A gut-derived hormone suppresses sugar appetite/regulates food choice Drosophila
nature.com
nature.com
Point being, people like to spew out CICO as if fat people just don't understand thermodynamics. What I've found is that matters is appetite: some people just get full way faster than others. Beyond metabolism differences, NEAT, emotional responses, etc, I think that's actually the major factor. So a hormone like that can be game-changing
Most people can get an off-label metformin prescription for anti-aging or appetite suppression.
Your interest in food will be reduced to the point you have trouble keeping weight on.
Sugar will be repulsive to you. Sweet food tastes "sickly sweet", nauseating.
Metformin also interferes with the absorption of carbohydrates in your gut.
> Metformin is generally safe, but common side effects do include vomiting, nausea, and diarrhea. Those experiencing these unpleasant side effects might consume less food, resulting in modest weight reductions.
Other foods remain delicious. For example, eggs and cheese and meat.
But basically, your interest in food will be drastically reduced, and you will eat just enough.
This is an important part of metformin's beneficial effect on lifespan and health.
I've never heard of this effect (let alone experienced it).
I do know that Diabetes itself can reduce the efficiency of taste receptors, and metformin will sometimes cause people to have a metallic taste in their mouth (due to metformin in produced saliva)
You say you've never heard of metformin affecting food palatability and taste? Did you search the web at all? Just use Google if you want anecdotal examples. For example:
https://forum.diabetes.org.uk/boards/threads/loss-of-appetit...
I joined as after 18 months on metformin, my appetite and enjoyment of food is constantly declining. I’ve lost about 10 kg over that time, which is not a problem. But I’ve lost my appetite and, as a keen cook and someone who has always enjoyed good food, I no longer look forward to meals and get little pleasure from food.
or
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/anyone-experience-l...
Metformin changed the taste of food slowly during the time I took it. It finally got to the point where all vegetables tasted like burnt plastic. This meant that I didn't want to eat them.
And so on. Now you've heard of it! All it took was a web search.
Dumb question: How? I'm reasonably certain my GP would not be amenable to being asked to prescribe drugs for off-label use.
>There is some evidence metformin may be helpful in extending lifespan, even in otherwise healthy people. It has received substantial interest as an agent that delays aging, possibly through similar mechanisms as its treatment of diabetes (insulin and carbohydrate regulation). This is controversial, and an area of active research.[61][62]
If you're overweight, tell your doctor you want help with your appetite. Otherwise, say you want metformin for its cancer prevention and anti-aging effects.
Metformin is safe and it almost universally improves health and well-being.
Your doctor knows this, and she'll gladly prescribe it.
If your doctor gladly prescribes anything you just walk in and ask for by name and dosage and doesn't have a green cross symbol outside their office, then I'd highly suggest seeking out a new doctor.
I'm saying it's likely your doctor will be willing to prescribe METFORMIN (that drug, in particular) for off-label use if you ask.
Surprisingly, metformin seems to be almost a pure win, even for healthy people: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-metformin-a-wonder-dr...
In contrast, GIP analogues like semaglutaide present real risks and are less well understood. For some people, with serious health problems, GIP analogues make sense. But generally you don't want to be taking them if you're healthy.
This may be true for some people but definitely not a universal
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-metformin-a-wonder-dr...
But "misleading and a bit dangerous"? Really?
Readers can find a summary of metformin's typical effects on Wikipedia, here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metformin
YMMV: "your mileage may vary"
In my search for a diet that would allow me to avoid gaining weight, the main successes were achieved by replacing various kinds of food that were tasty, but which did not satiate me before eating huge amounts of them, with other kinds of food that are also tasty, but which satiate me after eating a moderate amount of them.
Some instances this seemed due to an incredibly fast metabolism, others were due to GERD/IBS or some other factor that limits the craving.
The differences are real, even if it’s just something like gut biome.
My sister and I grew up with the same diet. We didn't starve, but neither of us had lots of access to junk food. Yet she could be hungry once she got home and after half a plate to be already satiated.
Today she has tons of junk food in her house yet she doesn't feel the compulsion to eat more than a few bytes. I'm down to 71 kg from 83 kg back in June, but I still can't have a single cookie package in my house.
I have said "a diet to avoid gaining weight", not "a diet that allows gaining weight".
If I eat more than 1900 ... 2000 kcal per day, I gain weight rapidly, so the problem was reducing the amount of energy intake so much, while ensuring an adequate daily intake of proteins and of any other essential nutrients, and without feeling that I am starving.
I agree that there are differences between people and there are also differences for a single human depending on circumstances, e.g. in many cases when you are ill you lose your appetite.
