We have all heard the phrase “what doesn’t kill you will make your stronger“. That is the theory of hormesis. It is the science of using small amounts of stress for big, long term gains. It is what activates repair proteins that we all have, but have been out of commission because of how easy our lives have become. If we are cold we go sit by a fire or turn on the heater. If you are too hot you turn on the air conditioning in your home or in your car and you take a picture of the temperature our cars tell us it is and send it to all of our friends. Hell, many of us have air conditioned seats. Come on guys! My kids do not even know what a swamp cooler is. When I tell them the 1980 diesel Volkswagen Rabbit I owned didn’t have air conditioning they thought I was raised in the third world. My air conditioning was a Big Gulp filled with ice I could chew and an open window. Sweating is no longer in vogue, unless you are working out and even then it is frowned upon with a lot of the instagramers out there. If your hungry, you just pull over to most corners in town and purchase a snack, meal, latte or anything that is teeming with calories. It’s not like hundreds of years ago here in the valley when you did not know when you were going to find something to eat. Remember before the advent of irrigation and farming this was a true food desert with the exception of the river basins. I mean could you imagine traveling through the rolling hills where Kettleman city is today in the summer on the way to the coast (on your horse or in your wagon) hoping to find something, anything to eat. It is during these difficult times that the proteins called sirtuins kick in and work on recycling and getting rid of the senescent cells (the ones that are doing nothing but causing inflammation and using energy). This process is referred to as autophagy. It is one of the markers of hormesis which enhances the process of biologic repair. Autophagy is a protein turnover pathway, a catalytic process, which aims to degrade and recycle cellular components. The process maintains cellular function during or after stress, when damaged materials accumulate and it has to be eliminated.
So what can you do to activate this amazing repair process that has been found to benefit you health and prolong your life? Well there are many options but I will list the ones that are easy to incorporate in to our daily lives.
First, is Exercise. Many of you already do this and I am proud of you for doing so. There are others, and you know who you are, who don’t. I mean nothing. I am not talking steps that you Fit-Bit or Apple Watch counts for you. I am talking dedicated exercise. Something that gets that heart rate up and causes a little sweat when you stop doing it. The type of exercise that makes you breath with your mouth open. What is hormetic about exercise? Well, if you exercise for hours you would break down and eventually die. I mean have you seen the triathletes and the end of their 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride finishing with a 26.2 run. Seriously, they do not look healthy. You body would become dehydrated, kidneys would shut down, you lose control of everything, and I mean everything and eventually your heart would do some not so healthy things, like beat irregularly and eventually stop. Exercise, in moderation can enhance autophagy in the liver, muscles (making them more efficient and productive which does well for your appearance with improved tone), pancreas (decreasing risk of diabetes)and adipose tissue (fat) as well as the brain (decreasing the risk of dementia by getting rid of the waste and amyloid plaques, tangles and tao proteins that accumulate as we age). How much exercise you ask? Here is a scary statistic I like to throw around. If you exercise 20 minutes a day, three days a week, just one hour a week, you would be considered the top 10% of physically active individuals above age 35 in the United States. That is how lazy, I mean inactive, we are. That is where I would like all of you to start. Do not make your exercise regimen too long or too difficult or you will find an excuse not to do it.
A second hormetic activity that is very popular currently is Moderate Hot or Cold exposure. If you stayed in the cold too long or the heat too long you would obviously die. Cold plunges are the in thing currently. If you can do three minutes in a cold plunge or a cold shower this will kick those sirtuins on like Donkey Kong (I’m dating myself with that one) 🙂 You will have to slowly build yourself up to 3 minutes but some is better than none. I am more the sauna type. For the equivalent benefit as the cold plunge you should build up to 15-20 minutes in the sauna. These activities activate Heat Shock Proteins (HSP). I like to describe sitting in a sauna as getting the benefits of exercise without exercise. Just sitting in there my heart rate will kick up to 110 beats per minute after 10 minutes, 120 after 15 minutes and up to 140 after 20 minutes. I can attest to the temperature at the GB3 gym on Palm and Nees as being 200 degrees on the top bench and 160 on the lower bench. How would I know? I was the weird guy who brought my digital meat thermometer one day to test it. Once a scientist always a scientist. Please check with your physician (me if you are my patient) before you go jumping into the ice bath or sit in a 200 degree sauna because you need to make sure that your heart can tolerate it.
The third hormetic activity is Intermittent Fasting. For obvious reasons. If you don’t eat you will die fairly quickly and if you eat too much you will accelerate your death due to the excess weight and the metabolic catastrophe that it causes. This one can be difficult for a lot of us because of more of the mental addiction, not the physiologic addiction. I have a lot of patients who feel that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. This is not true. No one meal is the most important of the day. If you have excess weight, you can skip a meal, or two. That is why your body is storing your excess calories for the days that there is no food available, but like I said before those days are few and far between. Breakfast got named for what it does. It “breaks your fast”.(Break-fast). Get it? Everyone should really fast and I would start with 12 hours for 2-3 weeks and then work up to 18 hours, which is what I shoot for. The first three weeks will be difficult. Your body does not want to let go of what it has stored in you body abdomen, arms, legs, face, around the organs and even in the liver and muscles. (For those beef eaters out there think of the marbling of a cut of Wagyu beef or a nice rib-eye.) That is the fat deposited into the muscle itself. Your stress response will kick in. You may notice you heart beats faster, you will realize that you vision will focus more, looking for something to eat. You will feel a bit anxious. If this is overwhelming, decrease the duration of your fast and go slower when it comes to lengthening it. I try to do it every day and if I am to break the fast early I will with fruits, vegetables or nuts. Some will utilize the 4:3 method (four days on and 3 days off). I just like to define what I will do and stick to it to make it a habit.
This is a way to better utilize ALL of the tools that our body has. Stressors have their benefits when controlled in small amounts. To quote the early 16th century, Swiss German physician Paracelsus (1493-1541) ” All things are poison, and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous”. So do not tell me you can’t fast, be hot, cold or exercise. “Strength doesn’t come from what you can do. Strength comes from overcoming the things you thought you couldn’t”.
Doug
