While intermittent fasting offers many health benefits for both genders, women may see more significant benefits from specific strategies due to physiological differences.
This article will explore the differences between how men and women respond to intermittent fasting and how women can safely practice this method.
What Is Intermittent Fasting?
Intermittent fasting, or going without food for extended periods while still being able to drink water and usually black coffee or plain tea, is an increasingly standard dietary protocol. There are a few popular models:
- 16/8: You fast for 16 hours daily, including your sleeping hours. For most people, this is just skipping breakfast or dinner.
- Eat, Stop, Eat: You fast for 24 hours once or twice weekly.
- Alternate Day Fasting (ADF): Every other day, you go without food, with no calorie restriction on your feeding days.
- 5:2: Your “fast days” are just low-calorie days of about 500 calories. It’s debatable as to whether this should be considered IF.
Some people fast for days, but this article is about methods that don’t involve fasting for more than 36 hours.
Eating more frequently does not result in increased fat loss, as is commonly believed.
The debate about whether fasting is better for fat loss than just eating the same number of calories over time is ongoing, as studies have produced conflicting results.
The evidence shows no significant difference in fat loss whether a person eats one or two large meals or several small meals throughout the day. However, many people find it more satisfying to eat one or two large meals rather than multiple small meals, although this preference varies from person to person.
Why Fast?
Fasting is not a new diet trend; it is a practice that has been around for centuries. Fasting has been a part of human existence for as long as we have been on Earth.
During the extended period when humans were hunter-gatherers, they fasted out of necessity. Food wasn’t available all the time. We would feast after a hunt and then fast until the next successful search.
However, fasting isn’t always out of necessity. Fasting has been shown to have numerous health benefits for thousands of years. A Greek philosopher, Plato, thought that not eating helped him have more physical and mental power. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, believed that fasting could help improve many different health issues.
Fasting is not new. Our bodies have evolved to handle fasting and even to do well while fasting.
Intermittent fasting is a safe and easy way for women to receive the benefits of fasting regularly.
Benefits of Intermittent Fasting for Women
- Supports Fat-Burning and Weight Loss
When you’re fasting, your body isn’t getting energy from food, so it has to find alternative sources. Your body starts to break down stored fat into molecules called ketones after it has burned up the stored glycogen (carbohydrates).
Ketones replace glycogen as fuel for your cells. The more your body becomes accustomed to burning fat, the more efficient it becomes at doing so. Studies show intermittent fasting has been linked with fat and weight loss and may reduce obesity.
- Supports Cellular Renewal and Repair
Fasting has been shown to support the process of autophagy. Autophagy is when your body breaks down and destroys old and damaged cells, which are then recycled for energy. Getting rid of old and unhealthy cells allows your body to create new and healthy cells. This supplement also helps to repair and regenerate cells, reduces the growth of abnormal cells, and keeps your cells and tissues healthy.
- Increases Stem cell Production.
Fasting allows your body to repair, essentially resetting your immune system. Stem cells are responsible for repairing and regenerating your body’s cells, making them essential to keeping you healthy. These cells change into many different types depending on what body parts need to be repaired. Fasting has been shown to increase the number of stem cells in the intestines, muscles, and brain while preserving the long-term ability of those stem cells to regenerate independently. The way this works is pretty unique. Our bodies reduce our energy expenditure by rapidly shrinking tissues, organs, and populations of different cells in our blood, including a 28% decrease in white blood cells when we fast.
- Reduces Inflammation
Most chronic disorders and diseases are caused by chronic inflammation. Fasting can lead to a reduction in the production of inflammatory substances, a reduction in chronic inflammation, and a reduction in overall inflammation. Dropping pounds can have plenty of perks beyond a smaller dress size. Losing weight may improve your physical and mental well-being and reduce your risk of developing certain diseases.
- Improves Energy
If you become used to using fat as a source of energy and experience ketosis through fasting, your energy will improve. The improvement is caused by mitophagy, when old, damaged, or dysfunctional mitochondria are broken down and replaced with new and healthy mitochondria.
Mitochondria are the energy factories in all our cells. Improving your mitochondrial health can help your cells produce more energy and efficiency.
- Supports the Gut
If you give your gut a break from food, it will have a chance to rest. Digestion takes a lot of energy. When you don’t eat for some time, your body can use that energy to repair itself.
Fasting helps your intestines produce stem cells, which enables you to recover from leaky gut syndrome and brings your body back into balance.
- Improves Insulin Sensitivity
Insulin is a hormone that regulates the level of sugar in the bloodstream. Frequently consuming carbohydrates (sugars) increases insulin resistance and inflammation.
Insulin is a hormone that regulates the transportation of glucose in the body. It is responsible for delivering glucose to cells and tissues, which are then used for energy. When sugar gets locked out, it has nowhere to go except your liver, where it’s converted to fat. When you have too much sugar in your bloodstream, your cells stop responding to insulin, which means the sugar cannot enter the cells. The sugar is then sent to the liver and converted to fat. We call this “insulin resistance” or “pre-diabetes.”
When your cells are no longer responding to insulin, your body produces even more insulin to force your cells to let in more sugar. You will ruin the pancreas’s insulin-producing cells if you keep eating sugar.
Without the ability to make insulin, your body cannot process glucose properly, leading to diabetes – a potentially fatal condition. IF can help improve the way your body uses blood sugar.
- Lowers the Risk of Chronic Disease
Fasting reduces chronic inflammation in your body. It could help prevent chronic disorders and diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, metabolic problems, obesity, hormonal issues, infertility, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.
