Aaron Hartman, MD explains that intermittent fasting must be done 'the right way' by using metabolic switching — cycling between fasted and fed states — rather than prolonged continuous fasting. He warns that chronic fasting can cause muscle loss and metabolic 'stuckness.' He emphasizes that metabolic switching is especially important for women because hormonal changes across the menstrual cycle make continuous fasting unhealthy or ineffective for long periods.
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Don't take a good thing and turn it into a bad thing. We've taken fasting and done it over and over again, caused muscle loss and actually got people metabolically stuck because we didn't do it the right way. So what do I mean by doing fasting the right way? We're supposed to go in and out fasting naturally. We did this historically, thousands of years ago, you go with times without eating. Your body was actually designed or made to go through this. But what's happened is people have gotten such amazing results with fasting that they've just done it for months and months or years sometimes. And they actually don't do this metabolic switching, which is really important for women, because women's metabolism changes every month throughout their cycle. So they can't actually fast in a healthy fashion the entire month, or it depends on what time they are in their hormonal health, from having cycles to not having cycles. So you have to realize that in order to use fasting appropriately, you actually have to do this thing, this metabolic switching, where you go from fastest states to not fastest states, in a way that actually continues to stress your.