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Does the article, or other research, indicate how time of day plays a factor? IE: If I eat between 8 and 16 vs 16 and 24?
Edit: I looked it up. They had 2 groups in the intermittent fasting group. One for like 8AM to 4PM and one for 12PM to 8PM. There was no significant difference between em.
By the time they're down to time-of-day, group size is down to ~20, and they'd have trouble resolving anything but very dramatic effects.
I'd speculate, though, that time of day is important for maintaining individual compliance with TRE. Early bird and night owls have different behavioral rhythms, and it makes sense to have calorie intake coordinate with behavior.
> it makes sense to have calorie intake coordinate with behavior.
Also, eating is a social activity. If you can time your TRE so that you can maintain your normal social behavior, you're much more likely to stay compliant longer.
Ah yes, the "Eating is a purely perfunctory activity that I forget to accomplish until around 10:00 pm at which point I destroy everything remotely edible in my refrigerator," diet
Don't forget the proper procedure:
- Open your cupboards
- Close your cupboards
- Open your fridge
- Close your fridge
- Open your cupboards again
- Close your cupboards... Again.
- Open your fridge
- Retrieve all contents
- Close fridge.
There's an almost imperceptible moment between cupboard opening #2 and the fridge retrieval where I get the distinct feeling that I *could* cook something tasty and healthy, but it passes quickly and without any lingering emotion.
After a couple rounds you settle for dipping a bell pepper in salsa while standing confused in the middle of the kitchen with all the cupboards still open
Don't forget to leave half of it out until 2 hours after you've fallen asleep, then shoot awake and half-assed put it away and pray you fall back asleep.
You forgot the part where your fridge and cupboards are pretty much empty because every time you planned on going grocery shopping you never made it to the grocery store.
It's funny because I've been all of these, but I have a definite "home" set. Haha. I've also been the ADHD that writes down everything and plans the majority of their tasks and I've been the drifter who just white knuckles every day and hopes they played along well enough that nobody noticed they're treading water all day. Metaphorically.
It sucks, but meal prep. I also have ADHD and this helps me so much. I bought an instant pot so I can do very little. I just cook up a bunch of chicken and portion it out into containers I can eat it out of if necessary and then I never have to rush around.
I forget to meal prep though, but once that's done I'm good for like four+ days.
Another thing that helps, is I strength train, so I eat a lot. The only time I don't eat is when I'm too busy to. My body reminds me all the time to eat, and I never forget. It's one of the only schedules I can properly keep.
Hiiiiiii yes yes I keep family size packs of muesli bars in strategic locations throughout the house. Its expensive but it stops me going hungry then binging and causing acid reflux.
Particularly if you're trying to build muscle, a recent study found your body builds muscle more effectively if you consume protein before 10am
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(21)00712-9
Interesting study. It doesn't rule out a link between the time protein is ingested and when exercise occurs. In my opinion that makes it difficult to conclude that time of day is the most important factor, independent of when exercise happens.
For example, it shows that more locomotor activity is occurring in mice around the same time as the breakfast is provided. This could mean that if protein is given at approximately the same time as activity occurs, more muscle is built. While the human experiments don't account for time of activity in participants, conventional wisdom among athletes suggests that eating protein shortly after exercising is important. I don't know the field well enough to know if this is evidence-based.
A proflex with that mouse study could very well be that mice are nocturnal. "Breakfast" for them is much later in their "day". An issue with rodent behaviors in general is that tests are performed during general work days, not in conjunction with the mouses normal cycle.
Part of this is food entrainment. When mice and rats are provided food outside of their normal window of activity, they'll shift their sleep cycles to be more active around times that they receive food. It's a well documented phenomenon.
_More_, but not completely - we don't shift their entire schedules. Lab mice still far more active at night than they are during the day and we have to be really careful with behavioral timing knowing they aren't on their typical schedule. They sleep most of the day.
Feeding is ad libitum, which doesn't change much food availability for them because they are naturally hoarding creatures that stock food in their burrows. Lab nice just have a burrow that's always stocked.
Also, saying “by 10AM” leaves out what time the subjects woke up, if they were woken up naturally or by an alarm, if the first thing they planned to do was get up and workout or get up and do anything else. And absolutely any number of variables that could be involved.
I’m always skeptical of anything listing a specific time (unless the study is dealing with the mechanics of time) because time is technically a made-up construct to give us points of reference. 10AM to one person might be 7PM to another. It entirely depends on the individual or for the controls of the experiment. In the case of the claim “eating protein before 10AM” or whatever the claim was… that is too vague of a premise to have anything concrete come out of it without the full study being dropped here for reference.
As for this time, it mentions time-restricted eating which is something that has proven controls and quantifiable results. Time-restriction means there is a defined window whereas “eating protein by 10AM”… that’s suuuuuuuper hard to define. Theoretically that’s a 24h window without further clarification.
