There is A LOT to say about intermittent fasting…. Here is a summary of the benefits:
- Fasting triggered a 1,300% rise of human growth hormone (HGH) in women, and an astounding 2,000 percent in men. HGH burns fat, builds muscle, and keeps you young.
- Fasting normalizes hormones (insulin and leptin), which is key for optimal health and hormone function to keep you energized and burn fat.
- It preserves memory function and accelerates learning
- “Undernutrition without malnutrition” is the only experimental approach that consistently improves survival in animals with cancer, as well as extends lifespan overall by as much as 30 percent
- Fasting boosts Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor which basically builds your brain tissue, making you smarter and makes your muscles stronger
- Intermittent fasting reduces free radical damage, regulates inflammatory conditions in the body and starves off cancer cell formation.
- Fasting frees these white blood cells up to destroy dormant infections and other problematic areas.
- Intermittent Fasting drastically helps your good bacteria in gut flourish. Essentially every aspect of your health will improve as your gut flora becomes balanced. You will sleep better, have more energy, have increased mental clarity and concentrate better.
Intermittent Fasting….whats the deal with that? I thought I had to eat 6 meals a day?
Is it a good idea to “starve” yourself just a little bit each day, or a couple of days a week? Mounting evidence indicates that yes, intermittent fasting (IF) could have a very beneficial impact on your health and longevity.
I believe it’s one of the most powerful interventions out there if you’re struggling with your weight, brain fog, poor energy, auto immune disease, hypothyroid….etc. One of the primary reasons for this is because it helps shift your body from burning sugar/carbs to burning fat as its primary fuel. We will talk about how this helps your brain work better. Intermittent fasting is not about binge eating followed by starvation; rather we are talking about timing your meals to allow for regular periods of fasting or gut rest.
To be effective, in the case of daily intermittent fasting, the length of your fast must be at least 10-16 hours. This means eating only between the hours of 11am until 7pm (an 8 hour eating window). Essentially, this equates to simply skipping breakfast, and making lunch your first meal of the day instead. Immediately upon waking until your first meal you are going to want to consume as much alkaline water as possible, about 32 ounces. This will help hydrate your cells and stimulate movement of the bowels which will further detoxify your body. It takes about 6-8 hours for your body to metabolize your glycogen stores; after that you start the shift from burning sugar/cars to burning fat. However, if you are replenishing your glycogen by eating every 3 hours, you make it far more difficult for your body to use your stored fat as fuel; AND your gut never rests, therefore never heals and energy is never what it can be.
Intermittent Fasting – A Energized living lifestyle, NOT A DIET!!!!
I view intermittent fasting as a lifestyle, not a diet, and that includes making healthy food choices whenever you DO eat. Also, proper nutrition becomes even more important when fasting, so you really want to address your food choices before you take on a new way of eating.
This includes minimizing refined carbs & sugar and replacing them with healthful fats, like coconut oil, olive oil, olives, butter, eggs, avocados, and nuts, omega 3 fish oil, flax/chia/hemp seeds. It typically takes several weeks to shift to fat burning mode, but once you do, your cravings for unhealthy foods and carbs will automatically disappear. This is because you’re now actually able to burn your stored fat and don’t have to rely on new fast-burning carbs for fuel. Unfortunately, despite mounting evidence, many health practitioners are still reluctant to prescribe fasting to their patients. According to Brad Pilon, author of Eat Stop Eat:3
“Health care practitioners across the board are so afraid to recommend eating less because of the stigma involved in that recommendation, but we are more than happy to recommend that someone start going to the gym. If all I said was you need to get to the gym and start eating healthier, no one would have a problem with it. When the message is not only should you eat less, you could probably go without eating for 24 hours once or twice a week, suddenly its heresy.”
The Health Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
Aside from removing your cravings for sugar and snack foods and
turning you into an efficient fat-burning machine, thereby making it
far easier to maintain a healthy body weight, modern science has
confirmed there are many other good reasons to fast intermittently. For
example, research presented at the 2011 annual scientific sessions of
the American College of Cardiology in New Orleans showed that fasting
triggered a 1,300% rise of human growth hormone (HGH) in women, and an
astounding 2,000 percent in men.
HGH, the proverbial anti-aging fitness
hormone plays an important role in maintaining health, fitness and
longevity, including promotion of muscle growth, and boosting fat loss
by revving up your metabolism. The fact that it helps build muscle while
simultaneously promoting fat loss explains why HGH helps you lose
weight without sacrificing muscle mass, and why even athletes can
benefit from the practice (as long as they don’t overtrain and are
careful about their nutrition). The only other thing that can compete in
terms of dramatically boosting HGH levels is high-intensity interval training. Other health benefits of intermittent fasting include:- Normalizing your insulin and leptin sensitivity, which is key for optimal health and hormone function.
