Need Explanation Please "WHY FASTING IS EASIER FOR SOME PEOPLE"

(Richard Hanson) #41

Nor does a body utilize hundreds of thousands of kj instantly.

Even if you are exercising continually, such as someone hiking the length of Appalachian Trail who is, at the upper end, expending about 8000 kcal/day … that is still only about 33500 kj/day, and not hundreds of thousands of kj instantly.

Obviously, there is an upper limit at how fast someone can utilize stored fat for energy.

The question is are the numbers calculated by Dr. Alpert for people suffering from a calorie restricted standard diet suffering from a significantly depressed metabolic rate at all germane to a person in ketoes who is fasting, and eating no carbs at all? I think the answer is most likely no.

If I ate a chronically hypocaloric diet at the rate of 1570 kcal/day such as the subjects of the Minnesota starvation study, which contained a lot of starch, I think it very unlikely that I would be in a state of nutritional ketosis. Instead, I have been eating only about 57% of that caloric intake for months and have experienced none of the deprivations of starvation as reported by observing participants in that study.

At this very moment, this day, I am on the last day of a five day fast where my exogenous caloric input has been 0 kcal/day. I will leave it to the community of the forum to judge if I am suffering from the diminished mental acuity commonly observed in starvation study participants.

Does my personal anecdotal experience demonstrate that study participants where not in ketosis? Clearly not, but it certainly does give rise to a rational skepticism about whether or not Dr. Alper’s calculations have any relevance to people on a ketogenic diet who are fasting, or even to anyone who is not on the same diet as those participating in the Minnesota study.

I would no more recommend that people consume a very specific number of grams of fat while fasting based on Dr. Alper’s calculations than I would recommend that the American people eat a low fat, low cholesterol, high carbohydrate diet based on the diet-heart hypothesis.

I would be most pleased if someone would engage in a scientific study to answer the question of how rapidly fat deposits can be mobilized to be used as energy when a person is in ketosis. I don’t think anyone can answer that question by analyzing the data from the Minnasota starvation studies as I think it quite unlikely that participants in those studies where in ketosis.

Most Respectfully,
Richard

(Adam Kirby) #42

You bring up an interesting point, one that I have thought about in the past. I’m not sure if data from hypocaloric carb eaters gives us insight into the maximal metabolic rate of body fat that is possible under the best circumstances.

(Richard Hanson) #43

I truly have the highest regard for Richard and am tremendously grateful for all of his contributions to the ketogenic community at large. I know that his knowledge easily eclipses mine own. I am his student and I thank him for the generous gift of his time.

I still think he has this one wrong. :wink:

Best Regards,
Richard

(Tim W) #44

I wish for the same Richard H, but I’ve had to settle for personal experiments and limited data points.

Such interesting things happen in the body that I’d like to explain more fully/get more “dialed in”. One simple example, the thermogenic effect of food.

We know that when we fast the body will likely turn down the thermostat since it doesn’t have excess calories to “burn off” and/or it is saving as much energy as possible so it can extend the period of time it can live before it HAS to break down muscle tissue etc. for energy purposes.

What I’m really curious about is: How long does it take to “access energy” from a stored unit of body fat (not that it matters, I’m just curious) and, once that process has “started” how long does it take.

One reason I’m curious about this, when my wife and I fast we often suffer from low body temps (I don’t like the cold and hover between 10 and 15% body fat so I spend LOTS of time cold to the point of near misery) BUT, when we go to bed, we often wake up warm (like having the meat sweats) even though we are fasting.

My theory is that one of two things are happening:

  1. During the day we are constantly moving so any energy being made is being used up almost instantly? Maybe just sitting for an entire day while fasting would increase body temps enough to tell if this is correct, but who has time for that?

  2. The body is “waiting” to “burn/access” body stores until night-time, maybe that’s it’s natural process or maybe my wife and I have just created this timeframe based on eating schedules etc.

At any rate, it’s still easier for her to fast, she has more stores than I do and she’s gone 40 days. I was ready to murder puppies after 20. So, the calculations in question are surely off, I consider them to be “ranges” VS hard and fast numbers (as so many things in our biology are…).

