Intermittent Fasting and Your Menstrual Cycle (Episode 352)

Full Transcript: Episode 352

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack:

Welcome to the Fertility Friday podcast, your source for information about the Fertility Awareness Method and all things fertility. I’m your host, Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of The Fifth Vital Sign and the Fertility Awareness Mastery Charting Journal. I’m a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health, and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones. I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health, because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health, because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys. I know, I know, I’m a busy girl, but I managed to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility, and your overall health, and I’m so excited that you’re here with us today.

Today’s episode was actually inspired by a couple of back-to-back conversations that I’ve had with clients over the past little while. This is a topic that I’ve touched on before, but today I decided to just jump in full force. So today we are going to be talking about decoding the male influencer space. I’m sure I won’t be talking about every possible thing under this heading, but there are a few specific things that I really want to talk about today, because they do relate to the menstrual cycle and to current trends that are happening, and there are just some things that I feel need to be said. So let’s jump in and talk today about decoding the male influencer space.

As I mentioned, today’s topic was really inspired by conversations that I’ve had with clients recently, but generally speaking, conversations that have come up in my client work pretty consistently over the past several years. Ultimately, the topic of decoding the male influencer space is really about highlighting some current trends that are happening and how they affect our menstrual cycle, how they affect us. A good place to start is by putting it out there that men and women are very different in terms of our hormonal profiles and how we respond to different activities. So it’ll come as no surprise that today we’ll be talking about intermittent fasting, certain dietary practices, magical supplements, and how we can actually use the menstrual cycle as the great equalizer. I’ll be taking this topic in such a way that I won’t necessarily be calling out individuals or specific diets or practices, but anyone who is paying attention to the different trends happening on social media will be more than familiar with many of them.

Intermittent fasting is a good place to start, because certainly this is a trend that we’ve seen more of. In my client work over the years, I’ve certainly seen an increase in the number of women doing some sort of intermittent fasting. Basically, intermittent fasting involves changing the window in which you eat, and it can be done in a number of ways. It can involve eating one meal a day, two meals a day, three meals a day, and of course fasting in general can involve going spans of time without eating. Fasting in and of itself isn’t necessarily a new thing, but there’s been a lot more attention on the concept of intermittent fasting and restricting the eating window for a number of different reasons. If you have certain health goals, for example trying to lose weight or balance your blood sugar, when you tune in to many of these male influencers, it can really feel like this is the ticket to every type of health benefit imaginable.

The reason I’m calling it out in this particular way is because there is a difference between men and women. Plenty of men can do fasting in certain ways and see incredible benefits, and it’s real, it happens. There are many men who can go spans of time without eating food, go days without eating, or skip meals, for instance having one meal a day or literally just skipping breakfast and having two meals a day. If you follow different people in the fitness and health space who are male, you may have heard these types of suggestions before, and these practices can work extremely well for men. You don’t have to search hard to find success stories of men who have restricted their eating significantly and reached their fitness goals with wonderful results.

As women, when we’re following the male influencer space and hearing these incredible success stories, it makes perfect sense that we’d be more likely to give it a try and do it the way that they do it. This is why I love menstrual cycle charting, because ultimately we’re not small men. Women and men are different. We have different bodies, different physiological processes, and different hormonal profiles, which means we have different requirements depending on our goals. If you are a woman of reproductive age, meaning you should be cycling, part of being optimally healthy from that fifth vital sign perspective is having cycles that fall into normal parameters. That means you have to ovulate, and you have to have your period.

If you break down the cycle into its different parts, at the beginning of your cycle you would expect to have your period, lasting anywhere from about three to seven days with an average of about five. Once your period is done, you’d expect a few days before you start to see cervical fluid, which we call dry days. Once you start to see cervical fluid, you’d expect anywhere between two to seven days of it, leading up to ovulation. Cervical fluid can range from creamy, lotiony consistency to the clear, raw egg-white type, and we’d expect at least one day of the clear, raw egg-white type throughout the day before it ends with ovulation. In a healthy cycle, we expect ovulation to happen. Cycle length can range anywhere from about 24 to 35 days, and within that, ovulation would be expected to happen somewhere between day 10 and day 23. In a healthy cycle, once you ovulate, the second half of your cycle, the post-ovulatory or luteal phase, should last about 12 to 14 days. We’d expect bleeding to happen during your period, and while some spotting before your period isn’t uncommon, it’s not optimal and is typically a sign of a progesterone production issue, because in a healthy cycle, progesterone prevents bleeding until your period starts.

The reason I’m going through this is because once you have a sense of what a healthy cycle looks like, if you start to change your eating practices and see those cycle patterns shift, that’s a huge sign. That’s the vital sign component of this. Of course it’s different if you’re not cycling, for example if you’re using a hormonal method of birth control, since hormonal methods suppress ovulation to some degree, so you wouldn’t necessarily see a proper cycle pattern. It can also happen that you’ve already adopted intermittent fasting and then come off hormonal birth control, and perhaps it takes a while for your cycles to return, or when they return, they’re outside of the normal parameters.

