Feast and Fast: How Returning to Your Roots Supports Resilience

If you’ve been following this series, you know we’ve been talking about the importance of creating space between meals to give your body time to rest, reset, and recalibrate. Today, we’re taking that idea one step further—by looking at why cycling between fasting and feasting is not just helpful, but actually how your body was designed to function.

Let’s rewind for a second.Throughout human history, we didn’t have 24/7 access to food. We didn’t have pantries stocked with snacks, coffee shops on every corner, or delivery apps at our fingertips. Our ancestors naturally lived through cycles of feast and famine—sometimes food was abundant, and more often, it wasn’t. And guess what? Our bodies evolved to thrive under those conditions.

Metabolic flexibility—the ability to easily shift between burning sugar (glucose) and burning fat for fuel—is a survival advantage. When food was available, we stored energy. When it wasn’t, we switched gears and burned stored fat. It wasn’t something we had to force or think about. It was simply built into our biology.

Fast forward to today: We eat from the minute we wake up almost until the minute we go to sleep. We graze all day long on processed and convenience foods. We rarely give our bodies a chance to dip into stored energy or flex between fuel sources.

Over time, this constant intake trains the body to become dependent on a steady supply of incoming sugar—and we lose the ability to efficiently burn fat.That loss of metabolic flexibility is at the root of so many modern health struggles:

• Blood sugar dysregulation

• Insulin resistance

• Weight gain (especially around the midsection)

• Chronic inflammation

• Low energy and brain fog

• Hormonal imbalances

The good news? You can retrain your body. You can rebuild your metabolic flexibility. You can return to the rhythms your body already knows—and where it feels better living.

How do we do that? We start by gently stretching the space between meals.

We allow the body to tap into stored energy between eating windows.

We honor periods of eating and periods of rest—without obsessing or pushing too hard.

It’s not about starving yourself. It’s about bringing back the balance.

And remember, just like we talked about last week, bioindividuality is key.Your ideal fasting and feeding windows might look different than someone else’s—and that’s perfectly okay. You might need to adjust based on your stress levels, your sleep, your hormone cycles, and where you are in your life stage, and always honor your current lifestyle. For women who are still cycling, those fasting rhythms will shift with your hormonal phases. And even post-menopausal women must be mindful of hormone production. (We’ll talk a lot more about that soon)!

Final Thoughts

Creating a fasting lifestyle isn’t about trying to mimic extreme survival situations. It’s about working with your body’s natural wiring—not against it.

By cycling through fasting and feasting the way our ancestors did, you can support more stable blood sugar, better energy, healthier hormones, and a body that can adapt to whatever life throws your way.

Next week, we’ll dig into how metabolic flexibility improves your energy, brain health, and mood—and how simple tweaks to your daily rhythm can spark big change.

Until then, start noticing:

• Are you eating out of true hunger—or out of habit?

• Are you giving your body time to shift into fat-burning mode?

• How does your energy feel when you create more space between meals?

  
  

Your body is wise. Let’s help it remember what it was built to do. 🌟