New blog post: https://intensivedietarymanagement....profile-sandra/

an inspiring case. Thanks for the heads up Glenda!

Love the testimonials.

This was an interesting read.

I have been doing 16:8 (ish) most every day for a few weeks now--I tried to do a 24-hour fast, and almost keeled over at 21 hours. Then I ate like crazy for the next two days, and I felt totally off-kilter and awful--my body was most displeased. 16:8, or 17:7, or 18:6, though, works great for me. I don't even snack anymore, really--sometimes I eat three times, sometimes I eat twice, but otherwise any moments of hunger are fleeting and I can just let them pass.

Yesterday, I had done a normal 16:8, and had breakfast around noon--eggs and sausage, a little bit of cheese, and a handful of cherry tomatoes. About 600 calories and 8 net carbs, which should have been enough to hold me for a good while.

But by 3 pm, I was getting hungry again, and even telling myself to just ride it out wasn't working. I kept being hungry, and not just "craving." I had a salad with full-fat dressing, and a handful of almonds. And twenty minutes later, I was so hungry again, and not able to ignore it. So, at 3:30, I ate what I had been planning to have for dinner, a chicken and cream cheese slow-cooker recipe. I ate slowly, I savored, and I easily stopped when I was satisfied, even though the amount I ate was probably more than I had planned on having at dinner. I didn't berate myself for "failing," I didn't measure, I didn't log, I didn't stuff it all into my mouth in a blur, I just listened to my body and ate until it told me I'd had enough.

At 7 pm, I had a bowl of blueberries with a splash of cream. And that was it until I had a cheese stick at 11:30 this morning, without any struggle. And I was down a pound. And today I'm not all that hungry.

I spent some time a few years ago getting very much into "intuitive eating," learning all about when I was really hungry, versus just craving food. And that there are times when your body is telling you it wants energy, and it's better to listen and eat until satisfied than to try to fight it and only end up overeating when you think it's the "right" time to eat.

So when the article linked to above concluded with "Don’t micromanage your brainstem by counting every calorie. You might be surprised at how well your health self-regulates," I thought of this, and thought about LCHF and its better satiating abilities compared to HCLF, and IF to take advantage of that by having a smaller window to eat--and then adding that intuitiveness into it, which granted takes a lot of work and self-awareness, can be a pretty potent combo.

(sorry, didn't mean for this to get long)

Not long at all and very relevant. Being able to manage oneself is one of the major differences in that when hungry, eat. When not hungry, one can skip meal(s) until the hunger returns. Making it difficult, which we all do at times, is ultimately counterproductive.

I see so many people here micromanaging calories, and mis-interpreting Dr. Atkins advice to look at calories as PART OF determining why an extended plateau may have been reached.

They claim that because he breathed the word "calories" that means that calories are inherently part of his plan.

Nope. He did not. His belief seemed to be, and is certainly borne out by most of us who've been following LCHF for more than a month or two, that we naturally lower our caloric intake as we lose weight and the satiating properties of a high fat diet become incorporated into our daily lives.

But, as googily noted, for whatever reasons, there will be days that we're hungrier, and days that we're not so hungry. We should honor that, and assume that our bodies will lead us to eat the proper amounts.

I say that, knowing full well that some of us have a challenge with that, as they spent a long enough time overriding the "I've had enough" signals, that they can't trust that they'll notice them.

But for the rest of us, hunger, as well as satiety, should be honored.

I loved the essay author's term: The super-high death-carb diet

Interesting that he cites that stupid 6 day study as "seeming" to discredit the superiority of low carb.

SO badly designed and executed, and, of course, ignores the most important issue it raises: why, toward the end of the 6 days, were the people on the low carb arm losing more weight?

Is that the one where the "low carb" was still 140g?

Truthfully, I don't remember that it was that high, and I wasn't willing to pay for the access to the whole study.

I just remembered it as a shining example of crap science. :lol:

http://caloriesproper.com/a-brief-e...e-low-carb-war/

Bill at caloriesproper did a write up on it, if this is the study we're talking about...

I love the argument that the fact that the low carb diet wasn't actually low carb, but the low fat diet was very low fat (8 percent) was unavoidable. All they'd have to do is put the baseline carbohydrate and fat at an equal level--which isn't even that unusual a thing, lots of people probably get about 40 percent of their calories from protein, 40 from carbohydrate, and 20 from protein. If that was the only change to the study design, they would have ended up comparing a 14 percent fat diet to a 14 percent carb one.

I think Gary Taubes sort of went out on a limb when he suggested that low calorie diets only worked by decreasing carbohydrate and thus insulin. Dr. Atkins was pretty firm on the idea of an individual carbohydrate threshold, above which people couldn't expect much in the way of spontaneous weight loss.

Holy cow. It WAS 140. SUCH bad science.

BAH.

Playing Jeopardy, if I had to pose the question the study answers, maybe it'd be something like, "if you lowered either carbohydrate or fat in the diet in such a way that the difference between the two to fasting insulin was minimal, would there be a significant difference in weightloss?" The answer being no, not really. We don't really know what was done to postprandial insulin--but in the muddy middle, given the effect of dietary fat combined with substantial amounts of carbohydrate of increasing the amount of insulin needed to handle the given glucose load, there is no guarantee that swapping carbohydrate out for fat will lower postprandial insulin until the decrease in carbohydrate is substantial.

Eat a high carb, low fat meal, and the second meal effect can reduce the insulin needed to handle the next high-carb, low fat meal, and so on. It's clear that a very low carb diet will result in lower insulin levels vs. a high carb meal, fasting, postprandial, and twenty four hour. It's actually not clear that that would be the case in the sort of intervention used in this study.

edited; end of post not ready for prime time.

Not to mention this essay fellow is a neuroscientist, and his new way of eating lowers carbs and raises fat, and he loses weight, and he's not hungry...

but Dr. Atkins, somehow, wasn't right?

Dude! You call yourself a scientist?

Just checking in as RL seems to have been too hectic lately to be online much. I've fallen off the IF wagon and am struggling to get back on as it really helped me I think, but somehow I always seem to want to end up eating. I joined the YMCA about a month ago as I missed swimming so much, and have been going for average of 30-40 minute lap swims 3-4 times a week since then, and in consequence have *gained* 10 pounds :help: !