Fasting has been around for thousands of years and has mainly been associated with religious practices and ceremonies. But recently, there has been a lot of scientific research into fasting which has shown incredible health benefits for people.

Research is beginning to prove what a lot of religions have been saying for years, fasting can reduce a myriad of conditions and complications and increase life expectancy.

The idea of fasting conjures up thoughts of a monk, nun or even a hermit living in a remote cave or temple, not eating food for weeks on end in order to attain a spiritual awakening or cleansing.

Fasting does not have to go on for days for a person to enjoy health benefits. Regular fasting where a person either eats during a short window each or most days or do an extended fast lasting several days once every few months can do wonders for a person’s health and life expectancy.

A study of the Great Depression which happened in the United States during the 1930s showed that during that time, when money, work and food was scarce, the people lived an average 6 years more than people in times where money was plentiful and food more abundant.

The researchers expected the mortality rate to be higher and was surprised to see the results. During the Great Depression, many people not only ate less food but they often only ate once a day. Researchers had to conclude that this forced fasting was the cause of the longevity.

Further research done at Cornell University found a group of mice which was fed less food compared to a second group lived much longer. The group with the restricted food intake not only lived longer but the risks of them developing brain diseases like alzheimers was reduced greatly.

In mouse years, the development of brain diseases in those mice which ate less was months but decades in humans in comparison. Meaning that if a person was excessive in their food intake over a long period of time, the risk of developing diseases like dementia and alzheimers was higher by many years compared to those who ate less.

When you actually think about it, it makes perfect sense that overeating is bad for us. Our bodies are specifically designed (mostly) to go long periods without food. When we do not eat our bodies will naturally burn up the stored fat and use it as fuel. More on this further down the post…

Healing The Body From Within

In religion, fasting is often done as a cleansing act, a way to rid the body of toxins and to allow the body to heal. This is exactly what scientific research is now proving to be the case.

Type 2 diabetes is being reversed in many people by fasting. Fasting has been shown to greatly reduce the risks of heart disease, brain diseases like dementia & alzheimers, and cancers. The majority of conditions people suffer today are called lifestyle diseases, and one of the biggest factors in modern lifestyle diseases is overeating.

Today, people’s bodies are suffering a constant barrage of sugar rich processed foods. The UK government only recently ran an ad campaign on TV and radio saying that the second biggest cause of cancer after smoking was obesity.

Obesity comes from food.

Unless you have a rare genetic condition, you can only get obese by eating a lot of bad foods. (I use the words ‘a lot’ loosely as you will read later how people eating small amounts of ‘certain’ foods become overweight.)

Firstly, let’s discuss fat. The word ‘fat’ has become an ‘umbrella’ term lately. There is ‘vegetable fat’, ‘animal fat’ and the word is used to describe things like ‘I am fat’, ‘I am getting fat’, and ‘I need to lose this fat’. To people, ‘fat’ means the same thing, they believe that eating too much fat makes you fat, and if you want to prevent getting fat then you should eat less fat.

This is not correct.

Food fat is not human fat.

When you eat excessive fat, the body does not put that spare fat into stores around your body. It’s not like being given too many potatoes for your veg box and you have to put them in a different box elsewhere.

This is not correct.

Human fat, the stuff around our hearts and around our waists called visceral fat comes from sugar. Mainly fructose. Excess sugar is turned into fat by our magnificent body and placed into storage for when we may need energy. Fat is energy in physical form. It is fuel.

Fat in food has very little to do with the making of human body fat itself.

Fat Free Cakes & The Growing US Obesity Crisis

In 1982, thanks to lobbying by several health authorities, the recommended total fat intake in the United States was reduced from 40% to 30%. Food companies across the US reduced the amount of fat they put into their products with several focusing on creating new ‘fat free’ foods to cater for this new social worry.

The problem is that after 1982, the levels of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke and other issues did not go down as expected, instead they sky rocketed. If fat was the cause then there should have been a drop.

In 1995 studies showed that people under the age of 18 were consuming on average up to 335 more calories a day than people 20 years previous.

The actual percentage of fat in those new calories was minimal compared to the percentage of carbohydrates. The study also highlighted that people were not necessarily eating more food, they were consuming food and drink rich in sugars.

Drinks high in High Fructose Corn Syrup are responsible for the obesity and type 2 diabetes crisis.

A lot of these extra calories and carbohydrates were coming from drinks such as pop and juice. Consumption of these products have increased dramatically over the years. And these products are rammed with sugars like fructose and sucrose. High Fructose Corn Syrup – which was developed in the 1960’s by the Japanese Agency of Industrial Science and Technology – is sweeter than normal cane sugar and is half the price.

With it being sweeter than normal sugar you would imagine drink manufacturers would add less to their drinks but that is not the case. With it being half the price, more is added to drown out the taste of salt often added to drinks with caffeine because the combination of salt and caffeine makes people urinate more and feel more thirsty. Which drives people to consume more of their products.

Quench your thirst?

Not a chance, not while they can make you crave more without you realising it.

Dr Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California who specialised in sugar called it the Coca Cola Conspiracy.

Drinks are – or were – manufactured to make you crave more.

Sugar: The Bitter Truth – Professor Robert H. Lustig

Our bodies simply cannot take that amount of sugars.

You see our bodies are the result of millions of years of evolution and that evolution does not change as fast as our social evolutions. As a society, the world we live in is a million miles away from the one our parents live in but… the bodies we live in, do exactly the same thing our ancient hunter gatherer ancestors did.

Our bodies have not changed much, they do the same thing now as they did hundreds of thousands of years ago when food was sparse. Back when our ancestors had to hunt for food, they did not eat several times a day, in fact, they probably went without food for several days.

They didn’t have cupboards or freezers filled with food like we do today or access to supermarkets filled with affordable convenience foods. No, anything they ate was from hunting and foraging.

The body cannot afford to shut down during those lean periods. Our ancestors had no option but to go out hunting for food and so it was vital that their bodies didn’t switch off and shut down just because it didn’t have breakfast.

No,it needed to be primed ready to hunt, and it needed fuel to help it track and kill new prey. This means that when we eat, our body puts a certain amount of food away as stored energy.

This system, the same system found in other animals, took millions of years to develop. Humans had lived for millions of years hunting and foraging for food before we had developed enough to understand organised agriculture and farming.

The body’s system is far more advanced than our social systems.

And so the big problem today is that we are eating far more than we ever have, and far more than we need.

Break-Fast The Most Important Meal Of The Day… Or Is It?

Breakfast is a fairly new invention too, in the old days people ate when they were hungry, now it has become a belief that you need to have a ‘hearty’ breakfast before we even leave the house and go to work.

“Go to work without breakfast? Are you nuts? You’ll faint.”

Those are the kind of things our friends and family will say when we skip breakfast, often followed by “It’s the most important meal of the day!”

That is strictly not true, the notion of breakfast being the most important meal of the day was a moral and marketing push by cereal manufacturers like John Harvey Kellog and James Caleb Jackson who both were Seventh-day Adventists.

They were pushing a religious morality claim that eating a light breakfast before work made you more productive and a better person. Also, Kellog apparently invented the cornflake as a way to stop masturbation which he believed was the greatest evil. I know, strange right?

They didn’t invent breakfast as such, but they did put a lot of emphasis on it being important, maybe to sell more of their product, but that’s maybe just my cynicism speaking.

Fun Fact: the word ‘breakfast’ means breaking your fast. People fast throughout the night, that is basically what sleeping is. If you get 7-8 hours sleep at night you are fasting.

Today, it is a different story. People eat on average 5 meals a day replacing the old breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Breakfast may be a sugar drenched cereal, then at elevenses there may be cake, chocolate, biscuits with a sugar heavy beverage, lunch might be a carb heavy sandwich or pastry or pasta washed down by another sugar heavy drink like a can of pop and then there is dinner (AKA tea in t’north) followed by super, both generally big meals.

For some the day is often crammed with more snacks like sausage rolls, biscuits or even pasties and sugar rich drinks in between the 5 meals. Basically, a day troughing through bags of sugar.

Complex carbs are essentially sugar, they are broken down into the body and these excess sugars are being turned into fat and stored in the body. With people constantly grazing throughout each and every day, eating carbs from grains and foods crammed with added sugar, their bodies are not being given a break.

Especially as people are generally living more sedentary lives today. A lot of people are stuck behind desks at work hardly doing any physical exercise.Their bodies are unable to use stored up energy reserves. They are constantly topping them up and this is putting a huge strain on organs like the liver and the heart.

People need to take a step back and allow the body to stop overheating as it were. This is what fasting does. It reduces the amount of food a person eats and reduces the amount of sugar that goes into their system.

Fasting allows the body to go into states like ketosis and autophagy where the body starts to use internal fat as fuel, repair damage at the cellular level and begin to heal parts of the body.

Fasting is now being pushed by many of the top Drs dealing with the obesity and diabetes epidemics which are becoming more prevalent around the world.

Food intake reduction is not a calorie controlled diet either. Controlling calorie intake can be dangerous and research shows that the fail rate of those kinds of diets is around 99%.

The Calorie Deception – Dr. Jason Fung

Fasting isn’t about counting calories, it is about going without food for specific lengths of time. Once the fast is over, people go back to eating normal amounts of food.

There are reasons for this and I shall come to that shortly but first… let’s talk some more about calories…

This may sound controversial but, counting calories as a good way to lose weight is a myth.

A calorie is nothing more than a measurement of energy. And here is why counting calories is pointless.

1.Calories do not make you fat.

2. A calorie is just a measurement of energy.

Fasting is not about restricting calories

They say that a male requires 2500 calories a day, the idea is that we use those calories up during a busy day, technically speaking a person who takes in calories should also use up those calories. It’s the first law of thermodynamics… calories in… calories out. Nothing is created or destroyed.

but does it work that way?

No.

In the Joslin’s Diabetes Mellitus (2005) it says:

“Reduction of caloric intake, is the cornerstone of any therapy for obesity.”

However “none of these approaches has any proven merit.”

Studies and research shows that the fail rate of all calorie reduction diets is around 99%

Yet… the advice today is still, calories in… calories out.

Doctors and nutritionists (the box standard ones who haven’t bothered to update their knowledge in these fields) tell us to count calories if we want to lose weight, but it really isn’t that simple.

When you reduce calories over time, your metabolism rate decreases – meaning that you burn less calories… but, and this is a kicker… production of your hunger hormone gherlin increases.

This increase in hunger makes willpower even harder and so you end up craving food more which can lead to eating more.

But… when a person who has been on a calorie controlled diet for a long period of time goes back to eating a full recommend daily calorie amount, their decreased metabolism does not return to its original rate so they are still burning less calories… but because they are eating more calories due to feeling more hungry, they put weight back on.

Calorie restrictive diets can damage a person’s metabolism – (fasting doesn’t).

But it gets even more complicated.

The weight which we know as fat is actually created by the hormone insulin.

Insulin along with cortisone turns sugars into fat and puts them into storage. Scientists have known this for well over a hundred years after studying diabetics who need to take insulin and prisoners who were forced on calorie restricted diets.

Diabetics suffering with type 1 diabetes who were eating less calories but taking regular controlled doses of insulin were putting on more weight. Comparative tests with people on less insulin were not putting the weight on.

Ever heard of Diabulimia?

It is an eating disorder where people with type 1 diabetes cut their insulin intake to lose weight. It is very dangerous as type 1 diabetes melts muscle and tissue into urine. A person with type 1 diabetes who doesn’t take the right amount of insulin when they need it can die of conditions like ketoacidosis. It is a serious condition, but some people purposely do it because they know it means they will lose weight.

Don’t Think Calorie: Think Material

Another thing to remember about calories is that it is just a measurement. It means nothing. It is abstract (If that is the right word). For example: to determine the amount of energy there is in a food source, scientists burn a piece of it and measure its intensity and how long it burns etc.

Food is not the only thing to burn. Paper burns.

Meaning that paper has a calorific rate.

But if I were to eat paper instead of chocolate, I would become very ill and probably die, but I won’t get fat.

Whereas if I were to eat a lot of chocolate, I would get fat. And that is because chocolate has sugar in it. Paper doesn’t.

The body reacts to the sugar in chocolate, the insulin burns some of it and helps convert the rest into fat and stores it.

Another point I want to make about ‘measurement’ is this… imagine taking out a window which was 6 feet tall. Now imagine that the bricks which were resting on the top started to loosen and looked like they were about to drop… to stop them falling out you need to brace them up.

So you slide in a piece of flat board for them all to sit on and look for something to hold that board up…

….would you use a couple of pieces of timber which were 6 feet long, or a couple lengths of rope which were also 6 feet long?

You’d choose the timber right?

Both are 6 feet long, but only one would be sufficient for the job.

The measurement is meaningless, the material is everything.

You can have 2 different food types which have the same calorie count but they can have completely different effects on the body.

Calories do not make you fat, they never did and they never will.

So if you eat 2500 calories a day in broccoli and your friend eats 2500 calories in sugar,

what will happen?

Your friend will suffer greatly.

Their health will deteriorate very quickly, and if they carried on eating 2500 calories a day of sugar only they would die.There is no benefits in sugar unlike broccoli, so saying that a person needs a certain amount of calories is just foolish.

Calorie is a measurement, it is meaningless.

Fat has been the enemy for many years, but it never was, it was always sugar. Sugar is turned into fat in the body by the liver. There is a two part process where sugar is burnt and some is stored away to be used as energy when the body doesn’t have any food.

