I love fasting, but sometimes it can be hard to know what you should be abstaining from. In this blog, I’m going to go over what you can and can’t have, and why.
First, I’m going to break down several different types of fasting that we should be looking at.
Water Fast
Water fasting involves abstaining from everything except for water. This forces your body to clean up and recycle any excess food and fat in your body. This is why water fasting is more efficient than other fasts.
Dirty Fasting
Dirty fasting involves consuming a small amount of calories during the fast. You can also do fat fasting, a version that means you abstain from every food except for a small amount of fats.
I recommend MCT oil, coconut oil, and broths, which are healthy fats that won’t spike insulin levels.
Low-Calorie Fasting
Low-calorie fasting involves eating less than 200 calories a day for 3 days. This 3-day period allows your body to enter autophagy, which is your body’s cleanup mode.
Now, if you are doing any of these fasting methods, can you drink anything other than water?
1. Coffee
Coffee has actually been shown to suppress appetite. Some studies even show that coffee helps our body go into autophagy.
You can’t drink coffee during a water fast, but you definitely can during a dirty or fat fast. For low-calorie fasting, you’re only getting about 5 calories in a cup.
The key here is to get coffee that is organic and shade-grown, which will eliminate molds and pesticides that come with many conventional forms of coffee.
Tea is similar, and can be herbal and anti-inflammatory without disrupting fasting.
2. Collagen
Collagen has been shown in some studies to stabilize blood sugar levels and help put our body into an insulin resistant state.
Collagen is a pure source of protein that doesn’t spike your insulin as much as something like whey protein does.
Collagen can be used during fat, dirty, and low-calorie fasting. Dirty fasting allows you to have a small amount of liquids like sparkling waters, coffees, and teas. Fat fasting allows you to eat a little bit, but collagen will help suppress any remaining hunger.
I actually make a collagen coffee, where I put one scoop of collagen into my coffee, that keeps me in my fasting mode without spiking insulin.
3. Broth
Broth will increase your calorie intake, but it’s very clean and excellent at reducing hunger. It also has a lot of electrolytes.
When you fast, you lower your insulin and blood sugar levels, and disrupt the balance of water in your body, which can cause cramps or palpitations. This is why we want to replenish our electrolytes.
Broth works with dirty fasting, but it also has a bit of fat, so you can do it with fat fasting as well.
4. Powders
You want to be careful of greens, electrolyte, and collagen powders, because if they’re made from a dairy source, they’ll spike insulin levels.
If you’re using an electrolyte powder, make sure there’s no sugar, cane sugar, or high fructose corn syrup in it.
Monk fruit and Stevia are two sugar substitutes I use because they don’t spike insulin levels.
I like to use electrolyte powders while I’m doing a dirty or low-calorie fast because it helps with the blood sugar that you lose during a fast.
I don’t buy breakfast food–I have a combination of greens, electrolyte, and collagen powder as my breakfast.
I have the collagen in my coffee, the greens in water, and sometimes I’ll have the electrolyte powder in the afternoon in a refreshing drink.
Not only is this good for me, it also suppresses my hunger. My greens powder is perfect for low-calorie fasting, because it’s only 20-30 calories per scoop, meaning you can drink green juice all day.
Drinks to Avoid During Fasting
You can also drink juices like Suja which is a juice you can buy that only has about 20-50 calories in it. Stay away from fruit juices, and stick to green juices for a low-calorie fast.
Diet drinks are a bad choice for low-calorie because they contain a ton of chemicals, excite your brain cells to death, and can actually cause you to gain weight.
This also goes for diet flavored waters and water flavorings. You want to make sure you’re identifying the ingredients in these drinks and know what to stay away from.
Summary
Try to stick to collagen powders, broths, electrolyte powders, greens powders, and vegetable juices if you’re doing a dirty or low-calorie fast.
If you want to learn how not to plateau while fasting, the key is rotational fasting. I made an entire training, workbook, and guide for it that you can access here.
Research: https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(14)00151-9
