Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

jacques_chester

Intermittent fasting works for me: http://chester.id.au/2012/04/17/my-diet/

I love food. I love everything about it. I love the smell of it, the sight of it, the way steam rises of freshly cooked food. I love mixing it up. I love the act of chewing, the taste, the way it feels in my mouth. The act of swallowing is great and the sensation of fullness is sensational.

So it should come as no surprise that for me, at least, weight control through portion control has been an absolute failure.

What has worked for me is skipping meals altogether. If I don't start eating at a given meal time I don't have to stop.

These days I skip breakfast, have a simple meal-replacement of my own recipe at lunch, train in the afternoon and eat whatever I feel like at dinner. So far I am 24kg (~53lb) down from my peak weight and the trendline is still pointing down.

(I wrote about that, too: http://chester.id.au/2012/05/26/fat-and-simple/ -- it caused one hell of a ruckus)

But do you know why? It isn't the schedule that really matters. It's that I imposed a caloric deficit in a way that I personally am I able to sustain. For others it might be low-carb or eating every 4 hours or being a vegetarian. Whatever. At the end of the forcing function of weight control is how much you ate.

Once I reach a weight I'm happy with I'll probably just eat an ordinary lunch more often.

>But do you know why? It isn't the schedule that really matters.

You haven't shown that. Where's the randomized experiment where one group is assigned to eat 3000 cal/day evenly distributed, and the other group is assigned 6000 cal during an 8 hour window, every other day, and then the same thing but now 1800 cal per day, or 3600 every other day?

I don't fully understand this compulsion to explain anything successful in the weight-loss field, ultimatlely, in terms of calorie restriction.

> I don't fully understand this compulsion to explain anything successful in the weight-loss field, ultimatlely, in terms of calorie restriction.

Because any other hypothesis has to explain why it violates the conservation of energy and matter. (Also: such studies are harder than they look to arrange. Completely controlling someone's caloric intake and output is difficult to achieve).

What tends to happen in discussions such as these is that they devolve into a shouting match about the boundaries of causality. In a basic physical sense, caloric balance is the only thing that matters. It is the causal element. Cut calories enough, you will lose weight. Raise them enough, you will gain. The relationship won't be linear, immediate, proportional or unary. But it will be causal.

But that's oversimplifying! comes the cry. And it is. The internal mechanisms of the body mediate and modulate weight control in interesting ways. The ever-plunging $:calorie ratio has its input. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

Proponents of IF talk about various interesting biological pathways that turn on and off, hormone levels that change and so on. But the direct cause of weight loss in IF is that you simply do not eat as much. You can't, you've removed entire culturally-important, structured opportunities to eat. Gone, just like that.

The relationship won't be linear, immediate, proportional or unary. But it will be causal.

So... you agree with the comment you're replying to, then?

No one disputes that a body cannot burn more energy than it has taken in. However, other factors can swamp a "mere" 25% percent reduction in caloric intake. IF has been the most effective weight loss strategy for me, but it doesn't work forever unless you keep reducing the amount you're eating. Eating only every other day worked great for two months or so, but eventually the loss tapered off (this was 2010), and something else must be done. The body doesn't need nearly as much energy as we typically give it, apparently, and varying the amount discarded can affect weight gain or loss greatly.

One thing you probably overlooked: fat cells add to BMR.

While I didn't overlook it entirely, it's true that it is quite difficult to know how to account for it without , since resting metabolism varies widely ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate#Causes_of_... suggests more than 25% variation after accounting for a number of potential factors). My own anecdotes suggest that once the (my) body adapts to higher caloric intake, it discards much more of it than when times are leaner.

25% is for extreme outliers.

http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peop...

BMR varies mostly on body size. Taller, heavier people have a higher BMR because there's more of them to keep alive.

> > I don't fully understand this compulsion to explain anything successful in the weight-loss field, ultimatlely, in terms of calorie restriction.

> Because any other hypothesis has to explain why it violates the conservation of energy and matter.

Umm, no. None of the weight loss diets violate the conservation of energy and matter. (The "I lived on just water for 10 years" diets do.)

Feces contains calories. Therefore conservation of energy isn't the only limiting factor - conversion and usage matter too.

There's no "conservation" argument that says that conversion effectiveness is a constant. Heck, there's no argument that says that calories/pound is a constant.

> But the direct cause of weight loss in IF is that you simply do not eat as much.

Nope. You lose weight when your body "releases" more mass than you're taking in.

> Because any other hypothesis has to explain why it violates the conservation of energy and matter.

This comment is so infuriating. I may not be a genius, but I did manage to eek out a degree in physics. I think I, and anyone here on HN should be given the benefit of the doubt that they can figurer out if energy conservation is being violated.

Simply from a principle of assuming that the person suggesting the hypothesis is not an _idiot_, you could infer that any of these alternative hypotheses do _not _ violate energy conservation.

I have found myself arguing with people who took the view that the conservation of energy and matter does not apply to sufficiently complex biological systems.

I am quite serious.

> Cut calories enough, you will lose weight. Raise them enough, you will gain.

That's true in the useless tautological sense.

I've read a case study a few years ago about someone who has to eat something like 10,000 calories a day, because after some serious illness, their body only takes in 20% or so.

Paper is also carbohydrates - albeit not ones that our gut can process. Any statement about "caloric intake" is so hard to measure to make statements about "caloric balance" vague. They are useful as a "small signal"[1] approximation around common steady states (which are often 1000-3000/kcal a day, although that's not a good characterization).

However, when you go away to this state, this approximation breaks down and stops working. A model that would have predictive power in the "large signal" setting would have to take your entire biomass (10 times as many bacterial cells, although only 10% of body weight; 30% or so of solid excretions; facilitators of many processes), and nonlinear effects of insulin, ketosis, and others.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-signal_model

Not exactly what you're asking for but there's a bunch of nice summaries with links to studies here: http://www.leangains.com/2011/06/is-late-night-eating-better...

It's not the study you describe, but there's already a lot of research to support the thesis that eating fewer calories (and fewer calories alone) than your body burns leads to weight loss and better health: http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/22/low-calorie-diet-lifestyle-...

Same here. I tried low-carb for a while and while it was effective for weight loss, I found it very difficult to stick to. I know for a fact, though, that my body responds poorly to too many carbohydrates, so regulating sugars is important if I want to lose any weight (and probably also to stop myself from winding up diabetic).

I switched to intermittent fasting and I am losing weight and have more energy while having no problems at all sticking to the routine.

I skip breakfast, have a low-carb/high protein snack around 2pm and a normal dinner sometime between 6-8pm. So it ends up being about a 16-18hr fast. On Friday and Saturday, I'll relax the rules and have a larger lunch or maybe a midnight snack, since I tend to stay up later those nights.

That "Fat and Simple" is a fantastic writeup of the Hacker's Diet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com