which just dropped a bunch of weight to get there, will require different caloric intakes just to maintain their weight. The person who just cut weight will need 300 - 400 fewer calories per day than the person who didn't.
If you cut weight just by caloric restriction alone, this is DISASTROUS, because you are hungry and weak and miserable ... and you need to eat even less just to keep the weight off.
Which is why crash diets don't work. You start by making sacrifices, which is uncomfortable, and then when metabolic adaptation kicks in you stop seeing results unless you make even more sacrifices. People can't stick with it so they stop dieting and very quickly and easily regain the weight.
Intermittent fasting not only helps with hunger control, but there is research that suggests that it can also increase resting metabolic rate, which can help to counteract metabolic adaptation.
But even if it didn't boost RMR, the fact that it helps with hunger control and maintaining a calorie deficit alone would make it more sustainable for more people than just trying to eat less in general.
Years ago I did some experimenting on myself, including increasing to gain weight, and at least for me hunger seems to mostly be a function of relative emptiness from recent maximum fullness.
Sounds odd, but let's say I filled my stomach to 90% of my total capacity, then a few hours later I've digested down to 45% capacity and that's when I get hungry. That's -50% of the last maximum. If I spend a week or two restricting what I ate to a maximum of 60% capacity, I'd only get hungry around 30%, also -50%. But with less total calories eaten.
(numbers made up just to give an idea what it felt like)
> If you can ride out a wave of hunger for 30 - 45 minutes it goes away.
I read "the glucose revolution" and it talked about reducing blood sugar spikes. If you have a big blood sugar spike, later you will have a blood sugar crash with a lack of energy, reduced concentration and... cravings.
I suspect that if you minimize your blood sugar spikes, you will reduce the crash later and waves of hunger aren't as much of an issue.
> If you can ride out a wave of hunger for 30 - 45 minutes it goes away.
I don't know how scientific this is but this comes from a person I consider smart & knowledgeable:
My medical doctor friend explained this as hunger being triggered by a nerve signal from your stomach that food in your stomach _is about to run out_. That is, once it runs out, the nerve signal goes away.
> After a period of adaptation, when this just becomes the new normal
Yep, and eventually even hunger you do feel is easy to ignore. I practice TRT and was meeting a friend at 3pm for a late lunch. I just skipped food all day, ate a nice meal at 3pm and then a very light dinner. Wasn't ever hungry after working out and working up until that point.
Bingo. This is pretty much exactly what I found to be true after many years of failing to lose weight - then adding IF/TRF to the party - it made it a lot easier.
It's also psychologically easier to manage. People have an easier time building a schedule where they do or don't eat and holding it (say, by skipping breakfast) than they do managing counting calories around things like "I went out to dinner and probably ate too much".
Binary choices (should I eat right now?) take much less cognitive overhead than spectral choices (What should I eat? How much of it? If I eat X and Y now will I have the capacity to eat Z later?)
The incredible thing is you don't really need to count calories, you just have to avoid complete garbage.
As Michael Pollan says "Eat food, mostly greens, not too much".
Don't eat anything processed, don't eat anything with more than one ingredient and only eat meat with at most one meal, and ideally quite a small portion.
Completely and utterly ignore things like icecream, chocolate, soda, candy, chips, anything deep friend and other "non food items". Treat them like Arsenic - i.e. you should never eat them.
There, you are now restricting calorie intake and you didn't have to count anything.
I see this kind of 'well actually' style response a lot when calorie counting vs intermittent fasting gets brought up. Yes they're both forms of calorie restriction in general but the mechanism and the ease of adherence is pretty difference so important to study especially given the results that IF seems to be significantly more effective because it's easier to execute.
After causally seeing popular weight loss advice in US media over the years offering all variety of silver bullets (One Weird Trick etc), I was flabbergasted and betrayed to learn how simple the math of weight loss is once I finally looked into it 4 months ago.
Very roughly, there’s 3500kcal in 1lb of body. Given that fact plus your current weight and calorie intake, you can build a spreadsheet in 30 mins to compute the calories per day to make your body any weight you want in a reasonable time frame (losing >1% a week is generally viewed as unhealthy and risky).
Of course adhering to the plan is the challenging part - and then it’s helpful to consider strategies like TRE, once you understand the metric target part.
I wrote the comment as a reaction to the editorialized headline suggesting to some degree that TRE is a silver bullet / One Weird Trick. Maybe it is effectively that for many people - but in case there’s a casual reader scrolling past I want to give them a bit more of the ground truth that’s somehow not popular knowledge.
That doesn't strike me as "well actually". The title says "more effective than calorie restriction". If it's a form of calorie restriction, then the title doesn't make sense: "Form A of calorie restriction is more effective than calorie restriction".
I think a clearer title would be something to the effect of "Intermittent fasting more effective than calorie counting for calorie restriction"
Also worth pointing out that the study was specific to T2 diabetes.
Nothing really works that well for most people ,and there is a lot of ambiguity. I am thankfull we have GLP-1 drugs , which unlike having to compare CR vs IF, seems to work for most people .
I’ve been IF for a while now, and it’s the easiest approach to “putting down the fork.” Rather than continuing on a standard eating schedule, simply skipping a meal or going longer between eating actually creates a new habit rather than trying to modify a bad one.
I’m actually capable of going an entire day without eating now and I’m not craving anything. A lot of days I’ll only have one meal, sometimes two.
It’s done wonders for my health. I’ve lost a little under a point per week (wouldn’t recommend more than this), my blood pressure is down, I no longer get heartburn after eating anything, and I feel lighter and healthier.
There are also tons of studies indicating that going longer between meals is healthier, and had anti aging effects on a cellular level. Seems to be an all around winner to me.
if you have a 'daily budget' of 1500 calories, personally I would much rather skip breakfast and have a burger and fries for dinner than 3 'slim meals' throughout the day (i'd probably stick to that more readily too)
Adherence is all about psychology! Although what works for one person might not work for another as well; if time restricted eating or calorie counting doesn’t work for you, try a different strategy.
My target right now is 1600 kcal & 150g protein, and my usual meal plan is a 300kcal protein frappe coffee thing in the morning, a lunch around 450kcal like gumbo, a 550kcal dinner like apricot glazed salmon w/ couscous, and then ~300kcal of Ben & Jerrie’s ice cream for dessert. For me adherence is super easy because those are all foods I love to eat, I’m full all day so I never want to snack, and I’m actually eating more dessert than before this diet because I don’t feel guilty about it anymore (yay decadence).
My girlfriend tried the same plan, but something about just knowing about the budget makes her feel totally trapped and she ends up binge eating snacks almost out of “revenge” after a few days. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I skipped breakfast for years because I was too lazy to make it. Then I ate fast food and pizza all the time and I still got fat. You're not gonna lose weight just skipping a meal.
While dietary adherence might be easier with that eating schedule, it isn't optimal from a protein metabolism standpoint. With any calorie restricted diet you risk losing lean muscle along with fat so you need to get enough protein to mitigate that (along with certain types of exercise and other factors). And that protein should to be split across at least two separate meals in order for your digestive system to process it effectively.
I don't believe it's as simple as what's the net -ve because with TRE the BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) does not reduce like with calorie restricted eating, so the net -ve is higher with TRE even when the calorie intake is the same. Also, reducing the BMR has other negative effects because the body does away with key repairing processes to live with the reduced availability of energy.
I think at reasonable sustainable fitness planning & weight change goals the BMR changes aren’t a significant factor. My target is to lose about 0.9% body weight per week. I did some napkin math numbers before starting my plan and decided not to worry about it much, and in my case seem to be fine.
I went from somewhere around 2400kcal daily to 1600kcal daily while eating 3 meals and lifting for 30min a day and my estimated resting energy expenditure per day by Withings & Apple Health is down about 60kcal over ~4 months. They’re not super accurate sources, but at current rates I’ll hit my target minimum weight before my estimated resting expenditure has dropped -100kcal.
Everyone's different. I did IF for 6 months and lost to the point of being gaunt, so I had to stop. It seems to have changed my metabolism for the better, because now I can eat what I want (mostly pizza and ice cream) without gaining weight. Of course, I don't overeat, or I would gain weight.
