Quite a number of the personal training and fitness bootcamp clients at the Genesis Performance Center are Muslims. And in August, they begin their fasting month. Most of them would still like to exercise to maintain their strength and weight loss / fat loss results. Last year I wrote about what to eat and how to schedule training during the fasting month of Ramadan.

Here are some additional tips and supplements that can help you or your Muslim friends during Ramadan.

The general idea is to make sure that everything you eat is nutritious! Because you will eat more infrequently, and there is only a certain amount of food that you can stomach at one time, every ounce should be full of nutrients. So, the same “caveman” rules apply. No refined food, and if a caveman didn’t have it, you shouldn’t either. This ensures that you are eating whole, non-refined foods.

Eat red meat, with fat. This is slower to digest than white meat or purely lean meat. That is good for keeping you full, and reducing the impact of the infrequent meals. Lamb, mutton beef! Yum.

Eat healthy fats in larger amounts. These include fat from meat, fish oils, and nuts. Fats slow digestion so that keeps nutrients coming in nice and slow over time. You feel more full, you don’t get elevated blood sugar, and you will store less body fat.

Supplements that can help you are things that will maximize digestive health (to get as many nutrients as you can from limited/infrequent meals) and stuff that will reduce the impact of stress hormones on your body because semi-starvation increases overall stress on the body.

Stuff like….

HCL to aid digestion

Omnizyme – a broad based digestive enzyme formula

Probiotics - to keep the good/bad bacteria ratios healthy in your digestive tract

Glycine with evening meals – to relax the nervous system and fight stress

Some form of herbal stress buster like serenity 2.0 or yin-hance

Something to get you up and going early in the morning, like Acetyl-L-Carnitine found in Yang R-ALA.

There we go! It’s tough to make maximal gains during Ramadan, but with these suggestions you should be able to train and maintain the gains that you have gotten from your past year of training.