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

(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?