ICYMI 👀 I am raising my private coaching rates on January 1st, so I am having a sale* 🥳 on 1:1 coaching – 20% off through today, Monday, December 9th.

✔️6 and 12 week options available

✔️Buy at the sale price and start now or start in January 

I only have a handful of spots available.

Reply GO to this email and we will schedule a quick phone call to chat about the details and get you started 🚀.

NOW, let’s talk about how fasting affects women, especially over 40 in perimenopause…

For the majority of my life, I was never someone who fasted, especially before a workout.

I was always hungry for breakfast and always ate breakfast, even on very early mornings.

But then, in my early 40’s, I started to occasionally workout fasted. Then during the summer of 2020, when I was 44, I did a fat loss cycle, after a long, “heavy” pandemic style maintenance (lol), and during that fat loss cycle I got into a habit of exercising fasted.

Then, when I turned 45, perimenopause hit hard, and fasting and exercising fasted stopped working for me.

I started to grow belly fat that I had never had before in my life, I struggled with bloat, inflammation, gut issues, and low energy around my workouts.

Then I learned how fasting and exercising fasted affects women differently than men, especially in perimenopause and menopause.

If you are a peri/menopausal woman, fasting is not your friend.

When estrogen, a protective anti-inflammatory hormone, declines in perimenopause, your cortisol rises and therefore you have a higher baseline cortisol+sympathetic drive (“fight or flight”), and you become more susceptible to inflammation.

Also, since estrogen passes through your gut, estrogen is food for your gut bacteria. So when estrogen declines, your gut microbiome becomes less diverse (which is the OPPOSITE of what you want).

If you fast and exercise fasted, then you put yourself in a Low Energy Availability state which can lower your thyroid and resting metabolic rate and increase cortisol. With higher cortisol, you develop resistance to growth hormone for muscle building, disrupt bone formation, and ghrelin (the hunger hormone) increases, while leptin (the satiety hormone) decreases.

You start to have low energy, crappy workouts, probably crappy sleep too, store belly fat, and then experience bloating because your gut is deprived not only of the estrogen levels it is used to, but also, since you are fasting and not eating enough, of food it needs to feed a healthy microbiome.

Given all of the above, if you are a woman over 40, the top 5 reasons why you should stop fasting are:

❌ Fasting kills your metabolism – lowers thyroid & raises cortisol

✅ Eating breakfast and before+after your workouts fires up your metabolism

❌ Fasted workouts leave you without energy – you can’t lift the heavy weight that you need to lift to build muscle in perimenopause

✅ Eating enough and especially before a workout fuels your workout and gives you energy to crush heavier weights

❌ Fasting puts your body in starvation mode so it holds onto fat to conserve energy

✅ Eating, especially high protein, turns your metabolism into a fat burning machine 

❌ Fasting puts your metabolism in a catabolic state and you lose muscle

✅ Eating puts your metabolism in an anabolic state and you build muscle and rev up your metabolism

❌ Fasting starves your gut microbiome and causes you to be bloated+inflamed

✅ Eating feeds your gut microbiome so that it becomes healthy, diverse, & resilient

If you want to learn how to fuel fat loss and muscle building in perimenopause, reply GO to this email and we’ll schedule a quick phone call to discuss details!

*Exclusions apply. Ends 12/9/24.