How to Intermittent Fast the Right Way with Expert Gin Stephens

The global expert on intermittent fasting.

You're looking at a photo and you're like, oh, I struggled with my weight. I was obese. I weighed 210 pounds. The reason I left Facebook is it felt very toxic. Well, that's what women do. We diet, find themselves panic, eating everything in the house. I'm not gonna like, force myself to feel miserable. You're not really able to burn fat very well. Sounds a little intimidating, right?

We want to get our insulin down.

Like, this is torture. Like, I just want to eat.

The fast is boring, boring, boring, boring. You should avoid break your fast with.

On today's show, we're bringing in the amazing Jean Stevens. Jin is an expert in intermittent fasting. If you want more energy, if you want to avoid autoimmune diseases, if you want to lose weight, if you want to have a longer life, then I want you to listen to this episode. Jin is the author of this amazing best selling book, Fast Food Feast. Repeat. We go deep today on what is fasting? Why should we do it? Who shouldn't do it? Is it different for women compared to men? How long should we fast? Is it dangerous? It's the most incredible insights that she shares. Now, most of you will know that have been listening long term that I've been fasting for a number of months now, since early December, and I've definitely had some massive results in terms of my health. So. So I'm a big advocate for it, but I'm also a big believer in questioning and asking. So I hope you sit back and enjoy the show. Jin, a huge welcome to the Lead on Purpose podcast.

Well, thank you so much for having me.

I'm very excited about this conversation. So many of the listeners and viewers will know. Back in early December, I started intermittent fasting and I've been learning a lot as I go, but I'm no expert. I wanted to speak to the global expert on intermittent fasting and I've been looking for that person and my team and I agree that you are that person. So you're booking it.

That's a big honor.

Well, you've done so much work, deep work in this area. You have, I believe you've had a community at one point of almost half a million people that you were driving.

Back in the day, we had about half a million people from all over the world. And you can imagine trying to manage 500,000 people in 2020, 2021. That's when I love Facebook completely. But it was, it was quite an undertaking.

I bet it was. Now I Can imagine. Well, I'm excited. Talk about the community. But also for the person who doesn't know much about intermittent fasting, they're going to get a lot of information. For the person that already does it or is dabbling with it, they're going to be able to go deep with our conversation today. So let's start with this. What is intermittent fasting?

Yeah, the name of it sounds a little intimidating, right? The word fasting is in there and people are like, oh, yeah, I don't do. I'm not going to do that. So then I didn't name it. Let me tell you a little bit about me. First of all, I am a teacher. I taught elementary school, which is grade school. What do y' all call that? In New Zealand?

We call that primary school.

Primary school. I knew I was getting one of them, missing one of the names. But I taught elementary children. At the end of my career, I taught gifted kids. I have a doctorate in gifted education. But I struggled with my weight. So I was a very smart person. I was good at every facet of my life except for controlling my weight. So I yo yo dieted for really decades until I was obese. I weighed 210lbs and finally hit that highest weight in 2014. So I was really. So I've been living the intermittent fasting lifestyle for 10 years now, but in 2014, I was really desperate and I was like, I've got to figure out what to do about this. So I had heard of intermittent fasting. Like I said, I did not invent it, but I learned as much as I could about it. I implemented it personally and went on to lose £80, which I've kept off ever since. So being the teacher that I am, I can't keep anything good to myself. Maybe my husband wishes I would because I'm very instructive all the time. I don't know.

But, you know, I set out to start teaching people about intermittent fasting. And at first it was people close to me, you know, friends, relatives, and then that grew into the large community. And so my gift is being a classroom teacher and breaking down content is what has allowed me to really teach the world about intermittent fasting since back in the day. So what is intermittent fasting? And again, I didn't invent any of this. I just share it and teach it to people. Just like, you know, when I was a math teacher, I didn't invent math, but I was teaching math to the children, of course.

Makes sense.

Exactly. So intermittent fasting, like I said, to Begin sounds very, very scary because you've got the word fasting in there. So we think about what do we know about fasting? We know about long religious fasts, or Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights. And we just think it sounds really intimidating. But when you really look at what it is, we all fast every day, every single person listening, every one of them fasts for a period of the day. And then most people wake up and have break fast early in the morning. That's actually literally what breakfast means. Break your fast. So most people break their fast first thing in the morning as soon as they get out of bed, because that's what they've been told to do. You don't need to do that, by the way. But those of us who live an intermittent fasting lifestyle, we just delay. We delay when we're going to have our break fast meal of the day. And we keep all of our eating for the day in a window of time we call our eating window. So that is also called time restricted eating. Is that the kind of intermittent fasting that you do, James? Time restricted eating? Yes.

So I do like 16, 8. Some days it will be 18, 6, and other days I don't do it at all because I'm traveling and speaking on a stage and I need to eat at some point. So I just get it in me when I can. But I would say 95% of the time it's time restricted.

Yeah. So time restricted eating is the most common form of intermittent fasting that most people follow. So the big umbrella term intermittent fasting has time restricted eating in there. We also have alternate daily fasting approaches which we can get. There's so many different types of intermittent fasting protocols that you can come up with and that people do. But it's just a matter of you're doing this intermittently, you're not fasting forever. You're not eating all the time. You're just intermittently having periods of fasting in there. And we're just extending overnight period. I think time restricted eating is really, I think would go over a lot better if we had just named it that from the beginning. Time restricted eating.

Easy, right?

100%. And it's interesting, I want to think about the viewer listener for a second right now going, huh, Do I need to do that? So for you, it was weight loss. For me, I'd find a lump on my left pack in October last year and I was just flying away a few days after that for a holiday and obviously it was on my mind the whole time, came back, got a mammogram and there was a gynecomastia. So essentially it's not cancer, but there's extra tissue. And I thought, well, what can I do? I am plant dominant. I wouldn't say plant based, but plant dominant. And I move my body, I'm not overweight, I drink a lot of water, I don't drink any alcohol, so what else can I do? There's got to be other things. And so I came across a podcast about intermittent fasting. Thought, well, let's give it a go. And my partner Caroline really drove it. And so we started in early December, and my goal was to see if I could improve my health, reduce this gynecomastia. So that was what brought me. What else do you find brings people to intermittent fasting? So weight loss, autoimmune disease, anything else?