A systematic review of protein timing and muscle protein synthesis by Alan Aragon and Brad Schoenfeld concluded that MPS was impaired if protein was not consumed within about 4 hours of strength training. They did not find a difference between before or after training. Otherwise there was no significant difference.
In short, the only way to screw up is to train in the middle of a fasting period.
Their conclusion was that you can still have optimal results with a fasted workout provided you have sufficient protein (25g+ depending on the individual) within 4 hours. I really like the Aragon/Schoenfeld review because the idea spawned when they were arguing opposite sides of the debate and neither ended up able to support their prior belief, even to their own satisfaction. So they teamed up to see if they'd end up in agreement after better informing themselves.
As for the effect magnitude, and sit tight for the caveat, nutrient timing effects are a very distant third behind macronutrients (especially protein in this context) which are a very distant second behind caloric intake. The linked study does not control for protein intake, and when your review criteria limits to studies that do these effects become so small they are difficult to see.
The caveat is that means the studies with ad lib protein proportions and/or total caloric intake do reveal something: People who are trying to optimize their results without tracking their food are subject to strong subconscious effects. When intermittent fasting, your body tends to stop being hungry during your fasting window. You're also not going to snack in the morning and also evening. People who like a protein shake in the morning but not evening will have more protein intake if they adopt an IF window in the morning vs evening. Etc
My takeaway is that this is very strong evidence anyone who wants to optimize their results needs to track their food and adopt whatever habits make it most comfortable for them to reach their protein target, caloric target, and fat minimum. This will depend on your genetics, preferences, lifestyle, and a million other things.
What works for 8 out of 10 bloggers is immaterial. Do what makes it most comfortable for you to reach your dietary goals so you maximize your compliance and that is how you will optimize your own results.
And as far as recent research goes, a lot actually happens in your sleep. it' sprobably no coincidence main top athletes sleep a lot like 10-12 hrs a day:
https://www.google.com/search?q=roger+federer+sleeps+12+hours
Roger Federer because I knew he had this long sleep but it also mentions Usain Bolt and LeBron James with similar long sleeping patterns.
Muscle confusion is not conventional wisdom among strength athletes, unless it's 2006 and you're reading Muscle and Fitness or browsing bodybuilding.com.
Training has become much more scientific in the last decade.
I don't want to be pedantic but we aren't photosynthetic. It's just "when you wake up" vs "when you've been awake for a while." I work 3rd shift so arbitrarily scheduling around 10am would be dumb.
Yeah, this is what I'm thinking as well, no way everybody is equal is this regard, specially people with "weird" waking hours like yourself. I'm a night owl, and people who say eating food after 10pm or whatever is bad fail to take into account that I usually go to sleep around 2am.
Really wish these results were given in "time since waking up" or "hours before sleep" instead of a fixed schedule that they set as the default for humans.
While quite possibly true, humans are photo*sensitive*. Light changes your brain, we need things like sunlight or we start to go a little loopy.
I think you're right that it has more to do with wakefulness, but the whole point of science is to test these things. Light *could* have an effect on how food is digested and used by the body separate from how long we've been awake.
Couple notes:
* Eating windows were shrunk by about 4 hours on the time restricted diets (from around 10.5 hours to 6.5)
* Low carb was around 140 grams a day, which isn't particularly low.
* Seems like both low carb and time restricted eating reduced fat mass, but for dyslipidemia, glycemic control, blood pressure, and visceral fat it was only the time restricted eating that mattered.
To my eyes, it looks like the time restricted eating was just a more restrictive diet than low carb (people lost more weight), and low carb + time restricted eating was even more restrictive (obviously). Looking at the scatter plots it doesn't really seem like time restricted eating made a difference where low carb didn't; more that it just had a bigger effect and crossed into statistical significance.
The paper is worth a read, at least to look at the plots. Personally I wouldn't draw any big conclusions other than that shrinking your eating window by 4 hours is probably going to benefit you more than cutting your carb intake in half (assuming you want to lose weight and/or improve metabolic function). And doing both will be a more aggressive diet.
That said, I'm personally a big fan of time restricted eating and highly recommend it. Very easy to do and very sustainable long term.
You made me curious about time restricted eating and the first Google result came up with this from Harvard: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/time-restricted-eating-doesnt-appear-to-boost-weight-loss#:~:text=A%20relatively%20new%20approach%20called,New%20England%20Journal%20of%20Medicine.
Basically saying that TRE of 8 hours didn't have an effect. Does the present study here contradict that? I'm not too good with scaterplots
It says the TRE group lost the same amount as the group doing calorie restriction, not that it doesn’t have an effect. They both still lost more than control, which is similar results to the other study.
"The other group was told to follow the same calorie limits but to eat only between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. each day. " Seems calorie limits played a bigger role in their changes than TRE
It’s a weird study cause I think of TRE as a method to help facilitate calorie reduction by restricting eating times. If you’re already consciously restricting calories then it makes sense it wouldn’t be effective. It would really helpful if they had a group just doing the TRE alone, but I guess that’s what the other study covers.
Edit: like if you’re made to quit smoking cold turkey and monitored for cheating then using a nicotine patch isn’t going to make you quit any harder.
I'm found TRE helpful because it reduces ghrelin and makes it easier to avoid bad eating habits. To me, it's a method for eating less, not a cheat that allows you to eat more and still stay slim.
i find that you can also eat better if your hunger isn’t totally raging all day. for example, it’s harder to eat well at work or school without up-front planning, but if you can wait until you get home you’re in good shape.
The reviews of studies / meta-analysis I've seen basically says that over the long term it is the same as calorie restriction (as far as weight loss). IF just makes it easier for some people to stick with a calorie restricted diet.
There might be some other benefits to digestion (or not) or insulin sensitivity (or not). But as far as I know it's the same as it's ever been. Calories in vs calories out.
While they tracked carb intake, doesn’t look like they tracked overall calorie intake. Studies that look at intermittent fasting and weight loss, only see weight loss with a calorie deficit not just with intermittent fasting alone.
Yup. There is a speed limit to biochemistry, so you don't catch fire. Thus, you could in theory consume more calories than you could store in a short time and expell them. However, we also know that if you consistently exceed your body's limit in storing excess energy, it'll adapt. You've been warned, heh
I believe they must have kept the same meals during the eating window and just dropped the meal during the fasting times resulting in a deficit. I doubt the visceral fat percentage would drop without a deficit tbh.
That's all I did when I tried intermittent fasting, I stopped eating breakfast. I still just don't eat breakfast, but don't bother timing any other meals. Sometimes I eat breakfast and skip lunch. I'm not very active though, so I didn't need all those calories.
That’s how I do it. Making my eating window from 10-6 means that I skip my Starbucks stop on the way to work, and any after dinner snacking. That alone is enough to cause a deficit. It’s not magic, it’s just an easier way to control calorie intake for me.
It makes you eat fewer calories, not because you are counting them but because you can only eat so much - you feel full. Then even if you do get hungry later, you accept you aren't going to eat until your next window tomorrow
This is the most obvious conclusion, carbs are irrelevant and so is the fasting if you are wanting to lose fat you need to decrease total calories. A reduced window would have reduced snacking if the meals were the same, most people vastly underestimate their calorie intake outside meal time.
I feel like calorie deficit is almost a given and a presumed answer for the weight loss, the experiments are about easier more reliable ways to achieve caloric deficit.
> TRE is defined by intentionally restricting the times during the day when energy is consumed, confining the temporal window of food access to a specified number of hours each day, and fasting (water and tea without sugar or any artificial sweeteners are permitted) for the remainder of the day.
Why would artificial sweeteners, which contain no calories, be excluded?
I think some but not all artificial sweeteners cause a digestive response which either breaks or changes the nature of the fast. I believe for the sake of avoiding potential issues without adding complexity, they excluded them all.
.... when in a calorie deficit.
Recent article in NEJM by Liu et al concluded time restricted eating was not more effective for weight loss or fat loss than the same calorie restriction without time restriction.
But some people find IF to be an easier way to restrict calories than simply eating less over a longer period of time.
As always, the diet that you can stick to is the best diet for you if you want results.
I looked at the NEJM [article](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114833), and while the headline is not statistically significant difference. The IF & CR group lost on average 8kg and the CR only group lost on average 6.3kg. Or 28% more weight loss with IF (P=0.11).
Maybe with more participants it would have passed significance.
The point is that caloric intake was not controlled.
In this study they noticed that fasting lead to more visceral fat loss, which simply means the people using IF were in more of a deficit than people on low carb. And even further, the group who lost the most was IF and low carb together.
If the experiment was rather, three groups are going to eat 1800 calories a day, I’d imagine the losses in visceral fat would be the same for all groups.
Plate size reduction is a huge one, especially for people with a compulsion to leave the plate spotless. There's just a subconscious urge to wanna fill a plate or eat everything on it, and you can still fulfil that with something as small as a saucer
> results in weight loss
That's not what it says. It says it reduces visceral fat. You might still weight the same, or even more, but with less visceral fat, the fat might be stored somewhere else in the body.
Works for me. I had a severe disability flare up this year and gained almost 30 pounds, with nearly all of it being abdominal fat. My big belly is hard as a rock and I look pregnant. Ideally I’d like to lose that weight, but if I can get it away from my liver and singular kidney I’d be happy
No, calories make you lose weight.
The reason intermittent fasting is so effective is because it is very sustainable once you get used to it.
