Fasting Ourselves Out of the Pleasure Trap: Dr. Alan Goldhamer (vegan), Part 2 of 3

“And so what we advocate is people eat a health-promoting whole plant food SOS-free diet. SOS is, of course, is the international symbol of danger, but it also stands for the chemicals added to food, including salt, oil, and sugar, that fool the satiety mechanisms of the brain and create what we call ‘the pleasure trap.’” Today, Dr. Goldhamer delves into the details of water fasting and how it can be a mode to restore health. "A big part of our energy and function is involved in digestion. Digestion is a really energy-consuming, intense process and that may be one of the benefits of fasting is that you don't have to put a lot of energy into all of those processes, you're living on reserves that are burned very efficiently, and it may be that the body's ‘energy’ so to speak, can be diverted into healing rather than carrying on functions of digestion and assimilation, and elimination. ” “You start with the feeding that's done before fasting. One of the things that we encourage patients to do is to adopt a whole plant food diet, but even more than that, the few days before fasting, if they limit their diet to fruit, salads, and steamed and starchy vegetables, that actually seems to be the best preparation for undergoing fasting, particularly eliminating a lot of the drugs like caffeine and other things that have such uncomfortable withdrawal reactions.” “One of the mistakes that people make is they try to maintain higher activity levels when they're fasting because they think that that's going to facilitate more weight loss, but what it actually does is it facilitates more protein breakdown. So by resting, you can increase the likelihood that most of the fuel that you are burning is going to be fat rather than protein.” “What I can tell you is that in fasting, and also in modified fasting, or fasting mimicking programs, one of the changes that happens is the satiety hormones tend to increase and so it makes it more possible to rebalance people's hormonal issues. And therefore, after fasting, they find they can reach satiety with a whole plant food diet more readily than they had when they were on a conventional program with a lot of refined carbohydrates.”