Fasting Benefits

Fasting And Its Many Benefits

There is an old legend of St. Anthony who lived in the 3rd century in Egypt. The story goes that when his parents died, he went off into the desert and there, lived all alone in a cave, shutting himself up and subsisting for 20 years on nothing but bread and water.

When the walls of his cave were broken down, his friends found him not wasted away, but with a soul like that of an angel. The fasting without exercise had neither made his muscles flabby nor had he become undernourished and thin.

Very recently, Andrew Newburg, a radiologist in the University of Pennsylvania studied the effects of fasting in the brains of monks. He feels that brains that don’t get too much of sugar and fats tend to become more fluid and are also open to more esoteric and transcendental thoughts.

This is especially so when there is a repetitive practice that accompanies a fast, like prayer. It leaves one thinking that perhaps those people of ancient times realized the connection between fasting and higher thinking, more so than us.

What about the physical benefits of fasting?

Research done on the CRAN diet has seen that mice tend to live much longer when they follow this diet. What is the CRAN diet? It stands for ‘calorie restriction with adequate nutrition’. The trouble with us today is that we forget that adequate nutrition is enough.

We do not need to indulge in our fanciful wants as far as food is concerned. This really is the path to discomfort and diseases. Every species where this diet was tried – fish, rats or monkeys – lived longer than their expected life span.

Human testing was done in the Louisiana State University on nearly 50 people. The diet was food that contained around 890 calories the whole day. What was astonishing was that people didn’t really feel hungry – on the contrary, they felt fit and more energetic.

The results?

They found that at the end of the stipulated research period, many had lower insulin readings and even their body temperature was lower! So fasting by cutting down on the calories could be a great way to increasing life expectancy.

What it seemed to be doing was not just slow down but reverse the effects of aging on the various organs in the body. It was observed that the effects of dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate or DHEA, the hormone related to aging was deferred.

Fasting and immunity

With fasting, the fats in the body are broken down for the body’s energy supplies.

This tends to get rid of accumulated toxins as well as the free radicals in the body. It is still unclear how this happens but the fact remains that it does.

Let’s take a look at one of Japan’s islands – Okinawa – where the people eat very few calories and where the main meal is soup made of vegetables and a bit of meat or fish. The population is lean and active and they have the oldest and healthiest people in the world! Fresh air and eating very little seems to work for them.

It’s hard to start initially but once you begin to enjoy the benefits of fasting, you’ll become a convert. It just means you have to try a couple of times.

Start slow and then build up to more days once you get the hang of it. You’ll find you sleep better, work better, feel upbeat for longer and feel alive and active. Could you really ask for anything more than good health in this life?