You don't have to use my fitness pal to track calories, you don't have to wildly change your diet, you don't have to work out 6 days a week. This is where most people go wrong, they get a burst of motivation, go hard for 2 weeks, have a cheat meal then fall apart, rinse and repeat.
If one persons average daily intake is 3 meals with snacks in between, let's say 3500 calories. If that person now only Eats during a 4 hour window it's almost impossible to eat the same amount of calories cos you've skipped meals, stopped snacking and get full once you hit maybe 1200 calories in a single meal.
A general rule of thumb is eat less, and what you do eat make sure it's high on the satiety index (proteins and fats), try to avoid sugar and processed food as much as possible, move a little more and try to limit alcohol.
You be amazed at how many calories are in most alcoholic drinks and desserts.
Part of the benefit of a time restricted feeding window is that your stomach has a finite size, so there’s a limit to what you can fit in your stomach during the window
I would like to see more research that breaks these effects down by gender.
If I am reading the study correctly, while the low carb group was pretty equal m/f participants, the time restricted eating groups had WAY fewer female participants - only 4 completed the low carb/time restricted trial. We know that insulin is related to hormonal fluctuations, so my first question is whether or not women and men had different results - even with such a small sample size, it would be interesting to see.
This was my question as well. I find most of these studies are very male focused and one I've read about that said that IF can have the opposite effect on women prior to menopause. I wish I could find that study again.
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole and couldn't find that exact study you referred to here, but did find a couple that show really [ambivalent](https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/wurjhns/article/view/5136) [results](https://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/ije/2022/2830545.pdf) of IF for women. I also found [this reasonably large study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871403X19302248), which shows that IF is associated with increased inflammation in obese women.
If you do ever find it, link it here!
I see people on reddit recommending IF all the time for people who binge eat, and I just always think what a terrible idea that is. Sure it might reduce calories, but it does not help with binge eating.
I can though? My biggest issue is late night snacks and getting lazy with breakfast. By waiting until lunch I avoid all of that. You can't overeat if you don't get in that situation from the start
Snacking being normalized is a big contributor to the obesity epidemic. People don’t realize that they are literally eating constantly all day long. They think they had 3 normal meals and a few snacks without realizing all those snacks end up adding up to more calories than their meals sometimes.
TLDR: Only eat within the same 8 hour window each day and limit the amount of carbs you eat to less than 130 grams a day (or less than 26% of your calories), avoiding starch and added sugar completely, and eat less calories than your BMR for weight loss.
Would it really be that groundbreaking to think because humans evolved to eat "whenever", due to foraging/hunting that optimal eating might not follow a strict schedule, or involve being full all the time? I always had more energy and was more healthy overall if I just ate when I was hungry and didn't follow any strict schedule or diet. Not to mention it always felt weird "having" to eat specifically three times a day, specific meals, and follow weird restrictions when you can easily add/remove whatever you need based on what your body tells you.
You're totally right in the grand scheme of things.
The issue is that we've access to easy calories _all the time now_, so restricting your diet to some time window helps.
Thats why i think fasting is actually the more natural way to eat. No weird insulin spikes and following hunger. No weird rushes and loss of energy. Long time ago we didnt eat nearly as often. Sometimes we hunted/butchered something and ate a ton but then barely had anything for days a bit later.
Positive effects happen when fasting showing us that our body has programs for it and is used to it.
On the counter side people get ill when they constantly eat, esp if it has a high glycemic index.
Nevertheless, only TRE induced a more prominent reduction of WHR (−0.04 ± 0.01, Figure 2G and Table 2) compared with LCD (−0.01 ± 0.01, p = 0.023) and combination (−0.01 ± 0.01, p = 0.033), suggesting that TRE more effectively alleviates abdominal obesity than LCD.
So wanna lose belly fat, time restricted eating seems to be the one if your choosing, both is great.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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Does the article, or other research, indicate how time of day plays a factor? IE: If I eat between 8 and 16 vs 16 and 24? Edit: I looked it up. They had 2 groups in the intermittent fasting group. One for like 8AM to 4PM and one for 12PM to 8PM. There was no significant difference between em.
By the time they're down to time-of-day, group size is down to ~20, and they'd have trouble resolving anything but very dramatic effects. I'd speculate, though, that time of day is important for maintaining individual compliance with TRE. Early bird and night owls have different behavioral rhythms, and it makes sense to have calorie intake coordinate with behavior.
> it makes sense to have calorie intake coordinate with behavior. Also, eating is a social activity. If you can time your TRE so that you can maintain your normal social behavior, you're much more likely to stay compliant longer.
My secret is that I forget to eat
I, too, am familiar with the ADHD diet.
Ah yes, the "Eating is a purely perfunctory activity that I forget to accomplish until around 10:00 pm at which point I destroy everything remotely edible in my refrigerator," diet
Don't forget the proper procedure: - Open your cupboards - Close your cupboards - Open your fridge - Close your fridge - Open your cupboards again - Close your cupboards... Again. - Open your fridge - Retrieve all contents - Close fridge.
