Intermittent fasting is as effective as counting calories, new study finds
npr.org
npr.org
This is consistent with my experience. IF makes eating a binary choice: either it's eating time or it's not. That simplifies the decision tree in a way that is helpful for me.
Now a normal portion feels right and me weight is under control, yay!
I have coffee in the morning, 1-2 cups, then just water the rest of the day. If you're fasting for true fasting effect (autophagy, etc.) then you can't eat more than 50cal or you'll "break" the fast.
If you're fasting for dieting/reduced calories, then having a protein shake (100-200cal) is OK if it helps you get through the day.
I'm lucky in that my body responds will to fasting, but you may need to ease into it - aim for not eating until 12pm (12-8pm), then push that later each week as you feel better until you get to 4pm or 6pm and are doing OMAD.
Also very important when fasting is food quality. OMAD is marketed as "eat anything you like and lose weight!", and while that may be true you'll feel like crap if the only meal you have pizza and ice cream and beer. Start with a salad, then get some good protein & fat in your entree, with a side of carbs. Dessert is OK, but it should be a treat - not a full serving/second meal.
Its better to stay under 50kcals (bit of milk with coffee), than to have small amounts of food (breaking autophagy). Small amount of food will cause hunger triggers making you hungry all the time.
With no calories my hunger fades away and its only mental experience of your brain saying 'you should be eating now' rather than physical one of your stomach rumbling.
Its a very interesting physical vs mental experience.
One more thing. To make most of OMAD its better to switch to Keto diet and focus on eating proteins.
However, I live with my wife and son, and socially it's much easier to skip lunch and have dinner with the family.
Either works for me, and I don't generally OMAD more than 2 days in a row.
In general I kind of IF (I always skip breakfast) most days, OMAD a couple every couple weeks, do a 24 hour fast every month or so, and a 48 hour one every quarter or so.
I get brainfog immediately when I don't eat, I cannot think properly (affects my work) and I'm irritable.
How do you manage that?
And before you say "drink", I easily drink 2L of water just in the morning
I still try to have been fasting at least 12 hours when I wake up in the morning, but I also try to get 40 g of protein 3 times a day and to separate those meals by at least 3 or 4 hours, and my muscles are back to being able to benefit from strength training like they are supposed to be.
Consistent with your experience I lost weight but it was almost all lean mass -fat was reduced only slightly.
I switched to a ketogenic diet after that and watched the fat melt away. IF clearly works for some people but it sure didn't for me.
A ketogenic diet, from the literature I have read, has no actual benefit in terms of body fat loss. This is due to the fact that the metabolic pathways shift, but towards dietary fats first and foremost. The pathways that eat muscle and then body fat continue to exist, meaning muscle tone is still at risk without a proper workout regime.
However, I am glad to hear it worked for you! At the end of the day what matters is you reached your fitness goals and can maintain them in a healthy lifestyle.
I can't IF with high carbs. It has to be keto for me. I wonder how many other people who can't make IF work have the same issue. I'd wager it's most of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-energy_X-ray_absorptiomet...
The theory is that during IF period your body depletes all carbs stores and is forced into ketosis o produce energy.
My OMAD is technically 2 sub-meals over 4 hours: 4pm: protein shake pre-workout, 5-6pm, weighted calisthenics, 6-8pm, dinner and dessert (protein ice creams).
Could be newbie gains, as I never exercised consistently before 50s: from zero pull-ups to 20+ (+40kg 1RM) over a year; zero dip to weighted (+30kg) RTO dips. zero full (ATG) squat to 10+ pistol squats.
The vegan OMAD has been easy for me, but I've never done other diet and exercise regimens before for comparisons.
I don’t think it’s that clear that dietary cholesterol is highly correlated with serum cholesterol in everyone. For me my LDL seems to be more correlated with excess carbs and sugar — when I cut back on those while maintaining my egg diet my LDL actually got better. (But this is not medical advice, please consult your doctor. May not be true for people with underlying conditions that require Lipitor)
My experience matches this guy’s (but please discount this type of bro science appropriately — YMMV)
I don’t think it’s that clear that dietary cholesterol is highly correlated with serum cholesterol in everyone.
LDL in eggs is the big fluffy LDL. This LDL does not clog arteries, in fact, it CLEANS them! It grabs on to the small LDL and removes them, reducing clogged arteries and heart disease.
But most health professionals still do not make the distinction. Leading to the wrong advice being doled out to patients.
The guideline is approximately 0.5g-1g per pound of lean body mass. 0.5g minimum to maintain mass, 1g to body build. Anything more than 1 isn't useful unless you're trying to hypertrophy like Arnold and live in the gym 8 hours a day.
Example: I'm 6 foot tall and male and about 180 pounds, with the Hume and James formulas, thats 131 to 142 pounds of lean mass; I should be aiming for 65g to 142g of protein. WHO's formula approximates this, CDC's formula has a slightly wider range at 59-208g.
A pound of raw bone-in chicken thighs with skin on is about 60g of protein, and only about 600 calories. I can base a meal around 1 to 1.5 pounds of chicken thighs easily.
All of that said, I'm wondering what you were doing that you were unable to hit your requirements, since it seems to be alarmingly easy.
