Training - "The past can’t be rewritten, but it can be overcome and rendered essentially obsolete."

6/22 - squats, press

Mark's Daily Apple: "Our cells are regenerative. The past can’t be rewritten, but it can be overcome and rendered essentially obsolete.

...if you let any poor health decisions made in the past linger in and cloud your mind, you will destroy yourself. This is spilt milk on a cosmic scale. So your belly fat is a little more stubborn than you’d like. So a sugar monster lurks beneath your resolve, and probably always will. Who cares? There is no sense in obsessing over what you cannot change. If you’re going to pore over your past, do so constructively and with a clear objective: to learn from your mistakes and revisit them to identify what you shouldn’t do. 

Look: if your mother carried you to term as war raged in the streets around her, food was scarce, liquor plentiful, and stress high, maybe there would be long lasting repercussions due to maladaptive epigenetic triggers to gene expression. You are what your mother, father, and grandparents ate (and experienced), after all. Those are tough. 

But even in that “worst case” in utero scenario, what can a person do but continue to make the best choices they can today, here, now? You’re not helpless, is my point. There are things to do. Promote autophagy, for one. Autophagy is cellular clean-up, the breakdown, metabolism, and recycling of broken cellular components. Autophagy is anti-aging; it keeps cells running like new (healthy centenarians tend to experience higher baseline autophagy than shorter-lived populations, for example). Because an unhealthy lifestyle may have sped up the aging process, autophagy becomes more important than ever to slow further degeneration. 

How? Get lots of sleep and only stay up late when it’s worth it, like if you have good friends over for dinner that lasts late into the night, or it’s the only time you can watch a really great movie with your loved one curled up on a couch. Don’t stay up late watching reruns of bad TV. Make your sleep deprivation count for something, and keep it acute and intermittent. Speaking of intermittent, fast every once in awhile. You don’t have to do it on a schedule, or even every week or two. It doesn’t have to be an entire day-long affair. But intermittent fasting has the potential to increase autophagy."