How To Live longer and look younger by fasting
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Misconceptions behind fasting and live longer
I am going to share some misconceptions behind fasting and live longer and some science behind this idea and in last i explain how’s my experience with it.
Everybody of us wants to look younger and live longer. There are a lot of things that contribute to longevity, but there is one method accepted by science that you can use to consistently increase longevity.
If I take any organism on the planet earth from yeast cells to spiders, insects, rabbits, dogs... and I reduce their caloric intake by 30%, they live 30% longer.
The only organism which has not yet been deliberately tested by scientists are Homo-Sapiens!"
So Let's start here.
For some time, the conventional wisdom has been that you need to get 3 balanced meals a day to stay healthy.
Ever since I was a kid, “Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner” seemed as natural as sleeping or going to the bathroom.
Breakfast was the most important meal of the day, I needed a healthy lunch to focus the rest of the school day and being sent to bed without Dinner was child abuse.But where did this 3 meals a day idea come from?
WHERE 3 MEALS A DAY IDEA COME FROM
As Abigail Carroll suggests in her book “THREE SQUARES: The INVENTION OF THE AMERICAN MEAL”:
Eating three meals a day was basically invented due to culture, When European settlers got to America, they found Native Americans were basically just eating whenever they felt the urge to, rather than at specified times.
The Europeans took their lack of defined eating times as evidence that they were uncivilized and had them change.In short: The 3 meals a day paradigm is not based off of our biological needs.
How our environment designed us In a Hunter Gatherer culture it wasn’t surprising at all to feast on a big catch, then survive on very little or no food for an extended period of time until they were in need of another big source of fat and protein.
The Pirahã people, an indigenous hunter-gatherer group of the Amazon Rainforest was extensively studied by an anthropological linguist named "DANIEL EVERRET"
He found they do not eat every day or even attempt to do so. They were even aware of food storage techniques yet never used them except to barter with
Brazilian traders.
When questioned about why they do not store food for themselves they explained “I store meat in the belly of my brother”.
Until the advent of Agriculture, eating 3 meals a day and in some cases even eating every day was a near impossibility.
Some of you may be pointing to the fact that the life expectancy in the Paleolithic era was much lower than now at around 33 years, as a sign that our modern eating habits are healthier.
However, infant mortality rate was a big factor in bringing that number down.
You have to understand that one of the effects of modern civilization and technology is that you have common misconception is that a stable blood glucose is necessary for survival.
SCIENCE BEHIND FASTING AND LONGEVITY
why constantly consuming Carbohydrates to maintain blood glucose is not only unnecessary but can be a detrimental and vicious cycle.
So, After you eat some carbohydrates- Bread, Pasta, Candy, Whatever.
Glucose enters the bloodstream and insulin is secreted to distribute the glucose properly.
Via an insulin receptor, glucose enters the cells to produce energy.
This can only happen at a certain rate, so to overload the cell with glucose or have
glucose sit in the bloodstream, 70 grams can be stored in the liver and 200 grams in the muscle.
So you have your morning bagel and some Frappa- "Whatever you want, some vanilla latte cappa thing, you know whatever you got." and you’ve stored all the glucose you can store.
So it has to go into your body fat. As well as storing it as energy, your body puts it in your body fat because the fat cells have less complex machinery as the other cells.
Too much glucose can bind to the proteins and muck up the machinery of the cells in a harmful inflammatory process called Glycation.
It's kind of like pouring pancake syrup into a car engine. The problem here is that if your energy levels start to wane, you can't tap the energy out of your stored body fat because the hormone that does that- hormone sensitive lipase is sensitive to insulin.
Insulin will not allow you to tap body fat for energy.
If you have a bunch of insulin sitting in your blood from processing a bunch of glucose
before and you need energy, you're going to get ravenously hungry and will need to jack
your blood sugar up short term with a snack or something to raise your energy levels again.
This is why if you’re following the recommended American diet, you’re usually going to be stuck in this loop of wanting to eat every time your blood glucose drops and 3 meals
a day will feel very necessary.
Even Medical Doctor Peter Attia fell victim to this: “Despite exercising 3 or 4 hours
every single day and following the food pyramid to the letter, I gained a lot of weight and developed something called ‘Metabolic Syndrome’
Ketosis to the rescue If you stop eating glucose for about 10 to 12 hours, your glucose stores will deplete and your body will start breaking down fat so that the liver can produce something called Ketone bodies.
