The title is clickbaity and he talks really slowly, still worth watching IMHO. He gets by on one meal a day of 1500 calories. His aim is lifespan prolongation.
a) he has a physique and strength completely out of the spectrum for his alleged diet;
b) is not available for third-party scrutiny and has completely made-up credentials;
c) every comment easily found about him online is clearly astroturfed by people selling his products.
It's certainly possible to do well on a relatively low-calorie and time-restricted diet, but you'll look skinny, not like superman. Beware the magic food men.
It is simply impossible for a normal height adult man to subsist permanently on 1500 kcal/day while also doing the hard exercise necessary to build and maintain the optimal level of lean muscle tissue. Do the math, the energy balance just doesn't work. It might be barely adequate for a short woman.
If yes, I am mighty interested....
Smaller women might have that.
I can maintain my weight at around 190lbs on ~1900 kCal as an active man. That's measuring absolutely everything religiously with a scale, and assuming all oil into every pan is ingested, etc.
My sister is quite overweight and she can maintain weight easily around 1200 kCal.
You can be regularly fasting AND eating the same amount of calories on average. You just eat more between fasts. Fasting just means there is enough period between your meals for your body to get stressed a bit and to have to go into fasting mode.
The idea here is that the act of fasting alone promotes positive changes. A side effect is that most people, usually, are not able to make up all of the calories in a short time. Meaning if you eat only every other day, it actually is quite hard to eat two days of calories within one day.
For me fasting is much more bearable than "dieting". For me dieting just means I am hungry constantly while fasting means I just need to survive until the next meal when I will be able to eat as much as I want and feel satisfied.
Also fasting is sort of self-regulating. As long as I can keep to the fasting period and I am not criminally overeating outside of it, I can reap the benefits of weight loss as if I was on caloric restriction but without having to think about it or counting calories.
Neither caloric restriction nor fasting necessarily means wasting of your muscles. Though if you fast long enough or restrict your calories enough at some point it will become unavoidable.
I personally think it all depends on your cost/benefit. Fasting brings positive effects you can't emulate in any other way. But you don't need to be fasting constantly, I personally think you can get a lot of effects by fasting occasionally (like one day a week, for example).
And without getting too much into details, I think if you are absolutely unwilling to do fasting and would prefer caloric restriction there still are better ways to do it. It is better to reduce your calorie ingestion by reducing hunger relative to your output.
For example, jogging every day in the morning, eating whole fresh fruit and vegetables some time before your meals, will have effect of reducing your hunger and making you eat less without having to be constantly hungry.
I don't think so - the comment said "one meal a day" which is clearly a kind of fasting.
Even the "16:8 diet" is referred to as intermittent fasting, and it's not as extreme as eating only one meal a day.
But the parent wrote "Does such caloric restricted diet allow one to maintain muscles and/or strength?" Which means he is asking about caloric restriction responding to comment about fasting.
1,500 calories per day is calorie restriction for an adult male of this size.
I'm not sure about the "one meal per day" part though - not sure if there are studies for that combined with a calorie deficit.
The lower your body fat percentage is, the harder it is to diet without losing muscle.
1. you have to do resistance training (lifting weights)
2. you need to consume enough protein so that it can be used to build the muscle mass (100-150g per day)
3. you limit calorie intake by skipping carbohydrates and fats - this is what your body fat can easily replace.
You probably cannot limit yourself to just one meal per day, or skipping eating some days - your body being in the "fasting mode" is the opposite of "muscle building mode".
another problem here is: high fat percentage lowers the testosterone levels, which is not great for gaining muscle. Some testosterone-boosting supplements, like zinc might be useful here.
> high fat percentage lowers the testosterone levels, which is not great for gaining muscle.
Anecdotally speaking, I was able to gain muscle / increase strength just fine when I started dieting, and I was definitely above 30% fat. Even if this isn't the case, the fat should melt away quickly on a good diet, so it probably isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
Even if I had only been gaining strength, that's still a good thing. So in practice this doesn't change the fact that it's a good idea to train while dieting.
