How to Unlock Your Body’s Built-In Repair System with Loren Lockman
Loren Lockman, a fasting advocate, describes how he reversed chronic illness at 23 through water fasting and has guided over 12,000 people through fasts averaging 26 days. He explains autophagy and ketosis, shares case studies of cancer remission and weight loss, and outlines practical fasting protocols including electrolyte management and re-feeding phases.
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Hello everyone. I know I say this every time, but I really mean it this time. I am so excited. I have been chomping at the bit to have our current— our guest today on my show. I saw Loren Lockman on a YouTube. I actually think that someone from my community sent me a YouTube video with him in it, and I have been dying to talk to him ever since. And guess what? Today is the day. So I feel like a giddy school child. Let me just tell you a little bit about Lauren. He is a 38-year vegan, so I definitely want to talk to him about how he's doing that. He works as a health coach. He is a fasting master and has been supervising water-only fasts since 1996. So he is doing it, doing it well, and doing it for a really long time. He's a Reiki master, a certified permaculture instructor. I had to learn about what that is. I, I did not know. And he is here to talk to us today about water-only fasting, about the power that is in that, and about how it not only changed his life, because his story is just mind-blowing, but how he has used the power of fasting to change so many lives. So, Lauren, welcome.
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here with you.
I am so delighted. I'm sure you were in a zillion YouTube videos, so I'm sure you have no idea of the one that I'm referring to.
But that's true. That's true.
Someone sent me this, I think on Instagram or something like that, and said, you need to, you need to check out this guy and what he's doing. And you were talking about your story and how you really suffered with multiple medical ailments until you found the solution. So I would love for you to share your story with my followers.
Sure. I'd be happy to. And I know you're an enlightened physician who has, I think, moved away from most conventional medicine.
Well, I haven't thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
Right, right. Of course.
But I, I thoughtfully consider what is good and what is not good for the patient, both in the short term, which is the only window through which conventional medical doctors are seeing. Exactly. And what is this going to mean in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 30 years.
Sure.
Because what most doctors don't think about is what happens after.
That's right, exactly. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I think perhaps the most important part of my story was the, the recognition, the realization that healing and detoxification— which of course fasting is, is significantly focused on detoxifying the body— And we can talk about why that's necessary, but both healing and detoxification are biological processes. And what that means is that only the body can cleanse or heal the body. So there may be times where medicine is necessary because, for instance, if someone has, you know, a terrible case of pneumonia and might die as a result of it, you might need antibiotics. But you know as well as I do that antibiotics have been overused and actually damage the body's immune function. And so should be used only when absolutely necessary. I went from, you know, I grew up outside of Washington, D.C., a medically conservative town, politically liberal, medically conservative. It wasn't California. I didn't know there were osteopaths and homeopaths. I didn't know any of those people.
It's very much like Philadelphia, actually.
Yeah, it's, it's similar. Exactly. Yeah.
Liberal.
Same, same region.
Yeah.
Right.
Politically liberal and extremely conservative. From a medical perspective.
That's, that's right. And so I, you know, when I got sick, all I knew was Western medicine. Well, over the course of 3 years, I saw 3 different doctors. At the end of the first year, I thought, this guy doesn't have any idea what he was doing. And at the time they were all males. I was, at the time I was the youngest officer of the second largest commercial real estate company in Washington, DC, and we had a very generous health plan. And most of the plan doctors that were close to me were, were men at the time. Again, this is many, many years ago now.
How old were you at this time?
I was 23. I was 23. And what were you going through?
Well, so— I mean, we don't— most 23-year-olds are what we think of as, you know, the healthiest they, they, that can be.
Exactly.
So what was going on with you?
Well, you know, I should, I should back up a little bit. I grew up, you know, I grew up in a, in an upper middle class family in a beautiful neighborhood. Everything was good. My parents split up when I was very young at 8, and my mother didn't do very well with that. So she was a bit of a tyrant. I didn't see my father very much. I mean, we saw him Wednesday nights and Sundays, but he wasn't around and he hadn't really been around when I was growing up. He was, he was running his architectural practice pretty much all the time. And, you know, I grew up fairly normally. I was a normal kid. I got colds and flus, etc., but I was a healthy kid. I was a competitive swimmer from the time I was 6 years old. I wasn't particularly good at most other sports, but I was physically active like most kids are. You know, back then we didn't have computers. In my house, we weren't allowed to watch television more than like 2 hours in the evening. That was it. And back then we only had like 4 channels, right? It was a very different world than it is today.
I remember, but we are of this same generation.
No, come on. I'm pretty sure I've got a few years on you. Quite a few.
I don't think you have.
I'll be 65 soon. I'll be 65 soon.
Me too. No.
Really? Okay.
Yeah, we're, we are, I always forget how old I am. We're 7 years apart. I like to forget how old I am.
Right, right.
We're of the same generation.
I would have, I would have guessed, you're right, within 10 years. I would have guessed you were.
You're a child of the '60s. I'm a child of the '60s.
Very, very much so. Yeah. Yeah.
And now let's forget about that.
Exactly. Sure. Well, so, so what happened for me, I was, I wasn't particularly happy in my mother's house and I began using marijuana and alcohol at the age of 14. And I moved out of my mother's house at 16 and continued making lots of poor choices. There was a slight interruption in some of that activity. It slowed way down. I was actually went to the US Air Force Academy. I was on the Dean's List and there it was much harder to abuse substances the way, although many of my friends got kicked out for doing just that, mostly marijuana. But I left after a couple of years because I had congenital knee problems that meant I wasn't going to be able to fly, which is the only reason I went there. I had no love for the military. I just wanted to learn how to fly and thought, you know, they'll pay me to go to school instead of paying a lot of money to learn. I went from there back to the East Coast. I was actually graduated from the University of Delaware and later I did graduate work at American University, and I went back to partying my head off with my friends. And so by the time I graduated from school a year late as a result of transferring schools and taking some time off between, I was staying out until 2 or 3 in the morning most nights, not eating very well, still using substances, and I got really sick at 23. Eventually diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic sinusitis, systemic Candida, and 57 allergies. And I've never been allergic to anything. I become allergic to everything. Believe I determined many years ago that— and I've seen this with many clients— I believe that allergies are nothing more than your body overreacting to something that shouldn't be a big deal because your immune function is pushed to the, to the edge. They can't handle anything, and so it overreacts to everything. And of course, at the time, as you can imagine, you know, again, this was— this would have been back in the early to mid-'80s. The doctors— I saw 3 of them over 3 years— all said the same thing. Chronic fatigue— most people didn't believe that was a real thing, right? Irritable bowel syndrome— what the advice was, be careful what you eat. And that advice worked really well as long as I didn't eat any food. If I ate anything, I felt terrible, so it didn't work too well. What else? Candida. You know, again, it wasn't really understood. People didn't really think it was real. The allergies, of course, and the sinusitis were easy to diagnose. And I was, I was offered broad-spectrum antibiotics for the sinus infection. It went away for 15 or 20 minutes, came back worse than ever, because again, you're, you're actually suppressing the body's immune function. And what most people don't know, and perhaps many of your listeners do, is that our body's immune function depends heavily on the bacteria, which we have an equal number of bacteria in our bodies as our own cells, if not more. I mean, there's still, I think, some question about exactly what those numbers are. Uh, 70 trillion cells and at least that many bacteria. You know, several years ago they were saying up to 10 times as many bacteria as our own cells. I'm not sure what the real number is, but our bodies depend on these bacteria. They perform important functions for us. When we use antibiotics and many other substances, we're taking them out of the equation, we're destroying them, and now the body is not able to do what it needs to. And so at the end of the first year, I was worse than I was when I started my journey with the first doctor. And so at the end of the year, I thought, okay, this guy doesn't know what he is doing. And I went and found another doctor, had the exact same experience and the exact same experience one more time. After the third one, I thought, okay, you know what? I don't think medicine is going to help me. I don't think medicine is able to help me. I'm going to have to figure this out myself. And I walked away from medicine and I literally never went back. The only times I've seen a doctor since then, and this was 1980, was when I've needed to have emergency room care and I used to be a bit of an adrenaline junkie. That, that hasn't been true for at least 15 or 20 minutes, but prior to that, um, minutes? Yeah, something like that. Yeah. So I used to skydive.
