WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR DIGESTION?
When you do intermittent fasting your digestive system takes a break. If you don’t eat you don’t poop. That’s a fact.
It may take a few days to stop pooping, but it will stop eventually especially if you do long fasts like three or four days.
If you do I week-long fast for example, and you’re still pooping on day five or six, then there is something really strange going on, because if you’re empty, you’re empty.
However, if you drink too much water while fasting, you will poop water. It won’t be pretty water, but it will be water.
Some people like to do this because they think that flushing the system is a good idea. Personally, I don’t like the idea. All the gets flushed is valuable electrolytes that you need in your body.
My suggestion is don’t drink too much water.
You actually want your digestive system to take a break so it can heal. If you’re constantly putting whatever it is in there, whether that be water or food, then it’s not going to be able to take a break.
Take a break!
Allow your digestive system to become completely dormant.
WHY DOES IT STOP?
It stops because you stop eating, silly. Your body’s fuel source is food, so when you stop eating, that process of waste elimination ceases.
It’s simple, really. You want your digestive system to take a break for a change. It’s always running in overdrive. And when anything runs in overdrive for long enough, it starts to breakdown.
You don’t want to breakdown. You don’t want your system to become sluggish or constipated. You want everything working like a smooth machine.
When you give your digestive system a break, cells regenerate It can fix little problems that could become big problems if not addressed.
So, why does your digestive system stop? Because it needs a little R&R like everything else. It’s amazing how a good night’s sleep can make us feel better in the morning.
Putting our digestive system to sleep will ensure that we feel better in the morning
BENEFITS OF A RESTED DIGESTIVE SYSTEM
When we allow our digestive system to go to sleep for a while, magical things start to happen. Our gut starts to heal.
When our gut doesn’t work as well as it should, they call it leaky gut.
If we have a leaky gut all sorts of problems pop up, from irritable bowel syndrome to a poor immune system.
Your immune system lives in the gut, so when you fix poor gut issues, then you fix your immune system. When you fix your immune system you can fight off diseases easier and prevent colds or lesson the duration of them.
CONSTIPATION AND DIARRHEA
Constipation and diarrhea become quite a problem as you age because of hormone depletion.
Hormones are responsible for how well we poop believe it or not. When we do intermittent fasting, we actually improve hormone levels in the body.
Take for example what happens with HGH when we fast. The human growth hormone increases 1000 times the norm in women, and 2000 times the norm in men while in a fasted state.
That’s incredible.
If one hormone improves, so do others. Harvard research has proven it. I will link the studies below.
WHAT TO EXPECT WITH FOOD INTRODUCTION
Reintroduction to food when you break the fast kickstarts the digestive system. It’s like priming a pump, and that’s it.
All you need to do is take a spoonful of ground flax and a couple of glasses of water and it gets your digestive system going again. Make sure that you have this in place before eating anything else or you will have an explosion.
Diarrhea is a problem when you start eating after a fast, but it doesn’t have to be. Just make sure that you prime the pump with a good fibrous mass like ground up flax or chia seeds that expand in your digestive tract, and it will hold the food in that you start eating.
There may be a little bit of diarrhea at first but it won’t be much as long as you have what I call a ‘bowel plug’ in place. The same thing can be achieved with Metamucil or even bread.
Check out the following Amazon affiliate link, Organic Ground Flax, for a 2 LB tub of flax seed so it will last a while.
The reintroduction of food into your system doesn’t have to be scary or difficult if you do it the right way. Just make sure you have your fibre and you really can eat anything that you want when you break a fast.
Before you know it, you will be pooping like normal once again.
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For further information, go to the Hungry Old Lady Youtube channel by clicking on the video at the end. I hope you enjoyed this article and consider living an intermittent fasting lifestyle.
