About fasting

Now that we know what toxins are and how much we surround ourselves with them let’s take a closer look into how to support our bodies into detoxing from chemicals, hormones, carcinogens, pesticides, and glyphosate our environment is contaminated with. As mentioned, humans and domestic animals are pretty much the only species on the planet suffering from chronic diseases. Migraine, chronic headaches, are often traced back to over toxicity in the body. The same applies to bloating, constipation, and digestive issues mainly caused by slight inflammations around the area of the intestines due to overstimulation from toxins in processed foods. Bad skin conditions and allergies, sleep difficulties and joint pain, autoimmune diseases, chronic pain, diabetes, and cancer are becoming widespread ailments among humans, sometimes causing live long suffering or even death.

The common school of nowadays medicine treats one symptom at the time. There is a pill for everything, a quick fix pushing away the symptoms and not looking at the root cause. Practices like Intervall Fasting and Ayurveda, as old as civilization itself, look at the body and its symptoms as one. A whole article about Ayurveda where food is seen as medicine matching your body type will be published soon. Today I want to dive deeper into the whole topic around fasting. I want to bring some awareness to fasting, which is often considered a spiritual or even religious practice and not what it actually is: a live changing experience for body, mind and soul liberating from chronic diseases and leading to an empowered, happy and healthy life.

Human predators

Let’s start with our origin. Looking back at evolution, humans were pretty much hunters for most of their timeline. Comparing the homo sapiens to other carnivores may seem a little bit far-fetched at first but is actually quite true. We hunt, kill and eat other animals. We evolved from fangs to weapons. We have our eyes at the front of our skull and not on the sides like sheep, antelopes, and rabbits because we are meant to keep an eye on the prey, not to be aware of eventually being hunted. Our intelligence allowed us to Whilst other predators mainly focus on the young or the weak prey and so keep the balance in any ecosystem, humans kill regardless. With our sophisticated weapons and technical aids, humans mainly hunt adult, healthy prey on land and in the sea, which is crucial for reproduction. That’s how we put a whole planet in danger – we are super predators.

The feasting state

The anatomy of carnivores is built around a so called feasting and fasting cycles. The ecosystem wouldn’t survive if species start to eat and hunt everything all the time. Just because we might seem superior in our way of hunting our genetics still function in a certain kind of way similar to the lifestyle our ancestors were living hundred thousands of years ago. Genetics move slow but our current lifestyle doesn’t. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are relatively new inventions due to the constant availability of food. This 24/7 accessibility is an invisible dot on the human timeline – there is no way your genetics know that the next meal is coming soon. When food is found, the body prioritizes digestion. Most of the body’s energy is used to digest, absorb, assimilate and absorb food properly. You might have noticed that carnivores, including yourself, get tired after a big meal. Because of acid being poured into the stomach, the body is running through an alkaline tide triggering certain hormonal shifts to make sure the body is able to absorb as much food as possible. The result is some kind of sleepiness, less motivation, reduced brain activity, and growth of fat cells. Other processes like detoxification, immunity, and thought patterns are slowed down. The body wants to catch up later when the digestion of the last meal is finished – but the next meal is coming in a few hours. We keep the body in the feasting state and don’t allow detoxification processes to start.

The fasting state

This is where interval fasting hits in – it has nothing to do with weeks without food or constant starving, no, it is just going back to a normal cycle of digestion and detoxing. Approximately 8 hours after the last meal, digestion is finished. With hunger, energy rises to “hunt” for the next meal. The storage hormones disappear and are replaced with hormones for the utilization of stored energy, minerals, and vitamins. Fat is converted into keto bodies to make more energy available for you. This fat mostly lingers in the area around your inner organs where they store toxins, leftovers from unfinished detoxification processes. Healing and repairing processes get triggered with the energy not used for digestion and storage anymore. After entering the fasting state 12 hours after the last meal the body starts “eating itself”, eliminating the least necessary cells like diseased ones first. Resources are sparingly used to find the perfect balance of hormones, vitamins, and minerals. That’s where all the magical healing stories around the fasting myth come from – terminal cancer cured, 30 years chronic pain disappears, depressions are healed. Seeing the feasting and the fasting state as the natural balance of the body is maybe helpful to understand how important it is. Life’s based on polarities – one extreme follows the other so both of them balance out in a sweet center point. It’s like Yin and Yang, Up and Down, Day and Night meeting in the center to create the whole picture.

How to start

When you experience constant fatigue, low motivation, inertia this might be a sign your body is constantly in the feasting state and you should consider extending the time in between your meals. If you suffer from allergies, intolerances, or digestive problems withdrawing food might be the first step to find out what actually bothers your body and give it a rest to heal. Global toxicity caused by humans is the most unnatural phenomenon and your body doesn’t know how to deal with it. Remember, when you’re really sick your appetite drops. Why? Because the body needs the energy outside of the digestive system to heal, repair and replace. It’s always important if fasting or not to drink a lot of unsweetened liquids like water or herbal teas. They flush out your intestines and give you some relief. Replacing breakfast or dinner with tea or a liquid meal like a soup or a shake is a good start to relieve the digestive system from some of the pressure. That is easily combined with your normal everyday life and doesn’t take much preparation. You’ll be surprised how energized you wake up the next morning. You certainly shouldn’t go on a fast when you are pregnant or just went through a breakup. Fasting has incredibly strong power to heal the body but sometimes we just need emotional food like chocolate, chips, and ice cream in front of the TV. Finding out what your dosha is and basing your diet on an Ayurvedic nutrition plan certainly helps as well. Getting familiar with toxins in your environment, especially in food, and being conscious about the origin and chemicals is a move in the right direction as well. There will soon be more information about that. I can highly recommend the CLEAN 7 and CLEAN 21 programs from Dr. Alejandro Junger which I am basing this article on.

Thanks for reading!