Intermittent Fasting – The No Hunger Method | Critical MAS
I started doing Intermittent Fasting over three years ago. My strategy has always been to just deal with the hunger. If you ignore it, it goes away. When I first began fasting, I’d think about my hunger constantly. These days, it barely grabs my attention. Recently, I was inspired by a post over at my favorite nutrition website Perfect Health Diet to try an alternate approach to Intermittent Fasting.
Before I go into the changes I tested, let me go over two benefits from Intermittent Fasting.
Ketostix
Well coconut oil by itself may not be enough for the hungry. Have no fear, the Perfect Health Diet book came up with another idea. It said you can consume fermented vegetables on a fast. Wouldn’t the carbs from the vegetables interfere with achieving ketosis? Nope. From the book:
Cortido Sauerkraut – Ketosis never tasted so good!
So if you’ve put off Intermittent Fasting, because you can’t deal with the hunger, you now have no excuses. Get yourself some coconut oil and make some fermented veggies.
Before I go into the changes I tested, let me go over two benefits from Intermittent Fasting.
- By restricting carbohydrates for an extended period, you can shift your body into a state of ketosis. Ketosis has a host of health benefits. One of which is you burn fat at a quicker pace.
- By restricting protein, you can trigger autophagy. This is the process where cells consume and recycle their own damaged material. This results in many health benefits, including life extension.
This means that if you eat a lot of coconut oil (which is 58% short-chain fats), you deliver a lot of fat to the liver for disposal. The disposal process for fat is conversion to acetyl CoA followed by either burning in the TCA cycle or conversion to ketones.Since that post was written, I have done many fasts where I consume nothing but 1 to 3 tablespoons of coconut oil. I find it has a slightly sweet taste and it does lower my hunger level. To confirm I was still hitting ketosis, I used Ketostix to measure ketones. After a 16 hour fast with coconut oil, I was measuring Small to Moderate ketones. Pretty cool.
Ketostix
Well coconut oil by itself may not be enough for the hungry. Have no fear, the Perfect Health Diet book came up with another idea. It said you can consume fermented vegetables on a fast. Wouldn’t the carbs from the vegetables interfere with achieving ketosis? Nope. From the book:
Most vegetable carbohydrates are intercepted by gut bacteria, which digest vegetable fiber into short-chain fatty acids.If the book is correct, I could eat coconut oil and sauerkraut and still go into ketosis. I decided to test it out.
- Monday night: My last food intake was at 10 PM.
- Tuesday 10 AM: 1 tablespoon of coconut oil, 100 grams of cortido sauerkraut.
- Tuesday 1 PM: 1 tablespoon of coconut oil, 100 grams of ghost pepper sauerkraut.
Cortido Sauerkraut – Ketosis never tasted so good!
So if you’ve put off Intermittent Fasting, because you can’t deal with the hunger, you now have no excuses. Get yourself some coconut oil and make some fermented veggies.
I have not tried the coconut oil part but might start that shortly.. take some after the 15 hr fast for women that you recommended or at the 13/14 hr mark?
I recall Mat Lalonde saying that his breakfast was often 1/2 cup of coconut milk, which provided a sense of satiety but, he believed, didn’t interfere with autophagy. Not sure whether the carbs in the coconut milk would be sufficient to disrupt ketosis, but there’s only about 6g in a 1/2 cup, so I’d be inclined to doubt it.
With the colder weather coming on I am ramping up my IF again. For October I’m starting back easily with just two 16-hour fasts a week. The number of weekly fasts will increase throughout fall, followed by increasing their duration in winter.
Coconut Milk has almost no protein, so Mat is probably right in believing it wouldn’t interfere with autophagy. It is the amino acids in protein that interrupt autophagy. As for interrupting ketosis, that might vary from person to person as well as the timing of the beverage.
I have been doing my own little version of this, but
with romaine lettuce and olive oil, as a meal for dinner
only. Just as a light three day thing.
Problem, as I was re-checking my data on romaine lettuce, I was dismayed to find that it has a substantial amount of sugars. I don’t know if this interfered with ketosis as I can not afford keto sticks.
But, I do feel like I am in ketosis.
What do you think of romaine lettuce as part of this “experiment” ?
Ketostix are dirt cheap at Wal-Mart.
I gotta admit though that I’m concerned about the possibility of over-consumption of coconut products. I doubt my genetic line (Northern European) feasted on coconuts over the past few millenium – but who the heck knows…
I suppose I could try to replicate the experiment with pork lard and/or duck fat…
- Alex Zinchenko
Just curious, thanks!
Thanks!
That rash was likely a fungal infection from funghi that live on ketones. GOOGLE site:perfecthealthdiet.com RASH FUNGAL and let us know how you got rid of it
“… short chain fats in our lingo encompasses the standard “short-chain” and “medium-chain” — 12 carbons or fewer. Since they’re handled similarly biologically, we thought it made more sense to use a descriptive term instead of technical jargon.”