36. The Myths and Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode number 36 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And there seems to be a lot of misleading information out there about intermittent fasting, people think it will mess up their metabolism or they think it’s unsafe, or they say it’s just plain crazy. The truth, however, is very different.

Intermittent Fasting is not only safe, but it provides some pretty amazing health benefits, especially when combined with a low carb diet. So today, I’m going to separate fact from fiction and share with you all of the incredible positive health benefits that intermittent fasting provides.

And if you liked this podcast, you should come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. It is a fun, positive, energetic group that kind of goes hand in hand with this podcast. It’s full of fun, like minded runners who all have a common goal, we all want to lose weight, we want running to be easier. We want to live a more vibrant life.

And I do weekly trainings in there on a bunch of different topics. This month, we’re talking all about intermittent fasting. So you gotta come check out the group.

Here’s a recent review from iTunes from somebody that found me on Facebook, and this is from Tinkerboom. And Tinkerboom says, “For a long time I asked myself the same questions, why can’t I lose weight if I run every day? I’ve talked to trainers, doctors, etc. And not one of them told me or suggested that it could be my hormones. I found Patrick on Facebook and started listening to his podcast and found incredible information. And I found that I am not alone in this struggle. Patrick’s information is on point and has worked for me and I am on my way to being a fat adapted runner. Thank you, Patrick, you are amazing. I look forward to listening to all your information. #youarealifechanger.”

Well thank you Tinkerboom. I just want my message, this message I’m sharing with you today. And every day, I just want this message to resonate with runners like you, because I want you to become that badass lean running machine that you’ve always wanted to be.

Okay, so I’m talking about the Facebook group, we’ve got a big challenge going on right now, September is intermittent fasting month in the Running Lean community on Facebook. And just to be clear, it does not mean we’re fasting for the entire month of September.

But you’re gonna learn what intermittent fasting is, what it isn’t, how to do it safely, how to incorporate this into your training as part of your not only nutrition plan, but your training plan. And you’re gonna learn all about the amazing health benefits of intermittent fasting especially for running. And I’m gonna be sharing some of those with you here in this episode. So just search for the Running Lean community on facebook and join us.

Also, if you are interested in losing weight and becoming a fat adapted runner, it can be hard to do on your own, I totally get it. That’s why I offer one-on-one coaching. We’re all different. We all have different goals, different needs, different lifestyles, and what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for somebody else.

So when you work with me directly, you will learn exactly how to become a lean fat burning running machine in a way that works for you. So I’ll help you determine the right plan and the right system that works for you. I help keep you accountable. I make sure you’re reaching your goals and I help you to get results if you’re ready to make some big changes in your life.

If you’re ready to reap all the benefits of a low carbohydrate diet and intermittent fasting, then just go to innerfiretribe.com/weightlosscoaching, that’s all one word, and apply. Apply for a one-on-one coaching with me. Do it now, I promise you it is life changing, you will not regret it.

Okay, let’s get into the topic today. So today I’m talking about the myths and benefits of intermittent fasting. And like I said there are a lot of myths in information out there. Some people think this is just crazy, you can’t do it. I’m going to address a bunch of these different myths here in a minute. But I want to back up just a little bit and explain how we lose weight.

Okay, so one thing that a lot of people don’t understand is that there are systems in place in our bodies that either promote fat storage, or promote fat burning. Okay, if we want to lose weight, we want to do that whole fat burning thing, right? We want to burn the fat, we don’t want to hold on to the fat.

So our body, we have two primary sources of fuel, we have glucose and we have fat. Glucose comes from eating carbohydrates, mainly, okay, you eat carbohydrates, any carbohydrates, you turn into glucose in your system, and they get stored as fuel as glycogen, or they get stored as fat. Okay, so that’s carbohydrates.

And then we have fat. This is our own body fat that we can use for fuel. The problem is, we can only use one of these fuel sources at a time, pretty much okay. Like in order to burn fat, you basically have to burn through the available glucose first, okay, so if you are eating a diet high in carbohydrates, then you know, getting that glucose out of your system is key, so that you can actually access your own body fat for fuel, okay?

Eating a diet high in carbohydrates, makes it very difficult to lose weight. If you’ve been listening to me for a while you understand this. We’re always going to want to use the available glucose as the primary fuel. That’s just the way our bodies are designed. Okay, we’re designed to use available glucose and glycogen first.

So when you have high glucose levels in your body, when you’re eating a lot of carbs and sugar, then you cannot access your fat stores, you know, maybe a little bit but not really. When glucose is high, insulin is also high. Insulin is produced when our blood sugar goes up insulin, its job is to bring blood sugars down. But when insulin is high, it puts our body into this fat storage mode. We hold on to our body fat when insulin is high.

When glucose is high, insulin is high, we’re in fat storage mode, when glucose is low. When we don’t eat a lot of carbohydrates, when we don’t have a lot of high blood sugar. When glucose is low, insulin is low, then our bodies are in fat burning mode.

Okay, so the key to this whole deal is keep insulin levels low, keep them low. And the way we do this, there’s two ways that we lower insulin to keep it low. We don’t eat carbohydrates, and we don’t eat. Insulin will remain low. As long as our blood sugar is low, as long as our blood sugar is normal, okay, it’s not elevated. Blood sugars go high when we eat a lot of carbohydrates, especially highly refined carbohydrates, the higher refined the carbohydrate, like pure sugar will spike our blood sugar like crazy, which spikes our insulin like crazy.

And then we’re in fat storage mode like crazy. All right, when we don’t eat carbohydrates, it keeps our blood sugars normalized. Another way of keeping blood sugars normalized is to not eat anything at all. Because every time you eat some food, your blood sugar goes up a little bit. So if you eat, you know, a pile of broccoli, and a steak, your blood sugar is going to go up a little bit, which is normal.

Insulin will get produced a little bit, which is normal, and it’ll come back down pretty quickly, which is normal. Everything is like working the way it should. But if you ate a big bowl of, you know, sugary cereal, and a glass of orange juice, your blood sugar is going to go up like crazy. Insulin is gonna go up like crazy. And then we’re in that insidious fat storage mode again, okay?

But anytime we eat any food at all, blood sugar goes up a little bit. So one awesome way of keeping blood sugar down, keeping insulin down, and getting us into fat burning mode is to not eat anything at all. And I’m not talking about you know, going on a 12 day fast or something like that.

We’re talking about intermittent fasting. I’m gonna break this all down in just a minute but I just want you understand that, for example, your blood sugars are very low in the morning, because you have been fasting all night long. So anyway, when we combine these two things a low carbohydrate, high fat diet, with intermittent fasting, both of these things work to regulate our blood sugars to keep our insulin levels in check, and to put us into fat burning mode.

So when we combine these two things, it’s like rocket fuel for your overall health and for your weight loss. This approach will keep blood sugars normalized, it’ll keep insulin down, and you’ll be able to access your own body fat for fuel. So what is intermittent fasting at its simplest?

It just means this. Don’t eat anything. It’s just like not eating for periods of time. Okay? The intermittent part means we don’t do it all the time. We do it intermittently, sporadically or periodically. So it’s basically, periodically we don’t eat. That’s all that it means. Okay.

A little bit about fasting in general. So fasting is something that is in our DNA. It’s something we’ve done as humans for millions of years. It’s not some new thing that was created by the CrossFit community or anything like that. Okay. I love the CrossFit people, by the way, I think they’re awesome.

But they love the whole low carb, high fat diet, they love their intermittent fasting. But people just have some notion that this is like all new. It’s not. We’ve been doing this forever. We didn’t evolve as humans by eating three meals a day, two snacks a day and dessert. We didn’t.

We didn’t have that much food available to us. We scavenged. We hunted. We foraged and we ate. And then we fasted. This is the way we’ve evolved as humans to get to where we are today, we feasted. And then we fasted. This was beautiful, everything was working beautifully for us. You know, we didn’t have ways of preserving foods until much later in our evolution.

So when we had food available, we ate it, right? Another kind of historical part of fasting is that cultures around the world today have been practicing some form of fasting for many 1000s of years.

Fasting has been used therapeutically since at least the fifth century, when the Greek physician Hippocrates recommended to his patients abstinence from food or drink, if they had certain types of illnesses. So, you know, back in the fifth century, Hippocrates was saying like, Hey, you want to get better, don’t eat or drink anything.

