Tyler, The Wandering Therapist, is talking about the benefits of fasting in our lives. He’ll talk about how fasting from food, (intermittent fasting) will boost our physical health and mental health. He’ll also dive into the benefits of fasting from other things in our life, such as media, TV, and other distractions that will lead to a more healthy emotional life.
Let's talk about fasting.
What's going on you guys? Tyler here, The Wandering Therapist and today I want to talk with you a little bit about the benefits of fasting, but not maybe in the ways that you hear about it in other health shows. There's a lot to be said right now with topics like intermittent fasting or long-term fasting and what the benefits are to the body. And what we're finding is that it is a lot of benefits that go on for the physical body when we fast. We realize that there's something especially important when we fast called “autophagy” that happens.
What autophagy is, it’s where the body, when it doesn't have other fuel sources, it starts to use its own cells as fuel. It picks out the cells that are the weakest or that are broken or to the disease first and it consumes those cells first. So, in essence what happens is, the body has a natural way of pruning itself away from other things that might cause this disease.
So, what we're finding, in like physical fasting, is that if you fast for—after about 18 hours, autophagy starts, and that's where the body starts to cleanse itself of cells that would be predisposed to things like cancer.
I've been doing some intermittent fasting myself over the last several months. And I've also noticed some other benefits that have come in the ability to think clearly and have more energy in the way that I think, and also overall benefits to health in terms of the way that my body is starting to shape differently and also the way that I feel with my levels of energy.
It got me thinking about the benefits of fasting, maybe in other areas, and how it might relate to emotional health, and the same idea of autophagy, but have it being done emotionally rather than physically.
We look at the patterns that we have in our lives and one of the things that we find, in something like the food that we consume, is that most of us, especially here in the western world and in America, we really don't even understand or know what hunger is like because we always have something at the ready.
We hate the feeling of discomfort of hunger. We get “hangry.” And so, we constantly have something being plugged into our bodies, to the point that we have excess. And that excess is what actually causes us to become unhealthy, get diabetes, gain weight—all the things that we don't like about our physical health.
And I think that we also kind of follow those patterns, sometimes in the way that we live our lives, where everything else that we have in our lives—we try to consume until there's excess. There's something about pursuing that level of comfort that feels good to us, even though it's actually not always good for us.
So, the challenge today is to think about the things in your life that might be excessive, a little bit. And they might be so automatic that you don't realize that they are excessive until you pause and consider these things.
So, consider in your life the things that you do from day to day. How much media do you consume? How much television do you watch? How much social media do you consume? In my case, how much YouTube do I watch on a given day and is it actually yielding benefit for me at the level that I'm consuming it? I challenge you to take one of those things, and take 30-days and fast from one of those things, just for the sake of seeing how it changes your life.
Our family, a couple of times a year, we try to shut off all of our media for one month in our house. So, we turn off the TVs—there's no video games, anything like that. And every single time that that kind of month rolls around that we do that, there's a couple of things that happen.
One is that there's a lot of discomfort because it's a change in our patterns, but there's also something that happens every time that we do this for a month. I notice that there seems to be more peace in my house. There's a lot more engagement with my family members. We are way more prone to play games with each other, to sit and visit, to go for walks. We get outside a lot more. And the quality of our life after 30-days actually increases and feels better in many ways as a result of having fasted from that media for 30-days.
The funny thing is that it still has this power to want to pull us back and within the next week after we stop our fast, we go back to watching media. But I still think there's some benefit to that in there. I know that there has been in my life.
And my challenge to you, is to think about those things in your life that might produce some emotional benefit by taking a break for just an intentional period of time, for the sake of awareness, and for the sake of hitting the reset button.
So, good luck to you guys.
Thank you so much for being here with me. If you found this to be valuable for you, please hit the like and subscribe button. If you're facing particular struggles that you need help with or roadblocks that you're running into, please submit a question. I'd be happy to answer it for you.