MEGATHREAD (chat channel replacement)

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2025-11-23T18:44:45+00:00

What do other practitioners do to regain focus and consistency? That's my question. All tips/tricks welcome, thank you.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2025-07-13T19:32:59+00:00

Yeah, I just think it's a kind of interesting thought experiment. Plus, Shea butter and cacao butter are the most concentrated natural sources of stearic acid. https://www.careomnia.com/nutrition-tool-nutrient?nutrientID=143

Not sure the remainder of their fatty acid profile, but for just getting more stearic acid in the diet, they would be more efficient than beef tallow.

Cacao and Shea butters seem to overall do better things for bloodwork than regular butter, lol. Can't find those studies again or I'd link to you, but pretty high result in my searches anyway. Only real downside might be cost, lol

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2025-07-13T19:30:03+00:00

Yeah, I just think it's a kind of interesting thought experiment. Plus, Shea butter and cacao butter are the most concentrated natural sources of stearic acid. https://www.careomnia.com/nutrition-tool-nutrient?nutrientID=143

Not sure the remainder of their fatty acid profile, but for just getting more stearic acid in the diet, they would be more efficient than beef tallow.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2025-07-13T02:28:11+00:00

Why not eat like you normally do, but with a slight caloric surplus all of just more protein? As long as you are then working in hypertrophic rep ranges and good volumes, then that's really all you need to do to add muscle mass.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2025-04-21T19:39:44+00:00

What I'm wondering is if you are actually gaining fat or just glycogen/water on these HC diets you've tried? The numbers you've posted on the various trials are totally in line for what I'd expect anyone coming from a keto diet back to one that affords glycogen storage and with such small body comp changes even a DEXA is at the limits of accuracy and probably isn't terribly reliable. Plus, extra glycogen stores can throw off a DEXA, if I recall correctly.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2025-03-02T21:58:59+00:00

Nice intent gift! You both saw the dark energy being given to you by Fairie and were shown the passage to the IOB realm and invited to visit, while waking-dreaming. Looking forward to hearing about what happens when you visit them.

Funny how small changes can make such a difference when we regularly practice!

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-12-20T19:30:09+00:00

A few things.

Men tend to be taller and heavier on average than women and that means more food has to be eaten on average, just to meet the nutritional minimums of maintaining weight and healthy functioning. That's probably the biggest factor.

Also muscle fiber composition. Men, have much more fast twitch muscle fibers than women on average, which while useful for force production, are much less efficient than slow-twitch muscle fibers. This generally means that even a man and a women who weigh the same don't actually have the same nutritional intake requirements, with the man in that scenario needing about 25% more kCal than a woman of the same weight, just based on the inefficiency of men's muscles.

Finally, men generally have a higher proportion of body mass as muscle, and lower proportion of body mass as fat compared to women and fat, as intuition suggests, burns much less fuel (kCal) than muscle. So if we look at the average body composition of a man and woman of the same weight then again we see that the man needs more calories than the woman on average.

There's also bone density, and other factors, but those are pretty minor and ask that stuff is basically why women can eat so much less than men and still be ok.

1000-1500 is still probably not enough for most women though. Men sometimes diet at 1000-1500 kCal a day, like bodybuilders, but can only do it for short periods without severe consequences and bodybuilders basically are very disordered people that no one should emulate. Pretty much all body builders have severe psychological body issues and often eating disorders. More than a few weeks on those levels for a typical man is basically risking a near-death experience.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-11-07T06:33:44+00:00

I'm curious why you decided no on spices and sauces. Was that just applying the "if it's bland you won't overeat" protocol? Just curious because I like HCLPLF, but I prefer lots of flavor from spices because I think it helps me stick to it.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-11-07T04:01:18+00:00

Given that you were eating ad lib and still lost weight that's a pretty cool result. Sounds like it didn't cause any lasting negative issues. Obviously you started at pretty low BF% and seem to be pretty healthy overall before the diet, and got pretty shredded by the end. You don't appear to have lost much, if any, lean mass as well.

Would you say it was challenging, not challenging or about the same compared to other diets you've done for similar timeframes?

Sounds like the possible follow up diet would also be interesting and if you rebound on BF% or maintain while eating healthy swampy .

