Quitting seed oils massively improved my ability to eat intuitively, which was non-existent before. I am usually pretty good these days about being able to satisfy food cravings by paying attention to a combination of my desired flavors and textures (e.g crunchy+bitter warrants eating belgian endive, etc).
But yeah it's not always straightforward. A lot of times, a salt craving is more easily satisfied with fruit juice than with, e.g., a pickle or something very obviously salty, so maybe I was craving potassium or some other mineral that was confused for salt?
I'm speculating, but in your case, you also eat extremely limited diets, and so I wonder if you filter your cravings through those diets? E.g. you crave tomato sauce because that's "all you know", but if you would eat a wider palate of food, the cravings would have a wider interpretive context?
The "all you know" thing is definitely an interesting phenomenon. Why am I not craving e.g. fried chicken, or bread, or something else that the diet doesn't allow?
It seems that as long as the diet allows enough things to be broadly sustainable, my cravings can easily be channeled into it. But if it's too narrow or limiting, my brain seems to fall back on ex150 type stuff. Maybe just cause I've been doing it so long and that's "all I know" in a sense?
I would not recommend only white rice. Just put it in cronometer and you see it is missing a ton of micronutrients. One way ticket to depletion, also there is a lot of rice grown within close range of heavy metal industrial contamination and arsenic, which doesn’t make it a good comparison. IMO potatoes avoiding skin and green flesh are far more nutrient complete but you will still develop deficiencies, but at least slower.
Asian village peasants always rounded it out with foraging and other small things and have a million rules that probably came out of lindy experiences over hundreds of years. You can do mostly rice, but only rice is not enough
Well, I did it, and I got no symptoms. If you only do it for 1 month, unlikely to deplete much. I don't recommend it for longer than a month at a time, and supplementing B1 just to be sure is a good idea.
I did only use California and imported Asian rice due to the arsenic issue though.
On obese appetite: I read somewhere that obese people often don't actually feel particularly hungry, just constantly peckish, and this is not satisfied by eating. Hence their hunger signals are nonexistent and this is worse than if they did feel genuine hunger.
If they've eaten to satiety then they're not going to feel real hunger. You only feel real hunger if your body notices your fat stores are too low.
If you're somehow so broken that your body *always* thinks your fat stores are too low, whatever you weigh, then I'd bet you would feel like you were starving. I'd imagine that the real fatties, who are eating as much as they possibly can and weigh hundreds of kilos, are in a state of constant terrible hunger.
Or of course if you were a bit fat, and have tried to starve it off. Then you'd be properly hungry, which is not an urge we're capable of consciously resisting, any more than we can stop breathing.
You make a good point about the "Kentucky" "Fried" "Chicken" stuff. It's always just tasted revolting to me, like greasy cardboard. I don't understand why anyone would eat it at all, let alone pay through the nose for it when you can make delicious fried chicken in a couple of minutes at home.
But if it's somehow filling you with endocannabinoid-like substances, I wonder if you can get an addiction to it. They say that cannabis isn't addictive, but I am sceptical after watching various friends turn into druggie losers who were always stoned. They didn't look like they were getting much joy out of it any more.
On the other hand the only things I ever ate fried in vegetable oil were chips (lots and lots of chips), so you'd think I'd have got the same effect, but I didn't notice any lack of satisfaction when I switched back to chips fried in butter or dripping.
On the gripping hand I drink coffee by the bucket and I don't even notice if it's decaf, so maybe I'm not that easy to addict.
I have a close friend who has told me that they 100% are addicted to certain foods. They daydream about it when the food is unavailable. And wolf it down when it becomes available. In this case it's a particular type of confectionery that is basically a combo of corn syrup, sugar, enriched flour, vegetable oil, artificial flavorings, and dyes/texturizers/etc.
There is no real objective definition of addiction, so that doesn't help. I have an easily addicted personality habit wise, but not very much in the physical addiction sense. I can stop coffee, but I like it so I drink it like almost nobody alive.
I'll show very repetitive, addiction-like eating patterns all the time, but I can just as easily change them (into a new "addiction").
"If you don’t want to eat plain white rice, are you really hungry?"
In my experience - sometimes! Or more specifically, I can eat white rice to satiation, then eat potatoes to satiation, then drink fruit juice to satiation, and still feel undernourished and lethargic until I consume - depending on circumstances - canned tuna, eggs, lean beef, liver, white bread, apple cider vinegar, or exogenous ketones.
