Fasting has been practiced worldwide for thousands of years for a variety of different reasons, considered to be an ancient natural healing mechanism. In recent years, it seems that there has been a growing awareness for fasting and more specifically intermittent fasting. Back in 2013, it was suggested that it might become the next big weight loss fad.

It's been talked about across social media platforms, daytime talk shows, various blogs and books have been written about it, there are many people out there today who are doing intermittent fasting for one reason or another.

Those who are dedicated to intermittent fasting regularly claim that they personally have reaped a variety of benefits from the activity, they will tell you that it's the best way to try and promote optimal health for your body.

Some doctors today, such as Dr. J Fung, are going against the grain and trying to use intermittent fasting to reverse type 2 diabetes. Fung, rather than focusing on managing the illness with traditional methods, he has instead sought to treat the illness differently; Fung has insisted that it's a metabolic derangement that has the potential to be reversed.

“Every time you eat, you’re going to stimulate insulin,... If you stimulate insulin all the time you get insulin resistant, your fat cells get big, it turns on leptin. If you turn on leptin all the time, you get leptin resistant. …So how do you reset that? You need to keep your insulin low for a significant amount of time .

“It’s the insulin that causes insulin resistance,..”

“Basically, intermittent fasting is any period of time you are not eating,...Generally speaking, only water is allowed. Variations of fasting include the use of tea, herbal tea, and coffee.” - Dr. Fung

His work is drastically different from other conventional approaches that you might see around today. And critics say that there still needs to be a great deal of research done before they'll start to believe in the benefits of intermittent fasting.

Intermittent Fasting No Better Than Other Diets

A recent study has suggested that there aren't any special benefits to intermittent fasting; no advantages over other weight loss diet programs. Find someone who follows intermittent fasting regularly however and you'll likely hear another story. The study concluded that intermittent fasting can help to promote weight-loss and better health but they didn't find it to be superior to a calorie restriction approach.

Fung, a well-known advocate of intermittent fasting, has previously written about his disagreement over the importance of calories in pursuing weight-loss goals.

In his post The Useless Concept of 'Calories' he writes:

What’s crucially important, though, is to see if the body ‘cares’ about calories. Is it calories, or weight of food that serves as the common currency, or common language of weight gain? Does the body have some mechanism to count calories? Does the body have sensors to detect calories? Do we have an internal bomb calorimeter to measure calories and change behavior/ metabolism based on calories? No, no and no.

Your body doesn’t give a hoot about calories. Calories are not an accepted currency in our body. It does not count calories so why should you?.... Consider two foods of equal caloric value. On the one hand, you have a bit of sugary soda, and on the other is a plate of lettuce. Calories are identical. OK. So what? When you eat those two foods, does your body somehow measure these calories? No.”

Fung has been labelled a quack for his approach, though he still stands by his theory that insulin over-production might be more of a contributor to obesity than just calories. He isn't alone.

Undermining The Immune System With Snacking

If we are always snacking, this means we might risk frequently triggering our immune system to produce an inflammatory response to the point where we are always in an inflammatory state. This persistent inflammation has the potential to be extremely detrimental to our body over the years.

You can find a variety of online stories where people detail their adventure with intermittent fasting in their own life. One of those stories tells of 3 men who no longer need insulin shots for their Type 2 diabetes because of the success that they saw with intermittent fasting. Those working in the field say that we are still in the early research days of seeing just what intermittent fasting has to offer.

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The information that is posted above is not intended be used as any substitute for professional medical advice, or diagnosis or treatment. The above is posted for informational purposes only.

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