Fasting allows the body to burn up some of that stored energy. The body needs to use up the stuff it is fed otherwise it will be placed in storage, which is not good at all.

Reversing Type 2 Diabetes With Fasting

Fasting has been shown to reverse type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle condition often brought on by years of excess eating and over indulgence of bad foods whereas type 1 diabetes is biological where the body does not produce insulin.

People with type 1 diabetes are prescribed insulin to prevent the body from eating itself. It is a completely different condition to type 2 diabetes which is caused by too much insulin being released over time due to overeating sugary foods.

Fructose is a complex sugar found in fruit. It is the worst sugar as it can only be broken down in the bloodstream or stored in the liver as fat. Other sugars like glycogens can be stored in the many parts of the body including muscles and organs. This is also not a good thing.

When the liver becomes so crammed with fat, a condition commonly known as fatty liver, after years of overeating foods high in sugars – many which have high levels of added fructose from HFCS High Fructose Corn Syrup – those sugars are forced into other parts of the body like the eyes. Many type 2 diabetes sufferers have eye conditions which can lead to blindness if not monitored.

People with type 2 diabetes are often prescribed insulin, like those who have type 1 diabetes, which can be bad for them. As insulin helps to convert sugar into fat at the same time it is burning sugar up in the bloodstream, it is just adding to the damage which is done.

As Dr Jason Fung, a nephrologist and leading diabetes specialist from Canada says, giving insulin to someone with type 2 diabetes is like giving an alcoholic alcohol to treat his alcoholism. It compounds the problem.

Dr Fung has had huge success reversing type 2 diabetes in his patients with fasting reducing the need to take harmful medication and has helped obese people lose weight reducing the risks of further health problems.

After spending the first 20 or so years of his career as a Dr treating people with diabetes with the recommended approaches, he realised that none of them were working and were in fact making the situations worse. It wasn’t until he reduced the amount of food people ate and reduced their natural and medicinal insulin levels that things began to improve.

Blood sugar levels are managed by insulin, but the sugar levels are not the problem, they are the result of what has been eaten and when. To control the blood sugar levels and the insulin release, he suggests controlling what you eat and when.

Fasting & Cancer

Several cancers are linked to eating. In his 2014 Horizon documentary titled Eat, Fast & Live Longer – still available on the BBC iPlayer – Dr Michael Mosley visited Professor Valter Longo at the Longevity Institute at the University of South California.

Professor Longo specialises in the aging process of the body and his research took him to a remote part of Ecuador where he was able to study a group of people who – at that time – had never developed or died from diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke or type 2 diabetes.

No matter how bad their lifestyle was, they very often ate bad and smoked cigarettes, none of these people would develop these lifestyle diseases.

This small group of people had a very rare mutation in their DNA where they did not produce the hormone IGF1 (Insulin-like Growth Factor 1) in the same quantities as people without the mutation.

It is a rare mutation which affects less than 350 people worldwide, and those with this mutation are left shorter in height compared to the average human, but there are benefits for not having this hormone.

IGF1 is produced in the liver and it puts the body into the go… go… go… mode, meaning that the body is not in a calm and relaxed healthy state allowing the body to repair itself at the cellular level.

IGF1 is produced when people eat protein. Excessive protein means constant production of IGF1 which led to Professor Longo and his colleagues recognising the importance of this hormone in many of these lifestyle diseases.

If people who cannot not produce regular amounts of IGF1 do not suffer from the same lifestyle diseases as the rest of the population then the hormone itself must be a contributing factory. His research led to the idea that people should eat less protein and reduce the amount of IGF1 in their system.

His recommendation to cut down the amount of protein in a person’s diet to sufficiently reduce the harmful amounts of IGF1 is to fast. A 4 day fast once a month or two would do enough to greatly reduce the risk of these diseases. In the docu-film Fasting (watch the trailer further down this article) Professor Longo referred to fasting as being ‘more powerful than chemotherapy’ when it came to the treatment of cancers.

Also on the same documentary, Michael Mosley talked to scientists who showed that research stated that protein was also linked to degenerative brain diseases like alzheimers and dementia. Excess protein is stored in the brain which they believe causes damage and leads to these diseases developing.

Exercising While Fasting

Research has shown that people who exercise while fasting will burn up excess body fat twice as quick.

When fasting, take yourself out for a stroll or a jog, it will help the body shed weight as well as help stimulate the healing process.

Doing intense exercise for a short period of time is just as good if not better than doing a full hour long gym session. High Intensity Interval Training is where you spend no more than 5 minutes doing a series of squats, star jumps and on the spot sprinting, going flat out for 20 seconds then stopping for a short break before continuing.

