Jennifer Smith: Welcome to You're Not Crazy. It's perimenopause. If you're a woman over 40 and feeling more anxious, not sleeping well or disconnected from your body, this podcast is for you. I'm your host, Jenny Smith, functional medicine health coach here to help you understand what the heck is happening in perimenopause. Each week we're diving into real life conversations about how our changing hormones impact anxiety, sleep and stress. and I'll share simple strategies to help you feel normal again. So grab a cup of tea or beverage of choice, get comfy and let's dive in. Hello. Hello. Welcome back to you're not crazy. It's Perry menopause. Today we are talking about intermittent fasting and intermittent fasting. It's, it's a complex topic and I have learned a thing or two about intermittent fasting. have personal experience with it. I have read a lot about it and I am a believer in intermittent fasting. Now things can get a little bit more complex as we get older and our hormones are changing, especially in perimenopause. Fasting can feel a little bit different. Personally for me, fasting was one of the easiest ways for me to lose weight when I started on my health journey and I started with fasting in the morning, skipping breakfast and eating lunch. And this is when I developed a love for black coffee. I used to drink coffee with lots of creamer. I guess you would say I had coffee with my creamer. That's how much creamer I had in my coffee. And when I learned about intermittent fasting and you cannot have any calories or that breaks your fast, that's when I had to go to black coffee. And because I love coffee so much, I tolerated it to a point that now I can't have coffee any other way. I love my coffee black. If I have any kind of creamer in my coffee, it is too sweet. So fasting was able to help me kick my sugar in the morning. If you've ever tried fasting, you've skipped the breakfast, you push coffee a little later because you have to have creamer in it. and you didn't feel good afterwards. You felt like shaky, irritable, just obsessed with when you're get your next meal, feeling exhausted. You didn't do anything wrong. You were just missing a few key pieces that people don't really talk about, especially for women. Men and women are very different. I tell my husband this all the time because he can do like five day extended fast and not have any issues. I go 24 hours and I have a major headache. It's hormonal. We are very different. And we're going to talk a little bit about how women in perimenopause should approach fasting so that you are not feeling miserable and that it's actually working because intermittent fasting is very powerful. It does a lot of healing, but the way so many women are doing it, it's actually working against their hormones. So today I want to walk you through what intermittent fasting really is, why it works so well for us, why it sometimes backfires and the approach I take with women who are trying to balance their hormones and feel normal again. Okay, first, what fasting actually is. Let's start by sharing what it is not. Intermittent fasting is not starving yourself and it's not skipping meals randomly. Intermittent fasting is a great tool that actually helps repair your body. And the fasting I'm going to talk about today is called autophagy fasting. And it is a great tool for you to use if you want to lose weight, if you are trying to clear up some brain fog and you don't have a whole lot of energy. Autophagy fasting is really helpful in healing your cells. And it's great when you want to detox and improve brain function, improve your immunity and help balance your hormones. So autophagy fasting is about 16 to 24 hours, meaning going 16 to 24 hours without any calories. And it just gives your body a break from digesting food. That's really what it is. And one of the most common ways to implement intermittent fasting is around 12 to 16 hours. of not eating. If you wanted to do like 16 hours, you would stop eating at seven o'clock and you wouldn't eat until 11 o'clock the next day. So extending that fast, so no calories, anything caloric that's drinks included will give you that good fast. So why does intermittent fasting work so well? When it is done correctly, fasting can be incredibly supportive for your body. can help stabilize your blood sugar. improve your energy, support mental clarity, reduce inflammation in your body and help with your hormones. And this is why so many people are drawn to it. There are other types of fasting. There's extended day fast. There's 36 hour fast. We're not going to talk about that today. Those are wonderful, powerful options for so many people. And I do hope to have some fasting experts come onto the show and talk a little bit more about fasting and its healing benefits and the wonderful, wonderful benefits that fasting brings to any kind of protocol. But today we are going to be talking about intermittent fasting or time restricted eating is what it's otherwise known as. You just essentially restrict the time that you eat during the day and it can really help with you're experiencing any kind of energy crashes, those annoying symptoms that I mentioned earlier, brain fog, you can't lose weight no matter what. Fasting can certainly help with those things and it helps when your body feels safe doing it. So let's talk about that a little bit. Before we talk about fasting, we have to talk about blood sugar. There's those words again, blood sugar. You know, I love to talk about blood sugar. This is where most women are actually struggling with is their blood sugar swings. And you might notice that you feel hungry after eating, you crave sugar constantly. You need to eat every few hours. You hit that afternoon crash and feel like you need a nap. You are irritable. You have brain fog. You might even feel anxious and that's your blood sugar on a roller coaster. Essentially. Dr. Jason Fung explains