The Healing Power of Water Only FASTING w/Dr. Alan Goldhamer (PART 1) EP 1124

This is episode number 1124 with Dr. Alan Goldhammer. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Winston Churchill said, healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have. And Tricia Cunningham said the individual who says it is not possible should move out of the way of those doing it. Today my guest is Dr. Alan Goldhammer who is one of the world's leading experts on medically supervised water only fasting. And in 1984 he founded and became Director of True North Health center in Santa Rosa, California. It is the largest facility in the world specializing in medically supervised water only fasting and one of the premier training facilities for doctors to gain certification in the supervision of therapeutic fasting. And Dr. Goldhamer is the author of the Healthy Promoting Cookbook and co author of the Pleasure Trap Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health and Happiness. And our conversation was so fascinating for me because I am diving deep in optimizing my health and understanding the science of all these things, from the diets to the water fasting to just fasting in general that we broke this up into two different episodes. And in this first episode we discussed the biggest benefits to water only fasting. And some of the stuff that he shares with me is blowing me away. The best way to fast from the comfort of your own home. How one of Goldhamer's patients was able to overcome cancer through fasting and a diet change. It's crazy. The stories he shares, what the Pleasure Trap is and how to avoid it, and so much more. If you're enjoying this, make sure to share this with a friend that you think would be inspired as well. You can just copy and paste the link wherever you're listening or use the show notes@lewishouse.com 11:24 okay, in just a moment, the one and only Dr. Alan Goldhammer.

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Welcome back everyone at school Greetings podcast. Very excited about our guest. Dr. Alan Goldhammer in the house. Good to see you sir.

Nice to be here.

Very excited about this. 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 three and a half days. I'm doing a lot of 24 hour fasting and it's been amazing to see the results I'm gaining 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. The rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, ankylosing spondylitis, the psoriasis, the eczema, these conditions where it's your own body that's kind of working against you. And also certain types of cancer like lymphoma and these conditions that are so common now are really thought to be unmanageable because I mean, if you go to a physician with high blood pressure, they're going to give you a medication. It might be a Diuretic or beta blocker or whatever, a combination of medications. And they're going to tell you right from the beginning. If you do what I tell you, you'll never get well.

Really?

You'll be on these meds for the rest of your life? Absolutely. They'll tell 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 slee, 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. And those primary dominant behaviors are feeding behavior and sexual behavior. Because it's food and sex that are necessary for the species to survive, to get enough to eat, to not get eaten, live long enough to reproduce. And that dopamine driven short term response worked great through most of human history. But more recently it's become a bit of a trap. And it's become a bit of a trap because we've changed our environment from an environment of scarcity where it was really hard to get enough to eat.

People'S food 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 loved life. But how can we be happy, healthy, fulfilled, and then have a quick, quicker death?

Right.

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

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

So what are these crazy benefits of water only fasting then? What are the main things you've seen people transform of these 20,000 plus cases?

Well, one of the biggest things 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 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 high chronic cough, fatigue, impotence and premature death. And yet they're routinely used because it's not recognized that blood pressure is a reversible and containable process. Really fasting is an effective and efficient way of reversing and normalizing blood pressure. Now the problem is you can't fast forever. You have to feed. So you also have to learn to eat a health promoting diet in order to sustain those results. But in terms of eliminating the risk factors, eliminating the need for medication, normalizing blood pressure. You can do that very predictably with medically supervised water only fasting.

What does it mean, medically supervised when you're just drinking water? I mean, why do you need someone there to watch you? Is it like testing with your blood sample? Is it just making sure you're not fatigued?

In starvation mode, we recognize that fasting can be done safely and should be done safely every day by every patient for 12 to 16 hours, depending on their goals. If they're trying to lose weight or gain weight, it may depend on the duration. But we Recommend A period, 16 hours a day of fasting, 8 hours a day of feeding. And by limiting the feeding window, as people like Valter Longo and others just 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 extra 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 who have risk factors, may be better off with a different approach than long term water only fasting. So first thing is a history and an examination to make sure there isn't any primary issues with kidney or cardiac function or medications that would contraindicate fasting.

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

So the kidneys and liver are main detoxifying organs in the body and particularly the kidneys. If kidney function isn't at least at some minimal level. In our clinic we use creatinine levels of 2.0 as an arbitrary marker. If kidney function isn't adequate, then the rapid detoxification that occurs during fasting, where the body mobilizes and eliminates both endogenous and exogenous toxins into the bloodstream and then are processed by the kidneys. If the kidneys function is inadequate, 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 fast ones. We're going to 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, you know, get rid of all the complications and shed the weight and all those things?

