Hey, hey ladies. Welcome to episode 16. You guys, it's mid December. Where is the time going? I'm not quite sure. I am in my office today. It is a Sunday,today. It's a dreary and rainy outside and I'm just putting my head down and I'm recording all of the podcasts. My husband and I are going on a trip back to his family home for Christmas, and we're going to be doing some snowboarding and we're going to take a week to come back and stop at all of the mountains, that's our plan. We love snowboarding, we got married on snowboards. For those of you who don't know well, we weren't actually on snowboards when we got married, we got married inside in a room, I was in my snowboard boots under my address. And then we went snowboarding and be in my dress and him and his tuxedo. It was fantastic. So snowboarding is something that's really special to us, it was one of our first dates, he proposed on a snowboard, if you don't know that in the backcountry of Whistler. So fun. Anyway, we're both really looking forward to it. So I am putting my head down and getting all of my work done before we go, so that I can just really take some time off and enjoy him. It's our fourth year wedding anniversary. We've been together nine years, something to celebrate. You all, we're still madly in love, that's good. All right.
So, today's episode is intermittent fasting. I'm going to talk about intermittent fasting, in terms of how I teach it. So there's lots of different ways to intermittent fast. Technically the term intermittent fasting just means that you are intermittently not having food. Right. All of us intermittently fast at night when we're sleeping and we're not eating. And then in the morning we break that fast with breakfast. Right, makes sense. However intermittent fasting has become much more popular over the last decade, in terms of weight loss or for health purposes, in regards to not eating for longer periods of time than you do eat throughout the day. So what this might look like is what we call the 8/16, which is you eat for eight hours a day, you fast for 16 hours a day. Some people do a 5/2, which is regular eating five days a week. And then more of an intermittent fast two days a week, where they only eat one meal on those two days. There's the 6/18, where you eat for six hours a day. Anyway, there's a lot of different ways to do it. There's more extreme ways to intermittent fast, where you may take full 24 hour periods without eating. I'm not going to go into all the different ways you can intermittently fast. Some are definitely safer than others.
I'm going to talk about the 8/16, which is what I use in the transformation program with my weight loss clients and what I find the most beneficial and also the easiest to fit in and sustain in a regular lifestyle. Now, when it comes to intermittent fasting, I just want to put this disclaimer out there. It's always best to just check in with your doctor, make sure that there's nothing that you're overlooking or no reasons that you shouldn't be doing this depending on what your doctor thinks of intermittent fasting, they may or may not try and talk you out of it. For the most part, I'd say 16/8 or an 8/16 is a pretty safe intermittent fast. This means you're eating for an eight hour window and you're fasting for a 16 hour window.
Now, I want to talk about this a little bit, because so many people get really hung up on the minute details of a diet or have a plan and they stress about it. So I first want to just let you know, just relax a little bit, it doesn't have to be perfect. The goal here is not perfection. The goal as a human being, the goal should never be about perfection ever because as human beings, we are not perfect. And when we beat ourselves up for not being perfect, it lowers our personal morale. It lowers our self-confidence. So, if you are able to intermittent fast and follow an 8/16, five days a week. And then there's a couple of days where you like to have brunch with your family or where you have a couple handfuls of popcorn after your 8:00 PM shut off time, it's fine. It doesn't mean you have failed. It's not a reason to let your brain talk you out of continuing. Okay. So what we're trying to set up here is an initial guideline to give you some rules. And I love intermittent fasting for this because it's such a clear vision of, okay I can eat between this time and this time period. Go, easy, right. So intermittent fasting is a really natural human way to eat. If you think back to hundreds of years ago, we didn't sit around and watch TV in the evening and snack late into the night. We didn't have food available to us at all times, we had to go out and hunt for food. We had to go out and pick our food from trees and things like that. So, food wasn't readily available to us at all times, we used to have to work a lot harder to get our food, and then we would have smaller windows to consume it because sleep was more important than we would fall asleep with when it was light and dark outside. So like right now it's getting dark at 4:00 PM. So, it would be time for bed. Right. Naturally, we would be on kind of an intermittent fasting style protocol where we might go to bed with the sun and sleep for 10 to 12 hours and wake up and then go and have to fetch breakfast, go and have to pick forge, hunt, find breakfast. And then bring it back in our breakfast would be started much later and our dinner would be much earlier. Right. And there might only be two meals a day or three meals a day. So nowadays we have this. Abundance of food readily available to us at all times. And we tend to stay up much later than when the sun goes down, watching TV and mindlessly consuming food, which is not good for us, you all. Right. Okay, tangent done. So naturally our metabolisms are designed to need rest. When our metabolisms don't have to be digesting food, our bodies can focus energy on other things, our bodies can heal and repair and put effort and energy into doing other bodily functions, which is awesome.
