Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Should You Use a Protein Sparing Modified Fast to Lose Weight?

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

Want to know what protein sparing modified fasting is, why people do it, and whether or not you should try it? Keep listening. You probably know trying to lose weight too fast is a mistake. You’re going to run into the hurdles of extreme hunger, lethargy, irritability, and the metabolic hobgoblins attendant to all crash diets. Plus, you’re walking a tightrope where one misstep could lead to a binge that wipes out your progress. That said, there are advantages to losing fat as fast as possible. You see results faster in the mirror, you don’t have to diet for as long, and you can get back to building muscle and getting stronger sooner. If you want to lose fat as fast as possible, though, you need to do it the right way. The worst thing you can do is follow some half-baked diet like water fasting, the military diet, or a detox diet, which are just forms of reckless calorie restriction in disguise. Instead, you should follow an evidence-based, structured, effective crash diet that helps you lose fat as fast as possible without losing much muscle. And the only diet that checks those boxes is known as a protein sparing modified fast (PSMF). If you want to learn what a PSMF is, why it’s so effective, how it compares to other crash diets, and how to use it to lose fat as fast as possible, keep listening. --- Mentioned on the show: Shop Legion Supplements Here: legionathletics.com/shop/ --- Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: www.legionathletics.com/signup/

Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Head over to www.LegionAthletics.com now to check it out. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will

save 10% on your entire order and it'll ship free if you are anywhere in the United States. And if you're not, it'll ship free if your order is over $100. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. If you want to lose fat as quickly as possible, you're going to have to follow some sort of crash diet, which just means you're going to have to eat very few calories every day. Now, most people go about that in a willy nilly kind of way. every day. Now, most people go about that in a willy-nilly kind of way. They don't really pay attention to the foods they're eating or their macronutrients, particularly their protein intake. They just make sure that they're starving. Now, this isn't ideal or recommended for a number of reasons, but there is one style of crash dieting that has been around in the body composition space for some time

and which has been promoted as a smarter way of going about it as a way to maximize fat loss and minimize muscle loss. And it's called a protein sparing modified fast, PSMF. And what it entails is eating about 15 to 30% of your total daily energy expenditure. So a massive calorie deficit and getting mostly all of your calories from protein. So you're going to be eating a lot of protein and then you'll have a small number of calories left over that you're supposed to use for fibrous vegetables. So the idea here is eat very few calories so you can lose a lot of fat. And eat basically nothing but protein so you can preserve muscle. And then use the vegetables to fill you up and help stave off hunger and cravings. Now, as far as exercise goes, what's normally recommended on a PSMF protocol is a couple weightlifting workouts per week,

lower volume, lower intensity, no long grueling workouts. And those workouts really are just supposed to help drive muscle retention. You're obviously not going to be gaining muscle on a diet like this, and you don't have enough energy to train more than just a couple times per week and at a moderate intensity. Now, how well can this work and who should do it and who should not do it? Well, to the first point, it can work quite well, actually. If you do what I just described, and I'll share a couple more tips as well, you can lose anywhere from let's say two to six pounds of fat per week while preserving most of your muscle. You may lose a little bit of muscle of actual lean muscle tissue, not just water or glycogen that would register as a loss of lean mass on like a DEXA scan, but is not actual lean mass, not actual lean muscle tissue. Now there's a price to pay

for those results. You are not going to feel good on a PSMF program. And unlike normal dieting, where the first week or two is a bit uncomfortable, but then you acclimate to it. And if you're doing things right, it's not too much of a struggle going forward unless you're really lean or unless you're lean wanting to get really lean. With PSMF, the first week is hard and the second week is harder and the third week is even harder. And the longer you try to maintain it, the harder it gets and the worse you feel. And that brings me then to who should and shouldn't do it. So PSMF is best suited to people who have quite a bit of fat to lose. So let's say guys over 15% body fat and women over 25% body fat and who want to just kickstart the results. They understand that this isn't a long-term weight loss solution.

It is a quick fix that can just give you a nice jolt of motivation because you're going to see fast results. And when you are in the beginning of your cut and you have a lot of fat to lose, that can be motivating. It can be nice to see a couple pounds of fat loss in the first week and a couple more in the next week and a couple more in the next week. Another benefit of starting a cut, especially a longer cut with a PSMF type approach is ultimately that means that you're going to finish your cut sooner. You're going to lose the amount of fat you want to lose a bit faster, and then you can get back to eating at maintenance or maybe even moving into a slight surplus if you want to focus on muscle gain. And so by that, I'm obviously implying who PSMF is not for, but I'm just going to state it clearly. It is not for people who are lean, wanting to get really lean and of course, preserve muscle.

So take someone like me, I'm probably around 9% body fat right now, 9 or 10%. And if I wanted to get down to six or seven percent for a photo shoot or something like that, it would not be a good idea for me to even start with PSMF because when you are lean, it is much easier to lose muscle. You simply cannot sustain as large of a calorie deficit without losing muscle. And so then if you're a guy around 10% body fat and you want to get into single digits, do not use PSMF. And if you are a woman and you are around 20% body fat and you want to get beneath that, do not use PSMF. Go with a traditional approach to your calorie deficit, something around three to 500 calorie per day, a deficit of three

to 500 calories per day, plenty of protein, plenty of carbs, et cetera, et cetera. Another thing to reiterate is if you are going to use PSMF, do it in the beginning of a cut. Don't do it at the end of a cut because it is going to be extra grueling if you were to do that. And depending where you're at at the end of that cut, it may actually accelerate muscle loss. So again, the best time to do it is in the beginning when you have quite a bit of fat to lose. Hey, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and

bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check everything out, just head over to legionathletics.com. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 20% on your entire order

if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order. That's essentially 10% cash back in rewards points. So again, the URL is legionathletics.com. And if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. Okay. And just to quickly summarize how to do PSMF, your calories should be at anywhere from 15 to 30% of your total daily energy expenditure. It really depends on who you listen to. I think if you are around 20 to 25%, just take it in the middle, then that is fine.

So let's just say a calorie deficit of 75 to 80%. And then as for your macros, about 80% of those calories should be coming from protein. So you can just work that out simply. One gram of protein contains about four calories. For most people, this is going to be between one and two grams of protein per pound of lean body mass per day. And then you get the remaining of your calories from fibrous vegetables. Oh, and one other thing regarding protein intake I should mention is you want that protein to be as low calorie as possible, meaning as lean as possible. So that protein needs to come with as little carbohydrate and fat as possible. Now, if you're wondering then, where's the dietary fat?

There is no dietary fat, really, when you're following a PSMF protocol. And that's because dietary fat is very rich in calories, and we are trying to maximally restrict calories while keeping protein intake high, and that means we have to sacrifice dietary fat. And that just further highlights how unsustainable this type of diet is. No, it is not good to eat very little to no dietary fat, but if you're only doing it for a couple of weeks, which should be the duration, you shouldn't be doing PSMF for more than three or four weeks in one go. So most people it's two to four weeks and you can do that. You can have a rather

extreme diet of very little or no dietary fat, for example, for a few weeks and come out the other end of it with no harm. You're not going to feel good while you do it, but you're not going to mess your body up. Now, also, as I mentioned, as for your exercise goes, you want to focus on weightlifting. So a couple of weightlifting workouts per week, two to three, you could do whatever split you want. It doesn't really matter if it's three, you could do a push, pull legs, or you could just do like an upper, lower, upper, or the other way around. If you want to focus a bit more on your lower body, or you could just do three full body workouts because we are so not

interested in performance and we are definitely not going to be gaining muscle while eating so few calories. We're really just looking to remind our body that it has muscle to preserve and we're trying to minimize muscle loss. Now it's also recommended to do cardio in addition to the weightlifting if you're going to be following a PSMF approach because you can just lose even more fat. If you're really willing to push it, you could lose up to six to eight pounds of fat in one week. Now, that's for someone who has a lot of fat to lose, but still that's impressive and that's very motivating. That said, because you are going to be eating so little and you are not going to have very much energy, don't try to do high intensity interval training or even moderate intensity steady state cardio. In my opinion, if you're going to add cardio, just add something like walking or it could be on a bike, I guess, but the bicycle equivalent of walking low intensity, just burn, you know, if you can burn an extra, let's say about an hour of walking for most people is three to 400 calories burned. So if you could get in two to four hours of walking,

or again, the equivalent of walking on in some other form of cardio, then I think that's reasonable. And lastly, I should mention that while following PSMF, I do think it's smart to take a multivitamin supplement, a good multivitamin supplement, because your body is not going to be eating much in the way of nutrition as well as an omega-3 fatty acid supplement for the same reason. Some people recommend taking magnesium and calcium as well specifically. And I think that's smart. But if you are taking a good multivitamin like mine, which is called Triumph, for example, it has magnesium. And if you are eating calcium rich protein, so let's say

you're having some dairy or just dairy derived products like whey, then you probably don't need to supplement with calcium. And that brings me to one last tip, which is try to get most of your calories from whole foods. Don't get into the habit of just living off powders because it's going to make it even harder. You're going to be even hungrier if you do that. It's okay to include some protein powder in your meal plan when you are following PSMF, but I would not recommend getting 40, 50, 60% of your, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Head over to www.legionathletics.com now to check it out. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps use the coupon code M F L at checkout, and you will save 10% on your entire order.

And it'll ship free if you are anywhere in the United States. And if you're not, it'll ship free if your order is over a hundred dollars. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. All right, well, that's it for today's episode. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and you don't mind doing me a favor, could you please leave a quick review for the podcast on iTunes or wherever you are listening from? Because those reviews not only convince people that they should check out the show, they also increase the search visibility and help more people find their way to me and to the podcast and learn how to build their best body

ever as well. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast and whatever app you're using to listen, and you will not miss out on any of the new stuff that I have coming. And last, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts. Let me know how you think I could do this better. I read every email myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback. All right. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.