How FASTING Can Help You LOSE WEIGHT, LIVE LONGER, and THINK CLEARER

[Music] you know a lot of us have this ball and chain when it comes to food we eat at breakfast sweet lunch we take up so much of our mental bandwidth that can be used for productivity for relationships for self-development [Music] water only fasting though needs to be done resting if you're going to maximize detox preserve lean tissue fasting 3 days a month 7 days every 3 months 14 days once a year my goal is to help people become their own self-experimentation i'm a huge fan of the ketogenic diet right i went on the doctor osho talking about the benefits of keto and i fell in love with it to be honest with you i don't really care so much as what you eat and how much i want you eating at the same time every day whatever that is it all depends on how you do the caloric restriction so because it's not just about the calories it's about the hormones when you look at the vegan diet vegetarian diet it doesn't by its default mean it's a healthy diet it just means you're avoiding animal foods so when you eat you're storing body fat what you don't eat when insulin is going down you're going to burn body fat you're actually going to you can't burn body fat if insulin is high so if you feel bad in fasting doesn't bother me as long as you get well you'll totally forgive us [Music] one of the main benefits of fasting prolongedly is affecting glucose insulin mitochondria function that we introduce the show on but it it drops empty towards the floor and we know that chronic mtor over expression is linked with premature aging diseases so i think the ability through drugs through exercise and through fasting protocols to manipulate this critical energy sensor called mtor is super fascinating so i think you know right now in 2019 a lot of people are microdosing psilocybin and lsd i personally experiment with that fairly often i think in two years people are going to be microdosing rapamycin people are going to be microdosing various mtor inhibitors to to like they're like called calorie restriction memetics so we're kind of manipulating the physiological effects people are already [ __ ] with rapamyosin it's a very few you mentioned the other one i'm blanking on it right now like metformin metformin does it take metformin i don't i take berberine interesting so the one thing like when the cameras stop rolling yeah the one thing a lot of people are like yeah i [ __ ] with it is is that a thousand percent i'm talking about doctors yeah where i'm like all right then like it's one of those it is only my fear of the unknown where it's like if something seems too good to be true it probably is and i don't know what kind because they've been giving it to diabetics and cancer patients for a long time a long time so uh i don't know what kind of studies have come out based on that but metformin is probably one of the safest drugs you could take um it it's actually very poorly absorbed here's what's really good so i've you know studied the microbiome forever i'm very curious about how these drugs work like it's only 33 or something like that is absorbed how is it working it's affecting your microbiome it's affecting the gut hormones and your bugs so very safe the only thing you might need to add more of would be b12 and folate because it purportedly does affect methylation and or absorption but that's a very safe drug i i'm not i wouldn't be ashamed to take say that i take it i don't i take berberine so i do that 500 milligrams of berberine hydrochloride three same thing meant to slow mtor yeah well it it affects am i i don't want to get complex into biochemistry but you have kind of a yin yang you have mtors growth ampk is break down okay you know one's either good or bad they just are uh berberine and metformin increase ampk ampk is a switch just like emptors of switch they're different knobs so it's breaking down what crap inside ourselves okay so this is a little bit like autophagy ampk and mtor are the key cellular switches that ultimately guide autophagy and govern whether or not we're going to tear down break down you know advert proteins dysfunctional proteins aggregated proteins dysfunctional organelles we kind of talked about how our cells are like little homes inside our appliances those appliances become dysfunctional and that's where autophagy self-digest comes in and so you have a bad furnace autophagy and will help to clear that a bad furnace in your cell would be a mitochondria golgi apparate endoplasmic reticulum there's all these different compartments it's even speculated that the ability to break down fat and glycogen stored glucose is autophagy mediated even recovering from exercise this is what's so cool so when we feel sore after workout how do you think our body recovers from that it's via autophagy and breaking down those damaged proteins so that we can rebuild them so that they're stronger for our next workout so i like to throw that in there because when people hear autophagy they think fasting but that's just one knob on the sautophagi wheel exercise there's a ton of data showing that exercise enhances autophagy because you're causing your body to dig deep and break down glycogen for that workout we recommend there's two types of fasting there's short term intermittent fasting which we recommend people do every day that everybody fast every day for between 12 and 16 hours depending on what your target is and that means that you don't eat at least three hours before you go to sleep hopefully going to sleep at a reasonable hour and so that gives you 12 to 16 hours of fasting and eight hour feeding window we recommend that that in that eight hour feeding window that the you know whole natural food diet that you eat excludes all the chemicals and the processed foods and the other stuff and in doing that you get the quantity and quality of nutrients you need and you give yourself a 16 hour period of fasting every day and cumulatively that's thought to induce changes and and stimulate factors that are that promote healing it also helps minimize overeating and so you know the net effect of that intermittent fasting which virtually everybody can do safely on their own is something we recommend and then periodically we recommend people take a longer period of time to do water only fasting in our clinic we fast people from five to forty days and so typically faster two three four weeks of time that needs to be done in a minute is that only for people that are obese no no not at all in fact most of our patients uh it's high blood pressure diabetes autoimmune diseases lymphoma and we have also healthy people that are just coming in for a shorter period of time like a week the reason we talk about supervision in that regard is number one not everybody's a good candidate for fasting some people should not be fasting well if people have for example cranium levels over 2.0 their kidney function is inadequate putting them on a fast can shut their kidneys down result in kidney failure and death um if they have cardiovascular why i've never heard that but why would your kidney shot because when you go on a fast you massively mobilize a detoxification response and the kidneys can only process so much material and if you overload the kidneys you end up with a kidney failure situation and that's you know you've heard recently there's been people that have tried dry fasting and dry fasting particularly puts a heavy load in the kidney and there was a death associated with one of its proponents just because you know you have to have a solute in order for the kidneys to function you have to have a way of getting the material that's mobilized out of the system why is fasting triggered detoxification well if you think about it when you're going on a fast there's nothing for the body to do except mobilize its reserves and in water fasting particularly in a resting state those reserves are predominantly fat in fact we've done a study recently at the true north health center where we've used a dexa scanner with software that allows us to do whole body composition we've determined not only is mostly fat mobilized during water only fasting but specifically in preferentially visceral fat so a person might lose say for example 20 of their adipose tissue but they'll lose 50 60 of their of their visceral fat which is really exciting much faster than for example being on a a low carbohydrate diet in terms of the ratio of visceral fat mobilization to subcutaneous fat and in that fat contains a lot of fat soluble materials and it's where a lot of toxins are stored when those fats are mobilized you get a increasing load pcbs dioxin pesticide residues etc all these fat soluble nutrients are rapidly mobilized processed and eliminated but you need to have the capacity to actually eliminate materials and most of those matures are eliminated in the urine that's the blood being processed by the kidneys and if you do a fat biopsy on any person you'll find hundreds of different chemicals in various concentrations and if you track back how did those chemicals get in the body where did they come from obviously if people take drugs or they smoke and they drink alcohol and they eat foods from the environment that are polluted that's a potential source but about 90 percent according to some researchers got there from one behavior and that's eating animal foods animals biologically concentrate the toxins from their environment so a calorie of animal food could have two to a thousand times the concentration of a given chemical compared to say a plant-based food calorie and so the consumption of large amounts of animal food uh potentially expose people to proportionally higher ratios of these materials and it's also why people on very high animal food diets often have a much more difficult time adapting to the fasting state initially because there's just literally more to process and eliminate but it does and so that's particular i might mention true of refined animal products just like refined plant products have particular problems so i think we need to be clear that it's actually these highly processed foods of any kind that seem to be the biggest sources of concentration of chemicals it's not necessarily the brown rice that's the main problem it might be the rice syrup or it's the products that the highly concentrated products that result in the largest concentrations of materials undesirable materials when you fast though the body rapidly mobilizes these materials if you fast and exercise them once you've depleted your glycogen stores after say 24-48 hours the only way the body would get the needed glucose to maintain muscle activity or excess brain activity would be through gluconeogenesis you'd have to break down proteins in order to get that so what happens is if you fast and exercise you actually lose more weight but more of it's lean tissue if you fast and rest you you mobilize predominantly fat and specifically and preferentially visceral fat so in addition to making sure a person is a good candidate for fasting with a history exam and lab we also need to make sure they rest during fasting now there's modified fasting when you take a certain amount of calories therefore you have more glucose available you're able to you know minimize gluconeogenesis that's a different process water only fasting though needs to be done resting if you're going to maximize detox preserve lean tissue and maximize fat loss and that we've been able to prove now you know we've actually done this and we've done you know before during after fasting six-week follow-up so we've got the data and so we can put a lot of the old wives tales to rest that paper will be published later this year and and i think that'll really make people aware of just why this rest which is so controversial to people trying to maximize weight loss is important with fasting what are your recommendations in terms of diet and exercise for somebody who's ready they've gotten sort of mentally prepped they're ready to go down the actual sort of mechanistic part of this journey yeah that's a great question so my goal is to help people become their own self-experimentation right so i'm a huge fan of the ketogenic diet right i want the doctor osho talking about the benefits of keto and i fell in love with it to be honest with you but it might not be for everybody and but what i tell people is be open to experimenting whether it's a plant-based diet or paleo or keto or whatever it is be open to some kind of experimentation with your body because it's not a one-size-fits-all approach i can't just give you a diet of 2 000 calories that's 70 fat 25 protein 5 carbs and then boom it'll magically work for you um just realizing that you know what works for me or you or someone else might not work for you that's totally fine let's go let's find something else that works for you so um helping people realize that it's a it's a journey not a destination it's not a race to the finish line right it's not like how much weight can i lose in the short amount of time with the least amount of effort you know just realize that this is a lifestyle it's going to take time and but being open to changing things upgrading evolving as you are on your journey i do uh intermittent fasting every day i do i try to keep my average pretty damn close to 20 hours a day what are what's your take on intermittent fasting fasting in general useful not useful i i love it i i advocate it in both of my books i but you have to find what works for your body because i feel like sometimes people i see this a lot they go too aggressive with time-restricted feeding or intermittent fasting and then they what's too aggressive well it's for their body so let's just say they want to try like the omad like the one meal a day 22 to 2. you are getting your calories in in a two hour to one hour window so 22 to 2 or 23 to 1 fasting to eating window you have to make sure you're getting enough calories in that time that's a big meal yeah so i've been experimenting with it you've tried omad oh yeah and i like it and i've just been doing this i knew about the research i've written about it before but i didn't do it for myself until recently um and i'm excited what's the research saying because i want to live forever okay is this going to help in that endeavor i mean with these longer periods of fasting you in theory are up regulating these autophagy pathways okay cellular recycling gobbling a good sales goal where do you think that kicks in 16 hour 18 hour 20 hours well i think depends on how much inflammation is going on in the person it depends on how insulin will determine when autophagy kicks in yeah because if the body you see people that are resistant and look we can't gauge i have no practical clinical way for me to gauge autophagy i wish i did but when a lab comes out i will be running it but when you look at people's biomarkers and the things we can gauge you look at their blood sugar you look at their insulin levels look at their inflammation levels some people can't get into this in ketosis very easily they have to kind of get these things in check and that takes time right and then you could measure your glucose you can measure your insulin you can measure your ketones if you wanted to have you ever worn a continuous glucose i haven't it's [ __ ] interesting dude you have to do it i need i know i need to i have patience on it but i was gonna say like that's a must that it's it is if your diet is clean it's a little bit gimmicky maybe the wrong word but you just get to see like oh wow like i ate an impossible burger i thought i'm really gonna like go ham on this whole plant protein thing or plant-based diet thing let me see how i do as i upregulate admittedly it was at a restaurant so maybe they put so much panache in it that it you know is what made it ridiculous but dude i reacted like i ate ice cream it spiked my glucose to like 170 which for me is crazy town yeah i mean you could just see on the because it's you know my continuous monitor is pretty flat this massive peak it was crazy i hope you guys enjoyed this episode brought to you by our sponsors at athletic greens to receive a free one-year supply of vitamin d and five free travel packs with your first purchase visit athleticgreens.com impact theory enjoy the episode be fasting three days a month seven days every three months 14 days once a year like i want to know that and there's no amount of money that would make it worth you know not knowing the answer to that question um wow that's a bold statement well think about it i'm not to suggest that like money doesn't matter and money you can't do great things with money like i want money just as much as the next person but never at the expense like i don't want anything to get in the way of the knowledge that can drive living longer that to me is such a priority that i would rather be poor but know how to you know live longer and have all the money in the world and lose my health if you look at this umbrella of intermittent fasting within that are different protocols alternate day fasting the 5 2 16 8 where you're fasting like you fast for 24 basically 20 hours a day within that is this time-restricted feeding bubble and they are having subjects eat earlier in the day so they started eating at eight and cutting off at two and that was it and what they showed is there was a dramatic increase in autophagy just by doing that changes in hormones changes in glucose insulin but we always think well if a topic is good more is better but if we think of overweight people their fat cells have higher levels of autophagy occurring it's a compensatory mechanism because if you were to it sounds weird but if you were to biopsy someone who's morbidly obese and you look at their fat tissue there's a lot of necrosis and like literally tissues are dying there's a lot of immune cells so if you didn't know anything about autophagy and you looked at adipocytes in obesity you would think autophagy is bad because it's upregulated and so i just want people to understand and certain cancers utilize autophagy upregulation to avert the immune system to help it so it's interesting so it's not this clear some it's good or bad it's contextualized and tissue specific and sometimes more is not better so that a lot of people are doing hey i did a 24 hour fast one let's just roll it out to 96 hours 72 hours what are your goals why are you doing this sometimes more is not better and when isn't it better because so if i knew for instance that um fasting 100 would keep you cancer-free but you have to do let's say a 14-day fast i would do it i would do it every year so when is when is too much too much you know i think when is too much is when it affects your sleep when it affects your recovery your muscle performance when you start seeing negative side effects when is it ideal when you feel good you know i'm not sure what the ideal situation is that really true so when i think okay so now let's make it real practical for me i'll just be selfish for a minute so uh i hate doing a five-day fast because my productivity falls through the [ __ ] roof or floor um after 72 hours 72 hours is very doable i can stay focused i still have energy all that but the last two days are gnarly and i i start feeling sick and and i'm just slowing down and i don't have my energy and i find myself zoning out so if it isn't advantageous i want to stop doing it but i know that my motives aren't pure so i'm gonna need some compelling evidence here here's my thought is autophagy you know is influenced by circadian rhythms by epigenetics and whatever just like exercise why not make it more consistent and shorter so every week do a 24-hour fast does everyone need to do that no but if you're looking for longevity like you are and then every quarter do a little bit of a longer one like three days or two days or whatever right so there's a little bit more consistency because if you i did the math if you look at over the course of a year you fast every monday for 24 hours if you don't do any other prolonged fast besides that you're fasting for 16 of the entire caliber year that gets you pretty close to that 20 calorie restriction that's well known and it's a good proxy for longevity enhancement at least in animals and other humans without having to really restrict yourself anything else above that in my eyes is just bonus so if you do a three-day fast or a four-day fast every six months that's just icing on the cake and that can get you closer to that 20 there's a physical component there's a mental component and a spiritual component right physically we know that's great for anti-aging longevity anti-cancer better digestion cell regeneration in your body that's the physical component yeah some people do it for weight loss which i do not do it for uh there's a mental component too knowing that you can go a day two three however long without food and live and actually thrive just realizing that you don't have to be asleep to food you can be in control of your body is is um it's amazing for your body and your mind to realize that you're okay without food you'll be okay you know you're not gonna die and then a spiritual component like there's a reason almost every major religion has some type of fasting in it you know in the mormon religion uh we grew up fasting uh one 24 hours uh a month like one day a month you fast for 24 hours and i hated it as a kid so you know my perception of what fasting was was like uh this sucks but there's a spiritual component like being able to be more in tune with your body and spirit without having food to distract you um is really powerful and i feel like it can uh be spiritually uplifting you know whether you're religious or not just being more in tune with your body and in your spirit as well like you you are a soul i do really believe that and i think fasting is a way to tap into that and so there's a physical mental and spiritual component to fasting that i just love and so for me i will i intermittent fast almost every day and then extended fasting i do kind of as a cleanse maybe two to three times a year and all it ranges anywhere from three days on the lower end to um you know i've done a seven day fast before but i'll admit for me already being really lean that was kind of that was kind of tough like day seven was really hard for me and this was during the winter in utah and my body temperature drops so i get freezing cold and then it was during christmas season so there we were going to christmas parties and there was food everywhere i'm like okay next time i do this like i gotta be like by myself you know um but for me and my sweet spot is four days to end water only so i'll do water and just a little bit of salt right and that's what i found works best for me yeah it's really i think it's super important for people to at least give fasting a try because so my bias is living forever so the only thing that's been shown across every species to elongate lifespan is caloric restriction and when you realize it seems studies suggest that you get all of the benefits of chronic caloric restriction by doing um just even intermittent fasting where it's a timed window so you've taken the same number of calories but you do it over a condensed