Bodybuilding Forums

I have just started lifting again after a long break. I am 45, 6'2" and 210. I have always preferred being a little more on the lean side than too bulked up. I was rail thin as a kid.

My diet and drinking habits have not been too good over the last couple of years and I am thinking about trying a cleansing fast that a friend has done. It is three weeks long. Mostly herbal supplements and a colon cleanse for the first week with liquids only. The second week is small protein,(beans nuts) lots of leafy vegetables. Last week is working back into a normal diet but more with whole grain pasta & rice. I eat a mostly vegetarian diet anyway. A little chicken and fish. Most of my protein comes from eggs, beans, cheese and nuts.

Can anybody tell me what they think would happen to my muscle? I haven't been doing too much cardio. Mostly lifting and a couple of yoga classes a week to maintain flexibility.

Cleansing may be good internally, but it doesn't do anything that a clean diet can't. Take a lot of fiber and eat "clean" to get started, that's all you need.

A full on "fast" will slow your metabolism, which is not ideal. Your body will pack on fat instead of muscle.

dsphoto wrote:I have just started lifting again after a long break. I am 45, 6'2" and 210. I have always preferred being a little more on the lean side than too bulked up. I was rail thin as a kid.

My diet and drinking habits have not been too good over the last couple of years and I am thinking about trying a cleansing fast that a friend has done. It is three weeks long. Mostly herbal supplements and a colon cleanse for the first week with liquids only. The second week is small protein,(beans nuts) lots of leafy vegetables. Last week is working back into a normal diet but more with whole grain pasta & rice. I eat a mostly vegetarian diet anyway. A little chicken and fish. Most of my protein comes from eggs, beans, cheese and nuts.

Can anybody tell me what they think would happen to my muscle? I haven't been doing too much cardio. Mostly lifting and a couple of yoga classes a week to maintain flexibility.

Any kind of fast where you severely restrict calories...you're going to loose some muscle. I've done fasts more extreme that what you're proposing, like eat no solid food for 21 days. People don't think about this aspect but...just as important as the fast is what you do when you come off of it. When you reincorporate food, you need to be working out hard to make sure that food doesn't get stored in your body as fat (famine response). People fail doing fasts because when they're coming off it they stuff their face and sit around, essentially gaining as much weight back (and negating the "cleansing" benefits) as they lost.