I prefer to eat big. When I eat, I eat. When I don't, I don't. That's how I'm wired and trying to fight against my natural inclinations always caused me to fail.
Intermittent fasting is in my opinion a very effective way to maintain some hedonism in your life while staying lean. I'm able to eat awesome meals (some go as high as 2000 kcal) without adding body fat. I wouldn't be able to do that on the six-meal-a-day-diets I tried to maintain on in the past. I never get cravings anymore. I don't fiend around for snacks. I don't need them.
http://www.leangains.com/2010/03/maintaining-low-body-fat.html
I've been experimenting with Martin's approach, and I like it a lot for how I feel. I like being liberated from the idea that I have to eat some protein when I wake. I just eat if I want to eat, otherwise, Martin's work has made me confident I won't be starving any muscle tissue just by letting my night's fast continue.
What is the virtue in fasting? The big payoff seems to come from the adaptation that fasting engenders, which is that the body, when not being fed orally, feeds itself on your body fat, and gets really good at doing that. The best I can tell, this is the normal state of affairs! Your body is supposed to run primarily on fat, stored or ingested! That's why you can store many days of fat, but only a few hours worth of glucose.
In general, we see this pattern in the Paleolithic model. We don't store or make (in our bodies) things that are present in food items that were presumably always present in our food when our genome formed - vitamin C, vitamin D, B12, and protein. We get more than enough vitamin C and B12 and protein from animals, and we got the D from the sun.
I've posted before about how the studies of Muslims post Ramadan show their markers of health are improved by the fasting. One thing that seems to have emerged about long term health is regulation of blood glucose, specifically, keeping it from getting too high or staying high. Fasting obviously would help sustain a 'normal' glucose because the only source of glucose is a small store of sugar in the liver, and gluconeogenesis. When left to these sources, the body produces enough sugar and ketones to fuel the brain, but not too much.
In short, I think it's probable that intermittent fasting was common over the course of the millions of years that our genome was evolving, and it is 'good for us' in the way that sleep is good for us and vitamin D is good for us in that these are all things we're built for, and deviations from things 'we're built for' makes it more likely that we will deviate from the normally good health of the paleolithic people.
Intermittent fasting is in my opinion a very effective way to maintain some hedonism in your life while staying lean. I'm able to eat awesome meals (some go as high as 2000 kcal) without adding body fat. I wouldn't be able to do that on the six-meal-a-day-diets I tried to maintain on in the past. I never get cravings anymore. I don't fiend around for snacks. I don't need them.
http://www.leangains.com/2010/03/maintaining-low-body-fat.html
I've been experimenting with Martin's approach, and I like it a lot for how I feel. I like being liberated from the idea that I have to eat some protein when I wake. I just eat if I want to eat, otherwise, Martin's work has made me confident I won't be starving any muscle tissue just by letting my night's fast continue.
What is the virtue in fasting? The big payoff seems to come from the adaptation that fasting engenders, which is that the body, when not being fed orally, feeds itself on your body fat, and gets really good at doing that. The best I can tell, this is the normal state of affairs! Your body is supposed to run primarily on fat, stored or ingested! That's why you can store many days of fat, but only a few hours worth of glucose.
In general, we see this pattern in the Paleolithic model. We don't store or make (in our bodies) things that are present in food items that were presumably always present in our food when our genome formed - vitamin C, vitamin D, B12, and protein. We get more than enough vitamin C and B12 and protein from animals, and we got the D from the sun.
I've posted before about how the studies of Muslims post Ramadan show their markers of health are improved by the fasting. One thing that seems to have emerged about long term health is regulation of blood glucose, specifically, keeping it from getting too high or staying high. Fasting obviously would help sustain a 'normal' glucose because the only source of glucose is a small store of sugar in the liver, and gluconeogenesis. When left to these sources, the body produces enough sugar and ketones to fuel the brain, but not too much.
In short, I think it's probable that intermittent fasting was common over the course of the millions of years that our genome was evolving, and it is 'good for us' in the way that sleep is good for us and vitamin D is good for us in that these are all things we're built for, and deviations from things 'we're built for' makes it more likely that we will deviate from the normally good health of the paleolithic people.
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