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

(Windmill Tilter) #482

See! Interesting tidbits every day. :grinning:

I’m super curious to hear now. I’ve dropped 40lbs in 3 months, and I’ve got 40 to go. I reckon I’m gonna need it. Even with fasting 3-4 days a week, I don’t think it’s possible to avoid some loose skin if the pounds drop too quickly.

I’m curious to hear the theory of how it works. My best guess is that it’s an single amino acid targeted to minimize muscle loss. The amino acid amplifies the muscle sparing signal generated from your daily weightlifting. Because the largest lean mass source remaining is skin, autophogy selectively targets it. Am I warm?

(Karim Wassef) #483

Its part of the story, but the Leucine and lifting are the demand side of the equation. The problem was the supply side… how to redirect the body’s blood flow and focus toward the loose skin… vs muscle.

You’d think that the body would just prioritize muscle over skin, but with the loss of lean muscle in my legs, that’s clearly not how it works. In fact, in terms of lean mass loss, it looks like muscle is the first to go and organs like the brain, heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, etc… are the most valuable.

That leaves organs like the digestive system and skin. I think the skin is seen as defensive barrier number 1… and is a pretty important organ for survival. While we see it as loose skin… the body doesn’t.

The hierarchy of preservation seems to be (and I am totally making this up)

Life/death organs (brain, heart, lungs)
Critical organs (liver, kidneys)
Defensive organs (skin, immune system)
Digestive organs (stomach, intestines, bladder)
Locomotion (bones, muscle)
Peripheral (hair, nails)

So skin is not really the lowest priority and muscle is actually a more likely source or amino acids, unless it’s heavily used.

That brings me to the secondary variables after “criticality”… those are “ease of access” and “use/stimulation”.

Muscles have very easy “access” (easy to break down) and if the “use” is low, then they’re first on the chopping block. Skin, on the other hand is harder to access with the top layer basically being dead and the next few layers not at deeply connected in terms of circulation as the muscles. In terms of use, their function is defensive so - constant.

So

Priority … muscle loses to skin
Access… muscle loses to skin
Use… muscle loses to skin unless heavily stimulated

… so skin stays and muscle goes. That’s my interpretation of my experience in phase 1.

This becomes the foundation of what I am changing in phase 2

(Karim Wassef) #484

Morning of day 5

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So total lost is 11.2 and I estimate 2lbs is fat, 1lb of lean, and 8.2 of water/food flux.

0.52 GKI so still in autophagy. I’m going to continue the Leucine so we’ll see how much it goes up with the refeed.

(Windmill Tilter) #485

High daily dose of niacin to promote blood flow to the skin? That’s my last guess, I promise. :wink:

(Karim Wassef) #486

I actually do take and have always taken niacin as a micro supplement both before and during fasting. But it really doesn’t flush the belly area. It’s mostly my face, scalp and ears… very uncomfortable but good.

But that’s not it. I’ll reveal all on April 15th after my next DEXA and RMR…

(Karim Wassef) #487

Dry fasting isn’t as bad today but there’s still 2hrs to go… I guess it is hard when you count hours instead of days.

(Karim Wassef) #488

So I dropped from 183.2 to 172 in 5 days of fasting. I have 2 days of refeeding… any bets on how much weight I regain before the next fasting cycle?

My bet is 8.2lbs… so I predict Monday’s morning weigh in to be 180.2… why 8.2 ? It’s the same weight gain I had the last cycle refeed… so I’m calling that my “flux”…

Come one, come all… place your bets.

(Windmill Tilter) #489

I’m not sure what I’m more excited about, finding out more about your loose skin autophagy protocol, or finding out whether a few weeks of feast/fast cycles was sufficient for RMR recovery. If I recall, your RMR dropped from 2300 prefeast to around 2000 after refeeding. I’m hoping it’s crept back up to 2100 or so. Make sure you’ve feasted for at least 24 hrs before you do the RMR to avoid skewing results!

(Windmill Tilter) #490

If we’re playing Price is Right rules, where the closest guess without going over wins, my bet is 6.7lbs of water weight regain.

(Karim Wassef) #491

No… it’s closest price… up or down… the smallest absolute delta wins.

And I promise not to change my feeding protocol to create any bias. Scout’s promise.

(Karim Wassef) #492

No bet changes after midnight today… so place your bets.

Karim 8.2
Nick 6.7
…

(PJ) #493

So I lost 170#, then regained it, then have lost 140#, so let’s just say any route to helping with loose skin is something I would give money, devotion, and my firstborn for.

Actually my firstborn (ONLY born) is 22 and she’s been a bad attitude pain in the ass since she was a bit less than 16, so I might ship her off for even less inspiration. :rofl:

[quote=“Karim_Wassef, post:481, topic:78183”]I also upped my daily dose of Leucine to 4g post workout. I think that this may be part of the reason I saw a much more dramatic ramp in ketones. If someone wants to intentionally get into autophagy fast, this seems to be it.

In fact, I suspect it’s also why I couldn’t get out of autophagy for days while eating … and sometimes even overeating carbs (70g). I never got out of ketosis. I would really like to study the effect of Leucine on RMR, especially while fasting.[/quote]

OK now I am really confused. Kind of.

Jason Fung – and my brain may have made a mess of this – seemed to say that even 3g of this would DESTROY autophagy. In two diff places I have seen (transcript) or heard him say, specifically, that if you wanted autophagy to be part of your fast, maybe you should skip the bone broth idea, because it had gelatin which had leucine.

