I have recently completed my first 3 day fast.

I have been introduced to fasting during my month of “clean eating” that I did with a nutritionist’s help. The reason I signed up to it was that I alone could not find the self-discipline to control my eating and I was getting heavier than ever. And what is worse, the health effects were getting serious: my body was getting stiffer and sorer by the day; my blood sugar all over the place; the mind fog and the memory loss was getting worrying… and a lot of other small things that told me I’m heading towards some sort of self-destruction.

Being accountable really helped: I straight away snapped into it and stuck with my diet plan religiously. The diet consisted mainly of meat, slow release vegetables (squash and courgettes, nothing starchy), a ridiculous amount of green leaves and avocados, plus bagful of limes. My snacks were hummus with celery and nuts. There was no dairy, no floury food; fruit smoothie only once a week, zero sugar, and the emphasis was on quality ingredients and fully homemade meals to avoid all additives.

By the second week my body was in ketosis and the weight was dropping off me. I ate less and less as my meals were so nutritious that I didn’t need much. I have learned a lot about cravings. And then a day came when I was working away from home all day and had nothing to take with me – that was the first 24h fast I have done unintentionally. I was shocked to realise that I did not get hungry once during that full day: we are taught a lot of untrue facts that support consumerism, and I always thought that not eating for a period is bad for me.

So a few months later I have done my first 3 day fast. I have read up on it properly (Jason Fung is a popular source), and to make the commitment serious, I have documented it on Facebook – it really helps to be accountable. So here is a link to my fb page where the video is uploaded: https://www.facebook.com/pg/Newtownards1/videos/?ref=page_internal

What have I achieved during the fast? Well, I suddenly had a lot of free time and saved a ton of money! My system got a rest and it rewrote a lot of damaging “programmes” I have been running in my head. The bad cravings that were damaging me went away and my real cravings where my body signals its actual needs were audible to me for the first time in my life: I craved broccoli with butter! For weeks I managed to stay with clean eating as planned. I felt more myself, stronger, cleaner. And a lot of popular myths got debunked for me too.

Fasting seems to be becoming the next big thing at the moment, but then fasting has been a natural part of human life for thousands of years.

The proven benefits are as follows: weight loss, promoting longevity, detoxification, improving or restarting your entire immune system, improving insulin sensitivity (used in many places now to heal diabetes) and the list goes on. It is good for your heart, your skin, your blood sugar levels, for acute pain, even may help prevent cancer.

The reason I feel especially strongly about it is that I have experienced what 4 weeks of clean eating with intermittent fasting can do for my body. The dairy free has gotten rid of my mild asthma completely. Aches I had for years disappeared into nothingness. So when I work on a client who has acute pain that no practitioner has been able to shift for long, I always feel that while massages are great to give relief, a diet change is what could help best to recover permanently. For so many conditions, we have the power to heal ourselves completely: we just need to get real about what we put into or bodies.