That is a great question because like I said, I started in 2014 for weight loss. That was it. That's all I had in my mind. I wanted to figure out how to lose weight. And if you asked anybody in 2014 who was talking about intermittent fasting or writing about it, books out there, there are very few and far between. But everyone pretty much just said intermittent fasting is a way to eat fewer calories. That's just what we thought we were eating at a window. So we're going to eat less, we're going to lose weight. We didn't know about the health benefits. We didn't understand what a powerful way this to live. And then in 2016, a study, well, it was the Nobel Prize in medicine actually was awarded to a researcher who was studying something called autophagy. Have you heard of this Nobel Prize winning research on autophagy? So he'd been studying autophagy and won the Nobel Prize and suddenly everyone was talking about this word that none of us had heard before and a lot of people didn't know how to pronounce. And guess what is one of the things that stimulates or upregulates autophagy? Fasting. So all of a sudden we understood that, wait a minute, fasting is doing more than just allowing us to eat fewer calories. It actually gives our bodies time to clean up in a powerful way. Autophagy is our body's cellular housekeeping system. We're upcycling, recycling, breaking down old junky parts. You know, if nothing is coming in, if you're not eating, your body has to make do with what's on hand and it has time to get busy. And so Suddenly we understood, wow, when we're fasting, we're having upregulated autophagy, which is awesome. Around that time, also, Dr. Jason Fung released a book, the Obesity Code. Are you familiar with the obesity Code?

I haven't read it, but I have seen the title.

Well, that came out, and I had already lost all the weight I wanted to lose at that point, but I was really struggling with fasting, feeling hard, and I'd been doing it for over a year at that point, and I was starting to have a little bit of regain. So I was like, well, I can't wait to read the obesity code. And in the obesity cod, he taught us about something called insulin, which we all had heard of. Obviously, we think of diabetics needing insulin. If your pancreas stops working, you have to take insulin. But Jason Fung suddenly was teaching us all about the role of having too much insulin in our bodies and storing too much fat or being overweight, having the metabolic diseases. So I put it all together and realized, well, if we want to keep our insulin low, we want to make sure we're doing that during the fast, keeping our insulin low. I came up with some words called the clean fast that I can get into later. But when we keep our insulin low while we're fasting, it is very, very good for our bodies. Also, we are having upregulated autophagy, very good for our bodies. And so what does this do for us? Well, so many of the modern lifestyle diseases that have just really exploded in the most recent decades are related to metabolic syndrome, having chronic high levels of insulin. And most people, unless they are type 2 diabetic and maybe thinking of, you know, insulin resistance and all of that, they've never even thought about insulin before. And so it's realizing that, huh? Why are we all running around with chronic high levels of insulin? We are. So we need to bring those down. There's a great book about that for someone who wants to learn more about high levels of insulin and how it affects our health in many, many way. It's called why we get sick. Dr. Benjamin Bickman. He's an expert on hyperinsulinemia, which is a fancy way of saying chronic high levels of insulin. But in his book, he connects having high levels of insulin to so many different conditions. I learned a lot while reading it. But we want to get our insulin down. So I like to think of intermittent fasting is really the health plan with the side effect of weight loss. Because when you understand all the powerful things that it's doing. When we take a pause from food, bringing our insulin down, we're having increased autophagy. We're able to tap into our fat stores for fuel. Finally, you know, people who have metabolic syndrome tend to have a lot of visceral fat or maybe a fatty liver. You know, if you've got a fatty liver, then your body is not working optimally. And so when we're fasting clean, our body has to clear things out. So it starts clearing out that fatty liver, it starts clearing out your visceral fat and you know, we end up so much healthier, 100%.

And I guess for me, I'm thinking about that as well. There's other things. I wanted to have more energy in the mid afternoon. I was like knackered in the mid afternoon. So I thought, will fasting help? And I'll be honest, yes, it has. I guess the other thing for a lot of people that I've talked to around fasting, is gut health and having gut issues and like long chronic issues, they come to fasting and they see improvements. But this whole idea of autophagy was really my big focal point because I thought if I can get the good cells in my body to literally cannibalize and eat the bad cells, then I might be able to reduce this, you know, essentially extra growth. And that's helped a lot. But you talk about clean fasting. What do you mean by that?

Well, that is what sets my work apart because I've really looked at, you know, why are we fasting? What, what do we want to do? And so I identified three main goals for, for while we're fasting. You know, first of all, I talked about the importance of insulin. We want to keep our insulin low.

Is anti lipolytic, another big fancy word that means anti fat burning, Lipolysis, fat burning. So if you have chronic high levels of insulin, you're in storage mode and you're not really able to burn fat very well. So we want to get our insulin levels down. So how do we do that? Well, what causes our body to release insulin? Well, eating. If we eat food, our body releases insulin to manage our blood sugar. We probably all know people who are diabetic and have to inject insulin after they eat to keep their blood sugar low. When we eat, our bodies produce more insulin or pump it out. So we don't want to have any eating, obviously when we're fasting. But we also don't want our brains to think that the food is coming in and that's where it gets A little tricky. There's something I learned about in the obesity code called the cephalic phase insulin response, meaning in the brain. So they did some work with rodents, for example, like little rats, little mice, and they put artificial sweeteners, zero calorie artificial sweeteners. They painted their oral cavity with those sweeteners so they tasted the sweetness, but zero calories were coming in. And they didn't really even ingest anything. They just tasted it. Well, those little rodents had a cephalic phase insulin response. Their brain interpreted, hmm, sweetness is coming in. We know what sweetness is because think about it, James, throughout all of history of the world, sweetness is associated with, like, name some foods.

Oh, we think of, like chocolate. We think of anything with the sugars in it. We've got obviously, some fruit that's kind of honey fruit.

If you're ancient man and you're like out in nature tasting sweetness, it's going to have a high glycemic load associated with it. Lots of sugar coming in. So your brain says, ooh, lots of sugar's coming in. Well, we're going to need to lower that blood sugar so it doesn't get too high. And so your pancreas goes ahead and pumps out some insulin. That's that syphacity metabolic phase insulin response, because it knows the sugar is coming in. It tasted the sweetness. Except these little rodents were having zero calorie artificial sweeteners. Their brain didn't know the difference. So then the researchers snipped the nerve from their tongue to their brain. So there were no more signals going from taste to their brain. Repeated the experiment. 0 cephalic phase insulin response. It was just the taste that was doing it. So if we want to keep our body from pumping out insulin, we want to keep our tongue from tasting anything that's going to think our body or going to make our brain think that food or sweetness are coming in. So we avoid diet sodas, we avoid artificial sweeteners, we avoid putting anything in our coffee that's going to sweeten it. You know, even if an artificial sweetener says won't raise your blood sugar, we're worried about insulin is what we're concerned with here. You know, artificial sweeteners are not going to raise your blood sugar because they're not sending in any sugar. We don't want to have an insulin response. So we want to keep our insulin low. So we stick to plain water, black coffee, plain tea, because a bitter flavor profile, which would be your black coffee, your plain, actual tea, bitter flavor profile, not Associated with an insulin response. That's true. You also want to avoid lemon in your water or the fruity teas, anything like that. If you think that sounds delicious. That reminds me of food. It's sweet or sour or anything like that. Anything other than bitter, you want to avoid that. So that's fasting goal one.

That's really important.

Yeah, we want to hear more, but that's brilliant. So we would have black coffee. Just usually just like either filter or instant, but it's black. I have decaf and I'm assuming it's fine as well.

Absolutely fine, yeah.

Okay, good.

But you just want to avoid flavored. No peppermint tea. No on the peppermint tea.

Oh, that's so good to know.

Is peppermint a delicious food flavor?

Of course.

Well, there you go. You don't want to have any delicious food flavors. Chamomile, herbal tea. Chamomile has a sweetness to it. So you want to stick to. Yeah, I know. See, there's the bad news. Stick to plain actual tea. Most herbal teas have a sweet or fruity flavor profile. Anything that's going to be food like you want to avoid. Keep the peppermint tea and the chamomile tea in your eating window. And during the fast, stick to just actual tea. The tea aisle is the trickiest aisle of the grocery store, by the way, because almost everything on it is not actually tea.

Yeah.

So true. This is really important for me to hear. I didn't realize that I've been cheating also when you break your fast. So I usually break it at either 10am or 12pm so is it important to break it with certain foods? Are there any things that you should avoid breaking it with?

You should avoid breaking your fast with anything that makes you feel unwell after you eat it. So for example, if I opened my eating window or broke my fast with a chocolate chip cookie and a sugary latte, I would feel terrible not too far after that because that ultra processed sugary cookie and the latte would send a giant sugar load into my body that had been fasting happily and it would shoot up my blood sugar and then it would crash it back down. So how would not be a good thing to open my window with. On the other hand, I can open my eating window with, you know, high fiber vegetables, beans, whole grains, things like that. Things that are going to be released more slowly and not cause a blood sugar spike. So you'll see all sorts of people who are like, this is how you must break your fast. And it's like complicated. People are not complicated eaters. If you go back again, I talked about an ancient man out there in the wilderness. They ate what was around. They, they were eating the foods that were available. And if it was a plant food, it was a high fiber food. Maybe they were eating some animals that day or whatever it was, but they ate what was around. So you can open your window with anything that makes you feel great after you eating, after you eat it. So are ready for the other two fasting goals?

Give them to me.

All right, so the second fasting goal is that we want to tap into our stored fat for fuel. And of course, keeping insulin down is part of that. But another thing is don't put other stuff in your coffee that are going to be sources of fuel. There was a big craze. It may have died down by now. I hope that it has. But in the United States, we had a big craze. Bulletproof coffee. Remember hearing about that?

Of course. Yeah. Dave Asprey. Yeah.

Yep. Everybody wanted to put butter in their coffee or they wanted to put just a tablespoon of cream in their coffee or they wanted to put MCT oil in their coffee because, well, all of those fuel sources, butter, MCT oil, cream, they're going to, you know, there are lots of energy. They're going to make you feel very energized, but you're taking in a whole lot of energy. Is your body going to burn your body fat if you're having butter in your coffee? No, it's going to burn the fat from your coffee cup. So we want to tap into our own stored fat for fuel. And so we don't put any source of fat or anything like that into our coffee. Even people are like, what about just this much nut milk? No, keep your coffee black. And one thing to know, for anybody who's struggling with that idea, our taste buds regenerate themselves very, very quickly. So if you like the smell of coffee, maybe you can't tolerate black coffee. You think it's disgusting, but you do like the smell of coffee. You are a black coffee drinker underneath there. You just don't know it yet. You just have to keep your taste buds a week or two, they will suddenly be able to tolerate that bitter flavor profile and you'll be amazed. So that was fasting goal 2. Fasting goal 3 is we want to have that increased autophagy that we were talking about. And so what down regulates or shuts down autophagy? Well, eating, but having protein would do that. So you want to avoid like bone broth or any kind of pre workout supplements that are going to give your body a load of protein. Because think about this. You know, we've been taught through the fitness industry lately that you have to support your body by putting in lots of extra protein. But now you're fasting clean, your body is actually breaking down junky proteins and recycling them. So you're going to be having increased autophagy while you're fasting clean. And we don't want to stop that process. You can have all the protein you're interested in having during your eating window.

I love it. This is so helpful. And the one other tea I was going to ask you about was Rooibos, the redbush, like African tea. Is it all good now?

I can't remember the flavor profile of that one. Would you describe it as bitter? How would you describe it?

No, there's actually, I would say it's bitter, but there's a hint of like joy I get from a little bit of sweetness.

Here's what I would have you do. I can't, I can't tell you 100%. And also I, I do understand that we're all different. And as far as like the way your taste buds perceive it versus mine, your body may or may not respond differently to that taste. Like for example, there's a Starbucks.

I don't know, it's like a nitro cold brew that doesn't have anything in it except nitro to make it foamy. But my body tastes that as sweet. It definitely breaks my fast. I feel terrible after I have it, so I can't have it. So a lot of it depends on your body. But here's what I would do to know for sure. Fast, completely clean with just black coffee, plain water, plain tea for 30 days. And then try that tea that. Say it. Say the name of it again, I can't pronounce it. Rooboos.

Yeah, rooibos.

Try that and then you'll know. At that point you'll know. Yeah.

The other thing I also do, and maybe I am breaking my fast, but I read some research around, once you start fasting and you get into it, sometimes you can start to have electrolyte issues. So during my fasting window, I put some pink Himalayan rock salt, not a lot, but into my water. Is that breaking my fast?

Minerals do not break a fast. So that is really good news. You just have to be careful with electrolyte supplements because people sell them and add stuff to them. Like for example, if there's like Redmond's real salt, pink salt, regular salt, that's all going to be fine. But if you're buying a product and it might even say safe for the fast, it might even say safe for the clean fast. But then you read the ingredients. For example, it might have citric acid in there. Well, citric acid adds a tangy flavor to it. You do not want to ingest anything with citric acid that you're going to taste while you're fasting clean. So just look for something that has only minerals in it and it should be fine.