Interesting. I guess that might be the difference between satiation and satiety. One is if you want to stop eating (a certain food) and the other means having nutrition requirements met.
That seems directionally true but oversimplified, e.g. if I'm satiated on white rice and potatoes and lean meat, but white bread gives me a kick, that can't exactly be the protein, or the calories. My best guess currently is that it's the betaine, and my next best guess is that there's something in white rice or potatoes that I have limited tolerance for before I hit negative marginal returns to consuming more, so it's actually still the calories.
As I understand it, the body can sense that something's wrong in various ways. And if you eat a thing that fixes that bad state, then you remember that, and next time you're in the same bad state, then you crave the remembered thing.
Similarly if you eat something that poisons you then you remember that taste and hate it. Which is why most adolescents start off their drinking career on cider (tastes really nice), and then after their first bad hangover they don't like the taste of cider any more.
I had this with cider as a youngster, but I also had it as an adult with absinthe, which was a favourite drink until one dissolute night I gave myself the sort of alcohol poisoning that involves vomiting yellow bile. The next time I took the top off a bottle of absinthe the smell made me want to throw up, I couldn't touch it. Oysters apparently do the same thing if you get a bad batch.
Yea in this sense we can learn to fix food issues that our body cannot specifically sense.
I think they even demonstrated this in the mice in the polyol path way experiments; even if you genetically knocked out their ability to taste fructose, they would STILL become addicted to it.
One weird experience I had along these lines in the last couple weeks was I made pancakes out of beef tallow and white flour (and eggs and coconut milk) and then I put plain HWC on top of them.
For some reason, this made me feel hungrier than before I started eating.
And I have definitely experienced this in the past with pancakes (including regular pancakes with cow milk and seed oils).
I have no idea what the issue is. I can eat buttered sourdough toast and don’t get the same feeling.
Did you try eating more pancakes? I never get really hungry until there's food in front of me, at which point I usually eat much more than I originally planned.
I did try eating more pancakes, but it doesn't make that feeling go away. It's a really uncomfortable "I know I should be full based on the amount of food I've eaten, but I'm still ravenous" and the way to solve it is to get out of the kitchen for an hour or so. Then the feeling goes away and I feel fine.
I don't know if you or anyone else is a fan of an old TV series called "Psych" (it ran in the late 2000s on USA Network) but the main tagline every episode was: "I'm sensing something!"
Salt's interesting. I turned vegetarian and a while later found myself craving salt to the stage of eating grains of salt. Found that worrying so did some googling and concluded a craving for salt meant I needed...more salt. So I upped the salt in my diet and that craving went away.
But even though I don't crave salt anymore, if you put potato chips in front of me (fries or crisps), I'll eat them till they're gone. Well past the stage of satiety. Ditto some other salty snacks like pistachios, though potato chips are the worst.
My own experience is that chips/steak fries give excellent satiety, and mine are usually drowned in salt. If you eat enough, you just end up leaving the rest because they're not very appealing any more. That's true of my recent butter/dripping chips, but it was also true of chips fried in varnish in the old days.
I've also found that that's true of ice-cream, which is famously the food that people say there's always room for. If I'm hungry I can wolf a pot, but I can never manage a second pot. Same for double cream, as I think you have found.
But on the other hand, I've never tried deliberately forcing a calorie deficit by eating less than I want. If you're doing that, *nothing* is going to satiate you until you get to the weight your body wants to be.
Quitting seed oils massively improved my ability to eat intuitively, which was non-existent before. I am usually pretty good these days about being able to satisfy food cravings by paying attention to a combination of my desired flavors and textures (e.g crunchy+bitter warrants eating belgian endive, etc).
But yeah it's not always straightforward. A lot of times, a salt craving is more easily satisfied with fruit juice than with, e.g., a pickle or something very obviously salty, so maybe I was craving potassium or some other mineral that was confused for salt?
I'm speculating, but in your case, you also eat extremely limited diets, and so I wonder if you filter your cravings through those diets? E.g. you crave tomato sauce because that's "all you know", but if you would eat a wider palate of food, the cravings would have a wider interpretive context?
The "all you know" thing is definitely an interesting phenomenon. Why am I not craving e.g. fried chicken, or bread, or something else that the diet doesn't allow?
