I kinda just eat whenever I feel hungry, and I have no problem maintaining a healthy weight.
If I fast, like during Lent, I typically lose some fat here and there.
So I believe intermittent fasting would work, but it seems to me it's not the only way to maintain a healthy weight.
You're also like 18 feet tall, tho. 😂
Most people are closer to my height, so they probably don't have as high of a calorie requirement.
Some people are just thin, regardless of what they eat and when. 🤷♀️ My sister was like that into her 40s.
But that is definitely not most people, otherwise the majority of the population wouldn't be overweight or obese. Being obese used to be relatively rare, and people ate carbs all the time and some people were quite sedentary, so it was probably something else that changed.
Biggest change seems to be that we now eat from 6 am to 10 pm (or even midnight!), the food is less nutrient-dense, and we don't sleep as much. Also, central heating and air conditioning seems to have an effect.
Basically, I think having cooked, easily-digestable food constantly available is a quite new thing and most of our bodies can't handle it.
People read about everyone eating porridge for breakfast and don't realize that breakfast was at like 11 am, and that they had to
1) start a fire in the hearth
2) milk and feed the cows
3) bring the water to a boil in a big pot
4) cook the seeds (they didn't come rolled) by stirring constantly for 30 minutes or more.
It took a couple of hours to make porridge.
I don't think most people consider that industrial food production is actually what made "eating really early" possible. They had to invent stuff like corn flakes or quick-cooking oats, pop-tarts, toasters, and microwaves.
Yeah, pottage, but you still had to stoke the fire and bring it to a boil before eating it, which could take a long time before gas stoves were invented.
The German word for breakfast is actually "Fruehstueck" (or "early piece") because you just ate a piece of bread, if you ate anything at all. And it's a relatively modern word, because it's a modern habit.
And people simply didn't eat early in the morning. It was dark out till 7 or 8am, the room was pitch black and often freezing cold, they'd just woken up and had morning chores and/or Mass soon after. You don't eat before morning Mass, and it took place at 9 am or even later (depending upon how far the congregation had to travel to get to the church, some walked a long way and it was often dark out) and lasted for over an hour, and then you had to walk back home to eat.
In the convents and monasteries, they ate lunch and dinner during the long summer and harvest days and only dinner during the winter, Lent, and on Wednesdays and Fridays. They made an exception for novices, giving them always an extra, earlier meal, because otherwise the hungry teenagers would gorge so much at dinner that they'd fall asleep or vomit everything right back up. 😅
My parents are homesteaders and they don't eat breakfast until 10 because there are so many chores to do.
They'll wake up, drink coffee, pray, then head out at the crack of dawn to start feeding animals.
Yeah, it's the same with the farmers and stuff around here. And most people used to be farmers.
It was the industrial age that switched our meals around, and the information age is starting to reverse that, as our increasingly sedentary jobs and home office make our nutritional needs more like that of monks in a scriptorium, than like farmers, and we're turning to fasting to help us adjust without having to obsess over our diets too much.
A lot of people seem also to eat for the sake of stimulation, rather than just because they're hungry. If you have a high metabolism, you can get away with that sometimes, but if not, you need to learn to adjust your desire to eat to correspond with your body's actual needs.
This also applies to what you eat. Proteins and fats will give you longer lasting energy, so those will make for better snacks than carbs and sugar.
I think most people would find a lot of benefit by getting rid of high-carb and high sugar snack foods from their pantry and waiting until they're hungry to go looking for food.
Coffee or tea is a decent way to have something to sip on if you just want stimulation.
Thin broth also seems to be a good choice. Many people actually can't tell the difference between hunger and thirst, so it's a good idea to drink something and wait 15 minutes to see if the sensation goes away.
And some people are simply sensitive to the movements in their bowels and that can be confused with hunger. Lots of people have IBS or PMS, for instance, that can suddenly increase the urge to eat or even gorge on food.
That's one reason why so many people like to drink coffee as breakfast or after meals. It is an intestinal stimulant and they're more alert after they clear their bowels.
And some people are like guinea pigs. They can't take a dump until they put something in their stomach, and warm drinks work as well as food. This seems to have evolved, so that humans eat and poop at home or on breaks while traveling, to help coordinate potty breaks as a group and prevent them from getting picked off by predators.
Okay, TMI. 🤣🤣 This is turning into an episode of Dr. Colon.
Another factor we have to consider is the overabundance of sugar and other sweeteners in the modern diet.
In myself, I've observed more weight gain when I eat lots of sugar, like around Christmas.
During the rest of the year, we typically don't keep a ton of sugary treats around the house, so I have to eat foods with some nutritional content to sate hunger.
Additionally, many "standard" breakfast foods like cereal or pancakes are carb- and sugar-heavy. Waking up and eating sausage and eggs is going to leave you satiated and energized into the early afternoon.
People used to eat waaaay more sugar. 3000-4500 cal / day was normal in France a hundred years ago. A lot of that was refined sugar.
What their food didn't have was:
- the extra, hidden starches that high fructose corn syrup, for example, has and on which gut bacteria go bonkers, giving you a truckload of endotoxins to deal with
- the phyto-estrogens in everything
- the unsatured fats at insane ratios
- BPA's and a bunch of other nearly untraceable toxic byproducts of current manufacturing tech
- being irradiated with a spectrum of new/strong emf's that interact with it at a cellular level
Some of the most healthy tribes have been living high-starch, high-collagen lives.
Dextrose is a sugar that doesn't even make it to your gut bacteria because it is directly absorbed. It has been used a healing agent for that reason. Very clean way to gain energy.
Clean sugar isn't a problem ,unless you lack the cofactors needed for its combustion. But that list of cofactors is waaay shorter than anything else you'd choose to consume for energy anyway.
They had bad teeth, tho. 😂
People consumed more alcohol, as well, which is fermented sugar.
Ale was a common breakfast because it was fast, gave energy, and didn't need to be cooked.
You also have to differentiate what the sugar was in. Sugar cookies and chocolate milk and etc. used to be more nutrient-dense and that probably outweighed the effect of the sugar.
