Hello and

welcome to the Nutrition Diva Podcast. I'm your host Monica Reinagel

and today we're revisiting a topic that continues to generate a lot of interest, a lot of questions

from listeners, and that is intermittent fasting.

And specifically, we're going to take a look at how intermittent fasting or as the researchers call it time restricted

eating T.R. E might affect women differently than men. I received an email from

a longtime listener Olga who's been practicing intermittent fasting

for about nine months and she writes, although I have lost a bit of weight, I haven't really noticed

any other health benefits. In fact, I've been sick more often during this time and it's

taken me longer to recover from viruses. As I've been digging into research, I've noticed

that male and female responses to intermittent fasting seem to differ.

So how should women approach intermittent fasting to balance the health benefits and hormonal well-being? This is a great question Olga and your timing couldn't be

better because I just attended a session on time-restricted eating at the

annual conference hosted by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, where researchers presented some of the latest

findings on this topic. Now, if you are a longtime listener, you might remember that we have talked

about intermittent fasting before, but I always want to

keep you up to date as new research emerges. Let's start though by quickly

reviewing what we mean by intermittent fasting. There are several different

approaches but time-restricted eating seems to be the most popular and it's

really quite simple because there's really just one rule you only eat during a specific

window of time each day. And even when people don't consciously try to cut calories, observing an eight-hour eating window

tends to lead them to reduce calorie intake, on average by about 350 calories a day and that naturally then leads to modest weight loss.

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