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TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Welcome to Episode 212 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, author of What When Wine: Lose Weight and Feel Great with Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, and Wine. I'm here with my cohost, Gin Stephens, author of Delay, Don't Deny: Living an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle. For more on us, check out ifpodcast.com, melanieavalon.com, and ginstephens.com. Please remember, the thoughts and opinions on this podcast do not constitute medical advice or treatment., pour yourself a cup of black coffee, a mug of tea or even a glass of wine, if it's that time, and get ready for The Intermittent Fasting Podcast.

Hi, friends. I am a huge proponent of getting our nutrition from food. When all else fails, I feel food is the way to go. That said, there are some nutrients that are super hard to get in today's environment. Did you know that 80% of the population is deficient in magnesium? Our soils are so depleted of magnesium today, that it's really, really hard to get enough of this crucial mineral. It's actually the number one mineral to fight stress, fatigue and sleep issues. I've been doing a lot of research on minerals, especially the calcium magnesium balance, and I walk away from so many conversations I have with experts just realizing more and more how important magnesium is. I personally love magnesium for its stress reducing effects, as well as helping with my digestive issues.

Yes, magnesium is the single most studied mineral in existence. It actually powers over 600 critical reactions and our bodies. Did you know that there are multiple types of magnesium? That's why I am so excited to share with you, the magnesium product that I discovered, is called Magnesium Breakthrough by BiOptimizers, and it combines all seven essential forms of magnesium into one convenient supplement. Most magnesium supplements actually fail, because they are synthetic and are not full spectrum. When you get all seven critical forms of magnesium, pretty much every function in your body gets upgraded, from your brain to your sleep, pain and inflammation and less stress.

With this one simple action, you can help reverse your magnesium deficiency and all of its forms. This is by far the most complete magnesium product ever created, and until or unless someone comes out with a better one, I highly recommend you give it a try. I can't tell you how many times I get feedback in my Facebook group, IF Biohackers, about people who have truly benefited so much from Magnesium Breakthrough, and we have a special offer just for our listeners, you can get 10% off Magnesium Breakthrough, if you go to magbreakthrough.com/ifpodcast and enter the code, IFPODCAST10. That's M-A-G-B-R-E-A-K-T-H-R-O-U-G-H forward slash I-F-P-O-D-C-A-S-T with coupon code IFPODCAST10. Once again, that's magbreakthrough.com/ifpodcast with the coupon code IFPODCAST10. By the way that coupon code is good for 10% off any order. Definitely take a look around the BiOptimizers website for other supplements that might benefit your health. I'll put all this information in the show notes. One more thing before you jump in.

Are you concerned about aging? Well, thankfully, fasting is super incredible for its anti-aging benefits. It activates genes in your body called sirtuins, which repair your body and help extend lifespan. Also, during the fast, your body can clean up a lot of harmful chemicals which may be taxing your detoxification systems. In fact, the reason people go gray is because their detox systems start producing a lot of hydrogen peroxide when dealing with toxins. Do you know where a lot of those chemicals come from? Your skincare and makeup. As it turns out, there are thousands of compounds found in conventional skincare and makeup that Europe has banned due to their toxic nature and the US has banned less than 10. When you put these on your skin every single day through your skincare makeup, you're adding to your body's burden and likely aging your skin faster.

Thankfully, you can easily clean up your skincare with a company called Beautycounter. They make incredible products that are extensively tested to be safe for your skin. You can feel good about every single ingredient that you put on. They also have an amazing antiaging line called Countertime. Friends, this is a game-changer. It's full of active ingredients which nourish and support your skin, reduce fine lines and wrinkles, and support a beautiful glow. It also has a safe alternative to retinol, so you can get all of the antiaging benefits of retinol without any of the toxic effects of retinol, because, yes, that stuff is toxic. Guys, put it away now.

Now, you can shop with us at melanieavalon.com/beautycounter. If you use that link, something really special and magical might happen after you place your first order. Also definitely get on my clean beauty email list that's at melanieavalon.com/cleanbeauty. I give away so many free things on that list. definitely check it out.

Lastly, if you anticipate making safe skincare a part of your future, just like Gin and I do? Definitely become a Band of Beauty member. It's sort of like the Amazon Prime for safe skincare. You get 10% back on all of your purchases, free shipping on qualifying orders, and a welcome gift, that costs way more than the price of the membership. It's completely worth it. Friends, are you fast and clean inside and out? You can with Beautycounter. Again, that link is melanieavalon.com/beautycounter. we'll put all this information in the show notes. All right, now back to the show.

Hi, everybody, and welcome. This is episode number 212 of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast. I'm Melanie Avalon and I'm here with Gin Stephens.

Gin Stephens: Hi, everybody.

Melanie Avalon: How are you today, Gin?

Gin Stephens: I am doing great, especially as I look at the date that this podcast comes out. It will be out on May 10th, and my book deadline is May 7th. In the future when this episode comes out, I'll be done with my book.

Melanie Avalon: That is very exciting. You're not going to ask for an extension?

Gin Stephens: Well, I got an extension already. It was due on March 31st, and so March 31^st was coming up soon, and I sent an email to my editor and I was like, “Hypothetically, what if I knew I was not going to be done by March 31st, what would happen?” I got an extension to May 7th. I'm working feverishly on it. I'm at the stage of the process where hour by hour, I'm like, “Oh, this book is so good.” Then, 10 minutes later, I'm like, “This book is terrible.” [chuckles] It's really hard to write a book.

Melanie Avalon: You haven't mentioned to listeners at all what it's about.

Gin Stephens: Well, I know I haven't really. I've dropped hints here and there. It's about how and why we want to clean up what we're eating and clean up the products. A lot of this has come out of our work here on this podcast, Melanie, with learning from you about some of the things. For example, even Beautycounter. Why does it matter what we put on our skin? Why does it matter what products we use? I started to get interested in this through our work here on the podcast and started digging in, and I started making changes in my own life. I realized when I ate better foods, I felt better. That just carried over in all areas. So, that’s what the book is about. What's fascinating to me is, as I'm digging in for the research, that this is actually controversial. You and I know how important it is after the research we've done about what we put on our skin. That's why we choose Beautycounter, right?

Melanie Avalon: Yes. 100%.

Gin Stephens: But when you start digging in, it's actually controversial out there. There's a whole segment of people out there who are telling us, “Don't worry, it's okay. These products are safe. Parabens, perfectly safe, all these things. You're crazy if you're worried about them.” It's like with Big Tobacco. Big tobacco in the 1950s, they all colluded and really went out of their way to convince us that smoking was great, we shouldn't worry about it.

Melanie Avalon: It's really, really shocking how pervasive that is. I feel like a few key industries like the cosmetic industry, but with Beautycounter that we've talked about, where it's really evident, because in a way the chapter closed, the tobacco industry, like you just said, because now it is pretty established that tobacco and smoking has all these negative effects. But for the longest time, for the longest time, that was suppressed--

Gin Stephens: Yeah, they have internal memos that have been released now that people-- they've talked about in courts of law, that the tobacco industry had this information, and they did not share it. That makes a consumer a little hesitant to just trust when people are like, “Oh, don't worry. GMO, no worries. It's all good.”

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, actually, the book I'm reading right now is called Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine. Do you know Dr. Robert Lustig, Gin?

Gin Stephens: I do, yeah.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. This is actually really, really exciting because for listeners, I have my other show, the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast, and on that show--I have this Google document and I have all of these columns of guests, people that I want to come on, people who are coming on, ideal people to reach out to. On the column of people I want to bring on, it's exciting because I used to really actively reach out to these people, but now they often come to me, which is really, really exciting. Well, they don't come to me, their publishers or their publicists or their agents. Robert Lustig has been on that list for quite a while because he's one of the go-to authorities on the role of particularly sugar and fructose and metabolic health, and disease. I've been wanting to interview him, but he has a book coming out, it releases May 4th, so it'll be out by the time this show airs. They came to me wanting him to come on my show for that book. I've been reading it. It's called Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine. It talks about everything you were just talking about.

Gin Stephens: Really?

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, like the bias in the processed food industry, the funding-- it reminds me of Gary Taubes a lot in that it's going through the history of everything and how ideas came to be and how they're treated in culture and society, in the news and health, and it's very upsetting.

Gin Stephens: Well, it is very upsetting because it feels like gaslighting. I can just imagine already the reviews from my new book when it comes out. People who are like, “Oh my God, I learned so much.” People who are like, “This is pseudoscience garbage. [laughs] BPA is fine, and all these chemicals are safe.” There'll be one or five. [laughs] It's polarizing, so many things are, but one thing I was working on today was a section about the precautionary principle. You’ve read about the precautionary principle, I'm sure, I know you follow it, whether you've read about it or not. It's the whole idea that we err on the side of caution.

Melanie Avalon: Yes.

Gin Stephens: These scientists are saying, “Uh-oh, beware of Roundup in your corn.” Then, other people are like, “Oh, it's no big deal. I eat Roundup for breakfast on purpose.”

Melanie Avalon: I will stop myself from going on a tangent, but I think Roundup and Monsanto's a perfect example of something that I think the evidence is so clear about the toxicity of it, but it is so political.

Gin Stephens: It is so political. That's the part that's frustrating. Then, there's a strong agenda for discrediting anyone who says that you should be cautious. That's the part that's-- we want to say, give our messages and have everybody like, “Oh, that's good information. Thank you for sharing it.” We don't want people to say, “That's ridiculous and not true.” [laughs] When you start talking about things like Beautycounter, for example, we find it to be very important, and something that we know makes a difference. Now, back to the topic of tobacco, I don't think there'd be a single voice out there saying cigarettes are safe, tobacco is safe, but it took 50 years, or however many years for people to be like, “Oh, that really was all bad information.” The doctors smoking, and I choose this brand, all those ads that they had back in the day, it takes a while for everybody to catch up.

Melanie Avalon: One of his chapters is on the history of the dental industry and the role of fluoride. Actually, what I really like about him is he admits to being fluoride agnostic. Something to the effect of, he's not pro or against fluoride. Regardless of what you think about fluoride being toxic or not toxic, it's an example of putting all of this focus on fluoride, and completely ignoring the role of sugar or diet in dental health. Just a lot of energy is focused on things and it's very frustrating.

Gin Stephens: Well, when you go back to the work of Weston Price, and the work he did in the 30s, or whatever, he was a dentist for anybody who doesn't know. Weston Price was a dentist, and he traveled the world with his wife, and they looked at people who were living in non-westernized communities that were still eating traditional foods. He went to Africa, and he went to all over the place. People who were eating the way their ancestors had always eaten, always, not eating the modern diet, not eating processed foods. He as a dentist was astonished by how beautiful their teeth were. They didn't have crooked teeth, they didn't have cavities. They weren't brushing with fluoride. They weren't doing any of that. They just ate nutritious food, they got what they needed, and they all ate a wide variety of things. They weren't all following the same diet because they lived in different places. They didn't have the same macronutrient ratio. The only thing they had in common is they ate the real food that their ancestors had eaten for all of time, so they were healthy.

Melanie Avalon: The thing about fluoride that I think is just concerning is it's an example of where not knowing the potential toxicity of it and then it's a situation where the government fluorinated water, like infused our drinking water with it. You truly cannot drink the tap water, but that's something being forced on you. There's a lot.

Gin Stephens: There's a lot. That's just a great example of precautionary principle. If you read things that say, “Here are some health concerns with this that you need to be aware of,” people are like, “Oh, it's perfectly fine,” which do you listen to? Well, if you're following the precautionary principle. You have to say, “Well, okay, the drawbacks maybe my dental health won't be as good. Maybe my teeth won't be as strong.” They're like, “Well, what did people do--“ Back in the days of Weston Price, was he finding people with rotted out teeth in his travels and then he was like, “Here's some fluoride for you.’” No. He found people with beautiful teeth. I had the worst teeth growing up. He talked about how the dental arches of the native population, their mouths were perfectly formed. Well, my teeth were so crooked. I had to have teeth pulled, I had to have so many braces for years. Lots and lots of dental work.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, James Nestor talks about that a lot in his book, Breath, how our mouths became crowded. It's really, really fascinating.

Gin Stephens: Does he base it on nutrition?

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm. He thinks it's two things. If I'm recalling correctly, and I'll put a link in the show notes because I had him on the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Chewing, like chewing whole foods.

Gin Stephens: That strengthens our jaw and makes our mouth form correctly? That makes sense.

Melanie Avalon: Chewing and breathing, becoming mouth breathers has affected our mouths.

Gin Stephens: Interesting. I was also very much a mouth breather because I had-- my adenoids were all-- I had my adenoids out when I was 21. I had a hard time breathing. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon: I had a really good moment, though. I'm also reading a book right now. Well, I'm reading many books, but one of them is-- have you heard of Dr. John Jaquish. I don't know how you say his last name. He wrote Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time.

Gin Stephens: Oh, I've seen that book. It just popped up on Amazon when I was looking at something down in the recommended books.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, really?

Gin Stephens: Yes. When did that come out? I just saw it popping up on Amazon.

Melanie Avalon: It came out August 7th.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, that's not that recent. I just saw it last week, which is funny. His premise is that you do shorter, different things instead of like going to the gym.

Melanie Avalon: Yes. Well, so his book is Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There's a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. He developed a system called X3 and its resistant bands. They sent it to me, which I'm really grateful for because it's very pricey. They reached out to me and I’ve started reading the book, and oh my goodness, it's actually blowing my mind about the potential of muscle building using resistance versus traditional weightlifting. Blowing my mind. I'm really excited because we get so many questions on this show about exercise and muscle building, strength training. That's not my forte, Exercise Science. I don't study it as much as I could.

Gin Stephens: Well, it's okay not to. We don't have to know everything.

Melanie Avalon: It's a knowledge bucket I would like to know more about, but I don't actively seek it out, I think, because I'm not a weightlifter and it's not a passion of mine. They came to me and so it just kind of fell in my lap and reading this book. I'm really, really excited to do this episode, because I'm learning so much and it is blowing my mind. Actually, he formed it because he originally was doing research on osteoporosis, and how loading for bone health, the way that you support bone health is by force onto your bones, he contemplated applying this concept to muscle. The part I'm reading right now is-- or listening to because I'm listening to the audiobook, he's talking all about intermittent fasting. He has a really great deep dive into fasting. He has a whole chapter in this release what we were just talking about, where he said they were trying to decide the best diet to promote for body composition. He said their goal was to have no bias, no cherry picking, just review the literature and see what is the best diet, and that's where they ultimately ended up which is basically a high protein, animal protein diet.

What happened that was funny was I was listening to it yesterday while working on my notes for Robert Lustig, and then he literally said, “For learning more about processed sugar, check out the work of Robert Lustig,” I was like, “Ah.” Small world. For listeners, I'll put a link in the show notes to all of these books. Can I tell you one really quick announcement?

Gin Stephens: Sure.

Melanie Avalon: It's not really an announcement. It's not for sure. Gin, I am seriously contemplating/ making/producing a serrapeptase supplement.

Gin Stephens: Very cool.

Melanie Avalon: We'll see. Somebody reached out to me that I'm actually very excited to work with, I think, and I really liked his approach. He was so excited about the serrapeptase idea. For listeners, Serrapeptase is the one supplement back in the beginning of this show that Gin and I realized that we both took at the time. I still take it. Gin, you don't?

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I haven't taken in a while.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Proteolytic enzyme by the Japanese silkworm and taking it, it works systemically. It can address a lot of health conditions because-- kind of the way fasting works systemically, it works systemically to break down protein, like old proteins and can help with inflammation and pain and a lot of different things. But there's so much debate out there about the right form. Should you have enteric-coated serrapeptase? Or should you have serrapeptase in enteric-coated capsules? There are a lot of brands out. I get asked all the time, like what brand do you recommend? I'm like, “I don't even know what brand I recommend, because I'm on the fence.” Now I'm thinking I should just do the research, find what I think is the best and produce it myself.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I think that's a great idea.

Melanie Avalon: So, stay tuned, listeners, stay tuned.

Gin Stephens: My research on supplements, also, coming out of my new book. I talk about how very frequently they're tainted.

Melanie Avalon: Yes.

Gin Stephens: They might have prescription drugs in there, instead of the supplement that it says it has, like something completely crazy. I am scared to take things that I would order from Amazon now, literally scared.

Melanie Avalon: When it comes to supplements, I'm so cautious and so nervous. I do a lot of research. I'm very, very cautious to recommend supplements because of that.

Gin Stephens: There's so little oversight. People aren't testing them to see what's really in there. You could say it has one thing, but it really has something completely different.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. That's why it's so important that we really, really trust the brands that we work with. I think on this show, BiOptimizers is actually a sponsor of today's-- I'm not sure.

Gin Stephens: They are, I see them up there, but you're right. When we partner with the brand, it's because we trust them. When you're on Amazon, number one, you don't know the people making those. We know the people who are making BiOptimizers, and they made them for themselves. We know that. We've had them on the show.

Melanie Avalon: We know them personally. [laughs]

Gin Stephens: We do. I trust that if they're making something they want to take themselves. It's like why I trust that intermittent fasting is good for your brain health because Mark Mattson researched brain health and then he does the intermittent fasting protocol that he thinks is best for it. I'm like, “I'm going to do it what he does.” Same thing with the BiOptimizers. They created the supplements they wanted, so I trust them. But when you're buying them from one of those online places, like Amazon, even if the company is good, you're not really certain that's what you're getting. What I learned with Delay, Don’t Deny, and counterfeiting of my own book is that people counterfeit things. I know Amazon doesn't want people to counterfeit things, but there aren't enough safeguards in place. If Amazon ever wanted to talk to me about it, I'd love to help them. Figure out better safeguards for making sure their products are not counterfeited. I have lots of ideas.

Melanie Avalon: I was just thinking about it. The majority of the supplements that I do talk about, I personally have interviewed the people, had them on the show. Like Atrantil with Ken Brown, BiOptimizers with Wade and Matt. Quicksilver with Chris Shade, Sleep Remedy with Dr. Kirk Parsley, I know these people. I know them. [laughs]

Gin Stephens: Exactly. That really is important, the supply chain, you know where it's coming from, someone isn't selling you a fake version of BiOptimizers. I just would not buy supplements on Amazon at this time. I would not, just because I'm not certain that just with the quality control of my own book, I don't know that they've got that in place. Maybe they do but I'm not certain.

Melanie Avalon: The two brands that I do-- there's really only on Amazon two brands I trust. I always make sure I'm ordering from their actual store on Amazon.

Gin Stephens: That's important.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, so that's Pure Encapsulations and Thorne. I feel good about those brands. Even with that said, I always still look at the ingredients.

Gin Stephens: The thing to make sure about that I learned the hard way with Delay, Don’t Deny is you have to look at the buy box to see who's selling it to you. Like Melanie just said, if it's coming from a third-party seller, you just don't know. I love Amazon. Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan. I buy a ton of stuff on Amazon to this day. I'm just careful about the buy box and who it's coming from. I know there are a lot of amazing third-party sellers on Amazon, and they are the people that Amazon needs to get it all sorted out for their benefit. I don't know if I'm saying this well, because the people who are good third-party sellers on Amazon, they're selling you legitimate products, their business is being affected negatively by the fact that you and I are now a little more suspicious and we don't know who to trust.

Melanie Avalon: I just had this call last week with this supplement creator. I did a call yesterday with Dr. Kirk Parsley, because his main thing is the Sleep Remedy supplement. I was like, “Tell me everything about supplements.” I was asking should I sell on my own website, would I sell on Amazon? I didn't realize on Amazon-- well, he was talking about the pros and cons to both, but did you know Amazon will-- if you have a supplement that become well known, they pretty much like by the title of it, so that when you're googling it, you will come up with Amazon, regardless even if it's on Amazon.

Gin Stephens: Oh.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, they want you to end up on Amazon for everything, even if it's not there. Then, he was talking about difference between selling it yourself on Amazon versus selling it through Amazon. I'm like, “Oh, there's a lot to take in.”

Gin Stephens: See, the thing is that we all love-- well, I don't know we don't all love Amazon. I'm sure some people don't. I do, I've been using Amazon since--

Melanie Avalon: I have an Amazon card.

Gin Stephens: I've been using it for so many years that I want it to be a place that I rely on, that I can trust what I'm getting there. I'm rooting for Amazon to be the place, but there's just a few things. I know they care about the customers but there's still just a few little things I think they could earn back some of that trust. They did lose my trust with the whole-- the fact that people were buying counterfeit copies of my book for months before we figured out what was happening.

Melanie Avalon: Well, exciting things, we'll have to stay tuned. I really think I'm going to do it though. I'm really excited.

Gin Stephens: Well, enjoy.

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Melanie Avalon: All right. Shall we jump into everything for today?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: To get things started, we have some feedback from Liz. Liz from Texas, and the subject is “In tears listening to Episode 200.” Liz says, “Hi, Gin and Melanie. After listening to the Ask Me Anything Episode 200, I was in tears of laughter during some of the questions. Gin's response to Trans-Siberian Orchestra during the who would you see in concert post COVID had me in stitches. Gin, I went and looked at the transcript to see what you--”

[laughter]

Gin Stephens: What did I say?

Melanie Avalon: It's so funny. I end up reading our transcripts. I basically said that one of my favorite songs was Epiphany from Trans-Siberian Orchestra and it's like 12 minutes of epicness and you made some comment about the gong bell that you would--

Gin Stephens: [laughs] Oh, yeah, The Gong Show. [laughs] Oh gosh. 12 minutes. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: For listeners, yeah, that was a fun episode. She says she had tears of gratitude and joy as well with the hinting comments from thankful listeners. “I agree with them wholeheartedly. I have only been living the lifestyle for seven and a half weeks, but I feel like I have gained years of knowledge from your podcasts in such a short amount of time. I also enjoy the personal commonalities I share with the both of you. Your descriptions of your high school selves made me think I would have sat at the lunch table with the both of you.” I also went back and read all of that. Gin, we ultimately concluded, we think we'd be at the same lunch table.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, we would have. 100%, we would have been. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon: “I'm a 45-year-old questioner who loves research, Taylor Swift. I went to both the 1989 and Reputation tours, Melanie. I tried to go to Red, but the tickets sold out in seconds.” I'm so jealous, that's me talking. She says, “James Taylor. He is fabulous in concert, Gin. Baked potatoes with butter and sour cream,” so that's Gin, “and scallops.” That's me. Yum. She says, “I was a little sad to be almost caught up with all of the IF podcast episodes. I started from Episode 2 and search incessantly for the mysterious Episode 1, until I realized now I'll have time to check out some of your other podcasts. While I truly love listening to the two of you together, it's so interesting to find out you can't see each other when recording. I'm excited to start a rotation of your other podcasts throughout the week. To answer the superpower question for myself, if I had a superpower, it would be to ensure that the IF podcast will go on for decades to come.” That's so nice. She says, “I am so grateful for the inspiration and motivation the two of you have given me to live a healthier and happier lifestyle. Keep up the fantastic work. #FriendsInMyHead.” That was fun. That made me laugh. Thank you, Liz, for sending that.

Gin Stephens: Anyway, for listeners. If you haven't listened-- one thing that I love about this podcast is that I get to hang out with Melanie every week, and I really enjoy it. It's like the highlight of my week. I think listeners will-- I mean, I love Intermittent Fasting Stories so very much, it's a different guest every week, Melanie has the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast with a different guest every week. But if you like the give and take that the chatter between Melanie and me, listeners, check out the Life Lessons podcast. I haven’t talked about that one maybe in a while, but it's called Life Lessons, my cohost is Sheri Bullock. We have a similar kind of a thing. We have a different topic every week. It's not about fasting. You'll get to know Sheri just as well you know Melanie and me.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, it's really fun. I feel with the two shows, it's like in college, the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast is the intense class that I'm prepping an exam for all the time and really stressful. I feel like I'm getting a grade on it, and this is my fun extracurricular class. We still do a lot of research, obviously, but I enjoy this podcast a lot.

Gin Stephens: Well, good. Yay.

Melanie Avalon: Shall we go on to our next question?

Gin Stephens: Yes. This is from Jin. J-I-N as opposed to me, G-I-N.

Melanie Avalon: Wow. That's two interesting spellings of Gin/Jin together.

Gin Stephens: Gin and Jin. The subject is, “My roller coaster journey with IF and finding balance.” “Hi, Gin and Melanie. I've been listening to your podcast since 2018 when I started my IF journey. I first found out about IF through various health-related podcasts like Dr. Rhonda Patrick and Tim Ferriss. Back then, I lived in San Francisco and was surrounded by all these health and biohacking people, which was a big impact on my lifestyle. When I first started IF, I started with a goal of losing 5 pounds and keeping it off forever, and after about six months, I was able to lose those pesky 5 pounds. But then my mind kept on telling me, you can always be skinnier, the skinnier the better. Another six months of 20:4 with not enough calories to sustain my body. I was averaging 500 calories per day and running 30 miles per week.”

Melanie Avalon: Oh, my goodness.

Gin Stephens: Yeah. “My body started fighting back,” and that is what our bodies do, Melanie. Just a little sidenote there. I talk about this in Fast. Feast. Repeat., when we're in a situation like this, our bodies are like, “Okay, we can't survive.” Then they start-- this is exactly what she describes next when I was reading this when she sent it in. I'm like, “Yeah, this is textbook what happens when you over-restrict.” She says, “My body started fighting back with this unstoppable appetite for sugar and anything junk food, donuts, cake frosting, bags of trail mix, etc. I just couldn't control my body wanting calories and to get back to my healthy weight.” You see, just another sidenote for me. That's why I talk about in Fast. Feast. Repeat., the urge to binge is a warning sign that you're over-restricting for your body.

Melanie Avalon: 100%.

Gin Stephens: You sometimes get it during the adjustment phase because your body isn't well fueled during the fast, so when you open your window, because you're not tapping into your fat stores well, you're not well fueled, your body's like, “Feed me, feed me, feed me,” but once you're fat adapted, that feeling goes away. If it starts to come back later after you've been fat adapted, don't ignore it. It is your body sending you a distress signal and you need to listen. All right, so she says, “Fast forward six months, I made up more than the 5 pounds I'd lost even with my [unintelligible [00:34:58] 20:4 fasting regimen. I finally came to realize that my hormones were all out of whack and really needed to feed my body after a visit to the holistic doctor and being diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. Since then, I've been playing with the IF timing and really listening to my body and how to nourish it.

After juggling with different IF schedules and methods, I now feel my healthiest with 14:10, and stopping to eat at 7:00 to 8:00. I make sure I eat breakfast to get my gut moving and make sure I don't feel starved like I used to when I was restricting to only four hours of eating at night on top of excessive cardio. I still enjoy running. I certainly make sure that I listen to my body and that my cortisol levels are in check. I have thrown out my scale and don't even care about how much I weigh anymore. I only care about if I'm starving or craving junk because that means my body is not being treated right. This is just a cautionary tale for those who are already fit and have a tendency to take it really hard on themselves and their bodies.

Once you really start to listen to your body and be truly empathetic to it, you'll be able to make peace with it and how it looks and serves you instead of your weight goals and sizes. Thank you, you two, for educating people about this and letting people know that everyone is different, and how we feel best and take care of ourselves comes from true self love. Thank you, Jin.”

Melanie Avalon: Well, that was fabulous. I don't really have any comments just with everything she said, I agree with 100%.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I don't want people to be afraid that that means 20:4 is too restrictive for a lot of people because it just depends, she said she was eating 500 calories a day with 20:4 and also running 30 miles a week. That is definitely over-restriction for anybody. There's no body on earth that's going to be happy with 500 calories a day and then running that level of activity. For me, I can eat a lot of food in a four-hour window. I'm not eating 500 calories a day, I can guarantee you that. A few times I've ever tried to add things up, which I'm not good at, it always surprises me with how high it is, like the amount of food that I eat. I eat a lot. I eat calorie-dense food, I eat a lot of food. For her though, for Jin, it sounds she's probably more of a light eater, more of a restrained eater. Some people naturally like to eat-- like grandma who ate like a bird, for example. People eat little bits of food here and there. A 10-hour window might be what she needs to get the volume of food, someone who eats like that in small amounts isn't going to be able to fit it into four hours.

Melanie Avalon: I'm so in awe of people like that because I'm a hearty eater, like you, Gin.

Gin Stephens: Don't be in awe of it. It's just different. It's not anything to aspire to. It's not better.

Melanie Avalon: I didn't mean it as I aspire to it that way. I'm in awe in that-- it's a state of being I just can't imagine, I can't really imagine a state where I feel satisfied eating lighter like that. Some people are very happy and comfortable, like you said, eating small amounts, or even eating small amounts all throughout the day. For me, it's just-- my brain, it doesn't work that way.

Gin Stephens: Mine either. I like to eat a hearty amount.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Me too, which is a reason I love intermittent fasting. Low carb sort of caused that effect where I felt like I could finally eat a lot more and feel satiated but IF was really the first time that I felt like I truly could eat what I wanted and not worry about the calories or the amount and just feel fulfilled and satiated.

Gin Stephens: Well for me, both low carb and low fat left me unsatisfied and unsatiated, that's the big thing for me. I never felt satisfied without enough carbs. I never felt satisfied without enough fat. To be satisfied, I’ve got to have a mixture of fat and carbs together. That's the only time that I feel satisfied. The volume of food, I’ve got to feel satisfied or I'm not happy.

Melanie Avalon: I eat so much animal protein specifically during my window. It's just funny to me because so many people will say, “How do you eat that much protein?” I'm like, “I don't know. It's easy for me.”

Gin Stephens: See, I don't. I don't eat that much protein. I mean I do eat protein. Like yesterday I had, I opened my window with two eggs over toast because Chad had bought extra eggs by accident and he's like, “We’ve got to eat these eggs.” I'm like, “I can do it.” I open my window with the two eggs over toast. Then, at dinnertime, I made chicken but I didn't feel like having the chicken, so I didn't eat the chicken.

Melanie Avalon: I would have eaten the chicken probably.

Gin Stephens: I know. I had couscous and I had carrots and I had kale with all the strawberries-- not strawberries, but cherries. They didn't have strawberries in there. It was dried cherries. It was actually a Green Chef meal. Green Chef is also sponsoring today's episode, but I didn't eat the chicken. I didn't feel like eating it. But Chad had the chicken. It's just funny how different we are.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, it is really funny. Similar, but different.

Gin Stephens: Yep.

Melanie Avalon: All right. Shall we go on to our next question?

Gin Stephens: Yes. Now we have a question from Linda, and her subject is, “When to eat carbs?” I'm going to answer it, in your eating window. Ha, ha. Did you like that, Melanie?

Melanie Avalon: That was wonderful. Moving on. Sorry.

Gin Stephens: [chuckles] Okay. I'm sure her question is a little more nuanced than that. All right. She says “Hello, Melanie and Gin. I just found your podcast a month ago, and I'm enjoying catching up on all the episodes. A quick background, I am 57 years old and have been lifting weights and running since my 20s. I've never had to lose a lot of weight, but I've always been mindful of my weight since I am 5’1”. I've been road racing for over 30 years and went low carb about 10 years ago. That caused some issues because I was still racing and had a hard time getting fat adapted. I now eat low carb/keto. I check my blood ketones here and there and have been wearing a CGM on and off for six months. I just got the Levels program with the app. I am a data analyst and love the information. I work full time and like most people right now, I'm working from home. My fasting glucose and insulin are great. I get them tested at least once a year. All my other health markers are very good.

My question is, if I want to eat some carbs, when would be the best time to eat them? I get up around 4:15 to 5:15 AM. I take a weightlifting class for 45 minutes two to three days per week and run three days per week. I usually do these workouts fasted. If I do a long run, 7 to 10 miles, on the weekend, I may have a bar or some sort of fat like peanut butter before the run. During the week, I usually eat around 10:30 AM, eggs, ground meat, and veggies. I may have some nuts and turkey breast with avocado mayo before dinner, and then protein and veggies for dinner around 6:00 PM, is it best to eat carbs with the first meal after my workout or with dinner? I've heard both recommended especially since I usually work out fasted.”

Melanie Avalon: All right, Linda, thank you so much for your question. She says at the end that she's heard both recommended. That is very true. I as well have heard both recommended. Some people say you should have your carbs later in the day, especially that it would promote sleep and that that's the best time to have them and you're more insulin sensitive. Some people say you're more insulin sensitive in the morning, or that you should have them directly after workout. From everything that I've seen through the years and my personal experience, I find for me having my carbs-- Well, I do one meal a day, so I'm always eating in the evening, but having them later is what really works for me. I feel like it seems to work for most people that I've seen, or the majority. That said, and this sounds like a cop-out answer, but I would play around and see-- especially since you're a data junkie and you were a CGM, I would see how it does affect you. If you're not intrinsically intuitively leaning towards one or the other, try it both ways, and see when you have your carbs earlier, does it change your hunger levels, your satiety? How does it make you feel? Compared to having it later. I do feel like most people seem to do better with it later. What have you seen in the groups, Gin?

Gin Stephens: I mean, this is not a question that has a one size fits all answer. Really in my groups, we're not doing a lot of talking about timing of when should I eat whatever. We just eat, [laughs] eat what feels good to you. If you open with carbs and you feel bad, don't open with carbs. If you have your carbs later, and you don't feel good having them later, don't have them later. Go by-- you're using your CGM for this, like Melanie suggested, I think that's great advice, but go by how it makes you feel. I got caught up on the wording what is the best time to eat them? It depends, best for what? Best for satiety? Best for sleep? Best for not storing them? There're so many possible second parts of that question, whereas the answer would be different. For me, I need to eat carbs close to when I go to sleep. If I don't have enough carbs, I can't sleep.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, that's why the carbs really help me for sleep. One thing I forgot to mention, though. When we're not working out, there's really only one modality for carbs to enter our glucose stores, for carbs to be stored as glycogen in the muscle or the liver. The exception is after exercise that actually sparks the release of-- I forget what it's called. It's like-- what is it, non-insulin mediated glucose uptake, I think, is what it's called. Basically, there is a way for carbs to enter muscle glycogen stores independent of insulin, so without insulin, and that is after workout. So, if you do have your carbs right after your workout, you can actually shuttle those.

One thing that I failed to mention, though, and it could be a factor to consider is normally the way carbs enter the storage form of glycogen in our liver or muscle is with insulin. We release insulin, and that's how it enters. There is something called non-insulin mediated glucose uptake. Our muscles can actually take up carbs without the use of insulin and the stimulator for that is exercise. The reason I say that is-- so that applies to when you're fasting. Say your blood sugar is high, while fasting, and then you do exercise, your muscles could actually take up glucose without the use of insulin, which is pretty cool. It also would indicate that your muscles are likely even more insulin sensitive after exercising because, A, if you're eating carbs, you'll release insulin, which would encourage them to be stored as glycogen. In addition, there's this other transport mechanism that’s stimulated by exercise. The point of that is that you might find that you're able to tolerate more carbs, having them right after a workout, for example. That could be something to consider. Again, it's going to come down to just finding what works for you. Again, that sounds like an answer where we're not giving us one answer, but it's because there's not one answer. Any other thoughts?

Gin Stephens: I'm just really wondering what our goals are, because she's eating low carb now. I don't know what she's trying to do. Is she trying to lose more weight? Is she maintaining? I just don't know. Does she just want to incorporate more carbs, because she misses them? That's the piece that I'm really missing a little bit. Was it in there and I missed it?

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I don't think it's in there. I wonder if it might just be-- especially with her wearing the CGM and everything. I would guess it might be either/or what is providing the healthiest blood glucose profile with her wearing the CGM and everything like that. Or, since she did say that she's always mindful of her weight, it might have something to do with maintaining her weight, maybe losing.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, it's just that she's been low carb keto and wants to add that more carbs, I guess. She just wants to add them back, I guess. I guess she wants to add them back and not see issues from them. When can she add them back and not have a problem? Again, she's got the CGM, I think that's the key, is if she sees crazy blood glucose spikes like, “Oops, maybe that isn't the right thing to eat for me.”

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. I'll put a link in the show notes, I've done two episodes on CGMs. The episode with Levels, I did interview them. The one I'd aired already was NutriSense. I think when this comes out, I will have aired the Levels episode as well. I'll put a link to that in the show notes, because you can learn more about a CGM. We didn't say what it was, for listeners, who are not familiar, it's a continuous glucose monitor. It's a device that you wear on your skin and it actually perpetually measures your blood glucose levels. Does it indirectly, it measures the interstitial fluid. It doesn't actually measure your blood, but it's pretty accurate and it can show you trends. It can really show you how you are reacting to foods and how things are affecting your blood sugar levels. It's fascinating. I have codes for both of them for discounts. Actually, I think Levels, the code I have is, they're on a waitlist, but my link lets you get it now rather than be on the waitlist. Then the NutriSense code, I think is MELANIEAVALON, and it's 15% off. Check out those episodes if you'd like to learn more about CGM.

Gin Stephens: Yes. All right. Sounds good.

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Now, we have a question from Julianne. The subject is “Hyperglycemia diabetes, gallstones.” Julianne says, “Hello. Thank you for your podcast. It is both informative and fun, and I appreciate it so much. I've been intermittent fasting for almost a year. Currently, I'm back home due to the pandemic and my family members are worried about my IF lifestyle. They claim that it is dangerous for it can cause hyperglycemia, diabetes, and also perhaps gallstones. Therefore, now I am fearful to continue this lifestyle. Do you have any insights that would help me quell these fears?”

Gin Stephens: I wonder if she means hypoglycemia instead of hyperglycemia. Although-- well, okay, so let's first let's dig into-- intermittent fasting could cause transient hyperglycemia and transient hypoglycemia, really, honestly. Let's talk about how, hyper is high blood glucose, hyperglycemia, and that's what Julianne mentioned. We've seen through the dawn phenomenon, Dr. Fung writes about this in a blog post that I always share when people ask me personally about it, he does a great job explaining it. Basically, when we wake up in the morning, and we're in the fasted state, our liver dumps out some glycogen and makes our blood glucose go up. You can have a spike of your blood glucose, but you haven't eaten, and you're like, “Oh my gosh, fasting’s making my blood glucose go up. This must be dangerous.” It's actually your body clearing out some of that stored energy, we actually need it to get cleared out, because having it stashed away is also not what we want. We want our bodies to use it up. A temporary higher blood glucose at the beginning of fasting is understandable.

You also might have hypoglycemia, your blood glucose dropping, like if you're not fasting clean, and your body releases insulin in response to whatever, diet soda, and then your blood glucose crashes. It really wasn't the fasting that caused it, but it happened in the fasted state because you weren't fasting clean, so that could happen as well. But is that something that is dangerously happening because of fasting? No. I wouldn't worry about that. I've never felt better steady blood glucose control than I have as an intermittent faster versus back in the day when I was eating frequently and I was on that blood glucose rollercoaster. I would eat, my blood sugar would go up, it would crash, I would have to eat again. I was always up and down, up and down. Now, I feel very steady. What's that show? MythBusters? Do you ever watch MythBusters?

Melanie Avalon: I did. Yeah.

Gin Stephens: Myth busted. [laughs] All right, the second myth we're going to bust is that whether intermittent fasting will cause diabetes. I assume you mean it's going to cause type 2 diabetes, because it's not going to cause your pancreas to shut down, which would be type 1 diabetes, it's definitely not going to do that. As far as type 2 diabetes, not only is it not going to cause it, but it's very likely to correct it, if you have it. I have had so many group members over the years and people on the Intermittent Fasting Stories podcast talk about how they were diagnosed as type 2 diabetic. Then, after living the intermittent fasting lifestyle, their A1c came down so much, thanks to fasting that now they're no longer medically classified as type 2 diabetic because their A1C is now normal. I've heard this time and time again. If you don't want to take my word for it, then please read The Diabetes Code by Dr. Jason Fung. He explains it to you there and you may trust his explanation more because he's a doctor who's worked with patients who is medically-- he's got a study, it's really short. I talk about it in Fast. Feast. Repeat. Go to Fast. Feast. Repeat., get that book if you don't have it already. There's a section in there and it'll point you to Dr. Fung’s research with some of his patients through his clinic where he has had them come off of insulin, and reversed their type 2 diabetes and it was actually published in a journal. You can read about it. It's like a couple of case study kind of a thing. As far as gallstones, didn't we just talk about this like last week?

Melanie Avalon: Yes, episode 209.

Gin Stephens: Go listen to 209. Again, myth busted. We busted it in episode 209. I'm pretty sure I bet I know who you were listening to, the person we talked about in episode 209. This is more of an anecdotal kind of a thing, but there have been so many members in the intermittent fasting groups that-- we talk about this in 209. If intermittent fasting led to a huge increase in gallstones, we would have seen a giant example of that in the groups, but we did not.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, just speaking to the gallstones, check out 209, we talk about it at length, length, length. For that episode, I went and tried to find the studies about fasting and gallstones, and I just couldn't find them. I was really, really expecting to find them, because there is this idea popularized out there. The one study I found that we talked about was looking at fasting and gallstones, and it found that there was a transient increase, but then the longer you fast, and once you hit-- I don't remember what it was. Once you hit 16 hours or so, there was actually a decreased potential for gallstones. Yeah, definitely check out that episode.

Gin Stephens: The thing about gallstones that’s so frustrating is, the risk factors for gallstones are being overweight or losing weight. It's like the only way to not have the risk factor is never gain weight in your life. If you have already gained the weight, you have an increased risk. You could choose to keep the weight and not lose it, but really, any weight loss gives you an increased likelihood of having gallstones. Honestly, you're like darned if you do and darned if you don't. You can't win, basically, except for never having gained weight to start with. Wouldn't we like to go back in time and be able to have that happen?

Melanie Avalon: Which is a similar thing with cholesterol as well, that people fasting can lead to a transient increase in cholesterol levels, because your body is burning fat and using those transporters to transport the fat. I have recently been diving deep into the whole cholesterol world. Going back to what we're talking about at the beginning of this show with as far as the confusing information out there. The studies surrounding cholesterol are so confusing. The blanket statement seems to be HDL is good and LDL is bad. Then, when you dive really deep into the literature, and actually look at the numbers, LDL is extremely confusing. Some of the takeaways I've seen so far is like with LDL, it seems when you're on the very, very extreme, really, really high LDL over a certain number does seem to correlate to heart disease. I think really low tends to correlate to less risk for CVD. But the majority of the numbers that most people are in, the correlations that people often make are much more complicated and nuanced than they're made out to be and high LDL does not really necessarily correlate the data.

There's this video where Peter Attia talks about cholesterol, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It will blow your mind. It will make you rethink everything you've ever thought about cholesterol. That was a cholesterol tangent.

Gin Stephens: I also read, I can't remember what it was, but it was the whole idea of cholesterol as a marker that there's something going on. High cholesterol can mean there's some issue and we have the high cholesterol in response to the issue, but the cholesterol itself is not the problem. It's whatever caused you to have the high cholesterol that your cholesterol is trying to-- it's like blaming the firemen because the fire happened. Every time, there's a fire, you see the firemen, so you start to extinguish the firemen. Get rid of firemen, firemen are dangerous. Wherever there's a fireman, there's a fire. But really the firemen didn't cause it, they just showed up in response. Cholesterol is like that and our body shows up.

Melanie Avalon: One of the things I think Peter Attia starts off that, lot of people will have really, really high cholesterol levels, especially on carnivore-type diets and a lot of low carb diets, but will have clear scans for plaque in the arteries. He says, “If you don't have plaque in your arteries, it doesn't matter. If you have sky high cholesterol, but you don't have plaque in your arteries, you do not have cardiovascular disease, just don't.” I want to find the perfect person to interview about it because it's just really fascinating to me. Something to look at that can be really helpful is, your triglyceride to HDL ratio. When you get a cholesterol panel, there's triglycerides, there's LDL, there's HDL. What's even more confusing is LDL-- I think most people don't realize this, when you get your cholesterol panel, most likely the LDL is calculated, which means they didn't actually test your LDL. So, those numbers can be off, unless you specifically asked for testing LDL, it most likely is a calculation, not a test. Then, the thing probably to focus on is triglycerides. Those are where the issue, I think, for a lot of people really is. If you look at your triglyceride to HDL ratio, that can be a pretty good indicator of your cardiovascular risk disease state, and the lower the better, that ratio. A lot of people will have high cholesterol, but their triglycerides HDL ratio is 1.5 or lower and that can be a really good indicator of health. High HDL seems to be very protective in either case. One last thing, just because I've been reading about this recently is statins and low-fat diets. While they reduce cholesterol, they tend to reduce more of the HDL, rather than focusing on the “bad” LDL, even though-- there's just so much here, even though LDL, there's different types of LDL, not all LDL is bad. There's just a lot. There’s a lot.

