Feast-Famine Cycling, Cell Energy, and Fixing Hormone Resistance, with Dr. Dan Pompa

The week before a woman's cycle is the best time to feast because your body's making hormones preparing. One of the better times to fast is during the cycle. This is a better way to do it around women's hormones. So to answer the question, there is different strategies for men than women.

If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great and feel freaking amazing. You're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo.

And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan. Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast.

Where we empower you to live a vibrant and healthy life by optimizing your structural, chemical, emotional, social and spiritual lives.

Hold on to your hats.

Welcome to the five journeys Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I've got Ed today. So we have a celebrity sighting and we have another celebrity sighting because we have Dr. Dan Pompa here. He is an author, speaker, media personality with degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Life University. He's considered an icon in the alternative health and wellness industry and has spent more than 20 years educating practitioners and the general public on the root causes of inflammation driven diseases. We'll get into it. His mess became his message. He's the founder of pompa program healthcenters.com cellular solutions and the author of Cellular Healing Diet and Beyond Fasting. Welcome, Dan. We're super psyched to have you here.

Yeah, I love this conversation. Two people who really love, love detox. Getting to the real cause of why people don't feel well, that's why we're here, right?

Exactly. So what are some things that the listeners at home can do about cellular regeneration? That's not fancy. Like what are some of the things you would say top three things. Do these three things to help your cells regenerate.

Okay. The two biggest causes of cellular inflammation. Not my opinion, absolute fact, toxins. Okay. You know, watch my social media channel and start to eliminate some of these big, big toxins. Right? But to, to my point, a lot of it's unavoidable. Let's get to the second one. To your point, you could start doing, you and your family today, eliminate the rancid bad fats and oils, especially the omega 6. Now I, I, I take a breath there because in our space, Omega 6 is like a bad guy. I'm going to argue the reason it's such a bad guy is because it's such an important good guy. What do I mean by that? Omega 6 is critical to reestablish to regenerate these cell membranes. It's more important than Omega 3, they're both important. They're both called parent omega fats, but the Omega 6 is more important. That's why rancid oxidized bad, if you will. Omega 6 is so dangerous because it's so important. So step one, get these rancid Omega 6 in the form of vegetable oil, canola oil, soy oil. I will say most seed oils. Now, seed oils can be good. If you get the right ones, it can be good sources. But if you're buying just regular sources of seed oils, yes, they're bad, too. So we get those out of our life. And unfortunately, you can't go to Whole Foods and be immune because if you pick up most products. Oh, all the food in Whole Foods that you buy, you know, on the.

Deli, prepackaged, let's just say in a package.

Yeah, it's. It's loaded with the stuff. They don't care, so don't be fooled. But you have to learn how to read ingredients. It's not that hard with this. Any vegetable, any canola oil. And if it doesn't say organic in front of the seed oil, no doubt it's rancid. Get rid of them. Step one.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. We got to dive into this, though. When you're saying you can have a packaged food, what oil are you looking for then? Because all of them are made with something. Or are you saying no packaged foods?

Well, right. I mean, let's say most packaged foods. If you're in a conventional grocery store, I would be bold enough to make the argument that every packaged food's gonna have a bad oil in it. So. And that's kind of the point you're making if you're in a health food store. Okay, maybe not. Right. You have to be more clever. It could then have extra virgin olive oil. It could have avocado oil. It could have coconut oil. You know, it could have real butter. It could have, you know, those aren't going to be rancid fats. Right. So. And there's alternatives today. If you go in the chip aisle, you know, the. I always say when I'm in Whole Foods, I do videos. Like, I'm in the most dangerous aisle in a health food store. Right. It's like chips on this side, cookies on the other. Exactly. And everything is like rancid oils. Right. It's like, yeah, that's a dangerous aisle. But the point is, is that if you go there, though, you can see, like, potato chips just in avocado oil. Right. And they're even doing ones in like different lard oils. People are like, wait a minute. Lard, lard Stable. Actually, saturated fat and butters, they're stable. Ghee is a good oil. It's stable.

Duck fat. We render our duck fat.

Yeah, duck fat's amazing, right? It's stable. It's saturated. Weren't we told that saturated fat causes heart disease? That's a whole nother show. But, you know, the bottom line is, let's get rid of the bad ones. And then I'm making the argument you need good Omega 6 to replace it. Here's the unfortunate part. Have some dessert every once in a while. Sugar. Sugar constantly is bad, okay? But every once in a while, your body burns it. Here's the problem with these oils. They stay in our cell membranes, driving this inflammation that impedes your hormones and detox pathways, as I just pointed out. Not ours, not days. Months. Months of cellular dysfunction. Because these oils accumulate and you and your family are accumulating them. So you eat a little bit, it's just a little bit every once in a while, but it stays for months. So it accumulates and then more and then more. And all of a sudden, you're cellularly inflamed. Not getting rid of toxins. So now the toxins are building up in the cell. Oh, your energy is going down. Because that's one of the things it does. As the toxins build up, it affects the mitochondria, where you make energy. Energy goes down. But here's a problem. As energy in your cells goes down, it affects something called glutathione, the Gibbs free energy equation. So energy down, glutathione down. What is glutathione? That's how your body gets rid of toxins, deals with inflammation. Oh, so now the equation shows inflammation goes up. More inflammation, more. More energy loss. You see where we are, America, So, you know, this is where we are. So we need these good omega sixes.

What are the good sources of good omega sixes?

So look, I mean, you can get, like, really good cold pressed, some seed oils, like hemp seeds, flax seeds, even sesame seed oil. If it's like cold pressed, done, right. You can get. And it's. We've tested them, and they're good. You can buy products that are focused on good oils like that, right. That, you know, that have a focus on making these Omega 6 really good. Here's the problem. Many of the products that have fish oil in them are actually the dangerous products. That's a whole nother show. Because I believe most fish oils are very, very bad. And not even because they go rancid in the bottle, but because they go rancid even in our body and exhaust of our own antioxidants. Cochrane Collaboration, they looked at all of these studies. That's kind of what Cochrane does, right? They look at the studies and they get rid of the, what they think are the bad ones and they keep the good ones. And they came out that holy cow, fish oil doesn't prevent heart disease. Matter of fact, they started linking it to cancer. So I'm not a fan and I, you know, I get into fights with people all the time, but I always throw studies at them and they go, oh, I never saw that. All right, well good, let's have the conversation. But anyways, the bottom line is we need good Omega 6 and we need good Omega 3. Right? But typically if you're eating grass fed real food, you're getting a perfect balance of omega 3 and omega 6. Grass fed meat has great omega 6. All right. Real nuts and seeds, they have great omega 6. I always say I'm a fan of vegetable oil when it's in vegetables. I'm a fan of fish oil when it's in fish. I'm a fan of seed oils when they're in seeds. Right. So if you're eating those foods, it's really, it's not hard, you know, so eat whole foods as much as you can and you'll get the good fats.

What's your fasting strategies? I guess. What's your thoughts about that? Because.

And does it differ male and female? Because.

Yeah, yeah, you know what, it's, this is a great conversation, right? It's almost another show. Which I'm welcome, I would love to come on and do. But yeah, so I think it does differ from male and females. Mindy Peltz was a student of mine that, you know, she sat in my front row and was the only one eating at one of my seminars. And she looked around. It's a funny story because I love her. She looked around and realized she was the only one eating. She was eating healthy food, but she was just eating the whole time. Right. Because when people came to my seminars we would put like, we'd give them the experience of fasting, but you know.

No food for you.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. We made it very experiential. But yeah, I look, I, I think though that there is a really good point there. Right. So you know, Mindy has done such a good job of telling you that girls really do has to fast different people with Thyroid conditions and adrenal conditions have to fast different. Today, people are fasting too much. I mean, in our space, I. I would say, you know, but even now, generally, people have caught on that intermittent fasting daily works wonderful, and they lose weight, but then what do they do? They start doing it more, and they actually start to. Eventually, the body thinks it's starving, it starts to lose muscle, gain fat, you know, it starts to work against them. So I find myself at a lot of the seminars telling people the feast is as important as the fast. So one of the things that Mindy, you know, based on my teaching, because this is something I discovered, was the week before a woman's cycle is the best time to feast because your body's making hormones preparing. One of the better times to fast is during the cycle. So she kind of in a clever way has laid out like, this is a better way to do it around women's hormones. So to answer the question, there is different strategies for men than women, but let me just keep it general. The problem with fasting is it's a stress. Now, that doesn't make it bad, it sounds bad, but exercise is a stress. And when you adapt to the stress, you become stronger, faster, et cetera. If you don't adapt to the stress of exercise, you literally become weaker, slower, worse. Cold plunging does amazing things if you adapt to the stress. Cold plunging only works because it's such a stress that the body thinks it's going to die. And then it upregulates norepinephrine, which potentially upregulates growth hormone. And, you know, all these wonderful things happen if you adapt. If you don't adapt to the cold, which happens so many times to people, you actually get worse, not better. Saunas. I mean, I can keep going down the list of things. It's all premise called. Hormesis means if you stress a system and it adapts, it gets stronger. If you don't adapt, it gets weaker. Simple as that. Okay? Fasting is a stress. If you adapt, it's great. But see, here's what people do. They do the same thing that they're doing with cold plunging. They apply. I heard three minutes in the cold plunge is, you know, the number. Well, I might be able to do three minutes, but you may be not because you have a thyroid condition, because you have whatever, whatever, whatever, and you don't adapt. Three minutes is bad for you. Ten seconds may have been wonderful for you. So everyone's doing the same with fasting. They apply the same fasting strategies as everyone you know, this many days, this many hours, everyone has to be looked at as an individual. Fasting has to be known as a stress. Without feasting, fasting becomes a problem because I already said it, too much fasting, your body thinks it's starving and will actually slow metabolism down to save your life. So feast famine cycling is a premise that I teach Ed, where if you're going to fast, you have to feast. So if you're intermittent fasting, some of you may need two days, maybe one day, maybe three days of feasting a week, a day where you don't intermittent fast, you get up and you eat three, four meals that day. Maybe if you're low carb, you eat high carb, healthy carbs that you know on certain days, feast, famine. It's not my opinion. It works for weight loss resistance, it works to regulate. I talk about how mitochondrial fitness, how it helps our mitochondria become better through adaptation, through this hormesis principle. And it's one of the ways we regenerate the mitochondria is feast famine cycling. Fasting, feasting, fasting, feasting.

Okay, very cool. I love that, I love that approach. In terms of. It really is individual. It is, it's. I would even add, it's not only do they have a thyroid issue, do they have this, that. The other thing is, do they have, do they, are they working 60 hours a week? Do they have a marital issue? Are they what. What's going on in people's lives? It's not just the biochemistry. It's really everything combined and ed.

And that changes, doesn't it? In other words, let's say you're doing three minute cold plunges and you're adapting. All of a sudden you have this major stress thing in your life, right? The tendency may to do more cold plunges, but now you're super stressed. And now three minutes is another addition added stress. And all of a sudden you realize you get sick two, three days later, it was because that cold plunge that you were adapting to, you didn't. And now it became a negative and you got low immunity. It happens all the time to people. So to your point, you have to assess your stressors, whatever the stressors are. So you don't just assess male, female, you don't just assess, assess where you are. The best way to do any stress assessment to see if you're adapting, whether it be a hot sauna or a cold plunge or a fast, how do you feel later that day? How do you feel the next day? How'd you sleep that night. Because if it's, you know, I actually didn't sleep that great after that. You probably didn't adapt, you know, the next day I was more tired. It seemed like, yeah, you know, you probably didn't adapt, whatever it is, Right. So how are you feeling? Well, you know, you have to assess those things. But here's the problem. We ignore things. We don't assess ourselves very well as humans, Right. So we have to look at. Detox is also a stress, right. If you look at life through this hormesis principle where things are stressors, if you adapt, it's good, if you're not, it's bad, right. Then you go, you live life a little differently. You know, I look at everything through those lenses and therefore like, if I'm more tired, it's like I can feel my body's done. I don't work out that day, I take a day off. I've learned, right. It's like. But anyways, most people don't do that. The other principle that I teach around all of this too is diet variation, where feast, famine, cycling is a diet variation strategy. And that could be done weekly. Where you throw in these feast days, it could be done monthly and it can be done also seasonally. Diet variation where change your diet in our space. You know this. How much debate is over what diet. You have your vegans, you have your vegetarians, you have your carnivore now you have your ketos, you have your paleos. And they all insist they're right. Oh, and they make good arguments. Oh, and then the people in those camps will tell you this is the diet. Because when I got on this diet, I felt so much better. I'm sure you did. Any variation off of the standard American diet will most likely make you feel better. But here's the problem. If you dig into it, if you stay on a vegan diet, you're going to get sick. Genetics will determine when you'll start to get deficiencies. It'll start to show itself if you stay on a keto diet. Oh, the anti keto people show you that this 4 hydroxynenolone builds up and it's a nasty free radical and over time it drives cancer. There's actually solid research around that, but they ignore the research that temporary keto diets are absolutely incredible for you. In matter of fact, every healthy culture on the planet was forced in to keto and probably carnivore too at times. But if you stay on any of these diets too long, they become problematic. If you're just eating this high protein diet all the time. I will argue with the vegans on this and say it's going to age you prematurely because of MTOR pathways. But short terms of the high protein can be incredibly beneficial in healing. So the point is, is barrier diet actually creates a more diversity in the microbiome and diversity of a microbiome is key. It's a whole other topic.

