The FastDay Forum

Hey, you lot seem like you might be able to answer a question! I lost 1.2kgs last week doing ADF. Around half of that was sadly lean mass. What could I be doing wrong? Or in your opinion what could I change? I have the main meal at dinner. I'm vegetarian so my protein is mainly plant based. It tends to be lentils, brown rice and occasionally eggs. Would you have any suggestions?

a) How do you know ?

b) FFM includes water, so part of the loss may be water

c) How much protein per day, and was it true alternate day fasting or alternate day calorie reduction.

Only 7% of the calories in brown rice are protein, lentils at 29% are a lot higher.

How do you know you lost lean mass? Are the measurements accurate enough? Measuring real lean mass is extremely difficult, as I understand it most people (and researchers) instead measure FFM, which is just the difference between total mass and fat mass - but this includes lots of other stuff, especially water. Maybe your apparent muscle loss is actually water loss?

Assuming that you really have loss muscle mass, my suggestions would be:

• Exercise - generally including while fasting.
• Maybe have something small but protein-filled for fasting day breakfast such as tuna

The conventional logic is that by denying your body essential amino acids through fasting (more specifically, through not taking in protein) you force the body to eat itself, and hence lose muscle mass. But I suspect that this is happening all the time anyway (autophagy) and the important thing is that you provide enough protein on the non-fasting days, which is not a problem on a western diet, and combine this with exercise to encourage the rebuilding.

Those of us (quite a lot of us here) fasting with one evening meal are doing the same as you albeit 5:2 rather than ADF. So the potential loss of lean mass is a serious issue for us as well as you if true!

I get weighed in weekly at my dietitian. They have scales that measure fat and lean mass percentages. She said the actual percentage is not always accurate but if they say the lean mass has gone down it has, maybe it says it's gone down .8 percent and it only went down .6 though because they cant get the percentage that close, she said not to pay too much attention to the actual number. But considering this equaled close to half of what I lost it must have been significant. Although she has never said there were other things that could contribute to 'lean mass' than muscle.

What I do is eat my dinner, then I won't eat again until the next dinner. So no breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, just watering black coffee, but then I eat what ever I want for dinner, and have dessert too if I want to. And I do this 1 day on 1 day off.

Oh and I'm training in body building so loads of exercise, I live at the gym

I missed something last time I was in this thread, and it's perhaps subtle but perhaps important. MM quotes Lau as saying, "muscle protein breakdown occurs in the first 24 hours of starvation."

1. Note that Lau didn't seem concerned with protein intake specifically, but with food intake more-generally. That is, he wasn't advocating higher protein levels, but rather he was a playing the stereotypical Italian grandmother and telling us to EAT!

2. The word, "starvation," is used, and not "fasting."

Am I wrong, or if I eat a healthy meal plus snacks the night before, ending around 10pm, and then break that nightly fast a 9am the next morning -- isn't it a stretch (to say the least) that I went through 11 hours of "starvation"?

That is, isn't this "starvation" that Dr. Lau is talking about something that begins several hours after your last food intake, and 24 hours after that is when this protein breakdown occurs?

I agree with PhilT that MM seems to be getting sloppy (or perhaps a lawyer sat down with him concerned about liability). He hedges twice when he didn't need to -- once on an apparently-new 12-hour guideline to fasting days, and again on encouraging increased protein intake (as a portion of overall calories) during fast days.

What I do is eat my dinner, then I won't eat again until the next dinner. So no breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, just watering black coffee, but then I eat what ever I want for dinner, and have dessert too if I want to. And I do this 1 day on 1 day off.

So on day 0 you eat normally all day including dinner
Day 1 you only eat dinner, but eat whatever you want and dessert if you want it
Day 2 you eat normally all day including dinner

etc.

Sorry to be slow.

If the scales only show fat and lean and the numbers add up to 100% then water is in the lean part and I would expect it to be part of the loss.

Grams of protein on "fast" and "normal" day ?? Calories on "fast" day ?

So dont worry so much about protien, continue what I'm doing but have a little something for breakfast, like an apple? So it's not such a long stretch? I could experiment this week.

Yep PhilT that's what I'm doing

[carorees]

How do you know it's lean mass? The body analyser scales are quite inaccurate, and mostly influenced by the water content so it might not be as much as you think. The trials of ADF found very little of the loss was lean mass. Have you measured your waist? A change there is indicative of fat loss.

I wouldn't bother adding any breakfast it will make you hungry and have little impact on any lean mass loss. The ADF trials just had a single meal...

Calories on fast day would be around 800 (I'm female) and out of that the protein would be the equivalent of one egg or one cup of lentils. I don't know what that works out to exactly. The rest is fruit and veg. And a bit of sugar!

Off to find my measuring tape... Lean mass is the term the dietitian uses, and she says it as if the world is ending. Lol.

Calories on fast day would be around 800 (I'm female) and out of that the protein would be the equivalent of one egg or one cup of lentils. I don't know what that works out to exactly. The rest is fruit and veg. And a bit of sugar!

So a high calorie intake with less than 10g of protein (one egg) or 18g for a cup of cooked lentils / 50g from a cup of dry lentils.

Not sure your regime counts as ADF at all, more like daily calorie cycling between 800 and another number.

Haha, the 'other number' would be between 1800 and 2000 calories. Maybe I have just come up with my own program. It seems to be doing the job though except for the muscle concerns. But I think I'll give that a bit more time before I get too worried.

Bruce, yes you are right about the fact that Dr Lau does not talk specifically about protein intake. So maybe my inference (about protein intake) is incorrect - hard to know.

The word, "starvation," is used, and not "fasting."

I think the article upon which Dr M's comments were based is here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/hea ... le8461083/. My guess is that the newspaper rang up Dr Lau for his views:

There’s one problem with the rationale behind fasting diets, according to David Lau, an obesity researcher, professor and chair of the diabetes and endocrine research group at the University of Calgary. When glycogen stores in the liver are depleted, the body doesn’t burn fat: It breaks down protein. Lau said starvation will only burn fat as fuel after about a week of starvation.

“Muscle protein breakdown occurs in the first 24 hours of starvation,” he said. “Muscle protein breakdown [is] not healthy.”

His concern is that many people are fasting without realizing they may be losing crucial muscle mass. The danger is that as protein in the body breaks down, it could lead to other unwanted side effects, such as altered immunity. In order to fight infections, the body needs to produce antibodies, a type of protein. But when the body is breaking down protein for fuel, it may not send the right signal to make antibodies, Lau said.

'The first 24 hours of starvation' is not a defined term, but how can it differ from the first 24 hours of a total fast? Dr M's response did seem to me defensive.

[carorees]

Something that occurs to me is that the increase in growth hormone which protects us from muscle breakdown is not discussed. However, IF has been shown to cause big increases in GH. Also, I bet the tests were done on people who are not used to fasting. As we know our bodies adapt to fasting, there could be very different results in habitual fasters than were found in the starvation study.