[fast5] Shattering the Myth of Fasting for Women: A Review of Female-Specific Responses

Here's an article that is critical of intermittent fasting for women - ladies, what do you say?

Shattering the Myth of Fasting for Women: A Review of Female-Specific Responses to Fasting in the Literature

One of the more esoteric but much beloved tools in the paleo dieter's tool-kit is intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is the practice of maintaining overall caloric intake while consuming those calories in fewer meals or in reduced time windows. Some examples include 10, 8, or 5 hour eating windows throughout the day, or perhaps eating just two meals each day: one in the morning, and one at night. The evolutionary premise is that humans evolved to optimize their health under less-than-optimal conditions. Fasting may have played a significant role in ancestral human physiology.

The modern-day scientific correlate appears promising, too. Most people are aware that a calorie-restricted diet has the ability not just to decrease body weight but also to lengthen a human life. Emerging research is beginning to show, however, that intermittent fasting is just as effective as calorie restriction in ensuring these health benefits, and amazingly enough without any of the psychological crippling side effects practitioners of calorie-restriction often experience.

Intermittent fasting also may benefit the fight against cancer, the ubiquity of diabetes, and individuals' immune function. Here is another excellent, up-to-date review. It is wholly understandable that fasting is all the rage these days.

Sort of.

I have a specific interest in intermittent fasting because of what I have witnessed in women in the PfW community. Many women find that with intermittent fasting comes sleeplessness, anxiety, and irregular periods, among a myriad of other symptoms hormone dysregulations. I have also personally experienced metabolic distress as a result of fasting, which is evidenced by my interest in hypocretin neurons. Hypocretin neurons have the ability to incite energetic wakefulness, and to prevent a person from falling asleep, should his body detect a "starved" state. Hypocretin neurons are one way in which intermittent fasting may dysregulate a woman's system.

Because of all these experiences I was having myself and hearing about in others, I undertook investigating both a) the fasting literature that paleo fasting advocates refer to, and b) the literature that exists out in the metabolic and reproductive research worlds.

More here:
http://www.paleoforwomen.com/shattering-the-myth-of-fasting-for-women-a-review-of-female-specific-responses-to-fasting-in-the-literature/










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