Author: Brad Pilon

ISBN: 978-1775110804

Best book on science behind intermittent fasting and different variations. Period.

EXCERPTS

Every diet will work if it recommends some form of caloric restriction. And if you follow a calorie-restricted diet you will lose weight, guaranteed.

There probably is no “right” way to eat. The best we can hope for is finding the way that works the best for you.

There are only two absolute truths when it comes to nutrition and weight loss.

1. Prolonged caloric restriction is the only proven nutritional method of weight loss
2. Human beings can only be in one of the following states: fed or fasted.

So, the yin and yang of fed and fasted has been replaced by a constant fed state, where we helplessly try to figure out how to continue eating and somehow lose weight at the same time. This is a very scary scenario when you consider the fact that our bodies are designed to store fat whenever it is provided with an amount of calories beyond its needs. In order to restore the balance of fed and fasted states, we have no choice but to go through periods of under-eating to match our large periods of overeating.

The bottom line is that food has very little to do with your metabolism. In fact, your metabolism is much more closely tied to your bodyweight than anything else. And, your metabolism is almost exclusively tied to your lean body mass or “LBM”. This means all the parts of your body that are not body fat.

Your muscle cells have the ability to store sugar in a modified form called glycogen. The interesting thing about this process is that your muscles lack the ability to pass this stored sugar back into the blood stream. In other words, once a muscle has stored up some glycogen, it can only be burned by that muscle and cannot be sent off for use by other parts of your body.

This basic rule goes for all of your muscles. This is in contrast to how your liver works. Your liver stores glycogen specifically for the purpose of feeding your organs, brain, and other muscles as needed.

During a period of fasting, the systems of your body are relying on fat and the sugar that is stored in your liver for energy. Your muscles still have their own sugar that they need for exercising. The sugar in your muscles is used up quickly during high intensity exercises like weight training and sprinting, but even a few consecutive days of fasting in the absence of exercise has little effect on muscle glycogen content. By doing so, your muscle glycogen is truly reserved for the energy needs of exercise.

From this research, we can see that you should be able to work out while fasted and not see any change in your performance. The only situation where I think there may be a negative effect from fasting is during prolonged endurance sports, like marathons or Ironman-style triathlons, where you are exercising continuously for several hours at a time. These types of ultra-long competitions typically require the athletes to eat during the actual event in order to maintain performance over such prolonged time periods. In most research trials examining the effects of fasting on prolonged endurance activities it was found that fasting negatively affected both overall endurance and perceived exertion. Keep in mind, however, that many of these studies were performed at the END of a 24-hour fast. So it is not advisable to partake in a 3.5-hour bike right at the end of a 24-hour fast, but I’m hoping you already knew that. It should be noted that the “negative effect” that occurs from fasting before a long endurance activity only affects an athlete’s time until exhaustion (performance duration). So, the amount of time an athlete can exercise while fasted before becoming exhausted is less than the amount of time it takes for a fed athlete to become exhausted. Even though fasting may decrease the amount of time it takes for an athlete to become exhausted, fasting actually has other positive effects, one of them being fat burning. Athletes performing long endurance activities while fasted actually burn more body fat than athletes who are fed (because the fed athletes are burning through food energy before they get to the stored energy in their body fat). So depending on your goals, fasting before endurance exercise may actually be beneficial (so much for the idea that you absolutely need to eat a small meal before working out — this completely depends on your exercise goals).

However, fasting is not advised preceding long-length endurance events, nor during the training of elite athletes if the training involves multiple workouts each day and where performance is the number one priority over body composition. But for everyone else the combination of fasting and exercise may be a potent way to lose body fat and maintain muscle mass.

The idea that we must eat to fuel our brains may in fact be true for children, as research seems to suggest that children do better in basic school tests after they have had breakfast as opposed to when they skip breakfast. This makes sense, as children are still growing and developing, but is it true for adults too? As it turns out, the research doesn’t really support the idea that you get “dumb” or “slow” when you haven’t eaten for a couple of hours. In a test where twenty-one university aged people were asked to perform a series of intellectual tests after having either a normal meal, skipping one meal, skipping two meals, or going 24 hours without food, researchers found no difference in performance on measures of reaction time, recall, or focused attention time. This led the authors of the study to conclude that short-term food deprivation did not significantly impair cognitive function.

