Is Protein Powder Helpful to Muscle Building for the Average Person?

[Metalcat]

I'm glad you found something that resonates! I do find it helpful to have certain rules or general practices so that I am not always negotiating with myself.

I need to think about the seconds and also how they are interacting with my dinner wine (I don't always have dinner wine, but I do with pasta, which lends itself much better to seconds than something like, for instance, a chicken where I am having one piece of chicken and one bread product). Do I want seconds or do I just want something to go with my wine? Do I need a REALLY tiny wine glass? I think maybe a really tiny wineglass would be helpful. It works for ice cream! I will check the thrift store next time I'm in. They often have oddments of glassware.

I've been embracing the Abby Langer one dessert a day. What can I say, I am a daily sweets eater and don't intend to change... but I wasn't always sticking to one a day. Now if I have already had a treat and I am hungry after dinner, I make toast or something.

Something worth noting is that "hunger" is typically a product of pattern, not of needing food.

I was reading a biopsychology book last year that was talking about how most diet research makes no sense and our entire understanding of hunger is wonky.

Think of it this way: food is really fucking hard to digest, and eating it is hard on the body. Everyone who has any degree of lethargy or indigestion knows this.

If you eat predictably, your body comes to anticipate the arrival of food and prepares your body for it by modulating hormones, churning stomach acid, etc. It's bracing for incoming food. This actually creates the aching we have been taught to interpret as "hunger."

Yes, you need food to feel better when this "hunger" roils up, but that's not because you need calories or energy, it's because your system braced for the food it expected thanks to your patterns of behaviour and if you don't give it food it's like "what the fucking fuck???"

This is why most people get hungry about half an hour before they normally eat and just keep getting steadily more hungry, to the point of feeling like they're starving if they go past their usual eating time.

So people who condition their body to expect evening snacks after dinner do genuinely feel like they need food, but only because they're created the anticipatory response that the body will get food.

This is why people who give up snacking don't get hungry between meals or after dinner, because their bodies have been conditioned not to expect more food shortly after eating a meal.

In short, tummy "hunger" is a conditioned, modifiable response that is totally unrelated to any need for calories. It's a pattern of preparation for food that we train our bodies to perform on schedule.

This is why people who adjust to intermittent fasting stop feeling tummy hunger between meals.

I was eating once a day and constantly shifting my meal times around so that my body literally never anticipated being fed. This meant I never felt hungry while fasting.

I felt INSANELY hungry if I took a bite of something though, because then the prep system revved up and knew food was coming. If I decided to start eating I would have to "prime" the system with something easy to digest, maybe a small piece of bread. Then I would wait 20 minutes while the engines revved and I would feel that tummy hunger fire up and by the time I felt like I was ravenous, I knew my digestive system was ready for a volume of food, because I had conditioned it to expect ALL of my calories for the day in one meal.

If I didn't prime the system and just dumped a day's worth of calories into a cold digestive system, I would pay for it, dearly, for hours.

By eliminating the scheduled eating, I eliminated the anticipatory revving of the digestive engine, and therefore never felt hungry until and unless I was ready to feel hungry.

So "I feel hungry" is best reconceptualized as "my body is expecting food."

Human bodies are hardcore pattern machines. We tend to perceive those patterns as drivers of behaviour because they are automatic, but they're actually the product of habits. Whatever you do normally is what your body will arrange itself around doing.

If you snack at night, your body will rev itself up for food at night. If you have one dessert a day, your body will crave that dessert every day. If you eat 6 small meals a day, your body will prepare frequently for small amounts of food, anything else will feel awful. If you eat one large meal a day, your body will do other shit all day until it gets the signal to prep and then it will prep appropriately for a giant pile of food.

If you eat vegetarian, you might crave legumes and meat might give you indigestion. If you eat primarily meat and potatoes then might crave meat and potatoes and beans might give you indigestion.

If you reverse those diets, you will reverse those reactions. I used to eat huge amounts of meat multiple times a day. Beans made me gassy. Then I ate mostly beans and meat makes my intestines furious if I eat it too often.

Now I'm back to meat because family are cooking for me and after 6 weeks it was fine.

I had a hardcore sweet tooth and craved sugar like a hummingbird. Then I stopped eating sugar and it started making me feel horribly sick. Then I quit alcohol and ate sugar every evening and went back to craving it like crazy and had no problem digesting it.

The body will build a neuro/hormonal modulatory system to adapt to whatever pattern it's exposed to. It will make that pattern feel like the only pattern that works for that body, because in that moment, it is. But those patterns are all eminently modifiable.

[englishteacheralex]

Fascinating, @Metalcat .

Once in a while I'll have something snacky after dinner and it's true; if I do it twice in a row it will be incredibly difficult to not do it moving forward. Which is why I became pretty vigilant several months ago about never eating after dinner. It didn't magically help weight gain, though, because the day time snacking became so frequent.

Not having the snacks I'm used to--I eat them at exactly the same time every day, including over the weekends, and I stopped eating them cold turkey last week Wednesday and didn't eat them over the weekend--is making my digestive system very weird lately. Lots more trips to el bano than usual. I really haven't changed anything else (well, that's not true. I'm also doubling up on veggies at meals); just stopped eating the packaged snacks that I was previously eating at a rate of three or four per day.

[Metalcat]

Fascinating, @Metalcat .

Once in a while I'll have something snacky after dinner and it's true; if I do it twice in a row it will be incredibly difficult to not do it moving forward. Which is why I became pretty vigilant several months ago about never eating after dinner. It didn't magically help weight gain, though, because the day time snacking became so frequent.

Not having the snacks I'm used to--I eat them at exactly the same time every day, including over the weekends, and I stopped eating them cold turkey last week Wednesday and didn't eat them over the weekend--is making my digestive system very weird lately. Lots more trips to el bano than usual. I really haven't changed anything else (well, that's not true. I'm also doubling up on veggies at meals); just stopped eating the packaged snacks that I was previously eating at a rate of three or four per day.

That's awesome.

Generally if you stick with any routine for about 6 weeks, it's what your body will accept as the new normal.

If I don't eat sugar or processed food for 6 weeks, it tasted disgusting to me. But yeah, it only takes 2 days in a row for sugar cravings to come raring back.

I have a system.

I can have however much sugar I want whenever I want it, big I can never have it two days in a row and never more than twice in one week.

As long as I stick to that. I never crave sugar and most desserts are too rich for me and I only want a few bites.

[La Bibliotecaria Feroz]

That's an interesting notion, @Metalcat. My subjective experience of my body is that I would feel like garbage if I tried to cram all my dietary needs into three meals a day and right now I see no reason to stop eating a nutrient-dense afternoon snack, but I will tuck that thought away in case my weight starts going up again in the future. (And as a working parent, definitely not interested in anything that throws off the meal schedule- there's a reason I eat at those times!)

Because I am still nursing the baby when I go to bed (and it's the best she eats all day), it doesn't seem like the right time to toy with skipping the after-dinner eating, but I will mull that over as well.

Basically, I understand how far I am willing to go... and it's not really that far. Weighing less is a "would be nice," not a huge priority, although avoiding future gain (my weight is currently stable) is more important and I would do more to avoid that if it became a concern.

[Metalcat]

That's an interesting notion, @Metalcat. My subjective experience of my body is that I would feel like garbage if I tried to cram all my dietary needs into three meals a day and right now I see no reason to stop eating a nutrient-dense afternoon snack, but I will tuck that thought away in case my weight starts going up again in the future. (And as a working parent, definitely not interested in anything that throws off the meal schedule- there's a reason I eat at those times!)

Because I am still nursing the baby when I go to bed (and it's the best she eats all day), it doesn't seem like the right time to toy with skipping the after-dinner eating, but I will mull that over as well.

Basically, I understand how far I am willing to go... and it's not really that far. Weighing less is a "would be nice," not a huge priority, although avoiding future gain (my weight is currently stable) is more important and I would do more to avoid that if it became a concern.

Yeah, you don't fuck with breastfeeding, you certainly don't change anything major while breastfeeding if you don't have to.

But the whole "intuiting" what your body responds to is kind of my whole point. You can *only* intuit what you've already conditioned your body to adapt to. So of course your body won't like cramming your food into 3 meals if it's used to more. That doesn't mean it can adapt to a totally new routine.

Eating habits are self-fulfilling cycles because of how our society fucked up it's understanding of hunger.

People have been taught to eat according to what their body tells them, except that's ass backwards logic. Your body responds to how you feed it.

My body has had a hissy fit every time I've significantly changed how or what I eat, but then 6 weeks later is totally attuned to the new pattern.

*I* choose how, when, and what my body will prefer to eat, not the other way around.

Yes, there are some genetic and medical factors that make certain people better at digesting certain things. I cannot and will not ever be able to digest raw onions, I have an intolerance to the protein that makes your eyes water, other people have GERD, and so on and so forth. But barring a specific food intolerance, for the most part, your body can and will adapt to whatever eating pattern you choose.

It will protest at first because it's routine is to prepare for what it knows, so it won't be properly prepared if you change things, but most people take this as a sign of "I shouldn't eat that way, it's not what my body responds to, so I won't do it." When in reality, their body would be *perfectly* happy to eat that way if it was given time to adjust to preparing for the new normal.

I'm not at all saying you should change your eating, just the way you conceptualize the sensations your body has in anticipation of and reaction to food.

People have WAY MORE power to modify how their body behaves in relation to food than they're been led to believe.

[Cranky]

When I was pregnant and even more so when I was breastfeeding, I was *hungry* hungry. I would wake up in the night hungry.

[Scandium]

Fill the cup halfway with water and blend. 1 T vanilla protein powder would be no problem at all, I just don't know if it's really worth the $25 the tub would cost at Costco or if it just adds calories.

Which ever way you go, I'd reconsider getting cheapo protein powder from costco. It highly likely have heavy metals in it, above safe FDA levels:
https://www.consumerreports.org/dietary-supplements/heavy-metals-in-protein-supplements/

As usual there's no serious regulation of this in the US. It is possible to figure out which are safe-ish, based in what's sold in canada, and I manage to dig up that old CR test once. It found that "Whey to go" is supposedly ok and I have been buying that for years. More like $40 box though. (I use very little, mainly for my picky eater kid so don't mind the cost. And of course: worth it for less heavy metals..)
https://a.co/d/hq7jzIU

[Metalcat]

When I was pregnant and even more so when I was breastfeeding, I was *hungry* hungry. I would wake up in the night hungry.