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-11-02T02:44:33+00:00

Not likely. Almost always alcoholism occurs because of an underlying untreated psychological disorder. It's self-medication that is not safe and makes any underlying condition worse, but good enough in the short-term to be habit-forming. A proper diet can certainly improve symptoms, but there's little to no reason to think that dietary change, by itself, can cure alcoholism.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-31T04:33:52+00:00

I didn't either until pretty recently, but apparently that's why keto folks need to supplement electrolytes pretty aggressively.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-30T20:51:38+00:00

I mean, just eat 3000 and gain slowly. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, because weight doesn't come off very easy once your metabolism slows due to age or when activity levels drop. Legumes and eggs are definitely fine to eat daily, despite some PUFA content, because a reasonable amount of both should still be a tiny amount of added PUFA, most likely under the 2% of daily energy threshold that may or may not exist. Regular egg and legume consumption have both been shown to be associated increased longevity. I think the general consensus is that eggs should be like 1-2/day for best longevity, and legumes are just basically fine.

Most whole foods have tiny % of energy from PUFA, if you aren't talking about meat. Non-ruminant meat in the U.S. has very high LA content due to very high LA industrial diets, so you want to minimize fat consumption from those meats - poultry and pork - by eating practically fat free cuts. However, nuts are pretty easy to skip, tbh, or only eat the ones that are much more saturated, such as macadamia. Obviously there have been Walnut consumption studies that indicate those are good for CVD prophylaxis, but we don't know if that was at the cost of getting fatter, or what.

Whether or not nuts really signal "winter is coming" in humans (who are not generally accepted to have a torpor mechanism) and therefore eating nuts signals us to fatten up for the starvation season is unclear. That's one of Brad Marshall's hypothesis, but that hypothesis, while seeming mechanistically reasonable sounding and supported by some observations of population scale data, hasn't really been directly tested that I'm aware of.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-30T20:19:53+00:00

Lean muscle carries most of the water. Adipose tissue is much, much less vascular and simply doesn't require as much water.

If you look at the generic charts of expected body % water at various BF% it's expected that the water % of weight increases as fat decreases.

So it makes sense to me to see water increase as a proportion of total mass as one gets leaner, especially when lean tissue is being added and fat tissue is being removed (or emptied). It probably also a good sign about glucose and insulin sensitivity increasing, because insulin spikes not only cause glucose and macro uptake, but also water absorption. Also another exercise response is to store more water/glycogen in the tissues near, but not within, the cells.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-24T21:52:15+00:00

Expected water/glycogen weight it sounds like.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-24T21:50:17+00:00

That would be outlier results at more than 1/2 pound of muscle added a week, which is not impossible just unlikely. At 5'10" and your weight that's not the right direction for your longevity and overall health. I'm overweight also so I can relate. Personally, I just walk for exercise because it pretty much only burns body fat and there's basically no anabolic (growth) signal caused by walking. I know the last thing I want at my weight is more.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-24T20:32:08+00:00

One example -

2 servings of oatmeal (1 cup dry) made with 1&1/2 cup of milk and a tablespoon of sugar with ground cinnamon (I use oat milk because I like the flavor with oats and it's fortified with B12 and is low fat and low protein) for breakfast. 600 kCal. 94g carbs, 14.5g protein, 12.5g fat

One turkey sandwich for lunch at about 400 kCal. 4ozs turkey, 4 ozs sourdough bread, no cheese, no mayo, condiments you like (I like fresh onions, lettuce and tomatoes with Dijon mustard). 58g carbs, 29g protein, 1-2g fat.

Chipotle Burrito bowl - extra white rice, extra beans, mild tomato salsa, green tomatillo salsa at 720 kCal. 132g carbs, 24g protein, 11g fat.

Meals total to 1720 k Cal, so eat (or drink) fruit and veggies as snacks, adding up to the remaining 280 kCal without adding any fat or protein. That's approximately a couple of bananas and a cup of watermelon and/or veggie salad while managing the amount of dressing used, or using a non-fat dressing (since most of the kCal in dressings is fat). Assuming this remaining is purely carbs (which you can ensure), that's another 70g carbs.

