What Happens to Muscle During Cleansing?

Proper Cleansing burns fat, not muscle.

During even a brief period of fasting, your metabolism can rapidly change. For example, let’s look at the macronutrient carbohydrate, like those found in rice, bread and fruit. The storage form in our bodies, glycogen, generally decreases, which can shift metabolism from burning carbohydrates to burning fat for energy. This occurs in multiple tissues, including the one responsible for movement, muscle.

Cleanse Days involve fasting to speed up metabolism and aid in fat burning. A recent study confirms that fat burning vastly increases during fasting, but its effects on muscle are even more impressive. Researchers found certain genes in muscles were actually altered in a very beneficial way (1).
Muscle can use both carbohydrates and fat for energy and can adapt to different nutrient intakes, including fasting (2). This occurs through a complex, energy and nutrient-sensing pathway that is involved with many different energy states, like being full or fasting (3). Understanding this pathway under different dietary conditions is very important as it can affect how genes are expressed and regulated (1).

Researcher Marjolein van Wijngaarden and colleagues from the Department of Endocrinology and Metabolic Diseases in Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands investigated the effects of fasting on carbohydrate and fat metabolism in relation to gene expression in healthy, young men. It was the first study to provide a map of the signalling pathways and changes in human muscle during short-term fasting.

The study used 12 young, lean, healthy males who stopped exercise and performed an overnight fast. The subjects started after a breakfast of 300 kilocalories. They then followed up with a 24-hour fast where only water and caffeine-free tea were allowed. Blood samples and muscle biopsies were collected at multiple times throughout the well-controlled study period.

Not surprisingly there was a rapid decrease in carbohydrate oxidation (sugar burning) with a large increase in fat oxidation (fat burning) mostly in muscle. Insulin and leptin (a hormone involved in appetite control) levels decreased as free fatty acids and growth hormone levels increased. Most interesting in this study was that genetic expression changed for more than 900 genes in muscle after only a 24-hour fast.

The study represents roughly seven percent of the genes expressed in muscle tissue. However, only 23 genes, mostly involved in the regulation of metabolic processes, were significantly affected by the fasting at early (10 hours) and late (24 hours) time points. Many of these genes helped move metabolism to fat oxidation (fat burning) at the whole-body level.

In relation to fat burning in muscle tissue, short-term fasting appeared to be quite effective. However, prolonging the daily fast or fasting too often to speed up fat loss is not advisable as fasting for too long can cause a loss in muscle mass and negatively affect metabolism (2;3).
Bottom line: When done correctly, cleansing works!