Muscle Loss

The older I get the more I want to withdraw from the world and find peace and tranquility.  When you get into your 70s, there are some nasty things happening that remind you the clock is ticking.  One of them is muscle loss.  That happens very quietly so that you hardly notice it, but then one day you realize you don’t have the strength you once had.  But with one’s mortality knocking at the door, why be so caught up in world affairs when one’s opinions really make no difference at all?  So to be obsessed with what is going on in the world seems more and more like a waste of time.  

Original License Plate

Food

Watching the series “Alone” on Netflix. The entire program, the contestants are talking about how they are starving and need to find food, so it is probably not the best TV to watch if one is watching how much one is eating. But I do find it a fascinating series. Kind of explains what travails early man — the caveman — would have been facing. The constant and unpredictable search for food. They don’t really know how long homo sapiens has been around. Estimates run from 1 to 2 million years. And then there was our immediate ancestor homo erectus — for a few more millions. Our current civilization is only about 3000 years old. Just a tiny fraction of the overall time we’ve been here. So the relentless search for food, like animals in the wild currently, was our lot for most of that time.

5-Day Mimicking Fast

Bread Again

I’ve been frustrated with commercially available bread, as I’ve wanted to move away from eating wheat and breads loaded with sugar). Not so much because of the glutan, but because wheat has been so modified in the last 100 years that it is the classic hybrid food (or said another way, is it food at all?). But if you look at commercially available breads, even those that call themselves “Rye Bread” or “Oat Bread” or whatever, the first and therefore biggest ingredient is always wheat. So who are they kidding? So I decided to try to make my own bread and nix the wheat. Ordered a bunch of different flours from Amazon, including walnut flour. But then, wouldn’t you know it, I discovered a commercially available bread that in fact does NOT include wheat and has zero sugar — even has some flaxseed and iodine (guess I’ll be making muffins with all that Amazon flour). This one:

Wheatless Bread

5-Day Mimicking Fast

I just googled the amount of protein an active man’s body actually uses each day, and it came in at 56 grams. So if I’m doing less than 20 grams of protein per day on this 5-day mimicking diet, then each day the body has to scavenge for at least 36 grams. Times 5, that’s 180 grams of protein that the body will have to break down from internal resources. At least, that logical.

If it were a water fast for 5 days, that would be 280 grams. So that would be the difference between the two — 100 grams of protein.

So while this mimicking diet hasn’t done much for weight loss for me, it may still do a not insignificant amount for autophagy, in my opinion.

The key is keeping that amount of protein per day extremely low…the lower the better. Next time I do this, I’m going to try for less than 15 grams per day. Not easy as even celery has some protein.

Learning

Can You Take It?

One of the most valuable things a boxer can have is a tough chin. If you can take the biggest punch your opponent has to offer and just shake it off, that’s gold. It means you can walk in and have at it with immunity.

When that happens to a fighter during the war in the ring, when he takes what he knows is the other fighter’s best shot and survives it with ease, that’s when a fighter can really become aggressive and go after his opponent relentlessly — because there is little to fear.

So, paradoxically, a very defensive ability turns into pure offense.

Beliefs

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