For most of recorded history, almost everyone ate only one or two meals per day, usually after noon. Today, this is called "intermittent fasting", and it will keep you thin, but it's actually just normal eating.
Daylight was precious for labour, food took long to gather and prepare, it was difficult to cook and setup for the groups typically attending the dinner (today called "lunch"), and you weren't supposed to eat before morning Mass.
I started eating breakfast every morning, a few months ago, and I quickly gained a _lot_ of weight. Dropped breakfast, again. Back to morning coffee or tea, instead. Really is something only for the infirm, heavy laborers, or nursing mothers.
It simply isn't normal to eat an entire, additional meal in the early morning, when you probably aren't even hungry.
On the contrary, I am often hungry pretty soon after I wake up, so I usually eat a modest breakfast.
My wife, on the other hand, often doesn't get hungry until closer to noon, so she often skips breakfast.
Intermittent fasting studies show that an 8-hour window is helpful for staying thin. So, if you eat breakfast at 8 am, your last meal should be before 4 pm. If you break your fast at 12 pm, your last meal should be before 8 pm.
The narrower you make the window, the faster you will typically lose weight and the easier you will stay thin.
Also seems to help prevent or treat diabetes. Some even swear by multi-day fasting, for maximum benefit.
I've never met anyone this hasn't worked for, but perhaps they will all crowd in, beneath this note. 😅
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.
I know some people who are hungry when they wake up, but they all have thyroid disease.
I stop eating early in the evening. This us the reason that when i wake up i want to eat something. In my experience, going to sleep at night while being almost hungry because you stopped eating early, makes you al
I think most people struggle to fall asleep when they're hungry, tho.
That is very hungry and i said almost hungry. Like, you couldneat more...
Well, yeah, if you eat dinner early, that shifts your eating window.
I meant people who eat dinner late and then wake up hungry. Sleeping shouldn't make you hungry, unless you have a voracious metabolism (like nursing mothers or teenage boys).
I have an aunt who lost 60 kg and got off meds by eating breakfast late and dinner early, and skipping lunch. Then she got a new boyfriend and started cooking big dinners for him and gained everything back and got back on the meds and added more meds.
That's pretty typical. Men don't understand why many women get fat once they have a partner, and why they then lose weight after a breakup, but it's like... there is only one factor changing in this situation. 😏
Trying to stay thin, when you have a family, is actually a never-ending nightmare because most children and men eat ginormous amounts of food and are constantly thinking and talking about food, and you spend hours every day in the kitchen. And men like big plates and bowls, and normal portions look ridiculous on them, so you'll invariably start increasing your own portion to fill the dishes.
My daughter and I have switched to salad plates and dessert bowls. That's like half the win, right there.
I prefer a breakfast and a late lunch combo. GM isn’t really a GM without breakfast ☀️
Yes you can avoid breakfast if you want, but there is a feeling that it would be better to take some energy. Not that you really feel hungry. For example if you don't have work to do, you can just relax
I think this makes sense if you have an inefficient (read: fast) digestive system. Most people tend to efficient digestion (as their ancestors survived bad harvests), which means that digesting food makes them sluggish and they are often still digesting their dinner, when they awake.
Might also be an ethnic difference, or something linked to body type.
I work two weeks on days and then two weeks on nights. I’ve noticed I get hungry at certain times of the day when I would be eating if I was on the opposite schedule. If I don’t eat anything I go back to not being hungry in half an hour. I usually only eat once or maybe twice a day.
Usually a couple hours after I wake up I eat something before work. I’m on my feet moving for 12 hours though. I don’t know that I’d call that heavy labor though.
That actually seems to be why "breakfast" started: industrialization drove everyone out of the house, and there were initially no lunch breaks, so they started eating a meal before they left.
That’s why I eat early. I might not get a lunch break depending on what happens at work.
Yeah, same with my husband. Sometimes the meetings just overlap. 🤷♀️
I fix my coworkers mistakes for a living so the workload varies. They make the products on the line and when a mistake is made in a unit they send it to me and I fix it by hand. My belt holds 11 units before it’s backing up the main line and I don’t like to have downtime. I routinely skip meetings as a waste of my time. No one’s said anything to me yet so I guess I’ll keep skipping them.
My dietitian convinced me that breakfast was a requirement regardless of my workout routine and caloric goals. I went from 1500 cals to 2200 cals/day but doubled the strength training effort. I have still been losing weight although at a slower rate, which is fine as I'm already under my target weight of 190, so I expect that number to start going back up again.
