Fasting means hunger and misery to most
people. Never mind a three-day fast:
Just a four-hour fast between meals
makes some people hungry and cranky!
Those who adopt a Paleo diet are
often surprised and pleased to find that
fasting has suddenly become easy and
comfortable—not exactly pleasurable,
but far from intolerable.
The reason this happens is that our
body adapts to our diet. Different
cellular machinery, enzymes, and
vitamins are involved in metabolizing
glucose, fatty acids, and amino acids.
If our diet provides glucose, fatty
acids, and amino acids in the same
proportions that are released during the
“cannibal diet” of fasting, we’ll be well
prepared for a fast. Fasting will be easy.
But if we eat a very different diet,
fasting can become hard. A high-carb
diet will give us lots of machinery for
metabolizing carbs but a dearth of
machinery for metabolizing fatty acids.
When fasting starts and selfcannibalization
begins providing 65
percent of energy in the form of fatty
acids and only 13 percent as glucose,
cells won’t be prepared to handle that
mix. Instead, they’ll be hungry for the
much larger amounts of glucose they’re
used to getting.
The natural way of eating is to obtain
macronutrients in similar proportions to
the composition of our own tissues. The
natural way to eat is to “eat what you
are.” This will prepare the body for
fasts and make hunger rare.
