Fasting For Survival: Why You Can't Fast Or Keep A Diet... | Dr. Pradip Jamnadas

This is the danger two things one is that they are truly addicted to this and there's two forms of addiction that I've discovered with these patients well not me discovered it but through experience firstly there's the psychological aspect that that you know you've become pavlovian you know you you you you you you come home and the first thing you want to do is is is is gorge on some junk food okay it's a pavlovian It's that house it's that kitchen it's that sofa it's it's sometimes getting into your car that you you dig for something

so we need to get rid of that pavlovian reflex so I tell patients when you it what stimulates your thought about food what what makes you crave for it uh is it certain friends that make you do it or certain environment that do it so that that's that those are all psychological cues and and then the second part of it is the true chemical Addiction which I do believe that is really true because these process Foods especially sugar sugar is number one it goes to the dopamine Center and now all of a sudden the next

time you e sugar you need more and more of it and there Cravings but you know what worse than the Cravings I have to point this out worse than the Cravings are the fact that it changes your brain completely there's actual neuronal pathway changes that occur in your brain So when you are eating all those Oreos all the time you've already got those Pathways built into your brain where the rostro pathways from your dopamine Center and lyic system which go to your frontal cortex they downregulate it now what does that mean that means that when

you addicted to that type of food you can't think straight about that food that means you've become a little Dumber about the intelligence of of your diet And and your control over your diet because it wants to continue to be addicted so you don't get so smart about it okay if you get smart you're gonna not be an addict addict anymore so it m makes your frontal lobe go down in its function and then it goes to the hippocampus so the there connections that go to the hippocampus that that actually make you remember uh that

wonderful feeling that you had when you ate um five uh really bad uh processed Food items in a matter of one hour so so you get that you to break all these down so yes you're absolutely right to break those neuronal Pathways and the Habit Pathways um you got to bring it bring in this slowly so you know I do discuss with my patients how far are they along the path of of this processed food addiction and and what is the consumption I mean today very sad that almost 57% of all the calories that they're

consuming these days are are Coming from processed or Ultra processed foods so you got to bring that number down so changing the content of the diet first before we even introduce fasting I think you're very right you got to change what they're eating first because if you just go straight into dieting they will get a lot of withdrawal symptoms and then as I said you know they're going to be so dismayed and feel so bad they'll fall off the bandwagon they'll never come back again so do make The make do make the change you got

to give them alternative Foods you got to show them that these foods are the ones non-addictive Foods non-addictive Foods um that you got to get on which is basically Whole Foods real food if it looks like that in nature eat it if it's going to go bad eat it if it's got a bar code on it be suspicious don't touch it if it's got a food label on it be suspicious try not to read read it or eat it just get rid of it just get rid Of it so just go for real food so

people come to me and say you're a cardologist so you know I became a vegetari and I don't eat meat anymore and I was one of them that believe that meat hey hey is bad stuff you know I'm Cardiology fac I realized that the research doesn't support that so why would red meat be be bad for you it it can be and my uh association with that or my inter interest in that is that if it's grain-fed cows they're going to have too Much Omega 6 that Omega 6 is getting into you now so that

beef is not going to have the same concentration of fats of a a cow that's eating grass because that's a grass-fed cow it'll have more omega-3 and it'll have more saturated fat in it not the Omega sixes you say you are what you eat and what that ate so meat is actually okay provided it's grass finished and and thereby it doesn't have all that omega-6 in it chicken is okay Organic chicken and if your eggs organic organic eggs I have no problem with these Foods because they are whole they natural and when I put my

patience on these I guess what I get better compliance CU I you can go ahead and eat your egg have your egg for breakfast you know just get rid of the toast just have your two eggs for breakfast cardiologist saying two eggs are fine yes because the cholesterol that's in the eggs is not what's going to raise your cholesterol Level your cholesterol is what you're making mostly in your liver so this type of education they get they feel better about it and say Doc let me eat eggs he lets me eat beef he lets me

eat chicken yeah but I tell you it's got to be the right stuff and then of course with it you got to have your vegetable with it so you got to make these changes in the diet so they eating better quality food better classes of food in the whole state with everything just way Nature Made if it's like that in nature consume it if it can't if it went to a factory and got changed get rid of it that's the bottom line it's the bottom line and sometimes the simplest answers still take it's an uphill

battle against the entire way that Society is organized around food and pleasure and as you've mentioned addiction so I want to say for anybody who's listening that is hearing this and is nodding their head along as they're listening or watching this you Know uh especially with you Dr Jay working with patients you know that there is so much past baggage that people have to let go of sometimes that's even trauma sometimes that's uh all sorts of different components as to even though it's a simple answer we know you're fighting an uphill battle and for everybody

who's listening that feels that they should be further along than they are you're doing the best you can and yes there might still be changes That you want to make and be gentle in the process but keep on at it because you're headed in the right direction yeah uh again you know you you you're you are so far ahead of everyone because you you understand that your eating behavior is also affected by what else is going on in your life so if you have a job that's extremely stressful you've had a lot of uh crisis

going on in your life then at that point I'm going to tell you okay you got to do this this This this and the other it's going to be very difficult for you to do it so when you look at dietary changes and behavioral changes in eating you also got to look at the totality of the patient's life how much stress is going on in his or her life uh what kind of job what kind but you know now you're digging even more layers on that onion you see what I'm saying so you you got

it's so deep it's it's a lifestyle so you got to say to yourself okay I'm Dr J Is not just talking to me about when to eat how to eat and what to eat he also talking to me about am I happy am I peaceful do I have purpose do I have connection am I depressed you know because all these factors are also going to affect not only your eating habit but also your General Health I mean you know let me give you an example I mean we look at the attributable risk of let's say

hypertension or cholesterol to Coronary arter disease but have you looked at the attributable risk of things like depression it's far worse so if you're depressed you're a Sitting Duck to have a heart attack and and nobody talks about that and say okay let's look at your risk factors or sit on your tummy if you're depressed you feel this form up and tell if you're depress nobody's got time to do your own family doctor doesn't have time to do that and yet we don't realize that the Attributable risk uh of depression and other psychological illnesses that

you might actually have are far more do you feel connected you know uh what's your what what's your understanding of your standing in society in general or do you feel that you're at the bottom uh do you feel do you feel that you have confidence that you can talk with um all these things affect your physiology so diet is big one big part of it but all these other things are so Important and and I got to tell you about this one study because this will really um raise your Curiosity on on how I got

involved with this this was a study that was done at Johns Hopkins they took medical students and uh obviously paid them for the experiment you put an arterial line in their radial artery and they were drawing out blood and putting it through a machine that measures your platelet reactivity okay right so they can tell moment to moment Because it's done through light as to whether the platelets are aggregating or not so platelets as you know are those tiny little particles that make your blood clot make your blood sticky um which you don't want because you

want your arteries to be free flowing so what happened is that they give them a test while they're doing this and they flip through the page they answer the questions and the platelets are happy they and then they turn the page and now You got a question that on on a subject that you were never taught the these kids go crazy now oh my God I don't know the answer and guess what happened to a platel reactivity changed instantaneously this is this is so fascinating that that you know and and and I read the study

about 30 years ago and it stuck with me just but it showed me how your moment to moment moment to moment I'm not saying long even moment To moment perception of stress uh affects your physiology this is just one example I've got hundreds of of examples I can show you of how your your mental state um affects your physiology and how your your body reacts on a momentto moment basis down to even expression of angiotensin into receptors in your in your in your endothelium and your blood vessels so whether you're going to actually clot right

now or you're going to Flow and the number of receptors that are expressed moment you know we say that we have these anot tensin to receptors in our cells right yeah so we think they're fixed they're not 3/4 of them are involuted they don't express themselves now under certain circumstances they'll all of a sudden Express themselves and that the the stimulus for the expression of those receptors could be dietary but more so it can also be psychological how you Feel and and it's amazing to me that that that 50,000 receptors now all of a sudden

they are 100,000 expressing themselves so now when the anot tenson comes along you're going to get a hypertensive blood pressure response suddenly your blood pressure goes up so we have these biochemical Pathways we know about it but nobody's saying that okay fine let's look at your diet but also come on get a handle on your life let's let's decrease the stress levels Let's do some meditation let's look at the peer group that you're spending time with are they supporting you with their habits you know there was a study that was uh an offshoot from the

the Framingham data the Framingham heart study that was done in Massachusetts that long longitudinal study and the study's title was the spread of obesity through social networks and they weren't talking about Facebook and Instagram and that they Were talking about how we don't typically think of obesity as a contagious condition or a contagious uh makeup that somebody might have but actually they found that when they looked at somebody in their life if their best friend or there somebody that was close to them that was a friend even more so than their spouse even more so

than their parents or their siblings if their close friend became obese they were much more likely to become obese Themselves so this just goes back to the message that you're sharing that when you step into this mindset of wanting to improve your life feel better and hopefully make the world a better place too you start to look at every single aspect that's there and ask yourself what is the nutrition that I need in that area of my life to feel whole complete and give back to the world and in some cases it's actual food nutrition

in some cases it's Healing your relationship in some cases it's there's so many people that are so alone today and don't have somebody that they would call a best friend somebody that they can rely on that they can be that can be their Confidant and every time I hear you speak I'm just reminded of like how deeply connected all aspects of our life are and we should feel happy about that because even sometimes you have a week where you don't feel like you hit your fasting goals or you didn't Make as much progress in your

dietary goals that are there or you didn't get as good enough sleep okay great don't beat yourself up there's all these other areas how about just calling a friend that you haven't talked to in a little while and making their day how about doing something nice or kind for someone and feeling that joy that comes from giving back into the world even if it's something really small there's always something that you can do to take a step In the right direction of feeling better oh absolutely so you see now you're really talking about a a

holistic approach to this whole problem of uh chronic degenerative diseases of which nutrition fasting is one part of it um but you just hit on so many important points about it's it's our whole Liv you know the the number of visitors that come see a patient after open heart surgery dictates how well that patient is going to recover I mean it's Ridiculous the complication rates are higher if that person has no visitors what's that got to do with complications versus if there's lots of visitors I mean this studies are all done the number of visitors

after open heart surgery to that dictates whether they's going to whether he's going to get home at day number nine or whether he'll be discharged at day number five what's that got to do with it so it's it gets really complicated but you know It gets complicated but then when you sit down and think about it it makes sense that you feel connected your platelets are now pacified your endothelium is working better your blood pressure is better um your physiology your physiology is dictated by the chemicals you put in and the medicines and the food

which is your medicine but also how you think your brain and your your your your whole psyche can also affect your your entire physiology so It's not just fasting I mean you you can't you can't be unhappy and fast I mean I think that's very bad um and you mentioned something about the contagiousness of you know this this is definitely because behavior is contagious that's why when you're trying to fast you you got to stay away from those enablers that enable you to break your fast and go back and fall off the bandwagon because your

best buddy said Oh come on man we we we we going to go For a drink and we're going to have some some chips and um etc etc etc um that's one thing and the other thing is bacterial Flora so you know it's it's amazing but your bacterial Flora can dictate a lot of your physiology too and I'm just digging into all this now and you I'm sure you're aware that uh you know you can do FAL transplants from an obese person to a thin person and vice versa and you can Actually change physiology and

this data is just coming out and it's fascinating but again I tell my patients you know look that may be true just take care of your own Flora feed them the right things give your gut a break let the bacteria flourish the good ones because the the bad bugs have a short half life that means if you don't eat for six or eight hours you've knocked off some of the bad bacteria in your gut so the so the good ones are the Ones that are going to stay behind and they're going to be your resident

population so I said think feed them the right thing eat eat it according to our program over here and you'll have the right bacteria then you won't have to talk about fial transplants and crapsules and all these things that they talk about these days it's absolutely fascinating stuff it's so true and also too when you get a craving you have to think we don't have The ability to distinguish it now but is that you or is that the quote unquote wrong bacteria that's having that craving the yeast inside of the body the candida the build

up of different funguses other things like that that are in the gut that are craving because they feed off of these sugars and those signaling Mo molecules those modulation of the gut bacteria can drive your own craving that's there so sometimes it's not even you that's craving it sometimes It's your bacteria and maybe not the type of bacteria that we want to continue to grow further oh you you are so asud you you you've hit on that gut brain uh AIS connection and it's so true and I just want to leave you with one word

about that that is that almost 50 or 60% % of the micronutrients that are floating around in my bloodstream and your bloodstream are not what we ate it's what the bacteria made and liberated them as a gift to you because You harbit them and you fed them the right stuff hopefully and the right kinds are there and they now float in your body so if you look at turmeric which our ancestry uses and we say it's an antioxidant all that well actually it works in different ways and similarly there are many others that actually the

bacteria the polyphenols are taken up by the bacteria they utilize those and then release the final chemicals into your body it's not the polyphenols getting Into your bloodstream so you're eating for yourself and you got to do the fasting all the stuff but you're also eating for your bacteria and your bacteria in turn are producing tons and tons of chemicals that are then liberated into your bloodstream so you just hit onto a huge thing right there and you know we can talk about hours and hours about all this wonderful new stuff we're learning is it's

just amazing amazing so amazing I have a couple more Questions and I want you to just be able to share about your world a little bit and just anything that you want to have if you had to ask for our audience you know uh to to to to check out something that you're up to then I'd love to get to that so selfish question that I'd love to ask you you know I have I wear a continuous glucose monitor and um that's been amazing I was one of those people that I was always more on

the thin side but I even noticed that uh even in my College career growing up ve vegetarian everything I started even as thin as I was and quite skinny at the time because I was vegan I actually became vegan after that after being vegetarian I started to get a little bit of the belly so I was that tofu I was that you know thin on the outside you know fat on the inside and I had that belly fat then I got in the world of functional medicine other things tried a bunch of different stuff started

incorporating back in Super high quality animal Foods into my diet completely a GameChanger especially tested my Omega 6 to Omega-3 ratio using Omega Quant it's a it's a test that's out there that's pretty popular no affiliation and I saw that my Omega 6 was really high and my Omega 3 was really low so I started incorporating high quality fish into my diet uh salmon wild cut salmon other things and I felt like a completely different person mentally like I was turned on I wasn't Clinically depressed before but I was feeling like I didn't I wasn't

as sharp and I didn't feel like that luster for life so that evolved into as keto became a little bit more popular I said you know what let me try this on now I found through my experimentation of Keto and I eating lower uh sugar lower carbs in the in the diet that was there that I F into what looked like this small class of smaller classification of people that has Loosely been called like lean mass Hyperresponders those are people who their lipids a lot of people go on a higher saturated fat diet and their

lipids improve like a lot of the patients you worked with I went on that even though I wasn't having the sugar and other things and my markers my LDL my NMR profile breakdown of my small dents they went in the wrong like in the not the great Direction have you worked at all with patients uh like that that are in that category that might signal That you know generally that type of diet works well for a lot of people and probably most people that are following the Western diet but there could be either a phen

type or a genotype component where people don't do as well on that diet we love to hear any thoughts that you have so I think you hit on a number of good points over there number one is we are very variable in the way we respond to Foods as well so wearing the glucose monitor you'll Notice that somebody else eats that same meal their sugar response is different and yours is different so and different foods create a different rising in your glucose so we are all a little bit different so you need to find your

food profile that best suits your glucose rise so after experimenting with your diet to see which of your foods cause the greatest sugar RIS in your bloodstream you can't then take that and give it to everybody because they may React a little bit differently so to a certain degree what you've done is very unique because you've you've you've done a unique examination of your own sugars so we all tend to respond a little bit differently um so I think that that's a very important point and then the other thing is that your lipids for example

how they responded generally speaking when I put my patients on a moderate fat low no sugar uh moderate protein diet the ldls to go up exactly like yours did And but what I find a little surprising with you is you see you had small dense particles they usually they go up but they usually large fluffy particles so when your LDL particles become small this is the take-home message that means that no matter what you're doing it may be helping you in other ways but there may be some inflammation going on because when the LDL particle

how does it become small dense it becomes small dense because lipopolysaccharides from Your gut are actually getting in and they displace the cholesterol from the LDL particle and now create a small dense particle that small dense particle also is more likely to get oxidized so these small dense particles you don't want them because they they're more Ox so it tells you that you got lipopolysaccharides which is endotoxin getting into your bloodstream so then you going to ask yourself why is that happening and it may be that that this There certain foods that may not be

causing symptoms in you but may be causing a breach in your in your gut barrier that maybe because you got to ask yourself where this inflammation came and that's the million dollar question I asked every Professor when I was doing my fellowship where does this inflammation come from nobody had an answer no not a single Professor had an answer and and it's plagued me all my life where does this inflammation it Comes from the gut it comes from the gut you know it's so interesting that you said that because we had a microbiologist on the

podcast his name is Kieran Krishan and he's with a company called microbiome labs and he had suggested to me because I had talked about this early on that I said I had a relapse of some skin irritation and acne and he said you know what for some people that had a history of leaky gut and I used to I had a lot of antibiotics Us to when I was a kid for sore throat other things and I had suffer from leaky gut in some instances higher saturated fats even though they can be a lot of

beneficial like butter ghee coconut oil they actually if your leaky gut isn't fixed they cause an endotoxemia effect so I removed coconut oil from my diet I removed the higher saturated fat foods even though I love you know grass-fed beef and I think you know I generally recommend it for people and I noticed a Cooling of the inflammation my skin irritation went away and it kind of brought down and now I'm doing a you know an updated gut protocol to heal all that in the meantime I've eased up on some of those Foods personally again

you know just for my own life to cool that inflammation for me but it just goes to show you that there's so many layers that are there generally speaking everything that we talked about in this interview is largely going to work for People that are there but we're all on our own unique journey of figuring things out exactly so we knew that you've got small dense particles lapop poac get how do they get in they get in through the Le got what is the mechanism what's the carrier molecule the carrier molecule is saturated fat so

we do know that the more saturated fat you consume and if you have a liquor gut now those saturated fats will take endotoxin or lipopolysaccharides into your Bloodstream and now cause small dense particles so you got to work this out so you're absolutely right so working out this chemistry is very important and everyone's individual say say okay you did this you did this you did this but now you got this but what else can cause this so you got to think this now look I I I'm a simple cardiologist I am not a gut doctor

nor am I but but you know but you know more than most gut doctors that are out there Just saying I just you know it it it's it's fascinating to me it's very humbling that all this is going on and and we we need lots more researchers and we need people like you to to to let people know that look it's complicated but it can be done like how you worked it out you said you still have a leaky gut okay fine and and saturated fats are the mechanism by which the lipop polyc get in

so you got to look to see which foods may be Causing your leaky gut and how can you get rid of that so again you know that gets really complicated and and people do tests in the bloodstream to see which antibodies are there and which foods might might be causing it because you may not have over GI symptoms but you may have certain food intolerances especially wheat products so what I do in my practice as a general rule okay as general rule when I'm suspecting that there's this gut is issue going on I Just to

stay away from wheat because that's the number one uh problem I found and when I do that honestly for 80% of the patients it it it helps my situation they may not come back and say oh my Botts feel great but I know that I've helped them because I see the markers in the bloodstream and other things that weight and everything else I see it so wheat wheat is a big one especially processed wheat you know and it's all processed it's all made into powder Wheat is number one and then of course some people don't

talk at um dairy products but I do an elimination a simple elimination look right now just get rid of all wheat just get rid of all wheat and then if you're going to eat other substances I I I do believe that you need to be careful about some lectins because I time to to soak the food the the the eltin containing foods and then use a pressure cooker to kill them so I teach them a little bit about How to eat right and then I look and see what's happening so you know with the leaky

gut it gets a little complicated but yeah Elimination Diet before I do blood tests because other you just there so many blood tests what role can fasting play when it comes to optimizing our health and maybe even uh longevity yeah that's a really interesting question because a lot of the research is still uh coming out um but you know fasting does a lot of different things And remember when we're talking about fasting it's really just any period of time that you're not eating so there's no specific sort of oh you must do sort of like

40 days and 40 nights thing there's no necessarily set limit it all depends on the different type of person however there are several interesting things that happen as you get into sort of um you know 24 hours plus um of of fasting and the thing that most people talk about um most commonly or um the Sort of most topical thing is autophagy and that's one of these things that has really um in the last say five years has really broken through into the Consciousness public Consciousness because uh in 2016 uh one of the big researchers

in autophagy was uh awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine so of course it brought a lot of publicity to it a lot of people heard about it and what it is is autophagy is this uh process where when you don't eat your body starts to Eat itself that's what the word actually means Auto meaning self and fine uh meaning eat so you eat yourself sounds really bad sounds like you know you're you're you're catabolizing you're cannibalizing yourself but that's actually very very good um because it uh what it does is it in a time where

you don't have a lot of access to food so such as fasting your body is going to break down sort of the the the the sort of lowlevel stuff so the the the Proteins that are not working too well they're really old they're sort of junky and it burns It Off for energy and it happens to these subcellular organel um and basically what you're trying to do is get rid of all the junk so it's um one of these mechanisms that's very hard to activate otherwise and it's very important because a lot of the research

was done on yeast so this is actually a a um mechanism that has been conserved through Evolution Basically through all sort of living things from yeast onwards so very very important to health uh if you look at it from that standpoint so what happens of course is that um your body like most people think breaking down is bad but it's generally very good as you get older so when you're young you want to build things up right you're getting bigger you're getting stronger you know everything's growing in size as you get to be an adult

it's not good to have a Lot of growth extra growth is generally bad for you so whether you're talking cancer whether you're talking you know um heart disease and stuff which is you know uh you know a lot of growth factors are actually going to make it worse um so one of the things that is really important to do is actually get rid of these sort of old junky parts and then what happens of course during fasting is that as you sort of get rid of all that old old junk then your growth hormone is

High so as you eat again your body is going to start rebuilding whatever is necessary so you start with getting rid of stuff then your body says okay so what do I actually need and then it's going to rebuild it so when you think about the that whole process of getting rid of old stuff and then bringing back or rebuilding new stuff it's the process of Rejuvenation so if you think about renovation for example you think that oh building is Good but you can't renovate that way if you have an old you know bathroom that

you want to renovate like the first thing you got to do is throw out all the old stuff so you got to get rid of that avocado green tub and matching toilet kind of thing you got to throw it out so you can put in a new tub and new floors and all that sort of stuff but the first step is to get rid of the stuff and that's why autophagy is so important because with without that you can't Actually rejuvenate yourself if you don't get rid of the old stuff you can't get new stuff

in right it's it's like the spring cleaning for your body until you throw out all the stuff you can't do anything so that's why it's so important this process of Rejuvenation so you're actually trying to make yourself sort of almost younger in that sense because that's what that fasting does and you might say okay well you know what what is the most important thing in terms of Turning off and on autophagy and it's really uh protein so when you eat protein um that process of autophagy so amino acids which is the the sort of um

building blocks of proteins that is really just going to turn off autophagy just like that so if people eating sort of you know a little bit all the time and they're eating protein bars and all that time you're you're really never getting into that stage of aagy and uh that's that's one of the Things that people have talked about recently of course the other things is that as you um fast what you're doing is you're tamping down and this is another area of um sort of very important uh sort of breakthroughs in the last five