Gin Stephens: It's a very complicated topic. Again, part of the problem is that experts don't agree. That is why consumers are so confused, because if the doctors don't agree, if the scientists don't agree, how are we supposed to know? Depending on who you listen to, it just gets more and more confusing when you start seeing the contradictory information.

Melanie Avalon: The reason I got on this train recently was I got my cholesterol panel back and my LDL was high. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” It wasn't super high, especially looking at-- if you go into like the carnivore groups, a lot of them will have like very, very high numbers. That's what made me really sit down and research what does this mean, and the ratios. I saw my panel, and I was like, “Oh, no, is this a problem?” Then, after I analyzed it through all of the different markers and ratios and everything, I actually walked away feeling very good about my cholesterol panel. It's really, really fascinating. I definitely encourage listeners to take initiative, to take charge of your own health and figure out, especially if you're testing things like this, figure out what's actually really going on. There are certain people who have a genetic tendency to more likely have issues with cholesterol, and that is something to keep in mind as well. That's something that you could find out through a genetic test. You could get SelfDecode for that, you could get InsideTracker. I'll put links in the show notes to discounts for those. Do you think we've quelled Julianne's fears?

Gin Stephens: Well, I hope so. Again, I would encourage, Julianne, read Fast. Feast. Repeat. because I go into all of the benefits of intermittent fasting. The scientists who study intermittent fasting like Dr. Mark Mattson and the positive effects, they generally take it up as the lifestyle themselves. That right there should give you confidence.

Melanie Avalon: Yes, that is so true. The majority of the people talking about this, they implement it in their daily life.

Gin Stephens: Yeah. It's like what is that InsideTracker, the company-- I've talked to Gil Blander, is that his name? You talk to him as well, right, for Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast?

Melanie Avalon: I'm actually this week recording with him. I haven't talked about this on this podcast, but listeners-- okay, when this is coming out, May 10th?

Gin Stephens: Yeah. Well, while you're looking at it, let me tell you, the reason I brought him up is because he's a longevity expert. When I interviewed him for Intermittent Fasting Stories, he made a powerful statement. He said intermittent fasting is the number one thing he would recommend anybody do for longevity. That's his expertise. He knows all the things you can do. When a scientist who studies longevity at that level and is a heavy hitting researcher, just like Mark Mattson, and they say intermittent fasting number, one thing I would do, that makes me listen. I wouldn't read a BuzzFeed article telling me not to do it and take that seriously. [laughs] “I saw on BuzzFeed not to do it.” “Okay, sorry, I'll think I'll listen to the people who research it and are doing it.”

Melanie Avalon: Okay, so this comes out May 10th. On May 8th, Dave Asprey had his virtual online biohacking conference. If you saw that, I was actually in it, which is very exciting, with Gil Blander. InsideTracker is one of the guests in that online virtual conference and the video that we're recording in two days from now, we talk about all this. I think we might talk about my cholesterol panel. I'm not sure, we haven't decided yet which things we're going to talk about from my labs but we're going to talk all about the company and how conventional blood tests are done versus ideal blood tests and my experience with InsideTracker. I'm really excited because I'm going to be in Dave Asprey’s conference. [laughs]

Yes, but in any case, this has been absolutely wonderful. A few things for listeners before we go. If you would like to submit your own questions for the podcast, you can directly email questions@ifpodcast.com or you can go to ifpodcast.com and you can submit questions there. We talked about a lot of stuff in this episode, and the show notes will have the full transcript and the links to everything we talked about, that will be at ifpodcast.com/episode212. You can follow us on Instagram. I still love Instagram, I'm MelanieAvalon, Gin there is GinStephens. Anything from you, Gin, before we go?

Gin Stephens: Nope, I think that's it.

Melanie Avalon: All right. Well, this has been absolutely wonderful, and I will talk to you next week.

Gin Stephens: All right, bye.

Melanie Avalon: Bye.

Thank you so much for listening to The Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Please remember that everything discussed on the show is not medical advice. We're not doctors. You can also check out our other podcasts, Intermittent Fasting Stories, and the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Theme music was composed by Leland Cox. See you next week.

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TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Welcome to Episode 211 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, author of What When Wine: Lose Weight and Feel Great with Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, and Wine. And I'm here with my cohost, Gin Stephens, author of Delay, Don't Deny: Living an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle. For more on us, check out ifpodcast.com, melanieavalon.com, and ginstephens.com. Please remember, the thoughts and opinions on this podcast do not constitute medical advice or treatment. So, pour yourself a cup of black coffee, a mug of tea or even a glass of wine, if it's that time, and get ready for The Intermittent Fasting Podcast.

Hi, friends. I am a huge proponent of getting our nutrition from food. When all else fails, I feel food is the way to go. That said, there are some nutrients that are super hard to get in today's environment. Did you know that 80% of the population is deficient in magnesium? Our soils are so depleted of magnesium today, that it's really, really hard to get enough of this crucial mineral. It's actually the number one mineral to fight stress, fatigue and sleep issues. I've been doing a lot of research on minerals, especially the calcium magnesium balance, and I walk away from so many conversations I have with experts just realizing more and more how important magnesium is. I personally love magnesium for its stress-reducing effects, as well as helping with my digestive issues. Yes, magnesium is the single most-studied mineral in existence. It actually powers over 600 critical reactions in our bodies.

Did you know that there are multiple types of magnesium? That's why I am so excited to share with you, the magnesium product that I discovered, is called Magnesium Breakthrough by BiOptimizers, and it combines all seven essential forms of magnesium into one convenient supplement. Most magnesium supplements actually fail, because they are synthetic and are not full spectrum. When you get all seven critical forms of magnesium, pretty much every function in your body gets upgraded, from your brain to your sleep, pain and inflammation, and less stress. With this one simple action, you can help reverse your magnesium deficiency and all of its forms. This is by far the most complete magnesium product ever created, and until or unless someone comes out with a better one, I highly recommend you give it a try. I can't tell you how many times I get feedback in my Facebook group, IF Biohackers, about people who have truly benefited so much from Magnesium Breakthrough.

We have a special offer just for our listeners, you can get 10% off Magnesium Breakthrough, if you go to magbreakthrough.com/ifpodcast and enter the code, IFPODCAST10. That's M-A-G-B-R-E-A-K-T-H-R-O-U-G-H forward slash I-F-P-O-D-C-A-S-T with coupon code, IFPODCAST10. Once again, that's magbreakthrough.com/ifpodcast with the coupon code, IFPODCAST10. By the way, that coupon code is good for 10% off any order. Definitely take a look around the BiOptimizers website for other supplements that might benefit your health. I'll put all this information in the show notes.

One more thing before we jump in. Are you concerned about aging? Well, thankfully, fasting is super incredible for its antiaging benefits. It activates genes in your body called sirtuins, which repair your body and help extend lifespan. Also, during the fast, your body can clean up a lot of harmful chemicals which may be taxing your detoxification systems. In fact, the reason people go gray is because their detox systems start producing a lot of hydrogen peroxide when dealing with toxins. Do you know where a lot of those chemicals come from? Your skincare and makeup. As it turns out, there are thousands of compounds found in conventional skincare and makeup that Europe has banned due to their toxic nature and the US has banned less than 10. When you put these on your skin every single day through your skincare makeup, you're adding to your body's burden and likely aging your skin faster.

Thankfully, you can easily clean up your skincare with a company called Beautycounter. They make incredible products that are extensively tested to be safe for your skin. You can feel good about every single ingredient that you put on. They also have an amazing antiaging line called Countertime. Friends, this is a game-changer. It's full of active ingredients which nourish and support your skin, reduce fine lines and wrinkles, and support a beautiful glow. It also has a safe alternative to retinol. So you can get all of the anti-aging benefits of retinol without any of the toxic effects of retinol, because, yes, that stuff is toxic. Guys, put it away now.

You can shop with us at melanieavalon.com/beautycounter. If you use that link, something really special and magical might happen after you place your first order. Also definitely get on my clean beauty email list that's at melanieavalon.com/cleanbeauty. I give away so many free things on that list. So definitely check it out.

Lastly, if you anticipate making safe skincare a part of your future, just like Gin and I do? Definitely become a Band of Beauty member. It's sort of like the Amazon Prime for safe skincare. You get 10% back on all of your purchases, free shipping on qualifying orders, and a welcome gift, that costs way more than the price of the membership. It's completely worth it. Friends, are you fast and clean inside and out? You can with Beautycounter. Again, that link is melanieavalon.com/beautycounter. And we'll put all this information in the show notes. All right, now back to the show.

Hi, everybody and welcome. This is episode number 211 of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast. I'm Melanie Avalon and I'm here with Gin Stephens.

Gin Stephens: Hi, everybody.

Melanie Avalon: How are you today, Gin?

Gin Stephens: Well, I'm still at the beach, so that lets you know I'm good. I'm going home tomorrow. I've just enjoyed this week so very much. I was going to go home on Saturday. It is now Sunday, and I'm not going home till Monday. Chad was so sad. I was like, “Oh,” because my sister decided to come down, and then I need just a little more time. I was like, “I'll be home Monday.” He's like, “What? You were coming home on Saturday,” but anyway.

Melanie Avalon: So relaxing.

Gin Stephens: It is. Yeah, I've been doing a lot of work. I had things I needed to do here at the beach property, but, well, I'm recording a podcast. I just recorded an ad for something else. I'm working. To me, this is relaxing. It's my kind of relaxing. [chuckles]

Melanie Avalon: Getting your vitamin D levels?

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I am getting my vitamin D. That is true.

Melanie Avalon: Did I tell you I got my vitamin D tested, and I way overshot everything?

Gin Stephens: Like it's high?

Melanie Avalon: Yes.

Gin Stephens: Well, I don't know that you can have too much vitamin D.

Melanie Avalon: I've been researching it. I don't think so. I don't want to make that blanket statement. Basically, there's only been as far as toxicity studies with vitamin D, there's been, I think, like two, and they were massive, major doses, like things that people would not be doing, but I am going to hold off. I feel like all my vitamin D levels-- because I was 30, which is low and now I'm like 130. Have you had yours tested?

Gin Stephens: Not for a long time. The last time I had mine tested, it was low, but I had not been supplementing, and it was like I'd not been in the sun, because it was wintery.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I guess I'll err on the side of having more rather than less. It's so important, the vitamin D.

Gin Stephens: Well, I think so for immunity, I just watched a video, it was a doctor talking about immunity, and he said seasonal cold and flu season-- not to mention coronavirus obviously, but seasonal cold and flu season is very much seasonal low vitamin D season. So, just keeping our vitamin D up is really one of the best things we can do for immunity of all types.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I'll actually put a link in the show notes, and I talked about this before on the show, but I did a guest blog post on Sunlighten’s blog, and I did a section on vitamin D with a lot of the studies on COVID, and things like that. It's a very intense correlation.

Gin Stephens: Now I couldn't find, does Sunlighten sauna increase your vitamin D?

Melanie Avalon: No, sorry. I'm glad you said that to clarify.

Gin Stephens: I looked for that and couldn't find anything that indicated that. If it does, that's really exciting, [laughs] but I thought the answer was no, because I looked it up.

Melanie Avalon: They asked that about Sunlighten infrared, and they asked that about like red light Joovv devices. No, those do not create vitamin D.

Gin Stephens: I got excited for a minute, because I was like, “Well, I could be wrong. Maybe I missed it.”

Melanie Avalon: No, they have a health and wellness blog. We have a link for them for our show. I think so.

Gin Stephens: Well. If not, we need one. I love my Sunlighten sauna.

Melanie Avalon: Yes, so for listeners, you can go to ifpodcast.com/sunlighten, and the coupon code, IFPODCAST, gets you whatever their deal is for us. I think it's like $200 off on sauna and free shipping, which is insane.

Gin Stephens: I'm so glad I invested in that sauna. I love it.

Melanie Avalon: It's so great.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I got the three person that you can get in, and it is-- I wouldn't get in there with two other people. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: I actually, because I have the solo unit, the one that you lay down in for the first time, because the place where I'm doing my almost daily cryotherapy, they have an infrared sauna. They actually have a Clearlight, which I like that brand too. I realized I hadn't sat in one of those.

Gin Stephens: Really?

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm. It's a different experience, being in the cabin unit.

Gin Stephens: Yeah. It's nice and it has a tablet in there, so I can watch TV while I'm using it. You may not want to do that, but I can. I have it on like Discovery+, because I'm watching Discovery+ right now. I'll go in there, and put on an episode or something, and set the timer, and just watch one episode, and then get on out. That's been my new morning routine, at home, not at the beach, because I don't have one at the beach, but get in the sauna, first thing in the morning, use it, then go get in the shower.

Melanie Avalon: It's so funny how we do it opposite. It's the last thing I do. I brought my phone though, into the Clearlight one, and then I was like, “Oh, I think I'm killing my phone.” [giggles] It got really hot. I felt like I was on the struggle bus when I got out the phone.

Gin Stephens: You really aren't supposed to heat those phones up, that's true. For me, now that I'm no longer on Facebook, I used to feel the stress of being in there because I'm like, “What's happening? I'm 45 minutes in the sauna, and I don't know what people were doing in the groups,” but now I'm just like, “I didn't take my phone in. I just got in.” It was so nice.

Melanie Avalon: For listeners, when you have the solo unit that I have, it's hard to describe, but it's like-- I don't want to say a coffin, but you lay down--

Gin Stephens: Like a big sleeping bag?

Melanie Avalon: Yes, that's a good example. A big one so it's not touching you and your head is actually out of it. I have a whole setup. I got this arm to hold a phone, so I can hold the phone over me, and I can read while I'm in it. It's relaxing and productive, and [sighs] one of my favorite things. Guess who I interviewed yesterday?

Gin Stephens: Well, I don't know.

Melanie Avalon: Marty Kendall.

Gin Stephens: Oh, I love Marty Kendall. Yay. Isn't he awesome?

Melanie Avalon: He's amazing, and he was going on and on. He'll probably listen to this. [laughs] It was really wonderful, because I really respect him, and I have for a long time, and he really respects us, and he has for a long time. It's this really cool, mutual respect thing. We were bonding over the fact that neither he nor I, we're not doctors or nutritionists. He's an engineer. I'm an actor, podcaster author, I don't even know.

Gin Stephens: You're a biohacker.

Melanie Avalon: A biohacker. [laughs] Is that my identity label? I guess so. Yes, but, oh, my goodness. Listeners, I can't wait till I air this episode, because it's going to be the resource episode that I refer listeners to now for the misconceptions surrounding keto and insulin and ketones and all of that. We talked for two hours, and we just dived in so deep, but I think it's going to be so valuable just to refer listeners to it.

Gin Stephens: He is brilliant.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, he's amazing.

Gin Stephens: What I love about him is that he started off thinking certain things, the conventional keto wisdom that we've all read hundred times, but then he realized over time, wait a minute, no, and then he did the work, and has done the actual trials, and he worked with people who are-- I don't mean trials like clinical trials, but they've tried it out, seen what happened, measured things.

Melanie Avalon: I'm trying to remember. I asked him at the end like, “What was the thing that he most changed his mind about?” I try to remember exactly, because we talked about all of this for two hours, so it's all running together.

Gin Stephens: Was it eating a lot of fat?

Melanie Avalon: It was either eating a lot of fat is the key, or it was like that keeping insulin low is the thing, something involving all of that. The idea of constant low insulin or--

Gin Stephens: Right, because we do want insulin to be low during the fast when we're fasting, but the body is so much more complicated.

Melanie Avalon: One of the things we talked about that I think most people do not realize, and even I'm prepping right now to interview Gary Taubes for the case for keto, and I was asking Marty. I've been asking every single authority figure or researcher in this area. What should I ask Gary? I was asking Marty, what would he ask Gary, and one of the things was the difference between basal and bolus insulin, because so many people think that we just release insulin with food and that it's on or off, but the majority of our insulin, I think 80% or something, well, it depends on what diet you're following, but the majority is the insulin, that's just always there.

Gin Stephens: He said that's interesting that he said 80%, I remember a Butter Bob blog post and video, he said, “50%.” I don’t know.

Melanie Avalon: It ranges--

Gin Stephens: Yeah, Butter Bob said 50% of your insulin that you've got circulating is just your natural--

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, and it ranges majorly, since it's a percent, not a specific number. While the specific number of the insulin while fasting might not change, the amount of insulin released when eating might change, depending on the macronutrients. The percentage would change based on your macros, but even though that percentage changes, that doesn't necessarily mean it's changing the amount of insulin necessarily during the fast, while the percentage would change. That was complicated. Did listeners follow that? [giggles]

Gin Stephens: Well, I get that, because the math, as numbers change, percentages change. The range is different, the range changes.

Melanie Avalon: The number might just change for the food based on your macros, but not so much for the fast. One number would change, it could drastically change the percent, but not drastically changed the amount of insulin that you have outside of eating,

Gin Stephens: Those are all ballpark numbers anyway, 50%, 80%. Those are not going to be set in stone for any anyone person, because we're all so different.

Melanie Avalon: 100%. That's what he was saying about the case for keto was that, and I need to revisit it with this lens, but I think the majority of what he talks about is he really just looks at the insulin in response to food. Well, no, because he talks about the baseline insulin state of given individual and smelling foods, I don't know, there's so much. Listeners, I will put this in the study. I found-- I didn't find it. James Clement, who I've had on the show, sent it to me. This amazing new study came out, it's a review. It came out March 26^th, so pretty recently, and it's called 100th Anniversary of the Discovery of Insulin Perspective: Insulin and Adipose Tissue Fatty Acid Metabolism. Oh, my goodness, it's blowing my mind. I'm going to have to read it 20 times. It dives really deep into the role of insulin and fat storage and fat release, and there's some really great quotes in there, basically saying with eating fat, specifically, insulin is not necessarily the primary or only factor involving fat storage, and all of these other things can create fat storage as well, and it lists examples of meal fat content, meal timing.

Gin Stephens: We knew that. We knew that already. Or, you and I knew that because- [laughs] but the misconception out there is I don't know why, why it makes no sense that your body can't store fat from fat you eat. I've seen people say that.

Melanie Avalon: It says for example, “Thus, factors other than insulin play more important roles to stimulate adipose tissue uptake,” so that means our bodies taking up fat and “storage of meal fatty acids, including meal fat content, [laughs] rate of meal fat appearance and circulation, repeated meal intake, lower body fat distribution, sex hormones, and other postprandial hormonal responses.”

Gin Stephens: Yep. Really, I think people get it mixed up. Insulin is antilipolytic, I love that word, meaning that, if you have really high levels of insulin, it's hard to be in a really good fat burning state with really high levels of insulin. But that doesn't mean that with low levels of insulin, you cannot store fat. That's the thing that people get mixed up, “Oh, high levels of insulin can't burn fat, low levels of insulin must mean I can't store fat.” No.

Melanie Avalon: 100%, and also with the storing fat, people think, “Oh, fat doesn't release insulin that much, so that must mean it can't be stored,” but the reason it doesn't release that much insulin is because it is easily stored. It's literally the opposite.

Gin Stephens: I was talking on a podcast for Intermittent Fasting Stories. I was interviewing Joel and Renee, a mother-son team of intermittent fasters, they both do intermittent fasting. It was a great episode. We were talking about, “What I would do if I needed to lose weight?” and I said, “I would eat less fat,” because I know how my body is. This was a long time ago before I even knew I cleared fat slowly, but I just knew based on my response results for keto, that my body didn't do well with a lot of fat. I said in that interview, “I would just put less butter on my bread, I would not use as much butter in my cooking, I would lower my fat.” Somebody actually wrote to me and said, “You're wrong. Fat is not the enemy. You cannot store fat,” and I’m like “What?” It just shows me that people are really confused.

Melanie Avalon: Yesterday on Instagram, I'm really trying to get-- I don't know how to say his last name Max Lugavere, the Genius Foods guy. [laughs] He wrote a book called Genius Foods, which is amazing, and then a new book called The Genius Life. I really want to bring him on the show, and people have been asking, and I've been emailing his assistant, but he's not responding. I've been trying to comment on his Instagram stuff to get his attention, but he posted something the other day that was all of these misconceptions about diet, I'm just looking at it right now. It's like eggs are unhealthy, meat is unhealthy, avoid salt, sugar is fine. And then, the next one is fat makes you fat, and then use refined cooking oils and all these different things. I commented and I said, the only one that I think about a lot is the fat makes you fat, because when you're storing fat, probably the majority of it was from fat, not carbs or protein. It's like did the carbs make you fat, or did carbs create an environment that allowed the fat to make you fat?

Gin Stephens: That's a good way of putting it. Had you eaten nothing but fat? For me, yes, you can still store fat. Even Dr. Fung has a blog post about this, where a lot of people didn't want to read it. You know how you put your hands in your ears, you go la, la, [laughs] when you don't want to hear something? He wrote a blog post a long time ago that said, “Who should have bulletproof coffee and fat bombs,” and he was like, “If you're trying to lose fat, not you.” People didn't really read that one or want to hear it.

Melanie Avalon: So many people do say that fat doesn't make you fat, but I feel in most of the cases, it is the fat that's becoming fat. The hormonal environment is determining whether or not it is, so or to what extent it is.

Gin Stephens: I'll never know what happens if you eat nothing but 100% fats, I don't want to do that. It makes me feel yucky. [laughs] It might be hard to overeat fat to that degree, because you're just like, “Gross, I'm done,” but I don't know.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. If you just ate-- Now, I'm thinking of tangents. If you just ate the C8 MCT oil, I don't think you would get fat. I don't think they would get stored.

Gin Stephens: I think it would make me really sick.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, yes, it would make [laughs] if that’s all you ate.

Gin Stephens: [laughs] Fine. Honestly, I don't know that I'd be able to eat enough of it to get it down, if I could choke it down enough to know if it would make me gain fat, because I wouldn't be able to consume it in that level. That's the thing. It wouldn't be enjoyable. Eww, ugh. [laughs] Anyway, it's interesting question.

Melanie Avalon: Also, oh, wait, one really last thing. I interviewed Dr. Gundry, recently, for his book. It's The Energy Paradox, because he's always got to use the word ‘paradox.’ [laughs] What he talks about a lot is mono diets in his book.

Gin Stephens: Does he like mono diets?

Melanie Avalon: I got so excited. For the longest time, I have thought if you do a mono diet, if something, so just protein or just carbs or just fat, which not so much the fat one, but it makes it very hard to gain weight in such a situation. He talks about the benefits of temporary mono diets basically because they allow the system to clear out, because there's not all these competing fuels. Though his book is about healing your mitochondria, it's a really good book. I learned so much about the mitochondria. It made me so happy, because I was like, “This is what I think about a lot.” He actually advocates intermittent fasting, opening your window with a monotype diet, and then having your second meal later be not a mono diet. I'll put a link in the show notes to his book, and any of the interviews I have done when this comes out, I don't think any of them will have aired though.

Hi, everybody. Today, I want to tell you about Prep Dish’s New Super Fast Menus. These are in addition to their three existing meal plans, Keto, Paleo and Gluten Free. Instead of scrambling and spending every single night prepping meals, do all of your prep at once in under one hour. You'll get delicious healthy meals on the table, even when you have limited time. If you've been a longtime listener, you know we're huge fans of Prep Dish. No more scrambling at each meal. Instead go into mealtime with a plan. Like Melanie would say, “You've got this.”

Prep Dish subscribers, now get four menus every week. Gluten Free, Paleo, Low-Carb Keto, and the new Superfast menus. Now, you can prep a whole week's meals in just an hour. You don't have to choose between meal prep and spending precious time with your family. With Prep Dish’s new Super Fast Menus, you get fast food, but it's homemade and healthy. If you've thought about trying Prep Dish but worried you wouldn't have time to do the prep, now is a great time to check out the free trial. The founder, Allison, is offering listeners a free two-week trial, and you can get that by going to prepdish.com/ifpodcast for this amazing deal. Again, that's prepdish.com/ifpodcast, and your first two weeks are absolutely free. So, try it out, see what you think about the new Super Fast Menus, and then send us an email. Let us know how you like it. Now, back to the show.

Melanie Avalon: Shall we jump into everything for today?

Gin Stephens: Yes, let's get started.

Melanie Avalon: All right, so to start things off, we just have some very brief listener feedback supportive listener feedback from Leah. The subject is “Gin's New Social Network.” Leah says, “Gin,” and then she says in parentheses “and Melanie”. “I just wanted to tell you thank you so much for starting your own social platform. I got off Facebook this year, and I am so excited to reconnect on your platform. Also, I want to tell you both that I am so inspired by what you have created. I have plans to start a podcast, and create content in the future, and you're both such an inspiration to me. Thanks, Leah.”

Gin Stephens: Well, thank you, Leah. It's dddsocialnetwork.com, for Delay, Don't Deny, that's what the Ds are. dddsocialnetwork.com, and I'm really enjoying it. Like I mentioned before, my life is so much calmer now, because not having to manage half a million Facebook members, [laughs] and the posting. I'm going on in the morning to the DDD Social Network, and I'm going in the evening, a couple times a day, and also, I'm checking my emails, because I get instant emails, if someone posts in the 28-Day FAST Start group or the Ask Gin group. I'm responding to those throughout the day, but it's so much less stressful, so much less pressure. For new intermittent fasters, Melanie, I'm having so much fun coaching them in the 28-Day FAST Start group. People are like, “I'm on day 10,” and they're talking about it. It's exciting to see so many brand-new people joining. It's not just for brand-new people, we have lots of experienced fasters too, but I like to see we're starting fresh with new fasters. Also, just like Leah said, a lot of people who had left Facebook, but missed the support. The long-term fasters who were not on Facebook, but missed the community, so now they can have the community again. It really is exciting.

Melanie Avalon: I'll set up an email that I use just with that group, and then I can set it up to have alerts just for my little group in it, because I went in there the other day, and I was like, “Oh, there's all this stuff.” Like, if there's a group for me in there, I didn't even realize-- Oh, I did realize.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, but you hadn't really poked around.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: It's so different than Facebook. This is the thing that confuses some people, because they think it's going to be Facebook 2.0 or something, and it's not, because we're used to Facebook serving up the content to us-- I've been on Facebook, or I was on Facebook since 2008 or something, and Facebook decided what you would see, and it showed it to you, and served it up, and you became a consumer of the information Facebook wanted you to see. Versus here on the DDD Social Network--

Melanie Avalon: You're creating the content.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, and you decide where you want to go, and what you want to engage with. You want to see the Melanie Avalon Biohacker Podcast group, you go to it. Some people are like, “Wait, I just wanted to show it to my eyeballs.” We're like, “No, that's not how it works. You’ve got to go there.’”

Melanie Avalon: If I did that, if I create an email, could I get alerts just for--

Gin Stephens: Yeah, you change it to instant on the settings for each group. I don't have every group I'm in set to instant. Just the ones I never want to miss something in. I never want to miss anything in Ask Gin, and I never want to miss anything in the 28-Day FAST Start. But I don't really care what they're doing in the Melanie Avalon Biohacking group, so I do not get instant notifications there. [laughs] Then, they go to your email, and then it's very easy. You just go to your email and go click, and then it takes you right to it. From that click, it takes you right to that post, and then you can respond to it. It's so easy.

The notifications are different than Facebook notifications, but they're way-- and there's more of them, because it doesn't group them together. You know how in Facebook it groups them together? If 20 people commented, it would group them together as one notification, here you get 20 notifications, but it just takes you to the post when you click on it, but they're less buggy.

Melanie Avalon: Okay. Perfect. For listeners, we'll put a link to that in the show notes, and then I always just want to clarify, I still have my Facebook groups. Those are still the place for all of my content. Those are IF Biohackers, Clean Beauty and Safe Skincare, and then I have a Lumen group, but you can just search Melanie Avalon in Facebook.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, and I also still have the big Delay, Don't Deny: Intermittent Fasting support group. I'm just not there. The moderators are running it, and you can ask questions on Ask a Moderator. Today, we got, “Does alcohol break a fast?” [laughs] The answer is yes. But the moderators are handling those questions. It's just the basic questions. If you need more support and you want me to walk you through the 28 Day Fast Start, you need to be at the DDD Social Network.

Melanie Avalon: Perfect.

Gin Stephens: All right, well, we have something from Alicia in Phoenix, and the subject is “IF and Dreams.” She says, “Hello, and happy day to you both. Intermittent fasting is fairly new to my lifestyle. Clean fasting for only six weeks after reading Gin's book, Fast. Feast. Repeat. Since finding your podcast, I've been learning tons. So, thank you so much for your continued efforts in bringing all the new and emerging research on the subject. My question is about dreams returning after little to no dreaming for years. Have you heard about this or think it's connected? If so, how? It was a rare occurrence for me to have a dream, now they're nightly. Since starting IF, I've been experiencing better sleep. I'm feeling more rested, and notice I wake less often at night. I'm super happy about this delightful side effect and would appreciate any thoughts you might have as to the mechanism of how this is happening. Maybe hormone balancing, deeper REM sleep?

Side note, here's a little info about myself and my eating window/pattern. I'm 5’5” and weigh 126 pounds. I started eating intuitively in 2019 after starting a daily yoga routine. Whole foods, lots of plants, cutting out what made my body unhappy, i.e., processed and sugar foods. I was inadvertently doing IF, but not clean, waiting to eat until after my noon yoga session. I lost the 30 pounds I needed to within a nine-month period, but a couple creeped back on when I started loosening my strict no-sweets policy.

Oh, a little tangent here. It made me laugh when I heard, Gin talk about her love for black bean brownies on a recent episode. They are my favs.” Yep, me too, Alicia. They're so good. People think they sound weird if they haven't ever had them. That's just a little side note there. [chuckles] 

Melanie Avalon: What's funny is, it doesn't even remotely strike me as weird. I'm like, “Oh yeah.”

Gin Stephens: It's so good. [laughs] All right, Alicia says, “Black bean variety are the best, and I've tried many, many types of alternative whole food brownies. Anyhoo, those couple pounds fell off after adopting the IF lifestyle. It was fairly easy at first, except the black coffee since my DNA report shows, I'm more likely to detect bitter taste like Gin, but I've grown to like it. Clean fasting ever since. My fasts last from 19 to 23 hours, although my average is 21, i.e., until I feel good, always some veggies, and usually something sweet to close my window. When I'm being good, it's dates, yum. When I'm splurging, it could be ice cream or a cannoli. Not often do I get those, probably for the best. Never feeling guilty. Thanks in advance. Lots of love to you ladies, Alicia. Oh, and I also have an Oura ring and love it.”

Melanie Avalon: Oh, I missed that. I didn't see that part.

Gin Stephens: Oh, by the way, I had ice cream yesterday, and it was amazing. [laughs] I'm at the beach with my sister, ice cream was on the menu. We did a lot of walking, we were shopping, and then we went and walked around a place called Brookgreen Gardens, which is just beautiful. It's spring and they have all these gardens, it's a place to see. Oh, I saw an owl. A baby owl.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, you saw baby owl?

Gin Stephens: There's a baby owl, and they had something called Live Oak Alley. The baby owl was up in the tree, and all these people were taking pictures of it, like professional photos, and it was just so fluffy and cute, and it was big, anyway.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, how big is a baby owl?

Gin Stephens: It's whatever, a big kind of owl is. It's a big species of owl. I can't remember the species that it is. Whatever they have down here in South Carolina that are really big, it's that. The baby is as big as the adult of some species of owls. It was so cute up in that tree. Anyway, tangent, sorry.

Melanie Avalon: It's appropriate, because owls and dreams at night.

Gin Stephens: Well, that's true. My point was I ate the ice cream, then I walked a lot. I didn't have restless legs, I didn't have any ill effects. I slept great. That was the good news.

Melanie Avalon: Well, I really, really love this question. I'm so happy for you. It sounds like she's really found the diet and lifestyle that works for her, which is awesome. She has her Oura ring, which is awesome. For your question, I actually asked Dr. Kirk Parsley, who is a sleep expert who I've had on the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast multiple times. I sent him your question. Here is his answer.

“Her sleep is almost certainly improved by improving insulin sensitivity and tighter glucose control, increased dreaming and more memories of dreams as a second order consequence of better sleep, and epiphenomenon.” I asked do people dream even when they don't remember it, he said, “Yes, remembering dreams depends a lot on waking and temporal proximity to the dream. Basically, it's most likely that your sleep is getting better, because of all of the health changes with your insulin regulation that you've experienced with intermittent fasting, and then it sounds like we do always dream, but whether or not remember it has to do with the timing of when we wake up.” That's a short answer, but do you have thoughts, Gin?

Gin Stephens: No, that's what I was going to say as well. We do always dream, whether you remember it or not, and that people don't know that because if you don't remember it, you're not aware you dreamed, but you did.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. You can still have increased dreaming and more memories of them, because you're getting better sleep. Shall we go on to our next question?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: All right, this question comes from Britt and the subject is “ADF, or one meal a day, or both.” Britt says, “Hi, ladies. Love your podcasts and books. I'm a postmenopausal 53-year-old, and currently weigh around 190 pounds. I lost weight in 2010. I was 256 pounds, and she went to 132 pounds after a gastric sleeve, and I kept it off mostly until about two years ago by focusing on protein and veggies and incorporating fasting after discovering Dr. Fung. Between COVID and a foot injury, I regained a considerable amount of weight last year, so I'm starting this back on track with fasting. I have no trouble fasting on a daily basis 16 to 24 hours. It didn't seem like I was losing consistently, but I don't have the data to look back at. Now, I've got 60 plus pounds to re-lose.

After hearing Megan Ramos mention that 36 to 42 hours often works better for women, I decided to give it a try. I find it a lot harder to go the full 36 to 42 hours. Not physically, I don't have much hunger until the very end, but it's been fairly difficult mentally. I've struggled with feelings of deprivation and find myself thinking about eating at the end of the first day probably, two out of every three fasting cycles. I'm wondering what advice you might have. Is it really worth pushing myself to do the three longer cycles per week? Is there that much of a difference in weight loss? Do I kick off the year with ADF, and go for maximum weight loss? Start every fast with something like a 20-hour goal, and keep going if my head is in the right place that day? Just do a longer fast one day a week, and work my way back up to three, or kick back to one meal a day and save ADF for a future stall?” Those are a lot of options. She thought this through. She says, “Insight appreciated.”

Gin Stephens: All right, so there's a lot to unpack in there. First of all, I want to say, this is my experience, me. I lost 75 of my 80-ish pounds-- since I don't know what I weigh exactly, we'll say 80-ish. I lost the first 75 with a daily eating window, not doing any ADF or longer fasts during that period of time. I didn't do really ADF. I'd done it way before in earlier tries with fasting back in that 2009 to 2014 struggle period. When I wasn't consistent with anything, I would dabble in eating window, and I would dabble in alternate day fasting and nothing really stuck, so I wasn't consistent, but when I did finally get consistent and lose the weight in 2014 to 2015, it was with the daily eating window approach.

When you say, “works better,” well, that worked fine for me. It was after The Obesity Code came out when I was already in maintenance, but struggling with a little bit of weight regain, which I blame on the fact that I was not fasting clean, because I didn't understand all of that until after I read The Obesity Code, and then I switched to the clean fast, lost the weight I had regained, but right after I read The Obesity Code, I did start doing a 4:3 approach, because he doesn't really have a plan in the book, in The Obesity Code except the appendix at the back, he does have like a 4:3 kind of, where you're doing like three-- Like, you said that Megan Ramos mentioned three 36- to 42-hour fast per week, so that's what I did. I'm like, “Well, that's what he says, so I'm going to do it.”

I did it. I did re-lose, it was about eight pounds that I had regained, I did re-lose those doing that approach, and I also had switched to the clean fast. Did I re-lose those eight pounds, because I was doing ADF or, the 4:3 approach or did I lose them because I was finally fast and clean? We'll never know, because I can't go back in time and replicate that study with a different approach. I did struggle with feelings of deprivation like, you're saying, Britt, that you went through.

Do you need to do it to lose weight? Well, clearly not every woman needs to do it to lose weight, because I didn't. Do some women find that it's an approach that really helps their bodies? Yes, 100%. Especially, if you're insulin resistant, you've been overweight and obese for a long time. Now, you're talking about how you lost a great deal of weight in 2010 after a gastric sleeve. You do have a history of obesity and the weight loss surgery. That was a while ago, but you kept it off, and then you regained it, I guess with the stress of COVID and your injury, so you're getting back on track there.

You may need to throw in a longer fast here and there, but it's really not all or nothing. If you've got Fast. Feast. Repeat., I want you to reread the Intermittent Fasting Toolbox section and pay attention to the part in the book where I talk about a hybrid approach. It's really not all or nothing, where you have to either do daily eating window, or do longer fasts. You could throw in one 36-hour fast. Here on the DDD Social Network, our moderator, Roxy leads us through Meal-less Monday. I don't do it. I don't do Meal-less Monday, but a lot of people do. They start off every Monday with one longer fast to 36 to 42 hours, followed by an up day, and then the whole rest of the week, you could do daily eating window approach if you want to. That's just one way you could do it.

Once a week, after a weekend, some people find that just starts the week off right, and it feels good after a weekend where they might have had a little more indulgence than usual. It also keeps you from having that adaptation that you might have, because even though intermittent fasting does protect us metabolically in many ways, you still can adapt if you do exactly the same thing day in day out. Fortunately, for me, I never do, because I'll have a day where I'm just hungry and I eat more, I've never really fallen into that rut of 23:1 day after day after day or something. I just naturally switch things up. If you find yourself naturally not switching things up, then you might need to purposefully do some switching up.

Oh, one other thing that I highlighted that was so important. This sentence right here, “It didn't seem like I was losing consistently, but I don't have the data to look back at.” Okay, I really, really, really do not want you to go by feel or what it seems. I don't want anybody to do that. When I was trying to be an intuitive eater, and they're like, “Just eat intuitively and you'll be fine.” I was not good at knowing what my body was doing. I could gain a whole lot of weight without feeling it. You got to have some data. I want you to reread the Scale-Schmale chapter of Fast. Feast. Repeat., and if you don't want to use the scale, don't use the scale. That is only one way to do it. Use measurements, use progress photos, use honesty pants, but use something. If you are going to use the scale, weigh daily, and you need to calculate your weekly average, or use an app like Happy Scale that does that for you and shows you your trend. I don't want anybody to go by what it feels like. That is the number one worst way to know whether you're losing or gaining. I'm puffy right this minute, because I ate two meals yesterday with ice cream in between. “Feel like I might be gaining weight.” Am I? No. I'm just puffy. You really can't go by how you feel. I don't want you to do. That is not a good tool.

Melanie Avalon: Awesome. I have three thoughts. The first thought was, it's ironic. I don't know if it's ironic. Okay, if I read her question a little bit out of order, and if I just read the end, and she's asking about what to do to lose this stubborn weight, I would suggest without reading the first paragraph of her message exactly what she did the first time around, which would be a high-protein veggie diet with a normal one meal a day type fasting window. It sounds like that's what worked for her the first time. I'm wondering why she doesn't want to do that again. It seems that instead she wants to do these really long fasts, but she doesn't like fasting longer.

Gin Stephens: Well, she doesn't say she did one meal a day at the beginning. She doesn't say that that's what she did. She discovered Dr. Fung, focused on protein and veggies. Maybe she was doing longer fasts, because a lot of people--

Melanie Avalon: And incorporating fasting.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, because we don't know what she did at the beginning. Well, although she does say after hearing Megan Ramos mentioned, “I decided to give it a try.”

Melanie Avalon: I feel this is a new idea to her.

Gin Stephens: Maybe.

Melanie Avalon: She finds it difficult mentally, so it's something that she is struggling with the concept and actually implementing it. For me, when it comes to weight loss, yes, the longer fasts are an avenue to that potentially. I believe the amount of change you can make if you haven't addressed the food choices within just a “normal fasting” one meal a day type window are extraordinary. I would suggest exactly what she already did, which was the protein and veggies. That's what I would suggest, is doing that unless for some reason that you don't want to do that again.

The second question was-- oh, this is a question for you, Gin. Just the concept in general, how do you feel about the concept of starting every fast with a 20-hour goal, and keep going if your head is in the right place that day? Is that something that you ever recommend to people to do?

Gin Stephens: When you start off with a goal that everyday must be 20, then I feel like, you're going to set yourself up for feeling disappointed and you've failed if you don't make that. You could say, “I want my week to have an average of 20,” or something like that, because then you'll have some days where it might have been 22, and another it was 18, but you still had an average of 20. Whereas, if you said every day, I'm going to make it to 20, that day that you did 18, you might feel like you failed, but really your average was 20.

Melanie Avalon: What's ironic is that was what worked best for me.

Gin Stephens: Was what? Every day it had to be 20?

Melanie Avalon: Well, not 20 specifically, but focusing on the minimum fasting hours, that was the most freeing approach for me.

Gin Stephens: Well, that's the thing. You have to find what's the most freeing approach to you, but a lot of people beat themselves up when they set a goal of, “Every day I'm going to do 20, and then I have permission to eat.” That's a rule, that's a diet rule that it might help you, maybe that's the thing that makes you successful, and there are people like that. But there are also a lot of people that feel like, “You've failed if you don't then make it to 20.”

For me, I am more of the average person, like I said. As long as I'm doing the average, this day was 18, but that day was 22, “Hey, it worked out.” That gives me flexibility, but also having a goal, but it's still a flexible goal, but it still averages out to be 20.

Melanie Avalon: How is it different from having an end to your eating window?

Gin Stephens: What do you mean?

Melanie Avalon: The way I like to do fasting is the marker that I have, and we've talked about this a lot before on the show, but the thing I'm counting and the marker that I have is the fast, and then when I eat, there's no rule or boundary on that. Compared to when you flip it, some people put the rule and boundary.

Gin Stephens: See, that was me. I was the eating window person. If I wanted to get a little more structured ever, if I needed to lose weight or something, I would work on focusing the length of my eating window and shutting it down. For me, tracking the eating window is a better approach, because if I have too long of an eating window, I can overeat. For me, the eating window was a better thing to try. As long as I kept it to five hours or less, that was better. My fast might have been 18, but my eating window still was 5, and then maybe the next day my fast was 22, but then my eating window was still kept it to less than 5.

Melanie Avalon: You really have to find what works for you. The only reason I wanted to elaborate on it was I didn't want to discourage, because like I said, for me, that's what works best-- is that I don't do it really anymore, but in the beginning, that's what really, really worked for me with minimum fasting hours, and then no rules, no regulations around the eating. That was just ridiculously freeing for me. Some people do better with the opposite, which is not having really any rules or regulations around the fast, and then having more rules and regulations around the eating window just as far as determining times of things.

Gin Stephens: It's what do you struggle with. For me, it was, “All right, I've had enough now, it's time to stop, my window has been open for five hours.” [laughs] That was like, “Okay, that's enough.”

Melanie Avalon: The question I was trying to get to-- because I think we're focused on the 20 hours, the question I was trying to get to though was, how do you feel about if somebody wants to do one of these longer fasts, the ones that Britt was referring to. The idea of I'll just do my normal time restricted eating intermittent fasting window, and then if I feel like it, go longer, how do you feel about that concept?

Gin Stephens: Well, that plays into the idea of intuitive eating. I like the idea of listening to your body, obviously. If you get to hour 20 and you say, “Am I hungry?” I'm really not. You give yourself permission to eat if you want to, instead of telling yourself you can't, or you're going to fail, and you can also do the down day approach where you have the 500-calorie meal on the down day. You could get to hour 20 and say, “All right, do I want to continue to fast to 36 hours?” Or, “Do I want to just play it by ear?” Or, “Do I want to have a down day meal?” Have a 500-calorie meal, and then close your window, and then the next day is an up day. That's also a perfectly good approach. Anybody who's like, “What is she talking about?” If you haven't read Fast. Feast. Repeat., the chapter on Alternate Daily Fasting Approaches. You can have a full 36- to 42-hour fast, or you can have a 500 calorie down day, where you fast clean, then you have one small 500 calorie meal, and then you start a second fast, and then the next day is your up day.

Melanie Avalon: Perfect. You're always such a wealth of knowledge.

Gin Stephens: That's because I got all this part down pat. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: Don't ask me about ADF and all of this.

Gin Stephens: There's so many ways you can adjust it. What I really was interested in is feedback after people read Fast. Feast. Repeat., I talk about the hybrid approach, which is really I made that wording up. I didn't make up the word ‘hybrid,’ of course, but I applied it to fasting, I'd never seen it applied there, but people were like, “I had no idea you could mix and match.” I'm like, “Yes, yes, you can.” We're so used to following plans where people tell us exactly what to do, and instead, “No, this is your Intermittent Fasting Toolbox, and you can do whatever you want,” and there's the freedom.

