Last Updated on April 12, 2024 by Fasting Planet
Stress is an unavoidable part of life. Whether it’s your job, tight finances, or another situation that causes you stress, knowing how to relieve your stressors is the key to good health. Yet what if we told you that not all stress is bad? Hormesis is a positive stress-inducing process that can lead to growth. Is it possible that fasting can enhance hormesis?
Fasting, and especially intermittent fasting, can induce the hormetic stress necessary to promote bodily growth and strength as well as better adaptability through hormesis. It’s recommended you fast for 16 to 48 hours for the most hormetic benefits.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through hormesis, how it works, and how it benefits you. We’ll also dive deeper to explore fasting’s role on hormesis and even recommend a few intermittent fasting types to try. You’re not going to want to miss it!
What Is Hormesis?
Although you might not be familiar with hormesis as a concept, it’s surely something you’ve experienced in your regular life before.
For example, have you ever had your boss push a project on you at the last minute? You were stressed by it, but you let that pressure push you into working quickly and efficiently to get it done. That’s an example of hormesis.
So too is getting into strength training, whether at home or the gym. You’re new to this area of fitness, so your squatting abilities are not much for now. You can only squat roughly 45 pounds. As you continue with strength training, and as you augment your exercise with a healthful, nutritious diet, you can soon squat more weight. This is also hormesis in action.
Okay, so what exactly is hormesis anyway? Hormesis is referred to as an organization of cell processes that causes a biphasic reaction when levels of a condition or substance go up. In other words, when you increase the pressure through stress for a limited period, you promote positive changes.
In the example of squatting more weight during strength training, when you exercise, your bodily inflammation increases, as does your oxidative stress and muscle damage. The injury to your muscles, albeit temporary, is why when you wake up the next morning, you’re sore from working out.
Your muscles will recover though, and more importantly, when you exercise, you’re boosting your levels of both testosterone and growth hormone. These hormones allow your muscles to develop fresh muscle fibers as the muscle tissue is rebuilt. The oxidative stress increase also works to calm inflammation through the triggering of antioxidants.
You don’t only have to use hormesis to get huge at the gym. Others harness the power of hormesis for daily resilience to the bad type of stress. This is possible because hormesis allows you to develop an adaptive stress response, including the muscles example above.
Your body even uses hormesis when sleeping. Yes, that’s right. Every evening, when you slip off into dreamland, your body makes all sorts of positive changes. Muscle repair will happen while you sleep. Hormones will flood your system to manage your energy usage and rebuild other damaged cells. Your blood pressure, breathing rate, and heart rate also fluctuate overnight to support the health of your cardiovascular system.
How Do You Induce Hormesis?
Since hormesis is stress-related, it’s not a bodily function that happens all the time. If you’re interested in inducing hormesis in your own life, the following factors may be able to make it happen.
Sun Exposure
One of the easiest ways to activate hormesis in your body is to spend a couple of hours outdoors.
Sun exposure is inherently stressful. If you stay out too long, you could burn your skin from the harsh UV rays. Prolonged sun damage can ruin the elasticity and appearance of your skin, making you look far older than your years. You could also get skin cancer.
Yet your body also has the ability to safeguard you from cancer through limited sun exposure. This 2005 report from the Journal of the National Cancer Institute says that some sun but not too much can trigger the production of vitamin D.
Vitamin D is a wholly beneficial vitamin, allowing your immune system to work as intended, promoting phosphorus and calcium absorption, and increasing the production of antioxidants and testosterone.
How much sunlight is appropriate for the average person can vary, but it’s at least 10 to 30 minutes of midday sun.
Oxygen Deprivation
Hypoxia, which is also referred to as oxygen deprivation, may sound scary, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. In a controlled environment and using something like an oxygen trainer, you can safely reduce your quantities of oxygen for hormesis.
If you’re not familiar with an oxygen trainer, it’s a type of device you wear when using a stationary bike or walking/jogging. The mask gives you air that contains less oxygen, then switches the air to that with more oxygen, then less, then more, and so on.
Through this high-altitude training or hypoxic training, it could be possible to physically perform better. A 2010 study from Cell Research reports that your body may make more mitochondria when you cause neuronal stress by reducing oxygen.
Cryotherapy
Extreme changes to temperature can also help you meet your hormetic goals. If you’d prefer very cold temps, then cryotherapy is one such option. When you receive cryotherapy, temperatures can dip as low as -250 degrees Fahrenheit.
After just a few minutes in a cryo chamber, hormesis might inspire your body to boost antioxidant production for a healthier immune system and less inflammation, notes this classic study in QJM and this 2007 publication of Infectious Agents and Cancer.
Infrared Saunas
What about heat therapy? Heat-shock proteins activate when you visit an infrared sauna and spend a little under 30 minutes there. You may have better control over cellular aging speed and improved stress response, says this report.
Consuming Gluten
We talked before about how exercise induces hormesis, but did you know your diet can as well? When you eat foods rich with gluten, hormesis may activate. That said, if you have a gluten sensitivity or allergy, then your T-cells will kick into gear, causing inflammation and other symptoms of intolerance. Thus, tread carefully with this one.
Drinking Alcohol
Another way to induce hormesis through your dietary decisions is by consuming alcohol. This is one of those situations where less is certainly more. Overconsuming alcohol can lead to intoxication, not to mention painful gut inflammation.
Can Fasting Induce Hormesis?
You’re now aware of lots of ways to induce hormesis, some of them better for your health than others. That brings us back to the main question: can intermittent fasting cause hormesis as well?
Yes, indeed. After all, when you intermittent fast, you deprive yourself of food and/or water for sometimes as long as 24 hours and, for more experienced fasters, even lengthier spans than that.
Fasting has a long-standing evolutionary basis that proves its effectiveness. In the days when you couldn’t just go to the grocery store or the drive-through line to buy food, people had to hunt and forage to eat. On some days, food may have been scarce and even impossible to come by.
To promote the survival of humankind, the body evolved to adapt to going without food and even water, at least for a certain amount of time. You can still perish if you forego food and water for long enough, but for a few days, you will survive and even thrive by fasting.
Back in those days when foraging and hunting produced little to no results, the body spurred on survival by conserving energy. This allowed the early peoples to preserve their own energy so they could try to hunt or forage again later, hopefully with more success.
We’ve written about the multitude of intermittent fasting benefits on this blog. In case you need a refresher, those benefits include weight loss, better immune health, warding off diseases, and even a longer life.
It’s been thousands of years since anyone has had to forage or hunt for food. As we said, food is readily, abundantly available at any grocery store, convenience store, and fast-food drive-through line. If you’ve eaten two to three meals a day for your entire life, then suddenly quitting food, even just for 24 hours, will cause hormetic stress in your body.
According to Fight Aging.org, hormesis needs autophagy to occur. Autophagy is a form of cell recycling where your healthy cells eat and remove old and damaged cells. This is beneficial for several reasons. By consuming or recycling older cells, they can’t experience cell death or apoptosis. This act makes a mess of cellular data that the healthy cells then have to clean up.
You need your healthy cells to work at what they’re supposed to be doing, such as supporting digestion or immune health. You also don’t want old cells to stick around for longer than they must, as they jumble up the efficiency of healthy cells. This could cause your immune system response to fail, which then makes you come down with the flu. Your skin could also age prematurely as your body stops producing fresh collagen cells.
Fight Aging.org mentions a study involving a species of worm called the Caenorhabditis elegans or roundworm. This worm species underwent an incubation period at a temperature of 96.8 degrees for only an hour during the study. This is much warmer than this worm is usually incubated.
Think of this experiment as heat exposure, but not like being in an infrared sauna. When the worms spent only an hour in a warmer environment, the researchers noted how the tissue of the worms had higher rates of autophagy.
The researchers then decided to repeat their experiment, but exposed the worms to heat for longer. This induced heat shock in them, which we know now can help trigger hormesis.
What Other Data Says
The study mentioned in the Fight Aging.org article is far from the only research done on intermittent fasting and hormesis. In 2010, the Journal of Physiological Anthropology mentioned that “mild dietary stress” such as dietary restriction or fasting is considered to result from hormetic mechanisms.”
In 2008, Ageing Research Reviews wrote how “either controlled caloric restriction or intermittent fasting…can increase the resistance of cells in the animals to different types of stress.” The journal cites several pieces of research that support how animals died less from oxidative or thermal stress as well as natural causes when they restricted calories for a long period compared to the animals that didn’t.
Rodents were proven to have been safeguarded by cancers caused by carcinogens and tissue damage through fasting. These cancers include N-methyl-N-nitrosourea-caused prostate cancer, DMBA-caused mammary tumors, and azaserine-caused pancreatic tumors.
Further, when animals reduced what they ate through intermittent fasting or caloric restriction, Ageing Research Reviews notes how these animals had fewer rates of ischemic injury in brain and heart cells. This reduced their risk of stroke and myocardial infarction.
Even more interestingly, the animals on a restricted diet had nerve cells that could resist the effects of neurotoxins that may cause Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and epilepsy.
How Long Do You Have to Fast for Hormesis? Which Type of Intermittent Fast Is Best?
The positive stress of hormesis can be greatly advantageous, which makes you want to try intermittent fasting for hormetic benefits. How long would you have to fast to experience any positive changes?
The recommended timeframe is 16 to 48 hours. Which types of intermittent fasts are best then? Here are some recommended fasts to try.
16:8 Fast
The 16:8 method or diet divides one period of 24 hours into two windows, one for fasting and one for eating. If you stick to the 16:8 method as intended, then you’d fast for 16 consecutive hours and then have the remaining eight hours of the day to eat.
You don’t need to eat for the entirety of those eight hours, but you do want to wrap up your food and caloric beverage consumption (outside of green tea, black tea, and black coffee) at the end of the eighth hour to give yourself those 16 hours to fast. It’s okay if you sleep during some of the 16 hours. In fact, we’d recommend it for beginners who are having a hard time going that long without food.
Since 16 hours is the lowest recommended timeframe for inducing hormetic benefits, you might tweak the 16:8 diet somewhat. For example, you can try the 18:6 diet, where you fast for 18 hours and then eat for only six hours.
Alternate-Day Fast
Another intermittent fasting option you have for hormesis is the alternate-day fast. For 24 consecutive hours, you’d be in a fasted state. Then, when that day-long period passes, you can eat normally over the next 24 hours. On the third day, you’d fast again, and the day after, you’d eat. This sets up your schedule so you’re fasting three or four days out of the week.
Your fasting window can begin any time you want, be that midnight, 6 a.m., or even 4 p.m. Make sure you eat a nutritious yet filling meal to get you through your fast.
5:2 Diet
The 5:2 diet is named that because for five days, you eat normally, and then for two, you’re on an intermittent fast. This fast is a little more generous, as you’re allowed to eat 25 percent of your daily recommended caloric limit for those two days. That averages out to 500 or 600 calories.
If you’ve already tried an intermittent fast or two, then you might spend those two days without food so you can activate hormesis. The two fasting days of the week don’t necessarily have to be back to back either, giving you even more leeway.
OMAD
In the same vein as the alternate-day fast is the one-meal-a-day or OMAD diet. You’re fasting for all but one hour of every day, so that’s 23 hours spent in a fasted state. During the 60 minutes you’re granted to eat, you can consume whatever you want.
That’s why the OMAD diet has some detractors, and rightfully so. If you consume a whole pizza or five cheeseburgers during your eating window, you’re not going to experience the health benefits that both hormesis and intermittent fasting promise. Try to stick to nutritious meals in quantities that you feel can sate you for the next 23 hours.
Water Fast
If you’d like to spend even more time intermittent fasting for greater hormetic benefits, then a water fast will suit you. During a water fast, you can consume water and other low-calorie beverages, but no food.
Water fasts last between 24 and 72 hours if you fast consecutively. Through on-and-off water fasting, you can stretch your fast for weeks and even months. One water faster lost over 100 pounds by consuming water and supplements for about a year. We wouldn’t suggest this for you at this stage, but it does show water fasts can last for a pretty long time.
Conclusion
Hormesis is a positive stress response that can push our bodies into better athletic performance, muscle growth, and even resilience to handle the not-so-great stresses we all deal with. Fasting is an ideal way to induce hormesis, but you’ll need to fast for at least 16 hours to get the process started. Best of luck with your fast!