Religions have been practicing fasting for millennia. Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Jainism, Hinduism have all been practicing some form of fasting for 1000s of years. Hindus, for example, are used to fasting on Ekadashi, which is the 11th day of the lunar cycle.

So they fast every 11th day. During the season of Lent, Catholics give up certain foods or practice fasting. In Judaism, they observed fasting on six different days of the year, like Yom Kippur, for example. The entire month of Ramadan and Islam as a period of penitence, sorry, and total fasting from dawn to dusk.

And then arguably three of the most influential people in the history of the world, Jesus, the prophet Muhammad, and the Buddha, they didn’t all agree on a whole lot, but they all agreed on one thing, the power of fasting.

And here’s something else that I just want you to understand about fasting. You are already doing it. You fast every day, you know, unless you eat while you’re sleeping. Like if you get up in the middle of the night and eat something and go back to bed. Most of us, I would say almost all of us fast for around seven or eight hours a day or more.

You know, you don’t you probably don’t need a couple hours before you go to bed. And maybe you don’t eat as soon as you wake up in the morning. So it might be 10 hours a day that you’re fasting anyway. Okay. And the word itself, breakfast means to break your fast, right? So this fasting is not something that is harmful. It’s not something that is weird. And it’s not something that is new. We’ve been doing this for a long, long time.

So I want to talk about some of the myths that people have around fasting and tell you what the truth is around some of these things. So here’s one of the first myths that people have: they say it’s not safe fasting is not safe. Well, like I just said you’re doing this every day, is that not safe?

And we’re not talking about going weeks without food here. This is intermittent fasting, this is sporadically not eating. You can safely go for days, weeks, probably even months without any food depending on how much body fat that you have on you.

And I’m not suggesting you do this. I’m not suggesting you try to go weeks or months without food. But you could easily go a couple of days without food without, you know, any deleterious effects. Okay? Can fasting be dangerous? Yes, if done recklessly, sure, just about anything can be done with reckless abandon and get you into trouble.

And consider the story of the marathon. According to legend. In 490 BC, the Greek soldier Pheidippides ran approximately 26 miles from the battlefield near the town of Marathon to Athens, he’s delivering a message on the news of the defeat of the Persians.

When he got there, he shouted Nike, which means victory. And then he promptly keeled over and died. And people say, well, yeah, you shouldn’t run marathons, they’re not safe, look what happened to this guy. And like, if we look at this, in today’s terms, if, if you took a sedentary middle aged out of shape person, and said go run of Marathon right now, as hard as you can, you know, at your maximum speed, without any type of preparation or knowledge, that person might very well keel over and die to okay.

But here’s the thing, just about anything can be done recklessly, can be done in a way that is not safe. But millions of people practice some form of fasting every single day on this planet and have zero problems. We have been doing fasting as a species for millions of years without any problems. Okay.

But just to address the safety issue, one step further. So there was this guy back in 1965, his name is Angus Barbieri, Scottish dude. And he was very overweight, he is obese at the time, you know, 1965 people weren’t this big, he weighed 456 pounds.

And his doctor suggested he’d go on a fast and so he fasted for like 10 days or something like that. And he loved it, he felt great, he was losing some weight. And he decided to keep going. And with his doctor supervision, he went on a total fast for 382 days. Think about that. This dude went over a year without eating any food.

He was living on his own body fat that whole time. Now, he was drinking water, obviously, coffee, tea, he had to take vitamins and electrolytes, you got to have, you know, some kind of nutrition coming in. But he lost like 276 pounds by living off of his own body fat for over a year. This is crazy, right? And I’m not suggesting again that anybody try this, but I just want you to see that, you know, this guy had doctor’s supervision, but you can go for a long time living off your own body fat. Okay.

So our fat is a great source of fuel for our bodies and for our brains. And, and this is the way we’re designed as people. So that’s kind of Myth number one that fasting isn’t safe. I think we can all agree that fasting is perfectly safe and something we do all the time. Another myth is that fasting makes you go into starvation mode.

