Really enjoying IF and it's had enormous benefits for me. The doc
basically said my latest bloods are outstanding, way, way down from
the serious telling-off I got 6 months ago. I'm not using someone
else's schedule, just listening to my body and pushing boundaries as
hard as my fitness will allow.
But there are mental "downsides" to reckon with.
It's not grumpiness, but rather a "predatory" state. Not quite
aggression - a little more of the warrior mode circuits seems switched
on. Plus general heightened emotion and general willingness to speak
the truth, fight/defend others, take risks.... Working out how to deal
with that and integrate it positively is my present challenge.
I know this feeling well. This is a false sense of sharpness caused by undereating. You dont feel hungry or tired, just energized, light and strong.
I say false sense of sharpness, because you're actually not that alert. Yes, you can push yourself more, but your brain is in flight/fright mode and not thinking rationally.
May I point to one paper of many that show proinflammatory cytokines to be reduced due to intermittent fasting?
“Under controlled conditions, [diurnal intermittent fasting] led to significantly decreased plasma levels of cytokines (IL-1β, IL-6, and IL-8), particularly IL-1β and IL-6 across 24 h.” – The effects of diurnal intermittent fasting on proinflammatory cytokine levels while controlling for sleep/wake pattern, meal composition and energy expenditure, 2019: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
We tend to eat up mechanistic reports that make us feel good about our preferred lifestyle, but in this topic you’d want to find experiments that increase alertness during IF (something that actually confirms an endpoint). Maybe they exist.
A classic example is the “antinutrients in plants” mechanistic fad while plants in a diet actually increase all health outcomes when put to the test.
Exercise causes a huge inflammatory response too. Thankfully we know better than to stop the analysis there.
The exercise inflammatory/antiinflammatory control loop is indeed wildly interesting! As are the nuances of how the interleukins work.
I deeply encourage people to read the science. And indeed all of it.
As you said: Maybe they exist. They probably do – if the substrate of under-funding things has allowed them to come into existence. There are studies that show general health benefits from intermittent fasting as I recall.
It’s also worth paying attention to one’s experience of the world, and to not discredit it. There’s a distinction between following a fad, preferring a lifestyle, wanting to feel good about it – in a social sense I guess? …versus, say, noticing a sense of clarity whole watching one’s bloodwork results improve.
Read papers. Mostly science. Not too carefully.
Mechanistic ones too. Mechanistic ones too! From personal experience, I ask you to believe me when I give insulin glargine as a clear example of the molecular biology of something clearly showing that a certain medicine is literally dangerous. The zoomed-out general health studies smooth over the substance’s obvious capacity to abruptly flow out of bolus sites and dump 24 hours’ worth of insulin into the bloodstream. It’s obvious from the molecular biology and the anecdotes of horrible blood sugar crashes and people dying in their sleep. Please don’t take too much salt with the mechanistic studies. It’s mechanics all the way down.
Irrational thinking seems unlikely. When glucose deficit, the brain functions fine on ketones. It might be you're experiencing your brain running on ketones.
It's a beautiful thing that we can rebrand "hangry" as "warrior mode". I also noticed this and just came to the conclusion that having breakfast and being in a good mood ("off edge"/"relaxed"/"opposite of warrior mode") was more worth it.
Huh, I've been intermittent fasting (eating only between 11am - 7pm for me) for most of this year, and haven't noticed any emotional changes like that.
But the physical ones definitely! I feel way healthier and my bloodwork just came back much improved as well.
For me, though, I don't think it has anything at all to do with the time restriction so much as the inadvertent calorie restriction. I've lost 30 lbs since I started, mostly because intermittent fasting has caused me to cut out my late night snacking and my greasy breakfasts.
In my experience, this is a good description of what happens. Eat less; lose weight; feel better.
Now let's find a way to put this in a pill so manufacturer reps will provide literature to doctors to prescribe it and insurance companies will pay the drug makers so everyone can go to pill maker conferences in Hawaii for education.
Been doing IF on-and-off for maybe 5 or 6 years. I get the same way.
Since you already called this "warrior mode", I'd recommend reading the warrior literature for tools and techniques to help deal with this in a positive way. If you're new to it, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman is a great introduction and there should be enough references on it to start digging deeper.
There is a movie for the book as well but I don't recommend it.
Feeding is such an important and complex function, I believe there's also a strong psychological component in fasting. In my case, I'm losing about a pound per week doing light exercise and 15 hours of fasting daily.
Sometimes I've gone to sleep a bit hungry, and I've had dramatic dreams of being weak and emaciated. When I woke up I felt anxious, but just needed to go to the mirror, talk to my subconscious as if it was a child, and show him that we still have a long road to go, but in a few hours there will be a generous breakfast. We're not dying of hunger anytime soon. The anxiety simply vanishes.
These days there's no feeding anxiety anymore, but the subconscious is a very interesting companion. Another night I dreamed that somehow I was at my intended goal, and I didn't know how that happened so fast, and then felt an overwhelming happiness because now I could eat at any hour again! I woke up, and said "Nice try, subconscious", and happily resumed my sleep.
> The doc basically said my latest bloods are outstanding
What was the change in blood reports?
I am surprised somone can simply reverse their 'serious' metabolic disease state in mere 6 months.
Then what would be the point of living a healthy lifestyle everyday if you can simply 'get healthy' in a matter of months when you need it.
I've wondered about this for a while. My friends don't give a shit about health and barely do any physical activity. They can get to 'outstanding' equivalent level in 6 months at the time of their choosing? That doesn't seem fair,lol.
Your body really doesn't want to be in some states (because you'll die) so certain markers/metabolic disease states like NAFLD and pre-T2D MetS will lower dramatically soon after the insult (chronic overfeeding) is stopped. RCTs have shown dramatic improvements in as little as a week or two. In my case, both my elevated AST and TG numbers halved a month into making significant lifestyle changes and almost all my bloodwork continued to improve dramatically into my next labs at 9mo and 1y.
That isn't to say there isn't accrued/long term damage, I think most people going through this sort of change will tell you that they are still dealing w/ health issues long term. I've notice that years after my initial interventions, my body still seems much more predisposed to weight gain for example - but trust me though, not feeling like crap is it's own reward. You can basically get used to anything and you don't really realize just how bad you were feeling (slowly getting worse over the course of a decade or so for me) until you turn it around.
Hey I'm really worried about sending out the wrong signal here, so let
me tell you it was not a picnic. NOT a picnic! But it was a walk
on the park, so to speak.
And I definitely wouldn't let myself go out of shape like that again
thinking it would be an easy ride home. Basically I stomped my A1C
almost in half, from 50 (knocking on the door of diabetic) down to 30
(complete remission to decent health) - so totally mullahed it. Doc
says that's at the limits of medical science, so I was pretty
chuffed. Need to maintain now with IF and regular workout.
What it cost me was:
IF, 12 or 18 hour sessions once (occasionally twice) per week.
Diet change to 80% plant based, more raw veg, nuts, fish
Setting a reminder to drink water
Walking 20 miles twice a week with a full pack (that's where most
people will wobble a bit).
Cold water sea swimming (you get used to it)
I added two tricks. One is to walk on sand. Other is replace lost
weight by stuffing a modular armour jacket with little sand bags in
the plate pockets. When I dropped from 95kg to 90kg I just added 5
kilos of sand and so on. This happens gradually. When you carry around
the weight you lost it keeps the calorie burn the same per mile and
really motivates you because you can literally feel how much lighter
you are when you take the vest off. Also you can just drop weight if
you get exhausted on a long yomp.
Yes I am lucky too. I live in a place with opportunity for outdoor
activity. Probably good metabolic genetics. Made time to do the health
work by dropping some contracts (I consider it an investment in myself
like college etc) Also I took the diagnosis seriously and researched
an action plan.
Oh yea for sure. I understand that you put in a lot of effort for the results that you mentioned.
> The doc basically said my latest bloods are outstanding
But I am not clear if you've had any lasting damage from the past or is everything is simply reversed. Is there anything that cannot be reversed with any amount of effort?
It's a mixed bag as I understand it. Some things recover quick and
some take much longer, many years of changed lifestyle.
