I think intermittent fasting is easier to implement for the average person. It's much easier to tell someone that they can eat as much as they want, but only between 6-8pm (one meal a day). It's difficult to tell someone you can eat 3 meals but no more than 1500 calories in total. Once I start eating, I don't want to stop (until I'm full). But the point at which I'm full is way beyond my calorie limit if I am eating 3 meals a day.

> until I'm full

and I've learnt that it's very hard to know when you're satisfied in terms of hunger, and full in terms of desire.

The level of food required to satiate my hunger seems to be quite different from when I am "full".

Doing a 1-2 meal, 800 calorie/day diet for 8 weeks helped me to figure this out. The hard adjustment period was only for the first week. I then realized small and fewer meals was sufficient.

Not that the remainder was easy, but it was a different kind of struggle - and noticeably easier than the first week.

800 is far too low for that amount of time unless you weight like 80lbs. 1200 calories at least to stop your body from using muscle for sustenance.

> 1200 calories at least to stop your body from using muscle for sustenance.

This is only true up to a point. A colleague put me onto a fasting method called “Buchinger’s Fasting”. I fasted for around a week and a half, muscle maintenance was not a concern. After 3 days, your body burns through the glucose reserves and you get brain fog. After that, indeed, your body tried to break down muscle mass for fuel. The trick is to do some moderate exercise to keep your muscles in good condition. After a few days, your body finally turns to your fat reserves, and rapidly starts burning away fat. After the first 3 or so days, you actually become numb to the hunger and go into a slightly “high”, hunter gatherer alert mode that enabled our ancestors to search for food when hungry. It really brings home that being hungry and not being fed constantly is a normal part of human existence, and the industrial era, shoving food down our gullets constantly is making us sick and prevents natural healing within our bodies.

I assume that is from Buchinger Clinic in Germany? I watched a documentary (can’t remember the name) about fasting that claims it is more commonplace in Europe than elsewhere. They also claimed the Soviets studied it for years with favorable results.

Yeah it's from Germany. I can personally attest to its effectiveness. Another colleague who is approaching retirement does it twice per year or so, and he's in great shape and looks great for his age. It was very eye-opening to see that and then to experience it.

ahh here's how to do it, you don't need to go to buchinger:

https://youtu.be/_ZG6lCgpPcA?t=480

wake up, do exercise, drink warm beverage, work, wait for hunger, eat breakfast/midday, take a powernap, work, last meal at 5-6pm.

This aligns exactly with my experience. The body is very reluctant to turn into fat reserves, as they the best source of energy and must be conserved. As you said, exercise helps, and another trick to eat some carbs every three or so days to convince your body to start burning fat.

How does eating carbs convince your body to start consuming fat?

Presumably by giving the signal that "food is available" and the system can break out of the hypocaloric energy preservation state. The problem is that the fat deposits are extremely valuable (in a non overweight person) and as one enters a hypocaloric state they become more valuable. I.e your body will rather throttle down metabolism and energy levels farther than start breaking down the fat for energy. Eating some carbs can healp to break this pattern.

I don't think the body works like that. After you eat carbs, your insulin level goes up and the cells get the glucose in them. If there's more than they can take, it is put into the adipose tissue as fat. Eating carbs once every 3 days is in no way telling the body that there is enough food, quite the contrary actually (all this is just my opinion).

This carb refeed reset "tricks" your leptide hormones to burning through energy reserves rather than putting the body through a catatonic (muscle burning) state. This is why the "Cheat" meal or day is an important step to sustaining body fat loss through elongated periods.

"catabolic", not "catatonic".

The more you are used to eating in an average meal, the longer it takes to feel "full".

Also, it takes time for the chemical reactions in your body to tell you you are full, so if you eat a little bit, and stop for 15 min, you might very well find that you are full.

However, once the taste buds are firing, it’s pretty hard to stop eating mid meal. One way is to take a little bit of food away from all the other food, eat it, and then force yourself to sit there while your blood sugar catches up to tell you if you still need more.

Growing up my mom would make me wait to get a second serving to see if I was really hungry. It was effective

I find it easier to eat nothing for three days than to ration my meals. Though I'm sure this kind of response is pretty much hard wired tbh

> it takes time for the chemical reactions in your body to tell you you are full

This is why I suppose I don't enjoy eating when I am "starving" as we like to say when we haven't eaten in a while. I am so hungry that I can't even enjoy the meal because the hunger pangs I am feeling don't subdue until I am practically done with the meal, and sometimes, even afterwards.

