Mastering Peak Performance Through Intermittent Fasting

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You are biologically designed for short-term pleasure seeking self-indulgent behavior. 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.

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Father's Day is coming up, and for lots of dads out there, dad doesn't quite cover it. They're groundskeepers, patio whisperers, spurs and rogue leaf vigilantes too. So this year, show dad some love with gifts from the Home Depot. They've got fast free delivery on handy gear that helps dad do his thing. We're talking Ryobi cordless outdoor tools like the Ryobi 40 volt expanded string trimmer. Find the perfect Father's Day gift at the Home Depot. Shop in store and online at homedepot.com, free delivery subject to availability. Welcome to this special masterclass. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in. 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, ankyllosing 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, it might be a diuretic or a beta blocker or whatever, a combination of medications and they're going to tell you right from the beginning, if you do what I tell you, you'll never get well.

Really?

You'll be on these meds for the rest of your life. Absolutely, they're telling you you'll never get off these meds, you'll be on drugs forever because they know that they're not actually dealing with the reasons that you've developed high blood pressure. The root. You're dealing with trying to manage the consequence of the root. And so our approach is a little different because we're not interested in trying to come up with a pill, potion or powder and tell you, well, that's it, just take these drugs and Except for the consequences.

Keep eating the same way, keep living the same lifestyle, keep lacking sleep, being stressed, eat all the processed foods, and you'll be on these drugs for the.

Rest of your life.

Well, live normally. Yeah, right.

Normal the way it is today. Well, two-thirds of people are now overweight or obese. So being overweight is normal. If you want it, doesn't mean it's healthy. You don't necessarily want to be normal if you want to be healthy, 'cause normal are 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 guys are 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. Food abundance.

To abundance.

And now we live in an environment of abundance and these highly processed foods are so appealing because they play off those ancient mechanisms.

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

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

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

Right.

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

Well, we talk about having a good life, 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 consequence 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 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, why do you need someone there to watch you? Is it like testing with your blood sample? Is it just making sure you're not fatigued? In starvation mode?

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

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

So the kidneys and liver are main detoxifying organs in the body and particularly the kidneys. If kidney 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 with potassium or sodium or other things which could become a problem, especially in these longer, faster ones we're going 2, 3, 4, 5 weeks or longer.

Wow.

What's the longest someone's been on a water fast with you?

Well, in our clinic, we limit fasting generally to 40 days. We've had a few patients we've had to go a little bit longer than that. But there's evidence in the literature of patients fasting in medically controlled settings for.

As long as a year or more. So not that we would recommend that. Is that just someone who's so obese that they're trying to get rid of.

All the complications and shed the weight and all those things? There was a lot of work done in the 70s and 80s in treating premature 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 that.

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 in particular. And that would suggest a biological adaptation, such an important adaptation that the species had to have it. So today humans can wander away from the tropics, spring can come late, and we can survive despite our very large brain. and it's huge burning of glucose because we have this ability to fast. All we've done is taken this ancient biological process and applied it in a very unnatural situation, and that is a situation of dietary excess. No other animals maintain obesity. I mean, even whales, who you think of as kind of fat, are 9% body fat.

Really?

Yeah, they just hold it on the outside of their skin. They're lean mean machines like all animals do, unless they get access to high 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 to induce dopamine stimulation in our brain. Those chemicals are salt, oil and sugar. These are not foods, they're food byproducts. They're hyperconcentrated food byproducts. They're essentially chemicals we're putting in the food to stimulate more dopamine. Dopamine is the neurochemistry associated with pleasure. The more dopamine, the more pleasure, the more we like the food. That's what good tasting food means, because it stimulates more dopamine production. And the consequence of hyper-stimulating our brain with dopamine means we overeat and we become obese. And that's why two-thirds of people are overweight is because they've fooled their brain with chemicals they put in their feed. It works in rats, it works in mice, it works in humans. Put the chemicals in their feed, they overeat, they get fat, then they develop obesity, and metabolic syndrome. And if you have metabolic syndrome, you're more vulnerable to dying from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and even viral infectious diseases like COVID. The higher your metabolic syndrome increases risk.

Of dying from all these things, all these downstream consequences. What about olive oil or avocado oil?

I hear 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 good oils. There are oils that are more harmful than, say, olive oil. So an oil being less harmful doesn't necessarily mean it's good. It's just less bad. So oils are all highly processed fractionated foods with nine calories per gram and limited satiety feedback. So if we're talking about trying to lose or maintain optimum weight, oils would have a disadvantage compared to eating your fat from a whole food. So I would advocate if Avocado oil, eat avocado oil. Not necessarily process it down, remove the fiber, a lot of the good components, and be left with the oil. And the same thing's 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 that we're consuming. If your goal is to avoid overeating, dietary excess, obesity and the diseases of dietary excess. Right.

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

It's hard to different, there's so many benefits. It'd be hard to say which are the three doms. I can talk about some of the benefits that we see. Certainly, you see weight loss. You can't help that. The laws of physics and thermodynamics say if you don't eat, you're gonna lose weight. We know that weight loss is about a pound a day. Now, that pound a day, a 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.

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 to do precise whole body composition. So not just how much fat and protein there is, but how much visceral fat there is.

Internally and externally, right?

Exactly. So visceral fat, typically you think about an apple or stored 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. Okay. 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 at a post-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'll have depleted a little bit of glucose. You'll have more muscle in order to maintain the glucose, the core glucose that your brain needed. And you're going to theoretically put back on fat. But after fasting, assuming a person adopts a whole plant food, S.O.S. free diet, what we found was Weight comes off, weight comes back on, but the weight that comes back on is glycogen, water, fiber, and protein, not fat. Fat continues to drop.

I like that.

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, re-analyzed them, and we're able to demonstrate that not only can people lose their fat and visceral fat, but they can continue to lose their fat and visceral fat even free living, eating health promoting so the.

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

And all these things, but not the fat back. Keep in mind, it's not weight per se that's the threat. It's excess fat. So, for example, if you work out, you might gain 10 or 20 pounds of lean tissue over time. That's not necessarily compromising your health just because you 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.

AODI really exists in sort of one of two states. You're either in the fed state, state or you're in the fasted state. Okay, so when you're in the fed state, you're eating, insulin is going up. And as insulin goes up, its job, like its normal job, is to tell your body to store those calories. Okay, so you can store it as glycogen, which is sugar, or it can store it as body fat. But that's the point. So you lunch or dinner, there's way more calories in that meal than you can use right at that point. So you want to store that.

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So when you don't eat, which is anytime you don't eat is called fasting. So when you fast, That means your insulin is going to drop, and that's the signal for your body to now start pulling those calories out of storage. And that's the reason you don't die in your sleep every single night, is because we have the ability to hold some of those calories in storage. So in the fed state, insulin goes up, you're storing calories or body fat. In the fasted state, you're not eating, your insulin's dropping, and you're using calories. So you're in one or the other. You can't do both at the same time. So if now you say, okay, I mean, go.

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

Every time I eat down, I will.

Store, I'm not burning body fat.

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

Don't burn anything off my body. Yeah, exactly. Keep all that stored fat, keep it.

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

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

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

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

It's burning fat. Exactly. And nobody died. bad happens, right? There was nothing wrong with that. And hopefully you learned your lesson too, right? And that's the whole point, is that there's nothing wrong. It's a natural part of our human physiology. If we couldn't survive without eating, like we would not be here today, because when we were cavemen and cave women, they didn't have food every day. Exactly. They could, there might be a stretch of three, four, five days. where there was no food, and therefore they had to survive on their own body fat, which they did. And that was the whole point. So let's let our body, you know, use it because that's the most natural thing to do.

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

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

So, you know, everyone's doing it, so no one's feeling exactly stressed when they smell the food and they're like, exactly.

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, if you want to lose weight, you can do very well, of course, with a sort of standard 70s style sort 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. which in a 14 hour fast every single night. Remember, they're doing 12 to 14 hours say every single night without even thinking about it. Like, that's a secret because they don't even think about that. That's just a period of time that they're not eating, right? But now, of course, the traditions are different. You can eat anywhere you want. You can eat in the theater, you can eat at your desk, you can eat in the car. Like in the 70s, stuff like that didn't exist. You didn't eat in a meeting, in a boardroom, for example. Now you go to a meeting in a boardroom when there's food everywhere, donuts, donuts and cookies, right? Somebody's ordered a plate of bagels or something like that, right? It's like, well, why? We're having a meeting here, right? So that's the thing. So you could do very well with that kind of, you know, eight hour eating window, 10 hour eating window. You can do very well with it. But if you're not doing well, then you can extend it. And that's the beauty of it. You could extend it as much as you want.