Melanie Avalon: Taylor Swift says, “take my hand, wreck my plans,” or something like that from Willow.

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Shall we do one more question?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, wait, I think it's “take my hand, wreck my plans, that's my man.” Okay. I wanted to actually throw out one. It's not really a resource, but I actually did just post a blog post all on fat cells. The reason I'm bringing it up, as I mentioned, because she had gastric surgery, right? Yes. I do talk about that a little bit. I dive deep into fat cells and burning and how they expand and how they shrink, and I address the myth of do fat cells die, because people think that they don't ever die naturally, but they do. They do about 10% per year. And then, I actually talk about different fat removal methods, things like CoolSculpting, liposuction and things like that, and I ponder the implications of that and what that leads to weight regain afterwards. It's interesting to hear for example, well, she a gastric sleeve so that creates weight loss by not actually removing fat cells, but by shrinking your stomach. If listeners are interested, it's at melanieavalon.com/fatcells.

Gin Stephens: All right. We have a question from Carolina, or Carol-eena, either, it's a beautiful name, as I'm sitting here in South Carolina recording. Her topic is “Toilet urgency when breaking fast,” and she says, “Good day to you. I've been doing IF for a year or so with some 24 hour and 36-hour fasts now and then. A very common occurrence for me is to have toilet urgency with number two very soon after breaking fast. Any thoughts, please? Thanks, Carolina,” or Carol-eena.

Melanie Avalon: All right, Carolina. I would say Caro-lina, but who knows. We've had questions about this before, and it can obviously be a lot of things. One of the things that I have read that I feel makes a lot of sense to me that it could be is just when we eat, even though we're putting in food at the top of our system, and it's in the stomach and the small intestine, that tends to stimulate peristalsis, so digestive movement throughout our entire digestive tract. When we eat, it can stimulate our lower colon, our large intestine, and depending on the state of our large intestine in general, which depends a lot on your gut microbiome state, it can basically start that process, and depending on what the environment situation is down there, that might manifest as diarrhea. That's an option. Another option, I don't know what you're eating, but people can experience this effect when they have fat with a meal and it creates stimulation of the gallbladder, and that can lead to an effect down there.

As far as my suggestion about the solution, and we just really don't have enough information to know, but it would be something where you would want to work with your food choices to try to address your gut microbiome state down there. Finding the diet that works for you for that, and I know that's really vague. As far as supplements might help, probiotics can potentially help. I really like P3-OM with BiOptimizers. They're actually the sponsor on today's episode, so you can listen to the ad for that to get a coupon. I actually just emailed them last night and I said, I was like, “Can you send me some more P3-OM?” because I'm running out.

I really think that looking at your food choices would be the thing to do here. The reason I think it starts happening a lot for a lot of people with fasting is you've changed from eating throughout the day and having this peristalsis and slow movement throughout the day, compared to a fasting situation where it's more of a-- sort of like a shock. You haven't been eating and then you do eat, and so it just turns on all of this movement. That's my thoughts, Gin. What are your thoughts?

Gin Stephens: We hear it a lot in the communities that people have this issue. Not a lot of people have it, but we hear it frequently. That's the way of putting it. It's a common thing that we hear that happens to some people. I'm so glad that it didn't happen to me, though. [laughs] This is a problem I'm glad I didn't have. I feel your pain, those of you that have had this issue, because I'm sorry, I know that it's not fun, and you're like, “What's happening?” What Melanie said, trying to get your gut health back in balance is a great idea. Just know that, yeah, it's your body getting things moving again, really.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: Just the food.

Melanie Avalon: The food choices. That actually made me think of something, Gin.

Gin Stephens: Okay, what?

Melanie Avalon:  I have a question for you.

Gin Stephens: All right.

Melanie Avalon: I've been dying to know, are you still implementing anything that you learned from your Zoe trial?

Gin Stephens: That's a great question. I've got it in the back of my mind. I will never not know that information about myself. It helps me just feel confident in my food choices, but I already was. Knowledge is power. Like I said, it confirmed what I knew about what foods really worked well for me and taught me a few things about that, and so, do I follow it like, this is how I eat exactly according to these recommendations? No.

Melanie Avalon: What dd they recommend for you?

Gin Stephens: It's not as easy as just saying that. There's an app and you can plug things in and see what things work well for your gut, what things work well for you based on your blood clearance, basically you know how quickly you clear blood glucose, how quickly you clear fat. What really was interesting to me, was how the timing of what I eat makes a difference as far as if I eat too much fat in a concentrated period of time.

For example, it would be better for my body to eat over-- maybe eat a little something to open my window, and then wait a while longer-- If I eat something high fat, wait longer before I eat again. The same amount of food in a six-hour window if I'm eating a lot of fat, would allow my body to clear the fat before I put more in.

Melanie Avalon: What's really interesting is, I don't know enough about the details, but it's like that study we mentioned at the beginning where I was saying that fat--

Gin Stephens: Fat clearance. 100%.

Melanie Avalon: Or something about the timing of fat into the bloodstream was a factor. What did it say?

Gin Stephens: I think you use the word ‘fat clearance.’

Melanie Avalon: Uptake and storage of meal fatty acids including meal fat content, rate of meal fat appearance in circulation. All of these factors are so, so important.

Gin Stephens: We've all been trained by the diet industry that the only thing that matters is calories in, calories out. If you're eating the exact same thing, or the macros, the exact same macros, the exact same calories, why does it matter if you eat them over one hour or six hours? But the way your body handles it, it really can matter.

Melanie Avalon: Sorry, I'm just remembering something that I-- I don't know if we have time. Okay, I'll tell it really quick. Dr. Gundry’s book that we talked about, there was a study. Are you familiar with the NIH study? There was one study in monkeys. I don't know the details, but there were two different institutions that did a study in monkeys, and they were looking at calorie restriction. One of the groups testing the monkeys, the monkeys were on a high fat, sugary, processed diet. The other monkeys, they were on a more whole foods type diet. Both of the monkeys had health benefits, but only the monkeys on the processed diet had increased longevity.

Gin Stephens: Processed food diet had better longevity?

Melanie Avalon: Yes. They were trying to theorize why that was, and Dr. Gundry was saying that he had theorized with other people that it was the low protein content of the processed diet that was the reason. Then, they did a follow-up study. I got so happy, because I read this. Then I was like, “I think I know why what it was.” Dr. Gundry doesn't really come out and say this, and I talked with him. When I interviewed him, and I asked him about it, and I was like, “Is it this,” and he said, “Yes, it's that.” He said the publishers made him word it really weird, because he couldn't come out and say this. [laughs]

They did a follow-up study with mice to try to figure out what was going on, and they did all different setups. They did mice that were eating their normal food all throughout the day, and then mice that were eating the food in a calorie restricted and a fasted window, like a time-restricted window, and then mice that could have all of their normal food, but in a time restricted window, and they were trying to figure out what was going on. Long story short, they found that the longer fasting was creating the most health benefits. The theory with the monkeys is that the high fat diet, because they ate for a shorter amount of time, because in order to control the calorie situation, they would give it just at one time, they didn't have access to it all day.

Gin Stephens: They had longer fasting. That was a variable. It wasn't the food, it was the longer fasting.

Melanie Avalon: Right. The monkeys eating the whole foods, it took them longer to eat it, compared to the monkeys that ate the processed foods, they ate it really fast, and then they had a longer fast, and they actually had more health benefits, and this is all theorizing. With calories, if they are eaten and cleared a lot faster, it matters. The timing matters, because I read the section in his book. I kept reading it over and over and over again, because I was thinking what I just said. I was like it just sounds, because the processed food was digested way faster, but they had a longer fast, and that was where the benefits came. He doesn't outright say that, because the publishers didn't want him to make it look like he was saying eat processed food.

Gin Stephens: There's never been a study that had ultra-processed food lead to better health outcomes, with all other variables being equal.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. With all other variables constant, yeah.

Gin Stephens: See, that's the thing. You can't draw conclusions when the variables are so unequal.

Melanie Avalon: What you'd have to do for that study is you'd have to have ultra-processed food, same amount of calories in whole foods, and then you'd have to dose out the processed food, so that the time window is the same time window as the whole foods.

In any case, this has been absolutely wonderful. A few things for listeners before we go. If you'd like to submit your own questions for the show, you can directly email questions@ifpodcast.com, or you can go to ifpodcast.com, and you can submit questions there. We have all the stuff that we like at ifpodcast.com/stuffwelike. The show notes for today's episode are at ifpodcast.com/episode211. And then lastly, you can follow us on Instagram. I'm MelanieAvalon, Gin is GinStephens, and you can join our various groups that we talked about in the show notes. Anything from you, Gin, before we go?

Gin Stephens: No, that's it.

Melanie Avalon: All right. Well, this was absolutely wonderful, and I will talk to you next week.

Gin Stephens: All right, bye.

Melanie Avalon: Bye.

Thank you so much for listening to the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Please remember that everything discussed on the show is not medical advice. We're not doctors. You can also check out our other podcasts, Intermittent Fasting Stories, and the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Theme music was composed by Leland Cox. See you next week.

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TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Welcome to Episode 210 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, author of What When Wine: Lose Weight and Feel Great with Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, and Wine. And I'm here with my cohost, Gin Stephens, author of Delay, Don't Deny: Living an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle. For more on us, check out ifpodcast.com, melanieavalon.com, and ginstephens.com. Please remember, the thoughts and opinions on this podcast do not constitute medical advice or treatment. So, pour yourself a cup of black coffee, a mug of tea or even a glass of wine, if it's that time, and get ready for The Intermittent Fasting Podcast.

Hi friends, are you struggling to lose weight despite fasting clean? Maybe you're even making healthy food choices, fasting more, shortening your eating window, ramping up your exercise, and yet the weight won't budge? Well, we actually just found a major reason for why that may be. As it turns out, there are compounds in our environment called endocrine disruptors. Meaning, they mess with your hormones. Studies show that a lot of these endocrine disruptors are actually obesogens. Meaning, they literally make you gain weight. They also make it hard to lose weight. These toxic obesogens are naturally stored in fat. When they enter your body, your body creates fat to store them in to protect you. Once they're in that fat, they then change the genes in your fat stores, so that you are more likely to store more fat and less likely to burn it. They can also affect your insulin signaling and boost your appetite, so you want to eat more and store more fat.

Most of us are actually exposed to these obesogenic endocrine disruptors daily in our skincare and makeup. That is actually one of the largest sources of these compounds. Yep. As it turns out, when you're washing your face, putting on makeup, using lotion, or even putting on sunscreen, you are likely putting 1 of up to 1300 compounds banned in Europe for their toxicity- and obesity-causing potential but they're completely fine for use in US skincare. When you put them on your skin, you're making it that much harder to burn fat, and that much easier to store fat. So, if you're struggling to lose weight, you definitely, definitely want to clean up your skincare ASAP.

You can do that easily with a company called Beautycounter. They make safe skincare and makeup products that are extensively tested to be free of endocrine disrupters, obesogens, and other toxic compounds. They're truly safe and supportive of your health. You can shop with us at melanieavalon.com/beautycounter. If you use that link, something really special and magical might happen after you place your first order. If you'd also like exclusive discounts, giveaways, and the latest on the science of skincare, definitely get on my clean beauty email list. That's melanieavalon.com/cleanbeauty. So, are you fasting clean inside and out? Well, now you can. All right, now back to the show.

Hi everybody and welcome. This is Episode number 210 of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast. I'm Melanie Avalon and I'm here with Gin Stephens.

Gin Stephens: Hi everybody.

Melanie Avalon: Gin, 210, it’s 210.

Gin Stephens: Wait, what?

Melanie Avalon: The numbers are in order.

Gin Stephens: Oh.

Melanie Avalon: Counting down.

Gin Stephens: Okay. Yeah. 210, that's right. I was like, “What? What are you talking about?” It's not 210, episode 210, got it. You like when things count down?

Melanie Avalon: I don't know. It just seems like a pattern. It doesn't mean anything. How are you?

Gin Stephens: Well, the other day, yesterday was, 4/3/21 we're recording this, on the fourth, but yesterday was 4/3/21. Did you know that?

Melanie Avalon: No. If we had done this yesterday, it would have been 210 on 4//3/21.

Gin Stephens: That would have been cool.

Melanie Avalon: I know.

Gin Stephens: Today is my dad's birthday. He's got the coolest birthday. He was born on for 4/4/44.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, wow.

Gin Stephens: Yeah.

Melanie Avalon: That's a cool one.

Gin Stephens: Now, the world knows how old my dad is.

Melanie Avalon: This is true.

Gin Stephens: We're recording on 4/4, and yesterday it was 4/3/21. Hello, numbers.

Melanie Avalon: I think I'm outnumbered now.

Gin Stephens: There you go.

Melanie Avalon: How are you today?

Gin Stephens: I'm great. I'm at the beach. If anybody hears anything weird, that's why, or if it sounds different. [sighs] It's spring break.

Melanie Avalon: Well, are a lot of people there for spring break or is it--?

Gin Stephens: Yes. It is cold. This morning, it was like in the 40s and I look out in the front there and there's people swimming in the pool, I'm like, “What is wrong with you? Are you from Canada?” or something. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: Oh, my goodness.

Gin Stephens: No offense to people from Canada. People down here that are from the south are not swimming in the ocean or the pool today. Let me just tell you. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: I have a very related to that exciting update.

Gin Stephens: What is it?

Melanie Avalon: I am so excited. You might have seen it on my Instagram. There's a place near where I live, and you can get unlimited-- it's insane the deal, for the first month at least. You get unlimited hyperbaric oxygen treatment, which I am actually too scared to do. Are you familiar with that?

Gin Stephens: I've heard of it for people who have like diving accidents or something, right?

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, it's like you get in a pressurized chamber and they pump in pure oxygen. I don't think I can do it because my phobia is claustrophobia and also pressure on things. It's basically the worst situation I could ever be in, I won't do that. It's unlimited that, unlimited infrared sauna unlimited, they actually have Joovv devices.

Gin Stephens: That's like actual Joovv?

Melanie Avalon: It is the actual Joovv brand. Unlimited stretch sessions, you get one IV. But the main thing that I am doing it for is unlimited cryotherapy.

Gin Stephens: Yeah. Well, very cool.

Melanie Avalon: Have you done that before? Have we talked about this?

Gin Stephens: Well, of course not.

Melanie Avalon: I did it three days in a row.

Gin Stephens: Are you supposed to do it three days in a row?

Melanie Avalon: I'm going to do it every single day that I can do it. I can't even describe how it makes me feel. Oh, my goodness. You feel high, like high, after, not during.

Gin Stephens: After the cryotherapy?

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm. Basically, for listeners who are not familiar, cryotherapy, it's this chamber that you get into and they pump in liquid nitrogen. It gets down to-- I think it depends, but I think it can get down to around negative 250 degrees Fahrenheit. I've been doing two and a half minutes. I don't know what it is, probably around negative 200. It's so exciting. You hook up your phone, so I play a Taylor Swift song. Then I get in, and then it fogs up, and you can see the thing counting down. But then, the nitrogen gets so thick, you can't see the clock anymore, and you're like, “How much longer?”

Gin Stephens: Yeah, that doesn't sound fun at all.

Melanie Avalon: It's incredible.

Gin Stephens: I'd rather go swim in the ocean today.

Melanie Avalon: I'm not kidding. I actually mean this in the most authentic, serious way.

Gin Stephens: It's better than getting in cold water?

Melanie Avalon: I think it is more doable and less unpleasant than a cold shower. I actually mean that, like--

Gin Stephens: I believe you.

Melanie Avalon: When I do a cold shower blast at the end of my shower, I used to do 40 seconds, and now I give up after 10 seconds. But this is just so cold that it almost doesn't even register as cold if that makes sense.

Gin Stephens: Well, okay, yeah, that makes sense.

Melanie Avalon: It just shocks you so much.

Gin Stephens: Seriously, though, is there an upper limit that you're supposed to do? Is it good to do it every day or is that too much?

Melanie Avalon: I don't know. I posted about it on my Instagram and my Facebook group. Some people have been saying they do it every day. Some people say they do it as much as they can. I seem fine. You're supposed to work your way up to higher and higher levels. It seems like the more you do it, probably the easier it will get. The first time I did it-- I've only done it three times. The first session, I did the beginner, which was negative 160 something degrees and I'm at intermediate.

Gin Stephens: You beginner you. [laughs] Negative 160, yeah, okay.

Melanie Avalon: It's so exciting.

Gin Stephens: Well, have fun.

Melanie Avalon: Listeners, if you want pictures, go to my Instagram, I posted a picture. I'll post a picture of the actual tank. I just posted a picture of me in front of it, but--

Gin Stephens: Well, I'm going to go look at it right this minute.

Melanie Avalon: Yes. I really like the end. I already said this, but at the end when the nitrogen gets so thick that you can't see the clock anymore, it's just this surreal, thrilling experience. Oh, last thing, I should probably say why I'm doing this. The health benefits of cold are pretty, pretty fantastic. A reason that we do intermittent fasting, tying it into our show, one of the reasons is that fasting activates a lot of survival-type genes in our body that basically go around and clean up shop and boost our immune system and just make us more resilient, and cold activates a lot of those same and other genetic pathways as well. It has a lot of health benefits. I've done an episode with Wim Hof, who's basically like the cold guy, you can check out that episode at melanieavalon.com/cold. It's really good. They did one study actually and they were testing specifically cryotherapy in patients with depression. In half of the patients, it reduced their depression by 50% compared to the control group, which was either none or 3% of people. There was basically no effect in the control group, which I can see why. You just get out and you're just like smiling. That's my pitch.

Gin Stephens: Oh, well, that's good. Have I talked to you since I left Facebook?

Melanie Avalon: I asked you how it went.

Gin Stephens: On Messenger?

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I didn't think I talked to you live, because I think we recorded last Sunday, the day before. Can I just tell you that people are fantastic? They're amazing. I got 99.9% positive feedback from people.

Melanie Avalon: That's amazing.

Gin Stephens: It was amazing. I was so scared when I woke up Monday morning, and I was going to archive the Advanced group and the One Meal a Day group. The big group is still open. The moderators are answering questions on Ask the Moderator and running the daily threads. My moderators are amazing. They are just amazing. I also sent out my blog post that explained why. It's at ginstephens.com, and it's called Change is in the Air. I have sent out blog posts before, and maybe one person replies to it. I got so many replies to the blog post from people who were understanding, and it said it made them think about it. Just amazing.

Melanie Avalon: That makes me so happy.

Gin Stephens: Also, no one ever comments on my blog posts, but 80 people commented. You know you can comment on a blog post?

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Wow.

Gin Stephens: I mean, it made me cry.

Melanie Avalon: That's amazing.

Gin Stephens: I was so scared that people were going to be like, “No, I hate you, Gin. How could you leave Facebook? You're awful. You've ruined my life.” Instead, people were like, “Take care of yourself.” They were so supportive. Anyway, it was amazing.

Melanie Avalon: That's wonderful.

Gin Stephens: Also, there's a kid running up and down in the hall, in case you hear it. Everybody, the teacher in me is going crazy. I'm at the beach condo, and someone is running up and down right outside the room while I'm recording it. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: I heard that. I was like, “Are there children?” [laughs]

Gin Stephens: There are children at the beach condo. If you hear running, that's what it is. Anyway, I'm just so grateful. I am so, so, so grateful. First of all, I'm grateful to the moderators that have allowed me to keep the large Facebook group open for people who want intermittent fasting support for free still on Facebook, but I'm also grateful to people who understood why I left Facebook. I feel like I have my life back in some ways. I really just can't explain how-- because we had pending posts, and I would go check them every 10 minutes, I swear I was on there, and it gave me so much stress and anxiety.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. No, I can imagine.

Gin Stephens: I guess no one was going to drop dead if their Facebook post wasn't approved but I felt personally responsible, like I needed to be in there doing it. Anyway, and I'm loving that there's an Ask Gin Group on the new platform. I'm also really grateful for people that have joined me on the DDD Social Network. There's an Ask Gin Group, so anybody can go in there and ask me a question, and because of the way that the platform works with the notifications, I get an email. I see an email that I need to go answer someone's question. It's just so much more of a relaxed way of responding to people.

Melanie Avalon: Well, that's very exciting.

Gin Stephens: It is exciting.

Melanie Avalon: I feel like it's going to add a really nice-- you already had a foundation, but like a stable, healthy foundation to all the work that you're doing.

Gin Stephens: Exactly.

Melanie Avalon: Well, that is all good things.

Gin Stephens: It is good. I just feel so relieved, because I was like, what's going to happen if everybody's so mad, and then no one ever listens to any of my podcasts again, because the whole key was that I was on Facebook. That was the key to my life. I'm just so glad that it isn't. I've been stuck in fear for a long time. Knowing I needed to do something different and knowing I wasn't present in my life but knowing I really couldn't do anything. When I wrote Fast. Feast. Repeat., okay, I wrote it in 2019. I purposely didn't say the word ‘Facebook’ in it one time. My editor was, like, “Don't you want to put in your bio about your Facebook groups?” I'm like, “No, do not put the word ‘Facebook,” because I just knew it was unsustainable. That was we only had 100,000 members at that point. I already knew I was like, “I don't know how I'm going to manage this.” Ah, such a relief.

Melanie Avalon: Well, for listeners, we'll put links in the show notes to Gin's new group that you can join the DDD Network.

Gin Stephens: DDD Social Network. That's right.

Melanie Avalon: DDD Social Network. Then I always do just want to clarify, I do still have my Facebook groups.

Gin Stephens: I do too. I have the big one. The Delay, Don’t Deny Intermittent Fasting Support, but you won't get me, you'll get a moderator, and the moderators are fabulous at answering the questions. They've all been trained by me. They love what they're doing. It really helps them become stronger in their intermittent fasting practice too, they enjoy supporting new members, they like to do it. I told all of them, “If this is not bringing you joy, walk away. You just tell me.” It is bringing them joy.

Melanie Avalon: A lot of communities, for listeners, DDD Social Network, the existing Facebook groups Gin has. Then I still have, if you want to talk about cryotherapy, and all the things, I have IF Biohackers: Intermittent Fasting + Real Foods + Life, also Clean Beauty and Safe Skincare group, and then a group for Lumen, Biosense, CGMs, and all that stuff. I've actually contemplated, the other day, I was like, “Should I start an Oura ring group?” No, at least not right now, but contemplating it. On that note, shall we jump into everything for today?

Gin Stephens: Yes, let's get started. The first is a question from Laura. The subject is “Stuff You Like.” She says, “First of all, I love your podcast. Thank you for all the information and inspiration. If you could choose only one or two items from the stuff you like list, what would you choose? And why?”

Melanie Avalon: All right, so that's a great question from Laura. I'm glad she sent this because I realized I think I've dropped the ball on updating that recently. I thought about this, I didn't even pull up the page. Basically, that page is supposed to have everything that we've ever talked about liking. I actually, my number one answer is the books because I think the most important thing to me, or one of the most important things to me in my daily life is knowledge and finding knowledge and researching. All of the books, if I can list that as one thing and then second would probably-- but it's so hard. If I had to pick an actual device or something like that, I don't know, it's probably red-light therapy, Joovv, or BLUblox, blue light blocking glasses. Those are both just so invaluable to my daily life. I can't imagine my life without them. Or Beautycounter. Okay, that was a lot of stuff. How about you, Gin?

Gin Stephens: Well, I love Beautycounter as well. I've started using my blue blocking glasses again, from BLUblox. I'm lazy about using them. I don't like putting glasses on my face. [laughs] I'm doing some research for my new book and got to that section. I'm like, “Darn it, you really should be using these. You really, really should. Darn it.” The science is so clear.

Melanie Avalon: Which ones do you have again? Are they red colored?

Gin Stephens: Yeah.

Melanie Avalon: Okay. You're wearing them at night before bed?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: Yes, is it helping?

Gin Stephens: I don't know. It's hard to know. I think so. Yeah, blue blocking glasses. I need something else, like something that just attaches to my face and they're not glasses. I don't know how to fix it. I don't know what I need. Maybe like a face shield, I'm not wearing glasses but they're important. I don't know, maybe I need like a bubble, like astronauts’ wear, or I just need to go to bed when the sun is down. I don't know. Anyway, the science is so very clear, it makes sense why we're not supposed to see those wavelengths at night because the blue light is the wavelength from the middle of the day.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. When I interviewed Andy Mant for the second time recently on my show, he said that even a brief exposure to blue light at night sets back your melatonin production by 30 minutes, which is upsetting.

Gin Stephens: Yeah. It's hard to do. I'm taking off my makeup with my eyes closed, so I don't accidentally see light. It's [laughs] really a challenge.

Melanie Avalon: Just thinking about what I do, because I put on the yellow, the SummerGLO ones earlier in the day. Well, when the sun's going down, I put on the SummerGLO one. Then if I'm taking off my makeup, then I guess I just take them off. Actually, I probably sometimes take off my makeup in the dark, and then switch over to the red. If listeners would like their own pair, they can go to BLUblox.com, that's spelled B-L-U-B-L-O-X dotcom. The coupon code, IFPODCAST, gets you 15% off. Something cool that BLUblox does is for every pair of glasses you buy, they actually donate a pair of glasses to someone in need.

Andy created the company because he realized the importance of how much blue light affects everything like our sleep, our stress, our anxiety. Then, he went actually tested a lot of the blue light blocking glasses on the market and realize they weren't actually blocking what they said they're blocking, so he decided to start his own company. I love BLUblox. They have so many options. They have all different styles and you can get them in prescription, if you have a prescription which is really cool. They also have clear computer glasses that don't block all of the blue light but those are good if you're staring at screens all day. Huge, huge fan. Again, the link for them is blublox.com, coupon code IFPODCAST gets you 15% off. Yes, they donate a pair of reading glasses to someone in need with every purchase that you'd buy. That worked well.

Gin Stephens: That did work. Well, I have a couple of other things that I really like. First of all, is my LifePro vibration plate. Yeah, ginstephens.com/lifepro, you can see about those. I also love my Shapa scale. I'm still using it, ginstephens.com/shapa. I really love it. It's helping me a lot. To have that, that color, it keeps me from feeling crazy about a number.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, that makes sense. I also want to add Oura ring to my list. I got my new diamond one.

Gin Stephens: Oh, how's that?

Melanie Avalon: It's really pretty. Although I feel like it probably does look like a engagement ring or wedding ring.

Gin Stephens: Are you wearing it on the wedding finger?

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm.

Gin Stephens: All right, well, you're married to Oura.

Melanie Avalon: I am. [laughs] I do. It's measuring my heart, literally. I did a lot of research on which finger to use, but my ring finger is just the most comfortable.

Gin Stephens: It's 2021, you can do whatever you want.

Melanie Avalon: This is true.

Gin Stephens: The worst thing that's going to happen is who's going to think you're married. Oh, no.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, no. [laughs] Oh, my goodness.

Hi, friends. I wanted to tell you about one of the most incredible resources for taking charge of your blood tests and lab work, ever. I am a huge fan of a company called InsideTracker. They are actually a David Sinclair partnered company. What they do is they provide access to the blood tests that you need to be testing, as well as interpretations, so that you can figure out what that all means.

Basically, we often go to our doctor, we get blood tests, we test things, but is it what we need to be testing? What does it even mean? That's what InsideTracker is here for. They've done extensive testing to figure out which blood markers can tell you the most about your actual health. These aren't necessarily all the tests that you might expect. They provide personalized interpretations of those results along with dietary and lifestyle recommendations, so that you can truly take charge of your health. Their InnerAge, for example, analyzes your blood work to determine your true “inner age” and how to lower it. I did it recently. Thankfully, my inner age was lower than my actual chronological age, but there were still some things that I could work on. InsideTracker has really helped me meet my goals in that way.

They've also got DNA testing, as well as one of my favorite things, which is their online portal. Guys, this online portal is a game-changer that includes your results from InsideTracker, but then you can upload all of your own data from any other blood results that you've had through your doctor, so helpful. You just go into the portal, you drop in your lab results, and then you have all their lab results all in one place. It's so easy to see how things have changed over time, and they interpret these lab results from other companies by their standards. It is so helpful. I cannot even describe how much I use this platform.

If you'd like to learn more about them, as well as all about bloodwork testing, definitely check out my interview I did with the founder, Gil Blander. That's at melanieavalon.com/iInsidetracker. And InsideTracker also has an amazing offer just for my audience. It was 20%, I asked if it could be 30, and they said yes. They are so amazing. So, if you go to melanieavalon.com/getinsidetracker, you can use the coupon code Melanie30, to get 30% off sitewide. Yes, 30% off sitewide, melanieavalon.com/getinsidetracker, you can use the coupon code Melanie30. That’s M-E-L-A-N-I-E 30, I'll put all of this information in the show notes. All right, now back to the show.

Shall we jump into our next question?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: This comes from Michelle. The subject is, “FASTING BUT GETTING BIGGER????” She has that in all caps with lots of question marks, so she seems a little bit distressed about this. She says, “Hello Gin and Melanie, I thoroughly enjoy your podcast, your knowledge, your willingness to do all the research and your expertise on IF. I am 51 years old, I started fasting June 1st, 2018 but didn't know about the clean fast until December 2018, and I've been a faithful clean faster ever since. I had no weight to lose when I started but just thought my body was starting to look older. My dad had Parkinson's disease, which I would like to avoid if at all possible. I started IF for the health benefits and I have seen felt many. Greatly reduced inflammation, no more eczema skin tags gone.” I want to circle back to the skin tags, by the way, Gin.

Gin Stephens: Oh yeah, I know what that is, by the way.

Melanie Avalon: Yes. “So much energy. No more bloating or gas, increased muscle mass, to name a few. This last one brings me to my question. I work out every day for at least one hour and then walk my dog three to six miles most days. I do HIIT workouts, cycling, weight training, running, stairs, elliptical, kayaks, swim all the things. My body is getting bigger, not in a bad way but I don't really want to be bigger. My legs/butt are rock hard. My arms are quite muscular. I have abs, but a tiny bit of flab, I have three kids, just under my belly button. I fast clean for 19 to 21 hours every day, eat all the things and one meal and a snack, but mostly healthy and hardly any processed foods and rarely any added sugar. I do eat fruit. I'm not much for alcohol, but I have an occasional drink. My jeans have gotten tight through the legs, and it makes me sad.

I've been the same size my whole life until now. I don't really weigh, but I would say I've always been 115 pounds, I'm 5’6.5” tall. When I last saw a doctor, they weighed me in at 126 pounds. I'm not at all concerned about the extra numbers on the scale but I do want my clothes to fit and I will never go back to all those daily meals and snacks. Yuck. I do not want to let up on my exercise. I have good energy and like to expend it. Any suggestions or ideas on how to fix this? I understand it's not a bad problem to have, but it's still a problem for me. Thank you again for all you have done and continue to do to help so many people. You two are a blessing. Michelle.”

Gin Stephens: Okay, Michelle, I've got some news for you that might be bad news, or maybe it's good news. All right, until we get to the part where we know that you're 5’6.5” tall, and you were 115, now you're 126, and you work out a lot, and your legs and butt are rock hard. You my dear are putting on muscle. We talked about how fasting increases human growth hormone and you're able to build muscle more easily. That's what's happening. You are going to have to stop doing so much working out or accept that you are now building muscle and you are going to be bigger. You're not gaining fat. If you're rock hard, it looks like you've gained 11 pounds of lean muscle honestly. Wouldn't you think so, Melanie? I don't know that she's gained 11 pounds of lean muscle, but she was 115. She's now 126. 126 is on the low end of a healthy weight for 5’6”. It's definitely not overweight, it sounds like you are just-- I bet you are gorgeous. I don't know that there's a problem to solve, except that your body is different now and more muscular.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, my thoughts were that most of the weight gain is likely muscle, most likely. It's harder for women to quit on size when it comes to muscle. If we do put on size, it's usually in our legs, that's like our thighs.

Gin Stephens: That's where she's having the trouble.

Melanie Avalon: That's where it feels tight. I think that's probably what's going on is that you are gaining muscle in your legs.

Gin Stephens: She said her arms are quite muscular, she said.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, also that too. Yeah. Just as far as like, be getting bigger from an actual, size perception, changing how your clothes fit, that will probably happen in your thighs and your legs, which is what you're experiencing. It's possible that you just gained muscle, but also didn't really lose fat. So, your legs would just be-- I mean, they would just be getting bigger, that would just be understood. My suggestion would actually be because I am all for muscle, 100%. I think it's-- honestly, the more I researched the more experts I interview-- People don't really talk about this that much, but it's thought that insulin resistance actually starts at the muscle. It's the muscle that first-- I don't know if it's that the muscle becomes insulin resistant, or we lose muscle so we don't have a glucose sync, and so that becomes an issue but muscle is just so, so important for overall health.

What I would suggest actually is if you don't want this volume, so this bigger-ness and the jeans and everything like that, I would change the type of the exercise that you're doing. She said she's doing workouts, cycling, weight training, running, stairs, elliptical, kayak, swim. I don't know what type of weight training she's doing and stuff, but if she's doing the type of weight training that specifically, its purpose is to grow like your legs bigger with muscle, maybe don't focus on that as much, maybe focus on full body strength, maybe try yoga or something, something that will be more toning and supporting your current muscle, rather than necessarily building it per se. I think if you change the type of workouts you're doing--

Gin Stephens: Like a Pilates kind a thing maybe. Get long lean muscles.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, especially it sounds like she really likes working out. Just changing that-- Oh, and she's doing cycling.

Gin Stephens: This is the magic of human growth hormone. I'm serious. She's 51, putting on lean muscle. The more lean muscle that we can have as we age, the better.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. This is a good problem to have, I understand for your own personal preference that you don't aesthetically want it to be that way. Just change the type of exercise you're doing. But I would still support all of the strength exercise, just a different type. If she is doing the cycling, the hard type of cycling, that's going to build your thighs a lot. Speaking from experience, growing up, but yeah, awesome.

Gin Stephens: All right, we have a question from Laurel, and the subject is “Daily headaches while fasting.” She says, “Hi, Gin and Melanie. Thanks for creating such a fabulous resource for intermittent fasting. I began IF in 2018 after having my daughter to lose the baby weight and never looked back. On average, I typically do 18:6 or one meal a day, with an evening eating window. I found recently that in the afternoons, I started getting headaches. They're not horribly painful, but more just uncomfortable and distracting. I know that I'm fat adapted because I've been eating a mostly ketogenic diet for years and have been doing IF for almost three years. I also drink tons of water during the day, usually around 70 to 80 ounces at least. I also noticed that these headaches disappear when I eat a snack. So, it's something food related, but I don't know why I'm getting headaches if I'm used to fasting. Do you have any ideas what might be causing these? As a side note, I worked out for approximately 30 to 40 minutes five to six times per week, early in the morning, doing cardio or strength training. Thanks for your help.”

Melanie Avalon: All right, Laurel. Thank you for your question. I have two ideas of what this might be. The first one is what I think it more likely might be. I would place a bet on electrolytes being a thing, especially the more that I research electrolytes. I've been listening to a lot of Robb Wolf's interviews for his company, LMNT, which we have partnered with before. I just think electrolytes can be a huge issue for a lot of people, especially on keto diets, especially while fasting. The fact that it goes away when you eat would probably speak even more to that. What I would suggest doing, Laurel, if you go to drinklmnt.com/ifpodcast, you can get a free sampler pack of LMNT. It includes four different flavors, they have way more than four flavors, but their sample pack includes four flavors. The raw unflavored version, which is included in that sample pack is clean fast friendly. I would get that, try that, and see if that resolves the headaches. I feel like it will. I'm feeling like it will. If it doesn't, then it's likely something else.

The other thing I was thinking it might be some sort of detox thing. It could be a recent exposure to something that you had, or it could be that you're going into the detox phase and something that you're detoxing is creating the headaches, and the reason that it goes away when you eat is that you're stopping your detox process. Those are my two thoughts. What do you think, Gin?

Gin Stephens: Well, the thing is that she's been doing this since 2018. I would say, okay, what is different now? I would find it to be very unusual that you've been fine since 2018, and now all of a sudden, your electrolytes are out of balance.

Melanie Avalon: I actually do, if I could just jump in really quickly, because that's one of the reasons they formulated it, is that they saw this a lot with people.

Gin Stephens: Like people were fine, and then all of a sudden, their electrolytes got out of balance?

Melanie Avalon: Well, for a lot of people, it's an issue right at the beginning, but for other people, it will become an issue later.

Gin Stephens: Why is that? Why does it become an issue? 2018 is a long time. She's not a baby faster. What would make someone who's been fat adapted since 2018 all of a sudden have trouble with electrolytes? I understand if she started a new workout regimen, and she's sweating more, or if it's like summertime. I can understand that, but that's where I'm puzzled.

Melanie Avalon: I'm not an expert on it. I can research this more but I imagine there are just so many lifestyle factors. Electrolytes are involved in so many things in our body.

Gin Stephens: Or, if she upped her water lately, that would do it.

Melanie Avalon: That was another reason I thought it might be that is that if she's upping her water.

Gin Stephens: Or even if she changed, maybe she used to be drinking San Pellegrino or a mineral water and now she switched to plain water. Maybe she's missing some minerals that she was getting or maybe she changed her salt that she uses. I don't know, I guess it could be something like that. Something may have changed, or something has changed. If you know suddenly she's having an issue, that's what I think with that. Also, Laurel, please do not assume that it's because of fasting. Even if every time you eat your headache stops, headaches that start out of nowwhere when nothing else has changed should not be ignored. I want you to go to your doctor and say, “Hey, I've all of a sudden started having headaches, and I didn't change anything else. Nothing is different.” There's likely-- there is a reason that you're having the headaches, and so it's time to get to the bottom of that.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, 100%. I would definitely give you electrolytes a try as well. Oh, I forgot. I want to touch on the skin tags thing.

Gin Stephens: Oh, yeah. Go ahead. I forgot to talk about that.

Melanie Avalon: I did too. Listeners might think that I'm going to say Beautycounter or something, but no. Skin tags, I think it's pretty well accepted that they are from insulin resistance.

Gin Stephens: Yes, they are. That's very commonly discussed.

Melanie Avalon: Aren't they benign tumors on the skin technically, isn’t that what they are?

Gin Stephens: I haven't thought about that. I don't know. I haven't read about what they are. I know that they are associated with insulin resistance. We hear it all the time that people lost their skin tags after they become more insulin sensitive after doing intermittent fasting. It usually corresponds like A1c going down and things like that. We have confirmation that their bodies are healing metabolically.

Melanie Avalon: It's awesome that they-- she said they were cleared up or gone.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, they just fall right off. I've heard this hundreds, thousands of times, we've heard this.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, wow. I didn't realize they did that.

Gin Stephens: They do. This is one of those things. You know how we talked last week about gallbladder? We don't hear that all the time, but we hear skin tags all the time. We know that is a thing. The next question we're getting ready to talk about also we hear, so we know it's a thing.

Melanie Avalon: Well, we can go right into that.

Gin Stephens: Alrighty.

Melanie Avalon: We have a question from Diane, the subject is “Hair Loss.” Diane says, “First, let me say I'm new to this, and I've learned so much from you, ladies, you're amazing. Please keep up the good work. My question is, if you're not doing keto, does one meal a day contribute to hair loss or thinning? I have hypothyroidism, so thin hair is an issue for me to start with. I do take super collagen with C and biotin, magnesium with a good multivitamin. To be honest, that's why I stopped doing keto was because my hair got so thin. I tried to eat a medium carb way of eating to avoid this. However, we keep trying to lose the weight to be healthy and look better but losing our hair definitely doesn't help that. I don't have this issue currently but I keep seeing posts in the One Meal a Day Facebook page, and this freaks me out to go through this again.”

Gin Stephens: The thing to keep in mind is that anything that your body perceives as a stressor can cause your body to begin the hair fall process. The name of that is telogen effluvium, if that is why hair falls out. If you are going through telogen effluvium, you may have hair fall issues from stress. It happened to me when I was doing the keto diet in the summer of 2014. My hair started falling out. Obviously, my body felt the keto diet was a stressor. Then I stopped doing keto, and my hair grew back in. Here's the thing though, I've done a good deal of reading about this, once the hair fall process starts, it's too late. It's already had the stress and it has to run its course. There's nothing you can do at that point to make it stop falling out, it just has to keep doing it. It just keeps pushing out those hairs and the new ones are going to come in, if that is the reason you're losing your hair. You said you're not losing your hair, Diane, but could intermittent fasting cause as well if your body perceives it to be a stress, it could, it could happen.

It's a two- to three-month process from the time the stressor. Really, if you see that your hair is starting to fall out, this for anybody, if your hair all of a sudden, starts to fall like crazy, count back two to three months and say what happened two to three months ago. It could be really anything. It could have been death of a family member, it could have been a serious illness that you went through. It could have been really radically changing your diet, like going keto. It could be starting intermittent fasting. By the time you notice it, it's already too late to stop it. That's what I have to say about that. It does grow back. I didn't mean to say that, sorry. It comes back. You just have to let it happen. What's funny, Melanie, I guess it's not funny, but even with me when I did it, I didn't really know what was happening. I was like, “Oh my God, keto’s make my hair fall out, I'm quitting.” You start taking things, like biotin, and all these things, and then you're like, “Look, it fixed my hair.” Well, actually, if you do nothing, your hair is going to start growing back.

Melanie Avalon: If you do nothing, and you have adequate nutrition.

Gin Stephens: Well, that's true. Yeah, what I'm saying is we were like, “Well, I started taking these hair and nail vitamins, that must have been the trick. Really, it's a process and you come out the other side.

Melanie Avalon: I'm going to be interviewing an author named Ann Louise. I don't know how you say her last name. I think it's Ann Louise Gittleman. She's a New York Times bestselling author, but she has a new book coming out called Radical Longevity. She actually has a chapter just on hair. She talks about, Gin, what you just mentioned that the telogen, how do you say, effluvium?

Gin Stephens: Effluvium, is how I would say it. It could be totally different. When I look at, it look like telogen effluvium.

Melanie Avalon: Normal hair has two different phases. It has the antigen phase, and then that telogen phase. A normal hair when we're not experiencing this intense stress, she said, it lasts four to six years, and the antigen phase, and then for two to four months, it's in the telogen phase. The telogen phase after that is when it's shed, and when people get telogen effluvium, 70% of your hair around that switches over really fast to the telogen phase and it often happens after an intense stressor. That's why you automatically can lose all of this hair, which is very-- that can sound really scary, but it's reassuring in a way because it doesn't necessarily mean that you're destined to lose all your hair for life. It just means that those hairs switched over to that face, which is a phase, they're all going to hit at some point.

Gin Stephens: They do it sooner and at the same time, but it really is terrifying. I can remember how scary it was. I was like, “What is happening?” It comes out a lot when it's happening. Then for about a year, my hair looked thinner I have the photos of me going through that period of time, and then you get a lot of little baby hairs that start growing back in. That'd be a good time to get some bangs because you're going to have them anyway. [laughs] You get these little tiny baby hairs growing back. Now, my hair is thicker than ever. Did intermittent fasting make me have thin hair for life? No, actually, it was keto that was the stressor for me, but it can be anything like that, like I said.

Melanie Avalon: It's really reassuring because, again, it doesn't mean you're destined for that. The nutrition though, and the stress is key. In the priority list of processes in our body, our hair is not high on the priority list for our body to maintain. When we're in a really intense stress event, or if the fasting that we're doing is being perceived as too much of a stress, the hair is something that can be expendable. That's a reason that can happen. Important nutrition for your hair, you want to make sure that you have enough protein, adequate iron levels, zinc, B vitamins, essential fatty acids. I do think concentrated nutrition to support hair can be key, and likely, when you are growing it back, you want the nutrition to support it. Again, everything I just mentioned with the protein, a lot of people actually benefit a lot from bone broth, MSM, silica, of course, addressing your stress levels.

This also might be something where you could work with a practitioner and do nutrient testing to see if you're lacking in certain minerals or nutrients. We do know that she has hypothyroidism, so that is linked to hair issues. I mean, hair loss is one of the main symptoms I feel of hypothyroidism. It can also be hormonal, so that would be where you'd want to work with a practitioner familiar with hormones and addressing that.

Gin Stephens: Don't be afraid that it's going to happen. I don't want anybody listening, like Diane said, “It's not happening to me, but I thought that it could, and now I'm really worried about it.” Ironically, stressing about the stress could cause the stress that leads to the stress. So, nobody worry about this. Don't worry about it.

Melanie Avalon: One of my really good friends right now who's my age is experiencing this and I feel so bad for her. It's been wrecking her, the amount of stress that she has about it on top of it, but she actually ordered-- this is something that the clinical trials have shown. If you have a Joovv device or if you have red light therapy, you can use that. They also make actual caps that concentrate the red light on your head, and she actually just ordered one of those. I'm really excited to see if it helps her. You can also do microneedling with stem cells and that has been shown to help. Can be pretty expensive, but it's definitely something to look into.

Hi friends, Gin and I talk about the importance of gut health all the time on this show. You guys know, we are obsessed with the gut microbiome. There's also a lot of confusion out there, surrounding probiotics. There are so many different probiotics. It can be so hard to know what to take. I personally have actually experimented with a lot of probiotics over the years, a lot. You guys know me. Did you know there's only one probiotic that I have consistently taken almost every single day since I found it? It's a non-negotiable. I see such radical improvements in my gut health, when I take this probiotic, and it's not just me, you guys, and my audience tell me all the time about how you feel this way as well. That is P3-OM. What is P3-OM? It's a patented probiotic that actually eats up excess sugar, eliminates bad bacteria fast, and protects your gut from inflammation and viruses. What initially made me so intrigued by this probiotic is that it is proteolytic. Meaning, it can actually digest protein. I, even saw a video on the BiOptimizers website of the probiotic digesting a steak. Yes, a steak.

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And I have some fantastic news for you guys. You can get 10% off P3-OM right now, when you go to p3om.com/ifpodcast and type in the coupon code, IFPODCAST10. By the way, if you order it and it's not everything you hoped for, the BiOptimizers support team will give you all your money back, no questions asked. To get that discount, just go to p3om.com/ifpodcast to get a 10% discount on one of my favorite probiotics, P3-OM, with the coupon code IFPODCAST10. We'll put all this information in the show notes. All right, now back to the show.

Gin Stephens: We have a question from Cindus. That's a beautiful name. Is that how you would say it, Melanie?

Melanie Avalon: I always think Cinda because of Cinderella.

Gin Stephens: She says, “I have a sensitive stomach. I've been trying to follow the low FODMAP, which is gluten free and no dairy products. Any recommendations? There is a lot of food that irritates me, I need to lose at least 50 pounds. Thank you, Cindus.”

Melanie Avalon: All right, Cindus, thank you so much for your question. I'm actually pulling up my app right now because it's interesting because you said low FODMAP, which is gluten free and no dairy products. Dairy products are actually usually not that high in FODMAPs. That's a blanket statement, some are. I don't know if she's doing low FODMAP and no dairy, or if she's doing--

Gin Stephens: It sounds like she is. I think maybe I've read it with the wrong emphasis. She's doing low FODMAP, which is gluten free and no dairy products, I think I might have read the emphasis incorrectly.

Melanie Avalon: That makes sense. Recommendations, and she wants to lose at least 50 pounds. I will say that when you have a sensitive stomach and foods are being inflammatory for you. Actual fat loss aside, finding the foods that are not inflammatory for your body can actually have a huge effect on weight loss. That's exciting for two main reasons. One is that losing the actual water weight from the inflammation can be huge. Then also, an inflammatory state is counterproductive for weight loss just because of the signaling that's going on. So, I'm very excited for you, Cindus, to find the diet that works for you. My recommendations are to get my app. You can get that at melanieavalon.com/foodsenseguide because it has gluten, it has FODMAPs, it has 11 compounds total of foods that have compounds that can be potentially inflammatory for people, and then also has AIP, if you ever want to try an autoimmune paleo approach.

As far as how to approach this, when you're trying to figure out what foods are working for you, I think it can be very beneficial in the beginning to commit to the things that you want to test. If you're trying low FODMAP, do low FODMAP and know that it's going to be-- it might be temporary, it might not be for life, but it's just so that you can find those foods that are working for you, because when we're taking in a lot of factors when it comes to food, like a lot of different types of foods, it can be hard to ascertain what's working and what's not. If low FODMAP, gluten free, no dairy is what you want to try, then embracing it with excitement, get my app, find the foods that you love that fall within that category. Then research recipes for that. If you get my book What When Wine, I have 50 recipes in that book and a lot of them, they're all gluten free. Then they're noted if they're low FODMAP, and they are noted if they're dairy free, so there's ideas in there. You can join my Facebook group, IF Biohackers, and ask in there for recipe ideas, but I always think of it is really exciting because it's like, “Oh, I find the foods that you love, I love these foods, and there's so many fun things that you can try.” You also might benefit from supporting digestion with HCl, depending on how your actual digestion is going down. That can help break down proteins and fats pretty well. Also, digestive enzymes can help a lot of people. We work with BiOptimizers a lot and they make a really good HCl supplement. They also make MassZymes supplement that might help. Yeah, there's a lot of potential. For a code for BiOptimizers, they are also a supporter on this episode. In the show notes, find the timestamp for the BiOptimizers ad and there'll be a code in there for a discount. Gin, what are your thoughts?

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I got nothing else to add to that.

Melanie Avalon: Quick reframe for people with sensitive stomachs. You can get excited because you're like the canary in the coalmine, or your stomach is like the canary in the coal mine and your stomach is telling you right away that food is not likely benefiting your health. So, it can be a nice thing.

Gin Stephens: You're listening to your body.

Melanie Avalon: Yes. Right. Shall we do one more question?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: All right. This question comes from Allie. The subject is “Autophagy and Me.” Allie says, “Hi, Gin and Melanie, I only recently stumbled upon your podcast and it is wonderfully informative. Thank you for all the information you provide during every show. I've been intermittent fasting since August 2020. I started IF not for the weight loss, but for the healing aspects. I am 36 years old and I have a rare autoimmune disease called granulomatosis with polyangiitis that I take medication for on a weekly basis. My end goal is to heal myself through IF so well that I won't need medication anymore. My question is, it seems in general, autophagy is not achieved unless a longer fast is done. That it is the next level unlocked after ketosis. I know I reach ketosis during my fast and I really want to help my body heal but I just don't want to fast for longer than 24 hours. It does not appeal to me.

Longer fasting seems to be the best route to obtaining autophagy. I usually fast for 20:4 every day and I feel it is a good balance for me. I know everyone's journey is different. I am wondering if my journey of self-healing can only be accomplished if I do a longer fasts such as 24 hours plus, healing occurs during ketosis. Autophagy on a whole different level of healing, my concern is that I'm not optimizing my best options to get to my end goal of no medications, just looking for the best route. Can I still reach autophagy level healing if I only reach ketosis level over an extended period of time, if that makes sense? For example, if I continue just doing 20:4 fasts every day, will eventually have the same amount of healing as if I were to incorporate a 24 plus hour fast into my routine once or twice a week? I know the longer I continue my IF journey, the more healing can happen. Will slow and steady win this race for me too? Thanks.”

Gin Stephens: This question, Allie, shows the level of confusion that's out in the world about autophagy. There's one graphic that is just so terrible that people have been sharing for years. It used to be a typed piece of paper and there’s was a photocopy everyone was sharing, or a screenshot of it or something. Then people made it pretty, it was the same exact information from that typed piece of paper, but someone made it into like graphics, and it said, “Autophagy begins at 24 hours.” That is not true. [laughs] Autophagy is not like that.

First of all, let's think about autophagy and what it is. It is the way our bodies scrounge around for old stuff hanging around when we've got no new things coming in. It's natural, it's what our bodies are supposed to do. Do you think that our bodies have processes in place that require us to fast for 24, 36, 48 hours? No. Our body is supposed to be able to do what it needs to do when it needs to do, just in and out. For some reason, the misconception here in your question is that there's a timeline like, “Oop, now I'm in ketosis. Oop, autophagy comes later.” That's not how it works. Autophagy and ketosis happen in the same state of nothing coming in.

Instead of a light switch, imagine you've got two dimmer switches, maybe and instead of just on off, it's like you're going up and down. Ketosis and autophagy are happening in the same state, they're not the same thing. Autophagy is one thing, ketosis is another thing. But when one is ramping up, the other is ramping up at the same time. Everybody experiences autophagy, even people who are not fasting. The misconception of unless you're fasting 24, 36, 48 hours, you have zero autophagy is so incorrect. But we have increased autophagy that goes along with the state of ketosis because they both happen when you get to that same state in the body, that fasted state when your body has to start rummaging around. Your cells start rummaging around for those junky proteins, that's autophagy. Your body starts to dig into your fat stores to fuel your brain, that's ketosis. But they're all happening at the same time. There was something else I was going to say, and I forgot what it was, but maybe I'll remember.

Melanie Avalon: It makes sense why she thinks this because it is the way it's put out there like you were saying. She thinks that it's ketosis, and then autophagy. When actually, if anything, it's the reverse because ketosis is not happening 24/7. Autophagy is happening 24/7.

Gin Stephens: That's true. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon: There is some level of autophagy always happening.

Gin Stephens: But if you're eating all the time, it slows it down. Oh, I know what I was going to say, I thought of it. A lot of things increase autophagy, fasting is one of them. Coffee is linked to increase autophagy. Exercise is linked to increase autophagy. So, if you want to have increased autophagy, drink some coffee while walking on a treadmill during the fast, I'm making a joke there, but you get my point.

Melanie Avalon: I have written down. I had written down, exercise, coffee.

Gin Stephens: [laughs] Yeah, I knew that I had something else in my brain. I'm glad I found that again.

Melanie Avalon: For listeners who are not familiar, we just jumped right into it. Autophagy is basically when your body finds old broken proteins in your body and basically breaks them down, recycles them, to create new things. It's a really great cleanup process for your body. Like we said, it's going on 24/7, to some extent. It just ramps up significantly with fasting, ramps up in exercise, coffee supports it. Everything Gin said is spot on and exactly what I was going to say. Only two things I would add would be, if you want to get heightened autophagy while still maintaining a 24-hour fast, you could do a day. She doesn't mention what she's eating. That was actually the second of the two things, so I'll just say them both.

She's talking about wanting to recover or put her autoimmune disease into remission, which I completely support, and I think that's wonderful, your goals about getting off of the medication. I don't know at all what you're eating, but I would make that a primary focus and the healing aspect. If it's just fasting, I don't know that everybody-- if they're eating foods in their eating window that are in favor of-- I don't know if encouraging is the right word, but encouraging the autoimmune disease. I don't know fasting alone would be enough to reverse it. So, I would definitely, definitely take a look at your food choices if you haven't already. Again, I already mentioned that app, Food Sense Guide, but it does have autoimmune paleo approach, which a lot of people find shocking success in reversing autoimmune conditions. So, that might be something to try. Again, the link for that is melanieavalon.com/foodsenseguide. That was the one thing.

The second thing was, if you did want to get heightened autophagy, you could do a day where your eating window is very, very low protein. I'm not encouraging this please, listeners, friends. I'm not saying do low-protein diet in general. I'm not saying do this every day. I think a higher protein diet is super, super important for so many things, health, body composition, weight loss, just so many things, but the occasional day of very low protein will ramp up autophagy, especially if you're combining it with fasting. If you want to do a little hack and try to get an autophagy day without fasting longer, that's what I would suggest doing, especially since autophagy seems to be something she wants to play with. Any other thoughts, Gin?

Gin Stephens: No, I think that all sounds good.

Melanie Avalon: All right. Well, this has been absolutely wonderful. A few things for listeners before we go. If you'd like to submit your own questions for the show, you can directly email questions@ifpodcast.com or you can go to ifpodcast.com and you can submit questions there. The show notes which I feel like are very important for today's show, those will be at ifpodcast.com/episode210. You can follow us on Instagram, see my pictures of the cryotherapy. Oh, my goodness. You can see Gin's cats and Gin's food [laughs] and Gin's house. Yeah, anything else, Gin, before we go?

Gin Stephens: No, I think that's it.

Melanie Avalon: All right. Well, this was absolutely wonderful, and I will talk to you next week.

Gin Stephens: All right, talk to you then. Bye-bye.

Melanie Avalon: Bye.

Thank you so much for listening to The Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Please remember that everything discussed on the show is not medical advice. We're not doctors. You can also check out our other podcasts, Intermittent Fasting Stories and the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Theme music was composed by Leland Cox. See you next week.

Check out the Stuff We Like page for links to any of the books/supplements/products etc. mentioned on the podcast that we like!

More on Gin: GinStephens.com

Theme Music Composed By Leland Cox: LelandCox.com

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TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Welcome to Episode 209 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, author of What When Wine: Lose Weight and Feel Great with Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, and Wine. I'm here with my cohost, Gin Stephens, author of Delay, Don't Deny: Living an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle. For more on us, check out ifpodcast.com, melanieavalon.com, and ginstephens.com. Please remember, the thoughts and opinions on this podcast do not constitute medical advice or treatment. So, pour yourself a cup of black coffee, a mug of tea or even a glass of wine, if it's that time, and get ready for the Intermittent Fasting Podcast.

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They've also got DNA testing, as well as one of my favorite things, which is their online portal. Guys, this online portal is a game changer. It includes your results from InsideTracker, but then you can upload all of your own data from any other blood results that you've had through your doctor, so helpful. You just go into the portal, you drop in your lab results, and then you have all their lab results all in one place. It's so easy to see how things have changed over time, and they interpret these lab results from other companies by their standards. It is so helpful. I cannot even describe how much I use this platform.

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One more thing before you jump in. Are you concerned about aging? Well, thankfully, fasting is super incredible for its anti-aging benefits. It activates genes in your body called sirtuins, which repair your body and help extend lifespan. Also, during the fast, your body can clean up a lot of harmful chemicals which may be taxing your detoxification systems. In fact, the reason people go gray is because their detox systems start producing a lot of hydrogen peroxide when dealing with toxins. Do you know where a lot of those chemicals come from? Your skincare and makeup. As it turns out, there are thousands of compounds found in conventional skincare and makeup that Europe has banned due to their toxic nature and the US has banned less than 10. When you put these on your skin every single day through your skincare makeup, you're adding to your body's burden and likely aging your skin faster.

Thankfully, you can easily clean up your skincare with a company called Beautycounter. They make incredible products that are extensively tested to be safe for your skin. You can feel good about every single ingredient that you put on. They also have an amazing antiaging line called Countertime. Friends, this is a game-changer. It's full of active ingredients which nourish and support your skin, reduce fine lines and wrinkles, and support a beautiful glow. It also has a safe alternative to retinol, so you can get all of the anti-aging benefits of retinol without any of the toxic effects of retinol, because, yes, that stuff is toxic. Guys, put it away now.

You can shop with us at melanieavalon.com/beautycounter. If you use that link, something really special and magical might happen after you place your first order. Also, definitely get on my clean beauty email list that's at melanieavalon.com/cleanbeauty. I give away so many free things on that list. definitely check it out.

Lastly, if you anticipate making safe skincare a part of your future, just like Gin and I do? Definitely become a Band of Beauty member. It's sort of like the Amazon Prime for safe skincare. You get 10% back on all of your purchases, free shipping on qualifying orders, and a welcome gift that costs way more than the price of the membership. It's completely worth it. So, friends, are you fasting clean inside and out? You can with Beautycounter. Again, that link is melanieavalon.com/beautycounter. we'll put all this information in the show notes. All right, now back to the show.

Hi, everybody, and welcome. This is Episode number 209 of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast. I'm Melanie Avalon and I'm here with Gin Stephens.

Gin Stephens: Hi, everybody.

Melanie Avalon: How are you today, Gin?

Gin Stephens: I am fabulous, and got a lot going on.

Melanie Avalon: What do you have going on?

Gin Stephens: Well, you already know but I'm going to share it here for the first time. Although, gosh, this is coming out-- this is the April 19th episode, so we're three weeks ahead approximately, recording it three weeks before it comes out. By the time it comes out, a lot of listeners will already know this news, because I'm announcing it officially tomorrow. Tomorrow is March 29th in the real world, because we're three weeks in the past here recording, but I am officially leaving Facebook tomorrow, March 29th. It's also Cal's birthday, he will be 23. That's just a coincidence.

Melanie Avalon: Wow, that's big.

Gin Stephens: It is big. I didn't make this decision lightly. I know some people are going to wake up tomorrow and see my announcement and be like, “What has just happened?” I actually wrote a blog post about it, and it's going to drop overnight. For anybody who hasn't heard this news, or maybe you heard about it, but you didn't read my blog post yet, I want you to go to ginstephens.com. Go to the blog post area, and it's called Change is in the Air, unless I decided to call it something else between now and tomorrow when it goes live, but right now, it's Change is in the Air. I really poured my heart into that blog post. I'm going to try not to cry. Gosh, I feel so emotional about this. I feel the tears like welling up and so I'm going to take a deep breath and try to not get emotional. I've reflected on all the time-- I've been on Facebook since 2008. Do you remember when you joined?

Melanie Avalon: Yes, I think we talked about this. Yep. It was around 2008 for me as well.

Gin Stephens: Okay. Well, just like everybody else, I used it as a casual user, but then in 2015, when I started my first group, my usage really changed. What's that they say on top of really long things? Too long didn't read, TLDR, you know what I'm talking about? TLDR, that little abbreviation.

Melanie Avalon: I know that abbreviation, I don't know what it means.

Gin Stephens: It means too long, didn't read or something like that. It's basically a one-sentence summary. Basically, I realized-- really not just recently, but over the past few years, I've realized that I haven't been fully present in my life, because of Facebook. It's been like this huge Catch-22. I love the work I've done on Facebook since 2015 with my intermittent fasting communities, I love it so much. I love supporting members and helping them and providing a safe place for them to get together and form a community. Yet, 16 hours of my day, all the time of the day when I'm not asleep, it's in my mind. Like it never sleeps. Facebook never sleeps, even if I'm sleeping, Facebook isn't sleeping. The pressure to be there and be in the groups and respond to everybody and the pending posts, it's heavy.

I've known for years, like I said, that I couldn't do this for the rest of my life. I could not spend 16 hours a day every day on Facebook. In the past year, I've started a third podcast and I'm working on a new book. I also want to have some time to talk to my husband or whatever else I want to do. I just realized that Facebook's got to go for my own mental well-being. Anyway, I encourage people to go find that blog post and read it all the way through because Facebook has just been such a part of my identity. It's what I do. It's how I spend all my time. For the past week, knowing that this is coming, I've been purposely trying to put my phone down, and my brain is looking for it. Does that sound crazy?

Melanie Avalon: No, not at all.

Gin Stephens: Like, “I’ve got to look, got to see, got to check, are there pending posts?” I'm like, “No, stop. Stop. Stop doing that.” Here's the part, that's the hardest and the part that has literally kept me up at night. I have not slept well-- I wasn't sure what I was going to do even a couple weeks ago. I started the Delay, Don't Deny Social Network. That was multifaceted, part of it was, of course, because as I've already shared, I was concerned about trusting my entire platform to Facebook, everything I've built. But then, I started thinking, “Do I really need to be on Facebook 16 hours a day?” This whole multifaceted, moving off of Facebook to a new platform that's just us, taking control of the platform. But also, it's not a place where I need to be from the minute I wake up to the minute I go to bed, so I'm going to be able to check in periodically. Like first thing in the morning after I get my coffee, I can spend some time there. Then later in the day, maybe I can go there again, but not feeling like I have to go every 10 minutes. It's almost like I feel like I'm withdrawing from a drug, Melanie.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, no. It sounds like that combined with moving.

Gin Stephens: Maybe I also want to say the hardest part of this, I started to say and then I got sidetracked, is the groups. I've had these groups, the Advanced group and the One Meal A Day group are the groups where I started, the One Meal A Day group started in 2015. It's where I met you.

Melanie Avalon: I know.

Gin Stephens: We have a whole community there. There's certain people that are well loved in that community. The Advanced group, that group’s about 30,000 members, and everyone there has read at least one of my books and so that they are my people, and I love them. But I don't think that anyone realizes how much of my life that it takes to run them. I just don't think they do. Maybe they do, but maybe they don't. But it's not something I can turn over to moderators and say, “All right, run the Advanced group, run the One Meal A Day group.” It's just too much. I mean, I can't ask volunteers to spend 16 hours a day managing these groups.

Melanie Avalon: How does it look different, the management and all of that?

Gin Stephens: Going forward? Well, I am actually archiving the Advanced group and the One Meal A Day group. What archiving means is, I click a button, and from that point going forward, nobody is able to post or comment or put a mad face on the fact that I just archived the group or cry face with the-- people are going to be sad, I get it. No one can respond or comment or do anything, but the content is still there, which is so important to me. You can still go in and search your question. You've got a question about anything, you put it in the search bar, and old posts will come up, and you'll be able to read. There's still a huge resource of information. You can find success stories there. It's just it freezes it in time. You want to see what people ate for dinner three months ago? It's still going to be there in the One Meal A Day group. We just aren't going to be adding any new content. That's the hardest part. That's the part that's kept me up at night, is how do I--

You know the song, Hotel California? “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” That is how I have felt about Facebook. I've built this huge thing, and now I am trapped by it. I'm trapped and consumed, and it's a good thing, but anything good can just be also too much. Does that make sense? [sighs] I hope that people hear what I'm saying about it and how hard this decision was for me. But the main group, the Delay, Don't Deny Intermittent Fasting support group, that group has over 300,000 members and we're not closing that one down. The moderators are going to continue to manage that one. We changed the way that group was managed in the summer of 2020 when it got really clear that we couldn't manage 300,000 people. We were having over 1000 posts a day. Did I ever tell the story about how I started crying when I was trying to make dinner?

Melanie Avalon: I think so.

Gin Stephens: I don't know if I told you on the podcast or just to you. There was one night over the summer or spring, maybe just over a year ago from today, when I was trying to make dinner, Chad said, “Is it time for dinner?” I'm like, “Yeah, I'll make dinner as soon as I can get these pending posts under control.” When I started, I don't remember the exact number. Let's say it was 32. I don't know, that's just-- 32 pending posts. When you had the pending posts, you had to go in and you had to approve them and then you had to make a comment on them. Sometimes though, you didn't need to approve them, like if they were, “Can I have lemon in my water?” If we approved every one of those, that's all the feed would have been. We would actually give personalized responses to those. We would decline them, but we would decline with feedback. We would say, “Sorry, lemon is not part of a clean fast. Please go check out blah, blah, blah resource,” but it took a lot of time for each post. We didn't just decline randomly. We gave feedback to everyone personally or we would add comments, we spend a lot of time on those posts.

I started, we had, let's just say, like I said, 32. I worked for about 20 minutes. At the end of that 20 minutes, we had more posts than when I had started, we were up to like 35. I just burst into tears and said to Chad, I said, “I can't keep this up.” It's like trying to throw the ocean back in, whereas the waves keep coming in, the tide is rising. I could not get the number of pending posts to zero so I could go cook dinner.

Melanie Avalon: Reminds me of, what's that computer game with blocks fall and you--?

Gin Stephens: Tetris?

Melanie Avalon: Yes.

Gin Stephens: It was very much like Tetris. In June, we changed the way that group worked, and it made such a difference. We still provide support there in the daily Ask a Moderator thread. Instead of having thousand separate posts a day, people just come and they ask a question, “Can I have lemon in in my water?” And we can answer it. We are still providing support to people through that community. I told the moderators, I said, “As long as this provides you with joy and you love it, we will keep this group running indefinitely.” They pop in, they don't go every 10 minutes like me. They pop in, they answer the questions in between their lives when they have time. We also have the Delay Don’t Deny social network. As I said, I am going to be there but not every 10 minutes. I'm in the 28 Day FAST Start group where people who are new to intermittent fasting, and that's my love is supporting people when they're getting started, so they can come in and ask questions, I'll answer them all. The Ask Gin group, people can ask me questions there. I'm really enjoying the personal interactions but without feeling like I'm playing Tetris or trying to manage something that's unmanageable.

Melanie Avalon: Well, I'm excited for you.

Gin Stephens: Well, my heart's racing just talking about it. Will I sleep tonight? I don't know. Everybody, please just understand why I'm making these changes in my life. One day, I'm going to have grandkids and I'm not going to be that grandma who's like, “Okay, now it's time for me to look at Facebook again for the--” I'm so grateful for all the years on Facebook and all of the people I've connected with, and the Delay Don’t Deny Social Network is going to be smaller. We have half a million combined members in the Facebook groups, half a million combined members.

Melanie Avalon: It's insane.

Gin Stephens: It's insane. I can't personally mentor half a million people as hard as I try and as much as I want to. Because the groups are so connected with me, I can't just walk away and leave them to go wild. Does that make sense? People don't realize how much careful moderation goes on behind the scenes to make sure they're a positive and supportive community. I can't just walk away and stop doing that. It can't keep going the way it was. Anyway, it's a big turning point. I hope that people understand from my heart, why I'm making these decisions. If they want to join us on the DDD Social Network, we'd love to have them, don't feel pressured like you have to. But that's where I'll be, but just not 16 hours a day. [laughs] I will answer your question within 24 hours, probably even sooner. [sighs]

Melanie Avalon: Well, I'm excited for you. Tomorrow is a new dawn.

Gin Stephens: It is. I'm going to also not look at Messenger because I can just imagine. Some people aren't going to be happy with me.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I anticipate that happening.

Gin Stephens: I just don't know how much support am I expected to provide for the rest of my life. 16 hours a day, I just can't. I can't physically and emotionally do it.

Melanie Avalon: Well, for listeners, the show notes for this episode will be at ifpodcast.com/209. We will put links to Gin’s blog post, so you can read that. We'll put links to her new social network.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, Delay Don’t Deny, dddsocialnetwork.com.

Melanie Avalon: Okay, so you can join there.

Gin Stephens: We have almost 3000 members there already. I don't want it to have half a million members. Maybe it will, I don't know, but they could just ask me questions in Ask Gin and 28 Day FAST Star and I could just focus on supporting those beginners and [laughs] answering those questions.

Melanie Avalon: Awesome. Then I will clarify, I still have my Facebook groups, so you can still join my Facebook groups.

Gin Stephens: You can even still join mine. I just won't be there. The Delay Don’t Deny Intermittent Fasting Support Group. You can ask the mods in the daily Ask a Moderator thread, but you cannot ask Gin.

Melanie Avalon: Yes. There's that one.

Gin Stephens: There's another place for asking Gin, yes.

Melanie Avalon: There's that one, you still have the one for your other podcast?

Gin Stephens: We still have that group, but Sheri’s going to manage it. I am taking Facebook off of my phone, I am not going to be checking in. It is not a place I'm going to be. I'm going to be more present in my life. Like I said, I'm going to be intentional about the time that I spend on the Delay Don’t Deny Social Network. I'm going to go there, and I'm going to answer the questions that are for me. I'm going to look around and spread cheer throughout the live feed and see what's going on. But because it doesn't have pending posts, nothing to be accepted, people are just there posting and living and doing. It doesn't require the degree of time for me on the admin side, if that makes sense.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, 100%.

Gin Stephens: Also, we've never had a reported post yet. We have those all the time on Facebook. We did have one reported post, I'm going to take that back. I made a joke about something and people didn't understand it was a joke. Once they understood it was a joke, no one reported it anymore.

Melanie Avalon: I think I mentioned this last time, or probably not because I don't know if we talked. No, we talked about a little bit.

Gin Stephens: We were off air, maybe.

Melanie Avalon: My groups are still at a nice place where we don't really have issues.

Gin Stephens: How many people?

Melanie Avalon: The main one is IF Biohackers and we almost have 9000.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, that's a good number. That's about how many we have in the Life Lessons Podcast group.

Melanie Avalon: I hope it stays this way. Everybody is just so kind and understanding and we just have very little drama, and you can talk about anything, biohacking, anything, diet, health, fitness lifestyle, there's so many random questions. I'm waiting for it to get--

Gin Stephens: A little more dramatic?

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, but it's really, really great. The other day somebody posted and they said how they were a little bit overwhelmed, because they don't understand what all the different acronyms for different things mean. They just feel like they can't understand anything. Then, it got 20 comments, and everybody was like, everybody's so nice, they were like, “Just ask and we'll tell you.”

Gin Stephens: I don't want to give the impression that the Advanced group is a hotbed of horribleness. It's not, it's an amazing group. 99.9% of the interactions that go on in there are amazing, and people are helpful, and people are supportive. I love being there. It's really more of the difficult situations occurred in the regular group before we changed the post process to have you to Ask a Mod, that was where we had put out a lot of fires. The One Meal A Day group still sometimes goes a little rogue here and there, as much as we love them. We do sometimes people will pop up that have been there since 2016, and they're like something wacky will pop out. We're like, “Where did you come from?” [laughs] They don't know anything about us. They just have been there, maybe not coming and something weird will happen. The Advanced group has been amazing, and I love them, which is why it is so hard to make this decision. That's why I lost the sleep over it because I both don't want to close the group down and archive it, but yet desperately need to for my mental health. That's the Catch-22 and that's why it felt like the Hotel California.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, that makes sense. The other two groups I have because I have a Lumen, Biosense, CGM group, but I have really great moderators in there, they mostly run that one. Then, I have the Clean Beauty and Safe Skincare, which is still my little boutique group, so we're almost at 1000 members, but it's been great. Well, so for listeners, again, the show notes, we'll put links to everything, and I'm excited to see how things go. I'm excited for you.

Gin Stephens: Well, I just really hope people are not just so mad at me and like, “Now, I hate you forever, Gin.” “Gin, you're terrible. You're a bad person.” Please don't think that.

Melanie Avalon: Haters going to hate. There's a lot of really wonderful people, so we can focus on that.

Gin Stephens: Let's do. I've just loved this time, but it has been so much of my time.

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Shall we jump into everything for today?

Gin Stephens: Yes, let's get started.

Melanie Avalon: To start things off, we have some feedback. This comes from Sarah. The subject is “Insulin Testing.” Sarah says, “Hi, Gin and Melanie. I just got my fasting insulin tested for the first time and I wanted to share with your other listeners how to do it easily and quickly. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time, but didn't want to go to the doctor and do the whole bloodwork panel and have to potentially argue with my doctor about why I wanted fasting insulin, etc.” Can I pop in something really quick, Gin?

Gin Stephens: Yes. I actually saw the doctor on Friday, I think, for just an annual checkup. The nurse that I was with, she was so receptive to testing everything that I wanted to test, so I got fasted insulin. When I went to test it, I went in right before the close to like 5 to Quest or LabCorp or one of those places. She was like, “Are you fasting?” I was like, “Yes.” She was like, “Are you sure you're fasting?” I was like, “Yes.” She was like, “It's really late.” I was like, “I know.”

Melanie Avalon: “Let me tell you what my job is. I have a podcast called The Intermittent Fasting Podcast, so guess what?”

Gin Stephens: I said, “Well, I practice intermittent fasting as a lifestyle”. She goes, “What?” I go, “Never mind.” Good times, but then they told me that I don't know why-- they said the fasting insulin won't be accurate at that time. I don't know. In any case, moving back to the question to Sarah's feedback. She says, “A long time ago, Gin mentioned on the podcast that one of her friends was using Walk-in Labs, that's exactly what I did. I went to walkinlabs.com and I bought just the fasting insulin test. It was $25 from Quest Diagnostics and $40 from LabCorp. Then I just found a location near me, walked in, got my test, and the next day got my results, it was super-duper easy and quick. On a more unfortunate note, my fasting insulin is 13.8. Yikes. I've been intermittent fasting and an average of 19 to 20 hours daily for almost four years, but my blood sugars are a little high in the 90s, low 100s. I recently gained 20 pounds and have so far been unable to lose it. I'm going to do my best to go low carb for a while and see what happens.

I reintroduced meat into my diet four months ago after realizing I've been getting only about 20 to 50 grams of protein a day for the past three years, but I kept my other higher carb habits and I think those didn't mesh well with a new higher protein/fat intake. The experiment continues. Very glad to finally have a fasting insulin measurement that I can track. Thanks for continuing to share your knowledge and wisdom on the pod.” All righty. Do you have feedback about this, Gin?

Gin Stephens: Well, yeah, 13.8 is high, although I'm not sure, it might fall into the “normal range,” how they say, “That's normal,” but it's really very far from optimum. That's what 13.8 would be. You want it to be down closer to 5 or 6.

Melanie Avalon: The standard reference range, they say less than 25. I think in Dr. Benjamin Bikman’s book, he recommends less than 6, I think.

Gin Stephens: Yes, that's exactly right.

Melanie Avalon: Ideally, even I think, like 4 or less.

Gin Stephens: Mine's less than 5. The day that I got mine done, I had coffee and I shouldn't have, and I would didn't even pay attention to what I was doing. I was like, “Oh gosh, why did I just drink that coffee?” So, mine could actually normally be lower in the fasted state. Coffee, of course, causes your liver to dump out glycogen. When you have increased blood glucose, you may have some insulin go up to manage that. If I ever do it again, I'm going to do it with zero black coffee, I’d be interested to see. As far as, Sarah, your numbers go, even with all of those years of intermittent fasting, you're right to focus on diet. We've talked before about Mastering Diabetes, that's a different paradigm, so you could try it this way for a while with the lower carb approach. If you don't find that improves it, you may want to try the Mastering Diabetes 180 way of managing it because either they are finding a lot of success with this as well. Theirs is a low-fat higher carb approach.

Melanie Avalon: It sounds like she really upped her protein and fat, like she says, but she kept in all of her carbs as well. Right now, she's basically high carb, high fat, high protein, which I think that combination works for not that many people for metabolic health, basically having all high of all of the macros.

Gin Stephens: Well, it's certainly not going to help correct a problem. It works really well for me as far as the way that I eat day to day. I'm certainly very healthy. But I'm not trying to lower my insulin, I'm not trying to lower my fat, does that make sense? I'm at a great place. But if you know you've got something to work on-- if I knew I needed to lose some weight, I would do some changes to that.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I'm happy that she said she brought back meat and was trying to upper protein because she realized she was low in protein. Focusing on raising protein, in my opinion and from a lot of the people I've interviewed and research that I've done, is going to have the most probably beneficial metabolic effects as far as satiety and muscle maintenance and not being a fuel substrate that encourages a state of energy toxicity like Marty Kendall talks about. But then, next to the protein, you basically have two options between the fat and the carbs and gravitating to one or the other can work wonders for a lot of people for getting to a place of better metabolic health. Since she wants to try low carb and she hasn't really tried it yet, I definitely encourage that. Try that, see how it goes. Then if it doesn't work, you can try the flip side and try the high carb, low fat, lower fat but high protein approach. I think there's a lot of potential here in making changes.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I think so too.

Melanie Avalon: That's really great to know about how easy it was for her to get the fasting insulin test.

Gin Stephens: I know. I love that part too. I think that is going to really help other people. Then, people can get the test and then see when you know, then you can address that. Because she said that she had recently gained 20 pounds and hasn't been able to lose it, so this high fasting insulin level can certainly help explain some of that. We hear all sorts of things from people. They'll be like, “I was unable to lose weight, no matter what I did. Then I found out I had blah, blah, blah.” You could fill in the blank. Anything from breast cancer, we've heard people say, “I couldn't lose any weight, then I found out I had breast cancer, and then we addressed that.” Our bodies are doing other things that we don't always know about, high fasted insulin level, you could have so many things going on behind the scenes. The inability to lose weight is a signal that there's something else wrong.

Melanie Avalon: All right, shall we jump into some questions?

Gin Stephens: Yes. All right. We have a question from Katherine and the subject is “Gallbladder and Fasting.” “Hi, Melanie and Gin. Hello from Australia.” I feel like we should read these in an accent. Although I can't. I can't.

Melanie Avalon: Go for it. [laughs] Go for it.

Gin Stephens: I don't know why but whenever I try to have a foreign accent, it sounds like I'm in Jamaica.

Melanie Avalon: That's where you end up.

Gin Stephens: I can only do a Jamaican accent apparently, like, “Hello, Maan.” I don't know. That's all I can do. I cannot do an Australian accent or an English accent, or an Irish accent. I'll just read it like myself. She says, “Firstly, thank you so much for all the work you both do in helping the rest of us learn about fasting and help. I've been fasting for about 18 months, now mostly around 18:6, but sometimes less and sometimes more. Have plateaued in the past six months, but I recognize I probably need to tweak the old eating patterns. My current issue is that I have gallstones diagnosed some time ago. Issue started several years ago. I just turned 60, so I'm unfortunately right in the age bracket where old gally can start playing up. This has been happening to me lately. I've been reading up about this and there seems to be some research suggesting fasting is not great for the gallbladder. That makes me very sad as no way do I want to give up the fasting, as I usually feel a lot better than I used to. Less general inflammation, more energy, and of course that initial weight loss which I've managed to maintain even throughout COVID lockdown. I'd also like to shed at least another 5 to 10 kilos in order to get back into my healthy weight range. My question is, what are your thoughts about fasting and the gallbladder? Be interesting to hear your take on this issue and to know if others with gallbladder issues have success or issues with fasting. Is there perhaps a threshold of fasting duration where the gallbladder may be more severely impacted? Whilst I'd like to increase my fasting time to help get the weight loss moving again, I don't want to ever do it an upset old gally.” I love that. That makes me smile. The gallbladder, old gally or golly, maybe it's old golly. “Be keen to hear your thoughts. Thanks for reading. Cheers, Kath, from Victoria, Australia. “

Melanie Avalon: All right. Kath, thank you so much for your question. This idea has been popularized by Dr. Valter Longo at the University of Southern California, fight on. Which by the way, I don't think I told you, Gin. Did I tell you he's coming on my show?

Gin Stephens: I'm not sure if you did. You got so many people coming on the show. I can't keep track. I'm not surprised.

Melanie Avalon: Well, I've been emailing his assistant, he's a little bit harder to lock down, but we've been emailing and talking about what he wants to talk about. In any case, Gin and I actually interviewed him.

Gin Stephens: A long time ago, 2017?

Melanie Avalon: Maybe ‘18, was it? I don't know, it was a while ago. It was when his first book came out, or his only book, it's when his book came out. In any case, he is the creator of the fasting mimicking diet. He does a lot of research in fasting mimicking diets and fasting in humans, and is considered one of the go-to authorities on fasting, just as far as from a research perspective. He is very vocal, at least last time I checked, about intermittent fasting’s potentially negative role on the gallbladder and encouraging gallstones. I'm definitely going to ask him about this when I interview him, for sure. I was shocked. I thought this would be way easier to find research on than it was. I was like, “Oh, I'm going to go to Google Scholar, I'm going to find all these fasting studies about the gallbladder and there will be an answer.” I found very little information. Yeah.

Gin Stephens: Can I just summarize it? There's two things that I know are true about the gallbladder and fasting.

Melanie Avalon: Sure.

Gin Stephens: These are two risk factors. Let me rephrase it. There are two risk factors for having gallbladder trouble.

Melanie Avalon: Low-fat diet?

Gin Stephens: If you were overweight, or if you lose that weight. Those are two, there are more, but two risk factors are being overweight and losing the weight, no matter how you lose it.

Melanie Avalon: That's really interesting.

Gin Stephens: You're like darned if you do and darned if you don’t. Everything I've read, if you're overweight, you're more likely to have gallbladder trouble. If you're actively losing weight, you're more likely to have gallbladder trouble, so you cannot win when it comes to the gallbladder. That's my research in a nutshell, or never have gained it to start with, but you can't go back in time and not have gained it.

Melanie Avalon: It's really interesting, because the whole idea of gallstones, I feel they come up in so many different books and authorities and researchers I talked to, and depending on who you're talking to, they'll say the cause of the gallstone is a different thing. When I interviewed Richard Jacoby recently, it was sugar. When I interviewed Susan Owens, it was-- or Sally Norton, one of them. They both work with oxalates. It was oxalates. I interviewed Dr. Campbell-McBride for the GAPS diet, she thinks it's related to, I don't even remember, bacteria. There's all these different thoughts about what it might be. In any case, what we do know, I think what most people agree on is that bile is responsible for flushing things through the gallbladder. Now, I'm going on tangents, I feel, but a lot of people on the low fat diet say to avoid fat because it will clog up the gallbladder or lead to gall stones. On the flip side, it's very possible that if you're on a very low-fat diet, then you're not flushing through and so you're more likely to get stones actually.

In any case, coming back to fasting. I was able to find like one study from 1980 but it was very, very interesting. It actually both supported exactly what Valter Longo says, and it completely went against it. I think he recommends not fasting more-- is it more than 15 hours, I think, that he says?

Gin Stephens: Well, he always says 12.

Melanie Avalon: 12, okay. Well, that works too. That works too for this study.

Gin Stephens: Which is-- Okay, never mind, don't get me started. I'm biting my tongue.

Melanie Avalon: Okay, so that actually works. Are you ready? This study is called Effects of fasting on the composition of gallbladder bile, and it was talking about the level of cholesterol that is dumped from the liver into bile depending on fasting with the idea being that higher cholesterol dumped into the bile is more likely to cause gallstones. Okay, they tested patients fasting at 10 hours fasted, 15 hours fasted and 20 hours fasted. Do you want to guess what they found?

Gin Stephens: No. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: 10 hours fasted, it was a certain number and it was very consistent between all the patients. 15 hours fasted, there was more cholesterol. The bile was more likely to be a risk factor for gallstones. But at 20 hours fasted, they had gone down. It seems that around 15 hours, it seems there might be a transitory increase in cholesterol and bile into the gallbladder up until around somewhere around 15, 16 hours. Then after that, it actually starts going down, which is fascinating because Valter Longo says, okay, maybe it's 12 hours, don't fast more. This is all me just going on one study from 1980, so keep that in mind. Just from that information, it seems if you fast just a little bit, you might get-- and by a little bit, between 12 and 15 hours, you might get a transitory dump of cholesterol into your gallbladder. If you fast a little bit longer, closer to a one meal a day situation, potentially a 16:8, I don't know, they didn't test 16 hours. I don't know exactly when it started going down. It sounds like if you're fasting the way a lot of our listeners probably are, you actually might have less of a chance of gallstones with that fasting window. I thought that was fascinating. Again, 1980, but--

Gin Stephens: I thought I was biting my tongue, I'm going to unloosen it a little bit. I unbit it. He changed his tune after his fasting mimicking diet came out. Before that, I heard him on a podcast talking about how he does his intermittent fasting, and then he changed what he was recommending. You were unable to find strong support of no one should fast beyond 12 hours a day or your gallbladder is going to explode or something. There was no good science for that, right?

Melanie Avalon: The purpose of that study, they did mention that, I guess, the research prior to that was contradictory and that shorter fasting did seem to increase the risk of gallstones, but longer fasting didn't. So, they were positing that it's actually because there's this transitory curve.

Gin Stephens: What I'm saying is you didn't find this wealth of information that was solidly pointed to this is a problem.

Melanie Avalon: I think there was one saying that women who skipped breakfast are more likely to have gallstones.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, that's the weight loss tie, and I would bet.

Melanie Avalon: To answer your question, I thought, because he's so vocal about it, I was like, “Oh.” I was like, there's going to be research, he's going to have published studies about it.” There's just going to be information, but there's not a lot. There's not much.

Gin Stephens: A lot of it is correlational, like you said, and that is the part, that's when I got a little upset with what he was talking about. He started talking about-- It was right when his book came out, maybe or right after that, or at some point, he started making the podcast circuit and telling people on the podcast circuit not to fast beyond 12 hours, which was shocking. Everybody's like, “Gosh, Valter Longo is telling people not fast after more than 12 hours,” but you can buy his fasting mimicking protocol, which is way better than actual fasting because fasting is dangerous. Then he started talking about all these the study and skipping breakfast led to heart attacks. I went and looked up that study that he cited, that is not what that study said at all. I lost a lot of respect that day, because he as a hard researcher understands what studies do and don't tell us. You don't go around saying skipping breakfast causes heart attacks based on a correlational study of people who are unhealthy and skipping breakfast. You know what I mean, Melanie. That made me like, “Okay.” He's scaring people off about doing intermittent fasting and using really poor evidence to do it. Instead say, “You know what, I've developed the fasting mimicking diet. I think it's amazing. Let me tell you why,” but don't knock intermittent fasting with poor evidence.

Melanie Avalon: I do still, all that aside--

Gin Stephens: You respect him.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I do really respect him. All of that aside, he's done a lot of really great research and studies. So, I am really excited to talk to him but I definitely am going-- these are the things I'm going to talk to him about. Normally, when I book the guests, they don't really communicate with me much beforehand about what they want to talk about, but his assistant has been very vocal about what he wants to talk about specifically. I'm really interested to see what we talk about, and I'm going to talk about this.

Gin Stephens: Can I tell you something that's kind of funny? I don't know if I should say this out loud.

Melanie Avalon: Say it, and then I'll let you know.

Gin Stephens: Let me know if I should. They actually approached me for him to be on Intermittent Fasting Stories within the past year.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, really?

Gin Stephens: Yes. I replied and said, “I'm sorry. I've heard him on a lot of podcasts recommending against intermittent fasting, so I'm not really sure we'd like we would like to hear his intermittent fasting story.”

Melanie Avalon: Oh, you said that? What did they say back?

Gin Stephens: I don't think they replied. I turned them down for Intermittent Fasting Stories, because it didn't seem like a good fit. Anyway, was it okay to say that out loud?

Melanie Avalon: I think it's okay. Yeah.

Gin Stephens: I will say one other thing, Melanie. We've had a half a million people in the intermittent fasting communities, on Facebook, and if fasting-- these are the things I know that will happen. You're very likely to have an increase in your overall cholesterol levels after you begin fasting. That is true.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. That's something people don't talk about enough, I don't think.

Gin Stephens: My point is that these are the things that we know because they come up over and over and over. Guess what does not come up over and over and over?

Melanie Avalon: Gallstones.

Gin Stephens: Gallstones. I think it comes up every now and then. I would tend to think the rarity at which it comes up actually is lower than the prevalence of gallstones in the general population. Does that make sense? There's a high level of gallbladder issues in the general population, especially among the target group of people that are in my Facebook groups. We have mostly women over 40, 50 in that age group, we're a very large group of people in that age range that often have the gallbladder issues. If fasting made gallbladder issues worse, I would think that we would be overrun with posts about it. Instead, the number of posts we get are few and far between and seem like a smaller percentage of the population than would be in any normal population of people. Does that make sense?

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm.

Gin Stephens: They do pop up from time to time just like here with Kath’s story, but they happen in the regular population. I feel like if fasting led to really increased gallbladder problems, we would see a lot more of it.

Melanie Avalon: The vague general idea is twofold because I realized I was focusing on the liver dumping cholesterol into the bile while fasting. But I think the main idea that's posited is that your gallbladder is becoming stagnant while fasting, and so things are accumulating in creating the stones. Literally, I was trying to find information, I couldn't find information, because I was trying to find if Valter had studies, but I couldn't find anything. But now whenever I think of old content on the internet, I'm going to think of your Facebook group, but I found this old Twitter thread.

Gin Stephens: Oh, that's so sad.

Melanie Avalon: [laughs] I found an old Twitter thread for Peter Attia and all his people. They're asking him what he thought about this, and he was just like, “No.” [laughs] He's like, “I haven't seen any evidence really to support this.”

Gin Stephens: We haven't. Like I said with the cholesterol, every day, there was someone saying, “I just had my bloodwork done, and my cholesterol is up.” We know that that is common because we see it, or like, “I just started fasting and my cycle’s a little wacky.” We see that all the time. We know what is very, very common. We are not a study, but we are very much an anecdotal group of evidence. We’ve got a lot of info.

Melanie Avalon: I will make a suggestion though for Kath and that is if you are struggling with gallstones-- it's controversial because, like I said in the beginning, a lot of people will say, “Oh, you need to avoid fat to avoid gallstones.” I personally think keeping at least like a small amount of fat in your diet to keep the gallbladder flushing can be pretty important. If you're doing a low-fat diet-- I don't know what type of diet she's eating but if you're doing a low-fat diet, I think that's often a risk factor for gallstones in people.

Gin Stephens: Everybody hears that we got a storm, there been some really bad storms around the southeast, and they just finally hit Augusta.

Melanie Avalon: It's weird, the area I'm in, I'm in Atlanta, but just the city I'm in for some reason, I don't know if it's the elevation, we rarely get the actual storms, like my little area. It's very strange.

Gin Stephens: Where we are near the river, the weather tends to follow a certain like path in the river. The shape of the land really does influence the weather a lot.

Melanie Avalon: Majorly. I grew up in Memphis, though. Oh, my goodness, talk about thunderstorms. We got a ton. I miss those.

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Shall we answer one more question?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: Okay. story about this question. We've actually answered this question before, but whatever episode it was originally cuts off, and somewhere along the line and the many, many times we have changed hosts, we lost that original episode. People have asked us so many times, what was our answer to this question? Our assistant actually was like, maybe you should just answer it again.

Gin Stephens: That's so funny. What episode was that?

Melanie Avalon: I don't even know.

Gin Stephens: I didn't realize that's what happened to it.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, the episode cuts off in half or something.

Gin Stephens: Okay. They’d be like, “What?”

Melanie Avalon: We get questions a lot about what our answer was, and we're like, “We don't know, we don't remember.” Our assistant, Sharon, was like, “Maybe you should just re-answer it.”

Gin Stephens: As if it's brand new because we might say new things.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. She's like, and then I can just tell them to check out this episode, so that's what we're doing right now. The original email was from Celeste and the subject was “Crashing when my window opens.” Celeste said, “I'm very new to IF. I've been doing 18:6 for about a week and listening to your podcast in the mornings as I get ready for the day. I typically open the window at noon for lunch and then eat dinner before 6 PM. I'm not eating terribly, I don't think. For lunches, I have something left over from the night before, like broccoli, chicken, ground turkey, taco, salad, or brown rice with a chicken something. However, about 30 minutes to an hour after eating, I feel like I just downed a pizza and a large ice cream and I feel a complete crash. Is this something that will improve with time or am I eating the wrong things? I keep hearing Gin say no foods are off limits. So, I'm not sure why I'm feeling my great morning energy disappear after eating.”

Gin Stephens: Celeste, first of all, I want to say you're very new to IF and feelings like this are a lot more pronounced in the beginning. During the adjustment phase, you're going to feel all sorts of wacky ups and downs with your energy levels both during the fast and after you eat. Your body is learning how to do a new thing. You're not metabolically flexible, you're probably not tapping into your fat stores very well during the fast, and your body is not great at shifting back and forth between fuel sources, the fed state, the fasted state. That's when you have a lot more weird energy slumps and stuff like that happening. That being said, I never feel as energetic after I eat as I do during the fast, and that's because during the fast I'm running on ketones increasingly as the day goes on. As the day gets longer, and my fast is longer, I have more mental clarity and more energy. Then, after I eat and my body shifts fuel sources, I feel more relaxed and calm and less productive. I like to use the same analogy all the time. Think about lions after they feast. What do they do? They sleep. Think about Thanksgiving dinner, what does everybody do after Thanksgiving dinner? You're all really tired. That's because digestion takes a lot of work. Now, I don't completely crash after my dinner. As your body becomes more metabolically flexible, you also should not just totally crash. You'll feel better, but you're not going to feel as energetic.

Melanie Avalon: I agree. That's the sort of response that I have as well. That's actually why I like eating later. It actually makes me tired, and it helps me sleep. The thing I'm wondering about is, the feeling, is it tiredness, just like you feel like you ate a big meal and you feel satiated and nourished, but you're tired? When I hear pizza and ice cream, I think more of a not good feeling, and maybe I'm getting a little bit esoteric. What I'm wondering is, is it literally just the feeling of a lack of energy or is that also the feeling of inflammation and reacting to food and an uncomfortable feeling? I know it can be a little bit vague or a little bit unclear about discerning between those two different things, but if it's just the tiredness and the digestion and everything, then I don't think that's necessarily a problem, and it's something that may or may not change, depending on how you continue. But if it is a different feeling of discomfort and brain fog and that sort of feeling, then I would also look at the food choices and see if the foods are not working for you specifically. That's my only other thought about it.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I definitely think that's important as you go on. Just during the adjustment phase is just not the time to feel like that's how you're going to feel every all the time.

Melanie Avalon: True.

Gin Stephens: By now, I'm pretty sure that Celeste has adjusted.

Melanie Avalon: Celeste, email us back.

Gin Stephens: Follow up. We would love that. Follow up, let us know how it's going, if it's gotten better.

Melanie Avalon: Shall we answer one more question?

Gin Stephens: Yes. Amber says, subject, “15-hour fast?” “Hello, ladies. Thank you so much. I love this podcast and each of yours individually and listen to all three regularly. My mother has had great success with intermittent fasting and I have as well, but have some struggles and questions. I exercise at a rigorous boot camp three to four times a week. I have diabetes in my family and feel reading Jason Fung’s Obesity Code as well as Gin’s books have been very helpful at lowering my insulin by lowering my number of feedings each day. I strive to fast every day, but I also have struggles. I love to eat with my coworkers, and also my family enjoys an evening meal together too. I skip breakfast and sometimes lunch. I try to fast 20 to 24 hours on Sundays and Wednesdays because of my schedule but most other days, it's only 15 hours. I feel great and workouts are great. I feel like it has to be lowering my overall insulin. But am I missing out on benefits because I only fast 15 hours most days?”

Melanie Avalon: All right, Amber, thank you so much for your question. I think what you're doing sounds great. I think 15 hours is great, especially if you're feeling great, you're seeing all of the benefits, and you're exercising at a rigorous boot camp three to four times a week, that's a lot right there. A lot of people do find just fasting without even that intensive exercise-- Oh, and then on top of that, you're also doing a few 20- to 24-hour fasts. If anything, some people in your situation, with the exercise, it might be too much. I'm not saying it's too much, but I'm saying she's wondering if she's not fasting enough, but for a lot of people, everything that she's doing might be the high end of what they even should be doing. So, I think it sounds like it's working great for you. Gin, what do you think?

Gin Stephens: Well, it just depends what benefits she's looking for. She says is she missing out on benefits? Maybe depending on what benefits you're looking for, like for example, you're not getting into peak fat burning time if you only fast 15 hours most days. On the flip side, if you're happy with your weight, then maybe you don't need to get into peak fat burning time. That's the part we haven't really enough information to know what benefits she's looking for. If you're looking for increased autophagy, you're going to have some increased autophagy at 15 versus if you got up and ate breakfast. But if you really want to have a little more increased autophagy during the day, you may want to go a little longer.

Melanie Avalon: She's also doing boot camp three to four times a week, and that's going to be really supportive of autophagy. I don't know if she's doing it fasted.

Gin Stephens: We don't know. There's still a bunch of questions. She's lowered her insulin, that's really good. If she's at a very healthy weight where she feels great and not trying to lose weight, and this feels like a great lifestyle and her rhythm is good and the exercise time and the fasting time, then she doesn't need to change a thing. But if she's not seeing what she wants to see as far as progress or goals or health, then I would tweak it. Only Amber can answer that question based on her goals. This may be just the right amount of fasting for her, but it might not be.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Should we do one more?

Gin Stephens: Sure. We're covering up like crazy today. And I talked for 100 years at the beginning.

Melanie Avalon: I know I'm impressed. I feel like and we talked about Valter Longo stuff for a long time. I feel like time is weird on this episode. One more question from Jennifer, the subject is, “Long-term intermittent fasting.” Jennifer says, “Hi, Melanie and Gin. Your intermittent fasting podcast is the best thing about Monday mornings. Thank you both for your wisdom. Within the last month, I have listened to two podcasts on fasting in which the speaker has said that eventually after two to three years, intermittent fasting stops working and that your body stops losing fat and/or maintaining fat loss. The experts said that bodies become adapted to whatever we do. Both of you have said this too about fasting protocols, and that eventually your body will react against this adaptation by gaining weight. Both podcasters stated that intermittent fasting only works in the short term. Well, both of you have proven this wrong in your own lives. I wonder if you could address and refute this claim to make me feel better about my long-term plan, which is to intermittent fast forever. Thanks for your insights on this. Jennifer.”

Gin Stephens: I'm going to give you a short answer, and then the long answer. The short answer is no. [laughs] You like that one? Oh, lordy. I just love when the experts who are not intermittent fasters like to talk about what's going to happen with the people who are intermittent fasting when they really just don't know. I hit my goal weight in 2015, and it is now 2021. Through that time, I went through menopause also. This morning, my Shapa scale shows that my Shapa age is 18. Isn't that wacky? It's based on my body composition, I'm 18 years old. So, I will say that no, that they are wrong about that it is impossible to maintain fat loss. Thanks to intermittent fasting. I've been in these communities for a long, long time since 2015, and the only time I've ever seen people having trouble with weight regain has been over the pandemic. A lot of people, who had been maintaining very well, all of a sudden had little weight gain after the pandemic. Did you know, Melanie, that the average weight gain was something like 29 pounds for adults?

Melanie Avalon: Did you listen to Joe Rogan today?

Gin Stephens: I don't.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, Mark Sisson was just on Joe Rogan and they were talking about. I just listened to that statistic right before this.

Gin Stephens: Everybody was talking about it all over the place, that the average American gained 29 pounds over the pandemic. We saw some of this in the intermittent fasting community.

Melanie Avalon: Some people just didn't gain weight, but if you did gain weight, that was the average, I think, regardless.

Gin Stephens: That's not what the way I saw it. That doesn't mean that the way I saw it was correct. You know how when you play the game of telephone by the time you get around the circle, it's completely different. I did hear people say repeating that, that the average person gained 29 pounds, but just because I heard people saying that doesn't mean that's really true. [laughs] Whatever it is, this is the only time in the history of managing Facebook support groups that we suddenly had people not maintaining their weight. What most of them have done, they've corrected it since then because it was because we were all baking sourdough bread and sweet rolls and cookies and cocktail day was every day.

Melanie Avalon: We weren't outside and we were not exercising, lost our jobs, stress. It's basically everything for weight gain.

Gin Stephens: It all happened at one time.

Melanie Avalon: Cornucopia of unpleasantness.

Gin Stephens: Other than that, let's just put that to the side, pretend 2020 didn't happen, my honesty pants got a little tighter. Again, right this minute, my waist measurement-- because I keep up with my waist measurement, it's at the lowest it's ever been. I have not been slimmer in my adult life ever maintaining it, and in a period of time, and I'm 51 years old, and I've been through menopause in the past year. So, our bodies do become adapted to what we do, but that doesn't mean that you're then suddenly going to start to crazy gain weight, because you're adapted. Being adapted doesn't make you suddenly crazy gain or lose weight. Now, if I started eating all day long every day, I would probably gain weight. But as long as I continue intermittent fasting, I'm not going to. Of course, prior to intermittent fasting, I was crazy gaining weight. Whatever has happened with my body, I am thousand times more healthy than I was in 2014 when I weighed 210 pounds. Even if it was true that my body changed and no longer, whatever, all this period of time has been so much healthier than if I hadn't lost the weight. I really don't know why the experts would say that. They're trying to convince you not to even try it, “Don't even try it, it's helpless.” If that's the case, why even try to lose weight at all? But we can lose weight, and we can keep it off. I don't want you to let those people get inside your head.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, for anybody doing a dietary protocol fasting, whatever they're doing, if there becomes a point where they lose a certain amount of weight where the body perceives it as not being adequate body fat and/or they're eating a diet that the body perceives as not enough food and nutrition, that's going to be most likely an inevitable response of the body adapting or wanting to hold on to weight. Intermittent fasting does not necessitate that. They seem they're the same thing as intermittent fasting, but they're not because they can go with intermittent fasting, but they don't have to.

Gin Stephens: Right. An overly restrictive intermittent fasting lifestyle is not recommended by either me nor by Melanie.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, the two things I'm saying is, like Gin said, the overly restrictive diet or the body reaching a point that's too low for what the hypothalamus feels it should be at. Those are not synonyms with intermittent fasting. It's funny, you mentioned that they were wrong about that and my initial response was, “Oh, I don't ever say anybody's wrong.” Then, I thought, “Well, actually, it is wrong, because some people,” I don't know exactly what they said. they said it's impossible to maintain a weight with intermittent fasting. That is wrong, because we see it all the time. Yes.

Gin Stephens: I just wonder what stops working? Autophagy doesn't stop working. Mark Mattson has been living in intermittent fasting lifestyle for, I don't know, what over a decade now. He's a neurological researcher and wrote the article in the New England Journal of Medicine that came out in 2019 that got everyone excited about the health benefits of intermittent fasting. He's one of the premier experts, and he does it. I don't think all these people that study it would do it. The more you read about it, the more you learn about it, the more you want to do it. I think people just like make things up.

Melanie Avalon: I think some people can do intermittent fasting, but then they also might--

Gin Stephens: They might stop doing it.

Melanie Avalon: Or they might be more lax is the flip side. They might actually still be able to maintain or lose weight without doing what they perceive to be as strict as they need to be all the time. The opposite could also be true. You might be able to not be doing all the fasting all the time and have some days off and still maintain and lose weight as well.

Gin Stephens: You're saying your maintenance protocol could be more relaxed than your weight loss protocol?

Melanie Avalon: That might be possible.

Gin Stephens: If you relax all the way down to not doing it anymore [laughs] ever, then you're probably going to regain the weight. That's the thing. I would not want to stop doing intermittent fasting for the health benefits alone, but I also feel great, and I'm maintaining the weight loss for the first time in my whole adult life. None of the other things led to lasting weight loss that I did, none of them, not one, only intermittent fasting. Yeah, it's my study of one but--

Melanie Avalon: We'll take it.

Gin Stephens: Yep.

Melanie Avalon: Well, this has been absolutely wonderful. a few things for listeners. Before we go, you can submit your own questions to the podcast, just directly email questions@ifpodcast.com, or you can go to ifpodcast.com and you can submit questions there. You can follow us on Instagram. I'm MelanieAvalon, Gin is GinStephens. I love Instagram.

Gin Stephens: Oh, can I tell you something very exciting?

Melanie Avalon: Yes, I was on Instagram the other day. I went to see what Tim Spector was posting. You know how when you go to someone's page and it says follow back, is he following you?

Gin Stephens: Yes. I was not following him, but I followed him back. It said, “Follow back.” I was like, “Oh my God,” because Tim Spector is one of my heroes, obviously, and Mark Mattson too. I don't even know if he's on Instagram, but I'm going to go look, but I was like, he knows who I am. Anyway.

Melanie Avalon: That is really exciting. I love that feeling.

Gin Stephens: It was exciting. It was so exciting.

Melanie Avalon: I just followed him on Instagram, and it recommends following Zoe. That's funny.

Gin Stephens: Yeah. I don't follow Zoe yet, but maybe I should. I don't know.

Melanie Avalon: All right. Well, anything from you, Gin, before we go?

Gin Stephens: Nope. Everybody check out my blog post if you need to read something. ginstephens.com, Change is in the Air.

Melanie Avalon: Perfect. Well, I'm excited for you.

Gin Stephens: Thank you.

Melanie Avalon: I will talk to you next week.

Gin Stephens: All right. Bye-bye.

Melanie Avalon: Bye.

Thank you so much for listening to The Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Please remember that everything discussed on the show is not medical advice. We're not doctors. You can also check out our other podcasts, Intermittent Fasting Stories, and the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Theme music was composed by Leland Cox. See you next week.

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TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Welcome to Episode 208 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, author of What When Wine: Lose Weight and Feel Great with Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, and Wine. I’m here with my cohost, Gin Stephens, author of Delay, Don't Deny: Living an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle. For more on us, check out ifpodcast.com, melanieavalon.com, and ginstephens.com. Please remember, the thoughts and opinions on this podcast do not constitute medical advice or treatment., pour yourself a cup of black coffee, a mug of tea or even a glass of wine, if it's that time, and get ready for The Intermittent Fasting Podcast.

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Hi everybody and welcome. This is episode number 208 of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast. I’m Melanie Avalon and I’m here with Gin Stephens.

Gin Stephens: Hi, everybody.

Melanie Avalon: How are you today, Gin?

Gin Stephens: I am doing so great. It's been a week since we launched the DDD social network at dddsocialnetwork.com. Members are coming in. We're at about 2500 members as of today. They're finding their groups and they're getting active. Oh, it's so much fun to watch. I feel like I invited everybody to a party, and they came over.

Melanie Avalon: I can't wait to actually explore, so then I can talk about my experience.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, it's wonderful. It's dddsocialnetwork.com. Yes, it's a paid membership site, but we're having to pay for it ourselves. It's not like we're not on a free platform like we used to be. There are costs involved in running this type of a thing. That's why it's paid. It's so much fun not having to worry about it, AI watching the wording. One of my moderators is in a group, that's a keto group, she said that they're having so much trouble over there because every time someone says fat adapted, the AI picks up on it and says, “It's hate speech,” because it thinks that you're bullying, calling somebody fat, so you're not allowed to use certain words. They're having so much trouble in that group. They're having to spell it out a different way or say things in code. I’m like, “Well, that's weird.” On the DDD Social Network, you can say fat adapted all day long if you want to.

Melanie Avalon: I wonder if anybody in my group has run into that problem.

Gin Stephens: It's just so very interesting some of the things that get flagged as questionable content. Obviously, AI, artificial intelligence, is not a human, so they're looking for certain keywords. Like in our Life Lessons Podcast Facebook group, we're studying Brené Brown’s, one of her books in the podcast group, we're doing a month-long book study. Someone was talking about bullying and just the whole sense of whatever, how it makes us to feel as a person. Then, someone commented on someone, they're like talking about middle school, like a lot of our issues come from what we go through in middle school. Someone was talking about that, and the comment was, “Oh, yeah, girls are the worst.” Well, wouldn't you say that middle school girls can be some of the worst for bullying?

Melanie Avalon: Yes.

Gin Stephens: Okay. But the comment, “Oh, yeah, girls are the worst,” it was perfectly in context. Got removed by AI, flagged as hate speech. The members don't know, they think that maybe I’ve removed their comment. They don't know Facebook's removed it. Facebook shows it to me and says, “Oop, hate speech.” We're like, “No, it's not. It's not.” Anyway. [sighs]

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, that reminds me of, I listened to a really good interview with Jack Dorsey about Twitter. He was talking about all of the complexities you have to take in context, it's hard for a bot. I don't even know if they can take in context.

Gin Stephens: I don't know how you would teach them to, you have to teach him to, but yeah, it's really creating a lot of problems. I understand why Facebook is cracking down on that type of thing. They want to make sure the platform doesn't have bullying and hate speech. We all agree with that. We don't want to have that either. But in the meantime, it's like running amuck.

Melanie Avalon: Actually, yes. Can I tell you about my related bot, Facebook-related struggle?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: It's not actually Facebook, it's Instagram, but they are together, they're the same company now. As you know, I’m having a fabulous time now on Instagram. I just love and I said this before, but I really love creating content. It's really exciting to create visual content with words about all the biohacking thing and share what I learned and even though selfies make me uncomfortable but still I’m really enjoying it. It can seem not that important but I think it's really important to have the verified badge, the little blue checkmark. It can do a lot of credibility and it's really important if you actually are needing to be verified for something. Gin, you're a New York times bestselling author, IF the podcast, so the issue is that it's also run by bots, the verification process. You can submit to be verified, but apparently it's bots that review. They have some sort of criteria, I think, I don't know, this is what I’ve been told. It's some sort of criteria with google and where your name comes up. There's no actual person looking at your account and being like, “Oh, yes, this is who they say they are,” because if that was the case, I think both you and I would get the little verification checkmark. My current dilemma is I’m trying to figure out how to get somebody at Instagram to actually look at my account, like a real person.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, well, hopefully they can look at mine too [laughs] because it would be nice to have the check. We are who we say we are.

Melanie Avalon: I know.

Gin Stephens: They'll be like, “Wait, why is she posting all these pictures of cats? She must not be. That's not really her.”

Melanie Avalon: It's really interesting to see most people you would expect in the biohacking health worlds to be verified are, but there are a lot of people that aren't, and I don't know if it's a situation where they are doing like I’m doing where they're submitting but it gets rejected or they're just not submitting for it. But if any of our thousands and thousands of listeners knows anybody at Instagram who can review our accounts, that'd be amazing.

Gin Stephens: Yeah. I told somebody, I can't remember who it was, but it was somebody who is definitely someone I consider to be legitimate and big enough, and they were not checked, they didn't have a check.

Melanie Avalon: I have a good friend who is an actor, who's in a lot of big TV shows, movies, and he cannot get-- they keep rejecting him too. He's posted about it a lot on Instagram. He's like, “Why am I getting rejected?” I mean, it makes no sense.

Gin Stephens: Is it somebody I would recognize?

Melanie Avalon: Possibly, I can tell you after.

Gin Stephens: Okay.

Melanie Avalon: I don't know if you've seen any of the shows, but one thing I keep thinking is, if I can somehow get somebody at Instagram to review my account, I’m going to be like, “Hey, can you also look at his?” because I know, and Gin’s.

Gin Stephens: And mine, and look at mine. I don't care. I don't need to be verified. I know I am who I am but it would still be like, “Oh, that's cool.

Melanie Avalon: For credibility, I think it's important. It just goes back to that bot versus human thing. If a human person would look at our accounts, we'd be good, but it's the bots. It sounds so futuristic.

Gin Stephens: It really is funny, but we're running into it, like I said, every day on the Facebook groups, some kind of weird comment, that's getting flagged. Did you know there's bots who try to join Facebook groups? I don't even know what that means, but there's Facebook profiles that are bots, did you know that?

Melanie Avalon: No.

Gin Stephens: I don't know either but one of my moderators is amazing and she understands all the security side of things and they all have certain answers. They'll try to join, it'll be like yes, yes, yes or like--

Melanie Avalon: No, I’ve been experiencing that recently. For listeners, I have my Facebook groups, I have IF Biohackers, I have a Lumen Biosense CGM group, and then I have my Clean Beauty and Safe Skincare. Every day, I get probably four or five requests where it's that. They answer it yes, yes, yes or hi, hi, hi.

Gin Stephens: Right. Hi, hi, hi, that's one.

Melanie Avalon: I thought it was spammers, it's bots?

Gin Stephens: Well, I don't know. There's bots and spammers. I don’t know the difference. Some of them are spammers and some of them are bots. I don't really know what a bot is, it makes no sense to me, but I just know that this moderator who understands how that works, she's like, “Yeah, this is a bot profile.” We're like, “Okay,” I don't know if they're all bots. Maybe some are spammers and some are bots, maybe they're spammer-bots. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: It's crazy.

Gin Stephens: It really is. Behind the scenes in social media management is just a whole different world that you just would not understand.

Melanie Avalon: Well, on that note, shall we jump into everything for today?

Gin Stephens: Yes, let's get started.

Melanie Avalon: All right. To start things off, we have a few questions and they come from Liz. The subject is “Bloating, Blood Glucose and Ketones, oh my. [I’m not chasing ketones, I promise]” I thought that was a great title.

Gin Stephens: I did too.

Melanie Avalon: Liz says, “Hi, Gin and Melanie. I am new to the if lifestyle, just about two weeks in and I’m already feeling so many health benefits. I love the energy I have while in the fasted state and it just warms my heart to think about all of the benefits my body is receiving behind the scenes. I began the IF journey after reading Dave Asprey’s new book, Fast This Way, landed on Fast. Feast. Repeat. through a Kindle recommendation. I’m currently reading What When Wine and am totally geeking out over all of the IF science.” Man, she's hitting all of them.

Gin Stephens: She really is.

Melanie Avalon: She says, “If you're familiar with Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies.” Oh yes, Liz, I am familiar. She says, “I am a questioner, so bingeing on your books and podcast episodes has totally fed my tendency, pardon the pun. My first question is about feeling bloated after feasting. I dove straight into a 16:8 plan two weeks ago, but naturally shifted to 20:4, sometimes 22:2 based on my hunger cues. I was shocked when I made it through a 20-hour fast without one thought of food. However, I’ve noticed that after eating a well-balanced meal of whole foods and a shorter window, I feel bloated. I don't believe I am overeating as I eat to satiety and don't feel overfull, so I’m confused by the bloated heavy feeling. Any thoughts?” We can do these one at a time if you like.

Gin Stephens: Okay, yeah, that's fine. That's a great question, Liz. We hear it all the time. You've got to figure out, it can be one of two things. Number one, it could be actual bloating. When we're doing intermittent fasting, we spend so much of the day in the fasted state, we get used to that feeling. Then now, you eat and then you're going to notice a difference in the way you feel. If it is actual bloating, you'll notice a difference sooner than you would like, say, if you were eating all day long in the past, because that's just how you felt, you didn't really notice-- there wasn't like a contrast between the fasted state and then now you're actually having bloating. You need to figure out if it's actual bloating or is it just the contrast between the fasted state and the fed state because your system feels so empty, and you feel so slim, and then you eat and then you've got food in there. Imagine your digestive system, from your esophagus to your stomach, to your intestines, imagine that during the fast that clears out. Then, you eat and suddenly that big mass of what you just ate is moving through you. Maybe you're mistaking that for bloating. You've got to decide or you've got to figure out is it just the massive food, you're not feeling that slim, fasted feeling anymore? Or, is it actual bloating, that now the fasting is showing you that you're bloating after eating? Fasting doesn't cause intestinal bloating itself, that would be what you're eating. You have to figure out if that's something that's going on for you.

Melanie Avalon: That's a really great distinction. Then, my suggestions for actually addressing the bloating, if it is due to actual bloating. The actual bloating from it could be digestive distress, because you're not breaking down the food properly and/or you have gut dysbiosis, it's creating issues with your gut bacteria. Suggestions I would make, one would be, a lot of people benefit from a low FODMAP approach, at least as a trial run. It's basically foods that are free of carbohydrate-based substrates that can feed gut bacteria and lead to bloating and digestive issues, so that's something you can try. Especially if you're already eating whole foods, you probably find it to be an easy adaptation. You can get my app, it's called Food Sense Guide. It's a comprehensive catalogue of over 300 foods for actually 12 different compounds that people often react to in foods. One of those categories is FODMAPs, so that might be helpful for you.

Other things on the app, if people struggle with histamine or lectins or gluten or oxalates, salicylates, night shades, sulfites, thiols, it even has AIP. It's a really, really cool app, which by the way, Gin, whenever I do randomly check it, it's usually between like number 10 and number 20 for all food and drinks apps still in the iTunes Store, which is very exciting, and thanks to Gin’s son, Cal. Then, on top of that, you can use digestive enzymes or HCL, or on top of that or in addition, if you are struggling with actually breaking down food, people can really, really benefit from digestive enzymes and HCL. BiOptimizers makes a really good digestive enzyme that we like called MassZymes. They also make HCL Breakthrough. The way that you would want to use those is the HCL you actually want to take at the beginning of your meal, and that's basically stomach acid and it's going to help digest your food. The stomach acid actually prompts the release of pancreatic enzymes in your small intestine, so increasing stomach acid not only breaks down the food in your stomach, it actually encourages breaking down the food further down in the small intestine.

On top of that, if you actually take the digestive enzymes, which you would want to take after the HCL, because that would be the natural order of things in your own body that can really, really help. It can be game changers for so many people, myself included. We can put links in the show notes to that. We often have a code for them, I’m not sure if this episode specifically will have a code, but there's usually a code. If they're not sponsoring this episode, just go back through the most recent episodes on our website, until you find--

Gin Stephens: Yeah, they're not sponsoring this one.

Melanie Avalon: Okay. They actually sponsored episode 207, which was the one before this, so if you go the show notes for 207, you can get a coupon code for them. They also make a probiotic called P3-OM, and I really like that probiotic because, in general, I said that gut microbiome can be an issue with bloating but P3-OM, specifically the strain is lact-- I think it's L plantarum. It's actually a proteolytic probiotic, meaning it also helps you digest your food, which is super cool. Looking at your food choices, trying maybe a low FODMAP approach, bringing in some digestive enzymes and digestive support, I really think that you can solve the bloating issue.

Her next question, she says, “Are about blood glucose and ketones. I recently tested both my blood glucose and ketone levels throughout the course of the day and had interesting results. My fasting blood sugar is typically between 70 to 75 milligrams per deciliter. An hour and a half after a cup of plain black coffee about 12.5 hours into my fast, my blood glucose level went to 85 milligrams per deciliter later in the afternoon, about 15 hours into my fast, I had a cup of plain black decaf coffee. I retested my blood glucose level an hour later and it was 86. I realize that this is still considered normal, but I was just wondering if the potential insulin response could cause a problem. I really do not want to switch to a water-only fast as I love and have always loved playing black coffee.”

Gin Stephens: Can we answer this one first?

Melanie Avalon: I just want to say, “Liz, your blood sugar levels are fabulous.”

Gin Stephens: Yeah, even 85 is fabulous.

Melanie Avalon: Fabulous. [laughs] Those are really great numbers. I have other thoughts but go ahead.

Gin Stephens: I was like, “What's the pro--?" People often get confused-- and so Liz is saying she's worrying about a potential insulin response, but see, let's think about this. You noticed that after you had coffee, your blood glucose was higher. Okay, so why was it higher? Well, coffee causes our liver to dump glycogen, what does that glycogen do? It raises your blood glucose level. Do we want our liver to dump glycogen? Yeah, as our liver dumps glycogen, it gets us closer to ketosis, to that fat burning state. People will be very confused. If the only thing that happened is you had an insulin response, like you drank coffee, had an insulin response, no glycogen dump, you just had an insulin response, your blood glucose would go down, because that's what insulin does. If you just have insulin only, blood glucose goes down. So, if your blood glucose is going up, yet you haven't taken in any good blood glucose, it's coming from inside your own body and that's your liver dumping the glycogen. Don't let your blood glucose level confuse you. Now, is it possible that if your blood glucose goes up, that your body might release some insulin to respond to a higher blood glucose? Yes, that could happen but that's how your body is supposed to work. Your body is constantly releasing what it feels like is the right amount of insulin. If your blood glucose had gone up to a higher level, your body was like, “Oop, we need to bring that down,” then you would have had a little-- We're not ever at a zero-insulin state unless you're like type 1 diabetic and you release no insulin at all. We all have insulin going on. What we don't want is chronic high levels of insulin.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, exactly, and then also this is not her case or it might be, but I just wanted to clarify for listeners as well that even if your glycogen is depleted, you can still have the same experience because the liver can actually create new glycogen--

Gin Stephens: New glucose to send out.

Melanie Avalon: Sugar, glucose, that’s the word, through gluconeogenesis, so you can experience that liver dumping effect regardless of your glycogen stores.

Gin Stephens: It's coming from somewhere, it's coming from inside your body. The coffee didn't have any glucose in it. When people say something raises your blood sugar, it doesn't raise your blood sugar, that's not necessarily the metric we're looking for. Jason Fung talks about this in the Diabetes Code that we've been chasing the wrong thing, what is your blood sugar doing from minute to minute. Instead, the whole point has been just control the blood sugar only without thinking about what else is happening.

Melanie Avalon: Then also on top of that, both Gin and I have worn CGMs, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve seen personally, just in general, it wavers-- because she says hers is normally between 70 to 75 and then it's gone up to 86, but that variation of around 10 to 15 within a certain range is very, very normal.

Gin Stephens: One of my moderators, she does Zumba every morning, and she's not had anything to eat obviously before she goes, but every day after Zumba, her blood glucose pops up, after exercise. She like, “There's the Zumba up, it goes up every day.”

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. The reason for that is for brief intense exercise, they say with people on very, very long-term ketogenic diets that they adapt to this, but for most people, like brief sprints and really intense exercise requires carbs, just because of the literal amount of speed, the time that it takes to turn that into energy compared to fatty acids and ketones, although ketones are faster than fatty acids.

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Melanie Avalon: Her next question. She says, “Now to the ketones, I promise I’m not chasing ketones, but out of curiosity, I have been testing them. The same day I tested blood glucose, I tested my ketone level 12 hours into my fast, and it was 1.4 millimoles per liter. Yippy, ketosis. But then I tested again 20 hours into my fast after an hour-long workout consisting of HIIT, strength training and flexibility, and it was down to 0.3. I thought longer fasting hours and exercise were supposed to promote ketosis. Could you shed any light as to why my ketone level dropped so significantly after a workout and longer fasting?”

Gin Stephens: Yes, because your body used some of that energy while you were doing that heavy workout, and so [laughs] that is one reason why I don't want you to-- as you said in your in your subject “chasing ketones” because they can confuse you. You think, you're like, “Well, look, I fasted longer and I worked out. I’m surely burning more fat, surely I’m going to have higher ketone levels.” But remember, the ketones circulating in your blood are the ones you're not using. You're using them for all sorts of things, so as we get adapted fewer will be floating around in our blood even as we get more and more into the lifestyle. The more experienced you get as a faster, the fewer ketones you'll have over time and then you'll be like, “Wait, I’m no longer going into ketosis. My ketones are lower.” No, that's not what that shows. So, I wouldn't get discouraged by that at all. We're not trying to have high ketone numbers.

Melanie Avalon: I think we've probably talked about this last week, and Gin already said it a little bit, but basically the blood ketones that you're measuring are in a way the storage form of the ketone. So, you would expect if you're using them for that marker to go down. Compared to for example breath ketones, and I talked about this last week, but they are a byproduct of burning ketones. Actually, if Liz had a breath monitor, if it was ketones that she was burning, we would expect that to actually go up from this exercise. Yeah, totally, completely normal.

Gin Stephens: Yep, totally normal.

Melanie Avalon: Right. Then she also says, “I plan to stop testing ketones after I’ve made it to the 28-day clean fasting mark, but I have just ordered a Nutrisense CGM using Melanie's coupon code.” Thank you, so excited. “I will continue to test blood glucose. Can't wait to insert my CGM while listening to Taylor Swift.” The reason she said that, one of my videos on Instagram speaking of-- I have some videos on my Instagram of how to put on a CGM, and of course, they are to the soundtrack of Taylor Swift, all of them are. She says, “Thank you for all that you do in the IF world, I am so thrilled to be a part of it.” I think, Liz, when you do get that CGM, you will feel a lot better actually about your blood glucose because you'll see how normal it is for it to be changing all the time. I think it'll give you a lot more clarity about everything.

For listeners, if you'd like to get your own Nutrisense CGM, the code for that that Liz used is go to melanieavalon.com/nutrisensecgm. That's N-U-T-R-I-S-E-N-S-E CGM and use the coupon code, MELANIEAVALON, and that will get you 15% off of any of their packages, with the exception of-- I think they have a trial one, I don't think it will work on that, but otherwise, you can use that 15% off on anything. Awesome.

Gin Stephens: All right, are we ready to move on?

Melanie Avalon: Yes.

Gin Stephens: All right. We have a question from Michelle. She says, “The most important question asked thus far.” Well, that's quite a buildup, Michelle. [laughs] All right, here we go. “Hi, Melanie, and Gin. I love you ladies and all the content you give out to all of us. I have heard you both mention that you will just drink a glass or a tablespoon of wine. How do you keep your wine, so it doesn't go bad? I enjoy a glass but find myself dumping it or cooking with it if I haven't had it within two days. What do you ladies do? Unfortunately, my husband doesn't drink wine. So, I’ve had no one to share my bottle with Thanks for the help to this very important question. Thanks, Michelle, from Buffalo, New York.” I almost didn't read that part, but there it is.

Melanie Avalon: I think this is a very important question. By the way, for listeners, I’ve moved past a tablespoon of wine. I’m back to normal amounts. I use Vacu Vin, I think is the brand. It's like the rubber wine stoppers and you pump out the extra air. She says he drinks it within two days. I find that it keeps it pretty well for at least four or five days. Yeah, I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. The show notes by the way are at ifpodcast.com/ episode208. Do you have any comments, Gin?

Gin Stephens: Ditto. Same thing. That's exactly what we use. I think it's a Vacu Vin, I think that's what it is, and it pumps out the air and you put the little stopper in, and it keeps it for a long time. Oh, and I also for bubbly things, use one of those champagne bottle stoppers that folds down over the rim and holds it in place and you also pump out the air a little bit. Those will keep the bubbles in for a long time. One time, I was at the beach, and then I left for two weeks and I came back and there was still a bottle that had been in the fridge and it still had bubbles. It wasn't like original bubbles like from the day we opened it. It wasn't as good, but it was still bubbly.

Melanie Avalon: When I worked in restaurants for five years, that's what they use usually, those pumper systems. By the way for the Vacu Vin, they have one where you can get colored stoppers, it's like purple, blue, and pink. They're so amazing, just in case you want some color. All right, shall we go to our next question?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: This comes from Rhonda. “Hello, questions.” “I’ve been fasting for 206 days, usually 16:8. Day by day, my number kept coming down each day. December, I reached my lowest weight of 132.8. My goal is 130. Since Christmas, my number has steadily been going up. Today, I was 138. Nothing has really changed with my food or activities. Any suggestions as to why this happened? What can I do to get it turned around and moving back down again? Please let me know. Thanks so much.”

Gin Stephens: All right. Well, unfortunately, I don't know much about how much you lost altogether, or what's happening, your size, your height, it's hard to really answer completely. Y'all, when you're writing in, the more details you can give us the better, like what was your starting weight? How much have you lost? Has your size changed? The scale is not a good picture always of what's happening. Someone could go from 132.8 to 138 and actually get smaller in size if you've lost fat and put on muscle. Just knowing that you went from 132.8 to 138 doesn't let me know anything about what your body is doing. You might be just slimmer today than you were then because you’ve, like I said, lost fat and built muscle, but maybe your pants are tight and you know you're gaining fat, and that's a whole different question. If that's what's happened, then probably something has changed because when we do gain weight or lose weight, there's something changing, but you've got to figure out what that is.

Sometimes, I’ve noticed in the community over the years, somebody will be like, “Well, I thought my fasts were X, Y, Z. Then, I started tracking it on an app, I realized, ‘Oh, it really wasn't that.’ Once you really start looking at what you're doing, you realize maybe you have had an extra dessert every day that you weren't having before, or something has changed. When you really look closely, maybe you can figure out what that is. Again, it may just be an indication of muscle gain and fat loss, and your body is changing. I want you to use other tools. Take photos, use your honesty, pants, all sorts of things. Then, you'll really know what's happening. The scale alone is really meaningless.

Melanie Avalon: I don't really have anything to add.

Gin Stephens: Okay. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: Next question.

Gin Stephens: We have a question from Leah. the subject is “Podcast Resources.” She says, “Melanie and Gin, I’ve been listening to your podcast for years. I feel like both of you are just old friends. I have had so much success with intermittent fasting, and I have persuaded so many people to adopt the lifestyle as well. I have a different question not related to IAF, which is, do you have any advice or resources that you would recommend for starting a podcast? I’m interested in everything from what sort of equipment I would need, to tutorials, from books and websites. This is a dream of mine, but I don't even know where to begin. Thanks so much for all that you do all the best, Leah.”

Melanie Avalon: All right, Leah. Well, thank you so much for your question. The first thing I will say is-- the first step is exactly what you're doing is asking somebody who's done a podcast how to do it, because that's actually how I started ours. One of my really good friends had a big podcast, so I just asked him what to do and then I just did exactly what he said. Here we are. Basically, as far as the components, which I really encourage anybody who wants to start a podcast to do so, I really like people to follow their creative dreams. This is appropriate because we're talking about all the stuff behind the scenes, there's a lot that goes into podcasting. I think people think that-- well, I don't know if people think this, but it might seem like we just show up and record and then release it, but there's a lot. There's a lot involved. I guess the components of things that you need are, equipment-wise, you need a pretty good mic, sound quality is so important. I have one called HyperX, I'm trying to think. I think that's the brand. It's amazing. It lights up bright red, which mic do you have, Gin?

Gin Stephens: What is it called, the one you told me to get?

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, the one I originally had. Audio-Technica AT2020USB.

Gin Stephens: Yep.

Melanie Avalon: That's what Gin had. We can put links to this. We'll put links in the show notes to what we have. There are a lot of different platforms that you can record on to connect if you're doing it with a co-host or interviewing somebody. There are platforms that allow you to talk, it's like Zoom, but it records it, so then you have the tracks. Gin and I use SquadCast right now for Intermittent Fasting Podcast, I use Zencastr for the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. And then, there's the editing process. Originally when we started the show, I edited everything. Now, we have editors that do that for us, so we actually use podcast doctors for our show. I think Gin use Resonate.

Gin Stephens: I do. Resonate Recordings does mine. That was the biggest freeing moment for me is when I realized, when I wanted to start Intermittent Fasting Stories, I had Melanie for Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Melanie was doing all the editing. Melanie knew how to upload it in podcast platforms and make it magically show up. I didn't know how to do any of that. I got this book Melanie called Podcasting For Dummies. I got that book and I’m like, “I’m going to figure this out.” I can do this. I’m going to learn how to edit. Then I was reading it, I’m like, it was talking about Libsyn and all these-- this was a while ago, it was like 2018. We've come a long way since then, even, but I’m like, “I have no idea what I’m doing. Wait a minute, I could pay someone to do this.” I just started looking and googled and found a company and found Resonate Recordings just from Google. I just googled and found them, and they are awesome, Resonate Recordings is, and I was like, “Hey,” they had a launch package that--

Melanie Avalon: Wait, we had been at Resonate though before.

