Dr. Stacy Sims

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.

And we need women to understand we want to build muscle, we want to sleep well, and that requires food.

Yeah, when I have athletes, because we see a higher percentage of PCOS in successful female athletes.

Why?

Like, well, what do I do?

And it's looking at what kind of training they're doing.

So we're putting this more short, sharp, high intensity to get that post-exercise response of anti-inflammatory, growth hormone response, all of these things that then bring down total body inflammation.

And then we're very careful about food intake and when we're doing it and what kinds of food.

So that they don't have to go down the route of oral contraceptive pills because that to them has an effect on their performance.

We're talking about the top end.

And when we bring it back down into recreational female athletes, we can do the same thing.