Dr. Stacy Sims

normal.

The problem is when it's constantly challenged.

When 70% of the things that you eat cause this chronic inflammation inside of you, your body can no longer respond appropriately when it's challenged again.

We want to make you first start with food, but not a pill that you're trying to take, but actually the food that you're putting into your body is the best source of all microbiome is fiber.

It's typically about 12 hours of eating and 12 hours of not.

So you're trying to follow that circadian rhythm and work with your hormones.

It can also, when we do have that period of time, which maybe that sounds very intuitive, but a lot of people are eating at 10 p.m., they're snacking on food, then they're trying to go to bed, and then they're getting up.

When you give your body a little bit longer, so at 12 hours time, is when your body will really efficiently be using up all your glucose, really dropping some of those insulin levels.

But it's not so much that it's stressful.

And we're using stress very generically here.

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.