#53 Autophagy Without Fasting, Breaking Addictions, and Brain Boosting Biohacks - Q&A Episode!

Siim Land (0:00)

What are the most powerful biohacks for increasing brain power? Is it possible to gain the life extension benefits of autophagy without fasting for several days in a row? What?

How do you quit addictions? How to break a dry fast? And what kind of routines and habits keep me on point?

These are some of the few questions we are going to be talking about in today's Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. My name is Siim Land, and this is a special Q&A episode about the questions I asked from my YouTube community page.

SPEAKER_2 (0:34)

I want to ask you a bunch of questions, and I want to have them answered immediately.

Siim Land (0:38)

Without further ado, let's talk about Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (0:42)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (0:48)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_3 (0:50)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (0:53)

Okay, I'm gonna start off with probably one of the most juiciest and interesting questions of the bunch.

Is it possible to gain the benefits of autophagy without doing days-long fasts?

So, let's go through some of the basics. Autophagy is the cellular detoxification process that requires the abstinence of nutrients.

Any type of energy, whether from carbs, protein, fat, exogenous ketones, BCAs, or fiber will inhibit autophagy to some degree. To induce autophagy, your liver glycogen needs to be low. You need to suppress the anabolic pathway of mTOR, which is the pathway that signals your cells to grow and replicate. You also need to upregulate AMPK, which is the fuel sensor that gets released in energy deprivation and fat burning. And you need to be in this depleted state for at least a day or even more. Autophagy is a very new thing and we don't know much about it, and that's what the current research is showing us. However, what we also know is that autophagy is a matter of degree, and it's happening in different tissues all the time. There are even some foods and compounds that boost autophagy even while eating. Exercise and heat saunas can also stimulate autophagy. So what I propose is that rather than looking at autophagy as something regulated by food, think of it as mediated by the overall energy homeostasis of your body. Whenever your body is in a depleted state, you're burning more fat, you're keeping your lymph system active, you're using your endogenous energy sources from your internal stores, and you're stimulating autophagy at least a bit more. Therefore, if you were to upregulate the AMPK boosting pathways that make your body burn its endogenous fuel sources and suppress the mTOR boosting pathways that register the presence of abundant nutrients, then you can induce mild autophagy while still eating on a regular basis. Are you serious? There are also some good research by Walter Longo and his Fasting Mimicking Diet, which kind of mimics the physiology of fasting to a certain degree, is going to put you into deep ketosis, but at the same time, you may not gain the full benefits of autophagy, like this deeper cellular cleansing. But at the same time, you know, it's a still great way of kind of restricting your nutrient intake and priming yourself to be more pro autophagy, if that makes sense. The best and most surest way to trigger autophagy is to fast for at least 72 hours. That's the general milestone where you can see that autophagy is beginning to really ramp up, but you know, you can't fast all the time for that long, unless you have a lot of body fat. But you can still trigger autophagy and gain some of the benefits without going through these extended fasts. So here are some of the tips for that. Number one, you need to still practice intermittent fasting every day. At minimum, you will want to fast for 18 to 20 hours every day to prime your body to produce more ketones and to deplete your energy stores. The truth is that you're not actually fasting as long as you think you are, because digesting food takes a long time, and before you can enter into a fasted state, you need to be burnt off the energy or the calories that you consumed in your last meal. It depends on what kind of a food is and how much you ate, but generally, it takes about six to eight hours for your body to break down the nutrients, absorb the nutrients, and clear out the bloodstream from those nutrients, and only after that, you're going to begin your fast. So in reality, if you eat dinner at 8 p.m. then you only begin to fast in the middle of the night at about 1 to 2 a.m. In the morning, you've been fasting only for, let's say, seven to eight hours, not 12 hours, as you might think.