I love-hate online nutrition articles like this. They all tell you to stop snacking, don't drink soda, limit carbs, etc and then have some little gimmick. The quirk on this one is that occasionally you skip breakfast, too. Makes sense to me. It's just nice to read an article that's not about covid or BLM.
> The quirk on this one is that occasionally you skip breakfast, too.
I've done intermittent fasting (IF) for the past 5 years. Apart from a black espresso every morning, I skip breakfast all the time (not just occasionally).
Skipping breakfast is a psychological trick (that doesn't work on everybody, but works well enough to make a difference). The real goal is to entice oneself to eat less by eating fewer meals in a day.
As someone who has practised IF for 5 years, I find I haven't really lost any weight (a benefit claimed by many IF practitioners). That said, I haven't gained any either -- blips on the scale around Thanksgiving and Christmastime automatically flatten within days.
To be absolutely honest, I can't tell if IF actually works, but the routine hasn't been onerous to keep up, and over the past 5 years my health has been mostly the same, no big changes. But perhaps the counterfactual is that if I didn't practice IF, I would've been worse off. (I don't care to test the counterfactual)
My experience with 16:8 IF has been almost similar. I skip breakfast too, and found that to be the easiest to follow with a black coffee (very light by normal standards). I can’t tell either if it works to provide any claimed benefits. But I’m used to it and psychologically feel better, especially not eating for several hours before bedtime.
I attribute the weight loss I experienced to cutting out processed foods and cutting out oils (I do consume these once in a while, and when I do the scales show me I’ve fallen off the tracks).
Perhaps, but for some people it's also a physiological risk. I eat about 1200 calories for breakfast as my body otherwise cannot function for the day.
Whether fasting is appropriate depends on one's body composition, daily exertion routine and physiological factors. For most people I'd recommend exercise instead of fasting.
Diet is so much more important for weight loss / maintenance than exercise. You can obviously have a healthy diet that does not include IF, but for most people they need to do something about their diet, and can’t just add exercise.
For most people, I tend to agree. A big part of The Obesity Code is unpacking the reasons why. One of the reasons is debunking the perception that weight loss is simply about calories in and calories out.
Another part of the story is showing the feedback cycles between glucose, insulin, and insulin resistance. I made a line art drawing as a gist, here:
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.
> I eat about 1200 calories for breakfast as my body otherwise cannot function for the day.
I used to think this too, until I switched to a low carb diet. The raging fire in my belly, inability to concentrate and overall sluggishness just simply...disappeared.
That’s when I realized that “my body needs X to Y” is unhelpful unless you’ve experimented with lots of different values of X for long enough for your body to adapt.
I’m not saying you haven’t, but I’m just reiterating the importance of tinkering with your approach to diet and exercise. By the time we reach adulthood, our bodies have adapted to years of bad eating habits. Reshaping the hormonal and microbiotic responses may take a few weeks of discomfort/unusual response before seeing results.
> For most people I'd recommend exercise instead of fasting.
"You can't outrun the fork."
Metabolic studies show that you have to be damn near Olympic calibre in your exercise routine to cause a significant change in caloric consumption by increasing metabolism through exercise. Your body pretty much holds a constant level of metabolism and shunts it around to whichever systems it deems most important right now.
Exercise might give you an extra couple calories of margin (maybe), but you won't lose weight with it alone.
If you want to lose weight, you have to get the caloric intake down. And that's hard because you are fighting biological systems that evolved to store energy really efficiently and to give up that energy only very reluctantly.
It's thought that aerobic exercise can help resolve hormonal issues that lead to overeating, which if true would mean exercise would help you eat fewer calories.
Anecdotally, my appetite became more reasonable after I took up running. Fat seemed to keep me full longer.
I know this is the standard advice and surely people need to pay attention to their diet, but exercise is not so marginal.
For example running or swimming for an hour seems to be around 8-900 kcal based on various websites.
Now that's not nothing, but also people won't do it daily for sure. I think nutrition advice is really hard because people already (have to) factor in the likelihood of following the advice by a general average person, their propensity to lie to themselves to be in denial, etc. If you actually (not just in your daydreams) do a lot of daily exercise (not just drive to the gym and read Facebook), it will matter in terms of calories.
I'm not saying this to counter your advice. Advice is hard, it is tangled up in motivational systems etc. but sometimes people may get the wrong idea in the other direction. It is true that exercise cannot make up for bad eating habits especially if you eat back more afterwards because you believe you earned this. I think that whole type of relationship to food is unhealthy (junk binge is reward, fast and exercise is punishment). A few sit-ups won't undo a chocolate chip. Etc etc. But regular exercise all else equal does have a significant effect. Yes, nothing is all else equal, but then we end up making so many assumptions on how people will react that the whole debate is infused with assumptions like, but then you will lie to yourself and actually follow the opposite advice and so I need to tell you this other thing.
> But regular exercise all else equal does have a significant effect. Yes, nothing is all else equal...
Right, and that's the problem. Even if you do avoid "cheating" and "I ran X miles so I deserve this" type things, your body will still mess with your metabolism to compensate for the added exercise, and that works against the weight loss plan.
I went from near-zero exercise to ~10 miles of running per week, and maintained that more or less for 2 years without experiencing any significant weight loss (it was/is definitely valuable for general cardiovascular health, though). Only changing my diet helped, and even then it was difficult to lose weight and keep it off (took a year to lose ~7 lbs, and less than half that to put them back one). But now with COVID-19 and sheltering in place, I've been cooking nearly every day, and in less than three months have lost 15 lbs, and I've been running less than usual.
But really, everyone's individual experience differs. It seems like nutrition and exercise advice really needs to be tailored to each person, and sometimes there's a bit of trial and error involved.
I find it easier to eat right when I do cardio and weight exercise. Maybe it's about practicing tolerating discomfort in the moment. Or about hormones. But I just don't crave junk when I exercise. Or it's because I don't have time to sit around on the couch and be bored because I fill the time with exercise. Not sure why. But I've never really been more than 5-10 kg overweight, so slow and steady was good for me. My issue was rather body composition, not pure weight. You need to train to gain lean mass. Losing weight at all price is only the very beginning of the journey.
Also I rather like to track things like waist circumference rather than weight. Your weight may stay the same, while becoming more lean. Of course if you start as overweight as the average American, your first goal may reasonably be to just lose weight and figure out leanness afterwards.
Still exercise may help so many other aspects like mood, energy,sleep quality etc. (even if not in the moment but with an hour or day or two delay) which are all helpful to keep oneself on track in the kitchen. It can be a concrete motivational goal to be able to lift this or that much, run so and so far, and it's straightforward to see how you will need to pay attention to your food it you want to achieve that.
As I said, everyone's experience differs. I find that my desire to snack and eat junk food does not change at all depending on how much or how little exercise I get.
> Still exercise may help so many other aspects like mood, energy,sleep quality etc. (even if not in the moment but with an hour or day or two delay) which are all helpful to keep oneself on track in the kitchen.
So, in other words, my initial statement is correct: you're not going to make meaningful progress weight-loss-wise without changing your diet. If exercising makes that easier for you as a second-order effect, that's great. But that's by no means universal.
You wrote "...my body otherwise cannot function for the day"? What have you tried? How certain are you that you body cannot break the morning fast?
Many people who do intermittent fasting go without eating from, say, 8 pm to noon the next day (16 hours). If you sleep between ~10 pm and ~6 am, in my experience, you might have a little bit of hunger at some points in the morning, but you can get used to it. I typically felt great on days I did it.
> For most people I'd recommend exercise instead of fasting.
A lot of what I've read over the past few years suggests that exercise won't help you lose weight[0]. It's great for general health, but exercise without some kind of diet modification generally won't do all that much for your weight.
This tracks with my experience, at least. In early 2016 my doc told me I needed to get some exercise. At the time I was doing nothing more than walking to and from work (60 mins total). I started running, and worked up to around 10 miles per week. I'd already been more or less been doing IF for a while (without realizing it; I was just never hungry when I woke up), eating lunch at noon and dinner at 7pm, or just a single mid-afternoon meal around 3pm.
I didn't start actually losing weight until 2 years later, when I started calorie counting and attempting to limit my intake to around 1500 per day (I wasn't always successful). It was still difficult; I only lost 6 or 7 lbs, and it took nearly a year to do that.
That turned out to be hard to maintain; I stopped counting calories, and by late 2019 I'd put those lbs back on and probably a couple more, even with IF in place.
With COVID-19, I've been cooking 6 days a week, so that's meant less oil/butter, nothing fried, but still a good amount of carbs. My running has dropped to 4-6 miles a week. But in less than three months, I've lost 15 lbs. The only thing that actually worked was changing my diet. Once things go back to normal and I'm going out to restaurants again, I fully expect I'll put that weight back on.
He lost 45 lbs, that’s what probably removed his sleeps apnea. Not because of some other magical ability of intermittent fasting. One of my friends also lost a lot of weight and his apnea went away, he went off of his CPAP machine.
I've an issue with sleep related binge-eating: fullness induces sleepiness, so when I'm awake at night and want to be asleep I'll eat - basically an extra meal. Alcohol too. For me the root issue is other mental health problems.
Sleep problems can readily lead to weight gain.
I can see how apnoea that exhibits as waking up a lot might lead someone attempting to fall into heavier sleep by overeating.
IF, paired with lots of exercise, was working for me before the current crisis.
But sleep apnea doesn't wake you up enough to get out of bed and start eating like pulling all-nighters or insomnia do and going to sleep with a full belly won't prevent flesh/muscle collapsing that causes sleep apnea although I can see how the body burning energy to digest + endorphin from a good meal might help falling asleep faster.
> IF, paired with lots of exercise, was working for me before the current crisis.
I've heard people referring to complex sleep issues as apnoea - I was just suggesting there can be complex causative links. Hopefully the OP can respond an answer the actual question.
> I've heard people referring to complex sleep issues as apnoea
Ah, it might be a translation issue on my part then. I am inclined to believe there are some complex causative links, hope research will bring new hypotheses and answers about that.
It's strongly suspected that there's a nasty feedback loop between disrupted sleep (caused by apnea) and weight gain due to interference with appetite regulation.
To be fair, I was assuming the person was still suffering from sleep deprivation even while on the CPAP treatment. (Bias disclosure: I have personal experience in this area.) It is possible this person was sleeping well and not suffering from sleep deprivation.
At this stage, I am not sure anyone, let alone myself, can elucidate the precise mechanism of how OSA/sleep deprivation leads to abnormal eating patterns, however I think even just a cursory review of the literature shows general agreement that there is a link between the two.
Here is an abstract from a review published in 2017:
Obesity and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) have a reciprocal relationship. Sleep disruptions characteristic of OSA may promote behavioral, metabolic, and/or hormonal changes favoring weight gain and/or difficulty losing weight. The regulation of energy balance (EB), i.e., the relationship between energy intake (EI) and energy expenditure (EE), is complex and multi-factorial, involving food intake, hormonal regulation of hunger/satiety/appetite, and EE via metabolism and physical activity (PA). The current systematic review describes the literature on how OSA affects EB-related parameters. OSA is associated with a hormonal profile characterized by abnormally high leptin and ghrelin levels, which may encourage excess EI. Data on actual measures of food intake are lacking, and not sufficient to make conclusions. Resting metabolic rate appears elevated in OSA vs.
Controls: Findings on PA are inconsistent, but may indicate a negative relationship with OSA severity that is modulated by daytime sleepiness and body weight. A speculative explanation for the positive EB in OSA is that the increased EE via metabolism induces an overcompensation in the drive for hunger/food intake, which is larger in magnitude than the rise in EI required to re-establish EB. Understanding how OSA affects EB-related parameters can help improve weight loss efforts in these patients.
> To be fair, I was assuming the person was still suffering from sleep deprivation even while on the CPAP treatment. (Bias disclosure: I have personal experience in this area.)
Yeah, I can say from first hand experience that CPAP doesn't always solve every sleep problems :/.
Thanks for the link, it's shedding some light on things that I suspected.
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't read the article, because paywall.)
If calorie counting and exercise aren’t working, it’s time to go to the doctor. You may have a hormonal imbalance or something. It affects more people then realize it.
Unfortunately, humans are terrible at these two basics. e.g. "it's just a cookie i'm having for a snack, that doesn't count, does it?" or "i walk up three flights of stairs to work every day, that's the same as 30 minutes of exercise a day, right?"
I agree that IF is for me the easiest way to lose weight, people should really give it a try. But in regards to the need of something magical because it’s difficult, as someone who has lost a lot of weight and stopped smoking, the latter was orders of magnitude harder. Wanting to smoke a cig was like being tempted by a cookie AFTER a fast. Also controlling my weight is child’s play compared to building muscle with a good muscle/fat ratio.
That's far from sure at this point. Yes, HN is a hotbed of intermittent fasting propaganda [1], which may make it seem like there is general agreement. But you'll find other communities pushing other diets as the one true diet, so... more research is needed.
[1] Note, for example, that the submitter subtly but crucially changed the title, which in the original says "works for many" (emphasis mine).
I'm not particularly claiming that IF works. My main point is that nothing we know of really works generally and reliably.
I've personally lost a significant amount of weight and kept it off continually for more than a decade. But I don't really know how I did that, nor do I have much confidence that whatever I did would work for others.
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 diets - fasting, intermittent fasting, keto, paleo, zero carb, low fat, food separation diet, ...
Personally, intermittent fasting hasn’t helped me lose weight (might have helped me maintain it though). So far, the only thing that has helped was very strict calorie counting, but that was accompanied with severe emotional/mental discomfort (constant hunger). I’m now experimenting with one-day fasting (turns out not eating, for me, is associated with less hunger than eating too little, go figure ...), we’ll see how t goes.
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.
Sure, but you're simply restating the problem. You can also keep from getting seriously burned by carefully following the strategy of keeping your skin cool all of the time. Problem solved. Hooray.
Methods for the "material" part of the problem are here. But the psychological problem will probably not be solvable by any "method". Its up to anyone's own mastery of itself and its a personal development issue.
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 steady at 5.3 almost immediately.
Interesting... that sort of makes sense to me maybe because by going for longer periods of time without resupply (and carbs / sugar), seems like you'd be putting more strain on your systems to keep yourself in equilibrium (blood sugar and otherwise) longer, wearing out that capacity more quickly.
I've been worried about this as well. A lenghty Harvard blog post from 2018 indicates that a 8-hour 7am-3pm feeding period gave better health-related results than an 12-hour 7am-7pm feeding period. In other words, 'timing is key':
Interestingly, the researcher doesn't discuss skipping breakfast. I've been skipping for several years with a somewhat uneasy feeling and a growing phobia for diabetes. I'll probably try the 3pm/7pm to 7am fast instead; maybe my body doesn't tolerate skipping breakfast as well as I would like it to.
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...
> 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 black coffee means it’s no longer effectively zero calories, and this is not technically fasting. Same with adding sugar to it. You can skip breakfast and have black coffee, black or herbal teas and water — all these are effectively zero calories.
One point this article doesn’t address in the 16:8 scheme is the frequency of eating within the eight hour eating window. Is it ok to have three meals and snacks within that window? Should it be two meals with a good gap between them? I’m sure these variations also determine if it works for weight loss or other benefits.
Intermittent fasting with 16:8 makes it easier to consume lower calories. Weight loss typically follows if activity levels are maintained the same or increased (to compensate for a lower basal metabolic rate).
Having done keto for a long time I can only recommend two options besides Tea.
1. Become a weird coffee person and put some nerd energy into it so black coffee doesn't taste disgusting on it's own. James Hoffman on YouTube is a great way into this.
2. Eschew the coffee and take a teaspoon of MCT Oil before your can of zero-calorie Energy Drink (Coke Zero Energy is my favorite atm).
It may be dirty and people are going to tell you Aspartame is evil and is going to make you hungry(it really might, but you are still hours away from your window so black/white discipline is easy to keep alive), but for me it worked much better than dreading the coffee in the morning.
And use good water, and follow best practices for whatever brewing method you prefer.
Failing any of these (including getting quality beans that are recently brewed), and your coffee may be much worse than it needs to be.
I despise Nestle business and social practices, but a Nespresso machine with Nespresso pods is probably the best coffee that most people could hope to make.
That's what I mean, if you don't intend to become a weird coffee person black coffee is just not a pleasurable experience for most people.
Starbucks made coffee appealing for a vast amount of the population by legitimising to drink 350ml of milk with lots of sugar by adding an espresso. If you are part of this crowd, the sad truth is that zero carb energy drinks are the more realistic morning beverage alternative for you.
> if you don't intend to become a weird coffee person black coffee is just not a pleasurable experience for most people.
Black coffee is the bomb. Don’t care if it’s Starbucks, Peet’s, FamilyMart, 7-11, it is the superior method of caffeine consumption, whether you like espresso, Americano or some other variety. I do not care about coffee snob stuff but coffee is best served black. Speaking personally.
Roasted *, but I disagree. Nespresso is easy, but it's expensive and even at best it tastes like hot garbage. You can grab aeropress for like 30 dollars and throw in a metal filter for like 5 dollars and that's already capable of making single cups of excellent coffee for years.
My current aeropress and filter are from 2012 and I'm not really in need of an upgrade any time soon so it's honestly a very affordable brewing device.
I do agree on the beans though, freshly roasted beans are more expensive and on top of that a grinder would also be a good idea. You can get a decent electric burr grinder around here for a bit over 60 dollars. On average, I buy both cheap and expensive beans, the cheaper ones are around 10 dollars per kilo and the more expensive ones are around 60 to 70 dollars per kilo. Quick maths tells me that a 8oz cup of the cheaper stuff comes down to about 13 cents and the more expensive one just under a dollar so definitely cheaper than any cafe and this is 3rd wave artisan type coffee we're talking about.
Aeropress is basically idiot proof as well, anyone can make a decent cup of coffee with it so I don't really buy into the Nespresso argument here either. For an investment of under a hundred bucks, you can most definitely enjoy extremely good black coffee at home with very palatable running costs as well. I'm happy to expand if anyone has _any_ coffee related questions.
As someone who has just started the journey towards coffee snobbery, I quickly had the impression that the grinder is the most important piece of kit needed, but from my research the electric burr grinders <300$ were hot garbage that produce very uneven coffee grounds, resulting in a very hard to control brew. But this is just YouTube and Reddit knowledge, would you agree?
I currently have my eyes on a Niche Zero grinder, but at 560€ it's quite the investment.
If you then buy a Chemex, V60, Aeropress or any other brewing method is a question of choice, but don't forget to filter your water before using it...
My point is that this effort is not feasible for most people. If my morning drink takes me more effort than getting showered and dressed, i'll probably forgo it 90% of the time. I'm working on this form of laziness, but that's the willpower/patience most people have to live with. In addition there is a whole host of other reasons why something that's easy and routine for you can be quite vexing for other people.
Opening a can takes less then ten seconds, we're already talking about a harsh diet change, we don't have to make it harder than necessary for people.
> I quickly had the impression that the grinder is the most important piece of kit needed, but from my research the electric burr grinders <300$ were hot garbage that produce very uneven coffee grounds, resulting in a very hard to control brew.
The Baratza Encore is $139 on Amazon, and should be sufficient for pourovers of any kind.
Of course, if you pour bad water into your machine, you're still not going to get the best you could get regardless of which method you use.
And I wasn't speaking anything about price (where Nespresso loses). Nor was I speaking of convenience (where Nespresso is great for 1-2 cups at a time).
I used an Aeropress for years, and it is tricky to get consistent results; plus it's a bit of a cleanup chore. Also, there's still the question of whether to use the Aeropress the way it was intended, or instead to do the upside-down brief-brew method.
I currently happily use a standard Melitta brewer where I can put good beans, freshly ground, and good water in and then get 10 cups of coffee 10 minutes later. My partner and I wouldn't enjoy our liesurely outdoor coffee time nearly as much if one of us were having to run back in the house and make a new Aeropress coffee every 15 minutes.
(Incidentally, make the pot of coffee and then pour it into a pre-warmed thermal carafe. It's not good to keep cooking it on the burner.)
> Chances are, the average Joe (pun intended) will not make a better cup than Nespresso, at least based on this…
I suspect people consider espresso-based beverages more premium because they tend to be made on the spot, and also because the mass market has been trained to think like that.
Filter coffee probably reminds people of diner coffee, or something lower-end.
I'd personally take filter coffee anytime, preferably using beans that aren't roasted too dark. It's so much easier to drink.
I disagree. I've had all of the most expensive coffees including Blue Mountain and Kona. I just don't think coffee is nice without some fat and/or sugar. It has a really bitter, astringent aftertaste that just isn't pleasant. I don't know why it's controversial. There are many foods (maybe even most foods) that aren't particularly nice on their own.
Blue Mountain and Kona sound like gimmicks to me. You should try a V60 pourover using a Geisha bean [1], preferably done by a barista who's really into pourovers.
I’m an enthusiastic drinker of coffee and alcoholic drinks and when I started drinking them they tasted vile and needed lots of other flavors to disguise how awful they tasted. The first time I had coffee of any kind, quite milky, I wretched. Some people just hate the flavor of coffee enough never to get over it, same as some people can never find an alcoholic drink they like.
To be fair, if you are used to coffee with milk and sugar, black coffee tends to taste badly, in no small part because of simply eating how one is used to eating. This isn't special to coffee, just very noticeable in it.
If this is one's issue, though, the solution is pretty easy: Wean yourself off. I did such a thing, and it has probably been one of the best things I've done. The cream was the first to go, as I was putting so little in that it was a pain. Sugar eventually went the same way: less than a spoonful or a packet in a standard coffee cup. This was a more difficult transition, honestly, and the coffee tasted weird for a couple of weeks.
This just isn't true. It might be true for your coffee and or how you make it, but a good barista could make a black coffee any form of coffee drinker would like, be it a tea-like fruity filter, clean espresso, whatever. If you don't believe me, you've never been to a good enough cafe. It's unbelievable, the variety of black coffees.
First things first, most folks don't have access to a lot of fine coffee simply because of the cost barrier. Really, you have to work with the stuff that is more often available to people - and for most, that is grocery store coffees of different sorts. The only 'cafe' I had access to with any regularity was Starbucks in the US, and that hardly counts. Small-to-medium sized Indiana towns aren't exactly known for their coffee selection, and really, if the advice can't be used by a good chunk of the population, it isn't going to help much with cutting calories from daily drinks.
I know there are tea-like coffees. I don't like them: I get introduced to new stuff in December, when I order a coffee bean Advent calendar from a little Norwegian brewer: I kinda hate the days of the fruity, tea-ish coffees. Even if they were my favorite, I can't afford to drink this daily.
But that's besides the point. Cream, especially, gives a completely different mouthfeel. When I did put cream in coffee, I would have done it with the fancy coffees as well, though you could talk me into taking a sip otherwise.
I mean, I wouldn't trust most bariatas to make a good coffee, let alone myself with an advent calendar. May if you go to norway you might change your mind.
It’s addictive, so your taste will adapt to what you regularly have. It’s entirely possible to train your body to love instant, you just need to stick with it.
I'm not actually American, just pandering examples to the audience. A pound shop is what we call them in Ireland. Americans wouldn't know what that is.
I didn't remove it I replaced it with needing calories. It's not reductionist to point out that some things are better than others, even when you're used to the worse option.
> 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.
What I've read in this area all comes back to "whether or not black coffee breaks the fast depends on the goal of your fasting", i.e., weight loss vs something more specific.
[Likewise for other things people don't always think about like vitamin / supplements.]
There is more info in [1][2] but tl;dr:
- Fasting for metabolic health/weight loss: likely does not break a fast
- Fasting for gut rest: does break a fast
- Fasting for longevity: likely does not break a fast
> Adding ghee or coconut oil in black coffee means it’s no longer effectively zero calories, and this is not technically fasting.
I guess it depends on how you choose to define your "technical" terms. For example (https://www.bulletproof.com/diet/bulletproof-diet/bulletproo...): "The technical definition of “fasting” describes not consuming a single calorie. When your body isn’t burdened with the task of digestion all day every day, it has a chance to carry out cleaning and repair processes that make you healthier. This cleanup and repair process is called autophagy. Depending on your diet, intermittent fasting can also put you in a fat-burning state called ketosis.[2] Learn more about the benefits of intermittent fasting.
The good news is that there’s no scientific reason to completely restrict calories to reap the benefits of intermittent fasting. If you only consume fat (no protein or carbs) during your fast, you won’t interrupt autophagy. You’ll also stay in the fat-burning state of ketosis."
(I have no opinion on any of this except that I'm amused by hobby nutritionists.)
Vague hints to "get the whole picture" or to "educate yourself" without pointing to approved sources are always bad moves in Internet discussions. But here especially: Skimming the top 10 DuckDuckGo results for "ketosis fat-burning", I'm getting the impression that you would not approve of most of them.
It should not be of interest to others what I personally would approve of. I don't hand out nutritionist advice on the Internet.
The body is an amazing machine. It's still a good idea to at least try to understand the basic processes before making experiments on it. At least understand how ketosis works and why it isn't our default mode of metabolism.
While there certainly are people who feel that it is helping them, others would be actively hurt by it. Results on one individual can not be extrapolated into some sort of universal cure. The fact that such advice can be readily found on the Internet anyway probably shouldn't come as a surprise though.
> At least understand how ketosis works and why it isn't our default mode of metabolism
It is the default metabolism.
1. All things being equal if you do not introduce any calories into your body you will naturally be in ketosis.
2. The only way to be kicked out of ketosis is to elevate blood glucose levels/spike insulin. Sure that is nearly everyone now, but that doesn’t make it the Body’s default...you need to eat a certain way for that to happen, historically there really wouldn’t have been a ton of available options to Eat Foods to kick humans out of ketosis until humans began farming grains and cereals.
3. Perhaps most importantly your brain can run off of ketones or glucose, very few things can cross the blood brain barrier, and ketones are far more efficient at crossing the blood brain barrier and powering the brain.
T1 diabetic people are at risk for ketoacidosis, which is a different condition than ketosis.
The important issues I found have to do with “keto flu” (you have to supplement elctrolytes or you’re likely to feel bad with weird symptoms for the first few weeks) and with some pre existing conditions; otherwise keto (and IF) seem to be as safe as any other diet, and likely much healthier.
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 then they will struggle more than they need to. Reducing food intake if you're dependant on that breakfast with wheat and sugar-carbs to numb your nervous system, to calm your current emotions and perhaps pressure from past unhealed/unprocessed trauma, then as you reduce your food intake you're going to get exposed to withdrawals, as well as start being able to feel what's underlying - and you may not understand it nor know how to process it; this is certainly why intermittent fasting is perhaps healthier, gentler, and more sustainable for people to succeed at - as it won't apply or re-expose them to as much pressure with the quelling-numbing effects of many if not most foods.
Another part to why fasting can be difficult for people is as your inflammation level goes down, so does the depressant-numbing effect, so you will feel whatever digestive pains and irritation some of the foods you're eating may be causing you more clearly; this coincides with most people commenting how their thinking and senses become much sharper as they deepen into the length of a fast. If you're regularly eating foods you don't realize are agitating your GI tract, any that are causing inflammation, then the potential for fasting to be an enjoyable and easy endeavour for upkeep - weight loss or maintenance - will go down.
Edit to add: There may also be mild to severe dis-ease progression, damage/injury to the GI tract from lifelong lack of awareness (being numbed from eating foods that are harmful to you by some of the foods you may/likely have been eating) allowing the damage to progress. You may then be exposed and feeling this pain and then eating again is how you numb feeling it as strongly. 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 - however, h.pylori bacterial infection for example causes nausea only on an empty stomach - and so that could be why some people are constantly driven to eat, not only to numb themselves but also to reduce nausea without realizing what's actually going on. That's why I also recommend microbiome stool testing. Also, if you underlying physical pain and injuries, reducing the inflammation from food will also increase your perception (and reaction to) to that physical pain - and so until you get that underlying pain treated then you'll be in a more agitated, less numbed state as well.
All of what I said above is ultimately why a practice of non-violence is necessary, non-violence towards others but also non-violence towards yourself: be gentle on yourself. I feel it's also important to state that all of this learning is a practice, an experiment you run through with yourself to understand yourself more and how things like food affect you, how breath affects you, how the mind affects you.
"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.
> 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.
The idea that you need a special kind of coffee to do intermittent fasting is IMHO a very bad idea: it sets an unnecessary barrier to entry, and it misses the main point: it's about what you don't eat, not what you add to your intake.
I found that particular quote confusing since adding ghee and coconut oil (e.g., bulletproof) make it very not black coffee and also a food one cannot eat during IF without breaking the fast / foregoing the longevity benefits of fasting [1]. It was weird that the author included that reference here.
It has a ton of info - Martin Berkhan is really first person who popularized 16:8.
One of advises there is that you can have black coffee with some milk, because milk is really low on calories.
Also, from his site again, 10g of BCAA pre and postworkout does not change expression of fasting markers in blood. 10g of BCAA is ~40 calories. Put differently, it is equal to two teaspoons of sugar.
And, to finalize, he recommends 14:10 regime for women.
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...
One cup of milk is about 242g, that means milk has energy density 0.62 calories per gram, much less that sugar (4 calories per gram) or fat (9 calories per gram).
Also, it looks like 80 calories will not change fasting state of your body (see above about 20g of BCAA). You may put 80 calories / 0.62 calories per gram = 129 grams of milk or half of cup, into your coffee or tea and not interrupt your fast.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how humans evolved and how differently we do some things. Is there consensus on the eating patterns of prehistoric humans?
My understanding of how humans evolved to eat is pretty limited, but I would guess unintentional intermittent fasting would have been commonplace in humans over the past few hundred thousand years.
There seems to be consensus that eating a large variety of foods is great for you, but is shifting your eating pattern, or even grazing, better than eating at the same time, the same amount, every day?
Does your ancestral background impact how frequently you eat? Similar to how some cultures are lactose intolerant due to historically not having access to cows, could similar issues present based on how frequently we eat?
I’d love to find resources that have dug into those topics if anyone has recommendations.
In general animals exposed to nature live shorter, not longer lives. It might be worth investigating, but I've not seen anything to suggest we might become healthier by restricting our diets to food available to effectively poor people. Besides the obvious not eating food that we already know is unhealthy and eating significantly more calories than we need.
I have been following IF on-and-off over the past few years. It has helped me lose weight initially and then maintain it at a good spot. I have not done detailed before and after blood work to know whether it has had other effects. But one problem I have started having recently is acid reflux and acidity. People immediately pounce on this and tell me that skipping breakfast is what is causing increased acidity levels in my stomach. And my doctor is also suggesting that I do not skip breakfast. The problem is I do not have any concrete evidence for either case (skipping breakfast causes/does not cause acidity). I am hoping to get my acidity issues under control first and then maybe give IF another shot to see whether the acidity issues return. Just wanted to throw out there that different people might have different experiences with IF and it is very important to listen to your body.
Binge eating can cause acid reflux, so I wonder if it’s a similar mechanism. Something about eating so much food in a small window maybe (?) doesn’t give your body time and space to digest it properly
That's an interesting point, never thought about it that way. Need to read more about it! If that is the case, then going back to IF might be a problem for me :). Currently I am back on 3 meals a day (12:12) and have eliminated certain types of foods that could cause acidity. And it's working for now.
I suspect the reason why it's common to skip breakfast in 16:8 and not dinner, is because of social pressure. It's much more common to have dinner with friends than breakfast. Skipping breakfast is way easiet for many people.
Like others mentioned below, logistics was the main issue. It was easier to skip breakfast because no one usually goes out for breakfast with friends/family. And almost no social activities/gatherings take place in the morning. So easier to maintain my own schedule in the mornings.
I agree with your point about eating late causing issues with digestions (which is something I learned recently while reading on this topic). I can remember that at least a few of my more severe reactions happened on days when I had a later dinner than usual.
I also read that our digestive system runs on a cycle and it usually needs to shut down during the night for maintenance mode. The later we eat, the more we put this cycle in disarray. And the older we are, more probable we get affected by this disruption. I am currently eating four hours before I go to bed. Next time around if and when I get back to trying to IF, I will aim to skip dinner rather than breakfast.
I had acid reflux for a number of years. It got more and more acute until it felt almost like how I imagine a heart attack to feel. In the end after a week in hospital I had my gallbladder removed and subsequent to that any very occasional mild acidity has gone away after a drink of water. Another anecdote that might be worth adding to the collection.
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 it is to only eat a little.
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 for 12 hours.
I once fasted for about a week while suffering an illness that wouldn't let me keep any food down. I only drank water during that time. To my surprise, after several days of not eating, my hunger disappeared completely. It was scary, but also eye-opening. The experience taught me that hunger is not the "you require food right now in order to survive" signal that everyone thinks it is.
There's an idea out there, no idea how true, that what most first-worlders call hunger isn't even really hunger. More like withdrawal symptoms from food addiction. The hunger that comes back when you're really malnourished is much more painful/compelling. Or so I've heard.
Same here. It disappeared after the first 24 hours for me and I didn't feel any hunger for the next 2 days, which was really weird. I didn't feel any tiredness or cognitive impairment (this is difficult to prove though, lol) either.
What a coincidence! Today is my 5th day of fasting. I've only been having water and coconut water[0] (one or two glasses a day).
The first few days which were a little tough. From midway through the third day onwards, I started feeling absolutely fine. There is an overall feeling of lightness. And, of course, the amazing experience when I have that glass of coconut water is truly indescribable!
Its why pregnant women are told not to drink alcohol at all. The reality is that the liver is amazing and can remove low levels of it so well that a small amount of drinking is fine. The problem is that it's really hard to a) effectively communicate what the safe level is b) get people to stick to it. It's much easier to avoid it entirely.
I've literally measured a glass of wine for someone who then told me the measure must be wrong rather than admit they had always drunk three glasses rather than one. (Person was not pregnant and is not someone that would be described in any way as having problems with alcohol.)
