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Fasting For Weight Loss
Great article about how you can use fasting to "manage" your weight, and how to eat after the fast
Date: 5/5/2006 10:17:25 PM ( 18 y ) ... viewed 4109 times By Ron Lagerquist
Clearly, fasting is an effective way to lose unnecessary body fat, but once the fat has melted away restoring a youthful physique, how do we keep it off? Should a fasting regime be practiced to maintain weight loss? The answer is a simple one. Never use fasting as your primary source of keeping weight off. The secret is to learn how to fast healthy and eat healthy. You fast to lose weight, than you eat in a way to keep the weight off. That's balance. Let's learn how.
First you must understand when I say weight management I do not mean the endless seesaw action of gaining and losing weight. We are all sick of that ride where eating is ether a mathematical equation of calorie counting or a mindless overindulgence. No, I am speaking about managing body weight as a consistent dietary lifestyle.
I have a friend who is an avid faster. In fact he finds it easy to fast and has done it often throughout the years. On the surface it would seem he has steel discipline, effortlessly doing what others find to be a great challenge. His self-imposed purpose is to become a fruitarian and for twenty years has read and studied the health benefits of eating an all-fruit diet. Yet never has he been able to put together more than 14 days of fruit eating, experiencing countless failed attempts. My friend eats better than most people I know, but in his words, always “blows it”, gorging with franticness and absurd extreme. I found it difficult to witness these compulsive exhibitions because I knew the aftermath would be guilt and depression, leading to yet another joyless fast. This abusive cycle has continued for years and probably is still continuing. He is thin and in good shape but there is no joy and little freedom in eating.
Fasting is an exhilarating way to begin a healthy diet, excess body fat quickly drops, bathroom mirror nodding approval, maybe for the first time in years. Fasting can produce a temporary altered state¾hunger and craving shut down. Often, while fasting, feelings of euphoria and emotional balance can be enjoyed. Those with an obsessive personality are attracted to fasting almost like the escape of drugs. Problem is, sooner or later you must face the world of eating with all its trappings. The junk-food shrines on every street corner have waited patiently. What was pushed into the peripheral through fasting, is now back into the fore. Voracious hunger awakens from sleep; the fragrance of KFC is all the more intoxicating. In fact, some find themselves worse off and within day’s rush to their old food-lovers, fulfilling the axiom, “distance makes the heart grow fonder.”
I have fasted to gain lost ground on a slipping diet or to break a tenacious addiction or even detoxify after Christmas feasting¾this has been very effective for me. The fast re-establishes focus on Christ. This can be healthy and balanced. Once the fast is completed, my diet reflects the spiritual freedom found during the fast. In other words, the fast is more about warfare than weight.
Where do we cross the line from healthy concern to obsession? The simplest way for me to answer this important question is by creating what I believe is a balanced and healthy lifelong weight management program, avoiding the endless seesaw action of gaining and losing weight through fad dieting or quick-fix fasting. Here is an overview of what I have dealt with in my book, Perfect Diet For Complete Health.
Step 1 – fasting, a running start
Managing weight can only be achieved through a healthy diet, in other words, eating. We all know the greatest challenge in weight management is gaining control of what goes in the mouth on a day to day bases. Overeating or eating too fast, feeding cravings and emotions not hunger, eating calorie-concentrated foods with lack of physical activity, all lead to unwanted weight-gain. Much of what we eat feeds cravings and addictions rather than nutritional needs. The problem with feeding a craving is two-fold: we crave all the wrong things, fat, salt and processed sugar. When is the last time you had a “big carrot attack”? The second problem is, cravings cannot be satisfied, hence we overeat far too much of the wrong kinds of food.
This is where fasting can help and is a great new beginning.
A ten to thirty-day fast will brake the physical side of addiction, break up the bad cycle of eating. But even a thirty-day fast will not necessarily break the emotional ties to addiction. We will deal with this a little later.
Another gift fasting provides is a tangible starting point for a new you. There must be a divorce before there can be remarriage. Most people are more intimately involved with their eating than they are with their spouses. Fasting effectively serves the divorce papers to your former food-lovers. There is remorse, yearning, some testify to loneliness, as if an old friend has died. Makes sense, addiction is always there, waiting to comfort empty emotions, a comfort that comes at a great price.
Clear starting points are important to change. Over years of compromise you may have effortlessly fallen into physical disrepair. Moving toward health is an uphill climb, demanding a strong exercising of your will-muscle. Fasting is a great way to start working that muscle out.
Lastly, fasting will build powerful momentum, from a dead standstill to exciting motion. When years of weight fall off excitement and hope tingle, maybe I can do this! We all need a push in the right direction, fasting is just that.
