I have a confession to make… over the past holiday season I slacked off when it came to health. I had joined the Air Force in March of 2021, started a rigorous and lengthy training pipeline which had a ton of work that was mostly sedentary… and over the holiday I had allowed myself to eat whatever, because, why not?
Then I stepped onto the scale. What I saw made my jaw drop. Not only was I the heaviest that I have ever been in my life, but I was 0.5 lbs away from being the max weight allowed for my height.
I knew I had to get my butt into gear, so I made a daily workout plan, looked for a meal-replacement superfood shake that had tons of healthy ingredients for my busy day, and started researching ways to reset my metabolism. That is how I started digging into intermittent fasting, and its health benefits.
As of the date of this post I am still in the middle of my journey, but I have lost 24 pounds, and have 10 more to go before reaching my goal weight. I started on January 1st this year until today, the 27th of March… and is still ongoing.
A lot has been said about glucose and Insulin, but the parts of fasting that I was not familiar with was HGH, Ketones and Autophagy. The short story is that once you have fasted for a certain number of hours, your body starts producing Human Growth Hormone (HGH), starts burning Ketones, and starts the process of Autophagy. The thing is that you have to get past 12 hours of not eating for these three to start being activated. Ok, so then why are these processes important?
Ketones: These are a fuel source made from the fat on your body. It actually burns cleaner than glucose, and helps optimize brain function.
Human Growth Hormone: This hormone is produced in the pituitary gland at the base of the brain and helps with muscle optimization and rebuilding cells. It effectively helps make your cells throughout your body revitalize. This is also important because if you are over 30 years old like me, your HGH has decreased dramatically. This is a way to bring your levels back up.
Autophagy: This is your body cleaning house. Since you are not using energy on processing food, your body can then turn to cleaning out old cells and repairing. This in turn causes your body systems to be able to function better and optimizes your immune system.
These are just a few of the benefits that come with fasting. It has also been shown to help with memory, muscle growth after exercising, as well as making the immune system more hardy during chemotherapy.
For more in depth information on what fasting does, and how to do it, check out the resources below that I have used to start my fasting journey.
I hope these resources are as beneficial to you as they were me. I can already tell a great difference coupling this tool with clean eating and a healthy workout schedule. I even had the highest PT Test score ever this past month. Hope you benefit from these resources as much as I have!
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