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"Fasting Eats Your Muscle" Is the Biggest Myth in Fitness · Connor with Honor: AI, Real Estate and Real Life

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lie floating around the fitness space that's keeping people fat.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it sounds so scientific that most people believe it without question.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the lie.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: If you start eating for more than a day or two, stop eating for more than a day or two.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Your body starts eating its own muscle.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Your muscle dissolves.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: You get weaker.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: You lose everything that you've built.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it's almost entirely wrong.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Let me explain why.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Your body is not stupid.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't survive thousands of years of evolution by burning its own engine for fuel every time food got scarce.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: If that's how human physiology worked, we would have gone extinct before we even figured out agriculture.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: The human body has a fuel hierarchy and it follows it in a very specific order.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: First, it burns through the glycogen.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's the sugar stored in our muscle and liver.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Twenty-four hours worth.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe a little less if we've been eating a lot of carbs because we burn through those stores faster.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Once glycogen is depleted, the body shifts to fat oxidation.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: It starts pulling triglycerides out of fat cells, breaking them down into free fatty acids, glycerol, and burning through those for energy.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is the metabolic switch.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: That is where fat loss actually starts.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part nobody talks about.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: The body also starts producing ketone bodies, beta-hydroxybutyrate, acetoacetate, and acetone.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: These ketones cross the blood vein barrier and fuel the brain directly.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: The brain can run on about 75% ketones and 25% glucose.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the glucose it still needs, the liver makes it through a process called gluconeogenesis.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: It converts glycerol from fat breakdown and certain amino acids into glucose.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now here's the muscle loss myth where that comes from.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: People here gluconeogenesis use amino acids and they panic.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Amino acids, so they come from protein.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Protein is muscle.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: So fasting must be eating muscle, but that's not what's happening at all.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: The body preferentially uses circulating amino acids and recycle cellular components, not skeletal muscle tissue.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: This there's a process called autophagy.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: It wraps up significantly between 24 and 72 hours of fasting.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Autophagy is a body's cleanup crew.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: It breaks down damaged, dysfunctional, and unnecessary cellular components and recycles them.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Old proteins, misfolded proteins, damaged organelles.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: The body isn't stupid.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't go to the bicep and start stripping out functional muscle fiber.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: It goes to the junk pile, the damaged cells, the precancerous cells, the cellular debris that's been accumulating for years.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: It eats the garbage before it touches the good stuff.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Jason Fung has written extensively about this.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Studies on alternate day fasting and extended fasting show that lean mass is largely preserved while fat mass decreases.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: A 2016 study in the Journal of Transitional Medicine found that subject who fasted intermittently lost significantly more fat while retaining more muscle than subject on a standard caloric restriction diet.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because caloric restriction keeps insulin elevated.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: The body in a constant low-grade fed state.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: The body never fully switches to fat burning when you restrict calories, so it compromises.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Burns a little fat, a little muscle, a little of everything.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Fasting does something different.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: It drops insulin to baseline.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: And when insulin is low, the body gets a clear signal.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Burn fat, not muscle, fat.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Growth hormone actually increases during fasting.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Some studies show a five-fold increase in growth hormone during extended fasts.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Growth hormone is muscle protective.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: It tells the body to preserve lead muscle and mobilize fat stores.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: So the hormonal environment during a fast is actually more muscle protective than a standard caloric deficit.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Think about that.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: The one thing everyone says destroys muscle actually creates a hormonal environment that protects it better than the thing everybody says is safe.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, does this mean you can fast for 60 days and come out looking like a bodybuilder?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: At some point, the body fat gets so low, the body's gonna start tapping at a muscle because that's what's left.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then after that, organ, and then after that, brain.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: But we're talking about people who are already lean.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Single digit body fat percentage lean, on stage bodybuilding lean.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing left there to burn.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: For somebody carrying a significant amount of body fat, and I'm carrying a snippet about body fat, the body has plenty of fuel, thousands of calories stored in my fat.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's not going to go to the muscle where there's a warehouse when there's a warehouse full of fat sitting right there.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now let me talk about insulin because it's the key most people missed.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Insulin is a storage hormone.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: When insulin is elevated, the body is in storage mode.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's putting fuel away, burning fat reserves.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not burning anything every time we eat, insulin goes up every single time.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Even protein raises insulin.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Even healthy food raises insulin.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: The only way to get insulin truly low is to stop eating.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Period.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: No amount of clean eating gets insulin as low as not eating at all.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And when insulin drops, something else happens.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: The body becomes insulin sensitive again.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: The receptors that have been beaten down by constant insulin exposure start to recover.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: They start responding normally, which means when we do eat again, the body handles the food a lot better.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Less gets stored as fat.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: More gets used as fuel.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: The system ends up doing a reset.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: This is why extending fasting, extended fasting is not just about weight loss, it's about metabolic repair.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's about giving the body a chance to clean house, reset its hormone signaling, and start operating the way it was designed to.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now the fitness industry doesn't want us to know this because you can't sell a meal plan to somebody who's not eating.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: You can't sell a supplement to somebody who's fasting.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: You can't sell a protein shake to somebody whose growth hormone is already elevated.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: The entire supplement industry collapses if people figure out that the most powerful metabolic tool available is free.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: It costs nothing.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: It requires no equipment, no gym membership, no coach, no app.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Just stop eating.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And let the body do what hundreds of thousands of years of life on this planet designed it to do.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Burn the stored fuel, clean the damaged cells, reset the hormones, and protect the muscle.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm not a doctor.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not giving medical advice.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a food addict who's done the research because my life depends on it.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the science says the thing everybody is afraid of is actually the thing that works and could save your life.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: If you're carrying extra weight because somebody tells you your fasting will eat your muscle, ask them one question.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Why would the body burn its own engine when the fuel tank is full of fat right there?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: They won't have a good answer because there isn't one.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Lastaddiction.com.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Connor.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you in the next one.