Do you have questions about nutrition? Send them to us at comer@lavanguardia.es, our nutritionist Aitor Sánchez will answer all your questions.
Is it healthy to do intermittent fasting during menopause? (Rosa Andiñach)
Hello rosa,
Assessing whether intermittent fasting is going to be a good option for someone will depend much more on their personal circumstances, and not so much on the point in their life.
That is to say, it makes more sense to consider whether you are a person who controls your appetite or the hunger that may appear throughout the day, if you surround yourself with good options, and also if you will be able to have healthy food when it is time to break your fast. …All of this is more important than the fact that you are in menopause or being an athlete.
As we have talked about on other occasions in the office, intermittent fasting is just another technique to control calorie intake. There are people who find it very easy to adhere to this guideline and for others it can cause excess effort and unnecessary anxiety. What the studies tell us is that intermittent fasting hardly has any extra advantages compared to the calorie restriction that we can do with a conventional eating plan.
Whether through the use of intermittent fasting or a diet that adapts to our true energy needs, it is recommended to monitor our diet during perimenopause and menopause because we face hormonal changes that can trigger difficulty in maintaining a healthy weight. or the same body composition to which we are accustomed.
The general advice that we should give therefore is to follow a healthy diet and practice regular physical activity, these are the true pillars and whether or not to try intermittent fasting may be an option but completely secondary and will never be one of the priorities. .
What percentage of body fat should we have to be healthy? (Mariana Cesto)
Hi Mariana,
Although I will answer your question by giving you some indicative body fat percentages within our composition, we must keep in mind that to be in a healthy situation there are many issues to evaluate beyond the percentage of fat or whether we are overweight or obese. . It is very common to find approaches in medicine and nutrition that are very weight-centric and that consider the result of the scale or fat measurement as if it were the most important part of a person’s nutritional status, and this is not entirely true. It is a very important variable but it is not something categorical. In short, we can enjoy good health despite not adhering to the recommended percentages.
The following values ??are usually considered normative levels of body fat:
> Men between 8 and 16%
> Women between 15% to 22%
We could even expand the range in both sexes to less strict percentages without finding negative associations for health.
It is also very important to keep in mind that fat does not have the same effect on our body depending on where it is being stored, for example, the visceral fat found inside the rib cage, specifically around our viscera, is known to have a more detrimental effect on our health than the peripheral fat that we may have in the extremities and also the subcutaneous fat that we store just under our skin.
The sexual component also has notable importance due to the effect that hormones have on the distribution of this fat, and precisely the fact that women tend to store more fatty tissue in the legs and hips is a protective variable against to the greater tendency and predominance of storing abdominal fat as most men usually do.
I would recommend that you take into account the values ??that we leave you here in the office only as a guide and that you keep in mind that it is much more important to follow good habits beyond the percentage of fat that we have.