Autophagy. Findings from a review of research looking at exercise and fasting highlight that it may increase autophagy. Autophagy is a process that helps destroy unwanted or damaged cells to regenerate newer and healthier ones.
Enhanced Metabolic Effects: Exercise during fasting can lead to greater metabolic changes, such as increased insulin sensitivity and improved lipid metabolism. These changes promote autophagy by altering energy availability and nutrient sensing pathways.
Exercise: Exercise can help to promote autophagy by stimulating the production of growth hormone and reducing insulin levels. It is essential to engage in light to moderate exercise during a water fast, such as walking, yoga, or light weight lifting.
Physical activity, particularly intense exercise like resistance training and high-intensity interval workouts, has emerged as a potent trigger for autophagy. By incorporating regular exercise into your routine, you can stimulate autophagy and promote cellular health without fasting.
Researchers theorized that exercise helped kickstart the fast by using up some of the body's glucose, or stored carbohydrate energy. Participants worked out by running on the treadmill for 40 to 50 minutes with intense effort (70% of their maximum heart rate).
Training while fasting increases your caloric deficit — which is an essential aspect of weight loss — but there are also downsides to exercising while fasting: Decreased exercise performance: Exercising on an empty stomach can negatively affect the quality of your workout.
Short-term activation: Shorter fasting durations — such as 12 to 16 hours — can stimulate a moderate level of autophagy over a short period of time. This level of autophagy may help with routine cellular maintenance and contribute to overall health.
What turns off autophagy? Eating. Glucose, insulin (or decreased glucagon) and proteins all turn off this self-cleaning process. And it doesn't take much.
Lysosomes are acidic organelles, with their digesting hydrolases dependent on low pH. Consequently agents such as bafilomycin or chloroquine derivatives, which disrupt the vacuolar H+ ATPase responsible for acidifying lysosomes, block autophagy in its final step, resulting in the accumulation of AVs (28-30).
According to clinical research, your fasting autophagy dimmer switch is not at peak “brightness” until at least 36–72 hours into a fast. For those who want to try to maximize the deep benefits of autophagy, the majority of studies present evidence that suggests you may need to target longer fasts lasting 2 to 4 days.
Typically, to see any cellular benefits, one must fast for a minimum of 24 - 48 hours. During a fasting period, a person should not consume any calories but may continuously drink water, caffeine-free coffee, or tea to remain hydrated. One should always consult their doctor before starting a fasting program.
Autophagy and gut rest fasts prohibit any caloric substances from passing your lips. Even one or two calories can be enough to stop autophagy and rouse your gut out of its fasted resting state. This means that virtually all foods, beverages, powders, pills, and even breath mints and gum chewing are off limits.
Fasting—specifically the intermittent and calorie restriction kind—is an optimal way to activate autophagy. Your body is going to recycle existing components to meet energy needs. Your diet also plays a role. Focus on balanced nutrition with plenty of fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains.
Accumulated evidence suggests that intermittent fasting or calorie restriction can lead to the induction of adaptive autophagy and increase longevity of eukaryotic cells. However, prolonged calorie restriction with excessive autophagy response is harmful and can stimulate a type II autophagic cell death.
Put simply, when people practice intermittent fasting without exercising, they are losing weight, but much of it often comes from the muscle in the lean mass. If they are exercising, then that shifts from a loss of muscle mass to a loss fat mass, so that's a large benefit.
Some popular activities include running, cycling, swimming, and brisk walking. Aerobic exercises cause cellular stress that leads to the activation of autophagy pathways. These heart rate boosting exercises can also improve cardiovascular health, which is closely related to autophagy regulation.
The process of autophagy is divided into five distinct stages: initiation, nucleation, expansion and elongation, closure and fusion, and cargo degradation. Each stage has potential clinical targets.
Depending on the individual's metabolism, significant autophagy may take two to four days of fasting in humans. Autophagy is believed to begin when glucose and insulin levels drop considerably. Animal studies have shown evidence of autophagy after 24 hours of fasting, which starts peaking at around 48 hours of fasting.
Problems with autophagy are also associated with cancer. “Junk” accumulating in a cell may increase the risk of errors in a cell's genetic material or DNA. Genetic mutations, or changes, in cell DNA can lead to cancer cells forming.
In short, no, diet sodas that are truly calorie free will not disrupt your fasting state.
Autophagy happens while we're sleeping—because that's when we're fasting. "If you eat a 30-inch pizza before bed, you're not going to have any autophagy," Dr. Gottlieb says. "That means you're not going to take out the trash, so the cells begin to accumulate more and more debris."
For example, studies have found that people who regularly fast more than 16 or 18 hours a day have a higher risk of gallstones. They're also more likely to need surgery to remove the gallbladder. Eating for 12 hours and then fasting for 12 hours is likely safe for most people, Longo explains.