Fasting, both intermittent and periodic extended fasts (24+ hours), are some of the best practices one can integrate into their lifestyle, and I believe very strongly that it plays a major role in literally peeling back the years on your cells, thus making you all the more resilient to age related diseases, which is basically all diseases. 

Why does fasting work to reverse aging and heal the body?

The reality is, eating and digesting food is a stressor on the body. 

You have two parts of your autonomic (automatically works without thinking) nervous system: your sympathetic and parasympathetic. 

The sympathetic part of your autonomic nervous system is referred to as the “fight or flight” portion, meaning it’s engaged when the body and/or mind is in a state of stress. 

The parasympathetic part of your autonomic nervous system is referred to as the “rest & digest” portion. 

Ideally, you want your parasympathetic nervous system engaged in “rest” as much as possible, versus a sympathetic stress state. 

Now, let’s dive into the “digest” portion of the parasympathetic nervous system. 

As you can probably put together, this is the part of the autonomic nervous system that engages when you eat. 

Remember, “autonomic” means it automatically works. For example, when you eat, you don’t have to tell your body to digest the food, rather, you eat, and the autonomic nervous system automatically engages and begins the necessary biological functions to begin breaking down that food and synthesizing macro and micro nutrients. 

This is work for your body and requires energy. 

Work and energy dedicated to breaking down food, which then pulls away from other healing and restorative functions of the body, like cellular detoxification, reducing systemic inflammation, repairing and rebuilding immune function, and even killing off potentially cancerous cells. (More on this in a bit)

So in effect, when you eat, it’s like you’re telling your body to stop everything else it’s doing to try to heal, restore, and reduce the effects of aging, and to start working on that food you just put down the gullet. 

The short of it is, when you eat and force your body to digest food, you are pulling it away from all of the wonderful healing and anti-aging functions it also does for us.

Now, there is an interesting dichotomy at play here, because we of course need to eat for survival, so it’s not as if you can just never eat and allow your body to heal and repair itself full time. 

You must also eat to survive. 

So the goal, and the idea behind fasting, is that you eat less often, with longer windows without eating, to balance the dichotomy of digesting food being a stressor on the body, and the reality that we also need to eat for survival.

Enter fasting. 

By going for longer periods without eating, you are giving your body more of a break from digesting food so that it can focus more of its precious energy on burning body fat, reducing systemic inflammation, cellular detoxification, and so much more. 

It’s not saying don’t eat entirely, it’s not even saying eat less, just eat less often, and get your calories in a more time restricted window (this is known as “intermittent fasting”), rather than eating all day. And then from time to time (every 1-3 months), do a longer extended fast to really give your body time to hunker down and do some really deep healing, restorative, and anti-aging work. 

I am going to circle back to these two types of fasting, and how to do them effectively, but first, I’m going to dive deeper on all of those incredible, almost magical healing and restorative biological functions the body does when it doesn’t have to digest food. 

✔️ Autophagy

Cellular autophagy is the body’s built-in system for cleaning up and recycling parts inside your cells. Over time, cells accumulate damaged proteins, worn-out structures, and other cellular “junk” from normal metabolism and stress. Autophagy allows the cell to identify these damaged components, break them down into their basic building blocks, and reuse those materials to build new, healthy cell parts. Instead of letting waste pile up, the cell stays efficient and functional.

Wow! See what I mean by “almost magical” built in, biological functions?

In short, your cells can literally take damaged material, and cellular debris that can gunk up cellular processes, which can cause the cell to not function as well (aging), and not only clean it up, but literally clean it up, and then recycle it into new, healthy, fully vital cells. 

Continuing on, this process is essential for overall cellular health. When autophagy is working properly, cells are better able to maintain energy production, manage stress, and prevent toxic buildup that can interfere with normal function. Strong autophagy is associated with improved resilience, healthier aging, and protection against many chronic conditions. When autophagy is impaired, damaged components accumulate, which can contribute to inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, and age-related disease.

Autophagy is most active when the body senses that resources are limited, like being in a fasted state.  

