How FASTING Can Turn Your Life Around TODAY! EP 1185

Today’s episode is a special mashup focused on all things fasting! We’ve had a few doctors and health experts on the show raving about the extreme health benefits of fasting when done right. In today’s episode we’ll hear from Dave Asprey, Dr. Alan Goldhamer, and Dr. Jason Fung talking all about the do’s and don’ts of fasting! In this episode we discuss the best fasting schedule for you and how to learn to listen to your body’s needs, the biggest mistakes you can make while fasting, the science behind how fasting works and how people discovered its benefits, why fasting is more accessible than you think, and so much more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1185Dave Asprey’s Full Episode - www.lewishowes.com/1084Dr. Alan Golhamer’s Full Episode - www.lewishowes.com/1124Dr. Jason Fung’s Full Episode - www.lewishowes.com/1030The Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,185 on the power of fasting. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:28Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone. We have a special episode today focused on all things fasting. We've had a few experts, doctors and health specialists on the show raving about the extreme health benefits of fasting when it's done correctly. Cause some people out there, I know you guys might be messing it up or hearing certain strategies that aren't really effective. But when it's done well and correctly, it can be extremely life-changing. And today's episode, we'll hear from Dave Asprey, Dr. Alan Goldhamer and Dr. Jason Fung, talking all about the do's and don'ts of fasting. We'll dive into the best fasting schedule for you and how to learn to listen to your

• 1:09Lewis Howes?

  body's needs, the biggest mistakes you can make while fasting, the science behind how fasting works and how people discovered its benefits, why fasting is more accessible than you think, and a lot more good information in this episode. And if you're enjoying this, make sure to spread the message forward. Let some of your friends know about fasting and how they can use this to improve the quality of their life, their health, to help them improve while they age, and so many other benefits. And please, if you're enjoying this at any moment, leave us a review over on Apple Podcast, letting us know which part of this episode you enjoyed the most. We had an amazing review this week from Kaitlyn, who's the fan of the week. And they said, "A colleague of mine from work recommended the School of Greatness.

• 1:53Lewis Howes?

  And since that day, I have felt so inspired to do better. I love each and every one of these shows as I have now started a journal that outlines each episode. Now my favorite question to ask my students is, what is your definition of greatness?" So I love that. Thank you, Kaitlyn, for leaving your review and for being the fan of the week. And again, post your reviews. We shout them out here on the podcast and they mean the world to us. Okay, in just a moment, we'll dive deep into this episode all about fasting.

• 2:25Lewis Howes?

  In this first section about fasting, Dave Asprey walks us through how to figure out the best fasting schedule for yourself. And he explains the fasting trap and why you need to look out for it, and the three best foods to eat before a fast. What is the fast that works best for you personally at this stage of your life? And what is the, the type of fast that you think the general population should be considering to improve the quality of their life, to live longer, and all these things that you talk about?

• 2:58Dave Asprey?

  If there was an easy answer to that, my book would have read like this. Step one, don't eat for a while. Step two, it's good for you. Here's a bunch of studies.

• 3:07Dave Asprey?

  10 years after writing my, my first big book and releasing the Bulletproof Diet, people lost a million pounds using intermittent fasting and bulletproof coffee and the other principles in that. And it stood the test of time, but I've learned a lot. And what you find is that there is not an answer for the general population because women are not just smaller men with less muscles. And so it varies. It also changes on time of life. And the most important thing, and the thing that motivated me to write Fast This Way is that it's not the same every day. So I was on a, a big TV show in London that required me to be awake at 2:30 a.m. and fully

• 3:49Dave Asprey?

  alert with bright lights on and, you know, being in a studio. That next morning was not the time to intermittent fast because I already had enough circadian stress. And so the deal is, what's the right fast for you today? And to give yourself permission to do it differently? And you know, because you're a pro athlete or you were, you, on a day when you're just, you don't have it, and you say, I'm going to go lift heavy anyway, what would happen to you?

• 4:16Lewis Howes?

  You might hurt yourself, you might strain something, you might not have the energy to do the full thing and then, you know, you might regret it. You might pull a muscle, who knows?

• 4:25Dave Asprey?

  Exactly. And fasting is the same kind of a thing where you're saying, okay, you know, what did my Oura ring tell me this morning about my readiness score? So, okay, if I'm ready to go and I'm totally full of it, maybe today is one meal a day. And maybe you're gonna wake up and say, you know, in most days, I just do a 14 or 16 hour fast because that's what works really well for me. And I usually do a 16 or an 18 hour fast. Today, it's around 2 o'clock, I had my first meal. And before that, I just had some black bulletproof coffee, without even the butter and MCT, because I didn't have time to put it in there because I was busy. And like, my metabolism can handle that. But when I weighed 300 pounds, if I would have tried that, I would have been hangry and hypoglycemic, and I would not

• 5:06Dave Asprey?

  have shown up the way that I expect myself to show up. So, it's that kindness to yourself that says, you know what? Today, I'm gonna do this. And if it's just not working, it's okay to say, I only fasted for 12 hours, which is the minimum fast that really does anything. Most people do 12 hours and don't even know it.

• 5:23Lewis Howes?

  So, what am I, am I hearing you say that, you know, just because you say you want to intermittent fast for two weeks or for a month, that you shouldn't push the fasting? If you went to bed at 2 AM for some reason, if you haven't recovered from your workouts, if you're exhausted and you're moody, that maybe you should eat breakfast, or you should have a smoothie, or do something to give you more energy and calories in the morning, as opposed to just, well, well, I'm supposed to fast because it's gonna make me live longer and, and kill off these dead cells or whatever. But it may be more harm if you actually don't listen to your body. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

• 5:57Dave Asprey?

  That is exactly right. Fasting is like exercise, and you don't want to overdo it, you don't want to underdo it. And what we fall into as just being humans, is what I call the fasting trap. And before that, there was the keto trap. And before that, when I was a raw vegan, it was the vegan trap. And the trap goes like this. And I may be more guilty of this than most people when I look back on my life. Hey, this is good, I'll just do more of it. Right? And that isn't the thing, the right amount is good.

• 6:27Dave Asprey?

  Many things in life have a U-shaped response curve or an inverted U. So what that means is if you do just do a little bit, nothing happens. You do the right amount, you get tons of benefits. And if you do too much, the benefits go back down. And fasting is a stressor on the body, but it's a good stressor unless you already have enough stress. So if your girlfriend broke up with you last night, maybe a 24 hour fast today is just really not the thing to do. But maybe wallowing in a bucket of ice cream isn't the right thing to do either. And there's something in the middle there. And so when people say, how should I fast every day? I can tell you for women, the recommendations, there's a whole chapter just on the studies for women in the book, because there are fewer of them. It turns out the minimum effective dose is three fasts a week, like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

• 7:12Dave Asprey?

  If you can do 14 or 16 hours, you'll get some benefits. And you get used to that and you say, you know what? Maybe I'm going to do it five days a week. But I tell everyone, even, and this will make some people mad, like have breakfast Saturday or Sunday. Don't have, you know, crazy, ridiculous, you know, IHOP. But if you want to have some gluten free pancakes even, it's fine. Because if you have a flexible metabolism, you should be able to handle it. And you want your body to know that it is in a land of plenty. You don't eat all the time, but that there's always enough food. And if you push your fasts too much, too often, you get an epigenetic, an environmental signal that says, hey, there's kind of a little bit of a famine going on here. And then your body adjusts in a way that isn't good for you.

• 7:54Dave Asprey?

  So it's the idea time without, time with, but you still have a sense of abundance in your tissues, which is very different than a low calorie diet, which just makes you feel like crap and want to punch people. That's not good.

• 8:04Lewis Howes?

  So it's taking it in in cycles. Let's do, I'm going to do this for two weeks, four weeks. But it's not going to be years consistently fasting, because that may not be as useful to your body long term.

• 8:17Dave Asprey?

  I think it will be years. Most people who practice intermittent fasting and learn how to do it the right way, they have more energy in the morning, the intermittent fast than when they have breakfast. Like Saturday morning, I sit down, you know, we have a small organic farm. So we're going to have bacon from our own pigs. It's the best bacon on the planet. I like bacon, but I look at myself, man, it's only nine. I really don't want to eat anything right now because I know that I actually have more energy if I don't eat, but I'm going to, because I'm doing it for a social thing. You know, this is family time, right? And I also know that I'm teaching my body, you should be able to handle this. All right, and I do. But there's times when I look at, I'm just not hungry, even though this is a time when most people say I'd be ravenous. And it's that freedom from the voice in your head that says, if I don't eat lunch,

• 9:00Dave Asprey?

  I'm going to starve. That's, that's the reason people do this for long term. In fact, one of the studies in Fast This Way talks about how the average person spends 15% of their thoughts about what their next meal is. I'm like, maybe we could have that 15% back and do something better with it.

• 9:17Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's more about optimizing your life and not obsessing over the, the brain thinking about what am I going to eat or watching media that's saying, eat this fast food. And you're constantly saying, well, what's next? What's next? As opposed to allowing your brain and your gut to rest for a little bit.

• 9:34Dave Asprey?

  The brain and gut rest thing is, is very interesting because in the history of fasting, it's always had spiritual contexts or health contexts. And what they do is they say, well, fast for a couple of days. And then on the third day, you stop caring about food. You get a lot of energy and then you can go into this new, open spiritual state. And there's several things happening there that I never would have imagined to be true. Back when the idea of skipping breakfast was something that was scary. Like, I don't want to do that. The first thing that happens is that when there's food in your stomach, even if it's really good food, that food is going to take energy to digest. So, energy that could have gone into thinking or feeling or repairing tissues or whatever, it goes into attacking the steak you're eating.

• 10:19Dave Asprey?

  And it breaks it down and you absorb it and then you get more energy later. But the process of doing that is an energy suck. So if you have especially a high sugar, high carb, but even oatmeal kind of breakfast, well, all of a sudden, all the energy that should have gone into your morning goes into your gut. And that's not where you wanted it to be. And then your blood sugar goes up and it, when it goes back down, the muffin calls to you at 10 a.m. and you really want the muffin. And then you start expending willpower on the muffin. Meanwhile, your body is spending extra energy digesting. So you have less energy for willpower. You're probably going to eat the muffin. And it doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means that that's biology. But the second thing that happens on these longer fasts is that you go into a state

• 11:03Dave Asprey?

  of ketosis after about a couple of days of not eating anything. And ketones provide more electrons to the neurons in your brain than even glucose or sugar or carbs do, even though that's what your brain usually eats. So all of a sudden now, you get these people fasting, all the energy that would have gone to digestion is going into repairing their tissues and going into their brain. And the brain got more energy because it's burning a better fuel. And then the body says, well, if there's no food, maybe I should open up my perception and my sensors and I should become more tuned into the world around me so I could find something to eat. Now, if you say, I'm not gonna eat yet, I'm gonna use that openness to connect with others. I'm gonna use it to connect with myself, to go for a walk in nature.

• 11:48Dave Asprey?

  You're actually in a different state. So you get all three of those from a longer fast. But the hack that I now have 10 years of experience with is that when you use MCT oil during a fast, I have very good evidence, you stay fasted, but you get the ketones that would have been present after a three day fast. And this is why people will say, okay, I'm going to do the bulletproof coffee thing in the morning, which I'm well known for. And there's a couple of other things going on there biochemically, but one of the things is that you just got the third day of fasting feeling the morning you fasted. And this is very sustainable. I mean, there are people who have done this for 10 years now and keep doing it because they're never hungry. And just not being hungry is such a relief.

• 12:31Dave Asprey?

  I know when I was a 300 pounder, I didn't even know you could have hunger.

• 12:35Lewis Howes?

  You're always hungry though, when you're 300 pounds probably, right? In the beginning?

• 12:39Dave Asprey?

  I was never hungry. I was always craving. I didn't know there was a difference.

• 12:42Lewis Howes?

  Craving, ah.

• 12:43Dave Asprey?

  Right?

• 12:44Lewis Howes?

  What's the difference between craving and hunger?

• 12:45Dave Asprey?

  There you go. Most people listening probably feel cravings most of the time. And craving is when, if I don't eat soon, a disaster is going to happen. Like, I really need to eat and it's an intense thing. But it turns out hunger is, I should probably eat sometime in the next couple of hours for you to perform better, but if I didn't, I'd be all right. I could go till tomorrow if I need to. So hunger is a gentle feeling. And the intensity of cravings is terrible. And what people find when they learn how to intermittent fast in the right ways is that they've eliminated cravings and hunger becomes a gentle presence in your life. Like, oh, it's a little bit cold in the room. Maybe I could turn the thermostat up, but if I don't, I'll be all right.

• 13:27Dave Asprey?

  And that calmness and peace that comes from it, that was what led me to write the book.

• 13:33Lewis Howes?

  And what's the biggest mistake you've made in fasting personally in the last 10 years? Or a mistake you've seen from other people who've tried to do fasting that it didn't work out for them?

• 13:45Dave Asprey?

  It's falling into that fasting trap that says if something's good, more is better.

• 13:48Lewis Howes?

  Extremism of it.

• 13:50Dave Asprey?

  Extremism, or even just something that worked for a little while, assuming it's always going to work. I noticed when I started writing about intermittent fasting, it's been a big pillar of the bulletproof diet for a long time, I think before intermittent fasting was really cool. And then people would call me and they'd say, especially women, I, you know, I felt amazing, I've lost weight, I, I can't believe this, like, who would ever thought butter would make me not hungry? I love my life. But then they call about four weeks, five weeks later and say, you know what? I feel like my sleep quality has gone down. What's going on here? And then I say, well, did you follow the advice of cycling in and out of keto and having some carbs sometimes and not, you're not pushing it? Like, well, no, I just felt so good.

• 14:34Dave Asprey?

  So I just kept doing that one thing, which was I didn't eat any carbs for long periods of time. And then I added this intermittent fasting. And then, so step one is you lose quality of sleep. Same amount of sleep, lower quality. Second thing, and men usually hit this about a month after women, but men and women both get poor quality of sleep. Women will get, their cycle is less regular than it was before. So they're going, hmm, this is weird. I don't normally have hormonal issues, but I'm feeling it this month more than I do. And for guys, I'm waking up without a kickstand. And the third thing that happens. I was watching you process that.

• 15:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. So you wake up without a kickstand because you're not having carbs and you're doing the extreme way. Is that what you're saying?

• 15:22Dave Asprey?

  Well, it's because you're over fasting.

• 15:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:23Dave Asprey?

  Right. And, and so the body's like, oh, it's a, it's a stressful environment. I don't really need that biological function very well.

• 15:29Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 15:29Dave Asprey?

  There's not enough food. It's a famine.

• 15:31Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 15:32Dave Asprey?

  And your cortisol levels go up. And what happens when cortisol goes up and you keep it elevated because you're not eating often enough is thinning of hair and it happens in women and men. So like, okay, sleep, hormones, hair, in that order is what happens when you overfast.

• 15:46Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 15:48Dave Asprey?

  And I've gone through times where I definitely went over keto. I went through a three month period where I ate

• 15:55Lewis Howes?

  just meat.

• 15:56Dave Asprey?

  One serving of broccoli a day. Just like meat and all, and it was all grass fed and very carnivore-ish, although I didn't have zero veggies. And I felt amazing at first, but by the end of that, it's exactly the same as over fasting. Where my, I'd wake up 12 times a night, but not know that I woke up and my sleep monitoring thinks that I was. And then you can even, you know, mess with your gut bacteria if you overdo it. So the deal is, look, you skip breakfast and you have lunch around noon or two. And sometimes you only have dinner, but you mix it up. And that's actually how it was in nature. But this idea of a rigid fasting schedule and you're going to like muscle through and push through. Like if you're fading, right, and I'm just not, I'm not feeling very good today.

• 16:35Lewis Howes?

  Eat some food, have a, have some broccoli, have some vegetables, have some salad, have some, yeah.

• 16:39Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. And it's just, it's okay. And the other, the flip side is also true. What if you say, I'm going to have a 16 hour fast today and noon comes like, I'm so feeling good. Like, you know, I'm going to make this a 20 or a 23 hour fast because I have it in me today.

• 16:53Lewis Howes?

  You have the energy. Yeah.

• 16:55Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. Right. And like, I feel like as an athlete, you would know this better than most. Sometimes go to the gym and you do the prescribing, other times like, I'm going to pull, pull another set in because I can. And cause like, my body's ready. If we approach fasting that way, really good things happen. And I thought it was important, I, okay, everything I do, and I mean, because we're friends and all, you know, I do cryotherapy and stem cells and all kinds of crazy stuff, right? But. There's a return on investment for everything you do. And it's not based on dollars. It's based on energy. You spend energy to do something and you get energy back. Well, fasting is like, okay, you walk into the bank and you don't have an account there. And the teller's like, oh, hi, here's some money. But I didn't do anything. That's right here.

• 17:39Dave Asprey?

  Here's some money and we'll pay you interest on this later today. And then two years from now, we'll pay you more interest. Like, but I didn't open an account. I didn't put any energy into this. It's like, yeah, I'll find that. That's all right. Cause with fasting, you spent no money and no time and no energy on breakfast. So you got paid right now. You got free energy and free money and time back. And then all morning long, you have less hunger and more energy than you did when you had the Pop-Tarts. And then you don't get type 2 diabetes and you have more energy and you have to buy smaller pants. And like all kinds of good things happen, even if you're not perfect with your diet. And so this is the one thing that has the highest return on investment because you invest less than you do today.

• 18:17Lewis Howes?

  And what do you think is the worst food to eat before you start fasting? Like, what's the worst thing you could do where it's kind of, doesn't matter that you fasted? Cause you just had this, this and this, you know, 16 hours ago.

• 18:31Dave Asprey?

  A bunch of fried stuff, especially like french fries. Yeah. From a restaurant, especially because they use such bad oils. And what you find from fasting is that sometimes it's effortless. And sometimes you're just have gnawing hunger the whole time. And the gnawing hunger, it's your fault. It's what you ate before the fast.

• 18:50Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 18:51Dave Asprey?

  So in Fast This Way, I teach about these six big categories of food that are likely to cause cravings for you. And they don't all cause the same intensity of cravings, but these are foods that aren't as good as we think they are. Because we have, anything you're going to eat has three things in it. And most nutritionists only look at two. I'm not picking on nutritionists specifically, dietitians are even worse. I'll pick on them. These are the guys who feed you Jell-O with NutraSweet in the hospital. But. There's calories in food and some types of of popular wisdom say, well, eat food with less calories. Guys, calories are energy. Energy is what you want. And to say that you are somehow going to feel really good on a low calorie diet, it does not work. As a 300 pound guy who's lost

• 19:34Dave Asprey?

  way more than 100 pounds, let's say I'm a 200 pound guy now, but you you go low calorie, lose 20 pounds, gain 30, lose 30, gain 40. It does not work. It makes you miserable and it makes you just, just cranky.

• 19:46Lewis Howes?

  So what's the solution? What's the solution then?

• 19:48Dave Asprey?

  Well, the solution is you actually eat enough calories and you eat the right kinds of calories. So well, let's assume your food has some energy in it. The second thing food has, it has nutrients. So it has vitamins and minerals and stuff like that. This is good. Now, most of the time we stop there and say, okay, you should eat more of this because it has, for some reason, some people say less calories and other people say more nutrients. But the third bucket is what matters. The third bucket is anti nutrients or toxins. And it's not like any food is is perfect, but some have more or less calories, some have more or less nutrients, and some have more or less anti nutrients. And if you pretend like they don't exist, which is how most nutritional stuff is written, let's eat this because it's packed with this, ignoring the fact that you could literally have a bowl of

• 20:30Dave Asprey?

  cyanide. And if you put some vitamins in it, they say, well, it's low calorie, it's high in vitamins, you should eat that. And so I teach people in in fast this way, look, here's the things to look for. If you eat that, you're probably going to have a miserable fast with low energy cravings and be cold. But if you don't eat that, you're going to have a much easier fast. And then you start to realize, wait a minute, maybe I'm going to choose foods that don't make me hungry as soon as I finish eating them. And if you master that, even when you're not intermittent fasting, you're going to have lunch. And instead of wanting a snack at two, I'm actually full until dinner. I just don't want to eat. So I don't think about eating. I don't reach for the cookies.

• 21:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 21:06Dave Asprey?

  So instead of willpower, it's just biology. It's so much easier that way.

• 21:10Lewis Howes?

  What would you say would be the top three foods, if you could only have three, that you would eat before a fast, whether 16 hour? 24 hour.

• 21:18Dave Asprey?

  It would be definitely grass fed steak. There is nothing more satiating than animal fats or butter. This stuff, it's full of nutrients as long as it's grass fed. If it's industrial, it'll actually give you cravings. It's not good to eat industrially raised animals. So the idea that meat is good or bad, you gotta know what meat. Um, how's the animal treated? And all that, it matters. I wish that it didn't matter. I wish you could just eat gravel, but it doesn't work. So this is something that is the most satiating. Something with a lot of soluble fiber in it. You can do broccoli if you want to. You can do some, some vegetables, preferably cooked. Not all vegetables are going to have the same effect on you. So I talk about things like how the nightshade family of vegetables, which have been a core part of the bulletproof diet. Like, guys, watch out for that.

• 22:03Dave Asprey?

  If you eat bell peppers, you're probably going to feel different than if you eat cabbage. In fact, you'll feel very different. And when I say that, most people go, oh, wait, I guess that might be true, but we've just never thought about it.

• 22:14Lewis Howes?

  Different in a not feeling as good with the nightshades?

• 22:17Dave Asprey?

  Bell peppers are in the deadly nightshade family. They're clearly not deadly, but they cause inflammation in many people. But in others, they handle it pretty well.

• 22:25Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 22:26Dave Asprey?

  So I'm like, watch out for that. But for me, I would say, give me some vegetables, give me some steak. And then the other thing that's going to be really good is anything with fat. Dark chocolate, guacamole, things like that. A salad with a really heavy dressing with real olive oil, not the fake stuff. And with some extra MCT oil in it and some extra avocados on top. So give me the good, undamaged fats, not a lot of seed oils. Give me some protein and give me some vegetables. You do that and you can cruise all day long. But if you say, oh, instead I'm going to insert some kind of fancy raw kale salad. Kale gives a lot of people cravings. In fact, it's not very good for you at all. In fact, have you ever, you know, huge kale salad and then being, I'm so full. I'm so satisfied.

• 23:11Dave Asprey?

  I'm just bursting with energy. I'm not going to be hungry for four hours.

• 23:14Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 23:16Dave Asprey?

  Even if you're covered in bacon, it still doesn't work. Kale has stuff in it that pisses your body off. It really does. And it's just how it is. It doesn't taste that good either. But even if you like the taste of it, it's not particularly a strong health food.

• 23:30Lewis Howes?

  In this section, Dr. Alan Goldhamer explains the main benefits of water-only fasting, how often you should do water-only fasting, the effects coffee has on your body, and if you should drink it during a fast, and how much your mindset and attitude affects the healing process during fasting. What are the insane benefits of water-only fasting? Because you've been doing this for 38 years with over 20,000 patients that have done water-only fasting. What are the main benefits?

• 24:02Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, you know, one of the first things that we look at is that there are certain conditions that are really common today. So cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes type 2, autoimmune diseases where the immune system itself is attacking the body, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, ankylosing spinalitis, psoriasis, the eczema, these conditions where it's your own body that's kind of working against you. And also certain types of cancer like lymphoma. And these conditions that are so common now are really thought to be unmanageable. Because, I mean, if you go to a physician with high blood pressure, they're going to give you a medication that might be a diuretic or a beta blocker or whatever, or a combination of medications, and they're going to tell you right from the beginning, if you do what I tell you, you'll never get well.

• 24:47Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 24:48Alan Goldhamer?

  You'll be on these meds for the rest of your life.

• 24:51Lewis Howes?

  For the rest of your life.

• 24:52Alan Goldhamer?

  Absolutely. They're telling you, you'll never get off these meds, you'll be on drugs forever. Because they know that they're not actually dealing with the reasons that you've developed high blood pressure.

• 25:01Lewis Howes?

  The root.

• 25:02Alan Goldhamer?

  You're dealing with trying to manage the consequence of the root. And so, our approach is a little different, because we're not interested in trying to come up with a pill, potion, or powder and tell you, well, that's it, just take these drugs and suffer the consequences.

• 25:15Lewis Howes?

  Keep eating the same way, keep living the same lifestyle, keep lacking sleep, being stressed, eat all the processed foods, and you'll be on these drugs for the rest of your life.

• 25:25Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, live normally.

• 25:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, right. Normal the way it is today, right.

• 25:28Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, 2/3 of people are now overweight or obese. So being overweight is normal. If you want to, it doesn't mean it's healthy.

• 25:36Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 25:37Alan Goldhamer?

  You don't necessarily want to be normal if you want to be healthy, because normal or average right now is in trouble. And it's in trouble because people are under the influence of a pleasure trap.

• 25:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 25:50Alan Goldhamer?

  There's this hidden force that's undermining people's health and happiness, and they don't even realize it in many cases.

• 25:55Lewis Howes?

  Delayed gratification is the key. That is the way, in my opinion. Not living in the instant pleasures of today, but how can I, you know, distance myself from it as long as possible to be rewarded in other healthier, happier ways?

• 26:09Alan Goldhamer?

  The problem, I think, is though that you are biologically designed for short-term pleasures seeking self-indulgent behavior.

• 26:15Lewis Howes?

  Those hits, those dopamine hits.

• 26:17Alan Goldhamer?

  Absolutely. The body, the brain rewards the body every time it engages in behavior that favors survival and reproduction. And those primary dominant behaviors are feeding behavior and sexual behavior. Because it's food and sex that are necessary for the species to survive, to get enough to eat, to not get eaten, live long enough to reproduce. And that dopamine-driven, short-term response worked great through most of human history. But more recently, it's become a bit of a trap. And it's become a bit of a trap because we've changed our environment from an environment of scarcity, where it was really hard to get enough to eat.

• 26:53Lewis Howes?

  To abundance.

• 26:54Alan Goldhamer?

  And now we live in an environment of abundance, and these highly processed foods are so appealing because they play off those ancient mechanisms.

• 27:03Lewis Howes?

  The salt, the sugar, the processed nature of it, it's just, mm, it's delicious, but it's not good for you.

• 27:08Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, you have to override that biology if your goal is to survive long and well.

• 27:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Not survive unwell, which is what we've trained our society to do. It's like, how can we extend our life on machines? That's not a well-lived life, but how can we be happy, healthy, fulfilled, and then have a quicker death, right? It's like, not suffer for as long as possible, but live as long, happy and healthy, and then turn off the lights.

• 27:39Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, we talk about having a good life, a hopefully long life, but also a good death. The death where one night you go to sleep and you don't wake up. Rather than spending the last 9.6 years unable to talk or move, lying in some nursing home bed, waiting for people to come and change your diaper because you've had a stroke or you've had other debilitating illnesses that prevent you from actually making the last decade or two perhaps the best, most enriching time of your life, rather than the worst. Dependent on others around you, unable to really function properly. And that's the price we pay for short-term pleasures seeking self-indulgent behavior that, you know, doesn't necessarily cause an immediate problem, but definitely causes longer-term problems.

• 28:16Lewis Howes?

  So what are these crazy benefits of water-only fasting then? What are the main things you've seen people transform of these 20,000-plus cases?

• 28:24Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, one of the biggest thing that fasting does, it's an efficient way of undoing the consequences of dietary excess. So people spend a long time accumulating the consequence of dietary excess, and they can very rapidly reverse many of those consequences.

• 28:39Lewis Howes?

  Such as what? What are the main things you see?

• 28:41Alan Goldhamer?

  So the conditions like of, they're caused by dietary excess, so high blood pressure, for example. We did a study with 174 consecutive patients with high blood pressure, and 174 people were able to lower their pressure enough to eliminate the need for medications.

• 28:54Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 28:55Alan Goldhamer?

  Medications for blood pressure cause chronic cough, fatigue, impotence, and premature death, and yet they're routinely used because it's not recognized that blood pressure is a reversible and containable process.

• 29:05Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 29:06Alan Goldhamer?

  Fasting is an effective and efficient way of reversing and normalizing blood pressure. Now, the problem is, you can't fast forever. You have to feed, so you also have to learn to eat a health-promoting diet in order to sustain those results. But in terms of eliminating the risk factors, eliminating the need for medication, normalizing blood pressure, you can do that very predictably with medically-supervised, water-only fasting.

• 29:27Lewis Howes?

  What does it mean medically-supervised? When you're just drinking water, I mean, what do you need, why do you need someone there to watch you? Is it like testing with your blood sample? Is it just making sure you're not fatigued and in starvation mode?

• 29:41Alan Goldhamer?

  We recognize that fasting can be done safely and should be done safely every day by every patient for 12 to 16 hours, depending on their goals. If they're trying to lose weight or gain weight, it may depend on the duration, but we recommend a period of 16 hours a day of fasting, eight hours a day of feeding. And by limiting the feeding window, as people like Walter Longo and others has pointed out, you may be able to induce some of the benefits that happen with long-term fasting cumulatively.

• 30:05Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 30:06Alan Goldhamer?

  And also prevent perhaps some of the overeating and other things that contribute to dietary excess. So, everybody can and should fast every day. In fact, everybody does fast every day.

• 30:14Lewis Howes?

