How To Fast The RIGHT WAY | Dave Asprey

It's the easiest way to lose weight. It's the easiest way to become sensitive to insulin again. It's the easiest way to reduce your risk of diabetes, of Alzheimer's, of cancer, of heart disease. And you can still eat whatever you eat today.

Our special guest today was called as a true lifestyle guru by Men's Health magazine and considered the father of biohacking, not to mention a highly successful entrepreneur. Dave Asprey founded Bulletproof 360 Inc. In 2013, and then later in 2017, founded Bulletproof Nutrition, Inc. As well as becoming one of the nation's top rated podcasters of Bulletproof Radio. Not to mention the author of six truly amazing books, including his newest hit, Fast this Way, Guys. Please help me welcome my good friend, Dave Asprey. Dave, how are you doing, man?

I'm doing really well. I'm on my 12th day of fasting. Okay. Not really.

Well.

Thank God you're going to be teaching us all about that today, because I tell you what, been trying to get the intermittent fasting down for some time myself, and I have these this week on, week off relationship kind of scenario with it, which I guess is better than nothing. But at the same time, I mean, that's why you wrote Fastest Way, because I feel like everybody needs a roadmap.

Well, you said the key words there. Just because you have a roadmap doesn't mean you have to be in the same neighborhood every single day. In fact, the reason you have a roadmap is so you know where you're going and you can move around. So, surprisingly, intermittent fasting for a week and then not intermittent fasting for a week, totally fine. In fact, our bodies work better when we don't do the same fast every single day.

Okay. It's kind of like the scenario with plateauing when you're working out things of that nature.

Exactly. You do the same workout every single time you work out. Basically, your muscles hit a certain size and they're like, I got this. And you go, maybe I'll lift a little bit heavier. But like, yeah, I got this. But when you mix it up and you rotate, or that's what creates change. And so for intermittent fasting, the problem has been, well, it's a great idea, except when I weighed 300 pounds and you told me I should try and skip breakfast. In fact, I remember someone said that and I'm like, are you nuts? And it was. It was. I was angry when they said it because it was so offensive. Don't you know you'll go into starvation mode. If you don't eat six times a day, how does that even make sense? If you don't eat six times, you're going to lose weight. If you eat more like, whatever. But I believe that. And then I also knew that I would become hypoglybitschy.

Love that.

I'm going to act like a jerk if I don't eat. So here I am, this 300 pound computer hacker. I'm going to be in a meeting, like telling people you're yelling at people and not being able to pay attention and going in starvation mode. Why would I ever do that? And this is still what a lot of people feel. And after 10 years of recommending intermittent fasting and the bulletproof diet, people have lost a million pounds doing this. And there's other stuff that's a part of it. Well, I have enough experience and I've interacted with enough people and I've done it myself for longer than that that I thought it was worth writing a book to just say, look, you can skip breakfast without being hungry and weak. There are hacks for that. You get all the metabolic benefits you want, but you just don't even think about food. Or, or you could be like, I'm going to suffer. Or you could do a spiritual fast, which is where you're saying, oh, I'm going to actually fast for a longer period. I'm going to rest, I'm going to relax, I'm going to journal. But the reason you have a hard time with fasting is that you're a busy guy. Like, you've got a show.

So you're supposed to be putting a lot of energy into your life, into the work you're sharing with the world. And you're telling your body, oh, you got nothing coming in right now. And that makes it hard. The body's like, you know what? F you, brother. It's telling you that, like, how dare you? Like, I'm going to distract you, I'm going to make you think about cookies and then you're going to eat the cookies and there, now you didn't fast. Now I get to go do my thing. So it's that balance of how do I do it in alignment with my biology so that you just don't even care about food. And the body doesn't sabotage you because it's actually got what it needs even though you're fasting.

Yeah, man. So we're already, we're already like, I don't know, 60 seconds, in 20 seconds or 180 seconds, and you're already dropping quite a bit. Let me ask you this before we go too much deeper in the book, because it's phenomenal. It's a must read for everybody. There's no doubt about it. What was missing from the conversation in the world of fasting, intermittent fasting, that you said, I've got to write this book. I've got to get this book in the hands of as many people as possible. What was missing?

Well, it's really easy to write a book on fasting. In fact, it's the easiest book you'd ever write. Step one, don't eat for a while. Step two, it's good for you. Here's 25 studies. There you go. And there's actually really good fasting books with that template, I wouldn't have written that book. I already feel like I wrote about intermittent fasting 10 years ago.

So this is one that says, how does someone who is like, I was overweight, or maybe not really overweight, but at least metabolically not that fit, and how do you do it in conjunction with your life? And that's missing. The spiritual side of fasting is missing from the entire conversation. In fact, it's gone. And then the. I didn't want to suffer because I have a kid on each arm and I'm trying to work from home. I'm busy and I didn't sleep well last night. Oh, and maybe I'm on my period. Right. Like, all those things are important variables. There's a whole chapter for women in the book. So what's missing is women are not miniature men, they're actually different. Like, who would have thought?

Yeah, absolutely. Right, right.

And so it's. So there's the chapter. There is. Okay, here's what the studies show works for women, and fasting does work for women, but women are more subject to over fasting. That's missing. So you see people like, oh, I felt so good. I went keto. I started fasting. And then reliab. Four to six weeks later, I can't sleep. And then, oh, my period's all screwed up. And then, oh, my hair is getting thin. But I know I feel good when I do this. Maybe I'm just not keto enough. And maybe I should fast even more. And so we end up doubling down. I call it the fasting track, by the way. Men do the same thing. It just takes us another two to four weeks to hit the wall. So with you, you're like, oh, this week I ate normally, I ate three meals a day because that's what I wanted. And then the next week I did some intermittent fasting that actually might be right for you. But I am going to teach you on this interview and people who read Fastest Way are going to learn. Here's the fasting hacks. So that you can just sail through a fast without even thinking about food once. And using your willpower for your life instead of to not think about food is probably a good investment.

Right? Well, one of the things I love most about the book is you don't just talk when it comes to fasting. It's not just fasting from food. Like you use fasting as a, as a terminology to basically give you road markers or road boundaries for life in general. You know, we're going to get into sleep and spirituality in a little bit for sure. But for those of who don't actually know what fasting is or maybe even have either loosely heard the term intermittent fasting or don't know what it is entirely, what is intermittent fasting or what is fasting in general?

Well, let's start with fasting. We'll go to intermittent fasting. Fasting is simply to go without. That's all it means. So you can fast from junk food, it's called eating healthier. You can fast from carbs, it's called keto. You can fast from alcohol, it's called abstinence. You can fast from ejaculation if you want to go there. And it's called abstinence.

Right?

All of these are forms of fasting. You can fast from social media, it's called deleting. Facebook, like all of these are things that people do, right? And we don't think of it as a fast, but what's happening is our body or our unconscious mind, but oftentimes it's the body itself. It believes you need something to stay alive and it's just wrong.

It's going to take you three months to starve to death. Yet you tell yourself at 10am that if you don't have tacos for lunch, you're starving. Clearly it's not true, but it sure feels true at the time. And so there's work to be done inside our heads around fasting. But fasting is to tell yourself and to show yourself that it is safe to go without. And the side effect of fasting is it makes you stronger. The short term effect of fasting, if you're doing a longer fast or you're fasting at the wrong time or you're in the wrong state for it is fasting will make you weaker in the short term. I have found that you can actually use fasting to make you stronger in the short term and stronger in the long term. And that's why I wrote fast this way, because that's how to do it. Think about the ROI on fasting. Return on investment. I don't mean dollars. You invest energy in everything you do and you get energy back because. And if you have tons, if you have no energy and you have tons of time, you'll sleep. And if you have no energy and tons of money, you'll spend it all, get your energy back. Energy is what matters. Energy makes time, energy makes money. So we invest energy and we get it back. But think about skipping breakfast. I spent less energy and time making breakfast. I spent less money making breakfast. And if I can do it in such a way that I get more energy, that means your investment was negative and you got energy back. Like it's the highest return on investment you could ever get for any activity because you got paid to do it.

You got better interest. Better interest, right?

Well, it's like you didn't have to put money in the bank to get interest, you just got interest without doing anything. It's really cool. And so that's what fasting is, to go without. But intermittent fasting is a practice of going without for at least 12 hours. And it starts at 12 hours. Most people end up getting to 14 or 16 or 18 hours where you don't eat and then you eat a normal amount of food the rest of the day. So a typical schedule is you have dinner a little bit early, which helps your sleep enormously, even just to shift dinner up by an hour. And then you went at least three hours after dinner, let's say four hours before bedtime. So you got four hours of not eating. After dinner you sleep for eight hours. You just fasted for 12 hours because you had breakfast early. Woohoo. You just did an intermittent fast. That was tough, wasn't it?

Nice job, win. All right.

Then you're like, okay, I'm going to go a little harder. I am not going to have breakfast until, oh, I don't know, 10. You just went 14 or 16 hours. And if you wait till noon, you just went 18 hours without food. But what it felt like was, oh yeah, I skipped breakfast. I could do that. Except if you're like I was when I weighed 300 pounds, man, I'd wake up, I'd have this gnawing hunger. I got to eat something, right? I'm not even going to be at peace until I have something in my stomach and then I go to work and someone brought in the donuts and you're looking at that, you're smelling the donuts and the donut screams me. And you go, no, I'm a winner. I'm not going to eat that donut. And then it goes, eat me. And you're no. And then with increasing intensity, eat me, eat me, eat me. Like, no, no. And it's like arguing with a two year old. Eventually the two year old gets the candy most of the time, because they just don't, they never give up. Well, that conversation. It's normal to fail in a fast. If you walk into a fast feeling intense hunger, maybe you'll win, maybe you won't. But if you win, it cost you so much willpower that you probably weren't paying attention in the meeting.

So this idea that you're supposed to go in and like just, just, you know, tough it out in the middle of your workday, that's actually not achievable for most people because we're toughing out life right now. So there are three fasting hacks in the book that actually let you get the metabolic benefits of fasting but flip off the hunger switch. So like, wait, you mean I got more energy than before and I got to do this? That was the other reason I wrote this. The idea that fasting is water only, it's not true. Most religions that use fasting and that most of them do at some point in their evolution. There's states you can go into without food. They usually have at least herbal tea or you drink a few things. It's not just water. Mice in cages without espresso machines will drink only water during a fast because they don't have a choice. It doesn't mean humans have to do that. So there's a purist, sort of like self flagellation, like suffering has merit mindset. You don't have to do that, but you can go into that when you get into the spiritual side of fasting, which is a major driver for writing the book. Because to talk about going without food just as a mechanistic, like we're meat robots. No, there's a lot of emotional and spiritual stuff that happens. If you sit down, you rest, you reflect, you journal and you go within. You're just not going to do that Monday morning with the kids hanging off of you, trying to get work done. And recognizing that and saying it's okay to not want to be hungry while I fast and I'm going to do what it takes to do that. As long as my blood sugar gets better, as long as I'm losing the weight I want to lose, as long as I keep my focus, that's a better fast. It's those. It's the permission to be kind to yourself during a fast. That was a part of writing fast this way.

