This Diet Comes With A Significant Tradeoff
We get a flood of nutrition questions this time of year. It's understandable. About 99% of the country over-indulged last month. As a society, we are chronically "over-nourished," but the last few weeks of every year tend toward the excessive. January becomes a month of penance in which we flagellate ourselves for our holiday decadence.
Many of these recent questions are from our IF'ers (not to be confused with MF'ers, who are totally different tribe 🙂). Intermittent Fasting (IF) is a dietary approach in which one restricts eating to a prescribed window of time, typically eight hours, and "fasts" the remaining portion of each day. As a lifestyle and weight loss approach, it became fashionable over the past 5-10 years. In the more scientific and academic circles, IF is better known by the term Time Restricted Eating (TRE), which is a more accurate descriptor.
Earlier in 2022, I posted that I had abandoned TRE when I learned that muscles could only absorb a limited amount of protein with each feeding - about 30-60 grams per bolus (to be honest, I was never a devout practitioner of TRE and mostly dabbled sporadically).
Of the three macronutrients, protein is arguably the most critical in our efforts to preserve and optimize our healthspan. And MANY true experts would argue it's the macronutrient most critical to our fat loss efforts, which for many has enormous bearing on their healthspan.
Few of us get enough daily protein. This worsens as we age and is particularly challenging for plant-based eaters.
I will pause here and lay out MidStrong's official philosophy toward ALL dietary approaches. We are 100% agnostic. Our ONE very firm conviction is that the only dietary method that works is the one you will stick with. Pick any one of them - vegan, pescatarian, carnivore, keto, paleo, DASH, ice-cream-atarian, or whatever - the science and anecdotal evidence will demonstrate that they work (at least in terms of fat loss), but only as long as you sustain that approach. So, pick the one you can live with and then STICK TO IT.
OK, back to TRE and protein. As we age, our bodies' ability to synthesize protein and our muscles' ability to absorb it diminishes. This is the classic wasting effect associated with aging. We lose muscle mass. Lost muscle makes us weaker. Weaker muscles lead to balance issues. Balance issues lead to falls. Over 50% of falls lead to death within one year in both men and women above the age of 65. That's scary. And 65 is NOT old. Not by today's standards.
As scary as that concern about falling is, worse (to me) is the inexorable erosion of our functional capabilities that occurs through this muscle-wasting effect. We find that we can't climb mountains anymore, or paddle board, or play with the grandkids on the floor, or throw a football at the annual Thanksgiving Day pickup game. This truly sucks because it's many of those joy-filled activities that make life worth living.
So, we NEED to consume more protein than we probably think. And we need to be intentional about how we consume all those grams of protein because we can only put a finite amount of it to good use with each feeding.
That's why I no longer practice TRE.
I want to reinforce that I am NOT discouraging anyone from TRE, and I have no other doubts or suspicions about that dietary approach. If you find that it’s working for you and how you want to live, go for it. Just keep in mind that it comes with a compromise. All dietary approaches do.
Julie and I will expand upon all things protein next week during our Healthspan Secrets webinar - Thursday January 12th at 5:30 pm. Click here to register. Please join us! I promise to keep it to a max of 30 min and will do my best to refrain from geeking out about physiology and biochemistry.
MidStrong's purpose in this world is to help you achieve optimal healthspan. Our dream is that all of us live legendary lives, doing all the amazing sh*t we dream of doing, with the ones we dream of doing it with, for as long as we live. We imagine a world in which our healthspan expires about 5 minutes before our lifespan.
Hey, while I've got you... please share this with everyone you can think of who might be interested in living a wildly happy and legendary life and who wants or needs to lose weight or build muscle. That's our tribe. We want more awesome MidStrongers like you!
See you next Thursday!
Work it. Live it. Keep it.
MidStrong is for life.