Why Should I Clean Fast? Also, Does Fasting Burn Muscle?
Is the clean fast really that important? Also, the body prefers to burn fat instead of muscle but it needs time to switch gears. Finally, an overview of the vision for this Substack.
Happy Tuesday! Welcome to our many new subscribers. Congrats on taking a very important step to success: committing to ongoing learning. I’m getting this letter out a bit late tonight because we moved this week, and I’m just glad I could find my laptop amidst this chaos. 😆 This is how we all feel after moving:
If you like listening to podcasts, you may enjoy a show that just aired this week where I was a guest on Gin Stephen’s podcast Intermittent Fasting Stories.
Remind Me Why I Have to Clean Fast Again
I love when people ask me this question. In fact, of all the questions I get asked, this one is my favorite.
The reason I love this question is because very few people find success from blindly following rules they don’t understand. In fact, I heard a doctor say on a podcast that every time he’s had a friend ask him for a 3 x 5 card telling him what health changes to make while refusing to listen to any explanation why those changes are important, that person has always failed to keep them.
The principle applies to the clean fast. I don’t want anyone clean fasting because I said so, or because all the fasting gurus said so. I want you fasting clean because you are personally convinced of the benefits.
First, What is a Clean Fast?
The term was popularized by Gin Stephens who wrote Fast.Feast.Repeat (a great book, by the way). It means that when you are fasting you should only have water (unflavored sparkling is fine), black coffee, and black tea. You should avoid things like milk or cream in coffee, all gum, artificial sweeteners, flavored waters such as La Croix, flavored and herbal teas (peach tea, Earl Gray, lemon green tea), flavored coffees such as French Vanilla roast even if it’s black, lemon in your water, breath mints, bone broth, etc.
Why are Black Coffee and Tea okay?
Both black coffee and black tea have a bitter flavor profile which does not signal the brain that calories are coming. When your brain senses flavors or sweeteners (even if artificial), it automatically flips the switch from the fasted state to the fed state. When no calories come, this puts the body in a state of distress. Because the body usually releases a small amount of insulin in response to a non-bitter flavor, and this blocks some of the fat-burning mechanisms. The body will then be forced to slow the metabolism down and may even use some muscle for fuel.
This response varies slightly from person to person. People who have a history of overeating carbs need to be the most careful to clean fast. These people’s bodies will often release more insulin in response to a flavor. This explains why there have been so many people on Intermittent Fasting Stories Podcast who couldn’t lose weight fasting until they began clean fasting.
Recalibrating Your Body’s Set Weight
It’s possible to lose weight on any diet: Weight Watchers, Whole 30, The Palm Beach version of the South Beach Diet. The question is: can you keep the weight off long term? The problem with most low-calorie diets is they fail to recalibrate your body’s set weight.
As Fung explains in The Obesity Code, your set weight is determined by the amount of basal (background) insulin in your blood. When you lower that basal insulin, your body resets and becomes comfortable at a lower weight. Then there’s no internal drive to regain the weight as normally happens on a diet.
When you simply restrict calories without resetting basal insulin, you simply slow your metabolic rate. This was measured and proven for contestants of the Biggest Loser show. Years later, the contestants’ metabolic rates were still significantly lower than before they had joined the show. This is why nearly all of them gain all the weight back after the show.
Everyone agrees you can temporarily lose weight on a low-calorie diet, and you can lose weight while dirty fasting (although some can’t). However, if you have flavors or calories (even small amounts such as cream in the coffee, broth, etc) you are simply on a low-calorie diet. You are not getting the full benefits of fasting.
I sometimes hear someone say: “But I’m working so hard doing all this fasting and you’re going to take my one comfort away, this little bit of cream.” My response to that is always: “If you’re working so hard doing all this fasting, why not get the full benefits rather than sabotaging your progress?”
It’s like eating a candy bar while running on the treadmill. If you’re going to do something hard, like run on treadmill, make it worth your time. Plus, you can only get that fantastic feeling of energy and brain clarity if you’re clean fasting. Those benefits come from being deep in the fat-burning state.
Here’s a quote I’ve used before but it’s worth repeating.
Edward Dewey was one of the first physicians to recommend intermittent fasting, though he didn’t call it that. In 1900, he published the book The No-Breakfast Plan and the Fasting Cure where he suggested that a healthy eating pattern is to forgo breakfast and eat only two meals each day. He says:
“The no-breakfast plan with me proved a matter of life unto life. With my morning coffee there were forenoons of the highest physical energy, the clearest condition of mind, and the acutest sense of everything enjoyable. Not being able to give my patients clearly defined reasons for the general and local improvements resulting from a forenoon fast as a method in hygiene, it had to be spread from relieved persons to suffering friends; and according to the need, the sufferers from various ailings would be willing to try anything new where efforts through the family physician or patent medicines had completely failed; it was spread as if by contagion, among the failures of the medical profession.”