Intermittent fasting doesn't suddenly change the laws of thermodynamics. Of course if you still eat 2,500 calories a day you will likely gain weight unless you already have a lot of muscle (but if you do, you likely know what you're doing enough that you're not reading this article actually hoping to learn anything).
The point is that IF makes it easier to reduce calories, in part psychologically but also in part because it's just a lot harder to eat 3,000 calories in 4 hours than it is to eat 3,000 calories in 12 hours.
Yeah this is what people often forget. In the end it comes down to calories in vs. out. Unless IF revs up metabolism in some way, which the evidence suggests it does not. No free lunch, sorry.
The problem with your thinking is that you assume that your eating habits don't effect your energy consumption. But that is wrong, if your Blood Sugar is to high your Body can't access Fat and needs to Burn other sources that are scarce and it prefers to make you tired and cold to reduce energy consumption. That doesn't happen if your Blood Sugar is very low and you can easily access your Fat reserves. Eating spikes your Blood Glucose, that's why intermittend fasting works so great.
I've (unintentionally) done intermittent fasting for most of my adult life. Frankly, it's just mindless. I don't have to think about it that hard. When I did keto or calorie counting years prior it was basically not only part of my day but part of my life.
I looked briefly into this and it seems that while there is evidence that intermittent fasting may be useful in preventing cancer and may be useful as an adjunct cancer treatment (in addition to chemotherapy and/or other treatments), the effect is largely from weight loss, not other mechanisms. Review article here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9530862/
From the conclusion:
"There is presently little evidence that intermittent fasting, without any reduction in body weight and proper balanced diet and exercise, can enhance cancer outcomes."
So, while the details in this review are interesting, the conclusions seem to come down to basic health advice: maintain a healthy weight, eat a healthy diet, and get exercise. Seems like good advice for pretty much everyone.
The only challenge of intermittent fasting for the masses if anyone happens to need to take medication in the morning that requires some food. Moving the eating window isn't always ideal.
The problem with most diet/fitness advice is that it comes from fit+healthy people who've never had serious weight/health problems, and for whom it's all easy.
I have been doing intermittent fasting combined with increased cardio activity, significantly reducing sugar intake (only source is from fruits and occasional/once a month indulgences) , and mild increase in fish consumption while reducing beef consumption.
So far, 20 lb weight loss in 3-4 month period. Cholesterol levels were “borderline” prior to weight loss (no statins Rx’d). Fasting glucose normal.
Anecdotally, reducing intake works!
side note: the sugar addiction was real and “retraining” my body and mind was the real effort. The mental fortitude to ignore the usual junk I grab at the grocery store is well understated.
I increased my sugar intake by 1/2 tbsp brown sugar in the morning and about a fifth of a pint (300kcal) of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream every night, I eat 3 meals a day up from 2, and also lost 20 lbs in 4 months!
At the end of the day, it’s all about the numbers — my intake is 1600kcal, and estimated expenditure is 2240kcal – and whatever makes it easy to stick to the plan. For me it’s ice cream.
Yes, that is the energy content of the food you eat. Your body still has to metabolize it, store it, and use it. There are sometimes extreme variations on how that takes place between individuals.
Black licorice is a terrible vice for me because it seems like less of one. I do OMAD + hiking + zero alcohol, and lost about 20lbs in 3mos as well. I've done omad before, but was sedantary and still drinking and while it worked, I gained it all back when I started adding lunches again, but it was because of being sedantary.
OMAD is effectively calorie restriction anyway because the longer you do intermittant fasting, the lower your average calorie consumption becomes over that period. Can't say it's healthy or smart, but it worked for me.
Current play is adapting this OMAD + hiking + zero alcohol for the winter to be fewer hikes but adding stronglifts 5x5 3-4x a week as a routine, which should consume any marginal meals and create the metabolic demand as I start lifting heavier again. I've found that sobriety is a free super power as well, can't recommend it highly enough for cutting out impaired judgment snacks.
In my experience and observations, calorie restricted diets are pretty easy to adhere to until sometime between dinner and bed time. This is where people typically go off the rails and eat far in excess of satiation, negating any success of the day.
