[vilaca]

Sounds like you could successfully fast very easily by eating the same amount of food in shorter period of the day, like 16h fasting and eating in the remaining 8h of the day. Without changing the amount of daily calories you wouldn't experience weight loss.

Obviously saying 'could' is not the same as saying 'should' and it's not very safe to do drastic changes to your diet without consulting a MD.

[joe_the_user]

I sometimes do this out of sloppiness. I'm not sure if there are any health benefits.

[webmaven]

Eating the same amount of food in a much shorter period is also a great way to train your stomach to accept (and unfortunately, expect) more food before feeling full.

[rjf72]

The Hadza in Africa are an interesting people. Quite a lot has been written about these hunter/gatherers. [1] The have the physiques you'd expect of hunter/gatherers, but not the lifestyle. They work around 2 hours a day in mostly low energy tasks. And their leisure time isn't exactly spent running marathons - the most common past times being gambling and simply relaxing. Part of the reason they've been reluctant to adopt agriculture is because they think it'd take too much work. You can do an imagine search for pictures of their well known people. Suffice to say, you're not gonna find many love handles.

Stories like this are part of what convinced me to give fasting a go. And after going on 2 years of it now, I've had the exact opposite experience of that which you describe. In particular I don't eat the same total amount of food/calories, I eat substantially less. And somehow I have substantially more energy. The reason I decided to try out fasting is because it seems evident that we're eating far more than we need, as the absurd rates of obesity/overweight attest to.

Blaming the lack of exercise is somewhat nonsensical as can be shown from more ancient peoples. But it can also be shown numerically. I now bike around 5k a day and that burns about 100 calories. That's 15 minutes of biking to burn the equivalent of about a third of a slice of pizza. Exercise is of course important, but not for the calorie burning. If you eat poorly (or too much) it doesn't matter if you spend hours at the gym - you're gonna get fat.

I think the actual truth is that in modern times we've trained our bodies to expect far too much food. Fortunately this is really easy to reverse. It just requires accepting a discomfort that fades somewhat quickly over the months.

[1] - http://rewild.com/in-depth/leisure.html

[tptacek]

Is that a well-documented truth, or just something you think seems right? The opposite has been true for me for the last few years of sort of informally fasting: I hit uncomfortable satiety faster when fasting.