FAST THE RIGHT WAY To Heal Your Body & Age In REVERSE! | Dave Asprey

The definition of fasting is simply to go without. And you can fast from many things. You can fast from masturbation, you can fast from porn, you can fast from alcohol, you can fast from junk food. It's called eating healthier. You can fast from carbs, it's called the keto diet. You can fast from animal products, even though it's a bad idea for long periods of time. It's called the vegan diet. And there's all sorts of things. So fasting literally means to go without for a set period of time. And all of those things can make you stronger. And a lot of people mix up the metabolic and the cognitive and the health benefits of fasting with the self control benefits and they try to mix them up. And the truth of the matter is that you and I are pretty fortunate. You know, we've had companies that have done well and we don't have to worry about getting up, driving for an hour in traffic. Our kids are now staying at home with, you know, two kids hanging off each arm and just a huge amount of chaos. Oh, and on top of that, I'm just going to fast today, even though I'm metabolically not really in good shape. And what's going to happen is you'll be just like me when I weigh 300 pounds. You're going to be hypoglybitschy, you're going to be hangry, you're going to yell at your kids, you're going to yell at your boss, and it's not going to be a good day. And you're going to say basically, f fasting. This is stupid, it doesn't work. But you don't have to do that. You don't have to experience pain and hunger to get the benefits of fasting and to go into fasting. And after 10 plus years of recommending this in my writing and 15 years of practicing this, what you find out is that there are things that you can do in literature that don't trigger the two things that break a fast. What breaks a fast is having sugar or carbohydrate that raises your insulin. So if you keep insulin low and your blood glucose won't change much except for based on your adrenal function, if you do that and you don't eat protein, which impacts a whole different set of enzymes, you're getting the benefits of fasting. And now some people are already up in arms going, you can't have 5,000 calories of fat. No, you would get disaster pants if you did that. But you can have small amounts of this. And the evidence I have for this is called, number one, bulletproof protein fasting, which has been practiced since 2012 when I wrote about it. And this is you eat less than 15 grams of protein during a day, but you eat carbs and you eat fat, and magically autophagy turns on. In studies, you can do that.

So I think we're going to have to define then what the biological markers are that we're bracketing fasting with. So if the loosest definition of fasting is going without. But now as we get into sort of metabolic fasting or dietary fasting, there's certain parameters that we're looking for. So I've heard people define it as you started that you break a fast with anything that raises your insulin. And should you take in something that doesn't raise your insulin, then you have not broken your fast. And so I'm just curious is one, why do people use insulin as the marker? Is insulin the only marker of a fast? Or if you're not an autophagy, it's technically not a fast. Like, what are the parameters by which you say this still qualifies as a fast?

It depends on your goals and the type of fast you're looking for. Right. So some people fast for healing the gut, right? And during that kind of a fast, you might want to have just water. You probably want to have water plus these colored compounds in tea or coffee, because those feed good bacteria. They're a prebiotic. You might also use one of the three fasting hacks that just turn off the pain of fasting for people. Just needed to get through the day and fast and get healthier along the way is prebiotic fiber. So you can do that.

What does prebiotic fiber get rid of? Symptomatically? Headaches, hunger.

Prebiotic fiber feeds the bacteria in your gut, so they make less lipopolysaccharide, which is a major issue during fasting. It also makes sure that you don't starve the gut bacteria. And when you do that, you turn off hunger. And there's multiple studies that show that the soluble fiber that cannot be digested by you, that it helps support good gut bacteria. So now you're fasting, you're not dealing with a large amount of lipopolysaccharides, which are bacterial toxins they make when they're stressed in the gut. So then like, oh, wait a minute, I had healthier gut bacteria. My blood sugar didn't change. But the gut bacteria converted this fiber into butyric acid or butyrate, which is a ketogenic compound. So all of a sudden, whoa. I didn't experience hunger this morning. Wasn't that great. I didn't spend half my morning thinking about muffins and barely make it through the day. And I still got my fast in. And this idea that you have to feel pain and suffering and just, like, muscle through it, it doesn't work for people who have a lot going on. In fact, it makes it much harder. I don't believe in causing suffering unless there's a hormetic effect and there's no other way to do it.

Okay, so let's talk about the goal of a fast. So one. So you just talked about healing a gut. So there we might have different outcomes that we're looking for. Basically, you'd be resting the gut. You even say in the book, if you have a gut problem, you're trying to heal it. The easiest way to heal it is to not have anything in the gut. So that makes a lot of sense. So we're not necessarily worried about insulin going up, down, or indifferent. We're not necessarily worried about even calories being present. We're worried about having things for the bacteria in your gut to have to work on so that they can just take a break and sort of hit the reset button. Now, if I'm doing a fast where my specific goal is to get into autophagy, what can we intake and still have autophagy being present? Like, can I have fat in my diet and stay in autophagy, or what does that look like?

You can have moderate amounts of fat in your diet and still stay in autophagy. But in the research that I did and in the conversations with other experts, it's apparent that having only fat isn't going to affect autophagy. Now, if you have 3,000 calories of fat, a caloric excess can inhibit autophagy. But no one's ever studied what a fat, only caloric excess looks like because no one would actually do that. So there's also a lot of things like the fasting, mimicking diet that turn on autophagy, even though you're eating some stuff.

And what elements of the fast are they mimicking?

Well, it's a very low calories for five days, about 500 calories or so for five days. And this is based on research from Valter Longo, who's, what I call him, the godfather of fasting, of the top fasting experts out there today. So they're saying, hmm, we're turning on autophagy, even though we're eating some stuff. So you can't even say protein without saying which proteins. There's some proteins you can't even digest, and maybe those wouldn't affect it. So it gets very specific around some amino acids raise insulin a lot more. So is a few teaspoons of whey protein going to break a fast more than collagen? Probably, but it depends on your individual response to those. Ideally, though, less than 15 grams of of protein from all sources is going to maintain your state of autophagy. And this goes back to like my first big book in 2014. That data was out there and based on studies. So the deal is just have no protein and have no sugar and no carbs you can digest, and the fasting processes will work. There's one little asterisk to that statement, and we're getting relatively technical. One of the things that happens when you fast is there's something called it's fasting induced adipose factor. And your liver turns this on and says, oh, I'm fasting, there's no calories, I better use this. And what does. It accelerates fat burning. And when you're not fasting, it accelerates fat storage. Unfortunately, if you have a lot of bad gut bacteria, they're like, oh, this petri dish is our petri dish, so we're going to hack it. And the bacteria themselves will make more fat fasting induced adipose factor than your liver would naturally, which means that you lose weight faster when you're fasting, but you gain weight faster when you're eating. And this is a question, why don't you do that? Because they want to make sure that their petri dish doesn't starve. And also, I, as a little bacteria, I don't have any food. Let me tell the petri dish to secrete more energy so it can go find food, and then I'll get food.

I see.

So they're literally changing your behavior. And it's fascinating that they do this, but you can also manipulate them knowing that they do this. And so fasting can help you lose weight. But if you have good gut bacteria present and you're aware of that fact, you can do things like consume that tea. Those polyphenols that feeds good bacteria called the bacteriodities family. So the colored compounds and fruits and vegetables and coffee and tea and chocolate are all prebiotics for good gut bacteria that you cannot buy in a probiotic. And so having healthy gut bacteria resolves that problem. And the reality is that you and I are, from the perspective of our mitochondria, which are the things we're working on mostly. In fact, most of my work is around mitochondria. These are ancient bacteria embedded in our body. They think they're in charge and they're the ones driving your hunger, your fear, your cravings. They're the ones that make you date people you shouldn't be dating. They drive human desire. In fact, there's an order of operations from them that I describe in the book. And this is the algorithm for all life forms. And so they're messing with you. And then you have gut bacteria that are also messing with you by secreting their own factors to try and get your body to do what they want you to do. And then, poor us, we're also in there in our logical cognitive brains going, wait a minute, I'm getting pulled all over the place by these urges, right? And then eventually, when your energy is lower and your urges are high, your ability to manage your emotions goes down, your ability to make good decisions goes down. And then you eat the cookie. And that's the annoying thing.

So when I think about all of this stuff sort of working in concert, this big cacophony of things happening, you've got the mitochondria pulling you in one direction, you've got the bacteria in your gut pulling you in another. You have your own body's response to lack of food. We've got autophagy that's working for us. We're cleaning up the cells. So I could see how that would speak to longevity, maybe even clarity. But other than autophagy, what are some of the reasons that fasting is so important for people?

The number one reason isn't autophagy. That's actually kind of a nerd reason for fasting. And I say that happily, being a nerd. Most people who are practicing intermittent fasting today don't even know what autophagy is. And that's okay. What they know is that they fast and they get energy, right? And it's a lot of energy. Because even if we're eating a so called healthy diet, according to the bulletproof stuff, the first chapter of the book, there's five classes of toxins made by mother Nature that we're eating every day, right? And the first one, I think this is the first big book about it, was lectins. Not all lectins are bad, but these are defense molecules for certain types of foods like grains and bell peppers and things like that. And they make you really Hungry and they mess with you. Right. And then you look at things like phytic acids that inhibit your ability to absorb minerals. There goes your argument for a whole grain kind of thing, because they're full of these things that stop you from having zinc. There's a problem there. And then we have histamine, which forms in certain foods when they sit around, that gives you just severe cravings. And then you have oxalic acid, which is kale and chard and raw spinach, which I've been warning about for years. And then the fifth one is mycotoxins that grow on, on food in the field and while it's stored. And all of those will mess with you. And when you fast, you get none of those. So you're like, wow, I feel so good. And it's not the fasting, it's that you're not eating stuff that makes you feel bad that you're used to eating every day. So that's a hidden side benefit of fasting.

Yeah. So getting into like inflammation and things like that and fasting having such a profound impact on that. What I want to know, when we start fasting and we're having our energy levels are going up because we're not intaking a bunch of things that, you know, whether it's just bad food or whether it's the toxins you're talking about, we also are getting this lowering of inflammation. 1. I'm curious, what's causing the lowering of inflammation? Is it simply the absence of the toxins that you mentioned, or is there more to it?

There's two big things going on. One is the absence of toxins. The other one is that ketones themselves are anti inflammatory, profoundly anti inflammatory. So now you're saying, wait a minute, I'm having less inflammation. Because if I had to guess, I'm going to say it's probably 2/3 caused by not eating stuff that makes you weak and one third caused by the presence of ketones, the inflammatory things. I could be wrong, but that's a very rough estimate of why. And if you were to say, I'm going to go on a super clean, no plant toxin kind of diet, you feel pretty similar, but you're still going to have blood sugar swings that you don't get when you're fasting. Generally after a little while, it stabilizes.

Okay, so we've got fasting playing this insane role when we're talking about metabolic diseases, which, depending on who you talk to, is everything from cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's. Like there must be some common thing that this all has working together. So is it insulin? People have referred to Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes. Type 3 of the brain, Is it just inflammation in general from the ketone bodies? Like, what is it that is operating across all these different disease manifestations?

What's going on there is you're getting a metabolic reset, and you're getting a lot of autophagy. You're taking the mitochondria that are weak. They've learned, and there's a quadrillion of them, way more than there are cells in your body. And they've learned there's lots of food coming. I don't really have to do anything. It's okay. If I'm running at 50% efficiency, it's good enough for the world I'm in. And then suddenly, like, I'm in a world where I have to be able to really be on my toes. The body looks around and says, well, this sucks. I guess I'm gonna have to kick out all the weak mitochondria and go to the expensive process of building fresh new ones that are young. And those are the mitochondria that can effectively and efficiently use glucose or ketones. And that's what's causing a lot of this. It's removal of senescent cells. But even then, if you were to take a water fast and you were to say, hey, I'm gonna do 500 milligrams of fisetin and 2 grams of quercetin, which are massive senolytic promoters, you're going to get more out of it. But now you're not on water only fast. You're using supplements in a targeted way to improve autophagy. And so I believe that the puritanical approach of just water isn't advisable. But I do think if you're going to do stuff during a fast, it's got to be limited, and you've got to know what it is and why you're taking it. For instance, there's other supplements that I recommend in FAST this way that improve the body's ability to do what it does during fasting. I'm talking about proteolytic enzymes, things like serrapeptase and nattokinase. And what these do is they help the body to break down waste proteins and scar tissue. Since the body's already working on that and you give it more of the enzymes it needs, that means your pancreas and to a certain extent, your liver can make the enzymes that they need to make for repairing DNA and refolding proteins and things like that. Because some of the cleanup proteins you've already taken orally. You can also take things like activated charcoal during a fast. And because your gut bacteria get really stressed and they make more of that lipopolysaccharide or LPS we talked about earlier, if you bind that in the gut, you actually have less inflammation, but you feel a lot better. So the water only thing is like, I'm just gonna put my head down and go through it. I just don't believe in extra suffering. I would say anyone on a water fast who adds activated charcoal is going to have better results 100% of the.

Time because it's blocking the toxins from coming out into the body. I know in the book you said that part of the keto flu that people experience when they're beginning fasting or beginning a keto diet is mitigated by taking activated charcoal. For that reason, it's interesting. I wish I had known that the first time that I did keto, which I had brutal keto flu. It was God awful. What are some of the other. Because you give many different styles of fasting and ways to mitigate some of the difficulties that people can have with fasting. So what are some of the other things that we need to address and how do we address them?

One of the biggest concerns there is people are saying, fasting makes me feel good, so I'm going to just do it every day. They go, you know what? I want to try this new omad thing where I only eat dinner, right? Like, I'll do that every day for a week or so. Oh, this is awesome.

Those that have never heard of that. One meal a day. Omad.

Yeah. So omad is one meal a day. And they're saying, okay, that's, that's great. And omad is really easy. You skip breakfast, skip lunch, have dinner. There you just did a 24 hour fasted. It's not as sexy as it sounds. Like, I'm omad, I'm, I'm keto, I'm strong. It's literally you skip two meals. Good for you. And during the day, though, you might get a little bit hungry, but there's things you can do. So if you ate, if you eat the right food, you won't be hungry after you eat. And if you eat the wrong food, which most of us do, at least one or two things is off. Then an hour or two later, we're like, man, I really want some food. I got a sugar craving. What's going on? And Then you have to work on it. So learning how to eat is an important part of not experiencing pain during a fast. But people are like, okay, I can do a 24 hour fast, man, I feel so good, I'm rocking it. What's really happening though is they're kind of getting a little bit stressed. Biologically, they're feeling good mentally, but their body's saying, okay, I'm making a lot of cortisol and adrenaline right now, which I'm using to break down some muscles so I can have enough glucose to keep my brain running. Because this isn't a fat burning body yet. Like your metabolism isn't flexible. And if you've been eating bad fats for years, it's gonna take a while to fix your mitochondria.

What's the ideal split for you?

The ideal split is whatever you'll do. And 16, eight is great, but for.

Especially an hour not eating, and then I eat however much I want in an eight hour window. Or do you put limitations in the eating window?

You can eat as much as you want during the window of Twinkies. You know you can. And you'll still get benefits. To be perfectly honest, you'll just get more benefits if you eat good stuff during the window. And that's the other thing. Okay, maybe you don't want to go grass fed only. Maybe you don't want to eliminate french fries from your universe. Okay, fine, intermittent fasting will help everybody, even on a complete crap diet. However, you'll be more hungry during your intermittent fast if you eat crap. So you got to deal with that. And ideally, what you're eating after you break your fast, you can have carbs or not have carbs, but don't have sugar, don't have seed oils, and eat grass fed meat or don't eat meat. And if you follow those basic principles, and there's other nuances in there, what you find is that you feel really good. And the next morning you wake up and you're not ravenous and you're like, oh yeah, I don't even want breakfast. And that's a very liberating thing because if we're spending so many of our thoughts every day on food, food, food, and then you just aren't hungry, it really changes things. So I want millions of people to say, I'm going to try this basic thing. I'm not going to worry about getting my diet perfect. I might make a few changes, but I'm just going to learn how to intermittent fast. And what I don't want them to do is what a lot of the fasting community does where it's all about the fast. And every month I'm going to fast for a week. And what you end up doing is you get people who become, they basically burn out their adrenals. Women see sleep problems as the first symptom that they're overdoing it. And then they see hormonal problems in their monthly cycle and then see hair loss and hair thinning. Guys, same thing, but it's usually two to four weeks out for women. First is sleep problems, then you wake up and there isn't a kickstand. And then you. It took me a second. I got there, yeah. And then after that you can see hair thing as well. And this is from excess cortisol because you overdid it. And you can see the same thing from just being keto for three months straight. That's why I've always recommended cycling, because I made all these mistakes when I was learning about all this stuff. It was just very early days. And so how do you make this sustainable? The truth is, fasting the same way every day is bad for you because it doesn't lend your body the idea of metabolic flexibility. It's like, oh, I live in a world where there's almost never enough food. So have breakfast every now and then, at least Saturday morning, have breakfast with your family and you can have a keto breakfast or you can have the gluten free waffles, whatever you want, you should be able to handle that. Just don't eat bad oils. And over time, it takes about two years to replace half your cell membranes. The oil in those membranes, over time you'll become more and more metabolically flexible because your cells work better. But if, while you're intermittent fasting, you're still eating a ton of junk food, you won't get that benefit. But you'll get many other benefits of fasting. You're still going to lose weight, you're still going to have an improved blood sugar profile, but not as good as if you made a few changes in the diet. So this is something everyone can do that's CH and more convenient than what you do in the morning right now.

So I don't think we closed the loop on metabolic flexibility before. So metabolic flexibility being that you've got, on one hand you can burn the glucose and then on the other that you can burn ketones. Most people, unless they're paying attention, never get into a space where they can burn ketones because they're not Creating ketones. Can you give people really fast? Because I want to get back to what an ideal fast looks like according to fastest way. But first, give people a quick breakdown about how you put your body in a state where it will produce ketones and exactly what they are.

Ketones are what happens when your body burns fat instead of sugar naturally. It doesn't happen if you're consuming carbohydrates in any meaningful amount, and it doesn't happen if you're eating a ton of protein. And what happens when you do that is ketones have more energy in them than glucose does. And the neurons in your brain love ketones. In fact, all the cells in your body do, but some of them prefer blood glucose. So all of a sudden you get this feeling of clarity. And the natural way to get into ketosis is you fast for about two days for the average person, sometimes three. And then the body says, I got nothing here. I better start burning my fat stores. So it liberates some fat from the fat stores, and all the toxins from the fat it liberates as well, which is why it's good to mop them up while you're fasting. And then your cells get. Get this and they go, oh, man, we've got to reformat our power plants because they're used to only having sugar. So it takes metabolic energy to transform, and they literally change their shape and function so that they're better at consuming fat. Right. And that takes a while. Now you're metabolically flexible, but if you do that all the time, forever, your cells are like, why would I ever be configured to do glucose? I live in a world with no sugar. So they aren't very good at that. Which is why cycling in and out of ketosis, fasting some of the time but not other times. And not fasting the same way every day or every week is really powerful. You want to keep the body a little bit off balance. So it's like, you know what? I'm ready to make energy at any time rapidly from any type of fuel. And when you do that, you can actually go out and have a bowl of hopefully dairy free ice cream without bad fats in it. So a coconut based ice cream and with real sugar and everything. And you know what will happen? Your blood sugar will go up and come right back down and you'll be fine. And that's a metabolically flexible person. You do it all the time. You won't be metabolically flexible. Right. But if you're the guy who has ice cream every Single night. Well, then what's going to happen is you're not going to know how to burn fat whatsoever. Your body's going to be only sugar burning and it's not going to work. And your blood sugar will always be high. So the idea is occasionally it's okay to have some carbs. I don't recommend ice cream as a major source, but honestly, if you're intermittent fasting, you're occasionally in ketosis. You ought to be able to eat a treatment that isn't full of inflammatory stuff like bad oils and all and be just fine. And the evidence is that people whose metabolisms work really well, they can do it and their blood sugar doesn't go bonkers.

Okay, now if we were gonna give somebody the fastest way starter kit, you know, sort of a, what does a basic week look like? What is. What is a good entry point where they're not hangry, they're not going crazy, but they're still getting some benefits anti inflammatory, they're maybe in, you know, ketosis, they've got some autophagy going on. Like, what does that starter kit fast look like?

All right, I'm going to explain that right here. I'm also going to offer because I was a teacher for five years at the University of California. I wrote every book I've written. I haven't really been a great teacher of the content I just write. I'm like, you should read it. When people order fast this way and send the receipt to fast this way dot com. I will teach you this over two weeks, like every morning, explaining walking people through this who are new to fasting, ending in a one or two day spiritual fast. So that's the long answer to the question is it's going to take me two weeks. But I'll show you the short answer is that do 12 hours without food. See if you can do that. If you've never done it before, that's not really technically an intermittent fast. You're just showing yourself you've got legs and you work yourself up to 14 hours without food. And that's when you're really starting a real intermittent fast. And then you maybe the next day have breakfast. Just lots of protein, lots of fat, no carbs for breakfast, right? You're taking it easy. And then the next day, okay, I'm going to do a 16 hour fast and you may use all three of the fasting hacks because you're ravenous. When I was £300, if you told me I was going to skip breakfast and lunch, I'M like, I will kill the people around me. Like, I will be such a jerk. And it was true. I ate six or eight times a day because I knew I'd go into starvation mode if I didn't. And all this, like, mental garbage, we've been told. So what you end up with is this idea where you're slowly going to work your way up, and it's okay to do that. And some morning someone's going to bring in donuts and you're just going to break your fast. And in the book, I explain the psychology and the biology of why that happens. And it's just. It's okay, right? You have the rest of your life to do this. That's why it's called a fasting practice. And it doesn't have to be perfect. And once you get up to that 16, eight, one day, you're going to sit there and go, you know what? It's lunchtime. But I'm actually not that hungry. So I am going to, for the first time in my adult life, I'm going to just say, I'm not gonna eat till dinner. And then you're really kind of tricking yourself because it's only like four or five more hours until you've had dinner anyway. And then you're going, wait a minute. The last time I ate was dinner yesterday. But it wasn't pain, it wasn't suffering, it wasn't struggle, it wasn't strife. It wasn't pushing. It was just, oh, okay, I could do that. Yeah, I was a little hungry in the afternoon, but I drank some extra water. Right. Maybe you did use coffee. Coffee's good for you anyway. It's okay.

And then no sugar or cream, I'm assuming.

Thank you. No sugar, no cream, no protein, no artificial sweetener either. You can use stevia or monk fruit if you want to, but definitely not Nutrasweeter, Splenda, because those wreck your gut bacteria. And it's really shocking. And you see this look of wonder, like, wow, I can't believe I thought I would die. Right? But I didn't. I just did 24 hours. And as we talked about earlier, that's, you know, one meal a day. But if the next day you're like, I did it yesterday, I'm gonna do it again today, and you're still just getting into it, you're probably not gonna feel as good. So the next day, go back to 16, eight, slowly work up to it. And what you're doing, it's like you go to the gym, say I haven't worked out in two years, but I'm going to go do a full CrossFit workout. I'm going to do the full wad, and then the next day you're laying on your back and you're like, I think I have to go to the hospital. My kidneys are overloaded with protein breakdown. I hate my life. It's because it's okay when you're exercising yourselves the way fasting is. It's okay to just get started in a healthy, gentle way and work yourself up to this. I can fast for 48 hours and still be totally fine and have my brain work and do interviews like this. And I feel great. I can also eat and feel great, but before I'd eat and then I get the food coma and then you don't feel very good and then you gotta have some sugar. That doesn't happen either. But if you just go all in and say, I'm gonna start with a 10 day water fast, man, you're gonna feel like crap. And the deal here is, fasting is not about deprivation and it's not supposed to be about willpower unless you're doing a spiritual fast. And what I would say is do fasting in a painless way, which is a big part of the book, or choose to face the pain and use it as a spiritual personal development practice. The arc of the book. When I first started this, I was afraid of being hungry, I was afraid of being alone, which was something I came up with through my personal development work. I'm like, oh, I didn't realize this, so I hired a shaman to drop me off in the middle of nowhere in a cave. There's no food and there's no people for 10 miles in any direction. And I'm like, I'm going to be here for four days and I'm scared. You know, I'm pretty scared of this, to be perfectly honest. This is the first time I'd done a four day fast. And when I got out of there, I couldn't believe the energy I had. And I talk in the book about, you know, the mental process you go through the first time you do a fast like that. And that is a spiritual practice. And that's why at the end of this challenge, I'm running for people. I am going to say, all right, here's the meditation work that you do. Here's understanding the voice in your head. Because there's these three voices in your head that make you do everything you've ever been ashamed of. And they're coming from mitochondria and gut bacteria. And getting on top of that and just owning that, that's awesome. But if you have to own it every day on top of everything else in your life, it's going to be overwhelming and it's going to raise your cortisol, and you don't need to do that to get the benefits.

What are the three voices?

This is the algorithm that all life runs. It doesn't matter if you're a plant, doesn't matter if you're a bacteria, which is what's powering us, or whether you know you're a deer. And the first rule is run away from, kill, or hide from everything. So that's fear. And you put 10 times more energy on that than is necessary. Right? Because from the perspective of making a life form that will always be around, it should protect itself and you protect yourself. If you're a plant with hard shells or spikes or toxins, and if you're a bacteria, you use toxins or other defense things. And if you're a person, you think you're out of it. And the second F word, which gets about five times more attention than normal, is eat everything. Because famines kill lots of things. So now we have fear and we have food. And that's why food gets so much attention when you're fasting. Because your bacteria are like, eat that, eat that, eat that, eat that, eat that. And you're like, no, no, no. And eventually it's like a little kid wearing you down. And, okay, fine, you can have half the cookie, Johnny. And they're like, why did I eat the cookie? I'm such. Listen, no, your mitochondria got the best of you. It's okay. And then the third F word. What else does all life have to do to make sure it's on the earth forever? Tom. Fornicate, baby. Oh, I was thinking fertility, but if you want to just go straight to the. I'll go right there. You're correct. So I actually was thinking of the other F word. I was just trying to get you to say it. So. Nice dodge. What's going on there is that gets about three times more attention than it deserves, right? And all life has to do it. And this explains everything you've ever done that you're ashamed of. Like all procrastination, all resistance, all not seeing things, all, hey, that's fear, right? Eating all the stuff you shouldn't eat. That's food. Going on that date, you know, you shouldn't have gone on that. Is the other F word, right? And this is in our cells. This is not your brain. This is your cellular biology driving you to do it. And the saving grace in all of this, and this is towards the end of the book, is that there is a fourth F word that all life does, and it's friend. And this is why we form communities, why we specialize, and we're actually wired to help each other, right? But if you're so wrapped up in hunger and so wrapped up in lack of love and so wrapped up in fear, whether it's from watching too much news or just your old programming, that's like, oh, no, if my boss yells you, I'm a bad person, no one will love me. Ah. And you just lose it. So if those are going on, we aren't there to help other people. And if you can turn off the hunger voice, it frees up so much more energy that you can now do the work necessary to turn down the fear and to make sure that you're managing the love in your life. And all of a sudden, you're a better person than you were before. And this is why fasting is so important, because it has the power to give you the energy to overcome the other F words that are messing with you on a daily basis. And it's not because we're bad people. It's a separate operating system meant to keep you alive. It's not trying to harm you. It just makes you do stupid stuff all the time. And fasting is a way out of that trap. If you're looking to upgrade everything about your life, make sure to check out the video right here. And while you're at it, hit subscribe below.