Yeah, pregnancy is a different beast.

Even my broken femur is a different beast. The broken bone drives some insane real hunger because my body is trying to build bone. Whenever the body is desperately diverting energy into building: bone, baby, milk for baby, etc, it can and will send out powerful signals to eat.

Even just being sick makes me absolutely ravenous for fatty, salty foods and I can't even stomach my usual vegetarian fare.

Some body processes trump routine. It's the same way your body can come to crave exercise, but various processes can make it unappealing or impossible.

Obviously some biological factors supersede digestive patterns.

[GuitarStv]

I've woken up in the middle of the night hungry.  Even when not pregnant.  :P

[La Bibliotecaria Feroz]

I'm actually less concerned about giving up snacking and more concerned with trying to cram in too many veggies at one sitting 😆. Or it taking impractically long to eat because raw veggies take a while to chew, or getting heartburn! Maybe I could get used to that but I would need a compelling reason to try.

There also certain nutritional boxes that I find it easier to check off in snack form, like having sardines on Triscuits if it's not a salmon-for-dinner kind of week.

[Metalcat]

I'm actually less concerned about giving up snacking and more concerned with trying to cram in too many veggies at one sitting 😆. Or it taking impractically long to eat because raw veggies take a while to chew, or getting heartburn! Maybe I could get used to that but I would need a compelling reason to try.

There also certain nutritional boxes that I find it easier to check off in snack form, like having sardines on Triscuits if it's not a salmon-for-dinner kind of week.

Eat whatever way works for you to make your body feel good and get the nutrients you need. If raw veggies isn't the way to go for you, then there's no need to eat them.

As for it taking too long to eat, that's a feature, not a flaw. For people who tend to overeat at meals and hoover down 2000+ calories in a few minutes, slowing them down and tiring them out is the main benefit of a plateful of raw veggies.

[billygoatjohnson]

I didn't read through everything on here. I've heard enough information from experts recently that we are supposed to be getting 100 grams of protein a day. I think USDA is only like 50. And it should be animal protein because otherwise it's not necessarily bio available. It's hard getting 100 grams unless you are eating a ton of meat. Once you think about it most of our calories used to come from meat/fats... so it makes sense. So I try to get 75-100 total everyday by using whey protein and collagen to get me up there. I don't do the fruit smoothies anymore because I found they were pretty bad on my teeth. I just with 8 ounces of whole milk or coconut milk, add an avocado, peanut butter powder, and the protein mix. Best of luck

[Scandium]

I didn't read through everything on here. I've heard enough information from experts recently that we are supposed to be getting 100 grams of protein a day. I think USDA is only like 50. And it should be animal protein because otherwise it's not necessarily bio available. It's hard getting 100 grams unless you are eating a ton of meat. Once you think about it most of our calories used to come from meat/fats... so it makes sense. So I try to get 75-100 total everyday by using whey protein and collagen to get me up there. I don't do the fruit smoothies anymore because I found they were pretty bad on my teeth. I just with 8 ounces of whole milk or coconut milk, add an avocado, peanut butter powder, and the protein mix. Best of luck

Source for that? (that's not someone selling protein powder...)

100 g per day is a ton, unless you're an athlete doing strength 6+ times a week. And most people (in the west) already get more protein than they need, not too little. Usually because they eat too much meat (and not enough plants). If you haven't noticed we have an issue with people being too big, not too small. And protein will make you "fat" if you don't use it.

[GuitarStv]

I didn't read through everything on here. I've heard enough information from experts recently that we are supposed to be getting 100 grams of protein a day. I think USDA is only like 50. And it should be animal protein because otherwise it's not necessarily bio available. It's hard getting 100 grams unless you are eating a ton of meat. Once you think about it most of our calories used to come from meat/fats... so it makes sense. So I try to get 75-100 total everyday by using whey protein and collagen to get me up there. I don't do the fruit smoothies anymore because I found they were pretty bad on my teeth. I just with 8 ounces of whole milk or coconut milk, add an avocado, peanut butter powder, and the protein mix. Best of luck

The amount of protein that you should be getting isn't absolute, it's a function of your activity level (are you doing extremely physical activity that's regularly causing your muscles damage that needs to be repaired?) and your size.  If you're relatively sedentary, then around a gram of protein per kg each day is perfectly fine.  If you're doing heavy athletics, then just over two grams per kg is sufficient.

As far as bioavailability, animal protein is complete and more easily absorbed by the body.  But vegetable protein is almost always much healthier to eat . . . coming with greater levels of macronutrients and fiber.  Personally, I think that a mix of the two is likely best but I've heard persuasive arguments on both sides.

[billygoatjohnson]

I didn't read through everything on here. I've heard enough information from experts recently that we are supposed to be getting 100 grams of protein a day. I think USDA is only like 50. And it should be animal protein because otherwise it's not necessarily bio available. It's hard getting 100 grams unless you are eating a ton of meat. Once you think about it most of our calories used to come from meat/fats... so it makes sense. So I try to get 75-100 total everyday by using whey protein and collagen to get me up there. I don't do the fruit smoothies anymore because I found they were pretty bad on my teeth. I just with 8 ounces of whole milk or coconut milk, add an avocado, peanut butter powder, and the protein mix. Best of luck

The amount of protein that you should be getting isn't absolute, it's a function of your activity level (are you doing extremely physical activity that's regularly causing your muscles damage that needs to be repaired?) and your size.  If you're relatively sedentary, then around a gram of protein per kg each day is perfectly fine.  If you're doing heavy athletics, then just over two grams per kg is sufficient.

As far as bioavailability, animal protein is complete and more easily absorbed by the body.  But vegetable protein is almost always much healthier to eat . . . coming with greater levels of macronutrients and fiber.  Personally, I think that a mix of the two is likely best but I've heard persuasive arguments on both sides.

Of course you need more based upon activity level. But even sedatary lifestyle seemed I was losing hair at 50 grams... now with collagen and more protein and from animals my hair stopped thinning. Nails are super healthy too. I'm just saying what's worked for me from years of trying different diets.

I don't think plant proteins do much good. And the pea protein stuff like that is actually bad for you. We've evolved from eating game, not hundreds of peas or beans or grains multiple times a day year round. Do what works for you. I have no health problems, and kicked covids butt without vax, never get sick. No health insurance. Gonna keep eating lots of wild game when I have it, farm eggs, and whey protein, collagen. Etc

[mspym]

Your body can only absorb so much protein per meal (30-40gms) and the rest is shed through sweat and urine. (Fun fact: The higher average protein consumption by men results in higher protein levels in sweat which also increases sweat discolouration on sheets/shirts etc)

I thought some of the concepts in the Whole Body Reset book, which was developed by the AARP, were really interesting - one of the reasons you lose muscle/gain fat as you age is decreased ability to use smaller amounts of protein so you need to hit a  protein target per meal instead of across a day (25-30gm for women, 30-35gm for men) along with trying to get a minimum of 5gms of fiber per meal for a total of 21gms a day for women and 30gms of fiber for men. Every thing else they recommend is basic common sense but the protein target per meal instead of basically getting all your protein at dinner was useful.

[Valley of Plenty]

There are three things you need in order to build muscle. Calorie surplus, sufficient protein intake, and breaking down your muscles through exercise.

If your goal is to build muscle quickly, you should ideally be getting about 1 gram of protein in your diet for every pound of lean body weight that you have. So say you weigh 200lbs, and 20% of that is body fat. Your lean mass would be 160lbs, so you would then want to be getting 160 grams of protein a day. You can still build muscle with lower protein intake, just expect it to be slower.

You can use protein powder to help you reach your protein intake goals, but ultimately the important thing is that you actually get enough protein. The benefit of protein shakes is they go down easier than eating a meal, so you can use them to inject more protein into your diet without having to eat more. Meat-based proteins are generally better than plant based ones in that our bodies are able to absorb more of the nutrients. Lean meats are your friend if you want to maximize protein intake while keeping your calorie intake reasonably low (assuming your goal is to build muscle and not just bulk up in general), so things like chicken, fish, and lean beef (I mostly use the former due to cost savings).

Of course, all of this is contingent on actually working out as well. You can eat as much protein as you like but if you aren't regularly pushing your muscles to the point of fatigue, you aren't going to build muscle. I'd recommend doing some research online to find a good full body workout program designed for building strength. Getting a good workout in 3-5 times a week, combined with a proper diet consisting of a sufficient balance of calories and protein will almost certainly get you the results you are looking for.

So to answer your original question, yes, protein powder can be helpful in building muscle, but there's much more to the process than that. You can't just drink a protein shake once a day and expect to become Mr. Olympia

[sonofsven]

I was talking to my SO about this thread - she is very knowledgeable on the subject, she recommended the book The Glucose Revolution.
She schooled me on the need for protein in the morning, not glucose.

[slappy]

I didn't read through everything on here. I've heard enough information from experts recently that we are supposed to be getting 100 grams of protein a day. I think USDA is only like 50. And it should be animal protein because otherwise it's not necessarily bio available. It's hard getting 100 grams unless you are eating a ton of meat. Once you think about it most of our calories used to come from meat/fats... so it makes sense. So I try to get 75-100 total everyday by using whey protein and collagen to get me up there. I don't do the fruit smoothies anymore because I found they were pretty bad on my teeth. I just with 8 ounces of whole milk or coconut milk, add an avocado, peanut butter powder, and the protein mix. Best of luck

Source for that? (that's not someone selling protein powder...)

100 g per day is a ton, unless you're an athlete doing strength 6+ times a week. And most people (in the west) already get more protein than they need, not too little. Usually because they eat too much meat (and not enough plants). If you haven't noticed we have an issue with people being too big, not too small. And protein will make you "fat" if you don't use it.

