Anyone have experience or interest in fasting? Anything you’d like to share or ask about it?
I’m on my fifth day of intermittent fasting; I eat only from noon to 8PM. It’s better and easier than I thought. The first day was trying, I was badly hungry from about 8AM to noon. The second day was easier, I was only badly hungry for about two hours. On the third day, when 12PM came around, I wasn’t desperate for food. My mind became both calm and energized; it felt like meditation or a low dose of MDMA. On the fourth day, I put off eating for half an hour to do strength training and I did well at that, I didn’t feel any weakness. I think I was on the verge of ketosis at that point because I got sugar cravings, gave in, ate five fruits and two chocolate bars. I’ll have to power through it next time.
I’ll also have to figure out how to fast (or something close to it) while still providing sufficient and timely protein for strength training. I do it with enough intensity that my muscles are sore for 1-2 days which I take to mean that my muscles need protein to rebuild.
To someone considering this, it may help to start fasting on non-working days since the early days are the hardest. Hot water can be surprisingly effective at cutting hunger.
Here’s an interesting videos on intermittent fasting and its benefits: - YouTube
You’re only eating from noon until 8pm? That includes the standard American lunch and dinner times. Frankly, it sounds more like “skipping breakfast” than fasting.
The thread is meant to cover both intermittent fasting (or time-restricted eating if you prefer) and more conventional fasting. IF may be a good jumping off point to fasting for several days which I’ve only done once.
What is this supposed to do for you? Weight loss? I’ll be real disappointed if it’s some kind if religious thing. Meditation? All I would think about is a chocolate bar.
I’ve been doing it for well over 10 years now. I’m on a 20/4 hour schedule. I eat when I get home from work in the evening. Roughly 6-10. I’ve also been athletically active all my life and this way of eating hasn’t had any negative impact on me in any way. My muscles are mildly sore more or less all the time but I like that feeling.
The only exception to my routine is coffee and or tea. One in the morning and one in the afternoon. I enjoy my caffeine habit.
It can help you lose weight. Especially if you don’t try to catch up on all your missed meals outside your fasting window. But there is a lot of research that benefits of intermittent fasting go well beyond weight control. Read the link the OP provided and google “intermittent fasting benefits studies”.
This is not a religious or woo thing. It’s got actual science to back it up. And you’re permitted to think about chocolate while you’re fasting. Think about any food you want. Just don’t eat it.
P.S. Dr. Rhonda Patrick is awesome and she’s the real deal as far as science street & lab creds go.
I’m not religious. I’m doing it for weightloss, physical fitness (independent of weightloss), changing my gut biome, improved energy/focus/mood, willpower training, meditation and also simple curiosity. Fasting may also contribute to something called autophagy where the body consumes then later replaces defective cells. I don’t know if I’ll get all or any of that but it’s worth a try. I’m also rather curious about what it would feel like to combine cold exposure, exercise, meditation, fasting ketosis and other stuff at the same time.
Quick,
Any info on how to ease the transition to ketosis? Last time I got into ketosis, it felt like a hangover and a flu wrapped into one. I gave in.
How long did it take for your body to learn not to be hungry outside those 4 hours?
Fasting is hardly ever worth the trouble. Why do it? It does not “cleanse” or “detox” your body. That is a provenly debunked myth. Also what can happen is your body can go into a semi-starvation mode where it latches onto every fat gram it can the next time you eat, and then stores it. This of course can lead to not only NOT losing weight but in actually gaining, as well as losing muscle mass and NOT dropping any fat.
Fasting is also of course not sustainable. And the key to ANY fitness regimen is that it MUST be sustainable and also involve BOTH nutritional tweaks AND exercise.
Lastly…what you are doing is not really fasting anyway. LOL. You are simply decreasing your caloric intake. This CAN lead to some weight loss but not automatically. Depends upon the quality of those calories you’re ingesting in the AM. You also need to be exercising.
Another fitness Myth for you: the notion that being thin is always being healthy, and that being over your optimal weight is always UNhelathy. This is not true.
It’s going to take your body time to adjust. I think you’re going about it in the right way by doing the 16/8 hour fast. Once you get used to that, you can try to adjust it to 18/6 and 20/4. Or really, whatever suits your lifestyle.
