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[nenjin]

Guess everyone is feeling the holiday goal killers. I've also been feeling a bit anxious about stuff.

There's so many different methods to getting the results you want that I think if you can just go with one and be patient and consistent you will get where you want to go. (At least with weight loss.)

So like, the science behind fasting is, if not complicated, then detailed. I'm juggling the questions of blood sugar spikes, insulin sensitivity, calorie counting and sources of what from where. It can be a lot to juggle, but I didn't have much else to contemplate while I made a week worth of food for 2 hours.

The thing I keep hearing about fasting is you want to keep all your eating in an 6 to 8 hour window, and if you eat or drink anything most anything with calories it will break the cycle. On the other extreme is the "6 small meals a day" thing, the goal being keeping your blood sugar at an even keel throughout the day, so you don't have blood sugar spikes, so your body doesn't release insulin, so it doesn't store calories as fat. (Or something like that, don't sue me, I'm paraphrasing a lot of fitness info I've been taking in.)

And it's like, every layer you think you drill down to, no, there's another layer of FITNESS below that. Almonds are supposed to be a pretty good, healthy snack right? Well not so fast. If you want MAXIMUM FITNESS you should let them sit in water over night so you can peel the skins off, because there's something in them you don't necessarily want. Oh but even then the oil in them in particular might make them hard to break down.

Yeesh. And all this before you lift a weight or run a foot. There can totally be the potential for info overload.

Anyways I'm still not really making any gains. My nutrition is better but I doubt I'm really packing in enough protein. Being caught between the desire to both bulk and cut  is rough, and even though I know it's probably better to err on the side of bulking what I really want more of the two is the cut. But also I know I'm still not putting out maximum effort toward some of my exercises, probably because I'm doing too many for my allotted 30 minutes and getting tuckered out. I should probably cut one or two out so I can really focus on getting three good sets in. That and I really need to get access to heavier dumbbells. I've been doing this for 3 to 4 months now at my current weights and I'm definitely starting to feeling like I'm stagnating even though I'm not getting out as many sets as I know I should be. Probably the only part of my body that is getting a serious workout is my core, I seem to be able to do a lot of core work versus anything else. Where I might fail reps or worry about dropping weights or falling over....I can always seem to do 5 more something with my core, even though I'll literally be gasping afterward.. And I can really feel it coming along, it feels wound like a spring most days now.

And I have seen some progress elsewhere, so it's not all bad. Finally found a scale. I've lost 10 pounds. If I assume at least a couple pounds of lean muscle mass gain, I've probably lost 12 to 14 pounds of fat. Maybe a little more. I'm pretty happy with that number though. I'm not breaking any records or shocking anyone with a body transformation in the time I've worked, but it's forward progress. Somehow I really doubt I'll ever be below 160 again.

And I started doing pushups again, finally. I feel like my ability to do them is commensurate with my weight loss. I've gone from barely being able to do two sets of 10 to doing 2 sets of 15 with gas in the tank left to spare. Pretty pleased about that because I feel like I can attack pushups again, where as before it was feeling like such a weak point I couldn't work up the nerve to improve on it.

Christmas is around the corner and if this was most years I'd be seriously worried about overeating and having a lot to work off. But since there's not going to be a big family get together, just me keeping both my mom and grandma company, I may be short on cheer but chances are I'll be short on calories and sugar and fat and booze too.

[JoshuaFH]

I read a book on fasting, and honestly, following it burned 40 pounds and earned me what almost feels like undeserved compliments. Though I was doing a 1 meal a day fast combined with exercise, and sometimes I would go for longer fasts. The longest I lasted was 3 days, and then started getting dizzy and feeling awful so I ate, but I heard that doing a week or two week fast is achievable and fulfilling.

The book I read was "The Complete Guide to Fasting" by Jason Fung.

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Fasting-Intermittent-Alternate-Day/dp/1628600012/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511959928&sr=8-1&keywords=jason+fung+complete+guide+to+fasting

There was no particular diet I followed for my single meals every day, I'm not a nutritionist and I don't try to be, though I do eat a lot of meat if only because that's been my palate for my entire life. Otherwise, there's been no strict adherence to anything, though honestly I still need to step my game up, as I still feel my results are lackluster.

