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Nutrition From Warrior Diet to Breakfast : A Journey

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Marcus Aurelius

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That's a song for everyone to listen too while you read this.

Hello Everybody,

Through a supervision of a coach:

So, over the last month or so I've been eating three squares a day and I couldn't be happier. This is coming from a guy who followed the Warrior Diet off and on for years at a time. I've never felt stronger, happier and just relaxed. I still kept the foods I ate on the Warrior Diet (pescatarian) but I'm eating with much more freedom. Just waking up, brewing some coffee and toasting some Ezekiel bread has enhanced my life.

I'm not trying to recommend against the Warrior Diet. I just noticed that I took it far too extreme and my personality isn't fit for it. I found myself being afraid to eat and that's not sustainable.

My thought process was that fasting will make me live forever. I know sounds really far fetched but that was my thought process. The more I researched, I realized that no one has a real answer and the longest lived people ate lots of plants and healthy simple food. They are social and got frequent task oriented exercise. Just basic things like gardening. walking and enjoying the sunshine.

It seems so simple but we make it so complicated.

I'm feeling lead to write so here we go :

Forever people have looked for the fountain of youth. Does is exist? What make us think we're capable of finding it? The most powerful men in the world have succumbed to death. They had all of the money and hope in the world to live forever and couldn't do it. Why do we fear death? I mean just look at all of the history around us. Every man and woman eventually dies. Every. Single. One.

Smile in the face of death for there is nothing to fear. It's a rest after a well lived life. What a beautiful thing it is. It's almost like we work for the privilege. When our mission here on Earth is done, we are done. We must go on to whatever follows. Some believe in reincarnation and others believe in heaven and hell. It's such a beautiful thing to look back throughout history and think that we all had the same fate. Kings, presidents, warriors and emperors.

Even they were not immune to the hands of time.
 
Wise words!
Personally I follow some kind of warrior diet/intermittend fasting i.e. I do only eat some fruit during the day and before training then have coffee, train and cook in the evening.
But I think there is really nothing magical about this style of eating. It just fits my schedule! Indeed, there is some research hinting at the benefits of fasting but if one thing can be said for sure it is that wise food selection and ovoiding fat gain are the most important factors.
Another thing that can be said: 5-8 dmall meals a day is BS.
So, if one enjoys having 3 squares there is really nothing wrong about it.
 


That's a song for everyone to listen too while you read this.

Hello Everybody,

Through a supervision of a coach:

So, over the last month or so I've been eating three squares a day and I couldn't be happier. This is coming from a guy who followed the Warrior Diet off and on for years at a time. I've never felt stronger, happier and just relaxed. I still kept the foods I ate on the Warrior Diet (pescatarian) but I'm eating with much more freedom. Just waking up, brewing some coffee and toasting some Ezekiel bread has enhanced my life.

I'm not trying to recommend against the Warrior Diet. I just noticed that I took it far too extreme and my personality isn't fit for it. I found myself being afraid to eat and that's not sustainable.

My thought process was that fasting will make me live forever. I know sounds really far fetched but that was my thought process. The more I researched, I realized that no one has a real answer and the longest lived people ate lots of plants and healthy simple food. They are social and got frequent task oriented exercise. Just basic things like gardening. walking and enjoying the sunshine.

It seems so simple but we make it so complicated.

I'm feeling lead to write so here we go :

Forever people have looked for the fountain of youth. Does is exist? What make us think we're capable of finding it? The most powerful men in the world have succumbed to death. They had all of the money and hope in the world to live forever and couldn't do it. Why do we fear death? I mean just look at all of the history around us. Every man and woman eventually dies. Every. Single. One.

Smile in the face of death for there is nothing to fear. It's a rest after a well lived life. What a beautiful thing it is. It's almost like we work for the privilege. When our mission here on Earth is done, we are done. We must go on to whatever follows. Some believe in reincarnation and others believe in heaven and hell. It's such a beautiful thing to look back throughout history and think that we all had the same fate. Kings, presidents, warriors and emperors.

