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.
>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.
Is exactly my point. They never feel full, yet neither do they really feel hungry.
>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.
There's levels to this, and hunger is only one narrow component of the CICO equation. Your body doesn't need to think your fat stores are low, only that you could do with eating some more.
>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.
No, I don't think that's the case. Think about your interactions with normal people. If they go a couple of hours past their usual lunch time, they start to get grumpy. That's peckish behaviour, not starvation behaviour.
Your body mass isn't just how much you eat. Your body has much better control over the CICO balance than your brain does. When fat people attempt to lose weight by cutting down on calories, their body reduces their metabolism to compensate. They don't even need to feel any more hungry than normal.
"For example, protein makes me ravenous. Not instantly, but within 45-60 minutes of eating a high-protein meal, while I might still be physically full & bloated from the protein, I am ravenous and want to eat again."
One possible explanation for this is gluconeogenesis. If protein induces gluconeogenesis in you (maybe you are more susceptible for that for any reason), then your blood sugar will go up and then crash inducing the hunger despite physically full. Have you ever tried to measure blood glucose after these high-protein meals?
"Whatever my body wanted, it wasn’t in tomato sauce - yet, somehow, my body thought it would be."
This was replicated in a study with sheep. They made them deficient of a certain mineral, then gave them three different feeds, with only one of them containing the mineral they were deficient. The sheep started to gravitate toward that one. Then after the sheep got back to normal mineral levels, they switched them to a forth feed for developing a baseline, and after that they made them deficient again. They presented them the same three feed as previosly, but now all of them was lacking the mineral. Despite that the sheep started to eat again the one which solved their deficiency in the past, and continued to prefer that despite now it did not contained the missing mineral.
In your case my assumption is that because of your usual tomato sauce + ground beef meals your body associated tomate sauce with protein. So when you get too little protein it simply starts to crave what it knows to contain protein. But because in the tomato sauce + beef combination the "main taste" is provided by the tomato, you felt craving for that. A possible explanation is that it's easier to "communicate" by strong flavors and hence the body uses the strongest flavor for the communication (but also as you mention it can be simply the glutamate which hijacks the process).
"There is an itch being scratched, the food is giving relief to something. Then, only a few bites in, a visible feeling of revulsion starts to set in."
For me this never happens. I can easily eat junk food as much as I want, I never get a revulsion or disgust. It doesn't help with satiation though. Anything with enough spice and/or sugar and I can eat it until my stomach wants to burst (and even then I would want to eat more).
By the way while I don't have clear craves for micronutrients, I do have for macronutrients. Although It took several years of clean eating of only meat, butter and eggs (plus black coffee), without any spices. By clean eating I don't mean that I've never ate anything else, but like 95% of my food intake were these, with only occassional cheating.
But now I can distinctly tell when my body craves fat or protein or sugar. Also I can tell the difference between mental craving (unfortunately I was taught to use food as stress management, entertainment and rewarding system in childhood) and "body" craving. Also when I'm cheating regularly for a longer period it gets really hard to separate mental and "body" craving.
- I only have "body" craving for sugar when I start to get some flu-like sickness (which happens rarely). And even then only 1-2 times and it vanishes. When this happens eating pure sugar (like honey) without anything else sounds great. But it takes only 1-2 teaspoon and it's enough.
- Protein craving is closest to "hunger which you feel in the stomach". I usually check this by if eating boiled eggs on its own or if grilled chicken breast on its own sounds good. Unfortunately protein satiety doesn't hit clearly and fast for me, and I can easily overeat protein if I'm eating too fast.
- Fat craving is the hardest to tell. Many years ago when I did lowish fat carnivore the only thing I noticed is that I craved all kind of sauces. Later I realized that all of the was high(ish) fat (made by sour cream or mayo, etc.). When I switched to proper high fat carnivore these cravings vanished. Nowadays it's mostly present with "general hunger". Like you don't feel anything hunger-like feeling, but just eating (more) sounds like a good idea. If thinking of pure protein doesn't sound that appealing, but I would just want to eat more and/or if I would want to eat high(er) fat cheat meals then eating more fat makes it go away. Also just as for like you, fat satiety kicks in pretty clearly so I don't have to be careful of overeating fat (assuming fat is not mixed with sugar).
