Moderate alcohol consumption associated with lower risk of death compared to none

[Physics Guy]

Maybe Peterson's pride in Mormon sobriety sounds different if it fits into a familiar context of Mormon smugness. His last few quotes just don't sound out of line to me, as a never-Mo who has barely ever even met any Mormons, and never been in a Mormon-majority environment.

My kind of fasting is not so extreme. The regime is to limit oneself to just six hundred calories for a day, two days a week (not consecutive). The rest of the time you just try to eat reasonably, making no particular efforts to count calories or anything. The effect should be to take two to three thousand calories per week out of your intake. Getting rid of those calories is the part I believe. It kind of has to make you lose half a pound a week or so, unless you overcompensate badly on the non-fast days.

The killer feature for me, apart from just working, is that this kind of intermittent fasting is simple. The only calorie counting I've had to do has been to identify a handful of 200-calorie snacks to eat for meals on fast days. Counting up to 200 calories is easy because you get there quickly. One granola bar does it for lunch. A small bowl of bland cereal makes breakfast. A small scoop of rice and a wonderfully big heap of almost any kind of vegetables is a supper. The other option is oatmeal with just a small splash of milk. A pretty normal bowl of oatmeal porridge is only around 200 calories.

At first I would weigh out portions on a kitchen scale, to make sure I had the right amounts, but you can dispense with that pretty quickly. It doesn't much matter if you go over by a few grams. So there isn't much mental effort in replanning all of one's food, the way there is in steady dieting. It's a short menu, and it would be miserable to eat nothing else for weeks on end, but for only two days in each week, getting bored with repetitive mini-meals has not been a problem.

On fast days you do have to stay at least moderately active. I'm pretty sure the reason why people say that weight loss isn't only about calories is that it actually is only about calories, but humans burn around two thousand calories each day just in moving around and staying warm, so if you go into a sluggish torpor that lowers that burn rate significantly, that's like cheating a lot on your diet.

I am definitely hungry on fast days. The main reason I don't get bored with my two kinds of granola bar for lunch is that by lunch every Monday and Thursday I'm thinking, "Hooray, my granola bar!" I find that the mini-meals are enough to keep me going, however. My patience is short on those days, and I find it hard to bring myself to focus on anything stressful, but I can be quite productive at absorbing tasks that distract me from hunger.

So this is my testimony about intermittent fasting. For me it's a sustainable lifestyle that I've been doing since just before COVID. I haven't wasted away to a wisp because I go off the regime for holidays and vacations, and I've also gone off the regime a few times for some months because my weight was staying in my target range without it. I don't care if I gain five pounds in December, because they're gone again by mid-March. I'm not worried about gaining weight back, because I have a hammer.

It may well work better for me than for others. I can control my own work schedule enough to move most stressful decisions out of Mondays and Thursdays. I also walk for around an hour every day, back and forth to work and with dogs. That's clearly a big help right there, though before COVID it wasn't enough to stop me from gaining a few pounds every year, and by middle age this had accumulated into significant pudginess.

Exercise is an important component in weight loss, but I think it must mainly be as some kind of signal to the body to keep up that 2000-calorie-per-day metabolic burn and not slip into a conservation mode, because the amount of exercise you need to burn a single muffin is ridiculous. The whole reason that biological life even exists as a phenomenon is that a small amount of food can power a lot of activity. Walking only burns a couple of hundred calories per hour. If I wanted to burn my excess calories with walking instead of just not eating them, with the fasting on two days, I'd have to walk three hours every day. Unless your daily schedule can fit in that much exercise, trying to lose weight with just exercise is bringing a knife to a gunfight.

I don't think it can be important to copy my regime exactly. The principle I see is just that it can be a lot easier, practically, to diet by cutting a lot of calories on a couple of days in each week, rather than by cutting more mildly all the time, or spending multiple hours every day exercising. It's dieting in a series of sprints rather than in a marathon. I'd probably get fed up with a diet after a week or two, but I can keep up my motivation through one hard day. It maybe even helps that I can feel myself heroically enduring hunger, rather than just getting bored and annoyed with the long slog of nothing but bland meals all the time. That seems to be my mentality. Maybe other people can implement the principle in their own ways.

[Morley]

So this is my testimony about intermittent fasting.

Physics Guy, I salute your methodology.

