#77 Episode: Breaking Down Intermittent Fasting: A Simple Path to Better Health

What if fasting could be your secret weapon for better health? Tune in to Better Than A Pill as our experts share how intermittent fasting can revitalize your metabolism and overall wellness.

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Show Notes

• Introduction to the topic of intermittent fasting and personal experience with a 16:8 schedule

• Explanation of time-restricted eating (TRE) and its effects on metabolic health

• How intermittent fasting can reduce insulin resistance and promote fat burning

• Discussion on the importance of managing insulin spikes, with advice for those who are insulin-resistant

• Gradual approach to fasting: starting with 12-hour fasts and increasing the duration

• Flexibility in fasting schedules and the benefits of alternating fasting routines

• How fasting helps improve gut health, inflammation, and supports autophagy

• Tips for managing hunger, including drinking tea like Yerba Mate and using fiber drinks from the Feel Great System

• The role of fasting in weight management, particularly for those who are aging

• The benefits of fasting for brain health, growth hormone production, and cell repair

• A reminder to consult with a healthcare provider before starting fasting

Key Takeaways

1. Intermittent fasting, especially time-restricted eating (TRE), helps lower insulin levels, reduce fat, and improve metabolic health.

2. Gradual adaptation to fasting (starting with 12-hour fasts) is important for long-term success.

3. Fasting can enhance brain health, promote cell repair through autophagy, and improve gut health.

4. Fasting is not a one-size-fits-all approach—personalize it to your lifestyle for the best results.

5. Products like Yerba Mate tea and the Feel Great System’s fiber drink can help curb hunger during fasting periods.

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome back to Better Than A Pill. I am super excited for this episode today. And so grateful to be here with Amanda, our functional medicine practitioner. Hey, and Shannon, our registered dietitian, and we're going to have a great, great podcast episode. Before we start, I just want to give credit to God for this episode, for making this podcast possible and to express my gratitude.

I really, no words can express that, but I wanted to start off in that manner. And today we're going to be talking about intermittent fasting  and, I know this is going to be a really good talk. I know myself, this is a lifestyle that I've adapted now for the past six months. So I I've been doing it, but I am still new.

And I know that Amanda and Shannon are, are seasoned experts in, in intermittent fasting. So, and I know a lot of you listening today have heard the term or you may be doing it. And I think that, I know for me that there's a lot of confusion. About it. So we're going to just break it down, you know, talk about what it is and, you know, and hopefully you'll walk away with, with some insight from this episode.

So, you know I'll just say like for me, and then I'll open up the floor for you guys too, is that I have found that intermittent fasting really has taken the focus off a little bit more of the focus off about what I'm eating and kind of shift the focus to more of. when I eat and how this can be helpful for my body.

And I know that there's many ways that we can do that. And we can talk a little bit about all those things. I will say for me personally, I practice right now what's called a 16 8. I can't believe I am saying that. I'm super excited. I can say, I practice a 16 8.  You guys, I get excited about this stuff.

But, and that is, you know, I guess considered the most popular form of intermittent fasting. How that works for me is I will. Basically stop eating around eight o'clock and then I resume around lunchtime or noon the next day. And that's how I've made it work for me and my lifestyle with flexibility because as we'll probably talk about today and I'm learning, especially when we're going through seasons that are challenging, which, which I am that we have to honor, always honor our bodies and,  and feed it.

Even if that breaks, breaks your fast and so forth, we'll, we'll get into all that. But I just want to let you guys kind of expand a little bit more, Amanda and Shannon on, on intermittent fasting.  Sure. And you want me to go, Amanda, or you want to, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, you can go first. All right. So the term intermittent fasting, there's so many different types of fast.

There are also The one that Amanda and I are going to talk predominantly about today is a nutrient fast or an insulin fast and it can often be called time restricted eating. So you may see it called T. R. E. And so really all we're trying to do is to condense our eating window. So you, there are studies that show even if you change nothing, Carrie, about what you eat, if you condense it into a smaller window, every marker of metabolic health improves.

