Did You Know You Have A Superpower If You’re Over 40?

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One of the strangest things about turning 40 is discovering that your body has quietly changed the rules without asking your permission. You eat like you did at 30 but gain weight anyway. You sleep the same hours but wake up less restored. Injuries linger a little longer. Inflammation pops up in unexpected places.

It’s easy to think you’re doing something wrong, but the truth is that the body after 40 begins shifting into a new phase of life, one that requires a different relationship with food, timing, and recovery.

And one of the most remarkable discoveries of modern biology is that this phase of life unlocks a superpower we didn’t even know we had until recently: the ability to clean, repair, and recycle damaged cells through a process called autophagy.

Autophagy literally means “self-eating,” although it’s not as grim as it sounds. It’s the body’s housekeeping system, a kind of overnight janitorial crew that moves through your cells identifying broken proteins, damaged components, misfolded structures, and accumulated waste, and then breaks them down into materials the body can reuse.

When autophagy is humming along, inflammation drops, energy becomes steadier, the immune system functions more smoothly, and the slow drift toward age-related disease decelerates. When autophagy is interrupted — usually because food comes in too frequently — those damaged bits of cellular machinery accumulate, and the whole system feels sluggish, inflamed, or prematurely old.

Most People Eat Too Frequently

Scientists have known about autophagy for years, but only recently have we realized how profoundly meal timing influences it. When my wife, Louise, and I were first married more than half a century ago, we read Arnold Ehret’s old book Rational Fasting. His basic argument was simple: most people eat too frequently, and the body functions better when it gets long breaks from digestion.

It made sense to us. So, early in our marriage, we decided to follow his advice and skip breakfast entirely. We’d have just two meals a day — lunch and dinner — and give our bodies a long stretch each morning to rest and repair. That was 53 years ago. We’re still doing it. We’ve never been breakfast eaters, except on an occasional weekend splurge or vacation.

Longer stretches without food activate autophagy, reduce insulin resistance, lower inflammation, and improve metabolic flexibility in people over 40 in ways no traditional diet ever has.

And it’s been surprisingly easy. In fact, what astonishes me now — after decades of living this way — is how normal it feels to only eat twice a day, and how pleasant the sensation of mild hunger can be.

Not the distracted, irritable hunger that comes from blood sugar swings, but a gentle awareness that your body is ready for nourishment. That feeling makes lunch taste better than any breakfast ever could. It’s a kind of earned hunger, the way people in traditional societies experienced food: not as constant grazing, but as a rhythm.

What amazes me is that modern science has circled right back to what Ehret was talking about in 1910 and what humans practiced for hundreds of thousands of years. Every major longevity researcher today — from Satchin Panda to David Sinclair — talks about time-restricted eating windows.

The most popular forms, like 16:8 or early time-restricted feeding, simply replicate what Louise and I stumbled into by reading a century-old naturopathic book. And the science is increasingly clear: these longer stretches without food activate autophagy, reduce insulin resistance, lower inflammation, and improve metabolic flexibility in people over 40 in ways no traditional diet ever has.

Accessing Your Body’s Overnight Repair Window

This isn’t about deprivation. It’s about giving the body space to take care of itself. The “overnight repair window,” as some researchers call it, begins a few hours after your last meal, and strengthens the longer you go without triggering insulin.

Most Americans close that window before it even opens by snacking at night, eating late dinners, and waking up to immediate calories. But when you finish dinner earlier and let your digestive system rest until midday, it feels as if the whole body exhales.

One of the ironies of the modern longevity craze is that wealthy people now pay small fortunes chasing the benefits of autophagy through pharmaceuticals rather than timing their meals. Rapamycin, for example, is currently the hottest anti-aging drug in elite circles. It appears to stimulate some of the same cellular cleanup pathways that fasting does. But using it requires a prescription, careful dosing, medical supervision, and it carries real side effects, immune suppression among them.

It’s a powerful drug, no question, but it’s telling that people are willing to take something that serious to mimic a process their bodies already know how to do for free if they simply extend the time between meals. Autophagy works whether you’re wealthy or not, whether you have access to cutting-edge medicine or not, whether you’re 40 or 70 or 85. The machinery is built in. You just have to stop interrupting it.

Your body is not your enemy in midlife or older age. It’s trying to tell you something. It wants longer evenings without food. It wants a break from constant digestion. It wants the chance to clean up yesterday’s cellular mess before today’s begins. When you give it that space, everything becomes easier: sleep deepens, inflammation drops, weight stabilizes, mood smooths out, and energy returns in a way that feels almost like youth but calmer, steadier.

If there’s a lesson here, it may be that aging isn’t an inevitable decline so much as a request for partnership. The body is always asking us to work with its rhythms rather than against them.

When you honor that rhythm — by eating less often, by letting hunger come and go without fear, by trusting the long arc of biology — you discover the remarkable truth that repair, renewal, and vitality aren’t things you have to fight for: they’re things your body is waiting to do as soon as you get out of the way.

Autophagy is not a miracle. It’s simply the body remembering what it’s always known: healing happens when you stop eating long enough to let the repair crew come out at night and in the morning.

Reprinted with permission from Thom Hartmann’s substack The Wisdom School: What It Means To Be Human.

Thom Hartmann is a NY Times bestselling author 34 books in 17 languages and the nation’s #1 progressive radio host, as well as a psychotherapist and international relief worker. Sign up to receive The Hartmann Report, a daily newsletter of Renaissance thinking about progressive politics, economics, science, and the issues of our day.

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