  Right, when you're sleeping, you're not eating.

• 30:15Alan Goldhamer?

  And you break it with breakfast in the morning.

• 30:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:18Alan Goldhamer?

  It's an interesting process. So we're talking about maybe extending that natural period daily. So that you aren't necessarily eating three or four hours before you go to sleep. May improve your sleep quality, may improve digestion, may improve your muscle to fat ratios over time, and may induce changes that are beneficial. The thing that we do in addition is we'll extend that period much longer. The problem when you start talking about long-term fasting, and we're fasting people anywhere from two to 40 days on water only, is that first you need to make sure that the person's an appropriate candidate for that longer-term intervention. People that have certain pathology, people on medications, people who have risk factors, may be better off with a different approach than long-term water-only fasting.

• 31:00Alan Goldhamer?

  So first thing is a history and an examination to make sure there isn't any primary issues with kidney or cardiac function or medications that would contraindicate fasting.

• 31:10Lewis Howes?

  What happens to the kidneys or the liver if you're water-only fasting?

• 31:16Alan Goldhamer?

  So the kidneys and liver are main detoxifying organs in the body, and particularly the kidneys. If kidney function isn't at least at some minimal level, in our clinic we use creatinine levels of 2.0 as an arbitrary marker. If kidney function isn't adequate, then the rapid detoxification that occurs during fasting, where the body mobilizes and eliminates both endogenous and exogenous toxins into the bloodstream and then are processed by the kidneys. If the kidneys' function isn't adequate, you could overload the kidney function and create problems there.

• 31:47Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 31:47Alan Goldhamer?

  And so it's very important that people have minimal levels of clearance, and that's also the reason we make sure that people have adequate fluid intake and maintain electrolyte balance and hydration. So we're monitoring people's electrolytes to make sure that we don't get into problems with potassium or sodium or other things, which could become a problem, especially in these longer fasts when we're going two, three, four, five weeks or longer.

• 32:08Lewis Howes?

  Wow. What's the longest someone's been on a water fast with you?

• 32:12Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, in our clinic, we limit fasting generally to 40 days. We've had a few patients we've had to go a little bit longer than that. But there's evidence in the literature of patients fasting in medically-controlled settings for as long as a year or more. So not that we would recommend that.

• 32:26Lewis Howes?

  Is that just someone who's so obese that they're trying to, you know, get rid of all the complications and shed the weight and all those things?

• 32:32Alan Goldhamer?

  There was a lot of work done in the seventies and eighties in treating supreme obesity with long-term fasting, but even a thin male, say a seventy kilogram male, could probably fast somewhere around up to seventy days if they're resting during the process. Not that they should necessarily do that.

• 32:51Lewis Howes?

  They could survive.

• 32:52Alan Goldhamer?

  But as far as nutrient reserves and adequacy, the body is pretty amazing. You know, the main burner of glucose for humans is our brain.

• 32:59Lewis Howes?

  Is what, just thinking or what?

• 33:01Alan Goldhamer?

  Cognitive activities, the brain. We have this ridiculously large brain in humans, two and a half times that, say, of a chimp. It's huge and it's our main burner of glucose. And in fact, if it wasn't for our ability to change our brain fuels from sugar to fat, we couldn't have survived as a species the way we have. Because if we had wandered away from the tropics after a week or so, if spring came late, we would have died. In fact, we did. The humans that didn't have the ability to change brain from burning sugar to burning fat weren't able to survive. We know that because today, virtually every human being has this ability to change its brain fuel from sugar, which is the normal fuel, to burning ketones or beta-hydroxybutyric acid in particular.

• 33:45Alan Goldhamer?

  And that would suggest a biological adaptation, such an important adaptation that the species had to have it. So today, humans can wander away from the tropics. Spring can come late and we can survive despite our very large brain and its huge burning of glucose because we have this ability to fast. All we've done is taken this ancient biological process and applied it in a very unnatural situation, and that is a situation of dietary excess. No other animals maintain obesity. I mean, even whales, who you think of as kind of fat, are nine percent body fat, okay?

• 34:17Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 34:17Alan Goldhamer?

  Yeah, they just hold it on the outside of their skeleton. They're lean meat machines, like all animals do, unless they get access to hyper-processed foods like humans do. So if you feed human-style, hyper-processed foods to animals, they also get fat. We add chemicals to our food specifically to induce dopamine stimulation in our brain. Those chemicals are salt, oil, and sugar. These are not foods, they're food byproducts, they're hyper-concentrated food byproducts, they're essentially chemicals we're putting in the food to stimulate more dopamine. Dopamine is the neurochemistry associated with pleasure. The more dopamine, the more pleasure, the more we like the food. That's what good tasting food means, is it stimulates more dopamine production.

• 34:59Alan Goldhamer?

  And the consequence of hyper-stimulating our brain with dopamine means we overeat, and we become obese. And that's why two-thirds of people are overweight, is because they fool their brain with chemicals they put in their feed. It works in rats, it works in mice, it works in humans. Put the chemicals in their feed, they overeat, they get fat. Then they develop obesity and metabolic syndrome. And if you have metabolic syndrome, you're more vulnerable to dying from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and even viral infectious diseases like COVID. The higher your... Metabolic syndrome increases the risk of dying from all these things, all these downstream consequences.

• 35:33Lewis Howes?

  What about olive oil or avocado oil? I hear that these good oils, these fatty oils are supposed to help you in certain ways. Is that...

• 35:41Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, you have to be careful when we define these quote "good oils." There are oils that are more harmful than, say, olive oil. So, an oil being less harmful doesn't necessarily mean it's good, it's just less bad. So, oils are all highly processed, fractionated foods with nine calories per gram and limited satiety feedback. So, if we're talking about trying to lose or maintain optimum weight, oils would have a disadvantage compared to eating your fat from whole food. So, I would advocate if anybody wants avocado oil, eat avocado.

• 36:14Lewis Howes?

  Right, not the oil.

• 36:14Alan Goldhamer?

  Not necessarily process it down, remove the fiber out of the good components, and be left with the oil. And the same thing's true with sugar. You need carbohydrates as a primary fuel, but you eat whole food, whether it's fruits or vegetables or starches, not necessarily the highly processed, hyper-processed byproducts of those foods. If your goal is to avoid overeating, dietary excess, obesity, and the disease of dietary excess.

• 36:40Lewis Howes?

  Right. What are the three main benefits that you see with pretty much everyone that goes through water-only fasting? Three biggest things that you see, whether it be seven or 70 days?

• 36:54Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, you know.

• 36:55Lewis Howes?

  They look younger, is it clearer skin, is it they're burning fat, is it that internally their cells are changing, what's the three main benefits you see?

• 37:03Alan Goldhamer?

  It's hard to different, there's so many benefits, it'd be hard to say which are the three, but I can talk about some of the benefits that we see, certainly you see weight loss, you can't help that, the laws of physics and thermodynamics say if you don't eat, you're gonna lose weight, and we know that weight loss is about a pound a day. Now, that pound a day, that's correct. Average weight loss is a pound, now some of that's water, some of it's protein, some of it's fiber, some of it's glycogen, and some of it's fat. And of that fat, some of it's adipose tissue, some of it's visceral fat.

• 37:33Lewis Howes?

  The visceral is what you wanna burn, right?

• 37:35Alan Goldhamer?

  Well visceral fat is the one that's most associated with pathology, in fact, probably shouldn't be very much visceral fat, visceral fat's what happens when the body has no place else to put fuel, and so you'll store some additional visceral fat, and the higher the visceral fat, generally the worse you are, simplistically speaking. And so we just did a study where we took a DEXA scanner that has software that allows to do precise whole body composition, so not just how much fat and protein there is, but how much visceral fat there is.

• 38:06Lewis Howes?

  Internally and externally, right?

• 38:07Alan Goldhamer?

  Exactly, so visceral fat typically you think about an apple, or surrounding the belly, and around the organs, that internal fat.

• 38:15Lewis Howes?

  There's a lot of visceral fat around the organs as well, right? That is not good for you.

• 38:20Alan Goldhamer?

  Yeah, that's not thought to be very helpful.

• 38:22Lewis Howes?

  I mean, the belly fat that people see is not good, obviously, but the stuff that's surrounding all the organs is, you don't wanna have a lot of that fat, right?

• 38:29Alan Goldhamer?

  That's correct. And so the question is, what can you do to get rid of it? And any type of dieting will cause various types of body changes, but the approach that's shown the most effective at mobilizing visceral fat is actually fasting. Fasting is the most, the highest ratio of visceral fat to adipose tissue mobilization. For example, typical patient in the study might lose 20% of their fat, but would lose over 50% of their visceral fat during a couple of weeks of fasting, even though they only lose 4% of their lean tissue. And what's even more exciting is, we look at, okay, what happens during fasting? Let's say, for example, a person loses 10 pounds, and we know some of that is water, some of it's fiber glycogen, some of it's adipose tissue, some of it's visceral fat. Then what happens after fasting?

• 39:14Alan Goldhamer?

  So you lose 10 pounds, you might regain 5 pounds. You're gonna gain about 2 pounds of glycogen. Because you have sugar stores in your muscles that'll be depleted within a couple days of fasting. You're going to rehydrate because there's a little physiological dehydration during fasting. You're going to put fiber back into your gut because your gut's not going to have had fiber being added to it. You're going to pump up your muscle cells again because you will have depleted a little bit of glucose.

• 39:36Lewis Howes?

  Get some more muscle.

• 39:37Alan Goldhamer?

  In order to maintain the glucose, the core glucose that your brain needed. And you're going to theoretically put back on fat. But after fasting, assuming a person adopts a whole plant food SOS free diet, what we found was weight comes off, weight comes back on, but the weight that comes back on is glycogen, water, fiber, and protein, not fat.

• 39:55Lewis Howes?

  Not fat.

• 39:56Alan Goldhamer?

  Fat continues to drop.

• 39:57Lewis Howes?

