FASTING

Welcome to Medicine Health, the Why Can't I Get Better series, what to do about it. So therapies, uh, this one we're going to talk briefly about fasting or time-restricted eating, etc. So this won't be a big long discussion, but we'll just get right into it. And we're doing a mixture of therapies. Some are, you know, very physician-dependent and tech technique-dependent and all that, and some are things that are a little more you can do at home. First thing with fasting is never enter any sort of fasting protocol without talking to one of your healthcare providers, preferably one that's aware of fasting and how to do it safely, et cetera. So never take medical advice from people on TV or YouTube or whatever. That doesn't end well usually. But fasting in general can be a part if it's monitored correctly and prescribed correctly. of healing, especially in chronic illnesses and other issues that go on. So the first thing that happens is the longer you go without eating, the more your body switches over from the type of biochemistry that is involved in your body, you know, metabolizing food and using energy and all of these things. And so at a certain point, somewhere between 12 and 13 hours of not eating, you could drink water, but of not eating, your body starts to turn on this process called autophagy, or autophagy depending on where you're from, and a number of other actual chemical processes. And those are there to help your cells, you can think of it like clean house. So when the food hasn't been going in for a while, the cells then get the signals, okay, we're not going to be taking in nutrients at this time and metabolizing. What we should do is get rid of any junk that's around. And so the body and the cells under a fasted state will start to then dump out material that have been building up, et cetera. And so the thing to keep in mind about this is that this then leads us to a number of different types of what you could call time-restricted eating or fasting that can be useful. Now, we have in other settings talked about the use of intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating in our cancer patients and some of our chronic illness patients. The idea there is that the research kind of shows when you get to about 13 hours, your body starts to kind of clean up and the chemistry changes and it can be very useful. Sometimes in cancer, we'll have fasting protocols around people's chemotherapy and that has become much more popular now. And it can actually synergize chemotherapy, it can synergize other treatments as well. So you can do a time-restricted eating of, say, 13 hours where it really starts to kick in. Some people do 16 or 18. Then there's other types of fasting where people will sometimes fast 1 day a week, you know, 1 24-hour period a week. Sometimes people will every quarter maybe do a 2 or a 3-day fast. And then I've seen people do 7-day water fasts and There's a lot of different types of health benefits that can come from fasting. Now, like I said, if you have anything going on in your body where it's very hard to control your blood sugar or there's other issues that go on, it's a case where you really need to work with a provider who knows what they're doing with either time-restricted eating or fasting so you do it safely. But the idea is if you, if you do say water-based fasting, and so you're drinking water, and whether it's a 13 to 16 hour restricted eating or a 1 day or 2 day or 3 day or a 7 day fasting period, you will turn on— the longer that you're away from food and just hydrating, you will turn on these restorative processes. And it can be very helpful for your body to kind of press the reset button. The other thing, and we talked about this on some of the cancer programs, is there's some human research now that shows that even without changing their diet, women who were breast cancer survivors had a 1/3 increase in life extension by simply doing a 13-hour fast every day. drinking water during that time, of course, and they didn't even change their diet. So what we always look at is, well, imagine if you also cleaned your diet up at the same time. Now, most of the side effects from fasting, unless you say are an insulin-dependent diabetic or you have other, you know, blood sugar control issues, most of the benefits from fasting actually occur, like I said, about 13+ hours, maybe 12, but probably 13+ hours. And most of the side effects of fasting, such as stomach issues, rumbling stomach, pain, gnawing away feeling, all of that stuff, dizziness, headaches, all that, most of those can be cured if you just drink more water during the time when you are away from the food. Now, certainly, if you're going to do a longer fast, so it's not just going to be a, you know, overnight 12 13-hour fast. The first time you do it, you know, you should be a little more closely connected to a healthcare provider who does fasting work, and so that they know, you know, what's going on with you. They can monitor you, make sure you're drinking enough water and all that stuff. And I would say certainly if you're going to do a 3-day or a 4-day or a 7-day fast or something like that, someone needs to know that you're doing that. Now obviously fasting goes back to the dawn of time. In prior, you know, really prior to about 75 years ago, it was not uncommon because of food availability and unavailability for people to occasionally fast because there was no food around. It was also not that uncommon for people not only to eat seasonally or eat what they could find, but also to have time periods where they just were not eating. And many Even of the, you know, a lot of the world's base or core religions have some sort of fasting involved in certain of their observances that they do. So fasting is certainly nothing new. And yes, it can be done safely. And yes, it's— the more you do it, the more you get used to it. And yes, you do need to, you know, have somebody you're bouncing this off of. from a healthcare perspective. Because the other thing is, let's say you're on medications or something of that nature and you're going to be doing fasting, you need to know that they're going to be compatible with you not eating. That's another, you know, kind of important thing around fasting. But because of these kind of clean out and clean up the body, clean up the cell processes that get turned on with time restriction of eating or fasting, I have seen people clinically gain a lot from the fasting process. And I've seen it be very useful, very helpful to them. And whether it was cancer patients, which is one whole group of people that we do this with, or people trying to change their metabolism, they're going to change their diet and they want to do an initial fast to kind of turn the ship a little more quickly, or people just doing some time-restricted eating every day to help out with their— body restoration, etc., or whatever other reason, the processes that go about cleaning up your cells due to fasting are best to be turned on more frequently. And one of the problems that we have in modern life is that unlike, you know, 75, 100, or more years ago, we have so much more availability of food and we have so much more availability of high-calorie food that may not be that great for us that fasting actually is harder for us to pull off because there's food around all the time. But the problem is if you're feeding your body constantly, you can't ever go into this restorative phase and do it long enough to help to clean the cells up. So that's getting us right about to the end here today of the show. I would like to thank everybody who's, you know, joined on the different Podburners or watches us regularly at CTR Radio or on Facebook Live. And especially thanks you guys joining joining as subscribers over at YouTube. So remember, please like, subscribe, share, and if you do the notifications, it's really nice because the algorithm doesn't always pick up when new stuff comes out, depending on what the algorithm is thinking at that particular day. So I really do appreciate everybody's support. It's your questions and your comments and things that, you know, people send in afterwards that really gives us new things to talk about and also gives us topics that I can see are on your mind. So these were all some of those for today. But thank you for listening. This is Dr. Paul Anderson, Medicine Health, and it's been my pleasure speaking to you. I'll see you all on the radio or some other version of the internet sometime next week.