Quote:
Originally Posted by Humdizzle
i am a physician and see this as a common complaint. everyone's body is a bit different so what works for one person may not work for another, but here some things i can share :
1. eat in regularly spaced intervals throughout the day, about every 6-8 hours. by starving yourself you are sending a message to your caveman brain there is no food around, so your body will hold on to what it can instead of burning through it.
2. water, water, and more water - you don't need juice/gatorade/milk etc, these are all just full of calories and sugar. low sugar options like kombucha, gatorade g2, and unsweetened teas are ok.
3. try not to snack -- save your calories for your mealtime. if you do want to snack find a low calorie option like baby carrots, pickles, an apple or something. don't go for a bag of chips
4. ok to have sweets every now and then, we are all human - a good option is having things that take time to eat. things like jolly ranchers take time to eat, while a candybar or reeses we can inhale in a minute. peeling an orange takes a bit more work and is less calories than pouring a glass of OJ. if you are a chocolate fan go for a higher quality dark chocolate option thats 70%+ rather than a hersheys bar
5. we put on weight through the addition of carbs usually. chemical bonds of carbon-hydrogen-oxygen. this is the same for fats, they are just long chains of this for more efficient storage of this chemical energy. So how do we lose this ? you don't lose the fat by pooping, peeing or sweating. You lose it by breathing. we exhale the carbs or fats as CO2 + water. So the more breathing you do (exercise) the more weight you lose. each breath is a little bit of fat being burned off.
6. try to avoid stress. i know, easier said than done. But if you are in a constant state of bad stress/anxiety it raises a hormone called cortisol which leads to a host of issues including weight gain or difficulty losing weight
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I agree with many of your points here, but #1 is not the way our physiology is supposed to work, and the situation you describe only applies if your metabolic machinery has been compromised to the point where you are carb dependent (sadly that's well over half the population). When the carb dependency is broken and you can burn fat again (== lowering insulin levels) it's easy and seamless to eat once a day, twice a day, once every other day, or even do longer fasts as you seamlessly transition to burning your own stored energy. Energy expenditure actually INCREASES on a longer fast as that is when our caveman ancestors would have needed their energy most to go out and procure more food, and after experiencing it I will say there is a noticeable malaise in comparison when constantly fed. There is also a lot of cellular level housekeeping that goes on in a fasted state AKA autophagy that our ancestors would have experienced on the regular but most ppl today do not with eating from dawn to bedtime constantly. We were actually designed for irregularly spaced and erratic eating patterns.