Gin Stephens: We tried them out after I was already using them.

Melanie Avalon: Really?

Gin Stephens: Yep, I used them first, and then we use them a little bit for editing because you were still doing all the editing at that point.

Melanie Avalon: Oh.

Gin Stephens: It's a long time ago, but you were doing-- I remember completely, you were doing all the editing. Then, it was after Resonate was editing mine, you were like, “Let's try this one.” I’m like, “Sure. It's fine with me.”

Melanie Avalon: Oh. I have that backwards in my head.

Gin Stephens: They're a little pricier. Melanie was looking for a more cost effective-- They're not expensive, but I certainly can understand looking for someone that costs less. Resonate Recordings is a little pricier, but I just really enjoyed working with them. Also, it's easy just to stay there. I like them. I have a person that works with me, and I can ask to really do almost anything, and they help me a lot. Anyway, they had everything, a launch package. They helped me set up the website for it, they helped me get it everywhere. Could I have done it all myself? Sure. Could I have learned how to edit it? Yes. Did I want to? Did I have time to? No. So, it's nice to be able to have that resource.

Melanie Avalon: Then on top of that, the podcast actually has to go on a platform.

Gin Stephens: You have to have a host.

Melanie Avalon: A host. We have been hosted all over the place. Friends, it's like moving when you move between hosts and platforms. We have been at Podbean, we've been at Megaphone, we've been at ART19, we're back at Podbean, we've contemplated going to other hosts. I think we might actually do that. The host is in charge of-- they basically store the episodes, and then they provide the feed that all of these podcast players are reading to pick up the episodes. There's a lot involved.

Gin Stephens: Oh, and Resonate Recordings also will host you. They didn't used to have that feature, or I would just be hosted with them probably still to this day. Our Life Lessons podcast is edited and hosted by Resonate. It's so easy, Melanie, all you do is click Approve episode, and then you've already put the date in and just automatically, you don't have to go somewhere else and put it there.

Melanie Avalon: Nice.

Gin Stephens: It's amazing. Intermittent Fasting Stories was hosted on Podbean and then I moved to Megaphone and then I moved to ART19. I’m still on ART19.

Melanie Avalon: Yes, although can I tell you something fun?

Gin Stephens: Yes, on dddsocialnetwork.com, you can listen to ad-free episodes of Intermittent Fasting Stories. Yep, I have a special place for them because Resonate, they're hosting them also. Actually, my podcast is hosted in two places. Resonate is hosting the ad-free version. I’m going to upload those early, so you will get them before Thursday. You just go to dddsocialnetwork.com. In the Intermittent Fasting Stories Podcast Group, there's a forum and each podcast episode has a different forum entry, so you can just listen to it right there. No ads are inserted. You're not going to have them at all. You can also discuss the episode right under there in the little forum. There's a place to discuss it with other people that are listening to it, so I’m really excited about that feature, and you can listen to all of them. I uploaded all of them. Oh, can I tell you a funny story?

Melanie Avalon: Yes.

Gin Stephens: I was doing this the other night at like 9 PM. I was uploading all the episodes because I had them in another place, but they all had to load and it was really clunky and I’m like I got to put them in these forums, this is going to be better because people were complaining they couldn't get under load and it would take a while. I understood, 139 episodes were having to load, it took a long time. I moved them. I was doing them one by one, boom, boom, moving them in, moving them in. Then I got this email from this girl. She's like, “I just got over 100 emails from you.” [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: Oh gosh.

Gin Stephens: Her notification in the new platform was set to all or something or instant. Every time I upload it, I’m like, “I’m so sorry. One day, we will laugh about this.” But she got 139 emails.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, my goodness. It's crazy.

Gin Stephens: I’m like, “I’m so sorry. I promise not to spam you. Okay, here you go. 139 emails from Gin.” We were laughing about it. Anyway, I thought that was funny.

Melanie Avalon: My goodness, that's really funny.

Gin Stephens: Yeah. What's great though? This new platform, the dddsocialnetwork.com is $59.95 a year, which is $4.99 a month. I don't know if listeners have been around since we were on Himalaya. I was a Himalaya premium podcast, which had a different feed that you could be a member for. If you subscribe through Himalaya premium, you got an ad-free version of Intermittent Fasting Stories for $4.99 a month. That's all you got. For $4.99 a month you got ad free Intermittent Fasting Stories, and you got them a day early, and I had a bunch of people who subscribe to that. Then that went away Himalaya, did made some changes, the ad free version was no more. This new platform dddsocialnetwork.com, you not only get the ad-free version, but you also get the whole community.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, so much more.

Gin Stephens: For the same price that people were paying for just getting the ad-free version.

Melanie Avalon: It's pretty incredible.

Gin Stephens: I think it's worth $4.99, even if you never go to the community just to have ad free versions of the podcast because you don't have to-- it's not interrupted and wherever the ad might pop in.

Melanie Avalon: Which actually to clarify, I'm glad you brought up the ads. It's another reason why hearing all of that, there's a lot that's involved in producing the podcast. It costs us a lot of money to create it, so that's why we're so grateful that we do have companies that we can work with.

Gin Stephens: Oh, we are. Yeah, I’m not dissing the ads at all. Thank you to everyone who advertises.

Melanie Avalon: I love the brands we work with.

Gin Stephens: Me too.

Melanie Avalon: They're all companies and products I personally use and adore and want everybody to experience. So, everybody wins. It's a wonderful situation.

Gin Stephens: Yes. I’m not anti-ads, because [laughs] everything's got to-- We love the podcast, but this is our job. We're making a living from it. You can either listen to ads, or you can pay us a different way, like Peter Attia does with his platform. Everyone who releases content is paid for that content by someone. You might have to do some digging to figure out who pays them for doing it. Very few people are just creating content for free.

Melanie Avalon: At least not if it's a full-time commitment.

Gin Stephens: Correct. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon: Which it is, because we don't just have this show. We have our other shows as well.

Gin Stephens: Yep, three podcasts is a lot, Melanie. I have three, and I love them. I love doing them. It's actually one of my favorite parts of what I do.

Melanie Avalon: I’m forever perpetually grateful.

Gin Stephens: Me too. Thank you all for listening.

Melanie Avalon: It is a shocking amount of time-

Gin Stephens: Yeah, it is.

Melanie Avalon: -spent. I mean, it's what I do.

Gin Stephens: When we get off today, I’ve got to record-- wait, one, two, three, I have to record six ads because Intermittent Fasting Stories is still going to have ads, just only if you're not listening to them in my platform, you'll still get the ads popped in, but I have to record two for Intermittent Fasting Podcast and four for Intermittent Fasting Stories.

Melanie Avalon: Yep, and then the prep work and everything.

Gin Stephens: It's a lot of work to record ads to. That sounds so weird, and you have to do them again. I’m like, “That sounds weird,” then I have to do it again, I don't know. Talking to you seems reasonable but we're recording ads, I feel like I’m so fake.

Melanie Avalon: I love recording ads.

Gin Stephens: I don't. I don't love it.

Melanie Avalon: I don't love it, but I don't feel fake doing it. I feel very authentic. [laughs]

Gin Stephens: I love the products. Don't get me wrong.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, yeah, I didn't mean it that way.

Gin Stephens: I’m about to record one for Green Chef, and I love Green Chef. We're having Green Chef for dinner, I’m not making that up. I really, really love it. The number of companies we say no to is remarkable. People don't understand that either. I'm like, “No, I’m not going to endorse that company because I don't like that company or like their product.” But I still feel weird when I’m recording it. I’ll talk to you all day about Green Chef, but if I have to tell you this ad about Green Chef, it feels weird.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, it doesn't feel weird to me. I just pretend like I’m just talking about it to somebody normally.

Melanie Avalon: I have a hard time with that. Again, you're a trained actress. I wonder if that has some that-- you can be-- Whereas I’m just like, I don't know. [laughs] I’m just like this teacher over here. I just want to talk to you.

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Melanie Avalon: Shall we go on to our next question?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: Our next question is from Maureen. She says, “I started IF for a second time in mid-October 2020 after you did a webinar at my work,” you did a--

Gin Stephens: I did a webinar. Yes, I did. I did a webinar.

Melanie Avalon: At her work?

Gin Stephens: Yes. A Mutual of Omaha webinar, they invited me, the company. This was so exciting Mutual of Omaha, they're a big insurance company in the Midwest like Omaha. That's where they're from. Have you heard of Mutual of Omaha, Melanie?

Melanie Avalon: Um, I don't think so.

Gin Stephens: Well, the reason probably my age, we all know them, because they used to sponsor TV shows we would watch, like the Disney show on Sunday nights or something was sponsored by Mutual of Omaha. I think we all remember those commercials. That's what I think of them anyway. They're a big insurance company. They're really big in the Midwest. They reached out to me and said, “Would you do a webinar about Fast. Feast. Repeat.?” Then I was super excited, because whenever a big company asks you to do something, that is really a big endorsement. They wanted me to talk about fasting. I went to my moderator, we have a little private group, and I’m like, “Guess what? Mutual of Omaha wants me to do a webinar.” One of my moderators said, “My husband is an executive at Mutual of Omaha.” Then they looked into who was asking me, and then both of them, my moderator friend, and her husband came on the webinar with me because they're both intermittent fasters. It wasn't her husband who said, “Y'all should do this.” That was totally unrelated. It was a coincidence.

Melanie Avalon: It's crazy.

Gin Stephens: It was crazy, but it felt wonderful to be asked to do that. It was a lot of pressure. I’m like, “Uh-oh. I’ve got to be on camera and do a webinar,” but I loved it. I don't want to do another one anytime soon, because it was a lot of pressure. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: Well, Maureen was present there.

Gin Stephens: She was there. Thank you, Maureen. I’m glad you were there.

Melanie Avalon: She says, “I realized I wasn't doing the clean fast. I’m doing an 18:6 most days. I have only about 4 to 5 pounds, and I want to lose 10 more. What advice do you have? Or, better alternatives do you have for a chocoholic like me?” She also wants to know if, I, Melanie, have ever been overweight? She says, “I listen to you ladies, IF podcast and love your different views.” I’ve never been overweight by BMI standards. I don't think, I’d have to look up.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, because you found intermittent fasting in college. If we all think back to college, the time in college-- Well, not all of us, a lot of us when we were teens and in college, we felt like we were maybe needed to lose a little weight. When we look back on that period of time, we realized we really didn't, like, we may have been a little over the weight where we felt our best, but we weren't technically overweight. That's not always true. Sometimes, people are overweight in college. I can remember feeling like I needed to go on a diet in college. Really, I was within a healthy weight range the whole time. I think that's probably true for you. That certainly was my college experience. I wasn't overweight, but I was sure dieting.

Melanie Avalon: The highest I got was probably at the upper end of normal weight. As far as the chocoholic question, I’m assuming this isn't in her eating window, right?

Gin Stephens: Oh, yeah. She's not having chocolate during the fast because she understands the clean fast. She's definitely not doing it, then.

Melanie Avalon: I’m guessing she is thinking the chocolate is a hindrance and her weight loss, which I would encourage her to reframe. You might be able to continue having chocolate. If it is a problem in your weight, I would guess it's probably from the processed normal chocolate bars and candies that we think of. I would suggest getting really high percent low sugar, high chocolate cacao versions. Is it cocoa or cacao percent?

Gin Stephens: Huh, I don't know. I would say cocoa, but I don't know. Anyway, look for the high number, big number.

Melanie Avalon: If you go to whole foods, I know they have a pretty good chocolate section there, and you can find some that are really, really high and then that are low in sugar. I don't know what diet you're doing. If that is not enough, you could make your own. You could get-- again, I don't know if it's our cacao or cocoa powder, but you could get the pure unsweetened powder and you could sweeten it-- If the carbs are an issue, you could sweeten it with something like stevia or monk fruit, like you can find recipes to make your own chocolate. Then if it's just because you want to cut out chocolate, I don't know what alternative you're looking for. Gin, do you have ideas?

Gin Stephens: Well, the thing that really gets to me here that-- she only wants to lose 10 pounds. Again, just like with the question we had earlier, it's really hard to know within the context of-- like you mentioned BMI before. I know BMI isn’t perfect, but losing 10 more pounds, like for example, where I am right now, if I decided like based on a scale number, if I got on a scale tomorrow and saw a number and I didn't like it and said, “I need to lose two more pounds on the scale,” I would have a really hard time doing it, my body wouldn't want to lose two more pounds. This is a weight where my body really wants to be. But I’m also in a healthy weight range. It's hard to know. If Maureen wants to lose 10 more pounds, maybe Maureen is overweight, and she's in the overweight BMI range, and her goal is to lose 10 more so she's just in the normal weight range, but barely, then it would be logical for her to lose 10 more pounds if she's in the overweight range. Am I making sense?

But if she's like solidly in the healthy weight range, and just wants to lose 10 more pounds, maybe her body doesn't want to do that. We're all different when it comes to our bodies preferred size and where our body wants to be and where it's easy for us to stay. We can get a preconceived idea, but if I decided I wanted to lose 10 more pounds, I would have a very challenging time doing that, and keeping it off. I guess, I’m so very fortunate and blessed, and I admit this, I know it. I’m so fortunate that the weight my body has settled in for these past six years, because I’ve been in maintenance for six years, the weight my body has settled in, this weight range, is one where I feel amazing. I’m very lucky there, and I do not discount someone who wants to lose 10 pounds to feel the way they want to feel. I know that's got to be hard. I feel your pain, but it's very hard to lose beyond a weight where your body is happy, and maintain it and live a lifestyle. I could lose 10 pounds, but I’d have to really diet and restrict and be hardcore. I don't want to live that way.

Melanie Avalon: Exactly. With the chocolate, it sounds like since she self-identifies as a chocoholic, maybe it's a trigger food, or maybe she has trouble stopping eating it, I would do one of the suggestions I said. Also, a good thing about making your own is, it's not like you can just keep buying it like, you have to keep making it. That puts a limit on it. Or, it might just be an all or none approach where you just say no, and you find something else to replace that with. When it comes to habits, it is really important to replace whatever the habit that you want to change with something else, so you're still getting that response in the brain that you're looking for, that pleasurable response. Otherwise, the brain is going to like look to fill that void with something. It doesn't even have to be a food that you replace it with. I don't know when you're eating the chocolate, but if it's a dessert thing at the end of your meal, and you just keep eating, maybe you change it completely and you replace the end of your meal with some sort of activity, like a gratitude journal or replacing it with something else completely. You can replace the chocolate with other versions of chocolate, or with something else completely. That was a lot.

Gin Stephens: It's just really hard to say. Now, Maureen, again, I could go back and give a little more answer. If you really do need to lose 10 pounds, like you're overweight and you need to lose 10 and you know your body can lose those 10, then it's time to do some tweaking in your eating window. 18:6 was not my body's weight loss magical sweet spot. I would go back to Fast. Feast. Repeat. and look at the Intermittent Fasting Toolbox chapter and figure out how you can do some adjusting there to see the weight loss that you're looking for.

Melanie Avalon: Awesome. Last comment. I just feel like I should emphasize this every time now. I really think when it comes to macros, focusing on protein for weight loss and satiety can be really, really a game changer. A high-protein diet, either low carb, high fat, or high carb low fat-- It's funny, Gin, I posted in my group, tell me you listen to my shows without telling me. Have you seen that before?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: The comments, you would love it. A lot of them involve you.

Gin Stephens: Oh, tell me some of them.

Melanie Avalon: The reason I thought about it is a lot of people have said high carb, low fat, or low carb high fat is the answer. It has 156 comments.

Gin Stephens: That's so fun.

Melanie Avalon: It's actually a lot of like our sponsor stuff, people saying like, I use Joovv or ButcherBox, blah, blah, blah. One is, “Anything from you, Gin, before you go?” One is always, “What are you grateful for?” “I love this so much.” “I do my research.” Funfetti, all the things. Oh, there was one about you and us disagreeing on things. Wait, let me find it. Gin, anything else from you?

Gin Stephens: Yeah, love it.

Melanie Avalon: Sorry. That was a lot. Anything to add, Gin?

[laughter]

Melanie Avalon: Yes. How would you say you listen to our show, Gin, without telling us?

Gin Stephens: Oh, gosh, now I’m on the spot. Maybe I would just say, “I don't know.” [laughs] You always ask me a question, like, “Do you know?” I say, “I don't know.”

Melanie Avalon: Well, somebody did this on Instagram and somebody replied, “I did not know that.” [laughs]

Gin Stephens: I did not know that. Yeah, there you go. I did not know that. That's right. That would be what I would say. “No, I did not know that.”

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Somebody commented on how we're opposites and everything. I said I feel like the conversation with that normally goes-- like something comes up and then I say, “See, we're opposites on everything.” Then you say, “No, we're not.” I’m just like, “Okay.” [laughs] But we are.

Gin Stephens: We're not totally the opposite on everything.

Melanie Avalon: See? That's what you always say. [laughs] It cracks me up.

Gin Stephens: Well, we're not.

Melanie Avalon: I know. I know. Okay, goodness, good times. In any case, for listeners, if you'd like to submit your own questions to the show, you can directly email questions@ifpodcast.com or you can go to ifpodcast.com and you can submit questions there. The show notes will be at ifpodcast.com/episode208. You can follow us on Instagram, our unverified Instagrams. I’m MelanieAvalon, Gin is GinStephens. Anything from you, Gin, before we go?

Gin Stephens: Nope, Not a thing. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: All right.

Gin Stephens: I'm going to start doing some wacky answers. Let me think.

Melanie Avalon: I’ll be ready.

Gin Stephens: Okay, next time.

Melanie Avalon: Okay. I'm going to be ready. All right. Well, I will talk to you next week.

Gin Stephens: All right, you too. Bye-bye.

Melanie Avalon: Bye.

Thank you so much for listening to The Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Please remember that everything discussed on the show is not medical advice. We're not doctors. You can also check out our other podcasts, Intermittent Fasting Stories, and the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Theme music was composed by Leland Cox. See you next week.

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TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Welcome to Episode 207 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, author of What When Wine: Lose Weight and Feel Great with Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, and Wine. And I’m here with my cohost, Gin Stephens, author of Delay, Don't Deny: Living an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle. For more on us, check out ifpodcast.com, melanieavalon.com, and ginstephens.com. Please remember, the thoughts and opinions on this podcast do not constitute medical advice or treatment. So, pour yourself a cup of black coffee, a mug of tea or even a glass of wine, if it's that time, and get ready for The Intermittent Fasting Podcast.

Hi friends, Gin and I talk about the importance of gut health all the time on this show. You guys know we are obsessed with the gut microbiome. There's also a lot of confusion out there surrounding probiotics. There are so many different probiotics. It can be so hard to know what to take. I personally have actually experimented with a lot of probiotics over the years. A lot. You guys know me. Did you know there's only one probiotic that I have consistently taken almost every single day, since I found it? It's a nonnegotiable. I see, such radical improvements in my gut health, when I take this probiotic, and it's not just me, you guys, and my audience tell me all the time about how you feel this way as well. That is P3-OM. What is P3-OM? It's a patented probiotic that actually eats up excess sugar, eliminates bad bacteria fast, and protects your gut from inflammation and viruses. What initially made me so intrigued by this probiotic is that it is proteolytic meaning it can actually digest protein. I even saw a video on the BiOptimizers website of the probiotic digesting a steak. Yes, a steak.

P3-OM has also been shown to improve digestion, speed up metabolism, and increase energy throughout the day. What also makes it unique is that it can survive the gastrointestinal tract, and it goes through your whole body to support both your gut and your entire immune response. It's a secret weapon for reducing or eliminating bad gas and upgrading your immunity and protection against bad bacteria. It's personally one of my go-to tools in my biohacking arsenal. I have some fantastic news for you guys. You can get 10% off P3-OM right now, when you go to p3om.com/ifpodcast and type in the coupon code, IFPODCAST10. By the way, if you order it and it's not everything you hoped for, the BiOptimizers support team will give you all your money back, no questions asked. To get that discount, just go to p3om.com/ifpodcast to get a 10% discount on one of my favorite probiotics P3-OM with the coupon code, IFPODCAST10. We'll put all this information in the show notes. One more thing before we jump in.

Are you concerned about aging? Well, thankfully, fasting is super incredible for its anti-aging benefits. It activates genes in your body called sirtuins, which repair your body and help extend lifespan. Also, during the fast, your body can clean up a lot of harmful chemicals which may be taxing your detoxification systems. In fact, the reason people go gray is because their detox systems start producing a lot of hydrogen peroxide when dealing with toxins. Do you know where a lot of those chemicals come from? Your skincare and makeup. As it turns out, there are thousands of compounds found in conventional skincare and makeup that Europe has banned due to their toxic nature and the US has banned less than 10. When you put these on your skin every single day through your skincare and makeup, you're adding to your body's burden and likely aging your skin faster.

Thankfully, you can easily clean up your skincare with a company called Beautycounter. They make incredible products that are extensively tested to be safe for your skin. You can feel good about every single ingredient that you put on. They also have an amazing anti-aging line called Countertime. Friends, this is a game-changer. It's full of active ingredients which nourish and support your skin, reduce fine lines and wrinkles, and support a beautiful glow. It also has a safe alternative to retinol, so you can get all of the anti-aging benefits of retinol without any of the toxic effects of retinol, because yes, that stuff is toxic. Guys, put it away now.

You can shop with us at melanieavalon.com/beautycounter. If you use that link, something really special and magical might happen after you place your first order. Also definitely get on my clean beauty email list that's at melanieavalon.com/cleanbeauty. I give away so many free things on that list. So definitely check it out.

Lastly, if you anticipate making safe skincare a part of your future, just like Gin and I do, definitely become a Band of Beauty member. It's sort of like the Amazon Prime for safe skincare. You get 10% back on all of your purchases, free shipping on qualifying orders, and a welcome gift, that costs way more than the price of the membership. It's completely worth it. Friends, are you fasting clean inside and out? You can with Beautycounter. Again, that link is melanieavalon.com/beautycounter. And we'll put all this information in the show notes. All right, now back to the show.

Hi, everybody and welcome. This is Episode number 207 of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast. I’m Melanie Avalon, and I’m here with Gin Stephens.

Gin Stephens: Hi, everybody.

Melanie Avalon: How are you today, Gin?

Gin Stephens: I am worn out. I am riding high on a bunch of emotions, good emotions, scary emotions, all sorts of emotions.

Melanie Avalon: That's good.

Gin Stephens: [laughs] Do you want me to elaborate a little bit?

Melanie Avalon: Yes, would you like to elaborate?

Gin Stephens: Well, we're recording this in mid-March. Yesterday, I finally announced to the public in the advanced group on Facebook, the project that I’m working on since the beginning of the year, and that was, I have launched Delay, Don’t Deny social network off of Facebook. It's a membership-based platform. Yes, members do need to pay to join. It's $4.99 a month. If you, what's the word, amortize your membership, it's $59.95 a year, and you join and that works out to $4.99 a month, if you join for the year as a founding member. Yes, it's a membership site. Now, we're all together, I have all the spinoff groups going on. It's hard to explain. I was letting people start spinoff groups. We had one spinoff group over there, and another spin off group over there, and I felt like I was losing touch with the community. Does that make sense?

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm.

Gin Stephens: I didn't have time to manage-- Facebook takes a lot to manage groups. You have membership requests, you have posts to approve, you have people coming in, they don't know who you are, why they're there. It takes a lot of work to manage it. We've got over 100 groups on the new platform. The address is dddsocialnetwork.com. DDD for Delay, Don’t-Deny. dddsocialnetwork.com. Like I said, we have over 100 groups, and they're not all intermittent fasting. We've got groups for different fasting styles, one meal a day, alternate daily fasting, the hybrid approach, but we also have a paleo group, Melanie. We have a vegetarian group. No matter how anybody eats, we've got a group for it. We've got hobbies, we've got different exercise styles. We've got a group for people who are interested in starting podcasts and writers, because a lot of people in my community have started podcasts and written books, which is one of the things, I’m a teacher, nothing makes me prouder than seeing other people create content. Does that make sense? Like inspired, they're like, “Well, Gin did a podcast, I can do a podcast,” or, “Gin wrote a book and self-published it. Melanie wrote a book and self-published it, and I can do that too.”

I feel like in a way the Delay, Don’t Deny community has been an incubator for some of these amazing people that I've connected with in the groups. Graeme Currie, he's got a great podcast called The Fasting Highway, and he started off just in my group. He's written a book. He's from Australia. We'll have a group for people who want to do stuff like that, so they can connect and talk about platforms and the process. We even have a group about dogs and cats if you're a pet lover. [laughs] The tag line is we want to be your favorite social network, because we really do. We were on Facebook, we've been on it for so long, but it's gotten a little harder to navigate, and the artificial intelligence has gotten a little weird lately. Like over Christmas in the Life Lessons group, we had some weird, we got something that Facebook was like, “This post does not-- it goes against community standards. Please review it.” I’m like, “Oh, my God, that sounds so scary.” I went to review it, it was covered up with a mask and how Facebook will cover something. Have you ever seen that?

Melanie Avalon: No.

Gin Stephens: Well, if they think it might be questionable, they're like, “Click on it on your own risk.” I’m like, “What was someone trying to post?” I clicked on it to see what it was that was so questionable and objectionable. It was a Christmas bow tutorial.

Melanie Avalon: That’s strange.

Gin Stephens: The artificial intelligence called it drug paraphernalia, but it was bows made of raffia. The artificial intelligence is also picking up on certain words as hate speech and bullying, like one of the moderators got put in Facebook Jail for clicking on something incorrectly, and then she said, “Oops, I apologize. I must have fat thumbs.” They put on Facebook Jail and said it was hate speech. Clearly, it wasn't, fat thumbs is a saying.

Melanie Avalon: I didn't know there was a Facebook Jail.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I've been In Facebook Jail before. I liked too many things too quickly?

Melanie Avalon: Okay, yes.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, the artificial intelligence--

Melanie Avalon: I've commented too much before.

Gin Stephens: Yes, the artificial intelligence looks for people who are doing things too rapidly. You have to take things slowly on Facebook. So, ever since then if I'd make a post and 100 people comment, I just want to go like, like, like, like, like, no, you cannot do that. I lost the ability to post for 24 hours, when I was in Facebook Jail that time. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: It's weird when it happens in your own group, like it's your group, because it's done that to me, I’m like, “Wait, but this is my group. I should be able to post whenever I want.”

Gin Stephens: You can't though. It's just a million little things like that. You hear stories. My friend Sheri that does the Life Lessons podcast with me. She has a friend, who was running a cooking group. It had like 10,000 members, was a cooking group. She woke up one morning, and her cooking group had been removed from Facebook, and she had been blocked from Facebook, like her account was deactivated, based on something that had happened in the cooking group overnight. I realized that we're at the whim of a platform. Now, I’m not knocking Facebook, because we have enjoyed being there for years and it has helped us grow this wonderful community. I will always have love for that platform, and what it allowed us to build. But at the same time, that terrified me that, I have that one group, the 300,000 plus member group that if something went really terribly wrong-

Melanie Avalon: Right, it could just disappear.

Gin Stephens: -it could disappear and I wouldn't be able to contact those 300,000 people at all. I don't have their email addresses, I don't know, would they ever find me again? I don't know. I’m one of those worst-case scenario people, like what could go wrong, always think about that. I’m like. “I don't want to lose this community that I've built.” We started the new platform, launched it yesterday-- Yeah, there's been some positives and some growing pains with it, not everyone was thrilled that I was starting a membership site, because people say-- well, rightly so, intermittent fasting is free and intermittent fasting continues to be free. However, starting a paid platform is very, very expensive, and Facebook is free, but why is it free?

Melanie Avalon: Ads.

Gin Stephens: It's got ads, they're selling you data, you're the product honestly. If you're on Facebook, you're the product and I’ve been okay with that for myself personally for all these years knowing that Facebook was looking at my data, and whatever, showing me ads, I lived with that for the free platform. But for me to have a platform, it is most certainly not free, because I’m not going to be selling your data and showing you ads, and there's a lot of costs involved in it, so it has to be paid. Anyway, I’m sad about any pushback, because I just made this fabulous community and I want everyone to be like, “Oh my God, I love it.” [laughs] So far, positive people are in there. We've got almost 1000 members on day two. It's just so exciting watching people find their community. Also, some of people that I know that had left Facebook for whatever reason, one of my trusted moderators who I love so much, he's a comedian, people may remember him, John McDonald from the Intermittent Fasting Stories Podcast. He left Facebook completely for personal reasons with his family, but he's joined the new platform. It's so good to reconnect with people that I had lost touch with, it feels amazing.

Melanie Avalon: I made a profile. I’m going to come in.

Gin Stephens: Well, people are waiting for you, because we made a Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast group.

Melanie Avalon: Group.

Gin Stephens: Yes. There's a group that you're in.

Melanie Avalon: Are there people in it?

Gin Stephens: Yeah, you want to know how many members are in, I can tell you right now.

Melanie Avalon: How many?

Gin Stephens: How many people have joined it? Hold on, I got to pull up the-- We're also going to have an app. The app is not out yet. Right now, I'm on my iPhone looking at it. Let's see Melanie. but right now, it's pretty easy to use in mobile on the iPhone. Melanie Avalon, you've got 63 members.

Melanie Avalon: Oh. Okay, now I am very much alert. I mean I was already alert, but let me go see.

Gin Stephens: Let’s see how many are on the Intermittent-- we have an Intermittent Fasting podcast group. Let me search for that one. Anyway, what I’m saying is, I’m certain that we probably have listeners, who are not on Facebook for whatever reason. Not everybody's on Facebook. My sister for example never joined Facebook ever, like ever, in her whole entire life never joined Facebook. From day one, she's like, “For some reason, I don't like that,” so she didn't join. People, that just never joined or didn't want to, we have a place for you now. We have 77 members right now in the Intermittent Fasting Podcast group. We can all get together there, and we also have something called the Podcast Enthusiasts Lounge, where you can go and talk about any podcast you want. If you say, “Oops, fat thumbs, I didn't mean to click that,” we don't even care. If you like things really quickly, go for it, like them as fast as you want.

Melanie Avalon: It's very exciting. Congratulations.

Gin Stephens: It is very exciting. Thank you. I didn't sleep last night, I tossed and turned, I thought, “Have I ruined-- Did I mess up? Is this wrong?” Like I said, I’m very much a people pleaser. I want to do things that make people happy. I’m like, “Look what I created for you. Aren't y'all excited?” “No, no, we're not excited. We hate it. Don't create this thing.” Anyway, ah, now I can take a breath, and the people that are there are very happy to be there, and the people who don't want to join, don't have to join. That's the thing,

Melanie Avalon: Listeners, friends, you can all join, we can put links to it in the show notes. That's very exciting.

Gin Stephens: That'd be awesome. dddsocialnetwork.com. It is very exciting.

Melanie Avalon: I can't even imagine, the logistics and everything that you have to go through to do that, so it's very exciting.

Gin Stephens: Well, setting up those groups was a lot. We thought about what would someone want? What could people want? We actually had a little survey and like, “If you were wanting to join a group, what would you want it to be?” I didn't tell anybody what it was. We got the ideas from members, and then we thought of more just on our own. We've got about 55 moderators/facilitators in there, plus a whole lot of members growing by the minute. I’m just very excited, because I love community. That's really it. The whole reason I started this with my first Facebook group back in 2015, before I'd even written a book, I didn't have a master plan, I’m going to write books, I’m going to have podcasts. No. I started a community, and that was the whole point of it. That's what I’m doing here. Everybody, you're welcome to join my community, I'd love to have you or don't join the community. Intermittent Fasting is still free. If you want to be with us on the platform, join us. I’m not closing down the Facebook groups, though I am going to be very busy with the new platform. The Facebook groups are still going. If you're a member, I’m not going to lock you out. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I was going to ask you that if you're keeping--

Gin Stephens: I might not answer all as much, because I’m going to be on this new place, because these people have joined and I can just take a deep breath, I don't have to approve posts, I don't have to approve members. You just join, there you are, you can do what you want, you can come and go. You can join 100 groups if you want to.

Melanie Avalon: That's exciting.

Gin Stephens: It is very exciting. You don't have to see what you don't want to see. In the advanced group, we've been talking a lot about Zoe, the Zoe app with the personalized nutrition and the gut microbiome testing and the CGM. Some people don't want to see that. They're like, “I’m really frustrated seeing all this talk about Zoe, because I just want to keep it simple.” Well, now you don't have to see it. You don't go to the Zoe group, but we have a Zoe group for people who do.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, that makes sense.

Gin Stephens: It does. I think it's nice. I’m so excited. Scared, yes, and excited. All the feels. I have all the feels. I have cried, I have laughed, I have cheered. I didn't sleep at all last night.

Melanie Avalon: Another reason, you know what happened last night?

Gin Stephens: The time change?

Melanie Avalon: Yes. That's when you realize you really are a night person. When you don't know the time change is going to happen, and then you get really confused, because all of a sudden, I was like, “Wow, that hour went by so fast.”

Gin Stephens: Oh, because you were awake?

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I looked at the clock and it was 3:00, I was like, “What happened?” [laughs] Yeah, not a fan.

Gin Stephens: I really tossed and turn, because I started having doubts. Do you ever do that? Do you have doubts? I’m like lying on the bed, we had 400 and something members join yesterday, and I was having these doubts. I was like, “What have I done? What if everyone hates it? What if no one is there?” Anyway, but I woke up today, got refreshed, and I started reading what people had been posting, and seeing how they were joining the groups, and everyone was excited, and then people were coming in that I hadn't seen in a long time. It felt like a big party, that I’m like, “Okay, now I can relax,” except I had this book deadline. Why did I do this at the same time that I have a book deadline? I don't know, I might be crazy.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I have no comment. That was some [laughs] interesting choice of timing.

Gin Stephens: Well, all of a sudden, I had that thought in my head that something could happen to my group. I was panicked. I was like, “I got to protect these groups,” so that move to the front burner. Honestly, I really was like, “I've got to do this now,” because it's too late. If I don't, and then something happened, something's probably not going to happen. I know that it probably won't, but it could. Did you know they shut down a bunch of essential oil groups?

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm.

Gin Stephens: Like all in one fell swoop. One of my members was telling me about it. When somebody like, “Nobody's shutting down groups, unless they're bad, dangerous groups.” This girl was like, “Well, I was on a bunch of essential oil groups, and they all got shut down because Facebook decided essential oils were dangerous,” and maybe they are, if you use them incorrectly, but isn't fasting, kind of like that, too? Couldn't fasting be dangerous if you use it incorrectly?

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm.

Gin Stephens: The answer is yes. Google restricts what it shows you now when you search, it has chosen which health people they're going to show you in, which health people they're not going to show you based on certain criteria. I felt like we might have a tenuous existence on a platform, that we couldn't 100% count on tomorrow, I’m going to wake up and my groups are going to be there. I’m 99.99% sure tomorrow I’m going to wake up and my groups will be there. But once I had in my mind that maybe they wouldn't be, I’m sure the essential oil people didn't know they were all going to be gone. It's almost like I wish they had told them, “Hey, we're going to remove your groups and one month, you have one month to figure something else out,” that would have been a good thing. I would have-- if only.

Melanie Avalon: Actually, that reminds me of a fun little fact I learned by listening to a podcast.

Gin Stephens: What is that?

Melanie Avalon: Do you know what the difference is between fear and anxiety?

Gin Stephens: Well, no.

Melanie Avalon: As it relates to this conversation?

Gin Stephens: I can't wait to hear though, because I think I have felt fear and anxiety.

Melanie Avalon: Fear is when you are aware of something bad happening, and you have the fear response. Anxiety is not knowing what is going to happen, and having the response, but then it's like, chronic, because--

Gin Stephens: I did have both.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: I had fear because I saw people who were not happy with me. They were not happy that I would do this, and that really hurt my feelings, because I’m like, “Look, number one, it came from the place of, I don't want to lose our community, how am I going to keep that from happening, just in case,” but nobody's making anybody join it. I didn't click archive group on Facebook nearby, come over here. Didn't close the group. My wording may be when I announced it, gave people some things to worry about, because I said, “We're not sure the future of how these groups are going to work on Facebook,” because clearly, I’m one person. I can't be here and there and everywhere all over the place. [laughs] Sometimes, I have to eat, and sleep, and take a shower. We're not closing the groups down, but, yeah, I had fear from backlash, like I made a huge mistake. But then, I saw the love. There was so much love. This morning, I woke up to so much love and there's so much positivity surrounding the new community that I can just let the rest go. The fear is gone. I still have some anxiety, but no more fear.

Melanie Avalon: That is fabulous.

Gin Stephens: Yes. Anything new with you? I’m sorry. I just rambled for 18 minutes, but-- [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: The only thing is I never travel ever, and I travelled somewhere, and I lost my Oura ring.

Gin Stephens: Oh, no. 

Melanie Avalon: I’m so sad. I'm so sad. I did something that I never do, because I don't-- We talked about this. You like jewelry, right?

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I wear earrings every day, and I have on my wedding ring every day.

Melanie Avalon: Yes, I don't ever really wear jewelry. They have an Oura ring that has diamonds in it. I was like, “If I’m going to get one piece of nice jewelry that I wear every day of my life,” so I upgraded, and I got that.

Gin Stephens: Oh, no, and you lost it.

Melanie Avalon: No, I didn't lose that one. I lost the one I had. I decided to buy a new one, because--

Gin Stephens: I thought you upgraded to the really expensive one and then lost it.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, I would be crushed.

Gin Stephens: That's what I thought you did.

Melanie Avalon: They're already pretty expensive normally, but yes. I think listeners think we get all the things for free all the time, but we don't. I have to purchase things. But that's how much I love it. I was like, it's not a question I’m buying a new one right now, and then I realized, I really want the one with the diamonds. I learned don't wear it on your ring finger, because then you look married or it looks like a wedding ring.

Gin Stephens: I probably would agree with that. I mean, unless who cares? Why do you care if people think you're married, right? That could be a plus.

Melanie Avalon: True.

Gin Stephens: Keep in mind. I've been wearing a ring on my wedding ring finger since I was 21. It's been a long time. 30 years I've had this ring on my finger.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, my goodness. It's ironic. I lost it, and I actually interviewed the CEO, again for Part Two episode a few days later. I’m airing it very soon, because I wanted it to be timely. If listeners are interested in Oura ring and learning more, I'll put a link in the show notes to that second interview that I just did with him.

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Melanie Avalon: Shall we jump into everything fasting related?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: To start things off, we have a question from Jamie. The subject is “Whoosh.” Jamie says, “When on average does someone, women get the whoosh effect, losing a bunch of weight at once, two weeks in and I've only lost one pound, where my husband has lost 17 pounds.”

Gin Stephens: All right. That's a great question. First of all, let's talk about what is the whoosh? We've talked about it before, but I want to talk about it again. The whoosh effect is when-- let's think about in our bodies biologically, we lose fat at a pretty slow rate, even if you're doing a complete fast, or you're eating nothing, your body probably is only going to lose about half a pound of fat a day max really for fat burning. Keep that in mind. That's like we're not usually losing about half a pound of fat a day with doing an intermittent fasting lifestyle. Let's say, you get on the scale and you don't see your weight change, you don't see your weight change, you don't see your weight change, you don't see your weight change, and then you get on one day and it's down five pounds. Did you just lose five pounds of fat overnight? No, you did not. You had a whoosh.

You had lost fat slowly, but something was hiding that fat loss. We were pretty sure that your body does something with water during the fat loss process, but not everybody has the same experience. Some people never whoosh. They just have a slow and steady down, down, down over time. They have this nice little graph, they're pretty linearly down. Most people don't, but some people do. Whereas someone who whooshes might look more like a stair step, where you have it's just the same, the same, the same, the same and then down. Then the same, the same, and same and then down, like that. I mean, you might zigzag up and down. I tended to have the pattern where I would go way down, and then I would go back up a little and stay there for a while, then I would go way down, then I would go up a little. Mine’s like the stock market's going down a little bit. Why does this happen?

As I said, we have the theory that it's something to do with water balance, because people will notice, maybe they have to get up in the middle the night to go to the bathroom a lot, and then the next morning they're lower. The water is coming from somewhere. There's one theory that I don't think is true, and that theory is that the body is actually putting water in your fat cells. I haven't been able to find any scientific basis for that, and I've heard scientists who are smarter about the body than me saying, “No, that's not what's happening.” Could they be wrong? Could that be what's happening? I don't know.

Melanie Avalon: One of the ones that sounded plausible to me was I think the glycerol. One thing I was reading online, his theory was that fat when we break it down, it breaks it down into glycerol. Is it fatty acids and glycerol? I think so. He says it takes a while for the body to process glycerol and glycerol attracts water.

Gin Stephens: Oh, that makes sense.

Melanie Avalon: It's like you burning the fat, you burn the fatty acid part of the fat-- and I might be wrong with a fatty acid is the other component, I think it is. Then the glycerol takes backlogs and as we process, in the meantime, it's stored with water or attracts water.

Gin Stephens: It's not happening in the fat cell, right?

Melanie Avalon: I’m not sure where the glycerol is?

Gin Stephens: Something's happening with water, we know that. [chuckles] It's somewhere. I also have talked about it before here, I have a hunch. It could be in your lymphatic system, which is the body's sewage system, because as you're clearing out a fat cell, fats not the only stuff that's in there, you've also got a lot of toxins and weird stuff that your body shoved in there. You shove junk under your bed, your body shoves junk into your fat cells when it doesn't know what else to do with it. Toxins do come out, and your body has all that going around in your lymphatic system, and then it can flush it out all at once. You may have puffy fingers, we've all experienced this, puffy ankles, your face might be puffy. That's water retention happening in your tissues, and then whoosh, you wake up and that's gone.

Jamie, not everyone gets a whoosh. Don't expect you're going to get one. But let's address the fact that you're two weeks in and you've only lost one pound. If you think back to the 28-Day FAST Start-- if you read Fast. Feast. Repeat, in the 28-Day FAST Start, I’m very, very emphatic about do not expect any weight loss for the first 28 days, because the first 28 days are the time for your body to adjust to the clean fast, and that's it, your body's not great at tapping into fat stores yet. It may lose a great deal of inflammation, like with your husband with 17 pounds in two weeks. He did not lose 17 pounds of fat in two weeks. I know that we would like to, we don't lose fat that quickly. But even if that's a lot of that's inflammation of water weight, 17 pounds is a lot of mass. Imagine how good it would feel to lose 17 pounds, whatever it is, water weight, inflammation, I know he feels better, but we don't lose fat that quickly.

Just understand that your body is doing what it's doing behind the scenes, and the scale doesn't always reflect that. The scale can go up because of water, it can go down because of water. It can go up if you're gaining fat, but it can go down if you're losing fat, but it can also stay the same while you're losing fat because you're also regaining water. The scale can really just confuse you.

Melanie Avalon: Yes, 100%. Did you read Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto?

Gin Stephens: No, I read Marty Kendall’s critique of it. I really like Marty Kendall. By the way, Marty, we talked about him on the podcast. I think that came out maybe last week, we're recording. It's several weeks ago in podcast world land, but in the real world, it was like last week. Marty listened and he was like, “Oh, thank y’all for talking about me.” Anyway.

Melanie Avalon: On our show?

Gin Stephens: Yeah, when we talked about Marty Kendall and his Optimising Nutrition site, but I read Marty Kendall’s blog post about The Case for Keto.

Melanie Avalon: I finished his book about it. So good. So good. I'm like three fourths of the way through, Gary Taubes.

Gin Stephens: He's coming on your podcast, right?

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm. I’m so excited. I want to air them back-to-back, like air Marty's and Gary's. I don't know what order I put them-- I guess it depends how that conversation goes.

Gin Stephens: I’m going to tell you Marty Kendall is brilliant, and you would think by reading-- he has a book called Keto Myths or something. You would think by reading the title of whatever, I can't remember the name of--

Melanie Avalon: Big Fat Keto Lies.

Gin Stephens: Yes, Big Fat Keto Lies, you would think by reading it, he was anti-keto, and he's not. He is busting some keto myths, like if you're having trouble losing fat, eat a lot more fat. He's saying some things that need to be heard in the keto community. I actually think some people are listening. One of the big guys, I can't remember which one of my moderators showed me one of the big keto people, might have been the Diet Doctor guy, the guy who runs Diet Doctor. He was somebody really big, well known. I just can't remember, my brain is full. Made some post, I don’t know if it was a tweet, I don't know where it was, but she showed me a screenshot of it, where he said that, he had lowered his fat intake or something and increased his protein. He was getting leaner than ever, he’d stopped eating so much fat. I’m like, “That's huge.”

