Page 70 - Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pilon PDF Program

was exercising experienced no significant decrease in lean mass, while the group that
was not exercising had more than a 4% decrease in lean body mass.
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Even more good news comes from the fact that your weight workouts don’t have to be

painfully long to be effective. When forty-four overweight women performed a 30-
minute weight training workout three days per week for twenty weeks while following
a low-calorie diet, they were able to lose almost 5% body fat while maintaining all of
their lean body mass.
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Finally, research has clearly shown that fasting for as long as 72 hours (regardless of

whether or not you are exercising) does not cause an increased breakdown in your
muscle, nor does it slow down muscle protein synthesis. 40,116

Another diet myth busted!

Fasting and low calorie diets DO NOT cause you to lose muscle mass if you are
resistance training. In fact, as we will discuss in the Fasting and Inflammation
chapter, fasting may actually decrease some metabolic factors that are actually
preventing you from building muscle. And, as we will discuss the Cellular Cleansing
chapter, fasting may perform critical maintenance and ‘clean up’ work in your muscle

that properly prepares it for extra growth. So in the long-term, fasting and weight loss
may actually improve your ability to build muscle mass!

So much for the so-called starvation mode or needing to eat protein every couple of

hours - the key to maintaining your muscle mass long-term is resistance exercise;
your diet has almost nothing to do with it!

And since your diet has very little to do with your muscle mass, short periods of
fasting definitely will not cause your muscles any harm (especially if you continue to
work out regularly) and may even help you build muscle in the long term.

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