Intermittent Fasting for Seniors Improves Mental Clarity

If you experience brain fog or “senior moments,” try intermittent fasting for seniors. It’s one of the best ways to improve mental clarity. This is a partial fast that you can practice after dinner until lunch the next day, giving your digestive system a 14-16 hour break from eating.

Fasting has shown very useful for weight loss. Perhaps more important, however, is the use of fasting to sharpen mental clarity. Why is fasting such an important health-promoting strategy? Let’s look at what happens when you take a break from eating for 14 to 16 hours (a fast called intermittent fasting or IF).

Intermittent fasting may seem like another lose-weight-quick-fix like so many diets on the Internet. Many diet gurus talk about fasting to lose weight, but they miss the more significant point: great health benefits to cells and improved mental clarity. Let’s look at the facts from a purely scientific perspective. 

What Happens When We Stop Eating

Not eating is a natural way for cells to cleanse and detoxify. When you give your digestive system a rest, you trigger cellular regeneration and get rid of accumulated debris from metabolic processes. Additionally, for seniors, fasting may be an essential strategy for longevity.

Sounds too good to be true. But these are steps you can take to improve your healthspan and lifespan. It isn’t wishful thinking. I want you to know that if you decide to try partial fasting, you can expect positive results as determined by valid research. You can read the original research article on the website for the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI): “Fasting: Molecular Mechanisms and Clinical Applications”

People have been fasting for millennia, but only recently, studies have shed light on its role in cellular responses that reduce oxidative damage and inflammation, two metabolic processes that are known to promote disease. Not eating optimizes energy metabolism and bolsters cell protection.

In lower animals, chronic fasting extends longevity in part by reprogramming metabolic and stress resistance pathways. In rodents, intermittent or periodic fasting protects against diabetes, cancers, heart disease, and neurodegeneration, while in humans, it helps reduce obesity, hypertension, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis. Thus, fasting has the potential to delay aging and help prevent and treat diseases while minimizing the side effects caused by chronic dietary interventions. 

8 Keys for Intermittent Fasting for Seniors

Essentially, going without food is a positive stressor on your body. It is like rigorous exercise, which tears down muscle so that it rebuilds to become stronger. To learn more about how it can benefit brain health, I turned to Dr. Joseph Mercola and his book Ketofast. Here are the beneficial mechanisms of fasting.

1. Reduces insulin resistance: Fasting is one of the most effective ways to restore normal sensitivity to your insulin receptors.
2. Autophagy: Your cells will “eat themselves” to get rid of damaged cells and recycle the more active components. Autophagy is the process that destroys foreign invaders, such as viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens. Another means is apoptosis when the entire cell is recycled. Without this mechanism, your risk of cancer increases because damaged cells start to replicate.
3. Detoxification: Most of us have experienced a lifetime of exposure to toxins from food and our environment. These unnatural chemicals get stored in fat cells. Fasting is one of the most potent ways to remove toxins from your body since the process burns fat for fuel.
4. Circadian Rhythms: Your body’s internal clock regulates nearly every process in the body, and disruption can cause a cascade of adverse effects. When you take a break from eating, you reset your circadian clock.
5. Gut health: This is my favorite. Fasting gives your digestive system and gut flora a chance to reboot. Your immune system cells live in your gut and depend on the health of your digestive system. Increasingly, there is more evidence that our moods and mental health are co-dependent with our gut microbiome. Surprisingly, many neurotransmitters – dopamine and serotonin- reside in the intestines and signal the brain in what’s called the Brain-Gut Axis
6. Weight Loss: Not surprisingly, fasting helps boost weight loss. It also lowers insulin levels, so your body is no longer receiving the signal to store extra calories as fat.
7. Brain Function: When you don’t eat, your body burns up your glucose reserves in your blood and liver, and then the liver turns fat into ketones and starts using them for fuel. Your brain and heart prefer ketones over glucose for fuel because they produce fewer harmful reactive oxygen species (ROS). Fasting helps your mind work better and improves your ability to think and learn.
8. Heart Function: Your heart can use fats, carbs, ketones, and amino acids for their high energy needs. Ketones have a fine-tuning metabolic role that optimizes heart performance and protects the heart from inflammation and injury.

Intermittent Fasting for Seniors

Fasting supports your body’s innate maintenance and healing systems. Most of the magic of fasting occurs during the refeeding phase after you’ve activated your stem cells and targeted damaged subcellular structures for removal with autophagy.

My husband Rob and I have been skipping our first meal of the day until after sports, usually around noon. That’s usually 15-16 hours of intermittent fasting. We aren’t trying to lose weight, but this helps us maintain. We have more energy for our sports and workouts, and surprisingly, don’t overeat when we do break the fast.

If you’re looking for a way to nourish yourself without worrying about weight, give this method a try. The biggest benefit is mental clarity all afternoon.