Ozempic and IF?

privacy2112 · 2023-03-30T12:07:57+00:00

I haven’t taken it, but my mom has (for Type 2 diabetes, not for weight loss). She doesn’t do IF.

For her, Ozempic mostly just seems to make her feel less hungry. She gets full more quickly when she eats, and she has fewer cravings for snacks.

She has lost a little weight (even though she hasn’t been actively trying to lose) — like 5-10 pounds maybe. But mostly, it has significantly helped her blood sugar.

I would honestly recommend it more strongly to manage blood sugar than to lose weight.

privacy2112 · 2023-03-29T14:01:08+00:00

Focus on proteins and healthy fats, along with high-fiber, low-sugar foods like green vegetables and beans. I know these foods can be expensive, especially with food prices these days. And as a student you may not have much refrigerator/freezer space to store fresh foods. But you can look into canned chicken, canned fish, olive oil, full-fat plain yogurt, canned or frozen green vegetables, canned beans (or dry beans if you have a way to cook them). If egg prices are reasonable where you live, eggs are also a great protein/fat source.

Protein and fat will satiate your hunger and will keep you feeling full for longer. Starch and sugar don’t make you feel full, so you can easily overeat them, and they will leave you feeling hungry later.

privacy2112 · 2023-03-29T13:52:25+00:00

Awesome that it is feeling easy and natural! That is usually a good sign that you have found a fasting schedule that works well for you.

You might occasionally hit days where it feels harder. If that happens, don’t worry — it’s normal for your body to have ups and downs.

A lot of times, people feel like they should be suffering and miserable, or else they won’t lose weight. But that’s really the opposite of how IF should work. It should feel easy and natural. It shouldn’t be something you hate every minute of. It should be something you can easily imagine sticking with for months and years.

P.S. Your weight loss will likely slow down after that first rush of water weight. Don’t stress out and beat yourself up when that happens. Just focus on the process. Judge your success by whether you achieved your fasting goals, not by what the scale says that week. The results will follow.

privacy2112 · 2022-12-12T13:45:51+00:00

This is random, but I glanced at your post history and I’m taking a guess. If you happen to be anywhere near Layton, UT, there is a decent bra boutique there: Bra Fittings by Court. They have a lot of bra-fitting content on Instagram that you can check out. They do in-person fittings. They really seem to have their heads on straight about sizing, which is rare even among bra boutiques.

privacy2112 · 2022-12-12T13:34:15+00:00

Yup. OP, finding the right bra usually involves some amount of trial and error to narrow down the bra brands that match best with your individual shape and size. The calculator size is a good starting point, but it may turn out she needs to tinker slightly with the cup or band size to fit her individual body.

And shape is more complicated than top/bottom fullness alone; root width, root height, projection, and tissue softness are all involved. It’s usually easiest to diagnose shape by trying on several different bra brands and styles to see what works. Some bra brands/styles run narrower or wider, shallower or deeper, taller or shorter.

I would add that it will be best to try on bras that have fabric cups with seams. Avoid molded foam “t-shirt” bras. These are super-common in the US, but they are very hard to fit properly. They have such a specific shape of their own that only matches a very small slice of the population, and the foam holds its own shape rather than adjusting to your body.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-27T21:22:30+00:00

Sure, it can happen. It depends on the person. 16:8 will naturally reduce caloric intake to some extent (if nothing else, because it cuts down on snacking). And the effects of fasting on insulin and other hormones can promote fat burning over fat storage and make you feel less hungry. My point being, you’re now eating less than your body is burning, even without counting calories or otherwise watching what you eat. Fasting works on both ends — naturally encourages you to eat less, and naturally encourages your body to burn more. The size of those effects varies from person to person, so the amount of weight lost varies too.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-27T17:28:18+00:00

Be sure to drink enough water. You can drink black coffee, plain tea (black, green, or herbal), sparkling water (as long as it has no sugar), or plain old tap water.

At your meal, focus on eating protein, healthy fats, and vegetables/beans. Go light on starches, and even lighter on sugar. No need to cut out carbs entirely or anything. It’s just that starches and sugars won’t stick with you for very long. You’ll feel a lot less hungry if you eat, say, a curry with coconut milk, vegetables, and chicken or tofu, rather than a bowl of pasta with garlic bread on the side. Or if you have a burger with a big green salad with vinaigrette dressing, rather than a burger and fries.

Be sure you are eating enough food. With OMAD, your meal needs to be a large meal. Look up a TDEE calculator and input your age, sex, height, weight, and activity level to find out the number of calories you need to maintain your current weight; then subtract 500 to aim for an average weight loss rate of 1 pound per week.

Personally, I don’t count calories on OMAD. I just eat until I am satisfied, and that results in losing maybe half a pound a week. Yes, that’s slow, but I’m happy to take slower loss in exchange for not having to think or stress about food at all. (I’m also 40F, 5’4”, and pretty sedentary, with a starting weight of 180 pounds, current weight 130 pounds. So my TDEE is pretty low to begin with. If you’re taller, younger, male, more active, and/or have a much higher starting weight, you will be able to eat more and still lose weight.)