Periods of fasting, low insulin levels (which fasting also does), physical exercise, and mild cellular stress like a cold shower/cold plunge and sauna, signal to the cell that it should shift from growth mode (like being fed) to maintenance mode. In these conditions, instead of relying on incoming nutrients, the cell turns inward and recycles what it already has. This adaptive response helps cells survive stress and become more efficient over time.

✔️ Apoptosis

Apoptosis is a form of programmed cell death, meaning it is a deliberate, controlled process by which the body eliminates cells that are no longer needed or are damaged beyond repair. Unlike accidental cell injury, apoptosis is an orderly “self-destruct” sequence that cells activate when continuing to exist would be harmful to the organism. It is a normal and essential part of healthy growth, maintenance, and healing.

Apoptosis plays a critical role throughout life. It helps shape organs during development, removes old or unnecessary cells, and eliminates cells that are severely damaged, infected, or genetically unstable. In this way, apoptosis acts as a quality-control system, preventing malfunctioning cells from multiplying or turning into more serious problems, such as cancer.

In a quick aside: think of apoptosis like beating cancer to the punch, before cancerous cells can metastasize and become a real problem. If you think about an actual cancer diagnosis, it’s not the very first cells to become cancerous that yield a cancer diagnosis, rather, a clinical cancer diagnosis actually means you have cancerous cells that have multiplied to the point where they are now a real problem, and potentially deadly. 

The reality is, if you’re reading this, you most likely have some cancerous cells in your body (myself included), so the goal isn’t to all out avoid cancerous cells, but rather to continually nip those cells in the bud before they become a problem, and this is what apoptosis does, it’s a literal cancer fighter before cancer can become a problem, and thus, why it’s so critical to maximize apoptosis in the body. 

The same is the case for autoimmunity. Just like cancer, increased apoptosis takes care of cells that have gone autoimmune and could begin attacking tissue. This can reduce risk of and prevent conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, and much more. 

In simple terms, while autophagy is about repair and recycling, apoptosis is about removal. If a cell can be fixed, autophagy helps clean it up and restores function. If the damage is too great, apoptosis ensures the cell exits safely for the good of the whole organism. Together, these processes keep tissues healthy, balanced, and functioning properly.

The above alone is all the reason to start incorporating fasting into your lifestyle, but wait there’s more!

✔️ New Stem Cells

During periods of fasting, nutrient and energy levels drop, which tells cells that resources are scarce. In response, the body turns down growth pathways (especially insulin and IGF-1) and turns up maintenance pathways like autophagy and apoptosis. 

Once that cleanup phase is underway, the body shifts into regeneration mode. After fasting (especially when refeeding begins), stem cells—particularly in tissues like the immune system and gut—receive strong signals to divide and differentiate into new, healthy cells. This happens because the low-growth, low-insulin state protects stem cells during fasting, while reducing competition from damaged cells. When nutrients return, growth signals come back online and stem cells step in to repopulate the tissue with fresh cells. 

So fasting clears out the old and broken parts, protects the “seed” cells, and then sets the stage for rebuilding with new, more functional cells.

To fully recap thus far, damaged cells that still have life left in them get cleaned up and rejuvenated through autophagy, old cells that have life left in them, and that will eventually go cancerous if left to stick around, get killed off through apoptosis, and then to take all this magic a full step further, the body then replaces those cells with brand new, fully vital, ready for action, stem cells. 

In fact, they once did imaging on the organs of subjects during a 5 day fast, and found that organs “shrunk” in size by as much as 30% due to apoptosis, and then within a week were back to full size due to the new, healthy, fully vital stem cells the body replaced the old cells with. 

Furthermore, there have been recorded cases of people who’ve reversed Type I Diabetes (this is not the lifestyle oriented form of Diabetes, but the form where you have an actual dysfunctional pancreas) through fasting practices, which means, they’ve been able to literally rebuild their pancreas over time, through fasting, to the point where they replaced enough dysfunctional pancreatic cells with new stem cells that then became healthy, fully vital pancreatic cells. 

By now, you’re probably able to paint a pretty broad picture on how fasting can help peel back the biological years on your cells, but let’s keep going. 

✔️ Regulating Blood Sugar

As mentioned multiple times above, one of the signals that kicks in many of these age reversing functions from fasting are low insulin levels as a result of your blood sugar emptying due to not eating. 

Ability to regulate blood sugar in general is a strong biomarker of disease, not just diabetes, but heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s/dementia. 

The better you are able to regulate blood sugar, the lower the risk of all serious disease, and the lower your ability to regulate blood sugar, the greater the risk of all serious disease. 

Fasting, especially intermittent fasting on a daily to mostly daily basis, trains your body to better regulate blood sugar, just like a muscle, which means when your blood sugar does rise from eating, your body is that much more adept at better regulating it. 

Much like exercise better trains your heart to be more physically fit, think of fasting like exercise that trains your ability to better regulate blood sugar. 

✔️ Immune & Gut Health

As mentioned above, many of the new stem cells created go to rebuilding a healthy gut and immune system, two critical factors in both short and long term health. 

In the short term, a healthy, better functioning immune system better helps prevent illness, both in frequency and severity if/when you do get sick. 

But long term, proper immune system function and regulation actually plays a critical role in preventing auto immunity (this includes cancer), and we as a population suffer from all kinds of auto immune issues, from worsening allergies, to joint issues, neurological issues, and once again, cancer, as cancer is really a byproduct of autoimmunity. 

Gut health is also highly linked to short and long term health. 

Fasting helps support the integrity of your gut and intestinal lining by repairing any permeations you may have, this is also known as leaky gut. 

The reason leaky guy is such a problem is that when you have a leaky gut, toxic material can flow in and out of your gut and intestinal lining, and that is where everything in your body is first synthesized, meaning that toxic, pathogenic material can go systemic and over time cause a whole host of health related issues and side effects. 

Finally, during periods of fasting, your gut microbiome (the bacterial environment in your gut) increases the total populations of probiotics (healthy, beneficial bacteria that serve a whole host of purposes) increase and also increase in biodiversity, which means new probiotic strains even form, and high numbers of probiotics and increased biodiversity of probiotics are literally our body’s first line of defense for everything. 

✔️ Cellular Detoxification

Your body naturally detoxes itself. We pee, poop, and sweat, all in an effort in part, to rid our bodies of and prevent toxic buildup. Unfortunately, the reality is, that we now live in a toxic world, far too toxic for the body to handle, and that’s even if you are highly aware of using all natural, non toxic products, clothing, etc. 

By fasting, and thus, not bogging your body down with digesting food as frequently, you allow your body more time to do what it naturally does, and one of those things is cellular detoxification. 

Increased cellular toxicity is one of the biggest modern factors (some would even say the biggest factor) in the rise of disease and other health conditions, and simply put, the more you practice fasting, the more you are aiding your body in its ability to detoxify at the cellular level, thus, keeping your cells far closer to a state of homeostasis, and disease cannot develop in a state of homeostasis. 

• • • • • • • • • • 

Okay, let’s move on to actual fasting protocols and how you can create your own for maximum efficacy. 

The Basics of Fasting

If I were to write a book on fasting, I could do the entire thing in as little as two words if I wanted to. 

Don’t eat.

And at minimum, if you are not doing any fasting, simply going for longer periods of time without food will help you live more optimally. 

But this is a blog about biohacking, which at its core, is all about getting the most out of the human biology we have all been so blessed with. 

When it comes to fasting, the “not eating part” is the hard part, so the way I look at it, if you’re going to do the hard part already, understanding more about how to get the most benefit possible from the hard part of fasting (the not eating part) is the way to go.

This can mean proper timing of your fasting, lifestyle hacks that boost the benefits of fasting, and even some supplements that also help you get the most out of doing a fast, especially an extended fast. 

