Last Updated on November 9, 2023 by Fasting Planet
Can fasting help your digestion?
You’re in the middle of your working day when suddenly, it hits you. What you ate for breakfast this morning is definitely not sitting right with you. If you’re striving to improve your gut health to avoid incidents like the above, should you consider intermittent fasting? How can cutting back on what you eat and even eating when fasting nothing improve your digestion?
Intermittent fasting could improve digestion in several ways. Since you’re eating less when fasting, your body doesn’t have to work quite as hard to digest food. This time off lets the digestive system repair itself. Also, your enzymes will detoxify your system during fasting so you have less waste in your system.
In this in-depth post on digestive health and how intermittent fasting plays a role in it, we’ll explain how digestion works, what happens to your digestive system when you’re fasting, and which benefits your body may experience when you take better care of your gut health. You’re not going to want to miss it!
What Is the Digestive System and How Does It Work?
Every day, you wake up and nourish your body with food. The only time you don’t do such a thing is during time-restricted feeding or intermittent fasting. Each time you eat, the food travels throughout your digestive system.
The digestive system comprises the gallbladder, pancreas, liver, and the gastrointestinal or GI tract. This tract is a long tube that includes organs like the anus, large intestine, small intestine, stomach, esophagus, and your mouth. Your GI tract begins at your mouth and stops at the anus.
Also found within the GI tract are bacteria known as gut flora. These are part of the human gastrointestinal microbiome or the gut microbiome, a big part of gut health. The flora within your gut microbiome serves a very important role, as without them, digestion couldn’t occur as efficiently.
Besides just the bacteria in the gut microbiome, also aiding your digestive abilities are your digestive tract’s organs, blood, hormones, and nerves.
When you consume food, you chew it up and swallow it with your mouth. The food then travels to the esophagus. Here, peristalsis occurs. Peristalsis is the GI tract movement that sends the food to the organs in the tract. The esophageal sphincter will open up as you digest so the food can continue to your stomach.
Upon reaching your stomach, two muscles work to move things along. The lower stomach muscle will release digestive juices that begin to break the food down. These juices include enzymes, bile, and stomach acid, so the juices here are highly acidic. The upper stomach muscle will become calmer so more food can get through.
Peristalsis will occur in both the small and large intestines. The small intestine receives the combination of food and digestive juices, also known as chyme. More digestive juices are released in this intestine so the food is broken down more. Any nutrients and water in the food you consumed are absorbed at this point.
The large intestine receives whatever waste products exist from the small intestine, such as old cells, liquid, and undigested food. Any remaining liquid will be absorbed by your large intestine. Also, your waste, which then was only a liquid, solidifies into stool. Further peristalsis from the large intestine sends the stool to your rectum, where it’s then released by the anus.
The next time you eat, your body does it all over again.
The spinal cord and brain, as well as other central nervous system nerves, are part of digestion. Getting hungry and drooling at the sight of food isn’t all about hunger. Those cues start at your brain, which tells your salivary glands to get working so you feel hungry.
The GI tract’s enteric nervous system also has nerves that can release digestive juices, help food move along the digestive system fast, or halt food progress if necessary.
Besides just nerves, your body’s hormones also aide in digestion. Within your small intestine and stomach are cells that produce digestive hormones. Depending on the hormonal function, you may feel full, hungry, and even have more digestive juices or fewer.
On average, your body will partially digest food in about six or eight hours. By then, the food has reached the small intestine, or at least the stomach. To get to the large intestine and pass all the way through your digestive tract takes about 36 hours. With only 24 hours in a day then, your body is digesting yesterday’s food still by the time you wake up tomorrow to eat more.
Does Fasting Help with Digestion?
A well-functioning digestive system matters more than simply processing the foods and drinks you consume. By caring for your gut health, especially your gut microbiome, you could positively impact your appetite, metabolism, inflammation, immune health, and your weight and athleticism. We’ll talk more about digestive benefits later, so keep reading!
You already rely on time-restricted feeding or intermittent fasting for weight loss, controlling your blood sugar, bettering your circadian rhythm, altering insulin sensitivity, and recycling old cells through autophagy. Is it possible that intermittent fasting could help make your digestive health better as well?
Absolutely! Your digestive system will be restored through time-restricted feeding in the following ways.
Fasting Gives Your Digestive System a Break
To reiterate what we mentioned in the last section, on average, it takes six to eight hours for your digested food to get to the stomach alone, sometimes only to the small intestine. So let’s say as an example that you wake up at 6 a.m. and eat 30 minutes after getting up. By 12:30 in the afternoon, your body is only partly done digesting your food. Yet that’s lunchtime, so you’re eating again.
