Kira Sutherland has 25+ years of clinical experience in Naturopathic medicine & sports nutrition and creates a truly wholistic approach to optimising performance for athletes. Today, we are uncovering the benefits and misconceptions of fasting. In particular intermittent fasting for runners. Kira describes the positive effects exercising has in a fasted state, including the fat burning benefits, signalling pathway improvements and the prime opportunity to eat after exercise post fasting. Kira also shares the misconceptions around fasting, the mistakes she has seen athletes make & the consequences if misusing the fasting principles. Please visit Kira's website and her Uberhealth facebook & instagram (Apple users: Click 'Episode Website' for links to..) Become a patron! Receive Run Smarter Emails Book a FREE Injury chat with Brodie Run Smarter App IOS or Android Podcast Facebook group Run Smarter Course with code 'PODCAST' for 3-day free trial.
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On today's episode, how safe is exercise while fasting with Kira Sutherland. Welcome to the Run Smarter podcast. The podcast helping you overcome your current and future running injuries by educating and transforming you into a healthier, stronger, smarter runner. If you're like me, running is life. But more often than not, injuries disrupt this lifestyle. And once you are injured, you're looking for answers and met with bad advice and conflicting messages circulating the running community. The world shouldn't be like this. You deserve to run injury free and have access to the right information. That's why I've made it my mission to bring clarity and control to every runner. My name is Brody Sharp. I am a physiotherapist, a former chronic injury sufferer, and your podcast host. I am excited that you have found this podcast and by default become the Run Smarter Scholar. So let's work together to overcome your injury, restore your confidence and start spreading the right information back into your running community. So let's begin today's lesson. Caught me in a very good mood I've just been buzzing the last day or two. From a couple of things like a lot of good things have come up podcast of light just as we're speaking the in the all time running podcast rankings we are number two in Australia and we are in the top 10 in the US and sometimes we look at the charts and it's like trending which is like how many new listeners you get within a week I think but then there's the all time. ranking and we're climbing our way up number two in the in Australia and top 10 in the US it's. Yeah it's unreal and just like in the last couple of days like say yesterday we had four or five new patrons sign up which is amazing we usually get about five per month and just got five in one day so it's great confirmation for me for people just to recognize how important this mission is and loving. podcast. That's another thing I've had so many people reach out in the last couple of weeks saying love and the podcast absolutely is my number one favorite and this is how it's benefited me and they tell me the benefits, how they've overcome injuries, how they're reaching marathon PBs. It just leaves me buzzing. It just makes my day. So thanks to everyone who's reached out and most of all, thanks for listening. Oh, and another reason why I am buzzing is since I've put out the offer to do these 20 minute free injury chats, I've had people book in and probably getting a couple per week, just having a chat saying that they're going through certain pains and issues. And I just love talking about injuries. I love helping people who are injured. finding out what their missing links are and just their reactions and gratitude when we have this chat just makes my day. I'm on a mission and you're signing up for these free injury chats. It's just helping me with my mission. So thanks again for that. Today we have our chat with Kira and I wanted to do a Facebook live within the patron group. I've done a solo episode before, but haven't done a interview and my worst fears came true when we set it all up. I told the patrons. Um, save your save the date for this day and time because we're doing an interview and then didn't work. Um, I now realize why, um, for some reason, zoom disconnected with the integration with Facebook and now that's working again, but we couldn't do it. Uh, we just did the old traditional way and then I just posted the video later on. But, um, yeah, I'll learn for next time. I just fumbled my way through these and hopefully it comes out good on the other end, but in this instance, um, it didn't. So. Better luck for me next time. However, Kira Sutherland is a naturopath. She's also a sports nutrition and a sports nutritionist, and she is creating a holistic approach to optimizing performance. She has more than 25 years of clinical experience. She's also done some lecturing in the past, both nationally and internationally. And she was a previous department head of nutritional medicine. um, up in Sydney. And so she is from the U S but has spent. Vast majority of her time in Sydney. And she was a blast to talk to. Um, we cover like what different types of fasting there are. We talk about what the benefits of fasting are. What are the consequences if you do it incorrectly and what it means for running where, when should we time it? What's a good, um, dosage or I guess frequency to start fasting. And she just. knew everything. She's well up to date with the research and I couldn't think of a better person to have on. I know a lot of you are excited for this when you heard that it was coming out. I got a lot of comments saying, yes, I do fasting. I want to know more about it and how it affects running. So let's take it away. Here is Kira. Before we get started, also you might notice there's a new outro to the episode. I thought I'd keep things fresh and change things up every now and then. And I thought the outro is a bit outdated. have a listen for that. Kiera, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. For those who aren't familiar with you, can you maybe just describe who you are and what you do as a profession? Sure. So I am a, I'm actually a naturopath as well as a sports nutritionist. So I kind of sit on both sides of that fence of alternative plus very sciencey post-grad sports nutrition. Um, and I work. Yeah, I work seeing clients and I lecture at the university level or undergraduate level in sports nutrition and naturopathy. I see probably 90% of my clients are athletes of any type from, oh my God, this year is crazy, from bobsledders to springboard divers to runners. But my big interest is endurance sports