Very interesting, thank you for sharing. I posted a video on fasting and I did the 16:8 method with good results.
For anyone interested, I have been trying to figure out full fasting (no eating for many days at a time) and intermittent fasting for about two years now.
While I have figured out the procedure for getting into a full fast I did discover that it was difficult to keep even intermittent fasting going for a long time. For those that are not aware, intermittent fasting is just eating one meal every 24 hours.
Here is what I discovered was super important:
Most important: I had to learn the basics of cooking. The body craves all kinds of things at all kinds of times of day. If you don't know how to cook you cannot satisfy your bodies need for the kinds of variety it will be looking for an you will eventually end up snacking or eating restaurant food.
Second most important thing: De-stress. I never thought this was an issue, but going to work with and/or for people that you hate has a hell of an impact on my eating habits. The chyna virus kind of opened my eyes to how much I was eating just to distract my self even though I just thought it was normal to eat 3 times a day.
Third most important thing: Downregulate your hormone levels. Did you know there is a hormone called ghrelin that controls our apetite? If you didn't know this, you probably thought you were hungry because your stomach was empty right? Nope. Hunger is controlled by ghrelin. How much fat you store is controled by the insulin hormone. You would not believe how many things in our body are regulated by hormone levels. The inverse is true too ... you wouldn't believe how many inputs from the environment (stress, food input, etc) affect your hormone levels. There are GIANT feedback loops built into how our bodies perform making losing weight really difficult.
It turns out that you cannot control how much and when you eat at all as far as I can tell. The only thing that you can do is interfere with the feedback loops that impact our hormone response and regulation systems.
It also turns out that the biggest impact on our hormone levels are controlled by sugars. I separate sugars and starches into categories because that is how we label food, to our body they are the same thing. Basically, if you cut out all sugars and starches your body will automatically start to downregulate your hormone levels because it is sugars and starches that are the cause of the majour spikes in hormone response levels.
I cannot tell yet if cooking was the most important part of the strategy or the chyna virus de-stressing my work environment that was ultimately what has allowed me to eat once a day to be honest. Right now, I feel it was learning to cook because my cravings went away once I learned how to cook because I no longer crave anything and eating once a day is the new normal.
But right now, eating once a day is not even intermittent fasting for me. It's normal. Yesterday I had 4 plain smokies in a baguette for dinner around 8pm, I am not hungry now and wont eat until about 7pm. Today I might even skip because I'm not that hungry.
Cutting out vegetable oils doesn't seem to really have affected my hormone downregulation in a noticeable way, I just did that for health reasons as per video above and other similar videos. Of course, to cook you have to use fats and obviously its beef / pork fat and butter. I can't use coconut oil because it makes everything taste like coconut.
But, there is another side effect of eating less and less because the cravings are gone: I am finding I am using less and less fat these days as well. With the exception of Indian and Chinese cooking which is very heavy on fats, I am even using less and less fat for some reason. I don't even crave most of the variety of foods that I used to crave in the past so I guess using less fat is just a sideffect of downregulating my hormone levels.
The human body is a wild mechanism.
>I can't use coconut oil because it makes everything taste like coconut.
Get the "refined" type, not the "extra virgin" type. It's good to have shelf stable options for fat.
No starch I had 4 plain smokies in a baguette
Where can I buy grain-free baguettes?
Good point. I'm over simplifying a tad to paint a picture. A bit more detail:
I cut out all sugars and starches about 12 months ago but I found out that I could not keep up meat + green veg only because I couldn't cook. Basically, I couldn't make meat + green veg taste good or interesting.
At the same time I cut out all sugar and I tried drinking nothing but water (12 months ago). I found out that not only can I not stand drinking water all the time I had sugar withdrawals. I tried drinking all of the sugar free stuff like coke zero, zevia and things like that. This worked for a bit but I slipped back to drinking regular coke.
There two critical discoveries that happened around that time:
I found out there were A LOT of sugar zero cal zero impact on your hormone levels replacements. Stevia is the big one but that stuff is cut with a lot of different things so its hard to get the effect. I settled on monkfruit sweetener which is zero cal and can be found in this product: https://www.lakanto.com/collections/shop-products/products/lakanto-golden-sugar-free-sweetener
The other thing that I found out was that TEA, of all things, makes water taste more "ROUND". I cannot explain it, but I cannot drink just plain water unless I am really thirsty. These days I make a giant pot of tea, have it sit on the counter at room temp and I can drink it. Sweetening with monkfruit zero cal means you can drink as much as you want all day long. So that replaced all commercial drinks.
The third thing that I found out was that I had to learn to cook and cooking is not about ingredients its about two dozen techniques that you use to mix and match sauce + meat + a filler (usually a starch like rice or potatoes). Once I learned to cook I was able to eat once a day because it was delicious and interesting but while it would be mostly asian style stir fries without a starch, I did cook a bunch of italian and that is mostly starch.
The exact current state of breakdown of meat vs green veg vs starch is as follows:
Mostly meat
Not too many green veg, but they do make it in to sauces and stir fries
I will occasionally make a side of rice or boiled / fried potato just to fill out a meal, but not often. So maybe a 1/4 of meal or less is starch in a given week?
I don't really make much italian any longer, that craving has gone away, recently i have just been stir frying / cooking up meats and making up sandwiches and adding sauces + veg toppings to change it up a bit. I'm not really craving that much these days.
Technically I haven't cut out starches 100%. They mostly just went away by accident and I eat so little of them that it probably doesn't even matter much any longer.
Also, I no longer use monkfruit to sweeten the tea that I drink at all. I think I have accidentally aclimatized to just drinking unsweetened tea and now I am down to that.
The whole thing has been a slow downregulation of the hormonal response cycles to eating.
As for cheating, Over the last two months I had McDonald cheezeburger meal I think twice and it was kind of gross, I remember it being a lot tastier. I did get a bunch of sushi two weeks ago because I haven't had it for 6 months, but that too wasn't as interesting as I remember it.
Weird.
// EDIT: What I am trying to get at is that I don't think it is super important to be too rigid about no starch no sugar all meat + veg. I think you want to probably eventually to get as low as possible, but having a bit of bread, pasta or maybe drinking a can of pop once a month or two is probably fine. You just want to get to a point where you are always satisfied and aren't craving stuff because the hormone levels are oscillating back and forth off the hook trying to get your body to consume stuff.
When I was a kid, McDonalds was a treat you had with your family once every 3 months or so? I have no idea I upregulated McDs consumption as an adult where it became normal part of weekly consumption. Same with all restaurants and highly processed food.
For anyone that bothered to read this far, I'm writing this to be read but also they are notes for my self. it's not interesting writing this down if someone doesn't prompt it with a question aor a challenge somehow.
I used juicing to build up to OMAD. Right now I’m trying to burn fat so I go low on the protein everyday. Trying to become less insulin resistant. Every ten days or so I’ll go for some protein and animal fat. I don’t lose weight but I don’t gain either. Everything I’ve seen points to seed oils being poison and adulterates processed foods.
That is precisely my finding as well. One meal a day is maintenance for me.
Which is fucking scary if I think about the health consequences of that.
The next step will be to actively extend fasting / and / or add excercise to the daily routine. Long term, fasting should be easier to maintain, but, the benefits of moderate excercise relative to my current excercise levels would probably be even more beneficial.
I think you are right, I have noticed I crave unhealthy kinds of food less if I eat healthy (less carbs and sugar = less cravings).
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