I appreciate the studies that go back and forth on this topic (hey, that's science) but I can't help but think of our ancestors.
Readily available caloric intake, in terms of human evolution, is relatively new. I imagine our ancestors waking up in the morning and going out on a hunt or foraging for something to eat.
Personally, I've been doing intermittent fasting (16/8) for roughly seven years. I (typically) eat between 12 - 8pm and sleep between midnight-ish and 8 am. I eat a half cup of oatmeal at noon, a protein shake and some kind of fruit at roughly 3-4pm, and (usually) do some weight training roughly an hour later, followed by another protein shake after and a more broadly nutritious dinner (vegetable heavy, often with a lean protein and little to no carbohydrates) somewhere between 7-8pm. On days with this schedule my first activity after waking is spirited running/leaping up and down a flight of stairs for a total of 10 round trips. Speaking of which...
When I do cardio it's in the morning fasted. I don't have any science to back it up but for me, personally, something happens doing cardio fasted. It's "hard" but the response from my body and mind is amazing. I can't help but think my pre-agriculture caveman brain feeds off of some kind of reward in eating after running a 5k. I (typically) do this once or twice a week and the mental clarity and general "feeling" of health afterwards is amazing. At this point a more typical (at least for Americans) diet of eating a heavy breakfast, snacking on whatever throughout the day, and eating shortly before bed seems like it would ruin me.
I agree with how incredible I feel about doing some morning cardio while fasted. Surprisingly, I feel much less hungry until my eating window opens up at noon when I do morning cardio than on days when I miss it.
Anecdotes are what they are but I'm happy to hear I'm not alone in experiencing this phenomena. From what I understand humans have evolved to run incredibly long distances relatively efficiently because much of our densest caloric intake (historically) came as a result of simply chasing down our prey until it essentially collapsed from exhaustion.
Even though I live in modern times my practice of running what is a relatively long distance (5k) before eating seems to be an incredible "hack" compared to more typical, modern patterns of diet and exercise.
Curious on your take here - whenever I am very hungry I notice that my sense are acutely aware of any smell and are generally sharper (outside of the hunger part). Wouldn't that similarity translate to after a post fasted run that your brain is also much more acutely aware since it has been starved of food and is now trying to (in a historical sense) forage or hunt for food on a short term need?
I just commented elsewhere but to repeat myself with what I think you might be describing:
From what I understand humans have evolved to run incredibly long distances relatively efficiently because much of our densest caloric intake (historically) came as a result of simply chasing down our prey until it essentially collapsed from exhaustion.
Even though I find that it "feels" more difficult running for my calories (at this distance) I actually end up with surprisingly good performance. I can't help but think there's some fundamental drive and resulting reward system that (subconsciously) thinks "If you don't beat the animal you're chasing you're not eating today".
I imagine something similar happens in terms of your enhanced senses for smell, being similar for foraging (and potentially even prey detection).
> Curious on your take here - whenever I am very hungry I notice that my sense are acutely aware of any smell and are generally sharper (outside of the hunger part). Wouldn't that similarity translate to after a post fasted run that your brain is also much more acutely aware since it has been starved of food and is now trying to (in a historical sense) forage or hunt for food on a short term need?
This seems to be normal and common when fasting. It happens to me personally and I’ve read comments from other people who experience it too.
In terms of something comprehensive, no. I hope I made this clear with qualifiers such as "I imagine", "I don't have any science to back it up", saying it was all anecdotal, etc.
I've been practicing and developing my personal exercise and nutrition for well over 20 years. I've been around long enough to remember low-fat wars (fat is bad - just crank up the sugar!), cardio is best for weight loss (not at all), carbs are good, carbs are bad, high protein is good, now it isn't, now it's back, etc, etc. Like I said I appreciate the evolving science but developing a routine based on the latest "we studied 20 people and..." doesn't make much sense to me. Do I have it nailed? Am I a high performance athlete? No. What I do have going for me at this point is the fact that every indicator puts me in a high percentile for just about any physical and overall health metric. So I guess I have to be doing something right, right?
This is why I started with "studies that go back and forth". After the first two or three reversals from various studies and predominant thinking I realized I should just develop whatever works for me.
My high-protein diet and strength-training focused exercise program works for me. I essentially stumbled upon running while fasted because of my intermittent fasting schedule (which I love) on a few occasions where my life schedule didn't allow for exercise before the end of my fasting window. I more-or-less just started to wonder "Why is running long distances with no caloric intake in > 12 hours so exhilarating?"
I'm also generally aware that humans have been capable of feats such as running > 25 miles at a five minute pace (or less) well before modern equipment, training, and nutrition.
There have to be reasons for all of this, hence my theory.
Hilariously, other studies / doctors state that breakfast is the most important meal & that eating late is the real danger.
Or that having the bigger meals earlier in the day is most important.
Or that splitting up your eating into more, smaller meals is better, the opposite of intermittent fasting.
In the end, I think the exact skew comes down to individual digestive systems and the only macro advice is "eat a bit less / eat nutritionally wholesome stuff / move a bit more / more sleep is better than less"
Right and also specifics of peoples anatomy.
For example people with acid reflux due to certain reasons like a hiatal hernia are advised to eat frequent, smaller meals. So the idea of cramming all eating into 8 hours/day or to skip breakfast would be counterproductive.
The only thing that works for everyone is - move more, eat less, eat more nutritionally, sleep enough.
Unfortunately the ability to do this is often tied to income / job status.
Most of the rest of these magic tricks only works on the margins, or to specific individuals.
I used to "forget" breakfast and lunch and didn't really feel that hungry, then have a big meal and keep snacking until bedtime.
Weight gain and bad sleep followed. Nowadays I make a game-like goal of "be hungry at lunch time". To do that I need to stop getting calories at ~6PM. I'll have just black coffee and water when waking up and lunch at 11AM.
I sleep much better, dental health and blood pressure have improved, weight is slowly going down. In addition I crave for stuff like broccoli, mushrooms and protein at the early lunch time - unlike the fries and pizza I desired before when eating a super late lunch at 4PM or so.
Later learned my current strategy is called intermittent fasting. Works great for me.
> Skipping breakfast is found to be slightly more beneficial than skipping dinner
Beneficial in what way?
A couple of quotes from the article you linked:
"In contrast, higher postprandial insulin concentrations and increased fat oxidation with breakfast skipping suggest the development of metabolic inflexibility in response to prolonged fasting that may in the long term lead to low-grade inflammation and impaired glucose homeostasis"
"Increased fat oxidation, despite higher postprandial insulin concentrations with breakfast skipping, suggests the development of metabolic inflexibility in response to prolonged fasting that may increase metabolic risk over time."
"Altogether, the present results support the association between breakfast skipping and disturbed glucose homeostasis, which is not explained by a positive energy balance."
This isn't exactly my domain of expertise, but it does not sound all that beneficial to me. Of course, something can be beneficial in one way and problematic in another. Further, I would caution against selectively reading a single article.
In a way that I won't be going crazy trying to fall asleep while hungry.
On the other hand, it's easy to skip breakfast - when I start to get a little hungry (say two hours after waking up) tea or coffee will avert that feeling easily. And feeling hungry is also much easier if I know a nice meal awaits an hour later.
All of this combined means it's much easier to not overeat during the entire day.
This is all personal of course, others might feel exactly the opposite.
I tend to have a black coffee in place of breakfast, in part because I just tend to not be hungry in the morning (and sometimes feel sick if I do force myself to eat), but also I feel like for most people having breakfast has very little affect on how hungry/how much you eat at lunch. So I take the calorie savings of not eating breakfast for what they are.
This article doesn't really explain _why_ eating earlier is supposedly better. The only explanation it gives is related to weight-loss. Conflating health and weight-loss is an unhealthy (pun intended) obsession of the media and society writ large. Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier. And if eating late at night helps with that goal, then eating later can be considered healthy.
> Conflating health and weight-loss is an unhealthy (pun intended) obsession of the media and society writ large.
Being overweight and diabetes are comorbidities of nearly everything, and are comorbidities of each-other for that matter. People are more overweight than ever. If anything there is not nearly enough alarm, and far too much normalization of the increasing status quo.
> Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier.
Approximately 1.5% of US adults are underweight. Approximately 73.6% are overweight or obese.
The only reason people treat statements like the ones you're making as obviously settled is because it plays into Protestant bullshit about being punished for enjoyment i.e. the worse it tastes the better it is for you.
