Water fasting + keto diet thread...

[Silock]

Originally Posted by petegz28

We get energy from carbs, not from protein.

We CAN get energy from protein. It's just that carbs are hugely preferred by the body to protein.

2. Complex carbs are needed by your body to burn fat. The fat actually needs the carb.

This isn't true, strictly speaking. Now, in a broad sense, most people do tend to function better with carb intake, but the body doesn't "need carbs" to burn fat from a mechanistic standpoint.

As Hama stated and most people are clueless about, your muscles burn carbs not fat, when you use them. If there are no carbs your body will catabolize the muscle defeating your entire goal.

This isn't strictly true, either. Muscle tissue can use fatty acids for energy. We evolved the ability to store energy as fat because we can metabolize that fat as energy in times when carbohydrates/glycogen isn't available. Now, your body WILL prioritize glycogen stores when you're performing high-intensity exercise, but mechanisms exist to use fatty acids for fuel when those stores begin to run low. I'm not saying that muscle catabolism due to exercise doesn't exist, because it does. But it's not as simple as "if you don't eat carbs, you will catabolize muscle." It takes a big deficit and sustained high intensity exercise to reach that point, as well as insufficient protein intake.

One other thing...keep the exercise under 60 minutes. Long, extended workouts sound manly but they jack up your cortisol levels and that kills weight loss and test production.

Again, this depends entirely on what you're doing and what nutrition you're taking in. Your general principle here is correct, in that killing yourself in the gym while also under-consuming food in attempt to achieve rapid fat loss will jack up your hormones. But, if you are eating properly, there's nothing that says exercise beyond 60 minutes is intrinsically harmful.