Meet the Intermittent Fasting Expert Who Stopped Fasting | Cynthia Thurlow

Chris Burres (0:02)

Hi, and welcome to the next episode of the Live Beyond the Norms Health and Longevity Podcast. You are going to gain weight during menopause, or at least that may be what you believe. You may be thinking the solution is to eat less and exercise more, but your hormones impair this strategy. Our next guest, Cynthia Thurlow, is here to teach us the right strategies to navigate weight gain during menopause.

A little bit about Cynthia. Cynthia Thurlow is a nurse practitioner, best-selling author, international speaker, and the host of the Everyday Wellness podcast. Her TEDx talk, Intermittent Fasting Transformational Technique, has reached more than 15 million views, and her books, Intermittent Fasting Transformation and the Menopause Gut, establish her as an expert in intermittent fasting, perimenopause, menopause, nutrition, metabolic health, and women's longevity.

Her mission is to help women understand how fasting, hormones, gut health, stress, sleep, and nutrition shape health and midlife and beyond. Hopefully, we can help her on that mission with this interview today. Cynthia, thank you so much for joining us today.

Cynthia Thurlow (1:08)

Oh, thanks for having me, Chris. I've been looking forward to this conversation.

Chris Burres (1:12)

All right, before we get into your areas of expertise, I like to go further back. I like to go much further back. What was it like growing up, little Cynthia? Where did you grow up? What were your parents like? And if there was some event or someone you could pinpoint as the reason you would ultimately become an women's health educator, best-selling author and metabolic health leader, what or who would that be?

Cynthia Thurlow (1:35)

Well, I mean, I've got an interesting past. So I was born in South Carolina while my dad was finishing his PhD, but grew up in New Jersey and left after I graduated high school. I knew from a very early age that I was not, my destiny was not New Jersey.

But I have many wonderful friends that are still there and feel very connected to the community. But spent arguably the next 30 plus years in the either Maryland or Northern Virginia, Virginia area. So I'm very much an East Coast gal.

I would say that I would have been completely surprised if you had asked me when I was 18 or 20 years old, that I would somehow end up in the health and wellness space. I never would have imagined because I was pre-law. I was very clear I was going to law school. I got accepted to law school. And my life changed when I got a dog. The dog all of a sudden was teaching me that maybe I wasn't really interested in practicing law. I actually was really interested in anatomy and physiology and chemistry. And so I went back and took tiers of pre-med classes and then applied to, at that time, a dual degree program. This is during the HIV and AIDS crisis. I started doing volunteer work in the HIV and AIDS space. And so there were really two preeminent institutions in the United States for this kind of work. It was Johns Hopkins or UCSF. And again, being an East Coast girl, it was a very easy decision to go to Baltimore. And I think it really changed the trajectory of everything I did. But what's most important to kind of genuflect into here is that when I got into medicine and finished my training, I was an adrenaline junkie. I was an ER and trauma nurse in inner city Baltimore. And then it was a natural extension. I was an ER and I went up in cardiology. But how I got to where I am now was because I was the typical midlife woman who got stuck. And I said, if all this teaching and training has taught me nothing, all the strategies I tell my patients to do are not working for me. Eat less, exercise more, none of those principles applied. Eat heart-healthy grains, none of that applied. And so I think that my second kind of evolution within my career has really...

Chris Burres (3:46)

Hold on, before we go there, I want to kind of unwrap some of this. Did you use a phrase, Jenny-flex? Yeah.

I've never heard that before.

Cynthia Thurlow (3:55)

Well, it's more, it's kind of, I was raised Roman Catholic. And so there's this whole process of, Jenny-flexion is really speaking to kind of this homage or this kind of orientation of trying to give tribute or trying to give respect towards the process. And so, you know, for me, being someone that had been so clear that I was going to law school and then I pivoted and then all of a sudden I'm pivoting again. So I call it the path less traveled. I have not done what most people expected me to do. I have taken the path less traveled multiple times throughout my life, because I could have just stayed on the attorney path. And I probably would have been very miserable because I don't actually like to argue. I just find the law interesting.