Dr. Stacy Sims

Do you need to recover more?

What are the things that are missing to bring you back to normal?

And this is where we look at the sociocultural effect of what a woman is supposed to look like.

And that's the thing that I'm really pushing out.

It's like,

We want to think about how strong we can be and how much muscle we can build because muscle is a massive metabolic help.

And as well as bone, right?

We talk about it.

And then when I get the pushback of, oh, I'm going to do fasted training or I'm going to fast till noon, I'm like, wait a second.

not only are we going to interfere with our circadian rhythm and our hormone pulses, we're also acutely interfering with our appetite hormones.

Because if we're looking at acylated ghrelin, which is our active form of our appetite, makes us hungry, it's elevated with cortisol.

And so if we're thinking about that elevation and we're not doing anything to drop it and tell our body we have food, then it goes in and directly affects our neuropeptides, which then

affects our hormone and our hormone pulses.

So when a woman's like, I'm just having coffee for breakfast and I'm going to hold my fast, it's like, okay, well, here we go.

Cortisol is going up.

As they get earlier, you're going to get hungrier.

Then you're going to learn not to respond to that hunger.

You're going to hold your fast.

And we see from the research that women who do that end up craving more simple carbohydrates in the afternoon, moving incidentally less and contributing to poor sleep because they've now phase shifted.

So when we're talking about sleep and how important sleep is, we also have to think about the circadian rhythm and how it is affected by food intake, light, darkness, and all of the things.