What up guys, I'm here to tell you homies, we've got to pay attention to our health. We so put everyone else's needs ahead of us, if our partner's feeling sick, if our children are feeling sick, if our parents feeling sick, we'll make sure that we show up for them, we'll make sure that we tell them to rest. But yet guys, we don't do the same thing with our own health. So I am here, literally to it as easy as humanly possible for us women to really freaking show up take our health seriously but also have the tools that we absolutely need to take our health seriously to actually improve it. So today guys I got my homie Cynthia Thurlow on the show to talk very specifically about debunking all the myths around fasting because I actually have been intermittent fasting and I've really noticed what a difference that makes to my brain capacity to me being able to make decisions to how I feel about myself to my hormones to my confidence. So Cynthia really does take fasting and shows us how to sink fasting to our cycle. And why fasting is one of the best freaking tools for us to prevent disease? Because I'm gonna repeat that. The fasting is one of the potential best tools for us to prevent disease. So guys, right now, let's start together, taking our health, freaking seriously, taking ownership. And now, let's actually hear really closely to my girl Cynthia on the strategies of how to do that. So let's get into it. You cannot eat at 47, like you did at 18 or 17, like you can't. And if you're still living that lifestyle, you're going to end up being a statistic and

it's like, I don't want that for people.

It's like you don't have to live that way.

It doesn't have to be your destiny.

Yes, it is harder up front to change your diet, to prioritize sleep, to eat less often.

But ultimately, you're going to avoid a lot of these chronic disease states that we now

think are so commonplace. Since the start I welcome to Women of Impact Girl. Thank you so much for having me. I've been really excited to meet you. Oh my God, me too! And where I want to start is, why on earth is fasting have insane benefits for women? Well, I think it really starts from an ancestral health perspective. This is how we are designed to thrive. We wouldn't be here as a species if we couldn't go through periods of having food scarcity. And so on a lot of different levels, I think women in particular have to embrace our physiology and I apologize for it, but also understand that fasting and eating less often can be part of what we do intermittently throughout our menstrual cycle, but also for women in perimenopause that are transitioning to menopause, you know, the 10 to 15 years preceding menopause. There are absolutely ways that we can integrate this into our lifestyle and be able to do so without apologizing for our physiology. I love that so much, but if you can list now like all benefits that it can do for us, because I do think that in moments where we feel super fatigued or we have the hangar, or we have mood swings, or we have trouble sleeping, all these things really do like way on us, especially as women, because we're trying to do so much, we're trying to please our partners, we're trying to please the family and we have to try and show up for ourselves.

So in that trying to do everything, we end up putting on weight and we don't know why because we haven't necessarily changed our diet. We get frustrated over things that we never used to get frustrated over. And you say that fasting can actually help all of these things. It definitely can, but I want to be clear before I start talking about the benefits that If someone is overly stressed, they're not sleeping.

They are going through a divorce.

They've gone through a job loss, goodness the pandemic. The last almost three years of our lives, there's been a lot of extra stress and fasting can be a form of beneficial stress, hormisus, beneficial stress in the right amount at the right time. So, if you are sleeping, your stress is dialed in, you're eating a fairly decent diet. You know, you're exercising your active, yes, fasting can be part of that. And some of the key benefits we can get a reduction in inflammation. So sometimes women will have less pain in a joint. They'll feel less achy. They feel less bloated. It upregulates something called a topogy, which is this waste and recycling process that goes on in the body. So it's, as if your body is taking out the trash.

We're getting rid of disease, disorder,

it sells things that don't belong. It can improve biophysical markers, so things like blood pressure, blood sugar, lipid profiles. We know that it lessens our likelihood of developing neurodegenerative disorders. Things like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's things that most of us really want to avoid. It can also be really helpful, very beneficial for helping to balance blood sugar.

I touched on that earlier, but I think for many, many people... that most of us really want to avoid. It can also be really helpful, very beneficial for helping

to balance blood sugar. I touched on that earlier, but I think for many, many people, they have been conditioned to believe that we need to eat snacks and many meals and eat all day long. And I'm here to tell people the way to balance your blood sugar is to eat less frequently. And why is it important to balance your blood sugar? Because that controls your energy, that it controls your cognition,

like how well you're able to think and draw upon words

and all of those kinds of things.

It's very important to stabilize your blood sugar so that your body is, you know, when your blood sugar is stable, your body can effectively go in and utilize either carbohydrates or fats as a fuel source. And for many people listening, that may seem kind of overwhelming. Like, what does that mean? We want our bodies to be able to be flexible. We want

that metabolic flexibility so that our bodies can effectively use different types of fuel, depending on what we're doing. If you're sprinting, you're probably going to be using predominantly carbohydrates. If you're doing a long form exercise, like you're hiking up a mountain, it's going going to be more endurance.

You're going to be tapping as some fat.

Stored fat is a fuel source.

But for many people what they don't realize is that keeping your blood sugar stable helps

with, as I was mentioning, cognition, energy, sleep also helps us be able to effectively use our metabolism in a way that we can draw upon stored fat as a fuel source. In a lot of different ways, blood sugar stabilization is almost always one of the first things that I work on with my female patients, because more often than not, the fact that we're eating frequently, we're eating the wrong combinations of foods, we're eating too frequently, it can all contribute to your blood sugar not being properly balanced. Yes, dude, thank you so much for breaking that down. And one of the things I really freaking love in your book is you really do identify why this specifically is important for women. For myself, my husband went on fasting because he done all these interviews. He said, oh my god, this is amazing. He starts doing something. I'll do it too. I just copy him. Of course, as you can imagine, the results weren't the same, the effects weren't the same. He was having all these amazing things and I was just finding myself even more tired at one point. And so what I realized is, and this is the thing that I really want to have at home today, is it is done differently for women because of our cycles, because of our hormones. And I'd love to go deep today on how we start to navigate that. And then the results and the benefits that as a woman it can have is just so beautiful and amazing that I want women to know what the benefits can be before they dismiss doing the act. Because I've heard you say it broke your heart but a lot of your clients and we're coming to you saying just give me a pill. Just give me a pill and the truth is is that by fasting it can actually help a lot of women you don't need to go to the pill. Yeah, and I think on a lot of different levels, we have conditioned our patients to expect a pill to treat a symptom. And, you know, certainly the pharmaceutical industry has reinforced this fact. And so the one thing that I got very frustrated with, mainstream kind of conventional medicine, and my whole background in cardiology was that I was just adding more and more medication because my patients were not willing to, for the most part, not willing to change their diet, not willing to exercise, not willing to prioritize sleep, lean in distress management. So I think that starting to change the narrative is really important for people to understand they do have control. They can be empowered. They can be inspired to take more control over their health care and their wellness. And one way to do that is to understand that there is this interrelationship between how frequently we eat, the food choices we make, and ultimately what translates into metabolic health. And metabolic health is, you know, is our blood pressure well controlled? What's our waste or conference? know, what's our, what our lipid panels look like? What's our fasting blood sugar look like? And so, you know, unfortunately, we've, we've contributed to this problem. And so I always say, for the rest of my life, I'm going to try to continue to have this conversation to say, yes, it is harder up front to change your diet, to prioritize to eat less often, but ultimately, you're going to avoid a lot of these chronic disease states that we now think are so commonplace. How many people do you know that it's totally normal to gain 30 pounds between the ages of 40 and 50? How many people think it's completely normal to be on five or six medications? And that is the norm. I think the average patient now is 15 medications.

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