Nevertheless, for the same human, different foods containing the same amount of energy can behave extremely differently from the point of view of causing satiety, both immediately after the meal and some hours later.
For remaining satiated many hours after the meal, at equal energy content food with higher content of proteins and/or fat and/or fiber is more effective.
For being satiated immediately after the meal, at equal nutrient composition food that is more consistent and requires prolonged chewing causes satiety much faster than soft food such as creams, mashed potatoes, ground meat and the like.
Successful dieting is about managing the sensation of hunger. That’s it.
Yet, some people have a different appetite, or a different reward system wiring for food, and they just don't feel the same impulse to do it even when they're stressed out.
All of these are valid approaches and can work! But you have to first know that CICO is what matters, in order to appreciate your (very correct) statement that "Successful dieting is about managing the sensation of hunger."
If someone thinks that IF works regardless of CICO, they're going to get it wrong. I know, I was there many years ago before starting to count calories and losing a lot of weight. (Though counting calories works for me, I don't necessarily advocate it for everyone!)
One other small point: While managing the sensation of hunger is a big part of it, other people "overeat" for other reasons. E.g. I have far less issues with hunger, than I have with just liking novelty in foods - I like to try a lot of different things, and lately I've started to cook a lot. That is a bigger source of problems for my dieting goals than feeling hungry, personally. Other people eat for stress, or to stay awake, etc. Hunger is a big part of the equation, but not the only part.
Calories are a measure chemical energy, not mass. Our digestive systems don't get anywhere near e=mc^2 in their efficiency. The conservation law is MIMO; calories are way more complicated. For example, people who extol CICO rarely take into account the fact that poop has a variable amount of chemical energy, which depends on a huge variety of factors including gut flora, hydration and fiber intake, or that most of our mass output is actually exhaled CO2.
Trying to be super precise about calories may be complicated, but nobody has to do that to reach a caloric deficit anyway so who cares. Eat less than you need by any reasonable ball park metric and you will lose weight, it's that simple.
The hard part is that for some reason a large percentage of the population can't regulate their intake naturally because what they require for calories to be a healthy weight is misaligned with what they are compelled to consume.
[0] http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
> The laws of thermodynamics define a group of physical quantities, such as temperature, energy, and entropy, that characterize thermodynamic systems in thermodynamic equilibrium.
If you eat 2000 calories of food and burn 2000 calories (taking into account inefficiencies in the metabolic processes our bodies undertake to convert molecules to other molecules), there is no source of energy for you to accumulate fat, regardless of anything else.
Your metabolic rate and the chemical energy of your excrement and the amount of co2 you exhale can be affected by a myriad of factors, hormonal included. But they just change the CO part of the equation, not the fact that CICO is law.
CICO was never law.
The closest practical approximation of this is the calorie measurement we assign to foods. Sure our metabolic processes are not equivalent to a calorimeter - but its easier to measure calories than to account for the specific metabolic process each gram of macronutrient you consume goes through.
So for all practical purposes, and in the context of hormonal effects, energy in vs energy out ie CICO is still law.
This is a half truth. If you cut down portion size your stomach will shrink over time. I eat a lot less before feeling full now, and I only changed my life a year ago.
It's also important that you eat stuff that makes you feel full, fibers and greens. Changing diet also changed my taste, so I crave more healthy things now, while the food I used to eat honestly don't appeal to me any longer or tastes empty.
OTOH if you push yourself to eat a little more every meal, your stomach will grown, accommodating room for more before you feel full.
There are many vegetables, fruits and nuts that require a decent amount of chewing. There are also some kinds of home-made bread that require much more chewing than the industrial soft bread, while also being much tastier than the commercial bread (when eaten immediately after baking; the commercial bread is optimized for long shelf life).
[ ] Thursday
[ ] 8am - if starter hasn't been used for 4 weeks or more; feed starter 30g flour and 30g of water
[ ] Thursday evening weigh out flour and salt as below into two bowls, and cover. Get water jug, yeast and teaspoon ready. Keep starter in the fridge until needed
[ ] Friday:
[ ] 1. (8am) Mix 100g of Starter, 200g white flour, 50g wholemeal flour, 200g warm water. Mix and cover. This is the Levain, set aside somewhere room temperature - if you house is very cold you can use extra starter.
[ ] 2. (1pm) Five hours later, in a big bowl mix 100 of white flour, 300g of wholemeal flour, 10g of salt and 330g warm water. Stand for 20 minutes, uncovered.
