Hey guys. Lance here. And I’m really excited about these next two videos.
This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a while now.
Today, I’m going to share with you a powerful technique in the fight to defeat aging.
I’m going to show you how to trigger autophagy to clear out a lot of cellular debris,
how to ignite a powerful repair process and how to give your immune system a tremendous boost,
all while losing weight and resetting your entire system.
I'm talking about fasting. So stay tuned.
Welcome back to this series on balancing the AMPK and mTOR pathways,
and this second video on autophagy and fasting.
In the first video, we talked about what autophagy is and why you’d want to trigger it.
Now if you haven’t watched the video, there’s a link to it in the description below.
The script for this video wound up being about 30 minutes long, so, I decided to split it into two videos.
This is the first, and the second will be next week.
In this video, we’ll be discussing the relationship between autophagy and fasting,
a great way to track a fasted state and determine where you are, and then, how to actually DO a fast,
preparations you’ll want to make, tips on the actual fast, and then how to break your fast.
In next weeks video, I’ll go over the stages of a fast…what happens on an hour-by-hour basis,
and then I’ll share my own experience with fasting and try to relate measurements that I took during the fast with the stages of a fast.
We’ve got a lot to cover…so let’s jump right in.
First, I want to emphasize that I’m not a doctor,
and that no one should do anything I say without consulting with a physician.
If you are diabetic, you shouldn’t be doing fasting,
and if you’re pre-diabetic or have any form of metabolic syndrome, you should consult with a physician.
About 6 or 7 weeks ago I did a video where I talked about the benefits of undergoing autophagy,
and I’m guessing that most of us would agree
that we should probably do something to trigger autophagy on a fairly regular basis.
But how do we do that?
Because up to a few months ago, I’m pretty sure that I’ve never really triggered and sustained autophagy…
in my life. Because I’ve never done an extended fast.
The very definition of “autophagy” states that it happens during periods of starvation.
Let’s be clear: if you want to activate autophagy, you need to fast,
you need to use up all of the exogenous nutrients in your body, all the nutrients that you get from your food.
And the longer you fast, the more autophagy you’ll activate.
Whether or not autophagy is activated depends primarily on two nutrient-sensing pathways:
AMPK and mTOR,
which is why this examination of fasting and autophagy is part of a bigger discussion about balancing those two pathways.
In order to trigger autophagy, you need to have the AMPK pathway activated, which shuts down mTOR.
In addition to the nutrient-sensing pathways, autophagy also utilizes two hormones: insulin and glucagon.
Many hormones come in what are called “antagonistic pairs.”
The body reacts to each of them in opposite or opposing ways.
Insulin and glucagon form an antagonistic pair.
Insulin lower blood sugar levels by promoting the absorption of glucose from the blood into liver, fat and skeletal muscle cells,
and is the primary anabolic hormone in the body.
Glucagon, on the other hand, raises blood sugar levels
by releasing liver glycogen and working to raise the concentration of glucose and fatty acids in the bloodstream,
and is the primary catabolic hormone in the body.
In order to trigger autophagy, insulin levels have to be low and glucagon levels need to be high.
You also need to have low liver glycogen stores.
Glycogen is the stored from of glucose, and it’s stored in the muscles and in the liver.
So, to trigger autophagy, you need to have your AMPK pathway activated, which shuts down mTOR,
you need to have low insulin and high glucagon levels, and your liver glycogen stores need to be low.
And finally, having relatively low levels of blood glucose and high levels of blood ketones
seems to be required to kick autophagy into high gear.
To the best of my knowledge, it’s only when you’re fasting that all of those conditions occur.
OK, we know that an extended fast can trigger autophagy, but when? Well, that's a good question.
In my research, I’ve read a variety of articles that state definitively that autophagy starts at…
Well.. they all claim that it starts at different times.
The truth is, nobody really knows.
It’s really difficult to measure autophagy outside of a lab environment.
But a lot of experts agree that in humans, autophagy begins at about 18-24 hours of fasting,
and reaches maximal levels after 48-72 hours.
OK, you’ve decided that you want to try a fast. But how do you do it?
It’s not as simple as just…not eating.
First off, like I said earlier, if you’re diabetic, don’t do a fast.
If you’ve any form of metabolic syndrome, consult with a physician before starting a fast.
In fact, is you’re planning on an extended fast, like longer than 5 to 7 days, you should only do so under the care of a physician.
Next, before you start a fast, you need to do some preparations.
The longer you intend to fast, the more preparation you need to do.
First off, I would recommend getting ketone-adapted, and you can do a couple of things to accomplish this.
First, try intermittent fasting.
This is easier to do than an extended fast, and it’ll prep your body for going without food,
it’ll help to reduce hunger during an extended fast, and it’ll help to create a ketone-adapted state.
So will eating a ketogenic diet.
This will not only make you more fat-adapted,
but it will also elevate your ketogenic state so that you go into your fast with a lower GKI.
More on the a little later.
Finally, you should prepare for ending the fast, and the longer the fast, the more you need to do this.
Plan, purchase and prepare the foods that you’ll be breaking your fast with.
If you’re doing a really extended fast, this food plan should cover 2 to 3 days.
OK, so you’re doing your first fast, and I’m talking about a water fast here, not a dry fast.
There are some liquids that you can consume that will help you get through a fast and the first of these would be water.
Water will keep your stomach filled and help prevent hunger.
Coffee, black and green tea will also do this, and they can have an beneficial effect on autophagy.
So will turmeric, ginger, gensing, medicinal mushrooms, adaptogenic herbs, berberine, pomegranate and elderberries
…although I’m not sure about their calorie content, so I would use them judiciously.