Comparing effectiveness of ways of eating without first identifying (and critically evaluating) goals is meaningless, in the same way it would be meaningless to declare that jogging and weight-lifting are equally effective without specifying a goal.
We're getting close to 80% obesity/overweight in the US with many other countries following closely. The majority of people in the west need to lose weight, we just got used to everyone being overweight
As somebody who finds it harder to gain weight, I still recognise that most have the opposite problem and understand that most content will be tailored to the average Joe, which is fine.
And while science cannot definitively say whether obesity causes problems, or some underlying problems cause obesity, it’s a fairly well understood fact that even if in your prime you’re healthy while being obese, your joints won’t be further into your life. Arthritis and general immobility are things I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
I haven’t lost any weight from IF because going down to 2 meals just meant I ate larger meals — because I’m one of those people who can eat a lot before feeling full. But I’m the exception. Most people feel full more easily.
For me though the satiation signal has low lag but my satiation threshold is just very high.
They cheat or miscalculate, because the US "serving" system is an insane way to measure nutrients.
Also 3% of body weight over 8 weeks is a nothing burger. Did they control for water intake? It's not in the abstract.
You can lose roughly 1-2% of your body weight in less than 24 hours, simply by sweating.
"They cheat or miscalculate, because the US "serving" system is an insane way to measure nutrients."
I'm not sure how many people who count calories use the "serving" system. Almost everyone I know, myself included, goes by weight of the food and calories.
Eg. 15g of Peanut butter is 90 Cals
I bet those who actually use the weight of the food (in a standardized 100g increment, for example) have much better compliance and success in weight control, like yourself.
There are two slightly different questions:
- how much weight is lost assuming perfect compliance
- how much weight is lost assuming the compliance of the average people
If I am interested in losing weight, I want to know what will work for me, a measly sack of meat with imperfect discipline, imperfect information and so on.
It’s like saying walking on a tight rope though a canyon is not dangerous - assuming you perfectly go through one edge to another. Sure, it’s trivially true. Not very informative though.
A girl I dated years ago started counting calories but not including the 3-5 cans of Coke she drank each day, or sometimes she'd only record one or two of them. I tried to point it out, and she insisted she only drank one or two cans/day and they were recorded. I pointed out that we bought a 12-pack of Coke on Sunday, and it was now Tuesday and there were only 2 cans left, so do the math, because I wasn't drinking any of it.
Or she'd buy Oreos and snack on them while gaming and after an hour not realize she's eaten a third of the package.
I don't think she was serious about wanting to lose weight, because anybody really wanting to lose weight probably wouldn't be buying Coke and Oreos. A single can of Coke and 3 Oreos is 300 calories. That's half a meal's calorie budget for someone trying to stick to 1800 calories/day with 3 meals/day.
Drove the whole family nuts. However, She lost 90 pounds from it all. So can’t complain.
Another cool thing is that calorie counting doesn't make you crazy hungry like some diets where the calories have been miscalculated.
However, it is a chore. Apps help.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/calories-count-only-when-...
I would agree based on my personal experience.
I think it’s a scooby-do moment where instead of calculating calories you let your stomach do it based on fullness. Drinking zero calorie drinks is essential through the day and having dessert less often helps of course.
I mostly follow one meal per day and have lost about a pound per week. The mostly part is drinking 1/4-1/2 cup of some oat milk or almond milk with medicine once or twice per day for a few weeks. I didn’t notice any difference in weight loss.
It literally cannot be as effective, because some people can eat a large amount of food in a short period of time.
What I suspect they mean is that the average person is more likely to stick to IF than they are to calorie counting. This feels intuitively obvious to me - it's a lot less work. Even on a bulking diet it can be really hard sometimes to figure out how many calories are in foods, small restaurants don't have a clue for example.
If you're assuming perfect adherence on one side and gaming on the other, then of course not.
People who don't want to adhere won't in either case and will find ways to cheat or game the process.
Also, IF (and calorie counting) helps shrink your stomach making giant meals less likely over time.
People are terrible at calorie counting too. Even when they don't give up. They stick to it they get sloppy over time. They'll estimate and round numbers, so they can have one more cookie, etc.
IF does not specify a calorie count. If it did, it would be a subset of calorie counting. There is nothing preventing me from eating 3-5k cals in 8 hours, I do it all the time when bulking.
There is nothing wrong with the idea of IF, it just relies on the fact that you will intuitively eat fewer calories if you restrict your eating to a shorter period. By definition then, it cannot be superior to just actually eating less.
Perfect adherence ignores those things by definition.
I think it's actionably useful to distinguish between "this doesn't work" and "people find it hard/impossible to do this".
I feel like we’re in a transition period where science is staring to take the human into account as part of what is possible. And I encourage that. Form nutrition to economics.
Humans are not fully rational. This is normal and expected. Except in science apparently.
Yes, if you are NASA you can fully account for calories perfectly, but outside of at least a hospital environment is it a fantasy.
It's very hard to over eat in a single meal unless you eat absolute junk food. It's relatively easy to over eat even on healthy food if you eat 3 meals per day + snacks here an there
I feel like NPR has gone down in quality in the last few years.