Melanie Avalon: I think it's one of the biggest misconceptions. This is something I’m going to ask Gary, this is the question I want to ask him, because it's probably the biggest takeaway I took from Marty. It’s the biggest paradigm shift I had about insulin after reading Marty's book, and now reading Gary's book. He talks about this completely, but he doesn't draw the same conclusion and it's really haunting me, and it's the fact that this has made me completely rethink insulin, its main purpose is not to store fat. Marty talks about this, which I'd never realized before.

Gin Stephens: Well, it's antilipolytic, which means if you have high insulin, you're going to have a hard time burning fat.

Melanie Avalon: Its main purpose is not to store fat. Its main purpose is to stop fat from being released. It's putting on the brakes--

Gin Stephens: To fat release. It's putting the brakes rather than shoving it in. That's a very good point. We read so many times that people are saying insulin is shoving the fat in or shoving sugar in something.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, it could because its main purpose-- and this is something that Marty pointed out that I hadn't really thought of. Fat doesn't elicit at all or barely any of an insulin release, and so they reached the conclusion that because it doesn't release insulin that it's not easily stored as fat. What Marty argues is the reason it doesn't release insulin is, because it doesn't need insulin to be stored as fat. It was just the complete opposite idea of what people are drawing the conclusion from. They're saying, “Oh, unlimited fat because it doesn't require insulin.” Right, it doesn't require insulin because it just gets stored without it, which is huge. Basically, insulin’s purpose is to deal with the toxicity of sugar in the bloodstream. If insulin wasn't there, we would just be burning fat and then we'd have an overload of fuel in our bloodstream, and so when we eat carbs, the body needs to burn it immediately, because too much sugar glycates and is toxic. It needs to shut down all other potential sources of fuel going into the bloodstream, which is from our fat cells and from the storage of carbs. Insulin is just closing the doors.

Gin Stephens: The traffic cop saying no.

Melanie Avalon: I've been thinking about it. It's like if you live in an apartment, I've been thinking about this, and the hallway is your bloodstream and then the doors to all the apartments are your fat cells and normally the doors are open and stuff is going in and out of the rooms, but once carbohydrates enter the bloodstream, insulin is like, “Nope, shut all the doors so that nothing else can come out and we can just deal with this these carbs right now.” What I want to ask Gary, and it helps me articulate this, because I've been thinking about this, but I haven't said it out loud and I want to like--

Gin Stephens: Well, it's also very interesting.

Melanie Avalon: The thing that I want to ask him about is, I mean, he gives that length-- It's basically, if anybody's read any of his books--

Gin Stephens: They're long.

Melanie Avalon: [laughs] Like, I said, I went on a trip this week, it was a four-hour drive both ways, I listened to the audiobook as much as I could both ways, and I was like, “I filled my Gary Taubes quota for quite a while.”

Gin Stephens: Does he read it himself?

Melanie Avalon: No, he doesn't. He's an investigative journalist. He's not a scientist. He's rather telling the history of all of these things. He makes a very good point that actual scientists-- and now I’m going on tangents, but scientists and nutritionists and doctors don't normally ever study the history of everything in detail, because they don't have time, they don't think it's relevant, but he's saying that, “You can't really understand a subject until you know the history of how it got there,” so, that's what he's doing. In any case, with the insulin, he [unintelligible [00:38:32] idea that it stops fat cells from releasing their fuel, but he'll also say a lot throughout the book that the misconceptions we have and how we've oversimplified calories in, calories out, and we say it's just about calories and really it's about insulin, it's really complicated, it's really nuanced, but I feel the simplistic statement he still continues to make is that insulin leads to fat storage. I'm not articulating this well. The insulin is required for fat storage, like that idea still comes through.

Gin Stephens: Okay, yeah, insulin is antilipolytic. It's anti-fat burning. If you want to tap into your fat stores, you don't want to have high insulin, but that doesn't mean you're storing, you're just not burning.

Melanie Avalon: I need to relisten or reread one part, because there's one part where he specifically says this, but I don't know if he's saying it or he was quoting somebody else, but it was the theory that you can't store fat in the absence of insulin, which just seems to not be true. The takeaway that I’m having right now is-- I don't even know if this is worth pondering, but, because he's trying to deconstruct the calories in, calories out model, I don't know if you are at a genuine calorie deficit even with high insulin. Do you think you can gain weight? Maybe you can't ever burn weight.

Gin Stephens: If nothing is coming in, what are you storing the fat--? What's it being made of? We don't create fat out of thin air. Our bodies don't just create fat out of thin air, It's something comes in, our bodies do something with it and store that as fat. Maybe it was fat already, and we just shoved it away.

Melanie Avalon: What I’m thinking is it seems like insulin could make it impossible to burn fat, so you could not possibly lose weight at a calorie deficit, because of high insulin. But I don't know if you could gain weight at a calorie deficit and high insulin, because if you are literally taking in less energy than you're burning, I don't know how you can have a net gain, even if-- I don't know.

Gin Stephens: You were talking about based on what the metabolism is doing. You couldn't.

Melanie Avalon: I mean, your metabolism could slow down.

Gin Stephens: Right, but if you're still burning more than that slowed metabolic rate, I don't think it's possible. No, I don't think so, that wouldn't make sense. The one thing to keep in mind though, let’s think thing about type 1 diabetics. Their bodies are not making insulin, they were unable to gain weight at all. Low insulin, because they're not making it, unable to gain weight. See, that's one of the big examples Fung uses, I think I used it, you hear it so much. That's why we know that high insulin is related to storing. It's a storage hormone.

Melanie Avalon: To clarify, it definitely encourages the storage of carbs as glycogen.

Gin Stephens: People who had type 1 diabetes before anybody knew what type 1 diabetes was, they would just waste away and die because they didn't have enough insulin. Because they could not, no matter how much they ate, their bodies couldn't store anything away. So many questions, so many complicated things going on. Here's what we need to know. The takeaway is we want to keep our insulin low. That's good, but also fat is not free.

Melanie Avalon: So far what I've read, that’s his thesis.

Gin Stephens: His takeaway is fat is free?

Melanie Avalon: Well, I haven't gotten to that yet, if he does say that. His takeaway is that-- I really like this idea, that everybody has a personal insulin threshold, and that if you're at that insulin threshold or below it, you'll be able to burn fat, but if you're above it, you won't be able to.

Gin Stephens: Oh, yeah, I 100% can buy into that theory, because I don't even know if that's like a-- I think that's true. I don't think it's under question. I think that is a fact. It explains-- I’m sure that I had really high insulin for so many years when I was overweight and having trouble gaining weight, and then, Chad, my husband always been slim, I’m sure he's always had low insulin. We had our insulin tested last year. Mine is low now, thanks to fasting, but Chad's was slow. His was lower than mine. I’m like, “Well, no wonder he never gained weight.” His body just makes less insulin. He's not like diabetic, but his body makes less insulin than me. We all have a different threshold with what our body's going to do based on the amount of insulin we have in our fasted insulin level.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, he talks about while fasted, if you release insulin, and how one person, they can think about something really delicious and yummy, and they don't get ravenously hungry, it doesn't make them-- they can handle it, they don't feel they have to have it and they're not craving and shaky and another person does have that response. He was saying that it's from this cephalic insulin, basically in our brain, and depending on your basal insulin, that may or may not be enough insulin release to put you over your personal insulin threshold. If you're wavering around your personal insulin threshold or if you're already past it, and then you think of something really delicious, then your brain releases cephalic insulin, which is basically some insulin that's primed and ready just to be released, and that might be an--

Gin Stephens: It's anticipating food’s coming in.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, exactly. Then it releases that, and then that puts your personal insulin threshold high enough that, it just shuts off the fat cells’ ability to release fat, so then you're not giving any fatty acid fuel. It's really interesting. I’m really excited to interview him.

Gin Stephens: One thing that Marty really helped me understand-- also with Zoe, if I put together Marty and Zoe, it really helps me understand a lot about my body. Marty talks about energy toxicity and having too much energy in your blood, whether it's fat or ketones or glucose. You're having a lot of energy in your bloodstream from any source is not good. I never did feel well when I did keto, that summer of 2014. I felt awful the whole time. I also felt very inflamed and puffy, and I just didn't feel good. Zoe taught me, when I did the study with them, that my body doesn't clear fat quickly. They tell you that if your body doesn't clear fat quickly, then too much fat is inflammatory for your body. I’m like, “Well, that makes perfect sense.” It explains why I didn't feel well when I was doing keto, because I was taking in a whole lot of energy, my body didn't clear it very quickly, and so I’m sure I had a ton of fat circulating in my bloodstream that I was taking in, and I wasn't clearing it. Of course, I also didn't release any fat. I didn't lose any weight. All those butter coffees I was chugging, they were keeping my energy levels topped up in my bloodstream, my body had no need to release any fat.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, wait, speaking of, since we recorded last, I did release that episode with Dave Asprey speaking of butter coffee. Listeners, I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. You can check that out. I think my favorite chart-- because Marty has a lot of really great charts in his book, my favorite one is the one that shows “preferred order of burning different fuels.”

Gin Stephens: By the way, I like Marty so very much that even in the new platform, the DDD Social Network, I have a data-driven fasting group over there. For anybody who's following Marty, because a lot of my people have followed Marty, especially since I interviewed somebody on the podcast that talked about him, and then I interviewed Marty. It hasn't come out yet. A lot of people were like, “Hey, I want to learn about that.” Anyway, so data driven-fasting in the DDD Social Network.

Melanie Avalon: This is not the full chart. The full chart is on a different page. The full chart that I saw included alcohol and ketones, I think the order was-- when alcohol and ketones were included, I think it was alcohol and ketones, and then, which is the order of that the body preferentially burns the fuel substrates in our body. I think it was alcohol and ketones, and then glucose in your blood, and then liver and muscle glycogen. I have to ask him about that, because I don't think muscle glycogen would be right there. I think that's incorrect. Then, free fatty acids in your blood and then body fat. So, body fat is basically at the very, very, very last resort.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, our body doesn't want to dig in. I love Jason Fung’s analogy that it's in the freezer in the basement. I’m not going to go down to that basement freezer unless I have to. That's the body to not wanting to-- but it's there, we can get to it if we have to. We just have to give the right environment for the body to tap into your fat.

Melanie Avalon: 100%.

Gin Stephens: Not as easy as it sounds though. [laughs] Ready for the next one?

Melanie Avalon: Sorry for the tangents. Mm-hmm.

Gin Stephens: No, it was good. I think it's all been very interesting. We have a question from Daniella. The subject is “Collagen/Vitamins.” She says, “When breaking a 19- to 20-hour fast, can I start with my collagen supplement which is powder in water, and gummy vitamins? Please don't judge a grown woman taking gummy vitamins, laugh emoji.” [laughs] I will not. No judging.

Melanie Avalon: Great question, Daniella. The very short and simple answer is yes. The longer answer is, it's a good thing to clarify. I think collagen is something, especially people that are new to fasting, think that it might be something that they can take, while fasting especially, because it's often, “prescribed” to take it the way she's taking it like in water. Collagen is definitely something that’s not fast and friendly. It's a protein, and amino acid, it's going to definitely, definitely break your fast.

Gin Stephens: People like to start in coffee. I don't know why.

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm. I think Dave started that.

Gin Stephens: Oh, did he?

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm. I think way back in the day, because I remember reading him writing about it and he was saying for women in particular it was a good thing.

Gin Stephens: Well, I don't know. It's like, “Why’s everybody wanted to put this in their coffee?”

Melanie Avalon: The good thing about collagen though is, it's very nourishing to your gut. It's actually a really wonderful time to take it right when you're breaking your fast, like Daniella is, and then same, it's fine to take the gummy vitamin. I’m not a huge fan of multivitamins in general. I think, it's better to target specific nutrients. There's so much complexities to vitamins that-- it's hard to find a vitamin that you know is actually doing what you want it to be doing, but that aside, it's fine. Yes, Gin, thoughts?

Gin Stephens: Oh, no. I was just thinking, I’m really hungry and I was like, “Why am I so hungry?” Then, I realized it's 3 PM but my body-- Wait, we sprung forward. See, I get so confused with the time change.

Melanie Avalon: Me too.

Gin Stephens: It's only 2 PM to my body. Then why am I so hungry? Okay, sorry. I just got really hungry.

Melanie Avalon: All the emotions, or all of our talk?

Gin Stephens: Maybe, the stress. I also didn't eat a lot yesterday that must be why. My body might need two meals today. I’m just all of a sudden really starving. All that delicious collagen discussion.

Melanie Avalon: Might have been that cephalic insulin response.

Gin Stephens: I don't know, but all of a sudden, I was like, “I need to eat some food right now.” Anyway, I’m going to go eat some eggs on toast, that sounds delicious.

Melanie Avalon: All right. Next question or do you have thoughts about--

Gin Stephens: No, I really think that's it. I don't take collagen. I sometimes wondered if I’m missing out, because so many people take it, but I don't know.

Melanie Avalon: It can do really wonderful things, especially if you are trying to grow your nails and hair, and then heal your gut lining. It can be really great.

Gin Stephens: Well, I’m of the age where collagen production in our skin goes down, and we start to look saggy. I mean, that's just part of the hormonal changes of being in the postmenopausal years. We've all seen those amazing grandmas on the beach rocking their bikinis, but they're all saggy. I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to have to start to get some collagen maybe,” or I'll just embrace the sag, I don't care.

Melanie Avalon: Well, I think the probably the most important thing about collagen is, it's really important the amino acid balance of the meat that we eat. Today, we tend to eat basically muscle meat, so chicken breasts and lean steak, or even fattier steaks, if it's not shank or something like that. Historically, we probably would have been eating more of the whole animal and getting collagen, which is really important for an anti-inflammatory/amino acid ratio, and building your gut like I said.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, it may be time, but I will keep it in my window. I don't know why I just can't think of the idea of powder and water. Can you take it in like a pill? That's what I’m going to look for. I don't know. I don't want to dissolve anything in water.

Melanie Avalon: When I took it, of course, I just would eat it with my food, I thought it tasted really good. It’s really important in my opinion to get grass-fed collagen. We can put the link in the show notes to some brands that I like.

Gin Stephens: I don't know why, I have a mental thing against it, like I feel it's going to be gross. I don't know why.

Melanie Avalon: It's funny. I love the way it tastes, but I’m weird.

Gin Stephens: I did eat bone marrow, when I was in Charleston.

Melanie Avalon: Was it delicious?

Gin Stephens: Oh, my Lord. It was good. It was at this little restaurant on King Street in Charleston. Man, it was good.

Melanie Avalon: It's one of those things where if you haven't tried it, it might sound gross, or it might sound like, why would you want to eat that?

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I was scared of it, but everybody raved about it on all the reviews.

Melanie Avalon: It tastes like heaven.

Gin Stephens: It was so good.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, well, we agree on a food. [laughs] It's hard to describe the taste. It just tastes like-

Gin Stephens: This is some kind of bone marrow pudding. It was like a bread pudding made of bone marrow.

Melanie Avalon: If you go to Whole Foods or something you can get--

Gin Stephens: Can't.

Melanie Avalon: I was going to say, you can get bones or you can get cuts that have the bone in it, like a shank cut and it'll have that marrow and if you cook it like normal, then you could just eat them marrow plain. It just tastes, oh, my goodness, amazing.

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All right, now back to the show. Shall we go on to our next question?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: This comes from Elizabeth, and the subject is “Starting IF After HCG.” Elizabeth says, “I've read both Delay, Don't Deny and Fast. Feast. Repeat. I discovered you while in the midst of a round of HCG. I am sure IF is for me. My HCG ends this week. My question is, do I need to do the follow-up protein diet and reintroduce carbs, before starting IF, or can I go right to IF after my three days after HCG?”

Gin Stephens: Yeah, that's a great question, and I do want to say, I’m really glad, Elizabeth, that you found us even in the middle of HCG, but I do not recommend HCG. I mean, honestly, you didn't know that because you were already doing it before you found us. I’m not saying, you shouldn't have done it, because you can't go back in time. Does that make sense? [laughs] For anyone who has not done HCG, I highly, highly would not recommend that you do it. I certainly tried it back in my diet days. I didn't do the drops, I did the “Go to the doctor, get the prescription, take the injections,” because the theory made so much sense. It was you're going to tap into your fat stores, because you're using this pregnancy hormone, your body thinks you're pregnant, so that it's going to help you tap into your fat stores better and it does something to your hypothalamus. That's the theory. Keep in mind, this was a long time ago that I was doing this. I was desperate to lose the weight. I was obese, so I get it.

Everyone who has tried these things like HCG, I tried them. I've done them. I lost a lot of weight doing it. Then, that was when I really started the diet yo-yo after that. The diet pills really got me, and I got those from my doctor too. The doctor prescribed diet pills, regained the weight, then I did HCG, got that from a doctor, lost a lot of weight, regained the weight, but then I was really like obese and struggling. It's not supposed to damage your metabolism, but I don't agree with that. I don't think that's true. I think that theory, just on my own personal response, I don't think that it's true. I think it tanked my metabolism, because suddenly, I gained way past any setpoint I'd ever had before, and I was over 200 pounds for the first time ever. Before all the crazy diets, I was hanging out around 160s as my upper limit. Then, I did all these crazy diets with the diet pills and the HCG, and then all of a sudden, my setpoint is now 200 or 180, in that range.

It definitely harmed my body long term. Thank goodness, I think intermittent fasting helped me reverse it. If it were me, Elizabeth, if I were finishing HCG right now today, and discovered intermittent fasting in the middle of it, I think I would go straight into the eating window approach, because you've already been eating practically nothing. Gosh, actually see, I don't know, because I’m thinking maybe the alternate-day fasting approach would be a good one for her, because her metabolism is probably slow. So you want to boost it again. I would probably, I don't know, you've already been eating a very tiny amount. Those are down days. I might would do alternate daily fasting. Down day, up day, down day, up day. As far as are you're going to reintroduce carbs, I don't know. The original doctor that created this protocol, Dr. Simeons, did have you restrict carbs, but I don't know that was like the magic. I think that just kept you from “regaining” that water weight because you lose a lot of water when you're doing a really restrictive diet like HCG. Then carbs, you eat carbs, and it causes your body to retain water. It's like rapid weight gain, but really, it's like a lot of water. Restricting the carbs as you ease back into eating would keep that from happening, which is what he wanted you to do.

Then, he wanted you to crash diet if your weight went up, like eat a tomato or something or have a tomato and steak day or some crazy nonsense like that. If your weight went up, you're supposed to have a steak day. Eat tomatoes all day and need a big steak or fast all day and then eat a steak, I can't even remember.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I think it's a one meal a day steak.

Gin Stephens: With just a steak.

Melanie Avalon: It's like carnivore one meal a day.

Gin Stephens: Maybe, that could be it. I think that actually is, but that's the super-duper crash diet. I am not judging anybody who does it, because I did it. I’m just going back and giving my back in the past self, giving her a hug.

Melanie Avalon: The interesting thing about HCGs, the macros of it are very similar to protein-sparing modified fast, which Gary actually talks about in his book about basically being the only “crash diet” that actually pretty much consistently always works because I think HCG is, isn't it like 500 calories of basically protein?

Gin Stephens: A day, yep.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. If it were me, I would probably just jump into IF, but maybe start with a longer eating window and making sure that you're eating a lot.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, maybe so, because I was thinking about that too. I almost went that direction. It's hard to know either way, coming from the perspective of your metabolism slowed after all that crash dieting.

Melanie Avalon: I just feel I need to be saying this more when we're getting questions especially from people who are hungry or trying to boost their metabolism, focusing on protein I think is so, so important. That's another one of the Big Fat Keto Lies that Marty talks about, is people think fat is satiating, protein is the macronutrient that is most satiating. I think focusing on protein can be really, really important for boosting metabolism and for weight loss, because it's the best of both worlds in that regard, and that it fills you up the most of any food, but it's not very likely to be stored as fat like we don't preferentially store protein as fat. Oh, actually, I don't know if it was in Marty's book. I think it was Marty's book. He mentioned a study about whey, and even in a study where they added in excess calories through processed whey protein, excess calories, the participants did not gain weight from it which I actually would have thought maybe they would when it's fat processed.

Gin Stephens: Because it was whey.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, and it's whey, which is very--

Gin Stephens: Dairy droved.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, it's growth promoting. Protein is a really good macronutrient to focus on if you're trying to lose weight, trying to be full. It's probably why I’ve been eating such a high-- I eat such a high protein diet for so long. But yeah, I will probably just jump into IF with a longer eating window. Especially if you're worried about gaining back a lot of weight after that, that's another reason I would really focus on protein. So, I would encourage you, Elizabeth, not to go crazy, and if you're eating tons of carbs and tons of fat, it's very likely that you might gain back a large part of-- not just water, you might gain back in fat a large part of what you lost. If you want to maintain whatever you did lose, I would really focus on protein and then looking at your macros.

Gin Stephens: I wouldn't just reintroduce all the things. That's a tricky one.

Melanie Avalon: I know.

Gin Stephens: I’m glad that you found us, Elizabeth, that makes me really-- or Beth. She goes by Beth. I’m glad you found us, Beth, and don't be scared if your weight goes back up a little bit, don't blame the intermittent fasting. Blame the HCG and know that it's going to go back up a little bit, and then it might take a little while longer for you to actually start burning fat well and start really losing more weight, just because your body's got to learn to trust you again. You definitely don't want to do intermittent fasting in a way that's also overly restrictive. That won't be helpful. Can I get something off my chest real quick?

Melanie Avalon: Sure.

Gin Stephens: I’m so frustrated by the whole women shouldn't do intermittent fasting at certain times of the month or we’re too fragile a flower to do intermittent fasting. That is really becoming more and more out there as just common knowledge, but I don't think it's true. I think women should not be overly restrictive with their diet. The fact that all of a sudden, we're like, “Well that means intermittent fasting is out,” intermittent fasting that is overly restrictive is the problem, but that doesn't mean no woman should ever do intermittent fasting during our cycles. I don't know. Maybe they haven't eaten with me. I eat a lot of food. [laughs] Nobody's telling those women not to do a 1200 calorie a day diet. That's overly restrictive, a traditional diet.

Melanie Avalon: I agree as well. I was also just thinking one of the other things people say. People say it's too hard for women especially to eat enough protein. I was just thinking about. It's probably really hard if you're not focusing on protein and so you're eating a lot of fat with it, or a lot of-- carbs might make it easier to a lot protein, but I think people focus so much on fat a lot of the times that that would make it harder to eat a lot of protein.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, just over-restriction is really hard on a woman's body. Over-restriction is hard on our body. But to then say, “Well, then women shouldn't fast certain times of the month,” I don't buy that argument. Even though some really well-known voices that I respect are starting to say that more it's common knowledge, I disagree. Anyway.

Melanie Avalon: I don't feel good when I’m not doing my fasting. This is me personally. I don't feel it helps my hormones. I feel much better hormonally during my fasting window, like hands down. But everybody's individual, that said, I do think there might be some women who do better with--

Gin Stephens: Yep. Particularly if they struggle with eating sufficiently, because they've trained themselves to be a dieter for example, and they're a restrained eater. If someone eats like a bird, tiny little amounts of it, maybe they just naturally can't eat a lot at one time. Okay, then they might need a longer window. It's not the fasting that's the problem, it's the fact that you can't eat enough food within your eating window, like that person shouldn't then try to do one meal a day in a one-hour window. I wouldn't recommend that. If you're eating this tiny little amount of food, that's not good for you, it's over-restriction. We don't want to over-restrict our bodies, women.

Melanie Avalon: Exactly.

Gin Stephens: But that doesn't mean that fasting is over-restriction. That's the part that I keep getting frustrated about. Assuming that fasting means over-restricting, and it does not to me.

Melanie Avalon: They're not synonyms.

Gin Stephens: Right.

Melanie Avalon: They are often posited as such.

Gin Stephens: Well, they are. There's this whole complicated graphic that people are now sharing that came from somewhere, and I know where it came from, not going to say, but it's like, “Here's how you fast every week of your cycle.” I’m like, “No, you might have a hungrier day. Listen to your body, do it.”

Melanie Avalon: That sounds really complicated.

Gin Stephens: It does. I don't know that there's solid science of why you would do that. Other than, yeah, your body might need more nutrients at a certain time of your cycle. My body was always good at telling me that, I can remember-- back earlier and before I got on this side of menopause, I remember, when I was doing intermittent fasting and losing weight, there'd be a day and I'd be like, “Oh my God, I’m so hungry today. What's wrong? I just ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and why am I so hungry and then?” Then, boom, the next day, I would have the reason why I would know. Every time it was a mystery. [laughs] Every month, I was surprised that I was so hungry. My body really communicated that well to me and I listened. I didn't try to diet through it. I didn't punish myself.

Melanie Avalon: You still ate what you wanted.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I ate more. My body pretty much commanded me to. I've always had a hard time-- Even though I did those crazy restrictive diets, they weren't easy for me. When I’m hungry, I want to eat. My body's like, “Eat.” I’m like, “Okay.”

Melanie Avalon: Me too. [laughs] That's why we're both here.

Gin Stephens: I think so.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: Gin can eat, y'all.

Melanie Avalon: So can Melanie, so much. I've already said this. It's a dead horse, but the amount of protein I eat every day is, I mean, it's pounds.

Gin Stephens: That's so funny, not me. Nope, not pounds of protein.

Melanie Avalon: It's so good. [laughs] Well, this has been absolutely wonderful. A few things for listeners before we go. If you would like to submit your own questions to the show, you can directly email questions@ifpodcast.com, or you can go to ifpodcast.com, and you can submit questions there. The show notes for today's episode will be at ifpodcast.com/episode207. You can get all the stuff that we like at ifpodcast.com/stuffwelike. You can follow us on Instagram. My Instagram is-- Gin, it's going really well-

Gin Stephens: Oh, good.

Melanie Avalon: -recently. Follow us. How's your Instagram?

Gin Stephens: I've decided I’m just going to live my life on Instagram. I’m just going to be Gin Stephens’ person on Instagram. If you want to come to Instagram and see what Gin Stephens’ person is doing, I don't need to be Gin Stephens. Argh. [laughs] I've just feeling very much like I just want to get back to basics. Maybe that's why I’m doing this new web platform. Just because I’m like-- I don't want to be, “Here's my dinner. Woo.” Maybe, “Here I am, everybody, come sit by me.”

Melanie Avalon: I think I really like Instagram-- well, besides the fact that selfies really stress me out, I like it, because I really like creating-- my background is film and theater, so I love creating visual content. It's combines my love for visual content with words because you-- I never thought about this until right now. You write as well, so I think that's me probably why I really like it. It's like creating little artwork.

Gin Stephens: Not me. I’m like, “Here's my backyard remodel.” Did you see that picture?

Melanie Avalon: I did. No, okay, I saw it really briefly, and I just saw wreckage and I was like, “Oh my gosh, was there is--" no, I was like, “Was there a storm in Augusta, is her house gone?”

Gin Stephens: Can I just tell you how crazy I am right now? I’m going through so many things, the book, and the website launch, and also our backyard remodel that we tried to start in the fall, but we're demoing everything. Well, it's halfway done, but the wood was rotten on the decks that were on the back, plus there was an arbor, all rotten, all needed to go. We knew it needed to be replaced when we bought the house. We got a great deal on this house, it needed some work. The pool though, huge pool from the 80s, it's full of cracks, a tree fell in it in 2014. They had an ice storm. Well, we had ice storm, and it cracked the pool, and so we were going to have to put all this money into fixing it. They're going to dig it all up. All that concrete is cracked, it has to go. The whole surround. So, I have a bobcat, one of those digger things, is in my front yard right now and they have to get it into the backyard. They're going to take down a fence. I think they start doing that tomorrow. They're going to start digging up all that-- it’s a 10-foot-deep pool.

Melanie Avalon: That's intense.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, fixing it was going to cost more than just digging it up. That sounds crazy, but we're starting over, we're going to put in a screened porch, because I really missed having the screen porch. We're putting in a small pool, like a dunk pool.

Melanie Avalon: You have a real bobcat in the picture. Does Ellie not have a tail?

Gin Stephens: That's Ellie. You remember she got hit by the car, and then her tail had to be amputated. She's just my little cutie, but, yeah, in that picture, she's got a face on it, doesn’t she? She's got some attitude. I love that cat.

Melanie Avalon: It's really funny. I’m looking at it right now.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, anyway, that's what I’m going to put on Instagram. I’m not going to try to influence you at all. I am not an influencer. I’m an anti-influencer.

Melanie Avalon: I’m an anti-influencer, who became an influencer. I give away a lot of free stuff.

Gin Stephens: Oh, I’m not anti-influencers. Let me just say that. I am an anti-influencer, but I’m not anti-influencers.

Melanie Avalon: Yes, exactly.

Gin Stephens: I’m just the anti-influencer. I’m not giving you anything. I’m not giving anything away.

Melanie Avalon: I give away a lot of stuff, listeners, so follow me. I usually give away every week something.

Gin Stephens: Well, follow me to see a very interesting backyard remodel.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, my gosh.

Gin Stephens: I can't wait though, because I really want to be able to enjoy the yard, and I like to go outside and sit on a screened porch. The mosquitoes here are tragic.

Melanie Avalon: I feel remodeling for you is therapeutic or something. You're always remodeling something.

Gin Stephens: Well, we bought this house that was built in the 80s, and needed to be-- it’s built in 1979, I said that wrong. It was built in 1979. The people who bought it from moved in 1984. The pool was built in the 80s. It just needed some work. When you have a house, there's always something that has to be done.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: This one needed some stuff. Bathroom, that's all finally done, thank you. The backyard. But it's very stressful.

Melanie Avalon: I can't wait to finally have a house, sometime.

Gin Stephens: I can't wait for it to be done. I told Chad, because I’m so busy. He likes to spend 100 years looking at stuff. “Look, you just pick two things and say which one, this one or that and I'll tell you.”

Melanie Avalon: Oh, so he picks. Okay. Yeah, that's good plan.

Gin Stephens: Well, in this case, I like to pick stuff. I don't have time right now to go to Lowe's, and then Home Depot, and then the other place, and then all the places, then back to Lowe's, because that's the way Chad shops. Sorry. [laughs] I’m like, “Hmm, that one.”

Melanie Avalon: He can do that, and pick two and then you pick one?

Gin Stephens: Yeah.

Melanie Avalon: That works well.

Gin Stephens: I’m very decisive.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: The one I'd say that one too is always the one we end up going with. Even if we've been to 100 places, we always get back to the one that I liked immediately. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: Wait, can I share really quick one last thing that relates?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: It goes with being decisive. Listeners, fun fact, if you're trying to throw away things, like clean out your apartment, throw away clothes, but you want to hold on to it for whatever reason, just do it when you're completely sleep deprived. It's like when I got back from the trip, and I was completely sleep deprived, I was like must throw away everything. I throw away so much stuff. That's the key.

Gin Stephens: It feels so good, doesn't it?

Melanie Avalon: That's the key. Next time, you're sleep deprived, which is not a good thing, turn it into a good thing. Use the decision fatigue and the exhaustion to throw away all these things that you were having trouble letting go of, like old clothes and stuff, shoes.

Gin Stephens: Very nice. I need to do that. I've got clothes that are no longer in style. Isn't that amazing? I've been the same weight for so long, that my clothes have gone out of style, that I bought.

Melanie Avalon: I think, I must not buy many clothes. I hold on to my outfits for a long time.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, because you always wear the same thing.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, pretty much during the day.

Gin Stephens: That's funny. Oh, by the way, I didn't tell you this. Today is the day, the day that we're recording this, today is the day that six years ago today I hit my initial goal weight.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, wow.

Gin Stephens: Today is the day. March 14th, 2015. I was 75 pounds down.

Melanie Avalon: Happy six-year anniversary.

Gin Stephens: Thank you. I've maintained for six years. Oh, also one more funny story. My Shapa was acting super wacky. I was like my age was going up, I was gray, gray, gray, gray, gray. I’m like, “That's not right.” It did that for three weeks. I changed the batteries. [laughs] It needed the batteries to be changed. People, if your Shapa is acting wacky, change the batteries. Got on it. I was 24 again instead of-- [laughs]

Melanie Avalon:  Oh, wow. That's really interesting.

Gin Stephens: It was interesting. No scales, when they lose-- It was also taking it a long time to take a reading. I would stand on it, and it took forever.

Melanie Avalon: I still want to reach out to the founder. Gin, I am so overwhelmed with guests. I have interviews scheduled for episodes airing through November. They're all people I have to read like-- [laughs] people keep coming to me and being like, “Oh, you should have this person on your show.” I’m like, “Nope, [laughs] the door is closed.” Unless you’re a New York Times bestseller, that'll get you in the door.

Gin Stephens: That's nice to be able to have options that people want to come on your show. I know that you're proud of that.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, oh, sorry, yeah, that came off as ungrateful. I’m really grateful for it.

Gin Stephens: It did not come off as ungrateful.

Melanie Avalon: I’m just really overwhelmed when people come to, especially because sometimes, like some well-known people in the biohacking sphere will try to recommend their friends and stuff and, I'm like, “I could circle back in a few months.”

Gin Stephens: That does make it hard. Same with me, I've got so many people that want to come on Intermittent Fasting Stories that I keep pushing them back, and I feel bad because I know they have a good story. I would like to tell it, but there's one a week.

Melanie Avalon: It's hard to know too-- I don't want the content to be too old. It's something I’m trying to figure out right now. At what point is that way too far in advance? Typically, it's books, so the content is pretty relevant.

Gin Stephens: But people want to come on right when it's launched. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, it's hard to know.

Gin Stephens: All right, we’ll come to dddsocialnetwork.com and visit the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast group.

Melanie Avalon: Another social group.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, you're going to love it though.

Melanie Avalon: I know. I will.

Gin Stephens: Everybody there came there specifically because they like the community. That is what is so exciting. It's not like Facebook where people are just there already, and they're like, “Well, I'll come over here if I want to, but I might not like you, and I’m going to tell you.” [laughs] Everybody who's on the DDD Social Network came there on purpose. It is just so exciting to be there with them. I love them all so much. I love the people on Facebook too. Facebook people, do not feel unloved, but sometimes, somebody will wander in that might not be as good of a fit. Anyway, that's all I’m going to say.

Melanie Avalon: I’m really shocked-- this is the last thing, I know we've said that like a million times. I recently started my Clean Beauty and Safe Skincare Facebook group. I’m really shocked. My IF Biohackers Facebook group, which is my main hub, I don't ever get spammers in that group ever, like ever. I don't get people trying to join who are spammers. I don't get spam posts.

Gin Stephens: We get them in the Life Lessons. We do. They try to join.

Melanie Avalon: My Clean Beauty one, like half of the requests are spam requests. I don't know if it has something to do with the keywords like people are searching-- This group has around almost 900 members. Yeah, everyday, half of the requests are spam.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, and it's really hard. I feel like people coming to the DDD Social Network and paying a membership fee are not going to be spammers.

Melanie Avalon: Right, that's going to filter that out.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, so I’m not going to have to worry about that. People would join the regular group before we changed the way it posts now. People would join it, and then they would get a post approved, through post approval. Then they would edit their post to some crazy spam posts, even post approval didn't fix it. It'll be some crazy spam post. They had this order, they would do it and it'd be called it getting pancaked, but we couldn't talk about it because we didn't want to teach people you could edit your posts. Someone would come in and they'd post something. They started copying and pasting old posts. There was one of our Hashimoto’s that they would use. Then we started to recognize them, we’d just block them straight from there, but they would copy this Hashimoto’s post, and then they would change it to, “Today, I’m five years sober.” Which, do you know why they would do that?

Melanie Avalon: No.

Gin Stephens: Because that drives a lot of engagement quickly, because everybody's like, “Oh, my God, congratulations. Thank you for sharing that. I support you.” Then they would have a million. Then they would change it to, “The admins of this group are about to start dropping inactive members, please comment me if you want to stay.” Then people would go, “Me, me, me.” I mean, you could just see. Then they would change it to, “These are the best pancakes I've ever had.”

Melanie Avalon: Oh, that's why you called it pancake.

Gin Stephens: Pancaking. Yes. It was always this pancake, and I’m like, “I don't know what happens if you click that pancake link,” but something bad is going to happen if you click it, but we called it getting pancaked, and somebody would post on there, like, “I think we're about to get pancaked,” and we'd be like, “Yeah, that looks like one,” and then we would keep our eye on it, and then sure enough, then we would block them. Now, Facebook has changed it. If you have post approval turned on, it sends edits back through the approval process. So, hallelujah. But now, they're just putting the spam in the comments.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I’m really grateful. Hopefully it won't change. My main hub is much smaller than yours. I think it's almost 8000 or 9000, but I don't know, we don't really get spam.

Gin Stephens: We don't get a lot of spam in the advanced group.

Melanie Avalon: Maybe, spammers are not searching out Biohacking groups compared to-- I don't know, it's weird. Well, okay. This has been absolutely wonderful.

Gin Stephens: It's been a lot of fun. I needed it. Lord, I have so much to do. I have so much to do, Melanie. Anyway, send me positive productive thoughts.

Melanie Avalon: Sending you sane, productive, wonderful vibes. Take some Feals CBD.

Gin Stephens: Oh, that's a good idea.

Melanie Avalon: Well, this has been absolutely wonderful. I will talk to you next week.

Gin Stephens: All right, talk to you then. Bye.

Melanie Avalon: Bye.

Thank you so much for listening to The Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Please remember that everything discussed on the show is not medical advice. We're not doctors. You can also check out our other podcasts, Intermittent Fasting Stories, and the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Theme music was composed by Leland Cox. See you next week.

STUFF WE LIKE

More on Gin: GinStephens.com

Theme Music Composed By Leland Cox: LelandCox.com

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a review in iTunes - it helps more than you know! 

Check out the Stuff We Like page for links to any of the books/supplements/products etc. mentioned on the podcast that we like!

More on Gin: GinStephens.com

Theme Music Composed By Leland Cox: LelandCox.com

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a review in iTunes - it helps more than you know! 

Check out the Stuff We Like page for links to any of the books/supplements/products etc. mentioned on the podcast that we like!

More on Gin: GinStephens.com

Theme Music Composed By Leland Cox: LelandCox.com

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TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Welcome to Episode 204 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, author of What When Wine: Lose Weight and Feel Great with Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, and Wine. And I'm here with my co-host, Gin Stephens, author of Delay, Don't Deny: Living an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle. For more on us, check out ifpodcast.com, melanieavalon.com, and ginstephens.com. Please remember, the thoughts and opinions on this podcast do not constitute medical advice or treatment. So, pour yourself a cup of black coffee, a mug of tea or even a glass of wine, if it's that time, and get ready for The Intermittent Fasting Podcast.

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Are you concerned about aging? Well, thankfully, fasting is super incredible for its anti-aging benefits. It activates genes in your body called sirtuins, which repair your body and help extend lifespan. Also, during the fast, your body can clean up a lot of harmful chemicals which may be taxing your detoxification systems. In fact, the reason people go gray is because their detox systems start producing a lot of hydrogen peroxide when dealing with toxins. Do you know where a lot of those chemicals come from? Your skincare and makeup. As it turns out, there are thousands of compounds found in conventional skincare and makeup that Europe has banned due to their toxic nature and the US has banned less than 10. When you put these on your skin every single day through your skincare makeup, you're adding to your body's burden and likely aging your skin faster.

Thankfully, you can easily clean up your skincare with a company called Beautycounter. They make incredible products that are extensively tested to be safe for your skin. You can feel good about every single ingredient that you put on. They also have an amazing anti-aging line called Countertime. Friends, this is a game changer. It's full of active ingredients which nourish and support your skin, reduce fine lines and wrinkles, and support a beautiful glow. It also has a safe alternative to retinol, so you can get all of the anti-aging benefits of retinol without any of the toxic effects of retinol, because, yes, that stuff is toxic. Guys, put it away now.

You can shop with us at melanieavalon.com/beautycounter. If you use that link, something really special and magical might happen after you place your first order. Also, definitely get on my clean beauty email list that's at melanieavalon.com/cleanbeauty. I give away so many free things on that list. So, definitely check it out.

Lastly, if you anticipate making safe skincare a part of your future, just like Gin and I do, definitely become a band of Beauty member. It's sort of like the Amazon Prime for safe skincare. You get 10% back on all of your purchases, free shipping on qualifying orders, and a welcome gift that costs way more than the price of the membership. It's completely worth it. Friends, are you fasting clean inside and out? You can with Beautycounter. Again, that link is melanieavalon.com/beautycounter. And we'll put all this information in the show notes. All right, now back to the show.

Hi, everybody and welcome. This is Episode number 204 after Intermittent Fasting podcast. I'm Melanie Avalon and I'm here with Gin Stephens.

Gin Stephens: Hi, everybody.

Melanie Avalon: Happy Valentine’s Day, Gin.

Gin Stephens: Oh, yeah, we're recording on Valentine's Day, even though people are not going to hear it for a month, [laughs] but I hope everyone had a great Valentine's Day. It's cold and rainy here.

Melanie Avalon: Yes, it is. How is everything with you?

Gin Stephens: Well, I am coming to you from my new computer and I'm so excited. Melanie knows a little bit of this saga, but listeners, y’all do not. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: Does it feel wonderful?

Gin Stephens: Yes. Let me let me tell you a little backstory. About a year ago, I decided that my laptop wasn't cutting it and I needed a dedicated desktop computer for recording podcast to put in my podcast studio, so I didn't have to go look for my laptop, drag it around that sort of thing. So, I got a new Mac, and I got the wrong one. I made a really bad choice. I didn't realize how much RAM I needed. I'm a big Apple fan, love Apple products, been in the Apple ecosystem. Since the very first iPhone came out, I had one within months. I've been iPhone all the way, Apple computers, love them. But I got one with not enough RAM. My son Cal, who's an app developer said, “What? I can't even believe they sold you that.” I'm like, “Thank you, Cal.” I didn't know. Melanie and I, again, for the audience, Melanie knows this whole story. Melanie said to me, “Oh, you just change out, add more RAM.” Well, I bought one where you could not do that. You could not add your own RAM. I was like, “All right, I have to get a new one.” In there, the big ones. I can't go to the Apple Store, everything's closed due to the pandemic. I had to order over the phone. The guy was like, “Yeah, you get this one here. You add the RAM. It's so easy.” Melanie did that.

Melanie Avalon: Gin was like, “It's going to be hard.” I was like, “No, it's so easy.”

Gin Stephens: It's so easy. Yeah, it was so easy. The RAM came, just like Melanie said, there's a little thing, the computer got here. Of course, it took a month because the pandemic everything shipping slowly. I opened a little window in the back where you just plug in the RAM, I got the RAM that Apple guy told me to get. I plugged in, the computer would not start up. It kept shutting down, an endless loop start up, not start up, start up, not start up. Then I put the old RAM back in that it came with, still wouldn't start up. I don't know if I got a dud computer. I don't know if it was dud RAM, but then my old RAM wouldn't work either. At one point, I was laying on the floor trying to get to the little window [laughs] it was just almost comical. Apple is fantastic, though. They took it all back, helped me find the one I really needed. I was like, “I don't care if it costs more, I'm getting the right one that comes with all the RAM to start with.” The girl on the phone was fantastic, the Apple support person.

She's like, “Alright. This is the amount of RAM that will be enough for you.” I'm like, “Great. Give me double that because I do not want to go through this ever again.” It's here. I'm on it. The screen is bigger. Oh my gosh, it's so fast. Melanie, I could not even open two things at one time before, and now I can have everything. The mail’s open, the calendar’s open, Chrome is open, Safari is open, Word is open, I don't know if I sound excited, it's because I am.

Melanie Avalon: No, it's so exciting. I remember when I got my new computer, and it's like, “Oh, I can do things.” Especially when the nature of our business is using our computer-- I mean lots of people are using computers, but I'm using it every day for work and it's just so freeing when you can just do things.

Gin Stephens: It really, really is. I feel if only I hadn't bought that other one a year ago, but then I felt like I was committed to it. I'm like, “I just bought this computer a year ago,” and it was not cheap. Fortunately, I sound like an Apple commercial, but I did the trade-in program, so yeah, I was able to get a good bit back from the trade in program. Someone who does not need a lot of RAM is going to be really happy. I can't believe that it was not as easy. It would have been fabulous, but no.

Melanie Avalon: Exciting. I'm glad we match now. Yours is similar to mine.