You can also exercise during a fast.
While aerobic exercise probably stimulates autophagy more than resistance training, you need to do both.
Lifting weights will help to preserve your muscle mass, and doing aerobic exercise will stimulate your lymphatic system.
Getting a good sweat on and keeping your blood flowing will flush out the toxins in your body.
Now, exercising while fasting is actually a pretty big topic,
so I’m going to leave that one for a later video in this series on balancing AMPK and mTOR.
Alright, while drinking a lot of water during a fast can help with hunger, it does have a drawback…
especially if you’re also drinking a lot of coffee.
That can act as a diuretic, causing you to urinate more frequently.
And this can flush out more than just toxins.
It can also flush out a lot of minerals, and drinking electrolytes can help to replace those lost minerals.
Here’s what I do when I’m fasting.
Before the fast, I fill a jar about a quarter of the way up with Himalayan pink salt, and then fill the jar with filtered water.
I put that in the refrigerator overnight, to dissolve all the salt,
and then, throughout the fast, I take a tablespoon of that solution and put it in 8 ounces of filtered water and drink it down.
During one of my earlier fasts, I was starting to feel really crappy about 36 hours in,
and replenishing my electrolytes cleared that right up.
Since then, I’ve made sure that I’m drinking plenty of electrolytes a couple times a day and my fasts have gone much better.
Once you’ve been fasting for several days and decide that it’s time to break your fast,
you need to be careful how you go about doing that.
You digestive system has been shut down for a while now, and you don’t want to start out with a big steak.
You want to gradually reintroduce food to your digestive system. So start with a broth or a light soup.
Now you could also start with fruit juices, but the sugars in juice will knock you out of ketosis,
so I usually limit myself to a broth, then maybe a simple soup.
The whole point is to start with something really simple, let that sit for a while and see how it goes.
After a while, try something a little more hardy.
and then fill the jar with filtered water. The longer you fast, the longer you should take to acclimate to food.
It might take a day or two to get back to regular food.
Also, consider this.
When you decide to start eating again, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to knock yourself out of ketosis.
You can keep ketosis going by eating ketogenic.
And that might mean that you can continue burning fat and triggering autophagy, even though you’ve broken your fast.
Whenever I do a fast, I like to know what’s going on, so I always track my progress while I’m fasting.
One way of tracking my fast uses time: how many hours has it been since I stopped eating.
If I know how many hours it’s been, I have a rough idea of which stage of fasting I’m in,
and I’ll be talking about the stages of fasting in next week’s video.
If I know which stage of fasting I’m in, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going on at the cellular level.
But I can also track it using the glucose/ketone index, or GKI.
The GKI is simply a ratio between your glucose level and your ketone level.
And to obtain those, you need to have a monitor.
Monitors that measure glucose, that measure ketones, and monitors that measure both, are widely available and pretty inexpensive.
These are the type of monitors that analyze a small sample of blood obtained through a pricking a finger with a lancet.
OK, to get your GKI, you need to know two things: your blood glucose level and your blood ketone level.
And you get these measurements by analyzing your blood in your monitor.
But first, you need to make sure that both measurements are in mmol/L.
Ketones are almost always measured in mmol/L, but sometimes glucose is measured in mg/dl.
If you’ve got a monitor that measures glucose in mg/dl, divide that number by 18,
and you’ll have the measurement in mmol/L.
Once you’ve got both measurements in mM,
simply divide your glucose measurement by your ketone measurement, and you’ve got your GKI.
For example, let’s say I prick my finger, I draw some blood up into the test strips
and my monitor gives me a glucose reading of 77.4 mg/dL, and a ketone reading of 3.0 mmol/L.
Now I’ve got my glucose and ketone levels, but they’re in different measurements,
so I can’t do the math.
I need to convert the glucose reading from mg/dL to mmol/L,
so I divide 77.4 by 18.
That gives me 4.3 mmol/L for my glucose.
Now I can divide 4.3 by 3.0, which give me a solution of 1.4.
And that’s my GKI, 1.4.
OK, so…your GKI tells you how far into ketosis you are.
But from that, you should have a pretty good idea of what stage of fasting you’re in,
especially if you combine that data with the number of hours you’ve been fasting.
Now, if your GKI is above 9.0, you are not in ketosis.
If your GKI is between 6.0 and 9.0, you’re in a mild state of ketosis.
Between 3.0 and 6.0, you’re now in a moderate state of ketosis.
If your GKI is between 1.5 and 3.0, your state of ketosis is now high.
And if your GKI is below 1.5, you’re in the maximal, most therapeutic state of ketosis.
This is where you want to be. It usually take me about 3 to 4 days of fasting to get there.
I use a monitor called Keto-Mojo, that measures both glucose and ketones.
It costs about $50, and it comes with enough lancets and test strips to do 10 readings.
After that, you’ll have to purchase more lancets and more test strips.
You can get the test strips from Keto-Mojo.
They’ll run you a little less the $60 for 60 each of glucose and ketone test strips.
You can get the lancets at any drug store, and they’ll cost about $10 for 100.
The monitor also comes with a free phone app that takes those readings and converts them into you GKI,
and then keeps track of your GKI over time.
OK, we covered why you need to fast to trigger autophagy, how to do a fast and how to track it.
Next week we’ll go over the stages of a fast, and then I’ll share with you my own experience in fasting.
Catch that video next week and if you’d like to watch all the videos in this series, check out this playlist.
That’s it for me. Until next time, I’m outta here.