The Perils of Intermittent Fasting for Runners

#RunPainFree Academy’s athletic conditioning and corrective expert, Coach Jessica dives into another most-talked-about topic in the weight loss scene — intermittent fasting. Coming from a nutrition and expert background on fueling athletes, she talks about why intermittent fasting is such a bad idea.
To hear more from Coach Jessica about intermittent fasting, listen to this episode.
She gives information on how our body is built to differentiate “famine mode” from “feast mode” and why it matters. She also talks about what happens inside the body when you starve yourself and what are the serious implications to your kidney and liver.
Coach Jessica gives a detailed account of what you should know first before submitting yourself to this trending diet fad.
The Three-Hour Rule
If you are an avid follower of Coach Jessica or a member of the Academy, you might have heard her talk about how your body only gives you three hours, before it goes into starvation mode. The term starvation mode means your body starts to feast on muscles. Your body eats out muscles in order to function, not from fat because the body needs fat to live, and not muscles.

“Fat is there to make sure that you're surviving and you always have something as a reserve. I'm going to first talk about what starvation mode actually is. I am going to get as in-depth as I possibly can without being too scientific.” - Coach Jessica Marie Rose Leggio

Starvation Mode
Starvation mode technically is not a term. It's what is commonly used in the fitness industry or health industry as a famine response. Starvation mode is also known as famine mode, starvation, resistance, starvation, tolerance, adapted, starvation, adaptive thermogenesis, fat adaptation, or metabolic adaptation.

“Many, many moons ago — and there's tons of information about this — when there was feast or famine, there was a time when they do not know when they were going to eat again and they would hunt. They would get an eat as much food as possible. It created a storing system, where our bodies went into ‘survival mode’ and would store all of this food.” - Coach Jessica Marie Rose Leggio

Our Bodies Hoard Food
Our bodies were trained hundreds of years ago to “hoard” food because they did not know when they will be able to hunt and eat again. This hasn't changed that much because that is how our bodies operate.

“Food equates to activity. Food is energy for activity. That's why I always say, ‘look at the food, are you going to use it or not? If you're not going to use it, don't eat it.’” - Coach Jessica Marie Rose Leggio

Why IF Is Bad for Runners
Coach Jessica gave a blow by blow discussion on what happens to your body when you fast. Since you are not ingesting anything, your body goes to your muscles for glycogen.
When you lose muscle, you lose the ability to burn fat, because muscle is how you burn fat. There is a triple-negative to this as lastly when you finally decide to eat, your body is in survival mode.

“So all the ideas of carb loading and eating all these carbs while you're running and doing your long runs, the reason for that is so you can ‘store glycogen in your muscles’ because you need it to run for a long period of time.” - Coach Jessica Marie Rose Leggio

More Bad News
Coach Jessica has read a lot of medical journals and has experienced numerous trials for herself on weight loss, building muscles, and creating a body prime for athletic running. She professes how you can achieve this without resorting to intermittent fasting.
She further discusses bodily functions, specifically post-digestive functions, on what happens to your kidneys when you fast.

“There's a reason why we need to eat, what we need to eat, how we need to eat and why we get to go so long without it. Our bodies are amazing, but everybody has a breaking point and the body has a breaking point as well.” - Coach Jessica Marie Rose Leggio

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THIS WEEK'S QUESTION IS:
Which part of the talk about intermittent fasting did you relate to the most?
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The #RunPainFree 60-Day Nutritional Program for Runners