(Richard Morris) #45

I was referring to the total energy in the body fat of the average person with an average amount of body fat - who has hundreds of thousands of kilo-Joules of energy stored for a rainy day. You can’t liberate it all instantaneously because that would be a ridiculous release of energy. So necessarily there must be some rate limit on release of energy from body fat. I’m just establishing that there must be SOME limit, because we’re not sticks of dynamite.

If that maximum rate you could extract energy from fat is higher than you could ever use then it would be a meaningless exercise, as you would always be rate limited by how much energy you could USE not how much you could draw down from stores. Equally the metabolic state of the person, whether they are in ketosis, or hiking the Appalachian trail doesn’t really matter as long as there comes a point that this USE of energy is at a greater rate than delivery of energy from body fat - and therefore the rate limit is delivery of energy from body fat.

Dr Alperts calculations only needed someone who was hypocaloric for long enough to lose lean mass, it doesn’t matter what they ate (well there is a wrinkle with respect to insulin… which I’ll return to later). Key’s subjects lost lean mass. Here for example is subject Sam Legg before and after the experiment.

image

So Dr Alpert reasoned that we lose weight from two depots, fat mass (FM) and fat free mass (FFM). Further he reasoned if the body had a choice then it would draw down fat mass first … because that is deposited for exactly this purpose as a store of energy when there was none available in the diet. Whereas lean mass has multiple important roles some essential to immediate survival. So all he needed was a hypocaloric experiment that went on for long enough for the body to HAVE to switch over to use amino acids from catabolized protein for it’s obligate energy requirements - and he needed the experiment to have good records of fat mass and fat free mass.

His math simply calculates the point at which the bodies of these subjects could no longer get enough energy from their body fat and they started recruiting lean mass to make up the difference.

Now there are 3 areas that I think this study may be problematic;

Ancel Keys is a weasel who projected his biases into his data … so that is one potential flaw. But as he had no idea in 1944 that someone one day could integrate the FFM/FM ratios over time, and he didn’t have an hypothesis he was chasing … I suspect the data is probably pretty reliable.

The second factor is that these were young men, conscientious objectors to the war a lot of them Mennonites … hardly representative of the diversity of human variability. So this data could be incorrect for women, children, the elderly, hard drinking irishmen … who knows.

Finally, insulin. What food they did eat was designed to be similar to food that a starving man might be able to dig up in war torn Europe … so roots and tubers. Starchy pap. And of course that means in the one meal every few days that they did eat … they would be making insulin, which for the duration of digestion of that meal would be inhibiting lipolysis (preventing body fat from giving up energy, and cells from burning fat for energy). So the value reached by Alpert of 31.5 kCal/lb/day might be a bit low. This error would be of the order of 1 hour in 24 - or roughly 4.1% I suspect the error is smaller because these subjects would have become very insulin sensitive and the advantage of testing people eating enough glucose to not need to make any is that you don’t have to factor in lean mass lost to make glucose via gluconeogenesis.

I’m perfectly happy to find better, more representative data from which to calculate the rate that fat gives up energy. I’m also happy to see some experimental testing of these rates.

We have some anecdotal evidence. There have been a few thin people unable to fast beyond the point where circulating lipids have been drawn down and they are at the mercy of the rate their body fat can release energy. A little bit of fat appears to enable them to get over the hump and fast for days if they need to.

(Tim W) #46

I’ve certainly noticed a big difference in water fasting and adding in heavy cream and/or some coconut oil, maybe an avacado if things get too dicey.

This is all anecdotal though and based on my personal experience in a single fast so it’s not really great data. I’ve also noticed that pre-fasting protocols have a big impact (which makes sense to the layman). If I carb up the day before a fast (as I used to do before going keto) I found the fast much more difficult in the first three days, as you guys have discussed that was due to the insulin/carb craving roller coaster. If I have multiple meals with lots of fast prior to a fast, the easier the first three days, once again, nothing shocking here.

I’m curious as to how long it takes to burn through consumed fats and begin to utilize body fat stores etc… lots more science to be done here.

On a side note, the cooks on America’s test kitchen HAVE to be suffering from diabetes, seeing their faces get pudgier and pudgier as the years go by, I wonder if they realize what’s going on? Another example of the fattening up of the human animal. Wait a minute, is some alien overlord fattening us up for slaughter? Are we cosmic cows??? (way off track, I know… sorry).

