I'll add one more anecdote for IF. I've been doing it for 3 years and for me it's been the most effective way to get in and stay in shape. Coffee with a bit of milk or cream in the morning keeps me until 1-3pm (I've never gone full bulletproof coffee, but coffee definitely helps.) As others have mentioned, a run feels really good toward the end of the fast.
Heavy olympic lifting hasn't been a problem but I only lift on high calorie days, and not more than 4 times a week. If you are into the Leangains flavor of IF, lifting is the recommended way to do IF. I find that in my and my gfs case, lifting has been far more effective than cardio.
I grew up with a mother as an aerobics instructor and I live in a very active Seattle, so I've seen and tried all number of diets and workout regimens. With IF I have the most energy and the fastest results. It's also reasonably easy to work into real life situations (travel, dinners at friends' houses, etc.).
I will say that using a calorie and exercise counter is very very helpful when starting or resuming IF. Otherwise it is far too easy to mis-estimate calories in or out. I use Fatsecret app. And to calculate target calorie in/out, there is a great tool here at 1percentedge [1]. (Unfortunately it's in Flash, contacting the author to port to a mobile app is on my long list...)
I do IF, with milk in my tea and coffee before lunch, and then break the fast at lunch time.
I think I better watch my milk input, particularly on non-lifting days (I'm a real amateur lifting), since it's probably bringing me out of "fasted" state according to my body. I drink a five cups of tea/coffee by lunch time.
In response to both of you, I really don't think that you have "fasted" in a particular period if you are consuming calories at all.
You're certainly restricting calories and I'm sure it's a positive step, healthwise, etc., but ...
If we have a goal of depleting the energy stores in our liver, you're interrupting (and perhaps) sabotaging that.
OR, if we are trying to restrict calories into a certain time window, you've opened up that window with the butter and the milk. You're no longer in the 16, you're in the 8 (so to speak).
It is a common misconception that any calories >0 break the fast. However, all IF coaches agree that the threshold for most people is around 50 calories [1]. Knowing this, I only take a splash of cream or milk in my coffee.
I've been doing IF (the "one meal per day" form) for a while now, mostly because I find it helps me focus during the day.
When I used to eat breakfast, I'd be productive in the morning, until I started getting distracted by craving lunch. Then I'd eat lunch, and end up sleepy and groggy afterwards while I digested.
Now that I'm used to IF, I feel more productive; I spend less time at work thinking about food, and I miss that whole post-lunch carb crash thing.
Obviously it's just anecdotal, possibly all psychosomatic, etc., etc. But I like it.
I'm with you. Breakfast has always felt very skippable for me. My body doesn't seem to crave it in any way. I'd grown up listening to the conventional wisdom: eat a hearty breakfast, or else you'll be so hungry you'll snack all morning and afternoon. But I never really found that to be the case. Really, I experienced the opposite effect, as you've described. Whenever I eat breakfast, I find myself hungry again anywhere from 30 to 60 mins later. When I don't eat breakfast, my hunger sort of quiets down and doesn't reemerge until later.
I basically never eat breakfast and see no negative effect, but when I tell people this they immediately get concerned about my wellbeing. The "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" idea is deeply ingrained in our culture.
I listened to the advice of family and friends for the early part of my life and ate breakfast as others do, but it always made me feel a bit bloated, and then shortly after, actually hungry where I wouldn't have been otherwise.
Left to my own devices I do not eat in the morning, I just drink perhaps a coffee, but mostly water and green tea. I'll start getting hungry a few hours after waking up, which is ideal because that is right around lunch time.
Then I'll eat after work, or after my thrice-weekly lifting session, with perhaps a small snack later on. Usually something like cheese, cucumber and chutney on wholegrain crackers.
My stomach just does not seem 'awake' in the mornings and never has done. When I did eat in the morning it always felt like a bit of a chore.
I'm read somewhere once that hunter-gatherer humans never really ate in the morning either, and our bodies go through some process/reaction after waking from sleep that gives us a burst of energy, enough to go out and forage or hunt, and that eating first thing in the morning is a recent thing in our evolution.
Makes perfect sense to me given my own personal experience.
I typically do better having breakfast, a hearty breakfast allows me to have a light lunch without heavy cravings. I've tried skipping breakfast with mixed results. I've also tried moving my eating period to breakfast & lunch with skipping dinner with some positive results, although it can be tough when I'm with others eating or drinking after work.
I do agree though, that the concept of breakfast being important is bunk. Everyone is different and as these IF studies show, no one meal is all that important.
But it makes me think too, other cultures have a strong emphasis on breakfast, and that doesn't necessarily include cereals (but it would include bread). Like France, Germany, and Finland.
I'm in Ireland, where people are definitely under the Kellogg's influence.
It's not so conspiranoic; the agri-lobby managed to get cereals and grains (+pasta) in the base of the food pyramid, where it should be at the top, since they're essentialy refined carbs.
Granted, in the 50s we didn't have the same scientific knowledge as we do today, but the food pyramid was "invented" by them for their own benefit, make no mistake. Remember when butter was good for you because it lubricated your arteries?[1] Or when doctors were associated with smoking?[2]
This sort of propaganda easily permeates into popular culture and can cause a lot of harm. Refined carbs are 90% guilty of the worldwide obesity pandemic.
""[I]n many ways, the breakfast is the most important meal of the day, because it is the meal that gets the day started," Lenna F. Cooper, B.S., writes in a 1917 issue of Good Health, the self-proclaimed "oldest health magazine in the world" edited by none other than Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the co-inventor of flaked cereal. "It should not be eaten hurriedly, and all the family, so far as possible, should partake of it together. And above all, it should be made up of easily digested foods, and balanced in such a way that the various food elements are present in the right proportions. It should not be a heavy meal, consisting of over five to seven hundred calories," Cooper's article continues.
Granted, Kellogg did hold an M.D. degree, but there's no denying he had a product to sell."
