In this enlightening episode, we explore intermittent fasting's benefits for women's health with special guest Megan Ramos, co-founder of "The Fasting Method." Discover the power of intermittent fasting beyond weight loss as Megan debunks misconceptions and shares insights. Learn about different fasting approaches, optimal meal timing, and hormonal balance. Gain valuable guidance on incorporating fasting into your life, addressing concerns for diabetics. Explore the fascinating science of autophagy and its impact on disease prevention and anti-aging. Overcome mental and practical fasting challenges with expert advice.

Whether you're a beginner or experienced faster, find practical tips and resources for your intermittent fasting journey. Tune in for an empowering discussion on optimizing women's health through intermittent fasting.

Don't miss out on other health and wellness insights. Join our WellWell-Being community at WellWellUSA.com for exclusive discounts on a wide range of health products and services.

Chapter Summaries;

[00:03:00] - Introduction of Megan Ramos and her personal journey with intermittent fasting.

[00:07:45] - Discussion on women's unique challenges with fasting, including hormonal changes and fertility.

[00:15:20] - Explanation of how intermittent fasting affects hormones and metabolic health in women.

[00:22:10] - Insights into optimal meal timing and fasting strategies for diabetics.

[00:26:50] - Debunking the myth that fasting negatively impacts female hormones.

[00:30:15] - Exploring the benefits of fasting for disease prevention and autophagy.

[00:34:00] - Wrap-up and conclusion of the interview with Megan Ramos.

[00:35:00] - Health hacks: tips for starting intermittent fasting, including consulting a doctor and starting slowly.

[00:36:00] - Reminder to seek professional guidance for pregnant women, children, and individuals with medical conditions.

[00:37:30] - Promotion of Megan Ramos' latest book and contact information for further engagement.

Don't miss an episode of What the Health. Subscribe now on your favorite podcast app to get the latest news and insights on health and wellness issues delivered right to your device.

Let's Connect:

Connect with Megan Ramos;

• Website: https://www.thefastingmethod.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fastingmethod/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheFastingMethod
• Book: The Essential Guide to Intermittent Fasting for Women

Connect with WellWell USA;

• Website: https://wellwellusa.com/
• Join WellWell-Being: https://wellwellusa.com/register/
• All Things WellWell USA: https://linkin.bio/wellwellusa

Why Women Should Fast

Getting a handle on proper nutrition is a challenge for almost everyone. Want proof? Look at the percentage of Americans who are obese, severely obese, diabetic, or pre-diabetic. It is both startling and terrifying at the same time. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that almost 40% of Americans are obese with almost 10% suffering from severe obesity.

More than half of Americans between 18 and 34 are on a diet in any given year, while almost 45% of all women embrace a weight loss plan annually, even though the vast majority of these efforts fail to produce long-term weight loss, you can't fault anyone for wanting to shed pounds and improve their health.

However, one dieting approach that is getting increased attention is intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating. There are different ways to apply this approach, but they all essentially focus on not eating for extended periods, perhaps 12, 16, 24, or even 36 hours at a time. The recognition and popularity of fasting have grown substantially in the last five to 10 years, although exact statistics on how many people are fasting are hard to come by.

Nonetheless. Some estimates claim it is the most popular diet in the US right now with maybe 10% of adults trying it. Proponents claim it can help people lose weight. Lower their blood pressure, improve cholesterol levels, control blood sugar, and much more. But does it work? Is it right for everyone? Are there risks?

Welcome to our guest interview on this edition of our WellWell What the Health Podcast. We're gonna be talking in this episode with Megan Ramos, who, among many things is an expert on fasting and intermittent fasting. And recently just produced a book called The Essential Guide to Intermittent Fasting for Women.

And we're gonna explore exactly what that means, why it's important, what the link to women is specifically is related to fasting in general. So we'd like to welcome Megan to our podcast. Hey Megan, how you doing?

Megan Ramos: Hi John. Thank you so much for having me on today.

John Salek: And just to let everybody know, Megan just told me she's from Canada and she's just moved to the US and she's pretty happy with it so far, correct?

