How FASTING Can Turn Your Life Around TODAY! EP 1185

This is episode number 1185 on the power of fasting. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now, let the class begin. Welcome back, everyone. We have a special episode today focused on all things fasting. We've had a few experts, doctors and health specialists on the show raving about the extreme health benefits of fasting when it's done correctly. Because some people out there, I know you guys might be messing it up or hearing certain strategies that aren't really effective, but when it's done well and correctly, it can be extremely life changing. And today's episode we'll hear from Dave Asprey, Dr. Alan Goldhammer and Dr. Jason Fung talking all about the dos and don'ts of fasting. We'll dive into the best fasting schedule for you and how to learn to listen to your body's needs, the biggest mistakes you can make while fasting, the science behind how fasting works and how people discovered its benefits, why fasting is more accessible than you think, and a lot more good information in this episode. And if you're enjoying this, make sure to spread the message forward, let some of your friends know about fasting and how they can to improve the quality of their life, their health, to help them improve while they age, and so many other benefits. And please, if you're enjoying this at any moment, leave us a review over on Apple Podcast, letting us know which part of this episode you enjoyed the most. We had an amazing review this week from Caitlin, who's the fan of the week, and they said a colleague of mine from work recommended the School of Greatness. And since that day, I have felt so inspired to do better.

Better.

I love each and every one of these shows as I have now started a journal that outlines each episode. Now, my favorite question asked my students is, what is your definition of greatness? So I love that. Thank you, Caitlin, for leaving your review and for being the fan of the week. And again, post your reviews. We shout them out here on the podcast and they mean the world to us. Okay, in just a moment, we'll dive deep into this episode all about Fasting. In this first section about fasting, Dave Asprey walks us through how to figure out the best fasting schedule for yourself. And he explains the fasting trap and why you need to look out for it, and the three best foods to eat before a fast. 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 hypoglycemic, 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, 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 wanna overdo it, you don't wanna 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, you know, 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 wanna punch people. That's not good. So it's taking it in cycles. Let's do, I'm gonna do this for two weeks, four weeks. But it's not going to be years consistently fasting because 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 going to 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 want to eat anything right now because 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 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 context or health context. 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 the 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 gonna eat yet, I'm gonna use that openness to connect with others. I'm gonna 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 of 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, I didn't know 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.

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, you know, I felt amazing. I've lost weight. I can't believe this. Like, 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. So I'm going, Hmm, 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.

So you're waking up without a kickstand because you're not having carbs and you're doing it in extreme ways. Is that what you're saying?

Well, it's because you're over fasting, right? And so the body is like, oh, 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. 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 overfast.

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 have 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 things 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 like muscle through and push through. Like if you're fading, right? And I'm just not feeling very good.

Eat some food, have some broccoli, have.

Some vegetables, have some salad, have some, yeah. Yeah, and 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 haven't been 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 another set in because I can and because like 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 and 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 two diabetes and you have more energy and you have to buy smaller pants. And like 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 because you just had this, this and this, you know, 16.

Hours ago, a bunch of fried stuff, especially like French fries.

Yeah.

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 just have gnawing hunger the whole time. 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 gonna 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 in the lasagna. 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 cranky.

So what's the solution? So what's the solution then? Well, the solution is you actually eat enough calories and you eat the right kinds of calories. So 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, some 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. So 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'd 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. 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 it's 16 hour or or 24 hours. 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 go, 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, if you ever, you know, huge kale salad and then being, I'm so full, I'm so satisfied, I'm just.

Bursting with energy, I'm not gonna 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 food.

In.

This section, Dr. Alan Goldhammer explains the main benefits of water only fasting, how often you should do water only fasting, the effects coffee has on your body, and if you should drink it during a fast and how much your mindset and attitude affects the healing process during fasting. What are the insane benefits of water only fasting? Because you've been doing this for 30 years. eight years with over 20,000 patients that have done water-only fasting. What are the main benefits? Well, you know, one of the first things that we look at is that.

There are certain conditions that are really common today. So, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes type 2, autoimmune diseases where the immune system itself is attacking the body, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, ankylosing spondylitis, the psoriasis, the eczema, these conditions where it's your own body that's kind of working against you. And also certain types of cancer like lymphoma. And these conditions that are so common now are really thought to be unmanageable. Because if you go to a physician with high blood pressure, they're going to give you a medication that might be a diuretic or a beta blocker or whatever, a combination of medications. And they're going to tell you right from the beginning, if you do what I tell you, you'll never get well. Really? You'll be on these meds for the rest of your life. Absolutely, they're telling you, you'll never get off these meds, you'll be on drugs forever because they know that they're not actually dealing with the reasons that you've developed high blood pressure. The root. You're dealing with trying to manage the consequence of the root. And so our approach is a little different because we're not interested in trying to come up with a pill, potion or powder and tell you, well, That's it. Just take these drugs and suffer the consequences.

Keep eating the same way, keep living the same lifestyle, keep lacking sleep, being stressed, eat all the processed foods, and.

You'Ll be on these drugs for the.

Rest of your life. Well, live normally.

Yeah, right. Normal the way it is today. Well, two-thirds of people are now overweight or obese. So being overweight is normal. If you want it, doesn't mean it's healthy. You don't necessarily want to be normal if you want to be healthy because normal or average right now is in trouble. And it's in trouble because people are under the influence of the pleasure trap. There's this hidden force that's undermining people's health and happiness and they don't even realize it in many cases.

Delayed gratification is the key. That is the way, in my opinion, not living in the instant pleasures of today but how can I distance myself from it as long as possible to be rewarded in other healthier, happier ways.

The problem, I think, is though that you are biologically designed for short-term pleasure seeking self-indulgent behavior. Those hits, those dopamine hits. Absolutely. The body, the brain rewards the body every time it engages in behavior that favors survival and reproduction. And those primary dominant behaviors are feeding behavior and sexual behavior. Because it's food and sex that are necessary for the species to survive. to survive, to get enough to eat, to not get eaten, live long enough to reproduce. And that dopamine-driven short-term response worked great through most of human history. But more recently, it's become a bit of a trap. And it's become a bit of a trap because we've changed our environment from an environment of scarcity where it was really hard to get enough to eat people. To abundance. And now we live in an environment of abundance and these highly processed foods are so appealing because they play off those ancient mechanisms.

The salt, the sugar, the processed nature of it, it's just delicious, but it's not good for you.

Well, you have to override that biology if your goal is to survive long and well.

Yeah, not survive unwell, which is what we've trained our society to do. It's like how can we extend our life on machines? that's not a well-lived life. But how can we be happy, healthy, fulfilled, and then have a quick, quicker death?

Right?

It's like not suffer for as long as possible, but live as long, happy and healthy, and then turn off the lights.

Well, we talk about having a good life, good, hopefully long life, but also a good death. The death where one night you go to sleep and you don't wake up. Rather than spending the last 9.6 years unable to talk or move, lying in some nursing home bed waiting for people to come and change your diaper because you've had a stroke or you've had other debilitating illnesses that prevent you from actually making the last decade or two, perhaps the best, most enriching time of your life rather than the worst, dependent on others around you unable to really function properly. And that's the price we pay for short-term pleasure seeking self-indulgent behavior that, you know, doesn't necessarily cause an immediate problem.

But definitely causes longer-term so what are these crazy benefits of water only fasting? What are the main things you've seen people transform of these 20,000 plus cases?

One of the biggest thing that fasting does, it's an efficient way of undoing the consequences of dietary excess. So people spend a long time accumulating the consequences of dietary excess and they can very rapidly reverse many of those consequences.

Such as what? What are the main things you see?

So the conditions like of that are caused by dietary excess, so high blood pressure, for example. We did a study with 174 consecutive patients with high blood pressure and 174 people were able to lower their pressure enough to eliminate the need for medications. the medications for blood pressure cause chronic cough, fatigue, impotence and premature death and yet they're routinely used because it's not recognized that blood pressure is a reversible and containable process. Really? Fasting is an effective and efficient way of reversing and normalizing blood pressure. Now the problem is you can't fast forever. You have to feed. So you also have to learn to eat a health promoting diet in order to sustain those results. But in terms of eliminating the risk factors, eliminating the need for medication, normalizing blood pressure, you can do that very predictably with medically supervised water only fasting.

What does it mean medically supervised? When you're just drinking water, I mean, what do you need, why do you need someone there to watch you? Is it like testing with your blood sample? Is it just making sure you're not fasting? fatigued, and in starvation mode.

We recognize that fasting can be done safely and should be done safely every day by every patient for 12 to 16 hours, depending on their goals. If they're trying to lose weight or gain weight, it may depend on the duration. But we recommend a period of 16 hours a day of fasting, eight hours a day of feeding. And by limiting the feeding window, as people like Walter Longo and others have pointed out, you may be able to induce some of the benefits that happen with long-term fasting. cuminatively and also prevent perhaps some of the overeating and other things that contribute to dietary excess. So everybody can and should fast every day. In fact, everybody does fast every day. When you're sleeping, you're not eating. You break it with break fast in the morning. It's an interesting process. So we're talking about maybe extending that natural period daily so that you aren't necessarily eating three or four hours before you go to sleep. It may improve your sleep quality, may improve digestion, may improve your muscle to fat ratios over time and may induce changes that are beneficial. The thing that we do in addition is we'll extend that period much longer. The problem when you start talking about long-term fasting, and we're fasting people anywhere from two to 40 days on water only, is that first you need to make sure that the person is an appropriate candidate for that longer term intervention. People that have certain pathology, people on medications, people who have risk factors, may be better off with a different approach than long-term water only fasting. So first thing is a history and an examination to make sure there isn't any primary issues with kidney or cardiac function or medications that would contraindicate fasting.

What happens to the kidneys or the liver if you're water only fasting?

So the kidneys and liver are main detoxifying organs in the body and particularly the kidneys. If kidney Kidney function isn't at least at some minimal level. In our clinic, we use creatinine levels of 2.0 as an arbitrary marker. If kidney function isn't adequate, then the rapid detoxification that occurs during fasting where the body mobilizes and eliminates both endogenous and exogenous toxins into the bloodstream and then are processed by the kidneys. If the kidneys function isn't adequate, you could overload the kidney function and create problems there. Really? It's very important that people have minimal levels of clearance and that's also the reason we make sure that people have adequate fluid intake and maintain electrolyte balance and hydration. So we're monitoring people's electrolytes to make sure that we don't get into problems with potassium or sodium or other things which could become a problem, especially in these longer fasts when we're going two.

Three, four, five weeks or longer. Wow. What's the longest someone's been on a.

Water fast with you? Well, in our clinic, we limit fasting generally to 40 days. We've had a few patients we've had to go a little bit longer than that. But there's evidence in the literature of patients fasting in medically controlled settings for as long as a year or more.

So not that we would recommend that. Is that just someone who's so obese that they're trying to get rid of all the complications and shed the weight.

And all those things? There was a lot of work done in the 70s and 80s in treating supreme obesity with long-term fasting. But even a thin male, say a 70 kilogram male, could probably fast somewhere around up to 70 days if they're resting during the process. Not that they should necessarily do it.

They could survive.

But as far as nutrient reserves and adequacy, the body is pretty amazing. You know, the main burner of glucose for humans is our brain.

Is what just thinking or what?

Cognitive activities, the brain, we have this ridiculously large brain in humans. Two and a half times that say of a chimp. It's huge and it's our main burner of glucose. In fact, if it wasn't for our ability to change our brain fuels from sugar to fat, we couldn't have survived as a species the way we have. Because if we had wandered away from the tropics after a week or so, if spring came late, we would have died. In fact, we did. The humans that didn't have the ability to change brain from burning sugar to burning fat weren't able to survive. We know that because today virtually every human being has this ability to change its brain fuel from sugar, which is the normal fuel to burning ketones or beta-hydroxybutyric acid in particular. And that would suggest a biological adaptation, such an important adaptation that the species had to have it. So today, humans can wander away from the tropics, spring can come late, and we can survive despite our very large brain and its huge burning of glucose because we have this ability to fast. All we've done is taken this ancient biological process and applied it in a very unnatural situation, and that is a situation of dietary excess. No other animals maintain obesity. I mean, even whales, who you think of as kind of fat, are 9% body fat, okay? Really? Yeah, they just hold it on the outside of their skin. They're lean mean machines, like all animals do, unless they get access to hyper-processed foods, like humans. So if you feed human style hyper-processed foods to animals, they also get fat. We add chemicals to our food specifically to induce dopamine stimulation in our brain. Those chemicals are salt, oil, and sugar. These are not foods, they're food byproducts. They're hyper-concentrated food byproducts. They're essentially chemicals we're putting in the food to stimulate more dopamine. Dopamine is the neurochemistry associated with pleasure. The more dopamine, the more pleasure, the more we like the food. That's what good tasting food means, because it stimulates more dopamine production. And the consequence of hyper-stimulating our brain with dopamine means we overeat and we become obese. And that's why two-thirds of people are overweight is because they've fooled their brain with chemicals they put in their feed. It works in rats, it works in mice, it works in humans. Put the chemicals in their feed, they overeat, they get fat, then they develop obesity and metabolic syndrome. And if you have metabolic syndrome, you're more vulnerable to dying from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and even viral infectious diseases like COVID. The higher your metabolic syndrome increases risk.

Of dying from all these things, all these downstream consequences. What about olive oil or avocado oil? I hear that these good oils, these.

Fatty oils are supposed to help you in certain ways. Is that? Well, you have to be careful when we define these quote good oils. There are oils that are more harmful than say olive oil. So an oil being less harmful doesn't necessarily mean it's good. It's just less bad. So oils are all highly processed fractionated foods with nine calories per gram and limited satiety feedback. So if we're talking about trying to lose or maintain optimum weight, oils would have a disadvantage compared to eating your fat from whole food. So I would advocate if you want avocado, eat avocado. Not necessarily process it remove the fiber out of the good components and be left with the oil. And the same thing is true with sugar. You need carbohydrates as a primary fuel, but you eat whole food, whether it's fruits or vegetables or starches, not necessarily the highly processed, hyper-processed byproducts of the food industry. If your goal is to avoid overeating dietary excess, obesity and the diseases of dietary excess.

Right.

What are the three main benefits that you see with pretty much everyone that goes through water only fasting. Three biggest things that you see, whether it be seven or 70 days. Well, you know, they look younger, is it the clear skin, is it they're burning fat, is it internally their cells are changing, what's the three main benefits you see?

It's hard to different, there's so many benefits. It'd be hard to say which are the three down, but I can talk about some of the benefits that we see. Certainly, you see weight loss, you can't help that. The laws of physics and thermodynamics say if you don't eat, you're gonna lose weight. we know that weight loss is about a pound a day. Now that pound a day, average weight loss is a pound a day. Now some of that's water, some of it's protein, some of it's fiber, some of it's glycogen and some of it's fat. And of that fat, some of it's.

Adipose tissue, some of it's visceral fat.

The visceral is what you want to burn, right? Well, visceral fat is the one that's most associated with pathology. In fact, probably shouldn't be very much visceral fat. Visceral fat's what happens and the body has no place else to put fuel, and so you'll store some additional visceral fat. And the higher the visceral fat, generally the worse you are, simplistically speaking. And so we just did a study where we took a DEXA scanner that has software that allows us to do precise whole body composition. So not just how much fat and protein there is, but how much visceral fat there is.

Internally and externally, right?

Exactly. So visceral fat, typically you think about an apple or around the belly and around the organs, that internal fat.

So, a lot of visceral fat around the organs as well, right? That is not good for you.

Yeah, that's not thought to be very healthy.

I mean, the belly fat that people see is not good, obviously, but the stuff that's surrounding all the organs is you don't want to have a lot of that fat, right?

