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Intermittent fasting works – not only for weight loss but also for heart health

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Intermittent fasting works – not only for weight loss but also for heart health

#161

Post by emiliobumachar »

jasonlfunk wrote: post #22

My experience with IF has taught me that I’m much better at complete denial, rather than moderation. So if I want to reduce my caloric intake it works better for me to say No to everything for 16 hours and only eat for 8, then to try to just eat less and in moderation all day. It also applies to carb and other reductions. If I allow myself any bread, sweets, etc, I will eat too much. It’s easier for me to eat 0, then…

Interesting. Maybe a normal moderation diet is analogous to an alcoholic trying to stay sober except for drinking half a pint three times a day.

Re: Intermittent fasting works – not only for weight loss but also for heart health

#162

Post by wmeredith »

jedimastert wrote: post #148
wmeredith wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> milk is really low on calories Excuse me? One cup of milk has about the same as, or a lot more, calories than a cup of Coca-Cola. 149 for whole milk (91 for skim). 98 for the coke.

The real question is how much milk are you putting in your coffee? Not a cup, I don't think. Although, full disclosure, I don't put milk in my coffee so I really wouldn't know...

I drink my coffee black. I thought the statement that milk was low on calories was odd.

Re: Intermittent fasting works – not only for weight loss but also for heart health

#163

Post by phonypc »

lloeki wrote: post #84
cachestash wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I eat about 1200 calories Do you have a medical condition? that's a lot of calories to take on for Breakfast, that's almost half my daily quota.

A typical cereal serving is 45g, which is a very small volume, the box I have in front of me tight now tells me it’s 250kcal. It’s super easy to eat muuuuch more than that because carbs are so satisfying they’re downright addictive. Two bowls of cereals can fly very quickly into one’s belly, pour in some milk and the tally easily crosses the 1000kcal mark.

That's either some strangely fatty cereal, or it's already factoring in some milk. 45g of pure sugar is only 180 kcal.

Re: Intermittent fasting works – not only for weight loss but also for heart health

#164

Post by wmeredith »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #48
AnonC wrote: post #10

> How do you start? Agatston told me to start by skipping one meal a day, usually breakfast. (Yes, you can have black coffee in the morning, into which he adds ghee, a type of clarified butter, and coconut oil to reduce hunger pangs. It’s not your typical cup of coffee.) This may be ok to start with, though black coffee by itself has the ability to kill hunger without these crutches. Adding ghee or coconut oil in bla…

> This may be ok to start with, though black coffee by itself has the ability to kill hunger without these crutches. I always wonderered how much ok it really was. Dreaking coffee will activate some digistive processes, and make the liver work. So you are not exactly fasting. I never could find a study comparing with, and without coffee.

You're still fasting because it doesn't affect your blood sugar. That's why you can drink black coffee, tea, or water when fasting for surgery.

Re: Intermittent fasting works – not only for weight loss but also for heart health

#165

Post by loceng »

softwarejosh wrote: post #157
loceng wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is often not acknowledged or even mentioned is that many people have difficulty with fasting because they are addicted to food - either addicted because of euphoric and opiate numbing effects that wheat specifically can cause, or from the numbing of sugar and carbohydrates - as inflammation has a depressant effect on the nervous system. The addiction to food is also self-medicating. If people don't realize this…

where do you get this claim that cancer grows better during fasting, all the data ive found suggests the opposite

Oops, I could have worded that more clearly.

"Likewise there are bacterial infections that will benefit from fasting, cutting off their food supply greatly - much like why fasting can be beneficial for cancer growth"

The benefit is to the person, not to the bacteria or the cancer - or negative benefit to the bacteria, cancer.

Re: Intermittent fasting works – not only for weight loss but also for heart health

#166

Post by BiteCode_dev »

wmeredith wrote: post #164
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This may be ok to start with, though black coffee by itself has the ability to kill hunger without these crutches. I always wonderered how much ok it really was. Dreaking coffee will activate some digistive processes, and make the liver work. So you are not exactly fasting. I never could find a study comparing with, and without coffee.

You're still fasting because it doesn't affect your blood sugar. That's why you can drink black coffee, tea, or water when fasting for surgery.

I heard this, but I can't find any study measuring the differences seriously.

Fasting has various effect, not all of them are linked to the sugar consumption.

