Intermittent fasting more effective than calorie restriction
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
> The mean (SD) reduction in energy intake was -313 (509) kcal/d for TRE, -197 (426) kcal/d for CR, and -16 (439) kcal/d for controls
So — the time restricted eating group reduced calories more than the group that counted calories; but the resulting weight loss has the same cause: reduced calorie intake compared to before.
If there’s a take away here, it’s possibly that adherence to a calorie deficit using a time restricted eating plan is easier than adherence to the same calorie deficit by explicitly tracking calories.
If you can adhere to a calorie deficit through other means, you won’t lose weight faster by adding intermittent fasting while maintaining the same calorie intake.
if you have a 'daily budget' of 1500 calories, personally I would much rather skip breakfast and have a burger and fries for dinner than 3 'slim meals' throughout the day (i'd probably stick to that more readily too)
My target right now is 1600 kcal & 150g protein, and my usual meal plan is a 300kcal protein frappe coffee thing in the morning, a lunch around 450kcal like gumbo, a 550kcal dinner like apricot glazed salmon w/ couscous, and then ~300kcal of Ben & Jerrie’s ice cream for dessert. For me adherence is super easy because those are all foods I love to eat, I’m full all day so I never want to snack, and I’m actually eating more dessert than before this diet because I don’t feel guilty about it anymore (yay decadence).
My girlfriend tried the same plan, but something about just knowing about the budget makes her feel totally trapped and she ends up binge eating snacks almost out of “revenge” after a few days. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of course the problem is, I have a hard time just eating three meals a day and not snacking in between.
Only way I can lose weight is if I also start restricting calories.
The point is that IF makes it easier to reduce calories, in part psychologically but also in part because it's just a lot harder to eat 3,000 calories in 4 hours than it is to eat 3,000 calories in 12 hours.
You can.
It's hard to count calories accurately.
It's very easy to look at the clock and determine if it's between 1300-1900 hours
The popular term 'intermittent fasting' usually describes time restricted eating, with a fasting period usually between 16-20 hours.
Cutting out the snacking is probably also a major factor in the effectiveness of intermittent fasting, especially given that snack foods are often more processed, calorie-dense, and less nutritionally balanced than what we typically eat at meals.
I think a lot of people could lose significant weight by simply eating three meals a day at the usual times, but just cutting out snacking between meals entirely and changing nothing else. Just fasting between meals, if you will.
Well I suppose not eating on purpose vs just being slob or not having time for it is kind of different.
Additionally your stomach shrinks under this regime - that one meal will definitely make you feel full and satiated.
All this goes into ease of adherence - I just don't have to think about it. I eat as much as I want for dinner each day and have dropped a steady 10lb/year for the last 5 years.
As Michael Pollan says "Eat food, mostly greens, not too much".
Don't eat anything processed, don't eat anything with more than one ingredient and only eat meat with at most one meal, and ideally quite a small portion.
Completely and utterly ignore things like icecream, chocolate, soda, candy, chips, anything deep friend and other "non food items". Treat them like Arsenic - i.e. you should never eat them.
There, you are now restricting calorie intake and you didn't have to count anything.
You should do this for your entire life.
That reminds me of something I saw a long time ago:
> Fuzzy Pink Niven's Law: Never waste calories. [...] Don't eat soggy potato chips. Or cheap candy. Or an inferior hot fudge sundae. Or a cold soggy pizza.
> You should do this for your entire life.
Out of all the advice in these comments, this contradicts the scientific evidence on fitness and nutrition the most. Everyone should do the thing that makes it the easiest for them to attain their health and fitness goals. Living an an acetic life because an internet comment and Michael Pollan said so will work sustainably for very few people.
Adherence/consistency is the single most important factor to consider when building a fitness plan. Evidence shows users of systematic plans like weight watchers points are less likely to lapse in the long term. A very gradual improvement that works for a long time is much better than a deep “improvement” you practice for 1.5 months before giving up.
I’d much rather count calories and eat ice cream every day than treat ice cream as arsenic. For me a little bit of a treat every day makes self control around my diet easier overall - I never buy snacks or overeat at meals because I think “hrrng if I spend this calorie now, I cant spend it on ice cream tonight”. Might not work for everyone - there’s a lot of commenters here who prefer TRE because it’s easier for them; if works well that’s what they should do.