I mean, get this. It’s not starving yourself. You don’t go into starvation mode when you fast. Your body has plenty of fuel onboard in the form of your own body fat. We all do. Even the leanest marathon runners have like 8% of body fat, plenty of fat on them to to last a long, long time without eating anything.

Calorie restriction diets actually will put you into starvation mode. And they did these experiments which sound horrible, the Minnesota starvation experiment where they took a group of men and they gave them a very, very limited calorie diet and they went into starvation mode. They became extremely weak, lethargic, emaciated, and were literally starving to death.

But here’s the thing, there’s a big difference between calorie restriction, severe calorie restriction and zero food. Something hormonally changes when you don’t eat anything, calorie restriction puts you in a starvation mode. Because your body can’t make the necessary hormonal adaptations that you get when you’re fasting when you have zero calories coming in, so you’re never actually getting to the point where you’re using your own body fat for fuel.

Everything changes when you go to zero calorie. So fasting the body switches from burning glucose to burning your own stored body fat. And this is exactly what your body fat is there for.
Our body fat is not for looks. It’s not there to make us look good. Right? It’s there, it’s used for food when no food is available, our stored body fat is used to nourish us when no food is available.

It’s a very well designed system and works very, very well. Again, humans have been feasting and then fasting for millions of years. If not eating for short periods of time would put us into starvation mode, we’ve become extinct a long, long time ago. Okay, so when you fast, you do not go into starvation mode. Okay.

Another myth is that when you fast you will lose muscle. So, consider the consequences of burning muscle for energy. During long winters, you know, back in the caveman days, there would have been many days where no food was available. After the first episode of like a period of no food available, your body was actually consuming muscle as fuel, you would be severely weakened after a couple times of this happening, you’d be so weak that you’d be unable to hunt, you won’t even be able to stand up.

Humans would never have survived as a species, if burning muscle happened when we didn’t eat. So your body, here’s the way your body works, you burn glucose first, then fat. And then when there’s no fat available, your body will start to use muscle as fuel.

But it’s a terrible source of fuel for your body. So it will not do that it won’t break down muscle until all the fat is gone. And I gotta tell you, it would be almost impossible for you to lose that much fat, think of Angus. He had so much fat on his body he was able to you know, use that as fuel for over a year. When you fast you burn fat that your body will only use muscle if there’s no more glucose, no fat available.

So you’d literally have to be at that point of like starving to death for your body to start using muscle. And studies indicate that intermittent fasting is actually better for maintaining muscle mass. In fact, intermittent fasting is very popular among bodybuilders because they find it helps them to maintain muscle alongside a low body fat percentage, right? So they’re lean, and super muscular. So you don’t burn muscle when you fast.

Another myth that I’m trying to bust here today is that fasting will make you tired, and lethargic. Oh, if I don’t eat all the time, I’m gonna be super tired. I need the energy. Well, have you ever been tired after eating a meal? Of course you have, everybody has. This is what happens when you eat.

There’s this moment of like drowsiness afterwards, lack of concentration. That’s your system like your stomach, your liver, your digestive system all working to process the food. When you fast, you don’t have these kinds of problems. Fat is a far superior source of fuel for your body and for your brain.

So when you fast your body can actually produce ketones, which is an amazing source of energy. And ketones along with your own body fat, actually increase your energy levels. Right? You get tired and lethargic when you’re eating a lot of sugar and carbs. And you have that crash after you eat.

Like if you’ve ever had a big lunch and then you want to go to sleep around two o’clock in the afternoon to three o’clock you’re just like dead. And you need your Starbucks, triple Mocha, caramel latte or whatever to get you through the afternoon. That’s because of you know, eating all that food, especially the sugar and the carbs.

But when you’re fasting this doesn’t happen. You don’t have those energy spikes and crashes. You have this like consistent energy throughout the day so no crashes at all. And I gotta tell you, my clients report a lot of increased energy and sustained energy when they become fat-adapted

When they stop eating the sugar and the carbs and they, their body is starting to burn fat. And then when we add in some intermittent fasting, their energy levels actually go up, not down. Okay? So fasting does not make you tired and lethargic actually gives you more energy. People think fasting will slow your metabolism.

