Dieting Doomed! Fast For Freedom

Feeling overwhelmed by the numerous dietary theories and conflicting nutritional advice available, all claiming to have your perfect answer? Do you crave a sustainable way of losing weight, without obsessing over food? Are you fed up with the growing number of health issues you're encountering, and being told that they are just a normal part of the aging process? What if there was a way of regaining control over your physical and emotional well-being, and maintaining your health for the long-term? There are certain key components involved in the re-cultivation of our innate ability to heal and feel awesome. I believe that one of these lies in the power of Intermittent Fasting.

It’s easy for us to convince ourselves that the latest fad diet will heal our issues and miraculously change our bodies forever. We become brainwashed by advertising and images of perfection. Unfortunately, the restrictive nature of diets means that their promised results are unsustainable. Intermittent Fasting, on the other hand, is a refreshingly liberating approach that cultivates better health, slowing down the aging process and improving life expectancy. Its powerful healing effects can result not only in lowering body fat and improving metabolism, but also in improving blood pressure, normalizing blood sugar and reducing inflammation. With this tool incorporated into our lifestyles, we can potentially lessen our dependence on medication, and subsequently regain control of our eating habits.

As a snacking culture, we have an obesity epidemic on our hands. Our bodies are being constantly forced to store fat, as we try to process the endless stream of food we’re consuming. We’re not giving ourselves a chance to tap into our stored fat resources for fuel, and are packing on the pounds and creating inflammation as a result. To make matters worse, we’re being convinced that all we have to do to be thin and healthy is to eat less and move more. We try this simple ‘calories in, calories out’ strategy in a desperate attempt to combat our expanding waistlines, and get frustrated when the results are short-lived, if at all. As a long-term calorie deficit situation is physically unsustainable, our bodies go into starvation mode and produce more hunger hormones in an attempt to force us to eat. This causes us to obsess over food, the ’forbidden fruit’, leading us to eventually cave into temptation. 

Intermittent Fasting is a highly effective means of helping us to achieve our desired health and weight results, without creating a hormonal roller-coaster. In its simplicity, it involves going for extended periods of time without eating. The power behind this approach lies in its resulting insulin stabilizing effects,. The fasting periods give us a chance to heal, as we’re not busy digesting food. It helps our bodies regulate blood glucose, making us more insulin sensitive. The less insulin we have circulating, the less fat we store, and the more insulin sensitive we become. If we lower insulin, we can access our fat stores. The result is progression towards inner healing and weight loss. 

There are numerous philosophies behind the most effective timing and components of our food intake. We will discuss these in my next blog. For the moment, let’s make our bodies less dependent on sugar and high carbohydrate foods, replacing them with good fats, proteins and nutrient-dense carbohydrates. This will make our subway into extending our nightly fasts by an hour or two at a time an easier feat, without feeling jittery and dizzy. The resulting health and weight benefits, let alone the emotional power we recapture, are worth it!