There was a lot of work done in the 70s and 80s in treating pre obesity with long term fasting. But even a thin male, say a 70 kilogram male, could probably fast somewhere around up to 70 days. If they're resting during the process. Not that they should necessarily do that, could survive. But as far as nutrient reserves and adequacy, the body is pretty amazing. You know, the main burner of glucose for humans is our brain is what, just thinking or what like cognitive activities, the brain. We have this ridiculously large brain in humans, two and a half times that, say of a chimp. It's huge. And it's our main burner of glucose. And 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 to spread 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. Okay.

Really?

Yeah, they just hold it on the outside of their lean me machines like all animals do, unless they get access to hyper processed 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, 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. 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. 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 2/3 of people are overweight, is because they fooled their brain with chemicals they put in their feed. It works in rats, it works in mice, it works in humans. Put the chemicals in their feed, they overeat, they get fat, then they develop obesity and metabolic syndrome. And if you have metabolic syndrome, you're more vulnerable to dying from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and even viral infectious diseases like Covid. The higher your metabolic syndrome increases risk of dying from all these things, all these downstream consequences.

What about olive oil or avocado oil? I hear that these good oils, these fatty oils, are supposed to help you in certain ways.

Is that, well, you have to be careful when we define these good oils. There are oils that are more harmful than say, olive oil. So an oil being less harmful doesn't necessarily mean it's good, it's just less bad. So oils are all highly processed, fractionated foods with 9 calories per gram and limited satiety feedback. So if we're talking about trying to lose or maintain optimum weight, oils would have a disadvantage compared to eating your fat from whole food. So I would advocate if 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's true with sugar. You need carbohydrates as a primary fuel. But you eat whole food, whether it's fruits or vegetables or starches, not necessarily the highly processed, hyper processed byproducts. If your goal is to avoid overeating, dietary excess, obesity and the diseases of dietary excess. Right.

What are the three main benefits that you see with pretty much everyone that goes through water Only fasting? Three biggest things that you see, whether it be seven or 70 days, well, you know, they look younger. Is it the clearer skin? Is it they're burning fat, is it that 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 dumps. 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. 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 its adipose tissue, some of its visceral fat.

The visceral is what you want to burn, right?

Well, visceral fat is the one that's most associated with pathology, in fact, probably shouldn't be very much visceral fat. Visceral fat is what happens when the body has no place else to put fuel. And so you'll store some additional visceral fat. And the higher the visceral fat generally the worse you are, simplistically speaking. And so we just did a study where we took a DEXA scanner that has software that allows 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 in the belly and around the organs, that internal fat.

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

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

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

Fat, right?

That's correct. The question is, what can you do to get rid of it? Any type of dieting will cause various types of body changes. But the approach that's shown the most effective at mobilizing visceral fat is actually fasting. Fasting is the highest ratio of visceral fat to adipose tissue mobilization. For example, 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 fiberglycogen, some of it's adipose tissue, some of it is visceral fat. Then what happens after fasting? So you lose 10 pounds, you might regain 5 pounds. You're going to gain about 2 pounds of glycogen because you have sugar stores in your muscles that'll be depleted within a couple days of fasting. You're going to rehydrate because there's a little physiological dehydration during fasting. You're going to put fiber back into your gut because your gut's not going to have had fiber being added to it. You're going to pump up your muscle cells again because you will have depleted a little bit of glucose in order to maintain the glucose, the core glues 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.

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

So the scale will go up some, but the fat will not go up.

That's correct.

So you gotta trick your mind and say, well, I'm not gaining all this weight. Like you're gaining the necessary weight that your body needs to be stronger so you can have an active lifestyle. And all these Things, but not the fat back.

Keep in mind it's not weight per se, that's the threat, it's excess fat. So, for example, if you work out, you might gain 10 or 20 pounds of lean tissue over time. That's not necessarily compromising your health just because you gained weight. Now if you sit around on the couch and eat greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying flesh and highly processed foods and put on a lot of fat, particularly visceral fat, gain that same £20, 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.

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 an opportunity to do it for a lot of years.

Sixteen?

Yes.

That's inspiring.

Yeah, well, it was out of desperation, really. I wanted to beat my best friend Doug Lyle in basketball, and I couldn't beat him. And I practiced and I really worked at it. But I thought if I got, 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. He still just destroys me every time we play.

Really.

I'm hoping though that maybe he'll age out a little quicker once we get into our 80s. Maybe we'll finally be.

