Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Strategies for Customizing Your Fasting Lifestyle

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

Today's episode is a special treat—a deep dive into customizing your fasting lifestyle, straight from a recent call within the Reset Academy. Those familiar with "Fast Like a Girl," know the significance of a fasting lifestyle. But what sets it apart is its adaptability to suit your unique needs and routines. Drawing from tools like the ketobiotic and hormone feasting eating styles, along with various fasting lengths, Dr. Mindy  empowers you to tailor your approach to match your body's unique rhythm. This episode is your roadmap to crafting a fasting lifestyle that resonates with your body's needs and your lifestyle demands. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep231 Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

On this episode of the Resetter podcast, I am bringing you a call that I did for my Reset Academy on how do you customize building a fasting lifestyle? So those of you that read Fast Like a Girl, I had a whole section in there on what a fasting lifestyle is. And I am so dedicated to this fasting lifestyle that I, it's really important to me you understand that it's completely customizable and completely personal to your lifestyle. So my Reset Academy, we do several experiences together every other month. We do a fat burning experience. I have coaches in there that are teaching on all different types of health

concepts. And one of the most common questions we get within our Reset Academy is we would like more information on how do we customize a fasting lifestyle to our personal needs. So what you're about to hear is the best explanation I could possibly, it's an hour long, I went into a lot of detail, I gave a lot of examples, I gave a lot of concrete principles for you to follow. And what I'm hoping and why I wanted to release it with the Resetter podcast is I'm really hoping you will see a personalized pattern. for you. And you will understand that all the tools that I've taught you in Fast Like a Girl

and here on the Resetter podcast and on my YouTube channel, they're all tools. Now, your job is to take these tools and make them customize them, make them personal to you. This is totally opposite of what many people teach. Many doctors, many nutritionists, many health influencers say this is the way and this is the only way and you follow my way to a T. I don't teach like that. I am teaching a lifestyle that now your job is to make it unique to you because your body is not like any other body on the planet. So when we look at the tools that I offered up and fast like a girl, like the ketobiotic

eating style, the hormone feasting eating style, the six different length fasts, how to break a fast. Like, how do you take all of that and customize it to fit your personal needs? If that has been a question, this is the episode for you, and I'm so excited to bring it to you. So here you go. If you want to make this a personal health path, here is your answer. Here is your resource. And as always, I hope it helps. Welcome to the Resetter podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. What I'm looking at this conversation as is as if I was personally coaching you, this is how I

would be explaining the customizing of a fasting window and an eating window to match. your lifestyle. And honestly, I think that might be what I love about fasting the most is it's customizable. I've sat with patients that have said, it's really important to me to eat dinner with my family. And we all get home from the sporting events and it's 8 o'clock at night and that's when I'm going to eat dinner. So I've learned like, okay, that's important. That's oxytocin. that's part of what a value of you and your family. We need to make this effortless. So let's build a fasting lifestyle around this anchor of sitting at the family table at

eight o'clock at night. I've had other people say to me, I work out in the morning and I need to either eat before I work out or I need to eat right after I work out. And that's around seven or eight in the morning. and so we've customized family life or fasting lifestyles that will fit that early morning workout. So literally you can position this any way you want to position it. And in fact, I encourage you to position it for your lifestyle. And you might even position it differently every day if you're like me where I don't

really have a set routine and my routines are always changing. so I'm always adapting my fasting and eating windows according to my routine. So I'm going to go through some basic principles, and then I'm going to go through some different scenarios. I'll use the scenarios in my own life. I'll use the scenarios I've been using with some of the high-performing clients that we've had to really work some interesting fasting and eating windows through. To start with, the way that I look at.

every single day is that I have an eating window and I have a fasting window. So the eating window starts the minute my blood sugar goes up. So I'll give you an example. It's right now, it's what, nine o'clock here in California. I was up early doing my morning time and then I had a call at eight o'clock. and I had this short little break before I came to you all, and I'm hungry. And I'm like, because I ate a really early dinner last night, I'm like, yeah, I want breakfast.