Of course because I'm on low carb for many years now, I'm not sure if there is a separate "more calorie" and "more fat" craving. So maybe what I've written as "fat craving" is just "more calorie". It would an interesting experiment if eating starch would make it go away the feeling I'm no associating with "more fat" (and then if there would be a separate "more fat" craving in some cases).
I have measured my blood sugar, and it does go up, but not crazy high, and it doesn't crash dramatically. Rather it stays elevated for hours on end. So it could be something with GNG, but maybe not the crash part?
If I eat enough protein, I'll basically become prediabetic - my glucose will be high 90s to low 100 all day long until the overnight fast.
Anecdotally for me, starch (rice) and fat both work. I was surprised that I had zero fat cravings, even for cream, eating a 100% rice diet.
I also never have sugar/carb cravings on ex150, so I assume that it's just "energy cravings" for that.
The sheep experiment is interesting, I suspect you're right. I basically hadn't eaten protein without sauce for 2 years straight, so my body would definitely associate the two.
I think her explanation is right, if you've been in a state of protein deficiency and tomato-flavoured things have fixed it, then next time you're in protein deficiency you'll crave something tomato flavoured. And it will take quite a lot of protein-free tomato flavoured things to fix that!
Cool, if you now choose something to put back in, I predict exponential decay upwards to a higher level.
I'd love to know what's going on here. Something about what we eat can shift the equilibrium point. Protein seems involved, but it may not be all of it. It's got to be something interfering with leptin, surely.
I haven't found a low stable point yet, but it's probably around 91kg or less on ex150ish, whereas my high equilibrium eating any old thing ad lib looks like it's around 95kg now. Mum can get it a bit higher than that, probably just through standard maternal over-feeding, but it comes back down again fairly quickly.
Given that 91kg in ketosis is 92.5kg really, that only gives me a 2.5kg range to yo-yo in. Probably enough.....
i've been happy since 230 :) But obviously 209 also made me quite happy.
So happy, in fact, that I've been cheating with jerky & extra meat the last 2 days, since the 209. Hm. Not sure if cravings or if I'm just already counting this experiment as a win and so am slacking off..
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.
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").
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.
"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.
> e.g. if I'm satiated on white rice and potatoes and lean meat, but white bread gives me a kick
Agreed. I wonder if there's something in the white bread that you're missing. (Could even be some novel chemical, you can get addicted to unnatural substances).
Can you get into this state reliably? Does wholemeal bread or sourdough or rye bread fix it for you? Does nice pure white bread where the only ingredients are flour, yeast and salt?
As a reminder, there is practically no such thing as "wholemeal" bread in the U.S. The ingredients are roller milled and sorted, and then later reconstituted to achieve the desired color.
You'd have to go looking far & wide for some organic local artisanal baker to find anything that Old Worlders would consider "wholemeal bread."
To my shame, I have no idea what it means if a packet of UK bread says 'wholemeal' on it. /(pause to consult ChatGPT)/ OK I'm surprised to find out that our definition is so rigorous, all the flour in the loaf must be wholemeal flour, and wholemeal flour must be the result of milling entire intact grains together.
But the great oracle learns me that there's a US legally defined term '100% whole wheat', which is equivalent. Is it just that nowhere sells it?
What you basically want is stone milled, not roller milled. Nearly impossible to find in industrial bread. Only artisans still use those mills, or you can buy them for your counter top.
I've only gotten into this state as a side effect of trying to solve other problems. The clearest case where it was specifically white bread, it was the pide from a local turkish restaurant, which seems likely to be a cleaner white bread than e.g. grocery store white bread, with the exception of a few sesame seeds sprinkled on top, but of course I'm not sure. I didn't have a good quality wholemeal bread on hand to compare.
