9 Intermittent Fasting Tips for Beginners

Intermittent Fasting

As a runner, it is important to also pay attention to what you are eating. In fact, you diet may be even more important that the running workouts you are doing. If you are not properly fueling yourself, it is impossible to perform at your best when you run. One of the most popular diet plans is intermittent fasting.

You might have heard of it, but what is it really?

Quite simply, intermittent fasting is when you restrict the times that you eat.

According to research, it has a lot of health possible benefits including:

Weight loss
Body fat loss
Improvement in your body’s ability to burn fat as a fuel source
Lower blood sugar levels
Reversal of type 2 diabetes
Increase in mental concentration
Increase in overall energy
Increase in growth hormones
Improvement in your cholesterol levels
Reduction for the risk of Alzheimer’s
Longer life
Cellular cleansing
Reduction in inflammation^[1]NCBI – Time restricted feeding without reducing caloric intake prevents metabolic diseases in mice fed a high fat diet

Needless to say, intermittent fasting is more than just a fad diet craze. However, just like any other diet, before starting, there are several things that you need to know in order to be safe.

Choose a Plan That Suits Your Life

When you hear intermittent fasting, you might only think of it as one thing.

However, there are several different types of plans that fall under the umbrella of intermittent fasting.

A few of the main ones are:^[2]Popsugar – 10 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Starting Intermittent Fasting

16/8 (fast for 16 hours, eat for 8)

Weekly (fast one day a week)

Alternate Day (alternate fasting days)

Warrior (fast for 20 hours, eat for 4)

Therefore, it is important for you to choose which one works best for your schedule and life. In addition, the above schedules are just suggestions. Perhaps you don’t like eating dinners. If that is the case, you can slightly change the schedule so that you only eat breakfast and lunch and skip dinner.

Really the most important thing is that you can find an intermittent fast diet that works for you. Only by finding something that you like and can follow long term will you see any real results.

Some of you might find following any of the above intermittent fasting protocols very difficult to start out with. If that is the case, it is always ok to gradually get yourself into it.

For example, if you decide to follow the 16:8 plan, but find it too hard to do completely at the beginning, start out at 10:14 (10 hours fasting, 14 hours eating). Once you get used to this, slowly decrease the amount of eating hours until you reach your final goal.

Certain Types of Exercise Are Better Than Others

Many people aren’t sure if they should be working out at the same times as they are intermittent fasting.

Well, they are partially right. It isn’t recommended to do high intensity exercises such as lifting weights or running fast for long periods of time.

However, low intensity steady state (LISS) exercises in the morning, such as a long run can actually be beneficial.^[3]Sober Alley – 8 Intermittent Fasting Tips & Tricks For Beginners Not only do low intensity exercises help make your body more efficient at using fat as a fuel source, running at moderate efforts can actually also help curb hunger pains!

If you would like to know more about the benefits of aerobic training, check out

Start You Intermittent Fast After Dinner

No matter what type of fasting schedule that you end up picking, one of the greatest tips that you can implement in order to make it a bit easier on yourself is by start fasting after you eat dinner.

By doing this, you end up spending a majority of your fasting time sleeping.^[4]Lift Learn Grow – The Top 10 Intermittent Fasting Tips & Tricks

For example, if you are on the 16:8 plan and you sleep 8 hours a night, you will end up spending at least half of the time asleep. Needless to say, this makes following the intermittent schedule much easier!

In addition, on the 16:8 plan, you will most likely have your last meal at 8 pm and go to sleep at 12 midnight. It is very unlikely that you will be hungry in the 4 hours between your last meal and when you sleep. Therefore, in reality, you will be able to go through around 12 hours of your 16 hour fast without even having to worry about hunger pains!

Physiologically, this makes intermittent fasting quite a bit easier. The easier it is mentally to follow your diet, the easier it will be physically to keep following it as well.

Understand the Difference Between Hunger and Boredom

One of the most important parts of intermittent fasting is understanding the difference between hunger and boredom.

Many people like to graze throughout the day. Perhaps it is a few chips here, or a piece of chocolate and candy there. However, in many cases they are doing this not because they are hungry, but because they are bored and don’t have anything else to do.^[5]Business Insider – I tried intermittent fasting for a month — and I saw 7 life-changing results

By intermittent fasting, and forcing yourself to only be allowed to eat in specified windows of time each day, you will quickly realize that previously you were easily eating hundreds of empty calories in snacks each day just because you were bored rather than really hungry.

