Fasting & Feasting with Brad Pilon

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A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof radio with Dave Asprey.

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Today's guest is a really, really interesting guy. I've been a fan of his work for a while and I'm really stoked to have him on the show. He's an expert on intermittent fasting and how it can help you lose weight and gain muscle. He's also the author of a book called Eat Stop Eat, which covers a method of intermittent fasting, which is there specifically for losing fat while keeping your muscle mass and energy. If you're listening and you've listened to a few of these episodes from me, you would understand why I think it's pretty exciting that we're having this conversation because I kind of do this sort of stuff a lot. That means that our guest is none other than Brad Pilon. Brad, welcome to the show.

How's it going, bud?

I got to admit something. Brad hit me. I've read your stuff. There's only one problem. I've never actually heard you say your last name right. So tell me I didn't just butcher it.

No, man, Pilon is the most accepted way. If you want to get kind of French Canadian, you could say Pilon. But Pilon is the preferred over Pylon, Pilen, and all the other weird ones I get.

Awesome. I usually just get called ass Spray. So I think you win in any case.

Fair enough.

All right, so you can tell this is the first time we chatted, but I feel like I already know you because of your work and just because I think we have a lot in common from that perspective. Your blog is on BradPelon.com and you're also someone who grew up in Canada, which is kind of cool. I live up here in Canada now. But you're on that other side of the country where they speak foreign languages and stuff.

Exactly. Yeah. Over in Ontario, just about an hour outside of Toronto. So we're in the same country, but man, were we like seven hours by flight.

Exactly.

Different worlds now.

Speaking of different worlds, you're an interesting guy from an education perspective because there's lots of people who study nutrition and there's even more people who studied pe, essentially physical exercise, exercise science and things like that. But you've done Applied Human Nutrition. And I have to say, the difference between nutrition and applied nutrition isn't that clear in my mind. Will you explain what makes what you did apply?

I will, and I'm going to preface it by saying that it was just as confusing to me. I knew I wanted to go into nutrition, and I'm looking at the course outlines at my school, University of Guelph, for Applied Human Nutrition and Nutritional Sciences. Two different courses, Completely different courses, I think. All right, Applied Human Nutrition, because I like humans, I'll go that way. Right. So what I found out about probably right by the end of first year is Applied Human Nutrition is the course you would take to become a dietitian. Human biology or nutritional sciences. That's what you more would take if you want to become a lab geek in nutrition. So my friends who are in nutritional sciences, you know, it's true. So my one ended up being nutrition, but a lot of information on counseling. And of course I did my first counseling class and I said, what is this? So I actually tried to transfer out. It's a huge long story. Wasn't able to, but was able to take some of the credits in some of the courses that I wanted to kind of blend it. But to give you an idea how messed up that is part of the curriculum. This may have changed. I'm old now. But part of the curriculum for nutritional sciences was Nutrition, Exercise and metabolism with Dr. Terry Graham. So like Frontier guy in the caffeine research knows his stuff. That was like Mandatory nutritional sciences, but an optional one if you're in applied Human nutrition. So yeah, a little different thinking there. But that was my. So my undergrad is in Applied Human nutrition, which is the one you would take if you want to become a dietician in Canada.

Got it. And from there you went on and forgive me for kind of going through your background, but yeah, no, man. I mean there's a lot of people who do different things. But you've done this kind of all through college before you got into being an author. I talk with science journalists and I talk with biohackers and then you've got the pedigree. It's kind of cool because you also studied protein synthesis and specifically the amino acid leucine.

Yes.

All of that knowledge happened before you started doing intermittent fasting, right?

Oh, absolutely.

You've got a pretty solid foundation here. What in those studies made you start looking at intermittent fasting and come up with the eat, stop, eat ideas?

Oh, that was kind of fun. So I went from my undergrad, didn't want to be a dietitian, ended up in research for sports supplement company in Canada, spent six years doing R and D there. So creatine research, leucine research, protein research, phenylalanine, you name it. Then during those conversations, I kind of realized I was on the wrong side of the table. I was the guy with the money funding the trials and I kind of wanted to be doing the research, so decided to leave the job because that's what every smart 30 year old does, is drop a good job and go back to school. And I went back to study nutritional sciences. So this time more of a science based dig in. And through just a ton of crazy happenstance, we ended up deciding the best place to start would be to study no nutrition. So what happens when you're not eating? And then the idea was, because obviously not eating is horrible for you, right?

You'll die, you die.

So you build on that. And since this is so bad for you, this is why my awesome diet is good for you. And then in the first couple months of that original research was looking at no eating is when I had to kind of make a decision because everything was different than what I thought it should be. I had six years in the bodybuilding industry, so I knew you had to eat every three hours. Totally. It had to be 300 grams of protein. Right. You had to eat at night, you had to wake up at 2am to eat. This was common knowledge.

Oh yeah, yeah.

So when I'm reading through These papers being like, hey, their metabolism didn't slow down. Ah, this paper is just wrong, right? Garbage. And then you read the next one, you're like, they didn't lose muscle. And you're like, more garbage. But by the time you're 12, 13 papers in, you've got to make a call. Either everybody else is wrong and you're right, or maybe you don't know as much as you think you do. So I decided to kind of redirect and study the effects of short term fasting on human health metabolism. That was my graduate work.

There's that interesting phenomenon that happens with all researchers because we're humans and it can't be because it isn't, or it isn't because it can't be. But like, that can't be possible. And that kind of logic is harmful to true research because it lets you conveniently throw out the garbage. But then you're like, well, wait, I just had an experience that matched the garbage. And now there's three garbage studies. And you're like, oh, wait, that was actually innovation, not garbage. But the first one might have been garbage.

You never know when it's building up.

You experienced this and you're like, okay, so not eating has benefits that we didn't know about. And then what benefits did you find?

The ones I was most interested in coming from bodybuilding. Right. So build muscle, lose fat. Everything else is just minutiae.

Totally. Like living a long time and stuff like that.

Yeah, abs, my friend, that's all that matters.

Right?

