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Comment by nonbel | Hacker News Reader

The thing with fasting/low-carb is that once you are adapted it takes quite a bit more to "feel hungry". In fact the feeling is qualitatively different.

I eventually tried the low-carb (actual low-carb of <100g carbs/day, not the fake one nutritionists study where "low" is like 40% carbs in your diet) because I kept hearing about it and it was so easy to self-experiment, so why not?

It was like the scales fell from my eyes when I realized that much of what I thought was "hunger" my whole life was actually "addictive cravings" for carbohydrates. And I was really not a fan of grains and sugary stuff to begin with.

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There was a really good episode of "Explained" on Netflix that talked about diets. They took a study group, and gave half of them low-carb, and the other half a low-fat diet.

Both groups lost weight equally. They didn't lose weight because of that particular diet, they lost weight because they made better decisions daily, stopped eating out, and stopped buying processed foods.

Just cancelled my netflix this morning when I heard about another rate hike (also hadn't been using it much recently). Can you share what they meant by "low carb", how long the study ran for, and how much weight was lost?

Because I can tell you one thing for sure, the reason I lost weight (and I was only slightly overweight) is because I ate less. And I ate less because I craved less food.

I'm open to the idea this is due to more home cooking rather than low carb per se but I doubt it... I could possibly test this by eating some noodles or homemade pizza or something.

What did the study consider to be "low-carb"?

I don't recall specifically, it was a TV show I watched a few weeks back.

I find your question interesting, though. Why do you not care about what the low-fat diet was as well?

Also, since they lost weight on the low-carb diet, I can only assume that it's one that works!

This was one of the Vox episodes.

This is exactly my experience with the diet.

I've been doing intermittent fasting for about 3 months now. I fast for 16 hours, and have 2 meals a day (lunch at 12PM and dinner at 8PM), I eat 0 to low carbs, since my diet is mostly animal based products (meat and eggs, and I have protein powder from beef and egg which I occasionally take as well).

I really don't feel hungry at all, never. It's insane. I go to the gym at 7AM, after 11 hours of fasting, and I can workout just fine. The difference has been absolutely crazy.

Good job on the fasting, but:

> since my diet is mostly animal based products (meat and eggs

Bad news. I'd recommend a whole-food plant-based (WFPB) diet if you'd like to improve your health.

How are you going to do this without consuming a lot of carbs?

https://nutritionstudies.org/recipes/

Lol - yeah good luck with that

https://nutritionstudies.org/recipes/

same experience with the difference that I do carb cycle. on workout days I eat high protein,carb and low fat and on workfree days I eat high protein, more fat and few carbs.

workout without breakfest does work, although if I go to very heavy weights, I tend to take a bit of BCAA before the workout.

Yes, it is quite eye-opening.

How long did it take you to become adapted?

It took a while for me to start burning fat efficiently when I started keto. YMMV. Day 1 was ok, 2 was difficult, 3 was the worst - had a persistent headache and my mind was at maybe 50% of what it is normally. After that I was fine, except for two issues -

1. I didn't feel hungry anymore, so I didn't want to eat. I had to force myself to eat protein so I wouldn't lose muscle.

2. I couldn't do strenuous exercise for at least a week afterwards. I could walk for several km at a time but running was difficult. Running up stairs even more so. But once I was fully adjusted to the diet 7-10 days in, I could do all of those things.

I'll return to this diet later this year. Really looking forward to it.

What I described happens after a few days, maybe up to a week for me. Right after getting really thirsty and drinking a crapload of water and pissing it out (I presume this is for hydrolyzing glycogen...) for 1-2 days.

Like I said, I already wasn't a big consumer of carbs/sugar to begin with though.

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