The Benefits of Fasting

Hi, so it's Nick here from Best Body Health Coaching. So I wanted to talk to you about fasting in this video and the benefits thereof. A lot of people balk when they hear the word fasting and they think of starving, where there's a big difference between fasting and starving. So fasting is when your body has been adapted to being able to burn its own fuel source within the body, which is body fat. And starving is when it hasn't been adapted to that and you just basically stop eating. After a few days your body will start eating the body fat, but it's going to be very uncomfortable by the time you get there. So if you do it right, you'll find that there are immense health benefits, and the longer you go, the more health benefits there are. And I'll just go over those for you so that you understand why, you know, we recommend that you do at least a little bit of fasting on our program and what your benefits will be. So once you've done 12 hours of fasting, so let's say you ate at 6 o'clock last night and at 6 o'clock in the morning you haven't eaten anything, I'm talking about you haven't snacked, you haven't put anything into your mouth other than maybe some water in between that, So you get a spike in human growth hormone. Human growth hormone is responsible for anti-aging, it's responsible for fat burning, it heals the joints and protein synthesis, which means your body gets to use the protein correctly. So that's what happens with 12 hours of fasting, which a lot of people can do. It's not that difficult to do 12 hours of fasting. We've all probably done that at some point of our lives, but you know, if you start going to 18 hours of fasting, so let's say you ate at 6 o'clock last night and it's 12 PM the next day, that's a good 18-hour fast. That's what the common thing that you're seeing on Facebook and social media these days about intermittent fasting. Now that's intermittent fasting, it's not a real fast, it's intermittent, so there's You should be going longer than that for it to be a real fast. So you get your 18 hours and then you should be eating 6 hours later. So you'll eat at 6 o'clock in the evening, 12 o'clock in the afternoon, and then 6 o'clock in the evening, 12 o'clock in the afternoon, and it goes on like that. So in that 18 hours you get what we call autophagy. Autophagy is where your body takes old broken-down protein and it renews it and it makes it into usable protein so that your body's not got all this junk floating around in it and burnt-out protein and toxins and everything. It takes that and it turns it into usable protein and it takes damaged protein cells and turns it into renewed tissue, renewed muscle tissue and all kinds of tissue in the body. So obviously that has health benefits. Now the reason why it does that is because it's obviously looking for a fuel source, and because it's been adapted to being able to find fuel sources within the body, it does that very easily. So also your digestive system is not really designed to be digesting food 24/7. It's supposed to get a rest to do other things in the body. There's a whole lot of other things that the digestive system does. It builds the immune system, it does a whole lot of different kinds of things. So you've got to really keep it not digesting food for a certain amount of time so that, you know, it gets to do these other things and it's not just digesting food all the time. All right, so that's 18 hours of fasting. Now let's see what happens when you have 24 hours of fasting. So what I've noticed to be very common on our program and even with myself is I go 18 hours and I'm hungry after 18 hours and I want to eat, and I eat a meal, and the secret is also not to overeat in that meal. So I eat that meal and then I continue on for another 6 hours, I eat another meal, and I normally go like that. That's kind of how I live my day, but I also do a lot of exercise. I exercise 2 to 3 hours a day, so I kind of need a little bit more food than everybody else does because I don't have a lot of body fat. But if you're going to go past 18 hours, You find that you get hungry at 18 hours and you're hungry for maybe half an hour or an hour, and when you get past that, the hunger tends to dissipate and then suddenly you're not hungry and you get this feeling of euphoria. It's actually quite a nice feeling, and you feel like a feeling of well-being. You feel very bright and alert and you actually feel full of energy. So that's also if you've been doing the correct protocols for fasting. I'm just going into the benefits of fasting here. I'm not going into the protocols that need to go in while you're doing fasting, do that at the end of this video so that you can see how you're going to be able to do a 24-hour fast or longer. Alright, so 24 hours of fasting, decreased hunger, so you're not hungry by 24 hours, your hunger is pretty much gone. You've got an increase in antioxidant reserves and oxygen reserves, so the body is now building up an immunity against all sorts of toxins that come in there and it has more oxygen so that it has more energy to burn, so everything starts working more