isn't this fitting? fasting to flourish!
topic of the day 059 & video of the day 052
intermittent fasting
What, who, when, how, why? Then, so?
Dieting almost never works.
Researches tell us eating less and exercising more can help in losing weight at first, but they rarely stay off.
Now experts think we should focus less on what we eat but more on how often.
Intermittent fasting is one of the hottest dieting fads with some health gurus suggest skipping breakfast every day while others recommend only five days a week, limiting yourself to less than 500 calories on the other two.
36 hours might seem like a long time between eating but in the wild, fasting might be even more normal than regular meals. Many predators only eat every few days and penguins don't eat for as much as six months each year!
Are the risk of depriving yourself of food worth the health benefits?
In one experiment, two sets of mice were given the same high fat diet but one group was only allowed to eat for eight hours every day.
After a hundred days, the mice that fasted weighed less and were in better shape, even though both groups have the same diet!
What makes skipping meals potentially so healthy?
When you eat, energy is stored as glycogen, mostly in your liver. Energy is easily added and via your daily metabolism, removed. We convert excess energy to body fat for long term storage - like the ingredients in your freezer. But the chemical insulin regulates access to that storage.
When we eat, insulin rises and our cells consume less fat and when we don't, insulin's low and we can burn those extra pounds. Not all body fat is bad but too much is unhealthy.
That chemical that stops us from burning fat is the result of our evolution through periods of scarcity.
Early hunter gatherers probably ate whenever food was available, making fasting an ancient part of all of us.
At our disposal, we have food with increasingly bigger sizes easily right within our grasps, too much calories of what we actually need daily.
Our bodies are wired to store excess energy for a rainy day, but since we keep eating, that day never comes.
But fasting creates artificial scarcity.
Periods without food lowers our insulin, leading to more fat-burning and maybe healthier bodies.
The early scientific studies shows that intermittent fasting may reduce triggers that lead to heart disease, diabetes and even cancer.
Short fast may seem to even benefit our brains.
You may think that hunger makes you delirious but fasting can feed our neurons because fat-burning creates chemicals called ketones which is beneficial to the brain. During fasting, scientists haven even seen growth in brain regions involved in memory.
It makes evolutionary sense that when we really need to find food, the human brain would be creative and alert.
It just seems to work in a special way: by calling on our bodies' evolutionary energy programs.
"It's not that food is bad for you. It's that not eating, sometimes, might be just as healthy."
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