The last two days I have written about the negative side effects of doing a detoxification diet. In essence, your body is well designed to detox on its own, and forcing a detox of the colon, will force all of the good bacteria out of your body as well. Not to mention the fact that diarrhea can upset the balance of electrolytes, potassium, and other nutrients needed in your body. If you’re trying to clean up your act and you really want to healthily cleanse your system, the best way to do it is by drinking plenty of water and eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and other fibers.
With that said, a short period of fasting does have some benefits–particularly for your mental health. Before we go into those, I do want to write a quick explanation of why I’m using fasting and cleansing interchangeably here. Fasting and cleansing are not technically interchangeable. However, one purpose of cleansing is to start anew. Many who have done detox diets talk about how it helped them ‘start over again.’ While I don’t believe that flushing your colon is necessary to ‘start over’, there is no doubt that when it comes to weight loss, winning the mental wars is half of the battle. So with that, I offer the benefits of fasting. . .
Fasting does not mean that you have to forgo all food. In fact, you should always be drinking water. But you can fast by drinking water, and eating fruits and vegetables as well as simply not eating anything. How long you fast, and how you fast, really depends on you and your goals.
A Chance to Focus
You likely spend a fairly significant portion of your life organized around food. I know I do. I get up in the morning and make sure the kids have breakfast ready. Then three short hours later I do snack, lunch, then another snack, then dinner. . .you get the point. Taking the food element out of your day frees up a substantial portion of your time to think about other things.
Focusing on Your Life
Since you have all this time to focus, many people use it to think about what things they’d like to change, how they’d like to change them and start to make plans on how to do that. It is a good time to look at emotional issues that may be causing you to overeat or to focus on detrimental patterns of behavior. Many people even talk about how they think about relationships, have clarity to make life altering decisions etc.
The Placebo Effect
There is not solid scientific evidence that fasting is biologically beneficial. It is true that fasting will cause you to use your carbohydrate stores and if you’re over weight–you have lots of those. However, simply eating less will cause you to use your carbohydrate stores as well. But there is something to be said for believing that it makes a difference. People who fast, generally do so believing that it will help them make healthier choices once they are finished fasting.
So if you feel like you just need to ‘start over’, a fast might be just what you