I am rethinking my goal. I am realizing that a goal weight is ridiculous, so I am changing my goal to my goal body, meaning the slimmer trimmer me. I will hopefully get there when I can wear my cowboy cut jeans without having love handles and a belly hanging over my belt.
Our bodies have their own goal in mind and it doesn’t matter what we believe it should be. If we force ourselves to lose more weight than what our bodies knows as it’s ideal size then our bodies will fight us tooth and nail to return to that perfect size that our bodies knows as it’s happy point and size. I have had it happen over and over. Now I have to learn to truly listen to my body and only eat as much as it needs, as well as to listen to what my body needs in the way of nutrition and not demand to feed my body what it doesn’t need or want. This is so hard for most of us due to media advertising, social media, and with everyone believing they know best for everyone else. We are all individuals and have different needs, size, and environment pressures. Our bodies knows best, and we have to learn to listen to our bodies needs and nutrient requirements.
My intermittent fasting low carb journey
Of course weight doesn’t matter as long as you don’t have much extra visible fat and feel right 
I mostly listen to my body but as it wants to stay fat (or rather just get enough food to make losing fat totally impossible… without higher activity than what I am able to do, at least), I will totally push things now. I was patient for long enough, for quite many years. Anyway, OMAD has lots of benefits for me so I will really do my best to do that. Some of us needs to be more strict to get any closer to our goals.
Of course, no force, that’s important.
I no longer can do the exercises that I once did, I do walk the trails, one day a week I have an adventure of taking my time an exploring new trails or sections of trails that I haven’t ventured into. The rest of the days I walk a trail that I look upon as my training track. I push myself to get stronger and do the hills more often and quicker. But I am not near as fast or strong as I use to be, but as I am slimming I am noticing improvements in how fast I walk the trail and how strong I feel afterwards.
I definitely must be adding some muscle mass, my weight is bouncing between 202.5 and 205, but yet my jeans and my shirts are getting looser. As I said yesterday I am walking the trails again when it isn’t raining or the trails aren’t flooded. And one of my indications of improvement in myself is that my resting heart rate lowers. I wear the Apple Watch and it records my trail walks and because I walk the same trail most days of the week I can see my improvement as a progression. My over all heart rate dropping as I walk the different sections of the trail, as I climb my favorite training hills. Even my body becoming more efficient as the estimated number of calories burned in walking the training trail and the climbs. I may not be as fast as I once was but the Watch app, the pants fit and the way I overall feel is saying I am seeing improvements. And I believe the fact that I am doing my walks during my fasting time is even helping me to burn fat more and faster.
I am still eating low carb and intermittent fasting and the two together seems to work for me. Fasting is mindset as well as retraining the body and digestive system to understand that it isn’t going to get something to eat by a little discomfort. And by mindset I mean to learn to tune out all of the advertisements and social pressures to eat just to be eating. I was little back in the 1950s when all of the food advertising first took over TV, as the food companies started pushing the carp they call food, all of of overly processed and overly refined food is cause of the obesity and diabetic problems that so many people have today. Back when we ate real food cooked mostly at home and wasn’t overly processed or refined we didn’t have the obesity issues nor the diabetics.
When I feel particularly ornery while fasting I tell myself what I’m hearing when listening to my body is mostly my fat cells whining, and I really don’t like them, so they can complain all they want.
I don’t see food ads (very rarely I hear but it’s not about processed stuff, more like meat), I do worse: I cook and bake 
Irresistible things. It’s good as long as I make sure I do this late enough. I failed that today. It turned out (okay I kinda knew it) that extreme (a bit higher than ideal) satiation and a tiny determination can’t keep me from eating a (for others) big meal at all.
So no wonder I don’t really try when fasting except very rarely but I usually fail there. Normally I only fast when it’s the (far) easier between fasting and eating. Fortunately a proper meal makes me very nicely satiated for a long time. I love that bliss. And my OMAD sized meals
One can get obese by normal food too but indeed, probably less people and with smaller chance… For me, as far as I can tell, it’s all about how satiating and satisfying my food is and when I eat. My maintenance range is the same on every woe and I easily overeat “good” food. Some of us need extra rules, finetuning our low-carb. And then again when we change and the old good woe doesn’t work so well… Sigh. Or our goals change. Or our timing changes. I need a different attitude and slightly different food choices for OMAD than for a bigger eating window. And I would have need something special for OMEOD but I don’t even want to try to do that.
Yes it is possible but not as likely. When I was a child and in my teens, I lived in a farming community I never saw an obese person, and never heard of type 2 diabetes, but my grandmother my mom’s mother was a type 1 diabetic. So I was told by my mother and my doctor to be careful about what I ate and to pay attention to my cravings and attention to if I was feeling weak or dizzy. That has been with me my whole life. Yes I slipped up at the point I went in the Navy boot camp. Before boot camp I had no issues with weight or dizziness or weakness because I payed attention to what I ate, but ever since boot I have had issues with dizziness and fatigue, but I am slowly retraining my body and removing the highly processed food addiction from my body. I have finally gotten to a point I can look at , bread, cakes, other desserts, and not crave them. I no longer fear going into a gas station or grocery store and crave, soft drinks or candy. I am retraining myself, body and brain.
I am younger and always saw obese people but my anchestors had high activity so they just used up what they ate anyway (they surely weren’t all slim though but being a bit chubby isn’t necessarily unhealthy I suppose)… And they eat proper meals when needed. There are multiple factors. Surely the very, very wrong food makes things worse, this way or another. But otherwise good food may trigger overeating too as we experience.
Stores aren’t a problem for me either since pretty long, the food we make and the fruit in my garden are the most problematic by far. And my inclination to eat multiple times a day, my old overeating skills are still with me. BUT I believe they got developed mostly due to the wrong food in my childhood.
I eat fruit in season or flash frozen berries. From my experience if I eat real food on not highly processed or highly refined foods I do great. I can’t live off of meat a lone and definitely can’t live off of vegetables and fruits a lone. I have to have the wide variety of meat, seafood, dairy, vegetables, and fruits. The only thing I can live without is bread, cereal, desserts. And of course soft drinks and artificial sweeteners. I am finding that if I revert back to what I ate growing up minus the wheat and oats I am good.
Nicely said, Chuck. Our relationship to food - what a wide range of possibilities is there.
My family lived in rural areas until I was 8 years old. No fat kids in school, though I’d seen pictures of fat people in print, on TV, etc. My paternal grandmother was pretty ‘big’ (one of 6 or 7 sisters who all were), and became officially diabetic at some point. She did eat some processed food - a lot of bread and pies, so obviously sugar and refined grains. But not nearly the amount that has become ‘standard’ for many. She and her siblings were born from 1900 - 1915, so they were affected by the world wars and the Depression, going through some relatively tough times where there wasn’t a lot to eat, and certainly not ‘sweet treats.’ Even being diabetic for 4 or 5 decades, she lived past 100.
In 1967, we moved to a small city, and in my school of about 500 kids there was one fat one. Now, here in the U.S., they are legion. Even kids of pre-school age, ouch… Gotta say it’s “cheap carbs” above all else.
Shinita, this made me laugh. 
So true for me too. “More for the sake of more.” That’s just who I was for so long. Fat and protein really helps, there. I often eat 4 eggs, and while that isn’t a huge amount of volume, I’ve never wanted more eggs right at that time. But in the old days, potato chips, pretzels, ice cream… 
What limits there were were hazy, indistinct, and far in the distance.
What do you call cheap carbs. I understand real food carbs, such as fruits and vegetables. Then there are highly processed foods that are mostly chemistry projects. Even modern bread is full of unpronounceable ingredients.
I would say that cheap carbs cover a lot of ground - certainly, most modern bread, pasta, cereal, crackers, much of “fast food,” all manner of frozen, refrigerated, and room-temperature stuff aimed at convenience, being more ready-to-eat, soft drinks, etc. Also rice, peas, beans, squash, sugar, flour, potatoes, some fruits. While there have been significant price increases in just about all foods the past few years, most of this stuff is still relatively cheap.
Some of it I agree with you on but not any of the real created by nature veggie or fruit. If it is real food then there isn’t anything wrong with eating it as long as you don’t over do it. I eat them all at times, except for anything with wheat and oats at this time. I do eat potatoes, squash, beans peas, fruit of almost any kind, I do stay a way from sugar, but I do eat some rice at times. The key for me is to stay within my carb limit for the day which is less than 100 carbs, even though I know I can handle up to 130 carbs per day as long as I fast at least 17 hours before my next eating window, but I do my best at 19 hours of fasting.
I believe in eat most real foods, carbs, protein and fat, I just will not eat wheat, oats or table sugar. So I don’t eat, bread, desserts, candy, soft drinks, or cereals. I have finally recognized my triggers, as long as I don’t eat something that triggers me to not recognize when I have had enough I am good and don’t over eat.
I think that’s the rub. Chuck, you have a really good handle on your own situation, no question about it. If something isn’t a problem, then it isn’t a problem. 
And I realize this is your thread. 
(That said, the personal threads - ‘accountability’ or otherwise, often range far and wide in discussion.) I think that the journey, if any, that we take in such matters is enormously valuable for its own sake. Some of us do really well - you’re a good example - and everybody on this forum has things to gain, things to satisfy them, hopefully.
“Real foods” include many things that have been enormously genetically modified by people through the ages - made vastly sweeter, and much larger fruits, etc. I would stick with my position that “cheap carbs” are the cause of the overwhelming majority of childhood obesity, and obesity/metabolic syndrome/diabetes, etc., for adults, whether those foods are “natural” or not.
“Overdoing it” - even “created by nature” things can easily go past that for some people, especially people who have years/decades of increasing metabolic derangement behind them. We don’t find orange juice in nature - versus inside an orange - but no big trick to squeeze out some juice. Some places, a “large orange juice” is like 16 ounces or almost half a liter. Really good sweet/acid balance there, so easy to drink a couple of those big glasses… Over 100 grams of carbs right there.
Lots of people feel that “fruit is healthy,” but I do think that for many of us it’s essentially not. The recent stuff about fructose being processed into uric acid by human bodies (we’re hardwired to do that) as in the " Anyone know about the Uric Acid connection with insulin resistance?" thread has only increased my feeling that fruit, per se, is often really not good for us.
Not a rub, I am mostly writing to reinforce myself to what is working for me to keep reminding myself to stay on my toes and toe the line I have found that works for me. I realize that everyone is different.
Fructose isn’t an issue at least not for me unless the fruit is juiced, our dried then the fructose becomes concentrated. So I don’t drink fruit juice or eat dried fruits I only eat fresh fruit or flash frozen fruit. My wife eats mostly bread and pasta. I don’t condemn her because she is lucky to even be a live. She only has a stomach the size of a fist due to an operation to save her life in 2013. I am lucky to have her today
True. Still, I wonder how many of us would be here - on this forum or sick or overweight - if there were no such thing as highly processed food. Maybe one in fifty?
If you get your meat, or dairy from a market, grocery store it has all sorts of antibiotics in it. Which is worse than what they do to some plants. At least I live out in the country and get most of what I eat from local small farms, the type of farms that do it to old fashioned ways. And not interested in making a huge profit. I also grow my own vegetables in limited quantities. I can also remember commercials saying that one day we would get all of our nutrients for a pill. Well I know so many that intake more different vitamins and minerals, and other supplements that it is coming true now. I can’t stand the thought of taking any supplements or medication. And following my diet plan with intermittent fasting I am prescription free. And i have stopped almost all supplements.
Lots of ‘ifs’ there - if most of us hadn’t eaten as much of this or that… Most have a whole bunch of metabolic rope, starting out.