I started IF about two years ago. I gradually, over a very long period worked down to one meal a day. It wasn’t hard, because it was gradual. I didn’t lose weight (but I wasn’t overweight to begin with), but I have leaner stomach and I gained muscle and strength. I’ve never felt better in my life. The first improvement I noticed was mental clarity.
It is embarrassing that the BBC article gets all its information from only one “expert”, who doesn’t seem expert at all. So shallow. For me, the best source of solid evidence-based information about IF was Jason Fung’s Obesity Code.
I am a scientist and I have to read sometimes hundreds of pages of dense scientific literature in a given week while doing other things that my job requires. I also find reading long difficult text to be hard. However, over the years I found two things that allowed me to get better at it:
1. Just read A LOT. There is no way around it. If you push yourself to do this, eventually your mind will figure out a way.
2. Markup the text you are reading. I do this on an iPad with a stylus. I underline key points, circle important paragraphs, jot down a quick summary of lengthy thoughts.
I doubt it. Using O_DIRECT is essentially bypassing the buffer cache. Similar to the “cold” experiments where the file is not cached. Mmap is still faster. I have also done experiments on a NVRAM machine with DAX file system (no buffer cache). Mmap is still several times faster.