Luckily, not only does reducing your caloric intake not cause your metabolism to slow down, it also does not result in a loss of your hard-earned muscle. There is one imperative rule that goes along with this statement. You have to be involved in some sort of resistance exercise, such as lifting weights. Now, to be clear, you do not have to weight training at the exact same time you are fasting, but resistance training must be occurring at some point for your muscle mass to be preserved in the face of a caloric deficit. While long-term caloric restriction on its own can cause you to lose muscle mass (such is the case with hospital patients who are on a low-calorie diet and confined to bed rest), the combination of caloric restriction with resistance exercises has been proven to be very effective at preserving your muscle mass.

As long as you are using your muscles, they will not waste away during short periods of dieting. From my experience in the sports supplement industry, I can tell you that drug- free bodybuilders and fitness athletes constantly undergo 16- to 20-week periods of very-low-calorie diets while maintaining all of their muscle mass as they prepare for bodybuilding contests.

Even more good news comes from the fact that your weight workouts don’t have to be painfully long to be effective. When forty four overweight women performed a 30- minute weight training workout three days per week for twenty weeks while following a low-calorie diet, they were able to lose almost 5% body fat while maintaining all of their lean body mass. Finally, research has clearly shown that fasting for as long as 72 hours (regardless of whether or not you are exercising) does not cause an increased breakdown in your muscle, nor does it slow down muscle protein synthesis.

So much for the so-called starvation mode or needing to eat protein every couple of hours — the key to maintaining your muscle mass long-term is resistance exercise; your diet has almost nothing to do with it!

While the research is very clear that fasting for 24 hours will not cause you to lose muscle, it does not address the issue of whether or not fasting can impede muscle growth.

There seem to be two basic nutritional requirements to ensure all these processes lead to muscle growth:

1.  Caloric Adequacy
2. Protein Adequacy

You’ll notice that the first point is caloric adequacy and not caloric surplus. While the common belief is that you need to “eat big to get big”, recent research has shown that any extra calories consumed above your estimated daily needs do not contribute to muscle gain. In fact, almost every single extra calorie can be accounted for in fat mass gains. So while there is an obvious caloric need for muscle building it does not seem to be any higher than your daily calorie needs (building muscle does take energy, but it also happens very slowly). Plus, if these calories are going towards the energy needs of building muscle, they cannot, by definition, be a surplus. Another way of looking at it is that if they were stored as fat, they couldn’t possibly have been used to build muscle.

While the speed of muscle growth is very slow, the unique ability to have periods of calorie restriction and calorie adequacy do supply a sound theory as to why intermittent fasting may be a superior choice for people looking to build muscle while losing body fat. Especially since there is a small but interesting amount of evidence to suggest that fasting can actually prime the metabolic machinery to be more sensitive to the anabolic effects that protein intake and exercise have on muscle growth.

Also, new research suggests that muscle growth may respond better to intermittent pulses of protein rather than a continuous supply. It is speculative, but intriguing, to suggest that a 24-hour break once in a while may even be able to aid in the muscle building process.

In general, it seems to be largely irrelevant whether protein is consumed before, during, or after-exercise. And, even during the post-exercise period there seems to be very little difference whether protein is consumed immediately or several hours after a workout. This is because anabolic effects of a resistance-training workout appear to last at least 24 hours 50. This is why protein sufficiency rather than a specific timing of protein intake seems to be most important nutritional component of muscle growth.

The true feeling of real hunger is difficult to explain and I’m not sure many of us have ever really experienced it. We have felt the withdrawal of not being able to eat when we wanted to, and the disappointment of not being able to eat what we wanted to, but true hunger is reserved for those who have gone weeks without eating and are not sure when or where their next meal will come from. Most likely, what we call hunger is really a learned reaction to a combination of metabolic, social, and environmental cues to eat.

From my own personal experience with fasting, I can tell you that you do get used to the feeling of not eating, and not worrying when you will be eating your next meal. It becomes easier to manage as your body gets used to the feeling of having a truly empty stomach. I am not certain if this is because you switch from fed to fasted at a quicker rate, or if it is just getting used to having an empty stomach, or if you are ‘unlearning’ your typical eating habits. Another possibility is that by learning the truth about fasting you get rid of the guilt you used to get when you thought you were doing something unhealthy by not eating every couple of hours. Whatever the case may be, it does get easier. Even when you do feel hungry while fasting, the hunger sensations usually don’t last more than a few minutes.