Step 2 - Raw fasting TRANSITION
I can tell you that from many testimonies and personal experience, the ending of a fast can be one of the most decisive moments of your whole life in terms of health. The completion of a fast can be the beginning of a new lifestyle or an excuse for a three-day feeding frenzy resulting in feelings of failure and shame. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” Pr. 13:12. I know people who will never fast again because of the letdown during the first few days of eating, face-first in the same old pizza, a mockery to all the good that just happened during the fast.
Once you begin to eat after a fast, digestion reawakens and an interesting thing happens. Although physical addictions are broken and homeostasis is balanced, awakened hunger can also reawaken our psychological ties to the same addictions we had before the fast. Entering the world of food after a prolonged fast can almost be like walking into the neighborhood of your youth and experiencing the same old emotions of fear and insecurity you had as a kid. It can be discouraging after such a high. Fasting has freed your body from physiological addiction, but often only disciplined eating can effectively break deeper emotional addictions by replacing life-long, entrenched, comfort-eating patterns with new healthy ones.
Ending the fast by eating raw food for half the days you have fasted will serve as an effective transition from the world of fasting to the more demanding world of eating.
I hesitate calling a raw diet “fasting,” some people have made raw their lifetime diet. But there are real benefits to approaching a raw diet with a fasting mentality. Fasting demands a disciplined focus and determination. Once off the fast, we naturally loosen up focus. A raw food fast is just as demanding as juice fasting. I personally find a raw diet more challenging than juice fasting.
And here is a word of advice. Do not spend the last days of your fast dreaming about all the delicious foods you are going to indulge in. Deciding to eat raw for about half the fasting period will greatly help with this, allowing an emotional transition from the world of fasting to eating. Our imagination is so powerful Jesus said, ‘If we lust in our heart it as if we have committed adultery.” If you engage in illicit food-fantasies, dreaming about all the nasty foods you are going to gorge on after the fast you have missed the whole point, slipping right back into that old binge and purge mentality.
This is about permanently changing your eating-paradigm and never going back. Never! There is a place for enjoying a treat here and there but you know as well as I do that was never the problem! Feeling deprived? Maybe this would be a good place for a little encouragement. Vibrant health, youthful body, clear-mindedness, self-control, consistent energy, needing less sleep, clear complexion, disease resistant and longer life. Is it worth sacrificing all that for an addiction? Of course not. And if you let this program work it may take some time, some say up to a year, but you will teach your body to hunger and feel satisfied with healthy foods.
Raw food will always taste best after a fast. Eat as much as you please. You will continue to lose weight on a raw diet. In fact you may lose it faster, especially if most of your food is vegetables. There are far fewer calories in raw vegetables than juice. Raw food is bulking, fiber-filled, low density food. The abundance of soft fiber has the added benefit of cleaning out any toxins that have been deposited in the colon during the fast. Also, as you reawaken digestion the body will pull out of the fasting state, your metabolism will increase, hence you will burn more calories on a raw diet. A higher metabolism and less caloric intake equals weight loss.
Step 3 - HEALTHY lifestyle
You may have heard this slogan on the radio touted by a popular weight loss program. “You can eat the food you love and still lose weight.” The problem is we love the wrong kinds of food. The whole approach is shallow and wrong. Body fat is a visible and embarrassing symptom to a deeper issue and there is a real temptation to quick-fix the poundage away without dealing with the unhealthy lifestyle hidden behind pounds. As we have learned, most mainstream diet programs, although providing weight loss, are extremely unhealthy even dangerous to health. They do not deal in any meaningful way with the source of the problem lying concealed deep below the skin.
There is a lot of money to be made offering desperate people quick fixes. In good conscience, I cannot do this. This system will not hit the Diet Top Ten Chart because it forces uncomfortable change. There are no thrills or pills.
So here we are. You have fasted for 30 days and eaten raw for 15, and never felt better. Weight is off, a youthful vitality is returned, and you want to keep it all. The following are five principles, if followed throughout your life, will permanently establish vibrant health.
Increase the percentage of raw food in diet
- The number one thing you can do to extend health and vibrant living
is increase raw food. Living food for a living body.
Eat natural unprocessed food
- Eat natural unprocessed whole grain foods and unrefined oils.
- Educate yourself on what is truly natural and what is often a
marketing ploy. Read the ingredients; do not be fooled by labels.
Eat when hungry
- Overeating taxes the body, stores fat, creates excessive mucus.
- Eat slowly and enjoy. Chew food well to assist digestion
- Feed the body, starve the cravings, and don’t feed depression.
Fasting for spiritual and physical cleansing
- Regular periods of detoxification and cleansing through juice fasting
or a raw food diet.
- Fasting can be a launching board to dietary change.
- A tranquil time of spiritual refreshment.
Exercise for mental and physical well being
- Exercise builds confidence and discipline.
- Cleansing the lymphatic system, increase metabolism for weight
management. Better circulation, strengthened lungs and heart.
- Improved appetite and less fear of the occasional indulgence.e
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