IF has helped me stop feeling cold from CCR, build a balanced relationship with food, helped me understand who I am as a person, and more.

Hello all, I've been getting more involved in this community and am very thankful to everyone for their feedback and contributions. I want to share what I've experienced recently. DISCLAIMER: I do mention my faith in this post, only because I feel that intermittent fasting has helped me hold a more holistic view toward fasting, but also toward being a human that is spiritual but also lives in a body. I've lost a bunch of weight with CCR/deficit/calorie counting over the last year and a half or so. EDIT: M, 5'9" SW: 227, CW: 141, GW 145. I weighed everything and sought a high protein diet, with thoughts of fiber close enough for me to know that it's important for satiety or something. I randomly started listening to Rhonda Patrick (I think through JRE), I learned about the gut microbiome, and then about TRE with the podcasts she's done with Dr. Satchin Panda. I started reading about chrononutrition, eTRE, etc and it was very enlightening and interesting to me. Along with this, I started seeing a dietician as I realized that my whole life, I either have been very overweight, or went down in weight just for it to go back up (only happened once, thankfully). My primal thought was "I've always eaten in excess or in scarcity," which is true, but I hadn't qualified that with food on a time scale yet. I wanted to find a way to maintain my weight for life. --An important side note is that I also had seen a doctor recently toward the end of the CCR and labs revealed a small anemia, which I've never had. I also had been feeling very cold, and even in August/September in Texas I was wearing multiple layers and still cold.-- In our first meeting, all of the fear I had of being judged for being a calorie-counter diminished. She was very accepting and made me feel very comfortable in session. She immediately recommended I go up 300kcal per day to 2500kcal. I work out 30mins5x per week (free antidepressant!) so she calculated I wasn't eating enough. At this time I started experimenting with 16:8, 3 meals. I immediately felt free when she told me I could eat more than 2200kcal. Things were going well. 16:8 began to feel very manageable. Because of my work, though, it didn't make sense for me to take time to eat 3 meals a day, so that eventually just turned into 2 meals, basically doing 18:6-- and, wow. I've saved money and time in not having to make 3 meals every day. It's easier now, being able to have a time to stop eating, and a time to stop thinking about food prep-- it's freeing! I met with her again after one month and now I'm up to 2800 calories, which feels way too high, but I trusted her math and, despite that it has been VERY stuffing, I feel great. This is where she reminded me that my metabolism is a fire I need to feed. I didn't make sense of this until it came to my mind that if I eat adequately but also fast my body can draw from fat to match the amount it needs to keep functioning and not need to slow down my metabolism. Anyway, I'm currently trying to see if this is the right amount. Back to the time-piece: with IF I find myself with so much time-- tonight I picked up my guitar and played some jazz charts, which was a good-as-dead habit in my life for a long time. I've learned that a feeding/fasting life rhythm gives you the time to DO the things we're called to do.Somehow, sometime throughout this I found this sub. I learned about the obesity code and read it. Wow. I then found a book that helped integrate this with my religious views, which was extremely helpful (I mention this because our relationship with food is holistic, and for me, my faith in Christ had been informed that I had to fast, but honestly, I started becoming more a fan of the science than for other reasons. The book I read -- Eat. Fast. Feast. By Jay Richards, brought an integrated approach that helped put my faith at the center while still being scientifically informed). These two books, and this sub have done so much to help me understand why, from a biological standpoint, fasting is supposed to be descriptive as a big part of our relationship with food. Fasting has helped me have a way more flexible relationship with food. This has been huge because I have been consumed by food most of my life. I love to cook, it's my love language, and so while there are many amazing things in my life that God has granted me through food and cooking, it was taking up more space in my life than what is beneficial. In regards to eating, I now know that I don't have to eat all the time, bc my body is designed to keep me fueled, whether that is by what I ate recently, or have stored as fat. My blood sugar will stay stable in the fasting state bc in lipolysis, we get 3 FFA molecules and a glycerol molecule, and the glycerol molecule goes to the liver to preserve the glucose level. Autophagy can happen. Ghrelin isn't what the Freudian theory of drives describes-- it comes in waves that we can longsuffer with Christ. Because of Eat. Fast. Feast. I was able to learn that there is no eating without fasting (even in a 12:12 TRE that people can do without much thought at all-- some may even do this without thinking!), and there's no fasting without feasting. It helped me integrate what fasting is from the biological perspective that's been fascinating me to my faith, which is most important to me. Seeing that there's a time for everything, I now hold the belief that as humans, we should not view feeding in isolation, nor fasting in isolation, but together in a balance. This taught me that feeding and fasting can have boundaries and that there's a time for each of themElucidating that thought, a rhythm of Feeding/Fasting also taught me the idea that balance operates out of simplicity, not duplicity. Let me explain. Simplicity is doing one thing at a time. Duplicity is doing two things at once. A period of (sufficient, whole) feeding matched by a period of fasting is more metabolically health-oriented than doing both at the same time (like in constant caloric restriction, where the reduction of calories matched with day-long feeding breeds a slow metabolism because insulin never got low enough to stop inhibiting lipolysis, and not to mention, never allowong for a period of fasting where AMPK can do it's magic).Picking up what I said earlier about the anemia and coldness: Today in the morning I didn't really feel like wearing a sweater, mostly bc I didn't have one clean that matched with my pants lol. But I still wore a grey hoodie anyway. I realized that I was now starting to feel warm, and maybe even perspiring in this hoodie. IF, along with the 2800 calorie diet, has helped me to stop feeling cold, give me a desire to think less about food, be able to eat to fuel my metabolism without it all going to fat bc of insulin clearing in fasting oeriods, and, maybe this is placebo, but I feel my stomach fat has gone down. So I find myself praising God and feeling thankful for the resources and redditors that I've learned from along the way. In short, IF has served as a means of grace to discover what our bodies are designed to do and capable of doing. It is also seeming to be the means of grace in healing my body from the CICO-induced metabolic slowdown. I found out that if you do it wisely, fasting is never torture, it's actually necessary for metabolic health and for the prevention (not to mention treatment) of hyperinsulinimia and insulin resistance. IF is built from a philosophy that there is a time for building up (feeding, where mTOR is active in the anabolic state) and a time to tear down (fasting, where AMPK is active in the catabolic state). One state needs the other, and both cannot function at the same time. Operating in our design lets food be in its rightful place and fasting be in its rightful place, both with the boundaries and dignity that they deserve. IF has helped me build a better philosophy of who I am from a domains standpoint (that is, an integrated physical and spiritual person), where everything I do, whether it's primarily a physical (or emotional, mental), or spiritual act, affect all domains because we are integrated beings. I hope this post is appropriate. I'm just overflowing with joy for what I've been taught. Thank you!! via /r/intermittentfasting https://ift.tt/whb3G0X https://ift.tt/CE03ceY