[Bonus Episode] Intuitive Fasting with Dr. Will Cole

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The big benefits of intermittent fasting. Let's roll through some of them because I keep thinking if this was a pill, you know, like, could you imagine.

You know, it would be the wonder pill. If it wasn't built for them, it would sell out and be prescribed for everybody.

Hey, it's JJ and welcome to Ask the Health Expert. But this isn't just any old Ask the Health Expert session. This is your bonus session. Yes, it's the weekend and because it's the weekend, we are going to take some time with an amazing expert. So be on the lookout for these.

Saturday Ask the Health Expert bonus sessions.

Where we're going to go deep into an amazing subject with an incredible expert to give you actionable items that you.

Can put into your life.

Hey, J.J. here with a bonus deep dive. Ask the Health Experts. Yep. I'm bringing you some bonus episodes because some of these people have got so much stuff to unpack that I want to give them extra time. And Dr. Will Cole is one of those. He is back with us now. You might remember him from when he came on and talked about ketotarian or the inflammation spectrum. Well, his next book is is I was going to say just as. But it's just the perfect, perfect, perfect companion really, to Keto Taren. He's going to be talking about intuitive fasting and we are going to be deep diving into the benefits of intermittent fasting and what it means to be metabolically flexible. So we're going to dive into that. That's a subject that comes up over and over. I think the questions I get asked the most now are about fasting and ketogenic diets. So we have you covered here. We're going to talk about why you want to make sure that you are a hybrid, that you can burn fat, that you can burn sugar, that you can burn ketones. So who is my buddy here? Dr. Will Cole, if you haven't heard him on one of the podcasts before. You may want to go back into the catalog and listen to these episodes. He is amazing. He's a leading functional medicine expert. He consults people all over the world via webcam. He is like so ahead of his time. Time. I'm sure when the pandemic hit he was like, you know, he was so, so already used to doing all this. Had been for 10 years. Lives in Pittsburgh. He's one of the top 50 functional medicine and ingrave medicine docs in the nation named that and works a lot with Mind Body Green. He's also co hosting the Goop Fellows podcast and Keto Talk and he's starting a new one, the Art of Being. Well, you'll want to look for that. He specializes in investigating underlying factors of chronic disease and customizing a functional medicine approach for thyroid issues, autoimmune conditions, hormonal balances, digestive disorders, and brain problems. And again, his new book is out Intuitive Fasting. And I was like, oh, you got to come on, we've got to unpack this book. And this is a super interesting interview. Again, we're talking fasting. We're talking what happens when you do chronic caloric restriction. We're talking about how you become metabolically flexible. All the things you want to know most about. So stay with me. We will be right back.

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You to suspicious texts, emails, and deep fake videos. Learn more@mcafee.com online protection. All right, Dr. Wilco, welcome back. So excited to talk about this new book.

Oh, thanks so much for having me, jj. It's always great talking and. Yeah, thank you.

Well, you're always doing such super cool stuff, Will.

Thank you.

Yeah, yeah. And this is no different. My gosh. First of all, the title of your book, Intuitive Fasting. So good. Explain what you mean.

Yeah. So these are all ripple effects of me talking to people via webcam 10 hours a day. And when you talk about this stuff as long as I have, I mean, as you know this. But for people that don't know, I started one of the first functional medicine telehealth clinics over a decade ago. So for 10 hours a day, Monday through Friday, that's what I'm really talking about. So a lot of these concepts and ideas just are born out of me seeing these amazing tools, better people's lives, and move their labs in the right direction, move the quality of life in the. In the right direction. And then it's just a matter of how do we educate people on this beyond just the clinical side of things. So as a lot of. Part of. A lot of my job is educating people and putting it in ways that they can understand. And I love writing, too. So intuitive fasting was just born out of that and this concept that I kept seeing online of intuitive eating. And we've heard about that over the years, and it sounds nice, right? Intuitive eating. And, And. But what does it actually mean? Because if you're one of my patients, when they're first meeting me at their initial consult, if they're in the throes of chronic inflammation or hormone imbalance or blood sugar's all over the place, to ask them to eat intuitively, they would have a lot of problems doing that. Is it hangriness or intuition? Is it hormone balance or intuition? Is it inflammation or intuition? Because stress eating is not intuitive eating. Emotional eating is not intuitive eating. Insatiable cravings is not intuitive eating. Right.

I know. I think of that with virgin diet. It's like, okay, well, if you're. Is Intuitive eating, like letting your cravings lead you, because I know where they lead you and it's not a pretty place.

No. And you all that is proverbial noise. On a physiological level it is, it's. You cannot hear amidst the scream and the noise that still small voice of your intuition. So I'm all for having intuitive eating, but let's have the, let's put in the work and show up for our health to get to that place. And metabolic flexibility is fertile ground for authentic intuitive eating. So when I called the book Intuitive Fasting, it on a superficial level, it was a play on words of intermittent fasting, the prefix int, but intermittent fasting or intuitive fasting. So this dichotomy or paradox of how the heck could fasting ever be intuitive. But when you get metabolic flexibility, you'll be able to fast intuitively and eat intuitively because you'll know what your body loves and what your body hates. So it's all the stuff that we do with patients in functional medicine that I just wanted to educate people how amazing the body is when you do implement these tools. And these are practical things. And specifically with intermittent fasting or time restricted feeding, which is the specific type of fasting that I talk about in the book, it is completely free. And when you start implementing these tools, the body is so cool. And Paracelsus, one of the fathers of medicine that I talk about at length in the book, we all, we all know about Hippocrates, but Paracelsus, lesser known guy, but he was the father of toxicology, he was known as the Martin Luther of medicine because he was reforming medicine. He called fasting. The physician within, which I think is so beautifully put, is it's this repair mechanism, this doctor within you that, that allows your body the time to repair and get to the place of true intuitive eating.

You know what's so crazy is like fasting, when you look back historically has been this amazing therapeutic tool then. And I'm thinking it happened, I don't know, 40, 30, 40 years ago. I just remember even 30 years ago you were taught to eat every couple hours, to never skip a meal, to have a snack before bed, you know, like, like such crazy stuff. And it's like, how the heck did that happen? How did we get so afraid? Like I remember saying, if you don't eat for a day, your body's going to eat up your muscle. And you know, it's like, it's like, wow, I don't think our body's that crazy. One day you'll be like shrunk to nothing. So, so I mean, first of all, like how did we stray so far into this crazy, you know, snacking culture that drives me insane and this big fear of even missing a meal to, you know, away from this obviously therapeutic tool that we're finally coming back to.

Right? I know, and I like snacks as much as the next person. But the snacking culture or this overvaluation of snacks or this needing to snack is another thing is like, okay, if you miss a snack, you will get hangry and you will get irritable and your blood sugar's all over the place. That's a problem there. There's something going on with our meals and our metabolic flexibility if we have to snack, if we're bound by that next meal or snack. So that is kindling on the fire as I talk about in the book. I mean most people are bound and stuck in this sugar burning mode from a metabolic standpoint that, so they kindling will create light, but it's going to be short lived. And many people are stuck with the endless kindling six times a day. If they don't get the kindling on, their light's gonna go out and they get hangry and irritable and, and, and super gonna bite someone's head off. So that is all relative, right? I mean if you're stuck in that zone and if you're only in sugar burning mode, the to say there's six meals a day and have six small meals a day and snack all the time, that is relatively true. Because if you're only stuck in sugar burning mode, they know and you know, the person knows out there how they feel that they're gonna have to keep that kindling on all day long or the light's gonna go out. So if that's your only option, if kindling's your only option, if burning sugar is your only option, then okay, go have at it. But the reality is there is another option. And metabolic flexibility is the ability to burn both fat and sugar, burn both the log in the fire or fat and sugar or kindling. So what I'm advocating for people in intuitive fasting is to gain metabolic flexibility. So there's a time and place for kindling on the fire and clean carbohydrates, for example, or a smoothie or, or starches from whole foods, like there's a place for that. But I want people to be fat adapted or keto adapted so they can do a cyclical approach. They can have this, this innate knowingness of what their body Needs to feel great. So, as I mentioned earlier, metabolic flexibility, or the ability to burn sugar and fat is real fertile ground of really having proper hormonal signaling, neurotransmitter signaling, proper inflammatory pathways, proper communication between the gut and the brain. All the stuff that you need infrastructurally to be working properly. That stuff will make it very clear about what your true intuition is telling you. Meaning you'll be able to eat when you're hungry, eat until you're satiated, you'll be able to go longer without meals, you'll be able to have more energy, you'll be able to feel better in your skin. That is that grace and that lightness that I want people to find for themselves. And that's authentic, intuitive eating. Beyond the sexy sounding sound bite that is on social media, let's actually build the infrastructure that is intuition on a physiological level.

Well, and to have that and to become metabolically flexible, it reminds me of, I had a girlfriend who said this statement years ago. Her name is Dr. Diana Schwarzbein. She goes, you know, you need to get healthy to lose weight, not lose weight to get healthy. And I go, that is a really tough concept to sell, Diana. You know, like, no one wants to hear this, but the bottom line is that you've got to create that metabolic flexibility to be able to do the intuitive fasting, to be able to hear, like, if you are not metabolically flexible, how could you possibly hear the right things from your body? Because all you're going to hear is what your body's saying because it's only able to burn sugar for fuel. So it's like, I'm hungry. I know you just ate two hours ago, but I'm hungry. And you know, like that crazy stuff I knew, you know, back in the day when everything was eat, super duper low fat, I was a super low fat vegan. So guess what I was eating. Because, you know, there's really only much of one thing I could possibly be eating, which was carbs. So I was hungry all day long and I could never miss a meal or a snack. Like, I was like Pavlov's dog. And I knew I'd finally shifted that corner to metabolic flexibility when I was like, I remember one day I went, did I eat lunch? I could not remember. And I'm like, oh. Like, it was like the, the angels were singing. I was like, I did it. You know, so. So you've talked about Metab. How does someone become metabolically flexible?

Well, I think first of all, it's it's just see how, give yourself a baseline, you know, how, how, where are you starting from? Because I realized just with my patients, they're all coming in at different points of their journey. I, I want people to, I know the readers of the book will be coming at different points of their journey as well. So I started out the book with a quiz and the quiz is on drwillcole.com too.

Oh, we're gonna give, we're gonna, we're gonna put that quiz. So everyone needs to take this quiz. Like I'm gonna be bossy, a bossy person right now and say, well, you've gotta know these things. You know, it's like I think we all should be our own personal health detectives and really learn to connect the dots between how we're feeling and what's going on and really know, like, hey, you shouldn't have to eat every two to three hours. You know, if you miss dinner one night, it shouldn't be like a tragic event. So, you know, that's why these, this, this quiz, this is the thing that I want people to do is to be able to start to recognize these things. So. Jjburgeon.com Metquiz M E T quiz so that you start to become aware. First step, right. Is start to go, okay, what, what does metabolic flexibility mean? And how do I start to identify my. For myself where I am so that I know what, where the gap is here and what I need to do. Okay, back over.

You're absolutely right. Because a lot of times and I you. I'm sure I've seen this so many times with clients over the years. I've seen this with clients, patients as well. Is that just because something's common? They equate that with normal. Normalcy. Just because something's common doesn't necessarily mean it's normal.

Look at lab values, Will. They're the perfect example of normal versus ideal normals. I don't want to be normal.

