Intermittent Fasting and Excercise

Where do I get the energy with intermittent fasting?

Losing body fat is relatively easy to accomplish with intermittent fasting (IF). But as my fitness has become greater and greater, I had been concerned about not having enough energy to complete my fitness goals while fasting. When I first reached my lowest body weight level of 161 lb, my wife complained that I was looking gaunt. She insisted that I stopped my fasting and entered a “maintenance” face. I then took protein supplements and slowly returned to my 3 meals a day, my breakfast included a banana and greek (high protein) yogurt after waking up and one greek yogurt at night, to maintain a balance of about 2000 calories/day after subtracting calories burned from exercise. Although I was controlling my caloric intake, my body began to increase.

Here is my body weight history since starting my IF in 2009.
 
 
 

 

3 Meals a day does not provide more energy

Note how breaking my IF protocol caused me to go back to 170 lb with a calorie-restricted, 3 meals a day diet. “If I don’t have breakfast”, I’d say to myself, “I won’t have the energy to complete my workout, and I will begin to lose muscle”. In 2016 I began to reduce my caloric intake to 1200 calories/day net after exercise and lost weight for a while. But soon began to gain weight again! By late 2017 I was at 175 lb. For the few months since I restarted IF (OMAD) again, I have already dropped the pounds and I am once again in the 160s. But how about exercise? is my performance reduced? not at all, if anything I have increased my level of energy, with ever-increasing levels of performance. In fact, I have begun to do pull-ups, one of the most demanding exercises you can do.

 

Fast and use your fat stores

During fasting, your body is going to use up your glycogen stores in the liver and muscle fairly quickly. Eventually, your body will learn to make use of your fat stores, which is a more efficient system of generating energy for your workouts. So fasting is not an energy depletion or restriction approach. Rather, it is a way to retrain your body into using your fat stores.

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