WHEN TO GIVE YOUR DIGESTION A BREAK
Brief, periodic fasts should be the norm for humans — it wasn’t exactly like we had food on demand back in the day. And we now know that observing a longer period without eating, also known as intermittent fasting, is beneficial for a number of reasons:
IT MAKES your digestive system more resilient.
YOUR metabolism and hormones can resync their 24-hour cycle.
THE metabolism is made to burn fat stored in the body.
IT ALLOWS your body to experience a longer-than-normal period of having low insulin in the blood, which tells your body to burn energy to keep insulin low (the opposite of what happens when you’re eating food continually).
IT’S A great way to gently stress your body in order to stimulate its renew and repair systems.
IT TRIGGERS autophagy, a bodywide cellular repair process that removes waste material from cells, quells inflammation, slows ageing and optimises mitochondria function, which gives you greater protection against disease.
WORK towards 16 hours between your last meal of the day and your first meal of the next. If you finish dinner at 8pm, you’ll break the fast around 12pm the following day. (Studies show that autophagy kicks in after about 16 hours.) If you need to, build up over time. Start with 12 hours (the ideal for good digestion and overnight detoxification).
DRINK water. Or, as a second-best option, tea. Third best would be black coffee. Water is ideal because anything besides it will call your liver into action and can put an end to autophagy.
The counterargument is that as long as you don’t trigger an insulin response (which is what eating carbohydrates would do), then you’re still technically fasting.
SKIP all of the above if you are pregnant, nursing, on medication, an athlete doing rigorous training, underweight, or under the age of 18. Also, if you would describe yourself as extremely stressed or emotionally distraught, give it a miss — your body doesn’t need the extra burden.
As always, consult your doctor if you have any concerns.