"It should not be a heavy meal, consisting of over five to seven hundred calories" is still good advice. That's about how big my breakfast is. Yes, I weigh it and count the calories.
How did you find your sleep patterns on days you missed breakfast? And what about your general stress levels?
I heard a sleep doctor give a lecture awhile ago who repeated the advice of eating a hearty breakfast, primarily as a way to encourage good sleep. She said that our bodies interpret food within 30 mins of waking up as a signal that food is abundant, which lowers our general stress levels and makes it easier to sleep.
Skipping breakfast, on the other hand, signals food scarcity or higher predator threat, increases stress hormones, and encourages lighter sleep so you can be woken more easily.
No idea how true it actually is, but it seems to make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
Couldn't you make the same argument about a hearty meal within distance of sleeping? I typically eat at the end of my day and ALWAYS conk out 2-3 hours after my last meal.
Eat carbs before sleep, they block orexin receptors and make you sleepy.
The "stress hormones" at the beginning of the day are beneficiary - they make you more attentive, easier to focus and, last but not least, make caffeine (and other stimulants) more stronger (you need less caffeine for same effect). So, enjoy fasted wakefullness at the beginning of the day, and gluttony sleepness at the end of it.
It's weird how that works. Like you I never feel the urge to have breakfast. Like, never. Sometimes I'll eat it if its available because I'm a lean guy and it has always been hard for me to put on and retain mass. However more often than not I don't have breakfast on the weekends. And if I'm really engrossed in something, there have definitely been times when I skip lunch too.
I haven't really experimented or tested the impact of this yet, but I wonder how it ties in alertness/energy levels. I'm normally a zombie in the morning and don't get productive till the afternoon and evening.
I have the same tendency, when I eat breakfast I get ravenously hungry within an hour unless it's a massive breakfast. Even with a large breakfast, I'll be just as hungry by lunchtime as I would be without the breakfast, sometimes even more.
Tangentially, "post-lunch carb crash" means you have insulin resistance and should be restricting carbohydrates, either low-carb or ketogenic. You'll know you set the dial properly when you no longer droop after a meal. That is, blood insulin and glucose curves are mild.
It's actually a sign of insulin over-secretion rather than poor insulin sensitivity.
However, in practice, there are signs as to whether you have good insulin sensitivity or not and possibly whether you over-secrete insulin. Here’s two very simple questions to ask yourself regarding your response to diet.
1. On high-carbohydrate intakes, do you find yourself getting pumped and full or sloppy and bloated? If the former, you have good insulin sensitivity; if the latter, you don’t.
2. When you eat a large carbohydrate meal, do you find that you have steady and stable energy levels or do you get an energy crash/sleep and get hungry about an hour later? If the former, you probably have normal/low levels of insulin secretion; if the latter, you probably tend to over-secrete insulin which is causing blood glucose to crash which is making you sleepy and hungry.
I don't understand why Lyle still doesn't mention the roles of insulin/leptin/dopamine receptors (and strategies to boost their results) in newer studies.
This is exactly what I do and I find that I have more energy throughout the day even though I also work out more than I did before starting IF. However, people don't typically believe me that eating less is making me feel better and have more energy. Although for me it's not just about fasting, it's also about making sure my one big meal of the day is all about nutrients as opposed to calories.
I tend to do a little bit of both; everything in good measure. In my opinion, the combination of IF and something akin to Keto approach to food composition(low carb, high fat, low-medium protein) is only improving my recovery and performance. If the idea is that our body actually uses fat as it should, as an active source of energy instead of a battery that keeps sitting around, things should work at the very least equally as well if not better. This is a very personal experience, of course.
> When I used to eat breakfast, I'd be productive in the morning, until I started getting distracted by craving lunch. Then I'd eat lunch, and end up sleepy and groggy afterwards while I digested.
Me as well. To help tamper the hunger craving, I drink a 1/2 portion of that popular "soy meal replacement" for breakfast, then again at lunch. I found I can maintain the hyper focused state all day, without a post-lunch crash. Not an expert, but I feel a little something for my stomach to process keeps my metabolism marching along.
I had been doing the same thing for most of my adult life just out of programmer habit. I have previously moved to three squares a day, and noticed exactly the same things you describe here. Now the one thing that is true is that it is almost totally incompatible with a heavy exercise schedule. It is very hard to go too long without eating when you go to the gym and run everyday.
I've been doing "IF" since I was a young teen, to be perfectly honest. I've never ever enjoyed breakfast, for the reasons you've cited, so put me down as another anecdote that backs it up.
At least one study did find that many subjects exhibit better insulin response in the morning, implying that such people should shunt their carb consumption to earlier in the day rather than later.
EDIT: then again, here's useful background as to why this occurs:
I've been following the 5:2 fast since Jan 1, and running 60-80 miles per week. I've run my 3 best marathons in this time, including a PR. (I'm not crediting the diet for this, just saying that the diet hasn't hurt my performance.)
I'm mostly doing it as an experiment for myself, after talking with a friend who did it last year, and watching the BBC Documentary on the diet (Eat, Fast, and Live Longer). I thought running on days that I partial fast would be unbearable, but I've felt fine. As well, on my non-fast days for the past two weeks, I'm trying to consume all my meals within 8 hours (1 PM - 9 PM).
I enjoy the discipline the diet requires. Also, somewhat like running a marathon, fasting days are a little bit about putting up with discomfort. I am definitely hungry toward the end of fasting days. Oddly, when I wake up the next morning my hunger has gone away, and I usually don't eat till 1 PM, as mentioned above.
Stats: 44 y/o male, 5'8", 140-145 lbs, down from 145-150. I'd like to be in the 135-140 range for racing purposes.
