Eat Less, Get Bigger?

[quote]Cthulhu wrote:
consumer wrote:
HouseOfAtlas wrote:
As for not getting enough protein and your body going into a big catabolic state, people are going to have their opinions. I don’t know if there is a study that says if you don’t have protein, your body is going to eat up X amount of muscle mass and your strength is going to go down 20%.

actually its basic fact based upon one of the most fundamental laws of the universe. that matter is neither created nor destroyed.

Each day there is a net loss of nitrogen, if you fast, where the hell do you think this nitrogen come from? I should say specifically urea and uric acid, which are byproducts of the deamination(loss of nitrogen from amino acids)
because you can theoretically use some other nitrogen heterocycles found in your body, but this is minute.

Anyway the moral of the story is that if textbooks say you need 50g of protein a day then you excrete 5g of nitrogen or so. 50g of protein has the potential to be approx 200g of muscle tissue(assuming 75% water), that is roughly .4lbs of muscle. quite a bit.

but thats the calculation for a person requiring 50g of protein, scale it up to someone who needs 200g or so and you could lose roughly 1.6lbs of muscle a day just by fasting.

not a good idea in my book.

I’m 6’4’’ and over 200 pounds and I fasted for a whole month and only lost 3 pounds of muscle.
Not a pound a day…

[/quote]

the problem with a pound a day calculation is that yes, the bodies metabolism rapidly changes with excessive starvation… it goes much more into starvation mode. In this mode, usually the only things requiring glucose is the brain, the only thing that can provide some form of glucose or intermediate is AA’s and glycerol(byproduct of fatty acid oxidation, or necessary for production of triglyceride).

so it would make sense that your brain was the only thing feasting on your muscle, which can make sense. ESPECIALLY if you are sedentary for a whole month.
I’m sorry you had to go through that and i’m glad you’ve recovered.

[quote]Cthulhu wrote:
I disagree.
I believe fasting is very healthy.
There is a HUGE difference between a car and a human. A car doesn’t clean it’s self up if it runs out of gas.The human body does.

If you’re eating a small meal every 2-3 hours,like most active people do, then your body is expanding large amounts of energy digesting the food.Your body can’t digest food and do everything else at the same time.It doesn’t work that way.Your body does eliminate toxins on a regular basis,but once you fast your body does a better job of it due to the fact that you’re not digesting food all day long.

Personally,I know for a fact that fasting works because I was once sick and I fasted and it worked.Your body isn’t going to heal it’s self like it should if you’re digesting food all day long.
A lot of people on here would probably disagree because they might lose a pound or two of muscle(that they could easily gain back).When you’re sick or have cancer muscle is the LAST thing on your mind.Believe me.[/quote]

I agree. I wonder why that when I’m sick, I don’t like to eat at all. Hmmmm… maybe my body is telling me something.

You know what they say,: “Feed a cold and starve a flu”. Of course, I wouldn’t drink just water. Maybe drink water and eat organic veggies, but that would be about it.

I don’t think fasting is needed often. Maybe once a year for 1-3 days. I have yet to do it, because I take some supplementation that helps detox the body.

[quote]rg73 wrote:
Who is to say what is “supposed” to be in the body and what isn’t?

Of course we didn’t evolve eating McDonalds and taking steroids. That doesn’t automatically translate into them being unhealthy in and of themselves.[/quote]

You are right. Of course, pollution, synthetic made pills, and man made fertilizers that cover our fruits and veggies weren’t around hundreds of years ago.

[quote]rg73 wrote:
One thing to note is that fasting, while certainly a preoccupation of people for centuries (millienium even), has always been something the rich and bored do. It is the affluent who have the time (and spare calories) to buy into whacko ideas that don’t enhance survival. Poor people have traditionally fasted not by choice. They also, generally, have much lower quality of life, more health problems and lower life expentancy. So if you went to various time points throughout history and offered poor people 3 meals for the day or the opportunity to continue starving to further their health, what do you think they’re going to do? [/quote]

There is big difference between fasting for months on end and fasting for a couple days out of the year.

[quote]rg73 wrote:
Beyond that, the entire idea is based on utterly wrong biology. Your body is very efficient at removing things that shouldn’t be in there while you’re eating. You don’t need to stop eating to get it to remove waste products. These basic functions are conserved throughout all animals and are not fasting dependent. In fact, if there were actually any biological advantage to fasting we’d see it in many other animals and we’d actually biologically be required to fast. That is, we’d expect that we would have the overwhelming desire to not eat periodically, no matter if we were in caloric defecit or surplus. [/quote]

So why are steroid users told to detox their liver after taking oral steroids? And why is Milk Thistle recommended? The liver can take care of itself, right??