High Protein Modified "Keto + Fasting" muscle building with low fat

(mole person) #571

Do tell!!

(Karim Wassef) #572

Ok. My travel schedule is hectic but I’ll take a breath and share. I’ve logged 40,000 miles in 8 weeks.

Here are my observations - all results are in a low carb state (<20g)

First - I’ve been cycling fat without intending to. This means that Mon-Fri I go high protein low fat and then on the weekend, I go high protein high fat. This wasn’t intentional, it’s just a biproduct of my hectic pace. The fat cycling makes my lean days very effective at fat burning as indicated by very high ketones (>1.5) which used to be very hard to achieve without fasting.

My theory is that the high fat sets up an expectation of fat availability and usage. Then the lean days continue to demand that fat availability from my own fat.

Second - supplements seem to really effect my hunger. Again, I’ve been unintentionally skipping my supplements or taking them later (after eating my OMAD). This really seems to make me very hungry.

My theory is that my hunger is due to nutrient needs, not caloric needs.

#573

Interesting…can you share more info on your fat cycling, ie how were your meals different?

(Karim Wassef) #574

During the week, I don’t have time to cook, so living out of a hotel room and my meals come prepared from a local grocery… no kitchen and just a teeny fridge…

Grilled tuna, roasted chicken, etc… in the mornings, I’d have black coffee. I’d have the whole chicken with the skin but no real source of good fats.

On the weekends, I’m home with the family so I’m adding heavy cream to my coffee, grilling up ribeyes and eggs and bacon with avocados in olive oil… basically, I splurge on the weekends with the family and then I go spartan during the week.

#575

Interesting, thanks…something to experiment with :slight_smile:
I frequently feel like protein doenst satiate me, however strong and fatty food does. I could defintely try this and observe my hunger levels. I drink black coffee, so I will keep it black and simple. Chicken, tuna, lean pork (loin, tenderloin) and lean beef during the week, with a salad (1 tbsp EVOO and ACV) without eggs, avocados and butter, weekend would be fattier cuts of meat, avocado, eggs, butter and salad (1tbsp EVOO and ACV). I cant have cold cuts and dairy, so my options are limited and I belive good for testing :slight_smile:

(Neil) #576

Happy to see you back here, Karim!

I keep bouncing back and forth on how I feel about protein vs. fat and the satiety of each. For me personally, the satiety effect of each of the three macronutrients is roughly as follows:

  • Protein: Immediate satiety. If you gave me a buffet table full of nothing but different cuts of lean meat, for example, I would eat up to the point where I felt full, then I would lose all interest in eating and stop. I would then continue to feel the same level of comfortable fullness over the next few hours.
  • Fat: Delayed satiety. If you gave me a buffet table full of nothing but cheese, I would eat and eat and eat and eat until either I emptied the table or I had overeaten by about 3x, at which point I might finally lose interest in eating more. I would feel fine right after I finished eating, but 1-2 hours later I would feel very overfull, to the point of feeling physically uncomfortable. That feeling of being “stuffed” would gradually dissipate over the next 24 hours.
  • Carbs: I think the response to this is pretty universal around the Keto forums and well understood. I would initially feel full, then a couple hours later I’d get very hungry.

The question is… what to do with that knowledge? Previously I followed the school of thought that said “high fat, low carb, moderate protein”. But the “high fat” part of that would lead to me feeling overfull after eating, so I tried dialing the fat back and switching to “high protein, low carb, moderate fat”. That’s been hard to accept, though, because fat is delicious!

(Karim Wassef) #577

Try cycling… I think the body needs some level of cycling to change

(Karim Wassef) #578

Another unintended experiment…

High potassium- I usually take 3 x 200mg a day.

However, I decided to take 6 x 200mg and had a yearning for pickle juice (finished a jar of pickles) and an avocado…

Haven’t run the total but I woke up in a very agitated state… almost hyper but in a bad way. Felt like I wanted to get out of my own skin. Very thirsty.

It wore off after drinking enough water and flushing it through.

Too much of a good thing…

(Windmill Tilter) #579

How about an update @Karim_Wassef? I know you’ve been travelling a ton, but I wanted to check in to see how things are going. :blush:

(Karim Wassef) #580

I’ve attempted to maintain my high protein Keto and got a second gym membership in NJ at Gold’s. So I now go to LA Fitness on Saturdays and Gold’s on Tue, Wed, Thurs.

I fly out every Monday morning and return every Friday night. Sunday is my day off.

I will eventually drop LA Fitness but not just yet.

My goal was to get to 190lbs with 160lbs lean.

My new role is very time consuming so I don’t get a lot of food prep or gym time really. So it’s less productive. I also get less sleep but the stress is a healthy energetic kind of stress.

I usually eat one pre-grilled chicken and 6 eggs a day or just 12 eggs a day depending on whether I had a heavy lift. All OMAD. Fridays I usually just skip altogether so I get one 48hr fast a week.

Still struggling with my nut-addiction… almonds and macadamias. I find that getting them raw (not spicy or salty) significantly reduces my cravings.

Results- I generally rest at 74-78 Glucose and 0.3-0.7.

I’ve gained weight overall but it’s not easily visible. I’ve gone from 169lbs last December to 188lbs this December. So that’s ~20lbs! But my clothes don’t fit much differently and the wife says she doesn’t believe it… so I got close to my weight gain goal but it’s not the muscle weight I want…

Lean mass went from 136lbs to 142lbs so that’s a good 6lbs… but the balance of 13lbs is fat. It’s not terrible but I’ve lost the vascularity I had a year ago. The ratio is the same though: 2lbs of fat for every 1lb of lean I put on. The fat weight looks to be all in my waist though…

I’ve been investigating hormone testing because of my age - 47 next year - and testosterone was low. Basically, I’ll be getting less gains for my effort than I would have 20yrs ago. I’m considering the options with my Dr but I really don’t want to go there since I would need to stay on it permanently…

I’m still supplementing and I’ll say that everything else hormonally based has been outstanding… teenage energy like. However, I’m finding that the hormones that bind to sex receptors reduce the available testosterone for hypertrophy…

Still learning and trying. Sorry the updates are many months apart but I still read up on the updated posts here :slight_smile:

(Windmill Tilter) #581

Glad to hear you’re doing well! I know how much travel like that can wear you down. I used to commute 2800 miles from Boston to Ft. McMurray every week. It was 2 commercial flights, a company jet, and then an hour drive in a rental car each way. I did that for about 18 months. Not sorry that’s over with…:yum:

Getting the lean mass up 6lbs is pretty great. Gaining fat with the muscle is pretty much inevitable. It’s a heck of a lot easier to get rid of the fat than it is to gain the muscle, so I’d put it in the “win” column. :slight_smile:

I looked into testosterone therapy a little bit myself and I came to the same conclusion you did. That’s not a one-way road I have any interest in going down. For folks for whom it’s medically necessary it makes a ton of sense, but it’s not something I’d want to do otherwise based on what I read.

One thing you might want to check is BFR training (Blood Flow Restriction Training), aka occlusion training. There is decades of research behind it, and it’s fascinating stuff. Basically you restrict venous blood flow while training at 20% of 1 rep max, concentrating all the metabolites into the limbs. This freaks the muscle out, and causes remarkable hypertrophy without stress to the central nervous system. It’s the exact opposite of HIT weight training, so it allows for more hypertrophy with less central nervous system stress (aka burnout/overtraining) in the same amount of time. I’m starting to play around with it. It might be of interest to you because the workouts are very brief, and don’t wear you out, but give still deliver on the hypertrophy end. I know you’re into weird experiments like I am so I’m putting it on your radar. :yum:

