Subnostr

I believe in fasting as a very effective weight maintenance mechanism in the following manner. Weigh yourself in the morning every day or every few days. At some point the scale will suprise you with a value that is higher than expected. That is the signal. Do not eat on that day (until breakfast the next day).

Some things of note:

* You will be overfed when you start your fast. Malnutrition is not a concern since that is a matter of degree. One day of fasting won't take you from overfed to malnourished.

* Your fast may drain more than just your glycogen and your digestive system contents. To ensure it is draining body fat and not muscle, make sure you are doing resistance exercise (gliding - see my previous post). Don't worry about not having enough protein - if you are overfed from the day before (and weren't on some weird low-protein diet), you have plenty of free protein floating around, and your body can scavange it.

Dissident Sound 1y ago

having high IQ is not substitute for knowledge.

if you go for more than 6 hours without protein in the diet you will begin to lose muscle relative to what amount of muscle you would have had if you had protein.

working out while not eating protein will only make you lose muscle faster because you will accelerate muscle breakdown without increasing protein synthesis ( granted, this will depend on how long the fast is - if the stimulus of workout lasts longer than the fast then you will still build muscle, but i would NEVER work out unless i was going to eat protein in the following couple of hours ).

fasting when your weight randomly goes up is not as clever an idea as it sounds, because it isn't random fluctuations ( that are mostly due to either water weight or contents of your intestines ) that will kill you but the integral of visceral fat mass overtime. so for example if you carried an average of 20 lbs of visceral fat for 20 years that 400 lbs of visceral fat pound-years is what is going to kill you.

the real reason to fast is because it is psychologically easier to periodically fast than to always stop eating before you're full ( which is what a dietitian would tell you to do ).

always stopping before you're full would be like having sex every day but always stopping before reaching orgasm. this is torture and the reason why very few people succeed on such diets. it is obviously more pleasurable to go for a few days without any sex and then be completely satisfied. likewise it is more pleasurable to touch no food the whole day and then only eat in the last few hours of the day ( how most people fast, and also how our hunter ancestors used to eat ).

this is the real reason for fasting - everything else is pseudoscientific BS charlatans make up to rationalize it with things like "autophagy" and so on.

we humans ( and other carnivores ) evolved to starve most of the time and occasionally pig out. nibbling until half full is contrary to our nature, which is why everybody hates that and few can stick to it.

if any of you want to know more about nutrition ask me on my site here

https://dissidentsound.discoursehosting.net/c/health/nutrition/113

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Dissident Sound 1y ago

i need to correct myself. if you work out without eating protein you will still gain mass in the muscle that you trained, but the protein will be pulled from your other muscles and / or your organs. i assume this is not what anybody wants.

the protein doesn't "float around" your body - rather your entire body is made of protein, which constantly "turns over" ( is both broken down and synthesized back ). so you won't suddenly run out of protein and die if you don't eat protein but the total amount of protein in your body will start going down after about 6 hours of not eating protein and will go down faster the more you train.

bodybuilders refer to something called "lean body mass" which is your total body mass minus your fat mass. the goal is to maximize lean body mass. skipping protein for more than 6 hours will always result in lean body mass going down, even if the ONE muscle you trained might be getting bigger.

for 90% of people the weight loss benefits will outweigh the muscle loss downsides - we're on the same page regarding that, the question is - what is the proper timing ?

IMO your proposed timing is a knee jerk reaction of panicking when you see weight go up on a scale and isn't based in science. that said it might work for you BECAUSE it makes sense to you ( even though it's wrong ) and you're able to do it because you believe in it.

in the end diet effectiveness is 90% adherence and 10% what diet it actually is and whether it is scientific or not.

but if you want the most OPTIMUM way to do it, MY suggestion would be to fast whenever you know you will be unable to work out or obtain clean food ( for example when traveling ) and vice versa - try to overlap high protein consumption with heavy training, with protein consumption starting anywhere from about 2 hours before training to 1 hour after training, and continuing for 2 or 3 days after training.

work out is essentially stimulus for protein synthesis ( when amino acids from food breakdown are synthesized back into muscle fibers ) - nothing more. protein is fuel injection and workout is the spark plug. if you want your engine to run at maximum efficiency you time injection and ignition relative to each other, and you also time protein consumption and training relative to each other.

the bro science of 1 hour "anabolic window" is simply a low IQ way of understanding what i am trying to explain here, and a very crude approximation / rule of thumb.

there is a guy ( Dr. Jacob Wilson ) who calls himself "The Muscle PHD" who knows more about this than me ( and runs an entire institute which he founded just to study this ) ... he creates a lot of free content, but unless you're a pro athlete you probably don't need that level of knowledge ...

Mike Dilger ☑️ 1y ago

First off, I did not mean to suggest that you do resistance training WHILE you fast. I think you should be doing it the day before you fast as part of your regular routine.

Also, any kind of weight loss will come from both adipose tissue and muscle -- it doesn't matter if you fast, or if you count calories and eat smaller meals, or if you go keto. If the weight is coming off, it comes from both places. And the studies I have read (and summaries of those studies I have heard talked about) indicate that regular resistance exercise is superior to eating lots of protein in terms of maintaining muscle mass during weight loss. It seems to me that eating protein would cause your body to use that (instead of your muscles), but I'm just reporting on what the counterintuitive studies say. Don't shoot the messenger.

It might be that muscle tissue starts being used after 6 hours (if you are correct) but if so then it happens every night while you sleep.

