intermittent fasting, because nothing good happens after dinner

 

Re: Not eating dinner

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Post by frank k » Fri Jul 26, 2024 5:03 am

befriend wrote: ↑Thu Jul 25, 2024 1:22 pmDo monastics eventually get over the hunger pains of not eating after noon? I am thinking of not eating dinner just because it’s a hassle not for spiritual reasons.

I've been not eating dinners (just breakfast 7am and lunch 12 noon) for about 15 years now.
So that's a 5 hour eating window and 19 hour fasting period (only water).
If you cook your own meals, pay attention to how much protein, fats, nutrients you actually need, it's really easy, especially with 2 meals per day.
I'm retired and a full time yogi, but there are a fair number of worldlings who have jobs working full time also follow a similar intermittent fasting program (usually for health, not spiritual reasons), and they just have a bigger eating window, say 8 hours instead of 5 like mine, and perhaps more than 2 meals or snacking periods between their meals.

So there is plenty of people doing it, and plenty of data showing it's easy to do without getting hungry or not having enough energy to get through a full 24hr cycle.

Now for monastics and yogis only eating in one session per day, I don't know how the majority of them find their hunger and energetic situation.
For me (as of right now), whenever I've tried only eating in one session per day, I could not sustain it for too long, just a few weeks.
At some point, I just can't get the calories and energy to last a full 24hour cycle.
The last 2-4 hours of the fast I can't function. Too tired to even sit up straight, too tired to even read suttas, but sleep doesn't alleviate that kind of energy crash.
But I believe the ability to thrive on one meal a day is highly dependent on how advanced your meditation practice is and how open your energy channels are (which determine how much energy you can absorb from your environment beyond just eating and sleeping).
So I continue to experiment with one meal per day occasionally as my meditation practice advances.

But intermittent fasting with a 5-8 hour window of eating?
"Piece of cake" (slang for, extremely easy to do) once you figure out what foods are actually healthy and nourishing and you don't waste valuable energy and money from eating junk and suboptimal food.
It takes energy to process drowsy and sluggish inducing junk foods,
and that junk food takes up space that healthy nourishing food would have occupied.

Intermittent fasting will never catch on,
because most people eat to indulge in the 5 cords of sensual pleasure;
For the hedonic pleasure of eating, drinking,
for the hedonic pleasure of socializing and talking about nonsense while you're eating,
watching t.v. while your eating, and not even getting the full enjoyment of either eating or t.v. because your attention is split.

Here's another huge tip and reason to follow the 8 precept rules of intermittent fasting (just breakfast and lunch in Buddhist version).

Nothing good happens after dinner.
People are high on food indulgence, social pleasure from gathering from friends, and next thing you know
you're burning off the nervous and overexcited energy that you didn't need from dinner
into all manners of debauchery.
Eating rich foods make you horny,
You go out drinking, carousing, gambling, whoring, staying up all night, etc.

When you don't eat dinner, and don't socialize?
You're energy is refined, you don't have over excited energy where you can't sleep,
you have just right amount of energy to meditate, study the suttas,
go to sleep early and wake up early,
creating a virtuous cycle.