How fasting or changing the amount of food that you eat, tampers with your metabolism?
In: Biology
Proper ELI5 – consider your body is like a house with a wood burning stove, you put fuel in to release energy you need. Now, having 0 fuel on hand is dangerous so you have a modest stack of wood inside, somewhere nearby. This is normal for anyone since you don’t want the house to freeze, so everyones body has some fat stores to burn on hand.
But Being obese fat is like bringing more and more wood in than you can burn constantly. Eventually you are building addition after addition on to that house, but only in order to stock the more and more wood inside you keep bringing. Time passes until you could last month’s without getting more wood, stacked to the rafters in every room and corridor where it can go.
Intermittent fasting would be like focusing on burning the wood you have in the house first and only bringing more in at the end of the day. You still need to burn more wood than you bring in, but that deficit will slowly over time whittle away at your stockpiles. It’s made easier to have less calories since your restricting based on time, it’s harder to get them in.
Months pass, Your additions get smaller and smaller, and even if you want to bring more in you can’t fit it. This is because your stomach volume shrinks over the hours it remains empty, and it’s harder to eat thousands of calories in the little time you have with a smaller stomach.
In time, the additions get emptied little by little, and the amount of wood you bring in becomes more manageable and normal because you simply aren’t used to carrying in an over abundance anymore, both physically and mentally.
I lost 100lbs on intermittent fasting, starting from 400+ to my 305 now. At 6 ft 6 I have a dad bod at that weight but I’m lower than I weighed in highschool. I’m working on losing more, thinking of getting to the gym (hotter stove means more wood gets burned!). I made no major changes other than restricting to 6-10pm and not drinking calories before. I ate like crap still, handfuls of lucky charms, full pizzas, beer, munchies out on weekends and still got here because I can’t eat as much in one go anymore. Still have moments where I order or plate up food and chuckle when I can’t finish more than half of what I once did.
Funny, I just realized the stove metaphor is actually spot on since any weight loss is actually expelled as CO2 from breathing!
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