Don’t Forget to Drink Water

For many people when they thinking dieting, they think about losing weight. When they think about losing weight, they think about not eating or drinking anything.

However, this is not health in any diet and especially while intermittent fasting. That is because intermittent is not a short term diet fad. Rather, it is a long term change in your eating habits.

As such, it is very important that you make sure you are drinking enough water every day while intermittent fasting. In fact, according to registered dietitian Maya F. Bach, “Keeping your water intake high helps to keep your body’s cells functioning as well as your appetite under control”.^[6]Insider – 10 intermittent fasting tips that actually help

As such it is important to make sure you are drinking throughout the day.

However, how much is enough water?

A simple formula to follow is, to drink half your body weight in ounces in water. For example, if you are 180 pounds, you should be drinking at least 90 oz. of water each day.

Don’t Drink Artificially Flavored Drinks

While it is very important to stay hydrated when you are intermittent fasting, that doesn’t mean that you can drink everything.

In fact, it is very important to stay away from artificially flavored drinks such as energy drinks and sodas, even if they say that they are low in sugar.

This is because they are usually filled with a lot of artificially sweeteners that are not only bad for your health (which defeats the purpose of going on a healthy diet in the first place!) but they also tend to make you feel even more hungry!^[7]Chasing Foxes – 8 Intermittent Fasting Hacks That’ll Making Your Life Easier

As such, rather than staying on your diet, you might be unable to control yourself and start overeating!

Get Enough Protein

When you are on an intermittent fasting diet, one of the hardest things for many people is to make sure that they are getting enough protein.

This is for a few reasons. First, proteins tend to be very satiating, so that you easily feel full when eating them. Second, because you are limiting the time you can eat, you don’t have enough time to eat the amount of protein necessary.

However, while intermittent fasting, you want to make sure that you maintain your muscle mass. There is no use if you are losing weight and it is mostly in muscle. Not only will you look more twig like, but your resting metabolic rate will drastically decrease. In the end, if you don’t have enough muscles, you will be much less likely to continue losing weight.

Therefore, it is important to eat enough protein.

In general, aim at making around 30% of your diet as protein. However, do just fill it with protein shakes. Rather, focus on high quality protein sources such as protein rich plants, chicken, seafood, and lean meats.^[8]Men’s Health – Daily Expert: Before You Trying Intermittent Fasting, Do These 5 Things

Avoid Unhealthy Foods

One of the biggest mistakes people make while intermittent fasting is only focusing on when to eat and not focusing on what to eat.

Just because you are only eating 8 hours a day doesn’t mean that you can eat whatever junk food you want.

According to Whitney Linsenmyer, spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, “Those experimenting with intermittent fasting still need the same essential nutrients”.^[9]MyFitnessPal – 6 Intermittent Fasting Mistakes to Avoid Therefore, it is important that you are focused on eating healthy, nutritious foods while intermittent fasting.

If you typically eat a lot of junk food in your diet and still want to intermittent fast, that means you need to stop eating unhealthy food. However, we understand that this might be difficult for you to stop right away.

Therefore, instead of completely changing your diet 180 degrees right away, focus on slowly taking out the junk food and slowly adding healthier options. This will make it much less likely that you will quite.

Ease Yourself Into It

A big mistake that many people make when starting intermittent fasting is going all in right away.

In many cases, the shock and difficult of adapting to this new way of eating can be too hard and they quickly find themselves back to their old ways.

This doesn’t work. Rather, you need to look at intermittent fasting as not a diet, but rather as a way of living. As such, it is better to ease yourself into if that means you will be more successful than to go all in right away and fail.^[10]Popsugar – 10 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Starting Intermittent Fasting

For example, if you decide on following the 16:8 plan, one your first day, rather than skipping breakfast completely and waiting for lunch, just delay eating breakfast by 30 minutes. Gradually, every day delay breakfast a bit more until you finally are just eating at lunch time.

Little tricks like this, can make intermittent fasting much easier to get into. And like we said before, if you can make intermittent fasting a lifestyle rather than a diet, you are much more likely to succeed.

Parting Words

As runners, it is very important to consider your diet and nutrition as part of your training plan.

While there are many different diets out there that can work great for runners, you should also consider intermittent fasting. It is not only a diet, but a way of living that is easy to incorporate into your life and particular nutritional needs.

Not only can you find many benefits from following this style of eating, it is extremely adaptable.

Good luck!

If you would like to learn more about nutrition, check out The Ultimate Marathon Nutrition Guide.

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