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I've been giving intermittent fasting a try and it's been quite amazing to me to realize how I've always equated the slightest feeling of hunger with the idea that "I must eat, I'm starving!". I think this is pretty common.

With some willpower and practice, I can now eat nothing but a single bowl of cereal in a 24hr period, including 60m of hard exercise, without anything remotely like hunger pangs. It takes getting used to not constantly rewarding the thought of food with food.

It's sort of a drastic measure, but the only one that has enabled me to lose real weight - plus there are purported health benefits: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/the-benefits-of-occasion...

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You can do even better than a bowl of cereal. Eat something fatty, and even eating a little will significantly reduce your hunger. These days fatty food, such as cheese and creamy yogurt have been a staple of my diet: I can go by for a lot longer without eating much that way. The fruit-fat-nuts diet is _completely_ doable (of course, I eat 'normal' food too, for a more balanced diet, but only in the weekends, etc.)

I cannot find full fat yogurt in any of my local grocery stores. Is "low fat" as good as it gets? Seems like the low-fat diet craze of the recent past, and the current greek yogurt phenomenon, mean that "zero fat" and "low fat" are the only two options.

2% Fage is usually the best I can find.

The low fat ones are marketing BS—loaded with sugar so they don't taste like nothing. Unfortunately that's very nearly the only thing available at most stores. Misleading advertising/labelling defeats good food yet again.

Stonyfield and Fage make full fat yogurts, for example. I do not remember seeing any at the grocery chain giants, though. More specialized groceries (e.g., Whole Foods, some "ethnic" stores) may carry a full fat yogurt.

http://www.stonyfield.com/products/yogurt/smooth-creamy/whol...

http://usa.fage.eu/product/fage-total-7-oz

Assuming you shop at U.S supermarkets, you can _usually_ find full-fats, but they are almost always the store brand. There are very limited flavor options with full-fat though.

Ohh, what I'd give for full(even extra!) fat yogurt with not a lot of sugar. : (

The best yogurt I have had, by far, far, is Juju Dhau, from Nepal. It's so heavy and creamy, it feels like a meal in itself.

Hey investors, ya hear me? Juju dhau might be the next Chobani!

http://tasteofnepal.blogspot.com/2012/02/juju-dhau-king-of-y...

How about making yoghurt yourself? It's not that hard.

Merchandising it on a large scale would be...

But you probably mean making it for personal use. I'm not the original poster, but I'm going to have to look into that.

Not sure if it qualifies as "full fat" per se, but Noosa brand yogurt has roughly twice the fat content of most Greek yogurts I've tried (seems to really help texture/flavor as well).

Every grocery store I've seen carries multiple brands of yogurts (usually in all of strained -- Greek, skyr, etc. -- non-strained, and drinkable), not labelled low- or no-fat that are full-fat. (At least one brands labels them as something like 4% fat, which is a low-seeming number, but is actually full fat.)

Are you not in a major metro area? When I lived in rural missouri (40k city) I still found multiple brands of full fat (and not just plain flavor).

Fage, Straus, Maple Hill, Voskos all sell full-fat yogurt, and Trader Joe's sells one under their own brand. Maple Hill's is not strained and made with milk form grass-fed cows.

Try making your own yogurt. It's not quite as easy as buying it, but it's still a very simple process. You can make it with whatever fat content you'd like (and less sugar, which was the big draw for me), and it's really remarkably good. A decent yogurt maker will set you back maybe 20 or 25 bucks:

http://amzn.com/B000EX16RY

I can't eat nonfat dairy because it triggers my lactose intolerance. It drives me crazy to know that full-fat Greek style yogurt exists but none of my local stores stock it. The best I have found is 2%, and even then the pickings are slim.

That said, my local Safeway does stock 4% Darigold cottage cheese.

I find that eating something with fat and protein does a better job than fat alone. On days when I add in a mozzarella cheese, I feel satiated much longer than a fruit+nut bar alone (also have a tablespoon of coconut oil in my coffee).

I am interested in trying this, but if I don't eat breakfast, I am sometimes so light headed by 11:00am that I am literally almost falling over and my brain doesn't function. Any advice or articles you'd recommend?

Here is the best summary I've seen on IF...

http://antranik.org/intermittent-fasting/

btw, I've been practicing IF for 2+ years and love it.

IF is by definition just about constraining your food intake to a certain window of time. Most people do this later in the day out of necessity or habit (e.g. 2-7), but there's no reason your window couldn't be 6-10.

The downside is that you are much more likely to cheat if you do this, because now you have to go all afternoon and evening without eating, and then go to sleep. Psychologically it's much easier to wake up and be able to say "only 6 more hours to eat" and go to bed a few hours after your last meal than it is to eat your last meal, have 12 waking hours left, then try to go to sleep with a grumbling belly.

Edit: A lot of people practice IF without even realizing it. The most popular form (mentioned in rob_61's linked article) is 16/8. If you don't eat until lunch and don't do a late dinner, it's very likely you fall in the 16/8 window.

