Fasting:
Why are no doctors telling you about fasting to lose weight and reverse diabetes? Well, there is NO MONEY to made by the food and pharmaceutical industries when people stop eating! Look at all of the commercials on television, the food industry is telling you to eat more and the pharmaceutical industry is trying to sell you more drugs to treat the diabetes, cancer, heart diease and dementia that are directly related to obesity!
Food is everywhere and when we are stressed, we eat more food. The more processed foods you eat, the more hungry you are to eat more of them! Processed foods were designed by food scientists to be “hyper-palatable” and “highly emulsified.” This means that the “food” tastes so good you want to keep eating it, you also don’t even have to chew most processed foods because they just slide down your throat. (Real food requires chewing which is important to activate salivary proteins that help your body absorb and digest the food optimally). Be sure to chew your (real) food slowly but I recommend less eating and more fasting!
Who has weighed themselves at night and then weighed themselves in the morning? You probably noticed that you weigh less in the morning, especially when you have had an especially restful night of sleep.
What is your body doing while you are sleeping? You are fasting. Your body is still performing important cellular and metabolic functions while you sleep. These important reactions require energy. The extra weight on your body is used as energy. One more time…
The extra weight we carry (fat) is really stored energy.
If you are overweight and you are eating, YOU ARE OVERFEEDING AN OVERFED AND INFLAMED BODY. Your joints hurt, your thinking is foggy and you have no energy. Your fat cells are sending inflammatory signals that increase your risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer and dementia.
Have you ever tried to clean out your pantry or clean out your garage? You need dedicated and un-interrupted time to complete the task. This is how your body feels when you stop eating and start fasting… Finally! It can do the work of metabolic repair/“housekeeping” and clean-up. Our bodies “detox” while we are fasting. The cells that our bodies have marked for death (cancer cells) need to be killed by the immune system. Our lymphatic system has to clear out inflammation and bacteria from our body.
When you keep eating throughout the day, this is like trying to clean out your garage or pantry on Halloween. Trick-or-treaters keep coming to the door and you have to answer the doorbell, constantly interrupting your task of successfully cleaning out the pantry or garage. You would never think to clean out your garage or pantry on Halloween, right?
This is how our body feels when we keep putting food in our mouth. Our body would like to use our stored glycogen and fat to fuel it but when you keep overfeeding an overfed body, then the body has to store the calories you are eating as fat. No cellular maintenance is achieved when you keep eating… your body just gets further burdened by the back-up of tasks to do because now it has to take all the food you ate and store it as fat.
So, it makes sense… let your body heal. Start fasting. You can do it! If you are interested in medically-supervised fasting, I will help you customize your fasting intervals to balance your insulin levels while optimizing your nutrition, sleep, strength and energy. Get leaner and cleaner, balance your hormones and truly manage your age and weight!
Dr Catherine Johnson, MD
