An article and some thoughts on fasting

One area of the ketogenic diet that I have a very positive affinity with, and something that was also discussed in the podcast with Andy Galpin above, is the idea of fasting.  I’ve been experimenting with fasting for over a year now.  I might do a 1 day fast or 14-hour fast and my reasons for doing so change all the time.  Sometimes I feel like my digestion needs a break, sometimes I feel like I’ve been over eating, some days I just want to challenge myself and a fast is a really good way to understand how you relate to food and how it unconsciously might control some areas of your life.  Aside from my own experiences, fasting has also been shown to be an effective short-term treatment for metabolic dysfunction such as poor glucose control / early Type 2 diabetes, chronic inflammation, and hypertension.
 
The first time I ever did a fast, what struck me the most was how mentally challenging it actually was.  In the context of spirituality, you learn alot about yourself during a fast and so I can see why it was and still is such an important part of the many religions who practice it. More so even than the fact that I felt hungry, I became faced with the challenge of no longer having the familiar breakfast, lunch and dinner timestamps to break up my day.  What would I do with myself now that all that cooking and eating time had become freed up!?  I feel like you get to know yourself a bit better when you take away food and one thing that I learnt about myself is that so often I was eating purely out of boredom as opposed to hunger. In the beginning, there was a lot of pointless shit that I was filling the time with.  This realization is a good thing and also a catalyst to change and implement more positive and beneficial activities into these times of not eating.
 
Since this first fast, I have experimented with many different types of fasting.  In the process I have fasted in times when I have felt really healthy and in times when I’ve felt really shitty.  I’ve fasted for too long and I’ve fasted intermittently for days in a row.  There are a lot of different ways you can fast and so to keep things really short and sweet, I wanted to share an article I came across on the most simple of them all, a good old fashioned water fast.