Even though there are numerous benefits of fasting the one that is the most important to you as a diabetic
is the fact that it keeps your insulin levels low for a prolonged period of time.
The longer you fast the longer your insulin level will stay low.
Now we have already discussed that it is the food that you consume that spikes your insulin or if we
wanted to be precise any calories that you consume will spike your insulin.
Once again this spike will be the biggest after carbs moderate after a protein and very small.
After eating fat quite obviously when you are fast you can consume water and not only can you do it
but you should actually take extra care to drink enough of it to stay hydrated.
You have to remember that most foods have very high water content so if you are skipping a meal you
need to make sure that you hydrate yourself by drinking that water instead.
Personally drinking a glass of water is the first thing I do after waking up.
So is there really nothing at all apart from water that you can consume during a fast.
Good news you can still consume some liquids as long as they have no calories and don't affect your
insulin levels.
The best examples here would be tea and coffee which is something that most of you probably like to
drink in the morning.
As long as your tea or coffee have no additional ingredients like sugar honey cream or things like that
then it's okay for you to have them remember as long as your drink has zero calories.
You should be fine.
There is however something you have to keep in mind.
There are a lot of products in the sweetener category that are marketed as zero calories.
Most of the time it's true and they do in fact have zero calories.
However what they don't tell you is the fact that many of these sweeteners will still have an effect
on your body's insulin levels.
Now one sweetener that I find to actually be safe to consume during your fast is stevia.
It's cheap.
It comes in small convenient tablets and it's easily available.
So if you really have to have your tea or coffee sweet make sure you sweeten it with stevia.
Now one question that I get asked pretty often is Will bulletproof coffee break my fast.
Now for those of you who are not familiar with bulletproof coffee it is a regular black coffee that
is made with an addition of fact like butter or coconut oil.
And the answer to the question is yes it will certainly break your fast remember if it has calories
it will break your fast period.
There is however a little bit of gray area here.
As you already know fact is the macro nutrient that will spike your insulin in very tiny amounts especially
if it's consumed without carbs or protein.
So we could say that something like the bulletproof coffee is diabetes safe even though you break your
fast when you drink it you will still have the benefit of low insulin you will lose all the other benefits
of fasting which I will talk about in the next video but your insulin will stay pretty low.
Now why is that important.
It is important because you can use something like bulletproof coffee to easily transition from your
normal eating schedule to the intermittent fasting schedule if you really do find it extremely difficult
to not eat anything in the morning.
You can simply start by swapping your breakfast with a bulletproof coffee you get the good of both worlds
your insulin stays pretty low but your stomach is not completely empty and after you get used to that
you can later on remove the bulletproof coffee from the morning schedule and start doing the real true
16 8 fasting where you don't consume any calories at all.
In the next video.
I will talk about a couple of other benefits of fasting just to prove to you how important true fasting
actually is.