#254 Recovery From a 13 Day Fast, Creating Good Food Habits and More - Cynthia Thurlow

Cynthia Thurlow (0:00)

One of the things that I think is really important, irrespective of gender, is to say, if intermittent fasting is working for you, great, but if you fast and you have no energy and your sleep is terrible and you can't get through your day, then it's okay to give yourself permission to stop fasting and to reevaluate things.

Siim Land (0:17)

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Cynthia, welcome to the show.

Cynthia Thurlow (1:17)

Hey, thanks. I've really been looking forward to this.

Siim Land (1:19)

Yeah, me too.

And maybe we can start off with talking about, you have a big TED Talk where you talk about interval fasting. And a lot of people are knowing you about that. So how did you get, or how did you give a TED Talk about fasting itself?

Cynthia Thurlow (1:38)

Well, I mean, it's a great story. I'm an introvert. And in 2018, I told my husband that I thought doing a TED Talk would be a great way to work through some of my introversion.

And so I was offered my first TED Talk, also focused on women's health. And around maybe about two weeks later, I was offered a second. And for your listeners, if they're not familiar with the way TED Talks work, you can't give the same talk twice. So I looked at my husband, I said, what do I know a lot about that I can, you know, essentially write up a mock-up of a TED Talk really quickly? And he said intermittent fasting. So it was really that simple, you know, knowing that it was a topic that I spoke a lot about with patients and with clients and just on social media. And of course, you know, the following year in 2019, I gave that talk, which I didn't realize that intermittent fasting would be the most googled or searched nutritional kind of paradigm or strategy. And so I think that's what drove a lot of interest in the talk itself. And obviously, you know, they always say that, you know, one talk can change your life. And it absolutely did.

Siim Land (2:46)

Yeah, that's awesome.

And yeah, it's a, you know, the fasting itself has become pretty popular, at least over the past few years. It's like you can see all these different trends in regards to like keto or carnivore or vegan diets are coming and going. But fasting is almost always like that something that is always there. Or like people are interested in it regardless of the type of diet that they're doing.

Cynthia Thurlow (3:06)

Well, and I think so many people are just frankly tired of gimmicks and they want to do something that's sustainable, they want to have control. I mean, over 20 plus years of working in health care, I've seen so many fads, as you mentioned, or things that are popular at one time or another. And in many, many ways, you know, fasting despite people thinking it's a fad or thinking that it's novel or new, it's really something that dates back to biblical times. And I have to remind people that it's part of nearly every major religion.

And on many levels, it really is something that is intrinsically the way our bodies are designed to thrive, eating less often as opposed to, you know, here in the United States, there's definitely a focus on eating frequently to stoke your metabolism, as well as many other diet dogmas that I hope will go to diet heaven and just die, that ultimately will just go away.

Siim Land (4:02)

Yeah, well, we hope for that, but like, how did you get into fasting itself? Like what are the things that you tried before and what made you choose fasting?