I'm Done Looking For A Method To Lower Body Fat Without Caloric Restriction

[Hans]

I ate a surplus for a week and a half a while ago and gained 4 kg. That's why I'm reducing calories again.

As I understand it, fructose has a low glycemic index because it's handled by the liver mainly. GI is not really a useful measure for fructose. But I'm not convinced drinking liters of orange juice every day is beneficial. See for example:

Long-Term Fructose Consumption Accelerates Glycation and Several Age-Related Variables in Male Rats

The purpose of this study was to investigate the consequences of long-term fructose consumption, compared with glucose or sucrose, on glycation, lipid peroxidation and aging. We measured the levels of fructosamine and GHb as indices of glycation, urine malondialdehyde levels as an indication of lipid peroxidation, and collagen solubility, crosslinking and fluorescence as age-related parameters. Because previous in vitro studies clearly showed that fructose is a more potent glycating agent than glucose (Bunns and Higgins 1981) and is as much as 10-fold more efficient at forming AGE (McPherson et al. 1988), we hypothesized that chronic fructose intake may adversely affect aging in vivo. Fructose consumption increased blood fructosamine and GHb, urine lipid peroxidation excretion, skin collagen crosslinking, collagen-bound fluorescence in cortical bones, and decreased skin collagen solubility. Thus, we suggest that fructose, compared with glucose or sucrose, accelerates the normal aging process.​

Long-Term Fructose Consumption Accelerates Glycation and Several Age-Related Variables in Male Rats

I use Cronometer to measure my nutrient intake and have no deficincies that I'm aware of; whatever I don't get from food I supplement.

They used pure fructose and we all know rat diets are horrible. AGE happens with both intra and extracellular glucose, but the excess of extracellular glucose is the problem. Fructose can enter the cells in the presence of insulin resistance, whereas glucose cannot. So it would seem more to me that elevated extracellular glucose is the problem and not fructose.
Getting fructose through fruits is also much more beneficial than lots of pure fructose in a bad diet as fruits/fruit juice helps to improve insulin sensitivity, lower inflammation, etc. Studies show that people that consume fruit juice are actually leaner than those that didn't.
Lots of liquids, regardless if it's juice or not, is not beneficial to everyone because it depends a lot on their metabolic state how they react to it.

Weight gain is expected when refeeding with a slow metabolism. Dropping calories again will just prevent metabolic recovery.

Guaranteed

It's definitely not guaranteed. The only benefit to IF is that it lowers endotoxins and inflammation. Only weight training and good metabolic function will increase muscle mass.

 

[Cirion]

Weight gain always happens for a reason, it's not because your body hates you and wants you to hate how you look. You can basically boil down the cause of weight gain, not due to calories, but rather to stressors of some kind (chronic dieting, environment toxins, food toxins, etc.) I am not surprised going from a chronic diet of 1500-2000 calories would result in weight gain. This is way too low for a man of any size, and too low for most women for that matter. The only way to realize permanent weight loss is to fix:

1. Chronic dieting (stop it)
2. Environmental toxins (get a less stressful job, move somewhere nice, stop dating that crazy person...)
3. Food toxins (stop eating junk food, eat whole some foods)
4. Getting enough quality sleep

Intermittent fasting is a bad idea for anyone but the most healthy of people, so the idea that doing it will make someone healthy is misguided. An unhealthy person can only last a couple hrs without a stress response, which means the average unhealthy person can not even last the night without food let alone skipping a meal or two on top of that. The "energy" that fasters feel is from stress hormones, not healthy energy released from the thyroid (T3).

I have mixed feelings on IF being beneficial even for healthy people. I still think it's a bad idea even then, but if you can do it without a stress response, then OK, fine.

IF might make gaining muscle easier (and probably only in healthy people, if it does) but gaining muscle =/= being healthy, it is an important distinction. I was at my leanest and best shape of my life for a long time but never healthy, never felt good. To be clear, you can certainly be lean and healthy. I'm just saying lean doesn't necessarily mean healthy.

