Everything on the nutritiming page is fairly good as a source for the legitimacy of continuous energy balance, as well as forthcoming research coming from Dr. Benardot this year. It very clearly predicts who has high body fat and who has low body fat in athletes, with no fails. It also predicts performance. Everyone on this website should consider themselves an athlete. This should matter to everyone.
This is a screenshot of references from a PDF file. I am tired to death of talking about this stuff right now. I don't want to retype things.
This concept also bridges the gap between the "anabolic window" and body composition changes seen over long periods, but to bridge that gap I would need 1-2 hours of your time.
'More importantly, when you put it into practice you see superior results every time. I've literally watched a girl in my class change over the course of 2 months while she was one of Benardot's subjects for an upcoming study, which I did not know at the time. All I knew was that she was changing more rapidly than I have seen almost anyone change, and she started winning race after race in steeplechase after 2 years of never even standing on the podium. She went to states, don't know how she did but that's a ridiculous improvement. She dropped 11 seconds off of her race time in less than 2 weeks. If an experienced college athlete seeing these types of results doesn't make you think twice about what you believe currently, then you haven't had enough experience with higher level athletes to know how ridiculously fast that kind of improvement is. In addition to performance improvements, she changed from being a pretty in shape girl to looking like a machine. I watched her VO2max test at the end of the semester and dude... I have rarely seen a woman that lean. The change took 2 months.
If you want a giant pile of science on this, you're going to have to wait 10 years. If you want to take advantage of everything your body is willing to give you with the right stimuli combinations then I will highly suggest that you try it yourself and see. It should go without saying that if you have a fitness enthusiast's activity level then food quality is going to make a much bigger difference on the carb side than if you are a competitive athlete in a physically demanding sport simply due to the level of full-body glycogen depletion and the effect this has on glycogenesis speed.
There is also a pile of evidence showing that intermittent fasting is associated with increased insulin resistance. All you have to do is a pubmed search for the two terms. There are honestly too many.
You should know that our bodies are capable of producing chemicals that make us feel good and sometimes keep us from noticing the sub-optimal nature of our current status. Just because you feel satisfied does not mean your body has gotten what it needs.
Short version:
Your body is made to require a certain amount of sugar, both at rest and when working at varying intensities. As the level of stored sugar decreases, our bodies adjust by making sugar out of other things. Unfortunately those other things are intact proteins. Yes, lactate can be used, but I had a long PM discussion with FiN about why that doesn't make a practical difference under normal circumstances. After HIIT, it certainly can offset up to 60% of the reliance on protein for GNG, but that is short-lived. Meaning for less than 4 hours.
There are other threads where I have detailed this quite clearly, and explained how using labile protein stores actually means tearing down excess liver mass and after a certain point the body switches over to skeletal muscle. In either case you end up spending energy and protein rebuilding the torn down tissues, leaving less protein available to be used for new skeletal muscle synthesis.
When you combine this with a lower carb diet you are now redirecting protein to GNG as well as the reconstruction of the labile stores.
There is a good reason why the typical math you describe does not work: It does not take into account the cyclical nature of:
carb restriction -> protein in GNG -> Less protein available for tissue synthesis -> unintended calorie deficits due to energy required for GNG and unaccounted-for thermic effect of protein metabolism -> lowering of free IGF-1, T3, and virtually everything associated with lower body fat levels -> impaired maintenance of lean mass -> slower metabolism due to loss of lean mass -> same calories cause more fat gain.
Another screen capture.
By itself, when combined with exercise and sufficient calories, this limits performance and sets a cycle of new proteins being built from the exercise stimulus then being broken down for energy (carbs). This is exactly why, on the leangains site, Martin clearly tells everyone that leangains produces very slow gains in lean mass and that you need to eat exactly how he tells you to.
If you do it juuuuust right, and it is certainly possible to do without using complicated maths, you will just barely stay in positive protein synthesis balance, which is why you see very slow gains. This does not take into account the high nitrogen load on the kidneys that comes from using extra protein in GNG. Combined with a diet that is recommended to already be high in protein, at 2+ grams per kg BW this extra load can put you into a danger zone where you WILL see long-term kidney damage.
There are a ton of people who don't get the results they see in his testimonials, and Martin tells them very clearly that the testimonial results are due to his direct, and strict, supervision. That's because the positive protein synthesis balance is so small.