How To Do Intermittent Fasting For SERIOUS WEIGHT LOSS! (Melt The Fat Away) | Mike Mutzel

This whole intermittent fasting phenomenon has really blown up in the last three to four years. And there's apps for it and there's millions of people that are in communities around this. But what the research is saying is that to, is it to burn more fat, to live longer potentially? The research is saying just skip dinner now, not skip breakfast. Simple as that. Simple as that.

Or have an earlier dinner.

Earlier dinner, like 6 o'clock, 5 o'clock.

Would it be reasonable for family? You know, I have a young daughter, nine years old, and she's super hungry after school. So instead of saying, no, honey, we're gonna go play and do all this stuff, and then we're gonna eat later, I just give her the food then. So then she's not even that hungry for dinner. It's not like I'm trying to get her to lose weight necessarily. I just want her to get into the habit. Because the most important thing, you know, for people listening right now, sleep is arguably, and I know you've talked a lot about sleep, it's key. When we eat a big dinner, you know, let's say you're doing the intermittent fasting thing, you fast till 2:00 PM, start having all this food, your sleep is not as good if you cut off your feeding window at 10:00 p.m. You're digesting the meat that you had or the olives or whatever healthy foods and you're not getting a good night's sleep. Then this sets up this vicious cycle when you're not sleeping good, then all your appetite regulatory hormones, leptin, ghrelin, insulin are all skewed and then you want to eat and consume ultra processed packaged crap because your sleep was messed up. and our sleep naturally kind of gets a little wonky as we age. People have sleep disorder breathing. We should be breathing through our nose when we're sleeping, not our mouth. A lot of people, we gain weight around the neck and so forth and that causes us to breathe through our mouth, which leads to all these changes we can talk about later. But anyway, so the point is the.

Way to remedy all of this, at least make a big dent in this.

Is to eat earlier. Dr. Man, is there any negative side effects to fasting? Dr. Well, that's a great question. You can overdo anything. You can drink too much water. Fasting can easily get you into a calorie deficit. And so especially for women that come from a history of disordered eating, anorexia, bulimia, if people are really lean, for example, if you're 8% body fat, fasting for 18, 20, probably not good. You're going to start to tear away muscle. Now, fasting is unique and the rise, and if we talk about the recipe, if we just back up a little bit in the physiology for people, one of the benefits of fasting comes through you're dropping your blood glucose levels. and that leads to a reduction in insulin, and that increases a related hormone to insulin called glucagon. So that signals your fat cells to start releasing stored energy. Does that mean burning fat? Essentially burning fat. Right, so that energy that's being released can go to your brain to help you think and make thoughts, and it can go to your liver to create energy and so forth, and that helps with fat loss, which is great, but it also helps with all these processes of longevity that we've been sort of talking about. Sure, okay. And then in the process, when you're burning fat, your body makes ketones, your liver makes these things called ketones, and they help suppress appetite and prevent muscle from being catabolized. So they're anti-catabolic, they're actually used in, or being studied to be used in individuals who are bedridden or have cachexia to give them exogenous ketones. Like let's say you have to get a surgery, you break your leg or something like that, and you're bedridden, you can't move, you don't wanna catabolize all your muscle that you've spent a long time building. you could take these exogenous ketones that would help prevent muscle wasting. So that's kind of cool. Anyway, the point of me giving that backstory is with fasting, you naturally have more of a suppressed appetite because these ketones help to suppress your appetite. So if you're already underweight, it may lend itself to being more and more underweight. And as we age, we naturally lose muscle anyway. And muscle helps us burn fat. So the point is it's a dance, it's a balance, figuring out what how much fasting you want to do and then when you refeed, try not to diet at the same time. So don't have the iceberg lettuce with boneless skinless chicken, right? Like have like a ribeye steak or some good stuff.

Really? Yeah. Okay. Don't be too extreme with everything in your life.

Exactly.

That's not sustainable.

No.

Yeah. What would you say are the five biggest benefits of fasting?

So the biggest benefit that I've noticed, and this is great for entrepreneurs, is mental clarity. As we age, everything atrophies in our body, but especially in our brain too. We start to notice that words are harder to retrieve and memory changes. So that's, to me, the biggest benefit. Another benefit is a reduction in blood pressure. So especially for men, heart disease is probably what's going to harm most men and compromise their lifespan. So you get a reduction in blood pressure. The third benefit that everyone wants is you lose body fat. easier to lose body fat. So that's a huge benefit. And I think the fourth, and this could be depending upon who you are, the first benefit is more energy. You know, I love food as much as anyone, but if I were to have, we're filming this around 2:00 or 2:30, right? If I would have went and had a big meal, I would be lethargic right now, unable to really, you know, I'd want caffeine, which would have affected my sleep negatively tonight. So I just haven't had breakfast or lunch or anything. So I'm just going. You haven't eaten. Haven't eaten today? Nothing.

No calories, no coffee, no tea.

Coffee. And I did have some exogenous ketones.

What is that? You just put it in the coffee?

Just had it separate.

So these are the- the powder is.

A pill, is a- Comes in different forms, but this one is a liquid. It's a ketone ester.

This is pretty cool.

I have to give you some. Give me some. Yeah, so- what is this? Honestly, it lights up your brain. So because our brains obviously need a lot of energy, but if you're fasted, your blood sugar drops, so your brain relies upon fat for oxidate to make memories and to retrieve words. And these ketones just go right into your brain and fuel the brain. And they're pretty cool.

So you haven't eaten today, you had black coffee, no oat milk or anything, or no almond milk, just black.

Just black.

Then some liquid ketones?

I just want to make sure I'm showing up to share good content. I want to thank you for having me on the show. And so it's like, dude, I want to make sure that I reciprocate and deliver value.

What, okay, and the fifth thing, fifth benefit, would you say?

We talked about energy, fat loss.

Did we talk about blood sugar yet?

Blood sugar, clarity, fat loss, more energy. Blood pressure, I would say, is one important. Blood pressure, yep. Blood sugar. Yeah, and then longevity.

I would just say.

Longevity. Many of the processes of aging, if we think about reframing how we think about aging, we think that aging is this sort of, phenomenon that just happens no matter what, but we can dramatically influence the rate at which we age biologically. And part of the processes and these intracellular signaling molecules and switches and genes that impact our aging process are beneficially augmented, shall we say, by way of fasting. And so there's a lot of synergy and parallels between all those metabolic processes that are upregulated when we're fasting. And so we support our natural, we sort of turn the thermostat down on the rate at which we're aging.

Is there a way to reverse aging?

It depends on who you talk to. If you talk to David Sinclair, there is some different ways to go about that. There's senolytic therapies and so it's a way to change the way our cells are functioning because there's this process known as cellular senescence, which means that our cells, we have a finite ability to sort of replicate in our cells function And when they achieve the end of their lifespan, they undergo this process known as senescence. And when our cells start to senesce, they release all these pheromones, so to speak. I'm really simplifying this. They release pheromones that recruit other cells to become more senescent. So it's like this vicious cycle, like a snowball rolling downhill. So once that process starts, it can become problematic. And that's why you see people, they might have a little pre-diabetes and high blood pressure, then they can't remember where their keys are, and then pretty soon they're in a nursing home. We've seen this in our family members and friends. Well, we can augment that by purging those senescent cells.

By killing the cells.

Yeah, those particular cells.

And you do that through fasting. Is that through autophagy or what is that?

Well, through autophagy, but also this emerging field in aging biology known as senolytic therapies. So there's different drugs, actually some drugs that are using cancer, but you just use them short dose, like two days with quercetin, Dasatinib and quercetin has been used. There's drugs like metformin and there's drugs like rapamycin we can talk about that have a really low side effect profile that people are sort of microdosing. We've heard about microdosing LSD and mushrooms and all that. But these are where people are microdosing longevity drugs to sort of pulse, to not totally drive down longevity because we still want to grow. We want to build muscles. But if we can slow down this process of biologic aging, then we can just function better. And this is, I think, One of the most exciting, I think honestly you and I in like five years, we'll be taking metformin like every other day or every fifth day to just sort of put a damper on some of these pathways that are linked with cancer.

What would you say are the top three ways to reverse aging then? Is fasting one of them?

Fasting is up there. If you were to interview all these health experts, most people would say fasting is the number one thing, but I honestly think exercise is the number one.

It's reverse aging.

To reverse aging because we talked about, and I know it's a big word, cellular senescence. So these are cells that have reached their end of their function. They should apoptose and die and go.

Away, but they don't. And then they recruit other cells to.

Become bad cells with them. Exactly. It releases this secretome, secretory phenotype, and.

It can be measured and this can be measured in the blood. And this just makes you look older. It makes your organs older, your skin.

Older, your face older, all those things, right? Exactly. Yeah, and it compromises your heart function, high blood pressure, poor memory.

Hurts your immune system, everything, right?

The immune system is the biggest one. In fact, this is how biological age is often assessed, is by way of the immune system. So the immune system, obviously it's hot with everything going on right now, but it's really involved in how we repair. So if you're not repairing when you're sleeping, and your immune system is repairing, changing, say you damage your muscles by working out, your immune system is going to help repair that. And our immune system can accumulate a lot of these senescent cells. We've heard about antibodies a lot on the media lately, but there's what's known as your T helper cells are really important for the immune system, but also aging in general. And these cells are prone to accumulate a lot of senescent T cells. But if you and I go out and burst train, if we go out to the beach and we lift weights and do some CrossFit or go hiking, we purge those bad T cells.

Through exercise. Through exercise. So any type of exercise or is this more high intensity training? Can you just walk and this does this? Does it have to be?

You know, this is a great question. Because I don't want to prevent anyone from gardening and just walking. Any exercise is way better than no exercise. However, intensity matters.