Back to intermittent fasting: depending on your goals, if you’re a woman of reproductive age wanting to balance your hormones and have healthy cycles, or planning to have a baby at some point, the cycle becomes very important as a way to gauge your bio-individuality. The first level of that bio-individuality is that you’re not a man, men have different physiology. Whereas men can experience great results from skipping meals or fasting, in my practice, where the menstrual cycle is front and center, what I tend to see is that when women jump into different types of intermittent fasting, it typically leads to menstrual cycle disruptions. This doesn’t mean you can’t intermittent fast depending on the situation, but it may mean doing it differently than the male influencer you’re following.

One reminder I often share with clients is that intermittent fasting can actually involve eating three meals a day. A lot of women end up skipping breakfast, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, as part of an eating window, say an eight-hour period. But if you’re only eating two meals within that window, what are the chances those two meals actually account for the total caloric equivalent of three? When male influencers say things like “just skip breakfast,” it can feel like eating lunch and dinner should be sufficient, but the trick, if you want to restrict your eating to an eight-hour window, is to actually consume the equivalent of three full meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, within that span. As soon as women start skipping meals, we tend to eat less food overall during that 24-hour period than is actually required, and this pattern continues, meaning we’re not consuming enough calories.

Many of the women I’ve worked with over the years who fall into these patterns aren’t necessarily feeling hungry, because there are things that can suppress that hunger without us realizing it. The easiest example is drinking coffee in the morning. If your breakfast is coffee, coffee is an appetite suppressant, so if you drink coffee or black tea every morning, you may not realize the reason you’re not hungry is because the coffee suppressed your appetite. This is a real, documented effect. What I typically see is a pattern where women have coffee for breakfast and then two meals for the rest of the day, and eating two meals instead of three, especially while intermittent fasting without snacking in between, typically means getting less food overall. What works best for women of reproductive age who want their hormones and cycles balanced is eating three full, solid meals a day, containing protein, fat, and carbohydrates in sufficient quantities. If you want to intermittent fast, you can eat a full meal, then not eat until the next full meal, and then not eat until the third meal.

Many women pursuing intermittent fasting are doing so because they’re wanting to achieve certain health and fitness goals, and are often more likely to be extremely health conscious and also have an exercise routine alongside it. If you’re restricting your eating window, skipping breakfast, consuming two main meals a day in a small window, and adding a pretty healthy exercise regimen on top, what you have is fewer calories overall with more movement and activity, which can lead to menstrual cycle issues. This is why the menstrual cycle is such a wonderful tool when we pay attention to it. There’s usefulness in looking at a cycle by itself and its parameters, and usefulness in looking at the cycle over periods of time. For anyone who has charted their cycle for six months or more, you’ve likely already seen that the cycle isn’t always the same, that ovulation fluctuates, and that periods can be different from cycle to cycle.

As a practitioner, having a charting history with a client is helpful for establishing a baseline, so we can see what happened when they started fasting or started a new exercise routine. If there’s nothing wrong with what someone is doing, their cycle parameters would be completely normal. So if you’ve been doing intermittent fasting and having some concerns about your cycle, some signs to watch for include your luteal phase getting shorter, say 11 days or less (I’d recommend a minimum of about 12 days), or spotting patterns that shift over several cycles, sometimes spotting for three days and other times for one day, or a luteal phase that’s sometimes a day shorter or longer. Your cycle acts as a gauge, telling us we aren’t men and that we respond to things differently, helping us tailor what we’re doing to our own bio-individuality.

To recap: there’s a trend of intermittent fasting where men can get incredible results from skipping meals or not eating certain days, and it’s easy to find those testimonials online. It can seem like, “wow, it worked so well for him, this is going to work well for me too.” But it’s not good to have an abnormal menstrual cycle, and if your cycle isn’t falling into normal parameters, this is one of the first places we should look. So if charting your cycle is something you’re interested in, the cycle is a great equalizer. If you can eat two meals a day, drink coffee, skip breakfast, and your cycle completely falls into normal parameters with great energy, that’s great. But if you notice your cycle isn’t falling into those normal parameters, that’s a sign.

Let’s move on from intermittent fasting. Along those same lines, there are also a lot of male influencers and health-conscious individuals who promote specific types of diets, whether plant-based, all-fruit, paleo, low-carb, carnivore, or other approaches. I’m not picking on any particular diet; the point isn’t to single one out, but to challenge the idea that there’s one type of diet for everyone at every point in their life, and that this diet is going to prevent illness or cause weight loss like some magical miracle. It’s very easy, especially today with social media, to immerse ourselves in a certain type of diet and create a narrow, one-sided view where it feels like this is the only right way to eat, forever, for everyone.

