Ten-Hour Time-Restricted Eating Benefits Patients with Metabolic Syndrome

19 people "study" looks like a fake news?

There's subtle differences here. What this title refers to is commonly referred to as "time restricted feeding" or in humans "time restricted eating" if you are curious to learn more, google for a pod cast with Sachin Panda and Rhonda Patrick. They get into the details of this style of dieting at a mechanistic level really well.

Basically doing this over the long run will make you live longer, have a healthier metabolic system, lose weight, have healthier glucose levels, etc.

I'm on a mixture of TRE and intermittent fasting, and let me tell you, it works. I do it for longevity and energy. Weight management is just a bonus since now I can eat more of what I want without gaining weight since I am doing it in a smaller number of hours in the day.

10/14 hour intermittent fasting would also include a regime where you eat before bed (22h) and then don't eat until noon next day.

What makes you think that eating before bed is "really bad"?

Is eating right before bed actually a bad habit? I don't see why it would matter much what time you eat (barring indigestion possibly).

It is a fasting protocol though. Sleeping is a fast, which is why we break our fast in the morning with break-fast.

> eat dinner at 6-7pm and that's your last food intake for the day and then eat breakfast around 7-9am. [...] It's just living life normally.

That sounds like the eating habits of my thin friends, not the habit of my overweight friends. 70%+ of the USA is overweight. Time to rethink "normal".

It might be normal behavior for you but this is not normal for everyone.

I think it's just a terminology issue.

Fasting - Counted from your last meal but starts at 24+ hours.

Time Restricted Eating - Anything less than 24 hours.

> In my mind this isn't "fasting". It's just living life normally based on your sleep schedule.

I forget where I heard it first, but someone out there said that all this 'keto', 'intermittent fasting', 'atkins', etc. isn't new. It's just that men are now doing something that women have done for centuries, but since women were the ones doing it, the men needed a new name for the exact same thing such they they didn't seem effeminate. Men needed to call it something other than 'going on a diet'.

Living normally today means constant snacking and never going a second with a stomach that is not full.

Are you sure eating absolutely nothing and drinking nothing else than water after 7pm 7 days a week is that common?

If this strategy works to encourage people to accidentally consume fewer calories, isn't that good enough? I don't think this was about the mechanism about the weight loss, but merely that the behavior pattern ended up encouraging it.

If they measured only weight loss, then yes, it's due to the reduction. But it's important to note that the reduction wasn't forced on them -- it arose "naturally", meaning intermittent might be an efficient strategy to lose weight (e.g. the person wouldn't have the burden of tracking calories).

That's regarding weight loss alone. Various health and cognitive benefits are usually talked about in the context of intermittent fasting, and that seems to arise from being fasted rather than from being in a deficit.

I’m of the opinion the calorie reduction is the primary catalyst for health improvements. Over and over our assumptions about nutritional timing have been wrong, eg breakfast should be the biggest meal of the day, don’t eat after 8pm, etc. The body adapts to whatever circumstance it encounters and if that circumstance repeats itself, it adapts extremely well.

But so much of eating for those (like me) who are subject to binge eating and being overweight, the time restriction brings about a means of control that can help replace the compulsion that contributes to overeating. And that time control brings other positive side effects such as calorie reduction, a smaller window to exercise control over food quality, and education on food discipline.

I’m not an expert, but I think intermittent fasting generally falls into the same category as going vegetarian or going carnivore or avoiding gluten: the result is almost always a healthier overall diet and more manageable calorie load than what the person was eating before. But the gimmick, which is mostly just a means of control and introduces discipline, takes most of the credit.

I have not read the study, but when I heard this on the radio the researcher specifically said that the weight loss was because of the reduction in calories.

The part that is interesting is that by instructing people to have their last meal earlier they naturally reduced their caloric intake without being instructed to do so.

> IMHO, the current status of nutrition is very divergent, almost every habit is backed up and discouraged at the same time by more than one study

Are there any that say fasting is bad?

> Dr Peter Attia has done some great podcasts and YouTube presentations on the science behind fasting for the curious.

As someone who wasn't overweight, it was Dr. Attia with his guest Rhonda Patrick who finally got me to try IF for general health. I highly recommend listening to his podcasts.

I greatly enjoy Peter Attia's podcast, especially as someone with no medical background. It's really helped me to learn a lot about the human body and how it functions in a way that's actionable for improving health.

> I am wondering if female metabolism is fundamentally different. My wife tried the same diet and it just hasn’t worked for her. She gets too hangry whereas I find myself in a flow-state by mid morning.

