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

(Doug) #141

Karim, it will be interesting to see what the next DEXA scan shows.

I originally thought you’d need 40 to 50 days of fasting to get to where you want to be. Certainly just a guess on my part - you get to 153 lbs with 19 lbs of fat. Starting to eat again, you go up to 159 with normal non-fasting water retention. Then 19/159 = 11.95%.

For total body weight, you’re already 56% of the way from 194.4 to 153, in 12 days of fasting. This is surprisingly fast, especially with you being exceptionally mindful of salt and hydration. There’s that initial chunk of weight that comes off quickly when beginning a fast, but you’re still ahead of where I’d have expected - 177 or 178 lbs.

So, is this more water loss, lean mass loss, or have you been burning fat above the presumed limit?

Gotta love this stuff. Thanks for all the good data, and for doing this project. :slightly_smiling_face:

(Karim Wassef) #142

Yes Thanks. I’ll share my body composition and weight projection based on my RMR and runrate data. It’s nonlinear and iterative so I’m going to tweak the math before I share :smiley:

I burn a lot of energy … my estimate is really 2700 to 3000 cal per day. However, as I lose lean mass, I expect that to change. That’s the iterative nonlinear part that I need to tweak.

More to come on that

(Karim Wassef) #143

Today I tried a 14hr dry fast… most of it sleeping but I did my morning coffee and salts. It’s my first real dry fast on an EF but I’ll be doing this again… hopefully stretching it to 24hrs eventually.

If I’m successful, I’ll try to make the last week of this fast One Drink A Day (ODAD). :slight_smile:

The idea being that I’ll get my salts and hydration once and be dry fasted for 23.5hrs every day of that week. Assuming I make it to week 6 still fasted. :joy:

(Karim Wassef) #144

Got my CAC score. I thought it was a number between 0 and 100%… instead it was a number that fit on a log scale from 0 to 400 (400+ being bad, 0 being perfect). I got 3.6 so that’s reasonably good given my elevated cholesterol that my doctor is always so upset about.

I was a sugar eater for 44 years and keto for 2… so maybe 0 was too much to ask for… :slight_smile:

High cholesterol (LDL) on keto need advice
(Windmill Tilter) #145

Wow! That’s outstanding. You couldn’t ask for a better result than that! There is an online calculator that calculates the 10 year CHD event risk based on your CAC score and other vitals. It might be fun to see what they calculate your risk at. I’m guessing it’s pretty darn low. Congrats!

https://www.mesa-nhlbi.org/MESACHDRisk/MesaRiskScore/RiskScore.aspx

(Karim Wassef) #146

Awesome! Thank you.

It came back with 3.3% which I think is higher than I expected but ok… more work to do there.

It asked for my cholesterol which is high at 262 … I don’t think that should be a factor, but ok…

My LDL is 200 too and my HDL is 41 … :smiley:

Frankly, none of that matters - My Tris were still high at 106 but he doesn’t even look at that…

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These results are from September last year - I had a “disagreement” with my doctor… let your imagination run wild here…

(Karim Wassef) #147

Ok. Personal record - day 13! Woohoo…

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So lost 1.2 lbs over the last 24hrs with 1.1 lbs fat and 0.1 lbs lean. Also right at 20% body fat and 170 lbs total weight. Decent progress.

Glucose going the wrong way (~60 vs. 45-55 perviously), and GKI back to ~0.5 instead of the best case ~0.3 mid-week. I think this is a manifestation of my life stress… It’s not bad, but I need to find more ways to chill out… This weekend should be prime for another ice bath.

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Definitely stabilized GKI trend in week 2. Wonder what week 3 will bring.

Ok… now to the projections…

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So the current trend is good and very bad… It shows that in another 24 days, I should get to my 12% bf target. Sounds good… but the lean mass loss is really concerning for me (~22lbs!). It took me years to make all that lean mass and I have to find ways to retain it while I improve my health.

Options - 1. More weightlifting… 2. Increase Leucine supplementation… 3. Dry fasting to change the ratio of fat to lean oxidation… 4. Increase Ice/Cold to drive higher ketones… 5. Accelerate loose skin with hard brushing, etc… 6. Break the fast and start BCAAs

Open to more ideas. My first pivot is to increase the lifting, Leucine and Ice…

Next Friday’s DEXA should help confirm or correct these projections.

(Karim Wassef) #148

ok.

Updated goal.

I need to find a way to achieve my 12% goal, stay in deep ketosis and autophagy, and not drop to 140 lbs total. At my height, I need to draw the line at 150 lbs.

The current math ends up with 150 lbs @15% by April 1st vs. 140 lbs @ 12% by April 9th… You normally wouldn’t think that someone can lost 10 lbs in 8 days, but my historical runrate does line up with that.

Another disturbing element is that (if I’m doing it right) my daily metabolic rate would drop from 3200 to 2700 if I lost so much lean mass.

So I need to change my lean mass trajectory without compromising my fat mass trajectory.

