Dave Asprey does 16:8 intermittent fasting and has stuck with keto for over fifteen years as his easiest, most sustainable diet. He's a cancer survivor whose body handles prolonged fasts well, and he started Bulletproof to fill a market gap for keto-friendly foods like ultra-low-sugar wine and coffee.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance.
Now you're doing if six days a week.
Yes, I, I mean, and it's not even like I, I do it seven days a week sometimes, but if I really want to on a weekend, I'll say, okay, today's the day. I mean I, I would say 12 hours is me not fasting, you know, so that would be my non fasting day. I would Never eat before 12 hours.
Which isn't as harsh as it seems. Cause if you have dinner before 8 and then you have breakfast after 8, that's a 12 hour fast. Right?
Exactly. It's very easy.
What's the length of fast that works best for you?
So I like a 16 hour fast. 16, 8 is what I usually do. But every now and then, like I said, if I listen to my body and somehow I feel like the only time I'll do a 1410 is if I know I have a major workout and I have to get it in before the run or if I waited it'd be too close to my run time. So those are the only times I kind of wiggle it a little bit because I know, oh, I'm about to do a 10 mile run and if I eat too close to it, that's not going to work. And if I don't eat at all, that's not going to work. But I'm telling you, I just did a seven mile run two weeks ago on a 17 hour fast and I was fine. So. So it's amazing what your body can do.
You just blew everyone's mind with that. Because most people are like, that's not even possible. And you're like, and I'm a cancer survivor and I'm a woman and all that kind of stuff.
It would have been impossible for me to even consider before. And that's why I'm kind of laughing thinking, how is my body able to do this? And then you realize our bodies are capable of so much more than we give them credit for. And that's been also some of the, the beauty and all of this just marveling at what our bodies can do and what they can do really well, if we know the science behind it.
Do your colleagues make fun of you?
Yes.
So are you like that person in the break room, like, don't eat the donut, you don't want to do that. You have to do that.
They probably hide them from me. They don't want to, they don't want to have me see them. I'm like, I'm not judging you to each his own. Like, I don't want to be that person, but I do think initially I was what you call a ketovangelist, because you get so excited about how great you feel, you want to share it. It's not even that I think everyone needs to or shouldn't. Certainly everyone isn't able to do some of the things that. That I can do. And obviously you should talk to your doctor, but you just want to spread the information because again, it's so counterintuitive to American culture and how we were raised and how we were taught to eat, even the food pyramid that we learn in school. So that's why I was so excited. But I will say I have a dressing room of women. My stylist, my hairstylist, my makeup artist, and we've all been keto together. And that's actually been really great. So when we all go out to lunch, or when we used to be able to go out to lunch together, we would all kind of order the same things, because if one jerk orders French fries for the table, it's a lot harder. So I do find it great. My husband does it with me, and then my parents actually did it too. So my parents are now at their high school weight and, you know, I thought they were going to kind of tease me and make fun of me, but they, when they knew the reasons why I was doing it, they said, we're going to do it too. Why wouldn't we? And everyone who has joined has stayed with it because they see the benefits. They feel the benefits.
It feels like it's more sustainable than any other diet I've ever done. And I'm 15 or so years into doing it, including the fasting and, you know, it's just the least amount of work and the least amount of distractions of anything else. And it seems to have the most health benefits to, too.
It's so true. And I've been so impressed. I'm four and a half years now. What products have been made available has been pretty remarkable. I mean, I love wine. I've always loved wine. And the fact that now you can have wine that's less than 1 gram of sugar per glass, and you also get zero hangovers as well. Like, you just think, wow, I can drink two glasses of wine, wake up, and feel like I just drank two gallons of water. It's pretty remarkable. Not that the two are the same, but I just, I appreciate how the industry, the food industry, has reacted to the benefits and made so many more just in the last few years. I can't imagine when it was, like, 15 years ago. I'm sure there was nothing available.
That was why I started a company to make that stuff. Right. And, you know, Bulletproof has done pretty well. But, yeah, I'm like, I really would like to have a lot of Bulletproof done a lot.
Yeah, pretty well. Bulletproof Coffee. You have a coffee named after you that everyone just says, oh, is that bulletproof?
But it's just what you said, there just wasn't anything you could do. And you couldn't go to 711 and get anything that was food, by the way. Now you can, because they just started stocking the coffee. And for me, that was actually like, one of the biggest, like, an emotional experience because I'm like, wow, this was when I started things like, why can't I eat? And now I can. And so thank you for calling out what the food industry's done to change, because it's not just bulletproof by a long shot.
It's.
It's actually respecting, oh, this is what people want.