Intermittent fasting typically has people shift their eating times towards the end of the day which should significantly reduce the chances of falling into a pre-bedtime eating habit. Especially if you also shift your sleep window earlier. So if you stop eating at 8PM and make sure you're asleep by 10PM, you're less likely to get hunger pangs.
I once heard a great tip to prevent those pre-bedtime snacks. After dinner, brush your teeth as if you’re going to bed. Your brain already associates that with “no more food” and so programmatically dissuades you from eating. It’s always worked for me.
I lost a lot of weight on a calorie restricted diet, from 215lb to 165lb over the course of a few years. But I gave it up because counting calories is soul sucking. I much prefer things like intermittent fasting or keto, I can think about what I am eating less and it's really raised my quality of life.
> But I gave it up because counting calories is soul sucking.
In the beginning it certainly is. But once I did it for a while, I found that I had developed a mental understanding for what various foods represented in terms of calories and could navigate it with much less effort. I started with spreadsheets and apps.
IMO much of the value in calorie counting stems from those early weeks where you suddenly realize how many calories each food represents - and relative to that how filling you find them.
I'm glad this works for you but this is far from a universal solution. It's true that thirst is often mistaken for hunger and in those cases this can work.
Personally when I wake up I quickly need a meal – I always drink a glass of water in the morning and it does very little, but if I have a black coffee the caffeine gets rid of my hunger for a few hours.
It makes you wonder if the intermittent fasting made the participants more aware of when they were actually hungry vs eating mainly out of habit/boredom/coping mechanism.
If I follow an overly strict diet, I wind up thinking about food all of the time. Calorie counting is a form of strictness: I'm continually putting in more time thinking about food. How many calories was that? Do I need to log everything? Do I figure it out when I'm planning and add the extra food thought time there?
And so on.
I've only lost weight through specific dietary changes that are easy to follow. Usually, this has been things like changing daytime food to something more healthy or fewer calories. Or simply putting more vegetables in my diet. I'm currently pescetarian, but rarely eat fish.
Intermittent fasting is in this second category. There isn't much to keep track of and I wouldn't have to put all that much extra thought into it. Some folks could put little to no thought into it. It makes it easier than anything strict.
The intermittent fasting group adhered to the prescribed eating interval 6.1 days per week. In the calorie restriction group, 68 percent achieved the calorie reduction target over six months. The intermittent fasting group lost more weight, reducing body weight by an average of 3.56 percent in six months, which was significant. Under calorie restriction, body weight fell by an average of 1.78 percent, which was not significant.
You should change the title to more accurately reflect that. The first question someone has when reading that title is "effective at what?" and there's room in the title for it to say so without the reader having to click through.
My tldr: intermittent fasting is easier to adhere to than calorie restriction.
Or in plain English: it’s easier to get someone to eat less by getting them to limit windows in which they eat than to ask them to eat less and keep the same routine.
Tre = intermittent fasting
Cr = calorie restriction
The TRE group reported being adherent with their eating window a mean (SD) of 6.1 (0.8) days per week (87% of days) over 6 months (eFigure 2 in Supplement 2). In the CR group, 17 participants (68%) reported being adherent with their prescribed calorie goals during the 6-month trial (eFigure 2 in Supplement 2). Participants in the TRE group reported finding their diet intervention easier to adhere to compared with CR group participants (eFigure 3 in Supplement 2
The most recent critiques I've seen for intermittent fasting have to do with how it may not preserve lean body mass unless you are extremely conscientious about getting enough protein (and probably resistance training). That is, if you don't get enough protein during your feeding windows, you'll lose lean body mass along with fat mass, which harms body composition. I'd expect to see the TRE arm losing more lean body mass.
Table 2 seems to show this effect. The TRE arm lost more lean body mass and fat mass, although without a difference in visceral fat. If compliance is the issue, I'd be curious to understand what regime can help TRE participants comply with a minimum protein threshold in their diet to minimize the risk of lean body mass loss.