Intermittent Fasting

The words “cleanup” and “maintenance” were mentioned on multiple occasions above. Think of intermittent fasting as your daily cleanup and maintenance protocol so things don’t build up too much in your body. This includes: systemic inflammation, toxic elements, damaged, dysfunctional cells, and cells with no purpose or life left in them. 

The beauty of human biology is that the goal of our 40 trillion cells is to return to homeostasis (balance). This is why we need sleep, but unfortunately, sleep is not enough to fully return to homeostasis in our modern society. In fact, they estimate it now takes our organs around 14 hours to fully recover from a day. 

This is why when we get sick, the immune system heals us. 

When we get a cut, it heals, like magic. 

Or break a bone. 

The goal of the human body is actually to return to health.

Which is great, because that means your body is actually working with you to try to return to optimal health. The rub is, we just need to give it more time now to do so. 

Between our toxic environment, processed foods with synthetic chemicals in it, high stress levels, and oftentimes, lack of quality sleep, our body is under just too much of a barrage to keep up with returning to health from a normal night’s sleep, even if it’s a good, quality night’s sleep. 

Enter “intermittent fasting”. 

By creating a time restricted eating window (TRE), which is a specific, shortened window in which you are allowed to consume calories on a daily basis, you give your body more of a break on said daily basis to get to work on everything I’ve discussed above.

In fact, there’s a super notable study that tested the benefits of intermittent fasting on important health related biomarkers such as pro-inflammatory biomarkers, body composition changes, and more. 

In the study, they had two groups:

1) One group ate a healthy diet and had an eating window of 16 hours where they consumed calories and only 8 hours consecutively where they weren’t allowed to. 

2) The Second group was put on the Standard American Diet (SAD) which is full of highly processed foods and not very healthy for you, but, they had a TRE window of only 8 hours consecutively where they could consume calories, followed by 16 consecutive hours where they didn’t. 

At the end of the study, the second group who was on the unhealthy, high processed food diet, but did do intermittent fasting actually had better improvements in all biomarkers, including improved body composition. 

This shows just how much your body is actually working with you to try to always return to health (homeostasis), and that we just need to give it more of a break to do what it naturally does. 

So much so that the unhealthy diet with intermittent fasting actually outperformed the healthy diet where they ate all day. 

Now, obviously it’s best to do intermittent fasting and eat healthy or healthier, but I think this study is important to show just how beneficial intermittent fasting is. 

Creating a time restricted eating window (TRE)

To create your own TRE window, simply choose a period of the day where you are allowed to consume calories, and then outside of that window, you are not allowed to. 

An ideal window is a 16:8 ratio aside from a couple variables, which I’ll mention. 

16:8 meaning you have an 8 hour window where you can consume calories, and then nothing outside of that. 

An example of this would be 10:00am-6:00pm feeding window. 

If you are super, super active, and burn a ton of calories in a day, a 14:10 window is a bit more ideal. I’m getting in 20,000 steps most days on top of dedicated exercise, and I burn a lot of calories, so right now, my TRE window is 14:10, and I eat from 10:00am-8:00pm. 

If you are a female trying to get pregnant, or trying to stay healthy and in the kind of shape to get pregnant in the future, you’d want to do a 12:12, something like 8:00am-8:00pm. 

Final thing to note, your window should end no sooner than 2 hours before you go to bed on average. 

Using my example, the absolute latest I’ll consume any calories is 8:00pm, but many nights I’m done by 7;00pm, and I typically go to sleep around 11:00pm to midnight, so that’s usually 3-4 hours before I go to bed. 

Conversely, if you’re in bed by 9pm, the latest you’d want your TRE window to close would be 7:00pm, and anything earlier, the better. 

The short of it is, as mentioned, food bogs the body down, so you don’t want to be digesting food while you’re sleeping and trying to repair and recover. 

Extended Fasting

If intermittent fasting is like your daily cleanup and maintenance protocol, doing an extended fast (anything over 24 hours) is like a periodic deep housecleaning. Like having a cleaning crew come into your house once a month or every other month to do a deep clean. 

When you fast for anything over 24 hours, all of the anti-aging, longevity inducing health benefits I outlined above: autophagy, apoptosis, new stem cells, immune & gut repair, and so on, all literally 3-5x the rate at which they perform these functions. 

But you have to make it to the 24 hour mark for that magic to start. 

So doing a periodic extended fast is a way of doing some deep, deep work to really peel back the years, and take care of all the stuff that sleep, exercise, and daily intermittent fasting cannot. 

• • • • • • • • • • 

36 Hour Fasting Protocol

Doing periodic extended fasts is something I believe in so much, and something I give a lot of credit for my biological age being a decade younger than my actual age, that I’ve put together a protocol to help you get the most out of a fast like this. 

I recommend doing a fast like this 4-6 times per year on top of a daily intermittent fasting protocol 5-7 days a week. 

Timing is everything. 

Timing of this fast is important, as you always want to start at night, not the morning of, for two reasons:

Let’s say you start your fast at 8pm on a Saturday night, 36 hours later would conclude your fast at 8am on Monday morning. 

This means you get two full nights of sleep on your fast, and the more rest you get while in a deep state of fasting, the deeper work your body can do. So getting more sleep during a fast is a biohack in and of itself. 

If you started say, at 8am on a Saturday morning, then your fast would end at 8pm on Sunday night, meaning only one night of sleep. 

Furthermore, by starting at 8pm and ending two days later at 8am for example, you really only have to fast for one full day, so you get more sleep and it really feels like you’re fasting for a shorter period of time. 

Notes on the 36 Hour Fasting Protocol

Anything included in the protocol are just recommendations, but will help you get hate most out of your fast. 

All recommended supplements are part of a “Fasting Support Kit”. This is a hand curated kit that I’ve literally put together and researched myself, so it’s something I use every time I fast. 

These supplements help speed up all of the benefits you receive from fasting, so again, if you’re going to do the hard work of “not eating”, the way I look at it, might as well do the other easier things to get the most out of it.

Senolytic

One supplement I highly recommend and will point out specifically beyond the support kit is Qualia Life’s Senolytic. 

This is a two day supplement protocol that you can take even if not fasting, and the key, clinically researched ingredients in it are called “Senolytics”, thus the name. 

These key ingredients initiate the same mechanisms that fasting does to induce apoptosis in the body, which is the programmed cellular death that kills off cancerous and autoimmune cells. 

If any supplement was ever your “beat cancer to the punch” supplement, this is it. 

When taken with a fast, it will actually compound the rate at which you go through apoptosis, making fasting and Senolytic an incredible one-two punch, but again, this supplement can be taken once per month, even if not fasting. 

The price point on it may seem a bit much for a two day protocol, but what would you pay in advance to continually stay ahead of cancer and autoimmune diseases?

Fasting lifestyle hacks

I will close by offering up some examples of the lifestyle hacks outlined in the fasting protocol. 

These are things you can do while fasting, and on a daily basis even, to help your body initiate different mechanisms of action that help speed up the benefits from fasting. 

Dry brushing is a pretty simple act of taking a softer bristle brush and brushing your skin. This not only exfoliates it, but it induces lymphatic drainage, and your lymphatic system is your main detox pathway, so if you’re trying to get ahead on cellular detoxification through fasting, jump starting your lymphatic system is a great hack. 

Rebounding, usually using a small trampoline, is another hack to not only jumpstart your metabolism, but. Jumpstart your lymphatic system. I’ve actually written about this, and aside from a drink of water, jumping or “rebounding” on a trampoline is the first thing I do to jumpstart my body (and my intermittent fast) for the day.

4-7-8 Breathwork fully engages your parasympathetic nervous system in just a couple minutes. Remember, your parasympathetic nervous system is your “rest & digest” portion of your autonomic nervous system, and if you’re not eating, when you engage it, you are engaging the “rest” portion, which means your body is instantly put into a healing and restorative state. Do 4-6 rounds of this simple technique first thing in the AM or before bed, and you can view a demo here.

Okay, there you have it, you are fully armed to go out there and…take a break from eating!