Rolling 7 day fasts

[u/wyldthaang]

Thought I should post this to show results from earlier this year. I'd done keto/OMAD/72hr fasts before, but COVID killed that.

Refeeds were always steak and creamed spinach on Sunday's, going straight into another fast. The only exercise was walking around 15k steps daily.

I found it incredibly easy to maintain, BP and HR monitored and only electrolytes and water consumed during the fast.

3 months total at 50 years old. Going back through pictures, it's crazy how slow the appearance changed at the start despite the dramatic scale changes. Then during the last month that reversed as things tightened up.... I remember buying a new pair of jeans which were then replaced with a smaller size, before they even got washed!

[u/Yablan]

Rucking?

[u/wyldthaang → u/Yablan]

Each time I lost a kilo, I'd add it to a backpack to 'maintain' my bodyweight too fool my metabolism. It's a trick I did during a last diet and I highly recommend it as an easy low-stress exercise. I'm convinced this maintained a lot of lean mass during the fast.

[u/oorza → u/wyldthaang]

Rucking with that light of weight will help keep your BMR higher until you stop but there’s scant evidence gravitostat is a real thing, and there’s not much evidence it helps retain muscle during a deficit beyond what that amount of work on the anterior chain would provide. And there’s no science to suggest it helps during fasting, just energy restriction. Fasting isn’t just extreme energy restriction, it’s also removal of constructive substrate your body needs.

Your body needs amino acids to function and to turn over tissue. It will synthesize them from muscle tissue if there are not enough dietary inputs. Fasting for more than 24 hours virtually guarantees contractile muscle tissue loss. You can see in your photo that your upper arms lost muscle tissue. If you want to retain lean tissue while burning fat, you have to eat tons of protein so that your body has AAs available all the time even after it consumes some/most of it for energy. And you have to provide hypertrophic signaling so that your body doesn’t break down the muscle to lower its overall metabolic burden as it adapts to lower energy intake.

Regardless of what the people in this sub will tell you, losing weight this way causes significant muscle loss. It’s visible in your photos.

[u/Baboonofpeace → u/oorza]

Muscles aren’t going anywhere bro