[nenjin]

Fast doesn't sound like a good time, personally. I'm already dealing with hunger pangs just getting below a 2k calorie diet. Pretty sure I'd be chewing my hands off if I was fasting.

[JoshuaFH]

The hunger actually isn't much of an issue once you become comfortable with it. It's only once you get to the 2-3 day mark where it becomes intense (I read in the book that once you get past this point, you stop feeling hunger entirely, and even feel slightly euphoric, but I didn't get that far) but the daily hunger isn't that bad, and in fact I'd say it's very enlivening and sharpens your concentration. I'm trying to get back on it, but...

What was kinda surprising is how cold fasting makes you feel. It seems that your body responds to fasting by producing less body heat, and so your extremities are always kinda chilly. I did it in summer where it wasn't that bad, but now in winter, it's uncomfortable, if not outright painful.

I'm not trying to endorse fasting, but these are my experiences after giving it a serious go. Jason Fung detailed a story where a guy fasted, eating absolutely nothing but water and vitamins to prevent malnutrition, for 382 days, going from 456 lbs to 180 lbs. I looked up this to give it some credibility:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/pdf/postmedj00315-0056.pdf

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I've enjoyed fasting before, but I've also decidedly not enjoyed a time when I ran out of money for food in my freshman year of college and stubbornly insisted on trying to string out 30 dollars of unfree funds over a week. Near the end of it I was having some scarily violent unbidden thoughts towards my roommate (granted, there was also no love lost between us) when he brought in a plate of takeout food.

[nenjin]

Throughout my life I've more or less operated in a fasting state. Usually 8 to 10 hours between meals. As a smoker I have a handy appetite suppressant. But I was also not physically active back then.

Now that I'm the habit of eating more regularly though, I'm more susceptible to hunger pangs. Especially on workout days.

[Yoink]

My previously-tiny appetite has skyrocketed in recent months since I've been trying to get in shape.
Though lately I think the hot, sweltering weather has been making working out quite a bit more difficult to keep up... is it possible to sweat away your muscle mass, or has the heat just been making me too lazy to eat/work enough to maintain? D:   


Edit: years ago after high school I fasted (although that's putting it mildly) all my flab away and have been unhealthily thin ever since, until this year when I've been putting in the effort to gain weight.
I thought I had a slow metabolism as a kid or something, but since I've been thin it seems as though I can eat most anything without much effect (apart from perhaps the psychological effect of my old anorexia rearing its head or overly-processed foods aggravating my asthma on occasion).

[nenjin]

Did 40 minutes of Pilates again today before my regular 30 minute high intensity workout.

And I’ve come to the realization that I must just retain a higher level of body heat than most people. By the end I was sweating even though the instructor and 65 year old woman in class were not. But I know that a higher internal body temp tends to correlate to higher fat loss and muscle growth (not to mention heat shock proteins) so I’m happy to be a sweaty bastard...at least as long as I’m working out.

And in truth Pilates is turning out to be pretty challenging when you do the more advanced version of some moves. We were working with stretch "ribbons" I'd call them. But I could see replacing that ribbon with an actual resistance band and making some of these exercises good resistance workouts.

[nenjin]

I'm not a super big fan of this channel but at least on the surface the research they cite sounds fairly solid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0JiwzwBEgE

Basically describes metabolism in relation to fasting vs. small meals throughout the day.

Their takeway is: a couple large meals during the day in effect results in a higher resting metabolic rate than eating small but consistently throughout the day. When you eat, your blood sugar spikes and your body releases insulin which then stores carbs and fats as fat. After about 4 hours, your insulin levels fall and your body releases glucagon, which allows your fat cells to release that stored energy for use in your body. (Turning fats in to free floating fatty acids ready for transport to where they're needed, for example, rather than staying as stored fat.)

