To be honest I think the science of autophagy is so new that nobody really knows. There are those who claim that it starts to work with an overnight fast and others that yes 48 hours is the minimum. I think that most would say to "guarantee" autophagy you need to have only water (or something like black tea) whilst fasting which I will admit is why I have never tried, would miss my coffee with cream too much.
The theory I have been looking at is that for the first three days, your body is living on its natural resources including the foods you recently ate and autophagy. Only on the 4th day does it reach a crisis mode where it says I need to do something at which point it starts reactivating stem cells.
The idea is that you allow it to do that for 2 days, and then have to nourish those new stem cells with nutrient dense refeeding.
If you look at my charts in order the info certainly seems in line with that.
I have long thought that it takes a few days to get a bad meal out of my system and that that shows through with a worsening of gluconeogenesis as shown by the dawn phenomenon.
During the first three days of the fast, the pattern looks entirely similar just with reducing levels of the same chart.
On the 4th day blood glucose has reached a rock bottom and any dawn phenomena was barely discernible and I recorded average blood sugars of only 4.2 mmol. On the 4th day my body also started to heat up. I could feel the difference , it was definitely different from before and it has stayed that way since.
I am now trying ot make sure that I do the refeeding part properly, that is actually quite hard because I really don't have much of an appetite, a bowl half the size of the one before my fast, now seems quite bulky and I have had to leave some.
I am trying to make sure everything I eat is really nutrient dense- bone broth, salmon eggs,beef, cheese. I have even been eating some chicken neck ( if cooked for 24 hours to make bone broth, the actual neck bones become soft like that which you find in tinned fish ) so that's a great source of calcium .
I lost 4.8kg during the 5 days which is unheard of. I'm guessing it will take a few days to find out how much of that was real versus water loss due to food deprivation.
Once started, if the answer to the question - what can I eat? is zero, its amazing how quickly you start to view it as a competition where giving up is simply not an option. The result of that was that during the fast I went out ( one black coffee) and I did some cooking for others - not one morsel crossed my lips . It felt rather surreal to be that much in control.
My goal for this is to finally get over the concept that food is essential every day and to realise that I do have the power to actually say no when faced with a temptation because if I can eat zero for 5 days, I really don't need to succumb to someone's offer of other food.