 

[rei]

>It's definitely not guaranteed. The only benefit to IF is that it lowers endotoxins and inflammation. Only weight training and good metabolic function will increase muscle mass.

Salmonamb, 8 minutes ago ReportBookmark

No you are wrong. I have not seen one IF study that arrived at lower muscle/fat ratio. It is a fundamental truth about the metabolic/hormonal shift. Absolutely no exercise is required.

And if you do exercise, just imagine wha the 2x HGH level will achieve during such feeding regimen? No need to take pills...

 

[revenant]

Weight gain always happens for a reason, it's not because your body hates you and wants you to hate how you look. You can basically boil down the cause of weight gain, not due to calories, but rather to stressors of some kind (chronic dieting, environment toxins, food toxins, etc.) I am not surprised going from a chronic diet of 1500-2000 calories would result in weight gain. This is way too low for a man of any size, and too low for most women for that matter. The only way to realize permanent weight loss is to fix:

1. Chronic dieting (stop it)
2. Environmental toxins (get a less stressful job, move somewhere nice, stop dating that crazy person...)
3. Food toxins (stop eating junk food, eat whole some foods)
4. Getting enough quality sleep

Intermittent fasting is a bad idea for anyone but the most healthy of people, so the idea that doing it will make someone healthy is misguided. An unhealthy person can only last a couple hrs without a stress response, which means the average unhealthy person can not even last the night without food let alone skipping a meal or two on top of that. The "energy" that fasters feel is from stress hormones, not healthy energy released from the thyroid (T3).
.

Well, calorie restriction (CR) has been shown to increase lifespan in a variety of species, so it can't be all that bad. That said, for CR to work properly you'd have to be really skinny and probably cold all the time, so that's not my goal here.

I've tried all kinds of diets just out of interest (and obviously to stay healthy). Did intermittent fasting for a few years (24 hours food window, 24 hours fasting) and was very lean at the time. Felt just fine. It was after the studies came out showing IF probably doesn't extend lifespan like CR that I decided to stop.

Environmental and food toxins are not an issue for me personally and I sleep enough (maybe too much even). Chronic dieting I'm probably guilty of, but if I don't count calories at all, I will just gain weight. If your theory is right then maybe it would stop after X months and then I'd start losing weight but that seems like a bit of a gamble.

Is there any evidence that someone's basal metabolic rate could drop that dramatically (i.e. enough for a 180cm / 80kg male to gain weight at 1,500 kcal)?

 

[Cirion]

The thing is, Calories in calories out is WAY too simplistic of a way of trying to measure a complicated system. Calories control so many functions of the human body than just energy, it helps keep skin vibrant and healthy, the brain happy, organs functioning at 100%, digestion working properly, stress resistance, and so much more. When you restrict calories, the body starts to turn off things it deems not as necessary (hair growth, skin quality, immune system / resistance to disease, nail growth, dials down hormone production, and redirects energy to essential functions to keep you alive). Worse, it even has to catabolize your muscles, bones, skins, and even your organs (although it only starts catabolizing your organ as kind of a last resort) It also tries to start putting on body fat, as another survival mechanism (It can still do this in a calorie "deficit" in many cases). When you finally bring calories back, at first it gains more body fat because it thinks another famine is imminent, and it does its best to keep you alive, which is annoying when you want to look and feel good but actually smart of the body to do when you consider food was not as easy to come by as it is in todays' culture. Eventually, it realizes calories are here to stay, so it finally starts up-ticking energy levels, hormones, digestion, stress resistance, all that stuff, rebuilding damaged pieces of the body, skin, hair, bones, organs from the catabolism that occurred from all the restriction. Unfortunately for us who want to look good, losing the body fat is about the last thing to occur, because it's still holding on to the body fat "just in case" another famine occurs and will only let it go when it is 100% sure another famine is not coming. You can trick the body to an extent, by doing lots of weight lifting for example. You make the body think it still needs muscles to survive, so now it prioritizes keeping the muscles intact. That's how I got down to like 3% bodyfat one time. However, it just dials down other non-essential functions that much even further down the toilet.