10 years is that uh we have in our bodies certain nutrient sensors that is we sense what food energy is available so we have insulin if you take carbohydrates you have mtor which is senses if you take proteins um that kind Of thing so we have nutrient sensors it turns out that these nutrient sensors are also growth factors so when you're eating you are turning up growth signaling so anytime you eat it's it's just built into our system so if you look back for instance insulin if you look back insulin didn't start off as a

nutrient sensor the way we think of it now right you eat you know bread insulin goes up it's a nutrient sensor it didn't start out that way um it started out as A growth factor so what we've learned recently is that both the growth factors and the nutrient sensors in the human body insulin mtor are exactly the same molecule so anytime you're eating anytime you're taking nutrition you're actually ramping up growth and again growth in most cases for adults is not a good thing you don't want things to keep growing that's that's how things break

down you actually got to get rid of stuff and then grow stuff so a lot of These uh um a lot of these things like cancer which is a disease of growth are not going to be improved by insulin say example because that's a that's going to increase growth and cancer loves skin inulin so it it ramps up very quickly so the thing is that when you do fasting of course you're going to reduce those nutrient sensors which is going to intrinsically reduce growth and potentially reduce your risk of cancer because we know that there's

a number of Cancers that are highly insulin sensitive breast cancer colar rectal cancer for example so those are two examples of how fasting sort of through autophagy and through reduced growth signaling are going to be super super important for longevity and you know preventing disease preventing cancers that kind of thing you know you've shared before in other interviews that to really understand the importance of all this we have to also understand and Ask the most basic of basic questions which is why do we age and you talked about how growth is not great as we

get older but for a long time and maybe still a little bit right now there's people that are not really uh clear about why is it that we age and what are the common things that uh contribute to that and if we don't understand why we age it's hard to understand how we can encourage longevity so can you just take us through maybe a quick little history Lesson of just what were some of the theories that were out there of aging and what do some of the more contemporary ideas say around aging and why are

they so important yeah and it's still sort of not well sort of known I mean there's there's a lot of theories uh of Aging like you know it's built in so that you know you get this constant rep replenishment of genes and so on initially they thought well it's just Sort of like a machine right it gets old and then it breaks down and there's nothing you can do about it it's not quite true um because our cells actually don't break down we don't have the same cells they they they sort of our cells grow

they die like red blood cells right every 30 days you sort of replace your blood cells they're not the same cell so it's not like a machine it's not like a you know a stapler you use it and you use it you use it eventually just breaks Down and there's nothing you can do that's not like our cells our cells actually rejuvenate so then within our cells we actually have this sort of built-in syence mechanism which is that after a certain number of replications the cells can no longer divide and therefore they start to get

the problems with aging and this is controlled with the tiir for example so in the in the genes you have in the in the DNA you actually have these uh in the chromosome So DNA is packaged within a chromosome at the ends of the chromosomes you have these tiir caps and you know sort of like an eraser on top of a pencil sort of thing it just sits on top and every time you replicate the cell it sort of shrinks and then once it gets down to nothing the cell can no longer replicate and basically

it's ccent or it it it can no longer do anything then it gets replaced with say uh scar tissue and so on so you get less functional tissue and You get more Scar Tissue but that's sort of this built-in ccent mechanism cancer actually circumvents that by getting rid of that you know problem of the tiir cap it doesn't it doesn't reduce each time and that's one of the reasons that cancer can actually replicate indefinitely um you know and that's one of the interesting things you see with unicellular organisms as well um you know as as

we talked about with the cancer code but the um so aging seems to Be this sort of built-in uh sort of clock but it doesn't necessarily have to because again one of the things that uh people now talk about is one you can't do anything about that tiir thing it used to be very popular you used to see it all the time but tiir based science and all this stuff it was just a big marketing toy you can't do a lot about unless you really want to give yourself cancer or something like that but the

the whole idea is that uh you know with Um aging it's not just about the sort of um age it's about the health as well so people talk now about the health span and in terms of um aging can you really slow it down by increasing this sort of Rejuvenation of this is not of the cell but of the subcell parts as with autophagy um and fasting and also to some extent slowing down uh metabolic rate which I actually think is kind of interesting as well because one of the things that people always talk about

um And this is a bit of a sidebar but people always talk about how they want to keep their metabolic rate revved up and I always think okay sure it's easier to lose weight that way I get you on that but if you're not trying to lose weight is it really beneficial to keep your metabolic rate revved up because you know it's like a car right you rev the engine you can run faster but you're going to burn out sooner so it's like are you really sacrificing one Way or the other so the way a

lot of people look at it now is sort of this seesaw between growth and Longevity so you know you can either grow really fast but you're going to live a short time or you're going to be on the other side of that seesaw which is you're not going to grow and you're going to live long right so that's that's where people are looking at you know trying to slow down growth um you know trying to say okay let's let's make sure that we're not Stimulating these things that are going to increase um uh growth factors

and those are all the nutrient sensors so you look at some of the longest sort of lived people in the world you know okanawa and stuff where they talk about you know eating 80% you know until you're only until you're about 80% full and you know people in Japan who also eat very little so their metabolic rates are likely lower like if you ever go to Europe or Japan or some of these places Um like they don't eat much I mean compared to an American meal like you go to a restaurant and you go whoa

I just pay a lot of money and that's all the food I guess so they don't eat a lot so clearly they're used to it so therefore if they're not eating a lot then since their weight is stable they're also their metabolic rates probably are not running as fast either so therefore they may be by by eating smaller amounts by by tradition they may be choosing sort Of to slow down growth and trying to go for that longevity as opposed to that growth which is where Americans North Americans Canadians tend to be more let's let's

let's hit the growth and and then we maybe we don't hit that longevity as as well so if you're talking longevity it's it's tied in very tightly to growth factors growth signaling uh that kind of thing well it seems uh you know putting the two pieces of the questions together That you've answered so far seems like fasting has a very unique role both when it comes to the health span aspect of improving your overall metabolic Health which is going to be one of the pathways to keep your metabolic rate down because if you are in

Better Health you're not struggling with processing food all day long um you're going to be able to keep your metabolic rate a little bit lower which is going to improve your metabolic Health the way that I understand it and Then there's this other aspect where fasting also can play it's not fully understood but at least some evidence that's there it can play a role with longevity so it's both the health span and the lifespan and uh is that a good way to think about it I think so I think so so um you know and

fasting interestingly enough has always been sort of used as this way of staying healthy right you look back at all these Traditions that we have and uh you know So like religious fasting for example so you know in most religions they have a period of fasting and of course at the time that these religions were established there's not a lot of obesity in fact starvation is the the predominant is much more common than obesity back say two three four thousand years ago whenever these religions and there's tons of them right that that that do the

fasting so um it's interesting because when they talk about The fasting it's it's a form of uh like they're not trying to punish themselves right it's not that they're trying to do something bad they're usually trying to do something healthy for the body so whether you're talking Buddhism or Hinduism or Christianity or you know whatever it is um sometimes it's it's couched in terms of sort of self-denial but a lot of times it's just something that's supposed to be sort of intrinsically healthy for you and it's It's interesting because this is outside of weight loss

so for North Americans particularly the weight loss thing is a huge impact like that that's a huge health benefit right there from uh fasting so but but in terms of longevity um it may be that that also it's it's going to have a m like this massive Improvement in uh longevity by doing something and it's it's it's it's sort of always been recognized that it is something that's healthy for you whether They talk about a detox or whether you talk about a purific ation or you know a cleansing or something it's it's always termed in

the same way that it's something that you're sort of clearing out the old junk sort of thing and interestingly enough that's exactly what aagy is so in the last sort of 10 years we've actually recognized the science behind all of this old sort of terminology of cleansing and detoxification that hey maybe it's Actually true maybe we've only just uh sort of put the scientific term on what all these other people who um you know they didn't know the science but they knew the benefits of what they were doing and then codified it within these religious

uh practices that various people follow so it's it's it's an interesting interesting way to to look at it so not only as you said with the health you know in terms of weight loss and all that stuff that's immediately uh You know obvious but there may be that sort of hidden thing that that takes a little longer for people to understand yeah hey this is something that's really really highly beneficial for us let's talk about caloric restriction and the importance of first of all for people that don't know what it is just explaining and how

it fits in to the conversation that we're having here yeah so caloric restriction is um probably the only really wellestablished Scientific way of increasing longevity um and it's mostly animal studies so they do this in animal studies they take rats or something and they have one that eats whatever they want and one group where they restrict how much they eat and the group that restricts how much they eat generally live longer so fruit flies and you know they've done it in all kinds of animals so that this has been shown for ages and um that

was sort of this really interesting and and and The first studies I came out with you know came out like you know 30 40 years ago as a real shock to people because people thought well hey if you're more more nourished right more nutrients more vitamins you're going to live longer but they didn't they all live shorter um and that was quite a shock and this is that whole um that's what sort of is that whole seesaw between growth and Longevity sort of thing so caloric restriction is um well established in Most animal uh models

as a way to increase longevity in humans of course it's really hard to do those studies um there was a few inadvertent sort of ways to do it but the problem is that you have to go between malnourishment you don't want to get malnourished so there's there's this you know um Continuum between calorie restriction where which is okay and malnourishment where you're just not getting enough vitamins and minerals and stuff and then You actually do very badly so sometimes they've crossed over there was a couple of biosphere experiments where they they sort of cross that

line I think you know remember those old experiments where people would live in a in this contained Dome and stuff and it was a little controversial at the time but they wound up sort of Fairly severely calorie restricting themselves and it wasn't always pretty it wasn't great so that was sort of an inadvertent human Experiment into it a fascinating sort of study for like sort of thing to look at sort of 20 years ago but the whole idea is that if you are well-nourished as most people in you know North America say are then uh

the calorie restriction may actually improve your your your lifespan and health span by a fairly significant amount so caloric restriction and and the question then is how do you do it and this is one of the big questions so you can do it like the Aans do it where you say I am going to sort of eat to 80% and so you impose that sort of um that sort of structure so that you can do it if you don't impose any kind of structure and you think day to day oh I'm just going to stop

eating like you know a little bit if you have to keep thinking about it it's never going to work fasting is another way of course to impose that sort of caloric restriction um by giving you the structure so if you Say I'm not going to eat today then you're almost automatically going to you know calorie restrict yourself um there there's some interesting studies on fasting where they they try to get around that because people always try to say well is it the fasting or is it the calories it's like I don't really care like if

you do fasting properly then you are going to be calorie restricted right but so what if I tell people okay cut 500 calories a day and it you know it Just doesn't work to lose weight then it doesn't matter it's it's just a failed strategy so why do I care that if I can do it through fasting that I reduce 500 calories a day by by saying oh I'm just going to eat once a day and that's going to do a 500 calorie a day restriction uh if it's successful it's successful like it doesn't matter

whether or not you restrict calories uh how you restrict calories if it works it works right so so don't don't worry about it so much um So there's some interesting studies lately that have tried to look at fasting and what they do is they try to um they try to get around that whole calor part by saying okay you'll fast but then you'll eat more when you when you're eating I'm like but that's not really the point of it right the whole um the whole point of the fasting is that when you're not eating you're

going to activate these mechanisms you're going to get rid of some of this old Stuff you don't need to eat more because you're you're using up your body fat and all that sort of stuff so the calorie restriction part of um things is is certainly part I think part of the fasting so therefore I think you just have to take it all together and rather than try to sort of tease it out and say well is it the calories is it the fasting it's all part of the same thing so it's just not though that

easy if you eat once a day or you you know if you Eat once every two days it's not easy to pack all those three meals into a single one yeah I think what's important about what you're saying and please correct if I'm wrong because I I definitely get things wrong sometimes is that you know we call it caloric restriction and it is the most studied model for increasing longevity specifically in animal trials but we don't want to get too caught up in the idea of the calorie component It's really just taking a break from

your body doing that work so it can enter into the repair mode and when you understand that you can take advantage of it because even the idea we've talked about it a bunch of this podcast that the primary uh you know recommendations and guidance from whether it's the FDA or the World Health Organization that weight loss is primarily a math equation and if you want to lose weight it's just about eating less and exercising more is Really not you know the the the full picture and might actually be very uh misguided in its approach because

there's so many other aspects that go into weight gain like uh insulin uh the mechanism of insulin and how that plays into it so it's it's important to understand calorie restriction and chloric restriction as a concept but really we're talking about taking advantage of your body going into the right environment so it can go into Repair mode exactly and and that's that's the whole idea of this seesaw right you're either going sort of um sort of in in growth mode or you're going into sort of uh repair uh mode right and and that's that's one

of the things that uh you know it's it's been a real shift in the last sort of number of years because of course um this whole idea of um you know Rejuvenation repair and stuff um was Probably only about five or 10 years like before that everybody was like growth growth growth growth so it's like if that's your what you want to do then it's eat eat eat eat eat which is you know of course then then you wound up with this whole obesity epidemic then then this kind of thing but you're you're absolutely right

