Fasting—or engaging in extended periods where you don’t consume any food—can be a key part of jump-starting a new diet or detox plan and is even a component of religious practices for some.
Some nutritional plans may include limited versions of fasting, where the dieter may be allowed certain, specific foods.

Healthy fasting plans will still promote drinking plenty of water, and many allow black coffee and some other zero calorie drinks as well. Sometimes, a fast only requires someone to fast at certain times throughout the day or week. This is called intermittent fasting, and it is often employed by people of all ages for nutritional purposes.

Can Intermittent Fasting Help You?

As we age, our bodies’ nutritional needs change. Women over 40 can sometimes experience this significantly, not only due to the approach of menopause and its significant physiological changes, but also because of increasing risk for diseases like osteoporosis and certain cancers. While managing caloric intake is important for anyone’s health at any stage of life, women entering later adulthood may find that getting proper nutritional levels becomes far more important to their overall sense of wellness than a quick burst of weight loss offered by fad diet pills and associated diets.

However, fasting without proper planning and supervision can have serious consequences on your overall health that will go far beyond weight loss. Fasting for women over 40 can be especially complicated, as it combines an extreme form of dieting with a stage of life that can exert serious physical and chemical changes on a woman’s body. Older adult women considering a fasting-based nutrition plan will want to make sure they’re doing so safely. This is one of the reasons intermittent fasting—a controlled schedule of fasting and eating in alternating blocks of time—can be a good dietary tactic for adult women, as opposed to other types of fasting.

What Is Intermittent Fasting?

Functionally, intermittent fasting is exactly what it sounds like: periods of fasting alternated with periods of eating. Depending on your specific diet, you might eat normally during your non-fasting periods, or you might stick to a diet regimen. The intermittency is key, as it allows your body to completely digest food and absorb its nutrients before it processes its next meal, then fully recover from the process.

More specifically, the body must recover via the cellular regeneration process by which the digestive tract repairs itself between uses. This is much like the process your muscles need to build and maintain mass. For this reason, you can look at periods of intermittent fasting as analogous to a bodybuilder resting their muscles on a set schedule and not working the same muscle groups day after day.

What Can Fasting Do For You?

What does fasting mean for your body? Several things:

Essentially, what you achieve by fasting is triggering a response by the body so that it begins burning energy stores (our stored fats and sugars) due to the lack of incoming nutrition. By repeating this process on a set schedule, intermittent fasting repeatedly re-triggers these weight-shedding processes. Meanwhile, the intermittent schedule means you’re looking forward to your next meal instead of starving yourself until you reach a goal weight. Intermittent fasting is a safer, more sustainable, and more scientifically sound way of >losing weight than simply cutting calories.

Aside from healthy, natural weight loss, intermittent fasting also helps some people with other issues, such as:

The other side of intermittent fasting is, of course, those well-earned periods of eating. Intermittent fasting plans have all calories, whether from food or beverages, consumed during specific blocks of time throughout the day.

Intermittent Fasting Schedules

A pure intermittent fasting-based plan is not actually a diet at all in the traditional sense. Intermittent fasting alone doesn’t restrict what you eat, it only restricts when you get to do it. Often, however, an intermittent fasting schedule will get combined with a particular diet or nutrition plan for best results. This can come in the form of a specific diet telling you exactly what to eat on which days, or it may be as simple as a list of ingredients to avoid from a nutritionist. Still, the framework of intermittent fasting can be used by anyone, whether they’re looking to pair it with a diet plan or not.

There are several commonly used intermittent fasting formats, including:

Possible Side Effects of Intermittent Fasting for Women Over 40

Fasting can be a powerful weight loss and wellness tool, but it can also be dangerous. The body needs fuel and nutrition to perform daily activities, exercise, and other tasks.

When you cut off that supply, there can sometimes be unpleasant consequences, including:

Many people who stick with their intermittent fasting regimen report that these side effects lessen or disappear once the intermittent fasting routine has been established and the cycle has been repeated a few times.

There are certain circumstances, however, where intermittent fasting may make someone feel worse over the long term, or even actively harm their health.

An intermittent fasting routine is unlikely to be a healthy choice for anyone experiencing:

Intermittent Fasting for Women Over 40: Final Thoughts

Listen to your body. A dietary plan designed to get you healthy shouldn’t leave you feeling sick or exhausted. It’s natural to feel hunger during the fasting portions of your diet and pairing it with a new exercise routine might leave you feeling a little worn out the first week or so. However, persistent feelings of lethargy, soreness, dizziness, or nausea can be signs that your body is not on board with your new diet.