In this 12‑minute monologue, Nick Howarth of Best Body Health Coach explains why fasting—when the body is already fat‑adapted—offers a cascade of physiological benefits that differ from simple starvation. He walks the viewer through the body’s response at key time‑points: after 12 hours (a surge in human growth hormone, increased fat burning and the start of autophagy), after 18‑24 hours (full‑speed autophagy, reduced hunger, higher antioxidant capacity, improved endurance and mental clarity), after 48 hours (stem‑cell activation, lowered inflammation, reduced cancer‑cell viability, new mitochondria formation), and after 72 hours (enhanced stem‑cell homing, gut‑driven immune boost). Throughout he shares personal endurance‑sport anecdotes to illustrate performance gains, stresses the importance of proper re‑feeding, and offers coaching support for prolonged fasts. The overall message is that, when done correctly, fasting can rejuvenate joints, muscles, brain, cardiovascular function, and overall metabolic health.
Chapters
Hi, it's Nick here from Best Body Health Coach. So in this video, I want to quickly talk to you about the benefits of fasting. So, and the difference between fasting and starving is fasting is when you're already fat adapted and your body knows how to tap into those fat stores and use those, but you're not digesting food and your digestive tract is not under any pressure. Where starving is when you've been eating carbohydrates and sugar, and then you just stop eating, and that's quite uncomfortable. So this is about fasting, which you do on our program if you feel you're up to it. It's not compulsory for everybody to do. Okay, cool. So what happens in the first 12 hours? So you haven't eaten for 12 hours, let's say you eat at 6 o'clock at night, and then by 6 o'clock the next morning, This is what starts happening to your body. You find a spike in human growth hormone in your body. That's involved with anti-aging. That sounds good. Fat burning. So that's why when you're young, you can eat pizzas and hot dogs and burgers and all these things, and you don't put on any weight, and you stay as lean as And your six-pack, and then when you start reaching around about the age of 27, 28, 29, 30, that six-pack starts to drift away into the background because your body produces less human growth hormone as you get older. So that's how you actually stimulate the growth, the production of human growth hormone. That's involved in that factor. And as I was saying, it heals the joints, so your joints start to feel younger. So everything starts to feel younger. In the body, and protein synthesis. So your your protein starts to be used for what it's supposed to be used for, and it also takes it's this this process over here, autophagy starts taking place where it takes old proteins and changes them back into new usable proteins. So all the old broken proteins. Right, eighteen hours. So let's say you ate at six o'clock last night, and it is twelve p.m. The next day, what starts happening then? So you've got autophagy, which is in full swing, where your body's now taking proteins that are all broken down in the body, being used for all sorts of things, possibly exercise, just generally living life, and you've got all this broken protein floating around in the body, in the muscles. Take that and it starts to convert it into healthy, usable protein. That sounds pretty good. So that's what it is, it recycles old damaged proteins and microbes. It turns damaged proteins into new amino acids and renews tissue, so your body starts to restore itself. So if you've been feeling old and inflamed and aches and pains and all these kinds of things, you might want to have a look at fasting. Okay, 24 hours, so, you know, it could be called a 24-hour fast or a one meal a day. So it's the same kind of thing, really. So your hunger decreases and your cravings decrease. Now that's the opposite of what you would think. You think you'd get through 24 hours and you'd be ravenous, but in actual fact what happens is you start to feel like you could go another day, and a lot of our clients do that. So they go 24 hours and they go, I want to go another 24 hours because I feel great, and it really does, it makes you feel great. It increases Antioxidant reserves and oxygen. So antioxidants handle all the free radicals which destroy the cells in your body, so it starts to handle all that kind of damage in the body. You find that you're burning fuel more efficiently, your fat is being burned more efficiently, and you become like a well-oiled, well-timed, well-tuned machine. And it really does feel that way. I mean, me as a sportsman, you know, I can feel it. I probably feel it more than the average person because I do a lot of endurance-type exercises, like cycling basically. And I feel that when I eat before I ride, I feel sluggish. When I don't eat, even if I feel like I'm hungry before I go and ride, say I haven't eaten since 6 o'clock the evening before, and And it's now 12 PM the next day or 3 PM the next day and I'm feeling like, hmm, I'm