IG Live with Sam Qurashi

I hope everyone's having an amazing week. An incredible last day of the month. Now we're just waiting for the father of Biohacking to enter. It is an absolute honor to interview him. It's been a long time coming. I was honored to be interviewed on his podcast last month, which was amazing. Dave is here. Dave has requested. Dave Asprey.

Sam, good morning. Good to see you. Good morning. Well, good evening.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Quick question. Are you fasting?

I am fasting. I'm doing the first of the three fasting hacks. Black coffee.

I knew it.

I knew it.

Straight into it. Okay. How was your week?

My week has been fantastic. Just not traveling as much has its benefits, right?

Absolutely. That kind of ties into the idea of consistency and inconsistency that I touched upon on my page right before our. Right before this interview. Because you were touching upon that. We're going to get to that. We're going to get to that. But for everyone that's watching, this is Dave Asprey, the father of Biohacking, the founder and CEO of Bulletproof, the creator of the Bulletproof diet, the innovator of the bulletproof coffee. A lot of people know this around the world. And right now I am the host of the award winning Bulletproof radio that I had the honor of being a guest on last month. And because of this incredible book, you, he is now four time New York Times best selling author. Fast this way. Congratulations once again.

Thank you.

That's amazing. Four times.

Never would have thought 10 years ago when I started this little blog, maybe five people will read this and not go through all of the painful health stuff that I went through that it would lead to any one New York Times bestseller, much less four. So I couldn't be more grateful and happy.

You're really an inspiration to me because every time I'm reading, every single book from every author that I interview is just an inspiration for me to start writing. There's always this book that I want to write that I keep on delaying. So this is another inspiration for me, another motivation for me. So thank you for that. Before we start talking about this book, there's something I have to. I have to touch upon. What I love about the book is the approach to everything that you've done that led to writing the book. Whether it's the cave visual, the vision quest that you've done, whether it's the way you approached all the miraculous things that you've experienced that you didn't have a logical scientific explanation for. And I love the fact that I love how you approached it, the openness, the unconditional acceptance of what you are receiving without judging it, without criticizing, without analyzing happened, and you're accepting it as your truth.

Thanks, Sam. That didn't come naturally to me. I come from a family of hardcore engineers. My grandmother's a PhD nuclear engineer, and my grandfather wrote for Encyclopedia Britannica back when that was a thing under the subheading of chemistry. So these, like, hardcore rational Westernists. Grandfather was an atheist. My parents were, you know, same mindset. So we get. I grew up with that going, well, none of that stuff is possible. Therefore anyone who would think about it is an idiot. But when all the stuff that was supposed to work for me to lose £100, for me to be happy, frankly, didn't work. So I tried fame. I'm 23. I sold the first thing ever sold over the Internet, before the web browser was invented, before E Commerce had a name. And it was a T shirt said caffeine my drug of choice on it, if you guys want to get a little bit of Internet trivia there. And I was an entrepreneur magazine, and I'm wearing a double extra large shirt. But I wasn't happy when I. I'm kind of famous, at least for my 15 minutes. It didn't do anything. And I made 6 million bucks when I was 26. And I said, I'll be happy to have $10 million, right? And I lost it when I was 28 anyway, so. But it didn't make. I was still miserable. So I'm like, okay, I tried all the Western stuff that's supposed to work. I'm going to have to open my mind because otherwise there's no hope, right? So then I just became curious about everything. And then I'm willing to go to Tibet and try yak butter tea. I'm willing to go to the Andes and do ayahuasca before it was cool and just to become exploratory. And I realized what science is. There's two. There's a kind I was raised in, which is a capital S, and that's a religion. It says that can't happen, therefore it didn't. And then there's the kind of science with a small S, which is curiosity. And it means to research, which means to look again and to look for the outliers, the things that should not be possible. And maybe everyone who says it happened is lying. Or maybe every now and then, something really special happens. And in my life, more often than every now and then, something really Special happens, I think, because I look for it.

Science. Here's what's interesting about science. Science is probably one of the most tangible, concrete things to a degree, but it constantly evolves, it constantly changes. And people that are so fixated on this is the right way, they're caught up in an extreme. And whenever you're an extreme, you're limited because, I mean, there's a lot of things that are just unexplained science, that science hadn't caught up, hadn't advanced enough to actually explain what's happening. It doesn't mean that what happened didn't happen. And obviously it's based on human observation. And we are, you know, human error is, as a. Is a natural thing we keep doing. We make mistakes, and that's okay. A lot of information and science is corrected over time. So it's really important to keep an open mind. It's really important to have that unconditional acceptance of what we receive. And that was just sprinkled throughout your book. And I love that. I just. So I just wanted to point that out. There's so many ways for us to start this. So I'm just going to start with this question because there's so many different ways. Why are people afraid? Fasting? Why are people uncomfortable? The ones that are uncomfortable, why are they uncomfortable? When it comes to fasting, people are.

