Dieting while on noFap

It will probably help your streak! I've slowly shifted to a vegetarian diet as of recently and since I'm focused on learning and understanding what it is that I should eat in a day, it's another way of being distracted and forgetting about PMO.

 

You know a lot of people say not to try and deprive yourself of multiple bad habits/fixes at once, because it's somehow harder to do than quitting one at a time - but personally I think this is utter bs and the opposite is true!

My take on it: Quit so many things at once that you don't have time to get urges for all of them!

Now fasting isn't quite quitting anything but it's similar because of the urge to eat.

How are you timing your intermittent fasting btw? If you're more than a few days in, you shouldn't really be feeling hungry. In fact that's one of the advantages of intermittent fasting, that it allows you to feel full even on some pretty significant calorie deficits, just because you're cramming all your food into that 8 hour window.

I haven't done 16/8 in a while because I'm no longer cutting, but I still don't eat breakfast until after midday - something I started doing when I first started IF. The only difference is now I sometimes eat my last meal fairly late, like 11pm or so, so it's more like 13 hours fasted/11 not for me. Even less fasted hours like that makes me feel like I'm eating more though so I get to really enjoy my meals since I don't feel like "Well after this I can't eat for another 2-3 hours".

Never found it to interfere with NoFap, in fact if anything I'd argue that it helps. I find that the early morning and late nights were a problematic time with me with regards to NoFap when I first started, as those were the times when I had the most urges. However, when you're fasted, you think a lot clearer, and so being fasted during both of those problem times made it a lot easier to resist said urges.

 

I'm currently doing intermittent fasting 16/8 along with a Protien Sparing Modified Fast (PSMF) geared shed body fat.

 

IF doesn't make you lose weight any faster if the calories stay the same (and I'm not just saying this based on how its supposed to work - but from personal experience too, I will lose weight at exactly the same rate doing IF as not doing IF if my calories are the same). Weight loss is basically calories in vs calories out* (*Sort of anyway, there are some other factors, like the Thermic Effect of Food etc that make for some ever so slight variation - but for weight loss purposes you can basically just see it as calories in vs calories out)

The benefit of IF for weight loss is being less hungry on the same amount of calories.

Let's say your maintenance calories are only 2000/day to stay the same weight, and you want to lose about 1lb a week, you'd have to eat as little as 1500 calories a day. If you have that spread out over say 4 meals, thats ~375 calories per meal. That's like, a sandwich.. You're going to get hungry very quick, especially during the time between meals.

If you only eat 1500 calories between midday and 8pm, you can have a small ~300 cal breakfast, a couple of snacks throughout the next few hours, and then a regular sized dinner - never going more than like 2.5 hours without a meal during your non-fasted period.

Now if you tried to have those same meals, i.e. a small meal, some snacks, and a decent sized dinner over a regular ~16 hour day, you'd spend at least half of the day starving.

During the early hours of the morning, hunger is at its lowest point, especially when fasted, so if you do the standard 16/8 eating between midday and 8pm then the only time you might feel hungry is between 8pm and whenever you go to bed, which is a few hours at most.

My suggestion is to switch to the regular eating between 12 and 8pm. Eating breakfast earlier and having your last meal earlier removes one of the major benefits of IF for your appetite: The fact that it's easy to go without eating throughout the entire morning once you've been doing it a few days. It's much easier than doing the opposite. It also means you don't have to skip out on meals with family etc. When you've already fasted for several hours, hunger decreases, which is why skipping the morning meal is easier than doing the reverse, because you're at the lowest level of hunger in the morning, vs the highest in the evening.

The first day or two it might feel weird not eating until midday, but after a couple of days it becomes so easy that you might even find yourself completely forgetting to end your fast at 12. I've had it happen to me a lot, where it's like 2pm and I realise I haven't eaten anything yet - I simply had zero hunger so it never crossed my mind. This is coming from someone with a huge appetite who's constantly hungry too..

If your goal is to lose weight, IF is great, but my suggestion is to combine it with calorie counting. It's a pain in the ass the first times you do it, but calorie counting is the only way to completely guarantee weight loss. If you're counting your calories, you can't //not// lose weight unless you eat too much. If you're not counting it's very easy to think you're eating way less than you are, and wonder why the number on the scale is staying the same day in day out. Once you start counting you'll quickly see that either a) you're eating more than you think you are, or b) you were eating WAY more than you needed before so you haven't reduced calories significantly enough to put you in a deficit.

If you're unsure how many calories to eat. Use the Katch-McArdle formula to estimate your BMR. You'll need your body fat % for accurate results, but we don't need accurate results, just a guideline - because after we work out roughly how many calories you should be aiming for, you can try that number out for a week, see by the scale if its working, and adjust up or down as necessary based on the results.

So just google "body fat percentage examples" and find the number that you think most represents your body fat %.

Then go here: http://www.calculatorpro.com/calculator/katch-mcardle-bmr-calculator/

Put in your weight, then select either kg or lbs from the dropdown box. Then enter in your body fat % estimate.

You're going to get a number back, this number, your BMR, or basal metabolic rate, is how many calories you would roughly burn if you were comatose and completely inactive, not even moving or doing anything.

Now take that number and times it by one of the following multiplication factors based on how active you are:

1. If you are sedentary (little or no exercise) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.2
2. If you are lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.375
3. If you are moderatetely active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.55
4. If you are very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.725
5. If you are extra active (very hard exercise/sports & physical job or 2x training) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.9

So for example, say your BMR came back 1600, and you don't exercise and you mostly sit around at home/for work etc, then you'd take 1600 and multiply it by 1.2. That gives you 1920 calories. That's how many calories you'd need to eat to stay the same weight. Anything more than that will == weight gain.

For every 1lb a week you want to lose, you need to be in approximately a 500 calorie deficit, so if you got that 1920 calorie number, that would mean to lose 1lb a week you'd aim to eat around 1420 calories a day.

Find your number. Spend the next 2-3 weeks tracking your meals each day (ps that includes drinks. For example a single glass of coke is 80 calories, so if you're drinking soda all day, that adds up to a LOT). Don't worry, you don't need to keep tracking them forever - but there's a reason you do it for at least a couple of weeks. Assuming you're like most people, you probably rotate through several different foods that you like, so just monitoring your diet for 2-3 weeks is enough to start remembering roughly how much each of your meals is.

I stopped tracking my calories a long time ago but I can remember things off the top of my head. Like I know the rolls I like to eat with cheese come to about 350 cals. I know my favourite brand of frozen pizza is 830 cals. I know an average sized dinner with a good mix of meat and veggies is 700-800 cals. etc. So now I can just roughly tally up in my head how much I've eaten and know whether I'm over/under/at my calorie target for the day, and eat more/stop eating depending on where I'm at.

PS if you decide to follow my advice, don't make it harder on yourself that it needs to be. Make an account on myfitnesspal.com and track your food there. That way you don't have to be looking up what every single food is in calories. You can just add stuff in from their selection. Like, if you eat 200g chicken breast, 4 potatoes, and like 100g of runner beans, you can just type that in and it'll find those items and put in the rough calories for them for you, no calculation needed.

So yeah:

1. Estimate your body fat % using Google images.
2. Calculate BMR using the link I gave you.
3. Calculate maintenance calories using the activity factor multiplier that fits you.
4. Remove 500 from that number to get how many calories you should eat to lose 1lb a week.
5. Sign up to MyFitnessPal and track your meals for the next 2-3 weeks to get an idea of their rough calorie amounts.
6. Every day when you first wake up, weigh yourself, write that down.
7. Each week add up all of the week's weigh ins and divide them by the number of days you remembered to weigh yourself to get your weekly average.
8. After 2 weeks, compare week 2 average to week 1. Did you lose ~1lb?
9. If you lost nothing, decrease calories by another ~500. If you lost a little but not much, decrease em by another ~200-250. If you almost lost 1lb but not quite, decrease by ~100. If you lost ~1lb, awesome. If you lost significantly more than 1lb - decide if you wanna keep losing more or if you wanna ease up on the diet and allow yourself to eat a bit more freely.
10. After another week, compare the last 2 averages again. Once again, adjust as necessary.
11. ???
12. Profit

It's the approach I used to successfully lose 31lbs in 5 months this year.