Why Should You Consider Fasting?
Fasting has been practiced for thousands of years and has been proven to provide many physiological and mental benefits such as:
- mental clarity
- increased energy
- weight loss
- muscle gain
- improved metabolic health
- prolonged longevity
“the best of all medicine is resting and fasting"
,Benjamin Franklin
When you give your body time fast your body undergoes many powerful biological changes. The most beneficial of these effects is that related to cellular autophagy and renewal.
Over the past few years scientists have made some significant breakthroughs in regards to their understanding of the benefits of fasting, and how it may help us live a longer life.
Fasting used to be regarded as a dangerous practice and the common though was that fasting would lead to starvation, ravenous hunger and muscle atrophy.
However, we now know that fasting is extremely beneficial and understand exactly how to optimize the benefits of fasting while eliminating the negatives.
Personally I have found that intermittent fasting combined with period long fasts and a ketogenic diet have helped me change my relationship with food and drastically changed my body composition.
I am no longer controlled by carb fueled hunger cravings and am much sharper and more productive thanks high number of ketones floating through my brain. Keto and I.F are the perfect combination. I honestly don't know how anyone could do intermittent fasting while eating a high carb diet, as the hunger would be intense. Ketones provide the satiety and freedom to fast for many hours.
>>You can learn about my keto experience in my Ultimate Guide To The Ketogenic Diet.
Before I explain exactly how you can maximize the health benefits of a fast, I must explain exactly what fasting is and educate you on the difference between a number of fasting protocols including:
- 16:8 Intermittent Fasting
- One Meal A Day (OMAD)
- Prolonged Fasting
16:8 Intermittent Fasting Is The Most Popular Fasting Method, But Is It The Best Way To Fast For Weight Loss and Longevity?
I am sure you have heard of the popular 16:8 method of fasting.
16:8 simply means that you will fast for 16 hours and then consume all of your food for the day within a 8hr window.
This method has been popularized by celebrities such as Hugh Jackman and popular books such as Brad Pilon's best selling e-book Eat Stop Eat have made this the in-vogue fasting method of the era.
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Unfortunately, 16:8 or other popular fasting methods such as 20:4 or 23:1 one meal a day (OMAD) style fast are not truly a biological fast.
These intermittent fasting protocols are more accuratly described as time restricted feeding (TRF) schedules and you are not truely fasting, but simply dieting.
I personally enjoy following a 16:8 time restricted feeding schedule as it fits in well with my daily schedule with quartley prolonged multi-day fasts. This protocol has has helped me lose weight and has improved my mental clarity and productiveness.
Unfortunately the benefits of a short 16:8 or OMAD feeding window are no where near as powerful as a true prolonged biological fast. True biological fasting only begins once the body has been free of food over 24-30 hours.
You must remember that it takes a a few hours to digest food after your last meal. After you eat, your body has to breakdown food, absorbs nutrients, and consume macro- and micro-nutrients at a cellular level.
Once that occurs, your body turns back to your stomach for a fresh source of calories. If your stomach is still running on empty, biological fasting begins.
The body realises that the body is It is at this point when your body can really benefit from a truly fasted state.
At this point the body can begin breaking down fat and starts producing ketone bodies to create energy for the body. This why fasting is so effective for losing stubborn body fat. In a biologically fasted state your body begins to eat itself and feeds on fat first.
If you really want to get the full longevity benefits of fasting, such as cellular clean up and stem cell-based regeneration, you will have to prolong your fast even more.
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Why Should You Consider Biological Fasting?
The benefits of fasting can be broken down into three categories:
- Weight control & weight loss
- Activating biological fasting
- Triggering cellular clean up & rejuvenation
As I mentioned before weight loss occurs because fasting forces your body to turn to body fat stores as a source of fuel.
Perhaps an even greater reason of why you lose so much weight when fasting is due to the combination of high ketones (which significantly reduce hunger) which when combined with a shorten eating window forces your body into a state of calorie deficit.
While fasting, you simply burn more calories than you consume.
In addition to weight loss, most 24-30 hr prolonged fasts begin to place your body into survival mode which in turn triggers your bodys physiological responses that in turn improve cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, and insulin resistance.
Most people who want to fast want to get the full benefits available and not simply settle for improved weight management and metabolic health.
Prolonged fasting is the most powerful and safest method we as humans have to initiate cellular clean up and rejuvenation.
DID YOU KNOW? the ProLon Fasting Mimicking Diet currently holds the first patent on regeneration which was awarded in 2016) and autophagy (the study of autophagy was awarded the Nobel Prize of Medicine in 2016). This innovative diet was created by Proffessor Volter Longer of the USC Longevity Institute. The Fasting Mimicking Diet, or FMD, is made from healthy, natural ingredients that you will eat for five days. Your body, however, does not recognize that it is being fed. This causes the body to enter a fasting mode.. You can learn more about this game changing diet protocol on the Official Prolon Website
The Phases Of Fasting
- PHASE 1: Approximately 24-30 hours after your last meal your body will begin consuming stored fat and tapping into the glycogen reserves in your muscles while generating new liver glucose and ketones for energy.
- PHASE 2: After 2-3 days without food, your bodytriggers autophagy. Autophagy means “self-eating”, is the process in which cells eat intra-cellular debris, eliminate waste, and optimize function in order to survive in the low-nutrient environment created by fasting.
- PHASE 3: After 4-5 days without food your body has consumed readily available fat reserves and optimized cell function but the continued fast is subjecting it to some major stress. It’s time for serious action. At this point the body begins deleting old, inefficient, and damaged cells, while at the same time increasing the number of circulating stem cells available to create new tissue that is young, efficient and strong. This late-stage survival mode phenomenon has been shown to optimize the biological aging of the body. Studies in mice have shown that this process has the potential to prevent or even reverse some chronic diseases!
When fasting places your body through all three phases of its survival mode protocols, it comes out the other side leaner, biologically more efficient, and better equipped to handle the stress of age and daily life thanks to autophagy and stem cell-based regeneration.
After 5 days of fasting, optimization has slowed and the body begins to look for alternate sources of energy, including from important tissue such as muscle. After 20 years of fasting and longevity research, The Longevity Institute of the University of Southern California has identified 5 days as the optimal duration for a fast. Or better yet, 5 days is the optimal period of time to follow a fasting mimicking diet such as ProLon.
Now that you have had a brief overview of many different types of fasts, let’s dive much deeper into the two
most practiced fasts, intermittent fasting and the ProLon Fasting Mimicking Diet® to see how they compare.
Intermittent Fasting Vs The Fasting Mimicking Diet
Unlike other popular fasts which only place the body in phase 1 of its survival mode, a 5-day fasting mimicking diet triggers profound biological changes by moving the body through all 3 phases of survival mode while protecting it from the potentially dangerous side effects associated with not eating.
In addition to the standard intermittent fasting benefits of losing weight and promoting metabolic health, a 5-day fasting mimicking diet triggers the rejuvenating benefits of autophagy and stem cell generation. A ProLon 5-day Fasting Mimicking Diet simulates 5 CONSECUTIVE days of fasting while supplying the body with enough food that it will maintain lean
body mass. Preclinical and clinical trials have shown that fasting mimicking diets have a broad impact, including:
Why Prolon Is Superior To Popular Fasting Methods
Due to the fact that most popular fasts don’t induce biological fasting for long enough, they don’t give you the most powerful benefits that can come from fasting - benefits such as the improvement of age-related biomarkers as a result of cellular optimization and stem cell generation.
Fasts that do cause biological fasting for long enough to result in these benefits come with all the risks associated with not eating for many consecutive days - risk such as the loss of lean muscle mass, dizziness, weakness, and ravenous hunger.
The ProLon 5-Day Fasting Mimicking Diet is superior to popular fasts because it allows you to fast with food thanks to small, specially-designed low calorie meals you eat for five consecutive days per month to shift your body into a fasting state.
The meals are low-sugar, lowprotein, and low-calorie, and are designed so that your body doesn’t recognize the food and remains in a fasting mode.
That means that ProLon allows you maximize the potential benefits of fasting while largely eliminating the drawbacks.
ProLon has been clinically tested and shown to induce and maintain the protective fasting state that promotes a person’s metabolic health and impacts age-related biomarkers.
ProLon is only used for 5 days per month. After 5 days, you will eat a regular healthy diet.
In order to purchase the ProLon Fasting Mimicking Diet®, visit www.prolonfmd.com. In order to maintain its mission of enhancing human healthspan, L-Nutra donates 60% of the ProLon profits to the CreateCures Foundation which in turn donates it to further medical research and charities that are dedicated to enhancing health and wellness.
The 5-Day Fast You Can Do!
Benefits of Fasting:
The Fasting Mimicking Diet® gives you all the Benefits of a 5-Day Fast… While Enjoying Food
With ProLon, you will successfully complete a 5-day fast while nourishing your body and avoiding the low energy that can be associated with water only fasts. ProLon gives you the benefits of a 5-Day fast without giving up food, going too hungry, or eating lots of unnatural ingredients. In just 5-days, you will experience the amazing benefits of fasting without having to skip a meal