Your experience is interesting to me. I'm a runner as well and I end up doing several races per year including a marathon, a few 1/2s, few 5k and 10ks. Do you do any interval training or long runs on the days you fast? What do you do about post run nutrition replacement and do you do glucose replacement during your longer runs? I'd love to shave off a few pounds for racing reasons as well. I always find myself eating more as I up my milage anyway so my weight usually stays constant.
Fasting days (Mon/Wed) are recovery runs. I usually run long on the weekend, and do my workouts on Tue (intervals) and Thu (tempo), but before breaking my fast.
My Tue interval day may include a 12 mi AM run of 2 mi w/u, 8 x 1000M at 8K pace w/600M RI, 2 mi c/d and 4 mi PM recovery run. My Thu tempo is usually something like a 10 mi AM run of 2 mi w/u, 6 mi at HMP, 2 mi c/d, then possibly a 4 mi PM recovery run.
Sunday is my cheat day. But there's only so much ice cream you can eat in one day. :-)
During long runs, I usually carry 21 oz of sports drink.
Post-marathon recovery drink: Guinness Float (that would be Guinness draught and a scoop of vanilla.)
My plan this year is to run a marathon each month, and 3000 miles total. So far so good.
I have never heard of a Guiness Float before, but seeing as I like both Guiness and Coke Floats... I want to try it as soon as I stop my short-term keto diet! What's it like?
I've read conflicting information about whether it's truly necessary to consume protein/carbs within 30 minutes of a workout, which I think is the basis of your question. Or whether as long as your overall diet is sufficient, it doesn't matter.
I've been fasting on Mon/Wed, and these are usually the days when I do recovery (i.e. slow) runs. I will run once or twice on these days, with my single meal in between. Typically I'll get up, have coffee (black), work an hour or two, then do a mid-morning run of 6-7 miles (about an hour). I'll have my meal around 1 PM. I then do a second run in the evening of 4-5 miles (about 40 mins).
My "meal" on fasting days is typically a nutribullet shake of spinach, frozen blueberries, banana or apple, cocoa powder (no sugar), unflavored whey protein powder, cashews or almonds, and two tsp of fish oil. My Fitness Pal says its ~ 600 calories, 27g fat, 60g carbs, 34g protein.
I'll have a second black coffee in the afternoon, and a green tea in the evenings.
I am currently losing weight (slowly), about 5 lbs since I started. But to answer: I eat more calories on the days I'm not fasting. Let's do the math:
At my age and weight, I need ~ 1900 calories/day to maintain my weight assuming I'm sedentary. That's 13,300 calories/week.
I run 76 miles per week. That's about 7,600 calories.
So 20,900 calories a week. On two days I restrict myself to 600/day, so that's 19,700 across the other 5 days, or 3,940 calories on those days. But I've been losing about 0.5 lb/week, which is a deficit of about 1750 calories/week. So on those other 5 days I must be around 3600 calories.
3500-4000 calories a day is a lot, but not extreme, just ask any weight lifter. And I happen to really enjoy food. So it hasn't been a problem.
But, I may have to reduce my fasting to 1 day a week once I reach my goal weight.
nice. do you run in the morning or afternoon? i'd considered doing the same as you but I usually run after work and hate running with food in my stomach...
I've been doing Leangains style IF for the past four years. I'd like to share a few quick tips.
If anyone here wants to try intermittent fasting, do it for the sake of convenience. I don't eat breakfast or lunch, I just eat when I get home from work or after weight training. On weekends I break my fast earlier than on weekdays.
I wouldn't say you should do it for the "benefits" if it doesn't fit your lifestyle. Right now all we know is that it's not bad for you. It does work pretty well for hunger control, which can help if your goal is weight loss.
Also, don't live by the clock. It's OK to eat outside your feeding window, you might get hungry later during the day and the next day you might get hungry earlier.
Everybody's different, I use meal time and IF in part to limit what I eat. I have to because I love everything about eating, the taste, the feeling of eating, the socialising environment, etc.
. I ccan eat anything at any time, and have a bottom less stomach.
For years I have been eating only evening meal, so I fast between 22 and 24 hours. I started doing this because it was very convenient for me to do so. I did not know anything about possible health benefits doing it, I was actually afraid to do any research if I would find out that eating only once a day was very dangerous and bad for you, but it fitted so well with my lifestyle that I wanted to continue no matter what.
A side effect is that I never feel really hungry anymore, even if I have been fasting for more than 25 hours. Before I could eat at noon and a few hours later be extremely hungry again. I really enjoy my evening meal complete with dessert, but I don't feel that deep hunger, almost pain, anymore.
Most of the time I only drink while eating and this can be a problem, especially in the summer and on the days I jog, as I can become very confused after not drinking for so many hours. As long as I stay hydrated everything is great, so I need to become better at that.
Having done IF myself, where I would eat between noon and 8pm and skip breakfast during a 'cutting phase', my experience:
* 'IF' is great if you are "cutting" and trying to achieve a lower body weight or maybe just maintaining what you have.
* 'IF' is not good or practical if you are going through a traditional bulk phase
* The feeling of alertness, energy and maybe slight 'high' during the morning, is real.
* Not sure if it is better or worse at preserving muscle than just lowering your calories (and having 3-4 regular meals). I did lose some muscle mass (as well as body fat) when I did it.
The strongest point of intermittent fasting is that it is very easy to practice. Just skip breakfast, (and no snacks) and have full normal/regular meals between noon and 8pm.
I feel like IF would be detrimental to maintaining muscle mass during a cut. You really want to keep a steady stream of amino acids to prevent catabolism of muscle tissue even when reducing total caloric intake. Usually you cut fat first during a cut. You want to keep carbs to fuel your workouts and you want to keep the protein flowing to prevent muscle loss.
From my limited knowledge of human physiology .I don't think 24h is enough to trigger catabolism. You still have some fat reserves, and if you exercise/lift during the cut, you probably will even gain muscle.