Really? How much intensity?

How long? I would say at least, and this is what the research shows, 75 minutes. combined over the course of a week?

75 minutes, I'm intense. Intensifies. What's that mean? Resistance training, training to failure, is that heart rate getting above a certain level? What does that mean?

A very simple way to approximate the intensity is how well can you breathe? So if I can't talk to you, then that's intense enough. So it's like an eight or nine out of 10. Now again, this is just in short segments. This can be little sprints for 10 minutes here, this can be going up the flight of stairs instead of taking the elevator. This can be walking up a hill. So if you're going to walk, which is amazing, like so good for all many aspects of your health, try to walk up hills as well, not just flat. Try to increase the intensity periodically. Tell your walking partner, Hey, we gotta speed it up. See that telephone pole down? Let's go as fast as we can. If you're functionally able to sprint, that's even better. So periodic sprints are fantastic. And again, there's all the benefits from the aerobics, the lungs, the cardiovascular system, but specifically since you asked about aging, that's where exercise in my estimation trumps, and I don't want to say it's better necessarily, but it seems that it has a lot of crossover. And here's what's cool about exercise, it makes fasting more efficient. So exercisers, we have one of several studies here if people can't see, Several studies have looked at individuals who are overweight and sedentary and had them fast for 72 hours, had individuals who were physically active and lean and had them fast for 72 hours. And they looked at the initiation of this process that we've sort of been talking about known as autophagy, which if I haven't defined yet, it's an intracellular way to break down accumulated proteins and stuff in our cells to recycle it. It's triggered by states of low nutrient conditions. so when we're fasting, when we exercise. Well, everyone thinks, well, you gotta fast for 72 hours or 36 hours. All the gurus have different opinions about how long you fast. Well, it depends upon how fit you are. So the more physically fit people are, the greater the initiation of autophagy is when they fast for the identical lengths of time.

So what does that mean? So if I'm shredded, 8% body fat, 5%, whatever it is, and I'm fit, does that mean I need to Fast longer to get the benefits short, less. Because I'm fit, I only need 24 hours, I only need 72. 18 is probably good.

18 hours to get the benefits.

If I'm 40% body fat or 30% or whatever it is, I'm going to need multiple days is what you're saying to get the same benefits. Exactly.

Why is that?

Well, it has to do with the muscles.

So if we think about what tissues are impacted by fasting, it's your liver primarily and your muscles and then your brain. but your liver and your muscles are sort of necessary in terms of the adaptations from exercise. So if you and I start training and then you look at sort of the proteomics or metabolomics, which is a way to see how bodily tissues are responding to exercise, you would see our liver and our muscles are like changing, right? And that's why exercise is so good for fatty liver disease, because it helps to prevent the accumulation of fat in the liver. So yeah, the act of moving your muscles changes how your muscles function, and in a fasted state, they're already primed to deal with conditions of nutrient deprivation from exercise.

So should we exercise and fast at the same time or is that too much where you're like, okay, I'm exhausted, now I need some energy? Yeah.

It totally depends on... So here's my personal perspective on this. And again, my biases are I'm not trying to lose weight, I'm trying to preserve muscle as I age, you know, because I know that as men and you lose muscle as you age. So I'm trying to maintain muscle. So I do my cardio in the morning fasted.

Cardio, so 30-60 minutes of running, biking, swimming, jogging, whatever.

I mean, honestly, it sounds silly, Louis, but I bike my daughter to school. And we're sprinting, we're having a good time, we're joking around, Hey, Nez, I'll beat you to that telephone. We're doing stuff, but my heart rate is up and that's enough cardio for me and then we'll do some stuff later in the day, walking or things like that. And then I wait, train after I've had some food.

Later on.

How do you eat? That's just my thing. But again, I've been lifting since I don't look like a bodybuilder. I'm not bragging, but I've been lifting since in high school. But if you're brand new to this, I would say give fasted exercise a try. See how it's just like a different diet. Keto works for some people, plant-based works for others. I would say try fasted because that recipe we talked about, low glucose, low insulin, high glucagon, you accelerate that process when you do fasted exercise.

Fasted exercise, gotcha. And what's more powerful in your mind or what is the research saying? Fasting or specific types of diets without fasting?

It's an awesome question. I don't know that it's possible to disentangle the two, you know, because to get the benefits of fasting, you get that metabolic switch, like low glucose and all that. And if you're eating McDonald's or pop tarts and foods that jack up your blood sugar, it's going to be hard to get some of the benefits and to trigger these autophagy related processes that we've been alluding to if you're eating that sort of food. Now, that being said, if that's all you can afford or your whole family eats that way and you're kind of stuck, still fast. It's better than not, but you want to try to eat as much unprocessed get rid of the packaged foods and eat more real food. If it comes in a box bag or a can, try to eat as little as possible of that and make your food from scratch. That's kind of a, but everyone responds differently. Some people love high carbs and eat rice and do well. I like more of a low-carb approach. I don't think there's any one diet that's going to be applicable to everyone and benefit everyone the same.

So how does the body create autophagy? Is that only through exercise and fasting or is that other ways you can do that?

Yeah, that's a great question. Well, autophagy is super complex. There's all these different subtypes of autophagy, but the autophagy that we're kind of alluding to with regards to longevity, I believe most of that is initiated by low glucose, low insulin environments. So if you do a fasted walk in the morning, you're going to see probably a bump in your autophagy. If you skip dinner, by the time you wake up, the autophagy initiation genes will have been upregulated. And this was actually a study, I think it was researchers at University of Alabama actually. They stratified, kind of alluded to it, people in two different groups, one ate the same amount of calories over 12 hours, one ate between eight and two. And they did these microarray studies in the muscle tissue in the liver and they actually found that autophagy was significantly increased in the group that stopped eating after 2:00 PM. They're eating this isocaloric diets and all that, max for their body weight.

So that just shows me that- Same calories, different times.

Yep.

And the autophagy was higher when people stopped eating at two.

Right, and not only the autophagy was higher, but there was a bunch of other genes related to autophagy signaling like mTOR. And so this is sort of a break on autophagy. It's an enzyme, it's a kinase, and this inhibits the process of autophagy. Now some people might say, oh my gosh, I want to inhibit autophagy all the time. you want mTOR to also grow and repair. So if you and I both go work out, we've been fasting, we would want to probably eat some protein. Well, part of how protein helps us recover is mediated through mTOR. So it's not this binary thing like one of these things is always bad and one's always good. It's the context. And you don't want to overexpress mTOR all of the time. That can accelerate your aging. So snacking every hour, having protein shakes, and then chips and cookies, like that's going to overload this growth process and lead to things like cancer, dementia, heart disease. Really?

So eating frequently throughout the day is typically not good or is it okay for some people?

Generally, so if you're a 20-something fitness model and you're training your butt off, you can get away with it. But when you get older, and there's been several studies, they call them like nibbling versus gorging studies, where they have people just eat one meal versus all these small little meals, when you're eating.

All the time, you think about food all the time. And you're digesting all the time too, I'm assuming, right?

Exactly. And you're having this constant surge in glucose and insulin and you're just preoccupied with food. I know a lot of your listeners are business owners or want to be business owners. So you can focus more on your business and your family, things that matter in life as opposed to always like, well, it's two hours, I gotta have my shake. you become food obsessed and that is a behavioral addiction that can compromise your life and productivity.

So what's your routine look like on a normal season of life when you're not splurging or something or whatever on a cheat day, but what's a normal routine look like? In terms of feeding, exercise, and fasting and sleep.

Awesome question, Louis. So I get up, meditate first thing in the morning. So I think mindfulness meditation is huge. I do a little Wim Hof hyperventilation, retention breath work. I have a cold plunge, I go in that and that just sort of sets the day. And then I have some black coffee. But my rule is I can't have coffee before I meditate. So that's just my rule. Because I would obviously just want to have the coffee and then go about my day and not do any of that. But I just have espresso black coffee. Our family, we bike to school and stuff like that. I'll come back, do like an hour or so of work and by then I'm starting to get hungry. It's like 9:00, 10:00. I usually have breakfast and and that includes protein and fat for me. So I'll have two meals a day and my feeding window generally, again, and I'm not saying this is good for every single person, but it's between 10 and something like 10 and six on most days. So it's like two meals a day. Now, if I train really hard or if I feel really hungry, I'll have a snack, maybe like one or two o'clock, and that can be some raw milk or a nut milk with some whey protein, something along those lines. and then dinner, generally low carb, but during the fall, that's when squashes and tubers, they're all-- so I know it sounds weird, it's not really sexy to talk about eating seasonally, that's all humans ever could ever do.

That's true. So you finish, you have dinner around five or six, so you finish around six typically?

Yeah.

It's pretty good, it sounds like a good lifestyle.

I mean, it's pretty simple. You know, you have two major meals a day, and if you want a.

Little snack, I mean, that's fine. But stop at 6, 7 o'clock latest is what you would suggest.

Exactly. Now, if I have friends that are doing a cool dinner, I'm not gonna be that weirdo like I already ate before. So that's the thing. So balancing that with social connections. Because social connections, I think, are as important as any of the stuff that.

We'Ve been talking about. Yeah, so one, two nights a week, if you're having a dinner at 8 o'clock, you're fine. You're just trying to eat quickly and.

Then just drink water the rest of the dinner or something. Totally, or make sure I go for a walk after. Going on a walk after a meal is such a great way to drop that glucose level.

Really?

Yeah, it's amazing.

What does it do to the body?