Well, I can tell you right now, I'm still enjoying the book. I've got it highlighted and underlined and all kinds of stuff. I realized very early on that.

I think I'm like a lot of people when they first hear the term intermittent fasting. They're curious. Then they go to, okay, I'll give it a shot. And it's like an oh moment. I gotta. I'm trying to do this. What do you, what do you think holds most people back from really, really getting started and following through with intermittent fasting as a whole? What are the. I mean, what types of fears and things are they bumping into that there's.

An algorithm that all life follows? And this came out of my, my, just lots of research on other books as well. And this is something that everything, whether it's a tree, whether it's a bacteria, whether it's a lizard or a human, it doesn't matter.

This is the recipe for life at its very basic.

And it has to be able to run on a tiny little cell without a brain. These are very, very basic behaviors that do not.

You can't say, oh, if. Whatever.

It's like, no, very basic. So step one, run away from, kill or hide from scary things, because otherwise stuff eats you all the time. So the defense system. So humans, we think our way out of it, but sometimes we freeze, sometimes we run away, sometimes we hit things. But generally fear gets 10 times more focus, right? And if it's justified because there's actually a tiger, it'll save your life. The rest of the time, it's just fear. And it's because there was no tiger, but your body thought there might be something afraid. So just in case, respond like there's a tiger. The second F word that drives life after we're not getting eaten by a tiger is food or feeding. And that's because famines actually are dangerous. They have killed humans, they have killed bacteria, they've killed everything. And since we are run by ancient bacteria, quadrillion of them, sensing the environment, deciding whether to give you energy or to give you stress hormones, and doing all those things, they decide, not you, they're not listening to you very much. They can when you go into a meditative state, but generally they're listening to the world around you. And if you tell them there's food all over the place and it's always sugar, you don't need to be strong, they'll be like, great. Why would I burn extra energy to be young and strong and to not be insulin resistant? Because it doesn't matter. Like, we're lazy bacteria, we're not smart. We just make very simple decisions. So if food gets five times more energy than it actually requires because we know there's enough food, they just don't know there's enough food. They're the ones making you talk to the cookie, right? Talk to the donut. And the third F word.

Fertility.

Fertility. You nailed it. There's other F words that might be.

Appropriate there, but I know I'm trying not to fall into that trap.

You nailed it. I usually get people to like, kind of blush and then, you know, avoid saying the F word, but you nailed it. So what's going on there is we've got to keep those species alive. And you put three times more energy into that than it really deserves. Because we know that whether or not we have sex, the species will survive. But our dumb little bacteria don't know that. They think you might be the last surviving human on earth. And to keep humans alive, if you don't have sex with that person who's maybe not the right person to have sex with right now, you will die. And if you don't eat the cookie right now, you will die. And if you don't run away from what you're afraid of right now, you'll die. You know what the number one fear of people in North America is?

What is it?

Public speaking. Okay, this is. You feel like you're going to die. You know damn well that if you get up on stage and make a fool of yourself, you're not going to die. But man, it feels like it. And you sweat and you shake and you don't do it and you avoid it at all costs. Well, that same fear. Well, let's look at food. When I'm this 300 pound guy, I'm like, I'm going to be a jerk if I don't eat. I don't want to be a jerk. I'm afraid of that. Because if you're a jerk, no one will like you. If no one likes you, no one will support you. If no one supports you, the tigers will eat you. Okay? So food becomes fear.

Always comes back to the tigers.

It really does. Tigers are a problem. And what's going on is we now have this weird conflation of fear and food and you add in the starvation mode programming that we've all had. If you don't eat six times a day, you're in starvation mode. So it's no wonder when you say fasting, people are like, screw you, that's the worst idea ever. Because you push my fear button and you push my food button, but it doesn't feel like I push those buttons. What it feels like is, that's revolting. I'm going to run away. And that's why, frankly, if I was writing, you know, writing for dollars, which isn't why I write, you wouldn't write a book on fasting. Because it's actually hard to convince people to read a book on fasting because their automated systems like, don't even think about that book. That book is too scary. You might be in charge of me and I'm going to keep you from starving to death. So it's, it's. But even if you're like a, you know, Diet Coke and Cheetos vegan, whether those are vegan foods.

No, they're not.

Aren't Cheetos vegan? Diet Coke is vegan.

If you say so.

Doritos. Okay, Doritos. Those are definitely vegan. It's like corn oil and corn.

Right.

But I'm saying if you're a really unhealthy eater, this is like the least healthy diet I could think of. But it is plant based.