When you eat throughout the day, your insulin levels stay elevated. Meaning your body is in "store this shit mode" for a longer period of time, and not reaching the insulin levels required to trigger the release of glucagon and enter "release this shit" mode. While the channel isn't saying you can't lose weight doing the small meals thing, they posit you lose weight faster with a fasting-like eating schedule. The old thinking I always used to hear was "being in a fasting state convinces your body to store everything as fat because it thinks you can't get sustenance and thinks it must store everything you eat as fat, expecting a long period of deprivation to be incoming." Which this channel posits is not the case at all: being in a fasting state convinces your body it must release all its stored energy reserves because it's not getting anything new in and needs to get energy from somewhere, i.e. its emergency reserves, i.e yo fat ass.

On the other side of the coin, I'm guessing the non-fasting, small meal crowd would say that their insulin doesn't spike as hard if they eat consistently throughout the day, resulting in a lower overall conversion rate of carbohydrates and fat to fatty tissue, whereas I'm guessing the fasting group experiences two fairly big insulin spikes during the day, and a higher rate of conversion during those periods.

So I imagine it looks like this, using myself as an example:

I'd only eat two meals a day. And those two meals would be around 1200 to 1500 calories of stuff high in fats and carbohydrates. So I was likely storing a large portion of my meals, already rich in carbs and fats, as fat, at a faster rate because I was doing a mild fast and my blood sugar spikes were much higher. And while my resting metabolic rate would be higher a couple hours later because my insulin levels would fall and I wouldn't raise them back up by eating more, triggering the release of glucagon and ridding myself of fat.....because I was packing on so much fat due to what I was eating (combined with no physical activity to help burn it off) I was building up a surplus of fat even though my body was trying its damnedest to get rid of it.

Compared to the small meal folks....who, generally speaking, are probably eating fairly healthy if they're mindful enough to spread out their eating, I was probably gaining more weight even on a fasting schedule. So while the small meal group's insulin levels overall are higher throughout the day, they're probably consuming less stuff that the body tries to store as fat. They eat a balanced diet of mostly proteins and veggies with a little bit of carbs and some fat through out the day, meaning while they're more often storing what they eat as fat....they're storing less of it than me, who was cramming down tons of calories and carbs all in one shot while having highly elevated levels of insulin.

So in summation.....I think it's less about how you eat and (obviously) much more about what you eat. If you're eating a lot of carbs and fats, whether that's in two (or one) large meals during the day, or consistently in smaller portions throughout the day.....it all will end up as fat regardless. Fasting might allow you to release some of that fat a little faster than a normal eating pattern or a spread out eating pattern, but you'll still pack on the fat regardless. And if you're eating smaller portions more consistently....but it's still largely made up of carbs and fat.....you're still going to be storing that food as fat and you'll probably release it more slowly than people that are doing some kind of fasting.

(Mind you, this is only in relation to eating and your metabolic rate without factoring exercise in.)

[NRDL]

God I'm really starting to love running. Got myself a new pair of Merrell trail running minimalist shoes, and they feel so much better than my old, heel cushioned, running shoes. They help promote better technique and I just feel so much faster. Gonna need to take some time for my calves and arches to get used to the forefoot/midfoot running technique, but if I can keep this up and not stupidly injure myself I'm gonna be running a lot of road and asphalt in the near future.

[SalmonGod]

Throughout my life I've more or less operated in a fasting state. Usually 8 to 10 hours between meals. As a smoker I have a handy appetite suppressant. But I was also not physically active back then.

Now that I'm the habit of eating more regularly though, I'm more susceptible to hunger pangs. Especially on workout days.

I used to go long periods without eating when I was younger, even (especially) when playing sports year 'round.  Rarely a full day.  But I still had coaches scold me for it.  I would intentionally not eat before doing anything athletic, because I hated feeling heavy when running around or taking hits with a stomach full of food.  If I had an event at night, I would usually eat some small snack for breakfast and then nothing until I was home from the game like 9 or 10 at night.  That never bothered me.  It was what I was comfortable doing. 

My first two years of wrestling, I did the starvation stuff to aim for lower weight classes.  That was genuinely miserable, but you do get used to it.  And it pushes your threshold of how much fasting you're comfortable with.  For years after I stopped worrying about my weight class, I would still shock people with how often I would genuinely want to skip eating.

