Ok I am not a philosopher but is it really “abstinence” if you only have to wait 8 hours?

Reminds me of the joke about celibacy. Most people are celibate 99.99% of their total hours lived. But if you intentionally add 0.01% to that, people lose their mind.

Just for fun I did the math. An 80 year lifespan is 700,800 hours. 0.01% of that is only 70 hours. I think most people have sex for more than 70 hours in the course of a life time!

The point still stands though.

Differences in efficiency.

For a lot of people, waiting 8 hours to eat is a long time. If you’ve ever been around snackers, you know what I mean.

Yeah but this can extremely plastic. Snacking is something you do, not who you are :)

I ate 5 or 6 times a day for 15-20 years. I would eat 3 meals, a snack in the afternoon, and then something before bed. And probably more than that to be honest. I was as much of a snacker as anybody.

In April I switched to eating 2 meals a day. I was very hungry for literally 1 or 2 days, and then I just got used to it, and started to like it!

Before that I was on a pretty strict diet for ~4 years. But I relaxed the diet after changing the schedule, and lost about 5 lbs. So the heuristic of just eating twice a day turns out to be easier to maintain than a diet.

Go figure! It was kinda shocking. I do think "3 meals a day" is a relatively recent thing. Millions of people lived for thousands of years without eating 3 meals a day.

Some downsides: I eat bigger meals, and I notice a bigger "tired" crash after dinner. But I think that's better than feely slightly groggy multiple times a day. I definitely am more aware of the fact that eating "slows you down". I do think there is something to the "alert, fasted" state, and I would call that pleasant.

Also I might have slowly gained back the 5 pounds but I'm still under my target weight ("normal" BMI which is like 20th percentile). I think after 6 months your body probably gets used to it, and maybe I relaxed the diet a bit too much. I'll continue to tweak it in the future.

An upside not to be discounted is that I spend less time and money on food, and traveling is a lot easier as a result!

I never snacked when I weighed 100lbs more, there are just too many damn calories in everything.

Jim you’re totally right. Our brains were wired for scarcity. We are not evolved to pass up sugars or deal with lookalike chemicals like opiates. The modern world asks a lot of our psychology to manage that.

Which is why I said "some". I know it's not the same set of problems for all of us ;)

I think with IF it exploits the fact that your stomach can only take so much food at a time. If you restrict your eating to a small window, you can't eat a whole day of calories in that window just because your stomach can't take that much food. It's like exploiting the fact that your stomach is a buffer and you fill it only at certain times of the day.

IME, most people find it rather easy to take in a days worth of calories in a single sitting, with the right (wrong?) kinds of food.

Like... a largish portion of very cheesy mac 'n' cheese will do it.

> But I always found it easier to abstain from something entirely rather than to do it in moderation.

Not a knock or being troll-y but that sound like a religion. As in, funny how patterns established in religion are just as effective outside that context.

I hope I am not oversharing but I definitely need my patterns to cope, I have ADHD so perhaps it is related to that. Maybe something along the lines of lessening the impact my poor impulse control has on my life by avoiding situations in which I could act impulsively. For example, I do not buy sweets and pretty much never have any at home because ignoring them in the store is easier than ignoring them at home. For me, it is an Herculean task to start a bag of sweets _without_ also finishing it in one sitting… but buying no sweets in the store? That is easy peasy lemon squeezy.