Intermittent Fasting For Women
While intermittent fasting has a multitude of benefits, if you are a woman reading this…
…there are some things you should know before you dive in.
While we’ve spent the last month touting the benefits of intermittent fasting, we do need to throw out a word of caution for women who are interested in doing some intermittent fasting work. If you start to experience symptoms like sleeplessness, anxiety, irregular periods, or a decrease in your bone density, you may be overdoing the fasting. Women must take caution and use intermittent fasting, well, intermittently. While women can have great benefits from an intermittent fasting protocol without risk of the symptoms above, here are the ground rules according to :
Build up slowly to longer fasting periods. Start with 12 hour fasts every other day and work slowly up to 16 hours. If that is working for you, then slowly increase to longer periods making sure to monitor for any symptoms that your body is going into stress mode.
Practice intermittent fasting at most, every other day. This ensures that your body doesn’t go into red alert starvation mode and start shutting down reproductive systems.
Train light on intermittent fasting days, do a light workout, some mobility work, or take a long walk. Save your high intensity or high load training for regular days.
Break fast with some quality protein and vegetables with a healthy dose of a good quality fat. Save your carbohydrates for your evening meal.
Use the Bulletproof coffee with your fasting, this will benefit in multiple ways but mostly reduce the stress response in your body.
If you love the premise of the intermittent fasting (only coffee for breakfast), on non-fasting days, add 20 grams of collagen protein to your Bulletproof coffee and save the breakfast prep. Between the butter, prebiotic fiber, MCTs, and collagen protein, your coffee now has everything you need for breakfast!
On not IF days, hit the weights as hard as you want and add in extra carbohydrates on those days.
For much more detail on this, check out Dave Asprey’s new book “Fast this Way” for an entire chapter on women and fasting.
