<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/YGP188R5hPc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> R.I.P brother.
ok i have a question. why is it bad to skip eating the first half of the day? i get that your blood sugar goes down, you get too hungry, you eat more later, yada yada. but as far as nutrient absorption/health (not so much energy/weight issues), is it BAD to intermittently fast daily? i have no appetite when i wake up. i've fallen into a routine the last few weeks of drinking water and hot tea all morning at work, taking my lunch hour around 1 and running errands, and then coming back to work, having soup/oatmeal around 3 when I start getting hungry, going to yoga straight from work, high-calorie protein/vegetable smoothie at 6 and then dinner at 7 or 8. I eat enough calories over the full day, I get enough protein, I generally eat clean. My energy levels are fine and I'm maintaining my weight easily. Is it unhealthy to eat like this? I'm constantly being side-eyed by my coworkers and earnestly curious as to whether I'm doing it all wrong.
^If you imagine your body as a predictable engine, cycles of energy starvation is bad because of the amount of effort needed to start up again, in this case it could be your body producing insulin and creating a small spike when you actually eat. I don't know the science exactly, but the gist is that small, repeatable patterns help your body out more than eating the same amount once or twice at the same intervals of the day. So I recommend eating steel cut oatmeal (the grainy over pure mush kind) right when you wake up. Firstly, because your body hasn't taken any energy since dinner or your latest snack, it would undoubtedly have to ramp up production to metabolize the food. Secondly, between the time of your last meal the day before and the first meal the day after, your body is training itself to conserve energy because it doesn't know when it's going to need it. The ideal fat burning state is always be metabolizing. Some people even recommend eating something like a spoonful of almond butter before sleeping to help that valley during sleep, but I haven't tried this so I'm not going to recommend it. I'm speaking from personal experience where I broke up my meal to 5 times a day and lost more weight despite eating more. The food itself was much more healthy and natural, and I began my day with oatmeal and "real breakfast" an hour later.
Telling you to eat this and that might not be beneficiary right now. Google 'carb cycling tnation'. That article should give you a good educational diet background.
Beats me. We went for something sustainable after my trainer weaned me off the low carb, no sugar diet. I started cooking and eating complex carbs, meat, veg and fruits with the goal of no processed foods, but in a regimented schedule and portioning scheme.
I think it's fine to intermittent fast. If we're eating real food I think we're a-ok. I don't see any reason to try and out-smart our naturally evolved hunger mechanism. We should simply rely on our bodies signals and eat when we're hungry. Sometimes I eat bacon and eggs at 9am, sometimes I eat nothing until 1pm, sometimes I have a whey protein shake with cocoa powder and milk. There is research to confirm and disclaim every diet scheme out there, but what's more robust than thousands of years of evolution?
don't want to get into a breakfast vs. fast war..but essentially i switched sides from preaching about breakfast to skipping breakfast for the past 2 years or so now. I love it. I mean if you want to eat steel cut oats every freaking day..be my guest but I like looking forward to a larger dinner. http://www.leangains.com/2010/10/top-ten-fasting-myths-debunked.html
Yup. Couldn't agree more. People are always trying to manipulate metabolism like they have a giant knob on the side of their body. There's so much BS in what Invisible Fan said..it's not even worth quoting.
It takes a good bit of time for the body to go into starvation mode. Simply skipping breakfast isn't going to get you there. I've done intermittent fasting in the past and lost a lot of weight doing it. I found that I wasn't necessarily hungry until after my first meal, whenever that was. So if I ate in the morning, I'd get hungry throughout the day. But if I skipped it, I wouldn't get hungry until 1 or 2 in the afternoon. I'd naturally eat less as a result. I stopped only because I started running in the mornings and felt the need eat afterwards. When I was running in the afternoons, I'd usually skip breakfast.
4. Myth: Fasting tricks the body into "starvation mode". Truth Efficient adaptation to famine was important for survival during rough times in our evolution. Lowering metabolic rate during starvation allowed us to live longer, increasing the possibility that we might come across something to eat. Starvation literally means starvation. It doesn't mean skipping a meal not eating for 24 hours. Or not eating for three days even. The belief that meal skipping or short-term fasting causes "starvation mode" is so completely ridiculous and absurd that it makes me want to jump out the window. Looking at the numerous studies I've read, the earliest evidence for lowered metabolic rate in response to fasting occurred after 60 hours (-8% in resting metabolic rate). Other studies show metabolic rate is not impacted until 72-96 hours have passed (George Cahill has contributed a lot on this topic). Seemingly paradoxical, metabolic rate is actually increased in short-term fasting. For some concrete numbers, studies have shown an increase of 3.6% - 10% after 36-48 hours (Mansell PI, et al, and Zauner C, et al). This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Epinephrine and norepinephrine (adrenaline/noradrenaline) sharpens the mind and makes us want to move around. Desirable traits that encouraged us to seek for food, or for the hunter to kill his prey, increasing survival. At some point, after several days of no eating, this benefit would confer no benefit to survival and probably would have done more harm than good; instead, an adaptation that favored conservation of energy turned out to be advantageous. Thus metabolic rate is increased in short-term fasting (up to 60 hours). Again, I have choosen extreme examples to show how absurd the myth of "starvation mode" is - especially when you consider that the exact opposite is true in the context of how the term is thrown around.
no pump, my last bulk and cut. zero cardio. got way too skinny imo if anyone needs help, pm me Spoiler
Coming off a lateral meniscus repair from Thanksgiving, I was 245 pounds. I needed to lose a lot of weight for the surgery to be a success long term, so I started working out with the P90X workouts (supplemented my cardio with swimming instead of their kenpo & plyo bc of my knees), and started a pretty strict diet. Been eating egg whites in the morning, 1/2 cup almonds and two slices of turkey breast with an apple for lunch, turkey stick for snack with some carrots, protein shake after workout, and salad for dinner pretty consistently with some cheats here and there. I lost 30 pounds, bringing me to 215, and then recently put on an additional 5 pounds. I don't know what it is, but I seem to have plateaued as far as weight loss goes for the past couple weeks. Is my diet solid? Should I replace the lifting with more cardio? Should I stop eating? Help.
It worked for me. Thanks for the link. I'll check it out later. Maybe eating healthy, regularly and working out is good enough. Everyone's different.
