Playing online casino Malaysia through Alibaba33 online casino Malaysia can be a fun and rewarding experience for those who enjoy playing games for fun. trusted online casino malaysia alibaba33Bet on your favourite slots, live, sporting events and win big! If you enjoy sports, slots like Mega888 ewallet Alibaba33 online casino Malaysia has something for you.

Viagra Malaysia treat erectile dysfunction with the original ED treatment that has helped men feel confident in bed for decades. We’ll connect you with a licensed viagra malaysia healthcare provider to evaluate if our prescription ED treatments could be right for you, including super-affordable generic Viagra viagramalaysiaofficial Viagra is an oral ED medication that works by suppressing an enzyme in the body called PDE5.

Tag: Fasting - Organic Lifestyle Magazine Tag: Fasting - Organic Lifestyle Magazine

Intermittent Fasting: The Best Breakfast May Be Eating Nothing At All

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!

If you don’t eat cereal for breakfast, you will be overcome by the greatest evil — masturbation.

Oh, and cereal will make you more efficient and productive, too.

These were the beliefs that started the commercialization of breakfast and breakfast cereals in the early 1900s. These ideas were proposed by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, an early Seventh-day Adventist and the inventor of corn flakes. With the help of his credentials, his brother’s mass-marketing of the corn flakes, and the magazine he edited called Good Health, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was able to popularize his idea that a “whole grain” breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Although most of us already know how bad cereal is for our health, the idea that breakfast is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle is still popular more than 100 years later. This has been confirmed by that fact that — in 2011 — 9 out of 10 people in the United States reported eating a daily morning meal. A plethora of scientific studies, on the other hand, support the 10% of Americans who skip breakfast and provide irrefutable evidence that breakfast is not the most important meal of the day. We can start to uncover the reasons why with a Nobel Prize.

Recommended: How to Eliminate IBS, IBD, Leaky Gut

How to Harness the Power of a Nobel Prize Winning Discovery

Last year, the Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi for discovering some of the mechanisms of autophagy or — in layman’s terms — how the cell devours itself. At first, this sounds like a horrendous discovery, until you consider what is really happening.

When our cells undergo the process of autophagy, damaged proteins are recycled and invading microorganisms and toxic compounds are removed. This means that autophagy plays an important role in stopping the aging process, reversing disease, and preventing cancer, but it doesn’t happen all the time. Fasting, protein restriction, and carbohydrate restriction are the three main ways that can initiate different autophagic processes — all of which are not the same. This is part of the reason why skipping meals like breakfast can be better for you than eating three or more meals throughout the day.

Enter Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is a fancy term that we use to describe the process of skipping meals. The most popular intermittent fasting strategy is fasting during a 16-hour window of time and eating two meals during the remaining 8 hours. Let’s say, for example, your last meal was at 6 pm last night, and you ate nothing else after that. To start an intermittent fast, simply restrict eating until 10 am the next morning.

There are many different variations of intermittent fasting. Dr. Dom D’Agostino, the well-known ketogenic diet researcher, suggests doing a longer intermittent fast for 3 days, 3 times a year. This means not eating for 3 days, and eating normally until the next fast.

Dr. D’Agostino also recommends daily intermittent fasts. He says that it is ideal to have one or two meals after fasting for most of the day to reap the benefits of intermittent fasting every day.

Clean Your (Cell’s) Room

Part of the reason why intermittent fasting promotes health is because you can use it to activate the processes of autophagy that are brought about by carbohydrate restriction, protein restriction, and fasting.

If this scientific jargon is throwing you off, think about what you do when your room is dirty. You may clean it in your spare time or have a set time on the weekend to clean it, but what happens when the weekend comes and you are busy with endless obligations? You spend so much of your time fixing the car, helping your mother and doing everything else you have to do that you have no time to clean your room. After a week without cleaning, your room is just a bit dirtier than usual, but after a month of being too busy to clean, your room is filthy. Dirty, smelly clothes are all over the floor, dust is everywhere, and you ran out of underwear (again).

This is what happens to our cells when we eat three or more meals a day that completely fulfill our need for calories. Even if you are eating the healthiest of foods, your cells still can get backed up with inessential proteins and toxic compounds. So what can you do?

