The Fasting Doctor: Do THIS To Heal Your Body & Reverse Disease | Alan Goldhamer

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.

I think you've got to have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really?

Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes. You're one of the leading experts on water only fasting and I'm so fascinated by this subject because I've been doing intermittent fasting, I've been doing, I've done up to three day no food fast before, and a half days. I'm doing a lot of 24-hour fasting. And it's been amazing to see the results I'm getting in just the last year testing some of these things. So I'm curious, 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. 'Cause I mean, if you go to a physician with high blood pressure, they're gonna give you a medication that might be a diuretic or a beta-blocker or whatever, or a combination of medications. And they're gonna tell you right from the beginning, if you do what I tell you, you'll never get well.

Really?

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

Just take these drugs and suffer the consequences. Keep eating the same way, keep living the same lifestyle, keep lacking sleep, being stressed, eat all the processed foods, and.

You'Ll be on these drugs for the.

Rest of your life. Well, live normally.

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

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

The problem, I think, is though that you are biologically designed for short-term pleasure seeking self-indulgent behavior.

Those hits, those dopamine hits.

Absolutely. The body, the brain rewards the body every time it engages in behavior that favors survival and reproduction. 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. 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, 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 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 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, they're 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 a day of fasting, eight hours a day of feeding. And by limiting the feeding window, as people like Valter 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 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. 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 2 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 that 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 fasts when we're going two, three, four, five weeks or longer.

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

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

So not that we would recommend that. Is that just someone who's so obese that they're trying to get rid of.

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

They could survive.

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

Is what, just thinking or what?

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 hyperprocessed foods like humans eat. So if you feed human style hyper-processed foods to animals, they also get fat. We add chemicals to our food specifically to induce dopamine stimulation in our brain. Those chemicals are salt, oil, and sugar. These are not foods, they're food byproducts. They're hyper-concentrated food byproducts. They're essentially chemicals we're putting in the food to stimulate more dopamine. Dopamine is the neurochemistry. associated with pleasure. The more dopamine, the more pleasure, the more we like the food. That's what good tasting food means, because it stimulates more dopamine production. And the consequence of hyper-stimulating our brain with dopamine means we overeat and we become obese. And that's why two-thirds of people are overweight is because they've fooled their brain with chemicals they put in their feed. It works in rats, it works in mice, it works in humans. Put the chemicals in their feed, they overeat, they get fat, then they develop obesity, and metabolic syndrome. And if you have metabolic syndrome, you're more vulnerable to dying from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and even viral infectious diseases like COVID. The higher your metabolic syndrome increases risk.

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

I hear 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 it. 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 that we're talking about. If your goal is to avoid overeating dietary excess, obesity and the disease 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, 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, 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 us to do precise whole body composition. So not just how much fat and protein there is, but how much visceral fat there is.

Internally and externally, right? Exactly.

So visceral fat, typically you think about an apple or strong on 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. It's not good.

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 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? So 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 in order to maintain the glucose, the core glucose that your brain needed. And you're going to theoretically put back on fat. But after fasting, assuming a person adopts a whole plant food SOS free diet, what we found was weight comes off, weight comes back on. But the weight that comes back on is glycogen, water, fiber, and protein, not fat. Fat continues to drop.

I like that.

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, reanalyze 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. 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, quote, gained weight. Now, if you sit around on the couch and eat greasy, fatty, slimy, dead decaying flesh and highly processed foods and put on a lot of fat, particularly visceral fat, gain that same 20 pounds, that might be a problem. Right. So we want to be careful not to be thinking just in terms of weight, but in terms of body composition. Okay. So the idea is to lower the fat, not necessarily lower the muscle, though for many people, particularly as people age, they go through sarcopenia, they can lose muscle mass. Having more muscle mass is thought to be health promoting and protective to a certain extent. Yeah, yeah.

How often do you do a water only fast? And what's your range that you do? Everybody should do a water only fast.

Every day from 12 to 16 hours. 16 hours a day. Water only. Okay.

And then we go into feeding. Okay.

Eight hour window. Eight hour window of whole plant foods. So fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, foods. Whole Foods.

-Are you vegan?

-I am. I don't use animal foods in my diet. I'm 62. I started on a whole plant food diet at 16. So, I've had the opportunity to do it for a lot of years.

-16.

-Yes. Wow, that's inspiring. -Yeah. Well, it was out of desperation. -Really? -I wanted to beat my best friend Doug Lisle in basketball and I couldn't beat him and I practiced and I really worked at it. But I thought if I got, you know, if I really got healthy, maybe I could get an edge. And so I read a book, it happened to be by Herbert Shelton, and he said that health was the result of healthful living. It was about diet, sleep, exercise, and that fasting could also be useful.

And I thought, well, I'll give that a try.

This was 40 something years ago. Yeah, 46 years ago. And of course it failed, because it turned out he adopted the same type of diet and lifestyle, and he still just destroys me every time we play. Really? I'm hoping though that maybe he'll age.

Out a little quicker. Once we get into our 80s, maybe- Wow.

We'll finally beat him. You guys are still friends. -Oh yeah, we still play. -Yeah, and he's actually the psychologist at the True North Health Center. -Amazing.

-Oh yeah, no we play, yeah, every day, you know, every week we're playing basketball. -And you still can't beat him. -No. -Okay, one day. -One day. -One day.

-Sometimes it doesn't matter how healthy you are, someone just might be a little taller, stronger, or more skilled. -Well, I'll give you an example, you know, I thought, you know, he's quick, he's a really good basketball player, and I thought, Okay, he's got some skills I don't have, but free throws are just practice. So I got some coaching and I thought, I'm just gonna, and I'm shooting 500 free throws a day. And I work really hard. And of course, he's only playing once a week. And so one day I say, Hey.

Doug, let's do a free throw shooting contest.

And he's, okay, you crush him. 48 out of 50, right? And I think, I got him.

He hits 19, he misses one if.

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

He's.

Well, he's a mutant.

99. I don't even know anyone's ever done that. It's amazing. He's.

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

Black coffee, bulletproof coffee, can I.

Can I do this or will it ruin the whole fast?

Well, it's not going to ruin the whole fast, but here's the thing with caffeine, which is a highly addictive nervous system stimulant, is it has a 17-hour half-life. It affects sleep quality. Even the coffee and the caffeine that you're consuming early in the day can affect quality of sleep. It can be really caustic and irritating to the stomach, not just the caffeine, but the coffee itself. So there's a lot of things to question about whether this is really a health-promoting habit. The other thing is a lot of people are using coffee for its caffeine because they're not getting enough sleep. So they need it. If you stop the caffeine, you go through like any addict, drug withdrawal, and it can be quite severe. But once you get free of that, you may find that now you're able to get the quality and quantity of sleep you need. So the need for using a highly addictive nervous system still may be reduced somewhat. Now the fact is it is a plant-based product, so there are still some redeeming properties and it's not completely devoid of any nutrition. But I think that the negatives outweigh the positives from my viewpoint for using that type of product as a component of your diet.

And have people in your clinic said, okay, I'm going to do seven days of water, but I'm going to have coffee every day also, and are they able to get similar results?

Well, we don't use any type of highly addictive drugs with patients when they're fasting. So we have a controlled study.

Got it. Okay.

Distilled water and it controls the pH.

And that's it. Yeah, that's it. Just pure water, distilled water for seven days. That's how we do it.

No food, some electrolytes in there or something or... No, actually, electrolytes are recycled.

Efficiently during fasting, so we monitor electrolytes.

But we're not supplementing electrolytes. So there's nothing added to the water. There's nothing added to the water for five to 40 days duration of the fast. Now people say, well, that is it safe? Is it safe? Well, we've answered that question because we've done a study, we've done an actual fasting safety study where we took all the subjects that went through the process for five years, evaluated all of their symptoms and adverse events, documented that and published that in a study that's available on our website. And people can look at that and find... And it turns out that yes, in fact, fasting when it's supervised in a controlled setting can be done safely and effectively, even for periods up to 40 days. Wow.

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

16 hours every day and eight hours of feeding, and then once a year we'll fast a week or two depending on the individual and how they're doing. What will you do? A week a year. Assuming at a week that there's no symptoms that show up from fasting, then that's the end of it. And I hate fasting. You cannot play basketball. You have to do anything. It's terrible. So, it's not something that we would want to wish on somebody excessively. On the other hand, it can be a very effective way of in both helping sick people recover, but also I believe in helping healthy people stay that way. I think that the people that may get ultimately the most benefit from fasting are healthy people that use it preventatively, that want to stay healthy. The difference is that in a person that lives a healthy lifestyle, fasting has much less entertaining. It's a much less dynamic process. People don't have a lot of the symptoms that people that are sick getting well have.

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

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

Well and exercise and put a bed on time. Right. Really radical stuff. Because it's been years or decades of.

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

That's it.

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

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

It varies from patient to patient. For example, we recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal of a case of a young woman who came in with follicular lymphoma stage three, which is a type of lymph cancer, had large palpable tumors involving her upper and lower- Internally. External, oh, you can even feel them externally. They were large enough. They were in the lymph glands. So, when they're very large, you can feel them. Oh, man. You can also see them on CAT scans, ganciatic presidential biopsy. It was well documented. Oh wow. So we ended up fasting her for 21 days. And by three weeks of fasting, you couldn't feel the tumor anymore. Come on. 10 days of recovery, back to her oncologist for CT scans. Make a long story short, this woman was able to completely resolve her stage three follicular lymphoma. At a year, we had a whole body CT. We were able to show that she's completely free of cancer. We have a three-year follow-up. and the case report and the follow-up are published in the British Medical Journal case reports. You can go onto our website and take a look there. It's exquisitely carefully detailed. Since then, including at our clinic right now, we have other patients with follicular lymphoma, including one gentleman right now who is stage four follicular lymphoma who's had preliminarily good results. He's on his second fast now. We did a previous fast last year who'd gotten significant improvement. We're now doing another fast, only this fast is going to be 40 days. Oh my gosh. And we're hoping that we can get the same kind of clearing resolution and long-term stability. Once we've published enough case reports in the form of cohort, we'll be able to then hopefully justify a clinical trial. We believe we're going to do real well with this particular type of cancer because our clinical observation is that it consistently is responding. Now it may not be the same thing when you talk about a solid organ tumor, a lung cancer, a different.

