In this solo episode of the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast, host Cheryl McColgan explains why she is passionate about fasting and shares her personal journey that began after her father's cancer diagnosis. She introduces autophagy, citing the 2016 Nobel Prize awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi, and describes how fasting triggers this cellular cleanup process. Cheryl outlines her fasting regimen: daily intermittent fasting (12‑18 hour windows), quarterly 5‑day water fasts, and a monthly 60‑hour assisted fast, emphasizing the role of electrolytes. She discusses contraindications (pregnancy, eating‑disorder history, advanced age) and advises listeners to consult medical professionals. The episode delves into what constitutes breaking a fast, differentiating between goals of maximal autophagy (water and electrolytes only, <100 kcal/day) and weight‑loss (small amounts of fat or collagen‑based products that stay under 50 kcal). Practical tips on calorie limits, electrolyte use, and optional additions like bone broth or keto cream are provided. Cheryl also mentions the relevance of fasting for diabetes management, referencing Dr. Jason Fung as a leading authority. Finally, she offers to read her extensive “Benefits of Fasting” article aloud to make the content more accessible, inviting listener questions and sharing her extensive personal experience.
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Well, hello everyone, welcome back to the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast. I am your host Cheryl McColgan, and if you haven't been around my content before, this will be a new topic for you. But if you have been around for a while, this is something that you've heard me talk about many, many times in the past, and that is the topic of fasting. So before we get into the rest of the show today, I just want to share with you some of my personal reasons why for fasting so that you know where I'm coming from and that you know why I'm so passionate about it because it's a topic that I quite often speak about at keto summits and other education. So I just want to share with you my background, why it's so important to me. So about 6, 7 years ago, or probably 7 years ago now, my dad was diagnosed with blood cancer. And actually prior to that he had had thyroid cancer. And my whole family has a whole bunch of cancer in it, both sides of the family. Breast cancer, colon cancer, all kinds of things. Probably some of this is due to the living in the South and maybe not having the best health habits, but it's certainly— there is a genetic component to cancer. And so I started digging around and doing some research, and This is kind of a lot how I got to come to the whole keto and low-carb space as well. But while I was digging around, I ended up finding some information. I was probably typing into Google cancer and cancer prevention, and I ended up finding an article about the 2016 Nobel Prize for autophagy. And it's— I pulled this up so that I could say his name properly because I could never quite get it, but it's Yoshinori Oshimi. Yumi. And so in 2016, he won the Nobel Prize for autophagy. Well, what autophagy is, what they discovered, is it's your body's cellular cleanup process. And basically, you can think of autophagy on a continuum. It's, it's kind of happening all the time in your body, but when it's happening most strongly is when you're not consuming any food, so AKA fasting. And that's really how I was introduced to the idea of autophagy. Meanwhile, when I ran across something saying that fasting was good, I was actually pretty happy because being in the yoga community for so many years— I've practiced yoga over 25 years and I've been an instructor for the last 11— and so in that community, fasting is pretty common. It's also common in a lot of religions. So for example, Ramadan, uh, they don't eat from sunrise to sunset. I believe it's for 40 days in a row. So fasting has been part of our culture and part of religion for a very, very long time. But in recent history, all we've been taught is you have to eat every few hours to keep your metabolism going, and if you fast, you're going to lose muscle, and, and all of these myths that have been perpetuated. And makes people nervous to try fasting or to think that it might be actually unhealthy in some way, when in fact exactly the opposite is true. So once I learned about this, and, you know, fasting was not a foreign concept to me, I'd done it multiple times, like I said, with yoga, but I decided at that point, I'm like, if this is something that can possibly prevent cancer in my future, it's simple enough to do, this is something I'm going to take on as a serious practice. And so what I began doing at that time was I would do intermittent fasting on a daily basis for the most part. And then I also started doing some more extended fasting. And what my initial plan was, based on what I had read and different things at the time, I was doing a 5-day fast quarterly, and that was just water and black coffee and electrolytes at that point. And if you're going to do any kind of fasting beyond 24 hours, electrolytes are very key to still feeling well while you're fasting. But so I would do those 5-day quarterly fasts. I actually have another video about it here on my YouTube channel that just kind of did a wrap-up, how I was feeling throughout it, anything that I noticed, just to share that with people. And what I found was obviously a 5-day fast is going to be more of a challenge for sure. It's also a big commitment to do that quarterly, and it can definitely interrupt your social life a little bit. But for me, it was so important because it was just making sure that I did that on a consistent basis. I really, based on everything I've read, all the research that I've read, convinced that it will hopefully help me possibly avoid cancer in the future, or at the very least, uh, stave off many other kinds of diseases or metabolic processes that might go wrong when you're not eating properly and you're not allowing your body this process of cellular cleanup. So that got to be a little bit more of a challenge than I wanted to, and I finally ran across more assisted fast. And so what I've been doing for the last 2 years in a row is a 60-hour fast every single month. So rather than doing it quarterly, I do that assisted fast. And what has happened through doing that process, it's made me far more consistent because before when I was doing the quarterly and I knew a 5-day was coming up it was pretty easy to think of some excuse or some reason why I didn't necessarily want to do that. And so I wasn't as consistent as I would have liked. But doing this monthly, uh, 60-hour fast instead has allowed me to be so much more consistent. Um, be doing my 31st one here coming up shortly, uh, right the weekend before Thanksgiving. And so anyway, all of that is to say, this is why I'm so passionate about fasting. And one of the articles that I wrote pretty early on on Heal, Nourish, Grow was about the benefits of fasting, listing some of the research studies, and just really wanting to share with people why I'm so passionate about it, how easily it can be incorporated into your life. And this is a health practice that you can use no matter what style of eating that you choose. So fasting is so powerful, so amazing, and the beauty of it is It's not, it's not starving yourself. You have— you're choosing this as a health protocol, and you can also choose to quit the fast at any time you want. So if you're really