A brief excerpt from a Gary Brecka YouTube video advising women on whether to begin intermittent fasting. The expert recommends assessing lifestyle (especially if very lean and highly active, which may indicate relative energy deficiency), ensuring good sleep, and avoiding fasting during major life stressors (e.g., divorce, job loss).
A lot of women listening to this podcast are like I want to go down the intermittent fasting journey. How do I decide if I'm a candidate or not?
How is your lifestyle to begin with? And then how can we tweak and kind of determine whether or not this is right for you? If you are very lean and exercise a lot, I would actually argue that you can put yourself in what's called the red. It's relative energy deficiency, I think you know, really looking at can you sleep through the night? Do you fall asleep and stay asleep? Sleep is foundational and if a woman, irrespective of what age she is tells me I don't sleep sleep well, I'm like that is the first thing we have to address. And so really kind of dialing in the sleep piece addressing the stress like don't add in fasting if you're going through a divorce, you lost your job. That is not the time to add this additional stressor.
