Radiance Experts: Midi Fairgrieve
by Christina Agnew,
Radiance's Executive Nutritional Therapist Midi Fairgrieve gives her view below on how fasting can heal serious disease:
Fasting is getting a lot of scientific attention at the moment especially with so much new research emerging about the powerful health benefits of intermittent fasting (such as The Fast Diet 5:2 approach), from weight loss to slowing down the ageing process. But for me, some of the most exciting new evidence emerging is around the ability of ‘fasting’ (or a very low calorie diet) to reverse type 2 diabetes and normalize blood sugar control.
Diabetes affects 3 million people in the UK (a further 850,000 people are thought to have undiagnosed Type 2 diabetes) and it’s a serious and growing problem worldwide. Given that it has been seen in the past as a long term condition, managed mainly through medication but generally not cured, it is an exciting development that so many scientific studies are now proving that a short period on a very low calorie diet can reverse type 2 diabetes.
Here’s a link to one research study carried out at Newcastle University (currently involved in a larger joint study with Glasgow University looking at the effects of a short term low calorie diet on diabetes), which shows that type 2 diabetes can be reversed just using diet.
Fasting is a powerful tool for restoring health, and the hope of turning around disease is one reason why people may choose to do a juice fast. Ideally, it’s better to weave regular fasting and a healthy diet into your lifestyle as a way of on-going disease prevention, but usually we wait until our health starts to deteriorate before taking any action!
Apart from having the potential to re-balance blood sugar control, fasting can overcome a multitude of conditions from digestive and bowel problems, painful joint inflammation, and high blood pressure to depression, obesity, fertility problems and lack of energy. The healing power lies in the fact that fasting allows the body to de-congest, cleanse, throw out toxic waste and then it is better able to heal and rejuvenate at cellular level. Key to this process is getting the body back to the optimum chemical environment for everything from enzyme action to nutrient uptake to be able to work as it should. A body labouring under too much excess weight, fatty foods, processed salt, toxins and sugar simply can’t function in a vital way. A juice fast clears the routes of elimination and restores metabolic pathways so that optimum health is achieved. You feel that change pretty quickly as your energy rises, your mind clears and a sense of excitement for life and optimism reappears.
