Intermittent Fasting for Healthy Weight Loss

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Full Episode Transcript:

Intermittent Fasting for Healthy Weight Loss

Hey there career women, welcome to the podcast. Non-career women you’re welcome too of course! So I know a lot of you are interested in intermittent fasting. You’ve been hearing about it often and wondering if it’s something you should try. Or maybe you’re just curious about what it can do for weight loss.

So, I’m going to give you the quick and dirty on intermittent fasting for healthy weight loss. I’ll explain what intermittent fasting is in a very simple way, what my husband Paul and I recently found when started trying it, why it helps with weight loss, how to make sure you’re using it for healthy weight loss if you want to try it, plus some simple steps and tips to get started.

So intermittent fasting is just not eating for a period of time each day or week. There are multiple options for the length of time that you fast for and this is called the fasting window. And fasting just means not eating. We all do this every day already.

A good example of this is when you’re sleeping. When you eat breakfast in the morning, you’re breaking the fast. Because you’re not eating all night while you’re sleeping, then when you have breakfast, that marks the end of that fasting period.

Some people don’t eat breakfast at all, so they fast until either a mid-morning snack or lunch. Some people don’t eat any snack or dessert after dinner and so they naturally fast from dinner until the first meal the next day.

And the first meal of the day also includes drinks with calories in them, such as a coffee with cream and sugar, or a smoothie. The eating window is the period of time between your first meal of the day and your last meal of the day.

Or some people fast for 24 hours or longer, so they would also have an eating window as well, where they would get all their food in.

There are several health benefits to intermittent fasting, but I’m going to be talking about the benefit of healthy weight loss in this episode.

Now, fairly recently, my husband Paul and I started just naturally extending the period of time from when we wake up until when we have breakfast, so this would be extending that fasting window, and shrinking the eating window.

We’re not doing it for the purpose of weight loss, but more so for the other health benefits. And I wanted to just give it a try to see how it feels and that way be able to provide some tips for you.

So why intermittent fasting helps with healthy weight loss is that whenever you are eating, your blood sugar rises and with that, insulin rises. Insulin is a hormone whose main job is to move that sugar (glucose) from the bloodstream into your body’s cells to make energy. Generally, this is a good thing.

However, when you eat foods that are not whole foods, processed foods that have flour or sugar in them, your blood sugar rises significantly. Since your blood sugar rises significantly, insulin also rises significantly.

This negatively affects the ability of your body to burn fat. It also negatively affects how full you feel.

So, if you’ve ever eaten chips or cookies and felt like you could keep going, this is in part due to getting a dopamine hit from the sugar and the salt, but also because that significant rise in insulin decreases your ability to actually feel full. Which then leads to overeating. Which certainly does not help with weight loss.

So, when you shorten that eating window, you’re shortening the period of time where your insulin is raised. This enables you to utilize your fat stores for energy, and burn fat, which of course assists with weight loss.

And as an added benefit, you get to utilize extra fat stores as energy. So, if you begin and continue with intermittent fasting and find something that works for you, you are just better able to utilize fat as energy. Rather than mainly just using glucose as energy.

This is called fat adaptation or becoming fat adapted. Can actually benefit you in long distance running, such as half marathon or full marathon distance, because you will run out of glycogen stores, but then you’ll be able to utilize fat as energy to finish up your long run or race.

OK, so now I want to tell you how to make sure you’re using it for healthy weight loss if you do want to try it.

So, I think the first most important step is just to make sure that you really understand what I just said about how it can help with weight loss. When you understand how, you’re more likely to stick with it. So, if you’re a little bit unclear, then just go through the first part of this episode again.

Now, the goal here isn’t to eat as little calories as possible during that eating window. The goal is consistency. If you want intermittent fasting to help with weight loss, you have to be consistent with it.

To help with consistency, making it doable is going to help, especially in the beginning. If this is new for you, I recommend easing in.

If you’re not that hungry in the morning, just see if you can delay eating until you are actually feeling like moderately hungry. A lot of times mild hunger in the morning is actually just dehydration from going all night without drinking water.

My husband Paul and I found this to be true. We would wake up mildly hungry but noticed that drinking a full bottle of water actually helped significantly with that. And then we didn’t start to get truly hungry until closer to mid-morning.

And if the water doesn’t quite make that mild hunger go away, that’s perfectly OK. You can totally do those mild hunger sensations. I like to explain hunger sensations as suggestions that it might be time to eat.

And then you get to actually decide if it’s truly time to eat based on multiple different things. I help my clients with this, so that they really can feel confident about eating with intention. Rather than just reactively. And understanding when it’s hunger versus something else.

Because a lot of times, that something else is an emotion or even a craving or urge, which are also emotions.

So for you, I recommend making those baby steps. So, if you normally eat first thing in the morning when you get up, say at 6:00, then just see if you can delay it until 7:00 or 8:00. Now certainly, you don’t want to be feeling lightheaded or anything like that, but if it’s just some mild hunger sensations, that’s perfectly okay.

I will tell you this, many of my clients find that they actually aren’t truly hungry until a little bit later in the morning or even lunchtime but have just been in the habit of eating breakfast in the morning before work. So interesting right?

Now, using intermittent fasting for healthy weight loss means that you actually have some weight to lose. Because if you don’t, you definitely want to make sure that you’re eating just as much food in that eating window as you were previously. If you’re actively trying to lose weight, then you can certainly eat a little bit less food in that eating window. That combined with becoming fat adapted will help with weight loss.

And if you don’t need to or want to lose weight but find you’re losing a little bit of weight while you’re intermittent fasting, then just make sure to eat a little bit more during that eating window to maintain weight.

Now let’s look at the other end of the eating. Nighttime. If you’re delaying the time in the morning that you’re going to be starting to eat, you’re going to want to make sure that you’re not eating later at night.

You want to make sure that that fasting window is longer, and that eating window is shorter than what you’re currently doing. Otherwise, you’re not really going to get the benefits.

So, as you see what feels right for you, you may find that a 16-hour fasting window with an 8-hour eating window feels good. This is a very common one. Some people do a 20-hour fasting window with a 4-hour eating window.

The key is to just find what works for you. You want to make sure that you’re feeling well. You will get used to that little bit of hunger that you might feel, and this typically goes away in the morning. Or in the evening, if you’re shortening your window more on the evening side.

Your body does adjust as long as you’re being consistent. If you’re sort of just sporadically doing this, your body won’t really adjust very well.

And keep in mind that drinks with calories in them count as food in a way. Because they also will raise your blood sugar and insulin.

Now for my coffee drinkers, you can drink black coffee, just don’t add a whole bunch of cream and sugar to it. If you absolutely cannot tolerate black coffee, if you just did like a drop or two of cream, that’s fine. For me, I need a tiny bit of cream to still enjoy my coffee.

And for my listeners who can’t go to bed feeling hungry, you can certainly still have an evening snack, but just remember that your fasting period starts after that evening snack. So that means you might want to shoot for not eating anything until late morning or even lunch time the next day.

But again, they’re free to work up to this. I think when things are too difficult when they’re new, it’s very easy to give up when it feels super uncomfortable period so that’s why I think easing in is helpful.

Some people may find that they are just the type of person that does well jumping right in. So if that’s you, feel free to just commit to a bigger fasting window early on.

And with anything, you want to just give this a try and see how it works for your body. I recommend giving it a solid month of being consistent. Now certainly if you’re easing in, you may want to give yourself two months to see if it’s effective for you.

And like any new behavior that we want to start doing and encourage ourselves to do again and again to create that consistency or that habit, you also want to reward yourself. We’re going to choose a non-food reward though.

So, pick some sort of reward for yourself for either every day or every week that you’re trying this. Something you can do daily is just put a little sticker on a calendar. You can use a little habit tracker and just fill in the bubbles or make an “x” or check mark in the boxes.

In general, daily rewards tend to work better than weekly rewards, because the daily ones are a little bit more immediate, and the brain likes to have an immediate reward. You can also just tell yourself that you did a really amazing job and that feels good. Good feelings also serve as a reward.

Alright, so that’s what I have for you on intermittent fasting for healthy weight loss. When I help my clients with breaking bad eating habits and losing weight in a simple way that is sustainable, intermittent fasting is not something that I make you do, however, I do help my clients eat with intention.

This means, eating due to hunger and not something else. Because of this, they find that they naturally end up intermittent fasting in a way, because they’re eating less often and in a shorter window.

Or, if this is something that you do want to try, I can help you work this in, and make a habit of it. Helping you to stay consistent and making it as easy as possible to stick to.

If you haven’t already, be sure to receive the free course plus workbook on weight loss habits with the link in the episode description.

It includes very easy steps to create some weight loss habits for yourself that will just make healthy weight loss easier and much more sustainable.

Thanks for listening, add the show to your library so you don’t miss an episode, and I’ll talk with you next week.