How do you prevent muscle loss when restricting so heavily?

[Welcometothenightcourt]

It's my understanding that if you lose weight to fast you end up losing muscle instead of fat - is that correct or is it an old wives tale? Doing 16:8 and going to the gym to lift twice a week plus walking and child-rearing.

[ShirleyPhallus]

That’s correct, and you need to eat a decent amount of protein to stop that happening

Worst worst diets are when people (usually women) drop to eating crudités, diet yoghurts, special K, weight watchers ready meals etc. Basically very low protein and lots of processed rubbish.

get yourself a macro counter and look at what your macros should be for the day

[pippablackwell]

Humans evolved in feast/famine environment. If our muscles disintegrated between meals, that wouldn't work in a hunter/gatherer situation where you need to exert yourself to gain food (unlike now where you just need to get to the fridge). Also, a 16:8 fast isn't so long I'd even begin to worry about this. I eat in a shorter window without trying (a lifelong breakfast sceptic). This is a quote from Jason Fung:

Everybody worries about all kinds of things like, "Oh, you're going to eat your muscle. You're going to burn your muscles." It's like, right. So the body stores fat as energy and as soon as you need it you start burning muscle and you need your fat there. Well, that doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would we do that? Lions, for instance, might eat once a week. You think they're burning their muscle as soon as they stop eating? I doubt it. I suspect that people burn fat because that's the way it was designed.

 It's like storing firewood. So you spend all winter storing firewood but as soon as the temperate goes down you chop off your sofa and throw it into the wood burning oven. Isn't that insane? That's the same thing. So we store energy as fat but then when it comes down to crunch time we burn our muscles? I don't think so. What you do is you burn sugar and you burn fat. That's the way it's stored and that's the way it goes.