Intermittent fasting, I don’t get it
Replies
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cheryldumais wrote: »thelandkraken wrote: »IF wouldn’t mean a skipped meal, though. If I understand right and it’s eating for an 8 hour window, that’s my normal meals anyway. Breakfast at 10 because I’m not hungry before that, lunch at 12, and dinner at 5.
I’m sorry if I’m being dense I just don’t get how it’s different from the norm, but I feel I must be missing something because of all the people who swear by the results of it.
Those who have never been snackers would not understand. When I am working on IF which I do from time to time when my weight is sneaking up a bit I find the first few days are torture because I have gotten used to snacking until I go to bed at night. IF effectively makes me stop eating and I get out of the habit of snacking so much. That's what it does for me. If snacking isn't an issue for you then IF probably won't be of much use to you. There are those who say it has health benefits but that has not been proven to date as far as I know.
@cheryldumais
I am curious about this. For most of my life I have heard people effectively losing weight or managing their weight better by eliminating snacks. This was well before the popularity of the internet or the attempt to formalize meal skipping into a plan.
My question is what is the difference between simply saying no more snacks and setting a window that makes snacking impossible? Both require you to be disciplined.
I am not trying to trip you up I am just curious as to how you see the difference. I am aware that that perception can make two very similar things seem more doable down one path and not the other.
Yeah, as someone said I think it has something to do with 7:00 being a very set time which I am not allowed to go over. Also for me I like to feel I can snack if I get hungry during the day but I know it has to be within a set time. It all boils down to each person's schedule and how to split the same number of calories. I view some foods as snack foods and some as meal foods. For example a piece of sugarless candy is not a meal food it is a snack food, lol. It would feel odd to me to have a piece of candy when I'm having a steak. But if I can have it anytime I will eat many pieces whereas if it has to fit in an eating window I might not have time or be hungry enough in my eating window to overdo it.
I don't know, you make a very valid point and I have toyed with the idea of quitting snacks altogether but the rebel in me is unwilling to be that rigid. This is my compromise and I'm still playing with it. Maintenance has become for me trial and error as I attempt to find a pattern that I can live with for life even after 2 years.
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Likely all of us spend about the same amount of time eating and not eating, it's just spread out differently.
@lemurcat2, hi, I'm not sure if you meant everybody spends the same amount of time eating, or that we spend the same amount of time eating as we do when we are not eating.
I think I might disagree with both though.
sorry.
Well in mycase I can say there have been times I spent a lot of time during the day eating, more than probably a lot of people. Part of it is because my teeth just aren't what they used to be, most of it is because I get into a habit of eating all the time in the difficult times of life.
On mfp I am beginning to hear that other people are also spending a lot of their day time in mindless eating too.
But if you meant that "all of us spend about the same amount of time eating" in general over a lifetime, I'm still not sure I could agree with that either.
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Likely all of us spend about the same amount of time eating and not eating, it's just spread out differently.
@lemurcat2, hi, I'm not sure if you meant everybody spends the same amount of time eating, or that we spend the same amount of time eating as we do when we are not eating.
I think I might disagree with both though. sorry.
Well in mycase I can say there have been times I spent a lot of time during the day eating, more than probably a lot of people. Part of it is because my teeth just aren't what they used to be, most of it is because I get into a habit of eating all the time in the difficult times of life.
On mfp I am beginning to hear that other people are also spending a lot of their day time in mindless eating too.
But if you meant that "all of us spend about the same amount of time eating" in general over a lifetime, I'm still not sure I could agree with that either.
I meant the physical time of eating, and not for all people, but for those of us here paying attention to our diets in some way.
Whether you eat your 1600 cal of food in 3 meals or 6 snacks or 1 giant meal, I doubt it makes much difference to the time spent actually eating. (I suppose someone who needs to eat many more cals than someone else may spend more time actually eating, and of course if eating is a chore it may physically take more time (although will the digestion?).
