Beginning two and one-half weeks ago Ellen and I started a fast. In this case, we were using the guidelines I created a while back for a green fast. We have been consuming nothing other than leafy greens, cauliflower, celery, jicama, avocado, coconut, olives, spices, vinegars, and powdered nutrients. The objective is to mimic a water fast by eliminating carbohydrates, protein, and most fats. We eat fiber, but very few calories. I see this as a multipurpose fast. The elimination of the bulk of the calories, protein, and carbs triggers the body into the starvation response called autophagy. Yet continuing to eat fibers feeds the gut microbiome good guys and allows for the transport and elimination of the toxic wastes that are released by the liver during the fasting response.
During this fast-mimicking diet, our bodies go into tear-down mode. The body literally eats itself by breaking down old pockets of intracellular bacteria, viruses, and old dysfunctional cellular components. As soon as our daily intake of protein dips below 16 grams of protein, our body is triggered into this autophagy (meaning self-eating) state, because we lose that much protein that has to be replaced every day in repairing cells and organs. If we are not eating that required replacement protein, the body has to start sacrificing less important cells in the body to keep the important ones going. If this goes on too long, eventually we sacrifice too many cells and we die of the disease called kwashiorkor – severe protein malnutrition. But the early stages of autophagy are very beneficial for us. Autophagy is like so many other biological processes, it has a Goldilocks zone. Too much is bad, but so is too little. Much of what we call chronic disease is really just too little autophagy.
Autophagy is cleaning out the trash. Can you imagine how your house would look on the inside if no one took out the trash for 40 years? That is what is happening inside us because of our food abundance. For most cells in the body, we have to be without food for 12 hours before we even begin to start cleanup work. (Big drops in available energy, like in muscle cells after a workout, will trigger autophagy in those muscle cells. So trained athletes are better able to get into autophagy more quickly.) For the average person simply decreasing your eating window to 8 hours a day and having no food for 16 hours will generate some autophagy benefits. The issue Ellen and I are facing is that autophagy decreases as you get older. The older you are the more time you need to spend fasting in order to get the benefits of autophagy. It is why 20-year-olds don’t generally have chronic diseases of aging. Their inner house cleaners are still on the job most of the time. By the time you get to 50+, those house cleaners spend most of their time on vacation and the internal house is getting pretty dirty. Dirt equals inflammation and disease. People ask me why their health goes downhill as they get older. Well, this is the biggest reason right here. Your cellular maintenance staff is not doing their job cleaning things up and replacing broken parts inside your cells.
One of the big bonuses of fasting and fast mimicking is that while we are doing this, our levels of growth hormone go sky high. Our stem cell production also goes way up. However, both of these bonuses are missing the last step they need before they go into action. That step happens when we start re-feeding protein into our systems. Specifically, this happens when the levels of the amino acid leucine, released from our digestion of protein, rise up in our blood stream. This releases the growth hormone and stem cells to go do their jobs building, replacing, and repairing damaged and worn-out cellular components. The re-feeding stage is as important as the fasting house-cleaning stage. It is like when you remodel your kitchen or bath. First, you have to tear out the old ugly cabinets and fixtures, then you repair the plumbing and floors and install the pretty new cabinets and fixtures. Fasting tears out the old and re-feeding fixes what you are keeping and installs the new stuff.
This is where the concept of pulsing comes into play. If you are feeling your age or have some chronic health challenge, your insides probably need some remodeling work done. In the health field, we call this rejuvenation. Pulsing between fasting and re-feeding is the ideal way to achieve this. When you are young your body does this naturally every day. You go into autophagy while you sleep and enter into rebuilding mode when you start feeding the next day. As you get a bit older, you can keep this going by doing time-restricted feeding to increase the amount of time you fast each day. A 16/8 pattern – 16 hours of fasting and 8 hours of eating, works well for the middle-aged. But for those of us a smidge past middle age, we generally need a good 36 hours to really kick into autophagy, with peak autophagy being reached at about 72 hours. This is why we need to pulse. We need to cycle between fasting and feasting.
Fortunately, thanks to the work of Dr. Valter Longo on fast mimicking down at USC, we now know that we do not have to restrict ourselves to just water fasting to achieve autophagy. We can simply eliminate carbs and proteins for a few days to get the response we want. Now the question becomes how long should each of the two phases of the pulse last? To answer this really depends upon your health needs and goals. How long you need to fast or fast mimic will depend upon your age and health issues. The re-feeding stage can be considered your normal healthy diet. Dr. Longo recommends one 5-day fast mimicking period each month for healthy middle-aged folks. On the other end of the medical fasting recommendations, we have Dr. Fung who prescribes water fasting for three weeks as treatment for diabetes. So we have quite a range of fasting lengths being used presently for treating disease. Ellen and I are using pulsing for rejuvenation. Neither of us has any particular disease issues going on, but we both are slowing down energetically. We carry too much weight and our skin is not as resilient as it used to be.
So what do we need to do for rejuvenation? Since we both want to drop some pounds, we want to spend a fair amount of time in the house cleaning mode as that is when the weight would come off. At the same time, we want the youth-generating benefits of growth hormone as much as possible. The growth hormone surge after fasting lasts for two to four days. In that same time frame, the stem cell release should have completed its surge. So the re-feeding stage needs to be at least 4-5 days. Since we want healthy young cells, the re-feeding needs to be very clean and top-quality protein, so we will use my Super Amino blend to be sure we get the amino acids needed for rebuilding into the bloodstream. At this point, we have done a protein pulse after two weeks of fast mimicking. Most likely we will go back to fasting for 7-9 days and then do another 5-day protein pulse. That will give us a manageable two-week cycle of pulsing to maximize both the clean-out with weight loss and the rejuvenation from the growth hormone and stem cells.
If the concept of this type of body remodeling is new to you, I would suggest starting with a simple three days of eating like a rabbit and seeing how you do. I know from experience that this style of eating is much easier when your body is already in ketosis and using body fat for energy. When you are using carbs from your diet for energy, it feels pretty unpleasant for a bit when you run out of that energy and have to shift into burning body fat instead. So go there before the three-day experiment. The basic game plan is to eliminate carbs and proteins and most fats for three days. I make a big pot of vegetable soup and add a couple of bags of konjac noodles to eat out of for several days as well as fresh salads for those days.
Rejuvenation is a bold goal, but the alternative is continually propping yourself up with various pharmaceutical drugs to combat the symptoms that result from too many years without the inner house getting cleaned and remodeled.
Take care,
David