QuestionHello there,
I am interested in trying Intermittent Fasting and have signed on to a Yahoo Group with some information on it. I am wondering if you would be willing to share the story of how you got into it and the challenges and benefits you encountered. I'm also curious as to whether IF helps with food sensitivities.
Thank you and good health to you!
AnswerI know the IF group you're referring to, and am a member of it.
Basically, when I first started going rawpalaeo, I made a large number of mistakes since I had very few online sources to draw on. Mistakes included consuming raw-dairy-products, eating only muscle-meat etc. etc. - once I sorted those issues re eating the right foods, I realised that I still had a few problems re fatigue and worked out that this was due to eating too much raw-food. I'd been very sceptical of Aajonus' recommendations re eating so much raw-food throughout each day, but I'd (wrongly) reasoned, at first, that, if raw food was healthy, that the more I ate each day, the faster I would recover - in fact, of course, raw food has higher nutrient-levels than cooked-food so you actually need to eat less of it, by comparison(especially if you eat some of the more nutrient-dense raw organ-meats as well). Anyway, it got to the point where I was eating so much that I lost my appetite, and the huge excess of food each day caused minor stomach-sensitivity(though nothing like the very painful stomach-aches I'd experienced in my cooked-food days). After I'd started to realise that I was struggling with a collapsing appetite, I decided to do whole-day fasts on regular occasions, which benefitted me enormously. Also, I found, in the end, that it was a lot easier to just have one large meal at the end of the day, due to increasing work-commitments. I did have to, initially, start off with eating some raw heather honeycomb or raw, organic fruit during the middle of the day so I could last until the evening meal, but, eventually, that wasn't necessary, and I just stuck to the one daily evening meal.
Later on, I came across some definitive studies about Intermittent Fasting(IF) which confirmed my suspicions, so that I became determined to make my Intermittent Fasting a more regular practice. I've tried experiments with an alternative IF-approach, where you eat all you want on one day(throughout the day or just the one large meal), and nothing the next day(except(mineral-)water), but I found I couldn't sustain it over a long period as my appetite varies considerably and on the eating-days I'd sometimes have virtually no appetite but be ravenously hungry on the whole-day-fasts of each 2-day-cycle - and with that approach you really need to eat enough on the non-fasting days. That said, many people claim that this type of (IF) is more effective than the 1-large-meal-a-day approach.
Anyway, after reducing food-intake to more normal levels and doing IF, I found that the fatigue was removed and I felt a definite increase in speed re my health-recovery - (the way I see it, the process of digestion is tiring and exhausts the body, forcing it divert essential resources away from healing/regenerating itself, so it makes sense to give the body a rest, here and there, from food)
I have no idea if IF helps with food-sensitivities, but, given my own experience re dairy , I very much doubt it.
RPG
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