The truth about fasting

You will know that what you eat is very important for your health and wellbeing. But not eating is just as important. Extended periods of not eating are called ‘intermittent fasting’, and when the body fasts, all kinds of magic happens, from accelerated weight loss (and specifically fat loss) to normalising of your blood sugar levels, cholesterol, and blood pressure.

Your body gets the chance to rest and repair in a way that it can never do when you are constantly grazing on food. Plus, when you choose to fast, you’ll save time and money. Fasting very simply means ‘not eating’, but it’s a lot different to ‘starving’. Fasting is a choice – voluntarily choosing not to eat for health and sometimes spiritual reasons. It’s an entirely natural process – your body does this every night while you sleep – and when you extend the period of fasting, the benefits are even greater.

There are many different ways you can fast, some of them easier and more practical than others. You can choose to fast for hours (between dinner and breakfast the next day), alternate days, two days a week or days on end. In this guide you’ll find detail on all of those. You might have heard about intermittent fasting before. Along with vegan or ketogenic (high fat, very low carbohydrate) diets, it is one of the nutrition topics there’s great deal of buzz about right now.

Fasting is nothing new. Human beings have fasted for millennia without detrimental consequences to health. There were times when food was plentiful and there were times when food was scarce. Fasting has been somewhat forgotten until relatively recently, yet it’s probably the oldest and most powerful dietary intervention with huge therapeutic potential.

How fasting works

When you eat, often you’re taking in more food (and energy) than you need at the time so the extra is stored away for use at a later time. The reason for it is this: you eat a meal, the body makes insulin in response to the amount of carbohydrates (which turn to sugar) in your food. The hormone insulin stores energy in the liver as long chains of sugars called glycogen, and then when that storage facility is full, the liver turns the remaining sugar into fat and stores it in fat deposits around the body.

The most basic difference between these two storage spaces is that one is limited but easily available (the energy stored in the liver) and the other is harder to get to, but there is an almost unlimited reserve (the energy stored in fat cells). So, if eating involves the body making insulin and storing excess sugar as body fat, fasting has the process work in reverse. Not eating means insulin drops and the body has to start using the stored energy – simply, your body switches to burning your body fat instead.

In a nutshell, you are either in a fed state (eating or not long having eaten) or a fasting state.

When your eating and fasting are balanced, you maintain a stable weight. But when you are either

eating meals or grazing with snacks all through the day, you are constantly supplying your body

with energy and will start to put on weight, because you are not giving your body any opportunity to use up the stored food energy.

To get your body back into balance and to lose weight, you need to burn the energy you have

in storage by fasting.