Latest / Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease / 126 // Fasting and Hashimoto's: Harmful or Helpful?

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126 // Fasting and Hashimoto's: Harmful or Helpful? · Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease

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  Hey, welcome to the Health with Hashimoto's podcast. This is the podcast where
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  you are going to learn simple and sustainable things that you can do to impact
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  your overall health, and specifically,
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  your immune health for your Hashimoto's, your thyroid health,
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  everything that is impacted by Hashimoto's thyroiditis.
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  My name is Esther. I'm a registered nurse, and it is my honor to bring this
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  podcast to you every single week.
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  Now, in December, I'm doing something I don't think I've ever done on the podcast,
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  and we are doing some replays.
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  I looked at 2024 and the most popular three episodes. We're going to do those
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  again in December for everybody who hasn't listened to all of them,
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  or because they are so popular, maybe you want a refresher.
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  And one thing you should know is that towards the very end of the year,
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  I switched us from an app, a standalone app to the school communities.
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  So now you can join the Health with Hashimoto's community on school,
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  S-K-O-O-L.com, and you will find the Health with Hashimoto's community there.
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  You can also find it down in the show notes.
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  The third most popular episode of 2024 is the episode all about fasting.
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  And there's controversy because some people say that fasting can be the solution
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  to Hashimoto's and some people say that fasting can be a root cause of Hashimoto's. So which one is it?
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  Well, it depends on you because you are an individual and you might be different than your best friend.
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  So listen in to episode 82 all about fasting and Hashimoto's and is it helpful or harmful?
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  Is fasting a root cause of Hashimoto's? Does it actually trigger Hashimoto's thyroiditis?
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  Or is fasting like some people claim even like a cure for Hashimoto's?
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  Well, the answer to both of those is yes.
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  And that's what we're going to talk about today because like so many different
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  things in your life and in your health, the answer for you might not be the
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  same as the answer for somebody else.
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  So we're going to talk all about fasting today and I'm going to help you figure
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  out, is this something that you could pursue or is this not a good idea for you?
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  And welcome to the Health with Hashimoto's podcast. This is episode 82.
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  Thank you so much for joining me. My name is Esther. I am a registered nurse.
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  I'm a holistic health educator.
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  I'm a mom and I have Hashimoto's and I have tried fasting several times and
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  it has always been really bad for me, honestly.
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  And so it was mid-fall maybe,
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  all of a sudden I started seeing so many ads and interviews with this doctor
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  on social media, and it was all about fasting and fasting with your hormones.
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  And I was intrigued because everything that I have read so far and everything
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  that I've looked at indicates that for women, fasting is generally harmful because of our hormone cycle.
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  And we have talked in the past that low blood sugar is actually one of the root
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  causes for Hashimoto's.
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  Out-of-balance blood sugar, both high and low, can be a root cause.
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  But out of those two, the low blood sugars seem to be more of a stressor on
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  the body and seem to trigger more autoimmune problems than high blood sugar.
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  And we've talked about that before on the podcast because I do want you to know
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  what the root causes are so that you can take action and you can implement changes
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  so that you can see better health.
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  So when I saw all of these ads and these interviews, I was intrigued.
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  But first, let's talk about what is fasting.
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  Fasting is basically going without food or something for a designated length of time.
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  As I record this, it is the beginning of the season of Lent,
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  and that is when many people in the church give up something so that they can
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  take the time that they would normally focus on that thing and focus on prayer and focus on Jesus.
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  Traditionally, it was always food because back in traditional cultures.
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  Gathering and preparing food was the bulk of your day.
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  Like we didn't have fridges and supermarkets and stuff.
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  So most of your time during the day and most of your energy went to preparing and eating food.
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  And so they would give that up to spend a lot of time in prayer.
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  And now some people give up other things like social media, or you'll see them give up something else.
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  But traditionally, when we talk about fasting, we are talking about giving up food.
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  And so that is the context that I'm using today for this podcast episode.
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  We're talking about giving up whole foods. I'm not talking about like a water
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  fast, anything like that, giving up foods.
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  And it has gained popularity over, I don't know, maybe the last decade.
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  Especially intermittent fasting.
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  And this used to be normal. People would stop eating at suppertime and then
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  they wouldn't eat again until breakfast.
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  But now, like I said, food is so much more easy to come by.
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  And, you know, we have microwave popcorn and we have bags of chips.
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  So what do you do after supper? You sit on the couch and you have a snack.
