Name: Why women should FAST differently than men… | Exercise & Nutrition Scientist Dr Stacy Sims
Uploaded: 2025-01-07T14:41:11.000Z
Duration: 7 min 57 s
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So this is the big debate, right? So we look at fasting and where it first came out and it's like, okay, we see that obese sedentary individuals who had to lose weight rapidly for surgery, they're put on a fasting type program to lose weight quickly in order to survive surgery.

And unfortunately, a lot of those times we look at clinical research and it gets transposed over to health and fitness without actually asking if it's viable. So then we look at the lower end of the fitness population. People are just learning to move and wanting to move. And like, I also want to lose more body fat so that I can move better. Oh, I'll start fasting. And when we see a lot of the like push on it, it comes from male data again. So when we start looking at women and a lot of women used to come with their partners to see me and say, I don't understand. We're both doing the same kind of fasted training. He's leaning up and getting fitter. I'm putting weight on and getting slower. I'm like, okay, well we have to separate it out, right? If you're a woman, you want to fast for all the health reasons that we hear about with regards to telomere length, improving longevity, improving our body's metabolic control. Then we work with our circadian rhythm where we stop eating at dinner. So we have dinner and we don't eat two to three hours before bed.

We have the overnight fast. And then you want to have food within a half an hour of waking up to blunt that cortisol peak. That's natural upon waking for men. You can have variations of fasting.

You can do intermittent fasting. You can do a warrior fasting and you can still have benefit.

But for women, we look at the data and if we were to do a warrior fast, which is a 20 hour fast, four hour eating window for men, we see more parasympathetic drive. So they get that more focus. They have better blood glucose control. They get an acceleration of body fat loss. They become more metabolically flexible, meaning their body's able to transfer between carbohydrate and fat utilization for women doesn't happen that way for women who do a warrior fast. So that's 20 hour fasting and four hour eating window. They end up with less blood sugar control. We have higher resting blood glucose. We have more fat storage. We have more sympathetic drives. That means the body's under stress and you're not going to be able to sleep or recover well.

And we see a downturn of the thyroid within four days of doing this. So when we're looking at the data of fasting, again, it's pulling from the men and generalizing to the women. But when we start really looking and narrowing it down and looking at female specific data, the type of fasting that's out there in the health and fitness world is not appropriate for women.

But you would say that the sort of overnight fast, eating dinner at an earlier time.

Six o'clock and then eating breakfast when you wake up at say eight in the morning or nine or something.

What about the like three day fast you hear about to get into like autophagy or whatever it is?

Exercise is a stronger stimulus for autophagy than fasting. Because if we look at exercise in itself is a fasting state. What happens during exercise, you start exercising, your body is trying to provide fuel. So it's breaking down fat, it's breaking down glucose, it's breaking down amino acids. It's also creating in a recovery standpoint, a boost of growth hormone, a boost of testosterone in both men and women that creates the cell cleanup, which is autophagy, right?

So if we're looking at the difference between fasting and exercise, exercise is a stronger stress. All the things that we hear about fasting and longevity, exercise does the same. It's a stronger stimulus for it. But the problem is we've become a lazy society and people think exercise is too hard. As an exercise physiologist, it breaks my heart to see people who are struggling to walk down the street because we are so used to being conditioned to a certain temperature in a room to having a car automatic opener or Uber come so we don't have to walk down the road.

And I bring up that movie WALL-E from the early 2000s with the little robot who's like wandering around society and you see all these people on these floating beds watching a screen and one of the guys gets kicked off by WALL-E accidentally, falls down, he can't get up. And he's looking around going, why can't I get up? What's going on? I'm like, that's today's society where people are not able to actually pull their own body weight around for a significant amount of time because it feels too difficult. Whereas we look at all the stuff that comes out with nutrition and all the trends that come out with nutrition from fasting to carnivorous diet to the old-fashioned paleo, all of these things that people are trying to do, we turn to exercise and we change the modalities of exercise. Are we doing intense exercise? Are we doing low intensity? Are we doing resistance training? Are we doing cardio? What are we doing? All of these things in exercise are significantly stronger stress on the body that create more adaptive changes than all these crazy diets. But people find exercise too hard where they don't have time. So if I, in that example where a man and woman come to you, you would, you wouldn't recommend the woman to fast in the same way that you'd recommend a man to fast. Is there any differences that you'd recommend in training if they were, if their goal was to lose weight? Yep, absolutely. So when we're looking at, regardless of age for women, because we see that women don't age in a linear fashion like men.

So we had definitive points. We have puberty. We have our reproductive years. We may not have pregnancy in there. We have perimenopause. We have postmenopause. Each one of those is a different hormone profile that can affect the way we train. For men, you know, you just kind of go, phew, and we start to see a decline of testosterone. We get into our late fifties.

So we're talking about women and training. If someone is coming in and they're in their mid thirties and they're like, I want to lose weight. Okay. Resistance training. If someone comes in and they're in their mid forties and perimenopause resistance training, it doesn't matter.

Resistance training is key for mobilizing abdominal fat and for creating more lean mass and also increasing the amount of crosstalk between their skeletal muscle and our stored fat through little things called myokines, which are hormone signals that are released during exercise and released from the skeletal muscle. So if we say, okay, let's do resistance training to really re-comp the body. We also want to increase our protein intake because we see if you're doing resistance training with a higher protein intake, then we have complete re-comp over the course of 12 weeks. And it's a very powerful motivating tool for women because for the most part, women have been excommunicated from the strength world until recently.

It wasn't kosher for women to have a lot of muscles. We see, like I grew up in the nineties with the supermodels that were super skinny, right? And it wasn't kosher for women to be in the gym lifting weights, but we're seeing this evolution change. And so we're starting to see more research come out in women in resistance training. And it's so imperative for body composition change to invoke that resistance training.

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