It's got me more interested in health and biology for sure. The human
body is remarkably hackable.
Things like bone density and tendon health definitely change
slowly. Superficial organ fat, the most dangerous type, is apparently
the first thing to go, and you can get so it won't go on quickly
again. That's what the cold swimming is for, something to do with
types of fat metabolics. I think being overweight for a considerable
time (a few years) may have given me joint damage, knees maybe, but
TBH I've not pushed myself into injuries and I think it's all
strengthening well. I may move to some light strength training soon,
but I prefer bodyweight only. Getting to the state where you can even
do bodyweight, like 20 press-ups, is a great target.
If you're thinking about doing this... DO IT. I wish I could be beside
you on some long walks. Maybe talk to the doc first and set a
reasonable plan. But the fasting is not as hard as you think. After
the first couple times it gets old and you start to make friends with
hunger.
And what ever you improve, whether it's lasting or not, that's gotta
be good right?
>Then what would be the point of living a healthy lifestyle everyday if you can simply 'get healthy' in a matter of months when you need it.
Because the labs are just indicators of whether or not damage is being done.
If you have high LDL for example, disease state is correlated to how long, and how high LDL levels have been. (The evidence for that is robust.) So for example, while you can improve those levels in 6 months, that doesn't mean you weren't racking up damage for the previous 10 years.
This is a common thing with most health indicators actually: blood pressure, LDL, blood sugar, etc. End organ damage, and risk of adverse events are correlated to how high and how long levels were maintained.
This would get very specific to the organ systems involved, and starts to get above my understanding, but it'd be things like:
Coronary calcium scan to check for the progress of atherosclerosis in the coronary arteries, ultrasound of the kidneys, maybe the heart to check for left ventricular hypertrophy (or do you need an echocardiogram for that?), ultrasound for the carotid arteries, etc.
I find macro timing/restriction to be better in combating "hangryness", meals before 10am and after 4pm are protein and carb heavy and anything in between is higher protien and low or near zero carb. I used to 16:8 and 18:6 IF but Id just be too moody.
How do you get that measured? Don't think it's in the standard NHS
bloodwork men my age get as routine in UK. Does it show up in urine
for any OTC tests?
Due to a downvote I wish to reaffirm my position: I do see a somewhat warrior-mode-like side of people who are fasting. And I do find it to be beautiful. It’s not bad company.
I am always unsure how this applies to someone with an irregular exercise schedule. If, when fasting (intermittent) my exercise is primarily cardio then I will continue fasting. However if it is resistance training, does getting some protein into my system as soon as possible take priority over fasting? Or is this less important than the immediate-protein-shake crowd suggests? Should I try to pull the window forward if exercising early?
A few researchers, notably Alan Aragon and Brad Schoenfeld did a lot of analysis on protein timing research a while back and the general conclusion is that as long as you get enough protein during the course of the day (or within a few hours of your workout), basically it doesn't matter so much.
Sources:
Aragon, Alan Albert, and Brad Jon Schoenfeld. “Nutrient Timing Revisited: Is There a Post-Exercise Anabolic Window?” Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition 10 (January 29, 2013): 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/1550-2783-10-5.
Schoenfeld, Brad Jon, Alan Aragon, Colin Wilborn, Stacie L. Urbina, Sara E. Hayward, and James Krieger. “Pre- versus Post-Exercise Protein Intake Has Similar Effects on Muscular Adaptations.” PeerJ 5 (January 3, 2017): e2825. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2825.
Schoenfeld, Brad Jon, Alan Albert Aragon, and James W Krieger. “The Effect of Protein Timing on Muscle Strength and Hypertrophy: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition 10 (December 3, 2013): 53. https://doi.org/10.1186/1550-2783-10-53.
Schoenfeld, Brad Jon, and Alan Albert Aragon. “How Much Protein Can the Body Use in a Single Meal for Muscle-Building? Implications for Daily Protein Distribution.” Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition 15 (February 27, 2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12970-018-0215-1.
There are some interesting wrinkles (like Leucine intake in particular), and I'd recommend looking at what Stuart M Phillips and Donald K Layman have published as additional places to spelunk from for anyone that's particularly interested in the topic.
