Are you intermittent fasting? Training while fasted? Wanting to know the do’s and don’ts of fasting? Want to supercharge your weight loss goals? What does coffee or tea do to your fast? And autophagy. Yeah autophagy. Believe me, you need some autophagy in your life.
This week’s post is inspired by another of Doctor Rhonda Patrick’s podcasts, and if you’ve been around a while, you know she’s one of my go to experts. It’s about fasting, a little bit of the meat and potatoes, but more of the sides. Some of what fasting is and why it works, but more the tips and tricks to ensure you are fasting optimally.
So, what’s fasting?
Basically not eating. But in today’s health space not all fasting is created equal. Let’s define the variations of the fasting protocols and why they’re beneficial.
Intermittent fasting (IF) – This is a daily practice that involves not eating for periods of time for a maximum of 24 hours. At minimum, IF is considered not eating anything (or drinking anything of enough calories) that triggers the digestive process for a minimum period of 12 hours. So, let’s say you stop eating at 7 pm, you should only eat again at 7 am the next day. That would be a 12 hour intermittent fast. Experts say 12 is okay, 14 hours is good and anything above 16 is power. Ladies caution, studies and anecdotal evidence show that intermittent fasting can physiologically over-stress highly active females. The benefits? Some autophagy (or DNA and mitochondrial repair) and via the shift of energy production to fat (ketones) anti-aging genetic pathways are stimulated (as it gives the mitochondria a break from use/damage).
Time Restricted Eating (TRE) – TRE is the other side of the coin of IF. It’s effectively the same, eating and not eating during specific time windows, but TRE focuses on eating when metabolism (digestion) is optimal. This is unsurprisingly during the day, in accordance with the body’s natural circadian rhythm. I’ve gone deep into that here. A typical TRE person will eat for 8 hours a day and fast the remaining 16, often eating between 8 am to 4 pm and then fasting again until 8 am the next day. The benefits are the same as IF, with one critical bonus of improving insulin sensitivity via robust fasting glucose levels.
Prolonged fast – Not eating for periods longer than 24 hours . And yes, this is doable. You will not die, or I would be dead. But, as always, be smart. Do research, discuss it with those with expertise or experience, and listen to your body. Unlike the mini-fasts of IF and TRE, now you are swimming in autophagy. Not only are cells and DNA being repaired, damaged ones are being thrown away and actually recycled to create new protein molecules. As mentioned below, organs shrink and upon re-feeding regrow with rejuvenated tissue. This is probably due to the spike of stems cells activated during long fasts, which makes sense as they are sent out to replace the junk cells that are being cleared away.
Fasting mimicking diet (FMD) – Patented by Dr. Valter Longo, this 5-day plan creates many of the benefits of true fasting via an excessively low calorie intake. For people truly worried about consuming no food or find that too challenging, this is a good option. It mimics many of the autophagy an insulin benefits discussed above.
And who should do what? Like everything, it depends on the individual. So before embarking on any practice, be responsible. But a good summary is that it would be “wise to combine“ all the practices, some regularly and some periodically. Personally, I do a 12 to 14 hour fast every day and then a 16 to 20 hour fast once a week. I also do 3 to 5 day fasts, consuming only juice and/or water for that period, two to three times a year.
But this was the tidbit of the podcast that caught my ear.
“If you’re training fasted you get really robust enhancements in glucose sensitivity but really robust enhancements in mitochondrial adaptations to using fatty acids. Basically your mitochondria become really primed for fatty acid use which make sense if your in a fasted state your depleting your glucose and you have more of these fatty acids that are available for energy. There is a lot of increased activity in genes that regulate fatty acid metabolism, basically they’re really expressed when you train in a fasting state”.
Basically, if you’re shooting to lose weight, of which exercise must be part and parcel, exercising in a fasting state can be very effective. The mitochondria, aka the energy centers in cells, will learn to better use fat as an energy source if you “train” them by exercising while fasting. An important note, this is under light training of under an hour in duration or if you are doing high intensity training like weightlifting. Dr. Patrick does not recommend doing endurance activity in a fasting state.
The rest of the podcast focused a lot on coffee. Why? Because a lot of people wake up the morning wanting to get into that cup of Joe but are concerned it will knock them out of the fasting state. The conclusion basically is yes, you can drink coffee and it won’t negate the positive consequences of fasting. But, this can only be black coffee, or plain tea, aka no sweeteners or creams or milks or anything else of any kind. Coffee or tea itself has too little calories to trigger digestion, but a little bit of anything like cream, butter, milk, sugar or honey does.
Another interesting add on is that recent studies have shown coffee and tea actually boost autophagy, one of the main benefits of fasting. Autophagy is an interesting biological function where the body basically removes dead or damaged cells. This is hugely beneficial in a variety of ways. It’s really not that important why, the nitty- gritty chemistry is complicated. [But if you want to know it’s due to polyphenols.]
But the point is autophagy is great for health and it’s something that has gone near extinct in our everything on demand overconsumption world. It’s actually suspected to be a phenomenon of evolution. Because our ancestors had to actually grind hard for high calorie food, essentially putting their lives on the line each and every hunt and gather, they went long stretches of time without eating, easily a few days. So, clever that it is, evolution figured that would be a opportune time to use the energy usually dedicated to digesting to design a cleaning and repair function we now call autophagy. Dr. Longo has even proposed that during autophagy all of our organs regenerate themselves, going against the ‘well-established’ scientific notion that the liver and skin are the only organs that can do so.
The remainder of the episode covers questions around how best to re-feed after fasting and the effect of electrolytes and exogenous ketones on fasting. All that bonus material, as well as my personal experimentation with juice fasting (is it fasting?), is available to subscribers. So, please sign up on the home page.
All information and quotes above are drawn from the below podcast.
Photo by Jonathan Pielmayer on Unsplash
Disclaimer:
Remember dear reader, I am neither a doctor nor any sort of medical physician in any capacity. None of the information presented above can be construed as any sort of medical advice in any sort of manner. You as the reader is solely responsible for creating and implementing your own physical, mental and emotional well-being, decisions, choices and actions. As such, the reader agrees that the author is not and will not be liable or responsible for any actions or inaction taken by the reader or for any direct or indirect results. This information is simply presented and whatever you decide to do with it is your choice and your responsibility.
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