FAST THE RIGHT WAY: What To Eat & When To Eat For LONGEVITY | Dave Asprey

If you can learn the skill, and it is a skill you practice, it's a muscle, to forgive the grudges that you carry, it will make you live longer.

Set you free.

Yes.

I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really?

Yeah. Please welcome Lewis Howes.

What is the FAST that works best for you personally at this stage of your life? And what is the type of FAST that you think the general population should be considering to improve the quality of their life, to live longer, and all these things that you talk about.

If there was an easy answer to that, my book would have read like this. Step one, don't eat for a while. Step two, it's good for you. Here's a bunch of studies. Ten years after writing my first big book and releasing the Bulletproof Diet, people have lost a million pounds using intermittent fasting and Bulletproof Coffee and the other principles in that. And it stood the test of time, but I've learned a lot. And what you find is that there is not an answer for the general population because women are not just smaller men with less muscles. And so it varies. It also changes on time of life. And the most important thing and the thing that motivated me to write Fast this Way is that it's not the same every day. So I was on a big TV show in London that required me to be awake at 2:30 a.m. and fully alert with bright lights on and, you know, Being in a studio, that next morning was not the time to intermittent fast because I already had enough circadian stress. And so the deal is what's the right fast for you today and to give yourself permission to do it differently. And you know, cuz you're a pro athlete or you were you on a day when you're just, you don't have it and you say, I'm gonna go lift heavy anyway. What would happen to you?

You might hurt yourself. You might strain something. You might not have the energy to do the full thing and then. you might regret it. You might pull a muscle, who knows?

Exactly. And fasting is the same kind of a thing where you're saying, okay, what did my Oura ring tell me this morning about my readiness score? Okay, if I'm ready to go and I'm totally full of it, maybe today is one meal a day. And maybe you're gonna wake up and say, you know, on most days I just do a 14 or a 16 hour fast because that's what works really well for me. And I usually do a 16 or an 18 hour fast. Today it's around two o'clock, I had my first meal. and before that, I just had some black bulletproof coffee without even the butter and MCT because I didn't have time to put it in there because I was busy. My metabolism could handle that, but when I weighed 300 pounds, if I would have tried that, I would have been hangry and hypoglycitic and I would not have shown up the way that I expect myself to show up. So it's that kindness to yourself that says, you know what? Today I'm going to do this and if it's just not working, it's okay to say I only fasted for 12 hours, which is the minimum fast that really does anything. most people do 12 hours and don't even know it.

So, am I hearing you say that just because you say you want to intermittent fast for two weeks or for a month that you shouldn't push the fasting? If you went to bed at 2:00 a.m. for some reason, if you haven't recovered from your workouts, if you're exhausted and you're moody, that maybe you should eat breakfast or you should have a smoothie or do something to give you more energy and calories in the morning as opposed to just, well, well, I'm supposed to fast because it's going to make me live longer and kill off these dead cells or whatever, but it may be more harm if you actually don't listen to your body.

Is that what I'm hearing you say? That is exactly right. Fasting is like exercise and you don't want to overdo it, you don't want to underdo it. And what we fall into as just being humans is what I call the fasting trap. And for that, there was the keto trap. And before that, when I was a raw vegan, it was the vegan trap. And the trap goes like this. And I may be more guilty of this than most people when I look back on my life. Hey, this is good, I'll just do more of it. And that isn't the thing. The right amount is good. And many things in life have a U shape response curve or an inverted U. So what that means is if you just do a little bit, nothing happens. You do the right amount, you get tons of benefits, and if you do too much, the benefits go back down. And fasting is a stressor on the body, but it's a good stressor unless you already have enough stress. So if your girlfriend broke up with you last night, maybe a 24-hour fast today is just really not the thing to do, but maybe wallowing in a bucket of ice cream isn't the right thing to do either. And there's something in the middle there. And so when people say, How should I fast every day? I can tell you for women, the recommendations, there's a whole chapter just on the studies for women in the book.

Because there are fewer of them.

