So last year I decided to train differently for the Shamrok-Anthem half marathon. That is I decided to train sanely. I took up MAF training and by late March, I saw results. It's now November and I'm seeing even more results. I'll probably be posting on that in the future as I hope these folks don't cancel the 2021 race via announcement in December. Anyway, I've added a new twist: Intermittent fasting.
One of the goals of the MAF training was to get my body to burn fat for fuel rather than sugar. You can go longer on fat than sugar so for a long distance race, this change would be very helpful. But the one thing I noticed is that I continue to carry a significant amount of abdominal fat. Now I'm not a spring chicken so I know that as we age we generally pack in fat but the thing is that for the amount of running and biking I do, it didn't make sense.
So I had to confess. I snack. Yes. Yes I do. So even though I eat sensible food, the snacking was undoing the gains, particularly the night snacking where since I'm not doing anything, the food is turned into fat for storage. I had to put a stop to this. Clearly will power was not going to work so I needed an incentive:
16-8 daily intermittent fasting.
Since I'm not actually trying to lose weight (I am, but very targetted) the idea here for me is not to reduce calories. For the amount of running I do it's not healthy. But to eliminate the extra eating by blocking off 16 hours. Basically, after dinner, there is no eating again until the next day whenever 16 hours is up.
Honestly, the worst part is the last 3 hours. And really the reason why is because generally, I'm not doing anything that takes attention away from the fact that I'm USED to eating by that time. I'm on week three and have dropped weight and actually can tell the difference between what I weigh when I've eaten and when my stomach is empty.
So far there have been no ill effects on my running, which I didn't expect there to be since I'm not on a starvation diet. I also make sure to take vitamins, etc. during the fast period because of my running and sweating out various elements.
Research says it takes about 3 to 5 weeks for your body to adjust to the schedule. I'm on the tail of week 3. We shall see.
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