You could do that. And intermittent fasting, you'll still be better off. You'll have very nasty intermittent fast because you have cravings all the time if you eat that stuff. But you can still become healthier. So this is something that works for everybody who eats, which is all of us. And you're probably going to realize, hmm, if I eat that, I'm really hungry during my fast, but if I eat that, I'm not hungry. So you realize that a lot of the cravings you have are driven by what you ate in your last meal. That's a side effect of fasting. And I teach people these are the most likely things to trigger cravings. Maybe you should eat less of those, but you don't have to. It's very flexible.

Yeah, it's actually one of the biggest takeaways for me because I, when I started intermittent fasting, I didn't pay a lot of attention to the meal I ate before at all. I wasn't thinking about it. I was like, okay, I got a business day. I've got to, you know, I've got this business meeting over here. I got this business meeting over here. I've got to meet this team over here. I've got to do a show today. I've got to do this and do that. So what do you do? You go grab the first thing that you get your hands on.

Yep.

Not knowing that it's going to end up creating the problem an hour from then or two hours from then, or five hours from there. And I found myself in that cycle over and over again.

It happens so much, especially when you go out to eat, like ranch dressing. There's a recipe for ranch dressing. It's bad oils. It doesn't really matter. Like the recipe on this. It's like this oil or that oil or that oil. So whatever they could buy mixed up with MSG. And usually it's not labeled MSG, because if it's 74% MSG, you can call it something else. So you can make organic msg and they do, right? And garlic and salt and a little bit of sugar. That's what's in ranch dressing. If you eat MSG even not labeled that way, you are going to be ravenously hungry. Because restaurants know. By the way, I own a restaurant, it's been open for six years in la, and I would never use MSG or something that's a fake msg. I wouldn't use bad oils either. So what happens, though, is MSG will raise your revenues at your restaurant by 30%, because by the end of the meal, people get a hunger. They get sugar cravings, and they order dessert and they order more drinks. If you can put that in their salad dressing. Right. And restaurant owners don't do this on purpose. They just know people really like the salad because it drives cravings and people buy more. When I make this wonderful salad, isn't that amazing? And it has organic ingredients msg, that's one example of those things where you wouldn't know that was driving this, and then two hours after you eat that, like, man, I said I was going to fast, but I, you know, I got to have a snack right now. If you're hungry two hours after you ate, you ate the wrong stuff. One of my favorite causes of hunger is kale. No one on earth has ever been satisfied after eating a big kale salad. It's not possible, because kale makes you hungry by definition.

Does it really? It's gross. You're making so many different epiphanies right now. I'M like kale. Okay. Oh my gosh. Well, look, let me ask you this. One of the things that I found very interesting in the book was the study that, I guess the Japanese study that was done, that the 58, roughly 58 hour fast timeframe actually increased life, life expectancy.

Even intermittent fasting can do that. But in the Japanese study it was 58 hours of fasting. And I don't remember how commonly they were doing that. I think it was what, once every month or two if I remember. It wasn't that frequently.

So 58 is a good number. But it comes down to you start getting benefits. If you do a 12 hour fast most days you are going to probably live longer. And if you don't live longer, you're going to have way less metabolic disease over time. That's not that hard to do. Literally early dinner, don't eat breakfast too early. You nailed it, right? That's very entry level. And what people find is once they start doing the intermittent fasts that I write about in fast, this way you kind of work your way up and then you realize, you know what, I only need to eat once a day on some days. And so you have like a lunch that's really big and then you're just, you're good. And dinner time comes around, you're like, man, I'm just really not, I'm not very hungry, I don't need to eat. And maybe it'd be pleasant to eat, but you're just not. And then you say, okay, I have some time, you know, maybe over a weekend. I'm just going to have dinner on Friday and I'm not going to eat until Monday. And all of a sudden, well, if you wait until dinner on Monday, you would have done a 72 hour fast. You have lunch on Monday, you have, you just did a 50 something hour fast like the Japanese study. Most people though, when they do that the first time, if they've never done any fasting before, they're going to really feel awful. So work your way up to it. And I did about two weeks ago, I did a 72 hour fast in the middle of a workweek. I did on one of those days. I had six interviews on podcasts. You know, as a host and as an interviewer, like all of your brain is engaged. I'm showing up fully to be able to do that without worrying about food, without thinking about food, without just like, I'm in the flow, I'm in the zone. Fasting is meant to put you in the zone and it's really cool because when you really think about it right now, the average person, 15% of your thoughts every day are about what's for lunch or what's for dinner, like what's for my next meal. When you're fasting and you've turned off your hunger properly, using the tools that I talk about in the book, you actually get 15% of your thoughts back. So instead of looking at you right now and going, tacos, I'm just looking at you. Right?

So there's 15% bonus. And all the energy that would have been going to work digesting food so I could use it later, all that energy returns to my brain or to my repair systems because it's not breaking down food. And then food is a combination of three things. There's calories, which is another word for energy. Calories are not bad for you. You actually need them to function. And so there's calories, there's nutrients, vitamins and minerals, and then there's stuff that's bad for you because plants don't want you to eat them. Right. So every food is the combination. Some amount of energy, some amount of good stuff and some amount of bad stuff. But most common literature, especially popular press nutrition, only talks about the good stuff. So you could literally be like, oh, here's a bowl of cyanide and I put a vitamin tablet in there and like, oh, that's a high nutrient density bowl. Because they don't count the negative stuff. Right. When you are fasting, whatever negative stuff you're getting doesn't get to detract from your energy. Your energy for digestion is now available for use. And you're not thinking about food. So this is the best day ever. And you get some ketones going. Ketones have more energy than carbs anyway. And your neurons are like, I'm in an exalted state. I can go into a flow state. I can do stuff I couldn't do before. And right now, let's see, I had dinner at 5 o' clock last night and it's 11am today and I worked out this morning and I'll probably eat in a couple hours.