More recently I've found that specifically pizza seemed to help me liven up and not be a sedentary lump in the evenings or miss sleep from hunger, especially when my supply of oxaloacetate was interrupted - this, on days when I'm fairly sure I'd already had enough protein and eaten as much wholemeal sourdough as I could stomach, plus some other calories sources like rice or sprouted-and-soaked oatmeal plus fruit and fruit juice plus potatoes with spices chosen to increase palatability and digestibility. Today, back on 2g/day oxaloacetate + exogenous ketones (plus my supraphysiological-doses vitamin stack), I managed to get enough of something or other early enough in the day that I'm not craving anything in particular this evening.
Like I said I suspect betaine is a factor (beets seem like at least partially valid substitute), but also I seem to be recovering from a period of accidental undereating while trying to fix other problems; I've also been noticing that I can get usable energy from considerably more fructose early in the day than I'd previously felt was reasonable, and adding exogenous ketones to my diet seems to help too. So maybe I just need the extra calories and need some cofactors to make them palatable; I didn't notice that this was problem because my kCal intake lined up roughly with what my Oura ring claimed I was burning. OTOH I am slowly gaining weight but I have suspended my concern with that as a target until I've finished working through various experiments to see how to keep my waking energy levels up and my sleep good. If my weight *still* hasn't taken care of itself after I finish all that then I'll revisit it in a few months.
I guess one obvious thing to try here is buy some dextrose, to see whether a little dextrose tastes good when fresh white bread or a pizza seems like a good idea. And to try supplementing TMG, which is already next in my queue after alpha-ketoglutarate.
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!"
Not quite: he's a hyperobservant person who has a photographic memory and pretends to be a psychic detective. He's not a real detective, nor is he a real psychic. He solves crimes by giving the real detectives tips based on minute details he's remembered seeing when snooping around crime scenes.
The theme song lyrics say, "I know ... you know ... that I'm not telling the truth; I know ... you know ... they just don't have any proof"
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.
Yeah, I think you're right. This stuff is just the basic Walmart enriched/bleached/pre-sifted all-purpose flour.
I recently bought a bag of unbleached organic (unenriched) all-purpose flour from Bob's Red Mill. I'll try it again with the new stuff and report back!
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.
See, I don't get satiety on steak fries like that. If there's a point where I end up leaving the rest because they're not very appealing, I haven't found it yet. Funny how that's not a universal experience!
Yes, that is interesting! Are you sure you're at or near your equilibrium weight? If you stopped thinking about food and just ate whatever you fancied, would your weight rise?
Chips/steak fries are kind of the perfect food. Some fat, some carbs, some protein, some micronutrients. (Potatoes are not far off being a complete food, and by frying them you've added more fat, which probably somewhat imbalances them).
I imagine just about any craving can be satisfied by chips.
My 2 cents on this: after I started learning more about nutrition (mostly about Ray Peat and pro-metabolic stuff, but not only), I started fixing my "senses". I used to eat absolutely crap, now I find that sometimes I have very specific cravings (eg: milk in the morning, for several days in a row, then suddenly not anymore) and that cravings for unhealthy snacks are gone. There have been occasions where I craved whey protein powder. The cravings for unhealthy stuff are gone to the extent that I can sit net to my wife who is eating potato chips and not touch them.
My body is not always perfect, it doesn't always pop out the food I should eat into my mind, but what I found helps is having a "recipe" list, and then suddenly something pops out from there "Ah yes, this sounds exactly like what I need". (to use machine learning terminology, the generative model is not that good, but the classifier works well :)))
And sometimes the "probability distribution" of what I crave is pretty flat, and then I just eat whatever (healthy stuff) is available.
I've gotten much better at reading my body's signals, too. It helps if you keep a pretty consistent diet, because then it's not this constant chaos & being overwhelmed with all kinds of different inputs/signals.
> If you don’t want to eat plain white rice, are you really hungry?
Me feeling hunger, and me definitely not minding eating plain boring rice right now, or boring canned tuna or even a plain salad leaf or dry chicken breast.
Definitely think I am hungry.
As for craving odd things, I think my most odd craving to date was craving Lugol's iodine.
I woke up one day and I was SERIOUSLY craving it, the 7% solution I have at home in 400ml bottles.
I decided to try it out and took the pipette and sprayed it into my mouth.
Now if you've tried iodine before you know it doesn't taste good, and something like 7% is outright VILE and burns when you consume it directly, but that day? I freaking loved it until my body suddenly said STOP and it tasted not as good anymore.
Never had that again, but it was so weird I cannot help but think about it at times.
idk if my thyroid was messed up, but i had issues prior to taking iodine, which idoine seemingly solved; think of low energy, feeling quite cold in warm areas, brain fog etc.
I've tried at times not taking it to see if it's all placebo, but eventually all the symptoms come back and I get increasingly awful again until I start taking it again.
All those sound like hypothyroid symptoms. So makes sense. You might have the same pseudo-hypothyroid issue (seed oils?) as John from Heart Attack Diet if you read his blog (https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com)
I'll definitely have to read up on those articles and see if it's similar, thanks!! ^^
As for seed oil component, I have no clue.
I had the "luxury" of starting low carb from a borderline anorexic level due to a severe eating disorder I had, so beyond my really early keto days I've been mostly seed-oil free since, though I haven't actually checked my lipids in that regard, so I can only guess.
I did eat bacon for far too long, though, so that likely impacted my levels, too.
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.
>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.
Is exactly my point. They never feel full, yet neither do they really feel hungry.
>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.
There's levels to this, and hunger is only one narrow component of the CICO equation. Your body doesn't need to think your fat stores are low, only that you could do with eating some more.
>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.
No, I don't think that's the case. Think about your interactions with normal people. If they go a couple of hours past their usual lunch time, they start to get grumpy. That's peckish behaviour, not starvation behaviour.
Your body mass isn't just how much you eat. Your body has much better control over the CICO balance than your brain does. When fat people attempt to lose weight by cutting down on calories, their body reduces their metabolism to compensate. They don't even need to feel any more hungry than normal.
"For example, protein makes me ravenous. Not instantly, but within 45-60 minutes of eating a high-protein meal, while I might still be physically full & bloated from the protein, I am ravenous and want to eat again."
One possible explanation for this is gluconeogenesis. If protein induces gluconeogenesis in you (maybe you are more susceptible for that for any reason), then your blood sugar will go up and then crash inducing the hunger despite physically full. Have you ever tried to measure blood glucose after these high-protein meals?
"Whatever my body wanted, it wasn’t in tomato sauce - yet, somehow, my body thought it would be."
This was replicated in a study with sheep. They made them deficient of a certain mineral, then gave them three different feeds, with only one of them containing the mineral they were deficient. The sheep started to gravitate toward that one. Then after the sheep got back to normal mineral levels, they switched them to a forth feed for developing a baseline, and after that they made them deficient again. They presented them the same three feed as previosly, but now all of them was lacking the mineral. Despite that the sheep started to eat again the one which solved their deficiency in the past, and continued to prefer that despite now it did not contained the missing mineral.
In your case my assumption is that because of your usual tomato sauce + ground beef meals your body associated tomate sauce with protein. So when you get too little protein it simply starts to crave what it knows to contain protein. But because in the tomato sauce + beef combination the "main taste" is provided by the tomato, you felt craving for that. A possible explanation is that it's easier to "communicate" by strong flavors and hence the body uses the strongest flavor for the communication (but also as you mention it can be simply the glutamate which hijacks the process).
"There is an itch being scratched, the food is giving relief to something. Then, only a few bites in, a visible feeling of revulsion starts to set in."
For me this never happens. I can easily eat junk food as much as I want, I never get a revulsion or disgust. It doesn't help with satiation though. Anything with enough spice and/or sugar and I can eat it until my stomach wants to burst (and even then I would want to eat more).
By the way while I don't have clear craves for micronutrients, I do have for macronutrients. Although It took several years of clean eating of only meat, butter and eggs (plus black coffee), without any spices. By clean eating I don't mean that I've never ate anything else, but like 95% of my food intake were these, with only occassional cheating.
But now I can distinctly tell when my body craves fat or protein or sugar. Also I can tell the difference between mental craving (unfortunately I was taught to use food as stress management, entertainment and rewarding system in childhood) and "body" craving. Also when I'm cheating regularly for a longer period it gets really hard to separate mental and "body" craving.
