IF and Weight Training

Rajions

So I'm currently Intermittent Fasting (IF) and I've decided to start weight training. It's been confusing listening to everyone saying different things about whether I can or can't eat after a workout. My current eating window is 12pm-8pm. I work Mon-Fri 8am-4pm. So, I'm trying to do my workouts in the morning around 6ish. If I break my fast after the workout, it'll cut my eating window down to 2pm.

It wouldn't pointless of my weight training session if I wait 6 hours to eat, right? I've watched countless videos on YouTube about IF and seen Terry Crews talking about himself waiting hours after his workout to eat... I know I'm not a man, but it obviously works for him... Idk, what do you guys think??

Please don't tell me how unhealthy training fasted is... I've lost weight before doing it and had no problems... I'm just trying to figure out if I can wait some hours after to eat. Thanx

AnvilHead

You can do it any way you want. Whether it’s an optimal way to do it for your goals is a completely separate question.

Azdak

Another question is whether, even if it is suboptimal, it makes any practical difference. In most cases, beginners will show significant improvement with almost any eating or lifting program.

Rajions

AnvilHead wrote: »

You can do it any way you want. Whether it’s an optimal way to do it for your goals is a completely separate question.

Okay so my initial plan was to just lose all my weight first and then start weight training. But, I decided to just do it all in one go. My goal is just to lose weight and get toned. I'm not competing in anything, so I won't be going hardcore with the weight training. Do you think it's an optimal way to do it for that?

AnvilHead

As Azdak alluded to, it won't make any practical difference. As a beginner, what's most 'optimal' is to choose a well-designed strength training program (by somebody who knows what they're doing) and stick to it. Consistency will be more important to your results than anything else. The most important aspects of meal timing will be satiety, adherence and workout performance.

IMO, the biggest benefits of IF have to do with sustainability and controlling your calorie intake - everything else about it is hugely overhyped. It's very trendy right now, but it won't cause you to lose weight or "tone up" any faster or more efficiently than any other eating pattern with equivalent calorie intake. So if you can have good workouts that time of the morning and deal with fasting until noon without feeling miserable and wanting to eat anything that's not nailed down, go for it. If you find that it creates problems with satiety and adherence to your diet and/or impairs your workout performance, then I don't see any reason to even continue with IF.

If you're really interested in digging into the nuts and bolts of it, here's a great study by Eric Helms and Alan Aragon containing evidence-based recommendations: https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1550-2783-11-20

You may want to skip down to the information under the headings "Nutrient Timing" and "Meal Frequency", as that's where the meat and potatoes of the information is as it pertains to your questions.

AnvilHead

Another interesting read is the Position Stand by the ISSN (International Society of Sports Nutrition), part of which pertains to Intermittent Fasting. It's located here: https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-0174-y

Here is an excerpt from the portion about Intermittent Fasting (emphasis added):

...Seimon et al. [108] recently published the largest systematic review of IF research to date, comparing the effects of intermittent energy restriction (IER) to continuous energy restriction (CER) on body weight, body composition, and other clinical parameters. Their review included 40 studies in total, 12 of which directly compared an IER with a CER condition. They found that overall, the two diet types resulted in “apparently equivalent outcomes” in terms of body weight reduction and body composition change. Interestingly, IER was found to be superior at suppressing hunger. The authors speculated that this might be attributable to ketone production in the fasting phases. However, this effect was immaterial since on the whole, IF failed to result in superior improvements in body composition or greater weight loss compared to CER. Table 2 outlines the characteristics of the major diet archetypes...

sijomial

Rajions wrote: »

AnvilHead wrote: »

You can do it any way you want. Whether it’s an optimal way to do it for your goals is a completely separate question.

Okay so my initial plan was to just lose all my weight first and then start weight training. But, I decided to just do it all in one go. My goal is just to lose weight and get toned. I'm not competing in anything, so I won't be going hardcore with the weight training. Do you think it's an optimal way to do it for that?

Do you think it's an optimal way to do it for that?
No possibly not - but by such a tiny amount it's an irrelevance to you.
There's also an element of optimal for YOU as opposed to optimal for the general population. If it helps you fit in your workouts into your schedule and that makes you more consistent with your exercise then it's optimal for you.

Okay so my initial plan was to just lose all my weight first and then start weight training
Now that would be really, really, really sub-optimal.