There are a lot of good reasons to give fasting a try. Curiosity might be one of them or just seeing if it’s something you can do. But it goes deeper than that. Here are nine great reasons to give fasting a try. Use them as inspiration to start fasting yourself and reap the benefits and rewards it can bring you.
If you are new to my blog, my name is Paula. I’m a mother to three beautiful kids and the wife of a Law Enforcement Officer. Because of my interest in health and fitness since about the age of 12, I ended up getting a degree in Health Education. My heart and passion have always been to help people get healthy from the inside out!
However, I have always struggled with the right balance between food, exercise and enjoying life. But because of my “education”, I thought intermittent fasting was bad for me. Turns out, it’s incredibly healthy and has helped free me from the diet roller coaster I’ve been on for the past 30 years.
Deepen Your Faith and Clear Your Mind
There’s a good reason why fasting traditions can be found most major religions. By abstaining from food, we can reach an almost meditative state. Fasting is a great way to clear your mind and the exercise of making do without food can help deepen our faith.
No matter what your faith, or what you’re trying to accomplish, there’s a definite spiritual act to fasting. Use it to bring you closer to God or just to quiet your mind and find a little peace in our busy, loud and fast-paced world.
Improve Your Self Worth and Self Esteem
Fasting isn’t easy. In fact, it can be quite a challenge at first. Your stomach will be growling and you’ll likely get a headache. Those side-effects will lessen and finally go away after a few days, but fasting isn’t something that’s done easily. And there’s a reward in that.
Making it through a fast, be it 3 days, 30 days or a month’s worth of intermittent fasting is an accomplishment and something you can be proud of. Once you do it, you’ll find that your feeling of self-worth and your self-esteem rise. It may not be your main reason for fasting, but it’s a good feeling nonetheless. Think of it as an added bonus.
Lose Weight and Burn Fat
One of the main reasons there’s been a lot of talk about fasting and intermittent fasting in particular recently is that it’s a great way to boost your metabolism, burn some unwanted body fat and lose weight.
If you don’t eat for a stretch of 12 hours or more, your body is forced to burn body fat for energy instead. This is often followed or accompanied by a slowdown in your metabolism to conserve energy. But intermittent fasting eliminates this problem. Since you’re eating well in between short periods of fasting, your metabolism continues to burn strong, helping you burn off plenty of fat when you’re fasting.
Improve Your Health and Live a Longer Life
Weight Loss alone will improve your health, but it goes deeper. When we fast, our body shifts into maintenance mode and works on repairing damage on a cellular level. The theory behind this idea is that when we’re not eating, our bodies should get into shape so we can hunt and gather when time allows. In other words, this added health benefit of fasting is a biological survival mechanism left over from our hunter and gatherer days. And according to some anecdotal data, it may even help you live longer.
There are many good reasons to give intermittent fasting a try. Improving your overall health and wellbeing is one of the major ones. In fact, there are quite a few different health benefits to be gained from intermittent fasting.
Lower Your Blood Sugar
Intermittent fasting can help you reverse insulin resistance. Part of that is due to weight and belly weight in particular that you’ll be losing as you fast, but a part of that is because you are avoiding blood sugar spikes while you’re fasting. If you combine intermittent fasting and staying away from sugar, sweets and white flour you can expect to see even better results. Wouldn’t it be worth it to reduce your risk for Diabetes?
Lower Your Blood Pressure
Fasting has also been shown to lower your blood pressure. As you are putting less stress on your body by cutting out some of the food you’re eating and as you’re burning off excess body fat, your blood pressure will start to lower, thus reducing your risk of heart disease and stroke.
Lose Weight – Burn Fat
Speaking of weight loss… one of my favorite benefits of intermittent fasting is losing weight. This particular way of eating and fasting seems to be very effective in losing the dangerous belly fat. Since you are continually moving from times of eating little to times of eating plenty, your metabolism stays strong, allowing you to burn off fat.
Reduce Inflammation
Fasting has also been shown to reduce inflammation in your body. It isn’t certain exactly how this is accomplished, but there is plenty of data out there that intermittent fasting is effective in reducing inflammation and the nasty side effects it brings with it.
Help Your Body Regenerate On a Cellular Level
Last but not least your body seems to go into repair mode when you’re fasting. Your cells start to generate and your body does everything it can to keep you in shape. Presumably, this is a genetic trait left from the days when we had to go out and hunt or find our food. During lean times, the body would regenerate and stay in shape so we were able to go find the food we needed to survive. Today we can use fasts to mimic this famine effect and reverse the effects of illness, cancer, and aging at least to a point. Does that mean fasting is the cure-all for anything that may ail us? Of course not, but it is a tool we can use on our journey to better health.
With all of these benefits, what do you have to lose??!?!?
Need more help getting started? Check out my free guide Intermittent Fasting Made Easy!
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