Plateaus in Fasting

Fasting WARNING: Once you start fasting, you have to do it forever.

That is true and at the same time not exactly true. What most people think of as a plateau really isn’t.

When they’re doing a proactive health program to benefit their health and they include fasting, the real benefits of the fast will come in time as they continue to practice.

What happens during that time is your body gets dramatically more efficient. That’s the whole point.

Weight loss, in the beginning, is the weight that must come off to heal.

That early fat that is released is dangerous.

It’s fat from around your organs and from inside your organs such as your liver fat and pancreas fat.

It’s also a toxic weight that your body holds onto to protect itself when it doesn’t have a mechanism to release it.

Water is involved in this process, and a person’s regular hydration status plays a big role in their ability to detoxify and eventually lose weight.

Water gets into tissue areas that aren’t supposed to have water when you are healthy.

It’s often due to extra fluid retention resulting from chemicals that the body is sequestering to protect itself.

Either way, that weight will always come off first.

That’s how people can lose numbers on the scale that don’t add up and appear to be larger than what you would expect from reducing calories even from fasting.

The more of that you have to lose, the more you will lose, and the more the scale changes in the beginning.

But the rate of fat burning as far as body fat from adipose tissue is concerned is the same.

Weight loss slows down and then stays pretty constant over time. As you get more metabolically fit and flexible, you will continue to burn that fat, but the body will shift into more of a constructive fat burning as the energy production, yield, and utility efficiency increase.

To continue to get the bigger results from fasting, you will need to “do more” to get the same type of results you got before, period.

It’s like working out.

When you start working out after a long time of not doing so, it’s going to be difficult.

It’s going to have a major impact on you.

You will get sore.

You will get stiff.

You will feel that you have worked out and you will get winded easier.

All of these things are normal reactions to starting a workout program. After six months of working out regularly, you won’t get that same effect.

That hard workout that you felt for days in the 6 month period will now feel like a warmup.

At that point, you will have to do a different workout that is harder or more intense or longer or something different than you did before if you want to continue with your progress, period.

The same concept applies to fasting.

You will have to do more to keep your body challenged and adapting at the same level as before.

That’s not a plateau.

That is a healthy response and a process that everyone must go through, period.

There are ways to enhance that process with what I call lifestyle magnifiers and ways to make sure that process is smooth and will continue producing ongoing results.

Don’t expect to get the same type of changes as you continue to fast as you did from when you started your first few months.

It isn’t a plateau, it isn’t a problem, and fasting is still working, but is just at times at times working on a higher priority scale than ours. This is a very good thing and the whole reason we fast.

I hope that helps.

Let me know if I can help frame it or help you set up a program for yourself, or for example walk you through an ongoing program over the next year.

We can do better!