It's cutting calories–not intermittent fasting–that drops weight

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/its-cutting-calories-not-intermittent-fasting-that-drops-weight-study-suggests/

by Tomte • 2 years ago

25 13 2 years ago

exabrial• 2 years ago

This doesn’t surprise me, My understanding or TRE was it made eating less easier (eventually) for physiological and psychological reasons.

afiori• 2 years ago

The "cutting calories" advice to losing weight is quite analogous to the gaming Protip "To defeat an hard enemy try keeping your health above 0 while lowering their health to 0"

quectophoton• 2 years ago

While I agree, it's not as common sense as you might think.

In many games, when people are fighting some hard enemy, and they get an opening where they can choose to either (1) heal themselves so they can survive, or (2) deal a bit of damage with a cool combo, nine times out of ten they'll choose greed (option 2).

They give more priority to greeding than to surviving, so they're not even trying to keep their own health above zero. And you (probably) can't deal damage your enemy if your own health is zero. As obvious as this sounds, their priorities are usually backwards.

It's more noticeable in souls-like games, but it happens in many other games as well.

ZeroGravitas• 2 years ago

If you limit your attacks to an 8 hour period then you don't need to avoid the attacks or strike back as much though.

It magically activates a scientifically unknown mechanism to make the game easier to win.

At least that's what we currently believe, some scientists are about to test whether you still need to do the same amount of damage to the bosses health regardless of timing. I wonder what it will reveal?

goosedragons• 2 years ago

A lot of people overestimate the effect of exercise on weight loss. Yeah, obviously you can but it takes A LOT of exercise to have it make a serious impact. A 5k run for most people is not even a Big Mac worth of calories, not a Big Mac Meal with fries and a Coke, just the sandwich.

imtringued• 2 years ago

This is such a weird study. Like, who here believes that changing the time you eat changes the thermodynamics of consuming and burning calories?

The thing is, intermittent fasting does not force you to do any specific diet, so by comparing it with people doing the same diet, instead of a general population attempting weight loss who are also free to attempt any random diet, you're already deep into selection bias, because you have chosen successful data points as a benchmark.

cbhl• 2 years ago

If you ignore the science for a minute, the anecdotes I hear from folks is that "counting calories doesn't work" and "intermittent fasting does work". So identifying a mechanism of action would help us develop strategies to help more Americans lose weight (with associated wins for mortality, sleep health, diabetes, etc.).

I have always found it surprising that intermittent fasting works at all -- I'd assume that during the eating period you'd be so hungry you would compensate by over-eating. ("I only get two meals today, so let's eat two meals' worth of food at the start and end of the eating window.") If intermittent fasting caused you to lose weight despite a higher caloric intake, that would make me reevaluate the calorie model of weight loss.

This study shows that controlling for calorie intake shows the same results. That implies to me that, in part, this is a _human factors_ problem (people lying to themselves when counting) which implies we should try different kinds of interventions.

_xerces_• 2 years ago

One of the arguments was that you improve your insulin sensitivity because by limiting your feeding window, you are not constantly eating, snacking for 16 hours a day and causing multiple spikes.

Borrible• 2 years ago

Somebody should invent a drug to strengthen willpower.

That would certainly also have interesting social side effects.

aitchnyu• 2 years ago

Today fast food execs complain about weight loss drugs affecting their business. A whole novel can be written about willpower drug.

prirun• 2 years ago

A relative used IF to lose around 80lb, back to a normal weight. She was pre-diabetic, now is diabetic. Her experience was, if she woke up and ate, she would eat all day. But if she ignored her hunger pains until 1 or 2 in the afternoon, she ate a lot less. It got to the point where she was not even that hungry in the afternoon and ate only because she knew she had to eat.

I have never been overweight, so it's hard for me to say, but it seems like eating on a fixed schedule helps develop some discipline over hunger pains that overweight people may not have, or at least not much.

xorvoid• 2 years ago

I think it’s about finding a strategy that works for you. Ultimately it’s about the calorie deficit but you need to find strategies that make you comfortable with the deficit. A one size fits all solution never works.

I lost a lot of weight and found that two things: (1) I’m allowed to eat any amount of healthy things: no limit, (2) exercise acts as a junk food craving suppressor for me.

I tried intermittent fasting years later and it led me directly to binge eating. Might work for some people (awesome) but doesn’t works for me.

kkoste• 2 years ago

Yesterday I decided I'd treat myself to two small snacks since I had just finished my shoulder session and I had walked 9km. One weighing 33g and the other weighing 26grams. Combined just below 250kcal. Walking 9 km took around 2 hours and burned 450kcal... eating two small snacks took me 1 minute.

It's scary how little is needed to off set your TDEE.

Drink 3 cans of cola and the average person has reached 25% of their TDEE.

Two tablestone dressing is 80kcal. Which suddenly adds 500% more calories to 100grams of salad.

And if you decide that nuts are healthy and you decide to have 50grams of almonds. Then you are looking at 300kcal.

I think the single biggest cause for obesity is simply because people don't know how calorie dense some foods are.

[JUst take a look at this video from Will Tennyson that shows how much 100kcal are in some mails](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9PmP3Wur4)

It's cutting calories–not intermittent fasting–that drops weight

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