A Woman's Guide to Using the Healing Power of Fasting to Burn Fat, Boost Energy, and Balance Hormones
Calories in must be less than calories out. How many times have you heard about or tried a diet that focuses on this idea? It’s been a popular mantra for years – if we eat fewer calories than we burn working out, we’ll lose weight and be healthier. However, studies have recently shown it’s less about how much you eat, and more about when you eat.
A 2018 study in the Journal of Nutrition, Health & Aging found obese individuals experienced metabolic improvements just by reducing the window in which they ate every day. Participants ate whatever they wanted, but only during an 8-hour period – and saw dramatic results. Another study published in 2020 in Cell Metabolism found that people who ate during a 10-hour period experienced greater metabolic effects than when the exact same things were eaten during a 14-hour period. So with just four extra hours of fasting and no change to their diet, people saw significant metabolic results. How is this possible? Well, let’s look at the science behind fasting.
Our ancestors evolved to have energy even after fasting. They ate during the day, and then their bodies entered a fasting state overnight. When they woke up, they needed enough energy to get more food. They got that energy from ketones their body produced while in a fasted state. This shift from using glucose as a source of energy to ketones is known as metabolic switching.
Metabolic switching is essentially the transition from a sugar-burning mode to a fat-burning mode. When our bodies aren’t in a fasted state, we’re in sugar-burning mode – our bodies “burn” the glucose we eat to energize us. When the body’s in a fasted state for long enough, it uses the fat-burning system to make energy. Sugar is stored in the body in the form of glycogen, which is deposited in the muscles, liver, and fat. Exercising burns glycogen in muscles; through fasting, we can also start burning glycogen stores in the liver and fat tissues.
And that’s not all our body does in a fasted state. It regenerates neurons damaged by exposure to toxins and too much sugar, helps heal our mitochondria, reduces the chance of developing cancer, and balances our gut. Pretty important stuff!
Metabolic switching worked perfectly with our ancestors’ habits. Today, we often don’t fully reach a fasted state because we have access to food 24/7. The benefits of fasting vary with the length of the fast, and we’ll cover different fasting windows and their uses later in the Blink. But first, let’s look at another important component that impacts the science of fasting: a woman’s cycle.
Fast Like a Girl (2022) empowers women to craft a fasting lifestyle based on their own personal hormone cycle. Learn how to harness your natural power by making fasting work with your body rather than against it.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
