Friday Q&A: Can I Work Out if I’m Fasting?

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If you can work out hard fasted, great. It's a better state to be in to go and work out. But if you can't and you find you eat a little something something and you can work out a lot harder, then do that.

Here's JJ Virgin, triple board certified nutrition and fitness expert and four time New York Times best selling author. It's time to reignite wellness.

Hey, welcome to Friday Q and A. It's jj. So here we go. And by the way, we get these off of Instagram and Facebook, especially when I'm going live. You can also DM me over at Instagram JJ Virgin and or leave a question on my wall at JJ Virgin official. So here is the question from Instagram and she says, I like to work out fasted, but I do drink coffee with a splash of half and half before I hit the gym. Does this change the fasted state or is it more that if you eat a full meal or solid food? All right, so here's the deal. If you eat, it breaks the fast. But really what I think we're looking for is like how if you want to go in fairly fasted into your workout, how do you do it? And here's the bigger thing with that. If you can work out hard fasted, great. It's a better state to be in to go and work out. But if you can't and you find you eat a little something something and you can work out a lot hard, then do that. But let's say that you can get up in the morning fasted and go get a great workout in. Awesome. And you want to have your coffee. I get it. By the way, coffee's an ergogenic aid. What does that mean? It means it'll help you work out harder and burn more fat. So we want to have coffee if we're going to go work out. It's actually something I do before my workouts. I go grab some coffee now. What you could do that will not really break the fastest state is throw a little bit of MCT oil in there. That would be better. It's actually a great fuel for when you're working out. It's great for getting your brain energized as well. So that would be my first recommendation is to have a little bit of MCT oil. If you're like, oh, I just need something in my coffee and not MCT oil, then I would do a little bit of coconut milk and you can do the full fat coconut milk. You would be better off if you don't have a dairy intolerance and you do want to do cow's milk dairy, get yourself some grass fed cream, not the half and half. You're going to be better off there than having the half and half. A little heavy cream. So you won't really get much in the way of the carbs and it won't really affect your fat burning. So might might prevent a little bit of autophagy, which is why I'm a little bit more gung ho on having a little bit of MCT in there. All right, so that would be my choice. And by the way, we'll link to something from my buddy Mark Sisson and we always do that in jjvirgin.com forward/questions. That's where we put the information on the questions from Friday Q and A. And he wrote a great little blog post about coffee breaking the fast. And you know, if you do half and half, because remember, half and half is milk and cream, so that will break that fast. Cream is pretty much mainly fat. There's a teensy, teensy bit of carbohydrate and protein in it. And then of course MCT would go after that. But again, I look more at why are you, why are you going into a workout in a fasted state and how can you get the best workout? Cause it's really above all else, the most important thing here is the quality of your workout. It's really not the fat you burn burn during the workouts that's going to make the difference. You want to have an intense workout, quality over quantity. Work really hard because it's going to be the, when you do that well, you're going to store sugar back in your muscles after the workout and burn more fat after the workout. So that's what you really want to think about. So if a little bit of coffee with MCT oil can do it, great. If not, next up would be a little bit of coconut milk or a little bit of coconut cream. And if not that, you're not dairy intolerant, then again, grass fed cream. Okay, if you want to leave a question again, pop on over to one of my social media feeds. Leave it on up and you will be our next Friday Q and A.

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