So step one is just trying to teach somebody we don't need to snack. And if we kind of look back, snacking came from the, from the food industry. I mean, our ancestors didn't snack. It would, it takes hours to prepare a meal. They've got to be out working and farming and hunting and snacking wasn't a, wasn't possible.

So, We've just done that over the last, you know, 10 to 20 years because it's  A way for big food to make money, but, but for the, for the term that we're speaking of to improve metabolic health, really, the, the point of it is, is to allow insulin to come down. So, insulin is really the mother hormone that we focus on when, when we look at metabolic health, whether we're burning fat or storing fat, whether we're going to have inflammation or  not, whether our cells are going to be insulin resistant or not.

Is our glucose up or down? So if we can. Limit the amount of time that we're putting food into our body, then that's going to give insulin more time to come down. It takes about four hours from the time that you eat for insulin and on average to come down. So if we're eating every two to three hours, insulin's never coming down, it's staying up, then our cells become resistant, we store in everything as fat.

As insulin comes down, we can tap into our own body fat for storage. Our cells increase their insulin sensitivity, so we don't need as much. And so really that's the, the gist of it. And during our, our fast, our insulin fast, we consume  water, we consume things. And I'll let Amanda go into that. It's, it's not a dry fast.

There are dry fasts. It's not an extended fast. There are extended autophagy fasts which may, Amanda may want to, to speak on. But for our purposes. It's an insulin fast. 12 to 16 or even 18 hours is perfect. And we consume anything that does not elicit an insulin spike.  Thank you. And then just to add to that Shannon mentions like on average, it takes about four hours for the insulin to come down.

That's for an insulin sensitive person. If you have insulin resistance, which 93 percent adult Americans are considered insulin resistance or pre diabetic, and 90 percent of them don't know that they have it, it takes eight to 10 hours for that insulin to come down. So if you have a breakfast of carbohydrates glucose processed food, coffee with sugar. 

Which many people do your insulin stay up there for the rest of the day that already set you up Even if you don't snack if you already have insulin resistance But yes, so our goal is to teach people  to just push back breakfast and just Many of us eat two meals a day. So lunch, dinner and no snacks in between.

And we have tools to help people to shut off the food noise, to decrease the cravings.  Many people have the sugar and then carbs cravings. And the tea that we are drinking, that we are promoting, this tea here has Tons of chlorogenic acids in it, which is one of the beneficial compounds in this tea. It's a concentrated extract, yobamate tea, that can  increase your own body's production of GLP 1.

GLP 1 is produced in your guts that signals your brain, okay, you're full, you don't need to eat. And that's why the injection, the semaglutide injections are so popular because  people are able to  reduce that craving, shut off that food noise so that they don't need to eat all the time and therefore they can lose the weight.

But the side effects of those injections are pretty severe because the exogenous GLP  1 agonist is superhuman levels that we're introducing into our body. So it can cause paralyzed gut, gastroparesis Thyroid cancer among the few. It's also now you know, have many more side effects that's coming on as well.

Whereas something like this is natural. It doesn't have those side effects. And this has been around for thousands of years. And  it's pure. It's clean. And it's simple. And we just mix this in the water and we drink it in a fasted state. And it also helps to increase ketone production as well, drinking this tea.

So you can also use this as a pre workout drink, which Shannon and I do. And it helps to improve muscle efficiency and decrease fat efficiency, meaning that. You're able to burn more fat, produce more ketones, helps with the brain fog, helps to feed your brain, and improve your muscle production. So, that's one part of it. 

Yeah,  I just want to intervene real quick and just take it a step back because I think it's like kind of breaking it down So it's understandable for a lot of people listening even even myself included. So I heard you say It's it's best to eat in the restricted window Like two times and I know myself that I have struggled with that  And we'll eat Up to three times.

