digest
Let's talk about what happens on the inside of your body when you're fasting. Over here we have the start of a fast, and we go 24 hours, 48, and 72. There are a lot of really magical things that happen when you fast. Our bodies have developed over a long period of time and have adapted to starvation many, many times, so we have all these unique proteins that get expressed or turned on that have to do with your brain doing better and the different parts of your body surviving better. Our bodies have not adapted to the frequency of eating like we do now, like every three hours.
Right around 12 hours, we get a spike in growth hormone. Growth hormone is the anti-aging hormone. It's the main fat-burning hormone. It's the hormone involved with healing joints, and it's involved with protein synthesis, or making different new proteins. Some people take growth hormone by injection. I don't recommend it, but they take it to help heal certain parts of their body. But guess what? Fasting will trigger it automatically. Just by the fact that you're fasting, you can increase growth hormone, and of course exercise will also increase growth hormone as well. So it starts about 12 hours and increases as you go on and on.
Now, at about 18 hours, you start developing something called autophagy. Autophagy is an interesting thing that happens with your body, where you start recycling old, damaged proteins and microbes as well. One type of protein would be the advanced glycation end products, which basically form when you combine glucose with a protein, and it becomes very sticky. So let's say you're on a high-carbohydrate diet, and that sugar combines with your own protein in your body. That starts to glycate, or just kind of destroy some of the proteins in your body, and then they don't function anymore. They get sticky and clog things up. Well, guess what? Your body will start cleaning all that up and turning these damaged proteins into new amino acids that your body can use. Amyloid plaque, which occurs in the brain and other parts of the body, is a type of protein that can be cleaned up with autophagy. So it's any type of cellular protein that is not working anymore in your body, and autophagy will start cleaning that up and start to renew the tissue. It starts right about 18 hours, and it gets more and more as you keep fasting.
In about 24 hours and a little bit longer, you start to really deplete this glycogen reserve, this storage supply of glucose in your liver. The more the liver is depleted of glycogen, the more you're going to be running on ketones as the alternative fuel. If you have a fatty liver, for example, your body will start using that fat and turning it into ketones. So your body is finally able to start tapping into this stored energy, and you're running more and more on ketones, which is a superior fuel. Because you're running on ketones, and ketones are an appetite suppressant, your hunger goes away and cravings are gone. There are antioxidants, so you're building up your antioxidant reserve. They provide more oxygen, so your body is running with more oxygen and less CO2, which makes it more efficient. And because ketones are a much more efficient fuel than glucose, the thyroid does not have to work as hard. You may find that your T3 is a little bit lower, but the thyroid-stimulating hormone is normal. All that means is your thyroid is adapting to this new type of fuel.
Some other cool things are happening right around 24 hours. Your inflammation is dropping significantly. If you want to speed it up even more, you can add some vitamin D, and that will really help you. Any type of condition that involves inflammatory states, like arthritis, bursitis, and autoimmune-type conditions, starts to improve about 24 hours in. You start getting more gut healing because the gut doesn't have to work as frequently, with the gallbladder being stimulated and the pancreas stimulating its enzymes. The gut finally has a chance to just chill out. If you have a condition called SIBO, where there are microbes in the small intestine that should normally be in the large intestine, that starts to become corrected. You start increasing stem cells in the gut, so your gut starts to heal. The heart loves ketones far better than glucose, so you start getting improvement in cardiovascular function as well as brain function. There's something called BDNF, a factor that helps make new brain cells, so your brain starts to repair at 24 hours as you keep going.
You would think you're going to be losing muscle protein, but that's not really what happens, because your body becomes more efficient, and there are certain genes that spare proteins, so it's not using muscle protein. The efficiency of fuel is much better. Plus, with autophagy, you're using the old damaged proteins and giving you new protein, so the combination is really good. The amount of nutrition you really need to run the body is a lot less, because the body slows down and can run on a smaller amount of nutrients. That's a positive thing.
The other thing that happens during autophagy is that you're also cleaning out microbes, fungus, mold, and yeast. To kill off those microbes, your body develops certain oxidants, and you also have antioxidants on the flipside. Your body actually makes things like hydrogen peroxide to kill off microbes, but on the other side it also makes its own antioxidants to protect the body against oxidation. We have this entire balance. It's only when we have lower amounts of antioxidants and higher amounts of oxidants that we get something called oxidative stress, where things start breaking down. But when you're fasting, you're getting a nice balance of more antioxidants, and your body is starting to heal.
When you get to 48 hours, you really start to stimulate the stem cells. These are undifferentiated cells, in other words, cells that don't have a specific purpose yet, so they can turn into this tissue or that tissue depending on what the body needs. You start to stimulate the stem cells and get more healing, more repair, and more anti-aging. You also get decreased risks of certain types of cancer and shrinkage of certain tumors, and you start making more mitochondria. If you push it and go up to 72 hours, you get even more stimulation of stem cells, and better immune function. But when you get into 72 hours or greater, I recommend doing that as a periodic thing, simply because a lot of people going into this have nutritional deficiencies. If you jump in too fast, you can get a little dizzy and have some side effects, so you want to gradually work up to it over a period of time.
Those are some general things that happen when you're fasting. I recommend doing intermittent fasting on a regular basis. A good average pattern would be 18 hours of fasting with a six-hour eating window: you eat, wait six hours, then eat again, and then fast for 18 hours. This would be a really good pattern to follow, and you can make it more strict over time depending on how you do. Then you can do periodic prolonged fasting to achieve additional health benefits, whether it's for your immune system because you have an autoimmune problem, or you want to look younger with your skin, or you want more brain cells, better heart function, better gut function, or let's say you have cancer and want to improve that. One thing fasting will do is increase your resistance to stress. Even if someone is on chemotherapy, it can help the body's resistance against chemicals and poisons, which is quite remarkable.
Make sure you take your minerals during fasting. I know a lot of people recommend just doing either a water fast, where you drink only water, or a dry fast, where you don't drink anything. I recommend doing a water fast with nutrients, because if you are deficient you can have problems. You want your minerals, you want your B vitamins, and you want your salt. That's very important.
Right around 8 o'clock in the morning, you have a spike in cortisol. If cortisol spikes, that can sometimes cause your body to make more glucose, and you can have higher blood sugars. It happens with a lot of people with blood sugar issues. There's nothing to worry about, and it will improve over time. But if you just add exercise in the morning, that will burn off some of that extra sugar. If you're fasting, it's not coming from your diet. It's just coming from your liver making glucose, making a little too much, perhaps because the cortisol is too high. I wanted to point that out, and I have videos on it. I put a link down below. It's called the dawn phenomenon.
Now, if your LDL, so-called bad cholesterol, which is not really bad, since it stands for low-density lipoprotein, is increased, especially if you're not consuming any significant carbohydrates and you're fasting, the reason is different. Think about one of the purposes of LDL: it delivers cholesterol to different tissues. Think about all the things that are happening when your body is fasting. You are going through a major healing process, and cholesterol is the raw material for your cell membranes, for your brain, for making hormones, for making vitamin D, and for making bile. About 40% of all the cholesterol in your body is there to supply the membranes of your cells, which is essential to protect the cell and allow things to go in and out. So maybe one of the reasons your body might need cholesterol transported through this carrier protein is to heal cellular membranes, or it may need the raw material to make more hormones. I would not worry about that. If you are concerned, there are various tests you could do to determine whether this cholesterol is doing damage, but I would not worry about it.
Anyway, I wanted to create a video to show you what happens inside your body when you're fasting. Thanks for watching. If you want more knowledge on how to create a healthy body, subscribe now and get daily notifications.