Water fasting strikes me as an inefficient way to do what you want to do. Sure, obviously, if you keep on getting no calories, eventually the body is going to burn fat, but paradoxically it prefers to burn protein from the muscles first (!) and the only way to stop that is with sufficiently intense exercise of the muscles, i.e., weight lifting, while trying to lose fat.
This next Andrew Huberman lecture describes how to burn fat via “using cold to create shiver”, exercise, “non-exercise movements such as fidgeting”, supplements and prescription drugs. I don’t recall any mention of fasting in this lecture though it has been a few months since I listened to the lecture. To be precise, because I would not have been surprised to hear Huberman warn against water fasting, I probably would not have remembered that, but I would’ve been quite surprised to hear him recommend it, and almost certainly would’ve remembered that. (So, he almost certainly does not recommend it in the lecture.)
(Sadly, to burn fat using exercise, you have to exercise continuously for about 90 minutes IIRC.)
I did 6.5 days of water fasting once out of ignorance of the risks and disadvantages, and I’ll never voluntarily go that long again without protein and without calories.
There’s a natural human tendency to believe that if one is basically healthy, one’s health interventions should be mild whereas if one is severely ill, drastic health interventions should be chosen. In reality, for most cases severe chronic illness, it takes great expertise or a heroic efforts of rationality sustained usually over years to identify or imagine any intervention that has more than a negligible chance of positively affecting the illness, and people dealing with severe illness should spend a significant fraction of their thinking time and mental energy on avoiding making the situation worse.
Happily for you, there are probably people with very deep expertise on fat loss although I don’t know enough about the subject to tell you who those people are. (And the fact that the drug companies hope to make a lot of money on fat loss makes it much harder to identify the deep experts.)
I personally have had 2 friends who’ve killed themselves by being overly aggressive about trying to rid themselves of chronic illness: one was being prescribed an anti-coagulant and either took more than he should have because of a strong desire to return to his previous healthy lifestyle; the other was enamored of smart drugs, and one of the many combinations of drugs he tried gave him Parkinsonism.
I’ve stayed completely the hell away from seed oils for decades: it’s just your plan for a long water fast that alarms me.
Water fasting strikes me as an inefficient way to do what you want to do. Sure, obviously, if you keep on getting no calories, eventually the body is going to burn fat, but paradoxically it prefers to burn protein from the muscles first (!) and the only way to stop that is with sufficiently intense exercise of the muscles, i.e., weight lifting, while trying to lose fat.
I don’t think this is correct. What actually happens (AFAIU) is that your body burns a proportion of muscle and a proportion of fat. The muscle it burns is necessary to maintain a protein intake. This is the logic behind a “protein-sparing modified fast”.
The problem is that I don’t really want to do a protein sparing modified fast if I can, because it’s just way easier for me to stop eating completely than it is to eat a small amount of food every day. I may attempt to switch if it becomes unbearable, but we’ll see.
and the only way to stop that is with sufficiently intense exercise of the muscles, i.e., weight lifting, while trying to lose fat.
Weight lifting during a water fast will not help, even if it were practical; you will damage your muscles, but instead of being repaired your body will just clean up the damaged proteins and use them in the rest of the body. This would accelerate any muscle loss.
It definitely is easier to stop eating completely! A water fast trades convenience against a significant risk of permanent damage (e.g., never regaining all the muscle you lost) or death.
Are there any references you can give me about the permanent damage? I would attempt to move to a protein sparing modified fast if so. Doesn’t need to be NIH links; would just like to see what you’ve read/watched.
But the usual purpose of the fasting-mimicking diet is not fat loss. (It is autophagy.) It’s low on protein. So maybe that last URL is irrelevant to you.
Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you. You seem to have the potential to contribute to the desperate fight to save the world from AI, so I want you as healthy as possible.
I agree! I was using the obvious unsuitability of strength training during a water fast as an argument against the water fast relative to the other ways to burn fat. (Weight lifting plus eating enough protein often enough is better at preserving muscle mass during an attempt to lose fat than eating enough protein often enough without the weight lifting.)
Yes. I basically cook everything I eat from scratch. I don’t eat any seeds or any fats or oils except for coconut, avocado, olive oil and fat from cow’s milk and lamb’s meat.
Hmm. I was going to write, “cows and lambs which I know not to have been fed seed oils,” but on second thought I do not know that to be the case. In particular, I use Kerrygold butter, which promises to be from cows fed on at least 95% grass, but as far as I know, the remaining 5% could include a large dose of seed oils. Kerrygold melts or more precisely gets soft at a much lower temperature than another brand of butter that claims to be 100% grass-fed, which means that the fatty-acid composition is much different than the other butter. The addition of seed oil to the cows diet could explain the difference.
My BMI is under 25. My motivation in entering this conversation is to try to talk you out of the water fast, not to learn how I might lose fat.
Water fasting strikes me as an inefficient way to do what you want to do. Sure, obviously, if you keep on getting no calories, eventually the body is going to burn fat, but paradoxically it prefers to burn protein from the muscles first (!) and the only way to stop that is with sufficiently intense exercise of the muscles, i.e., weight lifting, while trying to lose fat.
This next Andrew Huberman lecture describes how to burn fat via “using cold to create shiver”, exercise, “non-exercise movements such as fidgeting”, supplements and prescription drugs. I don’t recall any mention of fasting in this lecture though it has been a few months since I listened to the lecture. To be precise, because I would not have been surprised to hear Huberman warn against water fasting, I probably would not have remembered that, but I would’ve been quite surprised to hear him recommend it, and almost certainly would’ve remembered that. (So, he almost certainly does not recommend it in the lecture.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqPGXG5TlZw
(Sadly, to burn fat using exercise, you have to exercise continuously for about 90 minutes IIRC.)
I did 6.5 days of water fasting once out of ignorance of the risks and disadvantages, and I’ll never voluntarily go that long again without protein and without calories.
There’s a natural human tendency to believe that if one is basically healthy, one’s health interventions should be mild whereas if one is severely ill, drastic health interventions should be chosen. In reality, for most cases severe chronic illness, it takes great expertise or a heroic efforts of rationality sustained usually over years to identify or imagine any intervention that has more than a negligible chance of positively affecting the illness, and people dealing with severe illness should spend a significant fraction of their thinking time and mental energy on avoiding making the situation worse.
Happily for you, there are probably people with very deep expertise on fat loss although I don’t know enough about the subject to tell you who those people are. (And the fact that the drug companies hope to make a lot of money on fat loss makes it much harder to identify the deep experts.)
I personally have had 2 friends who’ve killed themselves by being overly aggressive about trying to rid themselves of chronic illness: one was being prescribed an anti-coagulant and either took more than he should have because of a strong desire to return to his previous healthy lifestyle; the other was enamored of smart drugs, and one of the many combinations of drugs he tried gave him Parkinsonism.
I’ve stayed completely the hell away from seed oils for decades: it’s just your plan for a long water fast that alarms me.
I don’t think this is correct. What actually happens (AFAIU) is that your body burns a proportion of muscle and a proportion of fat. The muscle it burns is necessary to maintain a protein intake. This is the logic behind a “protein-sparing modified fast”.
The problem is that I don’t really want to do a protein sparing modified fast if I can, because it’s just way easier for me to stop eating completely than it is to eat a small amount of food every day. I may attempt to switch if it becomes unbearable, but we’ll see.
Weight lifting during a water fast will not help, even if it were practical; you will damage your muscles, but instead of being repaired your body will just clean up the damaged proteins and use them in the rest of the body. This would accelerate any muscle loss.
It definitely is easier to stop eating completely! A water fast trades convenience against a significant risk of permanent damage (e.g., never regaining all the muscle you lost) or death.
Are there any references you can give me about the permanent damage? I would attempt to move to a protein sparing modified fast if so. Doesn’t need to be NIH links; would just like to see what you’ve read/watched.
According to my notes, what got me to resolve to avoid water fasting is the first .66 of this next interview with longevity researcher Valter Longo:
https://thedoctorskitchen.com/podcasts/62-fasting-and-medicine-with-prof-valter-longo
You can avoid the 90-second ads on that page by using yt-dlp to download the interview audio.
The next paragraph in my notes is the next URL, which describes what I replaced water fasts with, namely the fasting-mimicking diet.
https://kahn642.medium.com/265fc68f8e19
But the usual purpose of the fasting-mimicking diet is not fat loss. (It is autophagy.) It’s low on protein. So maybe that last URL is irrelevant to you.
Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you. You seem to have the potential to contribute to the desperate fight to save the world from AI, so I want you as healthy as possible.
I agree! I was using the obvious unsuitability of strength training during a water fast as an argument against the water fast relative to the other ways to burn fat. (Weight lifting plus eating enough protein often enough is better at preserving muscle mass during an attempt to lose fat than eating enough protein often enough without the weight lifting.)
Seed oils are in almost everything. Are you sure?
Yes. I basically cook everything I eat from scratch. I don’t eat any seeds or any fats or oils except for coconut, avocado, olive oil and fat from cow’s milk and lamb’s meat.
Hmm. I was going to write, “cows and lambs which I know not to have been fed seed oils,” but on second thought I do not know that to be the case. In particular, I use Kerrygold butter, which promises to be from cows fed on at least 95% grass, but as far as I know, the remaining 5% could include a large dose of seed oils. Kerrygold melts or more precisely gets soft at a much lower temperature than another brand of butter that claims to be 100% grass-fed, which means that the fatty-acid composition is much different than the other butter. The addition of seed oil to the cows diet could explain the difference.
My BMI is under 25. My motivation in entering this conversation is to try to talk you out of the water fast, not to learn how I might lose fat.