Type of cancer may respond completely different.

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

How much does the belief in your mindset that this fast will heal or help prevent or help create more healing for me? How much is the mindset, the thought process on a daily basis that I'm healing myself? This water is cleansing my body. Whatever the mind is telling versus, I don't know if this is going to work and what am I doing this for? How much do you believe the mind manipulates the healing process.

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

They don't salt in those pretzels.

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

Of course.

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

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

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

Best done with the right people in a clinical setting. So if you're on Medicaid, so you.

Don'T want to stop your medication to fast for two days.

Right. And you don't want to fast on.

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

For those that are healthy, not on medication, younger, just trying to optimize their life and test things, what do you say? 48 hours, three days, five days? What's like, okay, you can be fine for three days doing this.

That would depend on whether they can rest during the process. If they're going to be really active, they really would be better off limiting their fasting to 16 hours and then go through feeding. Now, what Valter Longo and others do is they have recommendations of calorie limited, modified fasting where they give people 750 calories for five days. And that seems to be able to be done safely. It doesn't require the same degree of modification of medications and other things. So I would say look at Valter Longo's book. and look at his approach to modified regime. I wouldn't recommend our more radical approach. Our approach is really better done for people that are when we're doing long-term fasting done in a controlled setting.

Got it, okay. But if I wanted to try it on my own, you think two days is fine?

Well, I think that you should do 16 hours every day.

I'm doing that already.

Eat a whole plant food SOS diet and the other eight hours.

I need to do that.

And then at some point you should come in Take a week off, do a fast at True North and let's do a show from you, fasting. Let's show people what they actually experience in a hopefully healthy individual. -Seven days? Whatever seems to be appropriate for you. We have to figure it out. -I can't work out? That is the biggest challenge. You'd have to limit yourself to stretching.

Yoga, mild activity during your fast. -Do you work still or are you.

Just like, I'm just relaxing, watching TV all day, drinking water? -Well, actually we have a pretty active educational We have people go through three classes a day. We have videos.

So it's like, I'm in a dorm, I'm in a hotel, and I'm in a process.

Well, you have a private room, but there's a community in the controlled setting where you have to get what I call brainwashing, what everybody else calls education. And the idea is to really help fine-tune people's attitudes towards diet, sleep, exercise, and the things that you need to keep doing after you leave so that you can sustain the long-term results and.

Make us look good. Where is this based?

We're in Santa Rosa, California. It's about an hour north of San Francisco.

Okay. So, people come into this clinic and then they stay for a week to weeks.

Anywhere from a week to some cases as long as a year.

And they're getting educated every day. You just say, Here's your food for the day. Like, how many glasses do I get? Is there like a dessert water?

We go through at least 40 ounces of water.

40 ounces of water.

Yeah, minimum.

What is that?

40 ounces is about, well, depends on the size of your glass. How many tall glasses? That's 12, so it's gonna at least.

Get four, at least four of those.

Enough so that you can maintain. Wait a minute, so only four glasses of water? Minimum four. Could be as much water as your thirst indicates.

Really?

So the idea is we don't want to make you a... Loaded. The problem is, if you drink excessively, you can flush your electrolytes. So, you know, there is, water intoxication that occurs if you just drink obsessively. So we want enough water to maintain normal specific gravity so we're monitoring your blood and your urine and make sure you're in target. If you get a little dehydrated, we might say, well let's get an extra glass of water in. If you're drinking too much water where.

Electrolytes get a little low, we might say let's keep it, you know, keep.

From getting too carried away. So what happens every day? I'm getting tested with urine and blood sample or what's so we're our doctors examine patients at least twice a day. So we're taking vitals and evaluating how they're doing. We're monitoring blood and urine. And stool, I guess there's no stool after eating. Well, you're not going to be passing.

Stool once you stop eating.

Two days, I guess, right? Once you empty the bowels, because you're not putting, because think about what is stool? It's undigested fiber, circulatory linings, some stuff from the liver, mostly bacteria. So there's going to be a massive change in bacteria during fasting. In fact, that's one of the big benefits of fasting is you have five pounds of bacteria in your gut right now. Five pounds of waste. A trillion creatures. No, I'm talking about bacteria, not just waste. You have a trillion creatures eating, drinking and defecating inside you right now. They're pooing inside you. And what they poo in you depends on what you're feeding.

Is it a healthy bacteria or unhealthy?

Well, if you're feeding them a lot of animal products, you're going to have much higher TMA than people that eat a lot of plant-based.

Plant-Based.

Trimethylamine. Well, it becomes TMAO, which is trimethylamine oxidase, which irritates animal lining of your vessels. And maybe one of the reasons people get more colon cancer and heart disease when they're on high animal product diets than plant eaters that tend to have less. If you feed your bacteria soluble fiber like sweet potatoes, you're gonna get vitamin K and fertilizer. So if you want more fertilizer and less toxic waste, you want to minimize the highly processed foods and animal foods, maximize the whole natural plant foods, you get a different flora and that's thought to be protective of your immune system, reduce your risk for colon cancer, help you resist viral infections, maintain better weight. There's a lot of stuff that's just coming out now about the changes in the microbiome as a consequence of diet and also fasting. We've actually done a study where we looked at stool samples before fasting early fasting and then after recovery, looking at the changes in microbiome that occur in fasting. So, you know, there's a lot of interest in what exactly this body does, not to only the thousand different strains of bacteria, but what they're giving off.

Right.

And so lots to learn. A lot of the stuff that we're doing now, really virgin data, because not very many people have had a chance to look at people with long-term water fasting and what happens physiologically.

What's the minimum I could go? to your facility.

There really is no minimum because some people will fast even just a few days. That may be all that's necessary. Okay, so you never know exactly what's ideal to you see how the person responds. And some people really aren't good candidates for fasting. So they might come to true north, but they wouldn't be water fasting. We might do a modified feeding regime or just healthy eating, exercise, appropriate supportive care. We also have doctors of chiropractic, osteopathy, nature of the acupuncture. There's a lot of people have problems that all nutrition based. Sometimes they have more mechanical problems. So we would approach it from a similar philosophy but not necessarily only fasting. Right.

I've heard from Dr. Jason Fung that he says fasting has been shown to, I don't know if it's reverse or eliminate or really support type 2 diabetes. And I don't know, is there a lot more research on this or is this accurate? about what you've seen in your studies?

Yeah, well we treat, there's two types of diabetes. The type 1 diabetics that don't make insulin is one type. Those people would not be good candidates for fasting because insulin is a part of the adaptive process of fasting. So a type 1 diabetic or a type 1 and a half diabetic, they're not producing enough insulin, can become ketoacidotic, get into dehydration, it can be really complicated. They've got to eat. Mess. So, they have to maintain tighter insulin and glucose controls than sometimes would be inherent with water-only fasting if they don't make insulin. Type 2 diabetics, which is what most diabetics are, make enough insulin. In fact, they make more insulin. It's not working.

And what's the cause of type 2 diabetes?

Insulin resistance. And insulin resistance is caused by the diet that makes you fat. It's not even just the fat. Obesity is a associated with it, but it's the diet that makes you fat that causes insulin resistance, which is why our type 2 diabetics, long before they've lost all their fat, begin normalizing their blood sugar levels. They may still be overweight, but their blood sugar levels come barreling down because they stop the diet that's making them fat. In fact, some of our patients just in preparing for fasting, we have to be really careful with their medication regulation because they start normalizing even before we get started with the fasting, just by making the dietary changes. And then once we start fasting, blood sugar levels come down, insulin levels are normalized. After fasting, assuming we adopt a whole plant food SOS-free diet, get involved in SOS-free. Salt, oil, and sugar. SOS is the international symbol of danger, and it stands for salt, oil, and sugar, the chemicals added to food that make people fat, sick, and miserable. It's salt, oil, and sugar. additions to the food that is why people are being fooled fooling their society mechanisms getting in the pleasure trap and developing obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Also known as the SAD diet, the standard American diet, right? Yeah, so the SAD diet.

If we use fasting to normalize insulin function, normalize blood sugar levels, and then adopt a health-promoting diet and exercise program, we can sustain that. And about 80% of our type 2 diabetics will achieve normal sugar levels without medications after a single fast. Some of those that have more resistance may need to do additional fasting or if you can't get them down to optimum weight within the context of initial fast you may take a little longer.

For those that are coming in with who are on medications, what are the average, would you say, medications that people are taking who are taking medications and then within three to six months after fasting what is the average that they're taking afterwards? Medications.

So let's talk about high blood pressure first. You know, people may be on a simple diuretic like hydrochlorothiazide or they may be on as many as five medications. Some of our patients come in capped out on medications 220 over 120. Wait, wait. Some of them are on 20 medications? No, five medications capped out with the systolic blood pressure is as much as 220 and diastolic is as much as 120. So we see some very severe hypertension. hypertensive patients. But in the study we did of 174 patients, 174 patients had pressure low enough to eliminate the need for all medications. Really? The average effect of stage three hypertension, so people who started 180 or higher on systolic blood pressure, their average drop will be 60 points. It's 60 points plus the fact that they're often baselined on meds. None of them are on medications if they've festered. By definition, we've eliminated all medications. and they don't need to go back on medications if they're willing to do the diet. And lifestyle, and obviously if they go back to the salty fatty processed food.

They can eventually develop obesity and blood pressure.

So high blood pressure is 100% related to food. Essential hypertension is not 100% related to food, but it's 100% manageable with diet and lifestyle. You know, stress and overwhelm.

Exercise and stress management also can be an important role for many people. But most people believe that you can't.

Reverse high blood pressure, you just have to be on medication forever, isn't that right? Well, people can't reverse hypertension. unless they're willing to do diet, sleep, exercise, and lifestyle modifications. Then you can reverse it. Yes, you can reverse it. In fact, you can almost always reverse it. We don't see people with essential hypertension that don't normalize their pressure if they're willing to do these types of interventions. Now, if they don't come down, usually it's because something's been missed and they actually have secondary hypertension. There's nephrosclerosis, there's some kind of other pathology. And so we have to do more detailed imaging to find out what is it that was, you know, been overlooked. I would say that at any one time we have an average of about 70 patients undergoing care at the center. We have at least 20 hypertensive patients and it would in any given year we might not have any of those typical patients that won't be able to lower their pressure enough to sustain it without medication.