  I like that.

• 39:58Alan Goldhamer?

  So we have, we've been able to show, and this study will be coming out later this year, exactly what happens. And then we followed people at six weeks, brought them back in, reanalyzed them, and we're, we're able to demonstrate that not only can people lose their fat and visceral fat, but they can continue to lose their fat and visceral fat, even free living, eating a health promoting diet.

• 40:18Lewis Howes?

  So the scale will go up some, but the fat will not go up.

• 40:21Alan Goldhamer?

  That's correct.

• 40:22Lewis Howes?

  So you gotta, you gotta trick your mind and say, well, I'm not gaining all this weight. Like you're gaining the necessary weight that your body needs to be stronger so you can have an active lifestyle and all these things, but not the fat back.

• 40:33Alan Goldhamer?

  Keep in mind, it's not weight per se that's the threat, it's excess fat. So for example, if you work out, you might gain 10 or 20 pounds of lean tissue over time. That's not necessarily compromising your health just because you quote gained weight. Now, if you sit around on the couch and eat greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying flesh and highly processed foods and put on a lot of fat, particularly visceral fat, gain that same 20 pounds, that might be a problem.

• 40:56Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 40:57Alan Goldhamer?

  So we want to be careful not to be thinking just in terms of weight, but in terms of body composition.

• 41:02Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 41:03Alan Goldhamer?

  So the idea is to lower the fat, not necessarily lower the muscle though. For many people, particularly as people age, they go through sarcopenia, they can lose muscle mass. Having more muscle mass is thought to be health promoting and protective to a certain extent.

• 41:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:18Lewis Howes?

  How often do you do a water only fast? And what's your range that you do?

• 41:21Alan Goldhamer?

  Everybody should do a water only fast every day from 12 to 16 hours.

• 41:27Lewis Howes?

  16 hours a day, water only.

• 41:28Alan Goldhamer?

  And then we go into feeding.

• 41:31Lewis Howes?

  Okay, 8 hour window.

• 41:32Alan Goldhamer?

  8 hour window of whole plant foods, so fruits, vegetables, grains, oats, nuts, seeds, foods, whole foods.

• 41:37Lewis Howes?

  Are you vegan?

• 41:39Alan Goldhamer?

  I am. I don't use animal foods in my diet. I'm 62. I started on a whole plant food diet at 16, so I've had opportunity to do it for a lot of years.

• 41:49Lewis Howes?

  16?

• 41:50Alan Goldhamer?

  Yes.

• 41:50Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's inspiring.

• 41:52Alan Goldhamer?

  Yeah, well, it was out of desperation.

• 41:55Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 41:55Alan Goldhamer?

  I wanted to beat my best friend Doug Lyle in basketball. And I couldn't beat him when I practiced, and I really worked at it. But I thought if I got, you know, if I really got healthy, maybe I could get an edge. And so I read a book, it happened to be by Herbert Shelton. And he said that health was the result of healthful living. It was about diet, sleep, exercise, and that fasting could also be useful. And I thought, well, I'll give that a try.

• 42:17Lewis Howes?

  This was 40 something years ago.

• 42:19Alan Goldhamer?

  Yeah, 46 years ago. And of course, it failed because it turned out he adopted the same type of diet and lifestyle. He still just destroys me every time we play.

• 42:27Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 42:27Alan Goldhamer?

  I'm hoping though that maybe he'll age out a little quicker. Once we get into our 80s, maybe I'll finally be able to beat him.

• 42:34Lewis Howes?

  You guys are still friends? You still play?

• 42:35Alan Goldhamer?

  Yeah, and he's, yeah, he's actually the psychologist at the True Earth Health Center.

• 42:39Lewis Howes?

  Amazing.

• 42:40Alan Goldhamer?

  Oh, yeah, no, we play, yeah. Every day, you know, every week we're playing basketball.

• 42:44Lewis Howes?

  And you still can't beat him?

• 42:45Alan Goldhamer?

  No.

• 42:45Lewis Howes?

  Okay, one day.

• 42:47Alan Goldhamer?

  One day.

• 42:48Lewis Howes?

  One day. Sometimes it doesn't matter how healthy you are. Someone just might be a little taller, stronger, or more skilled.

• 42:55Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, I'll give you an example, you know, I thought, you know, he's quick. He's a really good basketball player. And I thought, okay, he's got some skills I don't have, but, you know, free throws are just practice.

• 43:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 43:04Alan Goldhamer?

  So I got some coaching and I thought, I'm just gonna, and I'm shooting 500 free throws a day. And I'm working very hard. And I, and of course, you know, he's only playing once in a while. And so one day I say, hey Doug, let's do a free throw shooting contest. And he said, okay.

• 43:17Lewis Howes?

  You crush him.

• 43:18Alan Goldhamer?

  48 out of 50, right? And I think, I got him. He hits 19, he misses one, and it's 80 in a row.

• 43:23Lewis Howes?

  Oh my goodness.

• 43:25Alan Goldhamer?

  Which obviously means he's a choke, because, you know, if you can hit 99 out of 100, why don't you just hit 100?

• 43:31Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 43:31Alan Goldhamer?

  I know. Well, he's a mutant.

• 43:33Lewis Howes?

  Ninety nine, I don't even know anyone that's ever done that before. It's amazing.

• 43:36Alan Goldhamer?

  He's, he's, that's, this is the person I've been trying to compete against.

• 43:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, mutant, I love it. Um, well, so you're saying sixteen hours a day, everyone should do water only. Now, you're gonna say something very controversial here. What about those that love their coffee and water? If I'm gonna go a three day water only fast, can I add coffee, black coffee, bulletproof coffee? Can I, can I do this or will it ruin the whole fast?

• 43:59Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, it's not gonna ruin the whole fast, but here's the thing with caffeine, which is a highly addictive nervous system stimulant. Is, you know, it has a seventeen hour half-life. It affects sleep quality. Even the coffee and the caffeine that you're consuming early in the day can affect quality of sleep. It can be really caustic and irritating to the stomach, not just the caffeine, but the coffee itself. So there's a lot of things to question about whether this is really a health promoting habit. The other thing is, a lot of people are using coffee for its caffeine because they're not getting enough sleep.

• 44:27Lewis Howes?

  Right, so they need it.

• 44:28Alan Goldhamer?

  And so if you stop the caffeine, you go through, like any addict, drug withdrawal, okay? And it's, can be quite severe. Uh, but once you get free of that, you may find that now you're able to get the quality and quality of sleeping. And so the need for using a highly addictive nervous system stimulant may be reduced somewhat.

• 44:45Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 44:46Alan Goldhamer?

  So, um, now the fact is, it is a plant-based product, so there are still some redeeming properties and it's not completely devoid of any nutrition. Uh, but I think that the negatives outweigh the positives from my viewpoint, uh, for using that type of product as a, as a component.

• 45:02Lewis Howes?

  And how people in your clinic said, okay, I'm gonna do seven days water, but I'm gonna have coffee every day also, and are they able to get similar results?

• 45:11Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, we don't use any type of highly addictive drugs with patients when they're, when they're fasting. So we, we have a controlled setting.

• 45:18Lewis Howes?

  Got it, got it.

• 45:18Alan Goldhamer?

  So they're using, you know, distilled water in a controlled setting.

• 45:22Lewis Howes?

  And that's it?

• 45:22Alan Goldhamer?

  Yeah, that's it.

• 45:23Lewis Howes?

  Just pure water, distilled water, seven days?

• 45:25Alan Goldhamer?

  That's how we do it.

• 45:25Lewis Howes?

  No food, some electrolytes in there or something, or?

• 45:29Alan Goldhamer?

  No, actually electrolytes are recycled efficiently during fasting. So we monitor electrolytes, but we're not supplementing electrolytes.

• 45:35Lewis Howes?

  So there's nothing added to the water?

• 45:37Alan Goldhamer?

  Nothing added to the water for five to 40 days duration of the fast, yes. And we've been able, now people say, well, that is it's safe? Is it safe? Well, we've answered that question because we've done a study. We've done an actual fasting safety study where we took all the subjects that went through the process for five years, evaluated all of their symptoms and adverse events, documented that and published that in a study that's available on our website. And people can look at that and find, and it turns out that yes, in fact, fasting when it's supervised in a controlled setting can be done safely and effectively, even for periods up to 40 days.

• 46:13Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So what's, what's the, the pattern you use on a monthly? But you do 16 hour water only, but then are you doing one day a month, one day a week for 24 hours?

• 46:24Alan Goldhamer?

  16 hours every day and eight hours of feeding. And then once a year will fast a week or two, depending on, you know,

• 46:31Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 46:32Alan Goldhamer?

  the individual and how they're doing.

• 46:33Lewis Howes?

  What will you do?

• 46:34Alan Goldhamer?

  A week a year. Yes, assuming at a week that there's no symptoms that show up from fasting, then that's the end of it. And I hate fasting. You cannot play basketball. You have to rest.

• 46:42Lewis Howes?

  Can't do anything.

• 46:43Alan Goldhamer?

  It's all, it's terrible. So it's not something that we would want to wish on somebody excessively. On the other hand, it can be a very effective way of in both helping sick people recover, but also I believe in helping healthy people stay that way.

• 46:57Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 46:57Alan Goldhamer?

  I think that the people that may get ultimately the most benefit from fasting are healthy people that use it preventively, that want to stay healthy. The difference is that in a person that lives a healthy lifestyle, fasting is much less entertaining. It's a much less dynamic process. People have, don't have a lot of the symptoms that people that are sick getting well have.

• 47:17Lewis Howes?

  Because what I've heard you say before is that you can't really work out while you're doing a water fast. Even if it's a 24 hour fast, is it okay to move some? Or you really need the benefits of rest while you're drinking water?