So the main thing was from the bodybuilding perspective, if you didn't eat every three hours, you lost muscle. This was a guaranteed known fact. So to start seeing people in trials where we're measuring lean body mass via DEXA and we're not seeing changes, and DEXA is pretty good. It's a good measurement. It would be considered gold standard. That was the one that really kind of struck me. I'm like, okay, hold on, if they're not burning muscle, what are they burning? And then of course, you look back to the research and you're like, oh, they're burning fat.

That was air. You can't burn fat if you're not burning it.

It was air. Then the hard part was, well, if they're burning fat but they didn't eat anything, then it's body fat. The fun part about that was you're aware, but for everybody who's not, the measurement of the fuel mix that you're burning is a very actually simple measurement just of your breath. The oxygen you're breathing in, carbon dioxide you're breathing out. It's fundamental to human physiology and respiration research. It's kind of if that was wrong, everything we know about human physiology is wrong. And that measurement, the RQ consistently showed that these people were burning more fat as their fast went on. So I said, they're going, are you kidding me? I've been eating every three hours, waking up at 2am to eat, because if you don't eat, you burn muscle. Now I'm finding out he's just burning fat. That's all I had to do was just take a break from eating. And that was the part that was most interesting to me.

The whole idea. In the 90s, I was into the natural bodybuilding. I was never competitive. I was a 300 pounder. I have stretch marks that mean I'll never be pulling my shirt off on stage because I was a fat ass. But when I look back on that, I was doing the same thing. And it, as you probably found in your research, if you're getting excessive amounts of protein, there's this little thing called ammonia that can affect human performance. Also, I was overfeeding on protein. I was getting not enough fat, not enough of the right kinds of fat. And I was eating all the damn time because I didn't want to lose muscle because muscle helps you burn fat and I was desperate to burn fat.

There you go. Exactly. My favorite was working in an office building with about 200 mostly guys into bodybuilding with free access to protein. The ventilation system had to be one of the best ventilation systems in the world because it was bad. Sometimes, especially, you adapt to it. It was the new hires and new employees who are like, oh, dude, I'm happy you're into the lifestyle. You should go home for a couple days.

It's a known problem with excessive protein because it tries to ferment in the gut. And I've seen some research, it's in the bulletproof diet book that's coming out about a fermentability of different types of proteins in the gut. Collagen actually makes a reasonable ferment that creates butyric acid almost as well as resistant starch. And it doesn't smell too bad. But if you're trying to ferment eggs.

Whey casein eggs, the standard.

Yeah, that's just not okay.

It's not good for anybody. Right?

Yeah. Do you think there's a biotoxic lipopolysaccharide kind of effect from having protein doing that in your gut? Have you Come across that in your research?

I haven't, but I would be interested in long term, right? I mean six to eight weeks is a typical kind of high protein diet thing is what they study. You start at 16, you go to your 25 before you're kind of out of the bodybuilding lifestyle. That's a big period of time to be really consuming. Ultra high amounts of very processed protein too, right. When you're eating 300 grams of protein a day, plus it's not typical for that 300 grams to be from steak and vegetable sources and chicken. It's normally about a 50, 50 split of food. And whey casein shakes, very, very processed, quickly digested, hits the gut very, very fast. Doesn't take time to. There's no coagulation or anything. It just right through. That would be what I'd be really interested in to see what that does long term.

You also have that idea that between 16 and 25 your prefrontal cortex just finishes kind of wiring itself in at 24. So now if you've increased the number of biotoxins in the gut, which surely has to do with the bacteria that are there and lots of other factors. But if you do that during a critical formation phase of your brain, I don't know what happens. I don't know that it's bad either. But it's a question in my mind.

Tangent for a second because I love this topic, but applying research to the population based on research on a small subset of even age is my favorite one. You know, the up until age of about 24, 25, we're growing and developing physically, mentally, like you said. Then after that you're kind of fighting periods of decay. So you have a study group of people who are 18 to 45 at the edges of that. Bring them back in. You have very different types of human beings, but we kind of just lump them together and apply it to everybody. Right. So I totally agree. Breaking it down by age is kind of fundamental to understanding nutrition because I think it changes as we age.

I've talked to a few companies who are now starting to do real research. Looking at your genome, looking at your gut biome, looking at your age, looking at your gender, looking at your activity levels and then munging all that data together. And who knows, in another five years we may have shockingly good information that's like for you because of where your ancestors are from and because you live in this region. We'll just put all that together. Your ideal protein ratio for the next two years, protein to fat and how often you should eat and everything else. We may be able to actually tease that out to the point that you go to a restaurant. I would like option 7 6. That's my dream anyway.

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So let's jump back to intermittent fasting.

Let's just go right back into that.

Yeah, we're going to transition smoothly.

I think that's a good segue. We did well there. Yeah, hit me.

Talk about glucose regulation and specifically neuronal resistance to injury when it comes down to intermittent fasting. Because having tough neurons is badass.

It is badass. My personal view on it, without getting too technical, is it's just another example of the hormetic effect of fasting. It's a small stress that we go through that tends to strengthen the system. I guess that's a good generalized description of hormesis. So the body's introduced to a small stress and that small stress actually has beneficial effects. If the stress were to get too large, it would become a negative on the human body. But a small amount tends to allow the body to learn to adapt. And I think that a lot of what happens in brief periods of fasting, so maybe not a prolonged fast, but a brief one, tends to follow this kind of hormetic curve when it applies to the brain, when it applies to autophagy, when it applies to even inflammation responses, all of these areas. I think it's that small brief stress that causes what we consider a beneficial long term adaptation. I don't think it's much different than a weight training session. If you were to look at your body right after a weight training session and whether it's functional, MRI or something where you're actually looking into the muscle. If it was like a minute after a ton of calf raises, you would be like, don't ever do that again. Whatever you just did to your calf, don't ever do that again. Because it's a bloody mess, it's a grenade went off three or four days later, you're like, that's all. The muscle fibers are organized, they're a bit bigger. Whatever you did that was good. I think it's a lot like that. Whenever you deal with small fluctuations, whether it's the increase in blood free fatty acids, if it's a decrease in blood glucose back to a basal level, then has to be supported by the liver. Whether it's changing over to a mix of blending fuels that includes ketones, all of that tends to be a small stress or at least an introduction of a new metabolic pathway maybe we haven't been using because we eat all the time. That introduction, it strengthens the system. That's how I feel. It affects everything, not just the brain, but your entire body as a kind of holistic approach.

