Fasting Facts

Muscle loss from fasting is a common fear among people who are already in great shape. We know that people become emaciated with severe undernutrition, so we assume fasting will have similar affects. The research, however, says otherwise. In his book Eat Stop Eat Brad Pilon does a good job of highlighting some of the flawed conventional wisdom surrounding fasting. His review of the research found that as long as you’re doing strength training of some sort, you won’t lose muscle during 24 hour fasts. In fact, it’s even possible to gain muscle while fasting, contrary to popular belief. This makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint because it would be counter productive for us to lose muscle whenever we couldn’t find food, since we would then have trouble hunting for more. Other prominent names in the health and fitness field have found that they were STRONGEST when they worked out fasted.

In short, the myths about having to eat every 3 hours to avoid starvation mode or maintain muscle growth are exactly that: myths.

How To Lose Muscle

So if fasting doesn’t cause muscle loss unless done excessively (leading to undernutrition) then how IS muscle lost? Whether you actually want to know how to lose muscle, or simply how to avoid it, the causes of muscle loss can be found below.

1. Atrophy

This is the most obvious one but it’s still worth going over as it’s probably the most common way muscle is lost. When you don’t use your muscles for a long period of time, your body decides that they are no longer needed and they begin to atrophy. If you’ve ever seen a paraplegic in a wheel chair, you may have noticed that their legs are very thing. Because muscle is metabolically expensive, if a certain muscle group isn’t being used, the body will discontinue to support those muscles.

2. Overtraining

This one is one of the most common mistakes people make when working out. Quick fact: muscles don’t get grow when you work out, they grow when you rest. Working out actually causes microscopic damage to the muscle fibers and subsequent rest repairs those fibers and makes them stronger. When you overtrain by working the same muscle before it has had time to adequately recover, you actually break down the muscle further.

3. Undernutrition

Fasting doesn’t hamper muscle growth because you can still get the nutrients your body needs during the time you aren’t fasting. Prolonged lack of nutrients, however, will lead to emaciation as can be seen in starving populations. If your body is deprived of nutrients for an extended period of time it will break down your muscles to use for energy and resist building new muscles since lean tissue is metabolically expensive. It’s important to mention that trying to lose muscle through undernutrition is extremely unhealthy and should be avoided. Some people just have a predisposition to building muscle easily and trying to break your muscles down is usually a bad idea.

For the most part, this site is about fasting, but as you saw in the article Dreams of Holistic Detox: Problems with Juice Fasting, fasting really is really tough if your nutrition is completely out of whack. And while fasting IS an extremely beneficial practice, it’s not a miracle cure.

5 Simple steps to make your diet “detoxic”

1. Cut down on sugar, sugar substitutes and nutrient-barren foods that convert easily into glucose.

2. Use olive oil, coconut oil and/or organic butter instead of vegetable oils (olives are technically a fruit).

3. Buy foods without ingredient lists. You’re not going to find Xanthan gum in a whole chicken or a pack of asparagus.

4. Stay away from “health foods” that weren’t around 100 years ago. If people have lived in near-perfect health without it, you probably don’t need it.

5. The less processed something is the better. An apple > apple juice > an apple-flavored drink.

5 Things You Should Be Eating

1. Vegetables of all types, especially green ones. Fruits and vegetables are not equal, the vegetables are much more nutritionally dense.

2. Meat, preferably organic or better yet, pasture raised. Don’t fall for the “fat is bad” myth. Ancel Keys’ seven countries study (which much of mainstream nutrition is still based on) was severely flawed.

3. Nuts and nut butters. Peanuts are technically a legume, but peanut butter is alright as long as it’s mostly just peanuts and not partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (aka trans fat).

4. Fruit, but not too much. Again, vegetables are much more nutritionally dense. But don’t be afraid of fruit, it’s good stuff.

5. Whole grains are better than the usual, but nutritionally they’re not even comparable to fruits, vegetables and meat. Not too much here, but not the biggest issue either.

Detoxic without Detoxing

You don’t need a juice cleanse to feel a whole lot better. Get your diet handled to the extent you can and start fasting weekly for weight loss and more health benefits. Remember, take it SLOW with both the nutrition and the fasting. If you try to do everything perfect right away you’ll burn out. I know you think you’re different, but it happens to almost everyone. Do you remember back in high school P.E. class when everyone had to run the mile and there would be one kid who took off sprinting and burned out after the first 200 meters? Don’t be that kid.

