Fasting, Both Total and Natural

So far, I am 17 pounds down, many more to go.  My diet started as Slow Carb with the modification of one serving of carbs a day.  Then I was able to go full on Slow Carb. And then when went on a trip her sister and my daughter, I fasted and found it so damn easy that I have been skipping breakfast and lunch M/W/F, making a 23 hour fast from one dinner to the next each time.  

The game changer has been electrolytes.  Consuming one drink that has the full range of them (not just sodium, but potassium and magnesium) has helped me not feel brain fog or lack of energy on these fasts. I don’t even feel hungry, as long as I am not around food smells.  I just make sure to sip the drink over hours, as minerals too fast on an empty stomach can cause discomfort.

I buy that human beings are not supposed to eat a steady stream of carbs three meals a day, as we we did not involve in circumstances that allow that. And it makes sense that if long fasts are going to happen anyway, the body might as well use that time to make repairs... So look up autophagy, if that is a new idea to you.

But this then created a puzzle for me. If people are “supposed” to function under fast/feast, why is it that if you eat too quickly after a prolonged fast, you can get refeeding syndrome and actually  die from it?  How is that an example of the body being adapted to its natural environment?

Well, in the hunter/gather context people would still have small finds like nuts, berries, foraged greens, even honey.  And they wouldn’t refuse those opportunistic snacks.  Thus, their bodies were rarely in a state of total deprivation for days and days.

But what about autophagy? Doesn’t it need fasts of several days to start kicking in?  Turns out if your calories are restricted to around 500-800 and almost entirely from fats (thus not from sugars or proteins), the body can start autophagy [1].  Nuts and leafy vegetables would do this. So I plan on in the future taking several days eating meals consisting only of nuts and veg -- while sipping my electrolytes. I believe such an intervention will drastically reduce my odds of getting cancer.

Lastly, I theorized that people have long known about refeeding syndrome and have done things like make broths and start them before feasts. Yup.  Turns out that they have done so.

[1] See this guy https://valterlongo.com/biography/