0. Has anyone seriously looked into variations of intermittent fasting &| extended fasting?
1. Did you have brain fog after hunger went away after a few days, or less fog?
2. What about maintenance vitamins, electrolytes and preventing gallstones?
3. How long did you continue for, until hunger returned?
Eat your normal amount of meals, shovel it in your mouth, but stop before finishing the whole portion. I eat maybe 75% of each meals and toss the remaining bits. Do it for a couple months and watch the weight magically shed off.
It works because it requires no change in meal-type habits; it’s simply fewer calories. End of the day, that’s always the goal and this way is the most direct and simple
When the meals come where it’s hard to stop at 75%, I force myself to toss my napkin and utensils on the plate ensuring the food is now “dirty”. So altogether, it’s very few behavior changes make for a foolproof method.
I think the best method is to understand your own patterns, and to find ways to reduce caloric consumption which are going to require the least amount of will-power for you and will cause the least amount of psychological stress. The exact method is going to be different for different people.
One reason I like it is that it requires the least planning and mental load. I eat what I want as much as I want (except sugar) and almost no matter what I do it works out to be less than my maintenance calories and I lose weight because I can't eat 4k calories in one sitting. The simplicity of it gives me less breaking points, and the ability to "eat whatever I want" makes planning for a big meal in 2 days a good reward to keep going.
The beginning is very hard and it's mostly due to sugar addiction. Many people say switching to keto first to wean off sugar makes fasting much easier.
To answer your questions:
1. Hunger comes and goes in waves, but mostly it just goes. Mentally I become more focused and clearer the longer I am into my fast, and overall I no longer get the fog from overeating or too much sugar.
2. I take a standard multivitamin GNC brand. When I feel light headed/have low blood pressure I drink a salty bone broth. Some people have their own electrolyte recipes like snake juice you can look into.
3. I go for a set amount of time. I found that it's very difficult if I'm just fasting for "as long as I can" because when the hunger comes I break. If I have a set breakfast time it's much easier to carry on until then.
I also had success with a ketogenic diet, but in my experience that's a bit harder to stick to, since there's a lot of hidden carbohydrates in food, and it's also the kind of diet you find yourself explaining all the time like when you have to turn down the cookie your colleague made, or you order a hamburger without the bun at a restaurant. TRE offers many of the same benefits, but has almost no impact insofar as how you live your life.
> Hunger comes and goes in waves, but mostly it just goes.
Interesting thing about the hunger pattern you described: subjective experience of hunger maps pretty well to the hormone Ghrelin, which tends to peak close to your normal meal-times, and then naturally subsides afterwords whether or not you have eaten. So the science points to the fact that hunger is very much something you can "wait out".
> I started skipping a day twice a week for a total of 5x 24hr fasts and 2x 48hr fasts. This week I completed a 72hr fast.
It's important to be cautious when attempting longer fasts. I know a lot of people have subjectively good experiences with multi-day fasts, but I saw a talk where the presenter showed evidence that long fasts (more than 72 hours) can cause long-lasting metabolic changes which weren't recovered even several years later.
I thought one of the benefits of fasting was long-lasting metabolic changes (for the better).
What the talk I linked in the other comment talks about is something different: there's evidence that prolonged periods of severe calorie restriction can make your metabolism's bias move more toward storing calories and away from expending energy.
1. For me, I never really experienced brain fog while IF. If anything, I seem to get more fog after eating regular/larger meals. When I was really hungry, drinking water and/or coffee (Starbucks double shots) worked for me. After a while you get used to hunger, and I seem to work better when I’m hungry vs when I’ve eaten a typical meal. If I’m seriously so hungry I’m getting a headache (which happens) id only have something with protein, absolutely no carbs (i.e lunch meat, eggs, nuts)
2. Don’t have too much knowledge or experience on gallstones. I took fish oil supplements occasionally and cut out creatine, but that’s about it.
3. Not 100% sure based on wording, but I was doing IF for about 6 weeks and lost ~20lbs. I ate from 6pm to 10pm, slept typically 1am to 7-8am. Only coffee and water during the day.
Now at 180lbs and not on IF or a strict IF schedule, I typically just have coffee in the mornings, a light lunch if I eat, and a typical dinner. 30 mins cardio 2-3 days a week, compound lifts 2-3 days a week.
Source - mid 20’s software developer
Yeah I seem to find that a bit of mild hunger (not starvation or malnutrition) is good for the mind. I have at some points in my life found myself in a bit of a dampened state, where I am constantly either a bit lethargic from the last meal, or a bit preoccupied thinking about what I'm going to eat next.
I would love to understand the physiology more, but I have a pet theory that your brain gets a bit more "switched on" when you make calories and nutrients a bit more scarce for yourself, and that maybe when you let yourself eat whatever you want whenever you want, that survival instinct gets dialed back a bit.
After trying fasting, when I see a snake with a full belly sleeping in the grass like it's dead it makes total sense to me. That's what digestion feels like.