10 Really Great Reasons to Intermittent Fast
“The best of all medicines are rest and fasting.”
Benjamin Franklin
A little while back, I created a post that talked about my introduction to Intermittent Fasting. It briefly reviewed the ins and the outs, and touched upon how much it has changed my life. A little bit after that post, I was prompted to create writing around the big reasons that you should fast in the first place. This post is what came out of it.
1. It Changes Your Relationship with Food
George Romney once said: “Fasting strengthens control over our appetites, thus contributing to self-mastery.” This is exactly how I feel now that intermittent fasting is my way of life. I never thought I had a bad relationship with food. I mean, I openly admit(ted) that I ate chocolate enough to keep the factories in business. And I knew that I grazed through my pantry often and most of the day. But I felt it was more “just the way most people were” as opposed to a “problem”. My husband is the same way with sweets and constant food in his face.
… (now that I am typing this out, I realize the above sounds ridiculous.)
But anyway, I now understand how tied to food I was. It is freeing to work within a schedule – any type of schedule, really – and intermittent fasting (IF) is no different. I know when I am eating, I know what I am eating (which now is almost always a healthy choice), and after that, anything else isn’t an option. If it is important enough, I will wrap it up and save it for later. If it isn’t, I pass it by. That right there, is power.
2. Lowers Blood Sugar Levels
Every time you put food in your mouth, you spike your blood glucose levels. Those glucose levels, or your blood sugars, trigger insulin. [Unless you are diabetic] your body produces insulin – which is a hormone – to be able to convert your food into energy (or to store it for later use). Your insulin also keeps your blood sugars from getting too low or too high.
When you go an extended amount of time without eating, your body is able to stabilize in levels – both sugars, as well as in insulin release. This translates into better energy levels, improved mood, and less fatigue.
3. It Doesn’t Cost a Penny
Is there an eating “program” that DOESN’T cost money? Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Slim Fast, the 21-Day Fix, Shakeology – the list goes on. Not only do these programs cost money, but you need THINGS to go with them. Books, shakers, journals, measuring devices – and with most of them, you have to buy their products and you can’t always just access real food.
With fasting, it has all to do with the clock. You need nothing except to decide when you are going to eat, and when you are not.
Some people also claim that they save a lot of money on food, because they aren’t eating the hours away like they used to. I cannot openly admit that I have seen that in my case, but I do also have a husband (who only dabbles in IF) and two children, that still need to be fed at “normal” times.
4. It Can Be Incorporated Into Any Other Health Regiment That is Desired
Are you Keto, or do you want to be? Vegan? Low fat? (Although, I would argue that high fat is the way to go.) Vegetarian? Raw diet? Glutton free? Well, guess what? You can do alllll that (and more) with IF. Feel free to marry the lifestyle with any other eating pattern – they all go well together!
5. Umm .. Weight Loss – Need I Say More?
So, yeah – it goes without saying, really, that when you introduce IF into your life, that you lose weight. You are training your body to take its energy from your glucose stores or your fat cells, as opposed to the constant food in your gut. Once you remove the fat from the fat cell, water enters the cell and after that, the water releases and the fat cell collapses. Hooray! Over time, you start to lose more and more fat cells, and your body becomes adapted.
Most people will argue that it is truly for the health benefits that someone should fast (and I agree!) but I bet that 90% of people start the lifestyle to lose weight. The health benefits just happen to be a MAJOR added advantage.
“Remember—the more insulin you have circulating, the easier it is for you to store fat and the harder it is for you to access stored fat. Your body becomes very efficient at stuffing all of your fat cells full of energy and isn’t accessing any of your stored fat for energy. This leads to excessive hunger, because the foods you eat get stored away as fat so readily.”
Gin Stephens
Delay, don’t deny: living an intermittent fasting lifestyle
6. Autophagy
Autophagy is the way that your body cleans out old or damaged cells, in order to make room for new cells. There are two ways to get to that point within your body – ketogenically, and through fasting. There is some speculation as to when exactly (within the hours) autophagy begins, and then when it ramps up, but this is definitely a goal for fasters.
This is tied to anti-aging and the production of younger cells. Research is now also hinting that this can be a way to get rid of cancer cells, prevent cancer, and can aid in Parkinson’s patients, and Alzheimer’s patients. Ummm, yes, yes, and yes.
7. Can Stabilize Blood Pressures and Lab Results
We all know that our fingers are crossed when we go into the doctor’s office and they take our blood pressure, or draw labs. We are hoping that we don’t need medication management, or that it doesn’t show just how stressed we are, or that our levels are on the rise.
Unfortunately, with the way that most of us live and eat, all of the above are possible, if not probable.
My boss asked me back in October about intermittent fasting. We got into a conversation about how it worked, why it worked, how to do it, and what I had been seeing within myself. Unbeknownst to me, right after that, he began his own journey. The timing was excellent because he had just been into the doctors and he was facing blood pressure medication. He asked the physician to wait one more appointment, and he was looking for something on his own, to fix his levels. IF walked into his life just at the right time! By the time he went back for his next appointment, his blood pressure and his cholesterol had dropped dramatically! Not only did he NOT need meds, but the doctor said he was well within normal levels.
Everyone needs this sort of response in their lives!
8. It is Completely Flexible
You should be getting a picture by now that intermittent fasting is flexible with most things. But what this section is for, is to tell you that you can change your windows whenever you need or want to. If you have lunch at your daughter’s school tomorrow, move things to encompass that. If you have a date tonight, shift your window enough to work that in. Office Christmas party? That can be accommodated for, too. IF takes a little playing with in the beginning any way, to see what best suits you – but once you know what that is, you can move things around to work in life and then simply head right back to your normal schedule when you are done.
This also means that your windows can vary in most lengths – 16 hours, 18 hours, 20 hours, 36 hours? Whatever it is that works for you and for your goals. The sky is the limit!
9. It is a Way of Life (WOL) – Not a Diet
THIS is a hard one – it is a hard one because most of us have lived the diet life for so long. Due to that, it is challenging to get out of the diet mindset and to recognize IF for what it is – a way of life. With the diet-life comes feelings of guilt, thoughts of I can’t do this or, I can’t do that, feeling the need to accommodate for some imaginary “wrong doing” and over-extending your “diet” the following day.
Intermittent fasting doesn’t work that way. There is no guilt. Every day is a new day and you can make every day however it is YOU want it to be.
Once you wrap your head around that concept, IF becomes freeing!! It is something that you know you will live, always, and you don’t have to worry any more about the start and stop of a diet. Start looking at it as your life, and you will experience great mental freedom from it.
10. All the Cool Kids are Doing it, and it is How We are SUPPOSED to Eat
Hugh Jackman, Ellen DeGeneres, Jennifer Aniston, Chris Pratt – the list goes on. These celebrities and more (a.k.a. “The Cool Kids”) participate in a fasting lifestyle. It really is the “new”/old thing.
We were never meant to eat 3 small meals and 3 snacks a day. Or God forbid, 6 meals. Look back in our ancestry and you will clearly see that they feasted when they could, and fasted the rest of the time. How science and doctors turned it into something so different, I don’t know, but I think people are now starting to recognize the error of the way.
Fasting is such a natural way for us to live. Our systems work better when we fast, and it propels us into better health and the ability to live our best life.