Take it six hours after that and now it’s 6:30 in the evening. For many people, that’s dinnertime. By this time, since you first had breakfast at 6:30 a.m., 12 hours have passed. Your body still isn’t done digesting your breakfast, as that will take at least 36 hours. So by 6:30 a.m. the next day, the digestive process still isn’t finished. Instead, by 6 p.m. the day after, your body has fully processed what you had for breakfast yesterday.
In the meantime, it still has to digest yesterday’s lunch and dinner as well as any snacks or desserts you ate and, on top of all that, this morning’s breakfast, lunch, and now dinner as well as any snacks or desserts you had today.
You can see then how the digestive system more than works overtime. If any person was expected to do the same duties, there’s no way it could ever happen. We only have 24 hours in a day, so a job that requires 36 hours is simply impossible.
Yet because our ability to digest is only one part of our body, we expect it to keep chugging along and chugging along, even if that’s not necessarily sustainable.
Intermittent fasting calls for the cessation of eating, either whole or in part. No new food is entering your digestive system, which gives your body a chance to process what’s already in there. Then, finally, your body can stop digesting for a while, perhaps for the first instance ever.
Fasting Heals the Digestive System
Your digestive system is with you for life, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be healthy forever. Some habits you engage in can damage this your digestive tract, including the following:
- Using laxatives: Laxatives are promoted to help you pass stool, but the phenolphthalein in most laxatives can actually cause things to go the other way. Now, you’ll have diarrhea that can dehydrate some organisms in your gut microbiome. These can’t work as well, causing damage to your digestion.
- Not getting regular colonoscopies: If it’s been a while since you’ve seen your doctor for a colonoscopy, we don’t recommend waiting too much longer. Colon cancer, which does not necessarily cause painful symptoms, can be one of the leading causes of digestive damage. Worse than that is how deadly colon cancer is, behind only lung cancer in the number of deaths it causes.
- Chewing gum: When you munch on a stick of gum, you don’t swallow it, or at least, you shouldn’t. What you do end up swallowing is a lot of air. This causes digestive bloating that can make you uncomfortable.
- Overdoing it on the alcohol: The harshness of alcohol could lead to stomach ulcers that prevent the digestive tract from doing its job as well. If you already have such stomach ulcers, then booze will only worsen them. It’s much better to scale back or quit alcohol altogether.
- Eating in a hurry: Everyone eats in a rush sometimes, but making a habit of this is not great for your digestive tract. What happens is like when you chew gum, as you accidentally swallow a lot of air. Your stomach also isn’t fully expanded when you start adding food in, which puts a strain on your digestive abilities.
- Skipping the fiber: Speaking of strain, if you’re not getting a healthy source of fiber in your diet, that’s one thing you’ll want to change immediately. Each day, aim to consume 25 grams of the stuff for your gut health.
- Eating a lot at once: When you sit down to eat, do you consume a lot of food? You might want to reorganize your eating habits even outside of your intermittent fasting windows. Take the foods you would eat, shrink their portions, and eat more regularly around the clock.
- Taking medications: When you reach for the NSAIDs like ibuprofen or aspirin too often, you could end up with stomach ulcers.
Refraining from the above bad behaviors is a good start, and so is fasting.
Intermittent fasting may be able to heal your digestive tract. Your gut microbiome will have more healthy bacteria that can slowly repair the damage your GI system has lived with for years now. Combined with the little digesting vacation through intermittent fasting, your digestive tract will be in the best shape it’s ever been in.
Fasting Speeds up Digestion
According to a 2019 article from the National University of Natural Medicine or NUMM, fasting may make it easier for your body to digest food more quickly.
The article cites a study from Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology and says this about intermittent fasting and your digestive speed: “Generally, the benefits of fasting are dependent on the length and time of the fast. If you allow three hours between meals, the migrating motor complex will be able to complete a full cycle in which residual undigested material is swept through the digestive tract. Therefore, even a few hours of fasting may improve digestion.”
What is the migrating motor complex? As part of the small intestine, the migrating motor complex sends enterocytes and undigested food out of the intestine. This happens as part of our four phases that contribute to how long it takes your body to digest food.
The first part of the migrating motor complex is between 40 and 60 percent of the entire process. Motor dormancy will occur at this time. Then, as the migrating motor complex enters the second phase, which is up to 30 percent of the process, phasic contractions will begin, but happen irregularly.
The third phase is among the shortest, lasting 10 minutes max. These contractions follow a slower frequency before relenting to the fourth phase, which is yet another type of contraction. In all, these four phases take about 110 minutes to complete.
As you can see then, the migrating motor complex is an important one, especially in speeding up the digestive process.
Fasting Syncs Your Gut Microbiome with Your Circadian Rhythm
Your circadian rhythm is your internal clock. This rhythm runs on a cycle of 24 hours and manages your energy levels to dictate the periods you’re awake and asleep. Lots of things can throw your circadian rhythm out of whack, including switching from working days to a nightshift or experiencing jet lag. Those late-night snacks can ruin your internal clock too.
In a 2019 publication of the journal Microorganisms, researchers found that some digestive processes are also shared by clock genes, or parts of your circadian rhythm that can express various genes.
Further, the data reports that many habits that affect your circadian clock can also impact the bacteria in your microbiome. These habits include eating late at night, consuming a lot of fat, not sleeping well, getting interrupted sleep, and changing your light/dark cycle.
The gut microbiome can, in turn, influence your circadian rhythm, such as through the introduction of microbial metabolites such as hydrogen sulfide, biogenic amines, vitamins, and short-chain fatty acids.
Dietary choices, such as those you make when intermittent fasting, absolutely are significant in improving the health of your gut microbiome and the normalcy of your circadian rhythm.
Fasting Introduces Enzymes for Detoxification
Within your body is an enzyme system that includes all sorts of different enzymes. Some are metabolic enzymes for biochemical reaction regulation and better metabolic health. The others are digestive enzymes. These enzymes convert our food to energy. Besides these purposes of the enzyme system, another role of this system is to detoxify our system.
Your body is perfectly capable of detoxing itself for better health. This happens all the time through our sweat, urine, feces, and liver. The enzyme system regularly detoxifies, but this admittedly doesn’t work as well when our system is still trying to process and digest all that food you eat.
Once the digestive processes stop during intermittent fasting, your enzyme system can kick into high gear, detoxifying for even more optimal health.
What Are the Benefits of Better Digestion?
Once your digestive tract begins working its best through intermittent fasting, you’ll enjoy more than just faster digestion and more natural detoxing. You may also experience these other benefits.
Better Mood
If you have depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders, did you know part of that could be attributable to your digestive health? Your GI tract does more than just digest food, after all . Many medical and scientific experts refer to the GI tract as your body’s second brain.
Your GI tract and brain have a lot more in common than you would have thought. This Johns Hopkins Medicine piece notes that the telltale gut feeling you sometimes have could be due to the GI tract. Also, those with poor gut health from medical conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome or IBS also tend to experience depression and anxiety with their symptoms. This isn’t solely feeling sad about having IBS, but because of the second brain, or the GI tract.
The GI tract can even release serotonin, or the chemical that induces happiness and other positive feelings. When you get your gut health under control through intermittent fasting, your mood will improve.
More Nutrient Absorption
As we talked about earlier, nutrient absorption as you digest occurs in the small intestine. These nutrients then go straight to your bloodstream, where your body can use them for the sake of your health. Yet a damaged, tired small intestine can’t absorb nutrients very well, nor can it when the intestine is working all the time.
Intermittent fasting is the perfect time to put a pause on your digestive tract. When all its components eventually get back to work, the small intestine may be able to absorb nutrients better, which leads to a healthier you.
More Regular Bowel Movements
When you gotta go, you gotta go, right? Yet sometimes, that’s just not what happens. Your stool could get backed up, which is known as constipation, or you could be going too often if you have diarrhea. When your enzyme system can detox your body, less waste will accumulate in your system. This prevents the kind of stool backups that are incredibly painful.
Better Physical Performance
Another area where intermittent fasting can help your digestive tract is when it comes to your physical performance. You’d be surprised at how the toxins in your system, not to mention all that food, can make you feel. If you’re slow and sluggish when you hit the gym, play a sport, or engage in any physical activity, it’s not always mental tiredness, but what’s going in inside your digestive tract.
Not only are you bogged down with heavy foods, but all the energy your digestive tract needs to pass food through can suck up a lot of your juice too. If you feel lighter when intermittent fasting and able to perform better, that’s all because of the digestive break your system is receiving.
Improved Clarity
When you put the pause on eating through intermittent fasting, more neuropeptides can propagate in your GI tract. Neuropeptides are important brain molecules that send signals straight to the brain. An abundance of neuropeptides may also boost your mental clarity.
Weight Loss
One of the top health reasons to try intermittent fasting is that it can help you lose weight. When fasting for gut health, you may lose weight even more easily, and sometimes without even trying. How? When your enzyme system clears out more toxins during intermittent fasting, you have less waste in your system. Yes, waste can contribute to your overall weight much as water weight can.
Conclusion
Fasting is a great way to lose weight and make other positive changes for your body, including your metabolic health and your insulin sensitivity. Very important is how fasting can aide in your gut health as well.
Your digestive tract gets to take a break while you’re fasting, giving it time to process all the food in your system and begin repairing itself. Your enzyme system also kicks into high gear, removing toxins.
By prioritizing your gut health, you can improve your mental clarity, physical performance, mood, and you can even lose weight. The next time your gut health can use a boost, try fasting! It will certainly make a difference.