You guys are still friends?

Oh, yeah, we still play. Yeah. And he's. Yeah, 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, you know, free throws are just practice.

Yeah.

So I got some coaching and I thought I'm just gonna. And I'm shooting 500 free throws a day. I'm working really hard, and I. And of course, you know, he's only playing once in a while. And so one day I say, hey, Doug, let's do a free throw shooting contest.

Okay?

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. Because, you know, 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.

He's. He's. That's. This is the person I've been trying to compete against.

Yeah. Mutant.

I love it.

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C site for details well, so you're saying 16 hours a day everyone should do water only. Now you're going to say something very controversial here. What about those that love their coffee and water? If I'm going to go a three day water only fast, can I add black coffee? Bulletproof coffee? 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, 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. 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. Interesting. So now the fact is it is a plant based product, so there are still some redeeming properties and it's not completely devoid of any nutrition. But I think that the negatives outweigh the positives from my viewpoint for using that type of product as a component.

And have people in your clinic said, okay, I'm going to do seven days water, but I'm gonna 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 side, they're using distilled water and a controlled side.

And that's it?

Yeah, that's it.

Just pure water, distilled water, 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.

So there's nothing added to the water.

Nothing added to the water for 5 to 40 days duration of the fast? Yes, we've been able. 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 it turns out that yes, in fact fasting, when it's supervised in a controlled setting can be done safely and effectively, even for periods up to 40 days. Wow.

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

24 hours, 16 hours every day?

Yep.

And eight hours of feeding. And then once a year we'll fast a week or two, depending on, you know, really 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. 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. Really, I think that the people that may get ultimately the most benefit from fasting are healthy people that use it preventatively, that want to stay healthy. The difference is that in a person that lives a healthy lifestyle, fasting is much less entertaining, it's a much less dynamic process. People don't have a lot of the symptoms that people that are sick getting well have.

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

Well, we recommend that people limit their routine fasting to 16 hours because the 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 go to bed on time.

Really radical things 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 the minimal eczema afterwards or autoimmune disease? Do you see it drastically changing? Is it small changes that it's going to take multiple times over a year or years? What do you typically see when you.

See someone coming in? Well, it varies, you know, from patient to patient. For example, we recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal of a case of a young woman who came in with follicular lymphoma state free, which is a type of lymph, large palpable tumors involving her upper and lower internally external, you can even feel them externally. They were large enough. Those are in the lymph gland. So when they're very large you can feel them. You can also see them on CAT scan. She had excisional biopsy, it was well documented. So we ended up fasting her for 21 days and by three weeks of fasting you couldn't feel the tumor.

Come on.

10 days 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 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. 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 t different type of cancer may respond completely differently.

Brain cancer, things like that.

Yeah, especially brain cancer. It'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 way. In answer 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 clinically 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 with long term water fasting.

How much does the belief in your mindset that this fast will heal or help prevent or help, you know, 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 how to 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 on a plane in New York and they go all the way to California, they will die from starvation over Colorado. They think those pretzels saved their lives.

They don't know 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 you know, we're really trying to maintain those safety records. So we try really hard only to work with people that we expect to have an acceptable outcome.

So if someone's not coming to your clinic and they want to try this on their own.

Yes.

What would you say is a good window of time to try on your own at home, without medical, you know, 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, 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 will 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 could 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.

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 years.

You don't want to keep taking medicine and not food.

No, because the medications that may be okay in a feeding state may be very much more of a problem after you get into the fasting state. So our recommendation is fast every day for 16 hours, eat clean in those eight hours, and then if it's appropriate, 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 onto 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 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, you know, 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, right, for three days doing it.

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. Yes, 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?

I think that you should do 16 hours every day.

I'm doing that already.

Eat a whole plant food, SOS3 diet and the other 8 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 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 program. We have people go through three classes a day. We really.

I'm in a dorm, I'm in a hotel, and I'm in a process.

You have a private room, but there's a community in the controlled setting where you have to get, you know, 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. 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 a day.

40 ounces of water?

Yeah. Minimum.

What is that?

40 ounces is about? Well, it depends on the size of your glass. But talco acids, 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. You're not a bloated. The problem is if you drink excess, you can flush your electrolytes. So 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. 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?

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 also, I guess there's no stool after. Well, you're not going to be passing stool once you stop eating after two days, I guess. Right. Once you empty the bowels. Because you're not putting. Because when think about what is stool. It's undigested fiber circle Inogen, some stuff from the liver, mostly bacteria. So there's going to be a massive change in bacteria the during, during fasting. In fact, that's one of the big benefits of fasting is you know, you have five pounds of bacteria in your gut right now.

