Hello Health Champions.So many people are finding benefit from fasting and they're finding
it so easy to do, but other people are afraid because there's so many strange notions floating
around. So today I want to clarify some of those misconceptions and also talk about
the best length of time to do your fasting. Who needs to do what? First lets just demystify
the whole concept so we can get comfortable about what this really is. When we eat something
that allows us to store something. We use some of the energy for the time being but the excess
we can store. We can store a tiny little bit as carbohydrates and most of it we store
as fat, because it's the most energy dense form of storage. It's the most efficient way
to do it. And the way that we store it whether it's glycogen as sugar ,carbohydrate or whether
we stored it as fat, the mediator is insulin. Insulin is the hormone that allows us to put things
into cells. Now here is the big question. Why would we ever want to do that? So this is kind
of like, you put things you put fat in the body stores. That's sort of like you're putting food in
your pantry. Why would you do that? And the answer is because you plan to use it at some
later point. So then when we don't eat now we can reverse the process and we can burn
that fat we can take that stuff out of the pantry. That doesn't sound so strange that
we put things in so that we can take it out. And for most of human history we've had some
sort of balance in this system. And when you don't eat then insulin goes down. And this
is a very very normal process put in we take out nothing could be more natural. How has this
been working historically? So these guys lived a long long time ago Paleolithic Age hunter-gatherers
And we don't know exactly how often they ate but we do know that they didn't have probably
extensive pantries or freezers or refrigerators They were very limited in how much food they
could store. So on a bad day they probably didn't eat. If they couldn't find food every
day they probably went some time without, and on a good day they probably had one or two
or maybe three meals. And then humans developed some organization, some civilization, agriculture,
societies. So from recorded history up until 1970 we probably ate two to three times not
everyone had the luxury of eating 3 meals, but very very few people would ever more than
three meals. But then in the last forty years or so we've change that. We've gotten the idea that
the three meals are not enough, that we need to add snacks, every two hours we need to put
some extra fuel and we need to top it off and as if that wasn't enough a lot of people
walk around with a sippy cup they have their soda or their sweet tea or some other drink
and we're kind of used to having always having something to eat or drink and then of course
we have the development of all these fancy coffee shops we're almost every beverage sold
in there is a disguised sugar bomb. And what's interesting with a period of the last 40 years to the period before that
is the two things happened. We started eating more frequently and we started eating
more sugar and more processed foods and then we wonder why the rate of obesity and diabetes
shot up like a straight line or even exponentially So while some people think that the idea of fasting
is strange, what's really strange is what we've done in the last 40 years, because now we've
gotten the idea to never ever empty the pantry, right? Eating food is like loading up your body's pantry
and putting things in is a good thing but don't ever take anything out. We've gotten these
ideas that breakfast is the most important meal and while the word breakfast literally
means to break your fast it has come to mean that you eat something as soon as possible
after you get up. And then we tell the kids that you need energy before lunch I have to
have breakfast otherwise you can't perform you won't learn anything so make sure that
you eat breakfast and of course as a result we have these horrible "frankenfoods" of chemicals
and sugar and really nothing useful for the body. And what's really strange is this whole
idea that we would need to eat every 2 to 3 hours. That there would be some health benefit
that we would be better off doing that or that it would be dangerous to not eat every
2 to 3 hours. But what about sleep? Do you have to set the alarm so you can get up in the
middle of the night and eat something? Can you imagine the headlines? "Mass deaths last night
during the power out. Millions of people didn't wake up to their feeding alarm and they starved
to death in the middle of the night." No never happened, right? Because we don't need to eat
every 2 hours there is no health benefit there's tremendous health detriment to eating every
2 to 3 hours. Let's break it down and understand just how simple this is. What is fasting?
It is the period where you don't eat. So assuming that you sleep at all most people would get several hours
of fasting and if you have your late-night snack and you eat first thing in the morning
you probably still yet somewhere around eight hours or in the neighborhood of that. And
if you don't have that late night snack but you eat your dinner at 7 then you get 12 hours
if you have dinner a little earlier you have 14 hours and this is how humans have created
balance by having 12 to 14 hours for most of human history and that's how a lot of these
problems are avoided. Then what a lot of people find when they need to reverse the process
is that there's really not much need to eat breakfast so if you skip that and have your first
meal at noon and dinner at eight, you have 16 hours if you have dinner a little earlier you have
18 hours so it's not really that strange and what most people find is that this is not
even just easy but it's so easy that they don't understand why they would ever not do
it or why they would start having three meals or snacks or anything like that. So let's talk
about fat storing versus fat burning and how we get back to balance there, because if
you look at the obesity epidemic it's obvious we've spent a lot more time in fat storing
than we have in fat burning so the red above the line here is fat storing and the green
below is fat-burning so if you go to bed on a full stomach then you're going to have to
process that food that food is going to be put into storage so most of the time you sleeping
you still in fat storing then you get a few hours before waking up where you have some
fat burning but then as soon as you wake up you start eating your breakfast and you mid-morning
snack and your lunch and so on and for most of the day again you're in fat storing. You're
putting stuff in the pantry. You're never taking anything out so throughout the day you might
have a few minutes at best where you do some fat-burning but most people won't even get
to that point especially not if they're eating high carb and high sugar. Now if you dropped down to two
meals a day and you skipped breakfast it might look something like this that the first part
of sleep is probably still some fat storing but then instead of just eating as soon as
you get up now you get all those extra hours of fat burning in the morning and because
you're not eating so many meals throughout the day you actually get some fat burning
in during the day as well so you have more of a balance between fat storing and fat burning
you're allowing your body to clean out the pantry you put energy in to use, so now you're
using it instead of just adding more and more and more. And what if you do an extended fast?
What if you go a couple of days or even longer? Well you basically keep burning fat for the duration
that you don't eat, right? This seems really really simple but it's very very powerful
that the more time you go without eating the more fat gets burned. And as an additional
benefit of course the longer you go without food the longer you allow your insulin to
drop so it's not just about the weight, but it's also about the health benefits, about reversing
type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. The longer you go the more powerful the effect.
Then how long do you go? Well that depends on your goal and your situation and your DNA and
so forth but basically if your goal is weight loss it's going to depend on how stubborn
your weight is. Have you reached a plateau or do you just want it to happen faster?
And the same exact thing holds true for insulin resistance because it's basically the same
mechanism this weight is put there in the first place by insulin and if you have stubborn
weight you have stubborn insulin And other reasons to do fasting can be degenerative
disease if you want to reverse that.
If you have met your goals but you want to do some prevention or if you want more
longevity or if you just want to increase your health span. So much of the time we
talked about living longer but what's the point of living to 90 if the last 40 years
are riddled with disease and suffering. What if you could live to ninety or a hundred and
a hundred and twenty and be healthy and enjoy that virtually all of that time. Let's go over some examples for weight loss and the
vast majority of people somewhere 60 70 80 per-cent will get good results if they shrink
their feeding window down to six or eight hours which means their fasting window gets
to be 16 to 18 hours. Most people will get pretty good results and if you're one of those
people then just do that and be consistent and you'll develop a very good lifestyle that
works for you but if that doesn't work for you if you have stubborn weight, if you hit a
plateau if you needed to happen faster then you got to do more. It's as simple as that. So now
the next step is one meal a day which means you eat once a day or if you go further than
that then we're talkin maybe 42 or 48 hours and it's not as hard as people make it out to
be because if you start off with 16:8 or 18:6, and your body gets used to it, then it's not
that difficult to have dinner one day and then just to skip the whole next day just
make it till bedtime the next day go to bed and when you wake up you've fasted 36 hours.