I mean this whole calories thing this whole calories debate is um you know to my mind always a little bit silly so the whole thing About calories is that it's not a a concept from physiology it's a concept from physics so it's a unit of heat energy that's purely what it is right but it doesn't tell you anything about what your body does with that energy so for example if you eat a block of wood it has a number of calories because if you burn it it has a lot of calories because it's it's energy

that's energy but your body cannot do anything with it right so you block of wood it comes out Your your rectum and that's it that's all there's no energy associated with it even though within that wood there is a lot of potential energy so it's a same thing right the calories your body doesn't say oh you have this x x number of calories so I'm going to do this no your body has to translate that into something else and that's that piece that's missing right it translates it into hormones which is why you always have

to look at the hormones because That's sort of the language of the body that's physiology right you can't take a unit of energy like physics and say well all calories are the same because calories do different things so that block of wood does nothing for you if you eat a cookie it's going to trigger off hormones that are incredibly different than if you were to eat say an egg for example right so you eat protein and fat the hormonal profile that you get is completely different than if you Eat a cookie which is completely different

than if you eat a block of wood yet the calories are all equal so how is that the same because those those hormones are what tells our body what to do go into growth mode go into repair mode or don't do anything at all right with a piece of wood so so so the that whole thing about calories is you know I I I say it just because that's what people are used to it's it's easy for people to uh understand what's going on But truthfully the whole concept is quite useless to understand what's going

on with the body like you take um you know 100 calories of cookies and 100 calories of an egg for example right the minute those foods go into your mouth the hormonal response is totally different therefore our bodies are going to be doing something completely different with those two Foods even though they're the same calories right if your insulin goes up your body says Store that calories as fat if it doesn't go up your body will say take those calories and use them burn it for energy right so it's it's totally different and um you

know I think that that's where people get so messed up is because we're so inra trained in this idea of calories that calories are equal because when you put them as the same thing right 100 calories of cookies 100 calories of broccoli well now they're both 100 calorie so you can treat them the same You cannot treat them the same there's no there's no physiologic way like that they are the same in any degree like yes there's an overlap sure there's more overlap between that and 100 calories of wood but those calories is is nothing

it's it's it's it's it's just energy right what our body does with that energy is what's important do you store this fat do you uh build new proteins right do you uh just increase the metabolic rate and burn it as heat for Example it's all different right in one case you're going to get stronger right in one case you're going to get fatter and in one case your your metabolic rate's going to go up completely different from the same 100 calories such an important point and this idea which was really a theory the calorie in

calorie out model of obesity um and and sort of why we gain weight it's so indoctrinated into society that a lot of individuals including Wellestablished experts and and doctors took it as just um settled science and uh recently uh you know there was a big paper that was done a review paper in the American journal of clinical nutrition by Dr David lwig at Harvard including a bunch of other doctors that were there too and really uh they took you through the whole journey of how we got there how it was shaky science that sort of

led to that uh understanding and you've talked About this as well too just highlighting it because that paper was published recently we'll have the link in the show notes and then all the way to the idea of understanding exactly what you shared about how hormones is the the missing piece of the puzzle you know when I read that and I hear your example I often think about you know NASA has the largest uh vacuum that they use to test uh devices that they're going to put in space it's the largest vacuum in the World and

it's I think in um uh I think it might be in Georgia but I'll have to double check that and if you take a bowling ball and you take a feather and you drop it in a vacuum they both fall at the same rate but in the real world if you're in a Boeing 747 and you drop a bowling ball and a feather at the same time they're not going to all at the same rate and our body is like that it's a bunch of moving parts and pieces it's not just physics that are in

isolation That's what I'm hearing from your message well exactly and and this um you know I think the whole calories thing is sort of physics Envy sort of thing right we want to be as clean and as precise as physics is right because you look at physics wow they're building spaceships and you know computers and all this stuff and it's like this is great right so physics is all very precise it's all very math based and when physiology wants to be sort of you know has all This physics Envy they're like we want to be

precise just like physics but then you ignore the whole messiness that is human physiology because you know does insulin go up you know take those 100 calories right does insulin go up does it not go up does peptide YY which is a satiety hormone go up does it not go up do this stretch receptors in your stomach go up or down if you eat a big fibrous meal like a big you know uh if you eat a lot of say say vegetables and Your stomach stretches out well it doesn't have any calories because you could

eat hair and your stomach will stretch and turn on your Society signals right so there's there's stretch receptors in the stomach uh does does do those 100 calories do they increase chosy in which is in response to Fat for example uh what does it do to leptin like it's it's it's messy like crazy but that's reality right and all it means is that you know because every food is Going to have a different hormonal profile all it says is that certain foods for the same number of calories are more fattening than others which is actually

just common sense right I don't think anybody would really doubt that cookies and ice cream is more fattening than salmon and salad it's you know it's hard to get fat eating salad it just it just is right so that's very common sense it's totally in line with what the physiology is that hey all these foods Have different hormonal profiles some are going to lead to more body increasing fat stores right and others are not so therefore some foods are more founding than others that's all it says right I don't see how that's so non-scientific because

some people say oh you're a calorie denier or something like that I'm like I'm just telling you that calories is not a concept of physiology it's a concept of physics and it's this whole idea that they are equal And this whole idea of oh creating a caloric deficit I mean that's another really stupid stupid idea I have to say so this idea of oh to lose weight you have to create a caloric deficit now that's always true the question is how do you create the caloric deficits remember when you take that energy balance equation you

have body fat which is a storage form of energy right it's a storage form of calories it's stored Calories that's basically what it is body fat equals calories in calories out so when you look at that it's in it's it's inequality right x equals a plus b or whatever right so body fat equals calories in minus calories out that's always true the question is so it's not two things you have three variables there and those always have to balance so you can never have a deficit you either have storage you have calories in you have

calories out so the question is How do you create that inequality if you want to lose body fat you want to have calories in minus calories out so if you that's true so but then they take that next step and they say therefore all you have to do is reduce your calories in well two things can happen when you reduce those calories in either right so you have three things you have storage you have calories in you have calories out so you reduce calories in two possible things can happen either body Goes down which is

what they tell you is going to happen or which is perfectly in line with math right either when calories in goes down either body fat goes down or calories out goes down both are both are possibilities because there's three variables here what they don't tell you which is what the science of the last 100 years has told you is that every time you reduce calories in just by focusing on calories and not focusing on the hormones what happens is Not that the body fat goes down but that the calories out or your metabolic rate goes

down so we know this from I don't know there's there's hundreds of years of research of this the the the first research looking at this was from 1917 so more than a hundred years ago they showed this exact thing reduce calories in reduce calories out your calories out goes down so you you know you take 2,000 calories in drops down to 1500 right so two things can happen either your body Loses 500 calories of body fat or your metabolic rate goes down by 500 guess which one almost always happens is that the calories out goes

down that's just science we know that we've been proven that over and over again so therefore the question is not about whether or not a caloric deficit reduces body fat yes it does the question is how do you create that caloric deficit you cannot do that by reducing calories in you similarly cannot reduce it by Trying to increase calories out by exercising which is the other thing that people always talk about because yes when you exercise you are going to increase the rate of energy that your skeletal muscles will use but there's all these other

parts of our body that exercise does nothing for so there's your bladder there's your kidneys like does exercising increase the metab IC rate of your kidneys not in the least your liver your heart your lungs your Brain like there's all these other organ systems that use energy all the time the skeletal muscle is only a single system right so yeah if you exercise for six hours a day you can sort of overwhelm that effect but remember most of us are say burning 2,000 calories a day you go for a run or something you might burn

what you've seen those uh treadmills that that calorie counter goes up really really slowly right so if you have somebody okay so you burn 200 calories 300 calories like you're not even at 10% of what your body does using your kidneys your liver your body heat Generation all that kind of thing so this idea that you're going to exercise your way out of it is also similarly false and the other thing is that remember there's three variables you increase your calories out by exercising two things can happen one is that you're going to use take

take that energy from your body fat stores that's what they Want to happen that's what almost never happens what happens is that you eat more right and that's perfectly in balance with this energy balance equation three variables they always only look at two of them right as if one of them is fixed as if your calories out are fixed and that's the whole thing that's that that that these people never seem to understand I don't know why it's very obvious when you just you know put it out it's there's there's three legs On this stool

right you change one one of the other two can change it's it's not it's not for sure that you know they say body fat equals calories in minus calories out reduce calories in calories out if it stays stable then you'll lower your body fat but it doesn't stay stable where do you see inter intermittent fasting as being overrated in people's Journey but more importantly underrated that could be a powerful tool to help people transform their bodies and their Lives yeah I'll start with the underrated piece you know I think that it's vastly vastly underrated the

fact that intermittent fasting gives people an element of Mastery with the control in their diet and I think that we live in a world where we don't have a lot of control we might feel like we have a lot of control over what we eat but let's be really real here we have tons of hyper palatable foods that are lighting our brains up like Christmas trees all the Time that's not control like the food controls us and we may not want to admit it it may sound kind of weird and almost woooo witch doctory to

say that but it kind of does you know we have not even trying to sound crazy conspiracy here but we've got food marketers that know what they're doing food tastes dang good it lights our brains up and it makes us want more with fasting the underrated component of it is just that simple element of Mastery and being able to Abstain like abstinence from food is a powerful thing like we're exposed to food all the time the ability to be able to just say no and have complete control is freaking powerful it's all and that is

the piece that is underrated because everyone wants to focus on these overrated nuanced pieces that are still important but you know we talk about things like autophagy which is is great autop fasting absolutely induces autophagy but exercise also induces Autophagy fasting is a means of activating a lot of different cellular processes that would ordinarily be activated through other processes like exercise or caloric restri rtion it just works better for some people because their minds work that way for example I could have easily just restricted calories when I lost 110 pounds no denying that that could

have worked but did it mentally work for me no it didn't I tried and I felt like a slave to food I felt like a slave to the scale I felt like a slave to tracking it ruined my life it was terrible whereas fasting gave me peace and gave me like a lot of flexibility and it was still putting me in that same box was I accomplishing the same things that I would have accomplished with caloric restriction yeah but arguably faster arguably in a more defined way arguable in a way that jived with my personality

better and so it's not to say that things like Intermittent fasting don't induce these amazing things like autophagy but what I'm trying to say is that to say that fasting is the only way that does that is also factually incorrect it's just one of many ways to get there that's this one that I talk about a lot because I'm guilty of talking about autophagy and sort of embellishing how cool it is because it's to drive home a point of how cool this cellular process is but a lot of people That try intermittent fasting are also

people that are very overweight or metabolically dysfunctional and don't have the ability to really exercise with any intensity just yet you know you mentioned a key word there which was flexibility and I've heard you say in previous interviews that the level of flexibility that you feel because you have intern intermittent fasting as a tool in toolbox like that's the number one benefit to you what's an example of That flexibility that shows up on a daily or weekly basis that allows for more freedom in your life yeah D maybe I want to have a chicken nugget

with my kids you know not from you know McDonald's or anything but maybe like you know gluten-free chicken nugget or something right like go maybe I want to be able to have some flexibility maybe I want to go have some ice cream with my kids now and then let them be kids and not have Dad be a robot right maybe I Want them to experience food in a way where they can establish control and establish their own boundaries and if I am constantly having my guard up and not touching these Foods I'm risking giving my

kids eating disorders right so I need to make sure that they can experience Foods themselves and see Dad experience these foods but also see Dad put up the guard rails and he needs to put up the guard rails and get his life on track but also being able to just enjoy food I'm a foodie like I am I always have been I mean hence I was 300 lbs before I clearly like food there's no denying that so being able to enjoy food but being able to have a strong understanding of when it's time to stop

but have a very clear black and white picture of okay I'm eating now I'm not eating now and when I first went through my weight loss uh Journey like the first couple of months when I lost I lost like 50 pounds in the first three and a half Months or so that was all being very flexible that was just with intermittent fasting still eating the foods that I liked but just putting them into a compressed eating window so yeah I was probably restricting calories but dude I was still able to eat pizza I was still

able to eat burgers I was still able to eat the foods that I wanted to I just was eating a significantly less amount of them I'd love to Pivot to overrated but also based off of your life Experiences after having done intermittent fasting and it being a part of your life now and we'll talk about how you go about it now compared to previously what have you found that you modified it or maybe you changed your mind or your recommendations on your YouTube page a lot of people watch your videos that like you're thinking evolved

over a period of time based on some of the more overrated factors of of intermittent fasting yeah I mean for one Just diving more into research too and and seeing more and more and more and understanding the Nuance but what really started to get me to say okay I need to take a look at this is how things started to change after I lost weight because intermittent fasting Works super super super well when you were at a metabolic disadvantage when you are metabolically unhealthy when you have mitochondrial dysfunction when you're Energy Systems aren't working well

when You're overweight when you have metabolic syndrome Syndrome X like there's no denying that the research is very clear but once I got to a point where okay well now I'm maintaining weight things are different if I fast too much it's actually not good for me I'm I'm trying to just maintain now I don't have any more to really lose I'm trying to just stay lean so I need to Pivot my way of thinking while also making sure that when I'm talking to my Audience I'm understanding that I have you know a split demographic of

people that are already lean and people that are just coming to my channel that are like man I'm looking for help so I have to make sure that I navigate that very very carefully to not discourage people and a perfect example is I used to fast every day you know I used to fast every day because I thought that that was the way to do it because it just made sense I was skipping breakfast it would it Worked it got the weight off of me but if I did that now at my current body weight

