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What Hacker News says
- What they're describing here is close to the popular 16:8 variant of intermittent fasting. I found that it doesn't really work for weight loss for me.
Instead, I'm using the Every Other Day Diet variant of intermittent fasting which arguably is the best researched one. It helped me drop weight significantly in 2015 with little trouble (details: http://lukasz.langa.pl/9/i-lost-26-pounds-in-3-months/).
Sadly, since I stopped cycling regularly two years back and dropped the diet a year ago, I regained what I lost and then some. So I'm back on intermittent fasting now.
Recommendations based on my experience:
- weigh yourself daily in the morning, as the very second thing you're doing
- a Withings scale or similar helps putting this in a database efortlessly which helps seeing trends
- observe your moving average of 7 days
- eat just a light lunch (circa 500 kcal) every other day; it's easy to skip breakfast knowing there's going to be lunch soon and it's possible to skip dinner knowing "it's Eat Day tomorrow!"
- eat what you want on Eat Day but do it slowly, your body will quickly adapt to your fasts, the stomach will shrink and it's going to be easier to get full
- let people know you're losing weight and how, they will probably tell you you're more grumpy on Non-Eat Days
Good luck!
- This is a great article. I'm always in favor of flexible and scientific approaches to dieting. Lyle McDonald wrote a great series of articles on why diets fail (hint: it's a hormone called leptin) [1]. Caloric deficits lead to decreasing leptin, which explains why you feel like crap when dieting because this leads to metabolic slowdown by downregulating things like your immune system (why you get sick more when you diet) and reproductive system (why you lose your sex drive). Leptin's effects on the hunger-controlling hypothalamus explain why you may obsess over calorie-dense junk foods when you diet. It's your body's protection against starvation, but it goes all haywire in our obesogenic (obesity-causing) environment.
So what's the best way to acutely raise leptin levels when they're depressed from caloric restriction? Flexible diet solutions like the ones talked about in the article. High-carb "refeeds" - some people call them cheat days - are particularly helpful [2]. The trick is to binge on carbs (not fat!!!) while remaining at a caloric deficit, which is where a calorie journal definitely comes in handy. Things like sweet potatoes and pasta will fill you up and replete your leptin levels.
As an aside, while we're talking about leptin and flexible dieting, intermittent fasting is wonderful for flexible dieting. I'm working on a website right now that's based on the leangains method [3], which is great for folks in the moderately overweight category. For severely overweight or obese folks, Dr. Krista Varady (who I had the pleasure of speaking with on the phone recently), has published a ton of research on intermittent fasting over the past decade and just wrote a book called the Every Other Day Diet [4], which I highly recommend for anyone trying to lose a lot of weight quickly and safely and keep it off.
[1] http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-hormones-of-bo...
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11126336
[3] http://www.leangains.com/2010/03/intermittent-fasting-set-po...
[4] http://www.amazon.com/The-Every-Other-Day-Diet-That-Weight/d...
