Last Updated on November 9, 2023 by Fasting Planet
After reading this blog and discovering the autophagic benefits your immune and digestive systems can experience when intermittent fasting, you’ve decided that you’d like to try a fast too. How many hours of fasting would you have to do to induce autophagy?
Autophagy begins when fasting for at least 18 hours, sometimes up to 20 hours. You should keep fasting for two to three days (48 hours to 72 hours) longer to experience the greatest degree of health-boosting autophagic benefits.
In today’s post, we’ll talk about the autophagy process and discuss how often you need to fast to benefit your health. We’ll even discuss how you’ll know if you’re in an autophagic state. You’re definitely not going to want to miss it!
How Do You Trigger Autophagy?
First, let’s do a little recap on autophagy just to ensure we’re on the same page. When you activate autophagy on a fast, you’re triggering an internal process that recycles the cells throughout the body. Your younger, healthier cells will seek out the older, more damaged ones and then consume them.
Doing this is advantageous for several reasons. For one, consuming a cell before it degrades further prevents apoptosis, the death of a cell that often explodes cellular matter when it happens. Also, by recycling old cells, this ensures that only the youngest, healthiest cells survive. From your immune system to your digestive system, the youthfulness of your skin, and so much more, your body needs healthy cells to keep bodily processes moving as they should.
So how do you induce autophagy? By depriving yourself of calories, and–more importantly–nutrients, that’s how. That means you can follow a ketogenic diet to start autophagy, but fasting is another and even better way to do it since you’re often eating very little if anything at all.
Two hormones affect when you enter an autophagic state. The first of these is insulin, which controls your blood sugar. The other hormone is glucagon, which prevents your blood glucose from dropping to precipitously low levels. If your insulin is high, then your levels of glucagon are low because there’s no risk of your blood pressure decreasing to a potentially dangerous degree.
Insulin goes up as you eat, as the sugar source you provide to your body, which is known as glucose, raises insulin. When fasting, you lower your insulin, which allows your glucagon levels to rise. This increase in glucagon tells your body that it should begin autophagy.
Reactive oxygen species can also act as a type of signaler to kickstart autophagy according to a 2017 study from Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity.
That said, in some instances, your body’s ability to enter autophagy may be impacted. For instance, too much insulin-like growth factor or IGF 1 may reduce autophagic function, says this 2013 report in Human Molecular Genetics.
How Often Should I Fast for Autophagy?
Okay, so you know that fasting lets you enter a state of autophagy, but how many hours of fasting are we talking here?
As we stated in the intro, you want your fast to be at least 18 hours long to enter autophagy. To be on the safe side, you might want to increase the duration of your fast to 20 hours or even 24 hours.
Keep in mind that this is only the length of time it takes to reach autophagy. If you want the most cell recycling, prepare for the long haul on a 48-hour fast or even a 72-hour fast.
What about how often you should fast? That’s your choice. You might strive to enter a fasted state every week or every other week.
Does Intermittent Fasting Cause Autophagy?
Since autophagy is all about restricting calories, does intermittent fasting suffice as a means to begin autophagy?
Indeed, it does! If you need a refresher, an intermittent fast is a form of time-restricted eating in which you may go hours or days at a time without food. For example, the 16:8 diet lets you eat over eight hours and then fast for the other 16 hours. A more strict type of intermittent fast, the water fast, allows you to drink only water. You may go on a multi-day water fast if you’re especially experienced in fasting.
When you do eat on a fast, you want to stick to low-carb, low-sugar, nutritious, and balanced meals. Eating this way will nourish your body, provide lasting fuel that can carry you through your fasting periods, and encourage weight loss.
How Do You Know When Your Body Is in Autophagy?
You’ve fasted for a day or two now. You’re pretty sure your body is undergoing autophagy, but how can you be positive? Is there any way to tell?
The following signs may indicate autophagy is occurring, especially if you experience several of them at once.
Healthier, Brighter-Looking Skin
We’ve discussed on this blog that autophagy can cause the fibroblast cells to be recycled so they produce more elastin and collagen. This keeps your skin looking younger. Thus, if your body is undergoing autophagic processes, you may notice that your skin looks bright, healthy, supple, and dare we say it, young.
Lack of Appetite
You may have started out feeling like you were starving to death on your fast. Here you are a day or so later and you’re okay. Your energy source is now coming from fat, which means you’ve burned through all your leftover glucose from food. Your fast is progressing as it should, which definitely indicates that you’ve entered an autophagic state.
More Ketones
Have you tested your ketones lately? If not, you should! Your level of ketones should increase as your glucose goes down, just like glucagon. An increase in ketones will indicate that indeed, you’ve achieved autophagy!
Conclusion
Fasting is great for a lot of things, including weight loss and autophagy. This cell-recycling process keeps your body running in tip-top shape by recycling old cell parts that optimize digestion, immunity, skin health, and more.
Now that you know how to fast for autophagy, you can prioritize your health like never before!