Fashion Editor’s Top Human Being Diet Tips

Understanding Intermittent Fasting and its Effects

You might have embraced the intermittent fasting (IF) mantra a decade ago, skipping breakfast and restricting your eating to only certain hours of the day. This might have felt challenging initially, but surprisingly, you might have felt fantastic after some time. The fasting window may have ended with an almost euphoric feeling, yet also, a sense of manic energy.

Exploring the Science of Fasting

However, upon reading Stacy Sims’ Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life, you might discover her research-backed findings about how women, especially pre- and postmenopausal, should eat and exercise. Her famous quote, “women are not small men”, sums up the fact that the science related to fasting is often based on male data.

Women, being designed to bear children, experience nutrient scarcity as a “threat”. For women, fasting triggers a stress response, not the metabolic advantage it does for men. Skipping breakfast keeps our cortisol levels elevated for too long. For more information on fasting diets, you can read this guide on how the 5:2 diet works .

The Human Being Diet (HBD)

The Human Being Diet (HBD), as outlined by Petronella Ravenshear in her book of the same name, might be a suitable alternative for those looking for a different approach. Contrasting IF, HBD promotes eating three times a day with a strict five-hour gap between meals. This allows for a biological process called the migrating motor complex to occur, effectively ‘spring cleaning’ your digestive tract.

The first few months of HBD can be challenging as it requires you to measure your food intake. Despite the initial challenges, you might notice significant improvements in your health. You might lose fat and gain lean muscle, just like other HBD adherents who have reported weight loss. For a more detailed look at the Human Being Diet, you can explore this article on the summer’s new weight-loss trend.

Checking Your Metabolic Flexibility

To check if you’re burning fat or carbohydrates, you might use a gadget like a Lumen. This device shows that you burn carbohydrates immediately after eating and then switch to fat burning, indicating healthy metabolic flexibility. Interestingly, when forced to go longer than five hours without food, you might notice that your body switches back to carbohydrate burning, indicating stress.