by Siim Land
One study found that a group of wrestlers who ingested 52 grams of BCAAs a day retained more muscle and lost more fat than the control group who didn’t supplement[647]. However, the subjects were eating only about ~80 grams of protein at a mean body weight of 150 pounds, which is probably not ideal for someone engaged in such heavy physical activity. If they were to be consuming 0.8-1.0 g/lb of protein, the effects of BCAA supplementation would’ve probably been non-existent as all of the participants would’ve been on an even keel in terms of getting enough amino acids. What’s more, studies have shown how increased fatty acid concentrations have a muscle sparing effect[648]. This is most likely due to the body using more fat and ketones for energy production instead of amino acids and protein.
If you’re coming from a diet that doesn’t restrict carbohydrates and maintains a glucose-dependent metabolism, then, of course, you’re going to lose muscle tissue while fasting. That’s why you want to get into ketosis as fast as possible if you’re doing intermittent fasting. Don’t even try to fast for extended periods of time unless you’ve gotten into ketosis because you’re going to lose a whole lot of muscle. It means that if you’re in a deep fasted state with elevated level of ketones, you’re more protective of lean muscle tissue than if you were to be consuming amino acids and negating the positive effects of fasting.
Leucine and BCAAs acids do spike insulin but they increase plasma levels of insulin levels temporarily and they have almost no effect on glucose or urea nitrogen[649].
Figure 90 Leucine doesn't spike insulin when taken with water
There are many occasions outside of nutrition that can raise insulin and glucose, such as sitting in traffic, getting anxious, feeling angry, or even sitting on the couch. These examples may elevate cortisol and in so doing raise insulin and glucose as well but do they kick you out of a fasted state? Such insulin responses like that of BCAA supplementation or screaming at someone are short-term and not the same as eating a loaf of bread or potatoes.
There are also different degrees of fasting ketosis and keto-adaptation. Every person’s metabolism is unique and has different levels of insulin sensitivity. It all depends on muscle mass, your level of physical activity, body fat percentages, genes, time of the day, how many ketones you have in the blood, and how many BCAAs you’re actually consuming.
What’s more, some amino acids can actually be converted into ketones to further promote ketosis, although not in significant amounts[650]. With that being said, a good supply of nutrients can still be very useful in some rare occasions. Working out fasted is definitely more catabolic than working out fed.
If you’ve eaten a few hours before a workout, then you have nothing to worry about in regards to amino acids and muscle loss because your blood will be filled with BCAAs from food.
If you’re working out fasted and not having eaten anything for over 12-16 hours, then BCAAs can have an additional protective effect.
The key is to time your BCAA intake in a way that doesn’t kick you out of a fasted state.
Taking BCAAs before a workout or when being sedentary will stop the fast and make you catabolic.
However, if you’re working out, then you’re not necessarily in ketosis anyway. Heavy exercise, especially resistance training, releases muscle glycogen into the blood, thus raising insulin and lowering concentrations of ketones. That’s why a hard workout can cause a transient loss of ketosis.
Consuming a small amount of BCAAs while working out fasted, like in the example of targeted intermittent fasting, will probably have a negligible effect on the fast as you’ll dip straight back into fasting ketosis right after the workout.
Therefore, the only time you’d ever want to take BCAAs is during a heavy resistance training workout in a fasted state. Whether or not you should do it at that time depends on several additional factors.
Mineral Water
And of course, you can drink regular water, sparkling water, and mineral water. The reason you’d want to drink mineral water is that when you’re fasting, you’re flushing out a lot of water and this may lead to electrolyte imbalances and mineral deficiencies.
To prevent that, you can simply add a pinch of sea salt or pink Himalayan sea salt to your water. Also, consuming ionized rock salt will give you some iodine as well, which promotes thyroid functioning and prevents hypothyroidism.
But that's basically it...
All in all, you’d want to know the purpose of your fast. If you’re fasting just for burning fat, then you simply want to maintain a caloric deficit. I wouldn’t bother with trying to trick your body into thinking its fasting by drinking bulletproof coffee or taking exogenous ketones.
If you’re already overweight or have excess body fat, then your body is already carrying around enough energy. You don’t need to elevate your ketones after you adapt to fasting ketosis. BHB salts or other supplements aren’t a fat loss tool – they’re simply ways of increasing your blood ketones but as we found out too much energy in the system can have a counter-balancing effect.
If you’re planning to fast for 16-20 hours, then you’d want to boost autophagy with these compounds I mentioned earlier. You’d want to skip all calories and drink only some coffee, teas, and at the most take 1 tsp of MCT oil with compounds like ginger, turmeric, and ginseng. This will help you to maintain a caloric deficit while still cleaning your cells.
If you’re fasting for over 24 hours then I recommend you to stick to only coffee, apple cider vinegar, and tea because you don’t need the extra energy from fat or the herbs as your own endogenous ketone body production is through the roof.
How to Break a Fast
Breaking the fast with a lot of carbohydrates may cause an abrupt weight gain. The reason for that is sodium retention. While fasting you excrete a lot of water and refeeding on carbs causes antidiuresis of potassium and sodium. You’ll get bloated but you may also have an energy crash of insulin.
Therefore, you want to be eating something that’s easier to digest and doesn’t put too much strain on the gut. It also depends on how long you’ve been fasting for. If you’re coming off a 5 day fast, then you need to be more patient than you would when just doing daily intermittent fasting with 16 hours fasted.
Let’s start off with the average situation where you’ve been fasting for about 16-18 hours and you’re nearing the finish line. During your fast, you can drink non-caloric beverages like water, tea or coffee.
Now that you’re about to break the fast, you want to consume something that stimulates the digestive tract without releasing insulin. Apple cider vinegar is perfect for this – it balances healthy pH levels, kills off bad bacteria in your gut, stabilizes blood sugar and improves overall health. You can drink a glass of apple cider vinegar during your fast. But it’s a great drink for breaking it as well. Here’s what I do before eating any meals.
2 tbsp of raw apple cider vinegar
1 half of lemon squeezed into hot water
1 pinch of cinnamon for better blood sugar stabilization
1 pinch of sea salt
Alternatively, you can do this without apple cider vinegar as well and just use hot lemon water. In any case, you want the citric acid from lemons to promote the creation of digestive enzymes in the gut before you eat.
After that, you can also drink some bone broth. Bone broth is amazing and super good for you because it has a ton of electrolytes but it’s also packed with collagen.
Collagen protein is what most of your body is made of – your joints, nails, hair, skin – it helps to keep you more youthful and elastic.
Drinking bone broth after your fast will also help you to absorb the other electrolytes and minerals a lot better. Your gut has been cleaning house for a while and is now ready to utilize the nutrients from the bone broth as well as the foods you’ll be consuming afterward.
If you’ve been fasting for over 20 hours, then it’s a good idea to drink some bone broth or some soup before you eat anything solid. If you’ve fasted
for just 16 hours then it’s not that important but still a good idea. BONUS TIP: Add cinnamon to bone broth – it’s magnificent.
An alternative for bone broth is also fish broth. You cook up all the leftover bits of the fish, like the head, the fins and bones so you could get all those extra omega-3 fatty acids. Don’t just throw away these foods when there are still so many unused nutrients on them. When cooking fish, avoid boiling temperatures and overcooking because it may damage the fats. It would be best to steam the fish in some medium-heat water for many hours and make a soup out of it.
If you don’t have access to bone broth but you still want to give yourself some immediate energy without crashing, then you can also consume some MCT oil. MCTs get converted into energy faster because the fatty acids in it bypass the liver and go straight to the bloodstream. This is beneficial because you’ll also prolong the effects of fat burning and stay in ketosis for longer even after having consumed calories.
