What is the difference between eating less and not eating?
Well, let's look at two different situations. A study called the Minnesota Hunger Experiment was conducted in 1944 and was designed to understand the effects of calorie restriction on the body and gain some insights to help people who were starving after World War II. Average of thirty-six healthy men. A height of 178 cm (about five feet ten) and an average weight of 69.3 kilograms (or 153 pounds) were selected. They ate a diet of 3200 calories per day for three months. Afterwards, they ate just 1570 calories for six months. However, calorie intake has been adjusted to allow men to lose 1.1 kilograms per week, which means some men eat less than 1,000 calories a day. The food provided was high-carb—things like potatoes, turnips, bread, and pasta. Meat and dairy products were rarely given. For six months, the men went through profound physical and psychological changes. Everyone complained that it was too cold. One subject mentioned having to wear a sweater on a sunny day in July. The subjects' body temperature dropped to an average of 95.8 degrees Fahrenheit (35.4 degrees Celsius). Physical stamina dropped by half, and strength dropped 21 percent. The men had a complete disinterest in everything except the food they were obsessed with. They struggled with a constant and intense hunger. There were a few cases of neurotic behavior such as hoarding cookbooks and utensils. Two participants had to be excluded from the experiment because they admitted to stealing and eating a few raw turnips and taking food scraps from their trash cans. At first, participants were allowed to chew gum until some men started chewing up to 40 packs a day. Now compare all this with the case of Angus Barbieri, a Scottish man who fasted for more than 380 days in 1965. So he ate nothing but water, black coffee, and plain tea for over a year. He lost 276 pounds, went from 456 pounds to 180. A case report published by the University of Dundee Department of Medicine in 1973 states that "...the patient remained symptom-free, felt well, and walked normally" and "Prolonged fasting did not have any adverse effects on this patient." He had no complaints of mind-blowing hunger and kept his weight at bay - for several years his weight stayed around 196 pounds This is of course not a perfect comparison, there is only one issue with the Angus case and his starting weight was much higher compared to those in the Minnesota Experiment. , shows some very interesting points about how the physiological response you get from fasting (i.e. not eating anything) differs from eating less or calorie restriction.Dr Jason Fung, a Toronto physician specializing in kidney disease and author of the Obesity Code says Caloric Reduction will result in less weight loss, greater loss of lean mass (i.e. more muscle loss), and greater hunger compared to He writes about fasting as a way of healing.Describing his first few fasting trials, he writes: "The first day I was very hungry—the unhealthy, infuriating kind of hunger that all dyspepsia sufferers know. The second morning I was a little hungry, and then, to my great surprise, I wasn't hungry at all - I wasn't interested in food as if I knew the taste of it at all.” Sinclair recommends a fairly long fast - he does this around 12. In an episode that voices concerns about fasting, he says: He writes: "Many people have asked me whether it would be better to eat very little, rather than fast, or fast for two or three days at frequent intervals. My answer is that I find it very difficult to do this, since all the troubles of fasting occur in the first two or three days. That's when you're hungry.” Then he says: "...maybe it would be good to eat very light fruit instead of fasting completely -the only problem is that I can't do it. I tried many times but always the same result: Light meals are enough to keep me hungry..." In the book, when to end the fast He says he will understand what he needs because hunger will return.” He quotes a letter he received from a 72-year-old man as follows: “After fasting for twenty-eight days, I started to feel hungry and broke my fast with a little grape juice, the next day with tomato and then vegetable soup. Excerpts from a few letters he received from readers and this disappearance and reappearance of hunger is a common theme. Everyone who wrote to him fasted for at least 10 days and said they only break their fast when hunger "returns". This phenomenon goes against the notion that they will get more hungry unless they eat. However, most people Some have experienced that this is not the case at all, or at least not as hungry as at lunch or dinner. will see their names. But as long as you don't eat in your sleep, morning is the longest time you go without food. Part of this can be explained by the hormone Ghrelin. Known as the "hunger hormone," ghrelin has been found to increase appetite and weight gain. A study at the Medical University of Vienna looked at patients who fasted for 33 hours. Ghrelin levels were checked every 20 minutes. Here's how the levels have changed over time. Interestingly, the ghrelin is at its lowest at 9:00 am, the time when they stay the longest without eating. And Ghrelin comes in waves and generally does not rise during the fasting period of the subjects. Then, as you can see, ghrelin rises in sync with normal lunch and dinner times, as if the body had learned to wait for food at that time. However, this ghrelin increase spontaneously subsides 2 hours after ingestion. While working as a consultant, I have experienced this type of spontaneous reduction in hunger many times. Lunch time would come and I would be hungry, but I was too busy to eat, so I kept working. I forgot to eat very quickly and wasn't particularly hungry until dinner time. It's very helpful to keep this in mind even if you're fasting for a long time or starting intermittent fasting - you'll experience annoying hunger pangs, especially when you usually eat. But it won't get any worse, if you're patient, the hunger will go away. Another study on ghrelin was done at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark and it shows what happens if you fast for longer. They looked at the ghrelin levels of 33 people who fasted for 84 hours.