Right?

So if you think about fasting, you could go three days, you could go five days, you could go 30 days. People do that all the time. But no food. No food, yeah. So if you think about fasting, so the amount of energy that you need, so a pound of fat has 3,500 calories roughly. If you need about 1,800 calories, so that's for like a regular person, not like an athlete or somebody who's working out a lot. It takes about half a pound of fat per day. So if you're dealing with a lot of obese people, like a hundred pounds overweight, you could go 200 days, you know, if you want to lose a hundred pounds, you could go 200 days without eating before you get- and survive. And survive. Exactly.

And be okay.

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

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

Exactly. So you use it.

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

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

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

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

So it's almost like, so it's almost like you need to, be extreme in your usage in order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you. But if you just do a little bit, I'm gonna eat a little bit less today, it's not gonna do that much.

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

You're focused, you're clear, you're in the zone, everything.

Exactly. And that's, that's the reason that we actually pump ourselves up. And in the constant, the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say, well, I, I have to eat because I have to concentrate. It's like your concentration is actually much higher when you don't eat. think about when you had a huge Thanksgiving meal. Well, were you really sharp or did you really want to just lie down on the sofa and watch some football? You don't have any sort of focus. But if you think about animals, it's the same thing. Lions, they just eat, they just lounge around. But if you're the hungry wolf.

That.

Is a very dangerous animal because he's focused, he's ready to kill you. same thing for us. Our level of concentration, our mental ability, mental agility goes up significantly when we're hungry. Like if you think, oh, you're hungry for this, hungry for that, that doesn't mean you're falling down lethargic.

It means you're focused.

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This book a few years ago called Unbroken, which is a biography of this fellow who went to a prisoner of war camp in World War II Japan. And he was talking about starvation and they were literally starving. They'd eat almost nothing for the full day. And he's talking about how his other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats. So one guy was reading a book entirely from memory. another guy learned all of Norwegian in a week. And he, he. So the guy says, this is simply the mental Clarity of starvation. So it was incredible. It's like, it was so widespread, everybody was starving, and they'd see these incredible Feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time because your mental ability is ramped up to such a high degree. And then, you know, in the ancient Greece, the ancient mathematician, Pythagoras, he require his students to fast.

How many calories should we be eating a day? What's like a healthy range?

You know what's funny about this? Your body is actually pretty good at telling you how much to eat. The problem is, we eat, I know your people watching right now are probably like, what are you talking about? That's not true. It is. The problem is we eat foods, about 70% of our diets are made up of foods that have been engineered carefully engineered to make us overeat. And there's a lot of money and science that goes into doing this. Ultra processed foods are very powerful at making us overeat.

Snack foods with salt and sugar and yeah.

Just a combination of things that, I mean everything from the texture to the mouth feel. Tastes so good. Yes. Just how it affects your body. So they've done some really good studies on this. They've done studies where they'll take groups of people in not too many controlled studies in diet, so these are really good. They actually put them in a lab and they say, you guys over here, eat as much as you want. You guys over here, eat as much as you want. This group over here has whole natural foods. This group over here has ultra processed foods. And they even control for the macros, so proteins, fats, and carbs are pretty similar. Then they take the groups and they switch them. On average, and now we have multiple studies to show this, people will eat about 600 more calories a day from eating ultra processed foods. So to give another example, if I were to put five or six plain boiled potatoes, no salt, no butter, nothing, just plain boiled potatoes in front of you, and I told you to eat them in 30 minutes, it'd be really hard for you. After the second or third potato, you'd be gagging. You'd hit paleo potatoes? Yes, just plain, right? But if they gave you a family.

Size bag of potato chips, which has.

The whole bag with like 2000 calories or something, which has similar amounts of food in it, actually more calories because the oil, you'd be able to eat them. That's the power of ultra processed foods and how palatable they are. So I used to do this with my clients, simply telling people the following, eat as much as you want, just avoid ultra processed foods. You would typically see a 10 to 15 pound weight loss.

Wow.

Just from that.

If you're eating whole foods, there's only so much you can eat.

You hit palate fatigue faster. It's far more satiating. You just eat more appropriately. Our bodies, there's this myth that we're wired to overeat. We're just wired to just eat like crazy and just become obese. That's not true. We're not wired to do that. Overeating was just as bad for us thousands of years ago as it was today. I mean, you could have digestive issues, you could have died from that. Our bodies are pretty good at regulating. This is more complex than what I'm saying. these particular foods make you overeat. Simply avoiding them and even telling yourself, I'll eat as much as I want, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, meats, foods that have one or two ingredients, right? You'll find that your average calorie intake will probably decrease by about 5 to 600, some people even more. A day.

A day.

Wow.

On average.

And that's where you lose weight.

You lose it. Yeah. That's it. And then if you want to take it even a step further, if you add to that, here's a couple behavioral things that you could do that make that even more effective. Whole natural foods, I'm not going to limit myself, and I like saying this because when we're in the mindset of limiting ourselves, it plays a lot of tricks on us and it's really hard. So don't limit yourself to see all natural foods. And then here's the second one. Don't eat while distracted. In other words, when you eat, don't be on your phone, don't watch TV, just sit down and eat your meal. Why? that results in about 10% reduction in caloric intake just from doing that alone.

Why is that?

We're not in tune with our body's signals of satiety.

We're not focused and present on the food. Correct. So we're distracted and we just keep.

Eating and eating and eating. Yes, we actually eat faster doing it that way as well. So what happens is the signal of satiety doesn't get registered quite as quickly when we're distracted. Also, being distracted could cause emotional changes, stress, anxiety, whatever, which also can create bad relationships with nutrition. One of the worst things you could do is eat while watching stressful news or something like that.

You're gonna eat more, you'll be stressed out.

Absolutely, right? So that's the second one. And they sound so simple, but they make such a huge impact on people. A third one you could do even, and this is another really easy one, is when you eat your meals, eat the protein first.

Over the vegetables? Everything.

Just eat the protein first, then eat everything else. Why is that? Protein is in comparison to carbohydrates and fats, very satiating, so it produces a lot of satiety, right? It satisfies you. And the second reason is, and we now have what are called CGMs, right? Continual glucose monitors. The data on them is coming back and it's pretty clear that if you eat protein first, the spike in blood sugar-- yeah, it's blunted. Now, why is that important? A spike and then subsequent drop in blood sugar tends to promote cravings. It tends to make us want to eat more to get that blood sugar back up. So eating the protein first tends to result in through satiety and through the blunting effects of blood sugar tends to produce better satiety and make us eat less. So those are three things right there, Louis, that if people just did those three things and didn't say to themselves, I got to restrict, I got to cut, I got whatever. They would find over time that they would just start to lose weight and they would eat more appropriately. Wow.

That's not working out more, that's not moving your body more, that's just through nutritional eating.

Yes. And to speak about moving more, the burning calories approach to weight loss is a losing total losing strategy. Oh yeah, the data on that's very clear. Burning calories manually, our bodies do a terrific job of adapting and of storing fat, you're saying. And slowing down its calorie burn. We have a range within our current lean body mass, okay? We have a range of calories our bodies can burn. So there's like more efficient, less efficient. And burning calories manually, at first your body's burning more calories, but eventually your body knows how to make up for that and make you burn less calories. So the studies on tons of exercise for weight loss are pretty clear. It's a terrible approach. Really? Now, it's not to say you don't get health benefits. from moving more, you still get health benefits, but from a weight loss perspective, it's a terrible strategy. Now, there are some forms of exercise, one in particular, that can boost metabolic rate. What's that?

Strength training. Lifting, yeah.

Strength training is very effective. There was a study done with modern hunter-gatherers, the Hadza tribe of northern Tanzania. So they live the way that humans lived thousands of years ago, right? So they don't have electronics, they hunt, they gather, in comparison to the average Westerner, they're very active. Scientists went and studied them and through some pretty sophisticated testing, tested their metabolic rates. How many calories are they burning every single day? And what they found was they were burning generally the same amount of calories as the average Western couch potato. Really?

Yeah.

And now you think at first, well, that's crazy. They're moving so much. But actually it makes sense. Our bodies would not have if we burned 6,000 calories a day as Hunter Gatherers, we wouldn't be here. 6,000 calories in a Hunter Gatherer society is hard to come by. So our bodies learn to adapt. Now, strength training, on the other hand, tends to have a different effect. The main adaptation with strength training is to build muscle, the side effect of which is, and if you fuel it, you have to also feed your body appropriately to do this, but if you feed your body properly and strength train, the tendency is for the metabolism to boost or to go up. So you can see through this process, and I've done this many, many times with people where they'll come and hire me, we'll lose 30 pounds and we can eat more at the end of this process than we did before the process. More calories or just more food? All of it. Yeah.