[ ] 3. (1.20pm) Add a quarter tea spoon of instant yeast and 300g of the levain made this morning to the big bowl, mix all together (leftover levain add to starter you have in the fridge - save for next time or mix and give half to someone else).
[ ] 4.1 (2.30pm) 1st fold. Over the next 2 hours, fold the dough 3 times with wet hands. Roughly mix and blend the dough, no need to kneed.
[ ] 4.2 (3.30pm) 2nd fold
[ ] 4.3 (4.30pm) 3rd fold
[ ] 5. (6pm, approx 5 hours after step 2.) Shape into a ball and place on greaseproof paper in a large bowl. Put in fridge till tomorrow morning.
[ ] Saturday:
[ ] 6. (8am) Remove from fridge. Preheat oven and a cast-iron pot to 245 deg C
[ ] 7. Score top of loaf and place with greaseproof paper in the heated pot and bake for 20 minutes. Remove lid and cook for 25 mins more. Will sound hollow(ish) when tapped once baked. Crust should be a dark brown.
[ ] 8. Remove from pot, take off greaseproof paper and place on a rack. Cool for 20 minutes.
Besides such more elaborate recipes, after a little experimentation it is also possible to make bread with simplified recipes and preparation.
For example, in most days I make a bread to be eaten at breakfast, which needs less than 20 minutes for making, distributed over a duration of less than an hour.
It is baked in a microwave oven, which takes much less time than in a conventional oven and which is perfectly reproducible (the time depends on the microwave oven and on the amount of dough, so it must be found by experiments; in my oven @ 1000 W I use 13 minutes for dough made of 500 g of wheat flour, in a glass vessel covered by a lid).
Sometimes I add various spices, but even pure bread made only of wheat flour and water can be very good. I make the dough from wheat floor (with 12% proteins) + water having 75% of the mass of the floor. The dough is kneaded for a few minutes in a glass bowl, until becoming homogeneous and elastic. Then it is left 30 minutes, to become cohesive.
Then I wash for a few minutes the dough while kneading it, to remove a part of the starch, because I want to obtain a bread with high protein content, which causes more satiety than conventional bread, both due to the high protein content and by being more chewy. Then I bake it and I eat it after it cools enough. Of course, washing the dough is optional.
For softer bread, a leavening agent can be used. Nevertheless, when the dough is baked in a microwave oven, due to the internal heating, even the unleavened dough grows about 30% to 40% of what it would grow when leavened, due to the expansion of the incorporated air and water.
Having tried this, by basically eating a lot of carrots, its uh, not the same as being full/satiated. Feeling like your stomach is full is just a completely different feeling from feeling like you ate a satiating meal.
Carbs cause the opposite, they trigger the need to eat more (carbs).
The next part is just my own made-up opinion but: I think this is also why you shouldn't under-eat because then maybe your body won't learn because it actually thinks its starving and so it won't adapt to the smaller volume and lower frequency.
And or course then there's the cultural habit / ritual of eating 3 times a day.
That too is a half truth. It's not just that the stomach's available volume decreases that a feeling of appetite is satiated. Smaller portions of rich foods can do this, sometimes. Eating slower can but only if the right foods are consumed to help trigger the biochemical response (not vanishing calories). There is actually a feedback mechanism and it's not as cut and dry as fill the space = I'm done.
I recognize I've only given a high level talking point and I apologize that I can't recant the physiology and chemical pathways that perform this function. Maybe someone in the medical field can chime and and fill the gaps we're both creating? I happen to be the skinny one in a very obese family and have probably spent too much time time to figure this out.
But I think CICO is still helpful. It's not a panacea, lots of people struggle to just eat the right amount (see appetite).
But you can use CICO as a check to make sure you aren't bullshitting yourself. If you try a diet (eg. cut sugar, intermittent fasting, low carbs, etc), you will only lose weight if you have a caloric deficit. Eg. if you cut sugar from your diet but eat huge portions of whole grain pasta instead you aren't going to lose any weight.
Now imagine your body couldn't manage its own hydration properly, perhaps because we contaminated our water supplies with something that disregulates the thirst response. Then you'd have a society that spends a lot of time talking about WIWO and it'd be a pretty sick place to live. It's much healthier to treat the underlying disregulation than to force people to constantly be thirsty.
The problem with people who pitch it as the answer (rather than one line on four full whiteboards) is that calories out is very difficult to control or measure, and will tend to reduce in proportion to calories in.
On the flip side, many people find that their base metabolic rate increases when they switch to a very low carb diet - this is both because using the nutrients in their food takes more energy, and because they are no longer suppressing their body's use of energy with overabundant insulin.