The science of health vs fat is complicated, it's not some abstract moral tale of the gluttons being punished by god for their immoderate behavior.
There's so much to unpack beyond these surface-level statistics, though. Like how there's some evidence that the health risks associated with increased BMI are partially an artifact of weight loss diets being really bad for your health, plus selection bias. People with lower BMIs are significantly less likely to attempt these health-destroying weight loss diets in the first place. Which would then imply that an approach to the issue that focuses primarily on how to get people who are already fat to lose weight, rather than as a prevention-focused public health initiative, may be doing more harm than good.
Or how lumping the overweight and obese groups together is a great example of lying with statistics by gerrymandering the BMI quantiles that seem to be healthiest together with those that have the poorest health outcomes, and away from a group that was arbitrarily defined the better part of two centuries ago based on one person's aesthetic standards rather than any health indicators, most of which weren't even known at the time. In other words, it's the crux of a pervasive piece of statistical circular reasoning.
And the moralizing statements like "normalization of the increasing status quo" that politicize the issue, thereby making it harder to have a nuanced, thoughtful discussion about the topic, and instead push it toward always being yet another pea shooting contest between the "personal responsibility" and "fat positivitiy" caucuses. Which only serves to drown out any attempt to really contend with the full magnitude of the nuances and unknowns that surround this issue.
This is nonsense. Obesity doesn’t cause health issues because of crash diets - the link between obesity and several bad health outcomes (insulin resistance/diabetes, hypertension, joint damage, to name a few) is extremely well established, and has nothing to do with diet and everything to do with the accumulation of superhuman levels of fat relative to the conditions in which humans evolved. You’re right that there is some controversy about where exactly the line for “overweight” should be, but there’s no question that when you get into the obese category (41% of Americans) it is extremely bad for your health, irrespective of what diet you’re on - humans simply aren’t designed to handle the amount of fat we now routinely accumulate.
The link between many health issues and constant failed, and increasingly desperate attempts to lose weight is also extremely well established. Why do you dismiss the connection as if it were nothing in order to frame fatness as moral failure and disease as punishment?
> as nothing to do with diet and everything to do with the accumulation of superhuman levels of fat relative to the conditions in which humans evolved
This is a religious belief. Evolution doesn't visit judgement on human behavor, and any number of things that we do now that we didn't do in the Stone Age fail to have negative health consequences. Some might even be good for you, judging by the comparative lifespans of prehistoric humans and modern ones.
Look, if you care about people losing weight instead of wallowing in the cruelty and definitely something that looks like jealousy (e.g. that happy feeling some people get when they hear that people who have sex caught a venereal disease) - if you really care, then the health consequences of crash diets would concern you. The consequences of repeated failures to lose weight would concern you. None of this would be dismissed if your concern were health instead of moral superiority.
Sorry for the accusatory tone. To preempt, I'm 6', 175lb..
edit:
> Or how lumping the overweight and obese groups together is a great example of lying with statistics by gerrymandering the BMI quantiles
This is the fucking worst because it's conscious dishonesty. It's intentional deception.
I said nothing about the link between crash diets and health issues in my post. I only addressed this point in the OP:
> there's some evidence that the health risks associated with increased BMI are partially an artifact of weight loss diets
which is misleading at best - there is a huge amount of evidence that fat accumulation directly leads to health issues.
I am not moralizing in any way, I don't see anything in my original comment which indicated I'm passing moral judgement at all. I am simply stating that the health consequences of obesity are well known, and the causal direction is clear - obesity itself causes health problems. Again, I'm not passing judgement here - in fact I find the common refrain "eat less, move more" to be an extreme oversimplification of the problem, and I'm well aware that diet change is neither easy nor sufficient to solve the obesity problem. I'm just pushing back on the idea that crash diets are what cause the primary health issues associated with obesity - it's simply not true, and there's a mountain of evidence to back that up.
You have set up a false dichotomy. Why do you ignore that word "partially" in the sentence you quoted?
When someone proposes a partial cause, then pointing out the existence of other causes does absolutely nothing to challenge the premise that there might be multiple contributing factors.
