Karim's Extended Fast Tracker - come along for the ride

(Karim Wassef) #1094

Keto - Day 2

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interestingly, my ketones went up once I stopped PSK and went to keto. I think this is mostly dietary fat converted to ketones, not body fat ketones. My GKI dropped under 2 also but I’m not sure if GKI is meaningful after only 24 hrs of fasting (since I OMAD whether PSK or Keto).

I did lose weight on PSK.

I used 19 days for the average of the EF but still corrected for the first three days that came back after the fast… here are the results:

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so PSK was half the fat loss of EF (54%) and almost three quarters the lean mass loss of EF (72%).

Based on my results, EF is still a superior lean mass preserving and fat mass losing approach. The very high ketones achieves are excellent at preserving lean mass. The PSK’s protein abundance is actually less effective than just the very high ketones.

It does beg the question… what if exogenous ketones were used while on PSK? Combine the abundance of protein with the protection of very high ketones?

I would expect that consuming exogenous ketones would reduce fat mass loss… it’s an immediately available energy source.

I will say that going from PSK to Keto is hard on the digestion. Going from 800 calories to 2000 OMAD was not easy but I wanted to break my fast and hopefully kick up my metabolism in the process.

Tomorrow I’m going to Keto to satiety… if that happens at 1000 calories, so be it.

Dr Boz Calculates levels of autophagy using blood sugar/blood ketones ratio
(Karim Wassef) #1095

To be fair, both were successful. I lost a total of 18lbs of fat mass and 3lbs of lean mass in 44 days.

That’s down from 26.8% bf to 20.6% bf. That’s -6.2% bf.

That included 19 days EF and 19 days PSK with the rest 6 days as Keto.

I will continue Keto this week and into Saturday. I will then fast until the following Sunday evening.

(Karim Wassef) #1096

comparing last year’s fast to this year:

After my 19 day EF last year, I attempted a cyclic fasting approach. This year I tried PSK:

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Cyclic fasting didn’t really deliver persistent results. I would fast for 4 days and then eat for 3… And the feasting days completely undid the fasting days… so it was a revolving door of fat.

PSK looks to have been more consistent.

**note that the starting points are different, so the scales are reset to line up the start but the scale per division is the same.

Here’s the muscle change:

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This shows that PSK and cyclic EF are about the same for lean muscle mass… we’ll see over the next couple of weeks.

(Karim Wassef) #1097

Day 3 Keto cycle

I gained 8.5lbs overnight… the 2000 calorie meal was more than my usual but it made me very thirsty. I probably drank more than a gallon of water over the next few hours.

With all the puts and takes, I expected some increase but not 8.5lbs. That is comparable to my gain after an extended fast.

Depending on how this levels out, I may have to add a correction window for PSK just as I did on EF.

I’ll take another capture after my sauna and before I eat today…

(Karim Wassef) #1098

Day 3 Keto Refeed results

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The net effect today was about 1lb of fat mass regained and 0.5lb of lean muscle mass.

(Karim Wassef) #1099

Day 4 Keto Refeed

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Second day of weight gain.

After my EF, I had three days of consecutive weight recovery. I wonder if PSK will have the same effect.

Three more days of eating and then a week of EF… looking forward to it.

(Karim Wassef) #1100

Day 2 of the last extended fast for this spring…

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After PSK, it took my body 3 days again to reset waste and water weight under Keto, so I had to reset the math to calibrate again:

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So PSK is not half as effective, it’s more like 1/3 as effective for fat loss… the muscle mass loss was 22% of fat mass vs. 15% on the EF.

Also… I realize that I’m now so well adapted that Keto over 10g carb won’t maintain my ketones any more. I crash under 1.0K and GKI quickly goes over 5… that’s kind of sad… but unless I severely punish it, my body is now adapted to working with less ketones.

(Karim Wassef) #1101

Day 3 EF

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Almost in autophagy again… :smiley:

always takes me about 3 days to move my body around.

(Karim Wassef) #1102

Day 6 of the last cycle of the extended fast… I hit a glucose of 34 today! My ketones were at 5.2

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I feel good. I’m using MCT and it’s much easier

I think the PSK experience was good but nothing is as good as an EF. The only drawback is that the first three days of an EF are basically a waste while the body just clears through the food and water it’s holding on to.

Today is my last day not eating. Tomorrow evening I break my fast.

