The FastDay Forum

as I've said from when I started IF back in september,
the industry will hate it because there is no money to be made from it
and detailed dietary rules from doctors are not relevant
and only a very small proportion of people fail to get towardsa healthy weight.

no wonder they want to diss it !!

[carorees]

strange but when I use Google scholar I get a string of useful results that are scientific studies. Try this

Earlier today I did some searching on some aspect of intermittent fasting using 3 or 4 key words and Pubmed gave me 9 results whereas Google scholar had a few thousand. As I added IGF and something else Pubmed rapidly dropped to zero results, quite appalling really.

"calorie reduction intermittent protein" (without the quotes ) was the search string.

Change calorie to energy and you get 51 on pubmed. I would say that embase is probably better than pubmed but it's not free. The Cochrane database should also be searched.

My search on google scholar was sorted by date as I don't want ancient papers.

Review of different search engines here: http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/3159

That explains why I couldn't match your results - you should limit the date range if you have a time bias, and display by relevance to get the best search results. Sorting by date gives you the most recent hit regardless of quality or relevance scores as demonstrated above.

Would be interesting to see comparitive statistics of search tools, if I stuck to Pubmed there would be papers I never got to see.

The bit that made me LOL was one of the ways to lose weight listed at the end is "give up smoking". Um, no. Smoking is really REALLY bad for you, but giving it up won't help you lose weight, it will almost certainly help you put weight on.

I agree though that more research is needed on IF, to see if the health benefits do stack up. Yes there are positive studies, and some of these are on humans.

Just a couple of things:
First, I like the fact that IF is natural. Our bodies are very similar to that of our ancestors, and they most definitely would have alternated eating a lot and eating nothing. Oh, and they would NOT have stuffed their face with carbs all day. To me, it is logical. I don't need to see studies to be convinced. I do what I think my body is designed to do as a result of millions of years of evolution.

Second, there is an evolutionary problem that works against most of us: as we used to alternate feast and fast, our bodies are great at stocking fat for the next fast, and our minds just want to eat as much as possible in order to stock up for the next fast. Our biggest problem is that we still work like that, but without the fasting bit. So we overeat, and we don't understand why we can't help but polish the food in front of us, but we do. IF restores that fasting part of the natural cycle. WHAT IS UNNATURAL IS TO HAVE FOOD ALL THE TIME, NOT TO FAST! This, again, doesn't need to be demonstrated: those mechanisms have been well researched, it is a logical conclusion to add fasting to the cycle instead of trying to control urges all the time.

Finally, someone said earlier that people with eating disorders should not do IF. I disagree. I suffer from disordered eating (a much milder version but one that can lead to eating disorders) and IF is definitely helping me, in an almost miraculous way: for the first time, I can eat normally without feeling guilty, I can see hunger as a normal process that doesn't need to be stopped immediately, I can relax around food and stop obsessing about it. This WOE is curing me.

These, to me, are good enough reasons to continue without having to wait for all the research to be published. Published research, by definition, is always a little late.

I agree about the effect of this WOE on eating disorders. What has happened to me in a month is almost unbelievable. I have lost the urge to binge. I have two fast days a week and they get easier each time..and the other days I eat normally - I mean really like a normal person. Goodbye binge eating disorder. The effect started almost immediately when I started this diet. Something that was an overwhelming irresistible urge that was making my life a living hell has simply disappeared.