I followed a similar regimen many years ago. I fasted, apart from water, from my Sunday evening meal until my Tuesday morning breakfast--for a total of about 36 hours a week. I did this for the better part of a decade. My effort wasn't linked to weight loss, but was an attempt to boost my spirituality and to try to prompt God to communicate with me. Interestingly, apart from the whole God thing, I came look forward to the weekly self-denial and the feeling of (what you're calling) the heroism of the task. There seemed to be something cleansing about it. Unfortunately, the practice also appealed one of my fatal character flaws: that of quiet, but over-whelming, conceited self-righteousness.

I never did find God. I never did gain spiritually. I quit because I decided that, for me, the practice had become self-indulgent and vain. I concluded that I was not a titan or a gladiator but a regular human being. That said, I wonder if I might now benefit from renewing the discipline by following your more thoughtful approach.

[Gadianton]

I'm pretty sure the reason why people say that weight loss isn't only about calories is that it actually is only about calories,

Totally agree, but to get past how boring that is, you need an app, a community, and a bunch of placebo.

Exercise is an important component in weight loss, but I think it must mainly be as some kind of signal to the body to keep up that 2000-calorie-per day metabolic burn and not slip into a conservation mode, because the amount of exercise you need to burn a single muffin is ridiculous

Unless it's walking or something really sustainable exercise is a big problem. I've heard this from many people who were in top condition in the military and then when that's over, that 4,000 calorie a day diet doesn't mystically shrink to 2,000. Or suddenly an injury and can't exercise. Only exercise as much as you think you can commit to long-term.

But all this is just proving my point, unfortunately. I can't fault you for showing empathy. But look at how different your story is from Dan's. In an effort to defend those who may struggle with weight, you aren't shy about telling your success story, but it's with a lot of effort that you've put into it and trial and error.

This is in stark contrast to BYU students. Having the Word of Wisdom, in particular abstaining from tobacco or alcohol, is more like insider trading. There's no effort involved; this is how they were raised, there's no challenge to maintain it. And then look at the context of sharing the stories. You brought up your story to defend people who were struggling with weight. Dan didn't bring up his story to show empathy for those who struggle with addictions, it was to make these folks look like fools. It would be like if a naturally thin and healthy person who was also brought up vegetarian laughing at the local American Mormon ward and making comments like, "What is up with you people, I can't think of anything better than chomping on raw broccoli all afternoon!"

On my mission, which was a ways away and my first time out of the country, one of the things I was struck by the first time I went to the grocery store, was how rare it was to see someone who was overweight, whereas back home it's the norm.

This is typical of the Afore. He's never had to try. Everything in life has lined up for him to do whatever he wants with full justification to look down on others.

[drumdude]

As time passes, the word of wisdom will become increasingly irrelevant to modern understanding of optimal health. It doesn’t have the nuance to deal with changing research, discoveries, and technology.

There are many more ways of delivering nicotine, alcohol, psychedelics, painkillers, etc and to different ends. The childish view that all these substances are inherently evil and only end in addiction and homelessness is slowly eroding. Even the government is likely to stop categorizing marijuana as a top category substance, given the overwhelming evidence of its relatively benign nature.

I think the black and white abstinence only education around sex and drugs that was favored in the 80s and 90s did a huge disservice to those with the capacity to understand issues beyond a 3rd grade level.

One of the very frustrating aspects that affected the majority of my generation was that our parents did not get us vaccinated for HPV. There was a disgusting misconception that if teenagers, especially young girls, were vaccinated then that would lead to them becoming promiscuous. So they were robbed of a cheap effective protection against a disease that causes cancer in their adulthood.

Joseph Smith has nothing relevant to say about modern health, and basing one’s health around something so anachronistic that it includes instructions on livestock practices is just insane.

But that doesn’t stop Mormon parents from punishing their kids for drinking diet Mountain Dew.

[Doctor Scratch]

I agree completely with the Dean on this one. DCP does not actually care about advocating for good health/wellness practices. If he actually cared about improving wellness in the LDS community, he'd be posting articles on weight loss, avoiding excess sugar, and that sort of thing, but he never does. His primary goal, as Dean Robbers pointed out, is two-fold: on the one hand, it's meant to stick it to critics (especially atheists who drink), and on the other, it's meant to be a pat on the back for himself and his fellow Latter-day Saints. (The Dean is also right about how all of the Afore's stories seem to depict him as someone who has basically just coasted through life, without ever having to work or struggle for anything, but that's a separate issue.)

