The body plays the long game, and it will change and prepare for future changes in any health, fitness, or wellness efforts we apply to it.

Exercise’s health, strength, and healing potential don’t come from each day’s exercise session and recovery.

Yes, each day’s effort to push ourselves is needed. Still, the magic that exercise can bring comes from the synergistic, compounding systemic effect that builds over time with consistency and ongoing physical challenge.

When someone wants to get healthy or in shape, we know it takes regular exercise over a long period, if not a lifetime, to achieve our goals.

No one says, “To get in shape, you need 25 exercise sessions.” 

The same logic and process holds with fasting.

Each extended fast we do will change our bodies, making us different each time we start the next one.

Just as the same workout will get easier the longer we apply it. Extended fasts will build on our past fasting efforts and become more comfortable.

The body’s recycling, repair, and healing systems will get stronger and essentially pick up where they left off between one fast and the next, magnifying the benefits as fasting gets easier. Talk about a win-win.

As we get stronger in workouts, we need to increase the intensity, lift heavier weights, or extend the workout sessions to continue challenging ourselves if we want to keep seeing benefits.

As fasting gets more manageable, we must find ways to challenge ourselves and become more efficient recyclers, detoxifiers, and proficient healers.

If we are just getting started, we can change our experience with fasting by changing how we prep and plan before a fast and how we eat and live between each fast.

As we continue to rotate through different kinds, lengths, and models of fasting over time, we can add days to the length of the fast, change how we support ourselves through it, and decrease the time between fasts.

Another way to up your fasting game and keep challenging yourself is to pair your fasts with another well-being concept, as we did in our 30-Day Challenge, where we included resilience work, practices, and lessons to do each day.

When added to a fasting calendar, meditation, breath work, goal setting, mindfulness practices, grounding, writing or journaling, sauna work, yoga, or any combination of these will magnify the experience in many ways.

Find ways to intentionally make yourself push your comfort zone, and growth, learning, and healing will inevitably result.

We can do better!

Dr. Don