My name is Patrick Mcgill, and I'm an
experienced marathon,
Alt runner, sports nutrition, Matt Master life coach
and weight boss coach for runners.
I've dedicated my life to helping runners just
like you, properly few 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 02:39
of running lean. My name is Patrick Mc
mcgill, the v 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
mis leading 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 gonna separate fact, from fiction
and share all of the incredible positive health
benefits
that intermittent fasting
provides.
But first, if you wanna get leaner or
stronger if you wanna run faster or longer,
you need to change what you're doing. Doing
the same things over and over and over
again.
We'll 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 can consistently.
So if you decide you wanna get stronger
and you go to the gym once a
month, that's not gonna get you there. You
need to adopt new behavior 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 do it for a
bit that I 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 in 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 on my webs. That running link
coaching dot 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 realize...
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
gonna die. If you don't eat, you know,
6 or 8 times a day. And this
is not crazy. This is something we've been
doing as human beings. Forever. I'm gonna get
into all that in this episode.
And I wanna do more episodes upcoming about
intermittent and fasting because I think it's an
important topic forever 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 1 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 wanna lose weight,
We wanna do that whole fat burning thing.
Right? And we wanna burn the fat. We
don't wanna hold on to the fat.
So our body, we have 2 primary sources
of fuel. We have
glucose, and we have fat glucose comes from
eating carbohydrates
mainly. Okay? You eat carbohydrates,
any carbohydrates you eat 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 our own body fat
that we can use for fuel.
The problem is we can only use 1
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 carbohydrates,
makes it very difficult to lose weight.
If you've been listening to me for a
while, you you understand this.
We're always going to wanna use the available
glucose as the primary
fuel. That's just the way our bodies are
designed. Okay? We're...
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 are fat stores,
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 sugar 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 need 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 2 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.
And as long as our blood sugar is
normal.
K. It's not elevated.
Blood sugars
go high
when we eat a lot of.
Carbohydrates,
especially highly refined carbohydrates. The higher refined the
carbohydrates,
like pure sugar,
will spike our blood sugar like crazy,
which spikes our insulin light crazy.
And then we're in fat storage mode like
crazy.
Alright. When we
don't eat carbohydrates.
It keeps our blood sugars normalized.
Another way of keeping blood sugars normalize 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's is gonna
go up a little bit, which is normal.
So
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 eat a big bowl of,
you know, sugary cereal,
and glass of orange juice, your blood sugar's
is gonna go up like crazy.
Insulin is gonna go up like crazy, and
then we're in that insidious fast storage mode
again. Okay? But anytime we eat any food
at all, blood sugar goes up a little
bit. So 1 awesome way of keeping blood
sugar down, keeping insulin down,
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 and 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 2 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 2 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? And it's simplest?
It just means this. I don't need anything.
Alright?
It's just like not eating for periods of
time. Okay? The 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. It's 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 is 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
3 meals a day, 2 snacks a day
and dessert. We didn't. We didn't have that
much food available to us. We scavenge,
we hunted.
We forage,
and we ate.
And then we fasted.
This is the way we've evolved as humans
to get to where we are today. We
feast,
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
we... When we add 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 thousands of
years.
Fasting has been used therapeutic
since at least the fifth century
when the Greek physician, hip hypotheses
recommended
To his patients,
abs from food or drink
if they had certain types of illnesses. So
You know, back in the fifth century, hip
ape was saying like, hey, you wanna get
better, don't eat or drink anything.
Religions,
practice have been practicing
fasting for millennia,
buddhism,
christianity, Islam, judaism,
tao ism, jai ism, hindu. Have all been
practicing some form of
fasting.
For thousands of years
Hindu, for example, are are used to fasting
on
Ecuador
tit, which is the eleventh day of the
lunar cycle. So they fast every eleventh day.
During the season of lent, Catholics give up
certain foods or practice fasting.
In Judaism, they observed fasting on 6 different
days of the year, like Yam, for example.
The entire month of Rama and Islam is
a period of pet,
are pen, sorry, and total fasting from dawn
to dusk.
And then arguably,
3 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 1 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 7 or 8 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,
you're fasting anyway.
Okay?
And the word itself,
breakfast means to break your fast.
Right? So this is...
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 wanna talk about some of the
myths that people have around fasting and and
and tell you what the truth is around
some of these things. So here's 1 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. And
I'm not suggesting you try to go weeks
or months without food.
But
you could easily go couple days without food
with no
been, you know, any,
a delete
effects. Okay. Can fasting be dangerous, yes. If
done reckless,
sure. Just about anything can be done.
With reckless abandon and get you in a
trouble.
And consider the story of the marathon
according to legend, in 4 90 Bc, the
Greek Soldier
Ran approximately 26 miles. And from the battlefield
near the town of marathon to Athens.
He's delivering an a message, the news of
the defeat of the Persians.
When he got there, he shouted Nike, which
means victory and then he promptly killed over
and died.
In 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 us... Sedentary middle aged
out of shape person
and said go run of marathon right now
as hard as you can, you know, at
at your maximum speed,
without any type of preparation or knowledge, that
person might very well kill over and die
too. Okay? But here's the thing.
Just about anything can be done reckless,
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 0 problems. We have been doing fasting,
as a species,
4 millions of years without any problems.
Okay?
But just to address the safety issue,
1 step further, So There's his guy back
in 19 65. His name is Angus Barb,
Scottish dude.
And he was very
overweight. He's obese. At the time, you know,
65,
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'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.
At
that whole time.
Now he was drinking water. Obviously, coffee, tea,
he had to take vitamins and electrolytes. You
gotta 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 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
and this is the way we're design as
people. So that's kind of myth number 1
that fasting isn't safe. I think we can
all agree the fasting is perfectly safe and
something we do all the time.
Another myth is that fasting
makes you go into
starvation mode.
I 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 lean marathon runners
have, like 8 percent a 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 let
ema
and we're literally starving to death.
But here's the thing. There's a big difference
between
calorie
restriction, severe calorie restriction and 0 food.
Something
hormonal
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 0 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 0 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 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 feast and then fast
thing for millions of years.
If not eating for short periods of time
would put us into starvation mode, we've... 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 mandates
for 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 weak after
a couple,
times of this happening, you'd be so weak
that you'd be unable to hunt... You wouldn't
be 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. It's
stew.
So much fat on his body. So 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 body builders
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 let Oh, if I don't eat all
the time, I'm gonna be super tired. I
need the energy. Well, listen, Have you ever
been tired after eating meal
Of course, you have. Everybody has. This is
what happens When you eat, there's this
moment of, like, dr ness afterwards, lack of
concentration
That's your system, like your stomach, your liver,
or 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 let when you're
eating a lot of sugar and carbs, and
you have that crash after you week. Like,
if you've ever had a big lunch and
then you wanna go to sleep around 02:00
in the afternoon, 2 03:00, you're just, like,
dead,
and you need your Starbucks,
triple Mocha,
Carmel latte or whatever to get you through
the afternoon.
That's because of, you know, eating all that
food, especially the sugar in 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, knock down.
Okay? So fasting does not make you tired
and let.
It 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 it instruct 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 a 3 percent to up
to 14 percent.
Fasting does not slow your metabolism
And there's this misconception out there that you
need to eat like, 6 times a day,
you know,
to boost your metabolism,
and it's the opposite.
When you eat 6 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 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 deprive your body
of nutrients.
So some people have concerns that fasting will
lead to some sort of
Right? You don't... 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 and 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 eat you're you're you're eating
every day. Okay?
But for longer fat ass if you're doing,
like, a 24 hour longer fast,
doctors
recommend supplementing with,
electro electrolyte. 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
I...
We all need electrolytes when we're running is
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 fast. And
we'll talk a little bit about that in
a second here,
But actually, fat, fat is 1 of the
best things your body can use for fuel.
Right? It's 1 of 2 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 lights but
other than that, you're going to be fine.
You... You're gonna get all the food, all
the nutrients you need from the food that
you eat. Okay?
And then the,
last myth I wanna just talk about here
is people say fasting is just crazy.
And at this point, I wanna say, isn't
eating 6 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 who've been fasting
for thousands of years
Muslims, Christians, Jewish people hindu all are. Are
they all crazy?
No.
What about all the human ancestors who feast
it and fasted it? 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.
Bears, hi 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 hi. Right? Are they
crazy?
Are they like just, you know,
insane? By no. Is the 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 walrus
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 that's
optimal for them. Be 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 get eat. Experience. And I've kinda talked
about some of the stuff already, but I'll,
I'm gonna reiterate a few things and tell
you about a few things I think are
kinda cool here. So what happens when you
do some fasting? What's good about it, especially
for runners. Well, number 1, 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 fast storage mode, and
we get into fat burning mode Right? So
we have this boost in metabolism,
and our our bodies can actually get out
of fat storage and into fat burning mode.
So this a huge benefit for everybody. Right?
And 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. It So if you wanna become a
fat adapted runner,
1 of the best ways
to get there is obviously you have to
stop eating sugar and carbohydrates.
And then number 2, 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 fat.
It'll it'll happen quicker. If you if you
inch include a little intermittent fasting along with
the low carb pipe fat diet.
Another benefit is that intermittent fasting helps you
to break through weight loss plateau.
So with all my clients
invariably at some point, weight loss kinda stalls
a little bit. This is perfectly normal.
And we we anticipate this happening.
And there's all kinds of tools that I
help,
use and we implement to help my my
clients break through some of those weight loss
plateau and 1 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 body
adapt.
Our body very good at adapting.
Right? So what we wanna do is we
wanna kinda 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 why we don't work the same muscles
at the do the exact same workout at
the gym every single time we go. If
you wanna actually build muscle because your body
will adapt and it'll stop
seeing that as a stress, and it will
stop building the muscle. Right? So that's why
you
if you follow any kind of workout routine
or a plan 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 wanna do some really slow
long running, and then we wanna do some
stuff in between, and then we throw some
Fart lick in there.
I just love saying Fart lick. And then
we wanna do some,
interval training in there. Right? Well, I we
wanna just keep mixing things up, so our
bodies can respond to these changes of stress.
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 plateau
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 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 level
it helps to
decrease
inflammation in your body,
which is amazing,
especially is runners, We don't wanna be inflamed.
We want to decrease
inflammation. Right?
And intermittent fasting will help with that. Is
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 provide 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
interested
for you as a runner, number 1,
increased energy, not a loss of energy, but
an increase of energy So when you practice
some intermittent and 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, you know, lift a lot
more because you have all the increased adrenaline
and energy,
and
you're gonna get some pretty amazing results
because you have more energy.
It's Also, 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 view
out there and well, it'll help to increase
muscle mass, so this is good for everybody.
So 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
to and recover faster.
And then 1 of the big benefits I
wanna talk about here is that and I
kinda mentioned this already, but this is 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 need 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.
In this process of switching
from burning glycogen
to burning fat. Good is what we call
the fat adaptation period, and that takes a
couple of weeks, you know, 2 up 6
weeks depending on how you do it and
your body type and all kinds of other
fat actors, but... And it's kinda different for
everybody, but generally speaking, it's somewhere between 2
and 6 weeks to to get to that
point of where you become fully fat adapted.
Actors 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 don't
eat.
I think that's pretty
freaking amazing if you asked me.
Cool. That's all I got for you guys
today. As always,
lots and lots of love to each and
every 1 of you.
Keep on running Lean.
We'll talk to you soon.