it. wonderfully. He is a, he's a fasting expert and he has a couple of books on the diabetes code as well as the obesity code. And he uses a really great visual of a subway car and people trying to get into the subway and the conductors are trying to push the people into the subway. I'm going to try to explain this to where it makes sense because usually I present this visually and it's easier to see And so the subway car is your cell. The people that are trying to get into the subway car is glucose, the sugar in our blood. They're trying to get into the subway and the conductors, they are trying to get these people in, they're trying to fit these people into the subway. And essentially the conductors are insulin. So insulin is the hormone that is trying to get the sugar into your cells for energy. And sometimes when the subway is full and people are just kind of hanging out, it gets a little chaotic because what are we going to do with all these people? We can't get them in the subway. And that's what's happening in your body. When your cell is full of the sugar, the glucose, where else is the sugar going to go? It's going to go into your bloodstream and it's going to try to find somewhere else to go. And that's when it gets really chaotic. And that's when you start to feel unstable, you feel anxious, you feel uneasy. It's because we have too much of that going on and we need to kind of like release that. And so that's one of the beauties of fasting. Fasting allows your body to use up all that sugar for energy and so that you're not feeling overloaded with blood sugar spikes. So you start to use that sugar for energy. but when your blood sugar is unstable, sometimes you can feel worse and that's why our fasting can help. So hopefully that makes sense. Trying to explain it in a way that essentially fasting just really helps kind of stabilize blood sugar. It helps deplete all your sugar stores and then turn to your fat stores for energy. And that's when we start to have more mental clarity. That's when blood sugar is balanced. We're feeling really good. That's when we're not hungry after eating. And so that's where fasting can really, really help. But if your blood sugar is unstable, that's where it kind of backfires. And that's where women get a little frustrated because, they've heard that fasting so wonderful and they're doing it, but instead they feel more stressed out. They feel more tired, tired. They're more reactive and you know, sometimes their hair falls out. And so that's why you might hear like people say fasting isn't for women and that's not true. It's just, you've got to prepare your body for fasting and you got to do it in baby steps and make sure that you are doing it correctly because your body is already navigating all these hormonal shifts. And if you pile on extended fast, you're stressing your body out. So we want to make sure that we support our body. We do it in a way that we're not overstressing ourselves. during perimenopause and into menopause, your body starts to shift hormone production from your ovaries to your adrenal glands. And this is why we are more susceptible to stress because our adrenals are already working really hard to produce hormones that used to come from our ovaries, but our ovaries are retired. They're like, we're checked out. We're, you know, we're done. I'm handing it off to you, adrenal glands. You take it from here. And so then our adrenals start to produce our hormones and then we're we're dealing with stress on top of life. And then we try to top, you know, add on intermittent fasting to that. It's like, no wonder we feel awful. So, you know, you're, you've got all this stress and you're under eating, you're over fasting, you're not sleeping well, you're running on caffeine, which stresses out your adrenal glands even more. And your body interprets that as we're not safe. And when your body doesn't feel safe, you have worsened symptoms like fatigue, anxiety, brain fog. belly fat around the belly, like the cortisol belly, sleep issues, mood swings. So it's really important that if you are going to approach fasting, that you do it very delicately, especially if you're not used to it. I have personally changed my fasting routine. used to fast in the morning, ⁓ extended fast, and now I do things a little bit differently. I actually eat an earlier dinner and cut off food earlier before bed. I just find that I sleep better when I do that and I don't feel as hungry during the day if I'm skipping breakfast. And so you got to find the magic, not the magic, you got to find what is going to work for you. If you want to incorporate any kind of intermittent fasting into your protocol, into your routine and peri-metapause. And truth be told, there are actually times when your body can handle fasting really well and times that you don't want to do it. And when you learn how to work with your body instead of against it, that's when it starts to feel a little bit easier. And we go deeper into this inside my program because it can get very personalized, but just know that fasting is not a one size fits all. If you want to take a deeper dive into fasting for women, I highly recommend Dr. Mindy Palsbook Fast Like a Girl. She talks in more detail about how men and women fast differently and how women need to time their fast to their cycle, especially if you are a cycling woman. It is important to make sure that you don't fast on certain times of your cycle versus when it is good to fast, when you have more energy, things like that. I really recommend her book. The approach I take with women, especially inside the hormone reset project is we don't Like I said, we don't jump into long fast. I call it gentle fasting. And we start, everyone starts with a 12 hour overnight fast. Super simple, super easy. If you're somebody that doesn't get up in the middle of the night and starts eating and having that midnight snack, it's 12 