Where do we start? So I know when I started, I started with 12 and 12 really easy. 12 hours of eating, 12 hours of not eating. And then each day I went up by an hour until I got to 16. And I've generally kept it at 16 on average, a little bit more some days. But how do we start? What's the best way to start it from your experience?

Well, that is why I just wrote this book recently, 28 Day Fast Start Day by Day. It's a companion book to my other book, Fast Feast Repeat, which has the 28 day fast start in there. And so my original Fast Feast Repeat that I came out in 2020 has one chapter about the fast feed start, about how to get started. And in a really big, thick book. You can see there's a lot in this book. And so one little chapter on the fast start, people were overwhelmed. Let's just say it's a comprehensive book. But it was so much information for someone who's brand new that they might read it from COVID to cover and still be like, everything's all jumbled up. I've talked before about my elementary school background, and you just don't have the knowledge in your head yet to connect everything when you're brand new. So that's why I wrote the new book, 28 Day Fast Start Day by day. And it's very much day by day for your first 28 days. It has a little daily lesson of what you need to know. Like day one. Probably not surprised we talk about the clean fast because you got to nail that. That's the most important thing to be doing, right? You don't want to get, you know, four months in and realize you've been putting cream in your coffee every day. You want to have the clean fast from the beginning. It just makes things so much easier when you're fasting clean. Remember I talked about how before I read the obesity code, I was actually not fasting clean because I Hadn't heard about insulin. I didn't know about the cephalic phase insulin response. I white knuckled it through my fast every day, but then I was like, oh, I should stop putting sweeteners in my coffee and stop drinking diet sodas immediately. The fast got so much easier. So we want people to get off on the right foot with that. There's also a quiz that you take at the beginning that helps you figure out whether you are a rip the band aid off kind of a person or whether you need to really ease in or whether you're somewhere in the middle. And so you, you did a very ease in kind of approach, starting with 1212 and then finishing with 16,8. And you were not doing it for weight loss, you were doing it for health benefits. So that is a really, really great approach for someone like me who was obese. I don't really know my metabolic markers. I don't know what my insulin levels were. I don't know what my A1C was. I wish I had all of that data, but I'm sure it was a mess because I had, you know, the abdominal obesity. I couldn't reach down and paint my own toenails. I'm sure I was just not in good health at all. So if you're someone like me who's farther down the the road towards poor metabolic health, you're going to need to eventually bump up to a more aggressive, intermittent fasting approach. Like for me, 195 is what ended up being a pretty good weight loss and now lifestyle window. For me, it just feels right. So I have about a five hour eating window every day. But you're not starting with that at the beginning. You're easing in every week. Actually, literally every day, there's a section for you to check in about how your day went and how you worked through the hard moments. It's just like, I'm right there with you. You have your daily lesson, you plan how your day is going to go. There's an inspirational story from an intermittent Faster. You can listen to their podcast episode from Intermittent Fasting Stories and the update tells how they're doing now. And at the end of the day, you check in, see how your day went. At the end of every week for those four weeks, you assess how your week went. You know, if you started off with the very easy does it and you're like, this is just really, I think I could do more. You could bump yourself up a little bit, try something else the next week, make it a little more aggressive or if you started off with rip off the band aid and you're like, oh, this is a little more than my body's ready for, you can back it off. So all throughout the book, I'm helping you cement the habit for those first 28 days and also being very, very clear about what to expect.

Like, you might find you're having trouble sleeping at first as your body is adjusting. Very normal for people to have trouble sleeping at first. Or they start off and they're overeating because their window opens and then they find themselves panic eating everything in the house. You know, why does that happen? Well, because you're not metabolically flexible. Your body is not well fueled during the fast. You're not really tapping into your fat very well yet. Your body has to learn how to do some new things before you're going to feel really, really good and have that energy you just talked about. Because before we started recording, you said, was it the first 14 days were a real challenge for you?

Very much so. They were the toughest. Like, I really was asking myself, why am I doing this? Like, this is torture. Like, I just want to eat when I want to eat. But after I got through those first couple of weeks, I started to see the energy lift. I started to feel clearer in my mind. My big objection, I would actually be great to talk to you about objections. One of my biggest objections.

Mine was like, you know what? I'm going to get? Like, I'm going to have low blood sugar in the morning and feel really lightheaded, and I won't be able to work out or walk the dogs in the hills in the morning because I haven't anything. And this was a belief, like a deep seated belief I had, that I needed to eat first thing in the morning before I did anything physical. Now I've discovered I can actually do a lot of physical activity, even sweat, even get the heart rate up into the high zone while I'm fasted. And in fact, it feels great. So what are some of the other objectives?

You want me to explain why?

I would love to know why.

Yeah, I can tell you. Well, let's first talk about the normal person who's not an intermittent faster like you before you started. Me, when I weighed 210 pounds back in 2014, we were used to fueling our body based on what was coming in all the time. We started in the morning putting stuff in. Putting stuff in. And so we got on that blood sugar roller coaster. And I remember I got up in the morning, I ate breakfast first thing I went into my classroom, started having lattes throughout the morning, maybe a mid morning snack, then I had lunch, then I had afternoon lattes, Then I would go home and take a nap because I felt so worn out. Then there would be dinner and maybe an after dinner snack. So all day long my blood sugar was doing this. When I ate, it went up and then it crashed back down and then it went back up, then it crashed back down. And I would feel hungry and hangry if too much time went by between eating. And probably everybody listening has experienced that. So you're afraid that's what every minute is going to be like when you're living an intermittent fasting lifestyle. But it's actually the opposite of that. Because we have a lot of stored fuel in our body. And I'm not just talking about fat stores, I'm talking about we have glycogen, which is our body's storage for extra sugar fuel. To put it simply, when you eat something, whatever you eat, your body doesn't use 100% of it, right? That moment of your meal, your body stores it away for later. It puts fat into your fat cells, it puts glycogen into your liver and into your muscles for storage for later. So once you're what we call fat adapted, metabolically flexible, your body knows how to tap into your stored fat. Your body understands where all these fuel sources are. Again, you're adapted. You're no longer putting fuel in all day. Your body knows where to get fuel. So we're recording this. It's 4:35pm for me and I am still in the fasted state. I haven't eaten yet today. I don't feel foggy, I'm not hangry, I don't feel bad. I had a really big eating day yesterday. It was Easter here in the United States. And so I went to my sister's house. We had quite a feast. I had dessert, had cake. It was delicious. And so my body may have stored away a little extra fuel from that Easter feast, but the key is that, you know, you don't have those blood sugar crashes again. We're keeping insulin low, so let's imagine that. And I've actually worn a cgm. Have you ever worn a cgm? A continuous glucose monitor. Oh, you should try it. It's fascinating. I've worn a cgm. You just pop it in your arm and it connects to your smartphone and it tells you what your blood sugar is doing. So when I wake up in the morning and I look at, you know, what my blood Sugar might be doing. It's, you know, below 100 somewhere, probably in the 90s. Usually, first thing in the morning, I have my black coffee. Well, that actually makes my blood sugar go up a little bit, which might be confusing until you learn that coffee causes your liver to dump out some glycogen. So my liver is dumping out some of that stored glycogen. My blood sugar goes up gently, stays up there. Then eventually it gets to the point in my fast where I would feel a little bit of hunger. Maybe it's noon, I'm not opening my window yet. Maybe it's one feeling a little hunger. I would look at my cgm, and that's right when my blood sugar is settling down into the mid-70s. And then it just stays there for the rest of my fast. But remember, I'm not stimulating an insulin response, so my body is not crashing my blood sugar. Now, if I were to have a diet soda starting from a 70s, blood sugar right in there, instead of feeling great, my blood sugar would crash and I would feel terrible. So that's one reason we don't want to have the cephalic phase insulin response while we're fasting clean. It would make me shaky, it would make me feel yucky. But my blood sugar doesn't just go down to 70 and then go down, down, down, down, down. It stays steady right there. And that's when I know my body is, is. It's pulling any glycogen in as needed, but it also is tapping into my fat stores as needed. And I'm well fueled during the rest of my fast.