nutrition because I... You crazily do, you know, ultra and iron mans and stuff like that. So I've, I've got, you know, the love for the, I think sports nutrition is so fun when you get to ultra endurance events because it becomes so intricate. So that's my big focus and, and then weight loss, fasting, all that kind of stuff. Great. Fantastic. Um, before we delve into the questions I had planned today, I tried looking for quite a while for a guest to have on, on this topic. And usually if I have a topic in mind, it's easy to find a guest who's like, who's well aware of like the research and they're more than happy just to come onto the podcast. It's one thing that I love about this is the willingness for guests to come on and have a chat. I struggled so much to find a guest on talking about fasting and what it actually does. And I was finding, trying to chat to people on Twitter, reaching out to a whole bunch of gurus that I follow on Twitter. They kind of pointed me in a couple of directions. Then The people I reached out to pointed me in a couple of directions to other people and no one, I couldn't really find anyone for a couple of weeks. Do you, and do you know why? Does that make sense? Is there many people working on this? You know, and there are some incredible researchers on fasting, but then you, you've also got the very technical scientific end of fasting and what they're looking at with cell death and replication. You've got the people running the big weight loss industry, researchers and book writers. I don't know why, you know, I think it's also an area where we don't, we don't, hmm, we have good information, there is good research, but we're still extrapolating how to use the research in clinic. Whereas I'm not the researcher, I'm the clinical user of ideas around fasting, especially for athletes, but also fasting in general. My actual introduction into natural medicine was at a fasting clinic in Europe. 30 years ago, believe it or not. That's another story in itself. So, you know, fasting has been around for, I mean, they've been doing it forever. Every religion talks about fasting, but the Europeans were the gurus of fasting for years, you know, in the early 1900s, 1800s, and they've got different concepts on fasting, probably different to how people are thinking of intermittent fasting now. But so for me, I've always been involved in fasting on an application level. Yeah, right. Maybe they're maybe like a nutritionist or a fasting dietitian or naturopath is just like one removed away from the circle that I'm usually involved in with it being running athletes, strength and conditioning, that sort of thing. But, um, let's dive in. So for those who aren't familiar with fasting, um, how do you like to best describe it and what are the different types of fasting that I might participate in? Yeah, so there's all different types of fasting. There is complete fasting, which is called dry fasting, which I'm just gonna say right now I'm not a fan of and I think it needs to be done under, I'm just not a fan of it, point blank. Then there is, I mean, if you want the whole gamut, then there's water fasting where people are consuming nothing but water again. very extreme, should actually be done under supervised conditions in hospital where you're like lying down the whole time. That's my understanding of that. Although in popular media, there's been a lot of people doing crazy long water fasts and kind of promoting it, which makes me nervous. And then there's fasting of using, you know, whether it's considered fasting or not, but there's people that are doing juice fasting, like green juice fasting, and then we run into the whole fasted training. So undertaking exercise, which is probably more what you've grabbed me to talk about, but there's, you know, when do you train fasted? When do you train low glycogen? Should you be training fasted? And then there's the whole gamut of intermittent fasting, which runs from, you know, pulling or tightening the window of when you eat, whether it's eating in a 12 hour window, eating a 10, an eight, a six, a four hour window, we tend to grab things and go more and more extreme, which I think is a little bit too much sometimes, but anyway, so there's that window fasting, or there's the fasting of things like the five two, where you're eating normally five days a week, and then you're doing very restricted calories two days a week. There's other fasting called eat, eat fast to eat. I can't remember the names of it anymore. Where you're fasting for a whole 24 hours, then you're eating and then you're fasting again. So there's, you know, we've taken fasting and, you know, created 80 different ways to do it. So, you know, have I missed one? I don't know. I think with the research that I've done or like the most, the types of fasting that come most to me is the intermittent fasting. I think is one of the big ones. A lot of- people have listened to the podcast have just finished their Ramadan cycle. I think it was like the early this month and they were really interested about this sort of topic. And then there was the calorie restricted fasting or something where you can eat throughout the day which you mentioned, but they have to keep to a certain calorie or a certain type of, yeah, restricted type of eating. And yes. I'm sorry, I forgot the Ramadan because that is actually one of the biggest, most traditional styles of fasting. And there is incredible research on that. And the research I'm more up on is, is the one that has to do with athletes. Yeah. Um, okay. So we're talking about not eating and not feeding our bodies, which sounds counterintuitive if someone wants to perform or wants to be, um, you know, wants to try and produce energy or, you know, expel energy. What are the proposed benefits if we were to fast, if we were to say, do a standard like Ramadan or intermittent fasting, what are the, what's the science showing? What are the proposed benefits? So I would like to leave Ramadan for its own, you know, Ramadan isn't, it's done for spiritual purposes. It's not really done for running specific or athlete specific. And to be clear, Ramadan is, They're fasting from sunrise until sunset. So there is nil by mouth. They're just only allowed to eat while it's not daylight. So they are eating and drinking plenty, but it's happening in the nighttime or early morning hours before sunrise. So Ramadan's a bit different. Okay, yeah. So let's talk about the, I guess, the general more conventional styles of fasting. Okay, so as it pertains to athletes, you want to... Yeah, just, oh, well, let's talk about if they're... If... Not necessarily for running, but runners who do fast. What are the proposed benefits? So the idea of is to give the body a break. You know, when we are not putting food into the body, we're not spiking our insulin levels. I mean, this can also go for weight loss, not just athletes. And so quote, you're giving your pancreas a rest, you could almost say. That's probably not very scientific for me to say that, but. you're not producing, you know, every time we eat certain foods, we're spiking insulin. And, and so it gives that body that break from insulin production. We are, you know, not putting foods into our body. They're potentially inflammatory or, you know, the digestive process in general takes up a lot of energy and a lot of focus of the body. So the idea of fasting is to give this body this break so it can go around and kind of clean itself up. It literally, does, yeah, like a spring clean every time we give it at least four to five hours without eating, let alone giving it, you know, 12, 15 hours overnight if you're doing intermittent fasting. So the body will actually, we now know scientifically, although people have been talking about this for well over a hundred, 150 years, when we're not eating, the body will go and break down its old dead and dying cells to use those as fuel. So it's a way of, it's almost like being your own antioxidant or your, you know, it's this, yeah, it's a way to clean up your junk and get rid of it to use it as fuel while you're not actually putting fuel into the body. So that's one of the big ideas. That's why it's talked about so much for longevity or anti-aging. The longer we fast, growth hormone also gets stimulated. Growth hormone can help us, you know, in a lot of different ways, especially in muscle building. So. There's this information around going four to five hours without eating, you have a slight spike in your GH, which can be beneficial. And then we have, for racing and for sports, we have the idea that whether we're fasting overnight or whether we're going out and doing fasted training, that has multiple benefits, although... sometimes I think people grab onto that and then apply it every single day of their training life and that's not where the research is actually sitting. And so to train fasted is, especially like if you wake up in the morning and you train on empty, it's the idea that it will hormonally and chemically force your body into using your stores of fuel more quickly. So you will actually It teaches your body to quote fat adapt or fat adaptation. It'll start churning through your adipose tissue, hopefully a little bit quicker and more efficiently. And in the long run, hypothetically, you will, while staying in an aerobic level, like under your anaerobic threshold, you potentially are a more efficient fat burner. So it spares some of your glycogen burning. Now there's research on this, you know, it's not like, it's not like you can survive only on your body fat. Your body will even in your aerobic, you know, level of exercise, your body is still quite dependent on also using carbs and glycogen. And I think people oversell the fat burning versus the fact that you still need, you know, glycogen and carbohydrates, but yeah, it metabolically makes you more attuned to be able to do that. Yeah. Okay. When I first started learning about fasting, I was listening to podcasts. I think Dave Asprey was one of them and he mentions about ketosis. And when it comes to fasting, there'll be a certain period where you fast, where your body kind of switches or slowly transitions into ketosis, which, yep. Um, to my understanding is when the body starts primarily using fat as an energy source, which is what you were describing. Yep. Um, is. Is that kind of the right information or is, is that a bit of a misconception? It's not a misconception, but ketosis, you know, just fat adapting that training on empty and then choosing to eat afterwards, especially if you're eating a mixed meal of carbs and fats and protein, that's not doing ketosis ketosis, you know, to put the body into, um, nutritional ketosis, um, you need to be eating a diet. I mean, fasting will put you into ketosis. faster, but you, it takes, you know, a few days to up to a week of eating a very high fat diet, usually around 70 to 75% of your calorie intake is fats. And you have to keep your carbohydrate intake to around 5%. It's different for everybody. Um, and that, you know, if you do that over a couple of days, that will start to deplete a, you're going to deplete your glycogen stores and explain it non scientifically the body starts panicking because it doesn't have sugar or carbs to burn as a fuel especially in the brain which the brain predominantly lives off of carbs so the body then has to swap and go into a ketosis state where it burns fats as a fuel because you don't have any carbohydrates in the system so you know in about eight or nine years ago that became a huge thing to do in sport and running and again putting yourself into a ketogenic state for a couple of weeks to a couple of months. And there were books on this by, you know, Volokh and Finney are the two researchers that were really big on this or are big on this. And you then up-regulate this fat adaptation, absolutely, by being in ketosis for that long. But a lot of times people don't talk about the fact that when you up-regulate your fat burning, you do down-regulate your carb burning. So you actually, I think it's the Glut4 enzyme doesn't become as responsive. And if you need to do any training at your high end level of 80 to 100% of your max, you have actually down-regulated your ability to burn carbohydrates. So if you have any sprinting heavy weights, that actually becomes harder and it's down-regulated how well you burn that fuel. And that's something people don't often talk about. So you do up-regulate your ability. below 60% of your max, but hopefully that's where your sport is, because the minute you have to start sprinting, you're in all kinds of trouble. Yeah. And if someone's listening and not too familiar with the difference between carb burning and fat burning, I think it's worth discussing that from what I know that if you utilize fats as an energy source at this sort of low intensity exercise, it's a lot more abundant. You're able to like utilize, or there's just a lot more energy that can be converted. Uh, is it, is that kind of similar? Yeah. Well, if you think about it, carbs have four calories per gram, whereas fat has nine calories per gram. So it's, you know, very energy dense. We can get a lot of fuel out of it. We all have a lot more fat on our body as well. You know, our, our carbohydrate or glycogen stores that sit within our muscles