This is the exact opposite of everything I've understood to be true when it comes to health/fitness. No, I don't have a source at my fingertips at this moment, although I suppose I could google one. Out of curiosity, where did you get your info that most people eat too much protein or that 100 g is too much? 100 g is the bare minimum that I would personally feel comfortable with, but of course I work out on a very regular basis. I usually get over 130 g.

[Paper Chaser]

Protein needs will vary by age, gender, and activity level. Men tend to need more than women. People 40 and older tend to need a bit more than younger people in order to maintain muscle mass. The more active you are, the higher your needs. 100g per day might be overkill, and it could easily be too little as well.

I think this article is a decent summary:

https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/are-you-getting-too-much-protein

[mm1970]

I didn't read through everything on here. I've heard enough information from experts recently that we are supposed to be getting 100 grams of protein a day. I think USDA is only like 50. And it should be animal protein because otherwise it's not necessarily bio available. It's hard getting 100 grams unless you are eating a ton of meat. Once you think about it most of our calories used to come from meat/fats... so it makes sense. So I try to get 75-100 total everyday by using whey protein and collagen to get me up there. I don't do the fruit smoothies anymore because I found they were pretty bad on my teeth. I just with 8 ounces of whole milk or coconut milk, add an avocado, peanut butter powder, and the protein mix. Best of luck

Source for that? (that's not someone selling protein powder...)

100 g per day is a ton, unless you're an athlete doing strength 6+ times a week. And most people (in the west) already get more protein than they need, not too little. Usually because they eat too much meat (and not enough plants). If you haven't noticed we have an issue with people being too big, not too small. And protein will make you "fat" if you don't use it.

This is the exact opposite of everything I've understood to be true when it comes to health/fitness. No, I don't have a source at my fingertips at this moment, although I suppose I could google one. Out of curiosity, where did you get your info that most people eat too much protein or that 100 g is too much? 100 g is the bare minimum that I would personally feel comfortable with, but of course I work out on a very regular basis. I usually get over 130 g.

I read this type of information for YEARS in health and diet books, many of which were written by vegan authors.  However, more recently reading books written by dietitians point out that the 50g number was the minimum to prevent you from, well, getting sick.  The guidelines were not a maximum, they were written when people were not getting enough food.

https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/are-you-getting-too-much-protein

I'm glad you found something that resonates! I do find it helpful to have certain rules or general practices so that I am not always negotiating with myself.

I need to think about the seconds and also how they are interacting with my dinner wine (I don't always have dinner wine, but I do with pasta, which lends itself much better to seconds than something like, for instance, a chicken where I am having one piece of chicken and one bread product). Do I want seconds or do I just want something to go with my wine? Do I need a REALLY tiny wine glass? I think maybe a really tiny wineglass would be helpful. It works for ice cream! I will check the thrift store next time I'm in. They often have oddments of glassware.

I've been embracing the Abby Langer one dessert a day. What can I say, I am a daily sweets eater and don't intend to change... but I wasn't always sticking to one a day. Now if I have already had a treat and I am hungry after dinner, I make toast or something.

Something worth noting is that "hunger" is typically a product of pattern, not of needing food.

I was reading a biopsychology book last year that was talking about how most diet research makes no sense and our entire understanding of hunger is wonky.

Think of it this way: food is really fucking hard to digest, and eating it is hard on the body. Everyone who has any degree of lethargy or indigestion knows this.

If you eat predictably, your body comes to anticipate the arrival of food and prepares your body for it by modulating hormones, churning stomach acid, etc. It's bracing for incoming food. This actually creates the aching we have been taught to interpret as "hunger."

Yes, you need food to feel better when this "hunger" roils up, but that's not because you need calories or energy, it's because your system braced for the food it expected thanks to your patterns of behaviour and if you don't give it food it's like "what the fucking fuck???"

This is why most people get hungry about half an hour before they normally eat and just keep getting steadily more hungry, to the point of feeling like they're starving if they go past their usual eating time.

So people who condition their body to expect evening snacks after dinner do genuinely feel like they need food, but only because they're created the anticipatory response that the body will get food.

This is why people who give up snacking don't get hungry between meals or after dinner, because their bodies have been conditioned not to expect more food shortly after eating a meal.

In short, tummy "hunger" is a conditioned, modifiable response that is totally unrelated to any need for calories. It's a pattern of preparation for food that we train our bodies to perform on schedule.

This is why people who adjust to intermittent fasting stop feeling tummy hunger between meals.

I was eating once a day and constantly shifting my meal times around so that my body literally never anticipated being fed. This meant I never felt hungry while fasting.

I felt INSANELY hungry if I took a bite of something though, because then the prep system revved up and knew food was coming. If I decided to start eating I would have to "prime" the system with something easy to digest, maybe a small piece of bread. Then I would wait 20 minutes while the engines revved and I would feel that tummy hunger fire up and by the time I felt like I was ravenous, I knew my digestive system was ready for a volume of food, because I had conditioned it to expect ALL of my calories for the day in one meal.

If I didn't prime the system and just dumped a day's worth of calories into a cold digestive system, I would pay for it, dearly, for hours.

By eliminating the scheduled eating, I eliminated the anticipatory revving of the digestive engine, and therefore never felt hungry until and unless I was ready to feel hungry.

So "I feel hungry" is best reconceptualized as "my body is expecting food."

Human bodies are hardcore pattern machines. We tend to perceive those patterns as drivers of behaviour because they are automatic, but they're actually the product of habits. Whatever you do normally is what your body will arrange itself around doing.

If you snack at night, your body will rev itself up for food at night. If you have one dessert a day, your body will crave that dessert every day. If you eat 6 small meals a day, your body will prepare frequently for small amounts of food, anything else will feel awful. If you eat one large meal a day, your body will do other shit all day until it gets the signal to prep and then it will prep appropriately for a giant pile of food.

If you eat vegetarian, you might crave legumes and meat might give you indigestion. If you eat primarily meat and potatoes then might crave meat and potatoes and beans might give you indigestion.

If you reverse those diets, you will reverse those reactions. I used to eat huge amounts of meat multiple times a day. Beans made me gassy. Then I ate mostly beans and meat makes my intestines furious if I eat it too often.

Now I'm back to meat because family are cooking for me and after 6 weeks it was fine.

I had a hardcore sweet tooth and craved sugar like a hummingbird. Then I stopped eating sugar and it started making me feel horribly sick. Then I quit alcohol and ate sugar every evening and went back to craving it like crazy and had no problem digesting it.

The body will build a neuro/hormonal modulatory system to adapt to whatever pattern it's exposed to. It will make that pattern feel like the only pattern that works for that body, because in that moment, it is. But those patterns are all eminently modifiable.

Not gonna lie, this kind of blew my mind a bit.  When I see @Metalcat writing something, I'm either "all in" or I specifically don't read it because my brain needs to be ready to absorb the information.

With the combination of the group that I'm in and the Abby Langer book, I've been thinking about the recommendations to eat dessert or a treat every day.  The Langer book basically says that if you allow yourself a small treat and work it into  your day, you aren't going to binge because it's not off limits.  The group recommends a treat every day, and PLANNING it ahead of time.  Thus, the "smart" part of your brain plans it (vs when you are in the moment), and you get to anticipate it every day.  I've noticed over the last 2 months that I don't plan a treat every day.  I don't feel that I need it.  I've also learned, like others, that if I eat dessert after dinner 2x in a row, then I start to crave it.  I don't even want to plan dessert in the middle of the day sometimes.  Also, my "treats" (which now aren't every day), aren't always dessert.  I move around the times - sometimes breakfast, lunch, snack.  Sometimes my treat is a slice of pizza, or it may be popcorn.

This way, I can eat whatever kind of food I want.  Just not all of it, all of the time.  It helps that most of my meals that I cook myself are delicious, so I'm often getting great food.

The listening to your tummy part is also fascinating.  The group I'm in recommends choosing your frequency of meals (3 meals a day, 3 + snack, or ... whatever) and sticking to it.  So yes, your body gets hungry because it knows it's time to eat.  The "listening" part comes in DURING the meal.  So, eat slowly, savor the food, and stop when you are satisfied.  The coach even goes so far as to say that yes, if you eat a huge meal and you just aren't hungry for the next, you don't HAVE to eat it.  But she recommends not skipping a regular eating time.  So I eat a snack in the afternoon (around 3 or 4), and if I ate a big lunch, I still eat my snack.  It just may be only 1/3 the size of my normal snack.

Lots to ponder.

[Metalcat]

I didn't read through everything on here. I've heard enough information from experts recently that we are supposed to be getting 100 grams of protein a day. I think USDA is only like 50. And it should be animal protein because otherwise it's not necessarily bio available. It's hard getting 100 grams unless you are eating a ton of meat. Once you think about it most of our calories used to come from meat/fats... so it makes sense. So I try to get 75-100 total everyday by using whey protein and collagen to get me up there. I don't do the fruit smoothies anymore because I found they were pretty bad on my teeth. I just with 8 ounces of whole milk or coconut milk, add an avocado, peanut butter powder, and the protein mix. Best of luck

Source for that? (that's not someone selling protein powder...)

100 g per day is a ton, unless you're an athlete doing strength 6+ times a week. And most people (in the west) already get more protein than they need, not too little. Usually because they eat too much meat (and not enough plants). If you haven't noticed we have an issue with people being too big, not too small. And protein will make you "fat" if you don't use it.

This is the exact opposite of everything I've understood to be true when it comes to health/fitness. No, I don't have a source at my fingertips at this moment, although I suppose I could google one. Out of curiosity, where did you get your info that most people eat too much protein or that 100 g is too much? 100 g is the bare minimum that I would personally feel comfortable with, but of course I work out on a very regular basis. I usually get over 130 g.

I read this type of information for YEARS in health and diet books, many of which were written by vegan authors.  However, more recently reading books written by dietitians point out that the 50g number was the minimum to prevent you from, well, getting sick.  The guidelines were not a maximum, they were written when people were not getting enough food.

https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/are-you-getting-too-much-protein

I'm glad you found something that resonates! I do find it helpful to have certain rules or general practices so that I am not always negotiating with myself.