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  And so people are eating all the time. And that's not really good for our blood
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  sugar. It's not really good for our health.
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  So intermittent fasting is basically at the premise is taking some time off every day
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  to not eat. And when people start talking about intermittent fasting,
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  they'll start talking about a window, eating window and a fasting window.
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  So if you quit eating every day by 7pm, and then you start eating at 7am,
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  then your fasting window would be 12 hours and your eating window would be 12 hours.
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  So that's like intermittent fasting, and it can go up to fasting windows up to several days.
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  And when people started doing this, they noticed a lot of health benefits, especially the men.
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  But women do not have as many health benefits when they're doing this intermittent
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  fasting, especially women who are premenopausal.
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  And so we know that there's correlation with hormones and there's more that
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  we as women have to consider when we're fasting.
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  And honestly, I think that is why I had problems the first several times I tried
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  fasting because I was just going on, you know, on the blogs and what people
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  said on the internet and about intermittent fasting, I hadn't learned about the hormone aspect yet.
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  So I was implementing what they said about how to learn how to intermittent
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  fast, but I was not tying it to my hormones.
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  And every time I tried intermittent fasting, I tried it two different times
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  for like, I gave it a good month or two of trying to implement this in the way that people taught.
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  And I gained weight, I had increased fatigue.
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  I probably had increased Hashimoto's, but the first time I did it,
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  I didn't know that I had Hashimoto's.
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  Maybe I was developing it. I don't know, but it just didn't work for me.
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  Have you had that experience? Have you tried intermittent fasting and found
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  that it backfired on you?
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  And maybe it even triggered some Hashimoto's, like I assume that it probably
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  did for me. Well, there's a couple of reasons.
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  Number one, when your blood sugar goes low, it is a stressor on the body.
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  It is a hard stressor on the body.
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  And that increases your cortisol. Got lots of episodes on cortisol and on stress
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  and how that impacts your immune system and how it kind of causes your immune system to go haywire.
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  And then your immune system attacks your thyroid. and that is Hashimoto's.
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  So we do not want to raise our stress level, especially chronically.
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  Well, and then in women, during our typical 28-day cycle, of course,
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  your cycle might not be 28 days, you might not even have a cycle anymore.
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  But typically, on a 28-day cycle, there are different periods within that cycle
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  where we are more susceptible to stress and our body cannot tolerate fasting
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  as much because our bodies as women are created,
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  like everything about us is created for us to live and for us to grow a human being.
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  Everything is focused on that.
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  And there are certain times in your cycle where fasting does not work with your
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  cycle and it's going to cause increased stress in your body if you try.
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  So that's kind of like the bad news. Is fasting good or bad?
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  Well, bad news, yes, is bad.
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  And then let's look at the flip side.
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  How is fasting good? Now, fasting does a whole lot of things.
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  And some people say that through the practice of fasting and doing it correctly,
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  in sync with hormones, they have been able to reverse their Hashimoto's.
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  I am not making any claims on this podcast.
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  You know, I never claim to diagnose, to cure, to prevent all of those things
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  that the FDA says all the time. You see a little disclaimer at the bottom.
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  Well, I'm not here to tell you how to cure anything.
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  If it was as easy as one thing.
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  Everybody would know about it. There is not one simple thing.
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  There is things that are individual to you to support your body,
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  to do what your body needs to do.
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  And some people say that fasting is the way to do it.
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  Well, I take a little issue with the way, but it can be helpful.
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  So let's go through the different things that fasting does.
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  Number one, it creates an amplified healing state.
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  There are so many things in your body that it kind of activates and it mobilizes
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  so that your body can heal better.
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  One of those, and the earliest thing, is ketones.
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  Now you've probably heard of ketones because they're all over social media,
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  but ketones is what your body uses when it doesn't have sugar to burn.
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  It burns ketones. And you've heard me talk about your mitochondria before.
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  The mitochondria are the little powerhouses in your cell, and they like to run on ketones.
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  So we like to keep our mitochondria happy. When you're fasting, you have more ketones.
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  Another thing that you have when you're fasting is autophagy.
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  Now autophagy is super cool. It's basically like the self-cleaning cycle of your every single cell.
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  Autophagy is when it goes through and it figures out, your body figures out
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  what is needed, what is not needed. It cleans things up. It recycles.
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  It repairs. It throws stuff away.
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  Autophagy is really, really cool. And we need autophagy to happen in order to
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  clean out our bodies, to have a healthy, functioning body, to have healthy,
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  functioning organs and cells.
