Endurance

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, sports nutritionist, Master life coach and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you, properly fuel your body and your mind so you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there and welcome to Episode 239, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. Today is a replay. It is the Myths and Benefits of Intermittent Fasting.

So there seems to be a lot of misleading information out there about intermittent fasting. Some people think it will mess up your metabolism. Other people think it’s unsafe, and still others think it’s just plain crazy. The truth 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 all of the incredible positive health benefits that intermittent fasting provides.

But first, if you want to get leaner or stronger, if you want to run faster or longer, you need to change what you’re doing. Doing the same things over and over and over again will not get you new results. Nothing changes. If nothing changes, I think we all get this right, but the real secret here is doing new things consistently. So if you decide you want to get stronger and you go to the gym once a month, that’s not going to get you there. You need to adopt new behaviors, and you need to start doing things consistently.

And this is where coaching really helps, trying to stay on track yourself. It’s very difficult, I know because I’ve tried it like a million times. I’d start something, I’d do it for a bit, then I’d go right back to doing the same old stuff and never really make any progress toward my goals. But once I got a coach, everything changed. Now I had someone guiding me every step of the way, holding me accountable, calling me out when I started to slip back into old behaviors, and most importantly, someone that would never, ever, ever, let me quit. So if you’re ready to start doing new things and making sure you’re doing them consistently, let’s do the work to get you there. Just go to my website, running, leancoaching.com, click on, work with me, and I’ll show you exactly how to become the most badass version of yourself yet.

Cool. Okay, so today, the Myths and Benefits of Intermittent Fasting, I realized in going through previous episodes that I haven’t done a podcast on intermittent fasting in a very, very long time, and this is important information, especially if you are a runner and you are interested in losing weight, and you’ll see why when I go through all the different benefits and the myths here today, and there’s a lot of confusing information about intermittent fasting, and people think that it’s crazier that you’re going to die if you don’t eat, you know, six or eight times a day. And this is not crazy. This is something we’ve been doing as human beings forever.

I’m going to get into all that in this episode. And I want to do more episodes upcoming about intermittent fasting, because I think it’s an important topic. But for now, please enjoy this replay of Episode 36 the Myths and Benefits of Intermittent Fasting.

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 is a lot of misinformation out there. Some people think this is just crazy. You can’t do it. I’m gonna address a bunch of these different myths here in a minute, but I wanna 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/glycogen first. So when, 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. 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 we find 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’s gonna 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, getting us into fat burning mode, is to not eat anything at all.

Now 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 going to break this all down in just a minute, but I just want you to 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, they love the whole low carb, high fat diet. They love their intermittent fasting. But people just have some notions 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 Titi, 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 observe fasting on six different days of the year, like Yom Kippur, for example, the entire month of Ramadan in Islam is a period of penance or 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, 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 probably don’t eat 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 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 days without food with no, 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, Fidipities ran approximately 26 miles from the battlefield near the town of Marathon to Athens. He was delivering a message, 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.

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 a 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 too.

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’s this guy back in 1965 His name is Angus Barbieri, Scottish dude, and he was very overweight. He was obese at the time. You know, ‘65 people weren’t this big. He weighed 456 pounds. And his doctor suggested he 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’s 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 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 this is the way we’re designed as people. So that’s kind of a 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 don’t even get this, it’s not starving yourself. You don’t go into starvation mode when you fast. Your body has plenty of fuel on board 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 into 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 calories.

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 body fat, our stored body fat, is used to nourish us when no food is available. It’s a very well designed system. It 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’d have 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, if it 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 wouldn’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. Dude had so much fat on his body, he’s able to, you know, use that as fuel for over a year. When you fast, you burn fat, 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 going to be super tired. I need the energy. Well, listen, 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, two, 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 got to 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 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, it 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 it 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, you know, your fat stores, okay, your blood glucose is always elevated, insulin is 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 eating, 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, 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, enough 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 is 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’ve been fasting for 1000s of years, Muslims, Christians, Jewish people, Hindus, all. 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. It’s 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. 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 like, just, you know, insane? No, this way, they’re designed and just a little sidebar here, humans, we’re like the only animal on the planet that eats food 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 walruses 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. Okay? They’re designed to be this way, but it’s perfectly healthy for them. 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 going to 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, so. But I’m going to 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, normalize, 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 this is 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 go fast. It’ll happen quicker if you, 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 use and we implement to help 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, periodically, because here’s what happens when we do the same thing over and over again, our bodies adapt. Our bodies are 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 this, do 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 gotta 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. This 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, our 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 are 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. 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 going to get some pretty amazing results because you have more energy.

Also a huge benefit is there’s 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 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, and it’s kind of different for everybody, but generally speaking, it’s somewhere between two in 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 a 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 don’t eat. I think that’s pretty freaking amazing, if you ask me. 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. We’ll talk to you soon.