And so why we might want to aim for two times. My question would be to you guys, three times is still okay. Can we still have benefits? Can you speak to that for a second? Cause I know a lot of people that's hard to do. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm glad you brought that up. So again, when we speak of intermittent fasting, fasting is like a muscle you have to work up to it.

So I always tell people, if you've never fasted, Don't be afraid. You can incorporate the Unimate, the tools, just like Amanda said, but start with 12 hours. And each week, maybe you add an hour, you add two hours to work up to that window that fits you. Ideally, kind of like you said, the sweet spot, 16 hours is great.

Today I'm going 18. I still haven't eaten today just because of my schedule. But I'm not hungry because I have this, but some people do 14 and mine's not always 16. It depends on my day. It depends on when my last meal was. And that's the beauty of it. It's so flexible care. You can make it work for your schedule based on when did you stop eating?

That's, that's going to determine when you have your meal the next day. Some days I'm hungry, or I'm going to break it sooner. So as far as how many times you can eat, I feel like Just  in general terms, it's, it's easier for women to eat two to three times in their fasting window than it is for a male. We just can't hold the capacity that a man can as far as food intake goes.

And in order to get our proper nutrient allotment it may mean that you need to eat three, three meals a day. You may not have the capacity to, to get it in into. I. personally do too. But I am able, I can eat a lot of food. Anybody that's seen me knows that I can hold a lot. So I eat I can break down my meals and I can get, I get about 130 grams of protein a day.

So I will get about. 65 70 grams of protein per meal. Whereas somebody maybe like you carry can't hold that capacity. So if you're getting it in into that eating window, then that's appropriate for you. We just want to still encourage that that eating window is not a consistent six hours or eight hours of food the whole time and that you focus on, you know, when you break your fast, it's high quality fiber, protein and fat.

We don't want to break it with sugar and process carbohydrates and food chemicals. And that when you finish your meal, you know that you refrain from eating until your next meal comes up. And so what you, what you need to do inside that eating window is going to vary from person to person. But what we can still say is regardless of your fasting interval and your feeding interval, please make sure that you break that fast.

With good quality fiber, fat and protein that if you are consuming carbohydrates, which many people still do that you eat those at the end of your meal and that you stop eating and then you break your next, even if it's a teeny, teeny mental fast, you know the same way.  That's so, I love when you speak of flexibility because I think knowing myself and knowing most people, we need to hear that because how many of us have started on something, and myself included intermittent fasting, thinking that I need to be rigid.

How long is that gonna last? It's not, no, it's not. It doesn't matter if it's amazing.  You know, I compare it to those skin care regiments that you see that person is promoting this 10 step skin care product process. Her skin's beautiful. I want my skin to look like that. But I know I'm not doing 10 steps every morning, 10 steps every evening.

So we have to make it workable. And that's the such the beauty of intermittent fasting is anybody can do it. Anybody really can go 12 hours. And most people do carry and they just don't call it fasting. They don't know they stop eating. They get up, they get dressed, they get ready for work. By the time they get to work, it's like 9 a.

m. And they're like, wow, yeah, I haven't eaten since six, six, the, the morning before they just don't call it that. Sure. That's, that's really helpful. I just want to say that. So I'm hearing two to three times. And I think we've talked about this before where we want to stay away from that six times a day, because there's value in letting our system rest.

Right. So let's do that. Like for me, the big takeaway takeaways are eating two to three times within that window. We're going to have good benefits for our overall health and body tremendously for insulin, even cause that's the key is what I'm hearing. When you speak about insulin spikes and you threw that in there, I think one of you guys did, and I, my mind went to that.

I think that like, I want to focus back on that. That's where we're talking about eating the carbohydrates by themselves and our insulin spiking up. So when you said, and we've talked about this, I think before carbohydrates at the end of the meal that makes sense. I think you're saying, you know, if you break your fast, I hear what you're saying.