One of the reasons, why it is a good idea to eat slowly.

Along those lines, nutritionist suggest to eat without distractions.

Near impossible these days, I just had toast and coffee while scrolling through HN.

I count calories.

Eating while watching TV doesn't impact my eating choices.

very good point

>It's much easier to tell someone that they can eat as much as they want, but only between 6-8pm (one meal a day).

If eating is part of your social or work life as it is for most people then not really. Or you're going to sit there sipping water while your family or your colleagues eat or have drinks which is miserable

Though that's also a self-limiting belief. It might seem lame the first week of going out to lunch with coworkers and sticking to water, but in my experience you get over it quickly. The fun part is the conversation, not entirely that everyone is spooning food into their acid sacs at the exact same moment.

You can also adjust your fasting windows to include one meal with family (as the person your responded to suggested, but you didn't actually reply to). Or only fast every other day. If you're fasting for a reason like to lose weight, then you'll have to decide if the goal is worth it to you.

It just depends entirely on your mentality. Some folks are much better at moderating than abstaining, others are the opposite. If you tell me to drink 10% less, I virtually cannot do it. If you tell me to never touch a drop of alcohol again in my life, I just say "bummer!" and get on with it.

Plenty of recovered alcoholics can be around family that drinks (responsibly). Smokers who quit don't have to run away whenever someone lights up in front of them. I quit both (with longstanding addiction issues), and within a few weeks I was able to join family dinners where everyone else drinks and my brother smokes. NBD.

If people can endure that, then people can still be social at mealtimes and just get used to drinking some water or tea or whatever while they fast. Or coffee, mmmmm. They might feel a bit put out at first during lunch, but then again might enjoy the looks they get during dinner when they get to chow down with abandon. The big thing would be waiting until you're comfortable with the fasting so you're not making everyone around you uncomfortable with your body language (or worse, complaining or otherwise drawing attention to it).

Fasting is not easy. If you didn't restrict calories before and now want to lose weight quickly, you have to make some sacrifices.

If your social and/or work life heavily depends on eating together it might be part of the "problem" of why you need to lose weight in the first place.

> If your social and/or work life heavily depends on eating together it might be part of the "problem" of why you need to lose weight in the first place.

This! My last boss used to be a "bon-vivant" guy, meaning he would particularly enjoy a nice meal with the occasional wine to go with it (please note this is pretty common in France) [0].

Two years after joining his team, I had gained quite some weight. I figured I had to eat less somehow, but I never had the impression that I was overeating. I also didn't want to skip to those meals with him. So I tried a few things:

* Pace myself with the wine. We would usually split a bottle among us. I actually enjoy wine, but don't particularly enjoy being tipsy, especially when I have to work. So win-win-win (see below)

* If there was some fruit available have that instead of cake, or skip desert altogether. Drinking the wine slowly leaves me with "something to do" while the others have desert, so they don't feel any pressure to hurry up.

* Go for more "filling" meals, meaning I looked for dishes with a bunch of vegetables. This would keep me full longer and I'd be less hungry in the evening, so also eating less. Another bonus is that I'd feel /really/ full and actually not want desert.

What I've found is that even though in the beginning the others would comment on my not having desert, they actually stopped having it themselves after a little while. The wine never actually went away, but we would occasionally only have a glass instead of a whole bottle.

The point is that I think people may feel there's a certain expectation to have a lunch a certain way. And it may be true in the sense that "it's common, so people expect it". But if you don't fully conform to it there doesn't seem to be any issue, pretty much no one seems to care [1] (except maybe if you think that you have to adhere to the expectation).

All this being said, I do appreciate that for people who enjoy nice meals it can be difficult to choose those "restrictions", especially when they're right in front of you.

[0] There never was any pressure to go along, especially since he was the kind to actively avoid talking shop at lunch. But, as the team would go out with him, I would have missed out on getting to know them. I should note that I'm not particularly outgoing and rather focused on my job, so random chats during the day wasn't exactly something I'd spontaneously do.

Most Muslims seem to manage it annually.

Because everyone they know is doing it as well, that is exactly OPs point. Muslims living in non-Muslim countries have a much harder time with Ramadan, I know this from personal experience.

