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Fasting

I have been experimenting with fasting over the past two weeks.  I became intrigued with discussions on different blogs but I was especially interested in intermittant fasting.  As I understand (and have been practicing) this is when you skip eating for only a day or even part of a day.  So far I have fasted on four days.  Two were partial days where I broke the fast in mid-afternoon with some fruit and nuts and then ate whatever my wife had cooked for dinner.  The other days I was attending a business meeting in the evening which didn’t give me time to go home and return so I fasted all day.  Well, it was all day yesterday but last week, my partner dragged me to visit his brother who was being entertained by neighbors and I ended up with a piece of excelland pecan pie.  Amazingly, I don’t feel hungry during these fasts.  Nor do I feel week.

It is liberating to realize that I don’t need to eat three times a day and that I don’t need as much food as I once believed.

My intention was not to lose weight although that seems to motivate many fasters.  It’s not that I couldn’t stand to lose 15-20 pounds – in fact my loss of about 20 pounds over the past year seems to be over.  My interest was in the idea of calorie restriction and life extension.  Apparently intermittant fasting produces some of the benefits of calorie restriction.  (I havn’t had time to organize all my sources but that will be coming.) In fact, however, I have lost weight over the two weeks.  Time will tell if it is real loss or will come back.

More on this later.

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Fight free radicals with a healthy diet of fruits and vegetables high in antioxidants

Image via Wikipedia

What do antioxidants do?

You may have heard about antioxidants. You know that they are good for you but maybe you don’t know why or what they do.  They fight free radicals.  They stop the chain reaction of oxidation that free radicals cause when they steal electrons from lipid (fat) molecules in the body. A healthy body can normally deal with free radicals but aging appears to reduce the effectiveness of this process. The cumulative damage from free radical oxidation contributes to the deterioration we call aging.

And what are free radicals?

Free radicals are organic molecules with an odd number of electrons. They seek to stabilize themselves by stealing an electron from another molecule. They prefer to steal the needed electron from lipid molecules in the cells in a process called lipid peroxidation. When the lipid molecules lose an electron, they rearrange themselves to permit them to react with oxygen to form a peroxyl radical. The peroxyl radical then steals an electron from another lipid molecule causing a chain reaction. It takes an antioxidant molecule to stop the reaction. The antioxidant molecule gives up an electron and thus becomes a free radical itself. It is different, however, in being able to accommodate the loss of the electron without continuing the chain. [continue reading…]

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