High quality. Fiber, protein, fat, all of those things. Now let's speak about dessert. Let's say that somebody has like Carrie, 

it's not just very Shannon.  Amanda. Thank you. Thank you. I love food. Okay. Yeah. A lot of times I will eat my dinner. Let's say, let's just use numbers. It's not always going to be same. Let's say I eat at six and then I won't have dessert. This doesn't come right away. Cause your body's full.  Is that okay?

You know, cause it's still after, and like, what's the grace period? Like I know you've said an hour before, but sometimes that doesn't happen like an hour and a half to two hours. How does that work? I just want to, I want to know. Yeah, so I, I want to encourage people to.  Try to eat that as close to your fat protein meal as close as possible.

Maybe, maybe like eat a little bit less. And then if you're going to have that dessert, if you have to have that, and then make sure that dessert also,  you know, Have some fat protein in it. I mean, we've have some, we have recipes, you know, with higher contents of fat and protein and utilize sweeteners that will not spike your glucose, your insulin, like allulose.

We love allulose. Allulose can also stimulate your GLP one as well.  in addition to being a sweetener and it tastes great. I use it for everything and baking and drinks and everything. Literally I order one pound at a time. Yeah, I have the allulose to Amanda. I like the stevia, but sometimes that doesn't happen. 

So I mixed it because allulose is about 70, only 70 percent as sweet as sugar. And so when you mix the stevia and the allulose, you get the sweetness of the stevia, the GLP one and glucose lowering of the allulose. And it knocks out that bitterness that some people say that they find with stevia. It's the perfect combination.

Let me ask you, cause I use the stevia dropper.  Does allulose come in a dropper? You can get liquid allulose. Okay. It  comes in syrup. Yeah, it comes in syrup, too. They have chocolate syrup. But I just do the liquid stevia, Carrie. And then the powdered allulose. That's what goes in my coffee.  I gotta  try that.

I am gonna try that. I have the allulose.  Yeah. Yes. I don't, I don't like the allulose plain and I like the stevia, but it's a little bitter. So thank you.  Perfect.  Okay. Yeah. So that makes sense. And then sometimes people are going to have desserts without those things is what I was going to say. Like it's just going to happen.

It's okay. It's okay guys.  I mean, I want to  go back to the fasting just just make one point here. We actually encourage people to be more flexible instead of doing 16, eight all the time, because you want your body to become metabolically flexible. So it's actually good that you don't stay in that regimen, 16, eight all the time, every day, seven days a week. 

How I practice mine is 16, 818 six, maybe five days, and I would do a 24 hour fast one day, and I'll eat three meals the next day. So just mix it up so it's just like exercise right if you do the same exercise, every single day. You're not going to get the result anymore because your body will adapt to that.

So you're not going to, you know, you're not going to get as much results. Same thing with fasting. So mix it up.  Yep. So mix it up because I, yeah, I've heard that said, and I think Shannon, we talked about that before. I think that's great. Like, and everybody listening today, you can mix it up. How often, like within the week or you could mix it up within the month.

It doesn't matter. There's so  many. I brought that up. Like all the time. Some people do something like. They'll do every day a 12 to 16 hour. So I make mine's never the same, but other people will say, you know what?  On the weekends, it's when I want to eat with my family and go out and do things. So I'm going to just fast five days a week.

And then two days a week, I'm not going to fast. Then some people like Amanda will do a 24 hour fast. And then the rest of the time do short fast, shorter fast. I'm pretty  standard and I'm always doing a 12 to 16 hour. But some days again, it's 12 and I'll eat three times. Other days it's eight.

Today's 18 and I'm going to eat too. So really it's what works best and it's all going to depend on the person and their goals and their metabolic health.  You know, if I have somebody that's underweight but yet insulin resistant, then I'm not going to push for an 18 hour fast in one or two meals.

They're going to need the nutrition, but we're going to just, we're going to spread out the meals and we're going to, you know, push fiber protein and fat, but, but, but they would still benefit from probably 14 hours maybe. So it's going to vary.  They're going to benefit from not snacking in between their meal.

Yep.  Sure. So there's just one more point about the autophagy fast since we mentioned that in case your listener have question what is autophagy fast. So that is just takes place about, you know, 1618 hours that varies with everybody. It's just the longer fast. And when that. takes place. The autophagy fast allows your body to purge, allows your body to repair damaged cells, recycle damaged cells, produce new stem cells.

So it's a way for your body to clean house. So we, you know, I practice that a couple of times a year, I would do a three day fast. Of course,  start with that. But that's just,  I just want to mention. Thank you. Yeah. So there's a lot of different types of fasting and what Amanda is sharing. It sounds like there's one particular type of fast.

Is that when you fast more than 24 hours? And can you say that term again? Cause that's new. I'm sure a lot of people and myself, I've never heard it. Autophagy. It's just a medical term. Techno technical  detox. Yeah. So it's self. So it's, the word is autophagy self eating.  Got it. I couldn't understand you, the cell, the cell eats itself.

So basically like Amanda said, it's cleaning out the junk and, and you can stimulate, they don't really know exactly what hour that's stimulated, but you can, I think confidently say like, even at 18 hours, 24 hours is probably best. But even if you're exercising in a fasted state, you can stimulate it at 18.

But the more, the longer you go, the more you're going to get like true stem cell regeneration and true gut healing and all of that stuff. But you can get a little bit, I mean, I think with a 16, 18 hour, you're going to get a little bit every day anyway. Okay. So that the various types of fasting, there's 16, I've heard of five to 24 plus.

So there's lots of ways to do it in a nutshell. So, yeah.  But working up to those things now, who shouldn't fast, who listening today shouldn't fast when somebody with eating disorder, I would say should not fast. A child should not fast. I would say,  yeah, a nursing mom  and there are some cardiac like  I think it's congestive heart failure.

You have to be be careful with with conditions like that. So, obviously, Amanda and you and I can't we want to make sure that everybody speaks to their doctor first. But even  I think  safely. You can say  most every person can do a 12 hour gut rest. I mean, that's literally if you stop eating at six and eat at six the next morning, I would say 99.

9 percent of the population does that anyway without even knowing it. A gut rest of 12 hours, I think is,  I, I feel confidently saying anybody can do that. Even a child 12 hours.  Except a baby, right. This nursing. But, but, but kids, even Carrie, you can speak of your kids. They, they don't, they go 12 hours without eating without even thinking that.

Yeah, yeah, they could vary. I mean, if, if a child's busy or focused and they're going to be hungry later. Yeah. So that makes sense when you put it in those terms with the 12th as opposed to like a longer duration or a 24 hour. Right. Yeah.  And then we were talking about things that help us fast.

And I know all of us use the feel great system, which Amanda was talking about a little bit later, the yerba Monte tea, and then the the, the fiber drink, which also helps with the insulin with the insulin spikes. So they're amazing tools. I always think of, and I know you know, a lot more about. And we talk about this all the time about the benefits.

There's so many, I look, we're going to be on here talking all the time about the many benefits. But one of the reasons we're on here today is with intermittent fasting, the Yerba Mate teas, not only are we taking care of our bodies because of all the nutrients we're getting, but that also helps us. It doesn't make us as hungry as what we're saying and supports us in many ways.

And then the insulin spikes, since that's the issue,  the The other, the other product, the balance is the one that helps with the, with the spiking. So we've talked about that on here before. I remember you guys talk about this all the time. When somebody eats a big helping of pancakes with syrup, they've done a study so that their, your blood sugar doesn't spike as much.

So you can think about, I think of it in these kinds of terms. Like if I'm going to have my bowl of ice cream, I can have some of the, the Yeah. The balance drink. And that's going to help protect my body because I'm doing something good for it where it's not going to spike as much. That's curious. You guys can expand upon it, but that's kind of how I take it. 

