Episode 109: Shaky or Lightheaded?, Choosing Fasting, Always Starving, and More

up really earlier. He's like, I think you've thrown off your normal rhythm. And it's crazy how just five or six days will just really throw you off. And yeah, so yeah, then I came home, went straight to night shifts. So today I'm just like, whew, I feel like I think a nap and it's eleven o'clock in the morning and I don't nap.

rugby in Australia. But when we looked it up, it's called something if you play a certain way. But then there's like Australian football or something right, and they're all some form of rugby, but the rules are different, they are scored different, and so Eric is trying to figure it out, and I'm like, why don't you just get like a Rugby for Dummies book and read about it figure it out there. I don't know, but anyway, it's

fun to learn new things. But yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure I have forgotten more than I've ever learned about some subjects.

retype the sentence and take the parentheses out quite again. Yeah, And then I look it up again and I'm like, Okay, I don't feel like that's what it told me last time, but that's what I'll do, And yeah, I don't for whatever. Yeah, stuff like that is like in one ear out the other. I forget it as soon as you don't do every day.

more about a diabetic friendly diet. I already had the regular exercise built into my lifestyle. I walk my dogs every single day, no matter the temperature or the weather. Fasting is what has kept the skill slowly moving in a dadword trend. Your podcasts and books gen have supported me immensely. I also am a teacher, retiring this summer

after the school year. I would love to share my complete story with you, but today I wanted to share the fact that intermittent fasting has allowed me the ability to explore foods, bake and cook with such freedom. I enjoy making sourdaugh bread, bagels and other pastries, and my own yogurt. I am enjoying experiment with other delicious recipes without the fear of having to eliminate certain foods for my diet. Honestly, this is the first time in my

adult life that I have had that freedom. I share my sourdough bread through selling it, gifting it, and hosting classes. I look forward to retiring so that I can continue building my knowledge and sharing this knowledge with friends and family. I also share about intermittent fasting whenever people ask me how I continue to look younger. I am fifty six years young and I've taught for thirty four years. I have three children and one grand baby, two dogs, and

a husband. They all love to eat, and I love to cook for them. I have lost about fifty five pounds and follow an average of a nineteen to five intermittent fasting schedule. I love the flexibility. I love the freedom from constant hunger. I love the improved health. My husband has adopted the lifestyle alongside me and has seen thirty five pounds lost as well. I now see a number on the scale that I have never seen in my adult life. I am constantly amazed at that progress

and the process. Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing this amazing lifestyle.

get shaky and lightheaded by about one PM. My window is normally between one thirty and six thirty. This is something new, and it's not every day, but it's happening more often than not. I'm five foot three and weigh one hundred and forty seven pounds, down from one sixty three. Why is this happening?

start fasting. They don't even think that their blood pressure medication could be affecting them, but it does, and very very quickly into intermittent fasting. A lot of people are able to reduce or even stop taking blood pressure medication. So if that is something that's going on with you, I would start taking your blood pressure when you feel that way, see how your blood pressure is, and then talk to your doctor about an adjustment. Okay, so then

let's pivot. You don't take anything like that. You've never had a problem with your blood pressure. Feeling lightheaded or shaky. Two things. One, you could be inadvertently breaking your fast. If you've been doing a five hour window for five months, you should be metabolically adapted by now. You should be shifting into fat burning and you should not be getting shaky and lightheaded from that. If you are still in your first four to eight weeks, I would say that's

kind of normal. As your body starts to shift into fat burning, you feel that, and you're saying you normally open your window about one pint thirty. But I would not suspect this is happening for you. This should not be happening for you unless there's something sneaky going on

in your fast that is causing an insulin response. So pay attention to anything that you could be ingesting during your fast, whether it's a medication, a supplement, a new kind of coffee, maybe you're drinking a bottled iced tea, or some people, as they become more insulin sensitive, just find that they can't drink tea or coffee during their fasts.

