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I have been fasting for a month now and I have lost a solid 6kg. I started with one meal a day (OMAD) and then I started skipping a day twice a week for a total

I have been fasting for a month now and I have lost a solid 6kg. I started with one meal a day (OMAD) and then I started skipping a day twice a week for a total of 5x 24hr fasts and 2x 48hr fasts. This week I completed a 72hr fast. One reason I like it is that it requires the least planning and mental load. I eat what I want as much as I want (except sugar) and almost no matter what I do it works out to be less than my maintenance calories and I lose weight because I can't eat 4k calories in one sitting. The simplicity of it gives me less breaking points, and the ability to "eat whatever I want" makes planning for a big meal in 2 days a good reward to keep going. The beginning is very hard and it's mostly due to sugar addiction. Many people say switching to keto first to wean off sugar makes fasting much easier. To answer your questions: 1. Hunger comes and goes in waves, but mostly it just goes. Mentally I become more focused and clearer the longer I am into my fast, and overall I no longer get the fog from overeating or too much sugar. 2. I take a standard multivitamin GNC brand. When I feel light headed/have low blood pressure I drink a salty bone broth. Some people have their own electrolyte recipes like snake juice you can look into. 3. I go for a set amount of time. I found that it's very difficult if I'm just fasting for "as long as I can" because when the hunger comes I break. If I have a set breakfast time it's much easier to carry on until then.

skohan 7y ago
Yeah I have also found intermittent fasting to be an excellent tool in the toolbox when I want to reduce a bit of body-fat. As you say, for me it's easier to follow a simple rule-based diet like time-restricted eating than it is to track and measure calories and macronutrients. I also had success with a ketogenic diet, but in my experience that's a bit harder to stick to, since there's a lot of hidden carbohydrates in food, and it's also the kind of diet you find yourself explaining all the time like when you have to turn down the cookie your colleague made, or you order a hamburger without the bun at a restaurant. TRE offers many of the same benefits, but has almost no impact insofar as how you live your life. > Hunger comes and goes in waves, but mostly it just goes. Interesting thing about the hunger pattern you described: subjective experience of hunger maps pretty well to the hormone Ghrelin, which tends to peak close to your normal meal-times, and then naturally subsides afterwords whether or not you have eaten. So the science points to the fact that hunger is very much something you can "wait out". > I started skipping a day twice a week for a total of 5x 24hr fasts and 2x 48hr fasts. This week I completed a 72hr fast. It's important to be cautious when attempting longer fasts. I know a lot of people have subjectively good experiences with multi-day fasts, but I saw a talk where the presenter showed evidence that long fasts (more than 72 hours) can cause long-lasting metabolic changes which weren't recovered even several years later.
- seventhtiger 7y ago
  Can you please share the talk on the metabolic changes due to long fasts? I'm interested.
  - skohan 7y ago
    Sure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1r8ffLDFcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1r8ffLDFcE
- sweeneyrod 7y ago
  > I know a lot of people have subjectively good experiences with multi-day fasts, but I saw a talk where the presenter showed evidence that long fasts (more than 72 hours) can cause long-lasting metabolic changes which weren't recovered even several years later. I thought one of the benefits of fasting was long-lasting metabolic changes (for the better).
  - skohan 7y ago
    So my understanding is that there are positive changes associated with spending time in a state of ketosis, which is brought on by fasting as well as extremely low-carb diets: especially in the case of people who are already suffering insulin-related metabolic damage (like diabetes, prediabetes, or insulin insensitivity), there's evidence nutritional ketosis can help to halt or reverse that damage. What the talk I linked in the other comment talks about is something different: there's evidence that prolonged periods of severe calorie restriction can make your metabolism's bias move more toward storing calories and away from expending energy.

skohan 7y ago

Yeah I have also found intermittent fasting to be an excellent tool in the toolbox when I want to reduce a bit of body-fat. As you say, for me it's easier to follow a simple rule-based diet like time-restricted eating than it is to track and measure calories and macronutrients. I also had success with a ketogenic diet, but in my experience that's a bit harder to stick to, since there's a lot of hidden carbohydrates in food, and it's also the kind of diet you find yourself explaining all the time like when you have to turn down the cookie your colleague made, or you order a hamburger without the bun at a restaurant. TRE offers many of the same benefits, but has almost no impact insofar as how you live your life. > Hunger comes and goes in waves, but mostly it just goes. Interesting thing about the hunger pattern you described: subjective experience of hunger maps pretty well to the hormone Ghrelin, which tends to peak close to your normal meal-times, and then naturally subsides afterwords whether or not you have eaten. So the science points to the fact that hunger is very much something you can "wait out". > I started skipping a day twice a week for a total of 5x 24hr fasts and 2x 48hr fasts. This week I completed a 72hr fast. It's important to be cautious when attempting longer fasts. I know a lot of people have subjectively good experiences with multi-day fasts, but I saw a talk where the presenter showed evidence that long fasts (more than 72 hours) can cause long-lasting metabolic changes which weren't recovered even several years later.

seventhtiger 7y ago
Can you please share the talk on the metabolic changes due to long fasts? I'm interested.
- skohan 7y ago
  Sure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1r8ffLDFcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1r8ffLDFcE
sweeneyrod 7y ago
> I know a lot of people have subjectively good experiences with multi-day fasts, but I saw a talk where the presenter showed evidence that long fasts (more than 72 hours) can cause long-lasting metabolic changes which weren't recovered even several years later. I thought one of the benefits of fasting was long-lasting metabolic changes (for the better).
- skohan 7y ago
  So my understanding is that there are positive changes associated with spending time in a state of ketosis, which is brought on by fasting as well as extremely low-carb diets: especially in the case of people who are already suffering insulin-related metabolic damage (like diabetes, prediabetes, or insulin insensitivity), there's evidence nutritional ketosis can help to halt or reverse that damage. What the talk I linked in the other comment talks about is something different: there's evidence that prolonged periods of severe calorie restriction can make your metabolism's bias move more toward storing calories and away from expending energy.