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The Dangers of Intermittent Fasting

Celebrities and alternative health practitioners claim that fasting eliminates toxins from the body and quickly reduces weight. Yet there are several serious physiological consequences to fasting intermittently. Fasting essentially depletes nutrition in the body, disrupts the body's hormone balance, reduces musculature and weakens the body's immune system.

  1. Fasting Depletes Nutrition

    • Your body is a highly complex organic system that relies on millions of chemical interactions to keep its processes going. The body requires proteins, fatty, acids, carbohydrates, fatty acids, electrolytes, vitamins and minerals, along with plenty of water to sustain itself. Periodic fasting eliminates the sources the body uses to replenish its nutrition reserves, which may lead to future health problems like dehydration, dizziness, mental confusion, fatigue, anemia, hypoglycemia and constipation.

    Fasting Disrupts Hormone Balance

    • The thyroid gland regulates the body's metabolism, so its level of functioning determines whether you have a high or low metabolism. Fasting causes the body to go into what is known as starvation, survival or preservation mode. The thyroid gland's responsibility in this state is to reduce the metabolism, which slows down the burning of nutrients to help the body forestall weight loss. Another aspect of how the body functions in survival mode is it increases production of cortisol, a stress hormone. Having more cortisol in the body can cause you to feel more mentally, emotionally and physically stressed out.

    Fasting Reduces Muscle

    • The body's major organs, including the brain, require a supply of sugar to sustain them. When a diet no longer includes a source of sugar, the body then turns to the amino acids that make up your muscles for a source of energy. A reduction in muscle mass can cause you to feel weak and also slows down further weight loss since having muscles helps the body burn calories.

    Fasting Reduces Immune Function

    • The overall effect of throwing the body's function out of balance is that it can weaken your immune system's ability to fight off infection and reduce inflammation. Fasting can disrupt the flora balance in the intestines, which will affect the ability of the body to break down food for nutrition in the future. While the reduction of food in the body may begin a detoxification process in the body, allowing it to release chemicals once stored in the body's fatty tissue; different people may experience varying degrees of headaches, irritability, fatigue and aches during detox,and may even experience cold-like symptoms as the body's immune system reacts a load of toxins in the bloodstream.

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