Intermittent fasting: No advantage over conventional weight loss diets
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
The only strong signal we got was that people who were giving up soda were the most likely to lose the most weight. The cynic in me feels like we're writing giant book-length stories that are just cover to get people to reduce their sugar intake.
As I read more of the research, I'm coming to the opinion that our framework for thinking about weight loss is wrong. We mostly talk about rules, and I think we should be talking about levers.
You want to pull the levers that cause your body to burn fat while avoiding the levers that cause your body to store fat. That's subtlely but importantly different than calories in < calories out. Your levers include fasting, going Keto, even extreme exercise (most studies against exercise stop at 60 or 90 minutes, but try doing a backpacking trip or other 5hour+ routine).
I feel that's factual, not cynical. That's exactly what all the different weird diets that people love to make fun of do: Convince people in all sorts of ways to eat less.
All the rules and whatever of the diet have just the one goal.
We should stop evaluating diet plans based on weight loss (since they are all basically the same), and instead evaluate them based on compliance.
Or rather, evaluate people for which diet they're most likely to comply with.
One of the flaws in the personal development ecosystem is that because everyone is selling their own "one weird trick" there's no incentive to build good assessment programs.
It's not diet, but probably the only top author with a solid assessment is Gretchen Rubin and her habit tendencies. All the tendencies lead back to her advice, but at least they acknowledge that not all people are the same.
I've been learning about resistant starch, which is digested by gut bacteria into fat, rather than digesting into sugar directly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistant_starch
I can't eat legumes at the moment because I'm experiencing leaky gut symptoms and repairing my gut with L-glutamine. But I've generally experienced an association between eating foods like oatmeal/bananas/rice and weight loss.
Here is one of the more contemporary videos I've found about these things (from SelfHacked):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luna9RQsL1E
Also my personal belief is that excess nutrition causes disease. So you can consume much more protein/fat/cholesterol etc than the USRDA, as long as you are physically active. Being sedentary kills. My own experience is that weight training is several times more effective than cardio because it burns calories as you recover.
Also this is all hormonal. So actively lowering your cortisol by avoiding stressors and increasing your testosterone and growth hormone with nutritious food and moderate exercise is a big part of why people drop 10 pounds when traveling outside the US.
Disclaimer: I have no evidence of any of this, these are only additional data points for your own research.
Edit: based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistant_starch#Nutritional_i... I'm going to try overnight oats. Basically steel cut or rolled oats (NOT instant oatmeal - it's already cooked) soaked overnight to preserve its resistant starch content.
I stopped drinking soda regularly at least 5 years ago since graduating college and was able to lose 20+ pounds thanks to diet and exercise. The thing is after having stopped excercising I have been able to keep the weight off compared to people my age who also don't excercise and the only difference is that they drink way more soda than me. I try to limit my sugar intake to less than 10 grams a day.
It's crazy just how much sugar modern drinks have, the only exceptions seem to be Beer and Milk and those were developed thousands of years ago.
But afaik no one says it's particularly better at weight loss than other kinds of caloric restriction.
May be impossible for you. Doesn't mean it's impossible for, say, me (and it, demonstrably, isn't).
Lots of real research needs to be done on why people eat unhealthy even though logically they know it's bad for them.
And unless you're someone who's lots a significant amount of weight, changed your eating habits over a long time person and have maintained that you don't really have any standing to make such statements.
I still get cravings. But I control myself.
I think I have plenty of standing. When I was fat, I had no willpower and ate constantly. Now, its all about controlling myself.
My highest weight was 690, I had VSG surgery, so it's a little easier once I get into keto to keep going, as long as I don't stray into sugar land I don't usually have desire for food... I can easily eat 500 calories/day when intermittent fasting and feel like that's plenty... I've also been doing Crossfit 3-4 times per week.
I like IF because I only have to prepare one meal, and forget about food the rest of the day and just worry about my workout, and my day job.
Sunday, I started keto again though... and hopefully my appetite diminishes again... got a little lax around my birthday/thanksgiving.
Until you can explain the mechanism that causes some people to comply with a diet plan and some people to not comply with the same diet plan, or that causes a person to comply with one diet plan but not another diet plan, you don't actually understand the phenomenon.
"Log_e relative weight change over the intervention phase was −7.1% ± 0.7% (mean ± SEM) with ICR, −5.2% ± 0.6% with CCR, and −3.3% ± 0.6% with the control regimen (Poverall < 0.001, PICR vs. CCR = 0.053)."
So the difference on average between the ICR group and the CCR group was as great as the difference between the CCR and the control group.
Seems pretty clearly superior despite not being real fasting.
In other news: water is wet.
The study seems entirely focused on bodyfat.
But this is all very muddy waters since it's fad diet territory and unscientific claims abound.
I now eat a single meal per day, and aim for some notion of nutrient density. I'm almost never hungry, and my body composition has never been better.