Peak Fasting

Does struggling with your weight prompt you to participate in peak fasting? One factor of our lifestyle that appears to be driving not only obesity but also many chronic disease processes, is the fact we eat too frequently. According to research, a vast majority of Americans eat all day long. Most of the people actually consume the majority of their daily calories late in the evening. This eating pattern is a big cause for weight gain and metabolic dysfunction.

Struggling with your weight can be mostly because we seldom, if ever, skip a meal or snack. When the body has adapted to burning sugar as its primary fuel, it down-regulates enzymes that utilize and burn stored fat. Food wasn’t available to our ancestors 24/7, and the body just isn’t designed to run optimally when continuously being fed as it is now. Biological repair and rejuvenation processes take place when there is an absence of food. All day grazing triggers disease and the body never has the time to clean out the garbage and regenerate.

Going without food for a specific period of time can result in metabolic changes that stimulate a natural cleansing process known as autophagy, where your body detoxifies and rids itself of damaged cells. The constant feast mode forgoes many of these benefits within your body. If you just cycle between periods of eating and fasting on a daily or weekly schedule, it has shown to provide many of the same benefits as complete fasting. Complete fasting is not eating for several days.

Intermittent fasting covers an array of different meal schedules and involves cutting calories in whole or in part, for a couple of days a week, every other day, or even daily. Mercola.com has a lengthy article on this subject, on which I am only writing a bit.  Even Time Magazine has noted that intermittent fasting is becoming increasingly popular because it works! It works by the body converting food into glycogen, a form of energy. Then your body squirrels away that glycogen in both fat cells and in your liver. Our bodies are designed to run on fat as its primary fuel and cycle through periods of feast and famine. Usually the opposite is what people do today.

Intermittent fasting is also a way by which you can significantly boost mitochondrial health and energy efficiency, which is important for chronic disease prevention that will cut your risk for health problems like heart disease and cancer. By fasting, it may hold the key to cancer and dementia prevention. Fasting may also have a very beneficial impact on your brain function and Alzheimer’s disease.

There are several intermittent fasting schedules such as 5-day fast, 5:2 fast, alternate day fasting and peak fasting. For more information on how each of these works, please visit Mercola.com. Even though you might fast, you will still need to watch what you eat for the calories you are consuming.

The peak fasting, or fasting every day, is the new type they are recommending in the full article. Stop eating 3-4 hours before bed and don’t have your first meal for at least 13 hours. Measure the blood sugar at that time and every half hour thereafter. When it starts to dramatically rise, you need to break your fast and eat food. When the blood sugar raises and you haven’t eaten, it is a sign that glucogenesis is setting in.

Please visit the website for the full dos and don’ts of fasting to select the fasting schedule that best suits you. Consider the health benefits as well as the calories that can be dropped through fasting. It is one of the most effective interventions for normalizing your weight.

 – Dr Fredda Branyon