I need to think about the seconds and also how they are interacting with my dinner wine (I don't always have dinner wine, but I do with pasta, which lends itself much better to seconds than something like, for instance, a chicken where I am having one piece of chicken and one bread product). Do I want seconds or do I just want something to go with my wine? Do I need a REALLY tiny wine glass? I think maybe a really tiny wineglass would be helpful. It works for ice cream! I will check the thrift store next time I'm in. They often have oddments of glassware.

I've been embracing the Abby Langer one dessert a day. What can I say, I am a daily sweets eater and don't intend to change... but I wasn't always sticking to one a day. Now if I have already had a treat and I am hungry after dinner, I make toast or something.

Something worth noting is that "hunger" is typically a product of pattern, not of needing food.

I was reading a biopsychology book last year that was talking about how most diet research makes no sense and our entire understanding of hunger is wonky.

Think of it this way: food is really fucking hard to digest, and eating it is hard on the body. Everyone who has any degree of lethargy or indigestion knows this.

If you eat predictably, your body comes to anticipate the arrival of food and prepares your body for it by modulating hormones, churning stomach acid, etc. It's bracing for incoming food. This actually creates the aching we have been taught to interpret as "hunger."

Yes, you need food to feel better when this "hunger" roils up, but that's not because you need calories or energy, it's because your system braced for the food it expected thanks to your patterns of behaviour and if you don't give it food it's like "what the fucking fuck???"

This is why most people get hungry about half an hour before they normally eat and just keep getting steadily more hungry, to the point of feeling like they're starving if they go past their usual eating time.

So people who condition their body to expect evening snacks after dinner do genuinely feel like they need food, but only because they're created the anticipatory response that the body will get food.

This is why people who give up snacking don't get hungry between meals or after dinner, because their bodies have been conditioned not to expect more food shortly after eating a meal.

In short, tummy "hunger" is a conditioned, modifiable response that is totally unrelated to any need for calories. It's a pattern of preparation for food that we train our bodies to perform on schedule.

This is why people who adjust to intermittent fasting stop feeling tummy hunger between meals.

I was eating once a day and constantly shifting my meal times around so that my body literally never anticipated being fed. This meant I never felt hungry while fasting.

I felt INSANELY hungry if I took a bite of something though, because then the prep system revved up and knew food was coming. If I decided to start eating I would have to "prime" the system with something easy to digest, maybe a small piece of bread. Then I would wait 20 minutes while the engines revved and I would feel that tummy hunger fire up and by the time I felt like I was ravenous, I knew my digestive system was ready for a volume of food, because I had conditioned it to expect ALL of my calories for the day in one meal.

If I didn't prime the system and just dumped a day's worth of calories into a cold digestive system, I would pay for it, dearly, for hours.

By eliminating the scheduled eating, I eliminated the anticipatory revving of the digestive engine, and therefore never felt hungry until and unless I was ready to feel hungry.

So "I feel hungry" is best reconceptualized as "my body is expecting food."

Human bodies are hardcore pattern machines. We tend to perceive those patterns as drivers of behaviour because they are automatic, but they're actually the product of habits. Whatever you do normally is what your body will arrange itself around doing.

If you snack at night, your body will rev itself up for food at night. If you have one dessert a day, your body will crave that dessert every day. If you eat 6 small meals a day, your body will prepare frequently for small amounts of food, anything else will feel awful. If you eat one large meal a day, your body will do other shit all day until it gets the signal to prep and then it will prep appropriately for a giant pile of food.

If you eat vegetarian, you might crave legumes and meat might give you indigestion. If you eat primarily meat and potatoes then might crave meat and potatoes and beans might give you indigestion.

If you reverse those diets, you will reverse those reactions. I used to eat huge amounts of meat multiple times a day. Beans made me gassy. Then I ate mostly beans and meat makes my intestines furious if I eat it too often.

Now I'm back to meat because family are cooking for me and after 6 weeks it was fine.

I had a hardcore sweet tooth and craved sugar like a hummingbird. Then I stopped eating sugar and it started making me feel horribly sick. Then I quit alcohol and ate sugar every evening and went back to craving it like crazy and had no problem digesting it.

The body will build a neuro/hormonal modulatory system to adapt to whatever pattern it's exposed to. It will make that pattern feel like the only pattern that works for that body, because in that moment, it is. But those patterns are all eminently modifiable.

Not gonna lie, this kind of blew my mind a bit.  When I see @Metalcat writing something, I'm either "all in" or I specifically don't read it because my brain needs to be ready to absorb the information.

With the combination of the group that I'm in and the Abby Langer book, I've been thinking about the recommendations to eat dessert or a treat every day.  The Langer book basically says that if you allow yourself a small treat and work it into  your day, you aren't going to binge because it's not off limits.  The group recommends a treat every day, and PLANNING it ahead of time.  Thus, the "smart" part of your brain plans it (vs when you are in the moment), and you get to anticipate it every day.  I've noticed over the last 2 months that I don't plan a treat every day.  I don't feel that I need it.  I've also learned, like others, that if I eat dessert after dinner 2x in a row, then I start to crave it.  I don't even want to plan dessert in the middle of the day sometimes.  Also, my "treats" (which now aren't every day), aren't always dessert.  I move around the times - sometimes breakfast, lunch, snack.  Sometimes my treat is a slice of pizza, or it may be popcorn.

This way, I can eat whatever kind of food I want.  Just not all of it, all of the time.  It helps that most of my meals that I cook myself are delicious, so I'm often getting great food.

The listening to your tummy part is also fascinating.  The group I'm in recommends choosing your frequency of meals (3 meals a day, 3 + snack, or ... whatever) and sticking to it.  So yes, your body gets hungry because it knows it's time to eat.  The "listening" part comes in DURING the meal.  So, eat slowly, savor the food, and stop when you are satisfied.  The coach even goes so far as to say that yes, if you eat a huge meal and you just aren't hungry for the next, you don't HAVE to eat it.  But she recommends not skipping a regular eating time.  So I eat a snack in the afternoon (around 3 or 4), and if I ate a big lunch, I still eat my snack.  It just may be only 1/3 the size of my normal snack.

Lots to ponder.

And if that works for you, then cool.

Generally these ways of eating that "experts" and "gurus" recommend are strategies for overcoming unhealthy habits and the fucking horror show that is the Standard American Diet.

No one needs to give up snacking or any given meal if it's not causing them problems. I ate like clockwork, down to the minute for years and that's when I lost all of my weight from obese to lean. There's nothing wrong with giving the body a pattern to follow if it's working for you to eat healthy and maintain your weight.

My point is not to tell people how to eat, it's to understand that so many of the signals our bodies give us are modifiable.

So if something is working for you, awesome. But if it *isn't* working, don't let the specifics of various "gurus" and "experts" complicate things for you.

I've helped A LOT of people lose and keep off weight over the years, and the number one issue I see is that they've been inundated by so much guru methods that it all seems so complicated when it isn't.

So should you eat on a schedule and plan for a single dessert every day? Sure, if that's a strategy that works best for you to be happy and healthy. But that doesn't make it a necessary or superior way to eat.

FTR, I lost from obese to very lean while eating in a strict schedule. I currently prefer intermittent fasting with a whacky schedule because I no longer live a scheduled life and I just like it more. Neither is "better," they're just strategies that will variably work for different people at different stages of their lives.

[tygertygertyger]

I love all this. I've weaned myself off sweets over the last couple of months, which is excellent. This past weekend I ate a brownie... it was fine, but unnecessary. Then someone dropped off rice pudding for me (I have not eaten it yet), but those two things happening in row set my brain to thinking about chocolate and dessert. Happily I have been able to stand outside those thoughts and recognize them for what they are - just tumbling thoughts, not a need.

This notion about hunger reminded me of my trip to India many years ago. I was a guest of a friend, who was getting married there. Her family made sure we had a ton of food, all delicious, need-to-roll-myself-home-filling. I remember perhaps a week into the trip, I had somehow missed a meal and experienced a pang of hunger. I mentioned this pang to a friend, as it was a striking, unusual feeling. She asked if I wanted to get food and I said NO! I just want to experience this feeling for a while.

[GuitarStv]

We've evolved from eating game, not hundreds of peas or beans or grains multiple times a day year round.

This logic has never made much sense to me as something to aspire to.

We evolved to live to about fifty, to only wear clothes cobbled together from things we killed, to murder any human we saw who wasn't a member of our close tribe, to completely deplete the resources around us until we start to starve.  None of that sounds too appealing to me!  We didn't really evolve to have glasses, or physiotherapy, or antibiotics, or dental work, or fire to cook food.  But those things all make our lives better!

Even assuming that what we evolved to do is somehow automatically better (which seems like a pretty big ask) . . . we were never really big brave hunters.  Hunting is hard and often you go without.  Humans have always been opportunistic scavengers.  So any tubers that you can dig up and eat, insects, berries, scavenged half-rotting meat - this is what we are evolved to be eating.  Folks who tend to espouse the 'we didn't evolve to eat this' always seem to turn up their nose at stuff we did evolve to eat like cricket larva though.  Weird that.  :P

[Scandium]

We've evolved from eating game, not hundreds of peas or beans or grains multiple times a day year round.

This logic has never made much sense to me as something to aspire to.

We evolved to live to about fifty, to only wear clothes cobbled together from things we killed, to murder any human we saw who wasn't a member of our close tribe, to completely deplete the resources around us until we start to starve.  None of that sounds too appealing to me!  We didn't really evolve to have glasses, or physiotherapy, or antibiotics, or dental work, or fire to cook food.  But those things all make our lives better!

Even assuming that what we evolved to do is somehow automatically better (which seems like a pretty big ask) . . . we were never really big brave hunters.  Hunting is hard and often you go without.  Humans have always been opportunistic scavengers.  So any tubers that you can dig up and eat, insects, berries, scavenged half-rotting meat - this is what we are evolved to be eating.  Folks who tend to espouse the 'we didn't evolve to eat this' always seem to turn up their nose at stuff we did evolve to eat like cricket larva though.  Weird that.  :P

"appeal to nature" is a always a sure winner for people selling products with dubious qualities otherwise. It makes intuitive sense, unless you think about it for 2 min. This tracks with the "meat fad" people, who seems to forget that humans and other primates eat (ate..) large amount of fruits and vegetables. Check out any group of chimps! 

As you say all evolution care about is humans living till puberty, have offspring, then living long enough so those offspring survive. After that we can get every disease imaginable, and in some sense dying shortly after could be beneficial so we don't use up resources from the group. And there is no requirement that we're comfortable through this process! If the ailments don't kill you or prevent you from having offspring; nobody cares!

[mm1970]

So if something is working for you, awesome. But if it *isn't* working, don't let the specifics of various "gurus" and "experts" complicate things for you.

I think that's what's blowing my mind.  I always adjust things in a way that works for me.   Your point that if I ate dessert every night then I'd start to expect it is spot on.  I didn't actually realize the reason behind it, but I'd already decided that I shouldn't be eating dessert every night.

Both these "gurus" have their suggestions based on experience and data, but also note that a lot of this, you still have to figure out what works for you.  Do you like creamer in your coffee?  Yes.  Is it a must have?  Yes.  Then you may have to make adjustments elsewhere.

Also this:

So "I feel hungry" is best reconceptualized as "my body is expecting food."

is totally a revelation

[Telecaster]

We evolved to live to about fifty, to only wear clothes cobbled together from things we killed, to murder any human we saw who wasn't a member of our close tribe, to completely deplete the resources around us until we start to starve.  None of that sounds too appealing to me!  We didn't really evolve to have glasses, or physiotherapy, or antibiotics, or dental work, or fire to cook food.  But those things all make our lives better!

Even assuming that what we evolved to do is somehow automatically better (which seems like a pretty big ask) . . . we were never really big brave hunters.  Hunting is hard and often you go without.  Humans have always been opportunistic scavengers.  So any tubers that you can dig up and eat, insects, berries, scavenged half-rotting meat - this is what we are evolved to be eating.  Folks who tend to espouse the 'we didn't evolve to eat this' always seem to turn up their nose at stuff we did evolve to eat like cricket larva though.  Weird that.  :P

A hugely informative book about this topic The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Daniel Leiberman, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard.   The first part of the book is how modern humans evolved and why our bodies work they way they do.   He points out that the environment our bodies evolved in is different than the one we now live in in modern society.   This lead to what he calls mismatch diseases.   That is, diseases that are common in modern society, but rare or nonexistent in hunter gatherer populations (as well as can be determined, given the obvious limitations).   These disease include or may include conditions like:   Cavities and dental crowding, hypertension, cirrhosis, myopia, MS, type 2 diabetes, flat feet plantar fasciitis, and many more.   

Many of these we've learned to cope with.   For example, brushing and flossing and going to a hygienist twice a year for cleaning will help prevent cavities.   If not, a dentist can fill cavities or reconstruct teeth.   Or we could eat a low starch low sugar diet like our ancestors and barely have any cavities at all.   Linosipril will help with hypertension.   So will exercise and avoiding alcohol.   


https://www.amazon.com/Story-Human-Body-Evolution-Disease-ebook/dp/B00C8S9VCK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

[GuitarStv]

We evolved to live to about fifty, to only wear clothes cobbled together from things we killed, to murder any human we saw who wasn't a member of our close tribe, to completely deplete the resources around us until we start to starve.  None of that sounds too appealing to me!  We didn't really evolve to have glasses, or physiotherapy, or antibiotics, or dental work, or fire to cook food.  But those things all make our lives better!

Even assuming that what we evolved to do is somehow automatically better (which seems like a pretty big ask) . . . we were never really big brave hunters.  Hunting is hard and often you go without.  Humans have always been opportunistic scavengers.  So any tubers that you can dig up and eat, insects, berries, scavenged half-rotting meat - this is what we are evolved to be eating.  Folks who tend to espouse the 'we didn't evolve to eat this' always seem to turn up their nose at stuff we did evolve to eat like cricket larva though.  Weird that.  :P

A hugely informative book about this topic The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Daniel Leiberman, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard.   The first part of the book is how modern humans evolved and why our bodies work they way they do.   He points out that the environment our bodies evolved in is different than the one we now live in in modern society.   This lead to what he calls mismatch diseases.   That is, diseases that are common in modern society, but rare or nonexistent in hunter gatherer populations (as well as can be determined, given the obvious limitations).   These disease include or may include conditions like:   Cavities and dental crowding, hypertension, cirrhosis, myopia, MS, type 2 diabetes, flat feet plantar fasciitis, and many more.   

Many of these we've learned to cope with.   For example, brushing and flossing and going to a hygienist twice a year for cleaning will help prevent cavities.   If not, a dentist can fill cavities or reconstruct teeth.   Or we could eat a low starch low sugar diet like our ancestors and barely have any cavities at all.   Linosipril will help with hypertension.   So will exercise and avoiding alcohol.   


https://www.amazon.com/Story-Human-Body-Evolution-Disease-ebook/dp/B00C8S9VCK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

There's also a theory that a lot of recreational alcohol and drug use stems from the fact that people are designed to live in very small, tight knit communities never seeing strangers . . . and most of us are now in gigantic communities surrounded by strangers every day.  I think that was one of Yuval's ideas from Sapiens.

[Kris]

We evolved to live to about fifty, to only wear clothes cobbled together from things we killed, to murder any human we saw who wasn't a member of our close tribe, to completely deplete the resources around us until we start to starve.  None of that sounds too appealing to me!  We didn't really evolve to have glasses, or physiotherapy, or antibiotics, or dental work, or fire to cook food.  But those things all make our lives better!

Even assuming that what we evolved to do is somehow automatically better (which seems like a pretty big ask) . . . we were never really big brave hunters.  Hunting is hard and often you go without.  Humans have always been opportunistic scavengers.  So any tubers that you can dig up and eat, insects, berries, scavenged half-rotting meat - this is what we are evolved to be eating.  Folks who tend to espouse the 'we didn't evolve to eat this' always seem to turn up their nose at stuff we did evolve to eat like cricket larva though.  Weird that.  :P

A hugely informative book about this topic The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Daniel Leiberman, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard.   The first part of the book is how modern humans evolved and why our bodies work they way they do.   He points out that the environment our bodies evolved in is different than the one we now live in in modern society.   This lead to what he calls mismatch diseases.   That is, diseases that are common in modern society, but rare or nonexistent in hunter gatherer populations (as well as can be determined, given the obvious limitations).   These disease include or may include conditions like:   Cavities and dental crowding, hypertension, cirrhosis, myopia, MS, type 2 diabetes, flat feet plantar fasciitis, and many more.   

Many of these we've learned to cope with.   For example, brushing and flossing and going to a hygienist twice a year for cleaning will help prevent cavities.   If not, a dentist can fill cavities or reconstruct teeth.   Or we could eat a low starch low sugar diet like our ancestors and barely have any cavities at all.   Linosipril will help with hypertension.   So will exercise and avoiding alcohol.   


https://www.amazon.com/Story-Human-Body-Evolution-Disease-ebook/dp/B00C8S9VCK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Whoa. Myopia is a mismatch disease? I can’t fathom how. I think I need to read this book.

[Metalcat]

We evolved to live to about fifty, to only wear clothes cobbled together from things we killed, to murder any human we saw who wasn't a member of our close tribe, to completely deplete the resources around us until we start to starve.  None of that sounds too appealing to me!  We didn't really evolve to have glasses, or physiotherapy, or antibiotics, or dental work, or fire to cook food.  But those things all make our lives better!

Even assuming that what we evolved to do is somehow automatically better (which seems like a pretty big ask) . . . we were never really big brave hunters.  Hunting is hard and often you go without.  Humans have always been opportunistic scavengers.  So any tubers that you can dig up and eat, insects, berries, scavenged half-rotting meat - this is what we are evolved to be eating.  Folks who tend to espouse the 'we didn't evolve to eat this' always seem to turn up their nose at stuff we did evolve to eat like cricket larva though.  Weird that.  :P

A hugely informative book about this topic The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Daniel Leiberman, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard.   The first part of the book is how modern humans evolved and why our bodies work they way they do.   He points out that the environment our bodies evolved in is different than the one we now live in in modern society.   This lead to what he calls mismatch diseases.   That is, diseases that are common in modern society, but rare or nonexistent in hunter gatherer populations (as well as can be determined, given the obvious limitations).   These disease include or may include conditions like:   Cavities and dental crowding, hypertension, cirrhosis, myopia, MS, type 2 diabetes, flat feet plantar fasciitis, and many more.   

Many of these we've learned to cope with.   For example, brushing and flossing and going to a hygienist twice a year for cleaning will help prevent cavities.   If not, a dentist can fill cavities or reconstruct teeth.   Or we could eat a low starch low sugar diet like our ancestors and barely have any cavities at all.   Linosipril will help with hypertension.   So will exercise and avoiding alcohol.   


https://www.amazon.com/Story-Human-Body-Evolution-Disease-ebook/dp/B00C8S9VCK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Whoa. Myopia is a mismatch disease? I can’t fathom how. I think I need to read this book.

Simple explanation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6077798/

Basically, if you develop always looking at things close to you, you develop vision for looking at things close to you. Hence myopia. If kids grew up outdoors primarily focusing on the distance they would develop vision for distance.

Indoor kids end up needing glasses for far vision.

So the old school stereotype of nerdy indoor kids who read a lot and need glasses is actually kinda true.

[Kris]

We evolved to live to about fifty, to only wear clothes cobbled together from things we killed, to murder any human we saw who wasn't a member of our close tribe, to completely deplete the resources around us until we start to starve.  None of that sounds too appealing to me!  We didn't really evolve to have glasses, or physiotherapy, or antibiotics, or dental work, or fire to cook food.  But those things all make our lives better!