But when I do eat a meal, I'm a fucking pig.  Always have been.

These days, I still often eat only one meal a day.  But that one meal is like.... an entire pizza.

I think the key is just staying busy.  Like sitting in an office all day trying to focus on shit that doesn't interest me makes me want to eat all the time.  But when I'm at home doing stuff all day that I want to do and staying focused, I can go for 12 hours easily without any impulse to eat intruding on me.  And I think fasting assists in mental clarity, which cycles back into the ability and desire to stay focused on something and avoid the impulse to eat.

[nenjin]

But when I do eat a meal, I'm a fucking pig.  Always have been.

These days, I still often eat only one meal a day.  But that one meal is like.... an entire pizza.

Pictured: Me. I've had the phrases like "I have football players twice your size who come in and can't eat that much" and "Do you even taste your food when you breathe it in like that" many, many times in my life.

Or, I guess, was me up until about a month ago when I decided to start intentionally eating less to speed up weight loss. It's hard to even begin to control calories when you eat like that, especially when you're trying to make up for a whole day of food. You're also a prisoner to the nutritional value of that thing, so when I'm like "welp guess I'll make some pasta", I'm in for 400 or 450g of carbs in one meal. (An entire Red Baron Pepperoni pizza is like 1300 calories, with I think about 20% of if coming from fat.) That's also before you factor in added calories from other stuff. I'd find it hard to believe you only drank water an entire day and ate one meal consistently. Because you'd be the most boring person ever.

I think the key is just staying busy.  Like sitting in an office all day trying to focus on shit that doesn't interest me makes me want to eat all the time.  But when I'm at home doing stuff all day that I want to do and staying focused, I can go for 12 hours easily without any impulse to eat intruding on me.

This is not me however. I stopped eating from boredom when I was in my 20s. But doing stuff I enjoy can help me push my meals out waaaayyy later. That said, smoker here. So I'm not operating at a normal level of appetite to most people. Rather than food, it's cigarettes and coffee that I use to alleviate boredom. May be slowly killing myself, but at least there's no calories in cigarettes

I think I subconsciously started drinking my coffee slower so it'd last the entire day too, to keep me occupied. Most people get through a cup of coffee in 30 minutes or less. I will make 3 cups in one tumbler last 7 hours.

Anyways, the real bitch for an office worker is that sitting for long periods of time sends your body into a slower metabolic state. Standing desks address this.....at other costs. I've worked standing jobs and I've worked sitting jobs, and while I know standing jobs are better for you in general, sitting jobs feel like they hurt you less. I remember working 8 hour kitchen shifts and wanting to cut my feet off at the end of the day because they hurt so bad. Even now when I'm like, standing in my kitchen for two hours making some elaborate meal my feet will start aching again and I'll be like "how the hell did I ever do this for 8 hours every day?"

I made a funny observation the other day too when thinking about sitting vs. standing all day. My room mate is a full time kitchen line cook and I saw him the other day without his shirt on. He's probably 20+% body fat...but has no real love handles or back fat. But he has a great big ol' belly. As a sitter, I'm on the other side of the spectrum. I didn't have a big ol pronounced belly, but I had a good spare tire complete with love handles. (Less of one now.) We basically both play video games with most of our free time, the only real difference in our overall daily activities is sitting vs. standing.

And I think he has the better deal. Because back fat and love handle fat is some of the last to go. The handfuls of me I can grab on my belly has been shrinking over the months, but it's still largely the same on my love handles.

Lastly, before I sound like I'm completely obsessed with weight and appearance....this is all still kind of a science experiment to me. I was pretty comfortable with my body image before I started working out and getting back in to shape. Skinny fat. Being so focused on weight and fat, etc....now is feeling more like a game than anything.

[nenjin]

TFW you realize you can do lat pull downs on one of the machines in the gym.

[JoshuaFH]

Cool dude. I'm up to 17 pull-ups in a row.

[nenjin]

Hopefully working lats will get me to at least one pull up.