Boost Your Immunity Series -7 Intermittent Fasting to Reset and Boost your Immunity

 [The Foolish Couple are founders of the Foco Academy, nutrition specialists and success coaches. We focus on teaching Jack Canfield’s Success Principles and applying the principles to the 3 areas of life that money can’t buy, that is, Health, Time, and Love Relationship.]

Many of you may have had your DNA test done so that you can understand more about your genealogy and your ancestry data. What these tests and data doesn’t tell you, is the lifestyle that your ancestors had, the foods they ate, their activity levels, etc. But here’s what we do know.

Our ancestors, during the hunter gatherer days, they didn’t eat regular meals like we do. They did intermittent fasting and sometimes maybe even extended fasting. Here’s how their typical day went.

Sun comes up. The men gather their weapons and start walking out to hunt for food. The women would stay behind and take care of the family. On a good day, the men were able to hunt down some food and bring that home before the sun came down. They’d bring what they hinted home and ate it with their family. So in a good scenario, our ancestors ate one meal a day. And it’s a big deal because they didn’t have a refrigerator or freezer. They didn’t pickle or preserve things. So they ate the whole thing from nose to tail.

 Now, on a not so lucky day, the men would go out for an entire day without finding anything. Sun goes down, the men would stay out, rest, and wait for the sun to come back up the next day so that they can hunt again. Sometimes they may find something small like a rabbit and just eat it along the way. Meanwhile, the women back home are fasting for at least a day if not more. And the men won’t return until they found food and sometimes it may take 2 or 3 days.

So our ancestors lived on a feast and fast cycle. They practiced fasting regularly.

So what happened to us? I have heard some many friends and clients that says ‘I can’t fast’, ‘I have to eat’, ‘I can’t stand being hungry’. What’s wrong with us?

We got spoiled. Living in the world today, we have an abundance of food. We can literally eat 24 hours a day if we wanted to, unlike our ancient ancestors who had periods of feast and famine. Depending on what they hunted or gathered that day, they never knew when they will get to eat again, so intermittent fasting was common for them. Food wasn’t as convenient as going to your local supermarket or ordering online delivery as most of you have been doing since the Shelter in Place with Covid-19.

Our ability to intermittent fasting is built into our bodies, we just learned to ignore it because food is so abundant to most of us. But recently, intermittent fasting has regained its popularity because of the many benefits it has, such as reducing free radical damage, chronic inflammation and helping your body regenerate itself.

Before we move on, let us first introduce ourselves. My name is Minna, and (Andy), and we are the Foolish Couple. You are watching our blog series on boosting your immune system. We created this special series just for you because of the current situation that we are in. The spread of the COVID virus, the pandemic, and our shelter-in-place order.

This is the last video off our 7-part series. Just a quick recap.

We started off the Immunity Boosting series by first talking about metabolic efficiency. If you don’t know what it is, make sure you follow the link and go back and watch that video.

And then we talked about how our fear and anxiety actually weakens our immunity and makes us more susceptible to illnesses, and how you can overcome your fear especially right now.

We talked about the foods that helps our immune system in part 3,

and, if you have been using a lot of bleach and Clorox and other strong chemical cleaners, make sure that you watch part 4, because over-sanitizing your home may actually hurt your health.

In Part 5 we talked about the relationship between your age and your immune system,

and in part 6, we zoned in on vitamin D and how this little vitamin can really boost your immune system.

To wrap it all up, today in part 7, we’re going to talk about this amazing new discovery, which was actually our ancestral wisdom, that can really boost our immune system.

If you are a pet owner like us, have you ever noticed that when your baby (your cat or dog) is not feeling well, they stop eating and seem to just lay around a lot?

This does not mean they are sick and going to pass away, but rather, they have a primal instinct to prioritize their energy usage to boost their immune system and fight off infection. Interesting thing is, it actually takes a lot of energy to digest the food that you eat. So for pets, they instinctively know to conserve their energy to fight off their ailments and infections.

That’s right, whenever we eat, our innate immune system will try to protect us from any bad microorganisms that may be present in the foods that we ate.

It activates white blood cells to ward off any bad stuff that was present in the foods we eat. These white blood cells fight off any other infections that may be happening inside our body. During fasting these white blood cells would be free to attack and protect us from infections such as the COVID-19.

It’s interesting that in the whole animal kingdom, humans are the only species that are giving food during times of infections and illness.

