The true legends make what they do look easy. But if you saw them from the start and followed what they actually did to get to that level, you wouldn’t be surprised at all.

You can’t win a race if you sit in cruise control for the majority. Car or motorbike racers hit corners and have to slow down. But do they stay at that slow speed? Nope, as soon as they’re past that point they speed up again.

Oftentimes it’s right when they’re facing that obstacle that the best drivers will overtake their opponents. It’s those little moments that usually determine who will win and who will lose.

True, lasting success takes such an ungodly amount of work that to the observer, it looks like magic.

I love reading biographies of the greatest-in-their-field, particularly to pickup what got them to that point. There is usually some element of “luck” in there, but it only ever comes after they have put in the work to be able to take advantage of that opportunity.

Anyone who follows cricket will know of Donald Bradman’s long hours of practice as a kid with the fence picket and the ball.

Basketball’s Kobe Bryant was famous for showing up to day 1 of pre-season training every year at nearly 100% game fitness.

Warren Buffett is renowned for the amount of relevant information he reads every day.

Everyone who follows American football knows that what Tom Brady lacks in the typical physical attributes of a great player in his position, he more than makes up in his dedication to being the best, in all aspects of his life. It is said that when you face him, he has studied you and your team so much that he knows your weaknesses better than you do.

Think about your industry.

Think about what you want to be successful in.

What do you need to do to become great in it?

Go do that.

The post Work So Hard That You Make It Look Like Magic appeared first on Mike Haydon.

Disclaimer: I’m not a medical professional, nor do I play one on YouTube. I don’t recommend you undertake fasting, especially if you’re sick, not an adult or you’re pregnant. This is simply me sharing some of my research into the subject.

What Do We Mean By “Fasting”?

Fasting, as used by the scientific literature, is going for 12 hours or more consuming only water or fewer than 200 calories per day, as opposed to “Calorie Restriction”, which is a 20-40% reduction in calories (see here).

Given that most of the literature looks more at what happens after 24 hours or more of fasting, the simple definition I use is:

Going a day or more consuming virtually no calories.

That means, you only take in water, milkless & sugarless teas, black coffee, and some electrolytes like Himalayan Salt, Magnesium etc.

You then also have either Intermittent Fasting (IF) or Prolonged Fasting (PF). PF goes for 3 days or longer. You don’t do that very often, maybe a couple of times a year tops, if they’re a week or more. IF lasts a day or two and is meant to be done even weekly.

Fasting seems to be an evolutionary mechanism that helps organisms all the way from E. Coli (lived 4 times longer) to humans to survive and thrive in the feast and famine conditions of the ancient world.

This peer reviewed article has a great summary of how our bodies create and burn energy during fasting. Of particular note is the explanation of how humans can survive fasting 30 days or longer. And some animals, like King Penguins, can survive over 5 months without food!

Why Do I Fast

Some people fast for religious reasons (Islam’s Ramadan being a well known example), but that’s not really my thing.

One of my primary goals is a long, healthy life. Everything I’ve seen in the scientific literature points to regular fasting being one of the best ways of achieving that (after obvious things like clean drinking water, warm shelter, nutritious food etc).

Since I don’t find fasting particularly onerous, it’s a no-brainer for me. On IF, I don’t feel light-headed, fatigued or cranky. Like most things I do, I’m flexible with it, so if I’m fasting and someone invites us to dinner, I’ll usually eat and start another fast another time.

I enjoy eating, as anyone who knows me will attest. I just reckon this way I get the best of both worlds.

With that said, here are some of the fasting benefits my research has turned up. Be sure to follow the links if you want to read the actual papers.

Overall Health Improvement

In this section, they showed how fasting increased insulin sensitivity and the stress resistance of cells. Being more sensitive to insulin decreases fat storage and helps protect against things like diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Resting blood pressure and heart rate were decreased, as well as an increase in heart rate variability (usually seen as a sign of better heart health).

Other than when fasting was first started in very old mice, regular fasting increased life expectancy by as much as 30%. So if your life expectancy was 80 years, a 30% increase means living to 104!

Speaking of Metabolic Syndrome, as described here, IF was able to prevent and reverse all aspects of the disease in rodents.

Improved Brain Function

Summarising part of this article, fasting resulted in a decrease in size of most organs, except the brain and testicles. In fact, fasting caused an increase in BDNF, which increases focus and activity.