The beauty of this is that that fasting period includes two nights so you've slept twice in that period
And if you're used to not having breakfast then you just go another 6 hours to lunch and you
have 42 hours. If you want to you can now just have the evening meal and you have forty-eight
hours. It's not as hard as it sounds and the fasting that last more than 24 hours that's
not something most people have to do all the time if you do once in awhile that's going
to break up that plateau it's going to break up that stubborn pattern and it's really going
to make things happen faster for the vast majority of people. But another interesting
thing happens to people is once they get past that 42 up to 48 hour mark they find that
the worst has passed that they're not as hungry as they used to be the kind of getting in
the groove they're getting the flow of things their minds are brightening and their periods
of hunger are less and shorter so it's not as hard as people think to go from that 48
hours and just do one more night and now you're at 3 days and then you can just basically
go as long as you feel good. As long as you're comfortable. As long as you're clear minded.
As long as you have some energy. Don't go run marathons or anything silly like that but
just for daily life, people find that they can usually extend it a few extra day so maybe
go 3 to 7 days and if you hit a point where you feel hey I've had enough then you eat
something. The only thing to make sure of is to drink plenty of fluids and take some salt
and minerals because you will be losing a little bit extra of that. And if your goal is to reverse insulin
resistance and type 2 diabetes then the exact same reasoning holds true there because if
you have stubborn weight then you have stubborn insulin so the mechanism is exactly the same.
But there are even more reasons to fast such as degenerative disease because the longer
you go with fasting the more autophagy you get. And autophagy literally means " self eating"
When you're fasting your body get energy from the fat. You're burning fat. The longer you go the
more fat burn but the most precious resource beyond energy is protein because protein is
used for building blocks and enzymes and hormones and your body constantly have cells wear out
so your body has to make new ones and if you're not eating protein the body has to find it
somewhere. So protein becomes very very precious and where can you find protein in the body
well muscles is the obvious choice but the body doesn't want to spend muscles. It needs
those to do the work. So it up-regulates the cleaning crew, the recycling crew. It puts more
people on cleaning duty and that goes out and clean every nook and cranny in the body
looking for debris and waste materials and dead cells and virus and bacteria. So in essence
you're up-regulating not just the cleaning crew but your immune system and you can take care of
sagging skin and all sorts of dead cell and waste that the body doesn't need. It gets better
at finding those things and as a result now we have results with arthritis and diabetes
and blood pressure and even think like auto immunity. Something like multiple sclerosis
The brain and nervous system has a very poor cleanup and repair. And autophagy is
really the only thing that's going to significantly improve the ability to repair the brain and
the nervous system. That is also very powerful after a traumatic brain injury. The first thing
you want to do if you get a concussion is to stop eating because that autophagy is
going to help clean up the damage and there's even evidence that periods
of fasting and autophagy can help reduce and even reverse cancer at least certain kinds
There are so many benefits to fasting that it's a great idea to do it even just for
maintenance so now we're doing it for prevention for longevity etcetera like we talked about
And now I would suggest that you do a combination of 16: to OMAD. Somewhere in that range. You eat
once a day, twice a day, 3 times a day. If you have a tendency to lose a lot of weight, too
easily. If you don't want to lose weight, then don't do so much of the OMAD. You do more
of the 16:8. If you tend to put on weight if you have stubborn weight then you do more
of the OMAD and less of the 16:8. I have a hard time keeping weight on if I do OMAD,
if I do one meal a day, for any length of time I just tend to keep losing weight
cuz it's hard to eat that much food in one sitting. I don't feel bad but I get thinner
than I want to be. And if you get 16 to 24 hours of fasting on a regular basis you're
going to get a fair amount of autophagy but you're not going to get massive amounts
of autophagy. So that's why I suggest you do a 42 hour fast once or twice a month depending
on how you feel how much weight whatever what your goals are like we talked about what feels
right for you and like I said you just skip a whole day and then you skip breakfast the
next day and you're at 42 hours and now when you gone 42 hours instead of 16 you have
exponentially increased your autophagy. But then I also believe that there are benefits to going a little
bit longer once in awhile. I think now you can get into deep, deep autophagy levels where
you could maybe prevent cancer or reverse early stages of cancer there's some research
that indicate that might be the case and about every 3 months or so maybe two to four times
a year maybe once a year, You do a little bit longer fast and I would suggest go in at least
three days I would go 3 to 4 days for myself and if you feel good and you want to
go longer than that's fine too. If you enjoyed this video you'll love that one, and if you really
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