Gin Stephens: It's the 27-inch, which I also thought was going to be too big, because the little desk I use-- well, I use an old Baker's rack. It sounds crazy. I sit on a stool, it's a very narrow Baker's rack that I've used for my desk. Chad was like, “That computer is way too big. It's not going to work.” Well, it does work. It works perfectly. I have a bigger screen, so I can see my document. It's just fabulous. It's not too big at all.

Melanie Avalon: I'm excited. I've been waiting for this moment.

Gin Stephens: Well, I have too but I was being very stubborn. You know when you make a bad purchase and you're angry that you made a mistake, but you just spent a lot of money? My anger was what if I make another bad mistake and buy the wrong thing again, which actually happened, but thank goodness Apple was amazing about it.

Melanie Avalon: Or, it's like, is it the sunk cost fallacy? Where you've put in so much energy and effort into something that you don't try something new because you've already committed so much? It's not the same thing.

Gin Stephens: It is, I know exactly what you mean and that was exactly true. It was finally when Chad said to me, and Chad likes to save money. Okay, so let me put it that way. If you could pull your two-ply toilet paper into two single pliers, and then he would do that. Not really, but you get my point. He was like, “You just get a new one.” I'm like, “Oh, okay,” not that I need his permission. I do not, but when he was like, “Get a new one.” I'm like, it finally felt like, “You're right. I should just get a new one,” so I did.

Melanie Avalon: Yes, you should.

Gin Stephens: I also have another thing to share that is interesting. You know how I had talked about how I've been opening my window with my main meal, and feeling so great?

Melanie Avalon: Yes. Are you not anymore?

Gin Stephens: No. I realized it messed up my sleep.

Melanie Avalon: Oh.

Gin Stephens: This is so interesting. My sleep got worse and worse over time, and then I finally connected that to opening my window earlier. Here's what the problem was with my sleep. Actually, my sleep wasn't worse, but it shifted it, and let me explain.

Melanie Avalon: Wait, I just want to guess.

Gin Stephens: Okay, guess how it shifted my sleep.

Melanie Avalon: You changed to eating more food earlier, right?

Gin Stephens: Like at 2 o’clock, I was having my main meal at 2 o’clock instead of 6:30.

Melanie Avalon: I would think it would shift your sleep earlier, but I'm guessing since you're not liking the effect that maybe it was the opposite?

Gin Stephens: It shifted it so much earlier that it was ridiculous. I wanted to go to bed at 8 PM every single night. I was like, “It's 8 PM, I've got to go to bed now, I am so tired.” Then, I was waking up. I've gotten my clock set to not show a light till 5:30 in the morning. I was waking up, probably around 3 o’clock ready to get up, like wide awake, like I was going I wanted to go to bed so much earlier and I wanted to wake up so much earlier. I was fully rested. It's like it shifted my-- what's the word I'm looking for?

Melanie Avalon: Your circadian rhythm?

Gin Stephens: Well, yeah, it's like it changed my circadian rhythm, like shifted it earlier. I was like, “Well, this doesn't work for me at all.” Unless I wanted to get up at 3 AM every day bright and bushy tailed and go to bed at 7 PM. So, an early window does not work for me, boom, now I know it. If I had to get up at 4 AM, this would be 100% the right thing to do.

Melanie Avalon: That's probably really valuable. You're already pretty familiar with different eating windows and how they affect people, but I bet it was a valuable experience for making suggestions to people.

Gin Stephens: And it also helps me see that doesn't mean that, that this is what everybody should do. But for me, it really impacted what my body wants to do. My body prefers to eat later for the main meal and then go to sleep at some point after 9 PM and then wake up by about 5:30. That's what feels good to me. My body likes to wake up early, but by eating my main meal earlier, it shifted everything, my whole rhythm just changed and got out of whack.

Melanie Avalon: That's one of the things I really love about intermittent fasting, is if there's some reason where my sleep the night before and then my wakeup schedule on a given day is off, I can really always reset it in one night and I think most of that has to do with I just eat my dinner at the same time as I would have regardless, and that just always just sets it right back.

Gin Stephens: It's also one of those things that makes me so frustrated every time I see a one-size-fits-all recommendation, like early eating windows are better.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, exactly.

Gin Stephens: Or, we should all have our main meal at 2. I could take what works for me and say everyone should have their main meal for dinner, but no, that's not true. Anyway, we're all different and that just keeps being proven over and over again. I have friends, their main meal is breakfast time. They eat early in the day, and then they're done for the day and they feel better.

Melanie Avalon: I wish I was like that.

Gin Stephens: Well, I don't wish it.

Melanie Avalon: I know we've talked about this. We've had this conversation.

Gin Stephens: Right. In but in fact, one of my guests that I just interviewed, it was fascinating for Intermittent Fasting Stories. She said that she doesn't get the great energy during the day while she's fasted. She has great energy after she eats. She has an early in the day window with great energy all day. So, I’m the opposite. That's why everyone has to really find what works for them. I mean, just over and over, that is just shown. Anyway, I'm just so tired of so many people thinking that here's what you have to do, and everyone should do, and this is what is right for all.

Melanie Avalon: I just finished reading Dave Asprey’s new book, Fast This Way, because I'm interviewing him on Friday, which is very surreal. Very surreal. Do you know what he said was the reason we started eating breakfast?

Gin Stephens: I can't remember I skimmed all through his book, I got a copy of it, and skimmed through the whole thing really fast. Because I'm doing a million things, I didn't have time to like sit with it. But no, I can't remember what he said.

Melanie Avalon: He said it was because of train schedules. When we started using trains, and they were train schedules. I had not heard this before.

Gin Stephens: I don't know if that's true. [laughs] Sorry, Dave Asprey.

Melanie Avalon: I made a note, I was like, “Look that up.”

Gin Stephens: I actually have heard other--

Melanie Avalon: Maybe it would have been one of the things.

Gin Stephens: Maybe, I've heard breakfast wasn't a thing until certain points in history when people then suddenly started eating breakfast. It was really only like rich women would get up and have a little breakfast, but nobody else would.

Melanie Avalon: I think he talks about some of the other things, but he said, like, the thing was the train schedules. I don't know.

Gin Stephens: Well, if I had a train schedule, I still wouldn't eat before I got on the train. I don't know how that would make me have breakfast anyway. I don't know, but I don't remember reading that because like I said, I skimmed it.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I'm pretty excited. I am going to ask him a lot of questions about bulletproof coffee. It's going to be a fun time. Listeners will have to listen to it when it comes out. Can I do two quick plugs?

Gin Stephens: Sure. No, no, you cannot. Kidding.

Melanie Avalon: One plug is, and this goes back to the Valentine's Day, this will have been over by the time this comes out, but definitely follow me on Instagram, friends, because if you had been following me right now, I am giving away two Apollo Neuros on my Instagram, which is just crazy.

Gin Stephens: Very cool.

Melanie Avalon: Those are the Soundwave therapy devices that instantly stop stress with the touch of a button and I use mine all the time. The second plug, I plugged this a few times before already, but if you're interested at all in clean beauty and safe skincare, join my new Clean Beauty and Safe Skincare Facebook group. It's really taking off. I'm really enjoying it.

Gin Stephens: If you'd like to follow me on Instagram, you can see pictures of my cats and my flowers and my beans. [laughs] Oh, good times. I actually put cats yesterday, but did you see that one? Ellie was so cute all wrapped up in the little blanket, did you see that one?

Melanie Avalon: I just pulled it up right now.

Gin Stephens: Oh my God, she's so sweet. [laughs] Yes, my best friend might be a cat. I don't know. Is that weird?

Melanie Avalon: No. I love cats.

Gin Stephens: She follows me all around the house and whatever I'm doing.

Melanie Avalon: That's something we have in common. We're both cat people.

Gin Stephens: Yay. See, there's so many things.

Melanie Avalon: There's like two things. I'm trying to think what else. There was something else recently we realized, but for new listeners, Gin and I were pretty much opposite on almost everything.

Gin Stephens: On many things.

Melanie Avalon: From preference stuff, so like food-- maybe just food. Just food. Oh, and cold and sleeping. It's like body things.

Gin Stephens: Well, circadian rhythm things.

Melanie Avalon: Food. Yeah.

Gin Stephens: The temperature our shower is going to be. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: The clothes we wear, again, body things.

Gin Stephens: Exactly.

Melanie Avalon: Friends, I have a story for you. I recently got septoplasty to fix my deviated septum so that I could breathe better. And in the recovery period, you're not supposed to wear glasses. Oh, my goodness. I cannot tell you how much I realized how much I adore and need and love BLUblox blue light blocking glasses. I've been wearing them every single night of my life until I got that surgery. Guys, you need this in your life.

In today's world, we're way overexposed to blue light. While blue light is energizing, we're not supposed to be seeing it 24/7. It can raise cortisol, stress levels, create tension and headaches, disrupt your sleep, and so much more. Of course, there are a lot of “blue light blocking glasses” on the market these days. Andy Mant, the founder of BLUblox, he personally realized how incredible blue light blocking glasses were for him personally. So, then he did something crazy and actually tested all the brands on the market to see if they actually were blocking blue light like they said they were. They weren't really. That's why he took things into his own hands to create glasses that would block the blue light you need to be blocking to truly have the healthiest relationship possible with light. That's also why he made BLUblox light blocking glasses in a lot of different versions.

They have clear computer glasses you can wear all day while looking at the computer. They have their SummerGlo lens that blocked the draining form of blue light while still allowing in some of the energizing wavelengths. They're also tinted with a special yellow color, scientifically shown to boost mood. And of course, they have their Sleep+ lens, you can put those on a bed and it's just like, bam, tired. At least that's the way it works for me because actually blue light can block melatonin production, which helps us naturally fall asleep.

Also, get their Sleep REMedy Mask. Oh, my goodness, I use it every single night. It gives you complete blackout while still putting no pressure on your eyes, like you wear it, and you can open your eyes completely, and it's completely black. It's mind-blowing. In case you're wondering, I'm still not supposed to be wearing glasses, but I ordered this weird contraption head thing to hold the glasses over my eyes because I just really need the blue light blocking glasses in my life. These glasses also come in a huge array of styles, so you don't have to feel like a weirdo biohacker like me. You can really get any style or frame to fit your personal style. You can shop with us at blublox.com, that's B-L-U-B-L-O-X dotcom and use the code, IFPODCAST, to get 15% off. Something else amazing, for every pair of glasses you buy, BLUblox donates a pair of glasses to someone in need. The glasses can also come in prescription, made to order. Again, that's blublox.com with the coupon code, IFPODCAST, for 15% off. All right, now back to the show.

Shall we jump into everything for today?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: To start things off, we have some listener feedback, and this comes from Kay and the subject is “Intermittent Fasting Saved My Teeth.” Kay says, “Hi Gin and Melanie. Not a question but thought you could share this story with your listeners to highlight one of the many hidden benefits of IF. I started IF about 18 months ago. At that time, I had a dentist appointment where I found my first cavity at age 30 with four other spots on my teeth that were on their way to becoming cavities. One of those four could have been filled at the time, but the dentist said it could wait, so I chose to wait because I was nervous about my first filling. The dentist said at my next visit, we would likely book fillings for the other four. I was so devastated. I brush, floss, and rinse twice a day and always prided myself in never having a cavity my entire life. While today I had my yearly checkup and expected to leave with plans to fill these four cavities, they are gone.

At my last appointment, the dentist said three to four could be reversed, but likely that wouldn't happen because I already brushed and flossed twice a day, they're all gone. I told him I had started intermittent fasting, and he said that without a doubt that reverse the tooth decay process. By not eating often throughout the day, food and plaque isn't building up on my teeth and contributing to the cavities. He also said that fasting can reverse gum disease because the food isn't in your mouth giving bacteria a home. I started for weight loss and, in the process, saved my mouth. Just wanted to share. Thank you for introducing me to this lifestyle.”

Gin Stephens: Love it.

Melanie Avalon: Anybody in your Facebook groups talked about this before?

Gin Stephens: Well, I think it's remarkable that the cavities are gone. I don't know if I've ever heard that. Like her body just remineralized her teeth and filled that all in? That's astonishing. You can't argue that it happened. I actually interviewed Melissa Wages for Intermittent Fasting Stories, Episode 12. She's a pediatric dentist, and so she talks about all the ways that intermittent fasting is beneficial for our dental hygiene. If anybody's looking for that, search for Intermittent Fasting Stories, go to Episode 12, listen to Melissa Wages, pediatric dentist and intermittent faster, but yeah, remarkable.

Melanie Avalon: I think it's really interesting because a lot of doctors say that the mineralization of the teeth is something you can never reverse. I feel like I see a lot of people, not necessarily in intermittent fasting communities, but people just in holistic food and holistic health communities who say quite the opposite.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I've seen that too.

Melanie Avalon: Even actually, when I interviewed James Nestor, who wrote the book, Breath, he made some change. I think it was breathing related or chewing related, it was one of those. He grew, I think, he said like a dime-sized worth of new bone in his jaw. Basically, you can grow new teeth or bone. Very motivating.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, it's been a while since I've been to the dentist, so I recently started going to the dentist a couple years ago again. I had to get some crowns, which were no fun. Dental health is important. Have you ever used a Waterpik?

Melanie Avalon: No. Every time I think about it, I just remember my roommate in college got one because they were becoming pretty popular.

Gin Stephens: They were really popular in the 70s and 80s. I can remember being a kid and everybody had a Waterpik and I was like, “That looks so fancy.” I never had one.

Melanie Avalon: Did you get one?

Gin Stephens: I just got one. My dentist recommended at my last visit.

Melanie Avalon: What does it do? Does it squirt water really?

Gin Stephens: Yes. Crowns are new to me. I had not ever had crowns, and so now I have a couple crowns but food was getting all trapped in there and I was like, “Oh, my God, this is disgusting.” She's just like, “Get a Waterpik. Get a Waterpik.” I'm like, “Okay.” So, I did.

Melanie Avalon: I'm glad we're having this conversation because my roommate in college got it. She got it and then she said that it wasn't working in our teeth were getting worse and I had written them off is not something to get, so hearing you say this--

Gin Stephens: Oh, my dentist it suggested it. It's like amazing. I brushed my teeth first and then I use the Waterpik and let's just say it's pretty amazing what the Waterpik gets out of there.

Melanie Avalon: Do you still floss at all?

Gin Stephens: Well, it depends on who you ask. My dentist said it does not take the place of flossing but let me just tell you that maybe at my house, it does. So, don't tell her. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: I want to order one.

Gin Stephens: I really like it. Yeah, I got one on Amazon. She told me which one to get. Let me tell you get the one with a reservoir, instead of the handheld reservoir. You want one that plugs into the wall and as a big reservoir. Do not put just cold water in it. Let me tell you, it needs to be warm-ish.

Melanie Avalon: Okay.

Gin Stephens: Like a bunch of cold water on your teeth and gums does not feel great. It is too cold.

Melanie Avalon: We can put a link in the show notes for listeners, which will be at ifpodcast.com/Episode204 to the one that Gin got. I'm going to order it too.

Gin Stephens: Okay, awesome. We’ll see if you like it. I really, really do. It surprised me. She also made me get one of those electric toothbrushes to brush--

Melanie Avalon: The sonic ones.

Gin Stephens: Yes. I hated it, hated it. I don't like it. Don't like it. I cannot use it.

Melanie Avalon: They scare me so bad. They remind me of tooth sensitivity.

Gin Stephens: Well, I didn't like it. Apparently, I brush too hard and so she's like, “You’ve got to get this one. It's like so much better for your teeth.” I can't do it. I tried and then I hated it. Then I went back and they're like, “You're not using it.” I'm like, “Okay,” and then I tried again. I'm like, “No, I just can't.” I just don't like them. It makes my whole head feel weird.

Melanie Avalon: They just remind me of dental cleanings, I think.

Gin Stephens: I don't know, it made my head vibrate in a weird way. She's like, “Is something wrong with you?” I'm like, “I don't know, maybe.” [laughs] I love my dentist. She's hilarious.

Melanie Avalon: I have to share my favorite toothbrushes. I will put a link to them in the show notes. Especially if you brush really hard, they're the Perio ones. You can get them on Amazon. They're so soft. If you brush really hard, it's really good for not scraping away your teeth.

Gin Stephens: Well, I didn't know I brush too hard, but she told me I do. I think I also use the electric one too hard probably, I don't know. Also, here's a fun fact about me. If I try to write with a pencil, it snaps the point every time. I just apparently apply a lot of pressure to whatever I do.

Melanie Avalon: That's funny.

Gin Stephens: I know. I can't write with pencils, I can't brush my teeth, I need help. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: Whenever somebody pulls out a pencil, I'm like, “Wow.” I feel people don't use pencils much anymore.

Gin Stephens: Well, I do use pencils sometimes. Really, I have to use the regular kind. I can't use whatever one’s, automatic pencils, what are they called-- mechanical pencils. I can't use mechanical pencils because the lead is too small. I really can't write with mechanical pencils, but I can use a regular pencil.

Melanie Avalon: See, another example. I can't write with normal pencils. I have to use mechanical pencils.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I love normal pencils. Yeah, fun fact, we can split a pack of pencils, get all the regular, you get all the mechanical. We'll be good to go. All right, yep, great dental hygiene. Just another benefit of intermittent fasting. We do hear it all the time, people come back and have their best checkups ever. Thank you so much for sharing.

Melanie Avalon: I have one more fun fact that's related. I'm reading right now, the newest-- I don't think it's a rewrite, but you know the GAPS diet?

Gin Stephens: I am familiar with it. I can't remember what it stands for.

Melanie Avalon: Her first one's stands for gut and psychology syndrome. It's about healing the gut primarily for mental health issues, but all different issues. Her newest one is GAPS, it's gut and physiology syndrome. It's talking about other issues as well. It is blowing my mind.

Gin Stephens: Just basically the connection between the gut and our mental health and our whole body, is that the point?

Melanie Avalon: Yes. The GAPS protocol is a very specific protocol that a lot of people follow to try to restore gut health. In the beginning, it's a lot of gut-healing nutrients, and you'd slowly introduce fermented foods, and it has only well-cooked veggies in the beginning and meat and all this stuff. I'm reading the newest version of her book, and it's very long. Oh my goodness, it is the most in-depth thing I have read yet about the gut microbiome.

Gin Stephens: Well, that's good to know.

Melanie Avalon: She goes through bacteria, archaea, fungi, protozoa. This blew my mind. Did you know that there's this form of bacteria called the L-form bacteria? Basically, a lot of bacteria, they can just change what they are. They can be one bacteria one day and then there another bacteria the next.

Gin Stephens: I did not know that.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Or, they can do it with our body cells. They can become our own body cells. She said it's a huge problem in studying bacteria because it's like we think we've been studying bacteria in isolated forms, but really they could become other things. Then, also she says that antibiotics-- because when they become the L-form-- sorry, this is such a tangent. When they become the L-form, they lose their cell wall and then they can, I guess, change to something else. She said what antibiotics do is they tend to destroy the cell walls of bacteria. We haven't been taken into account that it doesn't necessarily destroy the bacteria, that they can in a way shape shift to something else. Really, really fascinating.

Gin Stephens: It's so interesting.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, and the reasons related was, she said that the oral microbiome in the placenta, and that the child experiences in the beginning actually most closely resembles our oral microbiome.

Gin Stephens: That's interesting.

Melanie Avalon: Women with less-than-ideal oral microbiomes, it actually has a big effect on their children. It's crazy.

Gin Stephens: It is so interesting. We're learning so much more all the time. When I was talking to Tim Spector’s people after I went through the Zoe test, I was like, “Gosh, this is so much different than the information I got back in 2017,” which doesn't feel like very long ago because really there was like three years difference between I had a test in 2017 with the American Gut Project, and then again in 2020, through the Zoe app, three years. But they're like, “Oh, yeah, three years ago, we didn't know anything, compared to what we know now.” This is really so cutting edge, like you read something that was written about the guT3 years ago, we know so much more now that's different. It changes. Because they couldn't sequence what was down there. They really just started to have a look in there.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, exactly. We barely look in the small intestine.

Gin Stephens: The more I learn though, the more I'm like, “Alright, there's so much we don't know, let's just don't even worry about it, just eat good food, do intermittent fasting, move on.”

Melanie Avalon: I don't know. I think a holistic, broad approach through diet is probably most beneficial. I have not read too far into the book, but she says basically, that the largest part of our bacteria is in our gut obviously, and that the biggest change we can make to that is through our diet and that will affect the bacteria throughout the rest of our body as well.

Gin Stephens: Right. It's all connected, everything is connected.

Melanie Avalon: We're just little worlds hosting all of these other symbiotic lifeforms that are living with us.

Gin Stephens: Your health is directly related to the health of that community.

Melanie Avalon: 100%. That's basically her thesis.

Gin Stephens: You can't be fully healthy if your gut’s not healthy.

Melanie Avalon: She even goes so far as to say if you have a really healthy, robust gut microbiome, that you won't get IBS, like you won't get these things. She thinks that it's a required factor of having a messed-up gut microbiome for a lot of diseases and illnesses that we experience.

Gin Stephens: I think so. I really, really do think so. This is the next frontier and we had it all the time, which we didn't know, it's always with us.

Melanie Avalon: Right in our own backyard.

Gin Stephens: Literally. [laughs] On that note, let's go to our first question from Marissa. The subject is “Small Portions.” She says, “Hello, ladies. I've been listening to the podcast for a while now and have been fasting for a little over a year with great results. You’re both super helpful with all the knowledge you share. Here's my question. My mom insists that when I open my window, I need to eat a small portion of food whenever I eat. Now, she's saying that if you eat smaller portions, your stomach shrinks, which to me doesn't make sense. Perhaps, she's living the diet lifestyle. Maybe you guys would know what I should explain to her to help her understand.” All right, so what do you say to Marissa and most importantly, Marissa’s mom?

Melanie Avalon: All right, Marissa, thank you so much for your question. This is definitely a prevailing myth out there that our stomach significantly shrinks, that it permanently becomes smaller or larger based on the size of food that we're eating. I did a lot of research on it and that's just not the case. When we eat a larger volume of food, yes, our stomach does expand substantially. Our normal stomach, if it has no food in it, it can contain about 200 milliliters of volume. How big is that, 200 milliliters?

Gin Stephens: Well, I'm picturing a graduated cylinder in my head that was 100 milliliters, so it's bigger than you think.

Melanie Avalon: 200 milliliters is about seven ounces?

Gin Stephens: Right.

Melanie Avalon: Okay, so that's when there's no food in our stomach. When we eat more, when we eat a large volume, it expands accordingly and it can expand a lot. So, yes and no. The problem isn't really from the stretching, or the thing that might possibly be a factor in there, but I don't think it's something to be too concerned about. Stretching, so eating a large volume of food is most likely not going to be a problem, that’s what the stomach is accustomed to do. If you're eating more, it doesn't necessarily make you want to eat more to feel full. There's so many different factors going into satiety, and the stomach literally stretching is only one of them. A lot of it has to do with hormones released, based on what you're eating, there's just a lot of factors. For eating less, there has been a study in mice and they did find that when they reduce the mice’s intake by 20% for over four weeks, it did reduce a few of the important factors in the stomach wall that affect how much food the stomach can accommodate. It's possible that if you're eating smaller amounts, you'll slowly need less to feel full. I don't think it's so much the opposite, where if you're eating a lot that you're going to be eating need to eat a lot. Even for example, in professional overeaters, which you cannot pay me to be a professional overeater, but that doesn't really affect their normal stomach.

They've also found that obese patients or obese people don't really have any different stomach size than normal people. Basically, there's a lot of factors involved in satiety, you don't really have to worry about the large volume being a problem. It is possible that if you're eating really small meals all the time, that maybe you might get fuller sooner. But I don't think it's that much of a concern. Your thoughts, Gin?

Gin Stephens: This reminds me of a very funny diet that came out in the late 80s. I can't remember the name of it. I was watching TV, it was in the morning, you were watching The Today Show or something. It was like my friends from college where because we're in college at the time. I remember sitting in, we were in my dorm room, and the guy was like, “On this diet, you just eat according to the size of your fist. You can eat whatever you want, as long as it's the size of your fist, because you don't want to stretch out your stomach.” We're like, “That's so dumb.” What if I ate a piece of butter the size of my fist? What if I ate-- [laughs] we were only in college, but we already thought that sounded dumb. That was the whole diet plan. Size of your fist, that's how much you get to eat. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: I'll put a link in the show notes. I found a really good article in Smithsonian that talks all about it. They even said-- because they're the ones where they talk about that mice study, but they even said even with those findings, I'll even quote it, they say, “It is also highly unlikely that short-term fasting is enough to produce long-term changes in the stomach. Based on our data from animals, we don't have any evidence that a day is enough to do this.” So, yeah.

Gin Stephens: Even then, I could see that eating the amount of food, the size of my fist was not going to be a good long-term dietary strategy. That one never really did take off, but someone sure was trying to sell that on The Today Show. I think they had a diet book, but it was not one that people remember.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I don't remember that one.

Gin Stephens: Probably, they just went on The Today Show, and everybody's like, “No, that's dumb,” and then no one did it.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Oh, one other thought. It also talks in this article about patients who have anorexia, if they haven't been eating at all, that might be the type of long term, not getting enough, where they might not be able to actually accommodate more food. But that actually reminds me of something else from the GAPS book, she talked about how people are actually starving, the gut bacteria can accommodate to where they extract more calories from food, which is really interesting. Specifically, the archaea, they're not bacteria. In anorexic patients, they usually have high levels of archaea, and it might be like a protective mechanism because it's extracting more calories from food. Very interesting.

Gin Stephens: That is interesting. Of course, knowing what we know about the relationship between the gut and our psychological health, I have a chicken or the egg question about that. Is it the anorexia causing the gut to be different or the gut difference is causing the anorexia?

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I've thought about that as well. It's really interesting. All right, shall we go on to our next question?

Gin Stephens: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: All right. This is some lingering leftovers from when we asked for Ask Me Anything for Episode 200, and I just think these are fun and they keep rolling in. This is from Nita, and the subject was, “Hopefully not too late, but maybe for the 200th Episode of IF Podcast.” Sort of too late, but not really because we're answering it. Nita says, “Hi, Melanie and Gin. I'm probably too late to add a question for your episode. You may have already recorded it, but I thought I do a ‘Would you rather’ game for you both.” Okay, so here's her game. “Would you rather give up IF forever or be forced to eat all the foods you dislike during the eating window?”

Gin Stephens: Well, I am not going to eat any foods I dislike ever. Ever. I'm not going to do it. I only eat foods I like. But again, I also can't give up IF forever because I'm sleeping, so even if I'm only fasting from over night--

Melanie Avalon: Gin, you're not allowed to do-- this is the would you rather game.

Gin Stephens: I'm sorry. I'm one of those loophole people. If the genie said you have one wish, I would wish for all the wishes. I'm sorry I'm looking for that loophole, but I don't know how to answer it. I have a hard time answering it, because--

Melanie Avalon: I feel you would do fasting, give up IF forever, because you would get your fasting during sleeping.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I just have decided I'm never going to eat foods I don't like, ever.

Melanie Avalon: Okay, so that answers that question.

Gin Stephens: I guess. I really also am not giving up I have forever. I'm the worst. I'm sorry.

Melanie Avalon: Gin is the worst to play would you rather with.

Gin Stephens: I don't like this game. I'm like, “No, I'm not doing either of those.” I reject the having to pick one.

Melanie Avalon: I would rather give up IF forever.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, I knew you would say that.

Melanie Avalon: It's similar to what you just said, I'm just not going to be in a place where I put in foods I don't want to put into my body.

Gin Stephens: Well, I guess, I would accidentally be fasting because I would not eat them. No matter what I'm fasting.

Melanie Avalon: Second question.

Gin Stephens: This one's easy. Thank goodness, I can answer this one. Go ahead.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, good. I was like, I don't know. Okay. Would you rather give up doing a podcast or give up writing books?

Gin Stephens: Well, I'm writing a new book right now, and as I've mentioned in earlier episodes, I'm like, “Why? Why am I writing this book?” I would give that up. Sorry, if anyone's listening, it's going to be a really good book. I go through periods of struggle with it, but it's going to be a really good book, but the writing process is very, very hard. It is more mentally draining than anything I've ever done in my life. Would you agree with that, Melanie?

Melanie Avalon: I would agree with that statement.

Gin Stephens: Whereas doing podcasts is fun.

Melanie Avalon: Exactly.

Gin Stephens: It's so fun. I would do 27 podcasts. [laughs] I love writing books, so don't get me wrong. I'm a writer. I'm really, really proud of the one I'm working on now. I think it's going to be good. I think it's going to be helpful. I just wrote about you in it, Melanie. I said Melanie was right about something.

Melanie Avalon: Really?

Gin Stephens: Yeah. You'll have to wait to see what that is. I'll tell you off the air, and I didn't want you to be right.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, I'm excited.

Gin Stephens: I put my finger in my ears, la, la, la, but you were right about something. The more you look at the evidence, the more you're like, “Okay, she's right.” [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: I do want to thank you, Gin, for putting up with all of my-- I'm always like, “Gin, this--” I don't know, I'm always saying my thoughts about things.

Gin Stephens: Well, that's what we do. But it's so much fun doing a podcast. Doing a podcast, it is work, don't get me wrong. It's so much fun work. Writing a book is so much fun, like childbirth. [laughs] You're so happy that you have your children, but you're like, “Oh Lordy, this childbirth was really not that fun.”

Melanie Avalon: Probably finding out you have the book deal is like finding out you're pregnant.

Gin Stephens: Yeah, exactly. Then you're like going through the glow and then you have morning sickness, and then you're vomiting, then the baby has to actually come out. Your epidural doesn't take and then you're feeling every pain, and anyway. Then, you push for five hours. That's more than anyone needed to know. On the other end of it, you have this beautiful baby. And not everyone's going to like your baby, that's also true. The first time the school calls and they're mad about your baby.

Melanie Avalon: People still ask me if I'm married or have children. I feel it's blatantly obvious how much I'm not married or have children. I just want to clarify that at this moment.

Gin Stephens: I am loving having adult children. It's so wonderful having adult children.

Melanie Avalon: I think I could skip to that point.

Gin Stephens: They're like really good friends that you created. It's true. Anybody with teenagers or struggling along the way, it does get better.

Melanie Avalon: Do you know Tom Bilyeu?

Gin Stephens: I know the name. What does he do?

Melanie Avalon: He has Impact Theory podcast. He was the founder of-- I don't think he was the founder of Quest Nutrition, he might have been.

Gin Stephens: I've heard his name. I don't know much about him.

Melanie Avalon: He has a really cool show that's really similar in format to my show, the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. I think it's called Impact Theory. I feel he is me, but a man. He went to USC film school, then he wanted to do all of this health stuff and he wanted to produce a lot of health content in order to ultimately fund creative projects, which is basically my-- I don't know, we're very similar. In any case, he's married. He was on Mikhaila Peterson's podcast, who is well known in the carnivore movement, but she asked him about having or not having kids, because she has a kid and he said that I guess he and his wife decide not to have kids right now, but he knows. I guess they would regret having kids right now because of all they're doing with their business and their career and all that, but he said he knows hands down on his deathbed, he will regret not having kids, and so that's just a choice that he makes, like regretting it now-- or not that it's regretting it but choosing the downsides to not having kids now or later. That got really deep really quick, but it's something that resonates.

Gin Stephens: One of my sisters-- I only have one sister. One of my son’s siblings, my sister, [laughs] I have two brothers and a sister. My sister, she decided not to have kids and her husband, they decided together before they even got married, that they would just not have kids. She wanted to have the aunt relationship with kids, but not be responsible for kids. She's not regretted her decision for a minute.

Melanie Avalon: I think everybody just has to find what works for them.

Gin Stephens: Absolutely. All that from me saying that writing a book was childbirth. I was like, “How do we get to that discussion?”

Melanie Avalon: That's how this show goes down.

Gin Stephens: There you go. Yeah, writing books is hard. podcasts are fun, and also hard.

Melanie Avalon: All of it, though, is very gratifying.

Gin Stephens: It really is. It's fun putting stuff out into the world.

Melanie Avalon: Yes, I just love creating content.

Gin Stephens: I do too. I really do.

Melanie Avalon: Especially when it's content that has such a effect on people, like as far as the information that we share.

Melanie Avalon: Right. Is helping people to live their best lives and solve the problems that they're struggling with, and that's the name of the game.

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Gin Stephens: All right. We have a question from Paige, and the subject is, “Any suggestions for lab work?” She says, “I will be seeing my doctor on February 10th,” unfortunately, we have now passed this, Paige, but hopefully it'll help someone else. She says, “What are the suggested labs for someone 49 and female that has struggled to lose weight her entire life? I have done intermittent fasting but never done it clean. I usually drink things loaded with artificial sweeteners or heavy whipping cream in my coffee. This week, I decided I have to be going wrong somewhere. So, I'm going clean during the fasting hours and eliminating all artificial sweeteners. I'm a regular group fitness exerciser for 30 years and have always had exercise discipline. I'm 5’5 and weigh around 170, I do not have documented thyroid issues. I'm an RN. I plan on asking for a fasted insulin level, but please let me know if you have other suggestions. Thank you so much.” Can I just jump in and say something real quick, Melanie? I don't think you need to do any specific “Why am I not losing weight lab work?” Because you haven't been fast and clean.

Melanie Avalon: I knew you're going to say that.

Gin Stephens: Yeah. You've been spiking that insulin all along with an eating heavy whipping cream is food for the body. You have not done intermittent fasting the way we recommend get. Instead of asking what's wrong with my body, we know it's the cream, it's the sweeteners You need to treat day one as the day you went to the clean fast. If a year from now, you haven't lost any weight-- obviously, maybe don't wait a year, but that's when it's going to be time to start digging in. Not now.

Melanie Avalon: For those who have a fast and clean and they want to do lab tests--

Gin Stephens: That's a totally different question. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon: What lab tests do you think are most telling for why somebody might not be losing weight?

Gin Stephens: Well, she said the fasted insulin level, which I think is key. I think that every doctor should do a fasted insulin level even before an A1x, and I've talked about this before, we've discussed it on this show. If your insulin level is really, really high, your fasted insulin level, it's hard for you to lose weight. We've had people in the group that have struggled and they got a fasted insulin level and they're like, “Well, no wonder I've been struggling. My fasting insulin level is 20.” So, you’ve got to work on getting that down.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I would probably say there's a few different categories of things that could be indicators insulin, like Gin said would be great. She said she doesn't have documented thyroid issues, but that would be probably the second thing I would look at. You want to make sure that it's the full thyroid panel. If Paige has only tested-- because conventional doctors typically only test T4 and TSH. TSH isn't even a thyroid hormone, it's a pituitary hormone that signals to the thyroid. It just indicates what the pituitary is telling your thyroid to do, it doesn't tell you anything about what the thyroid-- I mean it's correlated to that, but it does not necessarily indicate what the thyroid is actually doing. T4 is the storage form of thyroid hormone. Again, it's a storage form, so it doesn't indicate the active levels in your body. I think it's crazy that the two things we test to evaluate the thyroid, none of it is the actual active thyroid hormone. Isn't that a little bit strange?

Gin Stephens: We test the things that are easy to test, right?

Melanie Avalon: I don't know if it's any easier to test those. The other ones if you're getting a full panel would be T3, so that's the actual active thyroid hormone, and then reverse T3. We've had Elle Russ on.

Gin Stephens: We have.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, we've had Elle Russ on the show. I've had Elle Russ on my other show. I'll put links to it in the show notes. She was on the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. She has a really, really great book about hypothyroidism. I often share stuff about the thyroid with listeners, and I can't tell you how many times people tell me they go to their doctor and ask for a full panel, and the doctor will say that it just doesn't matter. Specifically, reverse T3, they say that it doesn't matter at all. But friends, reverse T3 is a thyroid hormone that can be made from T4. So, the storage form of thyroid hormone T4 can become either T3 or reverse T3. If it becomes reverse T3, it blocks the cells from taking in T3. You could have normal thyroid hormone levels like normal T3, but if your reverse T3 is high, it could be blocking all of that. So many people find the reverse T3 is high. That happens really because stress is the main factor. The body is perceiving a stress and so it is trying to slow down the metabolism because T3, the active form of the thyroid hormone is basically our metabolic piece of information hormone. It's what's telling cells to burn energy, to do everything they need to do. So, reverse T3 is a way to slow all of that down. You can also get tested for your TPO antibodies, and those will indicate if you have Hashimoto’s, which is the autoimmune form of hypothyroidism, which is the most common form. Some people even think that almost all thyroid issues are technically Hashimoto’s even if you test negative for the antibodies. That was a really long way of saying a full thyroid panel can be very, very helpful.

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The third thing I would say would be a full hormonal panel, and that's actually not usually a blood draw. It's something like a urine test. The DUTCH test is a really good hormonal panel you can do and that will show you all of your hormones, all of your cortisol, like your female hormones, so progesterone, estrogen. It'll give you a really good picture of you and what your hormones are doing. It's really hard to interpret. Admittedly, female hormones are not my expertise, I really don't know much about them, but that's something where you really want to work with a really functional practitioner who can interpret it for you.

A fourth thing you can maybe check would be CRP and any other inflammatory blood markers because those will show if your inflammation is really high in your body. If your inflammation is really high, that could be causing a lot of things and so you'd really want to find the cause of that. That could often be stress. It can really often be a food that's not working for you. It might indicate checking out your diet.

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Gin Stephens: Yeah. That's a really good, thorough answer to the question. When people say, “Oh, my thyroid’s fine,” the moral of the story is, “Well, is it?”

Melanie Avalon: 100%. All right, so we have time for one more question. This is from Ron, this question was for Gin. The subject is “Women only.” Ron says, “Great book.” He's referring to Fast. Feast. Repeat. He says, “I truly enjoyed it. I did notice all of your testimonials were for women. Is there any difference in the IF [unintelligible [00:56:13] between men and women?”

Gin Stephens: Well, they're really not all from women. If you dig in, they're not even-- I'm not sure if he was talking about Fast. Feast. Repeat. or Delay, Don’t Deny.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, okay.

Gin Stephens: He didn't say, but neither of them are 100% from women. There are men in the back of Delay, Don't Deny. Not very many, but there are. There are men in Fast. Feast. Repeat. as well, not as many. I think the reflection of why it is a majority women reflects the composition of the Facebook groups. We just so happen that 90 something percent of the members of the Facebook groups are women. It's the skewed community, not that there's something different you need to be doing men versus women. No, not a single thing you need to do differently because you're a man.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, my only caveat to that-- it's not really any different what you would do, but I do think women are more likely to experience potentially issues, not from the fasting per se, but because with fasting, they have begun over-restricting with everything. Female’s bodies are so much more sensitive to stress, as far as how it affects our reproduction and our menstrual cycles, and so it can affect our hormones if we get in that stressed-out state. So, it's no different at the beginning what you're doing, but I think women probably need to pay more attention that they're not over-restricting in their dietary choices, as well as the fasting to the point that it becomes too much of a stressor.

Gin Stephens: Yeah. I have a frequently asked question about that in Fast. Feast. Repeat. that over-restriction is not good for anybody, man or woman. But that is a trap that women tend to fall into because of the diet culture that's ingrained in us. Women-- just like that, what was her name, whose mom was telling her to eat tiny amounts of food? That's diet culture, and the whole idea of eat dainty amounts like a woman, well, you don't want to do intermittent fasting, and also eat dainty amounts of food like a woman because you're going to be overly restricting for your body. We don't recommend that for men or women. But women, I think, tend to be more likely to do it just because we're told not to eat a big meal in front of a date because it might-- I'm like, “Oh, forget it. I'm not doing that.” I can remember when Chad and I were dating, he's like, “Boy, you can eat a lot.” I'm like, “Thank you.” [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: I actually look forward to, if I am ever on a date, getting, like a really big steak or something just to be like, “See?”

Gin Stephens: I don't want to live a lie. I don't want to eat dainty in front of someone when I'm dating them. Then, when I really eat, I have to undo my pants buckle. No, I believed in being myself at all times.

Melanie Avalon: Me, too. That's another way we're the same.

Gin Stephens: Yay. We will be celebrating our 30th anniversary here in 2021. I still eat with gusto, as I did during the early days of dating.

Melanie Avalon: Is it this month?

Gin Stephens: No, it's not till July.

Melanie Avalon: Okay.

Gin Stephens: But it's coming, 30 years. I can't believe it, that's a long time.

Melanie Avalon: Three decades.

Gin Stephens: I know. It's like we grew up together. It feels like we were-- 30 years is more than half my life.

Melanie Avalon: Wow. Crazy. I was thinking like, how old would I have to be where I probably wouldn't reach the half my life thing if I got married.

Gin Stephens: Well, you're an intermittent faster, so you still have a lot of time.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: A biohacker and an intermittent faster, we're going to live a long time.

Melanie Avalon: If I do end up with somebody, I'm sure they're probably going to be a biohacker of sorts.

Gin Stephens: I can't imagine it any other way for you. No. [laughs] Cannot. “Honey, why is it red in here all the time?”

Melanie Avalon: I know. [laughs] There's so many things that you’d just have to be okay with.

Gin Stephens: Why are we sleeping in a Faraday cage? [laughs] What is this goat mattress? [laughs] Longtime listeners will get it.

Melanie Avalon: So many things.

Gin Stephens: Love it.

Melanie Avalon: All right. Well, this has been absolutely wonderful, so a few things for listeners before we go. If you'd like to submit your own questions to the podcast, you can directly email questions@ifpodcast.com or you can go to ifpodcast.com and you can submit questions there. You can get all of the stuff that we like at ifpodcast.com/stuffwelike. The show notes will be at ifpodcast.com/episode204. Like I said, you can follow us on Instagram, MelanieAvalon, GinStephens, and you can join our Facebook groups. Oh, yeah. Gin, do you want to plug your new Facebook group?

Gin Stephens: Our new podcast that I have with the cohost, Sheri Bullock, the Life Lessons podcast, and our community is called Life Lessons with Gin and Sheri. Oh, funny story, someone said the other day, they're like, “I love this group so much. It's my own private Google. This takes the place of Google.” Because anytime anyone has a question, they're getting real answers. You know how when you're trying to get like a product recommendation, and you're reading all the reviews, and some of them sound crazy and fake? Well, here we are just giving you real feedback. It's a lot more than obviously product reviews. We talk about everything. Seinfeld was the show about nothing. Well, Life Lessons community is the place for everything. People have talked about their divorces and their issues they're going through with their spouse and their family and “Which mandolin should I cut my vegetables?” Then someone's like, “Well, make sure you get the gloves.” I mean, we're really talking about everything.

Melanie Avalon: I love it. My group IF Biohackers is basically-- it's like Google for everything biohacking, and also mindset and diet, fitness, all of that.

Gin Stephens: For example, right before the holidays, someone's like, “My dad's in a memory care facility. Can anyone send him a Christmas card?” He got thousands of Christmas cards. It was like featured on their local news. It was amazing. If you like feel-good stories and positive things, join Life Lessons with Gin and Sheri, and listen to our podcast, we have our podcast.

Melanie Avalon: Podcasts that we would choose over books.

Gin Stephens: Oh, yeah, I know. I'm crazy with the podcast, three is a lot.

Melanie Avalon: Three is a lot.

Gin Stephens: It really is a lot.

Melanie Avalon: I've started actively, actively pitching my other show as a TV show, which would be really exciting.

Gin Stephens: That would be so exciting. That'd be so fun. That's your dream.

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm. It's going to happen. Manifest.

Gin Stephens: It's going to, we're putting it out there. I believe it.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. If anybody who listens to this show, is in the TV creation/producing industry and has some advice they would like to share with me, I'd be happy to hear it.

Gin Stephens: Love it.

Melanie Avalon: If you do have any, email me at melanie@ifpodcast.com. All right. Anything from you, Gin, before we go?

Gin Stephens: Nope. That's all.

Melanie Avalon: Well, I will talk to you next week.

Gin Stephens: All right. Bye-bye.

Melanie Avalon: Bye.

Thank you so much for listening to the Intermittent Fasting podcast. Please remember that everything discussed on the show is not medical advice. We're not doctors. You can also check out our other podcasts, Intermittent Fasting Stories, and the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Theme music was composed by Leland Cox. See you next week.

STUFF WE LIKE

Check out the Stuff We Like page for links to any of the books/supplements/products etc. mentioned on the podcast that we like!

More on Gin: GinStephens.com

Theme Music Composed By Leland Cox: LelandCox.com

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