Hello, I started doing 24 hours fast once a week some time ago, and I wanted to ask if somehow I can start losing muscle while I’m fasting, I read that people here go for 3 days fasts and see no muscle loss, but also everybody is different, so I wanted to ask if any of you have experience with this. I am 6ft1 172 lbs with really low body fat so I mainly do dry fasting for health purposes.
Even if you did lose muscle from fasting, (which I’m not sure because I have a lot of fat but have done several fasts over the past 4 years and never noticed any muscle changes) what drastic changes are you expecting from one day of fasting?
24 hours? No, I doubt it. That’s nothing in the grand scheme of things, not even usually enough time to use up all the stored sugar in the body. I have gone up to 3 days dry and did a 10 day wet fast last December, with probably (25) 36-48 hour fasts since then. Over time I am getting stronger with more muscle definition, not less. The human growth hormone spikes during fasts which is protective over muscles. Our body wants to preserve our muscles since that is how we are able to hunt for food.
Two main factors that seem to have a large impact on possible muscle breakdown is our diet in between fasts and lack of any movement during a fast. I am usually very careful with my diet, eating very nutrient dense, quality food in between my fasts. Grass fed beef, pasture raised eggs, organic vegetables, raw milk from local farms. In my opinion, this is just as important as the fasting itself. Going back to McDonald’s after fasting is like using cheap, molded wood to repair a house after a hurricane. So solid nutrition in between the fasts is what helps keep you strong, or even makes you stronger. Reward the body for surviving the fast!
The other factor being movement. If you are curled up in bed for 20 hours a day during the fast, that could encourage more muscle breakdown. If the point of using fasting is to tap into ancient health benefits, it makes sense to do what our ancestors did, which wasn’t laying around when fasting. Stay moving, at least taking walks, using your muscles at least a little (although I don’t do any crazy weight training during a long fast). The man who fasted for a month suspended inside a glass box did lose muscle mass, but he wasn’t moving at all the entire time.
The human body can go long periods without any food and shorter periods without any water. Regarding a 24-hour dry fast, I don’t imagine you’re going to lose any muscle, because your body is still relying on what’s in your digestive tract.
From my experience (and what I’ve heard), the body maintains muscle much better on a dry fast than a water fast. After around 3 days, your body starts to realize what is happening due to lack of food and water and burns through fat and very little muscle. On a water fast, this isn’t as intense and you are more likely to lose muscle. However, if you were to do let’s say a 10-day water fast and were fairly active and did very light exercise/walking each day and carried about your normal routine, you’d probably lose very little to no muscle.
I recently did a 10.5 day dry fast followed by a 25 day water fast and lost lots of muscle. So it also depends on the length of your fast. But from days 30-35 I was lying down most of the time.