Philip Weeks discusses the potential health benefits of fasting. Not only can it help you lose weight, but it can have many other health benefits as well. Find out how the body changes when calories are restricted and how it can shift into a different, yet healthy mode.
Scott: I want to talk about fasting. I had that on there. Talk about that a little bit. How does that help the body? A lot of people would think, if I’m not getting nutrients in, the body’s going to suffer, I’m going to feel hungry. How does that benefit the body? What’s going on?
Philip Weeks: Yeah, in theory it sounds kind of counterintuitive again. It’s… why would that be helpful? Well in… again, all ancient cultures have done it. Interesting things happen when you don’t eat. So, there are some theories that the body only repairs itself, for example when you’re sleeping. That’s thought to be due to with the neurotransmitters changes and for example in the case of melatonin, all those things happen when we sleep. But there’s also some theories that say the reason we repair ourselves at that time is because the body’s not eating. So when you go through a period of not eating, the body does all kinds of interesting and different things. So, again, studies have been shown on animals and rats that they become more intelligent when they don’t eat. So studies on rats, when they put them in mazes and don’t give them any food for a period of time, the rats become more intelligent in the mazes. They get through quicker.
And some theories are that in our ancestry, that we’ve had periods of famine and periods of fasting, so that would be normal for us as human beings. But also it might be that when we don’t eat, the body goes into a different kind of mode and therefore we need to be more intelligent to find food. So a lot of the research is on how improved cognitive health and how maybe fasting can be very helpful for brain conditions, for neurological diseases. And also when we don’t eat, the body goes into a mode of clearing up sometimes infections and finishing off processes it hasn’t done when we’re normally eating. So I think shaking things up sometimes can be very helpful. And we just see the effects in our clinic, and again in all these different published medical studies about fasting and the benefits of that. And they can be tremendous on not just weight loss but detoxification and also for conditions like diabetes and obviously it has to always be done in conjunction with a practitioner making sure its medically safe, but fasting is very exciting. And the research is showing some very promising areas of how that can be useful for us in combating chronic disease.
