How to preserve muscle while trying to lose body fat | Peter Attia and Luc van Loon

let's talk a little bit about eating less because again people who listen to this podcast are very familiar with the way I think about this but I'll I'll just sort of explain it to you very very quickly um I sort of break it down into three strategies to go about eating less so strategy one is a very deliberate strategy called caloric restriction so it's it's the only way that you directly go about eating less which is you know clearly what bodybuilders do where they're tracking every macronutrient every calorie they are counting them and they are shrinking that volume of calories lower and lower and lower to reach an energy imbalance that is sufficient for the amount of fat loss that they're trying to produce again you could argue that this is the most flexible way to go about weight loss because it is agnostic to when you eat or what the actual constitutive you know elements are of the of the diet um it's really just paying attention to the energy balance or imbalance the second way that you can go about doing this is indirectly through dietary restriction right so you just you talked about a vegan diet hey you're taking a lot of things out of the diet um and many of them are energy dense so there's a very good chance you're going to lose weight just on the basis of the Restriction similarly with a ketogenic diet or something of that nature you're going to really generally eat a lot less and it's that uh effect of the diet on perhaps your appetite and food choices that's going to result in lower energy intake and therefore for energy imbalance the third technique also indirect is time restriction uh which people call intermittent fasting here you're going to make a larger and larger window of non-eating and by extension a smaller and smaller window of eating that eventually results in a caloric deficit now we have historically meaning in our practice cautioned people about excessive use of time restriction if people fit a certain demographic and that is you are obviously overnourished which is our way of describing you have excess adiposity you have high visceral fat all of these things you're metabolically unhealthy so you're overnourished we need to make you less nourished but if you're also under muscled I get very worried about excessive time restriction because with calorie restriction comes protein restriction and with protein restriction comes not just a reduction in Mass which on some level is the goal but a disproportionate loss of lean mass and so I want to pause there does this resonate with you the all of these the sort of tradeoffs yeah yes I mean uh no I ful fully agree on that the the third one is of course the Tim restricted feeding or intermittent fasting um it works for people but it doesn't work in a scientific setting because now there's a lot of studies coming out we've also done a study in that that that uh in that that area so if you um standardize the nutrition so the caloric content of the diet you actually see exactly the same uh fat loss or weight loss with the intermittent or the time restricted feeding versus the same feeding but then x% of less caloric intake doesn't make any difference yeah so let's just make sure but let's just make sure people understand what you just said and I want to make sure I understand what you just said said you're saying that if you normalize for calories across the course of the day versus in a shrunk window if it's the same number of calories there's no weight loss exactly there's no not less weight loss so if you have 25% energy restriction independent of the time frame you're going to lose the same the same the same the same amount of body mass or fat mass now for me uh intermittent feeding or Tim restricted feeding works because I go to the university spend most of my day here um have no time to eat running back and forth and then I come home I sit behind a computer doing all my emails and revisions of manuscripts and I start eating way too much and also crap food so I think more than 70% of my food intake energy intake is between 7 or 8 and 12:00 at night if I do Tim restricted feeding from say 10: to 6 I will lose weight because I wouldn't have time to eat that amount of C calories in that time frame and that's good for a lot of people because they actually change their homeostasis and for a few weeks they lose a lot of uh lose a lot of fat mass and then they start eating differently and then they gain weight again so sometimes it's easy to change your routine and your bad nutritional nutritional habits but it the the time of feeding is not a Metabolic Effect to lose more weight yeah so what we like to do to try to get around the effect of people losing too much lean mass and again I find this to be particularly important in women who want to lose weight using a time-restricted feeding approach but who you know frankly already have an almi or an ffmi that's in the bottom 20% uh just for folks listening these are two different ways that we measure and quantify lean mass on people so this is people that are coming in with they're under muscled as we describe them um we will say look if you want to eat between you know 2:00 p.m. and 700 p.m. that's your feeding window you have a 5H hour window to eat so 19 hours of not eating 5 hours of eating we find that women can't again I say this because it is mostly women that experience this but I think it could be true for anybody it's very difficult to consume your total amount of protein if we're trying to get you to 1.6 or 1.8 G per kilogram in a 5H hour period furthermore you have that 19-hour window where you're missing one of the major inputs to muscle protein synthesis so a workaround is hey during that period of time you're going to have two shakes that are virtually no calories but are going to give you 50 gram of protein a 25 you know you're going to have a 25 gr whey protein uh shake you know again just mixed with water at 8:00 in the morning and again at 11:00 in the morning and then at 2:00 you're going to eat a meal and at 7:00 you're going to eat a meal so you're going to get your total amount of protein and yeah you've sort of cheated on your time-restricted feeding because you've had 200 calories outside of it but let's be honest the purpose of this is caloric restriction that 200 is relatively small compared to what you would have consumed throughout the day so again long question I apologize but it's as much for the listener as it is for you would you take that approach as a better way to tackle two simultaneous goals lose fat Mass preserve or gain lean mass simultaneously that would be the main goal and I would completely agree but I I I miss one factor and I I'm 100% uh sure that you actually added the effect of course the training effect yes the resistance training so if you if even if you have I mean old studies show that if you have a caloric restriction you lose you lose fat-free Mass you lose muscle Mass but if you do one two twice a week a resistance training session even in a caloric deficit you don't lose muscle mass so you can prevent the muscle mass with simply two sessions of resistance type exercise a week preferably more but of course that's that's the minimal yeah so besides that protein it's the exercise that makes you respond way more to the same or less amount of protein that you ingest and in the scenario I described where you're gonna have that person have a protein shake at 8:00 in the morning and you know 11:00 in the morning and then eat two meals between say 2 and 7 um it's probably not that important where the training session goes within that day at this point I mean I think for many people it's just convenient to do the exercise in the morning um and and I agree of course that that's you know that's half the battle is you have to have the training stimulus to produce the effect I mean that's why people always ask us like should we ingest the protein immediately after or an hour after excite doesn't make a difference no not really because every meal following your training session will have a greater response and so also before the next session there will again three meals or four meals so it's a continuous consistent effect of training to make you respond better to the same amount of protein and also in the hospital this is essential simply feeding people more protein because the deficient and losing muscle is not the only solution ution actually if you make them a little bit more active between meals every meal has more effect if we do a little bit of exercise more of the meal will actually be converted to muscle so using that intrinsic label protein I always have three uh different uh settings in my lectures the first one is this intrinsically protein shows you beyond any uh discussion you are what you eat in fact you are what you just ate now funny enough if you eat that same protein after you've done a little exercise more of that protein is converted to muscle so if you're physically active you are more of what you just ate now every athlete is using this and every coach knows this but we hardly use it in medical care and so it gets worse because then you come to the third side part of the of the of a lecture where I show you that with physical inactivity you become anabolically resistant so if you become physically less active you are less of what you just ate now the problem is when you become sick or ill or you get surgery you have two issues you exercise less or you be become less Physically Active but you also eat less so it's a double Wy downwards and that's what makes us so susceptible and and and vulnerable uh to a short period of inactivity or sickness n [Music]

Channel: Peter Attia MD

Views: 84,182

Keywords: Peter Attia MD, Dr. Peter Attia, Early Medical, The Drive Podcast, The Drive, Longevity, Zone 2, preserve muscle

Id: hZD8GEjMc9s

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2024