Fast With Food

This post was SPONSORED by ProLon. All opinions are my own.

Wouldn’t it be sublime if you could finally get rid of the visceral fat around your belly, have more energy, and help your cells act like they did when you were younger, in only three months?

You wouldn’t have to starve, suffer on a never-ending diet where you deprive yourself of so many foods you enjoy, or exercise incessantly to ensure that all these awesome things actually do take place in your body.

Here’s what you’ll have to do: Eat a meticulously formulated, strictly controlled assortment of food with high healthy fat, very low protein, a moderate amount of carbs, low sugar and salt for only five days a month, for three consecutive months. You’ll accomplish all the really good things that fasting does, but it’ll be safer and easier, give you more energy, and, you’ll get to eat!  

This game-changing dietary program, called the ProLon® Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD™), has been scientifically proven to positively impact biological aging and related health risk factors.  Those are pretty weighty claims, but considering more than $26 million of federally funded research went into creating the program, and it was in development for 20 years, I wanted to give it a try and tell you about it!

Throughout my experience (at the time of writing this it was day 4!) I’ve lost weight; my mind is clearer and brighter; my insides feel ‘cleaner’, and I have plenty of energy.  Going on the plan isn’t the easiest undertaking (I felt a bit headachy on the second and third days), but I forge on when I think of all the great things it’s doing for me.  Eating like this for five days isn’t an insurmountable goal. Over 20,000 people have already experienced the diet.

Fasting Isn’t Fun, But It Really Makes Sense

Improving our health by fasting dates back many centuries; as a matter of fact, Hippocrates and Plato were big fans of fasting. Can’t get better endorsements than theirs, even if they’re not on Yelp! And, scientists believe that ever since hunter-gatherers had erratic access to food, humans have evolved with livers and muscles that store quickly accessible carbohydrates in the form of glycogen, and fat tissue holding long-lasting energy reserves. We could sustain ourselves for weeks without food, as long as we had water!

The beauty of fasting is that “it pressures the body to shift from using glucose for fuel to using fat,” said Dr. James Kelley, consulting medical science liaison with L-Nutra, the company that created the ProLon fasting with food program. The fat is converted to compounds, called ketones, during this process, which is a source of energy that burns more efficiently than glucose, Dr. Kelley told us. “But the most interesting effect of fasting for many days in a row is the impact of regeneration and rejuvenation. When the body goes into a fasting state, key nutrient-sensing pathways are turned off, and regenerative pathways are activated. This triggers the whole body to react to optimize itself and become more energy-efficient and generally healthier.”

We need to “stress” our bodies at the cellular level way more than we usually do, at least when it comes to nutrition, Dr. Kelley explained. That means not feeding it the way we normally do,  so it’s a good form of stress. “Americans eat too much food, especially foods that can impede the cells in our bodies from functionally optimally,” he said.  Many of us get too fat and too sluggish as we age.  We don’t give our cells a chance to naturally and properly regenerate and rejuvenate, so we’re stuck with loads of damaged, poorly performing cells that can cause all kinds of havoc on our bodies, and contribute to age-related illnesses.

A Compelling New Way To Fast (With Food)!

It takes lots of energy to carry around excess weight, and if we keep eating more energy than we expend, we just keep getting fatter, more sedentary, and less healthy. The ProLon Fasting Mimicking Diet “hijacks the same burn mechanisms in our bodies as if we’re fasting, and melts away your fat,” Dr. Kelley said. “It looks at every single cell in the body and says, ‘are you healthy enough to be repaired do I need to delete you?’ By eliminating poorly functioning cells and restoring others, the ProLon Meal Program activates a system-wide spring cleaning. You wind up with new tissue sitting next to optimized old tissue.”

When you’re on the ProLon Diet, your body uses the energy you’ve stored, lowers the amount of energy you need, and gets rid of your excess unwanted fat, so your body becomes more efficient!

The ProLon Fasting Mimicking Diet isn’t magic. “It simply takes advantage of your body’s natural processes that are built into you,” Dr. Kelley explained. The diet can affect a wide range of markers that contribute to aging, including helping to maintain healthy levels of cholesterol, blood pressure, fasting glucose, and inflammation. “The benefits are best felt if you train your body over a three-month period,” Dr. Kelley added.

The Food on Your ‘Fast’

The ProLon fasting with food program provides all the foods you’ll eat during the five days, packaged in five individual boxes marked Day 1 through Day 5. An insert offers suggestions on what to eat for each meal, but you can consume the foods for the day in whatever order you’d like.  They include plant-based energy nut-based bars, soups like minestrone and quinoa and tomato, snacks, drinks, and supplements.  

You won’t see a single artificial ingredient. The minestrone includes peas, vegetable stock, parsley, carrot, and olive oil. The choco crisp bar is made with almond and cocoa butters, chocolate chips and brown rice. And, a tropical berry flavor glycerin drink “is like having a Red Bull, but for fasting, since glycerin is one of the components of energy,” Dr. Kelley said. “The food is remarkably tasteful and fresh tasting. It was created by Italian food scientists, who love good food.

The scientifically developed, plant-based foods optimally nourish your body while promoting regenerative and rejuvenating changes, but not activating any pro-aging processes. It also gives you the energy and nutrition you need to maintain lean body mass, which a traditional fast won’t do,” Dr. Kelley emphasized. You’ll eat 1,150 on the first day and about 800 calories on days two through five, so unless you’re used to eating thousands of calories every single day, you won’t starve!

*ProLon has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Its product is intended for use by healthy individuals who want to optimize their health and wellbeing, not to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. You can take a health self assessment evaluation to find out if ProLon is right for you.