Well, so after we eat, I mean, it's funny, so I love food, so just want to preface this, but eating is stressful on the body. And so your eating raises glucose, it raises cortisol, everyone's scared about cortisol from adrenal fatigue and all that, but when you eat, you disrupt the homeostatic balance. and so your body is trying to mitigate some of that and walking can help do that and bring down that post meal blood sugar level. So I think one of the easiest things people can do, especially if they don't have the money to eat healthy food or if you have a cheat meal, you go to McDonald's with your buddies, you go to Chick-fil-A, whatever, go for a quick walk afterwards and it can really kind of bring that glucose level down.

What if you did a run or an actual workout right afterwards?

Well, okay, so if you do something super intense, maybe you haven't digested everything.

I think that's good, yeah.

So you might want to wait a little bit, but yeah, there's nothing wrong with necessarily doing that.

Is there optimal times to work out during the day?

So I think cardio in the morning is better, and you're more powerful from a resistance training standpoint. You have more strength when your body temperature raises later in the day, so in the afternoons.

So don't do lifting or high intensity in the morning.

Well, I hate to add all these caveats, but dude, if you have three kids and that's the only time you can do it. Do what you want to do, yeah. Like Steve Weatherford, that's it, right? He's up at five in the morning, just do it. It's a machine, yes. Don't change what you're doing. But if you have the flexibility to.

Split hairs, sure, do your cardio in the morning or your walking and then hit the gym later in the day. And do you think it's good to do multiple workouts throughout the day? like a 20 to 30 minute walk, run, bike, swim in the morning and then 30 to 60 minutes gym, class, whatever in the afternoon.

If your schedule allows that, I think that's awesome.

Why is that?

Well, because you're training different energy systems, you give your body the ability, because when you're doing cardio, what you're doing is you're using your mitochondria, you're tearing down, it's just different pathways. and your body temperature is a little bit cooler. So I do think from a physiologic standpoint, it is good to split it up.

And do two a day if you can.

Yeah, maybe not every day, but like three or four days a week, I think that would be ideal.

And then-- well, how much cardio would you say for the normal person?

20 to 25 minutes. So jog, jog walk, you know-- Doesn't.

Have to be high intensity, like fast. You can push three mile run or something. It can be a-- A jog. Okay. What will that do? Just a 20 to 30 minute jog in the morning, first thing before you eat.

Yeah, well, first of all, mental clarity is huge because you're going to clear the cobwebs, you're going to drop your glucose. It's good for the body's inflammatory response. You're going to decrease chronic inflammation. You improve the distribution of your microvasculature. So as we age, our cardiovascular system gets compromised and we can get edema.

We can get varicose veins and all that.

Just moving, you're exercising this critical tissue.

What are varicose veins? Those really thick veins that stick out in those.

They're unsightly. What is that? Why do some people have that? The capillary integrity can be compromised. Some people are just genetically prone to that, but it does happen more as we age. It happens to women after they give birth, they get hemorrhoids and all the pressure. So that's where walking is really critical because when you're moving your muscles, it massages all that.

That tissue.

Interesting. And another facet of inflammation is when our lymph, so we have blood and we have our lymphatic system, which really mirrors our cardiovascular system. We want to move that lymph around. Stagnant lymph is a major problem. So if you go sit on an airplane or a train or even a road trip, it's good to just go for a quick walk, like five minutes. So last night I went in at Burbank and the rental car place is, it's a good hustle. So I decided just to run because I've been sitting for so long, not that, but like three and a half hours, right? And just to move that around to.

Just like... 5-10 minutes is good, right?

Easy, yes. I wasn't sweating, you know, it wasn't that big of a deal, but we don't think to do that stuff. We're like, oh, I'll get the Uber, I'll take the elevator, I'll take the escalator. These small little acts sprinkled in throughout the day, you know, it's just like, you know, if you ask someone, well, hey, when do you read about your bit? You know, if you can read 10.

Minutes, three times a day, it's probably.

Better than sitting there trying to sweat in it right before bed.

Yeah.

So you're gonna be tired. You're gonna have, you know.

Sure, sure. So cardio in the morning, a little workout in the afternoon, fasting. What is the bot? What happens to the body when we eat?

Yeah.

Like you said, it puts stress in the body. What happens to the body? And is it better to work out before or after eating? Like, before workout or like an hour and a half after, which one is better?

Everyone has different perspectives on this, but again, I just want to clarify, I love eating and I'm encouraged eating, however, we need to realize that eating can be a stressor on the body and that's how we can mitigate, especially eating more unreal food, more refined food, right? But it's better...

So what happens in the body when we eat? Say we have a big meal, what is the process of eating? Like, what does it do when we digest? How long does it take for us to kind of get back to focus? What is that process?

This is a phenomenal question. Well, what's interesting, and this leads into a tip, you know, practical tip with eating, is the more mindful we are when we're eating, the better we will process that food, and the better our blood sugar will be in the post meal window. So if you and I start cutting up garlic and ginger and oregano right now, we're gonna start to salivate. Right. Just even thinking about it, right? That. That's known as the cephalic phase of digestion. Okay, so digestion really starts in your brain. and that cephalic phase if that doesn't get initiated. So let's say you're eating, you're on Instagram, you're on Instagram and you're driving and you're eating. I saw someone doing this in the way over. Oh my gosh. So your brain's not thinking about processing food. So you could eat that same meal when you're in a relaxed state and you cook the meal with your significant other or family member and have a totally different post meal processing of insulin, glucose, inflammatory response.

Because you're relaxed or you're preparing it or you're preparing forward to be ready.

Exactly. Because your brain is signaling to your gut, food is coming. So we're going to increase and there's this whole field known as the incretin. So these gut hormones, they help insulin do its job in the post-meal window. So they help mitigate blood pressure and these incretins are so important that they're actually a big target when it comes to managing type 2 diabetes. In fact, a lot of if we think about bariatric surgery, I know I'm.

All over the place, but it'll come.

Back to your question. What is the surgery? Gastric bypass.

So to lose weight by manipulating the stomach.

By making it smaller, taking out some of the stomach. Correct. That's, so that's what a lot of people think. They assume that when you get bariatric surgery, the mechanism of action of how it's losing, how it's attributed or ascribed to losing weight is by making the stomach smaller. But a huge mechanism is changing these gut hormones and amplifying them. It's turning up thermostat on these hormones that we can amplify by chewing our food, slowing down.

Really?

Talking, you and I talking, we put the fork down, we're engaged, we cook the meal together, we smell the meal, we're gonna have a much better post meal processing of that compared to if we just shoved it down and we're driving on a 405 eating.

Right, right. So digestion starts in the brain.

Fascinating.

Huh.

Yeah.

It doesn't all just happen in the gut and just process all in the stomach and the intestines down here. It starts with the brain and the process before you eat. Correct.

And there's why you're eating, wow. Pre-meal insulin release. That's why when people are new to fasting, to dovetail it back, if they've been regularly eating at say, they always eat breakfast at 900, they always have lunch at 1200, if you skip breakfast, it's normal to be a little bit jittery because your body starts to remember, Sally has a meal at 900. so there's a little pre-meal insulin release and that's going to drop your glucose. So if you suddenly skip breakfast and this is a hurdle that people have logistically when they start fasting, they're like, I've tried it, I'm all jittery and I can't do it. Part of that is because there's this what's known as a second meal effect.

And this anticipatory effect of eating. So your body adapts.

So it just might take a week or two to get used to it. Exactly. Take some time and maybe you just.

Have instead of a monster meal, maybe you have some macadamia nuts or cashews or a banana or something or yeah, Interesting. Huh. I'm gonna have to try, because I love breakfast, but for the last few years I've been doing the intermittent fasting more in the morning, obviously. And so maybe I'll try the not eating after seven or something. Try it out for a few weeks. Yeah.

Yeah, I would love to know what you notice, changes. But again, if that's working for you, then maybe that's the change.

Yeah, if it's working.

Yeah.

Why is it so hard for so many people to lose belly fat? It's a good question.

I don't know that anyone totally knows the answer. Like five years ago, I would have told you it's all about the gut. It's all about your gut hormones. It's all about the gut microbiome. But now we know that stress and cortisol is an issue. We know that hormones, so if I give an overweight person testosterone, particularly if they're a male, they will start to lose more abdominal adiposity or fat around their fat tissue. So it's stressed. You take two different people and you look at their cortisol levels. You know, one's lean, one's overweight around the middle. generally their cortisol levels are a little bit higher. So I think it's multifactorial. There's a lot of things going on and that's why we can't just focus on just calories alone. Of course energy balance matters, but we need to look at the body as this interconnected network and there's all these different pieces of the puzzle and we now have some of the data to show that. So I think if we focus on eating more whole grain food, we cover some sort of that microbiome piece. if we focus on stress reduction and eating in a mindful state, we sort of COVID that cortisol piece and going to bed and rising at the same time of the day, making sure we're getting enough sunlight. As crazy as it sounds, there's good data to show that just 20 minutes of midday sun exposure can help you sleep better that night. We never hear about it, right? People want to take the Tylenol PM or the antihistamines or the whatever, but.

Very simple things are accessible and they're not very expensive. What about mitochondria? Why is this such an important thing now? What is it and why is it so important? Yeah, I mean the way the analogy.

That maybe it's not the best analogy, but if we think about our house and relate that to a cell, we have billions of cells and our house has a furnace, it has a dishwasher, it has different appliances that make the house able to be hospitable. Where your cells have these different intracellular components and the mitochondria help take that energy like we're going to both eat dinner tonight. We can't directly utilize the glucose from a sweet potato or the fat in, say, an avocado. We have to break that down into a form of energy our body can use known as ATP. And it turns out that our mitochondria help facilitate. Well, they are what are needed to make that process work.

What's ATP, Stan?

