Successful Intermittent Fasting When Stressed with Dr. Doni | How Humans Heal Podcast

Hi, thanks for joining me. I'm Dr. Donny on how humans heal. And I'm so glad you're here with me today. I wanted to dive into the topic of intermittent fasting and potentially some about fasting in general because it is such a common question and interest. And as you've noticed, I've recently done some interviews with colleagues of mine who specialize in intermittent fasting. But I really wanted to give you my take on it, especially for, for those of you who know you've been exposed to stress, like all of us, and those of you who maybe know that you're burned out or that your cortisol levels are imbalanced and you're trying to recover from adrenal distress and stress in general. And so the question is, well, how do you intermittent fast when you've been burned out or you've been under stress? And I think this is really important because I've seen it so often. I mean, a lot of my patients have been practicing intermittent fasting, trying it out, and sometimes that's the reason they come to see me for help, is because they've been intermittent fasting but they're not feeling better. So some of the common symptoms that can happen if you've been intermittent fasting but your body's under a lot of stress, what can happen is you could feel more fatigue, you could definitely get more digestive issues like gas, bloating, constipation, digestive issues. It also can cause some thyroid imbalances, it can raise your cortisol levels. These are important to know because I don't want it to happen to you. I think there's value in intermittent fasting and I'm going to teach you how to do it so that you get the most out of it. See, that's the reason that a lot of people choose intermittent fasting, because it can help with weight loss, it can help with balancing blood sugar levels, it can help with just longevity in general, meaning help you live longer by having more optimal blood sugar and metabolism and healthier cells in your body. Even it's used for treating and preventing dementia, for example, diabetes, heart disease. So there's a lot of reasons to understand intermittent fasting and use it. But what I'm going to emphasize that it's important to use it in a way that's best for your body at this point in time in your life. So that might be different for men than women. That might be different for someone who's 30 year old versus 60 years old. That might be different for someone who's been under a lot of stress versus someone who's been recovering from stress. Right. So it's very unique to you. And I would argue this is true for all different diet changes. All of care. When I say care, I'm talking about clean eating. So all aspects of clean eating need to be dialed in based on your body, your system and your stress situation. Also, sleep needs to be dialed in and so do the stress recovery activities, and so does your exercise. Right. Because even if we're choosing certain dietary changes like intermittent fasting, or even if we're choosing even certain kinds of stress recovery activities or exercise, it's not going to benefit you if it ends up being done in a way that triggers a stress response. I want to talk a little bit more about what I mean there, but I just wanted to start off by really pointing out that it's not one size fits all. It's not the same for everyone. And it's definitely not the same depending on where you are with your health right now. And so even with. So let's first talk about intermittent fasting and then I'm going to talk a little bit more why it's different for different situations and how to modify your intermittent fasting based on that. Okay, so when we say intermittent fasting, what I'm referring to is when we are not eating for a period of time. Now the simplest classic way to think about that would be not eating while you're sleeping at night. If you're sleeping for, let's say eight hours, which is optimal, and you're staying asleep, that means you're not eating during that time. You have an eight hour intermittent fast, which is why we say breakfast, because we're breaking the fast in the morning.

In some ways. Sometimes we hear about things, you know, social media or, you know, new trends, when really it's something that already exists in our usual day. Now some people, some of you might be let's. And I, believe me, I've done all of this myself, I learned from myself all the time. But say you maybe eat late at night. Say if you're staying up late and you eat late at night, and maybe you, or maybe you wake up in the middle of the night and eat something, or maybe you eat immediately when you wake up in the morning, that could shorten the fast. That could make it maybe only a 5 hour fast. For example, the first thing you may want to do if you want to try going toward more clearly an intermittent fast would be to stop eating so late in the evening once you have dinner, then maybe let's say you stop eating by 8pm Even that's kind of a little bit late potentially. Right? But say you have your last meal by 8pm and then maybe you go to bed by 10 or 11 and you sleep for eight hours. Now if you were to eat again by 8am That's a 12 hour fast already. That's still going to be beneficial for your body. Because what happens is when we have a 12 to 15 hours without eating, it actually starts to signal to our body a few different things. It signals to the digestion to do kind of a clean out. I mean our digestion is active when we're eating because it's helping digest our food. But our digestion is also active when we're not eating. And what it's doing is helping to clean out the system. And it also is very important for the gut bacteria to have signaling for when we're not eating. And so something called the migrating motor complex is this process of kind of, I think of it like a clean out of our, a very subtle clean out of our digestion that requires that we not eat for at least 12 to 15 hours. So by the time you're doing that, let's say 8pm to 8am or even if you go a little longer, maybe you finish eating at 8pm and then you don't eat your first meal until 10am now it's a 14 hour fast. So there's a benefit to your digestion. There's also the benefit to how what when we say what fuel source your body's using. So most of the time we rely on glucose and glycogen for our fuel, for our body. Right. Our cells have to use something to burn calories to make energy. And that energy we use for our brain, our muscles, everything we do as humans, we need to burn energy, or some people call it our fuel sour. And so usually we would think of that from glucose, like from carbohydrates. And if glucose gets stored in the liver as glycogen, we can use that. What happens when we fast for a period of time.