So let's talk about the benefits of intermittent fasting. So first off, in terms of weight loss, the fat adaptation component. We talked about this a little bit in the last episode. Allowing our body to have that 16 hour window where there isn't any insulin being pumped out of our pancreas, our bodies are able to really utilize stored fats. There isn't sugar and carbohydrates and glycogen in our bloodstream that we can use as fuel. So our body is forced to fat adapt to utilize that stored fuel in our bodies for energy. And this process is a really healthy process. Our bodies were designed to do this. That's why we store body fat, especially us women. Our bodies should be good at fat adaptation and intermittent fasting helps make our bodies more efficient at it. Intermittent fasting also improves insulin sensitivity, dopamine sensitivity to food, it decreases our appetite. And there's a ton of studies and benefits. I was looking through Google. So you guys, and I'm not going to go through all of it. You guys are welcome to jump into Google and do the research for yourself, but there are a ton of studies out there on intermittent fasting and the health benefits that go along with it. Both cognitively, physically, all of it. So, I'm a big fan of intermittent fasting. I love how easy and intermittent fasting protocol is to follow. I like the time-saving component of intermittent fasting. I like how fast the results are. And most people can adapt to an intermittent fasting protocol within a week. So it's generally a pretty easy sell to my weight loss clients. Sometimes I get a little bit of resistance, just a little bit of pushback at first. But I'm going to say nine out of 10 people give me resistance. I come back and are like, this is amazing. And I'm like, see, It's fine. Now, like I said in episode 15. Intermittent fasting is something I like to use temporarily. I do find that our human bodies adapt to an intermittent fasting protocol. So it's something that I'll use for weight loss for eight to 16 weeks. And then I transitioned clients into more of a multi mini meals protocol. And then maybe we'll bring them back into intermittent fasting at a later date.
So let's just kind of run through what an intermittent fasting protocol might look like for those of you who are like, yes, sign me up. What should I do? So first off, you want to look at your lifestyle and no one can tell you what's going to work best for you. You want to be able to pick, what's going to work best for you and what that is going to look like is whatever, you can sustain the longest, like whatever feels good for you so that you can do it for eight to 16 weeks, right. Or longer. So some people prefer to break their fast at 10:00 AM and eat till 6:00 PM. Some people like a noon to 8:00 PM window. That seems to be one of the most popular. And some people like to eat first thing in the morning that 8:00 AM breakfast is important to them. So they'll stop eating at four o'clock in the afternoon. Right. So whatever, an eight hour window works best for you. But I am going to suggest that you don't necessarily want to be eating right up until the moment you go to bed. You want to be able to give your body some time to digest before you lay down to rest for the night so that your body can go to work on healing your muscles and doing other things it needs to do rather than digesting your food while you're sleeping.
Okay, so I'm going to use the 12 to 8:00 PM intermittent fasting window. Just to give you an idea of what this might look like. So I'm going to go with someone who has weight loss in mind, just an average female who, you know, maybe weighs 160 pounds and is five foot four. Let's just throw out those numbers. I'm not going to get into math. We're not going to worry about the math when it comes to the transformation program and intermittent fasting except for those bare minimum goals that we talked about way back in like episode 11 or 12, that hundred grams of protein, that 50 grams of healthy fats and lots and lots of vegetables. Right. So what this might look like is, maybe she wakes up at 8:00 AM and has a cup of tea or a black coffee, or maybe some lemon water or maybe just drinks a liter of water. I like to have my clients drink a liter of water first thing in the morning. It's a good habit to get into. I drink a lot of water overnight, personally so I take a two liter jug with me to bed and I usually do drink about a liter overnight. And then I finished the rest of the jug in the morning before I had my first cup of coffee. So you can have non-caloric beverages and not break a fast. Now, some people are going to argue with me here. I also believe that you can have fats without breaking your fast cause technically fats do not have an insulin response. They keep you in a fat adopted state. So if you wanted to put a whole fat creamer or a little bit of coconut oil. This is why Bulletproof coffee is so popular when it comes to intermittent fasting because of the combination of coconut oil and butter, there's no carbohydrates in that, right. There's nothing creating an insulin response. So it keeps you in that fasted state. So I like to suggest that if you're just getting started to stick with non-caloric beverages, non sweetened beverages, just get your palette really used to not having anything creamy or sweet first thing in the morning. All right because that's what we tend to get dopamine addicted to you guys, the cream and sugar. We're not actually addicted to the coffee, it's the cream and sugar or the caffeine component, we might need that too. Our bodies become dependent on that stimulant. Right? But if you've noticed, like if you can switch over to decaf, no problem. But you can't kick coffee completely, it's the sugar and the cream.
I had a friend of mine, who wanted to decrease her tea intake? And I said to her, I said, why don't you just leave the tea in, but take out the honey and the milk. And she realized very quickly that it wasn't the tea that was the problem, iIt was the honey and the milk that she was really enjoying. Okay. Enough about that. So, let's say at noon, you break your fast, some options for doing this, maybe like a three egg omelet with lots of vegetables, maybe a little bit of goat cheese, or some Swiss cheese and a cup of berries on the side. Or one of my favorite ways to break a fast lunch is a big chicken Caesar salad with bacon bits and Parmesan cheese. And again, you maybe want to have some berries on the side, just to add a little bit of a card component to that. And then maybe you'd have your workout, this is one of the things that intermittent fasting. If you like to work out first thing in the morning, an intermittent fasting protocol may not be for you or a later in the day, intermittent fasting protocol may not be for you. So if you like to workout in the morning, I'm going to suggest that you eat after you work out, just so that your body can start recovering from that workout. At least a protein shake, get something in your system. But if you are working out in the afternoons, evening intermittent fasting protocol or a PM intermittent fasting protocol is perfect. So after lunch, you might wait an hour and then go do a workout. And then around 3:00 PM post-workout you might have a protein shake or a smoothie. And then 6:00 PM rolls around. You might have four to six ounces of protein and a double fetch. I really like to do green veg and colorful vege. So that might look like green beans and squash or broccoli and carrots or asparagus and sweet potato or zucchini and red pepper, whatever that looks like for you. I like to have multiple options on my plate, so that's how I like to do my dinner. And then an optional add on might be, a 7:30 cottage cheese blueberries and pumpkin seeds snack, if you're going to bed around nine o'clock. Now, if you are like me and go to bed at eight o'clock, you may not want to do that at 7:30 or you may want to consider breaking your fast at 10:00 AM so that you finish your food intake by 6:00 PM. Intermittent fasting is not for everybody. The people that I would suggest not. Use an intermittent fasting protocol, unless you have special supervision from a doctor or a dietician would be anyone under the age of 18. If you're still growing, your body's still figuring things out. You want to give your body lots of nutrients whenever it needs it. If you're pregnant, again, your body is growing another human being. Right. You want to give your body lots of nutrients whenever it needs it. If you're breastfeeding. If you have a history of eating disorders, this would be something you'd really want to talk to your dietician or your doctor about before implementing. If you have advanced diabetes or taking medication for diabetes, again, this would be something you'd want to have supervision with. And for those people who maybe don't have a weight loss goal, but they want to increase their body weight. Intermittent fasting is not going to be the most efficient way to do this. So, Intermittent fasting is fantastic for those who want to lose weight, for those who want to maintain a physique, for those who are looking for a really nice, easy lifestyle or more constraint. It's a really good lifestyle to put in temporarily when you have other things going on in your life or when you're trying to hit a certain goal. I really like to use intermittent fasting periodically throughout the year. So I might use it after Christmas and new year's just to really kick the sugar, the blood sugar levels back into submission after all the Christmas treats. I might use it for just a couple months there, kind of bring my weight down a little bit, going into spring summer. And then I use it for traveling throughout the year. And I like to use intermittent fasting if I'm like, camping. Like if I'm going camping for a couple of weeks, or if I'm at the cottage for a couple of weeks, I might intermittent fast Monday to Friday and then do like eggs and bacon and brunches on the weekends or something like that. It just gives you this very nice constrained control over your intake. And personally, I find that very easy to follow. All right. You guys, that is what I have for you on intermittent fasting. If you want to know more, if you want some help creating an intermittent fasting protocol. You need to download my nutrition protocol creation guide. I will put a hyperlink in the show notes for you can download that or my January 16 week transformation program is starting in less than one month, you guys. And there's still room, you can register, you can sign up or find out more information on my website. If you go to lylasleona.com, hit transform. All the details you need to know about. Are there? This program has been so successful. You guys, we've had clients lose as much as 47 and a half pounds over the course of 16 weeks. Come on.
Most people who come into the 16 week transformation program achieve their goal, which is usually anywhere from 15 to 30 pounds. And it's a fantastic, fantastic gift to yourself for Christmas, in terms of self-love, self-care and just getting to know you on a whole new level. If you want to know more about the transformation program, if you're not sure about it, if you have questions. Again, if you go over to my website, I'll put the link in the show notes too, for the transformation program. But if you click on that link, read everything and still have questions at the bottom of the transformation page, you can sign up for a 20 minute call with me to ask me all your questions. I'd be happy to answer them.
I'm so looking forward to starting the transformation program in January. I always do a live transformation program in January, and I always do it with the group. So I print off books for myself and I go through it too. And it's just such a nice reconnector very new year, I invite you to join me. All right, you guys, I will see you next week for episode 17. We're going to talk about multi mini meals and how to transition from intermittent fasting into multi mini meals. I'll see you then. Bye for now.