ATP is like when I move in my muscles, adenosine triphosphate. It's how the human mammalian cells function. Like that's the currency. If we think about cash, that this is the ultimate currency that enables transactions. By transactions, I mean movements, thinking, creating thoughts, they depend on this ATP. So we hear about, oh, the brain loves glucose. Well, the brain doesn't directly oxidize glucose. It needs it in the form of ATP. So anyway, that happens mostly in the mitochondria. And it turns out that our mitochondria can become rusty and squeaky if we don't exercise. if we never fast because we talked about autophagy as a way to autophagy is increased when we exercise or when we fast. Well, there's a way to sort of cause autophagy to our mitochondria. It's known as mitophagy. So mitophagy is a way to sort of take those rusty mitochondria that should be recycled. You know, it's like these papers, you put them in the recycle bin and we can use them for something else. Mitophagy helps to break down those intracellular components within the mitochondria.

Got it.

So exercise enhances that, fasting enhances that. So they're really important.

What is the thing that you've learned in the last two years that's been a breakthrough for you in your sleep, your performance, your health, your emotional and mental well-being, what's the thing you've noticed? Because you've been performing at an elite level for many years, you've been doing this since high school, you've been studying this, but what's something new for you in the last couple of years?

Yeah, this is a great question. I mean, you always get excited about the newest things, right? But I think really honoring the circadian clock system in the body and being much more vigilant, because I used to stay up late and do research up to like two in the morning, then sleep in. And having these irregular sleep wake cycles, especially as I age, I've noticed that I'm much more sensitive and I perform much better if I just say, look, Mike, You're going to bed at 10 and then in that process, if it's getting dark as we get into fall here, making sure that I'm cutting off the screens beforehand, at least two hours. Yeah, wow. So, I mean it sounds so simple. You're like, Dude, that's it. Like really, that's all I need. But how many people actually do it? That's the thing. You know, I had a late fight last night. I saw all these people on their phones, like just blaring. You can see the blue light, right? That is augmenting a lot of their aging process, their hunger hormones. It's impacting a lot of different things. So just being, I would say, being more conscious of how I treat my body's circadian clock system.

So you're saying if we're looking at TV screens or phones, we're more hungry or we're going to be susceptible to wanting a snack or something?

Probably the next day because it screws up your circadian clock system. All these hormones and all the men and probably all the women will recognize men's testosterone rises in the morning, right? Like it's very predictable. All these hormones rise on a circadian clock rhythm. They're influenced by our internal clock system. So when we're on these screens, we screw that up. So we might pivot it one hour here or two hours there. And so that then, leptin is another one of these hormones like testosterone that oscillates in this manner. And if we augment leptin, then you and I will start to crave crappier foods. We're going to want the cookies and the treats. whereas we might have had the willpower to say, you know what, I'm not going to have that. If our leptin is off because we went to bed at 2:00 in the morning or we're watching Netflix too late, then we can succumb to those cravings that ordinarily wouldn't be a problem because our circadian clock system is off and leptin can be imbalanced.

Wow. Because there's a few books out now about this circadian rhythm, right? Like the rising and sleeping with the sun and this and this. I mean, I'm not sure which, my mom was telling me about one recently, actually, I'm not sure which book was called, but how important is kind of this philosophy of, you know, once the sun goes down, like, you start getting ready for bed and when the sun comes up, it's time to get up.

To me, I think this is one of the most important facets of health. And if you go in nature and just look at what deer do, what bears do, even what? And what drilled this home for me is we got backyard chickens a few years ago. And I was like, every night, no matter what, these chickens, when the, at a certain time, the day like you.

They'Re in there because they're, they're prey, right? Right. They're hidden in their little Hut.

Yeah. And they go to sleep every night. So it's like if, if mammal, if we want to survive, we can't circumvent this critical process. And we have. And the Advent of screens, of phones, of Uber Eats, of all of this, we're seeing a worsening in our health. So I think it's one of the biggest things. And we've been talking a lot about fasting and autophagy and all that. All these processes linked with longevity that we're all trying to hit and increase to make our aging processes slow down, they depend upon the circadian clock system. You cannot disentangle longevity-related processes from this critical circadian rhythm. So that reminded me of the importance then of time-restricted feeding. As opposed to intermittent fasting, which focuses on the number of hours you fast, time-restricted feeding focuses on when you eat.

And when you fast.

Say it one more time, the last part? Yeah, so intermittent fasting, people hear about 16:8, 10:24, whatever. Time-restricted feeding is a subtype of intermittent fasting that focuses on the hours that you feed and the hours that you fast. Okay. Sorry, the time of the day.

Time of the day, not 16:8, but when you do that.

Exactly.

Got you.

So again, we've talked like I think a really easy window for most people is like 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Like if most people ate during those times, even if they're eating crap, they would probably improve their health. Really?

Yeah. Don't eat crap, but if you just did from 10 to 6 and that's.

The only time you ate. You would probably notice your pants feel less tight. Really? You would probably notice that you're a little bit more on top of it mentally. You might notice better digestion, and hopefully better sleep. A lot of people can't sleep. Wow.

So don't wait till one or two, which is what most people have been doing with the intermittent fasting is like skip breakfast, wait till afternoon, then from noon till eight or two till 10, it's like 10 to six.

Pushing it.

It's the same.

So it's the same.

Because the research is showing that if you eat the farther away from when you sleep, if you eat farther away, I guess, than when you're going to bed, the better it is for you.

Exactly.

The closer you eat to sleep, what does that do to you?

It makes it harder to burn fat. So there were several studies actually in overweight women where they had them have a little snack before dinner or after dinner or not, but they had the same calories. So what they did is they divide, let's just say it's like a thousand calorie dinner. They had one group have an 800 calorie dinner and a 200 calorie snack. So it's the same amount of energy, but they had the dinner, one group, group A, will say had the dinner, had the snack, went to bed. They tracked them for eight weeks. The group that just had the dinner but no snack lost more weight. Same calories, but it's just the timing.

And the distribution of those calories in relation to the sleep window.

Huh, so they had the snack, what.

30 minutes after dinner or something or later?

It was like an hour after that. Gotcha.

Interesting, same amount of calories.

Exactly.

Wow.

So that's where, again, calories matter, energy matters, but when the so-called calories in, calories out model of obesity was sort of elucidated, energy balance they call it in the fitness space, we didn't know about these circadian rhythms and circadian clocks. We didn't know about all the microbiome. So now that we understand this new biology, we should acknowledge and recognize that.

These things are influencing our metabolic health. Wow. If someone's listening or watching right now thinking, this sounds amazing, but it also seems overwhelming. And to do it on their own just seems daunting. What would you suggest? Is there accountability or coaching they can get? Is there groups online where people are doing this for support? What can they do to have a community to support them?

Yeah, no, this is a great question. I'm a fan of the apps, so there's a few different fasting apps. I like the Zero app. I don't know if you've used that, Peter Attia and company developed that one. So that's super simple.

I think it's- and you set the time then on that. You say, I'm only going to eat.

Between eight and six.

Exactly.

Is that right?

Eight and six? Yeah. Yeah, something like that. And then what it kind of reminds.

You of when to eat or has a community, how's that work? Yeah, they have, I think, an online Facebook group.

They do that.

Yeah, a lot of these I used to have this Facebook group, this Metabolic Monday thing, but it just became logistically hard to support it and all that. But I know there is fasting groups. There's a big fasting community, which is great. But I think an app is helpful. And then get your family on board. I don't know anyone who doesn't want to lose weight and have more energy and feel better.

Right, so just support each other and your family or find a friend who wants to do this with you.

Exactly.

And how can they support this with each other? Just check in once a day over text. What's the best process you think for getting people on a four to eight week process of doing this fasting cycle, of going to sleep at a better time, eating earlier, what do you suggest?

That's a phenomenal question. I suggest making the private public. That's what I found with goal setting. So if people just keep it to themselves, like I'm doing this thing but I'm not gonna tell anyone, then they don't really have any accountability. But if they put their foot in the sand and say, Hey, this is what I'm doing, Take a picture, even if you only have 100 Instagram connections or whatever, it's fine. Just say, hey, this is what I'm doing, here's why I'm doing it, and post about it. And you talk about this a lot. When you start to identify with the person that you want to be, you behave like that person. Even if you're morbidly obese and you're really overweight, it doesn't matter. Just start somewhere and make the private public. I've seen a lot of benefits doing that. You can do that with business, with all these things. I mean, that's how I got into it. Started sharing the research, like how, you know, just said, Hey guys, here's this new fasting study. And then when the time came to have cookies and ice cream, I'm like.

I can't share the study and then also not do this thing, right?

So... Do you give yourself a cheap meal or how does this work for you? Yeah, I mean, so I love like organic red wine and stuff like that. So like Saturday night, I have some wine. My wife used to have a raw food company, so we make like these almond flour cookies and this and that, you know, but It's not an everyday thing, but nutrition adheres to the 80/20 principle. So you don't have to eat like a monk or whatever every single day. You can have some buffer room. And this is where exercise and this is where compressing that feeding window comes in. It gives you a little buffer room to where I have friends who are like, dude, if I look at ice cream, I put on 10 pounds.

Right.

So if you're eating like a standard American, that is true. But when you start compressing your feeding window, when you're walking, when you periodically do maybe a 24-hour fast, you can get away with more stuff.

How often should we do a 24, 48 hour fast?

Well, I think it depends on your body fat. I think it depends on your age. So if it's more important for a 60 year old compared to like a 39 year old.

The older you are, it's more important to fast for longer periods.

For longer because the risk of cancer, the risk of dementia, all of these diseases that are improved when we fast, the risk aging is a disease. We've looked at it like an inconvenience, but it really is a disease. And we can decrease the prevalence of that disease by fasting more. So I think everyone over 40 should fast at least one day a week.

Wow.

It's tough, I know.

24 hours once a week. Unless you- Is that no food at all? Is that coffee? Is that just water? What does that look like?

Well, so the studies allow for like up to 300 calories, even up to 500 calories. So you could do like a one meal a day, an OMAD one day a week, I think that's way better. I mean, if you look at that, and let's just back up a little bit, you know, some of the studies look at calorie restriction as a way to enhance longevity. So one way to get into a calorie deficit is to restrict how much food you eat. But that's, who wants to do that? You're like, oh my gosh, I'm at 2,000 calories or 17, It's hard logistically to do. So one thing you can get into a 20% calorie deficit over the long haul by not eating one day a week. Super simple. You don't have to count calories on those other six days. Right. I think it's a huge-- Is that what you do?

Not every week.

So I'll be honest with you.

I would, for like a year, I.

Was every single week, every Monday. Wow. We'd have dinner Sunday night as a family.

I wouldn't eat until Tuesday morning. Wow.

So it was like 36 hours or something, right? Is that?

Yeah.

More, exactly, more like 36. Wow.

And what are you doing now? Once a month or something?

I was doing that every day, every week.

What are you doing now?

Oh, now, yeah, now it's like once a week, exactly. So like yesterday, like this will be my basically intermittent fat, like my 24 hour type fast. Really? I haven't had food since, you know.

It was like yesterday at 2:00 p.m. Really.

Gotcha. So you'll have a dinner tonight or what?

Yeah, I'll probably go for a hike after this and then go to Airwands.

Or something like that. Gotcha.

Or would you wait until breakfast the next morning and try to push it a little more?

Well, here's the thing. I noticed I was getting a little too skinny. Okay, so it's that balance.

Too lean, huh?

Yeah, I was like, I don't want to be the skinny guy. What's the point of being like having increased lifespan, but you're a stick figure? So muscle matters. So finding that balance, what's going to work for you? So now it's more like a OMAD one day a week, meaning one meal that day.

One meal.

Earlier, you know, and so yeah, but finding that balance, you know, that's what I think is helpful. Now, if someone is morbidly obese or pre-diabetic or has heart disease, maybe a 48-hour fast every week. And being consistent with that, like every week, as opposed to a lot of people get excited this January, I'm going to do a 72-hour fast. Imagine, like, if you ran a marathon only once a year. You're better off running like two miles a day compared to just one big event because that consistency. so that's my philosophy. I could be wrong on that.

How old are you now?

39.

What do you think will shift for you from 40 to 50? Is there anything you'll do differently?

Shoot, that's a good question. I don't know the answer to that question, Lewis. I mean, maybe I might crank the fasting a little bit more.

Really?

Cancer doesn't run in my family, but I do have this tumor biomarker that's elevated. Just I randomly happen to test this and it could be nothing or it could be related to early cancer. So just to sort of keep an eye on that, that's what has encouraged me and inspired me to dive into the science on fasting, but also personally, I'm just interested because we know that fasting is a way to help improve cancer biology.

And how important is a strong immune system at all ages of your life? and what would you say are the key factors to enhancing the strength to make it Bulletproof, your immune system?

This is a wonderful question. Well, not having glycemic variability. So if you and I go and have a soda right now and we test our glucose, we're gonna go up to probably 140, 160 and come back down. You want it to be more neutral.

Like a wave, not a big spikes.

Exactly. So less fluctuations.

How do you do that? Cutting out sugary foods and processed foods?

The processed packaged stuff. So sugar without fat is going to do that. So liquid calories, soda pop, candy, things like that are going to jack that up. Milkshakes as well. So just having more real food, reducing glycemic variability, improving our sleep, so making sure we're adhering to those circadian rhythms. I know it sounds like we're beating a dead horse here, but exercise is going to be one of the most important things. And I can share with you study after study about Individuals who have poor outcome when it comes to viral infections compared to individuals who have good outcomes in their exercise habits. Kaiser Permanente here in Southern California did that, 48,000 subjects. With COVID they looked at their exercise habits and individuals who regularly exercise were much less likely to go to the.

Hospital, end up in ICU or die.

From exercise. Just straight up exercising. This was another study in Sweden or, yeah, Sweden found this. several studies in China and South Korea. So the data is emerging that being sedentary, it compromises your immune system. Because when we're sedentary, our baseline level of inflammation increases. And so if we think about it, let's say we're playing really loud music in this room, we're not gonna hear if someone comes in or out. And that person could be a burglar, for example, just hypothetically, right? So if you have more static background inflammation because you're not exercising, you're eating processed food, when that pathogen you're exposed to, whether it's influenza or SARS-CoV-2 or whatever, then your immune system is not going to have the bandwidth to do what it should do and take care of that pathogen early. That seems to be the problem with these infections is the immune system is not mounting an appropriate initial response and the virus or the bug circulates and then it becomes just there's a lot of collateral damage. And our immune system freaks out. So if we can enhance, if we can prevent that smoldering inflammation with exercise, with raw food, with stress management, with sleep.

That's the key to increase the strength of your immune system. And what about gut inflammation? Because that seems to be a big leaky gut and gut inflammation seems to be a big topic these days. How do we, I guess, really clear up the inflammation in our gut so that we can process our food better and and be healthier that way.

Yeah, this is an awesome question. Well, it turns out that when we eat a lot of processed fats with carbs together, that creates that inflammation.

In the gut.

In the gut.

Processed fats with carbs, so we're saying.

Right.

So let's think about the foods that are problematic. So if we think about french fries, fried oil, carbs. I know, that's the thing. But if you just have a couple, maybe you go for a walk.

Afterwards, go for a walk.

Yeah, and if it's a one day a week thing or whatever, you're with your significant other, I'm fine with that. If we think about pizza, so you got cheese, which turns into liquid fat, and carbs.

My favorite food.

Corn dogs, right? Like it's tough, you know? Or if we have a soda with something else, right? That's like the ultimate disaster.

What do you mean, soda with what?

Ice cream? We have a soda with ice cream, root beer float, or you. Oh, so good. Corn dog, like, Dude, you're at, it's, you're just, look.

You're stacking on inflammation.

You are. And so you gotta mitigate that. Now, if you train your butt off.

It's gonna work out.

You're fasting, whatever. And this is like, you know, once a month, this is every other week. It's not a big deal. You know, but you don't wanna regularly do this. And sadly, people regularly eat that stuff. And it's reflective in their visceral adiposity, their belly fat, their liver accumulates fat. So the liver is, you know, a lot of first absorption happens from the small intestine to the liver. And so it's this first target. And so if we start to, you only have one liver and once it goes, you are really screwed. And a lot of people, there's a pandemic of fatty liver disease and most people don't even know. Really? They don't test their liver enzymes, which are really accessible. You get your blood work, AST, ALT, GGT, three tests we should all know. And this is not esoteric. You go to any doctor anywhere in the world, you can measure these. Those are, and you asked about who should fast. If your liver enzymes are increasing, you should fast more. So liver is a huge metabolic organ and by exercising and fasting we can reduce the amount of fat that's stored in that organ.

And what about eating before or after exercise? Say we did the eight and six, right? We eat in that window. We do a little cardio in the morning. and then we say, you know what? We're gonna do a workout at whatever, seven o'clock at night. Is it good? Is it, is it, is it a bad thing to train hard on the muscles and tear them down and then not eat protein afterwards? Is that okay? Or should you work out at four and then eat at six? I would do the latter.

That's what I would suggest. Work out if you have the, the.

Time and the flexibility.

Totally.

Work out before, then have protein afterwards. why is that? To help repair.

So in the post-exercise window, you're very insulin sensitive. So that's the other thing, you know, we talked about the soda and stuff like that. So if you just crushed a workout and had a soda, it's not going to have the same effect negatively on your blood glucose levels as compared to if you've been sitting all day and had that soda. So exercise causes your muscles to be like a glucose sponge. And what's cool about having like a post meal, post-exercise meal, is you're much more insulin sensitive, so you're gonna take those amino acids and they will help repair the damage that we did to our muscles from that workout. Got it. Okay. That's important. Some people do that. They train really hard, but they don't eat enough and then they wonder why they're not getting stronger. So again, it's this balance. It's tough and that's why it's so hard. It's like building a business. There's a lot of things that you've gotta do right and you gotta ask people, ask mentors, ask friends, Hey, what do you do? what's working for you?

Do you have a coach or do you just kind of do this all on your own?

I don't have a coach when it comes to health stuff.

This is your obsession though, this is what you do.

Yeah, and I've had a lot of clients over the years who used to work with a medical doctor helping overweight people and I was a personal trainer back in the day. So yeah, and I'm not saying I'm the world's greatest expert at all. I make a lot of mistakes too and stuff like that, but I think with some of these approaches that we've been talking about, we can get a lot of people trending in a better direction.

I love this, man. What else do we need to know? Anything else about optimizing for today's time where it's so much on our phones, so much late night TV, movie watching, so much poor eating, minimal exercise, anything else you think we need to address here?

Well, I guess there's two things. And the first one, especially for the men listening, donating blood. Why is that? well, as men, we don't have a natural way to sort of get rid of blood, like women menstruate and so they lose blood naturally. Back in the day, you and I would have been out hunting, we'd be exposed to parasites and ticks, and we would naturally have thinner, less viscous blood. But I found, and I can almost predict this with the clients that I work with, I would say about 90% of them have thick, hyper viscous blood. And we can easily help humanity and.

Help our own longevity and health by donating blood periodically. What does donating blood do for us and our health?

It reduces the viscosity of our blood, the thickness.

You don't want thick blood?

You don't. It can be, it's more sheer stress.

For the heart and the blood vessels.

The pumping in and out, right? Yeah, blood's moving around and it's circulating and that can create sheer challenges there. And so we think about eating fat, this was the mantra people used to think about in the 90s. You eat fat, creates cholesterol in your vessels, narrows the vessels, you get a heart attack. Well, it turns out that when your blood is thick, that sheer stress can cause that same atherosclerotic formation, which is the formation of plaque in the narrowing of the arteries that can lead to a heart attack or dementia or a stroke. And so, a lot of men are in a better position health-wise if they periodically donate blood. How often do you do it? Once every six months. Right. But you might want to just get some blood work to see so there's a test known as your hematocrit and hemoglobin. A lot of men, this is close to 50%. And so if you look at, say, we talked about cycling earlier and stuff like that, like those guys would do blood doping to get their hematocrit high.

Some of them are oxygen and everything.

Yeah.

Someone stroke out because their blood is so thick.

You ever get a stroke?

Yeah, a lot of people have died or had strokes and all that because their blood is so thick. placing so much stress from exercise and sometimes they'd be dehydrated. Wow. Some guys would stroke or. Anyway, so the point is we want thin-ish type blood. You want you to have a creat around maybe 42-43%.

The only way by doing that is donating or. Well. Is there nutrition or exercise that allows it to thin or no?

I mean, exercise would help because you're kind of damaging those red blood cells.

Okay.

And so they're gonna break down over time, so that does help. But for a lot of men, honestly, just periodic, just put it on the calendar. Like, hey, around Christmas, 4th of July, donate blood. Now, if you're anemic, you don't want to do that. If you're a menstruating woman trying to get pregnant, you don't want to do it. But post-menopausal women, they're not menstruating anymore, their iron can creep up as well. And so iron can be a pro-oxidant, it can accelerate degradation of the brain, it can lead to Alzheimer's and stuff. stuff like that. So it's just a good health thing to sort of get in the habit of doing.

What was the second thing? You said donating blood for guys. You were to say there's two things. One is for men donating blood.

Yeah, so gosh, I can't remember what else I was gonna say. I think it was this, go out and go camping.

Why?

Because it gets you more in tune with this whole circadian clock system that we have. and it gets you in tune with nature. And I think, and this sounds woo-woo, right? This sounds, but that has been the big, and you ask me, Hey Mike, what was the biggest thing that you've changed? Well, I've got with my family, you know, hey, we had the best conversations, we're not on our phones, we have no cell phone service, we're exercising, we're in nature. There's research in Japan, Shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. Like this is real tangible, like it reduces your inflammation. periodic, even if it's over the Fourth of July or even if it's over Labor Day weekend once a year, getting out in nature, it just reframes your perspective and it detoxifies you, so to speak, and all that word's been overused from the news and the stress. And it puts you in touch with your rhythms because when you're out camping, you might be having a drink or something around the fire, but you're not crushing buckets of ice cream on Netflix, right?

You're watching the sun, you're watching the stars, So, yeah, and you typically get tired because you're out in the dark all night and you're like, okay, it's time to go to bed.

Exactly.

What about grounding? What does that do for people?

Look, it sounds totally woo-woo, man, but there's data showing, and I did this before, you know, there's a building just south of here and I took my shoes off. They have little couches out there in the courtyard, and I just got some sun and grounded myself.

How often do you do that?

You know, I try to walk barefoot a little, like, a little bit every day. You know, I don't make it like a. I'm not, like, fanatical about it, but I think it's just good periodically. All animals touch the ground. We're animals, you know? I mean, I know birds stand on trees and stuff like that, but we should be touching the ground, and we never do. Yeah. And we have cell phones on our hips all the time. We have Wi-Fi going on, so if nothing else, it's just a great way to help. our electricity and our circuitry and our circulation. And again, it might sound crazy, but studies have actually shown improved circulation and blood flow in people who ground. Really? So there's grounding mats, there's all sorts of experts out there.

But the best thing is just go out in the grass and the dirt and just walk around barefoot for a little bit.

Take your shoes off when you're walking on the beach. Like it couldn't be simpler. And we all know we feel better when we do this. You go on vacation, what do you do? You go to the beach, you take your shoes off, you're in the sand. You feel amazing. You think it's because you're having a mocktail or margarita, but it's all these things. It's the sun, it's the fresh air, it's the grounding.

I like this, man. This is exciting stuff. Your site is highintensityhealth.com, what can we learn more when we go to your site?

Louis, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate this opportunity. I share a lot of the science details on these things, but I try to keep it practical and just what I found is there's so much good research, but it's not really being talked about. And I'm just like a weird nerd, like I love to read the research. So I just like to break it down and be like, hey guys, so here's what the studies found. Here's how we can validate healthy lifestyle change.

So that's what we encourage people to do. That's cool. Your social media is fun as well. You got a lot of cool memes on there. on Instagram, MetabolicMike, Mike Mutzel over on Twitter, Facebook as well. What's the main platform you're on the most? What do you like? Probably YouTube. YouTube.

What's your channel there?

I didn't see it. High Intensity Health.

High Intensity Health on YouTube.

You're putting out videos once a week or? At least five days a week.

Five days a week you're putting out a video.

I try to.

Wow, man.

Stepping it up. I like it. I mean, I just found the platform will push your video into the feed, right? With more frequency. Yes, on Instagram it's like kind of gone after a day where this stays more relevant frequently, which is cool. I'm a big YouTube fan. We've been going hard on YouTube. Thank you. And if you guys are listening and you haven't subscribed to our YouTube, go to the YouTube right now and check.

Out Mike's High Intensity Health on YouTube also. Anything else we can do to support you and be a part of your mission? This is all good, man. I mean, if anyone starts fasting and gets benefits, I'll check on the comments on this YouTube video. Okay. I would love to know where people are at and how fast or exercise, how that's improved their health. The comments, you can really get a good kind of pulse with the zygonites, you know, see what's working for people.

Absolutely. Okay, cool man. This is a question I asked everyone at the end called the Three Truths. So I'd like you to imagine a hypothetical scenario. You live as long as you want to live, but it's your last day on earth and you gotta turn the lights off. And you accomplish all your dreams and goals, but it's the last day. But for whatever reason, all of your content has to go somewhere else. It's not here on this earth anymore. No one has access to your five weekly YouTube videos and your content and this interview is gone. But you get to leave behind three lessons I like to call three truths to the world. And this is all we would have to be reminded by your work and your message. What would you say of those three truths for you?

That's a great question. I would say really value your relationships. People really matter. The person that I would want to be with would be my daughter. So relationships really matter. The second one would be slow down. Anything great takes patience. Businesses and professional athletes develop over time slowly. The third thing that I would say is we are part of nature. Whatever your business is, whatever your if you're gunning it and you're driving till 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and you think that you can circumvent these biologic rhythms that we talked about, that's going to come up and bite you in the butt. So living in harmony with nature, being.

Patient, valuing your relationships, that's what I would say. That's a great question. That's good, man. I appreciate it. I want to acknowledge you, Mike, for showing up and constantly doing this research. I think it's important because there's so much information out there. A lot of us don't know what is accurate, what is helpful for us, what is beneficial for us now and long term. So I acknowledge you for being obsessed with the data, the research, the science, and then teaching it to us in practical, fun, insightful ways for us to actually be like, okay, I'm not too overwhelmed. Let me go do some of this.

Yeah.

So I acknowledge you for doing that, man. And I acknowledge you for walking the talk. You know, you do the research, and then you're living it as well. you're not just telling people and going to sleep at 4:00 a.m. every night and all that stuff. So I appreciate you showing up for your audience by walking the talk. It's really fun to see that, man. Final question, what's your definition of greatness?

Yeah, I knew this was coming. I think being consistent. So if we think about Kobe, we think about great athletes, great entrepreneurs, they just showed up every day, day in, day out, and they were just consistent. and everything that we've talked about here, just be consistent with your walking. You can achieve a great physique, a great health, great mental clarity. So instead of trying to always jump onto the latest fad, just be consistent. Pick one thing that we talked about today and just be great at that one thing. It can be exercise, feeding, whatever. That to me is what I think leads to greatness or it can, one.

Attribute if you enjoyed that interview, then I know you'll love what we have coming up right now.

The majority of the inflammation that folks are experiencing oftentimes go unnoticed. They're these little kind of chronic low grade fevers or little fires burning that are contributing to a lot of different metabolic disorders. And the reason that our bodies are doing it is really the inflammation is sending out a distress signal from different tissues to recruit and call in the immune system to in defending against infections and repair. The list goes on and on. Inflammation is actually not a bad thing.

It's a healer, right?

Right.

If we would get a wound, we would never heal without inflammation. If we got an infection, it would be deadly without inflammation. It's an important part of our evolution in our health.

What's the difference between that and chronic inflammation?

Right. So what we generally think about is acute inflammation when we think about like a short-term intrusion, maybe an injury or an infection, for example, which the inflammation might last a few hours, even a few days.

Right.

But if inflammation is lasting for a long amount of time and also showing up in the wrong places, it can be devastating. And so now we're talking about chronic inflammation. And if we're venturing into chronic inflammation, we've got to look at what are the underlying components? What is creating the fire? What is throwing gasoline on the fire? as well. And so if we take one of the conditions that you mentioned, so right now here in the United States, we've got about 242 million of our citizens are overweight or obese. 240 million.

Out of how many? Out of how many?

Right around 330,000.

330 million.

I'm sorry, 330 million.

So 240 million.

Yeah.

So we're looking at somewhere in the ballpark of 70 to even upwards of 80%.

How is that possible now?

Exactly.

That's how we've gotten this far. How is it just food is too accessible? The wrong kinds of foods are too accessible to so many people now. The, you know, social media, is it laziness? Is it, why have we shifted from being a healthy nation, I don't know, probably 60, 70 years ago, to an unhealthy nation?

Yeah, it's really a perfect storm of all the things. So the first thing to look at and to ask is what's going on? Because our genes expect certain things from us. Our DNA expects certain things to have healthy outcomes or healthy cell replication, healthy expression. And so we've got to look at what are the things our genes expect of us. Our genes expect us to move. For example, we're the most sedentary culture in the history of humanity and recorded human history. We're the most sedentary culture to ever exist right now.

All of humanity or just USA?

Especially the US. We're the LeBron James We're the king of sedentary.

We're the Homer Simpsons.

We're the... Stove?

Yeah, we're really leading the league in these things. And so that's number one. Also, our genes expect us to get adequate sleep. This is something that we've talked about multiple times in the show, but it's built into our evolution. And if you think about sleep, it's very strange because you're incredibly vulnerable, you're unconscious, You'd think we might evolve out of it just for safety. But the thing is, so many wonderful, absolutely amazing things take place during sleep that we just haven't found a way to replicate. So even with the reduction of inflammation, which we'll talk about more, we have microglial cells in our brain, which is kind of the brain's immune system. And it's primarily active when we're sleeping to reduce inflammation, to clean out metabolic waste, and things of the like.

What would you say are the five biggest benefits of the greatest night of sleep consistently? What are the five main benefits that you get if you get deep REM sleep for seven, eight hours a night consistently? No interruptions, no light exposure, all the things you talked about in your other book, Sleep Smarter. What are the five main benefits that come from that versus interrupted sleep, four hours of sleep, you know, staying up late with the phone, you know, having coffee late at night, all that stuff.

What's the benefits? We'll just power, power pack, bullet point these. Yes. Number one, and this is because our culture, we are, we, I always like to connect to something visceral and people, we care about how we look.

Of course.

And so, you,'re young, nobody's, right, nobody's waking up like, I want to look so old today. I want to get my George Burns on. I want to be as old as possible, or I want to feel bad today about the way that I look, or they're not waking up like, I just want to look terrible and feel terrible today. And in my clinical practice, I never met one person, and people might argue these things and get into a, because of our cognitive biases, I never met anybody who wants to be unhealthy. Every single person wants to be healthy. Now, with that said, this is where sleep really comes into the fray because over the years, me being a nutritionist, I really, me being a nutritionist, I thought that food was everything, you know, because it was, it was for me, it was my bridge, but there's many paths to the goal. When you're sleeping, it is the most powerful anabolic state that you can be in. So it's just, you're just teeming with what we call these, quote, anti-aging hormones, you know, the release of human growth hormone, for example, that really, it's also known as the youth hormone. Yeah. You know, and also with, in that lane, lane of body composition and, and overall health and fitness, researchers at the University of Chicago did a very simple study. They brought folks in and they wanted to see what would happen with their weight loss. They put them on a calorie restricted diet, and they wanted to see what would happen with weight loss when they were well rested versus when they're sleep deprived. And so they put them under both conditions. And I love studies that do that. They put people under both conditions. see what would happen. And so they allow folks to get eight and a half hours of sleep in one phase of the study, and they tracked all their metrics, their weight loss, Etc. And then they sleep deprived them for the other phase. So they was getting eight and a half hours. Now they're getting five and a half hours. Tracked all their metrics.

Same group, same group on the same.

Exact calorie restricted diet. Same calories. Yeah, everything. But when they were sleep deprived, when they were sleep deprived versus when they were adequately adequately rested. When they were getting enough sleep, they lost 55 more body fat just by sleeping more. That's crazy.

It's, it doesn't even make sense. Were they working out the same or.

Was it like no movement? What was it just like? Everything is the same. This is what I love. It's a ward study. So they're under the conditions where they can track everything. Now here's another part of study I don't often talk about is that they actually did biopsies. So they actually took the fat cells to see what would happen with their fat cells under different conditions. And what they came to the conclusion was that your fat cells actually need sleep too.

Oh.

Because when the fat cells were not, when you, when they weren't adequately adequately rested, their fat cells actually became more insulin resistant, which should become like, that should put up a huge red flag because insulin resistance is one of the classic signs is carrying more belly fat.

Right.

So the fat cells themselves, looking at them versus when you're well rested versus when you're sleep deprived, your fat cells themselves become insulin resistant. And it's just going to lead to downstream problems with your liver, lipogenesis, the creation of new fat, the list goes on and on. So that's just one part, one thing. So number one, number two, the cognitive performance. And I love this study. This was published in the Lancet, and they wanted to see what would happen when physicians, they took physicians and had them to complete a task and tracked all their numbers. and they sleep deprived them for 24 hours, which is not abnormal in the field of medicine, and have them to complete the same task, which is a simulation of different like surgical type of simulation. They made 20% more mistakes doing the exact same thing, and it took them 14% longer to do the exact same thing. Wow.

All right.

So, and this is a big problem in our culture. Again, we mistake being busy for being effective, right? And so that's the number, that's the number two thing, the cognitive performance. Number three, and this parallels with cognitive performance, is the health of our brain. And so researchers at UC Berkeley did brain imaging scans and we talked about this before, but they actually looked at the sleep deprived brain, just again 24 hours of sleep deprivation, and the part of the brain that's associated with executive function, right? So decision making, distinguishing between right and wrong, social control, so the prefrontal cortex, the more human part of our brain, that part of the brain goes cold. The activity of that part of the brain just literally, as we're more and.

More tired, just shuts down.

With a lack of sleep. With a lack of sleep, coupled with more activity in the amygdala, which is very much more primitive, driven by emotion, very much concerned with survival of self. And so that part of the brain just lights up like a Christmas tree or Las Vegas sign. You just came back from Vegas. So these changes happen in the brain very quickly. And that leads into number three, reduce cognitive performance. So being able to manage our emotions, being able to manage our decisions. And then we'll go to number four is going to lean into this as well with the brain function is I talked a little bit about this earlier. During sleep is when your glymphatic system, which is the brain's waste management system.

Cleansing it all out.

It's 10 times more active when sleeping than when you're awake. So this, and your brain is doing literally trillions of activities every second. And there's a lot of metabolic waste that takes place. And you have to have this cleansing system, this cleaning system, or you're going to have a buildup of things like amyloid beta plaque, for example, which that is a strongly, strongly correlated with Alzheimer's disease. It's an inability of the brain to clean itself and also insulin resistance. to the brain we can talk about later. But we're wondering again, why are these issues going up? Why is brain inflammation going up? These are the things. Are we getting enough sleep for the processes that normally just naturally want to happen? They do it on their own. Are we getting that?

The final thing, so four is the cleansing.

Right, right. Right, cleaning. So this is associated with disease prevention of the brain, longevity of the brain. And number five, you know, this is tough. There's so many different things that this can benefit, but I would say for me and you as well, like we want to be able to perform, you know, we want to be able to use our body and our mind to compete, to get out and to play, to have a good time. And one of the fun things I talked about in my first book, Sleep Smarter, was research that was done on basketball players, collegiate basketball players at Stanford, and they found that simply by increasing the amount of sleep that they were getting, not training more, not doing anything else differently, this shaved a full second off of their sprint time just by increasing their sleep. They improved significantly their free throw shooting and a three-point shooting just by getting more sleep. All right? And these are things that we just kind of on a periphery, you kind of know that. But at the same time, are we utilizing it? So some of the greatest athletes in the world right now, sleep is a part of their training. LeBron James, it's a part of his training. Usain Bolt, same thing. It's a part of his training. Now Serena Williams, the list goes on and on and on.

These things weren't taught to us when.

We were in high school.

No.

They were just like, Get up at 4:00 a.m. and leave. Yeah, right. Just go right into somebody.

You know what I mean?

Make a play. Make a play. Keep your head up. But today, you know, it's really built into the system. Also the strength training programs are built into the system, which is beautiful because again, when we were in high school, it was very, I mean, some stuff was starting to take place with folks being in the weight room, but it wasn't a big emphasis. Whereas now, if you look at different sports, like a good friend, which I'm, it's so weird for me to say this right now, this is like the coolest thing. I've actually got chills. Ozzie Smith, right? So have an opportunity.

Saint Louis icon, man. Icon.

When I was a kid, my two idols were Ozzie Smith and Michael Jackson. Wow. Yeah. I tried to wear the Thriller jacket to school, and I got drove. That was not a good look. But Ozzie Smith could be my role model, and I could just.

I wanted to.

To play.

I wanted to compete, play baseball. And so I actually met him at the gym, and so he was there. I think he was probably in his around in his mid 60s maybe at the time. But he was there getting strong. And he was one of the first, if not the first high level elite baseball players to really embrace strength training way back in the 80s. The reason that he did it, funny enough, was he tore his rotator cuff and he didn't want to be out. This was back in the day where it's just like literally you do whatever it takes to get on the field. And he wanted to be there for his team. And so he just had to find out a way to strengthen everything around it because he didn't want to have surgery. He would have been out for a year at the time. And now, you know, of course, surgeries have advanced tremendously since then. But so he found in that he strengthened everything in his shoulder, but also he started throwing from a completely different arm angle and still wants 13 consecutive gold gloves.

Crazy.

It's crazy. It's crazy.

Back flipping at the same time.

Right. He's out there back flipping with the glove on. It's cool. so powerful. But it's a big part of what our genes expect is to be strong in some different domain. And we talked about this before the show. That translates over into our lives as well. So that strength, if you can train your body, because your mind is in play too, life gets a little bit easier in many aspects. You feel more physically ready to handle whatever life throws at you, you know? And so in the context that that final one is being able to perform at a high level, to recover from the training that we do, all the magic happens when you're sleeping. When you're up in the gym and training or you're out on the field competing, you're just tearing your body up. That's all catabolic stuff.

