Keto and intermittent fasting have changed my life. Over the past several months I've gone from 285 to 250 pounds and feel amazing. I don't feel hungry and meals satiate me enough to forego snacking. I feel mental clarity while coding, but can burn out if I over exert myself exercising (probably due to a lack of glycogen stored in my body). I like to think of it as a cleaner sustained burn rather than on-demand raw power.
Is there a lot of hype around this? Yes, but everyone's physiology is different, and this combo for whatever reason agrees with my body far more than eating high amounts of carbohydrates at random times throughout the day ever did.
edit:
I can't understand why someone would downvote this. I'm just trying to share a positive anecdote about my life.
Right there with you. Went from 205 to 185 with the same method. I'm also running longer distances than I did when I was eating more carbs. Did a half marathon in November for the first time in years and felt great. Even beat my previous time (43 now, was 32 last time).
In /r/keto they say "first rule about keto, you don't talk about keto".
There is a certain stigma about it as it's commonly associated with extreme fad diets. Keto posts typically get quite a lot of hate on generalist communities (like HN and reddit outside of the low carb subs) or even IRL.
The second rule is "call it low carb", unless you want to describe that terrible diet made of almond flour pizzas and cookies full of sweetener.
It's sad how commercialised the word "keto" has become, lost all of its meaning, and gave free ammunition to its critics.
At least in the zero-carb/carnivore world there is no leeway for companies to package it, or housewives to bastardise it. Good luck turning steaks into zero-carb donuts.
Is it that extreme though? It seems reasonable to assume that our ancestors would have been in and out of ketosis frequently in pre-history, meaning that our physiology should well adapted to this state of being.
I have so many health benefits from ketosis that I'd simply answer who cares?
But there is plenty of quality research these days backing up ketogenic diets (Volek and Phinney work is outstanding, Chris Palmer on the benefits for mental health too, just to name a few) that associating it to fad diets is simply ignorant misinformation.
My theory is that keto pairs well with intermittent fasting because it helps curb food cravings during fasts. Sure, you can do IF without keto, but you might have a difficult time with it and might be more susceptible to cheating.
what kind of exercise? keto works fine both with endurance sports (running and biking) and strength training. Most people blame glycogen while it's usually an electrolyte problem. Keep your electrolytes in check and you will be able to do any kind of sport (as long as you're fat adapted, which can take a while).
You should eat regular meals so you poop at the same time each day. Meals trigger mass peristalsis which helps cause a bowel movement. When you start messing with this you start causing constipation, which then leads to haemorrhoids. If you are 30yo+ you know that you cannot rely on nice soft stool anymore by just doing whatever you want with your diet. I really think people don't talk about this enough.
It's funny that these studies don't address any kind of side-effects like this.
I did a two day fast and it took a few weeks to get back to normal. Weirdly cutting out carbohydrates also seems to lead to constipation. The current view seems to be fiber = pooping well, but that has not really played out in my experience.
Note that most dietary fiber comes from carbohydrates (fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, seeds). Fiber is largely carbohydrates (and some proteins) you can't digest. Focus on soluble fiber. You could try a Phyllium supplement. Also important to feed the bacteria in your gut - they need carbs.
Cutting out carbs will drop a lot of water from your system (from my layman's perspective). Drinking more water won't fully replace it b/c of loss of sodium (again, from a speculative standpoint).
Drpoop, don't forget about Drsleep. People have a troubles sleeping when fasting too. I find eating 500 cals per day on a "fasting" day prevents gut and sleep issues. Especially if the 500 cals are from oatmeal and a banana.
Intermittent fasting is so over-hyped. What it means is usually skipping breakfast. Big deal.
I've been intermittent fasting, eating only around 2pm for lunch, and 7pm for dinner, for more than 10 years and I've managed to get quite overweight. Not IF's fault, just pointing out that it's neither worse nor better for your diet.
Eating one fewer meal doesn't stop one from making bad food choices, or doesn't change how much energy you burn through and hunger you feel. Only OMAD might be a little worthy of that hype because it is often physically impossible to overeat your daily caloric expenditure in one sitting, but as a recovering binge eater, I've seen first hand how ultra-processed hyper-palatable food makes it very easy to eat >3000 kcal in one meal.
That said, I agree that breakfast is a silly idea for us office workers. I personally do my best work in the (16) fasted hours between waking up and lunch, so much that I tend to have lunch as late as possible these days. You certainly don't need to eat 3 times a day for sitting on a chair 12 hours. Let alone that most idiotic, first-world idea of needing to eat "at least 5 small meals" around the clock never to feel hungry. Well, stop eating low-fat carby food and you won't feel hungry 5 times a day.
first of all, Worldwide, 15–20 percent of men with lung cancer are non-smokers while over 50 percent of women with lung cancer are non-smokers [1], so if you are a woman, chances are similar.
Secondly, former smokers and current smokers have similar risks of getting lung cancer.
Last, but not least, once you get it, survival rates are similar for non smokers, former smokers and current smokers (in similar groups of course).
> Worldwide, 15–20 percent of men with lung cancer are non-smokers while over 50 percent of women with lung cancer are non-smokers
50% seems like a big number but it's a pretty meaningless statistic if women overall smoke less than men. It just means that when you have few smoking-related cancer cases, the other cases make up a larger percentage. Using that ratio to justify "you might as well smoke, 50% of women with lung cancer were non-smokers" is... not a good use of the statistics.
As a thought exercise with made up numbers, suppose that you have 10 people, 1 will naturally get lung cancer, and everyone who smokes will get lung cancer.
If 4 men smoke and get cancer, that's 5 with cancer and 1 of them was a non-smoker. 20% are non-smokers.
If 1 woman smokes and gets cancer, that's 2 with cancer and 1 of them was a non-smoker. 50% are non-smokers.
In this scenario you can say the exact same statistic about "50% of women with lung cancer are non-smokers" and brush it off as not a big deal even though 100% of smokers are getting cancer.
That's not a useful number to be looking at to judge the risk of smoking vs not smoking.
I don't know why I thought that linking a scientific paper reporting accurately all the data would be helpful to the discussion.
Not my opinions my friend.
> but it's a pretty meaningless statistic women overall smoke less than men
That's not how epidemiology works.
The fact that black men in USA have ~20% higher risk of getting lung cancer, despite being less than white men, says anything to you?
No, they don't smoke more.
No, risk of getting cancer is not linked to how many cigarettes you smoke in a lifetime, once a smoker, the risk gets higher and stays higher for as long as you live, even if you quit.
> even though 100% of smokers are getting cancer
they are absolutely not!
See why I say non smocking is over hyped?
Because it leads to ideology, which is not the same thing of being informed.
> I don't know why I thought that linking a scientific paper reporting accurately all the data would be helpful to the discussion.
Right, but you cherry-picked the most uninformative statistic possible out of the whole thing to make it sound like smoking isn't a major factor.
These ones would have painted a different picture:
> In a study performed in the United States, roughly 19 percent of women with lung cancer were non-smokers, and only 9 percent of men with lung cancer were non-smokers.13 As this data has shown, lung cancer in non-smokers tends to be more common in females
> Importantly, there is also an increased risk for those non-smokers that have a spouse that is a smoker. In a meta-analysis that included 55 studies, it was found that women who were married to a smoker had a 27% increase in risk of lung cancer.
So a pretty good chunk of those non-smoker cancer cases are caused by smoking, it's just someone else's. And that 27% is just spouses who smoke, another chunk of that will be waitstaff with workplace smoke exposure (an occupation which skews female) since restaurants were one of the last public places people where kept smoking all the time. Indoor smoking bans will reduce those cases, but we're a long way yet from seeing the long terms effects of that.
> they are absolutely not!
I'm aware. As I said in my comment, that was a hypothetical scenario with made up numbers to illustrate how the 50% statistic on its own could give you the wrong impression of the safety of smoking.
You're right, I am looking at US causes. I didn't notice you had said Worldwide, but regardless I would say the US data is more relevant to readers on this site.
But I think you're missing my broader point, which is that even living in a smoggy coal-burning area like China it's still not reasonable to say "might as well smoke, I'm already exposed to other lung cancer risks." That's like saying "My car is older and not up to modern safety standards, and I'm probably going to die in a crash anyway, so I won't wear my seat belt."
You have a risk factor that you can't do anything about, and that does push up the statistics about how many non-smokers get lung cancer, but smoking is still a pointless additional factor that will only raise your odds of getting lung cancer further.
> which is that even living in a smoggy coal-burning area like China it's still not reasonable to say "might as well smoke, I'm already exposed to other lung cancer risks."
Agree, but that's not the point I am making.
The point I am making is that we know that smoking is linked to lung cancer but the opposite is not a certainty. We don't know if the smokers getting lung cancer would not get it if they did not smoke.
Unfortunately.
So it is wise to not smoke, of course, but that's only a fraction of the entire story.
People are getting cancer in the west more now than in the 60s and 70s, when smoking was vastly more spread.
The peak was in the 90s, we are slowly going back to the numbers of the mid 1970s.
We know that cancer is linked to age, so maybe an aging population has more chances of getting cancer than a younger one.
