Fasting has very negative thoughts thrown at it, its starving yourself, its not healthy, it puts your body into starvation mode and you stop burning fat, it causes your body to eat its own muscle. The list goes on and on, I myself even thought the same things taking a negative approach to it. That was before I even read about it and researched into it, in fact it’s the opposite to those things.
Did you know that 1lb of fat holds 3500 calories in, if you’re an average or over weight person you will hold a lot more than just 1 lb of fat on your body. The average woman burns 2000 calories a day and the average man 2500, you could fast for a whole day and still not have burned through a lb of fat. So, unless you are severely underweight you will not starve from fasting.
As for it not being healthy, think about it when you go for any major surgery they tell you that you need to fast for a certain amount of time. Would doctors really give you something unhealthy to do before you have major surgery? No, fasting has loads of health benefits to offer. It can improve insulin sensitivity, improve cardio vascular health, lower blood pressure, decrease blood sugar, decreases inflammation, reduces harmful protein production, the health benefits go on.
There is no such thing as a starvation mode and no such thing as your body slowing down and storing fat, I myself fell victim of believing this. In fact, your body switches to burning fat when you fast, our bodies favourite fuel is carbohydrates and sugar, if you constantly feed yourself this is what your body will be burning through. Fasting allows your body to burn through all the carbohydrate and sugar stores and then will switch to burning body fat.
Humans have been fasting since the very beginning of time and millions of people continue it to this day, there have been times of fasting and times of feasting. Weeks maybe months may have passed before finding food in the stone ages, but people survived. Believing our bodies would start eating its muscle instead of fat is ridiculous. If you believe that you’d had to believe that mother nature designed our bodies to store food energy as fat and sugar, but when we need it, it burns protein instead and slowly kills us. How flawed would that system be?
Now I have never tried fasting before, but I have been doing a lot of research and reading into it because this month I will be starting intermittent fasting every day. This means from 9pm till 1pm the following day I will be fasting, one reason being to drop body fat and the other to improve productivity and for the health benefits. That’s another great thing about fasting, imagine how much more time you will have to be productive during your fasting period, not worrying about cooking or eating. You can focus on more important tasks, you can fit in more exercise, you can do things you don’t have the time to do now, meditate, stretch, go for a walk, read, paint, play with your kids, whatever it is you want to do you will now have more time to achieve this due to not prepping, cooking and eating food.
Fasting is not for everyone, but if you have tried many forms of weight loss and not succeeded, maybe fasting is for you. How do you know if you haven’t tried?
A lot of people fast without knowing, when you work through your lunch that's fasting, when you skip breakfast in the morning that's fasting, even when you are sleeping that is fasting. The name breakfast means your breaking your fast.
I hope this has helped clear up some myths around fasting and educated you guys on how beneficial it can be for you.
I have attached a web address below to a quick video on fasting, check it out and see what you think.
https://www.dietdoctor.com/learn-intermittent-fasting-new-video-course
Thanks for reading 😊