Asking for the name. It's fast. This way is what we're talking about. Just saw a couple of new people jump in, and I was afraid of fasting for three reasons. And this is going back to 2008. And I said, all right, I've weighed 300 pounds, by the way, guys, I weigh about 200 pounds now. And I knew, because I'd been told forever that if you don't eat six times a day, you'll go into starvation mode and then you'll get fatter. And I didn't want to be fatter. I managed to lose a bunch of weight. So, like, I don't want to get fatter. If I don't eat all the time, I'll get fatter, which is totally just bad programming. That's not real. But I believed it, right? And also the words, there's your body goes into starvation mode. Starvation is a fear thing. But the bigger fear for me was that if I am hungry, I will be hypoglybitschy. I'll be hangry. I am unkind to people when I'm hungry. At least I used to be. Now it's not a thing. So, okay. I'm gonna act like a jerk, and I'm gonna get fatter, and I'll get in starvation mode. It's no wonder fasting is the least appealing, most offensive thing that I could think of, you know, as a normal Westerner. But I said, all right. I also know that I eat when I'm lonely. So I hired a shaman to drop me off in a cave in the middle of the desert with no people and no food anywhere for four days. So I can get as mad as I want, I can get as starvation as I want, and it just doesn't matter. I'm gonna have to face all of that stuff. And if I'm lonely and I want to eat, doesn't matter. I can't eat. So that was a really big thing for me. And I said, this is the first time I've ever done a fast. I'd done a little bit of, you know, having coffee in the morning sort of thing, experimenting with bulletproof coffee in the morning. But I wouldn't have called that an intermittent fast back then. And what I discovered during that is laid out in the course of the book. But you overcome those fears, and by the end of the thing on the fourth day, I had more energy than I'd had in years. I actually walked 10 miles in the desert, climbed the wrong mountain on my way out. A little bit of hijinks happened, but it was just so effortless, and it blew my mind because I believed that you would be disabled if you didn't eat for four days. But the reality is that you can go a long period of time. And what's happening here is a very common thing in that your cells in the body run an operating system, and they run rules. And you imagine if you're just an amoeba or just a single cell. You can't do a lot of complex things because you don't have a brain. So you have to follow these basic things. There's four F words that I write about in the book in order that all life, whether you're a tree, whether you're a bacteria, a worm, a human, a sheep, it doesn't matter. And the first thing you do is you run away from, kill, or hide from scary things. It's fear. And you take all of your energy and you put it there. And this is because if something eats you, it's the end of your chance to keep your species alive. And you don't have to think about that. That is automatic stuff. And it's the. You don't have to think about it. That's what gets us in trouble. So that's 10 times more effort and focus than anything. The second F word is food, because famines have killed everything that's alive when you run out of nutrients. So this is why you eat everything in front of you without thinking about it. Sometimes it's because your cells wanted you to do it. You didn't even have a chance to think about it. They thought about it for you. Right. And that gets about five times more attention than it really needs in the world we have now. And the third F word is something all life has to do to stay alive for generations. What's that, Sam?

I don't know.

Fertility. I don't know what you were thinking about. I was thinking about fertility.

Yeah.

Some other F word come to my mind.

I have no idea. I don't know what you were talking about.

But those three things, they drive so much of what we do unconsciously.

Yes.

Everything everyone listening to us today has, that they've done, they're ever ashamed of, came from ancient operating systems. If you think about it, there's nothing you've done. Procrastination, that's fear of something going. Dating the wrong people, staying in relationships, you should do all that stuff is driven by ancient bacteria embedded in our cells. And it's no wonder that fasting is really challenging because it pushes the. The food button and it pushes the fear button at the same time. So it's the hardest thing to write a book about fasting because really, it's just unappealing on its face. Right. It's easy to write a book that says, step one, don't eat for a while. Step two, it's good for you. But to write about the psychology of fasting and how to make it a lifestyle, one way to do it is you just, like, get so charged up. Yeah, I got this. Put all of your energy into it and you're just going to will your way through it. And that's what you do on a spiritual fast, which is part of the book. Okay. You know, I'm going to rest, I'm going to reflect, I'm going to journal, I'm going to pray, I'm going to do the things that are spiritual and I'm going to take it easy. That's kind of what I was doing in the cave. But then we have people saying, well, you should fast Monday morning when you've got kids in the house who wouldn't have been in the house. You've got a job, you've got pressure it turns out there's a working fast and there's a spiritual fast, and they're different things, but they're both fasting. So then how do we make working fasts so that they are better than having breakfast? So you actually have less investment of time, energy and money. You have more energy, more focus, and it actually works better than the way you did it before. At that point you would totally do it. And that's, that's what the book is about. How do you do both of those at the right time and with the right techniques?

So if we were, if we, for, if we were to kind of break down a couple of definitions and a couple of distinctions, make a couple of distinctions here, what is the difference in a nutshell between a working fast and a spiritual fast?

A spiritual fast is usually longer. And on a spiritual fast, you don't exercise, you don't interact as much with family and with the world at large, and you spend time inwardly reflecting. And some very interesting thing, some very interesting things happen during a fast, some of which are more of a spiritual component, but which can also apply to your business day. And when your body has food in the stomach, some percentage of your energy goes into breaking down the food. And when it's breaking down food, it's not going into your brain, it's not going into repairing your cells, it's actually going to making more energy. When your stomach is empty, you get more energy because you don't have to work on food. And that can go into your brain. But then what's really interesting is the next step of that. When you're fasting and you go into ketosis, which is when your body is burning fat instead of burning carbohydrates, which you get tiny traces of this after about 12 hours. If you use the hacks in the book, it happens faster. And if you go on a multi day fast, it always happens. And ketones provide more energy for your neurons than normal metabolism with glucose or protein. And this is a big deal because now you actually are feeling more power and you're wasting less power in digesting food. So no wonder. Okay, I got it. Like I'm feeling really good. And a final thing happens, which is more esoteric but is real, and that is when your body is hungry, it naturally opens up your sensors. And these ancient mitochondria that power your cells, they're actually environmental sensors that then make energy or hormones or neurotransmitters based on what they sense. But when you're without food for especially a day or Two, they're like, oh, we've got to be paying attention to the world around us. And suddenly you become more aware. You go for a walk on a spiritual fast, and you see the forest better, you see the desert better, you see the animals. Everything becomes crisper. Things smell different, the colors change. This is your body becoming more connected to the world around you. And when you say, oh, I have more energy, more focus and more energy, I'm not wasting as much energy. I have more focus and I have more sensors open. Well, you can do a lot. You sit down with a journal, or you sit down and meditate, or sit down and pray, and you've got more to offer because your body's in that special state. That's what happens on a spiritual fast. But you can take those same techniques and say, I'm going to turn this into the best day at work ever. Because my energy is even, because I'm dialed in, because I'm focused, because I feel good. It's when people try to do this spiritual stuff and they're trying to work at the same time that it gets pretty scrambled. And so it's okay to say, today I'm fasting for 18 hours.

And it's.

I might have a morning practice, like I do, but it's not the focus of the day. Focus of the day is my, you know, get stuff done day. Right. But maybe on Saturday or Sunday, or maybe next week, or maybe I'll take a couple days off, but I'm going to do a longer fast. Just don't mix them up. They're. They're really important to understand. And that was why in the book. A lot of modern fasting books are all science, science, science. There's plenty of science in my books. But this, this side of understanding the psychology, the emotion, the spirituality, fasting, it is so important. And if you try to divorce that from. From just the how to eat, when to eat, things like that, it doesn't work as well. You gotta. You gotta acknowledge that it's an important part, because fasting has been in every major and minor practice of spirituality or religion going back forever. Like, this is a core part of humans. We just lost it in the west, especially, because a food company told us to eat six times a day and we believed it.

That's. Yeah. Here's the thing about the idea of frequency, because one of the reasons for frequency is you maintain blood sugar at a certain level. You don't create glucose spikes to create insulin spikes, which increases the anabolism stage. Right? What you're saying in terms of fasting and in terms of, for example, intermittent fasting is staying for, you know, cessating from food for a long time does allow the glucose to drop. But then again, you prevent the anabolic state despite the fact that you're not doing it frequently enough to maintain a regular blood sugar level.

There's a lot of complexity there. Let me explain that a little bit on the science front. There's two major hallmarks of fasting, things that happen in the body. One of them is a compound called mtor. And MTOR is something that puts the body in growth mode, a signaling molecule in the body. And when we eat all the time, whether it's particularly protein or carbs will do it as well. It raises mtor, which is, okay, growth mode, I'm going to put on muscle. You know, this is a good thing. Well, except it's not, because if you're always in growth mode, you're in cancer mode. And this is why too much protein all the time does increase your risk of cancer. However, going on a plant based or no protein diet isn't going to be good for you either. So what you want to be able to do is say, how do I get my MTOR levels to be exceptionally high when I want to put on muscle and low the rest of the time? And fasting is perfect for that because MTOR is like a spring. You smash it down and then it comes surging forth. The way you smash it down is you fast. You drink coffee, or probably strong tea would do it too. But most of the studies are on coffee. And you exercise, especially weight bearing exercise. So if you do what I say in the book, you fast for at least 12, ideally 14, 16, 18 hours. You drink some coffee during the fast and you exercise at the end of the fast on an empty stomach. Then you eat protein and carbs. You've now compressed MTOR so much that as soon as you eat that it goes up through the roof. And then your body sucks in all the nutrient and you get more return on your investment than you did before. So you can exercise less and get better results. And when you're done with that, magically your MTOR can return back to a lower level. So then you get the benefits of being able to put this on. But with fasting, the MTOR is down. So that's one of the hallmarks of fasting. And I just explained that tripling down on MTOR technique from the book, which, to put it really bluntly, for people listening exercise at the end of your Fast, drink coffee during the fast and then eat right after you exercise. That's the recipe for that. Then the next thing is insulin. Insulin needs to not go up. Blood sugar needs to not spike during fast. What this means though is that if you're like I was overweight, insulin resistance, pre diabetic. If you were to sit down in the morning and say, today I'm going to fast, I'll just have water. By 11am I would have been completely yelling at my colleagues or falling asleep at my desk. I would have been cold, shaky, may be nauseous and it would not have worked. So how do you go to the point where I did a three day fast in the middle of my book launch just because I wanted to be dialed in for that. So how do you go to that from where most people are in the world today? Well, the way you do it is there's three fasting hacks in the book and you can do stuff during a fast. You can eat things or drink things as long as insulin doesn't change, as long as MTOR doesn't change. And I am very famous for bulletproof coffee because I've been using it with intermittent fasting for 10 years. I felt people lose more than a million pounds. And this is across the globe. I think the book's now in 16 or 18 languages and it's still going strong. And it's incredible because in fact I know it's very strong in the uae, in Saudi. It's pretty incredible. I was out there, I was in Oman, people were drinking. This is amazing. It's a global phenomena. But when you do this, which is grass fed butterfly MCT oil and blended into coffee and it has to be blended, it was inspired by something I had in Tibet, yak butter tea. And you do that and well, what happens? Your insulin stays constant, that's been validated by third parties. And your MTOR stays low because fat doesn't raise mtor. So people do that and all of a sudden they get massive energy because there's ketones from the MCT oil because they can metabolize the water from the coffee differently because of the small amount of butter that's in it. And all of a sudden like, I don't care about food. And it's the, I don't care about food because if when you're fasting in a working fast and all you can think about is donuts, you are not going to have a very good workday. But if instead you do this and you go, I just don't Care about food. Someone puts a donut in front of you and you don't even want it because you have enough energy for the first time in your life. That's a pretty big deal. That's the idea. And there's another thing called prebiotic fiber you can put in, which is something that feeds your good gut bacteria and it's very satiating. So there's. If I went back to my 26 year old or 23 year old, whatever, 300 pound self and I had given myself a cup of coffee with grass fed butter, MCT oil and prebiotic fiber and I drank it for breakfast, I would have been too full to want to eat yet. I would have been in a fasted state because my insulin was low, my MTOR was low, but I would have felt amazing. And when people do this, they build resilient, flexible metabolisms that can burn carbs, can burn fat, and they start to lose weight. And I have lots of data to support that now. And not only do they start to lose weight, but they become better able to say, I'll just have black coffee today or I'll even just have water. The name of the book Yousef is fast this way. It just came out.

Okay, so that makes sense because what you're basically saying is maintaining MTOR is the issue. Lowering MTOR and then allowing it to spike when we need it and then it crashes again is really the key. But utilizing MTOR when we need it instead of keeping it high the whole time, because there's a risk that comes with that as well. Yeah, yeah, okay. Sorry, you wanted to.

I was going to say that the risk is cancer, but it's also just aging. When your MTOR is high all the time, you're always in build mode, but you're never in break cells down mode. And that mode is called autophagy. And when you fast all that digestive energy that went into breaking down whatever's in your stomach, your body says, I got nothing to break down right now. How about I break down some of these old cells, Things that I call in my aging book, I call them zombie cells. And these are cells that they're not quite dead, but they aren't doing what they're supposed to do. They're sort of floating around, taking up energy and making free radicals. But. But they're not contributing to the system. When you're not always eating, the body says, oh, I've got time and attention to go out and clean up these old cells. It actually will destroy the cells. Imagine like the old Billboards where they have light bulbs screwed in, you know, hundreds of light bulbs. Well, some of the bulbs are dim. When you stop eating, your body will take out the dim bulbs and put in bright bulbs. So they're all the same brightness. When you can make more energy, when you can do a better job of combining 30 pounds of air and some amount of food to make electrons, you actually show it better for your spiritual practice. You show it better for your family, for your community, for yourself. More energy. I mean, like electrons energy, like in a battery, but more in your brain equals better progress in your life. Anything you put your time and attention on. And most people, at least in the U.S. i have some data on this. 88% of people are metabolically unfit. Their cells don't do a good job of turning air in food. We don't have great global data, but you can track it with obesity. So 42% of Americans are obese, 88% are metabolically unfit. So you can take the obesity rate in your country and basically double it. That's the number of people who have lost the knowledge and ability to turn air and food into the maximum amount of electricity to show up in the world. It's that big of a deal.

