Ben Greenfield practices daily 12-to-16-hour intermittent fasts, does 24-hour fasts once or twice monthly, and follows a 500-800 calorie fasting-mimicking diet for three to five days four times a year. He believes fasting beyond 16 hours triggers deeper cellular cleanup.
If I get up and have a midnight snack, guess what? I'm not eating again until noon. There's all sorts of different styles of fasting, but what I personally do is a 12 to 16 hour intermittent fast for every 24-hour cycle. That means that if I finish dinner at 8 PM, I'm not eating again until at least 8 AM. Now, in addition to that, 1 to 2 times a month I do a 24-hour dinner time to dinner time fast. That means that after dinner on Saturday night, I don't eat again until dinner on Sunday. And the reason that I implement that is because when you fast for longer than 16 hours, that's where a lot of the cellular cleanup and longevity benefits start to kick in. Finally, 4 times a year, or every quarter, I do a longer version of what's called a fasting mimicking diet, or FMD, where I go 3 to 5 days with reduced calorie and reduced protein intake. For me, This usually comes out to anywhere from 500 to 800 calories per day, less protein, and more of a focus on things like juices, bone broths, water, electrolytes, and multivitamins. That's what my own fasting protocol looks like. It will vary a lot from person to person, but I just want to give you a glimpse of what I practically do.
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