Prolon<\/em><\/strong>, p r o l o n. And it’s everything you need ready to go out of the box with all these nut bars and soups and snacks and, and things, teas electrolytes that you need to complete this five-day plan. It makes it foolproof if you just follow it and don’t cheat. You know, the problem is, it’s expensive. It’s about $250.<\/p>\nNow during the course Coronavirus pandemic they’re offering half price on this, so it’s still $125, still quite expensive. But if you follow it and it works it’s certainly worth it. My problem was, I just I wanted to find a way to do this a little more naturally so I wanted to use something I wanted to you know, basically copy the diet without purchasing the plan and you know, wasn’t really the price tag so much it was just I felt like if this is something that can be done, then we should all be able to do it at home.<\/p>\n
So I went about and created my own you know, you know listing some show notes exactly how I did that but I found a comparable nutbar that you can buy separately. I made my own soup starting with a broth, just a vegetable broth that you can buy, you know any grocery store. Nuts, of course are nuts, you know, really mean just almonds, plain almonds, some seaweed crackers that I found that were actually quite good. And olives, and herbal teas can be found everywhere; supplements and all that, again, very easy.<\/p>\n
It really wasn’t difficult to recreate his diet with my own ingredients found at the grocery store. Well, I haven’t been grocery shopping really, I’ve been ordering everything online through Amazon Prime at Whole Foods. And but I was able to do that very, very easily. And it cost a lot less than $250 or even $125.<\/p>\n
I did it and I want to share my experience with it with you with this plan, and just give the general impressions overall. It wasn’t too difficult. I expected it to be harder. There were moments when I did feel hungry in between meals, meals, such as they are they’re really not meals so much as they’re just sort of, you know, eating something to satisfy the hunger. But it wasn’t that hard.<\/p>\n
I mean, again, there were there were moments when it was harder than others, but I can\u2019t say that it was stressful or mentally difficult in any way. Day one was especially easy. You’re allowed to have more calories on day one so it’s about half what I would normally but it was enough to keep me keep me full. I will say that I did do one cheat perhaps that I had that he does not recommend is as I did drink my regular coffee. Now he says that if you must drink coffee, you can have one cup in the morning and that’s it. He says coffee interferes with the process somehow and so you know I did I did have my coffee every morning.<\/p>\n
9:42 <\/p>\n
Beyond that I kept full also by instead of drinking regular water sometimes I would have some a can of carbonated water. You know those ones you can buy, zero calorie carbonated with a little bit of natural flavoring like lemon or lime or something. Any store has those various brands. And so that kind of helped to keep full.<\/p>\n
And so day one was pretty easy. It didn’t feel any different than a normal day. Day two, it got into the tougher diet and that that was probably the hardest day because it was a kind of an extreme shift. But I still felt okay. It took a lot of mental focus, but not in a discomforting way, just had to concentrate. And I would say that wasn’t too hard.<\/p>\n
Days three and four got a little easier. And day five, I started to get a little anxious, I was ready to go back to normal and I’m recording this on day six, by the way, so this is fresh in my mind. I wanted to do this while I was still thinking about it. So overall, it wasn’t bad.<\/p>\n
I want to make one other comment is that my sleep was varied. After the first couple of days my sleep seemed to improve. And then these last couple days, especially last night, I didn’t sleep well, in effect, I woke up about 5:30 in the morning, couldn’t go back to bed. But I don’t know, maybe I didn’t need to sleep because I was getting the proper nutrition or something. Or it could be, you know, we’re all getting little less sleep these days, with stress from the coronavirus and being out of our normal routine. So I can’t speak to that directly.<\/p>\n
11:36 <\/p>\n
But I just wanted to note that energy levels in general, I would say energy levels have been good. I think towards the end, I did feel lower energy. I was getting tired at the end of the day, and wasn’t really able to focus much after you know, four or five o’clock in the afternoon. Then I would try to do some work after dinner and I really had a hard time doing that. So that’s something to note. I just think my body’s not used to it and I this is not something\u2014and this is a really important point\u2014this is not a protocol for daily life. He recommends once a quarter for healthy people to help just reverse the effects of aging.<\/p>\n
And for just general well-being to sort of reset your metabolism and, and here’s why I want to make it a real important note. And maybe the one reason that I did this, my weight is pretty good. I mean, six foot four, I weigh about 190 pounds. I did. I was about 193 or 194. Before I started this diet five days ago, six days ago, and I lost about three pounds during the course of this diet. Maybe a lot of it\u2019s water. I don’t know but I mean, it wasn’t an important part of it for me, losing weight, although for many people It does.<\/p>\n
It does help that for me, it was it was this nagging issue I’ve had with tendinitis in my in my right foot. I used to be a long-distance runner and I developed kind of a chronic tendinitis that flares up, and sometimes it’s pretty painful. Other times it’s just there and kind of nagging it doesn’t really hurt but it’s sort of just stiff. And I noticed that about a year and a half ago when I when I changed my diet significantly to really follow a Mediterranean Diet protocol that gradually over the period of a couple of months that that inflammation that pain in my tendinitis went away.<\/p>\n