Usually this 12 hour window, then our body is more likely to switch over and start burning fat for energy. Now that can be helpful if you're trying to lose weight, but it also when our body turn into burning fat for energy is something called ketosis that can be very helpful as been research has shown for preventing cancer, dementia and some other health issues and turning on something called autophagy. Autophagy is the way our body gets rid of debris and garbage or old cells in our body when it's getting rid of the stuff we don't need and helping to stimulate the growth of new healthy cells. That's called autophagy or autophagy that also gets stimulated by this ketosis or burning of fat for energy.

Because normally we're walking around thinking, well, I hope we're crossing our fingers. I hope my body burns this extra fat that we have stored around our waist in other places, I hope my body burns this fat. But actually our body, it doesn't preferentially burn fat until we have had a of time of not eating. And that's where intermittent fasting can be used to help stimulate fat loss. But it's fat loss not just around your waist and your belly, but throughout your body. And it's using that fat for energy. Does that make more sense? So that's why.

We'Re thinking of it while we're trying to achieve it, and why different researchers is trying to optimize, figure out how to optimize the burning of fat. But really we don't want to just go into fat burning and stay there. We want our body to be able to go back and forth. We want our body to be able to use glucose and carbs for energy and then switch over and use fat for energy. This is why you'll hear different practitioners and nutritionists talk about how to create that, how to make that happen, how to be flexible with your metabolism. So, but here again, that's why we're thinking about how to intermittent fast. The thing is that if we push our bodies too hard, if we fast too long, our body is going to start to get the message that we're starving. What's the difference between fasting and starving? That line is different for each person. But if your body starts to get a stress signal that it thinks you're starving, then it's going to tend to raise your cortisol levels because it's a stress signal. And so we want to be really careful because one person might get their starvation cortisol signal at a much earlier, sooner time than another person. And really, you also don't want to put your body in starvation for too long. That would be also right, an issue. We need our fuel, we need food and calories. If not, then our brain isn't working, our liver stops working, kidneys stop working, our digestion stops working. Our bodies can't. We can't be all or nothing. We can't have zero food. But we're also saying it's not good to eat all the time, all day and not have a little bit of a break from food. So we're trying to find like, often I think of it like a Goldilocks effect. We're trying to find the middle moderation that's going to be most beneficial for your health instead of saying I'm not going to eat at all or I'm going to fast for long periods of time. Which sometimes fasting for a little bit longer period of time can be useful, but you have to be really careful and work with a practitioner because you don't want to put yourself into too high of a stress reaction because of it. We're trying to find how do we take breaks from eating like 12 hours, let's say, or up to 15 hours of not eating while we're sleeping and overnight, but then eat during the day, right? So the other issue that can happen is if people have the longer they fast overnight, that means there's fewer hours during the day to eat the calories they need. Like let's give the example of at least 2,000 calories, right? So if a person needs to get in 2,000 calories, but now they're fasting, let's say 16 hours, now they only have eight hours to get those 2,000 calories in. So what can happen is, I see this all the time, is that people end up making their meals too large.