This makes more sense than "you have to eat protein within one hour from exercising". Why? Because wouldn't it take a lot longer for the protein to get digested in your body? Possibly many hours, depending on the source of protein. And if, after exercising, I'm still digesting protein I've eaten several hours earlier, what difference can it make if I add some more that will just get digested several hours later, provided that the total amount of protein is kept constant.
This has mostly arrived in the consensus of sports training. General advice is to have protein surplus in the 24 hours after training (if you train every day, like an athlete, that means every day).
Plus if you're training but want to lose at the same time, you need a caloric surplus for a while to have your muscle regenerate and grow, but it's totally possible to gain muscle and lose weight at the same time. But basically each calory that you're in deficit will make your muscles grow more slowly, so it's definitely harder than being on an overall surplus.
Yes Don Lyman's research has shown the same thing. Timing of protein consumption doesn't matter very much. The important thing is to consume a large bolus of at least 40g during a single meal rather than spreading it out in little snacks throughout the day.
After doing a 4 hour eating window for years eating at around maintenance and had some cheat meals over the weekend. It kind of kept my weight stable but my strength hardly increased so seems my anecdotal experience kind of seems to match that report.
I also heard somewhere it could take like 24~48 hours for all protein sources to be digested and extracted from your bloodstream so you might have like a constant amino acids drip into your bloodstream but i never really checked this.
I'll assume that your goal when drinking a protein shake/gaining muscle is to gain muscle. It's generally believed that a state of anabolism is generally viewed as being antagonistic to the body; too much protein/growth is taxing. Yet, having muscle is important for aging, and also acts as a glucose sink thereby improving metabolism. A balance has to be achieved.
> Or is this less important than the immediate-protein-shake crowd suggests?
From what I've read, this may be not as important as originally thought.
Overall, I believe the schedule that most holistically supports metabolism would be to exercise early and also eat early in the day. This would thereby keep the taxing metabolic activities aligned to your circadian clock, which expects a lot of early day stressors and fewer as the day progresses. This may be specifically true for protein which is especially metabolically taxing, so eating it early in the day is probably the time when it creates the most benefit at lowest risk.
Of course, people have to do what works for their schedules and lifestyles.
This is slightly contrary to what I’ve learned from Rhonda Patrick. Exercise in the morning, sure, but while still fasting from overnight (black coffee or plain tea ok… does not break the fast).
Eat after exercise so that your fast lasts longer. Also, cardio exercise blunts the hunger feeling in many people.
Here’s a piece of COMPLETELY anecdotal data, so do with it what you will. A friend with metabolic syndrome was struggling with weight despite intermittent fasting. She began to wear a continuous glucose monitor. She found that black coffee had the same effect as eating a donut, but if she added a boiled egg, the effect on her glucose was neutral.
Now, I don’t know what effect all that has on other metabolic processes. I doubt the effect is universal. But it is interesting that the revived wisdom about black coffee being okay is not universally true.
There's apparently some significant variation between people. Some don't see a glucose spike at all, some see it vanish if they consume protein first, and some see it regardless.
That's pretty crazy. I wonder if placebo effects played a role?
(Ie if you had pumped the liquid directly into her stomach, without telling her whether it's black coffee or some substitute, would the outcome still have been the same?)
The easy test would be to see if it's the caffeine having this affect by using switching between caf and decaf.
Something I wonder about though is that if blood glucose is rising after black coffee, that energy must becoming from somewhere. i.e. stored fat, stored glycogen or stored protein.
Given that she's about do some fasted exercise that will burn that blood glucose as its fuel source, is this a bad thing if the energy is coming from stored fat?
> Give that she's about do some fasted exercise that will burn that blood glucose as it's fuel source, is this a bad thing if the energy is coming from stored fat?
For a healthy person, this might be good. For someone with various health issues (like the person in question), I don't know.
A continuous glucose monitor checks the level of glucose in your blood. Glucose can be stored in your body as glycogen (e.g. in the liver, or muscle tissue).
Your pancreas produces glucagon, which influences the process of converting it back into glucose, released into your blood.
