Going with the flow.... getting into the swing!

The first day felt like a shock to the system, I admit.  But today I was back at work, stuck in Court for most of the day, and able to forget about my diet completely. I felt GREAT. I enjoyed the feeling of being slightly hungry. Maybe this was just because last night I happened to watch a documentary about fasting. Apparently there is a lot of research being done on it in the United States. They're looking at whether fasting can lower the risk of some diseases and provide other benefits, and the research suggests that it can. One method of fasting, called Alternate Day Fasting, required you to fast for one day (eating only a lunch) and then eat whatever you wanted to the next day, and repeating this pattern for eternity. Apparently it reduced the risk of heart disease, some cancers, etc dramatically, even if you had junk food on the eating day. Another researcher found that rats who were starved for two days out of every seven actually appeared to show an increase in brain activity. In other words, the effect of the fasting was to kick the brain into action, which makes sense on an evolutionary level (your brain kicks into gear so you can figure out how to find food, or something). The brain activity was reduced if they ate a lot of fructose though, suggesting it does matter what you eat when you're not fasting. Boo! This documentary could not have come at a more perfect moment for me. Now that I know there are scientific reasons why fasting and being hungry is good, I can just roll with it.