and our liver are very limited. Whereas even a skinny person has pretty unlimited fat stores. And we could all walk from Sydney to Melbourne easily fueled on our fat stores. That's not, you're not gonna feel great, but you're not gonna run out. So of fuel. So it's, yeah. But even when we are exercising, what I think a lot of people don't understand, even if you have done ketogenic or a low carb, high fat, fat adaption style diet, Even when you are fat adapted, when you are exercising, you are still also burning a little bit of carbohydrate and glycogen. And if you look into the science of it, once you've been going for about two hours, so say we're all running a marathon at our, around 60% of our max, so we're still in aerobic, not anaerobic, the average person would be burning 50% carb, 50% fat, once you hit what's known as your fat max, which takes about an hour and a half to two hours to get to your highest fat burning point. And if you are fat adapted, not if you're in ketogenic, because I don't actually know if I've seen the number crunching on that, but even if you're fat adapted, so that means your body's well trained to burn fats as a fuel, it's still, you might be, it goes up by five, 7%. I don't actually know the legal percentages. academically, so I'm gonna admit that. But you know, you'll burn more fat and a little bit less carb, but it's not like it goes to 75%, 25%, you know? And I think people get that confused. And just by being fit, just by doing consistent training day in, day out, weekend, especially doing aerobic running, biking, whatever, that- teaches your body to be fat adapted as well. It metabolically, you're more hormonally responsive to training and the way I explain it to my clients is the body doesn't want to run out of glycogen. That's its fear, right? And so it has all these mechanisms to not run out of its core fuel. So the minute you start exercising for longer than a little bit, you know, 20 so minutes, the body's like, ah, you're going for a while. Brody, what are you doing? I better start finding other sources of fuel besides glycogen. And so it starts accessing your fat a lot more. And that goes up and up until we hit that fat max at about that one and a half, two hours. So your body is already smart. I sometimes think in biohacking as we call it and in all this intermittent fasting, fat adaption, we overestimate the benefit it's it does, there's definitely benefits, but we underestimate how smart our body is. And it's already doing that. Do you think it goes into this fear of utilizing all this glycogen, because like you said, the brain, that's what the brain uses to function. And that's like one of our primary drivers is what we have to prioritize above all else. Absolutely. And you know, there's theories in long distance events when we hit exhaustion or fatigue. Is it actually that we're running low on glycogen or theoretically is it what it is? What's called a central nervous system fatigue. And it's actually your brain trying to trick you into how tired you are so that you stop because it doesn't, you know, there's theories around it. Right? We don't actually know exactly why that hitting the wall and that fatigue comes in. Cause it's not always just glycogen, but yeah, your brain, you know, if push comes to shove and you're too hot or too cold while you're exercising, know, if your body gets too hot, it will make you pass out. It will make you black out so that you don't injure yourself and that you lie down so that it can survive. The brain is the thing that wants to keep going more than anything. Okay. You mentioned that a lot of people are a little bit confused around the percentage of carb to fat that they are burning. And it's just like a slight fluctuation rather than it being a huge shift into your predominant energy stores that you're Is there any other misconceptions, common misconceptions that you hear when people talk about fasting and performance? Yes. Let me think of my list. Look, and I'm a fan of fasting. And can I back up? And one of the other major benefits of fasted training that we know from research over the last five years is that if you train fasted, there is some adaptations that happens in the body. with your muscles and with your strength. And I'm not gonna sound very scientific with it, but your body, there's new signaling pathways for muscle building and just your adaption of overall cardiovascular fitness that actually does occur when we fasted train or when we train with what's known as a low glycogen state, which would be waking up in the morning and training on empty. And there's research about how beneficial this training adaptation is, but the problem is people take Here's one of the things that bothers, not bothers me, but I see people go, oh my God, that's great. I'm now going to train every session fasted. This is probably my least favorite thing that I see athletes do. They go, oh, there's good, a little bit's good. More must be better. And every single morning session they do fasted. Whereas the research is really looking at picking key training sessions that are recovery sessions. They're more junk sessions. They're not your high intensity. big strength sets or your hill repeats or your intervals, those are not the sessions to be doing fasted. It's your more slow recovery sessions where you get this great training adaptation and you get this benefit of teaching the body to be more fat adapted. So that's probably one of the things, because we do, we take this, oh, if a little bit's good, more must be better. Whereas... you know, a lot of exercise happens well above your anaerobic threshold, all your weights, all your HIIT training, all your sprints. And that is fueled predominantly by carbohydrates because you're in the anaerobic system, which is it's only burning carbohydrates. And so you have all these people doing these sessions and they're struggling through and they're not feeling good or their forms getting messy by the end of it. And they're not finishing the session strong because they're low on fuel because they've done it fasted. And so One of my least favorite things is people doing every morning session, fasted, okay. Different running sessions, fasted. Yeah. Like your long, slow Sunday run or whatever, you know, that, that one's great fasted or do the first hour of it fasted and then start fueling after that hour. But I work with a lot of triathletes as well. And they're off. I'm hearing about these bike riders doing three hours fasted. And I'm like, you know, You've probably got a good benefit at an hour to an hour and a half. Why don't you actually be safe because your poor brain is probably not