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 dieters tool kit is intermittent fasting. What is intermittent fasting I. F. is the practice of maintaining overall caloric intake while consuming those calories in fewer meals or in reduced time windows throughout the day. The goal is to create conditions of fasting in the body, but not for extreme lengths of time. Some examples of intermittent fast strategies include 1. The evolutionary premise the argument that proponents of intermittent fasting make is that humans evolved to optimize their health under less than optimal conditions. Intermittent fasting, they say, is a natural and perhaps even necessary part of being human. The modern day scientific correlate appears promising, too Most people are nowadays 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 Amazingly enough, this happens without any of the psychological crippling side effects of cravings and food obsession that practictioners of calorie restriction often experience. Buy wow items, wow boe gears on Raiditem. Offers various wow items in cheap rate and 100 security. Buy wow boe gears with lower price. D0%A1%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%88%D0%BE%D1%82-Aionl_29.jpg' alt='Aion 3 5 0 12 Full Clients' title='Aion 3 5 0 12 Full Clients' />Intermittent fasting, proponents say, also may benefit the fight against cancer, diabetes, and autoimmunity. Here is an excellent, up to date review of the benefits of fasting. It is wholly understandable that fasting is all the rage these days. Sort of. Intermittent fasting women is a specific interest of mine because of what I have witnessed both in myself and in working with literally thousands of women in the Pf. W community. Many women report to me read more about that in this awesome book that intermittent fasting causes sleeplessness, anxiety, and irregular periods, among many other symptoms hormone imbalance, such as cystic acne. 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, in reaction to the body detecting a starved state. Hypocretin neurons are one way in which intermittent fasting may dysregulate a womans normal hormonal function. Abc Configuration Tool'>Abc Configuration Tool. After my own bad experience with IF, I decided to investigate intermittent fasting. Aion 3 5 0 12 Full Clients' title='Aion 3 5 0 12 Full Clients' />I looked into both a the fasting literature that paleo fasting advocates refer to, and b the literature that exists out in the metabolic and reproductive research archives. Intermittent Fasting Women Problems in the Paleosphere. Trap House 3. What I found is that the research articles cited by Marks Daily Apple and others,  focus on health benefits such as cancer fighting properties, insulin sensitivity, and immune function. However.  I was struck by what seemed like an egregious sex based oversight in that MDA post I linked to above. MDA cites this article as a great overview of the health benefits of intermittent fasting. This startled me because the article MDA cited was for me one of the strongest proponents of sex specific differences in response to fasting. Sex differences were relevant in two striking areas 1 women in studies covered by the review did not experience increased insulin sensitivity with IF regimes and. These two phenomena mean that womens metabolisms suffered from IF. The mens metabolisms on the other hand improved with IF across the board. Aion 3 5 0 12 Full Clients' title='Aion 3 5 0 12 Full Clients' />Eye injuries, most often occurring in people under 30, are the leading cause of monocular blindness vision loss in one eye throughout the United States. Download the free trial version below to get started. Doubleclick the downloaded file to install the software. Recall that the review was reported by MDA as a great overview of benefits of IF. Secondly, in another fasting post at MDA, of which there are many, the health benefits of fasting are listed and reviewed, but the sex specific aspects of the hormonal response go unmentioned, and reproductionfertilitymenstrual health isnt mentioned at all. This is not to say that Mark is not attentive to who should and who should not be fasting. He knows very well and cautions people against the dangers of fasting while stressed. Still, the mere fact of being more sensitive to fasting simply by being a woman is, I would assert, pretty important for a woman who is contemplating or already practicing IF. This goes nearly unmentioned in the blogosphere. Intermittent Fasting Women Problems in the Literature. Aion 3 5 0 12 Full Clients' title='Aion 3 5 0 12 Full Clients' />Beyond reporting biases in the blogosphere, there remains an even greater problem of a significant testing bias in the fasting literature. Searching men intermittent fasting in a Harvard article database yields 7. Cr File To Mp3 Converter. Searching intermittent fasting women yields 1. The animal studies are more equitable, but also a bit less applicable to human studies. It is well known in both the research and the nutritional communities that caloric restriction is horrible for female reproductive health. This is not news. There is an infertility condition called hypothalamic amenorrhea that millions of women suffer from due to being overly restrictive. But what of fasting Intermittent Fasting Women Should we Fast The few studies that exist point towards no. It is not definitive, since the literature is so sparse, and it necessarily differs for women who are overweight versus normal weight and who have different genetic makeups, but when it comes to hormones, women of reproductive age may do well to err on the side of caution with fasting. What follows first is a brief review of what can be gleaned in sex specific responses to fasting in animal studies. Afterwards I talk about what has been concluded by the few relevant human studies. Mice  Rats. First up is a study that demonstrates the hippocampal  changes of calorie restriction and intermittent fasting for both male and female rats. In this study, they do alternate day fasting, which entails free eating on one day and a fast day on the next. The study found that brain states while fasting were different for male and female rats. For male rats the change in hippocampus size, hippocampal gene expression, and ambulatory behavior was the same no matter what kind of restricted diet they were on but for female rats, the degree of change in brain chemistry and in behavior was directly proportional to degree of calorie intake, demonstrating the unique sensitivity of female rats to the starvation response. The organization of the females response to the energy restricted diets is suggestive of some underlying mechanism that may allow for an organized, pre programmed, response to enhance survival in times of food scarcity. Comparatively, the males genetic response was less specific, suggesting that the males respond to a general stressor but they seem to lack the ability to discriminate between a high energy and low energy stressor. Moreover, IF down regulated many gene pathways in males including those involved in protein degradation and apoptosis, but up regulated many gene pathways in females including those involved in cellular energy metabolism glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, pentose phosphate pathway, electron transport and PGC1, cell cycle regulation and protein deacetylation. In this study, both male and female rats gained small amounts of weight on IF diets. For female rats, even in the most innocuous form of restrictionintermittent fastingsignificant physiological changes take place.