It seems that as long as the diet allows enough things to be broadly sustainable, my cravings can easily be channeled into it. But if it's too narrow or limiting, my brain seems to fall back on ex150 type stuff. Maybe just cause I've been doing it so long and that's "all I know" in a sense?
I would not recommend only white rice. Just put it in cronometer and you see it is missing a ton of micronutrients. One way ticket to depletion, also there is a lot of rice grown within close range of heavy metal industrial contamination and arsenic, which doesn’t make it a good comparison. IMO potatoes avoiding skin and green flesh are far more nutrient complete but you will still develop deficiencies, but at least slower.
Asian village peasants always rounded it out with foraging and other small things and have a million rules that probably came out of lindy experiences over hundreds of years. You can do mostly rice, but only rice is not enough
Well, I did it, and I got no symptoms. If you only do it for 1 month, unlikely to deplete much. I don't recommend it for longer than a month at a time, and supplementing B1 just to be sure is a good idea.
I did only use California and imported Asian rice due to the arsenic issue though.
On obese appetite: I read somewhere that obese people often don't actually feel particularly hungry, just constantly peckish, and this is not satisfied by eating. Hence their hunger signals are nonexistent and this is worse than if they did feel genuine hunger.
If they've eaten to satiety then they're not going to feel real hunger. You only feel real hunger if your body notices your fat stores are too low.
If you're somehow so broken that your body *always* thinks your fat stores are too low, whatever you weigh, then I'd bet you would feel like you were starving. I'd imagine that the real fatties, who are eating as much as they possibly can and weigh hundreds of kilos, are in a state of constant terrible hunger.
Or of course if you were a bit fat, and have tried to starve it off. Then you'd be properly hungry, which is not an urge we're capable of consciously resisting, any more than we can stop breathing.
You make a good point about the "Kentucky" "Fried" "Chicken" stuff. It's always just tasted revolting to me, like greasy cardboard. I don't understand why anyone would eat it at all, let alone pay through the nose for it when you can make delicious fried chicken in a couple of minutes at home.
But if it's somehow filling you with endocannabinoid-like substances, I wonder if you can get an addiction to it. They say that cannabis isn't addictive, but I am sceptical after watching various friends turn into druggie losers who were always stoned. They didn't look like they were getting much joy out of it any more.
On the other hand the only things I ever ate fried in vegetable oil were chips (lots and lots of chips), so you'd think I'd have got the same effect, but I didn't notice any lack of satisfaction when I switched back to chips fried in butter or dripping.
On the gripping hand I drink coffee by the bucket and I don't even notice if it's decaf, so maybe I'm not that easy to addict.
I have a close friend who has told me that they 100% are addicted to certain foods. They daydream about it when the food is unavailable. And wolf it down when it becomes available. In this case it's a particular type of confectionery that is basically a combo of corn syrup, sugar, enriched flour, vegetable oil, artificial flavorings, and dyes/texturizers/etc.
haha horseman SAD food..
There is no real objective definition of addiction, so that doesn't help. I have an easily addicted personality habit wise, but not very much in the physical addiction sense. I can stop coffee, but I like it so I drink it like almost nobody alive.
I'll show very repetitive, addiction-like eating patterns all the time, but I can just as easily change them (into a new "addiction").
"If you don’t want to eat plain white rice, are you really hungry?"
In my experience - sometimes! Or more specifically, I can eat white rice to satiation, then eat potatoes to satiation, then drink fruit juice to satiation, and still feel undernourished and lethargic until I consume - depending on circumstances - canned tuna, eggs, lean beef, liver, white bread, apple cider vinegar, or exogenous ketones.
Interesting. I guess that might be the difference between satiation and satiety. One is if you want to stop eating (a certain food) and the other means having nutrition requirements met.
That sounds like calorie-satiety combined with various micronutrient deficiencies and also protein deficiency.
Rice fixes the calorie problem, potatoes fix the micronutrient problem, and tuna etc fix the protein problem.
If you're hungry for particular foods, that's not just calorie craving.
That seems directionally true but oversimplified, e.g. if I'm satiated on white rice and potatoes and lean meat, but white bread gives me a kick, that can't exactly be the protein, or the calories. My best guess currently is that it's the betaine, and my next best guess is that there's something in white rice or potatoes that I have limited tolerance for before I hit negative marginal returns to consuming more, so it's actually still the calories.
