How Does the Way I Fast Change in Perimenopause?

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Fast Change in Perimenopause? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Maxine from Facebook asks, how does the way I fast change in perimenopause? Hey, J.J. here. And I brought in my pal, Dr. Stephanie Estima. She's an expert in female physiology, metabolism, and body composition. She actually uses the science science of your cycle, whether you have a period or not, by the way, to reclaim your energy and feel great in your skin. She even uses it to help her decide how she's going to work. She's a science nerd and she's wrapped up in a glam package. I've been with her when she's walked the red carpet.

Oh my gosh.

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Plus, she plays a great Wonder Woman at costume parties. We'll be right back with the answer. Stay with us.

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Hey, it's JJ here.

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Well, this is maybe one of my favorite topics. I actually started blogging about fasting all the way back in like 2016, when it was just kind of becoming one of the more premier topics in health and fitness. And there are a lot of different ways to fast. If you are someone who's heard of fasting, maybe you've engaged in intermittent fasting. Um, there's a lot of different ways to fast. And depending on where you are in perimenopause, whether that's like early perimenopause, where women tend to be more estrogen dominant, meaning that their progesterone levels have lowered relative to their estrogen levels in the second half of their cycle, or they are in late stage perimenopause. So sort of 40s and like mid-40s and over, where we are now starting to see a decline in estrogen, we wanna be thinking about different ways to fast to support each of these different hormonal environments. So let's start with early perimenopause first. So when we think about early perimenopause, like I said, your, your progesterone levels start to decline in your mid-30s. So perimenopause actually kind of starts in your mid-30s. And most women are shocked to hear that, but that's when we started. So when you are sort of in your late 30s, early 40s, you may start noticing in that luteal phase, that second half of your cycle, that you're more irritable, maybe your rings are a little tighter, you're feeling a little bit more bloated, more water retention, sleep disturbances, these are all consistent with an estrogen dominant environment in the luteal phase. So one of the things that we want to do, and estrogen's golden rule, is use it and then lose it. So we want to have estrogen there to do all of her beautiful things. Plumping up the cheekbones and keeping the skin nice and taut. And it's a trophic factor. It helps with muscles and helps with brain volume and all those things. But we also, once we've used the appropriate amount of estrogen, we wanna get rid of it. And the way that we do that is through liver detoxification and getting our intestinal health in tip top shape. So the type of fast that I love for perimenopausal early perimenopausal women is going to be what I call a caloric liquid fast. Meaning if you're a fasting puritan, you're gonna be, you know, turning your nose up to me a little bit here. But you are still, you are still consuming calories. You know, there's no, you're not. This is still a model of caloric restriction. But there is calories that are being consumed. It's done in a liquid form. So for example, Dr. Kellyanne Petrucci's bone broth is a really great example of this. So I actually love to counsel women in early perimenopause to have bone broth. They can have it all day long, so maybe like a 24 hour fast or something, and then the next day they can, or even that evening they can consume, you know, a full solid meal. And what this does when you're consuming something like bone broth is it allows for the gut to heal. You are take bone broth is rich in many things. Glycine, gags, these are all gonna help the intestinal lining heal. And what we want, one of the ways that we help clear estrogen is through cleaning up our intestinal health. So caloric liquid fasts. And you can do this for a 24 hour fast. So let's say you have dinner on a Monday night and then all day Tuesday you can sip on bone broth and then you have your dinner on Tuesday night. So you still have a solid meal every day, but you just go for a prolonged period of time, including your sleep, where you're consuming. Well, with your sleep you won't be consuming anything. But then when you're awake, you're consuming some liquids. When we think about later stage perimenopause, we begin to see, as I mentioned before, estrogen drops and testosterone begins to drop. So I actually in like my ladies who are 45, 46, 49, 52, I don't like aggressive fasting in this cohort. And even Though fasting has lots of benefits, right? We see all the literature that propose all the benefits that fasting has to offer. At the end of the day, it's a stressor. And we wanna be thinking about these women who are about to head into menopause. We wanna be thinking about the resiliency of her adrenals, her HPA or hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. Because after menopause, once the ovaries stop producing estrogen, it is our adrenal glands and our fat cells that are the primary source of producing estrogens. And if your adrenals are kaput, like they flatlined because of years of chronic low grade stress, this is going to pose a problem for you in men. The key in late stage perimenopause, ladies, especially for my type A's, especially for you. You gots to be gentle. You gotta love yourself, you gotta be good to yourself. And this is, this is hard to hear, I think, but I would definitely be recommending still a daily time restricted eating model. So something that's commonly referred to as intermittent fasting. So that might look like a 12 hour fast. You know, you sleep for 8 hours and then you fast for 4 of your waking hours and then you have a 12 hour eating window. You can also do like a 14 hour fast or a 10 hour eating window. And then at the most extreme, I would say 16, 8. So 16 hours of a fast 8 hour eating window. But quite frankly, if you are training every day and right now, if you are dealing with children who are not, you know, in school, like school like it's all virtual and you have all these different things that you're kind of dealing with. 16, 8 might even be a little too aggressive. And I have found that since my, I have chosen to homeschool my children this year just based on, you know, world events and all that. But the 16, 8 has become too aggressive for me. So I have actually elongated my fasting window to a 1410. That works really well for me.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week week. So make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetoj.com.

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