I can’t tell you how long your adjustment level will be. People’s bodies adjust at different rates. Best advice I can give you is not to do things that you can’t/won’t stick with. I was lucky and didn’t experience too much in the way of negative effects. I remember being kind of hungry but never ravenous. I remember light headedness but never anything remotely like feeling sick in the way you describe.
To adjust to the 20/4 cycle, took about a year. I was quite determined to get there and was lucky not to suffer severe negative effects. My motivation was largely in not having that full gut feeling and lethargy that often follows a mid day meal.
What I didn’t do was try to trigger ketosis in a deliberate sense by dramatically reducing carbs and switching to a high fat diet. To be honest, back when I started, the high fat diet thing wasn’t anything I was aware of. My goal was to eat a balanced diet and reduce my caloric intake through daily intermittent fasting. That works for me and I continue to eat that way.
I’ve even done longer fasts. Occasionally I will do a 3 day fast. A couple of times I did a 5 day fast. The latter I will do on an extended business trip. It just works for me because most hotel/restaurant food sucks any and it’s too much of effort to seek out something more healthy. But mostly I will do it because it seems like the perfect opportunity for a fast.
But even 10+ years later, there are days when I’m at home and feeling hungry in the middle of the day or just feel like treating myself to a proper breakfast of eggs, bacon, hashbrowns, etc… So I allow myself to indulge. It doesn’t happen often. More so around holidays like today. Also I tend to crave comfort food in the winter than in the summer/warmer weather. It’s important to indulge yourself from time to time so it doesn’t feel like IF is a punishment.
As for the cold exposure, I’m a believer to the extent that we regulate the temp at home to be quite cool when we sleep 62-63 in the winter. 67-68 during the day. That’s easy enough in the winter. In the summer it’s harder because A/C doesn’t keep up as well. I don’t do anything more sever but I have read about the benefits and it seems a bit too aggressive for me to sleep without a blanket.
I’d focus on IF until you’re acclimated to whatever fasting window you are shooting for before adding the temp regulation. You don’t want to set yourself up to fail by taking on too much at once.
I did a different kind of modified fasting, strictly for weight loss. It was called a protein-sparing modified fast, and consisted of 600 calories per day of protein shakes, along with (liquid) potassium supplement and (Slow FE) iron supplement. This was done under doctor supervision, with weekly doctor or PA consultations and monthly blood tests. The 600 calories was stretched out to a shake every 3 hours or so during my waking hours. I also started with zero exercise and worked my way up to 3 or 4 fairly intense cardio sessions per week. I did this for almost 9 months and lost 150 pounds (from 335 to 185). That’s an average of nearly 4 pounds per week, which if you can maintain it becomes its own reward.
My experience: severe hunger at different times during the first two weeks, after which hunger mostly went away; also I learned how to deal with hunger when it did occur, basically by ignoring it until it went away.
I’ve had mixed luck keeping the weight off, but that wasn’t the fault of the original program. Maintenance is always much harder, and I gradually lost the ability to ignore hunger until it goes away. I am currently trying to regain that skill.
As for other benefits, I can’t say that I felt any. Perhaps other physical or emotional effects were masked by the relative euphoria of continuing weight loss. When I feel better physically, my mental and emotional states are also much improved; beyond that I can’t say. I have never thought (up to now) about continuing any kind of fast as an ongoing life choice.
Do a search.
I posted my experience with I.F. here awhile ago. Bottom line: it works, but probably for different reasons than most of the woo-ers postulate.
I noticed that my mind is slower after a meal. It’s like we only have enough blood for 1 of 3 places at a time.
How do you maintain your weight on 20/4? It seems like it would take a lot of effort to maintain your weight with the food eaten in a 4 hour period. Or lots of carbs. Your occasional indulgence makes up for that?
Can you describe how a 3 or 5 day fast differ? How do you feel on the 5th?
I’ve learned that two challenges at the same time is more than twice as difficult and failure prone as having one. It’s best to get used to one thing before adding another. I’ve already started doing some cold exposure in the form of cold showers so now I’ll add fasting.
If I don’t start eating, I don’t get hungry; if I don’t eat breakfast, I won’t be hungry at lunchtime; if I don’t eat lunch, I won’t be hungry at dinner.
I once dropped a very significant amount of weight by simply getting up, going to work and not eating until I got home - I would eat a small meal at about 8PM and even then, my appetite wouldn’t kick in until I tasted something. I carried this on until I could see the outline of my ribs through my skin, and all but one of my chins disappeared.