I usually have to force myself to eat breakfast, but it has quickly improved my morning productivity hitting my macro goals.
I don't know any heavy laborers that eat correctly, most of them have cigarettes and coffee for breakfast and more work for lunch then don't eat until dinner.
I have tried a handful of diets, most of them are restrictive, which helped me lose my big 60lbs but suffered in so many other ways, mostly mentally. For me we have been focusing on a diverse mixed macro diet, at regular intervals, usually 3 full sized meals and 3 protein biased snacks.
I'm basically in a part time college course with this nutrition work lol. She gives me homework, there's a textbook (she just gives me pdf snippets of) slides and everything XD. She is an active prof at UPenn so I guess that's where it comes from
i just went through 3 days fasting... because i've got type 2 now, i went straight into ketosis, it was pretty rough, but i eased back to eating... however, i am convinced that i'm going to do another 3 day fast until i go keto again, i think it's good for me because i have been feeling much better since
Type 2 diabetes?
That's hard.
I was just reading about a German professor that is prescribing 2-week fasts, to treat diabetes.
That's what got me thinking about what I was doing differently before, when I was losing weight instead of gaining. I was sticking to the 8-hour window and going for a walk every day.
And I ate more complex carbs and less meat.
1500 was really low, tho. That's barely over the 1200 baseline. And you perform physical labor.
I actually find it difficult to perform any labour or excersize after eating. But I'm hungry by lunchtime, at the latest.
My husband lost a lot of weight, effortlessly and without changing his diet, by moving to #OnlyDinner. That's harder for women to do, tho.
>That's harder for women to do, tho.
Yeah, I'm sure and I suppose I'm quite young so probably part of it too.
With my new eating routines I can workout pretty quickly after eating if I want to. I learned how to very carefully asses hunger/fullness cues so I don't over eat and I'm good. However meals are usually for quick recovery so always after a workout. The more frequent the meals the easier it is to listen to those cues and eat when slightly hungry so no overeating happens.
I was most worried about carbs, so we spent most of the time learning about that an blood sugar cycles.
Basically its this: Carbs are your source of energy, as they are quickly converted into glucose. It takes energy to breakdown proteins and fats into glucose so it's avoided if possible. glycogen and protein stores in muscles will be robbed before your digestion will attempt to convert proteins/fats into glucose, thus always leaving your muscles starved for necessary proteins and glycogen energy stores, so you generally feel weaker on a low carb diet and struggle even maintaining muscle.
Glucose is only absorbed during the duration of raised insulin production. If glucose is "left over" during that cycle or cannot be absorbed fast enough, it's absorbed by adipose which is also stimulated by insulin. Which is why quickly digested carbs cause such a high (and fast) spike in blood sugar causing poor consumption of carbs and increased adipose growth along with poor muscular uptake. Fruits and other higher-fiber simple carbs are helpful in this space. "The body does not know the difference in a given carb molecule, it all becomes glucose" as she would tell me.
I try to follow the blood sugar wave which is pretty good at telling you when you need more fuel, proteins don't hang around in the AA "pool" for very long, so you have to top them up regularly. So that's what I learned and seems to be working really well for me right now. Mixed macro meals, 3:1 carb to protein+fats ratio, eat within 1 hour of waking, then workout before a meal, learn hunger/fullness cues. Few/no long carb molecules (starches). Get a good mix of all fruits/veggies, whole grain stuff, lean and fatty meats on rotation with other good fats like milk nuts and the like when needed.
Maximize area under the blood sugar curve lol (sorta)
This is all too complicated for me. 😂 Easier to just have coffee or tea for breakfast, and avoid cupcakes.
I did really well with Weight Watchers, 12 years ago. Dropped nearly 30 kg and looked 🔥 and took up cross-country running.
But my life is rather chaotic, now, so "watching what I eat" is an onerous burden. Easier to watch "when I eat" and eat off smaller plates or only order an appetizer.
Here are mine. I can't even imagine eating only 1500/day. 👀 Must have been mostly low-fat protein and veggies.
I actually lose weight steadily, if I stick to the window and don't gorge on cupcakes, because I am quite active.
That’s funny, i started doing it years ago due to poorness and have never looked back. It just feels right, even though i’m not as poor as i was then due to making conscious sacrifices to humbly stack sats through h*ck or high water ✊
Yeah. Can cut out an entire meal and most of the low-quality food, with one neat trick. 😂