- Normalizing ghrelin levels, also known as “the hunger hormone”
- Lowering triglycerides
- Reducing inflammation and lessening free radical formation and damage
- Preserving memory function and learning
According to Dr. Stephen Freedland, associate professor of urology and pathology at the Duke University Medical Center, “undernutrition without malnutrition” is the only experimental approach that consistently improves survival in animals with cancer, as well as extends lifespan overall by as much as 30 percent.5 Interestingly enough, intermittent fasting appears to provide nearly identical health benefits without being as difficult to implement and maintain. It’s easier for most people to simply restrict their eating to a narrow window of time each day, opposed to dramatically decreasing their overall daily calorie intake.
Mark Mattson, senior investigator for the National Institute on Aging, which is part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), has researched the health benefits of intermittent fasting, as well as the benefits of calorie restriction. According to Mattson,6 there are several theories to explain why fasting works:
“The one that we’ve studied a lot, and designed experiments to test, is the hypothesis that during the fasting period, cells are under a mild stress, and they respond to the stress adaptively by enhancing their ability to cope with stress and, maybe, to resist disease… There is considerable similarity between how cells respond to the stress of exercise and how cells respond to intermittent fasting.”
In one of his studies,7 overweight adults with moderate asthma lost eight percent of their body weight by cutting their calorie intake by 80% on alternate days for eight weeks. Markers of oxidative stress and inflammation also decreased, and asthma-related symptoms improved, along with several quality-of-life indicators.
More recently, Mattson and colleagues compared the effectiveness of intermittent fasting against continuous calorie restriction for weight loss, insulin sensitivity and other metabolic disease risk markers. The study, published in the International Journal of Obesity in 2011,8 found that intermittent fasting was as effective as continuous calorie restriction for improving all of these issues, and slightly better for reducing insulin resistance. According to the authors:
“Both groups experienced comparable reductions in leptin, free androgen index, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, total and LDL cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure and increases in sex hormone binding globulin, IGF binding proteins 1 and 2. Reductions in fasting insulin and insulin resistance were modest in both groups, but greater with IER [intermittent fasting] than with CER [continuous energy restriction].”
How Intermittent Fasting Benefits Your Brain
Your brain can also benefit from intermittent fasting. As reported in the featured article:
“Mattson has also researched the protective benefits of fasting to neurons. If you don’t eat for 10-16 hours, your body will go to its fat stores for energy, and fatty acids called ketones will be released into the bloodstream. This has been shown to protect memory and learning functionality, says Mattson, as well as slow disease processes in the brain.”
FATS are a MAJOR fuel for humans and supply our energy needs between meals and during periods of stress, such as exercise. During fasting (10-16 hours), fatty acids become the major fuel for cardiac muscle, skeletal muscle, and liver. The liver converts fats to ketones (acetoacetate and B-hydroxybutyrate), which also serve as major fuels for tissues (i.e. the gut). The brain, which does not use fat as fuel, can use ketone bodies as a fuel during prolonged fasting.
Besides releasing ketones as a byproduct of burning fat, intermittent fasting also affects brain function by boosting production of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Mattson’s research suggests that fasting every other day (restricting your meal on fasting days to about 600 calories), tends to boost BDNF by anywhere from 50 to 400%,9 depending on the brain region. BDNF activates brain stem cells to convert into new neurons, and triggers numerous other chemicals that promote neural health. This protein also protects your brain cells from changes associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
BDNF also expresses itself in the neuro-muscular system where it protects neuro-motors from degradation. (The neuromotor is the most critical element in your muscle. Without the neuromotor, your muscle is like an engine without ignition. Neuro-motor degradation is part of the process that explains age-related muscle atrophy.) So BDNF is actively involved in both your muscles and your brain, and this cross-connection, if you will, appears to be a major part of the explanation for why a physical workout can have such a beneficial impact on your brain tissue – and why the combination of intermittent fasting with high intensity exercise appears to be a particularly potent combination.
Intermittent Fasting Boosts Your Immune System
Our ancient ancestors grew up in a world of stress and scarcity. Food was often not available and intermittent fasting was common. This form of life left a genetic blueprint with key information pertaining to our health and wellbeing. Intermittent fasting reduces free radical damage, regulates inflammatory conditions in the body and starves off cancer cell formation.
