> Fast for short intervals regularly, and longer fasts as they feel good to you. You can effectively do this every day if you just eat once per day. When I was properly obese, this technique resulted in rapid weight loss. Zero exercise was required to see results, which was good at the time because the not eating part was about all I could handle. Being in a fasted state is as close as you can get to actually reversi…
Fasting without any exercise has a hidden downside: you’re not just burning fat, you’re also burning muscle. Less muscle → lower glucose disposal capacity → systemic insulin resistance. The problem is that insulin resistance doesn’t stop in muscle — the brain is highly insulin-sensitive, and once central insulin signaling gets disrupted you start seeing network-level dysfunction and cognitive impairment (there’s a reason Alzheimer’s is sometimes called “type 3 diabetes”).
So yeah, autophagy is real, but pairing fasting with at least some resistance work is critical if you don’t want the “anti-aging hack” to backfire by accelerating muscle loss and brain decline.
See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5462531/ for brain insulin effect