Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

*Transcript

Hello. We are the Foolish Couple, and you are watching The Foolish Insights. We create these video blogs to give you a boost to your success, and it may be about your relationship, your career, finances, contributions, or, like today, we’re going to talk about Health.

Specifically, the latest craze on intermittent fasting.

So how is Intermittent Fasting different from Starvation?

Starvation is a global problem, and it is the absence of food, not by choice.

Fasting, on the other hand, is just choosing not to eat the food for a certain amount of time. And it can be for health, spiritual or other reasons.

So by definition, we actually “fast” everyday. The time between your dinner and your breakfast, which is usually about 12 to 14 hours, is your fasting period.

Therefore, “Breakfast” literally means Breaks your Fast. Get it? [tweet this]

So is it really necessary to fast? in our opinion, eating and fasting is all about balance. Over eating is bad. Over fasting is also bad. Your body is like a car. It needs fuel - whether it is gas or electricity, in order to run. When you car runs out of fuel, well, the car stops working. So does your body.

When we eat, we are ingesting energy that our body needs. Whatever energy is not used is stored for later use. Like leftovers in your fridge.

There is a complicated formula that calculates the energy consumption of your body, but lets just make it simple here.

When you eat, your Insulin level rises and the food energy is stored in two ways. 

One form is glycogen. It is stored in the liver, it is readily available, but is limited in storage. After all, your liver is only yay big. It’s like your storage on your desktop or laptop. If it is 1 gb, then that’s all you have.

Your body uses glycogen when you do activities such as sports, chores, and other physical activities.

Once the limited storage is full, the rest of the food energy is stored as body fat which, as you may have guessed, has unlimited storage. Like the cloud. You can upload unlimited storage into some cloud space and there is no limit how much you can store on the cloud. 

When we fast, the process is reversed. Your body will still use up your glycogen first, and since there is no food energy coming in, once it is consumed, your storage is empty. And your Insulin level drops.

And then, your body starts burning the energy that is stored as body fat.

 So, technically, you are eating and fasting throughout the day. When you eat, you are intaking energy, and your insulin level gets higher. After you stop eating, your insulin level starts to slowly drop. When you manage to balance the eating and fasting, then there is no change in your weight, or body fat.

If you are constantly eating, then your body would only burn the easily burned glycogen and never burn body fat.

That’s the one minute version of the fat burning formula.

So what are the benefits of fasting? How would fasting improve our health?

The most obvious benefit, of course, is the loss of body fat, or weight loss. And that’s usually how most people gauge their health.

But there are many other health benefits as well, such as:

• improved focus and brain functions
• lowered blood insulin levels and therefore lower sugar levels, which is helpful if you have type 2 Diabetes or if you are pre-diabetic
• Lower blood cholesterol
• increased growth hormone
• reduction of inflammation and
• the potential to having a longer life through Cellular Cleansing of old damaged cells

 So having all these benefits, does that motivate you to start intermittent fasting? Well, if you do, and you start googling ‘how to intermittent fast’ - you are going to be overwhelmed. There is so much information, some good, some fake, that will drive you absolutely bonkers just reading all that you feel like you need to eat a donut.

But, before you reach for that donut, here’s a concise list of intermittent fasting methods. Some are easier to follow and some that are just really hard to do.

The first one, is called the 16/8 method.

You fast for 16 hours and you can only eat during a 8 hour window. Typically they recommend that you fit in two meals in that 8 hours. 

The easiest way is to not eat after you finish dinner, go to sleep , skip breakfast and then eat lunch after 16 hours. so if you eat dinner at, say 7pm, your next meal would be at 11am the following day.

During that 16 hours, you can drink water and other non caloric drinks to stave off any hunger. No fruit juice, no soda, and absolutely no alcohol.

This is also called the lean gains method and is fairly easy to do, especially if you normally skip breakfast anyways.

A second way to intermittent fasting is to fast for 24 hours every other day, or maybe once or twice a week.

You eat your regular meals for one day, stop eating for a day, and then eat again the next day.

For example if you eat dinner at 7pm on Monday, your next meal would be 7pm on Tuesday. During your fasting period you are allowed to drink Water, Coffee and tea is allowed but no solid foods.

And then there’s the 5/2 method. Meaning you eat like you normally do for 5 days, and the fast for 2 days. Almost like the weekday-weekend arrangement.

During the 2 days of fasting, you can still eat a little bit, but limit your calories. The general rule is 500 calories per day for women and 600 calories for men.

This is also called the Fast diet, popularized by British Doctor Micheal Mosley.

And then there is the Warrior Diet where you eat small portions of fruit and vegetables during the day and have a large meal at night. The catch is that you can only eat whole unprocessed foods, which is similar to the Paleo Diet. No canned foods, pasta, bread, frozen dinners, ice cream, etc.

The hardest one in our opinion, is Juice fasting. You eat absolutely nothing but only drink juice for five full days. You can put all sorts of fruits and vegetables into your juice, but you can’t drink a hamburger, or a pizza. The goal is to intake all the nutrients you need from the juice, and at the same time the water will help cleanse out the toxins in your body.

With all these different ways to intermittent fasting, how do you know which one works best for you?

Well, before you decide, let’s first talk about the drawbacks of fasting:

1. You become hungry, or “hangry”. Your mood changes, you start to lose focus because you kept thinking about food. You look at your notebook and you see flatbread pizza.

2. You get physically tired, you lost your willpower, and then you fall off the wagon. You reach for the first piece of food you see which may be satisfying emotionally, but not necessarily healthy. Most likely you will fall of your ‘comfort food’ like fried chicken, ice cream, potato chips, whatever it may be. And then bam. you’ve ruined your diet.

And that’s actually your natural response. For years we have conditioned ourselves to eat, and putting things in our mouths. It’s part of our survival instinct.

Having said all that, we believe that whatever you want to do to improve your health, it should be done for the right reasons and that it is done without hurting your body.

When intermittent fasting is done right, it should

• jump start your weight loss effort,
• curb your cravings for bad foods,
• and reboot and retrain your body with the right nutrients and good bacteria.

More importantly , your fasting plan should be simple to execute. Counting calories, trying to figure out how much carbs and fats and protein your body needs can be complicated.

More importantly, most fasting program focus on what you will be losing, but not enough on what you should be gaining. When you cleanse your body, it is the best time to refill it back up with good nutrition. If you fill your gas tank with low grade gas you need to pump it all back out before you can put in high octane gas. So if you are not going to put in high grade gas, why bother pumping the gas out?

So we recommend that you do our 5 day program. Not only would you pump out all the toxins, we give you the high grade nutrition that your body naturally needs to function properly. You will feel some real difference in your body. It’s not just about the weight, or the waist line. You will feel a whole new level of energy that you didn’t even know you have. And, better yet, you may also notice that your complexion will clear up. Making you better and younger looking. We have a whole different video blog series just on skin health. But for now, let’s start you off with fasting first.

Our 5-day RESET program is really simple to follow, and you can repeat  every few months, after a vacation when you know you ate way too much, or after the holidays when we almost always over indulge.

Here’s how the RESET program works.

Over the 5 days we will provide you with three low glycemic meals every day. It comes in liquid form but it is filled with protein, carbs, fats, and fiber, that will leave you fulfilled and you won’t be hungry. It actually taste like milkshake, without the bad sugar. And it doesn’t have that weird taste that typical protein powder has. Proteins, carbs, fats and fiber are Macro nutrients, and you get that from the shakes. 

We will ALSO give you all the micro Nutrients that you need to reboot your body and give your body what it needs to lose the weight and curb the cravings. When you inject an optimal level of micro nutrients into your body, your cells will actually wake up and start repairing itself. There’s a lot of boring science behind what we said, and if you like you can follow the link below to read all that boring scientific research. But, believe me, there’s no better way to see if this works for you then to actually try it yourself.

And that’s not it. We will ALSO give you active Probiotics to feed your body with good bacteria and combat the bad bacteria build up from unhealthy foods. Your gut is constantly a war zone between the good and bad bacteria. And if you want the good stuff to win, you have got to replenish the good bacteria. Gut health is a problem with over 60% of the population, so feeding your body with high quality probiotics is like putting the swat team to fight the bad bacteria.

Get it? got it? good.

So are you ready to reboot your body and make it a lean mean fat burning machine?

Click HERE for our awesome 5 day RESET program to kick start your weight loss goals and lead you to better health.

Happy RESETTING!