Skipping Meals... Eating Enough, Etc.
collegefbfan
Posts: 346 Member
Okay, some folks on here say watch out you need to eat enough. Not necessarily the starvation mode thing, but you just need to. A lot of you say that you skip breakfast or skip lunch and that you are hardly ever hungry. I am noticing that a bit these last few days. I am skipping lunch right now. But what about getting at least enough maintenance calories? If I ate 500 calories for breakfast and skip lunch, should I really eat a huge 1300 calorie supper? What ways do you all work around this? Or am I doing something wrong? Breakfast and supper is all I am wanting. I might have a fat bomb or small piece of keto cheesecake for dessert after supper, but still not anything near 1200-1400 calories.
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I find these things come in cycles for me. Some days I'm super hungry so I eat over my calories and others I eat under. I think it all balances in the end. Of course I am a very short female so I don't need a ton of calories. If you think your calorie deficit is so big it's dangerous then I would add more fat to your meals to bump the calories. I just feel like if you are truly full and not hungry then why eat?2
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I agree with anglyn1. I've been skipping breakfast mostly except for coffee and most days that's fine, but a couple days ago I was super hungry and had to eat lunch at 10:00am. LOL!0
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As a man who was close to your size at one point (maxed at 6'1" and 223 lbs), went lower carb to about 190 and keto down to my current maintenance weight of 182, I would say as long as you are in weight loss mode, do not eat if you are not hungry if you are in ketosis.
At lunch today, I listened to Peter Attia as part of the fat summit. He is a great resource I would recommend. He is not a pro-keto doctor per se, but does see value in it for some people. One of the things he mentioned was when dealing with patients who want to lose weight, he first walks them through a process to understand the actual goal is to reduce the size of the fat cells. He starts with saying, if just losing weight is your goal, we can amputate your leg.
Anyway, he says there are 2 doors into a fat cell and 1 door out. The key is to get the flow correctly so more is going out than in. Reducing insulin, which is what happens when you limit carbs, allows lipolosys - fat leaving the fat cell. He then says the cells using that fat for energy can't tell if it is from diet or from lipolysis.
Therefore, if you are losing weight by design, there is no purpose in forcing food down your throat just to reach some arbitrary calorie number you think you need.
As both of the above have said, there will be days when you will go over and days you will be under. Your hormone levels (again, primarily insulin along with cortisol and adrenaline) will largely drive this. As long as you are not going crazy when you go over and your overall trend (say on a weekly basis) is to eat around your calorie goal, you will be fine.
As for IF, I am personally on a 16/8 where I only eat between 11am and 7pm. Ideally, I would only eat breakfast and lunch because I tried that recently and found it helped my fasting BG more. However, because of social reasons (family dinners and other social occasions around dinner) that is a very difficult schedule for me to maintain.
I also would not suggest having the majority of your calories late in the day because you will not burn much of them before going to bed, at which time they will just go into storage. You are better off eating more early so you use it before it gets stored.0 -
I'm in their camp above.0
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You do need to eat enough to get adequate nutrition, no one wants their hair falling out, or health problems. However, it's more about averages than any one day. If you're maintenance is 1,800 calories a day and one day you only eat 800 calories - that isn't going to cause a huge nutrition problem. 800 calories every day for a week or a month, that's going to start causing problems because you aren't going to be able to fit enough nutrients into 800 calories every single day.
If you simply don't have much of an appetite, then go for nutrient and calorie dense food like nuts, and nut butters, cheese, yogurt, etc1 -
Many thanks for the info people. I quit logging my food on MFP a little over a week ago. I feel I am doing okay. Just not eating as much. Probably not as much fat either which is not a good thing. Probably more protein than I need which is also not a good thing. Thanks again.0
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I find these things come in cycles for me. Some days I'm super hungry so I eat over my calories and others I eat under. I think it all balances in the end. Of course I am a very short female so I don't need a ton of calories. If you think your calorie deficit is so big it's dangerous then I would add more fat to your meals to bump the calories. I just feel like if you are truly full and not hungry then why eat?
THIS
I have hungry and I have not wanting to eat days. They equal out over time for me.
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