This seems to be confirmed by the fact that in USA ~5% of the population has cancer, while in large areas of Central Africa, for example Somalia, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, it's less than 0.5%.
I'm quite sure it is not due to better living conditions and less cigarettes. But another reason could be that it is not detected nor reported.
Also in USA there are ~140 deaths every 100,000 people, in Iran ~95, in Mexico is ~90, in Algeria ~75.
Just to say that we still haven't found the root cause and why there are people living the same exact life in the same exact place, one gets it and the other don't.
So, in the end, intermittent fasting has mostly the same effects of eating less in general, it shouldn't be surprising, like it shouldn't surprise anybody that a lot of people, who never smoked, still die of cancer.
A more healthy diet would have a large impact on mortality in USA, where the leading cause of death is hearth disease cause by unhealthy diets.
Especially when intermittent fasting is defined as "the other group only had access to food 9 hours a day", which is how most people eat, simply following local traditions.
I’ve seen many couples where the woman is a nonsmoker but the man is a relentless chain smoker. Does second hand smoke play into this statistic?
I know second hand smoke has been downplayed in recent years, but in this case we’re not talking about occasionally being exposed to smoke, but rather sharing and breathing the same smoke filled air with a smoker.
This also seems to depend on country and culture. In some cultures, it seems most nonsmoking women would instantly disqualify a smoking man as a partner, but in others it doesn’t seem to be quite the same dealbreaker.
> Does second hand smoke play into this statistic?
second hand smoke is a known risk factor.
still it doesn't explain the difference, which is rather large.
the most probable explanation is that women are more exposed or more susceptible to some other risk factor than men.
A wild guess, for example, could be: women are in charge of cooking and are exposed to the fireplace wood smoke. There are studies associating fireplace wood smoke to an increase of breast cancer. [1]
Indoor pollution is also thought to be harmful for respiratory system health.
Do people focus on lung cancer when it comes to whether they should smoke or not? I'd say the significantly reduced lung capacity and constant coughing are faster-acting, more problematic issues.
This is not at all what I expected. Before cigarette smoking was common, I was under the impression lung cancer was extremely rare. Is there something else that gives people lung cancer these days?
I believe smoking increases your risk of getting lung cancer by about 20%[1]. It's definitely significant, but plenty of regular smokers manage to die from something else. I'm pretty happy about the repression of public smoking though, because I find the odor of cigarette tobacco revolting and also prefer to not have my risk of lung cancer even moderately increased by second-hand smoke.
Annoyingly, it's hard to find good figures on relative risk for smokers and non-smokers, probably because of the current public health fad of dissembling to attempt to encourage desired behaviors. All I can find is that for the total population lifetime chance is 1/15 for men and 1/17 for women[2], with some weasel words about smoking increasing risk, but no actual quantification.
Edit: I appreciate the replies, but note that none of the sources cited actually list any meaningful quantifiable data. So I dug a bit more and found this[3]. It indicates that the effect is largely dose dependent and only really shows up in smokers of ten years or more. While p=.05 might fly for psychology studies, it's not a convincing bar for serious science. On the other hand the decade and longer smokers show a very respectable p=.001. For the heaviest smokers it looks like a bit over a 5x increase. Assuming continuity, there also exists some level of moderate smoking where my proposed 20% increased risk is accurate and even more limited levels of smoking where the risk is not appreciably higher than not smoking. In fact the data indicate that former smokers who quit for more than ten years actually have lower risk of lung cancer than never smokers! Surely that's some kind of noise, but it still goes to show.
[1] It's true that most people with lung cancer are or were smokers. But it's also true that most people with lung cancer are over 65, and they're from a period where most everyone was a smoker or exposed to smoke regularly. That's a pretty major confound. Over the next few decades we should get better data due to the relative decline in smoking making the effects of choosing to smoke clearer.
Dunno where you got the 20% stat, but it’s totally wrong. From cancer.org:
> The risk of lung cancer for people who smoke is many times higher than for people who don't smoke. The longer you smoke and the more packs a day you smoke, the greater your risk.
Nobody ever said that intermittent fasting would prevent you from becoming overweight. If you still overeat, you will still gain weight. It's not magic. You're being hypercritical for no reason and without knowledge of the topic.
> Intermittent fasting is so over-hyped. What it means is usually skipping breakfast. Big deal.
Not quite. Intermittent fasting is, typically, eating in a restricted time range in the day, usually an 8 hour period. As you point out, most practitioners skip breakfast. As you also point out it's also possible to overeat.
Eating between 11am - 7pm works well. You can have a late morning snack, a mid afternoon snack, and a normal dinner. No snacking at night. No consumption of alcohol outside of this eating range.
