What’s Up with Water Fasting? with Dr. Alan Goldhamer

Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance.

What I want to know though is there's a lot of people listening right now saying, okay, they've just read fast this way. I've talked about all different types and lengths of fasts and all but one thing that I don't have a good answer on is what is the longest safe, self administered water only fast that you would advise?

Well, I personally recommend that everybody fast every day and I suggest that they do that depending on their goals from 12 to 16 hours. So that means that everybody is limiting their feeding windows between 8 and 12 hours and that during the time from their last meal, which preferably is at least three hours before they go to sleep at a reasonable hour, they have a bit of fasting every day. And people like Valter Longo and others suggest that cumulatively that 12 to 16 hours of fasting every day may help on a number of levels. It may help prevent overeating which prevents the obesity. It may help induce metabolic changes and biological changes that cumulatively are thought to be protective. And it avoids a lot of the eating for the wrong reasons. Sometimes people eat because they're tired and they should sleep and sometimes they eat because they're bored and they shouldn't engage in productive activity or they're mad and they should do exercise or you know, make the other people eat. But so this idea of fasting every day and then breaking your fast with break fast whatever time you know that's appropriate for you is good. There's also evidence that people that exercise before eating during that intermittent fasting state preferentially mobilize fat. And so it may help keep total body fat down, which is thought to be a positive long term strategy for maintaining health and preventing disease. So I think this, and I think virtually everybody can do some type of intermittent fasting, even if they're not yet healthy enough to get off their medications and other things, there's still a way to design intermittent fasting that can be done by people at home safely, effectively every day. I also think that modified feeding regimes where people that are attempting to lose weight can reduce their caloric density, for example, to 6 to 800 calories, whether they're using a commercial product like prolon, like Dr. Longo advocates, or whether they just reduce their diet to, you know, plant based vegetable foods and other lower caloric density foods so that they have a, a lower caloric intake than what they actually need for, for function can cumulatively help with weight loss facilitation.

Doesn't it kind of matter what plants? Isn't plant based? Sort of an open window there.

Well, we do we.

Heroin is a plant based substance.

Absolutely.

I mean, I'm being extreme there, but like alfalfa, like which plants? You can't just say plant based without it having a meaning.

Yeah. Well, we describe dietary recommendations in exclusively whole plant foods. So these are not refined carbohydrates and processed flour products and all the rest of the things that make up 80 to 90% of the carbohydrates that people eat in the diet. So we're talking about fruits. Excuse me, fruits and vegetables, including in our approach, starchy vegetables. The Hubbard squash, the butternut squash, the sweet potatoes, the tubers, the starchy vegetable materials. Yeah, those are the kinds of green vegetable material and appropriate amounts of fruit, particularly, you know, some fruits might be more desirable in large quantities than others. Your berries, your melons, other things that, you know, may have advantages because of the fact that many of the fruits we eat today are hybridized, very high sugar foods that are low in minerals and low in fiber content. So you wouldn't want to necessarily just be eating, say, a fruit only diet or something, because that would have, you know, serious consequences long term. It.