Dave Asprey and Dr. Peter Attia discuss fasting, muscle gain, and metabolic health. They examine scientific research on how fasting affects muscle mass and whether you can build strength while eating less.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. You talked about something else in your book that's cool about an anabolic rebound after fasting. Tell me what, tell me what you've written about there.
Yes, yes. And so, okay, here's. You've never met Henry, my co author, one of the smartest guys I've ever met. Just, he's just awesome. And so I called him one day and I'm describing something. I'm like, every time I get done with like a fast, whether it's a 24 hour fast or 72 hour fat, whatever, I feel like I have. It's like. It's like I went through puberty again for like a day, and I just put on like a pound of muscle. Like all of a sudden I look a little different or, you know, like I was already leaner, but all of a sudden it's like muscle came on, but none of the body fat or even hydration even came back. It's just, I feel like I'm gaining muscle, like at an abnormally high level. And so here's what I want you to do. And so the problem with the fasting studies is the fasting is generally looking for weight loss, fat loss, it's checking hydration, but it's also, they're looking at body composition. So if somebody gains muscle in an abnormal way, it'll be recorded, but it probably won't be in the abstract. So what I want you to do is, is read the discussion section in. I think we were referencing 20 different fasting studies at the time. This is why we were writing the book. Read the discussion section and look for any abnormal gain in muscle mass. Because, like, the researchers weren't looking for it. So they won't. It will not be the thrust of the study. The thrust of the study will only be about whether this is a good weight loss method or not. And so Henry says to me, he's like, that is like. Like the chances of me finding that are next to zero. Like, you're.
That's.
That's a really specific request. And I said, just humor me. Just. Just give me. And it was like. It was in the morning. I'm like, just give me the rest of the day. Give me seven hours. Just do this for seven hours. And he's like, all right. Calls me an hour later, and he's like, was this a trick? Did you read these already? And I said, no, no. I mean, I was actually in the middle of meetings. I was at meetings all day long. I was traveling. And I said, no. But tell me what you found. He goes, I found exactly what you were describing. And there's one specific study that just. They said, we can't explain why the fasting group gained 2.2 kilos of muscle. So 5 pounds of muscle in 24 weeks. And they did not work out at all. Neither did the control group. Of course. The control group lost a little bit of muscle because they were on caloric deficit, which is to be expected. And the fasting group gained 5 pounds of muscle doing nothing. It.
It seems like fasting might be good for you.
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, it's been a part of the bulletproof diet since 2011. The intermittent fasting.
It's like one of the first things you wrote about, even. Even when all you had was the bulletproof executive website.
Yeah, yeah.
You were talking about it back then.
Because it was one of those things where I. I was seeing those results where I was feeling better, my muscle composition, and I was getting, like, I had abs for the first time, even though I'd done Atkins and I tried Paleo and all that stuff, and I wasn't getting the results. It's like, just don't have breakfast already. It's not that hard. And I love it that, that fasting has enough studies now that, you know, it's very hard to argue with the fact that fasting has metabolic effects. People say it doesn't.
They're.
They're lost in Clownland, where I have a belief, if I'm wrong, I'm a bad person, Mommy won't love me, and they will never see new. New ideas because new ideas would make them bad people.
Yeah, there's. There's a whole crowd of nutrition scientists out there that almost have like, a. Like an orthodox, like, way of looking at things that actually is not scientific. It's not anything that isn't caloric restriction. Because caloric restriction has more studies. Well, caloric restriction was studied for longer.
