Fasting and Nutritional Ketosis

Here is a summary/quick guide on how to do a week of intermittent fasting and nutritional ketosis.  This can be modified to include different meals and different fasting periods.

Why?  Fasting has been around for centuries, practiced all over the world for spiritual and health benefits.  We can be connected with our ancestors   

Here are the health benefits:

• Improves weight and body fat loss
• Improves mental clarity and concentration
• Lowers blood sugar levels
• Improves insulin sensitivity
• Increases energy
• Improves fat-burning
• Lowers blood cholesterol
• Prevents Alzheimer’s disease
• Extends life
• Reverses the aging process
• Decreases inflammation

 

These fasting periods that are so excellent for you are actually comprised of bone broth, tea, coffee, and water…super do-able!

You can add lemon, limes to your water.  

I drink a hefty amount of tea during these weeks.  I drank a lot of peppermint/chamomile/damiana tea this past fast.  Steer clear of making tea with herbs that contain calories (roots and fruits are where the calories are, you want leafy and flowerie).  You can also drink cinnamon chai (which actually lowers sugar cravings), bitter melon tea, black tea, and oolong tea (which all can help lower blood sugar levels).

To your coffee or tea you can add the following:

• Coconut oil
• MCT oil
• Butter
• Ghee
• Heavy whipping cream (35% fat)
• Half and half
• Whole milk
• Ground cinnamon
• Lemon

 

~My favorite mid-week was making a french press made with with coconut oil and chai spices~

Mindset is such a huge piece in fasting.  Our relationship with food can certainly tend to be emotional and faulty – “I need to eat”, “I’m starving”, “I’m craving something sweet.”  These things can be reset by going through this process.  

Craving is emotional.  We typically crave food to change our mind about something or fulfill a need that we think we have.  It’s like a drug seeking behavior that is fast and intense.  Once you feed into your craving your brain gets used to it.  One pizza slice could easily turn into 2.  This process gives a smaller amount of response (or no response at all!) to the same stimulance.  This is actually any situation where a tolerance is built.  

Intermittent fasting is really interesting in displaying how powerful our minds are.  Since your mind informs your body, and your body informs your mind, if you calm the body, the mind calms.  If you calm the mind, the body calms.  Once your mind is more distant from having snacks or sugar or carbs, your body is more distant from these things.  And once your body is, so is your mind.    

Below is how my last week shaped out.  Note that I’ve been doing a week involving bone broth and very clean eating once a season for a few years now, so the fasting periods may have come a bit easier for me than they will for someone who is not used to eating the broth as a meal.  The thing with the broth is that you can eat as much of it as you want!  

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Breakfast	Bone broth	Bone broth	Bone broth	Bone broth	Bone broth
Lunch	Bone broth	Bone broth	Bone broth	Bacon/egg muffins	Salad
Dinner	Bacon/egg muffins	Cauliflower pizza	Bone broth	Salad	Cauliflower pizza