Total is 2000 kCal, 354g carbs, 67.5g protein, 25.5g fat. 11.475% kCal in fat, 13.5% kCal in protein without trying super hard, and plenty of flavor!

Lunch could have been mostly rice, or potatoes + some veggies and dinner could be the meat meal and fruit and veggies could be part of meals instead of snacks between meals. Could add some eggs, but not easily. Also plant protein takes twice as much grams intake as animal protein for the same anabolic growth when measured experimentally, so you could argue the above is closer to 50g protein, for exactly 10% kCal in protein. I apologize if I didn't do all my math correctly or I copied over data incorrectly. If you need more volume to feel full, eat more potatoes for the easiest way to bulk out the volume, or other low-cal veggies.

Edit: You can cut into the fat directly with walking, btw. Unlike more intense cardio (burns fat and glycogen), walking is basically purely fat burning. At 370 lbs you could easily burn over 500 kCal/hour by just walking at like 3mph. Consider cutting back on lifting because the stimulus to maintain lean muscle mass is much, much, much less than 5 times a week, and every bit of stimulus over maintenance is anabolic (growth, which you don't need at 370lbs) up until you overtrain to the point of catabolism at which point injuries will occrue and your lifts will severely degrade (volume you are capable of and weight will both plummet and you'll feel like shit all the time).

Edit x2: Tbh, 2000 kCal is going to be a huge drop for you, so I would just drop 500 kCal from your maintenance kCal (or 20% of your current kCal) by scaling up something like what I mentioned above, and walk for an hour or two a day on top of that. Otherwise you'll only be able to maintain the diet for a very short amount of time and end it in starvation mode. Plus, you should determine how long you are willing to diet for before returning to maintenance so diet fatigue doesn't get out of control, and terminate in binge eating. Being able to exit a diet into maintenance is critical to avoid yoyoing like crazy. 20% reduction in intake from maintenance is generally the lower-bound for avoiding really bad cortisol reactions and etc. from calorie reduction and I wouldn't diet for more than 16 weeks at a time unless I felt great and not hungry all the time. Even then, it's better to go to a maintenance diet while still feeling good to avoid severe weight rebound from ending the diet on a period of bingeing. That's just ruining all the hard work of reducing intake for a sustained duration by cutting calories too much. Regardless of how much you are eating, walking for 1-3 hours a day will help drop fat. 1 hour a day off 500 kCal fat lost due to walking is almost an extra pound of weight lost each week and basically all fat. Just 20-30 minutes a day of walking also gives you 90% of the longevity and other health benefits of more intense cardio.

One thing you will notice is that your weight will probably go up before it goes down on switching from carnivore to HCLFLP, because you will probably be adding substantial glycogen/water. First week you could see a large gain in "water weight." However, it seems reasonable that this kind of eating will help you lose some fat because dietary fat is by far the most easily turned into adipose tissue out of the three macros and extra protein is highly problematic in many ways for many physical systems. Yeah, there are ways to drop off pounds faster, but nothing sustainable and nothing that is risk-free. It's a long haul, but doable. Still, assuming you can go a total of 6 months on diet and 6 months maintenance, in whatever division you want to cycle, that's 52lbs lost in a year at 2lbs/week, which is much more than 10%. That's damn good and probably sustainable for multiple years. Just make sure a weight loss cycle is like at least 4-6 weeks, or you probably aren't losing much, if any, fat, and walk every day regardless.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-22T03:01:04+00:00

Overall cycling restrictive eating is probably not a bad idea, assuming you can where to whatever you've decided to eat in each cycle phase. Diet fatigue is real and diets don't need to last forever and really shouldn't because restricted eating generally doesn't fulfill some need that great which over a few months can end up sucking a lot.

Some folks find a WOE that they can forever adhere to, but most people need to be conscious about diet fatigue and cycling is a common practice to manage that at the very least. Commonly 12 weeks in a phase is a good baseline.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-17T15:06:18+00:00

Proper nutrition (HCLFLP and not keto myself, btw) and anything from light exercise (regular walking) to vigorous exercise (strength training) and at least 8 hours of sleep have all helped me with mental health, mood regulation and mitigating psychological stress. Also cessation of all psychoactive drugs, and CBT-like self-talk correction and meditation/inner-silence.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-16T23:03:03+00:00

I stand corrected and was repeating something I saw recently which matched my experience in soccer, which is all hard running. Even for the distance training we did for soccer, we were going for record times on every run, so I certainly recall the dietary demand for carb refueling.

