Should Martin over at Leangains have to come up with a new term for IF? page

[brahnamin]

Disclaimer - I already know Martin is unlikely to change his terminology. Just using the thread title as a springboard.

Intermittent (adjective) occurring at irregular intervals, not steady.
Fasting (verb) abstaining from food.

Harking back to a discussion we were having earlier this week on another thread, IF seems to have become a very broad term that encompasses quite a few different states that are not necessarily related.

In Martin's Leangains approach pretty much all the intermittent is sucked out of intermittent fasting and you are left with something closer to Structured Fasting. Abstaining from food for (iirc) a minimum of 12 hours with 16 hrs being kinda ideal and the point where you will soon start to see diminishing returns.

Eat-Stop-Eat, on the other hand, is more about regular or irregular 24 hour[ish] fasts. So maybe intermittent. Maybe closer to structured. Depending on how regularly you do it.

But neither style really represents the way I was introduced to IF.

Though I think the people who introduced me to IF were familiar with both camps.

When I first heard about IF the emphasis was as much on the Intermittent part as on the Fasting part. You might skip a meal. You might skip two. You might skip a whole day. You might do this a couple days in a row. You might not do it for a week or more. It constantly changed and was very much situational. Stuck at the office picnic with no good primal choices? Why not fast?

Now, I'll admit to not being as familiar with Eat-Stop-Eat as I am with the Leangains approach, but the impression that I get is that Eat-Stop-Eat is a more intuitive approach to shaking things up inside and Leangains is more about deliberately optimizing body chemistry on a fairly set schedule.

While the third method, the one I was first introduced to, seems like more of a catch all *hey, don't worry if you miss a meal, it's not the end of the world* or a *listen to your body/eat when you're hungry* kind of approach.

I guess I was just curious of everyone's takes on the different types of IF and how/when each can be useful. Is one approach more optimal at certain stages of weight loss than others? Are they all fairly safe and/or healthy for all or most individuals?

I've heard some pretty strong opinions both in the regular IF threads that popped up over a lot of the last year and in the leptin threads that have sprung up lately.

And *do* we need to redefine our terms when talking about the different ways to IF? Or are they all close enough to fit under the same semantic umbrella for most (if not all) purposes?

[primalrob]

a change in terminology makes sense. eating during a specific window, or structured fasting (not bad), doesn't really fit in with the whole feast and famine eating that grok would have dealt with, but i think the term still works fine.
i do leangains style fasts (daily, 18-19 hours depending on my workouts), but i'm not too strict about it. i pretty much don't eat anything until after work on weekdays because i feel like work ruins food for me, and fasting keeps my energy up most of the time. but on weekends and vacations i really vary the schedule of my eating a lot. i might keep the same eating window in terms of how long i consume food, but that window may shift to different times of the day...and sometimes different lengths, and sometimes i throw it out all together. the variety doesn't seem to help or hurt me in anyway.
i got into fasting with the eat-stop-eat method...not wild about it. it's probably truer to grok's way of eating, but i would definitely get hungry more often. i do, just by chance, have the occasional 24 hour fast and feel fine, but on a day to day basis i prefer to fast and eat something each evening.

[JPA]

The fasts on Eat Stop Eat are more about surprising your body, or just going along with what could have happened to the Paleolithic man, sometimes he would be unlucky in the hunt and not eat nothing for some time.

Martin is a structured approach to look good, nothing too natural about it as you're set to eat at specific times and specific macro nutrients. Grok didn't have a food log or a watch to keep up with the system unfortunately... but he still prospered, or we wouldn't be here on the forums.

Note that I've read something about a hormone called ghrelin on one of Martin's post where he implies or states that it may be beneficial to have the same meals at around the same time.

Food for thought.

[DFH]

Good topic. Answer=yes.

A good example is Primal vs Paleo. Mark was clever and made his own brand of Paleo and gave it a name, PB. That gives it some definition.

IF is too vague.

Another example is the newer topic of leptin reset, LR. So far, it's one source, but at least LR has some definition, including notes on who should do it and who doesn't need it.

I've seen people say stuff like they are 280 lb, and doing IFs of 24-36 hrs, and they want to know if they should go to 48 because it's not working. WTF!?

IF is like a pill in a bottle with nothing on the label but a name, and everyone is just passing it around.

[DFH]

The fasts on Eat Stop Eat are more about surprising your body, or just going along with what could have happened to the Paleolithic man, sometimes he would be unlucky in the hunt and not eat nothing for some time.

Martin is a structured approach to look good, nothing too natural about it as you're set to eat at specific times and specific macro nutrients. Grok didn't have a food log or a watch to keep up with the system unfortunately... but he still prospered, or we wouldn't be here on the forums.

Note that I've read something about a hormone called ghrelin on one of Martin's post where he implies or states that it may be beneficial to have the same meals at around the same time.

Food for thought.

That's true but us modern humans have different problems than a hunter gatherer. Many of us have years of bad food and bad food advice to reverse, and it takes some structure based on what is known (hopefully) to work.

[Twinwolf]

I feel like for me, IF is something that I have to listen to my body about.. I've done a couple 24 hour or close to it IFs, I've done numerous 12-16 hour IFs, and all have been done when I feel I can go that long. As soon as I truly start to feel hungry, I eat.. I don't know if it's that simple, but I feel like the lack of structure is what makes it so simple and effective. Most times I don't even plan on fasting, it just doesn't occur to me that I'm hungry..

[Daemonized]

I think too much thought is being put into the word 'intermittent'. The webster's dictionary defines the word like this.:

: coming and going at intervals : not continuous <intermittent rain>; also : occasional <intermittent trips abroad>

The fact that the there is a pattern (like the leangains approach) in one's fasting does not have any effect on the word intermittent being appropriate. Martin's approach to eating involves fasted periods and non fasted periods and is therefore intermittent.

I also think that it's fine for everyone to have their own take on IF. We all claim to be more or less primal here, but no two people have exactly the same diet or even dietary needs.

[davem]

FRom dictionary.reference.com:
in·ter·mit·tent   
[in-ter-mit-nt] Show IPA
–adjective
1.
stopping or ceasing for a time; alternately ceasing and beginning again: an intermittent pain.
2.
alternately functioning and not functioning or alternately functioning properly and improperly.
3.
(of streams, lakes, or springs) recurrent; showing water only part of the time.

At the end of the day, it Martin's choice to call it what he wants, he could call it the "flaming purple people eater shoe dance of food scarcity" and it could still be the same thing as it is now. Sometimes, a rose is still a rose even if you call it a pumpkin.

[MikeEnRegalia]

It obviously depends on whether the body adapts/anticipates the fasts. If you regularly fast from 8 p.m. to 12 a.m. I think this is likely to be the case, and then it's hardly intermittent anymore. But even in that case it doesn't automatically follow that that's necessarily a negative.

[nolineon]

To quote one of my mentors:

NERDS!!!!

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