High Intensity Health: Genius Realizes That Starvation Isn't Healthy After All @High Intensity Health
Watch on YouTube · 2023-11-06 · 21 min
0:00 Hey guys, as requested, I'm going to review the video called I Quit Fasting, Here's Why by High Intensity Health.
[video] 0:07 In today's show, let's talk about fasting and muscle, and one of the reasons why I don't do extended fasting anymore.
0:12 As many of you know, Wow, this guy looks way worse than he used to. I did see some videos of his five, six years ago. He looked quite young compared to how he looks like now. His face is very haggard, as in worn out. He looks so exhausted. The fasting really didn't do anything good to him.
[video] 0:38 fasting is counterproductive to preserving and building muscle mass. And we know that muscle is very important for longevity. Preserving strength and muscle mass has many metabolic health-related benefits.
0:48 And I wanted to share with you... That would still need to be proven.
[video] 0:51 Just my perspective, as well as some insights from a recently published paper titled A Muscle-Centric Perspective on Intermittent Fasting, A Suboptimal Dietary Strategy for Supporting Muscle Protein Remodeling and Muscle Mass. So as you know, intermittent fasting is very popular. I used to do extended fast every single quarter. I would do three days. Once a week, I would do a 24-hour fast. We called it Metabolic Monday. I still think this has metabolic health.
1:10 Three days once a week as in three days of starvation? That's the problem with the so-called fasting community. They use the word fasting even though it's literally starvation. Absolutely zero difference except that you choose when you starve, but you're still starving. What's the difference? Literally no difference at all. It's problematic because when you start using the word fasting instead of starving, then you start associating it with something else in your head. And then you can actually try to talk yourself into believing that fasting has health benefits because it's something else than starving. Whereas if you say, I start three days in a week or I start for 24 hours to be healthy, then it doesn't sound the same anymore. Then it starts sounding strange and people may ask you, wait, you starved? Why did you Starving isn't healthy because everybody automatically knows that starving isn't healthy.
2:05 But when you say fasting, then it's, oh, that's something else, right? Because you use a different word for it. It doesn't make any sense.
[video] 2:14 Benefits for people that are morbidly obese, really overweight, sedentary.
2:19 Yes, people who sit around all day long and on top of that eat junk food, which means that they spike their insulin all day long, would of course benefit from starvation, seeing as they would eat themselves up. That's all that you're saying, right? They would lose weight, as in they would eat up their own cells, which means that they would lose cells and therefore lose the so-called weight. But that's not a health benefit as such. You're just saying that people who are too fat need to starve to lose the weight, even though there's way better ways. For example, you could just eat lean meat, avoid the fat and the carbs to gain weight, and you would at least not lose muscle mass by completely starving yourself, as in eating nothing, which is what fasting, aka starving, is about.
[video] 3:11 But I found over time, I just started to look weaker and I felt weaker in the gym. And since not fasting for extended periods of...
3:19 Yes, again, I don't say this to offend him, but he does look really bad. I understand that people age. He also has a gray beard, but that's not what I mean. His skin is melting. Like I said, he looks haggard. He's... collagen is also partly gone. He just doesn't look like a normal, healthy human being anymore, whereas back in the day he had this kind of almost glow. His channel name back then made some sense, whereas now it makes zero sense. He's not radiating any kind of health anymore. He more so looks like somebody who has survived severe starvation, which is exactly what he did to himself. He starved himself periodically, which of course still led to him looking like somebody who starved, as in failed in life. In nature, you would have to be a terrible hunter
4:17 Which is why nature would punish you by reducing your lifespan, seeing as whenever you starve, you also look a lot older, which means that you biologically age. Whereas these people believe that when they starve, they will prolong their life somehow. Here's the number one thing that these people don't understand. You will age less if you consume less calories, which you could only do if you eat foods which are high in micronutrients. The highest ones are raw animal organs and for a drink you would have to drink blood to eat as little as possible and to age as little as possible. But the problem with these people is that they don't understand it, and on top of that they also exercise, which also ages the body. And then they believe that they should consume less calories, which is why they starve themselves on top of working out. That can only lead to you aging even more biologically.