Well 'glass' is an entirely arbitrary measure and until they have looked it up in mililitres it's not clear why anyone would know how much it is. I don't. I think public health advice about drinking should stick to more concrete terms.
It’s really not though. The standard understanding is that a 750ml bottle consists of five 150ml (or 5oz) glasses of wine.
Calling that amount a “glass” perhaps is unfortunate, but it is convenient and well understood by most. But then again, I’ve also never known anyone who claimed that their 375ml pours were a “glass”. That just strikes me more as ignorance.
Well, it has to be in the blood first to get metabolized by the liver, so the unborn gets some. But as you say, a little wont probably matter. I was shocked how big an effect licoriice has (finnish study), before I read the stud, I thought they found something signific but not relevant. Reading the study changed my perspective and i am wondering why there are no warning labels
Everything absorbed by the gut goes through the liver before it reaches the systemic circulation.
This doesn’t necessarily invalidate your overall point (that a foetus may be exposed to some alcohol, as it depends on how efficient the first-pass metabolism of alcohol is) but it does impact your logic.
Yes, that's true for me too. I've been practising 16:8 IF for almost ten years now and this is definitely one of the reasons it works. I eat big meals consisting of traditional foods. I see others people's "diets" that don't work and they are always weird foods that aren't actually nice and weird portion sizes that aren't satisfying.
The other thing I've realised is it doesn't have to be about watching the clock every day. What I actually do is just eat lunch and dinner every day and that's it. It doesn't really matter when those meals are, which means I can adjust easily to accommodate socialising, for example. The diet that works is easy to adhere to. If you have to think about it every day and shape the rest of your life around it, it will not work (unless you're a professional athlete maybe).
I'm doing exactly the same since almost 1year, but still I'm not seeing much benefit from it. Like I still have belly fat, I wonder how do you eat when you break the fast and how do you avoid binging? I'm not gonna lie, after 15-16h I start to feel hungry and as soon as the fast finish I tend to eat something pretty caloric & fatty (ie: cheese or nuts)
I've been doing IF for the past five years or so (after "discovering" it by myself) and lost about 30 kg in the process. I am a bulk eater and I still "binge" periodically. The kinds of food that I binge on have changed greatly though, and that's what worked for me. I switched to simpler food: non-starchy grains like buckwheat, kidney beans, vegetables and fruit, and this stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(dairy_product) . I dropped almost every kind of processed food (I am not an American though, and we never had the same level of dependence on processed foods anyway). I can't even eat sugar and candies anymore, they overflow my senses and taste like crap.
What're you experiencing is the "no miracle occurs" effect. There is no "one weird trick" to weight loss, only the very boring, obvious, and difficult exercise of restraining ones caloric intake and/or increasing one's output.
I eat normal meals. No snacking. Before I started IF I was actually obese. I couldn't walk a mile without breaking into a sweat and being out of breath. I now have a six pack year round and have done for the almost ten years I've been doing this. So I think I'm qualified to offer some further advice:
* Limit your meals to two meals a day. Absolutely no snacking between meals. Make sure your last meal is it such a time that you won't go to bed hungry. But if you're hungry during the day, just wait until your next meal (lunch or dinner),
* Be mindful when you eat. The French are great at this. Don't eat for sustenance. Eat for pleasure. The object of eating isn't to get calories down your throat as quickly as you can. Enjoy the aroma of the food in your nose and the feel of it on your tongue. Don't load up your fork with the next bite while still chewing. If your food is too bland to enjoy this way, learn to cook French cuisine,
* Weigh your carbs carefully. Pasta, rice, potato etc. should all be weighed every time. Do not do it by eye. Your eye will cheat you. Do not rely on your satiation reflex because carbs won't trigger it,
* Do not be afraid of fat. Note the amount of fat in French cuisine. Fat is nice, but your body will automatically regulate your intake. Butter is delicious but nobody wants to eat a whole stick of it.
* Don't drink calories. Drink water, tea and coffee. Especially avoid beer, red wine, soft drinks and sweet cocktails. If possible, stop drinking alcoholic and soft drinks completely,
* Exercise discipline and restraint in the supermarket. Never go to the supermarket while fasted. Do not stock ready-to-eat food in your house. All food should be prepared before eating, and you should only prepare the amount that you plan to eat,
* Learn to relish hunger. Hunger is completely normal and something you are supposed to feel. Observe how fat people eat the moment they feel hunger. Remind yourself that you don't want to be one of them. If you feel hunger, just be safe in the knowledge that your next meal is planned and ready for you to prepare,
* Most importantly, find something that works for you. The first month should be discipline. After that it should become natural. If it feels like you want this new way of life to end at some point, revise your strategy. This should be easy. It's for the rest of your life.
I do eat. It's not a complete fast, it's more like "under 600 calories" (1).
The thing is, I already know where those calories are coming from, starting with the yogurt pot for breakfast. There's three items (under 200 calories each) with no room for extras.
Same here. I can't moderate, but just cutting things off is no problem. I've been doing 16:8 for a year where I haven't eaten a single thing outside the 8 hours, but I haven't really seen any difference.
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.
I used to weight twice what I do today, so I know a thing or two about eating too many calories, and I lost that weight so I know a thing or two about not eating that many calories.
Thing is, a rule like "only eat in an eight hour window" leaves plenty of time to consume huge amounts of calories. I've been known to pack away 4k+ in a meal, both in the past and today. It's not even hard for me. In fact, it's rather hard not to once I start eating because like many people who are of have been fat I'm a food addict.
Some here are saying things like "well, good luck eating 4k of lettuce dude!" and yeah, that is hard. But if you're eating lettuce and vegetables and all that low calorie stuff already you probably don't need the 8 hour window restriction!.
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.
The only significant contributors to calories and mass of any food item are water, proteins, carbs, and fat. They are respectively 0, 4, 4, and 9 calories per gram. So, foods that are waterlogged (fruits and veggies) are very low calories per gram and foods that are fattier will be denser.
Honestly curious: Is there more discussion to be had than that?
Just understanding how fullness relates to calories. How a full meal of something that is less calorically dense can divide your calorie intake by two compared to super fatty processed foods.
Yet another data point. Lot easier on will power reserves to fast at a stretch. All it takes is one nibble of something and I find myself returning to the tin for more.
Since I'm in sync with everyone else in this, ie, it's easier for me to shut my mouth completely than to eat in moderation, I'm guessing there's some biological drive behind this.
Maybe that happens because we, as animals, have our bodies more adapted to eat as much as we can while food is available than to risk losing that opportunity for another unknown meal in the future. That to say that it is a hardwired behavior we have, a survival strategy that makes sense in the wild.
Problem is we don't live in that environment anymore. So, I think fasting works because our bodies trigger another natural response, that of focusing our senses to the search of food, kind of accepting that food is not available. Thus, it's easier to simply not eat at all instead of trying to eat moderately.
For anyone interested in weight loss and heart health, please remember that both are impaired by not getting enough sleep. Studies have shown that you're way more likely to over eat if you get less than 7 hours of sleep a night.
If you can break your carb addiction the rest is not that hard. It was very similat to quitting cigarettes for me. Cut off carbs for a few days, it will feel horrible until day 3, then you almost feel euphoric but you still have an urge. Keep it up for a week then you start replacing the old habit with a new one (intermittent fasting with keto diet for example, or cardio). Even when I slack off, so long as I don't touch carbs I can just cut down on food intake or workout a little bit and I will have so much more energy. If I actually workout properly, people will notice changes in my energy level and attitude. It's really insane why it is so hard to make simple changes with immense benefits like this. I feel normal after stopping cigs and other vices but I am telling you, cutting out or extremely reducing carb intake has had the most impact on my life. If I didn't know better I'd be calling carbs an addictive harmful drug (in reality, our modern way of life that requires minimal carbs for fuel and healthy bodies that are energy efficient are causing a conflict with traditional meals and ingredients). Once you get some control/discipline over what you eat, controlling when you eat is a lot easier in my experience. When it gets hard to stick to the diet, intermittent fasting can compensate for lack of good calories.
Even a "normal" 3 meal pattern involves fasting overnight. That's why we call the first meal breakfast. This is just extending that overnight fast to 16 hours.
I think if you tried to eat 3 meals in 8 hours you'd eat smaller meals. Otherwise you'd be stuffing yourself full.
Not necessarily. IIRC, food leaves your stomach within 2-5 hours, and it varies depending on person and what the food is. I'm gonna guess you could fit in a light breakfast and a fairly decently sized lunch and dinner in that 8-hour window.
I am not certain how generalizable this is. Because this sorts of diet research relies most often on self-reporting, I mostly read it by prepending 'People exist for which ...'. And that is good to know, and hopefully they are not outliers by too much, but it probably won't be silver bullet for everybody.
I.e. I remember hearing two twich streamers talk about their diets an one said how she really enjoys intermittent fasting, while other mentionsh how he needs to eat something at least every four hours, or he literally sees his apm in Starcraft drop :D
I lost a little over 50lbs a number of years ago, following a 5:2 diet. Quite frankly, I found it pretty horrible. Selecting 2 days in which you won't eat (much) is pretty tough, and the obvious candidates would be your working days, but you should expect to be grumpy AF during them in all honesty.
These days, I generally stick to a 16:8 approach of IF (I typically eat between 13:00-21:00). I find that it works pretty well for me. I should note that I'm very active (exercise every day, running, cycling, or lifting weights), and that I still typically eat 3 meals, albeit within a smaller window. I think being sceptical of food science is smart, so all I can say is that it works for me.
There is also antifragile[1] theory of fasting - body metabolism needs randomness to prosper. So the idea is to not only do intermittent fasting, but also do it randomly, randomly change your food habits, etc. Of course, even with randomized food rations you need to keep them healthy.
At university I used to intermittent fast as a side-effect of laziness to cook breakfast.
Nowadays I've read the benefits of it and trying to replicate that but I just get severe headaches when trying to do it. Anyone got any tips for avoid thing that?
Two of the most common culprits to rule out would be 1) caffeine withdrawal and 2) dehydration. People often don't drink as much, or not at all, when they're not eating, and many don't even realize it.
When I work an all-nighter (36+ hours without sleep) I don't have much of an appetite the next day and so tend not to eat anything. Because I'm not eating I'm also not drinking much, which I like because I'm prone to slide into a salt+soda spiral. But if I don't force myself to drink fluids I often end up with a raging headache.
I'm not much of a breakfast eater and during periods when I drink a lot of caffeinated soda I often get headaches from the caffeine withdrawal, especially on the weekends as I tend to only drink soda when working.
And don't forget that maybe more than 20% of the normal water intake are due to food, not just drinking [1], so if you eat less you need to compensate water intake accordingly.
> How do you start? Agatston told me to start by skipping one meal a day, usually breakfast.
This sounds especially odd to me, as skipping breakfast has long been one of those well-known ways to accidentally gain weight... (explanation typically being that you end up hungrier at lunch/dinner and eat more over the whole day)
Are we sure about this? I mean, wasn't "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" an advertising slogan to sell more?
Additionally: I think this probably has more to do with the person. My mother is outright miserable without breakfast, which makes sense. She is hungriest early in the day. She doesn't have much issue completely skipping dinner or eating very little the rest of the day. I'm the opposite. Eating too early means I simply eat more food that day - and I'm not even hungry the first hour or two that I'm awake. I don't see a point in eating when I'm not hungry, so I generally don't. It is much easier to simply skip food early in the day, snack on something small for lunch (cheese and bread, fruit, etc), and have a nice dinner.
