Episode 7: Unusual NSVs, IF for Health, Losing Diet Brain, Fasting and Muscle, Window Length, and More

Welcome to Fast Feast Repeat Intermitten Fasting for Life. I'm Jen Stevens, author
of the New York Times bestseller Fast Feast Repeat, and I'm Sherry Bullock,
longtime Intermitten Faster and health and wellness advocate. Please keep in mind that this
podcast is for educational and motivational purposes only and is not intended to provide medical
or diagnostic advice. Jen and I are not doctors, so make sure to
check with your trusted healthcare professionals before making changes, especially when it comes to
any medical treatments or medications. Whether you're new to intermitten fasting or an experienced
Intermitten Faster, or tune in each week to get inspired, to learn,
and have some fun along the way. Hi, everybody, we are so
glad you're here today. Welcome to this week's episode of the Fast Feast Repeat,
Intermitten Fasting for Life Podcast. How are you doing today's Sherry, I'm
doing great. This is the first time we have recorded since your wonderful visit.
I know we had such a good time. We did have a great
time, we really really did. We had delicious meals, we had beach
days, we did some shopping, I miss y'all already. Shout out to
Christy who came with you. Yes, it was so great just to get
away and to be there and to spend time with you. Our minds meshed
so well. So it's nice to see each other in person. I realize
like we're still on the same page with things and yep, zero stress,
Like we had no stress, not at all. And you know, my
husband's such a planner that he wakes up in the morning and he went every
minute of every day planned out, which drives me insane because I am a
spontaneous person and I hate being super regimented. I hate feeling locked in,
and I love that we just woke up and we spent time in the community
and then we just let the days unfold. Absolutely and we celebrated your fiftieth
birthday, Yes we did. I'm still wrapping my brain around that. I
don't feel fifty, so it's just it's weird, seems foreign to me.
But I saw a sign yesterday. I was at that little farmer's market and
surf side. There was a sign that said, what let me see if
I can say it, it said, if you didn't know how old you
are, how old would you be in your mind or something like that.
Oh, I would still one hundred percent be thirty years old. Yeah,
yeah, if you didn't know your age, how old would you be?
My chiropractor said you turned thirty eight? Right, and I said, yes,
I did. I am thirty eight forever. Sure that sounds good.
But I like being in my fifties because it just seems so like and I
love saying it. And I'll be fifty four on what is It Sunday?
I don't even know you like the shock factor that you're a young fifty something.
I really really do. So I want to talk real quick about something
that listeners might be noticing all of a sudden for the past month because we're
recording those one month out, and that is the programmatic ads that might be
popping in. What is that? You know how when you listen to the
radio and you get ads and they just show up in your radio. We
have joined forces with the new podcast hosting platform that has targeted programmatic ads,
and I wanted to explain how those ads get chosen and Sherry and I have
nothing to do with any of those ads. It's all based on you,
your location, your browsing, habits. I don't know whatever big brother knows
about you. That's how you get ads. Like I was just listening Sherry
right before we started recording. I went into episode three came out today,
so you can see we're four weeks out. I was listening to it and
I got an AD for Myrtle Waves water park, like it knows where I
live. I thought that was fun. Well, I like that. I
like that, you know, if it's recommending something to me, it's something
that could be potential, you know, useful to me. Like maybe it's
a new restaurant in my area I didn't know about, or you know,
a new functional medicine doctor in my area that I didn't know about. I
mean, like, who knows what it would be. But I like it
that it's some thing that I may need. You know, ads are unnecessary,
evil and they help keep programming alive. So it's nice to know that,
you know, if I'm listening to a thirty second AD, it's something
that I could actually learn something from. I wanted to point something out about
them, though you might get something here and they're weird, and you might
think, why in the world would Gen and Sherry allow this ad to play
on their podcast like it might be something that feels off brand for us,
and that's true, it could happen. That's with programmatic targeted ads, we
don't get to choose them. And so in contrast, any ads that are
in our voices that are going to pop in, if it's an AD read
by Sherry or an AD read by me, those are the ones we do
endorse. So just keep that in mind. You know, if you get
an AD for, you know, an autoparts store, that's not because Sherry
and I were like, hey, let's get some autoparts ads. You're you
know, for whatever reason it might think you need autoparts. I don't know,
But just keep that in mind. So we don't know what ads you're
getting. And Sherry and I are getting different ads when we listened to and
like I said, it was a lot of fun to get one for Myrtle
Waves. Well yesterday I had one for Planet Fitness, and you know I
love to work out and I'm all about weightlifting. But if you're not,
it's not a message from Jen and I telling you to go join the gym.
Yeah, take it with a great assault. Absolutely, So before we
get to our weekly celebration. I have a cautionary tale that I want to
share with permission. Yesterday I was at my hairdressers shout out to Tasha.
