I have been reading about intermittent fasting again. The OMAD (one meal a day) plan might work for some people, but it is not working for me, at least at this time. However, for the last couple of days, I have been doing the intermittent fasting with a 16 hour fast, and 8 hour eating window. This allows me to have a small breakfast before I go swimming, and a large lunch/dinner meal afterwards, and a snack late afternoon, if I need one, although I usually don’t. My food window is 8-4, and fasting from 4pm-8am. There is a lot of good information about the many benefits of intermittent fasting, and I am especially interested in anything that improves my health, my thinking, and is anti-aging as well. I even joined a facebook group , so I have some online support for this. I am now reading one of the main books about intermittent fasting, it is called “Eat, Stop, Eat”, and it has a lot of great information about the good things that fasting does for your body and your mind.
I would say I fast for 12 hrs everyday. I only eat between 4 am and 4 pm It's very rare that I eat after 4 pm when at home in Fresno...of course when I visit I eat on their schedule unless it's too late.
I suspect diet requirements all vary according to individual, age, sex, race, ethnic background and activity level. There is a guy on another forum who eats one 7000 to 10,000 Kcal meal daily, and stays very slim, but he makes his living by hard physical labor and lives without electricity, running water or indoor plumbing. I couldn't even HOLD that many calories if I wanted to do so. He basically lives like people did hundreds of years ago. If you look at the diets of working people in Europe in the Middle Ages, they ate INCREDIBLE amounts of calories to keep up their hard labor. It seems logical that everyone should eat when they are hungry and not other wise. You will establish you own routine. My wife eats more frequently than I want do and I tend to eat when she does, so balancing when you have a partner makes things more difficult. Also, if you note that most religions once included fasting as part of their dietary regimen. That has been eliminated in much of Christianity, but is still observed in Islam and conservative Catholicism. The trick with cottage cheese brought up by @Bobby Cole is an interesting idea that I will try.
The old wives tale of not eating directly before bed is only semi-true. Gorging is one thing but purposeful snacking is quite another. The most important time for someone who works out isn’t in the gym but rather when the whole body is at rest and the same applies to someone who labors all day. Not too strangely, all the neat stuff like muscle fiber repair happens during our sleep period and that’s when balancing act really starts. A small meal before bed consisting of a little fat and protein is ideal to keep the ball rolling during sleep. Cottage cheese fills both criteria but since it metabolizes so slowly it allows the body to work all night rather than for an hour or two which really isn’t sufficient time for much repair. Oh yeah, I saw a documentary about a guy living up on the northern slopes of Alaska. During the winter months, for breakfast alone he consumed nearly 3000 calories and they said that he would burn all of that and more before his next meal some three hours later. All that said, he was living in the same conditions as was described by @Don Alaska. No electricity, no running water, no grocery store. Cut wood, dog sled to the pond and hunt for food. Note in line with the OP. I do eat several small meals but I do not start “eating” anything until around 2 or 3 PM. I do a predigested meal around 8AM and that’s it until later on.
Interesting reading this thread again, I haven't changed my eating habits much, still basically one meal a day, but when on vacation with Lisa I may have breakfast. My weight is stable at 150 lbs and I generally feel well,, but noticed while travelling in Bulgaria I developed lower back pain and some pain in my joints. When we crossed into Macedonia all these pains vanished, the main difference was that we were eating a more vegetarian diet in Macedonia, could this be the reason, I recall reading somewhere on here about inflammatory foods in a thread by @Yvonne Smith , maybe that could be a factor?
Speaking for myself, @Terry Page , I can say that i have found that it makes a whole lot of difference with my body pains when I am eating inflammatory foods like sugar, flour, meats, and dairy. I can use small amounts as a complement to whatever I am eating ; but if I make the main meal from those foods, I will be crippling along right away. It apparently does not affect everyone like it does me, though. Bobby, as an example, eats a basic diet of meats, fats, and starches, and he seems to do okay anyway. He eats very little vegetables, but does eat watermelon or grapes, so some fruits. Also, we have a totally different style of eating. The IF books say that it is important for your body to be in fasting mode overnight, so that it can repair itself, and then it goes through a process called “autophagy” (self-eating literally) where the body uses any bad or diseased cells as food. This helps to keep your body building and using fresh and functioning cells, and is also supposed to destroy any diseased ones, which is supposed to help get rid of any cancerous cells you might start to develop. I eat my main meals early in the day, and then fast in the evenings, so by the time I am sleeping, my body should be in restoration mode , and doing the necessary repair work. Since the body can only be in one mode at a time (digesting or repairing), it can’t be doing both at one time.