(Richard Hanson) #47

Hi Richard,

I thank you for taking the time to provide a detailed and thoughtful response.

I have always understand that there is an upper limit to the flow of energy from fat deposits, and certainly, when fat deposits are greatly depleted, when the tank is empty, that upper limit would decline.

I also imagened hundreds of thousand of kj being liberated instantly, that is I visualized a person exploding, vaporizing. It takes about 2300 kj/kg to vaporize water so I would not want to be standing next to anyone who experienced an instantaneous internal release of hundreds of thousands of kj.

Ancel Keys was a weasel, a subject opinion, and we are of one mind.

I’m perfectly happy to find better, more representative data from which to calculate the rate that fat gives up energy. I’m also happy to see some experimental testing of these rates.

My emphasis added.

What Dr. Alpert has calculate, it is not like the math is difficult to follow, is not the rate that fat gives up energy, but how much energy you can get out of fat deposits that are at the the point of depletion. How much energy you can get out of the fumes left over in a gas tank when the tank reaches empty.

If we want to determine the energy flow from fat deposits, the rate that fat gives up energy, then we need to look at people with a “healthy”, I am not going to even attempt to define healthy, level of energy stored in fat deposits. An engineer that is trying to determine the appropriate diameter of a fuel line and the appropriate capacity of a fuel pump does not test her calculation using an empty fuel tank. I respectfully submit that evolution is the most skilled of all trial and error experimental engineers.

Hypothesis: If you are starving and have no appreciable fat left on your body so that your body is metabolizing protein for energy, it is not likely to be a great idea to fast.

Personally, I am not going to volunteer for any clinical study that attempts to determine whether or not it is a good idea to fast when you are already starving to death. Anyone who does, I think them a dietary hero. I would not, however, be at all reluctant to volunteer for a study that determines the rate of fat mobilization in people with a “health” BMI.

I am currently still loosing weight, but I am now less then 20lb from my goal weight. I currently fast two contiguous days a weak, approximately 60 hours, and I eat the other five. My tentative plan is to continue this pattern indefinitely which implies a greater caloric consumption during the days I am eating. I also plan to have one, perhaps two, longer fasts each year. If I am not able to maintain a stable body weight, then I will eat more and fast less. I don’t think this is all that complex and I think Dr. Alpert’s calculation are of no utility as I have no intention of ever being in a state where I have depleted so much of my fat that I am metabolizing significant amounts of lean body mass, protein, for energy.

People who are consuming fat while “fasting”, are not fasting, they are eating a fat diet. Such a diet might provide some, most, or none of the benefits of fasting, which is likely to be a function of the amount of energy consumed in fat, but I am unaware of the clinical science, if it exists, that has examined this strategy.

On a personal note, I would like to express my profound gratitude for your podcasts and your obvious intellectual honesty. You might find it amusing that I am also a software developer, yes one more programmer in the keto community. For more than 25 years I wrote geophysical application for a seismic processing service company until the firm went bankrupt during the last major oil slump. Now I lead a team developing flight planning and flight dispatch software in the airline industry. The previous endeavor was far more interesting and now I get exited if I just get to use multiplication. I so miss the days living in fk and tau-p domain, utilizing general radon transforms and Kirchhoff summations, but I am still allowed to compute a product at least once a week.

Most Respectfully,
Richard

(Richard Hanson) #48

“Mr. Chambers, don’t get on that ship! The rest of the book To Serve Man, it’s… it’s a cookbook!”

My goal weight places me at the arithmetic mean of the normal BMI category. This is only a quantitative goal and I expect to find an acceptable maintenance value in that range based on qualitative considerations.

When I tell people what is my goal weight, many are rather shocked. We have had so many fat people in America for so many years that what people perceive as a “healthy” or “normal” weight has shifted to larger and larger numbers on the scale.

I remember, many years ago, looking at a photograph in a history text of a crowd outside the courthouse waiting for the verdict in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes 1925. There were a few fat people, but the vast majority of the crowd, not a statistical cross section of the population but still likely to be at least somewhat representative, were thin. A similar crowd today would not show a comparable distribution of BMI values. I can remember quite clearly thinking “Why?”

I think the answer to that question is, at least in part, Dr. Ancel Benjamin Keys.

