Astrogirl » Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent Fasting

Nicole — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:56:54 +0000

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Intermittent Fasting. I certainly see how it fits into the whole idea of eating as we evolved to eat, and that probably isn’t five (or six, in some cases) meals a day. Skipping meals seems to work for people when it comes to a leaning out stage where, say, a man is looking to go from 15% body fat to below 10%. Based on what I’ve seen by hanging around in the on-line nutrition and diet communities for the last few years, I’d say that IF is a useful tool in the final stage of becoming a real evolutionary bad ass. As far as using it as part of a weight loss program where you still need to lose 10% or more of your body fat? I’m not so sure about that.

Obviously, I’m not a biochemist, but let’s look at the evolutionary logic here. It’s a great strategy for us, as an animal in a state of nature, to be able to hunt hungry without hypoglycemia making us dumb and shaky and to be able to live on meat and a little bit of green forage nearly forever. At some point, however, the game is up, and the interaction of your genes and your hormones will decide that you’ve now optimized for your particular situation. For a lot of people, this means that they are still carrying around some fat they would rather not be.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people who are very successful on low-carb and paleo diets seem to get to a point where they can’t lose any more fat. Many of these people have lost quite a lot of weight, but they cannot get the last bit off. If they’ve lost 80-100 pounds, it’s the last 25. If they’ve lost 30-50 lbs, it’s the last 10-15. Some percentage of their excess weight just does not want to come off, even though their diets have worked a treat up to that point. The advice I generally see is to go lower in carbs and “add some intermittent fasting.” In low-carb circles (where they are not into skipping meals), people are generally told to go lower in carbs and control calories. Both of these things seem to be exactly the wrong advice, based on our evolutionary adaptations.

To be honest, I *hate* IF. I know people report feeling good while fasting, but I am just not one of those people. I can actually work out fasted without a blood sugar crash. I start at a blood glucose reading of 85 and after exercising, I’m closer to 105 through the magic of gluconeogenesis. This is what people who *like* intermittent fasting report, so I do not claim that I’m special or that I’m an exception to some biochemical rule.

To be perfectly clear: I’m defining a fast as no calories consumed. I don’t mean a juice fast or an egg fast, I mean no food, liquid or solid. Black coffee and tea have a few calories, but they count as non-caloric beverages for the sake of a fast.

Ultimately, what I am saying is that I sincerely doubt skipping three meals in row on a regular basis is an effective strategy to get off a weight loss plateau. If you’re already very close to your goal of being an Art DeVany type bad-ass? Then absolutely, yes.

Here’s what I see on comment boards fairly often:

Someone has been eating a low-carb Paleolithic or Primal-style diet, and has lost a bunch of excess fat and has become keto-adapted. Most people feel quite good in this state, and don’t experience any excess hunger. This is certainly a win-win for the dieter.

Women of child-bearing age may get to this state even earlier than men as their hormones are still thinking about the idea that they might get pregnant. They are eating what they think is good food, and certainly vegetables and high-quality meats can fuel you indefinitely, but it’s not a state that is conducive to weight loss. For some, it can apparently set the stage for infertility. If you read this epic comment thread on Free The Animal, you’ll find a lot of women wind that their cycles get wonky way before they look too skinny.

If you’ve got nothing available but meat and maybe some greens, your best bet for survival is to make glucose out of protein, and that’s what you’re doing. Your hormones have decided that there’s no fruit or tubers in their immediate future, so the best strategy is to hang on to that bit of fat just in case things get worse. Any fat-loss diet is about convincing your body to burn fat. In order to get it to do that, it has to be creatively starved.

And here’s something I’ve never really seen considered: what about all the foods that you’re putting off limits that you can see and smell? Might the psychology of denial have something to do with your body being unwilling to continue shedding fat? Grok wouldn’t be hunting hungry if he had food readily available, now would he?

Let’s say that our mythical person then stumbles on to a Paleo advice board and gets advice to try IF and to cut carbs lower. If it does work, then YIPPEE! you’re now adapted to eating even less. When you try to normalize your diet to that of a healthy eater that’s not consciously dieting, you have a higher chance of gaining back weight. If it doesn’t work, you’ve just put your body under more stress, possibly provoking problems with cortisol or your thyroid, and you are now worse off. None of this causes a problem for Grok, but you want to look good in a bikini, so it’s a problem for you.

I like meat and salads – really I do, but I’m not interested in living on that and nothing else. I do see a lot of hard-ass for the sake of hard-ass in Paleo/Primal circles. Intermittent Fasting and very low or zero carb diets are often the form that takes. Just because you can do that and feel good doing it does not mean that you will shed fat that way. Think about the signals you are sending your body. Do you want to work on being evolutionarily, optimally fit, or would you rather lose more fat first?

