About Us

Welcome to our site, Fasting Does the Body Good. We are your hosts, Dave and Iva and we are so happy you are here to learn more about living a healthier lifestyle.

**Disclaimer!! Please read this first!**

We are not health care professionals. We don’t claim to have or know all the answers. We are not doctors or professionals in the medical field whatsoever. We are only sharing our experiences, what works for us and what doesn’t work. Every one is different. Make sure to check with your doctor or health care practitioner before trying anything you read here or anywhere on the internet!

Here’s a bit about us.

We currently both live in Guatemala, Dave is originally from the US and Iva is from Canada.

Iva first!

I am a 59 year old woman who loves junk food and working out, but not at the same time (haha!). I am a former Certified Personal Trainer/Aerobics Instructor and although living a healthy lifestyle has always been my top priority in life, in the last few years I’ve let it fall to the wayside. This year (2021) I’m back on track and have been trying fasting, intermittent fasting, keto diets and so much more.

I quit smoking (after 46 years!) on Christmas Day 2020 and have started implementing more natural ways to stay healthy. You can check out some of my videos over on my YouTube channel Women Blazing Trails. 

My goal with this site is to motivate and inspire other women to take their health a wee bit more seriously and start taking better care of themselves as we round out the last half of our lives.

Some fun facts about me

I love singing, chocolate, helping the poor families here in Guatemala and dogs…I love dogs. A lot. Dogs are life. Did I mention I love dogs? Ya. So much so that my long term goal is to one day have a sanctuary here in Guatemala for all the stray dogs.

I also run a site for midlife women, Women Blazing Trails, and a self help site, Amazing Me Movement. You could say I’m a busy girl! I love helping and inspiring people any way I can. You can check out all my courses and mini self help eBooks here.

And now about Dave!

Hola! I was born and raised in Brooklyn NY by a single mom with no siblings and this means I was a “Latchkey Kid”. I was walking home to an empty apartment after the third day of First Grade. I was responsible for making my own food until my mother came home at 6pm. This situation is what I believe made me a very bad eater. Did I eat nutritious things? Nope. Garbage. I ate whatever crap was in the apt and watched TV for hours until she got home.

I got my first job at the tender age of 14 and by this time I was a really bad eater, but now I had money to get as much junk food as I could afford. Here’s the thing though, I wasn’t fat. I rode my bicycle all over the place and was fairly skinny. It wasn’t until I got a car at 17 that I started gaining weight. That’s because I could now drive to all the good pizza places!

At this point, my diet mainly consisted of eating out for every meal and getting snacks all throughout the day. McDonalds for breakfast, pizza for lunch and who knows what was for dinner. I’m fairly sure most of my money went to eating out.

Fast forward 25 years and the disease I was born with, Charcot Marie Tooth Disease really kicked in, I was unable to work, grew to 245 pounds and picked up a pretty good drinking habit. Let’s be honest, I had lost it all. I was REALLY good at my job and loved it. I was a System Administrator, made ok money and moved to Florida in 2004 to try and start a real estate empire. Well, just before I lost my job in 2010, I had lost about 350k in the real estate bubble. Then lost my health and job almost all in the same week. I had gotten let go on Wednesday Feb 24th, and two days before on a Monday, I had reached out the the Muscular Dystrophy Association about my disease because I had a hard time walking down the stairs. I knew it was coming. All that crap made me depressed which led me to drink more and eat more shit. They don’t call it “Comfort Food” for nothing!

It took a few years to get Social Security Disability and once I did, I just lived my life day by day, drinking and eating garbage. I figured that’s how my life was going to be from now on. Until I did something that got rid of my depression and put me in a new mindset. I decided to figure out a way to make the best of this life and planned on moving to Guatemala so I didn’t have to be poor. Disability doesn’t pay well, but in a Third World country, I’m no longer poor.

Just before I moved to Guatemala in 2017, my son suggested that I try intermittent fasting. I can’t cook and don’t know how to count calories, sugars or carbs in homemade meals, so I decided to eat out, but only twice a day, and I made sure I only ingested 100 grams of carbs and 25 grams of sugar. This was now easy as I can read fast food nutrition labels and make that happen. I quit my 30 year love affair with Mt. Dew and only drank water. I lost 20 pounds in two months, without lifting a finger. I had also quit drinking and that helped too. I found that I had WAY more energy throughout the day. My disease made me weak and I was usually done for the day right around noon. Just stayed home and watched TV and played on the computer. Now I had energy to stay out until around 5pm.

Then I moved to Guatemala. I didn’t know the language so I HAD to cook my own food, and I also had to walk to the store. That put me in a lot of pain, so I wound up buying a motorcycle. Now I was eating mostly healthy and walking more than I had in the last decade, and only eating twice a day. The weight just fell off. After a few months, I had realized that I no longer needed cannabis for pain relief as I was no longer in a lot of pain. This eating better and intermittent fasting was the bomb! I wasn’t hungry, I was losing weight and I felt like a million bucks!

So I started to do more research on it, and I’ll share what I’ve learned with you.

Our goal with this site

We put this site together for a few reasons. We are both in our 50’s and honestly feel the best we’ve ever felt and we want to share with other 50 yr old (and +) people how to change their food and lifestyle so they can feel good too!

We want you to feel your best and make the rest of your life, the best of your life. We both have very different metabolisms and different health challenges so we want to be able to share what we know, have tried and tested in order to give others motivation and inspiration to change too!

Everything we share with you will be 100% honest, real and raw! We will share the good, the bad and the super ugly with you. You can head on over to our YouTube channel and check us out there!

Our main goal is to give you the tools and motivation you need to take the first steps in changing your lifestyle. We’re right here with you. It’s not perfect, we’re not perfect but we’re honest and fun!

Dave and Iva