FASTING for HEALING

There’s a version of fasting that the internet loves to talk about. You’ve seen it everywhere, the 16:8 window, the daily skipped breakfast, the idea that if you just stop eating before 8pm you’ll unlock some kind of metabolic superpower. I’m not here to argue with that. I’m not here to argue with that. For some people, daily intermittent fasting works beautifully, and I genuinely respect the research behind it. But it was never my path, and after everything my body has been through, I’ve come to understand exactly why.

I’m at a point in my life, in my age, my knowledge, my accumulated experience, where what my body needs isn’t a daily tweak or a recurring dietary rule. What it needs is a meaningful pause. A full reset, once a week, intentional and prepared for and honoured.

That’s what I mean when I talk about fasting for healing: a real, purposeful, weekly fast that gives your body enough time and enough quiet to do the work it simply cannot do when it’s constantly digesting, responding to food, and managing blood sugar. The kind of fast that lets every system in your body exhale.
I’ve been asked many times why once a week rather than every day. The honest answer is that my body told me so, and that my history with fasting gave me the lived wisdom to listen. Daily intermittent fasting left me flat, hormonally and energetically and emotionally, working on paper while depleting me in practice. What I needed wasn’t a daily constraint but a weekly ceremony, a deeper dive that lets real biological change unfold rather than simply be gestured at.
At my age, with my hormonal landscape, with everything my body has carried and survived, meaningful weekly fasting is not a diet strategy. It is a healing practice, and that distinction matters enormously.

WHERE THIS JOURNEY REALLY BEGAN

My relationship with fasting didn’t start with a wellness podcast or a nutrition book. It started in 1998, in a moment of genuine desperation. My kidneys were failing, and I was looking for anything that might help me keep them, I was only 22. I began fasting the way many people do when they are frightened and determined in equal measure: intensely, imperfectly, and without the knowledge I would later spend years acquiring. For the better part of a year I fasted on and off and ate mainly raw fruits and vegetables, driven by the belief that if I could just give my body the right conditions, it might find its way back to health.

It didn’t work…

But here is what that year taught me, even as it was failing to save my kidneys: fasting is not a blunt instrument you wield against your body in a crisis. It is a conversation you have with your physiology, and like any conversation worth having, it requires you to listen at least as much as you speak. I was so intent on doing something, on forcing a result through sheer dietary will, that I never stopped to ask what my body actually needed, or whether the approach I was using was working with my particular biology or simply exhausting it.
The version of fasting I practice today is built on everything I’ve learned since then. I am significantly smarter about it now, not because I’ve read more books, though I have, but because I’ve learned to work with my personal physiology rather than against it. I prepare carefully, I support the process throughout, and I fast to give my body a gift rather than push it into compliance. That shift in relationship changed everything about how fasting feels and what it produces.

NOT ALL FASTING IS EQUAL

The conversation around fasting has become dominated by daily protocols, and while 16:8 and OMAD have genuine merit, it is worth being honest about what they can and cannot do. A 16:8 window, eating within an eight-hour period each day, offers a modest insulin rest and some degree of digestive relief, but sixteen hours is rarely enough time for autophagy to move beyond its threshold, and the body adapts to the daily rhythm relatively quickly, which diminishes its metabolic impact over time.

OMAD, one meal a day, goes further: it creates a longer daily fasting window, meaningfully lowers insulin, and begins to touch the edges of cellular repair. But it asks the body to compress all its nutritional intake into a single sitting, which can create its own digestive burden and, for many people, places considerable stress on the adrenals and the HPA axis when repeated daily without the recovery that a feeding day provides.

A meaningful 24 to 36 hour fast, done once a week with proper preparation, operates in an entirely different register. By hour twenty-four, autophagy is not just triggered but actively deepening, growth hormone has surged, the migrating motor complex has completed multiple full cleansing cycles, and the body has had enough uninterrupted time in a fat-burning, ketone-producing state to create changes that are genuinely cumulative rather than merely transient. The weekly rhythm also matters: six days of nourishment followed by one day of deep metabolic rest mirrors the kind of cyclical pattern that human physiology was shaped by, and it gives the body the recovery it needs to respond to the fast with full biological commitment rather than the blunted adaptation that daily restriction tends to produce.

THE 5 THINGS THAT HAPPEN WHEN YOU FAST MEANINGFULLY

When I first started learning about the science behind fasting, I expected to find 1 or 2 mechanisms that explained the benefits. What I found instead was a cascade – 5 deeply interconnected biological processes that unfold when you stop eating long enough for your body to shift gears.

The first is insulin reset – modern eating, with its frequent meals, high carbohydrate loads, and constant grazing, keeps insulin chronically elevated. Over time, cells stop responding as efficiently and the pancreas works harder to compensate. This underpins so much of what makes people feel unwell in midlife: fatigue, difficulty losing weight, brain fog, hormonal disruption. When you fast meaningfully, insulin drops to its physiological floor, cells begin to re-sensitise, and your body rediscovers a metabolic state it was brilliantly designed for but rarely gets to access. 

The second is gut repair – the gut is the most metabolically expensive organ in the body, and for many of us, with our bloating and food intolerances and low-grade digestive discomfort, it never truly gets to rest. During a fast, the migrating motor complex activates: a wave of muscular contractions that sweeps the gut clean, and which only operates in the absence of food. A meaningful fast allows ten to fifteen complete cleansing cycles. The gut lining begins to regenerate and intestinal permeability, the “leaky gut” that underlies so much chronic inflammation, starts meaningfully to reduce.

The third is hormonal rebalancing – growth hormone, one of the body’s most powerful repair and fat-mobilising hormones, can surge by 300 to 500% during an extended fast. Leptin sensitivity begins to recover. The body’s master stress-response system, the HPA axis, gets a chance to recalibrate when you approach the fast with the right preparation and support.

The fourth is autophagy – this is the one that moves me most deeply as I understood it, and also the one that humbled me most, because it reminded me that modern science does not discover truths so much as it eventually catches up with them. Autophagy, from the Greek for “self-eating,” is your body’s cellular housekeeping system: the process by which your cells break down and recycle their own damaged components, the dysfunctional proteins, the worn-out organelles, the cellular debris that accumulates quietly and ages us from the inside. Yoshinori Ohsumi received the Nobel Prize in in 2016 for mapping its mechanisms, and the scientific world responded as though something new had been found. But every healing tradition that ever prescribed fasting, from Hippocratic medicine to Ayurveda to the great spiritual fasts of every major religion, had already understood in its own language that the body, given enough stillness and enough time without food, turns inward and cleans house. The Nobel Prize named the mechanism, the ancients simply lived by the result.

The fifth is brain renewal – ketones produced during fasting are a preferred fuel for neurons and reduce inflammation in brain tissue. Fasting also dramatically upregulates BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein that supports neuron survival and growth and which is consistently low in people with depression, anxiety, and cognitive decline. The mental clarity that many people experience during a meaningful fast is not placebo, it has a measurable, well-documented biological basis.

What makes this so extraordinary is that these five mechanisms don’t operate in isolation. Autophagy improves insulin signalling, better insulin sensitivity reduces inflammatory load on the gut. A calmer gut reduces cortisol, lower cortisol allows BDNF to rise. The body heals in systems, and fasting is one of the very few interventions that activates all of them simultaneously.

Daily intermittent fasting can dip a toe into some of these processes. A meaningful once-weekly fast, with the depth of time it provides, allows the body to move through them fully.

PREPARATION IS EVERYTHING

Here’s what I’ve learned after years of fasting with both desperation and wisdom behind me – the difference between a fast that genuinely heals and one that leaves you depleted, headachy, and miserable is almost entirely in the preparation.

My preparation starts several days out, and it is built around a simple but important principle – fasting is metabolically demanding, and your body will draw heavily on its reserves once the process is underway. If those reserves are low going in, you will feel it acutely. If they are full, the fast unfolds with a ease that can genuinely surprise you.

The foundation of my preparation is a carefully chosen set of co-factors, specific nutritional support selected because fasting does not slow metabolic processes down, it intensifies them. Cellular repair accelerates, detoxification pathways become more active, elimination organs work harder, and the body draws on reserves it would normally replenish through food. Without the right co-factors in place before you begin, those intensified processes run without adequate support, and that is where the fatigue, the headaches, and the sense that fasting simply doesn’t agree with you tend to come from. The specific co-factors I use, along with the timing and sequencing that makes them effective, are detailed in the Foundation Guide. There is also a homeopathic Fasting combination that I take during the fasting window itself, to ensure the pathways responsible for clearing what the fast releases are open and moving throughout.

Alongside these, three simple preparations form the physical backbone of my fast: SOLE water, which provides the electrolyte support your body needs as glycogen depletes; wild fermented sauerkraut brine, which tends to the gut lining during the cleansing cycles the fast activates; and a specific fasting tea blend, which supports the digestive and nervous system through the transition. Each of these has a precise planning around timing and quantity, and each is detailed in my Foundation Guide.

This is also where functional DNA testing has changed how I work with clients and with my own body. Understanding your methylation profile, your detoxification variants, and individual metabolic tendencies means the co-factors you choose and the fasting window you follow are built around your actual physiology rather than a generic template. It is the difference between approximating what your body needs and knowing it.

THIS IS NOT FOR EVERYONE, AND THAT’S IMPORTANT

Meaningful fasting is not appropriate for everyone, I want to say this clearly, and approaching it without preparation or self-knowledge can cause harm. I know this from my own history more intimately than most.

There are absolute contraindications, including pregnancy, active eating disorders, type 1 diabetes, and being significantly underweight. There are conditions that warrant careful supervision – thyroid dysfunction, adrenal strain, blood sugar instability, and certain medications. Before I extend any fast meaningfully, I assess HPA axis readiness, blood sugar stability, and current stress load, and I encourage everyone drawn to fasting for healing to do the same.

Fasting done carefully is one of the most powerful things you can do for your health. Fasting done without that care can simply deplete you, and the difference between those two experiences comes down almost entirely to preparation. This is exactly why I created my guide.

If what I’ve described here resonates, if you feel in your body that what you need isn’t another daily rule to follow but a genuine weekly reset, then I’d love for you to have the foundation to do it properly.

Fasting for Healing: the Foundation Guide

Fasting meaningfully, once a week, with intention and preparation and the wisdom of your own physiology behind you, this is one of the most profound gifts you can give your body at any age.