Intermittent Fasting

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Replies

  • Monk_E_Boy
    Monk_E_Boy Posts: 28 Member
    kimny72 wrote: »
    Monk_E_Boy wrote: »
    kimny72 wrote: »
    Monk_E_Boy wrote: »
    kimny72 wrote: »
    Monk_E_Boy wrote: »
    Monk_E_Boy wrote: »
    I guess I should point out that Calorie Reduction is, in fact, a part of a successful IF regimen. What I’m arguing, is that the idea of Calorie Reduction As Primary... is exactly what its acronym spells out.
    Simply reducing calories in (and/or increasing calories out) only works in the short term. We don’t have a weight loss problem in this country, we have a weight re-gain problem. If you don’t address the hormonal aspect of obesity, you won’t be able to fix the problem long-term.

    If simply managing calories so that you eat less than you burn only works short term, what produces the energy that causes weight gain long term?

    And what is the mechanism by which hormones in and of themselves lead to obesity?

    Without getting too complicated:
    Eating (which for this conversation will be shorthand for “putting something in your mouth that isn’t water/black coffee/tea”) raises insulin up from your personal baseline.
    When insulin is up, its job is to store energy. First it refills your glucose (short term storage), and whatever is leftover goes to your fat cells (long term storage). If your fat cells are all too full, new fat cells will be made for extra storage room.
    While insulin is raised above your personal baseline, your body can’t effectively access your storage. When insulin is baselined, your body ‘can’ effectively access your storage.
    The amount of storage you have built up will largely determine what your personal baseline of insulin is. More storage, higher baseline. Your insulin baseline can also be thought of as the body’s control mechanism for its weight set point, which it will defend vigorously.
    So, “eating” often keeps insulin above its baseline. It tells your body to store the incoming energy, without giving your body a chance to access the energy it has already stored. Any energy out, by design of your non-baselined insulin, will largely be provided by the energy you just recently “ate”, as opposed to the energy you’ve been storing.
    You tell your body to store energy every time you eat, if you eat often throughout the day that means you’re storing and not pulling from your storage, and over time you need more and more room to store your energy.

    What exactly is your medical background? Or can you point us to resources that led you to adopt this particular understanding of how the endocrine system works?

    I have absolutely ZERO medical training, and I wholeheartedly apologize if me sharing what I’ve learned has led you (or anyone else) to think otherwise. I’m not any sort of an expert in anything.
    I first got interested in learning more about IF when I found Dr. Jason Fung on YouTube. Since that day I’ve just been doing a lot of reading, listening to different people who have probably forgotten more about science than I’ll ever learn, and trying to piece it all together in a way that I can understand and articulate.
    You can attack me if you like, but I’d much rather you refute or clarify any of the points I’ve been making. I’m still very much trying to learn more about how it all works, the more information the better!

    Honestly, every doctor, endocrinologist, diabetes counselor, and diabetic I've ever met would refute what you're saying. You are saying the endocrine system works differently than endocrinologists have seen it work in the lab and in their patients. If you are going to state as fact that a bodily system works differently than those that specialize in it report it to work, it's up to you to show your work.

    And to be clear, I'm not attacking you, I'm disagreeing with what you are stating as fact.

    To be fair, I’m stating things as I understand them.
    So far you’ve said that many professionals would disagree with me, which is fine, except that you haven’t said what they’d disagree with. Everything?
    I’ve seen lots of studies talk about energy balance without going any deeper, but (and this just an example) if calories in versus calories out is truly the end all be all, shouldn’t diet soft drinks with zero calories have made a positive impact? Why do type 2 diabetics gain weight when they start taking insulin doses? Why do the overwhelming majority of eat less / move more diets fail in the long term? (and if the answer is willpower, why have we as a society become so morally defunct over the past 50 years or so?)
    Haven’t you ever thought there might be more to it?

    Insulin being released into the blood stream after eating, ushering sugar into the cells that need energy and storing extra in fat cells, and then subsiding is a perfectly normal and healthy process that doesn't need to be limited to a specific time period. Insulin levels have time to drop in between meals and snacks in a more traditional eating schedule. Insulin resistance occurs when someone is consistently overburdening their system with too much and too high sugar food for extended periods of time, not someone eating a reasonable amount of food on a normal schedule.

    Diet drinks do have a positive result for some people, they were actually instrumental in me cutting 150 cals per day out of my budget. There are lots of reasons they don't correlate to weight loss - but if people aren't tracking calories, it's really easy for them to unwittingly eat more to make up the saved calories, often because they feel they deserve a reward for switching to diet. Also, most of those studies are merely demographic, and obviously at any given time there will be a number of overweight people just starting to try to lose weight who are drinking diet soda but are still overweight. If the diet isn't calorie controlled, there is no way to know whether switching to diet soda actually successfully causes an overall calorie deduction.

