Timeframe of 8-hour restricted eating irrelevant to weight loss

It's the most effective way I've found to lose weight. I don't think it's doing anything magical to my metabolism. Like you say, it's just a convenient and easy-to-maintain way of eating less. I just know that I don't eat anything in a day until after I get home from work, and I don't even have to think about it.

> Yes, but I need some practice > being hungry after years of stuffing > my face whenever I felt like it.

Why do you need such practice?

I'd honestly rather suffer an hour doing unpleasant cardio to burn off carbs than spending all day feeling miserable and shaky from hunger. Particularly on jobs or tasks where mental focus is essential.

So would you agree that the main reason for your weight loss on OMAD is caloric restriction from not being allowed to eat when you're sometimes hungry, when you probably would have eaten extra at those times before OMAD?

Visceral fat has long-term memory, and also come as the last in the line. So the diet mentioned in the study may not have started the visceral fat reduction at all…

And I forgot, you have to exercise, HIIT, calories deficit is not enough.

Forget about Ozempic and other drugs, they are good for people with diabetes. And you have to use them for the rest of life, otherwise there is yoyo effect.

Fat distribution, including subcutaneous vs visceral, has very clear racial/ethnic genetic associations, not to mention sex. East Asian and especially South Asian groups skew much more toward visceral fat, while European and especially African groups toward subcutaneous fat. Beyond calories in/calories out, generalized advice in this context might not be as helpful on an individual basis as with other health matters. In the context of diet & weight things are already complicated, but at least in this area we know why and can more easily predict how one person's body is likely to respond vs another. (Though, it might just come down to some ethnic groups having to put in alot more effort--e.g. much greater reduction in overall weight--than others for the same reduction in visceral fat.)

It's a bit to do with a change in diet and lifestyle to accompany the eating window but there is definitely something else at play as well.

The human body is an amazing machine and it has all sorts of abilities that we are unaware of. When you starve, your body starts shutting down non essential things first, starts pulling nutrients from everywhere it and limiting activity. Starvation has both a physical and mental element to it - both during the process and following it.

Intermittent fasting has been demonstrated to start a regenerative process in the body. It triggers cellular autophagy, which is kind of like running a cellular defrag.

There have been a lot of studies lately that look into the regenerative aspects of deep sleep following a serious injury - I sus that's the same system behind both things.

In response to the stress of not eating as usual, the body reacts. The mind does too. It sucks while you are starting it but it's nice to be able to know that you can skip of day of eating and be fine. After eating a big dinner and a good night's sleep you should have more energy and feel better for no real reason. I sus this has to do with how we ate while we were evolving - life was just a cycle of involuntarily intermittent fasting.

Unless you do strenuous activity all day - food is energy, you will be wore out of you do too much. The food you first eat after matters too!

Don't make a donut or highly processed/sweetened food the first nutrients after fasting - you'll feel like you ran a marathon. Simple carbs and protein - rice and black beans or oatmeal with seeds is typically what I do.

Everyone is different tho - whatever works for you! All the best of luck, sorry this is apparently my rant for the day - better topic than normal

I've been following Jason Fung and "intermittent fasting" for six or seven years.

I notice that the specific wording "time-restricted eating" has gained popularity in the past couple of years, possibly because "time-restricted" is less of a red flag to the public than "fasting," which may bring up some emotional baggage.

The reason for renaming is just speculation on my part - what's clear is that the eating protocol is the same, only the wording is different.

> You're making a bit of a leap with "made no difference."

I was paraphrasing the results of the study, which was designed specifically to see if fasting would reduce visceral fat as compared to a non-fasting regimen. If you read the abstract I cited, you'll see that there's not even any mention of overall body weight in the abstract -- that finding is buried in a figure of the paper, and mentioned basically in passing.

As for losing losing visceral fat versus other fat, that's partially true, but reality is a little bit more complex than that. Two people with the same 20% body fat can have radically different proportions of visceral and subcutaneous (under the skin) fat, and it's the person with more visceral fat who is at risk. This is why you have studies like this designed to find ways to target visceral fat.

"by time restricted eating you are breaking the cycle of eating out of habit when you are not even hungry.. or eating because you crave a certain taste or sensation in the body (as opposed to actually being hungry). You are training the mind/body out of these behaviours so that during the times when you are allowed to eat you are trained not to eat unless actually hungry, for example."

You are describing what I posted above. This is a behavioral tool to achieve a mechanism of caloric deficit. Getting out of a cycle of pointless eating is the definition of behavioral shift.

Not exactly sure what you are describing in the next paragraph but we have studies that equate calories between time restricted eating and non time restricted eating and find no statistical difference in expected weight outcomes.

