Today, I wanted to let you in on my intermittent fasting journey (and provide an Intermittent Fasting Guide) as that may help yours if you’ve begun, or maybe you’re curious what it’s ALL ABOUT.
If either sounds like YOU, I created a FREE Intermittent Fasting Guide with you in mind that you can download. It’s called The Start and Sustain Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle Guide… and it also comes in handy when you start IF and then take a short break.
That’s exactly what I did in 2023 during the holiday season, and then realized what I was missing from the benefits I saw on and in my body earlier in the year. I took a quick selfie for comparison…
…Um, that’s a bit of skin showing there! 👙 Oh and believe me, I’m not someone who bares all skin in case you’re wondering why this photo doesn’t fit along with my food and other healthy lifestyle inspo ones.
But the photo really does hone in on my gut ab area (as deep as I can show) and is the healthy reason why I started intermittent fasting in the first place.
I was feeling discomfort in my gut in the upper stomach area where the esophagus meets the stomach (aka the lower esophageal sphincter).
Despite doing all the healthy tips regularly like sourdough, veggie fiber, and ACV, I could feel a dull feeling in the stomach gut area when the optimal feeling is no nagging ache (or even better, feel nothing in those areas). An uneventful inside body feeling day is a good day.
You’ve probably felt similar if you ever experienced heartburn, GERD or acid reflux. Last summer’s heat didn’t help either (hottest recorded in history). That kicks up the Pitta. And, not the kind of fire-in-the-belly you want! 🔥
Even though my stomach case was mild, it’s probably what most people feel who experience heartburn in daily busy and stressful work lives. 🙋🏻♀️
And as someone who once-upon-a-time lived a stressful corporate work life (and works on feeling good and better all the time), I don’t believe you should suffer more than a minute necessary. So, I had to figure it out!… I couldn’t just let it slide. And maybe that’s how you are too in your health areas…
But, lemme backup just a minute so you have some background info…
I started cooking and baking virtually all my meals after the pandemic. So, I knew which ingredients were put into each healthy dish or snack (that I ate 90% of the time). I often show some of the celebrational weekly meal tables, healthy bakes, and dishes weekly here in my blog articles.
…That comes from the side of me that worked a decade in catering party planning, where food is love.
But most my eating ways were healthy (…with a lot less sugar for this former refined sugar addict!). And I was intentionally feeding healthy foods to help a happy gut as that’s where most of the happy hormones (serotonin) are produced.
But I could still feel the gut discomforts even though everything else was running smoothly. And after researching, listening to health interviews, and putting it all together… I came to the conclusion that it’s not the type of food that’s the problem, it’s the food itself.
Every food ingredient on the planet seems to be in question in some way these days. The only purer ones are the whole ones. And where there are edible food skin nutrients, that’s where the invisible poisons are too.
Even with good intentions to eat more healthy, our daily healthy foods are tainted.
The year prior, I was writing articles for wellness national publications on health and the Blue Zones, the oldest groups of people alive on the planet to date. So I was researching daily and comparing their food and healthy lifestyle ways with my own.
And I realized their B.Z. cheese is not our cheese process, and their bread is not our bread. Starting at the flour.
What we source and bring back home from grocery stores is processed, stripping out the gut valuable nutrients.
…So even with healthy and anti-inflammatory eating intentions, disappointingly we’re still off-setting so much food damage that’s out of our control.
From garden to grocery store, the good nutrients contain some harmful pesticide sprays and/or preservatives to make food shelf life last longer.
…And that means all of us have imperfect guts. And then we add plastic packaged food products, antibiotics, and daily stress into our lives… and that all compounds to the gut issues…
Or in some cases, leaky guts, bloating, IBS, etc. The list is long. And the gut stretches taller than you and me both. With over 15 feet, there’s all kinds of growing bug opportunities where we want to tip the scales to the good ones daily. Doing this impacts so much of our health and daily energy.
And long story short, all this is to say that’s why I started intermittent fasting regularly in 2023 for healthy preventative gut reasons and to help let the body naturally repair the gut.
It’s a great way to lose bad habits like snacking, sugar, overeating, drinking too late, drinking too much, etc. And a great opportunity to let your body detox reset, sleep more efficiently, and lose weight. If you want to discover more about the benefits and strategies, get the free guide.