So this is a common question that comes up, if I go low carb, I'm going to lower my insulin.

That's going to actually lower my muscle mass. So how do I maintain my muscle mass and do keto and intermittent fasting?

It is true that insulin is anabolic. So anabolic is a condition where your body is building up muscle, it's building muscle proteins.

And a lot of times when you associate bodybuilders with carboloding, a lot of times about a week before the competition, these bodybuilders will go low carb.

And maybe a day or two before the competition, they will do carboloding.

And they'll eat sugar and they will just create this huge storage in their muscles of glycogen, which is stored sugar.

With glycogen comes water. So every gram of glycogen equals 2.7 grams of water.

Now they're not consuming a lot of water during this period of time or else they would just completely blow up or salt.

But the fact that they spike their glycogen makes the muscles look really good and it pops out and makes you a little bit bigger.

So the reason the bodybuilders are doing the carboloding is not to build muscle, it's to build glycogen.

Now here's the problem when you start spiking insulin. You're going to create insulin resistance.

The majority of the population has insulin resistance. And that means that insulin is dysfunctional.

It's not working like it should. And one of the big purposes of insulin is to absorb amino acids because it's anabolic.

So if you have insulin resistance, you're not going to absorb the amino acids out that well.

This is why a diabetic who definitely has insulin resistance.

Despite having high levels of insulin by 9 times to a normal person, and I'm talking about diabetes type 2,

they're not absorbing these amino acids and this is why they have a loss of muscle mass.

Despite having high insulin. So that's interesting.

So when you do low carb, keto and fasting, you improve insulin resistance, you improve insulin sensitivity and you start to absorb these amino acids and proteins for the first time.

It's like, wow, finally starting absorb protein. Also, when you're on low carb and you're doing fasting, there's another thing that happens. It's called protein sparing.

In other words, your muscles now are protected against the loss or the use of that protein in the muscle for fuel.

So your body protects against that when you're doing fasting.

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