The holy month of Ramadhan is upon us. This is a time of reflection and fasting allowing us to empathize with those who suffer starvation on a continual basis.
Yet inexplicable many of us gain weight during this month. I myself have to be careful, as the amazing foods that are not often available during the rest of the year are often to tempting.
In addition many use this month as an excuse to stop their exercising programme. Easy to realize why we gain weight when you do the math, increase food eating, decrease activity that burns the calories, don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out.
Here I will give you some guidelines if followed will allow you to enjoy the holy month, without suffering during the day while fasting and keep up your exercise routine and stop your figure from expanding.
- Keep your exercise sessions light. Warm up thoroughly, most important to start slowly. This is not the time to be setting any new records.
Typically at The Ladies Club we will advise our clients to stick with their current training programme if they have been exercising for a while. If they are a new client or have been making recent increases in either their weight training or cardio (from walking to jogging etc.) then we will advise them to reduce their levels by about 30%.
If you are exercising at home or outdoors, keep to light walking and stretching. I would advise you exercise early in the morning before it gets to hot to help avoid dehydration or better yet after breaking fast in the evening.
- Keep your diet moderate in high protein.
- Keep your diet high in complex carbohydrate which has a low glycolic index (GI) as a rough rule of thumb, these are unprocessed carbohydrates i.e. unpolished rice. For more information on the GI visit www.glycemicindex.com I feel this is the single most important part to successful fasting.
- When breaking fast, avoid simple sugars, (this means no Kuih, candy, sweet delicacies and all its sugary friends), as they will cause your insulin levels to spike, resulting in making you feel extremely lethargic and unable to exercise. The fancy name for this is reactive hypoglycemia.
Your diet should not differ very much from your regular diet during Ramadhan. (I am assuming here that you already have a healthy diet which avoids fat, oil and sugar).
To help you through the day you should eat slow digesting foods with high unprocessed fiber contents. Slow digesting foods last up to 8 hours, and will see you though the day, While processed foods such as white rice, pasta etc. will fill you up quickly but will very quickly burn off leaving you hungry and tired.
Slow digesting foods with a low GI include whole grains, and seeds like barley, wheat, oats, millet, semolina, beans, lentils, unprocessed flour, unpolished rice etc.