Not really. They gorge themselves at night, so unlimited calories basically.

That’s true, and it sort of misses the point of Ramadan.

Exactly, but let's be realistic here: all that other eating between and all those meals that are not social meals - they can go.

> 14 subjects with metabolic syndrome who fasted (no eating or drinking) from dawn to sunset for more than 14 h daily for four consecutive weeks

it says no drinking as well, so not sure about the water, but I was surprised to read it, maybe they just meant drinks other than water.

Most IF practitioners say drinks to mean any caloric drinks. Plain coffee is ok to some and not others. Most think diet drinks are not ok because they can cause similar responses on the body as ingesting calories.

I IF from post-dinner to lunch every day, and only drink water and plain coffee.

I dislike eating. That’s a known thing about me. No one would bat an eye if I did exactly that - water should other eat.

Just anecdotal, but I did 12-8 fasting for a few months and it was not at all effective. I was starving half the day and didn't lose any weight at all. Mornings were tough and I was achy and cranky by 11am. 3 months in and my body never adjusted. I switched back to a normal meal schedule and felt better and didn't change weight up or down.

I've come to think this really depends on the person. I realized that I naturally intermittent fast, because it seems to work the best for me. Normally I eat my last meal of the day ~ 8pm, and nothing but coffee, tea, or water until 11am or 12pm the next day. The only time I eat something in the mornings is if I'm doing a workout or something active early in the day. Occasionally I'll feel hungry and eat something, but otherwise, I normally feel sluggish and slow if I eat breakfast. For my other meals, I actually eat a ton of food, around 2,500 calories on average.

On the flip side, I know multiple people who have tried the same and have your exact experience. Oddly enough, three of them had tried keto and had great results where I personally didn't. I know there's no real correlation there, just thought it was interesting. Try keto maybe?

If you start to restrict carbohydrate intake this helps with the low energy and irritability in my opinion. Been doing a 18-6 fasting since May (with some cheat days) and feel incredible.

Do you have to get up quite early in the morning? Only reason I ask is because half the day being the time until 12 is surprising -- after your midday meal, if you've constructed your meal properly, you should ideally not be hungry until dinner. I think IF needs to be paired with a mindfulness about what you're eating -- having toast with butter for lunch will not work.

Usually like 7:30. Had to get kids to school. I always eat pretty wholesome food with lots of whole grain and vegetable. When I was doing IF, I needed a big lunch to regain my senses and frequently didn't make it to 6PM without needing another dose of food. I suspect I was fitting my normal calorie intake in that window. If the goal was to somehow trick my metabolism into wanting fewer calories, I don't think it worked at all.

> Once I start eating, I don't want to stop (until I'm full).

Did you ever try, waiting 10 minutes?

You eat a little, food gets in your stomach, after 10 minutes the message "I'm full" is sent.

The point is, you won't feel full until those 10 minutes pass. But you don't need continue eating during those 10 minutes.

I'm just asking because if you always do, you might be under the impression that it requires 10 minutes of sustained eating, to stop feeling full.

Well that depends on what you eat ofcourse! If you’re concious about what you put in yourself designing meals that you won’t be able to finish is easy! (think bodybuilders fish and broccoli as an example or a bit of meat and tonns of cabbage etc).

Fasting is ”easier” because you can get away with caring less about that stuff though.

You also get to eat good food, even if it’s only for one meal a day.

My suspicion is that you would see similar improvement with things like waist circumference, BMI, blood pressure, at least initially, but that the difference with intermittent fasting is that it introduces enough of a "fasted state" that the body is able to perform repair and autophagy of senescent cells that would occur much less in a constantly fed state. (something about telomerase, but I probably shouldn't mention that because my memory about that is foggy)

If you increased the amount of fasting, I'd bet good money that people would lose more weight than on a calorie-equivalent diet. Intermittent fasting, in my experience, is helpful in sticking to a diet that is lower in calories because it allows you to eat satisfying meals.

From what I understand, autophagy doesn’t start until 18 hours and doesn’t peak until 72 hours.

I've never heard of that 18 hour rule. It's funny because I've read a lot about fasting, but this is news to me, and it seems like this is reported from multiple sources. But I can't seem to find any authoritative references.

The Japanese researcher that got a Nobel Prize for discovering the autophagy mechanisms has a course on edx. Doesn't get much more authoritative than that.

can you please provide the link to the course?