What WILL actually make a difference vs meal timing is food choice -- with that ultraprocessed vs. minimally or non processed study that was discussed a few months ago, some of us speculated that one reason for the difference was the ultraprocessed foods chosen were going to take much less time to eat (and food was freely available during the various meal windows in the study). But in that case taking a bit more time to eat is a good thing, not bad.
Anyway, what I was responding to was the idea that it's important to give your body a break from digestion (or, sometimes, from insulin). But if you have smaller meals, the extent of the insulin increase and time it lasts, and the time of overall digestion will be less than for a larger meal or one gigantic meal. I'd say that your body isn't going to be spending an appreciably larger amount of time digesting if you have several mini meals rather than one giant one, and it's not going to be spending less time digesting if you eat, say, 4 meals in a window vs. 2 or 3 that wouldn't fit in an IF window since they are more spread out. So the "not eating all the time" or "taking a break from digestion" things seem beside the point to me, even if there were some need to rest from digesting (which there might be, we certainly need things like sleep, although other functions like breathing, heart beating, the rest of your organ activity, certain kinds of brain activity, etc., go on all the time).
However, I will concede that I overgeneralized, but I hope this makes my point clearer.1 -
I always found this to be an interesting study:
Highlights
The daily eating pattern in healthy adults is highly variable from day to day
•
More than half of the adults eat for 15 hr or longer every day
•
Sleep duration parallels the fasting duration
•
Reducing the daily eating duration can contribute to weight loss
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)00462-38 -
pierinifitness wrote: »I always found this to be an interesting study:
Highlights
The daily eating pattern in healthy adults is highly variable from day to day
•
More than half of the adults eat for 15 hr or longer every day
•
Sleep duration parallels the fasting duration
•
Reducing the daily eating duration can contribute to weight loss
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)00462-3
Again - when you say that more than half of adults eat for 15 hours or longer per day - you aren’t talking about active eating: hand to mouth for 15 straight hours. You are talking about people eating on average during a period of 15 hours per day? Whether it be 6 am to 9 pm or 8 am to 11 pm that they might eat their total day’s intake during that time period. And that might be three traditional meals or more or less small meals. Right?
Sleep duration parallels fasting duration. Again, any surprise here? Isn’t most peoples “fast period” due to time spent sleeping? I don’t have a set schedule for “feeding” or whatever you want to call it but sure if I’m sleeping longer my “fasting period” is longer. I really feel like some IF advocates are missing the most basic piece of information, before any of this became trendy or a WOE - when you are a child you learn about Breakfast, which is the first meal of the day and when you BREAK the FAST which just means you’re not sleeping anymore so you eat something. Doesn’t matter if that’s first thing or later in the day.
Reducing daily eating duration only contributes to weight loss if a person eats less calories in the shorter time period than if they did during an unrestricted window.10 -
WinoGelato wrote: »Again - when you say that more than half of adults eat for 15 hours or longer per day - you aren’t talking about active eating: hand to mouth for 15 straight hours. You are talking about people eating on average during a period of 15 hours per day? Whether it be 6 am to 9 pm or 8 am to 11 pm that they might eat their total day’s intake during that time period. And that might be three traditional meals or more or less small meals. Right?
Yep. It's absurd to suggest people are gobbling up food for 15 hours straight, especially people who have found a way to control their eating (those of us in this discussion).
As I said above, I think my sister often grazes (again, she's never been overweight, she eats a generally nutritious diet). When she grazes, she eats a lot of little snacks. If she eats at my place or with her SO, then she will eat dinner (and maybe a little snack later), otherwise she might just snack (but not low nutrition stuff) instead of dinner. She still spends a lot more of her day NOT eating than eating. Her little snack-like meals take less time than an actual meal normally would.
I'd hate so much eating like that, but she likes it.
