Today is the first day of the five day “Longo Inspired Cancer Avoidance Fast” . Yesterday being the 4th of July I had quite the BBQ splurge to celebrate the day. Now it is on to the first day of the fast. This is my first time trying this rendition of it. As with most fasts I am keeping a journal. Unlike previous fasts I’ve decided to keep that journal here on my blog versus in my personal journal. If people find it interesting or helpful then awesome. If people find it tiresome then maybe mute me until Monday of next week when the fast ends. That of course assumes I actually keep up with journaling through this. It could easily be quite boring.

As I wrote in my “Thoughts on Fasting” post I am primarily looking to perform these multi-day fasts for cancer avoidance purposes. There is some evidence that a 3 day fast can help cut cancer risks. It is not a guarantee but the cost and risk associated with doing these things is small enough to make doing these things once or twice a year worth it even if it turns out to not have the cancer fighting benefit. A big part of the body of research I’ve followed on fasting has come from coverage of the works of Dr. Valter Longo . For years he has been an advocate for periodic multi-day fasts and avoiding excessive protein intake to increase longevity and cut down on cancer risks. This post highlights how I’ve designed my cancer avoidance fast around his techniques and research.

The usual disclaimer applies: I am not a doctor, trainer, dietitian, nutritionist, or any other expert in any related field. I’m talking about my amateur and anecdotal experiences here and none of this should replace expert medical advice.

As I’m getting ready to start my third multi-day fast of my life I thought I’d do a much better job of documenting it on my blog. To start off I wanted to lay out my very amateur thoughts on fasting and how I have done it in the past. This is a very long post so use the table of contents to jump around to the parts you may find worth reading if you don’t want to read the whole thing.

I’ve now had one full Goal Accountability Phase after my health reboot. I was concerned that I’d be able to continue my workout streak, the thing that I always struggle with. It turns out I was able to keep that up even hitting stretch goals. The rest of the grades I turned in were another solid result as well.

When I was training to run races the first thing I’d cut out was the cross-training. There is no debate that cross-training is important. It was not unknown to me. Yet when schedule pressures, real and contrived, caused me to need to cut something it was the cross-training that always got cut. My 30 day Health Reboot challenge was essentially 30 days of nothing but what would be considered cross-training. That was predominantly training via cycling. The whole time I was curious what my running fitness looked like at the end of that. I now have the answer. While I always knew cross-training was important I am still floored by how much that is so.

The 30 Day Health Reboot was about getting focus on the various health metrics that I track each day and grade myself on. While I’ve been very consistent in measuring these things going back to 2017 when I came up with the concept, I haven’t been very good at holding myself accountable to them. That makes the whole “goal accountability” part of this exercise a misnomer most of the time. It hasn’t been a total waste though. I probably would have gotten my act together for even less time than I did over the years without it. But I want to keep doing better. Having a closeout and kick off of each of the “phases” was something I always intended to do but never did. This is my attempt to bring that in line too.

Week #4 (plus two days) of my 30 day Health Reboot challenge is now in the books. With that the 30 day challenge is also completed. My final week had its rough points, as I predicted it would, but had lots of success too.

Week #3 of my 30 day Health Reboot challenge is now in the books. I’m pleased to report that I finished it even stronger than I did the previous weeks.

Yesterday I wrapped up the end of the second week of this 30 day Health Reboot challenge . The “challenge” is really just a question of if I can actually get good grades on each day of my daily metrics with the slight twist of needing to be at least 20 minutes of cardio every day. Week 2 was pretty solid on everything except diet.

I’ve really been dogging it on the health front. Metrics, self graded, have been in the toilet since middle of last year. To be honest, they were only good for a total of three months last year. Diet and exercise, captured by those metrics, was shit and it is reflected in my cardio fitness, strength fitness, body weight, and body composition all being in the toilet. When I had my comprehensive annual physical and blood work I figured my middle-aged body was probably going to show signs of being worse for the wear. Thankfully everything was still in line. That’s a dodged bullet not a sign that the status quo is okay though. So here I am one week into my 30 Day Health Reboot.