Right. Ubiquity doesn't necessarily equate with, with normalcy. And I'm feeling optimal. And many people when you. The quiz is quite illuminating or something like a quiz is really illuminating because I see this aha moment with so many people when they do something like that. They say whoa, I just thought, I thought that was completely normal. I deal with that every day. And they just settle for it because they don't know there's any difference. So these sublime low grade and sometimes not low grade. Sometimes these just everyday things are. And people just push through just to get through the day. I think that's a good starting point. But then from there, what do you do about that? Metabolic flexibility. If you're struggling with fatigue and hangriness and weight loss resistance or chronic inflammation issues or digestive problems, hormonal problems, all of these different signs of metabolic inflexibility or metabolic rigidity. The way that I advocate it in the book is a flexible intermittent fasting plan and a specific type of intermittent fasting called time restricted feeding, or trf. And I'm pairing these ebbing and flowing vacillating intermittent fasting windows with a clean ketogenic diet, or ketotarian, which was my first book. But this is in many ways intuitive Fasting is a partner book with keto tarian because they're both sides of the same coin. You don't need keto tarian to read intuitive fasting. It stands on its own. But the concept is, is really a continuation of the conversation because both a clean ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting both increase beta hydroxybutyrate, or bhb, which is a ketone body, which in, in the research, in certain studies, they refer to it as the fourth macronutrient. So we have protein, fats, carbs and ketones. So it's not just a way to burn fat, which it will if you need to lose weight. If you need to become a fat burner and lose weight, that will definitely be an outcome of that. As your friend had said, you know, get healthy to lose weight, not just lose weight to get healthy. You will become more metabolically flexible, you'll become a fat burner, but it's so much more than that. So as a functional medicine practitioner, I'm so excited and geeked out by all the mechanisms that are at play when someone starts producing some of these cyclical times of ketosis. So I'm advocating in the book not to always be in ketosis, especially women, they do better with dipping in ketosis and coming back out. But that's the flexibility. And I refer to it throughout the book as this proverbial yoga class, your metabolism. When people start yoga, at least for me, when I started it, I really sucked at it. I still got to suck at it, but. But it's showing up for your body. And the more you do it, just like anything, you become more flexible and you really can sit in those positions and hold them stronger and you get more strength, you get more resilience, you get more stamina through your breaths. That's the picture I had in my mind As I was building this protocol for the book is how do you get this proverbial yoga class for your metabolism? And that's the flexibility. At the end of that yoga class you have the savasana. And that's what I had at the end of the four weeks. I have a four week plan in the book that people can cycle through the four week flexible fasting plan as much as they need to. Because that's like yoga class. We're all coming in at different points of their journey, our journey we may need longer and some people need less, but it's a tool people keep going back to. And we start with lighter, fast, then we get deeper, then we get lighter, then we go start again from lighter, moderate, fast to deeper, then back to lighter. And that is a real amazing tool and a completely free tool for people to train their body even on a cellular level. The mitochondria, the cellular energy factors will start to be build the proper infrastructure to burn fat for fuel, to get energy to produce proper ATP and the body to start to heal. As Paracelsus, that father of medicine said that physician within body's repair mechanisms will kick into gear. It's amazing to see what's possible when you give your body the chance to rest and to repair. And the autophagy pathways or the cellular recycling, the anti aging pathways, or the longevity pathways, or the stem cell activation or I could go on and on. There's so many cool things that your body's able to do when you start becoming metabolic.

We're unpacking, but you've said so many things that are so awesome. So one of the ones I want to really highlight because I think it's really important and then we're going to, we're going to pit it against something else to show the difference is I think one of the things that is so underutilized in our world is the concept of cycling through diets. And so what you talk about is like you could do this in cycles is so critical. We know this in fitness. If you look at fitness, you're taught to cross train and you're taught to take rest days. But for some reason I eat the same thing every day. I'm like, how could that be? That makes no sense. It's like, right, So I want you to think of your diet and, and gosh, Will, if I could figure out a name that wasn't lame because I think, you know, you should use a diet short term therapeutically, cycle in, use it, get effects, cycle back out. So you, you cycle in with these therapeutic like hits. And then you have your eating plan, which is a lame name for it. So I can't figure out like how you have this overall, you know, healthy eating plan that every time you're doing these cycles you learn more stuff that you and pull into it. And then you have these therapeutic things like a, a 24 hour fast or a, you know, a five day fast or whatever the, or intermittent five day intermittent fast, not full fast, but all these things that you could do to cycle in to and see how your body responds to them. And then you look at like the classic dieting technique that is, I still can't believe it's out there because we've had so many, so much evidence of the destruction it does to your metabolism. And that is this low calorie dieting that is still the predominant model for weight loss and the one that we know that if you do chronically you are going to absolutely damage your metabolism. So can we talk about the difference of your approach with this intermittent fasting cycling versus chronic caloric restriction? What happens with chronic work restriction and like why it sucks so bad, why they need to do yours?

