Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Fast Words

Well that’s good. I tried out this fasting and did four, then two then three days, with the days in between eating my usual amount. I’ve lost 10lb+ in that time, but hard to judge precisely since when you eat again that’s a pound of so of food plus the fluid you retain while digesting it. Doesn’t take a lot – a cup of tea weighs half a pound. If I were to measure it from a month ago, when my weight hit 192.8, then I’ve lost 20lbs. I do feel a lot lighter! Anyway, fasting is a damned sight easier than trying to diet. Near analogy would be the difference between feathering the clutch while in traffic on a hill or putting on the handbrake. But I’ve gone on enough about this already so … writing.



I finished up the first book of the Jain trilogy a week ago then turned to a file marked Jain2. Here I’d dumped sections I’d excised from the first book. I had a few little hiccups when starting the new book – lot of checking and reiterating – but soon things were running strong. This week I’ve been clearing my 2,000 words a day. Today I looked at one of those previously dumped sections where I introduced a new character. I then realised it would be better to make this new character an old character, this being a (sort of) renegade prador from the previous book. It made it more interesting and allowed for better continuity. However, I then had to go back to the first book and make some alteration there. Glad I didn’t prematurely hand it in to Macmillan.

So what else can I tell you without giving too much away? There’s a Polity assassin drone nailed to an anti-gravity disc. There’s a very dangerous alien with its … manipulators on some serious weaponry. Orlandine is having an existential crisis, and a lethal war drone called Knobbler has a crucial mission. And then there’s the Clade, ooh let me tell you all about the Clade. Maybe I should start with how it –   


What was I saying?

Saturday, February 11, 2017

One Week Fast

When I came back from Crete in August, still suffering from anxiety and panic attacks, I was pretty slim from kayaking, swimming and walking and weighed about 175lb. However I wouldn’t have styled myself as fit and healthy. A year and a half plus of anxiety and cortisol overload hadn’t left much in the way of reserves and I was frequently exhausted. After I settled back in here I decided I needed some other exercise of interest besides walking so I joined a gym. Since unaccustomed muscle groups were involved and I was still exhausted I found this hard at first. I had to give up my long morning walks and just go to the gym.

Over a number of months I put on weight and it mostly seemed to be muscle. I had to go up a shirt size because of restriction about my shoulders and even a bangle I wear on one wrist started to get tight when before it hung loose. However, in the last month or so I could not deny that I was running out of holes on my belt, had developed a male muffin top and that the 192lb I reached at one point wasn’t due to my brawny arms.

I started dieting. Potatoes, bread and pasta ceased to go into my shopping trolley, while the pork scratchings were definitely out. On stir-fries I dropped about 5lb. Not so exhausted now I started walking again (in the last couple of weeks), doing 7 miles every morning. I then considered something else I had done in the past, which was take a day off every now and again and eat nothing at all. But I didn’t do anything about that.

On the day before my birthday I went out for a meal with someone. I ate a scallop starter, spaghetti carbonara followed by a sweet of profiteroles, washed down with a couple of gin and tonics. But even as I was eating I felt unhappy with the way my midriff was pushing against my shirt.

The next morning my weight was 184lb and I kinda fell into not eating that day. Because, obviously, I’m an avid reader of what interests me, I started reading up on fasting. My last post here tells you much of what I got from that. But I’ll reiterate:

Your body has evolved to store fat in times of plenty then burn it when there is no food about. We live constantly in times of plenty and that’s why so many of us are fat. The mechanism is this: over a few days of fasting your body burns through its glycogen reserves in your liver and elsewhere. It then starts burning fat (ketosis). The idea that you burn muscle and store fat is, in my opinion, apocryphal. Autophagy and apopsis accelerate during this time cleaning out cell detritus and breaking up those cells that are redundant and yes, some of those are muscle cells – useless, damaged inefficient cells. However the meme has been promulgated by people who have fasted seeing their biceps or whatever shrink and think, ‘Oh my god it’s true I’m burning muscle!’ Wake up. One of the closest animals to us physiologically is the pig and, bearing in mind that pigs are less well-fed than us, how much fat do you see in pork? Your muscles are getting smaller because they’re losing the fat in them. This story is also promulgated by those who stop exercising when they fast. Yes, you’re losing muscle BECAUSE ITS REDUNDANT IF YOU DON’T USE IT – autophagy and apopsis taking out what is surplus to requirements. Also, consider this: if your body is carrying 10lb of extra fat – the equivalent of five bags of sugar – then logically it requires muscle for that, which becomes redundant as you lose it. That is my opinion anyway.

