Fast Diet - Hunger Pangs

When I am doing the Fast Diet, I frequently experience long periods of calm after a brief period of hunger pangs. It is as if the body has gone into hibernation, and I am left well alone to carry on with my daily routine. This is most apparent the morning after the diet day, when I could usually skip breakfast and have a late lunch.

I am reminded of what my diving instructor told me during training many years ago, that feelings of suffocation after a brief period under water is not due to lack of oxygen, but due to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood stream. This means you are not going to die (yet), and with knowledge you should  try to suppress the panic, remain calm and find a way out of the current situation to surface.

Hunger is mostly the same thing. It makes us uncomfortable and compels us to eat to rid ourselves of the discomfort. Worse, we have come to associate a lot of other feelings (both positive and negative) with eating. So we eat to make ourselves feel better, not necessarily when we are hungry. And this slowly builds up over the years in the world we live in today, where food is available in abundence 24x7.

I think occasional calories restriction (which is essentially what the Fast Diet is about) serves to remind ourselves that it is OK to feel hungry, that you don't have to eat at the first sign of hunger. It also serves to calibrate the "gauges" in our bodies and I think that's where the health benefits are derived.