See previous parts for important information.
What are Some Fasting Health Victories?
continued
Liver Problems
The liver, your biggest fat burning organ, is the most important filtering organs in your body. Constantly it cleans your blood, maintains your blood sugar levels, digests fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, and produces bile and other enzyme, all this amongst over 200 functions. Science has developed no machine that can fill in for your liver.
So when you have liver problems, you have, as you would naturally expect, your health situation, which is tied into the liver, compromised. Health is going to suffer. Once overwhelmed with toxins, it will start to malfunction with impairments seen in enzyme production, bile development, and maintaining hormonal balances. If you start noticing weight gain (and trouble losing weight), bloating, high blood pressure, fatigue or high cholesterol, these may show you that your liver is being overwhelmed and needs your help.
I have read about some who say that you do not need to worry about cleaning your liver. But if you change the oil in your car, and you do not get a clean filter, you have done you car no good. The oil will be dirty. Why should you treat the filter of the body with any less regard. Your body is much more complicated than your car.
Many people are not overweight despite eating hardly any food. Why? It is all about how optimal the overall metabolism is running, and that is related to your liver. If you have a toxic clogged liver, it will also negatively affect your fat burning metabolism.
A clean and healthy liver will help you burn excess fat. If your liver is compromised, it will slow down that fat burning process. Also the liver is connected to the thyroid function and its hormones, which are regulating full body metabolism.
Liver inflammation brings on scarring of the liver tissue. Given enough time, this scarring can become so severe that the liver stops functioning adequately. This condition is called liver failure.
So you first can have a buildup of fat, the next event is increased inflammation, and then finally internal tissue liver scarring (liver disease). All these conditions build because you expose your body and liver to incorrect intake.
Basically, when you habitually do things, intake things, that overload your liver, you can bring on liver problems. Too much alcohol drinking is a well known example of this. However, it is not the only culprit. The modern diet can effectively do this too. As a result we see many people with messed up livers who are not heavy drinkers.
One of the biggest issues is how we store too much body fat, obesity. As we put on the weight, especially around the belly , we increase all our risks of creating a fatty liver.
There is also high fructose corn syrup and sugar. This over indulgence in our regular diet causes fat to build up in the liver. Look at the ingredients of what we eat today; almost every thing has these two, and often as major ingredients, sometimes even both of them in foods for a double shot of liver danger.
The livers of test animals which were fed large amounts of fructose were found to have developed fatty deposits and cirrhosis, similar to problems that we all expect in the compromised livers of alcoholics.
There are other things to consider too, like pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and environmental toxins.
There is a bright note in all this. You can reverse this with fasting. As stated the accumulation of fat, while hampering optimal liver function, is not necessarily a sign permanent damage. The liver can heal itself.
So if you can start something like a therapeutic fast you can begin to turn things around, and shed the liver of those fat deposits. At the same time you can tend also to speed up that fat burning metabolism. This will slow the fat storing process to a healthy operation, going forward.
Fasting can help your body in a natural way clean up and detox. Your body wants to do this and can do this. Water fasting creates the optimum environment for the body to do what it does best, cleanse and heal.
Even if you do not choose to do a moderate or long fast, every fast helps. And there is the intermittent fasting as a lifestyle tool, which is a good way to start out the cleaning and healing.
Milk Thistle
and other supplements are good to clean the liver. But if you are continually feeding the problem the results are limited. [That is not to say that there may not be some benefits to these.]
I am not suggesting this because I have seen no research on it. What if you on a water fast took a light dose of something like milk thistle? Would that speed the cleans? Or would it be too much detox at one time? Use such innovations with caution.