Yes there are differences is hormonal hunger signaling etc. My point is rather that a calorie deficit is why the weight loss occurs. The time restricted eating is the METHOD some choose to help achieve it.

Great to hear!

It's very easy to observe the changes you mention: A lack of energy in activities in the short term, which you can control with diet adjustments. In the long term (over the course of a few months), you should be tracking your weight chart and reducing your intake.

The body can adjust to caloric deficits, but not so much that consistent effort over weeks will be blocked.

I think it's necessary to mention how to deal with these changes, whenever they're mentioned.

Yes of course. The impact of caloric restriction on metabolism however is FAR overstated as we know from the available literature. "Starvation mode" is largely relegated to pseudo science at this point and most of the reduction in metabolism you speak of is due weight loss itself and a small reduction in NEAT.

But yes the human body is a complicated system effected by hormones, and other individual factors.

However it is important for the layman to understand the basics. It VERY rarely helps people struggling with weight loss to gloss over the basics and talk about metabolic adaption or provide other "excuses" like PCOS, hormones or starvation mode. They miss the forest for the trees.

I think the approach here is to overestimate your calories a bit if you're not sure. Practice makes perfect when it comes to eyeballing quantities.

Counting calories even when you don’t have a scale and/or barcodes gets much easier over time as long as you do a few things. One, actually bring a scale when you’re eating out for a bit. It’s a pain, but can help calibrate how much you’re actually eating. This works best with meals that have individual components. Two, use an app that has a good database of food (I use MacroFactor, but I have no clue how good Noom is). There’s plenty of entries for various salad types, and the majority of the calories in a salad tend to be the dressing and any meat anyways. With those two things, even eating out you’ll be a lot more accurate. As long as most of your meals aren’t falling into the estimation category, it also likely won’t have a huge impact on your weight loss goals either.

For me it worked to just estimate and tend to miss high... so if you're not sure how much of something there is, just guess and keep increasing until you're like "well it's definitely not THAT much"... and if I wasn't losing weight I adjusted my estimates up assuming I hadn't hit the mark.

Agreed it isn't simple, but I'm just saying tracking is effective. Tracking is in fact the single most effective way of ensuring a deficit. But yes it isnt easy and you can absolutely be successful in achieving a deficit without tracking. A food scale and weighing and understanding portion sizes for a couple weeks can be a lifetime level learning that you can apply though even if you don't stick to it - as most won't.

Much like you can save money without strict budgeting. I'm saying tracking is objectively "true" contrary to your statement. That doesn't make it easy though. Some find the other suggestions difficult. It is important to find what works for you.

A few nitpicks with this:

-Yes some studies show that increasing high intensity cardio or LISS cardio vs very low intensity cardio like walking can lead to both higher hunger and a reduction in NEAT, however it isn't correct to necessarily say walking is better.

Walking is also effective, but there is a clear dose response effect here:

-If you run or swim etc for an hour, even with a reduction in NEAT for the rest of the day, you will have burned more calories net than walking for an hour, though it is more taxing.

There are other benefits to higher intensity cardio than pure caloric expenditure (there are also drawbacks).

Walking is cardio. It’s not high intensity cardio, but it’s cardio nonetheless. The main point of cardio for burning calories is to raise your heart rate; walking is the most sustainable way to do this, although it isn’t the fastest way, time wise.

> Calories in calories out is not an immutable law.

It actually can be, if you define both "in" and "out" in a way which makes it so; but for any definition of those terms where it is an immutable law, we, in practice, have only very rough proxy measures for at least one, and maybe both, of "calories in" or "calories out", and the problem then becomes mistaking the proxy for the actual figure of merit.

But the bigger problem is that CICO is only a starting point, it a set of targets, and an actionable plan that works in the real world isn't just the targets the plan is directed at.

I know that CICO has been debunked, but I've never seen such a wonderfully clear example as in your last sentence. Thank you!

the 8 minute window is probably even better...

Why would you even try to fit three meals into 8 hours? That kind of defeats the point.

You would probably fit a snack and meal into that period. It could be a really big meal, and it would still probably be significantly less calories than breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

> Fitting 3 meals into an 8h window would be … tricky.

That's the main secret to time restricted eating, in my opinion: You don't have enough time to eat as much as you normally do so overall calorie intake tends to decrease. I think the other reason it's helpful for some people is that eating nothing for one meal takes less self control than restricting yourself to a small portion, leading to better adherence than normal calorie counting.

Don't forget the sugar! Frosted Mini-Wheats ... mmm ...