Transcription
Okay, maybe you're like me at some point, and you've done intermittent fasting. I used to love it, but I did it all wrong. It felt good, and it almost felt, yeah, I thought, easier to intermittent fast by pushing my meals later and later and later into the day and eating in a fueling window of, say, 2 to 6, 1 to 7, somewhere in there. Um, and in actuality, that really stressed my body.
So I'm going to talk, uh, in fairly good detail about intermittent fasting because it does have benefits, but how to do it in a circadian-friendly fashion and why you're going to want to, um, do it or maybe try it in the winter.
So first and foremost, why would we want to think about intermittent fasting in the winter? Well, the winter would naturally be a time of food scarcity. I don't know about you where you live, but where I live, come January, come December, we've got a blanket, a heavy blanket of snow everywhere, and basically, it means that my ability to find and gather food would have been really, really challenged from basically December through the end of February. And so it's a perfect time for me to kind of mimic that scarcity. Not say we've got to starve ourselves; we don't have to do 7-day water fasts, although I do have many a client who wants to do that sort of thing in the winter and have done that successfully to really promote healing. Not a topic that I'm going to go into detail about during this, um, prep for winter challenge because there's a lot of nuance and in, uh, inter, uh, individual variability that that comes into play when doing something like that, but it's a possibility.
But one way that I love to go about this is through intermittent fasting in a circadian-friendly, less stressful way, and that is instead of doing what I used to do, what as like a, you know, fast till dinner and then the next day fast till dinner and the next day fast till dinner, I actually do breakfast-to-breakfast fasts. And here's why: in order for my brain to really feel like it's not in a period of, uh, stress, I have to give it a couple of signals first thing in the morning. Number one, I have to tell it the time of day; right? I do that by going outside at sunrise and syncing with my circadian signaling, uh, in my light environment. Number two, I have to tell my body that there's, uh, food available, and I do that by shortly after sunrise eating breakfast. And then number three, my body likes to know where it is in, in space, right? Where it is on planet Earth, and it also gets that information by being outside, and that can be enhanced by earthing practices. And we'll do a whole video on, uh, winter-friendly earthing options. But if I can give my body, body and brain those three signals consistently every morning, then I get into a really good rhythm of peace, of harmony in my body as opposed to what I used to do, right? When I used to do dinner-to-dinner fasting and skip breakfast, skip lunch, my body would surge cortisol naturally, um, first thing in the morning, um, but then it would also surge cortisol every time I really needed to elevate my blood glucose levels and I wasn't giving my body, uh, an adequate amount of, uh, or when I wasn't giving my body any food. And so then that was compounded with coffee. I would have two coffees in that morning window of time, and those would also surge cortisol. And yes, I would exercise in a fasted state as well—another big cortisol surge. And while it felt good to, to do that, I mean, I, I subjectively felt good for a period of time, I actually started to notice that my muscle mass was decreasing, and I was slowly gaining weight. And not that that's the end-all be-all, but it was very interesting for me because I had always been an athlete, right? I'd always had a lean physique; I'd always had, I can, I can put on and maintain a really good amount of muscle mass on my body, and I wasn't able to do that anymore. And it was because of the cortisol stressor of the dinner-to-dinner style fasting that I was doing.
And so I switched, right? I started eating breakfast, which I thought was not going to be a good thing, but it turns out that if we can fuel in the morning, do something that, um, circadian researcher Sachin Panda calls time-restricted eating or early time-restricted eating, meaning an early fueling window, we get so many benefits from that. We lower inflammation; we become more insulin sensitive; we lower the amount of glucose that surges in our bloodstream after meals; we become a lot more metabolically flexible and metabolically fit. And so that's why I started to, to switch towards eating breakfast and doing an early style of intermittent fasting. And so that's what you can do as well. You can still get all of the benefits of intermittent fasting, which are things like, um, metabolic support, things like, um, uh, sensitizing your body to glucose, becoming insulin sensitive, actually supporting dopamine sensitivity in the brain. We can also get the benefits of autophagy, or clearing out damage, but guess what? A breakfast-to-breakfast, uh, fast stimulates autophagy when we sleep at night way better than eating that dinner right before we go to bed or in the evening and then, um, asking our body to get into autophagy; it just doesn't work as well. And so, um, I love these breakfast-to-breakfast fasts now.
In the next video, I'm going to talk a little bit about what I eat in the winter months, and I always love a protein-rich and fat-rich breakfast that is lower in carbohydrates. There's some wiggle room there. In the next video, when I talk about what I eat, I am going to discuss leptin as well because it's a key hormone that we need to know about when we're talking about what to eat. But that protein-rich and fat-rich breakfast, and I make it big, right? I make it a big, satiating meal that, actually doing that consistently over time, significantly lowers evening appetite and evening cravings. I used to be the "I need sugar after dinner" type of a person; I need something sweet. I used to get hangry if I didn't eat every so often. Eating in that, in that style and that fashion has almost completely lowered my appetite in the evening. I can eat if I want to; let's say we're having a big family gathering, and we're having dinner together, sure, not a big deal for me, but I don't because my body has received such a great amount of nutrients, and because my body has received the quality nutrients it needs to maintain its physical structure, things such as a good, a, a good quality protein and fat, which aids in satiety but also is very supportive for metabolic functions and making metabolic water in my mitochondria. If I can get those things in play, then guess what? My brain can shut off the danger signal that I need to go expend energy to find more food, find more nutrients. I've given it the sign. So it's been one of the coolest shifts I've seen with doing more of an early fueling window, um, an early intermittent fasting, and I, and I don't do that breakfast-to-breakfast every single day in the winter. I'll do breakfast-to-breakfast, oh, once a week, maybe twice a week, sometimes less, um, but then I do try to maintain that early fueling window. I eat between sunrise, give or take, and let's say 3 or 4 p.m., right? I'll have, I'll have two, sometimes just one meal if it's just breakfast-to-breakfast, or maybe two meals, or maybe three meals. And so a breakfast, a smaller lunch, a smaller dinner; that's the style of eating I do, and that's the style of intermittent fasting I do. It's an early fueling window, then a fast. It has been a game changer. I no longer have dysregulated cortisol; my leptin, which is an energy-sensing hormone in my body, is really, really strong; I'm not puffy anymore; I'm not gaining weight; I have a beautiful amount of muscle mass that I feel like my physique can easily maintain, and I feel very strong. It's been a game changer for me, and I'd love it also to be a game changer for you this winter.