That leaves just over 1000 calories to eat nutrient dense foods like broccoli and foods that bring even more protein.
(Just for fun, 1000cal of kale/broccoli aka 3kg fills all nutrient bars in cronometer except b12 and d3 and it has 70-90g protein)
Though i’m also not very convinced that we need nearly as much protein as broscientists think. If you aren’t jacked and you can’t grow on 100g protein per day at 200lbs, you aren’t covering enough of your max effort at the gym. Most people make that mistake and do grow no matter how much protein their ingest.
I was getting great results with about 110 calories worth 30 minutes after exercising (25-30g? "1 scoop" at any rate) plus creatine. I simultaneously lost a lot of fat according to the fat percentage scale at the supplement store.
It's hard to say because many overweight people already have a significant muscle mass, just those muscles are underused and hidden under the fat. When one starts to exercise and looses some weight their muscles' volume will increase with a better blood flow, and will get the proper shape and also become more prominent with less fat over them, but they'll probably not actually increase the muscle mass itself - it's just that we're now able to see them better.
I'm severely obese. Significantly less so than I was when I started fasting, but still over 35 BMI.
I think I've gained a small amount of muscle? It's definitely slowed down since before I was fasting, but lifts are progressing still. It may just be skill progression but these are simple lifts that I'm pretty familiar with (overhead press and deadlift), and I feel like I'm still gaining real strength.
I don't know how to judge muscle size really, especially since I'm losing body fat which is obviously making them look more pronounced.
I do take one "testosterone-boosting 'supplement'" (the main one). I've been running a test level of around 900.
That's basically a PED for your condition. That + protein + muscle load from lifting means you will be gaining muscle and losing fat as long as you engage in a progressive overload ( which is much easier to do with T boosters ).
Being a vegan it is very difficult to get enough protein needed to maintain the existing muscle mass, not to mention grow muscles at 1500 calories per day. That's below base for most men even with a lifestyle that does not include anything other than NEAT.
Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT)
The comment below claiming TDEE of 1900 for a 190 lb "active" male is interesting. I currently use the Macro Factor App to track meals and TDEE, make everything from scratch from raw ingredients, weigh and measure absolutely everything, including any cooking oil, so the estimates are good as you can get without checking into a metabolic ward, and I'm a 41 year-old male who currently weights 187 lbs and my TDEE is roughly 2900. That's at an activity level of lifting for 60-90 minutes 6 days a week, walking usually one to three hours a day at a pretty leisurely pace, usually while listening to a podcast or playing Pokemon Go, and I live in a four-story house so walk up and down stairs quite a bit.
The famous study on Amish body composition and activity levels had them at an average of 18000 steps and 9% body fat, and they were eating ungodly amounts of food, pounds of potato and grain, upwards of 4000 KCal a day in most cases. I suspect what a western white collar worker considers "active" is skewed a bit. I doubt there were many pre-industrial adults outside of nobility who got by on 1500 a day. Maybe some had no choice during a very harsh winter, but not as an everyday thing for years.
While working out or lifting will cause you to increase your need for calories and food intake. They are opposing forces. You cannot have it both ways.
Fasting = less mass less food intake. Lifting/muscle mass = more food intake more mass
Anyway, if you want to lose weight and maintain muscle mass, add protein shakes + creatine + strength training to whatever calorie restrictions you are doing. Get your body fat percentage tested every few weeks. Adjust calories as appropriate to draw down fat or build up muscle. In steady state, most people can either gain muscle or lose fat, but not both at the same time.
(The above works OK for absolute beginners; it gets harder to improve as you improve.)
The "A Workout Routine" book is ranty but has decent introductory routines and links to decent YouTube videos. You'll also need about $150 worth of exercise bands to get started. (Cheap Amazon ones are dangerous, so go to a reputable brick and mortar store's website to choose a brand.)
Building muscle requires a slight caloric surplus and sufficient protein intake spread out through the day (last part is more about optimization)
It doesn't:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10838463/
There are other similar studies, plus lots of anecdotal data from people who were able to gain muscle while losing weight.
We're not talking insane caloric surpluses for the latter either.