Signs of autophagy?

[ChrisW]

Just go to the doctor and get them snipped off. Did that a few years ago getting about 12 cut off with scissors.

[Momof5]

It costs a lot of money; I asked my doctor about it and they wanted $75 per one, so that is why I removed the big ones and the rest are tiny, too hard to tie off, so was just hoping they would come off naturally with Keto and fasting over time =) . Thanks for the information though =). I would have been happy with him doing it if he wouldn’t charge so much.

[KetoCancerMom]

I saw something at Walmart, in the pharmacy section, that you put on the skin tags - like a special tape that is supposed to remove the skin tags.

[Momof5]

Okay thanks! I will look for that =).

[ChrisW]

It costs a lot of money; I asked my doctor about it and they wanted $75 per one,

Sorry. Forgot not every country has free healthcare. Here in Australia had it done at no charge.

$75 each! That’s just ridiculous.

[Momof5]

I live in Canada, and we do have Government healthcare, but it is for essential services. They consider this, and circumcision of baby boys, and removing warts, and any optional surgeries as not necessary so are not covered.

[David_Stilley]

wish, TFG… Have to get the stomach and small intestine emptied out, then a while goes by - the ‘post-absorptive phase’ - and then glycogen gets depleted. After that is when autophagy can be really ramping up. If it’s before 24 hours, cool, and maybe toward the end of the first day we’re getting some increase, especially coming from a keto diet where glycogen should already be low.

Doug, I am fully focused on autophagy now and body composition as opposed to weight loss. I am starting to exp experiment with hacks for this. One important thing I have come to accept is that you can’t gorge on protein and get autophagy easily. Bikman and Niemen with their unlimited protein not contributing to weight gain may be true, but Jason Fung makes it plain that autophagy is driven by the absence of protein and carbohydrate. He mentioned Fat Fasting in a video I just saw yesterday. This is something that very much intrigued me. So I have cut my daily protein from approx 150g. to about 90g. per day. I am going to spend about 2-3 days per week consuming between 800-1100 calories of fat with as little protein and carbs as I can. I believe from viewing the Fung video that this will give me significant autophagy on those days without hunger, causing the recycling of protein as well as fat loss from the caloric deficit. I started an accountability thread this morning about my next moves 10 months into eating a ketogenic diet. I’m doing other things too to see where this journey takes me in the future.

[OldDoug]

David, yes - autophagy is primarily in response to nutrient deprivation. Protein and carbohydrates really kill the increase we normally find with fasting through their effect on the nutrient sensors mTOR and AMPK, and on the insulin/glucagon levels and ratio. Fat has a lesser effect, but I wouldn’t bank on “a lot” of fat not affecting autophagy much - I just don’t know, there. From all I’ve read, I don’t think a tablespoon or ~15 grams of fat in a cup of coffee, for example, is a worry if upregulated autophagy is what’s desired. When fasting, we’re burning our own fat, so if that little bit is coming in from the outside, I don’t think it’s a big deal.

Exercise stimulates autophagy 𝑖𝑛 𝑠𝑘𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑚𝑢𝑠𝑐𝑙𝑒𝑠, and there’s a low, basal rate of autophagy that is at least supposed to be at work within certain tissues. Much of the human nervous system is this way, being composed of cells that are ‘post-mitotic’ - that cannot divide and multiply to dilute out the effects of old, faulty, damaged cells and cell parts. So some “house cleaning” needs to always be going on. The failure of this is thought to contribute to Alzheimer’s Disease and other neurological problems.

Bikman has a great point about how coming from a ketogenic diet makes an ENORMOUS difference in how the body reacts to eating protein, as far as the insulin/glucagon ratio, but this really isn’t aimed at autophagy or not, I think. I see no reasonable expectation of increased autophagy when eating protein, in the first place.

Dr. Fung talks about autophagy here and there, but I’ve never seen him really be focused on it. I should watch that video too - I don’t know it. Yet my first reaction is that 800-1100 calories a day means no upregulated autophagy, as simple as that.

[PaulL]

While I believe that fasting permits autophagy at an increased rate, because the absence of dietary protein forces the body to find other sources of amino acids, I also believe that autophagy is possible in the presence of dietary protein, because I never had very much loose skin during my weight loss, and have none at all at the moment. I don’t fast, for various reasons, but my weight loss was slow enough for the rate of autophagy I was experiencing to keep up with it.

Something to bear in mind is that all proteins have a life-span, which may range from minutes to years. At the end of that lifespan, the protein is deconstructed into its constituent amino acids, which then either enter the labile pool for re-use, or get de-aminated and excreted. So the process of autophagy is always occurring, albeit at a more limited rate than when we fast. In fact, this process of proteolysis is part of the reason that protein is an essential part of the human diet, because there is always a certain unavoidable loss of nitrogen to the de-amination of amino acids.

[David_Stilley]

@OldDoug Here’s the video.

Am I Getting Kicked Out Of Autophagy If I Eat Salt A Few Hours Later After My Meal?

[OldDoug]

Something to bear in mind is that all proteins have a life-span, which may range from minutes to years. At the end of that lifespan, the protein is deconstructed into its constituent amino acids, which then either enter the labile pool for re-use, or get de-aminated and excreted. So the process of autophagy is always occurring, albeit at a more limited rate than when we fast. In fact, this process of proteolysis is part of the reason that protein is an essential part of the human diet, because there is always a certain unavoidable loss of nitrogen to the de-amination of amino acids.

Paul, I see different processes there. The generally smaller, shorter-lived proteins get handled, but it’s not autophagy, it’s the " Ubiquitin Proteasome Pathway" and it’s proteasomes, rather than autophagosomes/lysosomes doing it. The bigger, longer-lived stuff, all the way up to whole cellular organelles, is where autophagy does it’s thing.

It’s self-limiting, to an extent, since proteins are being broken down into amino acids, as you say. Leucine is the most potent inhibitor of autophagy there is, and even if we’re eating zero protein, some leucine is being produced by autophagy, and mTOR is very sensitive to it.

[OldDoug]

Hmm…based on that scale, I only get into “strong autophagy” if I fast >4 days. At my last 4.5 day fast, I had BG of 76 and ketones of 1.9, so that’s 40…after 4.5 days fasting. I no longer get high ketones after being low carb/keto 4.5 years. After 2.5 days of fasting, I only got ketones of 0.6 in the morning. And that’s starting at 0.5 days with 0.2 ketones (which is my normal level in the mornings now).

Bob, the glucose/ketones deal really bugs me, with respect to autophagy. One’s individual insulin sensitivity and fat-adaptation will greatly affect the numbers and ratios, and this is before we even get to considerations of autophagy. Somebody on a strict keto diet may have a lot of ketones and fairly low blood sugar, but be eating two or three meals a day, and shouldn’t even be thinking about upregulated autophagy at that point.

In humans, the normal thing is for the insulin/glucagon ratio and levels to get more favorable for autophagy for at least 5 or 6 days of fasting. I’m not at all saying that impressive gains in autophagy aren’t obtained during the 2nd, 3rd and 4th days of fasting - I think they are. But it still takes a good while to really get ourselves depleted, and the process is one of trailing off supplies, like with glycogen. Most of our stored glycogen will be gone by sometime in the 2nd day of fasting, but it’s still going down, slower and slower…

[PaulL]

Most of our stored glycogen will be gone by sometime in the 2nd day of fasting, but it’s still going down, slower and slower…

That’s because the body has evolved mechanisms for dealing with all sorts of conditions. The example you cite is merely one of them. I would like to inject a note of caution into this discussion: As we have found with calorie-counting, trying to override the body’s natural processes to achieve a goal can have unintended consequences. It is always wise to proceed cautiously.

So in this case, promoting autophagy by fasting, it might be wise to re-examine just why one considers it important to improve autophagy, and what one hopes to achieve by promoting it. How badly are we in need of autophagy, for example? How do we know what the problem is, and how do we know that autophagy is the best solution for solving it? Think things through, in other words.

What I am trying to get at is illustrated by the thinking that “excess fat adds extra pounds to my weight, therefore, I need to lose weight, therefore the number on the scale is extremely important”—a thought-process in which the distinction between fat-weight and the weight of other types of tissue gets lost, and thinking gets distorted. I would hate for that sort of distortion to occur in people’s thinking about autophagy.

[Janie]

Superficial ones: Skin tags disappearing. Loose skin tighten up. Grey hair turning back to normal hair color (I have that one). Age spots getting smaller turning back to normal skin color.

Not a scientific study but my n=2 observations. My husband saw his skin tags shrinking and disappearing while just eating a keto diet before he started fasting. My hair got darker before I started fasting while eating keto.

