Nobody makes money from fasting.
No one makes money from lean, healthy people.
Someone wants to sell breakfast cereal so that is the most important meal of the day.
Someone wants to sell snacks so it became important to constantly “feed the engine.”
Someone wants to sell insulin so sugar is healthy and fat is bad for you.
It’s all bullshit driven by corporate interest.
What tends to happen is that people will take the results of a study, focus on one thing and then use that to make money or push their own personal narrative. The HAES community is a good example of this when it comes to sound bites taken out of context or in a vacuum. It’s like the whole “diets don’t work” thing. Diets do work. In reality though, what happens is people reach their goals then go back to their old habits. When the weight inevitably comes back they go “see diets don’t work”. How your body uses and stores energy from food is complex. Weight gain and loss is complicated. My personal view is that food is the smallest part of the whole weight loss equation. If people focussed on why they eat like they do and then worked to build better habits I think their appetite would regulate and the weight would naturally fall off. I think if people truly understood the impact of what they put in their body they’d stop eating a lot of what they do and start eating a lot more do what they don’t.
There is an element of truth in what you say. Studies have shown that formerly overweight people need to eat fewer calories to maintain their loss than someone who was never obese. Someone who was never obese can maintain a certain weight at 2000, a formerly obese would need 1800 to maintain the same weight. I forget the percentage. I don’t know if they reached any conclusion on why this is. It may be something that happens as a result of the gain rather than the loss. It’s like the people who say losing quickly gives you loose skin. It doesn’t. The skin is stretched when you gain, it becomes noticeable when you lose. These are just some reasons why I think everyone should focus on their relationship with food first. Most people don’t eat because they are hungry.
Even fasting has been misinterpreted by many. You see it all the time in spaces where people do IF. They’ll restrict their window, shove more than a day’s worth of calories, frequently highly processed junk, into their mouth and then complain they aren’t losing. “But I’m fasting”. Broadly it’s CICO for most people. Different types of calories are processed differently, your body doesn’t digest fiber for example. Most importantly everyone has a different relationship with food.
Fasting is simply a tool and people do it for different reasons, one of which is weight loss. For weight loss you still need to follow the basic principle of burn more than you eat. You can really get in to the weeds about what happens to your body on IF vs eating lots of small meals throughout the day, but for weight loss simple CICO is enough for most people. You don’t need to worry about the whole optimization side of it.
Have you been lied to all your life? No, but also yes.
For my own “diet” I focus on fiber first, protein second. Protein is a whole other beast that I think the majority of people don’t need to focus so much on to reach their goals.
From what I understand, your body adjusts to calorie reduction (if you eat fewer calories, your body will start to burn fewer calories), so when you eat normal again yoi gain it back. But when you’re fasting, it’s a different mechanism and this doesn’t happens.
You’re talking about starvation mode, one of the biggest and hardest to quash myths out there. It’s literally impossible for your body to store energy when it needs to use it. To throw in some anecdotal evidence, I became interested in fasting when I hit plateaus during my weight loss journey. A 36-48 hour fast broke the plateau every time. I still fast once a week to keep from regaining. My metabolism is just fine — and I’m 67 years old.
It’s important to come out of an extended fast slowly, so you won’t jump to exorbitant [old] eating habits. If you do that, and perhaps adopt an intermittent fasting maintenance regimen, you will keep the weight off.
Fasting is no wonder pill, it’s just an other method to loose weight and may or may not have additional benefits. However, there are multiple ways to loose weight and it’s up to you to find out what works best for you.
Loosing weight is the easy part tho. Keeping the weight off is the hard thing to do. If you loose your weight by typical caloric restriction, increasing your energy expenditure or through fasting, as soon as you get back to your old habits which lead to your overweight, you will get all the fat back.
I don’t think we’ve necessarily been “lied” to. It’s more like you and me are early adopters.
For centuries meals have revolved around the 3 + 2(snacks) format that medicine os also built on that foundation with dosages.
Who knows. Maybe when we reach point where it’s famine and drought everywhere OMAD might become the norm.
Yes, of course it affects your metabolism, but not because your body has it’s own mind.
First of all, there’s a metabolism adaptation system in your body that notices when you stop intaking calories and nutrients and thinks uh-oh, we’re in trouble. After some time of fasting (1-3 days) your body will understand that you don’t eat anymore and it will start to shut off things that burn calories. You will feel colder, especially at the extremities, because excess heat means excess calories. Small, un-noticeable things in your daily life will slowly change too, such as you’re going to be blinking less often, breathing slower, and you won’t move as much as before.
All these things makes your body eat less and less calories until there’s nothing your body can do to minimize calorie consumption. So this means that if a calculator online says that a man with your weight needs x calories to maintain, your body is actually consuming less calories than that due to fasting and eating that x amount of calorie will actually mean you’re in a surplus.
Then there’s weight adaptation. If you lose 20kg of weight during your fast, you need to readjust your TDEE, because your body will not burn as many calories as when it was 20kg fatter. This is a common mistake because after fasting, people return to normal eating like they did before, not realizing they’re actually in a surplus.
And then there’s things like insulin, hunger, hormones, which will make you feel hungrier than before, therefore you will eat more and once again you will be in a caloric surplus, gaining weight.
Also remember than, when doing a complete fast (0 calories), you will lose a lot of water weight which will return back as soon as you start eating again, so a jump in weight is expected after a fast. However, the water weight is stored in the muscles, so if you managed to get skinnier, gaining that water weight back would actually make you look more muscular.
Refeeds are very important in fasting. Once you start eating again, you need to start it slowly to not shock your body, and count every single calorie. Don’t trust your hunger, don’t trust the scale in the first week or so. Eat below what those calculators say and after you regained the water weight you can start tweaking your diet. If you’re still losing weight with the new diet, increase the calories until you maintain.
Fasting is no magic tool and it’s a long-term commitment. You will not get consistent results if you expect that all the work that needs done is the fasting alone. The months after fasting are important hence many people do mistakes due to their lack of research and end up blaming their body for regaining weight.
Nutritionists have been basing a lot of advice for decades from the FDA which has half of it’s duties related to deciding the strategic planning of food resources for the US. With that in mind, perhaps it’s unlikely that the FDA would recommend a sudden change when so much of our US food supply chain is built around the food pyramid already, and changing that supply chain is a multigenerational effort.
I think its three things:
yeah, companies want to push ideas that help them make money
and
it is accurate around how a body using carbs for energy acts when reduced too much
and