Yeah. And you're wide awake and we're having a good time. Yeah. Right.

There's no stress.

Yeah. It's a funny thing. When I first began intermittent fasting, even though I'm a week on, a week off kind of guy, I'll get better. I'm working my way up as you prescribe. One of the things that I do notice is a higher level of increased focus.

Yeah.

I also noticed that when I began fasting in general, I began cutting out all carbs, which caused me to have the cold carb hangover scenario. And I also cut out all sugars. And I was able to go without sugars and stuff like that, just in general for, gosh, probably two or three months. And if I had even the slightest taste, you know, a few months later of a sugar, the sugar itself was tweeter or sweeter. Yep. Which really surprised me until I got to know that term insulin resistance. Correct me if I'm wrong, but insulin resistance by itself detracts more from the body and harms the body, everything from obesity and other things than probably anything else, which is one of the things fasting directly offsets.

Insulin resistance is bad for you. It means your body has a hard time processing the primary fuel for the human body. And that means you have a metabolic weakness. And so that metabolic weakness is a precursor to diabetes, which is a precursor to all the diseases of aging. So you really don't want to be insulin resistant. And things like heavy exercise, high intensity interval training, things like fasting, things like sleeping well, all help with insulin resistance. Not eating toxic foods, not eating seed oils. These omega 6 oils present in especially restaurant foods because they're cheap. And all of those things contribute to insulin resistance. But intermittent fasting is one of the easiest things you can do to improve that. And one of the other hacks that's in the book is you can time your exercise. So what you do ideally is you do an intermittent fast. At the end of the intermittent fast, you exercise. And exercise doesn't have to be crazy. You can do 10 minutes of like, air squats and some pushups. There you go. You could also go to the gym and lift real heavier. You could sprint or whatever. But I don't mean like a full crazy workout, unless you want to do that. And then you eat. And the results you get are profound. Way better than if you ate and then worked out. And there's some really neat biology here. And what's happening is that we didn't understand the biology well enough to have an instruction manual for the human body that said, oh, here's how to do it to get the best results. So instead, like, I'm going to eat, you know, three bananas to go to the gym so I have energy. Like, how about this? Tell the body, if you can't make enough energy from burning fat at the gym, then deal with it anyway, and then lift. And it's funny because people are like, well, I'm not going to have a good workout. But a lot of people set their personal best because all the energy that was going into digestion is now going into lifting.

Right.

So you set a PR and like, that's weird. I set a PR on an empty stomach. Who would have thought, right? And then you can have the, you know, the pre workout or the post workout, or you can just eat a steak or some eggs or whatever it is you're going to eat and maybe even have some carbs, because carbs can help you put on muscle after you work out. But that doesn't mean corn syrup and maltojection and crap carbs, because not all carbs are the same. And this is another really important thing that's a part of fasting. We love to make things simple. If you say fasting is good for you, fast all the time, you're not gonna like what happens to your life because it's only good for you in the right doses. And then we like to say things like a plant based diet is good for you. I'm like Sarin, the nerve gas they used in the Tokyo Subway Tech, that's a plant based protein.

So what?

Yeah. Staring. The nerve gas, Right. So in fact, most plants, if you go out into your backyard and you don't have a garden, you have a garden, just pick a few leaves and eat them and you'll probably end up in the hospital, if not at least in the bathroom. Right. Plant foods are not good for you. They're not bad for you. You have to know what plant food and how is prepared or it's a meaningless statement. A plant based diet, whatever. Now are animal based foods good for you? Well, spider venom doesn't seem like a very good animal based. So plant based, animal based protein.

You took my protein away from me.

Well, they're both garbage. Those words don't mean anything. So some plants make you hungry, some are very high in nutrients and low in toxins. Those are good ones. And some animal foods, like grass fed animals, are profoundly good for you and they're actually good for the planet. And other ones are bad for you and bad for the planet. And if you step into a slim gym or whatever, you go, well, that's keto, sorry, it's going to cause inflammation. So you got to pay attention to that as a part of this as well.

I actually want to drill down on inflammation just for a few seconds.

Sure.

With you, I'll just say a personal. Just be honest with you and transparent about something. My beautiful wife who Is amazing. We have been married now. We just got to celebrate our six year anniversary.

Yeah, I like her a lot.

Yeah.

Even better. I'm just, I'm just sounding like a jerk.

No, she's going to love you to death, man. Sure. She watches all the episodes as well. One of the things that has been important in our life is she has a high, high level of endometriosis. So she's had a full hysterectomy, has been through horrible surgery after horrible surgery after horrible surgery.

So much of her pain, her regular pain, comes from a higher level of inflammation on a regular basis. Yep. Talk to the audience about the importance of getting the inflammation down and how to do that, especially with fastest way, because I think it's vital to the conversation nowadays.

Oh, it is. So inflammation, when you peel away all the different things behind is one thing. It is mitochondrial dysfunction, your body's main thing. When you strip it all down. 30 pounds of air every day and X amount of food or other substrates that you're pulling out of your tissues. Right. If you do a great job of combining those things, all that comes out is electrons, energy to think, to feel, to act, to breathe, to do, to be.