- I only have "body" craving for sugar when I start to get some flu-like sickness (which happens rarely). And even then only 1-2 times and it vanishes. When this happens eating pure sugar (like honey) without anything else sounds great. But it takes only 1-2 teaspoon and it's enough.
- Protein craving is closest to "hunger which you feel in the stomach". I usually check this by if eating boiled eggs on its own or if grilled chicken breast on its own sounds good. Unfortunately protein satiety doesn't hit clearly and fast for me, and I can easily overeat protein if I'm eating too fast.
- Fat craving is the hardest to tell. Many years ago when I did lowish fat carnivore the only thing I noticed is that I craved all kind of sauces. Later I realized that all of the was high(ish) fat (made by sour cream or mayo, etc.). When I switched to proper high fat carnivore these cravings vanished. Nowadays it's mostly present with "general hunger". Like you don't feel anything hunger-like feeling, but just eating (more) sounds like a good idea. If thinking of pure protein doesn't sound that appealing, but I would just want to eat more and/or if I would want to eat high(er) fat cheat meals then eating more fat makes it go away. Also just as for like you, fat satiety kicks in pretty clearly so I don't have to be careful of overeating fat (assuming fat is not mixed with sugar).
Of course because I'm on low carb for many years now, I'm not sure if there is a separate "more calorie" and "more fat" craving. So maybe what I've written as "fat craving" is just "more calorie". It would an interesting experiment if eating starch would make it go away the feeling I'm no associating with "more fat" (and then if there would be a separate "more fat" craving in some cases).
I have measured my blood sugar, and it does go up, but not crazy high, and it doesn't crash dramatically. Rather it stays elevated for hours on end. So it could be something with GNG, but maybe not the crash part?
If I eat enough protein, I'll basically become prediabetic - my glucose will be high 90s to low 100 all day long until the overnight fast.
Anecdotally for me, starch (rice) and fat both work. I was surprised that I had zero fat cravings, even for cream, eating a 100% rice diet.
I also never have sugar/carb cravings on ex150, so I assume that it's just "energy cravings" for that.
The sheep experiment is interesting, I suspect you're right. I basically hadn't eaten protein without sauce for 2 years straight, so my body would definitely associate the two.
I think her explanation is right, if you've been in a state of protein deficiency and tomato-flavoured things have fixed it, then next time you're in protein deficiency you'll crave something tomato flavoured. And it will take quite a lot of protein-free tomato flavoured things to fix that!
> 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.
Cool, if you now choose something to put back in, I predict exponential decay upwards to a higher level.
I'd love to know what's going on here. Something about what we eat can shift the equilibrium point. Protein seems involved, but it may not be all of it. It's got to be something interfering with leptin, surely.
I haven't found a low stable point yet, but it's probably around 91kg or less on ex150ish, whereas my high equilibrium eating any old thing ad lib looks like it's around 95kg now. Mum can get it a bit higher than that, probably just through standard maternal over-feeding, but it comes back down again fairly quickly.
Given that 91kg in ketosis is 92.5kg really, that only gives me a 2.5kg range to yo-yo in. Probably enough.....
nvm, 209.8 this morning.. I think the mushrooms & hot cocoa were messing me up somehow
python3 -c 'h=(6*12+1)*0.0254; print((209.8/2.2046)/ (h*h))'
27.679773198874727
Ooh! That's barely even overweight! I'd be happy with that.
python3 -c 'h=(5*12+10)*0.0254; print((90.8)/ (h*h))'
28.722506424604685
You're a full point ahead, and I'm in also in ketosis at the moment.
What does nvm mean?
never mind
i've been happy since 230 :) But obviously 209 also made me quite happy.
So happy, in fact, that I've been cheating with jerky & extra meat the last 2 days, since the 209. Hm. Not sure if cravings or if I'm just already counting this experiment as a win and so am slacking off..
Err on the side of cravings, protein deficiency is bad!
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.
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").
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..
"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.