Low carb aka Atkins are typically hormonally-focused diets, not a caloric deficit diets.
Paleo is an autoimmune-friendly diet, not a caloric deficit diet.
One of the best examples I know of is Greg Doucette. He specifically preaches CICO because for 95-99% of people it is about putting the fork down. It’s a generalization because, more often than not you aren’t controlling your intake if you are overweight. There will always be the minority that truly have hormonal imbalances and need assistance losing weight.
If you have a higher appetite you should have learned about low calorie dense foods, and if you’re serious about losing or maintaining a healthy weight you have to find sustainable foods you like that fill you but are lower in calories.
There’s a heirarchy in terms of trouble shooting your weight problems and proper jumping to NEAT and hormonal imbalances is really just trying to take a shortcut for instant gratification.
Long term you can lose 1 pound a month, slowly, and keep it off the rest of your life via CICO.
Sorry for the rant but I can’t stand people who skip CICO cause they don’t like to hear it and haven’t done research on how to keep themselves full.
But we know it's not a minority. Most people who try to eat less fail, repeatedly, for all of their lives.
He said that of all the contributing factors to being overweight, the factor that was clearly the most significant by a margin was food production per capita. If you produce a lot more food, people will consume a lot more as well.
Putting down the fork may not be an effective solution, but the problem definitely is eating too much. Other factors like how our bodies absorb more from the same food than they did 40 years ago pale in comparison.
Not necessarily. Eating too much may be the result of whatever the actual problem may be. People know they're eating too much already. They still, very reliably, can't do anything about it.
Consistent with my comment. That they can't cut down eating doesn't mean the problem isn't overproduction.
(lost 20ish kg first time with fitness and diet change, put most of it back on over many years due largely to buffet lunch in the office followed by bad habits, lost it again by using time restriction and that seems to have stuck so far)
It’s because people who ‘try’ their whole lives yo-yo diet or crash diet and that’s
1) unsustainable 2) extremely likely to result in more long term weight gain 3) very unhealthy for your body to constantly be fluctuating in weight so rapidly
If you are eating right (let me be very clear here, right doesn’t mean whole 30 or some vegan diet: it means calories within the means to not add or lose weight which is called maintenance) you are not going to fluctuate in weight very much.
The majority of people in America are overweight because they lack basic understanding of nutrition, don’t exercise enough (still you cannot outwork a bad diet), self-control thus overeat or some permutation of all three.
It’s straight up a bold face lie to say that the majority of people have hormonal problems otherwise we would have a national crisis on our hands with something that we should drop our jobs for right now and study because our water or air or food is heavily impacting our hormones to cause every single person on earth to gain weight.
If losing and maintaining a healthy weight was easy, we would have put it into a pill already.
Not to mention you don’t need to be in a caloric deficit your whole life. Hell you could even be 15% BF and maintain that for 40+ years.
Most people adopt those fad diets and realize how much they hate it because it’s so restrictive.
The main goal of a good and healthy caloric intake is to basically eat the right foods you want to eat within the portion that allows you to maintain.
It’s pretty simple if you look at all the diets today - keto - intermittent fasting - vegan/ vegetarian - whole 30 - carnivore
It’s all an aim to put guard rails on your diet by making some foods ‘off limits’. CICO literally calorie restriction by cutting out entire groups of food.
It’s not sustainable because everyone eventually runs out of will power and wants a donut.
The key is, track your caloric intake. Micro-adjust to get to a healthy weight. Maintain.
You should be able to eat the foods you wanna eat the rest of your life on a good diet, just less of them and you need to find foods that satiate you personally well to counteract overeating.
People love to say its easy for you or make up all kinds of excuses. A person i dated in the pst liked to complain about how she couldn’t lose weight because of all these genetic issues. Both of her parents were fat and she had recently started to get a lot bigger. I said i would diet with her eating the same amount of calories even though i work out 5 times a week and need 2200 calories just to maintain my weight normally i am eating 2400 to 2600 since my goal is muscle gain. She needed likely about 1800 based on sex, height, and activity level. We both targeted 1600 calories a day.
I lost close to ten pounds (this is not at all healthy dont do it) she lost 4 pounds. I stopped after a month and she was unable to keep doing it alone without me doing all the meal planning and just generally because she was lazy.
I never had to hear about how it was because i was lucky again which was great. I had serious hunger cravings for the entire month but guess what you can decide to not eat.
Prepared for my downvotes from all the people “stuck” at unhealthy weight.
I found just a few spoons of stodgy porridge can keep hunger away for 6 - 8 hours.
[0]: https://chadnauseam.com/random/semaglutide-has-changed-the-w...
BTW I used to be exactly like you and could eat enough to feed a regiment without gaining an ounce. My eating for Britain stopped suddenly when I hit 40 and metabolism changed. Hope you are blessed with lifelong good apetite management, but for me I had to start working on it and changing my lifestyle/willpower.
It's good to know that advances are happening for those who truly need a helping hand though.
When I did intermittent fasting I got into the habit of never needing food until around 4pm.
The body adapts fairly quickly to whatever inputs you feed it, and it's amazing how little of diet advice focuses on that, to me
Doesn't is sound like a biological crutch for low-quality habits (fake food, cascading health issues, unhealthy environments,etc)?
Hormone treatments appear to be guinea pig experiments with lifelong consequences.
I've laughed several times already at "culture clumping" and "lifestyle clumping".
Being a technology native, I had good timing and got to grow up with the "golden library" that was the information superhighway.
The kids nowadays have to filter more tabloid info/illiteracy in a day than I had to in the course of years. I got to skip late-stage television too :p
Innovation in the 21st century is soooooooo much better than anything fiction has to offer.
For me it is mostly about the amount of sweet stuff, however in general it is about the appetite/calorie ratio. You can eat "unhealthy" food and still lose weight. My body wants sugar once a week or so, however that's still fine.
It's probably obvious, but avoid eating food you don't like, just because it is less calorie/supposedly healthy. This leads to enormous frustration. Experimenting however is a good idea, the more alternatives one has the better.
The factors that lead someone to overeat is a totally different question the answer to which should be figured out by themselves or maybe their psychologist. In most cases it's not that dire though, once their initial withdrawal from fast food stops people stop having these impulses to reach for a doughnut each time they're inconvenienced. In any case, your problems in life should be treated by dealing with the problems directly and not making themselves feel better by stuffing their face.
Thanks for explaining thermodynamics to me, I guess?
> once their initial withdrawal from fast food stops people stop having these impulses to reach for a doughnut each time they're inconvenienced
Statistically, most people who try to eat less fail to do it. Why do you think you don't you have the impulse to reach for a donut each time you're inconvenienced?
I guess it's more comfortable to just call them lazy, but it's utterly useless and un-actionable at a societal and personal level. Diets have to be all about managing the sensation of hunger while maintaining such a caloric deficit. CICO amounts to "Just eat less lol"
Yep, because the secret is simple, not easy. Whereas people want to find some high-tech wunderwaffen arcane diet that will be hyper complex but easy to follow and will lead to effortless results.
There was this documentary on yt[0] where a fitness model gained lots of weight on purpose to lose it, and even he had mood swings and initially had problems with following his diet regimen when it was time to lose the weight. But point still stands, if you stick with the diet your weight will drop.
I'm not continuing this conversation, but let me just tell you: if you don't feel a strong impulse, you don't need that much self-control to not act upon it. So you should think about what's actually so different about you compared to all those fat people.
Also it’s entirely plausible that various small molecules like artificial sweeteners, preservatives, solvents, and whatever else goes in the process chemistry products called processed food is in some way or another bioactive and alters homeostasis, perhaps by disrupting the endocrine system or perhaps through other pathways.
A slight overconsumption of grains, large overconsumption of meat, and massive under consumption of vegetables and fruits and dairy.
I looked this up recently. On my phone but googling “adherence of us population to dietary guidelines” may help.
It wasn't until high school that the doctors detected and diagnosed the ulcers, and my mom felt horribly bad because I'd always complained about my stomach pain and that I was hungry, and she asked if this is what I had always felt.
Unfortunately, the doctors didn't actually cure the ulcers. They came back. But at least now we know what causes them, and I can hopefully get proper treatment for them, once I get other things like my blood pressure and kidney stones dealt with.
But I am convinced that ulcers were at least a major contributor in my developing diabetes and obesity.
I wonder how many other people who are overweight have also had to deal with ulcers, but may not have realized what was causing that pain, or why it went away with food?
That is certainly what some people do, and they're wrong.
But CICO as a model is incredibly important. Mostly because a lot of people don't actually believe it! For years, I had the vague sense that I wanted to lose a bit of weight (for context, I wasn't obese, just a bit overweight.) And for years, my kind of underlying assumption was that I'd have to eat completely differently, mostly have to cut out carbs, etc.
Today, people talk about all sorts of different diets - Intermittent fasting, or Keto, low-carb in general, etc. Those are all legit! They all can work for some people. But understanding that the way they work is by making you consume less calories (and most likely making you less hungry) is a critical part of their success, IMO. Otherwise you'll do as I did- I started doing IF, lost a few kilo, then get used to consuming all the sweets I otherwise would've had late at night, but right before my IF window closed. Not helpful in the slightest, and just made my day less flexible.