Have you come across fasting induced adipose factor in your research?

I did. And you probably found it in the same area when looking into the gut microbiome.

Amen, brother.

There you go. Yeah, so I was really interested in that. I mean, the name was a tip off that I should maybe look into it more.

Yeah, a little bit, yeah.

And if fasting induced pilon is in. But yeah, really fascinating. And the thing I like because I've been very interested in the gut microbiome, very interested in even like endocrine disruptors from the environment. But people know me for fasting, so I always try to like to tie it in. So when I found that, I thought, okay, now we have a connection. Now we have some way the gut microbiome is interacting not only with the foods you eat, but it's also contributing at times you don't eat or in equivalent matters. So that I thought that was a very interesting thing that isn't maybe getting as enough playtime as it deserves. But only because of course, it's known by three or four different names right now. Right.

I covered it in the bulletproof diet. And there's another unrelated study to that one that looked at the impact of coffee and butter on the gut microbiome. Funny enough, especially if you add the brain octane oil to it, it's essentially going to tell the biome in the gut. It is not a good time for you to tell my body to store fat. It's suppressive basically of that kind of bacteria. But polyphenols, the ones you find in coffee, are actually feeding the bacterioides, the ones that don't have the fasting induced adipose factor. It's a complex way of saying your gut biome is telling your body to store extra fat or to burn extra fat. It's amplifying what your liver makes. Funny, one of the mechanisms of action that I'm hypothesizing for why I was magically able to eat stupid amounts of food and actually lose weight when I was trying to gain weight, like 4,000, 4,500 calories a day for two years kind of thing that I think that it had to do with that. In the morning, if you're not feeding the bacteria anything they can eat, whether because you're just eating nothing or whether because you're eating only fat, which doesn't really feed the bacteria, you can have an amplification of that one signal. That's probably a part of why people get some benefits from things like that.

Interesting, because the one thing we do know from research is that while obviously amino acids and glucose do have the ability to knock you out of the Fasted state fat doesn't. So you still have to deal with the fat. It's still there. It doesn't disappear. But in terms of actually affecting what I would consider a classic example of the fasted state, growth hormone increases insulin, decreases glucose back to a basal level. That happens even when fat is fed at an amount that's roughly equivalent to your basal metabolic rate. So large amounts of fat. It is very interesting because now we're looking at really two separate systems, your body and your gut microbiome working together, which only makes sense. Otherwise why would they be together? They have to be synergistic somehow.

Well, they could be. They could also just be parasitic.

Synergistic, parasitic.

I come at this from a computer hacker perspective. My background is decision support systems, which is a subset of artificial intelligence and literally hacking. In fact, I accidentally wore one of my hacker T shirts today. Great segue. But anyway, one of the first things to do if you want to take control of a system, whether it's your body or someone else's computer, is you want to get in there and look and see, has anyone else already taken control? Because I could exploit their control mechanisms. When I started looking at my body, I'm like, why was I £300? Why was I fat and inflamed all the time? That gut biome, well, they're not there for my best interest. They're there for their best interest. Their best interest is, well, I took over the body. I was like, I don't care if he doesn't have a six pack, but I want to make sure he has extra fuel in case there's not enough food for me, because this is my walking support system. As a bacterium, you'd say they aren't that smart, but emergent behavior happens. So they don't have to be smart, but they just have a core set of rules. And I'm like, okay, these little bastards are telling me to store fat when I don't want to. So take that.

Oh, yeah. And you look at how their communication, they share DNA the way we would text message each other, right? They're just like, oh, you need this Here. There you go. Right? So they adapt unbelievably quickly. And it's funny we're calling them they like they're a different unit because they actually are interesting. From what you just talked about, the only takeaway I have is that Dave is going to be responsible for Skynet. I think that's what I took from.

That whole hacking bio Skynet. It's totally different. Totally Different. Yeah.

Okay, good. The flesh around the terminator.

Good for you.

All right, that's evil.

But yeah, in terms of the gut microbiome and its role in fasting, it's one of those niche areas right now where we almost have to look to the placebo groups who weren't eating and see what happened to them to get an idea. But pretty soon research takes a while. So you've got your six to eight week study that actually took about 14 weeks to do, and then you have your whole process of writing revisions, getting it published. So in a couple years, I think it's going to be another big area.

So now we've kind of pumped up intermittent fasting. I'm actually fascinated that you've looked into what happens if you eat only fat. Because I honestly, when I started some of my bulletproof coffee experiments, I feel freaking amazing. But I didn't have all the research that I have now about, okay, what are the reasons it's doing what I can feel it doing and I can measure it doing. And I came across stuff similar to what you did that said, okay, fat doesn't have the same effect as protein or sugar on the body. So if I just do that, which is not natural, I don't think very often we'll just eat the hump off the buffalo with nothing else and just walk in the.

Yeah, I'm just leave the rest for the crows.

Or maybe I'll make a nice smoothie out of it. Given that you've got that, I would love to get your professional opinion. You can say positive or negative on the whole idea of consuming only fat during an intermittent fast just for energy or for feeling good.

That's the hard part. Because I know from a weight loss point of view you still have to deal with the fat. It still exists. But in terms of a feel good, energetic point of view, it's hard to measure in trials in a way that'll ever come across as significant because what you're asking your subjects to do is be in tuned with how they feel without the placebo effect of me saying, hey, Dave, how do you feel right now? Oh, crap, good. I get, oh, I've never even thought about it. So I think there's something there. And I think maybe the best way to do it would be instead of looking at just a placebo, you'd almost have to go coffee versus coffee with fat to use your thing, or just fat versus some form of placebo rather.

Than just the fast like olestra or something, or maybe caffeine.

Funny Enough it turned out great in comparison. I see the idea.

Here's an interesting result that I think is going to fascinate you because I actually did this study. We did seven measures of short term executive function like three back memory and finger tap time and stuff like that. Quantifiable university grade kind of measures. And we tested people on coffee from a selection of corner coffee shops. Coffee lab tested to not have mold toxins in it and both of those options with butter. So we're basically black coffee versus black coffee and butter. No mold coffee versus butter. Regular coffee.

