Fasting: A Trusted Tool in Your Long Term Health Tool Belt

Fasting has many benefits with regards to retraining our taste buds and appetites. If when we eat, we nourish ourselves well with the nutrients we really need, we do not tend to overeat. Combining high-quality nutrition and periodic fasting is a great recipe for success. This can also have some financial benefits in less spending if we skip eating for a day a week, which if we so choose can be passed on to those who are less fortunate. Just think of it, we can feel healthier and we can also feel better by helping others avoid the constant pain of hunger. When we look at many of the conflicts in the world, in addition to money and power at the top, when people are hungry they do not think straight and often choose badly when it comes to leaders. Few westerners have ever truly known persistent hunger. Fasting in this regard is very enlightening.

From a health standpoint fasting can help our bodies greatly. When you consider that 60% of our energy goes to digesting food and the rest to repairing our bodies, it makes sense that periodic fasting can free up valuable energy to assist our bodies in healing diseases we might be experiencing. In some cases, people with a serious health condition either inadvertently or in a planned manner stopped eating or chose to do mono diets of just greens and were surprised to find themselves feeling better in a fairly short period of time.

Fasting also frees up our minds to focus on other things. After all it is quite amazing how much energy and attention is devoted to what, when and where with regards to eating. Sometimes fasting helps us become more conscious of our real needs nutritionally because after the initial cravings have passed. Fasting helps restore a healthy sense that chooses foods based upon nutritional needs rather than craving-driven wants.

A true fast involves only consuming water and this can be safely done by most people, although mono diets of one fruit, for example, can help a new faster get used to eating less and moving towards fasting gradually until they are ready to go the whole way with a one day fast. If we observe the natural world we will notice how animals stop eating when they are sick, instinctively knowing that this helps give their bodies a chance to repair themselves. All animals respect and observe this instinct. Even us humans tend to lose our appetites when we are sick. We rarely stick to this abstinence as animals though and thus prolong our sickness rather than limiting how long it lasts by fasting. We would do ourselves a lot of good when we fast while we are sick. Try it. It might be challenging at first but with time you will get used to it and be so happy you chose to.