The healthy way to do intermittent fasting

The healthy approach to intermittent fasting is to get your day sorted, not your diet. Intermittent fasting is the new health craze. There’s the 16:8 diet (fast for 16 hours and eat within an eight-hour window); the 5:2 diet (cut back on calories two days a week) and all kinds of other versions up to regular 24-hour or 48-hour fasts. All of these impact negatively on your organs, and as organ health is the basis of health, its not necessarily a good idea. Your organs are running on a system perfected over millennia and connected to cycles of yin and yang, and seasons and the forces of nature. Your organs choose the natural 12:12 intermittent fasting that comes from following the daily 24 hour chi-cycle because that builds energy, instigates weight-loss, improves sleep, improves productivity and boosts overall health.

The origins of fasting

The origins of fasting are spiritual, and the idea is that you draw upon your discipline and training in chi-practice or breath or other spiritual techniques) to enable something else (chi / prana) to nourish your body / organs. But in the context of our contemporary lifestyle, fasting without training and technique can deplete the yin. This generates more symptoms including emotional reactivity, impulsiveness, feeling frustrated, aggro and miserable, and food intolerances increase. Most people are deficient, they may eat lots but this doesn’t mean they have core energy. Fasting on top of deficiency can put more serious symptoms into play.

Dieting isn’t healthy

Diet isn’t health, and food isn’t ‘medicine’, neither is intermittent fasting. So suddenly turning vegan or keto, going on the next juice craze (cucumber up next) or not eating at certain times doesn’t automatically mean health, because it doesn’t get to the root. People feel toxic, ‘off’, exhausted, stressed-out, bloated and heavy after eating, and react badly to more and more foods, and of course it’s natural to try to change that by diets and fasting because you feel it in the gut area, but the cause is stagnant chi and that comes from how we live, not just from what we eat.

The real medicinal foods

Instead of doing drastic diets or fasts which can create even more spin-off symptoms, add the real medicinal foods, the Chinese herbal formulas, to your diet (organs love this and start reversing symptoms). And get the first 2 hours of your morning right because your organs love this too, and it naturally mimics the fasting state and kicks off weight-loss every morning. The trick to health (which comes from eliminating symptoms) is to get your day sorted, not your diet. Don’t worry about food,

Get up early around 5.30am, have nothing but water for the first two hours, exercise then eat breakfast (the most critical meal of the day – never ever skip this) around 7.30 – 8am. Then follow the rest of the chi-cycle daily routine and you’ll be finishing your evening meal around 8.30pm. A lovely, natural 12 hour fast follows, and the organs that work on rejuvenation, restoration and repair at night-time (including gallbladder and liver) can do their job properly. Your metabolic rate and all bodily functions improve if you sleep. So you’ll get everything you want from intermittent fasting (increased metabolic rate, energy, vitality etc) but in a sustainable natural way. Health is already within us, we just need to activate it.