Can fasting help heal old injuries? Like ligament damage that causes shoulder pain, knee pain, back pain, etc? If so, how many days would you recommend fasting for and is there any good schedule to incorporate fasting? Is there any success stories with healing there old injuries or joint pain? Thank you everyone
Fasting isn’t particularly “healing”. Actual wound healing tends to be an anabolic process if it involves building new bone/skin/ligaments/etc. Fasting as we know, does the opposite by hard shutting down things like mTOR.
>activation of the PI3K-Akt-mTOR pathway […] represents an integral component of the normal wound healing process
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2869363/
My favorite example is the experience of Wonyia from Alone (which btw is a fantastic show for case studies of human starvation it would be unethical to do nowadays). Anyway, she described (@11:11) how her inflammation from a bone injury popped up months after the injury. High cortisol and nutrient deficit kept her immune system suppressed preventing initiation of inflammatory responses and no healing until her energy balance returned.
But if your “injury” is due to something like chronic inflammation due to some level of auto-immunity (like arthritis, bursitis, etc.), then fasting might definitely help by bringing the inflammation down.
Generally, for injury repair/healing the sane take is to NOT diet and eat properly, so you supply your body with the necessary energy and nutrients.
I’ll let you know. I hit 7 days of fasting in 18 minutes. I’m going an additional 3 days because I read it’s worth it regarding finding and fixing old issues. Lower back and shoulder are a problem-but diminishing during this fast.