The next day my weight was down 4lb, almost certainly all of it was the stuff in my liver, in my gut and fluid. Because I had not quite understood the above and feared ill effects I ate a banana and two satsumas in the morning then spent the rest of the day without food. The following morning I was down 1.6lb and the day after a further 1.4lb. The day after I was out for dinner again. I ate something at about 5pm to prepare my stomach for that (and the gin and tonics) and the following day my weight had gone up 2.6lb. And no I was not rapidly putting the fat back on because that was almost certainly the weight of the food and the fluid retained to digest it – no food again for a day and I dropped 3lb.

Throughout this I have continued exercising, walking 7 miles each morning and going to the gym for an hour and a quarter every afternoon. I had a couple of small dizzy spells at one point but mostly I’ve felt sharper mentally and had no problem exercising, quite the reverse in fact. Over four days my ‘love handles’ reduced by about half while my belly shrank about the same amount. My arms also shrank, but to give better muscle definition. Hunger was an issue but, three or four days in, it was no different from how it was on day one. It wasn’t constant either – I didn’t wake up hungry and I certainly wasn’t hungry while exercising. It was patchy throughout the day. And it wasn’t so severe I wanted to eat a raw buffalo liver or eat a fish while it was still wriggling (from the film The Revenant). I guess that kind of hunger occurs when ketosis is over – no fat left – and you do start eating your own muscle – protein starvation.

To sum up: Over a period of a week I lost 10lb. An awful lot of that has been around my waist. I have lost from shoulders, arms, chest, bum and legs but I like that there’s less to pinch under the skin and my musculature is more defined. I’m now going another day without food but not exercising. It’s snowy outside and cold and grey, but I also want to take the opportunity to see if there is any change in the hunger pangs and whether I’ll keep up the constant loss average of 1.5lbs a day.        

Sunday, February 05, 2017

Burning Muscle

I posted this on Facebook yesterday and there was quite a response – debate, agreement and even outrage:
Interesting. I've been reading stuff about weight loss and exercise etc for quite a while now. Some of the things I kept coming across are, 'Don't eat too little or your body will go into starvation mode! It'll burn muscle to preserve itself! It'll retain fat!' I raised an eyebrow at this because it made no logical sense. The body is a fast machine for the transmission of slow genes. When food is plentiful it stores it as fat. When food isn't plentiful it burns that fat. Surely? Yes it does. Starvation mode is a myth, probably from people who inhabit that world where squirting coffee up your bum is a good idea.
Note: I mean here 'starvation mode' in the world of the fad diet whereby some believe the body burns muscle in preference to fat.
So, apparently, the theory is this: if you fast, your body undergoes changes to utilize its resources more efficiently. It burns up the supplies in the liver and elsewhere then turns to the fat, switching over to ketosis. Or … it starts laying down fat and burns muscle. Or just within a day it starts doing that. Or…

You see the problem.

This stuff is rife with contradictions and fallacies and my goodness you mustn’t go into ‘starvation mode’ and experience ‘muscle wasting’. When I start reading emotive terms like that my bullshit radar comes on and starts beeping. The immediate mental image that arises is of people staggering out of Auschwitz or skeletal children in some African village. The problem here is that the internet is a breeding ground for the apocryphal and that ninety per cent of what you read is from somebody who has an angle, or a repetition of the same. Try the turnip and mealworm diet to avoid starvation mode and muscle wasting! The majority of the stuff you’ll read about diets, nutrition and exercise sits on the borderland of real science where self-appointed experts sell their snake oil. And all of this gets promulgated by people repeating stuff they want to believe (confirmation bias) and thus creating memes that are not necessarily true.

In the end you have to go back to first principles. What are we? We are fast machines for the transmission of slow genes evolved over millions of years by and for that purpose. The biological machines that are us take in energy to power us (food), ensure that we are capable of simply staying alive and gathering more food, and breed. That is all evolution requires of us. So, apply that logic to the above.

Is it logical that we would burn off muscle before fat? That we would experience ‘muscle wasting’? Does it make any sense to sacrifice the machine in preference to the fuel supply?
No, not really. Yes there might be a small loss, but in that respect I would go with the school of thought that says your body starts catabolising cells that are damaged, not functioning correctly or redundant (apopsis and autophagy). That makes sense – there was no imperative to deal with that mess while our guts were providing a bounty of nutrients.

Yes, muscle wasting does happen, and it happens when your body runs out of its usual food, that is, what is in your guts, liver and fat stores. It happens when you go below minimum body fat, which, beside the relocation camp victim, is something that can apply to body builders too. Your body does start eating itself to stay alive – almost certainly in order of importance i.e. the muscle in your biceps will go before the muscle in your heart. But this is irrelevant to the world of the fad diet and Joe Public (very few of whom are at the low end of body fat and very few of whom are likely to go without food for days on end), and the ‘burning your own muscle’ meme is an overblown scare story.

I think the reality is this: Strict diets and fasting in the healthy will only cause problems in THOSE WHO DON’T NEED THEM.