Megan?

Megan Ramos: Yeah. I'm not gonna complain about the weather here.

And you can visit the fasting method at thefastingmethod.com. So her experience and her expertise goes much wider than just fasting for women or intermittent fasting. And we'll get into that a little later. And we'll also provide contact information. So anyone with additional questions wanna learn more about Megan's practice can get in touch with her.

So Megan, for the uninformed fasting has gotten a tremendous amount of publicity of late or in the last five or 10 years. But for the uninformed, can you explain what intermittent fasting is and how it may differ from other types of fasting just as a starting point.

Megan Ramos: Yes. So you are really electing to choose to go for a period of time without consuming food.

Now, for our purposes, we primarily fast individuals to help them reverse metabolic syndrome or lose body fat. So we help a lot of people reverse their type two diabetes coming off of insulin or help women like postmenopausal women or young women with P C O S really be able to lose weight and reverse the any hormonal imbalances that they have.

And it typically takes around six months of this therapeutic approach to have the correct hormonal balancing occur at the end for your desired outcome. Whether that's to not be dependent on diabetic medications or to get things [00:07:00] balanced. So as a postmenopausal woman, you can lose weight and sustain that weight loss during that period of time.

So we look at it as a therapeutic approach for about six months, and then after that, We revert to the time restricted eating protocols, sort of those two meal a day strategies you see on the cover of a lot of newspapers these days.

John Salek: You've done a great job explaining, but I, I do wanna get a little more detail. So what is 16/8? 8/16?

I know it differs from intermittent fasting, but can you explain what they're driving for and just line it up more clearly against, or more succinctly against, yeah. Intermittent fasting.

Megan Ramos: Absolutely. So time-restricted eating is where you limit the number of hours a day that you eat.

Is essentially skipping one meal a day and just eating two meals within an eight hour window. So most people, especially in North America, our lives are so hectic and busy. We tend to skip breakfast, that's fine. Usually breakfast foods are highly processed. Foods anyways. So people wake up, they'll have their coffee or their tea.

They might have some broth, some water, and they won't eat until lunchtime. So this generates about a 16 hour window from when they had dinner the night before until they've had lunch the following day. And then they eat their two meals, their lunch and dinner within that eight hour window. So if they eat lunch at noon, they try to complete having their dinner by 8:00 PM.

John Salek: Is it fair then that when you define intermittent fasting or explain it and you're going to define it again for minute second, that as you say, you're gonna have normal days, three meals, a day on certain days, and then on certain days you'll skip a meal. Is that correct Or did I not get that right?

Megan Ramos: No, that, that's correct. Sometimes you might skip one meal and do sort of 16 or 18 hours of fasting. Sometimes you might skip two meals and do 24 hours of fasting, and some days you might skip all three meals and fast and until breakfast the following morning, and that's 36 hours of fasting.

John Salek: And how do you know what to do in terms of the meals you skip or don't skip? I mean, is there a plan for each person or does it vary?

Then we typically try to fast for a length of time that really helps suppress. The hormone insulin from being produced un unnecessarily in response of food. So for those individuals, we try to do the 24 or the 36 hour fast, but we don't always start there. I encourage people, you know, if you're working with someone like us, that's helpful. We can provide guidance. If you're out there trying to do it on your own start, which is 14 hours you know, eat your breakfast, lunch and dinner. Try to cut out your snacks. And then you can cut out breakfast, or you can cut out dinner and graduate into sort of the 16 or 18 hour fast.

John Salek: Now, I don't mean to sound rude, but somebody on the other hearing this might say, well, all you're telling people to do is eat less.

What's the difference between fasting and just simply eating less?

Megan Ramos: Yeah, that's a good question. So, the 14, 16 and 18 hour fasts, they're not things that we typically do. They're just good structured eating days to maintain good health. But when we do, say the 24, the 36 hour fasts, what we do with our diabetic patients, or say postmenopausal women, Is we fast long enough to suppress insulin levels.

You'll make cuts. To certain expenses like entertainment. Maybe you won't go to the grocery store and buy whatever's you want. Maybe you'll just buy what's on sale. Maybe you'll take public transit instead of driving to save on gasoline, but eventually you'll figure it out so you stock going into debt every month and then you'll be able to sustain.

So this is why people, they'll lose weight at first, and then they stop losing weight. The body adapts. But what also happens is the metabolic rate slows down. In medicine, we do something called randomized control trials. They're considered to be the gold standard in medical research. There's about a dozen of them that have been published since 2016, and each one of them shows that when you do calorie restriction diets, we see a clinically significant reduction in resting metabolic rate.

But when we do true alternate daily fasting, so these 24, 36 hour fasts that I speak of, we see no change in resting metabolic rate. Why is that? Well, if you're going for an entire day, say, you know, I ate dinner on Sunday and I'm not gonna eat again until Tuesday breakfast. We're giving our body nothing.

These counterregulatory hormones help us liberate our fat stores to provide our bodies with fuel, and they also produce one of them is human growth hormone, which helps us protect our lean mass from deteriorating. And another one helps us produce glucose if we need it while we are in a face state.

It also showed that we see less lean mass loss in people who lose weight through fasting versus losing weight through color restriction diets. We've also see from the data too, that we get more fat loss as well as abdominal fat loss. In the fasting groups than in the calorie restriction groups. So it's really this hormonal response that we have in our response to giving our body zero calories or next to zero calories throughout this therapeutic fasting period.

John Salek: When you're fasting like this, you're recommended fasting where you may be going for longer periods should you be making up the calorie content on the days you're not eating?

So that time you ate that extra slice of pizza when you knew you didn't need it, or that time you ate that extra donut when you got into work. All of this stuff that we don't utilize just gets put in our fat cells. Our fat cells store toxins and they store hormones.

Mm-hmm. They're smart, tricky cells. But they also store a lot of this excess fuel. And our problem in this society is all we do is fuel. Ourselves. We wake up, we have breakfast, we have a sugary coffee beverage. We get into work. We have another sugary coffee beverage we eat with our colleagues. We eat at our desk in the morning.

John Salek: Your book is focused on women on intermittent, yeah. What are some of the challenges women specifically face in terms of their current diet, whether it's calories or other issues that you know you're trying to address with intermittent fasting?

Megan Ramos: Sure. It varies across the age spectrum. So for women who are still cycling, for example we have different hormones that are dominant at different parts of the cycle for various reasons. So sometimes fasting is really easy at some parts, sometimes it's very difficult. At other parts of our cycle, sometimes it should be done and can be done quite aggressively.

And in the second half of the cycle, this luteal phase. We have progesterone being dominant, which makes us very hungry, makes us more insulin resistant. So having worsened glucose metabolism and a lot of women who are younger who have polycystic ovary syndrome, which is essentially just type two diabetes of the ovaries.

They already have low progesterone levels as it is, so they struggle to have normal cycles as a response. So we don't wanna do anything hormonally that might minimize their own production of progesterone. So for a cycling woman, we have to vary the fasting approach, a nutritional approach.

To just sort of see where we are with these different hormonal variations every month for postmenopausal women. This is where it gets to be a lot of fun because postmenopausal women can fast, just like men can fast. It's the one time I think in the female's life where we don't necessarily have to randomly or, or not randomly, but be very conscious, rather opposite of random and what we do compared to our male counterparts.

So sometimes we have to work on boosting the metabolic rate. In order to sort of generate some good fat loss results. So we implement some strategic strategies at the beginning of one's journey just to help with that and to help optimize their metabolism with fasting first.

John Salek: And what type of strategies are those? Is that starting exercise or something else? Or diet?

Megan Ramos: It's usually through nutrition. Nutritional means and through fasting strategies. Mm-hmm. So we'll put them on therapeutic fast, usually a bit longer, therapeutic fast for about six weeks just to help get the ball going, to help boost the metabolism.

We'll do a cyclical ketogenic diet in a lot of cases as well to help. And then of course we customize it to whether the individuals. More plant-based or animal-based or sit somewhere in between.

