| > I personally perceived a benefit to focus, concentration, and problem solving People often describe the same things about ketogenic diets and fasting, which are both fat burning modes. The issue is if you only get into the flux state where you're in between modes. That's where you're hangry, irritable, and can't focus because all you can think about is your hunger. In that condition feeding restores normal operation, and can seem like the only path to recovery. But it actually passes eventually, and what happens afterwards seems kind of remarkable if you've never done it before. Water is a different story, but food is really quite optional until the fat buffers start experiencing underruns and your muscles start getting cannibalized, then you're starting to get into trouble. We've evolved to not just struggle through periods of food scarcity, we actually perform well and can be surprisingly athletic without food. It makes sense to me, since when we're without food we need to be on our game and go find some or eventually we'd die. When fasting, for me anyways, it really feels like a keyed-up high-alert almost stimulated mode of operating. I've gone on long hikes and runs after not eating for multiple days, it's kind of preferable now so I don't have to carry any food and it's more pleasant to do physical activities with an empty abdomen. Edit: Above where I wrote "feeding restores normal operation", I'm assuming that "normal operation" isn't a ketogenic diet, and feeding includes carbs. People already in ketosis don't go through this suffering phase when starting a fast, because it already happened when they ceased consuming carbs. |