Next year, I think I’m going to cycle EF and PSK - one week each. I think PSK works to break a fast and it’s ok at maintaining partial loss.

Keto isn’t giving me incremental fat loss under 20% BF… it’s excellent for maintenance.

High Protein Modified "Keto + Fasting" muscle building with low fat
(Karim Wassef) #1103

Broke my 7 day fast yesterday

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For some reason, I lost more muscle mass this time. The last day shows the result of breaking the fast so ketones dropped again and weight went up with a ton of insulin and water/waste.

Overall a good season…

#1104

Congratulations on all this info, you are in a position to make very informed decisions. :grinning:
And may I add, I am experiencing serious graph making envy!

(PJ) #1105

Karim is the graph master

(Karim Wassef) #1106

Ok. I did my vegan extended fast again this year. I’m ending it May 1st but didn’t feel like the day to day documentation was useful.

I’ll post my results in a bit :slight_smile:

I started at ~193lbs and I’m bottoming out around ~167lbs after 40+ days.

I did a true fast for the first 14 days, then a FMD (fasting mimicking diet), then a low caloric high fiber keto OMAD and now slowly ramping up to keto again.

Stay tuned for the graphs :slight_smile:

(Karim Wassef) #1107

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I don’t show my blood glucose and ketones but it basically hovered around 50 glucose and 5.0 ketones. This was consistent until I started ramping my caloric intake a week ago… it’s ranging between 2.0 and 5.0 ketones now.

I’m ramping because my previous fasts were followed by a rapid regain of water and food flux - so I decided to slowly build up my intake and still stay keto until I fully break my fast.

(Karim Wassef) #1108

Here’s the comparison of my last three years’ fasts/modified fasts:

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for all three years, I start with a ~2week full fast and then try to keep it going using different keto approaches.

In 2019, I used my ketones to decide if I would eat or fast - hence the cycles.
In 2020, I tried a protein sparing keto (eat high protein to avoid losing muscle).
In 2021, I am trying a fasting mimicking keto (eat high fat, low protein) + low calorie keto.

My conclusion so far is that the full fast is still best. The next best is fasting mimicking with low protein. For the first part of the Keto FMD, I was operating at 500 calories of intake - mostly fat. My muscle loss was minimal and my fat loss was close to 1/2 of what I was getting on a full fast.

My normal eating BMR is probably between 1800 and 2300 calories, so 500 calories of mostly fat intake was very close to fasting but it kept my ketones at 5.0.

(PJ) #1109

Karim’s back!

Aside from ‘the graph says 2020 was better’ (nice to know 2020 was better for SOMEone about SOMEthing…), was the fast-mimicking easier, harder, or no diff, experientially, than fasting?

PJ

(Karim Wassef) #1110

Thanks.

I think 2021 is as good as 2020. I still have today’s data to add and I’ll repost that later today.

The fasting mimicking diet was the easiest I’d experienced. My ketones were consistently high (5) and I didn’t lose muscle beyond what I have in the past with glucose running low (around 50).

My mood was a lot better and I wasn’t hungry. It felt a little like cheating - or how I felt when I first started keto.

I basically ran at 500 calories and < 20g net carbs. I played with the protein fat ratio for the rest and the fat was generally 60%-80%. Fat is satisfying.

(Karim Wassef) #1111

Here’s the final results for 2021:

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After my extended fasts and keto-based diets, my refeeding usually reverses a lot of the food and fluid buildup so I wanted to take the last couple of weeks and slowly increase my intake (still on keto) and see if I could carry the benefits over.

I continued to lose as long as I was under ~ 1000 calories a day but stopped between 1000 and 2000 over the next 10 days or so. Some may consider this negative but I’ve effectively ramped my metabolism up from 1000 to 2000 without gaining any fat - and that’s very positive… I’m keeping all the benefits of the fast + diet and quickly recovered my metabolic rate.

I’ll continue to monitor my results while eating in the 1800-2000 calorie range to see if I can keep the benefits and even if I can continue to ramp up my intake and just keep pushing my metabolism up.

Hope this is useful for someone out there :smiley:

(PJ) #1112

Well getting through the metabolic downregulation is probably the biggest challenge our world hasn’t really figured out yet, so if your experimentation seems to have worked that out for your body, it’s a helluva accomplishment.

(Diana) #1113

This is interesting. How did this not cause a decrease in bmr when you resumed eating increased calories?