And then it came back during this coronavirus lockdown, especially when it just started. After the first couple weeks, I just got, you know, out of my good habits, and I started eating bad I started drinking too much wine. And that thing, that tendinitis, came back and it was really uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
So my goal for this fasting mimicking diet was to see if I could reduce that inflammation that tendinitis and happy to report, it’s worked. I have about a 90% improvement in five days on tendinitis that I swear, a week ago. Every morning I would get up and it was hard walking down the stairs. I mean, it’s not like I was crippled, but it was uncomfortable. Extremely stiff, somewhat painful\u2026and that is completely gone.<\/p>\n
14:03 <\/p>\n
You know, I still am aware of it, because I’m just always aware of it now, but it is not uncomfortable at all I can walk, I can run, I can walk up and down the stairs with no discomfort to some very minor stiffness. So I’m going to say it’s 90% better than it was just a week ago. So that was my goal, and I achieved that goal.<\/p>\n
And you know, everyone wants to claim a miracle cure all these different kinds of diets. And I think it’s worth noting that the fasting mimicking diet, the keto diet, paleo diet, intermittent fasting, all these things sort of have the same goal.<\/p>\n
I’m not a molecular biologist, I do have a degree in biochemistry, but my knowledge is, I’m sure, outdated. And I don’t want to get too deep into the science, but they say what this fasting state has is it affects the mitochondrial DNA.<\/p>\n
The mitochondria are the little energy batteries in our cells. And one of the things that causes aging is when these, the DNA of these mitochondria start to denigrate, and the telomeres, which is, again, we’re talking about DNA replication, these telomeres are something that sort of facilitate that process. And when these things start shortening, then there are errors that occur in the DNA replication and these errors result in, a breakdown of the of the DNA and the aging of the cells and consequently the aging of the body.<\/p>\n
So, that’s my short version of what happens here and what all of these diet regimens seek to overcome. So when you when you sort of starve the mitochondria, they go into this survival mode, and I guess this is how they it sort of \u201ccleans up\u201d the bad the fragmented, the bad DNA, and it replaces it with good DNA or good DNA fragments and good DNA replication.<\/p>\n
So, again, that’s my simplistic view of it. And I don’t think it’s super important that we understand the mechanism. But we can say there’s plenty of research to support all of these protocols who have the goal to achieve the same thing, which is to improve the replication of the mitochondrial DNA, which in turn, slows the aging process.<\/p>\n
So I think this fasting mimicking diet is sort of a shortcut to that without having to drastically change your lifestyle. However, it should be noted that, you know, you can’t just do this once a quarter and then go to eating junk food and eating whatever you want. And you know, drinking too much, staying up late, and smoking, all those bad things. You can’t do that. It has to be combined with a normal healthy lifestyle, which is a lifestyle within reason, just the basic Mediterranean diet. You can enjoy most things.<\/p>\n
And you can celebrate once in a while if there’s a birthday or a holiday or a Sunday family dinner, go a little beyond what you think is ideal diet and have some of these things that are just fun and delicious. And don’t worry about that. which is different than cheat days, by the way. So cheat days are these sort of scheduled days where you can eat whatever you want. And I think that’s a really bad philosophy. I think people shouldn’t do cheat days. You should celebrate meals once in a while where you’re going to cheat, but those should be for specific reasons. That shouldn’t be the reason itself.<\/p>\n
So you got to get over the mentality that I’m going to eat all good. All week long. I’m going to eat great and be healthy and all that so that I can cheat on Saturday. And that’s just I think that’s the wrong approach to dieting in general because it sort of misses the point. It’s supposed to be a lifestyle. Not a punishment and reward system. So that’s my take on that. But yeah, I mean this this fasting mimicking diet I think for a lot of people, this would be the right approach. It’s worth trying.<\/p>\n
It worked for me and I’m going to put some resources on the website where I talk about it a little more in depth. I talk about my what led me to this point and how you can you know, do the same thing at home. I’ll put down what I did you know how I recreated the Prolon diet, which is the one that Dr. Longo sells, with just stuff you can buy at your local grocery store.<\/p>\n
So I hope this is helpful. You know, I don’t know if you certainly have to do this under a diet a doctor’s supervision, or at least a doctor’s consent. I don’t think there’s anything particularly dangerous about it for normal healthy people. But if you do have a chronic condition, diabetes especially, you have to be careful of your sugar levels and all that. So you probably should consult a physician before trying this. I’m not a dietary physician or nutritionist, and I’m not giving you this as medical advice, but just as my experience what worked for me and you can think about researching it for yourself and trying it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On one of my other websites, \u201cEat Like an Italian,” I devote the content to discussing the rationale, benefits, and practical applications of a Mediterranean diet. There are some recipes and such, but the focus is more about the health aspects of mimicking the eating habits of our Italian friends… and also how their food […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11418,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[301,161,521],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10128"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}