Fasting, a Quick Way to Wellness?
Click bait tells us, “rise and shine while running on empty until lunch”; that it will be your golden ticket to weight loss and wellness. We can agree that daily fasting has its benefits, although knowing when is best for you is the key. We are all individuals with differences and require a thoughtful fasting routine. A few benefits of a personalized fasting schedule can be a clearer mind, less bloating, improved sleep, improved blood pressure, improved metabolic health, autophagy(cellular clean up), and weight loss.
Most of us wake early and hit the ground running. We ask a lot of our body while being stressed about time and to dos, over caffeinated and under fueled, this will generally negate any of the above listed benefits. Although most people can get away with this for a time, women seem to be a bit more sensitive to a mismatched fasting schedule. Morning fasting can seem easy, this is the busiest time of day for most of us. Before we know it, lunch time is here and we can happily break the fast. Meanwhile our bodies have just experienced running for our lives, wondering if it will be safe and fed again. When your body is experiencing this type of survival, it is not going to release much of anything except excess doses of stress hormones and dysregulated blood sugar levels. For most, this will signal to our body to temporarily work harder and faster. We then get the false sense that this type of fasting has worked as promised with this extra energy boost- until it doesn’t.
A tailored fasting schedule will look a little different for everyone. Before adding any fasting we must first make sure we are meeting the foundational needs for our body to be well and nourished. We cannot take the road of biohacking while swerving around the necessary groundwork. Are we getting adequate sleep, nutrition, and natural light? Prioritizing these should be first before you add in a supposed quick fix.
For the majority, an early dinner to close your eating window will be the most beneficial. This we know can be challenging with family dinner times and evening schedules. On a positive note, earlier eating and bedtimes might result in less screen time and more rest for everyone in the house. Keeping the majority of the fasting window to when our body is resting, will allow for the body to easily tidy up. We all know it's easier to get a job done when we aren’t trying to multitask. When we wake in the morning, we can hydrate and then have a little bit of nourishment to break the fast before any caffeine to let our body know it's cared for and easily manage blood sugar. When we step outside even for just a few minutes to see morning light, nature can communicate with us and express appropriate amounts of waking hormones to get us moving on with our day.
Fasting has its time and place in our lives, and can be very helpful to regulate chronic dysfunction. If you decide to do intentional fasting, please focus on doing it productively and safely. With most things, the way to balance is generally not the easiest route.
