Why Does IF Without Keto Seem to Work Sometimes

#1

I have a good friend, early 50s, Size 24W 5’6, who has tried every diet in creation. She has been heavy since she was a child. She has done versions of low carb since she was 16 plus weight watchers and so on. She is on blood pressure medications but is not diabetic and a few years ago her physician told her that her A1C was so low that she was unlikely to ever get diabetic. She does carry her weight in her torso with thin legs which is the classic IR.

She tried LC earlier this year but kept having false starts, for one thing she insists on eating fruit and too much protein and not enough fat so she is good for a month and then she crashes,

Her son introduced her to IF and the idea of an eating window, in her case 12 - 8. She eats whatever she wants in that window, eggs, ravioli, bagels within reason she is restrained in her eating but does not count anything and does not deprive herself. She has been on this for 6 weeks, I have not seen her yet but she says she is at the lowest end of her weight range (which can fluctuate by 20 lbs or more) and the weight is falling off at a rate she has never seen. My H saw her recently and noticed her weight loss (which is a huge deal).

I just honestly do not understand how this is possible? I am really happy for her but simply eating in an 8 hour window is enough to lose this much weight? She has exercised for brief periods with other diets but has not recently and certainly not while on this diet.

Here is my theory, there is a category of people who gain weight very early and have more fat cells than the average person. While it makes it harder for them to lose weight, they are also more insulin sensitive than a TOFI because they have more cells so a better storage mechanism than someone who became obese in their 20s. The 16 hours of fasting is reducing her insulin so that she can release fat from storage since she is more metabolically flexible than the average IR. She believes she is actually in ketosis when she is not eating. I am not sure except possibly after 14 or so hours for a short time. Thoughts? Explanations?

#2

Well my main thought is this: just changing from the grazing 6 meal-snacks a day and or 12 sodas a day is HUGE for the grazer - it allows the digestive system to rest, and it completely alters the hormonal balance. It takes someone from extremely dysregulated to just modestly dysregulated, depending on their sugar intake and liver state.

Your friend is reaping the benefits of going from dysregulated eating to a more traditional smaller eating window. She’s definitely experienced water loss and some optimization. It’s enough to help her get healthier, for sure. Is it enough for her to access the many additional benefits of ketosis? No. Is it enough for her to restore her lean body mass and create longer term muscle/joint strength? No. But it’s a great stepping stone for her!

I know that many in the HCLF IF world are using fatty coffee in the morning, which helps. But some aren’t. I cannot understand what would be pleasant about IF when not fat adapted - sounds like plenty of unpleasant hunger to me! But could be that for those who are recovering from being grazers that the body’s enzymes are so off and their digestions so sluggish, that their physical state has little digestive fire - and it would only become apparent on LCHF, when they find they need to address enzymatic balancing in order to digest all the fat.

I think the eating window’s impact on lowering insulin can mimic keto in some ways - especially if your friend isn’t a junk food/processed sugar/soda gal. It’s pretty amazing to me how just that one tweak of stopping the grazing helps activate the body’s energies and its resilience. On the topic of lean mass though - though HCLF IF can certainly transform body fat and reveal muscles, I believe it does little to actually repair & restore muscle & bone mass - and that for esp females over 50, we really need to be doing that, which keto provides. If your friend gets into weekly strength training though, it may fuel her interest in helping preventative self-care in terms of max lean mass gain along with bodyfat changes and maybe down the road she’ll get lower carb to the point of keto - you never know!

It’s interesting what people’s thresholds for carbs are, and different HGH levels produced via dietary way of life which really shows years down the road. Personally I’ve long been intrigued with preserving & increasing vitality, cellular health, and radiant ageing - but most of my peers seem to think that magical thinking while maintaining old SAD habits - or doctors (general medicine as well as medispa botox magic) and prescriptions - are a viable backup plan.

I have 5 friends all in their early-mid 50s, all of whom I’ve known about 30 years. Only one has preserved her youthful figure and radiant face, and she has small eating window gal who has always been lower carb than average folks - never having food addiction issues, etc. I don’t think she’s ever had a ‘diet’ she just has had a food culture of the small eating window with zero-to-minimal alcohol and sodas, whereas my other friends are longtime foodies who eat 3=6 hearty HCLF meals a day plus imbibe sodas and/or alcohol which has wreaked havoc on their hormones, also resulting in miserable hormonal cycles and menopause, etc.

(LeeAnn Brooks) #3

Fasting in general has popped up completely independent of Keto.
There’s books out there on the benefits of it and some don’t mention Keto at all or only on the peripheral. So no, one doesn’t have to do Keto to fast. But it works so well with Keto since fat adapted people naturally find they can go longer times without needing to fuel and it helps them tap into more fat burning potential.

I would think it would be more difficult for a carb eater, but as many have said, fasting is like a muscle that can be strengthened the more you do it.

I read an article on 24 hour fasting that explained the benefits of fasting and i don’t recall if it even mentioned keto or not, but I know it said you could do it without modifying your diet.

#4

Thank you for the replies @SlowBurnMary and @Anniegirl9

My friend is a hearty eater, clean your plate type. She likes meals and fruits rather than sweets. She has boys with hearty appetites and makes or picks up dinner every night never organic or anything. Very traditional 1950s Sad. I do not see her as a grazer although her H would pick up ice cream after dinner as a treat. She never drinks regular soda or juice. I have been trying to get her off diet soda for years, and she mostly drinks it in restaurants now (but eats lunch out at work most days). At home they use water or seltzer.

This has inspired me to put off my morning HWC coffee to my eating window. It still surprises me. It makes sense that her under 25 son with a healthy BMI might see some benefit but someone with a BMI in the high 30s?

Honestly I never thought of not eating from 8PM - 12PM as fasting. It is simply skipping breakfast which I did for large parts of my life without any benefit. I started in March 2017 eating moderate carb and fasting for 24 - 36 hours at a time and lost some weight. I do not think fasting for 16 hours would have been enough. Did not start keto for another month. I did not find the hunger a problem but I had fasted perviously for religious reasons. If anything when I started keto and continued to fast for the first month or so it was really hard to fast and then got easier again

I do have another friend who was always thin, works out (not weights and she will not listen to me anyway) an hour a day every day. This friend only eats after 6 pm and I believe she claims she eats a lot of crap at that time. In the last 5 years she looks good but when she wears a bathing suit she does not look the same no matter how much she exercises and she has put on a couple of pounds although I doubt her size has changed much.

I have read tons of posts of people eating OMAD on here and not losing so I still am thinking

(Rob) #5

Dr Fung certainly thinks if you can do only one thing, it would be IF rather than keto, though obviously both is better and complementary.

I think the same Insulin lowering effects (by time control rather than by volume limitation) that we see in keto should still apply so it shouldn’t be a mystery.

I haven’t seen any data that says that people have more fat cells than others. What I’ve read is that we all have roughly the same but we fill them to greater and lesser degrees and make them more or less IR with diet.

You should be lowering insulin with just IF but if you don’t also keto, it is possible that you never really get in to ketosis so you are not necessarily lipolytic and hence not really losing fat though you are lowering IR and becoming healthier (but not necessarily slimmer). Once we divorce weight loss from metabolic health then we can see a path to how you can get one without the other (a bit like how with CICO you can lose weight but not get much healthier).

#6

Thank

According to H she has looks like she lost 30 lbs in about 6 weeks which is probably about 14% of her body weight so she is definitely lipolytic.

The fat cell information I got from one of the Dudes podcasts. I cannot begin to remember which but @Carl and @Richard were discussing it.

(Rob) #7

I know you said she isn’t deprived but after years of diets (most of which would be CR/CICO) it wouldn’t surprise me that she is in the CICO honeymoon after introducing yet another shock to her system. If her doctor is right, she could be also metabolically healthy (though other observations suggest differently) at which point all bets are off. We are all n=1 snowflakes :thinking:

(Empress of the Unexpected) #8

Weight in torso with thin legs. My body wants to run away from home!!! I have no blood sugar problems yet, but sounds like I’m trending that way.

(Empress of the Unexpected) #9

Question. We have (for females) apples and pears. Are all apples doomed to diabetes? Are apples genetically predetermined?

#10

My situation is that I’ve been Keto for about 8 months, fully fat adapted for about 5 and stalled after losing 55 pounds (but, I also stopped trying to lose and took the time to increase my fitness). I just restarted my push to lose 20 more pounds, went OMAD two weeks ago, and it has been EASY. Feels great to combine OMAD with Keto - I have more energy, am deeper in ketosis, and have almost no hunger. I’m down an honest 3 pounds, plus water.

I’m probably over-confident.

#11

I don’t know but I mentioned the apple shape because it correlates with metabolic syndrome. I will say that her parents are in their 80s and do not have diabetes although they have blood pressure issues but it is herediatry on her mom’s side. Both her grandparents who lived into their 90s had it too. Neither had diabetes but both were trim. Her grandmother had no dementia at 97. Her mom has always been thin. Her dad could put on weight but her mom watches him like a hawk.

I have known her for many years. She really does not do CICO but is more of a Paleo dieter plus dairy (without realizing that is what she usually does) plus diet coke. It works for her until it stops working which anywhere from a month to 3 months when she breaks it and is done for awhile

(Karen) #12

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/05/04/fat-cell-number-is-set-in-childhood-and-stays-constant-in-ad/

Thin children may have a small advantage.

K

(Jay Patten) #13

Fasting can be done with any diet, but its easier on keto because keto keeps you fat adapted.

(Diane) #14

IThere is published evidence that metabolically healthy obese (MHO) people exist (possibly up to 35% of obese individuals). These people are significantly overweight but do not demonstrate metabolic consequences such as dyslipidemia, hypertension, high blood sugar, increased insulin resistance, etc.

These MHO individuals can create unlimited baby adipocytes as needed when the existing adipocytes are full of fat and don’t develop the problems that people who DON’T have the ability to do this end up developing.

These MHO people have many smaller fat cells, which don’t leak lipoproteins intercellularly, don’t develop inflammation, don’t develop insulin resistance, don’t end up with dangerous visceral fat, don’t develop DM2, don’t have metabolic syndrome, don’t have increased risk of CVD, don’t develop fatty livers, etc. All because they are able to produce an unlimited supply of new baby adipocytes as needed. So, they are metabolically healthy.

Obese people who are NOT metabolically healthy, who don’t have this ability to create unlimited baby adipocytes, end up with large, seriously overstuffed adipocytes that can’t take in any more lipoproteins. The body produces more and more insulin to try and override the cell’s refusal to let more fat into the adipocytes. This leads to insulin resistance, leaky adipocytes that cause intercellular inflammation, etc, etc.

Ivor Cummins presentation from KetoFest 2017 is linked below. He discusses this phenomenon at about the 26 minute mark.

Just FYI. :smiley:

(GINA ) #15

There are lots of people that lose weight with IF that are not keto or low carb. When Dr. Fung first ‘came on the scene’ he was all about fasting. He said his patients didn’t understand low carb and he didn’t have time to teach them. He fell into the low carb crowd later I think because low carbers were already bucking the system and were ready to embrace another “crazy” idea.

I belong to a Facebook group for a book called “Delay Don’t Deny” that is full of people that have reversed illness and lost large amounts of weight with IF only. Some low carb during the window, but by no means all.

Will they stall and/or gain it all back later? Maybe, but most people do, even low carbers.

(Adam Kirby) #16

A quote I’ve heard that makes the most sense to me, is that genetics loads the gun and diet pulls the trigger.

(marty) #17

Google or Youtube, “Going Keto with Casey”. I have found they’re very helpful to watch.

#18

I view IF with Keto as both on steroids. They can stand on their own, but they are really powerful when combined.

(Todd Allen) #19

Also there are drugs such as Pioglitazone which stimulate production of new adipocytes. I took Pioglitazone for 2 months and it made me unbearably hungry and I gained 15 lbs. So apparently it was effective for me. Even while gaining weight my blood sugar dropped by 15%. After discontinuing the drug I was able to resume fasting. As I lost the gained lbs my blood sugar continued dropping and is now healthy normal. However continued fat loss has been challenging. Hard to be certain though what the true effects of the drug were. If only I could have cloned myself and also tried fasting without ever taking the drug.

#20

That might be a solution for the Tofi T2 who does not want to do keto. Moderate weight gain may be better than losing a limb!