4 Different Reasons to Give Fasting a Try
There are a lot of good reasons to give fasting a try. Curiosity might be one of them or just seeing if it’s something you can do. But I have found that it goes much deeper than that. Here are four great reasons to give fasting a try. Use them as inspiration to start fasting yourself and reap the benefits and rewards it can bring you.
Deepen Your Faith and Clear Your Mind
There’s a good reason why fasting traditions can be found most major religions. By abstaining from food, we can reach an almost meditative state. Fasting is a great way to clear your mind and the exercise of making due without food can help deepen our faith.
No matter what your faith, or what you’re trying to accomplish, there’s a definite spiritual act to fasting. Use it to bring you close to God or just to quiet your mind and find a little peace in our busy, loud and fast-paced world.
Improve Your Self Worth and Self Esteem, Give Fasting a Try
Fasting isn’t easy. In fact, it can be quite the challenge at first. Your stomach will be growling and you’ll likely get a headache. Those side-effects will lessen and finally go away after a few days, but fasting isn’t something that’s done easily. And there’s a reward in that.
Making it through a fast, be it 3 days, 30 days or a month’s worth of intermittent fasting is an accomplishment and something you can be proud of. Once you do it, you’ll find that your feeling of self-worth and your self-esteem rise. It may not be your main reason for fasting, but it’s a good feeling nonetheless. Think of it as an added bonus.
Lose Weight and Burn Fat
One of the main reasons there’s been a lot of talk about fasting and intermittent fasting in particular recently is that it’s a great way to boost your metabolism, burn some unwanted body fat and lose weight.
If you don’t eat for a stretch of 12 hours or more, your body is forced to burn body fat for energy instead. This is often followed or accompanied by a slowdown in your metabolism to conserve energy. But intermittent fasting eliminates this problem. Since you’re eating well in between short periods of fasting, your metabolism continues to burn strong, helping you burn off plenty of fat when you’re fasting.
Improve Your Health and Live a Longer Life
Weight Loss alone will improve your health, but it goes deeper. When we fast, our body shifts into maintenance mode and works on repairing damage on a cellular level. The theory behind this idea is that when we’re not eating, our bodies should get into shape so we can hunt and gather when time allows. In other words, this added health benefit of fasting is a biological survival mechanism left over from our hunter and gatherer days. And according to some anecdotal data, it may even help you live longer.
Anti-Aging Benefits
Intermittent fasting is most well known for being an effective weight loss intervention. But did you know that more research is revealing that intermittent fasting may very well help with a number of other health markers, including aging? Intermittent fasting could help you live longer and ward off the aging processes, just like it has for me!
Fasting also Triggers Autophagy – autophagy comes from a Greek word that means self-eating. Autophagy is the self-recycling of cellular waste, a process which is increased in response to stress. As we age, autophagy slows down and our ability to recycle cells under stress is decreased. By fasting, we can increase autophagy which may slow down the rate of aging as we keep our body primed to combat cellular stress. One study showed that relatively short term fasting (24-48 hours) induced profound neural autophagy!
I have found that intermittent fasting is a simple health intervention which can have profound benefits that go beyond weight loss. By simply eating within a defined window of time on a daily basis, a number of anti-aging pathways in the body are activated. To learn more about “I.F.” contact me today to schedule your free consultation.
Youthfully Yours,
Nancy 🙂
