[Zuko]

Is there any benefit to skipping breakfast on days that you don’t do a morning workout? Per my work schedule I can’t reliably get a morning run in, but I’d still like to work on being fat adapt. If I wait until lunch to eat will I get any benefit if I’m just at the office and not exercising?

thanks for coming out to Denver last week, it was great to hear you guys. Also, thanks for featuring a ton of women in the new book through both the articles and the photos.

Topic

[Dane]

Dane on May 29, 2019 at 12:37 pm #22682

I actually tend to semi-fast on my rest day the day before my long zone 1 workouts, though there are days when I abandon it because I can tell I just need to eat. I can’t imagine there isn’t some fat adaptation going on by just fasting even if it’s not a training day. At the very least I can’t imagine it’s detrimental as long as you make up the calories from the skipped meal at lunch/dinner.

For what it’s worth I can say that in my experience of messing around with fasting while losing weight there was a big psychological benefit to randomly skipping meals. It helped me learn how to tell the difference between wanting to eat because I was actually hungry/low on energy vs wanting to eat just because my stomach felt empty or I was bored. Once I started to get back into backpacking I kept playing with seeing how far I could go on an empty stomach and now following a training plan it’s helped me power through fasted workouts where I can tell I just want to eat to eat not because I’m actually low on energy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on May 29, 2019 at 8:41 pm #22692

There are good benefits to intermittent fasting even when not training. As long as you recover well enough to handle the next training session. When highly fat adapted your recovery will be faster whether fasted or not.

Scott

[Colin Simon]

Colin Simon on May 30, 2019 at 12:57 pm #22707

I’ve tried this:
1. By just skipping breakfast for about a year and transferring to a more fat-based diet
2. By also fasted running at lunch

I had gold-standard lactate threshold tests after each. #1 didn’t improve fitness OR fat burning, #2 made a tremendous improvement in overall fitness and fat burning.

However, I believe #1 helped train me psychologically and physically to go without food for longer periods of time, very similarly to what Dane said. Just don’t expect #1 to make you “perform” better just because you are still sitting in an office eating different things.