More on the specifics of fasting health benefits and fasting for weight loss coming soon.

If you’ve read some of the previous articles you should be pretty skeptical about detox claims by now. We know the supporting science isn’t there and we know the issues with some of the commonly marketed detox methods.

You might have stumbled upon this article looking for something like how to detox your body, or maybe how to do a holistic detox, and maybe your happy to avoid a scam, but maybe there’s some part of you that just wanted it to work. Flushing all those toxins out and feeling better than ever sounds pretty enticing doesn’t it? Well, as we talked about, your liver is going to handle most of those toxins, but lets talk about how we can feel better than ever through fasting.

Natural Detox without the “Detox”

Just because there’s not really any solid evidence behind flushing and cleansing detox diets doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of toxic stuff getting into your body. There is. But where does it come from? Is all the pollution getting into the air and causing us to breath in millions of micro-toxins? Maybe in some areas. Are chemicals in pesticides or the water we drink ruining our health? Maybe a bit.

But think about the bigger picture? What’s getting into us in the largest quantities, or in the words of Catherine Shanahan M.D. what’s “the primary way that our body interacts with the rest of the world?” If you guessed through eating food, you’d be correct.

Americans shovel hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of food into their mouths every year, and most don’t know the first thing about the effects of what they’re putting into their bodies.

Some Literally Poisonous Foods

There’s a lot of things that are bad for us, and a lot that are good too. I’m sure you’ve been advised to read labels and stay away from things that you don’t recognize like Xanthan Gum, which is great, but again we want to think in relative terms.

Sugar is quite literally toxic, and Americans consume nearly 200 pounds each year.

Vegetable oils such as corn oil, soybean oil, canola oil and so on are also demonstrably dangerous, and they are in virtually everything we eat. It’s in fast food, processed food at the supermarket, bagels, muffins, salad dressing and almost anything else you can think of.

I realize targeting these two things is a big oversimplification of what’s wrong with America’s diet, but they are two HUGE factors playing into obesity and virtually all other diseases of civilization (diseases of civilization are diseases that basically aren’t present in primitive cultures).

Stay tuned for long articles discussing the more technical effects of excess sugar and vegetable oils. We’ll also get into more of what you SHOULD be eating, and how it ties in with fasting for weight loss and health benefits.

A few days ago I stumbled upon a juice fasting article that I found very interesting. I think it highlights the main issue with juice fasting, which is what I’m going to talk about today.

“To fast on water is a test of discipline. I do not enjoy water fasting; I do it for the results. Having a very fast metabolism, no excess fat and being muscular, my body demands a continual supply of calories. I live mostly on fruit and get hungry every two hours. About four hours into the fast, my body starts to feel the lack of calories. Twenty-four hours later, I am lying around with little energy to expend….Juice fasting is just the opposite of water fasting, blasting the body with more nutrition than it has ever seen.”

This passage perfectly highlights one of the main problems with juice fasting and the ideologies that surround it. But wait! you say, this guy says WATER fasting makes him feel bad! That’s exactly my point.

The passage above is a typical account of a person addicted to sugar. On a high fruit diet (or any sugar filled diet), it’s very hard to go for extended periods without eating. More and more research points to the addictive properties of sugar and how it functions in an extremely similar fashion to narcotics.

The writer in the passage above is going through a blood sugar roller coaster ride, which is why he feels terrible without a constant supply of juice. The reason juice fasts are so popular – besides the fact that marketers have something to sell you – is that people riding those blood sugar highs and lows will crash after just a few hours without eating. Juice diets provide them with a constant supply of sugar, which works perfectly for marketers because the overweight people they’re selling to are the most likely to have that kind of sugar dependence.

The Juice Fasting and Holistic Detox Scam

Lets get two things straight:

1. Fruit juice is NOT a health food

2. Thousands of calories of juice each day is NOT a fast

Juice fasting is just an easy way to sell people a product and keep the addiction going for people who are dependent on sugar.

We’ll get more into how sugar addiction works and how it hampers your ability to fast effectively in the next few articles. We’ll also get learn about what to eat to get out of the sugar loop and make fasting effectively much more doable.

Until then, don’t juice fast!

This post will give you a basic overview of how to fast effectively, which methods are best, who should try fasting, and who probably shouldn’t. Without further ado:

How long should I fast?

Most research points to approximately 24 hours as the ideal number. There’s some studies that show a good number of benefits after only 16-18 hours, so that’s a good place to get started, and if you’ve having trouble doing the full 24 then you’ll still get good results with that time frame. At around 30 hours the benefits of fasting start to taper off a little, and the longer you go after that, the more likely you’ll run into trouble. Some people do okay with 2-3 day fasts, but around 24 hours is still ideal. If you do want to try longer fasts, I’d advise you to do so under medical supervision – but since no one is going to do that, just trust me and stick with 24.

What Can I Eat while Fasting?

The best thing you can do is stick with water, although if you’re advised to take medicine or drugs by a health care professional, take them as you normally would (definitely consult the person who prescribed the medicine before attempting a fast). Juice fasts are really popular, but they’re popular because they’re easier for people on bad diets and they sell products. There’s some good reasons not to juice fast, which I’ll get into in detail in the next article.

Who Should Try Fasting?

I want to be really clear about this: fasting is not for people with medical conditions. People with Diabetes especially should not try fasting unless closely supervised by a medical professional. Don’t try fasting if you’re pregnant either.

It’s also worth noting that virtually all research on the health benefits of fasting has been done on adults, so I wouldn’t recommend it for children. Fasting is for generally healthy adults who want to get healthier and lose weight.

Fasting for Weight Loss and Health in 50 Words or Less

1. Start small by skipping meals

2. 24 hour fasts are ideal

3. Don’t fall for juice fasting marketing

4. Drink plenty of water

5. Only reasonably healthy adults should fast

That’s it! In other articles we’ll get into the problems with juice fasts, more on health benefits and weight loss and on what really happens in your body with a fasting “detox”.

The basic idea behind detoxification programs is that, over time, your body accumulates toxins that have to be flushed out or taken out by other means.

I have to admit, I’m skeptical. Let’s dig deeper.

Proponents of typical detoxification assert that intestinal sluggishness or other issues with digestion allow nutrients to become putrid, and their absorption results in chronic poisoning at of the body. This idea has been around for about a century, but was abandoned by the scientific community in the 1930s when research suggested other mechanisms for discomfort or illness. To this day, these none of these “toxins” that supposedly need to be flushed have ever been found. In other words, no one has ever been able to locate or even establish the existence of the toxins that are targeted by these programs.

Other Types of Detoxing

Other than “flushing” with liquid diets, there’s a few other detoxification practices that need to be addressed. Here are a few of the most common:

1. Herbal and dietary supplements

The idea here is that as these pass through your body, they will remove toxins and clear pathways. A test for the effectiveness of these remedies would be quite simple: you’d take a blood sample before and after and see if any identifiable toxins were removed. However, there is no evidence that a herbal or dietary detoxing supplement has managed to do this.

2. Colon Irrigation

This practice involves clearing out the colon with large quantities of water or other liquids. It is useful when preparing for surgery and a few other medical procedures, but there is no evidence of benefits beyond that.

3. Sweating it Out

Many programs target trace amounts of a toxin found in the blood stream (often at low enough levels to be interpreted as irrelevant) and aim to “sweat it out”. This may involve exercise or ingestion of niacin supplements which increase blood flow to the skin. It is important to note, that the liver is responsible for the processing and removal of nearly all these toxins, and that sweat glands play an insignificant role.

Regardless of the method, there seems to be little scientific backing behind the traditional ideas of detoxing your body. I’ll expand on this in future articles, as I’m sure the die-hard detoxing fans still aren’t convinced (and may never be). We’ll get into why “detox diets” might make you feel good or help you lose weight, despite not accomplishing their goal, and we’ll look at the real mechanisms behind it all.

So why Write an Article on Detoxing your Body?

Assuming you read the title, you probably started reading this article because you wanted to know how to detox your body.

The research doesn’t support all of the detoxing claims, but there is good news: I just saved a bunch of money on car insurance by switching to Geico. Just kidding. The good news is that you can improve your health with methods of fasting, resulting in the kind of health benefits that people expect to get through detoxing.

In future articles we’ll get into how to fast effectively, the scientific data for why it works, and detox version 2.0. Stay tuned.

