In First and only time I’m going say, my apologies to the navy!
The other website I’ve used for that said obese category. This one says I meet the body fat standards. And checking out the chart I’d still qualify even if I were 20 years younger. At my current vintage I have a few percentage points to play with.
Now I’d better check YMCA for the even more flattering version.
I don’t know where you get this information. Fasting more than 24 hours promotes autophagy, shrinking your excess skin should be part of weight loss, not just losing fat. Who wants a bunch of sagging wrinkly skin? It might have worked for you but I don’t think it’s written in stone for all of us. Plenty of people here sustain weight loss with longer fasting and the metabolism crash is questionable although it might be true without adequate refeeding or intervals between fasts. I recently dropped 9 pounds during a 144/24 hour fasting week, I regained four pounds eating again and my weight is stable. This was my first extended fast in 15 months of keto. Five day fasts are pretty common here. OMAD doesn’t work for weight loss with everyone, myself included. If I ate OMAD everyday I would fall into a serious caloric deficit that would definitely slow my metabolism. TMAD is where I got 75% of my weight loss easily. Eating till you’re “full and more” is never ever advised for a ketogenic diet. We eat till satiety, not to achieve a target. I don’t know where you are personally in your keto journey but doing things totally different than you did got me into maintenance in about a year with over a 25% body mass decrease. All my health markers are improved which was the real goal.
Snacking is anti weight loss, just don’t do it. Eat more at meals and give your pancreas a break! 
Autophagy will also be promoted if you do IF. Some doctors like Georgia Ede recommend not to do any fasting. Most clinics treating diabetics that I’ve heard from do either IF or alternate day fasting.
Stephen Phinney did a great talk that fasting is a double edged sword, it has benefits but also drawbacks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1r8ffLDFcE
[quote=“David_Stilley, post:22, topic:96102, full:true”]
Eating till you’re “full and more” is never ever advised for a ketogenic diet. We eat till satiety, not to achieve a target. I don’t know where you are personally in your keto journey but doing things totally different than you did got me into maintenance in about a year with over a 25% body mass decrease. All my health markers are improved which was the real goal.[/quote]
And your personal experience is universal and applicable for all other people? Losing weight is not a competition. Quotes like yours pressure people into behaviours that they might not be comfortable with, and they might even panic if they can’t keep up with expectations. Some people were deprived of micronutrients because they counted calories for decades and never ate healthy fat, and they might gain some weight before they eventually slim down. So what? Weight will take care of itself with time.
Calorie restriction is not advised and not necessary https://thefastingmethod.com/smash-the-fat-calories-part-xi/. The OP sounded to me as if he might try to limit calories, and I wanted to express that this is not a good idea. English is not my first language so I probably could have phrased “and more” better.
Not if the snack replaces a full meal. Snacking at the right time prevents me from getting hungry and needing a full meal later. (I started eating a handfull of nuts instead of my second meal before I went OMAD, and realized that it was enough for me.)
Again, we’re all different. There is no universal rule that fewer meals are better than more meals, and I have not seen any data that suggests that 2 meals a day is worse than one meal for example. I agree that people in metabolic syndrome will do better on OMAD or alternate day fasting to reduce insulin levels, but even 3 meals a day will restore insulin sensitivity if you limit carbs enough. It will take just a bit longer.
The point is to listen to your body and learn what works for you.
Gotta say that I think Phinney is wrong in this and other instances. He’s just plain wrong. Sorry.
First, I never implied my way was the way for everyone, just that general rules about weight loss as you mentioned don’t apply to everyone.
Second, I’m not sure what you mean by “pressuring others”? Five pounds a month isn’t an outrageous claim or goal for anyone on KETO unless you have very little to lose. No pressure on anyone. Just my results. I’ve seen plenty of 400 lbs people here drop what I did in over a year in two months. I wasn’t pressured by their posts. You’re right, weight loss isn’t a competition and I never implied it should be. Our bodies are all different and there isn’t a one size fits all KETO.
Snacking if it’s actually replacing a meal is a meal. I’m talking about in between meal snacking as that’s what a snack is defined by. Yes, I have decided before that a quarter pound of pepperoni and an Oz of cheese was enough of a meal and skip eating a regular full dinner if I am not that hungry. That’s a mini meal, not a snack.