Megan Ramos: Yeah, so for men, we don't see too much coming up, but for women we see a lot. The biggest thing for younger women is infertility. Well, they told me at 14 that I was gonna be infertile due to P C O S, and I am going to be 39 probably by the time this podcast airs. And I'm, I am. Expecting my first baby, I did bank some embryos, but I did not struggle with infertility.

We got very lucky. First embryo transfer, healthy baby boy. Due between Canadian and American Thanksgiving. Sometime he's gonna pop up. Okay. And so, I don't know about this infertility thing because if anything, fasting allowed me to balance my hormones mm-hmm. And to get pregnant.

You know, this is gonna take my metabolic rate. This is going to destroy my lean mass. Mm-hmm. You know, there's. Tons and tons of now RCTs, recent RCTs that go to show that the both of those concerns are not valid. The lean mass thing is kind of funny because we carry an abundance of body fat on us here in North America and our body fats primarily job, like it's job is to fuel us when in need whereas muscle actually plays a functional role. So my calling Jason, Always uses this great analogy. He can't think of a new one that's better. I can't think of one that's better in 15 years. So we keep running with it. But imagine you're in a cabin in the middle of the woods in winter and there's a snowstorm.

So why would you leave a hundred logs and ruin your coffee table? So why would you leave all of your body fat, your surplus of body fat, and tackle your muscles?

The body is not that dumb. The whole concept of body fat and body fat storage was to help us, you know, evolve through those times where food was scarce. One interview I gave when I was living in Toronto, it's February, it's minus 40, that's where Celsius and Fahrenheit meet.

And I imagine I would have to go quite extreme distances in order to hunt and gather animals that weren't hibernating or were easy to track down. So I mean, we, body Fat Storage was designed to help us. Store fuel and be able to retrieve it for later on when we need it. We just never retrieve it. So when we need it, we will retrieve it.

We're not gonna destroy our muscle mass and if anything, the human growth hormone produced well, we're fasting. Helps generate or maintain lead mass and even helps generate lead mass. We have a ton of women who have totally reversed their osteoporosis, well fasting without doing an abundance of physical activity, just their regular day-to-day chores and eating well.

So those are the biggest myths. That I see about fasting out there.

Megan Ramos: So if you are not diabetic, you know, we're designed to eat our largest meal midday. Mm-hmm. Our second largest meal in the morning and our tiniest meal of the day, at the end of the day. So, and that helps us balance our circadian rhythm, all of our hormones.

Mm-hmm. So if you can eat breakfast and lunch as your staple meals, you should. The problem is that we're rushing in the morning. I was talking to a client this morning about how North America, we just, we're all set up, you know, to, for our demise. We should you know, we we're on the go.

But if you can commit to eating some real healthy fats and good protein in the morning you're better off eating breakfast and lunch. As your main meals of the day. The only caveat is if you're diabetic. If you're diabetic, you'll know your blood sugar levels are highest in the morning than they are any other time throughout the day, even when you're fasting.

It's called the Dawn Effect or the Dawn phenomenon. We are certain hormones that are produced in the morning to wake us up Also, cause our liver to purge exos glucose, it's in our favor. Our body wants us to burn off. But why add fuel to a fire in the morning time? So for those particular diabetic individuals we will encourage them actually to skip breakfast until they reach a non-diabetic state.

John Salek: The things we've spoken about today and a significant part of your book, talks about fasting or focuses on fasting, intermittent fasting to address problems.

Should someone be fasting in general, even if they're quote unquote in a healthy state, a man or a woman?

My husband, he's a, a drug discovery chemist and there's [00:28:00] a lot of very interesting research going on right now in people trying to develop oncology medications that induce autophagy in certain cells because if it's disease fighting and preventing properties, so it's a very highly sought after physiological state. So doing periodic fasting can be very beneficial for that type of prevention and just good maintenance. Obviously a lot of my family and friends have been in. Inspired by the work that I do. And they'll do some of those, you know, 14, 16 or 18 hour fasts daily to try to maintain good health, and they'll periodically do something like a 24, 36 hour fast for some autophagy benefits.