You've reformed from being an adrenaline junkie since we got on the phone?
Completely. I'm a different person ever since we, we first spoke.
Okay.
So I, I used to, I used to fly a small plane. I used to skydive. And I've driven a motorcycle across the US and up and down the East Coast and across Europe 3 times on lecture tours by motorcycle and rock climbing, surfing, you know, all kinds of things. And I, and I sometimes injure myself. So when I've needed emergency room care, you know, if you sever an artery, you probably want to get that sewn back together. Fasting is not going to be the best way to deal with that. That's correct. 15, 20 minutes, you bleed out, right? Something like that. The only other time was when I needed to to purchase a life insurance policy, and they required a full physical. So I spent hours seeing 4 or 5 doctors who kept saying to me— I was 60 at the time, this was 5 years ago— and they kept saying, you're how old? Because they couldn't believe what they were seeing. So I walked away from medicine. I wound up not really knowing where to turn. The first thing that occurred to me was, well, maybe I need to go back to nutrition. I started studying nutrition when I was 14, which is probably a little bit unusual. And what happened was in the previous year, I had grown 10 inches without gaining a pound. So I literally look like a stick with a nose and I'm wanting, you know, hormones are kicking in. I'm wanting the girls to find me attractive and I look like a stick with a nose. And so I thought maybe if I pay attention to nutrition and start working out, I can build some muscle mass. Okay, that got me interested in nutrition and human health and potential and so forth. And so, and that's something, I mean, it's now, you know, 50 years that I've been on this journey, more than 50 years, I'll be 65 soon. But I went back to nutrition after I got sick, and what I realized was I was doing everything that conventional nutrition said I should be doing, and here I was sicker than anyone I knew. And I thought, okay, there's something wrong with this picture. And, you know, I've since come to, to find out, as I'm sure you're well aware, in 1910, medicine changed forever. And what happened was the world's first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, began investing in pharmaceutical companies, took control of the American Medical Association, shut down more than 70% of operating medical schools, and dictated the curriculum that medical schools were allowed to teach. And they still— pharma still controls this today. And the way it works is very simple. They go to you and say, Dr. Jenn, you've got a medical school, that's wonderful, we'd like to support you. We've got a million-dollar grant for you. It's a gift, you don't ever have to pay it back. We would like you to reconsider how you're talking about vaccines or breast cancer or whatever it might be. We'd like you to rethink that piece of it a little bit. Maybe you follow these guidelines instead. Now, of course, you don't have to. If you don't want to do it, Debbie's medical school would be happy to have the million dollars. And that's the way they control the entire, the entire—
That is exactly right. And I think there is little to no recognition or acknowledgement of that inside of the conventional medical system. And I have repeatedly said, it's unfortunate, but most doctors are just pawns in the game.
Exactly.
They just are. They're useful idiots. And it's not that they lack intelligence and they are well-meaning. They are well-meaning and well-intentioned and very, very poorly trained unknowingly. Unknowingly.
They've been brainwashed. I mean, look, unknowing to them. I mean, the system knowingly—
Yeah, unknowingly to them.
The system's intention is to create an army of pharmaceutical salesmen.
Yes.
Right. And they got it. It's, it's obvious in some areas. I've actually fasted several MDs who stopped being practicing MDs around the time of the pandemic because their careers were no longer viable because they weren't willing to go get injected. And there were, there were 3 who were psychiatrists. And of course, psychiatry, you know, has changed completely in my lifetime. I had a dear friend as a child whose father was a psychiatrist. They used to talk to people. Now, now as you know, they just prescribe medications.
Yeah, it does. It almost doesn't exist. Yeah.
I mean, you have, you have these issues because you have a deficiency of these toxic medications, right? No, no. So, and the point here was that what most people don't realize is that pharma also controls nutrition programs in the same way, because the last thing that pharma wants is anyone being healthy. Their goal isn't to kill people. I mean, sometimes during the pandemic, that seemed to be the agenda, but most of the time their goal is to keep people alive, but purchasing their prescriptions every single month.
Yes.
Right. Healthy people don't put anything in their pockets. Just barely alive. Right. Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Like healthy, healthy people don't help them and dead people don't help them, but if you can keep them sick. That's the sweet spot.
That's exactly right.
And what no one realizes is that this is what is happening all day, every day in well-intentioned practitioners' offices.
That's right.
All day long.
That's right. That's right. Exactly. Exactly. So I woke up, I woke, I had this realization that this is what was going on. And I took myself out of the picture. So no more, no more doctors for me. I haven't been to see a doctor. I don't get physical exams. I haven't had my prostate checked. Someone's got to take me out to dinner and kiss me a few times before they're sticking their fingers up my back door.
I love that. I use that line all the time.
Yeah.
Would be nice if you would kiss me first.
What I realized is, and this is the piece I started off with, again, healing is a biological process. You know, it's interesting. It's estimated there's between 25 and 30 million animal species on the planet. Okay. Number 1 least healthy species on the planet. You probably know this one.
Oh, I do.
Yeah, that would be us. Number 2, any idea what number 2 is?
Is it like dogs and cats?
Because dogs— cats are number 3. Dogs are number 2, cats are number 3. Number 4 through, through 50 are all the animals that humans take care of, uh, domesticated, whether they're pets circus animals, farm animals, laboratory animals. Those animals get the same diseases that humans do and die prematurely. And in nature, these things are still almost unknown. And so what I realized was, so, killing the wildlife in the process.
That's why anyone who's wondering why animals in captivity live less long than their wild cohorts, it's because of our influence on them. It's because we're feeding them what we think their diet should be, rather than what their diet actually should be.
Well, right. I mean, it's almost always going to be some processed version. I mean, you know, the interesting thing is— now, I, I'm not— I don't pretend to have any expertise here. My understanding was, is that sometimes animals in captivity actually live longer, but they're, you know, they don't have predators coming after them. They, they, you know, they— it's— they're living in a different way. But I think the bottom line is we're taking away their life. I mean, my sister used to have like 6 cats in her house. And when I would visit, she'd like, you know, she'd like, close the door quickly. Don't let the cats out. She didn't want the cats to go outside because they could get hit by a car or something. I'm like, right, but your cats are prisoners. All they want is to go outside. Yeah. They're just dying. As soon as you go toward the door, they're running.
Staring out the window longingly.
Exactly. I'm like, no, no.
I just want to chase that bird.
Exactly. I had 7 cats at my center in Costa Rica. We had 37 acres. They had plenty of room. But those cats were outside most of the time. They could come in if they wanted to. They didn't want to most of the time. They wanted to be outside. You know, I was— and, and my favorite, one of my favorite cats, I mean, there were— I had cats that were kind of favorites that would like sleep on my bed. One of them was eventually killed by a wild animal. But you know what? It lived every moment of its life the way it chose to. And so anyway, I mean, back, back to humans and health.
Um, no, I'm— but listen, I totally get that. I mean, not that this is, you know, I don't know the relevance of this, but we've had 2 labs live till 17, which people think is unheard of. And our 3rd lab lived till she was 2 months shy of 17. And people are like, what do you, what do you do? How do you do this? Even, even my vet was, was asking me to explain it. And I said, You know how often you see me? You see me when like, it's something that I can't figure out because the rest of the time they're eating their native diet.
Right.
And they don't get, they don't get shots. They don't get vaccines. They don't get any of that stuff because they're not meant to get it.
Of course not. Of course not. Yeah. I mean, listen, I, again, I woke up to all this. I stopped. Getting vaccines when I was 25 years old. Haven't been vaccinated for anything in 40 years. I haven't taken— the average person my age in the US takes 5 different medications every day. In the last 33, 34 years, I've taken 2 ibuprofen, and I wouldn't take them again if I didn't have to. Okay, I mean, I felt at the point I had, I had fallen 10 feet onto concrete and broken my right hip. This was 10 years ago, and I was— I wouldn't take painkillers. I was in so much pain, I couldn't sleep 4 nights in a row, not a minute. And on the 5th night, I thought, you know, I, I want to get some sleep here. So I took one, and it relaxed me enough to sleep. I took one the next night, and I threw the rest away. I don't want to put any of that crap in my body. Well, you know, what people need to understand is that all medications are toxic substances that suppress symptoms. They don't ever heal you. So here I was having all these realizations, and in fact, coming back to animals, you've had dogs. I'm sure there have been times where your dogs have refused to eat.
