The PCOS Plan. Jason Fung

food energy (calories)

       THE FASTED STATE: HOW THE BODY USES STORED FOOD ENERGY

      THE WORD “FASTING” may sound scary, but it simply refers to any time you are not eating. When you sleep, for example, you are fasting. In the fasted state, your body reverses its process for storing food. When insulin falls, as with fasting, the body breaks glycogen back down into individual glucose molecules to supply energy to the whole body. This is why we don’t die in our sleep every single night. “Breakfast” is literally the meal that breaks our fast, so you can see that fasting is a part of everyday life.

      Put another way, at any given time our bodies exist in only one of two states: the fed state or the fasted state. Our body is either storing food energy or using it up. High insulin is the body’s signal to store incoming food energy. Low insulin is the body’s signal to use the stored food energy because no food is coming in. In the fasted state, we must rely on our stores of food energy to survive.