Cool. Okay.

What we found was putting butter in coffee improved whether it was bad coffee or good coffee. That it improved almost everything except one thing. I think it was a visual color perception thing like when slightly down and then all the other ones essentially no mold. Coffee outperformed moldy coffee. And butter though didn't always outperform. So we were expecting, you know, if there's butter in your coffee. So we were expecting a substantial placebo result for butter. But butter underperformed, which means that we probably didn't have too much placebo in it. Butter still outperformed not putting butter. But there were a few cases where butter wasn't as good as just the difference between the coffees.

You'd almost want to wonder if doing the same trouble but with same coffees but decaf if possible and get the caffeine out of there as maybe a compounder.

That's a good idea. I'm funding some more research on different fronts there. There's like an inflammation side of what coffee oils do for you. And then there's the coffee gut biome. I am looking into this more. Of course everyone will say, well you have coffee and you have this excessively purified coconut oil stuff because you're from the supplement business. Half people say, well, that was funded by industry. I'm like, I'm not really industry and I'll publish the.

Yeah, the thing is too is that like being the guy who handed researchers money. I will tell you that you don't really have that much say. Right. If anybody's known a very well known person who performs research, they're rather opinionated and they don't really take advice kindly. Especially when you're younger and don't have 20 years of postdoctoral experience. It tends to just. They just ignore you.

Hiring real scientists is amazing because they act like scientists. It's a good thing.

Yeah, it is a good thing. Now with the coffee thing and even the butter thing, I find it interesting because getting back to supplements. I have Brad's whey protein, but in any given time I may be sourcing my whey protein from four or five different providers depending on cost. So my protein may be different now than it was last year. Nothing's changed on the label. I just bought it from someone else. Your butters, if you don't know exactly who they come from, they may change dairies depending on costing.

We controlled that. We told everyone to use Kerrygold Irish butter, which comes from a selection of Irish farms. But what does change in grass fed butter is seasonal. Seasonal, right. And they all did the test at the same time. But was their butter three months old or six months old? Because that changes the season. I did not control for the age date on the butter crap. Like we probably could have recorded that, but it wouldn't have been statistically significant because the sample wasn't big enough.

I have a hard time with any dairy stuff because you and I are really, really lucky being in Canada. I mean, a lot of our cows are just grass fed. You drive by and you see them. So when everybody in the US was very kind of up on trying to find grass fed butter and grass fed. I'm out in the country too, so I should caveat that. But I kind of looked around being like, how do you not find them? They're right here. And it wasn't until going down in the US to visit a lot more, I was like, oh, I get it. Like there's fundamental differences between Canada and then Ireland, Scotland, US in terms of how you raise your cows.

Well, it turns out that getting pastured butter here in Canada is really hard because most of it is fed grain because you get higher just for the dairy thing. And there's also a national quota system specifically finish.

Right. Grain finishing.

But not for dairy cows. Dairy cows are just always human grain because you get twice as much milk that way, even though it's lower quality. But for the beef cows, yeah, some of them are grass fed, some aren't, and some of them are finished to get the marbling. It's gotten to be such a point that finally Organic Meadow started putting a pastured sticker during the summer months for their butter. That's the only national brand in Canada where you get get pastured butter. And there's a few local ones. Before that there was like this little like butter smuggling racket where people would.

The black market butter roof. Yeah.

You have like a special vest with butter sticks in it. You like wear it carefully and try and make it over. No, I'm Kidding. But there are literally thousands of Canadians who drive over the border and buy two cases of grass fed Kerrygold Irish butter because it's not legal to import in Canada. And it's like, come on, couldn't we just get it here? But it's a different, you know, we.

Have in, I mean, I'm going way off topic here, a Guernsey milk. Guernsey cow. And so they have Guernsey ice cream and Guernsey butter as well. And for anybody who doesn't know what we're talking about, different cows, different breeds, species produce very markedly different milks in flavor, in color, in macronutrient and micronutrient profiles. And so we all just have gone with the standard across the board. But I just lucky, I think it's Eby Manor is the name out here in Ontario. And they just make a fantastic Guernsey milk. When I taste it, I was like, how can milk be so different? And that's when I realized, wow, that must affect then ice cream, butter, everything going down, creamer, everything. So it's interesting, we don't have that much selection available to us compared to what is actually available to us.

Yeah. And there's the French butters and the German butters and all this. And we may sound like butter snobs, but I proudly call myself a butter snob. Just like I'm a coffee snob and I'm a butter snob. It matters. Plus there's a taste.

There is a taste difference. Absolutely. We've done butter, we've done coffee. What do you want to do now?

And I wasn't planning on any of that, but you just actually can answer questions that I have that are like, okay, I've never asked anyone else about fasting induced adipose factor, who knew what it was. So boom, you got it. I wanted to ask you another question that's near and dear to me. I've done a lot of research on fertility and epigenetics. In fact, I was a co author of a book about that with my wife. When it comes to intermittent fasting in women, it's become kind of common paleo knowledge that women can get more adrenal stress and they can get fertility problems or even lose their cycle entirely when they're intermittent fasting. What's up with that?

Okay, so this, I won't lie, this irks me. And it irks me because what we've taken is known physiology, known biology, and used a crap out of it because it was beautiful for SEO when you couldn't get any SEO at all for intermittent fasting. All you had to do is intermittent fasting bad for women? And boom, you were getting hits. So it happened about a year ago. And what happened was we took sort of a known thing, so probably most people would recognize as the female athlete triad. So you have a combination of very low body fat, excessive exercise, very low calorie intake. That system sets up for amenorrhea in women and multiple other problems. I'm going to get to how this applies to men in a minute too. But it's this idea that, yeah, you get to too low of a body fat and you're not eating enough and you're excessively exercising, things are going to shut down and that includes your period. So what was interesting is the fitness world specifically caught on to the idea that women shouldn't fast at all because some women at like 14% body fat who were taking part in marathons and preparing for massive competitions started having problems. Right. So the general idea here is that fasting is a tool like anything else. And the leaner you are, the less you need to fast, which to anybody outside of fitness is completely logical. The less body fat you have, the less you have to diet. Let's just take fasting right out of it because you're done. The goal isn't 0% body fat. You're shredded, you're six pack abs, you're okay. You can try eating the maintenance or above, that's the goal. But we took it to a point where there was never a body fat level that was low enough. There was never a level of performance that was high enough. So we went right back into thinking that we could, instead of eat, stop, eat, we diet, stop, diet, run our asses off and then get confused as to why bad things were happening. The reason I'm somewhat irked about this is it did raise a very valid point, which is to a lot of women, if you are excessively exercising or you're already lean, forget fasting. The topic is dieting. You do not need to diet very hard. The part that I wish was brought to more people's attention was that the same thing happens to guys. We just don't have as obvious markers for it. So a girl doesn't get her period, she will go to her doctor and say something's up.

