The article is missing the point.
It’s easier to do. Duh.
Of course the real way to lose weight is Calories In, Calories Out. Anyone who thinks there’s some secret sauce special magic in South Beach, Paleo, Vegan, Low-Carb, Keto, Intermittent Fasting, Alternate Day Fasting is just reducing their caloric intake as a by-product of their “diet”.
It’s always been Calories In, Calories Out. It’s just easier to lower your intake by fasting sometimes. Trying to eat small, sensible meals suuuucks.
Even GLP-1s work by turning off hunger so you don’t want to cram food in your face all the time. So you eat less calories…
It’s not rocket surgery.
If it works, then it works.
the title is saying “particular way of achieving X no different than simply achieving X.” agree, any way of achieving X achieves X - the question is how do you do it
No, it says “particular way of attempting to achieve X no more likely to be successful than other ways of attempting to achieve X”. That’s a totally different thing to what you said.
Right, but it’s not special is all, or innately more effective.
However one can control their intake, that’s what works.
It is special, at least to me. I don’t even think about food until like 8pm.
IF probably works for some people because it reduces food noise for them.
Anything you can do to reduce food noise allows you to eat less, allows you to lose weight
So, it works? I’ve been thinking of trying it since it’s probably the only diet I could achieve.
It works for me. Been accidentally doing it since I was 13. Parents didn’t give me an allowance, but they did give me lunch money, so if I wanted to buy games I had to skip lunch. Never went back and I’ve always been a healthy weight without much exercise.
Coffee for breakfast, water all day, and a double serving size of dinner. Lately, with the rising cost of food, I have been doing a lighter dinner and supplementing with a protein shake for lunch.
From the article
is barely more effective than doing nothing
I do it all the time. I eat around 7:30pm and don’t eat until 1:00 p the next day. Usually have only 1 or 2 meals a day. Breakfast is bullshit. Most important meal my ass. I do just fine without it.
It’s the most important meal of the day if you make a living selling breakfast food.
Or if you do heavy labor everyday. Or if you’re a student trying to learn. Or anything else that requires activity or mental acuity.
Sitting in a cubical being non-productive, yeah breakfast don’t mean so much.
Still not “most important”. It was purely a marketing ploy to sell breakfast junk.
I usually get stomach aches and feel sick if I eat breakfast so yeah. None of that for me please
This has pretty much always happened to me too! You are not alone!
If you find it easier to skip a meal than to stop eating, go for it.
Yep. 16-8 fasting is just, skip breakfast and don’t snack at midnight. It’s just an easy way to restrict calories.
And I know that there’s no science behind this, but anecdotally I feel better when I give my digestive system a bit of a break.
Yep
Yup. Works. I’d suggest looking at the types, which are basically schedules:
https://www.everydayhealth.com/diet-nutrition/diet/types-intermittent-fasting-which-best-you/
I’d also suggest looking into some charts that help you decide how much you can lose based on your height/weight/age/sex.
https://simple.life/blog/intermittent-fasting-by-age-chart/
Trial, error, stick to a schedule and it works; yes.
There are a lot of reports of simple.life being a scam app. Charging people more than they agreed on and not honoring requests to cancel, being auto-subscribed to other ‘offers’, and the app not providing the info they claim it does. I filled out their questionnaire but did a bit of digging and stopped before giving them any payment. They still have my info though…
If you don’t have improper dietary restrictions, try keto. I found it most effective because of how full the food you learn to eat keeps you. It has been the most effective diet I ever tried. Just stay away from the fad keto stuff talking about “loose 200 pounds overnight” nonsense.
wow, wtaf? is there an IF downvote brigade here?
I think it’s because keto is not super healthy long term. You need fiber, friend. You. Need. Fiber.
That being said I’m a big believer of you get to choose what you want to eat, so do what you want with your own body!
I didn’t experience any health problems and fiber is explicitly encouraged as a way to get unavoidable carbs down. Like I said, you have to avoid the fad keto stuff that I luckily got in before it took off. Sounds like most people are only going off the dangerous/nonsensical fad keto stuff that all diets are subject to with enough popularity. Basic rule of thumb is if someone wants you to buy anything more than just food (supplement, pills, etc) stay away. Keto (the actual dietary principle) is just based on a different distribution of macronutrients when achieving your caloric deficit. I wasn’t trying to disparage IF, just offering the comment OP another option in his failed diet search.
So, it works?
Yep. I’ve hard it all comes down to calories out minus calories in.
Really anything that comfortably and sustainably controls calories in, for your individual lifestyle and metabolism, is going to work.
For some people, I imagine that could be intermittent fasting.
