If you haven’t read Petro Dobromylskyj’s posts about Physiological Insulin Resistance, then just go do it. Highly recommended.
I’ve written about it as well, albeit in a slightly different context:
What is our proper “natural” diet?
40 years ago a group of researchers turned ketosis into poetry.
But now on to more pressing matters. In the food deprived state, Physiological Insulin Resistance develops, in part, to spare muscle (yea yea yeah and glucose for the brain). But how much of this is due to ‘food deprivation’ per se as opposed to something else… like circadian rhythms.
Exhibit A. Hat tip to Dr Kruse for writing about this TED talk. In it, Jessa describes a crab that lives on the beach; scurries up the beach when the tide comes in and back down when it goes out. Scientists captured a few, flew them halfway around the world and put them in little tilted cages. The crabs still scurried up & down, in time with the tides.
Exhibit B. Evidence that the lunar cycle affects human sleep. People tend to sleep a little less during the full moon. Subjects were recruited to a windowless sleep lab and had no exposure to sun/moon/anything outside – they maintained this circadian rhythm for 3 days (Cajochen et al., 2013). Different from the crabs, but similar (in a way).
makes some of the strongest athletes in the world because unlike most other training regimes, they are constantly lifting very heavy weight. Other protocols restrict heavy lifting to certain times of the year, in-season / off-season, etc. At Westside, you’re going heavy on an exercise that changes very frequently (every 1 – 3 weeks). And it’s this latter point that provides the basis for why other people think Westside works. By constantly changing which exercise is lifted at maximal intensity, the body never fully adapts, or gets into a rut – this is part of Westside’s ‘Conjugate Method.’
, as per their 
theory: small doses of individual exercises, eg, conventional deadlifts one week, good mornings the next, sumo deads the next week, and so on and so forth – will improve your squats; the body never knows what’s coming (even though you might have planned it weeks in advance, or at least planned to check 
, wherein being prepared for “random” shocks seem to benefit the system as a whole, or make it stronger. Sedentary makes you fragile, weak, and soft; exercise makes you robust; Westside is Antifragile.
), Kate Harrison (
), Michael Mosley (
), Bert Herring (
), John Daugirdas (
), and Martin Berkhan (
). Chances are you’re probably unwittingly already doing one of them, at least intermittently. The theoretical benefits are seemingly endless (albeit via few human trials), beyond the scope of my brain.