I think that it would probably be problematic so like I've adjusted My fasting to be more three days a week per se and maybe increase the length of my fast so it's more of a you know a shock um also just seeing as intermittent fasting grew in popularity again over the last you know like I don't know five five six years ago when it really started the hockey stick up again of Course you've got social media so you've got influencers that hop on the bandwagon and they start talking about it but they're maybe embellishing things

that maybe shouldn't be embellished and it was starting to give the intermittent fasting crowd a bad name and that was frustrating for me because I'm someone that like I literally owe my life to intermittent fasting I don't know if I would be here today if it wasn't for it because I was so unhealthy so that was Frustrating to me to see like guys I know you're excited about intermittent fasting but you got to check yourself a little bit with some of the claims you're making because it's those claims that are triggering so many people to

come and attack intermittent fasting that have really big audiences and now you're going to completely squelch the benefits of it because people are going to listen to the people that are squelching and fasting versus the people That are uh are really getting benefit from it so I'm like you know what I need to be the guy that actually splits the lane here I need to be the guy that helps people understand that like yes you know what it's okay to get on your high horse about fasting it's okay but you got to be real you

know we can't just say it's magic all the time um even though it feels like it is it felt like magic to me and I'm guilty of probably shouting from the rooftops like It was magic because dude I mean this was the only thing that worked for me so so I mean I get that but it was so was at that point where I'm like I need to start putting some some bumpers up on how I talk about it you know you made a really great video recently talking about how do you know if fasting

is working like what should be what should you be measuring what should you be looking at and for the person that's listening today where they have a Significant amount of weight that they want to make a shift on they want to improve their body composition right because you talked about the different camps for Simplicity purposes say that's one camp and then we'll get to the other Camp which is people who already have some sense of being lean and you know they may not want to lose muscle mass and other areas we we'll talk about them

in a second so for the person who has a significant amount of weight that they Want to shift they want to improve their body composition what are some of the things they should be looking at uh maybe taking inspiration from that video that you made to know if intermittent fasting is actually working for them and they're making progress yeah I mean the obvious one is you know people first going to think about their weight right is weight working is weight dropping is things like yeah and that's a very valid thing to look at of course

but there's a Lot of other components there you know just because someone's losing weight doesn't mean you're a losing the right kind of weight uh you know so for one but it also doesn't mean that you're healthy you know it could just mean that you're you're losing muscle mass and you're not losing fat right so I try to look at a lot of things so looking at uh you know even your fasting glucose is a tremendous way to just understand is this working because there are lots of Bodies of research that still put people in

a stage of caloric restriction where their glucose is still really cattywampus still out of whack so if you're trying to say hey I'm just trying to get my metabolic Health in check is fasting working for me I mean being able to draw a line in the sand of where your uh you know blood glucose is when you start fasting versus where it is now in terms of the Long Haul not on the daily you know is your hba1c improving are you Noticing improvements in your just metabolic biomarkers uh if you have the ability to go

get a dexa scan I mean being able to look at your visceral fat that's a big big piece of intermittent fasting is the be the reduction in visceral fat which I think all camps can agree that is one of the most dangerous things that we could have is high levels of visceral fat as far as inflammation is concerned as far as a number of different factors fatty liver sort of a Proxy for fatty liver so with that it's like okay if you have the ability to get a dexa scan and you can see hey my

visceral fat is actually shrinking that is a great barometer for how well fasting is working uh also in the moment being able to test your ketones I mean are you actually getting the metabolic benefit that you want during a fast so you can get pretty granular with that but I think also looking at C reactive protein like Looking at your inflammatory markers arguably losing weight in general caloric restriction you're going to see an improvement in those kind of biomarkers your il6 your C-reactive protein is the main one that like if you went to your doctor

and said I want to test for inflammation they'd test your CRP and it's a pretty simple panel it's not like anything crazy that you'd have to pay a ton of money for that's a very important number to look at because if Your CRP is improving that's indicative of you know lowering inflammation regardless of weight loss so even if your weight was the same but your CRP is improving that's tremendous and that is a very early sign that your body is moving in the right direction also uh your heart rate variability if anyone wears a whoop

or an aura uh or even the Apple watch can do it now and fitpit and look at that now so it's pretty easy and mainstream looking at your heart rate Variability that tells you sort of uh if you're fasting too much right so if you start finding that like I'm fasting a lot I feel good but your HRV is going down indicating your recoveries going down well that's a good time to note that hey maybe I should stop fasting for a little bit and kind of uh check myself a little bit so that the HRV

comes back up because you don't want to put the cart before the horse fast for all these metabolic benefits while in the meantime Driving yourself into the ground you know what I loved about that video is that you know you've kind of contrasted that you know there's a lot of different ways to Fast and the type of fast that we want avoid is kind of like the standard American way of fasting right and it's from what I understand what you meant by that is this idea that people are going to fast but when they're going

to eat again they're going to eat a diet that's constantly throwing their blood Sugar on a roller coaster they're fasting insulin is high and they're eating still a lot of processed foods now some people have still gotten benefits from incorporating fasting especially if it maybe helped them as you mentioned reduce calories but in general tell us why that standard American approach of fasting where you don't eat and maybe you don't you don't eat a lot so you're sort of putting on this extreme pressure on your body and Then when you do eat you're eating all

sorts of junk again tell tell us why that's not ideal yeah I'll put it into sort of a maybe a visual metaphor a little bit let's say let's say you were in a really really loud room and that that loud room was your standard American diet it was just loud and noisy and like just bass booming all the time you couldn't hear each other talk couldn't hear yourself think and then you go and you you fast and you go into This like eerily quiet room where suddenly you know you could hear a mouse piss and

a cotton ball it's just like super quiet right and then you all of a sudden say okay I'm going to jump back into this room of the standard American diet noise how loud would that noise seem how disruptive would that seem right now I want you to think on the contrary you step out of that loud room go into the quiet room and then you uh step into the one room and there's just A gentle trickle of a a brook and a waterfall and it's just kind of nice and then you step into another room

and maybe there's a little bit more noise then you step into another room and then it's a little louder a much more peaceful experience a much easier on the ears it's much easier on the brain it's much easier on your psyche uh it's going to be less stressful it's a simple analogy for how it is with fasting it's like you're abstaining from food your Body is resetting your body is getting to a stage where it's for all intense and purpose it's more more sensitive it's potentially cleaner it's it's everything's operating a little bit better right

and then all of a sudden you're just going to throw the Pop-Tarts back in the mix you may as well be just jumping into that you know Dolby Surround super loud room uh it's going to be a shock to your body and it's going to be highly Inflammatory and the Nuance here of course any time you eat anything there's a level of inflammatory response like make no mistake like if I ate a salad right now there's going to be some inflammation it's just a normal thing so don't get the wrong idea that like oh like

I'm going to have inflammation when I eat and it's bad but arguably the worse the food is the higher the abundance of the food especially in a short bout the higher The inflammatory response is going to be and you sort of counteract all these benefits you've been trying to get from fasting in the first place so although it worked well for me in terms of flexibility eating burgers and pizza and stuff like that for the first few months I quickly learned that although I was losing weight I felt like total dog crap it did not

feel good when you would go back to eating those same sort of processed foods that you were having Exactly yeah so it's you know you you're you're defeating the entire purpose really you know you're you're taking all this work putting all this work into being able to reset your body and kind of have a clean start only to reintroduce things that you're only going to be more sensitive to in the first place it's that whole White Noise analogy you know it's like you turn the fan on you can hear the noise you turn it off

you know it's quiet and then you Can you know it's like you get accustomed to it so when you're constantly eating these processed foods all the time that just seems like the normal thing but once you you pull that away for a while and then introduce it again it's all the more intense what did you notice when you got started was your body naturally sort of Shifting and wanting to incorporate more Whole Foods along with your fasting routine like was it a gradual natural process or did you Feel like you had to sort of fight

and battle this world of addiction that's kind of constantly around us that wants to get us uh you know sucked into these hyper pble foods like was this a conscious choice that you made or did you gradually find that your body started craving different things once you started fasting it's a good question and it's the latter it's uh the the junk food actually just didn't feel good anymore is like after the weight started Coming off I think my body was starting to be a little bit more fine-tuned and realizing like this was just happening out

of habit it wasn't feeling good so naturally I actually wanted more Whole Foods and once I started implementing the Whole Foods then everything felt you know so much better so it's definitely uh when I was just restricting calories before I really tried intermittent fasting it was much more difficult for me to eat healthy foods because I was Constantly faced with them you know I was constantly having to make decisions I was constantly having to prefrontal Cortex my way through things right so it's like if I was eating five meals per day that was five different

opportunities in the course of a day that I would have to use my willpower whereas with fasting it was like two opportunities two chances to f up right so it just really made a big difference just by sheer um statistical like looks At it like if you give me five opportunities to screw up I'm going to have a much higher likelihood of screwing up if you give me two opportunities to screw up I probably won't screw up yeah you know it's really interesting and I feel like you do this well with your videos this is

something that I feel that the traditional world of energy balance and for those that are listening it's like the traditional world of it's all about calories in and It's all about calories out not Else Matters and it's just about energy balance and that's how we're going to keep people health and keep weight off and of course there are some truths to that we'll chat about that in a second but that World when they look at fasting I feel like one of the biggest things they miss is that component that processed food especially Ultra processed food

is so hyper palatable that if you're trying to just restrict Calories in itself it's actually like it's like hijacked your brain and you feel like you have zero control and that's probably what you're referring to when you felt like nothing was working when you were following the traditional advice is that right yeah totally man and I talk about this to this day and it kind of frustrates me because I absolutely understand thermodynamics you know I I I'm not an idiot I I I couldn't look at that I understand the math I Understand the physics of

it like I I understand that energy balance is such an important piece but I also feel like there's this big piece that's missing like clearly telling people to eat less and move more is not working like clearly because obesity is only increasing and that message has only gotten louder and louder and louder and for some reason that crowd wants to make it sound like it's the fasting groups and the low carb groups that are ruining Everything because we're the ones confusing people I don't think that's the case I think that just it's a problem with

all of us it's not just the low carb or the fasting Community like making crazy claims that are causing people to not have success it's also the evidence-based Community that's causing the problems too because if you just tell someone to move more and eat less and listen to their body like I'm sorry but we don't have control anymore like We can't just listen to our bodies especially when you have someone in the fitness industry telling you that someone in the fitness industry that has a lifetime of coping mechanisms to make sure that they live their

life a certain way and look a certain way whether that means that they have to log everything and track everything down to the tea to become obsessive to look a certain way it's easy coming out of the mouth of those people But when you've been overweight before and you've seen other people struggle it kind of pisses you off because you're like no I've tried that and I'm not saying that reducing calories doesn't work but I'm saying that if I simply just try to track everything I am going to be at the mercy of every delicious

thing that's on the grocery store shelf and I'm not going to win because not everyone has the willpower that every person in the fitness industry does you Know those people are outliers and they should be talking to other outliers does that make sense it totally makes sense when you decided that you were going to try fasting on and that it was going to be a potential solution for you to help significantly reduce your weight I think at that time you had become 110 pounds overweight about and a little bit of your story which which I

found really fascinating is that you were a skinny Kid in high school right and then you decided later in high school if I got correct you wanted to bulk up so you got into fitness and you started eating more uh your mom was really into like running and you wanted to be like your mom and you have got a close relationship so you started getting very active and along with that activity your caloric intake went up to match the level of fuel that you needed to support that level of activity and then life happening stress