That's generally accepted basic science, but from my own anecdotal friends/family experience, the pancreas also seems like a pretty buggy organ generally, prone to glitches both temporary (like perhaps in this coffee drinker) and chronic (type 1 diabetes), leading to undefined behavior, crashes, and even fatally bricking the system permanently.
So this anecdote isn't particularly surprising to me.
(Also, for those reasons, I would definitely wear a continuous glucose monitor myself if it wasn't so expensive and difficult to arrange when you don't actually have anything known to be wrong with your blood sugar levels. I predict that within a decade or two, they will be a fairly ubiquitous piece of human body instrumentation, like the sleep-tracking wristwatches and rings we have today.)
This has been my schedule for my entire adult life, not because I read it, but simply because it felt the "best" for myself. I was never a big breakfast eater anyway, and I found fasted + black coffee exercise the best for myself personally in terms of energy, motivation and so on.
My girlfriend pretty consistently gives me grief about it, as it goes against what she's been taught/knew. But I've always felt better doing physical or mental effort fasted, at least for a few hours in the morning!
Yeah I'm not suggesting an order between the two. I think everything held constant, eating earlier is supposed to be better. I don't think there have been many studies where people stop eating at like, 10am, or something like that. That said, I think most studies that have shown benefit are those where people have like a 4-8 hour eating window from 6am-2pm, or are of that order.
But is there a difference between having your day's large meal at 8am or 11am? Those are both pretty 'early', so it might not matter; I don't think we know. However, as the day winds on, more data comes to light which suggests that earlier is better.
> more data comes to light which suggests that earlier is better.
I have not seen studies like that. All the ones I’ve seen have participants stop eating 3 hours (minimum) before sleep. For example, With an 8 hour eating window and 10:00 sleep, that means eating between 11:00-7:00 giving you a 16 hour fast.
Here is the study I am referring to [1]. As far as studies go, this one is fairly rigorous and of what I would consider to be high quality based on several factors related to the study design.
This study in particular looked at early TR (6am-2pm) vs mid afternoon (1pm-8pm) TR vs no TR; and early TR had the greatest metabolic benefits by a long shot:
> "Furthermore, eTRF (early TR), but not mTRF (mid-day TR), improved fasting glucose, reduced total body mass and adiposity, ameliorated inflammation, and increased gut microbial diversity. No serious adverse events were reported during the trial. In conclusion, eTRF showed greater benefits for insulin resistance and related metabolic parameters compared with mTRF"
Proteins have 4 calories per gram so if your usual post-workout protein intake would be 20-30g, it'd be 80-120 calories. YMMV but that would move me out of fast. The only calories I ingest during the fast is a little fat for vitamin D bioavailability in the morning.
My caloric window is 1-8pm and I exercise in the mornings with just a few essential amino-acids.
Protein thermic effect is 30% so amount of calories equal to ~30% of that coming from protein is burned to digest protein. You're burning calories, not protein, to digest protein. Those calories are already stored and don't necessarily have to come from protein digestion.
No. I do IF and lift heavy+cardio every early morning. I have progressively gotten stronger - benching over 330 and squatting well into the 400s.
Ive spent a lot of heartache and headache over research around these type of questions. The best answer is to learn what works best for your own body. Eat enough protein as a starter in any case.
I can't comment on fasting in particular, but as another comment pointed out, I think the idea that you need to immediately get protein before/during/after a workout is a bit overblown.
My understanding is that protein can be rate-limiting for hypertrophy if you don't have enough in general, but timing is not as largely important. I believe there is a rough window for anabolic signaling / net-positive muscle protein synthesis that lasts up to 48 hours after exercise
The 'anabolic window' has largely been disproven. Depending on your goals though, from a resistance training perspective you typically need to be in a caloric surplus (although not an excessive one) to put on muscle.
Don't sauna in the few days before you plan to conceive. Bikes, among other things, can also screw up your semen. It's not that uncommon, and it's only temporary
I remember reading that the reason that many doctors prescribe pills over a lifestyle change is that it is significantly easier to gain compliance.