making good decisions, three hours of fasted training. And I don't want to be on the road riding next to someone who's been fasting for three hours because they're not making intelligent decisions. You know, that's where you have accidents and it gets messy. Yeah. I want to fall off my bike. So, um, the list of benefits that I have here. So one there's, it gives your. digestive system and the rest of the body system, just time off from food and digesting and that it increases like signaling pathways, muscles, tendons, and just like the, the overall system. And it helps you better utilize your fat burning system. It helps it. So it trains your body just like a muscle. Okay. Right. Um, and I guess this can speak true to me as well, because I to fasting maybe three times per week. And I mainly do it for the digestive system. I had gut issues in the past and found that when I fast for more than 16, 18 hours or something like that and do that a couple of times a week, my gut issues just like settle. And it seems like just that time away from food and not constantly digesting is really beneficial for me. But... the overall health benefits I wasn't too sure about, but I'm like, Hey, it feels good for me. Maybe I should continue doing it. Yeah. Um, and it speaks true for me as well, because I have had, uh, I guess, fasting errors in the past where I have had a long session, like a long bike session, or I remember one session where I fasted and then did a CrossFit workout and I felt sick, I felt like lightheaded and actually kind of ill and so have now recognized, okay, if I have a big session, um, let's not do it on my fasting days. But anything else, any other like long, low intensity run, I'm totally fine with. So that would speak true to everything that you've been saying. Yeah. Can I bring up my other least favorite thing that people do? Sure. Is if they're training fasted, I hear this people doing this and they, like if they're doing intermittent fasting and they're trying to only eat eight hours a day. So they're trying to do the tight window. They wake up, they do their session fasted, and then they continue to fast for a couple more hours before they eat. And the sports nutritionist in me, it breaks my heart. Because when you exercise, you get yourself metabolically so primed to create more glycogen from the food you eat. and your body wants to repair itself after, exercise is amazing for the body, but it is an assault on the body, right? We have stress hormones going up, we have cortisol going up, cortisol suppresses the immune system, and cortisol is catabolic, it breaks things down, it breaks down the muscles. And so when we finish training, the way to turn cortisol down is to eat. And if we continue to fast, because people are going, oh, I'm getting these great fasting benefits. you are continuing to be in a catabolic or breaking down state, plus your insulin, your body becomes more sensitive to insulin right after training. It's like your insulin is almost like a superhero at that time and it's gonna take the food you eat and really get it to the right spot. So an insulin is anabolic, you know, it helps with the signaling and muscle building and getting food where it's supposed to be. So... you know, people talk about these eating window after exercise and does it exist, does it not? And most of the research is looking at, you have this beautiful metabolic window where you're like, you know, your insulin's potent, your body's ready to make more glycogen, you have an enzyme called glycogen synthase that's been stimulated whose whole job it is to make more glycogen, stored carbs. And if you don't eat within that one to two hour window, but especially that one hour window, the same meal, eaten two hours after training versus right after training will only make you half as much glycogen. And why would you rob your body? I mean, making glycogen means your body's not using the food you eat and turning it into body fat. And you feel better the rest of the day as well. And so my heart always breaks when I hear about this fasted training and then continuing the fast because you're adding to a suppression of the immune system. You're adding to potentially more muscle breakdown. And I don't know any athlete that wants to be sick and take time off training, or that is trying to break down more muscle. I just don't, that's probably my least favorite thing about the IF fad or phenomenon going on at the moment. It might be worth getting your opinion on this as well, because last year I spoke to Kristy Ashwandan, who has the book, Good To Go. And she was looking at the research of this post exercise nutrition window. And I think was mainly talking about protein, getting in protein. And a lot of times growing up and a lot of people hear this after a workout session, getting in some protein a couple of hours after hits that window. And she was kind of saying the research doesn't necessarily support that. Is that something different to what you're referring to? I'm referring to all food. about eating. Yeah, people are obsessed with protein after training, but in reality, especially when we're trying to muscle build and hopefully I'm agreeing with what she said, your protein amount is more about how much protein you get in a 24 hour period. There actually isn't deep research around, oh my God, you've got to jam in protein right after training, which everybody does. And then they forget about their carbs because in reality, when you're exercising, especially if you're doing any form of hit or strength training you are using, you're in your anaerobic system is only using carbohydrates. I mean, the aerobic system is always happening as well, but, and your anaerobic system is fueled by carbs. So your glycogen, you know, a heavy weight session uses well more than, that wasn't very good English, but it uses more than 50% of your glycogen stores. You know, they can be really low. And the way to make more glycogen is to eat carbohydrates after training. And the professor I study under is always, always on about couching all your carbohydrate around your training, whether it's just before to help fuel the session to be stronger or getting the carb right after training. And yes, you can have protein as well at that time but carb is actually king right after training. And the protein can then come in one or two hour intervals after that. It's not to say not to have protein after training, but it's not, I don't let people just have protein after training. Cause if you do that, your body's gonna take some of that protein and turn it into glycogen anyway. So you might as well have some carbs cause we all love carbs, but we