Fasting for Balance: How Small Changes Create Big Results

Create Space to Heal

If you’ve been following along with me, you know we’ve been talking about creating space between meals to give your body a chance to rest, recover, and repair. Today, I want to dive a little deeper into one of the most powerful benefits of this approach: better blood sugar balance and improved insulin sensitivity.

When you stretch out the time between meals—especially between dinner and your "break-fast"—you give your body a chance to reset how it manages glucose. Dr. Mindy Pelz and Dr. Valter Longo have both shown through their research that even small shifts in meal timing can make a huge difference in metabolism, insulin levels, and overall hormonal health.

Here’s why this matters:

Every time we eat, blood sugar rises and the pancreas releases insulin to help move that sugar into our cells. If we’re constantly grazing or eating lots of refined carbs, insulin stays elevated all the time. Eventually, our cells stop responding as well to insulin—a state known as insulin resistance. This sets the stage for weight gain, inflammation, low energy, and chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes.

When you create longer gaps between meals, you:

• Let insulin levels naturally drop

• Help your cells become more sensitive to insulin again

• Encourage your body to burn stored fat for energy

• Reduce inflammation

• Support more stable moods, better energy, and clearer thinking

  
  

Blood Sugar and Your Hormone Balance

In my training with Andrea Nakayama and the Functional Nutrition Alliance, we talked a lot about how blood sugar sits at the foundation of hormonal health. If blood sugar is swinging up and down all day, it stresses every other part of the hormone cascade—cortisol, thyroid hormones, estrogen, progesterone, as well as some key neurotransmitters. When blood sugar is out of balance, it’s like trying to build a house on a shaky foundation. Everything above it has to work overtime to keep things from falling apart.

If you're dealing with things like fatigue, resistant weight loss, brain fog, mood swings, or irregular cycles - even poor sleep, chances are that blood sugar dysregulation is playing a big role. Before we layer on fancy interventions, stabilizing blood sugar is the place to start.

Fasting Isn't One-Size-Fits-All

One thing I always want to stress: there's no "perfect" fasting schedule that works for everyone. In functional nutrition, we honor bioindividuality—your body, your history, and your needs are uniquely yours. Some people feel best eating an early breakfast and closing their kitchen by late afternoon. Others thrive on a later eating window. It all depends on what your body needs, how you're sleeping, how stressed you are, and what your daily rhythms look like.

And if you’re a woman who is still cycling, it’s important to sync your fasting patterns with your hormonal shifts:

• In the first half of your cycle (follicular phase), longer fasts often feel easier and more energizing.

• In the second half (luteal phase), your body needs more fuel to support progesterone production, and you may want to ease up on fasting.

  
  

The key is tuning in—listening to your body and adjusting as you go.

Final Thoughts

Building a fasting lifestyle isn’t about rigid rules or pushing through hunger. It’s about creating space—space for blood sugar to stabilize, space for your hormones to reset, and space for your body to tap into its natural rhythms of healing.

Next week, we’ll take a closer look at metabolic flexibility and why even small changes in meal timing can have such a big impact.

In the meantime, notice how long you’re naturally going between dinner and breakfast. Could you stretch it just a little bit? See how your body responds. Small shifts create powerful ripples. Let’s start there.