Incredible.

No crashing, no hangry. Plenty of hangry. Yeah, we don't want it.

No. I remember the feeling of the first couple of weeks, feeling the pang or the wave of hunger about, you know, 20, 30 minutes after I normally have breakfast, I'm like, I think I'm gonna die. Like, this feels terrible and I would be hungry, right? But now I like, scale it. So we're out for a walk this morning at 7:30. We're walking up the hill. Pretty steep hill. I'm like, oh, that's like a seven. I feel a seven. Like a wave of seven out of ten. And we just have fun labeling it. And we know that it comes and it goes. It's not there. It passes. But.

Yeah, yeah, because your body has plenty of stored fuel. And that's the thing. You have got stored fuel in your liver, in your muscles and your fat cells. So you've got plenty of fuel and your body knows where to get it. So it's like, I could eat, I could eat. And you don't. And then your body's like, darn it, I have to get some of this other fuel. Okay. You know, sometimes people worry that your body is going to, like, just go straight to your muscle tissue and start burning that. And because we have that whole fear of, well, it's just going to eat my muscles up if I'm not sending in food. And. And Jason Fung, who wrote the obesity code that I mentioned before, he has a brilliant blog post. He's a nephrologist and he's worked with lots of people, you know, with type 2 diabetes, a kidney doctor, they'd come to his nephrology practice. And so he started using fasting therapeutically with his patients and improved their health in so many ways. But he has a brilliant blog post about the whole idea of is your body going to burn your muscle tissue? And his analogy is this. If you were snowed in and the power was out and you had a fireplace and you wanted to burn something in your fireplace for heat, would you chop up your sofa and burn that? Or would you go out to the wood pile and get some wood? Which would you do?

Easy. I love it. You'd head on out, right?

Your body is not going to burn up. And muscle tissue, which is very valuable to your body unless there's no other fuel source. Now, if it was so snowy that your door couldn't open and you couldn't get out to the, and you were going to freeze to death, you might chop up your sofa. That's actually what happens when you do a typical low calorie diet where you're eating teeny, teeny meals all day long. Remember I talked before about high levels of insulin being anti lipolytic. So if you're following a typical low calorie diet where you're eating like tiny little breakfast, drinking your diet soda all day, tiny little lunch, you're keeping your insulin high, high, high. Your body is not able to tap into your fat stores the same way. It would be as if you were fasting clean. So your body might have to turn to some muscle for fuel because it can't get to the fat. But once you give your body the clean, fast insulin comes down, your body's like, there's all that stored firewood. I can get to it.

That's a great way to look at it. Thank you. And I was thinking also just about people, different types of people. I've often had this chat, so with my partner Caroline, we were talking about fasting for men versus fasting for women. Women being cyclical, men not being so much. So what's the difference? Is there anything that women should consider differently than men?

That's a great question. And there's a lot of confusion in the world about, especially right now, because a book came out recently that was sold as a fasting book for women, Women in the. In the, you know, the female. In the title of it, it says the word girl is in the title of it. And so it. I don't like to speak negatively about books out in the world, but it really over complicates the idea of fasting for women as something that we have to do differently. And so I went to some friends of mine who are hormone experts, specifically a friend of mine, Dr. Tabitha Barber, she's a functional medicine obgyn and. And a friend. And we had her on our podcast, our Fast Feast Repeat podcast, and we asked her these questions about women and their hormones because, again, I'm a schoolteacher. You don't want a school teacher to tell you how to manage your female hormones. You want a functional medicine ob gyn who is a hormone expert to tell you about this. So she explained very, very well to us that what is bad for women's hormones is over restriction. So you think about that. She gave the story of, like, Olympic athletes, female athletes who are young women who are over training and eating, keeping their bodies a certain way for their sport, they will often lose their period. And the period she called it. Our fifth vital sign, I think, is what she said. If we lose our period, that's the sign that what we're doing is too restrictive for our bodies.

Wow.

