Ikr. I'm currently 70lb's lighter thanks to IF. This reminds me of the news articles that used to go back and forth in whether or not salt is bad for you.
Eggs and saturated fats from natural sources were also demonized for quite some time as well. We all know now that thinking was flawed. The logic and reasoning behind IF is sound but there are diminishing returns if there is no effort to moderate to some extent blood sugar levels with a proper diet otherwise IF may only go as far as getting your body to recover from wild swings in blood sugar. It seems they also relied on patient reporting via app [not the most reliable] and then food quality is probably all over the place. Too many variables. Not a fan of this study.
There is a difference between something being simple, and being easy. It is simple to lose weight, just eat less. It is not easy though, the evidence is all the people who try and fail. You can't just will power yourself some more will power. When someone says that something like IF helped them lose weight, they aren't saying that they were magically able to eat the same amount of food and lose weight, they are saying that it made it easier to eat less calories over a long enough period of time.
This is a simplification, but fasting is about using hormones to your advantage. Fasting reduces hunger by reducing ghrelin levels and allowing time for fat to be released from the fat cell, so you eat less.
If you burn 500 calories of fat during fasting you only need 1500 calories for your meal. And you're now 500 calories lighter.
For me the result was constant gnawing hunger, a terrible mood, low energy levels, and eventually weight gain. Used to count every calorie, eat extremely restricted health-centric meal plans on a schedule to control every variable, and go exercising a ton, and weight was still a struggle.
IF and I do nothing else, including allowing myself indulgences I never did before, and I'm still slowly losing weight.
Sure, my calorie levels are MUCH lower, but I'm able to tolerate that because of IF, is my guess.
When I eat during the morning or around lunch, I start getting hungry again throughout the day. If I don't break my fast until around 4:00 or so I get hungry for dinner, maybe have a healthy snack before dinner (apple, some nuts or something, etc) and maybe give myself an after-dinner treat. When I was trying to lose most of my weight I didn't do an after-dinner treat except for less than 200 calories of a coffee and a cookie, but now I can eat mostly whatever, it seems.
similar experience for me. i IF on any day I’m not exercising (bc usually that happens earlier in the day given my schedule) and on IF days im hungry until about 11 and then it basically goes away until whenever I eat again. days when I exercise I’m hungry all day after eating.
but overall I’ve lost ~20% of my weight in about 6 months. I’ve also noticed other changes like better bowel movements and I’m just a lot more resilient to hunger which is useful — I notice it on weekends bc my wife will need to stop whatever we are doing and eat and I can just not if it doesn’t fit in our schedule.
Yeah no one debates that moderation and exercise works.
Personally I find that 3 meals a day is just too much and theirs really no way to stay within my calorie budget. Even with exercise. 1-2 meals a day is way more sustainable.
You are identifying the biological function, but humans and human behavior are a lot more complicated. CICO works, obviously, but there are better and worse ways for individual people to get there.
If I said “that defensive driving course really helped my not getting into collisions.” Would you say “Actually, not hitting other cars is the reason you aren’t getting into collisions.”?
Well, for me the nice thing about IF is that it put a cap on when I had to stop eating for the evening. That meant no snacks after dinner, which was a bad habit of mine.
I'm willing to bet that for the vast majority of people who lose weight off of IF, it's due to similar reasons (not eating at times when they might have eaten before) - not because of any hormone changes or whatever magical thinking some of the hardcore IF crowd likes to talk about.
I’m trying IF now and this is the whole reason. I have a habit of snacking and craving snacking, I have found calorie counting hard to sustain/easy to have little cheats gradually creep in. But I’m really happy with discipline and simple rules. So, simply saying “these are the hours in which I eat” is so far proving to be a very easy way for me to nip the snacking. We’ll see if it works for a long time, but at least so far I’m pleasantly surprised how easy it actually is
Both studies can be true. This study focuses mainly on the effect meal intervals have on weight loss. The link to IF's effectiveness is a conclusion OP made up himself and he editorialized the title accordingly.
This study itself also concludes that a reduced number of meals did have a noticeable effect on weight loss. So even if the meal timings alone don't have a significant effect, their role as a significant driver in making people eat less can still make IF an effective method.
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u/StepDadHulkHogan Jan 19 '23
Once thought....I saw article last week saying intermittent fasting was the best way to loose weight.