Dr. Stacy Sims

But on a cellular level, long periods of fasting for women specifically can be very stressful to the body.

And that's why if you think about Stacey's example of what happened in two fasting periods to a man and a woman,

Different things are going to happen to your body if it thinks it's being in starvation.

So we don't want to put your body in a starved state.

We're just trying to give it a time period without food so that it can start to process the energy that's available differently.

They can do longer fasts and it can show to actually be something that might be advantageous for them for how their body is made, might increase their focus and some other metrics.

But for women, these longer periods are actually going to promote more visceral fat storage and become pro-inflammatory.

And you said it a little casually, but...

disrupting your hypothalamus and shutting off your hormone system will cause a low estrogen state and that's very problematic as we've talked about.

So thinking about your body should not be in a starved state.

So utilizing time-restricted eating, meaning I'm going to eat within my circadian rhythm, the hours that there is sun outside, back how your body's made to function, is working with your biology.

If you're saying I'm going to not eat for three days because I'm doing this fasting period,

For women, that's going to induce a stressful state where you're going to start to store more as visceral fat and cause more inflammation.

Easiest way to say it.

I don't know.

You have higher rates of infertility, higher rates of pregnancy loss.

You're more metabolically unhealthy.

Of course, we're generalizing a group of people.

And I think we've all had moments of life where shift work was part of what we had to do.

But night shift work, most people are not getting enough sleep during the day.