> e.g. if I'm satiated on white rice and potatoes and lean meat, but white bread gives me a kick
Agreed. I wonder if there's something in the white bread that you're missing. (Could even be some novel chemical, you can get addicted to unnatural substances).
Can you get into this state reliably? Does wholemeal bread or sourdough or rye bread fix it for you? Does nice pure white bread where the only ingredients are flour, yeast and salt?
As a reminder, there is practically no such thing as "wholemeal" bread in the U.S. The ingredients are roller milled and sorted, and then later reconstituted to achieve the desired color.
You'd have to go looking far & wide for some organic local artisanal baker to find anything that Old Worlders would consider "wholemeal bread."
To my shame, I have no idea what it means if a packet of UK bread says 'wholemeal' on it. /(pause to consult ChatGPT)/ OK I'm surprised to find out that our definition is so rigorous, all the flour in the loaf must be wholemeal flour, and wholemeal flour must be the result of milling entire intact grains together.
But the great oracle learns me that there's a US legally defined term '100% whole wheat', which is equivalent. Is it just that nowhere sells it?
What you basically want is stone milled, not roller milled. Nearly impossible to find in industrial bread. Only artisans still use those mills, or you can buy them for your counter top.
100% whole wheat can be reconstituted.
I've only gotten into this state as a side effect of trying to solve other problems. The clearest case where it was specifically white bread, it was the pide from a local turkish restaurant, which seems likely to be a cleaner white bread than e.g. grocery store white bread, with the exception of a few sesame seeds sprinkled on top, but of course I'm not sure. I didn't have a good quality wholemeal bread on hand to compare.
More recently I've found that specifically pizza seemed to help me liven up and not be a sedentary lump in the evenings or miss sleep from hunger, especially when my supply of oxaloacetate was interrupted - this, on days when I'm fairly sure I'd already had enough protein and eaten as much wholemeal sourdough as I could stomach, plus some other calories sources like rice or sprouted-and-soaked oatmeal plus fruit and fruit juice plus potatoes with spices chosen to increase palatability and digestibility. Today, back on 2g/day oxaloacetate + exogenous ketones (plus my supraphysiological-doses vitamin stack), I managed to get enough of something or other early enough in the day that I'm not craving anything in particular this evening.
Like I said I suspect betaine is a factor (beets seem like at least partially valid substitute), but also I seem to be recovering from a period of accidental undereating while trying to fix other problems; I've also been noticing that I can get usable energy from considerably more fructose early in the day than I'd previously felt was reasonable, and adding exogenous ketones to my diet seems to help too. So maybe I just need the extra calories and need some cofactors to make them palatable; I didn't notice that this was problem because my kCal intake lined up roughly with what my Oura ring claimed I was burning. OTOH I am slowly gaining weight but I have suspended my concern with that as a target until I've finished working through various experiments to see how to keep my waking energy levels up and my sleep good. If my weight *still* hasn't taken care of itself after I finish all that then I'll revisit it in a few months.
I guess one obvious thing to try here is buy some dextrose, to see whether a little dextrose tastes good when fresh white bread or a pizza seems like a good idea. And to try supplementing TMG, which is already next in my queue after alpha-ketoglutarate.
What is that TEE your intake/oura were suggesting? (And your lean mass if you know it, or height)
I’m 5’7.5” and Oura usually claims I burn around 2500 kcal/day but I feel better eating around 3500-4000.
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?
Not quite: he's a hyperobservant person who has a photographic memory and pretends to be a psychic detective. He's not a real detective, nor is he a real psychic. He solves crimes by giving the real detectives tips based on minute details he's remembered seeing when snooping around crime scenes.
The theme song lyrics say, "I know ... you know ... that I'm not telling the truth; I know ... you know ... they just don't have any proof"
I was thinking of The Mentalist, but that also seems like a similar premise, not actual psychic powers. Only saw a bit of one episode.
haha, yeah, those two shows came out around the same time. There's a few references to The Mentalist in Psych (because Psych is meant to be a comedy)
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.
Haha that sounds like my protein hyperphagia situation!
