So here's what I want you to think about I'm going to introduce you to a new concept
that you're going to see me talking about more and more and that's called your 30-day
cycle this is for women that have a cycle, timing your fast in your 30-day cycle
Dr. Mindy here and on this video we are going to dive into one of the most key concepts to
fasting specifically intermittent fasting and this is when should women intermittent fast
are we supposed to intermittent fast all the time are there times that we should not intermittent
fast so if you are new to my channel I just want to say welcome i am here teaching you all things
fasting and I'm on a mission to get a million people inspired to live a fasting lifestyle in
this year in 2021 so if you're new subscribe and as always you guys if you love this video
share it out into the world if there's one thing we learned in this time of a pandemic
that we are in this world of health together when you get healthy it affects me when I get healthy
it affects you so fasting is one of the quickest ways to turn the health switch on in your body so
welcome okay I don't mean to leave the men out but women we need to have another conversation
about intermittent fasting because there is a different way that we need to approach fasting and
not enough people are talking about it so on this video I really want to lay down some of
the fundamental principles around intermittent fasting so that you set yourself up for success
I also want to point out that we don't want to be left out of the fasting conversation
so when i hear people say oh women shouldn't fast or women shouldn't intermittent fast
it's like nails on a chalkboard to me because I want all the incredible benefits of fasting I
don't want to be left out of this conversation so on this video I'm going to make sure you're very
clear when you should do it and when you shouldn't do it and this is really for women of all ages so
here we go the first thing that I want to just sort of get a baseline of here is the idea of
what is intermittent fasting so when I say intermittent fasting what I mean is 13 to 15
hours without food now a lot of you are probably thinking what about my coffee what about my tea
for most of us drinking a cup of coffee in the morning putting some mct oil in it a little cup
of tea is not going to take us out of a fasted state anything that raises your blood sugar
is pulling you out of a fast so intermittent fasting is 13 to 15 hours with our blood sugar
starting to go down not go up so we want to be you are in a fasted state if your blood
sugar is not going up so 13 to 15 hours in is intermittent fasting second question before I
dive into the variations that we need to look at for women is a great question to ask yourself
is why would you need to intermittent fast so there is that you know there's so many cool
pieces of tools that we can use to bio-hack this incredible intelligence inside our body but
there is no better tool than fasting so we want to know how to do it right and the research that
we have the biggest study that we have was done on both men and women it's a meta-analysis so they've
looked at all the studies on intermittent fasting it came out on the New England Journal of Medicine
and it showed that after reviewing over 1500 peer-reviewed studies that intermittent fasting
is really good for neurodegenerative diseases like alzheimer's and dementia
it's great for diabetes and obesity it's really good to lower inflammation down pre and post
surgical times we also know that it's really great for growth hormone and boosting growth hormone so
we slow the aging process down and we become better fat burners so there is so much wisdom
inside of our body that we can tap into when we learn to intermittent fast for 13 to 15 hours
okay so if you're not convinced yet why you should do it let's talk about how women should do it
so here's what I want you to think about I'm going to introduce you to a new concept that
you're going to see me talking about more and more and that's called your 30-day cycle this
is for women that have a cycle we're timing your fast in your 30-day cycle so the first way you can
look at intermittent fasting is making sure you are matching it to different times of your cycle
and I have created something called the fasting circle it's not out yet but you guys who keep
coming back to my videos here on youtube I want you to know that this fasting circle is coming out
um I've got a tool a visual tool for you to be able to see in your monthly cycle when you should
be fasting so let me explain this fasting circle this is for women who have a cycle so from day 1
to day 10 of your cycle, your body needs you to be insulin sensitive so all of the fast intermittent
fasting 24 hour fast 17 hour fast those are all fabulous fasts from day one to day 10 now from
day 11 to about day 15 you're ovulating and when you ovulate, all three sex hormones
are at their highest estrogen progesterone testosterone so in this ovulation period
from day about day 11 to day 15 we all ovulate at different times but that's a general rule
you're going to want make sure you want to make sure that you never go over 15 hours of fasting
or the consequence is those hormones will start to tank so that short little window right there
you can still intermittent fast those of you that are fasting experts I don't want you going over
15 hours in that little window I just spoke of now after day 15 from about day 16 to around day 19 of
your cycle and you may want to come back to this video and watch this again or write this down but
from day 16 to day 19 you can do all the fasting you want again we can go into the longer fast you
can intermittent fast you can do more fasting you can do a 3-day water fast during that time
but once day 20 hits for women who have a cycle you need to make sure you are not fasting
so 13 hours would be right about the max I would tell you to do but even with that I am encouraging
you to step out of fasting from day 20 until you bleed because what happens in that time period is
your body needs to make progesterone and it cannot make progesterone as long as it's making cortisol
the precursor for the hormone progesterone and the hormone cortisol is the same precursor it's
called DHEA and if you are creating a hormetic stress like what fasting is your body will
take that DHEA and make cortisol and it will not make progesterone so this is really important for
those of you that started fasting and you started losing your cycle or those of you who are
wanting to fast I want to make sure you don't tank your progesterone because we love progesterone
makes us feel really really good and calm and it's a hormone you do not want to take for granted
so that's one way for women to approach it look at it from a monthly cycle now those of you
women that are perimenopausal, don't have a cycle, had a hysterectomy, post-menopausal don't know when
your cycle is coming or going I got you you're the one that needs to think more about a weekly
variation because there's not a monthly cycle to think about for you so let's think about a
weekly variation and I'm going to give you the basic weekly variation that I like for myself I
like for my patients for my academy members and it is a 5-1-1 variation so five days a
week you can intermittent fast don't go more than 15 hours of fasting especially if you're new and
if you're going to do this variation you don't have a cycle so we don't want to push too many
long fasts but 15 hours max of fasting five days a week one day a week you can push your fast you can
push it to 24 hours so that you get the rebooting of your intestinal stem cells in your gut so one
day a week you could go to 24 hour fasts and then one day a week no fasting so the way we look at
this from a hormonal standpoint five days a week you're intermittent fasting and making yourself
insulin sensitive so you can bring up your estrogen levels one day a week you're pushing your
fast to 24 hour fast so that you can repair your gut so that the bacteria in your gut that breaks
estrogen down creates a healing effect there and then one day you're working on progesterone
by getting out of fasting and to bringing that cortisol level down so the answer to
the question is what is the right time for a woman to intermittent fast is if you're cycling
follow the fasting circle the way I laid it out can't wait till I have a visual for you guys and
then if you don't know when your cycle is or your perimenopausal or postmenopausal follow the 5-1-1
variation now on the next video I am going to show you how women over 40 there are some nuances we
can get even deeper into this variation for women over 40 so make sure you subscribe to my channel
make sure you hit the notification button so that you get the next video that I put out
because it's going to be specifically for those of you that are over 40 years old women over 40
need to fast differently as well so we are complex humans, we have a lot of hormones coming and going
so we need to learn how to time our fast according to our hormonal needs and for those of you guys
asking about The Menopause Reset and when it's coming out in print you can pre-order it now
and in this, I talk about the five different lifestyle changes I personally made through
my 40s to make my menopause journey blissful yes there were moments where when I learned these five
tricks that I could really turn my hormones just by using lifestyle alone so if you want to
know how to pre-order The Menopause Reset just put Menopause Reset in the comments and my team will
send you a link where you can pre-order that and as always we don't we don't want to be left out
we want the benefits of fasting we just got to do it differently so I hope that helps