Dieting is America’s favorite past time. Yet, we are not successfully getting any thinner (or healthier). People try on new diets like they try on new hats, switching from one to the next in hopes of finding a good fit.

The problem?

Very few people find a diet they love enough to stick with for the rest of their lives.

Luckily for those people, intermittent fasting provides many of the benefits that they are looking for without actually changing their diets.

Intermittent Fasting Could Help With Diabetes

In a study out of the University of Southern California, researchers found fasting to completely cure type 2 diabetes in mice.

The researchers used mice that lacked the hormone leptin that is responsible for regulating food intake. A lack of leptin leads to intense overeating, which ultimately paves the way to obesity and diabetes.

They fed these obese and diabetic mice a restricted diet. The diet offered alternating fasting with seven consecutive days of regular eating and four consecutive days of restricted eating. Within just a few months of this pattern, the mice were cured of diabetes (and obesity, too).

While many might assume that this miracle was due to the fact that the mice shrunk back into a healthy weight, this actually isn’t the case.

Intermittent Fasting Stimulated Insulin Production

After carefully analyzing the mice, the researchers found that the major healing changes took place in the pancreas.

The pancreas plays a major role in diabetes. One of the landmarks of type 2 diabetes is that the pancreas does not produce enough insulin to process the glucose in the body. The result is elevated glucose, which causes a long string of damage to the body.

In this particular study, the mice began producing insulin following the intermittent fasting. More specifically, they found that the pancreas shrunk during the fasting and rebuilt itself afterward. This rebuilding, it seems, helped the pancreas to heal itself so that it could produce insulin once again.

While we can’t say for certain how your own body might react to intermittent fasting, it is worth giving it a try. There are many reasons to fast (read about it here, here, and here). Talk to your doctor to get more information.