I'm not sure intermittent fasting is really for me, but I am curious about it and some of the claims of energy levels. However, it's one of those health practices where there's a ton of discussion around the benefits, and then on closer look I realize 90% of them are talking about weight loss, which is not something I need or that interests me at all.
I find I run into this all the time. In nearly every online discussion weight loss is synonymous with health improvement - true for many people, but it makes navigating these topics in larger public spaces a minefield for someone on the lower end of what is traditionally considered a healthy range.
At the moment I just have to avoid any specific practices and stick to the basics: staying active, eating whole foods (:im-vegan:), getting enough sleep, breaks from sitting, refraining from too much alcohol, stretching, etc. Also the psychosocial side: maintaining community around me, getting enough nature, work-life balance, yada yada yada.
How do you parse this out? Can anyone speak to benefits from a practice like intermittent fasting (or anything else touted) if you're not trying to shed pounds? Does anyone else resonate with my position?
Not trying to whine as being thin comes with a lot of fucking privilege.
EDIT: I wasn't intended this post to be exclusively about intermittent fasting. I'm curious about it in particular, but I also wanted to speak to the general phenomenon that so much of the general health advice I see around is actually just weight loss advice. This is pervasive outside of discussions too - books and articles outside of strict academic work seem to conflate the two all the time because for a large portion of the audience that's really what they're after.
AFAIK dietitians (credentialed experts) promote multiple small meals a day on a whole food diet
A lot of the stuff out there is written by cranks trying to sell you something. I’d research the opinion of scientists who do this for a living before embarking on any new regimen.
AFAIK dietitians (credentialed experts) promote multiple small meals a day on a whole food diet.
Any good reading you can recommend on this from a credentialed expert or an academic?
Just my personal experience but I can't imagine intermittent fasting offering much benefit to somebody not trying to lose weight. I've done it in the past, and am currently trying to readjust to doing it, because I find it easier to stay under eating a certain amount if I am eating one medium sized meal in the evening rather than several very small meals throughout the day.
Idk, I know people talk about other stuff it supposedly does but I can't say I ever experienced that. Feels like there is a lot of people who are just looking for weird practices to get into so they can feel like they are "optimizing" how they live or w/e. I wouldn't worry too much about it.
I hate when weight loss is equated to being healthy. At my thinnest I was being terribly overworked at a shit job, getting hardly any sleep, and eating one meal a day. My body and self felt horrible but I was getting compliments galore about my like 40 pound drop in a very short timeframe due to those conditions. I became much more healthy after taking care of myself. In that I am now what some people would consider overweight but I'm in a good place and much healthier so what does it matter.
For me being healthy is carrying weight and while it's different for everyone I think the mindset of seeing a fat person as inherently unhealthy is bullshit and also fatphobic all around :shrug-outta-hecks:
Being heavy correlates to some bad health outcomes, but so do a lot of other things, often more so than weight does. As far as I understand the obsession with weight as the be all and end all of health is almost entirely brainworms and doctors being twits.
For energy or 'health'? I don't think intermittent fasting is particularly great for those, but also people are built different, so you might see some benefit.
It does (theoretically) have some other benefits though. It can help you 'reset' some stuff, like for example if you're trying to cut down on a sugar 'addiction', a fast can help you readjust your taste buds (or w/e) to lower sugar. It can also just help you with willpower and self control.
It does carry some risks though, so be aware of that.
Many people who practice it make claims about their energy levels going way up, which is what piqued my curiosity. Also, there is a bit of logistical convenience that comes with only eating within a certain period.
In the end it's probably not for me. But the post was meant to be about more than just IF.
It does (theoretically) have some other benefits though. It can help you ‘reset’ some stuff, like for example if you’re trying to cut down on a sugar ‘addiction’, a fast can help you readjust your taste buds (or w/e) to lower sugar. It can also just help you with willpower and self control.
Honestly I kinda wish people who did it could just do it for asetic and spiritual purposes as opposed to trying to make everything about physical health, as if we can measure someone morally by their attempts to min/max their body
Oh boy this is uh quite a topic and Ima get caught up writing way too much on it so some things that are important while I type up the rest:
Our bodies are on what we call a circadian (daily) rhythm when the rhythm gets disrupted it has a pretty significant impact on our health and stuff like when you go to sleep and important for this question when we eat can impact our circadian rhythm in turn impacting our health. So far the hypothesis is that eating a meal close to ones biological night can have a negative impact on your circadian rhythm. I'll update it a bit later but big warning there's not much that's currently out there about circadian rhythms in general and even less on how it's impacted by feeding windows and macro composition.
Edit:
Alright our body is running on a 'clock' called the circadian rhythm our brain, specifically our hypothalamus, regulate our bodies function on a 24 hours and 15 minute cycle, because of that difference we rely on stimuli to 'reset' our clock, the most important stimuli is light, your eyes detect light coming into your eye and receive that as a signal for their clock, that's why we shouldn't stare at a screen late at night because the blue light messes with our rhythm, though that's fairly easy to solve by just letting the screen shift to a more red hue. Now we recently know that we actually have several other circadian rhythms in our body that while linked to the 'master rhythm' can also be influenced by local stimuli, so far we identified them in the gut, liver, pancreas, adipose tissue and skeletal muscle.
Adverse health effects can occur when there is a serious misalignment between this 'master clock' and local clock, especially when it comes to our metabolism a misalignment between the two clocks can result in elevated glucose and insulin levels, lower leptin levels ('tends to lead to a lower drive for activity') and worse sleep quality.
Here's a great study that looked at the adverse effects that occur when someone has a circadian misalignment and another that examines what happens when people eat at night so generally speaking eating meals close to night, or more accurately our 'body clocks night'. Now we could make a case that that means instead of skipping breakfast what we should be doing is eat a larger breakfast and lunch and skip dinner but so far there haven't been too good quality studies about it, most of them didn't provide participants with meals and would let them self report and a lot of them were more concerned with weight loss than measuring other values, it does seem like eating earlier rather than later could lead to better health outcomes in the linked study we can see lower blood sugar excursions, but again it isn't the best study out there. There also have been a few studies on the circadian rythm, feeding times and health outcomes in mice which leads to better health outcomes when feeding them during a restrictive window, 8 hour and 10 hour windows, but animal data imo only gets us so far.
The two newest studies I know of are one where researchers used a feeding window from 7am to 1pm. Compared to the control it led to a lower postprandial insulin response, better beta-cell function, and less insulin resistance. and one that compared two 9 hour feeding windows one from 8am to 5pm and one from 12pm to 9pm, that didn't see any major differences both windows led to a significantly improved 3 hour PP glucose response.
This is going to be my opinion from here on out it seems that IF can improve ones health but I wouldn't say there's a ton of good studies and science behind it currently.
On the healthy part I go for a 30 min walk every morning do 30 minutes of mobility work/yoga on top, I pretty much tell everyone that they should do the same but I think the vast majority of people get their ideas about health from their doctor, who can't monitor their habits so will just go 'You are overweight better lose some for health reasons'.
Thanks, I'm curious about this side of it. I look forward to your update.
I also wanted to speak to the general phenomenon that so much of the general health advice I see around is actually just weight loss advice
Really makes you think.
The health detriment of weight loss is apparently wildly overstated, especially in comparison to other factors like smoking, drinking, lack of exercise, various diet things, all kinds of comorbidities. It does correlate with negative health outcomes but not nearly to the degree people think, nor does it merit completely ignoring other health issues and focusing entirely on weight loss.
It can reset insulin sensitivity, people bulking/trying to gain weight do find it useful to do it once in a while, so I've heard.
And yes, as someone trying to gain weight and keep my BMI above underweight (18.5), a lot of health advice is pretty bad in this regard.
Personally the only good advice I've found that seems to work is bodybuilders' bulking routines. So yeah, I'm eating some shake concoction of porridge, peanut butter and milks which has over 1000 calories in it, and doing resistance training in the 6-15 rep range, 6 times a week.
