Intermittent Fasting In Women

Plus: how to fix tight psoas (hip flexors), permanently!

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The 10almonds Team
February 23, 2024

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

Make your space greener! If you want to get some of the benefits of having houseplants about the place, but your plant custodian skills are akin to an ancient curse of “withering touch”, get some artificial plants instead!

They won’t improve the air quality for you, but the mental health benefits will be much the same as if they were living plants; that part of your brain just sees greenery and does its thing 😎

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

  • Intermittent Fasting (IF) is generally considered a very healthful practice

    • Most research has centered men, and many of those that included women in the study, did not record results by sex, despite the obvious metabolic differences driven by testosterone or estrogen+progesterone respectively

    • However, some research on IF in women has been done, and the good news is, it seems to be very beneficial! We share some of those studies and conclusions in today’s main feature!

  • Have you tried everything for sleep and still find yourself getting to sleep later than you’d like, and/or sleeping less soundly than you’d like?

    • Today’s sponsor Cornbread Hemp is offering gummies that combine organic CBD with lavender, valerian, and chamomile, for a synergistic soporific effect that’ll have you peacefully snoozing in no time, guaranteed (literally, they offer a guarantee).

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

🤫 A WORD TO THE WISE

Fatigue? Unexplained weight gain and dry skin? Could it be Hashimoto's disease?

Endocrinologist Dr. Aakansha Zala gives us the low-down:

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

How To Fix Tight Psoas (Hip Flexors) Forever

Physiotherapist Grant Frost explains the causes (and solutions) that you might not guess:

You’ll notice that we’re now hosting these videos on our website, so that we can have room to provide a bit more context. Watch and enjoy!

YOU MAY HAVE MISSED…

❓ MAIN FEATURE

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝Great article about collagen and glycine/copper/Vit C/Vit A. But! How much copper should one take per day?❞

The RDA for copper for adults is 900 μg/day:

Note: that's μg not mg, so that's equivalent to just under 1mg :)

For anyone who missed it, our collagen/glycine article was here:

❝Does intermittent fasting differ for women, and if so, how?❞

👆 For the sake of layout, we’ve put a shortened version of this question here, but the actual wording was as below, and merits sharing in full for context 👇

Went down a rabbit hole on your site and now can't remember how I got to the "Fasting Without Crashing" article on intermittent fasting so responding to this email lol, but was curious what you find/know about fasting for women specifically? It's tough for me to sift through and find legitimate studies done on the results of fasting in women, knowing that our bodies are significantly different from men. This came up when discussing with my sister about how I've been enjoying fasting 1-2 days/week. She said she wanted more reliable sources of info that that's good, since she's read more about how temporary starvation can lead to long-term weight gain due to our bodies feeling the need to store fat. I've also read about that, but also that fasting enables more focused autophagy in our bodies, which helps with long-term staving off of diseases/ailments. Curious to know what you all think!

~ 10almonds subscriber

So, first of all, great question! Thanks for asking it 🙂 

Next up, isn’t it strange? Books come in the format:

  • [title]

  • [title, for women]

You would not think women are a little over half of the world’s population!

Anyway, there has been some research done on the difference of intermittent fasting in women, but not much.

For example, here’s a study that looked at 1–2 days/week IF, in other words, exactly what you’ve been doing. And, they did have an equal number of men and women in the study… And then didn’t write down whether this made a difference or not! They recorded a lot of data, but neglected to note down who got what per sex:

Here’s a more helpful study, that looked at just women, and concluded:

❝In conclusion, intermittent fasting could be a nutritional strategy to decrease fat mass and increase jumping performance.

However, longer duration programs would be necessary to determine whether other parameters of muscle performance could be positively affected by IF. ❞

Those were “active women”; another study looked at just women who were overweight or obese (we realize that “active women” and “obese or overweight women” is a Venn diagram with some overlap, but still, the different focus is interesting), and concluded:

❝IER is as effective as CER with regard to weight loss, insulin sensitivity and other health biomarkers, and may be offered as an alternative equivalent to CER for weight loss and reducing disease risk.❞

As for your sister’s specific concern about yo-yoing, we couldn’t find studies for this yet, but anecdotally and based on books on Intermittent Fasting, this is not usually an issue people find with IF. This is assumed to be for exactly the reason you mention, the increased cellular apoptosis and autophagy—increasing cellular turnover is very much the opposite of storing fat!

You might, by the way, like Dr. Mindy Pelz’s “Fast Like A Girl”, which we reviewed previously 😎 

Take care!

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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

ADHD For Smart Ass Women: How to fall in love with your neurodivergent brain – by Tracy Otsuka

We’ve reviewed books about ADHD in adults before, what makes this one different? It’s the wholly female focus. Which is not to say some things won’t apply to men too, they will.

But while most books assume a male default unless it’s “bikini zone” health issues, this one is written by a woman for women focusing on the (biological and social) differences in ADHD for us.

A strength of the book is that it neither seeks to:

  • over-medicalize things in a way that any deviation from the norm is inherently bad and must be fixed, nor

  • pretend that everything’s a bonus, that we are superpowered and beautiful and perfect and capable and have no faults that might ever need addressing actually

…instead, it gives a good explanation of the ins and outs of ADHD in women, the strengths and weaknesses that this brings, and good solid advice on how to play to the strengths and reduce (or at least work around) the weaknesses.

Bottom line: this book has been described as “ADHD 2.0 (a very popular book that we’ve reviewed previously), but for women”, and it deserves that.

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Wishing you fantastic health throughout the day, every day,

The 10almonds Team