Why Should You Fast?
Fasting has been around for about as long as humans have. In addition to involuntary fasting from temporary lack of food or widespread famines, fasting has been an important part of most world religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. From west to east, it’s what humans do and what we’ve been doing for thousands of years. It’s literally in our DNA. The following are the biggest fasting takeaways.
Fasting works for everyone, you just have to figure out which type is right for you.
Overall, Health Benefits of Fasting
In the simplest sense of the word, fasting means not eating for a specified period of time. The benefits of fasting are many.
Fasting can help you lose weight. If done for a longer period of time, it can help you lose significant weight. Fasting can be as effective or better than continuous dieting, especially if done the right way, and combined with a healthy personalized diet, exercise, some key supplements, and a healthy lifestyle.
Fasting also reduces cardiovascular risk, cholesterol levels, inflammation, risk of dementia, and chronic pain.
Many people report improved cognitive function (i.e., less brain fog). Fasting helps slow down telomere shortening and the aging process.
Fasting helps slow down and in some cases even reverse type 2 diabetes.
Fasting usually improves asthma and wheezing.
Fasting helps normalize hormone levels, including human growth hormone, insulin, dopamine, serotonin, and adrenaline.
Fasting improves mental health and memory.
How does fasting help you think better?
Some scientists believe that because we humans have evolved for tens of thousands of years in environments where food was not always available or plentiful, we tend to function best with occasional food deprivation. One prominent theory states that because your cells are under mild stress while you’re fasting, it helps improve function. Your cells adapt to the stress caused by fasting, by enhancing their ability to handle stress, which helps improves your mental abilities. Whoever came up with that theory obviously has never heard of autophagy, which is the even more important reason why fasting works.
Autophagy: Every cell in your body does “house cleaning.”
It mostly happens at night, where enzymes in your brain cells (and other bodily cells) clean up junk debris and partly damaged proteins by digesting them. This is called “autophagy”, or “digesting yourself”. Your body digests itself a little bit, literally. This process is increased during fasting, and your body “eats itself” a lot more.
Weight Loss
Fasting can be so easy, patients actually prefer fasting to regular dieting. If you’re going to fast, choose one method with the help of this guide, and unless there is some really pressing reason, stick to that method long enough to see if it works or not. Another point you will have to keep in mind is that you’ll need to eat clean before and after the fast. If you’re looking to lose weight, you don’t want to gain it all back. If you’re looking to improve a condition, like high blood pressure, or inflammation, you don’t want it to come right back. To do that, you’ll have to eat a healthy diet. This means fewer processed foods, less alcohol if you drink a lot, quitting smoking, and avoiding fried foods, sweets, and other junk foods.
Removes Mucoid Plaque
Fasting also helps remove mucoid plaque, or hardened mucoid fecal matter. Not much has changed since Dr.Kellogg started the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan about 100 years ago (complete with Yoga-type classes!), and declared that “90% of the diseases of civilization are due to improper functioning of the colon.” There’s a lot of truth to that, and there is much talk today about the importance of general colon cleansing, but so much about mucoid plaque, especially in the small intestine.
In 1987, Dr. Richard Anderson developed a ground-breaking colon cleansing system using herbs, electrolytes, probiotics, and other supplements. Since then, close to 100,000 people have completed his program, with fantastic results. Much like fasting, the benefits of cleansing are also significant: improved energy, vision, mood, stress response, immune resiliency, and overall health, and oftentimes it actually leads to the resolution of lifelong sinus issues.
Many of these improvements are also due to Dr. Anderson’s diet, which is a blend of the Type O and A diets of the Blood Type Diet where he reduces or eliminates not only red meat but also many grains and dairy, serendipitously splitting the difference and maximizing the beneficials and minimizing the avoids for a decent one-size-fits-all diet. Other benefits often reported are a reduction of menstrual pain, migraines, and joint pain, fewer colds, breast cysts, weight, and improved concentration.
The intestines can store a significant amount of mucoid plaque. This consists of partially digested, putrefying food, bacteria, and hardened mucus, combined with whatever pharmaceutical drugs and other toxic chemicals you’ve been ingesting. All this junk often gets stuck in your small and large intestines for years, decades, or your entire life. When autopsied, some intestines can weight upwards of 40 pounds and are characterized as “distended to a diameter of 12 inches with only a pencil-thin channel through which the feces could move.” These many pounds of mucoid plaque consist of a layer (often, multiple layers) of caked-on “encrusted mucus mixed with fecal matter, bizarrely resembling hardened blackish-green truck tire rubber or an old piece of dried rawhide.” This mucoid plaque, if and when it finally passes through the digestive system such as during a colon cleanse, often shows “ropelike twists, striations, overlaps, folds, creases—the shape and texture of the intestinal wall.” People have reported this, often while using the Cleanse and Purify Thyself colon cleanse. You can also add some strong pepsin- and trypsin-containing digestive enzymes, and a little cayenne powder too if you can handle it. After a few days, 8 to 35 feet of mucoid plaque may come out. It often has the consistency of medium-hard chewing gum. And it has the exact folds and creases of your small intestine, which is why a colonoscopy will not always reveal it. Mucoid plaque varies considerably, depending on the individual, so yours may be different than someone else’s, or it may be nonexistent. But if you eat unhealthy foods, you probably have a few feet of it.
Lectin Avoidance
The more you learn about all the different types of fasting, the more you realize that most of them involve drastic reduction (or elimination) of grains and other lectin-containing foods from the diet. Any kind of mono- diet also eliminates many problematic dietary lectins, like Rice Fasting. Maybe one reason fasting works so well, and why people who follow the Blood Type Diet don’t need to fast as often, is because they are already avoiding these lectins just by following the Blood Type Diet.
Learn more: Finding the Best Type of Fasting for You
About Two Roads Wellness Clinic
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