A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012) • Hacker News Board

Re: A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012)

#171

Post by gingericha » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 4:42 PM UTC

HumanReadable wrote: post #126

lr4444lr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, it boggles my mind how someone can eat even a modest amount of fruits, veg., legumes, and whole grains alongside a generally healthful (not necessarily low fat, but healthful) diet and stay overweight. Not all of those foods every day necessarily, but I ran the numbers, and it just doesn't add up. Every chronically overweight person I know, once I know them well enough, seems to be putting down 500 kcal./da…

Go try dramatically changing your weight and see how it makes you feel. For the record I've never been obese, I'm in excellent shape and lift weights ~5 times a week. When bulking, eating enough calories to increase by weight by 25% requires significant effort. Similarly when I have do my cuts I find it incredibly difficult to get down to 10-12% body-fat. My body clearly has a weight it wants to be at, and deviating…

Maybe a better phrasing is "the body becomes accustomed to a certain size"?

Re: A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012)

#172

Post by dhimes » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

01100011 wrote: post #154

dhimes wrote: post #128

Once again I'll post my contra-indications. I tried intermittent fasting twice; the second time I got my doc to go along with ordering a second blood test after six months. My glucose and cholesterol were both worse . I gained a few points. FWIW, I skipped breakfast most of my adult life, but after having kids (well, my wife actually birthed them) I remained overweight. Exercising and using fitbit to monitor calories…

When I was exercising a lot(30-60 miles going per week) I unintentionally did time restricted eating and it seemed to work well for me. I tried it again years later while only doing moderate exercise and it caused me to start falling asleep after meals while I didn't see any positive effects like weight control. It took months to recover from the post meal sleepiness. Time restricted eating isn't, to my knowledge, we…

I tried it when I saw a recommendation from the (US) National Academy of Sciences to look into it more because the anecdata looked promising. I agree with you: The result of looking into it more doesn't seem as good as the promise.

Re: A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012)

#173

Post by rockdiesel » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

prometheus76 wrote: post #61

jstx1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the OG post that kicked off the intermittent fasting trend ... 2010 The Warrior Diet book came out in 2001 and it had quite a following in the 2000s. It wasn't exactly IF but it was still focused on eating most of your food once a day in the evening.

Warrior Diet recommended for your dinner meal to be a meat and vegetable stew of some kind most of the time.

I'll admit it's been 15 years since I originally read Warrior Diet, but I thought it advocated a massive salad as the first part of your dinner followed by the protein source? I don't recall much mention of stew in the book, but like I said it's been ages since I read it. Not challenging you. Just curious since it has been so long since I read it and I'm trying to jog my memory.

Re: A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012)

#174

Post by jsnodlin » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

xhkkffbf wrote: post #165

ssharp wrote: post #153

I've found that the 2 meals per day, eating lunch and dinner and then not eating again for 16 hours, is by far the easiest "diet" I've ever followed. It doesn't really disrupt any cultural norms around eating dinner (especially important with kids and getting that time together every night), doesn't require too much movement in terms of food you eat, and is very simple to follow. I think it can also have a bit of a f…

I find that it helps to drink several glasses of water in the morning. Many times, the body is more thirsty than hungry. Then I have no trouble making it to lunch.

No post body was provided.

Re: A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012)

#175

Post by xtracto » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

dhimes wrote: post #128

Once again I'll post my contra-indications. I tried intermittent fasting twice; the second time I got my doc to go along with ordering a second blood test after six months. My glucose and cholesterol were both worse . I gained a few points. FWIW, I skipped breakfast most of my adult life, but after having kids (well, my wife actually birthed them) I remained overweight. Exercising and using fitbit to monitor calories…

This is the one thing you don't see in all those analysis about intermitent fasting: Hard data about cholesterol, triglyceride and other blood levels. It would be good to have a large randomized trial with say 16/8 no-breakfast fasting which monitors those numbers.

Re: A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012)

#176

Post by telchior » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

thoughtpeddler wrote: post #124

gilbetron wrote: post #106

Just started doing this (again) two weeks ago and am down 4 lbs already. All I do is skip breakfast, and be a little aware not to gorge when lunch/dinner comes around, and then stop snacks (other than maybe a pickle or something) after dinner. It really depends on the person, for my wife, she just calorie counts and can shed the pounds with little problem. I can't stand being constantly hungry and not eating until I'…

It's remarkable (or maybe not?) how much of a similar experience I've had with my own diet, in relation to my wife. It's the exact same narrative between us -- she needs breakfast every morning, whereas for me I'm used to just skipping it. When I join my wife on a daily breakfast schedule, I feel like I'm just needlessly eating food when I know I don't have to. But for her, her mood palpably worsens within an hour or…

I'm on the opposite side of this with my wife. She can go 5-6 hours after waking up without food. I can... but it feels miserable and like my brain doesn't really start working until I eat.

On the flipside, I can eat my last meal of the day and go 7-8 hours without food until I sleep. She can't, though; she'll get severe hunger pangs or be light-headed.

So it seems like I should have breakfast + lunch, while she should have lunch + dinner. But being out of sync like that is unbelievably annoying in a relationship where you share / eat the same foods.

Re: A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012)

#177

Post by telchior » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

gingericha wrote: post #171

HumanReadable wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go try dramatically changing your weight and see how it makes you feel. For the record I've never been obese, I'm in excellent shape and lift weights ~5 times a week. When bulking, eating enough calories to increase by weight by 25% requires significant effort. Similarly when I have do my cuts I find it incredibly difficult to get down to 10-12% body-fat. My body clearly has a weight it wants to be at, and deviating…

Maybe a better phrasing is "the body becomes accustomed to a certain size"?

The accepted term for that idea is body weight set point. It's still a theory, but a lot of people attempting to lose weight seem to independently discover the idea as they rubber-band quickly back to their pre-diet weight.

Re: A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012)

#178

Post by telchior » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 5:39 PM UTC

farcaster wrote: post #162

This might be an individual reaction to fasting, but I always have headaches when I don't eat properly (skip meals, etc). Is this something that I would have to get used to when eating less?

Could be hypoglycemia, which has been linked to headaches.

One thing I've observed from going on / off IF several times is that trying to jump straight into the full fasting window can cause problems. If you normally eat on a 12/12 schedule, for instance, and try to switch straight to 16/8, your body will not appreciate it.

Try very gradually building up to the window -- add another 10 or 15 minutes between meals each day.

Re: A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012)

#179

Post by vidarh » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

sasawpg wrote: post #159

vidarh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of calories burned, most people in office jobs will fit firmly within ranges usually given for sedentary people. It takes a lot of physical activity outside of working hours to make up for an office job. E.g. for me, an hour of high intensity exercise five days a week still placed me firmly in the sedentary range. Part of the issue is that we tend to "forget" about the hours spent at work when evaluati…

I haven't really looked at sedentary ranges, can you point me to the guideline you reference? Are they based on calories burned during an activity, amount of activity, time in HR zones? As for intensity exercises, unless you actually measure your activity it will be difficult to estimate exactly how much time you're active inside of your hour exercise. I would guess a lot of people will over-estimate how much active…

It's been a long time since a looked at it in any detail, but a quick search for "calories burned sedentary" gave me a page full of calculators and estimates.

Looking quickly at a few of them, they mostly have tdee estimates for my age now that were still to high for me at the peak of my exercise fitness a decade ago... That includes the calculators trying to take weight and height into account.

The issue is that most of these are repeating and deriving categories based on guidelines set at points in time when a much larger proportion of the population had jobs that involved physical exertion.

And so you can be much more active than average for todays population and still be considered sedentary relative to the activity levels assumed in guidelines.

E.g. the UK NHS guideline of 2500 kcal for an average male would take me adding a couple of hours of walking during the day to reach despite exercising more than average...

And I'm sure you're right that people's failure to estimate their activity when they are exercising or being active is also a big part of it.

Re: A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012)

#180

Post by vidarh » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #160

sasawpg wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't really looked at sedentary ranges, can you point me to the guideline you reference? Are they based on calories burned during an activity, amount of activity, time in HR zones? As for intensity exercises, unless you actually measure your activity it will be difficult to estimate exactly how much time you're active inside of your hour exercise. I would guess a lot of people will over-estimate how much active…

I think it is even more complicated. When I was having after work activities that required me to walk to places, load/unload shelves, water the garden etc, I started loosing weight more then when exercising. And all those activities were not intensive at all. I was moving little bit a lot of time, basically. Same goes when I go for hikes in summer. I am loosing weight, but I am walking at comfortable pace max. I did…

Wearing a Fitbit 24/7 was enlightening in terms of seeing how little activity it takes to get a fairly substantial increase in heart rate, so yeah, just amlittle more activity sustained over hours can make a huge difference.