My Nugget: Fasting and Autophagy

I’ve been dabbling with intermittent fasting for some time now. I first came across it in a self healing book years ago, I admit I first poo-poo’d the idea. However, the topic came up again during my yoga teacher training albeit very briefly. Over the last 5 years I’ve become increasingly curious about it for the many health benefits it claimed to have.

Most recently I discovered that it could be used for balancing hormones for women. This was something important to me as I’m currently going through my peri-menopausal years and have noticed changes within my body.

Here’s the interesting science bit: Longer fasts of 24-48 hours leads to an evolutionary mechanism in our bodies that is called autophagy. I first came across the word autophagy whilst attending a talk at the first Health Optimisation Summit back in 2019 from Siim Land. It’s a way cells clean up themselves and rids itself of toxic proteins and recycles the rest. Pretty impressive right? Our bodies are so AMAZING! I did my first ever intentional 24 hour fast and was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was. No hangriness AT ALL.

What’s fascinating for me about this is its capacity to prevent/treat cancer and also neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s. Having lost both my Mum and Mother in Law to cancer and having a Dad who’s got late stage Parkinson’s and related dementia, I’m all for preventing these as much as possible. To find out more: