In the main page, I promised: "You WILL eat less, but naturally, with no effort and zero physical or mental suffering". To make it true, you should follow the instructions, given here. This page is about ketosis (the new state your body will live in) and hunger. There is a good reason why these different things are described in a same page:
Ketosis suppresses appetite and leads to a lack of hunger.
Hunger management is a practical part which is very important for your success, so it is described firstly:
TIPS AND TRICKS FOR EASY HUNGER MANAGEMENT
In the first days of your life without breakfasts, you will probably feel hunger in mornings. Not a big deal at all if you know the following lifehacks:
- Liquids remove the feeling of hunger: the stomach asks for something - the stomach gets something (even though it's not a solid food). Many times people feel hungry only because they are thirsty (this sense can also lead to overeating when it's time for your meal!). So, when you feel anything like hunger, your first response should be to drink:
• Ice cold water (for me, carbonated/sparkling water works better). I love natural spring/mineral water.
• Warm or hot tea (but real leaf tea, not "dust" in a bag; I love puer and oolong, many people prefer green tea) or coffee (I prefer espresso). Of course, everything - unsweetened! BTW, coffee is an appetite suppressant. We read in the article Does Coffee Reduce Appetite?: "Anecdotally, people have reported feeling less hungry after consuming a coffee, and some people prefer to have coffee instead of breakfast." - Many people mistakenly believe that if hunger is not satisfied, then it will become stronger and stronger, until some catastrophic consequences occur. But it's not true: the feeling of hunger is not dangerous. It's only a feeling - it's not a pain that is too terrible to endure. In fact, it's a signal, sent us by the brain, but literally nothing will happen if we ignore it (for example, if it's impossible to drink in that moment). Reddit Wiki is 100% right: "Our society has somehow decided that being hungry is one of the ultimate discomforts, and going without food for a bit to long is so detrimental to your health that people treat hunger like it is a terrible terminal disease that must be fought. It is not. As you begin IF, you will discover how ingrained eating is in our culture, and in our own psyche. Remember that, for most people, being hungry isn't life threatening, or even really dangerous at all. Just maybe a bit uncomfortable".
- Hunger disappears a few minutes after it comes - even if you do nothing. I've experienced many times when this feeling of hunger disappears in between the time I feel it and and the time the hot beverage I prepared to drink is ready. It's possible that you already had a similar experience. Remember: when by the time of a meal you were very busy and couldn't eat, the hunger (which was trained to attack at this time) came, but quickly disappeared - until the next scheduled meal.
- Fast carbs (sugar, bread, potatoes etc.) greatly increase appetite. Soon after a meal, you are starving again. So, removing them will make your transition to IF much-much easier. The following graph demonstrates, that carbs satiate you quickly (even quicker than the healthy nutrients), but then something terrible happens - you become even hungrier than you were before the meal! That's why the food industry adds sugar to many products which have nothing to do with sweets (for example, meat and dressings) - that industry doesn't want to wait too long before you take your credit card from the wallet next time:
- Proteins greatly decrease appetite - you stay not hungry for longer time. Meat, fish, eggs and cheese are your best fiends!
- After a few first days of IF, your body will begin working in a new mode (deep ketosis), so you will feel hungry very rarely. For me, the transition took 3 days. For some people it can be a week or longer. But in the first days - yes, some effort is required. Not so big, though - in fact, your goal is to hang on to the lunch time using your secret weapon - drinking. BTW, I switched from 2 meals a day to 1 meal on the 6th day of my IF. That was not planned, but I simply didn't want to eat (who said that I should force myself?). Sometimes I feel hungry even now, having been on IF for 2 months. But, in fact, very rarely - once in a few days (writing this text, I find it difficult to remember when it was the last time) - so what? I will not retreat and become fat like an elephant again because of that trifle. No way!
RUMBLING IN THE STOMACH IS NOT A SIGN OF HUNGER
Gastric rumbling is the result of peristalsis (undulating movements of the muscle wall) of the stomach and small intestine. That is, it is evidence of normal food digestion, which occurs when food, liquids, and gases pass through your gastrointestinal tract. When the digestive tract is empty, this sound is louder as there is nothing to drown it out.
But how then do muscles contract if there is nothing in the digestive tract?
After the contents of the stomach enter the small intestine, the digestive system sends signals to the brain, and the brain responds by telling the digestive muscles to begin the process of peristalsis. Muscle contractions are needed so that there is no excess food left in the stomach - as a result, a "false" signal is heard that the body needs food.
KETOSIS. YOUR BODY WILL WORK IN A NEW REGIME!
Ketosis is a metabolic condition when your body gets its energy mostly from splitting fats previously accumulated in it, into fat acids and ketone bodies. In simple terms, the body burns its fat reserves. The condition opposite to ketosis is called glycolysis. In it, energy is provided by glucose in your blood, whose source is the recently consumed meal.
In contrast to pregnancy, ketosis is not a state in which you can either be or not be. In other words, you can be in it to a greater or lesser degree. Ketosis to some extent occurs during each night sleep (a person does not eat for 10-14 hours). It would have intensified further if abstinence from food continued, but it is interrupted by breakfast each morning.
A few days after starting IF (maybe, a week or so), you will get into a deep ketosis, and your body will change its main fuel from glucose to accumulated fats. But even then each meal will still somehow lower your ketosis depth temporarily. And if you eat a piece of carb like sugar, bread or potato, you can say goodbye to your weight loss process for a while: you will need several days to return to the desired ketosis level.
KETOSIS IS SUCH A STATE WHERE YOU WILL NOT FEEL HUNGRY
As simple as that!
When the body has switched to the use fats (and not carbohydrates) as fuel, the acute urge to eat (typical for carbohydrate nutrition) disappears. The hunger experienced by most people is just a desire for sweets; it disappears when switching to the use of fats for energy, rather than carbohydrates.
