Eating window is twelve till eight, training is at seven in the morning before work. Currently taking creatine, a multivitamin, vitamin D and whey after training. Whey obviously has calories so that one is not a mystery, but I have no idea whether the fat soluble things are being wasted on an empty stomach. What did people actually end up doing here, and did it make any measurable difference?
Depends entirely what you think the fast is for, and this is where the arguments come from. If you are doing 16:8 as a calorie control device, which is what it is for most people, then a capsule with no meaningful calories does not break anything and nor does black coffee. If you have a specific physiological reason for wanting an uninterrupted fasted state, the rules you care about are different and much stricter, and you should be reading the actual literature rather than a forum. For the ordinary version, creatine, vitamin D and a multivitamin are all irrelevant to whether the fast is doing its job.
This is the crux. Half these arguments are two people using the same word for different goals and never noticing.
Practical note on the fasted lift itself rather than the pills: if you are training hard at seven and not eating until midday, the thing that will limit you is not supplement timing. I did fasted morning sessions for a year and my top sets were consistently worse than the same sessions done fed, by enough that I eventually moved my window to start at ten rather than twelve. Nothing about the supplements changed. If your lifts have plateaued while everything else is in place, that is the variable worth testing.
I moved everything to the first meal about two years ago, dropped the morning slot entirely, and the only thing I noticed was that I stopped forgetting doses. That is not nothing: adherence is the effect size that actually matters for anything slow acting.
Creatine whenever. Fat solubles with a meal that has fat in it. Whey is food, so it is inside the window by definition. Nothing else here is worth a decision.
@dax_darian · 3w ago · 3 replies
Fat soluble vitamins, so A, D, E and K, are absorbed better alongside a meal containing some fat, which for you means moving vitamin D to lunch or dinner rather than taking it at seven in the morning on an empty stomach. Creatine does not care in the slightest, total daily intake is the only thing that determines saturation, so take it whenever you will actually remember. Multivitamins on an empty stomach are the main source of the nausea people blame on fasting, especially if there is iron or zinc in there. Practically that is one change: move everything except creatine to your first meal and stop thinking about it.
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@coldsoak_kim · 3w ago
So the entire optimisation is move two things four hours later. That is a relief.
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@broody_bess · 3w ago
Most supplement timing questions end that way. The exceptions are things with a genuinely acute effect, and you are not taking any of those.
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