gwern comments on Open Thread: October 2009 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: gwern 01 October 2009 12:49PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (425)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gwern 20 December 2009 04:01:42AM 0 points [-]

knb: but what about IF? You get all the calories you want there. From my college days with the buffet, I remember on more than a few occasions I would simply not eat for a day and then the next day I would gorge. (I wasn't losing weight during this time, just to be clear, and I was also more athletic than my norm.)

Comment author: knb 20 December 2009 10:23:36PM 0 points [-]

That's actually really interesting. When I was an undergrad, I "accidentally" used intermittent fasting as well. I was about 20 lbs overweight when I started school one year, I managed to lose 25 lbs on accident, in spite of the fact that I regularly binged after 24 hours of being to busy to eat.

My (limited) understanding implies this kind of thing is unhealthy and leads to suboptimal mental functioning.

Comment author: gwern 21 December 2009 12:54:14AM 0 points [-]

My (limited) understanding implies this kind of thing is unhealthy and leads to suboptimal mental functioning.

If there's any unhealthiness to it, I didn't notice. It seemed to work out fine with my fencing & Taekwondo.

But mental functioning I really don't know. I ate pretty healthily even in the binging phase, but I know from my N-backing and polyphasic sleep experiments that one can be utterly unaware of even large deficits (or surpluses), and I was using no mental benchmark or task back then, so I would have remained unaware.