Welcome to Episode 400 of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast, hosted by Melanie Avalon, author of What When Wine Diet: Lose Weight And Feel Great With Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, And Wine, and Vanessa Spina, author of Keto Essentials: 150 Ketogenic Recipes to Revitalize, Heal, and Shed Weight.
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LINKS:
Zero App Episode on the IF Podcast
Vanessa's Tone Device: The Tone Device Breath Ketone Analyzer
Melanie's podcast: The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast
Vanessa's podcast: The Optimal Protein Podcast
More on Melanie: MelanieAvalon.com
More on Vanessa: ketogenicgirl.com
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TRANSCRIPT
(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)
Melanie Avalon
Welcome to episode 400 of the intermittent fasting podcast. If you want to burn fat, gain energy, and enhance your health by changing when you eat, not what you eat with no calorie counting, then this show is for you. I'm Melanie Avalon, biohacker, author of What, When, Wine, and creator of the supplement line, Avalon X. And I'm here with my co-host, Vanessa Spina, sports nutrition specialist, author of Keto Essentials, and creator of the Tone Breath ketone analyzer and Tone Lux red light therapy panels. For more on us, check out ifpodcast.com, melanieavalon.com, and ketogenicgirl.com. Please remember, the thoughts and opinions on this show do not constitute medical advice or treatment. To be featured on the show, email us your questions to questions at ifpodcast.com. We would love to hear from you. So pour yourself a mug of black coffee, a cup of tea, or even a glass of wine if it's that time and get ready for the intermittent fasting podcast. Hi everybody and welcome. This is episode number 400 of the intermittent fasting podcast. I'm Melanie Avalon and I am here today with a very, very special guest. This is going to be a special listener story episode. We've been doing a few of these episodes and they have been honestly so fun, so enlightening. It's been incredible to talk to you guys and hear about everybody's intermittent fasting journeys because there's a lot of similarities. There's a lot of differences. I'm just having so much fun doing this type of episode. It's also special because it's episode 400. Oh, hello. And then on top of that, so this listener, I'm here today with Andrea Miles and I was telling her beforehand, like I've seen your name like Facebook group and emails and things like that for a long time. You've been in this community for a while, right? So when did you first start listening to this show?
Andrea Miles
I would say probably it was it was during COVID. So maybe spring of 2020, I'm guessing. Okay.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, so a good solid four years or so. Yeah. I feel like I know you just from seeing you around all the places, and now we're connecting in real life. Oh, that's sweet, that's awesome. And I'm also really excited because when we bring listeners on this show, which by the way, listeners, if you'd like to come on, definitely submit, we would love to have you on the show as well. So for that, just go to ifpodcast.com, slash submit, and then there's a form there where you can submit to be on the show as well. And in any case, when you do that, we ask a lot of questions. And Andrea, you provided so much information, so many topics to dive into. I am just, I'm really looking forward to this. So foundational question, how did you first get exposed to or into intermittent fasting?
Andrea Miles
Well, I had been complaining to my doctor that I was doing all the right things, I was eating right, I was working out, I was really probably over-restricting on calories, and the scale was going up, it was not going down. I was getting very frustrated. And he suggested that I read the obesity code. That was all, just read it. But it made so much sense to me once I did the science behind it. And it kind of snowballed from there. Then I read Jen's book, and then your book, and started listening to the podcast, and I just got really into it from there, I suppose.
Melanie Avalon
So for listeners, I've had Jason Fung on the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. The ironic thing is I have never interviewed him specifically about fasting. I actually interviewed him. He wrote a book called The Cancer Code that came out during COVID. So that interview was pretty much all about cancer. So I've never actually, I mean, I think I probably asked him a few intermittent fasting questions, but barely any. But I have had his partner, Megan Ramos, like his fasting business partner in the clinic on the show a few times. And she's actually going to be on this show, I think like in a few episodes. So listeners can look forward to that as well. That book is amazing. It dives so deep into, I mean, from what I remember, because it's been so long that I read it, but I remember it really, really went into like the insulin obesity hypothesis and awesome, awesome. Okay. So I also love that your doc, that's amazing. So this was a conventional doctor that recommended it to you or was it a functional medical practitioner?
Andrea Miles
a regular medical doctor. He's an internal, internal med doctor. And yeah, I also thought it was kind of insightful of him, I should say, because a lot of doctors don't think along those lines, I suppose. And I think he knew that I was probably smart enough to pick up on the hints he was laying down with that book. The approach that Dr. Feng takes is maybe a little extreme, but I understood where he was coming from and what he was trying to say, and kind of adapted that to my own life and how I could approach it and get the benefits of intermittent fasting without maybe the super extreme fast that he was taking his patients on in the book.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I definitely want to dive into that specifically, your approach to things, because that's a lot of what you were saying in your answers that I really, really liked. It seems like you have a very healthy approach and mindset when it comes to fasting, just from what I read from your answers. I'm curious. Okay, I have a lot of questions. Question one, did you have a moment that you remember? Okay, wait, first of all, when was this? This was before the pandemic?