restrict them. If this is your favourite podcast and you want to have inner circle access and a VIP podcast experience, then join our podcast Patreon tribe. Mingle with like-minded listeners who love the podcast so much that they are happy to contribute $5 Aussie dollars per month to receive exclusive benefits and play a key role in the future direction of this podcast. So the first step is to click on the Patreon link in the show notes. Step 2 is to follow the instructions to subscribe. and instructions on how to join the Private Facebook Group. You can cancel at any time. Step three, log back into your Run Smarter app and all the Patreon episodes will be unlocked for you to binge on. Step four is to keep active in the Private Facebook Group that is designed only for our patrons by voting on future podcast topics, submitting questions to future guests, interacting in our Facebook Live episodes, and helping me out with your feedback whenever I need your assistance for future podcast steps. So sign up and say hi to your new patron family and we'll see you there. You talked about the wide variety of different types of fasting and why people can go about it, like how wide the window is of eating and how frequently throughout the week. Do you have, for the runners who are listening to this, do you have a recommended dosage or frequency throughout the week to when they should be fasting? Look, it really depends on what works for people and their schedule. If we're talking about intermittent fasting or IF, where we have a tight... eating window, I recommend people try, you know, just try it on themselves first. I would say for women, so this is, this is also becomes controversial because almost all the research on, on fasting is done on men. And even the big gurus that have the big websites and the researchers on fasting are starting to, you know, this is getting brought up a bit more, especially sports nutrition around. are we just looking at all this research on men and extrapolating it on women for just being a bit smaller? And there's a big hoo-ha on that in the last five years, which is awesome. So with women, so all those big researchers are now like, oh, we suggest all these tight windows. Maybe not so. Maybe women should just be on a 12 hour fast, a 12 hour eating window, because women don't respond as favorably to fasting as men. And so that's what a lot of these big people are now saying. So with women, I suggest 14, 10, like 10 hour eating window at the strictest. And I don't let women do a tighter window than 10. It's the theory that we are more sensitive to cortisol because back in caveman days, the guys are all off hunting and running after stuff and stuff running after them and their body is used to a lot more higher cortisol and stress hormone running around. Whereas women are, you know, we were back at the caves or whatever, finding our tubers and taking care of children. And when we got super stressed, it meant we were under attack or there was a famine. And so high stress or high cortisol, theoretically they're saying our body is more sensitive to it and it will put the brakes on weight loss more quickly than it would on a man. So they're saying these super tight windows for women hypothetically aren't great. because it puts us in too high of a stress state, long-term. I'm not saying women can't do fasting or do three-day fasts or other styles of fasting for short periods of time. I think that's different, but I'm talking day in and day out. So women, I start them on a 12-12 or 14-hour fast window, 10-hour eating window. And men, I would probably do, I would probably just start them at 14-10. If they really want to go extreme, they can go 16, eight, but it's got to fit into your life on a daily basis. And one of the biggest things that I think is not being discussed often is our circadian rhythms and our body likes routine and regularity. And we know we have a circadian rhythm for sleep, but our digestive system has circadian rhythms. Every organ of our body has its own 24 hour cycle where it's busy or resting. And from what I can tell from all the research I've read, the body likes to be fed at the same time every day. The body wants consistency, just like it wants to go to bed at the same time every day and wake up at the same time every day. Whereas leading erratic schedules is what leads to high insulin and weight gain and things like that. So whatever window people pick, pick it and stick to it. And I would say, try to do your breakfast at the same time every day and try to finish eating at the same time every day. And don't slide between two extremes during the week. Does that make sense? I think it does. I think at least keeping in mind that the body wants routine so you don't have these rapid fluctuations. And... Even if you might have a day or two here and there where it is a bit disruptive, as long as you fall back to what the body's used to, then it can just fall back in rhythm. Yeah. And, and so those are kind of the windows that I played with, with my clients. Um, if they want to do fasted training in the morning, they can, although again, there's some researchers out there. Um, Stacey Sims who's in New Zealand is really against women, fasted training. And there is starting to be some research on this and she's she's taking information and also, you know, she's taking research and she's looking at, you know, how women respond and she's suggesting again, because we're so sensitive to this cortisol that women should be having a small snack before all training sessions rather than faster training because the body will just respond better. So with women again, sometimes I play with, do you actually just have this tiny little snack before training and how much better do you feel or not? But I would let women fast to train twice a week. I wouldn't have a problem with that, but I don't really think we should be fast to training more than twice a week anyway, because most of us, our only goal isn't fat adaptation. Our goal is training adaptations and muscle building and cardiovascular health. But there was something else I was gonna say there. We also know the other thing around fasting is, and I had a big conversation with this. with Grant Schofield, who's one of the researchers out of Auckland who's written the book. Oh my gosh, I've just gone blank. It's a fasting book. I've got it on my shelf somewhere. He wrote, What the Fat and What the Fast. Okay. And he's amazing. He'd be a great person to interview actually. Yeah. Um, and he's fascinating and he and I have had a big discussion once after I gave a lecture around, you know, cause I was lecturing a little bit on this topic