Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent Fasting for Mature Women

Intermittent fasting (IF) is very popular at the moment and there is some good evidence behind it.

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

Cortisol levels are highest in the morning- they help wake us up. When you don’t eat in the morning, your cortisol is naturally high anyway and it can send it 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. 

Theoretically, it can seem like a great idea to not eat and presume your body will fuel itself with your fat stores. 

In practice, high cortisol levels have their own effect on the metabolism and can cause the body to hold onto fat in case of the emergency it thinks you are having. That’s why stress is associated with weight gain and can make it hard to lose weight. This will be more so for women and even more so for certain types of women.

These higher stress hormone levels can also mess with reproductive hormones. 

Some people can naturally skip breakfast or have it much later. The more phlegmatic type constitution can more easily skip meals. Even so, I urge caution. 

Many women skip breakfast because they are too busy, or they suppress their natural appetite with coffee (which further raises cortisol), or they are a bit quesy, liverish and/or hungover from the night before. They presume that by skipping breakfast they are practicing intermittent fasting which is good for you, right? 

Well, not necessarily. Check in with your body. Would eating a proper breakfast make you feel more grounded, well-fueled, balanced, and have consistent energy? It is a habit, and if you start eating breakfast, your body will adjust within a few days and you will start feeling hunger in the morning again.

If you want to play with IF, I recommend to stop eating around 7pm at night i.e. after dinner. And resume eating around 7am the next morning with breakfast first, and coffee 2nd (if needed). This is flexible according to each individual. A 12 hour break from eating makes sense, to give the digestive system a break, and after dinner eating is rarely useful and is often only compensating for lack of fuel earlier in the day. It is often when high calorie snack foods are eaten. For some people, a 10 hour eating window may be ok too.

There are other types of IF you may be able to play with, but I recommend you do it with some supervision, and most of the time I would suggest tweaking other things first. If you have done everything you can, then some lower-calorie days can help shake things up for sure, but unless you really resonate with that, I wouldn’t start there.

If you think about it, fuel at the beginning of the day makes sense. Otherwise…you are running on stress hormones, and not necessarily your fat stores. Often, a husband and wife will decide to do IF together and he loses weight and thrives, and she thinks she must be doing something wrong because she doesn’t get the same effect- so she tries harder and it barely helps. And it hurts her. She can end up shaky, hangry, panicky, anxious, and unable to function normally.

If you are too rushed to eat breakfast, you may also be too rushed to eat a proper nutritious sit down lunch, so by dinner you are starving unless you have stopped to binge on something in the afternoon. Dinner is not when your body needs those calories. And you probably can’t make up for nutritional gaps with one good meal.

I especially do not recommend fasting all morning (for women, but for many men too) or exercising without at least a large snack or meal to refuel your body afterward. Some people like to exercise fasted and it can work for some, although I wouldn’t recommend it in general. And I strongly recommend fuelling afterwards.

This is what I call disordered eating. A bit of information grabbed from here and there can be used to justify chaotic and unhealthy long term habits. 

For most people most of the time, (there are always exceptions) I do recommend 3 meals a day and just a normal moderate fasting period between dinner and break-fast.