You get the anabolic reward when you go to sleep. When I was interviewing Andrew Huberman, the neuroscientist out of Stanford, he was saying that even learning a new skill it's like the neurons connect when you're sleeping. Like when I do Spanish class sometimes, I'm just like, I'm not getting this. You know, there's moments where I'm like, gosh, this hurts my brain. It's so challenging. But then I come back the next day or two days later, I'm like, oh, I'm, you know, I've connected the neurons, or it's like in your sleep, if things are moving and processing for you to really connect those things you're learning, those new skills, those challenging things. So I think it's, and if I wasn't sleeping, I probably wouldn't connect the dots. on a new skill. So something to think about there as well. I'm curious about this. Have you seen a study around or any research around how our belief about our identity, how we view ourselves in the world, whether we think positively of ourselves, we have confidence, we believe in ourselves, or our lack thereof, we have a bad view of ourselves. Is there any research about how that affects the brain? our brain, our actual mindset of the brain and ourselves?

Absolutely.

Have you seen this?

The number one driving force of the human psyche is to stay congruent with the ideas that we carry about who we are. Every thought that we think, every action we take is really correlated with who we believe ourselves to be. And this is why change can be so uncomfortable. You know, when we start to think things that I don't think that way or these are things that I don't do, to our physiology, this stuff really gets hardwired into us and so it creates discomfort because we're literally going to start creating new neural pathways and potentially start to break down old ones. And a mutual friend, Dr. Caroline Leaf, and I love this, and she's really brought to the forefront. And I talked a little bit about this in Eat Smart in my new book and how our thoughts really affect our biology, even how food affects us based on our beliefs about food. And so one of the biggest things to really come from her work that unfortunately it wasn't embraced, even though she's been in the field for 40 years, she really knows her stuff and it's affected so many different lives. But it takes time for kind of collegiate training to change, for the books to change. But one of the big takeaways is thinking, your thoughts create your brain. Really, the process of thinking itself is creating your brain. And we think that the brain is in and of itself just kind of off shooting our thoughts. Now we can absolutely have thoughts stored in our brain, but thinking is so much bigger. Our mind is creating our brain.

So thinking is a part of the mind, is that right?

Also the brain as well.

It's both.

Yeah, it's kind of within the brain then we start to create she shares, I don't know if she did this with you, but she brings up the little trees and all these things.

The branches.

Yes. So we start to create these little trees, little thought trees, start to bear fruit, but we can supersede it. Your mind is bigger than just your brain. We tend to think that because everything is kind of up here, but our mind is in our toe as well, and our mind is just in our gut. Yeah, in our gut.

It's like Dr. Emmeron Mayeron.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was talking about the the mind in the gut and how it's all connected to the brain as well. The gut brain and the brain brain and it's fascinating.

It's so fascinating.

The mind is connected throughout all throughout your body as well.

So for example, even our heart within the gut, the human brain itself is just an absolute universe of neurons. So it's like 84 billion neurons, right? I was thinking about human cells overall. So we have about 84 billion neurons in the brain. We have about 100 million in the gut.

All right?

So this is like nerve tissue. It's like a mass of neural tissue in the gut. But the heart also has neurons as well. So when it's called, anybody can go to Dr. Google and look this up, it's called the heart brain. All right? So your brain, your heart actually has this kind of ability to think and there's this electromagnetic energy that it's expressing. and there's a field also, it's called a tube torus that's been monitored that's expanding beyond our body to be able to see this. And if folks want to check out the work from HeartMath Institute. HeartMath Institute is phenomenal. I've been, you know, probably for about 10 to 15 years connected with HeartMath Institute. It's just absolutely phenomenal.

So there's a field around the heart. Does that mean like quantum physics we're.

Talking about or is something else. So what does this feel like?

This energy field?

We'll keep it real simple first, which is if we think about the electrical energy that the heart is kicking off, like when you're in the hospital, and you see the monitor, it's not reading the smoke coming off your heart, it's reading the electrical energy that's coming off the heart. So we got EKGs and things of that that nature so we can read the electrical currency that the body is throwing off. Your body is just teeming with energy and there's even a form of energy that we generate, it's called piezoelectricity, just for moving, we're generating energy and electricity. So just from a very simplistic level, the heart is kicking off energy that we can't see. That's the thing about it. It's emanating from beyond us, even our skin is emanating energy. we just see a certain spectrum of light as humans. We see a certain spectrum of energy.

How far does this energy go beyond the body?

So the tube Taurus is from HeartMath Institute's data and being able to measure it and monitor it, it can be upwards of last checked around eight feet from your body. And so now this is getting into some freaky stuff, right? And I'm a very, give it to me. I'm a very logical, analytical human, so seeing is believing for me. But then we get into, there's there's many things that are just, and also I'm very open-minded as well. And there's many things that we don't understand. But when we talk about people being in your space and you picking up people's energy and interacting, and that stuff is very real, you know, you can pick up people's vibes, you know, bad, bad vibes. So we don't want to downplay that because other, other species of animals, they have that bigger connection, and we can, we can attribute, like bees, for example. you know, in this, quote, hive mind. But we throw that away when it comes to us. And so for me, for years, I've been seeking to find, how can I explain this to people to make sense? Because I'm a very solid thinker, you know, I'm a very logical person. And one of the things I came across was Princeton University researchers. They found that they just took two strangers and they put them together and they had them to just chat. And they found out within a matter of minutes, all they had to do was create some and their brain waves started to sync up.

Come on.

Their brain waves started syncing up just by having rapport and talking to another person. We start syncing up. And this is, this happens all the time.

What does that mean? We sync up. The brain is what?

So it's like, it's again, this is, this is expanding beyond our kind of normal concept of what the brain is because it's not just the brain, it's also the mind. that's controlling the brain, right?

The mind is controlling the brain. The brain isn't controlling the mind.

We tend to think that it's the brain that's running the show.

It's not. The mind. So what is the mind?

That's put Dr. Caroline Leaf's episode in your head. She could dive in deeper on what that is from a more clinical aspect. However, I'll tell you this. The mind is It's something that we're still having a hard time to identify what it is and where it's located.

That's the thing. Where is it? Is it here?

Is it around here? Is it in our stomach? It's definitely not in your brain alone. Your mind is everything about you. Everything about you. The problem is that we tend to think that the brain is the master controller. It's not. It's not. It's not. What is it?

The mind is.

Okay.

The mind. 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 12 o'clock, it's lunchtime, 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 1230, 1 o'clock, you're hungry. No question about it. If you don't eat by 3, 4 o'clock, that hunger level is actually the same whether you ate or you didn't 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. I often tell people you will get hungry, okay? 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. You know, keep doing stuff. Don't just think about how hungry you are. So we all have had this where we're, you know, working on some kind of, you know, doing work or if you're doing some kind of you know, home renovation or something. I did this all the time where I'm like painting, you know, 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, you know, 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 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. 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 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 you 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 gonna fast together because our strength is in our togetherness, right? You know, it's Good Friday, we're not gonna 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.

Yeah, exactly. So that's how you do it, right? You get yourself a supportive community. 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.

Yes.

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 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. But 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. 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 of 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 of 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, right? It breaks it down and recycles them. And everybody thinks, well, if you're breaking down stuff that's bad for you, right? You're breaking down protein that'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, right? That avocado green tub has to go. Otherwise, you can't put in a new tub, right? Right? That'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 gotta break it down. You gotta kill off those cells.

Yeah.

You gotta destroy them, rip them off the body and let them whatever. The waste mate or 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 does 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. Ohsumi 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 going to get if you are eating all the time. So this is this whole, you know, in people who are very interested in wellness, a lot of people are looking into this autophagy and so on. And you get 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 full of energy, right? And this is the thing that I thought very strange when I did my first sort of three or four day fasts. It's 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 this 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 and it's 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, 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 a hundred 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. The people called it a 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 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 dietitians, you go to conferences, 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, this 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 to, 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. 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 gonna 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 gonna do? There's nowhere else you're going to, 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 starve diet 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.

What are the insane benefits of water-only fasting? Because you've been doing this for 38 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 I mean, 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. 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.

Normal the way it is today, right? Well, two-thirds of people are now overweight or obese. So, being overweight is normal. 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 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 struggled.

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 quicker death? 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 talked about having a good life, 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 doesn't necessarily cause an immediate problem but definitely causes longer term problems.

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 your blood sample? Is it just making sure you're not 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 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 cumulatively 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 breakfast 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 four 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 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 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? And so 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 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 who'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 so obese that they're trying to, you know, 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, 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? Like 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 when 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 diet nuclear access. 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. They're lean meat machines, like all animals do, unless they get access to hyperprocessed foods, like humans eat. So if you feed human style hyperprocessed foods to animals, they also get fat. We add chemicals to our food specifically 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 who are overweight is because they 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 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 9 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 oil, eat avocado. Not necessarily process it down, remove the fiber a lot 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 sugar industry. If your goal is to avoid overeating dietary excess, obesity and the diseases of dietary excess.

What are the three main benefits that 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 their 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. 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 going to lose weight. We know that weight loss is about a pound a day. Now that pound a day, that's water only. 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 is what happens when 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 but how much visceral fat there is.

Internally and externally, right?

Exactly. So, visceral fat typically you think about an apple or string in 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 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 it.

So 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 were 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 got to trick your mind and say, well, I'm not gaining all this weight. Like, you're gaining the necessary 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 When 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 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 lot of fat, 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. that's looking at these low-carb, ketogenic diets, more protein, helping with satiety.

Think about it, when we're eating snacks.

And mini meals, were you ever satiated?

No.

Your blood sugar goes up, it comes back down, and it's this roller coaster of constant hunger, lack of satiety, so you're eating more foods.