Curious if anyone has experience with throwing occasional meals into the middle of an extended fast?
I had started on a 14 day fast (with 1 cup of bone broth per day). Then I realized I was going skiing on Day 7. Even though I’m fat-adapted and exercise daily, I didn’t want to risk getting on the mountain with no glycogen stores. So, I ate carbs the night before, went skiing, had plenty of strength, drank a six-pack, and went back to fasting. A day later and I feel great, back in ketosis and on my way to Day 14 (or Day 7 of the second fast).
It seems like I could just continue this pattern until I get back to my high school weight of 160 (I’m at 205). I’m curious if anyone has experience eating 1 day per week and if there are caveats?
I used to do a ton of week long fasts, always felt amazing during them. Totally destroyed my metabolism. Wound up being a 230lb guy that lifted weights 5x a week most weeks, cardio 2-3 times a week and had a physical job with an RMR of 1700! Should have been more like 3000+. Last time it was tested prior to that it was almost 3000. Still fixing the damage now. Doing that stuff in very limited bursts is one thing, your metabolism WILL adapt… then you’re screwed. Also lost a ton of muscle in the process.
Wow! Great to know, and thanks. Exactly the kind of relevant information I hoped I might receive.
I’m a bit concerned about potential downsides of fasting. I really like how I feel while fasting, but thinking it could be addictive and lead to a dependency, such that the only way I can keep weight off is with increasingly longer fasts.
That’s exactly what happened to me, for some idiotic reason I didn’t realize that it was because my RMR was getting slower until it was too late. Tracking macros, upping my protein and throttling my fat got me loosing again and slowly reverse dieting is working on getting my RMR back up. My state is (for now) scheduled to hit their Stage 1 reopening on the 15th, hoping the place that does my RMR testing comes back with that and hopefully I’m a couple hundred higher again.
I wasn’t aware of RMR testing but just now googled it based on your post. I’m in Long Beach and there’s a location close to my house, but no openings.
I had previously started a thread on the topic of reduced metabolism. I’m interested in the notion that lower metabolism may increase longevity due to reduced oxidative stress. Interested in hearing the downsides you experienced – sounds like they are weight gain and loss of muscle?
I don’t want to hijack your thread @Daves_Not_Here but what you and @lfod14 are talking about is important stuff. Researching metabolic slowdown while fasting is exactly what brought me here today.
My experience over the past couple of years has been doing alternate day fasts for six or seven month stretches and I think I’ve messed up my metabolism.
I’d said it stuff that needs to be said! I think a lot of things that are going keto mainstream (like fasting) are being taken too far. There’s also no question in my mind that my years of eating to satiety did just as much damage to my metabolism as the fasting. After about 3mo on keto I was almost NEVER hungry. Never snacked, always felt great. Took it as a sign that I was just burning off fat and I simply didn’t need to eat. After all, if I did my body would let me know…right? WRONG! No doubt in my mind looking back that eating to satiety was what started my issue with a slowing RMR, the fasting just accelerated it.
See, now you’re scaring me! Last year, I found I couldn’t lose weight without alternate day fasts - 3/week. And then even with that it slowed to zero by month 5 (May through October). I had other symptoms like getting cold around the 24th to 36th hour of the fast. I thought I had some signs of vitamin deficiencies, like my fingernails splitting, although 4 months of adding biotin and collagen peptides had no effect on that, so I still don’t know what’s causing that. If anything besides just being an olde farte.
At my wife’s urging I went into maintenance last November. I quickly gained 5 pounds back by December and 10 by early in the year. That was 8 pounds ago and I now hit the “I have to do something” barrier in the last couple of weeks.
The complication is that after my thread on puzzled about weightlifting, I modified my workouts, increased frequency and I’m aiming for more protein in my meals. Still not much; I know some people say 1 gram per pound of body weight. I’ve gone from 0.8 g/lb of fat-free body weight to about 0.8 g/lb of body weight. Since that’s like 24 ounces of meat/day, I’ve stopped doing OMAD days and sticking with TMAD. If I’m still gaining weight doing that over the last month or so and eating to satiety, that told me I might need to fast.