If living an acetic life without treats works the best for you, then do that - but don’t tell other people they should do it too.
There’s no reason to fear treats if you can manage them; if time restricted eating or calorie counting enables someone to eat the food they like, and so life is more enjoyable and it’s easier to adhere to a good diet, they should do that.
Binary choices (should I eat right now?) take much less cognitive overhead than spectral choices (What should I eat? How much of it? If I eat X and Y now will I have the capacity to eat Z later?)
Even the small effort of measuring your creamer with a teaspoon instead of just pouring it in the cup just takes more time and effort than simply checking what time it is.
I went from somewhere around 2400kcal daily to 1600kcal daily while eating 3 meals and lifting for 30min a day and my estimated resting energy expenditure per day by Withings & Apple Health is down about 60kcal over ~4 months. They’re not super accurate sources, but at current rates I’ll hit my target minimum weight before my estimated resting expenditure has dropped -100kcal.
Hunger is a weird thing. People tend to assume that if you don't eat you'll just get hungrier and hungrier. The reality is that hunger comes in waves. If you can ride out a wave of hunger for 30 - 45 minutes it goes away. And the longer you don't eat, the less hungrier you get. I think this is because those waves of hunger tend to correspond to your eating habits. So if you're accustomed to eating lunch, you feel hungry around lunch time etc.
After a period of adaptation, when this just becomes the new normal, you can find that when it comes time to eat you just don't want to eat all that much either. It's weird, but cool, and seems to work well for a lot of people.
Then there is metabolic adaptation, which is thought to be the biggest contributor to people re-gaining any weight that they've lost. What happens is that after dropping around 10% of your body mass, your body kicks in a survival mechanism whereby it lowers your resting metabolic rate to adapt and try to slow the weight loss. This means that two people who weigh the exact same, one of which just dropped a bunch of weight to get there, will require different caloric intakes just to maintain their weight. The person who just cut weight will need 300 - 400 fewer calories per day than the person who didn't.
If you cut weight just by caloric restriction alone, this is DISASTROUS, because you are hungry and weak and miserable ... and you need to eat even less just to keep the weight off.
Which is why crash diets don't work. You start by making sacrifices, which is uncomfortable, and then when metabolic adaptation kicks in you stop seeing results unless you make even more sacrifices. People can't stick with it so they stop dieting and very quickly and easily regain the weight.
Intermittent fasting not only helps with hunger control, but there is research that suggests that it can also increase resting metabolic rate, which can help to counteract metabolic adaptation.
But even if it didn't boost RMR, the fact that it helps with hunger control and maintaining a calorie deficit alone would make it more sustainable for more people than just trying to eat less in general.
Our bodies are so absurdly adaptive to just about anything we can throw at them. And so it makes sense, in some weird way, that if you're going to do something - doing it to an extreme degree can make things easier than going half way, since you optimize for the adaptive response from your body.
Sounds odd, but let's say I filled my stomach to 90% of my total capacity, then a few hours later I've digested down to 45% capacity and that's when I get hungry. That's -50% of the last maximum. If I spend a week or two restricting what I ate to a maximum of 60% capacity, I'd only get hungry around 30%, also -50%. But with less total calories eaten.
(numbers made up just to give an idea what it felt like)
Carbs, especially sugar and processed carbs make the fast day’s miserable. But if I stick to meat, vegetables and some whole grains it’s usually no big deal.
Yep, and eventually even hunger you do feel is easy to ignore. I practice TRT and was meeting a friend at 3pm for a late lunch. I just skipped food all day, ate a nice meal at 3pm and then a very light dinner. Wasn't ever hungry after working out and working up until that point.
The hunger goes away when I'm sleeping and I'm not hungry in the morning - Lunch at 11 or 12.
It's really hard to eat too many calories in the 8 hour window, unless I drink sodas and stuff my face with candy.
Also, it would be good to simultaneously (somehow) check if the results depend on one's genetic or cultural bias towards eating in the morning or evening.
The only immutable truth is that calorie deficit will make you lose weight.
BUT different people find different methods of calorie deficit easier to handle mentally and/or physically.[1]
I can easily go even 20 hours without food maybe only sipping on some water or tea, my grandmother is the same. She can just have a big meal once per day and go about her day (and night) just fine.
My partner on the other hand needs to eat every 3-4 hours or they become completely unbearable mentally. It doesn't need to be a full meal, but some kind of calorie top-up is essential.