It turns out the minimum effective dose is three fasts a week, like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday. If you can do 14 or 16 hours, you'll get some benefits. And you get used to that and you say, you, know what? maybe I'm gonna do it five days a week. But I tell everyone, even, and this will make some people mad, have breakfast Saturday or Sunday. Don't have crazy ridiculous IHOP. But if you wanna have some gluten-free pancakes even, it's fine because if you have a flexible metabolism, you should be able to handle it and you want your body to know that it is in a land of plenty. You don't need all the time, but that there's always enough food. And if you push your fasts too much too often, you get an epigenetic, an environmental signal that says, Hey, There's kind of a little bit of a famine going on here and then your body adjusts in a way that isn't good for you. So it's the idea time without, time with, but you still have a sense of abundance in your tissues, which is very different than a low calorie diet, which just makes you feel like crap and want to punch people. That's not good.

So it's taking it in cycles. Let's do, I'm going to do this for two weeks, four weeks, but it's not going to be years consistently fasting. 'cause that may not be as useful to your body long term.

I think it will be years. Most people who practice intermittent fasting and learn how to do it the right way, they have more energy in the morning, the intermittent fast than when they have breakfast. Like Saturday morning, I sit down, we have a small organic farm, so we're gonna have bacon from our own pigs. It's the best bacon on the planet. I like bacon, but I look at myself, man, it's only nine. I really don't wanna eat anything right now 'cause I know that I actually have more energy if I don't eat. But I'm going to because I'm doing it for a social thing. This is family time. And I also know that I'm teaching my body, you should be able to handle this. And I do. But there's times when I look at it, I'm just not hungry even though this is a time when most people say I'd be ravenous. And it's that freedom from the voice in your head that says, if I don't eat lunch, I'm going to starve. That's the reason people do this for long term. In fact, one of the studies in Fast this Way talks about how the average person spends 15% of their thoughts about what their next next meal is. I'm like, maybe we could have that 15% back and do something better with it.

Yeah, it's more about optimizing your life and not obsessing over the brain thinking about what am I going to eat or watching media that's saying eat this fast food and you're constantly saying, well, what's next? What's next? As opposed to allowing your brain and your gut to rest for a little bit.

The brain and gut rest thing is very interesting because in the history of fasting, it's always had spiritual contexts or health contexts. And what they do is they say, well, fast for a couple days, and then on the third day, you stop caring about food, you get a lot of energy, and then you can go into this new open spiritual state. And there's several things happening there that I never would have imagined to be true. Back when the idea of skipping breakfast was something that was scary, I'm like, I don't want to do that. The first thing that happens is that when there's food in your stomach, even if it's really good food, that food is going to take energy to digest. So energy that could have gone into thinking or feeling or repairing tissues or whatever, it goes into attacking the steak you state and it breaks it down and you absorb it and then you get more energy later. But the process of doing that is an energy suck. So if you have especially a high sugar, high carb, even oatmeal kind of breakfast, well, all of a sudden all the energy that should have gone into your morning goes into your gut. and that's not where you wanted it to be. And then your blood sugar goes up, then when it goes back down, the muffin calls to you at 10:00 a.m. and you really want the muffin. And then you start expending willpower on the muffin. Meanwhile, your body is spending extra energy digesting, so you have less energy for willpower. You're probably going to eat the muffin. And it doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means that that's biology. But the second thing that happens on these longer fasts, is that you go into a state of ketosis after about a couple days of not eating anything. And ketones provide more electrons to the neurons in your brain than even glucose or sugar or carbs do, even though that's what your brain usually eats. So all of a sudden now, you get these people fasting. All the energy that would have gone to digestion is going into repairing their tissues and going into their brain, and their brain got more energy because it's burning a better fuel. and then the body says, well, if there's no food, maybe I should open up my perception and my sensors and I should become more tuned into the world around me so I could find something to eat. Now, if you say, I'm not going to eat yet, I'm going to use that openness to connect with others. I'm going to use it to connect with myself, to go for a walk in nature. You're actually in a different state. So you get all three of those from a longer fast, But the hack that I now have 10 years of experience with is that when you use MCT oil during a fast, I have very good evidence you stay fasted, but you get the ketones that would have been present after a three-day fast. And this is why people will say, okay, I'm going to do the Bulletproof Coffee thing in the morning, which I'm well known for. And there's a couple other things going on there biochemically, but one of the things is that you just got the third day of fasting feeling the morning you fasted. And this is very sustainable. I mean, there are people who have done this for 10 years now and keep doing it because they're never hungry. And just not being hungry is such a relief. I know when I was a 300-pounder, you're always hungry. You could have hunger. You're always hungry though when you're 300 pounds, right?