This is not a particularly controversial idea among health researchers. I've been casually following obesity research for decades now, and one of the big themes I've seen is one of scientists being frustrated at their inability to get journalists and popularizers to give a proper accounting of the level of nuance in the knowledge we have. Your use of the phrase "the causal direction" implies that your knowledge is informed by these same popular sources that perennially frustrate the research community, because a proper accounting of the science does not permit the use of a definite pronoun in such a statement.
Because the magnitude of the effects isn't the same. The evidence is very clear - obesity _causes_ several negative health conditions. To suggest that crash dieting somehow reduces the relevance of those conditions is to deliberately mislead. Some links:
I would love to see any research you're aware of that would show evidence that crash diets cause significant health issues (I don't doubt that there are some diets that cause weight loss while being bad for health in other ways) but to suggest that the side effects of those diets compare in magnitude to the side effects of obesity itself is extremely misleading. If you have any reputable sources that provide evidence to the contrary I would be happy to read them, but I think you're misleading people, deliberately or inadvertently.
Yes, over the long term (tens of thousands of years?) evolution will probably come up with adaptations to material abundance assuming it lasts. Cold comfort to the people that suffer from it today though. Evolution can't do anything to help anyone who is alive today.
> there's some evidence that the health risks associated with increased BMI are partially an artifact [sic] of weight loss diets being really bad for your health
Citation needed.
Without fail when an article about health, weight loss and diet appears on hacker news these comments appear. Suggesting obesity isn't dangerous, and that we should be careful about addressing it due to normative standards, bias, demonisation etc.
In reality the severity of the impact of obesity on health is enormously underplayed in mass media - especially in the United States where are you admit there is a 'fat positivity' lobby.
There are lots of nuances around how and why this epidemic has happened. From food deserts to the promotion of fast food and high fructose corn syrup to shift work to sedentary lifestyles. But the impact itself is scientifically uncontroversial.
Sharing pragmatic articles about how to address this in our communities and our own lives is literally life saving.
Not at all. The science is very clear and has been for quite some time - being overweight is bad for your health and increases all cause mortality.
I could link meta analyses about how strong the link between increased weight and CVD is as one example, but I don't think you're really looking to change your mind.
Instead I'll just make it as simple as possible. Increased weight = increased metabolic demand = more stress on the heart and other organs.
> I could link meta analyses about how strong the link between increased weight and CVD is as one example, but I don't think you're really looking to change your mind.
You could not say that you could do something if you don't plan to do it, and you could avoid blaming the person you're arguing with for your failure to produce evidence that supports your point instead. Try making it complicated.
your advice makes your own comment pretty ironic, don't you think?
but no. I really don't have to provide evidence that the sun is hot, that Washington D.C. is the capital of the United States, or that being fat is bad for you. I understand HN is for a technical audience, but in the nutritional and health field, this is an accepted fact.
Given the Washington Post is based in the US and has a majoritarily U.S.-based readership, and that almost 3 out of 4 adults in the U.S. are overweight, the general advice to lose weight is sound...
Comparatively, less than 2% of the U.S. population is underweight. And even for these people, simply gaining weight by tricking your biological clock would not be a good advice either.
The older I get the more I am pretty convinced that at the margin, every bodys digestive system and metabolism responds a little differently the time/frequency of meals, precise content of meals, amount of exercise, amount of sleep, etc.
Therefore there is no "one size fits all" solution outside of the general "eat a bit less, move a bit more" guidance.
It's kind of like when they interview 100+ year olds for "the tricks to a long life" and it's just inane random stuff.
One does not become 100lb overweight because of "margins". One becomes 100lb overweight because they are doing 100mph in a 35mph zone so "slow the hell down" is a great advice.
You also don't become 100lb overweight because you eat your first meal at 12pm instead of 8am. That's what that comment was saying; the only obvious advice is eat less and exercise more, and it works 100% of the time for all bodies.
And of the two eating less is more important. The human body is remarkably efficient when it comes to exercise.
Also important is eating your food in a manner (e.g., smaller portions more frequently) that you don't ever get really hungry. Extreme hunger leads to binge eating which can easily undo any calory deficit you managed that day.
> Of course you do. That's like saying that you don't end up $100 in debt by having a deficit of $1 a day.
You do not. 100lbs is excess of 350000 calories "stored" and for every extra lb one's BMR increases. By the time someone is 100lbs overweight just to maintain that weight they would need to consume another gallon of ice cream every day.