For years I haven't been eating breakfast long before the IF craze. Mostly out of laziness. Buying all the ingredients, making sure they don't expire, preparing the food etc. is quite some time, so I gradually dropped the habit with no adverse effect. I live alone, but oh boy when people learned that I don't eat breakfast they'd get so defensive and try to tell me how unhealthy it was and how I must be underperforming because of that etc... I even got back to eating breakfast and intellectually felt good that now I'm more of a healthy normal person who does the socially acceptable normal things.
After all the IF articles I immediately went back to no breakfast with no guilt.
It's crazy how much of this stuff is in our head. The body is really really adaptive! If you get used to eating breakfast and suddenly skip it, you will feel like shit. But that doesn't mean your friend who never eats breakfast also goes through that every day. Or, if you always wake up at 9 AM, you may be shocked at those morning people who wake up at 4:30 AM. But probably if you followed their exact routine incl the evening routine, you'd find after a few weeks that it's not too bad. Surely there is a genetic component to it as well, but we underestimate the power of adaption and habits.
And most importantly, don't be so defensive when someone tells you about a strange habit of theirs while they are visibly healthy and well adjusted. Eating disorders and sudden drastic changes are of course cause for concern, but many people have a crabs in the bucket mentality and feel personally attacked when someone does something for their own health.
Delicious breakfast gives me great mood boost for the rest of the day, so I prefer to skip dinner, or at least have it early enough to have at least 7 hours before sleep.
> get so defensive and try to tell me how unhealthy it was and how I must be underperforming because of that etc.
I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that the candy industry, ahem, the breakfast cereals industry's ads and sponsored "research" is behind that.
Opening Wikipedia on Kellog's (first guess of where I might find sources on this):
> The FTC had previously found fault with Kellogg's claims that Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal improved kids' attentiveness by nearly 20%.
> In 2016 an ad telling UK consumers that Special K is “full of goodness” and “nutritious” was banned.
And from one of the sources on ftc.gov:
> At about the same time that Kellogg agreed to stop making these kinds of false claims in its cereal ads, the company began a new advertising campaign promoting the purported health benefits of Rice Krispies, according to the FTC. On product packaging, Kellogg claimed that Rice Krispies cereal “now helps support your child’s immunity,” with “25 percent Daily Value of Antioxidants and Nutrients – Vitamins A, B, C, and E.” The back of the cereal box stated that “Kellogg’s Rice Krispies has been improved to include antioxidants and nutrients that your family needs to help them stay healthy.”
> The expanded order against Kellogg prohibits the company from making claims about any health benefit of any food unless the claims are backed by scientific evidence and not misleading.
I, too, heard from my parents that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day!" and that I shouldn't skip it, and you can rationalize it with "sure, it's the first thing, a good start is half the work" or something. But that's not the same as reading the original research or at least doing a cursory search online -- something that my parents aren't used to questioning; and if they look it up, confirmation bias might play a big role.
So I don't think you can fully blame the people that got defensive about this, though I am sorry you had this experience.
To end on a more positive note, the European Union requires food to only make preapproved health claims. It feelt a bit like censorship or at least overreach when I first heard of this and I read that the number of claims made reduced very significantly (also correct claims, since it's now expensive to prove it truthful) if I remember correctly, but I guess this does stop a lot of this misinformation, at least within the EU. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_claim#European_Laws)
Ha, I've experienced the same thing. I'm a healthy weight and don't have any obvious health issues, but people keep telling me how bad it is that I don't eat breakfast. I've even had people tell me "yeah, you might look fine on the outside, but you're unhealthy on the inside", or imply that I'll run into health complications further down the track if I don't change my habits now.
I think food to most people is a little bit like religion: everyone wants to believe that their knowledge of nutrition is correct, and that anyone doing anything differently must be wrong.
> Although it sounds counterintuitive, long periods without eating actually decrease your levels of the “eat now” hormone
ghrelin.
I could not tell you if this is psychology or hormonal, but it seems to me after having done it, that the benefit of intermittent fasting is not just "fewer calories on average due to fast days" but also shifting the point at which the body starts to sound the alarms about hunger. You "get used" to not being sated, and it feels less like a problem that needs fixing, at least for a few hours longer. This happens at some level well below conscious thought.
that's entirely wrong though. Because it's not about cutting the calories of your meals in half - it's about having longer gaps between your caloric intake times, so your body goes into ketosis.
An accelerated version of intermittent fasting is longer term fasting - ideal minimum being 3 days, although even only being able to handle 24 hours at first is a great start; the next ideal number of days is 5 days, then 10 days, then 20 days based on different changes that occur at those periods.
I never argued no medical supervision? Many people find it much easier to take a daily electrolyte supplements while fasting, part of that is to increase blood pressure in the body - so you'll avoid the added effects and added pressure on the system of that.
If you're underweight then you shouldn't be fasting, that's the main concern from my understanding.
Some people may just want to make sure their blood sugar levels are healthy, perhaps along with checking for other abnormal factors. Obviously people who may be fasting to lose weight may have other dis-ease progression due to the weight or that caused their weight gain.
One other problem is many people don't understand how to come off of a fast properly - and eating slowly isn't necessarily how. In reality what will happen is if you don't know what foods you're normally eating that cause irritation/inflammation in your GI tract and you return to those foods, you're in for a very uncomfortable and painful experience because the contrast from being away from those foods - from a low to no inflammation state to then introducing them again, it's not fun and I say that from experience; it's part of the process of how an elimination diet can work to help you understand what foods you can tolerate or not, or you can do Igg food sensitivity testing and save yourself a lot of trial and error time - though those tests don't account for all sensitivities, so people need to not blindly trust that they are encompassing all possibilities.
It "works" exactly like calorie restriction, there's no magic to IF.
From a literature review[0]:
>Twelve studies used calorie-restricted diets as a comparator to IF and found equivalent weight loss in both groups.11,15-17,19,22,27,28,33,41-43 Study duration was 8 weeks to 1 year, with a combined total of 1206 participants (527 undergoing IF, 572 using calorie restriction, and 107 control participants) and demonstrated weight loss of 4.6% to 13.0%.11,15-17,19,22,27,28,33,41-43
IF offered better glycemic control for Type II Diabetes (see the last sentence):
> Synthesis All 27 IF trials found weight loss of 0.8% to 13.0% of baseline weight with no serious adverse events. Twelve studies comparing IF to calorie restriction found equivalent results. The 5 studies that included patients with type 2 diabetes documented improved glycemic control.
Is "glycaemic control" a general benefit, or is that only good for people with diabetes (and other conditions?)?
I've wondered if IF makes a difference in that way. If there's a pain au chocolat for me, and I eat it at breakfast is that different to me eating all the same food in the day but eating that pain au choc after lunch?
> It "works" exactly like calorie restriction[;] there's no magic to IF.
This phrasing is too easily misinterpreted.
Saying "works" leaves ambiguity between outcomes (i.e. weight loss results) and processes (i.e. metabolic mechanisms and changes). If you said "IF showed similar results as CR in treating obesity" that is consistent with the paper.
Second, saying "exactly like" in the context of statistics is an effective way to invite criticism (and not the constructive kind).
From the key points on the front page:
> The heterogeneity in the current evidence limits
> comparison of IF to other weight-loss strategies.
> Intermittent fasting shows promise as a primary care
> intervention for obesity, but little is known about
> long-term sustainability and health effects.
> Longer-duration studies are needed to understand
> how IF might contribute to effective weight-loss
> strategies.
> It "works" exactly like calorie restriction, there's no magic to IF.
"there's no magic to IF"? Well, literally speaking, I tend to agree. For example, I've never actually made out any mustachioed magical monkeys monkey-patching methods in Ruby on Rails.
Seriously though, I think I disagree with the intent behind your sentence, which I interpret as downplaying the difference between IF (intermittent fasting) and CR (calorie restriction). Based on reading the Obesity Code, my understanding is that IF leads to substantially different biological responses relative to CR.
This diagram below, or something similar to it, is a nice way of understanding the core principles in The Obesity Code by Fung which promotes IF. Sustained durations of fasting help lower insulin levels for long enough periods that insulin resistance itself can lower. (CR doesn't do this, to my knowledge.)
I am strongly prone to skipping breakfast and drinking black coffee all day long, but I honestly do feel like it leaves me with less energy at the end of the day, and makes me less likely to exercise.
If you are overweight, any weight loss may be good. If you aren't really overweight, eating healthy regularly timed meals and working out are probably a better bet for maintaining your physique.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadI've done intermittent fasting (IF) for the past 5 years. Apart from a black espresso every morning, I skip breakfast all the time (not just occasionally).
Skipping breakfast is a psychological trick (that doesn't work on everybody, but works well enough to make a difference). The real goal is to entice oneself to eat less by eating fewer meals in a day.
As someone who has practised IF for 5 years, I find I haven't really lost any weight (a benefit claimed by many IF practitioners). That said, I haven't gained any either -- blips on the scale around Thanksgiving and Christmastime automatically flatten within days.
To be absolutely honest, I can't tell if IF actually works, but the routine hasn't been onerous to keep up, and over the past 5 years my health has been mostly the same, no big changes. But perhaps the counterfactual is that if I didn't practice IF, I would've been worse off. (I don't care to test the counterfactual)
I attribute the weight loss I experienced to cutting out processed foods and cutting out oils (I do consume these once in a while, and when I do the scales show me I’ve fallen off the tracks).
Perhaps, but for some people it's also a physiological risk. I eat about 1200 calories for breakfast as my body otherwise cannot function for the day.
Whether fasting is appropriate depends on one's body composition, daily exertion routine and physiological factors. For most people I'd recommend exercise instead of fasting.
Another part of the story is showing the feedback cycles between glucose, insulin, and insulin resistance. I made a line art drawing as a gist, here:
https://gist.github.com/xpe/8d5c6243fba454e5987e87e9bc461a58
I already pasted it into another comment, so I don't want to exceed my line art threshold here.
Do you have a medical condition? that's a lot of calories to take on for Breakfast, that's almost half my daily quota.
Two bowls of cereals can fly very quickly into one’s belly, pour in some milk and the tally easily crosses the 1000kcal mark.
I used to think this too, until I switched to a low carb diet. The raging fire in my belly, inability to concentrate and overall sluggishness just simply...disappeared.
That’s when I realized that “my body needs X to Y” is unhelpful unless you’ve experimented with lots of different values of X for long enough for your body to adapt.
I’m not saying you haven’t, but I’m just reiterating the importance of tinkering with your approach to diet and exercise. By the time we reach adulthood, our bodies have adapted to years of bad eating habits. Reshaping the hormonal and microbiotic responses may take a few weeks of discomfort/unusual response before seeing results.
"You can't outrun the fork."
Metabolic studies show that you have to be damn near Olympic calibre in your exercise routine to cause a significant change in caloric consumption by increasing metabolism through exercise. Your body pretty much holds a constant level of metabolism and shunts it around to whichever systems it deems most important right now.
Exercise might give you an extra couple calories of margin (maybe), but you won't lose weight with it alone.
If you want to lose weight, you have to get the caloric intake down. And that's hard because you are fighting biological systems that evolved to store energy really efficiently and to give up that energy only very reluctantly.
Anecdotally, my appetite became more reasonable after I took up running. Fat seemed to keep me full longer.
For example running or swimming for an hour seems to be around 8-900 kcal based on various websites.