In the beginning? I was never hungry.

I was always craving. I didn't know there was such a thing.

Craving.

Ah, right.

What's the difference between craving and hunger?

There you go. Most people listening probably feel cravings most of the time. And craving is when if I don't eat soon, a disaster is going to happen. I really need to eat and it's an intense thing. But it turns out hunger is, I should probably eat some time in the next couple hours to perform better, but if I didn't, I'd be all right. I could go till tomorrow if I need to. So hunger is a gentle feeling. the intensity of cravings is terrible. And what people find when they learn how to intermittent fast in the right way is that they've eliminated cravings and hunger becomes a gentle presence in your life. Like, oh, it's a little bit cold in the room. Maybe I could turn the thermostat up. But if I don't, I'll be all right. And that calmness and peace that comes from it, that was what led me to write the book.

And what's the biggest mistake you've made in fasting personally in the last 10 years or mistake you've seen from other people who've tried to do fasting that it didn't work out for them?

It's falling into that fasting trap that says if something's good, more is better. Extremism of it. Extremism or even just something that worked for a little while, assuming it's always going to work. I noticed when I started writing about intermittent fasting, it's been a big pillar of the Bulletproof Diet for a long time, I think, before intermittent fasting was really cool. and then people would call me and they'd say, especially women, I felt amazing. I've lost weight. I can't believe this. Who would ever thought butter would make me not hungry? I love my life. But then they call about four weeks, five weeks later and say, you know what? I feel like my sleep quality has gone down. What's going on here? And then I say, well, did you follow the advice of cycling in and out of keto and having some carbs sometimes and not you're not pushing it. Like, well, no, I just felt so good. So I just kept doing that one thing, which was I didn't eat any carbs for long periods of time and then I added this intermittent fasting. And then, so step one is you lose quality of sleep. Same amount of sleep, lower quality. Second thing, and men usually hit this about a month after women, but men and women both get poor quality of sleep. Women will get, their cycle is less regular than it was before. something going, this is weird. I don't normally have hormonal issues, but I'm feeling it this month more than I do. And for guys, I'm waking up without a kickstand. And the third thing that happens, I was watching you process that. Yeah.

All right.

So you're waking up without a kickstand.

Because you're not having carbs and you're doing the extreme way. Is that what you're saying? Well, it's because you're over fasting. Yeah. Right.

And so the body is like, oh, it's a, it's a stressful environment. I don't really need that biological function very well because there's not enough. food. It's a famine. Right. And your cortisol levels go up. And what happens when cortisol goes up and you keep it elevated because you're not eating often enough is thinning of hair. And it happens in women and men. So, like, okay, sleep, hormones, hair in that order is what happens when you over fast. Interesting. And I've gone through times where I definitely went over keto. I went through a three-month period where I ate just one serving of broccoli a day and the rest was just like meat and all. And it was all grass-fed and very carnivore-ish, although I didn't zero veggies. And I felt amazing at first, but by the end of that, it's exactly the same as over fasting, where I'd wake up 12 times a night but not know that I woke up. And my sleep monitoring thinks that I was. And then you can even mess with your gut bacteria if you overdo it. So the deal is, look, you skip breakfast and you have lunch around noon or two, and sometimes you only have dinner, but you mix it up. And that's actually how it was in nature. But this idea of a rigid fasting schedule and you're gonna muscle through and push through, Like if you're fading, right, and I'm just not, I'm not feeling very good.

Eat some food, have some broccoli, have some vegetables, have some salad, have some, yeah.

Yeah, and it's just, it's okay. And the flip side is also true. What if you say, I'm going to have a 16 hour fast today and noon comes, like I am so feeling good. Like, you know, I'm gonna make this a 20 or a 23 hour fast.

Because I have it.

You're feeling good, you have the energy. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And like, I feel like as an athlete, you would know this better than most. Sometimes you go to the gym and you do the prescribed thing, other times like I'm gonna put, put another set in because I can and because my body's ready. If we approach fasting that way, really good things happen. And I thought it was important, I look at everything I do and I mean, because we're friends and all, you know I do cryotherapy and stem cells and all kinds of crazy stuff, right? But there's a return on investment for everything you do. And it's not based on dollars, it's based on energy. You spend energy to do something and you get energy back. Well, fasting is like, okay, you walk into the bank and you don't have an account there. And the teller's like, oh, hi, here's some money. But I didn't do anything. That's right here, here's some money. And we'll pay you interest on this later today. And then two years from now we'll pay you more interest. But I didn't open an account. I didn't put any energy into this. I was like, yeah, I'll find that. That's all right. Because with fasting, you spent no money, no time, and no energy on breakfast. So you got paid right now. You got free energy and free money and time back. and then all morning long you have less hunger and more energy than you did when you had the Pop-Tarts. And then you don't get type 2 diabetes and you have more energy and you have to buy smaller pants and all kinds of good things happen even if you're not perfect with your diet. And so this is the one thing that has the highest return on investment because you invest less than you do today.

And what do you think is the worst food to eat before you start fasting? like, what's the worst thing you could do where it's kind of doesn't matter that you fasted cuz you just had this, this and this, you know, 16 hours ago.

A bunch of fried stuff, especially like french fries.

Yeah.

Um, from a restaurant especially because they use such bad oils. And what you find from fasting is that sometimes it's effortless and sometimes you're just have gnawing hunger though. And the gnawing hunger, it's your fault. It's what you ate before the fast.

Interesting.

So in Fast this Way, I teach about these six big categories of food that are likely to cause cravings for you. And they don't all cause the same intensity of cravings, but these are foods that aren't as good as we think they are because we have anything you're going to eat has three things in it. And most nutritionists only look at two. I'm not picking on nutritionists specifically. Dietitians are even worse. I'll pick on them. These are the guys who feed you Jello with NutraSweet and Splenda. But There's calories in food and some types of popular wisdom say, well, eat food with less calories. Guys, calories are energy. Energy is what you want. And to say that you are somehow going to feel really good on a low calorie diet, it does not work. As a 300 pound guy who's lost way more than 100 pounds, I'd say I'm a 200 pound guy now, but you go low calorie, lose 20 pounds, gain 30, lose 30, gain 40. It does not work. It makes you miserable and it makes you just just cranky.

So what's the solution? What's the solution then?

Well, the solution is you actually eat enough calories and you eat the right kinds of calories. So, well, let's assume your food has some energy in it. The second thing food has, it has nutrients. So it has vitamins and minerals and stuff like that. This is good. Now, most of the time we stop there and say, okay, you should eat more of this because it has, for some reason, people say less calories and other people say more nutrients. But the third bucket is what matters. the third bucket is anti-nutrients or toxins. And it's not like any food is perfect, but some have more or less calories, some have more or less nutrients, and some have more or less anti-nutrients. And if you pretend like they don't exist, which is how most nutritional stuff is written, let's eat this because it's packed with this, ignoring the fact that you could literally have a bowl of cyanide. And if you put some vitamins in it, they say, well, it's low calorie, it's high in vitamins, you should eat that. And so I teach people in Fast this Way, Look, here's the things to look for. If you eat that, you're probably gonna have a miserable fast with low energy cravings and be cold, but if you don't eat that, you're gonna have a much easier fast. And then you start to realize, wait a minute, maybe I'm going to choose foods that don't make me hungry as soon as I finish eating them. And if you master that, even when you're not intermittent fasting, you're gonna have lunch. And instead of wanting a snack at two, I'm actually full until dinner. I just don't wanna eat, so I.