After you’ve drunk your lemon water and maybe bone broth, then you should wait for about 15-30 minutes to let your gut absorb the nutrients. You might feel your intestines waking up, which is a good thing.
What to Eat When Breaking a Fast
To prevent a sugar crash, I recommend your first meal should be something small and low glycemic no matter what diet you’re on. This will keep you in a semi-fasted state because of the non-existent rise in blood sugar. Some examples would be:
2-3 eggs, half an avocado, some nuts and spinach
1 can of sardines with some salad and olive oil
I wouldn’t recommend you break your fast with red meat because it’s more difficult to digest than eggs or fish. Meat products should be eaten as your second meal.
The first meal should be still relatively small. In total, it should be around 500 calories. Unless you’re coming straight from a workout. In that case, you’d want to spike muscle protein synthesis with more protein and calories.
On your second meal, you should eat based upon your desired anabolic-catabolic condition. If you’re trying to build muscle or recover from exercise, then it’s a good idea to pick something from the ModTOR group. When in maintenance mode or wanting deeper autophagy, stick to more nTOR foods and eat primarily plant-based.
Breaking Your Fast With Fruit
The best time to eat fruit ever is when your liver glycogen is empty i.e. when fasting or while exercising. If your liver is already full and you’re eating fruit, then that fructose will be stored as fat and you may even get fatty liver disease. Fruit for dessert isn’t a good idea.
But there aren’t many benefits to fruit in general. If your liver glycogen gets depleted, you’ll be burning ketones and you don’t need to replenish your stores with fructose. You’ll be actually better off with continuing to stay in this fat burning state, rather than breaking it with sugar that you don’t need.
If you do choose to consume fruit, then still make it low glycemic and opt for fruit with more fiber, like apples, berries or pears. Some citrus like grapefruit and oranges can be good as well. The high carb fruits like bananas and mangos should be considered more like performance fuel because they’re more insulinogenic.
Whatever type of fasting you’re coming from, you shouldn’t eat any more than twice a day. Consuming your calories within a smaller time-frame is what this entire concept of metabolic autophagy is all about. When doing the targeted intermittent fasting, you can have meals that span 1-2 hours but it’s generally better to stay in a semi-fasted state most of the time.
Chapter XIX
How to Fast for Days and Days
“You never know what a good meal tastes like
until you haven’t had one in a long time”
Siim Land
When someone was to ask you: “When are you going to have your next 5-day fast?” then you probably don’t have an immediate answer to give – “Ummm...Yea…Let’s do it right now!”
One day I was about to face 4 days of traveling and I thought why not practice some hardcore fasting during that trip? I figured: “Alright, I haven’t had a longer fast in a few months so let’s take advantage of this opportunity.” Sold!
The reason I decided to have a 5-day fast was that it kinda fit into my schedule quite nicely. I had to be on the road and I wouldn’t have had access to quality food sources. For me, that’s a perfect situation as I’ll get in my extended fast and I’ll avoid all the potentially harmful calories that I don’t need.
In fact, I prefer fasting and staying hungry rather than eating some random unhealthy meal on the go without much nutrition. Your body from a physiological and metabolic perspective would also be better off with avoiding all calories all together as to drive yourself into deeper ketosis and autophagy rather than nibbling on some dried out lettuce wrap or croissante from a fast food restaurant.
The more keto-adapted you are, the easier it is for your body to burn its own stored fat for fuel, and the easier it is for you to fast. With contemporary eating habits, like 4-6 small meals a day, very carbohydrate rich menus, highly palatable foods, and snacks, the average person’s body is almost incapable of burning fat and ketones for fuel.