5:15 Whereas if you eat foods which are very high in micronutrients, such as liver and brain, you will need to eat very small portions compared to somebody who eats even a fatty steak, but especially compared to somebody who eats overcooked meat with rice. They will eat huge portions, they will spike their insulin and growth hormones like crazy, and growth hormones only age your body. Every growth hormone is there to age your body. Growth always means aging, which is why you need to keep your growth hormones such as insulin very very low the only way to do that is to eat predominantly raw animal organs drink blood don't exercise at all and eat when you want to eat but you will overall just eat a lot less you won't need to on purpose starve yourself because when you starve then you only age
[video] 6:07 Over time, I have since gained significant muscle mass and strength and just overall feel better. So I just wanted to share with you my perspective as well as some of the perspectives that are being corroborated in the peer-reviewed academic literature.
6:20 What did you gain the muscle mass for? You don't actually use it in everyday life, right? You use it for your next exercise session, but not as such.
[video] 6:31 I'm a scientist who looked through the world of muscle-centric medicine and research. We've had many experts on the podcast, Dr. Gabriel Lyon, John Baker, speak to the importance of muscle and muscle strength and preserving muscle mass and grip strength and overall strength
6:43 as a proxy of you know supporting healthspan but let's hear what the scientists say and i'll offer my perspective and we're going to talk about how some of the benefits linked with fasting i.e low glucose and low insulin are counterproductive towards muscle protein synthesis and i want to share with you some images from this particular study of course insulin is incredibly important for muscle protein synthesis that's why you don't want to work out or produce any insulin seeing as the more you work out the more you need to eat and the more you eat the more you age
[video] 7:11 But first, let's talk about what they say. They say, intermittent fasting has become a popular topic of interest in the health community as well as an avenue to improve health and body composition, primarily via calorie deficiency as well as enhanced lipolysis and fat oxidation, secondary to attenuated daily insulin response. However, this approach belies the established anti-catabolic effect of insulin on skeletal muscle. So remember, insulin helps to prevent muscle protein breakdown. So while it might seem favorable to drop insulin to the floor and glucose to the floor, that's going to be counterproductive towards maintaining muscle health because insulin has powerful anti-catabolic properties. We're going to talk more about that in a moment. The scientists say, more importantly, muscle protein synthesis, which is the primary regulated turnover variable in healthy humans, is stimulated by consumption of dietary amino acids, a process that is saturated at a moderate protein intake. They say, while intermittent fasting may represent an option for a variety of populations to promote fat loss and improve aspects of metabolic health, additional research needs to focus on the impact of meal frequency on the quantity and quality of muscle mass, which I think is really important. And I found when I was compressing my feeding window too much, I started to lose muscle. Now, many of the gurus that promote fasting say, this is impossible. You do not lose muscle mass when you intermittent fast.
8:07 I think the nuance here is that you definitely do. I know that a lot of people who do intermittent fasting believe that you will only lose fat, as in your body will eat up the fat only. But that's very illogical because then you would only be living off of fat. But of course, you need to use some protein also. It's absolutely ridiculous biologically to believe that you can somehow only consume fat and survive. There are studies done on this, but what I'm saying is that it's also biological common sense that you can't starve for 22 hours, let's say, and not consume any of your muscle. Only your fat? That's a fantasy.
[video] 8:44 Your starvation strategies.
[video] 9:12 So the scientists say from our current understanding of muscle protein metabolism and taking a muscle-centric view, we highlight the current acute evidence for intermittent fasting may represent a counterproductive strategy to optimize muscle mass and help with muscle quality. The studies that concurrently measure muscle protein metabolism and muscle mass and function will be instrumental in results.
9:26 Here's another huge problem with this community. Why do you need studies or researchers, scientists to tell you common sense? If you starve, you know biologically that you will of course not be able to even maintain muscle mass, let alone build new muscle mass, seeing as the best way that you can build muscle is to eat all day long and to spike your insulin all day long. You need growth hormones to maintain and to build muscle mass, seeing as your muscle mass is an indicator of how stressed your body is. You put your body under a lot of stress, which ages your body, then you need to eat a lot of food, which ages your body even more, but that's how you maintain and gain muscle mass. Otherwise, you will of course only eat up your muscle mass for energy. You need to either give your body energy or lose energy.
10:26 But the more energy you consume, the more you will age.