Edward Dewey may not have been able to give his patients any clearly defined reasons why fasting works since the understanding of insulin has only recently advanced enough to explain it, but you my friend, now understand more than this physician did about why fasting works.
But I Don’t Need To Lose Weight
For those who are fasting for the health benefits only, the clean fast is the place where autophagy happens. An insulin release, even if small, will cause all autophagy to grind to a halt. For more on autophagy, see the post Upgrading Your Brain for Free.
Today's Myth: Fasting burns muscle
Although this is mostly a myth, there’s a grain of truth to it. If you were eating a diet very high in ultra-processed carbs, sugars, and oils and then one day you did a 20-hour fast out of nowhere, it’s possible that your body would be so confused that it would be forced to convert a small amount of muscle mass to glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis.
But this is not what your body wants to do long term—it wants to use your fat stores for energy (that’s what fat exists for), not your muscle. However, if your insulin is sky high, this blocks fat burning, and the body is not sure what to do.
You can prevent muscle loss by easing into fasting slowly, thus allowing your body to lower insulin over time and enabling your body to relearn how to use fat for fuel. This way, your human growth hormone increases and you can actually gain muscle through fasting, particularly if you’re eating a high-protein diet.
Deanna is a prime example that fasting maintains muscle. A doc named Raj Attariwala developed the Prenuvo, one of the most comprehensive MRI body scans in the world. The scan is extremely accurate at measuring muscle mass, fat, and the health of organs.
Below is the video describing what Dr. Raj saw when he scanned Deanna, a 45-year-old woman who eats one meal a day (OMAD) and a high protein, high-fat diet.
His first statement is:
From looking at your lean muscle mass, I would have thought you were 16.
He goes on to say that he’s been doing scans for 15 years and Deanna has the lowest amount of body fat and the most lean muscle he’s ever seen. It turns out that we can eat one meal a day and still have incredible muscle mass.
Most importantly, Deanna has almost no fat around her internal organs.
I do want to add just as a caveat that I like using this woman as an example because the extreme case proves the normal case. If fasting allowed her to have that much muscle, it must be maintaining yours and mine as well. However, I’m not holding her incredible results up as a target that we should all strive to obtain.
I do not ever plan on being that lean! I’m perfectly fine hanging out at around 20% body fat. Could I become leaner if I worked my tail off in the gym everyday? Of course. But that level of fitness has never been my goal, and this isn’t a contest.
There’s this principle called diminishing marginal returns. The difference between going from 35% body fat to 20% body fat can have dramatic, life-altering results on health. But the benefits of going from 20% body fat to 10% are less substantial.
It’s the same with exercise. The health benefits are huge if you go from doing no exercise to adding in a 30-minute walk a few times a week (particularly if you can do it in the sunshine). But the benefits of going from a 30-minute walk to a 60-minute walk are marginal. If you don’t have time to put on your special gym clothes, drive to the gym, and workout for an hour, it’s tempting to think, I just won’t do anything. But even a quick 10-minute walk has huge benefits.
When it comes to weight loss, I’m not interested in making everyone feel like they have to become bionic Barbies. If I can encourage more people to simply reach a normal, healthy weight, then I will feel that I have succeeded. Don’t let the ideal be the enemy of the good.
In the first picture, you can see that I had a lot of weight around the middle which was causing health problems. I’m no super model in the second picture, but have gained a lot of health. (Same dress, just very stretchy 😆)
Information Is Motivation: What Fastwell Is All About
I decided to write this Substack because I realized some things about human nature and our current food environment that led me to believe that without weekly encouragement, it may be impossible for many people to make permanent changes.
Here’s something I’ve noticed about human nature: many people who’ve read health and fasting books, such as Dr. Jason Fung’s excellent Obesity Code, failed to internalize the information long-term. I was in a Facebook group where you could only join if you had read The Obesity Code. And yet, I was regularly surprised at how few people in the group had truly grasped the concepts in the book.
This is completely understandable. The average reader has a number of disadvantages stacked against him.
First, few of us come to such books with medical vocabulary frequently used. And although authors like Fung are great writers and explain the terms, it’s a lot of new information for the average person to take in at once.
Second, the concepts fly in the face of the common health advice we’ve heard our whole lives, and this causes confusion. “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” “Eat often to keep your metabolism stoked.” And then there’s the “Government Food Pyramid of Lies,” as Dr. Ken Berry calls it, telling us to eat 7-11 servings (wait, what?) of carbs a day. It can take a lot of reading to reverse this dogma pounded into our heads.
Third, we are surrounded by food in our pantries, fridges, cars, at work, everywhere we drive, getting gas, fast food on every corner, and constant food ads on TV. Food is hard to avoid. And if we’re going to spend a portion of our day not eating, we need to constantly be reminded why.
