Form Factor Nutrition – Part Two

I am, of course, indebted to those who came before me. A big thank you goes out to Alan Aragon, Martin Berkhan, and Lyle McDonald for their help in crafting this article series.

Researching Reduced Meal Frequency

Any nutritional protocol that requires a reduction in meal frequency invokes its own unique set of costs and benefits. Prolonging the time your body stays in the post-fed or fasting state raises the hunger ceiling, so to speak, and would appear to be a damning blow against nutritional methodologies that utilize fasting protocols – who wants to be hungrier more often, right? Well, our bodies and brains being what they are, things aren’t quite that simple. Let’s begin with a discussion of meal frequency and its effect on appetite.

Appetite

With regard to appetite, very low calorie diets (VLCDs) negate the hunger response regardless of the populations being investigated, hence the ability of anorexics to survive for years on starvation diets. VLCDs are quantified as diets providing less than 800 calories per day. Above this 800 or so calorie threshold hunger signals return and the expected daily ebb and flow of hunger resumes. Researchers compared a control group fed three meals per day to a group fed one meal. The former group experienced less hunger throughout the day, and in an ad libidum test meal following the fasting phase, the one meal group consumed on average 26.5% more than the three meal-a-day group. Shaky ground to start on, for sure, but the likelihood of finding a diet that promotes a one meal-a-day protocol is pretty much nil, thus not a concern for our purposes herein.

There exists a hierarchy of hunger response, fasting serving as the maximal acute deficit and thereby eliciting the most hunger. As a dieting strategy, the research is pretty clear – the more aggressive alternate-day fasting programs (24 hours or more without food) are poor diet strategies. The alternation between feast and famine can be marred by adverse subjective states including irritability, poor concentration, and lethargy. Moreover, the problem of elevated hunger during the fasting phase could lead dieters to quickly over-eat their daily caloric allotment once given access to food. Such aggressive swings in energy balance may expedite latent tendencies that encourage the development of an eating disorder.

However, to look at this research and hastily proclaim that fewer meals prove commensurate with problems of adherence, excessive discomfort, and psychological disturbance is to ignore a middle ground that carries real benefit.

Researchers over the past few decades have continued to refine classification systems for human body types, physical generalizations indicative of genetic propensities in body shape. Everyone has a friend who drinks herself silly over the weekend, gorging on Italian gelato and pan-Asian cuisine, yet stays rail thin and draws the ire of her associates. Then there is the guy who, despite five days a week in the gym and a strict low-carbohydrate diet, still bears that extra pudge around the mid-section. Genetics explain this difference.

The fitness world appropriated a misguided behavioral theory concerning the relationship between body type and personality. Regardless, the body type classifications of ectomorph, endomorph, and mesomorph have persisted even if their psychological associations have disappeared. In our first example, a person with a general propensity toward leanness is known as an ectomorph. The latter, a person with a propensity toward corpulence, is known as an endomorph. The holy grail, of course, is the mesomorph. Most professional athletes fit into the mesomorphic category. These are the few gifted individuals predisposed to carry greater amounts of muscle and less fat than the average person.

In overfeeding studies, ectomorphic somatotypes have the tendency to fidget or otherwise unconsciously match an increase in caloric intake with a concurrent increase in caloric expenditure. The individual differences in response to overfeeding are striking. In studies, certain test subjects easily match and at times exceed the additional caloric input, meaning there are cases where additional food actually puts these ectomorphic individuals into am unconscious and unintended caloric deficit. Conversely, other subjects who exhibit classic endomorphic characteristics see no increase in basal metabolic rate. In one study, a participant actually had their BMR decrease in response to overfeeding.

These adaptations tend to be genetic and inalterable. The easy answer would seem to be that endomorphs need to exercise more, as so many in the fitness community suggest. However, this is to ignore the potential increase in appetite exercise may induce. Those of the endomorphic somatotype appear to have difficultly matching their caloric intake with their caloric expenditure. Some of the available research links habitual overeating with poor dopamine receptivity. Researchers have theorized that obese individuals fail to receive the same reward ectomorphs do at a given level of caloric intake, and thus compensate by eating more food until their particular dopamine threshold is met.

