100 Pounds Ago...I Started Learning How to Love Myself More Than the Pleasure of Food by Charles A. Postma - HTML preview

Chapter 9

Autophagy, the Healing Power Within Fasting

Autophagy is remarkable. It is a really big deal. Massive amounts of money are being thrown into research to upregulate autophagy without fasting. Fear of fasting is being used to discourage using the healing power of autophagy. The problem is that chemically induced autophagy confuses the intrinsic intelligence of autophagy. Autophagy works in a very orderly way, first, by removing trash and toxins from the body or remaking them into new useful organelles. Once the house cleaning is complete it begins devouring “superfluous tissues” like fat, cysts, tumors, and anything else it finds in your body that should not be there. This pecking order of priority plays out the exact same way with every mammalian life form on earth. Inanition (fasting) research since the 1800’s shows this repeatedly that the order by which the body eats itself leaves major organs alone until well past the Return of Natural Hunger.

Autophagy will not dissolve the heart (solid muscle) or the brain (mostly fat) until just before death.

There has never been one single deviation from this orderly process. Any image of famine survivors will prove this point. They are all emaciated in the same way.

The problem with chemically inducing autophagy is that this orderly process goes haywire, and autophagy becomes a cannibal feeding on anything it finds.

I mentioned earlier that autophagy does not follow orders, but usually works on the greatest health threat that it finds. Some people get frustrated that it does not work on what they want it to work on. I find this to be especially true for cosmetic desires. Maybe it responds to direction by prayer. Maybe that’s why prayer and fasting are always linked in every religion.

Fasting practitioners have always known about the healing power of fasting and with Yoshinori Ohsumi winning the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for documenting the process, the medical establishment will have to acknowledge that they are not the only healing game in town. The only thing that the medical establishment has to offer us is palliative drugs that only treat symptoms of disease while giving us no mercy from the diseases that cause them. Our bodies just continue to rot out from under us.

The definition of The Theory of Evolution found in Wikipedia says that “Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes that are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Different characteristics tend to exist within any given population as a result of mutation, genetic recombination and other sources of genetic variation. Evolution occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural 33

selection (including sexual selection) and genetic drift act on this variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more common or rare within a population. It is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organization, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules.”

The part of autophagy that has not evolved as we transformed from one cell insects to our current physical form is how is it possible that autophagy never experienced any change whatsoever? Each successive generation gets the identical imprint of the intrinsic intelligence displayed by autophagy without a “change in the heritable characteristics” “over successive generations. We also see no change

“as a result of mutation, genetic recombination and other sources of genetic variation.” Obviously, there is no “genetic drift.” How has this profound physical transformation taken place (worm to human), but how then does autophagy work in the same way with each living creature since pre-historic times?