I was recently talking with a friend of mine who is a prominent personal trainer and nutrition specialist in California. We were discussing diet and weight loss, and he mentioned the disconnect between abstract research and the actual results people are getting. As anyone who commonly works with people to help them lose weight can tell you, it’s often a lot more complicated than knowing what causes people to lose and gain weight.

Barriers to Entry

Even if a person knows exactly what they should eat to lose weight (most people have absolutely no idea, even if they might think they do) there’s still plenty of things that can get in the way, such as:

• Cravings
• Medical conditions
• Budgetary issues
• Inconvenience

And so on.

Back to my conversation, he mentioned that taking into account all the issues that real life presents (as opposed to lab tests), he and his colleagues found intermittent fasting to be the most consistent and effective way to lose weight. That’s a pretty big statement.

Of course you can’t eat garbage all day and expect fasting alone to get you lean and fit as a fiddle, but add in some decent food (I’ll help you develop a solid basic understanding of nutrition and weight loss) and you’ve got the quickest way to lose weight safely.

Why Fasting for Weight Loss Works

One of the best things about fasting is that, if done correctly, it can improve your health in a lot of different areas. A wealth of peer reviewed research suggests that fasting is one of the few areas of main stream health agendas that lives up to the hype. According to Elson M Haas, M.D., “Fasting is the single greatest healing therapy…” and there’s research to back that up.

What you can Expect from Fasting for Health Benefits

Here’s a quick list of some of the health improvements you can expect from effective intermittent fasting:

• Decreased insulin levels and increased insulin sensitivity
• Increased fat oxidation and lypolysis
• Increased growth hormone production
• Decreased blood glucose levels
• Decreased body fat and weight
• Maintenance of skeletal muscle mass and a higher percentage of lean tissue
• Increased glucagon levels

And many more.

Fasting can be potential dangerous for people with medical conditions, but for generally healthy people it carries a host of health benefits.

What does the Research Say?

So how do we know all this? How are we so sure of the health benefits of fasting? Large-scale studies on religious groups during their fasts, along with a host of controlled lab studies, population studies and so on.

A quick search on CSA’s research database turns up almost 6000 peer-reviewed studies relating to fasting and health. Now that’s not to say there’s 6000 studies that specifically conclude fasting is the best thing since sliced bread (most studies are very narrowly focused) but you get the idea. Intermittent fasting works. It comes with numerous health benefits, along with proper diet it’s the quickest way to lose weight safely.

How Often Should I Fast?

Different things work for different people, but as a general guideline, fasting weekly for weight loss or health benefits seems to work best. This is assuming you fast for 18-30 hours.  Some people like to fast less often, such as once a month, or as often as twice a week. If you’re a generally health person, just give it a try and see how you feel.

If you have any medical conditions and are worried about any other complications, consult a medical professional before beginning a fasting regimen. For some people, fasting leads to problems such a eating disorders, blood sugar issues and rare potassium deficiencies, all of which should be treated seriously.

Effective fasting is drastically misunderstood by the vast majority of people. Whether they’re looking to detox their body, get healthier or find the best way to lose weight quickly (all of which can be done with intermittent fasting), people often have no idea how to fast effectively and the benefits that come with it.

Fasting for Weight Loss

As you probably know if you’ve dieted or followed the trends and fads at all, everyone has a different opinion on what to eat – and more importantly, a lot of people stand to profit off telling you what to eat. For the average person, it’s hard to sift through all the information and products and find real answers. Is weight loss all about the calories? Is it the type of food that matters? What are the mechanisms behind it all? And finally, how does fasting and detox tie into all of this?

We’ll get to all of that in future articles.

Fasting and How to Detox your Body

Detoxing is one of the most misunderstood and exploited areas in the field of health and nutrition. Can liquid diets really clear out all the toxins in your body? Does juice fasting work? What does the research say about the benefits of detoxing?

Fasting for Health Benefits

Furthermore, we’ll talk about the other health benefits of fasting. And I’ll tell you right now, there are many. We’ll discuss things like the effects of effective fasting on blood pressure, energy levels, and much, much more. We’ll see what the research says, what doctors say, and separate the facts from the hype.

How to Fast Safely and Effectively

Finally, we’ll discuss how to fast effectively and how to get the most out of fasting. We’ll talk about what works best, what’s safe and what’s supported by the studies. For now, read up and don’t do anything dangerous. We’ll get the facts straight, then we’ll get on our way to being lean and healthy with fasting.