Which...

They lose fat. Oh, yeah. They're leaner.

They're leaner.

They have a little bit more lean body mass, five to ten pounds, depending on male or female. now, but they're burning more calories than they went into. Now, why is this important? Well, it's a great buffer. If you have a fast metabolism today, this is a wonderful buffer against the challenges of modern living, which is sedentary and food everywhere, super accessible. So fast metabolism today is an asset, whereas 10,000 years ago it might have been a liability. So strength training does that. Now, strength training doesn't burn as many calories as running. but remember I said that really doesn't make a big difference because your body learns to adapt to that anyway. But the strength training does contribute to a faster metabolism over time or at the very least help prevent or mitigate the metabolic adaptation or slow down that tends to happen when we reduce calories to lose weight. And then there's more to that. Because of the muscle building process, you see the balancing of hormones that we're all kind of looking for, like in men you see more testosterone, higher androgen receptor density. This is what testosterone attaches to. You see more appropriate levels of cortisol, a balancing of estrogen and progesterone. In women, growth hormone tends to be more youthful because when I tell my body to build muscle, my body organizes its hormones in a way to do so. And the hormone profile that contributes to muscle building just so happens to be the youthful hormone profile that we're looking for. Interesting. So I tend to, when I recommend exercise to people, average person who I know, like, okay, maybe we'll get them to do this two days a week, you know, if we do a good job. I tell them, if you're going to pick just one form, do strength training. That's going to be the most effective one. And then if you add something else, then it'd be great if you added.

Some cardiovascular and some mobility or flexibility training.

Wow. So if you can only choose one, strength training or cardio, you're saying strength training all day. 100. 100. Building muscle. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's far more protective. It's going to boost your metabolism, which will make being obese harder. It balances out your hormones better. Muscle sticks around longer than the calorie burning effects of whatever you're getting from the form of exercise. Once you stop your workout, there's the calorie burn, which like I said earlier, your body adapts to anyway. But when you build muscle, it sticks around for a little while before you start to lose it, and you develop something called muscle memory, which I know you understand as an athlete, right? have you ever broken a bone or anything like that? Okay. You know, you take the cast off, muscle super or your arms. But very quickly it bounces back. There's something called muscle memory. So if you build muscle and let's say you stop for whatever reason exercising and then you go back to working out, you'll gain that muscle back in a small fraction of the time. So it's a more, for lack of a better term, because there's no permanence when it comes to this, but it's a more permanent. form of results or fitness, which just so happens to fit perfectly with the challenges of modern life. When you look at the average person and you're saying, okay, what are the challenges that are preventing them from being healthier? It's, okay, I'm surrounded by tons of food, I'm inactive, is there something that can protect me against inactivity, which muscle does very well. Hormone imbalances now are rampant, and there's going to be times when even the most consistent average person, not fitness fanatic, is going to not work out for a month or two, is there something that'll help them bounce back faster? Strength training just tends to do that.

What about training where it's half strength training and half cardio? It's like an orange theory or something like this where you're doing 20-30 minutes of lifting in between different sets, maybe not to failure or fatigue, but intense, you know, lifting and then some two or three miles of running with intervals. What does that do for the body, for weight loss, for metabolism? Yeah.

So I want to be clear. All forms of exercise, so long as they're applied appropriately, are going to benefit you. So all forms of exercise have benefit so long as they're not overdone or inappropriate for the individual. So that being said, strength training needs to be, in order to reap the real benefits of strength training, it has to be applied in a particular way. Otherwise it ends up becoming cardio with weights. So if I did it like a bunch of circuits, even though I'm doing curls and presses and rows, really what I'm doing is just a lot of cardio. I'm just using weights. Okay. So if you really want to reap the benefits of strength training, you want to train in the way that builds strength and muscle. Now, I do want to be careful because I'm probably invoking images of bodybuilders with veins coming out of their neck and they're you mentioned it, right? Intensity, failure, lifting, whatever. that's not what most people need to do. Okay. Most people would derive tremendous benefits if they went to the gym and strength trained and they did traditional do a set, rest for a minute, do a set, rest for a minute. But the way that they did their set was practice. So the exercise as a skill, that's what we're going to look at. So rather than I'm going to go in here to beat up my legs, I'm gonna go practice squats rather than I'm gonna go hammer my shoulders, I'm gonna practice overhead presses. This tends to lead to more appropriate applications of exercise and you see a more consistent, you know, strength gains, more consistent muscle gains and far less risk injury. So intensity, although it's an important factor to manipulate, people over apply it. They think that- You got a failure on everything. Yeah, no, no, no, no, that's not the case. Like I said earlier, you need to have more energy at the end of your workout and you probably shouldn't feel sore or if you do feel a little sore the day after. And so for most people that's just like go in and get really good and practice these exercises that we know to be very effective. You're squatting, you're deadlifting, you're rowing, you're pressing, you know, maybe some kind of a split stance exercise like a lunge, some kind of rotation and just practice them and get good at them and naturally over time, people will apply more intensity, add more load, and they'll see the results that come from that. But that's a very, very, it's a much more effective long-term approach versus the go to the gym, beat myself up attitude.

Right.

Yeah.

What about, I'm sure you've answered this, I don't know, a thousand times, but, you know, belly fat seems to be the thing a lot of people want to eliminate.

Right.

Is there a formula for eliminating belly fat?

Yeah.

So. Or can you do it lots of different ways?

Or what's, what's the best approach? doing it? Yeah, so for the most part, where we store or lose body fat is determined by our genetics. So a good rule of thumb is the first place that I store it is probably going to be the last place that I lose it. Now that being said, hormonal changes can change the distribution of body fat on your body. So if you see like women with very, very high cortisol, estrogen, progesterone imbalances, they'll start to notice more more belly fat than they normally would. Men who's let's say testosterone is low, estrogen levels may be too high, they'll see more body fat level, more body fat storage and maybe the upper body, back of the arms, maybe in the lower body. So you'll start to see different patterns. But that's really a small percentage of where we tend to store body fat. It's largely determined by genetics. So the question is, how do I get rid of body fat? It's the same way that you get rid of any body fat. you have to create an energy imbalance, which to put it simply, and again, it's more complex than this, but to put it simply, you have to be able to burn more calories than you take in. And there's, there's, and we already talked about some of the effective ways of that, but if you can burn more than you take in, then you'll see body fat loss as a result. And building muscle is a great way to make that formula work for you, because if you don't, what ends up happening is you cut calories, you do tons and tons of cardio, you cut calories, you lose 15 pounds, you're stuck. Okay, I guess I cut calories more.

And you lose muscle too.

Well, that's what happens, right? Your body's adapting, so you end up losing some muscle. So now you got to cut even more to lose that next 10 pounds. And then at the end of it, it's like, okay, I'm eating 1300 calories a day to maintain this 25 pound weight loss. This is unsustainable. And then you gain it back. so what you want to do is you want to say, okay, I definitely want to eat healthier, but not so little that I can't fuel muscle growth. And I want to strength train so that I can get my metabolism to learn how to burn more calories on its own. And then the process looks more like a snowball effect rather than this quick plat, you know, weight loss with Plateau. So you start to see the scale move a little bit, and then it happens faster and faster and faster, and then you feel better. And, you know, I like to communicate this as well, which especially to women, muscle is a lot more dense than body fat. So don't get too obsessed with the scale. You know, if I could have everybody watching this lose 10 pounds of body fat and gain 10 pounds of muscle, their weight on the scale wouldn't change, but everybody would be smaller.

And their body composition would look a lot better, too.

Oh, you're gonna look different, but you're gonna be. You're gonna be smaller because body fat just takes up more space. I used to have this trainer that worked for me. I used to love. This is a great. sales technique when I was a general manager. I'd have, if I had a new member, especially a woman who, you know, was apprehensive to lifting weights, I would invite my, this trainer that worked for me. And I'd say, if you could guess her body weight within 10 pounds, I'll give you a free membership for a month.

Wow.

And they would, she was very petite. She was like 5'1 or whatever. And they would always guess, like, oh, she's 100 pounds. She's 110 pounds. And I'd get her on the scale, and she was 130 pounds. and I proved my point. Like, she has a lot of muscle, but she's small because muscle is very dense.

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