To make sure that you clean your bedroom, you stop allowing yourself to be consumed by other obligations – you free up your time. To make sure that your cells can clean themselves, you enter a fasted state.

Fasting will not only activate autophagy in your cells, it will also increase your ketone levels — an alternative fuel source for your body and brain. You can even boost ketone levels and autophagy by adding in low-intensity exercise (like walking and cycling).

Refeeding Syndrome — When Fasting Goes Too Far

Health complications can arise when you fast for longer than 5 days. One of these complications is called refeeding syndrome, which is caused by potentially fatal shifts in fluid and electrolyte balance that can happen when we eat after a period of undernourishment. Refeeding syndrome happens because the concentration of fluids and minerals in our body relies heavily on what we eat. For example, low carbohydrate diets, like the ketogenic diet, increase the excretion of vital minerals like sodium and potassium.

Fasts that are shorter than 5 days, however, aren’t likely to cause issues — especially if you sip water with a pinch of unrefined salt in it throughout each day and break your fast with a low carbohydrate meal that is filled with mineral rich foods. A meal with dark leafy greens, avocado, and salmon with some unrefined salt, for example, would be an ideal way to break a longer fast. But what about muscle? It’s only common sense that consuming no protein and fewer calories will lead to an unhealthy amount of muscle loss. That’s right — it is only common sense.

Intermittent Fasting and Muscle

Two paradigm-shifting studies have recently been published on the effects of intermittent fasting. One group of researchers studied the effects that 16 hours of intermittent fasting had on resistance-trained males. They found that muscle mass stayed the same, fat mass decreased significantly, and the males who fasted for 16 hours a day burned more fat for fuel compared to the control group that only fasted for 12 hours. This suggests that intermittent fasting can help us rely more on our fat stores for fuel rather than carbohydrates from food.

Another study showed that combining 20 hours of fasting with resistance training resulted in an increase in muscle mass, strength, and endurance, and all of this was achieved by eating ~650 fewer calories per day than normal.

The benefits of intermittent fasting translate to untrained overweight and obese individuals as well. One study published in Obesity Reviews found that eating fewer calories is effective for fat loss, but it does come with some muscle loss. However, if the subjects fasted for 24 hours and ate as much as they wanted on the next day for a period of 12 weeks, they lost significantly less muscle mass.

Yes — you read that correctly — 24 hours of intermittent fasting without any resistance training and these subjects were able to preserve more muscle mass than the subjects who ate fewer calories every day without fasting at all. This finding contradicts our common sense, but when we dig deeper into autophagy we can find the mechanism behind this result.

Autophagy and Muscle Loss Prevention

Before a Nobel Prize was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi in 2016, other researchers were discovering wonderful things about autophagy. In 2009, an article entitled “Autophagy Is Required to Maintain Muscle Mass” was published in Cell Metabolism that described how deactivating an important autophagy gene resulted in a profound loss of muscle mass and strength. This happened because autophagy is an essential process that the muscle cell uses to clean up damaged proteins and mitochondria before they reach the point where they can’t function any longer and die.

At first glance, this seems counter-intuitive because we tend to assume that the nutrients we eat will repair the damage, but this is not how things work in reality. Think about it like this — if you want to refurbish a room, it is best to clean the room and remove the old furniture before you put the new furniture in. The same thought process applies to your cells. We must use intermittent fasting to let autophagy clean the cell before we put in new furniture, and if we don’t, our cells can become cancerous.

Intermittent Fasting and Cancer

Although there is little to no literature on the effects of 2 or 3-day fasts on muscle loss in humans, many clinical trials are currently being conducted on the effects that fasting has on cancer patients.

In initial case studies, patients who were going through chemotherapy treatment voluntarily fasted for anywhere between 48 to 140 hours. Each patient reported fewer side effects and an improved quality of life regardless of how long they fasted. This implies that fasting for 2 to 7 days can have a protective effect on the cells in the body while they are undergoing intense bouts of toxicity.

Other studies have shown that fasting was as effective as chemotherapeutic agents in delaying the progression of different tumors, and it increased the effectiveness of chemotherapeutic drugs against melanoma, glioma, and breast cancer cells. Although this research may not directly apply to your life, it confirms that intermittent fasting can help prevent cancer and help support your body in times of toxic stress.