There are indeed studies that show you can gain weight on lesser calories. In fact in my opinion the best way to promote fat gain is to go on a diet. I'm the wrong person to ask for these studies though, I'm sure others like Haidut have a repository of studies on this subject though. A diet low in calories but high in PUFA, and low in carbs is a great way to trash a metabolism in particular.

Obviously, calories low enough will promote weight loss, because the body can only dial down metabolism so far. Once you get to the point where the body can dial down to a minimum, though, you're at a dangerously unhealthy place, like people in Nazi concentration camps for example. At that point, nothing works anymore - immune system is garbage, energy levels non existant, mood absolutely horrible etc.. Keep trashing the metabolism, and you'll probably get cancer (my coach, Nathan Hatch, got thyroid cancer by chronic dieting and chronic over-exercising). Or if cancer doesn't kill you, suicide by extreme depression is another great possibility. Happy hormones are down to basically zero at that point.

 

[Runenight201]

For what it’s worth. I’ve noticed that eating more lentils seems to make me not as ravenously hungry. I will stand by eating to satiation until I die, but I’m starting to believe the best way to do that is with a starch/lentils/beans as the base of the diet, and then add on all other foods according to cravings and taste.

Am I lowering my metabolism by doing so? Idk, but I feel good eating them in soups. They taste good, bring me mental well-being, don’t give me any brain fog and improve the consistency of my bowel movements.

 

[revenant]

The thing is, Calories in calories out is WAY too simplistic of a way of trying to measure a complicated system. Calories control so many functions of the human body than just energy, it helps keep skin vibrant and healthy, the brain happy, organs functioning at 100%, digestion working properly, stress resistance, and so much more. When you restrict calories, the body starts to turn off things it deems not as necessary (hair growth, skin quality, immune system / resistance to disease, nail growth, dials down hormone production, and redirects energy to essential functions to keep you alive). Worse, it even has to catabolize your muscles, bones, skins, and even your organs (although it only starts catabolizing your organ as kind of a last resort) .

All that makes sense at first glance, but when you look at the animal studies, something else happens. You can restrict a rat's calories to 50% of ad libitum, and it will not only live longer, but be healthier by all those measures (fur growth, immune system, etc).

 

[revenant]

Note: the calorie-restricted animals probably are stressed, but if stress means you live longer, how bad can it be...

 

[Cirion]

I'm sure there's more to it than meets the eye. Can you post any of those studies? There's so many confounding factors that can affect things. Also, lifespan =/= health. I don't want to live long if it means a bad quality of life, but maybe that's just me. Many people today live to be a pretty old age, but many of them are not healthy, and only kept alive through medications and constantly have health issues. That's not a life I want.

For example:

It's possible that eating 50% of calories from quality foods that don't promote endotoxin growth COULD be better/healthier than double the amount from health detrimental foods like PUFA.

It could even be possible that eating 50% of calories from "bad" foods is better than double that amount of bad foods (i.e., the damage from reduced calories in this context is actually less than the damage caused by too much calories, from bad foods). This is what I'm suspecting the studies might show. Too many calories from bad foods is indeed a MAJOR problem. This is why I don't like either Matt stone's or Gwyneth's approach to refeeding which include eating "junk" foods.

 

[Cirion]

For what it’s worth. I’ve noticed that eating more lentils seems to make me not as ravenously hungry. I will stand by eating to satiation until I die, but I’m starting to believe the best way to do that is with a starch/lentils/beans as the base of the diet, and then add on all other foods according to cravings and taste.

Am I lowering my metabolism by doing so? Idk, but I feel good eating them in soups. They taste good, bring me mental well-being, don’t give me any brain fog and improve the consistency of my bowel movements.