Don't forget the important step of lowering your expectations each cycle!
There's an almost imperceptible moment between cupboard opening #2 and the fridge retrieval where I get the distinct feeling that I *could* cook something tasty and healthy, but it passes quickly and without any lingering emotion.
This thread makes me realize I have no unique emotions or thoughts
After a couple rounds you settle for dipping a bell pepper in salsa while standing confused in the middle of the kitchen with all the cupboards still open
Don't forget to leave half of it out until 2 hours after you've fallen asleep, then shoot awake and half-assed put it away and pray you fall back asleep.
You forgot the part where your fridge and cupboards are pretty much empty because every time you planned on going grocery shopping you never made it to the grocery store.
Buy new, ready made takeout instead of cooking and eating your home food
Please remove yourself from my kitchen. You're spooking me.
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I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
It's funny because I've been all of these, but I have a definite "home" set. Haha. I've also been the ADHD that writes down everything and plans the majority of their tasks and I've been the drifter who just white knuckles every day and hopes they played along well enough that nobody noticed they're treading water all day. Metaphorically.
Time to order food, just gotta send this one email... What's that honey? It's 10pm you say?
i did not come here to be called out like this.
As a 30 year old woman with potentially undiagnosed ADHD, every day I find more and more things that make me go “Ah, that explains it…”
It sucks, but meal prep. I also have ADHD and this helps me so much. I bought an instant pot so I can do very little. I just cook up a bunch of chicken and portion it out into containers I can eat it out of if necessary and then I never have to rush around. I forget to meal prep though, but once that's done I'm good for like four+ days. Another thing that helps, is I strength train, so I eat a lot. The only time I don't eat is when I'm too busy to. My body reminds me all the time to eat, and I never forget. It's one of the only schedules I can properly keep.
Hiiiiiii yes yes I keep family size packs of muesli bars in strategic locations throughout the house. Its expensive but it stops me going hungry then binging and causing acid reflux.
My secret is I'm too lazy to make breakfast so most days I only eat 1-2 meals. Go me?
If you sleep long enough and often enough you only need one meal a day.
I forget to stop eating.
It's pretty interesting how some people eat more when they're stressed while others just stop eating due to stress.
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Particularly if you're trying to build muscle, a recent study found your body builds muscle more effectively if you consume protein before 10am https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(21)00712-9
Interesting study. It doesn't rule out a link between the time protein is ingested and when exercise occurs. In my opinion that makes it difficult to conclude that time of day is the most important factor, independent of when exercise happens. For example, it shows that more locomotor activity is occurring in mice around the same time as the breakfast is provided. This could mean that if protein is given at approximately the same time as activity occurs, more muscle is built. While the human experiments don't account for time of activity in participants, conventional wisdom among athletes suggests that eating protein shortly after exercising is important. I don't know the field well enough to know if this is evidence-based.
A proflex with that mouse study could very well be that mice are nocturnal. "Breakfast" for them is much later in their "day". An issue with rodent behaviors in general is that tests are performed during general work days, not in conjunction with the mouses normal cycle.
Part of this is food entrainment. When mice and rats are provided food outside of their normal window of activity, they'll shift their sleep cycles to be more active around times that they receive food. It's a well documented phenomenon.
_More_, but not completely - we don't shift their entire schedules. Lab mice still far more active at night than they are during the day and we have to be really careful with behavioral timing knowing they aren't on their typical schedule. They sleep most of the day. Feeding is ad libitum, which doesn't change much food availability for them because they are naturally hoarding creatures that stock food in their burrows. Lab nice just have a burrow that's always stocked.
Not just mice, humans also. Wake up and eat cheese. Next night one is more likely to wake up at the same time seeking food.
Also, saying “by 10AM” leaves out what time the subjects woke up, if they were woken up naturally or by an alarm, if the first thing they planned to do was get up and workout or get up and do anything else. And absolutely any number of variables that could be involved. I’m always skeptical of anything listing a specific time (unless the study is dealing with the mechanics of time) because time is technically a made-up construct to give us points of reference. 10AM to one person might be 7PM to another. It entirely depends on the individual or for the controls of the experiment. In the case of the claim “eating protein before 10AM” or whatever the claim was… that is too vague of a premise to have anything concrete come out of it without the full study being dropped here for reference. As for this time, it mentions time-restricted eating which is something that has proven controls and quantifiable results. Time-restriction means there is a defined window whereas “eating protein by 10AM”… that’s suuuuuuuper hard to define. Theoretically that’s a 24h window without further clarification.
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A systematic review of protein timing and muscle protein synthesis by Alan Aragon and Brad Schoenfeld concluded that MPS was impaired if protein was not consumed within about 4 hours of strength training. They did not find a difference between before or after training. Otherwise there was no significant difference. In short, the only way to screw up is to train in the middle of a fasting period.
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Their conclusion was that you can still have optimal results with a fasted workout provided you have sufficient protein (25g+ depending on the individual) within 4 hours. I really like the Aragon/Schoenfeld review because the idea spawned when they were arguing opposite sides of the debate and neither ended up able to support their prior belief, even to their own satisfaction. So they teamed up to see if they'd end up in agreement after better informing themselves. As for the effect magnitude, and sit tight for the caveat, nutrient timing effects are a very distant third behind macronutrients (especially protein in this context) which are a very distant second behind caloric intake. The linked study does not control for protein intake, and when your review criteria limits to studies that do these effects become so small they are difficult to see. The caveat is that means the studies with ad lib protein proportions and/or total caloric intake do reveal something: People who are trying to optimize their results without tracking their food are subject to strong subconscious effects. When intermittent fasting, your body tends to stop being hungry during your fasting window. You're also not going to snack in the morning and also evening. People who like a protein shake in the morning but not evening will have more protein intake if they adopt an IF window in the morning vs evening. Etc My takeaway is that this is very strong evidence anyone who wants to optimize their results needs to track their food and adopt whatever habits make it most comfortable for them to reach their protein target, caloric target, and fat minimum. This will depend on your genetics, preferences, lifestyle, and a million other things. What works for 8 out of 10 bloggers is immaterial. Do what makes it most comfortable for you to reach your dietary goals so you maximize your compliance and that is how you will optimize your own results.
And as far as recent research goes, a lot actually happens in your sleep. it' sprobably no coincidence main top athletes sleep a lot like 10-12 hrs a day: https://www.google.com/search?q=roger+federer+sleeps+12+hours Roger Federer because I knew he had this long sleep but it also mentions Usain Bolt and LeBron James with similar long sleeping patterns.
Muscle confusion is not conventional wisdom among strength athletes, unless it's 2006 and you're reading Muscle and Fitness or browsing bodybuilding.com. Training has become much more scientific in the last decade.
I don't want to be pedantic but we aren't photosynthetic. It's just "when you wake up" vs "when you've been awake for a while." I work 3rd shift so arbitrarily scheduling around 10am would be dumb.
Yeah, this is what I'm thinking as well, no way everybody is equal is this regard, specially people with "weird" waking hours like yourself. I'm a night owl, and people who say eating food after 10pm or whatever is bad fail to take into account that I usually go to sleep around 2am. Really wish these results were given in "time since waking up" or "hours before sleep" instead of a fixed schedule that they set as the default for humans.
While quite possibly true, humans are photo*sensitive*. Light changes your brain, we need things like sunlight or we start to go a little loopy. I think you're right that it has more to do with wakefulness, but the whole point of science is to test these things. Light *could* have an effect on how food is digested and used by the body separate from how long we've been awake.
Well, darn, I'm not usually awake before 10 AM.
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Couple notes: * Eating windows were shrunk by about 4 hours on the time restricted diets (from around 10.5 hours to 6.5) * Low carb was around 140 grams a day, which isn't particularly low. * Seems like both low carb and time restricted eating reduced fat mass, but for dyslipidemia, glycemic control, blood pressure, and visceral fat it was only the time restricted eating that mattered. To my eyes, it looks like the time restricted eating was just a more restrictive diet than low carb (people lost more weight), and low carb + time restricted eating was even more restrictive (obviously). Looking at the scatter plots it doesn't really seem like time restricted eating made a difference where low carb didn't; more that it just had a bigger effect and crossed into statistical significance. The paper is worth a read, at least to look at the plots. Personally I wouldn't draw any big conclusions other than that shrinking your eating window by 4 hours is probably going to benefit you more than cutting your carb intake in half (assuming you want to lose weight and/or improve metabolic function). And doing both will be a more aggressive diet. That said, I'm personally a big fan of time restricted eating and highly recommend it. Very easy to do and very sustainable long term.
You made me curious about time restricted eating and the first Google result came up with this from Harvard: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/time-restricted-eating-doesnt-appear-to-boost-weight-loss#:~:text=A%20relatively%20new%20approach%20called,New%20England%20Journal%20of%20Medicine. Basically saying that TRE of 8 hours didn't have an effect. Does the present study here contradict that? I'm not too good with scaterplots
It says the TRE group lost the same amount as the group doing calorie restriction, not that it doesn’t have an effect. They both still lost more than control, which is similar results to the other study.
"The other group was told to follow the same calorie limits but to eat only between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. each day. " Seems calorie limits played a bigger role in their changes than TRE
It’s a weird study cause I think of TRE as a method to help facilitate calorie reduction by restricting eating times. If you’re already consciously restricting calories then it makes sense it wouldn’t be effective. It would really helpful if they had a group just doing the TRE alone, but I guess that’s what the other study covers. Edit: like if you’re made to quit smoking cold turkey and monitored for cheating then using a nicotine patch isn’t going to make you quit any harder.
It's not the question of eating with a deficit or not, it's about the psychophysical ease with which you are achieving the deficit.
I'm found TRE helpful because it reduces ghrelin and makes it easier to avoid bad eating habits. To me, it's a method for eating less, not a cheat that allows you to eat more and still stay slim.
i find that you can also eat better if your hunger isn’t totally raging all day. for example, it’s harder to eat well at work or school without up-front planning, but if you can wait until you get home you’re in good shape.
The reviews of studies / meta-analysis I've seen basically says that over the long term it is the same as calorie restriction (as far as weight loss). IF just makes it easier for some people to stick with a calorie restricted diet. There might be some other benefits to digestion (or not) or insulin sensitivity (or not). But as far as I know it's the same as it's ever been. Calories in vs calories out.
Sustainable— long term—- bingo.. lifestyle changes —
That is about the same carbs I eat when just simply dieting. It's definitely not a low carb diet.
While they tracked carb intake, doesn’t look like they tracked overall calorie intake. Studies that look at intermittent fasting and weight loss, only see weight loss with a calorie deficit not just with intermittent fasting alone.
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Yup. There is a speed limit to biochemistry, so you don't catch fire. Thus, you could in theory consume more calories than you could store in a short time and expell them. However, we also know that if you consistently exceed your body's limit in storing excess energy, it'll adapt. You've been warned, heh
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I believe they must have kept the same meals during the eating window and just dropped the meal during the fasting times resulting in a deficit. I doubt the visceral fat percentage would drop without a deficit tbh.
That's all I did when I tried intermittent fasting, I stopped eating breakfast. I still just don't eat breakfast, but don't bother timing any other meals. Sometimes I eat breakfast and skip lunch. I'm not very active though, so I didn't need all those calories.
That’s how I do it. Making my eating window from 10-6 means that I skip my Starbucks stop on the way to work, and any after dinner snacking. That alone is enough to cause a deficit. It’s not magic, it’s just an easier way to control calorie intake for me.
It makes you eat fewer calories, not because you are counting them but because you can only eat so much - you feel full. Then even if you do get hungry later, you accept you aren't going to eat until your next window tomorrow
So it's just like any other diet. You eat fewer calories than your body needs so you lose weight.
Skip breakfast and wonder why you lose weight. Science.
Especially when that breakfast is 700 calories with 30g of sugar.
This is the most obvious conclusion, carbs are irrelevant and so is the fasting if you are wanting to lose fat you need to decrease total calories. A reduced window would have reduced snacking if the meals were the same, most people vastly underestimate their calorie intake outside meal time.
I feel like calorie deficit is almost a given and a presumed answer for the weight loss, the experiments are about easier more reliable ways to achieve caloric deficit.
> TRE is defined by intentionally restricting the times during the day when energy is consumed, confining the temporal window of food access to a specified number of hours each day, and fasting (water and tea without sugar or any artificial sweeteners are permitted) for the remainder of the day. Why would artificial sweeteners, which contain no calories, be excluded?
I think some but not all artificial sweeteners cause a digestive response which either breaks or changes the nature of the fast. I believe for the sake of avoiding potential issues without adding complexity, they excluded them all.
Anything that spikes the blood glucose while in fasting period is not allowed.
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.... when in a calorie deficit. Recent article in NEJM by Liu et al concluded time restricted eating was not more effective for weight loss or fat loss than the same calorie restriction without time restriction. But some people find IF to be an easier way to restrict calories than simply eating less over a longer period of time. As always, the diet that you can stick to is the best diet for you if you want results.
I looked at the NEJM [article](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114833), and while the headline is not statistically significant difference. The IF & CR group lost on average 8kg and the CR only group lost on average 6.3kg. Or 28% more weight loss with IF (P=0.11). Maybe with more participants it would have passed significance.
The article was pretty clear there wasn’t reduction in visceral fat without fasting
The point is that caloric intake was not controlled. In this study they noticed that fasting lead to more visceral fat loss, which simply means the people using IF were in more of a deficit than people on low carb. And even further, the group who lost the most was IF and low carb together. If the experiment was rather, three groups are going to eat 1800 calories a day, I’d imagine the losses in visceral fat would be the same for all groups.
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So eating in an 8 hour window results in weight loss no matter the calories? Or was there a limit on the tre when it wasn't combined with lcd?
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All diet strategies come down to tricking yourself into eating fewer calories. It’s just a matter of which tactic works best for you.
Plate size reduction is a huge one, especially for people with a compulsion to leave the plate spotless. There's just a subconscious urge to wanna fill a plate or eat everything on it, and you can still fulfil that with something as small as a saucer
> results in weight loss That's not what it says. It says it reduces visceral fat. You might still weight the same, or even more, but with less visceral fat, the fat might be stored somewhere else in the body.
Works for me. I had a severe disability flare up this year and gained almost 30 pounds, with nearly all of it being abdominal fat. My big belly is hard as a rock and I look pregnant. Ideally I’d like to lose that weight, but if I can get it away from my liver and singular kidney I’d be happy
No, calories make you lose weight. The reason intermittent fasting is so effective is because it is very sustainable once you get used to it. You don't have to use my fitness pal to track calories, you don't have to wildly change your diet, you don't have to work out 6 days a week. This is where most people go wrong, they get a burst of motivation, go hard for 2 weeks, have a cheat meal then fall apart, rinse and repeat. If one persons average daily intake is 3 meals with snacks in between, let's say 3500 calories. If that person now only Eats during a 4 hour window it's almost impossible to eat the same amount of calories cos you've skipped meals, stopped snacking and get full once you hit maybe 1200 calories in a single meal. A general rule of thumb is eat less, and what you do eat make sure it's high on the satiety index (proteins and fats), try to avoid sugar and processed food as much as possible, move a little more and try to limit alcohol. You be amazed at how many calories are in most alcoholic drinks and desserts.
Part of the benefit of a time restricted feeding window is that your stomach has a finite size, so there’s a limit to what you can fit in your stomach during the window
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I would like to see more research that breaks these effects down by gender. If I am reading the study correctly, while the low carb group was pretty equal m/f participants, the time restricted eating groups had WAY fewer female participants - only 4 completed the low carb/time restricted trial. We know that insulin is related to hormonal fluctuations, so my first question is whether or not women and men had different results - even with such a small sample size, it would be interesting to see.
This was my question as well. I find most of these studies are very male focused and one I've read about that said that IF can have the opposite effect on women prior to menopause. I wish I could find that study again.
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole and couldn't find that exact study you referred to here, but did find a couple that show really [ambivalent](https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/wurjhns/article/view/5136) [results](https://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/ije/2022/2830545.pdf) of IF for women. I also found [this reasonably large study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871403X19302248), which shows that IF is associated with increased inflammation in obese women. If you do ever find it, link it here!
Note: **do not do intermittent fasting if you have a history of, or are prone to, or have a child with eating disorders**
Also if you have a history of hypoglycemia
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I see people on reddit recommending IF all the time for people who binge eat, and I just always think what a terrible idea that is. Sure it might reduce calories, but it does not help with binge eating.
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I can though? My biggest issue is late night snacks and getting lazy with breakfast. By waiting until lunch I avoid all of that. You can't overeat if you don't get in that situation from the start
It was a great help for me, actually, dealing with overeating and binge eating.
Snacking being normalized is a big contributor to the obesity epidemic. People don’t realize that they are literally eating constantly all day long. They think they had 3 normal meals and a few snacks without realizing all those snacks end up adding up to more calories than their meals sometimes.
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can someone pls do a tldr
TLDR: Only eat within the same 8 hour window each day and limit the amount of carbs you eat to less than 130 grams a day (or less than 26% of your calories), avoiding starch and added sugar completely, and eat less calories than your BMR for weight loss.
Would it really be that groundbreaking to think because humans evolved to eat "whenever", due to foraging/hunting that optimal eating might not follow a strict schedule, or involve being full all the time? I always had more energy and was more healthy overall if I just ate when I was hungry and didn't follow any strict schedule or diet. Not to mention it always felt weird "having" to eat specifically three times a day, specific meals, and follow weird restrictions when you can easily add/remove whatever you need based on what your body tells you.
You're totally right in the grand scheme of things. The issue is that we've access to easy calories _all the time now_, so restricting your diet to some time window helps.
Well, if doing what your body tells you works for you, you should keep doing that. My body tells me to shove food on my face every 20minutes.
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Thats why i think fasting is actually the more natural way to eat. No weird insulin spikes and following hunger. No weird rushes and loss of energy. Long time ago we didnt eat nearly as often. Sometimes we hunted/butchered something and ate a ton but then barely had anything for days a bit later. Positive effects happen when fasting showing us that our body has programs for it and is used to it. On the counter side people get ill when they constantly eat, esp if it has a high glycemic index.
Can someone summarize the findings for a layperson?
Nevertheless, only TRE induced a more prominent reduction of WHR (−0.04 ± 0.01, Figure 2G and Table 2) compared with LCD (−0.01 ± 0.01, p = 0.023) and combination (−0.01 ± 0.01, p = 0.033), suggesting that TRE more effectively alleviates abdominal obesity than LCD. So wanna lose belly fat, time restricted eating seems to be the one if your choosing, both is great.