Google seems to suggest this is it:

https://www.edx.org/course/autophagy-research-behind-the-201...

Autophagy is always active, the real question is how that activity changes during fasting. The number of 18 hours is fairly arbitrary, as even after a few hours of fasting autophagy increases.

Depends on what you're eating... if you're on a keto (fast mimicking) macro level intake, you'll reach autophagy a bit faster. Heavy exercise/resistance/lifting can also help speed this up, which can also lend to timing of exercise and food intake.

I’ve been looking for a good source but haven’t found one. Has it not been studied in humans yet?

I think I heard it on the FoundMyFitness podcast which has excellent discussions about fasting science. I think it may have been the last interview with Valter Longo. I’ll see if I can dig it up, but their website would be a good starting point.

"Someone said so in an interview" isn't really compelling evidence. Do you know of actual evidence of this? Studies?

No idea why you're being downvoted. Even when videos/podcasts cite studies, it's difficult to verify that the study actually supports their claim since it's often difficult to find the study they mention.

The 18 hour claim may be supported by evidence, but there isn't any in this subthread so far.

Feel free to pore over thousands of scientific papers about the benefits of fasting on NCBI for us and let us know. Until then, I'll take NutritionFacts.org videos' word for it: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCddn8dUxYdgJz3Qr5mjADtA which cites scientific papers as it makes claims.

Autophagy is not a binary thing. Every body does autophagy all the time, it's the intensity/volume that increases in longer fasts.

True. However, even if intermittent fasting is no more effective than calorie restriction, from a human behavior perspective, it seems to be an easier way for many people to achieve their calorie goals than just "eating less".

Yeah, this is why I prefer one mead a day (OMAD). It's a very large meal, 1600-2000 calories over a 2 hour period but I find it much easier to control my calorie intake this way.

The only thing I regret since the pandemic is drinking coffee. I try to limit the amount of sugar and almond milk I add, but I feel like it's impacting my diet some how.

I know you meant one meal a day, but I read this as one mead a day and it was so really fun confusion.

EDIT: parent edited for the typo, but it originally read one mead a day... one very large mead. But where do you get your protein? Is there protein mead? How does this all mead diet work.

Sounds like how I used to 'fast' on weekends

As someone who absolutely needed sugar in coffee before I considered it drinkable, I can tell you that you can wean yourself off it. It took me several months before I stopped noticing its absence but nowadays I don’t miss it. I still use milk though!

I'm with you there, milk alone is almost too sweet for me because I rarely add sugar to anything. But I think I need it for the creaminess (fat?) to cut the bitterness (and adding oil/butter is probably worse).

You could try finding some different coffee, or brewing it differently. I never add anything to coffee, and find that the flavour differs markedly between blends / origins / brewing methods, for me covering the whole spectrum from "undrinkable" to "delicious".

I have read that cold brew coffee is less bitter.

I did read about a guy who cold brewed coffee, left the jug in the fridge, then just microwaved it every morning. That sounds tasty and convenient so I need to check it out.

the fat is very useful in the palatability of coffee. a little coconut butter does the trick, and is also aligned with a low calorie intake

Y’all need to be learning to make better coffee.

Your coffee should taste great without any milk much less sugar.

Are you using freshly roasted beans, with a burr grinder, and grinding just before brewing?

Use a $15 gram scale from Amazon and a $5 melita pour over paper filter holder and paper filter.

1 part of coffee to 15 to 18 parts water. So for a cup: 23 grams of coffee to 380 grams of water

You don't have to go quite that far to get better tasting coffee. You start with a good quality roast, pre-ground is fine, because average grind size is medium to coarse, which is a good general size (esp. if you don't wanna over-extract).

For a brew method, immersion brewing (like an aeropress) is uncomplicated, fast and can make larger batches at once. Brew at ~205F for 2 minutes, extract gently, and add water if it tastes too strong. You can use that method to make a large batch at once and keep it in a thermos, or make coldbrew and then warm it up to ~160F. No need for a scale or constantly grinding the coffee, and you don't end up with a single lukewarm cup of pour-over.

For "fancy" coffee you can do the same, except instead of adding water you can add frothed hot 2% milk. And if you really just want a "coffee ritual": clean everything of old coffee residue, filter the water, bloom the coffee before brewing, wet the filter before extraction, and get your coffee:water ratio, temperature, and extraction time to match the roast. All of that and no hardware besides an aeropress.