But sugar. Fuuuck I cannot walk past sweets. Sugar has claws in me I cannot shake. I hope we someday understand that mechanism better, maybe enough to give me a little help.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2020...
Whatever you think of willpower, I think controlling the food environment (don't bring it home from the store, don't eat at restaurants with mainly junk food, etc) is the most effective intervention. After that, things like substitution, delay, smallest possible portion, and putting the tempting food in an inconvenient location may help.
But if you have junk food in your home some people (like myself) will eat it compulsively at some point.
If one can make it through the sugar detox phase then it's pretty easy because the cravings do go away.
The other part is stress management; when something bad happens it's so tempting to say "fuck it, I deserve this <insert bad thing>". That's the harder part.
To my surprise, my weight hasn't skyrocketed, I feel full way faster without having to exert loads of willpower to stop eating and my sugar cravings have reduced by a lot. Only from time to time I want to taste something sweet and even then I'm happy with just a green apple.
Sugar is a drug and it messes with our satety hormones. No matter how much you eat, you end up always wanting more
It is essential for strong stomach acid (a whole system benefit), your body always ensures the salt level in the blood (and will even extract it from bones). Ask yourself - 'what is the most common medical intervention' and you will see it is a saline drip. And farmers ensure that salt is available to the their cattle for their health. And Japanese have a highly salty diet and live long, with fewer bone breaks. And, and....
Salt is essential, and a low salt diet is terrible.
Then ask, why is a low salt diet recommended to people, if it is so good? The answer, sadly, is that the 'health' industry actually requires ill people - they make money treating disease, not from keeping people healthy. It is in the big pharma's interests to encourage poor behaviour, and, yes, they will even lobby governments to mandate behaviour that creates disease.
For all the similar reasons you gave, except - no sugar, no energy. You may wonder why a skinny af cyclist will happily consume 6k+ calories a day, as well as shovelling glucose gels down. Endurance athletes get it best: long distance cycling is just an all-day eating competition.
Sugar is not an essential nutrient. You can eat absolutely no sugar without any ill effect. If you eat some starchy vegetables, that provides all the carbohydrates you need.
Even if you want to eat 6000 kcal as carbohydrates, you can eat that easily from rice/maize/bread/potatoes etc., with no sugar. In fact it is much easier to eat a huge amount of food when it does not contain sugar, because even if sugar is addictive and makes you crave for it, when you eat too much sugar during a short time, it becomes disgusting when you try to eat more.
On the other hand, if you stop eating salt, or even if you just eat too little salt, you will die soon, and not in a pleasant way (e.g. one of the symptoms of hyponatremia caused by eating too little salt is severe constipation, because various muscles, including the muscles that are used for the peristalsis of the intestines, lose their strength).
Like for any essential nutrient, both eating too little salt and eating to much salt is bad. The recommended daily intake of salt is between 4 and 5 grams of salt.
In order to be able to control precisely the daily intake of salt, I prefer to not add any salt to food during cooking (and I do not buy industrially made food). Instead of that, I add the salt only immediately prior to eating, so I can know exactly the amount added during a day.
One benefit of this, like you say, is you develop a general disgust for sweets and have no interest in them outside of training.
As you say, in order to achieve the maximum power output that can be sustained for a long time, i.e. in aerobic effort, you also need fructose, i.e. sugar, besides glucose, to reach the maximum rate of carbohydrate absorption in the intestine.
However the vast majority of the humans may never encounter during their entire lives a circumstance when they need to produce a sustained power output so high that it is limited by the intestinal absorption (and without an appropriate training their muscles would not be able to sustain so much power anyway), so they never need to eat sugar. They eat it only because it tastes good.
If you have never given up sugar before, it will take at least 6-8 weeks of non-use before the cravings go away. These will be some of the hardest weeks too.
1) everything has sugar in it, and you have to absolutely avoid it, not just sweets, fruits, juices, I'd even tell you diet drinks and artificial sweeteners too. That means no ketchup, sauces, breads, and most processed and store bought foods.
2) your body will do everything to remind you about those easy access sugars. During your detox, you will have cravings, dreams about sweets, even the overwhelming urge to eat stuff you might not even thing about "oh god, i could really go for some prunes right now" sort of thing.
After your body gets it figured out that your no longer getting access to easy glucose it calms the hell down. You'll notice one day that sweets just don't seem that appealing. You'll get better at detecting sweetness in things you would have never considered sweet, like lettuce.
