When you want to start Intermittent Fasting or Keto, remember that the 8-hour eating window is a period when you can eat but not an open period.

As you get more metabolically flexible and fit, metabolically you will be able to activate the autophagy signaling more efficiently and more quickly.

Studies have shown a level of detectable autophagy within the time between two meals during the day is possible to achieve.

To reach that second wave of autophagy, you must enter that day well-versed and experienced with the different strategies and techniques needed to activate the fasted state.

Flow charts and graphs that show what happens during a fast to our body are based on different non-human studies, not human trials.

Most of what we have learned about autophagy is from yeast studies and research, then on bacterial, animal, and some curly human studies.

The model to show what can happen over one day, two days, three days, or more is extrapolated from all of those studies, and it is a different timeline.

Too often, people speak about how many hours of fasting they have, assuming that they will be in the state that produces whatever’s on those different charts.

Most will not experience what the chart says at each point, and some won’t even be close.

You need more than just getting into ketosis to determine if you are at a high enough phase of autophagy to get all the well-documented benefits from fasting.

Metabolic flexibility is the long-term goal for all our fasting efforts and lifestyle changes in my 6-month program.

It’s a difference between getting in shape for the first time or getting in shape after you have been in the form before but just had some time off.

Then you can take it one step further by comparing it to someone who’s in shape doing a workout versus someone who’s getting in shape doing the same activity.

The workout intensity level, duration, and ability of the person doing it will be different in someone who is in shape trying to stay in shape compared to someone who is trying to get in shape for the first time or after a long lapse in workouts. A sane activity has different effects.

Attempting to say what will happen at 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, or longer in a fast with 10 different people is like lining up 10 completely different people and giving them all the same workout and then trying to say they all had the same effects and results at the same time from the training.

The results would be different if you had a child versus an adult in that workout. There’s a difference between a man and a woman. 

There’s a difference between someone who’s in their twenties and someone who’s in their 50s. There’s also a significant difference between a 30-year-old training for 10 years and someone in their 30s and just starting.

What if someone had an old injury that limited them, or they were overweight with other people who were at an average weight?

Even different heights will have different outcomes depending on the person.

You can no longer say what happens at any given time along an extended fast in any individual than you can in that workout scenario.

Just like working out, we must approach fasting with the same mentality that we must regularly apply over time and consistently to get the most from it.

The more we train, or the more we fast, the better we get at it, and the more challenging we need to make the workout or the fast to get the same results. 

That’s called fitness, and it applies to me also to metabolic fitness of efficiency.

As you get better at something, you need to make it harder to get the same stimulus as you did before. Doing the same workout for a year will impact your body differently on the 365th workout than it did on day one.

My entire reason for going into this is it deters people from thinking that they can do a fast and they’re going to create all these significant changes or some health problem will be healed.

Fasting is not a treatment like that. It’s not dose-dependent. It’s condition dependent.

That would be like me showing up to a marathon tomorrow and racing. I might get through it, but I would have a terrible time, be miserable, and be sore and hurting for days, if not weeks following.

You would think I’m crazy if I told you that I have never run a marathon before, and I am not even training, nor have I ever trained in long-distance running, and I expect to go to that marathon and place in the top five.

People do that when they think they’re getting all these great results or will get these life-changing things from fasting when they’ve only done one or two one-off fasts.

Then if they had done fasting before and hadn’t planned, prepared, or supported themselves during it and then reinforced what they needed to after for the next time, they could have been more ready and advanced. Get less out of the fast.

Whereas someone who does those things and does them well will enter each new fasting experience at a higher level and get more out of it.

So when people ask, “Hey Don, should I just do a 3-day fast for this?”

Well, how would you be able to answer now?

We can do better!

Message me if you want info on a structured Hormonal Enhancement & Functional Fasting program and join “Insulin Friendly Fasting Secrets.”

Don