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by sandGorgon 5068 days ago
The article is not very clear behind the science of intermittent fasting - for those who are interested, do definitely read Alan Aragon's article [1] as well as /r/advancedfitness.

My personal view is that meal frequency is irrelevant for body biochemistry. What is happening is CNS (central nervous sytem) Adaptation - you are, for the first time, truly understanding how really hungry you are. Your body begins to understand that it does NOT need to eat breakfast, or eat something every 4 hours or eat a dozen nachos as an evening snack. When this happens, you automatically balance out on calories in vs calories out and you start losing weight.

I think this is a workaround for a bug in our brain - it makes pessimistic predictions for food availability and hunger responses.

[1] http://www.alanaragon.com/an-objective-look-at-intermittent-...

1 comments

I would wager this depends a lot on the type of activity you're doing.

Sometimes after a really hard boxing practice I can be so hungry that I physically can't eat any more food, but I'm still hungry. And no, it isn't just a bug in the brain, the calorie tracker also agrees that I haven't eaten enough.

> Sometimes after a really hard boxing practice I can be so hungry that I physically can't eat any more food, but I'm still hungry.

For me it is the complete opposite - I can't eat or even think of food for a while, and am definitely not hungry or have any appetite -- and the harder the practice is, the longer it takes appetite to recover. (My practice of choice is thai boxing, btw...)

This is usually an hour after practice. Takes a while to get home, take a shower, prepare the food etc.
very true - but one is not asking you not to eat after a boxing session. One is asking you not to eat anything for the other 16 hours (assuming eating and boxing fall in the 8 hour block) - which is when your body, conditioned by Kellogs, starts sending panic signals.