What flour are you using? I suspect most flour is messed up. Maybe sourdough is different.
Yeah, I think you're right. This stuff is just the basic Walmart enriched/bleached/pre-sifted all-purpose flour.
I recently bought a bag of unbleached organic (unenriched) all-purpose flour from Bob's Red Mill. I'll try it again with the new stuff and report back!
My dream if I were to do ex_bread right now: Azure Organics grain, stone-milled fresh daily at home using a $200 or so countertop stone grinder.
My God, we're going to be knitting our own yoghurt soon. I'll start braiding my beard.
Lindy if ever there was such a thing
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.
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.
See, I don't get satiety on steak fries like that. If there's a point where I end up leaving the rest because they're not very appealing, I haven't found it yet. Funny how that's not a universal experience!
Yes, that is interesting! Are you sure you're at or near your equilibrium weight? If you stopped thinking about food and just ate whatever you fancied, would your weight rise?
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.
Chips is high carb + high fat food. So it can be simply fat craving.
Chips/steak fries are kind of the perfect food. Some fat, some carbs, some protein, some micronutrients. (Potatoes are not far off being a complete food, and by frying them you've added more fat, which probably somewhat imbalances them).
I imagine just about any craving can be satisfied by chips.
My 2 cents on this: after I started learning more about nutrition (mostly about Ray Peat and pro-metabolic stuff, but not only), I started fixing my "senses". I used to eat absolutely crap, now I find that sometimes I have very specific cravings (eg: milk in the morning, for several days in a row, then suddenly not anymore) and that cravings for unhealthy snacks are gone. There have been occasions where I craved whey protein powder. The cravings for unhealthy stuff are gone to the extent that I can sit net to my wife who is eating potato chips and not touch them.
My body is not always perfect, it doesn't always pop out the food I should eat into my mind, but what I found helps is having a "recipe" list, and then suddenly something pops out from there "Ah yes, this sounds exactly like what I need". (to use machine learning terminology, the generative model is not that good, but the classifier works well :)))
And sometimes the "probability distribution" of what I crave is pretty flat, and then I just eat whatever (healthy stuff) is available.
I've gotten much better at reading my body's signals, too. It helps if you keep a pretty consistent diet, because then it's not this constant chaos & being overwhelmed with all kinds of different inputs/signals.
> If you don’t want to eat plain white rice, are you really hungry?
Me feeling hunger, and me definitely not minding eating plain boring rice right now, or boring canned tuna or even a plain salad leaf or dry chicken breast.
Definitely think I am hungry.
As for craving odd things, I think my most odd craving to date was craving Lugol's iodine.
I woke up one day and I was SERIOUSLY craving it, the 7% solution I have at home in 400ml bottles.
I decided to try it out and took the pipette and sprayed it into my mouth.
Now if you've tried iodine before you know it doesn't taste good, and something like 7% is outright VILE and burns when you consume it directly, but that day? I freaking loved it until my body suddenly said STOP and it tasted not as good anymore.
Never had that again, but it was so weird I cannot help but think about it at times.
Huh very curious. I think iodine is involved in thyroid function?
Yep! It's why I take it.
idk if my thyroid was messed up, but i had issues prior to taking iodine, which idoine seemingly solved; think of low energy, feeling quite cold in warm areas, brain fog etc.
I've tried at times not taking it to see if it's all placebo, but eventually all the symptoms come back and I get increasingly awful again until I start taking it again.
All those sound like hypothyroid symptoms. So makes sense. You might have the same pseudo-hypothyroid issue (seed oils?) as John from Heart Attack Diet if you read his blog (https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com)
I'll definitely have to read up on those articles and see if it's similar, thanks!! ^^
As for seed oil component, I have no clue.
I had the "luxury" of starting low carb from a borderline anorexic level due to a severe eating disorder I had, so beyond my really early keto days I've been mostly seed-oil free since, though I haven't actually checked my lipids in that regard, so I can only guess.
I did eat bacon for far too long, though, so that likely impacted my levels, too.
I appreciate the Diablo 1 reference ("I sense a soul in search of answers").
Ahh fresh meat!