Andrea Miles
I think it was probably, I'm going to say spring of 2020. It was right before I started listening to your podcast.
Melanie Avalon
Okay, do you remember a when you decided to just try it? And do you remember when you actually like first started like the first day? And if you don't, that's totally fine.
Andrea Miles
I don't remember the exact day. I remember I started with skipping breakfast and lunch and my goal was 16 hours and I did 16 hours every day for two weeks and I patted myself on the back. I white knuckled it and I had some headaches and it was tough but also at that time I hadn't read Jin's book and I was putting lemon in my water. Once I stopped doing that, fasting became a lot easier.
Melanie Avalon
Oh, wow. Okay, so the queen fast super important for you. Were you doing coffee and tea or?
Andrea Miles
I am all about coffee and tea now I always I've always enjoyed those black without any creamer or sugar or anything like that so that was never a problem I suppose to to still enjoy those without really feeling like I was giving anything up.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I think people, people when they're coming from the the creamer sugar aspect, people struggle with that one switching over. I actually, you probably heard me talk about this before, but I, I was doing like, tea and coffee and, and sweeteners. Honestly, for a long time, I don't actually remember when I switched over to the clean fast perspective. Yeah, so always interesting to me how that works for people. And did you, because you said you were white knuckling it in the beginning, did you were you seeing beneficial effects pretty quickly? Or how long did it take to, you know, start experiencing changes physically?
Andrea Miles
I would say probably after about a month, maybe five to six weeks, I started to see changes in my body. Like I wasn't feeling as inflamed, if that makes any sense. I just, I was, before I started fasting, I felt puffy in all ways. Like everything about my body just, I was not comfortable in my own skin. And once some of that internal inflammation, at least I assume that's what was going on, went down, everything got a lot easier and I felt a lot more comfortable just overall on a day-to-day basis.
Melanie Avalon
I love that the the inflammation thing is one of my favorite benefits and like how you're struggling a little bit to describe it. I feel like you you don't really understand until you've had it and then had it go away and then you're like oh okay that's what that was. Yes. Yeah it's one of my favorites. Did you go back to that doctor after you started?
Andrea Miles
Yes, absolutely. I see him every year. And I actually in 2022 asked him to test my fasting insulin level. And he actually had to go over to the lab to explain what the test was. They didn't mess it up because nobody ever orders it. He said patients are never fasted long enough to actually take it. So he got pretty excited about that. And so I asked for that every year.
Melanie Avalon
That's amazing. And you said you're fasting. It's been going down, right? Every time you test it.
Andrea Miles
It has started at nine, then it was six, and then this last year it was four.
Melanie Avalon
That's amazing. Amazing. And the diet you're eating on all of this. So what's your what's your diet history? Like growing up, what type of foods did you like? How has it evolved through the years?
Andrea Miles
Well, I am a Gen X-er. My parents were always very health conscious in our house. My mom never fried anything. I kind of grew up in the low-fat revolution, so everything in the pantry was kind of geared towards the low-fat sort of paradigm, I suppose. And that worked well when I was young, but I'm 47 now. Once that metabolism starts slowing down a little bit and the muscle isn't as easy to keep on your body, you need to start opening up different macros, I suppose.
Melanie Avalon
I mean, that's something I was really excited to see you talking about was how you prioritize protein. Is that still a thing for you?
Andrea Miles
Absolutely, absolutely. If I have learned nothing in probably the past year, it has been the importance of protein and that macro balance. When I started intermittent fasting, I didn't watch calories anymore. I let my body tell me when I was full and when I was satisfied and when I was done eating, and I learned to listen to those hunger cues again. And that has been really eye-opening, I suppose, in so many ways, when you don't let food control your life anymore.
Melanie Avalon
I cannot agree anymore. I think honestly, that's another one of my I think we have this a lot of the same, you know, favorite benefits of fasting is that I just love food and I love that for so long, I was stressing about calories and what I was eating and all the things and now I eat all the things I love and I don't even think about calories and I do it in my eating window and it's like all good like it's so, so magical and and it sounds like we have similar so you eat, you're an evening eater. I am. Yes. And you have a family, right?
Andrea Miles
Yes, yes. I've been married for 24 years. We have 18-year-old twin daughters and a 13-year-old son. Oh, wow.
Melanie Avalon
twins oh my goodness is it is it true that twins like are not psychic but they like with each other
Andrea Miles
There is definitely some sort of connection there that is odd.
Melanie Avalon
I've always wondered what that would be like to have a twin. Are they identical? They're fraternal. They're fraternal. So have they dabbled in anything like this? No.
Andrea Miles
Although when I was growing up, my breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and I didn't always like eating breakfast. So when I was out on my own, off at college, that was the first thing to go in my life, was breakfast. I didn't like the way it made me feel in the mornings, I just didn't like eating breakfast. And so I decided as a parent, I wasn't going to put my kids through that. But once they were old enough to decide, if they knew how long it was till lunch, once they were 10, 11, I let them decide if they wanted breakfast that morning. In that way, yes, I guess I've let them experiment a little bit. They're both very active. One is in cheer and dance in college, and the other does track in cross-country in college. Yeah, as collegiate athletes, they eat quite a bit, actually, and pretty often.
Melanie Avalon
Wow, that's super cool. I love that. How about on the flip side when you were raising them? Did you make them finish their meals?
Andrea Miles
No, they had to try everything on their plate because, as you may or may not have heard, your taste buds change over time. So I would never let them get away with saying, I already tried that and I don't like it. That's what's for dinner tonight. You need to at least try one or two bites. And if you don't like it, that's fair. I'll let you find something else to eat. But I'm not a short order cook. So you either need to prepare yourself or find some leftovers in the fridge.
Melanie Avalon
That's awesome. That sounds like a very healthy, solid approach to parenting with the food stuff. Thank you. And wait, how about your son? Were any of them picky eaters? Yeah.
Andrea Miles
Two of the three were pretty picky, and one, he's, my son, he's really just, now that he's gotten into running himself, he's starting to make healthier food choices and be less picky. So I think just natural maturing and changing of interests has led them to be less picky, too.
Melanie Avalon
Were you a runner or are you a runner? Are you athletic?
Andrea Miles
I really enjoy exercise, but no, I'm not a runner.
Melanie Avalon
I mean, it sounds like you like spawned all these like athletic, you know, children. And I had another question about that. Oh, I loved the story you told about candy and Easter candy.
Andrea Miles
Could you tell that? Sure, sure. So when when my girls were young, I'm going to say maybe kindergarten age, they they wanted to eat candy in their Easter basket. And it was early morning. I mean, we hadn't even been to church for the day yet. And I decided, you know what? This is a good, good opportunity, a good learning lesson. And I said, you can have anything you want to eat today. If you want candy for breakfast, fine. You can have anything you want to eat all day long, whatever. But you can not complain to me about a stomachache. They got a stomachache. I didn't hear complaining, but they learned that lesson. And they never they never binged on the candy again because they knew how it would make them feel.
Melanie Avalon
That's really amazing. That was also a gamble on your part. Were you like, were you praying? Like, please let them get a stomachache.
Andrea Miles
I kind of was, but it also worked out too with my son because I thought, well, it worked out with the girls. I'll let, I'll do the same thing with him. Well, they had told him how miserable it made them feel. And he was really shy about it for the first couple of years. He didn't, he didn't binge. And it wasn't until like the third year of him being allowed to do that that he finally got us a mild tummy ache.
Melanie Avalon
That's so funny, I love it. I'm gonna, I don't think I'll ever have kids, but I'm gonna keep that in my back pocket, if I ever do. Okay, so going back to your food choices now, so you said you focus on protein. I think something that, well, I know something a lot of listeners struggle with is how to get enough protein, honestly, that might be one of the most common questions we get. So for you, well, first of all, so you're eating windows. So you're eating dinner, right? So you said you eat dinner and then kind of like another snack later, is that?
Andrea Miles
Yeah, I eat dinner with the family. I'll clean up from dinner, clean up the kitchen, do a few other things around the house, and then I'll sit down and relax for the night with a snack. I'll just keep eating, whether that be popcorn, my ninja creamy, nice cream, or some other somewhat healthy snack. I just keep eating until I decide I'm full and satisfied. Usually that's about an hour and a half to two hour eating window each day. Okay.
Melanie Avalon
Okay, so that's shorter, actually, than I was picturing when I was envisioning your schedule. I got to get one of these ninja things. Vanessa talks about it all the time, all the time. I see it on the web. People love it. That's where you make the protein ice cream, right? Yes. It seems like a really good way to get in. Because basically the ice cream you make, can it be almost pure protein, almost-ish?
Andrea Miles
I've used like the protein shakes and just added a scoop or two of sugar-free pudding mix to kind of give it a little extra flavor or thicken it a little bit and so yeah that's pretty much protein I suppose but.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, nice. So you're in your actual dinner. So again, going back to this protein question, we always get is your dinner that you have with your family? I'm assuming are you the one typically cooking dinner or just your husband?
Andrea Miles
Oh, I am the one cooking dinner. So no, yeah, I try to provide like a well-rounded balanced dinner for everybody. Not everybody's going to choose the vegetable that night. And that's fine. Not everybody's going to choose the fruit that night. That's okay. Whatever. After dinner, usually my dinner is pretty heavy with protein, a little bit of carbs, some fat. It'll be heavier and carbs if we have quite a bit of fruit that day, I suppose.
