Does Fasting make you fat?
            by Brad Pilon

If I remember correctly, the FTC views the use of animal research in supplement advertising to be one of the most heinous advertising infractions, right up there with Photoshopped before and after photos.

Why?

Because they believed that due to the lack of transferability of animal research to humans, doing so would be intentionally misleading the customer as to the potential benefits of said supplement.

Even the most ‘fly-by-night’ ethically-devoid supplement companies do not use animal trials in their marketing for this reason.

Keep this in mind when you see journalists and bloggers reporting on the latest mouse research, using it to create clickbait style articles about human diet, nutrition and weight loss.

Alright, now that I’ve said that, lets get to that article that appeared on Yahoo suggesting that skipping meals will actually make you fatter.

It was an animal study, using mice.

We know that mice are extremely sensitive to fluctuations in both body weight and meal patterns. They are very small animals, and without getting too technical I’ll just say it’s well known in the scientific community that many parts of metabolism scale with size.

For 5 days the mice in the diet group were given half the amount of food as the control mice, and all of the food was provided in one meal per day (that’s why it’s being referred to as a ‘fasting study’).

After 5 days of dieting the mice were allowed to gorge for 13 days, they were given an amount of food that was the same or more as the control mice, and were still only eating it all in one meal.

So what happened?

The control mice continue to grow normally, and their weight increased throughout the study, but the fasting diet-restricted mice lost almost 20% of their body weight in the first 5 days of the study. (This should be your first hint that mice are different than humans. If you and I eat 50% of our daily intake for 5 days we’re not going to lose 20% of our body weight – heck, we could do this for a month and we’re probably not losing 20% of our body weight.)

Then, the fasted mice were fed 98-122% of the amount of food as the growing control mice, so the fasted mice started to grow… and they grew quickly. If you think about it, they were getting fed the same amount of food (or more) as the mice that were 30% heavier then them… so rapid weight gain (and fat gain) make sense.

So end result? Mice who rapidly lost 20% of their body weight and then regained most of that weight by overeating ended up with larger fat cells then the control mice. I’m not sure why this is surprising.

They also had worse measurements of a bunch of health markers… again not surprising.

I’m not sure how much the eating cycle mattered here. Again, as I stated earlier, mice are really sensitive to eating patterns so it probably did play some sort of role, but rapid weight loss then overfeeding causing increased fat stores and messed up glucose control isn’t surprising.

What’s surprising is the reporting.

Overeating and causing rapid weight gain is generally not a good idea. Losing excess body fat generally is.

So what does this have to do with humans and Intermittent Fasting?

Simple. Fasting is popular, so it makes for great headline fodder.

We were baited in with the headline, then they attempted to blind us with the science.

Here’s the truth – There are lots of ways to lose excess body fat – Fasting is just one of dozens.

They all work, and some will obviously work better for you then others, based on your personal likes and dislikes and styles of eating.

The bottom line is please don’t worry about the mouse study, and feel free to voice your anger when people use mice to try and tell you how to eat.

Mice aren’t people, people aren’t mice. Yes, there is value in animal research and animal research can lead to proof of concept for human studies, but jumping right from animal trials to setting dietary recommendations for humans is reckless.

Brad Pilon is an expert on intermittent fasting as it relates to losing weight and gaining muscle. He's a bodybuilder, and the author of Eat Stop Eat.
 

"Today's Fact is Tomorrow's Myth."
This seems especially true for Weight-Loss Issues.

        The video below contains one expert's viewpoint (his Theories) which as of TODAY "conventional wisdom"  considers FACT.   What do I think?  His calculations seem valid as far as they go, but I believe that there is still a great deal of  undiscovered information that would challenge some of his Theories, thereby changing some of his "Facts" into "Myth".

The Calculus of Calories: Quantitative Obesity Research
                            Presented by Kevin Hall, PhD. (NIH)  March 2015


In this talk, Dr. Hall describes a mathematical approach to understanding the causes and treatment of obesity. Along the way, he debunks many weight loss myths and introduces useful tools to better understand the relationships between diet, physical activity, and body weight. 

Dr. Kevin Hall is a Senior Investigator at the NIH where he studies body weight regulation. His laboratory develops mathematical models to help design, predict, and interpret the results of clinical research studies. Dr. Hall has been the recipient of the NIH Director's Award, the NIDDK Director's Award, the Lilly Scientific Achievement Award from The Obesity Society, the Guyton Award for Excellence in Integrative Physiology from the American Society of Physiology.

For the past ten years I’ve been starving my body in order to maintain my body at a normal wight, but most of my lifetime I’ve been quite fat, so I know a lot about the experience of being fat.

Guessing why fat people are fat is a cultural favorite pastime.  Fat people have to deal with people guessing why they are fat.  We are told to “eat less and exercise more” by people who can’t possible know how much we eat or how much we exercise.  We’re told that no matter what we’re doing - our bodies make it completely obvious that we must not be doing it right.  We  are not doing enough cardio, we are doing too much cardio, resistance training is a must.  We need to cut down on this food or eat more of that food or use this or that new supplement etc.

People are a lot of different sizes for a lot for different reasons. After over 50 years of intense study there is not a single intervention that has been shown to lead to long term weight loss. There is no study that shows that such weight loss would lead to greater health.    

It’s bad enough when people use their limited time on Earth to make random guesses about why fat people are fat, but it’s worse when it comes to “well-meaning”, “concerned” people who think that such “information” constitutes some kind of evidence-based health intervention, and that “evidence based health interventions” are acceptable.

First, they need to take note of the fact that the way that you can identify an evidence-based health intervention is that it is based on evidence, and has something to do with health.  It is not based on somebody’s random guess about why people’s bodies are a certain size and how that size might be manipulated.

Then they need to Butt out.  Giving unsolicited comments or advice to fat people about their bodies is Ignorant, Unkind, and Rude!

So.... potential helpful persons, repeat after me:

"Not My Body, Not My Business"