That’s right, for as long as I can remember, whenever I was sick, my parents would always give me rice porridge or congee to eat. And this habit was ingrained into our lives all the way into our late 30’s. Whenever Andy or I got sick, the other would either cook congee or buy congee for the other to eat, this was taught to us by our parents as the best way for recovery.

That was probably one of the reasons both of us got sick all the time, got the cold or flu every season and were out for days sometimes weeks, all the way until we were 40.

We were literally fed lies that didn’t help us recover faster, but may have damaged our health over time in the long run.

Looking back for the first 40 years of our lives, the diet we ate, was more or less modeled after what our parents ate or what most Chinese families ate, and it really wasn’t one that was meant for health or longevity. Congee, after all, is essentially rice boiled down in water till it becomes a thick-like a porridge. And white rice is pretty high on the glycemic scale and will spike your blood sugars after eating it.

And remember higher blood sugar actually lowers your immune system. So your body may feel more comfortable with the congee, but in essence it is lowering your immune system with the spike in sugar and is also wasting precious energy your body can be using to heal itself.

We already talked about how energy can be used to boost your immune system rather that digesting food as a way fasting helps with your Immune system. 

Let’s take a look at other ways how water fasting can help with your immune system.

• it helps flush out bad microorganisms that may be in your gut.
• It stimulates cellular autophagy
• Speeds up and improves Genetic repair
• Improves your insulin sensitivity and boost ketones
• Reduces rating heart rate and blood pressure

Tell us what autophagy is and why it is so important for cellular repair and boosting our immune system?

Your body is constantly trying to make new cells, but it does not break down old damaged cells or abnormally developed cells fast enough nor often enough.

That’s why we age and why we can get auto-immune diseases and maybe even cancer over time from all these old and abnormal cells that build up in our system.

Autophagy is a fundamental process at the cellular level that breaks down old damaged cells and abnormal cells to recycle for energy, repair damage, store and rejuvenate your cells. However autophagy works best during periods of intermittent fasting, and since we have an endless supply of food, most of us are not doing intermittent fasting to allow autophagy to happen.

Since everyone is a bio-individual, autophagy works at different rates. For some intermittent fasting of 12 hours may stimulate autophagy, But research shows that autophagy happens usually after a 16-24 hr fast for most people depending on how high your insulin levels or blood sugar levels are. Once again eating that congee definitely is not going to help your body lower insulin and boost autophagy.

So if you haven’t tried intermittent fasting or water fasting yet, it really isn’t that hard to do. Most of you may already be doing it already without even knowing it.

We suggest that everyone starts with a 12:12 Intermittent fast, meaning that they eat their meals in a 12 hour window and fast or don’t eat in the other 12 hour window, for example your last meal of the day will be at 8pm and that includes all snacking and you don’t eat again till it is 8am. If you are not already doing this, I suggest you start now, you will notice that you will have better energy. If you are already doing this, we suggest you try a 16-8 Intermittent fast. This is eating in a 8 hour window for all your meals and fasting for 16 hrs, for example last meal at 8pm and breakfast at 12pm the next day. This is harder but it will give you a better chance to activate autophagy and boost your immune system.

There are some crazy benefits to your body when you intermittent fast for longer periods of time, such as boosting insulin density to reduce symptoms of type 2 diabetes, naturally lowering your blood pressure, starve cancer cells, regenerate your own stem cells to look and feel easily 10-15 years younger than your actual age.

Some pretty amazing benefits, and if you interested in learning more, join us for our Intermittent fasting Video series.  You can sign up for that series here. Over three days you will learn all there is about Intermittent fasting and why you need to start doing it now. Sign up now.

We hope you enjoyed our Boosting your immunity series, and if you missed any of the episodes, make sure you watch them and get our gifts. Download our Free Metabolic Efficiency List and also learn more about how our digestive health is important to your immune system in our Free “gut matters” book and how chronic inflammation in your cells can cause you to be immunocompromised in our free webinar in the links provided.

As we close our Boosting your Immunity series, we hope everyone is doing everything that they can do take care of themselves to boost not only your immunity but your health. Sometimes it takes something like a pandemic to  wake us up, that we are not as healthy as we think we are. It is never too late to change that, start your journey to better health today.

Book your free first concierge consultation and sign up for our upcoming Intermittent Fasting Video series now to repair damaged cells and regrow new ones to boost your health and your immunity. Sign up now.

Until next time, love what you live, and live what you love. 

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