What is intermittent fasting?
The lockdown diet plan for fat loss in athletes.
foods available during the lockdown, proving that a nutritionist can get you results with whatever is available. The key point here is that nutrition coaching should not stop, but should rather focus on guiding athletes on how to eat during the lockdown.
Many of you may know I have worked with Aamir Khan during Dangal, Sushil Kumar and Abhishek Bachchan. Many celebrities have graced my Qua Nutrition Clinics and we have experimented with the intermittentfasting regime. What is intermittent fasting? Should athletes do intermittent fasting? I recently put two athletes on this approach – Mayank Agarwal was one of them – the reason being that intermittent fasting runs on the principle that you have a feeding window and a fasting window wherein, for example, the last meal of the day is at 7pm and next is at 7am, maintaining a fasting window of 12 hours. Intermittent fasting, in my opinion, works best with 16 hours of fasting.
The rst point to note for athletes is that my recommendation of intermittent fasting is only for this lockdown period. Research has shown that it does not benet athletes as there is a drop in strength, endurance and mitochondrial concentration in cells as well as loss of muscle. Intermittent fasting has, however, shown to help decrease the bodyfat percentage. It is solely because of this that I am advising on a casetocase basis whether athletes should approach intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is the optimal strategy for fat loss, but one must acknowledge that studies on athletes have been conducted during Ramadan and their performance evaluation for strength, stamina and recovery showed a drop during the intermittentfasting period. My recommendation to try this is solely dependent on the fact that athletes are overeating, sleeping very late or not training enough. Adding a component of intermittent fasting to an athlete’s current lockdown schedule may enable better fat loss due to lower calorie consumption.
Intermittent fasting also helps by improving insulin sensitivity. Research has also focused on mitochondrial biogenesis, where intermittent fasting or a calorie decit produces new mitochondrial cells to adapt and enhance the athlete’s performance. While training, endurance athletes release AMPK factors in low energy state. AMPK factors stimulate positive adaptation to exercise and promote mitochondrial biogenesis. However, in a lockdown, training is limited, making mitochondrial biogenesis dicult. Another caution for athletes is that when there is carbohydrate restriction, which is normally induced by intermittent fasting, there is muscle hypotrophy. This, coupled with longer training sessions, is not the idle combination to build muscle. Hence, intermittent fasting should be done with a 12 hour workout around 11am12pm, preferably in the fasted state followed by the rst meal of the day after the workout. The second workout of the day can be during the feeding window, which is between 4pm and 6pm. Finish that training with a solid highprotein meal at 7pm.
It’s important for athletes to understand that my recommendation of intermittent fasting is not general for all athletes but on the basis of my analysis of the rst 40 days of the lockdown where I observed most of my athletes struggling to maintain discipline because they felt that they have not worked out and therefore they do not need the discipline of eating right. Intermittent fasting is an approach to control calorie consumption during the day and bring about better fat loss. A caution should be inserted in the entire intermittentfasting approach for the following: (1) Women’s menstruation cycle — weakness or iron, ferritin or vitamin B12 deciency; (2) Diabetics or master/veteran athlete or coaches; and (3) People with eating disorders or athletes who are extremely underweight should not attempt this approach except under the guidance of a sports nutritionist or a dietitian.
If any athlete wishes to avail of an intermittent-fasting diet plan at my clinic, please contact me so that we can evaluate your body fat percentage and your total energy expenditure through the day, and accordingly design the calories and macros that you need to consume in your structured feeding window.
Ryan Fernando is an award-winning celebrity sports nutrition coach and chief nutritionist at Qua Nutrition Signature Clinics. Book an intermittent fasting diet plan at www.ryanfernando.in