Yes, of course.
This— every species does this.
And the first thing you want to do is feed them.
Exactly. Well, every species on the planet instinctively stops eating when it's sick enough or badly enough injured. And they do this because they instinctively know that processing food takes an inordinate amount of energy. And when the body needs to cleanse or heal, it doesn't want food. So I realized this, and I began fasting 40 years ago when medicine— when I realized medicine wasn't helping me. And what happened was, I mean, it was crazy. As I said, I was in commercial real estate. I hadn't intended to, to become a health coach, but I went from dragging my butt around, barely able to function, And then 6 months later, people come up to me and say, oh my God, you look amazing. What did you do? Could you help me? Or could you help my partner? Could you help my kid or my parent or whatever it was? And of course, I mean, you, you, I, I entered commercial real estate to make a lot of money and retire young. That was my plan, right? You did something to help people and you know how it feels to help people. I came around and I realized, you know what? I like helping people. Regain their health and become the healthiest version of themselves possible, much more than I like helping wealthy people get wealthier, which is what I had been doing. That's what my business had been. I was helping rich people get richer. It's like, yeah, I don't really want to do that anymore. So I became a full-time health coach. And when I started fasting, my mentor was a dead guy. There was a book— I found a couple of them, but the authors were dead, long dead. And what they were talking about seemed crazy. I mean, people were talking about going weeks without food, and that sounded kind of insane to me. At the same time, it made a little bit of sense. I mean, it's weird how those two things can coexist, but they did. And I had a bit of experience with fasting. I'm Jewish, but only on my parents' side. It's both parents. And we grew up— it's a little joke. I'm culturally Jewish. I'm not religious at all. Okay. But I grew up fasting.
Jewish is Jewish.
Grew up fasting one day a year for, for Yom Kippur. Yeah, right. So I knew I could survive one day. I really didn't know if it was possible to survive two days. So I decided to try two days, and I parked myself close to the refrigerator just in case, and I was fine. And then I went four days, and then I went eight days, and I went 12 days, and I worked myself up to working to fasting 21 days at a time, and amazing things began to happen for me. And To put it in context, because I know, you know, time is limited and there's probably lots of questions. I'm now, as I said, I'm now nearly 65. I haven't been sick a single day in 39 years. And my genes, you know, genes are probably not bad, but I have 6 siblings. I have 3 sisters and my father and stepmother had 3 more kids. So I've got 3 half-siblings. All my siblings wear glasses, at least to read or to drive. The 3 who are in the older group with me, all in our 60s now, everybody has arthritis. My younger sister's had her knees replaced. My older sisters have, have issues, things they can't do anymore. My body works better today than it did when I was 18. And, and as you know, I mean, I started off fasting myself and, and coaching people on diet and other health, you know, lifestyle choices. But the people I was working with knew that I was fasting. And they started petitioning me, well, guide me through the process. And I didn't really feel like I was qualified to do that initially. Eventually, I wound up getting 2 years of training. There's an organization that trains practitioners, but you have to be an MD, osteopath, chiropractor, naturopath. And I don't have any of those qualifications. I don't carry any of those certifications. So what I did was I wound up hiring a doctor who was trained by them and trained to teach other people. And he worked side by side with me for a year, and when he left, I hired another one. So I had— they get 3 months of training, I had 2 years of training. Okay, I've now guided more than 12,000 people through fasts averaging 26 days, and what happens is amazing. Okay, it's amazing what we see happening because again, like every other species on the planet our bodies don't really want food. When we were young, you and I, and we were sick, we lost our appetite. Now, you know, your mom loved you and thought you needed to eat, and so she made you eat, but you probably— there were probably times you did not want to, okay? Your body didn't want food, and that's what happens. So what we find is that there are very few things that can't heal when we fast long enough and properly, okay? And of course, this, this includes—
say more about that because you're not just talking about abstaining from food when you don't feel well. I think all of us get that. I mean, even me as before I was an enlightened doctor, because I did spend 20 years as a surgeon before I woke up, right? But even then, I somehow intuitively knew that when my kid says he doesn't want to eat, and my husband's like trying to force-feed him, I'm like, no, if he says he doesn't want to eat— children are intuitive about that. They know what their bodies want. So when they just want to sleep, that means that that's what their body needs to heal.
Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah, we all have the instincts. Most of us lose touch with them, right? We just— we lose that understanding of what the body's trying to tell us.
But if you have let's say a breast cancer diagnosis, right? You don't lose your appetite.
No, that's right.
Like when you're chronically ill, you don't lose your appetite.
Exactly. This is the, and this is the thing that a lot of people don't understand because a lot of people say, well, yeah, if I have an acute crisis and I, I don't feel like eating, I stop eating. But this is different. I, I still have an appetite. And it's, it's true because imagine, you know, so cancer hardly exists in nature. I mean, unfortunately it's increasing in, in wild animals, because one species is ruining the planet for everybody else. Cancer, I believe, as far as I understand, medicine doesn't really understand what, why cancer happens. Maybe you have some ideas. I believe it happens when two things come together, significant toxicity and poor enough immune function because in a healthy—
That's exactly, exactly what cancer is. You hit the nail on the head.
It is— I've now, I've now worked with hundreds of people.
Yeah, you've, you've exceeded your ability to neutralize the toxins. So you've exceeded your ability to deal with your allostatic load, and it's the intersection between toxicity and immunocompromised, poor immunity, because the toxicity itself, which causes cellular damage and puts those cells into survival mode, right? But an intact immune system should be able to recognize those cells in their infancy and prevent them from expanding into a mass, a tumor, a population.
Exactly. And again, I know you know this.
So immunocompromised.
Well, exactly.
Yeah.
I know you know this. A lot of your listeners may not realize this. I mean, science says, I can't verify this, but science says that each of us have cancer cells forming in the body every day, but only 50% of the pop— only 50% of the population. It's grown a lot in my lifetime. Only 50% wind up developing cancer. How come the other 50% don't if they've got cancer cells? And the answer is because the body is— still has the ability to destroy those cancer cells as they form.
Yep.
And so we, we don't wind up with a cancer problem, right? But yes, I mean, people are immunocompromised and it happens I mean, the biggest problem is what people put in their face on purpose. Now, most people don't realize this because, you know, there's this naive belief that— my father was a very intelligent guy, and yet he once said to me, come on, you know, if they sell it in the grocery store, can't be so bad for you. I'm like, that's false, Dad, completely false. Most of what they sell in the grocery store does not belong in the human body. And there, you know, I, I don't know if I think we may want to focus on talking about fasting rather than diet, but every species on the planet has a natural diet. Anything that's been processed isn't natural. It doesn't belong in the body. And of course, many processed foods contain all kinds of toxic garbage. I mean, as you know, and I hopefully this is now changing a little bit with, with Kennedy, RFK running this piece, but until now, at least, They're breakfast food manufacturers, cereal makers, for instance. You get these brightly colored cereals that are meant to appeal to children that are made with very toxic substances outlawed in almost every country. And yet the companies based in the US still sell in the US. Why? Because it's cheaper and they make more profit, right? And it's, it's because the other governments have said, no, you can't sell that crap here. And so they find a way to, to make their product.
I actually think it's even I think it's even more sinister than that. I think it's that they're doing it in cooperation with the pharmaceutical companies because they know that eventually they'll make them into customers and they'll share the customer base.
You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. It's all the same people pulling the strings, no question about it. And so, I mean, I'll share this piece with you. When I woke up and realized that what I had learned in nutrition I was doing, and it wasn't— hadn't kept me safe, hadn't kept me healthy. I thought, okay, well, what's the natural diet for the human body? And for the last 34 years, I've lived on fruit and simple salads only, nothing else. Every once in a while, some nuts and seeds. I have to be careful because my body does not want much concentrated fat or protein.
Is that just an adaptation, or do you think your body never wanted much fat or protein?
