2 Week Zen Diet
As before, this "Diet" is more of a guide in eating, exercise and fasting and not what to eat per-se. This regime will focus on a 2 Week Cycle vs the 7 Day Cycle. To give you a brief intro as to why I am trying this version of eating and fasting as opposed to the 7 Day Zen Diet, a few things come to mind.
To begin with, I am not an overweight individual. To the contrary, I don't have much to lose in the way of excess body fat. That being said, most everyone has fat somewhere on themselves. During the 7 Day Zen Diet, I focused on eating regular amounts of food Ad Libitum for the majority of the week. I chose the end of each week to do my fasting as it's easier to illustrate it that way. I think that is has numerous benefits for ones health. There are two ways to look at it. You could see it as extreme, as you are fasting for 42-44 hours every single week, or less extreme as the fast is no more than 2 days long. If it was an intermittent fasting regime, that wouldn't sound like much at all, however it is a consecutive fast.
The first 12-24 hours of fasting are used to complete digestion. During this time, your body may also begin to start autolysis. (more commonly known as self-digestion, refers to the destruction of a cell through the action of its own enzymes. It may also refer to the digestion of an enzyme by another molecule of the same enzyme. The term derives from the Greek words αυτό ("self") and λύσις ("splitting").
During the first 24 hours, your body may begin to consume muscle tissue and start to break down fats into ketone bodies. Initially, after your glycogen stores have been used up, 1-2 oz of muscle tissue may be consumed for glycogen. HOWEVER...The human body has a very protective memory if you will for this type of event. After it has used 1-2 oz of muscle tissue, it starts to catabolize more fat, leaning more on the use of ketones for energy and less on glucose. This is good for anyone fasting, as by the second day, muscle loss should be down to 1/2 - 1 oz. On the plus side, many beneficial things have begun to happen. Any damaged or old muscle tissues will be consumed allowing for new and healthier growth after the fast, and any toxins stored in your fatty tissues will start to be eliminated.
After the 24 hour digestion period, the detoxification process kicks into high gear. Water becomes very important at this stage, to dilute the toxins released into the blood stream via fat reserves being broken down. Fat is excellent at storing harmful toxins and chemicals. When the body breaks them down, they may enter the blood stream before they exit the body. Water consumption will lessen the negative side effects some may experience during this cleansing process.
Between 2-3 days of water fasting, the body begins to run in a mostly ketogenic state, where ketones or ketone bodies become the primary source of energy. Red blood cells and parts of the brain will still need glucose and they will get it by consuming anything they can. The good news though, is that foreign objects (Tumors, viruses ect.) are the first to go. The body doesn't recognise them as vital to life and these foreign object are consumed and converted into energy.
After 3 days, the fast should be broken. A regimen of eating and exercising with a mid 24 hours juice fast followed again by more unrestricted eating and exercising preludes the end of the 2 week fasting period. The fasting period is a 3 day long water fast, allowing for a longer digestive break and more repairs to internal and external organs.
Here is a brief study in which the 2 week eating with a short fast has been used successfully to extend the life of rodents. The rodents fasted for 4 days at the end of each cycle, where as my regimen allows for only a 3 day fast at the end and a 1 day juice fast mid may through the 2 week cycle.
Caloric restriction in rodents is well known to retard the rate of aging, increase mean and maximum life-spans, and inhibit the occurrence of many age-associated diseases. However, little is known about the influence of short-term repeated fasting on longevity. In this study, female (NZB x NZW)F1 mice were used to test the physiological effect of short-term repeated fasting (4 consecutive days, every 2 weeks). The results showed that fasting mice survived significantly longer than the full-fed mice, in spite of the fasting group having a heavier body weight than the control group. Mean survival times for fasting and control mice were 64.0+/-15.3 and 47.9+/-9.4 weeks, respectively. Short-term repeated fasting manipulation was also effective on the prolongation of life-span in autoimmune-prone mice.
http://www.anti-aging-guide.com/31mousestudies.php
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