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.

I plan to write an article to go along with this cartoon, but I don't have the time at present... so... sometime in the future I will revisit this topic and post a Part 2.

22 years ago at age 47, weighing 271 lbs. at a height of 5'0",  I had an RNY gastric bypass, open surgery, with NO removal of any intestine, which means that every calorie I eat is still digested, and still counts. 

The doctor's recommendation for post-surgery eating was simple. "Eat three meals a day of whatever food you want, but make half of each meal protein; avoid fried foods and sweets; and have no carbonated beverages."

My surgery was done when the procedure was still considered experimental.  At the time, it was performed here in California by only a few doctors. To get surgery, people had to travel to San Diego, stay in the hospital 2 or 3 days, then stay at a local hotel for an additional 10 post-surgery days before being released to return back home.  Follow-up care was received once a month during the surgeon's visit to one of the nearby temporary clinics located in various cities throughout California.  About five years later,  surgeons all over California began setting up specialized practices for weight-loss surgery, and coordinated with nutritionists who made specific post-surgery diet recommendations like protein shakes etc. That happened several years before laser surgery became common.

The first year after surgery my body would tolerate very little food.  Eating more than one-quarter to one-half cup of food at a time made me feel uncomfortably stuffed like after Thanksgiving dinner.  

I frequently experienced Dumping syndrome, which is caused by food passing too quickly into the small intestine. This caused immediate symptoms of flushing, weakness, fatigue, dizziness, and an intense desire to lie down. Severe episodes include feelings of nausea, and even stomach cramps.

I experienced severe dumping symptoms after just a swallow or two of fruit juice; or one or two bites of fried-or-greasy food; or a bite or two of any sweet like cookies, cake, pie, candy. I also became lactose intolerant. Milk made me feel ill, and even the tiniest bit of ice cream, with it's combination of milk and sugar, immediately made me lie-down-with-dry-heaves-ill.

Therefore, due to my weight-loss surgery, that entire first year my food intake was somewhere between 200 to 600 calories a day, which caused my weight to drop from 271 down to 161 lbs .... without dieting. This happened while I ate however much I could, of whatever food my body would tolerate.  The reason I did not binge, cheat, or quit, even when my weight-loss was slower than I believed I deserved, was because it was physically impossible for me to do so. 

Most people think that weight loss after WLS always happens rapidly.  That immense amounts of weight fall off everyone's body every week, 5-10-15 pounds, week-after-week, like on the Biggest Loser tv show.. only maybe even faster. 

However, Real Life AFTER a Gastric Bypass Surgery, works just like Real Life BEFORE a Gastric Bypass Surgery.  Even though after a RNY surgery Everyone has a smaller stomach, and Everyone eats just a small amount, the rate of weight-loss continues to be an individual matter.  Some people's bodies simply drop weight faster than other people's bodies, and surgery doesn't change that fact. 

Below is a graph of my own individual weight-loss results. This is what happened to MY body during the 64 weeks after a RNY gastric bypass surgery.  ...

A farmer wants the donkey to take the load and travel.
But, the donkey does not move.
He hits the donkey with a stick, but it still won’t move.
So, he ties a carrot to the stick  and holds it in front of the donkey, just out of reach.
The donkey wants to eat the carrot and moves forward.
At the same time, the carrot also moves by the same distance.
The donkey cannot eat the carrot, till the farmer reaches his destination.
 

Here is the Carrot used in Intermittent fasting.

“Just get through today, and tomorrow you can eat what you want.”

Unfortunately it isn’t the truth … unless what you WANT tomorrow is merely what a naturally thin person consistently eats in order to maintain a normal weight.

Successful self-discipline requires plenty of carrot as well as stick.
The stick without the carrot can be used for punishment, but as a reward that stick is ineffective.

Success with intermittent fasting ... (or even with other diets involving intermittment times of calorie restriction – such as: restricted weekdays with unrestricted weekends) ... requires the low-calorie eating days to be balanced together with days of eating at maintenance calorie level … in other words, the restrictive days need to occur alongside the kind of “healthy” moderate diet that is followed by the naturally thin.

This requirement actually makes intermittent fasting more challenging than many other diets, and, for all but the most dedicated, even more unappealing and more impossible to follow.

If I WANTED only “normal” amounts of “healthy foods”, being fat would never have been a problem for me, and a Binge/Fast eating pattern rarely proves to be an effective weight-loss strategy.

The promise of days of unlimited, unrestricted eating is what lures one to the diet, but for most people this is really only a stick with the false promise of a carrot. Here’s a statement by one of the people who have found Intermittent Fasting a personal success:

“What I found was that my appetite gradually changed as I adapted to fasting and I no longer needed to binge-eat on up days. I wasn't a saint exactly but I was more restrained and weight-loss was steady and noticeable.”

People who succeed at non-fasting, but still intermittently restricted diets, such as the No S Diet, ..(which has restricted eating for 5 days, and unrestricted eating for 2 days)...  make similar claims. They indicate that after time, maybe 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, etc… their weekday restrained eating habits bleed over onto weekends, and they no longer wish to overeat even though the diet “allows” them to do so.

Allegedly … eventually, …. the fat person’s body and appetitive will adapt, and the formerly fat person will naturally choose to eat in a way that will maintain a “normal” person&r...