I've not had time to look around too far on here yet, so not sure if this next bit would be better elsewhere, but one thing I'm really interested to know is how people feel after they eat for the first time in a day, any day? I don't know why this is, but I have found if I eat early in the day, contrary to what a lot of the diet plans tell you, I'll eat more across the day, than if I waited until I felt ready for my first meal of the day. I thought I was the odd one, something not quite right with me, but now I'm thinking I've been trying to cram breakfast in, when my body didn't need it, and once I'd eaten, it's almost as if my body has turned on eating mode and doesn't know when to stop. I feel that if my brain could be scanned, they'd see something happen after I eat, with my brain saying keep going. Whereas, with the fasting days, I've found it remarkably easy to not start. Its as if my brain/body has non eating mode and eating mode. If I don't start to eat, I don't find it that hard to hold off that starting point, but if I have started to eat, it's so much harder to not keep thinking about food for the rest of the day. So traditional diet plans are torture for me, spending months obsessing about food but having to restrict it.
From an anthropological perspective I sort of see it as when we were hunter gatherers and there was sometimes no food, its best our bodies don't crave it too soon. But when there's food available, and we've seen it, and tasted it and established its safe and good, it's time to eat as much as possible right now as thousands of years we did't know when we'd next have access to food. After a certain time, we do need food, so then we will genuinely crave it (half way through day 2 for me, if I force myself to ignore the peckish type of hunger, and distraction is best then), at which point I suppose we would have gone out to look for our next meal. I don't know if this happened, but I imagine humans got fatter through the late summer, when there was more food available, and lost weight through the winter. But craving food too much in lean times might have caused too much energy to be spend looking for food that wasn't there, so best to let us bulk up when food was plenty, and allow us to lose the fat when food was sparce. Of course I'm not suggesting we yoyo like that, but in my head it makes sense that this might be how we evolved.
I've no idea if this makes sense to anyone else, but I'd be interested to hear if anyone else experiences this feeling that once you've had your first meal of the day, especially an early one, its as if your brain is telling you to just go for it and keep eating. Maybe its what I'm eating, rather than when, but even porridge or very seedy wholemeal bread (I make my own, its seriously seedy so as about low GI as bread can be) does this to me. I can't work out if it's the way I inadvertently trained my body and brain over 2 decades of dieting, or if it's really the way my body wants to work.
Of course I wouldn't suggest allowing weight to deliberately pile on in winter, as we have more than enough food all year round, but if I can stick to this eating plan for many years, I'm thinking that I'll be able to forgive myself the few kilos I gain in December when any diet is exceptionally hard. This first year of this diet, it's now only a few days into February and I am all ready back to the same weight as late November. And it's been no harder than before December arrived. That's never happened before.
Hmm, this drifted a bit away from my initial question, does eating kick start something in you that makes you want to eat more? But I suppose it's all related.
This is all one huge experiment, but I'll be delighted if this turns out to be an annual cycle. 10/11 months of good weight maintenance, and one month when I can relax a little when my body is saying - its dark and cold outside, eat, followed by about a month of weight correction just by getting back to what I was doing all year round until late November or so.
Sorry, I promise to not always write such long posts
From an anthropological perspective I sort of see it as when we were hunter gatherers and there was sometimes no food, its best our bodies don't crave it too soon. But when there's food available, and we've seen it, and tasted it and established its safe and good, it's time to eat as much as possible right now as thousands of years we did't know when we'd next have access to food. After a certain time, we do need food, so then we will genuinely crave it (half way through day 2 for me, if I force myself to ignore the peckish type of hunger, and distraction is best then), at which point I suppose we would have gone out to look for our next meal. I don't know if this happened, but I imagine humans got fatter through the late summer, when there was more food available, and lost weight through the winter. But craving food too much in lean times might have caused too much energy to be spend looking for food that wasn't there, so best to let us bulk up when food was plenty, and allow us to lose the fat when food was sparce. Of course I'm not suggesting we yoyo like that, but in my head it makes sense that this might be how we evolved.
I've no idea if this makes sense to anyone else, but I'd be interested to hear if anyone else experiences this feeling that once you've had your first meal of the day, especially an early one, its as if your brain is telling you to just go for it and keep eating. Maybe its what I'm eating, rather than when, but even porridge or very seedy wholemeal bread (I make my own, its seriously seedy so as about low GI as bread can be) does this to me. I can't work out if it's the way I inadvertently trained my body and brain over 2 decades of dieting, or if it's really the way my body wants to work.
Of course I wouldn't suggest allowing weight to deliberately pile on in winter, as we have more than enough food all year round, but if I can stick to this eating plan for many years, I'm thinking that I'll be able to forgive myself the few kilos I gain in December when any diet is exceptionally hard. This first year of this diet, it's now only a few days into February and I am all ready back to the same weight as late November. And it's been no harder than before December arrived. That's never happened before.
Hmm, this drifted a bit away from my initial question, does eating kick start something in you that makes you want to eat more? But I suppose it's all related.
This is all one huge experiment, but I'll be delighted if this turns out to be an annual cycle. 10/11 months of good weight maintenance, and one month when I can relax a little when my body is saying - its dark and cold outside, eat, followed by about a month of weight correction just by getting back to what I was doing all year round until late November or so.
Sorry, I promise to not always write such long posts