The Takeaway

It’s okay to skip breakfast. In fact, you may experience more health benefits by doing so. Although you will feel hungry at first, your body will adjust by activating autophagy and using more fat and ketones for fuel.

Dr. Dom D’Agostino, a popular ketogenic diet researcher, suggests doing a longer intermittent fast followed by shorter daily intermittent fasts. His fasting protocol includes fasting for up to 3 days, 3 times a year with a shorter 16 to 20 hour fast on the days before and after the longer 3-day fasts.

However, you can still get the benefits of intermittent fasting by fitting different methods into your lifestyle. For example, Dr. Krista Varaday — a researcher who has conducted many research studies on fasting — suggests using alternate day fasting, which consists of eating less than 500 calories on fasting days and eating normally on non-fasting days. Dr. Mercola, on the other hand, proposes a less strict approach to fasting — consisting of a 13 to 18 hour fast a couple days a week or more.

Whether you are fasting for 16 hours or 3 days, it is important to stay hydrated with distilled water that includes a pinch of mineral-rich unrefined salts. Break your fasts with vitamin and mineral rich foods like organic vegetables, leafy greens, nuts, seeds, pastured animal products like eggs, and wild caught seafood like salmon and sardines.

But Remember — All Intermittent Fasts Are Not The Same

Before you start fasting, it is important to know that each method will have different effects on different people. In general, longer fasts — like a 3-day fast — tend to increase autophagy and ketone levels much more than a shorter fast. Shorter fasts — like a 16-hour daily fast — have a smaller impact on ketone levels and autophagy, but they tend to do a great job at decreasing your daily caloric intake and increasing the likelihood that your body will burn fat for fuel.

The shorter fast is simple and easy enough to implement, but the 3-day fast seems daunting and difficult (at first). This is why I provided you with an example of one of my favorite 3-day fasting protocols that make it simple and easy.

Practical Protocol: Tim Ferris’s 3 Day Fast

If you want a simple guide to boost your ketone levels and activate autophagy, try this 3-day “fasting” protocol that Tim Ferris adapted from Dr. D’Agostino and wrote about it his book Tools of Titans:

Thursday Evening

  • Eat a normal dinner and make that the last meal of the day. Go to bed as normal.

Friday Morning

  • Get out the door and walk within 30 minutes of waking.
  • Bring at least 1 liter or more of water with some added unrefined salt in it, and sip as you walk to avoid cramping.
  • Walk for 3 to 4 hours, sipping water as needed.
  • Arrange phone calls for your walk to make the time productive.
  • The idea behind the walk is that you use up your glycogen stores, forcing your body to move more quickly into deep ketosis (when your body is burning ketones for fuel). The quicker you get into ketosis, the less time you spend feeling tired and starved.

Friday Day (post walk)

Saturday Morning

  • Upon waking, Tim suggests testing your blood ketones with a ketone blood testing kit like the Precision Xtra. Your ketones should be at 0.7mmol or greater.
  • If you’re at 0.7mmol, proceed with your fast.
  • If you’re under 0.7mmol, consider going for another extended walk, and then re-test.

Saturday & Sunday Day

  • Add further MCT oil or coconut oil if you need a boost, but do your best to only have water throughout the day.
  • Incorporate some salts in your water throughout the day. This can either be in the form of table salts, or via a specially formulated solution such as SaltStick electrolyte replacement pills.

Sunday Evening

  • Tim suggests breaking the fast with whatever meal you choose.

This process can be used as a way to get you into ketosis more quickly so that fasting is much easier. Each time you do an intermittent fast, your body will get better and better at using fat and ketones for fuel, which will lead to less hunger, more fat loss, and less muscle loss. If you can’t go without fat for the full 3-day fast,  it’s okay, you will still reap many of the benefits of fasting by not having any carbohydrates or protein.

Recommended Reading:
Sources:



Detox vs. Fasting – Which One You should do?

It’s often argued that a detoxification regimen is pointless because the body is always detoxifying. While this is true, there is also a process of “medicinal removal of toxic substances” which is the definition commonly used by naturopaths, and other alternative health care advocates. So, for the purposes of getting past this inane sticking point, let’s redefine detoxifying, and “detox” to mean a method to expel waste from the body at a significantly greater rate than what the body will remove without such aid.

Personally, I think that sounds pretty good. If you’ve got a better definition, I’d love to read it in the comments.

