The Intermittent Part of Fasting and Exercise Is Vital
The Intermittent Part of Fasting and Exercise Is Vital
Today we’re going to talk about this word intermittent. We’re going to talk about intermittent fasting and the big mistake that people make as well as intermittent exercise, and how that relates to your overall health. A healthy body has really good circadian rhythms. Those are natural waves of rhythm and i’m talking about sleep cycles eating cycles rhythms of digestion rhythms of hormones which follow certain type of wave patterns.
Stress or growth hormone cortisol – anything that we do of a sustained nature adds more stress to the body. Let’s take eating for example, one of the most important things that intermittent fasting will do is it corrects your digestion. Our body was not designed to be consuming on a sustained basis. Our body’s not designed to snack in between every single meal. Why? Because you stimulate insulin over and over and over and we know what happens with that, we get this insulin resistance situation, then we get a pre-diabetes and then we get diabetes.
What is diabetes, it’s an uncontrolled blood sugar so your blood sugar is too high because your insulin is all messed up and why did that happen, because you created a sustained stimulation of your insulin. One of the most important things to do is don’t eat anything when you are fasting, and also allow your body too fast a certain part of the day. What i see is happening for a lot of people is they’re doing a little bit of snack between their meals here and there and that actually kind of ruins the great benefit of fasting. When you’re fasting you don’t want to eat anything you can drink some water but ideally stay true to the definition of fasting, which basically you’re not eating anything so what’s going to happen is you’re going to get a lot more benefits to that because sometimes people become lax and really they’re they think they’re doing fasting but they’re doing a little snack.
The Intermittent Part of Fasting and Exercise Is Vital
They say well it’s not carbs it’s just a little protein right well protein will activate insulin so we want to practice in a minute of fasting and definitely want to get rid of that breakfast there and maybe do two meals a day and then maybe do one, but then do a true fast. Now i do recommend taking supplements during that period of time but supplements don’t really have many calories we’re just doing b vitamins, electrolytes, things like that.
Now let’s shift to exercise. Let’s take a look at high intensity interval training, which is intermittent so you’re going to do this high intensity you’re not going to do it sustained, you’re going to do it intermittently. So what is the benefit of this? Well you’re going to stimulate growth hormone why is this so beneficial because when you do it intermittently you do not over stimulate the opposing hormone which is cortisol so we keep the stress down but we activate the growth hormone. Growth hormone is stimulated by the entire intensity, but cortisol is stimulated by the duration a long duration of exercise. So it’s very stressful in your body is like a marathon because it’s sustained at a pretty good pace you have to have very good adrenals to do marathons or triathlons. What happens when you’re doing a high intensity interval training cycle is you’re activating something called the sympathetic nervous system.
The Intermittent Part of Fasting and Exercise Is Vital
We’re stimulating the pulse rate muscle activation and then there’s going to be a point where you’re going to stop right? When you hit a certain duration and a certain intensity and you want to keep this fairly short. As soon as you stop this exercise the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the opposing part of the nervous system kicks in and becomes active, and this system is an active push down wave that is going to push down your pulse rate and calm you down. It’s not passive, it’s active, it’s the same system that is helping you sleep at night. When this system is broken then the system takes over and everything is like high level pulse rate, nervous, can’t relax can’t sleep, why? Because of a sustained stimulation of this stress. When you do high intensity interval training it’s vitally important to be at a complete stop, until you fully recover.
You don’t want to get your pulse rate really high and then jog in place. No! You want to actually just sit down let your pulse rate come down to a good place and then you can start back up. So number two, you want to stop exercise at some point after the activation and really allow your body to recover. This is what’s missing in most people, is a recovery and this is why the interval training is vitally important.
Now you can also apply this to other things as well because if you’re consuming caffeine all day and you’re stimulating and stimulating, you’re going to not allow your body to calm down, you’re eventually going to be tired and require more stimulants so that will just burn you out and affect your ability to sleep which is key with recovery.
Same thing with mental stress. If you’re actively in stress all day long and you try to go to sleep it’s not going to work. So you want a period of downtime, you want to go for a long walk you want to get out in nature. During the downtime when you’re relaxing you want to get off your cell phone. I see so many people when they’re trying to relax they’re on their cell phone, well this is like stimulation stimulation.
The Intermittent Part of Fasting and Exercise Is Vital
The other thing is that you don’t want to go for a long walk and be solving problems because you’re going to activate the adrenal cortisol adrenaline. People actually think that they’re not productive because they’re not solving problems, so they have to be thinking so much. I think it’s going to be a lot more beneficial when you walk and just get your space and oxygen and relax just for 30 to 60 minutes a day.
Also in your house you have these artificial lights. The screen in front of your computer you want to get more sunlight to balance out this artificial light that you’ve been exposed to.
