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sometimes include data and research in the show notes if you are interested in that, but it will not be strictly as research heavy as it has been in the past. And what I mean by that is while my opinions on a lot of these things were really influenced by a lot of the research I read, I won’t just be quoting the statistics, data, and studies related to what I’m talking about. I will be more so sharing my personal experience with it, what I do, kind of my own opinion with the caveat that it is just my opinion.
Now, as always with these episodes, I want to preface by saying that this is strictly for inspiration and information. This is not at all in any way for comparison or medical advice. I’m certainly not a doctor. I don’t play one on the internet. If anything, I say over and over that we are each our own primary healthcare provider, and I encourage you to take the ownership of that decision entirely and work with practitioners who can be great partners in that.
I also, of course, believe we are each unique. So all of these episodes are with the caveat that I’m sharing my unique experience from my own perspective. And while it can maybe serve as a source of inspiration for your own experimentation, it’s in no way meant to be a blueprint or anything that’s followed directly by someone else. Simply just as a starting point for kind of your own experimentation, your own N of one kind of study.
Now, I’m also going to be doing these in video format so that we get to actually kind of see each other more in this way. And you’ll have to pardon me as I grow with this new format and learn to be entirely off the cuff without notes. I do today have some notes. So if you see me look down and if you’re watching the video, that is why. But I’m going to try to do that as little as possible.
So in this inaugural episode, I wanted to talk about something that’s extremely relevant to me right now. As I’m in the middle of, as you were listening to this, I am embarking on my yearly water fast and I’ve written about this before, I’ve podcasted about this before, and I’ve gotten a lot of questions about this. And it’s also not something I’ve talked super in-depth about other than quoting studies. And I know that fasting, especially for women, is a somewhat controversial topic. So again, this is not in any way advice. I’m just going to share my perspective and what I do and what I have found helpful. This for me, for many years, has been a new year practice to do a water fast. Over the years, they’ve varied from just a few days to the longest I ever did was 10 days, which was quite difficult.
And I originally started doing this for several reasons. One was the health benefits of autophagy and of just giving our bodies a break from digestion for a little while. Again, that is controversial, especially for women. So I’m not saying everybody needs to do this by any means. For me, during my healing phase of my journey, it was really helpful. But actually, what I found the bigger benefit and the reason I still return to my yearly water fast, even though I don’t feel like it’s needed for healing anymore, is for the sort of inner and mental and emotional benefits that I feel from it. From stoic philosophers to even in research, I think there’s a lot of things pointing to that if we cannot be controlled by our desire for food, not that we need to be in a forceful based control of it either, but if we can release and surrender a little bit of the control that food has over us, that kind of is a first step in sort of this inner control that then shows up other areas in our life.
And because I think food is one of the big signaling mechanisms, something that we do multiple times per day, when, at least for me, when I take that variable away, I notice its absence. It gives me more time to think. I certainly become aware of being hungry, of the desire for food, and get to sort of observe and look at the difference between when I feel physical hunger, also when I feel a craving or more of an emotional or, you know, just like an inner desire for food because it’s a pattern. I get to watch and see like, what is it that I desire to eat?
And I even started making a list of those things as just to observe. It’s kind of fascinating to see the things that my body would tend to crave. Maybe look at what those things tend to have in them. Maybe are there nutrient needs my body’s talking to me about? Perhaps those are emotional foods. I feel like emotions through the experience of a fast. So all that to say, while I do feel that water fasting especially does have health benefits when done correctly, I now do this once a year, mostly for the mental and emotional benefits.
I do now actually think for women, especially shorter fast or more just longer time restricted feeding windows can be actually more helpful. And I do feel like one thing I didn’t get right in the past, and I’m more careful of now is not letting fasting be a stress signal for the body. I feel like when we get into the talk about fasting being harmful, or especially for women, this is actually a lot of what we’re looking at in that if we’re already in a state, like a nervous system state of stress, if our body is already perceiving that something is going on, and then we add fasting, we’re essentially sort of communicating a famine situation to our body. We’re adding to our stress load. And that, as you might guess, is probably not ideal for our hormones, for our nervous system. And when we are in that kind of heightened state of stress, our body’s not primed and optimal for healing and for resting and digesting.
So now one thing I am doing even though I’m still choosing to do it one longer fast, is I’m preloading that by making sure that the few weeks ahead of time, I’m really focused on nourishing my body, getting enough protein and micronutrients, which I’ll do a podcast about my whole theory about that soon, but really just focused on making sure my body is maximally nourished every single day for weeks leading up, making sure my stress levels are good, that my sleep is really solid, that I’m sending my body all the signals of safety so that when I do add a stressor of fasting for say a week, my body’s in a place to be able to handle that and hopefully to be able to keep that in a range where it’s more hormetic stress and not in any way damaging.
