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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37979 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Things like this are why I sort of support things like Keto or Paleo.

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.

(you more or less stop being immediately hungry after about 24 hours)

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".

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.

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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