The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting

by Jason Fung

Feast and fast. It has been easy for me to maintain my weight loss and health since.

The most obvious benefits of fasting are that it helps with weight loss and type 2 diabetes, but there are many other benefits, including autophagy (a cellular cleansing process), lipolysis (fat-burning), anti-aging effects, and neurological benefits. In other words, fasting can benefit your brain and help your body stay younger.

Our brainpower, one of the main advantages we have in the natural world, would be squandered. So what actually happens during caloric deprivation is that the brain maintains or even boosts its abilities.

As the amount of blood going to the digestive system is increased to handle all that turkey and pie, less blood is available to go to the brain. About the only mental challenge we can handle after that enormous meal is sitting on the couch watching football.

Aging rats started on intermittent fasting regimens markedly improved their motor coordination, cognition, learning, and memory. Interestingly, there was even increased brain connectivity and new neuron growth from stem cells.

On the flip side, a higher body mass index is linked to decline in mental abilities and decreased blood flow to those areas of the brain involved in attention, focus, reasoning, and more complex, abstract thought.

In a process called apoptosis, also known as programmed cell death, cells that reach a certain age are programmed to commit suicide.

autophagy, coined by Nobel Prize–winning scientist Christian de Duve, derives from the Greek auto (“self”) and phagein (“to eat”). So the word literally means “to eat oneself.”

Autophagy is a form of cellular cleansing: it is a regulated, orderly process of breaking down and recycling cellular components when there’s no longer enough energy to sustain them.

While we often focus on new cell growth, we sometimes forget that the first step in renewal is destroying the old, broken-down cellular machinery.

The end result is the suppression of autophagy. In other words, the constant intake of food, such as snacking throughout the day, suppresses autophagy.

As the body senses the temporary absence of nutrients, it must prioritize which cellular parts to keep.

fasting may be considered one of the most potent anti-aging methods in existence.

Cancer is yet another disease that may be a result of disordered autophagy.

It is so vital for human health that virtually every cell in the body has the ability to manufacture cholesterol if needed.