nutrition:

Latest update heh 20231123:

https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1727683530128322840

I’m sort of MAYBE first-pass self-convinced now that 3 square meals a day is bad & ppl are meant to alternate FEAST-maxx (as many meals as it takes to fill tanks) & FAST-maxx. Key piece is normal diet doesn’t have enough B vitamins & electrolytes+​minerals to do it. Maybe.

I am sort of late to the party because it’s taken me this long to solve to solve my fasting intolerance. In my defense masterjohn is on another level and it took him a very long time to solve his deal.

[Tbc by feasting I mean eat like it’s your job for 1.5[or 0.75]-4.0 days.]

[tbc tbc once in ballpark listen to one's body re starting and stopping feasting/​fasting regimes]

how do you get your electrolytes and minerals?

LMNT and brain forza super fast and magnesium and algae/​d3/​k2 calcium and oatmeal and orange juice and dehydrated sweet potato and dehydrated fruit and a bit of vegetables

And like a partial dose of a kresser style multivitamin that goes over the USA rda

To taste/​tolerance for all of this

Cronometer synergizes well with intuition if ignore suggested amounts of everything and use as intuition pump

And unfortified gluten-free brewers yeast Mark

squash/​zucchini for even more potassium

And high-quality marine collagen

[...]

It seems like nutrient replete fasting might be the body’s least stressed state

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[Note 20230416: This section is maybe pretty deprecated. For example, I'm a much bigger fan of well-formulated multivitamins and smaller, more frequent meals (under some conditions) than I used to be.]

I am not a doctor or other kind of licensed health professional, and this is not medical or nutritional advice.

If you are lacking mental or physical stamina for meditation, you might try adding butter and/or MCT oil to your diet. (Some MCT oils have three different lengths and some just have two lengths. Sometimes just two lengths is advertised as "better" in some way, but I felt like I was getting some kind of weird metabolic deficiency on the two lengths variety. That last longer length chain seemed to really be good to have in there, for some reason, at least prior to adaptation, which I didn’t try to do.) Less likely to be helpful, but depends, you might try adding a bit more cheese or other animal saturated fat to your diet. (Each will have different chain length profiles.) You might also try adding a bit of choline, which can take a few weeks to month for you to notice any difference.

If you’re not, consider jogging or other aerobic exercise to you life, 2-5 times per week for 40 minutes, minimum, to avoid fat metabolism disfunction. You maybe should probably get your cholesterol checked periodically, too.

You might also consider adding non-rancid flax seed, some good source of sulfer, and/or some quality source of collagen.

You might also switch to all slow-release carbs, to even out insulin. The steadier energy release is, the less you’ll have boom and bust mental energy before and after meals. You want super-steady energy release for hours and hours. If you have insulin resistance, your body will release fuel from storage too slowly, and you’ll have to rely more on proximity to meals for meditation enablement.

If you have insulin smoothed out, your food craving system will be smarter, and you should generally indulge food cravings for weird food, as best you can.

If you’re eating fewer, larger meals, be careful with your kidney’s and liver.

Consider a multivitamin in powder form or in many pills per day, so you can titrate. I know multivitamins are supposed to do nothing or be detrimental, but you might find subdoses to be seemingly very helpful.

[Update 20230410 (xposted in a couple places): I'm becoming more distrustful of one-shot (at least) taste stuff because I think my body is saying no to things, but if I put it in my stomach anyway, my body is like "oh, huh, interesting" after a few hours. Or like "no, what?!" but after a couple days (or even longer) my body is more on board. Gotta do outside view stuff too, which of course I was, but I'm more outside view than I was.]

[Update 20230614:]

• possibly useful some ppl. not super error checked:
• these are very approximate:
• if meal was average macro ratios and 500+ calories, emptying starts somewhere between 1.5-2.5 hours.
• if meal was average macro ratios and <500 calories, emptying starts somewhere around 1.5 hours.
• if meal was mostly carbs, emptying can start around 40-60 min or less.
• if meal was medium-high in red meat, emptying might start as late as 3-5 hours.
• if meal was high in fat then emptying can take additional hours (instead of usual 1-2.5 hours(???))
• "slow metabolism" or "overeating" (for whatever reason) can cause delayed or prolonged stomach emptying, too.
• stomach emptying (and everything else) happens in brief pulses (lasting X-6 seconds??) with variable delays between pulses, though with some regularity, of course
• full transition for a meal between small and large intestine seems to take about one hour but sometimes up to two hours or three hours?
• it generally takes 6-8 hours to go from mouth to all the way through the small intestine (includes average mouth to complete stomach emptying time of about three hours???)
• it takes 24-36 hours (i think) to from mouth to all the way through the large intestine.
• i'm not sure how long eating times would affect things. I think the stomach starts emptying when all the food is digested and pauses emptying if new food is added to digest that, even if the last meal was fully digested but stomach wasn't fully empty. so pauses are shorter if just a little bit of food is added.
• (can google some of these and verify)
• stomach emptying, transition between small and large intestine, and pre-/post-pooping can cause increase in various symptoms if something is going on (dysbiosis, vagal nerve issues). one can also have symptoms for the full length of transit through the small intestine.
• if one is eating regularly, it can be hard to tell which meal or which part of the digestive system is causing issues. one way to get better information is to eat the same for a couple days and then change one thing (amount or meal composition), and then see if one notices a change in symptoms of good stuff like energy, mood, etc. (new absence presence or greater or lesser intensity of negative symptoms or a feeling of relief) over the next 0-36 hours. if there is a change, then one can use the time guidelines above to try to figure out where in the tract the issue is happening.
• note that sometimes good and bad stuff can happen with some delay after nutrient absorption, which starts when food hits the small intestine. for example, serotonin synthesis takes about 3.5-3.75 hours to start after food enters the mouth. and some mood and energy stuff can improve within 0-20 minutes after food hits the small intestine.
• a collaborator also suggests sentinal meals, corn, beets, etc., "that can easily be distinguished in stool."

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Chewing food down to "microscopic" pieces, and thoroughly mixing it with saliva before swallowing, can potentially make a big difference if you have an autoimmune condition, allergies, other inflammatory conditions, or a digestive condition. Saliva has "pre-digestive" enzymes that can break down carbs, fats, and protein, which greatly facilitates downstream digestion, and the more contact food has with mouth mucosa, the more opportunities there are for "oral tolerance" mechanisms to downregulate immune response to harmless food epitopes, over time.

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A small and conservative amount of exogenous digestive enzymes, once in a while, even just for a single meal, can sometimes somehow kickstart or reboot exogenous digestive enzymes (maybe increases supply of building blocks for endogenous enzymes or fortuitiously tweaks feedback loops) and stomach acid if digestion is disrupted and gets into a bad cycle by illness or stress or other factors.

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Electrolytes (e.g. sodium) and hydration, affect appetite and digestion quite a bit.