Essentially, when your brain realises there’s no food coming in, it switches to a mode best suited to finding food. Our ancient ancestors would have to be better hunters when they were hungry than when they were fed, else we wouldn’t have survived.

IF also resulted in better results in physical performance tests as well as learning and memory tests in rats. This was because of increased brain plasticity (usually associated with children’s learning) and increased production of neural stem cells.

This 2011 article demonstrated an improvement of coordination and cognitive function in older rats on an IF regimen. This one from 2007 showed an improvement in learning ability in mice. This 2016 study showed the method by which fasting improved neural plasticity. And this 2002 study in the Journal of Neurochemistry demonstrated that the rate of creation of new neurons could be directly modified by calorie restriction.

Dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s & Huntington’s Diseases

Fasting has been shown to reduce brain degeneration and slow the progression of diseases affecting the brain, such as Alzhimer’s, Parkinsons & Huntington’s Diseases. It did this reducing the damage caused by things like inflammation, boosting the levels of antioxidant defences, and improving the brain’s ability to heal through producing new neurons.

However, if I’m reading it right, fasting seems to speed up the progression of ALS.

Summarised from here.

Cancer Protection

In a 2012 study, it was found that fasting protected normal cells in mice from the harmful side effects of a range of chemotherapy drugs.

The same study found that regular fasting dramatically increased the effectiveness of chemo drugs.

It found that fasting protected normal cells by switching energy from maintenance to growth, but found that the same switch didn’t happen in cancer cells – they still got stressed by starvation. So the cancer cells became more sensitive to the chemo drugs, while the normal cells received increased protection from those drugs.

It was found to increase the cancer-free survival of mice with metastatic tumors (breast cancer, melanoma and neuroblastoma lines, specifically).

It concluded that regular fasting could potentially replace or significantly augment certain chemotherapy drugs for a wide range of tumors. They emphasised in the discussion that the effects went across cancer lines, which is something most drugs do not.

This 2015 study showed that cycles of PF reduced the damage to bone marrow caused by chemo drugs.

This 2011 study seems to suggest that, while the 20-40% calorie reduction usually recommended for cancer patients was effective and well studied, PF achieved the same benefits in only 5 days (as opposed to taking several months) and didn’t cause long-term muscle wasting.

This clinical trial found that 3 day fasts protected human patients from the toxic effects of chemo drugs.

Diabetes Reduction

A 1999 study found that regular fasting in rats decreased their incidence of diabetes by almost 30% fasting reduces diabetes. These were in rats specifically bred to mimic the human response to diabetes.

Autophagy

This 2010 study found that fasting dramatically increased a natural process called “autophagy” in the brains of mice.

Autophagy literally means “self eating” and is the body’s way of recycling old or dead cells.

This article has a huge amount of information about autophagy, what it does, how it works, how it helps, etc. A quick summary is:

• it protects against infections, cancer, aging and heart disease
• allows mammals to withstand nutrient depletion
• maintains homeostasis in cells
• removes “junk” from cells like abnormal proteins or pathogens
• limits DNA damage
• clears out “misfolded proteins” (like the ones associated with Alzheimer’s Disease) – see also this
• suppresses the growth of tumours – see also this
• is heavily involved in the immune response
• a decrease in autophagy corresponds with increased aging

Immune System “Reboot”

A 2014 study on mice and humans suggested that cycles of 2-4 day fasts shifted the stem cells of the immune system from dormant to active. At the same time, it cleared out old, damaged cells.

During fasting, they noticed that the white blood cell count (both in humans and animals) went down during PF, but then bounced right back after eating again. Most importantly, they found that to get this effect, you have to fully deplete your glycogen reserves, which takes between 24-48 hours.

High Blood Pressure

This 2001 study took 174 patients with high blood pressure through a single, medially supervised, 10-11 day water-only fast (with some healthy eating for a few days either side). Nearly 90% of them got their blood pressure back under 140/90. 11 of the patients were taking antihypertensive medication at the start, and all of them were allowed to stop the medication after the fast was done.

Now 140/90 is still high, so this study the following year did another fast with patients about the level that the previous had reached and got 82% into the “safe” zone for strokes.