So, did they get increasingly hungrier during the fasting period?
No, their ghrelin followed similar rhythms each day, but decreased as he fasted. Going longer without food made them less hungry. This lends credence to what Upton Sinclair and his readers have said about the disappearance of hunger after the first 3 days of fasting. I've done several 5 and 6 day fasts myself in the past and that was indeed the case. I fasted for 4 days last week and it was again the 4th day I was least hungry. Another thing that can contribute to this phenomenon is that you are entering ketosis. Ketosis is a physiological state in which your metabolism switches to using primarily fat for energy. This is why ketosis is popular as a weight loss method, but it has many other benefits, including better physical and mental efficiency. Ketosis occurs when you reduce carbs to 50 grams or less and don't eat a lot of protein. Everyone's body is a little different, so you may need to eat less carbs or have more room to eat, but the recommended ratio of the ketogenic diet is to get 5% of your calories from carbs, 25% from protein and 75% from carbs. good oil. A simpler way to get into ketosis is to not eat anything long enough. This is one of the main points in the difference between fasting and calorie restriction. The problem with the subjects in the Minnesota Hunger experiment was that they ate just enough to keep them out of ketosis and keep their metabolisms ready to burn carbohydrates (glucose), so they couldn't use their body fat for energy. This explains a lot of things like why they lost their strength, they were very sluggish and cold. He also explains why Upton Sinclair said that fruit or light meals were enough to keep him hungry and much weaker than if he hadn't eaten anything. As I explained in my last video, insulin is required for glucose to enter the cell so that it can be used for energy. When you eat carbs, the pancreas releases insulin to deal with it, and too much insulin blocks the action of something called hormone-sensitive lipase, which is necessary to mobilize fat and use it as fuel. Keep in mind, though, that grains or refined carbohydrates will cause a much higher insulin response than green vegetables. Now that it has trouble using body fat as fuel, it will do a few things: First, it will slow down the metabolism to conserve energy. In the Minnesota Hunger Experiment, the subject's metabolism dropped 40 percent. Their bodies haven't been able to access the stored energy, and their restricted calorie diet doesn't provide much fuel, so they have no choice but to slow down their metabolism. Ironically, in the fasting state - as Jason Fung points out - metabolism goes up. "If you don't do anything about your insulin and just cut your calories, your metabolism drops. But what happens during fasting? Well, here's a run of fasting for 4 consecutive days. What happens to your REE - that's the middle part. The line here is resting energy expenditure. It doesn't go down." , it rises. You burn more energy than you do." The other thing the body will do when it can't use fat as fuel is to break down muscle into glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis. The body doesn't want to do this too much because it's not wise to completely eat something as important as muscle, but it's more likely to resort to it when it can't access its stored energy. Therefore, you will lose more muscle on calorie restriction than if you ate nothing. Human Growth Hormone is released while fasting. As the name suggests, Human Growth Hormone is an anabolic hormone - a hormone favorable to growth. In Leninher's Principles of Biochemistry textbook, they give an example of how injecting the human growth hormone gene into a mouse can make the mouse unusually large. As explained in Guyton's Textbook of Medical Physiology: "...growth hormone also mobilizes large amounts of free fatty acids from adipose tissue, which in turn are used to provide most of the energy for body cells, thus making it a potent "protein saver." , is human growth hormone, it protects your muscles from breaking down. The study I mentioned earlier about subjects fasting for 84 hours shows that growth hormone rises significantly after the second day of fasting. As mentioned earlier, you should enter ketosis sometime during the first 3 days of fasting, and it depends on how much you move before you start fasting and what your diet is like. A state of ketosis is a great indicator that your body is making good use of stored body fat for energy. In Tim Ferriss' book "Tools of Titans," Tim talks about his first clinically supervised 7-day fast. Due to some kind of liability, he was not allowed to exercise or leave the facility. Given that exercise is a powerful stimulant of human growth hormone and will help deplete glucose stores, not doing any exercise is a great way to keep yourself from going into ketosis fast. It's also a great way to lose muscle. Tim says he lost 12 pounds of muscle during the overly restrictive clinically supervised 7-day fast. But while following a protocol designed to get him into ketosis as soon as possible—which included things like 4 hours of brisk walking, he did a ten-day fast and lost zero muscle mass. A final factor in ketosis protective muscle is leucine. When you're in ketosis, your fasting blood leucine level is higher. And leucine is a key branch chain amino acid that has an anabolic effect on the body thereby preserving lean body mass. Many people interested in building muscle may be concerned that fasting or a ketogenic diet won't work for them as insulin and thus carbohydrates are essential for protein synthesis (i.e. muscle growth), but actually this leucine fills this role and is a good trigger for protein synthesis. To sum it all up: Compared to a traditional calorie-restricted diet, fasting means you lose more weight as fat, retain more muscle, have more energy, and be less hungry. If your goal is proper weight loss, it may be better to eat nothing than to eat a traditional low-calorie diet.
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