You are playing with margins when you are 1-5lbs overweight.
> Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier.
Maybe in places of famine, but the target audience is western, specifically American. Emaciation is hardly a problem in the US. Obesity is. Two thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. Sure, it may not be enough to simply aim at weight reduction (most probably have bad diets to begin with), but weight loss is definitely important and healthy.
The great irony is that while emaciation is hardly a problem, malnutrition is. It's a country that is both malnourished and obese and there just doesn't seem to be much of a public policy push to change that.
I would suspect that malnourishment leads to obesity, at least in part. When you stuff yourself with empty calories, your body is left unsatisfied, because it's missing important nutrients. This leads to hunger signals, which leads to eating more empty calories, which leads to ...
“Conflating health and weight-loss is an unhealthy“
Reference needed.
Being overweight most definitely is a health risk.
What kind of risk exactly is then probably related to personal biology of each individual but I guess the list to pick from is quite long - diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol, joint problems etc.
Ofc weight is not the only relevant metric but it is relevant still.
I understood the post differently. For example, I am not overweight, never have been. I am interested in reading about healthy eating. I'm not interested in losing weight, as that would be unhealthy for me.
Yet, all I can ever find is how to eat in order to lose weight. Thus the two issues (health and weight loss) are conflated.
Generally people conflate health and weight because globally, for a very large number of people, this is the main problem. As societies move to western diets, the average person becomes overweight and is diagnosed with one or more health problems directly related to obesity (pick one or more from my list above).
This is the easy problem to diagnose.
The connection between nutrition and health, if obesity is not your concern, seems indeed to be far more nuanced and complex. I'm not sure if anyone has come up with anything better that every expert could agree on except "eat little bit of everything".
I suppose fasting seems to improve biological markers even for non-obese people so it's not only about weight loss as such, though.
> I am interested in reading about healthy eating.... Yet, all I can ever find is how to eat in order to lose weight.
I suspect that this is largely due to the fact that industrial food owns the food science in this country, and in most of the developed world. For decades, we were fed (no pun intended) a Food Pyramid that is a blatant lie, because it correlated to how monied interests wanted to feed the nation.
I had my annual physical last week, and my doctor told me that the consensus is now "eat whole, natural, unprocessed foods as much as possible, and probably cut back on meat." That seems reasonable, on its face. It also seems prohibitively expensive for many people.
I'm afraid that there isn't a great solution to this problem in this country, almost by design.
This is obviously technically true, but it's like reading "domestic violence" and thinking "ah, this must be about women beating their husbands". Yes, both directions of the problem actually exist, but one is orders of magnitude more likely.
Incorrect (by orders of magnitude). Both directions have about equal rates of occurrence. Female-initiated domestic violence is somewhat more frequent than male-initiated domestic violence.
Look, I don't want to get into a fight over that because it's completely out of topic, but to claim that "25.3% of individuals have perpetrated [violence]" and "80% (sic) of individuals have perpetrated emotional abuse" means using definitions of "violence" and "abuse" very different from ordinary English.
Perhaps you live in a bubble (high income, high education) if you find it completely unbelievable that a quarter of the populace will engage in domestic violence at some point in their lives.
I grew up in rural Appalachia, and I can tell you that the most common response to someone, say, being called a stupid bitch, is not to channel the eternal words of Marcus Aurelius or to center ones self like the Buddha, as might be the case for your average HN poster.
Men are continually trying to paint sexism as symmetric. Doesn't matter that 99% of the corpses that result from domestic violence are women, that 1% means that it's actually a back and forth tennis match. Meanwhile, one of the most common types of mass killings is when men just decide to kill every woman they see.
You seem to be conflating violence and murder. Yes, mens result in death more often, but data shows women and men are both comitters of domestic violence.
>means using definitions of "violence" and "abuse" very different from ordinary English
Incredible how the same critic is never moved against women when engage in the same kind of Newspeak. Let's remember that "speech as violence" was not invented by men.
> Lots of people do in fact need to gain weight to become healthier.
I'm sure given 7-8 billion people in the world this might be "true" for some value of "lots", but I'm curious where data backs this assertion for the audience for which this article is intended; where food is overabundant and mostly overprocessed.