[1] ...and it seems that different people get different amounts of calories from the same food, it's a gut flora thing.
If I don't have some kind of protein in the AM, I quickly start having mental/emotional issues (and end up with recovery problems due to exercise, including pain). Trying to make up for it at lunch is a losing battle.
1) I drink coffee in the morning too. No stomach problems yet, but I'm completely dependent on caffeine. Last summer I did a 4 month hiatus from caffeine and at the end I determined the tradeoff for me wasn't worth it. The energy and focus is just too valuable, to go without.
2) If it's going well, I wouldn't worry about it. At some point your body will stop having a huge fat reserve to burn off, and you will find that your energy levels crater and recover very slowly if you exert yourself too much for a given macro load.
3) You should try an extended fast! My response to "you are skipping the most important meal of the day" is "I don't even eat every day, fasting is good for you". If they press the issue I'll tell them about fasting for 5 days and how good it makes me feel.
And extended fasts really do make me feel amazing after the fact.
However, one unforseen side effect for me is that I sleep better on an empty stomach and feel better when I wake.
I don't know how scientific this is but this comes from a person I consider smart & knowledgeable:
My medical doctor friend explained this as hunger being triggered by a nerve signal from your stomach that food in your stomach _is about to run out_. That is, once it runs out, the nerve signal goes away.
I read "the glucose revolution" and it talked about reducing blood sugar spikes. If you have a big blood sugar spike, later you will have a blood sugar crash with a lack of energy, reduced concentration and... cravings.
I suspect that if you minimize your blood sugar spikes, you will reduce the crash later and waves of hunger aren't as much of an issue.
random internet presentation summarizing hacks from the book: https://www.believebig.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Glucos...
EDIT another one: https://njms.rutgers.edu/education/student_affairs/student_s...
I’m actually capable of going an entire day without eating now and I’m not craving anything. A lot of days I’ll only have one meal, sometimes two.
It’s done wonders for my health. I’ve lost a little under a point per week (wouldn’t recommend more than this), my blood pressure is down, I no longer get heartburn after eating anything, and I feel lighter and healthier.
There are also tons of studies indicating that going longer between meals is healthier, and had anti aging effects on a cellular level. Seems to be an all around winner to me.
Very roughly, there’s 3500kcal in 1lb of body. Given that fact plus your current weight and calorie intake, you can build a spreadsheet in 30 mins to compute the calories per day to make your body any weight you want in a reasonable time frame (losing >1% a week is generally viewed as unhealthy and risky).
Of course adhering to the plan is the challenging part - and then it’s helpful to consider strategies like TRE, once you understand the metric target part.
I wrote the comment as a reaction to the editorialized headline suggesting to some degree that TRE is a silver bullet / One Weird Trick. Maybe it is effectively that for many people - but in case there’s a casual reader scrolling past I want to give them a bit more of the ground truth that’s somehow not popular knowledge.
emphasis on the very roughly ... a significant part of body mass is tissue you do not want to lose: bone, brain, organs
And AFAIK this is calculated based on body fat actually corresponding to around 7.7 kcal per gram, not 9 (that is for food).
I think a clearer title would be something to the effect of "Intermittent fasting more effective than calorie counting for calorie restriction"
Also worth pointing out that the study was specific to T2 diabetes.
The problem with most diet/fitness advice is that it comes from fit+healthy people who've never had serious weight/health problems, and for whom it's all easy.
‘A major’
Appreciate you stepping out to engage in this. I’m going to answer this in support of the perspective you’re speaking from.
There is advice available from people who haven’t always been healthy and fit, but are now.
Should someone seeking diet/fitness advice take it from someone who hasn’t become and remained reasonably fit or diet?
One thing for me I strive towards is remembering building discipline is one of the key if not the master habit that unlocks so many other ones. For me a responsible mindset empowers, and a victim or blame mindset disempowers and I try not to forget it.
Longevity whether I like it or not is based on two things, a bit (not a lot) of regular exercise where uninterrupted walking over 60-90 minutes is amazing, and reducing the amount of processed food and step by step making sure the diet is one that best suits each individuals body. Reducing a harmful activity is a great start instead of making big leaps.
I have folks with weight and health problems in my life.
