Category: Diabetes

5-Day Mimicking Diet

I’m on day 3 of the 5-day mimicking diet. 800 calories per day, except the first day I went without food entirely.

Focus on the mimicking diet is minimizing protein so to maximize the amount of autophagy. Less than 20 grams of protein per day, except that first day was 0. From Longo’s book The Longevity Diet.

Really want the body to have to scavenge for protein wherever it can find it — all those wayward (and cancerous?) cells.

Longo says a healthy person should do this 3 times per year. Someone with diabetes much more often.

I knew I could do this because I did one similar 800 calorie day before and it wasn’t difficult. I thought I could boost the benefit by not eating that first day, which I knew I could do because I’ve done 48-hour fasts before.

Those more strenuous fasts one has to work one’s way up to them imo. Not sure I want to do a 5-day water fast because I do notice with a 48-hour fast that my energy level goes down significantly. One must feel very depleted after 5 days with no nutrition — really don’t want to experience that level of fatigue.

Insulin Spikes

Sugar Model

The diabetes sugar model I have in my head goes something like this.  When a person eats refined sugar or simple carbs, this spikes glucose in the blood, which spikes the insulin level so that that sugar can be absorbed by the cells.  But if this happens often enough, the metabolism reacts to protect the cells from being flooded with so much sugar by creating insulin resistance — the insulin receptors in the cells stop functioning, that is, sugar gets stopped at the gate.  This means that the excess sugar remains in the blood vessels.   Now you have dangerously high levels of sugar in the blood.  Here comes diabetes 2, a self-induced disease.

My Story