Hacker News Reader

Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, when I lost 80 pounds doing a ketogenic diet my appetite leveled off at exactly 1200 calories per day. I wasn’t counting calories out of anything other than curiosity as I was losing weight anyway. Getting even lower would have been pretty difficult.

View on HN

I did a lot of ketogenic diets when I was younger in an attempt to shed all of the weight that comes with being raised in Appalachia. It was my experience that it was a great kickstart to a weight-loss plan for someone who was at rock-bottom health and needed fast results while not feeling like you're starving.

But I feel like it taught me to be bored with eating, and to establish a more healthy relationship with food. High-fat, mid-protein, low-carb sounds terrific for the first day or two but once you're two weeks in, you're so sick of it all that you'd just as soon drink some water and get back to whatever you're doing.

Well I mean it worked for me because if I eat sugar I end up consuming something on the order of 4000+ calories per day. Something about carbohydrates makes me absolutely ravenous for sugars.

Also if I don’t eat right as I feel hungry I’ll feel as if someone has gut punched me. I get absurdly hungry.

Even artificial sweetener leads to craving carbs in my case.

As for the "gut punch" though, sounds like gastritis or something. Unless you're being metaphorical. For me, water helps when I'm fasting and stomach pains start.

This feeling is so intense for me that I’ve come to believe it’s something to do with the carbs and my gut microbiome changing. There’s a 1-2 week delay between changing diets and having these hunger pains start/stop that makes this feel more credible to me than insulin response changes or diet boredom. But: one should not treat N=1 subjective experiences as having any real value.

My "hunger pain" is tied to the some combination of the gut biome and the blood sugar cycle. It initially insists that I should eat frequently. If I persist through it, then an hour or two later, it settles down.

Likewise, I've noticed an effect develop with artificial sweeteners where I can have small amounts without difficulty, but if I start consuming it several times in a 48 hour span, I get cramps.

In periods where I've become addicted to carbs hunger pain is much stronger, but I've been able to keep it down for many years now. So if you're getting it intensely, your gut is probably still reactivating to its old profile.

I believe restriction in the regular diet is one way of correcting it while staying in a routine. But I have also experimented with fasting, intense exercise, hot/cold contrast in the shower, and breathing exercises, and the common theme to each is to challenge homeostasis in some fashion. Obviously there's always some danger in going too far, but if our norm is total comfort, we can definitely drop some aspect of it from time to time.

> It was my experience that it was a great kickstart to a weight-loss plan [...]

Part of that might be from less water retention early on.

Your body holds on to more water when your diet is full of carbs. As your liver runs down its glycogen stores and you eventually go into ketosis, you lose a lot of water. That's also there the early 'keto flu' comes from, which is a bit like a hangover; plenty of fluids and electrolytes fix you.

Losing water looks great on the scale. On the one hand, it doesn't actually do anything for you healthwise. On the other hand, losing that water ain't bad for your health either (assuming enough fluids and electrolytes), and is a great motivator for the kickstart you described.

Yup.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com