Menopause Fasted Exercise Pros and Cons

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Spoiler alert, before you even open and listen to this podcast, our stance at Flipping 50: we believe everyone is unique, and that said, we favor fed exercise over fasted exercise when it is intense. In fact, we are talking about purposeful, driven exercise for the purpose of gaining or maintaining lean muscle mass or bone density. That is high-intensity interval training. It's strength training with the intent of preserving your lean muscle mass and avoiding frailty or fragility occur within the eating window and ideally bookended by protein consumption if for muscle or for bone mass. We do acknowledge that exercise may feel hard and intense when exercise is performed fasted, giving the perception of working hard, but that is not the same as working to capacity.

I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond.

Before you knew to ask them.

Yeah, the goal: to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman, and it's not just about you but the 3 generations that you influence My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause and beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts the science of optimal hormone balancing, fitness, and longevity, and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve.

Based on the opener, I want to dive right back into this, and this is our stance at Flipping 50 until something and new research or enough of a landslide of research comes out to convince me otherwise. We believe, of course, number one, every woman is unique. I often will say don't fix it if it's not broken, but I want to drive home for all of us, for you, for me, that if superficially it seems to be working, that you are actually collecting the data to know that it's working. You're monitoring not just your weight and the way your clothes are fitting, but you're monitoring your body composition in detail. Skeletal muscle mass in pounds or kilograms is really an important distinction. In addition to percent body fat, knowing what's happening with your muscle so you never, ever, ever are losing it. When we're only dealing with a percentage, you don't have enough detail. And it doesn't matter if we were talking about, say, your lab tests, which are also important, and your A1C, your CRP, those things that indicate inflammation, your glucose levels, your fasting insulin levels, those things also hinting at what's going on would be an important part of making decisions. And so it is with your exercise. So not fixing it if it's not broken shouldn't be just based on your thoughts laid down from decades of, I learned this once and now I've held onto it for so long, it's hard to let go of. And look, I've been there. We've all been there in relationship to certain things, and we sometimes get very attached to those ideas. So I just want to open up the possibility that for you, this may be happening and you need to really look at your data objectively. And when you're in the frame, it can be hard, hard to see the picture. So I want to state this again. We do acknowledge that exercise may feel hard when you're in a fasted state. I hear women say all the time, I work really hard. I get that. I get that it feels hard. But we also know from some research that If we really wanted to test you, we wanted to see you perform at your optimum, we would never have taken any of those athletes who performed in the Paris Olympics and said, I want you to do this race fasted. You know, we saw somebody gold medal with a fever of 102, but I gotta say that was an anomaly, don't you? And, and a risk. But we wanna make sure that hard is really working at your highest speed or with your hardest resistance possible. And those are the measures of whether it's really hard. Indeed, your heart rate may be up, but that is not the only measure of whether you're really training yourself to get the best performance. So, It's an interesting thing to lay out and unpack. So we suggest based on research and on 4 years, 4 decades, sorry, of primary observation, women actually exercise harder related to their own personal capacity for exercise when they are fueled. That is, they, or let's say you listener and/or I, will go faster if we were being timed, we'll go further in a timed test. We will lift more weight or we will perform more reps to muscular fatigue. And in the end, if we want to get more fit, those are the things that make us more fit. So fasted exercise pros and cons. A 27% muscle loss has been reported between early and late stage of perimenopause. For many of us, that's ish, that's I-S-H, right? Between our early 40s and our 50s. Others start in their late 30s, and there is no, no specific, but that's probably on average is a good indication you're in perimenopause then. And this is most likely due to multiple factors. Insomnia that is starting or caused by changing hormones, insomnia can disrupt anabolic hormones, and together with other signs and symptoms of menopause interfering with desire to work out, as well as a drop in estrogen, testosterone, and growth hormone levels, and an increase in cortisol levels, that's a problem. And this is an important consideration when we look at fat loss versus lean muscle gain and priorities. Mitigating potential loss of muscle is a critical factor in aging well and overall metabolic health. I'm going to say that again. Mitigating your potential loss of muscle is a critical factor in aging well and overall metabolic health. And we know that it's harder to gain lean muscle mass while you're fasting. Strength has been documented. You can gain strength and may while you're fasting. That's particularly true if you're a beginner. You will probably plateau