The benefits of fasting are amazing – especially if you can do a 72-hour fast. Most people will need to build up to a fast this long by starting with a 48-hour fast. It’s a good idea to do a 48 or 72-hour fast periodically – maybe once every month or two.
The benefits of fasting on the immune system have to do with growing a new immune system.
Benefits:
1. Boosts white blood cell count, including phagocytes (macrophages and the neutrophils), T-cells, and B-cells. Phagocytes eat pathogens, clean up debris, they kill off viruses and bacteria using different chemicals.
You cannot kill a virus because viruses are not alive. What is a virus? A virus is a piece of genetic material wrapped in a sack that invades the body. They go into the cells and latch onto the machinery of the cells (usually the DNA), and they use our own body’s is energy to replicate.
You cannot kill a virus, but it does not have a life force but you can definitely acquire a virus get sick and then once your body deals with that virus it does not necessarily kill it because it is not a live, it goes into remission, it goes in a dormant stage. That is called a latent virus.
A healthy immune system will protect you from developing illness and being infected by bacteria and viruses.
In this video, Dr. Berg talks about how to supercharge your gut microbes with intermittent fasting.
The health benefits are the following:
1. Increase resistance to oxidative stress (aging) + xenobiotic stress (exposure to chemicals)
2. Increase diversity of microbes, which important to your gut health.
3. Increase tolerance to bad bacteria
4. Restores intestinal epithelium (lining of the colon)
5. Microbes live longer
6. Starve off sugar for yeast and candida
Intermittent fasting will kill off the bad population, the pathogenic microbes, and you help the good population. These microbes do a lot for you. They help recycle and increase your bile acids, which help you digest fats and extract fat-soluble vitamins and omega-3 fats.
Dr. Eric Berg is an excellent presenter. Please watch these 2 short videos. The highlights are shown below. The 2 videos are:
How Stress Makes You Fat
Stress and the immune system
How Stress Makes You Fat
The body‘s response to stress is to spike cortisol and adrenaline. Cortisol has the potential to significantly raise your blood sugar.
Even if you’re on the low-carb/ ketogenic diet and you are doing intermittent fasting you will see that your blood glucose goes up when you are stressed or experiencing trauma.
In times of stress, cortisol will also release glucose from your liver and dumps that stored sugar into your bloodstream so the insulin has to take it into storage as fat.
Also, cortisol breaks down protein and converts it to glucose which can be stored as fat.
This is why women specifically after menopause they start losing their muscle mass. It turns into fat and their blood glucose goes up.
Also cortisol decreases insulin sensitivity. This leads to insulin resistance, which causes the body to make more insulin to makes more fat, which slows down the metabolism. It’s a vicious cycle.
Also, cortisol will drive the storage of fat to your midsection or the area around the organs around in the midsection and the liver. This is why people under a lot of stress end up with a lot of midsection weight, skinny legs. It is because the body is breaking down proteins from the upper leg and butt muscles and turns into sugar and then converts that too fat and puts it around your midsection.
That is the relationship between stress and belly fat.
This Post has been condensed from: How Stress Makes You Fat
Stress and the immune system
Stress influences your immune system in general.
For any person with a chronic health problem it originated with some type of stressful event.
Stress can pre-disposed you to getting sick because what it does to the adrenal hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is a type of hormone, which is intimately involved in the immune response.
It suppresses white blood cells. It suppresses the T-cells, which trains the immune system to fight off infections. It lowers the immune barrier that allows the viruses to invade the cells. That’s why people get virus infections when they’re stressed such as shingles, herpes, etc.
It can increase platelets, which then will set you up for clotting factors.
It increases neutrophils, which will then leads to inflammation.
Stress is definitely involved in any autoimmune condition.
The typical treatment is prednisone, which is a synthetic type of cortisol. It will act on the adrenal hormones that will decrease inflammation and decrease immune function. For allergies or high levels of histamine people take prednisone or cortisol because it has that function.
When the stress gets too high there’s an alteration in the cortisol and adrenal function and this leads to a drop in the immune defense mechanism.
There are many different types of stress:
Physical trauma, surgery, being in a stressful relationship.
But the biggest stress is losses of a loved one or a job. That can hit someone very hard and the health just starts going downhill.
You can alleviate stress by going for long walks, getting in the sunshine to get your vitamin D, removing yourself from the stressful situation, taking a vacation, taking vitamin B and getting adequate sleep.
What to do with the stress that stuck in your body.
There are different parts of your body that are involved in the fight or flight mechanism. It is called the sympathetic nervous system. There’s also the opposite system called a parasympathetic nervous system, which counter the stress. And this is part of the nervous system that is throughout the body.
There is a way to tap into that to release the stress. One of the most powerful ones is working on the neck points. These points control the parasympathetic nervous system. If you apply pressure to these points it can relax you.
The next points are in the mid back, the next point are in the abdomen area which can indirectly affect the adrenal glands deep inside.
You can use Acupressure on these points on someone else or there are acupressure tools you can use on yourself, Dr. Berg sells one of them.
This Post has been condensed from: Stress and the immune system
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