What Is the Best Way to Break My Fast?

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What is the Best Way to Break my Fast?

This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times best selling author, celebrity nutrition expert, Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert.

Will from Instagram asks, what is the best way to break my fast? Hey, it's JJ and I've got Intermittent Fasting expert Cynthia Thurlow with me now. Her TEDx talk on intermittent fasting. It's been viewed over 8 months million times. So yes, she's a bit of an expert on this subject. In fact, she's my go to expert on this subject. She loves to travel and she's a voracious reader. She reads four to five books at once. Plus, like me, she's a total boy mom. She's got two human ones, although she's got two canine ones too. I've got Daisy Girl. You know she'll be right back to answer this question, so stay with us.

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I think this is hugely bio individual, meaning that if you were to take a cross section of 20 individuals that are doing fasting, they may all have different answers. But I can tell you personally what I recommend and what I do. I think it is best to break a fast with a small meal or and I don't like the word snack, but something small. Small like for me personally, I like to break it with bone broth. I like to break it with a non dairy smoothie that I put together in my house that generally is just non dairy protein powder, usually with some healthy fats. Maybe I might toss in some blueberries and then I'll toss in, I call it my supplement stack. I do l glutamine, I do branched chain amino acids and I do some other things in my smoothie and I sometimes will do that and then I will break my fast officially two hours later with a big meal, a bigger meal. Sometimes people like to have a light salad. Some people like to if they tolerate dairy, you know, Greek yogurt, unsweetened, maybe with some nuts, maybe with some berries. You just want to be really mindful when you break your fast. You don't want to do it in a way that you're breaking it with a carbohydrate rich meal. You want to do it with protein and a carbohydrate fat and a carbohydrate, but never a carbohydrate on its own because we don't want to be spiking seeing this huge insulin spike after consuming something that's carbohydrate dense. So you always want to consume carbohydrates with either some protein or some healthy fats so that you're mitigating the blood sugar response. So I think this is a highly bio individual question and I've come to find that a little bit of experimentation is really hugely beneficial. So if you're listening and you're saying, okay, well, none of those things sound good to me. I would say, well, then maybe the thing to do is to have a small piece of steak with some vegetables. That's another option. And then eat the other half of your meal maybe two hours later. I've come to find that women, when they tap into this process of intuitive eating, when they really resonate, listen to what their body needs, they generally will make better choices as opposed to pushing through a fast and really being overly hungry. And then you eat a massively big meal and then you're not hungry for the rest of the day. We don't want that to happen. And that's why I sometimes will say it's kind of like green, yellow, red, like a stoplight that you know, when you first break your fast, it's a green light. It's good to eat, but you don't want to go overboard. So you know that caution light is there to kind of remind you you don't want to overeat so that you're then not hungry for another meal or two, depending on the individual. I have many clients that will have two or three meals a day during their feeding window, and so it's really all about what resonates best with you. I would say that for me personally, I break my fast with bone broth or my shake, and that works well for me. And then two hours later I'll have bacon and eggs, I'll have steak, I'll have some vegetables. I've been gravitating towards eating more salads as the weather's gotten warmer in Washington, D.C. and I would just encourage you to be open to experimentation. That's the best way to figure out what works for you.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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