Different intermittent fasting regimens result in different results re: losing lean muscle. The longer intermittent fasting cycles seem to show no significant loss of lean muscle. (i'm way too lazy to go find the studies to back this up claim, but they're out there somewhere)
> The longer intermittent fasting cycles seem to show no significant loss of lean muscle. (i'm way too lazy to go find the studies to back this up claim, but they're out there somewhere)
An old fashioned way of fasting preserves muscle mass way better due to hormonal response. It only kicks in after 30-40 hours of fasting. I don’t think that a lot if people practice 3-4 of fasting when doing IF.
To be fair, any substantial calorie restriction TRE or not means you will lose some muscle/lean mass. I’m not sure table 2 shows evidence that TRE is more detrimental to lean mass than CR given that the TRE group had fewer calories on average than the CR group.
It’s possible to minimize the loss by consuming large amounts of protein, but some amount of it will be converted to glucose unfortunately. The difference is very drastic, you can preserve a lot of muscle mass by doing proper diet vs IF. It all adds up when you so it for 6 months.
Readit News
> The mean (SD) reduction in energy intake was -313 (509) kcal/d for TRE, -197 (426) kcal/d for CR, and -16 (439) kcal/d for controls
So — the time restricted eating group reduced calories more than the group that counted calories; but the resulting weight loss has the same cause: reduced calorie intake compared to before.
If there’s a take away here, it’s possibly that adherence to a calorie deficit using a time restricted eating plan is easier than adherence to the same calorie deficit by explicitly tracking calories.
If you can adhere to a calorie deficit through other means, you won’t lose weight faster by adding intermittent fasting while maintaining the same calorie intake.
Hunger is a weird thing. People tend to assume that if you don't eat you'll just get hungrier and hungrier. The reality is that hunger comes in waves. If you can ride out a wave of hunger for 30 - 45 minutes it goes away. And the longer you don't eat, the less hungrier you get. I think this is because those waves of hunger tend to correspond to your eating habits. So if you're accustomed to eating lunch, you feel hungry around lunch time etc.
After a period of adaptation, when this just becomes the new normal, you can find that when it comes time to eat you just don't want to eat all that much either. It's weird, but cool, and seems to work well for a lot of people.
Then there is metabolic adaptation, which is thought to be the biggest contributor to people re-gaining any weight that they've lost. What happens is that after dropping around 10% of your body mass, your body kicks in a survival mechanism whereby it lowers your resting metabolic rate to adapt and try to slow the weight loss. This means that two people who weigh the exact same, one of which just dropped a bunch of weight to get there, will require different caloric intakes just to maintain their weight. The person who just cut weight will need 300 - 400 fewer calories per day than the person who didn't.
If you cut weight just by caloric restriction alone, this is DISASTROUS, because you are hungry and weak and miserable ... and you need to eat even less just to keep the weight off.
Which is why crash diets don't work. You start by making sacrifices, which is uncomfortable, and then when metabolic adaptation kicks in you stop seeing results unless you make even more sacrifices. People can't stick with it so they stop dieting and very quickly and easily regain the weight.
Intermittent fasting not only helps with hunger control, but there is research that suggests that it can also increase resting metabolic rate, which can help to counteract metabolic adaptation.
But even if it didn't boost RMR, the fact that it helps with hunger control and maintaining a calorie deficit alone would make it more sustainable for more people than just trying to eat less in general.
The hunger goes away when I'm sleeping and I'm not hungry in the morning - Lunch at 11 or 12.
It's really hard to eat too many calories in the 8 hour window, unless I drink sodas and stuff my face with candy.
Sounds odd, but let's say I filled my stomach to 90% of my total capacity, then a few hours later I've digested down to 45% capacity and that's when I get hungry. That's -50% of the last maximum. If I spend a week or two restricting what I ate to a maximum of 60% capacity, I'd only get hungry around 30%, also -50%. But with less total calories eaten.
(numbers made up just to give an idea what it felt like)
I read "the glucose revolution" and it talked about reducing blood sugar spikes. If you have a big blood sugar spike, later you will have a blood sugar crash with a lack of energy, reduced concentration and... cravings.
I suspect that if you minimize your blood sugar spikes, you will reduce the crash later and waves of hunger aren't as much of an issue.
random internet presentation summarizing hacks from the book: https://www.believebig.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Glucos...
EDIT another one: https://njms.rutgers.edu/education/student_affairs/student_s...
I don't know how scientific this is but this comes from a person I consider smart & knowledgeable:
My medical doctor friend explained this as hunger being triggered by a nerve signal from your stomach that food in your stomach _is about to run out_. That is, once it runs out, the nerve signal goes away.
Yep, and eventually even hunger you do feel is easy to ignore. I practice TRT and was meeting a friend at 3pm for a late lunch. I just skipped food all day, ate a nice meal at 3pm and then a very light dinner. Wasn't ever hungry after working out and working up until that point.
It's hard to count calories accurately.
It's very easy to look at the clock and determine if it's between 1300-1900 hours
Binary choices (should I eat right now?) take much less cognitive overhead than spectral choices (What should I eat? How much of it? If I eat X and Y now will I have the capacity to eat Z later?)
As Michael Pollan says "Eat food, mostly greens, not too much".
Don't eat anything processed, don't eat anything with more than one ingredient and only eat meat with at most one meal, and ideally quite a small portion.
Completely and utterly ignore things like icecream, chocolate, soda, candy, chips, anything deep friend and other "non food items". Treat them like Arsenic - i.e. you should never eat them.
There, you are now restricting calorie intake and you didn't have to count anything.
You should do this for your entire life.
Very roughly, there’s 3500kcal in 1lb of body. Given that fact plus your current weight and calorie intake, you can build a spreadsheet in 30 mins to compute the calories per day to make your body any weight you want in a reasonable time frame (losing >1% a week is generally viewed as unhealthy and risky).
Of course adhering to the plan is the challenging part - and then it’s helpful to consider strategies like TRE, once you understand the metric target part.
I wrote the comment as a reaction to the editorialized headline suggesting to some degree that TRE is a silver bullet / One Weird Trick. Maybe it is effectively that for many people - but in case there’s a casual reader scrolling past I want to give them a bit more of the ground truth that’s somehow not popular knowledge.
I think a clearer title would be something to the effect of "Intermittent fasting more effective than calorie counting for calorie restriction"
Also worth pointing out that the study was specific to T2 diabetes.
I’m actually capable of going an entire day without eating now and I’m not craving anything. A lot of days I’ll only have one meal, sometimes two.
It’s done wonders for my health. I’ve lost a little under a point per week (wouldn’t recommend more than this), my blood pressure is down, I no longer get heartburn after eating anything, and I feel lighter and healthier.
There are also tons of studies indicating that going longer between meals is healthier, and had anti aging effects on a cellular level. Seems to be an all around winner to me.
if you have a 'daily budget' of 1500 calories, personally I would much rather skip breakfast and have a burger and fries for dinner than 3 'slim meals' throughout the day (i'd probably stick to that more readily too)
My target right now is 1600 kcal & 150g protein, and my usual meal plan is a 300kcal protein frappe coffee thing in the morning, a lunch around 450kcal like gumbo, a 550kcal dinner like apricot glazed salmon w/ couscous, and then ~300kcal of Ben & Jerrie’s ice cream for dessert. For me adherence is super easy because those are all foods I love to eat, I’m full all day so I never want to snack, and I’m actually eating more dessert than before this diet because I don’t feel guilty about it anymore (yay decadence).
My girlfriend tried the same plan, but something about just knowing about the budget makes her feel totally trapped and she ends up binge eating snacks almost out of “revenge” after a few days. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://peterattiamd.com/donlayman/
I went from somewhere around 2400kcal daily to 1600kcal daily while eating 3 meals and lifting for 30min a day and my estimated resting energy expenditure per day by Withings & Apple Health is down about 60kcal over ~4 months. They’re not super accurate sources, but at current rates I’ll hit my target minimum weight before my estimated resting expenditure has dropped -100kcal.
Only way I can lose weight is if I also start restricting calories.
The point is that IF makes it easier to reduce calories, in part psychologically but also in part because it's just a lot harder to eat 3,000 calories in 4 hours than it is to eat 3,000 calories in 12 hours.
Of course the problem is, I have a hard time just eating three meals a day and not snacking in between.
Given that cancers are literally mutated cells, forcing your body to do an occasional cell cleanup seems potentially like a good idea.
