THE BENEFITS

We’ve already established that eating this way can have great benefits for your levels of body fat, heart health and pancreas

(the organ that produces insulin and has a huge role to play in diabetes) but there are many other benefits, too.

Fasting has been proven in mice to increase production of a substance that helps protect the brain from dementia and makes it more malleable (a quality known as plasticity). When the brain is more plastic, it works better, so you are sharper and your mood is better, too.

Giving the digestive system a decent break also helps it out. The digestive tract and stomach produce enzymes and acid every time we see or smell food. But when we give it a break from lots of traffic (food) at night, the lining of the digestive tract has a chance to repair itself. Eating by day and fasting by night can thereby help improve symptoms of digestive disorders.

The same is true of the trillions of bacteria in the digestive system that make up what we call the microbiome. When they have a bit of downtime, they thrive and diversify, and that in turn can help not only the gut but your immune system, too.

And talking of your immune system, fasting can lead to a reduction in inflammation, meaning that inflammatory conditions in the body – such as asthma, arthritis, eczema and dermatitis – may calm down. It also encourages your immune system to act in a healthy manner and stave off illness without becoming disordered and attacking the cells of your own body (called auto-immunity).

Some of the issues I have seen helped by 10-hour fasting (probably through a process called autophagy, where the body goes into repair mode when it has a long stretch without food) include irritable bowel syndrome, acid reflux, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, inflammatory bowel disease (eg, Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis), diverticulitis, skin conditions including the