Melanie Avalon
So you don't personally you're not really existing in either low carb or low fat or high carb you're not any mention this earlier but you're you're just more eating intuitively and focusing on protein.
Andrea Miles
Correct, yes. I do try to balance, like the protein goal is always the main goal. And then interestingly, the other two sort of fall in line as well. Once I meet that protein goal, I think my natural tendencies just kind of balance that out, I suppose.
Melanie Avalon
I love that. That is, that's, it sounds like the perfect like intuitive approach to eating. What's your, okay, wait, two questions. One, what is your favorite meal in general? And also what would be your last meal where it's like anything goes?
Andrea Miles
Oh, well, I don't have a super sophisticated taste. I love pizza. I would probably pick pizza for my last meal with mint chip ice cream.
Melanie Avalon
Okay, you're a mint girl, mint ice cream girl. That's like very polarizing, the mint ice cream, I think.
Andrea Miles
It is, and oh, it's always been my favorite.
Melanie Avalon
Like when it's green?
Andrea Miles
Yes, and I'm very picky about ... This is going to sound so crazy, but I'm very picky about the chocolate in it. I specifically like chocolate chunks, not chocolate flakes.
Melanie Avalon
Okay, that's important. You got to know. You got to know exactly what you like. Is there a brand you like?
Andrea Miles
It's probably very local, but it's good, rich dairy. Good, rich. OK, I've never heard of that. Yeah, I think they're proud. I mean, I live in Nebraska, so I think they're probably, I'm sure they were bought out. But that was what I always had as a little girl.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, that'll do it. Like what you had when you were a kid, those emotional, nostalgic ties. Yeah. So what, and what is your favorite go-to meal in general? Like if you're going to a restaurant.
Andrea Miles
You know, that's what's so interesting, is since I've been intermittent fasting, I always kind of went towards the sandwiches and maybe even the pastas before, like the high carb, not good for you things. Now when I go to restaurants, I'll look for crazy things that I would have never thought to order before, like meatloaf or a grilled pork chop or, you know, just, I don't know, I'm failing to come up with good examples right now, but.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I know you're talking about like that actually first happened to me when I probably first went low carb, but I it's like my taste buds had a new eye perspective. Like they wanted to explore new things. It's like I had like, it's like I've been given a new taste bud experience and I wanted to try new things that I hadn't before.
Andrea Miles
Instead of going for the tried and true favorites, I expanded my palette a little bit. So now it's, who knows? Maybe I'll get the special. Who knows? It just depends on what I'm feeling that day.
Melanie Avalon
When you do eat at restaurants, do you eat more because it's a one meal a day type situation or do you just eat more later when you get home?
Andrea Miles
It kind of depends on what our plans are later that evening because I don't want to under eat either. Because I understand the risk that can come from that, doing that on a repeated basis too. If we aren't doing anything later and I'm gonna have the opportunity to come home and eat some more, then I will probably eat a little bit less at the restaurant. If I'm not going to, then I will make sure that I have quite a bit to eat at my dinner.
Melanie Avalon
Okay, that's smart. Yeah, I literally have just embraced getting usually two entrees now. That's smart, though. It's really fun. I love it, especially because I'm normally there's two entrees I want to try because I normally really want like a steak, but I'll also want to fish. So I remember I had like this moment where I was like, Oh, wait, I don't have to order just one entree. I can order two. Absolutely. Okay, yeah, no, I love that. So this episode actually airs mid December. So we are, you know, right in the holidays and all those things. Do you adjust your eating window or anything like that for the holidays? And like, I know for you and I recording right now, it's before Thanksgiving. So like, do you adjust for that? What do you do with holidays?
Andrea Miles
I try to keep my minimum fast to 16 hours. So for example, with Thanksgiving, I just recognize that I'm going to be breaking it earlier than I normally would and try to get at least 16 hours in. Now there's no rules. If I don't, okay, maybe I fall a little short of that goal. It's not the end of the world. It's just a new day tomorrow and you pick up and move on. But yeah, I shorten it. But also the thing that's kind of fun about shortening your window and eating one meal a day is I'm shifting that Thanksgiving meal in this example to earlier in the day at lunchtime when I would normally eat at dinner. So I'm also going to be closing my window earlier, which means the following day I often have a longer fast. Longer fast.
Melanie Avalon
Mm-hmm. That's super cool
Andrea Miles
If I'm ever kind of quote unquote beating myself up for for falling a little short of a goal. I always remind myself that hey tomorrow's even probably going to be better than far better than today was so
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, so it sounds like because you talked about it just now you talked about it in the answers you gave me, but the how you deal with your internal thoughts surrounding everything. So have you what are some examples of the evolution of your internal thoughts that you've had with, you know, dealing with cravings and food and all the things.
Andrea Miles
Yeah, it's been a learning journey too. I've always been a glass half full person. It's amazing how much your gut health matters to your emotional and mental well-being. Once my gut health started to get more in check, my mental clarity became so much better and those positive thoughts and feelings were a lot more frequent. And that was really, it was indescribable because you don't, like we were saying earlier, you don't realize how far you've maybe slipped kind of like with the inflammation until you start feeling better again. But yeah, I was really hard on myself in the beginning. But yeah, once I started to realize that I'm doing this and I'm actually pretty darn good at this, you gain a new perspective on your whole self.
Melanie Avalon
I love all of that so much. And yeah, with the gut health stuff, so you and I both, we struggled with SIBO. Did you get diagnosed with that officially?
Andrea Miles
I did through process of elimination because it was right at the height of COVID, and so they didn't want to do the breath tests for obvious reasons. And the gastroenterologist too, she said that she personally didn't like to rely too much on them anyway and preferred a process of elimination in terms of a diagnosis. So I did all the things. I had eight vials of blood drawn and provided stool sample and all the things and everything was negative. She called. She said that's the only other thing it could be.
Melanie Avalon
Oh, wow. Did she prescribe like Rifaximin or anything like that for you?
Andrea Miles
Yeah, she did Zafaxin. I did two rounds of that. And then in an elemental diet as well. I paired that with an elemental diet. That was my own choice, not her recommendation. I am glad I did that. That was very difficult, but I think it was very important to healing my stomach.
Melanie Avalon
What version of the elemental diet did you do? Like did you do because I was in that rabbit hole and there's like there's like the official shakes you can get and like people would do their di diy ones and for diy some people would do like a high carb version where they made it with like just all honey basically and then some people would do like low carb like bone broth. What did you do?
Andrea Miles
I did a commercial brand, it was a powder mix, but it had nothing in it in terms of no sugar, no additives like that. And it tasted really, really bad. But it helped. I relapsed with the SIBO after about 40, 45 days. And that was when the realization came to me that I can't continue with antibiotics. I mean, that's not a good future course to handle that, just to continue to take antibiotics. So I needed to find a different road.
Melanie Avalon
Wow. Yeah. So many people, I'm getting so many flashbacks when you said about the powder, because I think I ordered, I ordered some sort of elemental diet mix. And it was basically like the mix is just like the protein, essentially. And it tasted horrible. And then I mixed up myself and I don't, I think I gave up. I think I tried it for like a day and I was like, I'm not doing this. Um, so I failed at that. But I also did there was a vaccine, Rifaximin, whatever, whatever it's called. It actually, I feel like it made me worse. Like it didn't help me. I know it helps so many people, but for me, it was not a good fit. Yeah. Okay. So, and then were you doing, because I know you mentioned you were using my app a little bit for food, food sense guide. Did you ever do like a low FODMAT diet or anything like that?
Andrea Miles
I didn't, because some of the things that were on that list that should have been on the OK for the low FODMAP diet were some of my trigger foods. So I thought, well, this is not going to work. And so that's where your app was really helpful. I could just choose the specific foods that bothered me and make notes about them and and add them to my little list. And it was really helpful to go back and say, oh, yeah, I remember I didn't do so well with grapes that last time I had those. Wow. OK, maybe I'll I'll try those again and see if that happens.
Melanie Avalon
Awesome, yeah, so for listeners, FoodSense Guide, it's over 300 foods and it includes all of these different compounds that you might be reacting to in foods. So we were just talking about FODMAPs, which I should probably define there. I always forget what it stands for, but it's basically fermentable, these different potentially fermentable substrates in foods and every letter in FODMAP stands for one of those compounds. Then there's other things like histamine and glutamate and lectins and sulfites. And so that's all in that app. Something I would like to do actually, in like in all my free time, you're talking about how some of the low FODMAP foods were triggers for you. I think it would be cool if either in my app, probably in my app, if I could break it down into, cause like I said, each letter is a different compound. Some like high FODMAP foods or low FODMAP foods are, it's not necessarily like, like so FODMAPs is not like one thing, it's like these different things. So it could be possible that maybe one part of the FODMAPs is what is bothersome for you and not the others. Like I think it'd be cool if it could be like broken down even further is the point. Oh yeah, for sure. But it sounds like, so it sounds like now, so you made changes and do you struggle with gut issues now?
Andrea Miles
I don't. I can eat all the things. Leaky gut is a very real thing. I feel for anybody struggling with that, but you can come back from it. You can heal your gut and everything will be okay.
Melanie Avalon
Have you found fasting helped heal your gut as well?
Andrea Miles
Absolutely, absolutely. I think it even longer fasts, like if I'm really kind of going through a period of inflammation, I try to get a longer fast in there because I know that will happen.
Melanie Avalon
help. What constitutes a longer fast for you?
Andrea Miles
24 hours, I suppose, I have done longer, but yeah, about 24 hours I would say would be a long fast. Do you track the fast with apps? I do, I use the Zero app, I love it.