That's correct. And so, the question is what can you do to get rid of it? Any type of dieting will cause various types of body changes, but the approach that's shown the most effective at mobilizing visceral fat is actually fasting. Fasting is the highest ratio of visceral fat to adipose tissue mobilization. For example, a typical patient in the study might lose 20% of their fat but would lose over 50% of their visceral fat during a couple weeks of fasting, even though they only lose 4% of their lean tissue. And what's even more exciting is we look at, okay, what happens during fasting? Let's say, for example, a person loses 10 pounds. And we know some of that is water, some of it's fiber, glycogen, some of it's adipose tissue, some of it's visceral fat. Then what happens after fasting? You lose 10 pounds, you might regain five pounds. You're going to gain about two pounds of glycogen because you have sugar stores in your muscles that'll be depleted within a couple days of fasting. You're going to rehydrate because there's a little physiological dehydration during fasting. You're going to put fiber back into your gut because your gut's not going to have had fiber being added to it. you're going to pump up your muscle cells again because you will have depleted a little bit of glucose in order to maintain the glucose, the core glucose that your brain needed, and you're going to theoretically put back on fat. But after fasting, assuming a person adopts a whole plant food SOS free diet, what we found was weight comes off, weight comes back on, but the weight that comes back on is glycogen, water, fiber, and protein, not fat. Fat continues to drop. I like that. We have, we've been able to show, and this study will be coming out later this year, exactly what happens. And then we followed people at six weeks, brought them back in, reanalyzed them, and we're able to demonstrate that not only can people lose their fat and visceral fat, but they can continue to lose their fat and visceral fat, even free living, eating health promoting.

So the scale will go up some, but the fat will not go up. That's correct. So you gotta trick your mind and say, well, I'm not gaining all this weight, like you're gaining the necessary necessarily weight that your body needs to be stronger so you can have an active lifestyle and all these things, but not the fat back.

Keep in mind it's not weight per se that's the threat, it's excess fat. So for example, if you work out, you might gain 10 or 20 pounds of lean tissue over time. That's not necessarily compromising your health just because you quote gained weight. Now if you sit around on the couch and eat greasy, fatty, slimy, dead decaying flesh and highly processed foods and put on a particularly visceral fat, gain that same 20 pounds, that might be a problem. So we want to be careful not to be thinking just in terms of weight, but in terms of body composition. So the idea is to lower the fat, not necessarily lower the muscle though. For many people, particularly as people age, they go through sarcopenia, they can lose muscle mass. Having more muscle mass is thought to be health promoting and protective to a certain extent.

Yeah, yeah. How often do you do a water only fast and what's your range that you do?

Everybody should do a water only fast every day from 12 to 16 hours.

16 hours a day.

Water only.

Then we go into feeding.

Okay, eight hour window.

Eight hour window of whole plant foods, so fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, seeds, foods, whole foods.

Are you vegan?

I am. I don't use animal foods in my diet. I'm 62. I started on a whole plant food diet at 16. So, I've had the opportunity to do it for a lot of years. -16? -Yes. -Wow, that's inspiring. -Yeah. Well, it was out of desperation. -Really? -I wanted to beat my best friend Doug Lyle in basketball. And I couldn't beat him when I practiced and I really worked at it. But I thought if I got, you know, if I really got healthy, maybe I could get an edge. And so, I read a book. It happened to be by Herbert Shelton. And he said that health was the result of healthful living. It was about diet, sleep, exercise, and then fasting could also be useful. And I thought, well, I'll give that a try.

This was 40 something years ago.

Yeah, 46 years ago. And of course it failed because it turned out he adopted the same type of lifestyle. He still just destroys me every time we play. Really? I'm hoping though that maybe he'll age out a little quicker. Once we get into our 80s, maybe.

We'Ll finally beat him.

You guys are still friends. Oh yeah. We still play. Yeah, and he's actually the psychologist at.

The True North Health Center.

Amazing. Oh yeah, no, we play, yeah, every.

Day, you know, every week we're playing basketball. And you still can't beat him.

No.

Okay, one day. One day.

One day.

One day. Sometimes it doesn't matter how healthy you are, someone just might be a little.

Taller, stronger, or more skilled. Well, I'll give you an example, you know, I thought, you know, he's quick, he's a really good basketball player, and I thought, okay, he's got some skills I don't have, but Free throws are just practice. So I got some coaching and I thought, I'm just gonna, and I'm shooting 500 free throws a day. I'm working hard. And of course, he's only playing once a week. And so one day I say, Hey, Doug, let's do a free throw shooting contest. And he's, okay. And you crush him. 48 out of 50, right? And I think, I got him.

He hits 19, he misses one if.

It'S 80 in a row. Oh my goodness. Which obviously means he's a choke, 'cause if you can hit 99 out of 100, why don't you just hit 100? That's crazy. I know.

Well, he's a mutant. 99 out of I don't even know.

Anyone'S ever done that before. It's amazing.

He's, he's, that's, this is the person I've been trying to compete against. Yeah, I'm mutant. I love it. Well, so you're saying 16 hours a day, everyone should do water only. Now you're gonna say something very controversial here. What about those that love their coffee and water? If I'm gonna go a three-day water only fast, can I add coffee, black.

Coffee, bulletproof coffee, can I Can I.

Do this or will it ruin the whole fast?

Well, it's not going to ruin the whole fast, but here's the thing with caffeine, which is a highly addictive nervous system stimulant, is it has a 17-hour half-life. It affects sleep quality, even the coffee and the caffeine that you're consuming early in the day can affect quality of sleep. It can be really caustic and irritating to the stomach, not just the caffeine, but the coffee itself. So there's a lot of things to question about whether this is really a health-promoting habit. The other thing is a lot of people people are using coffee for its caffeine because they're not getting enough sleep.

Right.

So they need it. If you stop the caffeine, you go through like any addict, drug withdrawal, okay? And it can be quite severe. But once you get free of that, you may find that now you're able to get the quality and quantity of sleep you need. So the need for using a highly addictive nervous system still may be reducing one. Interesting. Now the fact is it is a plant-based product, so there are still some redeeming properties and it's not completely devoid of any nutrition. But I think that the negatives outweigh the positives from my viewpoint for using that type of product as a component. And have people in your clinic said.

Okay, I'm going to do seven days water, but I'm going to have coffee every day also. And are they able to get similar results? Well, we don't use any type of.

Highly addictive drugs with patients when they're, when they're fasting. So we, we have a controlled. Yeah, got it. Okay. They're using distilled water and it controls.

And that's it. Yeah, that's it.

Just pure water, distilled water for seven days.

That's how we do it. No food, some electrolytes in there or something or.

No, actually electrolytes are recycled efficiently during fasting.

So we monitor electrolytes, but we're not supplementing electrolytes.

So there's nothing added to the water. There's nothing added to the water for five to 40 days duration of the fast. Yes. Now people say, well, that is it safe? Is it safe? Well, we've answered that question because we've done a study. We've done an actual fasting safety study where we took all the subjects that went through the process for five years, evaluated all of their symptoms and adverse events, documented that and published that in a study that's available on our website. And people can look at that and find. And it turns out that, yes, in fact, fasting when it's supervised in a controlled setting can be done safely and effectively, even for periods up to 40 days. Wow.

So what's the pattern you use on a monthly basis? You do 16 hour water only, but then are you doing one day a month, one day a week, or for 24 hours?

16 hours every day and eight hours of feeding, and then once a year we'll fast a week or two depending on the individual and how they're doing.

What will you do?

A week a year. Assuming at a week that there's no symptoms that show up from fasting, then that's the end of it. And I hate fasting. you cannot play basketball. You have to do anything. It's all terrible. So it's not something that we would want to wish on somebody excessively. On the other hand, it can be a very effective way of in both helping sick people recover, but also, I believe, in helping healthy people stay that way.

Really?

I think that the people that may get ultimately the most benefit from fasting are healthy people that use it preventatively, that want to stay healthy. The difference is that In a person that lives a healthy lifestyle, fasting is much less entertaining. It's a much less dynamic process. People don't have a lot of the symptoms that people that are sick getting well have.

Because what I've heard you say before is that you can't really work out while you're doing a water fast. Even if it's a 24-hour fast, is it okay to move some or do you really need the benefits of rest while you're drinking water?

Well, we recommend that people limit their routine fasting to 16 hours because the the problem is, is you get beyond 16 hours and you start depleting glycogen stores, now you're going to force more gluconeogenesis. So I think the goal is in non-supplemented fasting to fast within those reserves, maximize fat loss and rest recovery, and minimize gluconeogenesis. Now some people do modified fasting where they can be more active because they're getting 600 calories or 700 calories, and so they have a little bit more flexibility in terms of the amount of activity they might undergo. That's not the approach that we're taking. So in our clinic, we're using these patients are average two to three weeks as much as 40 days and usually there's a reason. They're either a healthy person trying to stay healthy but more likely they have high blood pressure, they have diabetes, they have autoimmune disease, they have lymphoma, they want to get well. They're willing to do anything, even eat.

Well and exercise and go to bed on time. Really radical 'Cause it's been years or decades of suffering probably or pain or some type of stress.

We get, what I believe are highly motivated people. And the best motivation in my experience is pain, debility, and fear of death.

That's it.

That's who's willing to do these. You know, they say it's really radical because radical does mean radicus or root or cause. And we're actually trying to get to the reason why people are getting sick. So we're not talking about the leading causes of death, we're talking about the actual causes of death, the reason people get the heart disease, cancer, the stroke, not treating it after they've developed it, thinking that somehow that's gonna be the whole answer, but actually trying to understand why is it this problem has arisen and what can they do to undo the consequences of their dietary excess.

When you see people do a two to four week fast, Do you physically see transformation from eczema to no eczema or minimal eczema afterwards or autoimmune disease? Do you see it drastically changing? Is it small changes that it's going to take multiple times over a year or years? What do you typically see when you see someone come in?

It varies, you know, from patient to patient. For example, we recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal of a case of a young woman who came in with follicular lymphoma stage three, which is type of lymph cancer had large palpable tumors involving her upper and lower- Internally. External, oh you could even feel them externally, they were large enough. They were in the lymph glands, so when they're very large you can feel them.

Oh man.

You can also see them on CAT scan. She had excisional biopsy, it was well documented. Oh wow. So we ended up fasting her for 21 days and by three weeks of fasting you couldn't feel the tumors anymore. Now why? Come on. 10 days of recovery, back to her oncologist for CT scans, make a long story short, this woman was able to completely resolve her stage 3 follicular lymphoma. At a year, we had a whole body CT. We were able to show that she's completely free of cancer. We have a three-year follow-up and the case report and the follow-up were published in the British Medical Journal case reports. You can go onto our website and take a look there. It's exquisitely carefully detailed. Since then, including at our clinic right now, we have other patients with follicular lymphoma, including one gentleman right now who has stage 4 follicular lymphoma. who's had preliminarily good results. He's on his second fast now. We did a previous fast last year who'd gotten significant improvement. We're now doing another fast, only this fast is going to be 40 days.

Oh my gosh.

And we're hoping that we can get the same kind of clearing resolution and long-term stability. Once we've published enough case reports in the form of cohort, we'll be able to then hopefully justify a clinical trial. We believe we're going to do real well with this particular type of cancer because our clinical observation is that it consistently is responding. Now, it may not be the same thing when you talk about a solid organ tumor, a lung cancer, a different.

Type of cancer may respond completely different.

Brain cancer, things like that. Yeah, especially brain cancer. That's hard, huh? Well, brain masses are not as responsive possibly because of the way the body mobilizes things in fasting and the blood-brain barrier and some of the limitations to be able to get access to it. So you can't just say cancer is cancer, it's not all the same. And you can't say the same person with the same condition is going to respond the same. In answer to your question, some people like her, it's really dramatic where one fast big change. But I've also had people where it's the third fast before we see those big clinical significant. And I also have people that do everything right and we're still suffering and not responding. And we can't always predict who's going to respond, who's not going to respond. part of the research that we're doing is trying to figure out how do you predict who's going to respond the most? How long are they going to need to fast? When are they done fasting? Even non-invasive biological markers are not readily available because nobody up till now has been doing much research with long-term water fasting.

How much does the belief in your mindset that this fast will heal or help prevent or help create more healing for me? How much is the mindset? thought process on a daily basis that I'm healing myself. This water is cleansing my body. Whatever the mind is telling versus how do I know if this is going to work and what am I doing this for? How much do you believe the mind manipulates the healing process?

So I think that attitude is very important because it determines action. But it's the action you take that determines the outcome. So just having good thoughts, I don't think is enough to get the job done. But if having good thoughts and having a good attitude allows you to be motivated to do what it takes to get well, it's critical. We typically only work with people that have a good attitude because they wouldn't come to us otherwise. We have highly motivated self-selected patients that are willing to do really radical things like eat well, exercise, sleep, and fast. You know, the fact is most people think if they get in a plane in New York and they go all the way to California, they will die from starvation over Colorado. they think those pretzels saved their lives.

They don't know it. They don't know it. It's salt in those pretzels.

It's probably the... So we know differently. We know that the fact is the body is really good at adapting to the fasting state, particularly appropriate people in a resting state, and they can do it safely. We've done it over 20,000 times in patients, many of them are elderly and ill, and yet of the 20,000 people that have walked in, 20,000 people have walked out. And we're really trying to maintain those safety records.

Of course.

We try really hard only to work with people that we expect to have an acceptable outcome.

So if someone's not coming to your clinic and they want to try this on their own, what would you say is a good window of time to try on your own at home without medical safety, I guess, or someone watching over you. What is it, is it 24 hours, is it three days?

I really believe that everybody should try to do this on their own for up to 16 hours every day, but consistently do it day after day after day. And I think that cumulatively you can safely and effectively get the accumulation from intermittent fasting without putting yourself in a situation where you have to go in, have a medical evaluation, get a doctor that'll be able to establish baseline data and then monitor you through the process. And I think what happens particularly for people that are on medications, you can really muck yourself up. For example, let's say you're on steroid medications or you're on anticoagulant medications or you're on dysrhythmia medications. Even a 48-hour period of fasting can be a really complicating factor because you don't fast on medications. You don't want to arbitrarily discontinue medications. It really is unfortunately a process that's.

Best done with the right people in a clinical setting.

So if you're on Medicaid, so you don't want to stop your medication to fast for for two days.

Right.

And you don't want to fast on medications for two days.

You want to keep taking medicine and not food.

Because the medications that may be okay in a feeding state may be very much more of a problem after you get into the fasting state. So our recommendation is fast every day for 16 hours, eat clean in those eight hours, and then if it's appropriate, longer term fasting can be considered. If people would like to know whether long-term fasting is useful, there's a really simple I think it doesn't cost them anything. They can go on to our website, complete registration forms and give me a call. I'll talk to them. It doesn't cost them anything. And if they're where, depending where they live, we can send them to doctors that are trained in fasting supervision near them. They can help them go through the process safely and effectively. And if they're not a good candidate.

We can let them know that maybe.

There'S alternatives to water only fasting. In this section, Dr. Jason Fung explains the top myths about losing weight from fasting, the advantages of starving, why fasting is more accessible than you think, and why he believes fasting is the most powerful diet out there. Let's dive in. What does snacking do to our body, our brain, our digestion system when we're every couple hours putting something in our mouth? Even if it's a few nuts or a fruit or a protein bar? What is that doing to our brain and our digestive system?

Yeah, and this is the big thing that I've had, and I talk about this in the obesity code, is because our body really exists in one of two states. You're either in the fed state or you're in the fasted state. So when you're in the fed state, you're eating, insulin is going up, and as insulin goes up, its job, its normal job, is to tell your body to store those calories. So you can store it as glycogen, which is sugar, or it can store it as body fat. But that's the point. So you eat lunch or dinner, there's way more calories in that meal than you can use right at that point. So you want to store that. So when you don't eat, which is anytime you don't eat is called fasting, so when you fast, that means your insulin is going to drop and that's the signal for your body to now start pulling those calories out of storage. And that's the reason you don't die in your sleep every single night is because we have the ability to hold some of those calories in storage. So in the fed state, insulin goes up, you're storing calories or body fat. In the fasted state, you're not eating, your insulin's dropping, and you're using calories. So you're in one or the other. You can't do both at the same time. So if now you say, okay, I'm going to go...

When I'm eating, I'm storing. I'm not using calories. Is that right?

Every time I eat, I'll store.

I'm not burning body fat.

You're not burning body fat because you're putting in sugar, for example, and that sugar is going to signal that, hey, sugar's coming in, use the sugar that's coming in.

Don't burn anything off my body.

Exactly.

Keep all that stored fat, keep it. Just keep piling it on, right?

Exactly. So the only way that you can actually use the body fat is to let the insulin fall and not eat. So if you are now eating constantly, so the minute you get up, somebody tells you, oh, you have to eat, you can't skip breakfast, blah, blah, blah, blah. and then you have to snack all day long. So now if you look at studies, the average duration of how long people eat for is about 14 hours and 45 minutes. That's the average. So if you start eating at 8:00 a.m., you don't stop till 10:45 p.m. That's on average. That's the average.

14 hours, you mean a 14-hour span of eating from the start to finish, right? You may not be eating every moment, but you're eating every few hours within 14 hour window.

It takes about four hours for you to switch over into the fasted state. So the point is that before where you'd eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and by six o'clock you're done, boom, now you shift into using those calories and your mom would say, oh, you need time to digest, right? That's what she sort of said. But the point was that you need to start using those calories that you stored up during your meal times. And that was the secret that they could stay relatively slim. Now, if you're eating constantly, then you never give your body a chance to switch over into that fasted state and start using those calories. The problem, of course, is that insulin stays high, which tends to keep your body storing calories. Your body, so the high insulin, for example, blocks fat burning. You can't burn your fat stores because your body is like, the instructions that I'm getting is to store energy, not use energy. I want to keep my stored energy for when there's a time that there's no food. The problem, of course, is that there's never a time there's no food, right? Every day is the same thing, right? 14 hours of eating and no time of not eating. And that's the point. So now if you understand the problem, you can say, well, how am I going to change this? Well, it's simple. Increase the amount of time that you're not eating. And that's all intermittent fasting is. If you eat one meal a day, for example, or if you within an eight-hour window or a four-hour window or whatever, What you're doing is you're simply allowing your body to use the calories that have been stored, which is body fat predominantly, but that is precisely the reason you carry body fat. Like that body fat is not there for looks, is there for you to use, right? And that's the whole point. What's so bad about using it? If you don't eat, you're going to burn it. Well, so again, go back to the 70s and everybody says, oh, you can't fast, you can't fast. You know, they're eating breakfast, lunch, dinner. And if you're a naughty boy, you got sent to bed without dinner. So, you went from 12 o'clock to 8 a.m., 20 hours.

You look good the next day. You're looking lean. You got a six-pack.

It's burning fat. Exactly. And nobody died. Nothing bad happens, right? There was nothing wrong with that. And hopefully you learned your lesson too, right? And that's the whole point. is that there's nothing wrong. It's a natural part of our human physiology. If we couldn't survive without eating, like we would not be here today, because when we were cavemen and cave women, there was food.

We didn't have food every day.

Exactly. They could, there might be a stretch of three, four, five days where there was no food, and therefore they had to survive on their own body fat, which they did. and that was the whole point. So let's let our body, you know, use it because that's the most natural thing to do.

What's the process for you, your day-to-day life? Do you eat one meal a day, two meals a day? Do you fast every month for a day? Are you always doing intermittent fasting? Is there a downside to intermittent fasting? What's your process?

Yeah, I usually do a lot of sort of, I rarely eat breakfast, and I'll tell you that it didn't I mean, I started this in medical school, and that was mostly because I really wanted to just roll out of bed and go like, you know, I'd wake up literally like five minutes before I left the door. You know, I brushed my teeth, put on some clothes, and rolled out the door. I was, you know, it was just a, it was just that the way I was, right? And so I don't eat breakfast now because, again, people say you have to eat breakfast, you have to eat, but there's actually nothing magical about breakfast. if you don't eat breakfast, what's going to happen? Well, my body, which is now burning fat because I've had eight hours of sleep, it's gone into sort of fat burning mode because that's the storage form of calories or it's burning sugar. It's just going to keep doing it, right? There's nothing wrong with it. So a lot of times I try and confine myself to sort of an eating window of sort of six to eight hours. And then once in a while when I get very busy, I will do a 24-hour fast, which is a one meal a day. and then every so often I'll do a longer fast. And the longer fasts are actually not as bad as you might think, but they really disrupt your schedule sort of socially. It's a tough one because a lot of our socialization happens at meals. So I often have dinner with my family, for example, and doing those longer fasts is really, really disruptive to that sort of thing, which is why when you look at traditional societies, like if you look at, say, you know, during major religions, for example, there would be a period of fasting that sort of universal.

So, you know, everyone's doing it, so.

No one's feeling exactly stressed when they.

Smell the food and they're like, exactly.

So if you're, if it's like Good Friday or during Lent or during Ramadan for Muslims or, you know, during Yom Kippur for Jews or whatever, everybody's fasting. So it's actually terrifically easy because you're not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there. Whereas nowadays, if you fast, and I've done this, it's just really hard to do. It's not. physically, it's not hard, but it's hard. And I do it mostly, you know, when I, when I've gained a bit of weight, usually after the holidays and after a vacation, I will sort of schedule a longer fast right after because I know that I can lose that weight very quickly. But that means I can enjoy myself. Like, a couple years ago, I went on a cruise and really ate too much. Just a lot. I had a lot, and I knew it, and I could feel it in my pants. so I did sort of a three or four day fast. And I'll tell you, by the next week, I was back to my normal weight. Well, that's great because a week and, but I got to enjoy the whole week prior where I really didn't look at what I was eating or how often I was eating or anything. I was like, this is my vacation. I'm doing this. And at the same time, I know, hey, I've got this next, you know, after this week, the week after, you know, very little to eat. And, and, and, and it gives you a great tool. to use if you need it, right? Yeah.

It's almost like either every day, don't indulge and balance and create a schedule where you're only eating in a certain window of time, whether before 6-8 hours, which I'm hearing is kind of the, which would be a great standard to have between four and eight hours of a feeding time, is that right? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, if you want to lose weight, you can do very well, of course, with a sort of standard 70s style sort of 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, which in a 14 hour fast every single night. Remember, they're doing 12 to 14 hours say every single night without even thinking about it. Like, that's a secret because they don't even think about that. That's just a period of time that they're not eating, right? But now, of course, the traditions are different. You can eat anywhere you want. You can eat in the theater. You can eat at your desk. You can eat in the car. Like in the 70s, stuff like that didn't exist. You didn't eat in a meeting in a boardroom, for example. Now you go to a meeting in.

A boardroom when there's food everywhere.

Donuts, donuts and cookies, right? Somebody's ordered a plate of bagels or something like that, right? It's like, well, why? We're having a meeting here, right? So that's the thing. So you could do very well with that kind of, you know, eight hour eating window, 10 hour eating window. You can do very well with it. But if you're not doing well, then you can extend it. And that's the beauty of it. You could extend it as much as you want. right? So if you think about fasting, you could go three days, you could go five days, you could go 30 days. People do that all the time.

But no food.

No food, yeah. So if you look, if you think about fasting, so the amount of energy that you need, so a pound of fat has 3,500 calories roughly. If you need about 1,800 calories, so that's for like a regular person, not like an athlete or somebody who's working out a lot. It takes about half a pound of fat per day. So if you're dealing with a lot of obese people, like a hundred pounds overweight, you could go 200 days, you know, if you want to lose a hundred pounds, you could go 200 days without eating before you get- and survive. And survive. Exactly.

And be okay.

Exactly. Be perfectly fine because this is a very efficient fat is an efficient store of calories, right? It's very efficient. That's why we developed this.

It's to keep you alive when there's no food around.

Exactly. So you use it.

Does it affect your digestive system? Does it mess with your metabolism if you don't eat after a certain amount of time? And what happens when you start eating again? Does that affect your, again, your stomach, your intestines, your colon, your metabolism? What's affected there?

And this is the interesting part is that everybody thinks that fasting is like the worst thing you could do. When you actually look at the science of what happens during fasting, it's actually one of the best things you can do for yourself from both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint. assuming of course you're not malnourished, right? I mean, I'm assuming if you're the average American who's, you know, 10, 20, 30 pounds overweight, then this is something that actually has a lot of benefits. So there's a lot of sort of myths around it. One is that you're going to burn a lot of muscle. And the truth is that you don't. I mean, when you, you know, if your body, your body stores energy as body fat. So people say, oh, you're going to burn muscle. It's like, well, You've got to think that our body is so stupid that it stores energy as fat, but the minute you need it, it starts burning muscle. Why would our body be so stupid? And if it were so stupid, how did we survive? It's like if you save firewood all winter for the winter, and then as soon as it gets cold, you chop up your sofa and throw it into the fire. Why would you be so stupid? Our body's just the same. It's not that. you know, and I know and everybody knows that the way that you build muscle is that you exercise, right? So if you have, you know, lift heavy weights, then your muscles become stronger. It doesn't become stronger because you eat, right? That thing does nothing for building muscle. Like, otherwise we'd be, you know, the strongest nation on Earth, right? But we're not. We're the fattest nation on Earth. So that's the whole problem, right? I mean, you're confusing two completely different things. There is a point during fasting where there is a little bit of protein breakdown, and that's where people get very confused and say, well, you're burning muscle, but you're not. Protein is not the same as muscle. So our body has all kinds of protein, including all the connective tissue, like the skin and stuff that holds stuff in place. And some of that is often burned off. So, for example, when you look at those shows where people get surgery and they lose 150 pounds, they get all this floppy skin. that's not excess fat, that's excess protein. So that's, you know, it's functional tissue that you've never used up. So we actually see very little of that problem when people fast because there's a small period of time where they're actually using up the protein. Your body will maintain its musculature based on what exercise and stuff you're using. So another big myth, so muscle burning is one thing. The other big, big myth is people talk about is starvation mode or metabolic rate. So metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body uses in a day, the number of calories you burn in a day. And this is what we see if you simply cut calories. So this is a standard medical advice. Cut 500 calories a day and you'll lose a pound of fat a week. What happens, of course, is that you cut 500 calories a day and then your body quickly reduces the amount of calories it uses by about 500 calories. So now you're actually not losing any weight. That's what happens all the time because--.

Why does it stop? why does it stop burning those calories?

Well, it stops burning the calories by reducing its metabolic rate. So the metabolic rate is the energy that your body uses to, say, generate body heat, your liver, your kidney, your heart, and so on. We've known this for a hundred years that if you simply restrict the number of calories but keep the foods very similar, what happens is that your body is going to start using less. So because it doesn't like running a deficit, right? It's just like if you normally make a hundred thousand dollars a year and you spend a hundred thousand $1,000 a year. Now you make $50,000, you don't keep spending $100, right? It's, it's, you're gonna, you're gonna get thrown into jail. But so you reduce your expenditure same as a body. So it's getting less. So it's going to use less. And that's the natural reaction is, it's, it's important because it's a survival response.

It cannot do anything different. So it's almost like, so it's almost like you need to be extreme in your usage.

Yeah.

In order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you. But if you just do a little bit, I'm going to eat a little bit less today.

It's not going to be that much. It doesn't work. And people assume that if you go to zero, which is fasting, say you fast for a full day, you have zero calories. You don't die, right? Because what happens is completely different. Now you've lowered your insulin, so you're changing the hormonal profile of the body. and as you do that, you're now switching fuel sources. So instead of using food as your fuel, you're switching it into body fat, just like those hybrid cars where you go from gas to electric, right? So it's using food and then boom, it goes, okay, I have no food coming in. I need to switch over now into body fat. And then it goes, whoa, I have like 500,000 calories of body fat here. So why do I need to cut Cut it down. And the point is that it doesn't because assuming if you have no body fat, of course, it's a problem. But for people who have adequate stores of body fat, which is most of us, and truthfully, most people do it for weight loss, too much body fat, then what happens is that there's so much there, why wouldn't you use it? Because it's a fuel source. That's all it is. That's the way you have to look at the body fat. If you're eating all the time, you can never use your body fat. Because your insulin's here, your insulin's high, you're using food. Then you get hungry, so you eat some more, right? You have a snack, you have a low-fat muffin, you stay here. You can only burn food. All that stuff over there, those 500,000 calories of body fat are completely inaccessible for your body. So if you simply dial it down like this and say, okay, instead of 2,000 calories, I'm going to eat 1,500, but I'm going to eat 10 times a day. keeping myself here. Now you only have 1500 coming in. You can only burn 1500. You can't access that. If you go to zero, you go boom, and then your body burns the full 2000. So they did a study, for example, where they took people and fasted them for four days and measured how many calories they're using. They also measure their VO2, which, as you know, is something that it's a measure of how much cellular work your body is doing. and what they found, so they measured the metabolic rate at time zero, then they measured it at four days of zero food, and they were burning 10% more calories than they were per day than they were when they were eating. The VO2 was 10% higher. You're doing more work. Your body is actually not shutting down, it's revving itself up. And again, there's a good physiologic reason for that, and we know that when insulin goes down, when you switch yourself into this sort of mode that you're burning fat, other hormones go up including your sympathetic nervous system, which is your noradrenaline. So you're actually pumping your body up. The reason for that is sort of again, it's a survival response. So imagine again, we're cave man and it's winter and there's no food. So if you don't eat for two days and you get weaker, you're never.

Going to die again.

You're going to die because every day is going to be harder. You're going to circle the drain. so our body's just not that stupid. Right. So what they do is that your body says, okay, there's no food coming in. Boom. I'm going to switch you over to body fat, and then I'm going to pump you up so that you have energy.

You go out there, you go kill that woolly mammoth. You're focused, you're clear in the zone, everything.

Exactly. And that's, that's the reason that we actually pump ourselves up. And the constant, the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say, well, I, I have to eat because I have to concentrate. It's like your concentration is actually much higher. when you don't eat. Think about when you had a huge Thanksgiving meal. Well, were you really sharp or did you really want to just lie down on the sofa and watch some football? You don't have any sort of focus. But if you think about animals, it's the same thing. Lions, they just eat, they just lounge around. But if you're the hungry wolf, that is a very dangerous animal because he's focused, ready to kill you. Same thing for us. Our level of concentration, our mental ability, mental agility goes up significantly when we're hungry. Like if you think, oh, you're hungry for this, hungry for that, that doesn't mean you're falling down lethargic. It means you're focused. So it's interesting because there is this book a few years ago called Unbroken, which is a biography of this fellow who got, who went to a prisoner of war camp in World War II Japan. and he was talking about starvation and he, they were literally starving like there's, they eat like almost nothing for the full day. And he's talking about how his, his, his, other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats. So one guy was reading a book entirely from memory. Another guy learned all of Norwegian in a week. And he, so the guy says, this is simply the mental clarity of starvation. so it was incredible. It was so widespread, everybody was starving, and they'd see these incredible feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time because your mental ability is ramped up to such a high degree. And then, you know, in the ancient Greece, the ancient mathematician Pythagoras, he would require his students to fast in order to come to his class because otherwise he thought they had no mental agility. to learn this stuff. And it's like, wow, this is incredible. Completely different than what we were taught. But again, same thing. Our body's actually ramping up, ramping up because again, our major advantage over the lions and tigers and bears is really that mental ability.

But isn't there a period of time in the day for most people where they feel, Man, I'm really hungry. like, I can't focus. I can't concentrate because I'm starving. Like, I want food now, and it's. It's actually hurting them and focusing. It's almost like a window of time where you have to just deal with that period, and then it switches on into. Okay, I'm not hungry anymore. I haven't eaten in a day, but I'm not hungry anymore.

And I'm focused.

Isn't there this kind of window of time there? There absolutely is. So this is why it's important to get, you know, to understand what happens during fasting. so you can prepare for it. So if you look at hunger during fasting, so they've done again studies where they fast people for 24 hours and they measure a hormone called ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone. The higher it is, the hungrier you are. Turns out that our ghrelin peaks three times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So you get hungry at, you know, 12 o'clock, it's lunch time, you get hungry. So it's a learned response. The question is what happens if you don't eat? Does hunger keep going up and up and up? It doesn't. In fact, the ghrelin actually peaks and then it just falls. If you don't eat, it will actually just fall down and it will fall down within a couple of hours right to baseline, which means that your level of hunger at 12:30, 1:00, you're hungry. No question about it. If you don't eat by 3:00, 4:00, that hunger level is actually the same whether you ate or you didn't eat. to eat. What happened? Well, your body simply took the calories it needed from your body fat. You took that meal from your body fat and your hunger went down. So that's really interesting. So if you know that it's a wave, right? You just have to let the sort of wave pass over you.

Yeah.

I often tell people you will get hungry. Okay? Don't. Don't pretend that you're not, because you will. What you got to do is prepare for it and say, okay, well, if you get hungry, then you either. There's several things. One, stay busy. keep doing stuff. Don't just think about how hungry you are. So we all have had this where we're working on some kind of doing work at work or if you're doing some kind of home renovation or something. I get this all the time where I'm painting the house or something like that, right? And I'll just power right through because I just want to get it done and I'm not hungry at all because I'm so busy, I'm so focused on doing the work that I just forgot about it, right? You see this all the time, people who go to the casino and people who play video games, they just get so engrossed. So that's one strategy. The other strategy is to get something like green tea or coffee that you can drink. By the time you finish a big cup of green tea, the hunger will have passed. But you know that it's going to pass and that's the point. You know it's not going to get worse and worse and worse and that's how you do it. What's even more interesting actually is if you look at multiple day studies where they fast people for three, four, five days, the ghrelin peaks and then after about two days, it starts going down. So by, you know, day two, day three, as you get to day four, day five, the hunger almost completely disappears. It's actually fascinating if you've never done it. I've done a few of these four or five day fasts. And it's interesting because there's actually no physical sense of hunger. There's a whole lot of, hey, that slice of pizza looks really good. I really want to eat it. But there's no actual physical hunger. So if I hadn't seen it, which is hard now, of course, with all the advertising and all this sort of stuff, I would have actually, you know, gone and right by and done it. But the point is that the hunger is something that you have to learn how to deal with. That's not impossible because, again, one of the big objections to people with fasting is that nobody can do it. Like, it'll work. Sure. If you don't eat, you'll lose weight, but no way to do it. Well, you know that literally millions of People throughout history have done this. Look at Ramadan, you look at Yom Kippur, you look at Lent. Like when people say, okay, we're going to fast together because our strength is in our togetherness, right? You know, it's Good Friday. We're not going to eat for this amount of time. Well, that's how people did it, right? They supported each other. There was no food around. Somebody's not frying up, you know, his steak while you're trying to fast.

Or baking cookies.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that's how you do it, right? You get yourself a supportive Community, you know, you figure out something that you really love to do that keeps you active during that time, and that's how you get through it, right? And while you do that, of course, your body uses up the body fat, so you're going to lose weight. It's going to use up the blood sugar, which is going to keep you from becoming diabetic, and insulin is going to fall, which is going to reduce your risk of cancer in the long term, as well as those other conditions, obesity and type 2 diabetes, which puts you at such high risk of cancer in the first place. You're doing all kinds of good stuff for your body and it's completely free.

You don't have to spend any money on it.

Yeah. And this is the part that's crazy. It's because if you think about the number of diseases that you can make better, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, which is the leading cause of blindness, of kidney disease, of amputations, the secret to managing all of these things is not more medicine and surgery, it's less. It's actually within our grasp because fasting is free to every single person on earth. You can do it literally right now and start right now on the path to getting better. It's just a matter of having that knowledge to do it. the people tell you, oh, you can't do it. You can't do it. It's like, that's not true. We all used to do it, right? If you think about, you know, a community of like, you know, on Yom Kippur, like millions of Jews around the world are doing it, or Ramadan, millions of Muslims are doing it, or, you know, millions of Catholics are fasting during Good Friday. Like my priest used to tell me all the time during Lent, you know, fasting, fast. Like, that's all he talked about practically. So it's such an incredible tool that we've just sort of forgotten about and yet has more power than almost anything else to prevent all of the diseases. And we don't have to charge anybody anything. We're not trying to sell anybody anything. We're just trying to tell you, yes, you can do it because if you have too much weight and it's putting you at risk of this cancer, then let your body burn off that sugar. Let your body burn off that fat.

A couple months ago, I did a four day fast where I just had water and a black coffee a day. And it felt incredible. First couple days was challenging, but by day three, I was like, I'm in the zone, and I felt good. I looked younger, I felt healthier. I was doing it more of, like, seeing what I could do in my mindset and seeing what it would do for my, you know, kind of cleaning out my system. I just so happened to lose seven and a half pounds. It was burning a lot of excess fat, but I just felt better. I felt more confident. I felt like, oh, I could do something challenging, which gave me more strength in my mind. It was a spiritual experience in a lot of ways. And I'm curious, what are the other myths about fasting that people are afraid of that. That you've debunked?

I mean, the point about being healthier is one of these things that people think it's super unhealthy for you. It's actually one of the healthiest things you can do, as long as you're, again, not underweight and you're doing it safely, right? You're not on a bunch of medications that need adjustment and that kind of thing. But there's this whole recent scientific sort of revolution into this process called autophagy, which has been very, very topical. People have been going crazy on it because in 2016, one of the Nobel prizes in medicine was awarded to one of the early researchers. And what it showed is that when you fast and you turn down these nutrient sensors, then your body actually starts to activate a process called autophagy. And autophagy is where your body breaks down these sort of subcellular organelles. and just gets rid of them. It breaks it down and recycles them. And everybody thinks, well, if you're breaking down stuff, that's bad for you. You're breaking down protein, it's bad for you. It's good for you because the first thing you need to do whenever you want to renovate, for example, say you want to renovate your bathroom, the first thing you got to do is throw out everything in there. That avocado green tub has to go. Otherwise, you can't put in a new tub. Right. It's just the way it is. That's just so your body works the same way. The first thing you have to do is get rid of the old junky old protein. You got to break it down.

You got to kill off those cells.

Yeah.

You got to destroy them, rip them off the body and let them whatever. They flush out your skin or whatever they do, right?

