The Food Medic - S9 Ask Dr Hazel: How to manage intermittent fasting and morning workouts

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

Welcome back to Ask Dr Hazel, our mini episodes that drop each week.Our listener question this week is “Conflicting advice - There is evidence if we eat in an 8 hour window, this helps gut health. There is also evidence that it is important to eat before a workout - how do you manage these two together?”To learn more about the pros and cons of fasting, head over to www.thefoodmedic.co.uk for further reading. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back to Ask Dr Hazel, our mini episodes that drop each week. I'm your host as always, Dr Hazel. A little reminder, if you do want to send in your own question, you can send us an audio recorded question. Please make sure it's audio recorded on any topic related to health, fitness, nutrition to info at thefoodmedic.co.uk for your chance to be featured. So let's jump in to this week's question. Hi, I just had a question about diet and nutrition because a couple of pieces of advice that confuse me how to fit together. I know there's evidence that if we eat within, say, an eight hour window, that can be really helpful for your gut health. But I've also seen your recent posts around,

particularly for women, the importance of eating before a workout to help with energy levels and strength and things like that as well. And I guess it's kind of how to manage these two together. If you get up quite early and eat something and then work out in the morning. So if you were to then eat within a set window, you'd have to end that quite early

as well so I was just looking for advice on that one thank you okay so this question is related to the advice to eat within an eight hour window and how that's conflicting with eating before morning workouts now I am an advocate of making sure you're going into every workout fueled. And what I mean by that is I'm not really for fasted workouts, especially for women, because it can disrupt your hormones. So my advice is, regardless of what time of the morning it is, try to go into your workouts with at least a snack on board and a carbohydrate based snack. So that could be something like a slice of toast, an energy bar, a banana, something like that. So it's not a huge amount of energy. It's not going to make you feel

unwell during your workout, but it's going to provide you with fuel and it's going to make sure that you've got energy on board, which will last you until the end of your workout when you can have a full breakfast. Now, there's also advice that we've discussed on this podcast around eating within a certain time frame within our day. And you mentioned that this is related to gut health. I would argue that when people advise eating within a smaller window in the day, it's usually related to weight loss and related to circadian alignment. So kind of eating in keeping with our internal body clock, which we know is important for long term metabolic health, like heart health,

or risk of diabetes, that kind of thing. So that advice is still relevant. But what I would say is if you're thinking about your gut health, there are a lot more research backed ways to supporting your gut health, like eating a variety of plant based foods, eating a high fibre diet, versus eating within an eight hour window. And if following a fasting protocol like eating within an eight hour window and fasting for 16 hours is something that you're really keen on doing, but you also want to think about your hormones

and make sure you're having your workouts fueled and prepared, you could think about just extending that window. So eating within a 10 hour window, i.e. having your first meal at 7am, having your last meal at 7pm. That is likely to be optimal in many ways, because it's not going to disrupt your sleep, you're still eating within kind of the daytime window. And also it means that you're able to eat before your workouts or around your workout window.

So I hope that answers your question. It's not that they need to be mutually exclusive. It's about weighing up, which is more important to you. But like I said, as a woman, I really recommend trying to not do fasted training. I also don't recommend fasted protocols for everyone, especially if you have a history of disordered eating or if you have irregular or absent periods. That would be my best advice and hopefully it answers your question.