I can imagine it's kind of like being a parent or manager. After advising perfect behavior and rarely getting it, you give up and settle for easy, less perfect but achievable advice.
does doctors prescribing lifestyle change have any noticeable effects though. I assume everyone already knows they need to 'eat better and exercise'. I am not convinced that doctor telling them this will finally make it sink in for anyone.
Also, most doctors have layman level understanding of nutrition and excercise and many of them are not in best shape themselves.
I've been trying to do this for years but I like my coffee with cream and sugar. I've tried various sugar/cream alternatives over the years but nothing really stuck. With coffee+lite cream + sugar I fast about 15 hrs a day. Am I getting any benefits at all?
I am the same way, except I just cream. Every time I have come across a discussion on this topic of having cream in your coffee while trying IF, the anecdata consensus is that any calories at all break your fast, so you are no longer fasting if you consume a small amount of cream/sugar.
Having said that, I still do 18/6 IF with cream in my coffee and in my personal experience I still feel great and have had many positive benefits from continuing IF.
To me, a 10-hr window (eg 8am-6pm) doesn’t seem restrictive or even mildly inconvenient (definitely not enough to classify as IF), so maybe the insight here is that people regularly eat across all their waking hours - and not doing that is better.
It is just how devolved our modern eating habits are, we are constantly snacking or eating garbage which makes us hungry soon after. Three solid meals a day, cooked at home with unprocessed food ought to be good enough to live a healthy life but for the people who go on all sorts of diets, food has long become an emotional thing so they need restrictive frameworks in place to help them not eat so much/eat junk food. I bet our ancestor never thought this hard about what to eat and when to eat.
Limiting eating to ten hours might be a stretch for some people's lives but it's a simple plan that is easy to understand.
TLDR - the study compared a ten hour window versus a fourteen hour window control group (and fasting in between).
Not sure how this study was designed; but it's been replicated probably dozens or hundreds of times that circadian-based eating schedules confer the best metabolic benefits. That is, the earlier the eating, the better the metabolic benefit. Although I have seen some data that suggests you should wait one hour before consuming your first meal (as you should wait for the cortisol spike from waking to taper).
No, all your eating happens in that 10 hour window. You fast for at least 14 hours per day. Easy enough if you eat an early dinner and don't snack after.
This seems like one of the things that makes it hard to test intermittent fasting: there are a bunch of variables other than just the length of the window.
If it's a 10 hour window presumably most people are eating multiple meals, but it's not really underspecified since you can eat whenever you want during that time.
There are other people doing 4 hour windows for IF in which case it's more like a single meal, but that's not what this study tested.
(This is just explaining the idea, not advocating IF)
There were already two very well designed RCTs of IF in the last two years in the context of weight loss, one in the form of alternate-day fasting, and the other of more traditional 8-16 TRF, and in both studies, the IF group saw no excess weight loss or cardiometabolic benefits vs. the continuously calorically restricted control, but the IF group did lose a disproportionate amount of weight from muscle instead of fat. From the 8-16 study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7522780/):
>In analysis of secondary outcomes, we found a significant reduction in lean mass in the TRE group. In the in-person cohort, the average weight loss in the TRE group was 1.70 kg. Of this, 1.10 kg (approximately 65% of weight lost) was lean mass; only 0.51 kg of weight loss was fat mass. Loss of lean mass during weight loss typically accounts for 20% to 30% of total weight loss.16,17,18,19,20,21,22 The proportion of lean mass loss in this study (approximately 65%) far exceeds the normal range of 20% to 30%.
These results were damning, and to such a degree that one of the study's lead authors, Ethan Weiss, who practiced IF himself and was in the study's IF intervention group, completely abandoned IF after the study's completion.
The ADF study is paywalled, but the results are similar (disproportionate loss of leanmass in the fasting group), and there's a good breakdown of it here: youtube.com/watch?v=HaZmhuonGIs
It's astounding how many HN brainlets still cling to this idiotic practice, and on the flimsiest of evidence. Probably the same brainlets who think saturated fat is healthy.
