From Eating 4 Meals a Day to Fasting 20 Hours

How fasting 20 hours per day changed my life

Fasting is one of the oldest practices of mankind and it exists in almost all civilizations in one form or another. Its use originates from V Century b.C. when it was used by Hippocrates for therapeutic purposes and since then it has been a part of spiritual and wellness practice. However, it was only after Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology for “discoveries of the mechanisms for autophagy” that fasting really started to attract more and more people. Ohsumi identified fasting as one of the ways to trigger autophagy (natural, regulated mechanism of the cell that removes unnecessary or dysfunctional components) motivating all health-conscious people to embark on their fasting journeys.

There are a lot of different fasting practices that go from a 16 hour daily fast to week-long fasting or even more for the most courageous. While the benefits of fasting are now widely demonstrated by science, the question of what “dosage” is optimal remains disputed. As Dr. Peter Attia explains it, fasting may be the most powerful “drug” out there, but the question of its optimal dosage remains widely unclear. The most beneficial fasting protocol for health purposes is still to be determined, which is why self-experimenting with fasting makes a lot of sense. And that’s what I decided to…