It’s easier sometimes to think it’s easy for people who have it done, but not know their story
Starting and keeping going 1% better every day is the way and something everyone can learn to do relative to themselves as long as they don’t compare, and don’t stop. Intermittent fasting (starting with a smaller window and increasing it by 5 minutes every day than normal can be very helpful).
Given that cancers are literally mutated cells, forcing your body to do an occasional cell cleanup seems potentially like a good idea.
From the conclusion:
"There is presently little evidence that intermittent fasting, without any reduction in body weight and proper balanced diet and exercise, can enhance cancer outcomes."
So, while the details in this review are interesting, the conclusions seem to come down to basic health advice: maintain a healthy weight, eat a healthy diet, and get exercise. Seems like good advice for pretty much everyone.
autophagy takes at least a few days. wouldn't really considered IF to even really be "fasting" at all. it's just a fancy term for skipping breakfast.
I have been doing intermittent fasting combined with increased cardio activity, significantly reducing sugar intake (only source is from fruits and occasional/once a month indulgences) , and mild increase in fish consumption while reducing beef consumption.
So far, 20 lb weight loss in 3-4 month period. Cholesterol levels were “borderline” prior to weight loss (no statins Rx’d). Fasting glucose normal.
Anecdotally, reducing intake works!
side note: the sugar addiction was real and “retraining” my body and mind was the real effort. The mental fortitude to ignore the usual junk I grab at the grocery store is well understated.
At the end of the day, it’s all about the numbers — my intake is 1600kcal, and estimated expenditure is 2240kcal – and whatever makes it easy to stick to the plan. For me it’s ice cream.
Some people (like me) will almost literally get fat just by walking past the candy isle in the store, my body will suck up every single Joule of energy from any food I ingest.
Meanwhile I have a friend who was actually prescribed by a doctor to eat more fat (butter, specifically) every day because they just don't hold on to calories _at_all_. Everything goes straight through. He's been stick thin for the 25 years I've known him, no matter what he eats and how and when.
OMAD is effectively calorie restriction anyway because the longer you do intermittant fasting, the lower your average calorie consumption becomes over that period. Can't say it's healthy or smart, but it worked for me.
Current play is adapting this OMAD + hiking + zero alcohol for the winter to be fewer hikes but adding stronglifts 5x5 3-4x a week as a routine, which should consume any marginal meals and create the metabolic demand as I start lifting heavier again. I've found that sobriety is a free super power as well, can't recommend it highly enough for cutting out impaired judgment snacks.
Intermittent fasting typically has people shift their eating times towards the end of the day which should significantly reduce the chances of falling into a pre-bedtime eating habit. Especially if you also shift your sleep window earlier. So if you stop eating at 8PM and make sure you're asleep by 10PM, you're less likely to get hunger pangs.
In the beginning it certainly is. But once I did it for a while, I found that I had developed a mental understanding for what various foods represented in terms of calories and could navigate it with much less effort. I started with spreadsheets and apps.
IMO much of the value in calorie counting stems from those early weeks where you suddenly realize how many calories each food represents - and relative to that how filling you find them.
Personally when I wake up I quickly need a meal – I always drink a glass of water in the morning and it does very little, but if I have a black coffee the caffeine gets rid of my hunger for a few hours.
It makes you wonder if the intermittent fasting made the participants more aware of when they were actually hungry vs eating mainly out of habit/boredom/coping mechanism.
If I follow an overly strict diet, I wind up thinking about food all of the time. Calorie counting is a form of strictness: I'm continually putting in more time thinking about food. How many calories was that? Do I need to log everything? Do I figure it out when I'm planning and add the extra food thought time there?
And so on.
I've only lost weight through specific dietary changes that are easy to follow. Usually, this has been things like changing daytime food to something more healthy or fewer calories. Or simply putting more vegetables in my diet. I'm currently pescetarian, but rarely eat fish.
Intermittent fasting is in this second category. There isn't much to keep track of and I wouldn't have to put all that much extra thought into it. Some folks could put little to no thought into it. It makes it easier than anything strict.
But it works only if junk food and processed foods are stopped.
Or in plain English: it’s easier to get someone to eat less by getting them to limit windows in which they eat than to ask them to eat less and keep the same routine.
Tre = intermittent fasting Cr = calorie restriction
The TRE group reported being adherent with their eating window a mean (SD) of 6.1 (0.8) days per week (87% of days) over 6 months (eFigure 2 in Supplement 2). In the CR group, 17 participants (68%) reported being adherent with their prescribed calorie goals during the 6-month trial (eFigure 2 in Supplement 2). Participants in the TRE group reported finding their diet intervention easier to adhere to compared with CR group participants (eFigure 3 in Supplement 2
Full text: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Table 2 seems to show this effect. The TRE arm lost more lean body mass and fat mass, although without a difference in visceral fat. If compliance is the issue, I'd be curious to understand what regime can help TRE participants comply with a minimum protein threshold in their diet to minimize the risk of lean body mass loss.
And why would your body go out of its way to preserve metabolically more expensive tissue during longer periods of deprivation?
Absolutely wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38194372
Specifically, there are much longer periods of fasting which may have a different impact on the result which are not tested for here. There is a claim about alternate-day fasting which is actually not supported in the linked study.
In addition, the longer alternate-day fasting practices may include ad libitum which may have a detrimental effect. Lack of adequate protein is presumed by many to be linked to loss of lean muscle, and the quality and form of feeding during feeding windows would therefore be of high importance, but doesn't seem to be accounted for in these studies.
Better to eat less calories and consume small amounts of protein throughout the day.
I tried IF a couple times in my life. First time, coupled with lots of endurance exercise, worked great but I was constantly fighting to retain muscle. Second time I didn't exercise as much but also didn't lose any weight. I did develop extreme post-meal fatigue though, and that has persisted for years since stopping IF.
if this is the reason, then wouldn't adjusting your macros to ensure enough protein mitigate this?
Even if you up your dietary protein during the feeding window, if you're fasting for lengthy periods of time where the protein has already been utilized for fuel, then the muscles are starved and catabolic. There's no passive protein depot built into our physiology muscles can pull from.
I'm curious what the result would be if you add a cheatmeal every 3-4 days.
Note: This is regulated by leptin as far as I know - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22446-leptin
> Leptin’s main function is to help regulate the long-term balance between your body’s food intake and energy use (expenditure). Leptin helps inhibit (prevent) hunger and regulate energy balance so that your body doesn’t trigger a hunger response when it doesn’t need energy (calories).
As far as I'm aware. Eating less for a longer time and you're body will reduce energy expenditure and etc..
PS. If you want to lose weight, you want your energy expenditure to be as high as possible ;)
PS2. Not an expert. Read a lot about it and this seemed to theory seemed to fit my practical experience with losing weight ( -25 kg. in about 6 months. | from > 100 kg to ~ 77kg )
I think I found the original source: https://bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/bodyweight-regulation...
How do you deal with the hunger resulting from high energy expenditure. I find myself famished after a tough workout (interval training / strength training).
I realize there are other benefits to interval training / strength training (e.g., endurance, toning, increasing mass), but I wonder if it runs counter to weight loss given how much hunger it induces.
Spread more carbs in the morning, lean to more protein in the evening.
Calorie cycling: https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-to-know-calorie-cycling
Based on personal experience here. You're doing HITT? It's possible for a short intensive workout ( under 25 minutes) that you're body isn't taking from fat, but trying to get it from food you ingested. That's why it's "suggested" to do lower intensity workouts.
If you do heavy training, you can eat more than you did before too.
Check https://www.burnthefatinnercircle.com/public/Harris-Benedict... -> Activity Factor Guidelines
There are plenty related root causes, eg. sugar craving. Perhaps add some dextrose to your drink.
https://www.polar.com/blog/sugar-and-workouts-how-it-can-hel...
Also a lack of vitamins could create cravings ( eg. Because of a lack of sunlight/sleep), you need more vitamins since you workout more.
Losing weight is 60-70% eating correctly, the rest is exercise.
I'm still inclined to believe that gaining muscle is the best way to go for losing weight/fat as a male.
If you do weights:
Don't measure you're weight every day ( muscle is heavier than fat), if you want to check that, do it weekly ( preferably with a fat % counter. Same time of day, same water intake. Since it works based on conductivity / water. Water intake can change results slightly). Try the mirror instead.
Building muscle is slow, but losing muscle is slow too... ( Less strict "diet", useful for holidays)
Cardio is fast, gaining it again is fast too.
Ps. If you're always hungry, I think you're going to extreme and you're body is starving versus the exercise you're doing.
Note: random thoughts. Feel free to give some feedback so I understand the situation a bit better.