You are missing key informations here (see below). The study you linked is on obese people primarily aiming for weight loss, it’s absolutely not of good quality for judging IF because calories and protein intake are not matched between the groups, it’s more a study of if IF gives better satiety. Not really comparable to the one randomized on firefighters discussed here, which is of better quality overall especially for IF health benefits (main vs secondary objective in your linked study, randomized not only on obese people, no difference in meal compositions between groups) and so directly contradicts the decision of the lead researcher you cited to quit IF.
From the study you linked:
> Participants were randomized such that the consistent meal timing (CMT) group was instructed to eat 3 structured meals per day, and the time-restricted eating (TRE) group was instructed to eat ad libitum from 12:00 pm until 8:00 pm
> A follow-up study showed that when calorie intake and protein intake were matched to prestudy consumption, no change in lean mass was observed.
> Ad libitum feeding during TRE leads to reduced calorie intake and might also reduce protein intake.9 Together, these data highlight the importance of adequate protein consumption while adhering to a TRE diet. Many studies have shown that adequate/excessive protein consumption during weight loss can mitigate losses in lean mass.
> the IF group saw no excess weight loss or cardiometabolic benefits vs. the continuously calorically restricted control
It may be the case that these two processes lead to similar outcomes. But for me, it is much easier to stay faithful to an IF lifestyle than a "continuously calorically restricted" lifestyle. I find the binary aspect of the IF system to be very helpful. If the other system is easier for other folks to maintain, that's great, and they should do that.
But the fact that IF doesn't lead to better results than a different system doesn't mean that people who practice IF are clinging to an idiotic practice, as you put it.
> It may be the case that these two processes lead to similar outcomes. But for me, it is much easier to stay faithful to an IF lifestyle than a "continuously calorically restricted" lifestyle. I find the binary aspect of the IF system to be very helpful. If the other system is easier for other folks to maintain, that's great, and they should do that.
In the 8-16 IF study I linked to, the IF/TRE group actually had worse adherence:
> Self-reported adherence to the diets was 1002 of 1088 (92.1%) in the CMT group (did not miss any meals) and 1128 of 1351 (83.50%) in the TRE group
The fact that more people couldn't adhere to an IF plan than a the other plan isn't really relevant. It's easy for someone (like me) to be able to ascertain if it I am able to stick to IF, so it doesn't matter if other people find it harder. Like I said, if other people find the other plan easier to do, and also effective, then it makes sense for them to do it. I don't understand the name-calling, as if no rational person could choose IF.
I feel more awake when fasting. I feel sluggish and hungry if I eat breakfast. It's not ridiculous to skip breakfast. How is that idiotic ? I have top health markers for my age and do a variety of different types of physical sports. I think the old adage (still popular among powerlifters and bodybuilders) to eat every 3-4 hours to be completely stupid. We never evolved like that, it's a luxury modernity that this is even an option.
> We never evolved like that, it's a luxury modernity that this is even an option.
That's the brainletism I was referring to. You could have easily verified your assumption by looking at remaining hunter-gather populations, who serve as a good proxy for you ancestors, and had you done that, you would have discovered that--surprise, surprise--they don't fast:
You're overly confident in your tone and thin on details (and a written link goes further than a YouTube reference).
How in the world is a remaining hunter gatherer population in 2022 a proxy for what happened tens of thousands of years ago. That's an assumption you're expected to justify, first off.
Secondly, how is food abundance being modern a 'brainletism' or whatever you're enjoying repeating as a sort of provocation.
> and a written link goes further than a YouTube reference
That's an interview with Herman Pontzer, PhD, the lead author of the most import papers published to date studying the energy expenditure of the Hadza of Tanzania, one of the few remaining hunter-gather populations. By all means, keep believing that your ancestors subsisted off of 100% Woolly Mammoth meat in between days of starvation, if it makes you happy.
I mean, what weight was lost seems extremely important... let's say you lost the "as much weight" because your foot fell off... would that make the distinction more clear?
But there are mental "downsides" to reckon with.
It's not grumpiness, but rather a "predatory" state. Not quite aggression - a little more of the warrior mode circuits seems switched on. Plus general heightened emotion and general willingness to speak the truth, fight/defend others, take risks.... Working out how to deal with that and integrate it positively is my present challenge.
Anyone else getting that?