So this test you did of, I think it said 170, is that what you said?

170.

174. patients. They all had medication coming in, is that right?

Not all of them were medicated. Most of them had sustained pressures of 140 or 90 or higher. And all of the ones that were medicated were unmedicated by the time they were stopped afterwards. All of our patients stopped because they can't fast if we don't get them off the meds. Now sometimes we may have to feed them for a week to be able to wean their meds down because we don't like starting fasting. If the person's at 220, we're not going to initially start. Feed them, wean them, wind them, and then once we get below 160, we can start fasting.

And then how many weeks of water fasting is that typically until they're completely off the meds?

So it ranges from 5 to 40 days, but the typical hypertensive patient is going to fast somewhere between two and three weeks. Gotcha. Now during that time, they're going to lose 25 pounds.

They're going to look 10 years younger. They're going to feel better.

Yeah, you know. Have energy, focus, they better, because otherwise, you know, they're going to get really mad at us because fasting is not a lot of fun. You have to take time off work. Rest. Although it's getting a little bit better. One big thing that's happened recently is this idea that it's okay for people to work from home. Because what's happened is a lot of times people could take a couple weeks off to come in and fast, but they couldn't stay long enough to properly recover. So we couldn't fast them. Because we need about half the length of fast recovery. Well now what happens, they come in fast, but while they're recovering, they can work.

They can work.

Because we've got a really robust Wi-Fi system. That's great. And they can work In fact, I have one guy, he only works fast. He comes in once a year, he fasts. He's a writer. He writes better when he's fasting. And the rest of the time, he.

Doesn'T much of anything. Because you can get in the zone so much better. I've seen it. You can stay there longer because you're not thinking about, I need to go eat. I'm going to snack on something. I'm tired now from eating. My digestive system is using all the energy.

The energy is focused on creation.

It can be. It can be.

Unless you're exhausted and tired, but yeah. I think that recovery is much, has been a lot easier now to get people to stay appropriately for recovery because they're not necessarily have to not be working. Are they allowed to work while they're fasting there? It depends on how long and fast.

And who they are.

Some people are doing shorter fasts, they're going to be fine. Other people really are better off getting the rest they need. Because the more brain power you're using.

It's your mean burn of glucose. You're burning more calories and you don't.

Want to burn more excess calories, right? Because if you burn excess calories then you have to mobilize more protein through gluconeogenesis to sustain the extra glucose needs.

So, if you're water only fasting, how many calories do you want to be burning a day?

What range is that? Well, when you're water only fasting, once you've adapted to the fasting process, there's around 500 or 600 calories of kind of core glucose that's used by the.

Muscles in the brain.

Sugar that's being burned. Right. 500 calories. Most of your brain activity is converting to burning ketones. So, most of your burns burning fat. but there's still a little bit of glucose that's needed by the brain and for the muscles. And so if you are too active and you make your muscles burn more fuel and the only where it can get extra glucose during fasting because your glycogen is already burned up is breaking down protein. And that's the process of gluconeogenesis.

Exactly. You don't want to do that.

No, you prefer to keep your protein because then you gotta build it back up. And if you rest when you fast, you do. You preserve protein, you maximize fat conversion, and then when you recover, you pump your muscle cells back up, but you don't pump your fat cells back up because you're eating a whole plant food diet.

So if I want to do a, you know, a 36-hour fast where I have a dinner, let's say on a Sunday night, and I go through Tuesday morning and I just have water, no coffee, just water, you would recommend not working out. You'd recommend not working or doing very light. relaxing stuff, not heavy decision making and in creation mode.

Fasting and resting is the key. So, we always go together.

So, resting looks like what? Is that on the couch watching some movies and just chilling and reading a book or is reading a book too much activity for the brain? What is that?

So, interesting.

Sleeping all day.

Yeah. So, certainly getting caught up on your sleep deprivation, particularly you know if you've been addicted to caffeine, it's likely you have some sleep debt. And so catching up on sleep may be a good thing. Passive activities, like we do a lot of video education because we find when people are fasting, particularly early phase fasting, they may not want to be doing heavy concentration that comes with reading, but absorb it a little bit more passively. A little bit of sun, a little bit of gentle stretching, a little bit of hopefully pleasant company with other people that are not energy vampires.

So, some good conversations are fine. That's not draining on the brain.

Maybe you don't want to be spending all your time watching news about all the worst things that could happen in people's lives.

But you can watch a couple fun movies, have some great conversation, be in the sun, stretch a little, relax. But anything beyond that you're saying could be detrimental to the process.

We actually have a Roku channel, True North Health. free Roku channel people. We have a bunch of content on there that we keep adding it so people can go on to the Roku channel and watch all of our content.

I like that. So if I was to do that, you're saying anything with, if I added physical activity, if I trained and did a 24 to 36 hour, I think you know, that wouldn't be what we recommend.

What we'd recommend first, make sure that you're a good candidate. Right. And if you're going to fast, you'd rest. If you're going to be working out, then I would recommend Perhaps you look.

At Walter Longo's approach or fasting mimicking diet. Exactly. Okay, 700, 500 calories, you're going to move a little bit and that's going to burn some of that sugar or.

It'S going to give you some more energy to burn, I guess, right? That's not an area that we've researched. I really can't speak definitively. I'd really defer to the guys that are advocating those fasting mimicking programs. I know it's inconvenient. It's not what people want to hear. But there's almost nothing we tell people that they want to hear. It's what we tell them what they need to know to get and stay healthy. so if you're going to do long-term fasting and you use our protocol, you can do it safely and effectively. You know, it's interesting because I noticed that Longo in his book tells people don't do long-term fasting because it can be dangerous, but does make a caveat for people fasting at the Trinity Health.

Center because they know the protocol. Really? That's good. That's great. What are the negative effects or potential negative effects of water-only fasting?

Well, if it's done inappropriately, one of the negative effects could be death. so there's a process of fasting and then if you continue to fast beyond that process it's called starvation and then you die. And so that's why we would never do that. That would really be bad for our outcome data. So we're always very careful to always stick to the fasting where people have labile reserves and don't fast them so excessively that they become depleted. Electrolyte depletion could result in myocardial problems, kidney problems. There's a problem if you fast for a long period of time in the too rapidly refeed a refeeding syndrome that can occur that can also make you very sick or could kill you. When fasting is done according to these protocols, it's safe and effective. When it's done excessively like anything, it could be a very dangerous process. Particularly for people that are not healthy, that are on medications, that could become a significant problem. Not just the fasting, but the complication of manipulating their medications.

And so if I'm doing a 24-hour water-only fast, relaxing, what's the feeding process look like after that? It's probably okay after 24 hours to get back into normal foods, but I'm assuming anything over two, three, five days, there's a different feeding process, right?

Probably the most important part of fasting is careful refeeding. That's why we do it in an inpatient setting for half the length of the fast. So let's just take, for example, a 10-day water fast. For every 10 days of fasting, we would have one day of fresh juices. So it might be carrot, sorry, apple juice, watermelon, sorry, the first day. The first day, they have 12 ounces every three or four hours through the first day. Just juices, no fiber. So we kind of reactivate the system. Then there would be a day of raw fruit and vegetables. So they do some fruit and salad materials. Again, very low caloric density. Get a little bit of fiber in then we would introduce more concentrated foods perhaps like steamed vegetables but very softer. Yeah, so you're broccoli, cauliflower, turnips, kale, and things like this are relatively easy. And then assuming everything's going well, we would introduce a day with maybe more starchy vegetables, your Hubbard squash, your butternut, kabocha, etc. In addition to some salad, in addition to the other materials. And then more complex carbohydrates or whatever's appropriate for that individual. So it takes half the length of the fast through careful programmed refeeding. When we do that, we don't get refeeding syndrome, we don't get all the things that people talk about with complication. I'll give you another example that can happen. People fast for a few days and then they go out and eat, say, soup in a restaurant that's really salty. They can get post fasting edema with their legs swell up.

Now, what's that?

Oh, yeah. The leg swells up. Oh, you can get, especially longer term fasting, not so much a day. Yeah, gotcha. as they do longer turn faster because the body's flushed all this excess salt out of the system. But then you'll get this big retention and the fluid will be retained to protect your body from the toxic effect of excess salt. And you can get a lot, especially in people that have congestive heart failure, other types of limitations. You can get a lot of really unfortunate secondary side effects. We never see those happen using our protocol. But we hear about that frequently as people are, you know, well-intentioned misguided things. they read something on the internet and they try it. And they're doing it. And I saw there was this thing where you can do your own home app endectomy. And they'll talk you through it on it. And I imagine people could do it, but they're gonna get some bad effects. I wouldn't recommend it. I don't recommend people do long-term water-only fasting unless they really understand fasting and they've worked with their doctor to make sure they're a good candidate, they're appropriately monitored, they have some baseline data, so they have a good outcome. what we don't want is people messing up fasting because it makes fasting look bad. And then people get terrified of it and they don't need to be terrified of it.

It just needs to be done properly. So if someone does a seven-day fast at your clinic, then there's three and a half days of a feeding process strategically before they can get into more eating normally.

Once they've done half the length of the fast refeeding, most people can then eat a whole plant food SOS free diet. So fruits, vegetables, greens, legumes, nuts and seeds. We still would encourage them not to overeat and all that, but they wouldn't get the acute reaction to fasting. Now think about this, if you do a 40-day fast, okay? It's a 20-day recovery. And if you take a 40-day fast and put them on greasy, fatty, slimy processed stuff, they're going to be really sick. And a lot of people do end up with that try that extreme fasting and then inappropriate refeed. That's the most significant. Now, People will only do that once.

They'll never again.

No, because they'll learn the hard way. So we don't want them to do that.

What, this stuff is fascinating to me. What?

All this talk about fasting has made me thirsty.

I know, I gotta drink some more water. What else do we need to know about fasting at home in a safe way?

