Is exercising while fasting dangerous?

There’s always two sides to every story, an opinion, a misrepresentation, and the truth, which always lies somewhere in the middle.  Nothing holds more true with diet myths than this statement.  Perhaps the most long lived and best known is the starvation mode idea.  Exactly when it was determined is lost along a timeline somewhere, but the suggestion is that when you don’t eat, even as much as skipping one meal, that your body goes on red alert into starvation mode, turning everything you eat, magically into fat.  This has been debunked so many times as a myth, and yet the rumor continues to circulate in the diet world.  Perhaps because there is so much money riding on the nutrition enterprise, and those eager to part us from our finances.

Look at facts first.  There are so many groups of people, who for various reasons, choose to fast.  Muslims have Ramadan, which is a form of fasting, because they restrict the hours in which they eat, so that they are only consuming certain foods between sunset and sunrise.  They go sometimes as many as 18 hours a day without food, but have never suffered any ill effects from doing so.  Quite the opposite has been reported.  Medical studies published by the University of Nottingham Medical School, and Queen’s Medical Center, as well as the Swedish Aerospace Physiology Center have proven this to be false.  Many other scholars report the same.  Facts speak for themselves, in both laboratory as well as real life experience.  These medical leaders report that exercise while fasting actually forces your body to shed fat, because your body’s fat burning centers are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, which is activated by exercise, and lack of food.  Fasting prior to exercise has been shown to reduce both body weight and fat, whereas eating a small meal prior to exercise only reduces body weight.

Time and again, intermittent fasting proves through scientific research and application, to be the key to unlock your fat burning potential, yet it remains mired in superstition as the way toward starvation mode, effectively keeping people knocking on the doors of the latest fad diets that aren’t even good for long term sustainability.  And why?  Because if you are healthy and feeling great, and you’ve finally lost all those pounds and extra inches, then you are no longer capable of being marketed to, so in order to keep you buying, it’s not in the diet industry’s best interest to help you lose weight, rather, they’d see you struggle and give false hope.  They don’t want you to know about intermittent fasting’s benefits, because it only benefits you.  This way of living, ensures that your body is always operating at it’s maximum capacity, allowing cellular factors and catalysts (AMP Kinases) to work for you, breaking down fat and glycogen for energy.

The benefits don’t stop at simple fat burning however, fasting as the Eat Stop Eat program promotes actually helps in ways that go much deeper.  When exercise and fasting are twinned together, they yield acute oxidative stress, which sounds bad, but is amazingly good.  This state makes your muscles increasingly resilient to oxidative stress by stimulating glutathione and superoxide dismutase, which is the first antioxidant mobilized by your cells for defense.  This gain in production in the mitochondria along with the increased muscular capacity to utilize energy generates force and resists fatigue.  In other words, this helps stop muscle degeneration and the signs of aging.  But that’s not all either.

Fasting with exercise also triggers something that recycles and rejuvenates your brain and tissues.  Genes and growth factors, like brain derived neurotropic factor, and muscle regulatory factors which signal brain stem cells and muscle satellite cells to convert into new neurons and new cells are aided greatly by this.  It boosts your growth hormones, improves body composition, boosts cognitive function through an increase in stem cells, boosts testosterone, maintains healthy balanced levels of estrogen and progesterone, and prevents depression.  Fasting with exercise is a team worth betting on, especially when you can feel good about it.  The last major benefit reported is the release of seratonin, the happy hormone.  Who wouldn’t want to feel as good as they look?

So fear not intrepid wanderer, for you have found the right place finally to give you what you want, instead of marketing to what you don’t need.  Throw away your preconceived notions about fasting and diets with exercise, and start using a method that will see you never having to purge and punish yourself through the latest and greatest fad diet to be featured.