When I first got the idea to move to my present location, everyone who looked at the spot thought I was crazy. The building was in such bad condition that most folks thought I should just demolish the existing building and start over. I didn’t have the funds to do anything quite that ambitious, but with a lot of imagination and even more hard work, we rejuvenated the old building and turned it into a very nice office space.
The very first step in this process was to tear out almost everything in the old building. The floors were bad, the electrical was bad, the doors were bad, the plumbing was bad, the roof was bad, but the wall structure was usable. I spent many weekends tearing out all the old stuff preparing for the contractors to put in a couple walls and rebuild/replace all the unusable parts of the building. Before you refurbish anything you have to remove the old, bad stuff.
In the cells of our body, this process is called autophagy. The word literally means self-consumption. Inside every cell there are little bubbles of digestive enzymes called lysosomes that are for digesting worn out other parts of the cell. Whether these lysosomes activate and do their job is controlled by the balance between the two hormones insulin and its opposite glucagon. When we eat, insulin is released and glucagon is shut off. When we don’t eat and have no food floating around in our bloodstream, insulin drops and glucagon is released. Glucagon tells the liver to convert our stored sugar in the liver to feed our body.
Glucagon has another function in which we are most interested. When the level of sugar in our liver gets used up, the liver starts making ketones out of our fat that replace the sugar for energy to most of our cells. Glucagon no longer has any stored sugars to mobilize, so instead it triggers autophagy. It tells all the cells in the body to start breaking down old dysfunctional cell parts, so the body can reprocess the amino acid building blocks. Most of these are then used by the liver to make more sugar for the few cell types that can’t use ketones for energy.
The body is very smart. When there is no food available, it starts to tear down old parts and either burns them for energy or reuses the building blocks to build new cell parts. When we have no food for more than two days, the brain also starts pumping out growth hormones to kick the body into high gear to produce new cell parts and to conserve the protein structures, like muscles, in the body.This is the rejuvenation principle at work in the body.
Many of the diseases of aging, like cancer and Alzheimer’s, are the consequence of a buildup of too much junk protein in our cells. In our modern world of food abundance, how often do we go more than two days without any food? The natural clean-out and build-new-parts process never happens any more. It has been hypothesized that the epidemic of autoimmune diseases right now may be due to the buildup of old dysfunctional immune cells in our body. We are not attending to the need to “take out the trash” and clear the decks, so we can rejuvenate our bodies.
There have been a lot of scientific studies on lab animals demonstrating that periodic fasting increases both health and lifespan. Throughout history fasting has been the therapeutic intervention of choice for most any disease up until our modern medicine creation. Cultures, where fasting for social or religious reasons are the norm, do show increased life spans and improved health.
Our culture has lost connection to this most ancient method of super stimulating the clean-out and repair of our bodies. The Fountain of Youth exists right here in our own body, but we never turn it on.
Now for the good news; complete abstinence from food is not required to turn on all this healing. We can trigger autophagy simply by eliminating carbohydrates and certain amino acids from our diet, while decreasing our caloric load to less than 600 calories per day. What does that look like: lots of low-carb vegetables and a bit of healthy fat each day – no sugars, carbs, or protein foods. Low carb veggies are only about 20-30 calories per cup, so 9 to 10 cups of these veggies a day provides a nice filling trio of meals. At the same time it allows you to slip ever so easily into autophagy to begin the overhaul of your body. Typically we like to keep the autophagy phase in the body to only 5 to 14 days, so we can regularly engage the rebuilding phase of the rejuvenation process.
After a few days of clean-out, the body releases a huge supply of stem cells that travel to any weak areas of the body and build fresh new functional cells. This begins almost immediately after you start re-feeding the body by increasing your caloric load back to normal levels – specifically when you increase your protein load or your carbohydrate load. This process is controlled by something called mTOR. This rebuilding process is something we want to cycle in and out of, as too much of it increases inflammation and the buildup of junk proteins.
In simple terms, for maximum health and rejuvenation we want to cycle back and forth between cleaning out and rebuilding the body. This is accomplished through cycling between fasting and feasting. When we fast we clean out and when we feast we rebuild. If all we do is feast, we get clogged up and degenerated; we get old and have the diseases of degenerative old age. These diseases are not the natural outcome of aging, they are the consequence of never taking the time to “take out the trash” and clean the cells of all their debris.
The miracle of autophagy is available to every person. You don’t need any special medications or hospital stays. In fact autophagy is the most powerful way to avoid medications and hospital stays. All we need is a change of lifestyle mindset. Constant abundance is not good for either the body or the soul.