Well, I don't think that fasting 16 hours a day at home is really a problem for almost anybody. I mean, almost all patients can do that safely and consistently. If they develop symptoms like orthostatic hypertension, again, they should check with their doctor. And if they're on medications, we always recommend that they talk to their doctor because just getting healthy that'll happen as you start limiting your feeding window may require your physician to reduce the intensity of your medication. Think about high blood pressure. As soon as you get off the greasy, fatty, salty foods, your blood pressure starts to drop. If you're taking very powerful medications, you can actually get orthostatic hypotension as a consequence of excess meds. So the problems here really aren't fasting and feeding. They're as much as managing their medications that people are frequently on. So people that are not on any medications have a lot less problems and complications than those that are or have specific health issues.

And what's the longest you'd recommend someone at home going without being supervised?

If they're not going to be supervised, we recommend 16 hours. That's every day.

No more. That's it.

No 24, no 48. Well then they should talk to the doctor. They're a candidate for longer fast. Then if they do that, make sure they rest. I'll give you an example. We have some patients right now that can't get to True North Health because they're in foreign countries. So since the pandemic, they're not allowed to come in. So we've been working with a lot of physicians in foreign countries, helping people get through their fasting. and the doctors will take the history, do the exam, provide the monitoring and we'll provide support to the doctor. It's a service we provide, happy to do it, but you have to have a doctor willing to provide you core support, which is examine you once a day and make sure that things are going the way they're supposed to go.

This is a serious thing. You shouldn't mess with this. You shouldn't try to experiment these things on your own.

If you go online and you look at the complications from fasting, it's never from people in controlled settings doing it properly. It's usually people that they did a thing and a lot of times it'll work out well so they'll tell others about it but then they run into a complication. It's like anything though. You've got to use a little bit of common sense.

Common sense for sure.

And so there are people that have done longer fasts, they're very successful, it's worked out well for them and that's great. But I see the other side where the complications and so I tend to be a little bit maybe paranoid about the complexity. Sure.

What's the longest fast you've put someone on?

Longest fast at the 2nd House Center is 44 days. We don't recommend fasting over 40 days. There's been a few exceptions where we've really had no choice. We needed to complete the process the patient was in. Really? And so we ended up going a little bit longer, but we don't recommend it. Now, the guy that I trained with, Alec Burton, used to fast people as long as 100 days. Okay? But he stopped that.

Now, when I trained with him, This.

Was 40 years ago. And these are people that were what.

100 pounds obese or what? Well, no, yeah, they would have been.

You know, usually 50, 60 pounds overweight or more just to have the reserves to go through that. I asked him why when I got there, he had stopped doing fasting over 40 days and he said, oh, because of the sleep deprivation. I said, oh, do they have trouble sleeping after 40 days? He goes, Not them, me!

Oh, wow.

Because he would worry too much about it. Because what happens is, if you keep the fast under 40 days, we don't see that many complications. But as you start getting into the 50s, 60s, a lot of electrolyte balance issues has to be a lot more carefully monitored.

And so he would just have anxiety over this.

Everyday stress. He just stopped it. And so at some point in his career, this is because he knew he could go that long without the problems. And so that-- There you go. And that sounds really long. But for these people that were used to doing even longer fasting processes, you.

Know, it doesn't seem quite so radical. So 40 days is the extreme.

For us, an average fast is two to three weeks in that range. And what, so the people that come.

In with medications, how many usually do they have again when they come in? Little range. Some people have one or two medications.

Some people have, you know, a dozen medications or more.

And then afterwards, they're completely off the medications. The only exceptions are we will continue.

To fast some patients on true hormone replacement therapy, like thyroid replacement therapy. It's sometimes what we'll do is we may have to reduce their dosages. but we wouldn't necessarily discontinue somebody that's appropriately on replacement therapy. But we would never fast patients, for example, on steroid medications or anti-rhythmic medication, anticoagulant medications. Even people might use normally acetaminophen or ibuprofen, things that they might be able to take in a feeding state. In a fasting state, it could be very serious in terms of kidney response. So, drugs can be particularly potentiated medications doesn't go with fasting. Rest goes with fasting.

Have you ever been on medication?

I've been really fortunate to be able to avoid the use of medications because remember I got started when I was 16 years old. So I've never had a cup of coffee or an alcoholic drink or had to take medications. An exception would be I had some dental work done and they used novocaine. Right, right, right. So I have had that. But I've been very fortunate to be able to avoid medications and the drugs, the dietary drugs that are commonly used. And you don't miss what you don't know. So it's actually a little bit easier making good decisions when you don't know what you're giving up. So to speak.

I grew up in a religion where we were taught not to take medication. And so I've never really used medication. Maybe I've had an ibuprofen, I mean in football maybe I used an ibuprofen now and then, but luckily, I've never really had that. I've never been drunk, never been high.

And.

I feel grateful that I've never really had to take medication. And, I'm sure I would if I needed to for some reason, but it's...

Well, there are times when drugs and surgery can make the difference between life and death. Of course. And, that's where mostly they're not used for urgent situations. They're used to placate the symptoms of things rather than deal with the the reason why those symptoms arise.

And why do people not just say, let me try a different way and let me heal my body first before taking medication? Why do so many people just go right to medication than changing diet, lifestyle, sleep, routine?

Well, we wrote a book about that. It's called the Pleasure Trap. Exactly. And medicine is essentially one version of the Pleasure Trap because what it does is it's instead of actually doing the hard work to get rid of the cause of the problem, you can just make magically the consequences of that problem go away. And so that's an example of the pleasure trap. It's the same thing. Why don't people eat a health-promoting diet? Because it's so much easier to drive in and get 2,000 calories of grease and slime without even having to get out of the car. You can't even walk all the way to the counter at the fast food because it would be too much effort. So they put the drive in and the sales go up 40%. I mean, you know, we are energy conserving, pleasure seeking machines. And so we do everything we can to get the most pleasure, the least pain with the least effort. We talk about the motivational triad in.

The Pleasure Trap book.

Motivational triad? Yeah, pleasure seeking, pain avoidance, and energy conservation. And so that's why diet factors play in. They give us the most pleasure for the least effort and simply as quickly as possible because we don't want to put out extra energy. And particularly if you're sleep deprived because you're drinking all that coffee and not getting the quantity of sleep that you need. and you're never eating the right foods.

So you always feel hungry, right?

Not only that, but when you eat those refined carbohydrates, your blood sugar levels go up, so your insulin goes up, then your blood sugar goes down. Now, you got plenty of carbohydrates, but your brain thinks you're starving. And your brain is saying, give me more, give me more. Exactly. Don't waste their time with some of that stuff. Let's get something that'll give us the jolt again. And it's up and down and up and down all day long. The caffeine, the refined carbohydrates, the sleep deprivation, look around you. It's what you see. And then the long-term consequences is dietary excess metabolic syndrome, and then people are.

Dying from heart disease, cancer, or COVID.

So you never drink coffee or caffeine? Not so far.

Really? No teas, no caffeinated teas?

Well, I shouldn't say who knows. Maybe I've had a green tea. I don't drink any caffeine. I don't use any kind of teas. I've had herbal teas, though. Right. So peppermint. Not caffeinated. The basic rule on teas is if you can eat the plant, you can drink the tea. So if it's blueberry leaf or peppermint.

We don't think you can drink the tea. If you're talking about something with caffeine, then I wouldn't be using that. How has living a cap- because up until a few years ago, I didn't drink caffeine.

Well, I take it back.

I drank soda growing up, but then I cut it out of my diet. Did you eat chocolate? Yeah, I had chocolate. So, you were a caffeine user? I guess I'm, yeah, I guess I'm a caffeine. But I wasn't drinking coffee and I wasn't drinking teas. And I wasn't drinking soda for a long period of time. And it wasn't until a few years ago I started drinking Bulletproof Coffee. It's more for like the taste. I kind of just like it, but...

That's what people say about alcohol.

I don't drink alcohol, but yeah. I hear you. I get the point. I just like the wine once a night, you know? And I have always felt like I've had so much energy. Even now when I drink coffee, I kind of trick my mind. I don't feel like I need it to get energy. I kind of just say, okay, I.

Just like the taste.

And I can go without it and feel fine. And I've always felt like I just have energy, you know, without the coffee or the caffeine. Maybe I'm getting the caffeine from the chocolate. I don't know. But what is a life without caffeine done for you?

Well, I don't think that you have to have caffeine in order to have high levels of energy. It's just a stimulant. Anytime there's a stimulation, there's compensatory depression. You're able to get away with it because you don't drink. apparently that much, and you're healthy. And healthy people naturally have high levels of energy. Just because you have a lot more energy than other people doesn't mean that you have more energy. They just have less. Maybe you're just the baseline and that's what normal looks like.

So when you have coffee, what do you say with every spike there's a decline? What are you saying?

Anytime there's some stimulation of the body, somewhere down the road there has to be some compensatory depression. The body's always kind of end up itself out. Really? So, if you stimulate, there'll be some compensation later on.

And what happens when you do that?

You just take more caffeine and you keep pumping it until eventually the system breaks down.

Really? Do you feel like you always have high energy? No, at the end of the day.

I go to sleep and then you wake up and you feel energetic again. That's what sleep does. And if you don't get enough sleep, you don't quite recover. And if you don't quite recover day after day, eventually you develop fatigue. That's what fatigue is, is not getting the quality or quantity of sleep you need. You know, if you take a healthy person, they've done studies with medical students where they put them in a sleep lab and they simulate them just a little bit, just a little bit of stimulation, not enough to wake them up but to keep them out of non-REM deep sleep, within two or three days they've got fibromyalgia symptoms. Oh my goodness. Just the disruption of that normal, not getting that non-REM deep sleep.

Caffeine disrupts the quality of sleep.

So yeah, you can keep taking more and more. Caffeine, but eventually that process catches up with you.

So is the caffeine essentially harmful at any time throughout the day or is it better before a certain time if you're going to drink coffee or tea? Well, it's less bad earlier in the.

Day because the 17-hour half-life has less of an impact 17 hours later than it would. Oh, it's 17 hours, the caffeine. At half-life, so it's still having an effect. The point I'm making, even if you drink coffee in the morning, still affecting you at night. Really? It's just not as much as it would be if you drank it right before you went to sleep and then.

You know, and then tried to go to sleep.

So, cappuccino right before bed is not a good idea. Maybe not the very best idea. Okay. But, you know, to ask anybody with gastric ulcer disease, how do they feel drinking coffee? Well, it irritates the heck out of this stomach lining. Okay. There's 2,000 chemicals in coffee.

It's not just caffeine.