YMMV
The word "trigger" is not really useful in this situation because catabolism is not triggered, it just means muscle breakdown is happening at a higher rate than muscle synthesis (both of which are constant). This happens under a lot of different situations, and can temporarily go back and forth a lot. You certainly enter net catabolism long before your fat reserves are depleted (else cutting would be simple: just stop eating until you're pure hard muscle).
There are ways to temporarily spike muscle synthesis, and one of them is eating a protein rich meal. This specific mechanism has a refractory period in the order of magnitude of hours. Intermittent fasting robs you of the ability to spike muscle synthesis as many times per day as you could otherwise.
This effect is not massive. Your body is pretty good at optimizing this stuff. But when you are cutting, in particular, or trying to bulk without putting on significant fact, these minor optimizations can add up.
Fat reserves won't help prevent muscle protein breakdown. The only way to help prevent muscle catabolism is by consuming protein, which if you are fasting you aren't doing. If your goal is to lose weight while maintaining as much muscle mass as possible it doesn't seem like IF would be the optimal choice for that. Its not physiologically possible to have muscle protein synthesis exceed muscle protein breakdown unless you consume protein. The body cannot produce essential amino acids and must obtain them from the diet.
Supposedly IF works badly for women because they enter catabolism more quickly than men. I think I even read a study about it - of course I can't find it now.
That's the standard recommendation from sports nutrition texts, and I've certainly found it to be very true for myself. Over many cutting cycles as a strength athlete over the years, I always lost high ratios of muscle:fat during IF-style cuts, and augmenting with protein intake during long breaks between meals has made a tremendous difference despite my advancing age.
Well, you have to make choices at some point. If your goal is to absolutely maximize muscle gains, then fasting in general may not prove to be beneficial for this particular goal.
Or it may prove beneficial, who knows. I'm not sure if any research exists on this topic. But intuitively I agree with you, maintaining large amounts of muscular mass requires a lot of nutrient input.
There are plenty of places that advocate it during a cut, that's why for something like this only real studies can prove if it is more effective or not during a cut.
Valter Longo's work is probably the most robust and human-targeted on this topic, since his group is trying to get fasting and calorie restriction past the FDA as an adjuvant treatment for cancer. His breakthrough here is arguably as much the medical diet as a way to pull for-profit Big Pharma interest and funding into this field as the actual science.
Still, intermittent fasting is still far behind straight calorie restriction in terms of data and level of conviction that the output has a certain set of effects under a given set of circumstances. The interesting thing to my eyes is that the gene expression studies show that fasting and calorie restriction at similar overall intake of calories produce overlapping but in some ways quite different gene expression changes. Short-lived species have a much larger response in terms of health and longevity to all these things in comparison to long-lived species such as ourselves, however.
All in all it's quite the interesting area of research, especially now that the scientific community is making significant progress towards biomarkers of biological aging (such as DNA methylation pattern).
Here's a good introductory paper or two for human CR:
I've been practicing intermittent fasting for almost a year now. It works fine for me. I generally eat no breakfast or lunch. I drink only water throughout the day. I run a 5k every morning on an empty stomach with no ill effects. It really helps keep my body fat low and makes me conscious and deliberate about what I eat.
The only exceptions are meals I eat for social reasons (e.g., work lunch meetings) and mornings on which I run a road race and want to ensure I'm at peak performance. I find that when I do break the fast, I'm more hungry sooner.
One thing that doesn't get talked about very often is the social aspect of fasting. I've learned to just shut up about it because more often than not, people generally think you're crazy.
Anecdotally, low blood sugar only seems to bother me when I am not physically fit. Similarly, I only get hunger pangs when I've eaten too much and haven't exercised. After a few weeks of steady endurance training both of these things went away. If I am really hungry, it presents less as pain or weakness than a very empty stomach. If I'm not training regularly, my stomach is rarely ever that empty. I'm always hungry, which leads to constant snacking and eating big meals. Exercising even lightly on a regular basis, there's a much stronger feedback loop where your body has an opportunity to let you know you've over eaten or eaten a poor mix of nutrients.
All of this is probably limited to light resistance/endurance training. This sort of goes out the window while lifting weights, at least for me. Then its very hard for me not to eat a ton. I think the fascination with protein is totally misguided though. Some people think they need 200g/day when probably 30g is sufficient.
One thing I really embraced in college was ketosis. I hardly ate, aside from a few well earned feasts. But its extremely hard to maintain if you don't have the freedom to work out multiple times a day and carbs are a convenient and cheap source of calories.
That's something I should probably try. I've been trying to eat smaller portions on the days I have multiple meals. That's actually difficult for me. One of the advantages of IF is that it allows one to worry less about portion size.
definitely. I've tried to do smaller meals but found it difficult too so I eat a decent sized lunch and eat a relatively big dinner and it's worked out well for me so far
No, I run 5k every day, either on the road or the treadmill, but not necessarily in a race. I have been running a 5k race almost every weekend for the last five months. I live in Orlando, Florida. We'll have plenty of races to choose from every weekend until the summer.
Because I intentionally set my workout run to be 5 kilometers so that it matches an actual road race. Yes, I'm an American and we generally use miles as a distance unit, but the vast majority of our road races are 5ks.
Yes, but there's only a difference of an eighth of a mile -- less than a minute of running -- and you're going against convention. The very fact that someone was confused in the first place should tell you something is wrong saying "5k."
It's a big difference to me when I'm doing my morning run to put in that extra tenth of a mile beyond 3 miles at the end as I'm measuring my time against my PR. Your experience may vary, especially if you run longer distances.
I strongly doubt we are evolutionarily adapted to a steady regimen of 3 meals a day every day. I think it's virtually certain that our biochemical engine is optimized for something a lot closer to "intermittent fasting".
That's pseudoscience. Irregular eating is normal for hunter/gatherer societies, and most animals like our ancestors that sit in a scavenger niche. We know (or have good evidence that; I followed a link once and am too lazy to look up the research) our gut has adapted just in the 10k year period after the advent of agriculture. Agrarian societies are built around grain storage and rationing. They absolutely have regular access to calories.