[video] 10:32 these issues. And so again, I think it's important to look at these different images here representing the rates of muscle protein breakdown and muscle protein synthesis when we are fasting. Let's look at figure one here and focus in on part A of figure one. When you are fasting for 18, 24 hours, glucose goes down, insulin goes down, and that's where purportedly all the benefits come from because we know that insulin helps promote fat gain and the birth of insulin would help enhance fatty acid lipolysis and breakdown. But what we're not focusing in on is muscle and muscle protein synthesis and preventing muscle protein breakdown, which you can see here. If you're just eating one meal per day in part B of figure one here, you are seeing an increase in insulin as well as muscle protein synthesis and a reduction of muscle protein breakdown. Now, if you look at a time restricted feeding protocol eating two meals a day, you do see two bolus bumps here and an increase in muscle protein synthesis and a reduction in breakdown. And if you look at sort of a standard American way of eating three or four spaced out meals per day, you see a net increase in muscle protein synthesis and a slowing of muscle protein breakdown. So this is where I'm going to infuse my personal opinions on this topic. I think for most people, if they have little amount of body fat, excessive fasting and eating one meal a day or compressing the feeding window to 18 or 20 hours might over time be counterproductive for maintaining lean muscle mass.
[video] 11:31 That's just my personal perspective based upon what I've observed with clients as well as myself.
11:34 Yes, if you have low body fat, then you have nothing to consume when you're starving. Again, in nature, this would mean that you're an absolute loser. You have starved to the point where you have no body fat left, which means that you have no energy anymore. and that would mean that you could possibly die seeing as you would have no energy to even hunt anymore of course you would have your family to help you and so on but let's say that you would have a whole family of bad hunters losers all of you would die again it's so ridiculous that he needs to look at these graphs to understand that if you have low body fat then if you're starving you're going to start consuming your muscle mass which is also going to make it harder for you to gain new muscle which everybody understands naturally. If somebody is starved, it's going to be hard for them. Whereas if you eat all day long, then of course it will be a lot easier. You don't need anybody to tell you this. Everybody knows this naturally.
[video] 12:32 So I think people who have a large amount of body fat and their primary focus from a health perspective is losing that body fat, I think prolonged fasting and compressing the feeding window to 18 to 20 hours a day makes sense, but we need to consider the importance of muscle tissue because muscle is really important for overall metabolic health as well as resting energy expenditure. The more muscle mass you have, the higher your resting metabolic rate will be. So if you're fasting excessively and focusing myopically on just burning body fat but aren't really paying attention to the preservation of muscle mass, I think over time that is not a sustainable strategy. If you're lethargic, then you should start exercising more.
13:27 No, then you should start eating more. You should rest because the more you exercise, the more lethargic you're going to be, seeing as you're going to be more tired, you're going to use up more energy. If you have no energy, you shouldn't use up your energy. Energy expenditure is the worst thing that you can do.
[video] 13:45 which would prevent muscle protein breakdown. So I think for a long time, and Gabrielle Lyon has spoken at length about this, she has a new book that's going to dive into this. We have viewed, and I'm guilty of promoting this, we have viewed the metabolic landscape through the lens of fat, fat being problematic, visceral fat is bad, fat is inflammatory, fat releases leptin, all the problems. But we also need to take into consideration the other aspect of metabolism, which is muscle, because muscle is very important. Muscle is where 80% of your post-menopause glucose is deposited within muscle. Muscle mass is inversely correlated with all cause mortality, strength.
14:13 Absolutely no proof for that.
[video] 14:14 We recently shared a video finding, this was a study, finding that low grip strength was linked with accelerated biologic aging.
14:21 Low grip strength is linked to accelerated biological aging. How? Low grip strength. And it was linked, as in there's an association. And as we know, association studies are anti-science, which means that there's absolutely no proof for what he's saying. There's obviously absolutely zero scientific proof linking muscle mass, grip strength to a longer life. I hope that it's needless to say, but who the hell knows? People are very brainwashed nowadays. As far as associations and correlations go, as in religious beliefs, yes, you can make up anything. For example, people who are very sick, who are on chemotherapy, who have... diabetes and who knows what will generally be a lot weaker, especially, of course, if they are on medication, not necessarily as such.
15:18 That's why you could find an association between these people and a shorter life, seeing as they will be overall sick, whereas the people who are not on the medication will be stronger, which is why they will generally be healthier. And if you're healthier, you're going to live longer. That's how these anti-scientific fake studies work.