Some disease prevention.

John Salek: So you can take a as if you're healthy or you've overcome some of the problems you may have encountered, and that's why you're engaged in fasting. You should continue it, but you may not have to continue it on the same frequency or intensity as you initially started. Is that fair?

John Salek: How long did it take you to get yourself back in? You know, what you considered to be good health once you started fasting?

Megan Ramos: Yeah, it was six months in one week exactly from, from my, the date that I started. I, yeah. To the date I got my, my Clean Villa Health for my ultrasound.

John Salek: That's a, that's, that's a pretty good turnaround. Now your book is about women. Is fasting something that's, I assume it's can also benefit men as well.

What about younger people?

Mm-hmm. And if you're younger and struggling with metabolic illness as well. You can absolutely do fasting at any age therapeutically.

John Salek: So what are some of the challenges people face as they go into fasting? Is it a matter of hunger? Is it a psychological thing?

Is it something else? Do they overeat it times when they're not fasting? What do you see as the hurdles to putting fasting into your life in a successful manner?

Megan Ramos: Yeah, I'd say there's three primarily. One of them is just mental. We are so used to eating all of the time and because people are constantly eating around us as well, or just food is so easily accessible it's always at the forefront of our thoughts as a result.

You absolutely should lean into the broths for the first couple of months. That you're fasting this way, you won't get headaches, dizziness, feel fatigued. You'll be surprised actually how well you feel and it helps also control your appetite. And then the third one is just the naysayers in your life.

My colleague Jason says, the first world rule of fast club is not to tell anyone you're fasting because you don't want to hear all of the grievances or concerns. Concerns about it. So it can be very difficult for a lot of people. My husband fasted when I met him and lost 40 pounds when he started fasting.

And eventually people find out and the conflict does come, and that can be very discouraging. So again, having a supportive community for fasting can make a world of difference.

John Salek: Well, this is, this has been great. Is there anything else you want to leave us with, just as a wrap up thought? And then I also want you to tell people again how they can get in contact with you to learn more about your approach to fasting, your recommendations, or even if you can set up a program for them online or in person.

Megan Ramos: Yeah, absolutely. So the best place to get started is just not to snack. So if you're someone who leans into a handful of almonds at three in the afternoon, have them at lunch, have them at dinner. It's not about eating less food, especially healthy food.

And then over on our website, thefastingmethod.com you can learn about the different ways you can work with us. We do have a free blog. There's a great YouTube channel, all of our social profiles. But we do have a, a community that's a monthly or annual subscription with lots of live support meetings, q and a's information sessions and courses on fasting.

We do intermittent fasting masterclass periodically, once a quarter to help teach people how to fast. And then we do small group coaching and one-on-one coaching for a more personalized approach.

John Salek: You, you. Delivered everything. And you really put a lot of clarity into, the different types of fasting and what it can do and sort of tackling some of those myths.

John Salek: Okay. Thanks Megan. Bye.

Megan Ramos: Bye.

John Salek: Before we move on to Health Hack, we wanted to flag our listeners to an exclusive offer from one of our well Wellbeing community affiliates. Chef Fee, which makes a range of green juices, shakes, soups and more, is offering our members 50% off of any of its cleansing and detox products. Now signing up for Well Wellbeing is easy and free, and it provides members with hundreds of exclusive discounts on health and wellness products and services.

But if you're interested, first, consider the following. One. If you have a medical condition, consult your doctor before starting any fasting program. Two. It's wise to start slowly and build, which probably means intermittent fasting that focuses on a 12 hour break. Three, stay hydrated. Just because you're fasting, it doesn't mean that you can't have various liquids.

Four, when you do break a fast, don't gorge, but do make sure you're consuming enough protein. Five. Fasting is generally a no-go for pregnant women and children. Six. Exercise is perfectly fine while fasting, so go ahead and do it. And seven, finally, if you don't feel well, stop until you can consult with a nutritionist or a medical professional.

Take care and thanks for listening.