Even assuming that what we evolved to do is somehow automatically better (which seems like a pretty big ask) . . . we were never really big brave hunters.  Hunting is hard and often you go without.  Humans have always been opportunistic scavengers.  So any tubers that you can dig up and eat, insects, berries, scavenged half-rotting meat - this is what we are evolved to be eating.  Folks who tend to espouse the 'we didn't evolve to eat this' always seem to turn up their nose at stuff we did evolve to eat like cricket larva though.  Weird that.  :P

A hugely informative book about this topic The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Daniel Leiberman, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard.   The first part of the book is how modern humans evolved and why our bodies work they way they do.   He points out that the environment our bodies evolved in is different than the one we now live in in modern society.   This lead to what he calls mismatch diseases.   That is, diseases that are common in modern society, but rare or nonexistent in hunter gatherer populations (as well as can be determined, given the obvious limitations).   These disease include or may include conditions like:   Cavities and dental crowding, hypertension, cirrhosis, myopia, MS, type 2 diabetes, flat feet plantar fasciitis, and many more.   

Many of these we've learned to cope with.   For example, brushing and flossing and going to a hygienist twice a year for cleaning will help prevent cavities.   If not, a dentist can fill cavities or reconstruct teeth.   Or we could eat a low starch low sugar diet like our ancestors and barely have any cavities at all.   Linosipril will help with hypertension.   So will exercise and avoiding alcohol.   


https://www.amazon.com/Story-Human-Body-Evolution-Disease-ebook/dp/B00C8S9VCK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Whoa. Myopia is a mismatch disease? I can’t fathom how. I think I need to read this book.

Simple explanation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6077798/

Basically, if you develop always looking at things close to you, you develop vision for looking at things close to you. Hence myopia. If kids grew up outdoors primarily focusing on the distance they would develop vision for distance.

Indoor kids end up needing glasses for far vision.

So the old school stereotype of nerdy indoor kids who read a lot and need glasses is actually kinda true.

Ah, of course. And you know what? I should have figured that out on my own. When I read your comment, I realized I was confusing my myopia with my astigmatism, the latter being caused by a messed-up curvature in my eyes. I couldn’t figure out how that could be a mismatch disease. But of course, it isn’t. Duh.

[Metalcat]

Ah, of course. And you know what? I should have figured that out on my own. When I read your comment, I realized I was confusing my myopia with my astigmatism, the latter being caused by a messed-up curvature in my eyes. I couldn’t figure out how that could be a mismatch disease. But of course, it isn’t. Duh.

I gave myself astigmatism studying. I had myopia with no astigmatism for years, then got Lasik and had perfect vision in my early 20s. Then started a doctorate in my late 20s and studied often for 16+ hours straight on a tiny netbook and within 4 years had astigmatism.

The muscles of the eyes can squish them and fuck up the curve.

There has been a rise in astigmatism in children due to the pandemic, so it's definitely a mismatch disease as well.

Basically, eye shape is very responsive to what you do with your eyes.

[Kris]

Ah, of course. And you know what? I should have figured that out on my own. When I read your comment, I realized I was confusing my myopia with my astigmatism, the latter being caused by a messed-up curvature in my eyes. I couldn’t figure out how that could be a mismatch disease. But of course, it isn’t. Duh.

I gave myself astigmatism studying. I had myopia with no astigmatism for years, then got Lasik and had perfect vision in my early 20s. Then started a doctorate in my late 20s and studied often for 16+ hours straight on a tiny netbook and within 4 years had astigmatism.

The muscles of the eyes can squish them and fuck up the curve.

There has been a rise in astigmatism in children due to the pandemic, so it's definitely a mismatch disease as well.

Basically, eye shape is very responsive to what you do with your eyes.

That… is fucking weird.

[Raenia]

I'd heard before about 'hunger' being the stomach's expectation of food before, but I haven't really figured out what 'real hunger' signals look like. Anyone have insight on how to tell if you're actually hungry, vs just training your body to expect a meal?

Right now I'm pregnant, so eating whatever whenever (within the bounds of what's in the house, so pretty healthy), but normally, hunger is kind of an alien idea to me. I think my lack of hunger signals fed into lack of a schedule, which fed back into lack of hunger signals. For instance, on weekdays when I'm working from home, I might have breakfast anytime from 7-8:30, on the weekend might not be until 10:00, and when I'm in the office I often skip breakfast entirely and have lunch at 11:30. In college I had to set reminders on my phone to go to lunch, or I'd just skip it. Even now (pre-pregnancy, at least), I have days when I get to 4:00 and wonder why I have a headache and feel grumpy, and realize I haven't eaten anything all day.

If I had to wait until raw broccoli or a plain boiled egg sounded good, I'd be passing out on the floor on the regular. So how do you tell when you actually need to eat?

[GuitarStv]

I feel weak, cranky, and will usually get dizzy/lightheaded when I'm really hungry.  It's different from feeling like you need to eat or craving food - I don't feel like eating is all that necessary when I'm really hungry.

[Metalcat]

I feel weak, cranky, and will usually get dizzy/lightheaded when I'm really hungry.  It's different from feeling like you need to eat or craving food - I don't feel like eating is all that necessary when I'm really hungry.

Yep, real hunger is exactly like he's describing. It feels like general unwellness and for some people food isn't actually appealing when it happens.

Those are the times when friends and family are sometimes like "I think you need to eat something."

I'm getting a lot of that due to the broken leg. It's really annoying. DH will give me a stern look and hand me a snack because I'm being a bit of a prick.

Basically, if you've ever been around a hungry toddler, you know what hunger looks like.

[Metalcat]

Simple explanation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6077798/

Basically, if you develop always looking at things close to you, you develop vision for looking at things close to you. Hence myopia. If kids grew up outdoors primarily focusing on the distance they would develop vision for distance.

Indoor kids end up needing glasses for far vision.

So the old school stereotype of nerdy indoor kids who read a lot and need glasses is actually kinda true.

I was like... um but I grew up mostly outdoors. What gives?!

Then I read the part about being tall... oops! My bad! (though my dad was a foot taller than my mom and she had way worse vision! and grew up on a horse farm... huh!)

It's not the only cause. Genetics play a role too.

[dividendman]

I feel weak, cranky, and will usually get dizzy/lightheaded when I'm really hungry.  It's different from feeling like you need to eat or craving food - I don't feel like eating is all that necessary when I'm really hungry.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever gotten to that phase. I've done several 5-day fasts and journaled them. The first two days were the "hungriest" and then I wasn't really hungry. I felt more energetic the last day than the rest, but I had to break the fast due pre-planned social reasons. I wonder how long I could go before I got to true hunger. I'm also obese so I'm sure that's a factor.

[economista]

Simple explanation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6077798/

Basically, if you develop always looking at things close to you, you develop vision for looking at things close to you. Hence myopia. If kids grew up outdoors primarily focusing on the distance they would develop vision for distance.

Indoor kids end up needing glasses for far vision.

So the old school stereotype of nerdy indoor kids who read a lot and need glasses is actually kinda true.

I was like... um but I grew up mostly outdoors. What gives?!

Then I read the part about being tall... oops! My bad! (though my dad was a foot taller than my mom and she had way worse vision! and grew up on a horse farm... huh!)

Not to totally derail this thread and make it about eyes, but adding another anecdote. My 3 yo daughter has a rare neurological condition (complete agenesis of the corpus collosum) along with septo-optic dysplasia. She also has severe degenerative myopia (maybe caused by these things, maybe totally unrelated) and in an effort to try and preserve her vision for as long as possible we aim for a minimum of 2 hours per day outside. The special ophthalmologist she sees was really insistent that spending as much time outside as possible would have a huge impact on many kids with myopia, both preventing it altogether or preventing it from getting worse.

[Raenia]

I feel weak, cranky, and will usually get dizzy/lightheaded when I'm really hungry.  It's different from feeling like you need to eat or craving food - I don't feel like eating is all that necessary when I'm really hungry.

Yep, real hunger is exactly like he's describing. It feels like general unwellness and for some people food isn't actually appealing when it happens.

Those are the times when friends and family are sometimes like "I think you need to eat something."

I'm getting a lot of that due to the broken leg. It's really annoying. DH will give me a stern look and hand me a snack because I'm being a bit of a prick.

Basically, if you've ever been around a hungry toddler, you know what hunger looks like.

Waiting to eat until I feel terrible feels like a bad solution, though? I mean, that's what got me ten years of being borderline underweight, constantly cold, lightheaded every time I stood up fast, unable to keep on any reasonable amount of muscle, and just generally not great health.

I felt much healthier after gaining 10 lbs over COVID, thanks to a spate of baking and general bored snacking. Which I'd generally consider unhealthy, but it was working for me.

For reference, I'm 5'7", currently 135lbs but my baseline is more like 120-125, and that's with regularly scheduled not-actually-hungry meals. If I waited to eat until I was really hungry, cranky, lightheaded, headachy, I'd waste away.

[Metalcat]

I feel weak, cranky, and will usually get dizzy/lightheaded when I'm really hungry.  It's different from feeling like you need to eat or craving food - I don't feel like eating is all that necessary when I'm really hungry.

Yep, real hunger is exactly like he's describing. It feels like general unwellness and for some people food isn't actually appealing when it happens.

Those are the times when friends and family are sometimes like "I think you need to eat something."

I'm getting a lot of that due to the broken leg. It's really annoying. DH will give me a stern look and hand me a snack because I'm being a bit of a prick.

Basically, if you've ever been around a hungry toddler, you know what hunger looks like.

Waiting to eat until I feel terrible feels like a bad solution, though? I mean, that's what got me ten years of being borderline underweight, constantly cold, lightheaded every time I stood up fast, unable to keep on any reasonable amount of muscle, and just generally not great health.

I felt much healthier after gaining 10 lbs over COVID, thanks to a spate of baking and general bored snacking. Which I'd generally consider unhealthy, but it was working for me.

For reference, I'm 5'7", currently 135lbs but my baseline is more like 120-125, and that's with regularly scheduled not-actually-hungry meals. If I waited to eat until I was really hungry, cranky, lightheaded, headachy, I'd waste away.

I never said to wait until you feel awful to eat.

I'm just distinguishing between stomach sensations and a real need to eat.

Real hunger is something that happens to me randomly these days because my leg is broken. It kind of comes out of nowhere. I don't have to be fasted for hours for it to happen.

In fact, the more I regularly do fasting, the less this happens to me because my body can easily switch to ketosis and just use fat stores.