Fyi. I'm not considered an expert on the topic. I read a lot + personal experience and experimenting. You're mileage may vary ;)
Yeah, you might gorge yourself on occasion and have one our two day surplus, but it’s not something that anyone would regularly do because it’s not only uncomfortable, but it also messes with your gut. So in function while you’re correct, it is possible theoretically to ingest the same calories in a tiny window of eating as somebody who eats throughout a whole day, your body can’t process food that quickly and will give you significant gastrointestinal distress
I think the OP has a pretty reasonable point, intermediate fasting, restricts calories to certain hours, calories restriction in general restricts calories to a quantity.
Probably worth exploring the citation to know how well this holds.
“Evidence shows that limiting the eating window to 6 to 10 hours within a 24-hour period naturally reduces energy intake by 200 to 500 kcal/d”.
I linked to full txt above if you want to dig
(There are zero studies that show that time restricted eating causes a greater weight loss effect compared to other eating plans when calorie deficit is equated between the groups)
Please people, do not simply think that intermittent fasting makes you lose weight. If you still have a propensity to eat junk food or just a lot of food even in fasting windows, you could still be gaining weight or staying at maintenance.
The nice thing about this is how it prevents snacking at night because you're in an "off" state that is binary. I cant trick myself into thinking a tiny bit will be OK, because any tiny bit wrecks the binary state of fasting.
There are a bunch of advantages for me. I have 3 kids and I always start my window after 10am. Without the restriction I'll end up finishing off their breakfasts and snacking when I'm making their school lunches. Or late at night it's easy to resist the temptation of hot milk and cookies as it's outside of the window.
By myself I'm actually a pretty disciplined eater, but with kids and a partner who is a chronic feeder I need the window as a barrier against lazy eating.
The interesting bit for me: "Participants in the TRE group were adherent with their eating window on a mean (SD) of 6.1 (0.8) days per week"
I like TRE, but I don't follow it religiously. Some day of the week I will drink a wine with my partner or drink a beer with my friends. The night I drink I also eat a breakfast the morning after. Nice to know that it works if sometimes you fail to follow.
I mean, eating well 85% of the time is better than not doing it at all and most folks will still run an overall calorie deficit. And for a lot of people, if they can make 75-85% of their food decently healthy, they'll be better off.
You can absolutely do low intensity workouts in a fasted state and I regularly do so after work. In fact it helps burning fat reserves. Just don't overdo it.
On weekends, when I do my longer and/or more intensive rides I make sure to fuel properly though. I simply ignore fasting on those proper cycling days.
Do the results apply to people who have no obesity and no T2D ?
Longer fasting periods, including 16/8 TRE and alternate-day fasting, have been shown to cause a disproportionate amount of lean body mass loss: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
>In this RCT, a prescription of TRE did not result in weight loss when compared with a control prescription of 3 meals per day. Time-restricted eating did not change any relevant metabolic markers. Finally, there was a decrease in ALM in the TRE group compared with CMT. Together, the results of this study (1) do not support the efficacy of TRE for weight loss, (2) highlight the importance of control interventions, and (3) offer caution about the potential effects of TRE on ALM. Future studies should be aimed at understanding the effects of early vs late TRE and protein intake or timing as a means to offset the loss in ALM.
ALM = Appendicular (i.e., limb) Lean Mass.
One of the authors of this study, Ethan Weiss, is a cardiologist and was a big proponent of TRE, but after the results of his own study came in showing drastic loss of LBM in TRE group (to the point that most of the weight lost was LBM) and no added benefit, he completely stopped doing TRE, stopped recommending it, and went to Twitter and the news media to publicize the harm, eg: https://www.insider.com/new-research-finds-intermittent-fast...
X isn't showing his Twitter thread, but there's a copy of it here: https://old.reddit.com/r/ScientificNutrition/comments/j1fav8...
>In the in-person cohort, the average weight loss in the TRE group was 1.70 kg. Of this, 1.10 kg (~ 65% wt lost) was lean mass; only 0.51 kg of weight lost was fat mass. Loss of lean mass during weight loss is normal but typically accounts for 20% to 30% of total weight loss
>So in summary: 1) no matter how you slice it, prescription of TRE is not a very effective weight loss strategy; 2) There was no advantage to TRE when compared to a proper control group; 3) What weight was lost looked to come more from muscle mass than fat mass