That said, I do not think that long fasts like that are necessary for women. I do acknowledge that it might, by the end of that, be really difficult on my body and I am fully confident in my body’s ability to quickly recover from that and to get back into a calmer nervous system state, but that didn’t happen overnight.
I’m also going to be much more intuitive this time and listen to my body. So if I receive any signals from my body that it is absolutely done with that fast, even if mentally I want to go longer, I will listen to my body. And that, being able to say that out loud has been a big part of a journey for me, because certainly that’s not something I would have been able to pay attention to and do 10 years ago or even five years ago.
I’ve talked on this podcast before about the journey of learning to become friends with my body. And I say on here often, our body’s always on our side. That was a tough learned lesson for me as someone who used to have autoimmune disease, who used to say, my body is attacking itself, and who had to learn and I’m now so grateful for the fact that my body is always, always on my side.
It is always, always working toward optimal health, toward my best interests, toward keeping me safe and healthy. So if that is not happening in the way that I want it’s a wonderful opportunity to get curious, to learn from my body, to ask what it needs that I’m not giving it or what it has that it doesn’t want that I can remove. Often it’s subtractive, not additive. And that’ll be actually another episode coming soon. But learning to become friends with my body in a way that now I will absolutely listen to it if it shows, it tells me in a clear way that I’m done fasting, then I will be done fasting.
In the meantime, until I get that cue from my body or until I just feel mentally and emotionally complete with the fast, I am learning to lean into it, be grateful for and even enjoy the feeling of letting go of something that is normally a constant multiple times per day in just eating meals and the comfort that comes with that. Of course, the nourishment, the calories, all the things that come with that.
And for me in this week or less period, I’m replacing those times with sort of an experience of gratitude and journaling. So I’m actually doing this multiple times per day. And this part is new for me this year. I’ve had a gratitude practice for a long time, but I’m making it during this fast very intentional because I do feel that in fasting, it’s easy to feel deprivation or to feel the struggle or to feel how hard it is to go without food. So I’m trying to focus and replace that with noticing and feeling gratitude for all of the incredible things in my life, which truly are all of the things in my life, even the things that I might label as hard. So I’m doing a multi-time-a-day gratitude practice, which I do think if we can learn to cultivate gratitude a little bit more in any capacity, even if it’s just a subtle inner whisper, that can have such positive ripples in our life.
And for me personally, to help with that, I love at the beginning of the year, I’ve talked about this before, to reread the book, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. This one has helped me get through all of my yearly water fast, because when I begin by day three or four to feel sorry for myself and think about how difficult fasting feels, and then I get to read his experience in a situation much more difficult, and how he cultivated and found joy, even in those incredibly intense experiences, how he became that source of support and caring and love and joy for other people in the midst of his own working through those struggles. It really helps me to put into context how small the struggle of fasting is, how small really all of the struggles I’ve encountered in my life are. And how grateful I am for all of the incredible things in my life, including the hard things I’ve gotten to experience in my life.
But this year, I’m also rereading a couple of other books that have been really profoundly impactful for me in the past couple of years. One is Awareness by Anthony DeMello, and the other is Power Versus Force by David Hawkins. And I will put links to all of those books in the show notes if you ever want to go on this journey of reading those with me. But I feel like all of those have been personally for me very helpful in the inner journey of surrender that becomes very helpful and noticeable during fasting, but I find is actually helpful in essentially every area of life. And one, certainly I’m still very much learning to cultivate, but enjoying the journey of.
So all that to say, that was more of like kind of the philosophy of fasting. I’ve done podcasts before about the physical benefits of fasting, and I will include links to those if you are interested in going deeper on the science and data side. But like I said, also, I think this one for me and the real benefit I feel now is that the mental, emotional, the resilience, the letting go, the learning even deeper gratitude for the things we take for granted in life, like simply being able to eat multiple times a day when there are people in the world who don’t have that luxury, of getting to notice the absolute pleasures I still have in my life, even when food is gone, of sleeping in a comfortable bed and getting relaxing, cozy sleep and having, you know, comfy jammies and little things or snuggles with my kids or tending to my houseplants and just getting to notice the beauty of them and how much joy they bring me or going for a walk and noticing nature in a new way.
Another topic I will cover in an episode, a solo episode this year will be that kind of the, not just the benefits of nature, but beyond that, how in the modern world, we sort of have the ability to suffer from nature deficit disorder and what we can do about that. Total side note, not related to fasting, but I do actually feel and have become to feel more and more over the last few years, that light might be the most important signaling cue for health, for nervous system safety, for so many things. And so, I think there’s some easy things that we can do that help us have light be used to our advantage. And I feel like this for women, especially from a hormone supporting perspective, can be really, really helpful.
The other thing when it comes to fasting that is kind of a both and that’s, it can be separate from fasting, but also goes hand in hand with especially extended fast is that often in those times, the body will enter a state of ketosis. And this is again, of course, another controversial topic. My personal opinion on this is that ketosis is a metabolic state, that it can be very beneficial. I will link to some resources in the show notes, including podcast episode with Dr. Courtney Hunt that goes deep on this topic. And I love, she has a very unique perspective on this.
I personally don’t feel like ketosis is a place where we want to live every day, all day. But I do think that being able to access the metabolic state of ketosis at times is very beneficial for our bodies and likely how humans have lived throughout most of our history. My personal goal is to become increasingly metabolically adaptive, meaning that I can easily switch into a state of ketosis if needed. I can also easily digest carbohydrates when I want to and use them for energy and that my body is kind of primed and ready to handle whatever inputs I give it.
This of course also hasn’t happened overnight and is still very much a journey for me. But the thing I like about ketosis, and I do monitor my levels when I am fasting. I check both my glucose and my ketones. I have a monitor in my arm right now. I prick my finger to do ketones every morning. This lets me kind of get a gauge of what’s going on inside my body, as well as being able to kind of keep a pulse on what I’m feeling throughout those times as well.
But when we’re in a metabolic state of ketosis, so not just this goes beyond the keto diet, which you can do by eating enough fat and limiting carbs and even protein to a certain degree, ketosis as a metabolic state is kind of like a whole different metabolic thing that’s happening in our body. And a lot of people think that this is a more ideal state for kind of like this deep healing and that we get to kind of experience autophagy a little bit more in ketosis. Autophagy means self-eating. It’s kind of a cellular cleanup state, which is also, of course, a benefit of fasting. We also access autophagy when fasting. Different people have different estimates of when that begins to occur, but certainly by a few days into a fast, our body is kind of in that autophagy process.
I find this interesting, we also get to experience autophagy when we eat in a caloric deficit. Likely often at night, we get to experience autophagy when we don’t eat while we’re sleeping, obviously. When we do follow a more ketogenic diet with the goal of accessing ketosis as a metabolic state, we get to experience increased autophagy.
Another theory I personally have is that our modern diet and 24-7 access to highly palatable foods also means that we are not accessing this state, many of us, very often or ever, because we always have access to food. And likely throughout human history, we didn’t always have access to food 24-7. I feel like we often end up fighting ourselves with willpower over this. And what I realize is that that we didn’t have access to food 24-7 all throughout history. And it’s normal and healthy and a normal biological response that we crave carbohydrates, that we want to eat them a lot when they’re available. That is actually probably how our bodies survived throughout history when there was not access to all these foods all the time. It means we just need to be a little bit more aware in our approach in the modern world where we now do have access to everything delivered by food delivery services almost any time of day.
So I find the water fast is sort of like a light speed way to jump into ketosis and autophagy, there are, of course, other, I would say, gentler ways to get there. But now that my body is in a calmer nervous system state, now that I am not having the experience of autoimmune disease anymore, I feel for me personally, my body is able to handle these longer fasts, and it’s fun from a physical perspective to get to kind of rapidly jump into ketosis and autophagy and let my body do some cellular cleanup as long as I’m making sure ahead of time to, like I said, nourish my body, get enough protein and micronutrients, and then to do the same thing afterwards so that my body is not getting messages of extended famine or starvation or stress.
I think, like I said, our bodies are incredibly adaptable and able to handle inputs as long as we’re not already in a state of nervous system stress. So I think now in my life, if I were feeling like I was in a state of stress, whether that was from physical inflammation of my body, from lifestyle factors, from if my sleep wasn’t dialed in, I would choose not to fast in those times. And like I said, I’m making sure to very much pay attention to what my body is saying during this fast and to end it if my body requests that.
Like I also said, I do think if, especially if we are in a state of stress already, that fasting can be hard on the body, especially for women and too much fasting or too long of a fast, especially if we’re already in a state of stress, I feel like can really mess with our hormones, with fertility, because we’re sending stress signals to the body and sort of telling it food is not abundant, certainly we don’t need to have a baby right now. So fertility can be off. But that’s just also not how we ideally nourish our hormones.
So before I went into this fast, like I said, I spent weeks making sure I was maximally nourishing, getting enough protein, getting enough healthy fats to support my hormones, getting enough micronutrients, eating things that were genetically optimized for me. And so I’m going into this feeling awesome and will be paying very close attention to my body and how it’s feeling as I go on this process. But I am excited, like I said, mostly for the inner work, the mental and emotional, and getting to face sort of that edge when it gets hard, when I want food, when it would be easier to just give in and instead hopefully lean in and find some extra gratitude in those times.
So going forward, I would love if there are any topics you would especially love me to do a short solo episode like this about and share my opinion. Like I said, these are new in that I’m not just quoting studies. These will be more answers to like what I do. And they will always be with the caveat that that is strictly and only my opinion and what I do and not advice. But I think it’ll be fun to get to tackle some topics in a new way and kind of share my experience and my perspective from that’s from personal experience and reading studies and kind of these last 15 years in the health and wellness world as Wellness Mama.
But, I would love any feedback you have on this new format, any topics that you would like me to cover as well as if you have any people that you think would be amazing long form guests for those deeper conversations or experts to do short episodes to really tackle something.
Also going to try to start doing sort of action steps and key takeaways at the end. So with this one, there’s not that much, because again, I’m not trying to encourage anyone to fast. I think it’s a very individual decision. I believe we are all our own primary healthcare providers, and that when there can be a time and a place for this, certainly, this especially is something to be really well researched, to work with a medical professional if you are under the care of one, and to really listen to your body, to not ever do if you feel like you are in a state of stress. It was a very powerful healing tool for me.
And I would say, if you want to get sort of the benefits of fasting or ketosis, one does not need to do a 10-day fast to do that. That can be a tool that benefits some people. However, if you really want to get the benefits, you can experiment simply with, I would suggest, just stop eating at sunset. That’s one cue that we can give our body that’s really supportive. Light and food are two big, really big signaling factors when it comes to circadian health and hormones and stress. And I will say over and over again on this podcast, the importance of if we can just get morning light, even on a cloudy day, just go outside for 10 minutes and let the light touch your eyes. Don’t stare directly at the sun but just get outdoor light in the morning. That is so beneficial to our hormones. So helpful for sleep if you do this regularly.
And similarly, food is also a circadian signaling factor. So if we can watch the sunset, or even if we can’t, just go lower light at night. Let our body be in alignment with nature. When the sun is down, lower light in the house. Lower light exposed to, I turn either off my phone or have a red filter on the screen and not eat after sunset. I know that can be tough when we’re now at the shortest time of the year. And where I live, that’s before 5 p.m. but I find that it really helps my sleep and my circadian rhythm in the winter when I do stop eating when the sun goes down.
So even if you’d ever, ever want to experiment with longer fast, maybe start there as an experimentation point if it feels aligned to you. And you can start to tap into some of those benefits of time-restricted feeding, of fasting in a smaller scale, of maybe touching those states of ketosis or autophagy when you do this in combination with a really clean diet and metabolic factors to really increase dietary and nutritional ketosis.
But again, this is also not the path for everyone. And I would be curious if you have any experience with it, what yours has been like, what you’ve learned, what has worked for you. I certainly tried many things that didn’t work. I tried things that made things harder. And I also finally found things that worked for me an fasting was one of those, though I would maybe do it differently in hindsight if I knew what I knew now. So I share all that today simply to be inspirational and a starting point for you if it feels aligned in your own research, not as medical advice.
I look forward to getting to do more of these shorter episodes and get to cover some other topics in depth. Please either shoot me a message or an email or comment or ideally a review would be amazing. Let me know what you would love to see, and I will do my best to make sure I cover those this year.
As always, also, as I’m in this kind of multi-day gratitude practice, one thing that comes up on that list for me, very, very often is this amazing journey with Wellness Mama, of getting to learn so much about health and wellness, but more importantly, the community, you guys, people that has developed around this. It is no small thing, and I don’t take for granted how incredible it is that so many people are now aware and really learning about health and returning to nature and what our bodies actually need and things that were so obscure and unheard of when I first began this journey are now so common and mainstream and it gives me so much hope to see so many people really taking ownership for their own health, of really diving in and learning. I believe that’s where change is going to happen. And I’m intensely grateful every single day to get to be part of this community, to get to have been on this journey, to get to interact with each of you.
And I’m so incredibly grateful for your time, for you listening, for choosing to spend your only limited and valuable resource, your time with me and on this journey with me. So grateful. Thank you so much for being here. And I hope that you will join me again on the next and the future episodes of the Wellness Mama Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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