| PR_Glen |
07-05-2017 02:05 PM |
It can be genetic but not for the reasons most think. Generally if you have an addictive personality you will indulge. Whether it is with drinking, drugs and eating. It is obsessive behavior, people will grow up and purposely avoid these things to not have the same problems their relatives have had but find that they have developed other addictions instead such as gambling, shopping, collections or even video games.
I have this problem myself. I have been mindful of it since i was young. Going out of my way not to get addicted to even things like caffeine or sugar. My addiction is food though. I have mostly avoided it becoming a problem because I have always been extremely athletic. But the past couple of years I have had some issues with minor injuries from sport and a bit of depression and that was enough for my eating problem to grab hold of me. I got bigger than i ever have been, really out of shape like i have never been before. I was eating constantly as a release. It wasn't a matter of not having will to stop, it was just that I slowly got larger and that hunger hormone ghrelin was constant because my insulin was constantly running because I was eating all day.
I needed to fix this and any minor steps i was taking really wasn't working. I know more about health and nutrition than most people. I have been studying it as a hobby for over 20 years now so I had the knowledge of how to do it but that damn ghrelin hormone makes it EXTREMELY hard to start for anyone because it is triggered as a defense to protect us from losing any size. You could be 500 lbs and it will set off in attempts to protect your size if you try to cut calories any and is what makes dieting so hard in the first place. I needed to do something drastic. So I did exactly that, i had to treat it like an addict would. I had to stop all of it. I did something called a fasting mimicking diet for about 72 hours. I didn't eat anything more than an avocado with a spinach shake a couple times a day. Going from a tonne of fast food and take out to that was a harsh step, but I got through it. After that I ate modest sized steak with a salad and felt a lot better--but full. Since then I have been doing intermittent fasting from anywhere to 16 hours to 30 hours at a time. I'm keeping my carbohydrates in check but it isn't a full on low carb diet by any stretch. I have had great results with the ketogenic diet in the past but it is very hard to sustain and very unrealistic for the most part. Tomorrow will be a month since I started and I am down about 23 lbs and have lost 6 inches from my waist. The fasting thing is FAR more easier than straight up keto and I normally don't even get really hungry until about 30 hours in these days. I am still somewhat active, so I will do shorter fasts for performance purposes but I am night and day from what I was before both health wise and energy wise. Other than one day at the gym and a bit of baseball a few times a week i haven't been that active yet. So for those of you who insist that it is an exercise issue think again. It helps, but not enough. I am lean enough to get things rolling back in the gym again and even plan on doing a run tonight (for the first time in years).
The reason this works so well is because our bodies were not designed to be eating all day. Insulin running all day from eating makes EVERYONE fat. It slows everyone's metabolism and even makes everyone sick. It is not meant to be done by any of us. When we control that we get back to where we should. Shorten that eating window and your natural hgh goes up, inflammation goes down and your cells recycle and regenerate more effectively (look up autophagy). It's not easy to start off, and you don't necessarily have to do the extremes that i did to begin, but it will work for you.
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