and the benefits of eating at regular times. Many women I see are caught in fairly chaotic eating patterns, from trying to live on 1200 calories a day, to skipping meals, to not eating with the family such as making wonderful nutritious meals for the kids and not eating them themselves.

Some women are very in tune with themselves and can navigate eating at irregular times quite well, eating nutritious food when they feel true hunger signals. But generally speaking, I find its very common for women to try and manipulate their eating to lose weight, often starving themselves in the morning when willpower is the strongest, which often backfires later in the day.

Intermittent fasting (IF) is very popular at the moment. And it can be useful, and there is some good evidence behind it.

Most of the studies are done on men, and few are done long term on menstruating or menopausal women, who are more sensitive to stress hormones than men.

When you don’t eat in the morning, when your cortisol is naturally high anyway- which is what wakes you up- it can send your cortisol sky high (which gives you a high!). The body produces stress hormones (such as cortisol) so as to release glycogen (glucose) stores in your liver so you don’t starve. In particular it needs to protect the brain.

Let’s talk breakfast…some women love it, many skip it. Many women don’t feel like breakfast…or they learn to skip it to reduce overall calories or have a shorter eating window, such as with intermittent fasting.

No problem skipping breakfast…unless you are a woman with any of these issues: