Alright, so It's not ACTUALLY a diet. It's more of a way of life. At this point in time, I won't cover any of the nutritional aspects of it in any depth. It's simply an experiment with weekly fasting. I will post how I am feeling and if I have lost or gained any weight throughout the 2 week test. Over time, I will divulge more of my eating habits and eventually create a nice readable version for everyone. Until then, the 7 Day Zen Diet is more of an overall guideline delineating possible eating, sleeping, fasting and exercise times. Again, this is fairly non-specific and has plenty of room for modifications and dietary habits. The purpose of this "Diet", man I really hate that word...Is to create a set period throughout the week to fully rest the digestive tract and internal organs, while forcing them to work at cleaning and healing themselves. I will discuss this process in more detail in another article.
Note: The following experiment will be done for a period of 2 weeks or more. I am currently and have been doing a slightly modified version of this lifestyle, with the fasting period consisting of 24 hours water only, some juice or a small fruit before bed followed by another 12 hours of fasting (36 hours total). This experiment will extend the post 24 hour fast from 36 to 42-44 hours.
Key Points
-It has to be fairly simple to do
-There has to be concrete evidence that some or most of the following things show evidence to increase ones health and or increase ones longevity.
-It has to be repeatable and organized in such a fashion that someone could realistically follow it using the common 7 day week format, vs. a program that uses say a 9 or 12 day cycle. This is why 7 days were chosen for this experiment.
You may wonder why this program doesn't stop the fasting portion at the end of the 24 hour period. The idea behind extending it to 36-44 hours is fairly simple. To begin with, the first 24 hours is when your body depletes your glycogen stores and begins the process of burning fatty acids for its continuous energy needs. It gets this energy by burning fat in your tissues and accumulated areas around the organs.
As a reminder, the majority of the body actually prefers ketones for their primary energy source (Ketone bodies are created through the breakdown of fatty acids in the body). However, the brain and your red blood cells still require glucose. When the liver and muscles are depleted, your body looks elsewhere. Small portions of muscle become broken down so the body can convert the amino acids into usable glucose and glycerol from fat tissues in the body.
As you can see from this, if you eat carbohydrates during the week, a 24 hour fast may not be overly beneficial for you as your body will be used to having access to glucose and ending a fast at 24 hours has done little in the way of detoxing the body. That's not to say it hasn't done anything, but rather it has just begun to enter it's overhaul mode when you shut it off by breaking the fast. By allowing the fast to go into the second and third day, your body begins muscle sparing to prevent excess breakdown of tissue and instead begins to efficiently break down fat into ketones, where you will begin to enter ketosis. Ketosis has a number of benefits I will discuss at a later time, but for those of you who may be overweight, ketosis is an excellent state to be in.
As I mentioned earlier, you body has started to burn fat for fuel now somewhere around the 24 hour marker. By allowing your body to go another day or half a day, you can begin to see the detoxing effects. Fat is excellent at storing toxins and as the fat gets broken down, these toxins are released. They may exit through the skin, the tongue, the bowels or urinary tract or just about anywhere. Drinking plenty of water will help to dull some of these effects. The sicker your body is, the more and stronger side effects will be seen. During an extended or complete fast, an individual abstains from food until the tongue has turned completely pink again and a sweet taste has entered the mouth. At this point, saliva will build up signaling a strong urge to eat and stop the fast. This may happen in only a few day and upwards of 40+ day depending on your body fat and body toxicity. Doing regular short fasts will prevent the need to purge with 30-40 day long fasts as the body will be working at regular intervals to perform cleanses and rest the internal organs.
So the reason we don't fast for only a 24 hour period is that no studies have proven any anti-aging effects from doing so. That's not to say that a 24 hour fast isn't beneficial, as it has numerous benefits. Its to say that the body has simply finished digestion, and only begun to start burning ketones and cleaning the body, which makes stopping at 24 hours more work in the long run that occasionally allowing the body to fast for 2-3 days consecutively. One popular method for extending life that does use a 24-36 hour fast is intermittent fasting, however the major life extending effects of this diet only appear through CR (Calorie Restriction). As CR has been proven over and over to extend the life of numerous animals as well as worms and flies. Through fasting, a worms life was extended to the equivalent of a human living to be 600-700 years old. Although we are not worms and fasting wont make you live that long, the study does show tremendous results through CR and periodic fasting.
