Intermittent Fasting Allows You to Give Your Body a Rest for Better Digestion
“We can, and must, develop dialogue and relatedness with our body because it’s talking to us all the time. And please remember, your body loves you. It does everything it can to keep you alive and functioning. You can feed it garbage, and it will take it and digest it for you. You can deprive it of sleep, but still it gets you up and running next morning. You can drink too much alcohol, and it will eliminate it from your system. It loves you unconditionally and does its best to allow you to live the life you came here for. The real issue in this relationship is not whether your body loves you, but whether you love your body. In any relationship, if one partner is loving, faithful and supportive, it’s easy for the other to take that person for granted. That’s what most of us do with our bodies. It is time for you to shift this, and working to understand your cravings is one of the best places to begin. Then you can build a mutually loving relationship with your own body.” Joshua Rosenthal
From 9 incredible effects of fasting:
“Fasting promotes Autophagy
Autophagy is the body’s natural process of removing old and broken components and is associated with lowering the formation of tumor cells.
During fasting, the body essentially eats itself by destroying dysfunctional cell parts and proteins.
This process gets rid of damaged cell material before they can turn into cancerous cells.
By not constantly loading your body with food, it has time to clean itself up and becoming more efficient, producing healthy cells that respond better to environmental stress.
A lot about the role and function of autophagy is yet to be discovered but it plays an important role in longevity and general health.
From an evolutionary point of view it makes a lot of sense, since a constant oversupply of food is a relatively recent experience in human history and our hunter and gatherer ancestors would often go days without eating.
Your body would then have to prioritise absorption of nutrients and storage of fat when food was available and maintaining your internal health by recycling cell components, when food was in short supply.
Fasting may help to prevent cancer
It’s probably false and even dangerous to claim that fasting alone can prevent or even cure cancer, but studies have shown that fasting significantly reduces a growth hormone, known as the insulin growth factor (IGF-1), produced by the liver.
Low levels of IGF-1 are associated with a significantly decreased risk of several cancers, including breast and prostate cancer.
The IGF-1 levels stay lower for a period of time even when returning to normal eating habits after fasting.
Fasting boosts your immune system
Fasting activates the stem cells of your immune system to regenerate themselves by producing new white blood cells. helping to fight off infections and better cope with the side effects of toxic stress on the body such as chemotheraphy treatments in cancer patients.”
From Fasting Could Have a Powerful Effect on Our Circadian Rhythm:
“Each of the trillions of cells in our bodies has a tiny internal clock. When all of those clocks are synchronized, they tell us when to wake up, burn calories, and go to sleep. But when they lose their beat, we become vulnerable to all sorts of aging-related diseases. Fortunately, the author of a recent paper in Cell Reports thinks that there’s a simple way to reset those clocks if they get off rhythm: fasting.
The circadian rhythm — that 24-hour clock that controls sleep-wake cycles — is the internal “master” clock, controlled by a big group of neurons in the brain, that most of us are familiar with. But Paolo Sassone-Corsi, Ph.D., the director of UC Irvine’s Center for Epigenetics and Metabolism and a co-author on the new paper, previously showed that the circadian clock isn’t the only clock but rather the main clock in a whole network of internal clocks in the body.
The internal clock within every cell expresses certain genes according to the master clock’s instructions. The proteins that help the cells keep those rhythms of gene expression are called “core clock proteins.” In his paper, Sassone-Corsi shows how fasting could get core clock proteins back on track if they ever lose time.”
From How Intermittent Fasting Can Make You Healthier:
“Besides the benefits in reducing the risk of cancer, heart disease, and neurological problems, fasting actually helps facilitate weight loss and muscle growth. This actually seems logical if we think about it.
If a person has consumed food (especially carbohydrates) right before working out, the glucose from this food is still floating around in the bloodstream or is in the liver and muscles as glycogen. This is a fast fuel for the body, and it will choose to burn through this before resorting to burning fat cells, which take slightly more effort to break down.
When a person eats immediately after working out, these glycogen receptors and stores are refilled and some of the positive effects of the workout are cut off. This is how it works: The right kinds of high-intensity and resistance workouts can increase the body’s own natural production of growth hormone and slow aging. When food, especially food containing fructose, is consumed after workouts, it binds to the same receptors as growth hormone and prevents uptake of all the growth hormone the body has made.
Fasting for at least an hour before and after working out can ensure the most uptake of growth hormone, and contrary to popular belief, does not cause muscle wasting or inability to work out effectively.”