Just to answer people, I mean, a lot of people are asking, I'm probably going to be doing this a couple of times. Even though it's reverse, I'm just going to just do that every couple of minutes, maybe fast. This Way is the name of the book. The author that I have the honor of speaking to right now is Dave Asprey. There are a couple of distinctions that I'd like to make the difference between hunger and craving. And I'm just quoting your book. Hunger is a biological message, and it is something that you can control. Craving is a psychological need, and it is something that tries to control you. When it comes to turning off the hacks to turn off, Are we turning off hunger or craving?

You're turning off hunger. Cravings are something you can turn off, but it's a different thing. And I didn't know there's a difference between hunger and cravings because I always, throughout my entire life, man, if I don't eat, I feel like I'm just gonna die. This intense need, this focus on, like, I really have to eat, and it's like a gnawing hunger. Well, that was always caused by me. It was caused by something that I ate in the meal before. So if you wake up in the morning, I really have to eat, and you're starving. You Ate dinner wrong. It's okay. You ate something that was a trigger. And in fastest way in the book, I list five common sources of cravings from what you eat. And a beauty of fasting is that it makes you more aware of what your last meal did to you because you wake up saying like, I'm not hungry at all. In fact, it's two in the afternoon. I don't even want to eat. Well, you did a good job on dinner last night. But if instead you wake up and you're like, man, I'm just focused on food. I'm focused on food. Something's causing that and it's most likely what you ate. It could be that you slept really terribly or it could be that you were exposed to some kind of toxins, you breathe a lot of paint fumes. It'll make you have problems, sugar cravings. Because your body says, could I have some glucose to oxidize all this crap you just put in my liver? Like, those actually are real. But there's also the emotional requirements for eating. And fasting will help you face those as well. But you have to face them. And that was for me. Oh, I'm lonely. I think I'll eat. Which is different than I feel like I'm going to die if I don't eat something right now. And that's a craving. What hunger is is a gentle feeling. So now at the end of a fast, I'll probably have one meal today around 2pm and around, oh, probably one or two. I will get this. I'll get a feeling says, you know, it's probably about time to eat, but if I didn't eat, I'd be fine. And it's just, it's like an awareness and it's so relaxing, right, to say, I know and I know cognitively, but my tissues also know the truth. The truth is that it takes you about 90 days to starve to death. So if you tell yourself I am starving because you want lunch, you're not starving. You're not even in the universe of starving, right? There are people who fasted for 70 days who are alive today. And if you look in any book, whether you're looking in the Quran, in the Bible, people fast for 40 days all the time. It's like, you know, they do it all every other week. They fast for 40 days. Okay, can't really do that, but they. So we know we can do it, but it's intense if you're going to go that long. I'm not suggesting people do that, but it's really interesting that we believe we are starving if we don't have food every few hours. That belief is embedded in your tissues. Your body also believes that you can't lift something that's heavy. And the reason you push a little bit harder is you're actually showing the body, oh, you can. And the body says, oh, if I'm going to have to do that regularly, maybe I should put on some more muscle. Right. It's the same thing. Fasting is a form of weightlifting for your cellular metabolism. And you show the body, oh, you can do that. Not only can you do it, you're going to have to do it again. And then the body becomes stronger. But this is the kind of strength that stops diabetes, which is the precursor to cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer's disease. So fasting is cool. The first time you do it and you do it right. You didn't spend any time and energy on breakfast, but you had more energy and focus during the day. So you, you got paid by not making breakfast. You got more energy. So you got return on your non investment. And then over time you get an investment of not getting old and weak and then dying prematurely. So it's the best, highest return on investment activity that there is in terms of health. And it's got spiritual benefits as well.

Absolutely, absolutely. The idea of fasting, one of the benefits was that that it increases hippocampal volume.

Yes, yes.

What's interesting about that is gratitude has, based on studies, has been proven gratitude, practicing gratitude to increase and enhance hippocampal volume. I started thinking of the link between gratitude and fasting because fasting allows you to create some sort of a selective uncoupling of something that you want and it allows you, it enhances your appreciation of it. So it indirectly stimulates gratitude, which can create that. I think there's something else happening as well, because with selective deprivation or uncoupling, you are desensitizing yourself from the fear of loss, the fear that comes from that scarcity, of not having what you think you need to have. And gratitude really is a way to counter scarcity, that inner sense of being scarce, of not being enough, of not having enough, of not doing enough, by being grateful for what you have for the people you know. So there's this, it's an interesting kind of connection of abundance to counter scarcity and fasting as an indirect way. So I thought it was just interesting to share.