Personally, I just got out of the habit of eating breakfast, at some point, and I found it helped control my total daily calorie intake. (I don’t know if that counts as intermittent fasting?)
The key thing I had to internalize is that my “diet” can not just be something I do for awhile - it has to be my new normal, for any positive change to stick.
It’s not terrible after you get used to it. I just naturally started skipping breakfast when I moved out, read the meme, thought there might be something to this. Did a little reading and was on the daily type for about two years and have fallen into the weekly type in the last year or so naturally. I lost tons of weight, granted I started working out too. But I’ve been maintaining it just fine without being too strict with myself.
It’s not for everyone, but it was a good fit for me.
I’ve been doing something OMAD-like for about 4 or 5 months now. Went from 210lbs to 190lbs today. Here’s what I was doing:
- Each week, set a goal weight that is 1-2 lbs lower than your current weight/last week’s goal. The leaner you get, the harder it is to lose, so having a goal of 1 or even 1/2 lbs can be good for lean people. I’m 6’4" and decently athletic. Right now at 190, I’m starting to show abs, so my goal rn is 1/2lb per week.
- Each morning, wake up and weigh yourself. If you are at or below this week’s goal weight, great! Have a nice breakfast. If not, no breakfast. Then, skip lunch. Sometime in the evening, eat dinner. No need to beat yourself up if dinner isn’t perfect, but obviously, eating tacos at home is better than ordering a pizza.
- Using a little text document on your phone or whatever, write down everything you eat every day. I hate estimating portion sizes, and instead just record for the sake of tracking food quality - typically if I eat pizza and beer and cake, I gain weight, lol.
- Each week, review your progress and your food log. Did you achieve your goal? If so, celebrate! If not, review your food journal. Ask yourself - did you cheat or eat unhealthy foods? If so, why? And do you regret it? I think it is fine to have a slice of cake at someone’s party every once in a while, and I don’r regret that it might slow my progress a little. But if I go to McD’s 5 nights a week, then I’ll regret that. So then, you reflect on why you did the things you not regret, and ask yourself if there is some way you can make it easier to avoid these temptations in the future - like having dinner made already at home (crockpots ftw!), or finding a way to reduce stress in your life so you are less interested in binge eating.
I will also note that I exercise quite a lot. I lift, I go rock climbing, I go hiking. Sometimes I play hacky sack or pickleball or ultimate frisbee. I recommend exercising as well - it isn’t necessary according to CICO, but we all know it helps. Find some kind of fun, social exercise that you can keep coming back to and enjoying.
Another note: many people will feel like the progress I’ve made is quite minimal and slow. In my defence, (1) I’m already pretty lean relative to most people with body comp goals (2) this has been an extremely painless and very sustainable process and (3) losing weight slowly is the way to go, as it preserves muscle mass and ensures your diet is sustainable long term.
Just try it and see if it works for you.
I’ve found one or two 20h fasts per week very effective at shedding fat without losing too much muscle mass. Much less effort than counting macros every day.
I know a lot of people that have lost weight using that method. I don’t have weight problems but it’s the method I use when I’m cutting and it works as I expect it to. I think it’s probably the best way to get used to eating less. The trick is not gorging yourself when you do eat.
Of course, it’s not better. There is no way around the laws of thermodynamics. Weight loss is a measure of taking in fewer calories than you burn. That’s the formulae.
That said, intermittent fasting can be a great way for some people to manage their caloric intake. Some people just find it easier to manage their calories by eating once or twice a day and restricting themselves at others.
At the end of the day, though it’s not meant to be a panacea, it’s a tool to be used for those that prefer it to other options.
Is it meant to be a panna cotta then?
Or a panettone?
God I’m hungry.
Of course, it’s not better. There is no way around the laws of thermodynamics.
Well said. No diet is going to magic away the math. Haha.
Except that’s not what 99% of the punditorium espouses - for the last 15 years it’s been a continuous litany of “intermittent fasting is THE answer”, and anyone disagreeing is roundly condemned.
Despite 80 years of diabetes research that contradicts much of the argument for fasting.
Well yes, don’t listen to people who say, “this is THE solution and everything else is nonsense.”
agree, this is the way, and nobody can say otherwise
You seem like a smart and upright person, I think I’ll listen to your advice!
Exactly, everything else is nonsense!
All weight loss diets are just social engineering imo. If you find a way to fool yourself into eating less good for you.
There’s also the crowd that claims intermittent fasting inherently makes the individual healthier, live longer, have more energy and mental clarity, …
To get away from the idea that weight loss might be the only focus here.
Which law of thermodynamics applies?
The one that says you cannot burn more calories than your body uses and you have to burn more calories than food you eat. It’s just tongue in cheek that the amount of energy in a (closed) system is conserved.
