Does “skipping meals make you live longer”? • Hacker News Board

Re: Does “skipping meals make you live longer”?

#61

Post by Spivak » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 8:30 PM UTC

cheese_van wrote: post #58

Spivak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just describing how nutritionalists help people. You can of course apply the scientific method yourself without them but the reason you pay them to borrow their knowledge and experience to help you minimize the number of experiments you have to do to find "your" diet.

What I found interesting about adopting a diet was how it changed my perception of shopping for food. When I now walk into a modern well-stocked supermarket, it's shocking (now) that the vast majority of their inventory is useless and harmful (or at least to me). Vast isles of delicious utter crap. Crap in bags, crap in cans, colorful packaged crap wherever you turn. Food that will kill you given time enough. Is ther…

Right?! It’s crazy how much shelf space is devoted to junk food. But I don’t think it’s quite as bad as you’re making out. As long as you stick to “ingredients”, whether they’re canned, jarred, frozen, whatever, you’re pretty safe. Like I’m going through the aisles and yeah you have to avoid a bunch of whole aisles devoted to “processed” foods but that’s certainly not the majority of my grocery store.

Re: Does “skipping meals make you live longer”?

#62

Post by mzs » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

taylodl wrote: post #60

mzs wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes, that fasting regimen is a recipe for gall stones in ten years. Maybe seek a second medical opinion.

You've piqued my curiosity - how is this fasting regimen a recipe for gall stones?

first google result^ for: fasting gallstones

> Fasting decreases gallbladder movement, which causes the bile to become overconcentrated with cholesterol.

^ https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas....

Re: Does “skipping meals make you live longer”?

#63

Post by fouc » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 10:26 PM UTC

rajup wrote: post #30

fouc wrote: post #24

> This suggests that fasting might have negatively affected the health of the mice, to cause less benefit than simple calorie restriction at the same body weight did. This doesn't make sense. He's comparing 28% lifespan increase on calorie-restriction vs 11% on fasted, and then wildly jumping to "fasted is NEGATIVELY healthy" Fasting is a helluva lot easier than calorie-restriction, and I'd take a gain of +11% lifesp…

Yeah agreed, that Twitter thread is weird. Sinclair promoting his company does seem like a conflict of interest as far as his tweets are concerned, but the claims in this Twitter thread were equally all over the place.

Yeah, good point about that conflict of interest

Re: Does “skipping meals make you live longer”?

#64

Post by motohagiography » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 12:31 AM UTC

aviancrane wrote: post #54

motohagiography wrote: post #40

It's hard to reconcile this with personal anecdata, although it probably works because of behavioural side effects and not because of direct metabolic ones. I dropped 35lbs in 6 months using IF/OMAD, but I could easily attribute the ~6 lbs/mo weight loss to just applying any discipline at all to eating habits. It's a bit of a magic feather. I compare IF to religious people tithing a percentage of their income, where…

There's a slippery slope us STEM people fall into sometimes, where we step-out a level of abstraction and say that all instances of that abstraction were actually just the abstraction itself. I can step-out of any diet or behavior change and just say that if CaloriesIn But there are context-specific benefits to different implementations. I'm not saying you're wrong; you're right; but you don't want to end up stuck in…

Hah, your depression is my manic.:) This objects and morphisms analogy (the ur-analogy, really) is just a fast path for analysis, but artifacts in-and-of analysis are definitely a thing, sample bias in methods, etc. Depression thinking to me is described by Sapolsky's "aggression turned inward," whereas if you wanted to change your own behaviour (like eating) into something goal oriented like weight loss, having a magic feather isn't a bad thing. Magic feather militancy is its own problem, but I think it's generally true that we're wired to believe whatever preserves the idea of self, and whether our beliefs are real or not has no bearing on our attachment to them.

That said, thinking about how to manage eating is alien to my personality, so the OMAD habit is a way to eat for pleasure while cultivating one less comorbidity.

Re: Does “skipping meals make you live longer”?

#65

Post by cudgy » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 6:37 AM UTC

padobson wrote: post #21

Diet science is chaos. What we all need is not another fad diet or fasting strategy or super food, but rather a process that looks like a flowchart so an individual can achieve certain goals. I'd be shocked if we ever found a one-size-fits-all diet, but there should be some kind of process to design a good diet specific to an individual, using feedback from measurements like weight, blood sugar, vitamin levels, energ…

Sounds like the process of an oligoantigenic diet.

Almost everyone could benefit from it, but it is not an easy diet process to follow. Much can be learned from it though.

Re: Does “skipping meals make you live longer”?

#66

Post by maximus-decimus » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

jasonmclaren wrote: post #56

maximus-decimus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can basically ignore the effect of your intestinal worm and whatever else by just calculating yourself the amount of calories you need to keep the same weight. Eat 2000 calories and lose 1 pound per week? your baseline is ~2500 calories. Gained a pound? your baseline is ~1500 calories. The fact you don't absorb it all doesn't change the principle in any way. It just mean you need to recalibrate. But since you can…

I would echo this general idea of recalibrating, and add a refinement. Instead of believing the process and waiting for months to see if it works, you can weigh yourself every day and look at the moving average. That will let you ignore the natural daily fluctuations, but still give you regular feedback. In my experience, that regular feedback really helps with the motivation to keep doing the calorie counting.

I did that, but even then it takes weeks if not months to get a good idea from my experience. Basically, my weight would vary by 2 pounds, but i was aiming at losing 1 pound per week, so it took at least 2 weeks before my progress wouldn't get lost in the noise.

I've also heard the argument it's worse for women because weight changes with the menstrual cycles, so then you really have to look at the very least one month of data.