OK so I'm now at the end of the 2nd day of my fast, so far its been a very interesting and revealing experience for me.
I wont say its been easy, but I certainly haven't found it to be Hell like some people have commented when they have gone through it. I think a large part of this has been my mindset and understanding that this is just an experience, a challenge, something to learn from and grow. And with that understanding it has been at times quite pleasurable, in fact at times I have felt almost euphoric with energy.
The trickiest thing has been dealing with the voice, by going without food for two days I have ironically laid out food for the wolf to appear. In my mind I hear the following phrases
" fuck it, just go ahead and have a cookie/ take away"
" why not just break the fast and eat something healthy? that's not so bad?"
" are you sure you can see this through? you haven't done this before"
" nobody would know if you did break it"
" what are you trying to be? a health freak? why not just live with moderation?"
On and on it goes, but as it does, I recognize it, and I sit there with it, I am glad to have come face to face with it because this is the same voice that has held me back in so many other areas, and is responsible for all the bad decisions I make.
If I can come face to face with this voice, and learn to ignore it and do what I intuitively feel is the right thing, then perhaps there are many other areas of progress I can make in my life.
So anyway, back to the title of this blog, the science of fasting. Yesterday I went through my personal reasons for fasting, but today I want to cover the Science underpinning this method.
Longevity
The animal models are a little confusing regards the benefits of fasting on a longer life. The fist major study took hundreds of rats and split them into two groups with one group eating as much as they liked and the other group eating about a 1/3 less .
The result where pretty much astounding, the lower calorie group lived an incredible 50% longer than the other rats, they also head much lower incidence of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and even cataracts. They even had shiner coats.
A more recent study however has cast some doubt on the theory of fasting causing longer life spans. This study was done on our closest relative the rhesus monkey.
Over 23 years they studied the effects of eating a 1/3 less calories compared to other monkey in the group. They found that although they had much better health markers such as lower cholesterol and lower incidence of heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
In retrospect, fasting vs a diet where people eat crap will always win hands down, but fasting vs a normal healthy diet ( by my definition) I believe will still make you live longer, and will definitely improve health by lowering risk of diabetes, cancer and heart disease ( which may make you live longer!!!!)
Improved cellular repair
In a fasted state the body can start looking after itself better, instead of breaking down it conserves energy and starts doing a little maintenance. When food is constantly coming in the body has little need to do this as it has constant resources to build with. So fasting is a little bit like running out of money for your household budget, so you start to take better care of it and do more repair work.
Appetite Control
Sometimes people use extreme generalizations, like when they say the are " starving" when really they are just a little peckish. Well fasting teaches you what real hunger looks like and you start to get a real sense of just how much food your body actually needs.
Improved Health markets
Fasting helps the body become much more sensitive to Insulin. Seeing as how the current rise in obesity is very tightly knitted with a rise in diabetes then this is a very good thing. I am now on my third day of fasting. Most of the energy we need to do stuff comes from the food we ate yesterday. Seeing as how I ate nothing yesterday then my body is having to break down fat tissue for energy.
Fasting also lower cholesterol, especially the bad cholesterol, and improve the ratio of good to bad.
And on another personal note...
Fasting has really given me an increased spiritual perspective.Its no wonder that Hindus, Sikhs, Judaism, Buddhist and Muslim practice it as part of their religion. To me I am thinking less and feeling more, the world somehow seems more brighter and a part of me is actually enjoying this whole experience :)
Saying that though! I am definitely looking forward to a big juicy steak tonight!!!!
Fasting is just the first part of my 30 day transformation, keep tuned to here what else I have coming up.
No comments:
Post a Comment