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07.10.2024

Maintain your muscle mass during intermittent fasting | 4 strategies

If you want to lose weight by intermittent fasting, you will prevent your muscle mass from breaking down if you also reduce calorie intake, continue intermittent fasting for a longer time, work out with weights and do not make your eating window too narrow. This is evident from a meta-study that Chinese kinesiologists published in Nutrients.

Study
Researchers from Beijing Sport University analyzed 20 trials in which researchers had subjects lose weight by shortening the time period in the 24-hour period in which they were allowed to eat.

The researchers aggregated the results and reanalyzed them.

Results
Intermittent fasting reduces fat mass. The figure below shows this.

Click on the figures below for a larger version.

However, intermittent fasting was also at the expense of lean mass - read: muscle mass. You can see this in the figure above. The negative effect is almost as great as you find in comparable studies in which subjects lose weight with a traditional low-calorie diet.

When the researchers broke down their data, they found 4 ways you can protect muscle mass during intermittent fasting. We list them briefly.

#1 Only when the eating window opened for only 6-8 hours per day did lean body mass decrease. When the eating window was reduced to 10-12 hours per day, lean body mass was preserved.

#2 The longer you practice intermittent fasting, the better the body is able to protect muscle mass. The researchers found a decrease in muscle mass in trials where the subjects fasted part-time for less than 40 weeks. In trials lasting 40 weeks or longer, muscle mass was preserved.

Apparently the body needs time to learn how to retain muscle mass during fasting periods, the researchers speculate.

#3 In trials in which the subjects also did strength training - whether or not in combination with cardio training - muscle mass did not decrease. The researchers suspect that the protective effect of strength training becomes even greater in combination with an increase in protein intake.

#4 Muscle mass also remained intact when the subjects combined intermittent fasting with old-fashioned caloric restriction. Strange, but familiar to the regular readers of this free web magazine.

Health effects
The researchers also looked at the cholesterol balance of the test subjects. They found no major effects, but did note that intermittent fasting increased LDL levels by 2.70 mg/dL.

Conclusion
"This work provides moderate to high amounts of evidence that time-restricted eating is a promising dietary strategy for fat loss", the researchers summarize. "Although it may potentially reduce lean mass and increase LDL, these effects do not pose significant safety concerns."

Source:
Nutrients 2024;16(19):3390.

More:
Combining caloric restriction and part-time fasting aligned to circadian rhythm extends lifespan by 35 percent 16.04.2023
L-Serine supplementation may make the yo-yo effect a thing of the past 08.05.2022
Cardio on an empty stomach just as pleasant as after breakfast 01.12.2019
Caloric restriction + intermittent fasting = superior weight loss results 14.01.2019

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Intermittent Fasting
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