Like I'm craving food. I'm craving breakfast. But I had to come on a call here with you all. So instead of like taking a bite of my gluten-free bagel that's waiting for me, I grabbed some bone broth because bone broth will most likely keep me. me fasted. I know this from my glucose monitor. And I saved the bagel for after this call because my brain was like, oh, if I even take a bite of that bagel, I've now opened up my eating window. And if I can wait another hour, it might be either hunger goes away and maybe I'm not going to

open up my eating window for several hours or maybe, you know, I'll just open my eating window up an hour from now. So I'm always thinking the minute I spike my blood sugar, the eating window is now officially open. And I know because I wear continuous glucose monitors all the time, I'm very clear on what will pull me out of a fasted state and what doesn't, and bone broth doesn't seem to pull me out. It seems to actually bring my blood sugar down. So it was kind of a good resource at this moment to be able to curb my hunger while I maybe wait a couple more hours before I open my eating window. So the first thing you want every day is when, like when I wake up in the morning, it's when is that eating window going to start. Now, some mornings I wake up

and I'm not hungry at all. That was actually yesterday morning. And I had a really big day. The last couple days, I've been doing a lot of YouTube videos and podcasting and production work. And I like my high performance work to be done in the fasted state. I do really well with that. So yesterday, I didn't open up my eating window until 1 o'clock. And then again, once it opened up, then I was now in and eating food. So the first thing to do is to do, is to to figure out when's that eating window for you. And every day, it could change. Now, sometimes I do more of a reverse approach, which is, okay, what is the healing effect of fasting that I want? Am I wanting to go a little longer because I want more autophagy? Do I feel like I need to reset

my gut? If I feel like I need to reset my gut, I'll wake up. And I'll be like, okay, I'm not hungry. I've got a busy day. I'd like to reset my gut. Could I go all the way to dinner? And maybe I'll just have dinner. So I'm thinking about my day, the state I want to be in, and the repair that I would want. So that's sort of how I decide that eating window. And to me, the way my brain visually sees it is it moves around. That eating window moves around for me. Sometimes the eating window is 10 to 5. Sometimes the eating window is three to eight. But I'm constantly moving the eating window around.

And when I have a time period where, you know, I want to use fasting as a healing tool, then I just have to adapt my eating window. So I think the first thing to think about is sort of come at it from the eating window perspective. and when are you opening it up and when are you closing it down? And then how many hours does that leave for fasting? And is that, are those hours enough to create the healing effect you want to create in your body? I mean, that is like a daily thing that goes through my head all the time. And then, you know, if like Sunday was Easter and,

And it also happened to be my husband's birthday, and we had a ton of family here. And so my brain was like, well, I know I'm going to have this really big meal at 6 o'clock at night. It's not my preferred time to have a big meal, but this is what the family is doing. So I fasted all the way up until the big meal. And then we sat down, and it was quite a meal. It was like a four-hour meal where we sat there and ate till 10. and I just enjoyed this incredible experience and all the food that it provided me.

But then I knew that at 10 o'clock, my eating window was shut. And so the next day, I was like, okay, that was really late. I think I'm going to fast a little longer. And on Monday, I didn't open my window up until two or three in the afternoon. So play with the, the first advice I have is on a daily basis, play with that eating window. where are you putting it based off of your needs? The biggest challenge you have that I see sometimes is if you have a need for food in the morning because it's post-workout and maybe you have a social event at night.

And so you're not going to have a long enough period for a significant fasting window. So those are the days you wouldn't fast. Like there are some days that, you know, I don't fast, which is a lot of what I teach, that it's okay to have days that you don't fast. And then you would just maybe open up your eating window at seven or eight in the morning and you're kind of grazing all day and then you close it at, you know, seven or eight at night. That would not be a fasting day.

So think in terms of how you move this eating window around. Now, the second thing that I think about when I open up my eating window is, What does my body need? Does it need a low carb day? Does it need a high protein day? Does it need more of the three peas? Polyphenol, probiotic, prebiotic foods? Does it need more carbs? Now, I base all of that off of symptoms. So if I feel like I want to drop weight, I will then go into a lower carb day. day. So if I'm like, ooh, overdid it a lot, feeling a little couple extra pounds, not feeling good about that, I will tell myself, I'm going to shorten my eating window. And when I eat, it's going to be meat and vegetables. And I will stick to, and I will do no fruits on those days that I feel like I need

to be more in a ketobiotic place and I need to become more insulin sensitive. And I need to to drop a few pounds. So on that kind of day, it's a shorter eating window and it's more of the ketobiotic eating plan. Now, for those of you that have a regular cycle, sit with me. I'm going to time this. We're going to, once I get through these principles, I'll talk about how you relate them to an active cycle. For my postmenopausal women, you don't really have to do that as much. You can do it a little more every day, sort of check in with yourself and see what you're trying to accomplish. So the other place that a longer fast, more keto day, another symptom that would work, now

this is a symptom I don't get anymore, but I did get, and that is hot flashes. If you are getting hot flashes, oftentimes that can be low estrogen, like your estrogen system has completely tanked. So if you got night sweats that night or you had more hot flashes during that, then you in the days preceding, a longer fast, more keto, less alcohol, those are the three cures for hot flashes. If I have a high performance day where I'm like, I need my brain to be incredibly sharp, for me, then I would do more fasting and more keto because that keeps those ketones coming so that I can have that mental clarity.

