Fasting Isn't Always the Answer. Here's How to Know When It Is.
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Why is fasting considered a beneficial stressor only when properly dosed?
Hey, Dr. Mindy here, and welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast, where I bring you icons, disruptors, educators, scientists, and doctors that show you what can be possible when you love and celebrate the female body you are blessed to live in. Let's dive in. One in three adults are completely overwhelmed with their stress loads. Looking at it through that picture, fasting might not be the best tool for a completely stressed-out human. It doesn't mean fasting doesn't work. It means that once again, we need to think about if fasting is right for you. So, in this video, I am going to walk you through five signals that your body will Give you to tell you if fasting is working or if fasting is not working.
I call them green lights and red lights. And I'm going to show you five action steps you can do to either modify your fast, stopping your fast, or do more fasting, depending on where your stress loads are at and how your nervous system is. handling it. This is a video we've needed to do for you for a very long time. And I can't wait to dive into this. So here we go. Let's go. First, we have to say, just like exercise, fasting is a stressor. So there there's that's not a secret. Hopefully, you understand that. It is a hormetic stressor. Hormesis is a good stressor. This is how fasting works: it applies just a little bit of stress on the system that causes your body to grow bigger and do better things, just like exercise.
When you go and exercise, if you are lifting weights, you break muscle down and And that muscle is under stress, but it builds itself strong again. That's the same thing that's happening with fasting. But it's if you think about it, it's when we're already in a broken down, overwhelmed state. If we put more fasting on top of that, that's not a good system. The stress that we put ourselves in, whether we fast, whether we exercise, whether we cold plunge or sauna, that is a signal, but it's in the aftermath. of that in the recovery where the magic starts to hit. So think of it like Your metabolic switch. Remember how I taught you about the metabolic switch? You could when you eat your sugar burner, there's no stress there unless you're eating the wrong food, like ultra-processed foods.
But then when you switch over into fat burner, this is called your metabolic stress. Ooh, now we're adding some stress to this. And I think of it like a light switch turning on and turning off. And somewhere around 12 hours without food, you will come over into this fat-burning place, and your body will start to go into this repair phase. Now, what's so incredible about the human body is that it knows when it's over here that it needs to give you another fuel source. So it gives you ketones. And I've done a ton on ketones. I'm such a fan on ketones, especially for brain health, especially for postmenopausal women. So I'm over here in a fat-burning mode. I haven't eaten in 12 hours. My body, my brilliant body, makes ketones.
And it does that so it can supercharge the brain, but it does it so that it can preserve muscle. So, those of you who have heard, oh, fasting will break down muscle. Well, exercise and lifting weights breaks down muscle. And the beautiful part of the way the internal mechanisms are in our body is that the more ketones you make, the more muscle preservation that you will create. Now, this metabolic switch. It is not meant to be turned on or turned off all the time. If the metabolic switch is turned off, meaning you do not go into a fat-burning state, you have a tendency to gain more weight if you're not eating the right foods. If this metabolic switch is turned on all the time because you love fasting and you've been fasting over and over and over again, you also can go into a weight-gaining place because the body is under so much stress.
So why don't we fast forever? Why don't we do one meal a day over and over again?
How do the “green lights” indicate that fasting is supporting my metabolism?
Is because these pathways, this glucose and insulin pathway, this autophagy and mTOR pathway, these all of the ways I've tried to explain it to you all over the years, those pathways are meant to pulse.
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