Intermittent Fasting, Muscle Loss & Growth Hormone – Dr. Berg

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hey guys Dr Burg here in this video we’re going to talk about muscle loss and intermittent fasting now a lot of times people ask me well I’m a little concerned about doing intermittent fasting whether it’s even eating two meals a day with no snacks or three meals a day without snacks they’re concerned they’re going to lose their muscle mass or they want to work out and build muscle mass and so when I tell them to lower the amount of protein they kind of freak out sometimes because they think oh my gosh I’m going to become atrophied well let’s just kind of dive deeper into really what happens there’s there’s two types of hormones hormones that are uh catabolic which means they break things down okay and the main catabolic hormone is cortisol it’s very destructive so even when you work out and you break your muscles down or you go through a major stress and break your muscles down um the hormone responsible for that is called cortisol but then the body is supposed to recover when you’re sleeping through opposite hormones which are more anabolic so the anabolic hormones bu build things up and that’s what people want they want to build muscle mass they want to uh retain their muscles they want to get lean body mass well growth hormone is the main hormone that does that it does several things it’s the main fat burner it uh it it creates protein growth it builds lean body mass it’s anti-aging um so in gens physiology my friendly book here um textbook I want to show you something on page 888 it says right here growth hormone also mobilizes large quantities of free fatty acids from the atopos tissue so basically it dissolves fat and these in turn are used to supply most of the energy for the body cells thus acting as a potent protein spare okay so what does that mean protein spare it means that it spares protein it protects the loss of protein so if you have enough growth hormone in your body you will not get muscle loss all right so I’m going to show you four ways to improve this but typically it would take you four days of fasting before your body even thought about breaking down muscles so typically you don’t have to worry about it but let’s just take one step further and make sure that you’re doing it correctly number one fasting Believe It or Not triggers growth hormone so intermittent fasting helps you uh retain the protein and it helps you burn fat so it’s not going to make things worse number two hypoglycemia so when you drop hypo means below sugar like low sugar so when you keep your sugars really really low your body will trigger increased amounts of growth hormone so again to salvage the protein in the body so if you’re trying to get lean body mass or you’re trying to prevent atrophy and you’re eating sugar that’s going to be a problem okay and or you’re eating all through the day it’s grazing or snacking bad idea uh intense exercise also is a potent trigger for a growth hormone but the key is making sure that you’re recovering as well because the number four is sleep so if you’re actually not sleeping and you’re exercising intensely you can create a problem with growth hormone but if you’re sleeping good and you work out correctly without overtraining you can trigger growth hormone and actually protect your muscles and the other proteins in your body now on the flip side cortisol the stress hormone can block growth hormone so what triggers cortisol stress stress stress lack of sleep sugar will do it uh surgery trauma all that stuff so basically if you keep your stress down intense exercise intermittent fasting interval training sleep keep your sugars out of the diet you’re going to be in good shape so nothing to worry about so I just wanted to kind of brief few on intermittent fasting you don’t have to worry about muscle loss uh but this is how you actually retain and uh protect you against atrophy I’ll see you in the next video