Fasting
Fasting is the talk at the moment, and for some people they feel if they tried to fast (not eat for a period of time), they could quite possibly die!
A bit exaggerated, but that’s what I hear from many clients! They relate this type of ‘diet’ to calorie restricting, yet these are two totally different protocols – fasting is NOT calorie restricting, it is not starvation – it is simply a process that allows your body to rest and more so operate the way it was designed to work.
Like anything – if you understand a process or procedure it will make more sense to you, to know how our bodies are designed and what the process is with some of our organs, I believe you will come to accept this ‘fasting’ idea and be very successful at it.
First up – we have been told over many years, that we need to eat three main meals a day, plus 2-3 snacks to keep our ‘metabolism’ up and going, so as we do not ‘hit a wall’, especially around that 3pm mark.
We have come a long way since this theory and have had many scientists study exactly what our bodies can and cannot do without food.
So to put it simply we do not have to have breakfast first thing to ‘turn on our metabolism’, because quite frankly if our metabolism wasn’t on – we’d be dead!
How it should be explained is that you want your metabolism to work effectively, and that is based on liver function working at it’s best.
I read an amazing book “The Obesity Code” by Dr Jason Fung. He works with and studies a lot of obese patients who also struggle with diabetes, he studied why this is so common now and it’s not all about eating too much and not enough exercise, it’s about the organs in our bodies, the pressure they have had to deal with – with the types of foods we have eaten and the misinformation about when to eat.
Let me quote this from his book and then explain:
“Insulin is a key regulator of energy metabolism, and it is one of the fundamental hormones that promotes fat accumulation and storage. Insulin facilitates the uptake of glucose into cells for energy. Without sufficient insulin, glucose builds up in the bloodstream. Type 1 diabetes results from autoimmune destruction of the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, which results in extremely low levels of insulin.
At meal times, ingested carbohydrate leads to more glucose being available than needed. Insulin helps move this flood of glucose out of the bloodstream into storage for later use. We store this glucose by turning it into glycogen in the liver- a process is called glycogenesis. (Genesis means ‘the creation of’, so this term means the creation of glycogen.) Glucose molecules are strung together in long chains to form glycogen. Insulin is the main stimulus of glycogenesis. We can convert glucose to glycogen and back again quite easily.
But the liver has only limited storage space for glycogen. Once full excess carbohydrates will be turned into fat – a process called de novo lipogenesis. (De novo means ‘form new’. Lipogenesis means ‘making new fat’. De novo lipogenesis means ‘to make new fat’.
Several hours after a meal, blood sugars and insulin levels start to drop. Less glucose is available for use by the muscles, the brain and other organs. The liver starts to break down glycogen into glucose to release it into general circulation for energy – the glycogen-storage process in reverse. This happens most nights, assuming you don’t eat at night.
Glycogen is easily available, but in limited supply. During a short-term fast (fast mean that you don’t eat), your body has enough glycogen available to function. During a prolonged fast, your body can make new glucose from its fat stores – a process called gluconeogenesis (the ‘making of new sugar’). Fat is burned to release energy, which is then sent out to the body – the fat-storage process in reverse.
Insulin is a storage hormones. Ample intake of food leads to insulin release. Insulin then turns on storage of sugar and fat. When there is no intake of food, insulin levels fall, and burning of sugar and fat is turned on.
This process happens everyday. Normally, this well-designed, balanced system keeps itself in check. We eat, insulin goes up, and we store energy as glycogen and fat. We fast, insulin goes down and we use our stored energy. As long as our feeding and fasting periods are balanced, this system also remains balanced. If we eat breakfast at 7 a.m. and finished eating dinner at 7 p.m., the 12 hour of feeding balances the 12 hours of fasting.
If you continually refill your glycogen stores, you will never need to use your fat stores for energy.
What happens to the excess fat that is produced through de novo lipogenesis? This newly synthesized fat can be stored as visceral fat (around organs), as subcutaneous fat (underneath the skin) or in the liver.”
This explains that when we continuously eat/snack/graze throughout the day we:-
- Don’t allow ourselves to get hungry.
- Our fat cells keep filling up because our pancreas cannot take the load of the high sugary foods we eat. Our fat cells cannot empty because we are continually putting food into our bodies all day long.
- We are fueling with the wrong foods – empty calories that do not sustain our hunger, it in fact, fuels our hunger, leading to overeating and fat gain.
I would like to explain to you more about the misleading information that is thrown down our throats literally which has lead to such poor health.
1. Major companies like Kellogg’s, Sanitarium, Nestle have promoted ‘snacks’ just to make more money.
They manufacture products that have loads of sugar or carbohydrates that break down into sugar (think of boxed cereals), they have low fresh nutritional fibre (fully processed – as opposed to fresh kale/spinach/broccoli) and generally no good fats to sustain our hunger, leading us to want more food, (hello ‘muesli bars’ etc), that again do not have high nutritional quality, the next item on the menu is rice cakes or wraps, with processed cheeses, then fast forward to a snack after dinner like another bowl of cereal, repeating this process everyday, from meal to snack, to meal to snack etc.
2. We have been mislead that our body will canaloblise our muscle if we do not eat straight after training.
For a weekend warrior – If you do not have food directly after a training session your muscles will deplete, however if you are fat-adapted your body can go without fuel for a few hours as it will fuel off your body fat first. (Exactly what you want if your goal is to lean down and remove unwanted body fat). Instead we fuel with sports drinks and high carbohydrates to get the ‘energy’ back up, but from the workout itself and the high sugary refuel – this again sends signals to the brain (dopamine effect) to eat more sugar on top of what you’ve had, creating that continous hungry signal.
3. Restricting foods to a certain ‘calorie’ amount each day is not helping to reduce insulin resistance that is the primary fat cell filler.
Following a ‘diet’ that restricts you to so many calories – the first food type people restrict is ‘fat’ because fat holds the most amount of calories per gram (9 calories per gram of food, protein and carbs 4 calories per gram), so people see the value in the calorie the wrong way.
Fat will fuel your body longer, so therefore you do not need to eat as much, calories per say will stay low over the period of the day by default. Whereas if you go for the carbohydrate and protein, these are lower in calories per gram, but the carbs have the ability to break down into sugar to the bloodstream (spiking insulin – generating an overflow in the liver later on) and the protein breaks down (gluconeogenesis process) directly in the liver. So, your body will call out for sugar more because you will get hungry quicker and you will eat more often, but fighting the amount of ‘calories’ you are allowed per day.
So eating more often throughout the day over longer periods in the day, does not allow your body to rest from food, putting pressure on the pancreas, when there’s pressure on the pancreas – it’s overflow system is into the fat cells, and damages the liver – With the liver being damaged this way – think of ‘damaged liver – damaged metabolism’.
When you go back to eating your ‘regular diet’ after this restricting diet is over – your fat cells haven’t been emptied, and the problem is still there, which hello ‘weight gain AGAIN!’
Does this sound familiar???? This is why people think they will die if they ‘fast’ because they remember what it was like when they had to restrict calories, and the memories of that hungry feeling is all too unpleasant.
Over the next coming weeks I will break this down even more, but for now the message to you all is to start locking in a 12 hour eating window and a 12 hour fasting window – this way you cannot keep over filing your fat cell storage.
Thanks for your time in reading. Please share with a loved one that could benefit from this information.
To your health and happiness in 2018
Kerrie
Professional Health, Fitness and Wellbeing coach.