    I am not a doctor, so I'm not sure it's true that diabetics gain weight when they start taking insulin or why that would be.

    The majority of ALL diets fail because people focus on losing weight and never plan for maintenance. They eat foods they don't like, schedules that aren't practical for them, take up fitness routines they can't sustain. They aren't patient enough. They don't take the time to learn how to eat and exercise comfortably and practically at the right calorie level for the rest of their life. They just white knuckle it to goal weight, pat themselves on the back, and then go right back to their old ways. Learning through trial and error from my food log and noting how different foods/macros/workouts/schedules made me feel was instrumental in my so far 2 years of maintenance.

    We haven't become morally challenged in the last 50 years - we have been inundated with cheap yummy food and pushed into the sitting position by technology over the last 50 years. And we haven't quite adapted to it yet.

    I honestly don't think there is more to it. In fact I think the current "pop" medicine health & fitness industry has made it all far too complicated. People spend too much time chasing all these different theories. The problem is we are for the most part surrounded by cheap hyper-palatable food and live too sedentary a lifestyle. By logging my food and slowly becoming more active, I and a lot of the veterans here have managed to start to flip the script on maintenance success, at least it seems that way to me. And alot of veterans here do essentially practice IF for appetite control.

    I'd like to add, as I said recently in another IF thread, some of the theories circulating around IF right now (and more extreme fasting) are fascinating. And if someone wants to do IF in the hopes that some of these theories pan out, I can totally understand that. It's the stating as supposedly obvious scientific fact something that was suggested in one limited study or on rodents that I feel the need to push back.

    I absolutely love this response. 100%.
    There are aspects that I don’t agree with, but that’s ok lol
    Oddly enough, I didn’t actually come on here today to sing IF’s praises. I just saw that someone said it was simply a way to restrict calories, so I mentioned that AS I UNDERSTAND IT: there’s more to it than that.
    But I wanted to thank you for the above-quoted response, and apologize if I got under your skin at all. I assure you that it wasn’t my intent (same goes for all the other folks involved in this thread).

    Whether I agree with you (the general ‘you’, not you specifically) or not, the bottom line is that if it’s working, and it’s not going to hurt you or anyone else, stick with it!

    Much love to all, and best of luck in your journeys!
  • kimny72
    kimny72 Posts: 16,011 Member
    Monk_E_Boy wrote: »
    kimny72 wrote: »
    Monk_E_Boy wrote: »
    kimny72 wrote: »
    Monk_E_Boy wrote: »
    kimny72 wrote: »
    Monk_E_Boy wrote: »
    Monk_E_Boy wrote: »
    I guess I should point out that Calorie Reduction is, in fact, a part of a successful IF regimen. What I’m arguing, is that the idea of Calorie Reduction As Primary... is exactly what its acronym spells out.
    Simply reducing calories in (and/or increasing calories out) only works in the short term. We don’t have a weight loss problem in this country, we have a weight re-gain problem. If you don’t address the hormonal aspect of obesity, you won’t be able to fix the problem long-term.

    If simply managing calories so that you eat less than you burn only works short term, what produces the energy that causes weight gain long term?

    And what is the mechanism by which hormones in and of themselves lead to obesity?

    Without getting too complicated:
    Eating (which for this conversation will be shorthand for “putting something in your mouth that isn’t water/black coffee/tea”) raises insulin up from your personal baseline.
    When insulin is up, its job is to store energy. First it refills your glucose (short term storage), and whatever is leftover goes to your fat cells (long term storage). If your fat cells are all too full, new fat cells will be made for extra storage room.
    While insulin is raised above your personal baseline, your body can’t effectively access your storage. When insulin is baselined, your body ‘can’ effectively access your storage.
    The amount of storage you have built up will largely determine what your personal baseline of insulin is. More storage, higher baseline. Your insulin baseline can also be thought of as the body’s control mechanism for its weight set point, which it will defend vigorously.
    So, “eating” often keeps insulin above its baseline. It tells your body to store the incoming energy, without giving your body a chance to access the energy it has already stored. Any energy out, by design of your non-baselined insulin, will largely be provided by the energy you just recently “ate”, as opposed to the energy you’ve been storing.
    You tell your body to store energy every time you eat, if you eat often throughout the day that means you’re storing and not pulling from your storage, and over time you need more and more room to store your energy.

    What exactly is your medical background? Or can you point us to resources that led you to adopt this particular understanding of how the endocrine system works?

    I have absolutely ZERO medical training, and I wholeheartedly apologize if me sharing what I’ve learned has led you (or anyone else) to think otherwise. I’m not any sort of an expert in anything.
    I first got interested in learning more about IF when I found Dr. Jason Fung on YouTube. Since that day I’ve just been doing a lot of reading, listening to different people who have probably forgotten more about science than I’ll ever learn, and trying to piece it all together in a way that I can understand and articulate.
    You can attack me if you like, but I’d much rather you refute or clarify any of the points I’ve been making. I’m still very much trying to learn more about how it all works, the more information the better!

    Honestly, every doctor, endocrinologist, diabetes counselor, and diabetic I've ever met would refute what you're saying. You are saying the endocrine system works differently than endocrinologists have seen it work in the lab and in their patients. If you are going to state as fact that a bodily system works differently than those that specialize in it report it to work, it's up to you to show your work.

    And to be clear, I'm not attacking you, I'm disagreeing with what you are stating as fact.

    To be fair, I’m stating things as I understand them.
    So far you’ve said that many professionals would disagree with me, which is fine, except that you haven’t said what they’d disagree with. Everything?
    I’ve seen lots of studies talk about energy balance without going any deeper, but (and this just an example) if calories in versus calories out is truly the end all be all, shouldn’t diet soft drinks with zero calories have made a positive impact? Why do type 2 diabetics gain weight when they start taking insulin doses? Why do the overwhelming majority of eat less / move more diets fail in the long term? (and if the answer is willpower, why have we as a society become so morally defunct over the past 50 years or so?)
    Haven’t you ever thought there might be more to it?

    Insulin being released into the blood stream after eating, ushering sugar into the cells that need energy and storing extra in fat cells, and then subsiding is a perfectly normal and healthy process that doesn't need to be limited to a specific time period. Insulin levels have time to drop in between meals and snacks in a more traditional eating schedule. Insulin resistance occurs when someone is consistently overburdening their system with too much and too high sugar food for extended periods of time, not someone eating a reasonable amount of food on a normal schedule.

    Diet drinks do have a positive result for some people, they were actually instrumental in me cutting 150 cals per day out of my budget. There are lots of reasons they don't correlate to weight loss - but if people aren't tracking calories, it's really easy for them to unwittingly eat more to make up the saved calories, often because they feel they deserve a reward for switching to diet. Also, most of those studies are merely demographic, and obviously at any given time there will be a number of overweight people just starting to try to lose weight who are drinking diet soda but are still overweight. If the diet isn't calorie controlled, there is no way to know whether switching to diet soda actually successfully causes an overall calorie deduction.

    I am not a doctor, so I'm not sure it's true that diabetics gain weight when they start taking insulin or why that would be.

    The majority of ALL diets fail because people focus on losing weight and never plan for maintenance. They eat foods they don't like, schedules that aren't practical for them, take up fitness routines they can't sustain. They aren't patient enough. They don't take the time to learn how to eat and exercise comfortably and practically at the right calorie level for the rest of their life. They just white knuckle it to goal weight, pat themselves on the back, and then go right back to their old ways. Learning through trial and error from my food log and noting how different foods/macros/workouts/schedules made me feel was instrumental in my so far 2 years of maintenance.

    We haven't become morally challenged in the last 50 years - we have been inundated with cheap yummy food and pushed into the sitting position by technology over the last 50 years. And we haven't quite adapted to it yet.

    I honestly don't think there is more to it. In fact I think the current "pop" medicine health & fitness industry has made it all far too complicated. People spend too much time chasing all these different theories. The problem is we are for the most part surrounded by cheap hyper-palatable food and live too sedentary a lifestyle. By logging my food and slowly becoming more active, I and a lot of the veterans here have managed to start to flip the script on maintenance success, at least it seems that way to me. And alot of veterans here do essentially practice IF for appetite control.

    I'd like to add, as I said recently in another IF thread, some of the theories circulating around IF right now (and more extreme fasting) are fascinating. And if someone wants to do IF in the hopes that some of these theories pan out, I can totally understand that. It's the stating as supposedly obvious scientific fact something that was suggested in one limited study or on rodents that I feel the need to push back.

    I absolutely love this response. 100%.
    There are aspects that I don’t agree with, but that’s ok lol
    Oddly enough, I didn’t actually come on here today to sing IF’s praises. I just saw that someone said it was simply a way to restrict calories, so I mentioned that AS I UNDERSTAND IT: there’s more to it than that.
    But I wanted to thank you for the above-quoted response, and apologize if I got under your skin at all. I assure you that it wasn’t my intent (same goes for all the other folks involved in this thread).

    Whether I agree with you (the general ‘you’, not you specifically) or not, the bottom line is that if it’s working, and it’s not going to hurt you or anyone else, stick with it!

    Much love to all, and best of luck in your journeys!

    No worries, I appreciate you appreciating my response lol :drinker:
  • theonlyvictoria
    theonlyvictoria Posts: 11 Member
    I love it but only because like everyone has said it helps make a calorie deficit easier. I find I’m not really hungry until I start eating and then food literally never leaves my mind. It’s really just a matter of personal preference. Most people either love it or hate it. I’d suggest you give it a try and see how you feel in two weeks.

    This is me. it's worked so well because I used to think I NEEDED to eat first thing in the morning but all it did was start the hunger hormones that had me hungry all day. IF stopped that by delaying those signals and gave me a hard cut off so I don't late night snack anymore which stopped the mindless eating.
  • CharlieBeansmomTracey
    CharlieBeansmomTracey Posts: 7,682 Member
    I failed the last time I lost weight because I didnt really know at the time that when I was losing weight I was creating a deficit by not eating as much(sadly in the late 70s early 80s we werent taught that is school (no joke). I lost it and then I gained it back beause I started eating more and thought once you lost the weight thats all there was to it. sure I was naive because I never had to lose weight before then. my parents and grandparents were all of healthy weights and the only ones I knew that were on "diets" were very overweight/obese . Most of them did weight watchers and I had no clue how it worked back then. most of them were friends parents.they didnt like to talk about diets. so I had nothing to go on when it came to losing weight.

    I WAS told in school that being overweight or thin had to do with genetics. I now know thats not true.i was active most of my life and maintained my weight so as I got into my late 20s I was still at a healthy weight, I hadnt gained anything. once I got to my 30s around 33 or so is when I stopped a medication for my asthma I had taken since I was 11(I read that it can boost metabolism), once I stopped taking that I became less active. once that happened I started to gain weight because I did not change my eating habits to compensate for the lack of activities and medication.

    I slowly gained it over the years though.I lost weight again end if 2013-beginning of 2014 without trying due to having a broken leg and making less trips to the kitchen. I lost the weight, again didnt keep it off long(I didnt know how). and slowly gained it back and then some. flash forward to 5 years ago when I got tired of being obese and started working out and trying to eat better, it took a little while but I noticed it was working. until It stopped and I started gaining bak half what I lost,I could not understand why, I was using measuring cups and realized I was eating more than I thought I was(eating more than my body burned). I came here and was told to use a food scale and weigh in grams.

    once I started doing that I lost the weight I gained back and then some. I have kept most of it off for the most part. I have gained some but some of it is musle from doing recomps over the last 5 years off and on. no not all of it is muscle. but some is how much I have no idea as I have no way to get any kind of tests to measure(they dont do hydrostatic weighing or bod pods in my area and my insurance wont cover a dexa scan unless its needed).

    but Im maintaining within 5 or so lbs and have for the last 6 months this time. I have done IF the last 5 years and its just a window of time in which I myself eat my calories. its not made any difference in anything else. like I said ive done IF for more than 3 decades. The only time I ate breakfast was on the weekends as a kid when my dad didnt have to work. the rest of the week I didnt eat breakfast.after i got old enough I stopped doing that.its been all about CICO for me. I have ate healthy and gained weight,I have eaten not so healthy and lost weight and I am maintaining trying to eat as balanced as I can. Im losing fat and gaining some muscle but Im also recomping right now so.
  • This content has been removed.
  • lowcarbmale
    lowcarbmale Posts: 145 Member
    edited November 2018
    Did you read any of the links anvilhead posted?

    yes I did. all of them.
  • GottaBurnEmAll
    GottaBurnEmAll Posts: 7,722 Member
    edited November 2018
    Monk_E_Boy wrote: »
    Monk_E_Boy wrote: »
    Monk_E_Boy wrote: »
    Monk_E_Boy wrote: »
    I guess I should point out that Calorie Reduction is, in fact, a part of a successful IF regimen. What I’m arguing, is that the idea of Calorie Reduction As Primary... is exactly what its acronym spells out.
    Simply reducing calories in (and/or increasing calories out) only works in the short term. We don’t have a weight loss problem in this country, we have a weight re-gain problem. If you don’t address the hormonal aspect of obesity, you won’t be able to fix the problem long-term.