hours of fasting, especially when you're sleeping. So again, finishing dinner at seven o'clock. and not eating breakfast again until 7 a.m. And that's it. And that's, you know, just not even having any kind of calories that is going to break your fast. It's simple. And I encourage you to start with a 12 hour fast. It is so good for your digestion. It's so good for your hormones. It's so good for sleep. Everything that, you know, we work towards, we really do need a break in giving our body that break from eating. It's just a great, it's a great starting point. And I want to talk about what I see a lot of people doing that is jeopardizing their fast. That's actually breaking them out of a fast and it's, you know, drinking calories during their fasting window. They might have creamer in their coffee or you know, they're putting electrolytes in the water. Sometimes if you have flavored electrolytes, that's going to alert your body that, ⁓ we got some sugar in here. We're not actually fasting. So we're going to use the sugar up for energy instead of going to the store, the sugar stores that we already have in our body. So making sure that we don't have any calories, especially sweet calories that are going to trick our body into thinking that we're good. need to use that first before we use up the sugar stores that we have in our body that we want to kind of get rid of because Remember our subway is full and we don't want any chaotic people hanging out in our bloodstream, the glucose hanging out in our bloodstream. So making sure that we burn off what we have before we start adding. And you can do that beginning with the 12 hour fast. I see people breaking their fast with sugar or carbs. It's just not conducive to what you're trying to do. It kind of defeats the purpose of a fast. You're just adding more sugar. And so it's really important to focus on the balance plate method, which is what I teach and making sure that we have hormone friendly, blood sugar stable meals. The other mistake I see is women jumping into a 16 hour fast too quickly and they don't feel good. You really have to kind of work your body up to that, especially if you are used to eating every couple of hours and you don't have a long break in between meals. it's going to feel really hard at first. And so that's why I really encourage you to start slow. And that's why I really like the 12 hour break starting there. So again, making sure that when you are fasting, you're not consuming any calories. When you do break your fast, making sure that you are eating high protein lots of nutrients, non-starchy vegetables, healthy complex carbohydrates, having balanced meals. I see too many people breaking their fast with not enough protein, eating high sugar diet. It's going to be counterproductive to what you're trying to do with the fast. If you're not going to fuel your body with what it needs after the fasting, you're going to be right back on that blood sugar roller coaster. And that is why I love the balance plate method. And if you want to learn more about the balance plate method. You can listen to episode 10, where I talk about how to balance your plate to support your hormones, to support your mood, energy, and just making sure that you are boosting your metabolism. When you are fasting, you want your body to respond in a positive way. And that's the way to do it is really start slow. And fasting is not for everyone. If you have a history of eating disorders, It can trigger something in you. So you want to make sure that if you do have any history of eating disorders, that you speak to your counselor or a professional medical professional on whether or not it is right for you. Some people cannot do fasting for that reason. If you are underweight, fasting is not going to be a good approach for you. Fasting is not great for children and it's certainly not great for pregnant women. Obviously you always want to talk to your doctor before you start any kind of protocol that you're not certain about given your history. ⁓ But for the most part, fasting is pretty safe and it's a wonderful healing modality. It is what we did back in the Paleolithic days where we were hunting for food. We would eat as much as we could in the summer, faster in the winter when food was scarce. So our body is designed to go without food. in our regular day of life and in modern times, we have access to food whenever we want it. We always have food, like it's everywhere. And we are just not used to giving our bodies a break from eating. And even just a simple 12 hour break from food does wonders for your body. So if you've tried intermittent fasting before and it didn't work or it made you feel worse, I hope that this episode helped you understand why you want to make sure that ⁓ you, when you're doing this, that you support your body with balancing your blood sugar with the balanced meals and use tools like fasting as a way to support your hormones. And that's exactly what I walk women through inside my program, the hormone reset project. If you want to get on the wait list for the next round, I'll link the details in the show notes. I would love to support you on your healing journey. And fasting is optional in my program. That's why I don't do intense fast. It's, it's very gentle approach and not, not all women want to do it. And, you know, I respect that and you don't have to, to start feeling well. It is just one approach, ⁓ towards healing and towards feeling good in your body. That's all I have for fasting today. If you have a question I didn't answer on the podcast, find me on Instagram and ask me there. I love connecting with my listeners. Also make sure to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you're loving the podcast so far, it would mean so much to me if you love to review. This helps it get out to more women who need this information. Thank you so much for being here today and I'll see you next week.