What happens when you fast? On our previous Little Lesson, we were talking initially about fasting and looking at the fact that it is a biblical practice, something that every Christian should do. Just like they should pray and just like they should obey any of the Lord’s commandments.
Jesus said, “When you fast, here’s what you should do.” Not if you fast, but when you fast (see Matthew 6:16-18).
So I gave a little bit of a preliminary introductory information on our previous broadcast. I just want to go a little bit deeper into it in this edition of Little Lessons because I think there might be more to say and there might be more interest.
How Your Body Responds When You Fast
When you stop eating food, your body says, “Oh my goodness! What are you doing?” Because it’s used to taking what you give it and what it digests and turning that into glucose and streaming it through your bloodstream. And when your body realizes you’re not going to get any food to the stomach, it says, “I’ve got to get something some other way,” and it begins to then burn fat cells.
And fasting is a great way to lose weight quickly. Trouble is when you do it that way, you often gain it back pretty fast when you break your fast.
I’m not recommending fasting, an extended fast, as a means of losing weight. Although, the idea of intermittent fasting has become quite popular. When, just on a regular basis, once or twice a week, you fast the whole day. And that has proven to be a wonderful way for people to lose weight.
So if you’re thinking about the weight loss benefits, maybe you should check into that.
Be Careful When Coming Off a Long Fast
But your body starts burning fat, because it has to have the energy to keep all the organs going. It’s really an interesting kind of feeling. Your stomach shrinks, you feel those hunger pains, they kind of ebb and flow, come and go. And by the time you get to the third day, your stomach says, “Okay, I get it. You’re not going to give me any food.”
Your stomach has shrunken to a degree and it’s kind of shut down. And that’s why when you break a fast, you have to be cautious. You can’t eat a big meal after several days of fasting because your stomach’s smaller. You just find, “Oh, my goodness, I’m satiated so much quicker as I break my fast.”
Because your stomach hasn’t been functioning as it normally does when you break your fast. That’s why it’s important to break your fast very, very gradually and very carefully by giving it very easy things to digest. Easier to digest fruits, for example, is something, or diluted apple juice. And that gets your stomach realizing, “Oh, okay, food’s coming down so we need to start kicking in here.”
I’ve heard stories of people who were starved in concentration camps and so forth, and when they were liberated, gorged on food and actually died from it because their bodies couldn’t handle the input of such quantities of food and such difficult foods to digest so quickly. So be very, very cautious. The longer you fast, the more cautious you need to be when you break your fast.
Fasting By Delaying Breakfast
Another way to fast is just to delay breakfast. And there are nutritionists who are advocating that that’s actually a good thing for weight control and so forth because, once your body has digested the food and processed the food and turned it into glucose to feed the cells of your body, once there’s no food and that glucose flow shuts down, the body naturally then begins to break down the fat cells to use those for fuel.
And if you haven’t eaten since dinner time and you skipped breakfast, well, you’re past the glucose phase at that point in time and there’s nothing to digest and nothing to give your body energy, and so your body will begin to naturally kick into living off of the fat cells that have been accumulated in your body. Most all of us have a little bit of that.
And it is surmised by some that that’s actually healthier than a normal breakfast, lunch, dinner routine. That our ancestors would be much more accustomed to that kind of eating cycle. That eating wasn’t as quite as regular as it always has been.
And so I’m not going to try to defend that either way, but I have certainly noticed that it’s easier for me to control my weight when I delay my breakfast till later in the morning, or till lunchtime, and just have two meals a day, rather than three meals a day. Okay?
Why You Lack Energy When Fasting
I personally have never fasted longer than about six days. And if you’re going to fast longer than a couple of days, you’re not going to be able to do yard work or do any kind of physical manual labor. Most people, anyway, would testify that, because you just feel like you’re drained of energy.
And as I’ve studied the subject of fasting over the years, again, I can’t find a Bible verse for this, but I certainly have observed this in people who have fasted for the first time. They say that when you fast your body says, “Oh, great. We’re not going to have to use up all this energy digesting food, so let’s go to work in fixing some things that need some repair, and let’s purge the body of some things that have accumulated within the fat cells that need to get out of here.”
Because we’re all kind of like waste dumps in a sense. All the stuff that comes into our bodies through the processed foods that we eat and through the air that we breathe. And so it’s a cleansing, purging thing, a very, very healthy thing for your body as toxins and other things are purged from your body.
Persevering Through the Side Effects of Fasting
So you get horrible breath. Of course, your bowels have stopped moving and you need to, of course, keep urinating because you’re going to keep on drinking. But that becomes more pure as time goes on. And for people who are fasting for the first time, that can be very, very rough because you’re breaking addictions to caffeine and so forth. You get headaches, and toxins are being released and so forth. So it can be very miserable for the first time fasting.
But here’s the encouragement. You keep on doing it on somewhat of a regular basis, once a week, once a month, whatever, and you find it gets easier each time. And you don’t have nearly the severity of rough symptoms that you did at first.
Okay? Here’s a little final tip. The harder it is for you to fast, it could be said the more important it is that you do fast. And as you practice it and it gets easier, you’re very likely to become a healthier person. All right?
All right, so that’s all for today’s Little Lesson. That’s all I’m going to say about fasting. If you want more information, we do have a little information here on this website. God bless.
