the next lesson i want to talk about is how fasting helps with gut health
most people in the USA have poor gut health, add to that our poor diets and the way anti biotics are given like candy and now you got a problem. now i'm not saying that you should never use anti biotics, but i'm saying you should use them WHEN NECESSARY ONLY. ultimately you need to sit down with your doctor and decide if it is really necessary but its likely you have taken too many of them in your lifetime which has hurt your gut biome.
and if you follow a bodybuilder style of diet there is little doubt you are on that list. as i've said you can still eat a bodybuilder style of diet, but you should also throw in fasting in there too. did you know that when you have poor gut health you are unable to absorb vitamins and minerals properly?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3601187/ this is why you see bodybuilders who have poor vitamin and mineral health. this is why you see meat eaters who are magicaly b12 deficient. guess what? just throwing more minerals and vitamins at your body won't solve it if your gut health is compromised.
we have gut biome in our stomach and there must be a proper balance. when you fast for 2 days or more those gut biome actually start to die off
poor gut biome, i feel awful killing those tiny guys. however it is important to remember that killing your weak gut biome and replacing them with the stronger guys will make your gut health much better.
another aspect is that when you eat it causes inflammation. ever notice when you wake up after not eating all night your stomach is flatter, but after a meal your gut bulges out? that isn't your imagination. every single time you eat it causes inflammation, the more inflammatory the food is the worse. when you fast for let's say 5 days your gut flattens out cause fasting is anti-inflammatory. this is a huge boon for those who suffer from IBS, crohns and other gut 'diseases'. you may never cure these issues, but by implementing fasting you can CONTROL them.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190306171247.htm amazing how something logical like this isn't well understood. i've known people who have had crohns all their lives and put on horrible drugs to treat it, who have fasted and have been able to control it that way. check this out from the NE journal of medicine and also look up all the happy fasters who have reversed their crohns online. fasting will save your life!
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NE...=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed
here is a story of a person who reversed their crohns thanks to fasting when nothing else did and they explain exactly how they did it.
http://mech.fsv.cvut.cz/~smilauer/Crohn_Smilauer_fasting_en.pdf
"Abstract
Crohn's disease (CD) is often considered to be incurable. After trying several methods,
restarting the body with fasting and going back in diet before year 1950. The whole procedure
started June 4, 2009. The first fasting took 38 days and has been repeated once/twice a year with a
shortening to 25 fasting days. Almost all symptoms of CD had disappeared after the first fasting and
disappeared completely after the next fasts. The third assumption implied changing a diet and
eliminating all food allergens and possible harmful food additives introduced primarily by food
industry after the WWII. In this regard, fasting simply restarts the body. Now my body works normally
with no CD indicators and on no medication"
this is awesome, years of abusing their gut health was reversed once they implemented fasting. that is the magic of fasting, it can quickly reverse a lot of health problems even if you did so much wrong before. i love to hear happy stories like this
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the other obvious fact of fasting is that when you eat a meal your body must now process that meal. there was a very bad movie that came out in the 90's with Chevy Chase called 'memoires of an invisible man'. don't rent it, it was awful. but one part of the movie the invisible man ate food and watched himself in the mirror and saw that food go down into his gut. it grossed him out so much he threw it back up. if only we could actually see all the shit we eat and how it absolutely destroys our gut health. then we would no longer eat things out of packages or fast food. and we would only drink good quality water from now on and nothing else.
you can test this out by eating a heavy/large meal before going and working out. let's say eat a few slices of pizza and a coke. when you go and workout you will struggle and seem slow. but wait, isn't food fuel for our bodies? when we workout we stress our bodies out as it is. by adding hard to digest foods it is going to use up energy that we cannot use.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20613890/ now i've seen numbers anywhere from 10% up to 35% or more of our energy is spent digesting food. now before you get ahead of me know that using up energy to digest food is NOT A BAD THING! it is part of the calorie burn process. however, what IS a bad thing is when you are someone who wants to get in a killer workout and like in a video game where your energy level is lowered it harms your workouts. certain foods use up more energy than others obviously. obviously eating pizza with the dairy, gluten, sauce, garlic, etc. is gonna absolutely destroy your gut vs. eating some watermelon (99% water/fiber). so if you must eat before a workout go with the easier digestion idea.
athletes at the highest levels are smart enough to know they can get the most results from training fasted. that is why when you fast you put in the best workouts of your life. not only energy is high, but also you will burn fat quicker and more efficiently when you train fasted. this is why anyone from your normal gym rat up to Mr. Olympia athletes train fasted especially with things like HIT cardio which require a lot of energy
now some of you will say 'steve i have tried training fasted, i can't do it i get hypo'. well here is the thing. when you train your body to be like this then guess what will happen? the good news is you can train it the other way. it will take 2-3 weeks and it might be uncomfortable. but once your bodies switch goes off then it will be easy. also i suggest hydrating with good water with a pinch of salt/potassium. that will help balance your electrolytes