Intermittent Fasting Explained!
Health Benefits of Fasting in the Month of Ramadan
You know, when someone initially told me about fasting, I really didn’t think anything of it; I thought it was a fad. I’m like fasting: what is that going to do? You’re just skipping meals.
It didn’t make sense to me, and it kept coming up over and over and over again till I finally just took a look at it, and once I really understood what it was, it turned out that fasting, especially intermittent fasting, is the single best thing you could do for your health.
The most powerful thing you could do for weight loss. It is the cure for so many problems, including cancer, and that is because it addresses the deeper root cause of most health problems, which is insulin resistance and mitochondrial damage. So wherever you’re at, I’m going to show you how to transition into this as slowly and as fast as you want.
What is this intermittent fasting?
It’s not a diet; it’s just a pattern of eating and not eating. Our bodies were not developed or designed to have food 24/7, and that leads to weight gain, inflammation, and destruction of the brain cells and the immune system.
So if we reverse this thing and just eat less frequently, all sorts of magical things happen at a deeper level. You’re manipulating certain hormones; you’re lowering your insulin, which is going to help you tap into your fat cells. Whenever insulin is high and cannot be accessed, you must lower insulin to tap into your fat cells.
If you really understand this, it’s pretty simple: How should you lose weight? You want to adjust these hormones; you want to keep insulin as low as possible, and then the other hormone, growth hormone, we want to activate.
Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
And just so you know, one of the best indicators that this is working is when your appetite goes away. Now, think about that: for a second, your appetite goes away. Isn’t that like a huge barrier to trying to stick to any program? If you weren’t hungry all the time, wouldn’t it be a lot easier? The answer is yes.
1: Improves focus:
The next benefit that I personally like the most is cognitive. My brain works so much better when I do intermittent fasting. I had no idea before how much this frequent eating was destroying my brain and keeping me in a brain fog. I felt like I had a helmet on my head all the time, like this heavy cloud, and I just couldn’t wake up. So from the brain level, intermittent fasting is really awesome, and this is going to help you focus, improve your concentration, and help your memory.
The other thing that this does is raise your mood. If you were depressed before and had anxiety, you’re not going to have that anymore.
The Story of a Suicidal Person!
This person who wanted to commit suicide was extremely depressed, and the way that he was going to kill himself was by starving himself to death, so he goes into his room, locks the door, and just lies on the bed. Day one, he wakes up; he’s still not dead. Day two, he wakes up; he’s still not dead. Day three, he wakes up; he’s feeling good; he’s actually no longer depressed.
He unlocks the door, walks out, and says, What’s going on? Why do I feel so good right now? I’m not going to kill myself. He started looking up things on the Internet about fasting and what happens when you don’t eat, and he stumbled on this fasting thing and stumbled on my website. Anyway, he lost a lot of weight, is no longer depressed, is no longer suicidal, is a much happier person, has this huge success story, and it all started with this miraculous fasting. So fasting can help you fix your brain.
Fasting vs Starving
As a side note, fasting is not starving; that’s different. Starving is when your body is starting to eat up your muscle protein and different organs, and you pretty much run out of fat. The fat on your body is there to help you survive when you are not eating.
When you don’t eat, your body is not going to directly go after your muscle as energy; it’s going to go after your fat as energy for a period of time until that’s gone, then it’ll use the muscle that’s when you’re starving.
Once you get used to it, you know that after a couple days it becomes easier, and uh, you start seeing the results, and you’re more confident that you’re not going to starve to death emotionally. You’re going to be happier.
2: Boost the immune system:
number two your immune system is going to be better now I’m going to be talking about prolong fasting a little bit and what that can do that’s like uh fasting for a couple days or longer boy that can completely increase and help you generate stem cells for the immune system so you’re literally regrowing a new immune system which is fascinating.
3: Get rid of old cells:
The other really cool thing about fasting is that you can generate this condition of autophagy. Autophagy means self-eating, so basically your body cells are cleaning up old damaged cells, rejuvenating them, and recycling them into new cells, so it’s kind of like garbage disposal on steroids. You start cleaning everything up, and then you’re generating new cells.
4: Anti-aging
When people do fasting, especially routine, consistent intermittent fasting, it’s definitely anti-aging. You start looking younger. Your skin and joints inflammation goes down.
And so, that’s another point of inflammation. I mean, think about how many diseases and conditions cause inflammation. Heart disease, autoimmune disease, arthritis—they all have inflammation, right?
5: Low calorie requirements
I do want to point out that this is not just about cutting calories; however, when you do intermittent fasting, the need for food becomes less and your body becomes more efficient, so you can get by on fewer calories and your nutrient requirements are lower because your body has adapted.
6: Efficient Weight Loss
When we talk about weight loss in a slow metabolism, fasting does not slow the metabolism; it repairs this thing behind the metabolism behind that set point that you might attempt to lose weight and hit a certain plateau and you can’t get anything less on that that’s your set point and that’s controlled by insulin resistance.
So, once you fast for a period of time, you can correct that and actually lower that set point. So basically, you’re repairing your metabolism when you’re fasting because behind this slow metabolism is this insulin issue. Remember, insulin is the key factor that determines whether you’re going to burn fat or not, so we can actually lower our overall average insulin levels.
7: Resets the digestive system
Now, the other thing that’s cool about fasting or eating less frequently is that it’s going to give you a lot of extra time because you’re not constantly feeding yourself while preparing meals.
Another big benefit is that it gives your digestive system a chance to reset, so it’s not constantly having to work 24/7 because you’re cramming all this food down your throat, so you have less bloating and less inflammation in the gut, and that alone is huge.
(Credit: Dr. Eric Berg, DC)