That's a, that's a really good point, Sam. When you, you look at fasting, you can actually consciously practice gratitude that you get to choose to fast. There are somewhere around a billion people on the planet who are fasting involuntarily at any time or another. So. And also when you eat, I like to tell the story about my son. He was maybe 8 and he seen me fasting for years. And he said, daddy, I want to try a fast. And I said, okay, I don't recommend fasting for kids, and it's not a good thing. You can fast every now and then if you want to try it, but I wouldn't want you to intermittent fasting every single day. You know, you. Your cells need to know the world is full of abundant food, so you build a thriving, strong body. So fasting isn't for kids to answer one of the questions that was in our thread here. But fasting occasionally or having a late breakfast because they're not hungry, that's good for kids. But he says, okay, I'm going to go 24 hours without food. Wow, that's awesome. You're not allowed to do that very often, but if you want to try it, you can. And I said, why don't you do one of the fasting hacks, like have some coffee, have a little bit of bulletproof coffee, and then you won't feel the hunger as much. He goes, no, I want to see if I can do it. So he only had water for 24 hours. And at the end of that, and there was no encouragement here, this is just him saying, I want to do it. I've seen you do it. Like, I'm going to. I'm going to see. Like, I want to run a marathon. I'm see. And at the end of it, when he had. He did it, he was a little bit tired, a little bit cranky, but not bad. And at dinner, he ate dinner. He goes, you're right, Daddy. Fasting is the best spice ever. This is the best meal I've ever had. It tastes so good. And so you can have gratitude when you eat those. Like when you eat at the end of a fast, you think, oh, I can. I can do that. And it feels really good. And so that's where gratitude comes in. Gratitude when you eat and gratitude that you get to choose not to eat. And both of those make fasting better. And you can do that in a working fast or a spiritual fast.

It also enhances. I mean, obviously it heightens your senses, so you get to appreciate, because that is a byproduct of fasting anyway. So when you eat it, in addition to that it actually heightens your appreciation because you get to taste things that you normally wouldn't. And I remember you were mentioning something in the book about a guy that actually smelled. Was it a sandwich or something or.

Yeah, that was. This is my friend Chris. He's a long range recon guy in the military. And these are the guys. They drop them off in jungles and countries where they probably shouldn't be and then they disappear for a month and magic stuff happens. And to. During his training he was telling me this and I just had a hard time believing it. But they'd give him an 80 pound backpack and say, you and your team, it's going to be three days, you have no food, you're going to go through the jungle and you're going to find this GPS coordinate using just a compass and we'll see you there and pick you up and buy. And then the helicopter leaves and that's that. So what they would do though is they'd hang a cheeseburger in a tree by the point where they were going to that point they were looking for. And he said, dave, when we were three miles away, every one of us could smell the cheeseburger. It was readily apparent. And this is the sensors opening in the body. And when you study the shamanic oriented trackers, you know people who live closer to nature and this is true in all cultures. You go to an island nation, they, they're connected to the water and they can see the waves in a certain way. They're connected. You go into the desert, there's tons of life. I grew up in a desert, there's tons of life in the desert. And you know where it is because you're with it. And in this case, the sensors open up all the way. Tom Brown Tracker School is another example. This is a guy who teaches shamanic techniques of tracking and he says, oh, let's do it fasted. And suddenly you, you know where all the animals are around you because your body always knew that you just never had the sensors open for it. So that's, that's why it's a powerful practice. And I'm seeing lots of questions about Ramadan in the thread here.

Yeah, and I actually cite studies, Please get into it.

Yeah, I cite studies in the book and there's a whole in the chapter on spiritual fasting. This is one of the most practiced forms of spiritual fasting that's out there. And what you're doing there is a substantially long fast. It's at least 12, 14, 16 hours, depending on that and there's studies of improvements in people's metabolism from it. And of course, there's the spiritual aspect of it, right? So all day long you're thinking about it. And what's interesting about Ramadan is that it's a dry fast, which is a more advanced form of fasting, because you're not drinking water during the day, at least if you're practicing it. Some people get an excuse if you're pregnant and things like that. But what happens there is what happens when anyone tries intermittent fasting over time is that your metabolism gets healthier, your brain turns on. But there is a fourth F word. Remember those three F words that I talked about before? Fear, food and fertility. The fourth F word that all life does is friend. Right? And you support your community. We take care of our elders, we take care of our children. We help people, we specialize. You know, we become a teacher. We become what we do for our community and all that stuff. And that, that final F word is important because when you fast in a community, really good stuff happens. In fact, for fastest way, if you go to fast this way dot com, you can sign up for a free fasting challenge. There's 30,000 people fasting together, and that's incredible. And I am actually teaching the book like this. And it's just, I just want people to have the knowledge. So it's not a pay thing, it's a free thing. But when you go into the Facebook group and you look at the comments from people, you see people saying, I have never fasted for 24 hours of my life. I didn't think I could do it. And it's the emotional equivalent of running a marathon. It's a big deal because it blows your mind. I can't believe this is possible, much less that I could do it and feel like myself. Right? So you feel like you have faced death. But if you're someone who's, you know what, Since I was 12, I've been fasting without water for at least 12 hours a day. You probably know you can do it because it was something you did with your community that was built in. I would like to see fasting become a worldwide thing that we do on a regular basis where we just honor that. The model. I like to imagine, what if in order to get gas for your car, if you still have a gas burning car, which most people still have, what if you always Tuesday morning just filled up with gas, even if you didn't eat, if your tank was full and you didn't drive, that's what we're doing every day. Everyone sit down and eat. But I don't need to eat. It doesn't matter. You eat now. Well, it would make no sense because what you're doing is you're pumping gas out until it flows out onto the know, onto the driveway. It doesn't make any sense, but that's what we're doing. And some of the technology that's available now, Sam, is amazing. I have this thing called levels on the back of my arm right here. I can wave my phone over that, and it tells me my blood sugar. So I'm feeling hungry, and I look at my blood sugar. My blood sugar is 105. I have plenty of available energy in my body. My body's just not using it. So it's sending me a false signal. Those ancient sense are like, eat the donut, right? But I'm like, nah, sorry, I've got data. And so then I can better correlate my. My instrumentation. You know, we aren't born with a manual, and there's all sorts of knobs and dials and sensations and feelings, and they aren't labeled. And as we evolve and mature, we become more and more aware of what those mean. But when you have a little bit of data showing you, you know what, that wasn't really hunger. That was something else. Because clearly I have enough energy. Maybe my cells aren't using energy. Then I should work on my metabolism. Maybe I'm lacking a nutrient or something, but just knowing I have enough energy, I don't need to eat. What's going on here? You suddenly realize that eating is something we do way more than we need to. And frankly, it's because eating tastes good. It feels good.