Yeah, I mean it's. People conflate the two but they're not the same. The holidays are almost here, but there's still time to score great gifts at Dick's Sporting Goods. Find everyone's must have gifts from Nike, FP movement, Adidas and more. Need your gifts fast? Stop by your local Dick's or shop Dick's.com for fast shipping, curbside pickup or same day delivery. Every holiday starts at Dick's. I mean chronic caloric restriction or like chronically forever lowering your calories is not the same as intermittent fasting. And there's many different ways to do intermittent fasting. And I highlight all different types within the studies in the book. I talk about the different studies within the book and they're all looking at different kinds. But the commonality between many of them is that they are not restricting calories. And if they are, it's not intentional. It's just because if you have a tighter eating window, people just tend to eat slightly less. So it's not a huge caloric deficit, it's just a slight deficit which can have benefits there. But the goal is not to chronically lower calories. There's just a cyclical time of less calories. So it is a real instinctive, intuitive way to eat because you're not changing how much you're eating. You are eating until satiety. But within specific Windows. So when certain studies were done that looked at both groups, both one group ate throughout the whole day, and the other group had specific eating windows and fasting windows, but they both ate the same amount of calories. The ones that had the eating and fasting window saw better improvements in their health. They saw decreased inflammation. They saw improved hormonal balance. They saw increased satiety. All these markers that we want on labs that I run on for patients, all that stuff is improved. So it's that yin and yang. It's that balance. So eating requires a lot of energy of our body and a lot of work. So this physician within, this fasting mechanism that we can tap into by giving our body just little moments of break throughout the day really allows these repair mechanisms and healing mechanisms to upregulate and to activate because they're lying dormant for so many people, because they're always snacking, always eating, and then they're not sleeping well at night, so they're never fully repairing. And through just some slight pivots in people's lifestyle choices, they can really take their health to the next level. So that's really what the difference is. It's not about lowering calories. As I say in the book and as many of us advocate for in the health space is our body is not a calorie counter. It's not a calculator. It's a biochemistry lab. And fasting is a way to optimize that beautiful chemistry lab that is our metabolism, because it really shifts the way your hormones are signaling, shifts the way your neurotransmitters are signaling, and allows that physician within to repair all those things and optimize. Optimize all those things.

Perfect.

It's such a great point, and I would love to hit home one more time because you sort of started to rattle through them. And just one more time, slowly, what are, like the. Some of the key benefits? Because I think so many people look at intermittent fasting and think, oh, I want to go on this to lose weight. To me, that's a side benefit of becoming more insulin sensitive. But that's like one of the. That's. That's a side benefit. Like the big benefits of intermittent fasting. Let's roll through some of them. Because I keep thinking if this was a pill, you know, like, could you.

Imagine, you know, it would be the wonder pill. If it wasn't pill form, it would be. It would sell out and be prescribed for everybody. Yeah. So let's go from the head to toe. If we could, in my Mind like let's do it. Yeah. So when your body's producing beta hydroxybutyrate and ketones and there's two different levels of this, right? I mean not everybody when they're fasting is always in ketosis. So ketosis is just one aspect of this healing, this physician within. But let's start there. Beta hydroxybutyrate passes through the blood brain barrier and can provide our brain clean fuel. So anybody that's struggling with fatigue or brain fog or even things like anxiety and depression, I mean there's a whole field of research looking at the these pro inflammatory cytokine activity of neuroinflammation. Basically how is inflammation impacting how people's brain works? So beta hydroxybutyrate is a great way to lower, lower neuroinflammation. So it lowers these pro inflammatory cytokines like NF kappa B and the NLRP3 inflammasome, the COX2 pathway. There's a lot of basically anybody dealing with chronic inflammation and that's not just in the brain, that's systemically. Uh, beta hydroxybutyrate is an endogenous anti inflammatory. It's a natural anti inflammatory and it increases pro antioxidant pathways like NF Kappa B, the NRF2 pathway, basically pro health, anti disease, pro antioxidant pro healing pathways. It's increasing huge.

I want to throw one thing out too, just for everybody listening is it is emerging like an emerging area that I think in another five years will be completely out there of. You know, we think of it in brain injury, but depression, bipolar, like in all the different areas that you start to look at with brain, whether it's dementia, whether it's mood disorders. Consider the impact of neural inflammation. It's a huge piece of it. So this is massively important, massively important.

And even also in the brain. If we're just, and we're just in the brain right now, this state of fasting also increases BDNF brain derived neurotropic factor. So our body's ability to actually make new neurons or neuroplasticity is enhanced and supported with this fasting state. And then if we go out of the brain and just systemically that's also doing the same thing systemically, it's systemically lowering inflammation, it's systemically increasing antioxidant pathways, it's increasing autophagy. So for people that are not aware of that, it's, it's our cellular recycling. If you break that word down autophagy, it's self eating, it's all the healthy cells gobbling up all the dysfunctional cells. So it's in a way these housekeeping mechanism, house cleaning mechanism in the body that we don't ever utilize and leverage because we're constantly doing things that suppress autophagy. So by supporting your body by intermittent fasting, flexible intermittent fasting, we can really support these autophagy pathways. So it's fantastic to support anti aging mechanisms, longevity mechanisms, so all of that supported there. And one of the studies that I'm exploring in the book is the microbiome component too, which is fascinating because your listeners know this. But for people that are new, our gut is home to trillions of bacteria. But we know that the microbiome, it's this massive microbiome metropolis of trillions of different colonies or neighborhoods of bacteria. But there's an actual circadian rhythm of the microbiome. So researchers have found that throughout the day, like in the morning, there's different colonies of bacteria that are higher and then the evening the other colonies are higher. So this is ebb and flow of the circadian rhythm, just like a hormone, just like cortisol rhythm. So it is profound. But if we're constantly eating food, constantly snacking, constantly eating inflammatory foods that disrupt the microbiome and impact gastrointestinal health, we're never allowing our gut to repair. So fasting has been shown to actually reset the microbiome circadian rhythm. And this is profoundly important, not just from a digestive standpoint, which there is compelling studies to show that fasting can really repair inflammatory bowel issues or IBS, but also because this is 75, 80% of the immune system. When you're looking at immune mediated issues, inflammatory problems, specifically which inflammation is a product of the immune system by resetting the microbiome is way more than just just digestion. It is inflammatory issues are improved and other immune mediated issues are improved.

So if someone could listen to that and not say sign me up, then I, then I want you to listen again. And you know an important thing here because it might sound like, well, that sounds painful. Now I remember, you know our mutual friend Dr. Joel Kahn. I was sitting at Expo west talking to him and Dr. Jeff Bland and Joel goes, hunger equals younger. And I went, that is an amazing reframe because I think for so many of us we've been taught that, in fact I even remember this. Well, this probably before your time. But you were not supposed to let yourself get hungry, right? You needed to eat before you got hungry, which I think is the craziest idea ever. Like, don't ever let yourself eat before you get hungry. And so the reframe really is. It's like, don't eat till you're really hungry, be drinking a lot of water, green tea in between meals, and reframe that hunger, which first of all will pass, by the way. So just, you know, relax. But hunger equals younger.

I love that.

You know. Right?

Yes.

A little nutty, though. Yeah, he's a good nutty. He's a good nutty. Oh, my gosh. I. Yeah, this. We won't go into the Joel Kahn stories or his book covers. So super funny guy. But just remember that as you're thinking that. But just address real quickly, you know, for someone stepping into this who might be thinking, but I'm going to get hungry.

Well, I didn't even mention the hormone side of things. So what fasting is also doing, and I'll tie it into difficult and hunger is insulin's typically high in a lot of people. Leptin, which is a hormone that our fat cells produce, is typically high. So many people have various forms or varying degrees of insulin resistance and leptin resistance and even things like thyroid resistance, too. So fasting resets all of that stuff, stuff over time. So a lot of those hormonal problems and inflammation and the gut brain axis and what's going on there and neuroinflammation, all the things that I mentioned, that is at the heart on a physiological level of metabolic inflexibility, which drives things like hangriness and cravings and a lack of resilience. And I think that that is the voice that's speaking. When someone says that sounds scary or that's hard. Well, that's like showing up to that yoga class. Anybody that's new to the gym or new to the yoga class, that first class may be a little tough, but that doesn't mean. That's like someone saying, well, working out is not for me, that's a little tough at the beginning. I'm not going to do that. And that's what I. That same recoiling that I see with something like measured, you know, flexible, intermittent fasting, it's nothing too extreme. But that initial walking into that class for your body, that's the same thing I want people to come into with walking in for their health and their metabolism. Because it may be tough at the start, but actually the way that I built the protocol, it's not too tough. And anything that you're doing, it's not for Long. It's not like you're starving yourself. This is just ebbing and flowing. It's just dipping in and dipping back out. So week one, we start with the 12:12 fasting to eating window. That is super easy. I started it off because we should do this anyway.

