about 9 months ago, i was curious about it and started at a 16:8 with my eating window between 11a and 7p. didn’t notice anything, but basically just didn’t do breakfast and never ate late. acid reflux stopped. about 6 months ago, i was watching some lecture from a cardiologist give a presentation on autophagy and metabolism and fasting as a healthcare maintenance strategy. it was biology heavy, but delivered in a fairly entertaining way. as a biology nerd who took some human nutrition, animal nutrition, and a whole lot of soil metabolic courses, it was right up my alley. metabolic pathways are complex and us multicellular warm bloods have a lot of adaptability to variable environments, compared to single cells who just sort of go dormant like a robot.
anyway, the lecture made me super curious about a 20:4 (eating window 11am - 3pm). i decided to try that for 1 day. i had this impression that fasting for 20 hours a day would make me all fucked up, cranky, jittery, or whatever. the big change really was confining myself to only tea and water outside of that window, which meant no more artificial sweeteners outside the window. so anyway, nothing weird happened. i was “bored” at dinner time, but decided to just focus on something else. since it went off so easily, i extended the plan to last 3 days. actually had improved energy after that.
i did a week, then 3 weeks. i couldn’t see any downsides. it also made me more conscious of my meal time to make sure to eat something balanced, not just some dumb crap to not be hungry. i decided that 2 days a week, i would optionally drop to the 16:8 schedule so i could be sociable at dinner time. i noticed that those extra meal days i was actually sluggish unless the second meal was super small and light. like a few vegetable dumplings or basically an appetizer. even during once a day regular meal, i could no longer pack it away. my capacity for big eating went way down, so i got full very easy and had that “sated” feel.
anyway, im roughly around 6-7 months on it. i have no scale and don’t weigh myself. all of my clothes are now kinda loose/big on me. i went in to the doc for my check-in. i’ve been on 3 different medications for blood pressure, one for cholesterol, and i take stuff with meals for controlling blood sugar / diabetes. that has been going on for literally several years, and generally my numbers have been OK but not great and my meds have only ever gone up. anyway, i dropped 15% of my body weight apparently in the last 6 months. and my lipid panels all came back optimal, my a1c came back as optimal/normal. my cholesterol is ideal. my BP is now too low like a little old lady, so we’re reducing my meds slowly and checking back in 3 months. i also feel like i have a ton of energy for shit and i am literally never hungry outside my window. i do get excited at meal time for the novely of eating and have found enjoyment in foods i used to not be excited by. like very spicy/acidic thai dishes that are like 80% vegetables by volume, pickled things. since i’m only eating once a day, i can be very intentional about it and i can spend a little extra dough on it if i want.
i gotta say it’s working out for me. there are absolutely people it probably won’t work for and some of those people think their situation is universal. they believe those of us having success with it are crazy nutjobs who don’t listen to our bodies, so they wipe their asses on our experiences. my primary care physician knows i am doing it and seems neutral about it in general, but very supportive of my results. wouldn’t it be crazy if the solution for many of those people succumbing to Metabolic Syndome X was to not force ourselves to metabolize something every 4 hours? like maybe we’re some subset of the population that are better adapted to eat less frequently and we shouldn’t let others bully us into conforming to their constant snacky snacky yum yum lifestyle because it’s literally killing us.
they believe those of us having success with it are crazy nutjobs who don’t listen to our bodies,
Some people don’t seem to understand that “listen to your body” means that everyone’s body is different and different things will work for different people.
I tried intermittent fasting for a couple of weeks when trying out different dieting methods, and I might’ve given up on it too soon. It sounds far easier to manage than calorie counting, which “worked” but was just exhausting to deal with every day.
Some people don’t seem to understand that “listen to your body” means that everyone’s body is different and different things will work for different people.
I think it’s straight up dangerous to listen to your body under our current material conditions. There are food engineers who are paid extreme amounts of money to hjack the processes filed under what you are listening to. Your entire hormonal feedback loop is subject to attack from a food environment that is mostly ersatz foods - amalgams of sugar, fat and salt which are chemically pre-digested. You consume them so quickly your body is trained from birth to always signal both hunger and appetite.
