Eating in 10-hour window can override disease-causing genetic defects

I picked it up from Martin Berkhan's leangains. It was a lot easier than counting calories for long term maintenance, and it kept the lard off. It made sense to me from an evolutionary point of view; cavemen don't eat "3 square meals" before attacking wooly mammoths, and virtually every religion in the world includes a rigorous fasting period, which, IMO emulates hunter gatherer eating patterns.

For me, the main side effect is I feel a lot more alert, and I waste less time during the day, as preparing and eating food takes up less of it. You know that sleepy feeling you get after a huge breakfast or lunch that makes you reach for an extra cup of coffee? It is no longer a problem. Hunger pangs were an issue for the first two days I did this, and haven't been since then. Oh yeah, and I also feel REALLY FULL when I've eaten too much. Keeping your gut empty from time to time helps you to self regulate.

I think I won the genetic lottery as far as aging goes, and I exercise and try to not eat too much junk food, but "so far so good."

and here's what happened when Panda tracked actual humans - "Even though the participants didn’t change the content of their diet, Panda confirms that reducing the hours they ate resulted in the reduction of about 20 percent of calories, which may be one reason why they were able to lose weight."

So it's the calories after all. Regardless, if any technique (well, almost any) helps you cut calories without having to 'count' them, then that's still a win!

It's actually not as hard as you think for experimental design to show strong causitive effects - I think randomized controlled trials (in animal and then human models) and meta-analysis are much more effective than epidemiological studies (which don't have effective controls, often don't appropriately correct for other factors, or are specific enough to target specific lines of inquiry and allow spurious conclusions to be drawn).

I've just started doing my own research digging through the literature in PubMed and there's a huge amount of research over the past decade especially that's really advanced our understanding of nutrition and metabolism (that sadly, has yet to get full traction in conventional wisdom/popular science).

Just a few examples from my collection on fasting (at this point I'm tracking hundreds of publications covering a whole range of different aspects of nutritional science, and this is only over the course of a couple weeks of research):

Nørrelund, Helene, K. Sreekumaran Nair, Jens Otto Lunde Jørgensen, Jens Sandahl Christiansen, and Niels Møller. “The Protein-Retaining Effects of Growth Hormone During Fasting Involve Inhibition of Muscle-Protein Breakdown.” Diabetes 50, no. 1 (January 1, 2001): 96–104. https://doi.org/10.2337/diabetes.50.1.96.

Bhutani, Surabhi, Monica C. Klempel, Reed A. Berger, and Krista A. Varady. “Improvements in Coronary Heart Disease Risk Indicators by Alternate-Day Fasting Involve Adipose Tissue Modulations.” Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.) 18, no. 11 (November 2010): 2152–59. https://doi.org/10.1038/oby.2010.54.

Harvie, Michelle N., Mary Pegington, Mark P. Mattson, Jan Frystyk, Bernice Dillon, Gareth Evans, Jack Cuzick, et al. “The Effects of Intermittent or Continuous Energy Restriction on Weight Loss and Metabolic Disease Risk Markers: A Randomised Trial in Young Overweight Women.” International Journal of Obesity (2005) 35, no. 5 (May 2011): 714–27. https://doi.org/10.1038/ijo.2010.171.

Chaix, Amandine, Amir Zarrinpar, Phuong Miu, and Satchidananda Panda. “Time-Restricted Feeding Is a Preventative and Therapeutic Intervention against Diverse Nutritional Challenges.” Cell Metabolism 20, no. 6 (December 2, 2014): 991–1005. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2014.11.001.

Rothschild, Jeff, Kristin K. Hoddy, Pera Jambazian, and Krista A. Varady. “Time-Restricted Feeding and Risk of Metabolic Disease: A Review of Human and Animal Studies.” Nutrition Reviews 72, no. 5 (May 1, 2014): 308–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/nure.12104.

Fontana, Luigi, and Linda Partridge. “Promoting Health and Longevity through Diet: From Model Organisms to Humans.” Cell 161, no. 1 (March 26, 2015): 106–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.02.020.