Now that's not nothing, but also people won't do it daily for sure. I think nutrition advice is really hard because people already (have to) factor in the likelihood of following the advice by a general average person, their propensity to lie to themselves to be in denial, etc. If you actually (not just in your daydreams) do a lot of daily exercise (not just drive to the gym and read Facebook), it will matter in terms of calories.
I'm not saying this to counter your advice. Advice is hard, it is tangled up in motivational systems etc. but sometimes people may get the wrong idea in the other direction. It is true that exercise cannot make up for bad eating habits especially if you eat back more afterwards because you believe you earned this. I think that whole type of relationship to food is unhealthy (junk binge is reward, fast and exercise is punishment). A few sit-ups won't undo a chocolate chip. Etc etc. But regular exercise all else equal does have a significant effect. Yes, nothing is all else equal, but then we end up making so many assumptions on how people will react that the whole debate is infused with assumptions like, but then you will lie to yourself and actually follow the opposite advice and so I need to tell you this other thing.
Right, and that's the problem. Even if you do avoid "cheating" and "I ran X miles so I deserve this" type things, your body will still mess with your metabolism to compensate for the added exercise, and that works against the weight loss plan.
I went from near-zero exercise to ~10 miles of running per week, and maintained that more or less for 2 years without experiencing any significant weight loss (it was/is definitely valuable for general cardiovascular health, though). Only changing my diet helped, and even then it was difficult to lose weight and keep it off (took a year to lose ~7 lbs, and less than half that to put them back one). But now with COVID-19 and sheltering in place, I've been cooking nearly every day, and in less than three months have lost 15 lbs, and I've been running less than usual.
But really, everyone's individual experience differs. It seems like nutrition and exercise advice really needs to be tailored to each person, and sometimes there's a bit of trial and error involved.
Still exercise may help so many other aspects like mood, energy,sleep quality etc. (even if not in the moment but with an hour or day or two delay) which are all helpful to keep oneself on track in the kitchen. It can be a concrete motivational goal to be able to lift this or that much, run so and so far, and it's straightforward to see how you will need to pay attention to your food it you want to achieve that.
> Still exercise may help so many other aspects like mood, energy,sleep quality etc. (even if not in the moment but with an hour or day or two delay) which are all helpful to keep oneself on track in the kitchen.
So, in other words, my initial statement is correct: you're not going to make meaningful progress weight-loss-wise without changing your diet. If exercising makes that easier for you as a second-order effect, that's great. But that's by no means universal.
Many people who do intermittent fasting go without eating from, say, 8 pm to noon the next day (16 hours). If you sleep between ~10 pm and ~6 am, in my experience, you might have a little bit of hunger at some points in the morning, but you can get used to it. I typically felt great on days I did it.
A lot of what I've read over the past few years suggests that exercise won't help you lose weight[0]. It's great for general health, but exercise without some kind of diet modification generally won't do all that much for your weight.
This tracks with my experience, at least. In early 2016 my doc told me I needed to get some exercise. At the time I was doing nothing more than walking to and from work (60 mins total). I started running, and worked up to around 10 miles per week. I'd already been more or less been doing IF for a while (without realizing it; I was just never hungry when I woke up), eating lunch at noon and dinner at 7pm, or just a single mid-afternoon meal around 3pm.
I didn't start actually losing weight until 2 years later, when I started calorie counting and attempting to limit my intake to around 1500 per day (I wasn't always successful). It was still difficult; I only lost 6 or 7 lbs, and it took nearly a year to do that.
That turned out to be hard to maintain; I stopped counting calories, and by late 2019 I'd put those lbs back on and probably a couple more, even with IF in place.
With COVID-19, I've been cooking 6 days a week, so that's meant less oil/butter, nothing fried, but still a good amount of carbs. My running has dropped to 4-6 miles a week. But in less than three months, I've lost 15 lbs. The only thing that actually worked was changing my diet. Once things go back to normal and I'm going out to restaurants again, I fully expect I'll put that weight back on.
[0] E.g. https://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11518804/weight-loss-exercise-...
How so ?
I've an issue with sleep related binge-eating: fullness induces sleepiness, so when I'm awake at night and want to be asleep I'll eat - basically an extra meal. Alcohol too. For me the root issue is other mental health problems.
Sleep problems can readily lead to weight gain.
I can see how apnoea that exhibits as waking up a lot might lead someone attempting to fall into heavier sleep by overeating.
IF, paired with lots of exercise, was working for me before the current crisis.
> IF, paired with lots of exercise, was working for me before the current crisis.
You mean the pandemic/lockdown ?
Yes, I meant lockdown.
Ah, it might be a translation issue on my part then. I am inclined to believe there are some complex causative links, hope research will bring new hypotheses and answers about that.
At this stage, I am not sure anyone, let alone myself, can elucidate the precise mechanism of how OSA/sleep deprivation leads to abnormal eating patterns, however I think even just a cursory review of the literature shows general agreement that there is a link between the two.
Here is an abstract from a review published in 2017:
Obesity and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) have a reciprocal relationship. Sleep disruptions characteristic of OSA may promote behavioral, metabolic, and/or hormonal changes favoring weight gain and/or difficulty losing weight. The regulation of energy balance (EB), i.e., the relationship between energy intake (EI) and energy expenditure (EE), is complex and multi-factorial, involving food intake, hormonal regulation of hunger/satiety/appetite, and EE via metabolism and physical activity (PA). The current systematic review describes the literature on how OSA affects EB-related parameters. OSA is associated with a hormonal profile characterized by abnormally high leptin and ghrelin levels, which may encourage excess EI. Data on actual measures of food intake are lacking, and not sufficient to make conclusions. Resting metabolic rate appears elevated in OSA vs.
Controls: Findings on PA are inconsistent, but may indicate a negative relationship with OSA severity that is modulated by daytime sleepiness and body weight. A speculative explanation for the positive EB in OSA is that the increased EE via metabolism induces an overcompensation in the drive for hunger/food intake, which is larger in magnitude than the rise in EI required to re-establish EB. Understanding how OSA affects EB-related parameters can help improve weight loss efforts in these patients.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2016.07.001
Yeah, I can say from first hand experience that CPAP doesn't always solve every sleep problems :/.
Thanks for the link, it's shedding some light on things that I suspected.
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't read the article, because paywall.)
That's far from sure at this point. Yes, HN is a hotbed of intermittent fasting propaganda [1], which may make it seem like there is general agreement. But you'll find other communities pushing other diets as the one true diet, so... more research is needed.
[1] Note, for example, that the submitter subtly but crucially changed the title, which in the original says "works for many" (emphasis mine).
I've personally lost a significant amount of weight and kept it off continually for more than a decade. But I don't really know how I did that, nor do I have much confidence that whatever I did would work for others.
If you’re so inclined, Google the exact article URL, then click the first result that matches.
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 diets - fasting, intermittent fasting, keto, paleo, zero carb, low fat, food separation diet, ...
Personally, intermittent fasting hasn’t helped me lose weight (might have helped me maintain it though). So far, the only thing that has helped was very strict calorie counting, but that was accompanied with severe emotional/mental discomfort (constant hunger). I’m now experimenting with one-day fasting (turns out not eating, for me, is associated with less hunger than eating too little, go figure ...), we’ll see how t goes.
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.
The magical part is sticking to it though.
Methods for the "material" part of the problem are here. But the psychological problem will probably not be solvable by any "method". Its up to anyone's own mastery of itself and its a personal development issue.
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 steady at 5.3 almost immediately.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-sur...
Interestingly, the researcher doesn't discuss skipping breakfast. I've been skipping for several years with a somewhat uneasy feeling and a growing phobia for diabetes. I'll probably try the 3pm/7pm to 7am fast instead; maybe my body doesn't tolerate skipping breakfast as well as I would like it to.
Regardless, good on you for getting better.
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.
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 black coffee means it’s no longer effectively zero calories, and this is not technically fasting. Same with adding sugar to it. You can skip breakfast and have black coffee, black or herbal teas and water — all these are effectively zero calories.
One point this article doesn’t address in the 16:8 scheme is the frequency of eating within the eight hour eating window. Is it ok to have three meals and snacks within that window? Should it be two meals with a good gap between them? I’m sure these variations also determine if it works for weight loss or other benefits.
Intermittent fasting with 16:8 makes it easier to consume lower calories. Weight loss typically follows if activity levels are maintained the same or increased (to compensate for a lower basal metabolic rate).
1. Become a weird coffee person and put some nerd energy into it so black coffee doesn't taste disgusting on it's own. James Hoffman on YouTube is a great way into this.
2. Eschew the coffee and take a teaspoon of MCT Oil before your can of zero-calorie Energy Drink (Coke Zero Energy is my favorite atm). It may be dirty and people are going to tell you Aspartame is evil and is going to make you hungry(it really might, but you are still hours away from your window so black/white discipline is easy to keep alive), but for me it worked much better than dreading the coffee in the morning.
Failing any of these (including getting quality beans that are recently brewed), and your coffee may be much worse than it needs to be.
I despise Nestle business and social practices, but a Nespresso machine with Nespresso pods is probably the best coffee that most people could hope to make.
Starbucks made coffee appealing for a vast amount of the population by legitimising to drink 350ml of milk with lots of sugar by adding an espresso. If you are part of this crowd, the sad truth is that zero carb energy drinks are the more realistic morning beverage alternative for you.
Black coffee is the bomb. Don’t care if it’s Starbucks, Peet’s, FamilyMart, 7-11, it is the superior method of caffeine consumption, whether you like espresso, Americano or some other variety. I do not care about coffee snob stuff but coffee is best served black. Speaking personally.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
My current aeropress and filter are from 2012 and I'm not really in need of an upgrade any time soon so it's honestly a very affordable brewing device.
I do agree on the beans though, freshly roasted beans are more expensive and on top of that a grinder would also be a good idea. You can get a decent electric burr grinder around here for a bit over 60 dollars. On average, I buy both cheap and expensive beans, the cheaper ones are around 10 dollars per kilo and the more expensive ones are around 60 to 70 dollars per kilo. Quick maths tells me that a 8oz cup of the cheaper stuff comes down to about 13 cents and the more expensive one just under a dollar so definitely cheaper than any cafe and this is 3rd wave artisan type coffee we're talking about.
Aeropress is basically idiot proof as well, anyone can make a decent cup of coffee with it so I don't really buy into the Nespresso argument here either. For an investment of under a hundred bucks, you can most definitely enjoy extremely good black coffee at home with very palatable running costs as well. I'm happy to expand if anyone has _any_ coffee related questions.
My point is that this effort is not feasible for most people. If my morning drink takes me more effort than getting showered and dressed, i'll probably forgo it 90% of the time. I'm working on this form of laziness, but that's the willpower/patience most people have to live with. In addition there is a whole host of other reasons why something that's easy and routine for you can be quite vexing for other people.
Opening a can takes less then ten seconds, we're already talking about a harsh diet change, we don't have to make it harder than necessary for people.
The Baratza Encore is $139 on Amazon, and should be sufficient for pourovers of any kind.
Of course, if you pour bad water into your machine, you're still not going to get the best you could get regardless of which method you use.
And I wasn't speaking anything about price (where Nespresso loses). Nor was I speaking of convenience (where Nespresso is great for 1-2 cups at a time).
I used an Aeropress for years, and it is tricky to get consistent results; plus it's a bit of a cleanup chore. Also, there's still the question of whether to use the Aeropress the way it was intended, or instead to do the upside-down brief-brew method.
