Fasting is an eating pattern during which you refrain from consuming any sustenance for an extended period of time. A fast usually lasts from 12 to 40 hours, but some types continue for days at a time. In some cases, water, coffee, and other calorie-free beverages are allowed during the fast, but no solid foods or calorie-containing drinks are permitted. You may eat a little very restricted type of vegetarian food or herbs for prolonged fasting. If you consider fasting, you get to know the downsides of fasting.
Here are 4 of the most popular eating patterns for adding fasting to your diet in the USA:
- Time-restricted eating. Involves fasting every day for 12 hours or longer and eating in the remaining hours, such as eating between noon and 8 pm.
- The 5:2 diet. Involves eating as you normally do 5 days of the week and restricting your calorie intake on the remaining 2 days.
- Alternate-day fasting. Fast every other day.
- The Warrior Diet. Involves eating small amounts of raw fruits and vegetables during the day and eating one large meal at night.
For example, if you finish dinner at 7 p.m. Monday and don’t eat again until 7 p.m. Tuesday, you’ve completed a 24-hour fast.
A full 24-hour fast every other day is difficult for many people to maintain, and so many intermittent fasting routines start with shorter fasting periods.
The media makes people believe fasting can detoxify, clean up the body, and help losing weight. Many are so moved that they start fasting.
They may eat just vegetables and fruits during the week and only water during the weekend or relaxing days. Each of those detoxes has harmful effect on our body’s energy system. As time goes by, their energy is stagnant, meridians are blocked, and the energy and blood cannot circulate; or even though their meridians are open to allow circulation, their energy and blood are insufficient. Just a month of some of those detoxes can make a woman lose their period due to “starvation.”
Our body uses a great amount of energy and resources for digesting food. Fasting is a Western term, and a Chinese term is called inedia (辟谷). Inedia is mainly used for the energy cultivators who can collect a great amount of energy from their surroundings and the universe, who rely less on food energy, and who want to limit their daily energy consumption especially in digesting food to conserve the use of energy for a long life.
Some countries or regions have had this “empty stomach” therapy since ancient times. For the majority of people who do not have the knowledge of the vast accumulation of energy from their surroundings, fast once or twice when the body is too malfunctioned to recover from ill health. But fasting often or even continuous fasting is not advisable. Using the same method, energy cultivators save their limited but vital life energy for a longer life while regular folks may deplete their life energy and shorten their lives besides the typical symptoms from fasting:
- Hunger and cravings.
- Headaches and lightheadedness.
- Digestive issues
- Irritability and other mood changes.
- Fatigue and low energy.
- Bad breath.
- Sleep disturbances.
All these symptoms are due to a lack of nourishment.
If you are not the few who can cultivate a vast amount of energy through meditation and breathing, it’s recommended to halt fasting, consume millet porridge, and the Siwu herbal soup (四物汤) prescribed by a Traditional Chinese doctor to replenish and nourish your qi and blood.
If you still want this kind of fasting, learn how to accumulate a great amount of energy from your surroundings first. But I need to warn you: not everyone can learn and accomplish this because a great amount of time and effort to learn and practice is needed. Very few, if any, people in the Western world can do this. I know a few of the energy practitioners who thought they could accumulate enough energy but had fainted, even a trip to the emergency room, from fasting.