Tasha has been doing your bitten fasting since she met me a year ago,
and we were talking about tweaks. She's a podcast listener. I've given her
her some suggestions. She was sharing how her husband just started fast and clean.
That was very exciting, and then she talked about how much she loves
the coffee that she drinks all day long during her fast and it is unfortunately
a fast breaker coffee and shary. You can guess which one I'm talking about,
right, Oh, yes, it has four letters in the name.
It's stoked coffee, Stoked coffee, st Okay. And you know, a
lot of people are very confused about this type of coffee because bottled coffee and
tea products I think are the sneakiest fast breakers out there, because you look
at the label on the front and you think it's just black coffee. It
doesn't have any flavors added that you like. It's not like vanilla cream or
it's not like you know what else, might be almond flavored or something.
It's also not got any sweeteners that you can see, but when you flip
around to the label, it's coffee, water, and natural flavors. And
that is the red flag ingredient on bottled tea products, the red flag ingredient.
It can be other things too, but citric acid is the one they
usually put in bottled tea. So if you're drinking a bottled coffee or tea
product and you think it's just black coffee or you think it's just tea,
look at the ingredients. The only two dance you want to see our coffee
and water or tea and water. So avoid natural flavors. There's one from
Costco that people sometimes get confused by because it has something called coffee extract.
You know, we don't know what that is. And I'm just going to
caution you too. I would always look two things. Always look at your
labels every time you buy it. Because there was a period of time back
when we were on Facebook and the delayed on de Night community where there was
a Starbucks bottled coffee that was fast safe, and suddenly somebody bought a bottle
and it suddenly had an ingredient in it that was no longer fast safe.
And when other people went and pulled their bottle. I don't remember what it
was. It might have been the blonde roast or something. When they went
and pulled their bottle either refrigerator, it did not have that ingredient on it.
So whether it's being manufactured in different facilities across different regions, or they
had changed the ingredient list and that person just had the older variety. So
people manufacturers do change the ingredients up. So I mean, every time you
grab one, it takes two seconds look at it, make sure nothing's changed.
Don't just assume it's always going to be good because it once was.
And then the next thing I want to say, I was shocked. I've
been on an iced tea kick and I went to buy some just regular tea
bags to make my own iced tea at home, and one of them was
designed for iced tea. Or maybe it might have been the cold brew iced
tea. I don't remember for sure which one, but when I flipped over
and looked at the ingredients, it had like natural essence of tea. What
is that, I don't know. I think that's what it was called natural
tea essence or essence of tea or something like that which to me, if
you're saying an essence that's not tea, that is code for something else,
like flavor or I don't know, So I threw that box back on the
shelf and I went with a different variety, so you know, don't just
assume, also because you're picking up black tea that there's nothing else in that
tea bag. And can I throw one more thing out that's confusing about tea?
Yes, that is orange pico tea. Did you know it's going to
say that. Yes, we do get that asked that a lot. So
often people will go to buy tea bags at the grocery store and they'll look
at the back and it says orange pico tea, and they'll like, oh,
no, my tea bags have orange flavor added. And actually, orange
pico is not a flavor of tea. It's just a grade of tea.
It's just a type of actual tea. So tea, why you got to
be so confusing? Yeah? I think mainly like the conventional black teas are
like a blend of black and orange peco te So totally normal. Don't panic.
And now it's time for our weekly celebration. So today we have a
wonderful celebration that comes from c Anddy Bradley, who is part of the Delay
Don't Deny community. She wrote, I joined this community just over an hour
ago as I don't feel anyone else will believe my story. My family certainly
didn't and just looked at me as if I was deluded. I heard the
Lovely Gin on a Zoe podcast in the middle of May and have been listening
to the Intermittent Stories podcast, as well as reading Fast Feast, Repeat and
the two Jason Fung codebooks Long Stray Short. I started IF on the twenty
eighth of May, so I'm just a month in and I have clean fasted
starting on sixteen eight, and then eighteen six, and then this week.
I've done a couple of twenty four hour fasts. For years, I have
had a black lump on my eyelid. It felt huge to me. It
was only a couple of millimeters in diameter, and the doctor said it was
just one of those things and that they would not do anything about it unless
it started to get sore or bothered me, that it was just a factor
of getting old. Anyway. I put makeup on for the first time in
about a week and guess what, it is completely gone. I have so
many questions. How did I not notice it disappearing? Why did I never
take a decent photo of it so I can prove this miracle? Was it
all down to autophagy? Am I just losing my mind? Now? It
could just be coincidence. Yet it's strange, right, I'm wishing you all
minor miracles too well. I love that one so much. You know,
for years now people have come to the communities of reporting different skin changes after
they started fasting, and it happens relatively quickly, yep. And it's things
that you know, things like this like Sandy's doctor didn't know what it was
and said, oh, it's no big deal, we don't know what it
is, and then it just went away. But it's one of those things
that if we put it in a book, like when you do it of
it and fasting, weird things in your skin are going to suddenly disappear.
