318 – SYNCPodcast_FasterWay
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Jenny Swisher: Welcome friends to this [00:01:00] episode of The Sink Your Life Podcast. Today I’m sharing with you the true data around fasting, metabolic health, and what long-term wellness really looks like for women. My goodness, we are over 300 episodes into the Sink Your Life Podcast. So if you followed me for any amount of time, you know that this is not a new topic for me to cover.

That said, I’ve recently seen a trend through social media surrounding fasting, carb cycling, and exercise. That has me scratching my head a little because only recently are the companies representing these methods starting to label them as hormone healthy, and I put that in air quotes. Yeah, just, no, no, no, no.

So today I’m sharing with you why no. Why isn’t fasting healthy for women, especially active women? What metabolic health, also known as inside out health truly looks like, and how many diet culture trends out there are serving up only short-term results in exchange for long-term dysfunction? I share this because well, once you know, you can’t not know it anymore.

When I became certified in Dr. Stacy Sims courses in 20 19, 20 [00:02:00] 20, I learned the science behind what women truly need in regard to their fitness and nutrition. The true data as in published in PubMed, not what my friend, the online influencer is sharing. And once I saw the science, it all started to make sense.

It made sense as to why I had reached peak fitness from the outside in my twenties, but felt absolutely miserable on the inside. It made sense as to why so many women struggled to lose the lower belly. It started to make sense why so many women seem to work so hard to exercise and maintain portion sizes and follow their macros, yet still struggle in the energy department.

I’ve become an absolute nerd on women’s hormone health for the last decade, largely due to my own struggle with chronic migraines, infertility, weight loss, resistance, and other symptoms tied directly to hormone imbalance. Multiple certifications, including my IHP, my integrative health practitioner, and thousands of hours spent diving into the books and the research that many don’t take the time to read.

In [00:03:00] this journey, I uncovered that the majority of diet trends out there, keto, intermittent fasting, low carb, low fat, the detoxes, all the things are all just diet culture. What women truly need at the end of the day is fuel for their activity level in the form of quality whole foods. And if they embrace exercise, walking and lifting, weights are queen.

So long as again, nutrition compensates for activity level. Anything less leads to LEA low energy availability, which then leads to metabolic dysfunction. Listen, in 20 22, 300 highly successful health coaches came into my course because they themselves were stuck. Many of them were over the age of 35.

Their bodies were shifting, and what they’d been doing was no longer working. When they got through the course, I could hardly keep up with messages. Messages like, oh my gosh, this makes total sense as to why I’ve been struggling, or I’ve been doing this backwards the entire time. Many of them had been years into home fitness programs, restricting [00:04:00] fats and even protein, and then struggling with low energy and lack of results.

As time went on, many of them found themselves working harder and harder only to be met with discouragement. I see this every day, every. Day, not only in fitness enthusiasts and health coaches, but also in women seeking advice from their OBGYNs or their primary care doctors. The workout harder and eat less mentality, the just cut your carbs and do more HIT is not a long-term solution.

So let’s start first with fasting. And before we begin, please know that overnight fasting, let’s say 10 to 12 hours, is always a good idea to let your body’s digestive system rest and do its job. It’s great for sleep and so much more, unless you’re someone like me who needs that bedtime snack for blood sugar stability.

Turns out that’s more common than one might think. At the risk of being a broken record, health is individual. What works for you may not work for me. So when it comes to fasting, according to Dr. Stacey Sims, the lead researcher on active women, she says, [00:05:00] quote, so many women are still getting the message that intermittent fasting and keto are the way to go for mental focus, high performance and weight loss.

And it simply is not true. She goes on to say quote. As I’ve said many times from a health standpoint, intermittent fasting is useful. This is particularly true for the general population who are not very active and struggling with metabolic diseases. However, when you dig deeper and look at longevity data in terms of both intermittent fasting and exercise, they’re both beneficial, but you do not garner any additional benefits from layering intermittent fasting on top of exercise.

End quote. It comes down to Kisspeptin, which is a neuropeptide that’s responsible for sex hormones, and endocrine and reproductive function, which also plays a significant role in maintaining healthy glucose levels, appetite regulation, and body composition. It’s also more sensitive in women than men.

When it gets perturbed, our sex hormones aren’t produced and released the way we need them to be. Intermittent fasting and keto both disrupt Kisspeptin production. [00:06:00] When our brain perceives we have a deficiency in nutrients, especially carbohydrate, we have a marked reduction in kisspeptin stimulation, which not only increases our appetite, but also reduces our sensitivity to insulin.

This is why research shows intermittent fasting is more likely to cause impaired glucose intolerance in women, but not men. Let’s read that last phrase again. She says, this is why research shows intermittent fasting is more likely to cause impaired glucose intolerance in women. But not men at the time of this recording.

