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Please help with this argument- Intermittent fasting related
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Nowhere did I say evolution has an aim, goal, or plan of attack. That I say it obeys a solution space is a mathematical thing, not an implication that evolution is trying to solve things in the sense a human does. It isn't calling it an intention any more than saying an apple moves with a straight path to the ground or water looks for the lowest local level.lynn_glenmont wrote: »magnusthenerd wrote: »lynn_glenmont wrote: »magnusthenerd wrote: »lynn_glenmont wrote: »snickerscharlie wrote: »My takeaway from IF is it gives you're body a break from all the food you consume. Since your body isn't burning hot all the time, that provides anti-aging benefits
Your body (and more specifically, your digestive tract) doesn't need a break. That would be like saying your heart and lungs need a break, too.
In addition, calories equal, I'm not sure why it would take less total time to digest the same cals (and even the same foods) if they were consumed in one huge meal vs. 3 smaller ones.
It seems like you'd get meal + shorter digestion time + meal + shorter digestion time + meal + shorter digestion time vs. huge meal + long digestion time -- no reason the times wouldn't equal each other.
Also, if you want to reduce digestion time, you can eat faster digested foods (like quick carbs) and avoid slower foods that take more work to digest (protein and fiber), but of course no one would recommend that (absent a health issue).
Indeed, one reason I personally could not regularly do OMAD (not saying it's not a great choice for others) is because I would not be able to eat enough protein and fiber and vegetables on a regular basis (based on what I consider desirable, at least) in one meal. My own appetite/digestive system would likely rebel.
Especially since even in people who make no attempt to do IF, they are not eating 24 hrs a day. Most folks probably "fast" for at least 8 hours, and I believe I've read it typically takes more than 24 hrs for a meal to pass all the way through your stomach and both intestines.
Considering that most (if not all?) of our organs and body systems are running 24/7 keeping us alive on auto-pilot, it seems illogical to me that just one system - the digestive system - needs occasional or regular breaks for us to reach optimum health. What would be the evolutionary advantage to that?
To add to the bolded, when I hear these claims, I always wonder at what point is the "break" no longer a benefit and then become a detriment? Obviously, the body needs calories both for energy, and to continue to perform vital functions, so if we did need such a break, then when does the body decide it needs food again? I also question why humans feel hunger if our body actually got such remarkable benefits from fasting.
Wellll . . . I don't IF, wouldn't (uncongenial to my preferences), and think it's waaay over-hyped for the level of sound evidence. So don't get me wrong, here.
But, to the bolded, as far as I understand it, natural selection is unlikely to optimize. It's all about satisficing, i.e., adequate results, or rather odds-shifting in the direction of marginally better results.
Humans (and other animals) have many behaviors that are sub-optimal, and, as their context changes, even harmful (all other things equal, that context change will create pressure for different natural selection outcomes).
For most of our history, there was food shortage, so hunger is a useful motivator, lest we simply conserve energy and starve where we sit/sleep. There are reasons to believe that our impulses are poorly shaped for lucky regions'/people's now over-ample food supply, and reduced need for physical activity: Perhaps it would be useful if we had more of an "anti-hunger" that made us feel icky if over maintenance calories.
I think your overall point is right, just that that last bit expects more of natural selection than it's likely to deliver. :flowerforyou:
I agree with most of this, but I think the passage I bolded is a bit off. Natural selection can only choose among the genetic variations it's offered. If it happens that all the genetic variations available are within a narrow range, then you get a shift in the odds toward marginally better results. If there are more dramatic differences among the genetic variations available, then you can get more dramatic results (assuming that one or more of the variations have a survival advantage).
Interestingly, there are certain optimizations natural selection will never achieve because the solution space is unreachable without first having a worse solution. Like if you had a hill and valley lay out with high points representing better, evolution will never walk down a valley to go up a hill inside it, even if that hill might be the highest point around.
I've had the misfortune of discussing (arguing) with advocates of Intelligent Design, and I've often told them that I would instantly accept Intelligent Design if they could show me just one case of such a trait that meets that pattern - getting worse at first to get better in the long run.
Again, this seems to assume that evolution must proceed incrementally (which, oddly given your overall position, seems more aligned with the idea that evolution proceeds according to design than not). If we agree that mutations are random and aren't headed anywhere by design, there is no need for them to take a series of genetic changes down the hill and up the other side. It's possible (maybe less likely, but still possible) for dramatic mutations to occur that would allow the organism to leap across the valley without walking down the hill and up the other side.
When speaking of it in forms of algorithms, there are cases where, no, there could not be such a leap because an evolutionary algorithm will have a limit on how far a mutation can cross a solution space.
In nature rather than in math, there could be the possibility of say, several hundred mutations happening at once in an organism to reach one particular state, but the probability tends to be such that even if a million size population was born every second for the length of time the universe has existed, it still would be unlikely.
Yes, evolution is incremental. It isn't a designer, it is a tinkerer - it cobbles together what already works. Design would be the type of thing that can produce what isn't incremental.
How I'm reading your take on evolution sounds more like the hopeful monsters of saltation, not the kind of evolution of the Modern Synthesis that's descended from Darwinism.
I guess without practical examples there's no way of knowing whether we're thinking of valleys and hills on the same magnitude. The discussion started on the issue of whether there could possibly be benefits from fasting given that there have not developed genetically preferred fasting behaviors, and my objection was that such an argument actually pictures evolution as pursuing some goal. We seem to have strayed far from that issue.
ETA: and again, this seems self-contradictory. You say evolution isn't a designer (which I agree with) and then you imbue it with an aim, a goal, a plan of attack to solve problems, which has you, I suspect, unintentionally in agreement with advocates of intelligent design theory:It isn't a designer, it is a tinkerer - it cobbles together what already works.
Evolution doesn't care what already works, because it doesn't care about anything. It doesn't think. It doesn't have intention. It doesn't tinker. It doesn't really do anything. It's just an unavoidable consequence of genetic inheritance, random mutations, and the fact that sometimes a mutation is more beneficial for survival of the genes.
Nothing in calling it a tinkerer as an analogy means I'm imbibing it with intentionality. We use analogous language all the time. If you want to get into it philosophically, one could argue evolution isn't even a thing, it has no ontology, but rather is a theory, and theories are don't do anything or actually exist unless you're a scientific realist. When I call it a tinkerer, the point is that evolution never removes working mechanisms to wholesale replace them. It must always operate in a locally optimizing pattern.
A concrete example would be the classic giraffe laryngeal nerve. The giraffe has a meters long nerve from the heart, up the neck, and back to heart, instead of taking a local loop around. It would be safer and use less energy to have a shorter nerve path, but the evolutionary history is of a nerve that was fine in fish that don't have necks. As land vertebrates grew necks, the nerve growing longer was possible, but just growing a whole new nerve path is too great a change. Growing a longer nerve is the kind of thing a tinkerer can do, while a designer could start over on the layout and put a different nerve path in if designing giraffes for the first time.
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i guess its safe to say that there is still more research that needs to be done.
But in the end, whatever works for you is good.2 -
I think one problem that comes up in these discussions is people don't understand the difference in literature between calorie restriction and calorie deficit.
Almost every researcher acknowledges calorie deficits are how weight is lost.
Calorie restriction in research refers instead to the actual conscious effort to constraint / reduce calories. So when researchers publish that people lost without calorie restriction, they don't mean the people did so without a calorie deficit.7 -
The "magic" of IF for me has always been the ability to restrict calories (eat less) without feeling like I am restricting calories...2
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magnusthenerd wrote: »
Which IMO is crazy to say it that way...2 -
magnusthenerd wrote: »
Which IMO is crazy to say it that way...
There's plenty of verbiage in literature that in hindsight seems bad, but once it is picked up, the important thing is consistent meaning in a phrase.2 -
magnusthenerd wrote: »
Which IMO is crazy to say it that way...
I think the verbiage used for BMI is worse.
People argue endlessly that because their body fat is low, they're not overweight even when they meet the BMI category for it. Well... no. Medically, I'm overweight when I'm 5'8" and 166, even though I'm also 10.1% body fat at that weight. Overweight is only diagnosed by BMI being in the range.
What people want is to say they aren't over-fat at when they're lean, muscled, but in the overweight category. Or they mean to say many of the health predictions of BMI probably don't apply to them.0 -
magnusthenerd wrote: »magnusthenerd wrote: »
Which IMO is crazy to say it that way...
I think the verbiage used for BMI is worse.
People argue endlessly that because their body fat is low, they're not overweight even when they meet the BMI category for it. Well... no. Medically, I'm overweight when I'm 5'8" and 166, even though I'm also 10.1% body fat at that weight. Overweight is only diagnosed by BMI being in the range.
What people want is to say they aren't over-fat at when they're lean, muscled, but in the overweight category. Or they mean to say many of the health predictions of BMI probably don't apply to them.
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I couldn’t agree more0
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the click-bait on the main page this morning got me, and I read the article titled "what is the best intermittent fasting window to lose belly fat?"
ugh. You'd think I'd know better by now. It starts off repeating much of the claims for intermittent fasting thats been dealt with here already, using a study on 19 people as a vague backup for their claims. After highlighting all the benefits these 19 people had when practicing intermittent fasting during the study, at the very end, there was this phrase" Although participants were not asked to change their diets, they consumed 9% fewer calories." So in other words, they lost weight because they were consuming less calories than before.....
It's not until you get to the very bottom, after reading all these wonderful things about intermittent fasting, where you see this line: What does all of this mean if you’re trying to shed pounds? Whitney Linsenmeyer, PhD, RD, an assistant professor of nutrition at St. Louis University and spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, advocates an old-fashioned approach.
“It’s not sexy, but balancing energy intake with physical activity is the only lasting solution,” she says."