Everyone needs to be doing the 1212 anyway.

Exactly. It's just like baseline stuff. But I wanted to like start off with like somebody that's snacking really late at night or has no sort of awareness on their body and resting from food and all that stuff. So it's just give them a win.

So you get a win right out of the gate. Listen to this. Because hopefully if you're listening to this, you know the hard and fast rule of the 12 hour overnight fast and locking that kitchen down. You know, I swear I would love to have like these, these things that come down on your kitchen. So you cannot get in from like after dinner, you know.

Right, yeah. So 8:00am to 8:00pm or 7:00am to 7:00pm, you're allowing a couple hours before night. But I'm pairing that with the ketotarian way of eating. So you're getting the supportive blood sugar balancing anti inflammatory benefits of a ketotarian diet, which is a mostly plant based, clean ketogenic diet that is mimicking a lot of this benefits of fasting without actually fasting. So you're doing that with the 12 12. Then week two we get a bit deeper, about an 18 hour fast, like 12 to 6pm 6 hour eating window or 18 hour fast. Week three is the deepest fast. So you're only doing that every other day for week three. That is an almost OMAD approach which omad, for people that don't know it's acronym that stands for one meal a day or omad. But you're doing that every other day so it's not something that's super difficult. And then week four you're leading back out to 1212. So you're cycling through those lighter to deeper crescendoing fasting that I want people to lean and ebb and flow from. It's not, you're doing nothing. Even if it is difficult, it won't be for too long. So this macro variability and eating window variability is, allows people to have a sustainable relationship with this because it's nothing punitive, it's nothing arduous, it's something that's very accessible.

Here's the thing, it's going to be a little bit challenging at first. That's okay. We're never better than when we're challenged. Things don't, don't. You don't get great things when they're easy. You know, it's like easy sitting on the couch. So this, yes, it might be a little challenging at the first, the payoff and rewards are great and then it will get way easier and it's worth it. So here's what you're going to do. You are going to jjvirgen.com metquiz because you really need to know your starting point and I want you to learn how to, how to really see how things are impacting you. So Metquiz and I know you said, well, they don't need the ketotarian. Get them both, man. You want intuitive fasting and ketotarian. They're your success library. Use them for this. Go all in. It's the best way to go and jump into to Will's fasting group. So get in there, go playful out. You'll be blown away by the rewards. And I mean, Will, you've done your homework. You've been at this a long time and you also have just such a great way of making this super user friendly and even fun. So thank you so much for all of that.

Thank you, kind word. I feel the same way about you. So thank you. Oh, cool.

Well, I look forward to hanging out with you this year, hopefully. Fingers crossed.

Yes.

All right, well, thank you. And again everyone, jjvirgin.com forward/metquiz. All right. I hope you loved this Deep Dive episode and we will be doing more bonus episodes. Now I've got my daily Q and A. It's called Ask the Health Expert. Where me I, J.J. do some of the questions, but I also pull in super awesome people like Dr. Will Cole to answer the question questions that you throw at me on social media, whether it's JJ Virgin on Instagram, JJ Virgin on TikTok, JJ Virgin Official on Facebook. Find me. Leave your questions. We will get those answered on the Ask the Health Expert daily Q and A. And then we're going to be deep dive and doing some really awesome bonus episodes with my fantastic, brilliant friends. You want to make sure you don't miss out on those, so be sure to go to subscribetoj.com how easy is that? So you never miss an episode. Subscribe to JJ.com don't miss it.

I'll see you next time.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their Reading Lives Every week I take all things Books and Reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.