I disagree, I’ve found a very significant difference between pre-ground and freshly ground coffee.

There are volatile organic compounds in coffee that begin to dissipate and react with oxygen as soon as they are exposed to the air by being ground.

I’m no coffee snob, I’m not advocating a high end burr grinder, the cheapest one on Amazon will do (~$60).

Same with the brewing method. Aeropress is great too, but anyone can find Meltia pour over filter holders and filters for $5 at their grocery store.

I use cream to fatten it up a little (makes it much more enjoyable having nothing to do with taste) and it also does wonders against teeth staining.

> Are you using freshly roasted beans, with a burr grinder, and grinding just before brewing?

If bitterness is a concern, people should also look for beans that are medium roast (which tend to be more balanced) or lighter (more acidic/sour).

> I try to limit the amount of sugar and almond milk I add

You're not fasting.

If you add anything to your coffee you're in fact breaking your fast so you're not really intermittent fasting any more.

With regards to coffee, you can try cold brewing coffee, it's much smoother (less bitter and less acidic), which might allow you to drink it without sugar and milk. There are commercially available cold brew coffees that have no added sugar and milk as well, in case you want to try the taste before making it at home.

Black coffee all the way my friend! I know it's easier said than done. I resisted for a long time, but finally took the plunge ;-) when doing a fasting diet that allowed only water and black coffee outside the eating window. Now it's stuck.

In hindsight, I think one of the smartest decisions I made for myself was to first try coffee black. Since I didn't know any better, it was extremely easy to commit to it, and I am appreciative of it today. I wish I could influence more people to do it at their age, because I think a lot of people would appreciate it when they're older.

Drip coffee is horrible, so I understand wanting sugar. I moved to black by buying a mocha pot and aeropress. It's a whole different coffee experience, milk and sugar not necessary.

I have every coffee making gimmick from the chemex to the aeropress and I guarantee you would fail a blind test on which one is which, or if the cups of coffee are even different.

I mean, what exactly is the mechanical difference of putting hot water through coffee grounds and a filter that differs when you do it in an aeropress vs. a dripper? And you think you're tasting enough of a difference to say one is horrible and one is amazing? Because the hot water and the ground coffee interacted slightly differently(?) between contraptions?

I do this test for all of my friends and they all fail. Unless it's the moka pot or french press because the lack of filter has you picking soot from your teeth. Those cups always rank last.

Not to derail the thread. But I seriously think you should do a blind test with someone who knows what they're doing. Just for fun.

My theory is that it's 75% placebo of having a coffee gimmick that everyone else is missing out on, and 25% the fact that an aeropress or whatever finally got someone to measure coffee grounds and time it for once instead of dumping a random amount of grounds into a drip filter and then drinking it when it's been sitting on the burner for 3 hours.

> I guarantee you would fail a blind test on which one is which, or if the cups of coffee are even different.

Oddly enough, I've actually done a blind taste test on multiple coffee systems systems: drip, aeropress, chemex (pour over), italian percolator, french press, keurig, manual espresso machine, and real espresso machine. We controlled for water temperature and mass, steep time, coffee type, coffee grind (with exceptions for specialized filters), coffee mass, packing pressure (similar pressures for similar types of brew methods).

There were ten of us in the test. We each did three tastings of each brew, with a 10 minute break between each round of tasting. Each round we wrote down guesses at brew methods, how much we enjoyed the taste, how much we enjoyed the smell, and the coffee's were shuffled between each round.

Analyzing the results was interesting, and gave some insights into similarity categories between them. For example, everyone identified the espresso brews correctly, but some people misidentified the percolator brew as being an espresso brew during the first tasting, then correctly identified the espresso during their second or third. The aeropress was also misidentified as both the manual espresso and the percolator.

There were a few more interesting conclusions, but the total average accuracy was something like 70%.

That's cool. It would be nice if you published protocol and data via blog or even .md file github pages.

I think humanity could benefit a lot from more citizen sience, especially in non-fundable Arras (such as coffie brewing/tasting ;)

Anecdotally, I've taste tested various types of coffee using different brewing techniques (regular pour over, Chemex, French press, and espresso), and I can definitely tell the difference. For some specific examples: espresso was by far the most acidic and concentrated (which makes sense if you know how it works); the French press brought out the most bitterness; Chemex produced the least bitter and most consistent coffee regardless of the types of beans (for me this was a downside as I could barely taste the difference between beans, and all of them tasted more bland); and pour over was a nice middle ground (my favorite).