I often do my meals over the course of 15 hours, since if I run in the morning I want breakfast (if I don't, I usually don't care about breakfast). Because I like to eat meals at home when possible, if I have breakfast and both meals at home, that means 6:30 to 9:30 or even 10 sometimes -- so 15 hours. Am I actually eating for all of those hours? Of course not. I don't eat for about 5 hours between breakfast and lunch, and don't eat for maybe 9 hours between lunch and dinner. So would IF (eating as much as I want within 8 hours) make me eat for a smaller portion of time or automatically reduce how much I eat? Seems unlikely.
In fact, I do IF at least a few days a week normally (although I don't call it that, I call it not having breakfast and eating dinner earlier than usual) because it works for my schedule, and on those days I eat bigger meals and may even eat MORE cals than usual (I tend to do it when I plan to have a restaurant dinner or when we have work lunch).
If I did unrestricted eating for 8 hours a day I could easily eat MORE often than I now do (2 meals and snacks in-between), so I really doubt it would reduce my cals.
Does it work for some people? Absolutely. Is it the best for all or the only alternative to this strawman that everyone else is doing nothing but shoving food in their mouths all day? Of course not.2 -
@WinoGelato, I didn’t “say” anything and should have put what I posted in quotation marks to make it clear. My apologies.3
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pierinifitness wrote: »I always found this to be an interesting study:
Highlights
The daily eating pattern in healthy adults is highly variable from day to day
•
More than half of the adults eat for 15 hr or longer every day
•
Sleep duration parallels the fasting duration
•
Reducing the daily eating duration can contribute to weight loss
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)00462-3
I tried to read the study but got no page found.0 -
For some reason after posting the link it doesn't work - here's where the study was mentioned in a Huffington Post article, a place I generally don't frequent:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/you-say-you-eat-three-meals-a-day-this-app-proves-you-wrong_n_5602f3f3e4b00310edf9ba42?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAETO4sG5rokHmlyUQG7-B6Z1Yhvs1Be3zpulPwTqDxDRHV-GDZnXrKGpeZh4yY9q1r4icSAaJ1cBSUOvP0AmO1iwPoP18YBg1wcY2ebxJC1LOETC7zE8gmaPaf1DlHZX7isnjpPFdlLOom90fnAaXVAThrLJK5tJHmboIPKKT_xa0 -
Nope but that's okay. I probably need to stop my reading this morning and get moving.0
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I think what's happening is that (some?) browsers think the original link ends at the right parenthesis. Copy and paste the full link into your browser instead: That should work.1
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pierinifitness wrote: »I always found this to be an interesting study:
Highlights
The daily eating pattern in healthy adults is highly variable from day to day
•
More than half of the adults eat for 15 hr or longer every day
•
Sleep duration parallels the fasting duration
•
Reducing the daily eating duration can contribute to weight loss
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)00462-3
I tried to read the study but got no page found.
The link is broken. Copy and paste the full text into your browser.
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)00462-3
edit: Even after copying it straight from the address bar it pastes here broken...0 -
Okay...I had a chance to read it.
Unfortunately I think that it describes my eating habits at one time. As soon as I would eat the first "meal" in the morning I had a tendency to then eat all day long. If I tried to abstain I then had food on my brain continually. I have found that my way of eating now (won't mention what that way of eating is) has almost eliminated that. Actually if I am not careful I will end the day with not enough calories.
I have been surprised that this WOE for me actually seems to be working for me. I have never been much on following some set of rules. I suppose that when you get desperate and nothing else has worked long term then "following the rules" doesn't seem to be so bad.
Disclaimer: In no way am I saying this will work for anyone else nor do I encourage anyone to try it. Do your research on whatever method that you think might work for you. Build a plan around it and give your chosen method a try.
Just to add...no WOE will produce miracles. Any WOE will only work if you put out the effort to make it work. I did a lot of research, planning and changing my life in order make my plan work.2 -
Nope but that's okay. I probably need to stop my reading this morning and get moving.