Don'T think about eating. I don't reach for the cookies. Yeah. So instead of willpower, it's just biology. It's so much easier that way. What would you say would be the top three foods if you could only have three that you would eat before a fast, whether 16 hour or 24 hour?

It would be definitely grass-fed steak. There is nothing more satiating than animal fats or butter. This stuff, it's full of nutrients as long as it's grass-fed. If it's industrial, it'll actually give you cravings. It's not good to eat industrially raised animals. So the idea that meat is good or bad, you gotta know what meat. How is the animal treated? and all that, it matters. I wish that it didn't matter. I wish you could just eat gravel, but it doesn't work. So this is something that is the most satiating. Something with a lot of soluble fiber in it. You can do broccoli if you want to. You can do some vegetables, preferably cooked. Not all vegetables are going to have the same effect on you. So I talk about things like how the nightshade family of vegetables, which have been a core part of the Bulletproof Diet, like guys, watch out for that. If you eat bell peppers, you're probably gonna feel different. than if you eat cabbage. In fact, you'll feel very different. And when I say that, most people, oh wait, I guess that might be true, but we've just never thought about it.

Different in a not feeling as good with the nightshades.

Bell peppers are in the deadly nightshade family. They're clearly not deadly, but they cause inflammation in many people, but in others they handle it pretty well. So I'm like, watch out for that. But for me, I would say, give me some vegetables, give me some steak. And then the other thing that's gonna be really good is anything with fat, dark chocolate, guacamole, things like that. A salad with a really heavy dressing with real olive oil, not the fake stuff, and with some extra MCT oil in it and some extra avocados on top. So give me the good undamaged fats, not a lot of seed oils. Give me some protein and give me some vegetables. You do that and you can cruise all day long. But if you say, oh, instead, I'm going to insert some kind of fancy raw kale salad. Kale gives a lot of people cravings. In fact, it's not very good for you at all. In fact, have you ever eaten a huge kale salad and then been, I'm so full, I'm so satisfied, I'm just.

Bursting with energy, I'm not going to.

Be hungry for four hours? No. Even if you cover it in bacon, it still doesn't work. Kale has stuff in it that pisses your body off. It really does. And it's just how it is. It doesn't taste that good either.

But even if you like the taste of it, it's not particularly a strong health There you go. And how does, from all the research that you've done, obviously you've tested this for 10 years personally, but from the research and the science, how does fasting the right way play a role in anti-aging in your life and, and other people's lives?

The number one thing fasting or intermittent fasting regularly will do. And remember, it doesn't have to be a super long one. 14 hours can start, 16 hours is good. We're not talking heavy duty, you know, living in a cave kind of stuff. and that will stop you from having insulin resistance. When you have insulin resistance, it means that insulin levels go up and your body can't hear them so they go up higher. When your insulin is higher, your all-cause mortality goes up. In other words, your chances of dying from every disease you can think of happens. What insulin resistance means is that when there's energy in your body, your cells are weak enough that they can't make good use of the energy. and fasting fixes that problem. When sugar goes up in the body, it forms something called advanced glycation end products. It basically cooks your tissues the way onions brown in a pan. And we know this from 30 years of anti-aging research about the effect of excess insulin and sugar in the body. Fasting will fix that. But on top of it, there's something called autophagy, which is a core part of the recommendations I make, which is do whatever it takes to cause your body to turn its protein digestion mechanisms back on you. Because if it's not busy eating steak and eggs or, you know, tofu, if that's what you're into, it'll turn around and go, oh, there's some extra debris, some junk inside the cells, outside the cells. I can clean that up. And if you go a little bit longer, it says, you know what? I've got enough extra enzyme activity here. I think I will take out the weak mitochondria, these little power plant generators. I'll take out the weak ones and replace them with young, strong ones. And you start upgrading yourself internally. because the stuff that would have gone into digesting the food you eat every two hours because that's what someone told you to do in the 70s. Instead of doing that, you're eating the stuff in your body that makes you old. And when you control insulin and you control autophagy, something very interesting anti-aging wise happens, and it's that you actually have younger and more abundant stem cells in your body. So intermittent fasting has proven to increase stem cells, increases testosterone, human growth hormone, and a huge swath of anti-aging substances in the body. And, it's free. It costs less than eating breakfast.

And, what's some of the new research about stem cells or the new developments that have excited you that everyone should know about?

Well, I've been pretty public about doing a lot of stem cells. I've had my bone marrow taken out twice.

You've been trying to convince me to do this for a while. Consider getting a change of life. I still need to consider more.

It'll change your life. Anyone with old injuries like that, I have just no bodily pain and you get younger and there's really intriguing research about stem cells making brains work better, especially if you've had a traumatic brain injury, which I have had. And so, you just get younger. And, I can't tell you that it was stem cells alone that did this. I live a bulletproof life and all that. But I recently measured my brain's response time. This is an automatic response time. How quickly does the brain respond when a light or a sound comes on? So this isn't a conscious thing. And my response time is the average response time for a 20 year old. The response time goes down with or goes up with age. So you get slower and slower as you age. So I have a 20 year old's ability to respond to the environment around me, which is pretty remarkable. And I truly think that the stem cells helped with that. There's also things like arterial flexibility where I have the average flexible arteries of a 24-year-old when you just compare and I'm twice as old as that, Lewis. So something is working. I think stem cells are a core part of the anti-aging thing. What's happening now though is we're able to pull things that are like stem cells out of the blood instead of out of the marrow. And that's a lot less painful.

And then I'm more open to that than the whole sucking out of my bones. Yeah, it's spinning it up.

You're asleep when you're actually, I was.

Awake one time when they did it.

Oh, man.

So, wait, what's this new blood drawing.

Stem cell that you're talking about? It's still getting regulatory approval, but it's called very small stem-like cells. But I'll show you the video sometime and that I'm laying on the table and the doctor has this thing and he hammers it with a hammer. Oh, no, I can't. And it goes, err, err, err. Oh, man.

Every time I see that video, it's like it's the worst thing ever. Man, yeah, you go through a lot of pain to have, you know, less pain for the rest of your life.

It's really weird, Louis. It's almost like hunger. You can look at something as pain or just weird. And when I really dug into it, there's the strangest feeling in my skeleton, but it wasn't pain. It was just so outside the universe of anything you would ever or should ever feel that it your body could say it's pain or it could just.

Be like, that's different.

That's weird.

Yeah.

So I can say I've been through much more painful things than that. But the idea that we could have younger and more stem cells by skipping breakfast is a little bit less money and time than that. And that's why I think it's such an important practice.

And what's this blood stem cell process then? It's not available yet, but have you tested it?

There's a very few doctors who are are offering it today. And I think it's in a bit of a gray zone from a regulatory perspective. So have you tried it? Very small stem-like cells.

Of course I've tried it.

How do you feel about it? Well, I think it's hard to say to compare A versus B. There's a lot more studies on getting stem cells from your fat or your marrow. There's also people getting stem cells from like placental cords and umbilical cords or placentas and umbilical cords. Right. There, I have mixed feelings about that because if you're getting stem cells from eight different people and like how, how tested was that? And that makes all of my friends who do stem cells that way irritated that I would question it. Maybe it's perfectly good. I know a lot of people do it and love it. I just, in my mind, I'm like, what do we test for every little virus and every little bacteria? And I kind of like the idea of growing my own stem cells, but that's not legal in the US anymore. It was for a while and that was the most effective. That's crazy. It's coming down. We're at year one of an evolution that's happening, kind of like cell phones. The first cell phone, some guy in LA in his Mercedes 300D convertible, the whole trunk is his cell phone.

Yeah, exactly.

And it was $25 a minute. But with stem cells, it's come down in price a lot. The efficacy is way higher. It's getting better. It works better and better every year, but it still takes a doctor a lot of time to get the needles in all the right places and understand your joints. But man, it's a couple hours of relatively minor discomfort, but then you're better for decades. It's a really big deal, Louis. And I'll tell you, if you fast before you do that procedure, you have less insulin resistance, you have a working metabolism, Everything you can do in a hospital, whether it's a surgery, whether you're getting a car accident, whatever, everything goes better if you just have a strong metabolism.