Yeah. In terms of. There are people talking about Ramadan. So I just want to clarify something. There is a way to fast in Ramadan that isn't healthy. And there are people that do that. So one of the unhealthy things that unfortunately, there are several individuals. And I mean, you can. We can find that in different countries in the Middle east, where after fasting, when they break the fast, at the end, when they break the fast, they indulge, they overeat. So it's the amount and I guess it's the type of food that we eat that damages the effect. But the idea is we're not supposed to. If we actually go back to the sunnah on how to actually do it, we're not supposed to eat too much. When you break the fast, it's very light, but a lot of People eat heavy, and that's not the healthy way to do it. The second thing is there are three levels to fasting in Ramadan. First one is the physical. No food, no water, no sex during the day. The second is the kind of sensory, physiological, motor kind of fasting, which involves, for example, tongue fasting, where for the entire 30 days, you want to heighten the. The depth of that fasting, you. You basically fast. Tongue fasting is basically not lying, not gossiping, not cursing, not. So that's an example. And you can kind of use that for any other part of the body, really. The things to avoid. The things to avoid in terms of receiving, or the things to avoid in terms of, you know, motor stimulation. The third is the spiritual, which is dedicating the entire month to doing all that, but just focusing 100% on God. That's it. And these are the three levels. So just to kind of clarify that, because there are certain people, there are different individuals asking about that, I'd like to touch upon a couple of more.

Distinctions before we go there. Sam, can I get a word in there? Because.

Yeah.

The real definition of fasting is to. To go without. And it doesn't mean to go without food always. You can fast from junk food. It's called eating healthier. You can fast from carbs. It's called keto. And I talk about a dopamine fast in the book, which is fasting from things that are overstimulating. And that's part of what you're talking about there with Ramadan. Right. And so this is one where you're focusing on more peaceful, more calm things, less social media, less exploding movies and things like that, where you're just allowing the body to calm down a little bit. And what this does is the same effect that makes food taste good at the end of a fast is that everything that creates pleasure does it more easily if occasionally you go without it. But at the end of the book, the hardest fast, the one that I talk about, is exactly like your tongue fast. And I ask people fast from hate. See if you can go four hours without thinking a bad thought about yourself or another person or another thing. And it is one of the hardest fasts to do. And when you first start working on a practice like that, you will find that every five seconds, your brain, the voice in your head, probably says something bad about you or other people, and it's a habit. And the body's doing that for the first F word, fear. It's basically saying they might be a threat, they might Be bad. I might not be good enough. If I'm not good enough, no one's going to love me. And you're not choosing these thoughts. This is not you. This is an ancient defense system. The same thing that makes you pull your hand away from a hot fire before you notice it's hot. It's that system that's making you think all these negative thoughts and all. But when you become aware of it, you can actually train it like you train a dog to not do that very often. And when you do it. Talk about freeing up energy. 15% of the average person's thoughts every day are about what's for the next meal. If you can stop thinking about food, you get 15% of your thoughts back. If you can stop thinking about fear, you probably get 50% more thoughts back. And that's why it's actually really advanced technology that's behind Ramadan. When you're doing the three levels you're talking about there, even the. No sex during the day. I talk about fasting from sex in the book. Right. And it's different for men and women. There's different effects. But yeah, there's really. There's. There's raw electron energy power that comes from all these practices.

And.

And there's also something around just not wasting a lot of your electrons on this stuff in your head that doesn't belong there. And this is on a spiritual path. It's also on a path of performing better. So there's a direct correlation between spirituality and showing up in your life for everything you do better. And it's been really transformative for me.

