PaleoJay's Smoothie Cafe podcast #114 Get Slim and Healthy FAST!

I know this post might scare you- in our modern, western culture the very notion of not eating is enough to scare the heck out of us!

It was not always so; in fact, it has almost never been so.  Hippocrates, the Greek founder of modern medicine, said around 400 BC: “To eat when you are sick is to feed your illness”.  Plato and Aristotle concurred, as have most other thinkers such as Ben Franklin, who said: “The best of all medicines is resting and fasting”.

Who do you think would recommend such a thing now, when everyone is in a constant headlong rush to get everything done, especially medical doctors!?  No, you have to treat yourself in this matter, as you really should be treating yourself in all matters of health!  In  fact, did you know that the third leading cause of death today in the US is “Death by Doctor”?

That’s right, just checking into a medical clinic for treatment ups your chance of dying tremendously, either by contracting one of the “superbugs” that now run rampant in most hospitals and are largely immune to antibiotics, a mistake in surgery, or most commonly, by a correct usage of prescription drugs!!  Legal drugs are far more lethal than illegal drugs, believe it or not!!

But that is another subject, for another podcast: for now, let’s just agree to heal ourselves- by FASTING!

You don’t have to fast for a full 24 hours or more!  But you can, no problem... just so you know, it is perfectly safe and actually very very healthy to do so.  When you fast, you do NOT “lose muscle”, but you very likely will lose fat.  FAST.

LOSE FAT FAST(ING)! And that is just one benefit.  When you fast like I prefer to do, which is every day, you just eat during an 8 or so hour window, and then fast the other 16 hours.  For instance, an easy way to fast is to just have coffee upon arising in the morning, and then eat your first meal at 12:00 noon.  It’s really easy to do this, at least for most people!

You are now in your “eating window” of 12 noon til 8:00 PM in the evening.  I usually wind up just eating lunch (around noon), and supper around 6 PM.  I go to bed about 10 PM, and get up around 6:00 AM, at which time I work out... working out fasted means your body is primed to shed fat and store muscle even better!  It also suppresses, not increases your hunger.

You could also do it the other way around, by eating a big breakfast of High Fat Low Carb (HFLC), which is basically the Paleo prescription, and then another meal at 2 or 4 PM.  Just so you sleep 8 hours (at least), fast another 8 hrs either in the AM or the PM, and make sure you eat a diet of natural, paleo friendly real foods and eliminate the processed junk and wheat and most potatoes and rice and other carbs!

One of the best benefits of Intermittent Fasting as this style of eating is called, is that your body goes into “autophagy” during that 16 hours of not eating or fasting:
This means that the digestion process can rest, and the body can concentrate on cleaning house; your body can eliminate “junk cells” like pre-cancerous cells, otherwise get rid of things it does not need or want.  Your body gives itself a housecleaning, ridding itself of toxins!

This is why fasting is promoted amongst virtually every traditional culture in history- because it worked wonders!

Now, of course, Big Food manufacturers and Fast Food purveyors have a vested interest in you eating constantly, from your sugary flake crap cereal and fake orange sugar juice in the morning to your Big Gulp and Big Burger on 4 buns with fake vegetable oil cheese, to your deep dish dough-boy pizza in the evening, and all those grain chips and doodles and pretzels all day long...

Get it?  Even when everyone in the world ate healthy, paleo types of ancestral diets, and everyone exercised out of necessity on a daily basis; even then they knew the crucial role played by fasting!
Think how much more we need it now!

So start out by Intermittently fasting- not necessarily every day, but just try it out, and see how easy it is, and how it simplifies your life, cutting out one more meal of preparation, clutter, time consumption and expense.  Feel your clothes gradually begin to fit looser.

Soon, you’ll be like me, and just automatically do it every day (or most days), just out of preference, because it works so well, and makes you feel (and look) lots better.

You might even decide to occasionally do a longer fast.  24 hours is not really hard to do, and many do it as much as one, twice, or even three times in a week.  And it you have a lot of fat to burn, this is a great way to go!

Just remember this- the more fat you have to lose, the less you should eat. Especially this means carbohydrates!And the more you fast = the less you eat.

The only ones who should NOT try this are children, and pregnant and nursing mothers!

Everyone else can get healthier FAST by FAST (ing)!