You know, both of those things can give you a little boost of glycogen, pushing it out from your liver, and if you have a strong insulin response to that, it could make you a little hypoglycemic, making you feel this way. Then there's this whole other caveat. This is why it's so hard for us to tell you exactly what's going on. You're going to have to do some problem solving on your own. I feel shaky and lightheaded when I am a little dehydrod. When I see dehydrod,

I don't mean just water. I mean when my level of electrolytes water, sodium, potassium are not in balance. I get very lightheaded. It's something that happens to me when I stand up, or if I bend over and then I stand up, I'll get super light headed. Swimmy, everything goes black for a second. I got to hold onto something. If that's happening to you, that could be an electrolyte issue. So make sure that you are not over hydrating during your fast, and then during your window make sure that

you're eating lots of electrolyte rich foods. So you're wanting to take food in that have a lot of potassium and magnesium naturally in them, and then you know, if it continues to happen, you're just going to have to do some brainstorming. Talk to your doctor. He might suggest a potassium supplement. Some people just feel better just from putting some salt under their tongue. And I'm not talking table salt. Gets you some good salt. There's one called Baja Gold that is a good salt. I like it.

There's Redman's real salt, and you can actually just put it sublingually under your tongue, suck on it. It gets into your body really quick that way, and you can try that now. Some people get really hungry when they taste salt. Me Jin's one of those. I'm convinced it's because your body thinks you're gonna eat something delicious like French fries or potato chips. But I don't have the real answer for why that promotes hunger like that and some people. It does not happen to me, and it

actually helps me. So another way you can tell if you're deficient in sodium is to put some salt in like eight ounces of water, like a quarter teaspoon of salt. If you can't taste that salt water, if it doesn't taste like saltya water to you, you probably need some sodium. And some people just need a little more sodium than others. So those are some things to play with and to kind of monitor you have an everything else on that, Jen, Those.

carbonated beverages and some teas. I'd like to know what you suggest getting around this by about noon, the acid starts in my stomach and can get worse depending on what I eat. I'm trying to stay off the meds. Is they are terrible fear of microbiome. Now I'm confused a little bit because she said by noon it gets worse what she eats, but she still fasting at noon.

you brew your coffee makes it different as well. Cold brew is the least acidic, so if you've not tried cold brew, you might find a good quality cold brew. There's two organic brands of cold brew I like. We are not sponsored by them, but I'll tell you their names. They are fast safe. One is Chameleon comes in a little glass bottle. It is a cold blue brew concentrate and you mix it with water to taste. The other one is called Busy b Izzy. I like their espresso blend.

It's very smooth. It does not taste acidic to me, and again you can cut it with water to taste. So you might try cold Brood just because it is known to be a less acidic coffee the way it's brood. But other than that, yes, I would definitely just cut out conventionally brood coffees and carbonated water up, sparkling water or whatever from your fast. Try to fast with just plain water, still water and see if that makes a difference. You can also add some baking soda to your water.

I do not have the actual amounts that you're supposed to use, but you can look it up. Look up a baking soda and water for indigestion or heartburn or whatever. Actually I have it right here. It is a half a tea spin of baking soda in four ounce glass of water. You can do it every four hours. This will not break your fast. What it does it just balances the pH in your stomach. So you can try that all right.

the science behind it. I don't know why, but I can't seem to get my mindset in the right place. I do really good for a very short time, usually about a month, and then something will send me back to eating all day. I know it's up to me to get my mindset there, but I guess I'm writing in hopes that for some encouragement directed specifically at me, so that will finally push me over to success. Thank you for all you do, and I look forward every week to listening.

deal of weight loss. But both of those strategies can also lead to a lot of rebound weight gain. And especially with weight loss surgery, you are permanently altering your body. And I want you to think really, really long and

hard about that. You know, there are lots and lots of negative long term effects, you know, dumping syndrome, nutritional abies, yeah, malabsorption, right, so many things you you know can't eat, you know, a large volume of food or it literally makes you sick and you feel bad, like like shaky and it affects your body and the way your body functions forever. Okay, So I know it might seem like, well, there's my solution, because I can't eat so much, I'm going to lose weight.

But then you know, people tend to find kind of ways around it, right, There's something called slider foods where you were like, you can't eat a lot, but you could drink a milkshake. Or often people will become alcoholics after weight loss surgery when they never had that problem before and now they're suddenly turning to alcohol. We've heard that so many times from people that have struggled with so weight loss surgery is not a solution that I

would turn to without a lot of thought. Did you want to add anything else about weight loss surgery, Shary?

So you know, like I just think like this is a temporary solution that may result in immediate weight loss, but it's not a long term solution for health and longevity, right where fasting can be all of that, all of that, and weight loss surgery may seem easy, like, oh, I don't have nothing to work, but it is not, because you still have to. And this is why weight loss

surgery fails for so many people. You have to address the reason behind weight gain in the first place, whether it's psychological, emotional, or you know the fact that you have past traumas you haven't dealt with then you use food as a way to cope, or you just that you have no nutritional foundation and you just don't know how to fuel your body in a healthy manner, and

weight loss surgery doesn't take those things away. And unfortunately, I mean, I personally think it's criminal to do these surgeries on people and not provide therapy and not provide nutritional counseling so that they can move on in a different healthier manner than they were in prior to the surgery. And I just see this time and time again, and I have had so many weight loss surgery patients come

into the ear. They've got complications either immediately after or years after the surgery, and they have told me that nobody told them the risks. They only told them the benefits, and they wish that they'd never had the surgery. And it's one of those things. Once you have it done, you can't have it undone.

thing to do. Watched a friend lose a lot of weight on it, and the like, sign me up when to my doctor got some And basically you're eating on a starvation level diet that has metabolic consequences.

how to make changes. So you know, you said you want just a little something to help you get a good foundation started. Well what if this little something comes with a whole lot of metabolic negative effects And now you're going to try to go to fasting, But because your metabolism is so slow, you're going to gain back all the weight plus more. And also fasting is going to be harder because your body is fighting back.

well within it. You know, we have natural hormones in our body that tell us when we've had enough. You know, I just did a YouTube video about this, you know, asking yourself, am I satisfied? Food quality matters. You know, we want physical satisfaction. That means eating you know, bulky food that engage your stretch receptors and let your brain know that you have a lot of food in there. That's important. You know, we want to be nutritionally satisfied.

We also have in our digestive tract that let us know what nutrients are like nutrients sensors. You want to think about it like that. And so we need to be nutritionally satisfied and also emotionally satisfied. We need to feel like we've had something that was delicious. So if you focus on nourishing your body, giving your body real food, eating until you're physically and emotionally satisfied with this real delicious food plus the clean fast, you know you're not missing out on anything.

can do to self soothe that doesn't include food. Maybe it's time for some therapy, you know, maybe it's time to work on your self esteem. Maybe it's time to work on healing. Maybe it's time to work on getting rid of of relationships that cause you stress or grief

in your life, you know, whatever that is. You know, therapy can even just help you learn new coping mechanisms, and they can help you learn, you know, when you have these thoughts of I have a bad day, I deserve x y Z, it's time to replace those thoughts with I've had a bad day. I deserve to be healthy, happy and achieve success. And so yeah, just figure out what is derailing you from a fasting lifestyle. And once you solve that, conquer that little hurdle, then you can

find the success you seek. And I also just wanted to throw in there, once you can find consistency with if you are going to achieve naturally the things that your friends are achieving through artificial means. Fasting in itself promotes GLP one, it promotes that hormone in your body. Exercise does, Choosing whole foods does so if once you can conquer them, ye, I'm going to wake up and clean fast every day. The pieces really will fall into place for you.

hunger getting through my workday. And after about three or four months, I easily maintained not being remotely strict with times or food choices. I constantly would reopen my window if I felt like eating, and yet I still maintained I like junk and alcohol and moderation, and I never

hesitated when I wanted something. A typical week on the zero app of fasting may have been nineteen seventeen, eighteen, thirteen, sixteen, twenty to twenty two, and another week might have been anywhere from fifteen to twenty, and just for informational purposes, I averaged those out, and those two weeks would have averaged to like seventeen and a half hour fast to

just over eighteen hour fasts. Anyway, she says, I would throw in the occasional down day if I was feeling thick, if I was hungry, I opened my window at eight. I always tracked the fast, never the window. I had good energy and I felt like this was easy. But earlier this year I went on vacation and I indulged nothing crazy. Since then, five months later, I have about five to seven pounds that I cannot seem to get

rid of. I've got as low as one fifty seven after a lot of exercise, but then it pops right back up to one sixty or one sixty one. In the last month, I've gotten really strict with my windows, going to four or five hour eating windows in the hopes of losing this weight. But I am so hungry, which makes me think I've lost my fat adaptation. The hunger builds, it is not in waves. I get so hungry I cannot think straight. I've also been lifting weights

since just recently my arms started to look untoned. I've always been active, not much of a weightlifter, though I have also felt very tired. I go to bed tired, I wake up tired. I'm feeling tired all day. This is how I felt in my forties when I had a young child, a demanding job, and a soso marriage, and an extra thirty to forty pounds. I feel like maybe I need to cut out bread, ice cream, rice, etc. But I've never had to cut those out in the past, and I feel hungrier when I try to do low carb.

I have cut out alcohol, unless it's just one or two went out with friends. My clothes fit but not as well. My face doesn't look as pretty, and I'm frustrated. I do try the five hundred calorie down days, but I struggle to be consistent with them. Is I find that after a couple of down days, I am hungry all the time, like a bottomless pit. This was so easy for so long, and now I'm really struggling. I would love your insight. Thank you so much for all

you do. I am a big, big fan. Thank you for listening.

three meals in twelve hours. So since you never mentioned the word upday ever a single time, I'm wondering if you are not having a sufficient upday, that would be my number one guess. And if you are having down days and then not having a sufficient update, that's going to damage your metabolism over time, because the upday is what gives you that metabolic boost. That's why ADF works

so well. So if you're just like having your five hundred calorie down day, having it in two meals instead of one, and then having I don't know what you're doing the next day, but it's not really up, then you're going to be hungry and your body is going to send you the signal over time, it's going to build and build and build, eat eat, eat, eat eat. We learned that from the Minnesota starvation experiment. Over restriction over a long period of time sends you extreme hunger.

That's what our bodies are designed to do, so that might be what's happening. So I have some homework for you. I want you to get a copy of the second edition of Delay Don Deny. If you don't already have it, make sure it's the second edition, and I want you to read the ADF chapter and I want you to see if that's really how you've been doing it. If the answer is no, then that's the problem. That being said, I don't want you to eat less less less right now.

You know you said you're trying to do, you know, a four to five hour window and you're hungry all the time like a bottomless pit. You need to have some substantial refeeding in there so that your body knows

you're not starving. That's really really important. Whenever the urge to binge starts increasing over time, that's a sign that what you're doing is perceived by your body as overly restrict Now, on the flip side, it's all so possible that you are somehow accidentally breaking your fast and you don't know it, like I'm going to throw out creatine.

Maybe you've just started adding a creatine supplement in the morning because somebody told you it didn't break a fast, and now you're starving all the time because you're accidentally breaking your fast. Or it could be anything not just creating any kind of supplement or anything that's different and so, or maybe you started an electrolyte that has fast breaking ingredients in it, whatever it might be.

least now. And you know, as we once we're postmenopausal, our bodies do start to change, and our skin starts to change because of the lack of estrogen, and you know, our muscle tone changes. We do lose muscle. We have to work harder to maintain and manage our muscle. But it's the fact too that you're saying that you're really, really feeling exhausted. And something that people don't often know is that menopause can be a real it can really

throw us into hypothyroidism. And so if you're feeling very, very tired and fatigued all the time, and you're feeling really hungry, and you know, maybe time to go see your doctor, have some you know, have a checkup, have some basic labs drawn, have a full thyroid piano drawn,

make sure that everything looks good there. And then yeah, just rule out that there's not something metabolically going on with you that's making you feel so bad, because I can't think of any reason why five to seven pounds of weight gain is going to suddenly make you feel

so sluggish, tired and not feel great. And as long as you're fast and clean every day and you're eating in a four to five hour window, like you said, you should absolutely be fat adapted and you should be flipping the metal box switch and you should be having energy and feeling good. So there's something going on if you're not all right.

and join me in fasting. It's clear to me now that I never cleaned fasted, since I would drink bone broth at night after a tough workout or have a cappuccino in the morning at work.

been a fast loser and gainer, this is new. I am playing with different fasting windows. Eighteen six, nineteen five, twenty four. I won't give up. My question is is it okay to switch daily depending on work schedules. I do eighteen six as a minimum, but some days may be very different. Any advice, I am clean fasting now.

you were doing a low calorie diet. And because of the way you were doing that, it's going to take your body time to like you're a brand new faster. And this is why we tell people during the fast start, follow one of the fast start I want to call them programs, what do you call them? In the book protocols, Yeah, protocols, plans, protocols, yes, aproach.

So you know, it sounds like you're kind of doing a little bit of this, a little bit that, But really you want to work through the system so that your body has time to become metabolically adapted to be able to flip over into fat burning. That's not going to happen in three weeks likely, especially if you had three months of just all day eating, and then once that happens, that's when your body starts shifting into fat burning.

That's when we see fat loss. So we would never expect anybody to see the scale moving in three weeks, and in some cases it can actually go up a little bit. It did for me. I gained eight pounds over my first six weeks of intermint fasting. So just give it time. It's not going to happen fast, but give your body time to adapt to the clean fast to get your body shifting into fat burning, and you will get there. And then as far as switching up

your protocols each day, here's what I would suggest. I have a varied work schedule home in life, they don't match. When I eat each day is not the same from day to day. Rather than saying I'm going to do eighteen six or I'm going to do twenty four, I'm going to do nineteenth five. Take the fast out of the equation. Don't even worry about the fast. Look at that day based off of your work schedule, life schedule, whatever.

Settle into a boundary of I'm going to have a five hour eating window today, and then look ahead at your day and say, okay, today, realistically, I can close my window it's seven pm, and then don't open your window prior to two pm, and that is setting you up for a very consistent eating window. If you are satisfied and full and you're done at six pm, go ahead and close your window. You had a four hour window. If you need the full five hours, use the full

five hours. But just settle in that way, using your body as a guide for when you've had enough within that timeframe. And that just me. That's I think that eliminates a lot of the confusion with trying to work a window in around your work schedules. If they're buried and congratulations on clean fasting.

so it wasn't until fasting. Now fast and clean living the intermitt infesting lifestyle, I have healed my metabolism and I'm able to keep the weight off. But as Sherry said, we don't expect weight loss in the first month, and you've got to really give your body some time for your metabolic rate to even out all of that. So keep going. You've got this.

morning around six am, I get even hotter. And having a dual zone bedjet, which where I can customize and schedule our own sleeping temperatures. Even setting up bio rhythms has been a huge lifesaver for us. This is just a device that you plug in under your bed and it blows air up through a special sheet to each side of the bed and you get to set your own temperature. It is clinically proven by to improve sleep. My husband and I have noticed a big improvement in

the quality of our sleep once we added it. It removes body moisture and sweat from the bed. My husband is the sweatiest sleeper. It is gross. He does not sleep sweaty anymore. We are also saving energy costs because we don't have to heat and cool the entire house while sleeping just to keep our bedroom at the preferred temperature for sleeping. It's been a life saver year round.

We have noticed the benefits in the winter and in the heat of the summer, and anytime that I travel, like when I went to Gin's last week, or on the weekends for work where I stay with a friend. I miss my bedget so much. So if you are tired of sleeping hot or cold, or your partner and you just can't decide on a comfortable thermostat temperature for sleeping. Stop the arguing, get yourself a Bedget it's just amazing. I don't know how we live so long without it.

So I have a link in the show notes for this episode, or you can always go to fast feast dot com slash Sherry that's sah er I and you can find a link there to check it out.

out of the bed, you're cold. I'm cold, and I sleep with my little remote from my bedjet in the bed and I just tick notch up the temperature a couple degrees and then I'm back to sleep.

you're satisfied, you don't need any more. So well, we'd love to leave you with inspiration or motivational quotes, and this week we have a quote from Janet in College Station, Texas and the quote is from Nick Saban, a former head coach for Alabama football. The quote is, there are two pains in life. There's the pain of discipline and the pain of disappointment. If you can handle the pain of discipline, then you'll never have to deal with the

pain of disappointment. And I just think that is so powerful.