Please let me point you to https://leangains.com

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.

> milk is really low on calories

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.

In the amounts people usually put in coffee, it is insignificant.

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.

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...

I drink my coffee black. I thought the statement that milk was low on calories was odd.

> 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.

> activate some digistive processes, and make the liver work. So you are not exactly 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.

You're still fasting because it doesn't affect your blood sugar. That's why you can drink black coffee, tea, or water when fasting for surgery.

I heard this, but I can't find any study measuring the differences seriously.

Fasting has various effect, not all of them are linked to the sugar consumption.

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

[1]: https://www.zerofasting.com/does-coffee-break-your-fast/

[2]: https://www.dietdoctor.com/can-use-cream-coffee-fasting

> 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.

[1]: https://www.zerofasting.com/does-coffee-break-your-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.)

> it has a chance to carry out cleaning and repair processes that make you healthier

Sounds like Goop-grade quack science to me. :-)

It isn't.

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.

Please take care when your Internet nutritionist calls ketosis a "fat-burning state".

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.

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.

Did you reach other conclusions?

Can you elaborate?

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.

where do you get this claim that cancer grows better during fasting, all the data ive found suggests the opposite

Oops, I could have worded that more clearly.

"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.

black coffee + ghee/coconut oil is part of keto. He must be doing keto + IF.

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.

If your black coffee tastes disgusting on its own, you need to buy better coffee.

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.

I now live in Norway, and have for the past 7 years. And I still have this opinion.

The advent calendar is from Kaffebox, and I definitely recommend it, by the way.

Fair enough :) Guess I was pointlessly trying to back up a generalisation.

Yeah, and neat alcohol tastes lovely.

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.

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 only eat dollar store steak and your body needs calories so your taste will adapt."

You can say this about literally any food. Nonsense.

If you remove predicates (“it’s addictive”) you can reduce anything to the absurd

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.

OK sure. If you remove one predicate and change it with something completely different, you can invalidate any assertion. gg

This be a man o straw.

As a German... do.. do your dollar stores actually have steaks?

Scary thought.

Yes, some do, but they’re not actually a dollar. Which only makes it slightly better?

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.

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.

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.

Chances are, the average Joe (pun intended) will not make a better cup than Nespresso, at least based on this ( https://www.grubstreet.com/2013/03/nespresso-sold-at-micheli... ) and this ( https://www.businessinsider.com/baristas-are-going-obsolete-... ).

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.

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.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisha_(coffee)

I had similar issues removing added sugar from my regular meals.

If the bitterness is what bothers you, get beans that are lightly roasted. The bitterness comes from roasting it dark.

I would say you have more options, if you expand your definition of tea to other things than literaly tea-leaves brew :-)

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

Agree. That sounded like “bulletproof coffee” with some changes.