Like many other people doing fasting, I don’t really get hungry. My hunger is mostly emotional and motivated by stress.
Hence why it’s mostly a myth or false notion that if people don’t eat 6 times a day they will get ravenously hungry.
But then I was reading Dr Fung’s The Obesity Code. And it mentions a number of hunger experiments where participants really did get ravenously hungry on a very low calorie diet. They got obsessed with food to the point where they hoarded silverware and cookbooks, fantasised about food and started mixing strange flavors.
I don’t remember the specifics about these experiments but I can’t help but wonder why people don’t get ravenously hungry on intermittent fasting but do get very hungry and obsessed with food on a low-calorie diet. The same can be observed (up to a certain point) in people doing traditional diets. I don’t remember maybe the people in the experiments were also doing exercise?
Anyway, if I had to do a low-calorie diet instead of fasting I really wouldn’t like it. Low-calorie means you have to eat specific things, pre-plan your meals, and cut out a lot of stuff while on intermittent fasting I get to eat whatever I want during my window. And if I had to eat anything during my fasting time (like bone broth) I would find it very hard not to go down a slippery slope and take more/something else.
My personal experience is that it’s simply easier to make a binary decision on food. I got into IF via the 5:2 diet which has 2 days of very low calorific intake. I realised within a year that it was easier mentally not to eat at all. Just less to fixate on, a simple yes I’m eating or no I’m not.
I Recently saw a video that explained exactly that, why these participant were absolutely miserable while people fasting even feel better that usually and a couple of days into the fast they don’t feel hunger anymore (for a while, until they start to deplete their fat storages I suppose) The reason, according to the author, was that the participants in the experiment were feed mostly carbs, in very low quantities but enough to keep them out of ketosis, so they were constantly hungry, and even going insane for that.
I fast for this reason - it’s just easier to do prolonged fasts than calorie reduction. Don’t need to deal with the hunger and I feel great as opposed to thinking about food all day as I always did on calorie restriction.