Welcome to the high performance health podcast with your host, Angela Foster, the show where we talk about everything you need to break through limits and achieve a high performance, mind, body and lifestyle.
Hi, friends, welcome to another episode of Bitesize biohacks, I am going for a walk actually, as I record this today, continuing with the theme of hormones, I want you to understand about a special hormone. It's actually a neuropeptide known as kisspeptin, which is really important in the context of fasting. And a lot of women don't know much about it. And that's why I wanted to really just feature it here on this little bite size bio hacks with a short clip from my episode with Dr. Stacy Sims, because I think people often get confused around fasting thinking that more is better. And I think there's a common misconception that if you're fasting for, for example, 16 hours a day, and keeping your eating window within eight hours, then you're stimulating that full cellular autophagy. And that's not actually the case, as you'll learn in a future episode that's coming with Dr. Joseph Antoun. But essentially to actually go into full cellular autophagy takes anywhere between 24 and 48 hours as a minimum depending on the individual. And so if you're somebody who is like myself a keen exerciser, and you exercise every day or most days of the week, then there isn't actually a benefit to doing extended fasts. And actually, it can really mess with women's hormones, as you'll hear in this clip, and exercise itself is a fantastic tool for stimulating autophagy. So you don't really need to do both at birth and natural fat pre fueling for exercise with at least some essential amino acids can be very positive. So let me introduce you now to this bite size bio hacks with Dr. Stacy Sims.
I mean, like, we'd like to say things like intermittent fasting keto diet, all those that are so popular is more of an elimination diet. And when you look from the big scheme of things, you're eliminating things, your body is like, Hey, what's going on. But if we disseminated down to what's happening from like, women versus men, and you see all these things on Instagram, intermittent fast working, and exercising high intensity stuff, all this kind of stuff across the board. And when you're looking at that one shot, and I'm like, Okay, I better do that. But when you start looking at the research and understanding the research, most of the research outcomes are based on male populations, or sedentary obese. And when we look at women who are exercising, exercise in itself is a fasted state. So your body's already doing everything that intermittent fasting touts to do with telomere length changes, and autophagy. All of those things happen with exercise. So if you're layering exercise and intermittent fasting, then it's above and beyond the stress that a woman's body shape. And a critical thing that happens is a perturbance in a protein called kisspeptin, kisspeptin is responsible for turning the endocrine system on and off. For men's threshold for the signalling on and off is so much higher than it is for women. So if women drop their calories and have a long period of time where they're not eating, then kisspeptin get perturbed and starts causing endocrine as, so you have thyroid that gets downturn, which turns your resting metabolic rate down. And you start feeling tired and fatigued. Your oestrogen progesterone, they start to be perturbed and you end up having more amenorrhea aspects or irregular cycles. And we're eating into the older woman set and we're in your mid 40s. And you're already starting to have some perturbance in hormones because of perimenopause and you're not eating, you have increased cortisol from the stress of life, plus increased cortisol from not, not eating. All these things are perturbing kisspeptin. And then your endocrine system takes a big whack and what a lot of like natural therapists are saying, Oh, it's adrenal fatigue. And it's not necessarily adrenal fatigue, per se. But it's this whole cascade of things that are happening with endocrine system that is starting to put your body out of whack where you are getting more tired, your resting metabolic rate is going down. And because oestrogen, progesterone ratios are changing, you're starting to put on more visceral abdominal fat.That's deep belly fatter than better than men are. And no matter what kind of exercise you're doing, you're not gonna be able to count, right? It's the food aspect, and then the type of exercise that you're doing to work together. And there's so many people that don't think about it that way. Like, I'm going to follow this diet, and then I'm going to follow this exercise trend, but they're not thinking about it together in concert with how that also affects their daily life.
Yeah, I agree with that. And I think I think a lot of people are looking at it and going well, the research on things like longevity looks so good on fasting therefore I'm going to throw in fasting, then I'm going to look at this type of exercise because that looks really good as well. And then, you know, friends or I've seen people on social media who got really amazing results from the keto diet. So now I'm going to incorporate keto as well. And they start layering all these things on top, I guess, thinking that, actually now that's going to give them more and more longevity benefits. Whereas actually, from what you're saying, it's completely over stressing their system. And I think you mentioned in the course, actually, as well about how, at this time, cortisol is naturally rising as a woman's going through perimenopause, she's getting greater levels of oxidative stress. And also, she's now less insulin sensitive. So her baseline level of all these things is quite tricky. What's the reason for cortisol specifically? Because before we just now we were chatting about how it's also that it's a really difficult time in many women's lives, isn't it? They're raising growing children who've got demands, they're at a point in their careers or profession where it's busy, right? They're almost at that peak, right? They've been doing what they've been doing a while, they've got lots of responsibility. And often then they've got ageing parents at the same time to cope with it. There's a lot of pressure on women, I think, in that kind of decade. But you're saying that like biologically, cortisol is also rising on its own?
Yes, and one of the responses for having like lowered oestrogen progesterone is cortisol is also a steroid. So when your body starts having less estradiol and converting estrone, so one of the byproducts of conversion of estrone, is getting more cortisol by the nature of your oestrogen or your when I say yesterday, I mean your estradiol dropping, which is our primary, most powerful sex hormone, then you're having this conversion of trying to get more estradiol. So estone converts to cortisol, cortisol is being being treated as if Okay, well, now we need to find a way to convert this to estradiol but you can't do so cortisone or cortisol levels keep coming up and up and up and up and up. And you start getting more oestrogen dominance at different times, to the whole hormonal aspect of what's happening. It's so far removed from whatever a man would experience.
I hope you enjoyed that short clip from Dr. Stacy Sims. If you'd like to listen to the full episode, it is episode 94. And it's all about the sex differences and training between men and women and we dive into women's hormones perimenopause, and also fasting and look out for another episode and updated episode that's coming with Dr. Sims Very, very soon. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast. So that you never miss an episode. That episode will be coming out in the next few weeks. So more on that. And also, if you're enjoying the podcast, we can ask you to leave a positive review on whichever platform you're listening to. It really helps us to get the message out to a wider audience. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you next week for another Bitesize bio hacks. Please know that while I try to cover as much information to help you as I can on these bite sized episodes, none of the things I mentioned should be taken as a substitute for medical advice before taking any supplements or anything else. Please consult first with your medical doctor.
Thanks for listening. Remember to review and subscribe. You can grab the show notes, the resources and highlights of everything Angela mentioned over at Angela Foster performance.com You can also snatch up plenty of other goodies including the highly helpful Angela recommends page which is a list of everything she personally recommend to optimise your mind, body and lifestyle