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  We need autophagy to happen. And autophagy does happen when you're fasting.
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  And those two things are really, really cool and helpful about fasting.
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  Another thing that happens when you're fasting for an extended length is you
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  have this entire like reset of your gut.
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  Now you probably have heard me say that when you have Hashimoto's,
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  you have a gut component to that.
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  We all do, is we want to focus on gut health as much as we can,
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  because that's a huge component of your immune system.
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  And it's a huge factor in your autoimmune condition.
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  Another thing that fasting does is it helps your immune system repair.
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  And this was first discovered when people were doing three-day water fasts,
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  which if you do not have somebody guiding you through a fast, do not try a water fast.
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  So a water fast is where you don't do anything except for water.
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  You really need some guidance if you're going to do that. But they found out this Dr.
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  Walter Longo, he did these studies with a three-day water fast,
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  and he found that it just reset the whole immune system.
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  He was working with patients with cancer, and they were on chemo, and it was crazy.
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  They were all of a sudden releasing all these stem cells. The stem cells naturally
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  go to the places in your body that need the most healing.
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  And these people were having so much renewal and like this reset of their entire
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  immune system, which was really cool.
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  So of course, if we're having problems with our immune system,
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  that sounds ideal, right?
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  Like if you just do this one thing, you can fix everything.
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  What? That sounds like the American dream, not the traditional American dream,
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  the current American dream, where we want a pill for every ill.
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  We want a quick solution to a problem that's been building for decades. We want fast.
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  So if you could just like do a three-day water fast and fix it,
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  awesome. But it doesn't work that way. I'm sorry.
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  It does not work that way. And one reason is because if you have problems with
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  your blood sugar, like if you've ever gotten hangry, especially if you get hangry
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  frequently, like you are not ready to do a fast.
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  If you get hangry, it is your body saying that you don't handle low blood sugar well.
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  When you get hangry, that feeling of impatience and anger when you get hungry,
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  or you don't even feel hungry yet, you're just irritable.
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  And then you're like, oh yeah, I haven't eaten in a while.
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  That's a sign that your body does not handle low blood sugar well.
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  And you're not ready to fast, quite honestly.
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  You're not ready. You need to get your blood sugar taken care of.
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  Well, let me go over the six different lengths of fasts and what they do.
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  This is from the book Fast Like a Girl.
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  And if you want to explore fasting, if you want to try it out,
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  I highly recommend that you get the book.
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  I have the book on Kindle and I will be getting it in paperback because this
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  is a book where you need the appendices so that you can know exactly what to
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  do if you have Hashimoto's or if you have adrenal fatigue.
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  And then you need like the, towards the end, the recipes.
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  There's some really good recipes in there as far as blood sugar balancing recipes.
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  And then you need the charts in the middle to help you know when to eat what.
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  And those things are just kind of harder on a Kindle. You can bookmark each
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  thing, but this is a book that you really want to have in your hand as a reference
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  guide as you learn to fast, as you prepare your body, as you figure out when to do what,
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  you really want to have this book in your hands.
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  The author is Dr. Mindy Pelz, and she was all over social media a little while
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  ago, and you can look her up on YouTube.
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  You can look her up on any of the social channels. She has some,
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  I think, a free Facebook group and then a Facebook group where you pay a lot
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  of money every month in order to fast with her to have these guided fasts,
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  but she's got tons of resources.
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  But the Fast Like a Girl book is great. I would recommend that if you want to dive into this.
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  So anyway, the six different length fasts are, these.
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  First is intermittent fasting, and that's between 12 and 16 hours without food.
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  And then the next one is autophagy fasting.
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  And that's, like I said, it activates your body to clean things up. I love autophagy.
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  I have a little autophagy activators. They are in the protandim line.
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  I've told you before about the protandim NRF2 that activates my body to create
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  its own antioxidants and protect me that way. It decreases oxidative stress.
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  I also take the NRF1 activator and that helps my mitochondria.
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  Well, the third one, and this one I believe is best during two parts of the
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  cycle after reading this book, it activates autophagy.
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  So even though I haven't been able to fast in the past, I've been able to activate
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  autophagy and that's the cleaning. So autophagy fasting starts at 17 hours.
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  After 24 hours of fasting, you're starting to reset your gut, which is super cool.
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  Reset all of those microbes and do like two or three other things in the gut to help heal.
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  Then after 36 hours, you start to burn more fat.
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  After 48 hours, you actually reset your dopamine.