period of time yeah um that is i think super important for people to experiment with and look at and see what kind of effect that is i think there's a balance too because i think there's you know quantity of life but there's also quality of life it's not like you need to fast and just eat at a calorie deficit deficit for the rest of your life like you know enjoy life too you know have some wine you know have a beer every once in a while and pizza like you know but you know when and and when it feels right to you can i confess something yeah go ahead i had ice cream this weekend you did it no ice cream amazing real ice cream realizing not like halo top okay ice cream cold stone wow and my wife and i just decided to like make it we we've been working so much yeah that just have a reconnect weekend and to do something fun yeah and she was like you know you game for this and it was rad yeah and it was yeah it was a super good reminder that while i think you can obviously get yourself into trouble if you're not in control of that but for me i probably cheat on my diet three times a year so it's like i don't have an addictive personality first of all so like that's not a real thing for me um but dipping into it and like you said and i've heard you talk wonderfully about this like you said something like oh if i'm at my mom's house and this christmas and she makes you know some special bread thing i'm gonna have the special bread exactly and i i love that talk about that like how can people um because i here's what makes me sad eating ice cream is awesome yeah being alone by yourself in the corner of the ice cream shop shoveling it down and not making eye contact with people and you're clearly not having fun like that breaks my heart every time i see yeah it's similar to kind of consuming alcohol like are you by yourself celebrating by or are you celebrating by yourself are you kind of down on yourself and you're eating your emotions with that substance whether it's ice cream or alcohol or drugs whatever it is like what's your intention behind it for me those types of moments with whether it's alcohol or whether it's certain types of foods are meant to be you know a bonding thing with with family or friends or a positive experience and yes i think in that situation if your intention is just i'm eating i'm stressed out so and no one's watching so now's the time to do it that's where i think that's uh a behavior that needs to be worked on right and i wish it was as simple as saying well just don't do it right like you wouldn't tell a drug addict like hey stop doing drugs what's wrong with you it's not that hard just put it down it's similar for some people right where they're you know eating their emotions and they're so ashamed by it that they you know have to do it by themselves and it's sad and i feel like that's where that self-worth comes in and the need for support system and accountability come into play and um it's not like a black and it's not black and white there's so many gray areas a lot of it has to do with trauma or self-worth from a very young age and now we're trying to tell people like yeah you're beautiful you're worth it and just change your behavior overnight i wish it was that easy but just realize that it's constant battle it's never ending you're always going to fight it for the rest of your life but just realize that you're worth it to keep fighting that's my message that's my hope for people even on these long fast two three four five weeks and they're do they do fine but they are resting and so resting in some ways is a little bit harder but it's more effective i say it's harder because you'll detox more you'll feel worse but we don't care how you feel we care how well you get so if you feel bad in fasting doesn't bother me as long as you get well you'll totally forgive us and so next time you fast you want to make sure you rest during that doesn't mean you can't do some stretching you can't do meditation there's things you can do but they're more passive and then you look at how your recovery is post-fasting you'll find it's really quite fabulous because not only you get rid of the inflammation and the joint pain and some of the chronic injuries but then you recover quickly and we and we're able to demonstrate that quantitatively now as as lean tissue recovers fat continues to go down after fasting so you're losing fat you're losing fat you continue to lose fat even though you're regaining quote weight because glycogen water fiber and muscle come back after fasting fat does not what's interesting is you have two pounds of glycogen so you know you're going to get that two pound back you've got fiber that has to go back in the gut unless you're eating an all meat diet then there is no fiber and there's also hydration there's a physiological dehydration with fasting now that's more when you're exercising you dehydrate more so it looks like you're losing more weight but all you're doing is dehydrating why are you dehydrating if you're drinking water it doesn't matter if you're drinking water if it's you hold it in the cells there's a physiological adaptation to fasting where there's a natural dehydration state it's probably part of the conservation mechanism there's a lot of weird things that happen very contra intuitive during fasting like for example you know we talked about exercise increasing brain derived neurotrophic factor that preserves the brain and protects the nervous system it also increases in fasting you think about exercise you're vigorously active fasting you're laying on your around and not doing much they both are changing these same things in the same way it's it's really really um non-intuitive but when we look at the science if we look at the data and then we look at the clinical outcomes it's really apparent and now we're tracking people 30 35 years i've got people now that are in their 80s that we started off in their 50s and they all say the same thing including my mother who at 92 had outlived all 50 of her lifelong friends every one of her friends was dead she was alone and she said alan you need to warn your patients if they're going to do this diet make younger friends so i'm telling people starting right now make younger friends so when you're older and you're still around you know they'll you'll have people to interact with people should try various diets and see what works for them and i think a lot of people get stuck in this regimented thing where and it can backfire on them too they're carnivore so then when berries come in season when people might watch this towards the end of summer blueberries gonna be in full swing does that mean you totally avoid blueberries because there's i believe i'm not one of these people that think plants are bad i think blueberries the anthocyanidins and the various and you know antioxidants have a lot of benefit to your microbiome and to your body in general but then when you start to identify that you're a carnivore or a keto or you're vegan then you close yourself down a little bit so i think in your case you don't have any major health issues that i'm aware of you know that you've talked about so i would just continue what you're doing but maybe in the winter probably the best time to go carnivore i'm going to say [ __ ] you and here's i don't have i have one health issue and that is i'm dying so the only real question i care about in every health theory episode i do is how do i live forever like if you're steering by how you feel which is essentially what i do i just don't know what its impact is on longevity um if a carnivore diet like if somebody could tell me no no a thousand percent if you do a carnivore diet you're gonna live to 150. i'd be all over the carnivore diet all day every day i wouldn't even think about it i'd never touch another [ __ ] blueberry in my life like i would just eat it um but it's it's that big [ __ ] question mark about longevity that winds me up well let me pose this question to you how could a diet be negatively affecting your longevity if it makes you feel better that makes your sleep better if it improves your heart rate variability if it makes you stronger if it makes you recover better how could it slow down your longevity i mean or affect longevity in a negative way i don't know maybe i'm not thinking about this through properly but it doesn't make sense to me if your diet is con is mostly consists of cinnamon toast crunch and mountain dew like mine was you know all these processed foods which look i'll be honest with you they're convenient they're affordable they're super they're cheap compared to you know a salad or whatever and they taste really good they really do and there's they are they can be very addictive for some people if you're eating real food most of the time and you're moving your body every single day biking or swimming or zumba dancing ecstatic dance whatever it is moving your body right just getting out there moving and eating real food you know no one it's super easy to eat 20 cookies right like if you're like stressed out and you're having these baked goods in your house but no one's gonna eat sit down eat 10 20 avocados right i mean i've never seen anyone do that because they're stressed out and i think if we could just get people to focus on the process of the habits that make a healthy lifestyle rather than the results then i think the results will take care of themselves you have two daughters how do you deal with food and them i mean especially knowing how tasty processed foods are that's a great question i always ask other parents when they come on my podcast like what works for them because it's different for each family for each kid because i see both ways of being overly strict right and not letting them touch a process carbohydrate or any refined sugar and then i know that the moment they're with grandma or whether at the friend's house on a play day or they're at school where other kids are eating candy and they can't there's moments where i can't control what they're going to eat but when they're with me i try and control what they eat and teach them about why we eat certain foods like why are we eating vegetables it's not a punishment right i'm not making you do it it's there's a reason i'm you know we're supposed to be eating vegetables and here's why so from my girls are seven and nine and they know what uh broccoli is they know what cauliflower is and you know we go grocery shopping together i help i have them help chop food and prepare the food so they're in there in the kitchen things like micronutrients i mean they don't understand that so basically this is what i do is i say hey on the inside of us there's a lot of good guys there's a lot of bad guys and when we eat vegetables our good guys get stronger and they can beat up the bad guys but when we're eating junk food the bad guys they get strong and they beat up the good guys and that's when we feel sick that's kind of what i tell them and it seems to work um but you know i'll be honest with you we do have treats every once well but i'll get them like halo top ice cream or something like that or i'll make them a keto cookie and they don't really know you know but then they're with grandma this week for example in in idaho and i know she's going to give them you know juice with high fructose corn syrup and that kills me but i can't micromanage every single person that comes into my daughter's life so don't beat yourself up just do the best you can with what you have it's not going to be perfect they're going to you know have access to this food at some point in time but if you can control what they eat when you're with them then that's all you can control right and i i don't have the energy to micromanage every single food piece of food that goes into their mouth but let's talk uh carnivore versus vegetables so i maybe i like vegetables a lot but i tend to like the ones that are really um carby sweet potatoes are so delicious i would give virtually everything to eat them all day um but i even though i like vegetables partly out of laziness because i don't want to cook them i am almost not entirely because i'll throw in rice every now and then um but i'm carnivore adjacent i like that what is it what nutrients do you fear i will miss if i were to eat organ meat and all that but not have vegetables i think if you are eating organ meat and doing it well with a variety of nutrient-dense meats i don't think you'd be meeting eat missing many nutrients other than fiber which is a major way that we help with gut diversity a robust variety of plant foods is associated with a healthier microbiome longer term and we have longer term studies with these we don't have longer-term studies with the carnivore diet i would assume that if someone's doing it properly there they probably at a period of time would be would seem more good than bad because they're removing a lot of foods and then it's going to be a net positive for them if they're doing a properly formed carnivore diet right but is that going to be sustainable long term for them most people are are going to want more variety than that you know a lot of us have this ball and chain when it comes to food right we're just you know we eat at breakfast we eat lunch and we work we take up so much of our mental bandwidth that can be used for productivity for relationships for self-development but when i do interviews when i interview other people or when i'm being interviewed i like to do it in a fasted state now i didn't start doing that it took me a while to get to the point where my ketone levels get to a point where i'm not feeling hypoglycemic and the symptoms of like low blood sugar affect me but i don't really worry about is because once you're fasted for me personally i don't start to get negative symptoms in terms of sleep issues and maybe constipation or whatever until day three so i'm cool going to 36 hours and not knowing am i going to have food or not so it's just a way to clear the cobwebs not have to worry about meal prep on sunday but the reason why i do it is i actually have a tumor biomarker that's elevated called alpha fetal protein interesting that's why you started doing it well that's why i'm fasting pro more on a more prolonged basis every time people why why do you think that it and then tell us the exact protocol yeah um give people a little bit of the background on the potential anti-cancer properties what you've read i'm super interested in this so you can go as crazy as you want well you know there's a lot of research people talk about fasting first of all lowering glucose and insulin and so obviously there's many different cancer subtypes and cancer cells metastasize and they they mutate and and so forth but a lot of research shows that cancer cells can utilize glucose and insulin to thrive so getting rid of those growth insulin i've not heard that so the cancer cell can actually use insulin as what a growth factor is a growth factor to kind of pivot uh their metabolism to a more glycolytic so they're burning sugar instead of fats and we'll get into autophagy in a minute but insulin is involved in kind of amplifying mtor mechanistic target of rapamycin i know you had peter atiya on and he talked at length about this but this is really the gas pedal for cellular growth and so it's and i like to just pause right here and let people know it's it i describe mtor like a light switch in your home right it's not good or bad it's the context that matters your light switch is great when you want to find something in the dark but it can be bad if you're sleeping and someone turns it on so that's where you know every time we eat even if it's a vegan meal or a animal-based meal we're going to stimulate mtor so just wanted to throw that out there it's not good or bad it just is in its context but getting back to your question about insulin that could be the purported mechanism through which insulin may affect cancer growth is through mtor activation which just kind of fuels pro-growth pathways yeah so getting back to it glucose inhibition or lowering glucose down lowering insulin enhancing mitochondrial function so a lot of people i'm sure you've talked about this you know if we envision our home being a cell our home has different appliances right we have the refrigerator the stove top the furnace uh inside each one of our cells we have different appliances they're called organelles so they're little cells within cells really and our mitochondria play a key role in helping us burn fat for fuel helping us think clearly helping us move our muscles and it seems that mitochondrial dysfunction is uh you know an upstream event leading to various diseases from mild cognitive impairment to blood sugar issues and low energy fatigue things like that but certainly cancer as well so we got the mitochondrial function and then for me enhancing autophagy so as i said i do lab work i've been doing lab work like you know comprehensive metabolic panels twice a year and i started to have this gi pain and i could not figure out where it was coming from and it was just like persistent so after three months this was back in 2015. i started to do some research on the internet and i'm like you know maybe i could have cancer maybe i could have something and i started to look and since it was in this region i was looking for gastrointestinal biomarkers so i measured those and there was this one test called alpha fetal protein which is high in people that have hepatitis or hepatocellular carcinoma which is a metastasis of the liver so i ran it and the normal range is zero to eight and mine was 80. whoa so anytime you have a weird biomarker just retest because it could just be part of the lab so i retested it and it was 79 and then i was freaking out like dude because i have a little girl at home so i'm i was nervous right you're nervous because that's indicative of having this liver cancer exactly okay so because i had this biomarker i started to kind of believe that i might have cancer and then i started like on one hand it was great because i was more present with my daughter enjoying the moment putting down the phone at night things like that but on the other side i was like i can't have this mindset that i have something i and this is common in western medicine you have autoimmunities you have hashimoto's so people start saying i have ms i have this and i i think we need to realize that certainly our body can have perturbations but it doesn't mean you're always going to manifest symptoms of that if you you can the body and the mind and the diet and lifestyle are so powerful one of the things that i found fascinating about your own story is that you start as uh were you full vegan or were you just vegetarian i was a vegan for 10 years okay so you migrate away from that why did you migrate away from that so i think there's a good way to do an optimal way to go to the vegan diet and there's many vegan keto options in ketotarian so if people are for religious reasons or ethical reasons or personal preference reasons i wanted to teach them to go entirely plant-based in a way that i believe is sustainable not only for the environment but for their physiology their environment their bodily environment so we all have different gene snips i have a double gene snip of the mthfr gene which is the gene that makes the enzyme that converts folic acid into folate which we need is a methyl donor it basically does a lot of cool things for our body it's a carbon hydrogen group that brings down inflammation it helps our hormones working well our brain working well it builds proteins in our bodies my body does that pretty dang slowly like up to 70 percent slower and folate uh especially in abundant amounts and b12 aren't as high in in b vitamins uh when you're doing entirely plant-based so i adjusted my diet where i'm still predominantly plant-based but i'm bringing in things like egg yolks into the vegetarian land and then the wild caught fish and as far as the pescetarian section of my diet to provide my body more ample bioavailable sources of these nutrients and omega fats are another one of them not just the b vitamins but the conversion is lousy in my body of these like flax seeds and chia seeds my body doesn't convert them to sort of the long chain omegas as well as somebody else so we have to find out what works for a body then there's some people that do great with vegan diets i mean you know rich role right the guy does amazing on this diet and his wife julie they do fine but i talk to patients for a living and i most of my patients are very well read they've done all their research they're eating cleaner than most americans they're eating vegan diets they're eating vegetarian diets they're doing all these things but their health is struggling how can we optimize it without abandoning the foundation of maybe their ethics or principles right so one thing in the book that you cover is what oftentimes vegetarians and vegans do wrong what is that where do they what whole is in their diet that you help fix i think a lot of them overdo it on the carbs you know they're carbitarians by definition and when you look at the vegan diet vegetarian diet it doesn't by it default meaning it's a healthy diet just means you're avoiding animal foods so you have to have it properly formed you have to really lean into it it's so easy because it's convenient to get all these convenient vegetarian foods just like any other way of eating so you want to make sure you're again focusing on whole foods real foods look at your macros just get a snapshot of where you're at from a macronutrient which is proteins fats and carbs some people have a taller they can handle more carbs some people can't like i have many patients that if they ate what rich role ate their blood sugar would be through the roof but some people can do it so we have to find your what works for your body and what doesn't so they could that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be plant-based maybe they just need to shift what plant-based foods are focusing on that's all the other thing with fasting while we're talking about risks is the re-feeding period if you have a long period of fasting and you re-feed inappropriately you can get a condition called re-feeding syndrome which can be fatal it's a very serious problem where electrolyte balances and all kinds of stuff can occur we've never seen that because we have a very specific refeeding protocol that's followed and we refeed for a period of no less than half the length of the fast in a controlled setting so it is it is important you can also get a condition called post-fasting edema when you get off all the greasy salty processed crap that people are living on and you do a fast all that gets flushed out of the body if you then expose a person to very high concentrations of sodium like in commercial soups or something like that the body will suck that material and fluid up to protect itself from it and that can result in post-fasting edema if you do it slowly you can get back to whatever your normal diet was without that problem but it has to happen over a period of time so there's a re-feeding period that's important particularly in this long-term fasting you know in the three-day the five-day fast for most people that's not going to result in you know as much of it of an issue they may get a belly ache if they eat eat too much food but they're not going to get the very serious consequences as you can see in very long-term fasting now the other concern here is of course medications some medications you don't want to rapidly discontinue anticoagulant medications steroid medications any psychotic medications the rapid withdrawal of those medications can induce a very serious or life-threatening response some medications you want to get off as soon as possible but you don't want to be taking those medications during fasting so medications that might not do that much damage feeding can be very serious fasting even non-steroidally anti-inflammatories and common over-the-counter medications in the fasting state strongly contraindicated result in all kinds of downstream consequences supplementation is included lots of complications in the fasting state whereas you wouldn't necessarily see any problem in the feeding state that's one of the reasons we talk about making sure before a person undertakes a long-term fast they have appropriate history exam and lab remember 99 of patients have no complications uh with fasting but one percent can have very serious complications important that percentage be identified monitored and so you don't end up with bad outcomes because that's what gives fasting a bad name is people doing it inappropriately they continue to work they get dehydrated which is one of the main issues with fasting is maintaining adequate hydration and drinking water itself won't assure that in fact drinking too much water can flush your electrolytes out and result in um water intoxication so if we don't solve the problem drinking water how do we solve the problem right we solve it by resting maintaining appropriate hydration and allow the natural recycling mechanisms in the body to maintain nutritional status and monitoring people so that we don't get into a depleted state that's why we're monitoring electrolytes that's why we do twice daily examinations on patients so it is a safe and natural adaptation remember fasting is a biological adaptation you notice everybody every human can fast we have to be able to fast every human that couldn't fast died because every time spring came late there's no way to sustain this bulbous neural net our massively oversized brain two and a half times the vas of say a chimp chimps don't fast you don't feed a chip in a week or so they're dead they that's why you'll never see chimps wandering away from the tropics they live with a constant year-round supply of food because their brain doesn't change to burning ketones your brain is a bi-fuel brain it changes completely the normal fuel is glucose and that's your main burner of glucose is your brain that's the biggest thing and when the brain goes into fasting state it changes to burning ketone bodies particularly beta hydroxybutyric acid and it becomes preferentially burning it just brings a tiny little bit of glucose and that's the little bit of gluconeogenesis that continues during fasting unless you're active then of course your muscles burn glucose and now you really start breaking muscle down so um the brain being a bi-fuel brain had to be that way because otherwise humans when spring came late because we burned so much glucose in our brain we wouldn't have been able to make it and this is the mechanism by which fasting mimicking diets and keto diets play because if you go on a very high fat diet or a high fat high protein diet which some people do and you don't eat carbohydrates this fasting mechanism kicks in so your brain changes over to burning ketones you go into ketosis and it has a hunger blunting effect when you're in a ketotic state you don't feel hunger and as a consequence that helps people that are trying to do short-term weight loss the problem is what's good for short-term weight loss isn't necessarily the same thing that's best for long-term health stability so in our clinic we're not a weight loss clinic we're not looking to maximize gross weight on the scale over a short period of time we're interested in fat loss and improving health so we're looking at what does it take not only to live a long life everybody wants to live their full potential but more importantly how do you avoid debility how do you avoid spending the last 79.6 years into ability 16 years in poor health what the average person is doing how do you avoid finding yourself unable to talk or move lying in some nursing home bed waiting for people to change your diaper for the last years or decades of your life how do you increase healthy life expectancy not just life expectancy the years you live fully functional how do you ensure a good death that means you live your life to your full potential one day you go to sleep you don't wake up because you reached your genetic potential and not become debilitated uh individual for years and decades where we spend most of our money and effectively trying to manage illnesses that were caused by poor diet lifestyle choices that's what we're using fasting to do is try to help healthy life expectancy and then a whole plant food sos free diet to sustain it this distinction between chronic caloric restriction and fasting that i find really interesting and let us for the sake of this discussion assume that we have a person who is willing to endure an unlimited amount of suffering um and you even you've talked a lot about the book unbroken that you read about world war ii people in japanese concentration camps and they were literally being starved and obviously all of them got lean so what i want to understand is okay fasting seems to have all these tremendous benefits chronic caloric restriction has some but also has like this really damaging psychological component if there was no damaging psychological component would they be equal or is there still some difference it all depends on how you do the caloric restriction so because it's not just about the calories it's about the hormones right so you have to sort of take it not to sort of this two compartment problem you have to take it to like a three compartment problem right there's what's coming in there's what's stored and there's what's being used okay so most people only think of sort of the two compartments and then the storage is sort of left over that's not the way the body works if insulin is high your body is going to store calories remember insulin is a nutrient sensor it tells your body that hey energy is coming in you're eating you need to store some of this right so you eat breakfast lunch dinner did you get somebody on a low calorie diet like if you were on 700 calories a day but i gave you insulin can i make you fat yeah absolutely whoa because think about it this way if you have insulin your body and so if you think about it physiologically if you have insulin your body goes into a storage mode because it's a hormone insulin is a hormone it tells your body food is coming in and even if you don't give food if you just give insulin you're going to switch your body into this mode where it thinks that food is coming in so it's going to store energy so imagine that for example you are a coal you know a coal uh plant right the power plant you get 2 000 tons of coal coming in and you burn 2 000 tons of coal that's fine but you have a storage compartment too so if you're you know if you do a thought experiment say you say you have 2 000 tons of coal coming in you divert the whole thing over to uh or a thousand tons of coal into storage well you only have a thousand left so you're gonna feel tired and cold and hungry and you're gonna get fat at the same time right that's what's gonna happen but it's because of the way that you've diverted off the energy so think about it from a human body standpoint suppose you have two thousand calories coming in two thousand calories going out now you artificially inject insulin well you shuttle a thousand calories immediately into body fat and you have a thousand calories left to burn well what's going to happen your your body heat generation is going to go down your heart rate is going to slow you're going to feel tired you're going to feel hungry because you want to get more energy right that's the signal for you to get more energy so that you can get more you can burn more guess what that's exactly what happens when you go on a chronic calorie restricted diet and the the point is that if you do it correctly and you you correct that insulin part of things so that none of it's going into storage and you can't do that with chronic calorie restriction you certainly can you have to know that you have to do it properly like cutting out processed foods cutting out refined carbohydrates that kind of thing but it all depends on that sort of that sort of toggle in the middle that says how much goes here how much grease here insulin what it does is it tells your body to store fat but it also turns off fat burning remember fat is purely a store of energy it's a store of calories so you're immediately shuttling all your energy into storage and you have nothing left so say you take 700 calories but you're pumping people full of insulin so that energy is going to go into into storage and 700 is probably the lower limit of what you could really do but your body would then try to subsist on say five six hundred calories of energy you'd get really hungry because you're you've got no energy coming in you'd probably wouldn't be able to last very long but you could still gain weight there's a great experiment a few years ago where they actually took the type 2 diabetics and they gave them a lot of insulin so they went from zero units a day to a hundred units a day over a span of six months which is a lot and they dropped the number of calories that they ate by 300 okay so they're taking insulin but they're eating less 700 300 calories a day less so over the span of six months on average that group gained 20 pounds 20 pounds by eating 300 calories a day less why because so let's take an example you're eating 2000 calories you go down to 1700 but the insulin is shuttling 700 of that immediately off to storage so you're gaining body fat now your body can only burn 1000 calories a day so you feel like crap you feel tired you feel hungry and you're still gaining weight and guess what if you do it wrong which is constantly snacking and eating cutting out all the dietary fat and eating all refined carbohydrates which remember is almost precisely what we told people to do in the 80s and 90s oh i remember it well yeah actually i had a tub of licorice because it was fat-free and i would just eat it and eat it i'm like it's fat-free what's happening why am i getting fat yeah that was a very confusing time it makes perfect sense from like because but you have to think of that additional step that is what is the body actually doing it's this sort of flip the switch so when you eat you're storing body fat when you don't eat when insulin is going down you're going to burn body fat you're actually going to you can't burn body fat if insulin is high i'm going to put you to the test for a second so hiding behind the screen door number one is somebody i'm not going to tell you anything about them i'm not going to tell you if they're a man or woman overweight ripped whatever but you have to tell them how to eat for longevity and feeling good how should they eat i would say sally or joe look i don't know what your health issues are i don't know what you're experiencing but we're going to get you off anything that comes in a box bag or a can no processed food no processed food i want you to go to a farmer that's within a 50-mile radius of you ask them what you can buy that's in season and and buy the animal products that you feel comfortable consuming i don't really care so much as what you eat and how much i want you eating at the same time every day whatever that is so influencing the circadian rhythm so there's a lot of new research studies where they're controlling how many calories people are eating the same amount of calories but if they force it into a confined window it changes this mtor expression and not just a defined window but the same defined window every day you hit on the head exactly so if you're if you're gonna intermittent fast great then eat from say you know noon to six or two to eight it doesn't matter but just try to be consistent just like we should try to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time you know we hear a lot about toxic blue light well when we eat and food in general affects our circadian biology we have molecular clocks in our gut and our muscle and our brain and our pancreas everywhere food entrains that clock too fortunately now there's a higher and higher percentage of organically grown fruits and vegetables available in fact do you know who the largest seller of organic produce in the country is now no it's costco foods whoa okay costco foods is the largest producer or seller of organic products you know who number two is no it's walmart ah i should have guessed so what's happened now is they've said oh i don't think these companies sat down and said well we really want to help the health of our clients they said oh people will pay a premium for food that doesn't use glyphosate or doesn't use chemicals well why don't we sell them that food and now it's become a dominant source of their produce sales because people spoke with their dollars and they said we would prefer to have our vegetable material grown without this and they're doing the same thing with meat you know they're trying to buy free-range meat that doesn't have all the antibiotics and the chemicals because they know that animals biologically accumulate and concentrate these materials and i don't always think it's an and or too even if you're going to for example include animal foods in your diet if you eat a dominant amount of vegetable materials in addition to that your likelihood that your negative consequences from the animal food will be minimized and then the health benefits of being a healthy diet are going to be maximized i think it's a question of proportion and quantity that's the major issue i don't think that there's any evidence that the hundred percent vegan necessarily has any advantage over the person that's mostly vegan and uses a small amount of other products in their diet i don't know that we can demonstrate that difference not from a health standpoint there's this chronic inflammation in the bowel and what you get is a super high risk of cancer down the down the line so uh both inflammation and hyperinsulinemia and obesity all of them are risk factors and and this is the important thing is that there's a lot of different things that can contribute to the risk of cancer it's not just that if one is right then the other is wrong i mean both are correct so if you eat foods that are highly inflammatory and a lot of people feel that for example omega-6 seed oils perhaps are in in these big doses that we take perhaps those are highly inflammatory that even if it doesn't cause obesity could be a factor because we know inflammation chronic inflammation can certainly do that so both can be very important jason thank you so much for joining me today i really really enjoyed our time together and i really enjoyed researching you as well i'm so super grateful and speaking of things you'll be grateful for if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential