Begginer's Guide: Intermittent Fasting, Kids Gut Health & Gut Related Disorders

Hello, longevity friends. Claudia von Boeselager here, and welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast, where I invite pioneers and thought leaders in all things longevity and lifestyle to give you the strategies, tools, and practices to live better and reach your highest potential. Today's episode is from an Instagram Live I did with Gut Philosophy founder and functional nutritionist Elena Rolt on intermittent fasting. We cover what exactly fasting and intermittent fasting are, how to do it, benefits, hacks, potential risks, what to watch out for, and much more. If you like these types of episodes with Instagram Lives, let me know by sending me a DM on Instagram @longevityandlifestyle and what you might like to hear more of. Before we begin, please hit subscribe to the podcast and share it with those you love. And if you enjoy the podcast, please consider leaving a short review. It takes just a few seconds, but means the world to me and helps me get the best guests and content for you. And I love reading your reviews. Thanks so much. And please enjoy.

Hello, how are you?

Fantastic. Good to have you here.

Thank you. So excited for us to be on today and discussing such a cool hack to living really, really well. How are you?

I'm very well. Thank you. It's one of my favorite topics. Definitely one of the coolest tools we can have to use. However, some people don't use it correctly and we're here to clarify all the different issues which you may experience while you're going to intermittent fasting. And we really want just to help you just to do the best, to use this tool the best, right? To get the best out of it.

And I think people are just joining now. And in case you didn't see our announcement, what we're going to talk about today is fasting and particularly intermittent fasting and what it is and what it's not. Because I'm sure, Elena, you too, when I talk about fasting, people are like, oh, you can't starve yourself. I mean, this isn't like a bread and water diet. There's almost a technicality to it, but it's super simple and actually it's free. So it's quite a powerful tool. But Elena, do you want to kick off and maybe just explain to people exactly what is fasting? How do you describe fasting in your textbook?

Yeah, absolutely. So fasting is really a type, it's the pattern of eating. It's not a diet, it's a pattern. And we all go through fasting when we sleep at night. That's our natural overnight fasting, right? So this just literally means not eating. But because we're living in such a world where it's a lot of snacking all the time, we're eating very early in the morning, we're eating late at night, this whole fasting, it is actually not new, right? It's like it's been— people have been experiencing religious fasting for centuries, but also in general, fasting simply means having a period of not eating anything and just drinking water.

And what I love, one of my favorite analogies as well, is if you think back sort of from a human evolutionary perspective, you look at cavemen and women, right? They used to go days without eating, and the human species would completely be dead if there wasn't a mechanism in the body to actually produce energy energy and survive while hunting and looking for new food as well. And so that's the beauty of the body being able to flip into ketosis, which, which we can obviously jump into. Elena, let's talk about the different types of intermittent fasting. What are some of your favorites? What do you recommend some of your clients?

So there are, I would say, 4 main types of intermittent fasting. So it's basically finding a pattern of not eating which works for your social life and just works for your health, really. So the one of the most studied, uh, in the literature, it's called alternate day fasting, which means you're eating normally for one day and the next day you have a very limited restricted food meal, like usually 20 to 25% of calories. So usually just one meal per day. The next day you're eating again normally And then the day after that, you're not eating and so on. That's alternate day fasting. Then you have 5:2, which is 5 days of normal eating. And then you have 2 days, could be consecutive days. Like let's say Friday and Saturday, you having this restricted eating. So 1 meal per day, or it could be Monday and Wednesday. The trick is to find the days that work for you. Right? So if you, if you, and have, you have to stick to it as well. So if you do Monday and Friday, you have to be as consistent as possible. So that's other type of fasting.

And just to make a point to that as well, I think that the human body, just to say how important it is to be that consistency, that the human body reacts so well to that consistency. It's like a small child. It loves the same routine and it just works so, so beautifully when you get that routine.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Because all your hormones are driven by these habits in a way. So that's why, maybe we're going to go into this, but that's why it could be a little bit difficult to get into intermittent fasting. So the third type of intermittent fasting, probably one of the most popular ones, is the time-restricted feeding. So basically having your fasting window or eating window. It's easier to focus on the positive. My eating window from 12:00 PM until 8:00 PM. That's my 8-hour eating window. And in the literature you have 16:8, meaning 16 hours of not eating, 8 hours of eating. These 8 hours, it's a little bit of, it's not a magic number. It's just literally based on the laboratory because it was done in animals and it's just much easier to feed animals within 8 hours because the lab workers need to come in, clean the cells.

It was just the normal shift hours.

Yeah, absolutely. It's literally, it's not a magic number. So your eating window could be 6 hours or it could be 10 hours as long as you stick to it. And as you mentioned, as long as you have this consistency in terms of following the same pattern over and over again. And this 16:8 or eating window, it could be done every day. It could be done 3 days a week. As long as your window is consistent, this is the best. That's what we're seeing in the research.

Yeah. And 2 things I'd like to discuss as well, which I think are super interesting. One was a really important point you made when we first were discussing this offline separately a while ago, already last year, but the fact that you can't or you shouldn't be looking at fasting, especially for women, if there's certain imbalances going on, be it, you know, you have certain minerals that are low, etc. So can you walk through some of the main things where, you know, it's kind of like tidy up your house first before you actually—

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Can you talk a bit about that?

Sure. I'm seeing intermittent fasting as your health optimization tool. But before you can optimize your health, You need to clean up your health first. So it's going back to foundation. Like, let's say if you have a house and you want to have this beautiful designed interior inside with the beautiful curtains and furniture, but your plumbing is off and you have mold in the basement and your electricity is not working really well, it's no point to have this beautiful interior. So for me, intermittent fasting is really the next step, is really getting you in the ultimate performance, making sure it's really anti-aging tool. So if you have any issues, and the most common ones, which I see a lot at the clinic, is people, especially women with thyroidal issues, people who are already quite stressed out and have some adrenal issues trying to embark on this intermittent fasting and actually creating more damage than the benefits. So you want to make sure you do not have any glaring hormonal imbalances.

So hormones are the main one to look out for, right? So hormonal imbalances.

Definitely.

So men, women.

For men and women. So female hormones, like if you're having issues with the fertility, if you have a severe PMS, this is not the time to do intermittent fasting, or you can do it really gently. Um, so just to talk about the hormonal imbalances, the insulin one. So the, the prediabetes, if anything, intermittent fasting is a great tool to support your insulin sensitivity, but then you need to— obviously it will be very dependent on your personal circumstances. Are you on any medications? If you are not, how dysregulated is your blood sugar? But in general, if you are trying to improve your blood sugar and you're not in a very sort of severe situation, then intermittent fasting could be a great tool. It could be difficult in the beginning, but this is something that would support your insulin sensitivity over time. Ideally, you would do it with a with a professional or with some supervision.

Yeah, exactly. And I think what's beautiful about it is that you can, you can mix it up. You don't need to go, you know, cold turkey, let's say, and do, you know, 20-hour fasts from today or tomorrow. And also changing your diet a little bit, the hours that you're actually eating as well, is really looking for nutritious food to really feel the benefits as well. But I think, you know, that is one of the key messages is that if you want to start intermittent fasting, for longer periods than just the overnight 12 hours, like make sure that, you know, your biomarkers, all those things are in a good place, right? And that you're getting enough sleep, etc., because otherwise you're stressing your body and you're aging yourself. So you're kind of defeating the purpose of what you're doing.

That's it. This is the key point, because any type of fasting would be a stress to your body. So you want to be using this stress to your benefit. You don't want to stress yourself excessively. So if you are, let's say, going through some stressful period, maybe recovering from the infection, or if you have an exam preparation, or you have young kids at home, really not a good time to start doing the 20 hours non-eating, 4 hours of eating. You're probably going to completely dysregulate yourself. So it has, as you said, it's literally using common sense. And I would say start from overnight fasting because to be honest, if you start asking people, what is your, what time do you have dinner? Or having it at 7. That's not your dinner. This is when you start your dinner, right? So you finish your dinner by 8 and then some people have a late night snack and then they wake up and they have a bit of a breakfast with the kids at 7:00 AM. So actually doing 12 hours fasting, it's not that common in reality, right? So—

No, exactly. And I think people need to be aware of it. And there's a really cool app actually called Zero. There's a free version and then there's a freemium model as well where you can upgrade. And Zero, I think is really cool because you can just tap starts. So basically as soon as you finish your dinner, and you can actually really know in which phase you are for fasting. So yeah, it's, it's just a really great app that's actually backed also by Dr. Peter Attia, which I—

yeah, I love that one as well. I love using this app. That's brilliant.

Yeah, I find it really cool to see in which phase you're in. And then if you're doing a longer phase fast as well, then you can actually see when you're hitting into ketosis and things like that, which is really incredible. And for people interested, what do you think, Elena, to explain the, like, what goes on, the benefits of fasting, you know, what is happening in your gut, what is happening with your telomeres, like what are the different anti-aging benefits as well that go on?

Okay. So for me, I would say the 3 most important ones, the benefits. So the number 1, I would definitely say it's metabolic flexibility. So making sure that your glucose levels are dropping, your insulin sensitivity is improving, that your glycogen, which is your storage of your sugar in the liver, is decreasing. That would be by far probably one of the most important ones because insulin is such an important hormone which regulates everything else and links to everything else. So that would be number one. Number two for me would be anti-aging, really. So this is the— during fasting, when we're not eating, we start actually recycling this cellular, uh, cellular debris, cellular waste.

Waste.

So if you think about the, like, cell, like a little household, and this household accumulates different waste during the day. And at night when we're not eating, this waste is being recycled and the old organelles, cellular organelles, is being used for different functions. So this process is called autophagy. So basically self-eating and clean up this waste. And the fasting, and it's a lot of evidence in the literature, suggests that this process is kicking in when you're not eating. So it's over, over time, this is the proper anti-aging benefits. That's my number 2. And number 3, it's really what you implied was the ketosis. So ketosis is a state where you're using ketones instead of the glucose as your main energy source. And these ketones, they can cross the blood-brain barrier.

Your brain loves it, basically. Yeah.

Your brain loves it. Exactly. And if you have this uplifting in your mood, some people say like, I'm just feeling so great when I'm in ketosis. So like my mood is lifted. I'm having clarity in my, in my, in my thinking. So this is like a cognitive, a brain health is a really strong advantage of fasting. And number 4, I would say weight loss, but people, I mean, weight loss comes Naturally, it's not a diet, as I said, it's really a pattern which you should be using for all the different other advantages. And some people do see weight loss as just a positive side effect of intermittent fasting, but I wouldn't focus on it specifically for weight loss. If you want to lose weight, you need to address the issues first. There are probably reasons for the weight loss.

Yeah. So we have a question from Thilo. Thank you for the questions as well. Does it make sense to combine intermittent fasting with low carb? Yeah. So, so I mean, it goes like, what are your objectives?

Right? So what are your objectives with intermittent fasting? Is it for your brain health? Is it for your anti-aging? Is it for the weight loss? I would say low-carb and intermittent fasting does work in particular if you're dealing with any metabolic inflexibility. So if you want to make sure that your insulin sensitivity is really improved, if you're trying to, if you know your markers and you're trying to improve your markers, then it makes sense.

Yes, exactly. And I think it's almost thinking intermittent fasting and then increasing the variety of vegetables you have and really clean, nice, like grass-fed meats. Um, yeah. So weight loss, anti-aging, well-being. Exactly. Yeah.

So yeah, all the best ones. I wouldn't say I'm a really big believer in the low carb. There are some disadvantages, but it definitely works for some people in a, in a shorter term in particular. So for the low carbs, you just need to watch out what are you excluding, because some people go really severe and they just exclude a lot of different foods and they can damage their microbiome in the long term. I'm sure you know, like, how passionate I am about my microbiome.

Which I've learned is so essential. Yeah, exactly.

It's crucial for anti-aging. So if you want to stick to the low carb, just ensure that you have a really good variety of vegetables. And all different vegetables, obviously.

And I really want to reiterate this point about having— it's like eating the rainbow, right? And eating about 30 different types of mainly vegetables, organic vegetables, if you're eating the skin with it each week, because you're feeding them the gut microbiome, which means that the whole system is working right. So the gut is basically the second brain. They've actually found that there's as many neurons in your gut as there is in a dog. And I mean, we think dogs are pretty intelligent, so clearly you want to be feeding feeding your microbiome really, really well as well. And I think what happens a lot when people do a diet is that they find something online. There's like 5 different recipes and then they just repeat the same things. And after about 2 weeks, they're pretty much ready to pull the plug.

I'm a really anti-diet person. Yeah, I would never put— I mean, sometimes you do need to restrict certain things when you're trying to work on the imbalances, but that's a very targeted approach. We know what we're trying to achieve. I usually measure those things as well, but I would never say go on this diet or that diet or that diet. Intermittent fasting is not a diet, and that's the beauty of it, right? We're all doing it anyway. You just need to do it in a way that it supports your anti-aging, well-being, your brain health, and everything else.

Yeah, exactly. And I think just to recap for people just joining now is that it's very much, you know, making sure the baseline is really good, that you're in a good place, that you're not super, stressed out because it's going to add to aging as well and that your gut health isn't a good thing. And then when you do your eating windows, if you will, that you choose really beautiful food that's really delicious, really good, really healthy. Obviously, try and avoid sugar and— or there's like organic stevia and obviously good replacements as well and having a diverse range of vegetables. And I love it, as Elena says as well, like eat the rainbow. And I think just remembering that, like, have you eaten the rainbow today? Right? Like, have you really had some paprika and the whole range of things and eggplant and things like that as well. So just mixing it up. Elaine, I'd like to also touch on one thing that came up for me, right? Because I had the Oura Ring on, so I was monitoring my sleep at night and then I had a continuous glucose monitor. And so I thought I was being very clever and doing my long period of intermittent fasting. And what we were seeing when we were discussing it together is that my blood sugar levels were dropping so low, right? I was hypoglycemic. They were around like 40 or something at night. Which was then triggering a cortisol response in the body, which was waking me up several times a night without me even knowing it, and which was leading to brain fog and things as well. Can you explain the mechanism behind situations like that and what— there's a really cool hack for everyone listening to it. Maybe you can just explain the science behind it and I can share the hack.

So basically, when you're not eating, when you're fasting, what happens, your blood sugar starts dropping. And this is actually quite stressful for your body, in particular if you don't have this flexibility, if you cannot switch from burning your, your sugar into burning your fats quickly enough. And I would say a majority of people will have some sort of inflexibility. So this— when this switch is not happening, your blood sugar drops too low. So you're becoming hypoglycemic, a low blood sugar. And what happens? It's a stress response. So your body needs to generate energy from somewhere. And your adrenaline goes up. So that's stressful for you. And it tells your liver, go and produce new glucose for me. So your liver starts producing glucose. So actually you're still running on glucose in a way, but this adrenaline shot in your case was waking you up at night because you were going into this glycemic, hypoglycemic response. So we want to avoid that by starting. So if you, thinking that maybe your blood sugar regulation is not that optimal, well, first of all, you can measure that. Measure your insulin, fasted insulin, measure your fasted glucose, and measure something called glycosylated hemoglobin, HbA1c. Those 3 things, measure them, see where you are.

On a blood test?

On a blood test.

Yeah.

It's a simple— I mean, you can measure it with your GP. So see where you are, and if it's too high on the range, so maybe your glycemic response is not that great. In this case, you still can do intermittent fasting. However, start, start nice and slow. Start by having 3 regular meals, avoid snacking first, and then go into the 12-hour windows, and then you can increase it slowly up to 14 hours of fasting, 10 hours of eating. Nothing excessive, because you're definitely going to get into some sort of trouble if you're trying to just go, as you said, if you go cold turkey and you're just going to do 24-hour fast, definitely more damage than any benefit.

It's going to hurt. Exactly. Yeah. It's not very fun. And some people have tried it as well. We have a question from, and I think I'm going to pronounce this properly, but, um, Rihu Feneser. Yeah. Does it help to lose weight? So we covered that a little bit before. Thank you for asking. And I think what we, So the sort of summary to that is that it can and it has really powerful benefits, but almost looking at the anti-aging benefits and the health benefits is like the number one thing. But really, really important is obviously to get your foundation in place first. So if your hormones are out of balance or your gut microbiome is off or you're super stressed out, it's not the time to be adding this controlled stress to your body. So it's almost like, you know, tidy your house first and then you can go for it to do that optimization stage. And then it's really powerful. And then obviously for the time window that you are eating, I mean, if you're going to be eating pizza and ice cream and things like that, you're not going to obviously lose weight. But if you focus on really clean, healthy, amazing foods for your body, then you're going to start feeling amazing as well. And so I just wanted to circle back to the hack as well that we were discussing. So for me, what we discovered, what was really amazing was to have a spoonful of, believe it or not, almond butter. But be careful, almond butter that has no sugar. Or no palm oil added to it. And with that, the blood levels just— sorry, the glucose levels overnight just stayed completely constant. And I was getting amazing sleep as well. And so I always think that, you know, you almost become your own diagnostic, you know, doctor almost, I guess, at this point. But if you notice something is off, if you notice, for example, you're doing this intermittent fasting and you still have brain fog, something's obviously off. And it's basically troubleshooting and trying to figure out what the best thing to do is as well. Yeah.

Yeah. There are some comments about the blood, the continuous glucose monitoring. I do agree they are not very accurate because they are not measuring your glucose in the blood. They are in tissue liquid, right? So like it's between the—

it's between the muscle. Exactly.

Between the muscle cells, right? So it's not as accurate than the finger prick. But some people just don't like finger pricking all the time. So the continuous glucose monitoring does give you some sort of trend. So you'll see if you're reacting to some foods, it will show you.

Yeah.

So it's definitely a valid kit really just to see where you are with your blood glucose monitoring. If you're diabetic, definitely think a FreQ would be better.

Exactly. Yeah. Thank you for pointing that out, MB Insider. And so let's also talk about different types of fasts as well. So we talked about obviously the different types of intermittent fasts there are as well, but there's so much power also in doing a several-day fast. And I think it was Dr. Dom D'Agostino, which I'm sure some of you will be familiar with, he recommends once a quarter a 3-day fast and then once or twice a year a 7 to 10-day fast. And I think for a lot of people, they're like, okay, eating, you know, not eating for that amount of time, no way, it's not possible. And you alluded to that before. I think one of the keys is really getting that metabolic flexibility and having your body switch into ketosis as soon as possible. And I came across a really cool hack and maybe you also have one as well, but one way to get into ketosis pretty fast, if you were to do the 3-day fast, this is recommended from Tim Ferriss. I don't know if some of you have read some of his books, you might be familiar with him. But basically let's say you want to fast between dinner on a Thursday night and dinner on Sunday night, right? So that would be your 3 days. So you have a low-carb meal on Thursday night, say you have steak with some spinach or whatever it is as well. You go to bed, you try and sleep for part of the day, and then the, the secret is to be out and active but not excessively active. So you're not doing a HIIT workout, but you're doing a fast-paced walk with hydration. Add some lemon to your water, and that should, within a few hours, you should really start getting into ketosis already. And you can measure ketosis either with like a urine stick, or you can also do from Abbott Laboratories, skin prick test as well. You will get slightly different results, but depends how, you know, particular you're trying to be. And by the next morning, you should already be in, in some state of ketosis, maybe at 0.5 mmol, millimol, millimolars rather. And the ideal state of mental clarity, I think, for many is between 1 and 4 millimolars, right? And it's just really, really fantastic. And obviously, the more frequently you do it, the better you feel. And you're also freeing up so much time to actually do other stuff because you're not thinking about food.

You don't What am I going to do for this meal?

Okay, I have to go get food or whatever as well. So yeah, it's really fun. And obviously it's something you could do with friends and things as well. Elena, do you have tips for longer day fasts?

So for the longer days fast, again, like as you mentioned, do not attempt it unless you know you can, you can do it. And if you want to try like maybe 1 to 2 days to start and see how you feel, that's a good idea. So Valter Longo, he is one of the researchers into the fasting diet. He's got his own diet which you can follow. It's basically eating very tiny amounts of food throughout the day with some of the nutrients and some of the supplements which mimics the fasting. So you still remain in ketosis, you're burning fat. However, you do not lose any nutrients. So if you're already depleted in any nutrients, so maybe going for a couple of days of not eating is not a good idea. You need to be in a great state, but Well, it is longer, so he recommends, I think it's every once you do it for a couple of months, like once a month for 5 days, and then you like a maintenance course. So it's very similar idea, but you'll be having prepackaged food in a way. I don't like the idea of having this processed food. It's mainly like some soups and powders, but for some people who just cannot not eat for such a long time, that probably could be a good, a good idea.

Yeah. And then also organic chicken bone broth, which is obviously amazing for the gut lining as well. But I think in general that doesn't really kick you out of ketosis, right? So that's also a really good—

So certain foods will keep you in ketosis if you want to stay in ketosis. So, but again, like it really depends on your personal— some people would have a coffee and they wouldn't get into ketosis, but some would. And like if you have some Bulletproof coffee, normally you would You've been in ketosis, you continue to be in ketosis. So some foods are allowed, but then it's— this is where the personalization comes in. For me, if I want to be fasting, I just do not want to eat anything. It was like, what's the point? I'm fasting. I'm just going to drink water or I'm drinking my green tea and I'm staying in this fasted state. And personally, I don't do anything excessive. I'm doing my 14, 14 hours eating, 10 hours Sorry, other way around. 14 hours fasting, 10 hours eating. Yeah, from time to time. This is good enough for me. The important point I wanted to note, to mention, it's like, what are you skipping? Are you skipping breakfast or are you skipping dinner? From the circadian circulation, the circadian rhythms, and from the hormonal perspective, it's much easier to skip dinner, so it works better. However, if you're gonna start skipping dinner all the time, our social lives will be ruined in a way. So Finding something that works for you is really important. So I would suggest what it is. There is definitely evidence in the, in the research that the first hour when you wake up, ideally you should be not eating. It's no point of eating. So you want to prolong your overnight fast for this extra hour. So maybe skipping breakfast and having earlier dinner. This seems to be the golden type of pattern. So let's say it's 12 to 8 or 12 to 7. 7:00 to 12:00 PM, it's your lunchtime, 7:00 PM your dinner, 12:00 to 6:00. This works the best. But then again, like you have to go with what works for you. So if you feel that you cannot skip dinner, if you're having social occasions, client meetings, et cetera, so stick to the dinner, skip breakfast. You still have some benefits.

Yeah. And so MBM Insider is asking, what about MCT oil? And yeah, I mean, that's a coconut-based, right? The multi-chain triglycerides. And so that basically won't kick you out of, ketosis.

Yeah. So you would, you will, because it's basically some people just go, go through this keto diet. They would combine ketosis and keto diet with intermittent fasting. And this is where MCT oil could be helpful. So you wake up in the morning, you have MCT oil, so you do have some energy, but you're also getting this energy from the fat burning if you are already in ketosis. But for some people it doesn't kick in overnight. So if you have metabolic inflexibility, you probably not in ketosis in the morning. But if you have a healthy metabolic function, then normally after 12-13 hours you are in a slight ketosis. So you do have benefits of some ketosis in the morning.

Exactly. And I think they call it exogenous ketones, right? So you can take MCT oil, which is one of them as well, for that energy boost also. So yeah, and it's also good for your brain. Your brain likes MCT oil, a good quality one, I should I would say as well. Yeah.

Um, let's see, what are for the, um, things to watch out for?

You're welcome. Um, the things to look out for, Elena, what are some things that— I mean, we've recapped a little bit at the beginning, but in case anyone is thinking, okay, tomorrow morning I'm not going to eat for— or maybe starting tonight I'm not going to eat for so and so many hours— what would you say are kind of the just the 3, 4, 5 things to look out for and to do first in order to be successful and doing this as a health optimization So sorting out your hormones would be really important.

So if you have any issues with your thyroid, if you're on any sort of medication, consult your doctor because some of the dosages may need to be adjusted. That would be number one. Number two, I would say, oh, there are a lot of complaints about constipation, a lot of complaints of being irritable, having a low mood, and fatigue. Those are the three main ones in terms of side effects. Those are temporary. Just make sure that you drink a lot, that you're hydrated, and then when you eat, your, your food needs to be quite nutrient and fiber rich. However, if you are prone to constipation to start with and it's not great, you probably need to sort out your constipation before embarking on intermittent fasting because it may definitely aggravate your constipation.

Yeah. And I think also the constipation, as you'll know, will be to do with your gut health. So it's like there's certain things you can do and even in a couple of weeks you'll notice a difference in sorting it about your gut health as well. And then one hack also that I found really, really helpful if you are doing even a longer day fast, sparkling water with fresh lemon or fresh lime, it kind of fills you up. And also, if you read, there's a brilliant book by Dr. Jason Fung called "The Complete Guide to Fasting" where he really explains it. And phenomenally, he's able to get people off type 2 diabetes medication in the matter of the space of months. But also to understand that the hunger hormone is actually only temporary. So if you're feeling hunger, it's going to pass. It might be 20 minutes, it might be half an hour, it might be an hour. So if you, you know, fill that time with having some sparkling water, I like to put it with lemon or fresh lemon or lime just to mix it up or whatever as well. It will pass and then you don't feel hungry anymore. And I think for people who have done it the first time, they're like, you know, I'm not hungry. I feel like my mental clarity is there again. I feel amazing. So it's a really exciting tool and really, really great for longevity and anti-aging benefits as well. So yeah, definitely.

I love Jason Funk. He's got great books and he definitely explains it really well. He's got some YouTube videos as well for people to watch.

Yeah. Amazing. Elena, have we covered everything? Anything else anybody wants to ask from everyone online at the moment before we sign off?

I think we've covered a lot. Yeah, good luck with fasting, guys. Just find the fasting pattern that works for you. And this is the main, the main tool. It's a great tool to use.

And yeah, yeah, and play around with it. Have fun, you know, have an accountability buddy. I think those are always really, really great as well. And any questions, obviously you can reach out to Elena and myself with them. So it was so great to have you on, Elena. Thanks so much. And thank you for joining in and watching the replay.

We'll continue with our series, right? So yes, we hopefully will find something something else.

We have another topic as well. Thank you.

Fantastic. Thank you, everyone.

Okay, bye-bye.

Hey everyone, it's Claudia here. Before you take off, I hope you enjoyed the episode and learned as much as I did. If so, please hit subscribe so you don't miss out on our next episodes. I would also love to hear what you thought, be it your favorite part, quote, or other feedback from the episode. So please leave a written review on Apple Podcasts or on social media. And if you think this episode will help someone in your own life, share it with them. Together we can change our own lives and the lives around us for the better. Until next week. Goodbye. Farewell. And choose to live well.