Once we started fasting for autophagy his rate of skin tag shrinkage and disappearance sped up. The dark spots on both our arms started lightening after fasting. My loose skin on my belly and thighs started firming up after fasting.

So if these are signs of autophagy my conclusion is we had a low level of autophagy going on because we were in ketosis and we regularly went 17 hours without eating (6 pm - 11 am)

Fasting speeded up the process… although it is still a glacially slow process - we still see results. Over months, not days or weeks.

We are both cancer survivors so we will continue to do at least 36 hour fasts a couple of times a month as a preventative from now on. This is done completely on faith because we have no idea what is actually going on at a cellular level in our bodies. But not eating for a day a couple of times a month is cheap and easy and with the long historical precedence of fasting I do not believe it will do any harm.

[OldDoug]

Here’s the video.

David, I’m thinking the Fungster goes a little too far, there. While fat has much less effect on insulin secretion than protein and carbohydrates, it’s not zero, and one’s insulin level does affect autophagy. And while I don’t know all the particulars, I’m guessing that the presence of food, even if pure fat, in the stomach, small intestine and then going into the bloodstream from there (rather than the relatively slow breaking-down of stored triglycerides) has hormonal/biochemical effects that may affect what is a fairly complicated dance of regulation and counter-regulation.

It really is a guess - there is a horrible lack of sure information and studies about human fasting and autophagy.

[David_Stilley]

a thought-process in which the distinction between fat-weight and the weight of other types of tissue gets lost, and thinking gets distorted. I would hate for that sort of distortion to occur in people’s thinking about autophagy.

I agree that fasting could be taken to an unhealthy place. As I understand it muscle loss is the last resort in autophagy, to avert death from starvation. Your body prioritizes getting rid of unnecessary protein structures, dead or dying cells and such. It’s not anywhere close to calorie restriction dieting on a long term basis. I don’t know what is happening in my body, but yesterday I ate almost fat only, 4 carbs from espresso and 9g. of incidental protein which I think was a really high estimate considering the visual appearance of the bacon and I dipped into the 150’s for the first time since I started keto after 2 months of stalling. I am definitely continuing my experimentation in radically mixing up my routine in ways that I haven’t yet. There’s so many ideas and knowledge available here, what worked for me did for quite a while. I don’t know if I am up to 4-5 days of EF, but yesterday was relatively easy without hunger until near bed time. It apparently is working to bust my stall. Check out the short video I linked to. I started an accountability thread after 10 months here just yesterday, to document what happens next for me. I will be cycling my eating throughout the week to mix things up. I did 3 days of carnivore followed by a regular keto day to celebrate my son’s birthday and did a Fat Fast yesterday and I will continue that today to see how much weight I drop. According to the Fung video that I posted a link to I should be getting autophagy benefits from this routine of fat fasting off and on.

https://www.ketogenicforums.com/t/full-metal-keto-next-steps-and-progress-thread/89541/5

[OldDoug]

Once we started fasting for autophagy his rate of skin tag shrinkage and disappearance sped up. The dark spots on both our arms started lightening after fasting. My loose skin on my belly and thighs started firming up after fasting.

Right on, Jane. I had raised keloid scars on both legs on the shin areas. 6 years and no change. After I started fasting, within 16 months I noticed they were shrunk down to skin level, leaving just an outline, or even entirely vanished.

We are both cancer survivors so we will continue to do at least 36 hour fasts a couple of times a month as a preventative from now on. This is done completely on faith because we have no idea what is actually going on at a cellular level in our bodies. But not eating for a day a couple of times a month is cheap and easy and with the long historical precedence of fasting I do not believe it will do any harm.

Good point. For most people I have to think there is value in fasting “at least once in a while.” Autophagy and immune system regeneration is pretty well established. Stem cell rejuvenation - I don’t know about this but it’s certainly being talked about a good bit.

[Momof5]

Once we started fasting for autophagy his rate of skin tag shrinkage and disappearance sped up.

Feeling hungry now on my fast of 66 hours, so this is encouraging me, thanks @Janie!

[Alexandru_Radu]

great ! thank you ! so 20g carbs or less per day ? is this true ? and also how can you measure them ?

[KetoCancerMom]

Are you asking how to get under 20g of carbs a day?

If so, the best way to do that is by weighing your food and logging it using a program like CarbManager or Chronometer.