As a fun project, you should look up the history of eating schedules. They vary wildly between different cultures. Some have a single large meal at the start of the day, others have 5 smaller meals spread through, and everything in between. There is no standard even if it feels like it simply because that is how we are raised.
Most "good for your health" advice is pop culture driven with a half life of 5 years anyway and breakfast being the most important meal of the day is a marketing slogan. In other words, no better than any various convention.
About the only things that stick are "don't stop physical and mental activity as you age" and "do stuff in moderation".
If you call it "intermittent fasting" and write a book about it, you can get a whole movement behind how healthy skipping breakfast and lunch is. And another movement preaching about how bad it is. And a followup book about what you REALLY should do ad nauseam.
Pretty much, so much of what we take for granted in culture was actually intentionally designed from the top down to have masses of people fall into line and become good servants of the economic system.
As for good diets, for instance, there is a wild meal schedule that has shown to be fairly good at managing weight, it is just intense. It is the 16 to 17 meals a day plan. One meal every hour you are awake, each one only about 100 to 150 calories. It does potentially work but try selling it to people and worse getting folks to stick to it.
Social behavior and the actual behaviors themselves evolved through populations as, among other things, an information storage mechanism that survives generations.
Agreed. This view also makes sense if we look at pre-agriculture humans - they’d eat heartily when there’s a good catch, maybe eat some leftovers the next day, go without food for some time, etc. Evolution by natural selection doesn’t move fast enough for humans to have adapted strongly to a fixed 3 meals a day schedule by now; eating times are still very much a convention.
"hitting a protein goal" being one of the current health fads I'm talking about
surely the natural response here will be about how important, healthy, and real this particular fad is. same as all the other health fads everyone would talk about for the last hundred years
Intermittent fasting and calorie reduction are the only known way to EXTEND lifespan and wellness. 10 years of low carb + fasting is the single most important health decision I have ever made.
You are more correct, but I think the truth lies somewhere between your statement and theirs. We have correlative evidence that lower calorie diets and/or fasting results in longer lifespans, improved insulin sensitivity, pancreatic cell responsiveness, blood pressure, oxidative-stress measures, and more, in humans. We also have animal testing showing causative evidence that fasting produces longer lifespans. Of course, animals are not humans, and correlation does not imply causation. Still, we do not currently have causative evidence that smoking causes lung cancer, and we widely agree that that is harmful for lungs. With enough correlative evidence I think it becomes reasonable to accept it as actionable evidence.
The secret is to have your children eat for you, then just do blood transfusions when they’re at peak nutrient level. You can do that while you work for optimal efficiency.
Yeah I had a schedule like that when the kids were very young but it caught up with me, frankly. Having the computer be the first and last thing I interacted with every day was not great for my mood either.
Granted, I do need to take a break from that schedule every so often. If I catch myself being unfocused I just go to bed.
Also, the first thing I work on is usually a high leverage project that excites me. Reading news or answering emails (things that can affect my emotions) are usually avoided during that time. Usually.
Wellllll, kind of... I've realized hunger is often just another habit because we're used to eating N meals a day, like the GP comment implies. I've done a quasi OMAD (1-meal a day) thing on-and-off for 3+ years now and don't feel hungry the rest of the time, given my current physical activity levels. It took a few days to get used to, but now I can start and stop OMAD on demand.
I'd recommend everyone try fasting and figure out what their bodies really need (preferably over the holidays, because the adjustment period can be a bit rough and could interfere with work.) I suspect most of the developed world is over-eating by quite a lot given our largely sedentary lifestyles.
I did fasting for a while, usually fasting for 16+ hours and eating 1-2 meals in the eight hour feeding window, but eventually stopped in favour of working out. I'd like to be able to lift while also fasting, but I'm worried that (1) I'd struggle to hit my protein targets and (2) only eating during a small window each day would hurt muscle growth.
Oh for sure, if your physical activity is higher you need to eat commensurately more! What I meant is, for most of us with desk jobs and little physical activity, our bodies need surprisingly little food and this is what fasting reveals.
Like even on OMAD I pretty much don't lose any weight (and no, I'm not as lean as I wish I were!) I strongly suspect if average, healthy people cut out an entire meal a day and changed nothing else, their bodies would stay mostly the same.