If you're trying to get the calories in and you have a short period of time to do it, it ends up to be too big of a meal. This is another stress on the system because whatever we eat, whatever we swallow, the body has to digest it and the nutrients have to get absorbed. Then the insulin has to respond to any carbohydrates in that meal and the liver has to help with any carbohydrates that are not. The insulin is not able to get into the cells. You see what I mean? So there's a lot of follow up that happens in our bodies after we eat. And if we eat a larger meal, like say you're having 1,000 or 2,000 calories at once, that's a lot of work for your body to do. And usually the body can't get it all done. What can happen is if you eat more than you can digest, is that instead of those nutrients getting into your body, which is what you're really hoping for, but if it's too much to digest at that, it's going to not get absorbed into your body, you're not even going to benefit from the food you're eating, and it's going to feed the bacteria instead. Now, feeding the bacteria can be a good thing to a certain extent. But if we eat too much, too much fiber, too many calories, too much food at once, it can't get into our body and get used. It ends up overfeeding the bacteria and the digestion. What happens is what we call a bacterial overgrowth, which could be bacterial overgrowth of the small intestine, like sibo, or bacterial overgrowth of the large intestine, or both. It could also be overfeeding yeast. And all of this is going to be more likely to cause bloating, pain, discomfort, gas, because when the bacteria are overfed, that's what they do. They make more gas and bloating. If you're feeling gas and bloating, then that tells me you're eating more than you can digest at a moment in time. I really want to warn you, when you intermittent fast and you have a shorter eating window, you have to still be careful that you're only eating as much as you can digest at that moment in time. You need to really look at your schedule and say, okay, you probably need at least three meals in a day, maybe even four meals in a day to spread out the calories in such a way that you can actually digest. Because you also don't want to be. It's not considered optimal to eat like every hour. You want to give your body.

Usually more like three, four hours in between meals so that you can digest and absorb the nutrients. If we keep on eating a little bit, eating a little bit, eating a little bit, eating a little bit every hour. Now, some people who have severe blood sugar imbalances, and we're trying to correct for that, sometimes we have to do that for temporarily to get their blood sugar stabilized. But in general, if we can, we want to get a good three, four hours in between meals so that your body can digest and everything can process through, and then you eat the next small meal with, you know, with protein, fat and carbohydrates in there. So it's a matter of how do you spread out these calories in a way that you, your body can digest and absorb and use them.

Something a lot of people don't know is that too much stress can actually create an abundance of health problems like high blood pressure, high blood sugar, anxiety, migraines, insomnia, even fertility issues. This is because high stress puts your adrenal glands on overload. They release cortisol and adrenaline, which controls your digestion. Hormones, immune system, energy, focus and even your emotional response. So how can you beat stress when you don't know where to start? That's why we have a free seven day stress reset program. It's designed to help support weight loss, digestive healing and hormone balancing. It includes support for integrating self care. Daily tips come to you by email and video. Gluten free dairy free meal plans as well as grocery shopping lists, journal pages and more. This free program will help you beat stress and put you on the path to wholeness in your body. Get your plan now for free@drdonni.com.

So I always really emphasize, even when you're wanting to intermittent fast. Also make sure you're leaving enough time to digest and to metabolize what you're eating.

Because if we overdo it, sometimes we're very tempted to push it too much. We're like, oh, I can fast longer or I can eat a larger meal. Or sometimes when you're fasting longer, you get hungrier because you haven't been eating, you're fasting. So then you're like, I'm so hungry. Then we overeat. And if we overeat now, we're throwing off our hunger signals and our fullness signals. So it has to be where we find this middle ground, this Goldilocks. Instead of having too much or too little, we want just the right amount for your body. And I would give you more specifics, but it's going to be unique to you and it's not something that you're going to want to jump right into. You're going to work your way there. What I suggest is look at what your timing is now. Are you, you know, what was your meal last meal yesterday and what was your first meal today and how many hours was that? That's your starting point. And then you might say, hey, I'm doing, I'm already happy with that. Maybe you're like, hey, I'm doing good. I 12 hours, I'm going to stick with that for a little while. Or maybe you're going to say, hey, I'd really like to. Maybe you're eating, you know, maybe it's been only like 10 hours. And you're like, okay, let me see if I can get my intermittent fast to 11 hours or 12 hours or 13 hours. And it might not be every single day, but you start to go, okay, what if I can get 12 hours some days or 13 hours some days and always monitor how you feel. Monitor what? I consider the five important ways to monitor your health in general, which is your energy level. Like, do you feel like you have enough energy? Are you too tired? Monitor your mood. Are you feeling more anxious and more depressed or any fluctuation in your mood based on your eating pattern? Look at your focus. How well are you focusing on tasks and getting things done? Look at your sleep. How has your sleep been doing? Did your sleep get disrupted by any of the changes you're making? Then look at your body. How does your body feel? Are there any symptoms you're having in your body, such as the digestive symptoms we're just talking about? If any of these five areas start to get disrupted, that tells you you're pushing too much. You're pushing too much in terms of intermittent fasting or you're pushing too much. This could go the same with exercise or any other activities that you're adding in or shifts you're making in your diet or your life.