Even they were not immune to the hands of time.


Nice to hear your new approach is working. Honestly, I bet even Ori would approve of you making changes that suit you.

I think there are some truths that he hits on in his books that I try to incorporate, including intermittent controlled fasts and not being constantly fed, but you have to see what works for each person, not just rigidly stamp out a dietary prescription for everyone.
 
Wise words!
Personally I follow some kind of warrior diet/intermittend fasting i.e. I do only eat some fruit during the day and before training then have coffee, train and cook in the evening.
But I think there is really nothing magical about this style of eating. It just fits my schedule! Indeed, there is some research hinting at the benefits of fasting but if one thing can be said for sure it is that wise food selection and ovoiding fat gain are the most important factors.
Another thing that can be said: 5-8 dmall meals a day is BS.
So, if one enjoys having 3 squares there is really nothing wrong about it.

Yeah definitely. I understand the thought process between 5 to 8 meals but how can people take that much time out of their day to eat? Plus the stress on the digestive system.

I just simply took it too far.
 
Nice to hear your new approach is working. Honestly, I bet even Ori would approve of you making changes that suit you.

I think there are some truths that he hits on in his books that I try to incorporate, including intermittent controlled fasts and not being constantly fed, but you have to see what works for each person, not just rigidly stamp out a dietary prescription for everyone.

Yeah, I've actually consulted with Ori before. He's extremely wise. In his most recent book he actually pushed his fasting window back to 16 - 18 hours. There's so much that's in common with effective diets. They all preach whole foods.
 
Ori is recommending a more of a LeanGains approach now of 16/8? It seems quite a few are doing it.
 
Ori is recommending a more of a LeanGains approach now of 16/8? It seems quite a few are doing it.
Yeah either 16 to 18. He really makes a point in the new book of listening to your body and not taking the fasting/undereating too far. He still believes that the natural feeding time is at night.
 
Yeah either 16 to 18. He really makes a point in the new book of listening to your body and not taking the fasting/undereating too far. He still believes that the natural feeding time is at night.
Not taking it too far is key for me, I really got into the warrior diet and then lean gains a few years back and friends/family thought I'd become anorexic. I started so suffer a bit with always feeling cold etc, after persisting for a while I stopped and went back to 3 meals a day. I put some good weight back on, I now do a mornings fast most mornings, but eat carbs for lunch/dinner. I also have breakfast when my body says so, in which case I try to stay away form carbs, but very occasionally I'll have some toast with PB. My point is that 16 hr does work, but you can digress from it if your body wants to occasionally and suffer no ill effects. @Snowman did a great write up on this topic.
 
Not taking it too far is key for me, I really got into the warrior diet and then lean gains a few years back and friends/family thought I'd become anorexic. I started so suffer a bit with always feeling cold etc, after persisting for a while I stopped and went back to 3 meals a day. I put some good weight back on, I now do a mornings fast most mornings, but eat carbs for lunch/dinner. I also have breakfast when my body says so, in which case I try to stay away form carbs, but very occasionally I'll have some toast with PB. My point is that 16 hr does work, but you can digress from it if your body wants to occasionally and suffer no ill effects. @Snowman did a great write up on this topic.

Yeah. Dan John puts it like this. If you can't spend quality time with your friends or family is the diet really making you better? If it forces you into isolation, is it really sustainable? Having good intuition trumps everything, I think.

How do you guys think fasting works with older People? Do you think they should eat more often because of sarcopenia/muscle loss?
 
Yeah. Dan John puts it like this. If you can't spend quality time with your friends or family is the diet really making you better? If it forces you into isolation, is it really sustainable? Having good intuition trumps everything, I think.

How do you guys think fasting works with older People? Do you think they should eat more often because of sarcopenia/muscle loss?
I think this is also down to how you feel. My very layman response would be to eat as needed and cut back when you need to lose some weight. I think in general the 16hr fast for 80% of the time works for most people, unless maybe you are a child still growing, or pregnant or maybe elderly etc etc, I guess. @Snowman could offer much more insight and a more educated response.
Purely my observation, but an older person say 75+ does look more healthy with some meat on the bones, which may mean eating more, I surmise.
 
How do you guys think fasting works with older People? Do you think they should eat more often because of sarcopenia/muscle loss?

I think that sarcopenia can be a real issue when getting old. Of course the lack of muscle mass has the same implications with younger people as well, it's just that younger people typically have more of it. For example, if one has to go through an operation, the amount of muscle mass can be a predictor for chances of complications in the recovery process and by that in survivability.

So I think I personally will try to keep as much of my muscles as possible as I grow older. That means adequate eating. But I think it's also worth a thought that hypertrophy is much easier to come by when younger. From that I conclude that it's also very important to try to eat well and increase muscle mass when young so I have the muscle to keep when I grow older.

As a caveat I acknowledge that there is an issue with the chicken and the egg considering ill health and sarcopenia. But I think the benefits of muscle mass are becoming clearer in the research. Also, I really don't see any bad sides in hypertrophy personally so the decision is clear to me.
 
@Antti

Isn't lack of appetite a known issue with older people? Maybe that's their body trying to preserve itself? I agree about the muscle mass thing. I feel like older people should really focus on mobility, getting up off the floor, some strength exercises, avoid sitting and walking.
 
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How do you guys think fasting works with older People? Do you think they should eat more often because of sarcopenia/muscle loss?
t. I think in general the 16hr fast for 80% of the time works for most people, unless maybe you are a child still growing, or pregnant or maybe elderly etc etc, I guess.

I think there's a lot to be said for understanding the effects of cumulative stress, and knowing how it feels on a personal level. As @Stuart Elliott pointed out, some days it's easier to fast than other days. For instance, if we sleep poorly, we tend to have a lower threshold for comfortably fasting. That being said, poor sleep can dramatically decrease insulin sensitivity as well. One option is to exert a little more willpower on that day and remain strict with our diet, so that our insulin-insensitive body doesn't deal with food in a sub-optimal way. The downside is that this adds stress on top of stress. The other option would be to be a little gentler with ourselves and eat based on how we feel, but of course this will lead to more fat storage and less fat burning.
Which one we should do is largely based on the the conditions of the rest of our life. If I usually lead a healthy life with plenty of good food, good sleep, activity, and minimal emotional stressors, then I should probably just tough it out and stay strict. I 'll be able to "absorb" the stress from one rough day without any long-term issues, and it might even be a healthy hormetic stimulus. If I'm an under-nourished, over-fed, sedentary insomniac with all sorts of family drama, maybe more stress isn't what I need. Not to say that fasting is a no-no, but simply that it should be kept down to a level that's not too challenging. Maybe I need to focus on fixing eating less garbage, getting a little more sleep, and figuring out how to keep my mother-in-law's insults from getting under my skin. Will I still gain some weight while I get that sorted out? Sure. But there's no guarantee that I would gain weight anyways due to the extra stress hormones being pumped into my system 24/7. For everything in between, I think you just have to experiment and go by feel. This means you can't get too married to one particular dietary dogma, which can be pretty challenging.

In regard to the elderly, I think a lot (though not all) of the issues we associate with age are the result of poor hormonal function, brought on by poor diet, poor sleep, sedentary behavior, and generally poor management of stress. This is 100% just my opinion, but if you look at the elderly populations of many indigenous peoples, they are usually vigorous and busy until the brief period (usually less than a year) preceding their death. This could be in their 70's, 80's, or even 90's. I think that most of them could go even longer if they didn't have the burden of infectious disease and parasites. Sarcopenia does still happen in these people, but to a lesser degree than it happens to us. Even though we have plenty of people who live into their 70's and beyond, we often achieve this by stretching out the dying process for years and years. My point is, the conversation about muscle mass and life span only exists in places where people retire, stop moving, stop caring, and start to die slowly. Maybe my time spent working in a nursing home has made me a little cynical; sorry if I come off this way. I honestly believe that if an 80 year old can run around and play with his or her great-grandkids after a morning of gardening or cutting wood, muscle mass is probably a moot point ;).
 