That leads to yesterday. I did a fast from dinner on the 4th through noon today, 40 hours. Last night at hour 24 to 26 I started getting cold. It was like I was completely acclimated to the fast and had no difficulties with it at all. My body just went into energy conservation and started turning down. At about hour 27 I did my lifting routine. That’s right - on a fasting day. Is that stupid? It warmed me up, though. I’m doing that workout every four days, and do an hour long bike ride about every other day.
I’m in a hole, and the first law is to stop digging. Do I go back to more frequent fasts? I was planning on eating to satiety instead of fasting. Now your post scares me about that.
I’ve been fasting 5-6 days a week for a couple of months and am actually losing weight (on another thread I mentioned that I’ve been the same weight for a year, despite strict keto). I figured I could keep going for at least another couple of months and then change it up a bit with OMAD or EOD fasting, etc. Now I’m wondering if I’m shooting myself in the foot…
Did it all! The coldness, nails that could rip for no reason at all, my hair got thinner (noticeably) I’m 39 now, so was 38 when I said enough was enough.
I wouldn’t have you’re protein less than 1g/lb of bodyweight, if you feel like you’ve lost muscle OR you SHOULD be gaining it with what you’re doing and you’re not, up it from there. 1.2-1.5 still isn’t a lot to maintain or gain when you’re lifting. The fasted lifting is fine, warming up makes perfect sense, you FORCED your metabolism to fire up again, can’t build and repair if that thing is in sleep mode!
Clearly I’m biased on this one from my experiences, but both me and my wife pretty much wound up in the same exact boat, issue for issue, and changing our approach has both of us back on the right track. I’d stay the hell away from intuitive eating AND fasting but again… I’m biased.
What really helped up was just doing what you said, we STOPPED DIGGING! We reminded ourselves of the definition of insanity and clearly what we were doing wasn’t working. I was already pretty big into lifting, she was starting out. We pretty much adopted the ketogains mindset, which is a little different than mosts mindset here. They’re more or less a 30g/day carbs approach, protein based on all the normal stuff but their calculator also allows a lot of measurements to get a more zoned in idea, and protein is a MUST hit macro, makes no difference if you’re hungry for it or not. Fat becomes the “lever” and that’s what you’d play with to loose weight. So in my case I eat around 1800-2000 calories a day right now, if I eat less that’s fine but I MUST get my protein, doesn’t matter how much fat I eat but I have a LIMIT which I shouldn’t go over. That approach for both of us broke MONTHS (like 8+) stalls and got us moving in the right direction again. It was a little hard to reprogram the keto we knew but I noticed after months of lurking around there that they didn’t seem to have all the long term stalls and issue that many of us here had, if they did, they’d play with the numbers and change things accordingly and stuff started moving again.
Let me just clear up something. Do you count calories? Or do you keep carbs low, force the protein amount and allow minimal fat? Long ago, I came to the conclusion that counting calories was silly because our bodies adapt so well. In any experiment that’s long enough you see people lose weight then gain it back as the body adapts to the different calories available.
I’m pretty clear on the basic approach of less than 30g/day of carbs, which is pretty much what I do. Some days I can approach up to 50g, but that’s easy to cut out. I’ve been keto for five years now, and was low carb almost since '97 so some of these numbers are second nature. I’m 66 FWIW.
Protein: the numbers here are I’m currently around 208. At that weight, 1g/lb of protein a day is just about 30 ounces of meat or other high protein source. I definitely don’t eat that. Right now, my wife is cooking dinner, a pound of ground beef. She’ll take 3 or 4 ounces of that and I’ll have the rest, 12 or 13 ounces. I’m guessing my lunch was five ounces of protein. It was a loaded omelet that we split. We often make a dish for the two of us that makes counting nutrients pretty much impossible, if any precision is needed. Maybe with a spreadsheet and good scale.