Re: Intermittent fasting works – not only for weight loss but also for heart health

#167

Post by dghughes »

tomp wrote: post #108
downerending wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably correct, in that losing a lot of weight greatly improved his health. That said, losing weight is freaking difficult, and if intermittent fasting is a path towards that, it'd be very useful. I've done a lot of fasting. The results seem pretty good. Pulling it off is non-trivial. At this point, we need "magical", because nothing else has really seemed to work in general for losing weight. (And no, didn'…

Weight loss is in theory very simple - just eat less. In practice, however, doing that is extremely hard (for a lot of people), as it goes against our upbringing and evolutionary and social pressures. The key of any weight-loss diet is that it somehow hacks our brain so that we end up eating less. But everyone’s brain is different, so different hacks work (or not) for different people. That’s why you have so many die…

Not eating was easy for me even as a teen, 20s, and 30s. I found eating a necessity and that's it. That didn't mean I was eating healthy food but small amounts of anything. For me going a day or two without eating was easy. I didn't do it to lose weight and I never did lose weight I was a consistent 150lbs from early teens to my early 40s.

But then in my 40s my thyroid failed and I have hypothyroidism. I suspect it was failing for a decade maybe a bit less. I should say my thyroid was working less not really failing since that takes a while to notice rather than an outright failure.

Now I consistently weigh 40 pounds more than I did all my life. I was always the slim guy who never gained weight. Now I have to fight the urge to eat food when I am not hungry. It feels like I need something to reset my clock or reboot my programming.

Re: Intermittent fasting works – not only for weight loss but also for heart health

#168

Post by londons_explore »

Roritharr wrote: post #30
jasonlfunk wrote: post #22

My experience with IF has taught me that I’m much better at complete denial, rather than moderation. So if I want to reduce my caloric intake it works better for me to say No to everything for 16 hours and only eat for 8, then to try to just eat less and in moderation all day. It also applies to carb and other reductions. If I allow myself any bread, sweets, etc, I will eat too much. It’s easier for me to eat 0, then…

Same here, years of people telling me drastic diets are "unhealthy" etc. kept me from playing to my strengths of just doing the extremes for long periods of time instead of fighting constant urges while balancing them with a moderate calorie intake. I think most (healthy) people should try fasting for 5 days to see how your body responds. It won't kill you, but many people are terrified of the thought of not eating f…

Lots of people I speak to seem scared of accidentally loosing too much weight and starving to death...

I don't really understand it though... Between 'too heavy' and 'too light' exists 'just right', and it's pretty hard to miss...

Re: Intermittent fasting works – not only for weight loss but also for heart health

#169

Post by slothtrop »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #135
jasonlfunk wrote: post #22

My experience with IF has taught me that I’m much better at complete denial, rather than moderation. So if I want to reduce my caloric intake it works better for me to say No to everything for 16 hours and only eat for 8, then to try to just eat less and in moderation all day. It also applies to carb and other reductions. If I allow myself any bread, sweets, etc, I will eat too much. It’s easier for me to eat 0, then…

My problem is, I still would have 8 hours in which I must exercise restraint. Packing away 4k calories in a single meal is trivially easy. There is no way to avoid the need for restraint and moderation.

This must depend highly on where your calories come from, because for most people it really isn't that easy. Even bodybuilders will switch to liquid diets to try to pack that much away. If you're consuming lean protein, fibrous vegetables, nuts and pulses, 4000 calories in a sitting is far more difficult. Think of how many apples you can eat in a sitting, and consider that a single apple is 52 calories.

Re: Intermittent fasting works – not only for weight loss but also for heart health

#170

Post by tim333 »

chx wrote: post #5

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/esoe-cif0516... warns you intermittent fasting diets could increase diabetes risk. I wish I had data from before but after I attempted intermittent fasting I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. It's possible I had it before, I alas haven't had blood work done for a few years prior. I changed my diet, never attempted fasting again and the 6.8 HbA1c dropped to and stayed…

That link doesn't seem to have much evidence, just some speculation that it might increase risk.

There was a small study here where:

>recruited three men, ages 40 to 67, with type 2 diabetes ...

>Eighteen days into the study, all three men lost 10 to 18 percent of their body weight, trimmed their waist circumferences, no longer had to take insulin, and reduced their oral medication. (Two of the three men completely got off their medication during this time frame.) https://www.everydayhealth.com/type-2-diabetes/diet/intermit...

So hopefully it's ok though n=3 is not many.

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