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Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time : So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want
by
John Jaquish
A small study on ketogenic diets showed increased HDL with stable LDL, considered indicative of a lowered risk of a bad cardiac event.
Stanford researchers compared the extremely low-carb, high-fat, high-protein Atkins Diet to other more conventional diet protocols and concluded those who were assigned to “the Atkins diet, which had the lowest carbohydrate intake, lost more weight and experienced more favorable overall metabolic effects at 12 months than women assigned to follow the Zone, Ornish, or LEARN diets.”96
Your LDLs go up if you fast for forty-eight hours because your body is metabolizing its own body fat. Simply saying that high levels of LDLs are bad for you is like saying fat loss is bad for you. People who are losing body fat are less likely to have a heart attack, not more likely to have one.
Whether you want to lose weight, build muscle, or simply be as healthy as possible, these recommendations still apply.
Eliminate Sugar The first thing we recommend is to cut out added sugar. Dietary sugar is the leading factor in obesity. In general, you don’t get fat from eating fat, you get fat from eating too much sugar as well as other kinds of carbohydrates.
Eliminate Simple Carbohydrates As we stated earlier in this chapter, carbohydrates are not a macronutrient.
So, our second recommendation is to cut out processed carbohydrates. This includes eliminating processed grains, like anything made from flour, from your diet.
For instance, a bear comes out of hibernation and eats protein—say deer and a fish—until the end of the summer. In autumn, when carbohydrates become available again, they eat as many fruits and berries as possible. Bears basically give themselves type two diabetes every year before they go into hibernation in an attempt to get as fat as possible.
The bottom line: if you’re looking to increase your body fat, eat carbohydrates. If you’re looking for optimal health, focus on fats and proteins.
Do Intermittent Fasting/Time-Restricted Eating Research shows fasting is one of the healthiest things you can do for your body. It provides a total metabolic reset, autophagy, and regeneration of the immune system.
For most of human history, we didn’t eat three square meals a day because we didn’t have food available at all times. If people were going without food because they hadn’t killed an animal recently, the body burned fat to get necessary nutrients and have enough energy to survive.
In the context of more recent history, Mark Twain once wrote, “A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors. I do not mean a restricted diet; I mean total abstention from food for one or two days.”
Isn’t Fasting Just a Way to Achieve Caloric Restriction? Fortunately, fasting and time-restricted feeding are not merely a caloric restriction.
When the final results were tallied in 2006, the experiment proved the opposite of conventional thinking. Despite good compliance, over seven years of calorie counting led to virtually no weight loss (.04kg). Not even a single pound.
Fortunately, you don’t have to take our word on this, as a recent randomized, controlled trial demonstrated quite conclusively that when it comes to time-restricted eating, there are benefits for obesity and health generally that are not derived from caloric restriction.
One had food available twenty-four hours a day, while the other was only permitted to eat within an eight-hour window. Both of those groups consumed the same food and the same amount of calories.
Simply by restricting the time within which mice ate their meals, the negative health consequences normally associated with the high-fat diet were eliminated. The researchers concluded that a “time-restricted feeding regimen is a non-pharmacological strategy against obesity and associated diseases.”100
when you eat could be as important as what you eat.
First, the benefits of fasting appear to occur because after a sufficient period of time without food, a “metabolic switch” is flicked in the body. This typically occurs around twelve hours after your last meal, assuming you consume no further calories during that time.
Around twelve hours after your last consumption of food, the body begins to break fatty acids down into ketone bodies, which will become the new blood-borne chemical energy vector, replacing the glucose that your body is running out of. 102 While we would expect this metabolic switch to be “flipped” at the twelve-hour mark and the transition to ketosis to be initiated at that time, it may take a much longer fast of perhaps seventy-two hours for some individuals to transition completely to a ketogenic state.103
Finally, by the seventy-two-hour mark, the body has been triggered to recycle and replace all of its T-Cells, effectively regenerating a substantial part of the immune system and reversing immunosuppression.107
Fasting Has a Surprising Effect on Testosterone
Testosterone, a primarily male sex hormone, is responsible for the major male-associated characteristics, such as muscle growth, facial hair, bone mass density, and sexual drive. It is also upregulated during the fasting period.
In one such study, intermittent fasting in healthy men looking to improve testosterone showed an improvement in fasting LH of nearly 67 percent which in turn improved overall testosterone by an amazing 180 percent.
The benefit is also realized because improved insulin sensitivity is associated with the rapid metabolization of body fat, and lower levels of body fat are associated with higher levels of testosterone.
Now, if you put the body in a situation where it has zero calories, is it going to find homeostasis for this position? Of course not. This is not sustainable. Instead of trying to adapt to an impossible circumstance, the body instead prepares for the future. It knows you will need to eat something eventually, and to get to that point—say, to potentially catch an animal for consumption—it will help you. This is done by dramatically increasing growth hormone, even upwards of 2,000 percent, to maintain muscle mass all while body fat is being metabolized for energy.
In contrast to this, a low-calorie environment does initiate a homeostasis process, since reduced but continuous calorie intake is potentially tenable for the body in a survival context.
Therefore, the science leads us to recommend fasting over caloric restriction for everyone.
Focusing on time-restricted eating/fasting instead can produce more rapid fat loss and induce the preservation of all muscle mass.
Multiple studies have demonstrated that fasting can be undertaken while preserving muscle and losing fat and that fasting can lead to muscle growth after the fasting period.
Similarly, research on daily sixteen-hour fasts performed in 2016 showed that participants in those fasts were also able to lose significant amounts of weight with no loss in muscle mass or maximal strength.117
Acceleration When It Ends An intriguing 2016 study compared alternate day fasting with daily calorie restriction among obese subjects who were not engaged in exercise. The subjects engaged in eight weeks of intervention, followed by twenty-four weeks of unmodified follow-up. Measurements were made at the eight-week and thirty-two-week mark. At eight weeks, the fasting group had lost more weight as a percentage of starting weight (marginal significance, p=.056) with otherwise negligible differences between groups. However, at the thirty-two-week follow-up, the fasting group had accomplished a
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Effectively, it may have “primed” the body to build muscle and not to store fat so when participants presumably abandoned the diet after the eight-week mark, more of their increased caloric intake was diverted to lean mass growth, resulting in the improvement seen at the thirty-two-week mark.
keep in mind that fasting is not magic and a diet that is too low in calories or protein (and protein especially is easy to under consume) for a prolonged period of time will not be saved by fasting.
16:8 Split The most basic way to implement intermittent fasting is to do a 16:8 split. This means eating within an eight-hour window and fasting for the remaining sixteen hours. In most cases, people choose to skip breakfast in this method.
You should not be eating when you’re about to engage in strenuous mental or physical activity. In fact, we recommend exercising fasted to elicit the most efficient muscular and hormonal response.
Moderate-length fasting like a 16:8 split triggers a hormonal response that prevents you from losing muscle or other valuable tissue while encouraging your body to switch over to burning the tissue that serves the specific function of energy storage.
16:8 fasting, the participant enters the fasted state after hour twelve and then spends four hours benefiting from that state before ending the fast. This introductory level recommendation is the threshold where you should start to see benefits from intermittent fasting.
Eat One Meal a Day (OMAD) The next obvious step in intermittent fasting is to move to one meal a day. That’s a 23:1 split, and the concept is
You just have dinner or a late lun...
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Keep in mind, you can follow any sort of diet—for instance, ketogenic, carnivore, or others—while adhering to an OMAD eating pattern. There is no evidence the benefits of fasting are limited to any particular nutrition plan.
Occasionally Fast for Forty-Eight or Seventy-Two Hours Occasionally fasting for forty-eight or seventy-two hours is a great way to keep your immune system strong.
Research done at USC in 2014 shows a seventy-two-hour fast triggers stem cell regeneration of T-Cells.120 In other words, the entire immune system basically resets after not eating for three days.
Bulletproof Coffee and Time-Restricted Eating/Fasting
We also speculate that a lot of the benefit of fasting has to do with the lack of insulin response, so it may even be possible to consume more than fifty calories if all of those calories are from fat, as they would be in the case of Bulletproof Coffee.
Implement a Ketogenic Diet The next step would be to eliminate many unprocessed carbohydrates as well, including most fruit and starchy vegetables, as well as remaining grains,
When the quantity of carbohydrates you consume is low enough, this is referred to as a ketogenic diet.
for the body to meet its energy needs. Effectively, in ketosis, the body uses broken down fat as the standard energy delivery mechanism in the bloodstream instead of glucose. The Standard American Diet (SAD) keeps most people running on glucose, which is transported into the cells with the help of insulin, at all times. However, if you stop eating carbohydrates and sugars and get a sufficient portion of your daily energy from fat instead, the body will begin to break that down into ketone bodies. This
The strongest research recommends limiting carbs to fifty grams per day to keep the body in ketosis. Both ways induce fat loss.
This addresses one of the largest myths of ketosis. Many internet promoters of “ketogenic nutrition” push the idea that you can eat however much fat you want. This is absolutely false and will not help you with anything except your blood glucose levels. If you eat too much fat too often while on a ketogenic diet, it can still promote obesity
