Ramadan fasting involves abstention from eating, drinking, and other forbidden tasks before sunrise to after sunset. It is obligatory for all Muslims from the age of puberty. You can engage in all these acts after breaking your fasting and restart fasting the next dawn. You need to follow this cycle for a whole month. If planned well, it has long-lasting health benefits. Continue reading to know what happens to your body when you fast for 14 to 16 hours.
What happens to your body when you fast for 14 to 16 hours?
Speeds Up The Metabolism
Fasting assists to energise your metabolism by giving your digestive system a rest because it burns through the calories more efficiently. When your digestion is poor, this can affect your ability to metabolise food and burn fat. Fasting regulates your digestion promoting healthy bowel function. In this way, fasting improves your metabolic function.
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Weight loss
Fasting works like magic to lose weight. It can help both obese and non-obese people to lose weight. The connection to fasting is that when you fast, less energy is coming in than going out. That’s why you lose weight. When you are fasting you burn more calories than you take. As a result, you lose fat and improve body composition just by splitting those calories into two meals rather than three.
Improves Hunger
When you don’t take any food for 14 to 16 hours, you experience real hunger. Fasting helps to regulate the hormones in your body so that you experience what true hunger is. Therefore, take fasting as a reset button. The longer you fast, the more your body can regulate itself to release the correct hormones.
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Develops Your Eating Patterns
Fasting is a helpful practice for people who suffer from binge eating disorders. The month-long fasting is also helpful for those who find it difficult to establish a correct eating pattern due to work and other priorities. When you are fasting all afternoon without a meal, it can allow you to eat at a set time and helps you to set your lifestyle.
Ketosis
Your hormone insulin of course stays low with your break from eating. Consequently, low insulin helps you burn body fat and make ketones. The fat-burning system is called ketosis which may have the following health benefits:
- More stable energy
- Reduced cravings
- Better appetite control
- Enhanced mental acuity
- Increased “good” HDL cholesterol
- Lower blood sugar and insulin levels
- Lower blood pressure
- Improvements to metabolic syndrome
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Lower blood sugar
If a person consumes carbs constantly —their blood sugar stays chronically elevated. This is known as hyperglycemia and is defined as a clinical feature of type 2 diabetes. This causes huge complications, including heart disease. In this situation, fasting may be part of the solution. Studies have shown that fasting lowered average blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes.
Promotes Longevity
The younger your body is, the faster and more systematic your metabolism will be. But none of us are getting younger anymore. Therefore, we have to be careful about the process of ageing and relative health issues.
You need to remember that the primary effect of ageing is a slower metabolism. Naturally, when you eat less, the less toll it takes on your digestive system. There is a saying- the less you eat the longer you will live. If you believe it, surely it is for you.
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Improves Your Immune System
Fasting contributes to improving your immune system by reducing free radical damage, regulating inflammatory conditions in the body, and starving cancer cell formation.
Science has already proved that fasting has a direct connection with Autophagy. The term Autophagy refers to a natural process in which the cells of a human body can clean out the damaged, dysfunctional, or unnecessary components. Autophagy strengthens the immune system of human health.
Contributes To Self-Enlightenment
Fasting surely helps you to connect to life because you can get enough time and energy during fasting to practise reading, meditation, and yoga. The digestive system is one of the most energy-absorbing systems in the body. When you have no food in the digestive system, you get more energy in the body.
Besides, fasting creates self-enlightenment in you by helping you feel better both consciously and physically. When your body is light and your mind is clear, you become more aware and grateful for the things around you.
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Clear The Skin And Prevent Acne
Fasting can help clear the skin as your body is temporarily freed from digestion. Thus, it’s able to focus its regenerative energies on other systems. Not eating anything for a long time helps the body to clean up the toxins and regulate the functioning of other organs of the body such as the liver, kidneys, and other parts.
Brain health
During fasting, your body burns fat and thus fuels your brain. Naturally, your brain runs entirely on glucose. But when you are fasting, it elevates ketone levels leading to better performance in a variety of mental tasks. It is natural that the ageing brain doesn’t lose its ability to use ketones.
Promotes good sleep
Research has shown that fasting may assist to enhance our body's sleep-wake cycle. Generally, overeating can induce disturbed sleep. During fasting, you eat less, allowing you to sleep better.
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Reduces stress
Fasting reduces cortisol (stress hormone) levels and inflammation.
Besides this, fasting allows you to understand how it feels to starve for long hours. Thus, you can be grateful for the food you have. It also makes you sympathetic to those who can’t afford food everyday and encourages you to help those people which in turn gives mental peace. Therefore, fasting is beneficial for your mental health.
Heart health
Fasting is beneficial to your heart health also. It not only reduces body weight but has also been shown to improve other influential factors of heart health.
Fasting reduced low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol and triglycerides in some of the most rigorous studies leaving positive impacts for heart health. Fasting also improves multiple cardiovascular risk markers.
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More productive time
Of course, fasting gives you more productive time as you have to invest less time in meal preparations, eating, and cleanup. Besides, ketosis provides a steady energy source for your brain in the form of ketones without having to deal with rapid blood sugar fluctuations, which can enhance sustained concentration.
Bottom Line
So far, we have discussed the health benefits of fasting in Ramadan. No doubt, fasting is a very popular weight-loss method. It serves as a reset system of the digestive system of a human body. Fasting promotes autophagy which is good for the human immune system. Furthermore, fasting leaves positive impacts on the heart and brain.
Besides, realisation of hunger during fasting makes you a grateful, kind and sympathetic person. Fasting helps you to feel satisfaction with your current achievements or possessions. On the whole, Ramadan fasting helps you live a longer, healthier and peaceful life.