Like almost every other drastic weight loss scheme, most of it rebounded when I went back to normal.
A guy I work with is doing the intermittent fasting thing, only eating during a designated set of hours. He does appear to have lost some weight but he seems like a miserable bastard all the time. First off all he does is complain about being hungry and talks non-stop about food, I mean literally all day.
He’s been having a lot of headaches and back pain, I doubt the back pain is relevant but maybe the headaches are, of course that could just be lack of caffeine or something. The other thing is he is always cold all the time and complains about that incessantly, he just always seems to be miserable. He has also been complaining about waking up frequently throughout the night.
I love IF because it helps me suppress my appetite and I feel like I have better control over food, which feels good. If I eat breakfast for some reason my body has always been like “oh it’s ON”, wanting to eat and eat the rest of the day. If I just don’t eat, then when I do I can’t eat as much in one sitting. There is lots of research into the benefits of IF. I don’t like my body to get super accustomed to any one thing so I switch it up. 16/8 is super easy, on up to a 22 hour fast (longest I’ve gone) and sometimes I even eat breakfast now and it doesn’t make me ravenous the rest of the day. I’ll skip lunch and just have dinner later.
Not long ago we had a somewhat contentious thread about the advisability of intermittent fasting and gorging, along the lines of “I don’t want to hear about whether it’s good or bad, just tell me if it worked for you”.
I don’t know whether it purges the Bad Cells or not, but I have had success with what could be called the Cranky ER Doc’s Weight Loss Plan, named for a semi-sociopathic physician’s comment to a morbidly obese patient we went in to see during my med school days (on his way out of the room, the Cranky ER Doc told her “You need to eat less”).
This is going to be a rough week, seeing that there are two pies on the sideboard calling to me, plus a fridge full of leftover turkey and trimmings. I plan to work off some weight digging my canna tubers, plus treadmilling at least 50 miles a day for the duration. :dubious:
I’m not a huge guy (5’8") and I work in an office setting so I’m pretty sedentary during business hours. The only physically active thing I do is my workouts. I used to be an avid cyclist but my interest in long distance rides has waned in the past few years. So I don’t need all that many calories to maintain my weight. Roughly 1600-1800 is plenty to maintain my current weight of 165lbs. I prefer to be at 156-158 and can easily get there if I monitor my calories through an app and a food scale. But it’s winter and my clothes still fit so I’m not going to get all militant about being dropping 8lbs right now.
When I track my macros, the average caloric breakdown is roughly: 40%carbs/30%protein/30%fat. I won’t bore you with what I eat specifically but it’s really easy to eat 1600-2000 calories in a 4 hour period. Most people over-estimate how much they burn in the gym and under-estimate how many calories they consume through the day.
My non-20/4 indulgences are very rare. I’ll have my ‘fantasy breakfast’ maybe once or twice a year. I also make a mean french toast breakfast xmas morning and that’s something I start looking forward to soon as December rolls around. Sweet things are another weakness of mine. Not in the form of soda or ridiculous coffee concoctions, but in the form of deserts like fruit pies or custards/puddings. Also, TJ’s mini biscotti with my evening cuppa. It’s getting to the time of year when my wife bakes her fantastic rugelach and russian tea cookies. So I’m properly screwed, calorie wise.
I’ve been toying with the idea of going to a plant based diet (mostly vegan) but I’m really struggling with it. I do love my meat and I’m finding it harder to give up than missing meals. But it’s the right thing to do from a health, environmental and humane perspective. So I’m still working on getting into the frame of mind required to commit to it.
That’s an easy one. The first two days always suck. It becomes easier on day 3 through 5. I did a 5 day fast in september (while on business travel) and found it to be pretty easy after the initial couple of days. I worked out at about 80% of my normal effort every day and made sure to stay hydrated. The worst thing about this kind of multiple day fast is figuring out what to do with yourself during your normal meal time. Despite my I.F. lifestyle, I still love food and cooking and the entire social ritual around meal time. That’s why, for me, it’s easier to multi-day fast while away from home on business.
At the end of the 5 day fast, I felt slightly elated mentally and really fit physically. My gut felt really calm. I was actually reluctant to start eating again. I didn’t feel particularly hungry and considered pushing it to day 6 and 7 but I was home and the comfort of routine took over.