Monitor. Please yourselves and see and make small changes. Don't feel like you've got to jump in into doing it exactly how everybody else is doing it. And this is so important, especially if you have hormonal shifts happening. Say you're trying to reset your thyroid function and you're working on changing your thyroid doses. Maybe you're perimenopausal and you have estrogen and progesterone shifting, or your menstrual cycle is changing, or you're trying to get pregnant, or you're, you know, or if you're under a lot of stress, if you have a wedding coming up in your family, if you have, if you're moving your home so you're packing and you're moving. These are big stresses. You're going through a divorce, you're going through a job change.

You have a lawsuit going on. Whatever it is, whatever the stress, then you're going to need to go much more slowly with any of these changes. You're going to need to maybe instead of changing your intermittent fast by an hour each day, maybe you're going to only Change it by 15 minutes and you're going to need to pay attention. How's my energy? Mood, focus, Sleep, body? How am I feeling? Feeling? Each time I make a little incremental change. Now these, what I'm talking about here in science is also referred to as hormesis. H O R M E S I s and also this concept of homeostasis. Homeostasis is what our bodies do to help keep us in balance. It's where it's kind of like homeostasis is your home it's your center point. It's what your body's used to, and it's going to try to bring you back to now. Sometimes the homeostasis gets a little bit thrown off because it's what we've been doing. Our body gets used to what we've been doing, and it tries to maintain that. Even your weight. It tries to maintain the weight where it is. So what we're essentially wanting to do, let's say if you're trying to change your health, your energy or your weight or anything else, you're trying to change your health, well, we're trying to change your homeostasis to a more healthy place. How do we do that? We do that by making small incremental changes, which is using this concept of hormesis. Hormesis means we're going to make a small enough change that the body understands that we're making a change and it starts to adapt to this new pattern. But we're not making such a big change that it triggers a stress response. You see what I mean? If we change, if we change too much too soon in a period of time, it'll tell the body that there's stress happening. Our bodies are constantly on guard for stress signals. If we fast too long, then it's going to trigger a stress signal. But if we just do our intermittent fast a little longer than before, little longer than last week, now we're using hormesis to our benefit. We're telling our body, hey, I'm going to fast a little longer, and then I'm still going to eat, but I'm going to eat a little bit smaller meal. Maybe your meal is only one or two bites smaller. You can make little small changes so that the body understands that you want things to change, but you don't want to trigger stress response. If you do that incrementally, little by little, week by week, over time. Now you actually look back over several weeks and you're like, oh, my gosh, I feel so much better. And I achieved this much of resetting my healthy homeostasis by making small incremental changes without triggering more stress. Right. The whole idea is we want to help you recover from stress, not cause more stress. And the trick is that sometimes we do things that we think are going to help us, but they end up causing more stress, and then that's just backfiring. That's just getting us right back to where we started from. So we don't want to do that. And especially for those of you who already tend to have a high cortisol level. So we're all different. Sometimes we assume we all have high cortisol, but that's not the case. It's not the case. We don't all have high cortisol. Even if we all have the same stress, our cortisol is not the same. Cortisol varies from different times a day. Normally, cortisol should be a little higher in the morning and gradually decreasing through the day. For some people, it's too high in the morning, some people it's too high in the afternoon or the evening. We need to test, we need to test your cortisol either in urine or saliva at four different times a day so we can see your pattern. What is your cortisol up to? Other people might have too low cortisol in the morning, or really we want low cortisol in the evening, so that's okay. But we need to see, is your cortisol too high at any time of day? Is it too low at any time of day? And then we also need to measure your adrenaline levels because adrenaline can be measured in urine. And if adrenaline is too high or too low, we need to address that. The more we can get your cortisol and adrenaline to healthier levels, then it's going to be a lot easier and more beneficial for you to implement things like intermittent fasting. If your cortisol is already high, for example, or way too low, and you start to try