On the other hand I just watched a fabulous video (see autophagy thread in the forum here) where he (Donald Layman) made clear that protein synthesis does NOT happen without sufficient leucine (I promptly went and bought leucine as a supplement). So I guess I can see that maybe protein synthesis… might have some relationship… to autophagy… esp if you aren’t eating protein so maybe it has to scavenge for what it can. Maybe?

(Windmill Tilter) #494

Can you find the links to this? This is fascinating given @Karim_Wassef experience!

(PJ) #495

Years ago I used to take fairly high doses of niacin regularly. Flush, of course.

Yesterday I took 100mg (tiny amount) in the morning and had zero response to it.

So then I took 200mg (still not very large IMO) in the evening. It took a long time for reaction. Which then was somewhat miserable, but not so much around the head and neck as usual, mostly arms.

And then just as I thought the reaction was done (still somewhat visually present on arms but didn’t feel anything) my heart rate jumped to about 115, and varied from 105-115 for a long time. Then reduced to the 80s super briefly then jumped to as high as 155 and went from 105-155 for awhile. All this took (just the heartbeat part) about two hours. I wasn’t too worried in terms of the heart, I was just wondering what the hell would cause that. I know that allegedly, overdose of niacin can cause rushing heart, lightheadedness, nausea – and I had the tiniest bit of the last two also but for like 3 seconds is all – but 200mg is an incredibly small dose IMO. I’m wondering if it’s just that I’m fasting? They say fasting makes all ‘drugs’ more powerful (myth?) and niacin’s the closest thing the vitamin world has to a drug that acts fast enough and intensely enough on the outside of the body to be so noticed.

(Doug) #496

Leucine is the single most potent inhibitor of autophagy. Essentially, as we’re talking about autophagy here, it’s in response to nutrient deprivation, and among all human nutrients, leucine has the most effect. So when talking about autophagy and fasting, there indeed is a big difference between just water fasting and the addition of bone broth. Adding a little fat, for example, would be much less of a factor.

The body’s regulation of autophagy is really darn complicated, though. Most nervous system cells - that are ‘postmitotic’ (that can’t divide and multiply to dilute out the effects of old, damaged or faulty cells) are supposed to have a low, basal rate of autophagy going on all the time. Other cells - those in skeletal muscle, can have increased autophagy stimulated by exercise.

I don’t know what the “normal, fed-state” rate of autophagy is for human cells in general, but in rat liver cells fasting makes autophagy increase 600-700%. This is autophagy “eating” as much as 1.5% of a cell’s volume, per hour. That’s some serious autophagy, eh? :smile:

With autophagy, we’re breaking down protein structures into amino acids, including leucine and the other ‘essential’ ones for humans. (I’ll watch that Donald Layman video - have to think he was talking about normal protein building in humans, not autophagy…?) The stuff that gets “eaten” by autophagy isn’t just lost to the cells - much of it is returned to the watery innards of them. So now we have the appearance of these amino acids, and they (like eaten amino acids, leucine, etc.) damp down autophagy, so there’s a negative feedback loop at work which is also part of the regulation of autophagy.

(PJ) #497

Firefox has eaten my ‘history’ aside from today for some reason. I searched in the IDM site but they have no decent index of their videos anywhere that I can find. I searched youtube but apparently the only fung vid I watched there was another one. I do recall that one, I only read the transcript, and it was an interview.

(It took awhile to search as I’ve been listening to fave songs for days. You nearly got Van Morrison and Cheap Trick instead. :smiley: )

(PJ) #498

Yes, he was. I was just trying to make sense of Karim’s comments about leucine in relationship to his perception of autophagy with his fasting.

(Karim Wassef) #499

My experience is that Leucine is anabolic and ketogenic…

and while fasted, ketogenic + low blood glucose = autophagic… maybe?

It is complicated but I believe that hormones have different effects on different body parts. The negative feedback loops and the interplay between AMPK and mToR is where I think we need more research. I think that it’s dose dependent, duration dependent, and delay dependent.

In other words…as usual… it depends… on how much, which amino acids, and how often. This means Dr Fung may be correct and I may be correct based on my n=1…

The only way to tell is to measure glucagon and insulin… many times… over different conditions.

I’m personally getting the results I want with loose skin and fat loss (we’ll see what DEXA & RMR say)…

(Karim Wassef) #500

Any other bets on my refeed weight gain?

Trying to make the thread more fun, you see?

Nerdy, but fun. :smiley:

(Karim Wassef) #501

There’s publications that show that Leucine supplementation while fasted accelerates gluconeogenesis and the breakdown of other proteins.

So it causes a mini-insulin spike to trigger building (anabolic) and that creates a demand for more (other) amino acids to build with + it needs to rebalance blood glucose so kicks up gluconeogenesis… I haven’t figured out how it increases ketones but I suspect that the energy deficit created by the poor metabolic efficiency in gluconeogenesis (take a lot more energy to get glucose that way) in a fat adapted body triggers the need for more ketones = more glucagon = burns more fat too.

This is a short lived event so it’s not going to kick me out of ketosis. It also doesn’t raise blood glucose… it just maintains. In fact, the catabolism it drives indirectly is more aligned with autophagy. But it is anabolic too… and consumes lean mass, but not necessarily muscle.

I’ll try to research it more but I think Leucine sets off a chain reaction that triggers insulin and glucagon in sequence. It builds muscle, breaks down lean mass, and burns fat… all in a cascade of events.

Complicated but beautiful.