The many benefits of fasting.
There are many benefits of fasting, let’s consider some of the best. Before we do let’s quickly discuss what fasting is and how it became part of my life.
I had never tried fasting until two years ago. Once I found out the incredible benefits of fasting I became fascinated, and dove in deep experimenting with it myself.
I have a post here which steps through my weight loss journey where I lost 40kg. While my weight loss started with traditional diet and exercise, it ended with a trio of diet, exercise and fasting.
Fasting is now a core part of my health and will remain with me for the rest of my life. It amazes me that something with so much potential had eluded me. I thought that frequent small healthy meals were optimal for a healthy life.
I was so wrong.
The benefits of fasting background.
Let’s clear something up first, fasting and starving are not the same thing.
Fasting is a voluntary abstaining from food. Starving is lack of food due to environmental factors. If someone is fasting for an hour, a day, a week or a month, nothing is stopping them from breaking their fast. It’s voluntary.
Everyone fasts, but may miss the benefits by not fasting long enough.
Fasting is normal, we can’t eat 24/7. We fast between meals, and when we wake up we break-fast, breaking the nightly fast.
We also fast when we are sick – if unwell we lose our appetite — our body needs to heal, maybe we should take note. Why not start the healing process before our body hits rock bottom? We can do this with planned fasts and we aren’t going to starve.
We aren’t going to run out of fuel any time soon.
Fat is essentially a backup fuel source we use after fuel from our food runs out. This was important for survival historically when food was sporadic.
In the modern age, food has become more accessible for most of the world and many people are storing more than is useful.
Fat is great at filling it’s purpose of storing reserve fuel. Consider that 1kg of human fat is nearly 8000 calories, with a typical diet being around 2000 calories per day, 1kg of fat is enough fuel for 4 days.
If we consider an example of myself, I’m lean and would estimate my body fat at about 16% of 70kg. If we then consider the bare essential fat at 5% that leaves 11% of 70kg. I have approximately 7.7kg of fat before I start starving, which is enough for over a month.
To be clear, I have no plans to get to 5% body fat, I’m a normal person, not a bodybuilder or a professional athlete. I’m not overweight and still have over a month of reserve fuel that I’m carrying around.
Truckload of fuel.
Imagine how well a car would perform if it was carrying a month – or even much more – fuel around. The car would have to tow an entire fuel truck everywhere. Just in case it can’t find fuel in the service stations everywhere, that makes no sense.
Why would we make our bodies do that?
It led me to consider I could have been doing so much better for my body over the years. Why was I dragging all this reserve fuel around?
I started at 110kg and reduced my weight by 40kg ending up at 70kg. That’s approximately 160 days’ worth of reserve fuel. Now that I’ve left that behind I feel incredible.
When I go to the gym and pick up two 20kg weights, I consider I use to weigh this all the time. It’s a miracle I did anything.
Getting back to reality.
While feasting and fasting have been normal throughout our heritage, the modern world has warped this thinking.
Unfortunately, the world revolves around money and excessive consumption. But fasting doesn’t involve money.
To get everybody to consume more, sell them food, then pills to fix up the side effects of food, then diet food to keep consumption up. Top this all up with some unnecessary beverages. Then sell a gym membership to burn more calories to further increase consumption.
It’s the upsell of the century and everyone’s health is suffering from it.
Maybe it’s time to break the cycle.
The belief that fasting equals starving which equals unhealthy is just wrong.
We can replace that believe with fasting is normal, we do it every day, and we can boost our health in incredible ways by fasting longer.
And we don’t have to do a month-long fast, even just skipping breakfast or avoiding a late-night snack can extend our fasting window and we can reap the benefits.
Let’s now look at the first 5 incredible benefits of fasting.