Fast. Okay, the. That's. That's something I wanted to touch upon later, but since you brought.

Okay, sorry, I took in sideways talk about it.

No, no, let's talk about it now. So, first of all, I admire the fact that you mentioned that in terms of fasting from hate, because a lot of people wouldn't even acknowledge that they have hate towards other people for whatever reason, or thinking hateful thoughts about someone that has wronged you. We've been wronged by so many. I mean, everybody's been wronged in some way or form by someone. And I. I just admire the fact that you mentioned that and that indirectly, in its way, in a certain way, is a very powerful thing. Because what I do, what I'm mainly focusing on right now is emotional healing. But part of that is expressing the truth about how you feel. And there's a study at UCLA by. And I think we touched upon Amy Chan and I touched upon in the Last IG Live. I think Dr. Matthew Lieberman, if I'm not mistaken, Matthew D. Lieberman, he that expressing, writing down how you feel specifically it was about anger basically lowers the activity of the amygdala. It's no longer triggered, it's no longer stimulated. And it basically increases the activity of the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that is responsible for emotional processing and behavioral inhibition. And that in and of itself is a way. Because with trauma there's a circuit. And whenever we talk CBT or DBT or just expressing or journaling, we're looking for a better story in a desperate attempt to resolve the conflict inside of us. And whenever we're caught up in thought, when what we need to do is release the emotion that is causing the thought, this is what I'm basically focusing on, on releasing emotions to change behavior, change belief to release the thoughts so they would no longer be there because there's a triad. Belief, behavior and emotions and self development. They're all focusing about belief and behavior. And if you change the behavior, that's great. Change the belief, that's great. The thing is, a lot of times it reverses, a lot of times it comes back again. Because the emotion is what puts the belief in behavior. It's what keeps them in place. It's the glue. You melt the glue. Belief in behavior is a lot easier to change a metaphor, quick metaphor is think of behavior as a branch. Think of belief as a trunk. Think of emotions as the root. Most people go after symptomatic treatment. They go after the branch, go after the trunk, they don't remove the root. And so they just chops heads of hydra instead of piercing the heart. So that was a really interesting concept because one of the things that you were mentioning about that when you say hate, thought about thinking about hate and fasting from that is. And I love what you said when you, when you, when you try to fast from hate, you realize how much hate exists around you because you become so sensitive to it. And that's the thing when we detach from something, we get to see it. So just wanted to touch upon that because I thought that was a really powerful. I think it was chapter seven that was in. That was the last part of chapter seven that was really, really powerful. But just to get back to the distinction fasting and starvation, just to clarify for people, we're talking about fasting and the book once again, fast this way. Just put the phone in front of a mirror and you'll see it. So fasting versus Starvation. Your definition in the book, which simplifies it, is basically fasting is uncon. Well, starvation is uncontrolled fasting. So if you're forced to do it and it's uncontrolled, that's starvation. And that's not what we're. Because there's damage there, especially that you're not in control of it. And I think the value of what you're. The way you're framing fasting, I love what you. How you framed it as an opportunity. And whether it's diet or not, whether it's related to food or not, it's an opportunity to gradually introduce the possibility of changing a behavior. So fasting is kind of like dipping your toes into the opportunity of changing a behavior. Just test it, see how it feels like. You'll probably discover that if you stop something for seven days, you're more likely to be. That gives you more confidence to actually stop it instead of saying, I want to stop now. It's a very nice gradual introduction to stopping something because you get. Instead of fearing the unknown of what would happen if I do it well, do it temporarily. The power of impermanence. Do it for three days. See what happens. You realize nothing happens. You can do and you can do it. So that actually changes everything. So I just wanted to thank you for that and two more distinctions that I'd like to ask you to clarify. Fasting. We'll start with the first one. Fasting and dieting, are they similar? Are they different? When people talk about both?

A lot of people are attracted to fasting because they think it's a way to lose weight. Any diet that works, weight loss is a side effect. You eat for energy. That's our job. That's what food is for. So if. If you eat so that you have no cravings, so that your brain is focused so that you feel really good, you will lose weight as you do that. And if the diet is one that makes you lose weight but not feel good, what will happen is you will gain all the way back and then some. I didn't really lose 100 pounds. I probably lost 200 or 300 pounds. You lose 20 pounds, you gain 30, you lose 30, you gain 40. And partly that's because I wasn't using intermittent fasting. And intermittent fasting helps to reset your hunger level to be at the level of your current body weight. But if you do what I did, which was I went on a low fat, low calorie diet, and I worked out six days a week for an hour and a half a day for 18 months, you'd say, wow, you should have looked great. No, I still had a 46 inch waist, I still weighed 300 pounds and I could max out all the machines at the time gym and I was over training and I was undernourished. So you can do that and it's not good for you. Many people will lose weight under regimen like that, but many people won't because there are other variables like.