Has anyone here gained a lot of weight after fasting for a while. I was fasting like crazy a few years ago and got down about 40lbs but found it wasn’t super sustainable for me. When I ate normally again I gained all the weight back and then some.
Maybe my body converted everything I ate back to fat after I stopped fasting? I don’t think I ate too crazy after I stopped.
I couldn’t really find my answer any info would be great!
Define “normal”.
Personally I wasn’t ever particularly physically active, but neither was I ever a massive overeater. Before OMAD, “normal” for me meant sipping on a liter of fruit juice a day while seated at my desk; grabbing “just a few” nuts or a slice of cheese on every other kitchen visit; relaxing over an alcoholic beverage accompanied by a small bag of chips or equivalent late at night, maybe twice or thrice a week; and that was just routine, without accounting for the more sporadic food offerings by others, treats while walking around town or being stuck in traffic, grandiose restaurant meals and whatnot; and of course it was all on top of ordinary breakfast and lunch. It sounds like a lot, but strangely enough it wouldn’t add up to thousands of extra calories, just to the mere few hundred separating high-end overweight BMI, where I set off from, and low-end normal BMI, where I’ve landed at. On OMAD, breakfast and lunch merged and the rest just went away.
Now, what would reasonably happen if I gave OMAD up? These habits would progressively creep back in, for one because for me (and I suspect for most folks) greater freedom of choice translates to greater screw-up potential, and for two because instead of getting hungry like clockwork only once a day, in the early afternoon, I’d be getting hungry every couple hours. Surely I could “exercise away” those ~400 calories but doing so would require active action as opposed to avoidance, and at least for me personally the latter is much less mentally taxing to attain. At the end of the day OMAD has served me well as a vessel toward weight loss, remains as effective as a permanent residence for maintenance, still feels effortless a year and a half later and my body seems to like it; I see exactly zero reason to transition to any other definition of “normalcy”.
It’s common for people to diet and lose weight, stop dieting and then gain it back. Any food (energy) not used is stored as fat, regardless of your previous diets. It’s impossible for all of your food to have been converted to fat- it’s used for many different bodily functions.