to do intermittent fasting, you might actually feel worse. You might be more tired or irritable, or you're not getting anywhere. You're like, why am I doing this? I don't feel any better because your cortisol is not in a healthy place. So to me, if I was going to choose the priority order sequence of doing these things, I would first want to measure your cortisol and adrenaline, which we can do at an at home test. I do this with patients all the time. We order it. You can order it through my office and then we know where we're starting from. And if your cortisol and adrenaline is too high or too low, we're going to work on and I walk you through my recovery protocol to get them to more optimal levels. If the cortisol is too high, we use supplements, herbs and nutrients to bring it down. If it's too low, we're going to eventually work to bring it back up again. But first we need to look at your adrenaline. If the adrenaline is too high, we need to address that and get it down. If your neurotransmitters are too low. We need to bring those up. So we do a lot of rebalancing. Whatever's too high comes to the middle, whatever's too low comes to the middle and we get everything back in balance. As everything gets back in balance, then you can see, okay, now can I expand on my intermittent fasting? Now? Sometimes, depending on the situation, as you're in the stress recovery process, you might be able to start doing some intermittent fasting. But you're going to go very carefully, very slowly. If you feel worse, you got to back off and go more slowly. It's a very careful process of, okay, body, how am I doing? Can I do a little bit of longer intermittent fast or sometimes maybe it's just about being consistent. Hey, I'm going to be consistently eating. I'm going to take a 12 hours off overnight and then I'm going to eat at regular intervals during the day and making sure my digestion is working better, healing, leaky gut, getting the cortisol balanced. As all those things improve, then you could see, hey, maybe I can go to 13 or 14 hour intermittent fast. You see what I mean? So that your body's ready for it and your body can benefit from it. It's sometimes the body just can't even benefit from certain things until the stress recovery has happened. Which is why to me, stress recovery is a priority. We can't leave that out. If we skip that step, we're not getting anywhere. If we skip that step, we still don't have healthy digestion. We still don't have cortisol working for us. We still don't have insulin working for us. Everything's all. It'd be like. I think of it sometimes like flying an airplane and you have all the dials there and you've got to get the dials all lined up or else the airplane is not going to fly. Right. We got to get all these dials lined up and working smoothly so that this plane can take off. Then we can just keep it balanced. Then we can work with it. But we've got to get the dials all dialed in first. This is what I talk about in my. You can see over my shoulder here my new book called Master your Stress Reset yout Health. I talk about how to master your stress, how to recover from stress, how to, how to dial in the cortisol, the adrenaline, the neurotransmitters, how do we dial in, how do we use hormesis for our benefit, how do we use tools like intermittent fasting for our benefit without making things worse.

Again, the key is we got to do the stress recovery and make small incremental changes and always listen to your body signals so that you can modify and adapt for your body.

Well, I hope that's super helpful for all of you. I know I just covered a lot of information, but you can re listen to it again and you can always reach out to us, to me and my office if you have questions and if you'd like me to guide you step by step along the way and do this testing and guide you through the stress recovery protocol. We can do that. We can do that. So just I'll put a link for how to connect with me to schedule a time for us to meet or even you may want to participate in one of my online programs so that we can do this in a group online, which is really fun and beautiful way to do this work as well. So. And when you order the Master your Stress Reset your health book, you're going to get recipes from the book from me already even before the book arrives. And you're also going to get access to my live Stress Reset. And in the Livestress Reset, I'm going to be guiding you through all the steps of implementing care and implementing these small incremental steps to change your health and your future. So you can I'll put a link so you can where you can go to find where you can pre order the book and then let me know you pre ordered it so that I can set you up for the live Stress Reset to attend for free. Okay, well thanks so much for joining me and I look forward to connecting with you again soon. Be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast and video so that you hear from me my next video. Have a good rest of day.

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