Intermittent fasting is one of my favorite bullshit diets because if I’m to believe instagram influencers? When you eat your food in a small window of time, there’s a quantum flux in the food-mouth window, and the calories are sucked into the vacuum of space.
That’s about as accurate as almost everything else I’ve read about intermittent fasting, so.
Today’s Moment of Science… intermittent bullshit.
There’s a frequently cited idea that fasting has some interesting metabolic effects, including lowering insulin, leading to increased weight loss. It’s also posited that a person will burn more calories during fasted periods regardless of the number of overall calories consumed.
Hooboy.
To be fair, plenty of myths that have been propagated about when and how often we’re supposed to eat. Breakfast isn’t “the most important meal of the day,” either in terms of when we eat or the types of food we arbitrarily shovel down with our coffee. Daily meal frequency doesn’t, to any significant degree, alter metabolism. And there’s no set number of times a day that a healthy person should eat.
So indeed, a person can go on an intermittent fasting schedule to absolutely no deleterious effects. But can someone eat less frequently and bank health benefits out of some metabolic trickery?
That’s a big fat… maybe? At this point, there are some small but measurable impacts on various health markers. A reduction in insulin production is one of the known effects of fasting. Though we can speculate, the overall influence on long term health from this is difficult to project. So far the impact from this has been shown to be bigger in animal models, with studies showing decreased healing times and better inflammation markers.
As for weight itself? A veritable stack of studies show that meal frequency itself does not directly affect weight. It’s likely that for some people, eating in an intermittent fasting pattern helps maintain a habit of eating fewer calories, which leads to weight reduction.
Which means if it fucking works for someone and their doctor says it’s cool, it can be perfectly healthy. But it also means that there’s no compelling health reason that someone needs to do this if whatever they’re doing now is already working for them. So if you’re trying to balance your health and you need to eat on a regular schedule either for medical reasons or just because you’ll cut a bitch? You’ll be fine if you intermittently grab yourself that goddamn snickers.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, still waiting for the Diet Coke and tacos diet to take off.
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The big advantage to intermittent(ish) fasting: Once I got used to it, my body quit claiming to be hungry outside my normal feeding window. I’m pretty sure the advantages are almost entirely psychological…but that’s pretty important by itself.
exercise more important than calorie restriction. many people can live quite happily on pbjs and ramen.
Exercise is not more important. We use exercise to get our lungs, heart, and muscles into shape, but the amount of control that it has over calories is so much lower than our food intake.
You can kill off the amount of food that you burn in a ten mile run in a matter of minutes. I’ve done a lot of running in my life. You have to control the calories too.