I also just finished reading Dr. Laura Bride’s newest book, metabolism Repair Manual, where she also covers Kisspeptin and how there are physiological differences between men and women. I’ll link that book up for you in the show notes. To summarize, as Sims says, fasting doesn’t work for women, it’s counterproductive because it makes your body hold onto fat.

End quote. Okay then, so what about carb cycling? Does it have benefit, especially if done in tandem with certain types of workouts? [00:07:00] I’m seeing this all over my social media right now. Well, it comes down to metabolic flexibility, and according to the NIH, only 5% of Americans are metabolically flexible. Wow.

Only 5%. I love the way Sims answers the question on carbohydrates for active women. She says the body isn’t an algorithm. You can’t jump straight to fat burning and be like, Hey, we’re just burning fat today because you actually need carbohydrate in order to burn. Fat systems need carbohydrate in order to get the mitochondria working to get into free fatty acid use.

End quote. She goes on to say that if a woman is really looking to go on to change her body composition, she needs to fuel for what she’s doing and hydrate and recover from it. My friends, the research shows that at least 55% of training women are in a state of LEA. Low energy availability directly from a lack of carbohydrate intake and under fueling, avoiding LEA starts with eating enough.

I will link up some specific research for you on [00:08:00] carbohydrate intake for women so that you can dive deeper if you’d like. I’ll also make sure I link up all of the articles written in PubMed by Stacey Sims herself. You see my friends. There is no faster way to metabolic health. If you want short term results with just the scale, okay, maybe I can come up with a few ways to restrict you or overwork you to get you there to lose the weight.

But long term blood sugar instability and a weakened four-legged chair awaits. So since it’s been a hot minute since we covered the four-legged hormone chair, let’s go ahead and do that. Now, if you picture your average, sturdy four-legged kitchen chair, right, each leg of the chair represents a different leg of the endocrine system.

So we have our blood sugar as one leg of the chair, our cortisol as a leg of the chair, our sex hormones, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone as a leg of the chair and our thyroid as a leg. So that’s four legs of the chair. So if I ask you the question, what if I take a saw and I saw off just an inch of one leg of the chair, for today’s purposes, let’s say the blood sugar [00:09:00] leg of the chair.

What happens to the chair as a whole? Well, hopefully you’re picturing this in your brain and you’re thinking, well, the whole chair becomes unstable and wobbly. Yes, that’s correct. That would be my friend’s metabolic dysfunction. When we disrupt our blood sugar stability, it affects our cortisol when we’re exercising in a fasted state or when we’re incorporating fasting and exercise on top of each other.

As Dr. Sims talks about here on this podcast that I’ve shared, that’s when we start to see those legs of the chair really become cut off and cause the entire endocrine system to suffer. This, my friends, is metabolic dysfunction. Cortisol is queen. Blood sugar and cortisol oppose each other. So trying different tricks like restricting eating windows, or lowering carbon intake or cycling when you eat the carbs, exercising daily.

This is all just a conglomerate disaster when it comes to your inside health. Right now, a good number of women that I’m friends with on social media are going right back to the old ways of exercising according to male physiology, following a nutrition plan that tells them it’s [00:10:00] hormone healthy, but that actually follows zero data and only diet culture.

And they’re doing it because it’s familiar. We do familiar things to feel safe, but are we really safe? I challenge you to read Metabolism Reset by Dr. Laura Bryden. Again, I’ll link it for you in the show notes, but I’m about to start a six week book club if you’re interested in reading it with me as I dive in a second time.

I also recommend checking out the PubMed research by Abby Smith, Ryan and Dr. Stacy Sims. Once you learn this, my friends, you’ll understand why this is the way when women know the why they will apply. It really saddens me to watch these trends because it affects people, real people. I remember when cheeseburgers without the bun topped with bacon and the keto lifestyle that went haywire a few years ago.

I remember when that died out. Finally, a few of my friends on social who swore by that are now larger than they’ve ever been, and they’re struggling, and now we’re here. Back to restriction and cardio and thinking that we can trick our bodies into Slim Strong is the goal. It’s always been [00:11:00] the goal.

Muscle is the key to longevity. Food is fuel for women. It’s not just calories in and calories out. It’s metabolic health. It’s waist to hip ratio. It’s Dutch testing through life. It’s aging without losing cognition and mobility. It’s so much more than swimsuit season. I hope this wakes you up a bit. If you’ve been wondering about these trends, as always, they lure us in with their, I wonder if that will work for me.

Thoughts for health coaches, the allure of another faster way begs for them to dive into the familiar, even though they seemingly forgot that the familiar wasn’t serving them in the first place. So I’ll be over here with my microphone serving up the same message for another 300 podcasts. Women are not small men.

We deserve to live with maximum energy. There is a way to long term sustainable metabolic health, but it starts with letting go of diet culture. Until next time, my friends [00:12:00]