I point that out because a lot of the symptoms of perimenopause and menopause is brain fog. So when brain fog is high, fast go longer, carbs go away. And that seems to really help sharpen my brain for a performance day where I just have a ton to do. So that would be how I would organize more of a keto day. My hormone feasting day, these are the foods that I lean into where I will bring my carbohydrate load up. And I know it's time to bring my carbohydrate load up when I'm feeling more anxiety, like whether it's just random thoughts of anxiety or I can't sit on the couch without relaxing, or if I have insomnia,

those are signs that potentially progesterone has gone low. So I will do, if I'm starting to see a pattern of those kinds of signs, I do less fasting and I do more hormone feasting foods. Hormone feasting foods for me is going to be a lot of squashes, a lot of fruit, a lot of potatoes, and maybe some gluten-free breads. I am a huge fan of fermented sourdough bread because you get that added probiotic in there. So if I am going to go into bread, it's usually I would go in with more of a fermented bread because there's some benefit to my microbiome.

But I lean, I will eat these hormone feasting foods when I feel those symptoms. Again, I just want to remind you that is through the lens of a postman. menopausal woman. In my perimenopausal years, I started noticing that if I did longer fast and did more ketobiotic days, that I would find I started spotting because you know how in your perimenopausal years you can go 60 days without a period, I would start to see that I was spotting a lot. and if I was starting to spot a lot, that was a sign progesterone was trying to build in order to be able to shed the uterine lining. So I needed to bring glucose up and fast less so that I can give progesterone what she needed

so that I could have a full period. So you can either use your symptoms or you can, you know, you can look at like what your hormonal needs might be. And I, and as a postmenopausal women, it's usually my symptoms, because that's all I have to go off of right now. Or I'll follow the moon cycle, which we'll talk about here in a second. So, again, I want to recap that you're picking your eating window based off of what your day looks like. So you're going to move that eating a window according to, are you sitting down to dinner with the family? Do you need to be able to eat breakfast or eat around a workout?

Or maybe it's a busy day and you like having ketones fuel your brain so that you can function at your best. That's how you're picking where that eating window goes. And that eating window, it's okay to change it. every single day. Now, and then you're looking at the length of your eating window is really determined based off of how long you want to fast. So if you feel like you need to detox, then you need to at least get to 17 hours of fasting, which would leave you with a seven-hour eating window. So you would just take that seven-hour eating window and you would move it around according to

where you want to put your food that day. Does that make sense? And then if you wanted a gut reset, you would have one meal a day. Now, where's that meal going to go? You just need at least have 24 hours without food and then you put the meal in. So I hope you're gathering that you can move your eating window very freely. And I experiment all the time. So lately I've been really experimenting with the eating window being in the daylight.

I am absolutely finding that if I keep my eating window in the daylight, that I tend to sleep better, and I tend to stay the weight that I want to stay. If you're not familiar with that concept, that is based off of melatonin. When it's dark out, melatonin is high. When melatonin is high, you are more insulin resistant. So eating your meal in the daylight when melatonin isn't around allows your cells to be more insulin sensitive so they can take in that glucose. Now, obviously, the example I gave you about Easter doesn't work because I ate in the dark, but that was an unusual situation. But what I'm trying to show you, and I hope, hope this is coming across, is that you have

flexibility in this eating window and the length of your fasting window. That's what makes this so easy to stick with over time because you get to create the length of your fasting, whatever you were trying to do, and you get to move the eating window around. So Jesse Itzler is this really fun, beautiful human. He is what started off as a rapper. He had a rap song that the New York Knicks used as their theme song. and then he became a serial entrepreneur, Marquis, Jet. He was co-owner of that and Zico Coconut Water, and he's now part owner of the Atlanta Hawks.

And he happens to be married to one of my shiro's, Sarah Blakely, who started Spanx. So Jesse heard me on a podcast and got really fascinated about this fasting thing. And so he brought me on or asked for a consult with me, and we worked together for about a year, customizing all of his eating windows around his family meals and his workouts. And they constantly changed. The eating window constantly changed based off of if he was literally about to do a hundred mile endurance race, if he was training for one of those, or if he was on going on vacation with the family. He then invited me into a mentorship group where he has all these high-performing entrepreneurs have these really crazy lifestyles. And my job for this group is we would pop on a call

