Here’s why an extended fast efficiently optimizes your body!
9 - History of fasting Fasting in general has gained popularity in
recent years, especially intermittent fasting within the fitness crowd.
However, the fact is, fasting is as old as mankind itself.
It’s one of the oldest healing traditions in the world, in all types of cultures.
Ancient Greeks used to fast for days on end.
Hippocrates, Socrates and Plato all recommended fasting for health reasons.
Several religions also contemplate fasting as a process of purification and cleaning
the body and the soul.
Therapeutic fasting became popular in the nineteenth century when medicine started to
develop really quickly.
Still, fasting wasn’t always practiced as a healing ritual.
Many movements used it as a political gesture.
Gandhi undertook 17 political fasts during the battle for Indian independence.
The longest fast he ever did lasted 21 days.
Other people have done it for the mental focus.
Nowadays, many health centers run fasting programs throughout the world, and many people
perform long term fasts as a way to reset their body.
8 - Who should and shouldn’t be fasting So who exactly should and shouldn’t be fasting?
There are some people who simply shouldn’t fast for health reasons.
Children and teenagers up to 18 aren’t recommended to do a long term fast as they need nutrients
for continued growth.
Human bodies burn a lot of energy while developing, so almost everything that’s consumed is
quickly used.
If a kid needs to lose weight, a far safer and more appropriate approach is to cut out
refined sugars and grains.
Kids shouldn’t be cutting the supply of nutrients, but instead just restructuring
their diet to make it healthier.
If someone’s underweight or malnourished, defined as having a body mass index of 18.5
or less, they shouldn’t be fasting.
People who are low in weight without much bodyfat shouldn’t be stressing their bodies,
because that’s what fasting is, a good stress to the body like exercise.
Pregnant or breastfeeding women shouldn’t be fasting because the baby needs a steady
supply of nutrients to ensure the baby's healthy growth and development, and fasting during
pregnancy or while breastfeeding is simply too risky for the baby.
Diabetic patients should always fast under the strict supervision of a professional.
And oh yeah, obviously, long fasts aren’t a good fit for someone who’s lean and trying
to build muscle.
Insulin is needed to put on muscle!
If you guys do decide to do any sort of fasting, consult your healthcare professional first!
I’ve put a few sources to different research studies in the description so be sure to check
those out.
Now that we got the medical disclaimers outta the way, let’s move on!
7- Fasting to lose bodyfat When we eat, we eat plenty of macronutrients
that our body processes into energy.
A lot of us ingest much more food than we actually need.
Like all animals, our bodies are designed to store this extra energy in fatty cells,
when we need it.
But if we eat every day, several times a day, our bodies virtually never have the chance
to use the stored energy.
When we stop eating food, our body will start to process the stored energy it has.
When you don’t eat, your blood sugar comes down.
Fasting is an excellent way to lose fat, because when our bodies lack incoming food, it’ll
start to burn all the stored body fat.
During fasting, your body starts off by burning off all the glycogen in the liver, which is
all the sugar.
Your body stores energy as glycogen in the liver, which is links or chains of sugar,
and then it stores any excess as body fat.
A pound of fat roughly equals 3,500 calories.
If your basal metabolic rate is somewhere around 1,800 to 2,000 calories a day, it takes
around two full days of fasting to burn a single pound of fat!
Nephrologist Dr. Jason Fung, author of the obesity code, says that if someone’s trying
to lose 100 pounds of fat, they could theoretically go 200 days of fasting just to burn all that
fat!
Guess what the longest known fast ever is?!
THREE HUNDRED and EIGHTY TWO DAYS!
That’s more than a year without eating!
The patient was an obese man weighing 456 lbs, and he was able to get down to 180 lbs
during his fast.
6 - The myth of losing muscle I’m sure you guys have heard about the bro
science that Arnold gave out back on Pumping Iron.
He said that whenever you don’t eat you lose about half fat and half muscle.
I mean, who wants to lose hard earned muscle from the gym?
But if the human body really used protein as much as Arnold said, then we’d probably
be extinct!
Humans back in the day would have been too weak to hunt or gather any food after several
days and eventually just be gone!
Our bodies are smart; why would our body store energy as fat and when the time came that
we needed energy, it decided to use the hard earned muscle instead?
That doesn’t make any sense.
After you burn off all the glycogen in the liver during fasting, there's a point there
where some of the excess amino acids in your body need to get burnt as well.
That’s gluconeogenesis.
We store energy as sugar and fat, so we burn sugar and fat.
Protein burning is NOT increased.
Studies show little change in muscle mass with fasting.
However, an obese person will burn a larger percentage of fat than a lean person.
Any time you lose weight, your lean mass is reduced.
Fasting is FOUR times better at preserving lean mass as compared to caloric restriction.
There’s a certain amount of protein that our body needs for a regular turnover.
When someone starts fasting, that starts to go down and then fat oxidation goes way up.
In essence, what they’ve done is switched over from burning sugar to burning fat!
5 - Fasting and insulin For more than 100 years it’s been known
that diabetes can be reversed by fasting.