Well, I think we, we're meant to consume very small amounts of concentrated fat and protein. I believe everything— I mean, today there's a lot of discussion, especially as people get older, they need to consume more protein. I, I don't think there's any reason to believe that's true. I, I'm, I'm 6 feet tall, I'm 165 pounds, I don't carry much fat. I have a 30 1-inch waist. I have a 42-inch chest. It's mostly muscle, and I maintain it and build. If I've been— if I get injured and I'm not working out for 6 months, and that's happened— I had a terrible shoulder accident in a big wave a few years ago that kept me out of, you know, kept me from doing much for quite a while.
Would you say a big wave? I just want everyone to understand that you are still an avid surfer.
Yes, that's right. Now mostly, I mean, I never got very good on a board, but I grew up body surfing. And so it's mostly— but I body surf big waves. I've been to places where most people aren't going out there because the waves are too big. Um, and I still do this whenever I can.
I'm not going out there for fear of sharks. I have a highly, highly irrational fear of sharks ever since I saw Jaws when I was 8 years old.
Yeah, you know, you probably get on air for showing me that movie. You probably get on airplanes though, don't you? And you probably know that the risk of death from an airplane crash is much greater than the risk of death from being—
I know it's a totally irrational fear, but fears are not rational.
No, exactly. Most of the time they're not.
Yeah. And I'm sure that I could do cognitive therapy to work on it and get rid of it, or I could have like someone Tony Robbins me.
Hypnosis might work. There are various ways.
But it's not, it's not a worthwhile thing for me. Although maybe it would be nice to go in the ocean. I haven't gone in the ocean in decades.
I love the ocean. I mean, I'll go when I go to the beach. I could, you know, if there's waves, I could be 4 hours in the water.
Yeah. All right. Enough of my crazy. Let's get back to what you were talking about. So I want to know, I hear you that, that we probably don't need nearly as much as everyone who's jumping on those bandwagons.
No, exactly.
Has your body, I'm just wondering, become so efficient, or do you really, like, genetically maybe not need as much?
No, no, it's not, it's not genetic. And I'm so glad you said what you said. No, I, I believe so. First of all, I mean, yes, the body, and again, I, a lot of people I think don't understand this, but we can become much more efficient, much more fit. This, the whole conversation around this is, is totally skewed. You, you drive a car, right? Everyone, everyone drives a car. Let's say, let's say you're, you're, you know, you're driving.
Now I feel like you think I'm a nut job because I haven't been in the water since Jaws. That's my own. That's my only crazy.
Yeah.
The rest of it, I'm pretty, I'm pretty sane.
That's, that's okay. We've all got some crazy. So let's assume that your car gets 30 miles to the gallon. Something somewhere in that range. Maybe it's 40. Wouldn't it be great if you could get under the hood, tweak the engine so it got 15 miles to the gallon instead of 30? Wouldn't that be great? No, no, it wouldn't. And yet, because— right, because that would mean you would need twice as much fuel to do the same amount of work.
Yes.
Everyone talks about raising your metabolism. If you doubled your metabolism, you would need twice as much food to do the same amount of work, twice as much fuel. And the faster your metabolism is, the faster you age and die. Everyone wants to raise their metabolism because higher metabolism means you can eat more without gaining weight, or you can lose weight without eating less. Okay, but what we want to do to become more efficient, we need to actually be able to get to the point where we need less food. And the only thing longevity experts agree on is that as long as we're meeting the body's needs, we don't want to eat any more than we absolutely need to. So I maintain 165 pounds eating an average of 1,000 to 1,200 calories per day, something that's not supposed to be possible because the body becomes much more efficient. And it becomes more efficient for various reasons. There's some, some things, some aspects of it I probably don't understand, but there's some very basic things. The way most people eat, okay, again, cooking food creates toxic compounds. Destroys nutrients and creates toxins. There's an immune response, digestive leukocytosis, which happens. Some people say, well, it happens with any food. I don't believe it happens at all if we're eating the foods our bodies are meant for. But even if it happens with things that are uncooked, it happens to a much greater degree with cooked foods because cooking actually creates chemical changes in the food. For instance, acrylamide is created by cooking carbohydrates. Coffee, sorry to tell you, contains acrylamide because coffee beans are— it's tea. Okay, good. Okay, anytime we're cooking carbohydrates of any kind— potatoes, corn, bread— bread has a lot of acrylamide because it's cooked at high temperatures. The higher the temperature, the more that's formed. So the first thing we do when we stop consuming cooked foods we no longer have the body spending energy to recover from the damage and to eliminate the toxins. We need less energy because we're not doing all that work. We're also— we're not destroying nutrients, right? So water-soluble vitamins are destroyed by cooking. Vitamin C in pasteurized orange juice— there's almost no vitamin C from the oranges. It's all produced in a factory. And put into the juice. Okay, you'd be much better off eating oranges. I don't drink juices or recommend juices. Okay, they're processed and largely oxidized. So when we're eating the way that we're meant to—
there are a lot of people, there are a lot of people who are in my audience and in the audience of another, um, big cancer influencer who really believe in their juices that they're pressing at home. But what, what do you, what do you feel about that? I, I, I have very strong feelings about juice, but I'm curious.
Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously pressing them at home is much better than buying something that's been manufactured. You know, if it's, if you buy it from a store that's not making it themselves, they're legally required to pasteurize it in the US for the last 20 years. or so. And so again, if it's pasteurized— pasteurization is a boiling process to kill bacteria, but you're destroying those water-soluble nutrients. So you're drinking juice to get vitamin C, it doesn't have any. I mean, whatever's in there— I mean, if it's— again, if it's a place that presses fresh juices, they're not adding vitamin C in, but there isn't much left from the food because it's been destroyed. So if it's carrots, beets, or fruit juices, you've got something that's got 4 to 5 times the glycemic load of the whole food. Which means it's wreaking havoc with blood sugar, insulin levels. This is not something you want to be doing if the goal is to create a healthy body. Okay, you don't want to mess with those things. If we're looking at green juices, we're looking at concentrated sources of protein. And again, most people are, you know, have this idea, well, we have to get more protein. There, there's almost no one on the planet today who's deficient in protein if they're getting enough food. In places where there's extreme poverty and people don't have enough to eat, they might wind up with protein deficiencies. But otherwise, they're virtually unknown because we don't need protein. Again, you may know this story, but over 100 years ago, when the USDA first set out to determine the— what they, they came to call the RDAs, the recommended daily allowances for macro and micronutrients, they were trying to figure out how much protein they should be telling people that they needed to eat every day. And so what they did was they took a group of rats and they studied the rats to determine how much protein a rat needs to be healthy. Now, I'm, I'm guessing that most of your listeners are probably not rats.
No, definitely not.
Yeah, our needs are— well, let's hope, right? Our needs are quite different than theirs. But that they determined it by studying rats, and then to be safe, they doubled the result. And we need less protein than rats need. Okay, because we don't grow nearly as quickly as they do. And then, and then, as you might expect if you thought about this for just a moment, the meat and dairy industry lobbyists came calling and said, hey, do us a favor. And so they doubled it again. So the RDAs for protein are based on 4 times what a rat needs to be healthy. I eat tiny amounts of concentrated— I mean, almost no concentrated protein. Okay, now most people think Well, you have to eat animal products, nuts and seeds, beans and legumes. I mean, where else do you get protein? What turns out that protein is the building block of cell tissue. So when I lived in Costa Rica for more than 20 years, I got my protein from watermelon and papayas and mangoes and pineapples and bananas. I would eat salads 3 or 4 times a week, and obviously leafy greens. I mean, dark green leaves are about 50% protein by calorie. But they don't contain any calories. If I was having a meal of bananas, I might, depending on the size of the banana, I might eat 6 to 10 bananas depending on how big they are. I mean, some varieties are quite small. If I'm having a salad, a whole head of lettuce has as many— as much protein, as many calories, which is again where it's protein by calorie— as much protein as one banana. So even with greens, you're not— unless you do what? Unless you juice it, now you're consuming much more of it. Okay, so you're losing nutrients, you're oxidizing nutrients, you're creating imbalances. When you eat the whole food, you've got this perfect proportion of nutrients, but when you oxidize some of them, now you have something that's no longer properly balanced. You also concentrate the deuterium. Deuterium is heavy hydrogen, and it's harmful to us, and it exists in everything in tiny, tiny quantities. But when we juice something, the deuterium becomes concentrated in the juice. Okay, so we're getting this heavy hydrogen hit. Too much protein, too much sugar, heavy hydrogen, the loss of nutrients that we need. We lose the valuable nutrients that are bound in the fiber. You throw the fiber away, we're losing that. Now, if you do smoothies, you're getting, you know, the fiber is still there, but the problem is, is that we don't digest it when we swallow it, right? Do you like apples?
I do.
You probably chew your apples.
I do.
Because it's either chew or choke, right?
Yes.
But when you eat applesauce, you probably don't chew the applesauce.
Well, I don't eat applesauce, but I hear you.
You know, the problem, problem is when we—
I hate that you picked apples because I feel like that's one of the most toxic crops. So as much as I love apples, I avoid them.
Well, you just buy organic ones.
But even so, I bought— I'm gonna interject here along with Another one of my crazy stories that my husband thinks I'm a nut job. So I bought whatever organic apples from my organic market, right? And, uh, I cut one up and, uh, then I got distracted or whatever I did, and, uh, I ended up not eating it. And the next day I looked at it and it wasn't brown, and I got really upset.
Yeah, yeah, sure. It should be oxidizing.
When your organic apple has been cut for a day and doesn't turn brown, something's very, very wrong.
Yeah. Yeah, agreed. I don't know how to explain it.
I don't eat apples because I feel like I can't trust them.
Well, I mean, honestly, I think it's difficult. You know, Bill Gates now owns more farmland in the United States than anybody else. And he's trying to kill us. Bill Gates, who believes, you know, who believes that we should, there should be a lot fewer people on the planet. I don't think we want to buy food from a guy that thinks we shouldn't be here.
No, he's doing everything he can to kill us.
Exactly.
For sure.
Right. So, I mean, I don't trust most growers. You know, I think you want to buy at farmers markets from people that you get to know and trust. Right? I mean, this, this is what's actually safe. You have to, you have to know who you're buying from. And, you know, I would go to farmers markets, get to know the farmers, and then eventually, if they don't invite me, I'll ask if I can come visit their farm. I really want to see what they're doing and, you know, get a sense of, can I really trust these people? Because I've, I've heard of people at farmers markets who claim they're selling organic produce but aren't. I find most of these folks are pretty honest. If you ask them, they'll tell you the truth. Some of them will say It's not certified because that's expensive, but we don't use pesticides. You know, we use this way of treating, you know, dealing with pests. And that's, that's fine. But I, but I think it's important that, you know, and of course, you know, even better, I mean, in Costa Rica, I was growing as much of my own food as possible. That's the best.
Which is not always available to everyone depending on where you live.
And of course, yeah, absolutely.
It's not the easiest thing.
Okay, it's not the easiest.
We have like taken this huge tangent, so I need to bring us back around because I want you to talk about, first of all, what happens in the body when you fast. What is happening? What is the benefit to fasting?
Sure. So there's a term that you know, autophagy, which was coined many years ago and is auto— it's from the Greek, auto, self, phagy, eat. This is how the body eliminates damaged tissue. And in 2016, I believe it was, Japanese PhD Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize for Medicine when he proved that autophagy happens much more efficiently and much more effectively, as they often say in science and medicine, in starvation. When we're not eating, okay? And again, the reason is very simple. We're liberating the body's energy, which normally a lot of energy goes to processing food. When we're not eating, when we're fasting, the body instead can focus on eliminating the damaged tissue, any tissue that's been damaged in any way. And this is how we heal, clients heal from virtually everything. The other thing that happens, and again, this is also quite misunderstood, is that the body moves into ketosis. Now, there's a lot of people that say, oh, ketosis is beneficial, therefore we should eat a ketogenic diet. But there's actually no science to support that. In fact, there are very few people that would suggest that going, you know, being ketogenic all the time is very useful. And when we're in— when we're fasting, the levels of ketones in the body are about 4 to 10 times higher than when we're eating a ketogenic diet. So we're not meant to live on a fat-based diet. What we're meant to do is eat the diet that our bodies are actually intended for, which I, I would suggest is fruit and leafy greens without getting deeper into that rabbit hole. Cuz there's a lot, a lot of questions there. Of course it works for me. I mean, surprising as it may sound, I put diabetic clients on a fruit-based diet and their blood sugar goes down. My average blood sugar's around 65. I live almost exclusively on fruit. I eat lettuce 3 times a week or so, maybe 4, and all the rest is fruit. And my blood sugar is perfect, I have no issues, you know, etc., etc. But anyway, when we are fasting, the body is running primarily on ketones, with a little bit of muscle being converted to sugar because our brains, spleens, and reproductive organs need sugar. They want sugar, they don't want to run on ketones. And so we're getting most of those needs met by converting tiny amounts of muscle sugar. And we measure this every day now for more than 20 years. I can see exactly what's happening in the average body, in the specific client's body. But the body, unburdened by having— we use sophisticated bioimpedance devices, and these bioimpedance devices allow us to see, to measure every day muscle mass, body fat, how much water is in the body. I've written formulas, so I actually then calculate from the water mass is simply What percentage of your mass is water? And that's not the same as hydration because body fat contains very little water. So if you've got someone who is morbidly obese, as a lot of people are these days, they're going to have very low percentage of their mass in water. If half their weight is in fat, that's only 10% water while their muscle mass is about 75%. So I correct for that to see how well hydrated is their lean tissue. And what I've come to believe, when I'm guiding someone through the process, we're looking at 30 different metrics every day. Some of them are measured, like blood pressure, pulse, temperature, blood oxygen saturation, blood sugar, weight, muscle mass, body fat, and water in the body. Others are calculated from those numbers. And a few, a few of the things we're looking at are lifestyle things. I want to know every day how much water you had in the previous 24 hours. And I teach people how to drink safely. You know, most people think there's only a limit to how much water your body can handle in one day. The truth is there's a limit to how much you can handle in one minute because your kidneys are filtering your blood in real time. So you may have noticed I've been sipping water since we got on the call together. You have to sip slowly because if, if I could drink this whole glass right now, but my kidneys could not process that much at one time. And what would happen is it would be dumped into the bladder, but it goes into the bloodstream first, would be dumped into the bladder, and I'd wind up losing electrolytes. Well, it's not a big deal because I'm gonna eat later today. Okay? I usually have breakfast between 2 and 3 in the afternoon. I would have a meal, 1 or 2 meals today, and I'll be replacing electrolytes when I eat. But when you're not eating for an average of 3 to 4 weeks, you wanna make sure you're not flushing out your electrolytes. But it's not about the quantity of water, it's about the pace at which you drink it.
Interesting.
So I have clients— I mean, my clients wind up needing to drink between 6 and 8 liters a day by the end of their processes, and sometimes much more than that. And they're fine as long as they don't exceed that safe pace. Now, what this does— I mean, if when we think about what happens to the average person— now, again, this isn't something most people ever measure, but you've eaten corn chips at some point in your life.
Yes.
Hopefully not recently, but I do not eat them now, but yes. Perfect. Okay, how much water would you guess they have?
Almost none.
Okay, and if 3%— if some people are surprised it's that much, white bread on average—
I am surprised that it's that much.
White bread is 50% water, so in, you know, in comparison, 3% is pretty low.
But an apple is—
an apple's about 80, about 84% water. Yeah, 84, 85%. Depends on the variety, but it's going to be in that range. So, and of course how ripe it is. Uh, when it's not fully ripe, it's lower in water content. When the corn chips come back out of your body, or came back out of your body, were they as dry?
I'll tell you that. You better— it better not be 3%.
You better hope it's not. You would be— that would be pretty uncomfortable. Where's the water coming from? Yeah, almost everything people eat is taking water from the body to move it through. You know, in the transverse colon. We're meant to be absorbing the water from our perfect foods into the body. And every species on the planet— I mean, a carnivore usually will take its prey, bite through the neck, through the jugular vein, the, the carotid arteries. This is blood, you know, but for the average person, blood going to and from the brain, right? Again, I'm 160 pounds. The brain on average is 3 pounds. It's less than 2% of my body weight. But it's getting 35% of my blood supply. So this is a very good way to kill an animal, right? And to get the blood, what do they do? The first thing they do is they drink the blood, then they tear it open, eat the water-rich internal organs. Then, only then, do they take them, eat the muscle meat without cooking the water out of it first and putting it between two dry pieces of bread. Okay, animals in nature, carnivores, are eating a high water content diet. Every animals eating plants, very high water content diet. Even termites. If you've ever cut a tree down, before you can use the wood, you have to let it dry. It's full of water. So even insects that eat wood are getting a lot of water. But the average person, average person's walking around significantly dehydrated from their diet. And not just from what they eat. Alcohol, coffee, tea, sodas are all diuretics. Salt takes water out of your cells to protect you from it. Okay, you know, I, I was a cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy. We were taught that if you're shot down and you have no water to drink, you're better— let's say you're in a boat in the, in the water, okay, a raft— you're better off drinking nothing than drinking seawater. The seawater will dehydrate you faster, okay, than your own— than drinking nothing because of the— because of the salt content. So most people are walking around severely dehydrated. I mean, this is shocking, and this won't have any interest for you because you're too young, but if you have older listeners here who are thinking about aging at some point in the distant future, right, most of what we think of as, as normal aging, I believe, is chronic dehydration. And I have proof for my belief because we've been able to reverse almost all of it. Wrinkles on the face— I just came from a family wedding 2 weeks ago. Most of my relatives, my sisters my age, you know, around my age, have lots of wrinkles on their face. I don't. I'm the best hydrated person we've ever measured. I take older clients and get them hydrated again, which we have to clean the— we haven't talked about this yet, but every time we eat anything that's not high in both water and fiber, which is most of what people eat, a little tiny bit of it gets stuck in the small intestine. It's not in the colon, it's in the small intestine. From the bottom of my stomach to the ileocecal valve in my right groin, which on my relatively long torso— I'm 6 feet tall— that's about 12 inches. In that space, there's about 22 feet of small intestine. It's all twists and turns, and it's 1/3 the diameter of the large intestine, and it's sacculated like a vacuum cleaner hose. If there's not enough fiber, we can't move everything through together. Little pieces wind up getting stuck. Okay. I know a lot of people don't believe this stuff exists. All of my clients, if they follow my directions, wind up eliminating pounds and pounds of old hard waste. And until we eliminate it, it sits in the small intestine like a giant sponge. When you eat or drink, it's absorbing water from your food and drink. You're not getting it into your cells. And then overnight, when you're not eating and drinking, it dries out again. You never get hydrated this way. It's impossible. Okay. It's why the average person I see is walking around about 84% as hydrated as they should be. And sometimes it's much worse than that. Usually the older we get, the worse it is because it's just more stuff, more time, you know, getting worse all every day. But sometimes I have, I have a woman fasting with me right now who is 51 and her hydration level is where I'll normally see people who are 75 or 80. It's terrible. She's been severely constipated for a long time, and it's a vicious cycle because if you're dehydrated, more stuff is going to get stuck, and if more stuff is in there, you're going to be more dehydrated. So it's this vicious cycle.
So you talked about clients can heal from virtually everything, and I want to be clear, not everything, but virtually. Okay.
Yeah.
But what What are the not everythings?
Well, so it's not, it's not even about specific diseases or conditions. It's about specific bodies and circumstances. So for instance, you, you deal primarily with breast cancer, right? For many years. Breast cancer, not including skin cancer, which is often not a big deal. Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer that women experience.
Yes.
Something like 13% of American women will develop breast cancer. I mean, it's crazy. Like 1 out of every 8 people.
And getting worse.
And getting worse. Of course. Of course it's getting worse because the, we're living in an increasingly more toxic environment.
That's correct.
And medicine's doing everything it can to contribute to that.
You need more vaccines, which are vaccines starting with more mammograms, right? The more radiation, the more cancers.
Exactly. Absolutely.
We are creating the very disease.
Exactly. And so I've had great success with women with breast cancer. Now, early stages, nearly 100% success, but even stage 4 cancer will heal sometimes. But this is where it's important to understand each situation's different. If, you know, if I had two women here who were the same age, and they both had stage 4 breast cancer, which means it's metastasized to various— two or more places. Better than I do. And, you know, so it looks like it's the same situation. There are going to be differences, and the differences are going to include how much vitality that woman still has, how toxic is her body overall. Because what happens when we fast is the body says, okay, here's what's going on, I'm going to deal with the most important things first. I'm going to do everything I can to but there's a limit to what it's able to do. And sometimes, let me give you a kind of extreme example. I got an email about 5 years ago from 2 young men in Denmark. They were brothers and they wrote to me and they said, at the time we were putting up 3 videos per week on my YouTube channel. And this is an old channel where there's more than 1,000 videos right now. They wrote to me and they said, Lorne, we're some of your biggest fans. We watch with our parents. We watch all your videos. Every time they come out. We've never actually done anything you've told us to do, but we believe what you're saying, right? We haven't actually followed through, but we believe you. And we're writing to you because our father a few days ago was diagnosed with a liver tumor. Now, as you know, the liver is the largest organ in the abdomen. Starts over here to the right rib cage, comes all the way across. It's pretty big, right? By the time he was diagnosed, the tumor was bigger than his liver. You know, he was feeling—
replaced his liver.
He was, he was feeling some pain. Well, I would imagine it's like you have a cat in your abdomen, right? An extra— this whole extra thing is in there.
Yes.
And although we don't, we don't have pain receptors in the liver, it's now pushing on everything. It's got to be very uncomfortable. He was a, he was a tough guy. He was a fisherman, a deep sea fisherman, Danish, you know. Um, he I'm sure had lots of pain in his life and he just was one of those guys who would grin and bear it. Well, it finally got bad enough that he went and got diagnosed. And so they wrote to me and said, the doctors have said he's got maybe 2 weeks to live. Will fasting help him? And this is a tough conversation. I have this conversation at least once a year for the last 30 years. And the answer is, I don't know. In a situation like this, it's very difficult to overcome, right? This is gonna be difficult to recover from. Here's the thing, it can't hurt him. The only downside is if the investment is going to be a problem for the family. It's like, no, the money's not an issue. Okay, they hired me, I guided him through the process. He wound up living for 3 months. He had much more time with his family. He did wind up dying because of the cancer. It was too late for his body to heal, but he felt better within even a week or so. He felt much better. He felt much less pressure in his system, much less pain. He was far more comfortable, and he was able to, you know, to have roughly 6 times more time with his family. Eventually it did, it did kill him. And I've had, you know, probably dozens of clients in similar situations where they were dealing— by the time they, they realized what was going on, it was so late and their bodies were so depleted already that it might not have been possible for them to heal. But there's no better way. I mean, this is still, in my opinion, the best thing we can do to heal is to get out of the body's way, cuz healing's a biological process. So when we fast properly, we're just getting out of the body's way and letting that happen.
So there are so many people that have been sold this narrative that they can't fast. So in your opinion, is there anyone that that is true for? Is there anyone that can't fast?
Yeah, there, there's a few, but there aren't very many. First of all, it's unwise, dangerous to the baby or fetus to fast if you're pregnant or breastfeeding, because you will detoxify fast enough that it will actually be injurious to the baby. You know, for young women that are listening, if you want to get pregnant, you should get your body clean before you get pregnant. You'll have a much healthier baby if you do. Okay, but if you're already pregnant, then you need to wait until after you're done breastfeeding. There are people who are And I haven't seen very many of them. I talked about the old YouTube channel, the woman who produced all my videos for 4 years. She lived on site, Costa Rica. She was a client of mine. She came to me almost 9 years ago to fast. She was dealing with health challenges and she couldn't gain weight. It turns out the first day I measured her blood sugar and her blood sugar was something like 325. Right now, for anyone listening, you know, the AMA says it should be between 70 and 100. I believe it should be between 60 and 90, but it was ridiculously high and it was high every day. We measured, we measured it every day and it was, it was way high. And I said to her after a few days, I said, have you ever been tested for, for diabetes? She said, no. I said, well, as soon as you go home, I think you need to get tested. Okay. And it turns out she was a type 1 diabetic and didn't know it. So her body wasn't making enough insulin, so her blood sugar was super high. And of course, it's like you're on speed all the time, right, when your blood sugar is super high.