I will admit another disappointment and that’s the reappearance of loose skin starting a couple of days ago. I had gained enough weight pre-fast that it had “filled out” and I was hoping that losing fat on the fast would remove the skin alongside the fat in proper proportion… doesn’t look like that’s working. I may take some pictures later today to show how things are developing.

It seems that my body is following the same curve up and down… Here’s a scatterplot of what that’s looked like. This is in spite of weight training, keto, IF, OMAD and EF.

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So the challenge in changing the trajectory of my body’s natural composition preference is to shake it out of it’s comfort zone… to intentionally choose discomfort. That’s what I believe anyway.

There are subtle hints that this can be done in the “scattering” of states above 185lbs which includes a mix of older data (keto only) and newer data (keto + IF and EF)…

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It’s not a massive change but it’s 0.5% in BF… mostly using IF. The hope is that EF + more lifting + Leucine + Ice will allow a change in trajectory.

I’m asking for help now - if anyone knows of references for how this is achievable, or even ideas on how to influence it, please share.

First, I’m doubling Leucine supplements and checking what my glucose and ketone change is. I’ll provide my results later today.

(Windmill Tilter) #149

It’s a tough one, that’s for sure. Here is a small piece of the puzzle that we’re trying to figure out. The vast majority of the published research on prolonged fasting has been done on obese subjects. This article from Elia et al. was done to distinguish the metabolic and catabolic differences between lean and obese subjects during prolonged fasting. The big problem is that protein sparing enjoyed by obese people does not exist for leaner subjects.

Take a look at this chart. Protein catabolism for very obese people is 5-10% of daily calorie expenditure, but for people approaching 12% bodyfat, that number skyrockets to over 30% of total daily calories! That’s a huge amount of lean mass. Certainly excess skin and redundant tissue must be a portion of that, but if the average man has 80lbs of muscle, and 20lbs of skin, it stands to reason that a very large proportion of that catabolism is muscle. Put more bluntly, you’ll start losing actual muscle at an accelerating rate from here on out. The link to the study is just below the diagram.

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https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/j.1550-8528.1999.tb00720.x

That’s the bad news. The better news is that resistance training might have a positive effect on RMR upregulation. My friend PP over at the IDM clinic forum has been tracking his RMR daily during his weekly 2Feast:5Fast cycles. We did an experiment last week to add a 15 minute Body by Science style workout to the first day and 3rd days of his 5 day fast to see whether it would have an effect. It did. The chart is below. The good news is that your daily resistance training might be maintaining your elevated RMR, but the bad news is that 25%-30% of those burned calories will be lean mass, a large proportion of which may be actual muscle. I’ve never found research on what those proportions are (skin vs muscle vs other). If you’re burning 3000kcal per day though, and 1/3rd is coming from protein, that’s 250g of protein, or up to .55lbs each day. At that point your lean mass loss by weight exceeds your fat loss by weight. (1000/4=250g Lean Mass < 2000/9=222g Fat Mass).

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Something else you may be interested in regarding GKI is that lean people upregulate ketones much faster than obese people. This allows you to get into deep autophagy a bit quicker than you used to. This makes sense I guess, since autophagy goes after lean mass components, and lean mass catabolism is dramatically increased at lower bodyfat levels.

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https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/j.1550-8528.1999.tb00720.x

(Karim Wassef) #150

Thanks. This goes back to my other thread struggling between loose skin autophagy and muscle hypertrophy.

Sounds like I’m struggling between autophagy for loose skin and recycling unhealthy lean mass and fat loss too.

One solution is to give up on the autophagy and just focus on the body fat target first with ketosis. Then come back and address the autophagy later. Just seems like we’re still missing something to make both work simultaneously. I have the gut intuition that timing is a missing variable.

Ok. Ran the Leucine experiment. I usually take 800mg once a day at night before going to sleep. I plan to do that but took an equal dose around 2hrs ago.

My glucose & ketones went from 46G, 6.2K = 0.41GKI to 62G, 7.2K = 0.49GKI. So definitely a glucose increase. The ketone increase may or may not be related. Overall GKI went up with higher ketones.

I’ll wait a couple of hours and repeat it again. Then once more at night.

If the results are good (glucose under 80, ketones over 5), I’ll actually continue this repeated dosage and see if it makes a difference in the lean mass loss rate.

Strangely, this mirrors my multi-day feeding when I used to bulk while lifting decades ago: “Eat every two hours whether you want to or not”. Feels weird seriously trying this while fasting … since it’s the opposite of fasting - sort of.

(Windmill Tilter) #151

Interesting thought! You might be right. What if it’s not just timing but frequency (in the duration of a recurring pattern sense of the word). What if its as simple as ADF. Protein sparing, fat burning, protective of RMR, autophagy inducing. It checks a lot of boxes.

Hypercaloric feasts alternated with 42hr zero kcal fasts, coupled with resistance training. Kind of makes sense.

(Karim Wassef) #152

I’m going to try multi-day Leucine supplements until I see a drop in ketones and increase in glucose.

That’s a lot of pin pricks, but I’m willing to do it if it changes the slope of lean mass.