I gotta say, Brad, women in general are better biohackers than men because they have better signaling and better body awareness. Because of their monthly cycle. They'll see it before we will.

You and me. Let's imagine we're in our 20s and we're athletes. We're lean, we're fasting. We're dieting and we just, we don't got it. We're lethargic, we're tired, we can't get out of bed. No sex drive. You go tell your coach. Coach, I don't feel so good. I'm kind of tired. He'd be like, what the date laps go right? Don't ever bring that up to me again. And so that's the thing that irked me, was that man or woman, you have to think of it this way. The leaner you are, the less you have to diet. Forget fasting. Diet now. If you're fasting, because that's my gig, then the leaner you are, the less frequently. So less often or the shorter duration because you've earned it, you're lean, you've accomplished what you're trying to do. Now you're basically fasting for health benefits and as a way to keep your weight in check. So Eat, Stop, Eat specifically was designed because of this. My personal style of fasting is fast, eat normal, eat normal, eat normal, fast, eat, not fast, diet crazy or fast, fast, fast, fast, fast. And that's, I imagine it's the same thing that you have with your coffee. You just want to put your head through a wall because everybody's doing bulletproof coffee, right? They put margarine in their coffee. Bulletproof coffee. Nabob margin, done. So intermittent fasting became what you label everything. That's fasting.

Yeah.

And so people who are doing the. My favorite thing ever, the people doing the 24 hour fast every day figured out how they do it and then saying, well, I don't, you know, fasting didn't make me feel great. I'll be, oh, okay. That's, that's why I didn't like.

I promise you're doing it wrong.

Yeah, I promise you. I did my research when writing that book. I did fast for 72 hours, realized I'm not ever doing that again. I don't want you to do it. And that's why I didn't write the book that way. So it was kind of irksome because it should have been obvious to most people, instead of blaming the fasting, you should have been blaming the combination of the level of body fat, the level of exercise, and the diet, which includes, but not exclusively the fasting. So it kind of worked around there. But that was my main issue because we know from whether it's fertility data to female athletes data, we know those three things aren't great. And then exasperating the problem with fasting and diet and then whatever other sort of weird things you're doing with your diet, it's a recipe for disaster. And that's one of the things I always want to get across to people with my view on fasting. Fasting should be used as a way to allow you to eat normally on the days you're not fasting. The fast for me was the diet. What I don't think I ever got across clearly enough was that exact point. The fast is the diet. So I don't want you to layer it on top of your diet. I want you to replace your diet with it. That's part of the next update. If you stop eating. Is maybe me making that a bit clearer is that this is on the days you're not fasting, when you're doing eat, stop, eat, I'd like you just to eat responsibly. I like to say, like a grown up, like an adult, you don't get to eat like it's Halloween every day. But what I don't want is fast, 800 calories a day. Fast 800 calories a day combined with four hours of exercise and wonder why you're crashing.

There's also just the notion of total biological stress load, which is something I think we both understand, where it's not just exercise, but like, oh, you didn't sleep. Oh, like you had 12 hours of aggressive meetings and then you got in a fight. Like, maybe you shouldn't fast. The next morning you got fired, came.

Home and found out you were getting divorced. Maybe take it easy. Right? It's weird I say that, but we've actually had email correspondence with people and I'm like, I don't understand. Like, honestly, from all my background, I don't know what's going on. You should be losing weight. And then he goes, this is horrible because I also, I just lost my job and my wife's leaves. And I'm like, okay, we left that part out.

A little cortisol factor, fairly significant, right? Yeah.

So let's work on other parts first. So, yeah, the total biological stress is something that, well, we don't want to admit, right? Because we want to believe we're all professional athletes who just got missed in the draft so we can train four hours a day. Despite the fact that for me, almost every professional athlete my age is retired, I still think I should be able to train for two or three hours a day, compete at a high level four or five times in a week. But you have to realize that's not. That's four 20 year olds in peak condition and only the top 1% of 1% and the rest of us who aren't that person. We have to manage these things and balance them out.

I found that I did do a lot of intermittent fasting with nothing in the morning when I was putting together my experiences for the book and just learning how to control my biology more especially earlier on I would get like the 11:30, 11:00am Energy dip. I wasn't starving like I'm going to die, but it was like I'm in the middle of my workday, I have a social life and things are busy. I can't bring it right now. I need to do it. That was one of the things where I'm like, well wait, what if I just had some fat? Because I really believe in fasting, but I also don't have the professional athlete sort of luxury of work my ass off and then recover my ass off because my recovery time is very limited.

Take a nap.

Right.

Can't do that at work always. So the little dips, and they're difficult because they're different for everybody.

How do you manage them?

Okay, so for me, what I found again, so for everybody who hasn't read my book, shame on you. But no Eat Stop eat is a 24 hour fast, but divided between two days. So if Dave and I were to start fasting today at 3, we would fast till tomorrow at 3. So 24 hours. Anybody who's saying you're doing isafi by fasting for a day straight, that's technically 36 because you go night, day, night, but 24 hours divided between two days, you effectively get to eat every day. But the other thing it gives you is control over your start stop times. So when I first started, 7pm to 7pm was a dream. For me. It was the perfect fast. I didn't even notice it was happening. And then two kids happened and various other changes and seven, seven. It didn't work. It did not work. By four, I was an angry, frustrated father and it wasn't my fault, it was the kids. But it happened.

I get it.

And all I had to do was change it to a 2pm to 2pm fast. Everything changed. A lot of it has to do with I always want you to be going through your personal hardest part of the fast. Usually my personal thought is it's when you're really switching down to an exclusively fat burning metabolism. I want you to be to sleep for that part. I want you to be completely out of it. So if 11 is kind of when you're hurting, changing those times around tends to help. The other thing is there are lots of very small cycles in the body we don't really talk about that allow you to change things like pyruvate and lactate back into glucose. So anything as simple as if you have the luxury getting up and going for a walk doesn't have to be a long one. Can also help if it is a blood sugar issue. It's not always. It could be blood pressure, it could just be you really want to eat. Finally, it's accepting for people like me that a lot of the midday grumpies, it wasn't hunger, it wasn't metabolic. I just was habitually trained to eat then. So I was breaking that training. That was the hardest part, getting all the way back to my first attempt at fasting. The hardest part of fasting wasn't the not eating because I was hungry, it was the not eating because of my habits. And when I drive down that road, at that time I stopped for coffee every time. So driving past the Tim Hortons because I'm a Canadian, it was like a knife right in the gut because I knew I should be pulling over. And it took a while to get used to letting go of my entrained eating styles. So that could be it too. But there's all kinds of workarounds. It's never not impossible. And then the last thing, which is super cool, is you can stop fasting. So 24 is picked because I like it. It made for great research, it's memorable. 20 is still fantastic. Yeah, right? So people are like, I can always make it to 22. And then everything crashes. I'm like, well, then go to 21, you're good.

I tend to do 18 a lot. Is that still enough?

12 to 24? Well, 12 to 72 is my research, but to be honest, that's getting out there even for me. You start seeing significant changes at 12 hour mark, even before, depending on how much you ate the previous the meal right before you started anything past 12. To me, you're entering into the fasted state. You're starting to make the shift. Insulin is going down, growth hormone is going up. You're seeing inflammation responses. You're seeing, I'm going to say autophagic responses. I don't know if that's the right way to say autophagy. And then you see some other cool things. Your excretion of phthalates is increasing. As little as 12 to 15 hours, you're starting to see these environmental toxin loads decreasing. So it does not have to be 24. I just prefer 24 over 2. The occasional break from eating is really all I'm asking. 18 if that's what you do is beautiful. Also the leaner. So when I'm below 10% I do 124 hour, 120 hour. If I'm beach ready or I'm being really vain just getting lean, I'll do a 2020. Because I'm lean, I don't have to do more. So a lot of it depends on the available fuel source, your body fat. If you've got a ton of it, you can probably handle 24. If you've been dieting, you're leaner and 24 is getting hard, stop doing 24. That's kind of how I view it.

Being less dogmatic is helpful. You mentioned that tough part when your body's kicking over into ketosis and how that's stressful. Do you have an objection to using a tablespoon of well, in my case I would use straight C8MCT because it's the stuff that goes most quickly into beta hydroxybutyrate and then into coenzyme A and then ATP. Essentially you can measure ketones in blood a half hour after you take that stuff. Kick starting ketosis that way. Good or bad during an intermittent fast.

I don't have a problem with anything during the fasting with a couple of caveats. If you're trying to sneak your way through a fasting, you could have totally made it and you're just being lazy or giving into the want. There's a big difference between doing something like you're talking about and grabbing a handful of M&Ms. Just because they were there. But my big thing when I first started writing Eat Stoppy and it was before the bulletproof coffee movement, it was okay, can I have cream in my coffee? And I said, okay, well I'd prefer you not to. If I don't have cream in my coffee, I'm not fasting. Well then have the cream in your coffee. If that's the difference in getting the benefits. If. If adding the cream into the coffee reduced you from 100% fasting benefit to 98.72%, I'm cool with that. A lot of it's the mentality. If you're doing little things because you think it's going to improve it, by all means. If you're doing things because otherwise you're not going to make it again, by all means. If you're getting away with doing little things. That's when I want you to grow up. You really have to wait four hours and you can have the M&MS.

Very, very well said. I really admire that. For me it was I want to be able to bring it all the time. I want this energy and I can do this. I've done it many, many times. But I suffer a performance decrease towards the end of it that I just don't want. I can stomp that out and I can still get what I'm looking for from it, which is why I do it. But it's very individual and I love that you're so open about how many hours are you going to do your thing?

Yeah, it doesn't matter. Just do it. There is no right way to do this. There is wrong ways for you, but there's no way for me to tell everybody exactly how the entire world should attempt fasting. So I introduce you to it and you play with it until you get what works.

Well, let's switch gears a bit because one of the other areas of interest for me is neuroplasticity and brain training. I do a lot of neurofeedback and I've done this 40 years of Zen thing many times for weeks. I found sort of having ketones present allows me to spend more time training my brain before I hit the wall. You can bonk from riding too far or running a marathon. You can bonk from neurofeedback too. And I was able to move the wall. But I don't know if there's a neuroplasticity component or if it's just a ketone making ATP thing. So share with people who are listening. Okay. What is neuroplasticity? The sort of short version. And what does eat, stop, eat or other types of intermittent fasting? What do they do for your neuroplasticity?

I've never been asked that to define neuroplasticity in a general way.

Yeah, just the idea that your nervous system can grow new neurons, bdnf, like brain derived nootropic factor, things like that.

I want to say it's like the flexibility of your neurons to adapt. But I don't know if that's exactly the easiest way to explain it. You're dealing with the overall. The brain as a system is the way I like to think of it. And truly its flexibility. Almost like we talked about the hermetic response. Right. Its ability to adapt to its environment and the stress is placed on it. And that's a lot of what Neuroplasticity is. You could almost view. Would it be fair to say that neuroplasticity is almost the opposite of Alzheimer's? Would people get that?

Maybe. Well, we can look at synaptogenesis, growing new synapses. We figured out your brain can do that in response to environmental inputs. Then there's myelination or myelinogenesis, which is that the brain can grow myelin, which happens when you practice a lot. Those are the two mechanisms that we know about for neuroplasticity. But I know that you've looked at what intermittent fasting does for your brain.

