Fasting While Feasting: Harness The Healing Power of Fasting

It's not a Crime to Feast while you are Fasting

Know the technique on how to Fasting While Feasting and upscale your diet plans…

It’s interesting what happens when healthcare practitioners or practitioners “to be” face their own health challenges.  

Many already in the field, such as my good friend and mentor Terry Wahls, find themselves alone and pushed beyond the limits of conventional medicine in order to figure out how to save their own life.    

Being a student of allopathic medicine and its standard education, the challenge took Dr. Wahls into another realm of possibilities she had been completely unaware of.

In other cases, the power of the experience itself motivates a person to become a practitioner.

I’m in the latter group.

At the age of 27 I was a bit of a mess.  I grew up eating a diet filled with highly processed foods and an overabundance of sugar with an occasional dose of mixed vegetables (usually from a can). Add to that the typical lifestyle of a college student followed by the stress of a career in the tech industry and you have a recipe for disaster. 

I had continuous brain fog, excruciating headaches, and my sinuses were constantly clogged with God only knows what. Low energy and fatigue were a constant companion along with fiery stomach aches that followed every meal.  

Despite multiple failed attempts to find help through the typical options offered by conventional medicine, my health was continuing to go downhill – fast. 

So what’s a girl to do? You go get your tires rotated.    

Life can change in an instant.

Yes, my life was changed while getting my tires rotated, which I will get to, but my point is, life goes on.

Millions of people drag themselves through each day, chronically “NOT FEELING GOOD” and it seems this is becoming more and more accepted as the natural state of things.

Well, I DON’T accept that. You shouldn’t either.

So I’m in the waiting area of an automotive shop while my tires are being rotated, my head buried in yet another book on self-care (hard to find pre-internet in the mid-eighties), when a gentleman notices what I’m reading and asks me about my health issues.

We start a casual conversation and I explain to him what I’ve been dealing with and he tells me I should fast.  It just so happened I had just finished a 5-day water fast, but all my symptoms returned as soon as I started eating again.  

He told me I needed to fast longer, handed me a card from a nearby fasting retreat, and suggested I read the book, “Fasting Can Save Your Life.”  By the time I looked up from examining the card he had handed me,  he was gone. Just like that.

My entire life got rotated that day, not just my tires. That conversation with a complete stranger, whom I now refer to as “the angel who saved my life,” planted the seed that would grow into a future I never imagined.

Shortly thereafter I found myself at a fasting center where I began a supervised 28-day water fast.  

My food became every tape, magazine and book available to me at the center. And when the feast was over I had not only regained my health, but I’d decided to quit my job and go back to school to become a doctor. I wanted a new career where I could share my newly found passion for wellness, motivated by the knowledge I could empower people to take their health back into their own hands.

The power of fasting.

The topic of fasting is hard to avoid these days and with good reason. With chronic health conditions at epidemic levels, calorie restriction is one of the few, research-backed nutritional interventions that has the potential to increase life span at the same time it increases health span.   

Practitioners in the field of functional healthcare and alternative medicine know there are countless ways in which diet and lifestyle can do this, but conventional medicine’s stubborn need to hold onto reductionist research methods as the holy grail will continue to hold back these findings.

In the meantime, fasting provides some welcomed common ground.

Research has shown that fasting can lead to:

• Lowered insulin and glucose, and increased insulin sensitivity
• Decreased inflammation
• Stimulation of autophagy – where your body eats up damaged cells
• Improved blood pressure, triglycerides and cholesterol
• Improved brain function
• Reversal of the effects of aging
• Increased butyrate, carnitine and branched-chain amino acids
• Enhanced gene expression and protein synthesis
• Improved antioxidant defense
• And MUCH more!

The best of both worlds.

Given its documented benefits and what it did for me personally, for years I’ve encouraged clients to incorporate fasting into their health routines whenever appropriate, but most struggle with just the idea of not eating. It’s clearly the most difficult aspect for the majority of people who consider fasting.

A possible answer to this came from research conducted by Dr. Valter Longo and his team at USC.  For over 20 years they explored the idea of a fasting mimicking diet (FMD) in which a person gets the benefits of a water fast while still eating.

In 2017 they conducted a clinical trial with 100 healthy people.  Half followed a FMD that consisted of high-quality foods that provided specific ratios of macronutrients, micronutrients and calories.  They were asked to follow the FMD  5 days per month for 3 months. The other half ate their usual diet.

For those that followed the FMD, the results were pretty impressive.  Benefits included:

• Weight and belly fat loss
• Normalization of blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol
• Decreased markers of inflammation
• Decrease in insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), a marker for cancer
• Increase in stem cell production, a marker for regeneration of cells

The results prompted Dr. Longo to create his own FMD which includes a kit you use for 5 days consisting of soup mixes, bars, and other packaged food. Although convenient, it’s relatively expensive and uses ingredients I encourage clients to avoid.

I believed there had to be a way to do this that incorporated my core belief in the inherent value of real, fresh, whole, plant-based foods. 

There is.

I call it Fasting While Feasting.

Fasting While Feasting

Early each year I guide those interested clients and students through the FMD I developed which I call Fasting While Feasting. The results have been nothing short of spectacular.

It involves a very doable 5-day challenge which I personally guide. Participants meet daily to check-in and discuss their experience while following a menu I created which is focused on providing maximum nutrition in the fewest calories. Some people see dramatic results in a few days while others don’t experience serious benefits until they have followed the plan once a month for a few months.

Either way, it bypasses the fear associated with fasting and leads people to proven results that support their best health. Many who have struggled with chronic conditions for years feel  vibrant by the end and can finally see light at the end of the tunnel.  They finally see a real path to wellness and the possibility of living the life they were meant to live.

Hope can be the best medicine.

Sometimes the greatest challenge I have as a functional healthcare practitioner is reawakening the sense of possibility in clients who have struggled for years within the allopathic medical system.  They come to me sick, tired, negative and skeptical; as a last resort they’ve decided to give this “woo woo” stuff a shot.

It’s not the easiest place for a practitioner to be, but I know I have something to offer they haven’t found anywhere else; real healthcare that produces lasting results by addressing the root cause of chronic health conditions. 

I want to empower my clients to take their health back into their own hands, not perpetuate their ongoing feelings of frustration and helplessness. When I do, it doesn’t take long for glimmers of hope to start shining through.

And just as I appreciated Dr. Longo’s work, but knew there had to be a better way that lined up with my beliefs, so I feel about the broken healthcare system.  I knew from personal experience there was a better way, so I built the Nutritional Endocrinology Practitioners Training (NEPT) program. 

I was confident that if I provided other practitioners with the curriculum and support they needed to expand their practice to include root-cause healthcare, they too would see there is a better way,  reflected in their clients’ outcomes.

Now my students give ME hope that change is possible.

You don’t have to get your tires rotated to find the angel that could change your life.  I work with them every day. 

In fact, maybe YOU’RE someone’s angel. I know of a great way to find out. 

Check us out at www.INEMethod.com