I warn you sugar is insidious and everywhere. One day, you will sit down to some mundane meal, nothing special about it. After a few bites, you will say, wow this is wonderful, its the best thing I have ever tasted, I absolutely must have more of this very mundane thing, I'll need seconds, thirds, more if available. That meal you were eating was loaded down with sugar, it probably didn't taste sweet but it will taste like the best thing ever. That's how sugar gets you.
As an example, cutting out candy and donuts for apples and pears isn't keto, but is objectively a step in the right direction. If you want to give it a try, just go for it and see what happens!
To get the benefits of keto, you have to get the body adapted to burning fat. Depending on the body, this can take a week or so. All those cravings are the body crying out for a fix of easy sugar, because it really doesn't want to have to switch over and burn fat for fuel as its harder for it to do.
If you just had sugar every 3rd day, you're body would never adjust.
Lost 10kg.
But it was hard.
My "trick" was buying a Pepsi Max Cherry and a >80% chocolate, when I got cravings.
After ingesting nothing but water, coffee and electrolytes for 3-5 days your eating compulsions will be immediately reset. It's incredible how quick the effect is when you go extreme. It's not magic but it is pretty close.
On top of that, I find it easier to go into water fasting if I've been in ketosis for a bit, which is difficult in itself.
But for that, I've found it helpful to remove other dietary restrictions; I don't typically eat dairy, and the stuff I do like to eat in keto is often much more expensive than the beans and rice / peanuts/ fruit that are the staples of my diet when I'm not trying to force ketosis or fast. Eating nicer food (usually meats, lots of eggs, dairy) makes being that process easier.
It came back a few weeks later, but over a few years I tried fasting again and it would go away every single time. Now I try to avoid sweets as much as I can but when old habits creep back in I just have a fast and it goes away.
I don't really fast for any reason other than knowing it will take the sweet tooth away—and generally make me want to eat healthier.
The first ~12 days were hell, as if the devil possesed me, that is how strong sugar addiction is.
But then all of the sudden it was as if cravings reduced by 95% in just 24 hours around day ~12.
Realistically how do you avoid sugar like this? Soft drinks, candy, and other artificial stuff are easy enough to avoid, but most bread? Fruits? What are you supposed to eat and how are you supposed to obtain it without involving sugar? Are you suggesting people eat pure meat and lettuce and eggs for 6-8 weeks? It would be so much more helpful to give some examples of sample diets people could actually follow.
(What specifically are you saying needs to be avoided btw? Sucrose and fructose and artificial sweeteners I assume, but not glucose?)
- Minimal to no fruit (that includes tomato).
- Don't eat anything that comes in a package or that has an ingredients list more than 1 item long (so, frozen broccoli is fine, as long as there's no extra stuff in the bag).
- Don't eat anything that your great grandparents wouldn't have had access to.
Some things, like bell peppers, will start tasting like candy after a few weeks of this.
Absolute zero is not really necessary for anything...
Carbs, all of them, as much as you can.
Gotta think on the lines of what did human bodies evolve to process and use. Since sugar sources weren't always available, our bodies make all the glucose we need to live. We don't need sugar or carbs at all. Sure our body's do like them because it's easier for our bodies to process carbs to glucose than to make it from fats and other amino acids. This means our brain signals to eat more of the sugary stuff because its "free" energy.
> Are you suggesting people eat pure meat and lettuce and eggs for 6-8 weeks?
Kinda. It's scary yes, but as your body switches over to eating less carbs, it has to work harder to convert non carbs into things it can use. This levels out your blood sugar levels which in turn makes you less hungry.
> It would be so much more helpful to give some examples of sample diets people could actually follow.
My diet when I'm in the zone so to speak (Keto + intermittent fasting), looks like the following.
First meal around 1pm. Salad - a store bought green mix, might have a little carrot with it, various lettuce (not iceberg or just romaine), I might throw in an egg, a serving of a protein (anything from steak, lunch meat, tuna or salmon), some cheese, maybe something salty (olives or peppers) and some kind of non-sugary dressing (ranch, blue cheese, oil and vinegar), water or unsweet tea.
About 3pm - 5pm is a mixed bag and might be a snack or meal, and depends on hunger levels. This can be some nuts (almonds typically), cheese, lunch meat, protein shake, or just left overs.
7-8pm I'll have dinner. Bunless burgers are common, or just some source of protein and a veggie side. I like chicken, beef, pork, fish. You can make all kinds of stuff with them. Bake it, grill it, fry it (without breading). Meatloaf is good. Lots of good recipe sites, maybe you like tacos, so you can have them with low carb tortillas. Asian dishes work out too, as long as you modify them. Cauliflower can be subbed for rice.