Five pounds of waste.

A trillion creatures. Now 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 temperature TMA than people that eat a lot of plant based meat is 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 going to get, you know, 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 till 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, naturopathy, acupuncture. There's a lot of people have problems that aren't all in the nutrition based. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes they have more mechanical problems. So we would approach it from a similar philosophy, but not necessarily only fasting.

Right.

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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. 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 one diabetic or a type one 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 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. So, 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 feel fat, sick and miserable. It's salt, oil and sugar additions to the food. That is why people are being fooled. Fooling their satiety 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 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.

No, five medications capped out with a systolic blood pressure is as much as 220 and diastolics as much as 120. So we see some very severe hypertensive patients. But in the study we did, of 174 patients, 174 patients had pressure low enough to eliminate the need for all medication. Really the average effect of stage three hypertensive. 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. They're. None of them are on medications. If they fasted, by definition, we've eliminated.

All medication because they're not.

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 interesting, 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, stressed and overwhelmed, exercising.

Stress management also can be in 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 modification.

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 and won't be able to lower their pressure enough to sustain it without medication.

So of these, this test you did of, I think you said 170, 174, they all had medication coming in, is that right?

Not all of them were medicated. Mostly all 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 stopped afterwards, all of our patients stopped because they can't fast. If we don't get them off the 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. We're going to 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 five to 40 days. But the typical hypertensive patient is going to fast somewhere between two and three weeks. Now, during that time, they're going to lose £25. They're going to, 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, you have to rest, although it's getting a little bit better. You know, one big thing that's happened recently is this idea that it's okay for people to, you know, like, 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, recover. So we couldn't fast them because we need about half the length of fast recovery. Well, now what happens? They come in and fast, but while they're recovering, they can work because we've got like 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 guys think he does much of anything.

You can get in the zone so much better. I've seen it. And 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 has been a lot easier now to get people to stay appropriately for recovery because they're not necessarily have to. Not.

Yeah.

And, you know, that's.

Are they allowed to work while they're.

Fasting there, it depends on how long a 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 main burner of glucose. You're burning more calories. 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, 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 the fasting process, there's around 5 or 600 calories of kind of core glucose that's used by the muscles in the brain.

Sugar that's being burned, 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 muscles burn more fuel. And the only way it can get extra glucose during fasting because your glycogen is already burned up, is breaking down protein. And that's the process of muscle genesis. Exactly.

You don't want to do that.

No, you prefer to keep your protein.

Because then you got to 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 creation mode.

Fasting and resting is the key. So resting looks like.

What is that on the couch? Watching some movies and just chilling. Reading a book or is reading a book too much activity for the brain? What does that look like?

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, they may not want to be doing heavy concentration that comes with reading, but absorb it a little bit better passively. A little bit of sun, a little bit of gentle stretching, a little bit of meditation, hopefully pleasant company with other people that are not energy vampires.

So some good conversations are fine. That's not absolutely, 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 could 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, it's a free Roku channel. We have a bunch of content on there that we keep adding 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. If I added physical activity, if I trained and did a 24 to 36.

Hour fasting, that wouldn't be what we recommend. What we'd recommend first, make sure that you're a good candidate. 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 Valter Longo's approach fasting 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. So 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. 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 could be dangerous, but does make a caveat for people fasting at the Truman of 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 and then too rapidly refeed, a refeeding syndrome that can occur that can also make you very sick or could kill you. So, you know, when fasting is done according to these protocols, it's safe and effective. When it's done excessively, like anything could be a very dangerous process. And particularly for people that are not healthy, that are on medications, you know, that could become, you know, a significant problem. Not just the fasting, but the complication of manipulating their medications.

And so if I'm, 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, celery, apple juice, watermelon, celery. The first day, 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. And then there would be a day of raw fruit and vegetables. So they'd do some fruit and salad materials. Again, very low caloric density, get a little bit of fiber introduced. Then we would introduce more concentrated foods, perhaps like steamed vegetables, but very low, softer. Yeah. So yours. Broccoli and cauliflower and string beans and 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, kombucha, 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 all salty. They can get post fasting edema where their legs swell up and really.

Oh yeah, the legs swells up.

Oh, you can get like especially longer term fasting, not so much a day as they do longer term fasting 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 well intentioned, misguided things. They read something on the Internet and they're doing it. And I saw there was this thing where you can do your own home app and appendectomy and you know 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.