And no, this is not true at all. It actually boosts your metabolism. When you fast it puts your body into fat burning mode, okay, which is boosting it actually boosts your metabolic rate. This is due to a drastic increase in blood levels of norepinephrine, which stimulates your metabolism and instructs your fat cells to break down body fat. And then you can use that body fat for fuel.

Studies have shown that fasting for even up to like 48 hours will boost your metabolism by something like 3% up to 14%. Fasting does not slow your metabolism. And there’s this misconception out there that you need to eat like six times a day, you know, to boost your metabolism. And it’s the opposite.

When you eat six times a day, you slow your metabolism down. Because you’re always hanging on to all that extra body fat. All that extra food is going into your fat stores. Okay, your your blood glucose is always elevated, insulin has always elevated and you’re holding on to all that extra fat. Okay, so you’re actually not burning fat when you do that. So eating less often or eating nothing at all for periods of time will actually speed up your metabolism.

Another myth is that fasting deprives your body of nutrients. So some people have concerns that fasting will lead to some sort of malnourishment, right, you’re not getting the right vitamins and minerals. And it’s been shown that fasting that lasts under 24 hours, like what we’re talking about here, intermittent fasting, there’s no real need to be concerned with missing vitamins or minerals, mainly because we replenish anything we lost.

When we eat food later in the day, like you’re not you’re you’re eating every day, okay? But for longer fasts, if you’re doing like a 24 hour or longer fast, doctors recommend supplementing with electrolytes. So sodium, potassium, magnesium, which is very easy to get in a supplement, right? I actually take these when I’m running in the heat, just because we all need electrolytes when we’re running, especially longer distances, especially when it’s super hot outside.

And so I take a supplement that’s just sodium, potassium, and magnesium, and no sugar or anything like that, and gives me everything I need. And I do all my runs fasted. And we’ll talk a little bit about that in a second here. But actually, fat is one of the best things your body can use for fuel, right, it’s one of two essential nutrients that we have to have.

And so, you know, you’re not depriving your body of nutrients when you fast for short periods of time at all. Okay, if you’re concerned, just make sure you’re getting enough salt on the electrolytes. But other than that, you’re going to be fine. You’re going to get all the food, all the nutrients you need from the food that you eat. Okay.

And then the last myth I want to just talk about here, as people say, fasting is just crazy. And at this point, I want to say isn’t eating six times a day crazy? Yeah. Keeping your insulin levels elevated all the time. So your body is constantly in fat storage mode, you become insulin resistant when you do this. You know, you get fat, you can’t lose the weight. Isn’t that crazy? Yeah, I think so.

You know, think about all these millions of people around the world who have been fasting for 1000s of years. Muslims, Christians, Jewish people, Hindus, are they all crazy? No. What about all the human ancestors who feasted and fasted millions of years of evolution and we thrived as a species? It’s not crazy. It’s perfect. It’s how we’ve evolved is how we’re designed to function optimally.

And I just wanted you to think about this. Think about animals, the animal kingdom Okay, so bears hibernate every winter, right? They gorge themselves on salmon and berries, which sounds delicious, by the way, and then they live on their own body fat all winter long when they hibernate, right? Are they crazy? Are they just you know, insane? No, is the way they’re designed.

And just a little sidebar here humans were like the only animal on the planet It eats foods that we’re not designed to eat. So all the sugar and the highly refined carbohydrates, we’re not supposed to eat that stuff. That stuff makes us fat. It makes us obese. It creates all kinds of health problems for us. But we eat tons of that stuff. No other animal on the planet does this.

Humans are the only overweight animal on the planet. Think about that. No other animals get fat and obese. You know, obviously, there’s fat animals, like Wallace’s and elephant seals, right? They have a lot of body fat, but they’re not overweight. That’s the way they’re supposed to be. They’re designed to be this way. But it’s perfectly healthy for them. That’s, that’s optimal for them. But it’s not perfectly healthy for humans to be as fat as a walrus. To me, that’s crazy.

Okay, so I hope you understand that fasting is not crazy, it’s perfectly normal. So let’s quickly I’m gonna talk about some of the benefits of fasting, sorry, I get all worked up about this stuff. And I crack myself up sometimes, okay, the benefits of fasting, especially for runners.

So here’s the benefits we can experience. And I’ve kind of talked about some of the stuff already. But I’m gonna reiterate a few things and tell you about a few things I think are kind of cool here. So what happens when you do some fasting? What’s good about it, especially for runners?

Well, number one, glucose levels go down. So when our blood sugars, you know, normalized insulin levels go down, it improves insulin sensitivity, which means our bodies can react to insulin the way they’re supposed to, we get out of fat storage mode, and we get into fat burning mode, right, so we have this boost in metabolism. And our bodies can actually get out of fat storage and into fat burning mode. So there’s a huge benefit for everybody right in it.

The second benefit is that it induces weight loss, because our metabolism is speeding up, not slowing down. It speeds up weight loss and fat loss and fat adaptation. So if you want to become a fat adapted runner, one of the best ways to get there is obviously you have to stop eating sugar and carbohydrates. And then number two, start doing some intermittent fasting.

And when you do it, you will get your body into fat burning mode faster, you’ll lose more weight, obviously, but becoming a fat adapted runner will happen quicker if you include a little intermittent fasting along with the low carb high fat diet.

Another benefit is that intermittent fasting helps you to break through weight loss plateaus. So with all my clients, invariably, at some point, weight loss kind of stalls a little bit, this is perfectly normal. And we anticipate this happening.

And there’s all kinds of tools that I help us and we implement to help my, my clients break through some of those weight loss plateaus, and one of them is intermittent fasting, it’s a great way to bust through when you get stuck at a certain weight, especially when it’s done intermittently. So not all the time, but periodically.

Because here’s what happens when we do the same thing over and over again, our bodies adapt, our body’s very good at adapting, right, so what we want to do is we want to kind of shake things up a little bit every now and then we want to cause our body a little bit of stress so that it can adapt in a different way and change things. Okay.

This is why we don’t work the same muscles at the exact same workout at the gym every single time we go if you want to actually build muscle because your body will adapt, and it’ll stop seeing that as a stressor, and it will stop building the muscle, right. So that’s why if you follow any kind of workout routine or a plan that somebody put in place for you, then you know, they always want you to be doing different things and mixing it up.

And that’s how you get stronger and build muscle. Also, this is why we don’t run the same distances and the same pace. Every time we go out and run right you got to mix things up. We want our bodies to adapt to some super hard super fast running like sprints or hill repeats. And then we want to do some really slow long running.

And then we want to do some stuff in between and then we throw some fartleks in there. I just love saying fartleks and then we want to do some interval training in there. Right? Well, we want to just keep mixing things up so our bodies can respond to these changes of stressors. Same thing happens with fasting it helps us to respond to changes in a different way and really helps to break through some of these weight loss plateaus that we get.

Another huge benefit of intermittent fasting is increased mental and cognitive abilities. So our brains love fat and ketones for fuel is an amazing source of fuel for our brains. And when we do intermittent fasting fat and ketones are produced, we get this flood of amazing fuel for our brain.

It helps improve our mental clarity or concentration, you’ll think more clearly, you’ll be more focused, you’ll be smarter, you get smarter when you do intermittent fasting. FYI. Another amazing benefit is that intermittent fasting enables cell regeneration, including immune cell regeneration, which is very important during things like global pandemics. Okay?

Intermittent fasting also helps to lower blood cholesterol levels, it helps to decrease inflammation in your body, which is amazing, especially as runners, we don’t want to be inflamed, we want to decrease inflammation, right. And intermittent fasting will help with that.

Intermittent fasting helps to lower blood pressure, so reducing hypertension. And then studies have shown that intermittent fasting can also help to prevent Alzheimer’s disease, it helps to extend your life by reversing the aging process. So fasting actually provides some anti aging benefits.

And studies have actually shown that intermittent fasting helps to lower the risk of certain types of cancer. Now, here’s some benefits that are particularly interesting for you as a runner, number one, increased energy, not a loss of energy, but an increase of energy.

So when you practice some intermittent fasting, Adrenaline increases, you actually have more energy, so you can train harder, you can run harder, you can do some more intense workouts, you know, if you’re lifting weights at the gym, you can lift a lot more, because you have all this increased adrenaline and energy. And you’re gonna get some pretty amazing results. Because you have more energy.