    If simply managing calories so that you eat less than you burn only works short term, what produces the energy that causes weight gain long term?

    And what is the mechanism by which hormones in and of themselves lead to obesity?

    Without getting too complicated:
    Eating (which for this conversation will be shorthand for “putting something in your mouth that isn’t water/black coffee/tea”) raises insulin up from your personal baseline.
    When insulin is up, its job is to store energy. First it refills your glucose (short term storage), and whatever is leftover goes to your fat cells (long term storage). If your fat cells are all too full, new fat cells will be made for extra storage room.
    While insulin is raised above your personal baseline, your body can’t effectively access your storage. When insulin is baselined, your body ‘can’ effectively access your storage.
    The amount of storage you have built up will largely determine what your personal baseline of insulin is. More storage, higher baseline. Your insulin baseline can also be thought of as the body’s control mechanism for its weight set point, which it will defend vigorously.
    So, “eating” often keeps insulin above its baseline. It tells your body to store the incoming energy, without giving your body a chance to access the energy it has already stored. Any energy out, by design of your non-baselined insulin, will largely be provided by the energy you just recently “ate”, as opposed to the energy you’ve been storing.
    You tell your body to store energy every time you eat, if you eat often throughout the day that means you’re storing and not pulling from your storage, and over time you need more and more room to store your energy.

    CDqD1KV.jpg

    You failed to describe how insulin acted independent of energy balance.

    Furthermore,


    https://weightology.net/insulin-an-undeserved-bad-reputation/

    Cute meme.
    Calories in versus calories out (or “energy balance”) is based entirely on a one compartment theory. That all the calories we eat go into one compartment, and that when we expend energy, we pull it out of that same compartment. The only problem with that theory, is that it’s wrong.
    Calories go in and get sent to different places, one of which is easy to get energy back out of, and one of them isn’t (unless your insulin is at baseline).
    No one is “creating or destroying matter”, all the calories are accounted for. You just can’t access a portion of them for fuel if your insulin isn’t baselined.
    And that, the act of storing energy as fat combined with not allowing access to said stored energy when above baseline, is how insulin affects obesity independently from energy balance.

    But that's just wrong.
    Let's just... make an easy example.
    Say you're John Everyman who is just a normal guy, sedentary job, etc. whose body needs 2000 calories to function.
    Do you get me so far?
    John's body needs 2000 calories to function, if it doesn't get 2000 calories, what happens? He doesn't just drop dead like a car that runs out of gas. It takes them from the stores.
    Okay?
    Now, there's glycogen stores and fat stores in the body, as well as muscle. Where your idea that "fat can only be accessed at baseline insulin" is just wrong comes now.
    https://exrx.net/Nutrition/Substrates Where your body takes energy from is directly tied to your current activity, whether your body needs energy fast or not so fast. At rest, 60% of your energy needs are met by fat.
    Directly after eating, while you're digesting, part of the nutrients will immediately be used to fuel your body, the rest will be stored. If you IF, since you eat everything over a shorter time frame, you will store more, because it doesn't magically make your body need more all of a sudden. The end result is the same. All the food you ate that your body didn't immediately need got stored and then afterwards will slowly get used again. If you ate less calories than you needed then more fat will be used up than you stored and vice versa.

    Oh, and glycogen is readily replenished, but that means the carbs aren't available for use, which means you use fat to make up for the calories you stored in your glycogen, so...

    Also, I think you didn't think far enough to realize that if you IF and eat all your calories over a smaller time frame, your insulin spike is going to be larger and longer as more nutrients at once have to be transported. Insulin is driven by need, less to transport, less insulin. More to transport, more insulin.
    So, even if you falsely believe that insulin would have to be at baseline to lose fat (it doesn't because "inhibit" is not the same as "completely stop", that would be pretty dangerous if you were eating 10 calories in sugar, your insulin goes up and suddenly you only have 10 calories available for your whole body), the time your insulin is elevated when eating the exact same foods spaced out or in a short time is going to be similar. Multiple short, small elevations vs. fewer but higher and longer ones.

    Nice! Very well explained!
    Who knows, maybe the dozen other times I’ve restricted calories for extended periods of time and lost very little were just unlucky, and this time with IF is just a happy accident? 13th time’s the charm!
    Regardless, the weight is coming off and my energy levels are steady, so I guess I’ll just keep going!
    Best of luck in your journey!!

    What is your daily calorie goal and how long have you been eating at it?

    How long were your previous diet attempts?
  • Alex
    Alex Posts: 10,137 MFP Staff
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