What Strategies Can Help Boost or Potentiate Fasting Results?

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What strategies can help boost or potentiate fasting results? This is jj Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert and fitness hall of famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Kaysen from Facebook asks what strategies can help boost or potentiate fasting results. Hey, it's JJ and I've got intermittent fasting expert Cynthia Thurlow with me now. Her TEDx talk on intermittent fasting. It's been viewed over 8 million times. So yes, she's a bit of an expert on this subject. In fact, she's my go to expert on this subject. She loves to travel and she's a voracious reader. She reads four to five books at once. Plus, like me, she's a total boy mom. She's got two human ones, although she's got two canine ones too. I've got Daisy girl. You know, she'll be right back to answer this question, so stay with us.

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I love this question. So if you've been doing intermittent fasting for a while, I think at the Bare Bones Basics you want to make sure that you've got the sleep, the stress management, the nutrition piece dialed in. And then on top of that, I always encourage women to switch up their fasting regimen. So if you've been doing a 16, 8, 16 hours fast with an 8 hour feeding window for years and years and years, guess what? Your body gets acclimated. That's why it's important for us to not eat the same foods every day, to not exercise the same way every day. That's why it's critically important to change our fasting patterns day to day, week to week, month to month. And so the first thing that you can do is integrate doing a 24 hour fast. If you've already, you know, gotten through fat adaptation, you know, your, your body is fueled on fats as a fuel source as opposed to carbohydrates. You feel good. I would incorporate it one 24 hour fast a week. And it's not nearly as hard as people anticipate it will be. Or if you've been doing 16 hour fasts, go to 20 hour fast, or if doing an 18 hour fast, go to a 22 hour fast. That's number one. So you want to vary the fasting windows and feeding windows. Number two, I always think about the fact that there are ways to integrate herbs and supplements into your diet that can help kind of boost the benefits of autophagy, which is one of those key benefits where we're scavenging up disease and disordered cells. And I think it can be hugely beneficial to consider supplements like berberine. And it doesn't have to be on a daily basis. Maybe you've had a big Dinner you've overindulged. Berberine can help with insulin sensitivity. We know that it can, when taken during a fasting episode, it can help boost some key nutrients in our body that require some support while fasting. You know, there's sirtuins and AMPK and things like that. I also think about just the ability to, you know, consume polyphenol rich foods. So green tea, black tea, coffee, we know they boost fat oxidation and fat oxidation means boosting, you know, using up fat as a fuel source as well as the polyphenols are really helpful, helpful. And they can also potentiate the benefits of being in autophagy when you're fasted. So I think about that and then I also think about the fact that it's important to try different types of fasts. And so I learned a technique through Dr. Daniel Pompa and it is a variation of fasting where you do five days of your normal range of fasting, whether that's 16, 18 or 20 hours a day, and then you incorporate one 24 hour fast a week and then you incorporate one day where you really are not doing a very short or tight feeding window. And it's, it's like a 12 hour feeding window. And what that does, you know, between the 24 hour fast, which I indicated is good just for variety, what that feeding day, that refeeding day is doing, you're either going to up your protein or up your carbohydrates. I personally prefer upping my protein. We're kind of reminding our bodies that we're not starving, we're pushing ourself out of ketosis, out of this fat adaptation, we're kind of pushing ourselves out of it. And then the following day we'll go back to our normal fasting pattern. And so I've come to find this is a great strategy for people that are dealing with plateaus. If they're frustrated and they're saying, I'm just not getting results, I always look at it that way, that there are other things to do. And then lastly, another strategy that can be helpful is changing up what you're eating. I think for many people, they think that keto or going low carb is a be all end all. It's that or nothing. And I just remind people that sometimes you might want to do a couple weeks of carnivore, sometimes you might want to do a couple weeks of higher portions of healthy fats and lower or moderate protein. And that can look like a ketogenic diet, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. And so I encourage people to change things up. You may go through a week and just say I just want to focus on eating vegetables and that's okay too. I would just encourage everyone not to be I always say monogamy is good, but food monogamy is not good. So we don't want to eat the same exact foods every single day over and over again. That can definitely help boost results.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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