While intermittent fasting is safe for all adults, women do need to be a little more careful with it.
Here are some things to know about intermittent fasting and whether or not it might affect your menstrual cycle.
What Studies Have Seen
Studies have been looking at how intermittent fasting affects women, because of a concern with how it might affect your hormone levels.
If your hormones get unbalanced, it could possibly could a disruption with your cycle, especially with when or if you ovulate.
This might lead to infertility, which could be an issue if you are in your childbearing years and want to start a family.
Your body actually has an extremely complex system that uses a lot of the energy that you eat to power the communication of important signals it needs to prioritize.
When it finds that you lack something, it can sometimes decide to push back some processes.
During studies involving nutrition and pregnancy in animals, the subjects all showed some noted modifications in their ability to procreate.
Given the lifespan of these animals in comparison to humans, it’s possible that most people will be perfectly fine in most cases but there is still much to sort through during these studies.
Even though there are quite a few metabolic differences between men and women, studies are just beginning to take note and include these variables, but these studies have presented other amazing information to think about.
Your Body Can Tell Why You’re Hungry
Studies of hormones have shown doctors something strange, and it’s that your body can see which kinds of stress come from lack of food, or being in a hurry and lots of other daily snags.
That is a large part of the reason you don’t go into starvation mode when you skip meals, and it further explains why your body needs to be fooled to lose weight in some cases.
This can put a damper on many of the classic beliefs that people hold about simply working out.
This means that emotional changes and moods directly impact your physical form.
The fact that hormones can have such a massive impact on the way energy is stored and used could be a huge puzzle piece in the search to understand why weight is harder to lose for many people.
Does it Affect Your Menstrual Cycle?
In short, intermittent fasting could affect your menstrual cycle depending on each individual.
It is not necessarily dangerous to do fasting, but women in their childbearing years do need to be a little more cautious.
Pay close attention to your body, track your cycle, and see if you notice changes when you ovulate or how long your cycle is over time with fasting.
As always, talk to a doctor if you have any issues with your cycle when you are doing intermittent fasting.