not feeling well for some reason, then you just stop. It's that simple. So there's really no reason— there, there are a few contraindications, so let's just go over that, because as always, there's going to be this disclaimer in the podcast about, you know, I'm not a medical professional, this is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and that you should always talk to your doctor about any new health protocol all that you want to try. All that being said, the things that might be the most contraindication for fasting or not fasting are, you know, obviously if you're pregnant, you're not going to want to be fasting. If you have a history of eating disorders, this is something that you'd want to work extremely closely with a professional on. It isn't to say that you could never do fasting if you have some kind of eating disorder, but for some eating disorders, it could actually be beneficial. And if you have, you know, a history with this of control issues and, you know, all that stuff around eating disorder, again, you've got to work with a professional on it. But if there's some health reason that you need to do it, say that you have a lot of cancer in your family, you have cancer personally, you have some other health issues where fasting might be appropriate, then maybe you could still try it again with the help of professional. Um, the older you get, so So I'm approaching 50, and pretty soon I need to probably revamp my fasting protocols again, because one of the things that happens as we get older is that your body loses muscle mass. And while everything I've read for the length of fast that I'm doing, I don't believe that it indicates that there's going to be any kind of muscle loss. Um, but also as you get older, your body doesn't deal with protein as effectively. So if there's a small chance that you might be losing a little bit of muscle mass every time you fast, then you might want to consider as you get older, because it's harder to build back because we are losing it continually anyway, you might want to back off on it a little bit. So those are really the things that you want to consider if you're doing fasting or not. Uh, again, I think an intermittent fast every single day is very, very safe and just about Anyone can do that. All you're doing is restraining yourself from eating for a minimum of 14 hours a day. Most people can pretty easily get to 12 because, say you, say you stop eating at 8 o'clock at night and then you don't eat again until 8 o'clock the next morning. You're sleeping through most of that. But where you start to get more benefits is if you go more 14, 16, 18 hours without food. Another topic that I should just touch on quickly because I don't think I'll be covering that later in the article, and I probably should go back and talk about there, that there, if I don't already. But people always have this question to me. The big question is, what breaks a fast? And my answer is, much like all of the Health Mama stuff that I talk about and share with you, is that it depends on your goal. So if your goal is maximum autophagy, you're just going to want to drink water and electrolytes for your fast. That will give you the maximum autophagy. But again, you also have to consider what will make you more consistent in doing it. If the only way that you can be consistent in doing it is to do an assisted fast, or maybe have something like a little bone broth or ketones or a little cream in your coffee, whatever it is, if it's going to make you more consistent and allow you to do it, then having that is totally fine. You just don't want to go over 50 calories on anything that you're consuming, and then for the whole day you don't want to be consuming more than 100 calories for the whole day. And that will give you a high, a very high amount of autophagy. Not the maximum, again, it's a continuum, but you're getting still high autophagy. And again, if it's, it's the only way that you're going to do it, or it's the way that you can get through a fast, then I'm all for that. And, you know, everybody has a little bit different opinion on that, but ultimately you just need to decide this for yourself. If on the other hand your goal is more using fasting for weight loss, then small amounts of fat during your fasting windows— so for example, if you get up in the morning and have a little bit of cream in your coffee, or if you use a product like I use every morning that's got, um, it's called Keto Cream and it's got protein and some— or like, not protein powder but collagen powder. So that's really good for your skin, hair, and nails. So it's got a little bit of collagen, it's got some MCT fat in it, it's a total of 120 calories. So I quite often consume that in my fasting window when I'm doing intermittent fasts. And so if your goal is weight loss, that amount of calories, and if it's all fat calories, it's not raising your insulin, so it's not promoting the fat storing signaling in your body. And so that would be considered an okay thing to do if your goal is weight loss. Again, if you want the very maximal effect for weight loss or for autophagy, you're ideally just consuming electrolytes and water. So So hopefully that clears up that question once and for all. Again, I'm sure other people have other opinions, but I'm all about using the tools that will make you more consistent and allow you to have some ease in these practices. Because if you had to think of a 60-hour fast every single month where you're drinking absolutely nothing but water and salt, it can get to be quite drudgerous. Drudgery? Drudgery is definitely a word. I don't know if dredgeress is a word, but in any case, you get my point. So I think that I covered everything I wanted to cover to set this up. And so now what I wanted to do is, because that benefits of fasting article at healnourishgrow.com is quite long, what I thought I'd do is kind of treat it like an audiobook and read it to you, because I know sometimes, you know, people don't have the time to necessarily sit down and read a whole long article. But if it's a topic that you're interested in and you want to hear more about it, you could easily listen this on your walk or on your, you know, whatever you're doing for your movement for the day, have your headphones on, or on your way to work in the car, something like that. And so I just hope that'll make this article a little bit more accessible to people having it in audio as well, because as I said, it is something I am very, very passionate about. It's something that is a very powerful health practice. I should also mention that it is very indicated in diabetes, and if you've never heard of Jason Fung before, he's kind of basically the world authority on fasting and diabetes at this point. And so for very resistant cases of diabetes, or even just normal diabetes, people are using it as part of the protocol to reverse their diabetes and get their blood sugar under control. So with all that set up, now I will go ahead and go to audio only and pop over and read the article from Heal, Nourish, Grow. And if you have any follow-up questions, please definitely let me know. Again, this is a topic that I just, uh, I'm very passionate about. So I'd love to hear your commentary or hear you ask your questions. I mean, at this point I have so much experience doing it personally, so if you're wondering about how it feels or any issues you might have as you're going along, it's probably something that I've experienced myself or dealt with before. So without further ado, let's go to the article.
