Intermittent fasting is one of the best dietary routines to make lasting positive changes for your health. It’s also an excellent tool for losing weight when combined with food tracking and counting calories.
However, you may be wondering what the best food is for breaking the fast. It’s a fair question, and it may have drastic effects on the results you get from intermittent fasting and your diet overall.
Before discussing what foods are best to break a prolonged fasting period, we must understand what counts as breaking a fast. After all, there are only a few foods that are so low in calories that they have minimal-to-no effects on your insulin levels.
You might know that insulin is the primary hormone we are looking to keep in check during fasting. Here are some of the things you can have that don’t count as breaking your fast:
A note about bone broth: the high-quality stuff will have ample amounts of protein and will break a fast. Real bone broth extracts collagen proteins from the bones, and it does count as calories and slightly breaks your fast.
There are cheaper versions of broth out there that are basically salty water and might be a better choice. Sipping is suitable, but chugging bone broth isn’t.
All other foods and drinks pretty much break your fast. Even healthy fruits and vegetables full of vitamins and minerals will do it.
If you don’t see the results you’d expect from following a strict intermittent fasting schedule, you might be breaking your fast with the wrong type of foods. Some foods build on the momentum that fasting provides, while others wreak havoc on the progress and try to undo it. First, let’s look at the wrong way to break a fast:
Foods high in fat and carbohydrates are a terrible pairing with breaking your fast. When fasting, your insulin levels are low, and your glucagon levels are high. These two compounds work in an alternating fashion. When glucagon is high, the body looks for alternative fuel sources to keep chugging along, including glycogen and stored fatty acids.
That is why intermittent fasting can speed up weight loss effectively. The increased insulin sensitivity with prolonged periods of raised glucagon levels encourages the body to burn fatty acids for fuel.
When you break your fast with high carbohydrate food, insulin levels drive up quickly. Insulin is the storage hormone that will store glucose, amino acids, and fatty acids in your body. When fat is present alongside this high carbohydrate food, those fatty acids are easily pushed into existing fat cells due to available insulin and lack of glucagon. The best food to break intermittent fasting will be:
It goes without saying: don’t stuff yourself when breaking your fast, either. Keep the first meal light and plan larger meals later into your eating window.
It’s time to break that fast! Drink a glass of water to subdue your potentially ravenous appetite at the end of your fasting period, and then try some of these foods:
There are plenty of other options to break your fast properly as well. Just stick to what was laid out in this article, and you are good to go!
You will need:
Blend all the ingredients, and your smoothie is ready in less than 5 minutes! Nutritional value: 211kcal, 46.4g of carbs, 4.3g of protein, 3.6g of fats.
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