Melanie Avalon
love that we will have to put a link in the show notes we've had. I think it's the current she was not the founder, but she came in recently and now is one of the head people at zero. Dr. Naomi Parela I think is her name. We'll put a link in the show notes if people want to learn more about the zero app because that was that was an incredible episode actually. It was. Yeah, I really had a fun time interviewing them. Okay, so what are some of your other favorite benefits? Like we've talked a lot about the physical stuff. What about life benefits that come from fasting?
Andrea Miles
Oh, there's so much less planning, I suppose, and time spent in the kitchen. You just don't have to dedicate the time to planning, and it's so flexible that you can not worry about making sure you are near food for lunch, or make sure there's breakfast nearby, or to choose to just live your life and not be tied down by the fact that it's mealtime for some.
Melanie Avalon
It's another thing where you have to experience it to really realize it but like you're saying the amount of time you get back like you don't realize when you're eating constantly throughout the day just how much time that is because it's just so normal like it's what everybody does but then when you get back all that time it's like wow like for me it's amazing it's a I can't yeah it's it's again it's something that you have to have done I think to realize just how beneficial it is true and then have you found because you said something in one of your answers about how you can if you're creative you can make intermittent fasting work for most situations so like do you encounter challenges with making it work in certain situations and how do you deal with that.
Andrea Miles
only sometimes it's like I've said I I'm an evening eater so there would be times when maybe I'm invited to an event in the afternoon where you know maybe I just don't really care to eat with their serving and and that's okay you don't need to feel like you have to eat just because you are attending an event like that everybody there is excited that you're there and wants to see you not necessarily see you eating.
Melanie Avalon
I agree so much, because I honestly do think that oftentimes the hardest thing for people is what you just touched on, which is it's not so... Well, people will say things. I'm not saying they won't, but there's a lot of internal anxiety people can have about worrying about what people are thinking. And so it takes, at least for me, it definitely took building up that muscle to realize, oh, I can go and just be me and not eat if I don't want to, and that's okay. And people are not going to freak out on me unless they do. In the past, some of my family used to freak out on me once I got through that. But yeah, it definitely takes... Honestly, it takes practice just as much as the fasting takes practice, because it can really break from social norms. And especially, it's getting a lot better now. I think because intermittent fasting is becoming so much more well known. But when I started, it was so long ago, and nobody was really doing it. And yeah.
Andrea Miles
So then it was you were the person that stood out in the room because you were the only one not eating. Yeah, I understand that.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, but now like people know about like if I like meant say it say it people know like they're like, oh like they're familiar.
Andrea Miles
Yes, yes, it just takes a certain level of confidence to be okay with explaining why you're not eating too when asked.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I found one of my hacks is I will especially if it's like a long, like a holiday long get together thing where people are going to be there for hours and hours. If it's one of those, and there's a meal at the beginning, I will just kind of come at the end of the meal. And that kind of addresses that. So yeah, there's a lot of a lot of different things that you can do. Do you anticipate, because you mentioned earlier, how you find like naturally with your with the quote macros and such that you kind of naturally adapt to what you need. Do you anticipate changing things up in the future, especially like with the evening window that you're doing? Do you anticipate much change? Or do you think you've kind of found your pattern?
Andrea Miles
I think I've kind of found my niche. I don't at least at least right now in my life this is working really well. I work full-time and you know my son's still in school on a you know day-to-day basis so the schedule works well I suppose. Now maybe later in life I would shift that but right now it's it's going well and we were planning a vacation for earlier this spring and last fall I had lost all of the weight I was probably going to lose with intermittent fasting but I was not toned really and so I decided to focus on protein and since then I have seen muscle gains and I have started people have started to ask me if I've lost weight well I haven't lost weight in in a year now but people are starting to notice and I can only attribute that to the increased protein and and focus on my protein intake so I don't see that changing because obviously that part is going well.
Melanie Avalon
I love that, especially because a lot of people worry or say you can't build muscle while fasting. And it's just not true because people, people do it. Like we see it all the time. So that is amazing to hear. Did you, so you added in protein, you focused, so did you at the same time you're adding a protein and focusing on strength training together?
Andrea Miles
I have always done strength training with cardio on the off days, I suppose. So I didn't really change anything with what I was doing in terms of exercise. Oh wow, you just added more protein.
Melanie Avalon
Shifted protein. Yeah, that's amazing. That's awesome to hear you mentioned your job. Do you do you work from home? Or what do you what do you do?
Andrea Miles
I do work from home. I'm an underwriter. So when COVID hit, they closed our office and sold the building. So I work from home permanently. It's not for everybody. Personally, I love it. It just works really well for me. I can control the lighting, for example, my surroundings. I can get little chores done by taking quick breaks in my day, which you should do anyway. When they did change to working from home full time, I got really nervous about being inactive. The office, the physical office that we were located in was quite large. It had an exercise room. So you could go down there on your lunch break and just walk on the treadmill if you wanted, which was fabulous. And you know, I find long routes to the bathroom during my day and things like that. So that made me really nervous coming home and lopping that square footage off. We are fortunate we have quite a few exercise machines and things in our basement that I can take advantage of, but I still was going to need to be in front of my computer eight hours a day. So I got an under desk elliptical, a cubie. And I pedal, and I pedal, and I pedal five to seven miles a day.
