1) Breakfast: The word breakfast means to break a fast.

When we do our regular weekly fast, we have dinner on Sunday, Monday we only have clear liquids (herbal tea or water; sometimes in the evening we may have a cup of clear vegetable broth) and then Tuesday morning we “breakfast”.

2) What you fast on will determine how quickly you expel toxins from your body.

For instance, a juice fast will remove 2 – 20 days of accumulated toxins in a day, whereas an Ionized Water fast will remove up to 100 days of accumulated toxins in a single day.

3) Intermittent Fasting will help to normalizing your insulin and leptin sensitivity, and boosting mitochondrial energy efficiency.

One of the primary mechanisms that makes intermittent fasting so beneficial for health is related to its impact on your insulin sensitivity. While sugar is a source of energy for your body, it also promotes insulin resistance when consumed in the amounts found in our modern processed junk food diets. Insulin resistance, in turn, is a primary driver of chronic disease—from heart disease to cancer. Intermittent fasting helps reset your body to use fat as its primary fuel, and mounting evidence confirms that when your body becomes adapted to burning FAT instead of sugar as its primary fuel, you dramatically reduce your risk of chronic disease.

4) Intermittent Fasting will help in reduction of oxidative stress.

Fasting decreases the accumulation of oxidative radicals in the cell, and thereby prevents oxidative damage to cellular proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids associated with aging and disease.

5) Intermittent Fasting will promote your human growth hormone (HGH) production.

Research has shown fasting can raise HGH by as much as 1,300 percent in women, and 2,000 percent in men, 2 which plays an important part in health, fitness, and slowing the aging process. HGH is also a fat-burning hormone, which helps explain why fasting is so effective for weight loss.

6) Intermittent fasting is by far the most effective way I know of to eliminate your sugar cravings.

Since most of us are carrying excess fat we just can’t seem to burn, this is a really important benefit. When sugar is not needed as a primary fuel, your body will also not crave it as much when your sugar stores run low.

7) Fasting in animals.

Research suggests that in animals, intermittent fasting can fend off or even reverse such illnesses as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and neurodegenerative disorders. Animal studies suggest that intermittent fasting provides these benefits by allowing the body to respond better to stress that might otherwise damage it. For example, fasting could starve tumors, reduce inflammation, or improve the removal of damaged molecules and other components of cells.

8) Fasting may help your heart.

Fasting for a day once a month may prevent heart disease and insulin resistance, the precursor to diabetes, according to two studies from Utah’s Intermountain Medical Center presented recently at the American College of Cardiology’s scientific sessions. When researchers looked at the habits of 200 men and women, they found that those who fasted once a month were 58 percent less likely to have heart disease than those who didn’t (after they controlled for factors such as age, smoking status, and high blood pressure). www.everydayhealth.com

9) Intermediate Fasting and lifespan.

The positive effects of IF have been chronicled in a variety of animal and human studies, starting with a seminal experiment in 1946, when University of Chicago researchers discovered that denying food every third day boosted rats’ lifespans by 20 percent in males, 15 percent in females. A 2007 review by University of California, Berkeley, researchers concluded that alternate-day fasting may:

  • Lower diabetes risk (at least in animals, data on humans were less clear, possibly because the trial periods in the studies were not long enough to show an effect).
  • Decrease cardiovascular disease risk.
  • Decrease cancer risk.
  • Improve cognitive function.
  • Protect against some effects of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

(Research: Chronic disease prevention; also see this PDF document for more info on IF and life span.)

10) Fasting and Telomeres.

There are a lot of different things that happen in the body on a cellular level when you’re in a fasted state, but one I can single out has to do with the length of your telomeres. You can compare telomeres to the plastic casings at the end of a pair of shoelaces. Just as the plastic casings protect the end shoestrings, telomeres protect the ends of your chromosomes. The length of these guys is important. Basically, the shorter your telomeres, the shorter your lifespan. And intermittent fasting is a way to increase the length of your telomeres. It may reduce the rate of destruction of telomeres by inducing less oxidative stress than eating every day. See this article on what are Telomeres.