Dr. Tabatha Barber outlines a 7-day intermittent fasting plan for women that starts with three meals a day, then narrows to an 8-hour eating window by day three. She covers how fasting burns stored fat, addresses concerns about muscle loss and hunger, and pairs the physical practice with lectio divina, a Christian meditation on scripture.
Questions this video answers
March 13, 2025
About 12 hours without food
80 to 100 ounces of water per day
Eat three meals a day for two days, emphasizing healthy fats and protein
An ~8-hour eating window (compress three meals into eight hours)
Chapters
What if you could reset your body, boost your energy and jump start weight loss all in just seven days? Intermittent fasting isn't just about skipping meals. It's about transforming your body from the inside out. Today we are breaking down exactly what happens when you fast and why the science supports it. By the way, I'm Dr. Tabitha, your Christian physician. If you're interested in losing weight in a sustainable way, I have a link down in the description. Alright, let's get into fasting. Most people think fasting just means not eating. That is not actually what's going on. You have a lot of energy stored up in your body, I promise you. Especially if you eat the standard American diet and you're eating more carbohydrates than fats and proteins, or you're eating every few hours, you're not using all of that food, so your body stores it. And we, especially as women, we don't like that storage. We see it on our belly, we see it on our hips, we see it on our arms. But here's the thing, we also store it in our liver. And that is called fatty liver. And that is quickly becoming the number one cause of liver transplant in the United States. So it's a big deal. Fasting is the quickest way to tap into those stores and start depleting them. And when you burn off all that excess stored fat in your liver, then you can start burning off the fat on your hips and off your arms and off your waist. The key is you have to know how to fast and how not to fast. So often I see women who are jumping all in and they're doing extreme fasts and then they're feeling terrible, they're hangry, shaky, jittery, and they give up. They say, fasting doesn't work for me. My blood sugar drops. I was told it's not safe to do. That is not true. Your body was designed to fast, but it was also designed to feast. So even more important of what you're not eating and when you're not eating is what you are eating when you are eating and how you're doing that. When I created Fast to Faith, this was a download from God. He gave me this assignment. You need to teach women how to fast the right way. We have to do a progressive fast with carb cycling. I call it this feast famine cycle. And that is where the magic happens. Your body doesn't freak out and think you're starving, but it taps into the liver and starts burning up that stored sugar, all that glycogen and then it starts tapping into your fat cells and burning that off in just a minute. I'm going to teach you how to have a successful seven day intermittent fast without feeling starved. But before I do that, I want to share some of the most frequent worries and concerns I hear. Some of the pushback I hear about fasting is I don't want to lose muscle, I'm afraid to lose muscle. And there's a trend right now to eat a lot of protein so that we can build more muscle. Here's the deal. When you have stored fat to burn, you're not going to tap into your muscle and lose muscle first. You're going to burn through all the glycogen stored in your liver, all the fat stored on your hips and on your belly and on your arms, arms before you get into that muscle. But here's the key. You don't want to jump into a fast if you don't have metabolic flexibility. You have to remind your body how to burn fat for fuel. Because my guess is you've been in sugar burning mode like the rest of America for a long, long time. That means you're eating every few hours. You're eating quite a bit of carbohydrates, processed foods. Our body knows how to burn fat for fuel, but it hasn't done it in a while. So you just have to remind it you're not going to lose muscle as long as you fat to burn. The biggest push back I get when women hear the word fasting is, I can't do that. I will be so hungry I will starve to death. That's just not true. It's actually the opposite. Our body has this innate ability to curb that hunger. After a few hours of not eating. We have this ghrelin hormone that is our hunger hormone. It spikes when we're hungry, but it only lasts 20 or 30 minutes. So if you can ride that wave to drink a nice glass of water, get your electrolytes in, go for a walk, it will pass and you won't be hungry anymore. And the even cooler thing is about 12 hours without food, you start making growth hormone. Growth hormone is an amazing hormone that is our anti aging hormone. It repairs things in our body, but it also suppresses our appetite. So if you get to 12 hours, which you should easily just by sleeping and not eating in the evening after dinner, if you get to that 12 hour mark, your growth hormone is going to start to increase and that is going to get rid of your appetite as well. So here's what I Hear all the time in my fast to faith 40 day program. I can't believe I wasn't hungry. I got over that initial sugar breakup and I feel amazing. I actually don't feel hungry. I have to remind myself to eat. And it's so freeing not to be looking for food all the time, to not be hungry, not be distracted by all those hunger pains. It's so freeing. I know for myself, when I was addicted to sugar and I was living a really busy, stressful life, I was constantly reaching for food to give me energy to keep me focused and to soothe my stress and my worries. It was almost a comfort to just know that I could reach over and eat that Snickers bar or I could just sip on my Mountain Dew. And it was kind of like carrying around my favorite blanket, right? It just, it got me through the day. But, but here's the deal. That is the quickest way to aging and disease. And I'm here to tell you there's a better way. I had to change what was going on in my gut, and I had to also reconnect with God. I said, God, I need your strength to get me through this during the day. And I started meditating on scripture as soon as I felt it. So grab some water, some electrolytes. You're probably not hungry, you're probably dehydrated. Read a scripture. You will shift. All right, I hope this answers some of your concerns. Now let's talk about how to have a successful intermittent fast for seven days. I'm just gonna lay out the first seven days of my 40 day fast of faith program right here because I want you to get started right now. So first things first, we gotta break up with sugar. What I want you to do is to eat three, three meals a day. And you might say, well, that sounds really easy. But if you actually journaled what you ate for the past week, you'd probably realize that you put something in your mouth an average of seven to ten times a day. That all counts as a meal. So if you can just eat three meals, then we're gonna start there, do that for two days. Make sure they're full of healthy fats and protein. Next you're gonna shrink your eating window. So about day three, try to only e eight hour window. So if you've been eating in a 12 hour window, try to get those three meals in in eight hours. That's going to shift you as well. And you want to make sure you're getting enough water. If you're getting at least 80 to 100 ounces of water. In adding some magnesium, sodium, potassium, all those good electrolytes, you are going to start to shift and lose weight. You're going to start burning fat for fuel instead of sugar. So in seven days, you really can regain your metabolic flexibility. And here's what sets fast to FAI apart. You can do all that science stuff, and that's in other fasting programs, but the magic happens when you do the ancient practice of lectio divina. Here's what it is. It's super simple. You take one scripture, which is usually a sentence or two, and you meditate on it for a couple minutes, and you ask God, what are you trying to say to me through this scripture? And then you journal for five to 10 minutes. It doesn't take a long time. You should have 10 minutes a day to really focus on you and reconnecting with your creator. When you do this, the floodgates open. Lines of communication open. You start hearing what God has for you, and you ask him into this health journey. Ask him to show you why you can't release the weight, what you need to do next. And that is where the magic happens. We are carrying so many mental burdens, and that is showing up in our physical body. That is why you're carrying extra weight sometimes. And so hand that over to God. Get into this practice of lectio divina for seven days, and I have it free for you. If you go to the fast to faith app, we have lectio divina. We have so many free resources. Do this for seven days, and I promise you, you will want more. All right, you guys, so go out there and start your fast. If you found this video beneficial and you're interested in learning more about controlling weight during menopause, check out this video right here. Okay, I'll see you on the next one.