Glucose:Fructose ratio should be approximately 50/50 for an optimal hypo recovery diet from what I've seen from many sources now. So starch can indeed be helpful. Especially as some starch provide some nutrients you can't get from fruit. But fruit is also need in large quantities. Neither should be taken in excess in place of the other based upon what I have learned recently. I love sweet potatoes personally and have them almost every day.

 

[Hans]

>It's definitely not guaranteed. The only benefit to IF is that it lowers endotoxins and inflammation. Only weight training and good metabolic function will increase muscle mass.

Salmonamb, 8 minutes ago ReportBookmark

No you are wrong. I have not seen one IF study that arrived at lower muscle/fat ratio. It is a fundamental truth about the metabolic/hormonal shift. Absolutely no exercise is required.

And if you do exercise, just imagine wha the 2x HGH level will achieve during such feeding regimen? No need to take pills...

I didn't say that intermittent fasting will eat up your muscles, but we don't have long term studies on IF to see the effect. We do have studies that show that fasting breaks down lean mass very rapidly, especially early on in the fast. Fasting doesn't automatically make you retain muscle. HGH doesn't help either.
Studies even show that supraphysiological doses of GH isn't very effective at boost hypertrophy and some studies even show that it does nothing for muscle mass, especially if it's not combined with exercise.
GH is only "helpful" if it increases IGF-1, and just because IF increase GH doesn't mean it increases IGF-1. Actually IF lowers IGF-1.
I have not seen one study that shows that IF results in better fat loss or muscle gains than non-IF when not combined with exercise.

Over the long run IF will harm your metabolism, because it do lower thyroid hormones, testosterone, IGF-1, dopamine, etc., and that will negatively impact your health and gains.

 

[Hans]

All that makes sense at first glance, but when you look at the animal studies, something else happens. You can restrict a rat's calories to 50% of ad libitum, and it will not only live longer, but be healthier by all those measures (fur growth, immune system, etc).

Extended lifespan and improved health is because of reduced methionine, tryptophan, cysteine, endotoxins and PUFAs. Rats that are methionine restricted without restricting their calories live just as long as the calorie restricted rats.

 

[Cirion]

I'm not super well-versed on growth hormones, but isn't it possible that elevated growth hormones actually puts you in a better place to gain body fat and not muscle? @Salmonamb Is that what you were saying when you said GH is no good for muscle gain unless it is IGF-1? I seem to re call Haidut posted a study a year or two back that showed that elevated HGH was actually not conducive to good health (at least, not necessarily), but I could be wrong.

Extended lifespan and improved health is because of reduced methionine, tryptophan, cysteine, endotoxins and PUFAs. Rats that are methionine restricted without restricting their calories live just as long as the calorie restricted rats.

Yes, this is what my thinking was as well.

As an n=1 anecdote... I used to do extreme IF (warrior diet, only one big meal a day basically) and later did a blood test. From what I recall, I had high HGH (not a surprise), I believe high cortisol, and what was interesting though was that I had high total T but low free T. I am not sure the mechanism as to why my total T was pretty high. But, the telling factor is that my free T was low. Free T is actually what matters more than total T. I think fasting gets a good reputation sometimes is potentially because it did increase my total T numbers. Any idea why that happens? I'm not surprised as to why free T tanked though.

 

[revenant]

I'm sure there's more to it than meets the eye. Can you post any of those studies? There's so many confounding factors that can affect things. Also, lifespan =/= health. I don't want to live long if it means a bad quality of life, but maybe that's just me. Many people today live to be a pretty old age, but many of them are not healthy, and only kept alive through medications and constantly have health issues. That's not a life I want.

For example:

It's possible that eating 50% of calories from quality foods that don't promote endotoxin growth COULD be better/healthier than double the amount from health detrimental foods like PUFA.

It could even be possible that eating 50% of calories from "bad" foods is better than double that amount of bad foods (i.e., the damage from reduced calories in this context is actually less than the damage caused by too much calories, from bad foods). This is what I'm suspecting the studies might show. Too many calories from bad foods is indeed a MAJOR problem. This is why I don't like either Matt stone's or Gwyneth's approach to refeeding which include eating "junk" foods.