I admit that my test was not blind or scientific by any means, but I didn't know much about the brewing methods back then, so at least I wasn't swayed by any preconceived ideas of how they should taste. Also, it's entirely possible that most people would fail this test, but IME most people also don't particularly care how their coffee tastes. This is evidenced by the popularity of Starbucks, which trades flavor for consistency by over-roasting their coffee.

Alternating between pour-over, drip, french press (rarely) and a moka pot gives me a different coffee experience for each. The former two are similar in flavor, probably exactly the same aside from amount of grounds used per cup of joe. French press is a bit stronger flavor, usually slightly more bitter as well. It can be slightly chalky, but if you're picking grounds from your teeth you might be doing it wrong.

The moka pot is miles ahead of all the rest in terms of flavor and texture. It isn't quite as creamy and rich as a good shot of espresso, but it's pretty darn close for what it is. It's certainly better than a mediocre espresso, like you might get at a drive-through coffee shack (could be my beans more than anything, hard to know for sure). There is a pressure buildup and a rapid extraction time with the moka pot that certainly changes the interaction between hot water and ground coffee. If you are picking grounds from your teeth with a moka pot you are 100% doing it wrong and probably ruining the coffee in the process.

I don't bother with the chemex (isn't this just a retro style of pour over?) and aeropress because I'm not really into gimmicks :)

Are you really arguing that the length of time the hot water is in contact with the coffee makes no difference? Or the pressure under which that contact occurs? It seems fairly intuitive that both things would make a difference.

You're doing it wrong if there are grounds in your cup. Yes there's a huge difference between letting the coffee soak for minutes and then applying pressure versus quickly dripping water through the beans.

The uncontrolled variable you don't mention in all this is the coffee beans themselves.

If you start out with mediocre beans, they'll tend to taste more or less the same as other mediocre beans, no matter how they're ground and brewed.

If you take good beans, grind them within a few days of roasting, and brew them within a few hours of grinding, you will start to notice a very significant difference in taste, regardless of brewing method.

Not to mention selecting the proper grind for each method and your personal preferences (ideally using a bur grinder for all but drip). Over or under extraction (or both, with bladed grinders) is almost a certainty if the grind is at a drastically wrong coarseness for the method.

I can definitely taste the difference brewing the same coffee via a french press versus my old fashioned percolator on the stove, and not on account of loose coffee grounds. This may be an extreme comparison as a percolator is possibly the worst way to brew coffee. Convenient, though. It makes little difference to me, I usually drink it black over ice.

With all other things equal, the coffee maker you use seems to make a big difference for drip coffee. Variables I can think of would include flow rate (both on the grounds and into the jug), temperature of water when it drops on the grounds, and temperature of the hot plate under the jug.

The best coffee maker I had was 20€ no-brand from grocery store corner shelf. One of the worst offenders IMHO is the popular design icon Moccamaster.

give a try to butter coffee aka Bulletproof coffee (TM), basically just coffee, butter and coconut oil, some people say it can easily replace breakfast

"Would really like to see this compared to another group with a similar level of calorie restriction but without the intermittent fasting."

I think the answer to your question is total time inflamed (for lack of a better term).

Eating and digesting appear to be an interrupt for many other processes, for obvious reasons. You divert a lot of resources and produce a lot of inflammation and depress a lot of immunity.

Do you want to be in that state for 14 hours per day or for 6 hours per day ?

My bro-science intuition tells me that, all else being equal, consuming the same number of calories in a tighter window is much less expensive.

Whereas my bro-science intuition tells me that asking my pancreas to produce all the insulin I need in a tighter window is much more taxing

A single, giant meal is not going to be associated with the problematic blood sugar spikes and rapid insulin responses as long as it is a balanced meal that includes a good amount of fats, proteins and vegetables. All of these slow digestion, so the pancreas will be doling out insulin at a relatively steady, slow rate over the course of hours and then getting a nice long rest.