efficiently. The nutrients are being absorbed by the cells with oxygen to fire like a combustion engine, and it's doing that more efficiently, so you feel like you have more energy. It's quite an interesting concept. You would think that you would start slowing down if you did fasting, but in actual fact you start speeding up. It's the opposite of what people might think. So yeah, the next point is better fuel efficiency, so you're basically burning fuel at a much better rate, And at this point you also get decreased inflammation, so the inflammation in your body starts going down. Your gut starts to heal, like what I mentioned earlier. It's giving your gut time to recover and to do the things it's supposed to do, and it starts to repair itself. Any kind of leaky gut starts to repair itself, the gut bacteria starts to repair itself, parasites that are in your gut that have been feeding off your 24/7 eating habits are now starting to die off, and sometimes those parasites are actually what are hungry and it's not actually you. So when you get really ravenous and starving with a 24-hour fast or even an 18-hour fast, you may just want to have a look at that. That's an indicator that there may be parasites there. I don't know, this is not a diagnosis, this is just an indication. All right, and you have improved cardiovascular function, so So your heart, your lungs, everything starts working better. So your ability to take in oxygen and use it is a lot more efficient. Your heart starts to pump at a much better rate, your blood pressure starts coming down. It's quite a big or a vast difference in the cardiovascular system, as well as cognitive function. So you start to think a lot with a lot more clarity, and I'm pretty sure that your IQ goes up at this point as well. All right, so then let's go into what seems to be more extreme, 48 hours of fasting. So you start getting stem cell growth, so if you have any injuries in your body, these stem cells gravitate towards those injuries and they start repairing them. So you have— I fixed a back injury like this, and it's not completely healed and I'm still in the process of it, but it is a work in progress and fasting is definitely the way to go forward because obviously you haven't got the inflammation in your body and you have the stem cell growth. So that all comes from fasting for 48 hours. 48 hours is actually a lot easier than it seems. All right, you have also now at 48 hours any kind of tumors that you have in your body or cancer cells you have in your body, they start to they start to reduce in size at 48 hours. Okay, 72 hours, so there's even more stem cell growth. So it's like the body, if you were— if you had to graph it, it would be going up and up and up and up and up as far as stem cell growth goes. All right, and your immune system is just like, at this point, is just like super strong. So if you have some kind of illness or virus or flu or COVID or whatever it might be, fasting is the way to get through this. It is the best healing method other than, you know, piling in the actual supplements that you need to supplement your body, which is what I get to next. When it comes to fasting, your body can create certain vitamins within itself and nutrients, but it cannot create electrolytes and it cannot create B vitamins and it cannot create vitamin C. So these kinds of things you've got to put into the body while you're fasting. So you have to make sure that you have your salt and your potassium and possibly your magnesium and a little bit of calcium and some trace minerals which you would get from pink salt or your sea salt which comes from a clean ocean. So you have to have your electrolytes because your electrolytes are the spark plugs for the energy that's going on in the body and it powers the healing process, let's put it that way. That's a simple way of explaining it. The other thing that you need to do is make sure that you're getting your B vitamins in because if you don't have your B vitamins you may feel that you have a bit of a dip in energy and that's usually the B vitamins, either that or it's the dip in electrolytes. So I hope that helped. The fasting is definitely the way forward. It's not compulsory on our program, obviously. You know, if people don't feel like they want to fast, they don't have to fast. But if you want to do it, we can coach you through the fasting. I've had people on my program who've fasted for 14 days and longer, and they've done very, very well with that. It is not necessarily a weight loss process. Fasting. You will lose weight, but it's more of a healing process, and it will also kickstart weight loss. So if you've been plateauing on a certain— on a particular weight and you want to kickstart it, there's various things you can do, and one of those things is fasting, because as you can see from what I've just mentioned, there are a lot of health benefits, and when you get these health benefits and your body starts improving health-wise, fat loss or weight loss starts to speed up. Okay, cool. So I hope that helped and I hope it inspired you to do your first fast, and I'll see you in the next video.