and I've learnt that it's very hard to know when you're satisfied in terms of hunger, and full in terms of desire.
The level of food required to satiate my hunger seems to be quite different from when I am "full".
Not that the remainder was easy, but it was a different kind of struggle - and noticeably easier than the first week.
This is only true up to a point. A colleague put me onto a fasting method called “Buchinger’s Fasting”. I fasted for around a week and a half, muscle maintenance was not a concern. After 3 days, your body burns through the glucose reserves and you get brain fog. After that, indeed, your body tried to break down muscle mass for fuel. The trick is to do some moderate exercise to keep your muscles in good condition. After a few days, your body finally turns to your fat reserves, and rapidly starts burning away fat. After the first 3 or so days, you actually become numb to the hunger and go into a slightly “high”, hunter gatherer alert mode that enabled our ancestors to search for food when hungry. It really brings home that being hungry and not being fed constantly is a normal part of human existence, and the industrial era, shoving food down our gullets constantly is making us sick and prevents natural healing within our bodies.
https://youtu.be/_ZG6lCgpPcA?t=480
wake up, do exercise, drink warm beverage, work, wait for hunger, eat breakfast/midday, take a powernap, work, last meal at 5-6pm.
However, once the taste buds are firing, it’s pretty hard to stop eating mid meal. One way is to take a little bit of food away from all the other food, eat it, and then force yourself to sit there while your blood sugar catches up to tell you if you still need more.
This is why I suppose I don't enjoy eating when I am "starving" as we like to say when we haven't eaten in a while. I am so hungry that I can't even enjoy the meal because the hunger pangs I am feeling don't subdue until I am practically done with the meal, and sometimes, even afterwards.
Near impossible these days, I just had toast and coffee while scrolling through HN.
Eating while watching TV doesn't impact my eating choices.
If eating is part of your social or work life as it is for most people then not really. Or you're going to sit there sipping water while your family or your colleagues eat or have drinks which is miserable
You can also adjust your fasting windows to include one meal with family (as the person your responded to suggested, but you didn't actually reply to). Or only fast every other day. If you're fasting for a reason like to lose weight, then you'll have to decide if the goal is worth it to you.
If people can endure that, then people can still be social at mealtimes and just get used to drinking some water or tea or whatever while they fast. Or coffee, mmmmm. They might feel a bit put out at first during lunch, but then again might enjoy the looks they get during dinner when they get to chow down with abandon. The big thing would be waiting until you're comfortable with the fasting so you're not making everyone around you uncomfortable with your body language (or worse, complaining or otherwise drawing attention to it).
If your social and/or work life heavily depends on eating together it might be part of the "problem" of why you need to lose weight in the first place.
This! My last boss used to be a "bon-vivant" guy, meaning he would particularly enjoy a nice meal with the occasional wine to go with it (please note this is pretty common in France) [0].
Two years after joining his team, I had gained quite some weight. I figured I had to eat less somehow, but I never had the impression that I was overeating. I also didn't want to skip to those meals with him. So I tried a few things:
* Pace myself with the wine. We would usually split a bottle among us. I actually enjoy wine, but don't particularly enjoy being tipsy, especially when I have to work. So win-win-win (see below)
* If there was some fruit available have that instead of cake, or skip desert altogether. Drinking the wine slowly leaves me with "something to do" while the others have desert, so they don't feel any pressure to hurry up.
* Go for more "filling" meals, meaning I looked for dishes with a bunch of vegetables. This would keep me full longer and I'd be less hungry in the evening, so also eating less. Another bonus is that I'd feel /really/ full and actually not want desert.
What I've found is that even though in the beginning the others would comment on my not having desert, they actually stopped having it themselves after a little while. The wine never actually went away, but we would occasionally only have a glass instead of a whole bottle.
The point is that I think people may feel there's a certain expectation to have a lunch a certain way. And it may be true in the sense that "it's common, so people expect it". But if you don't fully conform to it there doesn't seem to be any issue, pretty much no one seems to care [1] (except maybe if you think that you have to adhere to the expectation).
All this being said, I do appreciate that for people who enjoy nice meals it can be difficult to choose those "restrictions", especially when they're right in front of you.
[0] There never was any pressure to go along, especially since he was the kind to actively avoid talking shop at lunch. But, as the team would go out with him, I would have missed out on getting to know them. I should note that I'm not particularly outgoing and rather focused on my job, so random chats during the day wasn't exactly something I'd spontaneously do.
it says no drinking as well, so not sure about the water, but I was surprised to read it, maybe they just meant drinks other than water.
I IF from post-dinner to lunch every day, and only drink water and plain coffee.
On the flip side, I know multiple people who have tried the same and have your exact experience. Oddly enough, three of them had tried keto and had great results where I personally didn't. I know there's no real correlation there, just thought it was interesting. Try keto maybe?
Did you ever try, waiting 10 minutes?
You eat a little, food gets in your stomach, after 10 minutes the message "I'm full" is sent.
The point is, you won't feel full until those 10 minutes pass. But you don't need continue eating during those 10 minutes.
I'm just asking because if you always do, you might be under the impression that it requires 10 minutes of sustained eating, to stop feeling full.
Fasting is ”easier” because you can get away with caring less about that stuff though.