I think most people who are adequately fat adapted…blood ketone measuring tools are cheap and widely available, can eat one all you can eat meal every 48 hours and consistently lose weight. Maintainers can eat one meal every 24 hours and be satisfied and healthy. I do think vegetables can provide micronutrients and insoluble fiber to feed a healthy microbiome and provide volume for for intestines.
Discussion
Adequately adapted to what? Not having carbs or sugars, so burning ketones? Yeah, I can go 48 hours without a meal, no problem. I tend to do this on the weekends, actually, and then eat twice a day during the week, but my earlier meal is more of a snack, like 12oz of ahrimp.
I haven't seen the need for fiber for myself. My theory is that is is ONLY useful if you are still eating plants. I don't want volume in my intestines, and since meat digests so well, the whole biome thing is much different. I'm not breaking down sugars, or much of anything with a cell wall. No flours, grains, etc.
I still take a daily multivitamin, out of habit mostly, but I'm not feeling any issues with vitamin deficiencies. What micronutrients would I be lacking, and why would I need them?
There's some evidence out there that you actually may need to eat more, and specifically more fats, if you are trying to lose weight and hit a plateau. I'm not really doing this for weight loss, although I think when I weigh less, I may be more tempted to have an occasional slice of cheesecake.
Thanks for replying though, just feeling out these communities on Nostr.
Wow there is a lot here.
There are two metabolic pathways for producing the energy we need to survive. Ingested glucose and foods that digest into glucose, and fats if varying length carbon chains. Our bodies operate on fats, it’s the preferred energy source and the way we store energy long term. Free fatty acids produced by the liver and absorbed in our lymph lacteals are stored in adipose tissue. The hormone that causes issue with the system is insulin. Let’s imagine we are foraging, scarce food, no food storage, and we find a fruit tree full of ripe fruit. We eat as much as we can, sleep, eat some more, invite our tribe, and the fruit is spoiled or eaten quickly. Our blood sugar spikes, insulin is excreted to force stock blood glucose in the cells of the body. If blood glucose levels don’t retreat the liver starts converting blood glucose to free fatty acids that are stored as adipose tissue, because high blood glucose will poison you. No more fruit for a while, maybe no more food for a while. Insulin levels drop opening the metabolic pathways for FFA. This is key, when insulin is present you cannot metabolize fat.
Most people don’t realize that even complete protein is partially digested into glucose, and glucose always inspires insulin secretion. Our society eats all the time, therefore insulin is pretty much always present. Exercise all you want, when insulin is present adipose tissue cannot be metabolized.
Regarding fiber, feces are waste and often antagonistic to the epithelial cells in the gut. Keeping them moving makes irritation and immune response less likely preventing things like colon cancer and IBD. Also, feeding friendly bacterial colonies in the gut is key to having those cultures ie. lactobacillus outcompete destructive cultures like helicobacter pylori.
In short fasting is the healthiest and most effective way to lose adipose tissue, because it’s the way we evolved to function for survival, it also triggers autophagy at intervals over 36 hours which makes your immune system go in cellular trash patrol, metabolizing things like cancer cells for fuel. I hope this helps.