That’s a very high frequency amino acid cycle while fasting, so that’s bizzare. I’ll have to redefine what constitutes fasting if this actually works.

(Karim Wassef) #153

Ok… down to 50G, 7.2K, 0.39 GKI… so taking the next 800mg of Leucine.

#154

I’m not caught up on all of your incredible charts and details, but as someone who watched her belly firm up after two pregnancies, I can tell you that even if skin does not respond as/how you might expect right now, the overall arc can be still be very good. I remember watching in disbelief as the skin of my belly hung - spilled!- over my waistband soon after the second one. I couldn’t imagine how it would ever tighten up, but I think I was in a bikini within a few months.

Skin can be elastic, but not over days or weeks and I think you’ll see some of the good effects of all this work further down the line.

(Karim Wassef) #155

thank you for the reassurance.

I think age and taking care of the skin helps… I have neither working in my favor historically.

I’m 45 and trying to remain hydrated, take cold showers and use lotion/UV… we’ll see

:smiley:

(Karim Wassef) #156

Second Leucine experiment result… down to 47G, 7.0K, 0.37 GKI… that’s very counter-intuitive, but it may actually be related to Dr Bikman’s experimentation on protein glucagon upregulation during deep ketosis. He did it with Alanine instead of Leucine. His thesis is basically that with very low glucose levels (45-55), the body CANNOT afford to issue insulin due to the fear of hypoglycemia (falling into a coma). So the body HAS to use the amino acids and so upregulated glucagon instead.

Skip to 10:45 to see this… and then the result in 19:00…

I take a Carnitine supplement too to help fat metabolism too. I might actually try the experiment with both Leucine and Carnitine supplementation every 2 hours… maybe that’s the next phase of this experiment.

It may be that the amino acids in a fasted state can’t really reduce the slope of the lean mass loss, but it might increase the slope of the fat mass loss.

Ok… going to round 3 of Leucine 800mg.

Feedback from my wife = Keto breath seems to be 100x today (subjective).
One more note: had my first “salt headache” today. This usually happens when I don’t take enough salt but I’m pretty diligent about it… I thought I was doing that, but apparently, I need more today.

(Doug) #157

Karim, yes - might not be possible to go for so many things at once, though I think there’s more we don’t know, here, than what we know for sure. One thing with leucine supplements - that is the single most potent inhibitor of autophagy found yet. Fats have a much lesser effect, carbs have a very substantial effect, proteins even more, and of all the amino acids, leucine is particularly adept at up-regulating mTOR and inhibiting autophagy.

Here’s one study that notes this:

(Karim Wassef) #158

I realize that. It’s why I picked Leucine specifically. I picked Leucine to upregulate muscular mToR while my fast unregulated AMPK and autophaphy elsewhere (like skin and fat).

I also picked Carnitine to enhance the penetration of fat into cells for metabolism.

(Karim Wassef) #159

I think I miscounted, I actually ran this 4 times … so here are the results over time today

Pre-experiments starting… 46G, 6.2K, 0.41GKI

800mg Leucine + 2 hours …

Pre-experiments result… 62G, 7.2K = 0.49GKI

800mg Leucine + 2 hours …

First Leucine experiment result… 50G, 7.2K, 0.39 GKI

800mg Leucine + 2 hours …

Second Leucine experiment result… 47G, 7.0K, 0.37 GKI

800mg Leucine + 2 hours …

Third Leucine experiment result… 62G, 6.5K, 0.53 GKI

So after four (1 pre-experiments + 3 experiment cycles) consecutive Leucine supplement doses of 800mg each, I’m still well in the “safe zone” of <80G and >5K = <0.89 GKI.

I’m going to take the fifth 800mg dose before going to sleep and see what happens tomorrow morning.

That’s 3.2 mg of Leucine so far and will be 4.0 mg total… This is unusual given that 2mg should be sufficient to kick me out autophagy. My hypothesis is that the research is usually conducted on people on intermittent fasting, low carb or even SAD, not long extended fasts like mine?

(Doug) #160

:grinning: Getting complicated all of a sudden. I see what you mean, but don’t know how it would all work out. Exercise itself stimulates autophagy in skeletal muscles, so it’s working against mTOR there. And too little as well as too much autophagy is detrimental for muscle tissue.

Karim, have you seen anything that indicates specific control of autophagy in skin cells? I’ve never seen it mentioned as being any different than body cells in general.

They’ve found that in a mouse’s liver, insulin doesn’t damp autophagy down as much as it does in muscle tissue, and that amino acids had more effect in the liver versus muscle. Yet that’s comparing the action of of each one by iteself, i.e. it’s not necessarily like insulin has a comparable amount of inhibition to amino acids.

Why would it make much of a difference for the GKI? We’re still talking about 4 grams of protein - no big thing for anybody - but especially coming from eating ketogenically or fasting.

I also have to think again that the connection between the GKI and autophagy can be quite shaky - as with a very insulin-sensitive person eating zero-carb, ending up with fairly high ketones and fairly low blod sugar.