Intermittent fasting is simply going 16-18 hours without eating food. At first, it sounds miserable: low blood sugar most of the day, being hungry, irritable, tired, etc...and wouldn't that make me more prone to overeat when I break the fast? After hearing several well respected colleagues promoting intermittent fasting, I decided to check it out in further detail and discovered it is not that bad if done properly. Essentially you are restricting calories to somewhere between 500-800 every 24 hours with 16-18 of those hours resulting in consumption of negligible calories to maintain nutritional requirements. The goal is to restrict the energy expended by the digestive, immune, and endocrine system in response to food so that the energy typically expended on food can be redirected to healing. So consuming extremely low calorie and high nutritional content liquids like grass-fed organic beef broth or cultured Whey Water is done every few hours to keep blood sugar normalized, energy levels from crashing, and prevent the body from going into "starvation" mode.
Why do this? The benefits are truly amazing when you understand the body's hierarchy of needs. The immune system is one of the most metabolically expensive functions of the body. Healing and repair is often put on the back-burner while the body deals with more immediate stressors like creating enough cortisol to deal with that work deadline while you worry about how you are going to pick the kids up from school on-time and still find the time to drop of the rent check to avoid late charges. Other more immediate stressors could be breaking down that BigMac you scarfed down without chewing sufficiently because you didn't have time to make yourself something for lunch and you definitely didn't have time to chew properly (not that it would really help that much with a BigMac). Even if you chose a healthy salad for lunch, your body still prioritizes digestion over healing and repair. This is very important to understand because our digestive system along with our endocrine system (responsible for most of the hormones in our body) are typically in the mode of constantly working. The only real time they get to heal and repair is when we sleep. I'm sure it's starting to make perfect sense now why you seem to get sick after several days of insufficient sleep. There comes a time when the body says, "Enough is enough! You need to rest so I can heal."
Intermittent fasting is great, because you give the body 16-18 hours to heal/repair your gut and endocrine organs. Most of the cellular inflammation we have comes from the foods we eat unfortunately. Intermittent fasting allows that to be resolved quicker as well. With reduced cellular inflammation comes increased hormone sensitivity. With increased cellular inflammation, hormone receptors are damaged and become resistant to the hormones trying to bind to them. The scenario most people are familiar with is Type II Diabetes, where the body's insulin receptors are damaged and the body is unable to get glucose into the cell efficiently, causing increased blood sugar. Hormone sensitivity is the exact opposite of hormone resistance. Intermittent fasting helps repair the hormone receptors by both reducing cellular inflammation and allowing the body to dedicate energy stores to healing receptor sites.
So now that the benefits are known, how do you go about doing this without the miserable side effects of fasting I talked about in the introduction to this post? Beef Broth and Cultured Whey Water are both nutritionally dense liquids that are extremely low in calories. Consuming 8-16 ounces of either of these liquids every 2 hours or so is never enough calories to officially "break" the fast, yet it keeps the hunger urges satisfied (some people, especially diabetics will have a harder time with this - Suero Green can help with this as the sprouted Wheat Grass provides some extra nutrients to regulate blood sugar better), keeps energy levels normal, and provides key fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals to support the body through the fast. If you do this with Cultured Whey Water, you will find yourself not even needing to drink extra water as the Whey Water contains enough to meet your daily intake requirements of water, but you can drink extra water if you feel the need to. The dinner you consume should be a Healing Diet dinner (for more information on the Cellular Healing Diet, you can search amazon for the Cellular Healing Diet Book) - meaning no grains, no sugar, no high carbohydrate/high glycemic/starchy veggies. It's even best to do fermented veggies and quality grass fed beef/cheeses (Beyond Organic is the only source I know of that does not contain A1 Beta Casein which is highly inflammatory to the human digestive system).
So basically, I get up in the morning and around 10am, I have a Suero Gold (Cultured Whey Water from Beyond Organic). I will have a Suero Gold every 2 hours - up to 6 per day as needed. Around 7pm-8pm, I have a healing diet dinner consisting of either soft/steamed veggies (peas, carrots, green beans, broccoli) and a quality protein (Beyond Organic Beef/Cheese, Eggs, Free Range Chicken/Turkey) and when it's available, some fermented veggies like sauerkraut (still need to increase my range of options here). So it is essentially 14-15 hours before I'm taking in any calories, and when I do, it's 50-100 calories which is hardly enough to break the fast. If I'm having a particularly rough day, I can add in an Amasai (Beyond Organic Cultured Dairy Beverage - similar to drinkable yogurt). Or if it's a workout day, I can put some Vitol (powdered Egg protein with digestive enzymes) or Grass Fed Whey Protein (Designs for Health makes a great product called Whey Cool and another called PaleoMeal that work perfectly) in the Suero Gold to give the extra protein needed for repair and recovery from exercise. Another great benefit of using the Suero Gold product is that it contains the perfect ratio of sodium to potassium, helping to keep vital electrolyte stores in proper balance (most people are sodium dominant due to the Standard American Diet).
Generally, you can do this for 3-4 days at a time to give your body a much needed rest to focus its attention more on healing and repair. Those who need more than an occasional boost or are looking to repair faster can extend this type of an intermittent fast as long as they can tolerate it. I have a friend who pretty much does the routine I described above day in and day out because it makes him feel great, reduces the stress of finding quality foods throughout the day, and the increased hormone sensitivity improves many aspects of his life. I hope to be able to implement that one day, but for now, I'm starting with 6 days. I'll try to keep the blog updated with my progress.
Again, you can learn about and purchase Beyond Organic products at:
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