If you think about it in terms of different phases of life, a baby has different requirements than a growing child, who has different requirements than a teenager going through puberty, who has different requirements than someone actively trying to have a baby, who has different requirements than someone who’s pregnant, breastfeeding, or heading into menopause. I don’t believe there’s one diet that’s good for everyone, first because everyone isn’t the same, and also because there isn’t one diet that would work for everyone throughout their entire lives. There are a lot of women of reproductive age trying to balance hormones, maintain a good body size, and optimize fertility, and the diet that works for them can be very different than the diet promoted by a male influencer in their 50s or 60s who may be focused on mitigating age-related illness rather than building fertility.

Bringing this back to the episode’s core reminder: what you may need as a woman of reproductive age trying to optimize your hormone profile, balance your cycle, and support fertility can be different than what a male influencer in the health space is promoting, and it may not have occurred to you that they may have different goals than you. This ties into the intermittent fasting angle too, since it’s not necessarily every phase of life where restricting your eating window would be advantageous. When it comes to what your goals are and what you’re trying to achieve, it comes back to the menstrual cycle, because when you’re charting, you can see whether what you’re doing is working, and if you’ve tried everything and your cycle still isn’t in a healthy, normal range, that’s when it makes sense to ask whether diet could be a factor. I’ve never promoted a specific type of diet or told people to follow a named “diet X.” What I’m typically concerned about is whether you’re getting sufficient protein, fat, and carbohydrates to maintain good blood sugar balance, and whether you’re restoring specific nutrients postpartum, post-birth control, or during a preconception phase.

To bring the “one diet for everyone” point to a close: everyone isn’t the same, so everyone isn’t going to eat the same way, and everyone isn’t in the same phase of life. If you’re trying to achieve optimal health, fertility, and hormonal balance, you may not want to follow a male influencer in their 50s or 60s, since what they’re recommending may not be a fit for someone trying to have babies or maintain optimal hormone balance in their reproductive years.

There’s one other thing I wanted to bring up: the magical supplement. There are a lot of well-meaning and questionable individuals online who talk about magical supplements and magical foods, and it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of “everyone should take this thing, and this much of it.” Even something like vitamin D, which we all do need to some degree, isn’t something anyone can say a universal, exact amount for. We can have general guidelines, but if you have health or fertility challenges, it’s worth testing your actual levels, working with a practitioner on a strategy and dosage, and retesting, because people respond very differently to the same amount of a given nutrient. The point again is bio-individuality.

I hope this episode is landing as a reminder that you’re unique. We all need the basic building blocks of life, like protein, fat, and carbohydrates, but we are all different, and it’s easy to get swept up in someone’s story about a magical supplement or practice that helped them feel so much better. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t do something for you, but when someone frames it as something “everyone” needs, it’s worth pausing, because very few things are truly needed by everyone, and it’s easy to find yourself taking things that may not actually be necessary for you.

I wanted to take a moment to talk about how this applies for practitioners working with clients. Understanding the menstrual cycle and using it as a vital sign can help in a couple of major ways. First, it helps you understand what’s actually happening with a client, because the cycle responds directly to what someone is doing. If you see negative shifts in a client’s cycle, that can be a strong, real-time indicator that something they’re doing may be less than beneficial. This is especially useful over time, since with three months or more of charts, you can see whether changes are having a positive or negative effect, and you can have two clients doing very similar things whose cycles respond quite differently.

The second major way the cycle is useful from a practitioner perspective is that it invites the client into the process. When a client sees, with her own eyes, that taking a rest day, adding back breakfast, or switching to decaf changes her temperature pattern or lengthens her luteal phase, it becomes less about what the practitioner says and more about what the client’s own body is showing her. I often tell clients that it doesn’t really matter what I say; what matters is what happens in the cycle. I can share a hypothesis, like “I think you need to eat breakfast again,” and then we see what the cycle tells us. This can be extremely motivating for clients, because it becomes about their own results rather than instructions from someone else.

It can also help practitioners notice their own dogmatic beliefs about diet or exercise, because seeing how differently two people can respond to the same protocol is another reminder of bio-individuality. As soon as women become aware that they have the power to make changes and see real improvements in their cycle, that awareness of the link between the cycle and their health and behavior can be incredibly motivating, often more so than lectures or general data, because it’s tangible, real-world feedback.

To recap, today’s episode was about decoding the male influencer space. This concept, of following men we admire for fitness and diet, does filter into the women’s reproductive health space, and it can have real effects. Intermittent fasting isn’t something women can’t do, but if you’re a woman of reproductive age, it’s worth approaching differently, and letting your cycle be the guide. My typical recommendation is three meals a day, and if you want to intermittent fast, skip the snacks rather than the meals. When it comes to the “one diet for everyone” idea, or the “magical supplement everyone needs” idea, those kinds of claims, well-meaning as they are, can lead us away from looking at the individuality of each person. A good model for health moving forward would be one that’s individualized, and it comes down to the fact that your cycle gets the final say. If your cycle isn’t within a normal range, there’s something going on worth looking at, and if you’ve tried everything else, it’s worth looking at diet, exercise, and fasting patterns specifically.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, tag me on social media. I’ll link previous podcasts I’ve done on intermittent fasting, some of which also touch on this male influencer space idea. Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode, and as always, until next time, be well and happy charting.