Food Experiment Conclusions

Conclusions

Today was the last day of my little food addiction experiment.  While the experiment didn't go as well as I would've liked, I learned a lot about my emotional tendencies towards food and have definitely made steps in the right direction.  Perhaps more importantly, I learned a lot about how to conduct a successful self-experiment.  I'll discuss more about this aspect of my thinking when I introduce my next experiment in tomorrow's post. Without further ado, what I learned from this experiment, in bullet form:

• Intermittent fasting is a very useful tool for breaking food addictions.  By the end of the experiment, I was consistently eating two or three meals a day within an 8-hour feeding window.  I noticed a significant decrease in hunger both psychological and physical, particularly outside of my feeding window.  However, getting into the routine of not eating in the mornings was psychologically difficult at first.  16-18 hours is not nearly enough time to feel true physical hunger, but the psychological effects were noticeable.
• Eating processed, sugary foods is a self-perpetuating cycle that tends to make you want more processed, sugary food. I consistently felt much hungrier whenever I "cheated" and ate such foods.
• Extreme carb restriction produces somewhat increased food cravings independent of many other factors.  This is obviously very personal and might've gone away if I had been more consistently low-carb.  However, I learned I personally prefer to simply eat moderate amounts of carbs.
• I do better eating with pretty hard, set rules.  I find moderation more difficult than simple, but arguably somewhat stringent restrictions.  In fact, my healthiest period of eating happened last summer when I simply decided to cut out all bread.
• Finally, while I still possess significant attachments to food, I feel like I have increased my mindfulness of my eating habits and ability to fix my attachments to food.  Now that this experiment is over, I plan to eat in a more free-form way for a bit.  While I will stay pretty Paleo, I plan on not stressing too much about the specifics.  Following a period of loose paleo eating, I want to wholeheartedly attempt a high-starch diet.  I will most likely post a bit about this on the blog at least once or twice.  So stay tuned for future food updates.

Plans for Upcoming Posts
 
Tomorrow I'm going to post about my next experiment, which will be going in a pretty different direction from this one, although I'll be applying what I've learned to the methodology I use.