It’s unfortunate that time restricted feeding is also called fasting, when it should probably just be called normal eating. You are just getting rid of snacks and eating at set meal times, and this will greatly reduce bingeing and make moderating your intake a million times easier.
Even so, there’s many benefits you simply don’t get from merely dieting, or you get them at such low levels that it’s not worth mentioning. Even so many calories in calories out parrots will continue to die on that hill but you can’t reach everyone.
At 36 h you should be into light ketosis, but really no one has to ever measure their ketones. If you are not in ketosis, and your blood sugar is high, that just means you have a lot of fat in your liver. Your liver is now taking this opportunity to get rid of that ectopic fact in your liver cells by turning it into sugar. This is perfectly healthy, so don’t worry about these magic numbers – your body is complex, but you can be assured if you are fasting your body is working hard to heal itself.
Your BDNF and NGF and growth hormone should be elevated by now, too. These will allow you to grow new nerves and neurons when you break the fast. Sirtuins will be elevated, which will start repairing the DNA. You should have significant autophagy as well, which is simply gobbling up junk proteins and organelles within the cell.
At 36 h you will have elevated fat burning and metabolic rate significantly due to release of adrenaline. Your macrophages will also be in overdrive, roaming around and eating up plaques, bacteria and dead cell material. These macrophages can also heal important organs like the kidney by lending them mitochondria when they are in a damaged or diseased state. You’ll also have elevated interferon levels, which will help fight off viruses!
In addition to all this, at 36 h you should have greatly elevated growth hormone. This is very important not so much for muscle cells but for organ regeneration. Organs like the thymus and testes typically dwindle to nothing as we age, but adding growth hormone can reverse this process. Which is very important because the thymus controls the immune system and the immune system does all your body’s repair, including holding back the ravages of aging!
Lots of people talk about gluconeogenesis, but most of them have little idea what they are talking about. Around 90% of all gluconeogenesis comes from glycerol, not from protein. When you consume whole proteins, only miniscule amounts are typically converted to glucose. When you are in ketosis this goes up a bit and some aminos that normally never get burned can be burned, but even then it’s generally quite low.
If your body converted just one pound of meat to glucose, you would die from the byproducts. If it did work as most think, everyone on the carnivore diet would die on the first day! When you are starving to death, your body will do whatever it takes to create energy, and this is what happens in rabbit starvation – your body turns large amounts of meat into glucose and the ammonia byproducts kill you.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson put this to the test by living in a metabolic ward for a year and eating only meat. He did fine on fattier meats but when fed on rabbit alone, he developed rabbit starvation in just 3 days even though the amount of meat consumed was only around 2000 calories. Yet many carnivores and body builders consume way more protein than this every day with no issues, because the body only burns large amounts of protein when your body is starved of other energy sources!
At 72 hours you reach homeostasis. Your autophagy and most other benefits should be at their maximum or close to it, though ketones will go up and up for days yet.
At this point, up to one third of the less functional white blood cells have been fused or destroyed. Once you break the fast, you will have a largely brand new immune system because they will be replaced by new ones.
Better tolerance to chemotherapy and better cancer outcomes have also been recorded.
You also start to release stem cells from your bone marrow at this point. These are totally undifferentiated stem cells called mesenchymal stem cells. They can differentiate to become almost any type of cell in the body. This is extremely helpful for healing serious problems.
After 14 days, autophagy actually starts to go DOWN. So if I did have some very serious issue I was trying to heal, like neurological issues from traumatic brain injury, this is probably the maximum I would try in a single fast.
Many with serious cancer have also tried these long fasts, and sometimes had amazing results. But these long fasts can be risky, especially when ill.
You may have to discontinue many medications before fasting. Just make sure to include your doctor in the process if you are on meds. And again, if the doctor is unhelpful there are clinics available where you can fast under medical supervision.
Music courtesy Karl@whitebataudio
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