Intermittent Fasting
I want to talk about Intermittent Fasting, Fasting and the benefits and harms that it has on our bodies. First lets take a look at fasting and what is it? Fasting is when you go a period of time without consuming food for health benefits and for most of the time weight loss. So what happens with your body when you are in a fasting state? When our bodies are processing food certain processes are not happening in our bodies and when food is not present these processes and healing of our cells can take place. The majority of the population consume large amounts of glucose from carbohydrates and our bodies use glucose as a fuel source; when using glucose as a fuel source your body isn’t using fat and stored fat as a fuel source, I guess you can call glucose fat sparing in a way.
Another great process that happens when you fast is your body is under a small amount of stress so your cells learn to adapt to the stress, adapt to burning a different fuel source and they become stronger. There are also great benefits to our health like autophagy where the body cleans out dead and damaged cells so that it can create new clean cells.
Fasting can also have some negative effects on our health like your body is under a certain amount of stress during the fasting period and for women especially our hormones can be thrown off easily and we are normally under a lot of stress as it is so this extra stress can be detrimental to our hormones. With fasting you are severely reducing or consuming no calories at all and this can cause a drop in blood sugar for some people and also cause binge eating after the fast for other people.
There are different types of fasting like a Water Fast which these can be done for 24 hours all the way up to 7 days or more. These type of fasts are best done under the care of a professional because your body is going through extremes if you are doing this the first time or coming from a high calorie diet to nothing at all. I don’t really like Water Fasts, I have done it a couple times and it sucked and I felt so shitty. I also did a 48hour Bone Broth Fast which I felt better doing; this also should be done under the care of a professional but it is much easier because you are giving your body some nutrients and electrolytes to keep you going during the fast.
People like to do water fasting or juice fasting for weight loss and but this can be problematic for a couple reasons; one reason is with a juice fast you are consuming a ton of sugar all day long for multiple days and this can spike your blood sugar and cause insulin problems and actually do the reverse of what you are trying to achieve. Another problem that can arise is people tend to come out of their fasts and consume a lot of calories and most of the time from nutrient poor foods and this can cause or contribute to a bad relationship with food. If you have an eating disorder or bad relationship with food I recommend you stay away from these types of fasts or only do them with a medical professional.
Now lets talk about Intermittent Fasting the hot new trend right now. Intermittent or Block Fasting with where you spend a certain amount of time eating and a certain amount of time fasting. The easiest and most common is 12:12; 12 hours of an eating window and 12 hours of fasting, one very important thing for people to know is that the time you are sleeping counts toward your fasting time. I here from people all the time saying that 12-18 hour fasts are too long and how do you do that? Well counting your sleeping time as part of your time frame really doesn’t make it sound all that bad anymore right!?
Another beneficial fasting window is 16:8 where you stop eating around 6pm or three hours before you go to bed and than fast for 16 hours till around 9-10 am. You can play with the numbers and figure out which works best for you, I go around 14-18 hours each day depending on my work schedule and when we have time for breakfast. Also another great fast is between your meals during the day, your metabolism runs efficiently when you consume your meals with 3-4 hours in between so that you have time to digest and your glucose has more time being stable, depending on what you are consuming you may have huge spikes in your blood sugar and with these huge spikes you creating less resistance to insulin. One of the great benefits of fasting is creating more insulin sensitivity, as you do your fasting of choice each day it creates more healing of your cells and more health benefits like insulin sensitivity.
Intermittent Fasting also has benefits for your brain health like improved overall cognitive function, improved learning and memory, enhances neuron resistance to disease and injury. It also allows the mitochondria to function optimally which is the power house of your cells.
Intermittent fasting is the best type of fasting especially if your just starting out and if you are working on fat loss. Everyone should be doing at least a 12:12 IF, eating before you sleep can interrupt your deep sleep with blood sugar and cortisol spikes and your body has to concentrate on digesting instead of healing the body.
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