and then he's this big fasting researcher that came and sat in my lecture and I was like freaking out as you do. And we had a good chat afterwards because theoretically, and this is just me throwing out some Kira theory from research that I've read because really I'm a clinician. I'm not a researcher. Let's get, you know, I'm. 25 years of clinical practice and watching what works and doesn't. And not only do we have like our digestive system has circadian rhythms, our insulin actually responds differently in a 24 hour cycle. And our insulin actually is more potent and works better or we produce more insulin and it works better starting in the morning up until about 2 p.m. because that's when we should be eating and that's when our body is giving us a good amount of insulin to do its thing. Whereas the day progresses, your insulin production drops off and your insulin production massively drops off overnight because your pancreas is always has what's known as a basal amount of insulin being released, right? To keep our, it's figuring out where our blood sugars is and it's trying to keep us alive. but you do actually always have this little drip feed of insulin happening. But our drip feed goes down at night because otherwise we would wake up in the middle of the night starving. And so our insulin works better from morning till about 2 p.m. And so with intermittent fasting, I question, and this is again, Kira theory, and I talked to Grant about this, our digestion is stronger and our insulin works better until 2 p.m. So why, you know, most people do intermittent fasting where they try not to eat until like lunchtime and then they gorge themselves for the next six to seven hours and I'm like, but that's actually not when our body is efficient at dealing with food. And if our body isn't as efficient dealing with food, that's when we're more likely to make body fat from the foods we eat. Whereas if we actually ate in the morning, I mean, say it was even just, you know, nine or 10 or eight or whatever, and we ate. are bigger meals, you know, the way people used to say, you know, eat your bigger meals, breakfast and lunch. Would that be a more efficient way to intermittent fast? And I actually think it would, but I am putting that out there as more of a cura theory based on digestive research that I've read. Could I maybe sum up a few things and say if you agree with the summary. So for women, you're saying that... Maybe a good start is the 12 12. So maybe go 12 hours without eating and maybe do that a couple of times a week and see how that goes. And for men, you might want to, you can extend that window a little bit more or extend the fasting a little bit more. Start a couple of times a week, see how you feel and then maybe, um, time your low intensity runs at that, at the time that you are fasting, then break your fast at the end of that low intensity session. Um, say how you feel and then maybe try to, if you are feeling good, would you recommend maybe doing it a couple more times per week or maybe extending the, the fasting window? What, what do you recommend? Look, I'm, if people want to do IF every day, you can do it. Like women could, I think we would all benefit male or female doing a 1212. You know, we eat way too often, we eat way too much. Whoever sold us snacking 5 million times a day in the 80s and 90s should be shot because our body actually doesn't need to be grazing constantly. There's actually research saying that's counterproductive to our digestive system. And again, we want it's more longevity, more anti-cancer even if you don't eat as frequently. You know, that's some of the big sale you know, IF. So, you know, three meals a day was actually really smart, but we've now added in a million snacks as well as three meals a day. And then our meals don't get any smaller even though we're having snacks. So I would get say to everybody, if you're trying this for the first time, just try 12-12, try to shut off, you know, or if you're a guy, try fasting for 14 hours and eating for 10, but I would do it consistently every single day. you know, those windows, because it's not so tight that it feels astronomically difficult, stay to those for a couple of weeks and see how you go. That type of IF, God, you can do that forever. And we probably all should, you know, there's research saying that we consume 30% of our daily calories after dinner. Wow, geez. Because we consume really... calorie dense fat, you know, after dinner you don't go, oh, I'm just going to have some carrot sticks, you know. I had cake after my dinner last night. You have cake, you have ice cream, you have cookies, you have, at my house, it's chocolate, right? But if I don't have chocolate, then I go for seeds and nuts, which are also super calorie dense. So, you know, I challenge everybody in doing their 12-12 or 14-10, don't eat after dinner. Like eat what you need. and then let it go have a sweet herbal tea without honey. And if people just did that, oh my gosh, so much would change. Yeah. I think the willpower to not eat is a struggle for some people. I think of my mom, but I've started having like my fast during the week, my Wednesday fast. I actually have my Tuesday dinner at like four o'clock or five o'clock and then just don't eat, sleep, wake up. And then I can... eat it maybe like nine o'clock or 10 o'clock or something the next day. And it feels very achievable once I break it up that way, rather than my last meal being say 8 PM and then I have to like wait until 12, one o'clock, two o'clock the next day when I'm constantly thinking about food. Um, when it comes to the rules of kind of breaking your fast, some people say coffee's okay, tea's okay, water fine. Um, I think it. From what I know, it's whatever doesn't spike your insulin or something like that. What's what's in, what's out, what can we have? Yeah. So there's a lot of controversy over this true, true fast purists would say anything, but water breaks the fast. Um, from a realistic daily person point of view, I would say I'm more of the fan of if it doesn't contain calories, it's not going to break the fast. Other people will say as long as it doesn't spike the insulin. So there's theories of what will and won't break the fast. You got those people doing, you know, fat black coffees or whatever bulletproof coffees and, you know, MCT oils and cream and all this stuff because hypothetically high fat in some people won't spike insulin. But if you're using like heavy cream. We do know now some people are insulin sensitive to lactose and other people aren't. So I'm a fan of saying if you're gonna have, I would let someone do a black coffee, a black tea. There is no milk, no sugars, you know, and no sugar substitutes either. There's questions of if the taste of sugar is gonna spike stuff or not. So I'm more of a purist there and I would say water. black coffee and tea. And I pretty much say everything else is out because people are just trying to cheat the system. Basically. We're always trying to see what I can get away with. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I think we have covered almost all of the things that I wanted to plan. We did talk about the, uh, the potential harms or consequences. If you misuse this, um, is there anything else that we might want to add or any cautions that people might want to take that we haven't discussed already? Well, I mean, if you are a type two diabetic, a type one diabetic, or if you're pre-diabetic, you know, undertaking, or if you're on certain medications, you know, go see a doctor about this, or go see a dietician or nutritionist that knows what they're doing when it regards to fasting. You know, undertaking anything major, your health should be assessed. There's a lot of medications that people take in the morning that need to be taken with food, so. whether you swap when you take that medication, but don't take medications on an empty stomach unless it's specifically like thyroid medication is actually taken on an empty stomach. But don't mess with that because if you take medications on an empty stomach, sometimes you don't absorb them as well. So just be, you know, be cautious with that. Anything else, if you're doing it and it's not working, try something else. That would be my real thing because you meet all these, this especially happens with women. a husband and wife or girlfriend, boyfriend go off and they do IF together. You get this all the time. And it's usually the female that then comes to see me for an appointment. And they're like, my partner and I have been doing intermittent fasting for four months and my partner's lost 20 kilos and I've lost two. And they're like, so what's wrong with me? Why am I broken? And the women instantly go, it's my fault. And it's not. it's that you metabolically are different. You know, we respond so differently as males and females and the style of IF they're obviously doing is not working for them metabolically, which would mean it's time to change and try something different. It's not that they're broken or not doing it tough enough. I think we tend to punish ourselves that way. So, and for guys as well, if it's not working, try a different style of IF. You know, I have other clients that we do an IF much like the five two, where you're eating normal calories five days a week and then two days a week, they do very low calories. Like you do 500 or 600 calories a day instead of 2000 or 2200. And I have a lot of clients that works well for. Often they just do a six one. So normal six times a week eating and then one day a week they just go really low and they typically do it in soups and smoothies and liquids and they just kind of let go of eating. And, um, and that's an interesting one. That's not as publicized as much for people to try. Cave it the day that you only have 500 calories. You do not train that as your rest day, please do not exercise on super low calorie days, it just puts the body into a panic. Yeah. Okay. And the same can be said for like in more intense days, if you have more of an intense workouts, make sure that we. plan that around our week so that we have, um, yeah, a good carb intake at the right time. Yes, please. And, you know, before I hit session, before you go to CrossFit or something, I'm talking half a banana, one to two dates, one piece of toast. I'm not talking about a massive meal of oats and berries. I'm talking, give yourself a little hit of carb so that you feel awesome during your session. Your session is going to burn up all that carb and a bunch of body fat. Um, Make yourself, you will feel, it's amazing when you swap people back out of fasted training for high intensity. They're like, I haven't enjoyed training so much in years because they've been cheating their body of feeling good. Yeah. Fantastic. There's so much to unpack there. I think I did, I've been fasting for so long and I was still a bit unsure of the benefits and I just knew it felt good for me, but not too sure why. Apart from just giving my digestive system a break. But we covered so much, we covered so much misconceptions and how to actually use it and how to start and if someone's still doing it, how to train their week or schedule their week for to best suit them. So I want to thank you so much for sharing this knowledge and I searched high and I searched low and I found the right person. So I'm really happy you've come on. If someone wants to learn more about you, I have your Instagram, I have uber health, which is your company. Do you want to talk about that? Sure. I'm just a sole trader. So it's just me and a few backend helpful people, but, um, on, on all socials, well, no Instagram and Facebook on Uber health, one word. I'm just going to let people know to you. That's been my business name for 22 years long. Wow. Uber came about. There you go. Um, um, and my, if you put in uber health.com.au, it does flick to me, but my actual website is just curious other than.com.au. And, and Um, but I, you know, I zoom with clients around the world and, um, and I, yeah, mainly work with athletes. Athletes also means people trying to run their first half marathon. Yeah. Which is most of the people who listen to this podcast, almost all are just recreational runners, so that it's right up your alley. And I will include all those show notes, all those links in the show notes as well. Oh, awesome. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for coming on. This was a lot of fun. Oh, thanks for having me. And fasting is such an interesting topic that again, to get your heads around it. And I think for me as well, I'm fascinated by it, but I've also tried it all. There is not a fast I haven't done to my body, including three weeks of proper juice fasting. I've gone hardcore, I've tried ketosis, I've tried it all, because I won't, I don't wanna talk about anything if I don't understand it from my own physiological point of view. Yeah, fantastic strategy. All right, thanks again. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks! who are looking for evidence-based long-term solutions and will not accept problematic quick fixes. And last but not least, who serve a cause bigger than themselves and pass on the right information to other runners who need it. I look forward to bringing you another episode and helping you on your Run Smarter path.