Like we couldn't say that. I would not be a claim we could make.
But people are finding it, like scars disappear. It's wild. I
think there was somebody who want shared that they had been in an accident or
something, and they had like bad scarring and like scar tissue build up from
the accident, where like they didn't have good mobility of their like shoulder.
I'm thinking they had not been fasting very long when all of a sudden they
realized, like their scars were considerably faded and they had mobility back in their
shoulder that they hadn't had in years. That happened also on an intermittent Fasting
Stories interview, I interviewed a husband and wife and the husband had atrophy in
his left arm. He couldn't apply deodorant for example, using that arm on
his other arm, and he just one meal a day, fast and clean.
He no longer had I mean it was years his arm had been atrophied.
I mean it was amazing just from the clean fast he can now use
that arm. He has his full range of motion. I mean, those
are the kind of things that sound unbelievable, but they're true. Yeah,
we see it all the time. So if you're noticing changes, if you're
nosing in tags going away, or like me, I had a dark spot
that on my skin that was there for a long time that just disappeared,
It's absolutely you can chock it up to fasting. All right, So now
we have a question from a listener. This question is from Julie in Oregon.
She says, I'm fifty four years young and I've been doing intermitt and
fastening for six months and eating low carb for eight months. My starting weight
was two hundred and thirty five pounds and my current weight is one hundred and
seventy five pounds. I'm five to six, and I'm perimentoposal. I take
progesterone and estrogen medication and recently was able to stop taking my blood pressure medication.
My question is how do I get over my obsession with the scale and
how do you suggest that I transition off of keto and into a less restrictive
daily eating menu. I want the freedom to eat what sounds good and what
my body is craving. My diet brain has a pretty strong hold on me
after years of trying all the diets. I know intermitt and fastening the lifestyle
for me, but old habits are hard to break. Thanks, well,
my answer is probably not going to be Gen's answer, and only because I
am more carb sensitive and Gen is not. So I get diet brain.
I would say I was either orthorexic, or on the path the orthorexia.
When I found IF, I had a longer list of foods that I would
not eat than foods that I would, and IF has really cured me of
that. But with that said, I still choose foods that I know make
me feel my best. So I think it comes down to what foods make
Julie feel great. She's been keto, she says, but she wants to
be less restrictive. And I think there is a happy medium. I'm the
person that likes balance. I feel like there's a happy medium between all or
none. I feel like there's a happy medium between keto and eating all the
carbs. I think you can be carbohydrate choosy, and I mean that by
saying, choose your carbs wisely. Choose the ones that aren't going to spike
your blood sugar, that aren't going to make you sleepy after eating that aren't
going to make you ravenous after eating them. You know, really focus on
pairing your carbs, you know, with protein, fat, and fiber,
because that helps your body digest them more slowly so that they don't affect you
as strongly. And you know, choose whole food carbs and that to me
is the way of having like the best of both worlds. Yeah, I
don't think our answer is completely different at all. I don't think it's different.
I think it's very very similar. But the point is what you said
that I completely agree with, and that is you need to find the foods
that make you feel great, Julie. And that is not going to be
necessarily what makes me feel great or what makes Sherry feel great. You may
actually feel better at a more keto ish kind of eating, or maybe not.
Sometimes people are really surprised when they because they think keto is the way
they're supposed to eat, and then they realize over time it's not. But
like I want to illustrate how Sherry and I ate when we were together the
last night, is that when we went to Pizza Hiena was at the last
night. Yes, so we're at Pizza Hyena and we'd eaten, you know,
pretty well the whole time, and we actually weren't all that hungry.
We did a little food tasting tour around Merl's Inlet and Surf Side, so
we had kind of we snacked through our window at different restaurants. It was
fun and it ended up being real what only like seven hours total. It
still wasn't that long. Oh, I think it was less than that.
I think we were surprised at what it was. Yeah, we ended up
at Pizza Hyena with our friend Chris. Shout out to Chris, she lives
nearby. You're one of my real world friends locally. And at Pizza Hyena,
we just ordered like some appetizery kind of things because we weren't super hungry
for a whole meal. And I ordered pretzels with beer cheese, and she
re ordered meat balls and she's like, I got out some meat. I
need some meat. And I'm like, I don't want any of that.
I didn't need any of the meat ball. I didn't want it. I
wasn't craven it. But you know, that goes to show that you need
to figure out what works for you. Sherry had not had enough meat.
She needed some meat. She ate some meat. And losing diet brain is
tricky, but it comes with learning to trust yourself. Sherry said something important,
and that was choose foods that don't make you super duper sleepy after you
eat them. Well, I have realized recently, and it all came back.