Um, yeah, but it's also very, very toxic and damages your organs. And absolutely, it's, it's, it's a very, very, very big problem.
It's a, it's a big deal. So she was 5'7", still is 5'7". At the time When she showed up to start her fast, she weighed 88 pounds. So people tell me all the time, I mean, people say to me, I just responded to a woman yesterday who wrote and said, I'm 5'5", but I only weigh 135 pounds. Can I fast? I'm like, absolutely, no problem, no problem at all. Okay, this one was 5'7", 88 pounds.
I had another actually that fast with me 3 times, like, it was 5, absolutely normal weight. 5'5" and 135 pounds is not underweight.
No, exactly. I mean, I, I have people all the time who are asking me, yeah, but I'm, but I'm pretty lean, because everyone around them is overweight or obese, and they're thinking, you know, this isn't very much. No, you're perfectly— you're actually probably way more than you should even now, right? So even when someone is very, very lean, they can usually fast with no problem. It's usually not an issue, okay? But there are people, you know, if someone is like a serious anorexic and they, you know, they're If they're, if they're super, super, super lean, you know, they're already starving to death, then you can't fast because fasting means you're living on fat reserves. You don't have to have much. What happens for the average person in a 21-day fast is they lose 21 pounds on average if they're within the normal weight range for their height. Okay. Now, obviously, if someone is morbidly obese, they're going to lose much more than that, which is fantastic because we want to lose that extra weight. And when someone's much leaner than average, they wind up losing much less weight. And so in her case where the average person lose, and it's not, by the way, it's not a pound per day. The weight loss is front loaded. You lose more than half that weight in the first week. What happens when someone is very lean, like this woman who's 5'7", 88 pounds, she lost 40% as much weight as the average person does. That's when you're very lean, your body is super intelligent. It says, you know what? There's not a lot of reserves here. Let's slow the metabolism way down so we can survive this. Until there's food available, because your body doesn't know you've decided you're not going to eat. It just knows there's no food coming in.
Yeah.
When someone's overweight, what's interesting is the opposite. The body says, oh, thank God there's no more food coming in. Let's ramp up metabolism to burn off as much of the garbage as we can as quickly as possible. And so I'll have obese people lose 100 pounds sometimes in, in 3 or 4 weeks, which is insane. And normally when that happens, there'd be a lot of loose skin. But when we're fasting, the body usually will take that loose skin up as we're losing weight. And so, I mean, if someone is old enough, if they're 60 and they've got, they're morbidly obese, they've lost enough skin elasticity from chronic dehydration that there probably will be some loose skin. If they're 40 and they lose 100 pounds, there won't be any loose skin when they're done. It's crazy.
It's really, it's really amazing. Yeah, it's really amazing.
It's an incredible thing that happens. Um, you know, in fact, I'm thinking back to the beginning of our conversation. I think the video where you saw me— because I, I haven't been— so I lost the old channel. These folks hacked me and I lost everything, and I started a new channel, but I haven't actually put up much content yet except for very short 1-minute reels. But a doctor, an MD, who fasted with me back in June Hello there. She invited me to come out to Gallup, New Mexico. In fact, I was heading west anyway in a car, and she said, you know, if you, if you want to come to New Mexico, I'll organize an event for you. I want my congregation, the church— because everyone had seen her amazing transformation. She'd been 7 years in bed, barely able to, to move or do anything. She couldn't work. Her husband was also a doctor. He was supporting the family. She couldn't, and she fasted with me. And all of a sudden she's now like a new person. She's hiking 3 to 4 miles through the mountains where they live every day. She's back to being a normal, healthy person. In fact, the process was so powerful for her that her 23-year-old daughter wrote to me 2 months later and said, I want this. And she fasted with me for 21 days in September. And again, I had the chance to meet them in person. They're both completely, her husband, the doctor, is just got permission to take the month of April off so he can do his 21-day fast with me as well.
Wow. All right. So I know the answer to this, but I want you to share it. What about supplements?
Right. Well, so, so first of all, let's, let's back up a little bit. We know we talked about, we talked about drugs early in the process briefly. There may be times where they're necessary. The same can be true, you know, if you're, if you're severely deficient in B12, and a B12 deficiency can cause brain damage, you might want to take a B12 supplement temporarily. But here's the thing, again, there's 25+ million animal species who don't need supplements. We shouldn't need them either. If our bodies are clean, they're working properly, and we're eating the diet that belongs in the body, we shouldn't need any supplements. Supplements. I haven't taken a supplement in 33 years.
So you don't supplement with B12 despite the fact that you're a vegan?
Exactly. And you know what's interesting is, I mean, first of all, vegans and vegetarians absolutely do have lower serum B12. Now, for anyone who's not a doctor or doesn't understand, serum B12 means B12 in the bloodstream, which is how it's measured. But we don't need B12 in the bloodstream. We need it in the cells. And so much better to test homocysteine or methylmalonic acid, because these are things— if your B12 really is low in the cells, then those are going to be high. Okay, testing how much B12 is in your bloodstream doesn't really tell us very much about whether your body's able to use what it needs to in the cells or not. And so, uh, the doctor I mentioned a few minutes ago, who was 5'6" and 85 pounds when she started her fast with me— she fasted with me 3 times total. The other woman I mentioned fasted with me, by the way, 6 times, and now still 5'7", now weighs about 125 pounds. She could never gain weight until after she got her body clean and working properly. Now she's got a healthy weight again. She's lean for her height, but, but she's healthy, right? Where before she, you know, she looked pretty skinny. Um, so supplements— there's increasing, increasing research all the time, more and more research that demonstrates that taking supplements is detrimental to our health. And it's not, not a surprise because while we know we need these nutrients, we're meant to be getting them from whole foods. Okay. You've probably heard about the Finnish smokers study. They took a group, a large group, thousands of middle-aged male cigarette smokers. A lot of people in Finland smoke cigarettes and they, they, it was a double-blind study, which again, as, as I know, you know, means that neither the participants nor the researchers knew who was getting the, in this case, beta-carotene, which is believed to have a protective effect on the lungs, and who was getting the placebo until afterward. They wound up stopping the study because as the data came in, it, it became apparent that people taking beta-carotene had higher rates of lung disease, not lower as expected. Is beta-carotene bad for you? No, it's not. But again, we need to get it in those perfect proportions with other nutrients. Not as, even with multivitamins, there's studies now that are showing harm. Vitamin E, all the B vitamins, vitamin D. Rat poison. When we were kids, rat poison was so toxic that if you touched it, it could kill you. You couldn't like handle it on your skin. These days, rat poison is called calciferol. Well, hang on, that's vitamin D. Yeah, they take vitamin D made in the lab and they flavor it, they sweeten it so it appeals to the rats, and the rats eat enough of it, it drives up their calcium levels until they're dead. That's what it does. So if you need to take— and the research is clear— if you need vitamin D, and the more vitamin D you take, the higher the risk of death. So you want to take only what you need to, to survive. And of course, if you live in Scandinavia Or I'm in Seattle right now, okay? There's some sun. Most people here probably have no idea what that is because it doesn't show up very often. If you live in Seattle or Portland or London, you might need to take vitamin D, but you want to be careful and take no more than absolutely necessary because it's actually harmful to you, okay? If you— when you get your body clean, we talked before about being efficient. Cooked food, cooking foods destroys some of these nutrients. Eating foods the way that we find them in nature, as every other species does. I mean, it sounds crazy to most people because we've always cooked, but actually not always. Humans have been cooking for 800,000 years, only controlling fire for 400,000 years. And cooking began when humans migrated from tropical equatorial Africa to Eurasia, where it wasn't summer 12 months of the year. They didn't have fresh food available. They needed to cook because there were things that they couldn't digest or weren't palatable in their natural, in their raw state. And so they figured, and the people that didn't figure it out, they're gone. We all came from people who were smart enough to figure this out. And I, by the way, I believe this is why our brains developed. Some people say it's because we ate cooked food or because we ate meat. I don't think so. I think our brains developed when we were challenged with figuring out how to survive or die. We grow our brains by doing crossword puzzles and mental problems. I, you know, I personally, when I buy stuff, I calculate the final price in my head before they get it on the cash register. I'm using my brain and that keeps us sharp.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Well, I mean, I could literally talk to you forever, but I want to be respectful of your time. So I just want to end by talking about who should be seeking your services. Because I know for my patient population, I'm like running through the Rolodex in my head of people who I am going to ask to reach out to you because I think they're at a state where this is what they really need. So can you talk about what you do specifically, what you do with people and what it looks like to work with you?
Absolutely. Yeah. It's a good question. I want to answer your first question first though, because it's, it's, I mean, I believe everybody should be doing this, you know, increasingly. Initially it was all, it was people who had specific issues they're trying to deal with, and I still see a lot of those people. I, I now work with hundreds of people a year remotely, right? We do Zoom calls. I do currently do 3 group calls per day. One, each person's in one call. So I have, I have a European call, I have a North American call, I have a Pacific call for people in Australia, New Zealand, wherever it might be. We speak every day. I've got them— I give them a spreadsheet and give them recommendations as to the tools they need. They'll need to get an automatic blood pressure monitor, an infrared thermometer— any kind of thermometer is fine— a pulse oximeter. Blood sugar is not required for people that don't have blood sugar issues. Obviously, if you're diabetic, you're already measuring your blood sugar, and that's great. We're going to want to see those numbers. I like to have the numbers for everybody because my, you know, my thinking is, hey, the more data we have, the better, right? I had a woman from Pennsylvania who— I had posted something on Facebook, and she, she wrote, she responded and said, well, I fasted 21 days, was the worst thing I ever did. And I responded to her and I said, did you fast on your own? She said, yeah. I said, well, that happens a lot. I mean, the devil's in the details. And people say, well, come on, we just stop eating. How hard can it be? Well, it's a little bit more complicated than that. You really have to understand everything. And so we started a conversation. She had a consultation with me and she decided she would fast and she wanted to fast with me in September, October for 21 days. Recently posted on Facebook was the best thing she ever did. She resolved all the issues she had. But I remember when we had our first call, she said, my blood sugar plummeted when I fasted. I said, really? What, what number did it get to? And she said, well, I wasn't measuring it. I'm like, so what do you, what do you mean? She said, well, it felt like it dropped. I'm like, okay, a lot of reasons that could happen. It's not necessarily blood sugar. So we measured her blood sugar every day. She didn't have blood sugar issues, but we measured it and she could see it wasn't a blood sugar issue at all. So having the data is useful. And then we need a decent bioimpedance device. Again, this is the scale that gives us And you know, there you can buy one for $35 or $40, but they're garbage. Um, I encourage people to spend $100, $125 or so at least. And there's, there's specific brands that I've had very good luck with. Um, that gives us weight, body fat, muscle mass, and how much water's in the body. And with that information, it's crazy. I can say to you, well, it looks like your body's letting go of extracellular water. And you'll say, yeah, I've been coughing up mucus all day. I can see that. From the numbers. Or the opposite. Okay, it looks like you've got some, you know, some edema or inflammation today. Yeah, my, my neck is hurting, right? Which often means there's some inflammation. There's usually— it's healing an old wound in a situation like that. So everybody benefits, because if you've been on the planet for 10 years or more, you know, chances are good there's a lot of garbage in your body that doesn't belong there. And when you fast properly and long enough— and most of my clients fast at least 21 days, that's a full-week process with the refeeding part of it. So it's 21 days on water and then 7 days. It's a guided refeeding process. We're still talking every single day. They're taking their numbers, they're putting them on the spreadsheet, and I'm talking to them every day about what those numbers mean, why they're experiencing the symptoms they are, which allows them to relax and surrender to the process. I had, um, night before last, I got a message, urgent message, can you call me right now? I'm in the hospital. Emergency room with a dear friend of mine from a client of mine. Her friend had gone into the hospital with all, all kinds of symptoms, lots of edema and various issues, and turns out was diagnosed with congestive heart failure at 51. And he made the decision— we had a conversation in the hospital, and he wound up checking himself out of the hospital and going home. And he is now on day 2 of a fast with me. Pressure dramatically— all but 3 in their 70s, all of them were able to take their blood pressure below normal to actually healthy levels. Every single time. Type 2 diabetes, 100% success. Again, very high rates of success with very early stage cancer. The later the stage, the, the more challenging it gets, but we still see great results. And even when people don't heal completely, one of the, the beautiful things about breast tumors, I'm not usually the one doing the palpating, but the, the woman herself can feel how big the tumor is. Obviously, if, you know, if the tumor is in your pancreas, we have no way of seeing what's happening to it. Yeah, right. With, with a breast tumor, it's easy to feel. I've had women go from golf ball to a pea in 3 weeks. If it doesn't disappear, it's going to be a fraction of what it was. So everybody benefits by giving the body a chance to cleanse and heal. But anybody who is dealing with a serious issue and is willing to do what they need to, to take, you know, create an amazing level of health. I mean, most people have no, really no way of understanding how good they can feel if they've never felt this good before. I mean, it's, my girlfriend is 20 years younger than me and she can't keep up with me. Literally.
All right. We're going to leave it at that. I loved this conversation. I've only ever done 5 days myself, but my eyes are open and I am completely willing to consider and pursue more.
It would be amazing for you.
I hope that my listeners are hearing this and willing to do and consider more and to just consider the fact that the body is capable of so much more than we give it credit for.
Absolutely.
Tremendous healing. And it's not giving it more, it's doing less.
No, exactly, exactly. Well, and you know, the one thing— let me come back to something we spoke about earlier briefly. You've mentioned that you've had Labradors. You like Labradors, I take it. They're beautiful dogs. When they've chosen to stop eating, what do they do?
Sleep and heal.
Yeah, they don't do anything. They lay there. And you know, it's funny, it's funny because everyone says they sleep all day. You know what? They're like us. When, when our bodies have enough— we talk about oversleeping in English. It doesn't happen. When the body has enough sleep, it wakes up. It's impossible to sleep more than you need to. It's the same for the dogs. The dogs look like they're sleeping all the time because they lay there with their eyes closed. And that's exactly how we should fast. And so the piece I wanted to add here, you know, for your listeners, is that in order to do that, this, this will benefit every single person. And I'll I'll give that to you, a guarantee in writing. If you follow my directions throughout the process, you will take your health to a level you haven't experienced in decades. And for some people, it'll be higher than it's ever been before. That's what happens for everybody. But here's the thing: you have to take the time off. You need to be resting as completely as possible. You can't do this while you're working. You shouldn't be doing this while you're trying to do much of anything. You really need to be resting as completely as possible, because the whole goal is to conserve the body's energy so we can put that energy into cleansing and healing.
Yeah. How do people get in touch with you?
Well, probably the easiest way would be to email me at info@tanglewoodwellnesscenter.com. That's the old brand, and that website's going to come down, but the email will continue to, to work, to work, or be okay.
And we'll be sure to put that in the show notes. I want to thank you so much for what you do and for enlightening me, because I, even though I knew the power of fasting, and Dr. Lodi and I talk about fasting all the time. I don't know if you know Tom Lodi, but I do.
I know Tom. Yeah, Tom actually asked me about coming to work for me many years ago. It didn't happen. He didn't want to move to Costa Rica.
But I, I think that the more that we talk about this, the more that we normalize this Right? Because people have so much fear around not eating, and the conversation is so loud now about protein, protein, protein, and, and how much you need. And this is a totally different perspective. And when we really talk about longevity, we have to consider doing less because the more you use your body, you use up your, your potential, right? And so we need to conserve that potential. And by significantly cutting down on what we eat and what we consume, we are doing that. So I loved this conversation. I will make sure that we put in the show notes how to get in touch with you. And I thank you for your time today. And I thank all of you for joining me. This was So fascinating, and I hope that you felt all of that. If you have someone who needs to hear this, please share this podcast with them and know that I will be back next week, same time, same place. It's Dr. Jenn. Bye for now.
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