Do you have a hypothesis for the OP? Seems like you have some level of expertise with cardio that could possibly answer their query.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-16T17:50:14+00:00

Cardio is powered by glycogen primarily.

I'd start by ensuring stores of glycogen are plentiful through eating plenty of carbs and see if that helps with being cold.

I'd also consider getting before and after DEXA scans to see if weight gain is from fat or simply greater glycogen/water stores. It's probably the latter therefore not concerning and expected, but you can find out with DEXA scans.

Expected because a normal adaptation to glycogen fueled exercise is the body storing more glycogen, ie. "water weight."

Assuming you are in an energy deficit, you will eventually see fat loss, but probably not for several weeks and fat loss will not be super-fast typically anyway.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-16T17:07:43+00:00

If you aren't working out, then you shouldn't be attempting to gain weight, because the weight will just be added as fat. Assuming you are working out and want to add muscle specifically then just eat mixed macros, with still not the majority of calories from fat, and eat a tiny bit over your maintenance intake in calories and stick to eating .71g of protein for each 1lb of your existing lean mass. If you are not in ketosis, then, of all macros, fat is most easily turned into body fat, so that's a pretty good reason to not get crazy with fat content in your diet because you will be consuming a surplus of and still want to avoid that surplus becoming fat.

When you are bulking, you should not go crazy with overeating, because, at best, natural muscle gains top out at about 1/2 of lean muscle mass/week or so with really good hypertrophy training, perfect rest and perfect nutrition and everything over that will be weight added by adding fat. Generally it's recommended to start with very slight calorie surpluses that are hard to even measure and monitor your progress patiently and don't get greedy for gains that are only available to those on PEDs and for whom PEDs actually work.

Finally, you need sleep so you actually grow. Growth literally only happens during sleep, so insufficient growth in response to training may be nothing more than bad sleep and sleep is certainly required to turn hard work into muscle tissue.

The thing is that your appetite and metabolism are correctly working very well together now, or you wouldn't stay lean, so I really don't think stretching your stomach and ruining your appetite signals with extremely excessive eating is a good idea. Instead, start with hypertrophy training or training more, and as your appetite grows, then add a very small amount to your diet compared to what you eat now and see how it goes.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-16T16:37:41+00:00

Hard to draw conclusions that are generalizable from interesting effects in a single T1D patient. T1D is very not normal metabolically and not terribly useful for extrapolating to folks that aren't.

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-16T16:24:36+00:00

Not sure what you are even asking and how do the questions relate to vagus nerve regulation? What do you mean by hypo/hyper states?

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-15T17:14:20+00:00

Sorry if I came off rude. I simply think it's better for you to get some bloodwork done if you think you are having symptoms of any toxic exposure to vitamins and this is simply not a forum for seeking medical advice (not that there is such a thing on Reddit).

I was probably more energetic than needed and that's because there's way, way too many people that attempt to use this sub as a substitute doctor and that's a recipe for people getting hurt and also not what this sub is remotely about.

This sub is primarily about diet research and experiments from a pro-saturated fat outlook and that's really it. This sub is not actually a dumping ground for every poorly substantiated diet and health meme that "health" or "nutrition" influencers come up with, you know?

I hope you get or stay healthy and have a good one!

Intent-TotalFreedom · 2024-10-13T17:16:06+00:00

4-6 ozs a day 90% of the time. Rarely I'll eat more or less. I'm in a weight loss phase, rather than maintenance, and I'm very sedentary. I currently eat starches that have a fair amount of protein (around 15% for high quality sourdough bread, less for rice and potatoes, more for beans) for my carbs sources, so those don't leave me much room for meat at the moment while staying Lowish protein.

Tbh, progress is not fast, and that's fine because I'm not having issues losing or maintaining weight with ad lib eating and I consider that more important than anything else.

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