I did a whole food plant based experiment for two months from October through
the end of December of twenty twenty two, and when I added back everything
that I had just experimented with not eating, I have realized, for example,
eggs make me really really sleepy. That sounds crazy, And in fact
I said that on intermitt and Fasting stories and somebody was like, are you
sure it didn't the bread you're eating the eggs with. I'm like, trust
me, I promise you bread doesn't make me sleepy. Sure you can attest
to that, right? Yeah. I couldn't just sit there and eat bread
and cheese like I feel like Jin could live off bread and cheese. I
don't know how she does it. I mean, i'd not to say I
don't love bread and cheese, but it's just not satiating for me. Oh
my god, it's so satiating for me. I have really strong cravings for
meat, like that is what my body wants. When people say, oh,
I just can't eat enough potatoes, that's never been me. I'm the
person that really needs meat and delicious sauces and vegetables. I'm like, I
crave vegetables. I crave a big green salad. So I think your body.
If you really just start listening to what your body wants and then like
just noticing how it makes you feel, like you'll figure out how your body
is designed to eat. And then something else. I wanted to say,
if you're coming off of keto and you're going to be less restrictive, you
are probably going to see some weight gain change on the scale. Not to
say that you have gained fat because you stopped eating keto. You need to
give your body time to balance it out. You are going to gain water
weight when you start eating carbohydrates again. I mean, like I honestly,
once you switch, it's going to take some time for you to sort it
out and figure out you know, what's what and what you want to eat
and how much you want to eat, and it's going to take time for
the scale to balance back out. Like I wouldn't even panic about anything on
the scale for like, I'm gonna say six weeks after you switch eating styles,
and for me it four pounds is what I know my body with water
weight, it's four pounds. Whenever I would try low carb in the past,
I mean, I'm not ever going to do it again because I know
it's not how my body prefers to be. But back in the day,
prior to intermittent fasting, I would dabble in low carb because it seemed like
it's got to work for everybody, right. I would immediately lose four pounds,
never lose another pound. And then the day I started eating carbs again,
there were those four pounds back again. And so that's just my body's
fluctuation range. When I restrict carbs four pounds of water weight. When I
add them back, here's those four pounds again. That is definitely something to
keep in mind. So don't let that freak you out. Just like Sherry
said, and you know you talk about your obsession with the scale. Now,
Julie, we're going to talk about this when we get to Tweak of
the Week this week, so keep listening. I'm going to talk about how
to get rid of your obsession with the scale. But I want to tell
you something here. I did some math. You have been doing intermittent fasting
for six months, in low carb for eight months, and you started at
two thirty five. I am assuming that was when you were eight months ago
when you started low carb. Now you're one seventy five. You have lost
sixty pounds in eight months or six months, depending on when the starting weight.
I'm assuming like I said that it was eight months. You've lost sixty
pounds in eight months. That is incredibly quick. So I definitely want you
to if you're feeling like the scale is not working well for you, it
actually is. That is an incredibly fast right of loss. So I wanted
to point that out. I know it's hard when you don't trust your body
and you don't trust that you know you have found the answer, but at
some point you have to really just turn yourself over to the process and realize,
like, this is bigger than me. I cannot micromanage this. All
I can do is fast, clean every day and eat delicious, nutritious food
and let the scale work itself out. I like to think of it as
relaxing into the process. You know, sometimes people think trust the process means
you just do one thing and you just keep doing that and you know it's
going to work. But that's not actually true. Trust the process doesn't mean
well, I'm just gonna have a five hour eating window and that's gonna work.
You might need to do some tweaking. That's why we say tweak it
till it's easy. Trusting the process doesn't mean you do one thing and that's
going to be the thing you have to tweak. We have an entire toolbox
full of intermittent fasting strategies, and also food is a very important part of
that toolbox. And what works for you, what works for me. You
know, yesterday, Sherry, I went to that farmer's market and I bought
this amazing loaf of like sourday, like artisan sour day bread with garlic and
olives. Oh my god, it was so good. They like have this
fermenting process. It was so good. I opened, I had a daily
harvest bowl. I had some of that bread. By the time dinner time
rolled around, I was still so satisfied from that delicious bread had a little
butter on it, and my daily harvest bowl. I just had a little
bit of my dinner. I was so full and satisfied. I had no
meat at all yesterday, and I was fine. Somebody might be completely the
opposite of me, and they're not satisfied until they have meat. So again,
just as Sherry said, Julie, I'm saying the same thing. Learn
to trust your body, go within. You are the expert, and what
makes you feel great? Not me, not Sherry, not the Keto diet
people, not anybody, but you. And so you can figure out what
makes you feel great and don't let the scale be your feedback of what's working
in what's not working day to day. So many people are really like they
really just don't know, like you really just don't know because they have lost
faith in their body and they have lost faith in their intuition regarding food,
or they've restricted so long that they just really don't know what foods make them
feel well. And if that's you, I really can't stress enough keep a
journal for like even two weeks. And I'm not saying way and measure your
food and count your calories. That's not what I'm telling you at all.