I played around on the ketogains website and they say 152 g of protein a day, pretty much 1g/lb of lean body mass. I’m closer to that on a daily basis, but still probably short. The seem to calculate macros on 25% below basal rate (calculated). It doesn’t seem you can change that basal rate, and I’m pretty sure you’ve measured yours.
I count everything, I do calories and fat as a limit and protein as a goal. I never believed they mattered either, from both years pre-keto when I did Atkins or even a couple years into keto. What I came up with is they do, if for no other reason that it’s all we really have to measure our intake. Eating a “small plate” of steak doesn’t tell you much. Or in my case a fist of bacon. Sounds funny, but ultimately doesn’t tell me anything. When I got my RMR tested, that number was the one I started with when I was trying to loose… and it worked. I couldn’t get myself to loose weight for months prior, that number got me loosing. We all know that in vs out isn’t a perfect thing (especially out) but ultimately it’s the measurement we got. It’s true our bodies adapt but think of reverse dieting, how else would you know how much or often to increase what you’re eating above maintenance? Or even maintain maintenance? Or know what your maintenance even is?
The other thing I hit myself with after the calories thing was we all know and typically agree then when we start out, and most carb junkies have our satiety system hijacked and we THINK we’re hungry when we’re not. We KNOW that’s happening. But it seems we (maybe I’m wrong here) think that only happens in one direction? Like in my case where I wasn’t eating enough because I wasn’t hungry and felt good. Throughout the reverse dieting I constantly eat when I’m not hungry. I love eating so it works out but without tracking my calories I have no way to know that I’m not pushing it to whatever level I’ve set to myself, or to make sure I don’t over do it.
Was wondering how long you would use that method? Almost sounds like an eating disorder or a very anorexic like way of eating and fasting?
Part of your weight maybe more lean skeletal muscle and bone density (you already attained from previous fasting?) and your trying to attain a smaller version of your high school self?
Yes, but it looks like this thread is going there, which is fine by me.
I just mentioned 160 because at that weight, I had very low body fat (I’m 5’10"). Now, at age 60, the less I weigh, the better I feel, so I’m looking for a reliable way to get to and maintain any weight I choose. But, based on the comments here, it appears there is a risk that regular fasting will result in an adaptation that will require longer and more frequent fasts to sustain?
Men don’t quit growing until age 24 -25 so 160 might not be your ideal weight?
Fasting too much may make you lose more muscle so you will get fatter every time you eat a carb.
If it were my body I would be lifting and doing squats to build muscle volume and you may make it closer to 160 with-out much effort even if carbing up occasionally than having to do all this fasting and burning up your muscle volume only to gain it all back again? You want to try and burn more body fat when at rest and fasting will slow down your BMR if you keep doing it with-out the muscle mass being greater than adipose ratio, that’s what prevents glucose from being stored as fat when pigging-out on carbs?
@atomicspacebunny Good points. A few years ago, I hit 170 and it felt great – I’d be happy with that. My muscle mass seems to be holding steady; although, I think my ability to gain is impeded by lower testosterone as I age. My primary goal is to have the functional strength to improve in my strenuous activities.
This discussion keeps bringing to mind two tangents worth their own threads:
Tangent 1. Is a lower BMR necessarily a bad thing? It occurs to me that it could lower oxidative stress and inflammation, leading to increased longevity. I realize I’m the only person on the planet that would even consider this, as the “higher BMR is good” view is universally held. (In fact, I previously started a thread on this question and people were not amused)
Tangent 2. Can regular fasting lead to adaptation, addiction and dependency? For me, I’d say potentially yes, as the more I do it, the easier it gets and the better I feel during. But I’m scared I might get to a stage that I must constantly fast to avoid weight gain. (if there is no existing thread on this, I’ll start it).
I think it’s entirely reasonable to talk about, and likely even has a probable effect on humans - it makes sense on a basic level, at least. It certainly operates in laboratory mice, although the effect is more pronounced when it’s begun early, like at 1 month of age. The effect is lessened when older mice are fed less.
