Intermittent Fasting
House Smoked Salmon from Outpost Kitchen in Costa Mesa, CA
Intermittent Fasting (IF)… is it worth the hype? The answer is, it depends. If you suffer from adrenal fatigue (more accurately termed “HPA Axis Dysregulation”), then it might not be for you. Your body is already in a heightened state of stress, so fasting (especially if done with black coffee) can cause further stress to your already taxed adrenal glands. Additionally, most of the research on fasting has been done on men and post-menopausal women, so there is some evidence that it might impede optimal hormonal function in menstruating women. If you’re a woman and your body thinks it is starving, it is going to shut down ovulation because famine is not the right time to get pregnant. However, IF does have many benefits including: giving your digestion system a break, improving blood sugar control, and helping with weight loss.
If you are a woman with a healthy cycle and balanced energy or a man, you might want to try more traditional forms of IF like 16:8. This means you eat during an 8 hour window - lunch at noon and finish eating dinner by 8pm. If you don’t fall into those categories, you can still try more gentle forms of IF which I’ve explained below. These forms will still give you the benefits listed above.
Gentle IF practices that should be safe for almost everyone:
12:12 - This simply means that you space dinner and breakfast by 12 hours. So if you stop eating dinner at 8pm, you don't eat breakfast until 8am the next day. I have been doing this almost every single day for years, and the vast majority of people would benefit from this type of fasting to give your digestion system a rest nightly.
Reverse IF - Instead of skipping breakfast, you eat a really early dinner. I like to do this 1 or 2 days a week. I will eat breakfast around 8am, and I will finish my last meal by 5 or 6pm. You are still eating 3 full meals, but you are also getting in 14-15 hours of fasting time. I always get my best night’s sleep when I do this, and it is less stressful on female hormones than skipping breakfast.
Weekend IF (I made this name up), but on the weekends I like to have slow morning where I wake up, hydrate, journal, do a fasted workout around 9am, and eat my first meal at 10:30am. I am just not as hungry when I wake up in the morning on weekends, so it feels natural to me to wait to eat until this time. Also we are less likely to wake up in fight or flight mode on a weekend, so your body is better equipped to handle the “stress” of fasting.
One of my top tips for IF is that it should feel relatively natural and easy to do no matter what form you choose. If you are starving and counting down the seconds until you can eat food, then your body probably needs fuel and you should honor that. Additionally, if you let yourself get that starving you are likely to overeat when you break the fast which defeats the purpose. Please share your fasting tips and experiences in the comments below!
