Dorian Greenow explains why blood ketones drop after initially spiking during fasting: your liver makes ketones faster than your cells can use them until you're fat-adapted, a process that typically takes 12 weeks. Prolonged fasting triggers autophagy and boosts growth hormone, while monitoring ketones helps you distinguish real hunger from habit.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. One thing that's happened when I first started measuring my ketones, I could get my levels up. The more I'm in ketosis, the more they go down. It's not that common to have them above too, even if you're, you know, fasting and you're not, you're not eating anything or you're eating fat only. So what's going on with the people who are saying, well, my ketones are at 7, I'm better than you. Help me understand why ketones go down over time.
That's the classic go, go chasing ketones, chasing results. And it sort of like comes back to the baseline, you know, what is, what is that? Individual's bio individuality. Again, we don't measure how well your liver can create ketones, nor how well your mitochondria can receive them. So somebody first starting and they suddenly might get like, look at that. I got 4.0 on my ketones. I'm raging in it. Well, guess what, May. Mitochondria is not ready to receive those. So, yes, you are awash in that, but you're not fat adapted. And volunteer Finney showed with their fasta study, it's about 12 weeks for an athlete to get fat adapted. But I actually think that, you know, there's a longer tail that can occur there, and then there can be fundamental biological changes. And I'm an N equals one here. That fasting can, on some people make a profound difference. I mean, that apoptosis, that autophagy, the h, the human growth hormone that comes into play from extended fasts, from therapeutic fasts, can actually have a profound change on the body. And Dave, mitochondria, what is it? About 20% of the. Of the body is mitochondria? Something like that. Oh, by weight, yeah. If you think about, I think I somewhere heard somewhere, maybe Dr. Naysha Winters mentioned this at one of her seminars. It's about 20%. So if we are fundamentally changing the way our mitochondria work, that's 20% of our body, we are able to change at a cellular level. That, to me, is pretty cool. And I found that once we started going in these longer extended fasts, and actually, as a bit of a sidebar there, as you know, fasting is physiological and psychological. That psychological period where Pavlov dog is ringing the bell at noon, it's time for you to eat. Or when you're just coming back in from, in from work and you're looking for a cocktail or something like that. That psychological piece is hard. And when I sometimes found myself reaching at the refrigerator, I would take a moment and say, am I hungry now, if I know what my baseline is, maybe in the ones. And then I test and I'm like in 3 or 3.5, because now my ketones are very high and I've got a nice blood glucose down in the 60s. I've got over twice as much energy in my body, so am I really hungry? And what it is then is then you realize the psychological ways and the wave is usually past. And then once that wave has gone past, that little hunger, and then it makes it easier and you build your muscles up over time.
