The actress Aitana Sánchez-Gijón has revealed in an interview with the magazine Elle how she manages to keep such an enviable figure well into adulthood, at her 57 years old, and how she stays active and energized throughout the day. The secret isn’t really a mystery: a solid workout routine paired with a strategic diet, where intermittent fasting is one of the main focal points. Not to mention the way she breaks the fast in the mornings.
Aitana Sánchez-Gijón’s Routine
According to the actress herself, one of the most important things that has helped her reach where she is today is consistency, the resolve not to give up for anything. Yet she admits it wasn’t easy to process at first. “It was hard to pick up the habit, but I don’t skip a day,” she says. And that’s clear, since beginnings are always tough. Although once you get used to them, both fasting and training can become the fundamental pillars of your life, the ones that, like Aitana, you never skip.
Continuing with the fasting, Aitana reveals that she breaks it with a protein-packed breakfast, tailored to her own needs: “Every day I have a breakfast with a lot of protein to break the fast; not everyone responds the same way to the same thing.” But that’s not all, and besides the protein she always has one more thing at breakfast that brings back memories of her youth, which even involves actor Richard Gere: “When I was very young he gave me a kiwi. Before, you didn’t see kiwis in the markets here in Spain, and since then I have breakfast one every morning.”
Why You Should Start Intermittent Fasting
The intermittent fasting that Aitana practices isn’t something she decided to undertake on a whim; it is a practice backed by several experts today, such as David Sinclair, a genetics professor at the Harvard Medical School. At 56 years old, Sinclair is another major advocate of intermittent fasting, and he has gone as far as to say that “eating three times a day is madness.” To explain it in simple terms, the expert appeals to evolution and biology, asserting that years ago there was no option to eat constantly, and yet the body functioned just fine. He also notes that the habit of perpetual eating today keeps the body in a state of “permanent abundance”, which prevents certain defense and regeneration mechanisms from activating.
Furthermore, the impact of delaying the first meal of the day, as the Spanish actress does, has robust scientific backing. A study published in 2019 in The New England Journal of Medicine described that intermittent fasting can induce a “metabolic shift” in the body.