That doesn't prove anything, of course. But it does argue that you should be careful with that kind of "it's the way our bodies are intended to work" logic. To a large extent, we're already adapted to "modern" eating styles.
I'm getting a bit tired of seeing the "pseudoscience" label slapped on an argument every single time evolutionary biology is mentioned. I understand why one might want to do this occasionally, but I feel the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, and now the label is being abused.
This is basically the new "correlation is not causation" meme equivalent. Yes, correlation indeed does not equate causation in a strict sense. But given a large enough number of samples, it becomes the domain of statistical analysis, and then causation can be solidly inferred with a well determined degree of confidence.
So be careful when repeating trendy memes. Trendy does not equate truthful.
Anyway, to provide some kind of answer: Seeing how studies keep coming in, showing that I.F. is beneficial in a number of different ways, seems to suggest that this regimen is, indeed, better overall for your health than 3 meals a day every day. The jury is probably still out, but perhaps getting close to returning for a decision now.
Also, the 10k year "adaptation" is a weak argument. We've adapted in some ways, yes - lactose tolerance, etc. In other ways the intracellular biochemistry has not changed. 10k years is a short time after all; it allows some adaptations but it's too quick for big changes. Our distant ancestors very likely did not live on a steady caloric input, and the time is too short for us to have adapted completely to a different feeding pattern.
Yes, I agree it's hard to know for sure, that's why I used expressions such as "virtually certain" and "strongly doubt". Both suggest a degree of uncertainty. I was not making it into a science, by any means.
Hmm, I'm tempted to think this is an analogue of Muphry's law, where someone correcting someone's grammar is likely to make grammar mistakes himself. (Or, at least, that we are much more likely to notice if he has.)
Getting a large enough number of samples is not enough to show that a correlation implies a causation. It merely demonstrates that a perceived correlation is real and is not the result of random sampling error. Take a few samples, and you'll see a strong correlation between wearing a cast and having broken bones; take an enormous number of samples, and you'll prove the correlation is real, and you'll show the precise magnitude of the correlation with small error bars; but you'll never prove that wearing a cast causes broken bones. To prove causation, you need a causative theory, and evidence that distinguishes it from competing causative theories.
Though perhaps you are thinking of situations where the only plausible causative theories are "A and B are unrelated" and "A causes B".
I think to claim it's pseudoscience is to claim it's more than a hypothesis. The OP did no such thing. The virtual certainty is from his perspective, not yours (or mine).
EDIT: I would also strongly recommend divorcing our DNA from our gut in this case; they are two different things, and both certainly influence our metabolic processes.
> I would also strongly recommend divorcing our DNA from our gut
Why? The gut flora has its own DNA, and it absolutely coevolves with the rest of the organism. It's non-sensical to say that we're "adapted" for something via one mechanism and not the other. Adaptations use the full spectrum of evolvable media (including culture, for that matter) by definition. They aren't separable unless you can literally point to a specific gene or bacteria or cooking practice. And we can't.
> It's non-sensical to say that we're "adapted" for something via one mechanism and not the other.
And yet, that's exactly what you implied—that our current metabolic process is entirely the result of the 10k years of change in the gut bacteria, NOT the previous hundreds of thousands of years we spent persistence hunting protein and gathering nutrition.
What? No, I said there was clear evidence that our systems (as a whole, though I specifically referenced gut flora as the evidence) had adapted to our existence as agrarian grain eaters. And that makes argument from the position of "our systems are really intended to be scavengers" pretty suspect.
Basically, any argument of what we are "supposed" to eat in that context is pseudoscientific garbage. The real science says we need to pay attention to agriculture.
> The real science says we need to pay attention to agriculture.
What's the source in question here? I've now completely lost you. Gut flora is elastic and can't tell us much about anything but what we eat in our own lifetimes. I see zero evidence anywhere I look that we should use this flora to figure out which diet maximizes long term health. If anything, it's more indicative of what we are eating than what we might eat that would be better.
My personal anecdote is a bit different. I don't have a breakfast on a daily bases since I can remember, for the simple reason that I wake up a little bit nauseous every day, and it takes me a couple hours to actually feel like eating anything, so I just go on and wait for lunchtime.
It's never helped me lose weight, and I can't really correlate to any improvements in my everyday life. It got me on a daily Pantoprazole regime though, since the long periods without food have skyrocketed my gastritis.
So, as most of the stuff out on the Internet, don't go doing it just because everybody else is. Try it, and see if it fits you. Don't overdo it and you should be fine.
It got me on a daily Pantoprazole regime though, since the long periods without food have skyrocketed my gastritis.
I highly recommend you look into Pepcid Complete. I took Prilosec for years and it has some interesting side effects that even the experts don't know what they mean: it turns the lining of your stomach from smooth to all bumpy. I know I'm describing it badly, but when I had an endoscopy before and after being on Prilosec I noticed it in the pictures my Dr. showed me. When I asked him he said "no one knows what effect those will have on you long term." And this was from the premier Gastroenterologist in my area.
I immediately looked for an alternative.
The thing about Pepsid Complete (available at Costco for ~$20 for 100) is it has a weaker proton pump inhibitor and an antacid. I only take them when I need them and I take them far less than I did Prilosec.
Drug side effects are the dirty secret of the pharma industry. The FDA is just too weak to demand better and longer term studies on drugs.
Or just take a Calcium/Magnesium 2:1 (try 500/250mg daily) supplement with vitamin D. Better ratio, no anti-histamin. Vitamin D helps the body utilize the minerals.
My better half had serious acid reflux, but no longer use prescription meds since taking these daily.
I'm pushing 40 now. Blood pressure and numbers on my blood tests are still good. Would love to lose some weight without exercising though. Knees can't take it.