Of course one question is, does intermittent fasting somehow cause you to increase your base metabolic rate or cause you to digest your food less effectively per unit of food eaten, which could still satisfy thermodynamic constraints while still having an apparently larger effect. This study indicates that at a macro level, people do not have more success with this strategy vs traditional calorie restrictions, which do not support either hypothesis. They don’t disprove the hypotheses, but you don’t disprove such things, only support them. This doesn’t support them.
What you’ve stated is not a law of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics, which is the one often misused to tell us that calories are the only thing that matter, states that within an isolated system, the total energy of a system is constant. It’s well defined. The human body isn’t an isolated system, and the laws of thermodynamics aren’t tongue in cheek.
Our bodies don’t burn calories, and you are right in saying that we do indeed eat food, not calories.
Fasting can, for example, deplete our liver’s glycogen stores, and change the levels of various hormones in our body.
Sort of. Thermodynamics still definitely plays a role. You cannot have more calories than you ingest, and over time, you cannot perform more work than electrochemically possible; this is true precisely because of the laws described by thermodynamic constraints.
The laws of thermodynamics aren’t tongue in cheek. The poster saying you can’t escape the laws of thermodynamics I took to mean they’re making a tongue in cheek response; in other words, they’re sort of being witty and saying the reason this finding was observed is because of the fundamental laws governing energy consumption and use in the human body. That absolutely is rhetorically meeting the definition of tongue in cheek.
A calorie is a unit of heat energy. We cannot ingest a calorie since it has no rest mass. It is a ridiculous simplification of our biology.
We have to disagree on the wit of the poster.
Calorie is a unit of heat energy. The energetic yield of a gram of protein can be described by its ability to be burned to heat a gram of water, say. This is the definition of a calorie.
That energy is still constant, there is not some magical world where protein suddenly has more energy density in a human body than it did when it was burned in a calorimeter. That would break the laws of thermodynamics.
You can question whether there is metabolic advantage to consumption of certain types of food (that is, does the human body leverage certain foods in a metabolically more efficient fashion than others, such that consumption of the same calories but in a different composition results in differential weight gain or loss — this actually is studied in nutritional studies). But the laws of thermodynamics still apply there. The first that energy is conserved (kcal is fine for describing this as an upper bound) and the second concerning the free energy of a chemical system to perform “work”, which isn’t heating a gram of water (though it also sort of is, were warm blooded creatures) but rather describing the capacity of the substance to ultimately contribute to chemical processes in a cell, such as the generation or consumption of ATP.
And yes, every gram of food has a specific amount it can contribute to those chemical processes, and it’s tied to the total amount of energy in a gram of that material, which is conveniently calculated in a calorimeter.
You can question whether there is metabolic advantage to consumption of certain types of food
Yes, this is a much better question. Our bodies do not seek energy, but the substances that are required for our biological processes.
were warm blooded creatures
Yes, our body temperature is regulated by our biological processes and at the same time the converse is also true. It’s much more complex than doing ‘work’. That would again be an oversimplification. Thinking of the body as a thermodynamic system like a bomb calorimeter is silly.
What is the error margin when measuring food? To save you the trouble, it’s about 20-25%. Unless we compensate by considerably under-consuming the amount of food we eat, the sheer amount of noise alone caused by this error margin makes it meaningless.
Intermittent fasting no better at promoting weight loss than typical weight loss diets. FTFY
Intermittent fasting for adults with overweight or obesity https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD015610.pub2/full
Systemic proteome adaptions to 7-day complete caloric restriction in humans https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-024-01008-9
Here are some article about IF induction of autophagy, not covered in the article or the citations above.
The effect of prolonged intermittent fasting on autophagy, inflammasome and senescence genes expressions: An exploratory study in healthy young males https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666149723000063
The Beneficial and Adverse Effects of Autophagic Response to Caloric Restriction and Fasting https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10509423/
The Role of Intermittent Fasting in the Activation of Autophagy Processes in the Context of Cancer Diseases https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/26/10/4742
A Narrative Review about Metabolic Pathways, Molecular Mechanisms and Clinical Implications of Intermittent Fasting as Autophagy Promotor https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40481380/
Autophagy and intermittent fasting: the connection for cancer therapy? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6257056/
i’m not an expert but i use IF for autophagy and gut health. it’s the only thing i’ve tried that worked for me for weight loss. i’m down 40+ lb from a year ago.
i think a lot of “studies” are ordered up by some organizations that hate intermittent fasting, because rather than replacing one food with another food, you’re reducing the food, period. which means you’re spending less money. which corporations hate.
so, pooh-pooh on IF
i just finished eating for the day, will not eat again until tomorrow, and i’ll sleep great because of it
Not everything is a conspiracy.
of course not. but a lot of things are.
https://conspiracylibrary.org/2025/01/27/the-big-tobacco-conspiracy-a-proven-conspiracy/
let’s not forget the fraudulent “scientific research” that led to the entire anti-vaxxer movement
whether it’s a “conspiracy” or not hardly matters when the outcome is wrong “scholarship” leading to negative health outcomes
Hahahahaha.
