#149 Balancing the Anabolic and Catabolic Sides of Life at the Health Optimisation Summit in London 2019

Siim Land (0:00)

Hey, hey, hey, this episode is my speech at the Health Optimization Summit in London, and it's going to be talking about how do you balance the anabolic and catabolic sides of life, and primarily with the help of fasting as well as training. So definitely listen to it, it's pretty good. And you should also check out the show notes for this episode at siimland.com forward slash 149

And there you can find the links to my book, Metabolic Autophagy, the audiobook that you can only get from my website, you don't get it from Audible, just from my website, and also link to the Metabolic Autophagy cookbook that actually gives you like a meal plan type of thing where you can know what kind of foods promote these anabolic and catabolic sides of life and when to consume them.

SPEAKER_2 (0:50)

So yeah, check it out, siimland.com forward slash one forty nine, do you want to know what it is, body mind empowerment, get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven, everything the body needs, control your mind.

Siim Land (1:12)

Thanks for inviting me and super glad to be here in the first health optimization in London. So I'm hopeful it's going to be like many other future events at the same place and potentially in the rest of Europe as well. So, well, the title of my speech is balancing the anabolic and catabolic cycles of life. And it's going to involve a lot about fasting, ketosis, autophagy and those are very trendy terms that you hear nowadays. And, yeah, I'm actually from Estonia, so I'm a kind of professional biohacker, almost doing it as a living.

And I can think that every good book should have like this sort of a starting title. And I think every good presentation should also have like a good starting quote as an inspiration. So I'm going to open up the speech with a quote from Elon Musk who said, I think you should bear in mind that entropy is not on your side. So entropy is from physics and it describes this tendency of living organisms and complex systems to gradually move towards chaos, deterioration and destruction basically. Like that's how the world works and that's how life and death work as well. So you as a living organism are always on the verge of entropy.

And I hate to break it to you, but we're all dying and we're slowly aging. But it doesn't mean that it has to kind of degrade the quality of our life. And hopefully my speech is going to give us some good points or some good tips to alleviate this process of entropy and at least like mitigate it to a certain extent.

So inside your body, this entropy reflects quite nicely. You know, your life is divided into two parts, basically two categories. One of them is where life sprouts into existence, which can be called growth, growing, building and the metabolic or metabolic term for that is anabolism or the growth stage. And this is where DNA synthesis occurs. This is where you grow as a child and this is where you build muscle, etc.

And the other side is where entropy takes place. It's called catabolism or breaking down. And this is basically the aging process and deterioration. So these things are constantly happening on a daily basis. And these things are balancing each other based on the status of what you're doing, what you're eating and so on.

In, you know, this entropy reflects in the way your body deteriorates every day. So there's a tendency of you to lose gradually your muscle mass as you get older. And it actually becomes more difficult for you to build muscle as you get older as well. You know, the growth stage when you're young reaches its maximum peak in the early parts of the life. And in the later stages, it begins to slowly take over towards, you know, entropy and degrading. So it's inevitable to a certain extent. But what you can do is to mitigate it and make sure that you don't suffer from this.

And yeah, as we age, we tend to lose a lot of our functional parts or functional physical qualities such as muscle mass, strength, bone density, even cognition and etc. Those are all signs of aging and getting older.

You would think that in order to prevent that, you would want to be in this growth stage all the time and mitigate the catabolic aspect of living and be always anabolic and growing and building muscle. But there's actually a lot of research to show that this entropy or this catabolic process of degradation has many longevity boosting benefits. So for example, one of the few known ways of promoting lifespan in virtually all species is calorie restriction. And eating less calories just essentially helps you to, well at least in most species, it shows to prolong the lifespan of that species. And there are many different pathways and processes that promote it, such as like sirtuins, you might have heard of them, they're really popular or new, these longevity proteins that are said to promote lifespan and longevity. And there's also like these things like mitochondria, which are essentially the power plants of your cells that produce energy. And as you get older, your mitochondria tend to get weaker and they're not producing that much energy. So in return, you begin to suffer from lack of energy and etc. So these things are very much connected to calorie restriction, where calorie restriction helps these processes to sustain themselves. For example, not eating anything promotes sirtuins and it also maintains mitochondrial functioning. So you're slowing down the aging process because you're being more catabolic, as opposed to just growing all the time.