There is a machine in the brain that moves us towards food. It's not hunger. Hunger is pretty obvious, this machine of the brain is more subtle and more powerful. It diminishes the will to continue fasting by lowering your ability to be self determined.
I watch for it now. Part of this machine starts by wanting to crunch or chew something. It uses your imagination by imagining food moving down your throat and filling your stomach.
My method for conquering this powerful mechanism is to leave my home. This keeps me away from the food in the kitchen. Here though, is my opportunity to conquer this machine. It has taken years of distance from my kitchen to get used to the idea that I must eat.
Breaking the habit of always snacking and eating meals is not a habit you can change easily. I was destined for blindness. So I had an incentive to conquer this powerful habit. Wet macular degeneration is a weird disease. It takes away pieces of your sight in the center of your vision but leaves peripheral vision alone. You can kind of make out your environment.
I started with the knowledge that the cysts under my retina were being removed by fasting. Fasting did do so. No doubt about that. I received 42 shots in my eyes and was still losing my eyesight. The doctors simply did not have the ability to stop the degeneration. After I started fasting my cysts disappeared.
But after a while, I started to feel better. I moved easier. My walking gait was wider. I still have some minor pains in my shoulder and hand and sometimes I have some pain in my knees as I bicycle through my neighborhood. But it lessened at every fast.
For the fun of it, I had my age checked by the TruAge telomeres test and it showed me 7 years younger. Now everything has changed.
I believe I have discovered the fountain of youth that was such a moving thought in some stories. And it's not some pie in the sky. A delusion of an old man wishing for youth again.
Science has slammed the machine of Autophagy on society and has given me the thought that I could live centuries in a young body. Is this a delusion? No it's basically a fact. The question remains in my brain. Am I doing enough to not just stave off old age but actually removing my zombie cells? After all the old age cells are just sitting there, unable to continue replicating. They're moving the needle of frailty and disease towards eventual death.
Fasting awakens lysosomes. These are those little bags of proteins that kill broken garbage in your body. They are what kills bacteria and virus, when you're sick and you become well again. Have you noticed that when you're sick, you don't feel like eating? That's the mechanism that fixes you.
If you stop eating for a while your body lowers glucose (sugar foods) and raises ketones (fat food) in your bloodstream. When ketones are up and glucose is down then mTOR drops and AMPK rises. When mTOR drops, it signals your DNA to duplicate the section that creates lysosomes. Those lysosomes convert old age cells into food. It's another way of keeping you alive longer while you're starving.
The medical industry is simply not in a state where it can push a 4 day fast onto society. That's right, not a short fast, but one that lasts long enough to remove the junk in your system.
Short fasts remove the junk you've accumulated today in your system. An extended fast removes the stuff you've accumulated in your system for years of glucose and toxin dumping in your cells.
The questions remain, how often do I do a 4 day fast? At what point does the body have diminishing returns after 4 days without food? What foods do I eat to make sure I have the right nutrients to replace the cells that were removed? Am I fasting enough to reduce my age?
How long will I live and will I be healthy throughout? I look at young bodies and see what they can do. How much weight lifting, yoga, Tai-Chi, Essentrics do I do to keep my body from not being able to move? Questions remain and the only way to really understand is by trial and error. There is a glut of nonsense out there. It's difficult to know which one is accurate.
When it all stabilizes again, we'll know.