Caloric restriction on a non-ketogenic diet with plenty of carbohydrates also prevents you from establishing ketosis and reaping the benefits of a fat burning metabolism. You’ll burn a little bit of fat but because your body is so used to glucose, it’ll also compensate for that deficit by converting some of your muscle tissue and vital organs into glucose through gluconeogenesis. Gluconeogenesis occurs only if your body isn’t in ketosis and it can’t cover its energy demands with fat and ketones. This happens because the metabolism hasn’t adapted to using your fat stores.
Therefore, the key to a healthy and successful fast is to establish ketosis as soon as possible and to prevent your body from entering into a semi-starved state. It also means that if you’re trying to lose weight, then it would be better to avoid all calories and do strict fasting until you’re lean rather than follow a calorically restricted diet that keeps you malnourished for several months.
With fasting, you can get into ketosis with a few days and you’ll trigger the other benefits that can increase your longevity whereas with restricting your food intake will downregulate your metabolic rate and thyroid. This makes you moody and lowers your energy levels to the point of complete exhaustion.
Day One - Just the Routine
I started my 5 day fast like I start any other day of my week – the standard morning routine of meditation, cold thermogenesis, and red light therapy.
During the day I’m going to be drinking very sparingly and only when I feel thirsty. The reason being is that keeping your electrolytes in check is one of the most important things you have to do while fasting.
You NEED TO Get Enough Electrolytes! Fasting with nothing but pure water will make you flush out all of the minerals in your body, which can lead to muscle cramps, lethargy, exhaustion, heart palpitations, and elevated cortisol.
Daily sodium minimum is at about 1500-2300 mg-s, which is 1-2 tsp of salt. If you’re physically active or are sweating a lot, then aim for up to 3000-4000 mg-s, which is 3-4 tsp of salt. Use quality sea salt or pink rock salt. Mix it with water for better absorption.
RDA for potassium is 4700 but once you get enough sodium, you don’t have to worry about getting any more than 2500 mg-s of potassium. Sodium is potassium-sparing and your cells will lose potassium only if you lose sodium. You can use potassium salts like NuSalt to get more potassium with less sodium.
Other electrolytes like magnesium, calcium, phosphorus, and chloride aren’t that important during 3-5 day fasts because most of them are actually stored inside the body. Magnesium is much better absorbed through the skin than from supplements. That's why taking an Epson salt bath with magnesium flakes can be a very good idea. However, 300-450 mg of magnesium can do wonders. Taking a multivitamin is necessary only if you fast for longer than 5-7 days. Your ability to absorb vitamins is much lower without food
anyway so it's easier to not take any supplements.
Additional sources of electrolytes can be baking soda and apple cider vinegar.
Baking soda is 100% sodium bicarbonate and 1 tsp of baking soda has 1259 mg of sodium. It’s great for balancing the body’s pH levels, fixing digestive issues and healing the kidneys. Baking soda is a natural antibacterial and antifungal agent that promotes alkalinity in the body. You shouldn’t take around meal times because it’ll interfere with stomach acid production.
Apple Cider Vinegar – ACV is zero calories but it has trace amounts of potassium and other minerals so it’s great to consume while fasting. During the fasting window, you should use the distilled vinegar without the mother.
That’s why I consume 1 cup of water with ½ tsp of baking soda, 1-2 tsp of ACV once or twice a day. This will also prevent kidney stones and ulcers while fasting, which may happen because of inadequate production of digestive enzymes.
Besides drinking salted water all day, you can also consume some black coffee, sparkling water, mineral water, non-caloric teas, and that’s practically it.
The danger of drinking coffee or drinking too much water, in general, is that you may have to go to the bathroom more often. If you’re peeing very frequently, then you’ll also excrete out more electrolytes. A loss of minerals will make you feel more tired and actually predisposes you to dehydration. That’s why dry fasting can be much more effective than water fasting because you’ll hold onto your salts and you’ll enter into ketosis faster.
Bone broth or collagen protein powders will definitely kick you out of a fasted state because they contain a lot of amino acids that in the presence of no calories can be insulinogenic, thus kicking you out of a fasted state.