It does: "Because of the way our internal clocks operate, our bodies are primed to digest and metabolize food early in the day. As the day progresses, our metabolisms become less efficient."
Digest and metabolize. This would mean that early in the day, you digest food and put it to work. Your body temperature is higher, you fidget more, your body repairs some of the damage you did when you worked out last night.
Later in the day, the food you digest sits around. Your body temperature is lower, you fidget less, your body performs less maintenance and repair. But the body isn't wasteful; it's still built to survive periodic famine. So, those extra calories that are just sitting around get stored away for later.
They’re confused by the word efficiency. They’re assuming that if metabolism is inefficient then it must take more energy to process food. Thus, more calories burned, thus weightloss.
According to a BBC article from 2016 [0] there were an estimated 641 million overweight people on earth and 462 million underweight people.
I wouldn't call that "very few".
I bet most of those half a billion underweight people are not going to be reading the Washington Post, or even worrying about dietary advice it's from a us-based news outlet.
> This article doesn't really explain _why_ eating earlier is supposedly better.
I feel like it's a personal preference and I only eat later in a day, but here[1] you may find some explanations on why eating in the morning may be better.
This is the main problem with social media in its declining era.
"I encourage my competitors to take some really bad advice" simply becomes tiresome when the rest of the traffic has been pushed away and that's all that remains in the social media sphere.
In the US, most people are overweight, not underweight. I'm not a medical student, but I can imagine that if the average American lost 10% of their excess body weight, the improvement to their health (and subsequently public health) would be enormous. But public officials don't address this like they did when I was growing up. Now we just have this weird culture of "fat acceptance", I guess to presumably spare peoples' feelings.
You’re not a medical student, so you wouldn’t know, but it’s well studied that making people feel bad for being fat actually makes them fatter. So sparing their feelings about their fatness is actually the correct behavior if we want to encourage the average American to lose weight. A fat person isn’t ignorant about their fatness, but not treating them any different for being fat is actually the path to get them thin.
>It's well studied that making people feel bad for being fat actually makes them fatter.
Thanks for the downvote. That doesn't mean that doctors shouldn't tell their patients to lose some freaking weight if they're obese. Fat sympathy is a cultural problem. But also all the seed oils, sugars, and fakeness in our foods is another problem.
I didn’t downvote you. Im just telling you that displays of fat shaming actually make fat people fatter, statistically, while there’s no evidence that fat sympathy does the same (and in fact might do the opposite).
I recorded my meal sizes and weight and various other features for a year and did some machine learning using gbdt and shap values. One result out of my expectation was that big breakfasts tends to help weight loss. After that I seached and found the book "the big breakfast diet". I find it in line with my data and followed this diet afterwards.
Firstly: the two mentions of sample sizes are 485 and 16. The 485 didn't sound very controlled ("asked to eat larger meals at a certain time")
Next; there's no details on why.
> "the study found that eating later caused the participants to burn less fat and fewer calories, and pushed their fat cells to store more fat."
This makes little sense.. unless the users activity level changes, the only other calorie burning I'm aware of is your base metabolic rate.. so eating later is possibly slowing down your metabolic rate?
> The 485 didn't sound very controlled ("asked to eat larger meals at a certain time")
This is typically how it's done though: if you were to make a subselection of the treatment group to only include those that adhered to the intervention then (a) you risk undoing the randomization, because people who are more likely to adhere to the protocol are likely different in other ways as well and (b) the effect size you'd report would be a best case scenario, not realistically the kinds of results a dietician would see when helping people.
On a related topic: wouldn't the "time in body" be a larger factor on weight loss? Most nutrients are extracted I'm the intestines, so meals earlier in the day, followed by afternoon coffee and afternoon/evening vigorous exercise should mean you extract get calories from your food as these activities encourage your body to push through food without digesting them as fully...
It's explained in the paragraph right before the one you quoted.
>A look at their hormone levels showed why: Eating later caused their levels of ghrelin, a hormone that increases appetite, to spike, while simultaneously suppressing their levels of leptin, a hormone that causes satiety.
Although the article advocates for eating breakfast, I found what works best for me was skipping breakfast, skipping lunch, and eating a single meal a day, also known as OMAD (one meal a day). For me, this intermittent fasting routine started back in July 2022, when I initially starting experimenting.