So in all of our years of working with intermittent fasters in our fasting community, I can't think of any women who were fasting according to the way that we recommend that you do it. We fast, feast, repeat. We don't fast, eat a tiny diet meal, repeat. We're nourishing our bodies. Well, we're not doing this in an overly restrictive way. Women do not lose their periods. So if you're not losing your period, then you can be confident that you're not doing something that's too restrictive for your body. But we do hear all sorts of stories from women who are doing too much CrossFit coupled with an overly restrictive diet. They might be following typical dietary advice to eat 1200 calories a day, and they're eating 1200 calories a day over the course of the whole day and doing crossfit and they lose their period, that is too much restriction. So we need to listen to our bodies, and if we lose our period, that's too much for your body. But we do not hear this from intermittent fasters in our community. It's actually much more common that we hear from women who perhaps had PCOS and they haven't had regular cycles in years. And now all of a sudden, now that they're living life as an intermittent faster, suddenly their cycles get regular again. That is a much more common story. Maybe at first their cycle comes sooner than they were expecting. They're like, my cycle was really short this month. I'm like, well, shorter is not a bad sign. That means things are revving up, right? It's only if you stop having your period that you need to worry about it. So, you know, I know that anecdotal evidence might seem like the lowest form of evidence, but I've had so many, you know, hundreds of thousands of women in our communities that we have so many women who report, oh, my gosh, my cycle is normal again for the first time, maybe ever. If they've had PCOS for a long time. Or they'll say, well, I suddenly stopped getting my period and I was extra hungry. And then I found out I was pregnant because they maybe they, I had an oops baby. Like, they were extra fertile, they weren't expecting it. We've heard that from women before, and that's the only time we've heard people having trouble with their cycle is when, oops, I'm suddenly pregnant. And then we reckon you should not be fasting while you're pregnant. But, you know, I actually also early on, I interviewed an OB GYN, Dr. Cecily Ganhart, who uses intermittent fasting with her PCOS patients specifically to increase fertility. She found that when her PCOS patients incorporated an intermittent fasting lifestyle, they were able to become pregnant. So all that to say if you've recently read a book about fasting that said that women have to fast differently, different times of the month, you actually don't. And my friend Tabitha Barber, OBGYN functional medicine expert, you'll find her episode on the Fast Feast Repeat podcast. It came out January. We can do that. We absolutely can do it. Because I think that hearing from her is a lot more weight than hearing from me.

That's amazing. I'll definitely make sure that the team puts all the links to those episodes in, so people can just click through and check it out for sure. And thanks for answering that, because that's an important One, are there any other individuals who should seek medical advice before fasting?

Yes, you absolutely should not fast if you're pregnant or if you're breastfeeding or if you have a history with eating disorders. This is where it gets tricky. The official word is do not fast if you have a history of eating disorders. And that is because fasting is a tool that many people with eating disorders might abuse, just like someone with an eating disorder might abuse laxatives. Laxatives don't cause an eating disorder. Fasting doesn't cause an eating disorder. But if you are prone to one, you could get down that cycle. And so you need to have, you know, talk to your counselor. You know, we on the flip side, have had people in our community who are working with their therapist or their counselor and they're incorporating intermittent fasting. And they find that for the first time, it quiets the food noise. So they are able to reestablish a healthy relationship with food and with eating and with their body by incorporating intermittent fasting. But I would not do that on your own. You need to work with your therapist who understands and can look for the warning signs. That's just really, really important if someone is underweight. You know, if you're underweight, you need to be cautious when it comes to fasting. You know, just keep that in mind, you know. Yeah, you don't want to be fasting and not at a healthy weight. So really that's it. And you talk to your doctor if you're concerned as to whether or not you should fast. Oh, and also kids that are not fully physically developed yet. Kids should not be doing intermittent fasting. You know, talk to your. If you have a teenager who's obese, you know, we're hearing that more and more now. And you know, can an obese teenager fast? Well, you would want to talk to your child's doctor and make sure they're physically developed enough. You would definitely not want to be fasting when you're still physically maturing.

This is so interesting because I've got a seven year old, so Caroline and I have a wee boy and he is very curious about our fasting and we clearly don't want him to fast. So I'm conscious that I don't want to create any stories in his young head that when I'm an adult I should be restricting and I shouldn't be eating. What's the best way coming maybe from your school teacher days? What might be a really good way for us to talk to him about what we're doing that doesn't kind of impact him in a negative way long term.

Well, I think that's great. And really I look back on myself and all those years that I dieted and I did some crazy diets. I talked about these in my very first book, delay Don't Deny, which was self published. And I talk about them on my podcast. So I've done literally every crazy diet. If the doctor was going to give you diet pills or give you a diet injection rejection or you're only eating this weird food, like, I literally tried everything. I was desperate. So I'm pretty sure that if I'm thank goodness I have two boys. But I mean, I know boys can have eating disorders as well, but my boys just pretty much ignored everything I was doing and they're like, whatever, that's my mom, she's weird. But had I had girls, all those crazy diets that I did, I'm sure would have communicated some negative diet culture, we call it diet brain in our community, to my girls if I had had girls. But you know, I remember my earlies thoughts about diets came from my mom. She's a dance teacher and I always saw her diet. So I just thought, well, that's what women do. We diet. So we do have to be really careful with the message that we send to our kids. But I contrast that to the me that has been living in this intermittent fasting lifestyle since 2014. I have a very healthy relationship with food. No one would watch me eat or watch me around food and feel like, no fear around food. We don't good food, bad food. So I would feel so confident right now raising girls as an intermittent faster, but teaching the children, girls or boys, to listen to their body. And as far as adults versus children when it comes to fasting, kids completely understand it immediately when you say to them, growing bodies have different nutritional needs than adult bodies that are already grown. They're like, yeah, that makes sense. Because if you're growing, you need to put in sufficient fuel so that you will grow. Kids need to eat frequently. I mean, think about the period of time when the kids are eating the most frequently. It's when they're babies. Newborn babies eat around the clock. Literally. You wake up in the middle of the night, you feed them several times. My babies wanted to eat all the time in the middle of the night. And so they are building their bodies and they're growing at the fast rate that they will ever grow. And you need to eat very, very frequently to grow. Once you're an Adult, you're not growing anymore. We don't need to put in as much fuel. It just makes sense. But if you look around you in the world, people are still growing in adulthood. They're just growing with their fat stores. People are really, I mean, I was obese, so I'm certainly not judging because there I was, I was in the obese category for several years and I was continuing to put in growing, growing body fuel amounts and I kept growing until I started putting in less. So just really communicating that to your kids. You know, we, we don't fear food. Food is delicious. We listen to our body. We stop when we've had enough. We don't demonize food as good food, bad food. And we show them the joy of eating.

That's really important. And for us that we, we eat a lot of food. Like during our eating window, we, we go wild. I love food. So he does see us enjoy it. And it's, it's important. We want it. Wanted to see that.

But I guess you may not realize how kids are really learning from us, you know, with my podcast Intermittent Fasting Stories, I've interviewed over 400 people now who are intermittent fasters that tell their story. And one very common story that people, you know, in their 60s, 50s are telling is that they got these thoughts, these negative thoughts as children about their bodies or about what they were eating. Like, like their dad made a comment like, well, you shouldn't eat that, you're getting a little chunky. And now they're 60 year old women who have this intense guilt that they got from when they were five.

