Fasting involves restricting your dietary intake to a liquid and liquid only. The liquid can be water, tea, or fruit juice. Proponents of fasting urge occasional routine short fasts, lasting from two to five days, within an overall health-maintenance regimen. Advocates recommend that more fasts for health care or the healing of illness, lasting a month or longer, be conducted under medical supervision.

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For fasts lasting over one week, fruit juices are given to provide the nutrients required to maintain health. Some include enemas as part of the detox fasting regimen. Proponents assert that because the body is relieved of its regular chore of breaking down food to its elemental nutrients, fasting enables the body’s internal resources to concentrate on healing and cleansing. Cleansing is reported to be accomplished through the elimination of toxins.

Fasting claims to improve the immune system and reduces the demands placed on it. Besides its function as part of health care, some believe that fasting is a powerful means to treat ailments, such as arthritis, ulcers, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and other issues. The early belief that fasting purifies the spirit was extended to the present view that fasting can also purify the body.

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Fasting maintains and restores health through physiological mechanisms. Included in these mechanisms are altering physiological effort from food conversion to the removal of toxins, reducing the immune system’s workload, discharging pesticides and other substances from body fat, and removing the body of connective tissue. It’s helpful to look at these beliefs concerning scientific information regarding this well-studied sequence of events that happens when folks start fasting. When body weight declines, fat and water, but not radicals, are lost from cells.

Toxins are left behind. Nutrients are required to sustain immune competence, the capacity of the body’s disease-fighting immune system to create antibodies and other cells and proteins. Immune system failure, not enhancement, happens when people don’t eat enough to offer the nutrients that maintain proper immune function. Rather than reducing its workload, fasting impedes the immune system. Advocates explain that people feel ill when fasting since toxins are leaving the body.

Immune system

Actually, fasting reduces the immune system’s capacity to destroy and remove toxins. Fasting also causes a drop in blood glucose levels, which causes a breakdown of cells required for energy. This leads people to feel ill because the brain and other cells don’t receive needed sugars, and the body’s metabolism is made to remove the required nutrients from liver and muscle tissue. At exactly the exact same time, the liver and kidneys aren’t able to perform their work of managing the by-products of protein breakdown.

Fasting can damage all organs. It’s very dangerous to health, particularly for those that are afflicted by chronic illness, yet some proponents urge fasting to deal with chronic illnesses. The thinner the person, the more dangerous a quick will be. The more the fast, the more life threatening it becomes. Studies reveal that when people reach 56 percent of the body weight that is appropriate, death happens. The body can’t distinguish between intentional starvation and fasting.

Research

Solid scientific research doesn’t support the claims of fasting urges. To the contrary, it contradicts these claims and indicates that the risks of fasting, in spite of water or juices. Reducing the amount of calories you consume while maintaining a regular, balanced diet will lower your weight. But consuming only water, tea, or juice is harmful, not beneficial, to health and should be avoided particularly by those that are ill.

Advocates think that fasting can create fatigue, anemia, irregular heartbeat, body aches, nausea, dizziness, and other unwanted consequences. They refer to these as temporary issues that precede feelings of well-being, mental clarity, inner cleanliness, and other benefits. Unlike advocacy claims, fasting doesn’t and can’t cure medical conditions, help immune or other physiological function, or play a role in health maintenance. The decreased supply of blood sugar leads the body to break down muscle for energy, causing fatigue, depression, fatigue, and ill feelings.