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Fasting for health
“Everyone has a physician inside him or her; we just have to help it in its work.
The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well.
Our food should be our medicine. Our medicine should be our food. But to eat when you are sick is to feed your sickness.”- Hippocrates
In nature we see this all the time.
When an animal, such as a dog or cat, is sick, its natural instinct is to refuse food, though on occasions cats will actually eat grass to stimulate vomiting.
Once we have recovered, and our body has healed itself, our appetites will return.
The human body also has a fasting instinct, just like that of other animals.
Evolutionary adaptation has made our bodies very efficient at storing energy reserves, and drawing upon them when food supplies are scarce.
During the second world war, this country was rationed, meat was in short supply and most people had to eat far less for years.
Interestingly, the people who then were in their twenties, thirties and forties, are the octogenarians and centenarians who are the examples that we now use as indicators of longevity and health.
Perhaps their minimal food regime is demonstrable of one of the keys to longevity.
The ancient Greeks were great believers in fasting
Hippocrates advocated it, as shown in the above quotation.
Plato said that he fasted for greater physical and mental efficiency.
Both Aristotle and Plato lived into their eighties without vaccines and modern drugs to sustain them.
Giving our digestive system a break enables the body to detox and cleanse and enables us to rejuvenate our systems.
Our digestive systems work too hard, for too long, and too often with nutritionally deficient foods.
In this busy hectic world we live in today it is important to give our body and mind a real break – occasional fasting is a wonderful way to achieve this.
Our mission is to provide you with both insightful information and evidence-based content, all orientated towards the Personalised Health approach, with actionable knowledge and tips to help you on your journey to optimal health.
So let’s take a look at fasting and how it can benefit your overall health as well as potentially promoting natural weight loss.
Could Fasting Help You Lose Weight?
Fasting for weight loss, as with many alternative methods of weight loss, has garnered a lot of mixed feedback.
But it is something that is being given more and more credence the more that it is tried and tested.
Especially since intermittent fasting was covered by the BBC’s Michael Mosley in 2012, when he made the documentary entitled, ‘Eat, Fast, Live Longer’.
When you see the evidence and the science to back up the claims that calorie restriction makes you healthier and younger looking for longer, you will be astonished.
There are many different ways to fast.
You can go all out and take four days off eating, or have five days of feeding and two days fasting each week, or just go for a week or two juice cleansing (not strictly fasting as you are taking in calories), as we do here at Amchara.
An increasingly popular way of fasting for weight loss is the 5:2 diet.
This involves five ‘feeding’ days each week when you can eat whatever you want, and two ‘fasting’ days when you are limited to 500 calories maximum.
Interestingly in various studies on the 5:2 diet, participants reported only eating around 2,000 calories on a feeding day, even though they were allowed to eat whatever they wanted.
The allowance of feeding days seemed to have prevented them from gorging out on food and over-eating.
Fast To Lose Weight
But for those who really want to lose weight, juice cleansing is another alternative.
This involves eating very few calories by replacing food with fresh juices for a number of days.
Juices give your body all of the nutritional value it needs with predominantly vegetable juices and some fruit.
At Amchara, we don’t use too much fruit due to the content of natural sugars.
Another fantastic benefit of juice cleansing is that it gives your body a detox.
The food that we eat in the Western world, unless we select our foods very carefully, often contain chemicals and high levels of fat, sugar and salt that is bad for us in large quantities.
One of the most important elements of a weight loss venture is to educate yourself so that you can become more in tune with your body and eat the foods that support your health.
All of us are different and have different nutritional requirements based on our individual health, age and genetic make-up.
But by eating well and by not indulging in ‘bad’ foods, generally our bodies will begin to be more healthy in a natural way, which can include natural weight loss.
By juice cleansing and detoxing the body, you can lose weight, but also can improve health conditions, achieve glowing, healthier looking skin, brighter eyes, improved hair, stronger nails and teeth, and you can also live for longer as well as look and feel younger and healthier for longer too.
It can help to begin your detox diet with expert guidance to put you on the right track and ensure that you are fasting and detoxing safely, but then it is up to you to keep up the good work at home.
Fasting to Detox
Detoxification is the process of cleansing your system of the pollutants that build up through food, water, personal care and cleaning products as well as exposure to toxins in the environment.
Generally called body detox or natural detox, this powerful practice cleanses the body from the inside, flushing out the harmful toxins which build up within all of us.
Even the body’s natural functions add toxins to your system, toxins like ammonia which is created when you digest proteins.
There are a range of methods available to detox your system, ranging from simple detox diets to whole body pill and drink cleansing solutions.
Preventing the buildup of toxins is the key to all detox remedies because this allows the immune system to fully engage viruses and other illnesses.
One of the most straightforward and reliable practices you can use to detox your body is the detox fast.
By removing the processed food and soft drinks which deliver the highest amount of harmful toxins from your diet, you can give your body the chance it needs to recover naturally.
Adopting a diet of only fibre rich vegetables and filtered water, usually for a period of up to one week, you can use this well recognised method to detox your body.
The high amount of antioxidants and fibre found in vegetables like beans, carrots, and avocados works to detox your body in two distinct ways.
Antioxidants are the tools the body uses to chemically remove toxins, and fibre spurs the digestive system to remove toxins through bodily waste.
Drinking large amounts of pure, filtered water further flushes the system of harmful build up, and by regularly engaging in this standard detox diet, you can help your body to function at its optimum level.
This is one of the simplest ways to ensure that your body is functioning at its peak performance and that your immune system retains its natural strength.
By finding the right detox fit for your needs, you can begin enjoying the countless health benefits of natural detoxification.
Have you tried fasting? We’d love to hear from you.
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