> Of course this also means I immediately smashed through my old plateau low of 217lbs and have been sitting around 211-212lbs for the last week.
> With a little luck, I might break through the 210lbs mark before the end of the experiment.
Oooooh, bang on the 'surprise' boundary. What does the graph look like? e^-t + const + noise or something more linear?
It looks like exponential decay toward a new low of ~210. Maybe I've even already hit it at 212, not sure.
As I understand it, the body can sense that something's wrong in various ways. And if you eat a thing that fixes that bad state, then you remember that, and next time you're in the same bad state, then you crave the remembered thing.
Similarly if you eat something that poisons you then you remember that taste and hate it. Which is why most adolescents start off their drinking career on cider (tastes really nice), and then after their first bad hangover they don't like the taste of cider any more.
I had this with cider as a youngster, but I also had it as an adult with absinthe, which was a favourite drink until one dissolute night I gave myself the sort of alcohol poisoning that involves vomiting yellow bile. The next time I took the top off a bottle of absinthe the smell made me want to throw up, I couldn't touch it. Oysters apparently do the same thing if you get a bad batch.
Yea in this sense we can learn to fix food issues that our body cannot specifically sense.
I think they even demonstrated this in the mice in the polyol path way experiments; even if you genetically knocked out their ability to taste fructose, they would STILL become addicted to it.
One weird experience I had along these lines in the last couple weeks was I made pancakes out of beef tallow and white flour (and eggs and coconut milk) and then I put plain HWC on top of them.
For some reason, this made me feel hungrier than before I started eating.
And I have definitely experienced this in the past with pancakes (including regular pancakes with cow milk and seed oils).
I have no idea what the issue is. I can eat buttered sourdough toast and don’t get the same feeling.
Did you try eating more pancakes? I never get really hungry until there's food in front of me, at which point I usually eat much more than I originally planned.
I did try eating more pancakes, but it doesn't make that feeling go away. It's a really uncomfortable "I know I should be full based on the amount of food I've eaten, but I'm still ravenous" and the way to solve it is to get out of the kitchen for an hour or so. Then the feeling goes away and I feel fine.
So you can just eat infinite pancakes? Weird! Are you deliberately trying to eat less?
Well, I reckon eventually if I kept eating through the hunger, it would catch up to me. But I didn't want to try it out because it sounds sickening.
And, no, I'm not trying to eat less. I just want to enjoy some pancakes! And apparently something in that mixture makes that impossible for me to do.
Haha that sounds like my protein hyperphagia situation!
What flour are you using? I suspect most flour is messed up. Maybe sourdough is different.
I don't know if you or anyone else is a fan of an old TV series called "Psych" (it ran in the late 2000s on USA Network) but the main tagline every episode was: "I'm sensing something!"
Is this the guy pretending to be a detective, but he's actually a psychic?
Salt's interesting. I turned vegetarian and a while later found myself craving salt to the stage of eating grains of salt. Found that worrying so did some googling and concluded a craving for salt meant I needed...more salt. So I upped the salt in my diet and that craving went away.
But even though I don't crave salt anymore, if you put potato chips in front of me (fries or crisps), I'll eat them till they're gone. Well past the stage of satiety. Ditto some other salty snacks like pistachios, though potato chips are the worst.
I've never been much of a potato chip/fries guy, although I certainly didn't get great satiety from chips when I still ate them.
I wonder if tallow fries/chips would have the same effect eventually.. or maybe anything fried & salty is crack?
My own experience is that chips/steak fries give excellent satiety, and mine are usually drowned in salt. If you eat enough, you just end up leaving the rest because they're not very appealing any more. That's true of my recent butter/dripping chips, but it was also true of chips fried in varnish in the old days.
I've also found that that's true of ice-cream, which is famously the food that people say there's always room for. If I'm hungry I can wolf a pot, but I can never manage a second pot. Same for double cream, as I think you have found.
But on the other hand, I've never tried deliberately forcing a calorie deficit by eating less than I want. If you're doing that, *nothing* is going to satiate you until you get to the weight your body wants to be.
Macadamia nuts are a wonderful salty snack that gives me great enjoyment. However, it’s hard for me to eat them past satiety.
I’ve eaten a whole bag of tallow crisps before. Didn’t feel the need to keep eating them beyond that.