From the conclusion:
"There is presently little evidence that intermittent fasting, without any reduction in body weight and proper balanced diet and exercise, can enhance cancer outcomes."
So, while the details in this review are interesting, the conclusions seem to come down to basic health advice: maintain a healthy weight, eat a healthy diet, and get exercise. Seems like good advice for pretty much everyone.
The problem with most diet/fitness advice is that it comes from fit+healthy people who've never had serious weight/health problems, and for whom it's all easy.
I have been doing intermittent fasting combined with increased cardio activity, significantly reducing sugar intake (only source is from fruits and occasional/once a month indulgences) , and mild increase in fish consumption while reducing beef consumption.
So far, 20 lb weight loss in 3-4 month period. Cholesterol levels were “borderline” prior to weight loss (no statins Rx’d). Fasting glucose normal.
Anecdotally, reducing intake works!
side note: the sugar addiction was real and “retraining” my body and mind was the real effort. The mental fortitude to ignore the usual junk I grab at the grocery store is well understated.
At the end of the day, it’s all about the numbers — my intake is 1600kcal, and estimated expenditure is 2240kcal – and whatever makes it easy to stick to the plan. For me it’s ice cream.
OMAD is effectively calorie restriction anyway because the longer you do intermittant fasting, the lower your average calorie consumption becomes over that period. Can't say it's healthy or smart, but it worked for me.
Current play is adapting this OMAD + hiking + zero alcohol for the winter to be fewer hikes but adding stronglifts 5x5 3-4x a week as a routine, which should consume any marginal meals and create the metabolic demand as I start lifting heavier again. I've found that sobriety is a free super power as well, can't recommend it highly enough for cutting out impaired judgment snacks.
Intermittent fasting typically has people shift their eating times towards the end of the day which should significantly reduce the chances of falling into a pre-bedtime eating habit. Especially if you also shift your sleep window earlier. So if you stop eating at 8PM and make sure you're asleep by 10PM, you're less likely to get hunger pangs.
In the beginning it certainly is. But once I did it for a while, I found that I had developed a mental understanding for what various foods represented in terms of calories and could navigate it with much less effort. I started with spreadsheets and apps.
IMO much of the value in calorie counting stems from those early weeks where you suddenly realize how many calories each food represents - and relative to that how filling you find them.
Personally when I wake up I quickly need a meal – I always drink a glass of water in the morning and it does very little, but if I have a black coffee the caffeine gets rid of my hunger for a few hours.
It makes you wonder if the intermittent fasting made the participants more aware of when they were actually hungry vs eating mainly out of habit/boredom/coping mechanism.
If I follow an overly strict diet, I wind up thinking about food all of the time. Calorie counting is a form of strictness: I'm continually putting in more time thinking about food. How many calories was that? Do I need to log everything? Do I figure it out when I'm planning and add the extra food thought time there?
And so on.
I've only lost weight through specific dietary changes that are easy to follow. Usually, this has been things like changing daytime food to something more healthy or fewer calories. Or simply putting more vegetables in my diet. I'm currently pescetarian, but rarely eat fish.
Intermittent fasting is in this second category. There isn't much to keep track of and I wouldn't have to put all that much extra thought into it. Some folks could put little to no thought into it. It makes it easier than anything strict.
But it works only if junk food and processed foods are stopped.
Or in plain English: it’s easier to get someone to eat less by getting them to limit windows in which they eat than to ask them to eat less and keep the same routine.
Tre = intermittent fasting Cr = calorie restriction
The TRE group reported being adherent with their eating window a mean (SD) of 6.1 (0.8) days per week (87% of days) over 6 months (eFigure 2 in Supplement 2). In the CR group, 17 participants (68%) reported being adherent with their prescribed calorie goals during the 6-month trial (eFigure 2 in Supplement 2). Participants in the TRE group reported finding their diet intervention easier to adhere to compared with CR group participants (eFigure 3 in Supplement 2
Full text: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Table 2 seems to show this effect. The TRE arm lost more lean body mass and fat mass, although without a difference in visceral fat. If compliance is the issue, I'd be curious to understand what regime can help TRE participants comply with a minimum protein threshold in their diet to minimize the risk of lean body mass loss.
Absolutely wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38194372