when you're no longer a beginner, but a fed active individual will also plateau somewhat. The virgins, you're gonna make the most progress the fastest. It's true. But here's what science says. Some exercise studies, review of literature. So when we say collectively studies, it means that it may be one study looking at 14 different studies, meaning hundreds or thousands of subjects, which is good, suggest that before prolonged exercise, fueling provides more benefit, but before short exercise, results are inconclusive. So I have to give that one up, right? To those of you who are absolutely pounding the table, fasted exercise. And here's what I would wish for both of us. Let's not pound the table, try to be right, but let's pound the table and try to do the right thing that is getting us, each of us, the best possible results, right? Continuing to stay open to this is really gonna be important. So many of those studies— a 2013 study on sumo wrestlers, this was males, sumo wrestlers eating an ultra-high-calorie diet and 50% of it was fat— they burned more fat after exercise when it was done in a fasted state. However, we've got to consider how like that are you, right? Number one, are you consuming a 5,000-calorie diet on a daily basis? Are you consuming 50% of that from fat calories? Most of us would say no, I'm probably barely getting 2,000 if that, 'cause I'm trying to quote unquote diet. And then we're watching our fat or maybe, maybe a little less so. We're probably a little more open to healthy fats at this point. In fact, maybe, maybe we're getting a little too much and too friendly with our fat. But how like you are those sumo wrestlers? Probably not so. They do well in their sports big. For most women, that's not our goal. Extremely high calorie and 50% fat. You know, in almost this same time frame that this study was released, there was another study. College women were fed versus fasted in an exercise, and they show no difference. In the fat burning afterward. So there was no— we're probably a little bit more like them, wouldn't you agree? At least they're female. They still have hormones circulating and cycling on a regular basis. But my guess would be we're still probably also skipping or skipping meals, cutting back, going lower calorie, more health conscious. And they are a little bit more at least like us. And there was no difference. So the problem is there are few studies about fasting and exercise that exist on midlife or postmenopausal women. So they're coming, I'm sure they are, but it's hard and complicated because there's so many factors with women, women who are at risk for accelerated muscle loss and strength losses. Do we wanna take that chance before we have the result. So again, I support you in doing this or trying it as long as you're measuring your own skeletal muscle mass. You know, whether you've done a DEXA scan or you at home have a great smart scale that's telling you not just percent body fat but your skeletal muscle mass in pounds— fat-free mass, by the way, includes everything but that. That includes your smooth muscle, your bone, your internal organs. So there's gonna be a little less direct play on the muscle in that. And yes, we can guess that gains or losses are hopefully due to skeletal muscle, not your internal organs, and certainly not, you know, you're losing pounds because you were constipated, now you're no longer constipated, but that could come into play. So it's good to understand What are you looking at and what are you measuring? I hear comments from women who believe they're burning fat for fuel because they're in a fasted state. And in theory, I understand where you're coming from. When they're fat adapted, this would be true potentially, not necessarily because you're fasted, but simply because you're taking in fat for fuel or protein for fuel and not necessarily relying on the need for carbohydrate hydrate. So you can go longer without having to eat. For athletes especially who are endurance athletes, whether it's ultra runners who do like 50-milers or more, or it's, uh, triathletes, or it's marathoners who are going for hours on end, it actually is to their benefit if they can become more fat adapted. So number one, it means you work at higher intensities And at higher intensities, your body typically will turn over in favor carbohydrates because it's easier to go get that fuel, turn it on, flip the switch. Fat, you have to go get it. You have to use those reserves and the body turning that into, here you go, use it for fuel now, takes a little longer. There are more things that have to happen along the way in that turning fat into fuel on the go. And so you've got to practice over months slowly elevating the intensity of exercise while consuming mostly fat. It's not an easy thing to do to get that crossover point to happen at a higher level. That would say that instead of turning into, I'm using carbs now because I'm running versus when I was walking, I could use more fat for fuel. So it may take, oh, I've gotta sprint now, I'm really turning into carbs, but I can actually run at slower levels, of course, and do a lot more fat burning, and then I won't have to eat as much. So to an endurance athlete, that's really important 'cause your gut tends to shut down the longer you go. And for anyone else, it can also be supportive, right? Anyone who wants to lose weight, But it takes time and it's not going to happen immediately. But fat adapted can still occur in a fed state. You can still be using more fat for fuel and be in a fed state, say having protein, so your body will not have to go get protein to hold those muscles together. It will already have that, so it can go get that instead. It's an important distinction to make. So it's