Fasting Is Good For Your Health
>> Friday
I HAVE FASTED for three days (twice). I have fasted quite a few times for just one day and once for two days. And even though fasting is sometimes difficult, it has improved my mood overall, and the research seems to indicate it improved my health too.
A recent study found that those who fasted one day per month were 40 percent less likely to have clogged arteries. That's a pretty big difference.
Almost always, if something is good for your health, it's also good for your mood, and this is no exception. If you've never tried it, I recommend a simple one-day fast.
Do it on a day off (you may not feel very energetic). Don't eat anything at all from the time you get up in the morning until the following morning. Don't drink anything except water, and drink plenty of water. You will be thirsty. Don't do a lot of strenuous activity. Just take it easy and relax, but keep yourself busy on tasks that don't require a lot of physical energy.
If you normally drink coffee, stop drinking it a few days before your fast so you are over your withdrawals before you begin fasting.
At times, fasting doesn't feel good, but it is surprisingly easy, even for someone like me who usually never even considers skipping a meal. Occasionally throughout a fasting day, you'll feel really hungry. And then it goes away and you get involved in what you're doing and forget about food.
The most amazing thing is how much time you have when you're fasting. A day without food seems twice as long, and not because you're suffering. It's because food preparation and eating the food takes a lot of time.
Anyway, I recommend it. You'll appreciate food more in the days following a fast, you'll be in a better mood, and you'll be healthier.
5 comments:
From YouMe Works:
I'VE READ A LOT OF BOOKS on fasting, and almost all of them mention significant health benefits. When I first started reading this stuff, the claims seemed over the top. Nothing could be that beneficial. I tried to find some studies supporting these claims, but I found very little. I didn't find much research either supporting the claims or refuting them.
But then a study came out a couple of weeks ago that changed the way I think about fasting. I read about it in InteliHealth, a newsletter that publishes medical findings. They have never promoted fasting, and probably wouldn't recommend it (that's the general medical stance on fasting — it's dangerous). In other words, InteliHealth has no vested interest in saying fasting is great. And yet this study is remarkable.
The experiment was conducted by Mark Mattson and his team at the National Institute on Aging. Mattson fed mice nothing every other day. The mice could eat as much as they wanted on the days in between, and they did. They pigged out. They ended up eating very nearly double what normal mice eat in a day.
But fasting every other day caused them to live longer and healthier lives. A lot longer and a lot healthier. The researchers don't exactly know what to make of it. Mattson said, "We think what happens is going without food imposes a mild stress on the cells, and cells respond by increasing their ability to cope with more severe stress." He said maybe it's similar to what happens when you lift weights: You stress your muscles and they respond by growing stronger.
Near the very end of the study, they injected all the mice (those fasting every other day, and those eating a normal diet) with a toxin that damages the cells in the same part of the brain Alzheimer's damages in humans (the hippocampus). Mattson and his team later looked at the brains of the mice and found that those that had been fasting every other day suffered less damage to their brain cells.
This study made me think maybe all the claims in these fasting books might not be ridiculous. At least some of it might be true.
I've been thinking about this. It seems likely that at least an occasional state of hunger would have been fairly common throughout our evolution. Our bodies might be adapted to it. Maybe it creates unnatural problems when the body doesn't ever go hungry. Maybe eating three square meals a day, every day, is unnatural.
Up until the first time I fasted, I had gone my whole life without ever going even one day without food, and very rarely even went twelve hours without food. That ain't natural.
For the millions of years mammals have been evolving and right up to our invention of agriculture a short ten thousand years ago, mammals often went hungry many times in an individual's lifetime. Surely our bodies have evolved to handle this. Maybe that's why it is totally accepted by most people in the health profession that human beings gain about a pound a year. Maybe that is part of the body's adaptation to the inevitable lean times the eons have adapted us to.
In other words, eating plenty of food every day is probably unnatural for mice as well as for people. An occasional fast might very well be more natural and very good for us.
I've read a lot of books on fasting. I thought most of them were not very good. But I found one I really liked, and I recommend it if you're interested in trying a fast: Principles of Fasting.
From YouMe Works:
A FEW MONTHS AGO, I went on a three day fast. I consumed nothing but water for three full days. Afterward, I didn't eat as much as I did before the fast, and yet, within a week, I was putting on fat on my belly. I was gaining weight while eating less.
I once heard somewhere that fasting is bad because it lowers your metabolism. After the fast you would resume your old eating habits, it was presumed, and with a lowered metabolism, you would get fat.
I've encountered thinking like this in the exercise literature too. Raise your metabolism. That's how you can become trim and fit. It is as if the "given" is that we are going to gorge ourselves at every meal (and given how many carbohydrates most people eat and how ravenous carbs make you, maybe it seems inevitable), but the solution they offer is: Exercise hard enough to try to keep ahead of your mouth. That seems ridiculous.
One of the things I most enjoyed about fasting was the great calm I felt. And after the fast was over, I felt calmer than I did before the fast. Not sluggish or dim-witted. Just calm. Less ruffled. Less fidgety. Less nervous. I liked it.
Maybe a lower metabolism (if that's what I'm feeling as "calm") is a good thing. Maybe it would be better to eat smaller meals and keep the calm than it would be to try to keep myself revved enough to keep up with my mouth.
Here's to a lowered metabolism. Couldn't this world use fewer people who are revved up all the time and more people who feel a deep calm? I think so. This compulsion to eat eat eat and then workout like mad to keep it all burned off is going about it the wrong way. It is another form of insatiable consumerism. Let's ease off. Let's relax and make this world a little calmer and a little saner and a little less frantic. Let's raise a (small) glass and toast to a low metabolism.
I like everything about fasting except the fact that I gain more weight after breaking it :(
JD, I actually lost weight after my last fast, but I'm getting better at it. One of the main things I did was to think about how I was going to improve my diet after my fast, and I did this thinking during my fast.
So I had it all worked out, and did it. It was much easier to change my diet after a fast because everything tastes really good after a fast. A carrot is delicious. Take advantage of this fact and improve your diet after a fast.
Hi there. Your metabolism in fact did not slow down. A couple days of fasting will only effectively shed water weight from your body, not actual fat. The reduction of water makes areas of your body seem less "puffy." When you break your fast and resume eating, salt (even small amounts) will cause the body to retain water underneath fat cells effectively budging them outward. A severely lowered metabolism or starvation mode (where your body will store most calories as fat) almost always occurs in EXTREME conditions. Severely limiting calories for a very prolonged time, while incorporating severe strenuous excercise (burning 1000s) of calories daily to create a drastic negative calories deficit would you effectively lower your metabolism to a level of noticeable effects. Remember, the weight you lost was water. The weight you gained back was water.
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