It basically just says that of a group who participated in a project (who may or may not be reflective of the pop as a whole), most of them ate more often than they had assumed, and typically continued snacking (off and on -- the idea that people are eating continuously for 15 hours and doing nothing else is of course silly) until bed.
These are people not logging cals or controlling cals in other ways.
For these people, it was found that intentionally limiting the times in which they ate tended to reduce calories.
That makes total sense and is intuitive to me. What is a silly extrapolation from that is that for EVERYONE, including for those already controlling cals in other ways, it is somehow beneficial to eat within a window.
Way back when I decided to lose weight, I looked at my own eating habits, and although I thought I didn't eat that much, I realized I was eating more than I thought for a few reasons, one of which WAS excess snacking. A little of this was at night, most of it was actually within a typical eating window. So -- and this was well before IF was a thing, thank goodness! -- I compared that with times in my life when I had been effortless of normal weight. At those times, I realized I was naturally somewhat more active during the day, so I made sure to increase daily activity. I also realized that at those times I'd eaten 3 meals a day and not between meals (and most of my meals were homecooked or dorm-type meals). Therefore, it made sense to me that what would work FOR ME was going back to that pattern, and I did. I didn't log at that time (this was in my early 30s), and I effortlessly lost weight (and also started exercising more).
For various life reasons (including some issues with anxiety and depression and stress eating as a bad coping mechanism, and just not caring), I did regain the weight after keeping it off for years (I regained somewhat rapidly). When I was ready to lose again, in 2014, I did what I had done before, but logged at MFP this time. It worked again.
I was limiting the amounts I ate (or was tempted to eat) by limiting when I ate, but not in an IF way, and I still suspect it worked every bit as well as doing a window would have, without needlessly interfering with my natural schedule.
Therefore, while I think IF works great for some and can be a helpful tool, it's simply not the case that absent IF everyone will be an uncontrolled eater. Many people have different ways to control their calories without having to think about it a lot. (Logging is even one of them, since it forces mindfulness, as well as just tracking cals.)2 -
I think more than anything the study proves that once a person becomes more aware of their eating they will have a better chance of making more mindful decisions.9
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pierinifitness wrote: »I always found this to be an interesting study:
Highlights
The daily eating pattern in healthy adults is highly variable from day to day
•
More than half of the adults eat for 15 hr or longer every day
•
Sleep duration parallels the fasting duration
•
Reducing the daily eating duration can contribute to weight loss
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)00462-3
I tried to read the study but got no page found.
The link is broken. Copy and paste the full text into your browser.
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)00462-3
edit: Even after copying it straight from the address bar it pastes here broken...
When I post links with dashes and parentheses I usually use the "url" tags around the link text and that fixes it.
Like this:
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)00462-31 -
amusedmonkey wrote: »pierinifitness wrote: »I always found this to be an interesting study:
Highlights
The daily eating pattern in healthy adults is highly variable from day to day
•
More than half of the adults eat for 15 hr or longer every day
•
Sleep duration parallels the fasting duration
•
Reducing the daily eating duration can contribute to weight loss
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)00462-3
I tried to read the study but got no page found.
The link is broken. Copy and paste the full text into your browser.
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)00462-3
edit: Even after copying it straight from the address bar it pastes here broken...
When I post links with dashes and parentheses I usually use the "url" tags around the link text and that fixes it.
Like this:
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)00462-3
Ah good to know, thank you @amusedmonkey0 -
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I agree, but then again I’m a moderator. One thing I’ve learned through a few years on these boards is that some people genuinely prefer not to have to think about if they can fit something in, if they will be able to stop at one serving, etc. I think for people who prefer structure and not having to put too much thought into something, IF, or any other plan that makes significant changes in calorie intake without someone feeling like they have to count or meticulously log, can be beneficial.
Not that you’re saying otherwise I’m just agreeing and expanding on why I think some people prefer this way and feel it is superior because for them it feels like less work. It wouldn’t be beneficial for me as I’ve never been a snacker and really enjoy the flexibility of a mindful moderation approach.3
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