Net result: lost 20 pounds and 5 months later, glad to report not only has the weight stayed off but my (fasted) glucose levels dropped to below prediabetic levels (i.e. 99 mg/dL)
Exactly, I’ve done OMAD continuously for two years now and it has worked well for me. The only thing you should be looking at is it’s hard to get all your vitamins and minerals from one meal a day so make sure you take a multivitamin.
The results described in the article talk about weight loss mostly in overweight and obese individuals. The other health benefits are improved blood sugar regulation and insulin sensitivity when eating in the morning rather than at night.
The book “How Not to Diet” by Dr. Michael Greger has a section about this, referencing similar studies.
It's looks poorly worded. I thing they're trying to say that late-day metabolism is less efficient at signalling the brain "plenty of food down here in the stomach, so flip the Hunger Bit to 0 now".
It's like they are genetically incapable of eating less and better and need to turn everything into a competition. This time against weight. "If you eat at night obesity won't notice, because it's sleeping!".
Apparently being the richest country in the World is not enough to afford healthy and quality food for everybody.
Doesn't matter when you eat,if you eat less calories than those you burn you'll lose weight. Yes, it will take time of course, but the good news is it's gonna last.
It's not rocket science.
edit: as an experiment, start by cutting a big chunk from your portions. Many say to cut in a half, it might be too much, reduce them by 30% for a month and see what happens. If you feel like you have no energy, eat a small portion of fresh fruit, for example half a banana, an orange or two mandarins, depending on the season.
Obviously Americans, who are also very touch when you point out they aren't perfect, took this personally.
So to lend them a hand, I'll leave this here, it talks about Samoans, who are not as easily offended.
From a very young age American children are trained to associate daily activities with food. Americans have a food for everything and that food is present, in abundance, wherever profit is to be had.
(Seriously, list an activity and I'll reply with at least one food pairing.)
Ask any dedicated American dieter how challenging it is to go out with friends or visit family without being put in multiple situations in which they are the only one not eating or eating something far healthier than everyone else.
This requires willpower of which no person has an unlimited reserve.
The basis for obesity is undeniably food addiction. How can we expect addicts to fight uphill against a system and a culture which has evolved to profit from their failure?
> Ask any dedicated American dieter how challenging it is to go out with friends or visit family without being put in multiple situations in which they are the only one not eating or eating something far healthier than everyone else.
That's exactly what always amazes me.
I can't pinpoint when Americans started allowing themselves to eat unhealthy food to make someone else profit.
I never witnessed it anywhere else in the World, except poor countries where access to healthy food is hard or too expensive.
Of course it is not specific to USA, but nowhere it is so widespread as in the USA in my experience.
As an Italian with an Italian mother, I can totally relate to the obsession for food, I am in no way fan of the constant eating and talking about food all the time, while my mother's main concern it's the perfectly stereotypical "did you eat? and what did you eat?", she's been asking the same question everyday for as long as I can remember, but it's also closely linked to eating well and healthy.
What amazes me is that USA has all the potentials to be the best place in the World to eat, I've honestly ate better cooked pasta in some NY restaurant than at home in Italy, only problem is that it was unreasonably expensive, 5 times more than an expensive restaurant in the centre of Rome or Milan.
Maybe it's one of those things that the market cannot fix.
I don't think this is a definitive factor. Most societies organise around food and most activities have food either as a central component or at least available.
The quality of the food associated with these activities is probably a lot more significant.
The (I guess related) thing I noticed in the US was not just the portion sizes but the drink sizes. A small coffee looks like it comes in a milkshake cup. Soft drinks are enormous and/or come with unlimited refills.
I wonder if people who are paying attention to what they eat are equally as conscious about what they drink.
There is a tab-or-space discussion around whether skipping breakfast is okay or not. Personally I feel way better when I plan to skip it for a few weeks, I feel the spark of feeling activated and feel less hungry during the day. I won't skip it on weekends I feel like I deserve that glorious breakfast though.
I preferred to skip breakfast, but filter coffee on an empty stomach would leave me with two days of brutal heartburn. Switching long-term to espresso made my tummy much happier and let me skip (or delay) breakfasts once again. YMMV.
