I always thought of fasting as pseudoscience.  

“Attack of the quacks”, if you will.

But now fasting is run-of-the-mill bog standard.  

My friends and family natter about it.  It dominates podcasts I listen to.  And I'm being stalked on my phone by ads for fasting apps.

Maybe this trend isn't so random.

If the science is right, fasting can help people lose weight, regulate metabolism, reduce inflammation and even slow down aging.

Now, the jury’s still out on the research.  But it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of these claims are true.

Why?

Because fasting replicates the ways our cavemen ancestors lived. 

They fasted.  And when they caught a boar, they feasted.  And when they finished feasting, they fasted again until the next boar came along.

After all, they didn’t have much choice.

They couldn’t mosey on down to Tesco to buy a microwaveable pizza. 

They couldn’t order a box of Krispy Kremes from Deliveroo whenever they felt a bit peckish.

And they couldn’t guarantee they’d have three meals a day, every day, every week and every month.  Like we do.

So our bodies are wired for this feast and famine.  It’s 300,000 years of natural evolution at work.

And if fasting is healthy, it’s because it’s replicating the way our ancestors lived.

But evolution hasn’t had the chance to catch up with how available food is nowadays.  So some people are changing the way they eat instead.  Hence the rising popularity of fasting.

Guess what?

Working life is the same.

Humans are simply not wired to sit on their bums, stare at a screen and process information for 40 hours a week. 

Sedentary bum shuffling is not what our caveman ancestors did either (you don't say!). 

Instead, they spent most of their time hunting and foraging.  And a few hours making tools or preparing food. 

In other words, moving their bodies and crafting with their hands.  Not tapping away at a keyboard and gawping at pixels on their three monitor set-ups.

And if taking a break from eating might improve your physical health because it replicates how our ancestors ate, the logical conclusion is this:

Taking a break from your screen, letting your brain rest and moving around – and replicating how our ancestors used their bodies – might improve your mental health.

Not a radical idea is it?

Yet office jobs mean limited physical activity.

And if you find yourself grumpy, unproductive, uninterested, unable to make decisions or generally lacking in mental energy towards the end of your working day, this could be why.

To bring it back to food – spending all day staring at a screen is the equivalent of spending all day eating donuts. 

This whole idea is known as the Promethean Gap. 

The Promethean Gap says that the world is changing faster than humans can adapt. 

And because we can’t adapt, we suffer.

We suffer physically because we eat too much food.  And we suffer mentally because we don’t use our bodies enough.

Now I'm not going to pretend physical fitness is my area of expertise.

But it is for my PT Zack.  Zack lives and breathes all things health and fitness.

Zack’s trained me for almost a year, so I know this first hand.  And in that time I’ve dropped nearly a stone, built muscle and I’m about to run (and hopefully complete) my first half marathon.

But more than this, Zack makes getting results fun.

And for the next 24 hours, Zack has a special one-time offer only for people on this email list.

If you'd like to join the list, here's the link:

https://followingfulfilment.com/signup