Nature loves diversity and so do we.

Exactly.

One of the first books I read was Healing with the Seasons, like, and Eating with the Seasons. Like every. Just because all the food is available all the time doesn't mean we should be eating it.

Yeah. You know, Ed, there is so much principle around that. And with today, being able to go to the grocery store and get any food you want anytime has really made that a complicated diet. I mean, it's very intentional to eat that way. Otherwise you just end up buying whatever you want. Right. And everyone does it. But I agree with the principle, matter of fact, to even another point. This is incredible. I did a social media piece on this. Oh my gosh, the controversy. Bananas. When you look at the research on bananas, it's like, so bad, so good. So bad. Listen, don't, don't tell me. It's like, okay, the principle is people that live where bananas grow, bananas are incredibly healthy for them, microbiome is different. Your eyes know what latitude you're at and where you are. I know it sounds crazy, but it is true. I mean, it's like, and all of a sudden now, you know, your body will start, you know, to function at that latitude, which things grow with that latitude that don't grow. In Canada, I would make the argument that Canadians shouldn't be eating bananas to any, you know, extended part of their diet. Right. Periodically, I, you know, I'm not going to say your body's not going to deal with that, but if it's a mainstay in your diet and you live where bananas don't grow, I think that's where a lot of the bad rap becomes. And I'm using bananas as one example. We can pick any poor banana.

Bad rap.

Yeah, poor banana. But. But again, it's all this controversy in our world, right? What's good, what's bad, what diet, what food? It's like, you know, it's like, I think we have to throw the science out because we can oftentimes make science say what we want and just look at ancient cultures and go, what do they do? No ancient cultures stayed a vegan diet. No ancient culture Stayed in a keto or carnivore diet. Either they switched as they, the, the seasons changed or they were forced to change. Oh, and they feasted and they famine, didn't they? When they had it, they ate it. When they had kill, they ate high protein diets. When they didn't, they were forging. I spent some time in a, an African tribe that just came out of the mountains. It was fascinating. And I wasn't even there for the dietary stuff, but I learned so much. But anyways, different subject. When you fast, something called autophagy happens where your body's so smart, it gets rid of bad cells, right, that don't perform. But mitophagy is where literally the, the body will get rid of the bad mitochondria and you start making more. But you, you can imagine though, trying to do that without dealing with the toxins is useless. Trying to do that without dealing with what's inflaming these membranes is useless. So you can see how these things all play together. So the membrane's inflamed, right? That's toxins. And these bad fats are inflaming this membrane. This is where your hormone receptors are. And when membranes get inflamed, those receptors become blunted. We're familiar with insulin resistance, meaning you have plenty of insulin out here in the blood, but your cells are resistant. Well, this is the cause, right? So we know that. But hormone resistance against thyroid hormone, estrogen, testosterone, we don't talk a lot about that. But this is an epidemic, right? It's like when your cells are inflamed, you're impeding those hormones to getting into themselves. Sometimes the hormone itself has to get in the cell or the message. Either way, we impede that process. That's a problem because plenty of people improve their thyroid hormone in their blood by taking a hormone, typically in the form of T4, but they take the hormone and if it converts to T3, which is the active form that attaches to this receptor, gets in the cell, we feel, well, we make good energy, we burn fat, all is well. But if that doesn't convert, that's a whole other story. But the point is, if we take the hormones, we can improve the blood level. But just because the blood level is normal, if you have cellular inflammation, it doesn't matter as these toxins start to build up, which they do once this membrane's inflamed. Now cellular, this membrane in here, this mitochondrial membrane, is even more sensitive. It gets inflamed. Now, we don't make Energy. So energy drops as energy drops. I said that something called glutathione, it's abbreviated gsh. That's how your body is set up to get rid of these toxins. Oh, and that's also protects the cell from being over inflamed. So energy starts to drop and then glutathione drops. Because to make glutathione in the cell, so you, you could do all the IV glutathions you want, but if this pathway in the cell is impeded. Now the problem is, is that you need two molecules of ATP to make glutathione. Glutathione's dropping, glutathione's dropping. And now inflammation is increasing. And if inflammation increases, energy drops more glutathione. You see, it's a perpetual cycle. You have to restore the cell energy. And there's a lot of conversations there. Right. Obviously this is where diet can play in. This is where fasting can play in. This is, you know, we, through fasting strategies, oftentimes we can get something called mitophagy, meaning your body will get rid of bad mitochondria. We make new ones. It helps decrease the inflammation. But all of these R's work together. If we're not working on the inflammation of the membranes, we're not going to improve energy. If we're not improving energy, we're not going to work on the inflammation. And again, a lot of these dietary strategies, and there's supplement strategies around this too. But reducing the cellular inflammation, if you don't do that, then again we're not going to get the good stuff in and the bad stuff out of the cells. We're not going to get the mitochondria. Inflammation of the mitochondria is a big problem because we can't raise cellular energy. Remember what I said, if we can't raise cellular energy, we don't, we do glutathione drops, inflammation goes back up. So we, we have to be doing all of these things at the same time. There's nutrients we can take to decrease cell inflammation. Herbals strategies, dietary as we're talking about. But that has to be part of the goal is to reduce cell inflammation. And if we don't reestablish methylation, we will never detox normally, ever. Right. As methylation goes down, glutathione goes down. Remember, glutathione is how we naturally detox. As glutathione goes down, methylation drop. I mean, so there's all these parallel, we can't even detox our own hormones if we don't have normal methylation pathways. So methylation is critical, and there's different nutrients that absolutely have to be utilized in. In these methylation pathways. But again, we won't raise them unless we deal with the sources. Right.