I'm not knocking intermittent fasting; I've tried it myself a couple of times, trying to find a tool to help me stay within deficit. And I'm not going to deny that there has been some studies with interesting results, but none of those results are hard-proof, and as the article even admitted, while some studies show signs of potential, they are no where near proof of anything and more long term studies are definitely needed. However, how many people will take the time to read to the bottom of the article and really grasp that?8 -
bmeadows380 wrote: »the click-bait on the main page this morning got me, and I read the article titled "what is the best intermittent fasting window to lose belly fat?"
ugh. You'd think I'd know better by now. It starts off repeating much of the claims for intermittent fasting thats been dealt with here already, using a study on 19 people as a vague backup for their claims. After highlighting all the benefits these 19 people had when practicing intermittent fasting during the study, at the very end, there was this phrase" Although participants were not asked to change their diets, they consumed 9% fewer calories." So in other words, they lost weight because they were consuming less calories than before.....
It's not until you get to the very bottom, after reading all these wonderful things about intermittent fasting, where you see this line: What does all of this mean if you’re trying to shed pounds? Whitney Linsenmeyer, PhD, RD, an assistant professor of nutrition at St. Louis University and spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, advocates an old-fashioned approach.
“It’s not sexy, but balancing energy intake with physical activity is the only lasting solution,” she says."
I'm not knocking intermittent fasting; I've tried it myself a couple of times, trying to find a tool to help me stay within deficit. And I'm not going to deny that there has been some studies with interesting results, but none of those results are hard-proof, and as the article even admitted, while some studies show signs of potential, they are no where near proof of anything and more long term studies are definitely needed. However, how many people will take the time to read to the bottom of the article and really grasp that?
My guess? One out of a thousand, if that. And the rest will be here on the forums, spouting the magic that is IF.
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kshama2001 wrote: »raven56706 wrote: »
Completely agree, but I do IF because it's easier for me to stay in a calorie deficit. No lies, that's it for me. There are no amazing side effects or it doesn't cure anything.2 -
CarleyMarie83 wrote: »kshama2001 wrote: »raven56706 wrote: »
Completely agree, but I do IF because it's easier for me to stay in a calorie deficit. No lies, that's it for me. There are no amazing side effects or it doesn't cure anything.
I've done all kinds of crap over the years and had my best success following Weight Watchers when it was probably at it's best in the mid-2000s, which of course, is just having a calorie deficit. And I started doing C25K because I wanted to earn more food points, so I bribed myself into doing some great cardio. I lost 50 pounds in three months and kept it off for 3 years.
The reason I blew back up a couple of years later was due to meds (amitriptyline) for years long headaches (THAT was really fun btw, haha.) Anyway, i gained back the 50 pounds and added another 30 to the gut because I basically had the munchies 24/7. Come to find out my headaches were due to a herniated disc and some other crap in my neck, so those meds did nothing but pudge me up. I had a cervical fusion in 2012, started keto once I was feeling better, and began doing hardcore elliptical work every day at lunch (adding strength training to the mix) and lost all the weight I gained and was in the best shape of my adult life. Keto just made it easier for me to keep a calorie deficit because I would eat my nice protein and fat laden breakfast and not eat again until 5 or 6pm. But to me, it just wasn't sustainable because believe it or not you CAN get sick of eating bacon, eggs, and cheesr every day of your lifr. It got me over the hump, but then portion control was easier to me since I was now in a better mindset.
Then a few years later, more neck issues popped up and a multitude of back issues joined the party so I quit exercising and ate through my feelings again.
I was back up over 60 pounds and decided to give IF a shot a few weeks ago, because nI couldn't keep going on that way. So far, I've been able to lose 10 of those pounds again and I've forced myself to walk 30 minutes a day. It's a fraction of what I used to be able to do, but it's better to do anything you can. And I have to say, doing an 16/8 IF cycle has been a lot easier than I thought. I'm slightly cheating, since I put heavy cream in my coffee (2 TB for a 30 oz Yeti serving) but hey, baby steps, haha. IF and trying to cook thr majority of what I eat, really has helped me get back to a reasonable deficit since I'm being more mindful of my eating habits. I'm hoping getting this weight back off will help reverse some of the back pain that's gotten progressively worse.
Whether there's some physiological stuff happening that makes IF better or not remains to be seen with more research. But at least for me, it seems to be a reasonable way to keep my caloric intake lower. And by making a commitment to myself to stick to the plan, it stops me from that nightime snacking I was doing when I WASN'T EVEN HUNGRY! Haha. I would eat just because I was just feeling bad.
Your mileage may vary, but for me I'm a fan of whatever works for you, whether it be keto, or paleo, or clean eating, or eating your daily calorie limit with fast food because that's all you got. If it helps you lose weight safely or maintain, you a'ight in my book.0 -
I think fasting, intermittent or otherwise , like any diet fad, fails to address the root of weight problems - lifestyle. Eat less, eat better, move more.2
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There's no benefit to it aside from indirectly helping someone eat less calories. IF depends on the person. Some people prefer it while others don't. My boyfriend for example loves it. He eats one meal a day which helps him eat less. He's lost over 50 pounds. Me? I can't do it. In fact, last time I tried IF, I almost died from dangerously low blood sugar. I lost over 50 pounds without IF.3
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