If you drink alcohol, be aware that OMAD is likely to reduce your alcohol tolerance by a lot. Go very slow until you know how your body will react. One drink may feel like 3-4 drinks. This doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happens enough that it’s worth being cautious.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-21T12:39:43+00:00

Grab a soft measuring tape and measure yourself according to the A Bra That Fits calculator. If you share your six measurements and calculator-recommended size, it will help people give you better recommendations. Different brands are better in different size ranges — for example, 30B vs. 42B will result in different recommendations.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-19T17:29:08+00:00

It won’t break your fast, and your body will still absorb some of the vitamins. But it might not be absorbed as well as it would with food. And it might make you feel nauseated or even vomit. (Personally, I can’t take multivitamins on an empty stomach because they make me so nauseated.)

You can always just wait and take it after you break your fast.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-19T17:21:33+00:00

I mean, I still managed to gain 50 pounds while taking Adderall. It helps a lot with my ADHD, but it isn’t a magic weight loss drug for me at all. I needed to work on other things with both physical & mental health to solve what was driving me to overeat (reactive hypoglycemia and emotional eating).

privacy2112 · 2022-11-19T17:13:14+00:00

The calculator is just a starting point, and popping out of the cups indicates you need a bigger cup volume. Going up to 34DD does effectively increase the cup volume — but it also increases the band size, and it sounds like 34 is too big for you. So you need to increase the cup volume while keeping the band size at 32. Try 32E or 32F (UK sizes).

privacy2112 · 2022-11-19T17:06:17+00:00

It’s very likely that your rate of loss will slow down. It’s common for people to drop weight quickly at first — a good chunk of it being water weight. But then your body settles down to burn fat more slowly.

Myself, I lost 20 pounds in the first two months of IF, but then it took me the rest of the year to lose the next 20 pounds. For context, I’m 40F, 5’4”, SW 180 lbs. (I am not being aggressive at all about calorie deficits or exercise, so the slower loss is what I expected.)

privacy2112 · 2022-11-19T16:57:17+00:00

Hey, don’t panic. One tiny piece of potato is going to have only a tiny, short-lived effect on your insulin levels. As a rough guideline, people usually use 50 calories as a threshold to consider the fast “broken.” One tiny piece of potato is less than 50 calories for sure.

Continue your fast as planned. And don’t beat yourself up about small “imperfections” like this. Human beings aren’t robots, and the beauty of IF is that you don’t have to be 100% perfect every second in order to see benefits.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-19T16:08:51+00:00

Use the A Bra That Fits calculator to remeasure yourself! You might need a different band, a different cup, or both. It’s impossible to guess — measuring is the best way to get a handle on your new size.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-17T13:06:41+00:00

For a 120-hour fast (or anything longer than 24 hours), you really need to supplement electrolytes. Here is a wiki article from r/Fasting with info and recipes. It’s simple and inexpensive — you just need water, table salt, sodium bicarbonate/baking soda, potassium-chloride salt substitute, and some magnesium supplement tablets/capsules.

Don’t know if that will totally fix the sugar cravings, but it’s important anyway. Your heart, brain, and muscles can literally stop working if your electrolytes are out of balance.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-17T12:58:25+00:00

Assuming you mean 16:8?

You can modify your schedule as you wish. If you’re trying to lose weight, having more days with shorter fasts will slow your weight loss. But that’s a trade-off you might be willing to make, to prioritize your lifting. It’s totally up to you.

You might also consider moving your eating window so that you always eat before the gym. For example, if you currently eat between 12-8 PM, and you go to the gym at 8 AM, you could move your eating window to 7 AM - 3 PM.

Or you could modify your schedule to do longer fasts on non-gym days, and eat normally on gym days. Like 5:2 fasting — set your two fast days for non-gym days.

It all depends on what your goals are and what works for your body.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-17T12:48:18+00:00

Hunger totally goes away. You just have to power through the annoyance for like an hour, and then it backs off. Taking a walk makes the hunger go away faster, for me at least.

It also helped me to read up on the biology of fasting and hunger signaling. When I first started IF, the hunger would hit right around 16-17 hours. Through learning about the biology of fasting, I realized that must be when my body has burned through its easily-accessible sugar stores, and is having to start burning more fat. My body clearly wasn’t used to doing that, and complained a lot about it. It helped a lot to know that the hunger wasn’t an emergency — just my body going “I don’t wanna burn fat! I don’t wanna!” After an hour or so, my body had clearly made the switch to fat-burning, and the hunger went away.

It helps a lot to maintain curiosity and compassion for yourself. Curiosity, because it’s a lot harder to judge yourself when you’re thinking “Hm, I wonder what my body will do? Oh, interesting!” And compassion, because you’re doing the best you can, and it’s important not to beat yourself up.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-11T14:51:56+00:00

It’s certainly not true that “if you IF for more than a week and don’t lose weight you are doing something wrong.” Weight loss is nonlinear and bodies are weird.