48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. That means they suck at turning air and food into energy. They turn it into energy. And the part they don't turn into energy turns into inflammation. Now why would your mitochondria suck at turning food into energy and have inflammation? There are many causes of that, but all of them come down to that basic equation. That basic system, intermittent fasting works because it makes the cells that don't do a good job, they get basically flagged for elimination in a process called autophagy, or more technically mitophagy, because we're talking about mitochondria. And the body's then saying, oh, my protein digestion, it's now available because I'm not eating right now, I can use it to clear up, oh, endometriosis I can use to clear other things up. Now in endometriosis, surprisingly a very common cause of that inflammation is something that I dealt with when I had endometriosis.

Now. So the funny thing is my wife assures me that there is a segment of the population that has struggled with endometriosis that is male. So when you said that I was going to take you seriously because has taught me about endo.

Guys can get fibroids and stuff, but not in our uterine area because we.

Have that, we don't have the uterine.

But what I did have was toxic mold in my house. It was one of the reasons I weighed 300 pounds. I did a documentary. It's available for free. It's moldymovie.com and you should ask your wife to watch it. And a major trigger for endometriosis is mold exposure in the environment. And quite often that triggers candida, which is a type of yeast in the body. Both of those will cause inflammation like no one's business. You think about it, ancient bacteria are our power system and our environmental sensors. What is the ancient enemy of bacteria? Mold. That's where antibiotics come from. So we have 2 billion years of mold and bacteria fighting with each other for dominance because they're fighting over cheese. And they both think you're made out of cheese. The mitochondria. Like we got a mobile petri dish, we're walking it around. Look at this. We made it talk on the, on the microphone. They're literally puppet masters. But when you dose them with a tiny bit, a little antibiotic pill, it radically changes the bacteria in your gut. Well, those antibiotics can change the bacteria in you as well. The ones that power you, that are incorporated into your cells. So if she has a low grade fungal infection or a yeast infection, or has been exposed to toxic mold in her environment, that can be a trigger for endometriosis. And the toxic seed oils. These plant toxins I'm talking about, you get people off these plant based diets, you get people off of high inflammation foods, inflammation goes down dramatically. Endometriosis runs in my family. Lots of women like my mother had it, and it is something that can be managed. But you don't need omega 6 oils, you don't need inflammatory plants. You control your exposure to other inflammations and you do intermittent fasting. And magically, I guarantee you that even with the amount of pain your wife has, she is nowhere near as screwed up as I was. I had chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, high risk of stroke and heart attack, prediabetes, arthritis, and cognitive dysfunction before I was 30.

Hang on one second. You just said had fibromyalgia. Because my wife currently has fibromyalgia as well.

Everyone with fibromyalgia has toxic mold poisoning. Mic drop.

Watch, watch Moldy movie. This is going to change your life.

All right, Moldy movie it is. Yeah, jotting it down. And plus I got it on.

That is moldymovie.com, that is, that is there. I spent a couple hundred thousand dollars and a Lot of time making that documentary because mold is in 100 million homes in the U.S. by the way. One of the major things that drives cravings is toxic mold exposure. To this day. And so I am abundantly healthy. But if I go into a hotel or a restaurant or a home that has water damage in the walls, I'll feel it. And depending on what species is, whether it's one that my body is sensitized to, within an hour of that, I'll start getting huge food cravings, huge sugar cravings and hunger and brain fog. And you know what I do? I eat. I eat. I eat sugar. And I do that because my body is asking for sugar for a good reason to help to oxidize the toxins. And I take toxin binders and I go on with my life. It used to be one exposure was a month of feeling like I was hungover all the time. And that's what fibromyalgia is like. Constant pain and constant brain fog. It's not a part of my life anymore. And intermittent fasting is core to this. Because my metabolism is strong, I have what it takes to handle whatever life brings to me in a way that I have never had. I'm 48. I did not have this when I was 28. Like, I am more resilient as a human and you can ditch all that stuff. But what's going on there is this. Something came and interjected and got in the way of her ability to combine air and food. And when you tell the body, hey, sometimes you don't have food, it gets way better at handling food.

Yeah, that's going to be life changing for her.

I. Dude, I'm excited as her husband. You know, when, when I, when we first met, she was running miles upon miles, exercising radically, I would say intermittent fasting. I mean, I don't know that we knew that's what it was at the time, but she'd only eat once or twice. Maybe once, maybe twice in a 24 hour timeframe.

Yep.

And you know, as things have progressed, some of those symptoms began to arise and come, come back up. And you know, there's some days that she has to get around on the scooter now or walk with a cane because of the, because of the pain that she's in. Wow.

From the fibromyalgia or from the endometriosis.

You know, she's not 100 sure what, what's from what because obviously she's had gym problems and all kinds of things.

Oh, man. She needs to go on, on Two months of antifungal pharmaceutical therapy with, with fluconazole. She needs to do ozone therapy and she should read my book. Headstrong is going to change her life. That that book has everything about turning mitochondria back on. And she'll probably benefit from the bulletproof diet. She probably needs to quit eating the nightshade family. And she's quit eating kale and raw spinach. Those are major offenders. And it's funny, my wife was infertile when I met her. She had pcos. And she's a medical doctor trained at the Karolinsk Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, which is a very well respected medical school. And her professors and sorry, you're not gonna have. And my first book is called the Better Baby Book. Took five years of cooking and doing all the shopping and putting together a program. We restored her fertility and we had one child at 39, one at 42 with no IVF. And now she's not an emergency room doctor. She does fertility consulting for 10 people at a time just every week. Weekly calls with results. People who aren't supposed to get pregnant can get pregnant. But what's going on here is I've dug so deep on female fertility and on fibromyalgia and cfs. You look at this, you go, what does it have to do with fast this way? Well, fasting is one of those things that allows the body to clean itself out. And the more toxins we have in our body, whether it's because we have an infection, a fungal infection, a yeast infection, or just we're in an environment that's not right for us, what we end up doing is saying, oh, all of the digestion that was going to go into that food is now going to go into cleaning up the body. And it's a slow process. And what most people, especially with fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue or whatever, what they're feeling is if I don't eat, I'm going to die. I'm so tired. And this was me. And there are things you can do during a fast that turn off the hunger. And there's three fasting hacks that are in fast this way that make it easy to go without. And what we're doing is saying, how do you get the results without the pain? And the first fasting hack is black coffee. Ideally, especially for your wife, it would be mold free coffee, which is, I do that for bulletproof. I'm not trying to sell more bulletproof coffee. It's become a very successful company. People have Lost a million pounds. And. Yeah, no, it's, it's, you know, I'm happy with Bulletproof. And I only talk about it because it's changed my life and because it works. But you don't have to buy my stuff. So the black coffee doubles ketone production. You want ketones because they're anti inflammatory in your wife's case, or because they provide energy and they suppress hunger. When you get your ketones up a little bit, it turns down ghrelin, which is a hunger hormone, and it turns up cck, which is a fullness hormone. And we didn't know this until pretty recently. UC San Diego did the study. Oh, look. Amount of caffeine in two small cups of coffee equals doubling of ketones. And when I launched Bulletproof, we did not have the science to tell you that the C8 brain octane MCT oil, that. That has made MCT oil famous, that raises ketones four times more than the most common MCT oil and four times more than coconut oil. So you could, while fasting, because fat will not turn on your protein digestion, especially MCT oils. You could have a cup of black coffee, you could add your MCT oil, you got a little bit of butter, which does something else to make it easier for your body to burn fat. Fat, it changes the structure of the water in the coffee. Again, university science. That's a study from University of Washington, Dr. Gerald Pollock's lab. So this is real science, not a.

Fad picking it up on the fly.

Yeah. And then the third fasting hack is something that's never been talked about in the world of fasting, but it deserves to be talked about. And it's called soluble fiber or prebiotic fiber. And this is a type of carbohydrate that does not raise your insulin, just like bulletproof coffee won't raise your insulin and it cannot be digested by your body. However, when the bacteria in your gut get it, the bacteria like, oh, let me eat this. The good guys grow stronger and they make short chain fatty acids which are ketogenic. So now it turns out people who eat more prebiotic fiber live longer. In hundreds of studies. Even the fda, which is not necessarily the best source at usda, whoever it is that makes the food pyramid, I think it's the usda. This is not really a great thing. Even they have a recommendation for soluble fiber. It's so important. So when you do this during a fast. But I had something that wasn't water. There's no rule that says a fast has to Be water. Fasting is going without, and you're deciding what to go without. I'm going to go without hunger during my fast, and I'm going to get the metabolic benefits. So you put a little bit of butter, put some MCT oil in your coffee, put in some prebiotic fiber. There is no one on earth who will do that and then be hungry afterwards. But from the body's perspective, I got no carbs, I got no protein, and my gut bacteria are happy, so they're not messing with me. And I got this weird energy.

That came from the McTool and the caffeine. That's the energy that normally happens on day three of a fast in a cave, but you got it on day one. And when you have fibromyalgia or you have that brain fog, you wake up, but people don't have that. They do it like, wow, I had the best morning ever. And I didn't think about the donuts, but I still got the metabolic benefits, which is really cool.

Yeah, dude, you've given me so much for her to digest on. Like, you don't understand. Watching my wife suffer in silence is really, really hard as a husband, you know? So.

There'S so much there that I can't wait to unpack with her. We're going to have a very good conversation.

It's going to change your life. That's even. It's that big of a deal. I am 100% certain. You get people with fibromyalgia, you treat them for mold. You remove mold from the environment. It is a symptom of toxic mold in the environment. And there's a genetic discrepancy when you watch that documentary. There's a husband and wife couple I interviewed. There's 12 people who got hit by mold. Normal people were just taken out. And 12 doctors. And this is a husband and wife doctor couple. And she got symptoms he didn't. And she thought she was crazy, because doctors know if you have 12 symptoms, you're crazy. She biopsied every organ in her body because she had a fever. So she knew her body temperature was a little bit elevated. She knew something was wrong. And they finally tracked it down, and they're sitting there and he says, I don't feel it, but I know it's real. Right. And so this is why it's so frustrating. It's based on genetics. Some people have it.

I've had things like that before, even with endo and things.

Yeah.

We only have, like, a handful of minutes left, like three to five Minutes left. I promised the audience that we would talk a little bit about the importance of fastest way and doing so in a spiritual nature.

Yeah, and there is so important.

Break it down.

