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Things like this are why I sort of support things like Keto or Paleo. It seems that the main trick is to get people to eat fewer calories (and less processed foods at the same time) while not making it feel like eating less food. Keto and Paleo do this by making people eat rather filling foods that take a while to digest which, while it would lower insulin because you aren’t spiking sugar ten seconds after you eat, also keeps your stomach full longer so you don’t want more food too quickly.
I think the reason that people used to be thinner is at least in part that up until the advent of TV, computers, gaming and the internet, social activities were far more active— recreational sports leagues, roller skating, swimming, dancing, going for walks. People were not overtly exercising the way we think about it, but they were so naturally active that they likely got the equivalent of a workout every day just from the extra walking, the active social activities, and fun sports leagues that kept people busy before we decided that we could socialize over the internet from the couch, and before play devolved into mashing buttons on an Xbox while trash talking over a headset.
I don’t think modern entertainment is bad per se, but I think one rather long term solution to the exercise thing is to stop making it a separate thing to do outside of normal life and more of a side effect of normal living. The biggest problem I see in the exercise thing is just how not fun it is. Playing basketball on a court with your buddies is fun. Going to a gym to do sets is work. Taking your SO on a date and going dancing is fun. Aerobics is work. If we had those kinds of things cheap and available and not segregated by skill level, I think there’s a good chance of people losing more weight. As it sits, I’m watching youth league sports and it’s so competitive so quickly with so much of a time energy and money commitment at very young ages that it’s forcing kids to stop playing sports at very young ages and they just never get to enjoy being physically active. My nephew started with select sports at age 8. And for all the kids that aren’t good enough to do that, they end up not being active in sports because of the lack of church leagues or rec leagues. It’s insane. Our biggest issue is people not being active and we force kids to stop being active by 8-10 unless they’re rich enough for traveling teams and good enough to make those teams.
It’s probably worth mentioning here that one study showed that Amish men walk an average of 18,000 steps per day and Amish women an average of 14,000. Add in basketball, softball, or even bowling leagues on top of that, and almost anyone would end up slender and fit.
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Same, but for me it's fasting, intermittent or otherwise. The easiest way I've found to cut caloric intake without much effort or unhappiness is to just skip 1-3 meals. I've found that once you've done it a couple times, it becomes pretty easy to avoid getting "hangry", which is the main objection friends have given me when I recommend it. "I could never do that, I get so horrible to be around when I skip a meal."
There's a ton of science about fasting being good for you (e.g. it's great for insulin resistance), and I think it makes sense from an "is it lindy" perspective. Certainly our hunter gatherer ancestors didn't eat three meals a day everyday, so it makes sense to me that our bodies would be optimized for skipping meals.
I've fasted for as long as four days. Longer fasts like that are definitely much more difficult, not because of hunger (you more or less stop being immediately hungry after about 24 hours) and more because you have to deal with some physical weakness, imbalanced electrolytes, things like that. Definitely well worth doing, I strongly recommend it, but definitely much more difficult than just fasting for a day or less.
This does not fit my experience at all. I also did a 4-day water fast once and my hunger slowly grew from a 6/10 on day 1 to a 10/10 on day 4. That is to say, from self-torture, to completely unbearable.
Very interesting, that wasn't my experience at all. After the first 24 hours it was mostly a vague "yeah I could definitely eat" rather than the acute "damn I'm hungry". That made it easy for me to gently titrate up my first meals, what did you do for your first meals after, how did that go?
On the night of the 4th day, at 3am, I couldn't get to sleep no matter what I tried. So i went into the kitchen and binged so brutally that I nearly fell into a coma. I can't tell you exactly what I ate but I would summarize as "whatever the hell was inside the fridge and contained carbs".
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What do you do to avoid losing (too much) muscle weight during fasts?
Honestly? It's a total non issue on the scale of days. I don't worry about it at all, and I've not noticed any long term decreases in my lifts afterwards or anything like that.
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I think the bro science that “your body can only absorb 40 grams of protein per meal”is likely bullshit, so presumably intermittent fasting would be fine provided you just got all the nutrition needed from your one meal a day.
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