Fasting 50% of the Solution
 

Is fasting 50% of the Solution? How do you go about fasting/IF?

To quote Dr. Fung:



I can easily do food windows. And choose foods for satiety. That will get you off the "three meals and two snacks" hamster wheel.

Mee too, love the food windows as well.

I started with just skipping breakfast. Not really hungry in the morning though, so it wasn't hard at all. More difficult, yet waaaaayyy more effective was skipping dinner and nothing to eat the rest of the night.

An interesting quote that I like from Dr Tro Kalajian: "Intermittent fasting used to just be called 'eating'."

Once people are eating a carb-restricted diet - or as I like to call it, a carb-appropriate diet, there's no reason to constantly graze. Finish your dinner. Go to bed. Don't eat again until you're hungry.

Sure, the low-fat carb-pushers started this "you must eat breakfast" stuff decades ago and it's become dogma, but to me, that was more aimed at kids. There was (rightfully) a lot of attention on kids going to school hungry and doing poorly. Somehow, that spread into diet dogma for obese adults. Around the same time, junk food pushers got everything everywhere. Gas stations turned into convenience stores. Schools had vending machines. We were conditioned to eat ALL. THE. TIME.

So is it 50% of the solution? Probably, depending on what your old habits were. If you were obeying the 80s rules, most likely yes.

Time-restricted eating – a detailed intermittent fasting guide 6-11-20 [ dietdoctor ]

Time-restricted eating [ foundmyfitness ]

Fasting before exercise and the effect on endurance, aerobic, and strength training | Rhonda Patrick

Then there is omad (one meal a day), aka skipping 2 meals. To me, when you do fasts longer than 24 hours they are intermittent fasts.

Thanks guys! Kristine,mojolissa, s93uv3h and everyone.

I like the saying "a carb-appropriate diet" as well. Thanks for posting links too.
Love the diet doctor's recipes.

i do eat 1 a day at times but 2 meals a day work better most of the time. Need the proteins.

Bob Briggs "Butter Bob", he used to speak about the impact the first fasting day does on lowering the fasting insulin levels. Dr. Joseph R. Kraft work too.


I am so glad we can help each other out and still tailor our own ways - our individual lifespan programs. That is why I love CAD/CALP and that it works for me. The Drs Hellers as well.

Durring one period I fasted and lost 10 kilos on just fasting with some days just drinking bone broth and the days in between I could handle more regular food. It was a good experience. For me just eating the carbs once a day helps. If I have f i eggs as my first meal then it does not effect my insulin much but helps me through the day to my main course.

Have a great day!

I'm a Butter Bob disciple, wish he was back to making videos but the ones he did make are still there and I revisit them occasionally just for a little motivation to keep going. When I was in my 20s (30 years ago) I did intermittent fasting without knowing it was a thing. I was afraid to even mention it to people because they'd all tell me I'd die if I didn't eat. But I would only eat one meal every two or three or even four days and it wasn't low carb. I shed weight like crazy, 70 pounds in a few months.

Over time I went back to standard eating and eventually fattened up again, then I tried low carb. Amazing results, lost the 70 back in a similar time frame without the long fasts. But that was only the first time. Every time after that the weight loss on low carb was slower than the last.

Then I discovered Butter Bob and Jason Fung and decided to try intermittent fasting again, this time with low carb and no fear of telling others what I was up to. Amazing results again, every bit as fast as that time in my 20s. But everyone is different and that baseline insulin level has an effect on how quiclly you can drive yourself into fat burning mode. But I firmly believe that when you put things into your mouth is as important as what things you put in there. For me long fasting windows work amaingly well, shorter ones are less effective but still I lose. I have a high resting insulin level so there ya go. Anyway you can lose weight even on a high carb diet if you are spacing it out, I proved it (though my spacing was loooong gaps between meals then).

Anyway for me it's just what I do now. I never eat more than one meal a day anymore, or at least very rarely. And never ever threee. But those two and three day fasts are far less common now. It's sort of just a way of life for me.

Butter Bob Revisit
 

Thank Steve, good comment. I to revisit his videos. These past days I've not been hungry so I have skipped my crave reduction meal and just had one meal a day. I never try to eat the CM unless I am hungry I just wait till the main meal. Rarely do I take a protein snack but if I am hungry I will allow it.
We are about the same age you, Bob and me. Think he is a few years older.
Such a brave man.

If the times will get tougher we may not have the foods we want/need then we will have to rely on fasting not to gain/get sick IMO. Fasting is KEY.


May you be blessed richly.

Your strategy of eating when you are hungry is what works for me. I don't eat because the clock says it's eating time. I do limit myself to a window (sometimes bigger, sometimes longer) but if I get hungry and it's outside my window, I give it some time to pass but if it doesn't then I accept that my body is telling me it needs food. I'm not talking a little hunger pang, I'm talking about that real feeling of hunger that lingers for more than half an hour or so. Over time, with fasting those periods of hunger become far less frequent anyway.

One caveat though, for people reading this thread and just getting started in IF. You do have to get into fat burning and when you are starting you are likely to be hungry a bit if you are skipping a meal you've always had. Start with a shirter fasts and build up over time but don't snack whenever you get a hunger pang because then you simply arent fasting. Once you are getting momentum you can have a little more flexibility. Sort if like getting into induction on Atkins.

In addition to the other excellent advice here, I'll add that when I went Very Low Carb, I felt I wasn't doing it right, because I was constantly hungry. Even after my One Meal A Day (OMAD) of a whole pound of hamburger :)

Fortunately, enough people have shared similar experiences to urge me to go ahead and eat more meat. Which worked great!

My body was signaling malnutrition. So don't compare starting out, with issues, with what people do when they have lost considerable weight, improved health markers, etc.