Page 71 - Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pilon PDF Program

A note on Fasting and Increasing Muscle Size

While the research is very clear that fasting for 24 hours will not cause you to lose

muscle, it does not address the issue of whether or not fasting can impede muscle
growth.

The process of muscle growth is still a vague collection of physiological phenomena
that is not completely understood. What we do know is that muscles respond to
certain types of mechanical stress by being damaged, repairing themselves and, under

the right circumstances, increasing in size and capacity to generate force.
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There seem to be two basic nutritional requirements to ensure muscle growth occurs:

1) Caloric Adequacy
2) Protein Adequacy

You’ll notice that the first point is caloric adequacy and not caloric surplus. While the

common belief that you need to ‘eat big to get big’, recent research has shown that
any extra calories above your estimated daily needs does not contribute to muscle
gain. In fact, almost every single extra calorie can be accounted for in fat mass
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gains . So while there is an obvious caloric need for muscle building it does not seem
to be any higher than your daily calorie needs (building muscle does take energy, but
it also happens very slowly).

This is where Eat Stop Eat may actually be BETTER than traditional dieting for muscle
gains. With Eat Stop Eat you are only in a calorie deficit for one or two 24-hour periods
per week. The rest of the time you can eat to maintenance if you choose to. This is in

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