Lowers blood pressure High blood pressure levels create a heavy workload for your heart. When you fast intermittently, you lose excess water and sodium, and then your blood pressure comes down. How and why intermittent fasting helps lower blood pressure is a very large topic, beyond the scope of this book, but it’s useful to know about this benefit

because you don’t have to count calories or measure foods when you fast, I find their attitude toward food actually becomes more relaxed and healthy.

Fasting is not an excuse to eat poorly. During nonfasting days, stick to a nutritious diet low in sugars and refined carbohydrates for best results. Remember your healing mindset: you are healing and rebuilding. Choose nourishing foods.

Your eyes adjust whether you are in a dark room or bright sunlight. Your ears adjust if you are in a loud airport or a quiet house. The same applies to weight loss. Your body adapts to a constant diet by slowing its metabolism. Successful dieting requires an intermittent strategy, not a constant one. Restricting some foods all the time (portion con

Dietary fat makes the body work harder to digest it, and therefore you spend more metabolic energy digesting fat than carbohydrates.

All systems in the body are tightly regulated by specific hormones. Several key hormones regulate metabolism—the process by which the body converts food and drink into fuel. Ghrelin, also known as the hunger hormone, causes hunger. And peptide YY3–36 causes us to feel satisfied and stop eating. But insulin is by far the most important hormone when

NATURAL FATS Choose from these healthy fats oils (buy organic when you can): avocado, extra-virgin olive, MCT (made from the fatty acids found in coconut oil, palm kernel oil, and certain dairy products), and macadamia nut dairy: unprocessed cheese; full-fat cream, sour cream, and crème fraiche; ghee and butter meat: any kind (preferably grass-fed)

two weeks learning to cut out snacks, and then two more weeks on dropping one meal.

We now know that obesity is a disease of too much insulin (hyperinsulinemia), and we want to eat in a way that doesn’t add more fuel to the fire. That means we don’t want to add more insulin when we already have too much. Instead, we want to add healthy fats.