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

[Karim_Wassef]

Day 17 - PSK

[atomicspacebunny]

Looking at your glucose, wouldn’t high endogenous glucose while fasting be a good thing? Some organs of the body are glucose dependent.

Protein Sparing may lower glucose but then you also have the catabolic thing going on?

That why I carb up + protein before lifting weights so I’m not burning up muscle tissue I worked so hard to build.

It gets tricky because you never know what your really burning when lifting (i.e. physical exertion). Fat, ketones, glucose like fuel or amino acids…one flame torching the other.

[Karim_Wassef]

interesting… it depends on the cause, source and destination of the glucose.

high glucose could only be the result of gluconeogenesis and that is either from food protein, lean muscle or the glycerol backbone of fat (food or body).

It could be the result of high cortisol from excess stress or exercise.

Even when I weightlift, I try to use slow controlled motion with the heaviest weights I can to reduce the need for explosive energy.

I know that I can function on low glucose and high ketones. If my glucose is high, then my ketones are low… and I’m sugar burning instead of fat burning… that just isn’t where I want to be.

I want to be building muscle with protein and using my body fat for fuel. Seeing glucose go up doesn’t line up with that?

[Karim_Wassef]

Day 18 - PSK

One day left to go. Tomorrow I break the PSK and go simple Keto.

and here’s the comparison of EF to PSK:

So… with one day left to go (19 days EF vs. 18 days PSK)
The fat loss on EF was 11lbs vs. 5.2lbs PSK… so it’s about 50% as effective in fat loss.
The muscle loss on EF was 1.7lbs vs. 1.1lbs PSK … so the PSK muscle loss was about 68% of EF

Another way of looking at this is the ratio of muscle to fat lost:
EF = 1.7 / 11 = 16%
PSK = 1.1 / 5.2 = 22% (…more muscle lost vs. fat lost)

So while it works, my experience on vegan PSK has been that it’s half as effective and disproportionately consumes more lean muscle (1/3 more muscle to fat ratio lost). So if the idea is to lose less muscle, I don’t think it worked for me.

My GKI has been steadily increasing and it now around 4… so PSK does not support autophagy for me. In fact above 3, I don’t think I’m seeing much ketosis… my ketones varied from 1.0 to 0.5 (after weightlifting). That’s after consuming only 850 calories and 4g carbs last night!!!

There’s one more day to go, but I doubt it’ll change the results much.

On an experiential level … PSK got easier over time. I got over the headaches and I didn’t experience the emotional downturn I had with EF. It’s just not as effective though and has little benefit in retaining muscle mass vs. a true EF.

I do think that PSK is likely more effective than traditional Keto but that’s a separate experiment.
I also think that carnivore PSK is probably more effective than vegan Keto but that’s also a separate experiment.

Hope this is useful

[KetoRocks]

It’s useful, thank you very much!

[Karim_Wassef]

Keto - Day 2

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:

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.

[Karim_Wassef]

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]

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:

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:

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]

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]

Day 3 Keto Refeed results

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

[Karim_Wassef]

Day 4 Keto Refeed

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]

Day 2 of the last extended fast for this spring…

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:

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]

Day 3 EF

Almost in autophagy again…

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

[Karim_Wassef]

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

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.

[Karim_Wassef]

Broke my 7 day fast yesterday

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…

[KetoRocks]

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

[RightNOW]

Karim is the graph master

[Karim_Wassef]

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

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

[Karim_Wassef]

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]

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

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.