important that you really know and understand what's happening. The only way to know, have you changed that crossover, is to have a test. So have a— go in, have a VO2 test and look at your fuel substrate and where that crossover occurs for you right now. Then go through a diligent planned training program and see if you can work that in. I want to remind you all that at a certain point we do cross over. As your intensity goes up, your body is going to say, oh, this is too hard, this is too hard. I really need to focus on delivering the oxygen to the working muscles. I can't go get fat, so I'm going to start now using less fat and more carbohydrate. And that's a natural thing to have happen. So if you're working hard in high-intensity interval training, you're probably not burning fat during. But if we're burning a high number of calories in a short period of time, which is what we're doing with high-intensity interval training, even though it's a smaller percentage of fat being dedicated to that fuel overall, that could be more fat burned during that high-intensity interval training than, say, going for a walk where you're burning at least 50 to 60% of it as fat. So it's just happening so slow, you're not burning that many calories. But when you do high intensity, you're burning a lot of calories and you end up burning more fat anyway. But the biggest support for exercise is actually the afterburn in helping to burn fat. Getting away from that, I want to come back to fasted versus fed. What seems most important is having a hypocaloric diet, meaning you're in a caloric deficit. So your body needs X, you're giving it Y, but it's not so great that it's putting you under a great deal of stress. If you're doing that at best at rest, the data is not there to support higher fat burning during HIIT fasted. It's just not there. It's not there to support higher fat burning after HIIT if fasted either. So you wanna look at where do you work the hardest? Can you work harder, go faster, lift more, do better repetitions, not fall apart when you're fed or when you're fasted? And I also wanna clarify something. Fed does not have to mean you just had a meal, a bowl of oatmeal at— you're not having to have a full smoothie, but having something so you've got calories to just start lighting that fire. It's like light a match so that we've got a little spark going so we could start a great big forest fire. That may help boost your metabolism and your caloric burn during, and then because you do during, it's after is a bonus. You're getting both at the same time. So think about where do you feel the most comfortable? So don't just exercise in a fasted state because you feel like it's being virtuous and punishing yourself and having it feel really hard is not the same as it really being a hard workout where we really push you at your capacity. So for women who can't seem to lose fat weight and are in good adrenal health after employing a foundation of high protein, 3 meals, no snacks, fasting at least 12 hours overnight, extending the fast and testing how that works for you might help you shake off of a plateau. Absolutely. The approach needs to be unique to the individual's needs and goals to lose fat weight and gain lean muscle mass. And may need to be addressed step by step to first improve your metabolic health. That's your, your blood lipids, your blood pressure, your insulin, your glucose, with close observation on skeletal muscle mass to determine success. What I mean by that is your first priority might be let's improve metabolic health by fasting, let's focus on that, but When and if you really want to look at gaining lean muscle mass, preserving your bone density, getting in the best shape of your life, you are probably going to revert to a fed exercise form so that you can fuel those muscles, fuel the bone density, and optimize your energy and the output that you get. So again, I come back to comparing this to the Olympics. They were, we needed them at top form, right? They were fueled, I guarantee you. And it was probably very calculated. They may have done ritualistically, you know, what they needed to do, but they know, you know, a certain thing may carry some magical unicorn feel to them before they have a race. But most of them were very well fed on a very specific schedule and routine according to their optimal results. And so should we, you know, right? We're not performing at that level, but what we're performing for is for the rest of our lives can be really important for women who recomposition is best addressed by focus on gaining lean muscle mass and not slowing progress. Probably fueling is better. We do know strength can be gained during fasting, at least in the beginning. Muscle mass doesn't improve in fasted exercise based on most of the existing studies. So it's important to remember the research featuring women in menopause and postmenopause with anabolic resistance is minimal. There's not a lot out there, so we have to extrapolate what's happening to a woman in midlife going through menopause plus what's happening based on aging and what's happening with fasting and understanding, you know, fasting is putting you in a catabolic state, more likely to break down muscle than to gain muscle. And you may get some hormetic stress from it that helps you gain or maintain muscle, but long periods of it or too often doing it to an extreme may end up not being good. So you've gotta again monitor it. Cycling, I found I have really good luck with VIP clients who've done all the work laying the good foundation, good relationship with food, and then we cycle exercise intensity as well as cycling the fasting and the fed and the substrates. So what are we doing with micronutrients during it? And