and for a month, I would create a fasting plan for them. And it was always based off of what their work schedule was, what their priorities with their family was, what their workout. schedule was and how we could vary that in a week's time. So it's really just about moving the eating window around to match what you're trying, when you're trying to eat with loved ones or what you need to eat according to your workouts or what kind of performance state you're in. So I hope that makes sense because it's a moment. moving target that you get to move. If you are postmenopausal, this is where we have a lot of freedom

because we don't really have a cycle that we're matching it to. So I like to use my symptoms like I explain to you. I like to use my symptoms so that I can sort of say, check in with my body every morning and be like, what do you need? And sometimes I don't really get a clear answer. Like my body is like, I feel good. So then if that's the answer, I ask myself, have I done too many keto days? Have I eaten enough carbs? What foods haven't I eaten? Do I need to open the diversification of my foods? So I'm constantly adapting to what my body needs or what my lifestyle demands. That's if you're postmenopausal. If you have a menstrual cycle, we have more boundaries.

So your eating window can be shorter from day one to day 10. Day one is the day you bleed. So from day one to day 10, if you're trying to lose. weight, if you're perimenopausal and you want to clean up the hot flash situation or you have brain fog or you have big high performance moments, then you're going to lean into a shorter eating window, leaving a longer fasting time. And you're going to want to eat more ketobiotic. That is your performance state combo. But if you have a menstrual cycle, you can only do it from day one to day 10, and then after ovulation, day 16 to day 19.

So you have about half of the month to lean into that set of tools. If you look at it, if you're trying to lose weight, you literally have half the month that your hormones will be okay going into these more cortisol-rich experiences, which, you know, a longer fast creates a higher cortisol spike. Estrogen doesn't mind that as much. And you can go into keto so that you can lose more weight. You can have more ketones for better mental clarity. You've got half of a month to be able to lean into that tool.

The challenge we had as women was that we were doing, once key, came out or and fasting came out, women were so excited. I mean, everybody was so excited about the, the energy it gave us and the mental focus it gave us and the ability to drop weight that we were able to get from it. But then when women were doing it all month long, they started to see that it was at the expense of another key hormone, which is progesterone. So just to be clear, although estrogen and progesterone are both considered sex hormones, they require very different lifestyle tools. And so when we do a restrictive diet, when we go, we get addicted to one meal a day, or we love fasting and we're like, I got to just do this all the time,

we are doing it at the expense of progesterone. She does not like that. So, if I want to lose weight, I am going to use day one to day 10 of my menstrual cycle and day 16 to day 19 of my menstrual cycle to fast longer and to do keto longer. That's how I map that. And now I'm minding the principles of estrogen. When we go into the ovulation window, which is day 11 to day 15, so, day 10 is this weird day. It's a transition day. It's like a day your, you know, your body's getting ready for ovulation. Now we have a really different scenario going on in that window,

in that time period because estrogen's at her peak, testosterone comes roaring in, and you get a little bit of progester. For the experienced faster, you can get away with like a 15-hour fast. I think a 15-hour fast. I think a 15-hour fast. is really good in that little window period. If you don't want to fast, you're fine, not fasting. If you want to fast even lower, like a 13-hour fast, you're fine. But when you open up your eating window during ovulation, it is massively important to lean in to more of what I call nature's carbs. And nature's carbs are basically anything that has been grown on a tree. or come out of the ground and didn't require any alteration.

So, like, you can say wheat is a nature's carb, but most people don't just take a wheat stock and eat it. It has to be milled and refined in order to be put into a flour so that we can make a bread. So now it's a man-made carb. To me, nature's carbs are like fruit, potatoes, you know, all the vegetables that can came out of the earth and were instantly ready for me to eat them. When you're in that ovulation window, you're eating those nature's carbs are really important because they have a ton of fiber in them.

And you need fiber to be able to feed the bacteria in your gut that break down your hormones. Your hormones have to be what we call metabolized. metabolized is where you take a hormone that's been produced and you make it usable for the cells. It's very much like if you have to export a document to be able to email it to somebody. You have to change the format of that document so that it can be sent as an email. So the same thing during ovulation, you have all of these. hormones surging in. And so you need to step out of keto, you need to go into these hormone feasting foods. You need to eat more carbs so that you can feed your gut so that you are

able to break these hormones down so they're usable to yourselves. So I like to use ovulation for a lot of fiber-fueled meals. You can still fast. It just has to to be a little shorter because progesterone's around. She's hanging around. And progesterone doesn't like when we fast longer. When you come out of ovulation, now all your hormones drop and you are able to go into a shorter eating window and a longer fasting window. But that's another point. Like you have a dip, you can go into the fasting as your tool and a shorter eating window. When we hit day 20, Day 19, day 20, I know I'm not trying to be vague. It's just everybody's a little different, but around day 19, day 20, we need to step out of fasting because this is progesterone's moment.

