Fasting Does Not Detox Your Body- Eating Well Does
Fasting is defined as an abstinence of some sort with regard to food and water, and is done usually for either spiritual reasons or improving overall health and losing weight. Spiritual fasting is an integral practice in almost all world religions and can be profoundly meaningful in a spiritual context. However, the current trend of fasting as a way to detoxify your body or lose weight lacks much in terms of scientific credibility. In this first of two articles we will explore the myths regarding fasting and detoxifying your body. The next blog post will tackle the issue of weight loss and fasting. Aside from losing weight quickly, there are three main reasons people use to justify the use of fasting, most of them commonly accepted by the general population as being true. They are:
1. Fasting gives your digestive system and organs time to rest and recover from the strain of the processed foods that we eat today.
2. Fasting helps the body get rid of unwanted toxins.
3. Fasting helps you lose weight.
With regards to the first suggestion that your digestive system needs a rest, it seems like a very plausible idea, and most would agree that it sounds like a good idea. However, our own rather linear logic does not always translate into physiological reality nor does it have any grounding in the biology of how the human body actually works. Our bodies are designed to process food as an ongoing requirement. As such, it can’t be overworked from digesting the very nutrients that we need to survive. Consider the parallel example of a car engine; by not putting any gas in the tank you don’t do anything to make it run better. Engines are designed to run on gas and it would be unthinkable to expect any benefits from driving your car with an empty tank. In the same vein, you shouldn’t expect your body to function optimally if you don’t give it the fuel it needs.
Now if you put contaminated or low quality fuel in your car, you can indeed do damage to the engine, but having the car run with no gas for periods after filling it with cheap gas isn’t going to make it any better. The same applies to junk food. If you eat a diet high in refined junk foods, one or two days of not eating anything will not magically undo the 363-364 days of bad food choices. It is an appealing idea that a couple of days fasting can somehow absolve you of frequent bad food choices, but this is called magical thinking and has no basis in reality whatsoever. If you want to be sure that your organs are not overwhelmed, then your focus should be on consistently wholesome food choices and avoiding foods that our bodies naturally were not designed to consume. Not quite the quick, feel-good fix that most are looking for, but it is the only way proven to maintain optimal health.
Myth 2: Fasting Eliminates Toxins.
With regard to eliminating toxins, again it sounds like a solid theory, but only if you don’t have a background in biology. Our organs are here to do just that: to breakdown and remove toxins. They do a pretty darn good job of it. There is absolutely no scientific evidence that fasting will cleanse the body. This what our lungs, liver, colon, kidneys, lymph glands and even our skin does and are built to do. In a sense, our organs are natural detoxification centers and by not eating for a period of time you do nothing to eliminate any excess toxins. The practice of drinking lots of water or juices while fasting is equally useless.
Water and juices cannot flush away toxins- it only dilutes whatever compounds are already in the body.
Drinking more water whether you are fasting or not does nothing to increase the rate of toxin removal, if anything the dilution from an increased fluid intake may actually slow down the rate of excretion. The idea of water and juices washing away the bad chemicals inside our bodies is laughable, yet there are numerous New Age types who take advantage of the public’s lack of knowledge of human biochemistry. An internet search on fasting and detox will give you hundreds of websites selling products but none with any scientific credibility. This is an oversimplified view of how the human body works and has no grounds in human biology. It goes a long way in selling juicers and promoting the sales of bottled water but does nothing to eliminate toxins.
If you wanted to ensure that your liver or kidneys are not strained by harmful toxins then not smoking, staying away from alcohol, illegal drugs and highly processed foods is the answer. Again, not a simple fix, but if you don’t put anything harmful into your body you don’t have to worry about having to get rid of it in the first place. The practice of fasting in that sense only serves to distract from developing the healthy habits needed to learn to live a healthier lifestyle.
Check back next week for our follow up article on fasting and weight loss.
Celebrity personal trainer NYC Kevin Richardson is one of the most sought after fitness trainers in New York City and the creator of Naturally Intense High Intensity Training™. Download a copy of Kevin’s free weight loss ebook here!
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