Factors other stuff I want to talk about stress because you you talk so much about stress being the biggest factor that kind of shifted things in your journey and now all of a sudden your consumption is really high and your activity level is changing and you have all this stress and now you're gaining weight is that an accurate understanding of the story that's perfect yep so then at a certain point in time you are now carrying all this Excess weight and you're feeling like okay I need to give something a shot so how did intermittent

fasting even first make it onto your radar as a possible solution to incorporate yeah I mean the industry that I was in I was in sort of a like biomed biotech sales really so I worked with a lot of Physicians we had a lot of medical advisers in the company that I was with and I was pretty good friends with them anyway just because we were you know Associates in work um they Knew me when I was overweight and they never really pushed any agenda on me I mean occasionally a comment would be made that

like it was kind of ironic that you know the world that we were in and I was here I was overweight But ultimately when I finally did decide that it was time to lose weight there were a couple of different instances where a couple of the docs that I knew were just kind of casual about hey like we've had good success with some of our Patients that have been you know doing this intermittent fasting thing and you know it might work really well for you so it was really just like a a casual like hey

you should try this from some people that I trusted um and really I never looked back so it wasn't like I was scouring the internet looking for the right kind of thing uh it was more so like I knew what I needed to do as far as eating less but it was just very difficult for me in the environment that I was in uh high stress commission only work where I was just like if I didn't perform I didn't get paid uh that was just difficult for me to also try to keep track of how

much I was eating try to like exercise more try to do all these different things I just didn't have the time I didn't have the resources like if I took more time to track my food or took more time to exercise that would mean that I was lacking in the financial department Right so it was really really difficult for me now in retrospect knowing what I know now I think I could have always made the time right like maybe I just wasn't in the head space right everyone can make the time if it's a priority

to you you make the time but it was also a priority of mine to put food on the table for my wife and I so fasting was like dude this is great I actually like save time like I'm actually not eating I'm not worrying about eating so I Didn't really have to exercise a whole lot in the first like month or so and then I started kind of running again and you know doing other things but yeah I mean that's how it ended up on my radar and when you first decided to take it on

and I think a lot of people are in this position was there enough Clarity at the time where you were like okay here's how I'm going to approach intermittent fasting like how did you decide which version of fasting to take on and what Did you start off with and is that the version that you kept up in the process of uh you know body composition change yeah actually the funny thing is like I did like one simple fast where I like didn't eat breakfast and I was like this is easy and then like three days

later I just decided to not eat for two days and I was just like I'm just going to I'm just going to do a two-day fast and I don't remember how much weight I lost but it was super successful and I felt Great and I was like oh cool this is awesome but it was also hard so I was like I'm not going to do that again but anyway it kind of I just jumped right in that's kind of my mentality and my personality anyway I was just like ah scw if this works if it

worked for 16 hours it's going to work better with 48 and it did but it's not something that I would say I'm going to do like two 48 hour fast a week or something so then I jumped into the conventional 168 and I Did that for like a good six months or so before I really started kind of lengthening my fasts and playing around with different things so just just for people who are following along that means you're not eating for 16 hours and then you have an 8 Hour eating window correct and in that

8 Hour eating window what were you finding again it changed over a period of time you sort off with this sort of standard American fasting where you were still going back and Eating some of the processed foods that were there but once you got into a good uh routine what were the tips and tricks that you found to make that sustainable for you specifically during the time that you were eating so that the time that you weren't eating was a lot easier end up so one of them was obviously shifting towards Whole Foods was anything

else would you have your bigger meal in the morning or in the evening Like what were you doing that you found was helpful for you I didn't start manipulating timing a whole lot until I was a couple years in uh until I really kind of started understanding things more uh one of the things that you know as some people like it some people don't but you know six seven months in after I was kind of starting to implement War Whole Foods is when I added keto into the mix too and that's was a huge game

changer for me because especially at the Time you know 11 years ago or so there weren't super ious keto treats everywhere so for me I was doing keto before the keto wave came along and that just by default meant that I was eating pretty Wholesome foods like keto at that point was basically eating meat cheese coconut oil and avocados you know it was like it was pretty hard to go off the rails with that and once I did that it was like I'm never turning back I was like this is this is the way I

want to Live for the rest of my life and obviously things have changed now now that I'm you know at my set weight and I don't necessarily feel like I need to do keto all the time I feel like I can dance around with different things but the point is is like I felt so dang amazing that there was like no Cravings whatsoever it was really really crazy uh but by and large the ways that I controlled my eating period I would typically break my fast with something Really light and I didn't always do that

but I realized that I was always getting bloated whenever I would break my fast and eat something big I used to kind of like break my fast and I used to either like have like a Chick-fil-A or you know something right like it was like I was still eating crap when I was first starting and that was a Terri disaster and then a few months in you know then I would just sort of like make my own food maybe I would make you know pasta or Whatever I just didn't really know what I was doing

and then as time went on and I started add adding the Whole Foods in I was realizing well wait a minute if I have like a salad right when I break my fast I feel kind of bloated and then I was realizing like okay if I have fiber right when I break my fast I feel bloated maybe I need to kind of figure out the system here uh so I started figuring out that if I just had a little bit of lean protein I would control my Cravings I would feel satiated right when I broke

my fast and it would give me this massive element of control over the rest of my eating period whereas if I had something high in starch and high in carbohydrates right when I broke my fast I would feel like I would have to be battling these blood sugar roller coasters the rest of the eating period and it was like a struggle and I was actually looking forward to the next day of fasting because I didn't have to deal With the struggle anymore because it was actually like it was turmoil it was like eight hours of

hell trying to like combat these Cravings then I realized oh if I just have like a six or seven ounce chicken breast or even a protein shake right when I break my fast I'm not craving crazy amounts of things so then I can have a lot more control so the influence of sort of blood sugar and your knowledge around that played a huge role in how you Actually felt and your ability to be compliant with fasting yes and I had a knowledge of blood sugar stuff because when I was overweight my I became clinically diabetic

in a short period of time so you know I had sort of the standard uh operating procedure sort of thing that they would give you and you uh get diagnosed with technically diabetes I was 144 milligrams per deciliter so I was definitely in the diabetic range I made myself that pretty Quick so you know I got the handbook right like the little little pamphlet the doctors give you when they say you're diabetic you know not needing insulin yet but needing to like kind of eat the special diet that they said which was total baloney by

the way it was just like what were they telling you to eat brown rice instead of white rice you know it just like which I I don't have a problem with brown rice but if you're diabetic like you shouldn't be Like saying add copious amounts of carbohydrate it just doesn't make sense to me it didn't make sense to me at the time either so I did learn the ropes and I did have to kind of learn some of the research behind that uh and I knew how to read a paper just given the work that

I was in like I I knew how to read a research paper even though that wasn't where my you know my educational background was in I just I had to learn so the point is is that you know Understanding the blood sugar piece made a big difference I understood that like if I would spike and crash and all this that I would probably get hungry so now after you know now three point something million on YouTube and people following you and practicing what have you seen over the years of again four people who have excess

weight and then we'll get to the next category in group do you recommend that the 168 is the best way for them to get introduced Into intermittent fasting if they want to use it as a tool I think for getting started it's the easiest lowest barrier to entry for people to get familiar with it and become comfortable with it so I do think that if someone is like fresh off the street never fasted before never gone more than 10 or 12 hours without eating they feel like their face is going to fall off if they

fast longer than 12 hours then yes I think starting with 16 hours is a great place to start Because arguably the benefits don't really start kicking in until you know 15 16 hours anyway but at least if they get to 16 hours they prove to themselves they can get to that point and doesn't take long before people do that and say oh I can go longer should I go longer so although I don't think that we should be doing 168 every day for extended periods of time and I can explain why I do think that

it's a great entry point for people yeah could you explain why yeah you know At the risk of uh you know you end up putting yourself in the same category as basic caloric restriction not saying that intermittent fasting is not caloric restriction because it most likely is for most people but even in a lot of studies where things are matched for calories between caloric restriction and intermittent fasting a lot of times we end up seeing the intermittent fasting group eating the same amount of calories as caloric restriction group that's Maybe eating three Square meals a

day you you know 8:00 a.m. 2 p.m. 800 p.m. or something and magically quote unquote the intermittent fasting group will have the same amount of weight loss but have better biomarkers they'll have better glucose better hba1c better inflammatory markers like how do you explain that other than the fact that maybe there's is some extra benefit to abstaining from food for extended periods of time not denying the fact that caloric Restriction was still at play it's just how are you going about that caloric restriction intermittent caloric restriction throughout the day by having multiple meals or caloric

restriction in a big nice bis of not eating for 16 hours maybe that's activating more of the processes right point is is that if you just do that every single day eventually your body ACC gets accustomed to that it becomes the norm and then it's not really different anymore then It's fasting does need to be looked at with the lens of it being a hormetic stressor which means that fasting probably works so well because it is such a shock to the system it is so different and it's so different from what most people do for

the entirety of their lives that they get a lot of benefits especially in the beginning but you find that people that do 168 every single day for years they feel great they love it but maybe they're weight Loss Platos so if it works for a lifestyle and you just enjoy how you feel but you're not trying to do anything else then by all means don't change it but if you've reached this Plateau which most people do it's probably because your basal metabolic rate has adjusted just because it does your metabolism is going to adjust the

amount of calories that you take in and if you are doing 168 every day and just eating the same amount of calories Roughly but the only difference is you're skipping breakfast your body's going to adjust to that and the benefits of fasting start to kind of diminish so I typically recommend like especially once you've been doing it for a while shift it up to slightly longer fasts a little less frequently you know try doing an 18 or 20 hour fast three days per week that's more like what I do these days that way it remains

a shock to my system that way it Remains the Quote unquote stressor that I want it to be where it doesn't become just the norm going back to people plateauing is also one of the things that you were hinting at especially in this world where even wellness products have become you know hyper palatable and there's all these like great treats and keto treats and other things that are out there is that if somebody is plateauing one reason could be that as you mentioned you know they need a Different stressor on their body but also that

people are really bad in general about tracking how many calories or understanding how many calories they're eating so that if somebody says kind of like you were saying hey I've tried everything and intermittent fasting is the only thing that worked for me there's also stories that I hear about hey I've been doing intermittent fasting and it worked great in the beginning and it kind of stopped working Could one of the things that people have to look at be hey are you just still overc consuming on calories even though you're practicing intermittent fasting yes a million

percent and that ends up being a lot of the issue you know it's I usually say that's the first thing that people should look at I mean before before trying to adjust anything else or play with fasting length and things like that just take a minute and and take a few days and log and just see I mean you Don't have to do it for the rest of your life I know it's unrealistic to track for a lot of people but you know you can use an app for a little bit and just see where

you are and you might find that well shoot I'm eating more with intermittent fasting than I am with you know regular caloric restriction especially when people start combining keto with fasting because as much as I love keto we got to remember that fats are very calorically dense and it's very Easy to overeat on keto and there's these misnomers out there that like because you're doing keto you're granted all this amnesty from calories that is not the truth like it still matters and fats store very easily as fat common kind of misconception is that fat burns

fat that's put out there as sort of a like a colloquialism like eat fat to burn fat and I understand where that's coming from I've even said it myself but that's not literal truth like fat Doesn't burn fat fat stores as fat quite easily because it doesn't have to go through different enzymatic processes to store a adapost tissue so when you take someone that's doing like a higher fat diet along with intermittent fasting and they've got a compressed eating window like there's a good chance they're just adding in way too many calories particularly as fat

during that period of time and next thing you know they're like oh shoot I'm eating 3500 calories Yeah no wonder you're gaining weight uh so we do need to kind of check ourselves with that you know there's good apps like as much as you know Lane Norton is kind of an opponent of fasting in many ways like he's also created you know he's got his like carbon app which I think is great it's not a plug for it it's just it kind of algorithmically adjusts based on like your body weight and stuff that's kind of

cool so there's tools out there for people to just be Like hey I don't need to track my food forever but I can do it for a week and kind of get a glimpse of where I'm at so many people know that fasting is so powerful they've heard about the science they know it can do wonders for the body but my question is even with all that why do some people not pursue fasting why do they not jump into the deep end and get started that's a great question I I think a lot of it's

limiting beliefs we've been so conditioned by society That we need to eat snacks and mini meals that the concept of going longer periods in between eating it seems a little bit daunting and I think on a lot of levels even though there's all this growing awareness and and growing bodies of research about metabolic health and strategies such as fasting that can be so critically important for ensuring we have you know incredible longevity uh I think it really stems from uh the issues related to kind of a Scarcity mindset or this overwhelm I think it also

really reflects the fact that you know for many of us um there's a lot we have a complicated relationship with food meaning for many many people they eat Beyond just I'm hungry they eat for comfort and certainly the last two and a half years we've all lived through unprecedented amounts of stress we've been disconnected from loved ones maybe um you know our our job roles have changed our children you know we're Evolving trying to support our children and extended families and so I I also think there's this complex inter relationship with food and and food

is not just fuel for many people food is a source of comfort and I do believe fervently that a lot of people have made it through the last uh two and a half years by you know working on their feelings and in many ways they've they've created opportunities where they've been eating throughout the day And eating hyper pable highly processed foods and so I would imagine that those are two large contributors and just you know the analysis paralysis there are also people who are well intentioned and have a desire to lean into eating less often

and they just get stuck in overthinking things and fasting doesn't have to be complicated but many many people make it more complicated than needs to be because of this again the social Conditioning of overthinking everything and I think for every person who finds really high quality research there'll be some cruddy research that's out there that you know completely contradicts the message that someone else is trying to share and so I I do find on a daily basis trying to defend defend the position of fasting but I think those are definitely three contributors to why people

may not have yet embraced that strategy or really you know ingrained it Into their day-to-day or week to week schedules as a champion of fasting when you sit down and I know you're not in clinical practice at the moment right now uh but really I would argue that you kind of are in clinical practice you're like getting people excited it just is on the web and other things it's not one-on-one patient but when you're sitting with someone even at a cocktail party or somewhere dinner and you're really sharing the elevator pitch around Fasting and why

you fast what are some of the highlights of some of the things that you're mentioning to them oh I always talk about you know especially at the stage of life that I'm in having more energy having a lot of energy because your body is not focused on breaking down and assimilating food and nutrients I think about cognition I mean gosh who doesn't want to feel more mentally sharp irrespective of Life what life stage you're in and then also think So you know when we really understand the research between autophagy which is this waste and recycling

process that gets upregulated when we're in an unfed State and lessens our likelihood of developing certain types of chronic diseases that we think of as being completely natural you know how many of us believe that high blood pressure and diabetes are just part of the aging process or significant weight gain and then beyond that when I'm doing the Elevator pitch I talk about the fact that you know I feel much younger than I am chronic chronologically and I do credit a great deal of that to being able to maintain a very healthy lean body habitus

and you know the the changes to body composition related to intermittent fasting or undeniable but I would say that the changes in energy the mental Clarity are two of the big selling points from from my perspective because How many people assume it's normal to get to be 35 40 4550 or Beyond and you're tired all the time and you're weight loss resistant and you're feeling really inflamed you know chronic joint pain or any of these other chronic health issues that seem to be the main stay for most people that are at the life stage I'm

in so that's usually what I choose to focus on and I find that you know those those three key areas for a lot of people make it even more Intriguing they're like oh I hadn't thought about that you know what's interesting is that you used energy was one of the first things you mentioned and as I look out in society today and questions that come into the podcast gu that people want to have our guest cover like yourself people are often looking for what is this external thing that will give me energy they don't necessarily

think of energy as being attributed to not having something Potentially like fasting so help people understand that of how does that make sense that how could not having food or eating less and will break down all the details of the type of fasting that you talk about and how to do it but how could not have something actually be a contributor to giving your body energy such a good question you know when we think about what drives energy in the body we're really talking about organel U mitochondria which are the powerhouses Of our cells and

by the age of 40 most of us have some degree of dysfunctional mitochondria which contributes to the fatigue and chronic health issues that we see but when I explain to people that most of us if we're eating snacks and mini meals we're not able to effectively utilize utilize different types of fuel substrates so our body isn't able to effectively use both glucose and fatty acids and potentially ketones versus when we eat less often it forces our Body to use fuel much more efficiently so our body can use if we're being chased by a Rabbid animal

can use glucose as a fuel substrate but it can also tap into fat stored fat and even thin people have plenty of stored fat which can be broken down into fatty acids and certain types of ketones in particular beta hydroxy uate which actually diffuses across the blood brain barrier in an unfed State can provide a really effective energy source for brain Cells so we understand that we want our bodies to be metabolically flexible because this can help improve energy is really understanding that metabolic flexibility is highly dependent on meal frequency and being able to effectively

utilize stored fat as a fuel source and so understanding that fats and ketones in particular really potentiate this energy source this is why people can can work out in an unfed State when they're fat adapted People have the ability to be very cognitively astute going through their day in an unfed State until they choose to break their fast and so on a very very simple level it's understanding that metabolic flexibility is what is is what provides that additional energy and and people feeling like they're much more energetic when people say to me I feel like

I have more energy at 50 than I did at 35 and I always say that's the beauty of metabolic flexibility you know Metabolic flexibility is something that our audience has gotten a chance to get to know more about that phrase over the last few years you know my business partner Dr Markman he wrote a book you know many years ago called the blood sugar solution and inside of that he you know didn't use that phrase but he's talking about what it looks like to get your body in that state but that phrase specifically metabolic flexibility

thanks to people like Dr Casey means People like yourself Ben bman individuals that we've had on the podcast people are becoming a lot more aware but still I would say just kind of like with fasting there might be some people that are listening that don't fully understand what that looks like so let's use a contrast what are some top signs that you could share uh symptoms reactions other stuff uh you know habits in people's lives that are a good indication that they're not Metabolically flexible are there things that they're doing or feeling throughout the day

that shows that they may not have metabolic flexibility and by the way metabolic flexibility is a good thing so you're going to share with us the signs that maybe somebody is not in that place right now absolutely I I would think first and foremost when you eat a meal and you get hungry one to two hours later that's a sign that you're either not fueling your body effectively Or you're not particularly fuel efficient I also think about the people they get hangry so they're a they're hungry but they're getting grumpy kind of like a toddler

I could o make the argument kind of like a teenager because I have a few of those in my house as well but those hangry episodes are a sign that your body is not effectively utilizing fats as a stored form of fuel people that have stubborn weight loss resistance because their body is not Metabolically well adapted um you know the people that say to me I'm doing all the right things and I can't lose weight more often than not it's because their body is is stuck whether it's leptin or insulin resistance and I'm sure we'll

probably touch on some of these things that can be a major contributor I also think about you know people that can't go more than two to three hours in between a meal and it's because they again they're utilizing that fast quick Source of glucose or carbohydrates for fuel and they're not able to uh tap into the into the fats and so um those are some of the key most common things that I see but it's also that fatigue if you eat a meal and you're really tired after eating that's not normal that is a sign

that either you didn't put your Macros your protein fat and carbohydrates together but could also be a sign of not being metabolic flexible and unfortunately I think in our society we Think it's normal to get tired after eating a meal or to feel like we've eaten a good siiz meal and we want to continue eating it's almost like those those satiation cues are off uh which is super common to see some degree of letin resistance but if you keep wanting to eat after eating a good-sized meal that can also be a sign that you're not

in a position where you're medic metabolically optimized and having your training and Background as a nurse practitioner can you share with us just for the people that are following along what might be some biomarkers that are also an indication where you can see it in your blood work that you're not You' haven't stepped into metabolic flexibility I would say first and foremost a fasting insulin I I think it's the first biomarker that becomes disregulated in some degree of insulin resistance way before fasting glucose or An A1C and they do have their place but I think

if we were looking at more fasting insulins we would be discovering more people who are heading in the wrong direction I also think about triglycerides and HDL uh we know that part of this metabolic syndrome are triglycerides that are greater than 150 HDL if you're a male um less than 45 women if they're less than 55 and what's interesting is every time I would work and my whole background as an NP is in Cardiology so 16 years working with some very sick patients and I would look at a triglyceride and it was 500 300 and

I would say you have a carbohydrate problem and they would say no no no no no and I would say you know generally the people that have got genetic propensities for high triglycerides it's it's exceedingly high and that puts them at risk for pancreatitis but that was definitely a barometer which I would use I would say okay we need to clean up the Carbohydrates because you're not getting this from eting too much meat you're not getting this from eating too many vegetables this is clearly processed carbohydrates alcohol etc those are three that I think about

I think about high sensitivity CRP um I certainly lean into some of the other biophysical mark you know we're looking at fasting glucose um you know certainly uric acid I know that uh Dr David Pearl mutters really kind of Highlighted this area and particulars being a metabolic Health marker how many people have gout and or my patients in Baltimore used to call it gou which I thought was so cute um that really have these issues related to twoo high uric acid levels and we're not talking to our patients about the fact that this is a

sign that your insulin is way too high um I also think about just having you know a blood pressure that not within a a proper range as a sign of some degree Of insulin resistance those are the ones I tend to focus in on I mean obviously you can get with some degree of insulin resistance you can get changes in in your sex hormones there are other things that go on but fasting insulin is one that I talk about all the time because it is such an inexpensive test and far too many allopathic train providers

are not looking at this measure and I I think it's really it's criminal because if we really want to get ahead of Metabolic health issues we have to start doing a better job of monitoring and prevention as opposed to waiting until someone has you know documented disease waiting until they actually have a chronic health issue let's be much more preventative so those are the ones that I typically focus in on and because you really highlighted fasting insulin as the first one do you have a range where when somebody first of all it's kind of sad

but a lot of people you have to kind Of maybe fight a little bit and I don't mean that in a Advocate I guess is the better word because not always unless if there's something immediately where you are screened or have a history of of diabetes in your family or you are clearly sort of diabetic or pre-diabetic you kind of have to push your practitioner to order this lab for you as you mentioned it's not expensive but when people do Convince or work with one of these direct lab companies which it's great that there's more

of them that are out there and let's say that they get their number back what what general range are you thinking about when it comes to fasel and Insulin as they start to work towards more optimal numbers yeah I do like to see it between two and five and more often than not women will come to me and they'll say I've been weight loss resistant for a period of time I don't Understand why this is happening and all their other values don't look too bad you know values that they Labs that they've done through their

health care professional and then I'll say well let's do a fasting insulin and their fasting insulin is 20 and I'm like well now we understand um and now we need to work very very diligently uh or a fasting insulin of 15 or a fasting insulin of 12 and I just say it gives us something to work towards objectively And I really congratulate the healthcare practitioners who are now starting to order this test in particular because we could be we could be monitoring patients for years way ahead and you know saying to them okay your fasting

insulin's been five for five years and now it's 10 we need to do something differently so that we can lower this understanding that it is often times a biomark and I've had conversations with a lot of Physicians um who believe it's 5 to 10 years Preceding becoming you know officially insulin resistant or diabetic and you know given the you know that the lack of metabolic flexibility in our general population this should be something that is monitored several times a year monitored with you know Lifestyle Changes Etc but I really think that this is an inexpensive

way to get a sense it's it's like a litmus test really um to get a sense of where someone is you know how much work do we need to do do We have to be aggressive or can we say okay it's a little bit of tweaking maybe a little bit of fasting lower carbohydrate let's take a walk after dinner or your big meals um let's focus on sleep all things that are so important but yet we're not consistently talking about these things enough I think you know we the traditional kind of allopathic model which I

was trained in um many people they're they're they're bucking up against so many Changes in the healthcare system that they just don't feel like they have time to do one more thing you know it feels onor and overwhelming so it's such a profound thing of what you just shared so I just want to make sure that our audience like has those dots connected so just can you firmly connect the dots between if you have a elevated fasting insulin right out of that range that you mentioned and many people are way out of that range that

you mentioned they're in Their 15 20 and above how does that make it difficult to lose weight so when your fasting insulin levels are high your body cannot go in and draw upon fats as a fuel source so it's almost like there's a lock and key mechanism that has been disrupted so when we're as an example we we're in a fasted State and our insulin levels are low our body can go in and can draw upon those fatty acids and utilize them as a fuel substrate but if your fasting insulin is High either because you

eat constantly and let's be frank we've been telling our patients for years eat three meals a day and snacks and you know eat to stoke your metabolism and you know breakfast is the most important meal of the day what we're forgetting is that every time we're eating depending on what we're eating we can get either a significant blood sugar rise or maybe a minimal one and important to probably note here that We're going to get a much more um a much greater response from blood sugar and Insulin secreted to bring that blood sugar back down

you're eating all carbohydrates is very different than needing some protein and healthy fats which are going to have a more negligible impact on that blood sugar response so understanding that meal frequency chronic stress um you know understanding that if you're getting poor quality sleep all of these things Comm mitigate that but the big takeaway is if your fasting insulin's High guess what you are not going to be metabolically flexible it is hormonally uh you were hormonally incapable of drawing upon those stores fat stored fats as a fuel source and really important to understand that there

are ways we can work around there there's never been a patient that I've worked with who's had a high insulin that we haven't been able to fix But more often than not that knowledge is power but it's understanding on a fundamental level fasting insulin needs to be low to be able to utilize it effectively it's not a bad hormone it gets a bad wrap unfortunately you know we think about insulin resistance and that's all we always say it's a negative thing and I always say insulin is a beautiful hormone when it's properly balanced and all

these hormones it's almost like there's a great Symphony we Need to properly balance these hormones and much of that can be can be adjusted by simply Chang in our lifestyle yeah it's so important to remember these things that we feel like we want to demonize play a super important role in the body even things like plaque right and obviously we know the cholesterol story and we've talked about that what was really interesting and I know you're familiar with his work and he's been on this podcast before but Ben bman was Saying that there are two

times in our life where our body actually goes into insulin resistance to support us one of them is and you know you mentioned you have teenagers in the house one is during puberty insulin is a major part of helping us rapidly grow in the case of women to develop uh you know breast and and their hips and everything else for young men you know also just growing rapidly being a part of that process that sort of insatiable appetite which Is part of that process of stepping into it and then the other one which I if

I understand correctly was also when um when uh is it when it's a a baby a baby is going through it or is it when a mother is pregnant either way I'll look back back up and I'll write that inside of the show notes maybe you know do you know the other time that that the body actually purposefully goes into insulin resistance well I think it's a it's a very delicate balance you know during Pregnancy because you don't want insulin resistance that's then fueling just stational diabetes totally um but but I I being the parent

of teenagers especially male teenagers I can assure you that that anabolic massive growth phase the amount of food that their bodies can intake in a in a meal let alone over the course of 24 hours is quite impressive so let's Zoom back out to fasting because really the other dots that we're connecting through your work And that you've highlighted in your book it's there in the background for the people that are watching intermittent fasting transformation the 45-day program for women to lose stubborn weight improve hormonal health and slow aging so to connect the dots with

fasting and metabolic health and improving metabolic flexibility fasting is one of the primary levers that you've used both as a practitioner and now in your teaching to help people step into Optimal metabolic health so how do you look at the world of fasting fasting can mean a lot of different things and is there a particular type of fasting that you recommend for most people yeah I mean fasting is as simple as saying eat less often I think it's very triggering for some people to say the word fasting can be very triggering and so I always

say that the beauty of fasting is it's flexible we don't have to do the same eating and and feeding window uh and Fasting window on a daily basis I do lean into a 168 as a good starting point obviously there are lots of variations but I do find that the average person when they're new to fasting and we're working our way up to 16 hours fast with an eight hour feeding window is a good starting point obviously there are people that engage and and advocate for longer fasts and people are doing shorter fasts but for

the average person that's listening that's trying to you Know wrap their heads around I'm going to go 16 hours without eating it's understanding most of that time is spent sleeping you know that that's the one thing for many people they don't realize you're actually sleeping you know eight nine 10 hours a day or you're you know you stopped eating and you're you know heading to bed and it really isn't as arduous as people anticipate it will be I know that even myself I had a healthy amount of skepticism at first um and Then I started

doing it so really it's eating less often and understanding that that feeding and that fasting window are very flexible so obviously men and menopausal women can fast differently than women that are still getting a menstrual cycle and that's an area of my work because it hasn't really been focused in on um very much in most others you know work but I I think that fasting is really as simple as eating less often and it's not newer novel That's unfortunately one of those things that the media really wants us to believe that it's new and novel

and it's just like you know a fad and a phase and I have to remind them that dates back to Biblical times all the major religions have Incorporated some degree of fasting into their practices and so it is not new it maybe new to us because we've been conditioned otherwise by I want to believe well-meaning clinicians and probably the media but our bodies Actually are adapted to be able to eat less often we have trained them otherwise though when people hear it they're often facing against all the marketing advice that they see out there in

the world you hinted at that a little bit earlier but I think it's just worthwhile touching on for a second you know why are the powers that be and I don't mean that in a conspiratorial way you know I think economics is often the primary Driver of things but why is the powers that be and and how did we get so entrenched in this idea that we have to eat regularly and somehow that will help us have a better metabolism or will help us keep up our metabolism yeah well the processed food industry is is

ultimately there to make a profit and so if you look look at the trajectory of the processed food industry over the last hundred years last 80 years um we went from as a Society eating largely eating a substantive breakfast you know whether it's bacon and eggs whether it's leftover steak you know whatever it is that we're eating because people actually needed to have a real party breakfast because they weren't going to eat again till lunch or maybe they didn't eat again till later in the afternoon or evening and we slowly transition to eating a lot

of grain products obviously things that are Subsidized by the federal government really proliferate in the processed food industry and grains are a large part of that and we went from eating you know protein and and healthy fats to eating a lot of carbohydrate and so whether it's cereal or granola or sugar seatan beverages or um you know the the sugar sweet and yogurt that's out there we've shifted away from being protein focused to being carbohydrate focused and we went from having a substantive meal and Not being hungry for four or five hours to eating a

poultry meal with not a lot of nutritional value uh that is not going to keep our blood sugar stable that is going to you know create a degree of potential insulin resistance and is not going to give us the uh cognitive ability to be able to focus for hours on end we're going to get hungry an hour or two later and this is where I think the notion started was we started changing the way we were eating We started eating much more um processed foods and and it's interesting my uh grandparents my grandfather was Italian

my grandmother was German and they used to talk to me quite a bit because food is very important in Italian's Lifestyles and so they would talk to me about what they were watching you know from an evolution perspective over the past 50 plus years and they used to talk about like people used to grow gardens and people used to you know Spend a lot of time making meals and I think the processed food industry stepped in after World War II and really started to convince people like oh if you buy these products they're going to

help you stay out of the kitchen you're going to have to spend as much time people started getting disconnected from the process of cooking um people started feeling dependent on these processed foods to be able to create quote unquote nutritious meals for their fam so I Think there's many things that changed that contributed this but when I think about the processed food industry as a whole they've introduced products to make our lives easier but in essence these same products have made us less healthy so we're convinced we don't know how to cook we're convinced that

meals should be prepared in five minutes um we've convinced ourselves that we should eat on the go you know all these convenien Foods you know think about it When you travel you know go to an airport you know there's there's very rarely at least where I seem to go through there aren't always healthy options while you're traveling and so when I think about all the things that have contributed to this this mindset that we've gotten disconnected from the way our bodies are designed to you know fervently Thrive and instead we are focused on quick fixes

uh believing that you know the limiting beliefs that we Shouldn't we don't need to be cooking or that these things are going to be healthier than what we could creating our own our own home and we're leading we're kind of heading down a path where young people don't know how to cook and they're convinced that they want to go through the fast food line because that's going to be more convenient but more often than not the U processed foods that they're consuming are contributing to insulin resistance and Poor metabolic health I posted something on social

media the other day uh about Chick-fil-A and it was showing what the ingredients were in the bun and the chicken and the seasonings and most of it was seed oils uh and lot of you know hydrogenated products that no one should be eating and people are understanding now that often times when you're consuming these hyper palatable Foods you want more and more and more because it dis Reggulator monal mechanisms in the body that remind us we're full as opposed to sitting down and having a steak and maybe you have some broccoli and then maybe you're

you're having something else with your meal and you feel full and satiated because your body can recognize what those macronutrients are so I think many things have contributed to this um you know certainly always say that if you start your day with uh you know process carbs you're you're Definitely not setting yourself up in the right foot or the right frame of mind to be able to get through your day and have enough energy um and feel like you're going to be able to tackle whatever the day throws at you what I love about your

message and how you break things down is number one you're a great Storyteller and I just want to acknowledge you for that you really help people kind of connect the dots and see what was happening in the past versus Now another thing that you do that I think is very needed in today's world of Health and Wellness is that you hear a few different things when it comes to this topic of you were just chatting about breakfast right so on one side let's call it the traditional TV advertising the old model it's like breakfast is

Mo the most important meal of the day and within that context it's you need to have your cereal you need to have your dut Bagel whatever they just Looking at it from a standpoint of calories in calories out get that external energy that's there right then you have another side of let's call it um you know some of the health trends that we've seeing where people are like skip breakfast it's completely unnecessary just fast and go right into whatever you need to do for the day and you know there's no reason to you know to

have that component which okay there might be a lot of individuality and Sometimes that works great for individuals especially when they've tapped into metabolic flexibility but this other area that you kind of highlighted in the middle which is that it's not that breakfast is bad or good the question is what are you fueling yourself with and how does that set the tone for what's going on especially when you're in this transitionary phase of getting your body from not metabolically flexible to more metabolically flexible So that is so that often means you know do did you

have a really tough workout the day before do you have a lot of cognitive activities you know there's a lot of layers that you're balancing out we don't want to just rule things out completely well we know that that traditional story that we see on TV that breakfast is the most important meal of the day so just eat as much as sugar and carbs as you want we know that that's not true because we could just look Around and see that that's not working but there's these other sides where people can have a little bit

of variation so help us unpack that variation and is there any variation specifically on the topic of breakfast that um that you teach your your clients is and that your coaches teach uh the people that they're working with it's such a good it's such a good way to think about this and I'm going to disclose this to you up front so today Is one of those very busy days I had a very heavy leg uh day yesterday I woke up this morning and I was hungry um my day is so busy that I knew I

was not going to have an opportunity to eat in between all the things that I'm doing and so I got up this morning and I ate breakfast and I think most people would be surprised to know that but I I think that when you get to a point when you acknowledge where you are in time and space when you look at your schedule and You say to yourself I would rather sit down and have a real nutrient dense Whole Foods diet meal then fast really long today because I can tell you right now like when

I'm that hungry when I wake up I know it's that my body is looking for for me personally I need to eat I'm I'm going to get that protein Bolis in and then I will make it through all of my things I need to do on my calendar but when I'm working with women in particular if I'm working with my Coaches I always tell them you know first of all our bodies if we lean into the our intuitive side of our bodies and for many people if you're not metabolically healthy that's challenging so let me

just preface that but when you're in a point where you are metabolically flexible I think those C sometimes you don't sleep well sometimes you had a really tough workout maybe you're stressed um maybe you didn't eat enough the day before because you just Had a busy day and that does happen um it really genuinely happens not to my teenagers but it does happen to me on occasion that might be a day where you're not going to fast as long you may get up in the morning and say I've done a 15-hour fast already I'm ready

to eat and you need to intuitively lean into what your body is trying to share with you I think on the other end we have to acknowledge that we as women if we're still getting menstrual cycles There are going to be times during our Cycles when we're going to have greater success with fasting than in others I think it's important to acknowledge that if you're not sleeping that's not a time to fast you know and I'm sure you probably have had other um guests on that have talked about hormesis and hormetic stress and how this

is so important beneficial stress in the right amount at the right time intermittent fasting is a type of hormesis and so it Might be you have too much on your plate and that is okay so what I always say is a go standard for everyone um unless you are growing like you are a teenager like my teenagers don't fast um pregnant people breastfeeding people should not fast but one thing I like to emphasize is that everyone can benefit from 12 hours of not eating really and truly like that should be the gold standard for everyone

and I don't consider that per se fasting but that's 12 hours of Digestive rest which has incredible health benefits and that should be the gold standard that we're teaching our patients and we're talking to people about so when I talk about fasting and really leaning into bio indiv individuality it's asking yourself all of those questions sleep stress life circumstances where you are in your menstrual cycle where you are life stage and understanding it is okay to adjust we don't have to be rigid that's one Thing about fasting that I always like to emphasize is how

important it is to not be rigid the one of the key proponents of fasting from my perspective is flexibility so you may fast five days out of the week and say on the weekends I don't want to fast and that's okay or you may fast two weeks out of your menstrual cycle and say I don't want to fast the last two weeks of my menstrual cycle or a male could say I don't want to fast on the days I'm Lifting really heavy and that's okay but I think the the gold standard should really be can

you get enough protein into your feeding window where are you life stage and what is your lifestyle like at that given point in time all of those things can really impact the success that you Embrace with fasting hey YouTube If you enjoyed what you just saw keep watching for more great content on how to improve your brain and your life it becomes very difficult to sleep As you get older and when we don't sleep we are more prone to eating late at night and getting exposed to light that itself puts us into a visious cycle