Consider just picking one of those if you’ve hit a plateau. A lot of folks seem unable to do both at the same time.

Dairy Foods and Paleo

Nicole — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 20:17:22 +0000

I’m not a pure paleo, nor will I ever be one. I just want to eat real food, and I’ve found that mostly sticking to paleolithic foods helps me feel better and control my weight. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been adhering more closely than I have for a while, but one place that I do not adhere is dairy. While I agree that there’s no way to justify dairy as a paleolithic food, I still eat it. I do impose limits, however.

I have gone off all pasteurized fluid milk products (I have a raw milk share), and I only eat real cheese. If it contains anything other than milk and cream, culture or enzymes and herbs, spices or annatto, it’s not real. This means that I mostly don’t eat cheese away from home, and if my budget allowed for it, I’d only eat raw milk cheeses. There are a some places I eat that I’m confident serve actual provolone, swiss, cheddar or mozzarella cheese, but I don’t just indiscriminately eat something simply referred to as “cheese.” Generally, that’s processed American cheese, which won’t qualify.

Sour cream is another place where all manner of crap can be added – even in a product that you’d consider “real” sour cream. At this point, I only buy Daisy brand because it’s the only brand I can find locally that contains nothing but cultured Grade A cream.

Seriously, check out the labels – you’d be surprised how much crap is in typical cream cheese or even sour cream. At a minimum, they typically contain vegetable gums (yes, even full fat products). Many contain skim milk that may have been powdered and probably contains oxidized cholesterol (added for body). I used to think stuff like carrageenan and polysorbate-80 were harmless, but my digestive system seems to think otherwise.

Those gums are part of the problem with cream. Believe it or not, it’s become almost impossible to purchase non-UHT, vegetable gum and preservative-free cream in a supermarket. All the organic stuff is UHT, and all the non-organic that isn’t UHT has a bunch of crap in it.

Since Whole Foods is a 100 mile round trip, and I don’t want cream badly enough to pay $4 per pint for it from a local butcher shop that can order it for me, I mostly do without. There’s some on my raw milk share, of course, sometimes a lot, but in the interest of not having a bunch of skimmed milk I don’t want, I consume it with the milk now. I found some fabulous coconut milk for coffee, something I mentioned a short while ago.

It’s not that I think the $4 is too much for this particular cream, but having to order it ahead and pick it up during a narrow window of hours at a shop that’s off the beaten path? All of that means the price is too high. If I could buy it in the supermarket, I would not hesitate to pay $4 a pint for local, grass-fed, regular-temp pasteurized cream.

This is kind of a jumping off point for more posts on my deviations from paleo. I started with this one because I think that while I differ on this issue, the pure Paleo eaters are right – it’s a Neolithic food. The other two points of contention I have, Intermittent Fasting and Omega-3 supplementation, I feel more justified in bitching about.

Gluconeogenesis

Nicole — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:21:29 +0000

I’ve had something about polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) in the hopper that is my brain for some time, but when I was finally catching up on my blog reading, I found that Dr. Kurt Harris has written something about it recently. It’s a good one.

It’s coming from a little different place than I am, and winds up somewhere a bit different, but it’s close. Ultimately, vegetable fats are not your friends. I’ll get to mine eventually, but go read his, especially if you’re a Paleo who uses canola oil, flax oil or eats a lot of nuts.

Anyway, another concept that I’ve been thinking about a lot came up on Robb Wolf’s podcast this week. Here’s “Bill’s” question:

Quick question about maximizing effectiveness of carb intake on cortisol levels. In a nutshell, if carb intake is restricted sufficiently to require more or less continuous gluconeogenesis to maintain blood sugar, and cortisol is the pathway by which gluconeogenesis is activated, wouldn’t eating close to zero carbs result in continuously elevated cortisol levels?

I’m pretty sure that this is what triggered my cortisol and adrenal issues. If I didn’t have *other* issues, it might not have happened, but I can’t help but notice that a lot of people (especially women) in the paleosphere also have hypothyroid symptoms. Non-raging hypothyroid symptoms (like gluten intolerance) are something you can experience for quite a long time and not realize that you just aren’t performing up to snuff. Once they start to abate, you realize just how many problems you had that were caused by your hormones that *aren’t* insulin. People in the low-carb world, paleo or not, tend to blame everything on insulin.

Here’s Robb Wolf’s answer (this is my transcription from the podcast. It may not be perfect, but I’m sure it’s pretty close):

Cortisol is not the only way to turn on gluconeogenesis, it’s one way to do it, but it’s not the only way to do it. The thought here is good, and this is part of the reason why the Intermittent Fasting stuff is really interesting, but also potentially very, very problematic because if you are in a fasted state, and then begin training, especially at a high intensity level, the likelihood of you releasing cortisol to prop up blood sugar levels is very, very high.

When I was talking with Lon Kilgore [not sure about that name, maybe this guy?] the other day about how cortisol levels can be elevated from overtraining and one of the obvious places this can happen, like if we’re doing intense, mixed modal activity where we’re using a lot of muscle mass intensely, like basically taking things down to failure, we’re causing a huge stimulus to uptake glucose into the muscles. If we clear all the blood glucose out of the bloodstream into the muscles, we’re going to really perturb the system, and if we do not have an easy way of replenishing that glucose then we are going to stimulate the release of cortisol and adrenaline to release glucose out of the liver. And so this is one of those things that when I’m looking back at my own problems with elevated cortisol levels, the AM training in a fasted state, when I’m looking back at it and I was already stressed, already having problems, already overly caffeinated and then throwing in fasted training on top of that? Oh, I was an idiot, no wonder I ended up producing the problems that I had.

He goes on to talk about moderation, and says that (paraphrased) some of the HIT training, some of the fasting is OK and maybe you can fly under the cortisol radar if you’ve got everything else in order, if you aren’t stressed and you’re sleeping enough and all that.

Robb and Andy Deas have discussed caffeine in the past, so they don’t go into that piece again here. Basically, they feel a moderate intake is OK and that something to slow down the jolt (heavy cream or coconut/almond milk if you don’t do dairy) is beneficial. They take a lot of questions about caffeine and alcohol in the podcast.

Also, Robb seems to feel pretty strongly that benefits of Intermittent Fasting max out at 16 hours. He has mentioned that more than once in these podcasts. The other half of the question:

Likewise, to maximize development of muscle (occurring in reduced cortisol environment) wouldn’t the ideal, though perhaps unattainable, diet be the one that provided JUST enough carbs to nearly eliminate gluconeogenesis, thus generating the lowest levels of cortisol due to diet (all other factors being equal)? Or is my understanding of this simply immature?

Robb’s answer:

I think that’s pretty spot on from the reality for maximum muscle development, although I am no means an exemplary expert in this area, the things that seem to go into it are insulin sensitivity but then also getting away with as much carbohydrate as you can definitely has some growth promotion to it, but different people have some different levels of buy-in on how much carbohydrate they can tolerate in this whole scene. The cortisol management piece is definitely really important from an androgen perspective. If your cortisol is going up, testosterone is going to go down and it’s going to have some other collateral damage effects including insulin sensitivity because of elevated cortisol, so there’s a lot of reasons for keeping cortisol in tight check.

As your pro-sleep hormones fall off (your best quality sleep for hormone balancing occurs before midnight), your system starts to produce cortisol in the morning to get you going. This is normal, but it’s *not* normal if you’re getting that shot of cortisol at 3am or 4am and waking up then. I found that if that happens (I can usually go back to sleep for a couple of hours, but it’s not high-quality sleep), I have a higher fasting blood glucose in the morning (in the 90s or about 105 instead of my normal low 80s) as well. This also makes sense, because the cortisol is driving the liver to produce some glucose as part of the waking process. So, this is a deranged reaction as the BG is too high and I was waking up too early.

Since I added the carbs back (a serving of fruit at the end of two meals and one meal with root veggies – I eat about 100g of carbohydrate a day including fiber), my morning blood sugars are coming down from 95-100. Yesterday it was 72 (which is really too low), and today it was 87, which is just right. I’m not waking up at 3 or 4am either, obviously. It’s a slow process, but everything keeps getting a *little bit better* every day.

Feast Day / Fast Day

Nicole — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:21:37 +0000

Richard at Free The Animal blogged about a study that was both interesting and timely, at least to me.

I’ve been successfully controlling my weight in a within two pounds of my final diet day weigh-in for about a month, but I’m always interested in tips and tricks.

I’ve recently read about the Johnson Up Down Day Diet. There’s also the Bang Bang Diet, but I don’t think that would work for me for a variety of reasons.

After reading the study, I’m encouraged re: trying their method (including intermittent fast, something the JUDDD does not require) to lose about 10 more pounds. I’m really impressed with it in particular because a feast day / fast day diet is something that could be done through the holiday season and would allow me to not worry about what I’m eating *every* day, but only every other day. At first, I think I would track the up day too because I really want the data.

I never take my calories as low as 25% of maintenance if I’m over the range, but I do make cuts and changes, and it always knocks off the weight. I only need to make cuts or changes about once a week, not every other day. I’m also very confident that I know my maintenance calorie level, and without that, I might not try this.