have been able to shape off a plateau using that. So if you focus on losing fat, you may also lose lean muscle mass. You've got to be careful by fasting. So like many things, including exercise, the solution may be cycling fasting during— with alternating periods of time, whether that's weeks and months, right, with primary focus on muscle gains versus fat loss. But the one constant should be monitoring your personal results. Is your lean muscle mass going up or down? Is your body fat going up or down? Is your gut health, digestion, elimination improving? And that, again, another great reason to take a look at fasting if you're struggling with that. Not for the reason of avoid eating because then I won't have belly issues, but for the support of the gut microbiome improving during fasting. And then when you stop fasting so long, you may find that your gut has improved because the microbiome will adapt during that period of time. So to unpack your personal fasted exercise pros and cons, you want to prioritize and you're prioritizing these things like which of these would you order as this is my biggest priority? Longevity. Avoidance of frailty or fragility, improvement of balance and stability, increase in bone density, your gut health, emotional eating and relationship with food. You want to look at what do I need to do, which are the highest priorities for me, the places where I have the greatest deficit, the place where I have the greatest need or urgency. And, you know, I think if you have your bone density, your lean muscle mass is in the right place, then okay, you can go on to those things like maybe longevity. Now you want to take a little focus on that and play with fasting a little bit for that reason. So it's really up to, you know, where are you, what's your highest priority right now, you know, avoidance of frailty and fragility, you know, that probably takes great precedence fasting may not be your best friend. If that is the case, consuming inadequate fuel can make women store more fat. It may depend on whether you are in perimenopause versus postmenopause. According to Dr. Stacy Sims, it's the hypothalamus related to the kisspeptin hormone— the kiss, if you will— hormone thyroid hormone gets downregulated within a short period of time, just a few days, if you're taking in too little fuel. So those of you who are really extremely active, not just those of you who are exercising for health, but those of you who really love to be active more, you enjoy it, it's something you want in your lifestyle. It may somewhat define you and who you are. You wanna avoid that underfueling, remembering that you feel like you're exercising hard, but you're not necessarily exercising to capacity. So you're simply struggling. It's not the same as quality intensity of workout. If you're more athletic, you wanna do more endurance or peak performances, the more you have low calories while taxing your system, you're really going to suffer and compromise results. Increasing the additional or increasing additional protein without changing anything. So that's a double blind right there, right? Increasing protein without changing anything else. So don't change your calories, right? If you don't change your calories, you increase your protein, you will by default drop down on your carbs and/or your fat, or you might drop down a little with both. Body fat loss will be facilitated within about 3 months according to many studies. Just that the increased protein will do that whether you're active or not. So huge bonus there. So another way to get around thinking that fasting is instantaneous— it's not supposed to be, right? So for women who struggle with dieting or a history of restrictive eating or binge-purge cycles, using a time-restricted eating window can be complicated by the desire to also restrict calories. And if you're doing that, you're back to the '70s and the '80s. It's just a diet, right? So remember that intermittent fasting was born out of just changing the window of what it is you're eating. Now, if you shorten that window too much, you're not gonna be able to get in 3 meals. So you are by default restricting your calories, and that makes it awful hard to get in the macronutrients you need, makes it awful hard to get in the micronutrients that you need. And it may temporarily once or twice and very infrequently or occasionally have its purpose. But I think again, you have to come back to what are your goals. For extremely active women, fasted exercise reflects poorer performance. Here's how it shows up. Slower walking pace compared to those who are fueled, lower endurance, longer recovery periods, less muscle mass gain and less fat loss compared to fed exercise because it occurs at higher intensities. In the resources for today's show, I will put the smart scales that are my picks, and you might like a resource of Dr. Mindy Peltz. So she's got a thriving YouTube channel that might be insightful. She's got a Great book on fasting, Fast Like a Girl. You also might get some support from, we have a 5-Day Flip if you're interested in short workouts that do work you and give you the longevity exercise that you need with power, dynamic balance, agility, reaction skills, ground forces, all within 10 to 12 minutes. Plus, 2 days of strength training within that. And if you need to get started, need a restart, or you need to reset because what you're doing isn't working, it'd be a great place to start. And you'll find all that in the show notes for today. Love to hear your comments on your successes, your attempts, your— if you failed, it's data, so I'm not going to call it a failure. But what's happened to you in regard to fasting and exercise?

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