It's hard because I'll tell you where I get caught on this. In terms of any sort of neuroplasticity, any sort of cognition research, even memory recall. Stroop test is, there's a lot of research out there, but they don't divide fasts with adequate hydration away from the fasts that include water. Fundamentally, the short term fasts that don't include water, you have a pretty immediate reduction in cognitive ability, the management of stress loads, the ability to recount numbers. You just do bloody awful on a Stroop test. So the addition of water seems to be important. But we do know from the way intermittent periods of not eating so chronically affect the brain, we're getting to the point where it seems to be, I don't want to call it an improvement, more as I do what we're seeing as suggestion in a delayed non improvement, delayed decay, delayed stiffening or lack of flexibility. So that's where I am with it now. I'm not far enough into understanding that research to say whether or not we even have a hope that it's going to reverse anything. But you're probably farther into that than I am based on the experiments that you're doing.

Well, there's definitely a ton of research about ketones in Alzheimer's. I had Dr. Mary Newport on the show pretty early on. She's talking about coconut oil and ketones and things. We know fasting creates ketones. We know ketones seem to have a beneficial effect on Alzheimer's from those bodies of research. But whether someone's ever tested ketones from food versus ketones from fasting on Alzheimer's patients, I don't know.

The one that hurt me was when that research came out. I don't know if it was local newspaper, but you got the idea of fasting for Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is so devastating that I hate seeing that, oh, we can fix it in three days. By fasting. It's encouraging. But man, yeah. When I saw that research come out, because first you're like, this is amazing. And you see the headlines. An hour later, I'm barely through analyzing the introduction, and the headlines are always coming out. I'm like, oh, don't do that. It's so bad.

And also, we call Alzheimer's disease type 3 diabetes. In some bodies of research, I have to say that the evidence is still out on that, but there's clearly some cognitive or some brain insulin resistance going on there.

The glucose toxicity theory, right?

Yeah. I think telling someone who essentially has a blood sugar regulation issue, who's old and has weak mitochondria, oh, just don't eat for a while and you'll get better. Honestly, I don't want to be dramatic here, but you could die if you don't eat and your system is weak. That can happen.

Yeah. That's kind of one of those things where you individual type stuff is what you want there you want to deal with, which I think is what medical doctors are great for. They deal with the actual person who just writes a blog for anybody to read. Right. So you have to be somewhat realistic. But I do find, because it's the two things you have going. You have a concept of glucose toxicity in the actual brain. You have the idea that ketosis is either helping or delaying. It's really easy to go like, oh, well, obviously, boom, right? The problem is glucose, go, ketosis, everything's fixed. But I don't think we're anywhere near there yet. But on the protective side of things, that's where I think the research should definitely kind of move very quickly, is in terms of people who have. You're prone to Alzheimer's, you have a history of Alzheimer's. Is there something we can do here?

There's definitely some hacks for Alzheimer's disease that are out there. And there's so many people who have it and don't know it, and so many people know they have it or a loved one has it, that the Internet is helping people be like, well, funny. My grandparents or my parents, they sure, I can talk to them when they do this. And then they talk about that enough times.

Have you seen. There's a crazy. I'm trying to remember here. There's some sort of connection between a pseudo Alzheimer's and certain blood pressure medications.

Oh, yes. Yes.

Yeah. So you think you have Alzheimer's. And I don't know what it's like in the States, but in Canada, there's like a Handful of specialists in Alzheimer's. Once you think that might be the issue, you're waiting seven, eight months to meet a specialist. In the meantime you're on drugs for something else. Diabetes and then leads to blood pressure and you're on blood pressure med that could actually be contributing to the Alzheimer's like symptoms. I mean that's horrible, but it's also mind blowing because that must skew the data.

I actually have chronically low blood pressure and I have for a while. It's probably as a result of chronic neurotoxin exposure from toxic mold. I lived in several houses that had mold that jacked my biology.

Oh, the black mold of death behind the walls. Yeah.

In fact I'm doing a documentary on that. It's become such a big problem that people like, I don't know why everything's falling apart and I'm fat and I'm tired or I just lost student housing. It's not just student housing. The experts I've interviewed are like 50% of houses have water damage at the low end and it goes up from there. So I brought in all these physicians who have been made ill by mold toxins and some of the world's top experts and interviewed them all. And it's going to be an amazing.

Thing if you want to bash your head against the wall. When I was in so out of rez, so in the first few years in university in Canada you're in res and after that you tend to go and live in house with a group of people. So we're in a 30 year old house and we used to have water gun fights all the time. So you're just spraying the drywall. Giant super soaker guns. Sorry for anybody who's living in that house now. I apologize.

It's funny because a third of people have genes where it's going to just trash them. I remember my freshman year of college, we had one of those five gallon water coolers in the room and it leaked. My roommate was like, it smells like turtles in here all the time. Because if we had mold in the carpet and I didn't know I was genetically susceptible. I'm like, I'm getting acne and I'm gaining weight and I'm farting death all the time, which are symptoms of this. And my nose is bleeding many times a day and all this weird stuff. And of course my grades are not doing very well because my brain is shut down. I had no idea at the time.

Like years later, if a water goes leaking, you put a towel under it done.

You might have a fan. But it turns out that for everyone. It's bad for me, though, having acquired chronic low blood pressure as a result of that. The cognitive thing is what made me think of this. The cognitive thing you're talking about with Alzheimer's, it's metabolic. You don't have enough oxygen in your blood, in your brain, then you're going to have low performance. You can increase oxygen then if you don't have enough fuel, either glucose or ketones, you're going to have low performance. If you get all that stuff in there and your mitochondria are damaged by something, then you're going to have low performance. It's like this stack where get the fuel in there and then let's see what happens.

Very cool.

See, there's two other big questions I want to ask you. One of them is around cheat days. What's your take on cheat days? I've had people on the show who are like, eat whatever the heck you want kind of thing. And others who are like, well, eat intelligently during your cheat day and don't set yourself back. Where are you on that spectrum? Can I go out and have apple pie and cherry turnovers? Or is that not the right approach?

