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Altering Anabolic and Catabolic States

July 11, 2005 04:19 PM

A reader has asked which is best, eating every other day or compressing the fed state to 10 hours or less. This later strategy means compressing all your meals into a narrow time window of 12, 10 or less hours and eating nothing for the remaining 12 or 14 hours.

We first have to identify the prime factor in either of these eating patterns relative to a more conventional eating style. What is a conventional eating style? It depends on your daily pattern and pretty much on whether you are overweight or not.

Overtly obese individuals have a typical pattern of eating: many meals and snacks during the day, a high fat content of the meals, and a shifting of calories toward the later hours of the day, particularly during the dark hours. Body builders follow a similar pattern, though their intake is more uniform over all 24 hours of the day; some get up at night to eat so as to stay in the anabolic state (a fed state with high insulin and net protein positive balance) and avoid entering the catabolic state (the opposite of the anabolic state). The overweight and body builders tend to share a common strategy (or failure) of eating many meals a day.

Both have problems. The obese have many and body builders manage to avoid some of them because they have such high activity levels. But, they both tend to die of similar diseases, diseases of metabolism.

The characteristic that links both these sets of individuals (the obese and the body builders of the serious type) is that they both lack variation between the anabolic and catabolic states. They have a flattened and somewhat uniform metabolic state. The obese do little and eat steadily so that they seldom vary their metabolic state; they are almost always in the anabolic (growth) state.

Body builders who fixate on maintaining a positive protein (nitrogen) balance only enter the catabolic state when they work out. Fortunately, they tend to work out often and long, so they do enter the catabolic state for that period of time. But they ingest a meal soon after the work out and then go back into the anabolic state.

This is bad.

Our ancestors altered between anabolic and catabolic states. The alterations were sometimes pretty extreme as in five days of hunger, subsisting on wild plants or nothing, and then a big feast when game was killed. Hunter gatherers lived in a connection to the outside world that was highly varied and this coupled their metabolic states to the natural variation of the physical world.

A strong component of that natural coupling was a diurnal variation; night versus day. Activity (a catabolic state) and eating took place during the day, sleep (an anabolic state) happened during the dark. Our various biological clocks run on this pattern. These clocks, of which there are many, synchronize our metabolic states with day light and dark and with the frequency and duration of our eating and activity patterns.

Modern life has uncoupled we humans from the natural metabolic landscape. We see little of the alternation between anabolic and catabolic states that our ancestors experienced. If you downloaded and read my Evolutionary Fitness Essay you will already understand that the modern distribution of activity, nutrition and anabolic/catabolic state is fundamentally shifted. The modern distribution is flat; there is too little variation. The ancient distribution (see my Why We Get Fat article which can be downloaded from this site) of the variation of states in the ancestral habitat has a higher variation and a few outliers of extreme catabolic and even starvation states. And the diurnal rhythm was strongly periodic, unlike modern life where you can live, eat and function at any time of the day or night.

So, back to the original question, but now with some background. Which is best, eating every other day or compressing the eating window to fewer hours in the day? They both are good. Nature prefers mixed strategies; the only optimum is to randomly vary strategies. This effectively smooths the strategy space and lets you do a little of every thing. So, do follow both strategies and vary them along with your "normal" eating pattern. The key to all of it is the variation between catabolic and anabolic states.

I have understood or believed for a long time that a lot of our vaunted intelligence is "out there" in the world. Our metabolic systems are geared to the natural variation of night and day and seasonal variation of cold and heat. And they are geared to the natural variation of food and activity. To fail to cycle between anabolic and catabolic states, which is only possible in the modern world of nutrition abundance and flattened energy expenditure landscape, is to fail to heed the long-established ancestral pattern. It spells compromised metabolic fitness. Our natural intelligence, cognitive and metabolic, is geared to a complex and shifting energy landscape with peaks and valleys that represent extremes of the anabolic and catabolic states.


· Evolutionary Fitness

Comments

I agree with Woody. I've read one of Ori Hofmeiker's books "Maximum Muscle Minimum Fat". The key lesson from that is the principle of the metabolic benefits of both fasting and overeating. OH argues that this should be exploited by including both within each day. As you say this removes randomness.

However, the idea of eating more later in the day seems to me to be more congruent with the whole paleo thing. you need to get up, maybe eat a few nuts or whatever is around, then hunt and if successful find your kill which would be eaten later in the day. Of course, some days, hunting is poor, so you get a random element.

Posted by: Chris H at July 12, 2005 8:06 AM

If I'm not mistaken, Art does not recommend the Warrior Diet where you only eat once a day. Here are my guesses why:
1. The large meal is at night and in the above blog he says we evolved eating in the day. Eating a large meal at night may also not be good for proper sleep.
2. Eating only once a day is not enough (if sustained for a long period of time).
3. The Warrior Diet isn't really random. It's a set schedule -- just that the schedule is once a day. I'm assuming Art (and our bodies) would prefer to see more variation over a week, both of food timing and overall caloric intake.

Posted by: Woody at July 12, 2005 7:51 AM

Dear Art
Again great post.As i've said what you say reminds me , of what i've read by Ori Hofsteder
in the "Warrior Diet".Being on the move during the day and eating at night.This explains the
ancient traditions of Islam and of the Jews of
not eating till sun down.
I also liked the Russian quote by the previous gentleman.
Barry

Posted by: barry bocchieri at July 12, 2005 6:30 AM

Great article, covered some points I've been curious about since I started this whole evolutionary fitness thing.

If your day is pretty sedentary (office worker, student, whatever), how drasticically must activity distribution change in order to achieve the varied metabolic states we're aiming for? Will walking to work do it? Walking several flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator? Or does it have to be more intense, like dropping and doing some burpees/push-ups/jump squats/whatever for five minutes, several times througout the day?

Again, awesome article.

Posted by: Jason Berger at July 11, 2005 9:29 PM

Good entry. Reminds me of an old Russian saying: "Eat your breakfast and give your dinner to the enemy."

Posted by: Woody at July 11, 2005 9:03 PM

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