Do you struggle with excess weight? Are you showing signs of insulin and leptin resistance? Is your fasting blood sugar above 100? If you answer yes to one or more of these questions, you may want to reconsider not only what you eat but when you eat as well.

One lifestyle factor that appears to be driving not only obesity but also many chronic disease processes is the fact that we eat too frequently.

Research reveals that a vast majority of Americans eat all day long.¹ Most also consume a majority of their daily calories late in the evening, and this type of eating pattern is a recipe for weight gain and metabolic dysfunction.

The reason so many struggle with their weight (aside from eating processed foods that have been grossly altered from their natural state) is because they rarely, if ever, skip a meal.

As a result, their bodies have adapted to burning sugar as its primary fuel, which down-regulates enzymes that utilize and burn stored fat. In addition, our ancestors didn’t have access to food 24/7, and biologically your body simply isn’t designed to run optimally when continuously fed.

Biological Repair and Rejuvenation Occurs During Fasting

Research has confirmed that many biological repair and rejuvenation processes take place when there’s an absence of food, and this is another reason why all-day grazing triggers disease. Your body never has the time to clean out the garbage and regenerate.

When you go without food for a period of time, the resulting metabolic changes stimulate a natural cleansing process known as autophagy, or mitophagy in the case of mitochondrial autophagy, in which your body detoxifies and rids itself of damaged cells.

When you’re in constant “feast mode,” your body forgoes many of these benefits. That does not mean you need to (or should) starve yourself for extended periods of time though.

Simply cycling between periods of eating and fasting on a daily or weekly schedule has been shown to provide many of the same benefits as complete fasting, where you don’t eat for several days.

What’s so Great About Intermittent Fasting?

Intermittent fasting is a term that covers an array of different meal timing schedules. As a general rule, it involves cutting calories in whole or in part, either a couple of days a week, every other day, or even daily, as in the case of the scheduled eating regimen I prefer to use myself.

As noted by Time magazine, intermittent fasting is becoming increasingly popular, and for good reason — it works. And it works whether you’re trying to lose weight or simply improve biomarkers for optimal health.

But what exactly makes it so effective for weight loss when other calorie-cutting diets have such a high failure rate? As noted in the featured article:²

    “The body converts food into glycogen — a form of energy that it can store for later use. Your body then squirrels away that glycogen in both fat cells and in your liver.

    ‘If you’re eating all day, the stores of glycogen in your liver are never depleted,’ [neuroscientist Mark Mattson, Ph.D.] says.

    On the other hand, after about 12 hours without food your liver runs out of glycogen, at which point your body starts drawing energy from the glycogen stored in your fat cells.”

In a nutshell, your body was designed to: a) run on fat as its primary fuel, and b) cycle through periods of feast and famine. Today, most people do the complete opposite. They eat sugar and net carbs (total carbs minus fiber), which is virtually identical to sugar metabolically, all day long.

So, by mimicking the eating habits of our ancestors, who did not have access to food around the clock, you restore your body to a more natural state that allows a whole host of biochemical benefits to occur.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtROQjUkk9g