What I would add is that part of the reason why he's doing this is because Mormonism has so little to offer in the way of noticeable benefits. If you read the comments at "SeN," they are constantly flailing about in search of reasons why being Church members is "great." The reality is that they all sink 10% of their income for life into this organization that will never tell them what is happening with the money, and in return they get an assurance--which must be taken on faith--that they'll get to have "eternal salvation." Members pump in all that money, along with lots of time spent in meetings, and on "callings," etc., but they get pretty much nothing in return. It's why Midgley has described his life as a form of being on "probation." So, in a sense, I can't completely fault them for grasping at these WoW "benefits," even if (obviously) those same benefits can be gotten for free.

I think, too, that the criticisms of the Afore in this thread are connected to the Afore's fundamental haughtiness.

And parenthetically: I think that DCP likely feels that he has "gamed" the system. I.e., I bet he thinks that he has managed to get around the "paying 10% for life) disadvantage because, hey: he worked for BYU! So, whatever he paid to the Church he got back in the form of his Church-funded salary, so at worst, it's a draw! Plus, he's managed to milk all these free vacations and meals out of his Church connections. So, I guess if one is as mercenary about it as possible, one *can* manage to extract some value out of Church membership.

[Physics Guy]

I fasted, apart from water, from my Sunday evening meal until my Tuesday morning breakfast--for a total of about 36 hours a week. I did this for the better part of a decade. My effort wasn't linked to weight loss, but was an attempt to boost my spirituality and to try to prompt God to communicate with me.

36 hours on just water is a lot harder than about the same amount of time, from the normal previous day's supper until the normal following day's breakfast, on six hundred calories. Six hundred is a lot less than two thousand but also a lot more than zero.

As an undergrad I was also briefly into the harder, total fasting for religious reasons, though in retrospect my religious reasons were vague even as that. I had some Catholic friends who were into fasting for some kind of Catholic ascetic reasons, and I kind of wanted to be in their group even though I was neither Catholic nor otherwise drawn to asceticism. I only kept it up for a few weeks—months, at most, I'm sure—before deciding that it wasn't really doing anything for me, or for anyone else. I still remember how great the next day's breakfasts were, though. I reckon I ate enough extra waffles at the cafeteria that my net total calorie reduction from that fasting was small. I had a younger metabolism then and that wasn't an issue.

Far be it from me to criticise the Buddha, whose teachings I don't know at all well, but that experience did give me a different feeling about the supposed fact that he attained enlightenment after giving up excessive asceticism and finally having a modest meal. Those next-day waffles were so good.

[huckelberry]

Physics Guy, I am glad to read your explanation of your fast.It sounds reasonably moderated to something a person could try.

[Physics Guy]

Yeah, it is easy to try. You don't have to learn a lot or change your whole life; you can just do it one day, and see how it goes. If it's tolerable, you can try it again a couple of days later. If it's okay for a couple of weeks, you should be able to see some effect, and decide if it's worth keeping doing. If it's working, it should be good for about a pound a week, or nearly that, most weeks.

About seeing effects: I found at the beginning, when I was really losing weight and not just maintaining, that it helped to weigh myself every day (not just on fast days), but then deliberately not pay attention to the daily results, and instead keep a rolling seven-day average. Tracking weight loss with daily weighing is like tracking climate change by following the weather. It's totally possible for weight to go up or down from one day to the next by more than you're trying to lose in a week, because the scale counts whatever is standing on top of it at that moment, even stuff that's only inside you temporarily. Drinking eight ounces of water adds no fat at all, but it immediately adds half a pound to your weight. That's actually why it's worth weighing daily, because if you only check once a week, then that one check could happen to be high or low, and you'll get more excited or discouraged than you should.

The seven-day average should show a pretty steady downward trend that will be noticeable after a few weeks and substantial over months. If I did glance at the daily numbers, I always saw clear drops after each fast day, just because my body had less food in it. The numbers would climb back up in the normal days, but if I looked over a week or two it was clear that they usually didn't climb back all the way, and that some bits of those fasting drops were sticking.

I sometimes got a random plateau week for no reason I could tell, but the only time I found the regime to just stop working for longer than that was when we went to home-office mode for COVID and I stopped walking to work. I took up a bit more exercise and progress resumed. That's why I have to admit that a bit of exercise may somehow play an important role, even though I don't see how it can directly burn enough calories to matter much.