Needing food happens when your body isn't great at switching to body fat for fuel. By the time I was doing only one meal a day and occasionally skipping whole days, I was literally never having real hunger unless I was sick or hormonal.

It happened far more often when I was eating multiple times a day because my body wasn't easily switching back and forth between metabolizing food and metabolizing fat.

In fact, I worried I had diabetes in the past back when I was doing the whole 5-6 small meals a day thing because my blood sugar levels were so whacky. It turns out my body does extremely well with fasting and ketosis and has limits as to how well it can adapt to frequent eating.

So no, in no way am I advocating that people wait until they feel sick to eat. That would be insane.

I'm saying that that is a clear signal that you should eat, regardless of when the last time you ate is.

For me, it happens most often about 2 hours after a meal these days. No idea why. I would guess it has something to do with the metabolic healing activity of the leg. Maybe it's chewing through some nutrients it needs for healing and screaming "MORE!"

Who knows. All I know is that when I feel like crap like that, no matter how many calories I've had that day, I eat because I don't want to fuck with my body right now.

[GuitarStv]

I feel weak, cranky, and will usually get dizzy/lightheaded when I'm really hungry.  It's different from feeling like you need to eat or craving food - I don't feel like eating is all that necessary when I'm really hungry.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever gotten to that phase. I've done several 5-day fasts and journaled them. The first two days were the "hungriest" and then I wasn't really hungry. I felt more energetic the last day than the rest, but I had to break the fast due pre-planned social reasons. I wonder how long I could go before I got to true hunger. I'm also obese so I'm sure that's a factor.

I ran into it several times when I was learning to cycle long distances.  Eventually as you're going you'll just run out of fuel . . . and then things get dark really fast.  You can't go another inch, and want to lay down on the ground and cry.  It's a trip.  :P

[Raenia]

So I guess I'm back to the question of, how does one know when it's actually time to eat? We can't trust 'hunger pains' because those are trainable, and we don't want to wait until we're really hungry because that's not healthy either, so how do you know?

How does one tell the difference between bored eating, habit eating, and yes-I-should-actually-eat-now, without letting it get to I-will-pass-out-if-I-don't-eat-soon?

[mm1970]

We evolved to live to about fifty, to only wear clothes cobbled together from things we killed, to murder any human we saw who wasn't a member of our close tribe, to completely deplete the resources around us until we start to starve.  None of that sounds too appealing to me!  We didn't really evolve to have glasses, or physiotherapy, or antibiotics, or dental work, or fire to cook food.  But those things all make our lives better!

Even assuming that what we evolved to do is somehow automatically better (which seems like a pretty big ask) . . . we were never really big brave hunters.  Hunting is hard and often you go without.  Humans have always been opportunistic scavengers.  So any tubers that you can dig up and eat, insects, berries, scavenged half-rotting meat - this is what we are evolved to be eating.  Folks who tend to espouse the 'we didn't evolve to eat this' always seem to turn up their nose at stuff we did evolve to eat like cricket larva though.  Weird that.  :P

A hugely informative book about this topic The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Daniel Leiberman, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard.   The first part of the book is how modern humans evolved and why our bodies work they way they do.   He points out that the environment our bodies evolved in is different than the one we now live in in modern society.   This lead to what he calls mismatch diseases.   That is, diseases that are common in modern society, but rare or nonexistent in hunter gatherer populations (as well as can be determined, given the obvious limitations).   These disease include or may include conditions like:   Cavities and dental crowding, hypertension, cirrhosis, myopia, MS, type 2 diabetes, flat feet plantar fasciitis, and many more.   

Many of these we've learned to cope with.   For example, brushing and flossing and going to a hygienist twice a year for cleaning will help prevent cavities.   If not, a dentist can fill cavities or reconstruct teeth.   Or we could eat a low starch low sugar diet like our ancestors and barely have any cavities at all.   Linosipril will help with hypertension.   So will exercise and avoiding alcohol.   


https://www.amazon.com/Story-Human-Body-Evolution-Disease-ebook/dp/B00C8S9VCK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Whoa. Myopia is a mismatch disease? I can’t fathom how. I think I need to read this book.

Simple explanation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6077798/

Basically, if you develop always looking at things close to you, you develop vision for looking at things close to you. Hence myopia. If kids grew up outdoors primarily focusing on the distance they would develop vision for distance.

Indoor kids end up needing glasses for far vision.

So the old school stereotype of nerdy indoor kids who read a lot and need glasses is actually kinda true.

This is crazy.  Both my husband and I were nerdy kids who read a lot, and needed glasses at age 10.  (However, growing up in the 70s and 80s, we also spent a fair bit of time outside).

OTOH, my kids are definitely indoor kids who play a lot of video games.  They spend time outside at school and such, but they aren't sporty kids.  They are 17 and 10, no glasses.  We still can't quite figure them out.

[GuitarStv]

We evolved to live to about fifty, to only wear clothes cobbled together from things we killed, to murder any human we saw who wasn't a member of our close tribe, to completely deplete the resources around us until we start to starve.  None of that sounds too appealing to me!  We didn't really evolve to have glasses, or physiotherapy, or antibiotics, or dental work, or fire to cook food.  But those things all make our lives better!

Even assuming that what we evolved to do is somehow automatically better (which seems like a pretty big ask) . . . we were never really big brave hunters.  Hunting is hard and often you go without.  Humans have always been opportunistic scavengers.  So any tubers that you can dig up and eat, insects, berries, scavenged half-rotting meat - this is what we are evolved to be eating.  Folks who tend to espouse the 'we didn't evolve to eat this' always seem to turn up their nose at stuff we did evolve to eat like cricket larva though.  Weird that.  :P

A hugely informative book about this topic The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Daniel Leiberman, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard.   The first part of the book is how modern humans evolved and why our bodies work they way they do.   He points out that the environment our bodies evolved in is different than the one we now live in in modern society.   This lead to what he calls mismatch diseases.   That is, diseases that are common in modern society, but rare or nonexistent in hunter gatherer populations (as well as can be determined, given the obvious limitations).   These disease include or may include conditions like:   Cavities and dental crowding, hypertension, cirrhosis, myopia, MS, type 2 diabetes, flat feet plantar fasciitis, and many more.   

Many of these we've learned to cope with.   For example, brushing and flossing and going to a hygienist twice a year for cleaning will help prevent cavities.   If not, a dentist can fill cavities or reconstruct teeth.   Or we could eat a low starch low sugar diet like our ancestors and barely have any cavities at all.   Linosipril will help with hypertension.   So will exercise and avoiding alcohol.   


https://www.amazon.com/Story-Human-Body-Evolution-Disease-ebook/dp/B00C8S9VCK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Whoa. Myopia is a mismatch disease? I can’t fathom how. I think I need to read this book.

Simple explanation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6077798/

Basically, if you develop always looking at things close to you, you develop vision for looking at things close to you. Hence myopia. If kids grew up outdoors primarily focusing on the distance they would develop vision for distance.

Indoor kids end up needing glasses for far vision.

So the old school stereotype of nerdy indoor kids who read a lot and need glasses is actually kinda true.

This is crazy.  Both my husband and I were nerdy kids who read a lot, and needed glasses at age 10.  (However, growing up in the 70s and 80s, we also spent a fair bit of time outside).

OTOH, my kids are definitely indoor kids who play a lot of video games.  They spend time outside at school and such, but they aren't sporty kids.  They are 17 and 10, no glasses.  We still can't quite figure them out.

I needed glasses for myopia starting at two years old.  I had zero screen time, and was not reading for hours a day at this point in my life.  :P  Figure there's got to be a genetic component as well.

[Metalcat]

So I guess I'm back to the question of, how does one know when it's actually time to eat? We can't trust 'hunger pains' because those are trainable, and we don't want to wait until we're really hungry because that's not healthy either, so how do you know?

How does one tell the difference between bored eating, habit eating, and yes-I-should-actually-eat-now, without letting it get to I-will-pass-out-if-I-don't-eat-soon?

That's the entire point I've been trying to make.

There is no time to eat. Eat whenever you want and your body will adjust to it. The whole point is that you don't need to depend on signals from your body to know when to eat.

You only NEED to eat when something is wrong and your body has been over taxed and can't just switch over to fat metabolism easily, like if you've over trained, had a baby, broken a femur, had a hormonal surge, whatever.

You could eat every 2 hours or you could eat every 2 days and you will probably adapt.

Some people have bodies that don't adapt well to certain extremes. Some people never adjust to alternate day eating and some people like me never adjust to 6 small meals a day.

It's trial and error.

But my whole point is that you can pretty much decide when and how and what you want to eat and once you transition, that is what will feel 'right' to your body.

For some people a cold turkey transition if best for some things for other a slow transition is best. For me, changing food types is best done cold Turkey. If I want to stop craving sugar, it's best to just stop for 6 weeks.

For fasting, it was best to transition sloooowly. In fact, I never intended to do one meal a day or alternate day fasting, that sounded insane to me, but as I transitioned it just got easier and easier and more comfortable. So that's what I did.

It isn't now because of the leg so I don't do that.

The range of ways and times that you can eat is ASTRONOMICAL, so your best bet is to let go of any expectation that your body should dictate when you eat and just start adjusting to how you *want* to be eating and see what happens.

You're confused and not getting the answer that you want because you're asking the wrong question based on nonsense beliefs about "hunger" that our society basically made up with no real evidence other than how we have all misinterpreted body sensations.

So in summary: if something is wrong and your body tells you you have to eat because you feel awful, you should eat no matter what, regardless of when you last ate or how many calories you've had. I prefer hard boiled eggs when this happens so I keep them on hand.

Otherwise, eat whenever the fuck you want, your body will adjust.

Word of caution though: limited research suggests that if you skip more than one day of food that your metabolism could drop. We have no good research in this for people who are well adopted to fasting though. But it's a pretty good rule of thumb, don't skip more than one day of eating and make sure you eat plenty the next day.

Short of that, most bodies can adapt to literally any eating schedule.

[Raenia]

So I guess I'm back to the question of, how does one know when it's actually time to eat? We can't trust 'hunger pains' because those are trainable, and we don't want to wait until we're really hungry because that's not healthy either, so how do you know?