She is, needs to peak. You have to have a high amount of progesterone in order for your uterine lining to shed. If you don't hit just like estrogen during ovulation, she has to peak in order for an egg to be released. Starting day 1920, progesterone has to peak in order for that uterine lining to shed. That's what will trigger the uterine lining to shed and for you to bleed is progestrone hits a peak.

So we need more carbs, less stress, less fasting. So you could customize your fasting lifestyle through your menstrual cycle following those guidelines. That's what Fast Like a Girl was all about. Now, the good news is that I have a sequel coming out called Eat Like a Girl. And that sequel is all about the eating window. What do we look at according to the menstrual cycle and my menopausal friends, I heard your cries of like more postmenopausal information.

So there's a ton, there's a whole chapter dedicated to you. There's a ton of information in there about how we eat to help our postmenopausal symptoms and how do we eat when we don't have a cycle. So I've got you covered there. But what I want you to think of and when we're customizing a fasting lifestyle, I really want you to think about moving this eating, around according to your lifestyle demands, according to what you're trying to accomplish with your body, and according to where you are within your menstrual cycle or what your

hormonal needs are. So it's movable. Does that make sense? Now, what I can totally do is sort of, I'll give you, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to give you Lisa Lisa Billew's plan that I customized for her last week because she's being very public about the work we're doing together. So Lisa Billew is the podcast host for Women of Impact. I highly recommend you follow this badass woman. She is incredible. She is a high performer.

She was the founder of Quest Nutrition. She sold that company about five to seven years ago. And she now has this amazing podcast that is all built around empowering women. And she had last week a really busy week. So she literally sent me her calendar and we built a fasting lifestyle around her demands that week. And I'm going to give you some of the highlights that I created for her that you might find necessary for your fasting lifestyle.

And you're going to see, if you're like, I'm so confused, we took the demands of her life and we customized eating windows and fasting windows around what her life demanded and when she needed to be into a performance state. So it started on a Sunday. She was flying from L.A. to New York on Sunday. But her flight was at like 11 or 12 California time. So I would have told her to fast all day long. A lot of times my travel days are fasting days. And this is a really important note. When you go up in an airplane, your digestion shuts down. That pressure change causes a change to your digestion. And so the best thing you can do when you fly is to not eat a meal two hours before the

flight or just to fast all day. One trick I've been doing lately is bringing bone broth protein powder on a flight with me and then I just ask for hot water and I'll just drink bone broth while I'm on the flight. Now Lisa, we had seen some days. She's very thin. And we had seen some days when she fasts all day that she went into a really cortisol-saturated anxiety state and her blood sugar dropped.

We had already experimented with that two weeks earlier. I didn't want to reproduce that. So I told her to get up that morning and eat breakfast. Just make sure that and have a big breakfast, a carb-rich breakfast, a protein-rich breakfast, two hours, make sure it was two hours before she got on the flight. By the way, another fun hack is she's in her mid-40s. She built this badass company that was a lot of stress. And so both myself and she had just interviewed Dr. Daniel Amen on her podcast. And he told her that he just doesn't fly red eyes anymore because he's like, I'm too old. And I can't.

too much about my sleep and I want to protect my brain. I don't do red eyes. So she was used to doing red eyes because they're very time efficient. And I told her, no, we're trying to get you out of dysregulation with your nervous system. I agree with Dr. Amen, no red eyes. So she took this flight right smack in the middle of the day, which was great for her nervous system, but it created a bit of a challenge for her food system. So her biggest meal that day was breakfast. Then she got to New York and the plan was for her to do bone broth. But she messaged me and she's like, I'm here. It's 8 o'clock at night. She had a big day of interviewing. She was interviewing the next day, Mel B, the Spice Girl. And she was really excited about it. And I had already witnessed

that she needs to be fueled before a high-performance state. So I needed to get some food in her. So I told her at 8 o'clock at night, here's what I would tell you is eat some protein because protein's going to stabilize your blood sugar. So she had taken some paleo valley beef sticks. And when she got to her hotel, she had a bunch of beef sticks and some bone broth protein and went to bed.

