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Intermittent fasting can be effective for weight loss, but no more so than other methods of caloric restriction.

I prefer switching out high calorie food for lower calorie food of the same volume.

it's actually not that hard, the average person lives on just seven different meals 95% of the time, so work through optimizing one a week

Intermittent fasting does not equal caloric restriction. It is only an arrangement on when you eat, not how much you eat.
Pedantically, yes. However folks who use it for dieting use it as a tool to restrict calories. There's a reasonable upper limit to the amount someone will eat in one meal, and by delaying their meals they are able to simply reduce the amount they consume in one day.
Judging from experience of several years on a 16-8 fasting protocol, it’s super easy to overeat. All it takes is a bag of chips and a couple of cokes :)
Restricting when you can eat limits the amount you can eat, because humans have a limited storage capacity and throughput.
Depends on what you eat. There are plenty of calorie-dense foods that are super easy to consume without much thinking (potato chips, Coca Cola, chocolate, etc) You can still overeat on a fasting schedule.
Studies have shown that any weight loss benefits of intermittent fasting correlate directly to how many fewer calories you eat, and nothing else.
When it comes to diet, consuming fewer calories than you burn in a day is literally only way to lose weight. Anything else is a cheap mind trick.
Ok, but almost no one disputes that, right? The argument is whether intermittent fasting makes it easier--for any number of reasons, such as causing you to feel less hungry or force you into a better schedule or whatever--to cause you to eat less calories.
Many people do, actually. They argue that fasting “reprograms your metabolism” or changes how your body digests food or the like.

If you think of it as a different way to effect caloric restriction, then you’re on the right track.

To me, the main advantage of intermittent fasting is diet adherence. I find it much easier to eat less if I eat less often. Plus, for some reason, skipping breakfast helps me avoid being hungry around 10-11 AM. So win-win I guess.

I've been looking around a bit into diets, and it seems that "all diets work", if they have you eat less calories than you need.

But it would seem that that if is a tall order. Apparently people have a tendency to underestimate how much they eat, so just a basic "don't eat more than X calories" doesn't really work in practice, unless people are willing to do calorie counting, which isn't always practical. And if the diet is "strict", as in "you eat these things in particular and nothing else", there's a psychological (for lack of a better term) component that comes into play.

On the one hand, there's the calorie deficit. At the limit, you will probably not adhere to a 0 calorie diet. So the deficit should be "reasonable". I guess defining what that means is the hard part.

Then there's the "wants" part, and also the effect some foods have on your appetite. Eating X calories from only Mars bars is not the same as eating a "balanced" diet. In the former case, you'll probably be miserable and feel hungry all the time. In the latter, you'll probably feel OK, though at first it will probably be tough.

There's also the fact that some foods are very palatable and just make you want to keep on eating. I think this is very, very important to bear in mind. Just because food X is "healthy" and / or has low calories, it doesn't mean you can eat a ton of it without gaining weight. Fruit is one example that comes to mind, bananas in my case.

Is it true that many Silicon Valley employers have free cafeterias, as the author states without citation? Or is this just an obvious reference to Google?
Many have free cafeterias or free catered lunch and catered snacks.

There are startups that deliver food to other startups, printing revenue numbers using the same VC’s entire portfolio of companies, therefore sloshing around the exact same dollars in order to get an attractive revenue multiple and exit.

Understanding that makes understanding the whole of Silicon Valley much easier.

> There are startups that deliver food to other startups, printing revenue numbers using the same VC’s entire portfolio of companies, therefore sloshing around the exact same dollars in order to get an attractive revenue multiple and exit.

Wow, I hadn't realized that. I looked up the catering company one of my previous employers used and perhaps unsurprisingly they share investors.

ka-ching

A lot of people look at having venture capital as validation, when it is really about how convenient the shares are in a private equity portfolio at that point in time. Some people understand that and are selling placement in a portfolio instead of selling an idea.

It’s quite common and predates Google.
Common, but not universal. It’s much more common in smaller startups, and often fades away as companies scale and costs go up nonlinearly. At a 20 person company, you can throw a pile of burritos on the conference room table. At 10k employees, you need a full kitchen staff, dishwashers, food safety team, etc.

Of the FAANG, I believe only Google and FB have free meals on a regular basis.

Apple is not free but heavily subsidized and the quality is much better than the other two ime.
Agreed : i ate extremely healthfully while there for years, anecdotally.
Meal regularity is an invention, humans have an obvious biological adaptation to fasting, as evidenced in cases such as the 382-day fast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast
I am sad this guy only lived to 51 years old, but given that he started his fast weighing over 450 pounds and died almost 25 years later, I am having a hard time deciding what was his downfall :(.
There’s a lot (both good and bad) that could be usefully written on the various topics covered in this short piece, but this article is not among them. It’s pure clickbait. And Silicon Valley (or SF in the case of Dorsey) have nothing to do with it.

This piece is unworthy of the Atlantic.

I think the average article in the Atlantic was clickbait. I saw some irony in an Atlantic article recently that pronounced the Atlantic as one of the few successful quality publications in the digital age.

I thought the Atlantic was great in 2000, but today I think the article generation process starts with "let's pick a clickbait topic" and then "let's write a clickbit headline" and they go from there.

I think

https://tedium.co/

is an example of a quality publication for the web, and it's good enough that I can no longer mock Medium by calling it "Tedium" because "Tedium" is actually better!

I went 7 days without eating and realized that I spend a lot of time:

  * shopping
  * traveling to and from the store
  * preparing food
  * eating food
  * cleaning up afterwards
so when you are not eating you find at least two hours if not more a day to fill.

Fasting is not just a physical practice, it's a spiritual practice. I had the best conversation about fasting ever with a Catholic Nun. Jesus fasted for 40 days, but it's not just a Christian thing -- fasting is a common practice in Eastern and Indigenous religions.

How does this tripe get published? This is nothing but hot air and anti-SV bloviating.
Not worth the read, there is no content in this piece.