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The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less

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Re: The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience the only intermittent fadting pattern that works is to eat your food later. If you try to eat 2000 calorie lunches, you'll have major lethargy in the afternoon and insomnia from hunger in the evening. Better to use hunger as a driver during the day, then gorge and go to sleep at night.

> Better to use hunger as a driver during the day, then gorge and go to sleep at night. Is this just a guess you are making, or do you have research or citations to back up this advice?

OP wrote "in my experience".

Re: The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less

#172
post #61

My father has had a low calorie diet all of his life. At 78, he is in perfect physical and mental condition. His doctor had only one concern; he is slowly losing weight each year and needs to reverse that. The doctor wanted to prescribe an appetite enhancing drug but my father explained he can not simply gain weight by eating more. It's as if his digestive system is already at a maximum threshold. I wonder if habitua…

Does your father do any resistance training? He should. Strength training stops muscle loss and improves bone density.

That's not the easiest thing to just pick up at 78.

Re: The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less

#173
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree with this. However it's not because it's aggressive. It's because he's recommending eating at all. When you eat very little, your body's metabolism drops to match the new standard energy intake. A much preferable recommendation would be to simply water fast for the same time. Lose even more weight (mostly water weight), then eat normally. Much more natural in the context of evolution. Periods of eatin…

I've found that I can manage a day without taking in any calories, if I'm willing to feel really tired and have a moderate headache by ~1pm, and be horribly brain-fogged and useless by ~2pm. I've got a job and kids to take care of—I can't afford to have days like that very often. The hunger's not a problem—it's that I feel rather ill by mid-afternoon. FWIW I rarely eat breakfast, so I guess I'm usually doing the (lam…

The reason you feel sick is because you're body isn't used to the shift from carbohydrates for energy and ketones as energy (body fat). You get brain fog because only fat in the form of ketones can cross the blood brain barrier. So adaptation to ketones are vital. You need to work into it. No different from exercise, or climate adaptation.

Having cold showers shifts your body into using ketones more and more.

Regarding not eating breakfast, watch these videos from FoundMyFitness:

Dr. Satchin Panda on Time-Restricted Feeding and Its Effects on Obesity, Muscle Mass and Heart Health

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R-eqJDQ2nU

Ruth Patterson, Ph.D. on Time-Restricted Eating in Humans & Breast Cancer Prevention

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qlrB84xp5g

Time restricted eating, AKA your 16/8, is VERY important. Even if you don't immediately notice changes. Those changes could begin to occur 2 to 8 years later. Depending on adherence. Also based on Dr. Ruth Patterson's advice, skipping breakfast leads to eating late into the night, which is not good for your health generally.

Re: The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less

#174
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. Fair enough. Allow me to clarify. I was speaking of norm for the body, not norm of what most people do. In any case, my point was "restriction" isn't a restriction if you're over-consuming to begin with. It's a language/communication issue. Telling people to reduce (when they think they're normal") is, imho, the wrong message. We've normalized obesity by, to some extent, allowing people to believe obesity is perf…

> I was speaking of norm for the body, not norm of what most people do. In any case, my point was "restriction" isn't a restriction if you're over-consuming to begin with. It's a language/communication issue. Telling people to reduce (when they think they're normal") is, imho, the wrong message. We've normalized obesity by, to some extent, allowing people to believe obesity is perfectly normal. Almost no one actually…

"Almost no one actually thinks obesity is normal. a very small set of people argue it's healthy, but that is a tiny minority."

Tiny? Lol

Jokes aside, I see it differently. Much.

First, look around. Obesity is normalized. Those less so, look around and think "I'm okay...Look at that guy/gal..." We (speaking for the USA) got here because humans do what they do. In this case, they define norm by what they see.

I'm not concerned about those who argue it's healty. My concern is those who do not. Think of the current politics and healthcare. NO ONE brings up the fact that if we prevented what we could prevent, there'd be money for real illness.

As it is, we have fat people eating donuts, drinking milk by the gallon, and complaining about their premiums. That would be funny, if it wasn't so absurd.

Re: The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less

#175
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. Fair enough. Allow me to clarify. I was speaking of norm for the body, not norm of what most people do. In any case, my point was "restriction" isn't a restriction if you're over-consuming to begin with. It's a language/communication issue. Telling people to reduce (when they think they're normal") is, imho, the wrong message. We've normalized obesity by, to some extent, allowing people to believe obesity is perf…

> I was speaking of norm for the body, not norm of what most people do. In any case, my point was "restriction" isn't a restriction if you're over-consuming to begin with. It's a language/communication issue. Telling people to reduce (when they think they're normal") is, imho, the wrong message. We've normalized obesity by, to some extent, allowing people to believe obesity is perfectly normal. Almost no one actually…

Re: inflammation

Perhaps. But do you have a better term for "completely fucking over your normal body processes"?

I was using inflammation as a generic term for "disrupting the baseline." Sorry. You're correct. I'll try to be more particular next time.

Thanks.

Re: The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less

#176
post #121

A few thoughts. It seems that "calorie restriction" is a misleading term. If these funds are correct, CR should be considered the norm/ideal. That means the majority, currently, over-consume. That aside. I wonder if it's also related to modern food, and the production there of. If inflammation is the root of most disease, and CR, I presume, reduces inflammation, then what is it about our foods that trigger so much in…

> If inflammation is the root of most disease Reminds me of a quote in one of Heinlein's books, that all forms of death could ultimately be described as heart failure.

Funny.

But do note I did say "If..."

Re: The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less

#177
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. Fair enough. Allow me to clarify. I was speaking of norm for the body, not norm of what most people do. In any case, my point was "restriction" isn't a restriction if you're over-consuming to begin with. It's a language/communication issue. Telling people to reduce (when they think they're normal") is, imho, the wrong message. We've normalized obesity by, to some extent, allowing people to believe obesity is perf…

> I was speaking of norm for the body, not norm of what most people do. In any case, my point was "restriction" isn't a restriction if you're over-consuming to begin with. It's a language/communication issue. Telling people to reduce (when they think they're normal") is, imho, the wrong message. We've normalized obesity by, to some extent, allowing people to believe obesity is perfectly normal. Almost no one actually…

> I don't believe there's actually any evidence for the claim that inflammation is the root issue for most disease.

There is growing evidence that it is in the chain of causality for lots of diseases where it has previously not been thought of, and that lots of inflammatory conditions seem to be linked manifestations of common systemic causes rather than localised inflammation with unrelated causes.

This does get overplayed sometimes into “everything starts with inflammation”.

Re: The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less

#178
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was speaking of norm for the body, not norm of what most people do. In any case, my point was "restriction" isn't a restriction if you're over-consuming to begin with. It's a language/communication issue. Telling people to reduce (when they think they're normal") is, imho, the wrong message. We've normalized obesity by, to some extent, allowing people to believe obesity is perfectly normal. Almost no one actually…

Re: inflammation Perhaps. But do you have a better term for "completely fucking over your normal body processes"? I was using inflammation as a generic term for "disrupting the baseline." Sorry. You're correct. I'll try to be more particular next time. Thanks.

> I was using inflammation as a generic term for "disrupting the baseline."

You've lumped literally all illnesses together (anything that disrupts the baseline) and referred to them as "inflammation". This is exactly what I'm criticizing. Inflammation in this context is a meaningless term used to give an appearance of medicine to pseudoscience.

Re: The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less

#179

I checked out the recipes on the iDiet website recommended in the article, and I'm feeling sad and deprived just reading them. I'm willing to suffer for better health, but I'd hate to suffer through a life of egg whites and margarine and then discover in the end that the science was wrong.

I'm surprised that no one mentioned it here already but the whole article smells of submarine marketing[0]. A short back story about calorie reduction then some science and then they casually mention Susan Roberts which uses a tool called iDiet. When you visit the website you will see that Dr. Susan Roberts is the one who created this iDiet tool so... yeah

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Re: The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less

#180
post #76

Good overview of the benefits of calorie restriction, but doesn't touch on two of the most important schools of thought of the past couple years. 1. Calorie restriction is almost impossible for most humans to follow long term 2. Many of the same benefits of calorie restriction may be achievable through intermittent fasting, which is much easier for people to follow. I've been experimenting with a daily 16 hour fast (…

> Many of the same benefits of calorie restriction may be achievable through intermittent fasting, which is much easier for people to follow. I've been experimenting with a daily 16 hour fast Citation? I can't get the NIH study to load, but the other two are wildly different from 16/8 IF. IF proponents like to look at alternate day fasting or periodic weekly fasting and claim evidence for the effectiveness of 16/8 fa…

16/8 is not just skipping breakfast: it's also not eating anything (or drinking anything calorie rich) in the evening after dinner, which is a common practice for many people. It's also not eating anything between the skipped breakfast and lunch. In other words: it cuts down on snacking and alcohol.

That intermittent fasting has many of the same benefits of calorie restriction is obvious if you realize that people practicing intermittent fasting usually do not compensate the lost calories in other meals. So they effectively calorie restrict. Often that is even the main goal.

  I have never seen a study that indicated 16/8 had effects 
  similar to 24/24
It's well known when the body goes into the fasted state: after at most 12 hours. So 16/8 gives you at least 4 hours in that state, vs. 12 hours for 24/24. In addition to that there is the calorie restriction. It would be surprising if 16/8 did not confer much of the same benefits as other forms of intermittent fasting.
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