Weight loss aside, eating a lot early just makes more sense. You can go the whole day hungry and tired, or you can go the whole day not hungry and tired. It just makes sense to put the big meal in the morning than at night.
Indication of a diet too high in carbs, leading to insulin levels being too high, leading to a crash in blood glucose, leading to feelings of cold and starvation. Which some people can, temporarily, white-knuckle self discipline thru, but most cannot.
My personal IF is based on not feeling hungry. Sure, I'm self disciplined and hit the gym and all that, but I don't need any discipline for my diet.
Self discipline is only useful for weight loss when food shopping, not when cooking or eating. I can't binge the entire pack of oreos if I don't buy a pack of oreos. And I don't feel hunger or hypoglycemic because I minimize my carb intake, which minimizes my craving for carbs.
If so many companies were not making so much money selling hyperrefined carb junk food, that stuff would probably be regulated as an addictive drug. Abuse of those products certainly kills people at a young age.
Opposite anecdote: when I tried skipping breakfast for a month I was so miserable for the entire time and my mind could only think about the time of the next meal.
My nutritionist recommended to eat the three meals at the same hour. She even told me to separate them evenly thru the day, e.g., breakfast at 10, lunch at 2 (4 hours later) and dinner at 6 (again 4 hours later).
This is pretty similar to sleep advice, go to bed and wake up at the same time, every day.
I read somewhere that when you do things at the same hour every day your body prepare for the activity. I can't find the link, but might be curious to know if there's any study to back it up.
Once I started eating only beef I noticed that I was just naturally hungry much less often. I've heard the same from other people who follow a diet of only red meat -- it is rare to eat more than twice a day. In fact, when I had to go off my diet a while ago during a trip to India I began getting annoyed at how often I got hungry and had to eat.
You'd probably get the same effect from chowing down on eggs. Protein does it. Also, being sick of eating eggs all the time might help curb your appetite :)
During 2021 I ate only beef, eggs, fish, and cheese and I drank a fair amount of milk. I ended the year in absolutely fantastic shape. Note that this was not a keto diet because of the carbs in the milk. But it was diet without any calories from any plant-based source.
During 2022 I relaxed my diet significantly, began drinking beer again, had a pizza here or there, and then gained 15 pounds of belly fat which gave me low back pain.
So in October 2022, I decided that I would go back to a strict diet. I am now eating almost only beef. I'll have eggs a couple of times a week. I'm cutting back on dairy almost entirely and I am currently in ketosis as a result.
> This pattern of eating aligns with our circadian rhythms, the innate 24-hour clock that governs many aspects of our health, from our daily hormonal fluctuations and body temperatures to our sleep-wake cycles.
I thought this had been debunked a while ago. Have nutritionists gone full circle?
Nutritionism is a "science" with virtually no reproduciblity/replication. Its generally impossible to properly test diets and such.
There's a tremendous history of nutrition science being published with intentional bias. Only in 2005 when you must now declare any conflicts of interest have we suddenly had huge quiet zones. Evil things in our diets in 2004 suddenly not anymore.
There is nothing scientific in nutrition science. Conflicts of interests, ideological diets like veganism or keto, corporate intromission, religious bias against certain food, impossibility of controlling if the participants to the study are actually following the diet, lots of self reporting and so on and on...
Interesting direction, but didn't see any quantification of the impact (of eating earlier in the day) on long-term health indicators. Hopefully we will see that later if this has any substance.
This is too bad because I rarely want to eat in the mornings. I’ve always skipped breakfast because I can’t build an appetite until lunchtime. I truly enjoy the food during dinner however.
Surprised to see this from Anahad (who just moved to WaPo) after he popularized the “fasting doesn’t help you lose weight” study back in 2020 when still at NYT.
I read a journal article saying the opposite to this one, just 2 weeks ago; how it's not how much you eat, but what you eat and when (protein and fats in the morning, carbs in the evening - which funny enough the article above actually denounces). It results in better sleep and as such, improved health and longevity.
Eat what you want, when you want, and provided it's not too much or too processed then you'll likely be validating one study or another. I wish click-bait diet article fluff would crawl back into the tabloid, gas stations magazines they crawled from.
Skipping breakfast is found to be slightly more beneficial than skipping dinner: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28490511/