It usually takes from 18-48 hours of fasting before autophagy kicks in, the process of desperately looking for protein by consuming broken down organelles inside of cells. Autophagy scavenges protein from cellular organelles, so if you aren't doing it regularly, you'll still be getting some protein from that. Before that there are a lot of substrates that can be used (lactate, pyruvate, alanine, oxaloacetic acid, free amino acids in your blood, liver, etc). Also when fasting your testosterone shoots up 1300% and human growth hormone by 400%.

Mike Dilger ☑️ 1y ago

Also I dare the reader of this note to research whether having lots of lean body mass is healthy or not.

Dissident Sound 1y ago

the 6 hour figure is a reference to the fact that there is a "refractory period" associated with muscle protein synthesis ( MPS )

that is to say a high protein meal ( Leucine Amino Acid in particular ) will stimulate MPS for say 1.5-3 hours and then it cannot be stimulated again by a meal until about 6 hours pass. this is similar to how when you have an orgasm you can't have an orgasm again until some period of time passes.

the practical implication of this is that if you had a good meal and then had nothing to eat for the next 6 hours you haven't lost an OPPORTUNITY to build muscle because there was none. but if you continue to not consume protein after 6 hours you're now throwing away that opportunity to build more muscle.

this refractory period in evolutionary terms is probably related to the time it takes to digest something like a steak, but is not actually directly driven by digestion. the refractory period for MPS is AN INTERNAL CLOCK

think of it as Jet Lag. you fly to another time zone and the body ignores the sun rising / setting time and just uses an internal clock instead. same with refractory nature of MPS - the body ignores actual availability of amino acids from digestion of food and instead uses a clock to make assumptions about their availability so it builds muscle for 1.5-3 hours after a meal then stops and refuses to build again until 6 hours Post Prandium ( after a meal ).

it's actually hard to communicate what happens because our language is too primitive to explain how the body works. in the body most opposite processes run in parallel at all times. so you're both building and breaking down muscle 100% of the time and the same for fat etc. this isn't how people run their lives - nobody is running heating and AC at the same time for example, and for that reason our language is poorly equipped to deal with how the body works.

so when i say the body is building or breaking down muscle it can mean different things because the body is always doing both of those things and yet it doesn't always make sense to think in those terms and so on ... this is why people of average intelligence need rules of thumb and diets and so on because they can't understand how it actually works ...

Mike Dilger ☑️ 1y ago

Some processes always run at different rates, even opposite processes, but others approach being switched (e.g. insulin/ketosis) and the mental model of switching is accurate enough for practical purposes. It's even accurate enough for practical purposes for those processes that are much more smooth and not switchy (if you are correct enough about which process dominates).

What you've said is interesting about MPS. I didn't know these things.

There is a presumption there that I want to be building muscle. This is good advice for a bodybuilder, but not so much for my case, someone trying to stay alive for as long as possible. From what I understand, the smaller I am the better, including lean mass, modulo sarcopenia.

Dissident Sound 1y ago

the strongest causal relationship that i know of to longevity is visceral fat mass. the more fat you have inside your abdomen the shorter your life will be. this fat can be accurately measured using MRI and some clinics offer that service, but in most cases simply using a tape to measure your waist is good enough.

muscle mass ( and more importantly STRENGTH ) is positively correlated to longevity as far as i know, but i do NOT believe this relationship is causal. i believe that strength is a RESULT of health not the cause of it.

muscle mass can be beneficial because it is a calorie sink, but it isn't such a huge sink that it can't be easily overwhelmed with junk food.

Dissident Sound 1y ago

i never heard anybody say that having less muscle will make you live longer. it may be true but i never heard about it. i hope whoever studied this relationship has controlled for fat mass. that is a smaller person obviously will live longer than a bigger person but probably not because they have less muscle but because they eat less.

eating less does make you live longer. not only because you avoid diabetes but because your metabolism slows DRAMATICALLY when you eat less. my heart rate goes down by a THIRD when i diet. although we don't die from the heart mechanically wearing out it would be logical to assume that when metabolism slows damage accumulates slower.

so basically if you want to live as long as possible - eat less and keep your waist down to a small size.

Mike Dilger ☑️ 1y ago

Also there is this:

"Researchers followed 12 healthy volunteers taking part in a seven-day water-only fast. The volunteers were monitored closely on a daily basis to record changes in the levels of around 3,000 proteins in their blood before, during, and after the fast. By identifying which proteins are involved in the body's response, the researchers could then predict potential health outcomes of prolonged fasting by integrating genetic information from large-scale studies.

As expected, the researchers observed the body switching energy sources – from glucose to fat stored in the body – within the first two or three days of fasting. The volunteers lost an average of 5.7 kg of both fat mass and lean mass. After three days of eating after fasting, the weight stayed off – the loss of lean was almost completely reversed, but the fat mass stayed off. "

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20240301/Study-reveals-the-bodys-molecular-response-to-prolonged-fasting.aspx

Dissident Sound 1y ago

there could be many explanations for this strange effect and this is the type of stuff Dr. Jacob Wilson likes to study, namely the various anomalies in the body's response to both food and training ... but i'm not sure we as dilettantes should focus on odd effects like this or at least we shouldn't try to extrapolate them to general rules from a single anomaly ...

we know a body has a set point for fat mass for example - that is if you have unlimited food you will reach a certain weight and stop getting fatter.

there also appears to be a similar set point for muscle mass as well, regulated by myostatin. there was at one point an attempt to use myostatin inhibitors as super drugs for muscle building - not sure what is the status of that now.

what may have happened in this experiment is during fasting the participants dipped below their set points for both fat and muscle but were able to rebound muscle mass faster than than fat mass. if that is the explanation then there was nothing about this unique to fasting itself.

BUT it could also be some unique effect of fasting. it could be that fasting primes the body for muscle building later when protein is reintroduced into diet. i don't know.