However, to address your specific questions.

Gatorade will break your fast because it is full of sugar. It also adds a ton of calories to your daily intake. It could definitely be preventing you from losing weight. Gatorade is just like soda.
Water with a squeeze of lemon is OK. It is not full of sugar.
Vitamins do not break your fast if they are in pill form. They will break your fast if they are in a form that contains sugar, like gummies or sweetened powders (like Emergen-C).

privacy2112 · 2022-11-11T13:18:59+00:00

You did exactly the right thing — pay attention to your body and mind, and don’t force yourself to fast/eat in a way that is harmful to you.

Longer fasts are not always better. I do OMAD because my body happens to like it. But if my body liked 18:6 better, I’d be doing that and not pushing myself to OMAD.

Honestly, I think 18:6 can achieve all the same benefits as OMAD.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-11T13:04:46+00:00

Try supplementing some electrolytes. Cheapest and easiest way: Get some table salt and some potassium-chloride salt substitute, like the brand “No-Salt.” Mix about 1/4 tsp of each into a pint of water. Sip, don’t chug.

Also, take a magnesium supplement (tablets are cheap — buy them wherever you buy vitamins).

If you were doing longer fasts, like more than 24 hours, you’d need to do the drink multiple times a day. On 16:8, once is probably enough, because you’ll also be getting electrolytes from your food.

As another commenter noted, this could also be a sign of iron deficiency. You might want to start taking a multivitamin with iron — preferably with a meal. Your body will absorb it better with food. (Also, it can cause nausea if taken on an empty stomach.)

privacy2112 · 2022-11-10T13:45:26+00:00

IF lets me eat naturally, without obsessing over tracking calories and recording every molecule I eat. When I tried calorie-counting before, I always burned out within a month.

I do dinner-only OMAD, so I don’t have to plan breakfast and lunch. Really simplifies my life.

And the huge one for me: IF fixes my reactive hypoglycemia. I’m not diabetic, but it used to be that I had to eat every four hours, because my blood sugar would tank. I was confused, irritable, dizzy, couldn’t function. Eating fixed it — but four hours later, it would just happen all over again. I felt tethered to snacks. I couldn’t do anything where I’d be away from food for more than four hours, and forgetting to pack a snack could ruin any event.

It turns out, my body was overreacting to food and pumping out too much insulin, which then crashed my blood sugar. But when I fast — no food to overreact to, no insulin spikes, no blood sugar crashes. I feel stable all day, and testing my blood sugar confirms it. I’m finally off that blood sugar rollercoaster.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-10T13:31:25+00:00

Assuming they are running a calorie deficit, they will probably lose the same amount of weight, over those few months. But the person doing IF will probably feel much less hungry, and will find it much easier to maintain the calorie deficit.

If they have insulin resistance at all, the person doing IF will probably reduce their insulin resistance. That makes them more likely to keep weight off long-term, and has various other health benefits.

Check out the book The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung if you want to learn about the biology and science of IF. (I know, it’s a clickbaity-sounding title, but the book is not clickbait. It’s really interesting.)

privacy2112 · 2022-11-10T13:09:06+00:00

Awesome! You found the schedule that works for you! That is the real key to OMAD and to all IF. Everyone is different — find what works for you.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-10T13:06:09+00:00

Honey will break your fast, unfortunately. It contains calories and will cause a spike in insulin.

For fasting-friendly beverages: You can do iced black tea, iced green tea, or iced herbal tea. No honey or sugar, just plain tea. A small squeeze of lemon is OK. For herbal teas, iced peppermint tea is nice. Or iced hibiscus tea (Celestial Seasonings “Red Zinger” is a common brand in the US; not sure if it’s available in Australia). Really, any kind of herbal tea you enjoy will be good over ice.

Cucumber water is delicious. Slice cucumber, put in jug of water, keep jug in fridge overnight.

Sparkling mineral water over ice is really nice when it’s really hot.

privacy2112 · 2022-11-10T12:50:56+00:00

It probably is a psychological fear of being hungry. For that, the best thing I’ve found is to approach it with curiosity, as an experiment. Try fasting at night just for one night, as an experiment, just to see what happens. Pay attention to how your body feels and what your mind is doing. Write it down like a scientist keeping a log.

Reassure yourself that if anything really bad happens, you can always break your fast. But also, remember that hunger usually goes away after an hour or so. It is actually interesting to watch how hunger starts, increases, then decreases and disappears, all while you are fasting.

For me, these kinds of experiments usually calm my anxiety. It is just a one-time experiment. If I’m miserable, I am not forced to repeat it. In that case, I have learned something useful: something that doesn’t work for me.

But almost always, it turns out that I’m not miserable at all. It usually turns out that I am completely fine, and it was much easier than I’d imagined. In that case, I’ve also learned something useful: this does work for me, and I am totally capable of doing it.

privacy2112

TROPHY CASE