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comment by b_b
b_b  ·  825 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 21, 2022

Been doing the whole don't-eat-breakfast thing (a.k.a. intermittent fasting to the techier crowd, a.k.a. starving myself into submission) for about a month now, maybe a little less. I find it marginally less torturous than I did in the beginning, but I'm still raging hungry for the first hours of the day. On the plus side, I've lost about 6 lbs in the approximately 4 weeks I've been at it, which is a little ahead of the rate I expected based purely on a calorie-deficit basis. I figured I was cutting about 500/day, which would equate to 1 lb/wk all other things equal. But as we know with biology all other things are rarely equal, so maybe it's 6 lbs this month, but 2 next...who knows. Anyone else have experience with this? Does the hunger get better or is this just me?





moe  ·  820 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Are you consuming enough high-satiety foods (see this chart)? Anecdotally, potatoes in particular were key to eliminating my hunger back when I 'fasted'. If you're not used to it after a month, there's no reason to expect the hunger pangs to 'get better' without changing your diet, food scheduling or appetite suppressants.

mk  ·  825 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I’ve almost always skipped breakfast, but I do have coffee with milk in the morning. Are you having coffee?

user-inactivated  ·  824 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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moe  ·  820 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Stimulation of the 'hunger hormone', ghrelin, tends to have varying causes between people. A few studies (n=11 n=90) suggest that water is actually worse at suppressing hunger than either caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee.

user-inactivated  ·  820 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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moe  ·  820 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Regarding 'breaking a fast', that really depends on whether someone's following a so-called "water fast" or a simple caloric fast. If you're referring to ketosis, the only thing that can end that is intake of additional carbohydrates. Barring that, your body needs to break down fats (since the biological pathways to consume protein are extremely inefficient) to sustain your BMR, which isn't significantly correlated to current diet.

user-inactivated  ·  820 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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moe  ·  820 days ago  ·  link  ·  

re: ketosis, the Wikipedia article is sufficient for a layman understanding, and the safety section illustrates why keto is not medically advised. re: fasting, this metastudy is a comprehensive overview of the current literature suggesting that intermittent fasting is beneficial to weight loss, though it establishes that this is due to fasting being a useful tool for caloric restriction, not popsci hypotheses involving ketosis or autophagy. Also note that some terminology surrounding fasting, e.g. "breaking" a fast, is fairly arbitrary depending on the speaker and arguably meaningless.

user-inactivated  ·  820 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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b_b  ·  825 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah. Black. But sometimes that seems to make me feel worse.

mk  ·  825 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Put some milk in it.

kleinbl00  ·  825 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I spent high school as an exercise bulimic. I didn't eat anything before 5:30 pm for four years. I weighed 90lbs less then than I do now, and right now I have a 34" waist.

Betr Health refuses you breakfast. I'm mostly fine with it. I generally don't eat anything until 11 or so. But then, I drink coffee. Coffee is an appetite suppressant.

If you're fighting hunger, nuts or bananas. We've got a costco container of cashews and a costco container of almonds in the pantry. It's easy to take on too much sodium with nuts, though.

Bananas are probably your only source of potassium and you aren't getting enough, guaranteed. Coffee and a banana is a decidedly LA breakfast and it'll make you feel human and not hungry for two or three hours after.

If you're hungry you should eat something. The mistake most people make is in eating too much.