• 47:30Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, we recommend that people limit their routine fasting to 16 hours because the problem is, is you get beyond 16 hours and you start depleting glycogen stores. Now you're going to force more gluconeogenesis. So I think the goal is in non-supplemented fasting. To fast within those reserves, maximize fat loss and rest recovery and minimize glukine degeneration. Now, some people do modified fasting where they can be more active because they're getting 600 calories or 700 calories. And so they have a little bit more flexibility in terms of the amount of activity they might undergo. That's not the approach that we're taking. So in our clinic, we're using, these patients are averaged two to three weeks, as much as 40 days. And usually there's a reason. They're either a healthy person, trying to stay healthy, but more likely they have high

• 48:15Alan Goldhamer?

  blood pressure, they have diabetes, they have autoimmune disease, they have lymphoma, they want to get well. They're willing to do anything, even eat well and exercise and put a bed on time.

• 48:24Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 48:25Alan Goldhamer?

  Really radical stuff.

• 48:26Lewis Howes?

  It's been years or decades of suffering probably, or pain, or some type of stress.

• 48:30Alan Goldhamer?

  We get, what I believe are highly motivated people. And the best motivation, in my experience, is pain, debility, and fear of death.

• 48:39Lewis Howes?

  That's it.

• 48:40Alan Goldhamer?

  That's who's willing to do these, you know, they say it's really radical because radical does mean radicus or root or cause. And we're actually trying to get to the reason why people are getting sick. So we're not talking about the leading causes of death, we're talking about the actual causes of death. The reason people get the heart disease, cancer, the stroke. Not treating it after they've developed it, thinking that somehow that's going to be the whole answer, but actually trying to understand why is it this problem has arisen? And what can they do to undo the consequences of their dietary excess?

• 49:11Lewis Howes?

  When you see people do a two to four week fast, do you physically see transformation from eczema to no eczema, or minimal eczema afterwards, or autoimmune disease? Do you see it drastically changing? Is it small changes that is going to take multiple times over a year or years? What do you typically see when you see someone coming?

• 49:33Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, it varies, you know, from patient to patient. For example, we recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal of a case of a young woman who came in with follicular lymphoma stage three, which is a type of lymph cancer, had large palpable tumors involving her upper and lower.

• 49:45Lewis Howes?

  Internally?

• 49:46Alan Goldhamer?

  External, or you can even feel them externally, they were large enough. Those are in the lymph gland. So when they're very large, you can feel them. You can also see them on CAT scan. She had excisional biopsy, it was well documented.

• 49:55Lewis Howes?

  Oh, wow.

• 49:56Alan Goldhamer?

  So we ended up fasting her for 21 days. And by three weeks of fasting, you couldn't feel the tumors anymore.

• 50:02Lewis Howes?

  No way, come on.

• 50:03Alan Goldhamer?

  10 days of recovery. Back to her oncologist for CT scans. Make a long story short, this woman was able to completely resolve her stage 3 follicle lymphoma. At a year, we had a whole body CT. We were able to show that she's completely free of cancer. We have a three-year follow-up. And the case report and the follow-up are published in the British Medical Journal Case Reports. You can go onto our website and take a look there. It's exquisitely, carefully detailed. Since then, including at our clinic right now, we have other patients with follicle lymphoma, including one gentleman right now is stage 4 follicle lymphoma, who's had preliminarily good results. He's on his second FAST now. We did a previous FAST last year, who'd gotten significant improvement. We're now doing another FAST, only this FAST is going to be 40 days.

• 50:47Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 50:48Alan Goldhamer?

  And we're hoping that we can get the same kind of clearing resolution and long-term stability. Once we've published enough case reports in the form of cohort, we'll be able to then hopefully justify a clinical trial. We believe we're going to do real well with this particular type of cancer, because our clinical observation is that it consistently is responding. Now, it may not be the same thing when you talk about a solid organ tumor, a lung cancer, different type of cancer may respond completely differently.

• 51:13Lewis Howes?

  Brain cancer, things like that, yeah.

• 51:14Alan Goldhamer?

  Especially brain cancer.

• 51:15Lewis Howes?

  That's hard, huh?

• 51:16Alan Goldhamer?

  Well, brain masses are not as responsive, possibly because of the way the body mobilizes things in fasting and the blood-brain barrier and some of the limitations to be able to get access to it. So, you can't just say cancer is cancer, it's not all the same. And you can't say the same person with the same condition is going to respond the same. In answer to your question, some people like her, it's really dramatic, where one FAST, big change. But I've also had people where it's the third FAST before we see those big clinical, significant. And I also have people that do everything right and we're still suffering and not responding. And we can't always predict who's going to respond, who's not going to respond. That's part of the research that we're doing, is trying to figure out, how do you predict who's going to respond the most? How long are they going to need to FAST? When are they done FASTing?

• 52:01Alan Goldhamer?

  Even, none of these of biological markers are not readily available, because nobody up till now has been doing much research.

• 52:07Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 52:08Alan Goldhamer?

  With long-term water FASTing.

• 52:09Lewis Howes?

  How much does the belief in your mindset that this FAST will heal or help?

• 52:16Lewis Howes?

  Prevent or help, you know, create more healing for me. How much is the mindset, the thought process on a daily basis that I'm healing myself? This water is cleansing my body. Whatever the mind is telling versus, I don't know if this is gonna work. And what am I doing this for? How much do you believe the mind manipulates the healing process?

• 52:37Alan Goldhamer?

  So I think that attitude is very important because it determines action. But it's the action you take that determines the outcome. So just having good thoughts, I don't think is enough to get the job done. But if having good thoughts and having a good attitude allows you to be motivated to do what it takes to get well, it's critical. We typically only work with people that have a good attitude because they wouldn't come to us otherwise. We have highly motivated, self-selected patients that are willing to do really radical things like eat well, exercise, sleep, and fast. You know, the fact is, most people are, think if they get on a plane in New York and they go all the way to California, they will die from starvation over Colorado.

• 53:20Alan Goldhamer?

  They think those pretzels saved their life.

• 53:24Lewis Howes?

  So salt in those pretzels.

• 53:26Alan Goldhamer?

  It's probably the... So we know differently. We know that the fact is the body is really good at adapting to the fasting state, particularly appropriate people in a resting state. And they can do it safely. We've done it over 20,000 times in patients. Many of them are elderly and ill. And yet, of the 20,000 people that have walked in, 20,000 people have walked out. And you know, we're really trying to maintain those safety records.

• 53:50Lewis Howes?

  Of course.

• 53:51Alan Goldhamer?

  We try really hard only to work with people that we expect to have an acceptable outcome.

• 53:56Lewis Howes?

  So if someone's not coming to your clinic and they wanna try this on their own?

• 54:00Alan Goldhamer?

  Yes.

• 54:01Lewis Howes?

  What would you say is a good window of time to try on your own, at home, without medical, you know?

• 54:10Lewis Howes?

  Safety, I guess, or someone watching over you. What is it, is it 24 hours, is it three days?

• 54:14Alan Goldhamer?

  Yeah, so I really believe that everybody should try to do this on their own for up to 16 hours every day, but consistently do it day after day after day. And I think that cumulatively, you can safely and effectively get the accumulation from intermittent fasting without putting yourself in a situation where you have to go in, have a medical evaluation, get a doctor that'll be able to establish baseline data, and then monitor you through the process. And I think what happens particularly for people that are on medications, you can really muck yourself up. For example, let's say you're on steroid medications, or you're on anticoagulant medications, or you're on dysrhythmia medications. Even a 48-hour period of fasting can be a really complicating factor because you don't fast on medications. You don't want to arbitrarily discontinue medications.

• 54:57Alan Goldhamer?

  It really is unfortunately a process that's best done with the right people in a consistent setting.

• 55:03Lewis Howes?

  So if you're on medication, so you don't want to stop your medication and fast for two days?

• 55:07Alan Goldhamer?

  Right. And you don't want to fast on medications for two days?

• 55:10Lewis Howes?

  You don't want to keep taking medicine and not food?

• 55:12Alan Goldhamer?

  No, because the medications that may be okay in a feeding state may be very much more of a problem after you get into the fasting phase. So our recommendation is fast every day for 16 hours. Eat clean in those eight hours. And then if it's appropriate, you know, longer-term fasting can be considered. If people would like to know whether long-term fasting is useful, there's a really simple thing that doesn't cost them anything. Then go onto our website, complete registration forms, and give me a call. I'll talk to them. It doesn't cost them anything. And if they're, depending where they live, we can send them to doctors that are trained in fasting supervision near them. They can help them go through the process safely and effectively. And if they're not a good candidate, we can let them know that maybe there's alternatives to water-only fasting.

• 55:54Lewis Howes?

  In this section, Dr. Jason Fung explains the top myths about losing weight from fasting, the advantages of starving, why fasting is more accessible than you think, and why he believes fasting is the most powerful diet out there. Let's dive in. What does snacking do to our body or our brain, our digestion system when we're every couple hours putting something in our mouth? Well, even if it's a few nuts or a fruit or a protein bar, like what is that doing to our brain and our digestive system?

• 56:27Jason Fung?

  Yeah, and this is the big thing that I've had and, you know, I talk about this in the obesity code is because our body really exists in sort of one of two states. You're either in the fed state or you're in the fasted state. Okay, so when you're in the fed state, you're eating, insulin is going up. And as insulin goes up, its job, like its normal job is to tell your body to store those calories. Okay, so you can store it as glycogen, which is sugar, or it can store it as body fat. But that's the point. So you eat lunch or dinner, there's way more calories in that meal than you can use right at that point. So you want to store that. So when you don't eat, which is anytime you don't eat is called

• 57:09Jason Fung?

  fasting. So when you fast, that means your insulin has been a drop and that's the signal for your body to now start pulling those calories out of storage, right? And that's the reason you don't die in your sleep every single night is because we have the ability to hold some of those calories in storage. So in the fed state, insulin goes up, you're storing calories or body fat. In the fasted state, you're not eating, your insulin's dropping, and you're using calories. So you're in one or the other. You can't do both at the same time. So if now you say, okay, I'm gonna go-

• 57:42Lewis Howes?