I'm telling you. Notate how you felt before you opened your window, Notate
what you ate, and then notate how did it make you feel an hour
or two hours after you ate it, And how did your fast go the
next day? If once you're fat adapted, you know, like I know,
I woke up starving this morning. I could have very easily eaten breakfast
this morning. I had too much sugar in my window yesterday. It was
my husband's day off, and he was encouraged, you mean to eat all
sorts of foods I should not have eaten. And I was being having a
lazy day at home with him, and I indulged. And I knew when
I was doing it, I was going to feel it today, and I
did it anyway, and I sure did feel it this morning. Now got
that cause of effect figured out, I have now flipped the switch and I
feel great, But this morning I was white knuckle on it, just like
a new faster. So those are the things I know. So if you
can put those pieces together, it can really help you. Jen and I
have heard some information that is circling in the intermittent fasting world, and so
we want to talk about that this week. So it recently came to our
tension that a well known fasting advocate who's a physician who focuses on improving health
span and longevity for his patients, may have recently changed his tune about I'm
going to a quote fasting. So knowing that there had to be more to
the story than that he just woke up one day and suddenly didn't believe in
the science of fasting, we did some searching and we undercovered some articles and
like a transcript from a podcast, and so we want to dig into that
a little bit today and hopefully as we share with you some of the questions
we had, you will start to learn what questions you should be asking when
you hear people make broad blanket statements about fasting, and I want to pop
in to say this. We have decided not to say who it is because
you know, we don't want anybody to get more confused. And if you
have heard this person speaking, you've probably heard it and you know who we're
talking about. And if you haven't, then you don't. We don't want
to send you down, you know, rabbit holes. And we also I
never liked to feel like I'm talking about somebody behind their back. I mean,
we heard a podcast, it's not behind their back. I never want
to speak negatively about someone else in the space because as we start digging into
what he said, I actually agree with what he says, which you might
be like, what, because we're talking about things in different ways. But
I knew we had to talk about this when my brother in law called me
on the phone and said, oh my god, because he does intermitt and
fastening. He said, oh, my gosh, I just listened to this
doctor whose name we're not going to say, on a podcast. He also
is promoting a new book, by the way, so he's going on a
lot of shows, and he said some things about fasting and muscle loss,
and now I'm really scared, and I'm like, well, you know,
I don't understand why he said that. We're going to have to dig in.
So that was when Sherry and I started digging in to figure it out.
But I could assure you everybody, first of all, that if you're
doing intermitt and fasting the way that Sherry and I recommend that you do it,
you're not going to have muscle loss. It's not a concern. And
we know this anecdotally. We've had so many people like I just interviewed someone
for intermitt and fasting stories last week, and she is so lean and strong
and building so much muscle, and she gets a dexa scan every three months
and she doesn't etten fasting. She has a pretty tight window. But she
works out hard, she eats every day, she eats, you know,
sufficient protein for her body, and she is finding every three months when she
gets her dexa scan that she has lost more fat and built more muscle.
So you know, I know all sorts of stories like that, and so
that doesn't job with what this doctor is suddenly saying that, you know,
fasting is going to lead you to have muscle loss, So let's dig in.
So yeah, I mean, like the first few questions, like Jin
and I both have the same questions, is like, Okay, what made
him change his tune? And these are the kinds of questions I ask anytime
a research article comes out this as a research article shows YadA, YadA,
YadA. My very first question is what kind of fasting are they referring to?
Because the term fasting can be used in so many various ways, and
I always wonder are they clean fasting? Are they getting the benefits of a
clean fast? Or are they doing the cream and sugar free sweeteners while they're
fasting? Are they having bone broth? Are they doing a juice fast?
You know, So it's really important to figure out what the parameters are that
a person is evaluating whether or not fasting does this or that. So this
person he has changed his tune based off of his personal experience, based off
of what he personally has based off of how he fasts and in his experience
with his body based off of the way he fasts. So he was personally
doing three day monthly fasts and seven day quarterly multi day fasts. So I
mean, let's think about it. He's doing a seventy two hour fast once
a month, and in every quarter on top of that, he's doing a
seven day fast, and over three years of doing this, he estimates that
he lost ten pounds of muscle mass, and so his concern is that and
this is a founded concern that people need to maintain muscle mass as they age,
which we completely agree with. We absolutely agree with that the more muscle
mass that you lose as you age, it makes you more prone to ousty
porosis, falls, fractures, and we all know that fractures and the elderly
can contribute to mortality. We aren't doing three day monthly fasts, we are
not doing seven day quarterly fasts. We're never going to tell you to do
that. And if you look at the Fasting Red Flags chapter of fast Feats,
repeat, I very very very clear about longer fasts and that you should
never do a fast longer than seventy two hours unless you're under medical supervision.
And even a seventy two hour fast is not to be done for the purpose
of faster weight loss. You're going to have some increased autophogy. But what
really helped me understand that these longer fastening. When I say longer, i'm
talking about anything longer than the fasts related to alternate daily fasting, which are
really like thirty six hours. If you're doing strict alternate daily fasting like the
way it was researched, you're doing like a thirty six twelve right, you're
fasting for thirty six hours, then you're having like a twelve hour eating window.
That's pure alternate daily fasting, and those protocols are very well researched.
But if you're doing anything beyond that, that's when you need to understand.
They're going to be tradeoffs and muscle loss could occur. You know, when
you start getting farther into the fasting, you do need to worry about that.
And so I do not promote that type of fasting. Sherry and I
don't do that type of fasting, and it's a very real concern. There
was a book I read, Oh gosh, what is it? I've got
it over here. I'm trying to find it. Joel Furman. Oh,
here, it is Fastening and Eating for Health, doctor Joel Furman. Have
you seen that when Sherry? Have you ever read it? I have not.
It's a pretty old book. I don't know how long it's been around,
but I read it early in my fasting journey. And doctor Joel Furman
is a huge fan of fasting. Huge He uses it therapeutically with patients and
he's done that probably decades, I think. Anyway, he has people come
and he medically supervises them with fasting, and he loves fasting. But he
said in his book that is pro fasting. You're going to have a slow
metabolic grade if you do this type of extended fasting, and then you're going
to have to be very very careful to refeed and understand what's happened to your
body with this long fasting. And so I had lightbulbs go off when I
read that there is such a thing as overfasting and too much fasting, and
that's what we need to be careful of. And I would say that a
seventy two hour fast once a month and a seven day quarterly multi day fast
would be over fasting based on my understanding. And so this doctor, we
do not disagree with him. He's saying, don't do that. What did
We're also saying don't do what he did. And the other interesting thing is
that in a transcription from an interview that he gave, he stated that he
does not even consider daily if with one meal a day, to be considered
fasting. So he clearly when he says that, you know, he doesn't
think people should fast because of concerns of muscle mass loss, he's not talking
about what we are doing. So again, that's where it's really important to
understand. When somebody says fasting, you need to understand what parameters are they
considering fasting to be. Yeah, he apparently, based on the transcripts that
we've been able to dick up where he talks about this, he thinks of
fasting to be multi day fasts. And so the thing is is that,
you know, words can be used so interchangeably. You know, I didn't
invent the term intermittent fasting, but you know, some people interpret it differently.
Some people think time restricted eating is not intermittent fasting. But if I
go back early into you know, the early reading. Clearly people write about
time restricted eating as a type of intermittent fasting. So you know Venn diagram.
Everybody can picture like a Venn diagram, those circles that overlap. I
think if you asked a bunch of experts to draw Venn diagrams about fasting,
they would look so different because well, I think about it like this.
You can practice intermittent fasting or you can practice intermittently fasting. So if you're
eating normal all month long and then you just take three days off from eating,
you're intermittently fasting, which is a little different than intermittent fasting. That's
the way my brain sees it. Well, It's just it's so much wording,
right, I'd like to also just point out though, so like we
know that with intermittent fasting that we okay, so studies show that fasting leads
to a major increase in human growth hormone levels, and I've seen reports of
a rise of two thousand percent. I've seen five times. I mean,
there's different research articles out there that have, you know, different findings based
off of the parameters of that research, but all in all, it's pretty
well known that fasting increases You're a human growth hormone. What does human growth
hormone do? It helps your body grow, helps your body grow muscles,
It helps make your bones more dense, it helps keep you young. So
if he was just doing these random fasts, which we know you're gonna lose
some muscle mass as a tradeoff of doing that, but then he wasn't daily
intermittent fasting as well, he didn't also didn't get that extra human growth hormone
benefit from the daily intermittent fasting. So like, all in all, I
could look at this from so many different ways and see that what we're doing
and what he's talking about are just drastically different practices, and bottom line,
we do agree with him. So again we agree with him that multi day
fasts done frequently can have some metabolic consequences. It can have some muscle consequences,
and Shary and I do not recommend that you do those types of fasts
for increased weight loss. You need to understand what the trade offs might be.
So again, if you wanted to take a look at fastening and eating
for health, doctor Joel Ferman, like I said, it's an oldie,
but a goodie, based on his experience with people doing fasting. He's also
vegan. I mean, he's a lot about diet. It may not be
the right book for everybody, but the part where he talked about fasting in
his experience with people, you know, if they fasted for multi day,
multi multi multi like twenty one days or something, they ended up with a
slowed metabolism and muscle loss at the end of that. So you just need
to understand overfasting is a problem sharing. I don't recommend it, neither does
this doctor who is talking about fasting in that way. And the lesson that
Sherry said, and I just want to reiterate, is you need to make
sure you understand what they're saying. So if somebody says, you know,
fasting leads to muscle mass loss, how are they defining fasting. If they
think of fasting is seventy two hours and beyond and that's how they define it.
And they think time restricted eating or daily eating window isn't fasting, then
we're talking apples and oranges. We're not using the same words. So just
really try to understand what they're saying. Never get overly reactive to anything you've
heard. Also, as I was talking to my brother in law. I
said, have you experienced muscle loss? And he said no. It said,
well there you go, trust yourself and your experience. I mean,
I have a picture I share in the Delayed and I community where my weight
was not changing for a fifteen month period, and in my head, I
was just like, why can't I get my weight to budge? Why?
I mean, like, I wasn't frantic, but I really wanted to get
my weight down about eight more pounds, right, I'm trying to make my
body do something it wasn't wanting to do. And somebody told me or asked
me, when did you last take a progress photo? And I'm like,
well, I've been in maintenance for a year, so I haven't taken one.
Well I took one and my body was drastically different. And when I
posted it, the people were like, yeah, but you've been lifting weights
and you've been working out really hard, and my response was no, I
have not. I was much more muscular in my fifteen month after photo than
when I first got into maintenance, and all I was doing was rebounding on
my belicon rebounder, which is cardio that's not really muscle building. And I
was doing some yoga a couple of times a week. I was not lifting
weights. It was all just exercise that made me feel great. I mean,
it blew my mind. So I attribute that one hundred percent to clean
fasting and the fact that I do choose high quality protein sources and that increase
in human growth hormone that we experience. So if you're worried about muscle mass,
and some people do ask, you know about muscle mass and protein in
this and that or whatever, I mean, it's really pretty simple. We
eat in a window. We have ample opportunity to eat enough protein, and
you don't have to pound protein like Jin's body clearly doesn't need the protein that
my body needs. Jen and I are also built very different. I have
a very muscular, stocky build and Gen has a very slender build. So
yeah, choose high quality protein sources. You know, don't practice super short
windows. Open with some protein in your opening window. Snack, include protein
in your meal. You're going to get your protein meats met. And the
most important thing is stay active and do some resistance training, do lift heavy
things. That's what's going to maintain your muscle mass. Yeah, you've got
to use your muscle to build your muscle, that's key. You know,
Jason Fong has a blog post about protein needs, and you know that's all.
We get a whole episode about protein and how eating too much protein can
cause you to gain fat and all of that. But Jason Fong has a
wonderful article blog post about protein and he says, let's see if I can
figure I'm going to paraphrase it. He said that if you look at the
standard American eating right now and how much protein people are getting throughout their day
based average, that people are consuming more than enough protein. But if eating
protein was all you needed to build strong muscle, that we would have a
muscle epidemic in the United States. But instead we do not have a muscle
epidemic. We have an obesity epidemic. So I just thought that was the
way he says. It is obviously way better than I just said it.
But you know, we're not having it. We're not discussing the muscle epidemic.
We're discussing the obesity epidemic in America. And it's because people are not
obviously a lot of ultraprocessed foods in the standard American diet, but not working
the muscles to build the muscle. So it's a lot more complicated than just
putting the protein in. It doesn't just automatically smash it onto your muscles.
And like I said, quality protein. Get your protein from real food sources,
not protein bars, not protein drinks, not protein water. You know
you can get your protein from you know, quality dairy products, and you
know quality grass fed beef beans, and you know rice and beans is a
perfect protein pairing. So yeah, just focus on eating real foods. Don't
have a super short window and you're going to get your protein meats met So
before we get to our tweak of the week, I just want to take
a minute to tell you about beauty counter. A couple of years ago,
I really started learning about how toxic mainstream health and beauty products really are.
These are products that we are putting on our skin, the bodies large,
just organ every single day, and so many of these products contain ingredients that
are known endocrine disruptors, which can wreck havoc on your hormones, your health,
and actually impair your metabolism, energy, and appetite. This can change
your body's sensitivity to glucose and lipid metabolism, leading to weight gain and weight
loss resistance. With beauty Counter, I can rest easy as they have twelve
safety standards that must be met for all products, and they have a neverlist
of over twenty eight hundred questionable ingredients, seventeen hundred of which are banned in
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as clean beauty is to me, if their products were not highly effective,
I would have kept looking for a different product that met my skins needs.