There is that voice in your head that says stuff, and then you generally believe it to be true, or you feel guilty that it's saying those mean things about yourself, about other people. That's part of the automated protection system of your body. And what fasting does is it puts you in charge of yourself and it gives you that extra boost of energy that we just talked about. And that boost of energy is what it takes to make spiritual progress, to become aware, more aware of your environment, more aware of yourself, more aware of the thoughts in your head, the feelings in your body, and to sort out bad programming responses from reality. So if there is actually a tiger, great, you're going to respond properly to it. But if doing something like skipping a meal feels like a tiger, when you do a spiritual fast, you tend to open up your sensors and the body's designed to do this so you can better find food. And it gives you a burst of energy to find food. But instead of doing that, you take the open sensors and you take the energy and you turn it inwards and you realize, wow, I have more power. I can go into a state, I can realize this about myself, and I can change myself for the positive. And that's not something you read about in a book on fasting. And that's why the story through the book is me fasting in a cave on the spiritual side. But the metabolic benefits are so strong, so it's okay during the week, do a working fast just so you feel good and so you lose weight and so your body works and you won't die in a hospital when you're old. And then when you decide you're gonna do the spiritual work, sit down and don't eat for a couple days and journal and breathe. And what I'm doing for fast this way, send your receipt to fastestway.com and I'll teach you the book. I'll lead you through two weeks of here's an entry level fast. Here's the different hacks. I'll teach you the book. But the final day, with more than 10,000 people simultaneously, we're going to do a spiritual fast. And I'll lead you through the steps of awareness, of calmness, of turning off your fight or flight response and using a fast for personal growth. They're just different techniques, common stuff at the bottom. But what you do one of them, you show up in your life. The other one is you show up in yourself. And it's such a powerful thing. So fastestway.com, it's a gift for readers.

So good. So good. So receipt to fastestway.com it is definitely a book. You got to pick up. Where can they actually pick up the book?

You can pick up the book. As we are trained as authors, say, anywhere books are sold. And I would encourage you, if you have a small bookstore in your area, do it there, because small businesses are hurting right now. And I will take a picture of your receipt. You can do whatever you want. You know, you can buy it online. You can buy it at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or any of the other booksellers. There's an audible version. There's a Kindle version. Whatever you like, however you like to absorb it. But I want to teach it to people. I was a teacher for five years at the University of California, and I realized I've never taught one of my books before. And if I was going to charge us three Q&A sessions live for all the attendees, it would be an expensive program. It's free. I just want people to try this. We are nicer to each other when we're in control of our cravings.

No doubt about that. And the value was there. I'm telling you right now. It is a highlight. Underlined book all day long. The concepts you break down, the humble way, humbly confident way you break it down, the way in which you are teaching throughout the course of the book by not only sharing your experience and science and things of that nature, but also the way in which you break it down to practical action. That someone can, even as soon as they get into the book, they can start taking steps. That's what I love.

It's meant to be usable. And my bar for anything I'm going to publish, whether it's a blog post or it's a book or an episode of Bulletproof Radio, it has to be worth more than the time and energy you invested in consuming it. So I promise you, if you read fast this way, you will get more out of the book than the time it took you to read it. And that is just. I'm so certain of that. That's how it works. Otherwise I wouldn't do it.

Well, I know I have for sure. How can the audience? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is what it is, right? I mean, I'm a fan of truth. And when truth works, I like to see it propagated as much as possible with as many people as possible. Because to your point a minute ago, Covid even Covid aside, there are always people hurting. It's just intensified now and everybody can use a little, little additional hope. And sometimes that hope can start yourself.

Well said, Steven. Thank you.

Absolutely. Well, look, before we head out real quick, where can people find more about you and learn more about everything else? Because Bulletproof is still out there as well. You've got a lot of different resources.

That you've been working on for, gosh, a long time that have helped so many people. How can they learn more about you?

Go to daveasprey.com There's 3,000 blog posts and almost 1,000 hours of video. And I'm working this year on making it so that I will guide you through it, make it easier to find the stuff that you want to do. But there's as much as a two year college degree and it's free because I just want you to have it because no one gave this to me when I was 18 and fat. So there's a body of work there. And if you like the bulletproof stuff, go to bulletproof.com and pick up all the stuff. We have new canned coffee with the MCT oil. We have new collagen bars, chocolate dipped. It's awesome. And I'm always a fan of Bulletproof and Bulletproof Radio, my podcast. And I'm also real active on Instagram and again, fastest way.com, you go there and I'm going to teach you a lot. I'm going to do it because I.

Want to love it. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today and dropping everything. I can't tell you what, this will be an episode that I personally have to rewatch and rewatch and rewatch so much here. I don't know, it's hard to even know where to start in many cases, but I do know that I can pick up Fastest Way like everybody else. I'm going to get a couple from my friend as well and make sure that they also get a copy. But yeah, man, thank you for writing. Thank you for writing the book. Thank you for taking the time to put your heart into it and really set out to help everybody.

You are welcome. And send me a note about how your wife progresses, what we just talked about. I think it's going to be game changing.

I will. I sure will. All right, my friend, will you get back to your thing? I'll talk to you soon.

Talk soon. Bye.

I hope you got a lot out of that interview with Dave Asprey and his new book, Fastest Way. Make sure you check it out. Also, in the meantime, if you love that video, check out this one right here.

Everybody has a superpower. The problem is people are so focused.

On wanting to have somebody else's superpower.

They never take the time to discover their own.