Originally published at: Once again, eating less, less often shown to help people manage their weight | Boing Boing
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I also only eat one meal a day, most days. Have done so for twenty or thirty years. People tell me it’s fantastically bad for me and I’ll surely drop dead any day now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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In the same way that changes in microbiomes is being shown to be related to the increase in colon cancer in younger people- I think factors other than self control are involved in the increase in weight over the decades.
And some consideration needs to be given to when and if obesity is a major health problem for an individual. I lost a lot of weight. But my cholesterol was always excellent. My blood pressure did not change. 
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It’s just your standard conservation law:
[accumulation] = [in] - [out]
This is fundamentally, physiologically, wrong. Unless the caloric deficit is small, the action that statement describes leads primarily to muscle mass loss, does very little to affect body fat, and increases endocrine stress (worsening or increasing risk of diabetes).
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My experience has been that not eating as many and as much of sugary desert foods - but eating as many calories with healthy fats helped maintain my weight. Oh - and lowered my A1C - forgot about that one!
It’s walnuts - all the way down.
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It’s not rocket science. I was doing a 5/2 for a while (600 calories for 2 days a week) and that’s hard. But I’m currently trying to do 12 hour fasting (only eat from 8am to 8pm) and what that does is completely eliminate my late night snacks which are rarely healthy. I’m thinking of going to 16 hour (eat from 12pm to 8pm) and eliminate a meal completely. It’s harder than I expected to eat all the calories back when I limit my daily feeding times (whereas on 5:2 fasting I tended to overeat on the day after my 600 calorie day, and I found it really hard to exercise on the fast days.)
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I do 16 hr fasting and got there by slowly moving my breakfast time closer to lunch over 8 months or so. Unless its a special occasion I don’t think about breakfast anymore and when I do eat early I have a lot more cravings.
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600 calorie days - that’s just not healthy.
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For me, it seems to depend on how much energy I expend vs how much I eat… If I don’t eat and lay around on the sofa, I lose muscle mass. If I don’t eat but spend all my waking hours walking around and/or ultraviolence, I lose fat, not muscle.
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The rule of thumb should be, whatever works for you, do it. But when we extend it to a diverse population, it goes back to how bodies, organs, and cells work. And there’s simply no cheat code to being healthy. It takes work and it takes time, because that’s how the underlying physiology functions. Is it possible to lose weight fast by running a big deficit (either by eating a normal amount but exercising heavily or by less exercise and very little caloric intake)? Definitely. Is that weight loss sustainable or healthy? Nope.
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Some days I am like that.Especially the weekend.
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I can only think of 3 ways to reliably lose weight -
- malnutrition. Most people call this “dieting”.
- get a wasting disease like terminal cancer.
- expend more energy than you take in.
That last one is kinda like “well if you want to be rich why don’t you just make more money” though. I mean, if you have that level of control over your intake and output, you’re probably not overweight.
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well, i will continue to eat three meals a day, be relatively active, and exercise. it works for me.
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I have no useful advice to give anyone about how many meals to eat or when to eat them, but it’s interesting to me that Sumo wrestlers only eat 2 meals per day when training and gaining weight. (Obviously they aren’t small meals.)
How does one perform intermittent fasting without being hangry most of the time?
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You get over it. Hangry is the feeling you get when your body is screaming for glucose because it’s still used to burning carbs and only carbs. Once the body gets the hang of switching to ketones (what your body burns when there are no carbs available), that feeling disappears.
I started intermittent fasting back in 2020. The last hour of the fast (from 2pm to 3pm, then later and later as I increased the length of the fast) was murder. But only for a couple of weeks. Then my body adapted and now I’m never hangry, even if I haven’t eaten all day.
Like right now, for example. I’ve had coffee and nothing else today. It’s nearly 7pm. In an hour or so I’ll sit down for dinner and I’ll be happy and enthusiastic, but not hangry.
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Except “in” and “out” are interdependent so it’s not as easy as all that.
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and for a Type 1 Diabetes, it can be a complete crapshoot. Some days I am almost constantly grazing to keep my glucose levels up in a safe range, other days I am sky high and fasting/taking excessive insulin/exercising to bring it down.
I always describe Diabetes as an engineering project balancing energy inputs with energy output, but with a large, changing, fiddle factor.
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