The Dirty Secret About Fasting No One Is Telling You About

Today we are talking about the dirty secret about fasting that no one talking about.

Welcome everyone!

Fasting… very hot. Super hot.

Over the last few months, I’ve been seeing a trend on our Metabolic Breakthrough calls. A Metabolic Breakthrough call is your free consult call where I lead you through a series of questions and we get clarity on the state of your metabolism and if the Freese Method is a good fit for you.

One of the questions, of course, is what have you been doing, if anything in the last 3 months to try and lose weight?

Now, guess what my favorite answer is?

My favorite answer is when you say, actually, I’ve been doing nothing to tell you the truth.

Isn’t that funny?!

I like that answer because we can just start at ground zero and just hit the ground running.

One answer I hear often is, “I’m doing some intermittent fasting…but I’m not losing much weight…”

Maybe you’re waiting to have breakfast until later.

Maybe you’re skipping breakfast a few times a week.

There is actually two different approaches to this not eating for a specific amount of time.

The first is time restricted eating, and that is eating your meals within a set amount of time, usually 10 hours or less and then fasting for 12 hours or more.

When you fast less that 24 hours, that is time-restricted eating.

Time restricted eating is a really simple and helpful way to put parameters on your intake without ever counting a calorie or logging your food.

When you don’t eat for 24 hours of more, then you are in the realm of intermittent fasting.

There is no fasting police that is going to check the technicalities on whether it’s fasting or time restricted eating and since it’s become so popular, we have been using the two phrases interchangeably and you know what, that’s fine.

Good, so the whole premise is that you should not eat for a certain amount of time so that your insulin, your primary metabolic hormone that signals your body to store fat, your insulin comes down and you then reach into your fat stores to burn body fat for energy.

Fasting is not about calorie restriction.

They are not the same thing.

You may have heard this too. Fasting just works because you’re eating less. Not quite. Fasting works because of the hormone and chemical response that your body goes through after long periods of not ingesting calories.

Once again, the calories are secondary and less consequential to the primary drivers of results, the hormones!

So, we are not eating for a certain amount of time so that our insulin will drop.

When our insulin drops, that signals a new hormone, glucagon to turn on. Glucagon says, "Hey liver, can we use some of that sugar that we stored earlier to help fuel our cells?"

And the liver says, "Yes, absolutely, but I only have enough in energy in my liver fridge for about 24 hours…"

Your body says, "No problem, that’d be great, we always get a meal within 4 hours anyway."

So your liver gives up it’s stored sugar called glycogen and you use it. Then you eat and your insulin turns back on and now your glucagon turns off.

It does this dance, over and over and over.

You’ll see in this scenario, you never dip into your fat reserves because you are constantly supplying your body with fuel. If you are eating food, bringing in fuel, your body will always use that first. And only when the fuel from your meal and the liver glycogen fridge is pretty low will it switch over to burning fat.

Burning fat is a time dependent process.

Burning fat is also a hormone dependent process.

Fasting, or not eating, helps you burn your body fat because you are not eating and more importantly not stimulating insulin.

But here is the dirty secret.

Most women over 40 with excess weight to lose, especially belly fat, they never get into this great fat burning place.

In the Freese Method we call this the Green Zone.

When your insulin is on and you are burning sugar, we call that the Red Zone.

There are three reasons women can’t get into the Green Zone.

First, their metabolic damage is so severe, that even when they don’t eat, their insulin takes hours and hours to come down.

Second, when they do eat during their allotted times, the food is all wrong so that sets them up for another round of unfruitful fasting and more insulin.

And third, most women are accidentally still stimulating their insulin during fasting.

So the dirty secret of fasting that no one is talking about is that for some women, their metabolisms are so damaged that fasting is not that effective for them.

In the Freese Method, we don’t talk about Time Restricted Eating or fasting until Step 3.

First we fix your mitochondria and balance your insulin. Then we eat well when we aren’t fasting....

Then and only then does the fasting start to really kick in and work.

If you don’t do steps 1 & 2 of the Freese Method, your fasting is ineffective and could be downright miserable.

If you can’t get your insulin down fast enough, your body will be screaming for food, especially sugar which makes fasting a nightmare.

You may be able to will your self to do it for a few weeks, but after you don’t see much movement on the scale, you’ll get disappointed and stop.

It doesn’t feel fair.

You're not eating. You are reducing your calories so much! A whole meal every day!

How could you not burn fat?

But remember, fat burning is not calorie dependent.

It's time dependent and hormone dependent.

So if you are struggling with duct taping different diets together and kinda trying intermittent fasting, we should talk.

Intermittent fasting and TRE are amazing… if you have a metabolism that can reap the benefits.

You absolutely have what it takes to lose weight and keep it off forever without exercising everyday, but you have to repair your metabolism first.