so today we're gonna talk about the fasting influence over growth hormone
now why is that important because as you age growth hormone decreases more and
more and more and more to the point where your and your 60s or 70s or 80s
and there's not much left and the problem with that is that it affects
your proteins your skin so your skin starts looking older your joints fall
apart you lose muscle mass you lose your hair but other than that you're doing
good growth hormone helps to preserve proteins that help you look youthful it
actually helps with body fat so it's one of the main fat burning hormones it also
helps in building lean muscle mass thus the word growth hormone and it preserves
muscles so it prevents the loss of muscle it also is involved with bone
density making sure your bones are dense and strong and collagen which is
involved in a lot of different things including your skin so without collagen
your skin can look old very quickly growth hormone peaks at puberty and
every year it decreases it spikes when you're sleeping it's suppressed when
you're eating especially carbohydrates you can spike growth hormone with
high-intensity interval training you can also suppress growth hormone with stress
but you can dramatically increase growth hormone through fasting I'm gonna put
some links down below referencing some of the studies but it's been shown that
in a two day fast you can potentially increase growth hormone by 200% a three
day fast up to 300% and in one report with a seven day fast there was a spike
with growth hormone by 1250% fasting will help you with all of these
factors right here especially preserving muscle because there's this thought that
if I stop eating I'm going to lose my muscle mass that is not gonna happen for
a period of time if you're starving and you tap down all your fat yeah then
there's gonna be a problem because your body's gonna go after muscle but if you
have fat to be tapped into your body won't necessarily go after your
protein for fuel and this is a survival thing that's been going on for a very
very long time especially way back when we had to hunt for our food and we
didn't have food available 24/7 so if you can imagine if our bodies didn't
adapt to starvation we would have died off a long time ago and there's a lot of
genetic factors and hormone pathways that will preserve your muscle when you
don't eat in fact when you eat too much or too frequent you develop insulin
resistance problem you become a diabetic and you start losing your muscle mass
that way but when you stop eating there's all sorts of things to protect
you it was found that short-term fasting
causes four times better muscle preservation than being on a low-calorie
diet that's fascinating I'll put that link down below
fasting inhibits protein breakdown the word for that is catabolism fasting also
supports your brain and your nervous system now you might be thinking I need
to consume some type of maybe branched chain amino acids or some type of
protein shake before I workout or during a fast not necessarily the dietary
recommendations for protein should be between 0.6 to 0.8 grams of protein per
pound of body weight per meal so just multiply your weight in pounds by 0.6 or
by 0.8 and come up with the amount of protein and grams that you need to
consume per meal what determines if it's going to be 0.6 or 0.8 has to do with
how big you are how fast your metabolism is if you are younger and you have a
fast metabolism go with this right here if you are older you're smaller and you
have a slower metabolism you can use this one right here or just use 0.7
if you're unsure and that will give you a rough estimate of how much protein you
actually need so to preserve and retain muscle mass if you're fasting you don't
need to be constantly consuming massive amounts of protein you need sufficient
protein you also don't want to eat too frequently
you want to do fasting you want to do exercise especially high-intensity
interval training you want to avoid carbs you want to get more sleep
you want to try to keep your stress as low as possible there you have it if you
want more information about growth hormone I put a link right here