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Comment by jplayer01 | Hacker News Reader

This is ridiculous - the point of choosing a predetermined window for feeding is so your body adapts to only expecting food within that window. Routine is incredibly important for being able to stick to something like IF. If you're fighting your body at every step by, for example, being unpredictable, you're just screwing yourself.

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This seems unlikely in evolutionary terms. It's more likely that eating times were unpredictable for most of our history and that our bodies have evolved to prepare for digestion based on external stimuli such as sight and smell of food.

This is completely unsubstantiated. Worse yet, the "from an evolutionary standpoint" trope is frequently (ab)used to support some kind of pseudoscientific idea/diet (Paleo springs to mind here). If you have a real, coherent argument based on verifiable truth to make that is great, but right now you're just making something up and running with it because it feels right to you. Nobody benefits in this scenario, least of all you.

Please read my comment again and pay attention to the language I used. I'm expressing an opinion, not writing a thesis.

The difference between us back then and us now is context. We live in an age of complete overwhelming external stimulus. You see food or calorie-laden drinks everywhere you look. The point of routine, which is also an evolutionary trait, is to reduce reliance on willpower and avoid wasting energy on making decisions. These are real problems that we have right now because of our body's greedy, opportunistic behavior (which was evolutionarily advantageous when food wasn't so abundant and also had completely different forms).

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