Fasting Part 2.

[MikePollard]

Before continuing on the insulin theme I think I should expand on the dangers of fasting. Here’s a snippet of an article I just pulled from Google:

“After 72 hours:

Muscle wasting begins. In an effort to save the brain, the body starts to dissolve itself, turning muscles into glucose. Other serious compromises start to happen. Without the right vitamins, the immune system is first to go. Energy evaporates. Then, eventually: death. Sometimes after three weeks, sometimes as long as 70 days. Usually by heart attack, after the tissues around it have disintegrated”.

Pretty scary eh? After 72 hours you turn into a gibbering puddle!

Well consider this; the average (and I’m not talking overweight or obese) body has say, 40,000 calories stored as fat and about 8,000 calories in the liver and muscles as glycogen - bound glucose. That will keep you alive for at least 3 weeks before you start breaking muscle down for energy. Now, does it make any sense that nature would selectively waste muscle - needed to engine the body when the famine is over - whilst leaving the fuel untouched? How much muscle would you lose if you fasted for 382 days (the clinically supervised record)? Well, none actually because two wonderful protective processes kicks in after a very short time. They are autophagy and human growth hormone increase. Autophagy is a topic in its own right, but for now here’s what happens when you fast in a nutshell. Human growth hormone increases spectacularly and protects the muscle mass. Autophagy is turned on whereby cellular debris and junk proteins are cleared from the cells and recycled. This is why someone can fast for 382 day and still be able to walk at the end (and in between of course). Incidentally autophagy has another potentially protective factor in that damaged cells and organelles are thought to be cleared before they turn tumorous.

Here’s a bald fact.

If you only eat say 1500 calories a day and the (average) needed is roughly 2500 to keep bodily function normal, then that deficit of 1000 has to come from stored fat and translates to weight loss over the course of a week of 2lb. These are very rough figures.

Now a calorie is supposed to be a calorie no matter from what source and impacts the body equally right?

This is utter nonsense and if followed along current guidelines will keep you overweight and T2 diabetic. Why? Well let’s consider what happens when you eat a meal based on ‘healthy whole grains etc’ as opposed to a meal based on natural fats. The former will send your blood sugar and insulin through the roof, the latter will not. After the insulin has removed the sugar from you blood you will experience a sugar drop which will give you hunger pangs and you will be driven to start the whole process again.

Roller coasting from sugar highs to sugar lows with the insulin STILL CIRCULATING makes it IMPOSSIBLE to access your stored fat and you will be constantly hungry and that’s the problem with conventional ‘diets’.