It's generally a lot easier to not eat 100 calories than it is to burn them off. One thing I've found that works well, apart from just calorie counting, is finding filling low calorie foods. Bulking up a meal with cauliflower for example, or making carrot soup or just a big pile of roast carrots.
As you lose weight, it'll get easier to do some more exercise as well.
Knee strength is not an absolute. Start working on strengthening it. Have a 5 year plan. Sign up to r/progresspics on reddit. You'll be amazed at what you can do over the long term. You owe it to your body. It's all you really have.
About feeling nauseous in the morning: I struggled with this through high school and college, also not eating because of how I felt in the morning. It wouldn't really feel better until lunch.
Took way too long to find out I wasn't pooping nearly as often as I should have been. I'd usually go about every 3 or 4 days. If you're not pooping at least once a day, I'd very much consider researching things to eat to help you out and even asking your doc about it. I'm still sleepy and grouchy in the morning, but I haven't felt the nausea in a very long time.
I've done intermittent fasting (specifically, the 'Leangains' protocol) for 6 years now, and it's treated me very well. The biggest benefit to me is that it makes diet adherence much easier, and keeps my macronutrient intake top-of-mind, which has a sort of trickle-down effect in my overall health.
Coupled with intense fasted weight lifting or sport activity, I feel great whether I am cutting or bulking. I can play 90 minutes of soccer while fasted and feel more energetic than anyone else on the field.
For anyone interested in starting: ease into it, track your calories and protein/fats/carbs to get a sense of what ratios make you feel better / lose bodyfat more effectively, and keep in mind caffeine and alcohol will feel more potent. Some people find the first few days uncomfortable, but wait for the one week mark before making any judgments (or 1-month if you're comfortable gathering more data).
It's not so much that I feel better exercising while fasted; it's that I don't feel inhibited exercising while fasted. However, the hunger-dampening effect of working out is common[0]:
> "There are two important hormones involved in provoking appetite: ghrelin and peptide YY. Ghrelin is a hormone that stimulates hunger while peptide YY suppresses it. Aerobic and anaerobic exercise, such as weight training, both stimulate an increase in the peptide YY hormone. This is the primary reason healthy people have a feeling of fullness post-workout."
After reflecting for a moment, I realize I experienced that sensation more often before I started intermittently fasting.
> TMI but if I eat healthy and frequently I kill several trees w/ toilet paper consumption
Why would frequent bowel movements (which I assume were implied by the above) be an "improvement"? Wouldn't the best case scenario be once a day, regularly (same time every day), very low TP consumption (not too much fluid)?
And you do this every day? Not what I picture when I hear "intermittent" - the article mentions the 5:2 plan, but I'm curious what other schedules are common. I've always skipped 2 meals monthly as religious observance, but I'm seriously considering 5:2 to try out health benefits.
No on the weekends I sort of do a refeed to regain leptin and what not so I eat 2 calorie dense meals and follow the 8 hour regimen.
During the week I just find I need to start shutting it down earlier or tapering down.. or else. So I do a casein protein shake (just casein) and a beer (usually the beer is prior) as my second meal.
I don't think there is any magic except that I'm doing something that I can maintain (the beer being my treat to help maintain follow through).
Oh I forgot. Sometimes on Friday I will wait till 8:00pm to eat (24 hour fast). A guy on reddit does this and he/she calls it "Fast Fridays". The idea being Fridays and the weekends are usually a calorie fest. I like it for it practicality and for the catchy name.
IF coaches have reported that women tend to want to break the fast ~2 hours earlier than men. Men can generally make it 16 hours and women make it to 14 before the hunger really sets in. This has been my experience also, but I don't know the root cause.
My anecdotal experience is that my wife and various other females seem to loose more weight with additional meals earlier in the day. My next observation is that perhaps post fast my wife and others seem binge more often (again just an observation).
For me after I fast its almost impossible for me to pack 2k calories in 4 hours IF I eat healthy. I feel disgustingly full but my wife doesn't.
The other thing is my wife also prefers to eat before working out which I do not like at all.
My girlfriend and I are both dancers and whenever we have a hard training session she prefers to eat about 1.5-2 hours beforehand while for me it's more like 2.5-3 to feel the most comfortable. Just an anectode.
From my anecdotal experience, that's approximately where the mental "hump" is. If you can push past that point, the hunger becomes background noise, and maintaining the fast becomes easier.
> The scientific community remains divided about the value of intermittent fasting. Critics say that the science is not yet strong enough to justify widespread recommendations for fasting as a way to lose weight or boost health...
Its always strange when ancient practices like fasting are so poorly understood.
I see it in the good old human error "it's too simple, it can't be right". Well, same goes for exercising. But of course nowadays there's a shitload of stuff to sell and money to be made with "coaching", so ...
That's because they were not done for any good reason. By this I mean some person with mental problems started a cult told everyone to start fasting for "religious" reasons and people followed. Obviously we don't pay much attention to that these days. Just like we don't investigate the scientific benefits of sanctified food.
Barely worth responding to, but many of dietary restrictions imposed by early religions had very real benefits, such as Hebrews with pork (Trichinella).
It's beyond foolish to flippantly dismiss knowledge offhand because you dislike or are prejudiced against the source.
They may have had real benefits, but not scientifically understood benefits, and by now they are followed for religious tradition rather than because research has been done showing that it's a good idea. Pork is a good example, as far as I'm aware there aren't people recommending avoiding pork (while still eating other meats) for health reasons, just for religious reasons.
The person you replied to worded it rudely about religions, but I agree with his overally point in that I want to hear from scientists not religious leaders when it comes to health advice, regardless of how sensible the religious advice was when it first came into existence.
Considering all the other problems that have been caused by religion, I think being a bit critical of it is more than justified. I am not going around oppressing millions if not billions of people with bad ideas that are quite literally based in mental problems.