Oh my, no wonder I am up to 169 pounds. I am on a medication that makes me hungry. I want to eat day and night. I'm trying hard to overcome this and avoid eating much at night. Right now it seems impossible to fast after a lunch meal but I'll work it out I'm sure. I'm going to have a good lunch then try to fast till the breakfast hour comes around again. So hard to do. Going to try, going to try...
I have been reading about insulin resistance, and some of the effects that it has on our bodies, and apparently one of the side-effects of insulin resistance can be muscle loss, because it is connected with low levels of human growth hormone. Ken had started a thread about muscle loss, and I was going to post this in that thread; but it actually covers more than just age-related muscle loss, and I think that it fits better in this thread about intermittant fasting. The two hormones (insulin and human growth hormone) work in sync, and when that sync is messed up, then the body suffers the results. When we eat carbs, we produce insulin to send the glucose to our muscles for energy, and to our liver for glycogen stores. However, when a person over eats on carbs, or lives on processed carbs and not natural Whole Foods, then we can become insulin resistant, and when that happens, the cells refuse to let the insulin come in with the glucose. Since the blood sugar can’t be allowed to get too high, the insulin ends up sending the glucose to the fat cells and stores it as fat instead of burning it as energy. Even worse, is that a fat person makes five times as much insulin as a slim person, when they eat the identical food. So....hypothetical scenario......two people eat a piece of apple pie, One person is overweight, one is slim. The fat person produces 5 times as much insulin as the slim person; but because of insulin resistance, he doesn’t get the benefit of using the nutrients from the food as energy like the slim person did. The slim person enjoys his pie, burns the carbs as energy, and happily goes on about his day. The overweight person, has no energy, because all of the sugar in his blood went into fat cells, so now his blood sugar is too low again, and he is hungry. He eats the rest of the apple pie. Of course, it doesn’t do him any good either, all due to insulin resistance, and even worse, he now has more body fat, and is still craving food. Once the body has digested food, and after we go to sleep at night, then our body goes into restorative mode, burns fat, and produces human growth hormone. This is when our muscles are rebuilt, and bad cells are burned up as food, and the body regenerates itself. This takes at least 4-6 hours after our last meal, before we stop digesting and burn the glucose, and then start burning body fat. Now, when we are doing intermittent fasting, OMAD (one meal a day), then during the fasting period, several amazing things happen ! The first thing is that fasting lowers our insulin resistance better than anything else can do. A 3 day fast will lower a person’s insulin resistance by about 70%. The good news is that about 2/3 of that happens during the first 24 hours, so simply eating one meal a day, and fasting for 16-23 hours will lower you IR almost as much as a 3 day fast, and the more you do IF, the more it lowers your insulin resistance. The other thing that IF does is increase your HGH levels. In men, it can increase up to 2000%, and about 1300 % for women. When HGH increases, you can build/retain your body muscle mass better, and it also helps with anti-aging. I am not done yet ! This is only from testing with mice, but they found that when they restricted their feeding time, even though they were given the same amount of food to eat, the mice did not get old-age related dementia like the mice that were allowed to eat whenever they wanted to eat. Most mice started to develop dementia at about 9 months of age, but the mice who fasted didn’t start to develop this until 24 months, almost their whole life span ! This correlates to about 20 years for a human, so this lowers the chances of Alzheimer’s , especially if a person continues in the OMAD food plan.
I am now into my second month of eating one meal a day, and I have to say that for me, it works better than anything else I have tried, and it is a way of eating that I think I can enjoy for the rest of my life, just because there are so many health benefits to the intermittent fasting. I sort of sneaked my way into this by starting out with a 16:8 IF, and an eating window of 8am-4pm, and fasting after that until the next morning. Then, I stopped eating breakfast andjust had a protein shake before swimming instead. After reading that you burn fat better if you exercise in a fasted state, I also started skipping breakfast and not eating until I got back home from swimming at the fitness center. Basically, that put me into the one meal a day phase, and that is where I have stayed. I am also eating a low carb/keto diet, so I am burning fat ketones for fuel instead of sugar, and that helps a lot with feeling so good, as well as for burning fat. My body is burning fat most of the time, so I don’t have food cravings anymore, I feel great, and enjoy swimming more than ever. Since there are so many other health benefits, this is probably going to be a lifetime eating change for me, even after I lose the extra weight. If anyone else is interested in learning more about OMAD, here is a great website that has helped me a lot. It was started by a person who lost over 80 lbs doing OMAD, and he explains everything about how and why it works so well. https://omaddiet.com/
Thanks for the link @Yvonne Smith , it's good to hear that it's really working for you, the loss of hunger pangs was a big shift for me, I can eat more or less when I want rather than when my gut demands. I see it's three years since I first posted this thread, hard to believe I have been on one meal a day for all that time, though I have lapsed a few times when on vacation with a breakfast provided. I am still playing around with inflammatory foods, and wheat/gluten plus oats seem to be suspect at the moment