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What Hacker News says
- Check out The Shangri-La Diet by Seth Roberts for a way to hack your set point with a daily tablespoon of flavorless cooking oil. I'm sure someone on the web has written up the details if you don't want to read the book.
- Since that doesn't work, you should try something different -
Seth Roberts' Shangri-La "diet" seems to work extremely well for about 80% of the people (and not at all for the remaining 20%). I quote "diet" because it involves ADDING 200-400 calories a day to your intake (albeit with some weird specific constraints).
It worked for me for a while, and then stopped. Other things worth trying are atkins style diets, Dave Asprey's BP diet (4500kcal/day, but with extreme attention to details) or even the Tim Ferriss advocated "slow carb" system.
It seems that no diet works for 100% of the people, and those that are not crackpot work for 80% but not more. I guess variance (biome or otherwise) is much larger than assumed - or there's a missing ingredient in diet that is being overlooked.
- Yes, though it depends on when you start paying attention and how you define "intermittent". My intermittent varies from 8-16 hours per day and 1-3 days per week depending on autophagy and ketosis, both of which appear at ~ 48 hours for me but can go from 24-36 hours depending on exercise, i.e. there are risks in running long distances while fasting, but I have a daily carry kit that includes gels and fruits so I've not been to an emergency room in 30 years, which brings me to my next point.
Chronic Type 1 Diabetic here so the things I'm about to describe are high risk and are not endorsed by anyone in my world-class care team. They are aware that I understand and accept the risks having grown up and been educated at Children's Hospital and Joslin. I wear an insulin pump and two Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGM).
It's all about executive function. From a root cause perspective, I'd start there since that's really what determines health.
My fasting started 15 years ago when I read Seth Roberts Shangri La Diet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Roberts
I'm one of those people who can balance empirical and phenomenological despite n-of-1 emergent qualities.
In 2007, I'd fast for 3 days liquid-only roughly once every 90 days. I used Roberts extra light olive oil hack (ELOO) to help. I don't do that anymore though it had no negative effects in my experience. I practiced that cadence until 2020.
In 2019, I stopped eating meat. I like meat but it was the easiest way to get the caloric load and impurities down. From fall 2019 to summer 2020 I lost 50 lbs. Ate plant-based whole foods for two years, then and now vegetarian. Over that time I've varied from 0MAD, 1MAD, and 2MAD while finishing a half and full marathon in 2021 and 2022, respectively. I run mostly daily, varying between 10K and 10 miles with occasional half marathon distances tossed in for good effect.
Post 2022, I've done a series of experiments with some success. Those include emulating Valter Longo's protocol with soup for a Fast-Mimicking Diet (FMD). Also, my current regimen has been eating M-W-F and fasting T-Th-Sat-Sun. I sustained that for a couple weeks and I'm eating once or twice daily now. I'll probably reverse the intermittent binge-ing in new experiments, so 4 days eat, 3 days fast per week; theme and variations.
I'll probably return to a odd-metered cadence of fast-feast weeks as it made meals much easier with the challenges you mention.
For whatever reason, I ate 5-6K calories/day from high school through college and couldn't fast a few hours. At my age now, fasting is easier than eating and could very well be related to delayed gastric emptying or some other complication of disease. I have no evidence.
The less I eat, the better I feel, while benefiting from the anecdotal improvement in cognitive function that comes with ketosis. Like leading ultramarathon runners, I don't practice ketosis as perfection, but rather, a state I hit occasionally without making it an end-goal. Paraphrasing Peter Attia, it's the cycle, not the state that matters.
The limiting factor for me is of course not ketosis, but ketoacidosis. The former is well-managed for me because it's predictable, euglycemic, and easy-to-fix with carbs. The latter was common enough to me as a young person that I know the ketosis flu feeling well and avoid it by testing compulsively. Just like software!
FWIW, I've vomited water in euglycemic ketosis and know enough to avoid the emergency room. This scares my medical team, since there are truly frightening and deadly side effects (refeeding syndrome), but I'm still here.
I've worked in medical devices and healthcare so my learning has been enhanced by those experiences where we treated patients who responded well to coaching around metabolic illness including cancer and diabetes, both of which respond to diet and fasting.