[video] 15:38 Just look through the lens of fat and maximizing fat oxidation and fat loss without also considering muscle. And so I implore you to prioritize muscle and maybe your weight loss might be a little bit slower with this new framework that is focusing on muscle, preserving muscle, because over time, what we see is when people start to lose weight, particularly quickly, we see a loss of both body fat as well as muscle tissue. And I think that is problematic for long-term weight maintenance. And that's really been underscored in many different studies. You know, going back to the biggest loser study finding that the rest of metabolic rate after they lost the weight was significantly lower compared to baseline. And then they ended up regaining the weight, but have a slower metabolic rate, which is kind of productive. Why might that be? Because they lost a lot of weight quickly. A big chunk of that body weight loss was actually muscle tissue, which is compromising their overall long-term weight maintenance. So I think framing this and considering balancing fat loss with muscle mass preservation is the ideal strategy and tactic. And now we have studies and scientists are now looking at this, finding that excessive fasting could be counterproductive to the preservation of muscle tissue, which is so important for longevity, metabolic health, aging, and much more. So in conclusion, I have changed my strategy. I'm no longer doing 24 hour fast every week.
[video] 16:38 On Mondays, I usually just have two meals instead of my normal three meals. And I try to do a little bit more aerobic exercise, bike my daughter to school,
16:46 Or you could simply listen to yourself, as in your body, and eat when you want to eat, what you want to eat, as long as it's natural, instead of reading other people's opinions about what you should do. That's slavery! How do you not understand that no other human being can have an answer as to when you should eat? That's very severe mind control.
[video] 17:12 Move around a little bit more. Try to get into that calorie deficit, so to speak, and exercise in a low state as opposed to excessively fasting. Because I have just found that, again, I just feel better, I feel stronger, and there's something...
17:26 Yes, you feel better and stronger when you're not starving. That's common sense to every human being on earth who isn't brainwashed. The less you starve, the better you're going to feel. Hello, good morning.
[video] 17:42 If you're increasing your protein intake, even on days where you're just eating one meal a day or two meals a day, I think that makes a lot of sense from a nutritional perspective that if you are doing a lot of fasting, probably need to increase the protein because that will help to stimulate muscle protein synthesis and prevent the muscle protein breakdown.
17:58 This channel is basically a starvation cult.
[video] 18:02 So as always, friends, I'm grateful that you tuned all the way in. Thanks for hitting that like button, leaving a comment in the comment section below.
18:07 The main problem with this video and this channel overall is that even after all of these years, he still doesn't understand that human beings should simply eat when they want to eat. Nobody should be able to tell you when you should eat because if your body signals you, you are your body, so if you signal yourself, you just listen to your signals, when you want to eat, then that's exactly when you should eat. It's that simple. Yes, life is very simple. Nature is super simple. There's nothing complicated about it. You don't need any studies. You don't need to listen to any other people as to when you should eat. When you do that, you know that you're brainwashed. What else is it other than brainwashing? Your mind has been manipulated to the point where you feel like you can't listen to yourself anymore and you gotta listen to other people because they know better than you.
19:06 If you believe that somebody else knows better than you, especially when it comes to something such as eating, then you're done your mind is completely messed up and you really need to deprogram yourself this channel doesn't help anybody it's really a cult as i said because it has this cult mentality that you need to starve yourself for sure it just depends on when and he experimented with starvation for many years and now realized that starvation which every human being knows doesn't actually feel so good. You actually lose muscle mass, you don't have as much energy, your mood is worse, and so on. Because as I said, from a natural perspective, you're dying. When you starve, you die slowly, but that's what's happening, and it doesn't feel good to die. That's why you need to eat to feel good.
20:06 And as I said also, if you eat micronutrient-rich foods, then you won't have a problem because you will be absolutely satiated, but you will consume very little macronutrients, as in calories, which means that you will consume a lot less calories than most people, which means that you will age a lot less, but you will be actually a lot more nourished than most people, which is why eating naturally...
20:39 you will age a lot less and you will feel a lot better. That's exactly what every human being on earth wants. The bottom line is that the more you eat, The more you work out, the more you will age. Because if you work out, then you need to also eat more. And eating in general ages you. The less food you consume, and the only way to do that is not to exert yourself, not to stress yourself, and to eat raw animal organs, the longer you're going to live. Thanks for watching.