Fasting Does Not Detox Your Body- Eating Well Does

Fasting is defined as an abstinence of some sort with regard to food and water, and is done usually for either spiritual reasons or improving overall health and losing weight. Spiritual fasting is an integral practice in almost all world religions and can be profoundly meaningful in a spiritual context. However, the current trend of fasting as a way to detoxify your body or lose weight lacks much in terms of scientific credibility. In this first of two articles we will explore the myths regarding fasting and detoxifying your body. The next blog post will tackle the issue of weight loss and fasting. Aside from losing weight quickly, there are three main reasons people use to justify the use of fasting, most of them commonly accepted by the general population as being true. They are:

1. Fasting gives your digestive system and organs time to rest and recover from the strain of the processed foods that we eat today.

2. Fasting helps the body get rid of unwanted toxins.

3. Fasting helps you lose weight.

Myth 1: Fasting & Resting Your Organs

With regards to the first suggestion that your digestive system needs a rest, it seems like a very plausible idea, and most would agree that it sounds like a good idea. However, our own rather linear logic does not always translate into physiological reality nor does it have any grounding in the biology of how the human body actually works. Our bodies are designed to process food as an ongoing requirement. As such, they can’t be overworked from digesting the very nutrients we need to survive. Consider the parallel example of a car engine; by not putting any gas in the tank you don’t do anything to make it run better. Engines are designed to run on gas and it would be unthinkable to expect any benefits from driving your car with an empty tank. In the same vein, you shouldn’t expect your body to function optimally if you don’t give it the fuel it needs.

Now if you put contaminated or low quality fuel in your car, you can indeed do damage to the engine, but having the car run with no gas for periods after filling it with cheap gas isn’t going to make it any better. The same applies to junk food. If you eat a diet high in refined junk foods, one or two days of not eating anything will not magically undo the 363-364 days of bad food choices. It is an appealing idea that a couple of days fasting can somehow absolve you of frequent bad food choices, but this is called magical thinking and has no basis in reality whatsoever. If you want to be sure that your organs are not overwhelmed, then your focus should be on consistently wholesome food choices and avoiding foods that our bodies naturally were not designed to consume. Not quite the quick, feel-good fix that most are looking for, but it is the only way proven to maintain optimal health.

Instead of fasting to remove toxins, you'd be better served avoiding putting them in your body in the first place.

Myth 2: Fasting Eliminates Toxins

With regard to eliminating toxins, again it sounds like a solid theory, but only if you don’t have a background in biology. Our organs are here to do just that: to breakdown and remove toxins. They do a pretty darn good job of it. There is absolutely no scientific evidence that fasting will cleanse the body. This is what our lungs, liver, colon, kidneys, lymph glands and even our skin does and are built to do. In a sense, our organs are natural detoxification centers and by not eating for a period of time you do nothing to eliminate any excess toxins. The practice of drinking lots of water or juices while fasting is equally useless.

Water and juices cannot flush away toxins- they only dilute whatever compounds are already in the body.

Drinking more water whether you are fasting or not does nothing to increase the rate of toxin removal, if anything the dilution from an increased fluid intake may actually slow down the rate of excretion. The idea of water and juices washing away the bad chemicals inside our bodies is laughable, yet there are numerous New Age types who take advantage of the public’s lack of knowledge of human biochemistry. An internet search on fasting and detox will give you hundreds of websites selling products but none with any scientific credibility. This is an oversimplified view of how the human body works and has no grounds in human biology. It goes a long way in selling juicers and promoting the sales of bottled water but does nothing to eliminate toxins.

If you want to ensure that your liver or kidneys are not strained by harmful toxins then not smoking, staying away from alcohol, illegal drugs and highly processed foods is the answer. Again, not a simple fix, but if you don’t put anything harmful into your body you don’t have to worry about having to get rid of it in the first place. The practice of fasting in that sense only serves to distract from developing the healthy habits needed to learn to live a healthier lifestyle.

See Part 2 of our series here: Fasting Is Not An Effective Method of Weight Loss

Celebrity personal trainer NYC Kevin Richardson is one of the most sought after fitness trainers in New York City and the creator of Naturally Intense High Intensity Training™. Download a copy of Kevin’s free weight loss ebook here!

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Sweating Has Nothing to Do With Losing Fat

His nickname was Stinky- so named, as one might rightly imagine, for the unmistakable musk that trailed behind him whenever he walked into the gym back home in Trinidad. He probably didn’t have a body odor problem under normal circumstances, but stinky was a true believer in the magical powers of sweating for burning fat and losing weight. Clad in two layers of gym attire, gracefully topped by a garbage bag, he would enter the gym already drenched (and ripe), and hop onto the treadmill for an hour or more of cardio. The average temperature back home was already 85-90 degrees Fahrenheit, and the air conditioning systems at the gym where I first trained didn’t do much save to reduce the humidity a bit. Needless to say, one day Stinky, soaked to the bone with sweat, collapsed during one of his aerobic perspiration marathons. When we got to him, he was severely feverish and a bit delirious, and we had to tear off his many layers of clothes and garbage bags and try to make him drink as much as possible while cooling him off. He ended up in the back of an ambulance bound for the general hospital. An extreme case- yes, but a useful example of how important many think sweating is for overall fat loss. A dangerous, and misguided idea that can do you more harm than good, not to mention, distract you from what you really need to be doing to lose fat.

Sweating Won’t Help You Burn Fat

Sweating has absolutely nothing to do with fat burning, and there is no relationship between how much you sweat and how much fat you burn. If sweating meant losing fat, we wouldn’t have a growing obesity problem here in the United States, as every summer everyone would just sweat off the extra pounds! There wouldn’t be anyone overweight living near the equator- I have lived there and trust me that really isn’t the case! Sweat- or perspiration if you want to be a bit more technical, occurs when our body excretes water and dissolved salts from our sweat glands along with a small amount of urea.[1] Sweating is the way in which our bodies regulate our body temperature so we don’t overheat as the evaporation of sweat from the skin’s surface has a significant cooling effect on the body.

During exercise, when your muscles heat up from exertion, you will tend to sweat more, however the amount of sweat has nothing to do with how much fat you burn, or how effective your workout was. The oft heard post workout expression, “I had a good sweat” only means that your body did what it was designed to do while you were exercising and not much more. Some people naturally seem to sweat less than others while training, but this is not always an indication of how hard they were training. A study conducted at Osaka International and Kobe Universities, in Japan, found that men being perspiring faster than women and tend to sweat twice as much as women do while exercising [2] but that has no bearing on fat loss or levels of exercise intensity.

Where Did The Myth Of Sweating To Burn Fat Come From?

Every myth has its origins, and the myth that sweating helps you burn fat is no different. The problem stems primarily from observations of athletes in sports with standardized weight classes. A boxer or wrestler, for example, knows that they will be most successful if they compete on the upper side of their weight class limit as opposed to the lower limit. For obvious reasons, you would rather be in a ring weighing as much as you could and the same logic applies to bodybuilding and physique contests as well. Thus, a major part of preparation for a fight, or contest is ‘making weight’ or “getting down to fighting weight’. The goal being to fall right on the upper limit of your weight class when you are weighed before the event. To get to their desired weight, athletes often spend hours in saunas and steam rooms or try to sweat out extra pounds by running or doing aerobic exercises while wearing layers upon layers of clothing. The human body is composed of almost 75% water, so it makes sense if you need to shed a few pounds to try and sweat as much as possible- but you are only losing fluids-not fat.

The downside is that very often athletes suffer hyperthermia- heat exhaustion or heat stroke; when the body produces more heat than it can dissipate and our heat regulating sweat mechanisms are overwhelmed by the amount of heat generated. [3] By exposing yourself to high temperatures for prolonged periods of time in steam rooms, you can suffer heat stroke. Also, by wearing too many layers while exercising, or wearing plastic type materials that interfere with the water evaporation process that cools us down, you run a real risk of ending up in an emergency room.

These quick fix techniques, alone or combined with a restriction in water intake, can adversely affect your heart, nervous system, heat regulation, kidney function, electrolyte balance, body composition, and muscular endurance and strength. [4,5,6] Sadly,  many athletes- boxers, collegiate wrestlers and bodybuilders have died as a result. The general impression, however, from seeing these athletes, is that they are able to drop 10 pounds easily in a couple of days and look pretty darned good in the process. Thus began the erroneous idea that if you want to lose weight and get into shape, you should try to sweat as much as possible the way athletes do. Many miss the point that any weight loss is temporary- athletes regain the weight after drinking a few glasses of water, and that no extra fat is lost in the process.

Sweating Doesn’t Burn Fat- So What Does?

So we have firmly established that sweating is a localized phenomenon that doesn’t increase your metabolism or help you do anything but cool down and lose water, but what can you do to lose fat? There are no secrets. Consistency in diet and exercise, with a strong emphasis on diet. Aerobic exercise, while noted for being a great way to work up a sweat, does have its benefits, but it isn’t going to sculpt your body into a work of art. For that, you need weight training of sufficient intensity while eating the foods that you need and avoiding the ones that you don’t. How wet you are after training really isn’t part of the equation at all, so don’t sweat it!

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References:

1        Mosher HH (1933). “Simultaneous Study of Constituents of Urine and Perspiration”. The Journal of Biological Chemistry 99: 781–790.

2        “Women outshine men in sweat test”. Sydney Morning Hearld. 9 October 2010. http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/lifematters/women-outshine-men-in-sweat-test-20101008-16c0c.html. Retrieved 21 October 2010.

3        Elert, Glenn (2005). “Temperature of a Healthy Human (Body Temperature)”. The Physics Factbook. http://hypertextbook.com/facts/LenaWong.shtml. Retrieved 2007-08-22.

4        Horswill CA. Applied physiology of amateur wrestling. Sports Med 1992;14:114-43.

5        Scott JR, Horswill CA, Dick RW. Acute weight gain in collegiate wrestlers following a tournament weigh-in. Med Sci Sports Exerc 1994;26:1181-5.

6        Steen SN, Brownell KD. Patterns of weight loss and regain in wrestlers: has the tradition changed? Med Sci Sports Exerc 1990;22:762-8.

7        Sawka MN, Young AJ, Francesconi RP, Muza SR, Pandolf KB. Thermoregulatory and blood responses during exercise at graded hypohydration levels. J Appl Physiol 1985;59:1394-401.

Kevin Richardson- celebrity NYC Personal Trainer is the creator of Naturally Intense™ High Intensity Training, a lifetime natural bodybuilder and arguably one of the most sought out personal trainer in New York City.

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How Much Water Do I Need & Can You Drink Too Much Water?

According to estimates, the average male adult needs approximately 12 cups of water per day, the average female just about nine cups. These numbers don’t apply to plain old water as our bodies are able to get water from juices, and even many solid food items, however for those serious about peak performance and optimal health you really can’t go wrong using water as your primary fluid source. For those engaged in intensive regular exercise, especially high intensity training more water is needed on a daily basis- an increase that has been validated by several dietetic associations over the years.

Reasons for increased water intake are:

• exercise

• high temperature

• low humidity

• high altitude

• high-fiber diet

• increased fluid losses as a result of diarrhea or vomiting

• caffeine or alcohol consumption (Alcohol and caffeine are diuretics which means they cause water loss and could increase the risk of dehydration)

Water Requirements Are Higher For Those Engaged In High Intensity Training Or Other Activities

Since exercise and a high fiber diet is part of the Naturally Intense System of Diet & Exercise™ I recommend sometimes up to a gallon of water for some based in their bodyweight and activity levels especially since increased protein intake is also an additional requirement for more fluids. Bloating, and water retention is often a sign of inadequate water intake, as such the more you drink, the less water your body will retain. As a rule the more water you drink the less water your body will retain and I have seen some clients over the years lose as much as 10-15 lbs of water weight in the course of a week simply by regulating their sodium intake and ensuring adequate hydration levels.

When Should I Drink Water? Some Useful Tips From The Field!

Thirst tells us we need water, but the thirst mechanism cannot be relied upon to meet our water needs, since by the time you are thirsty, you are can already be slightly dehydrated. Mild dehydration occurs with as little as 1 percent loss of body weight. My suggestion is to to drink water during the day, and taper off the amount as the day goes on so that you can stop drinking at least an hour or two before bedtime. This is a good practice that prevents you having to wake up too often during the night and having your sleep patterns affected by your fluid intake

On days that you exercise, your water intake is most important. You will see a significant drop off in your performance if you do not drink an adequate amount, and it is my recommendation that you not engage in high intensity training if you have not drunk enough water during the day. My clients are often amazed at how well I can tell when they haven’t had enough water before their high intensity workouts. There is inevitably a marked reduction in their strength, endurance and they may experience muscle cramps – especially on warmer days.

Are There Any Potential Dangers To Drinking Water?

People with kidney problems or cardiovascular disease or other conditions where fluid intake needs to be limited should follow their doctor’s recommendations with correct sodium intake. Always seek advice from your doctor before beginning any new diet or changing eating and drinking habits. Can You Drink Too Much Water? In a word, yes, you can indeed drink too much water but it is a very rare occurrence among adults. Too much water ingested at one time can bring about dilution of sodium levels in the body, which creates a state called hyponatremia.

Electrolyte imbalance of this nature can cause arrythmia, confusion, nausea, seizures and it can lead to comatose states and death. The effects mimic alcohol consumption and as such it is often referred to as water intoxification. The key to remember is that this usually only occurs in infants, athletes involved in long term strenuous activities or in individuals that are somehow mentally impaired. Babies can suffer from hyponatremia by having too much water or from drinking formula that has been diluted too much, as their low weight makes it easy for them to over consume water.

Athletes that are dehydrated during marathon type events can also succumb to hyponatremia, as they drink too much water at one time in an attempt to rehydrate themselves. If they drink plain water without any electrolytes, they can very easily suffer from water intoxification. Finally, the third group at risk are those with some degree of mental impairment, be it organic or as a result of drug and alcohol use. The key to remember about hyponatremia is that it is not caused by drinking too much water, but rather from drinking an enormous amount of water all at one time, and it is very unlikely that anyone would do so under ordinary circumstances.

The media does tend to make a big story out of any deaths attributed to water intoxification, but as sensationalist as they can be, it does not take away the fact that most victims are infants, endurance athletes or people under the influence. The kidneys of a healthy human being can process 15 liters a day, (that is almost 4 gallons) without any ill effects. Keeping in mind that muscle is 72% water, and given their high protein intake, and bodyweights, it is not uncommon for bodybuilders and high performance athletes to ingest between 1 to 2 gallons of water a day. But that amount is consumed over the course of twenty four hours and not all at once, and that number can increase based on weather conditions. So as long as you are not trying to win a water drinking contest, or running a marathon, hyponatremia is not something that you should really be worried about.

Sources:

The American Dietetic Association. Water: The Beverage for Life.

Convertino V.A., Amstrong L.E., Coyle E.F.,Mack G.W., Swaka M.N., Senay L.C. Jr., Sherman W.M. 1996.

American College of Sports Medicine position. “Exercise and fluid replacement.” Medical Science Sports Exercise.

Kleiner S.M. 1999. “Water: An essential but overlooked nutrient.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

Get a copy of Kevin’s free weight loss ebook here!

Kevin Richardson- celebrity Personal Trainer New York City is the creator of Naturally Intense™ High Intensity Training, a lifetime natural bodybuilder, head of Naturally Intense™ Personal Trainers NYC and one of the most sought after personal trainer in NYC.

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Water cannot flush away toxins- it can do no more than dilute that which is already in the body. It is only if we work to ingest that which is toxic that we can rid ourselves of toxins.

Celebrity personal trainer NYC, Kevin Richardson is the creator of  Naturally Intense High Intensity Training™, a lifetime natural bodybuilder and one of the most popular personal trainers in New York City. Get a copy of his free weight loss ebook here.