As you will see in the 2 Week Zen Diet, a 24 hour fast is included in the regimen, however its not a dry or water fast, but instead allows for fresh juices. This prevents the body from consuming muscle (One method for bodybuilder who are not using the Ketogenic Diet or Anabolic Diet), which means you love your carbs. The fresh juices on the fasting day if you are using the previous methods mentioned for bodybuilding on a low carb diet with periodic carb up phases, the juice fasting day can include simple sugar fruit juices for an additional carb up day, or can remain as low sugar vegetable juices allowing for ketoses if you have allowed your body to function optimally.
So Let look at a few reasons why the 7 Day Zen Diet might be a good starting point for anyone looking to lose weight, increase growth hormone, have a cleaner and healthier system and feel better.
This 7 day plan allows for a 24 hour period of no food which increases HGH in the body. HGH is a protein based peptide-hormone. It's known for it's function is cell regeneration, reproduction and general growth. Bodybuilders should be familiar with this one! Some people buy HGH as a synthetic drug to help with deficiencies and child growth abnormalities. To get it however, you need a prescription from a doctor and can only purchase it from a pharmacy.
The benefits of HGH are many and knowing how to create it for FREE is something I would think might be worthwhile for just about anyone past adolescent development stage. By this I mean, I wouldn't recommend fasting for children and they are still growing. Its once the growing stages have stopped, that fasting benefits as really noticed. The more often you fast (Short Fasts) the better able the body is to recognize the situation and increase HGH production and get to work consuming old, dead or diseased cells and quickly rebuilding new ones. The reason we live longer than animals in general is because we have an excellent regenerative system that takes cells and remakes them continually. Mice are great study subjects as they don't have such a great system for this. That's why when we see a mice live exponentially longer than its counterparts due to continuous short fasting, we know that this generality of aging increase can easily be transcribed to the human animal. If we were testing a particular vitamin and its effect on a mouse, the translation to humans wouldn't be so good. Something like fasting and life extension however, can and has been translated.
Back to HGH. Since the 1970's, it has been circulating the bodybuilding arena as an anabolic means of muscle production for professional competition. It couldn't be banned until early in 2000, when small traces could finally show up on a test. These athletes paid top dollar for this stuff. They also thought you had to eat all day every day to retain and build muscle. Funny thing is, that by fasting, you continually get rid of old and damaged cells and stop them from reproducing. At the same time, your body is able to build new and healthier ones much quicker. You also retain more muscle when you stop eating, as your body learns to burn fat instead.
For those of you that are overweight, how does dieting just 2 days a week sound. That's all this is really. Sure your suppose to eat healthy all week, but we know not everyone does. Fasting for two days a week could help protect you from the crap you eat and may even help nudge you into eating healthier, at least post fast. Your body will be craving healthier foods for the vitamin and mineral content after a fast and your head will be a bit clearer to boot.
VLCD represents an extremely efficient and safe therapeutic procedure which, apart from body mass loss, is characterized by favourable changes in metabolism of lipids and a decrease in hyperinsulinism, which eventually results in reduction of the risk from early and accelerated atherosclerosis.
Cravings did not increase during either diet; all changes represented decreases. Compared with a primarily food-based diet (LCD), a more restrictive supplement-based diet (VLCD) resulted in significantly larger decreases in food cravings that occurred by the end of the 5th week of supplement use and did not rebound with resumption of solid food intake. The results of this study suggest that food cravings diminish with calorie restriction.
The course of fasting therapy consisting of a 2-week fasting period and the recovery period of the same duration resulted in a statistically significant reduction of weight, a decrease of average daily systolic and diastolic AP, lowering of the hyperbaric index of diastolic AP and improvement of the diastolic reserve of the left ventricle. 24-h AP monitoring and stress echocardiography within 3 months showed a high clinical effectiveness of fasting therapy.
This weight loss programme with a VLCD enabled obese subjects to lose weight and decrease cardiovascular risks. Despite some regain in weight during follow-up, the beneficial effects were overall maintained over the year. Sodium intake tended to increase during follow-up. Information on sodium restriction should be included in weight loss programmes.
the short term use of a VLCD is very effective in rapidly improving glycaemic control and promoting substantial weight loss in obese NIDDM patients. Moreover, a VLCD diet increases insulin secretion and reduces substrate for gluconeogenesis. Thus, VLCD treatment may improve glycaemic control by factors more than caloric restriction alone.
http://antiaging-europe.com/lists/29/diseases.html
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