Also another huge benefit is there is an increase in growth hormone production during those fasting periods. When you have more growth hormone being produced in your body, this helps to increase your bone density. So this is good for people over 40. I don’t know if there’s any of you out there, well, it’ll help to increase muscle mass. So this is good for everybody.

Right, you can build more muscle because you’re producing more growth hormone. When you’re producing more growth hormone, it also allows you to recover faster from these harder runs and workouts. So intermittent fasting allows you to train harder, and recover faster.

And then one of the big benefits I want to talk about here is that and I kind of mentioned this already, but this is that intermittent fasting helps to speed up the fat adaptation process. The key to fat adaptation, becoming a fat adapted runner, is to get your body used to using your own body fat for fuel.

And the best way to do this, is just don’t eat anything. That way, your body will not have any glucose available for energy. So it will have to go into your fat stores for energy, this is good, this is what we want. And this process of switching from burning glycogen to burning fat, is what we call the fat adaptation period.

And that takes a couple of weeks, you know, two to six weeks depending on how you do it, and your body type and all kinds of other factors. But it’s kind of different for everybody. But generally speaking, it’s somewhere between two and six weeks to get to that point of where you become fully fat adapted. Fasting really helps to speed up this process, okay? It’s an uncomfortable period, because running really sucks during that period.

So when you combine low carbohydrate, high fat diet, along with intermittent fasting, it helps to shorten that uncomfortable fat adaptation period. Okay, so all of these amazing benefits that I just listed. You get all these amazing health benefits without taking any kind of medications without buying any kind of supplements, without any cost at all to you without doing anything at all, except just donate. I think that’s pretty freakin amazing if you ask me.

Okay, so we will be continuing this conversation. We’re talking all about intermittent fasting this month over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. So here’s a little preview of what’s coming up in the Running Lean community. September intermittent fasting challenge.

And so over the course of the next several weeks, talking about how to do intermittent fasting is a lot simpler than you might think. I’m going to be offering tips on how to succeed with intermittent fasting, like how to make sure we’re getting enough electrolytes, what electrolytes should you take? When should you take them?

And what to do when you feel like, when you feel like eating something because like when we’re intermittent fasting, one of the things I talk about the first thing we’re doing this week is no snacks, right? Not eating between meals. And people are like, well, I feel hungry. And I’m like, Well, what did we do about that? You know, that never happens, people never feel hungry between meals. So I’ll give you some tips on how to deal with stuff like that.

So it’s like about how to curb the cravings between meals, how to deal with those urges and stuff like that, okay. I’ll be going over all the different types of intermittent fasting. So there’s different ways of doing this. There’s something called time restricted eating. There’s something people do called alternate day fasting.

There’s some advanced fasting regimens like a 36 hour, 48 hour, 24 hour fasts, one meal a day that people like to do. So there’s different ways of doing this. And I’ll just be giving you some information on all these things, and how to do some of them safely.

And then one of the big things I’ll be talking about over in the Running Lean community on Facebook is training in a fasted state. I call it running on empty. So this is where you don’t need fuel before, during or even after your runs. What? I know it sounds crazy, right? But I gotta tell you, it’s pretty amazing. I have not used fuel.

For months, I do all my workouts, all of my runs in a fasted state. So I haven’t eaten anything for like, at least 12 hours before running, just do some coffee, you know, I gotta have my coffee in the morning. Just honestly, I take electrolytes with me on my runs. And my runs have been amazing.

I’m up to about 15 miles doing this, alright, and I don’t need to have fuel with me. It’s kind of an experiment I’m doing. You know, I could take some fuel with me if I wanted to, but I don’t need it. And that’s the point I’m trying to get out here is like, you don’t have to have it. And when you train this way, and you train in this fasted state you’re building, you’re producing all this growth hormone, and you’ve got an amazing amount of energy. So you can actually run harder, run faster, run longer, and recover faster. So amazing, right?

So honestly, becoming a fat-adapted runner, this is one of the best things you can do for yourself. We’ll talk about how we do all that. So join us for the September intermittent fasting, and see what not eating can do for your overall health, energy, weight loss, and running. Cool. That’s all I got for you guys today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you. Keep on Running Lean will talk to you soon.

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