8-9pm I'm likely to have another snack.
9pm-1pm - Water. I'll eat if my blood sugar levels demand it. But on a typical day, I avoid anything that needs to be digested.
I used to consume about 1.5 litres of ice cream every day. I still get the cravings but less and less. Good thing my wife is making fruit salads for me.
Do you know how many calories you're getting from the healthy food? It's actually tough to maintain 2k calories while eating very healthy so your body will get cravings for candy which it knows is calorie dense.
But when I'm not totally focused on eating clean, I will eat as much sugar as I can reach.
Keto helps, but it's anything but automatic. (Especially around the holidays.)
You are doing this completely in reverse. You need to drop sugar & carbs. And eat fatty-meat/low-carb.
Dairy is sugar... I'll have some cottage cheese or other cheeses. And salty junk food (chips, cheese crackers, etc) is almost always high carb.
See keto diet. (I do it and carnivore).
I had a really really bad body odor. Doctors did not help much.
It seems that during one episode in life my gut biome became really bad (heavy deinking).
Years passed and nothing helped me recover from that. Various health issues also depression due to that.
Latest doctor asked me to try FMT.. I was sceptic but at that point thought to myself - hell why not.
And after few months stuff started to fix by itself.
We dont understand yet how much our health depends on a healthy gut biome..
The drug mentioned in these links was just FDA approved this year and some are calling it a legit breakthrough.
At first it looks like only a diabetes drug, but it’s dual use, prescribed for weight loss as well. It’s expensive, but for those with high blood sugar it is sometimes, covered by insurance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/health/obesity-drugs-insu...
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...
Note that I am lifting weighs 3 times per week. Is IF still a good idea...?
I don't feel confident that this is something that I can lift with my GP, as it is not part of their standard set of guidelines (?)
As for IF while lifting? Depends on your goals.
In other words, I assumed that IF is not just good for weight-loss or weight maintenance.
When you look at sources of compiled research such as Examine [1] or meta-analysis [2], the science on IF/TRE isn't yet solid enough to back more than the weight-loss aspect.
So here's my current summary of the evidence:
1. Obviously, everything depends on what your goals are.
2. Since you're lifting weights, I assume your goal is better body composition, which in most cases means losing fat and gaining muscle.
3. The main thing you need to do to lose fat is be on a caloric deficit. In order to lose mostly fat and not much muscle, you should be on the smallest caloric deficit you can reasonably manage, -300 calories per day is perfect. (Less than that and you can't really measure it accurately enough to see that you're actually losing fat.)
4. The other thing you need to do to not lose muscle is eat enough protein. Around 0.8 grams for each pound of body weight is probably good enough, though going up to 1 gram per pound is totally safe and makes sure you aren't getting too little protein.
5. How to achieve a caloric deficit mostly depends on what's easiest/funnest/best for you. Intermittent Fasting is very popular, because it makes it easy for many people to get a caloric deficit.
6. I personally don't love IF because it doesn't fit in with my life schedule, and personally prefer counting calories explicitly cause it's the most accurate and gives me the feeling of the most control, which I like. That said, it's a lot of work and isn't for everyone.
7. IF is not a panacea by any means. If you are doing IF but not actually getting a caloric deficit, it won't help you lose weight.
8. As far as I can tell, there are no known benefits to IF, health-wise. There's a lot of claimed benefits, but nothing actually proven. (And people claim health benefits for a lot of other things as well.) The only thing it's known to be good for is that a lot of people really like it as a way of managing calories/hunger. And there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that it actually helps for that - a lot of people really do find it easier to be on IF when they're dieting. If you're curious, totally worth just giving it a shot.
9. In terms of IF and weightlifting - technically speaking, a lot of studies have shown that it's best to get 4-5 protein feedings in a day, relatively spread out. So it's better to have 4 meals a day of protein than 2. As far as I can tell, this is a real effect, but it's not an enormous one. You're "leaving some gains on the table" if you do IF, but if it helps you reach a desired bodyweight, that's probably worth it. Especially since, after dieting down, you can start a bulking round of having a caloric surplus in order to actually gain weight and muscle.
The CICO cult are a hindrance to society, obviously everyone would count calories if it didn't make them feel like they're dying. The fact is we don't know CO. And we don't know each how each persons appetite is influenced. So talking about CICO is meaningless.
The environment, pesticides, plastics, skinny robot aliens from the future. We just don't know!
Anything but indulgence.