The researchers concluded that there is no doubt that some people may find eating less to be more stressful than others, but as long as no other metabolic disease is present, the ability to maintain blood glucose in the normal range does not seem to be effected during a 24-hour fast. They then speculated that the symptoms of hypoglycemia could in fact be related to anxiety and stress over not eating, as opposed to being caused by low blood sugar. This anxiety could be over fear of becoming hypoglycemic, fear that they are doing something unhealthy by not eating, or even a drug-like withdrawal response to not being able to eat when they wanted to.

This is where fasting is different. Fasting for as little as 24-hours has been shown to drastically reduce your insulin levels. This is especially important because in order to burn body fat, insulin levels must be very low.

Both intermittent fasting and long-term caloric restriction have been shown to cause an improved insulin sensitivity.

So, using a 24-hour fast once or twice a week is an excellent way for people with low levels of insulin sensitivity to improve their insulin sensitivity, especially when combined with exercise and weight loss.

A 24-hour period of fasting shifts your body from the fed state to the fasted state, which causes large increases in both lipolysis (fat release) and fat oxidation (fat burning).

During short-term fasting, free fatty acids start to be released from your body fat as soon as you are done burning the calories that you consumed during your last meal. Depending on the size of the meal, this can happen anywhere from 2-6 hours into a fast. After this point, the amount of free fatty acids entering your blood continue to increase as does the amount of body fat being oxidized for energy. By about the 12 to 14-hour mark, you begin to burn predominantly body fat as your main fuel source.

After only 24-hours of fasting, the amount of fat being released from people’s fat stores (lipolysis) and the amount being burned for fuel (oxidation) had been significantly increased by over 50%.

Depending on your size (taller, bigger people lose more), most diets see a loss of one to two pounds of fat per week — at best. Adding short-term fasting into your lifestyle will have the same effect (just without the daily dieting).

Fasting for 24-hours once or twice per week, may be the easiest way to decrease your calorie intake by 10% to 20%, without having to sacrifice and restrict what you eat during the times when you are not fasting.

Obesity is not created by one specific macronutrient in our diet. In fact, it’s not the diet at all. In my opinion, the number one cause of our obesity epidemic is abundance.

It’s a way of life where you accept the idea of taking small 24-hour breaks from eating, and taking part in resistance exercises (working out with weights) at least two to three times a week. That’s it. The Eat Stop Eat lifestyle is simply taking a 24-hour break from eating once or twice per week and a commitment to a workout routine.

During your fasts you may drink any calorie-free beverages you like. As an example, these are all drinks that would be permissible during your fast:

• Black Coffee
• Black tea
• Green tea
• Herbal tea
• Water

So, when it comes to what you can and cannot eat while fasting, follow this simple guideline: if you can go without then go without, but if you really can’t go without then don’t. If you are sick, or aren’t feeling well, then you do not have to fast. If work gets hectic or you’ve increased your exercise volume so much that fasting isn’t practical for a period of time, then again, don’t fast. Eat Stop Eat is a flexible long-term solution. On some weeks you may fast once, others twice. It’s all up to you and your personal preferences.

I recommend at least 48-hours of time in between each 24- hour fast.

People who stay flexible and relaxed see the best weight loss results and are the most able to keep the weight off.

On the other hand, the people who try to speed up the process by fasting multiple times per week or extending their fasts to 48 or even 72-hours do see quick results, but also “burn out” very quickly.

This is in agreement with the large volume of research on restrained eating, which eloquently shows that the more restrained a person is with their eating, meaning the more rules they try and follow (good food/bad food lists, food combining, etc.) the more likely they will see quick weight loss, but also the more likely they will experience extreme weight rebounds after they have broken some of their rules and restraints.

The same “fasting burnout” happens to people who combine fasting with strict dieting, or excessive amount of exercise. As a general rule of thumb, if you are having difficulties organizing fasting, exercising, and dieting into your schedule you are most likely doing too much of at least one of these activities.

I’d like you to perform weigh training at least twice per week, and you can add in cardio style training if you wish, just make sure you are adequately recovering from your workouts and fasts. With regards to dieting, as a general rule of thumb, if you are fasting, then on the days you are eating you should not be in any more than a 10% to 20% deficit for any length of time. Your once or twice per week fasts are meant to be a replacement for traditional dieting.

