Four Steps to Fasting

Fasting can help prevent chronic disease, optimize hormones, aid in weight loss, and bring many other anti-aging benefits when done smartly and safely. This includes the more approachable intermittent fasting, which shortens your daily eating window, usually to 8 hours. It also includes longer fasts of 24-48 hours or more, which can enhance benefits.

Fasting can be a powerful way to clean and clear out your GI tract and your body as a whole, allowing time for damaged cells to be disposed of and recycled – cellular “pruning” so to speak. This process is called autophagy, and it happens at its peak during periods without food, when our body has time and space to do it’s healing.

Is fasting right for you? Probably, but it can be intimidating! Although most people can benefit, some preparation is in order to get to a place where we can fast easily and effectively. The biggest factor to consider is your metabolic readiness. Are you good at burning fat for fuel? Or are you very dependent on a constant stream of glucose to get you from meal to meal, crashing if you miss one? If the latter is you, then using a 4-phase approach can be extremely helpful, starting with a diet that weans you off the constant glucose “drip”. If you try to move from a high carbohydrate diet with frequent blood sugar fluctuations directly to no food at all, you will engage your stress response too heavily, as it tries to make up for the blood sugar crash. This will translate into feeling pretty awful and putting undue stress on your adrenals.

Phase 1:

A better way to start is with a healthy baseline diet that is high in vegetables, nutrients, healthy fats and moderate amounts of protein, but lower in carbohydrate. This would be something like my Align 21-Day Diet Reset, a veggie-rich paleo diet, or an anti-inflammatory diet that is moderately low in carbohydrate.

If excessive stress, adrenal fatigue, medications, pregnancy or other factors make make you a poor candidate for fasting, then this is a good place to pause, continuing your healthy whole foods diet and tweaking it as your individual needs dictate. Check in with a qualified health provider if you aren’t sure where you land. Otherwise, move to phase 2 after the 21 days.

Phase 2:

From here, you could start to dabble in intermittent fasting (IF). This might mean deciding not to eat during a 12 hour window, then a 14 hour window, then a 16 hour window, as tolerated. This could look like having an early dinner, then going from 6pm to 10am without food. I tend to suggest that people start doing this 2-3 days/week, choosing days when it feels easy, when they don’t wake up starving. Listen to your body’s hunger cues and go longer on days you get the green light, shorter on days your body is asking for food. IF will be much easier once you have done the 21-day diet mentioned above since your blood sugar will be more stable.

Again, this might be a great place to hover. Getting to this point is manageable for most people, and you will already be reaping so many benefits of healthy blood sugar management, a nutrient rich diet, and cellular healing.

Phase 3:

If you want to take the next step toward a longer fast, or just step up your body’s ability to activate autophagy, consider 6 weeks of the ketogenic diet. The ketogenic diet is a low carb (under 50g/day), moderate protein, high healthy fat diet, and just 6 weeks of it will transform your body’s ability to burn fat for fuel.

Remember when we talked about metabolic readiness and flexibility? Being a star at burning fat translates into not needing to eat so often because we can burn our fat stores when we need energy. This skill takes training for our bodies, training that we used to get naturally when we were hunters and gatherers. We would go through periods without access to food, so we got good at fueling our movement with our stored fat until it was time to feast again. These days we need to do this consciously, and the ketogenic diet is the best way to cultivate readiness for fasting.

A lifetime of keto? Not attractive for most! But doing keto “training” for 6 weeks can turn our bodies into “fat-burning beasts” as coined by Mark Sisson in his book The Keto Reset Diet. From there, we can deviate when our favorite dessert or a week-long vacation calls, but get right back on track, because we have laid the groundwork.

Phase 4:

Once you’ve moved through the 3 week reset and 6 week keto phases, you are are primed and ready to do a longer fast! A water fast, alternate day fasting or a fasting-mimicking diet are all options. Working with a coach or health care professional can provide some extra support here, if needed. The benefits can be transformational!

Resources:

https://www.foundmyfitness.com/topics/fasting

https://www.marksdailyapple.com/keto/

https://drpompa.com/fasting-diet/fasting-for-purpose-five-day-water-fast/

https://chriskresser.com/your-guide-to-keto-fasting-with-joseph-mercola/
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