Fighting the Cravings While You’re Fasting
Hey Coach Jimmy here and we’re talking intermittent fasting today. I’m actually sitting at my buddy Dave Ward’s house and I’m here for a few days, an extended visit, and we got to talking last night, and he said, “Teach me how you eat. Like, show me what you do.” So, today we’re going to start doing that, but I thought that I would talk about what most people think is the most challenging part, and what I thought was the most challenging part, of intermittent fasting was the fasting part of it.
For those of you that don’t know, a real quick synopsis (and you can do more research on this) is that it’s basically eating the same amount of calories in an eight hour window that you would all day long, right? So it’s 16 hours of fasting and 8 hours eating the same amount of calories in a shorter amount of time. So for me, my window of eating is usually 11am to 7pm and I’ll let you know, I still get up super early in the morning. My workouts usually happen around 6am to 7am, so there’s a window after my workout where my body’s pretty hungry before I can eat.
We can get into the science of this later, but in this short video I just wanted to show you what I do to stave off hunger and some of the things that I use. So one of the things that I use that’s been really helpful is just branch chain amino acids. Technically, these are 10 calories in this for three scoops. What I’ve learned from experts like Melissa McAllister and Dr. Sarah Solomon is that, it’s not about just having zero calories, you can spread some of these lower calorie things out and what you’re trying to do is not spike your insulin.
The other thing that I use both during my workouts and throughout the morning are low calorie pre-workout mixes. Both of these are from Beachbody, one is their energy and endurance and this one is their brand new Energize from the Performance Formula. All these things can be found on my blog at TheCoachJimmy.com. So mixtures of those. Another one that I really like and does have zero calories is from Vega and is called their Hydrator.
So for me, it’s something with some flavor that has some sustenance and some nutritional value to it, but still allows me to take advantage of that fasting window. Last but not least, the good old favorite, coffee. I hadn’t been a big coffee drinker until I started doing this, but I will say a cup of coffee after my workout and I still have a little bit to go before my first meal makes all the difference in the world.
What I would love to know is if you’ve experimented with intermittent fasting? What were your results? Leave me a comment below this. I would love to know more about your experience with this!