The gray hair in my beard suggests to me that I might be getting older. This is important to me because aging means my levels of growth hormone are decreasing. Growth hormone is vital for cellular regeneration, growth, and healthy tissue repair and maintenance. Said simply, my ability to heal my body is being lost. It is for this reason that growth hormone has been considered as a prime candidate for longevity research as the means to stop the aging process. Many individuals include growth hormone injections as a measure for slowing down aging and extending healthinto our senior years.
Effects of growth hormone:
Increased muscle strength
Increased collagen formation
Stronger bones and improved fracture healing
Decreased cardiovascular disease
Decreased ED issues
Improved mood and cognitive abilities
Decreased obesity
Improved sleep
Signs of Growth Hormone Deficiency:
Depression and/or anxiety
Fatigue
Muscle strength loss
Hair loss
Memory loss / difficulty concentrating
Osteoporosis
Decreased sex drive
Thinning / dry skin
Central obesity
Temperature sensitivity
High LDL and/or triglycerides
Insulin resistance
HGH, as human growth hormone is known as in the clinical world, is a huge and very unstable molecule. It can’t be taken as an oral supplement as it breaks down almost immediately. The only reliable way to get HGH is through injections, which typically run around $3000 a month. This might be important if you are young and have a pituitary dysfunction since HGH is made by the pituitary and without it you end up with pituitary dwarfism. But the typical person might find that cost a bit inhibitory. Plus hormone injections carry risks and issues, not the least of which is that by taking HGH or any hormone from the outside suppresses your own natural production of the hormone.
Body builders love HGH as one of its functions is to release testosterone, which builds more muscle. Because of the high cost and negative side effects, the more common approach is to take supplements that boost your own production of HGH from your pituitary. Dosages for combating aging can be found for around $80 a month – far more reasonable. However there are many natural lifestyle changes that will stimulate increased growth hormone production. These are things that are supportive of healthanyway, so I recommend these.
Eliminate the sugar – sugar suppresses growth hormone.
Lose the abdominal body fat – this also suppresses HGH.
Don’t eat before bedtime – eating releases insulin which suppresses growth hormone and HGH maximal production is a couple hours after going to bed.
Optimize your sleep – for the same reason as not eating 3 hours before bed.
Do high intensity exercise like Interval Training with either aerobic exercise or weights.
Fasting
This last lifestyle factor, fasting, needs a little bit of additional explaining. Fasting is probably the most powerful way to increase your growth hormone production. Fasting just 2 days can double your growth hormone, three days can triple it – a 300% increase. A full week of fasting can increase growth hormone 1250%. These numbers can sound very impressive – massively better than most other techniques. However, the numbers can be deceiving. Once released from the pituitary, growth hormone only lasts a few minutes. Normally the liver quickly converts it into several other growth factors like IGF-1. But during fasting this conversion does not happen and IGF-1 decreases. The HGH level increases in part because it is not being converted into IGF-1. Forhealth benefits this is considered to be a good thing. The high HGH levels help the body to conserve your lean muscle tissue and to convert stored fat into usable energy. In fact your body can actually build muscle better when you are fasting than when you are dieting.
Once you stop fasting the regeneration effects of the high levels of HGH really kick in and will last for up to a week. This is a key point – to really get the full benefit of fasting you have to stop fasting. Maximum benefit is gained when you shift in and out of the fasted state. It takes a minimum of 11 hours before the absence of food affects HGH levels. A nice recent discovery is that total absence of all food is not necessary, just the removal of proteins and carbs. Fat and fiber does not seem to participate in this process. So you can mimic a fast by restricting your food consumption to around 600 calories a day of fat and fiber – think low carb veggie broth soups and salads.
An excellent age fighting and healing protocol would be to do a 60 hour fast mimicking diet followed by 5 days of a high quality protein keto diet. For me that looks like starting Sunday night and doing only veggie smoothies and salads Monday and Tuesday. I start back in with a protein smoothie Wednesday morning and a clean
protein meal with lots of low carb veggies around 4 pm. I repeat my Wednesday meal plan the rest of the week. The Sunday night to Wednesday morning fat & fiber meal plan will boost my growth hormone levels around 300%, which will kick the production of IGF-1 into high gear once you start eating proteins, especially branched chain amino acid proteins like whey protein. If you have damaged tissues as in an injury or chronic inflammation, this is where the boost in healing will happen. Boosting IGF-1 is helpful if you are dealing with chronic inflammation or auto immune disorders.
On the flip side, increasing growth and repair is not helpful if you are battling cancer. You already have too much growth. So this protocol is not recommended for cancer patients. Everything in the body is about balance. Some people are genetically prone to excess growth in the body. These folks want to decrease HGH and IGF-1 levels, while others are prone to degeneration and inflammation. These folks want more growth hormone.
Generally, aging is a degenerative inflammatory process. The new term for it is now inflamaging. Pumping up the growth hormone to improve muscle mass, bone strength, skin thickness and elasticity, energy, brain function, immune function, and tissue repair fights the process of aging. Growth hormone is the hormone of choice to fight this process. Fasting or fast mimicking dieting provides a simple way to turn back the clock in your body. Add in some high intensity interval training exercise a couple times a week with cardio and weights and you can really pump up your growth hormone levels. Moving in and out of growth hormone loads is better than trying to pump it up all the time, as continuous hormone loads produce negative effects. Right now this is the closest thing we have to a fountain of youth.