Go Fast Yourself! Part 2

Low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) diets can be effective for weight loss, but we can do better by adding in intermittent fasting (IF). IF offers many advantages not offered by conventional dieting. Both have the same goals: to improve metabolic health, improve fat loss, and lower insulin effect/impact. How many of you out there believe that excess calories alone cause weight gain? That is actually only partially true! Calories and insulin can both drive weight gain. LCHF diets focus on lowering insulin regardless of calories, but also reduce calories without even trying. LCHF is evidently effective for weight loss. However, combining IF and LCHF may have a beautifully synergistic benefit for maximum effect!

At its core, intermittent fasting allows the body to use its stored energy by burning off excess body fat. It is important to note that this is normal and humans have evolved to fast for shorter time periods – days or hours – without detrimental health consequences, as we mentioned in Part 1. Body fat is food energy that has been stored away. If you do not eat, your body will simply “eat” its own fat for energy. Kinda cool right? Life is about balance. Yin and yang. The same principle applies to eating and fasting. Fasting, after all, is simply the flip side of eating. If you are not eating, you are fasting.

Here’s how it works:

When we eat, more food energy is ingested than can be used immediately and so some of this gets stored for later use. Insulin is one of the key hormones involved in the storage of food energy. Insulin goes up when we eat, helping to store excess energy in two ways: carbs are first broken down into glucose, which gets linked into long chains to form glycogen, and that is then stored in the liver or skeletal muscle. Guess what? There is only a limited storage space for carbs so once that is reached, your liver starts to turn the excess glucose into fat.

This whole process goes in reverse when we fast. Insulin levels lower, signaling the body to start burning stored energy. Blood glucose lowers and now the body must pull glucose out of storage to burn for energy. If we begin our day eating and do not stop until bedtime, we spend almost all our time in the fed state! Over time, this can case weight gain because our body has not had any time to burn stored food energy! To lose weight or restore balance, you might consider simply increasing the amount of time spent burning food energy. Enter intermittent fasting.

Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

Did you know that back in the day people used to refer to fasting periods as cleanses, purifications, or detoxifications? People used to believe that abstaining from eating food(s) for a certain period of time would cleanse their systems of toxins and provide rejuvenating effects. Some of the many benefits of fasting include:

• Weight loss & body fat loss

• Lower insulin & blood sugar levels

• Improvement in concentration, mental focus, clarity

• Better blood cholesterol levels

• Cellular cleansing stimulated by autophagy

• Increased energy

• Less inflammation

…to our final series post Go Fast Yourself! Part 3, where we will talk about how to start with IF and some of the advantages!