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  So that is really cool if you're struggling with depression or if you find that
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  you are struggling with like an addiction to your phone and you really need those dopamine hits,
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  then combining a food fast with a social media fast can be helpful.
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  And then after 72 hours, like I said, that's where you start to release the
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  stem cells and you're going to have the immune reset fast.
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  So those are the six different lengths that she talks about in the book.
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  But what I found the best, absolutely loved it, is she's got a chart in here
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  and it's a couple of places in here and it talks about when to fast and when to eat.
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  So in the book, there's this chart of a 28-day, she actually has a 30-day menstrual
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  cycle, and it tells you what is when.
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  The first about week of your cycle is menstruation. And so that's when you bleed.
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  Day one of your cycle is the first day that you're bleeding.
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  And that, she calls, is a power phase. During the power phase, you can be fasting.
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  And then during the next phase, that's like the week when you're ovulating.
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  That is when you cannot fast.
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  Your body is putting all the resources into maybe we can make a baby.
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  And if you're fasting, you're telling your body it's not safe to make a baby
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  and then your hormones are going to get all messed up. They're going to be all out of whack.
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  It's really not good to fast when you're in that part of your cycle.
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  And I don't just mean that if you're not wanting to get pregnant this month,
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  then it's going to be okay to fast because there are so many things that hinge
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  on your hormones and it is to your benefit and everybody's benefit around you.
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  But you're going to be the healthiest when you honor the hormones and your cycle of hormones.
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  You do not want to fast, at least not a long time during that ovulation stage.
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  And then there's another power stage, power phase after ovulation.
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  And that's another time when you can do fasting and it's okay with your hormones.
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  And then you go into this next stage, which she calls the nurture phase,
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  and that is until you bleed again.
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  And these are not like full...
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  For seven day periods. It really varies on you, but it also varies on this chart.
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  So grab the book, look it up. I'm sure that this chart is on the internet somewhere.
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  If you look it up, I will try to find it and post a link down in the show notes.
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  Or you can always head over to my blog.
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  I do try to keep the blog updated, usually within one week of the podcast episode airing.
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  Then I have the transcript you know revised so that it reads better and I have
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  that up on the blog and I will have all the links in the blog and then I should
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  have this chart if I can find it or I'll just have a link to it.
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  Anyway you really want to honor your hormones and to work with them.
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  When you are working against your hormones things don't work and that's I think
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  the biggest reason why fasting, as a general thing, doesn't work well for women.
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  Men, they have a 24-hour cycle.
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  24 hours. Every single day is the same as far as their hormones.
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  Women, our hormones are always changing. We have several different hormones,
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  and they go off of each other, and one rises, one falls.
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  It's really complex. It is amazing.
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  Women are amazing. Our bodies are incredible.
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  Everything that we go through in in a
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  period cycle it's so cool and
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  I really feel bad that we don't grow up knowing that we
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  do not grow up at least I didn't I didn't grow up knowing that it was a gift
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  to be a woman instead we felt like it was shameful to get a period puberty was
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  well it still is awkward for everybody it's not fun for any woman but But.
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  It's a really, really cool thing. And our hormones are amazing when you learn
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  that you can work with your hormones and that you can harness different types
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  of energy during different parts of your cycle.
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  Like there's one week where you feel more beautiful and you actually like look
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  better according to what your hormones are doing with your skin and with other things.
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  And then there's other times during your cycle where you are able to multitask
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  and you're able to get a ton of stuff done.
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  There's other times in your cycle where you are more emotional.
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  And that is probably the one that we all recognize. But really,
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  our cycles are wonderful.
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  And I feel bad that so many of us have grown up thinking that it's almost shameful
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  to be a woman. It's not. You are amazing.
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  Your body has been created perfectly.
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  And when you can learn to work with your hormones and not stress them out,
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  things are going to work better so in summary
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  fasting it can be
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  bad it can be good if you're just going to like fly into
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  it and try it then it's probably going to be bad if
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  you're going to prepare your body to adapt if
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  you're going to prepare your blood sugar and get off of
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  that hangry cycle then that's going to be better and then if
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  you work with your hormones and follow a specific plan like this fast with a
• 21:16
  girl like a girl there's possibly other ones out there too that teach you how
• 21:21
  to follow your hormones then that's going to be better always work with your
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  hormones because when you're working with your body things are going to work better.
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  This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only please be sure
• 21:35
  to discuss any concerns and plans with your trusted healthcare professional.
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  Music.