Intermittent Fasting: the Ultimate Guide for Men and Women!

Let's get into this. So fasting and the brain.

Yeah.

Yeah, where do we start?

And you know what my chronic statement is, is that if people come to fasting to lose weight, happy you're here, but I'm going to ask you to stay for the brain changes.

I love this.

So the first thing to realize, and I'm sure, I mean, I know I'm speaking to the master here, but your brain needs 50% glucose for fuel and 50% ketones.

Yeah.

It has this other fuel source. So the biggest thing that I think about fasting is that when you put yourself in a fasted state, you are producing low microdoses of ketones. And these ketones will go up into the brain and provide it the fuel that it needs. Now, I think we've been coming in through, for ketones, in the wrong door. We've been going in through like the ketogenic diet. I'm saying, let's just take everything you eat, compress it into a specific eating window, leaving longer space for fasting, you're going to create ketones in that fasting window, and now you're providing the fuel source that your brain needs, at least 50% of it. And then when you eat, you can go into all the brain foods, you can go into all the things that we know will nourish it from another angle. And now you've, you've brought the best of both worlds together.

I love that. What are some of the misconceptions that you find the community has, or people in general and the public has about fasting?

Here's the biggest one that's showing up lately, and people are really reacting strongly to it, is I believe that fasting is for everyone. I really believe that the misconception is that fasting is this optional state that we maybe decide to try if we want to lose weight or we want more energy, or maybe we heard about the brain power like we were just saying, and that it's sort of like a diet. It's like, yeah, that sounded like a really cool thing I should do. I think of it like sleep. You cannot go your whole life without sleep. And just like you expressed on my podcast, you need sleep for so many brain functions that will happen while you're sleeping. If you are not fasting, you are missing out on a massive healing experience for your body and your brain. It is not optional in my book.

Yeah, it's not even optional. It's a must. Where does somebody start?

Well, okay, so interesting. You start with food. So if I'm going to assume, if I'm talking to somebody on the Western American or standard diet, where highly processed oils, refined flours, toxic ingredients, all of that, as you know, is creating brain inflammation, but it's also making your sugar-burning metabolism really, really dysfunctional and sluggish. So let's just change that. Let's change it to 3 different foods that you are gonna focus on. You're gonna eat healthy oils. So good oils, not bad oils. These are like your olive oil, your MCT oil, coconut oil, All of those are the healthy oils. The bad ones are canola, cottonseed, corn oils. I list them all in the book. So let's switch your oils.

Okay.

Second thing, let's switch your carb source. So the whole world's gone like low carb, and I'm not saying go low carb. I'm saying go eat carb that has fiber in it. So that is anything that's come out of the earth. So I call it nature's carbs. Just anything that doesn't have a label on it. An apple, greens, like a potato. Anything that came from the earth is nature's carbs.

Okay.

And then the third one is just get rid of the toxins. Get rid of the Diet Cokes and the synthetic ingredients and the red dyes and all of that that's going into our food system. If we make those 3 changes, then fasting becomes so effortless. And your next step then becomes to start looking at your food every day as you have a fasting window and you have an eating window.

Hmm.

It's not like you're gonna get up and just eat all day. You're gonna make a conscious decision in the moment when that eating window opens. We'll use today as an example. I got up, I started writing this morning. I was in a highly creative space. I went and moved my body around 10:30. I went and made a bunch of calls while I was walking. All of that was in a fasted state. And then I came here at noon, right before I came here, I broke my fast. And I broke it with protein, really high protein so that I can keep my brain fueled. And that's all I've had today is, well, I guess, and then I had a salad, a salad with protein. So now my eating window's open. So now I would eat until I eat dinner, and then I shut that window down again.

And have you found there's a certain amount of hours for that eating window and that Fasting window, that in terms of the maximum return or—

Yeah, so the most, the most, yeah, the most common research was done out of cell metabolism on what they call 16:8. So 16 hours of fasting, 8 hours of eating. So your eating window would be 8 hours. So that would be like you open your eating window up at noon and it closes down at 8, and you can eat throughout that whole time. You get to decide how often you want to eat.

Got it.

But then once you shut that eating window down, now you're not even drinking, you're not doing any— water can go in, coffee the next morning, but you're not raising your glucose.

Okay, so coffee is okay?

Coffee is okay, yeah.

Is there a difference? I know the answer to this because we've chatted about this for females and males.