When I read about that before starting my IF, I did not believe, frankly ("they deliberately lie to lure me into their sect"). You do not need to believe either: just try and you will be pleasantly surprised! What's more, I eat my only daily meal, let us say, without excitement. It's half past five or six in the evening, but I don't want to make it a feast, so I chew my small piece of meal slowly, with a meditative look in the window, while I was supposed, according to the laws of the genre, to gnaw it crazily after 24 hours of fasting and to devour an immense quantity of food trying to get even with these long hours of torment... While you may currently contemplate your future fasting judging by your "current self", you will feel different after your body has switched to deep ketosis. You will feel the difference with all your senses!
Now I will quote two articles. As most articles and videos about ketosis, they talk about low-carb diets only (like ketogenic and LCHF), and don't mention Intermittent Fasting. But keep in mind, that there are 2 ways to get into ketosis: carbs removal (the good way) and IF (the excellent, fantastic way), while their combination is the best.
Let's read what the article 7 Signs You Are In Ketosis says:
Little or No Appetite
When you stop eating carbs, something crazy happens: You don't get hungry. At least not as much or as often. Instead, you will find that your levels of satiation from your meals require much less food because of the super high fat content. Also, when you're in ketosis, your body does a better job of regulating the hunger hormones that make your brain tell your body it's hungry.
Now, let's find more information the article How Ketosis Helps You Lose Weight Through Suppressed Appetite:
Many people first stumble upon the idea of ketosis while looking for a weight loss strategy. That can be a major part of it for so many people out there who have tried just about every other diet out there but haven't seen the results they'd hoped for.
When you look at keeping your weight off forever, ketosis provides a level of appetite suppression that is actually liberating. Ketosis helps you literally stop thinking about food all the time. This post walks you through one of the most important yet underrated mechanisms that makes ketosis so effective for people who have tried everything else to lose weight and failed to keep it off: appetite suppression.
Ketosis suppresses appetite in more than one way.
When you start eating more fat and cut out all those senseless carbs (sugar, bread, and the like), you tend to stop experiencing the blood sugar swings that plague most people on the Standard American Diet. These fluctuations cause intense hunger that keeps you lurching from one carb-heavy meal to the next, never feeling satisfied — and never reaching the deep fat-burning state of ketosis. But that’s not big news to most of us.
What’s exciting is that ketones suppress appetite in a variety of more subtle and significant ways because ketones can control hunger and satiety hormones. Scientists have identified that ketones impact cholecystokinin (CCK), a hormone which makes you feel full, and ghrelin, the “hunger hormone.”
Ghrelin is called “the hunger hormone” because it increases appetite. It’s released from your stomach and intestines, with blood levels reaching their highest point during normal fasting. When you eat a meal, ghrelin drops in response to nutrients circulating in your blood.
When scientists give ghrelin to rats, they eat more, gain weight, and use less fat for energy. When us humans get ghrelin injections, it causes a 28% increase in food intake. When you lose weight you can bet your ghrelin levels go up – but not if you’re also in ketosis.
Ketosis completely suppresses the increase in ghrelin levels that occurs with weight loss.
Because increased appetite following weight loss is one of the key factors in weight regain, this is nothing short of amazing.
You can be sure that ketones are the cause, because when scientists injected people with ketones (again, in controlled studies!) it has the same appetite-suppressing effects as diets that induce ketosis.
From Quora: "There are many more benefits to IF but let me just mention one more. Once you have done it for a while and have become “fat adapted”, you will no longer get fatigued between meals like you often get from high 5 or 6 high carb meals a day. The familiar “sugar crash” or carb crash is basically this. The high carbs plus in most cases the extra insulin caused by insulin resistance spike your insulin too high. Before it has fallen far enough (remember, it is slow to fall), it has “put away” all the food you ate in the form of glycogen stores and then the rest stored as fat once the glycogen stores are full. But because those stores cannot be accessed while insulin is still high, you experience an energy crisis. You’ve run out of food in your blood and you can’t access your stores until insulin falls so you get very fatigued and get cravings to eat more for energy. When doing IF, your energy level stays consistent because you have access to your fat while fasted and because you are fat adapted, you don’t have a lot of insulin left after your meals have been “put away”. I.e. you transition smoothly from the fed to the fasted state with fat release ramping up as the sugar in your blood is ramping down. This is how it has always worked throughout human history before we injected a lot of sugar and processed carbs into our diet with frequent meals."
This knowledge is enough for you if you want to lose weight on IF. But if you want to know even more about ketosis, read this article.
AVOID CARBOHYDRATES!
As an auxiliary measure, you should totally exclude "fast" carbohydrates (you will be provided with more detailed instructions on the page HOW TO START, paragraph #6). The reason - carbohydrates raise both glucose and insulin higher than other macronutrients (fat, on the other hand, raises glucose and insulin the very least):
As you see in the picture, fatty food results in the lowest insulin spike. If your meal is mixed, then the total spike depends on the average of all the ingredients. So, if you have eaten some carbs (not necessarily fast once), it's a good idea to add fatty food to the meal to weaken the bad action of the carbs. Cakes are absolutely forbidden, but, anyway, if you have eaten a piece of cake, eat some bacon too - that sounds like a joke, but I am serious!
In general, when you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food and burning what it can from what you just consumed. Because it has all of this readily available, easy to burn energy in its blood stream (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored. This is ESPECIALLY true if you just consumed carbohydrates, because these are rapidly converted to glucose and your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source (high glucose is toxic and your body burns extra glucose preferentially to get rid of it, much in the same way that the body burns alcohol consumed for energy prior to other energy calories - alcohol therefore also sabotages fat loss).
Also, I want to write with large red letters what was already mentioned previously: