I'm trying fasting again

[Money & Muscle]

I've actually temporarily stopped fasting as I was not seeing any results over the prior 2 months from it, or very minimal.

What I am learning is that fasting is a great tool to use to get you to a certain point quickly but then I think it becomes diminishing returns.

I said this before and I don't think you wanted to listen at the time, but fasting itself is just a mechanism to allow your busy to consume less food. It's main benefit is that it's an easy lifestyle change to adopt and keep "post diet". I don't mean this to come off as a "I told you so", merely some insight.

At the end of the day, you need to consume less calories than you burn; fasting is just an effective tool to allow that.

My coach has me doing a quasi-carb cycle where I still eat the same amount of food day to day (same macros too), but I time my carbs for pre/intra workout only.
This is the most dialed in my diet has ever been, and I'm seeing a steady/sustainable weight loss of about 1lb/wk. I'm also nearing single digits on BF% so that complicates things.

Still, I like this method a lot.

Current macros:
P: 300
F: 50-60
C: 125

 

[EyeBRollin]

Current macros:
P: 300
F: 50-60
C: 125

Why is the protein so much higher than carbs?

 

[Money & Muscle]

Why is the protein so much higher than carbs?

Satiety, Thermic Effect of Food, Steroids increase protein synthesis rate, and because losing muscle is a travesty.
FWIW, coach only has me on 250g protein daily, but I end up hitting more like 300 because BCAAs are tastier than water.

I'd post progress pics here but something with the formatting on this website is fvcked - it never lets me load picturs... took me like 2 months to figure out how to load a profile pic lol

 

[EyeBRollin]

Satiety, Thermic Effect of Food, Steroids increase protein synthesis rate, and because losing muscle is a travesty.

Ahh. Okay. I was going to say. I don’t understand how athletic people can get by on only 500 calories worth of carbs per day. I’d feel like complete shvt.

 

[Money & Muscle]

Ahh. Okay. I was going to say. I don’t understand how athletic people can get by on only 500 calories worth of carbs per day. I’d feel like complete shvt.

I thought I would too, but timing them immediately before/during training is a godsend honestly. Give it a shot dude, I think you'll be surprised.

I admit that I occasionally go off diet and have a banana (100cal maybe) post-training if I need a pick-me-up.

 

[BackInTheGame78]

Ahh. Okay. I was going to say. I don’t understand how athletic people can get by on only 500 calories worth of carbs per day. I’d feel like complete shvt.

Well for people on keto who have been doing it a while it's because after a few weeks your body changes pathways to preferentially burn fatty acids for fuel instead of carbs.

The body prefers carbs, but after 2 weeks or so of consistent low carbs, the cells begin to switch to "backup" mode and greatly enhance their ability to burn fatty acids instead and lessen their ability to burn carbs.

Think of it as like a hybrid engine. If you run out of gas, the electric motor takes over and runs on electricity.

However, this means that once you switch back to carbs the body will be highly inefficient at burning it for fuel and the body will store a lot of it as fat for the first 2 weeks...so when you stop keto, you have to wean yourself back onto carbs slowly or you will pack on fat quickly.

There was actual some research done on this and basically your body "forgets" how to use carbs after a period of time if you don't eat them...which isn't surprising since with almost everything else in the body, it only keeps things functioning which are needed and used on a regular basis and downregulates things that aren't.

 

[Money & Muscle]

There was actual some research done on this and basically your body "forgets" how to use carbs after a period of time if you don't eat them

I would be very interested to see this research.

 

[BackInTheGame78]

I would be very interested to see this research.

It's called "carb intolerance", I am trying to locate it, first heard about this while listening to one of the videos by Thomas DeLauer who does a pretty exceptional job about talking about a wide array of things and breaking down the studies on them.

Another one showed that long term keto diets can cause glucose intolerance and reduced beta cells functioning in the pancreas where the beta cells no longer produce enough insulin. This happened in as little as 22 weeks.

Obviously once the body returns to using carbs again, that functionality returns over time as new beta cells are produced. But again, showing the body stops keeping up body functions that it doesn't use regularly.

So it turns into a double whammy...

Cells do not respond to insulin efficiently AND the pancreas doesn't produce enough insulin.

Go to perplexity.ai, turn on Co-Pilot and type in "carb intolerance after keto diet" and it will give you the relevant info with links to studies.

Thomas DeLauer also has a video about it, he has a ton of content so it will take me a while to find it but I will track it down at some point and link to it.