If you have a significant amount of weight to lose then you may be able to handle both fasting and eating at a slight deficit, but the leaner you get, the less this is advised.

There is no real way around this. If you want your muscles to burn your body fat as a fuel, then you can’t have your muscles also burn high amounts of carbohydrates. And since your muscles are not oxidizing carbohydrates, less glucose is actually entering your muscles. It’s still in your blood, but your muscles don’t want any. They are “full” from a carbohydrate point of view — there would be no place to put the glucose if it entered your muscles. As a result, it is a well-established fact that longer periods of fasting (48 to 72-hours and beyond) not only induce a high level of fat oxidation, but also create a short period of insulin resistance at the muscular level in the immediate hours after the fast is finished.

The bottom line is that almost everyone can fast for 24-hours, but NOT everyone can do more. For that reason, 24-hours once or twice per week, separated by 2 to 6-days of normal, responsible eating and regular exercise is the Eat Stop Eat prescription for weight loss and overall health.

Eat less, while enjoying the foods you eat. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables, and lots of herbs and spices. And maybe most importantly, spend less time stressing over the types of food you are eating.

The key to making Eat Stop Eat work for you is self-control. This is NOT a “fast once or twice a week and eat anything and everything you want every other day” type of lifestyle. Fasting may have a myriad of health benefits, but it is NOT magic.

I could also tell you about the benefits of avoiding over-flavoring your food with salt and sugar, but if you are eating lots of herbs and spices you are already doing this too. Finally, I could tell you about avoiding overly processed foods but if you are both eating less and eating more fruits and vegetables, then you are already accomplishing this.

The truth is there is NO “normal” or “perfect” way to eat for weight loss. This is the great fallacy behind most diet books. The fact is, and always will be, it is calorie restriction that causes weight loss. And, properly balancing calorie restriction with the demands of your life allows that weight loss to be long-term weight loss.

There is NO such thing as an all-encompassing way to define eating “normal”. Humans can adapt to a wide variety of feeding regimens depending on the habitual meal patterns. In other words, eating “normal” is simply whatever you happen to be used to doing.

And, despite what some people like to preach, you simply cannot eat as much as you want and still lose weight as long as you take supplement X or follow diet Y or exercise routine Z.

If I had to pick one word to describe healthy eating it would be “variety”. As much variety as you can fit into your life.

By striving to eat with variety we avoid over-eating or under-eating any one nutrient, discovered or yet to be discovered.

There is one problem with the concept of variety and that is that research has shown us that eating for variety tends to lead us to eating more. This is where self-control comes in. Just like the balance between fed/fasted and insulin/growth hormone, you also need to find a balance between eating for variety while still eating less so that you can lose weight.

The first and most important thing you need to remember is to drink a lot of calorie-free fluids; this will help you avoid getting thirsty, which is often mistaken as hunger.

Food is a form of bio-feedback. It is a form of stimulus in our everyday lives. So, when parts of our days are lacking excitement or stimulation (like when we are sitting in a car stuck in rush hour traffic), we seek stimulation in the form of foods and snacks. Have you ever had a really boring day at work? Did you ever notice how often you snacked, or made coffee? This is because you are replacing mental stimulation with food stimulation.

Resistance training is an essential part of the Eat Stop Eat lifestyle. The combination of fasting and responsible eating will allow you to lose body fat quickly and easily, but it is your resistance-training workouts that will ensure you maintain (or even increase) the size of your muscles while you are losing body fat.

By using any combination of increasing intensity, volume, or frequency you can ensure that your workouts remain progressive.

The exact details of what equipment and program you use and how you use them probably does not matter too much as long as you are sufficiently stressing your muscles. The resistance can come from your body weight, free weights such as dumbbells, elasticized bands, machines, or even lengths of chain!

If there is any secret to weight training it is simply that consistency, effort, and proper recovery are what will get you the best results, and while there are many different ways you can perform a weight training workout, science has not yet identified the “best” way to work out and probably never will.

An optimal workout schedule should allow each major muscle group to be exercised roughly twice per week, which scientific research suggests is a sufficient amount for causing muscle growth and the preservation of muscle while you are dieting.

Exercise sessions should consist of between three and eight sets per muscle group (depending on the size of the muscle), with optimal results occurring when each major muscle group goes through 40-60 repetitions per workout. Examples of this style of workout would include any combination of sets and repetitions that allow a muscle to fatigue between the 6th and 15th-repetition. [Advice for hypertrophyNot for strength.]