So yeah, parents have such a critical role in the words that they use to themselves and to their kids. A hundred percent agree with that. Now, Jen, I also heard recently that if someone around you has got a flu or a cold, if you realize you're spending time in their proximity and you go into, I think it was a 72 hour fast or something like that. But a longer fast, it can prevent or reduce the chances of you getting the cold. Is there anything that backs that up?

You don't even need to do it that long. I don't get sick hardly ever. I don't fast that long. I eat every day. I haven't done a longer fast since 2016. I've eaten every single day. And I used to, when I was a school teacher, I would get sick so frequently, I was always going to the doctor and getting an antibiotic. I would get frequent ear infections. Well, then I started fasting in 2014, the last time I went to the doctor with an illness. Now I was still teaching, by the way. It was the spring of 2015. I had only been fasting for a few months at that point, and I thought I might have strep throat. I wasn't really sure, but my throat felt. It didn't feel great. So I went to the doctor and she did the test and she's like, actually, you've got the flu. I'm like, I don't feel nearly bad enough to have the flu, but okay. That was the last time I've been to the doctor for a sick visit. 2015.

That's incredible.

If I find myself coming down with something, it's usually connected to a holiday. Like I, you know, over Christmas, I had several longer windows. Then I'll get a little tiny cold, but it only lasts for like, really I'll feel a cold coming on at night and then I'll be like, oh, I feel like I'm coming out with a cold. I'm just going to go into bed now. And then I wake up in the morning and I'm fine. It never even fully materializes. So I did get Covid in 2021. Fasting did not prevent me from getting it. But, you know, my body, I listened to my body while I was sick. My body cleared it out.

Incredible.

You don't need to do a 72 hour fast for that. No.

Okay, good. And in terms of autophagy, is there a point? So let's say someone's doing a 14 hour fasting window. Is that enough to get the body to go into autophagy or is there a point that we must hit in terms of hours? Really?

Great, great question. Because there's so much confusing information out there. Like you'll hear people say, oh, you, you like the apps, for example, the fasting apps have all these different things that are happening at different times. That is not what's necessarily happening, y'. All.

That is an estimate based on who knows what. But your body could be doing something completely different at that time. So autophagy is not like an on off switch. You know, when you think of a light switch, on, off, on off, lights on, lights off. Autophagy is not like that. Autophagy is more like a dimmer switch. You ramp it up, it turns back down. Many things cause autophagy to be increased. Exercise is one of them. Black coffee is another. So if you're exercising and you're having your black coffee and you're fasting clean and you're metabolically flexible, you'll probably have increased autophagy earlier in the fast than somebody who's on day 14 and they've never fasted before. So I don't want anybody to worry about that. We're not trying to aim for maximum autophagyou want to settle into an intermittent fasting lifestyle. That feels like a lifestyle, something that you can keep doing and know that your dimmer switch is ramping things up. Good things are happening, then you're going to eat. It's going to ramp it back down. You don't need to worry about the time or looking at an app or saying, I got to make it to 18 hours or I can't eat yet at 1759. I can't get. I can't do it. No, just eat. You don't have to be that regimented because all those things are estimates. And our body doesn't just, you know, bam, bam, bam, do things on a timeline. So anybody who tells you, if someone gives you an answer like this is when autophagy starts, don't listen to what they're telling you because that's really how you work. Yeah. Yeah.

And I guess for me, I was about a month in to fasting and I had a best friend's wedding and it was going to just mess with my window. And I just thought, you know what? Stuff it. I'm going to go there and I'm going to eat the good food and I'm going to have a night and I'm not going to worry about it. And then tomorrow I'm just going to get back on the boat and do the same thing that I've always been doing with my fasting. So is it okay to be a little flexible when things come up?

Yeah, that's life. You know, you want to be flexible because you're going to live your life. And that being said, when it comes to intermittent fasting, I talked about being metabolically flexible and flipping that metabolic switch so that the fasting feels good. If you're too flexible, you can get to the point where you're trapped in the hard part. The first 14 days that you felt imagine, you never get beyond that because you're too inconsistent. That actually explains how I first did intermittent fasting. I talked about how 2014 is when I really started and never stopped. I dabbled in it from 2009 to 2014, all the while getting bigger and bigger because I never gave it enough time. I might would try it for like two days and then I would have a weekend and I would stop and then I wouldn't do it again. A couple weeks later I'd be like, oh, I'm going to try it again. So I was always living in the hard part. It wasn't until I started in 2014 and then never quit. That doesn't mean I haven't opened early. I went to San Francisco in August of last year to visit my son and his wife. My husband went with me.

Took the red eye back. I don't know what I was thinking. We traveled all night long. I swear I think I had a 24 hour eating window. I didn't have a 24 hour fast. I had a 24 hour eating window because of just the way that, you know, we ate normally in San Francisco. And then we're getting on the plane, it's like midnight. I'm like, I'm really, really hungry. I'm normally sleeping through the hard part of the fast. But I was awake and I was like, well, I'm really hungry, so I'm going to eat. I'm not going to like forced myself to feel miserable. Then we're sitting in Atlanta waiting on our next flight. And there for hours, I'm like, I'm going to have a delicious breakfast in Atlanta.

I love it.

Then I got back home and about midday I was like, all right, I'm going to stop now. And I just closed my 24 hour eating window and didn't eat again until the next day. And then I had about a 24 hour fast just because that's how it worked out from one day to midday the next day. So it's just, you just suit your life with it. I didn't fall off the wagon. I didn't cheat, I didn't quit. I just, huh, this eating window is really, really long. That's okay.

I love it. And there's a couple things I hear that I want to just highlight for the listener. One, let's not get into calorie counting. Like, there's no need for that. Two, your window can be whenever you want it to be. It doesn't have to be from 6pm to midday. It can be whenever you want it to be to fit in with your schedule. And we want to avoid anything sweet or tangy. We want to stick to the water. Black coffee, regular tea, keep it simple. So if somebody wants to get started, could they start today with that information?

They absolutely can. You absolutely can start with that. Making sure you're nailing the clean fast is the most important thing. Don't put anything in your water to make it taste better. People just really think they need all that mouth entertainment. You know, they're used to the water enhancers and the Powerade drinks and all that. You just, you want it to be boring. The fast is boring. Boring. Drinking your black coffee, drinking your plain tea, drinking your water. Boring, boring, boring. If it's, you know, tantalizing your taste buds, you don't need it. Save that for your eating window. But when your window opens, you're going to have the foods that sound great and that make you feel great. Now over time you're going to probably find like I have that you gravitate towards really nutritious foods. That shocked me when I first started. I was eating what you would probably call the standard American diet. I was not eating healthy foods. My palate was like, you know, a college freshman boy as far as what, what foods I wanted to eat. I liked fast food. Not anymore. Now I really love vegetables. That's what I crave. I want to eat beans. I want to eat lots of, lots of delicious as plant foods. I'm not completely plant based either, but I've, I've kind of gravitated that way just because, you know, like we went out to a really nice chop house a few weeks ago and they had, they're known for their steaks. And I was like, I don't want to eat a big steak at this time of night. That doesn't even sound good. So I had a beet salad, it was golden beets and red beans and a bowl of soup. Then we had bananas foster.

But they do right at the table side. And neither of us had nontrike. My husband does intermittent fasting too. He has a longer window than me. He has about an eight hour eating window every day. He never needed to lose weight, but he's a scientist. He has a PhD in medicinal chemistry. So he just started living the lifestyle because he became sold on the health benefits. And he also watched me get healthier and healthier. You know, you couldn't argue with that. Suddenly sickly gin is healthy. Never going to the doctor for sick visits. And he's like, well, I think I want some of that.

And your energy just is beaming. For anybody that's watching this on video, if you're not just listening on audio, you've got an energy irradiance. You're beaming with lots of it. So obviously it does work for you really well.

Yeah, and I'm in the fasted state. I haven't eaten since yesterday and I feel amazing. And so I'm gonna Go home and make dinner. And I usually finish eating by about 7.

Amazing.

I want you to go home and get a good dinner and good feed. But I want to just ask you a couple more questions. One was for the person who feels like I'm alone, and I quit on myself. When I try new things, I like to be around other people. I do know you've got a community, so what would the community look like for them, and how might it support them?

Well, that's a great question, and you're right. Having community makes such a difference. You know, I talked about how I dabbled with intermittent fasting from 09 to 14, and it never could stick. I didn't understand the science. So many problems, Wasn't giving it time. But the time that it did stick was when I started in 2014. And at that point, there were Facebook groups for things. And so I joined different Facebook groups, and suddenly, oh, there are other people doing this. It's not just me, because people in my daily life thought I was crazy. Oh, Jen's doing another one of her crazy things again. You know, like, no, I had some friends. You know, eventually, as I started to lose the weight, people around me were like, what is that crazy thing you're doing again? But I started my Facebook communities, which I no longer have because we left Facebook. But the thing about being in a community of people, you know, Weight Watchers has been around for decades. And the reason people keep going back to Weight Watchers is not because their plan works so great, because if it did, no one would ever need to go back because they would just lose the weight and then be done. But people keep coming back because of the community, having the community and the support. The biggest strength of Weight Watchers has always been the community feature of it. And so that is really. That is my role right now. You know, I'm not a doctor. I'm a retired elementary school teacher who does podcasts. I'm a teacher. But my strength is in helping people.

Develop an intermittent fasting lifestyle that works for them, and so that they feel empowered to craft the lifestyle that's doable and that makes them feel good. So in our community, we've got people from all over the world. We run at about 5,000 people, give or take. People come, people go, but people come back. They're like, I didn't think I needed the community, so I left. Well, I'm back because I do need the community. So, you know, we have people who might have been doing intermittent fasting for a while. Then they have A stressful life event, and for whatever reason, things get out of control. But then they come back and they're like, here I am. I remember how great I felt. And we're there to welcome you. The reason I love Facebook is it felt very toxic. I know. Have you been. Been in any Facebook groups lately?

100%. Like, yeah, we've got a community has like, our little village has a community Facebook group. And some of the comments in there, I'm like, this can't be real.

It's absolutely crazy. Like, I live at a beach community and we got a new pier and the pier has been a while building. And all people are like, yay, the pier is open. And other people are like, it's too expensive to park at the pier. That pier is really ugly. I liked the old pier and I'm like, y' all just shut it. Stop it.

I agree.

But now imagine you're in a. In a health and wellness Facebook group. Things. It was. Anyway, let's just say in our community, it's. It's. It's a very small amount to join and it's. I wanted it to be affordable, but, you know, 9.99 US a month keeps out those people that are going to come and complain about things.

That's amazing, though, how affordable and accessible.

9.99Amonth, US. And, you know, you can cancel it at any time. But, you know, a lot of people lurk. We have a lot of lurkers who just do a lot of reading in the community, but then we also have people who are really active and post every day and like to comment on the post of others. I'm there every single day. So if you join my community, you post, I will talk to you in the community.

That's incredible.

Therefore, and I. I love it. It's me getting to be a teacher, but in a different way.

Well, we'll definitely put a link in the show notes. So if anybody's on YouTube or Spotify or Apple right now, just click on it. They can go through and check out the community.

They can just find me@jenstevens.com Gin is like gin and tonic and Stevens is with a ph. Everything through jenstevens.com magic.

I love it. Yeah, please go and order a book. Order multiple books. I mean, I've got the Fast Feast repeat here. But I will be ordering your new book as well, because I want to be.

People have been really helped by it. People who had been struggling. They came back to this one and gave them that refresh that they needed.

Yeah, we all need it, definitely. Now, one last question before we wrap up. I would like you to fast forward many years into the future. You know, it's your very last day here on Earth and someone very young that you love comes into the room and they ask you a question. They ask you, jen, how do I go about leading my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

Oh, that's a beautiful question. Gosh, I could talk about that in so many different ways. But just, I guess I would say don't worry about everyone else, worry about yourself. You are only in charge of yourself and the way you respond to things and what you do in the world. And so there are always going to be people around you, no matter what you're doing, who think it's the wrong thing. Literally no matter what what they're going to think it's the wrong thing. And so you just have to control what you're putting out into the world and treat people with kindness, with love and respect. Kind of like running an elementary school classroom. The things we want to foster in the classroom is really just good life skills. And you just also don't interpret people negatively. Someone's doing something, just let them do what they're doing. You don't have to take all the negative interpretations of, oh, what do they mean? What are they saying? No, you just live your life unapologetically, putting out the energy that you would like to get back. And you will get that back from most people, not everybody, because some people, you can't control them anyway, so you just stay true to yourself.

That's amazing. Thank you for that beautiful advice. I know there'll be a lot of listeners right now thinking that's exactly what I needed to hear today. So thank you very much and I do believe we will reconnect again in the future. I would like to to connecting with you in about a year or two to let you know how my intermittent fasting journey has gone and served me. And it's certainly been good so far. I'm on the journey, going to get your other books and dig deep into them. But I just want to say a heartfelt thank you for creating the space today.

Well, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Absolute pleasure.