Studies on CR? Well, sure... but the effect of CR on lifespan been known since 1930's so it's easy to just Google them. You could start here: CR Society Home - CR Society Forum

To be sure, CR doesn't just extend your life when you're already old (e.g. lying in a hospital bed for an extra 30 years, no one is after that), but actually slows down aging. So in that sense it really is equivalent to health. They certainly have much less of the diseases of old age than animals fed ad libitum. But -- and it's a big but -- the animals are starved throughout their life. So in that sense for most people it's not practical, and certainly many people would say it means a bad quality of life (mentally at least). Also, it's not really compatible with body-building or any kind of lifestyle where you need those extra calories. That said, as you will find on the CR Society forums, there are plenty of people who choose to try this diet on themselves.

And yes, lab chow in these studies is probably not optimal, but given the wide range of studies on a wide range of animals we can be pretty sure that it's the reduction in calories itself that increases maximum lifespan, not the reduction in "harmful" calories. That is, CR works whether you include or exclude PUFAs or whatever.

 

[Cirion]

15% lactalbumin, 10% corn oil and approximately 65% carbohydrate in the form of

The corn oil will do it. That and this is important as well:

The macronutrient composition of the restricted and control diets is similar,
but the restricted diet is supplemented with an additional 30% of the vitamin and mineral content to ensure that the groups, on average, consume a similar amount of micronutrients.

So, essentially the reduced calorie was not only less bad fats (corn oil), but also more vitamin and minerals. That makes a difference.

 

[revenant]

Extended lifespan and improved health is because of reduced methionine, tryptophan, cysteine, endotoxins and PUFAs. Rats that are methionine restricted without restricting their calories live just as long as the calorie restricted rats.

Not exactly the same, but similar effects. See this thread: Methionine Restriction is Not Viable in Humans

 

[Hans]

I'm not super well-versed on growth hormones, but isn't it possible that elevated growth hormones actually puts you in a better place to gain body fat and not muscle? @Salmonamb Is that what you were saying when you said GH is no good for muscle gain unless it is IGF-1? I seem to re call Haidut posted a study a year or two back that showed that elevated HGH was actually not conducive to good health (at least, not necessarily), but I could be wrong.

Elevated GH is definitely not a good thing. It's an indication of a negative energy balance and Peat also wrote an article about it. GH the death hormone or something like that.
Plus GH will increase FFAs and make you insulin resistant, and then you will be in a position to start gaining fat and losing muscle yes.

 

[Cirion]

Elevated GH is definitely not a good thing. It's an indication of a negative energy balance and Peat also wrote an article about it. GH the death hormone or something like that.
Plus GH will increase FFAs and make you insulin resistant, and then you will be in a position to start gaining fat and losing muscle yes.

Found the article for those interested.

Growth hormone: Hormone of Stress, Aging, and Death?

 

[Glassy]

I ate a surplus for a week and a half a while ago and gained 4 kg. That's why I'm reducing calories again.

You do realise that it’s very very unlikely that any significant portion of this 4kg is from fat gain? You shouldn’t go from a long term caloric deficit to a surplus straight away if fat gain is a concern, but unless you were eating a lot of fat I’d guess not even a quarter of that weight gain was fat.

I gain that sort of weight coming out of a long diet and I know it doesn’t keep increasing at that rate. It’s mainly water and undigested food but I know it can be depressing after obsessing about losing small amounts of weight over a long period. You need to take a long term approach to your health and fat loss though.

When coming out of a diet (particularly a long one), try a reverse diet approach by slowly adding more calories back in each week. Watch your fat intake as you’ll initially be prone to storing it and it will give you some confidence that what you are gaining on the scales is mostly not fat.

 

[Ron J]

I'm steadily losing weight, and would like to know what body fat percentage is the most optimal. It may vary by individual, so a range would be great. I'm guessing 9-13%.