No, that's perfect. It's like, like you mix this and form a gel light. So it's kind of like. Coating your ice cream so your ice cream doesn't go straight into your bloodstream and spike your glucose and your insulin. That's what this is. It helps to slow down the absorption of carbohydrates, of glucose, of fat.

So that way your glucose will rise steadily and come down steadily. So you don't get that spikes and that crash.  Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. And that I was just going to say something and I can't remember what it is, but  anyway, we'll get back to that if I remember, but I wanted to just say, like, we wrap it up.

If we could end with, if we had to kind of tell people today, like the benefits, like  the, you know, obviously their insulin is linked to everything. So that I'm taking away is one of the biggest, biggest. Yeah. Benefits to fasting is you're going to not, you're going to not struggle with your, your insulin.

Insulin resistance is going to be reduced and you're going to do your health. So many good, it's going to help you in so many good ways. You guys can see the chart behind Amanda and anything else you guys want to expand. On that with the intermittent fasting piece. Sure. Sure. You know, obviously the goal is to improve metabolic health.

So it's huge. It also can help with, with gut health, right? It helps lower inflammation. I mean, there are so many benefits and obviously, again, the longer you draw that fast, the more that you're going to add on increases growth hormone, increases BDNF. brain derived neurotrophic factor that can help with learning and cognition.

It can help lower inflammation. So as people will see better like joint pain and, and autoimmune. So there's Carrie, there's so many benefits that we're seeing with intermittent fasting. We've just touched on a few, but it's, it's a, such an amazing tool to help people get started with It's basically calorie counting without calorie counting.

And it's free. It's free. And I feel like it really works well with the people listening today that are over 40, because tell me if I'm right in saying this, typically that's when our metabolism begins to get challenged. We're not able to, to break down carbohydrates. Like we used to look, kids don't have a problem.

They can eat the, eat those things, you know, to some degree. All right.  That makes sense to me. I remember what I was going to ask you Amanda with the fiber drink and the balance. I know I've asked you guys this before you can take that. Ideally, you want to take that first before you eat, but it's okay to take it during or even after it's still going to help you.

Is that correct? Like if somebody's Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. And you can take this. If you're doing a long fast, you can take this as your meal to feed your gut microbiome, but also to help keep you, you know, satiated so that you don't feel the need to snack. So you can take this by itself without breaking your fast.

If you're doing say a 24 hour fast and you want. To have your balance for lunch. You can do that. And when I work at the pharmacy, sometimes I do that. I just mix this and just drink this and that'd be my lunch. That's how you can do that.  Well, I just hunger off. Yeah. So wonderful tools. You guys know that the feel great system.

I mean, it's helping me in so many ways and just want to get the word out there. And so if you are interested in using the feel great system, just click on the link. It's in this podcast description and the company's awesome. It gives you a 90, 90 day money back guarantee on all the products. So if it doesn't work for you, you can return it.

I was going to say on, on that note, Carrie, a positive for moving forward in 2025 for your listeners is that we are FSA,  HSA card approved. So if people have that through their insurance they can utilize that to purchase their feel great system and they still get that 90 day money back guarantee.

Thank you. And we, we can add that in. I know that Amanda said that the other day, FSA and HSA approved. That's wonderful. Absolutely. Absolutely. Excellent guys. People, people leave that money on the table and it's their hard earned money, so put it to good use.  Absolutely. There's so many ways we can be helping our body that, you know, can help us get off medication.

That's better than a pill. The system is amazing. I know a lot of you also are struggling living with pain and you're just want to be able to move more and feel better. And I am here to help you. I've got 26 years of experience in helping people improve their health, get rid of back pain, all of those things.

things. So you can schedule also a well body consultation today by clicking the link in this episode and you will get an exclusive 50 percent savings just for letting us know that you are a listener. So please join us. In two weeks we release episodes every other week on Wednesday, and I look forward to having you join me then.

Thank you guys.  Okay. Bye. Thank you. Bye.