Best Regards,
Richard

(Mike Glasbrener) #49

When I tell people my goal weight/waistline people are also shocked. However, as a 6’5” male BMI is just way off from any reasonable weight.

(Richard Hanson) #50

evil grin

I have a 19 year old son who is 6’4" and weights 135lb. He is far out on the tail of the BMI distribution and we have had to have his pants custom tailored for years. Both my boys are Eagle Scouts and when John went backpacking in Philmont we had a custom pack made for him by Dan McHalel; mchalepacks.com. When I emailed him John’s measurements he responded … paraphrasing … “Wow, I have never done that but I am always up for a challenge”.

Daenerys Targaryen might be the mother of Dragons, but Mrs. Hanson is most certainly a mother of Eagles.

If anyone is interested, Dan McHale is incredible, meticulous to a fault, not a great communicator, a terrible web designer, but he constructs a backpack that is arguable the best in the world. I have no reservation at all recommending his product and I have absolutely no financial conflict in doing just that.

Keto for Life!
Richard

(Mike Glasbrener) #51

Your son is probably 6 sigma to the low side and as such would have an excellent professional cycling career!:grinning:

PS: If Mrs. Hanson looks anything like Daenerys Targaryen…

(Richard Hanson) #52

We watch Le Tour every summer, but John has no interest at all.

My dear Susi still hates Alberto Contador for attacking when Andy Schleck suffered a mechanical on the Port de Balès in 2010. She gets so mad every time Alberto is on the TV that I keep a cloth handy to wipe the spittle off the screen. I am quite certain I would find myself homeless if she ever had a change to replace me with Peter Sagan.

Mrs. Hanson is a hot, Irish, redheaded version of Miss. Targaryen, to me, and as I am a physical coward, no one will ever catch me saying anything contrary to that view, not even in private. :wink:

(Richard Morris) #53

LOL. I think we can just put that hypothesis into the category of … “no shit sherlock”. :smiley:

Alpert’s calculations determined the slope of the line at various points on the process in the starvation process, so I’m not sure that we can say he was only testing the fumes in an empty fuel tank … he also captured the initial change in FFM as fat contribution first began to be constrained and found that that constraint was a linear function of the total fat mass. He was able to extrapolate that in both directions and to speculate a figure for the theoretical maximum rate. And I think you are correct that is is just a speculation … but he was able to compare all the subjects in Keys study to back test his hypothesis.

But yeah we still come down to relying upon “the weasel Keys”, damn his eyes. I wish that all George Cahills data from his starvation study were available because he had catheterized subjects and was measuring all their circulating energy substrates. At the very least I’d like to know if they fit on Alpert’s curve.

I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t expect to ever have a “healthy” BMI. I am currently at the top of overweight flirting with Obese. I’ll tell you why I don’t expect every to be healthy … for my height my healthy range is 59kg to 79kg. I don’t expect to grow taller from this point in my life, so below 79kg is what I have to hit if I ever want to be healthy weight.

But according to DEXA scans my current lean mass is 80.380 kgs. Even if I could lose all body fat, I would still be 1.38 kgs overweight. It shows you how crazy the idea of using BMI to set your goals is, well at least it’s crazy for a dense bastard like me.

Oh nice application, yes that would be intellectually quite stimulating. I can well imagine how the flight dispatch scheduling software since might be a different pace.

I have a similar story. In 2000 I made partner on Wall St in a company that spun off from the risk division of JP Morgan, but I was at the coal face as a software architect developing risk modeling for credit derivatives. Also quite an intellectual challenge. I’ve not worked in such a challenging area since … but when I left in 2002 I told everyone I could that CDOs would blow up the economy and 6 years later … they did exactly that. But I didn’t have a podcast back then and no-one was listening. Now when I warn people that type 2 diabetes will explode our health care if we don’t change course … well I have a few listeners :slight_smile:

(Consensus is Politics) #54

I make my 20oz coffee with 2 tbsp of coconut oil, 1 tsp of ghee, and probably 1/4 cup of heavy whipping cream (was the only heavy cream I could find. It is 0 carb, 100% fat, so there’s that).

