 Hey everybody, Dr. O here again. Let's dive into fasting myth number two, that fasting will wreck your metabolism. So it's important to understand that weight loss will impact your metabolism. If you lose 20 pounds, 40 pounds, 100 pounds, 200 pounds doesn't matter. Your metabolic rate will drop or usually will drop because you're carrying less you around, right? There's less tissue for you to keep alive. Even fat requires six calories per day, give or take to to maintain it. So if you have less weight to maintain, less body to maintain, your metabolic rate will drop. Now we can combat this by dieting really smartly, and I think fasting is a good way to do that along with calorie cycling, and then we can build lean mass. We can actually get our metabolism to go up. So some studies actually show that this calorie cycling approach, which you use with fasting where you eat and then you don't eat and then you eat again, can preserve your metabolic rate. So let's look at some of those studies. So here's the first one. This actually will show that your metabolic rate can go up. Resting energy expenditure in short-term starvation is increased as a result of an increase in serum norepinephrine. So in this study during a short fast, the basal metabolic rate or resting energy expenditure went up 14 percent, and that was because the norepinephrine levels doubled. So norepinephrine is a noreadrenaline, it's a relative of adrenaline, and norepinephrine is what leads to an increase in energy expenditure when you're not eating. And the reason your body does that, we'll cover that more detail later, but the reason your body does that is because if you're starving, if you're not eating, your body wants to mobilize energy and increase your metabolic rate so you can go find food or not become food. So it's actually, your metabolic rate can even climb. So that's what this study showed. Over short-term fast, that's why I don't recommend extended fasting anymore. I recommend your 16 to 36 hour protocols that we cover here in this program. Alternate day fasting in non-obese subjects affects on body weight, body composition, and energy metabolism. I chose this study because these subjects weren't even obese. So this was a 22 day study, and the resting metabolic rate did not change significantly. Went down a little bit because they lost weight, but it did not change significantly. And these are non-obese subjects. If you're an obese subject, if you have more fat on your body, then you will actually see an even lower or smaller drop in resting metabolic rate or basal metabolic rate. All right, intermittent energy restriction attenuates the loss of fat-free mass in resistance-trained individuals, a randomized controlled trial. So in this one, what they found is that two-day refeeds, so two-day carbohydrate refeeds, actually preserve both fat-free mass, which is all your body that isn't fat, and resting metabolic rate during energy restriction compared to continuous calorie restriction. So the study showed that occasionally bringing the calories up and then back down preserves metabolic rate. Well, that's what we're doing with the calorie cycling fasting program that I'm teaching you. You're bringing your calories way down and then back up, way down and back up. So I think this study shows that alternate-day fasting or different fasting protocols may preserve your metabolic rate better than just always being on a diet. All right, now let's look at my personal experiment. So these are the results of my first three resting energy expenditure tests that I get done on a regular basis. So here you see, at this time, I still weighed 323 pounds. I'd lost 90 pounds before I got my first scan. I didn't know I was going to be successful. I tried dieting so many times. I wish that I would have started to track these things earlier. So I'd lost 90 pounds. I still had about 140 pounds of fat mass on my body at this time. So you see here that my measured resting energy expenditure was 2,211 kilocalories per day. This is not an estimate. This was they actually measure how much oxygen you take in, how much carbon dioxide you get out. This is a very sophisticated measurement. Now let's see what happened as I lost weight. So here we see I had lost 27 pounds between scans. And my metabolic rate went up slightly. It went up 22 calories, 2,233 kilocalories or calories per day. So I'm really happy with that. If you lose 27 pounds, your resting energy expenditure should go down, not up. So the fact that mine stayed the same or went slightly up was great. But here, watch what happened here. This is when I started to incorporate resistance training on top of my dieting and my regular physical activity. So here at this scan, I had lost 54 pounds between scans. And you will see that my resting energy expenditure was now 2,392 calories per day. My metabolic rate went up 181 calories while I lost 54 pounds of weight, which was almost all fat. So my metabolic rate actually climbed. So I think that the smart fasting protocol that I used was a really big part of that, but then incorporating resistance training. Because as I was losing weight, I was actually building lean mass. I was increasing the amount of muscle that I had on my body, which was causing my metabolic rate to go up. So don't let anyone tell you that your metabolic rate has to go down with fasting or it's going to wreck your metabolism. Mine stayed the same and then actually went up as I started to incorporate more weight lifting and strength training and these types of things. So no, fasting will not wreck your metabolism. We have busted that myth. But if you do want to preserve your metabolism while you're on any kind of diet, but especially if you're fasting, please follow all the advice that I'm sharing to the letter. I designed my entire program around preserving lean mass, losing as much fat as you can while losing as little fat-free mass or lean mass as possible. Because that's the only way to sustain weight loss. If you do wreck your metabolism while you lose weight, you'll be a yo-yo dieter for the rest of your life. You'll lose it, you'll gain it, you'll lose it, you'll gain it. So follow this program and it will help you and it will not wreck your metabolism. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.