Eating 3 balanced meals throughout the day might be marginally better or worse for the pancreas, but neither of these dietary choices trigger the panic-level insulin responses (which ultimately lead to insulin resistance and diabetes) that snacking on large amounts of refined carbs and refined sugars are notorious for.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2121099/ This study found that although there was higher blood glucose and reduced glucose tolerance in the morning for the group eating 1 meal a day, surprisingly they had less insulin resistance than the group eating 3. Other indicators of dietary/hormonal health were the same between groups. Same caloric intake of glucose between groups, and the 1 meal a day group shared the same evening window just like OMAD. This was a pilot study with small sample size (irritatingly the actual number isn't listed from what I can see) as well as a high withdrawal rate, unsurprisingly.

I don't know. You're talking about the engagement of the pancreas itself and I am talking about the effects of that engagement on the entire body.

I note with interest that we make reference to insulin "spikes".

Do I want to insulin spike more, or fewer, times per day ?

Ideally you want no spikes, because you are eating a balanced diet and avoiding meals and snacks consisting largely of refined carbs and refined sugars. A proper meal shouldn't really create a blood sugar (and resulting insulin) spike as much as a gradual elevation and fall back to baseline, because protein, fat, and fiber all slow digestion, and complex carbs (and even sugars within fiber/nutrient matrixes ie whole fruits) don't tend to spike blood sugar too badly in the first place.

> depress a lot of immunity

That seems odd, in a non-city context wouldn't eating and drinking be one of the riskiest things in terms of getting sick?

Edit: After thinking about it maybe it's related to not overreacting to everything we eat and causing allergies?

Compared to not-eating and drinking? No.

How so? Wouldn't most pathogens be food or water borne if you're not in a crowded city in close proximity to other humans or livestock?

Either way I don't see how what you say is true. If I stop eating or drinking how does that make me catch the flu or something the immune response helps against?

It seems having it active when I eat would be the most useful, which is why I wondered why it worked how it does.

>Wouldn't most pathogens be food or water borne if you're not in a crowded city in close proximity to other humans or livestock?

In that eating and drinking is essential, and for the primitive man, not guaranteed everyday...

>If I stop eating or drinking how does that make me catch the flu or something the immune response helps against?

It just makes you die in a couple months from not eating, and a week or so from not drinking :-)

I don't really see how that relates, when I say "getting sick" I don't think most people from here would include starvation or dehydration in that bucket, but maybe that's a regional difference. I meant things you catch (virus, bacteria, parasites) because we're talking about immune response.

We’re working on this. Harder than it seems.

By "we", you mean https://zerofasting.com/ ? Seems like a nice app!

I tried that app a very long time ago, and then in an update they forced users to create an online account with no local use option. I promptly removed it since I’m averse to creating online accounts when I see no good reason to do it.

I use it without an account.

Edit: Tried it again on iOS and there’s no way to proceed after the initial questions without creating an account. Deleted it again.

You can log in with Apple ID, never share your email and remove the app from your account whenever you please. If that's too intrusive for you, I'm surprised that you've managed to sign up to HN so you can write a comment.

I didn’t sign up to HN just to write this comment. Also, HN doesn’t require providing an email address to create an account, unlike this app. I like my local-only preferences.

Sorry, my mistake. Turned out I was signed in via Apple ID.

I won’t pretend why you want that if you don’t pretend why we don’t offer it.

All I can say is that we are a SaaS supported product, not an ad supported one. We are highly incentivized to protect your data.

That is us!

From a pure scientific underlying root method - I agree with you.

The problem I see is if this question is the only one, the immediate second question becomes - does Intermittent Fasting produce the same results? requiring an additional study.

From a practical implementation, this research is better suited to everyday life. Intermittent Fasting as a system is way easier to implement at scale than calorie counting.

I don't have any studies handy but here's what I remember from looking into this. IF does not lead to more weight loss than other diets when you match calories. At least some forms of IF also have lower adherence than simple caloric restriction.

My own anecdata suggests that I have better adherence to IF than regular caloric restriction. YMMV. The diet that helps you lose the most weight will be the one you follow closest.

Can only speak anecdotally.. but I find it relatively easy to stick to one or two meals a day over trying to do smaller/frequent meals. Same goes for avoiding carbs (keto macros). When I eat more frequently or start adding starchy foods, I'm ravenous the next couple days.

It would be better in that the body activates ketosis after 12 straight hours. Interrupting that cycle with calories will switch the body back to fed mode.

I think there was a study done with similar levels of calories restriction and the results were the exact same.

Not sure if 14 subjects is enough sample size