So I don't like the idea of chronic diet in terms of calorie restriction thing. I don't mind if you averaged out your calorie intake over the course of two months if it was low. But I really feel like you need to have days you're eating to at least maintenance. So Eat, Stop, Eat is designed so almost all your days are to maintenance. If you didn't want to follow Eat, Stop, eat. But you still wanted me to help you with your diet. I'd have you dieting for four or five days and just eating up to maintenance on two or three days. I like those periods of just like, okay, the mental stress, the ego depletion is what we call it of dieting. It's difficult. You're literally, literally, you're constantly making decisions about food. It's exhausting. So every once in a while, I want you to take a break. If you're dieting very, very hard for two weeks at a time, does that suggest that just one day of over consumption is a solution or should it be longer? I would opt for longer. I like the idea of eating the maintenance. I don't like the idea of a cheat day being once a week. I pretend it's Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas all mashed into one and I just go to town.

You eat like 6,000 calories?

Yeah. From a Skittles and M and Ms. Put on a pizza, like that kind of thing.

Well that's the question there. I mean is a cheat day of Skittles, M and Ms. And pizza. But even with the right caloric number, is that different in your experience than a cheat day with. Well, I would recommend grass fed steak and sweet potatoes or you're eating. It's not really a cheat day but it's like a full fuel day. Right.

Dose dependent for me. A full fuel day as opposed to I'm going to try to make up for a week's worth of calorie restriction in one day. Now my general opinion on that kind of cheat, where it's going to be a large amount of calories above what you need is it's going to happen. I wouldn't plan it in. You're going to have a wedding to go to, you're going to go to a kid's birthday party and you're going to eat the cake. I prefer not to plan that into my diet because it's going to happen.

It'S going to happen naturally. You don't need to have a special day where you go out and you buy a wedding cake and eat the whole thing.

Exactly. In terms of using we'll say an eat up day as opposed to cheat because cheat gives the impression that you're going for a new record of calories intake but just a day to eating back up. I think that they're extremely helpful if not physically, mentally. The ego depletion, the psychological part of dieting can be exhausting and mostly the reason why most people stop. Mostly, mostly the reason most people stop a diet. So to take a break from dieting every once in a while without undoing the damage I think is sort of a fundamental part of a long term diet strategy. The issue run into with people is that you have to understand your fasted or dieted weight is a bit of an exaggeration. You have the water loss, you're just not your true weight. So on your eat day if your weight goes up by a pound or two, please don't freak out. Right? Because that's more in line. It's when you're done, you're dieting and then after three or four days you're like oh my God, all the weight came back. I'm like no it didn't. That was just an artificial low. This is about where you are now. You should be happy now. Try to maintain that. So that would be the only thing Is mentally you have to be prepared for on the cheat days, your weight's going to kind of go up. And people dieting in general, when it comes to weight, you get really hypersensitive to these fluctuations without admitting that you had the exact same fluctuations before when you were heavy. So just be aware of that if you're going to enter them into your enters this cheat day, eat up day into your diet that your weight will change, but long term, it's probably going to help you stay on that diet longer.

Well, Brad, it's been amazingly fun to have you on the show and get to ask some of these hard questions that most people just have never heard of. And I'm hoping everyone listening just enjoyed learning more about fasting. I fully recommend that if you're listening to this and you're trying intermittent fasting or you practice it regularly, play with the timing and eat, stop, eat. 24 hours is totally legit. And read Brad's book because it's also totally legit.

Why, thank you. And every time you see 24 from me just in your head, go 24ish, and then you'll kind of get the flow of what I'm trying to do.

That's like a tweet right there.

Yeah, perfect.

So, Brad, there's one more question, though, that I ask every guest. And this is your top three recommendations for people who want to perform better. You want to kick ass at life. Doesn't have to have anything to do with fasting, but it can. So what are your three biggest nuggets?

Okay, first, outside of things that are going to land you in jail, rules are guidelines. They're only guidelines. So especially when it comes to diet and exercise, you get hung up in these rules, it'll defeat you. So you're supposed to do three sets of six. Use it instead of six instead of six instead of four. Not the end of the world. Pilon says 24 hours. If I don't do 24 hours, I'm not doing ESOP. Eat 24ish, stay cool with it. These guidelines, et cetera, they're meant there to help and guide you on your way. But if you treat them as these hard fast rules, you'll burn out. So that's number one. Number two is the ups and downs of life. Whether it's your weight, whether it's performance in the gym, the people who come to me wanting help on their diet and they present me with their Excel spreadsheet of everything, and they're worried about these little blips. What you want to do is really think about the overall trend. If you get caught up in the two pounds up, two pounds down, one pound up mentality and try to go backwards and find out why that happened, you can find amazing things and make breakthroughs, but also you can make yourself completely neurotic. So always go with the trend of what's going on. And then again, another life thing I'm taking from diet or exercise, but you can apply it to everything is reproducibility is the key to research. If Dave had something that turned out really well for him and then I tried it, turned out really well for me, then three of my friends tried it and it turned out well for them, it's more likely to be right than the one outlier who's bragging on the forums about how he's 302 pounds of 5% body fat and you get upset that you're not. So reproducibility. The things that have had results for most people, something you should pay attention to that, but stop thinking that you're going to buck that system. So if you think you're broken and that specific thing isn't working for you, well, it's worked for a lot of people. So let's look at other parts of your life that may be the issue. This goes all the way back to that guy who just lost his job and divorced. Right. Like the generally, the diet that he was on was very reproducible. Lots of people had good results with that. His exercise program, lots of had results with that. So because they're so reproducible, I was able to look other areas of his life and find the issue. So that's another thing. It's always kind of be aware of everything that's going around and look for the weird blips rather than the things sort of obviously sit in front of your face that you want to change that might not need to be changed. That last one was. There was a point there. I promise if you replay that, it will make sense.

We'll boil it down. No, just kidding. We will have a full transcript on the show. Perfect. If you enjoyed this podcast, do Brad a favor and check out Eat, Stop Eat. And please do me a favor and head on over to itunes and leave a review for Bulletproof Radio. I do this as a labor of love to help a lot of people try and get smart people on the show that succeeded this time with Brad. And I really appreciate kind reviews because those help other people find the show perfect. See you all in the next episode.

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