What IF isn't about is gorging yourself during the window when you're able to eat. The goal then isn't just about when you eat, but also paying attention to what you eat, and how much you're eating.
"Intermittent fasting is so over-hyped...I've managed to get quite overweight. Not IF's fault, just pointing out that it's neither worse nor better for your diet."
This is a strange take. For one thing, intermittent fasting is not a diet.
IF is also not about eating less than you did before. You can, and many people do, eat the same number of calories as they did before. Eating more or less calories should be a separate decision made in the context of what you are trying to achieve.
So many non-conclusion in nutrition. My father has subscribed to 3 cardiologists they are somewhat 70% overlap and left 30% non-consensus. Read some papers (only read abstract mostly). When I read all of these I only treat it as raw data, listen to your own body is closer to the truth. Debugging your body is kinda not fun since it takes a lot of time in iteration.
I found my brain burn a lot of energy even if I just sit for a couple hours. So breakfast is needed.
OMAD (one meal per day) genuinely works with the only caveat being that you need to make sure you’re getting all your nutritional requirements for the day. This means having a larger single meal and taking multivitamins for me. Also I avoid all processed foods, especially processed meat. I’ve been doing it for two years now.
Why would our body behave like this? why would gene expression, hormones, etc. all benefit from IF? I'm having trouble understanding if this is just a "fluke" that IF has all these benefits or if it serves some evolutionary purpose?
Also, more speculatively I wonder if the food we eat is even worse than we already know it is and these studies are basically observing what happens when "poison ingestion" for lack of a better word is temporarily halted
Something approximating intermittent fasting, was probably an extremely common condition for humans to experience, until the development of agriculture.
In a mobile culture without access to lots of salt, there are few ways to preserve food. You eat what you find as you find it, as much as you can. Then you go hungry until you find the next big score. Hunters may go many days or weeks between large kills or a group reaches a more promising foraging ground, everyone scraping by on minimal nutrition like dried jerky and plants collected on the move. But doing that for a few weeks, or even months, is just fine, if everyone was well-fed at the start, anyway.
Think of IF as excercise for your cells' different metabolic pathways. People are able to live without ever walking or running, and some do, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to never excercise.
I know some people who have NEVER in their lives gone more than ~12 hours without a meal, and all of them are ~30 years old but with the standard array of contemporary american health problems more typical of people in their 40s. Our ancestors certainly entered ketosis at least occasionally. It seems like a drastic change to switch to never using that cellular process over a span of just 1 or 2 generations.
This website is dubious, the article looks like it was written by a bot, so I looked at the original paper.
The actual science studied TRF (time restricted fasting), not intermittent fasting. Which is eating over a 8-10 hour period per day, and that is just... normal eating? Skipping breakfast is all you need to do.
I semi gave up a year back, but I did a lot of self reflection on my eating after trying IF. I skip breakfast and run 6 km a few times a week, but I eat for a timetable without feeling hunger pangs for weeks at a time. Now I eat less calories and allow myself to be hungry.
Another beautiful side benefit of regular fasting: you can skip meals when necessary, while traveling, for example without really any negative effect. It seems small, but compare that to people who absolutely fall apart if they haven't ingested carbs in the last 2 hours... it's a powerful adapation.
"circadian rhythms can be found in every cell" - seems vague.
The info-nibble doesn't detail some of the downsides of IF - like how difficult it can be to practice it in social life (married? good luck telling your spouse you're not eating with them for months/years/ever). I did the 18-6 and 20-4 cycles and it worked. However, I gained back all the weight when I stopped due to my partner pleading daily for months to "eat like a normal person" again.
No need to get that extreme... with 14-10 you start eating at 12 and stop at 22, so you can share the two main meals with your spouse, even breakfast if you just drink your unsweetened black coffee with her.
Can I ask, who in the hell agreed to be part of this study?
"After seven weeks, tissue samples from 22 organ groups and the brain were taken at various periods during the day or night to examine their genetic makeup."
They are doing major surgery (multiple times by the looks of it), including removing brain tissue...
I've a son who's worked a physical job for 4 years and started IF two years ago. Starting at ~300lbs, he went to ~200lbs in 4 months and has been <200lbs since. His first meal is a late day lunch; the sort of food he eats hasn't changed.
It may be my genetic line has a disposition to sharply lose weight. In 2021, I went from 225 to 192 in one month (panic + light eating).
Is there a lot of hype around this? Yes, but everyone's physiology is different, and this combo for whatever reason agrees with my body far more than eating high amounts of carbohydrates at random times throughout the day ever did.
edit: I can't understand why someone would downvote this. I'm just trying to share a positive anecdote about my life.