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Low-carb healthy fat living. Intermittent fasting. What’s your why?
LCHF Living & Intermittent Fasting | Last Active: Apr 4 8:07am | Replies (97)Comment receiving replies
Thank you for inviting my further contribution. My initial interest in intermittent fasting was sparked by reading about autophagy induced by fasting. There are all sorts of varying posts regarding what it takes to induce autophagy by fasting but the one I'm using posits that after 18 hours of fasting your body will begin to consume damaged and dead cells as fuel and subsequently replace them with new cells. For someone who has lost about 85% of my kidney function, that process holds great appeal. As for sleeping, I don't have that problem, although at 74 years old I do have an enlarged prostate that does cause me to wake up every 2 hours to urinate through the night. Fortunately, I usually don't have any problem falling back to sleep after 10 or 15 minutes. I fence competitively at the national level so I get plenty of exercise and also like HIIT. I use the stairs in my apartment building. I climb 50 flights up and down taking 2 stairs at a time just about everyday. I also have been practicing tai chi for the past 40+ years and do that for about half an hour everyday. Also practicing Zen meditation for the past 40+ years.
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I fast for 18 hours daily. I believe that autophagy is improved by exercising while fasted - only makes sense that in a fasted state your body will be burning fat and anything else it can find like useless proteins. So I do interval work each morning before breakfast (I fast from 2pm to 7 or 8 am the next morning). I also do hot baths - 20 minutes daily followed by a quick cooling off (cold showers in winter and sitting under an overhead fan in summer). I have also gone vegan with the exception of a can of sardines every couple of days and take fish oil.
Over the last 1.5 years my body has changed so much it is hard to describe - I feel better now than I did at 50, I am now 75. More alert, chronic back pain is gone - able to run again, dry skin on my face is gone, periodic skin cancer (basil cell) is no longer reoccurring, mood is better, motivation is better... it just goes on and on. I highly recommend listening to Huberman podcasts on health. He is a neuro biologist researcher and professor at Standford that interviews top research scientists. The amazing thing is that all that I am doing now has become easy - no one seems to believe me. Screaming into the void is how I feel when I tell people what is there for them if they change their lifestyles.