(PJ) #582

So I’ve been speedreading on this much of the day. One notable quote:

a few studies have now shown that low-intensity [20–50% 1-repetition maximum (1-RM)] resistance exercise in combination with blood flow restriction (BFR) to the working muscles produces increases in muscle size and strength similar to those of traditional, high-intensity resistance exercise (1, 49–52). … With recent studies demonstrating that traditional high-intensity resistance exercise produces a smaller response or is incapable of stimulating muscle protein synthesis in older humans (34, 37, 48), the use of a novel muscle rehabilitation intervention, such as low-intensity resistance in combination with BFR, may prove beneficial in stimulating mTORC1 signaling and muscle protein synthesis and eventually in improving or maintaining muscle mass in older individuals. https://physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysiol.01266.2009

That was news to me. I didn’t know HIIT was not effective for older (how much older? I don’t know, I didn’t look (yet)) people.

Interesting stuff. I have a large blood pressure cuff. The more interesting thing to me is that just as I thought of it, I searched on BFR + WBV (whole body vibration) and it turns out there is a decent dose of papers on this already, probably because both of those are therapies for people who are old, weak, injured, etc.

(Full Metal KETO AF) #583

It says “smaller response”. It makes sense because as we age we produce less HGH. It’s much easier for young people to bulk up. :cowboy_hat_face:

(Full Metal KETO AF) #584

I’m very interested in learning more about this BFR. I’m supposed to have some PT sessions but also wonder if BFR training would be okay for me, I have atherosclerosis damages and less blood flow in my legs. :cowboy_hat_face:

(Windmill Tilter) #585

HIIT is aerobic exercise where there are mixed intervals of hitting maximum heart rate for a brief duration interspersed with short recovery periods. It seeks to create cardio-respiratory adaptations, and causes significant central nervous system stress so can only be done infrequently.

HIT (high intensity training) is poorly defined but generally refers to working with 80% or greater of one rep max to total muscle failure. It seeks to increase strength and elicit hypertrophy. It causes enormous central nervous system stress, so it can only be done infrequently.

The study you mentioned referred to HIRE (high intensity resistance exercise) which is harder to pin down. I gather it means that the exercise is hypertrophy focused rather than cardiorespiratory focused, and uses resistance between 10%-100% in a range of somewhere between 1-100 sets, done 1-7 days per week to somewhere between mild fatigue and shock induced coma. :yum:

The workouts I do fall under the umbrella of HIT. My particular program is called Body by Science, which actually evolved from a program called Super Slow. Super Slow was designed to build strength and reverse sarcopenia on geriatric patients. Theres been plenty of reasearch on Super Slow and it’s many variants on geriatric patientsto back it up.

The study above seems to be saying that older patients don’t muscle as fast as younger patients, which I would imagine is true regardless of training. They don’t really define what they mean by HIRE either so we don’t know if the studies they reference used water aerobics with billiard balls to mild discomfort. If there are populations that struggle to build muscle, it might well be centenarians. There is heaps of research on the positive results from any type of resistance training with older individuals.

(Windmill Tilter) #586

You should definitely check into it. It might be something that would work for you. I know you did some hardcore resistance training in the past, and maybe BFR could be a bridge back to higher resistance during your recovery. It makes 20lbs feel like 200lbs. :yum:

From a heart stress perspective, it’s pretty mild because the loads involved are very small. Even so, given that it’s messing with blood flow it might not be a good fit.

I’m no expert on BFR but it looks promising. I wouldn’t recommend experimenting with a blood pressure cuff though BTW. It would be extremely easy to create arterial occlusion (very bad) because that’s what it was designed to do. If you want to experiment you’d be better off with an ace bandage, and checking for pulse on the affected limb to confirm there is venous occlusion, but not arterial occlusion. That’s my 2 cents anyway.

(PJ) #587

Howdy!

Some of the BFR research has been done with a standard blood pressure cuff.