You gotta listen to your body holistically. Feeling like shit all the time is not normal. Having a bad sleep all the time is not normal either. Check your intake of stimulants and high processed foods. Depending on what you eat you’ll feel 5 times better after just a few days on whole or home-processed foods. That also falls under listening to your body, and it’s much more pressing in our de-regulated food capitalist dystopias.
what appeals to me is that it is very much a self-directed thing that one can adjust for their own goals and situation. lose weight/insulin sensitivity recovery/cholesterol control/general maintenance has been my main one and the lecture keyed me into what would be recommended, timing wise. if i ever hit some nebulous goal weight and everything on my tests looks perfect and maybe i’m even more active, i would probably try adjusting the time restriction again.
honestly, check out that lecture i linked. it’s long and he digresses a little here and there, but he is an amusing lecturer on what is typically a brutal topic. i still remember memorizing functional groups in biology and, as a systems guy, i was like FML.
anyway, he talks about how IF/time restricted feeding gives metabolic processes, especially those related to insulin regulation, a recovery period. and because there’s this pause of 16-20 hours, it gives the hormone receptors that have downregulated from the consistent influx / overabundance of insulin a chance to recover a more typical sensitivity. that means, when you do eat again, your pancreas doesn’t have to flood you with a high level of insulin to control blood sugar. there’s a lot of other stuff going on that insulin cascades into, but when he talks about how much energy it takes for the body to simply convert the food we intake into some energy for later, it was pretty eye instructive as to why we feel run down after eating. and if we are eating frequently, we are staying in that state. digesting food is very energy intensive. we are putting a bunch of foreign matter into us and forcing our body to, as quick as it can, make it safe, break it down physically, chemically, and microbially at various stages to strip it of usable materials to convert into short, medium, and long term energy storage as well as a whole suite of vital nutrients, and keep it moving along the way like a reverse assembly line taking apart a car and creating a pile of whatever it couldn’t figure out in time mixed with whatever could be toxic if it stuck around. while also filtering out out water for ourselves. think about how conditioned we are to intake caffeine with / shortly after meals to mentally overcome this massive energetic effort going on inside us.
for me, it’s been the most significant lifestyle change i’ve engaged with where i’m like, “shit this is easy. i could do this forever.” i can just eat my meal at a meal time i chose and be full, and then spend the rest of my waking time doing whatever i actually want to do, not worrying about what i’m going to figure out that’s healthy and reasonable and satisfying 5 hours from then. my biggest obstacle are family members who have no background whatsoever in biological sciences, are total snacky treat addicts, and have had to resort to major medical intervention (with frightening side effects) to basically not die from their lifestyles. i was the last one in my family to develop syndrome x symptoms, because i was always just more active, worked physical labor jobs for my 20s-30s and have generally been less snacky. but it caught up to me in my 40s. until i found this, i was basically slowly, steadily heading down the same road. and when i started it, they were all like “you’re going to die. that’s impossible. you have to eat 5 times a day to keep your metabolism up. join us in our constant snacking and treat chasing. you’re hurting your body.” now that i’m not dead and my doctor is like, “wow, whatever you’re doing is working” they aren’t sure what to do. they still try to sabotage me by pushing food and snacks at me (with “concern”) whenever they want to chase their own dopamine hit. “try this powder, try this supplement, try this diet meal plan subscription.” just all the same “common sense” pack of bs that have been pedaled for years to sell shit to unhappy people with all the diseases of modern civilization. the hilarious thing about IF that the lecturer addresses is he gets zero industry support for anything his foundation does, because he’s not selling anything. that lecture’s audience are other healthcare professionals because he wants to reduce the damage being done by pushing old narratives the science has grown beyond. and there is nothing to sell, so industry turns up its nose. he’s literally just telling people to consider eating less frequently, to try–with the knowledge of their physician re: medication and situation–fasting for a day, and there is no money to be made with that. there’s no specially formulated macronutrient kibble or water flavoring powder or magic cookbook or subscription meal plan or pharmaceutical to patent.
