nb: Wikepedia on Catecholamines - here
Key point:
A quick summary of those that have the best results reveals a theme emerging almost immediately – losing body fat must be done by raising the catecholamines. However, to keep your body from adapting to the surge in catecholamines, you MUST NOT be in weight loss mode 7 days per week. That’s why it’s the half-time dieters that manage to lose fat without (as much) negative consequence.Extracts:
RRARF, a protocol I’ve laid out in the FREE eBOOK that you can access HERE to counter each one of those high adrenal dead ends, is the perfect antithesis to each one of those paths. As the most astute health and nutrition researchers understand, such as Lyle McDonald, overfeeding, especially when it is high in carbohydrates and paired with lots of sleep and physical inactivity, lowers catecholamine levels as well as cortisol levels – another adrenal hormone that works against someone looking to improve their health, vitality, and body composition.
By dropping the levels of all these adrenal hormones, you allow your adrenal glands to heal themselves, and you allow the adrenergic receptors to upregulate as well, making those adrenal hormones much more effective the next time you go to use them .
Plus, you get to optimize the output of your thyroid and sex hormones which is another major advantage. Lastly, overfeeding is a hell of a way to increase lean body mass, particularly once you’ve continued it for a substantial amount of time. In fact, several people have reported seeing continual rises in weight with pants fitting more loosely as time goes by – indicative of the bodybuilder Holy Grail state of positive calorie balance and negative fat balance simultaneously (losing fat while eating more calories than you are burning).
But RRARF, and overfeeding in general, is a rehabilitative strategy.
Like I’ve said since the beginning, there are no health awards awaiting those who manage to eat the most food and exert the least amount of physical energy in their lifetimes. Rather, it’s taking a timeout to heal up before you try to move forward – especially when it comes to making attempts to improve your body composition.
Having said that, there will a considerable amount of focus coming up this summer on body composition, and how the effective strategies used for losing body fat (low-carb, IF, exercise, etc.) can be used in a way that potentially avoids the pitfalls or the dead ends of just simply “going on a low-carb diet” or “exercising a bunch.”
A quick summary of those that have the best results reveals a theme emerging almost immediately – losing body fat must be done by raising the catecholamines. However, to keep your body from adapting to the surge in catecholamines, you MUST NOT be in weight loss mode 7 days per week. That’s why it’s the half-time dieters that manage to lose fat without (as much) negative consequence.
Part-time dieters can be filed into four basic categories…
1) Carb Cyclers
2) Re-Feeders
3) Intermittent Fasters
4) Exercisers
With carb cycling, you lose fat with a big rise in catecholamines while low in carbohydrates – then you eat tons of carbohydrates periodically throughout the week (once every 3 days for example, or once every 3 meals in the case of Jay Robb). This prevents adaptation somewhat, and allows you to get away with more fat loss than you would otherwise be able to get away with – and less rebound. You can also gain muscle on your high carbohydrate days and make some big changes to your appearance.
Re-feeders are basically cycling calories. They may spend 5 days losing weight, and 2 days gaining weight each week. By timing your overfeeding days with a good weightlifting session and extra carbohydrates, you can ensure that more of your excess calories end up in muscle tissue than fat. By keeping carbohydrates somewhat low while doing long-duration, low-intensity exercise during the underfeeding days, you can lose more fat than muscle while underfeeding. Thus, each week you can literally gain muscle and lose fat, and do so with minimal adaptation on behalf of your body.
Intermittent fasters are losing fat very rapidly while blunting appetite during the fasting period. Once again, this is due to big rises in catecholamines primarily. However, you’d destroy yourself in a hurry if you overdid this – and the fat loss/high catecholamine period is met with big meals and some good rest – usually following a workout in which you are burning maximal amounts of fat (towards the end of a 16-24 hour fasting period).
Then there are the exercisers, who raise catecholamines and burn fat during exercise, and lower catecholamines and replace fat after exercise. Those who do the most exercise and rest the least, lose fat the fastest but do the most damage and cause the most metabolic adaptation. Once again, you need both fat burning/high catecholamine spurts followed with rest and rehabilitation for it to work long time without working you over.
And of course the best approach is one that combines elements of all of those approaches in a very shrewd and sustainable manner with great caution and a great understanding of both anabolism (low-catecholamine states more or less) and catabolism (high-catecholamine states more or less).
The best out there currently appears to be Martin Berkhan of http://www.leangains.blogspot.com/
Martin does just a small amount of exercise (a few hours per week), which he times with big periods of overfeeding, including lots of carbohydrates, for maximal muscle growth following the workouts (carbohydrates, when paired with protein, provide better protein deposition into muscle cells). He has even been known to eat entire Cheesecakes at one sitting – not something you’d picture being a habit of someone with 5% bodyfat, but, done intelligently with the right timing, may actually be effective for fat loss and improving body composition.
The rest of the week, he eats a more low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet (but not ketogenic, which is important) while going long periods (16 hours) without food each day. He calls this Intermittent Fasting, but it’s not truly intermittent fasting. I would call it “decreased meal frequency,” and I suspect it would be just as effective to eat 3 meals per day spaced 6-7 hours apart (the first 3-4 hours after meals are a low-catecholamine period… after that you are burning fat – so the longer you go between meals and snacks the more fat you will be burning) as it would be to skip breakfast to increase the fasting period. It would certainly achieve some of the effects, and would be a little easier on the adrenals for those that really have issues there – which includes a great many people who have flocked to 180D no doubt.
Anyway, some food for thought for those who feel they have really rehabilitated themselves from some of their dietary and heredity follies, and are inspired to pursue a little risky narcissism.
I personally will be doing a very high volume of exercise over the summer because I love hiking (... and fishing - and I have to walk a long way to find fish as big as the one in the photo below dumb enough to go after what I throw at them), but high volume exercise like that (15-20 hours per week most weeks) is too much to attempt carbohydrate restriction or intermittent fasting with the delicate adrenals I’ve been dealt combined with the damage I’ve inflicted upon them thus far in my life.
But you can bet I’ll be having some good rest days with big calorie surpluses and unfathomable amounts of carbohydrates. This will both prevent negative consequence and improve performance out on the ol’ trail. (Note, on low-carb my hiking performance was the worst, the aftermath was the worst, but my body composition was by far the best… impressive body composition doesn’t necessarily = health).
More to come in the months ahead as I continue to review the works of:
… and a handful of others who are implementing some of these “smart” approaches to fat loss without the standard pitfalls – the greatest of which is the high-cortisol and/or downregulated adrenergic receptor rude awakening.
- Lyle McDonald
- Scott Abel
- Rob Faigan
- Brad Pilon
- Jay Robb
- Martin Berkhan
- Clarence Bass
- Joel Marion
- Dan Duchaine
- Anthony Colpo
But please don’t get overly-seduced by any of these authors or the programs they recommend. As you’ll see in the comments section of this post I’m willing to bet, there are people who had both great and catastrophic results on each and every one of the strategies discussed above.
