Hey there and welcome to Pursuing Health. I'm Dr. Julie Fouche, family physician and

former CrossFit Games athlete. Here is your bonus weekly CrossFit Health Tip, which

was originally published on CrossFit.com. Enjoy.

I'm here today with Dr. Mike Malin, emergency medicine physician, and we're going to be

talking about fasting. So first of all, how do we define fasting?

Well fasting is not eating, and there's lots of ways to not eat, but typically what

we hear about these days is something called timer-stricted feeding, where you only eat

to in certain times of the day, or actual fasting, where you're going periods of time without

taking in that food. Got it. And how does fasting impact our health?

In so many ways. I mean, believe it or not, the average American eats 15 hours a day,

which means that they're basically eating when they go to bed and then immediately when

they wake up. And if you eat like that, you don't give your body the opportunity to

sort of clear out the byproducts of metabolism from the day. And your cells need that.

They're not used to be in an anabolic, let's build state all the time. They need that

opportunity to turn off for a little while and to clear up some of those proteins, those

broken down proteins that you've created throughout the day.

What if some of the studies that are looking specifically at timer-stricted feeding or

per-long fasting, what are they telling us about decreased risk of different chronic diseases?

Lots of things. So we're seeing decreased rates of obesity, improved blood pressure, decreased

insulin resistance, better lipids, lower cardiovascular disease, decreased cancer and inflammation

risk. So quite a few improvements in life just by not eating all the time. And it's really

interesting that you could do something as simple as just not eat every hour of the day

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