So now she had amino acids in her. we had stabilized her blood sugar. She woke up the next morning. Her interview with Mel B was at two or three in the afternoon. So I had her eat breakfast and eat like a couple of good meals before the interview. They were more ketobiotic. We didn't go into carbs. We did more protein, more vegetables, so she could be in a performance state at two o'clock in the afternoon. Then she came out of that. By the time she was done, it was six o'clock at night. And for recovery, we went back in to more protein. Same kind of meal that she had that night. Now, Tuesday, she got up early and flew home. So there was no breakfast. But now, by the time she got home,

I was like, we got to get some carbs in you. You've done a lot. a lot of protein and a lot of fasting, we need some carbs. So I told her when she got home to eat a carb-rich meal that night so we could bring the carbs back in. And then Wednesday, she had another day where she was, had a couple of podcasts. So I kept her fasted that day, but I had her do a bone broth fast so she could keep her blood sugar up and that it was easy for her as she was going through her podcasting day. And then the following day, now she had a little more free time, so we went a little more into carbs. Because carbs can sometimes tank your energy. We create a longer eating window. And then the next day was her husband's birthday.

And I'm like, you got to do whatever is right. You eat to celebrate his birthday. Like, let's not have a rule around it. So I tell you all this to say, we had to build fasting around the flight. We had to keep her food in more of a keto state build around performance. And we had to find pockets that fit where I could bring some carbs in and some more diversity of food. So she had enough nutrients to be able to keep her blood sugar at a high level. So if I completely lost you, no problem. I just want you to know that the name of the game was we created variety around the ever

changing the cadence of her schedule. And you can do the same. If you have more of a routine, it's much easier. If you have like an exercise routine, you have like a workout routine, much easier. Like, you get up in the morning, your fasting window may be always in the morning. You, like, when I'm not traveling, I like to work out 11 o'clock. So I, and I like to work out in a fasted state. So when I work out, I'll, you know, I'll do some aminos.

I'll do maybe some collagen powder. I'll go work out. And then the minute I come home, I open up my eating window. And now I lean in to more food. So I'm just sort of showing you the flexibility of this moving target. Believe me, it would be a lot easier for me to just tell you, here's when your eating window opens up every day, here's when it closes down, here's the food you're going to eat. It's so much easier to tell you that. But we all have these sort of lifestyles that tend to change. And so, we're going to change. And so, we need to have our food patterns change with it, and then we have to change with our hormones. So, again, I hope, I hope that makes sense. Another eating window that I did for years, or eating variation that I did for years in my

clinic was around high-performing athletes. And what I did is we looked at the days that they did not, these athletes did not work out as rigorous. And those were our longer fasting days. So I used the days with less training as longer fasting. And I used the days so that we could stimulate. And by the way, there was a reason for this. The reason was to be able to stimulate the release of stored glucose in their muscles so that we could make sure that those muscles stayed insulin sensitive. So that when they did eat, the muscles were grabbing the nutrients, they were grabbing the glucose so they could be ready for a performance state.

then on the days that they were training harder or they were lifting more weights, we didn't fast as much, we actually leaned into more protein. So I used recovery days and less working out for more fasting, and I used the harder fitness days for more eating and more food. So it changed according to that. So again, I'm hoping that you're seeing that there's flexibility in all of this. And I'm not trying to confuse you. I'm trying to help you find your pattern.

I'm a huge believer in a couple of principles that will tell you if you nailed your eating and fasting windows. So the first thing is I really want you to understand this concept called N of one. And I talk about it a lot here in the Reset Academy. I have a big section on it in Eat Like a Girl so you can understand it. When we look at a science article or at a study, the N equals how many people were in the study. So let's use my favorite study to break apart, that horrible, not a study, but pretended to be a study, that came out. saying that 91% increase in cardiovascular event if you intermittent fast. Just so we're all clear,

that was not a peer-reviewed study. But when I first saw that statistic come out, my brain was like, this makes no sense because I've spent the last decade of my life looking at fasting research. And over and over and over again, I am seeing the exact opposite of what this study is saying. I am seeing that people who intermittent fast, that they actually help improve their blood pressure, their cholesterol, their liver enzymes, their belly fat, all the things that are predictors for a cardiovascular event. So I was massively suspicious from the 91% statistic. But the next thing I went and did is I looked at how many people they studied.

And it was impressive. I'm not going to lie. It was over 20,000 people. So the N was 20,000 people. So then my brain went like, how were they able to do that? Like how did they, what did that? How, I mean, being able to put 20,000 people. 20,000 people in a study setting is almost near impossible.

Like you just don't see ends of 20,000. And that's when the study started to fall apart. And just so we're clear, because this has been a thorn in my side over the last couple weeks, because unfortunately we have lost some people who have got, had great results with fasting to a sensational headline. And we have spouses that are concerned. friends that are concerned that their loved ones are fasting and it's going to create a cardiovascular event. So where the study fell apart is they looked at these 20,000 people over many years

and they had them report in two days out of many years. They had to call in and answer some questions. And one of those questions was, do you intermittent fast? And the people who say, Yes, all got put in a separate grip to be analyzed. Now, within that group, just so we're clear, 27% of that group smoked. So they didn't, which probably was part of the huge reason for the cardiovascular event. And calling in what they realized is people don't really remember their food choices and they don't remember their fasting windows. And as you all are learning, intermittent fasting is a different phrase to different people.

So if somebody says, do you intermittent fast? One person might be like, yeah, I only have fruit juice in the morning and I don't eat a meal until noon. That's not intermittent fasting. They didn't vet this group for what they were doing in their eating window or in their fasting window. And then the second part of that is they didn't ask them what they ate in their eating window. So this is why it is a bogus study.

But I tell you all this to say that the N group was really big. What I'm going to ask you to do is to be an N of one, where the only person that matters in your fasting lifestyle is you. And what works for you? One of the biggest challenges we have around science is that you take people, if you're even looking at people and not mice, and you put them in a very controlled environment and you try to take as many variables out of the equation as possible. That's not how we live. That's in opposition of everything I just taught you, which was this fasting lifestyle is

flexible, and it can work to your lifestyle. So you customize it. You change that eating window based off of the demands of your family, the demands of work, and what you're trying to do with your health and keep in mind your hormonal symptoms or where you are in your menstrual cycle. You could never study that. Like, it's got a lot of variables in it, which means the only person that matters in this moment is you and making sure that you are fitting this to your needs. So, yes, it's confusing when I teach it. But the more you listen to it, the more curious you are, the more you play with these principles, the easier this becomes. My experience is when we take ownership back of our health and our lifestyle.

and say, I'm going to make this thing work for me and the demands of my life, that it becomes effortless over time to stick to it. How many diets have we gone on where we're like, I'm done carrying extra weight? I'm done feeling horrible. And my friend went on the X, Y, and Z diet, and she lost 30 pounds, so I'm going to do what she did. And we go on that diet and either we get a result and then over time we're like, this is really hard. It's a lot of discipline and I'm not able to eat with my family.

And I'm finding that like, this is actually how I feel about protein right now. I love that we're bringing protein into the conversation. I love that we have a marker now, one gram of protein for every pound of ideal body weight. I love that. But how many of us are discovering that over time keeping that focus on protein is exhausting and hard. And on a busy day, I get to the end of the day and I'm like, oh, man, I forgot my protein. So we have to find our own natural rhythm with protein intake so we can keep protein in the diet

conversation for the long haul because the principle is good. and the principal's not going away. But there's no way, I don't think, unless you're a fitness bodybuilder who has really got your body at the forefront of every single part of your day, I don't think it's an easy eating style to stick to over time.

If you give yourself permission in a fasting lifestyle to flex, in and out of high carb, low carb, high protein, oops, wasn't able to do a lot of protein today, long fast, short fast, and you look at them as tools you're going to use to build yourself a healthy lifestyle, it will get easier over time and it becomes effortless. But the minute we start to do it, like our friend did it, the minute we go into rigidity over time, the whole, all of what I'm saying falls apart. And we can't sustain it. And this lifestyle, when we put our N of one glasses on and we take these principles and we look at them

like tools and we customize them for our needs and our lifestyle, they become easier and easier. When I had this amazing dinner on Easter, we had some great wine. Oh my God, this place had gluten-free sourdough bread. I was like, I'm normally the person that's like, don't even bring me the bread basket at a restaurant. This one, I was like, keep bringing me the bread basket. I had dessert. This is not a normal thing that I typically lean into.

But I was in celebration with my family. and in that moment, that I have a foodie family. We love food. In fact, our son right now is training to be a chef. And so the food experience is important to the family experience. So I went into it without any guilt. And then the next day was like, okay, what tools do I have here? I'd like to fast a little longer. I'd like to sharpen my brain. I'd like a little bit of a recovery from that meal. Now I'm going to go into more keto. Does that make sense? Is that helpful? So in Fast Like a Girl, what I tried to do is give you some protocols. So if you have an autoimmune condition, if you have a thyroid problem, if you're trying to get pregnant, I just was on a call with a client who is wanted to become insulin

sensitive before she got pregnant. And so we've spent the last three to four months really working on that insulin sensitivity, longer fast, more keto. And now we're at the the month, she's going to try to get pregnant. And so the whole thing changed because now her target is different. I think we should do this with every eating style. We do it with working out. Anybody who's serious about working out doesn't do the same workout over and over and over again because we get less of a result. We're constantly changing the workout to meet what we want to accomplish in our body. You're fasting and should be the same. Fasting window, eating window timing, how am I mapping those and what food style do I need?