  When I'm eating, I'm storing. I'm not using calories. Is that right?

• 57:47Jason Fung?

  You will shut down-

• 57:48Lewis Howes?

  Every time I eat, I will store. I'm not burning body fat.

• 57:51Jason Fung?

  You're not burning body fat because you're putting in sugar, for example, and that sugar is going to signal that, hey, sugar's coming in, use the sugar that's coming in.

• 58:00Lewis Howes?

  Don't burn anything off my body. Yeah.

• 58:02Jason Fung?

  Exactly.

• 58:03Lewis Howes?

  Keep all that stored fat, keep it. Just keep pirating on, right?

• 58:08Jason Fung?

  Exactly. So the only way that you can actually use the body fat is to let the insulin fall and not eat. So if you are now eating constantly, so the minute you get up, somebody tells you, oh, you have to eat. You can't skip breakfast, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you have to snack all day long. So now, if you look at studies, the average duration of how long people eat for is about fourteen hours and forty-five minutes. That's the average. So if you start eating at eight AM, you don't stop till ten forty-five PM. That's on average. That's the average.

• 58:45Lewis Howes?

  Fourteen hours, you mean a fourteen hour span of eating from the start to finish, right? You may not be eating every moment, but you're eating every few hours within a fourteen hour window.

• 58:54Jason Fung?

  It takes about four hours for you to switch over into the fasted state. So the point is that before, where you'd eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and by six o'clock, you're done. You know, boom, you're, you know, now you shift into using those calories and your mom would you say, oh, you need time to digest, right? That's what she sort of said, but the point was that you need to start using those calories that you stored up during your mealtimes. Um, and that was the secret, that they could stay relatively slim. Now, if you're eating constantly, then you never give your body a chance to switch over into that fasted state and start using those calories. The problem, of course, is that insulin stays high, which tends to keep your body storing calories.

• 59:35Jason Fung?

  Your body, so the high insulin, for example, blocks fat burning. You can't burn your fat stores. Because your body's like, the instructions that I'm getting is to store energy, not use energy. I want to keep my stored energy for when there's a time that there's no food. The problem, of course, is that there's never a time there's no food, right? Every day is the same, same thing, right? Fourteen hours of, of eating and no time of not eating. And that's the point. So now, if you understand the problem, you can say, well, how am I going to change this? Well, it's simple. Increase the amount of time that you're not eating, and that's all intermittent fasting is. If you eat one meal a day, for example, or if you eat within a eight hour window or a four hour window or whatever.

• 1:00:18Jason Fung?

  What you're doing is you're simply allowing your body to use the calories that have been stored, which is body fat predominantly. But that is precisely the reason you carry body fat. Like that body fat is not there for looks, is there for you to use, right? And that's the whole point. What's so bad about using it? If you don't eat, you're gonna burn it. Well, so again, go back to the seventies and everybody says, oh, you can't fast, you can't fast. Well, you know, they're eating breakfast, lunch, dinner. And if you're a naughty boy, you got sent to bed without dinner. So you went from twelve o'clock to eight AM, twenty hours.

• 1:00:57Lewis Howes?

  You look good the next day. You're like a queen. You got a six pack. It's burning fat.

• 1:01:02Jason Fung?

  Exactly. And nobody died. Nothing bad happens, right? There was nothing wrong with that. And hopefully you learned your lesson too, right? And that's the whole point is that there's nothing wrong. It's a natural part of our human physiology. If we couldn't survive without eating, like we would not be here today. Because when we were cavemen and cave women, there were periods of time.

• 1:01:28Jason Fung?

  Exactly. They couldn't, there might be a stretch of three, four, five days where there was no food. And therefore they had to survive on their own body fat, which they did. And that was the whole point. So let's let our body, you know, use it. Because that's the most natural thing to do.

• 1:01:47Lewis Howes?

  What's the process for you, your day to day life? Do you eat one meal a day, two meals a day? Do you fast every month for a day? Are you always doing intermittent fasting? Is there a downside to intermittent fasting? What's your process?

• 1:01:59Jason Fung?

  Yeah, I usually do a lot of sort of, I rarely eat breakfast. And I'll tell you that it didn't come, I mean, I started this in medical school. And that was mostly because I really wanted to just roll out of bed and go like, you know, I'd wake up literally like five minutes before I left the floor. I brush my teeth. Put on some clothes and rolled out the door. I was, you know, it's just, it's just that the way I was, right? And so I, I, I don't eat breakfast now because again, people say you have to eat breakfast, you have to eat, but there's actually nothing magical about breakfast. If you don't eat breakfast, what's gonna happen? Well, my body, which is now burning fat because I've had eight hours of sleep, it's gone into sort of fat burning mode.

• 1:02:42Jason Fung?

  Because that's the storage form of calories or it's burning sugar. Um, it's just gonna keep doing it, right? There's nothing wrong with it. So, um, so a lot of times I try and confine myself to sort of an eating window of sort of six to eight hours. And then once in a while, when I get very busy, I will do a twenty-four hour fast, which is a one meal a day. And then every so often I'll do a longer fast and the longer fasts are actually not as bad as you might think, but they really disrupt your schedule sort of socially. It's, it's, it's a tough one because. A lot of our socialization happens at meals. So I often have dinner with my family, for example, and doing those longer fasts is really, really disruptive. To that sort of thing, which is why when you look at traditional societies, like if you look at, say, you know, during.

• 1:03:27Jason Fung?

  Uh, major religions, for example, there would be a period of fasting that's sort of. Universal, so. Everyone's doing it, so no one's feeling. Exactly. Stress when they smell the food and they're like, ah. Exactly. So if you're, if it's like Good Friday or during Lent or during Ramadan for Muslims or. You know, during Yom Kippur for Jews or whatever, everybody's fasting. So it's actually terrifically easy because you're not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there. Whereas nowadays, if you fast, and I've done this, it's just really hard to do. It's not, physically it's not hard, but it's hard. And I do it mostly. Um, you know, when I, when I've gained a bit of weight, usually after the holidays and after a vacation, I will.

• 1:04:09Jason Fung?

  Sort of schedule a, uh, longer fast right after because I know. Uh, that I can lose that weight very quickly, but that means I can enjoy myself. Like a couple of years ago, I went on a cruise. And really ate too much. Just a lot. I had a lot and I knew it and I could feel it in my pants were tight and stuff. So I did sort of a three or four day fast and I'll tell you by the next week I was back to my normal weight. Well, that's great because a week and but I got to enjoy the whole week prior where I really didn't look at what I was eating or how often I was eating or anything. I was like, this is my vacation. I'm doing this. And at the same time, I know, hey, I've got this next, you know, after this week, the week after, you know, very little to eat.

• 1:04:52Jason Fung?

  And and and and it gives you a great tool to use if you need it, right?

• 1:04:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's almost like either every day, don't indulge and balance and create a schedule where you're only eating in a certain window of time, whether it be four, six, eight hours, which I'm hearing is kind of the uh, which would be a great standard to have between four and eight hours of a feeding time. Is that right?

• 1:05:15Jason Fung?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you want to lose weight, you can do very well, of course, with a sort of standard seventies style, sort of eight AM to six PM, which in a fourteen hour fast every single night. Remember, they're doing eight for twelve to fourteen hours day every single night without even thinking about it. Like, that's a secret because they don't even think about that. That's just a period of time that they're not eating, right? But now, of course, the the the the traditions are different. You can eat anywhere you want. You can eat in the theater. You can eat at your desk, eating in a car. Like in the seventies, stuff like that didn't exist. You didn't eat in a meeting in a boardroom, for example. Now you go to a meeting in a boardroom when

• 1:05:53Lewis Howes?

  Food everywhere. Donuts, is it?

• 1:05:55Jason Fung?

  Donuts and cookies, right? Somebody's ordered a plate of bagels or something like that, right? It's like, well, why? We're having a meeting here, right? So that's the uh, that's the thing. So you could do very well with that kind of, you know, eight hour eating window, four, ten hour eating window. You can do very well with it. But if you're not doing well, then you can extend it and that's the beauty of it. You could extend it as much as you want. Right? So if you think about fasting, you could go three days. You could go five days. You could go thirty days. People do that all the time. But

• 1:06:26Lewis Howes?

  No, no food?

• 1:06:28Jason Fung?

  No food. Yeah. So if you look, if you think about um, Fasting, so the amount of energy that you need, so a pound of fat has thirty five hundred calories roughly. If you need about eighteen hundred calories, so that's for like a regular person, not like an athlete or somebody who's working out a lot. It takes about half a pound of fat per day. So if you're dealing with a lot of obese people, like a hundred pounds overweight, you could go two hundred days. You know, if you want to lose a hundred pounds, you could go two hundred days without eating. Before you get

• 1:07:02Lewis Howes?

  And survive.

• 1:07:03Jason Fung?

  And survive, exactly.

• 1:07:04Lewis Howes?

  And be okay.

• 1:07:05Jason Fung?

  Exactly, be perfectly fine, because this is a very efficient, fat is an efficient store of calories. Right, it's very efficient, that's why we developed this.

• 1:07:14Lewis Howes?

  It's to keep you alive when there's no food around.

• 1:07:16Jason Fung?

  Exactly, so use it.

• 1:07:17Lewis Howes?

  Does it affect your digestive system, does it mess with your metabolism if you don't eat after a certain amount of time?

• 1:07:24Jason Fung?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Lewis Howes?

  And what happens when you start eating again, does that affect your, again, your stomach, your intestines, your colon, your metabolism, what's affected there?

• 1:07:33Jason Fung?

  And this is the interesting part, is that everybody thinks that fasting is like the worst thing you could do. When you actually look at the science of what happens during fasting, it's actually one of the best things you can do for yourself. From both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint. Assuming, of course, you're not malnourished, right? I mean, I'm assuming if you're the average American who's, you know, ten, twenty, thirty pounds overweight, um, then this is something that actually has a lot of benefits. So there's a lot of sort of myths around it. One is that you're gonna burn a lot of muscle, and the the truth is that you don't. I mean, when you, you you know, if your body, your body stores energy as body fat. So people say, oh, you're gonna burn muscle. It's like, well, you've got to think that our body is so stupid that it stores energy as fat.

