A lot of people think fasting is not a good idea, and it makes you weak. However, fasting can be a better option for a healthy gut if done correctly. Who do you think works on your mood swings and protects your internal system? Well. It is your gut bacteria. The gut bacteria play a crucial role when it comes to protecting the immune system. It also helps regulate mood and collect all the essential nutrients from food to provide it to your body. Fasting is a two-way activity for better health. It helps to boost the power of gut bacteria, which eventually makes a better immune system. The power combination of fasting and gut bacteria makes you stay healthy and fit.
Before we jump into the benefits of fasting for a healthier gut, it will help us understand the gut and how it works. Our intestine is the home to trillions of microorganisms. These microorganisms break the food we take and make nutrients like vitamin k, b vitamins, etc. According to several types of research, these microorganisms create some compounds. Those compounds are vital for preventing diseases and helping muscles to function. Suzanne Devkota said: we rely on the gut bugs, and they are essential for us to live. These gut bugs play a massive role in sending signals between our body and digestive system.
Firstly studies said that it’s essential to have a healthy food intake for keeping the balance of good gut bugs. However, new research on the body says that it takes more than healthy eating to balancing gut bacteria. Sometimes not eating affects the microbiome more than the times you eat.
Here is how fasting can help you make a better impact on your delicate microorganisms.
Intermittent fasting and the details
Before we talk in more depth about fasting, let us understand one thing clearly, women should not try any kind of fasting during pregnancy. Not only pregnancy but also women who have a history with an eating disorder or who breastfeed their baby should not try fasting, no matter which form.
Timing is an essential part of fasting. If you want to start your journey towards a healthy gut with fasting, you need to understand the terms of fasting and make a proper schedule. The best part of intermittent fasting is that one can do it in various schedules. If you choose to try the weekly fasting, you will have to put restrictions on your food for two to three days non-consecutively. If not weekly, then there is another way you can fast daily. If fasting means not eating at all for a day, then you might not want to keep this way in the fasting category. It will be better to say that it is time-restricted feeding.
To be more exact, in this fasting process, you restrict your mealtimes. You schedule some particular hours when you can eat, and for the rest of the hours, you won’t eat anything. Be it the weekly fasting or the hour restricted one, there are several benefits of trying these. If you struggle to lose weight, you will lose weight due to fasting, but the best part is that it won’t make you weak. Intermittent fasting helps you to improve your metabolism. It also helps to reduce the chances of cancer and diabetes. A lot of us think that eating healthy food makes your body, internal systems more responsive. However, it is not. The truth is the opposite of this; your gut bacteria responses more during the absence of food. The lack of food makes the microbiome shift in composition.
Akkermansia muciniphila helps to make our health, and its rapid expansion helps to decrease intestinal inflammation. According to Dr Amir Zarrinpar, an assistant professor of gastroenterology at the University of California San Diego Medicine School. The microbiome has a unique circadian rhythm in studies with animals, and it resolves around various populations. He also explained the cycle in humans, that there are several sets of bacteria. When we sleep, we can’t eat, and there’s still one set of bacteria that thrives. However, when we wake up and eat, the rest of the sets bloom. It is a 24 hours normal schedule, but the very time we consume unhealthy food or go off from our daily eating schedule, it gets away. No worries, as you can help reinforce those fluctuations with time-restricted fasting.
Fast on sleep
When we talk about the 24 hours fasting cycle, it can help do a 14:10 or 16:08 breakdown, and you can continue the fasting with your usual sleep cycle. To understand the cycle work, it will help if we go into depth. We function based on our hormones, and there are specific hormones that affect us more at a particular time. For example, insulin works best in the morning, mid-day, evening, and over the night. Now, if you didn’t know already, let us tell you that higher level hormones such as melatonin shows interference with insulin. If your last meal is dinner and you eat the next morning directly, it will help your insulin work well, but if you snack in between dinner and breakfast, the insulin secretion might not be that effective.
Maintaining a good gap between your dinner and breakfast can help you decrease the risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, etc. Let us tell you how. Insulin is the source that shuttles the sugar from the blood to your cells. Repetitive dampen of the sugaring procedure can lead to the dangerous diseases mentioned above.
Conclusion
There are several eating patterns when it comes to trying some kind of fasting. If you can’t go most of the day without eating or can’t go an entire day without food, it will help if you try time-restricted fasting. Fasting enables you to balance good and bad gut bugs that allow you to live a fitter life.
