Calorie restriction has long proven to boost immunity

It may not be fun, but calorie restriction has been proven across all species, including humans, to provide a variety of benefits, including:

• weight loss – especially burning the dangerous visceral fat around your organs
• lowered blood sugar
• reduced cholesterol
• decreased inflammation
• increased longevity
• enhanced brain function
• increased autophagy

You know the benefits of weight loss. Lowering blood sugar and cholesterol are helping move you away from diabetes and heart disease respectively. Decreased inflammation is generally of benefit to reduce your risk across all the degenerative diseases, including the aforementioned diabetes and heart disease, but also cancer and autoimmune diseases.

Obviously protecting brain function and living longer and healthier is a big plus.

So what’s the last one on the list, autophagy?

Autophagy, or “self-cleaning” and why it’s good

Autophagy means: Auto – self, phagy-eat = Eat self?

Sounds a little weird but it’s actually a very protective function your body performs when little to no fuel is coming in. Simply put, fuel from the outside is low, so your body starts “cleaning house” by eating up old damaged, cells, organelles and parts of your organs that are not functioning correctly and in fact are putting a burden on your system.

Once the “cleaning out” of the old and damaged cells and parts has occurred, your body rushes in with replacement parts, activating the process of regenerating new, healthier cells.

Therefore, when autophagy is induced, it’s followed up by a rush of stem cell production to repair and regenerate.

How does this protect your immune system?

Ridding your body of old, damaged parts and replacing them with new and healthy cells is empowering to your immune system in addition to your organs, brain, and overall longevity.

Autophagy improves the effectiveness of your immune system, making it better at clearing out pathogens, including viruses.

Autophagy doesn’t just help you clear out inhospitable organisms, it also balances inflammation, helpful for your immune system and overall health.

The truth: fasting isn’t fun

I think we can all agree it’s no fun to feel hungry all the time.

Dr. Valter Longo, in his book The Longevity Diet, solved the problem.

He created the Fasting Mimicking Diet to reap all the benefits of fasting without the starvation.

The fasting-mimicking diet

This is a 5-day program that can be done monthly, quarterly, or whatever best suits your health status and how you wish to improve your health.

I did two in-depth blogs on Dr. Longo’s work and the Fasting Mimicking Diet.

They are entitled “3 Steps to Living Longer Without Disease” and “What’s the Ideal Healthy Diet for Humans“.

Feel free to peruse these for a “deeper dive” into this subject.

5 days on a high-fat, low-calorie diet to boost immunity and more

The diet was created by Dr. Longo and there’s research to support its efficacy.

The company he created, Prolon, is a not for profit company; all of the proceeds go back into his research.

Dr. Longo heads the Longevity Institute at USC in Southern California where he continues to research, with his team, the benefits surrounding the fasting-mimicking diet.

The box of food comes to you

The 5 days of food including nut bars, soup blends (just need to add water and heat), kale crackers, nutrients, teas, and a dark chocolate crisp bar (yummy but no sugar, dairy, gluten, etc) are delivered to your door.

I write this blog at this time for 2 reasons:

1. We are all obsessed with what we can do to boost our immune system and prevent getting COVID-19. This 5-day program is proven to induce autophagy and that does boost your immune system.
2. Some of us have gone a little “crazy” on our diets due to quarantine, eating all the wrong things. Many people have gotten over-stressed and anxious with COVID-19. Who blames them? But what doesn’t help is sitting at home eating all the wrong foods. High sugar foods and highly processed carbohydrates are definitely comfort foods. Sadly, they tend to empower viruses and weaken your immune system, neither of which you need at this time.

The Prolon program is a nice opportunity to reset your metabolism and boost your immune system

It’s a 5-day program because it takes the first 24-30 hours to fully digest your last meal.

The next 2 days gets you into a state of ketosis, where the body starts to break down dangerous abdominal fat that is highly pro-inflammatory.

The last 2 days gets your body into autophagy. Now the real cleansing begins as we discussed above.

Day 6 – re-feeding day. You don’t go crazy; the program tells you how to reintroduce more calories gradually. This is very important because post-autophagy your nice baby stem cells get secreted to repair and regenerate.

It’s an exciting process.

Prolon is offering a nice discount through doctors at the moment

In an effort to support those who wish to support their immune function, the company is offering a $50 discount off their 5-day program.

This is a first since their inception, I believe, and it’s being done to assist us during this time of needing to support our immune system in the best ways possible.

If you’re interested, just give the office a call and we can have a box drop shipped directly to your door. Call us at 408-733-0400.

You certainly don’t have to do this through us, but I don’t believe you’ll get the discount without going through a doctor.

The program is best done with a doctor’s support

Calorie restriction is not appropriate for everyone.

If you have diabetes or kidney disease, you should do the program under a doctor’s supervision.

If you have suffered from an eating disorder, this may not be a good fit for you. 

If you are pregnant or breastfeeding you don’t want to do the program at this time, it’s too low calorie. But there are other things we can assist you with to boost your immune system if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding. Just reach out and we can assist you.

A specific combination of food is provided for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, depending on the day. You don’t want to alter what is provided unless you have an aversion to certain foods, then the company can assist you in making a substitution. e.g. perhaps you don’t do well with tomatoes and 1 meal is tomato soup. They can provide a substitution in that case.

The unique combination of nutrients and reduction in calories is meant to trick your body into thinking it’s fasting, even though it’s being given energy.

Let me know how I can assist you

If this program is of interest to you, let me know. We can set you up for the next step to take.

If this isn’t something you can do but would like other suggestions on how to best boost your immune system, please reach out. We are here to help.