There is a huge difference between detoxification and fasting, and yet the words tend to be used interchangeably. To detox is to facilitate the removal of toxins from the body whereas fasting is a severe restriction of calories. A fast may be a water fast where no nutrients are consumed, but the typically fast is to eliminate all solid foods while drinking a lot of fluids, including juices, to flush out the body. The Master Cleanse lemonade diet is a well-known example. The Master Cleanse does help to detoxify the body, so it is both a detox and a fast.

People often wonder if a beet juice fast, or a watermelon fast, or some other kind of fast is right for them.

Benefits of Fasting to Detoxify

  • Whether it be a viral, bacterial, fungal, or a parasitic infection, not eating is the easiest way to ensure you do not feed the infection.
  • Fasting quickly resets the taste buds, which can make it easier to enjoy healthy foods when the fast is over.
  • Not eating for a while can reset the appetite, allow someone to come off of the fast with more restraint from overeating.
  • Fasting can break or adjust psychological barriers with weight loss and food.
  • Fasting can kick start a weight loss diet by shedding pounds quickly.
  • For people with a severely compromised digestive system, juicing only, or exclusively consuming fruits that are very easy to digest, is often the best way to quickly facilitate healing.
  • When taking certain tinctures and other herbal formulas, fasting can ensure that no foods or herbs are eaten that could reduce the effects of the formula.
  • It is difficult for a toxic body to detoxify without supplemental support, even with a very healthy diet. Fasting can overcome this, especially when lots of fluids are consumed, flushing the body.

It’s easier to restore one’s health by eliminating all foods, and then slowly adding produce and then other foods into the diet as health improves, learning along the way which foods should be avoided and why, as opposed to simply learning what foods to avoid.

Fasting is great. It’s got most of the benefits of detoxifying, with additional benefits as well. Fasting, when done right, is powerful. Personally, I recommend fasting regularly, but only for short periods of time.

Once the intestinal tract is capable of properly digesting food, if the person’s health isn’t too poor, introducing the right foods into the diet can aid in the detoxification process.

Benefits to Detoxifying Without Fasting

I highly recommend eating while detoxifying. When made right, salads have amazing medicinal benefits. Try one with as many different vegetables as possible, from dandelion leaves to collard greens, and add a bunch of fresh garlic, lemon, and apple cider vinegar. Salads are the easiest way, in my experience, to digest a lot of raw garlic at once. Even if you don’t care for salads, after a fast, this sort of vegetable medley can be very appetizing. Check out 80% Raw Food Diet for more on that.

  • It’s possible to sustain a detoxification regimen longer when eating, which is imperative for ridding the body of many serious health afflictions.
  • Many foods are actually well known to aid the body in detoxification. Great examples are cilantro, garlic, turmeric, and cabbage.
  • Vegetable, spice, and herb health benefits often have accumulative effects when eaten together.
  • It’s easier to get a lot of nutrition and a lot of garlic into the body.
  • When the intestines are healthy, nutrition is better absorbed as food.
  • Enzymes, found in fresh food, also help the body detoxify and rebuild.

It’s true that the body is always expelling waste. To oversimplify things, a sick body, and a body that is getting sick, expels toxins slower than it accumulates them. A healthy body, or a body getting well, eliminates toxins at the same rate or more quickly than the body accumulates them. The right foods help to detoxify the body. Getting enough nutrition allows the body to detoxify on its own. A healthy person who has practiced eating a truly healthy diet that focuses on fresh produce and eliminates toxic food almost always eliminates more toxins than accumulated. These are the people who do detoxify every day, all day. Some assistance via supplementation, every now and then, can increase the body’s ability to detoxify from environmental toxin accumulation.

Regardless, Get Nutrition

Restricted calorie programs don’t have to restrict vitamins and minerals and other important nutrients. We recommend a good multivitamin/mineral formula regardless of whichever detox protocol you choose. Even when we eat very well, it can be hard in this day and age to get enough nutrition from our food. Especially while fasting, a nutrition powder can significantly affect the results in a positive way.

Make sure any detox you do addresses candida. If you’re looking for an inexpensive, and easy detox, click here, and see Make Your Own Nutrition Formula for a recipe, or check it out to see some of the best ingredients to look for when shopping for yours.

Recommended Supplements:

Further Reading: