Fasting: The Ultimate Immunity Booster
If you’ve had your ear to the ground recently, you’ve probably heard whisperings about a new covid variant from Canada, and a few institutions who have rules about wearing face masks, isolations or closings again. I’m confident that we all have some PTSD about 2020 - 2022. Most of us lost friends and family, have lingering side effects of either the virus or the vaccination, and yet here we are again, facing what sounds like round 2. But, I’m also confident that we have more tools to KNOW what will actually keep us healthy.
I’m so grateful to work in an industry that is relatively neutral ground; very few people will disagree that being healthy is a valuable and necessary goal. No one wants to be sick. This is why it was so easy for us to be persuaded to do things that we normally wouldn’t do (like mask wearing, lockdowns and staying away from people). If it’s for the sake of staying healthy, or at least not being too awfully sick. or if we can help prevent other people from getting sick, then it was an easy sell.
Unfortunately, even the health and wellness industry has become controversial. What we have learned since 2020, is that being together, sunshine, fresh air, healthy food and fitness and creating our best natural immunity is actually the most important and viable way to avoid disease, covid or otherwise.
You know how when you have a cold, you lose your appetite, sense of smell or taste, and generally, don’t want to eat much of anything? This experience happens because our immune systems are fighting. We need all the energy we can gather to fight sickness, and when we have an acute reaction, we lose our appetite for food because digesting would limit our ability to stay healthy. This is fasting in practice.
As a preventive measure, no matter what side of the fences you find yourself on, I’m going to explain 3 simple reasons that fasting, the tool I’ve been yelling about for the last 2+ years, is actually one of the most effective and efficient ways to improve your chance of staying vibrant, healthy, strong and whole. And, by default, able to help those around you in the best ways possible.
Autophagy: Cellular recycling (autophagy) is one of our body’s most effect ways to declutter the old, used, partial cells and then make new, healthy cells. Think of this as daily or weekly housekeeping. We get rid of dirt, fingerprints, laundry, trash, dust and maybe even unused clothing. I’ve written extensively about this before.
Healthy cells are vital to a robust immune system. We know that we all have potential disease roaming around inside at any given time. Whether or not those rogue cells turn into inflammation or disease, is largely dependent on whether or not our immune cells are ready and available to fight.
If we never experience autophagy because we never fast 16 or more hours, we limit how healthy our cells can be.
I have very simple strategies to guide you to fasting 16 or more hours within a week. Click here if you want my free guide.
Reduced Inflammation: Very often, when new clients start to fast, they experience a decrease in inflammation within the first few days of intermittent fasting. This is so very encouraging on many levels, especially when we’ve often tried our best to be healthy, only for progress to be so tragically slow we give up, or it’s so challenging to fit into our lives, we stop too soon.
That initial quick change in body weight is a reduction of the fluid in our lymph systems, joints, organs and brains that is finally getting released because our insulin levels have finally decreased and our body isn’t in digest and storage mode. By simply reducing the amount of time we spend eating, our body will miraculously stop swelling.
Chronic inflammation is the result of our body’s confusion about whether there is an emergency to fix or whether we have insulin resistance. If we are over-stressed, under-slept, over/under exercised, over/under fed (you get the picture), our body will create inflammation as a tool to heal. Unfortunately, it’s often self-induced from bad habits and food, and not a real emergency at all.
Gut Health: Maybe it goes without saying that if we aren’t digesting all day, our systems improve, but this is a HUGE asset of fasting.
Believe it or not, frequent eating is very energetically expensive. We need energy for all our systems to function, not just to break down and store meals. However, if we eat ever two or four hours, a lot of energy is spent to process the snack we just ate.
Wouldn’t it be better if we ate meals 5 or more hours apart so that digestion could end, insulin could recover, glucose decrease, energy increase, growth factor increase, immunity increase, ketones increase, organs detox and anything else that needs to happen?
Our gut lining WILL HEAL ITSELF if we give it time and rest. Then, when we do eat, we consume foods that don’t break down the thin lining of our digestive tract (no junk, processed, convenience foods — real, whole foods that were recently alive, please). If we want to make strong disease resistant cells, we need a well-functioning gut!
Can you think of a more important reason to work on fasting than to improve your ability to stay healthy? I sure can’t. And thankfully, you don’t have to figure it all out on your own! I’ve got a simple Formula that has worked over and over again, and I know it can work for you, too. It may seem like a bold statement to say that EVERYONE would benefit from fasting, but I’m saying it: Everyone benefits when we live a fasting lifestyle.
Thankfully, you don’t have to just take my word for it! You can hear straight from a few of the women who have worked with me to discover that we all are hoping for; a healthy, happy, strong, life worth living. When you’re ready to go, connect with me here!