But I really want you to see that there's freedom in this lifestyle. And this is why, you know, we, in full transparency, like fast like a girl is doing better than anybody thought, especially me. Like I was blown away. Like I just wrote a book because I really wanted women to have another resource. And what I'm discovering in over 4,000 reviews on Amazon is that women are finally finding a lifestyle that they can stick to. And it's because it's so customizable. So if you're one of those women that you like the rigidity, you like the structure, okay, well, in Fast Like a Girl, I gave you a 30-day reset in there.

You can use that structure and kind of start there. In the back of the book, I gave you weekly structures that are mapped over like eight to 12 weeks. So if you have a condition, you can lean into that and use that. But ultimately, I think those are training wheels and that you should start to, like, this should start to become an effortless experience. So I just really, it's, I think the hardest part for people is when we go on a diet, it has a lot of rules. And it has a lot of rigidity. But this is why the diet culture doesn't work.

And so this is why I call it a lifestyle. To me, a lifestyle is something that's adaptable. And that's what a fasting lifestyle is. And the last thing that I want to say is really. be curious about what your body needs because you can't mess this up. So if you have a day that you're like, get to the end of the day and you're like, okay, well, I tried a longer fasting window and then I opened up my eating window and the next thing you know, I ate the whole house. Okay. Well, that was a good experiment. Like maybe we need to have like that first meal

and I have a whole chapter called The First Meal Matters and Eat Like a Girl. But maybe that, and I had a whole chapter called Breaking the Fast and Fast like a Girl, maybe that first meal, you just need to focus on that first meal the next time you go into a longer fast. As opposed to what we used to do when we would go into a diet is we would mess up and then we'd ridicule ourselves. I messed that up. I was doing so well. I messed it up. And now I'm really mad at myself.

And then the next day, you're holding on to guilt and shame and you're beating yourself up and you're feeling bad. And all of a sudden, your favorite food comes in front of you and you have it. You eat horribly again. And now that second day, you're like, no, like two days in a row, I've messed up. If you do that in enough days in a row, you just go, I give up. I'm going to ask you to stop that behavior that play with these tools, play with the fasting window and the eating window, play with the, what are you breaking your fast with, what diet are you

leaning into, play with these tools. And if you get to the end of the day and you're like, well, that tool didn't work for me because at three o'clock, my energy crashed. Or you do three or four days of hormone feasting foods in a row and you're like, I'm gaining weight, okay, well, now lean into the next tool, which is keto and a longer fast. But don't beat yourself up because the minute that the mind starts to go after itself, now we're back into the arms of the Western standard diet. And once you have given up and you're not in this fasting lifestyle and you're just eating

what's in front of you or you're just eating what your taste buds tell you to do, or you're just going into the market and eating whatever you used to eat, you're dead in the water. And I can't say this enough, but we literally now live in a time that if you are mindlessly eating, you are putting yourself in the category of building chronic disease. We have chemicals in our food that are called obesity,ens, that are triggering stem cells to become fat cells and are known endocrine disruptors that are throwing all of your hormones off. So if we are not intentionally eating and intentionally thinking about when we fast and when we

don't fast, you are in the lane of chronic disease. This is why we have to have a lifestyle that gets easier with time. And the only one that I know when it comes to eating and it comes to when to eat and what to eat is a fasting lifestyle. I mean, you might know another one. You can let me know. But it's our doorout of this chronic disease. Our door out is not OZempic because what happens when you stop OZempic?

Like, where are you going from there? And if you're on OZempic, then this fasting lifestyle is even more important because the path off of OZempic. because the path off of a Zempec is a fasting lifestyle. So I, and I've tried to disprove this, and I can't. Here I sit a decade later after studying this fasting lifestyle and how it fits to the feminine body, I am more convinced than ever before that this is our way out of the horrific food culture that we are living in. So I hope that helps.

I really, like, my biggest concern is that the information will overwhelm, and so you shut down. So go back, re-listen to this, and be curious about this beautiful body you get to live in. And if you have a day where your fasting and food didn't work for you, then it just, then it's just data. It's just data. Okay, that didn't work today. I'm going to do it differently tomorrow. and I have a lot of tools and a lot of ways I can do it different.

Okay? So I really hope that helps. I try when I give confusing information, I try to come at it from different directions, knowing that some of you are going to hear this very differently. I also know that some of us are auditory learners. Some of us need the visual. I'm a visual learner. And some of us need the experience of it,

which is why the Reset Academy was created so we could experience this. So please, please stick with it. Don't give up on it because, again, I'm more convinced than ever that this is our way out of chronic disease. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what you're

your biggest takeaway is.