If you're not obese there are always other things you can do to help your health. Exercise more, strengthen your muscles, make sure you're eating enough fruits and veggies and not just junk so you aren't "skinny fat", drink enough water and especially get good sleep.,
Seriously, this is highly underrated. Get some blackout curtains, set a sleep schedule and try not to use your bed outside of sleep and your body will slowly begin to associate your bed and that time with going to sleep, and open a window for nice fresh cool air. You're effectively pavloving yourself into it but it helps. Even if you're insomniac, you can still better your chances with a sound strategy.
I think that for a lot of people the most important thing about 'diets' for weight loss or gain is the rules, structure, and mindfulness around food they provide for people who are are not able to 'intuitively eat' (eat in a way that keeps them happy and healthy). Of course once the goal is achieved and the structure is lost many people yo-yo back to their original weight because they haven't learned what healthy eating feels like.
People I've known to achieve their weightloss goals might be experiencing some 'resets' or tapping into some epigenetic stuff, but I think a huge part of it for them is just reducing how much they are eating. Modern society can find someone easily surrounded by not-so-healthy food, so having an rule/excuse to make you say 'no' to the office birthday cake or the Drive-Thru on the way home is a big difference maker. This excuse can be any of the no-carb, wrong time of day, seed-oils, etc rules that are popular nowadays.
In the opposite direction, weight gain diets for the underweight often read as 'If you at least consume this one calorie dense thing every day you won't waste away.' The 'meme' body builder diet GOMAD (Gallon of Milk a Day) is an extreme example, but I know a handful of ADHD/Neurodivergent types who are underweight or chronically dehydrated that have 'at-least' rules and use pre-portioned meal/shakes and phone reminders.
All in all I think a lot of diet success is similar to the exercise adage "The Best Workout (Diet) Program Is the One You Actually Enjoy/Do." However, it might be also the case that to graduate from consistent, conscious dieting to healthy intuitive eating some underlying mental barriers might need to be addressed.
Disclaimer: I am not a dietician or anything close, this is just a pet theory that I've had rolling around for a while.
I like this write-up but I'm actually not sure what it has to do with my post. Thanks anyway.
For dieting, I did the whole30 paleo thing, and I think it was worthwhile outside of weight loss. The idea behind that one is that you avoid this huge list of foods for a month, then slowly introduce them back in and observe their effects. Good way to find out that you actually have a mild allergy to eggs, or that it's specifically greasy food that makes you feel bad, or whatever. I don't think it's worth sticking to a paleo diet long term.
For general energy levels, the biggest things I can suggest are:
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Get enough sleep. Get blackout curtains or a sleep mask if you have to.
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Be up to date on your medical / dental stuff. Tooth infections make you tired.
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Open a window. Modern buildings are so air-tight that you're basically always drowning in CO2 if you keep the windows closed.
Good advice, I like that you mentioned the windows. Thank god I have dental benefits for the first time in my life.
I'm a bit skeptical of elimination diets though, mostly because I think the gut biome complicates the picture and makes the connection between a particular food and how it effects you much less static, not to mention other factors like the interplay between different foods you eat and how they might make each other easier or harder to process. If I started eating dairy again, it would be a long, slow, transition to get myself back to the point of being able to process it properly again and a large number of other factors could change in that time.
I would just like to remind everyone that during the paleolithic we got like 60%+ of our calories from plant sources, at all kinds of fruits and grains, scarfed down starchy tubers wherever we could find them, probably made some kind of bread or seed cakes, and so on and so forth. "Paleo" is just marketing and it is a pet peeve.
That specific paleo diet also mentions this, or at least did eight years ago. The "eat all meat and no bread and you're good" thing never made much sense.
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I really wanna lose weight because i hate how big i am, and have always been made fun of it my whole life. I've lost a lot of weight since 2018 but i need to lose more as I'm not satisfied and find myself really feeling horrible about it.