Unsurprisingly, endomorphs tend also to be novelty seeking individuals who demand a variety of foods to fulfill certain sensory satiety measures. In my practice, ectomorphs are pickier eaters, willing to drop their fork and step away from the table if a given food doesn’t sit well with their taste buds. By reducing meal frequency, we can potentially alter the expectation and reward system dopamine is responsible for controlling. Larger boluses of calories can provide an acute increase in dopamine and, by amplifying anticipation of these larger meals, merit a reduction in appetite mid-meal.

Life Extension & Neuroplasticity

Some of the more interesting argumentation concerning the use of fasting has come not out of the physique obsessed crowd but rather the life obsessed crowd. The use of caloric restriction as a means toward life extension has grown in popularity over the past few years. Now, it seems that intermittent fasting and other low meal frequency diet variations may promote gene expression better than caloric restriction, regardless of caloric intake.

Thus far, caloric restriction (hereon abbreviated as CR) has a fairly impressive track record. Researchers have observed increases in insulin sensitivity, meaning subjects showed improved tolerance and usage of dietary carbohydrate, in CR populations. Insulin sensitive individuals tend to handle higher levels of carbohydrate and are able to convert ingested carbohydrate into lean tissue more readily than insulin resistant individuals. Insulin resistant individuals have difficulty converting glucose into glycogen in the muscle and at the same time suffer from higher than normal concentrations of fatty acids in the bloodstream. Clearly, the former proves more desirable than the latter.

What’s most surprising about intermittent fasting is its ability to replicate the bonuses offered by caloric restriction sans the starvation and irritability. CR has attracted a quixotic following and stirred heated debate amongst researchers. The great confounder of CR, however, is its inability to fuel high-intensity activity. In the case of intermittent fasting, the same benefits of CR accrue while simultaneously providing a diet plan that maintains the weight of the practitioner. Independent of caloric intake, intermittent fasting showed greater improvements in exototic stress reduction, basal serum glucose levels, and lifespan than CR interventions. For the life-extensionist crowd, IF seems to be a case of having your cake and eating it too. Literally.

The benefits don’t stop there. IF has also shown to improve biomarkers for obese individuals and offer cardioprotective advantages. Oxidative stress and inflammation subsided in intermittent fasting studies testing asthmatic patients. Neurodegenerative diseases, resultant from exototic stress, appear to be transduced through mechanisms that can result in both acute or delayed forms of death. Fasting appears to enhance the neuroplasticity of the brain and allow new neuronal connections to form more readily than might otherwise. For stroke patients and other victims of brain trauma, intermittent fasting could be worked in as a modal recovery unit accompanying other traditional forms of therapy and rehabilitation.

Some Conclusions

First, intermittent fasting isn’t the end-all-be all panacea anecdote makes it out to be. While it has aroused popularity on fitness message boards and bodybuilding forums across the ‘net, the individuals succeeding with this protocol may be predisposed to such semi-radical measures based on their individual personality traits. Bodybuilders tend to be an extremist bunch, falling often into the ‘all-or-nothing’ mindset, in turn making intermittent fasting ever the more appealing. Practitioners already have a certain placebo effect engaged once they start their new nutrition plan fueled by the feverent support found in the online fitness community.

That said, from a practical standpoint, intermittent fasting gives us a lot of good. By compressing the eating window, life will be less likely to get in the way of prepping solid, healthy meals. Moreover, the early purported benefits offer a lot in the way of health improvement, and certainly the theories of nutrient timing support intermittent fasting as a legitimate means toward physique improvement. While much of the research surrounding IF remains in infancy, early feedback has shown it to be a field of positive inquiry that merits further investigation. For now anecdote shows it to be a wonderfully pragmatic nutritional methodology offering a myriad of at- this-juncture theoretical benefits.

In part three, our final installment, we’ll discuss the application of IF in the context of a complete nutritional system. This will be the applied form of Form Factor Nutrition, so stay tuned, and if you enjoyed this post, please comment below.

Tagged as: caloric restriction, fat loss, intermittent fasting, muscle gain, Nutrition