Fourth, most people we interact with on a daily basis are doing the mainstream thing. If we have kids, they need to eat often since they’re growing. Food is meant to be eaten in community, so if everyone at work eats donuts every 20 minutes, not only are they going to wonder why you’re not eating them, but you’re going to wonder why you’re not eating them.
Finally, and this may be the hardest thing of all to overcome, we have our decades-long eating habits to overcome. When we’ve eaten throughout the day our entire lives, fasting requires some serious reorientation. These are some steep obstacles.
What I’ve found is that we have to keep returning to the fundamentals of why we’re changing. We need a weekly reminder to keep us on track and prevent us from slipping back into old habits.
We need information about how fasting works, why it works. We need reminders about what food we should be eating and avoiding.
However, my goal is to keep it as simple as possible.
Why I’m not a Biohacker
I don’t have anything against biohackers, and it’s not my goal to discourage anyone from exploring that world, but I want to come out plainly and say that I do not ever see myself going down that road, and here’s just one example why.
Many medical professionals say that diseases such as diabetes will shave at least 15 years off your life. On top of that, the last decade or so will likely be riddled with health problems. This means that those of us like myself who have reversed our diabetes through fasting and low carb have already added 15 years back onto our lives.
Therefore, my goal is not to try to live to 130 like some of these biohackers are hoping to do. I think a better goal is to have a strong body and mind up until the end. I heard a doc say recently that when we envision what healthy aging looks like we should think of Queen Elizabeth as an example. She was healthy and had her wits about her into her 90s. Then she declined rapidly just before she passed. She didn’t have a decade of her life where she was on dialysis, needed amputations, and suffered neuropathy, dementia (that I know of), autoimmune, heart problems, etc.
Doubtless, there was probably a genetic factor for Queen Elizabeth. But here’s the beauty of epigenetics. If you’re like me and are susceptible to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and autoimmune disease, you can turn the expression of those genes off through lifestyle changes.
The health changes I promote are a kind of biohacking, I suppose. But it’s not the extreme kind. The kind of biohacking that I’m not personally interested in is things like cold therapy, super high-intensive interval training (I just like walking 😆), extreme weight lifting, taking 27 longevity supplements, getting down to 10% body fat (not interested), listening to 5 hours of podcasts a day, reading 43 longevity books, and whatever else that community is up to.
I want to go on record as differentiating myself from that crowd because I’m afraid that people may first jump wholeheartedly into the uber-health world and then progress to the hard-core biohacking world and then get burned out.
One day you may wake up and realize you’re spending an inordinate amount of time and money on health and you may think, “This is too hard. I think I’ll just go back to eating Cheetos around the clock.” The struggle is real.
But it doesn't have to be that way. The things that will bring the greatest changes are the most simple.
Do at least some fasting every day
Remove as many seed oils from your diet as you can
Eat more saturated fat in the form of butter, beef tallow, coconut oil, dairy products, and eggs
Make an effort to eat more red meat and eggs so you’re getting adequate protein
Eat your protein first so you have less room for carbs
Reduce ultra-processed foods, especially carbs and sugar
Add some extra salt to your food (the body only retains sodium when carbs are high)
Get some extra sunlight at noon
Take a walk most days
These are super simple changes that anyone can make. Yes, meat costs a bit. But think about what you are no longer buying: soda, candy, crackers, cereal, chips, cookies, granola bars, specialty coffee, sports drinks, beer, ice cream. A tub of ice cream costs about the same amount as the meat I feed my family each night. I can easily get us enough meat for a meal $5. Eat meat and skip the ice cream afterward.
In conclusion, try to avoid the all-or-nothing way of thinking. If the above list is overwhelming, pick just two things to work on this month. Once you’ve mastered those two, pick two more from the list.
Keep reading and educating yourself about why these changes are important. Don’t assume that you either have to be a total health fanatic or nothing. Any small change you make in the right direction is a victory.
So do some fasting today while drinking some cool, pure, delicious water. Envision all the positive changes that are happening while you fast.
By way of reminder, don’t forget that fasting boosts the immune system, upgrades your brain, gives you food freedom, may down-regulate autoimmune diseases, reduces depression, and corrects the appetite. What’s not to love?
If you’re hitting a rough spot in your fasting journey, be sure to check out my post on pushing through, and more beginner fasting tips.
Until next week, do the easiest thing for your future health: practice some fasting!
Fast Well, then Feast Well,
Leslie Taylor
Have you had success fasting? If so:
[This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not designed as a substitute for medical advice. Talk to your doctor before beginning any dietary changes, especially if you are on medications for diabetes. Fasting while taking certain medications such as Metformin and especially insulin can lead to dangerously low blood sugars. If your doctor does not support fasting, search for a physician who will support your fasting journey. Fasting is not recommended for those pregnant, breastfeeding, or for children and teens still growing and developing. For those with diabetes, personal fasting coaches are available through TheFastingMethod.com. I receive no compensation or ad revenue for anything in this newsletter including links to books, videos, websites, coaching services, podcasts, or supplements.]