Introduction to Fasting & Insulin

What is Fasting?

= Voluntarily abstaining from eating food for a period of time.

The bible states, when you fast, not if you fast.

Spiritual Benefits of Fasting

• Dethrone the dictator within.
• Seek first the kingdom of God and you will be blessed.
• It’s a war between your spirit and flesh.
• Bring clarity to the voice of God.
• Fasting can lead to God’s favour, healing, and it helps you withstand temptation.
  • It gives you freedom, protection, spiritual authority and teaches you to depend on God!
  • Fasting weakens the desires of the flesh – we can look at it as spiritual warfare.

Nutritional Benefits of Fasting

• Autophagy: spring cleaning the body, giving your body time to heal itself.
• If you are overweight your body has stored way more energy than needed (the world record for fasting is 382 days).
• Reduces insulin resistance.
• Improves blood sugar.
• Reduces inflammation.
• Reduced blood pressure.
• Decreases Cholesterol.

Physical Benefits of Fasting

• Training in a fasted state burns more fat.
• Improves performance.
• Slows down the ageing process.
• Preserves muscle mass/ gains.
• Ideal to rectify body composition which includes maintaining or gaining muscle mass, while losing fat.

INSULIN

To exercise away fat is a serious challenge if you are overweight, as you are already ahead of your eating schedule. Fasting moves the dial in the right direction, far easier than exercise does. Insulin is essential to convert food to stored energy.  Insulin is produced every time you need to digest food or drink. Insulin blocks leptin (a hunger hormone) from  signalling to the brain that you have had enough

1. Energy is first stored in your liver, and this requires +- 2hrs of high-intensity exercise to deplete.
2. Energy is stored in your muscle, and this differs depending on how much muscle you have (These first two are readily accessible for use by the body).
3. Energy is stored as fat- there is unlimited storage available, but with restricted access.

In order for your body to access these restricted stores, no insulin should be present, and you should be training at an elevated but moderate heart rate (180- age is a rough upper limit).

So fat as a fuel source for exercise is a challenge because you first need to deplete all the energy stored in your liver and muscle which takes +- 2 hrs of high-intensity exercise followed by a period of prolonged training at an elevated but moderate heart rate.

This implies that you should be training in a fasted state, so your fat stores can be used as a source of energy. So as you can see, sorting out your nutrition is a far simpler and more appropriate solution to lose weight.

Take-Home Message

Fasting controls insulin production. Insulin stores energy for later use. Therefore, if you lead a largely sedentary lifestyle with frequent eating and snacking, your energy stores in your liver and muscles remain full and you are forcing your body to store energy as fat.

GETTING PRACTICAL

YOUR transformation needs

• A clear plan to correct behaviours, thoughts and temptations.
• Partnerships with specialists.
• Break old habits by disrupting them with fasting.
• Implement good new habits to replace the bad ones.

YOUR challenge

• Cut sugar.
• Reduce refined carbohydrates.
• Cut snacking between meals.
• Drink more water.
• Aim for 6000-10000 steps a day.
• Start fasting. We recommend you start with 16/8 intermittent fasting.

Remember you are unique, and you need to learn and experiment in order to work out the ultimate solution for improving your healthspan.