Maybe she should try eating breakfast but skipping dinner. Different people have different metabolic "styles."

I have a hard time skipping breakfast and it doesn't seem to affect my weight very much, but when I consistently skip dinner (which is socially hard to do in my situation) I do lose weight - rapidly.

It's like, I feel terrible on keto, but my wife swears by it. Everyone is different.

If you drink your coffee black, you don't need to do it right after a meal :)

Most people I know do IF by waiting to eat until 2-3pm.

I don't understand what you are saying here. It seems to me like you would expect hunger to increase over time after eating. Thus putting the part of your fast with the highest hunger intensity into your sleep time seems considerably easier than intentionally being awake for it?

I.E: If I skip dinner earlier I am effectively adding hours of minimal hunger experience but if I skip breakfast I am adding hours of maximal hunger experience.

That is incredible, and I'm a little jealous.

I need to eat every two hours, maximum, whilst awake. If I miss one period then I'm basically unable to function normally.

It also ruins your social life and relationships :)

To each their own, though. I did OMAD (one meal a day) and found that it was just not tenable from the relationship standpoint.

In this case compressing the period of time within which you eat reduced calorie intake. That is totally unsurprising, as it means odds are higher that you'll still feel full at any point during your eating window.

Having done intermittent fasting, it's totally possible to get to the point that you spend most of your eating window hating food because you keep feeling like you've just had a massive meal. That you end up eating less then isn't so strange. It boils down to whether or not you manage to stick to the schedule, but one of the nice things about an intermittent fasting schedule is that it's never long until you can eat, and that makes compliance feel easier for at least some people.

I'm not aware of a formal name for it, but there's certainly a hypothesis floating around that weight loss diets mostly work by altering the way that people pay attention to food. That is, the behavioral effects of being "on a diet" explain most of the weight loss while the particular rules and theory of any given diet explain little of the weight loss. It's sort of like the dodo bird verdict [1] for diets. It would be interesting to know if any studies have compared "real" and "placebo" diets to estimate this effect; searches mostly come up with references to a book called "The Placebo Diet" which seems related but I'm not sure it directly addresses the empirical question.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict

It's also easier not to eat than burning off the excess. With my complexion, it takes about 5K to burn through 1 Snickers bar. I do run and I find easier not to eat that bar than to burn it, so for people who don't exercise themselves it should be a no brainer.

I can usually plan for events that would normally be outside my eating window and adjust timing accordingly. But ultimately, I don't beat myself up about it if, say, one day a week I can't get things perfect due to social constraints.

I think time restriction AND caloric restriction matter. Yes, a narrow eating window reduces the odds of overeating. But it also gives the body a chance to lower insulin levels during the fasted period, lowering the potential for insulin resistance. This is why it's bad advice to eat many small meals throughout the day--it keeps your insulin high at all times, never giving your body a chance to actually burn fat and likely resulting in reduced metabolic rate when done concurrently with caloric restriction.

> I can easily (very, very easily) down 10k Calories in under an hour.

But would you want to? Maybe you would, but most wouldn't because appetite doesn't just increase linearly over time. The idea with TRF is that even if people eat 500 extra calories at dinner that still has less effect than 1000 calories' worth of breakfast, lunch, and/or snacks, both in terms of raw calories and in terms of varying metabolic effects. Even if it were just a highly abstracted trick for just eating fewer calories (it's not), people might find it easier to stick to than having every meal but eating less at each. Motivation matters.

You're right that time restriction alone is not sufficient. Neither is calories counting alone. How much you eat, what you eat, when you eat all matter. Any diet that focuses on only one - any one - won't work for some people, or at all. Let's not try to counter bad advice with more sample-of-one bad advice.

With all due respect, I wager you've got a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't for you. There's no silver bullet, and the effectiveness of dietary interventions is very individualized.

For instance, I've got a friend who manages to stay thin by always eating throughout the day, but never more than a handful of food. This wouldn't work for me because once I start eating, it's very difficult for me to stop.

By the same token, simple caloric restriction (calorie counting) doesn't work for me, because I just hate tracking my food intake, so inevitably I give up on it.

However, for me, time restricted eating is like magic. I simply don't start eating until a bit later in the day, and everything else takes care of itself.

So it could very well be that this is the wrong diet for you but that doesn't mean it's completely without merit.