a bit hungry. I go ride my bike, the hunger goes away firstly. Secondly, I ride like a human demon. It's really incredible. However, if I feel, oh, let me just have a meal before I go, then I go and ride and my legs just feel a little bit heavier and a little bit more sluggish. Quite interesting. So decreased inflammation, now that's nice. So you basically, your aches and pains start going away. If you've got old injuries that are always bothering you, the pain in those injuries starts to decrease, your muscles start to feel better, your bones, your joints, everything starts to feel better, your headaches start to go away at that point. Your gut, now that your gut is starting to go into a kind of hibernation, it gets time to heal itself and to repair and restore all the broken down elements in your digestive tract. Because it's not got this constant barrage of food that it's having to handle. And you can imagine over years and years and years, it gets used up and it starts to get damaged. So it starts to give it time to heal. Improved cardiovascular function. Now, that's another thing that I feel. That's probably why I feel like I ride a whole lot better when I don't eat before I ride, when I'll be fasting. And I ride fasted 99% of the time. Probably 150 miles on my bike without eating a single thing, without eating breakfast, without eating anything along the ride. So that's quite an interesting concept. So improved cardiovascular function, so the use of oxygen, the strength of your heart, it's all running on ketones. Heart, kidneys, the brain love ketones. Improved cognitive function, as I was saying, the brain loves ketones. So you start to feel that real clarity, all the kind of residues of brain fog go away, and you can think a lot clearer, and you become probably higher IQ at that point. Alright, 48 hours of fasting. So this is where it starts to get really interesting. So you stimulate stem cells, so stem cell growth. So stem cells go to that part of your body that needs help, like let's say you have a knee injury. If you can produce stem cells in your body, those stem cells will gravitate towards the injured area and start to repair it. So that's what happens with 48 hours of fasting, you start to stimulate stem cell growth. Decreased risk of cancer and tumors. The reason for that is because you're not feeding your body anything. Cancer lives off sugar, Glutamate. Glutamate is found in just about every single food that there is, so you can be eating as healthy as you possibly can, if you're eating, you're getting glutamate in your body and cancer can feed off that. It doesn't feed off oxygen, it feeds off sugar and glutamate. So if you stop eating, it has nothing to feed off, and then what starts to happen is the cells, the healthy cells, feel that they want to start feeding off something, And they start attacking those cancer cells. And at that point, it's quite an interesting thing where the cancer cells, because they're actually, they're actually like really, if you think about toxic people in the environment, as soon as you go at them, they start to wither away and they're actually cowards. And that's what cancer is like. So it starts to, in actual fact, the cells start to commit suicide. They start to eat themselves and kill themselves off. Alright, you make more mitochondria. Mitochondria is These basically what the the building blocks of the body, and your energy comes from. Your energy is produced in the mitochondria. You really need to keep these things healthy because cancer starts inside the mitochondria. So here you're making more fresh, new, young mitochondria, which like I say is the major energy production factory in the body. Seventy-two hours. So we're only— we're going to 72 hours, but you can say 72 hours or more, because you can continue on. You know, I've had people do 14 and 21-day fasts on my program, done very, very well. So let's go to 72 hours and then we'll stop it there before I frighten anybody off. So, uh, more stimulation of stem cells, you get even more stem cells and they become, uh, more sensitive. So they really, really start homing in on those areas that need fixing, and your immune system starts to function better, purely because your immune system comes from your gut. And as soon as your gut starts getting healthy, and it's getting healthy now because it's repairing, obviously your immune system gets better. Then there's a whole technology to feeding with your first meal after doing a prolonged fast like that, or even that for that matter. But if you decide to do this along the way, one of our coaches would coach you through that process, like right from the beginning, right to the end when you start to eat again, because there is a technology to fasting. So don't just think, I'm going to stop eating now and that's going to be great, because you need to make sure that you do it properly, and that's what we're here for. We'd like to help you do that. So I'm a big advocate of fasting. I hope this helped you, and we'll see you in the next video. Thanks, Nick.