Exactly. The skin proteins, the connective tissue, all of that goes. And it's not like the body knows what it needs and doesn't need. What happens is that everything starts to go and then the stuff you need, like if you're still exercising, your body's like, Hey, I still need those muscles. I'm going to rebuild that. So that's the key that one of the things that activates during fasting is actually growth hormone. So if you fast for 24 hours, your growth hormone level is like four times what it is when you're eating. Yeah. And it sounds very strange. Why would growth hormone goes up? Well, it's because of this whole process where you want to break down stuff as soon as you start to eat it. you want to rebuild all of it. So the Nobel Prize in Medicine, which is Dr. Osuni said, this is the body's intracellular recycling system. So it's not let's flush out all our old stuff. It's not flush it out and rebuild into new stuff. But if you think about it, that's incredibly powerful because that's the whole process of rejuvenation, right? Get rid of the old stuff, bring in new stuff. It's like renovating your body, right? So all the cells in your body undergo this process of regeneration that you're not not going to get if you are eating all the time. So this is this whole, you know, in, in, in people who are very interested in wellness, a lot of people are looking into this autophagy and so on. And, and, and you get this, this point where you're doing, you know, so you've done these longer fasts. It's like, wow, this is, you just feel really good about yourself. You know, you're, you're full of energy. Right. And, and this is the thing that I thought very strange when I did my first sort of three or four day fasts. Like, I have a ton of energy. Like, I could feel like I could do anything. My friend who used to work, he's a doctor, and he worked a lot of nights and stuff. He said, it felt like my brain was like on fire. Like, I thought I could do anything and everything faster than I could and better than I could ever do it before. Interestingly, another friend of mine who's a cardiologist, so he's a heart specialist, he says, you know, I used to, he played piano for his whole life. He says, there's always piece that I couldn't play. And then as soon as I started fasting, I noticed that I could start to do it.

Wow.

That's incredible. And the doctors, when I talk to the doctors, they actually instantly see the logic of what I'm talking about because they know the physiology, what happens in the human body. Because what I'm talking about, which is what all the stuff we know about medical physiology is in contrast to all the stuff that people tell you about fasting, which is, oh, you can't do it. dangerous and it's really bad for you. Whereas the opposite is true, right? It's actually part of a natural cycle, right? It's feeding and fasting, feeding and fasting, right? You don't feed all the time, you don't fast all the time. But we've gone so far into that one thing. So yeah, I mean, this whole point of autophagy is very, very interesting and very topical. If you look at studies of longevity, for example, in animals, the only thing that really makes people makes animals in the lab live longer is caloric restriction. And so even almost 100 years ago, people were talking about it and saying, well, you can try and restrict your calories, but if you do that day after day after day, it's really hard. So fasting may be a better way to go, which is something they figured out sort of ages ago, because if you look back, that's how people thought of fasting. that people called it a cleanse, detoxification, reawakening, spiritual purification, that kind of thing. There's this whole sense of rebirth and something super healthy for you, which got turned in the 80s into something really bad for you. It's strange how things work, but without any sort of scientific evidence and as we've become as a nation, more overweight, it becomes even more important. And that's just one of these sort of fascinating things. So, you know, it's not like something I just made up. It's like literally the oldest dietary intervention in the books, right? I'm just rediscovering this and trying to tell people, hey, there's a lot of good medical science that tells you this is actually something that is applicable to what we're seeing today in our health care. And you can do something like you don't need your doctor, you don't need your dietitian. You can do something about it right now for no money. Right. And there's the science is all there. Right. Imagine how much money you could save as a society if we got rid of this problem. And it's like, oh, my God, like the, it's mind blowing.

Well, I think that's part of the issue is the reason it's not popular, I guess, is because businesses make a lot of money on medicine. Businesses make a lot of money on selling more food, not selling less food. And therefore, people want to make more money. And so they have to market their products. They have to market their medicines. They have to market their foods to try to sell more of it, not to say, oh, just have a few of these. Just have a couple of cookies a day. No, they want to sell boxes of cookies, right? It's not like they got to make money. as in their mind, this is a business to be run and we need to sell more, more means more people need to eat sugar, refined sugar, breads, all these things, refined oils, refined meats, refined fats, all these things you said that are horrible for us to eat, the company's making them in order for them to survive financially, they need to sell more of these things to us, which is a challenge.

It's a real problem because if you look at, say, you know, the doctors and the dieticians, you go to conferences, They're sponsored by Kellogg's and, you know, the breakfast makers and so on. And it's crazy. I was watching the show the other day, one of these, you know, TLC shows with like these very heavy women. Anyway, they're trying to lose weight and they're taking these protein shakes. I'm thinking, and they couldn't drink it. It was horrible stuff. They tasted really bad. So they spit it out. I'm thinking somebody's just trying to make a buck on you because you should just drink water. let your body use the fat and use the protein from your own body. Why would you want to drink two of these protein shakes a day, except that somebody wants to sell it to you? You're being played here. You're drinking this horrible, horrible tasting stuff and they're spitting it out. They couldn't take it. It's like, oh, the whole thing is so sad because it's like if you knew, you could simply take nothing at all. and be far healthier and save yourself a lot of money. It's a sad, sad sort of state of affairs that we get into.

What would you say are the top four or five benefits of fasting then? If we had to recap that part of it, what would you say are the top five? I'm hearing it's free.

That's one of them. Yeah. So it's free. That's a huge thing. You really, you can add it to any diet because remember that it does not tell you what to eat when you're eating. It only tells you what the period of time that you're not eating. So whether you're a vegetarian or carnivore or paleo or keto or whatever you want to be, even if you want to eat fast food all day, it doesn't tell you you can't eat fast food. It tells you that during this period of time, don't eat. So you can add it to any diet, which is incredible, because now we're pulling on a completely different lever. That is, if you think about weight loss and nutrition in general, there's two levers, right? We always think of the what you're eating. Eat more vegetables. That's great. But what if you don't like vegetables? Well, that lever doesn't work. So here's a completely different lever. You're talking about, well, there's this other thing I can do to lose weight or get healthier. So you can add it to any diet. It's completely flexible. That is to say, you can do it whenever you want or if you don't want. If it's Christmas and you do not want to fast, for these few days, then you don't have to. If they decide to fast longer after Christmas, then sure, you can do that. That's completely up to you. It's not like you're locked in. You know, the fourth thing is that it's very simple. So if you look at a lot of diets, that is to say, say you're on a paleo diet. It's a great diet, right? But it's like this is paleo and this is paleo and this is not paleo, right? It's complex or keto or whatever you want to be. So it's very difficult for some people to understand, and I've tried to explain sort of these differences because they'll always get confused and you always get the, is this keto or is this paleo or whatever. Whereas fasting is very simple. It's like you can drink water and tea and herbal tea say, that's it. Everything else you can't eat, right? So it's very simple to explain to somebody. It makes it very easy for them to follow because it's very black and white. If you ate a peanut, that's not fasting, right? Yes, it's not a big deal, but at the same time, that's not fasting. And then the other thing is that it's powerful, right? Because if you follow any type of a diet, there's always a natural limit. So say here you want to lose weight and so you say, I'm going to do a keto diet or a paleo diet or a vegetarian diet. So you do a vegetarian diet and you lose a few pounds but not as much as you want. Well, you can't go more vegetarian than vegetarian.

We're already vegetarian.

Exactly. So, what else are you going to do? There's nowhere else you can go, or you can't go more keto or you can't go more paleo, whereas there's no actual upper limit to what you can do in terms of fasting. And, it's powerful because you're eating zero, which means that it is, by definition, for weight loss, the most powerful diet there is. Like, absolutely, you cannot lose more than that.

If you put any calories in your body, no matter what diet you're on, you're not going to lose as much as if you had zero calories.

Exactly. So that's the whole thing. It is the most powerful diet. It's the most powerful diet. The starvation should die. But it's like, okay, well, why would you not want it? If you have a lot of work to do, you want the best tool. That's it. This is the best tool. And somehow we said, don't ever use this. It's like, why? If you use it, you'll actually get all these other benefits. so it's free, it's available, it's simple. You can do it with any diet, and it's powerful, and you actually don't have to stop. You can actually keep going. You can do a seven-day fast and take a little break, do another seven-day fast, and you can't go lower than zero. There's no way it is possible physiologically to go less than zero. So it is the most powerful diet. So there's so many benefits, and yet for years, I'll tell you, when I started using it with with patients in about seven or eight, seven years ago, maybe. It was like the stuff we saw was just incredible. People were like coming off their medications, they're reversing their type 2 diabetes, they're losing weight. It's like, you know, all from this simple intervention that is literally the oldest one in the book.

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