the really fascinating stuff though is when he gets into the timetable of what the body starts doing after insulin levels have dropped (2 hours, 5 hours 16 hours, 24 hours, 36 hours etc), what typically “off” genes start expressing to keep us rolling, alert, energetic, and mentally capable. the autophagy thing is legit crazy, how it was misunderstood for a long time until recently. he points out that any cellular action leaves behind some trash components over time, weird little proteins and fragments that are just sitting there in cells and as they build up, they mechanistically interfere with normal cellular processes. when autophagy is signaled, it starts a recycling process to cannibalize components from junked up/underperforming cells, which then signal they need to be reconstituted as soon as nutrition is available again. it was assumed this was only a starvation prevention mechanism, but it turns out this is a key recycling/regenerative process for preventing cells from becoming cancerous and has implications for neurodegeneration and immune disorders. and if you’re eating every 4-5 hours during waking periods, this process almost never activates. it legitimately only starts around 16 or so hours after food intake has ceased.
anyway, i’m “new” to it and had great results at 6 months in, so i’m obviously excited about it. because my family is unsupportive, i can’t really talk to them about it so i took this opportunity to gush. maybe if i have perfect blood work/BP, am physically active, and look 35 when i’m 50, they’ll respect my lifestyle choices but i doubt it. guess i’ll just have to do it for my own enrichment.
I think one of the things you’re striking on here is how IF can be really useful for people who eat excessive quantities and for people who engage in boredom-eating.
By fasting intermittently it sounds like you’ve changed your relationship to responding to hunger cues, to boredom, to the food you eat, and probably to how big a meal you need.
I think this is why IF is polarising - for some people, such as yourself, it’s the right kind of lifestyle intervention and just what they need. For others it doesn’t fit well at all. It’s a bit like when someone gets a dog or moves to New York and suddenly, 6 months later, they are so much healthier in an effortless sort of way that it seems amazing but it turns out that the change in their lifestyle was enough to tip the scales towards healthier behaviours. Sometimes people just need that external motivation to get out and walk every morning or to sprint to the train, to use the steps on the subway multiple times per day, and to carry their groceries home on foot every other day which is all they needed to achieve a healthier lifestyle.
metabolic pathways are complex
Lol, this is such a mood. As a person who took interest in psychopharmacology later in life, I really wish I paid attention in biology class in school.
about 9 months ago, i was curious about it and started at a 16:8 with my eating window between 11a and 7p. didn’t notice anything, but basically just didn’t do breakfast and never ate late. acid reflux stopped. about 6 months ago, i was watching some lecture from a cardiologist give a presentation on autophagy and metabolism and fasting as a healthcare maintenance strategy. it was biology heavy, but delivered in a fairly entertaining way. as a biology nerd who took some human nutrition, animal nutrition, and a whole lot of soil metabolic courses, it was right up my alley. metabolic pathways are complex and us multicellular warm bloods have a lot of adaptability to variable environments, compared to single cells who just sort of go dormant like a robot.
anyway, the lecture made me super curious about a 20:4 (eating window 11am - 3pm). i decided to try that for 1 day. i had this impression that fasting for 20 hours a day would make me all fucked up, cranky, jittery, or whatever. the big change really was confining myself to only tea and water outside of that window, which meant no more artificial sweeteners outside the window. so anyway, nothing weird happened. i was “bored” at dinner time, but decided to just focus on something else. since it went off so easily, i extended the plan to last 3 days. actually had improved energy after that.
i did a week, then 3 weeks. i couldn’t see any downsides. it also made me more conscious of my meal time to make sure to eat something balanced, not just some dumb crap to not be hungry. i decided that 2 days a week, i would optionally drop to the 16:8 schedule so i could be sociable at dinner time. i noticed that those extra meal days i was actually sluggish unless the second meal was super small and light. like a few vegetable dumplings or basically an appetizer. even during once a day regular meal, i could no longer pack it away. my capacity for big eating went way down, so i got full very easy and had that “sated” feel.
