Whether or not diets are effective depends mostly on how easy they are to follow. It’s dead easy to come up with “the right calories and nutrients”. The hard part is sticking to that.
That’s why keto works for a lot of people – they don’t feel as hungry. That’s why intermittent fasting works for a lot of people – it’s easier to just decide not to eat at all outside certain hours than to restrict what you can eat all day, and restricting the hours often doesn’t increase appetite enough in the “eating hours” to overcome the lack of snacking outside the “eating hours”.
Yeah, if you could lock people in a room and just give them a balanced diet with the ideal number of calories, and nothing else to eat, it probably wouldn’t much matter when they consumed those calories, or the precise ratio of fat to carb to protein. But out in the real world, where people have the option to eat a lot of stuff all day long, it does matter.
Definitely this. I don’t want to count calories. I know what I should eat and what I shouldn’t (but mostly how much of the shouldn’t’s I should not eat).
COVID has made the 16/8 very easy, as it also cuts out a major-calorie, going-out-to-lunch meal (with free refills on diet soda) that I would eat daily.
