Help Your Brain Heal by Your Body Eating Itself?
You read that title correctly. Autophagy is a very useful biological “clean-up crew” process that helps get rid bits and parts floating around that no longer need to be there. Trouble is, the conviences of modern living stop the clean-up crew from coming around disrupting our feasting and lounging. Regular, long-term, responsible fasting exercise, ketogenic diet (or at least low carb) were build in parts of daily life for thousands of years before we became agrarian.
Bottom line, living in such a way that your body regularly engages it’s self-cleaning mechanisms, autophagy, not only promots long, healthy living, but it can help heal the brain because the body is restoring #Godsengineering, working as God created us to work.
This post from Mark’s Daily Apple is an excellent guide to autophagy and how to encorparate practices into daily life than may help you. Here is a preview quote...
Autophagy: the word comes from the Greek for “self-eating,” and that’s a very accurate description: Autophagy is when a cell consumes the parts of itself that are damaged or malfunctioning. Lysosomes—members of the innate immune system that also degrade pathogens—degrade the damaged cellular material, making it available for energy and other metabolites. It’s cellular pruning, and it’s an important part of staving off the worst parts of the aging process.
In study after study, we find that impairment to or reductions of normal levels of autophagy are linked to almost every age-related degenerative disease and malady you can imagine.
Early in my brain injury I went off processed foods. Abnout ten years ago, I discovered paleo and ketogenic (I eat the ketogenic version of the Perfect Health Diet). I eat only two meals a day, with little to no snacking except on “hard” brain days. I ride my bike several hours every day my brain allows. I have improved slowly and steadily over this time, and notice I do worse in those times I am unable to regularly enter autophagy. For me, it is a key component of my #longtermTBIhealing.
May God startle you with joy!