anyway, im roughly around 6-7 months on it. i have no scale and don’t weigh myself. all of my clothes are now kinda loose/big on me. i went in to the doc for my check-in. i’ve been on 3 different medications for blood pressure, one for cholesterol, and i take stuff with meals for controlling blood sugar / diabetes. that has been going on for literally several years, and generally my numbers have been OK but not great and my meds have only ever gone up. anyway, i dropped 15% of my body weight apparently in the last 6 months. and my lipid panels all came back optimal, my a1c came back as optimal/normal. my cholesterol is ideal. my BP is now too low like a little old lady, so we’re reducing my meds slowly and checking back in 3 months. i also feel like i have a ton of energy for shit and i am literally never hungry outside my window. i do get excited at meal time for the novely of eating and have found enjoyment in foods i used to not be excited by. like very spicy/acidic thai dishes that are like 80% vegetables by volume, pickled things. since i’m only eating once a day, i can be very intentional about it and i can spend a little extra dough on it if i want.
i gotta say it’s working out for me. there are absolutely people it probably won’t work for and some of those people think their situation is universal. they believe those of us having success with it are crazy nutjobs who don’t listen to our bodies, so they wipe their asses on our experiences. my primary care physician knows i am doing it and seems neutral about it in general, but very supportive of my results. wouldn’t it be crazy if the solution for many of those people succumbing to Metabolic Syndome X was to not force ourselves to metabolize something every 4 hours? like maybe we’re some subset of the population that are better adapted to eat less frequently and we shouldn’t let others bully us into conforming to their constant snacky snacky yum yum lifestyle because it’s literally killing us.
Some people don’t seem to understand that “listen to your body” means that everyone’s body is different and different things will work for different people.
I tried intermittent fasting for a couple of weeks when trying out different dieting methods, and I might’ve given up on it too soon. It sounds far easier to manage than calorie counting, which “worked” but was just exhausting to deal with every day.
I think it’s straight up dangerous to listen to your body under our current material conditions. There are food engineers who are paid extreme amounts of money to hjack the processes filed under what you are listening to. Your entire hormonal feedback loop is subject to attack from a food environment that is mostly ersatz foods - amalgams of sugar, fat and salt which are chemically pre-digested. You consume them so quickly your body is trained from birth to always signal both hunger and appetite.
You gotta listen to your body holistically. Feeling like shit all the time is not normal. Having a bad sleep all the time is not normal either. Check your intake of stimulants and high processed foods. Depending on what you eat you’ll feel 5 times better after just a few days on whole or home-processed foods. That also falls under listening to your body, and it’s much more pressing in our de-regulated food capitalist dystopias.
what appeals to me is that it is very much a self-directed thing that one can adjust for their own goals and situation. lose weight/insulin sensitivity recovery/cholesterol control/general maintenance has been my main one and the lecture keyed me into what would be recommended, timing wise. if i ever hit some nebulous goal weight and everything on my tests looks perfect and maybe i’m even more active, i would probably try adjusting the time restriction again.
honestly, check out that lecture i linked. it’s long and he digresses a little here and there, but he is an amusing lecturer on what is typically a brutal topic. i still remember memorizing functional groups in biology and, as a systems guy, i was like FML.
anyway, he talks about how IF/time restricted feeding gives metabolic processes, especially those related to insulin regulation, a recovery period. and because there’s this pause of 16-20 hours, it gives the hormone receptors that have downregulated from the consistent influx / overabundance of insulin a chance to recover a more typical sensitivity. that means, when you do eat again, your pancreas doesn’t have to flood you with a high level of insulin to control blood sugar. there’s a lot of other stuff going on that insulin cascades into, but when he talks about how much energy it takes for the body to simply convert the food we intake into some energy for later, it was pretty eye instructive as to why we feel run down after eating. and if we are eating frequently, we are staying in that state. digesting food is very energy intensive. we are putting a bunch of foreign matter into us and forcing our body to, as quick as it can, make it safe, break it down physically, chemically, and microbially at various stages to strip it of usable materials to convert into short, medium, and long term energy storage as well as a whole suite of vital nutrients, and keep it moving along the way like a reverse assembly line taking apart a car and creating a pile of whatever it couldn’t figure out in time mixed with whatever could be toxic if it stuck around. while also filtering out out water for ourselves. think about how conditioned we are to intake caffeine with / shortly after meals to mentally overcome this massive energetic effort going on inside us.
for me, it’s been the most significant lifestyle change i’ve engaged with where i’m like, “shit this is easy. i could do this forever.” i can just eat my meal at a meal time i chose and be full, and then spend the rest of my waking time doing whatever i actually want to do, not worrying about what i’m going to figure out that’s healthy and reasonable and satisfying 5 hours from then. my biggest obstacle are family members who have no background whatsoever in biological sciences, are total snacky treat addicts, and have had to resort to major medical intervention (with frightening side effects) to basically not die from their lifestyles. i was the last one in my family to develop syndrome x symptoms, because i was always just more active, worked physical labor jobs for my 20s-30s and have generally been less snacky. but it caught up to me in my 40s. until i found this, i was basically slowly, steadily heading down the same road. and when i started it, they were all like “you’re going to die. that’s impossible. you have to eat 5 times a day to keep your metabolism up. join us in our constant snacking and treat chasing. you’re hurting your body.” now that i’m not dead and my doctor is like, “wow, whatever you’re doing is working” they aren’t sure what to do. they still try to sabotage me by pushing food and snacks at me (with “concern”) whenever they want to chase their own dopamine hit. “try this powder, try this supplement, try this diet meal plan subscription.” just all the same “common sense” pack of bs that have been pedaled for years to sell shit to unhappy people with all the diseases of modern civilization. the hilarious thing about IF that the lecturer addresses is he gets zero industry support for anything his foundation does, because he’s not selling anything. that lecture’s audience are other healthcare professionals because he wants to reduce the damage being done by pushing old narratives the science has grown beyond. and there is nothing to sell, so industry turns up its nose. he’s literally just telling people to consider eating less frequently, to try–with the knowledge of their physician re: medication and situation–fasting for a day, and there is no money to be made with that. there’s no specially formulated macronutrient kibble or water flavoring powder or magic cookbook or subscription meal plan or pharmaceutical to patent.
the really fascinating stuff though is when he gets into the timetable of what the body starts doing after insulin levels have dropped (2 hours, 5 hours 16 hours, 24 hours, 36 hours etc), what typically “off” genes start expressing to keep us rolling, alert, energetic, and mentally capable. the autophagy thing is legit crazy, how it was misunderstood for a long time until recently. he points out that any cellular action leaves behind some trash components over time, weird little proteins and fragments that are just sitting there in cells and as they build up, they mechanistically interfere with normal cellular processes. when autophagy is signaled, it starts a recycling process to cannibalize components from junked up/underperforming cells, which then signal they need to be reconstituted as soon as nutrition is available again. it was assumed this was only a starvation prevention mechanism, but it turns out this is a key recycling/regenerative process for preventing cells from becoming cancerous and has implications for neurodegeneration and immune disorders. and if you’re eating every 4-5 hours during waking periods, this process almost never activates. it legitimately only starts around 16 or so hours after food intake has ceased.
anyway, i’m “new” to it and had great results at 6 months in, so i’m obviously excited about it. because my family is unsupportive, i can’t really talk to them about it so i took this opportunity to gush. maybe if i have perfect blood work/BP, am physically active, and look 35 when i’m 50, they’ll respect my lifestyle choices but i doubt it. guess i’ll just have to do it for my own enrichment.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I think one of the things you’re striking on here is how IF can be really useful for people who eat excessive quantities and for people who engage in boredom-eating.
By fasting intermittently it sounds like you’ve changed your relationship to responding to hunger cues, to boredom, to the food you eat, and probably to how big a meal you need.
I think this is why IF is polarising - for some people, such as yourself, it’s the right kind of lifestyle intervention and just what they need. For others it doesn’t fit well at all. It’s a bit like when someone gets a dog or moves to New York and suddenly, 6 months later, they are so much healthier in an effortless sort of way that it seems amazing but it turns out that the change in their lifestyle was enough to tip the scales towards healthier behaviours. Sometimes people just need that external motivation to get out and walk every morning or to sprint to the train, to use the steps on the subway multiple times per day, and to carry their groceries home on foot every other day which is all they needed to achieve a healthier lifestyle.
Lol, this is such a mood. As a person who took interest in psychopharmacology later in life, I really wish I paid attention in biology class in school.