That's kind of obvious. I mean, that's like, goes without saying. Right. But when you, when you refer to nutrients, what does that mean to you?

Well, yeah, good point. Because there's macronutrients, carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and then there's micronutrients, vitamin A, B, C, D, blah, blah, blah. Right.

So nutrients so general, just like your multivitamin nutrients, essentially.

Yeah, general. And. And that's kind of hard to say, multivitamin nutrients, because as we know, there's multivitamin nutrients can be very bad. They can be good. But there's. That's a broad topic, right?

There's a lot of things there. Yes.

Yeah. We were just talking about one of the other podcasts we recorded about a year ago was Joe Pizzarno, who talked about this study where they looked at in, like the 1950s, they just decided that certain things were critical and certain things were not. But they essentially ignored, like, 25,000 phytonutrients and just said, okay, these are the important things and these are the not important things. But. But really, we need all of it. It's all happening in our body.

Right. Another category, fight. You know, phytonutrients. Right. That's again, eating these whole foods. And it's very important.

We're scratching the surface here. How do people find you? And we'll put all this in the show notes so they can click on it. But how do, how do people reach out, get in touch? What should they be doing?

Yeah, I mean, two ways. If you go to pompaprogram.com there's a great webinar. I did teaching training on this. Watch it. That'll help you. And then you could, you know, speak to someone even about the program. If you're interested in being, like, certified in this, which I for, you know, 20 years, just certified doctors last year. It's the first time that I'm certifying the average person pain to purpose, like me, right. Who's been through it and goes, I want to do this now. You know, and coaches, you know, I'm certifying coaches in what I do, but also people who just want to do it. That's healthcenters.com if you want to be certified, which is a new thing for me. I'm trying to obviously, my impact is to, you know, take this message to the world.

100 well, we can be doing this forever.

I know. But I would say for the listeners, thank you for listening. And for Dan, thanks for being here and sharing the message and the really a message of inspiration and hope. Right. And possibility. So thank you for joining us.

Yeah. Thank you for being here.

Thanks for being here. And then again, thanks for joining us for another episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. Ed Levitan, Wendy Trubo, and Dan Pompa, you heard it from the source. Inspire and empower someone else by leaving.

A five star review so they can.

Transform their lives too.