Now, something I could do is team up with a local dietician or endocrinologist and recruit patients to try calorie restriction.
Why not run a pilot on yourself first? The nice thing about IF is that in many forms, it’s dead easy: you eat nothing one day, twice as much the next. Record some data on yourself for a few months (weight? blood glucose*? a full blood panel?), and you’ll have solid data about your own reactions to IF and a better idea what to look for.
Personally, I would be surprised if you could do worthwhile research on IF by mining research records: ‘eating food every day’ is nigh-universal, and most datasets are concerned entirely with what people eat, not when. You might have to get creative and do something like look for natural experiments involving fasting such as Ramadan.
* and don’t write off blood glucose as too painful or messy for non-diabetics to measure! Blood glucose strip testing turns out to be easier than I thought. I used up a package recently: while I nearly fainted the first time as my heart-rate plunged into the mid-50s because of my blood phobia, over the course of 10 strips I progressed to not minding and my heart-rate hardly budging.
The nice thing about IF is that in many forms, it’s dead easy: you eat nothing one day, twice as much the next.
A particular form of IF I’ve heard of from several places is even easier: only eat within an 8-hour window each day. I often do that out of sheer can’t-be-arsed-to-have-breakfastness.
(I hear that existing studies about that are pretty confounded, e.g. they find that people who don’t have breakfast are less healthy but the effect disappears when controlling for conscientiousness.)
Why not run a pilot on yourself first? The nice thing about IF is that in many forms, it’s dead easy: you eat nothing one day, twice as much the next. Record some data on yourself for a few months (weight? blood glucose*? a full blood panel?), and you’ll have solid data about your own reactions to IF and a better idea what to look for.
Personally, I would be surprised if you could do worthwhile research on IF by mining research records: ‘eating food every day’ is nigh-universal, and most datasets are concerned entirely with what people eat, not when. You might have to get creative and do something like look for natural experiments involving fasting such as Ramadan.
* and don’t write off blood glucose as too painful or messy for non-diabetics to measure! Blood glucose strip testing turns out to be easier than I thought. I used up a package recently: while I nearly fainted the first time as my heart-rate plunged into the mid-50s because of my blood phobia, over the course of 10 strips I progressed to not minding and my heart-rate hardly budging.
The Ramadan natural experiment is interesting, this has been discussed wrt sport performance previously, eg see http://regressing.deadspin.com/is-fasting-for-ramadan-dangerous-at-the-world-cup-1598373130
A particular form of IF I’ve heard of from several places is even easier: only eat within an 8-hour window each day. I often do that out of sheer can’t-be-arsed-to-have-breakfastness.
(I hear that existing studies about that are pretty confounded, e.g. they find that people who don’t have breakfast are less healthy but the effect disappears when controlling for conscientiousness.)