@Snowman

Wow awesome write up. I agree about the muscle mass part, it's all gonna go away no matter what.

Steve Maxwell says you have to get the idea of your aging/crippled parents out of your head. Lots of people just accept that as being the way it is. Maybe we underplay the psychological and mental part of aging.

Man this is some interesting stuff. Maybe I'll just move to a Blue Zone and call it a day. (y)
 
it's all gonna go away no matter what
I think the trick is to try and get everything to give out at the same time. No point in having big muscles if your heart doesn't function well enough to push blood through them. No point in having a healthy heart if your joints are so ruined you can't move enough to keep it that way. I'm not saying having lots of muscle mass is bad. If you can achieve it healthily, all the data points to it being a very good thing. If someone achieves it at the expense of some other aspect of their health, then I suppose they have different priorities than me :p.
I do think we can undo a lot of mistakes these days (to a certain extent) with things like joint replacements, hormonal therapy, and a number of other treatments that are being tested now, some of which will probably be very common within the next decade or three. All that being said, there are quite a few folks who live full, happy lives for a heck of a long time without any of these. I imagine a group of people with access to the developed world's level of medical care, but without the unhealthy baggage that comes with developed society, would pretty easily have an average lifespan of around a century or more.

underplay the psychological and mental part of aging
Our expectations often shape the course of our lives, and cultural norms for "old people" are no different. Retirement is a hell of a drug.

Maybe I'll just move to a Blue Zone and call it a day.
There are worse ideas ;)
 
Did Ori give any guidelines for the new feasting timeframe? Two meals, three? Start light and still have the biggest meal at night?
I can't wait to read his new book
 
Did Ori give any guidelines for the new feasting timeframe? Two meals, three? Start light and still have the biggest meal at night?
I can't wait to read his new book

I think it depends on your own tolerance to stress. You should still have your main meal at night or as close to the evening as possible. He writes about different dietary protocols to address bulimia, anorexia, muscle building and obesity.

I honestly wish he was a little bit more specific but I think he did that on purpose because people cause themselves undue stress by adhering to super strict time restraints. He still recommends one main meal per day but it needs to be tailored to individual needs. If you're active you're obviously going to have to eat some light protein, fruit or vegetables. Then you have people who don't do anything active all day. They could probably get away with coffee and water. You have to find an optimal balance for you.

What many people don't know is that Ori lives in California, on his own estate, runs his own business,is financially independent and has a fresh garden year round. This is vastly different from someone who lives in a really cold place, works at a steel mill and works 12 hour days. You can be certain that Ori is having an easier time fasting than the second guy. You always have to look at the context of who is writing the book and where the information is coming from.

The overruling principle is to never overstress your body. You have to use your intuition and make sure your hunger is acute and not chronic. He explains more in the book about the signs of overstressing your body.

Go look up Ori on Youtube he has had a few podcasts about his new book. The new book is available on Amazon right now.
 
What many people don't know is that Ori lives in California, on his own estate, runs his own business,is financially independent and has a fresh garden year round. This is vastly different from someone who lives in a really cold place, works at a steel mill and works 12 hour days. You can be certain that Ori is having an easier time fasting than the second guy. You always have to look at the context of who is writing the book and where the information is coming from.
+1
 
So us lumberjack types working on the railroad and working out need to eat some good protein and food in those eight hours.
 
This is interesting conversation!
Relative to sarcopenia and the active older person, my biggest goal is to keep locomoting. The one thing I see most in older folk who can no longer move freely is a pronounced loss of glute and leg mass. This could be chicken/egg factor, but I relate this to some of the studies that claim leg strength is a strong indicator of longevity.

I cannot imagine staying active as I get much older without lots of walking and some leg work - unloaded squats etc.

I find the dietary advice referenced to be very curious, as I've always felt best on Poor Richard's king, prince and pauper - eating lighter at the end of the day and my richer meals in the morning. Especially if trying to lean up a bit.
 
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