Funny.
But if you want to get technical, when I say “not everything is a conspiracy”, those words themselves imply that some conspiracies exist. So you pointing to a conspiracy is completely redundant, not only funny.
So corporations do have my best interest at heart? 🤔
my best interests
That’s a funny way of spelling shareholder value!
The intermittent fasting corporation dumbass?
Big IF
What evidence do you have that all the studies are corrupt?
i didn’t say “all the studies,” so let’s go ahead and stop changing each others’ words to whatever we prefer they said
also, fraud in the scientific literature has been going on forever.
https://www.nextgenpurpose.com/articles/industry-funded-food-studies-trust-bias-solutions
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10260999/
that latest one is about sugar companies telling you you’re fat only because you’re not exercising enough, not because you drink 7 cokes per day
so far, we’ve ignored the AI angle:
https://www.acsh.org/news/2024/03/12/scientific-fraud-age-ai-17714
https://truthscan.com/blog/ai-driven-fraud-in-global-healthcare-2025-trends-and-countermeasures/
again, i’m not saying ALL papers are fraudulent or even biased, but i’m definitely skeptical of scientific “conclusions” that dismiss methods that involve spending less money and/or blames the patient’s problems on “not enough exercise” while ignoring dietary habits
Okay, yeah, I came in too aggressive and sorry for that.
These article type is annoying. So its not better but no worse. Tell me one that is more effective than others or deficient not that its typical. BEIGE ALERT! BEIGE ALERT!
Not every news article is going to be about some ground breaking research. That researchers are putting these sorts of fad diets to the test is important and knowing the outcome of that is useful. Journalism is about informing people, not entertaining them. If you can’t handle being informed without the sensationalism, you may need to seek professional help.
This isn’t information to me. One of many diet options does about as well as most other diet options. Really unnecessary. If you can’t reading a critique comment without needing to infer the commentor needs professional help whelp then I would say I should write some sarcatic reply about it.
Tell me one that is more effective than others or deficient not that its typical
I mean, basically every reasonable idea works about the same. Eat real food, not too much, go exercise. As long as your diet does that, it is all about long term adherence - your diet only really works if you can stick to it the rest of your life.
The desire for a silver bullet, though, is what drives the wackball solutions.
And I can go with that but then its not news to say. hey this diet is as good as other choices or no worse or such.
Idk, it seems like news to me since some areas of the internet have been very vocal in their hype.
yeah maybe I don’t see it as much. Feels to me like all diets become fads at some point but as you said they all have merit (well real ones im sure some cooky internet thing has no value.). Like my wife has to limit carbs or anything else she does seems to not work. Even complex ones to some degree. I don’t seem to have that limitation.
I think most people do if because of other effects than weight loss. Well, none of the people I know who have done it, have done it because of weight loss specifically.
Well, none of the people I know who have done it, have done it because of weight loss specifically.
What have been their reasons?
Cause it’s supposed to be healthy.
Because they’re poor.
Eat only at home for cheap rather than at the office.
what I wouldn’t give for there to be a real “one weird trick” just something I don’t care how dumb it makes you look is as long as it beats normal calorie restriction by a good margin
Change your physical and social environment. Move somewhere where everyone walks and rides bikes and plays sports. Hang out with people who eat healthy food and take care of themselves. Your brain will come to see these behaviors as normal and desireable, and the weight will naturally come off.
I believe that’s called “Ozempic.”
Its so simple.
That all consuming voice that says feed me, all day.
It quiets it.
Yup. It works. It just makes you not want to constantly cram food in your mouth.
The only problem is if you stop it. Oh my god the hunger urges come back twice as strong. Unstoppable food rampage urges…
Either a full-time personal coach or GLP-1 drugs would be pretty effective.
Or you could join the military, go to prison, take up long-distance running, or get cancer or AIDS or something. Plenty of options.
I bet there is one for you! The problem is that every person is in a different place with their diet, physical, and mental health, so the one weird trick that works for one person may not work for someone else. It might not even work for the same person later in their life!
When I was younger my trick was to only eat when I’m hungry. I worked at a pizza place where I could make and eat food whenever it wasn’t busy, so I could eat earlier or later in the day depending on how hungry I was. That doesn’t work as well now that I’m in an office position and have to eat on a regular schedule.