Heart Health

In this 2005 study, regular IF was found to protect rats’ hearts from ischemic injury (problems with blood supply) and recovery from a heart attack.

General Notes

Given relative energy expenditure etc, 24 hours for a rat is seen to be similar to one week for humans.

A 2015 report in Cell Metabolism provides a good summary of the “known” positive effects of prolonged fasting. The report centres on whether the researchers could achieve positive effects by a diet that mimics fasting. Their reasoning was “prolonged water-only fasting is difficult for the great majority of the population”, which I can completely understand. That restriction was found to have a positive effect. My main takeaway from that report is that we just don’t need as much food as we’re getting.

This study’s preliminary results suggested that PF could positively affect the body similar to hard exercise, by way of suppressing the inflammatory response.

The post 9 Surprising Health Benefits of Fasting appeared first on Mike Haydon.

I sure hadn’t, but I’d heard a lot about the health benefits associated with it. See my subsequent post that goes into depth on some of the research around fasting benefits.

I grew up in a devout Catholic family, so fasting is something I’ve done as long as I remember. Our fasting rule was “no meat, no treat”, but that generally translated to Weetbix for breakfast, toast & Vegemite for lunch and pasta with tomato sauce (from the bottle) and cheese. So it was more sensory deprivation than calorie restriction. Oh and super high in carbs. But that was back in the 90s, when only fats were the enemy.

Over the last few years, I’ve taken to various forms of intermittent fasting. A lot of 24 hour fasts. I rarely have breakfast, even though I’m usually up around 5am.

In the last 6 months or so I’ve started increasing fasts to 48 hours and did a 3 day fast. Virtually all of them went really well, so it was time to tackle “the big one”.

Why Even Fast?

I don’t particularly care about losing weight, except as maybe a bit of an internal scorecard. I’m a healthy weight for my height. Sure having better definition would be great, but it’s really low on the priorities.

I find when I do short-term fasts that I have more focus, better creativity in my business, more energy and it’s good to give my digestive system a break.

My goal is to live for a very long time in great health. Pretty much all the data points to fasting from time to time being a great way of achieving that.

As it was the start of the year (3 Jan – 10 Jan 2018) I also took time to regenerate my mind through reading some amazing books. They were Relentless, The New Case For Gold, and So Good They Can’t Ignore You:

Three fantastic books that I highly recommend.

So Why 7 Days?

Going 48 hours is great for giving your body a break, but to truly kick the healing and regeneration into gear, you need to go longer. Most of what I’d read or seen said 7 days was the minimum for getting that.

I discovered the downside to supercharging your immune system, tho. On day 3 I got bitten on the foot by some ants. That resulted in the itchiest I ever remember being. It was so bad I had to regularly put ice packs on to calm it down.

Given how much I’m in the garden, I get ant bites all the time. They don’t usually bother me. This time was very different. These were worse than any spider bites I’ve ever had.

It was so bad, it’d wake me up at night.

Because of it, I couldn’t do the couple of kms walking per day that I’d planned. Much to the disappointment of my son’s Pokemon playing ambitions.

On Day 7 I finally figured I’d try rubbing apple cider vinegar on my whole foot. After half an hour or so the itchiness went away for quite a few hours. Re-application took it away for the rest of the time. Sweet heavenly bliss!

How Was Your Energy? Did You Get Hungry?

Sure did. Days 3 and 4 were tough.

It was funny, on day 4 I started remembering a whole lot of food I loved as a kid. Dishes I don’t recall thinking about in at least 10 years.

Days 5 and 6 I still got the odd wave of hunger. But otherwise I just forgot about the foot and took it easy. And read a lot.

I got a bit of work done, but not much. I think because it took so much willpower to keep going that I had zero motivation to work. Played Monopoly a lot with my eldest (5yo). It’s his favourite game at the moment.

Day 7 was fantastic from an energy perspective. I even strongly contemplated continuing the fast. But decided against that because, you know, food.

There were no hunger waves on Day 7. By then I was entirely unfazed about eating. It was a lovely change to the previous week.

How Did It End?

On Day 7 I made a batch of French Onion Soup. Like I said I wasn’t fazed about what I was going to eat. Just wanted something pretty easy on the stomach to wake up the digestive system.

I’ve never made onion soup before, but it turned out excellently. As you can imagine, I tasted even better for not having eaten in a week!