Ketone bodies produce energy for your cells through similar pathways as glucose but are
much more stable, efficient and don't cause complications like we just talked about.
You may have heard of this Ketosis state referred to as “Starvation Mode” in school, but this by no means suggests you are about to starve.
I particularly dislike this term because it suggests that glucose/carbohydrates is our
body’s primary fuel source, when in fact it is possible to live entirely without carbohydrates.
"Humans have absolutely no requirement for Carbohydrate. Not 1 gram do we require.
We have this fabulous liver that produces as much glucose as you require."
CASE IN POINT
A 456 pound 27 year old man in Scotland fasted an incredible 382 days consuming only water and vitamin supplements.He lost 276 pounds and completed the fast with no ill effects.He was technically in “Starvation mode” this entire time and his body was using his stored body fat for energy.Quick note: Ketosis and Diabetic KetoAcidosis are NOT the same thing.
Several years back, when I first heard about low carb diets, I was skeptical and frankly
when I heard my close friend’s mother was trying the Atkins diet, I was worried for her.
However, after understanding the biochemistry behind it, I started doing the ‘Paleo diet’.
I felt great in general, had a better physique with less effort and much more stable energy levels.Plato apparently fasted for greater mental efficiency, the “Luther of Medicine” Philippus Paracelsus called fasting “the greatest remedy” and Mark Twain suggested to be more effective than any medicine.
The Romans even found that they cure people who were possessed with demons by shutting them in a room without food.thats how people live longer and look younger at that time.
VIEWS OF MEDICAL SCIENCE ON FASTING
Professor of Genetics, David Sinclair and his team found that not eating stimulatesthe Sirtuin proteins which are directly responsible for DNA repair.Professor of Neuroscience Mark Mattson, at John Hopkins University Neuroscience showed
how fasting promotes the growth of new neurons in the brain. This explains why fasting has been linked to the prevention of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and alziehmer.
Upton Sinclair who was born in the the late 1800’s and lived to the swell age of 90,
published a book in 1911 called “The Fasting Cure”. The book was inspired by the personal accounts of 250 people who cured some ailment with extended fasting. The ailments ranged from colds, headaches, constipation to arthritis, valvular heart disease and cancer. This proves fasting is also useful in live longer and look younger.
Dr. Alan Goldhamer spoke about how in 2012, a 42 year old patient cured her cancer (stage 3 follicular lymphoma) with a 21 day fast.All this opened me up to try my first week long fast... but I ended up around the 4th day even though I didn’t feel particularly bad.
MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH IT
Over the following days, I started to notice something.
I used to enjoy eating some refined sugar crap here and there, but after the fast, I
wasn’t so interested. It was like it reset my eating preferences.
Around this time I came across this book "Kuufuku ga hito o kenkou ni Suru" - by Dr. Yoshinori Nagumo.
(It was easy to trust him since he’s 30 years older than me and looks younger than I do.)
FIRST THREE DAYS
I started the Nagumo plan and the first three days were definitely the hardest.
When the clock hit around 11AM, I realized I wasn’t getting the joy from eating that. But i am exicted to try this experiment to live longe rand look younger.
I was used to around this time of day and started really wanting to eat.
My stomach didn’t particularly hurt, it was the equivalent of not being able to play
video games when getting home from Middle School. Around 4PM was when I was convinced that I was really hungry and needed to eat.
Waiting another 30 minutes until 4.30PM to eat was like pushing through a last set of squats.
DAY 4TH
The next two days were slightly easier, and come the 4th day I realized I wasn’t lookingat the clock thinking “Ah...Only 4 more hours to go!”.
AFTER A WEAK
A week later I decided to put the diet to the test by doing a 5 KM runningI hadn’t been working out all that much and a usual running session for me.
It was unsurprisingly difficult, but I never felt physically weak.
I had hunger pangs earlier than normal, but I didn’t feel like I had less strength from a lack of food.
AFTER A MONTH
This made me decide to stick with eating once per day. It’s been a month since I started and I feel great in general, my energy levels are very stable, I feel more focused and surprisingly I have less problems with hunger compared to Intermittent Fasting.Conclusion
Even if I don’t eat the healthiest meal I can now feel confident that my body will have more than enough time to empty whatever excess glucose or toxins I ingested.
So that was my experience with it, Hope you find it useful.so the final conclusion is that anyone can live longer and look younger with the help of fasting or eating once a day.check out blog how to stop procrastination.
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