Mine is wide (8") which means generally a lower pressure can be used. A lot of the stuff I skim-read yesterday related to the materials of the cuffs, the width of the cuffs, and the considerations of it (how much pressure is needed, the tissue damage that can be done from the effort, etc.) and I don’t think I would use elastic materials or ad-hoc stuff. Thinner people might do better with it than my body likely would.

I read a lot about the heart aspects but I think since I have no issues with my heart itself, or blood pressure, blood consistency, blood composition, etc. – merely the birth defect that led to the heart valve replacement a few years ago – and given it would be impossible for me to do lower-body BFR as I could never find any reasonable cuff that would fit around one of my thighs – I am limited to arms anyway, and one at a time at that, so it’ll probably work out. It is contraindicated for a variety of issues, but the studies looking at heart response don’t show any problems (though one did mention that bi- and alt- had greater heart rate response than unilateral exercises) (another showed improvements in HRV).

The blood pressure cuffs only fully occlude blood flow if you pump them to the point where they do. I will actually need to get nearly-there for 20sec a few times, to move the edema persistently present in my upper arms, and then do the pressure. If I take blood pressure at the docs and they don’t do this it’s artificially high, but a few brief periods of pressure, cleared then redone, and then it’s fine. Just has to push the stuff out of the way.

I’m pretty sure I can use the combination of subjective perception, and the actual result (whether it causes anything to start going numb, etc.) to work out a compression without full occlusion. (I have more pain from BP cuff than most people due to edema/size, so full occlusion is acutely miserable for me compared to when I was leaner.) What % that may be, who knows, because I think it’ll just take some experimentation to come up with what seems reasonable.

Oh, back to the whole “older humans” thing: yes, of course hormonal response etc. is lower, but how much lower is an important issue. The quote didn’t just say it was lower it said: “With recent studies demonstrating that traditional high-intensity resistance exercise produces a smaller response or is incapable of stimulating muscle protein synthesis in older humans” I think it depends on the person. The BFR approach seems ideal for people working against some situation that makes traditional ideal-exercise difficult or dangerous or poorly-responsive, so it just seems to me that much “less response” or worse, is definitely one of those criteria that would make it worth investigating.

I do notice that so far there hasn’t been enough time/funding to get research on a solid variety of people including post-menopausal women vs. lots of co-eds and especially men. Only an issue since the response to a lot of things differs in that group vs. the latter.

Anyway, it will be an interesting experiment. I intend to begin this week to see if it’s possible given my body sitch and my limited materials. Thanks for the reference @Don_Q Nick! I’m amazed I had not read on this before, especially since some research overlaps with the WBV stuff which I make a point to look for somewhat ongoing.

Karim I know I sorta hijacked your journal in responding to him here, but well, here was where the conversation was, I bet you don’t mind. Hope you are having fun in your new challenging job. :slight_smile:

PJ

(Windmill Tilter) #588

Sounds like you know what you’re doing. I just wanted to flag it as possible issue. If absolutely agree that a blood pressure cuff will work if you’re careful about it. I’m getting a set of these, because I’m a nerd and I like the idea of knowing precise repeatable pressures:

If you want to get real fancy, you can get a handheld ultrasound to monitor occlusion like they do in BFR research and in psychotherapy clinics. They’re surprisingly cheap and easy to use. Edge mobility is targeted at physiotherapy clinics, so I’m guessing it’s a quality piece of equipment.

I’ve noticed that too. Lots of stuff on athletes and injury recovery, but not so much on older populations.

(Karim Wassef) #590

I have been using blood flow restriction. It seems to help but I need to experiment more with it.

Also… since I merged the high protein diet with My extended fasting thread, if anyone wants to follow on, it’s all here now:

I used a DIY sauna and occlusion bands and Serrapeptase to work through my shoulder and bicep injury. This season I’ve lost almost 35lbs again… starting 201 to 166. Only 25lbs of that is fat though, the rest is muscle and water/waste.

(PJ) #592

Glad to hear serrapeptase helped! That stuff is the bomb.

PJ