To Fast or Not to Fast

Hungry person hand holding fork knife on food plate

Whether it’s religion or a personal preference, some people choose to fast. Fasting is when a person willingly abstains from a certain, or all food for a period of time. With religion aside, this blog post will be all about the benefits of fasting.

Life Hack is a website that wrote a helpful and informative article on this topic, specifically 10 benefits of fasting. Those 10 are:

  1. Weight loss- fasting can actually help you lose weight (obviously)! However, it is smart to know the difference between STARVING and fasting. Starving yourself and not eating anything at all is not healthy, whereas “intermittent fasting – fasting that is controlled within a set number of hours – allows the body to burn through fat cells more effectively than just regular dieting…allowing the body to use fat as it’s primary source of energy instead of sugar.”
  2. Along the lines of sugar, Fasting can help with improving insulin sensitivity- this allows your body to obtain carbohydrates (sugar) more effectively.
  3. Fasting can increase the speed of your metabolism- because you’re eating less, your digestive system has to digest less and your metabolism begins to kick in more to help burn calories. “Intermittent fasts can regulate your digestion and promote healthy bowel function, thus improving your metabolic function.”
  4. Expand your life span by fasting- this corresponds with the topic above, a healthier metabolism equals a healthier body.
  5. Hungry? Fasting can help- your body adjusts to eating less while managing to keep your body healthy. Where most people don’t truly experience severe hunger, fasting can regulate the hormones in your body that tell you when you’re actually hungry. This regulation of hormones cannot only help your body to know when you’re truly experiencing hunger, it can also make you feel fuller over time.
  6. Your regular eating habits improve- fasting helps with binge eating because as your body adjusts, you mentally adjust as well and your desire for food decreases. As you intermittent fast, you create a pattern for eating.
  7. Your brain function increases- life hack writes, “Fasting has shown to improve brain function, because it boosts the production of a protein called brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF.) BDNF activates brain stem cells to convert into new neurons, and triggers numerous other chemicals that promote neural health. This protein also protects your brain cells from changes associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.”
  8. Along with your metabolism, fasting also helps your immune system- fasting “reduces free radical damage, regulates inflammatory conditions in the body and starves off cancer cell formation.”
  9. There is an intellectual advantage to fasting as well- because your body does not have to use energy to digest food, the energy is used in other ways throughout the body when fasting.
  10. Fasting=clearer skin- related to what was mentioned above, the energy previously used to digest is able to focus on other systems in your body like you skin, including your blemishes! Along with the energy side, your intake of toxins also decreases when eating less, ultimately improving your skin.

An experiment with intermittent fasting was conducted man by the name of John M Berardi with Dr. Krista Scott-Dixon and Nate Green. The first experiment was to weekely fast, where Berardi fasted for one day out of the week, and progressed past that. His schedule looked like this:

DAY EXERCISE NUTRITION
Monday Upper body strength exercise – 45 minutes Moderate calorie intake (2500 kcal)
Tuesday Treadmill sprints – 10 minutes Moderate calorie intake (2500 kcal)
Wednesday Upper body circuit exercise – 30 minutes Moderate calorie intake (2500 kcal)
Thursday Treadmill sprints – 10 minutes Moderate calorie intake (2500 kcal)
Friday Lower body strength exercise – 45 minutes Moderate calorie intake (2500 kcal)
Saturday 100 push-ups before each meal Eat whatever I want, stopping at 10 PM (5000 kcal)
Sunday No exercise Fast until Monday morning (0 kcal)

After 8 weeks of this plan, Berardi lost 12 pounds, on his fasting days he describes how he had much more time to do activities that he wanted to do throughout the day, and his mood ultimately improved in the end. He mentions how before his body adjusted, it was difficult for him to not eat as much and he was cranky about not being able to eat when he immediately wanted to. So, if you correctly fast and do not mistake starving yourself for fasting, your overall physical and mental health could ultimately improve!

3 thoughts on “To Fast or Not to Fast

  1. Dominik Wlodarczyk

    Madison- I found Your article “To fast or not to fast” very insightful! I have never before associated fasting with all the health benefits you touched upon in your article. I feel like growing up, I was taught in health classes, and by my elders that eating small portions throughout the day would be most beneficial to my health. The idea of periodically eating portioned food throughout the day seems justifiable to me: a spontaneous hunger pang could easily be pacified with a granola bar or piece of fruit. In this article I stumbled upon, medical experts claim that eating throughout the day can combat overeating, and keep energy levels high. However, after reading your blog my opinion is swayed. “ Temporary fasting” may in fact be the better option! Eating per say, two meals a day would allow one’s body hours to burn off calories without having to deal with excess calories from random snacking.

  2. Lunan Qiu

    From your blog I learned a lot about the benefits of fasting. But it seems not have enough scientific studies to support these benefits. Though to introduce all the researches behind the reasons specifically might be difficult, maybe you can pick up 1-2 researches and explain how these reasons are found and whether these are convincible or not. And the experiment you mentioned in the blog may not be considered as a scientific research to support your views. Because it may happen by chance and as professor mentioned in class, we should not rely on personal experiment too much. I also found a website
    which said fasting helps immune system regeneration. Although your blog are all about the benefits but I still feel curious that do fasting have some bad effect to people?

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