So a 17-hour fast (I was aiming for 16.) Finished my lunch around 1:00 yesterday, and broke my fast around 6:30 this morning.
Observations:
I drank a couple cups of hot water in the evening, and I got up to pee after every damn sleep cycle. Four times, I think. I don’t know if it was hunger, or a revved metabolism, or the extra water, or the combination: but anyway, it was not a great-quality sleep. NB I did have one of those really deep naps yesterday afternoon, so that’s a possible factor. Also recollect that carb bomb of the birthday croissant and two enormous cookies. That probably destabilized my blood sugar a bit.
The hunger really does come and go. It doesn’t just ramp up and up. And I wasn’t all that hungry when I woke up to pee: certainly not so hungry as to make it especially difficult to get back to sleep. A really interesting thing was that when I when I got up in the morning, and was on the verge of breakfast -- breakfast was within sight -- the hunger vanished. A lot of it apparently consisted of anxiety about whether I would be able to do the fast, and whether fasting meant I would never get to eat again. I could easily have dawdled another hour before getting breakfast. (I did in fact take my first walk before I ate.)
At no point was I anywhere near as desperately hungry as I used to be -- multiple times a day -- when I was fat. No cravings.
3 comments:
When I started doing IF, I told myself multiple times a day "It's okay to be hungry. You are NOT going to starve."
Then, when I did eat, I enjoyed it so much more.
I also was telling myself, you can eat however much you damn well please when you're done (of my usual unprocessed foods.) In the event I just ate my standard breakfast afterwards and was perfectly happy. But it feels very different from the sustained misery of constant calorie restriction.
It has been an extraordinary experience for me to be free of craving, to have a healthy appetite, to feel full and satisfied with food I thoroughly enjoy and not feel constantly hungry during my waking hours or, for that matter, in the middle of the night. Craving is not hunger. It's something else. On a daily basis, I am astonished that after I eat my three hearty and filling meals over a period of 6-7 hours (no need to be rigid) in the first part of the day, I don't feel the desire to eat until the next morning, at which time I feel genuine hunger, not craving. No feeling of desperation. It is heartening to know that more and more people in my circle of friends are having this experience.
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