How does one tell the difference between bored eating, habit eating, and yes-I-should-actually-eat-now, without letting it get to I-will-pass-out-if-I-don't-eat-soon?

That's the entire point I've been trying to make.

There is no time to eat. Eat whenever you want and your body will adjust to it. The whole point is that you don't need to depend on signals from your body to know when to eat.

You only NEED to eat when something is wrong and your body has been over taxed and can't just switch over to fat metabolism easily, like if you've over trained, had a baby, broken a femur, had a hormonal surge, whatever.

You could eat every 2 hours or you could eat every 2 days and you will probably adapt.

Some people have bodies that don't adapt well to certain extremes. Some people never adjust to alternate day eating and some people like me never adjust to 6 small meals a day.

It's trial and error.

But my whole point is that you can pretty much decide when and how and what you want to eat and once you transition, that is what will feel 'right' to your body.

For some people a cold turkey transition if best for some things for other a slow transition is best. For me, changing food types is best done cold Turkey. If I want to stop craving sugar, it's best to just stop for 6 weeks.

For fasting, it was best to transition sloooowly. In fact, I never intended to do one meal a day or alternate day fasting, that sounded insane to me, but as I transitioned it just got easier and easier and more comfortable. So that's what I did.

It isn't now because of the leg so I don't do that.

The range of ways and times that you can eat is ASTRONOMICAL, so your best bet is to let go of any expectation that your body should dictate when you eat and just start adjusting to how you *want* to be eating and see what happens.

You're confused and not getting the answer that you want because you're asking the wrong question based on nonsense beliefs about "hunger" that our society basically made up with no real evidence other than how we have all misinterpreted body sensations.

So in summary: if something is wrong and your body tells you you have to eat because you feel awful, you should eat no matter what, regardless of when you last ate or how many calories you've had. I prefer hard boiled eggs when this happens so I keep them on hand.

Otherwise, eat whenever the fuck you want, your body will adjust.

Word of caution though: limited research suggests that if you skip more than one day of food that your metabolism could drop. We have no good research in this for people who are well adopted to fasting though. But it's a pretty good rule of thumb, don't skip more than one day of eating and make sure you eat plenty the next day.

Short of that, most bodies can adapt to literally any eating schedule.

Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised at a disappointing answer. If the only way to figure out healthy eating is trial and error, no wonder so many people are unhealthy eaters!

Eating whatever I want and waiting for my body to adjust has proven to be a great way to wind up underweight, because I frequently just don't want to eat. How I "want" to be eating is generally... not. If I eat whatever the fuck I want, I will be regularly keeling over at the end of the day.

It's a good thing I love to cook, or I'd probably be extremely underweight and unhealthy. But I do it because I like to cook, not because I want to eat. Even when I managed to gain weight, it was because I was cooking and baking more for fun, not because I wanted to eat. But I can't keep up those habits - I don't have time now that I'm back at work, for one, and DH would turn into a balloon if I did.

Even when I was setting alarms to go to meals at the same time, I never really adjusted the way you've described. I never started getting "hunger pain" signals, and it never got any easier to remember to go eat. Maybe I'm just fucked up.

[GuitarStv]

Just weigh yourself every morning right after you get up and record it in a little journal.  Then adjust your eating habits based upon whether you want that number to go up or down.

[Metalcat]

So I guess I'm back to the question of, how does one know when it's actually time to eat? We can't trust 'hunger pains' because those are trainable, and we don't want to wait until we're really hungry because that's not healthy either, so how do you know?

How does one tell the difference between bored eating, habit eating, and yes-I-should-actually-eat-now, without letting it get to I-will-pass-out-if-I-don't-eat-soon?

That's the entire point I've been trying to make.

There is no time to eat. Eat whenever you want and your body will adjust to it. The whole point is that you don't need to depend on signals from your body to know when to eat.

You only NEED to eat when something is wrong and your body has been over taxed and can't just switch over to fat metabolism easily, like if you've over trained, had a baby, broken a femur, had a hormonal surge, whatever.

You could eat every 2 hours or you could eat every 2 days and you will probably adapt.

Some people have bodies that don't adapt well to certain extremes. Some people never adjust to alternate day eating and some people like me never adjust to 6 small meals a day.

It's trial and error.

But my whole point is that you can pretty much decide when and how and what you want to eat and once you transition, that is what will feel 'right' to your body.

For some people a cold turkey transition if best for some things for other a slow transition is best. For me, changing food types is best done cold Turkey. If I want to stop craving sugar, it's best to just stop for 6 weeks.

For fasting, it was best to transition sloooowly. In fact, I never intended to do one meal a day or alternate day fasting, that sounded insane to me, but as I transitioned it just got easier and easier and more comfortable. So that's what I did.

It isn't now because of the leg so I don't do that.

The range of ways and times that you can eat is ASTRONOMICAL, so your best bet is to let go of any expectation that your body should dictate when you eat and just start adjusting to how you *want* to be eating and see what happens.

You're confused and not getting the answer that you want because you're asking the wrong question based on nonsense beliefs about "hunger" that our society basically made up with no real evidence other than how we have all misinterpreted body sensations.

So in summary: if something is wrong and your body tells you you have to eat because you feel awful, you should eat no matter what, regardless of when you last ate or how many calories you've had. I prefer hard boiled eggs when this happens so I keep them on hand.

Otherwise, eat whenever the fuck you want, your body will adjust.

Word of caution though: limited research suggests that if you skip more than one day of food that your metabolism could drop. We have no good research in this for people who are well adopted to fasting though. But it's a pretty good rule of thumb, don't skip more than one day of eating and make sure you eat plenty the next day.

Short of that, most bodies can adapt to literally any eating schedule.

Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised at a disappointing answer. If the only way to figure out healthy eating is trial and error, no wonder so many people are unhealthy eaters!

Eating whatever I want and waiting for my body to adjust has proven to be a great way to wind up underweight, because I frequently just don't want to eat. How I "want" to be eating is generally... not. If I eat whatever the fuck I want, I will be regularly keeling over at the end of the day.

It's a good thing I love to cook, or I'd probably be extremely underweight and unhealthy. But I do it because I like to cook, not because I want to eat. Even when I managed to gain weight, it was because I was cooking and baking more for fun, not because I wanted to eat. But I can't keep up those habits - I don't have time now that I'm back at work, for one, and DH would turn into a balloon if I did.

Even when I was setting alarms to go to meals at the same time, I never really adjusted the way you've described. I never started getting "hunger pain" signals, and it never got any easier to remember to go eat. Maybe I'm just fucked up.

To be fair, when I say to eat however you want, I mean to determine what nutrients you want to eat and how many calories you want to eat and eating those.

I'm actually saying the opposite of what you are saying. I'm not saying not to eat if you don't feel like it, I'm saying if you know what nutrients you need and know what calories you need, then eat those in whatever order, timeline, whatever works for you.

If you are losing weight then I assume that you want to be eating more. You don't have to wait for your body to tell you to eat more in order to eat.

When I'm fasting I'm never hungry, I eat because I have a goal of how much and what nutrients to eat that day, and I do that whenever it is convenient for me.

Do not mistake my use of the word "wanting" for "craving."

You could substitute the word "intend" if that makes more sense to you.

ETA: I'm not a diet "guru" I can't tell anyone how to eat. I can only tell you that most of what people believe about eating is fabricated bullshit from drawing insane conclusions based on extremely limited science.

Note that the only science I'm referencing is that it is known that digestion is hard on the human body and the human body proactively prepares for the arrival of food and creates sensations that we decided to define as a "need" to eat when it's actually a "preparedness" to eat.

If you wrap your mind around that, you will see that almost every single diet claim that exists makes no fucking sense. But you can also see why so many different diets seem to "work" for so many people. Because you can adapt to just about anything, and just about anything that's recommended is better than the Standard American Diet.

Beyond that, I know fuck all other than to share anecdotally what has worked well for me and the people I've helped lose weight and keep it off.

[Raenia]

Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised at a disappointing answer. If the only way to figure out healthy eating is trial and error, no wonder so many people are unhealthy eaters!

Eating whatever I want and waiting for my body to adjust has proven to be a great way to wind up underweight, because I frequently just don't want to eat. How I "want" to be eating is generally... not. If I eat whatever the fuck I want, I will be regularly keeling over at the end of the day.

It's a good thing I love to cook, or I'd probably be extremely underweight and unhealthy. But I do it because I like to cook, not because I want to eat. Even when I managed to gain weight, it was because I was cooking and baking more for fun, not because I wanted to eat. But I can't keep up those habits - I don't have time now that I'm back at work, for one, and DH would turn into a balloon if I did.

Even when I was setting alarms to go to meals at the same time, I never really adjusted the way you've described. I never started getting "hunger pain" signals, and it never got any easier to remember to go eat. Maybe I'm just fucked up.

To be fair, when I say to eat however you want, I mean to determine what nutrients you want to eat and how many calories you want to eat and eating those.

I'm actually saying the opposite of what you are saying. I'm not saying not to eat if you don't feel like it, I'm saying if you know what nutrients you need and know what calories you need, then eat those in whatever order, timeline, whatever works for you.

If you are losing weight then I assume that you want to be eating more. You don't have to wait for your body to tell you to eat more in order to eat.

When I'm fasting I'm never hungry, I eat because I have a goal of how much and what nutrients to eat that day, and I do that whenever it is convenient for me.

Do not mistake my use of the word "wanting" for "craving."

You could substitute the word "intend" if that makes more sense to you.

Fair enough on the different meanings of "want."

But I don't know what nutrients and calories I need, and there seems to be no easy way to determine that. Just look at the arguments about how much protein is enough or too much! Nevermind trying to make the same meal plans meet a second person's needs, with a totally different body!

Maybe it's as simple as adding an extra snack to the day, whether I want it or not, or making more effort to bake a dessert once a week. Even if DH will eat 3/4 of it...

Of course, all of this is academic until I'm not pregnant anymore, so I'll have plenty of time to noodle on it. Currently I'm making myself eat whenever the idea of food pops into my head, because I absolutely cannot let myself lose weight right now.