I have the opposite experience. I find it virtually impossible to consume 2,000 calories at once, so I don't have to spend a single second thinking about diet or exercise; I just eat once a day and can guarantee weight loss / maintenance. Eating under 2,000 calories is obvious. You don't fast so that you can eat more, you fast so that eating less doesn't feel so terrible. Everyone already knows they have to eat less calories to lose weight.

> By some delusional people's metric, that's a 23 hour fasting period and should work great.

No one thinks you can fast and eat 5 days worth of food every day and lose weight.

I'd like to know how you could possibly consume 10,000 calories in less than an hour, let alone "very, very easily".

You're being downvoted by people who don't agree with you. That doesn't mean that you are wrong. According to dang this is actually encouraged. [1] [2]

I don't think it's a good practice to downvote things you don't agree with, but apparently HN's current approach is that it is (and it's always been that way).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16574021

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

Perhaps there is a little competition component, but the idea is to stay longer in the ketosis state. If you're doing 18/6, then your body will be in a fasting state for a longer time, and the belief is that the longer your body is in that state, the more benefit you will reap.

skip a meal; breakfast+lunch OR lunch+dinner

Eat a protein bar at 1400.

Most of the fasting schedules are 16/8, or 16 hours no-eating, 8 hours eating.

Assuming you start at 2pm, you can eat from 1400-2200. Grab a small snack at 2, and then plan on a big meal at home.

When you can get people to adhere to -8.6% calorie diets let the rest of the world know.

this seems to be standard effect of many dietary fads, i.e. they end up enforcing compliance with a low calories regime.

Which is a good thing! But somehow we're always looking for other "magical" effects of diets.

Anything that reduces how much calories you take in without reducing the calories you burn, is going to make you lose weight.

The whole trick in helping people lose weight is finding a way people can easily keep doing that without any expenditure in willpower. That's the big problem with every single diet: it requires discipline and willpower. The less of those it requires, the easier it becomes to stick to the diet.

The point of pretty much all intermittent fasting schedules is being "basically forced diet".

While I agree it'd be interesting to see if there are additional benefits vs. the same reduction without the time constraint, a large part of the reason why some people prefer intermittent fasting is that some feel it is easier to comply with. E.g. you only need to exercise self-control for a relatively low number of waking hours.

I've done it in the past, and it was remarkable how easy it was to end up eating less when you compress it in a smaller time window; most of your hunger ends up happening outside of your eating window, towards the end of your fasting period, so you just need to hang in there and count down the time, which for me at least was easier than most other ways of dieting I've trued.

I wouldn't expect any difference. It' still physics, body uses energy to produce heat or movement, hard to change that through a diet.

I occasionally use intermittent fasting for weight control, and the reason it works for me is because time-restricted eating makes it easy to consume less food. If I skip breakfast, and sometimes lunch, after a couple days I don't get hungry in the morning anymore, and I simply eat what I want the rest of the day, which ends up being significantly less.

I have had much less success with things like calorie counting and portion control. Those diets felt like constant self-denial, and I would inevitably end up fudging the numbers to allow myself to eat more, or would eventually just break down and binge.

So if your point is to say these numbers aren't that interesting because it's "really" just the caloric deficit doing the work here, I would say that could very well be right. But there are a lot of ways to get to a caloric deficit, and time-restricted eating has particular benefits over many of those methods.

Yes, I believe any diet that "works" is just the diet happening to make it more manageable to reduce calories below expenditure. A similar diet I've read about is one meal a day. The basic idea is that you can eat whatever you want, but only one time per day (within reason). Most people can't eat their total daily calories in one sitting before feeling uncomfortable. Thus, you lose weight.

I'm not aware of any studies but muslims have been doing seasonal intermittent fasting for a long time - Ramadan.

If we weighed the known effects of being overweight against the possible harmful effects of intermittent fasting, in all likelihood there's no debate at all.

People have been going on intermittent fasting schedules for centuries.

Ramadan being a good example.

This is also by no means the first study into intermittent fasting.

While we certainly don't know every detail about what the optimal pattern is, the idea that you might "ruin your body" by limiting your eating to a 10 your window seems far fetched.

They intentionally did a very mild form of intermittent fasting to mitigate the risk of bodily damage, there are people who adhere to 2 day a week fasts, and the like

id argue that giving your body food (and sugar) all of the time is a much bigger risk that has harmful long term effects on your body.

I can't imagine maintaining a ten-hour eating window for years would have any negative effects. That's basically "breakfast at 9am, dinner over by 7pm". I hardly even consider that a restriction.