Melanie Avalon
That's amazing I love that so so that one that you're talking about is it is it electric.
Andrea Miles
Yes, yes, it's it runs through Bluetooth on my phone, actually. So. Oh, wow. Yeah. So I can keep track of how far I've gone just by looking at my phone. But yeah, it's.
Melanie Avalon
It's cool. And you have a standing desk that goes with it.
Andrea Miles
I do. Um, I also decided that, okay, well, if I'm coming home to work, I am going to make my quote unquote office exactly the way I want it. So I got a desk that I can sit or stand in three monitors.
Melanie Avalon
I love that. Yeah, I was already working from home primarily before the pandemic and I had a serving job. So I lost that with COVID. And it was actually really amazing because I think I was holding on to it like a security blanket. So it forced me to just go full time with you know, podcasting and all of that stuff. But that's something I was really worried about actually was because I kind of saw my serving job as my exercise because it's a really those jobs are really movement intense. So I had to really, I really had to make sure to, you know, make sure I'm not being sedentary all day. And I so for example, like zoom calls, I rarely do video, I pretty much always call in or do audio. So then I can like walk around during them. That's like just like a little small hack that works really well for me like you don't have to be chained to your computer all day with a lot of things. I love that. I did get I got one of those treadmills. And it didn't I should probably look into it again. It didn't like really work with my setup. But it was it was really big. Is this one that you have? Was it big? It's probably
Andrea Miles
two feet long by a foot and a half wide okay that's way better so yeah i do have to i used an old luggage strap to strap my chair to it because otherwise it tends to creep away from me oh that's funny oh my god
Melanie Avalon
Oh my goodness. I love that small hack for you there of the hacks. Oh, and speaking of cool machines. So can you tell what you experienced with your vibration?
Andrea Miles
Yes, so I have osteopenia, so I wanted a vibration plate to help my bone density. After about 18 months of using this vibration plate for 20 minutes a day, almost every day, I went in for my normal routine checkup, and she measured me, and she measured me at 5'2.25". Now, I have never in my entire adult life measured higher than 5'1.75", so I told her she must have mismeasured, and could she please do it again? She repeated, and same result. That is really weird. So, I came home, and our family has the trusty marks on the wall on the wall, and so I had myself re-measured, and sure enough, I have grown half an inch. That's crazy. Yeah, just my spine decompressing, I'm sure, but how cool. Now I can actually say I'm 5'2 in my life.
Melanie Avalon
That's amazing. So how often do you do the vibration?
Andrea Miles
I do it every morning for 20 minutes in the day before I log on my computer to work. And you sit on it, stand on it? I stand on it with my knees just slightly bent. And that's when I kind of get my social media time in on my phone.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I need to start. Okay, because I have one of those and I never use it. I used to. I used to use it all the time. I need to start doing that I read that and I was like, Whoa, I need to. I gotta get on that. That's amazing. That's, that's incredible.
Andrea Miles
I used the highest level for 20 minutes.
Melanie Avalon
Have you seen any effects on your bone density from it?
Andrea Miles
So, my DEXA scan, I just had one recently and I still have osteopenia, but my one prior to that was 12 years earlier.
Melanie Avalon
so oh wow wow it's like hard to make any
Andrea Miles
Yeah, it's not a real good comparison, honestly.
Melanie Avalon
No, not at all. Wow. Okay. That's so cool. You talked about how you got into someone like the biohacking type stuff. What other stuff do you like?
Andrea Miles
or a ring. I use Lumen as well. So I like that. I have an Apollo neuro. Really like that as well. I love my Apollo so much. Yes, I do too. I do too. It's so comforting.
Melanie Avalon
It's a game changer for me. I'm actually getting one for my brother for Christmas and I use it every single night of my life. So for listeners, it uses sound vibration but it's just like gentle vibrations and you can wear it on your wrist or your ankle or you can clip it to your shirt and it helps automatically turn on your body's parasympathetic nervous system so your rest and digest and calming state. You're literally turning that on basically with the touch of a button. So rather than having to get there through meditation or things like that, which are great, this also really helps and just turns off the stress in a way and can actually enhance meditation. They actually just did a study on that. I recently had Dr. Dave Rabin, the founder back on the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast so people can check that out.
Andrea Miles
out. Yeah, you can use it to for things like a little burst of energy because there's different modes for that as well.
Melanie Avalon
Yes, and they just added like a hug thing that's super cute. So yeah, I love it. Would you ever go to any of the conferences?
Andrea Miles
Oh, I would love to, that'd be so much fun.
Melanie Avalon
There's so much fun to meet all these guests and see all these people and all the brands. We just, yeah, it's so, so fun. So fun. Speaking of, do you travel? I mean, you mentioned about traveling in the spring. Does your family travel much?
Andrea Miles
Yeah, we do. We like to travel. We try to go somewhere about once a year or so. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. We just recently went to Hilton Head this last spring to celebrate my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. They renewed their vows on the beach. It was sweet.
Melanie Avalon
Have you found fasting helps with travel? It does.
Andrea Miles
is because everybody else in our party was, are we gonna have time to grab food in between flights? Does anybody have snacks in their bag? And okay, where do I need to be and when? I mean, yeah, it was just, it was a lot less stressful, I suppose, not to have to worry about food. And then, you know, we landed and everybody's starving and can't get their luggage fast enough and find food fast enough and yeah.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah. It's so nice. It is. Does your husband...
Andrea Miles
been fast? He does not, no. Hasn't trickled over. No, it hasn't. He probably thinks it's kind of my superpower because I think it's kind of amazing to him. He doesn't quite grasp how how I'm not hungry and
Melanie Avalon
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I don't think it hasn't really rubbed off on any of my family. Nope. Just me. Yeah, agreed. What would you tell people who may be nervous about starting or on the fence about starting fasting? What would your go-to advice be for people with fasting?
Andrea Miles
Try it and don't get discouraged if you don't succeed or what you deem as success. Keep at it because like I said, it took four to six weeks before I thought, I really have the hang of this now. So stick with it, be patient with yourself. It's a long journey and it winds. You're gonna sometimes feel like you're not making any ground so I would recommend definitely some sort of a progress, whether that be pictures, measurements, honesty pants, all of the above, do all of the things so that you can see, look back and see, wow, look what I've done. I am better than I was on that day because I've been doing this.
Melanie Avalon
I love that. And you had a moment with your trying on jeans.
Andrea Miles
I did, yeah. I took one of my daughter's jeans shopping with me and I've always carried my weight in my hips and my thighs and my rear end. So I was always looking for ways to cover those areas. And now I buy clothes that fit. And when I went jean shopping recently, my daughter said, I don't, I don't like those jeans on you mom. I said, well, why not? They fit. And she said, they make you look like you don't have any butt. She was right. It's kind of disappeared. So those were no, and I had to find some different jeans, but never has that ever been a problem in my life.
Melanie Avalon
Wow. And what I love about that, though, is not only are you losing the weight, but we've talked about it all throughout this episode, your focus now on your protein and coupled with the training, you know, you're also building muscle with all of this. So seems to be the ideal changes in body composition that people are hoping for.
Andrea Miles
My body's never gonna be perfect. It is what it is. That's not my ultimate goal. My ultimate goal is just to be comfortable with myself again, and I am. I'm happy with that.
Melanie Avalon
I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining us for episode 400. Oh, my goodness. Such a special moment. Was there anything else you wanted to touch on about your journey or share with listeners?
Andrea Miles
I came across this quote when I was preparing for this podcast and Maya Angelou said, nothing will work unless you do. And that really resonated with me. If you put in the work, you
Melanie Avalon
you will see the payoff. I love that so much. Well, thank you, Andrea. This has been such a lovely, wonderful time. Everything you said has been so inspiring. And I love how you were saying earlier how you're like a glass half full person, like that your mindset and approach to life really, like I can feel it. It's like very, very positive and like high vibration. And I just, I'm just smiling. And I was during this whole interview. So thank you. Thank you so much for your time. And maybe the last question I'll ask you, it's the last question that I ask on my other show on the Biohacking podcast, but it's always a nice way to round things out, which is what is something that you're grateful for?
Andrea Miles
I am grateful for diversity in this world. I think it provides such a fabulous opportunity for us to learn from each other. We have all these different platforms now to make that so much easier. It's one of the things I'm grateful for, in addition to my health, because I understand how important that is as well.
Melanie Avalon
That's an incredible answer. Nobody has ever given me that answer before. I love that. I'm always so curious what people are going to say. That's so wonderful. Well, thank you, Andrea. I am so grateful for you. I'm grateful that you've been here all this time and that I got to talk to you now about your journey and keep me updated. I'll see you around the Facebook group and all the things and just thank you and have the happiest of holidays.
Andrea Miles
Thank you so much, Melanie. This was such an honor. I really, really appreciate it.
Melanie Avalon
Well, yeah, well, I will talk to you later. All right. Bye. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Please remember, everything we discussed on this show does not constitute medical advice, and no patient-doctor relationship is formed. If you enjoyed the show, please consider writing a review on iTunes. We couldn't do this without our amazing team. Editing by podcast doctors, show notes and artwork by Brianna Joyner, and original theme composed by Leland Cox, and recomposed by Steve Saunders. See you next week.