I'm not sure intermittent fasting is really for me, but I am curious about it and some of the claims of energy levels. However, it's one of those health practices where there's a ton of discussion around the benefits, and then on closer look I realize 90% of them are talking about weight loss, which is not something I need or that interests me at all.

I find I run into this all the time. In nearly every online discussion weight loss is synonymous with health improvement - true for many people, but it makes navigating these topics in larger public spaces a minefield for someone on the lower end of what is traditionally considered a healthy range.

At the moment I just have to avoid any specific practices and stick to the basics: staying active, eating whole foods (:im-vegan:), getting enough sleep, breaks from sitting, refraining from too much alcohol, stretching, etc. Also the psychosocial side: maintaining community around me, getting enough nature, work-life balance, yada yada yada.

How do you parse this out? Can anyone speak to benefits from a practice like intermittent fasting (or anything else touted) if you're not trying to shed pounds? Does anyone else resonate with my position?

Not trying to whine as being thin comes with a lot of fucking privilege.

EDIT: I wasn't intended this post to be exclusively about intermittent fasting. I'm curious about it in particular, but I also wanted to speak to the general phenomenon that so much of the general health advice I see around is actually just weight loss advice. This is pervasive outside of discussions too - books and articles outside of strict academic work seem to conflate the two all the time because for a large portion of the audience that's really what they're after.

  • notceps [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Oh boy this is uh quite a topic and Ima get caught up writing way too much on it so some things that are important while I type up the rest:

    Our bodies are on what we call a circadian (daily) rhythm when the rhythm gets disrupted it has a pretty significant impact on our health and stuff like when you go to sleep and important for this question when we eat can impact our circadian rhythm in turn impacting our health. So far the hypothesis is that eating a meal close to ones biological night can have a negative impact on your circadian rhythm. I'll update it a bit later but big warning there's not much that's currently out there about circadian rhythms in general and even less on how it's impacted by feeding windows and macro composition.

    Edit:

    Alright our body is running on a 'clock' called the circadian rhythm our brain, specifically our hypothalamus, regulate our bodies function on a 24 hours and 15 minute cycle, because of that difference we rely on stimuli to 'reset' our clock, the most important stimuli is light, your eyes detect light coming into your eye and receive that as a signal for their clock, that's why we shouldn't stare at a screen late at night because the blue light messes with our rhythm, though that's fairly easy to solve by just letting the screen shift to a more red hue. Now we recently know that we actually have several other circadian rhythms in our body that while linked to the 'master rhythm' can also be influenced by local stimuli, so far we identified them in the gut, liver, pancreas, adipose tissue and skeletal muscle.

    Adverse health effects can occur when there is a serious misalignment between this 'master clock' and local clock, especially when it comes to our metabolism a misalignment between the two clocks can result in elevated glucose and insulin levels, lower leptin levels ('tends to lead to a lower drive for activity') and worse sleep quality.

    Here's a great study that looked at the adverse effects that occur when someone has a circadian misalignment and another that examines what happens when people eat at night so generally speaking eating meals close to night, or more accurately our 'body clocks night'. Now we could make a case that that means instead of skipping breakfast what we should be doing is eat a larger breakfast and lunch and skip dinner but so far there haven't been too good quality studies about it, most of them didn't provide participants with meals and would let them self report and a lot of them were more concerned with weight loss than measuring other values, it does seem like eating earlier rather than later could lead to better health outcomes in the linked study we can see lower blood sugar excursions, but again it isn't the best study out there. There also have been a few studies on the circadian rythm, feeding times and health outcomes in mice which leads to better health outcomes when feeding them during a restrictive window, 8 hour and 10 hour windows, but animal data imo only gets us so far.

    The two newest studies I know of are one where researchers used a feeding window from 7am to 1pm. Compared to the control it led to a lower postprandial insulin response, better beta-cell function, and less insulin resistance. and one that compared two 9 hour feeding windows one from 8am to 5pm and one from 12pm to 9pm, that didn't see any major differences both windows led to a significantly improved 3 hour PP glucose response.

    This is going to be my opinion from here on out it seems that IF can improve ones health but I wouldn't say there's a ton of good studies and science behind it currently.

    On the healthy part I go for a 30 min walk every morning do 30 minutes of mobility work/yoga on top, I pretty much tell everyone that they should do the same but I think the vast majority of people get their ideas about health from their doctor, who can't monitor their habits so will just go 'You are overweight better lose some for health reasons'.