Fasting & Autophagy

in #fasting6 years ago

I began interested in fasting when I began to go to the Hare Krishna temple. People at temple practice fasting 11th day before and after the full moon. Sometimes with special celebrations, they also would fast until sunset. Sometimes, their celebration would last for 5 days or even longer. Food is our basic and primal instinct, if we can learn to control this sensation of hunger, we can certainly become a powerful person. It requires a lot of discipline in order to fast.

Here is a video from my 48 hours prolonged fasting that I did just two weeks ago.

In the beginner stage, it's best to start with 1 day per week. It does take some training for our body to become good at functioning without eating any food. Initially, we would feel kinda shocked, hungry and feel low energy. After a few times of practice, our body will become good at fasting. It will learn quickly to go to our fat reserve and converting them as energy.

As we advance and becoming better, we can then begin to expand our fasting to 2 days or several days in a roll. What I did last year in October was a 21 days 1 meal per day challenge. It sounded like a wild idea but when I actually begin to do it, it's actually not that hard. The first 3 days were difficult and once you get over that, it becomes so easy. You will begin to appreciate the many benefits coming from fasting.

In this article, I want to focus on the benefit of autophagy via fasting. Autophagy is a cell-recycling process that our body does to keep ourself young. Our body functions more like a recycling depot. Most of our protein our body need each day are coming from recycling old protein and only 25% are actually from our food intake. When we go on fasting, we change that 25% to 0%. This process push our body to work harder on recycling. On the other hand, we can eat a high protein diet and reaching 50% of our daily requirement. This will slow down our autophagy process because our body don't need that much protein anymore. In the very extreme with a super high protein diet up to 250 gram or even more protein, our autophagy process gets shut down and leads to a high chance of getting cancer.

By altering the protein content in our diet, we can speed up or slow down our autophagy process. Normally, we want to keep our autophagy working, so that all our old cell, damage cell and cancer cell get removed. Autophagy also keep us young and healthy. Aging is the slowing down of our autophagy process. This clock of autophagy will eventually stop ticking. We want to avoid from premature shut down and do our best to keep this process working.

BALANCE

Some of the vegan, raw-foodist or fruitarian are pushing too hard on the autophagy process and they become malnutrition and weak. Sometimes, it even affect their brain functions. It's important every week, we should get a few days that are for re-feeding. Our body can not grow out of nothing. We still need to give our body some solid building material to heal and re-construct. Even plants, still need their nutrition from the soil. There are is no life can grow purely out of sunlight and oxygen.

OVER FEEDING

75% of people in western countries are over-wieght. It's easy to over eat than doing any type of fasting or protein restriction. For most people, they need to simply focus on fasting. Over feeding simply kill us prematurely

TAKING ACTION

Knowledge are useless without action. There are many people know about fasting but don't do it. Any body can look up how to build a car on the Internet. Without taking any action, no car can be built. Fasting & Autophagy is a very powerful tool that anyone can use.

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@watermelonprince, Fasting is a rule in many religions, such as Hindus offer fast on various festivals, and so do Muslims. Muslims offer rojah. During these fasts they not only clean their bodies, but they are inclined to spirituality also.

The hare krishna temple I go to, they don't fast properly. All they do is refrain from grains. On fasting days, they still inculdge in whole bunch of potato, fruits and vegetable. Pure fasting is nothing, not even water. I admire Muslin's ramadan when the whole country are fasting. It makes the process easier. Fasting in western countries are more difficult because there are cheap food and attraction everywhere and nobody really wants to fast. They just want to eat more.

fasting gave your body an opportunity to rest and recover. with continue practice, the general health of your body is growing from day to day! keep practicing it!

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