Doing OMAD: The One Meal A Day Lifestyle.

It would seem that eating food in the quantities we are today pumped full of ingredients like fructose is causing us more harm than good. The popular notion that we need to eat regularly and graze throughout the day to prevent us feeling ‘weak’ or ‘faint’ is wrong.

Fasting is good for the body.

All the major religions have known this and now with meticulous research the best scientists are discovering why .

Reducing the amount of foods with added sugars and proteins would actually do us the world of good.

Just by reducing our food intake by one meal a day can lower the risks of getting type 2 diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.

By reducing the body’s production of certain hormones like insulin and insulin-like growth factor 1, you give your body the chance to use up some of its own fuel stores and give it time to do much needed maintenance.

Fasting can slow down the aging process meaning that you will not only live longer but you will live better in your retirement years.

There is a growing movement of OMADers who only eat One Meal A Day. The rest of the time is spent fasting. It is called One Meal A Day but technically it’s not quite that strict.

The One Meal A Day refers to an eating period called a ‘window’. The window can be as long or as short as you want it. The one meal is the amount of food you eat during that time. So for example if you decided to fast for 20 hours of the day, you are left with an eating window of 4 hours.

During that 4 hours you can have a small starter, then maybe a meal an hour or two later followed by desert even later. You can eat as much as you wish during that window. Some people chose to eat very clean natural food, some eat a keto diet and others eat what the hell they want. It is your decision.

You eat what you want without counting calories and you eat until you are full. Once the eating window closes, you eat nothing else until the next window opens.

The fasting period has to be clean, only water, black tea, coffee and bone broth can be drunk. Anything else can stimulate insulin release breaking the fast.

You can, as I mentioned, eat whatever you want during your eating window. The food can be calorific as you are not counting calories but it is recommended that you do eat good healthy food regulary for the reasons discussed above.

As much as burgers, chips and pizzas are tasty, it wouldn’t do the body much good if they were the only foods you ate most days as your one meal a day.

Extended Fasts

Extended fasts are great for the body, but they must be done right. Dr Michael Mosley was asked by Professor Valter Longo to do a 4 day extended fast in his BBC Horizon documentary Eat, Fast And Live Longer.

During that time he could only drink soup made from bone broth or water. Black tea and black coffee can also be drunk during a fast. The extended fast had reduced the levels of ‘dangerous’ hormones in his system, his blood pressure and other important signs were all at an excellent rate.

How Extended Water Fasts Stopped 16 Years Of Constant Head Trauma Headaches

Many people do longer water fasts lasting up to several weeks but this is not advised without at least consulting your doctor or doing plenty of research.

During these longer fasts, the body is given time to really go to work on itself and start healing. Some people have had amazing results from doing longer water fasts.

Fasting (official trailer)

More Powerful Than Any Drug On earth

In the docu-film Fasting (featuring Professor Longo and Dr Jason Fung) one woman told her story how she had suffered from severe headaches for 16 years after receiving a head injury in 1994. The headaches were intense and constant. She had them every minute for 24 hours of the day, 7 days a week and 365 days of the year.

Longevity was in her family and she feared living to an old age suffering constant excruciating headaches. On a scale to 10 she stated that her pain was around 6-7 most days. Somedays the pain would reach a 10 which would leave her unable to do anything. She was at the end of her tether.

Fasting cured this woman of her headaches which she had suffered each day for 16 years

She took herself off to True North, a clinic which specialised in extended fasts. She had decided that she was going to do an extended fast until she had either got rid of the headaches or was forced to stop by the doctors. She began an extended water fast under the supervision of doctors and nurses. She was checked over twice a day.

On day 19 she woke up thinking something was wrong. She then realised that she was without a headache. It lasted 5 mins. The following day she was headache free for 10 minutes. Each following day she experienced longer periods without pain. On day 41 she ended the fast. Her headaches were gone.

She had been pain free for the whole day. She was then put on a refeeding programme and was relatively pain free for 2 months. There were twinges creeping back and so she went back to True North to do a second fast. The doctors had said that sometimes severe issues required more than one fast to get rid of them completely.

She was advised to eat healthy and nutritious food to get her nutritional reserves up before starting a second extended water only fast. After 6 months of eating clean and nutritious food under the supervision of doctors she began a second 40 day water fast.

When that second fast finished, she was completely pain free. And at the time of filming the docu-film Fasting in 2017, she had not suffered any headaches since 2010 when she had attended the True North clinic..

Eat Less And Live Longer: The Benefits Of Fasting