Oh, and its awesome! I drink that at around 0630 hrs every morning. No breakfast. I’m not hungry all day. But I realize I need a certain amount of protein so I usually eat a late lunch, around 1500 hrs. Lately its been about a 5 oz portion of pork loin that I made from a big ol’ long pork loin. Got 20 little pork steaks out of it. Cooked up the loin following a simple recipe for it I found online. Cut it up into 20ish portions about 1 1/2 inches thick each, and vacuum pack. I under cooked them by about 5 minutes, still pink in the middle after cutting them up. Look a little on the raw side. I take one out the night before, still in its vacuum pack and put it in the fridge. Take it out around noon to see if it thawed, if not, toss it in a pot of water to quick thaw to room temp. Then throw that baby on a skillet with coconut oil or olive oil, or even in a pan of bacon grease. I’ll cook some bacon just to have the fresh bacon grease. Then I have a great snack later! Sorry for another verbose reply, but, Im not a cook. Im especially happy this one worked out, kinda proud of it one might say.

(Richard Morris) #55

That’s an impressive technique … and you say you’re not a cook. I beg to differ. That pork belly sounds perfect.

(Richard Hanson) #56

Hi Richard,

I started in the obese category and am now nominally in the “health” BMI range. I have a light bone structure, but others are much different and it is my understanding that BMI is more appropriately applied to populations instead of individuals. People are not statistics and don’t fit into tidy little categories.

At 55, and wed these many years, I truly don’t have any interest in increasing lean body mass, most especially not upper body strength. To me, that is just useless extra weight to haul up and down mountains when I go backpacking. Something I can do again.

Early in December, Mrs. Hanson and I are going down to the Texas Hill Country to have a dinner at our favorite winery. $175 a plate with an abundance of good wine, good food, and good friends. It will be my 56th birthday and if I get overly intoxicated the B&B is right next door. I should be able to make it safely home for the night if Susi can refrain from stepping on my hands. I am going to be wearing a new gray jacket that I bought just this evening, size 40 down from a 46, a pair of wrangler jeans and a dark blue cowboy shirt, the exact same pants and shirt that I wore decades ago on the very day I first met my darling wife. Mrs. Hanson has no idea, she is going to cry.

Keto life is full of joy!

Warmest Regards,
Richard

(Bunny) #57

Women (hormonal) should not fast more than two or three days [edit] (for two weeks then add a day Need Explanation Please "WHY FASTING IS EASIER FOR SOME PEOPLE") because it can shrink the ovaries.

Craving food or sweets means your not burning fat during the delta phase of sleep that is when you actually burn the fat and human growth hormone (hgh) is produced and released from the brain and into the blood stream. And women especially should be mindful to always drink organic apple cider vinegar mixed (1tbs. to a glass of water) with organic lemon juice (1tbs. to a glass of water) EVERYDAY for PH balance (alkaline to acidic ratio as different parts of the body need different PH) to prevent stones (calcium oxalate) in the body when fasting or on a ketogenic diet e.g gall stones/kidney stones/bladder stones etc. Apple cider vinegar and lemon juice (when fasting) also spikes (cells on pituitary gland) human growth hormones (hgh) to 2000% when in the delta phase of sleep. You cannot burn fat without HGH!

DO NOT take HGH or DHEA supplements or your body will quit producing them naturally and will rely on an exogenic source!

(Richard Morris) #58

We secrete hydrochloric acid in our stomachs to break down proteins into chyme … HCl has a pH of 1.

Acetic acid with a pH around 2.2 and Citric acid with a pH of 2 are not going to alter the pH of anything in your gut beyond your stomach. We tightly regulate the pH of our body with a homeostatic regulation called the bicarbonate buffer system. It takes a major derangement like lactic or keto acidosis to perturb that.

Acetic acid (vinegar) has discrete benefits for glycostasis and it’s a SCFA substrate for making ketones. But I don’t think any of it’s health benefits are from it’s acidity - except for preventing acid reflux above the stomach.

I’d be interested in a citation on that statement about fasting shrinking the ovaries and what benefit or detriment that confers.

(Bunny) #59

I can answer your question correctly but cannot because it will be deleted!

sorry guy!

(Tim W) #60

Same here Richard, i don’t think we will see it, as many fasting papers, studies and books I’ve read I’ve never seen those cautions. Sbun is trolling/bot?