Re Kevin Bass twee reference…he says “On average, the elderly are energy restricted” to support his statement. And his scientific research to back this assertion? I completely disagree.
Indeed, resistance exercise is both a minimum AND fundamental requirement, independent of macronutrient intake.
Not sure what “type” of keto you did…animal fat, plant fat? I do plant fat…for me, avocados and nuts, and a bit of hard cheese, are very satiating.
I didn’t do keto for weight loss, but to be bathing in ketones for brain health…so I have an ulterior motive beyond weight loss.
Significant loss in muscle mass “over the last several months” might not be indicative of sarcopenia setting in, but perhaps some other signal.
Nevertheless, I would strongly suggest adding resistant exercise to your lifestyle as a response to muscle level/functional reduction. Adding protein would not be my first reaction.
I did plant fat, I did keto for the health and cardio benefits as I was big into jiu jitsu at the time ,but like I said I lost so much weight and felt very tired constantly to continue doing it.
I tried a pea protein powder for a while, had the opposite effect. I found it backed up my digestion, and abandoned it. The company did warn about “low bioavailability”.
It’s too bad, it’s amino acid profile was the SAME/BETTER than animal protein…from a plant.
Yes some people have a fatigue factor. It’s very important to watch your electrolytes with the excess water excretion. Some people don’t adapt well neurologically re how they feel, complicated pathways.
Do you have any advice on trying keto again. like I said i wanted to go back on it for the health benefits.
Yes, don’t.
Keto inhibits exercise performance ergo is sub optimal for health.
That’s the point, i do a significant amount of resistance exercise on 4 days each week.
It might just be the case that I’ve reached the limits of strength with the limited amount of protein that I have been consuming. (Maybe the recent creeping lower of the muscle percentage is just coincidental as my strength hasn’t declined). It could just be the case that to become stronger from here, maybe I now need that little bit more protein.
To build bigger, wouldn’t one need more building blocks?
Maybe, maybe not. You may just need more (healthy) calories, such as from resistant starch for instance. Those calories will be directed towards providing your body and brain with energy while allowing your ingested protein to be directed towards muscle growth.
By the way, I should point out, it isn’t a “significant loss” of muscle mass, just that the trend of gaining muscle mass ceased and then there was a tiny loss of muscle mass which hasn’t yet turned around.
I will experiment with a 10 - 20% increase for a month, then go back to current levels and see what happens.
Generally though I am of the opinion that it’s best not to eat too much protein but I’ve been doing resistance training for over 30 years now and I don’t want to start losing it.
How are you able to monitor these muscle changes…visually, DEXA scans, other?
You say you’ve been trending gaining muscle, and have been resistance training for over 30 years?
Can I ask your age…any other health changes?
What kind of protein quality is your diet and approx net protein g/kg/day?
Why not just increase your resistance exercise before adding protein as one pathway? As you say, you might not want to add animal protein (increase mTOR/IGF-1) unless you are in calorie/energy deficit. Excess protein dosen’t necessarily get converted into muscle…muscle can only take in so much, rest converted to stored glycogen/fat.
I’m 53.
Apart from doing the resistance training since my late teens, I wasn’t actively doing much else good for my health until Covid first hit which happened to coincide with my doc telling me I had high blood pressure and needed to see a consultant. (I’d also been living with acid reflux for 10 years at this stage).
Then the research started, massive dietary changes, added some aerobic fitness (luckily I was able to get hold of a squat rack and bench just before everyone sold out hence keeping up the resistance training during lock-downs).
The dietary changes saw my bp come back down into a relatively normal range, cured my acid reflux (last took Omeprazole 2 years ago) and saw my fat percentage fall from around 17% to just over 9% (lab measurement on sophisticated kit) whilst strength (measured by weight increase or rep increase at same weight before moving up) continued to increase.
As of Jan this year I dropped from the average over a week of roughly 1.5g/kg/day of protein to about 0.75g (noting the logic of your arguments MAC). Strength gains continued until early/mid Feb and nothing since. (Not really lost anything either - just maybe a very minor amount as slightly under PB’s)
My more frequent measurements come from the scales I have at home that indicate fat mass, muscle mass, bone mass etc. - highly inaccurate from an absolute figures standpoint, but should be fairly accurate from a direction of travel point of view. Here fat percentage has crept up a couple of points whilst muscle percentage has crept down a couple of points over the last 8 weeks. Overall weight unchanged.
The only other thing I will say is that I actually started craving more meat about a month ago.
Anyway, I’ve gone up to the 1kg now.
Maybe the metrics are all just a natural fluctuation with the seasons (never noticed before as I never measured anything), but I did have that distinct reduction in my diet hence it giving rise to the question and a feeling that I should go back up a bit for a couple of months and see what happens.
(only thing is, this won’t be the only change as I hope to start on the Rapa in a few weeks time).
Does not seem like a strong strength loss signal…you say “very minor”?
You reduced protein significantly (50%), but you think your fat went up a couple of points, but weight remained same. So probably traded protein for some other macronutrient types. Possible some noise in your measuring device, masking what you think is absolute muscle loss with relative loss?
Your protein desire signal, perhaps just a manifestation of hunger satiation?
I am in no way trained in this dietary/skeletal muscle/physiological science. I just know (the science) that you can significantly grow muscles through hypertrophy/hyperplasia with mechanical load without the need for additional protein. Not talking body builder type objective, just maximizing your musculature without additional stimulatory nutrition.
I can only say from my n=1 experiment, I went from very little muscle to significant build with just resistance exercise, even though I reduced my net daily protein intake.
Thank you MAC for the discussion and debate and the two follow-up articles.
You could be right on the protein desire signal just being a manifestation of hunger satiation - protein taking much longer to digest than anything else.
Maybe the problem is simply the fact that I did a 50% cut in one go and should have dialled it down a bit more gradually over the course of a month. Therefore going up a bit again before going back to the lower levels might be the answer.
Here’s a “very dense” link to satiety. Yes, energy dense foods like protein are indeed high on satiation index, no surprise.
1.5 g/day/kg protein (did you confirm this is animal based metric?) for just muscle maintenance seems very high, more so, if you subscribe to the “lower animal protein-lower mTOR/IGF-1” associations with longevity.
Run your experiment, see how it goes, trying to control for this variable only.
It wasn’t about taking 1.5g for muscle maintenance, I just really liked meat (and probably explains why I never got fat due to the satiety of it). It was only near the end of last year I realised that such a high amount was probably not a good idea from a longevity point of view!
‘Strong convictions loosely held…’
I have continued my reading based on this paper and now plan to drastically decrease meat consumption.
An old thread this one but I’m interested to hear whether anyone switching from whey to pea protein has seen an improvement in biomarkers?
The low methionine content seems promising in theory?
It’s becoming contagious. Blagosklonny seems to be really into the animal proteins as well. Not really seeing it in regards to longevity. All long lived cultures have diets low in animal proteins. Not absent, but low.