- Improves your relationship with food
A common problem in our modern world is that people mindlessly snack, emotionally eat, binge eat, overeat, and crave unhealthy, sugary junk food.
When you start intermittent fasting, you may notice that you no longer depend on food to cope when you’re bored, stressed, or emotional.
Fasting may help to fix food addictions and change your brain chemistry. IF allows you to become more mindful about what you eat.
- Boosts Human Growth Hormone
A recent study found that fasting for 24 hours increased levels of human growth hormone (HGH) by 2000% in men and 1300% in women.
HGH is essential for creating, sustaining, and repairing healthy tissue in the brain, bones, and other organs. It also helps heal injuries faster and repair muscle tissue after working out.
HGH builds muscle mass, boosts metabolism, and burns fat. Your human growth hormone levels (HGH) naturally decrease as you age. This makes it even more important to take dietary steps to maintain and increase your HGH levels.
HGH has been shown to reduce sagging and wrinkles and thus slow the skin’s aging process.
- Increases BDNF, “Miracle-Gro for your brain.”
BDNF is a hormone that helps the brain create new neurons. Harvard Neuropsychiatrist John J. Ratey deemed it “Miracle-Gro for the brain.”
Intermittent fasting has been found to increase levels of BDNF, which is associated with improved mood, higher cognitive ability, increased productivity, and better memory. Additionally, intermittent fasting has been shown to decrease the risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, and Parkinson’s.
BDNF gets a boost from fasting because it helps to form new neural networks rapidly.
Nerve cells in the brain firing together form a network that creates new thoughts, memories, or skills. We include these networks very quickly in emergencies when we’re under stress.
We are in a state of controlled threat when we are fasting. The exact list of benefits from the stress that includes stem cell production, HGG, and autophagy is also likely from the trigger of BDNF.
Why Fasting Can Be Harder for Women
Dr. Aastha Kalra, a New York-based physician, says that some weight gain could be related to hormones. This hormone affects other hormones in the body, which then affects the function of the ovaries in a woman and the testes in a man.” There is a hormone in everyone’s body called gonadotropin-releasing hormone, which affects the hormones that control the ovaries in women and the testes in men. The gonads produce sex hormones in response to gonadotropins. For females, this causes the ovaries to release progesterone, and in males, it causes the testes to produce testosterone.
The process is highly regulated in women as it’s involved in ovulation, which is reliant on the fluctuations of hormones throughout the menstrual cycle. This text says that it is easier for women than men to have their gonadotropin-releasing hormone disrupted by changes in their habits and routines. So if a woman skips a meal, she may feel more discomfort than a man.
Research has shown that women have higher levels of a protein called kisspeptin, which makes them more sensitive to fasting. Logically, the hormonal shift from fasting can affect metabolism, though more research is needed on this topic.
This is only one possible explanation, and Dr. Kalra pointed out that more research is necessary. However, some rodent studies have found that fasting negatively affects females, and there is limited research on humans, which suggests that women find it more difficult to suppress hunger during fasts.
A few studies have found interesting differences in how the nervous system responds to fasting: men became more relaxed, while women became more stressed.
Intermittent Fasting Strategies for Women
Simple Fast
If you’re new to intermittent fasting, a good strategy is to start fasting for a short period. This is an excellent option if you’re worried about your blood sugar levels. This approach is for you if you’re looking to cut down on late-night snacking, emotional eating, or unhealthy food cravings. The Simple Fast involves a relatively short–12-hour–fasting window. This window includes your overnight sleep. Don’t eat anything after dinner; wait until breakfast the next day to eat again.
Brunch Fast
If you are doing well with the Simple Fast, you may want to extend your fasting window to a Brunch Fast. This fast includes 14 hours of fasting window where breakfast becomes more of a late breakfast or brunch.
Crescendo Fasting
Crescendo Fasting. This exercise is not as demanding on female bodies as other types, but it helps lower inflammation, burn fat, and increase energy.
Crescendo fasting is an alternate-day strategy. It would be best if you only were fasting on 2 to 3 days out of the week, and they should not be consecutive days. During non-IF days, you usually eat.
On fasting days, try to eat within an 8-hour window and fast for 16 hours following the 16:8 rule.
Intermittent Feasting
When most people talk about intermittent fasting, there’s a lot of emphasis on not eating. However, our eating window is just as important.
Feasting (the eating window) is the time to nourish your body with nutrient-dense foods. Healthy animal fats and proteins will balance your hormones, reduce inflammation, improve your immune system, support cellular growth, aid lean tissue development, and support emotional health.
Nourish your body with anti-inflammatory, nutrient-dense foods, including healthy fats, grass-fed butter and ghee, grass-fed beef, pasture-raised eggs, wild-caught fish, and wild game.
For women, it’s also essential to pay attention to your menstrual cycle. It may be best to put the fasting aside and only feast when ovulating (days 12 to 16) and during the week before your period (days 22 to 28). Feasting during these times helps to support the increase in estrogen and progesterone taking place in your body.
However, on an HFLC diet, you may not need to stop fasting. This is because the healthy fats and cholesterol you get from nutrient-dense animal foods provide the building blocks for your reproductive hormones.
Conclusion
Most data indicate that both men and women benefit from improved insulin sensitivity and body composition. Although the process is not recommended for use by pregnant women, lactating women, or women with irregular periods, some diabetics and women with insulin resistance have reported benefits from using the IF.
Many find success with it but remember that it’s individual: there’s no reason to try fasting if it’s something that you feel will add anxiety to your life or if you feel it will disturb your relationship with food.