Gotta agree with Bob here, yes Dr. Phinney is a smart respected KETO authority but I am a follower of Dr. Jason Fung who is an expert on fasting, not necessarily KETO. They have been at odds on this slow down metabolism nonsense for sometime. You can run your metabolism down but by calorie restriction, not fasting and feasting.
We disagree again on this. Fewer meals means less insulin spiking, which heals metabolic syndrome and encourages weight loss, it’s all about insulin brother. If you truly believe this why promote OMAD?
I think both Phinney and Fung are right on some points and are wrong on some points. (I often think the same of myself. 
) For fasting, though, I’ve done many 4.5-5.5 day fasts and have not experienced any detriments I can tell. During this time, I’ve gained muscle mass and loss fat mass. I have DEXA scans to prove it. So, in my mind, Phinney’s negativity about fasting (at least for the length of times I fast) is wrong.
Of course, I’d need two of me to actually prove him wrong, one that does fasting and one that does not.
For me, fasting calms my heart. I have idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy, and fasting seems to help the heart for some reason. (It’s not ketones, as the effect occurs the first day, when my ketones are still low.)
I think fasting may also be protective of the endothelium. Though I have no evidence of that. The only evidence I have is an insanely high Lp(a) level, yet a zero CAC score. Something is helping protect my endothelium.
As some famous dude probably said: Show me the science 
Autophagy is something where everybody “knows” how what promotes it, funnily enough with contradictory ideas. I prefer science, until then I’ll reserve judgement. (And for me no wrinkly skin after losing 15% of my weight with 1-2 meals a day.)
Social pressure is something that doesn’t happen intentionally, but happens nevertheless. People feel bad if they read all those people talking about their weight loss, and start to worry (and do silly things) if they can’t reproduce the results. You can observe it here and in other forums, a lot, from the reaction of keto newbies.
(My approach is very much the one of Eric Westman: Speed of healing may be highly individual but we know that it works, so stop worrying.)
Game developers use it for profit. Even in games where there are only cosmetic items to purchase they want to make sure that players brag about all the skins they bought, and it works: There are apparently studies that show that kids in the schoolyard are bullied if they can’t keep up. (Not my area of expertise though, so I’m just echoing what I’ve heard from others.)
[quote=“David_Stilley, post:25, topic:96102, full:true”]
Gotta agree with Bob here, yes Dr. Phinney is a smart respected KETO authority but I am a follower of Dr. Jason Fung who is an expert on fasting, not necessarily KETO. They have been at odds on this slow down metabolism nonsense for sometime. You can run your metabolism down but by calorie restriction, not fasting and feasting.[/quote]
Jason Fung uses other day fasting but not extended fasts AFAIK. I don’t know any data on metabolism changes for regular longer fasting.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think eating more meals is better. I’m just saying that I don’t know.
When I transitioned to keto I stopped making assumptions. Of all the things we “know”, 50% will turn out to be false in the future. (That doesn’t mean that we’re doing the wrong things though. People “knew” the earth was flat 400 years ago, we now know it isn’t, yet we still use 2-dimensional maps to navigate in the neighbourhood and not globes.) Every metabolic fact I learned in the last years says that the croissant diet will lead to weight gain if anything, but it doesn’t (at least in a size=1 experiment). Some of the “facts” that we take for granted will turn out to be wrong. If I haven’t seen convincing data on something I may make assumptions and conjectures, but I don’t know for sure.
A lot of people seem to lose weight very quickly with 2 or even 3 meals a day. Why are you sure that not eating is beneficial? It seems intuitive, but it also seems intuitive that exercise leads to weight loss (which we know to be false) and energy restriction leads to weight loss (which is at least not universally true, Gary Taubes gives many counterexamples).
We assume insulin spikes whenever we eat, but this is simply wrong. Insulin does spike if you eat meat in a western diet but not in ketosis, there is a good talk from Benjamin Bikman about this. Yes, there may be a bit of insulin but not significantly more than we have anyway due to normal blood sugar levels. So why would insulin resistance reversal take longer if we stick to meat and fat? And one could argue that insulin spikes from eating 10g carbs or whatever in veggies are minor, too.
I do believe things if we have well designed studies. I do OMAD because I find it convenient and tend to get hungry in the afternoon, but I will eat a second meal if I’m hungry. (I can’t remember needing a third meal, but to make a point: If I was still hungry I would eat a third meal.)
I love your post, made me laugh at myself also!
I think you might have been fasting too much (mTOR stuff) which you seem to realize also!
I think you should try body by science and get some resistance exercise against skeletal muscle (you may still have too many fatty deposits inside the skeletal muscle despite increase in mass, DEXA can’t see it), that’s what did the trick for me, if you like oxidizing carbohydrates before they get stored inside the fat cell, we work so hard trying to extract those lipids out with the keto diet and fasting, that we forget the other side of the process?
@Don_Q really has some good info on that (body by science)! I’m in darn good shape, thanks to Don!
Good luck!
Just listening to Ben Bikmans podcast with DietDoctor, and he talks about autophagy. He says that insulin inhibits autophagy, and autophagy keeps running even if people eat a lot of meat. Very good podcast.
He speaks my heart: Fasting does have benefits and can be very efficient for some people, but in order lower to insulin and kickstart autophagy it’s much more comfortable to do IF (+keto) and it works almost as good.
I listened to that, and he basically says he doesn’t know when autophagy starts or stops. Insulin is a factor. But I still (after 6 years) have relatively “high” fasting insulin. Does that mean that I won’t have autophagy? Certainly, fasting for multiple days helps this, in that it definitely lowers insulin (the lowest “fasting” insulin value I ever got was after fasting 4.5 days).
He even admitted that he really can’t say when autophagy starts or stops, though he did say that the insulin/glucagon ratio is way better for low carb, so you’re at a better starting point.
You’re going to lose about 1 pound or .5 kg of fat in two days. Differences in hydration and electrolyte balance can easily overwhelm that, on the scale. I’ve seen longer fasts, even dry fasts, where the math really does work out in the end - there’s fat loss, there’s water loss, and once the body is rehydrated, the 1/2 lb per day fat loss proves out pretty well. Really big people can lose a little more per day…
Hard for me to believe he says that eating a lot of meat does not affect autophagy. Protein is the most potent inhibitor of autophagy there is.
It’s not so simple as an On/Off switch for autophagy for the whole body. Some tissues have (or are supposed to have) a low, basal level of autophagy going on all the time, since the cells are ‘post-mitotic’ (they can’t divide and multiply to dilute out the effects of old, faulty or damaged cells) - much of the nervous system is this way. Need to have some “house cleaning” going on or bad stuff can build up - this is thought to heavily bear on Alzheimer’s Disease and some other neurological conditions.
There are other causes of autophagy, or of autophagy being increased - exercise does it in skeletal muscle, for example. Our level of insulin and our insulin/glucagon ratio does matter, with respect to increasing autophagy in most tissues, but it’s not as important as mTOR and AMPK - these are kinases which are nutrient sensors, and they are the most important regulators of autophagy.
If we are looking for increased autophagy - and I’ve never seen anything that says this is not a worthy goal (i.e. the 3 meals per day crowd is really screwing themselves…) - then we don’t want to eat. Protein and carbohydrates really make mTOR and AMPK react, and it does not take much to damp down increased autophagy. Fat - maybe not so much effect. We’re burning our own fat when fasting anyway; is it going to matter if we take in some fat from outside? Fat doesn’t impact insulin/glucagon nearly as much as the other nutrients, nor does it activate mTOR (serves to make autophagy decline) or suppress AMPK (serves to make autophagy decline) anywhere near what protein and carbs do.
You can’t mix protein with carbs. As noted the body reacts very differently to protein depending on if it’s in ketosis or not. So far we know that insulin stops autophagy, and eating fat and protein won’t change insulin (and glucagon) a lot (again, only in ketosis). So no problem there. Everything else (that I know) is conjecture only because it has been tested only against the background of a high carb diet. I’d be interested in all literature on this subject of course.
Guess I’ll have to dig out those old starvation experiments. They can’t reproduce them today with humans because they would be considered unethical… As if a few weeks of water fasting would kill off participants.
Thomas, first, I have to say that we really do need more good studies on fasting humans. You’re right that there is reluctance to do them on humans currently, and there is also not much money available. Big profits don’t await corporations from people not eating or taking drugs… 
I’d gladly be a study subject. One really positive thing is that there is interest in fasting as it applies to neurological conditions and cancer; despite the worries about “oh those poor people - not eating…”, a significant amount of research is already being done, and I think the decades ahead hold a lot more. (Back in 2017, there were more than 60 papers being published every week on autophagy, for example.)
Bikman has a great point about the body’s response to protein differing massively when in the context of a ketogenic diet versus a carb-heavy one; this was one of the most eye-opening things ever for me. But insulin is not the main thing for autophagy - mTOR and AMPK are. Insulin and glucagon do matter, with respect to fasting, and the picture, there, for autophagy continues to get better over quite a few days of fasting - certainly to 5 or 6 days. But it’s the mTOR pathway itself that up-regulates or down-regulates autophagy.
Insulin, per se, won’t necessarily mean much to the question of “autophagy or not.” A person with normal, healthy insulin response will often have their insulin return to the basal level two hours after eating. It’s not like autophagy is increased at this time or anywhere near it (and nobody is claiming it is) - the body is still entirely in the fed state, the nutrient-rich state, and will be for many more hours - through the stomach and small intestine emptying, through the post-absorptive phase, through the initial decline in blood sugar and then later the glycogen depletion. This is going to take us well toward the end of the first day, if not into the second day or even the third day, for some people on some diets.
The body can go between the two states - being fed, in ‘growth’ mode, being anabolic, OR being fasted, in “tear down and recycle mode”, being catabolic. This is primarily controlled by the presence or absence of nutrients, and it’s the nutrient sensors mTOR and AMPK that react to this. While there is a lot we don’t yet know about human fasting and autophagy, the above really is not in doubt. Christian de Duve came up with the term “autophagy,” and his work on cells gained him a Nobel Prize in 1974. More recently, Yoshinori Ohsumi won one in 2016, “for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy.” The mTOR/AMPK deal really isn’t in doubt here. (edX.org has a free class that one can take in autophagy.)
While it may seem counter-intuitive, the metabolism actually usually increases after fasting for a few days. From Dr. Fung’s blog:
Studies of fasting show that basal metabolism doesn’t shut down during fasting, it revvs itself up. Four consecutive days of fasting increases basal metabolism by 13%.
In response to fasting, the body secretes more counter-regulatory hormones, noradrenalin (sometimes called norepinephrin) for one, and this revs up the body.
There is the question - when does human metabolism slow down when fasting? Go long enough, and eventually it does, obviously. I’ve read about 25 day fasts - I believe this was somewhere in Dr. Fung’s blogs (a fantastic free resource) where adjusting for the the decline in body weight, the metabolism remained the same. It was also true with fasting every other day - after 22 days, body weight was down 4%, metabolism was down 5% - not statistically significantly different in that case.
We do have the famous case of Angus Barbieri, though what a shame it wasn’t studied more intensely. Guy fasted for 382 days, went from 456 lbs/207 kg to 180 lbs/82 kg. His blood sugar went as low as 17 mg/dl or 0.94 mmol/L 
, and yet he felt fine, in general, and went about his daily activities. There have been other similar fasts, with durations of 210, 210, 236, 249, and 256 days.
While obviously the metabolism will eventually go down, as body weight falls, I think the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis plays a part here, and proves out - these people are running on fat, and as long as the body can access enough each day, they need not suffer metabolic slowdown (at least not enough to feel “bad” - and this is mirrored by many current people who fast for 30 or 40 days). This is as opposed to a ‘standard’ diet with calorie restriction, where - as with the ‘Biggest Loser’ contestants - there was a general and pronounced metabolic slowdown.
There does seem to be a limit on how much fat can be utilized each day, i.e. the less fat one has, the less can be burned - and lean people commonly have a much harder time fasting for days. I also think there is considerable individual variation - some people really feel cold after fasting for a while, some don’t. I’d like to see measurements - to confirm how much temperature decrease is actually apparent, as well as what the metabolism is doing overall.