Some might say it cures diabetes completely.
While that’s a bold statement, it IS true that type 2 diabetes patients have showed
a significant improvement while fasting.
If you’ve got diabetes, you may know who Dr. Elliot Joslin is.
Dr. Joslin was a renowned doctor who dedicated his career to the study of diabetes.
He wrote in the Canadian Medical Association journal back in 1916 that he thought fasting
was so obvious a remedy for diabetes that studies weren’t necessary.
Wellll, things didn’t exactly work out that way.
In 1921, insulin was discovered, and after that discovery, many scientists dedicated
their time and effort to find the cure for diabetes.
Interest in fasting waned as the doctors focused on what they thought was the future of medicine:
drugs.
So what does fasting do to insulin levels?
Insulin is the primary hormone that tells your body whether to store energy or burn
energy.
When you eat, you're taking calories in and insulin goes up.
Higher levels of insulin signal your body to store energy.
When insulin falls, it tells your body to release energy.
When someone develops insulin resistance, their insulin levels remain chronically elevated,
hence their body is in constant fat-storing mode.
A drop in insulin tells someone’s body to start releasing that stored energy.
This is also why it's so difficult to lose weight when someone is insulin resistant.
The key to breaking this cycle is to have sustained low insulin for periods of time,
and this is why fasting is a great way for losing excess bodyfat.
Fasting lowers insulin better than any other strategy, which then allows body fat to be
burned.
4 - Starvation mode vs Fasting Fasting is basically going without any of
the macronutrients of fat, protein, or carbs.
One common fear is that fasting equals starvation, which isn’t true.
Many people believe they can’t or shouldn’t fast because it’ll send their body into
"starvation mode" a situation where the body starts holding on to fat rather than burning
it off.
What these people are talking about is when the body's metabolism starts to slow down
to match the caloric intake they’re taking in.
That's actually exactly what happens when you reduce your calories.
Scientific research has shown that as you cut your calorie intake, your calorie expenditure
goes down as well.
Starvation mode actually is guaranteed if you just try and cut your calories.
But what's interesting is that fasting DOESN’T do that.
What research shows is that after four days of fasting, basal metabolic rate actually
goes UP 10 percent higher than when you started!
The body hasn’t shut down at all during fasting; in fact, what the body’s done is
just switched fuel sources!
3 - Fasting and other processes The process of fasting turns on several other
processes, including autophagy, which literally means self-eating.
Autophagy is a natural process in which the body hunts out dead, damaged, or diseased
cells in order to strip them apart and use the resulting molecules to make new cells
or for energy.
Think about autophagy as a tiny army of cell-eating Roombas, ready to clean you out of the waste
that accumulates in all the corners of your body!
Autophagy induced by fasting will actually help maintain muscle mass, reduce the negatives
effects of aging, and the progression of age-related diseases.
Autophagy even works inside our neuronal system, avoiding brain damage.
At the same time, fasting also stimulates growth hormone, which tells our body to start
rebuilding different parts.
Fasting increases noradrenaline, which are counter regulatory hormones that counter the
effect of insulin.
Noradrenaline gives you more energy and keeps your metabolic rate high.
Human growth hormone makes it so when you start eating again, you’ll put on lean mass!
2 - Fasting lifestyle Who doesn’t love a good ol’ home cooked,
prepared-from-scratch meal?
Unfortunately cooking just takes up a lot of time.
Just the simple act of eating takes up a decent amount of time!
Don’t get me wrong, I love to cook and eat as much as the next person.
But going to the grocery store to get food, then preparing and cooking the food, and don’t
forget about the clean up, is just a lot of time for people with increasingly busier lifestyle.
This is where fasting makes life even easier.
Fasting is all about NOT doing something.
With fasting you skip a lot of the tedious tasks that eating involves.
Just as an example, imagine how much time you’d save if you didn’t have to eat breakfast!
You can sleep a bit more, then get out of bed, take a shower, drink a couple glasses
of water and you’re ready to go.
While many other diet programs complicate your life with precise instructions on what,
when, and how to eat, fasting simplifies life!
1 - The energy increase We’ve talked about losing bodyfat and we’ve
talked about autophagy, and now we’ll talk about how fasting will increase your energy
levels.
Fasting increases your energy the same way exercise does, by releasing adrenaline.
This might sound kinda counterintuitive since fasting involves not eating.
But adrenaline is a hormone released in situations of stress, and like I had mentioned earlier,
exercise is a low-stress situation in which your body believes it’s in a dangerous situation
and releases the right hormones.
When adrenaline is pumped into your bloodstream, you feel awake, alert, and ready for action.
You experience accelerated breathing and an increased heart rate.
That’s why you always feel more energetic after exercising.
And the same logic applies to fasting.
Of course, fasting is a low stress situation, so there’ll be less adrenaline in your system,
but fasting gives you energy and mental clarity once your body is fully adapted.
If you do decide to give a long term fast a try, make sure you take it slow, and with
supervision!
Here’s what’s next!