Yeah, so this part's really interesting because when we look at fasting, it is creating a hormonal change to one of the major hormones in our body called insulin. And insulin is what actually will affect our sex hormones. So insulin affects estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. So the— if you want to balance your sex hormones, doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman, the best thing you can do is get yourself insulin sensitive. Understand that first. But in order to balance these hormones by balancing insulin for a man, that is a 24-hour Cycle. So you all are run off of testosterone. Testosterone comes in maybe 15, every 15, 20 minutes, you get a pulse of testosterone. Testosterone goes up into the brain and converts to estrogen. So you only have one hormone to think about, and you have to think about it in terms of it in 24 hours.

Got it.

We have 3. We have estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. That those hormones are all produced From our ovaries. And when we go into menopause, the adrenals kick in and start producing some of that. And so, there's no conversion in the brain. It's all happening in the body. Now, there's communication from the brain and it's happening in a 28, 30-day period.

Okay.

So, we've got to honor our hormonal cycles as women. And if we don't do that, then now we start to tank our hormones in the fasting process.

Does that inform That hormonal expression over those 4 weeks, does that inform what behaviors those, like, week 1, 2, 3, do you—

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So estrogen, like, if you look at a woman's cycle, day 1 through day 10, estrogen is coming in. That estrogen stimulates dopamine, serotonin, like we talked about, acetylcholine, oxytocin, BDNF. So for women, when estrogen's coming in, We're going to be much more outgoing. We're going to be more— we're going to be a lot happier. We're going to be able to hold on to information.

It's so important for relationships, right?

Right.

Yeah. I hope just everyone's listening to this in general. But, you know, you have— you have— if you're living with, with a woman.

Yeah.

Right. And it would explain, you know, certain moods and behaviors and—

Yeah. And why she seems like one person at one part of the month and then another part of the month she's completely different.

Okay. So those first 10 days after her cycle.

So day 1 is the day her period starts.

Okay.

And then estrogen will build. And you'll notice as she gets closer to that day 10, she's much more outgoing because she's neurochemically locked and loaded. You can fast during that time. That's as much as you want. If you want to go on a 3-day water fast, women can do a lot during that time because estrogen is very forgiving of cortisol.

Okay.

So estrogen, if cortisol comes in, like you work out really hard, you fast a lot, estrogen is going to be okay.

Got it.

Now, during your ovulation period, day 11 through day 15, when an egg is actually released, this part is just crazy to me. Estrogen is at her peak. She's not going to get any higher because she has to peak for that egg to release. But then testosterone comes in. So check this out. We only get testosterone for this 5-day period during ovulation. We don't really get it the rest of the month.

Hmm. Where guys are getting a hit every X amount of minutes.

Right. This is going to be the height of our motivation because testosterone is motivation and drive. And then we have estrogen during this time. So we're very creative. We can use both. Estrogen helps us use both hemispheres of our brain. And then we get a little bit of progesterone during that time. So we're calm. If a woman was trying to become limitless with her brain, Ovulation's the time to do it.

I love that. What happens after day 15?

Okay, then after 15, then you get a— the hormones crash. So a lot of women coming out of ovulation can— don't feel super great. They just kind of go down.

And what would your recommendation be for somebody in that situation?

Well, first, mind that week before. So the week before a woman's cycle is really important to do differently. So you got to bring stress down. So That's the first thing. Second thing, you got to bring glucose up, which is really different, right?

Right.

Because estrogen wants you to bring glucose down. Progesterone wants you to bring glucose up. And she needs more glucose to be able to fully come into her glory that week before. So, this is why the keto diet fasting did not do well for women the week before their cycles, because there wasn't enough glucose there for progesterone to appear. So, but check this out. You talk to any woman, what does she crave the week before her period? What is the week— what do you crave the week before your period? Chocolate.

Okay.

You crave chocolate and you crave carbohydrates. And you don't crave fruit. You crave breads and pastas and things like that because your body's saying, give me more glucose, bring the glucose up. You need chocolate because it has magnesium in it and magnesium will help to to support progesterone. So this is the most fascinating thing to me is every time I teach this to a woman, the response I get is that intuitively makes sense. That's how I feel.

Yeah.

But we've been doing the same diet, the same exercise, the same behaviors all month long, not adapting to the changes of these hormones. And that is why it's so important to get just something as simple as you crave different things at different times of the month. You should fast differently. You should exercise differently. You should socialize differently at different times of the month. Understood that, everything would feel right for you. I absolutely promise you.