I had tried several other clean makeup companies before I found beauty Counter, and
they didn't work for me, and I always ended up going back to something
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And my skin looks better at fifty than it did at forty five. So
if you would like to learn more, please visit beautycounter dot com, slash
Sherry Bullock that's one R S H E, R I, B U,
L L O c K, or visit the Lincoln Show notes. By shopping
with me, you do help support this podcast. And now it's time for
our tweak of the Week. And I also told a lie earlier when I
said I was going to talk about weight tracking. That's next week. I
just prepped episode eight before we recorded today, so everybody, I was like,
oh, yeah, we're gonna talk about that later. No, we're
not. After I answered Julie's question this week, I'll talk about weight tracking
next week. So you'll have to tune back in, everybody. But this
week's tweak was actually submitted by Vanessa. She said, I've been fastening since
February of twenty twenty three. Initially I lost twenty eight pounds, but I'm
only five two and wage two hundred and twenty eight. By the way,
February that we're recording this in July, that's like six months twenty eight pounds.
That's not too shabby. I just want to say, and I'm sure
she put this in in June, right, that's pretty good Vanessa of the
word, you know, when we think about, you know, only losing
a certain amount, that's actually very very good. So she said she's only
five to two and weigh two hundred and twenty eight. She said she drank
daily before fasting, said most of the weight loss was inflammation. She's been
stuck at two hundred point two for about a month, which was her motivation
for making the tweek now. I totally get that, Vanessa. I don't
know what it is, Sherry about our scales. It's like they know,
Like I can remember when I was trying to get below one thirty. I
just wanted to see a two. I just wanted to see one two something
one two nine point nine. I don't care. That would have been okay,
but it kept on me one three zero point one, one three zero
point four. I don't It's like our scales mess with us. I just
want to tell Vanessa too, you did not lose twenty eight pounds of inflammation,
honey, give yourself some credit. There's some fat loss happening there,
absolutely so. Anyway, She's been stuck at two hundred point two for about
a which was her motivations for making the tweaks. She said, I've just
realized I was keeping my window too short and not eating enough. I haven't
felt hungry, but the scale hadn't moved in about a month. She said,
I have been now opening my window earlier with a yogurt and granola or
fruit with a little protein, than eating more food at dinner more slowly.
She said, I was eating so fast because I was hungry, I would
feel full fast and then close my window. I've discovered that if I slow
down enjoy the food, I get in more food and I feel better.
When I cram it in, I feel gross. Plus the scale is slowly
moving down again, another non scale victory, slowing down and enjoying little moments.
I love that. I do think some people think it's a race to
get the food in, but you don't get to enjoy it, so your
brain doesn't get the satisfaction of eating. And I think that's important. Our
brains need to feel satisfied. We do need to light up those pleasure centers.
You know, it's really easy to overeat if you eat quickly and then
feel gross, like she said. Yeah, but it's also easy to under
eat if you're keeping yourself to a really, really short window, and that
can cause you to plateau. So Vanessa's right that, you know, you
need to not be such a short regimented window. Open it up a little
bit. And I do want to say something too, you know, she
said she had lost twenty eight pounds over approximately four months, and then the
scale kind of got stuck there, and that is very common. So I
love that she found a tweak. I think this is going to help her
overall, but it could just have been that her body was taking a pause
on weight loss. And we see this a lot. When people lose,
you know, around twenty pounds as in a relatively quick period of time,
a lot of times the body takes a little pause. The body likes homeostasis,
so when things start shifting and changing, the body says, WHOA,
what's happening and it takes a second for it to like kind of recalibrate and
see like, Okay, all is good. I'm getting fed, I'm not
sick, I don't need to conserve calories, and then it starts to release
weight again. Yes, absolutely true. Well, this week we have an
inspirational quote from Patricia Cherry who lives in Plumouth, UK, and we'd love
to leave you guys with some inspiration to go into your next week. The
quote is the only thing that's here to stay is change. This meme has
been my mantra for many years and it has seen me through many of life's
ups and downs. It means accepting that life moves on. I don't believe
in quote the good old days. I believe strongly that we need to be
grateful for everything. Even the downtimes can be learning curves, and that's right.
Life is continually changing and we just have to change and roll with it.
Thanks so much for listening today. We would love to have you join
us the Delayed on Tonight community, where you can interact with both me and
Shay plus the most supportive bunch of intermittent fasters you'll find anywhere. Go to
Jen Stevens dot com slash community to join us. Don't forget to subscribe to
this podcast to your favorite podcast app, and if you haven't already, please
leave us a five star review that helps new listeners find the show and we
really appreciate it. We are a community driven podcast, so to submit your
success stories, your questions, your favorite tweak it till It's Easy, moments,
or anything else you want us to share on the podcast, go to
Fast Feast Repeat dot com slash submit and then listen each week to see if
we share your submission or answer your question until next week. Thanks for listening, m