They've got half the length of the fast refeed. 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 that. This, if you do a 40 day fast, okay, it's a 20 day recovery period. And if you take a 40 day fast and put them on greasy, fatty, slimy process 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 refeeding, that's the most significant. Now, people will only do that once again, no, because they'll learn from the hard way. So we don't want to do that.

This stuff's fascinating to me.

What all this talk about fasting has made me thirsty.

I know I got to 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 a day, every day. That's it?

No. 24? No.

Well, then they should talk to the doc, make sure they're candidates for a 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 children with 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 other people about it, but then they run into a complication. It's like anything. You've got to use a little bit of common sense, for sure. 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, you know, I see the other side where, you know, the complications. And so I tend to be a little bit maybe paranoid about the complexity, but, you know, what's the longest fast.

You'Ve put someone on?

Longest fast at the True north health 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, 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, a hundred pounds obese or.

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 him. 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 careful monitored. And so he would, he would just have anxiety over everyday stressful. 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 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.

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Conditions apply and what so the people that come in with medications, how many usually do they have again when they.

Come in a 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 their medications.

The only exceptions are we will continue to fast some patients on true hormone replacement therapy, like thyroid replacement therapy therapy. Sometimes what we'll do is we may have to reduce their dosing 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 arrhythmic medication, anticoagulant medications, even meds you might people might use normally acetaminophen or ibuprofen, things that they might be able to take in a feeding state in a fasting state could be very serious in terms of kidney response. So drugs can be 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. To exception would be I had some dental work done and they used no gain. So I have had that. But I've been very fortunate to avoid medications and 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 it's. I've never really used medication. Maybe I've had an ibuprofen every one. I mean, in football, maybe I use the ibuprofen every now and then, but luckily I've never really had that. I've never been drunk, never been high. And I feel, 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 great. Mostly they're not used for urgent situations. They're used to placate the symptoms of things rather than deal with 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 2000 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 then some 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 dietary factors play in. They give us the most pleasure for the least effort and you know, as simply as quickly as possible because we don't want to put out extra energy. And particularly if you're sleep drinking all that coffee and not getting the quantity of you need. Absolutely.

And you're never eating the right foods. 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 calories on board, but your brain thinks you're starving. And your brain's saying give me more, give me more. Exactly. I'm waste their time with some of that. Sal, 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 drank coffee or caffeine?

Not so far.

Really?

No teas? No caffeinated teaspoon?

Not. 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, so peppermint non caffeinated tea. 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 drink the tea.

If you're talking about something with caffeine, then I wouldn't be using that.

How has living a caffeine? 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 12.

You're 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, you say with every spike there's a decline. What did you say?

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 balancing itself out, really. So if you stimulate, there'll be some compensation later on.

And what happens when you just take.

More caffeine and you keep puncturing 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 that 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 at half Life.

So it's still having an effect. The point I'm making, even if you drink coffee in the morning, it's 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, tried to go to sleep.

So a cappuccino right before bed is.

Not 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. There's 2,000 chemicals in coffee. It's not just caffeine. 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?

I hope you enjoyed this first part and if you want to learn about the answer to what you should be never eating again after you come off a fast, then make sure you check out part two coming very soon. Soon. And I can't wait for you to check out this episode because everything he shares in episode two just continued to blow me away. If you enjoyed first part, make sure to share this with a friend. You can copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to this podcast or use the show notes Lewishouse.com 1124 and share it with a friend. I'm telling you, this is something that I'm fascinated by is understanding how we can optimize the brain, the body, heal the past. And a lot of the science and the research behind fasting has helped people heal their bodies, which helps clear up their mind and optimize their life. So again, stuff I'm curious about, stuff I want to explore and test out. And part two you are going to love. If this is your first time here, please click the subscribe button over on Apple Podcast or Spotify right now so you can stay up to date on the latest and greatest from the School of Greatness podcast. We'd love your thoughts and your reviews. Please leave a rating and review over on Apple Podcast Podcast as well as the more people that leave ratings and reviews. It helps us spread the message of greatness to more people. So please subscribe right now on Apple Podcast and leave a rating and a review and stay tuned for part two coming up next. And I want to leave you with this quote from Deepak Chopra who said if we are creating ourselves all the time, then it is never too late to begin creating the bodies we want instead of the ones we mistakenly assume we are stuck with. My friend, it is never too late to start making incredible changes in your health and in your life. You can start right now and I hope this resource has been a powerful one for you to start testing and exploring and learning more about optimizing your health. And if no one has told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.

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