How much water have you had? Eat something fatty and high in protein. Your body never enters fat burning mode - as you get used to fasting once per week this process will get easier, like anything really.

Have you tried gradually increasing the fasting window over time?

I've done IF and lost 40 lbs with it. My advice is to eat something really small, and see what the smallest breakfast you can get away with is. After a month or so, try stopping breakfast and see how you make out then.

My understanding is that the gut and vagus nerve are very sensitive to disruptions, any changes in routine have large initial perceived effects, until a new equilibrium is established. I think this mechanism is why diets are so faddish and people think they have food allergies when they actually don't.

So, mitigate the worst of the symptoms, be willing to accept some temporary discomfort, and iterate towards a better diet over time.

Maybe it helps to be a bit heavier. I used to almost faint without breakfast and running to catch the tram, but I gained a bit of weight (back into normal range) since then and now I can do it.

(Travelling and hiking on rice and vegetables seems to be very good for weight loss without hunger.)

Your symptoms sound like hypoglycemia. As someone for whom hypoglycemia is a chronic issue, the best thing I've found for dealing with fasting is to load up on protein-heavy foods with low glycemic indexes prior to the fast.

Edit: I should be more clear - avoid foods with high glycemic indexes prior to the fast. In fact, just avoid them generally; they're usually empty calories.

A good test for whether you're hypoglycemic is to set an alarm to go off every waking hour for three days, and eat a handful of nuts (or something else with a low glycemic load) every time the alarm goes off.

I did this and felt waaaaaaaaay better than normal mood- and concentration-wise. Realizing that I have blood sugar issues is the most important thing that's happened to me in the last five years except for having a kid.

Wait, but what's the test condition? What results should I expect from your experiment if I'm hypoglycemic or not?

Right, sorry. Basically that you feel way better, unmistakably better (mood, concentration, alertness, that sort of thing). Not super scientific, but effective at least in my case.

I'd recommend something different, and drastic.

At Wal-Mart, they sell a glucometer called ReliOn. It's the cheapest strips of the ones out there, 50 for $21.

Start testing your blood sugar. Test it when you wake up. Test before you eat, and then 30 minutes after you eat (up to 4 tests) and look at the carb count on what you ate.

A healthy human should be between 85mg/dL and 100 mg/dL. Numbers over that show "something". Over 140mg/dL causes nerve death. We think that over 100 mg/dL causes pancreatic beta cells to die or mutate.

Then start playing around with how much carbs you eat. Dow what's called, "Eating to the Meter".

Also analysing what you're eating may give you a strong answer why you're feeling bad by 11.

Also, look in my history for what I'm doing (from yesterday).

I copied my technique from this BBC doc: http://www.documentarytube.com/videos/eat-fast-and-live-long...

On my fast days (Tues/Thur/Sun) I eat a decent breakfast, but I don't pig out. Then I just don't worry about food until breakfast the next day (when breakfast tastes particularly delicious btw).

To be honest, the biggest factor tied to failure for me is mood. If I'm in a poor mood, I'm 1000% more likely to feel like I can give in and grab lunch on a fast day. And then once I've had lunch...

The next biggest challenge is other people, especially on Sundays. I might eat fruit salad at brunch, b/c it's both hard and weird to not eat in the company of eating friends.

One thing I try to keep front-of-mind is how awesome it feels to wake up in the morning after a fast day with a sense of accomplishment. And how satisfying it was to need to take 2-inches off the waist of the suit I got married in. Success is addictive.

Edit: I allow myself as much coffee/tea with milk as I feel I need. Yeah, it's not fasting, but it's not eating either.

>Success is addictive.

Be careful not to go too far then.

> * I've been giving intermittent fasting a try and it's been quite amazing to me to realize how I've always equated the slightest feeling of hunger with the idea that "I must eat, I'm starving!". I think this is pretty common.*

Not as extreme, but recently started to eat less for lunch(before: eating out, burger/sandwich + fries + drink, etc, now: homemade food, fruits) and already I don't get the afternoon snooze, and haven't needed coffee in a long time!

also haven't been to any fast food restaurants or had soda in a few months, hopefully I can break the one-year mark!

I have a fun story to share about how I created a soda-disgust in myself!

In college at one point, I was drinking soda almost every day. It was bad for me and I knew it, but couldn't help.

So one day, I froze a bottle of some soda, and then let it thaw, sipping it after. It was the nastiest, sweetest, most awful-headaching thing I've ever put in my mouth. Having discovered what soda 'really' was, I stopped drinking it. I drink it maybe once in a year at most, but that's about it.

When you say soda, what do you mean? Coca Cola?

coke, sprite, Fanta aka 'orange soda', whatever you want. The sweet corn syrup thaws first since it's got higher melting point than water, and it tastes nasty!

It was not until I started a ketogenic diet, that I learned the difference between hungry and thirsty. The signals are very very similar, at least for me.

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