Fasting. It sounds so beneficial: 'purifying' your body by drinking a lot, eating nothing and at the same time losing weight. But is fasting sound so healthy and does it make you slimmer?
Fasting is a very old use.
Most religions have periods of fasting as a time of reflection. Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, among others, have fasting rituals, although they are sometimes heavily diluted. In the form of a hunger strike, fasting has traditionally been a means of protesting or of enforcing something. The ancient Greeks, stimulated by the physician Hippocrates, firmly believed in the health benefits of temporary food abstinence. Nowadays, fasting is also used to lose weight and to purify the body of waste. Scientists also questioned that purification, detoxification or detoxification. There is no scientific evidence that fasting detoxifies the body. Scientists believe that the body itself has a perfect system for removing toxins and waste with the help of the liver, kidneys, sweat glands and large intestine.
What happens when you fast.
While religious fasting has many rules, there are no rules when it comes to fasting for health or a leaner line. You can choose not to eat for a while and only drink water, or to drink only fruit and vegetable juices. You can do it one day, or two weeks. If you persist for a long time, then there will be an energy shortage in the body at a given moment. If the body notices that there are too few calories for a long period of time, it appeals to the reserves. They come first from the liver and muscles, which have stored a supply of glycogen (a type of sugar). But after a short time, that glycogen is gone and the body has to use the fat reserves for the much needed energy. Unfortunately, the brain has nothing to do with fat. They use glucose as fuel and fat can not be converted into glucose. The body has found something on this: in burning fat it produces ketones, a fuel that the brain can use. If the body makes many ketones, it becomes "ketogenic". You can get itchy and headache and get unpleasant (acetone) smelling breath. If all the fat has been cut, the body cells will eat themselves as it were. The muscle mass is broken down and the organs can be damaged.
Lose weight or not?
Do you fall for long fasting? At first everyone would answer this question with "yes": you burn more calories than you get inside. Even if a person does virtually no activities, a woman burns about 1500 and man 1800 kilos of calories a day. So yes, you will lose weight. The big question is just how long that weight stays away after you give up fasting. Our body is still programmed like that of our distant ancestors, who never knew if they had to eat the next day. They had to deal sparingly with calories. When there was a period when there was little to eat, their bodies switched to "low-energy mode": to save energy, the metabolism became slower. And that is still the case with us. If we fast, or follow a crash diet, the metabolism slows down: that means that as much energy as possible is extracted from the few calories. After a period of fasting, you are less hungry in the first instance. But soon the hormones that regulate the appetite work just like before. However, the metabolism is still in the low-energy mode. Your appetite encourages you to eat and thanks to the low-energy mode, calories remain that are stored as fat. The weight that had disappeared is soon on again.
Science is positive about the 'new' fast.
There is now also a way of fasting, which does not know all these drawbacks: intermittent fasting (fasting with interim). It is currently a fad in the United States and is also becoming increasingly popular in Europe. How does it work? All you have to do is: regularly insert short fasting periods. For example, you get one or two days every week. Or you skip a meal every day. Or you take 500 calories two days a week and the other 5 days you just eat. Intermittent fasting is not a diet and is not really fasting; it is a way of life. More and more scientific evidence for its positive effects. And it has been shown that it is a good and safe method to lose weight. According to an article in the journal of diabetes and vascular discase, intermittent fasting also has a positive effect on the onset of diabetes type 2 and cardiovascular disease. The supporters believe that it protects against all kinds of diseases and leads to a longer life. Incidentally, this way of fasting is not suitable for everyone; for example, pregnant women, people with low blood sugar levels and people with chronic stress should not start it.