2,000 chemicals.

So, we like the way it makes it feel. It stimulates dopamine. We're going to convince ourselves it's a good thing.

But you know, it's not. I don't think so.

What are the, after someone comes off the fast, what are the five foods you would recommend they never eat again?

Well, number one on my list would be dairy products. I think of all the animal products, dairy products, particularly cheese. Probably number one is cheese. It's like coagulated cow pus. You know, they allow 750 50,000 puss cells per cc. Might as well find a festering wound.

Stick a straw in it and suck.

Oh man. It's also full of salt because if you take the salt out of cheese. That's why it tastes so good though. Without the salt you wouldn't think so. So now you've got the benefit of an animal food which is biological concentration of all the toxins. They give the cows hormones in order to make them make more milk, make more productive, which passes on. Isn't it interesting you have little girls now that are menstruating it. 9 and 10 years old as they reach sexual maturity much earlier. The same hormones that make the cows make more milk also affect humans and particularly you see it.

I'm like a foot taller than everyone in my family but I used to only drink milk all day long. Milk.

Milk proteins. Milk proteins are also highly antigenic when it comes to type 1 diabetes in children. It's known that in genetically vulnerable kids exposure to those proteins can stimulate the immune system to attack the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas and may be part of the mechanism in juvenile onset diabetes. We know that people that have eczema and psoriasis and autoimmune diseases find that those proteins can aggravate their condition. We know that cheese, when you think about, talk about saturated fat, calories and.

Salt all in one package, may not.

Be the ideal cheese. Cheese is the worst food, you're saying. I wrote an article that says the title of it's, nobody needs milk. and you can find that on our website. It has about six and a half million downloads. I don't think we're getting any funding from the milk industry. Nobody needs milk. I would argue milk is probably number one as far as the foods that cause the most problem. And what you see the biggest change is the quickest just by stopping them. Animal foods in general have biological concentration issues where animals accumulate materials day after day after week after month so that when you eat it, you get its entire lifetime accumulation of mature. If you look at just toxins, the PCB, dioxin, pesticides, heavy metals, et cetera, if you look at a calorie of animal food compared to a calorie of plant food, you could have two to a thousand times the concentration in animal foods compared to plant foods just because of biological concentration. Right.

So animal foods in general, dairy products in particular. Then I think number three on my list are cheese. Is that what you're saying?

Or is it cheese and milk in one? Or is it just dairy is number one? Is it worth to drowned or burn to death?

Which should we?

So yeah, I would say cheese just because it's hyper-concentrated too.

It's a highly processed.

It's milk.

Any of these milk products, dairy products.

And then three was. Animal products in general. So meat, fish, fowl, eggs, all of it. Really? Well, any animal food has biological concentration as a concern. So we're advocating a whole plant food diet. So fruits and vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts and seeds. I would argue that next would be refined carbohydrates. So, your sugars, your concentrated sweeteners, refined flour products, because these are so helpful at getting people fat and helping them develop the disease of dietary excess.

Okay, refined carbs.

Then would be oil, including olive oil.

Really?

Yeah, all fractionated highly processed fats in the form of oils.

I have the cases of olive oil are helping with longevity. and all these other things.

Well, what you're seeing is some people arguing that oil, if it displaces something even more toxic, maybe higher up in our list, may be less detrimental. I don't think that makes it healthy, in my opinion. Got it.

And then the last thing would be all oils.

All oils, not all fats. Of course, you're getting fat from whole foods. So, you're eating your nuts, your seeds, your avocado, your whole foods. Whole foods. Which contain all the essential fats you need.

Got it. But not the. But not the passionate byproducts of whole foods. Coconut oils, olive oils, avocado oils, all those you think people should eliminate.

Absolutely. And then we also get rid of the added salt. Now sodium is an essential nutrient without which you would die, but you get all of the salt you need from.

Your whole plant food diet.

What are the saltiest plants? Well, some foods are very rich in salt, like your Swiss chard and your tomatoes and your, you know, that have naturally have a lot of salt. But the fact is all vegetables and fruit have some level of sodium. And the amount of sodium you need is actually somewhat less than what people are eating on average. We get too much salt, which contributes to high blood pressure. It contributes to edema. And think about this. Salt actually has a preservative effect on bacteria. This is why you salt meat to try to keep the bacteria down. When you eat a very high salt diet, it could also potentially affect the microbiome that lives in your gut as well. So people on high salt diets may have different microbiomes. beyond people that eat a lower sodium intake in the diet. Now, this is where we get some of the most aggressive criticism, particularly from modern advocates on a lot of the podcasts. They understand, okay, oil, maybe there's a problem with too much oil. Okay, sugar, pretty much there's a consensus now sugar may not be good. But salt, oh no, we can't say that because they like their salt. It's pink. It's, it's, it's, Blessed by the guru, it's special salt. They say, well, isn't the special salt better than the other salt? Well, sure, because it's contaminated with other minerals, so it's not as much sodium per volume. It's like saying, isn't honey better than sugar? Honey is twice as sweet per unit of sugar, so you use half as much of it.

So it's therefore half as bad.

Right, right.

Okay.

Basically, here's how you can do it. Here's a simple tool. If you want to look at something and think, should I eat it or should I not eat it? Is it good for me or not? I have a simple way. You just get really quiet and go inside yourself. Close your eyes and think, do I really, really, really, really want whatever it is? And if the answer is truly yes, you know. You can't have it. You get nothing. Because you really, really, really want it because it's activating the pleasure centers.

It's stimulating. It doesn't mean you won't like your food.

Desire, everything. Nobody wakes up and says, I think I'll have a carrot.

What?

We're out of carrots. Call up the grocer. I don't care. Wake him up.

It can't wait till morning. We're like, oh, I'm craving the pizza.

I'm craving the ice cream. I'm craving the cheese, the milkshake, whatever it is. It doesn't mean you don't like eating. Believe me, people that eat a whole plant food diet, they like to eat. They look forward to eating. They enjoy their food. It's just like, if you're used to very loud rock and roll and you go and start maybe listening to classical music. It doesn't mean you can't enjoy your music anymore, but you're just not going to lose your hearing participating in it. Okay? So, but there is an adjustment, you know, and there's an adjustment to that, which is why I like fasting. Because after fasting, good foods taste good. They taste good. People that think it's tasteless, disgusting, swill that couldn't choke down the disgusting. Now they eat it, it's like, oh, this tastes pretty good.

Yeah, it does.

Because the palate changes. We actually did a study. We actually did a taste adaptation study. It's actually going to be coming out this year. We were able to detect minimum threshold to have salt and sugar and show changes after fasting and also a change in the hedonic likingness of salty, sugary and salty fatty foods. The palate actually changes in people after fasting to where the stuff they used to think they really liked, maybe now it doesn't have so much appeal. peel and the foods that maybe they weren't that interested in now have a stronger peel because there's actually a change in the palette.

Crazy. And what about the five best foods? If you could only eat five foods for the rest of your life to live an optimal, healthy, you know, give your body what it needs, feel good at the same time in a positive way, what would be those five foods?

Well, I would say that on the fruit side, I particularly like watermelon. One of the reason is it's tends to be picked ripe, so it tends to be well tolerated by people. It's a high mineral content fruit. We use it a lot to terminate fasting. It's very rarely, as are people allergically inclined towards watermelon. That's readily available almost all year long. So I'd say watermelon and then berries. So any of the berries, but particularly blueberries and raspberries and blackberries, are very nutritious. They have a little bit lower glycemic index and maybe some of the other hybridized high sugar fruits that we commonly eat. On the vegetable side, there are some vegetables that are super nutritious, like broccoli, like kale and chard, your greens, the whole class of steamed greens. Two cups of steamed broccoli has as much calcium as a cup of milk.

Really?

Without all the health compromising components and without any pus.

Yeah, well don't put butter on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well you don't need it though. Steamed broccoli is really good. Don't put any salt on it either. You don't need to add any salt. There's enough sodium to meet your needs. It tastes better with the salt. Well of course it tastes better because tasting better means more dopamine is produced. So you eat, you salt it up and your brain goes oh yeah, that's good and then you're gonna, exactly. You're overunity. So then I would say let's pick some starchy vegetables like Kabocha squash is certainly one of my favorites or Hubbard or butternut, some of the squashes. Again, these are low caloric density but easily processed, readily available, organic, all year round, very affordable, and can be tolerated by most people. Even people that maybe can't take grains or beans or other things might be sensitive to lectins or they have problems. Almost everybody can handle starches. Think about what you can feed infants. Most of them can tolerate these fruits or melons they can feed. Avocado as a fat-rich food might be on that list. Again, you can overdo anything. And then maybe something like walnuts, flax seeds that are really high omega-3 fatty acid foods. And I think out of that diet, you could get all of the calories, vitamins, protein, nutrients, except B12. You'd still need to supplement B12 because B12 is only found from bacteria. So if you're eating animal foods, of course, you're getting lots of bacterial contamination. Lots of feces mixed in there. You're going to need 12 in that. But if you're eating plant-based foods and you're washing and peeling because you don't want worms and parasites, you can eventually deplete Beachwelf stores. It might take you years, but eventually you can. So we recommend that vegans supplement 1,000 micrograms of methyIc bAlmete a day. So a small amount of Beachwelf supplement. That's the only supplement that we recommend routinely using. The other one that commonly comes up, if people don't get outside and they're not getting their extra exercise is vitamin D. Sometimes D can be an issue. Best way to get it is the Sun. But if you can't get out in the Sun enough or you live really far north or whatnot, then that may be another one supplementation may be necessary.

Wow. What about protein powders?

I don't recommend hyper processed food of any kind, including protein powders. You know, getting enough protein is not the problem. It's getting too much protein that causes the kidney disease and the heart disease. So especially too much animal protein. So even for vegans that are not eating animal products, we still want to respect these very concentrated protein foods in the sense that you do need protein, essential nutrients, 60-70 grams a day, depending on your caloric intake. And if you ate nothing but brown rice and broccoli, you'd get the quantity and quality of protein you need if you got your calories sufficiently provided by your brown rice and your broccoli. You'd get about 80 grams of calories of protein on 2,000 calories of brown rice and broccoli. I don't think we have to worry about getting too much. The question is always avoiding excess protein intake. Now, people say, But if I increase my animal food intake, won't I gain muscle faster? And the answer is yes, you probably will. One, higher caloric load because of the fat. Two, more anabolic steroids because of the animal protein that you're eating and it's carrying across. And so just because you get bigger faster doesn't necessarily mean you're getting healthier as a consequence. So I think you can get where you need to go athletically without necessarily having to use animal foods?

I know some people that have been on animal only, like meat only diets, because they've said that there have been many complications from fruits and vegetables, and they were very sick on more of a plant-based diet. I don't know if this is extreme cases of individuals or what that is. Have you seen this where people are only functioning on meat-based diets only and not vegetables and fruits?

I think people that have had problems eating anything because their microbiome is so screwed up that the only thing that they seem to not get distressed is animal food. But eating an animal food only diet is not, in my opinion, a long-term sustainable health-promoting approach. So, it might be for a period of time. For a short period of time, people can do just about anything. They can go on a standard American diet for sometimes years before it kills them. Right. Okay. So, if people can eat that.

You can live 70, 80 years on that.

So, but what I find is more common is that you have to correct the microbial imbalance.

How do you do that?

We do that with fasting. So we'll do fasting and then we'll follow it with a rotational whole plant food diet. We may not be able to use grains and beans and some of the more highly processed foods, but we can usually find foods that people can digest that they can recover their health on. I've never, since we don't use animal foods, at all at True North Health and we've managed to treat tens of thousands of patients, I guess it would be pretty rare or maybe those people wouldn't come to us but that's not been a problem that we've run into.

Interesting. How much waste in poundage is inside the body like of just food waste?

Well think about this. If you take the body and you divide it into two stacks, human cells and non-human cells, Protozoa, bacteria, there's actually more non-human cells than human cells.

So, your relationship with cells.

All those related components is really important. And your diet largely determines how they function and what that balance is.

So, I guess it will depend on.

Who you're talking about. But if you think about the typical transit time and what total food is, there can be several pounds of material that accumulate that are passing through the body. But most of the materials that I'm concerned about is inside the cells. And that is where the fat cells. Into the blood is processed by the kidneys and is eliminated in the urine. And that's why it's necessary to maintain adequate hydration and fasting so that you have a solute, which is also why dry fasting could potentially be much more dangerous. What is dry fasting? Dry fasting is where fast, but no water. No water, no food. Some people advocate, in fact, one of the gentlemen used to advocate that passed away from it recently. But anyway, so they'll go up to a week or more. And the thing is, it can be fatal because you can shut the kidneys down and get dehydrated. We don't advocate dry fasting. We believe it's important that there be a solute available in the form of water so that there's something for the body to put the material in that it's trying to get rid of in a pathway for it to eliminate. So dry fasting is now is advocated online. If you look online and people are utilizing it. But as I said, some people have suffered the consequences already from falling that hard. Oh, man.

And when you start a water fast, how long does it take until you stop going to the bathroom? Number two.

Well, it would depend on what you've eaten before the fast, your autonomic nervous system that controls your movements. but most people ask-- How many bowel.

Movements usually after you stop eating?

Usually once those initial bowel activity after 48-72 hours stops, you may not see something maybe till day 20 if enough material can accumulate, you might have another little movement. Really? And then bowel movements start again after a few days once you get function back. So, there can be bowel activity even deep into a fast, depending on what's.

Being sloughed off the gut.

Because the toxins are finally coming out, huh? Yeah, there's all kinds of materials that take various times to pass. But if you have people that eat well before the fast and have a bowel movement before fasting, often there won't be bowel activity till recovery time.

And what about your thoughts on, now that I'm thinking about this, what is it called where it's the water, you shoot the water up?

The enema.

Yes, the water enema.

Turning yourself into a bowel laundry.

What is that, what are the positives and negatives before a fast to kind of like get the stuff out.

Yeah, the positives are that if you have some collected material and you flush those out, they don't turn into a brick over the time that they might be sitting around there and fasting. The way to solve that was just eat properly before the fast, which is what we do. And then when you the residual material would just be some vegetable cellulose. You're not going to have, you know, big chunks of dead decaying flesh turning into bricks.

Got it.

And so, The disadvantage of doing too much with enemas is that you can debilitate the colon and then the balance becomes sluggish because you're overstimulating the autonomic nervous system. So we don't advocate routine use of that therapy, although there are circumstances where a post fasting colonic might be necessary because you have somebody that has neurological problems with their colon or whatever. But mostly the idea of fleshing yourself out is a misnomer because the toxins aren't in your stool. Toxins are in your blood and they show up in your urine. The stool, there's a tunnel that goes from your mouth down to the throat, and there's a hole at the end called the anus. So digestion is shoving stuff in one hole and then pushing it out the other. It's not unless it gets absorbed into the body through the intestinal mucosa that it gets in the body.

You swallow something, it's not in your.

Body, it's in a tunnel going through your body. But these things that are coming out of the cells. If it absorbs into the cells, it has to be very small to get through the intestinal mucosa unless you have gut leakage. which comes from free radicals, which comes from eating oils, or cheese, or smoking, or drinking alcohol. The leaky gut comes from that. That's what causes the inflammation that causes the leakage or the widening of those cells that allows proteins to be absorbed that the immune system reacts to and then your immune system reacts to your own cells. So if you don't have the free radicals, the smoking, the drinking, the cheese, the oil, you tend not to get gut leakage. And so a person like yourself that maybe doesn't drink and smoke, doesn't have much gut leakage, eat the thing and not notice much of a problem. Give that to a person with a permeable membrane. Oh my gosh, a single meal is enough to flare up their autoimmune condition. Wow.

This is fascinating stuff. What is the science that you've seen over the last 38 years? What's the newer science you've seen in research that really excites you of what's possible with fasting moving forward?

Well, in the past, the research was really more anecdotal. it was clinical research where patients with sicknesses got well. And we saw that and it was exciting, but we couldn't explain why they got well. But now, particularly people like T. Colin Campbell from Cornell University, author of Whole and the China Study, have done some massive epidemiological studies showing general dietary trends. He has a new book that's out, the Future of Nutrition, which is really a brilliant book. and Dr. Campbell's really one of my heroes because he's really swam against the tide, so to speak. And then most recently, Walter Longo from USC. He's a really brilliant scientist who's done a great job in supporting particularly intermittent fasting and doing research looking both at animal and human studies, kind of what's going on in the body and what's changing in the body. And so that research has been really exciting. and I've talked to Dr. Longo and we're hoping to do some collaborative studies comparing the intermittent and the long-term fasting. And he's just been a wonderful guy and he has colleagues like Mattson and others that have done just fabulous research. We did a project with Luigi Fontana from Washington University and that hasn't been published yet, but we've been looking at gut microbiome changes in work that we did with him. And the director of research at the True North Health Center is Tasha Myers. who's originally from Columbia University doing kind of basic science research. He really got excited about human subjects research and she's come in and brought in other researchers that we have at True North. So we're really excited about the stuff that we've done that we're doing. We've got a couple papers in the pipeline right now. Next year we'll be doing a phase three clinical trial with one of our colleagues at the Mayo Clinic looking at not just the treatment of high blood pressure, but long-term follow-up in the biomarkers that change. And so this study we're just completing, it was the first one we've had formalized follow-up data showing that people can not only get well in a contained setting, but you can get them free living and they can sustain those results and continue to make progress. That's exciting. Because we were criticized early on, they said, well, it won't work. And they said, well, it works, but.

It will only work as long as.

You have them in a controlled setting. And now they're going to have to explain how is it these people can be free living 5-10 years later.

Yeah.

I'm seeing patients now in my practice that are 35 years later. So I'm seeing people now that are in their 80s that I treated in their 50s. And you know, in fact, one of my patients when she was 92, this is my mother, turned 92, she realized she'd outlived all 52 of her lifelong friends. So everybody she'd known and grown up with, every one of her friends was dead. And she was socially pretty isolated at this point. She said, Alan, you need to warn your patients. If they do this diet, make younger friends. And she said, Much younger, not just a little younger, because even by the time they were in their 80s, most of her friends weren't, you know, functionally younger.

20 years, 30 years younger.

So if you're going to do this, you have to be prepared for the fact that, you know, the people that you know that aren't doing it are going to pay the price. and that's where you see the big differences in the last 20 years of life because instead of finding yourself unable to talk or move along in that nursing home bed, you can still be functional and vital. Dr. Lyle and I see it. We're in our 60s now playing basketball with people in their 40s. They're already starting to show aging outside.

Really?

Even when you're running around, you're feeling great. Well, especially in basketball, you can really see it. It starts to show up earlier. They're winded. Well, they show in terms of capacity. to recover. You think about what happens to a guy in his mid-30s in the NBA. He's considered like an old guy. Well, wait a second. Now, you could be in your 30s and still have the skill set, maybe even still have the quickness, but what you don't have is the rapidity of recovery. So the guys that are playing late into their careers, it's because they're able to recover from injuries.

How are they doing that?

And that's because usually they live a healthier diet and less diet. If you look at game and other movies. They're looking at some of these competitive athletes. Many of these people that are adopting plant-based sets, they may not be the biggest, but they tend to be able to sustain the longest duration because they're able to recover. And I think that's the big difference with aging is people's recovery rates tend to slow, and particularly in a professional sporting environment, we have 82 games a season like in the NBA, or now I guess it's 70-something. That's a really challenging burden. is to recover from the inevitable injuries that occur from playing at that level. And I think that if people adopt plant-based diets, not only do they have higher endurance potential, but they have better recovery potential.

They can be sustainable for much longer.

And it's even more relevant for the weekend warrior that's not necessarily a professional athlete, but that just wants to be able to continue to function in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and hopefully 70s.

Wow. What's the cost for someone to go.

To your clinic for a week? Well, we're a 501 nonprofit research facility, so our costs are much lower than most places. It's 159 a night for a private room share. That includes everything we do. So feeding, fasting, twice daily water, all.

The water you want.

All the water, what else are they going through refeeding and all the things that we do. So we have a much more affordable model because we don't have the pressures that other people do generate return and stockholders and we don't advertise.

How are you guys making money?

We have staff that work really hard. We're really productive and efficient. We're booked fully several months in advance, and we have low cost per patient overhead. So we've designed it so that we can keep it affordable. Wow.

Do you have people funding or donations or houses?