I currently happily use a standard Melitta brewer where I can put good beans, freshly ground, and good water in and then get 10 cups of coffee 10 minutes later. My partner and I wouldn't enjoy our liesurely outdoor coffee time nearly as much if one of us were having to run back in the house and make a new Aeropress coffee every 15 minutes.
(Incidentally, make the pot of coffee and then pour it into a pre-warmed thermal carafe. It's not good to keep cooking it on the burner.)
I suspect people consider espresso-based beverages more premium because they tend to be made on the spot, and also because the mass market has been trained to think like that.
Filter coffee probably reminds people of diner coffee, or something lower-end.
I'd personally take filter coffee anytime, preferably using beans that aren't roasted too dark. It's so much easier to drink.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisha_(coffee)
I’m an enthusiastic drinker of coffee and alcoholic drinks and when I started drinking them they tasted vile and needed lots of other flavors to disguise how awful they tasted. The first time I had coffee of any kind, quite milky, I wretched. Some people just hate the flavor of coffee enough never to get over it, same as some people can never find an alcoholic drink they like.
If this is one's issue, though, the solution is pretty easy: Wean yourself off. I did such a thing, and it has probably been one of the best things I've done. The cream was the first to go, as I was putting so little in that it was a pain. Sugar eventually went the same way: less than a spoonful or a packet in a standard coffee cup. This was a more difficult transition, honestly, and the coffee tasted weird for a couple of weeks.
I know there are tea-like coffees. I don't like them: I get introduced to new stuff in December, when I order a coffee bean Advent calendar from a little Norwegian brewer: I kinda hate the days of the fruity, tea-ish coffees. Even if they were my favorite, I can't afford to drink this daily.
But that's besides the point. Cream, especially, gives a completely different mouthfeel. When I did put cream in coffee, I would have done it with the fancy coffees as well, though you could talk me into taking a sip otherwise.
The advent calendar is from Kaffebox, and I definitely recommend it, by the way.
You can say this about literally any food. Nonsense.
Scary thought.
I.e. I had my wakeup ritual with Mint/Nana for a bit and it was nice :-)
But I did discover James Hoffman on youtube and am on a verge of becomming a weird coffe nerd :D
If the bitterness is what bothers you, get beans that are lightly roasted. The bitterness comes from roasting it dark.
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.
Fasting has various effect, not all of them are linked to the sugar consumption.
[Likewise for other things people don't always think about like vitamin / supplements.]
There is more info in [1][2] but tl;dr:
- Fasting for metabolic health/weight loss: likely does not break a fast
- Fasting for gut rest: does break a fast
- Fasting for longevity: likely does not break a fast
[1]: https://www.zerofasting.com/does-coffee-break-your-fast/
[2]: https://www.dietdoctor.com/can-use-cream-coffee-fasting
There's a difference between working a bit and a lot.
Go up in the night, go some steps to the toilet. -- Or go out running 10k. Then back to sleep. Repeat reach night.
Coffee or a big meal.
I guess it depends on how you choose to define your "technical" terms. For example (https://www.bulletproof.com/diet/bulletproof-diet/bulletproo...): "The technical definition of “fasting” describes not consuming a single calorie. When your body isn’t burdened with the task of digestion all day every day, it has a chance to carry out cleaning and repair processes that make you healthier. This cleanup and repair process is called autophagy. Depending on your diet, intermittent fasting can also put you in a fat-burning state called ketosis.[2] Learn more about the benefits of intermittent fasting.
The good news is that there’s no scientific reason to completely restrict calories to reap the benefits of intermittent fasting. If you only consume fat (no protein or carbs) during your fast, you won’t interrupt autophagy. You’ll also stay in the fat-burning state of ketosis."
(I have no opinion on any of this except that I'm amused by hobby nutritionists.)
While true, it's also a lot like calling the Internet a "photon transport mechanism".
If you experiment with such things, make sure you get the whole picture and is otherwise healthy. Ask anyone with diabetes why.
The body is an amazing machine. It's still a good idea to at least try to understand the basic processes before making experiments on it. At least understand how ketosis works and why it isn't our default mode of metabolism.
While there certainly are people who feel that it is helping them, others would be actively hurt by it. Results on one individual can not be extrapolated into some sort of universal cure. The fact that such advice can be readily found on the Internet anyway probably shouldn't come as a surprise though.
It is the default metabolism.
1. All things being equal if you do not introduce any calories into your body you will naturally be in ketosis.
2. The only way to be kicked out of ketosis is to elevate blood glucose levels/spike insulin. Sure that is nearly everyone now, but that doesn’t make it the Body’s default...you need to eat a certain way for that to happen, historically there really wouldn’t have been a ton of available options to Eat Foods to kick humans out of ketosis until humans began farming grains and cereals.
3. Perhaps most importantly your brain can run off of ketones or glucose, very few things can cross the blood brain barrier, and ketones are far more efficient at crossing the blood brain barrier and powering the brain.
The important issues I found have to do with “keto flu” (you have to supplement elctrolytes or you’re likely to feel bad with weird symptoms for the first few weeks) and with some pre existing conditions; otherwise keto (and IF) seem to be as safe as any other diet, and likely much healthier.
Did you reach other conclusions?
Sounds like Goop-grade quack science to me. :-)
You can read books about fasting or do the autophagy class on EdX. Professor in Tokyo got a Nobel for outlining the mechanisms a few years ago.
Another part to why fasting can be difficult for people is as your inflammation level goes down, so does the depressant-numbing effect, so you will feel whatever digestive pains and irritation some of the foods you're eating may be causing you more clearly; this coincides with most people commenting how their thinking and senses become much sharper as they deepen into the length of a fast. If you're regularly eating foods you don't realize are agitating your GI tract, any that are causing inflammation, then the potential for fasting to be an enjoyable and easy endeavour for upkeep - weight loss or maintenance - will go down.
Edit to add: There may also be mild to severe dis-ease progression, damage/injury to the GI tract from lifelong lack of awareness (being numbed from eating foods that are harmful to you by some of the foods you may/likely have been eating) allowing the damage to progress. You may then be exposed and feeling this pain and then eating again is how you numb feeling it as strongly. 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 - however, h.pylori bacterial infection for example causes nausea only on an empty stomach - and so that could be why some people are constantly driven to eat, not only to numb themselves but also to reduce nausea without realizing what's actually going on. That's why I also recommend microbiome stool testing. Also, if you underlying physical pain and injuries, reducing the inflammation from food will also increase your perception (and reaction to) to that physical pain - and so until you get that underlying pain treated then you'll be in a more agitated, less numbed state as well.
All of what I said above is ultimately why a practice of non-violence is necessary, non-violence towards others but also non-violence towards yourself: be gentle on yourself. I feel it's also important to state that all of this learning is a practice, an experiment you run through with yourself to understand yourself more and how things like food affect you, how breath affects you, how the mind affects you.
"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.
The idea that you need a special kind of coffee to do intermittent fasting is IMHO a very bad idea: it sets an unnecessary barrier to entry, and it misses the main point: it's about what you don't eat, not what you add to your intake.
[1]: https://www.zerofasting.com/does-coffee-break-your-fast/
It has a ton of info - Martin Berkhan is really first person who popularized 16:8.
One of advises there is that you can have black coffee with some milk, because milk is really low on calories.
Also, from his site again, 10g of BCAA pre and postworkout does not change expression of fasting markers in blood. 10g of BCAA is ~40 calories. Put differently, it is equal to two teaspoons of sugar.
And, to finalize, he recommends 14:10 regime for women.
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.
Also, it looks like 80 calories will not change fasting state of your body (see above about 20g of BCAA). You may put 80 calories / 0.62 calories per gram = 129 grams of milk or half of cup, into your coffee or tea and not interrupt your fast.
https://www.amazon.com/Obesity-Code-Unlocking-Secrets-Weight...
My understanding of how humans evolved to eat is pretty limited, but I would guess unintentional intermittent fasting would have been commonplace in humans over the past few hundred thousand years.
There seems to be consensus that eating a large variety of foods is great for you, but is shifting your eating pattern, or even grazing, better than eating at the same time, the same amount, every day?
Does your ancestral background impact how frequently you eat? Similar to how some cultures are lactose intolerant due to historically not having access to cows, could similar issues present based on how frequently we eat?
I’d love to find resources that have dug into those topics if anyone has recommendations.
Eating close to bedtime can cause reflux and FWIW I had less reflux when I fasted after 4pm.
I agree with your point about eating late causing issues with digestions (which is something I learned recently while reading on this topic). I can remember that at least a few of my more severe reactions happened on days when I had a later dinner than usual.
I also read that our digestive system runs on a cycle and it usually needs to shut down during the night for maintenance mode. The later we eat, the more we put this cycle in disarray. And the older we are, more probable we get affected by this disruption. I am currently eating four hours before I go to bed. Next time around if and when I get back to trying to IF, I will aim to skip dinner rather than breakfast.
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 it is to only eat a little.
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 for 12 hours.
I don't really understand it though... Between 'too heavy' and 'too light' exists 'just right', and it's pretty hard to miss...
The human mind is bizarre.
The first few days which were a little tough. From midway through the third day onwards, I started feeling absolutely fine. There is an overall feeling of lightness. And, of course, the amazing experience when I have that glass of coconut water is truly indescribable!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_water
Its why pregnant women are told not to drink alcohol at all. The reality is that the liver is amazing and can remove low levels of it so well that a small amount of drinking is fine. The problem is that it's really hard to a) effectively communicate what the safe level is b) get people to stick to it. It's much easier to avoid it entirely.
Calling that amount a “glass” perhaps is unfortunate, but it is convenient and well understood by most. But then again, I’ve also never known anyone who claimed that their 375ml pours were a “glass”. That just strikes me more as ignorance.
This doesn’t necessarily invalidate your overall point (that a foetus may be exposed to some alcohol, as it depends on how efficient the first-pass metabolism of alcohol is) but it does impact your logic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_pass_effect
The other thing I've realised is it doesn't have to be about watching the clock every day. What I actually do is just eat lunch and dinner every day and that's it. It doesn't really matter when those meals are, which means I can adjust easily to accommodate socialising, for example. The diet that works is easy to adhere to. If you have to think about it every day and shape the rest of your life around it, it will not work (unless you're a professional athlete maybe).
A slight life hack. A few days of fasting (3-5 should do it) will probably get you to this state.
So once deciding on a new healthy composition of food. Start of a with a few days of fasting and it will be easier to stick to it.
* Limit your meals to two meals a day. Absolutely no snacking between meals. Make sure your last meal is it such a time that you won't go to bed hungry. But if you're hungry during the day, just wait until your next meal (lunch or dinner),
* Be mindful when you eat. The French are great at this. Don't eat for sustenance. Eat for pleasure. The object of eating isn't to get calories down your throat as quickly as you can. Enjoy the aroma of the food in your nose and the feel of it on your tongue. Don't load up your fork with the next bite while still chewing. If your food is too bland to enjoy this way, learn to cook French cuisine,
* Weigh your carbs carefully. Pasta, rice, potato etc. should all be weighed every time. Do not do it by eye. Your eye will cheat you. Do not rely on your satiation reflex because carbs won't trigger it,
* Do not be afraid of fat. Note the amount of fat in French cuisine. Fat is nice, but your body will automatically regulate your intake. Butter is delicious but nobody wants to eat a whole stick of it.
