For many months last year I would do a 5 day water fast the third week of every month. I enjoyed it but my mental performance at work suffered during the end of the fast.
I've been intermittent fasting for the last 2 months. I eat breakfast around 7:30 (protein shake I make at home with some healthy things tossed in), eat an orange or apple around 10AM, a large salad I make at work without any dressing at noonish, and a handful of cashews and almonds at 2:00PM. That's it. Nothing after that. I'll drink some unsweetened herbal tea or a carbonated water around 7pm sometimes when I'm winding down.
It's by far the best diet I've ever been on. It's hard sometimes when work events offer food/drinks after my eating window closes but not that hard. If I have to do work drinks I'll do a vodka soda to minimize my caloric intake.
Now I walk around at the weight that I wrestled at in college, I don't feel hungry often, and I feel great during the day.
I'm trying to get my family to try it for a few weeks to spur a lifestyle / eating change but it's been difficult. Most people are locked into the three meals a day (and likely a few snacks) mindset.
I've always found fasting easier by shifting the eating window to the end of the day rather than the beginning, i.e., doing all the eating after 5PM for a nice big dinner. I've found that the initial fast-breaking in the morning seems to be what triggers hunger soon thereafter around lunch time, whereas not breaking the fast in the morning seems to make it easier to coast through most of the workday without feeling any hunger.
Agreed. It also pre-loads the calorie deficit. If you eat in the morning, you haven't accomplished anything until you fail to eat at night.
In my case, hunger is one of the few things that can cause almost complete insomnia (like, lie awake actually all night, not just fitful wakeups), which means it works much better for me if I'm hungry in the daytime, instead of in the evening.
I'm pretty sure that's why muslims break their fast at night during Ramadan. It's much easier to go through the day hungry than it is through the night.
Presumably, this is a case of "listen to your body." People's metabolisms work differently and what works for one person may not necessarily work for everyone.
Same here. If I decide to eat only between 5:30 PM and 10 PM, that's a resolution I can generally keep for many consecutive weeks, and then seamlessly resume after an occasional midday meal. If I eat my breakfast at 8:30 AM rather than 5:30 PM, then it is a Sisyphean effort for me to fast through the rest of the day. No way could I establish that as a permanent lifestyle.
I figure that if my appetite spikes while I'm sleeping, I'm very unlikely to act on it.
If I eat breakfast at 5:30 PM, I generally want another meal around 10 PM, which is about the same interval as breakfast at 8:30 AM, lunch at 1 PM. But with the latter, I also want another meal at 5:30 PM, then maybe a snack at 10 PM. For the delayed meal schedule, that would probably put increases in appetite around 2:30 AM and 7 AM, which are easy enough to ignore if I'm not awake.
So my stomach timer runs at about 4.5 hours. If I'm awake, it's difficult to ignore when it times out, and it takes about 12 hours for the "eat now" alarm to stop screaming so loudly. So skipping a morning breakfast (with some effort) and midday lunch (easily) is about the only way I can manage to skip any meals without driving myself crazy from attempting to ignore the constant "eat now" appetite signaling. It then takes maybe 20 hours before the hunger signals start, which is not so much an "eat now" imperative as "get really irritable and impatient, be more stupid, and stop enjoying whatever it is you're doing". And that seems like a good a time as any to eat. If I ever push past 24 hours, I'm just not fit for participation in civilized society for a while.
I've found the same, and for the last year I've been almost always skipping breakfast and usually skipping lunch. I've gotten used to it, and I rarely experience the gnawing kind of hunger that doesn't pass as quickly as it arises.
I wonder if I could adapt just as easily to the reverse, like gp.
I don't think it matters when you fast per se, big lunch vs big dinner vs big breakfast. Some people claim a big breakfast and light dinner is better because you aren't digesting at night. If you do eat a bigger dinner it should be eaten earlier in the evening.
Congratulations on finding something that works for you and sharing it here.
However, it's incredibly common for just about anything to "work" for a three to four months. The key is finding something that is sustainable for a lifetime. It's also noteworthy that you're a former wrestler - a sport where careful control of eating and weight is of paramount importance so you presumably have a lot of experience with modulating nutrition and weight within narrow bounds. Given your experience what works for you may very well not work at all for others.
Sometimes it helps to observe your parents' eating habits. At some point I realized I had very similar eating habits to my dad, and started skipping breakfast as he had been doing for years. Now I do that every day (for years) and feel great.
Conversely, it can be useful to take a look at your parents' habits and realize what terrible habits you've accidentally copied so you can avoid them, especially when around family.
Absolutely. I recognize that my ability to fast is likely much greater than most due to that being the norm for a significant part of my life. However I also believe that many people could train their body/brain to have a similar response if they really tried for a few weeks or a month. It's incredible what we can train out bodies to do if we believe.
IDK. I feel most ppl are locked into a mindset of consuming food as something they want, not something they need. That is, it's mostly about pleasure and satisfaction and too little about nutrition and replacement.
As one of my XFit friends say "you can't outtrain a bad diet."
p.s. I too prefer vodka and soda. I like it. But I also know I'm better off with V&S than a beer. One look at the waistlines of my beer drinking friends and I'm happy with plain and boring V&S.
On the other hand, I also feel that it doesn't hurt to if you deviate from your own rules sometimes, instead of being all fundamentalist about it.
I try to live by a whole set of self-imposed rules because I think they are beneficial to my health and well-being, but for me these are not dogma's. By default, I don't drink during weekdays for example, but if there's a special occasion once or twice a month, I don't feel guilty deviating and/or making up for it some other day. As long as you feel comfortable with it yourself.
Generally I agree with your sentiments as stated, but it's becoming increasingly clear that any amount of alcohol consumption is carcinogenic due to the acetaldehyde it produces.
Basically drinking is joining smoking, and I don't think it's particularly smart to occasionally smoke a cigarette.
After reading this [1] I hugely cut down on my alcohol consumption. I'd prefer to never drink, but my current social circle doesn't seem to operate as a group without involving alcohol.
"I quickly discovered that way back in 1988, the World Health Organization declared alcohol a Group 1 carcinogen, meaning that it’s been proved to cause cancer. There is no known safe dosage in humans, according to the WHO. Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, but it kills more women from breast cancer than from any other. The International Agency for Research on Cancer estimates that for every drink consumed daily, the risk of breast cancer goes up 7 percent." - [1]
I didnt drink for the majority of my life and after a few years of overdoing it I'm back in the mindset of alcohol is poison. Poison you likely wont die from but you are ingesting something into your body that is bad for you. It's helped my mindset shift from a casual drink or three is fine to avoiding it whenever possible.
> it doesn't hurt to if you deviate from your own rules sometimes
This is very true and valid, my concern was/is more that peer pressure was resulting in someone feeling like that have to drink. People should be free to do whatever they like with their own self. Including not drinking if they don't want to.
Yes - I do abstain from time to time but if it's a one on one meeting I want to make the other person feel at ease. In group settings I'm likely to get a soda water at the bar without the vodka and no one will be the wiser.
You do what is best for you, I think that is what I mean. I just don't like it when people cajole others into drinking when they normally wouldn't. No one should be made to feel that they aren't normal because they don't want to drink.
Someone mentioned on HN recently (sorry, couldn't find the thread) that multi day fasting damages the lining of the stomach — something to do with acid production.
Generally fasting under 2 weeks is considered safe. The stomach does not have a problem being in an acidic environment, it's always in acid. What some people report is heartburn or acid reflux, which can be damaging to the throat lining however it's usually temporary or treatable. Keep in mind people have been fasting safely, whether intentionally or not since before history. Our bodies are capable of handling many feast/famine cycles.
Typical advice I've heard is to not stay hungry for too long. The stomach sends acid to the stomach as a strong message that it's hungry. Not eating means there isn't food protecting the stomach from the acid. That risks getting an ulcer.
Fasting seems to be a common practice, though. I wonder what variations in fasting (how long to go without eating, how often to fast, etc.) maximizes fasting time while keeping the risk of getting an ulcer to a minimum.
EDIT: Changed "increases or decreases risk" as of course fasting is not going to decrease the risk as opposed to not fasting.
Alcohol metabolism is pretty complex, though. Your liver can only process so much at once, so you’re not going to extract all the available energy from it if you’re drinking quickly/heavily, because the body will start excreting the excess acetic acid as urine.
That is, a bottle of wine has ~600 Cal in ethanol alone, but to actually get those calories out of it, you would need to drink it slowly, one glass at a time—you won’t actually get 600 Cal out of it if you drink it in one sitting.
Anecdotally: when I used to drink quite heavily a few years ago, I was consuming 500–1000 Cal of ethanol a day, yet still eating a normal ~2000 Cal diet, with ~2 hours a day of moderate physical activity, and losing weight.
The calories per gram you reference is how much energy you get out of substance from literally setting it on fire.
But how much actual energy is available to the human body is very different. And alcohol specifically is very hard for the human body to efficiently turn into eneegy.
In addition alcohol make the mitochondria more inefficient leading to greater energy usage.
Most studies that add alcohol to animals diet find no change in weight.
A calorie is a unit of measure of energy right? But you can release different amounts of energy depending on the chemical reaction you use.
Well the chemical reaction they use to measure energy in macronutrients is not the same chemical reaction that is used by the human body, they burn it instead. Now for most macronutrients this doesn't matter because the amount of calories released by the human body is pretty close to the amount released by burning.
But this isn't true of ethanol which is very efficiently burned, but very inefficiently consumed by the human body. So the 7 Cal/gram is very misleading.
I'm not sure you can say that about a body in a fasting condition described here: the metabolism shifts may be more significant than default caloric counts.
In particular, note the observation about acetic acid being excreted in urine rather than completing energy metabolism in this Wikipedia write-up, and the resulting massive difference in caloric energy output:
I havnt measured but it doesnt feel unsustainable. I weigh about 172 right now and ultimately I'd like to walk around at 160 pounds. I could be ignorant here but eventually if I continue this diet my body will get to a weight where my caloric intake is enough to maintain my weight. I havnt seen any decrease in performance mentally or physically so I wouldn't call it unsustainable. I went on a 15 mile walk this weekend and felt fine.
I'm trying to get my family to try it for a few weeks to spur a lifestyle / eating change but it's been difficult. Most people are locked into the three meals a day (and likely a few snacks) mindset.
I think flipping it around to skip breakfast is far easier, both in terms of self-control and socially. Food is really important to most cultures, and an incredible amount of social cohesion is built around sharing meals together, primarily dinner, but also lunch. But for most people's lifestyle, if you start skipping breakfast, many people won't even notice.
I like this idea. It's the next option I'm going to try with them. No eating until lunch at noon and then stop eating at 8pm. That should be do able for most of my family as I don't think they are big breakfast people anyways. It will just cut out that late night snacking.
Depends on the kind of shake and the amount consumed. But with most products meant for weight loss at recommended intake [e.g. not Soylent], the caloric intake is so low, that the metabolism enters the fasting state.
However, muscle loss and the risk for other deficiencies is reduced.
I've been intermittent fasting for the last 2 months. I eat breakfast around 7:30 (protein shake I make at home with some healthy things tossed in), eat an orange or apple around 10AM, a large salad I make at work without any dressing at noonish, and a handful of cashews and almonds at 2:00PM. That's it. Nothing after that. I'll drink some unsweetened herbal tea or a carbonated water around 7pm sometimes when I'm winding down.
It's by far the best diet I've ever been on. It's hard sometimes when work events offer food/drinks after my eating window closes but not that hard. If I have to do work drinks I'll do a vodka soda to minimize my caloric intake.
Now I walk around at the weight that I wrestled at in college, I don't feel hungry often, and I feel great during the day.
I'm trying to get my family to try it for a few weeks to spur a lifestyle / eating change but it's been difficult. Most people are locked into the three meals a day (and likely a few snacks) mindset.