I'm an atheist, and I have many criticisms of many religions, but imposing dietry restrictions on those who wish to follow them isn't one of them. I'd also suggest that being constructively critical in a debate is fine, posting comments like yours that I refered to is only going to make religious people dislike you and won't change a single opinion, other than making you and other people who already agree with you feel smug.
(For the record, while I wouldn't necessarily agree with a statement of "religions have done more good than harm", I do think they can and have done good in some areas. A religion that promotes good morals and tolerance, without preaching the negatives that you and I dislike, is fine with me, even if I don't personally believe in everything they believe in. And on a personal note, I'm thankful for some of the wonderful music and other art that religion has inspired and/or funded over the years.)
I don't have sources handy, but one of my friends doesn't eat pork because he believes (based on some source or another) that it is worse for his health than other meats (including beef).
I never asked him for his sources because it doesn't really affect me. The only reason it came up is because he was eating dinner at our house one day.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Same I guess goes with a broken brain. I mean I guess you could say that mental disorder for instance hypochondria has benefits now and then so I guess we can justify all the other problems it causes for a few solutions that it provides, due to the hyper-vigilance of the individual against preconceived threats.
I've been eating mostly in the 5pm-10pm window for the last 6 months after watching a few TED talks and related videos. Adjustment took about a week or two. I don't feel hunger during the day but when u get home I eat all I want. Lost 10 kilos and am feeling great. Every other morning I go for a 4K run and every day I go for a swim in the ocean. Don't feel any hunger after the run or swim.
I cook breakfast for my family a few times a week and have no cravings while smelling or handling food.
The good things about IF are
- more free time - breakfast and lunch can be spent having fun
- no 3.30itis after lunch - productive all day long
- less money spent
The bad:
- socially awkward. Most social gatherings involve eating. All celebrations are eat-feasts.
All in all it's a positive experience and feels more natural.
I've been thinking "eat less, exercise more" for a while. But only when I started doing IF I really understood what it means: 80% eat less, 20% exercise more. And exercise must come before food - having a big meal, then going for a walk is not as good for you as doing it the other way around. Run first, eat second - like the lions do it.
You have to eat way less and exercise just a little more and your body will adjust. IF is much easier than going for controlled portions. Because "limbic hunger" (look it up).
> The bad: socially awkward. Most social gatherings involve eating. All celebrations are eat-feasts.
I found the opposite: since I can skip breakfast and lunch, going out at night and having beers and snacks without reaching my daily limits is possible.
> - socially awkward. Most social gatherings involve eating. All celebrations are eat-feasts.
And a popular theme is that fast food is taking a toll in recent decades. Well if basically most gatherings involve food, this being advertised with instapics etc. becoming a norm, why do people wonder that the avg. weight is rising ? After starting IF, I'm actually getting to a point where I'm annoyed because everytime I visit somewhere, people insist to offer something to eat.
I had just been reading Antifragile by Nassim Taleb and he theorizes that fasting works by exploiting your body's "anti-fragility" and need for stressors by periodically starving it of some resource, which forces it to adapt in a way that improves the overall system (eg by economizing). For similar reasons, he recommends a diet of "different nutrients at different meals" rather than making each meal balanced in itself: you rotate what your body has to economize on.
Not saying he necessarily has a justifiable basis for believing this: in a lot of the book, he really comes off as a know-it-all everyone-else-is-stupid crank :-/
Very interesting that you brought up Taleb. He's been a spirited force in my education, often forcing me to re-think my learned statistical habit to tend towards the mean. It's true that the average human would have 1 breast and 1 testicle and be very inapt at reproduction. Taleb, being a self-recognized patron of literature and written thought, often brings up supposed cultural origins to human heuristics. Thus, I present a few immediate recollections from my classical and literary education.
In Julius Caesar, Brutus famously quips
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
And in Ecclesiastes:
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
2 a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6 a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7 a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
I've been eating LCHF for almost 4 years now, I started doing it to lose weight, but I feel so much better when on diet that is hard to stop.
When I'm firm on the diet, I can easily go a full day without any food, and not feel any hunger or mood swings. It's great.
I've known (and have been following a form of fasting diet) about this since I watched this documentary: Eat, Fast and Live Longer (BBC Horizon, 2012-2013)[1]
> Michael Mosley has set himself a truly ambitious goal: he wants to live longer, stay younger and lose weight in the bargain. And he wants to make as few changes to his life as possible along the way. He discovers the powerful new science behind the ancient idea of fasting, and he thinks he's found a way of doing it that still allows him to enjoy his food. Michael tests out the science of fasting on himself - with life-changing results.
> Critics say that the science is not yet strong enough to justify widespread recommendations for fasting as a way to lose weight or boost health, and that most of the evidence supporting it comes from animal research.
Should that not be the other way around, that more research is needed before recommending you eat three large meals a day plus snacks?
I did the "no breakfast/no dinner/reasonable lunch" thing for about 6 months - I'd also flag you have to be ultra careful when trying to "normalise" your eating habits too.
I intended to lose about 2 1/2 stone, but ended up losing 3 because I was fighting my body's urge to EAT ALL THE THINGS and slowly bring intake back up when going back to three meals a day.
I got really into IF about 6 years ago. It was a pretty good way to drop about 30 pounds of fat.
That said - at least for me - I'm not sure it helped my eating patterns in general.
For some background, I got up to about 305 lbs when I was ~19 (about 9 years ago), then lost a bunch of weight over a year and a half or so. Got down to about 180 (way too skinny). I really like food. I eat way too fast, and I eat way too much, and I love eating junk food.
So, for me, IF was kind of a way to compartmentalize what was essentially binge eating. I'd push my fasting periods further and further into the evenings, sometimes going til 4-7 PM, then having an absolute blowout meal.
Eventually I stopped doing IF. Well, kind of. I still don't eat breakfast. I got less extreme with it.
