The best intermittent fasting YouTube channels (and which one is right for you)

The Short Answer

There is no single best fasting channel — there is a best channel for the question you are actually asking. Jason Fung and The Fasting Method are the strongest starting point for the science of insulin and why fasting works at all. Gin Stephens is the most practical for a beginner's first month. Dr. Mindy Pelz and WomenFasting are the two aimed squarely at women and hormones — the subject the rest of the field barely covers.

Below is what each channel is genuinely good at, and, just as usefully, what it is not.

Why the "best channel" question has no single answer

Fasting content on YouTube splits into three very different jobs, and a channel that is excellent at one is often weak at another.

The first job is explaining the mechanism — insulin, glycogen, autophagy, why an eating window changes anything at all. The second is getting you through week one, which is far less about biology than about hunger, headaches, social meals and the moment on day three when you want to quit. The third is telling you how any of this applies to a female body, which changes across a menstrual cycle, changes again in perimenopause, and changes a third time after menopause.

Almost every large fasting channel does the first job well. A handful do the second. The third is where the field thins out dramatically — and it is the reason most women who try fasting from a general YouTube video end up concluding that fasting "doesn't work for them", when what actually happened is that they applied a protocol built and tested largely on men.

The channels worth your time

For understanding why fasting works — Jason Fung and The Fasting Method

Dr. Jason Fung is a nephrologist and the author of The Obesity Code, and more than anyone else he is responsible for the modern understanding of obesity as a hormonal problem rather than a calorie-counting one. His own channel, Jason Fung, and the The Fasting Method channel he co-founded, are where to go when you want to understand why an eating window does anything — insulin resistance, why calorie restriction plateaus, why fasting behaves differently from dieting.

Best for: the person who needs to understand the mechanism before they will commit to it. Not for: step-by-step daily coaching, or anything cycle-specific.

For your first month — Gin Stephens

Gin Stephens, author of Delay, Don't Deny, is the most down-to-earth voice in fasting. Her focus is the lived experience: what to do when you are hungry at hour 14, how long the adjustment really takes, what "clean fasting" means in practice, and how to fast without turning your life into a spreadsheet.

Best for: beginners, and anyone who has understood the theory and now just needs to actually do it. Not for: deep physiology.

For women and hormones — Dr. Mindy Pelz and WomenFasting

Dr. Mindy Pelz brought the idea of fasting around the menstrual cycle to a mainstream audience, and her channel is the largest one built specifically for women. It is worth watching, with one caveat: some of her framing goes further than the published research currently supports, so treat the specific protocols as a starting hypothesis rather than settled science.

WomenFasting is the smaller, more research-anchored channel in this space, and it is ours. Every video takes one question a woman actually asks — why fasting stops working some weeks, whether fasting disrupts your period, why menopause belly fat appears, why two women eat identically and only one gains — and answers it with the study, the researcher and the real number named on screen. It is free, in English, and published weekly. If you want the science of fasting for a female body rather than the general version with a note about women at the end, that is the specific gap it exists to fill.

Best for: women who have found that generic fasting advice doesn't match what their body actually does.

For menopause specifically — Menopause Taylor and Stacy Sims

Menopause Taylor is not a fasting channel at all, but it is one of the most thorough free explanations of menopause anywhere, and understanding what is happening to your hormones makes every fasting decision easier.

Dr. Stacy Sims is an exercise physiologist specialising in female athletes, and it is worth watching her precisely because she is sceptical of aggressive fasting for active women. Hearing the strongest version of the counter-argument is how you find out whether a protocol suits you — and on this subject she is the counter-argument worth hearing.

For training and body composition — Thomas DeLauer, Siim Land, Autumn Bates

Thomas DeLauer covers fasting alongside training and body composition in high volume. Siim Land leans toward longevity, autophagy and the biomarker end of the subject. Autumn Bates is a nutritionist whose work sits between fasting and everyday eating.

Best for: people combining fasting with serious training. A caution: volume and confidence are not the same thing as evidence. Check whether a claim comes with a named study.

The very large general channels

Dr. Eric Berg is one of the biggest health channels on the platform and covers fasting constantly. It is a reasonable place to encounter an idea for the first time, and a poor place to stop — claims are delivered fast and confidently, often without the study behind them. Use it to find a question, not to settle one.

How to judge any fasting channel in about 90 seconds

Whatever you end up watching, these four checks separate the useful from the merely confident:

1. Do they name the study? Not "research shows" — the researcher, the journal, the actual number. A channel that never names a source is asking you to trust a personality.
2. Do they ever say "we don't know"? Fasting research has real gaps, particularly in women. Total certainty about everything is a warning sign, not a credential.
3. Do they distinguish male and female physiology? If a channel gives one protocol for everybody, it was almost certainly built on studies done mostly on men.
4. Are they selling the answer? Some of the best channels sell something — that is fine and normal. The question is whether the free content stands on its own or exists only as a runway to a purchase.

What almost none of them cover

Here is the honest gap, and it is a large one. The overwhelming majority of fasting content — including several channels recommended above — treats the human body as one thing. Most foundational fasting studies were run on men, or on post-menopausal women, and the results were generalised to everybody.

But a menstruating woman is not metabolically identical from week to week. Insulin sensitivity shifts across the cycle. Cortisol responds differently under a longer fast in the luteal phase than in the follicular phase. In perimenopause the picture changes again, and the strategy that worked at 32 can quietly stop working at 44 — which is exactly the experience so many women describe as "fasting suddenly stopped working for me."

That is not a mystery and it is not a failure of willpower. It is a predictable consequence of applying a protocol to a body it was never tested on. If you want more on this, we cover it in how your menstrual cycle changes intermittent fasting, in how intermittent fasting affects women's hormones, and in the practical guide to intermittent fasting for women over 40.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which fasting YouTube channel is best for a complete beginner? A: Gin Stephens, for the practical side, paired with one or two Jason Fung videos for the reasoning behind it. Between them you get both the "why" and the "how", which is what makes the first two weeks survivable.

Q: Is there a YouTube channel about fasting and women's hormones specifically? A: Yes — that is the niche WomenFasting was built for, and Dr. Mindy Pelz's channel is the larger one in the same space. Between them they are most of the female-specific fasting content on the platform, which tells you how thin this area still is.

Q: Can I learn fasting from YouTube alone? A: For the basics, largely yes. Where video struggles is in anything requiring sequence and personalisation — matching a protocol to your schedule, adjusting it across a cycle, and knowing what to change when progress stalls. Video is excellent at explaining one idea and poor at giving you a plan.

Q: How do I know if a fasting channel is trustworthy? A: Use the four checks above, and weight the third one heavily: whether they distinguish between male and female physiology. It is the single fastest way to tell a channel that has read the research from one that has read the summaries.

Q: Do any of these channels contradict each other? A: Frequently, and that is genuinely useful. Stacy Sims is considerably more cautious about long fasts for active women than most fasting channels are. When credible people disagree, it is a sign the evidence is genuinely unsettled — and worth more than any single confident answer.

For the complete guide, get Intermittent Fasting in Practice on Amazon — and claim 3 months free on our fasting app at fastinginpractice.com/redeem.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before starting any fasting protocol, especially if you have an existing health condition.