- I think the ultimate weird tip for weight loss is the Shangri-La Diet[0]. Seth Roberts was a professor at Berkeley who pioneered quantified self, and he ran many experiments with N=1. While it didn't do much for me, about 50% of the people that try it have some success. I would skip directly to walnut oil if you try it, as the other oils are less palatable. Since I wasn't seeing any effect after a couple of months, I went back to using those 300 calories on food I enjoyed while losing weight.
Everyone on this forum should be familiar with The Hacker's Diet[1], a free book from the founder of AutoCAD with a very engineering orientation. I have been recording data into my free account at The Hacker's Diet Online[2] for four years, and I find the exponential smoothing very useful to turn daily weight measurements into the underlying weights. If you weight yourself every day, you can notice trends in a few days and make corrections, instead of catching a trend over a few weeks. Just be aware that something like 8.3lbs of "stuff" (food, water, feces) flow through your body every day, and there are major variations day by day. Don't panic just because your daily weight is up one day. And after awhile, if you are at least writing down what you eat (just the name, not weights) everyday, you will pretty easily predict your weight the next day because that list is rather longer than a normal day, or you had a big pile of french fries for lunch one day.
A few tips I use:
Eat quantized food if possible. Instead of sitting down with a bag of chips or a box of cookies, eat food that is always in the same size so you have to make the mental decision to eat more than one. Babybel cheeses, Snyder's 60ct box of 100 calorie pretzel packs, etc. work for me.
Weigh in every morning, naked, empty bladder (so the minimum possible for the day), and write that number down BY HAND. Do not use some automated app that saves you that mindfulness period between reading the number and writing it down. You will see a thousand messages today suggesting you eat. You must take some time everyday to think about what you weigh, and what you are going to put in your mouth. The food companies are counting on you not putting any attention on it. You must put regular attention on it, or you will gain weight.
Sometimes we have a minor craving for something sweet, but popping a cookie whenever that happens can blow the whole day. I keep jars of jalapeno relish and when I have an urge for something sweet, I eat a small spoonful of the spicy relish. I get the urge for something sweet in my mouth satisfied, but it is spicy enough that I'm not eating a lot of it. Walmart's Bread & Butter Pickles do the same for me: a few chips in the sweet/tangy juice and the craving is satisfied, and only $1.50 for a big 500 calorie jar.
Be very careful with fasting. It is a great technique if you manage to retain muscle tissue. If you fast without exercising, 25% of the weight loss is lean mass, which is an utter disaster for your health, especially as you age. Bone broth is high protein and may be a nice supplement while fasting. The more active muscle on your body, the more insulin sensitive you are and that mitigates the crashes from eating carbs.
Avoid potato chips like the plague. Since chips are dehydrated, you can eat an enormous number of calories at one sitting and not even feel full.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shangri-La_Diet
- The safety is trivial, the cost is minuscule. The worst thing the critics say about it is that "it wasn't peer reviewed or done in a big study". Indeed, it wasn't - but asking for it in this case is simply cargo cult.
Most diets, whether tested in a large scale study or a small one, don't work equally well (if at all) on all participants - you'll notice that more often than not the only thing reported is the average weight loss, and that's usually because at least one participant didn't lose anything (or even gained).
The Shangri-La diet actually followed from experimental results in rats and people, which Roberts published, for free, on his own website[0], with all rationale, all the references you can ask for, and a description of his personal experience. This paper became very popular, but is too detailed for most people, that a publisher approached Roberts with a request to write a simplified version for lay people, and it is this book version that became an NYTimes best seller.
"No backing studies" in this case is knee jerk reaction -- when you can just try yourself at essentially zero cost and zero risk. Personally, it worked for me when I tried it; Roberts collected anecdotes from people on his website, urging anyone who tried to report starting and then their progress; IIRC, he assumed anyone who started and didn't report progress (there weren't many) as "didn't work", and after a year or so, it had ~80% success rate.
[0] http://media.sethroberts.net/about/whatmakesfoodfattening.pd...
- Yup. It's the same idea as Seth Roberts' "Shangri-la Diet" where you drink a tbsp of olive oil or something first thing in the morning which supposedly reduces hunger the rest of the day.