I would be interested to see the body of research on the effects of Ramadan (1 month of fasting, both food and liquid until sunset) on the health of those who fast.
The effects on the economy were clear from what I observed in Afghanistan - at least 5% potential GDP loss due to reduced working hours, shutdown of public services, overall latency of business transactions during this time. An actual study across different observing countries would be intriguing.
I really wish there was more scientific research around extended fasting. There's so little research and much of it doesn't wait long enough for ketoadaptation.
I've done extended water fasts as well. 18 days of just water is the longest I've done and I felt like I could have gone longer.
Did a 48 (actually a few hours more I guess) water fast ending yesterday and haven't had carbs since, am quite low on calories yesterday/today and still feeling absolutely fine and not hungry. Definitely will repeat again in the future (and staying off carbs for at least a few weeks, hopefully).
Nearly every health-related article that makes it to the top of Hacker News these days is stuff that was discussed in the Paleo community 5+ years ago. Earlier today was the benefits of a high fat ketogenic diet in regards to cancer, and now IF. Good to see you guys catching up!
An experiment: list every topic/theory discussed by paleo enthusiasts. How many are currently supported by evidence? How many have been soundly refuted? How frequently does the evidence shift in either case?
I've been using the time restricted Intermittent Fasting for the last month or two. I drink coffee in the morning with some creamer but other than that I don't eat until 12:30 (Lunch) and eat again around 7:00PM or 8:00PM at night.
Honestly, Its not all that different than my old eating habits except now I've cut out breakfast (which I only really ate because it is, "the most important meal of the day")
I use to wrestle in college and maintain my weight via exercise but now I work in an office and this is the only diet I've been able to find that allows me to workout a normal amount and maintain a decent weight.
I've tried IF on-and-since since 2010. While I found it pretty useful for weight loss, I constantly felt foggy and dased mentally, even after months of going at it.
My body(or brain, I guess) works better when I eat small amounts of protein every four hours or so.
Seemingly everyone is talking about this in the context of 'gains' as part of a high-exercise lifestyle. What about the rest of us on the bare minimum of exercise? Is it possible that simply skipping breakfast has all these health benefits?
Well eat if you're hungry and don't if you aren't. Just don't eat because "it's time", "it's socially accepted" or any of this shit. Also hungry doesn't mean "I haven't had food in my mouth in less then 3 hours".
That's the gist of it, but we humans have to complicate it, because "complicated" is supposedly more scientific then "simple".
been doing it for a few months now. it's pretty interesting that the first week i get hungry the whole day from not eating breakfast, but now I go on with the day without breakfast or lunch, and only drink water through the day and I don't get hungry or cravings.
Also none of that afternoon food coma from lunch!
Still not sure if IF just makes it easier to eat less or there's really something behind it(enough evidence from both sides, like how good/bad egg is for you) but it's worked for me so far
It's not the "be all end all" deal, but an objective measurement of progress (or lack thereof) nonetheless. The question might be "what's his 100m dash time" or anything else really.
Nothing in that article indicates any positive improvement as a result of this self-imposed IF for no apparent reason :)
(edit: I eat two meals a day, except sometimes I'm hungry in the morning and then I do often get hungry again soon afterward too and end up eating 4-5 meals that day, but I think everyone's metabolism is different, and moreover different at different times, and feel more harm than good can often come out of these studies, especially when presented to data-centric people like HN readers). (Not to mention, I think a lot of it doesn't matter at all (searching for "Douglas Adams Nutrition" diatribe but not finding it).
I don't think it's possible for the average person to fast in any of the ways suggested here. I think the best thing to do is have a light dinner without carbs and a healthy breakfast. If you do this daily it will be like a daily intermittent fast as you can have a large lunch to indulge yourself. This way you can actually stick to it. I have been doing this for years and am very fit. I made a video showing what I ate for lunch each day while losing weight to prove it works https://youtu.be/v0hYofwTIiw
> I don't think it's possible for the average person to fast in any of the ways suggested here.
I'm quite an average person (or at least I'd like to think so) but for many years I did what that first guy from the article did, i.e. not having breakfast nor lunch, I was eating most of the calories for the day during dinner. Not sure how that has affected my health, at least now I'm back at having breakfast again, but the culture of "three big meals a day" is certainly not the be-all and end-all of nutrition.
I also cannot eat meat before 4 or 5 PM, I can't understand how people can have things like English breakfast so early in the morning. I also love fruits, if it were to me I'd eat fruits all day, every day.
>I don't think it's possible for the average person to fast in any of the ways suggested here.
Really? I did a form of time restricted feeding and it was the easiest thing ever. It seems hard to consume all your calories in an eight hour window, until you realize all that really means in practice is skipping breakfast and eating a late lunch. Once you get used to it, it's really easy and natural.
Why not skip breakfast and only eat lunch (at 1pm) and dinner (before 9)? You phrased your claim in such a way that it's impossible for anyone to argue with it (I manage to eat like above, but then I might not be an average person). Do you have any reasons to make such claim?
Heavy olympic lifting hasn't been a problem but I only lift on high calorie days, and not more than 4 times a week. If you are into the Leangains flavor of IF, lifting is the recommended way to do IF. I find that in my and my gfs case, lifting has been far more effective than cardio.
I grew up with a mother as an aerobics instructor and I live in a very active Seattle, so I've seen and tried all number of diets and workout regimens. With IF I have the most energy and the fastest results. It's also reasonably easy to work into real life situations (travel, dinners at friends' houses, etc.).
I will say that using a calorie and exercise counter is very very helpful when starting or resuming IF. Otherwise it is far too easy to mis-estimate calories in or out. I use Fatsecret app. And to calculate target calorie in/out, there is a great tool here at 1percentedge [1]. (Unfortunately it's in Flash, contacting the author to port to a mobile app is on my long list...)
[1]: http://www.1percentedge.com/ifcalc/