In nature, when animals get sick they stop eating and instead focus on resting. This is a primal instinct to reduce stress on their internal system so their body can fight off infection. This natural mechanism allows the animal to concentrate all their internal energy systems towards immunity. Humans are the ONLY species that often look for MORE food during times of illness and stress.
Energy Conservation in the Body
The body has a certain amount of available energy that it diverts into important function such as digestion, physical movement, immunity, cognition, etc. The CONTINUAL need to digest food diverts energy away from these other factors while fasting conserves energy for use with these other systems. In fact, the digestive process diverts huge amounts of blood and is considered energy expensive.
When we eat food the immune system gets activated to increase inflammatory conditions to ward off any unwanted microorganisms within the food. This is a perfectly natural response so that the “5 second rule” actually works! This happens whether the food is raw or cooked as nothing is truly sterile. When the immune system activates in order to attack newly ingested pathogens it is using up its energy reserves that could be used for other activities. Fasting frees these white blood cells up to destroy dormant infections and other problematic areas.
Fasting Increases Immune Regulation
The practice of fasting allows the body to put more energy and focus into the process of effective immune regulation. Fasting, while drinking Alkaline water and cleansing beverages flushes out the digestive system and reduces the number of natural microorganisms in the gut. The microorganism count is typically regulated by the immune system. So this allows the immune system to divert energy to other more important areas.
Intermittent fasting is a terrific regulator of the immune system as it controls the amount of inflammatory cytokines that are released in the body. Two major cytokines Interleukin-6 and Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha (TNF-a) promote an inflammatory response in the body. Studies have shown that fasting reduces the release of these inflammatory mediators. The immune system modulation that intermittent fasting provides, may also be helpful if you have moderate to severe allergies or food intolerances.
Autophagy to Protect the Body
Intermittent fasting also stimulates the process of Autophagy, where the body breaks down old, damaged cells and abnormally developing cells to recycle for energy. The process of autophagy is part of the innate immune system and utilizes pattern recognition receptors to identify viral cell invaders.
Intermittent fasting stimulates autophagy processes which restrict viral infections and the replication of parasites. This catabolic process helps the body rid itself of intracellar pathogens, as well as abnormal cancer cell development. It is also important in protecting the brain and tissue cells from abnormal growths, toxicity and chronic inflammation.
Intermittent Fasting and Auto-Immune Disease
Individuals with auto-immune diseases such as systemic lupus (SLE), rheumatoid arthritis, colitis and Crohn’s disease have seen a tremendous improvement in symptoms with the incorporation of intermittent fasting. This process reduces the hyper inflammatory processes these individuals undergo and allow for more normalized immune function.
Cancer cells are known to have anywhere from ten to thirty times more insulin receptors than normal cells and depend upon anaerobic metabolism of sugar for fuel. Intermittent fasting starves cancer cells and leaves them vulnerable to free radical damage and ultimate destruction.
Give Intermittent Fasting a Try
If you’re ready to give intermittent fasting a try, consider skipping breakfast, make sure you stop eating and drinking anything but water three hours before you go to sleep, and restrict your eating to an 8-hour (or less) window every day. In the 6-8 hours that you do eat, have healthy protein, minimize your carbs like pasta, bread, and potatoes and exchange them for healthful fats like raw grassfed butter, free range eggs, avocado, coconut oil, olive oil (unheaded) and nuts & seeds – essentially the very fats the media and “experts” tell you to avoid.
This will help shift you from carb burning to fat burning mode. Once your body has made this shift, it is nothing short of magical as your cravings for sweets, and food in general, rapidly normalizes and your desire for sweets and junk food radically decreases if not disappears entirely.
Remember it takes a few weeks, and you have to do it gradually, but once you succeed and switch to fat burning mode, you’ll be easily able to fast for 18 hours and not feel hungry. The “hunger” most people feel is actually cravings for sugar, and these will disappear, as if by magic, once you successfully shift over to burning fat instead.
Another phenomenal side effect/benefit that occurs is that you will radically improve the beneficial bacteria in your gut. Supporting healthy gut bacteria, which actually outnumber your cells 10 to one, is one of the most important things you can do to improve your immune system so you won’t get sick, or get coughs, colds and flus. You will sleep better, have more energy, have increased mental clarity and concentrate better. Essentially every aspect of your health will improve as your gut flora becomes balanced.
Reference:
http://chaddsfordchiropractor.com/intermittent-fasting-boosts-your-energy-and-brain/