In most research trials where people on a low-calorie diet preserved lean mass by using resistance training, their workouts fit into the following parameters: they typically worked out three to four times per week with each workout session lasting about 45- minutes. On average, two to three muscle groups would be exercised per workout session. Each workout consisted of between six to ten exercises with each exercise being completed for two to four sets of eight to twelve reps. Rest periods would consist of up to two minutes rest between each set of an exercise.

Adding exercise did little to increase weight loss beyond what the diet alone could achieve. In other words, when it came to the actual weight loss benefits — the diets seemed to do all the work.

The pitfall to cardio training is that just like dieting, fasting, and weight training, it is a form of stress being placed on the body, and too much stress can have deleterious effects. Indeed, chronic strenuous exercise has been connected to hypercortisolism, hypogonadism, and nutritional depletion. So while the right amount of cardio can cause marked increases in insulin sensitivity and the increased ability to clear fat from your blood stream to be used as a fuel, too much exercise can cause negative health issues, especially when coupled with a large calorie deficit.

The studies have been remarkably conclusive in that the specific macronutrient profile of the diet did not matter. In other words, the amount of protein, carbohydrates, and fats in the diet does not affect how well the diet is able help you keep the weight off.

In fact, research has found two things:

1. Your ability to keep the weight off is directly related to your ability to maintain a flexible amount of dietary restraint.
2. Your ability to keep the weight off is directly related to how well you maintained your lean body mass while you were losing weight.

Based on these definitions, fasting could be the purest hybrid of the two definitions; since it could be considered a form of physical training through short-term abstinence from caloric intake.

And, both exercise and fasting follow rules of hormesis — the “right” amount is good for you, but too much or too often can have the opposite effects.

Fasting is also similar to non-resistance exercise like endurance training as it is able to train a person (both men and women, young and old) to burn more fat as a fuel.

As a general rule of thumb, I do not recommend anything under 20% calorie deficit on the days you are not fasting, nor do I recommend anything over a 20% calorie surplus, as either can be considered another additional form of stress. In other words, attempting to “recover” from a fast by grossly overeating may be just as damaging as attempting to continue a highly restricted diet in between your fasts.

Eat Stop Eat is a method of eating that allows for one or two small periods of “stress” per week, a form of physical training through the short-term abstinence from caloric intake. In this sense Eat Stop Eat is more of a style of training than it is a diet. Dieting or how you choose to eat is what you do between your fasts, but your fasts are a form of training.

Never be afraid to adjust the amount you work out or how often you fast in order to maintain your energy levels and overall feelings of health. Some weeks you may fast twice, others only once. Some weeks you may lift weights 4-times, others you may only lift only twice. The key to keeping this lifestyle sustainable is to always remember to keep it flexible and adapt to stresses and needs of your everyday life.

Eat less, stress less; move more, lift more, and get a good night’s sleep. For physical health, that’s pretty much as good as it gets.

In actuality, your body begins to burn significantly more fat four to eight hours after your last meal (depending on the size of your last meal). This effect begins to level off after 30-hours. If you don’t quite make it to the 24-hour point some days, don’t sweat it. You’re still getting a benefit.

Q: What is the best thing for me to eat after I am finished fasting? When you finish your fast you need to pretend that your fast NEVER HAPPENED. No compensation, no reward, no special way of eating, no special shakes, drinks, or pills. The minute you decide to stop fasting, you need to wipe the fast from your memory, and eat the exact way you would normally eat at that specific time of the day (while eating responsibly of course). If you end your fast at dinner time, have dinner. If you end your fast at 4:00 PM and you don’t typically have dinner until 6:00 or 7:00 PM, then have a light snack… but nothing larger than you would normally have at that time.

Q: What about post-workout nutrition — do you think it is necessary to have high glycemic carbohydrates after training? I really don't see any need for high-glycemic carbs after training unless you are an endurance athlete and need to replenish glycogen stores. Even then, it would only be if you have to compete again in very short period of time (24 to 48-hours). For general muscle growth and well-being, I think carbs are one of the most overrated post- workout foods. With typical eating, your glycogen stores will be replenished to their maximum within 48-hours after your workout. Unless you are doing multiple endurance style events in the same day, I see emphasis on high carbohydrate intake as just another obsessive-compulsive eating habit that can wind up causing us to gain weight.