* Don't drink calories. Drink water, tea and coffee. Especially avoid beer, red wine, soft drinks and sweet cocktails. If possible, stop drinking alcoholic and soft drinks completely,
* Exercise discipline and restraint in the supermarket. Never go to the supermarket while fasted. Do not stock ready-to-eat food in your house. All food should be prepared before eating, and you should only prepare the amount that you plan to eat,
* Learn to relish hunger. Hunger is completely normal and something you are supposed to feel. Observe how fat people eat the moment they feel hunger. Remind yourself that you don't want to be one of them. If you feel hunger, just be safe in the knowledge that your next meal is planned and ready for you to prepare,
* Most importantly, find something that works for you. The first month should be discipline. After that it should become natural. If it feels like you want this new way of life to end at some point, revise your strategy. This should be easy. It's for the rest of your life.
If it's a Monday or Wednesday, no I can't eat it. Else, I can.
This works so much better for me than counting calories every day, the "cheating" is eliminated.
The thing is, I already know where those calories are coming from, starting with the yogurt pot for breakfast. There's three items (under 200 calories each) with no room for extras.
1) https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/the-5-2-diet-guide
Does it take must restraint to just eat like 2K calories in a 8-hour span?
Never had much problem with that during IF, and I used to have a BMI of over 35, so I was quite the eater...
Thing is, a rule like "only eat in an eight hour window" leaves plenty of time to consume huge amounts of calories. I've been known to pack away 4k+ in a meal, both in the past and today. It's not even hard for me. In fact, it's rather hard not to once I start eating because like many people who are of have been fat I'm a food addict.
Some here are saying things like "well, good luck eating 4k of lettuce dude!" and yeah, that is hard. But if you're eating lettuce and vegetables and all that low calorie stuff already you probably don't need the 8 hour window restriction!.
Honestly curious: Is there more discussion to be had than that?
Maybe that happens because we, as animals, have our bodies more adapted to eat as much as we can while food is available than to risk losing that opportunity for another unknown meal in the future. That to say that it is a hardwired behavior we have, a survival strategy that makes sense in the wild.
Problem is we don't live in that environment anymore. So, I think fasting works because our bodies trigger another natural response, that of focusing our senses to the search of food, kind of accepting that food is not available. Thus, it's easier to simply not eat at all instead of trying to eat moderately.
These are my 5 cents.
Source: "Why we sleep" by Matthew Walker.
Update: he has. His reply can be found here: https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/
I think if you tried to eat 3 meals in 8 hours you'd eat smaller meals. Otherwise you'd be stuffing yourself full.
I am not certain how generalizable this is. Because this sorts of diet research relies most often on self-reporting, I mostly read it by prepending 'People exist for which ...'. And that is good to know, and hopefully they are not outliers by too much, but it probably won't be silver bullet for everybody.
I.e. I remember hearing two twich streamers talk about their diets an one said how she really enjoys intermittent fasting, while other mentionsh how he needs to eat something at least every four hours, or he literally sees his apm in Starcraft drop :D
These days, I generally stick to a 16:8 approach of IF (I typically eat between 13:00-21:00). I find that it works pretty well for me. I should note that I'm very active (exercise every day, running, cycling, or lifting weights), and that I still typically eat 3 meals, albeit within a smaller window. I think being sceptical of food science is smart, so all I can say is that it works for me.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13530973-antifragile
Nowadays I've read the benefits of it and trying to replicate that but I just get severe headaches when trying to do it. Anyone got any tips for avoid thing that?
When I work an all-nighter (36+ hours without sleep) I don't have much of an appetite the next day and so tend not to eat anything. Because I'm not eating I'm also not drinking much, which I like because I'm prone to slide into a salt+soda spiral. But if I don't force myself to drink fluids I often end up with a raging headache.
I'm not much of a breakfast eater and during periods when I drink a lot of caffeinated soda I often get headaches from the caffeine withdrawal, especially on the weekends as I tend to only drink soda when working.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5084017/
This sounds especially odd to me, as skipping breakfast has long been one of those well-known ways to accidentally gain weight... (explanation typically being that you end up hungrier at lunch/dinner and eat more over the whole day)
Additionally: I think this probably has more to do with the person. My mother is outright miserable without breakfast, which makes sense. She is hungriest early in the day. She doesn't have much issue completely skipping dinner or eating very little the rest of the day. I'm the opposite. Eating too early means I simply eat more food that day - and I'm not even hungry the first hour or two that I'm awake. I don't see a point in eating when I'm not hungry, so I generally don't. It is much easier to simply skip food early in the day, snack on something small for lunch (cheese and bread, fruit, etc), and have a nice dinner.
I tried IF for a while. Had mixed results (mostly positive, just not as positive as expected). Willing to try again.
After all the IF articles I immediately went back to no breakfast with no guilt.
It's crazy how much of this stuff is in our head. The body is really really adaptive! If you get used to eating breakfast and suddenly skip it, you will feel like shit. But that doesn't mean your friend who never eats breakfast also goes through that every day. Or, if you always wake up at 9 AM, you may be shocked at those morning people who wake up at 4:30 AM. But probably if you followed their exact routine incl the evening routine, you'd find after a few weeks that it's not too bad. Surely there is a genetic component to it as well, but we underestimate the power of adaption and habits.
And most importantly, don't be so defensive when someone tells you about a strange habit of theirs while they are visibly healthy and well adjusted. Eating disorders and sudden drastic changes are of course cause for concern, but many people have a crabs in the bucket mentality and feel personally attacked when someone does something for their own health.
I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that the candy industry, ahem, the breakfast cereals industry's ads and sponsored "research" is behind that.
Opening Wikipedia on Kellog's (first guess of where I might find sources on this):
> The FTC had previously found fault with Kellogg's claims that Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal improved kids' attentiveness by nearly 20%.
> In 2016 an ad telling UK consumers that Special K is “full of goodness” and “nutritious” was banned.
And from one of the sources on ftc.gov:
> At about the same time that Kellogg agreed to stop making these kinds of false claims in its cereal ads, the company began a new advertising campaign promoting the purported health benefits of Rice Krispies, according to the FTC. On product packaging, Kellogg claimed that Rice Krispies cereal “now helps support your child’s immunity,” with “25 percent Daily Value of Antioxidants and Nutrients – Vitamins A, B, C, and E.” The back of the cereal box stated that “Kellogg’s Rice Krispies has been improved to include antioxidants and nutrients that your family needs to help them stay healthy.”
> The expanded order against Kellogg prohibits the company from making claims about any health benefit of any food unless the claims are backed by scientific evidence and not misleading.
I, too, heard from my parents that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day!" and that I shouldn't skip it, and you can rationalize it with "sure, it's the first thing, a good start is half the work" or something. But that's not the same as reading the original research or at least doing a cursory search online -- something that my parents aren't used to questioning; and if they look it up, confirmation bias might play a big role.
So I don't think you can fully blame the people that got defensive about this, though I am sorry you had this experience.
To end on a more positive note, the European Union requires food to only make preapproved health claims. It feelt a bit like censorship or at least overreach when I first heard of this and I read that the number of claims made reduced very significantly (also correct claims, since it's now expensive to prove it truthful) if I remember correctly, but I guess this does stop a lot of this misinformation, at least within the EU. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_claim#European_Laws)
Me too, and I've been slightly wondering how they got that idea -- when nowadays I don't eat breakfast and still feel fine
> breakfast cereals industry's ads and sponsored "research"
How interesting, makes sense, maybe the answer
I think food to most people is a little bit like religion: everyone wants to believe that their knowledge of nutrition is correct, and that anyone doing anything differently must be wrong.
> It's crazy how much of this stuff is in our head.
Likewise the idea that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" being ingrained in American culture despite lacking a scientific basis [1].
[1]: https://thefastingmethod.com/tyranny-breakfast-lose-weight-v...
I could not tell you if this is psychology or hormonal, but it seems to me after having done it, that the benefit of intermittent fasting is not just "fewer calories on average due to fast days" but also shifting the point at which the body starts to sound the alarms about hunger. You "get used" to not being sated, and it feels less like a problem that needs fixing, at least for a few hours longer. This happens at some level well below conscious thought.
The link points to Michael Mosley's 2012 BBC documentary. Mark Mattson's TEDx talk from 2014 is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UkZAwKoCP8
I always recommend people watch this by Dr. Jason Fung: 'Therapeutic Fasting - Solving the Two-Compartment Problem' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIuj-oMN-Fk
If you're underweight then you shouldn't be fasting, that's the main concern from my understanding.
Some people may just want to make sure their blood sugar levels are healthy, perhaps along with checking for other abnormal factors. Obviously people who may be fasting to lose weight may have other dis-ease progression due to the weight or that caused their weight gain.
One other problem is many people don't understand how to come off of a fast properly - and eating slowly isn't necessarily how. In reality what will happen is if you don't know what foods you're normally eating that cause irritation/inflammation in your GI tract and you return to those foods, you're in for a very uncomfortable and painful experience because the contrast from being away from those foods - from a low to no inflammation state to then introducing them again, it's not fun and I say that from experience; it's part of the process of how an elimination diet can work to help you understand what foods you can tolerate or not, or you can do Igg food sensitivity testing and save yourself a lot of trial and error time - though those tests don't account for all sensitivities, so people need to not blindly trust that they are encompassing all possibilities.
From a literature review[0]:
>Twelve studies used calorie-restricted diets as a comparator to IF and found equivalent weight loss in both groups.11,15-17,19,22,27,28,33,41-43 Study duration was 8 weeks to 1 year, with a combined total of 1206 participants (527 undergoing IF, 572 using calorie restriction, and 107 control participants) and demonstrated weight loss of 4.6% to 13.0%.11,15-17,19,22,27,28,33,41-43
[0] https://www.cfp.ca/content/cfp/66/2/117.full.pdf
> Synthesis All 27 IF trials found weight loss of 0.8% to 13.0% of baseline weight with no serious adverse events. Twelve studies comparing IF to calorie restriction found equivalent results. The 5 studies that included patients with type 2 diabetes documented improved glycemic control.
I've wondered if IF makes a difference in that way. If there's a pain au chocolat for me, and I eat it at breakfast is that different to me eating all the same food in the day but eating that pain au choc after lunch?
Great question. My guess would that it would be correlated, at least. If you check this out, please share back what you find.
This phrasing is too easily misinterpreted.
Saying "works" leaves ambiguity between outcomes (i.e. weight loss results) and processes (i.e. metabolic mechanisms and changes). If you said "IF showed similar results as CR in treating obesity" that is consistent with the paper.
Second, saying "exactly like" in the context of statistics is an effective way to invite criticism (and not the constructive kind).
From the key points on the front page:
"there's no magic to IF"? Well, literally speaking, I tend to agree. For example, I've never actually made out any mustachioed magical monkeys monkey-patching methods in Ruby on Rails.
Seriously though, I think I disagree with the intent behind your sentence, which I interpret as downplaying the difference between IF (intermittent fasting) and CR (calorie restriction). Based on reading the Obesity Code, my understanding is that IF leads to substantially different biological responses relative to CR.
This diagram below, or something similar to it, is a nice way of understanding the core principles in The Obesity Code by Fung which promotes IF. Sustained durations of fasting help lower insulin levels for long enough periods that insulin resistance itself can lower. (CR doesn't do this, to my knowledge.)
If you are overweight, any weight loss may be good. If you aren't really overweight, eating healthy regularly timed meals and working out are probably a better bet for maintaining your physique.