I should add that the evidence was so strong for certain behaviors that I have changed my diet (VLCHF + 16+:8IF) and n=1 shows immediate improvements in weight, energy, mental clarity, and even skin health. Somewhat unexpected because I wasn't eating that badly according to common wisdom (and have maintained a moderate overweight, but stable weight for the past 3+yrs).

I've been doing this for more than 17 years. Some thoughts:

1. Anything that makes a real change will have side effects. Some of those side effects can be negative. For people not familiar with the concept of a healing crisis, this can be a confusing fact. They can end up temporarily feeling worse and conclude this is a bad thing rather than a temporary stage of a process headed in the right direction.

2. Prescribed medicine typically has a long list of provisos and side effects. If you have a serious condition, prescribed medicine trades short term gains for long term costs. Doctors claim credit for the short term gains, then blame the long term costs on your condition or age rather than on long term drug use. You need to be leery of the possibility that you are doing the same sort of thing and crediting any positive changes to this dietary change and dismissing any negative changes as coincidental or due to something else.

3. I've seen people post questions to a discussion forum along the lines of "What are non drug alternatives for treating X issue? I would like to participate in a drug trial and they won't accept patients taking this drug. I need to get off it to qualify." So people doing stuff like that are confounding the results of the trial and will report changes in symptoms and attribute them to the drug being tried rather than attributing them to getting off some other drug and using non drug alternatives.

4. In practice, it's quite hard to isolate one specific dietary factor because dietary changes typically involve at least two factors. If you add some new food to your diet and eat the same calories, it displaces some other food. You can't say for certain if the changes are due to adding the new food or removing what was replaced. If you are experimenting with your own diet, it helps to start with supplements, make one and only one change at a time and track things somehow. This makes it possible to get some idea of what effect X is having.

5. It's a moving target. If you are calcium deficient and add calcium to your diet, this may be exactly what you need to start feeling better. Initially, more calcium may be better. If your mental model boils down to "more calcium is better," you may wind up resolving the deficiency and then enter a situation where you are actually consuming too much calcium. This can lead to problems that you may not attribute to consuming high levels of calcium because you already decided "more calcium is better." You may develop new issues and utterly fail to relate them to consuming high levels of calcium.

6. People have a really hard time mentally modeling the road not taken. It isn't completely impossible, but people tend to be bad at it. If you have a specific diagnosis and you know the usual course of the condition, you can compare your health to the typical outcome and make some inferences, but it isn't absolutely conclusive. This is why twin studies are valued: We can't make two copies of you, but if there are already two people with identical genes, that's the closest we get to that.

7. Life is chemistry and there can be myriad other factors being overlooked. I try hard to track not only diet, but how much I walk, environmental factors, etc. I've done this for years and I still find myself blindsided at times and struggling to pinpoint why X is happening currently.

Most people aren't going to be able to read hundreds of studies. If you can and that gives you a mental model that makes sense to you, awesome. That doesn't actually strike me as a convincing rebuttal. It strikes me as more evidence that it's actually rather challenging to figure out dietary stuff. You won't solve it by reading an article or two.

I am not a medical professional, but I have lost a great deal of weight (was on the low end of obese before, and trend towards very thin now). I've kept it off for at least 5 years, with a small amount of fluctuation (one pant size, isn't so much). I always suggest folks eat most when they find they are the most hungry. It takes a bit of paying attention, but after that it gets easy.

I'm personally better off eating very lightly early in the day and eating a large meal at dinnertime. I feel satisfied being full then and don't miss the food early in the day. When I try to eat a full breakfast or lunch regularly, I'm actually more hungry the rest of the day and still want the full dinner. I'm also a night owl, but I do not know if this is related. This holds true no matter what waking schedule I'm on, however.

I personally eat a very light breakfast (a piece of bread with some cheese, for example), a light snack if I'm hungry during the day, and a full dinner. Only dinner is a warm meal, mostly vegetarian save for fish once a week.

My mother, on the other hand, has done the opposite, She's likely to eat a decent breakfast (instead of a piece of bread with cheese), a lunch, and a light dinner. Her weight loss wasn't as drastic as mine, but she didn't weigh as much either.

The thing is that us humans aren't all wired the same way. Even things like insulin response can vary from human to human. I'm guessing there is a genetic component or something to it, but that is an uneducated guess.