We do have that. Fund our research side. We absolutely have some very generous people. A lot of people, like for example, we're one of the charities on Amazon. Through Amazon Smile. So if they pick us, They don't donate a half a percent. We have people like Mama says in Leafside and well youl World, where they offer SOS free versions of their food, and they'll make a donation to the Foundation for people that identify us as a source of their thing. We have all of the people that stay at True North Health, any proceeds from the Operation of True North Health Clinic go to the True North Health Foundation. And so the Foundation is largely funded by the fact that we run a really efficient operation. Right. And there's a small margin that helps fund the research. And then some patients have been very generous in supporting our research directly.

Where do you see your life being right now if you weren't into fasting? Where would you be?

Well, when I was 16, I met Dr. Gerald Benesh and he told me that his job doing this kind of work, he had the best job in the whole world because the patients did all the work, the body did all the healing and all he had to do was take credit for the good results. And I thought then, that's the job for me. And the reason we're focused on this research is because that's the way to compellingly convince people that health really does result from healthful living. And we want to learn how to do it better, how to do it more effectively. I live in the best place in the world. I have the best job in the world. We live in Santa Rosa because we thought that would be the best place to live. We're doing the work that we're doing right now because we thought that would be the most fun, the most challenging. I can't really think of anything I'd rather be doing than what I'm doing right now.

Where do you think you would be in your body if you weren't practicing what you're preaching.

I think I'd be just like everybody else, overweight, developing diseases of dietary excess, probably be working on my first heart attack or first, you know, other thing just like everybody else. I don't think there's anything special about me except that I got started earlier and so I never developed bad habits so it's been easier and also I live at the True North Health Center where it's really easy to eat healthy every day. We have about 20 of our staff that live at the True North Health Center or in our adjacent apartment building. And I noticed they maintain a high degree of health. They don't have sick time. I'll tell you what, there's nothing better for an employer. I've got 70 employees than having people that aren't sick and debilitated and missing work and not functioning at their full potential and making healthy food available to our employees, allowing them to fast as part of their benefit package. Guess what? We have people that have been with us 30 years or more working every day. I can show you 30 years history where they've not been out as a consequence of illness because they're staying healthy. Prevention is a lot better than treatment.

It is.

Is everyone there plant-based?

Who works there? Well, all the only food that we offer is plant-based so those that live there have no choice. Unless they go off. They might have some fish every now.

And then or something. Who knows? They're sneaking off and hiding.

People that are living and eating at the center, that's what their choices are. Whatever they do in their first life is their personal life.

So every day you have people coming in and also weaning off or eating food as well, or is it they come in for set time and then it's like feeding time?

Well, most patients come in and feed down into the fasting stage. Some people, if they've done a really good job before they get there, can get to work pretty quickly. And everybody goes through a refeeding period of half a link of the fast, but many people are never fasting. They're coming for feeding or therapy or other things too. We've had 20,000 people undergo fasting. We might have had almost twice that many patients come through the clinic. So we see 1,200 new admissions a year. So we're processing a lot of people. We have a dozen clinicians. One of the things that we have since the pandemic that's been really interesting is we developed a telemedicine practice. So we took our doctors, our attendings, and we made them available online so that people can go through Zoom and call in and ask their questions and have a doctor at their disposal affordably that's not an idiot, that's used to people getting well, that can give them a second opinion. That thing is really taken off. And of course, I like it because the proceeds from that all go to the Trimbos Health Foundation, so it funds our research. But now we're able to service the whole world. So a lot of our particularly foreign patients that we're already working with are able to access us efficiently through our, they just go to our website and they click on the phone coaching service. And so now we can service people with this kind of advice remotely without them even having to come to the center. Because a lot of times it's just they just need good advice.

How much is a call with someone on your team?

It's $95 for a 20-minute consult. And it's all electronic. So they go online, they fill out the registration forms online, we have all their health history information, they email us, their lab, it all can be reviewed. And then we can work with their local doctor if they need something, we can refer them to a place that may be closer. Because, you know, True North is in California is great, but not everybody lives in California. There are people that live in all the other states. Of course. And we have doctors that we've trained through our residency training program. We have doctors that come and train with us as like from Texas A&M or from the naturopaths or the chiropractors will come in and train part of our residency program and then they go into practice. Sure, sure. We can refer to them. that maybe need a local doctor. Right.

And the website is where where can do this?

We have two websites. It's healthpromoting.com which is our main website. Healthpromoting.com is a simple way to get there. We also have a site for the foundation. It's called Fasting.org and Fasting.org is just a fasting compendium website of the research on fasting. Ours and other people's readily available. and it's new. So that's a newly launched site, particularly for people interested in fasting, for people interested in our content, our articles, our Roku channel, our TrueNorth.TV, all that. Freely available, everything's easy to get to you. Just go to healthpromoting.com and it's all right there.

I love this. You've got a book also that you wrote. I do. This is about 15 years ago you did this. You're ahead of the time.

You were way ahead of the curve.

On the pleasure called the Pleasure Trap, Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health and Happiness. And what is that hidden force?

That hidden force is the artificial stimulation of dopamine that comes from in the case of diet, highly processed foods. And so, it's the sugar, oil and salt that makes people fat, sick and miserable. And we talk about why it's difficult to make changes. This is a really disturbing book because it doesn't tell you what you want to hear. It tells you what you need to know to get and stay healthy. It tells you why it's hard to make changes and why people are so resistant to it, but it gives you a clear strategy to do so successfully, including the use of fasting.

And you have one of the keywords on the COVID you have medications, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, but at the top of the list is sex. Is sex a bad thing?

Sex is a good thing. It's necessary for our species to survive. If it wasn't for the ability to engage and sexual reproduction, our species wouldn't have made it. And it's food and sex that are the natural, normal stimulants of dopamine. And it's only food and sex that naturally cause those powerful stimulation. But the problem is we figured out a way to fool that with drugs, with highly processed foods. So we stimulate dopamine just like you naturally get from sex with things like drugs. For example, if you smoke cocaine, you get 10 times as much dopamine released as if you have an orgasm.

No way.

10 times as much dopamine is secreted.

People say, I gotta get on cocaine.

The problem is it's an artificial stimulation and it can lead to addiction. And so the problem is, yes, very powerful, very addictive. The normal stimulation of dopamine, good. The artificial stimulation of dopamine is the pleasure trap.

What is the artificial, if you're getting 10 times the amount of what you're.

Supposed to get, what does that do to the body? Well, what it does is- Or the brain. It's like the hallmark of addiction is you'll continue to do something not just to feel good, but when you stop doing it, you feel really bad.

The hallmark of addiction.

Like you said, anytime there's a stimulus, there's a depression. We talk a lot about this. There's actually a chart in the book that explains this hypernormal stimulation, whether it's from drug behavior or a drug-like behavior, which comes from the chemicals added to food. Sugar, salt. Now, these concepts that we talked about when we wrote this book are now becoming much more acceptable. and you're finding other books that are coming out there talking about the drug like effects of sugar and that. And so I feel really gratified that these ideas that were expressed so clearly by Dr. Lyle, the principal author of this book, are now being reflected more in the mainstream. And we went back through this recently, Chef AJ did a professional audio version of it, and it's great. And so for people that don't like to read, they can listen to it. And I listen to it, and I actually got more out of the same book listening to it because you process information differently. And one of the things that I really got was that this content was really sharply right on, even though it was written, as you mentioned, some years ago. And what's interesting is the sales of the Pleasure Trap now are actually better now than they were back then because now communication is a lot broader. Right. And so what I used to talk to public lectures to 100 people 500 people. Now these podcasts we're doing, like I did that show with Rich Roll, and I think there's almost 2 million people that have listened to it. So that would have been 500 years of talking yoga.

Right, right, right.

So now this invention of the podcast, which I think is relatively recent, has changed the way people like me that have really radical concepts can communicate with much broader audiences.

It's beautiful. I love of our show and our ability to spread these messages. You also have a pleasure trap test that people can take a number of questions and assess to see how healthy of a lifestyle they have or how duped they are by pleasures of food and all these different things.

It gives them a sense of how hard they're gonna have to work. If you were like you, you're gonna score quite high because you never got exposed to the drugs and the other things. Those things weigh quite heavily. And the reason they weigh heavily because they have a major effect on people. And so people that didn't do that can get away with a whole lot of other things without it necessarily showing up. You can have some of the cheese.

And no one else knows.

It may not catch up as much. But also remember a lot of it depends on genetics. How long you're going to live is largely determined by genetics and luck. You were lucky to have good genes. You're lucky to have been exposed to an adverse background that maybe minimized your exposure to some of the evil influences. but how well you're going to live is going to determine what you put in your mouth and how you live your life. And so what we have to focus on is whatever genes you have and whatever use and abuse has occurred, from here on out, you have to take responsibility to control your diet and lifestyle. And if you want to have a good chance of having a good life and a good death, now is the time to get focused. And that's what we're trying to share with people, is what can you do to have not just a good life, but to also make the last part of your life an even richer part.

Of in the first part. Yeah, I've heard too many stories and I've seen it. I'm starting to see it more with people that I know and family members who are extended family members who are struggling and who are unhealthy and there's not really a return point. There's not really a way to go back to healthy. Maybe there is, but they're not making the choices and the actions necessary in order to start helping themselves. And it's almost sometimes where it's too late, right? Can you ever reverse something if it's too late?

In my practice, it's amazing how forgiving the body is. Really? I see people, I remember when I was in Australia, I was going to osteopathic college and I was studying with Dr. Burton at his, what was called the Arcadia Health Center and he did a lot of fasting and I would see people coming in thinking, no way.

I thought if this one comes good, oh really? I said, I believe it. I said, I believe it. they can't walk, they're stiff, they're obese, all these things.

You see the tumors drop off, the energy come back, the cognitive, I'll give you an example. We published a paper recently on a gentleman who was in his 80s that they thought was going through cognitive decline and dementia. We also had atrial fibrillation, hypertension, diabetes, and all we did was unwind his medications, clean up his diet, and he woke up. because it turned out he didn't have dementia. He had polypharmacy. He was- what was that? Excess drugs causing cognitive decline. Causing him to be slower and memory loss. It looked like Alzheimer's, but it was actually- and as soon as the medications cleared his system, he was like, oh, woke back up. Sharp. Normalized his atrial fibrillation, he got off his meds, he normalized his blood pressure. Interesting, one of the reviewers in the case report that we submitted to the medical journal said, Wow, what an amazing result. But what made you guys think it was the drugs?

Oh, wow.

So just getting people off their medications appropriately can sometimes make a huge difference because it turns out some people are on too much medication. Some people are on the wrong medications and almost everybody's on medications is a consequence of poor dietary choices. So if you're willing to correct the dietary choices, the need for medications can be mitigated.

What does medication do to the brain and the body when you take one medication?

It depends on the medication. What is... If you look at any medication, just go look up the side effects, the three pages in the text or listen to any ad on the television about.

The whole side effects about the side effects in a loving, beautiful way.

Those are side effects. Those are effects. They're just effects you don't like. Those are what medications do to the body. Sometimes they do it in a more powerful way that you don't find convenient, so we call them side effects. But they're all physiological effects of medications.

You think most people, what's your percentage of people that you think could get off medication if they lived a healthier lifestyle with fasting and proper nutrition?

Well, if we talk about the people that we treat, the people with high blood pressure, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, all of that, Most of those people are going to be able to achieve levels without the use of medication. But even those people that might require some pharmaceutical medications will function better on a healthy diet and lifestyle. A lot of the side effects from the medications are complicated by the poor diet and lifestyle choices people are making. And yet, if you go on to the websites of some of the medical societies, they'll tell you we can't cure high blood pressure because we don't know what causes it. So just take the drugs and don't ask too many questions. It's not really true. Drugs cause chronic cough fatigue, impotence, and death. That's why they don't give everybody blood pressure medication. 60% of people have high blood pressure by the time they reach retirement age. Why don't they just put it in the public water stream for that? Because the negative effects of the medication outweigh the positive effects for everybody except those with the highest levels of hypertension. So don't underestimate the negative effects that medications, including commonly used over-the-counter medications, that patients can have on people. Right. Right.

Any medication. This has been fascinating. I wanna make sure people get your book, the Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health and Happiness. I wanna make sure they check out your website. Is it health promoting or healthy promoting? Health promoting. Healthpromoting.com and also Fasting.org if you wanna learn more about fasting, check out True North. Are you getting more on social media now yourself or?

What I've done is gone on people like yourself that have been kind enough to ask me to come on and share my radical message. I really don't know too much about the nuances of social media. But I'm confident that the people like you that know what they're doing are getting the message out.

There you go. Well, healthpromoting.com, learn more, schedule a call, check out the center. I might send my mom over to your place and send her there for a week or two.

I think you should come experience a short fast and go through that process yourself.

Like 3 days maybe?

Let's take it a day at a time and see how you hold up. Okay.

Might be very entertaining for your viewers. I know. Maybe I could do three days. Because then I have to do, what, a day and a half of feeding, right? Yeah, a little recovery. Three to five days, maybe I could do that. Could be interesting. I'll be down. I'll be down to test it out. So if you're bringing me in, I'm down to check it out. This is a question I asked everyone at the end called the Three Truths. So I'd like you to imagine you live as long as you want to live, but it's eventually your last day. And you've accomplished all of your wildest dreams, you've lived your life the way you want to live it, you have the relationships and you're helping people, you're educating, everything you want to do, you do it. But for whatever reason, you've got to take all of your messages with you to the next place, wherever you're going next. And no one has access to your book, this interview, content, your information anymore. But you get to leave behind three lessons that you would share with the world. This is all we would have to remember your information by. What would you say are those three truths for you?

So health is the result of healthful living. Healthful living involves diet, sleep, and exercise. And fasting can be very helpful at undoing the consequences of dietary excess.

There you go. Say it one more time. The first one, health is the- the.

Health is the result. of healthful living.

Yes.

That healthful living involves a healthy diet, sleep and exercise. And that fasting can help undo the consequences of dietary excess.

I love it. I want to acknowledge you, Dr. Alan Goldhammer, for being radical and taking chances to see these transformations in people that really have nowhere else to go. And for doing it for 38 years now, and now showing up and sharing your message online and putting it out there more. I hope you do more content like this. I think more people need to be willing to try things, even if it's a two day, a three day, or even just 16 hours to see the results they get by trying a little bit and then pushing the boundaries for their own health and happiness. So I acknowledge you for showing up for four decades doing this, for being the example, for leading the way, for getting now research that backs these things so people are more educated and can see case studies and results, peer reviewed results, things like that. So I acknowledge you for constantly showing up and being a healing force for the world.

Thank you.

It's inspiring. My final question is what's your definition of greatness?

Where people are doing what they want to do and in the way they want to do it.

There you go. Appreciate you very much.

Thank you.

If you're looking for more greatness in your life, make sure to check out this video right here. What does snacking do to our body, our brain, our digestion system when we're every couple hours putting something in our mouth? Even if it's a few nuts or a fruit or a protein bar, what is that doing to our brain and our digestive system?

Yeah, and this is the big thing that I've had, and I talk about this in the obesity code is because our body really exists in sort of one of two states. You're either in the fed 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 usually lunch or dinner. There's way more calories in that meal than you can use right at that Point. So you want to store that. So when you don't eat, which is any time 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.

Right?

And that's the reason you don't die in your sleep every single night is because we have the ability to hold some of those calories in storage. So in the fed state, insulin goes up, you're storing calories. or body fat in the fasted state, you're not eating your insulin's dropping and you're using calories. So you're in one or the other. You can't do both at the same time. So if now you say, okay, I'm.

Eating, what 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 is about 14 hours and 45 minutes. That's the average. So if you start eating at 8:00 a.m., you don't stop till 10:45 p.m. That's on average. That's the average.

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

It takes about four hours for you to switch over into the fasted state. last day. So the point is that before where you'd eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and by six o'clock you're done, you know, boom, you're, you know, now you shift into using those calories and your mom would you 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. Same thing, right? 14 hours of eating and no time of not eating. And that's the point. So now if you understand the problem, you can say, well, how am I going to change this? Well, it's simple. Increase the amount of time that you're not eating. And that's all intermittent fasting is. If you eat one meal a day, for example, or if you within an eight-hour window or a four-hour window or whatever, what you're doing is you're simply allowing your body to use the calories that have been stored which is body fat predominantly. But that is precisely the reason you carry body fat. Like that body fat is not there for looks, is there for you to use. And that's the whole point. What's so bad about using it? If you don't eat, you're going to burn it. Well, so again, go back to the seventies 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. Nothing bad happens, right? There was nothing wrong with that. And hopefully you learned your lesson too, right? And that's the whole point, is that there's nothing wrong. It's a natural part of our human physiology. If we couldn't survive without eating, like we would not be here today, because when we were cavemen and cave women.

There was food every day.

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

So if you're, if it's like good Friday or during Lent or during Ramadan for Muslims or, you know, during Yom Kippur for Jews or whatever, everybody's fasting. So it's actually terrifically easy because you're not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there. Whereas nowadays, if you fast, and I've done this, it's just really hard to do. It's not physically. It's not hard, but it's hard. And I do it mostly, you know, when I, when I've gained a bit of weight, usually after the holidays and after a vacation, I will. sort of schedule a longer fast right after because I know that I can lose that weight very quickly, but that means I can enjoy myself. Like a couple years ago, I went on a cruise and really ate too much. Just a lot. I had a lot and I knew it. Then 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. And.

And it gives you a great tool to use if you need it.

Right. Yeah.

It's almost like either every day, don't indulge and balance and create a schedule where you're. only eating in a certain window of time, whether it be four, 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 of 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 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 a 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 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. So if you think about fasting, you could go three days, you could go five days, you could go 30 days. People do that all the time.

But no food.

No food, yeah. So if you look, if you think.

About.

Fasting, so the amount of energy that you need, so a pound of fat has 3,500 calories roughly. If you need about 1,800 calories, so that's for like a regular person, not like an athlete or somebody who's working out a lot. It takes about half a pound of fat per day. So if you're dealing with a lot of obese people like 100 pounds overweight, you could go 200 days. You know, if you want to lose 100 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? And it's like if you save firewood 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. So, 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 flappy 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 as 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 burning those calories?

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

Yeah.

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

Bit less today, it's not going to 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, you're changing the hormonal profile of the body, and as you do that, you're now switching fuel sources. So instead of using food as your fuel, you're switching it into body fat, just like those hybrid cars where you go from gas to electric, right? So it's using food and then boom, it goes, okay, I have no food coming in. I need to switch over now into body fat. And then it goes, whoa, I have like 500,000 calories of body fat here. So why do I need to cut 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 1,500 coming in. You can only burn 1,500. 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 measured 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 going to eat again. You're going to die because every day is going to be harder. You're going to circle the drain. So our body is 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 gonna 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 the content, the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say, well, I, I have to eat because I have to concentrate. It's like your concentration is actually much higher. when you don't eat. Think about when you had a huge Thanksgiving meal. Well, were you really sharp or did you really want to just lie down on the sofa and watch some football? You don't have any sort of focus. But if you think about animals, it's the same thing. Lions, they just eat, they just lounge around. But if you're the hungry wolf.

That.

Is a very dangerous animal because he's focused, ready to kill you. Same thing for us. Our level of concentration, our mental ability, mental agility goes up significantly when we're hungry. Like if you think, oh, you're hungry for this, hungry for that, that doesn't mean you're falling down lethargic. It means you're focused. So it's interesting because there is this book a few years ago called Unbroken, which is a biography of this fellow who got, who went to a prisoner of war camp in World War II Japan. and he was talking about starvation and he, they were literally starving like there's, they'd eat like almost nothing for the full day. And he's talking about how his, his, his, other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats. So one guy was reading a book entirely from memory. Another guy learned all of Norwegian in a week. And he, so the guy says, this is simply the mental clarity of starvation. So, it was incredible. It was so widespread, everybody was starving, and they'd see these incredible feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time because your mental ability is ramped up to such a high degree. And then, you know, in the ancient Greece, the ancient mathematician Pythagoras, he would require his students to fast.

I usually get about 40 to 60 grams of soluble fiber a day, which is way more than most people. And it's going to make sure that everything goes out pretty much no matter what you eat the way you want it to. But most importantly, it suppresses hunger and it gives you good gut bacteria.