• 1:08:18Jason Fung?

  But the minute you need it, it starts burning muscle, right? Like, why would our body be so stupid? And if it were so stupid, how did we survive, right? And it's like, you know, if you save firewood all winter for the winter, and then as soon as it gets cold, you chop up your sofa and throw it into the fire, like, why would you be so stupid, right? Our body's just the same, it's not that. So you know, and I know, and everybody knows, that the way that you Build muscle is that you exercise, right? So if you have, uh, you know, lift heavy weights, then your muscles become stronger. It doesn't become stronger because you eat, right? That does nothing for building muscle. Like otherwise, we'd be, you know, the strongest nation on earth, right? But we're not, we're the fattest nation on earth. So that's the whole problem, right?

• 1:09:03Jason Fung?

  I mean, you're confusing two completely different things. Um, there is a point during fasting where there is a little bit of protein breakdown and that's where people get very confused and say, well, you're burning muscle. But you're not, protein is not the same as muscle. So our body has all kinds of protein, including all the connective tissue, like the skin and stuff that holds stuff in place. And some of that is often burned off. So for example, when you look at those shows where people get surgery and they lose a hundred and fifty pounds, they get all this flappy skin. That's not excess fat, that's excess protein. So that's, you know, it's functional tissue that you've never used up. So we actually see very little of that problem when people fast because there's a small period of time where they're actually using up the protein.

• 1:09:47Jason Fung?

  Your body will maintain its musculature based on what exercise and stuff you're using. Um, so another big myth, so muscle burning is one thing. The other big, big myth is people talk about is starvation mode or metabolic rate. So metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body uses in a day, the number of calories you burn in a day. And this is what we see if you simply cut calories. So this is a standard medical advice. Cut five hundred calories a day and you'll lose a pound of fat a week. What happens, of course, is that you cut five hundred calories a day, uh, and then your body quickly reduces the amount of calories it uses by about five hundred calories. So now you're actually not losing any weight. That's what happens all the time because.

• 1:10:31Jason Fung?

  Why does it stop, why does it stop burning those calories? Well, it stops burning the calories by reducing its metabolic rate. So the metabolic rate is the energy that your body uses to, say, generate body heat, your liver, your kidney, your heart, and so on. We've known this for a hundred years, that if you simply restrict the number of calories, but keep the foods very similar, what happens is that your body is going to start using less. So, because it doesn't like running a deficit, right? It's just like if you normally make a hundred thousand dollars a year, and you spend a hundred thousand dollars a year, now you make fifty thousand, you don't keep spending a hundred, right? It's, it's, you're gonna, you're gonna get thrown in jail. But, so you reduce your expenditure, same as a body.

• 1:11:15Jason Fung?

  So it's getting less, so it's gonna use less. And that's the natural reaction. It's, it's, it's important because it's a survival response. It cannot do anything different.

• 1:11:24Lewis Howes?

  So it's almost like, so it's almost like you need to be extreme in your use, in order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you. But if you just do a little bit, I'm gonna eat a little bit less today, it's not gonna do that much.

• 1:11:39Jason Fung?

  It doesn't work. And, and people assume that if you go to zero, which is fasting, say you fast for a full day, you have zero calories. You don't die, right? Because what happens is completely different. Now you've lowered your insulin, so you're changing the hormonal profile of the body. And as you do that, you're now switching fuel sources. So instead of using food as your fuel, you're switching it into body fat. Just like those hybrid cars where you go from gas to electric, right? So it's using food, and then boom, it goes, okay, I have no food coming in. I need to switch over now into body fat. And then it goes, whoa, I have like five hundred thousand calories of body fat here, so why do I need to cut, cut it down?

• 1:12:23Jason Fung?

  And the point is that it doesn't, because assuming if you have no body fat, of course, it's a problem. But for people who have adequate stores of body fat, which is most of us, and truthfully, most people do it for weight loss, too much body fat, then what happens is that there's so much there, why wouldn't you use it? Because it's a fuel source, that's all it is. That's the way you have to look at the body fat. If you're eating all the time, you can never use your body fat. Because your, your insulin's here, your insulin's high, you're using food. Then you get hungry, so you eat some more, right? You have a snack, you have a low-fat muffin. You stay here, there's, you can only burn food. All that stuff over there, those five hundred thousand calories of body fat are completely inaccessible for your body.

• 1:13:08Jason Fung?

  So if you simply dial it down like this and say, okay, instead of two thousand calories, I'm gonna eat fifteen hundred, but I'm gonna eat ten times a day. Keeping myself here. Now you only have fifteen hundred coming in. You can only burn fifteen hundred. You can't access that. If you go to zero, you go boom, and then your body burns the full two thousand. So they did a study, for example, where they took people and fasted them for four days and measured how many calories they're using. They also measured their VO2, which, as you know, is something that it's a measure of how much cellular work your body is doing. And what they found, so they measured the metabolic rate at time zero, then they measured it at four days of zero food.

• 1:13:48Jason Fung?

  And they were burning ten percent more calories than they were per day than they were when they were eating. The VO2 was ten percent higher. You're doing more work. Your body is actually not shutting down. It's revving itself up. And again, there's a good physiologic reason for that, and we know that when insulin goes down, when you switch yourself into this sort of uh, you know, mode that you're burning fat, other hormones go up, including your sympathetic nervous system, which is your noradrenaline. So you're actually pumping your body up. The reason for that is sort of, again, it's a survival response. So imagine again we're cave man and it's winter and there's no food.

• 1:14:29Jason Fung?

  So if you don't eat for two days and you get weaker, you're never gonna eat again. You're gonna die, because every day is gonna be harder. You're gonna circle the drain. So our body's just not that stupid, right? So what they do is that your body says, okay, there's no food coming in, boom, I'm gonna switch you over to body fat. And then I'm gonna pump you up so that you have energy, you go out there, you go kill that woolly mammoth.

• 1:14:52Lewis Howes?

  You're focused, you're clear, you're in the zone, everything.

• 1:14:56Jason Fung?

  Exactly. And that's, that's the reason that we actually pump ourselves up. And the constant, the, the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say, well, I, I have to eat because I have to concentrate. It's like your concentration's actually much higher when you don't eat. Think about when you had a huge Thanksgiving meal. Well, were you really sharp or did you really wanna just lie down on the sofa and watch some football? Right? You don't have any sort of focus. But if you think about animals, it's the same thing. Lions, they just eat, they just like lounging around. But if you're the hungry wolf. That is not, that is a very dangerous animal because he's focused, he's ready to kill you.

• 1:15:37Jason Fung?

  Same thing for us, our level of concentration, our mental ability, mental agility, goes up significantly when we're hungry. Like if you think, oh, you're hungry for this, hungry for that, that doesn't mean you're falling down lethargic, it means you're focused. So it's interesting because there is this book a few years ago called Unbroken, which is a biography of this fellow who got, who went to prisoner of war camp in World War II Japan. And he was talking about starvation and he, they were literally starving, like there's, they eat like almost nothing for the full day. And he's talking about how his, his, uh, his, uh, other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats. So one guy was reading a book entirely from memory.

• 1:16:22Jason Fung?

  Another guy learned all of Norwegian in a week. And he, he, so the guy says, this is simply the mental clarity of starvation. So it was incredible. It's like, it was so widespread. Everybody was starving. And they'd see these incredible feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time. Because your mental ability is, is ramped up to such a high degree. And then, you know, in the ancient Greece, the ancient mathematician Pythagoras, he would require his students to fast in order to, to come to his class. Because otherwise he thought they had no mental agility to learn this stuff. And it's like, wow, this is incredible, completely different than what we were taught. But again, same thing, our body's actually ramping up, ramping up.

• 1:17:05Jason Fung?

  Because again, our major advantage over the lions and tigers and bears is really the, uh, is really that, uh, mental, uh, ability.

• 1:17:16Lewis Howes?

  But isn't there a, isn't there like a period of time in the day for most people? Where they feel, man, I'm really hungry. Like, I can't focus, I can't concentrate because I'm starving. Like I want food now. And it's, it's actually hurting them in focusing. It's almost like a window of time where you have to just deal with that period. And then it switches on into, okay, I'm not hungry anymore. I haven't eaten in a day, but I'm not hungry anymore and I'm focused. Isn't there this kind of window of time?

• 1:17:43Jason Fung?

  There, there absolutely is. So this is why it's important to get, you know, to understand what happens during fasting. So you can prepare for it. So if you look at hunger during fasting, so they've done again, studies where they fast people for twenty four hours and they measure a hormone called ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone. The higher it is, the hungrier you are. Turns out that our ghrelin peaks three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. So you get hungry at, you know, twelve o'clock, it's lunchtime, you get hungry. So it's a learned response. The question is, what happens if you don't eat? Does hunger keep going up and up and up? It doesn't. In fact, the ghrelin actually peaks and then it just falls.

• 1:18:22Jason Fung?

  If you don't eat, it will actually just fall down and it will fall down within a couple of hours right to baseline. Which means that your level of hunger at, so at twelve thirty, one o'clock, you're hungry. No question about it. If you don't eat by three, four o'clock, that hunger level is actually the same whether you ate or you didn't eat. What happened? Well, your body simply took the calories it needed from your body fat. You took that meal from your body fat and your hunger went down. So that's really interesting. So if you know that it's a wave, right? You just have to let the sort of wave pass over you. Yeah. I often tell people, you will get hungry, okay? Don't, don't pretend that you're not, because you will.

• 1:19:03Jason Fung?

  What you gotta do is prepare for it and say, okay, well, if you get hungry, then you either, there are several things. One, stay busy. You know, keep doing stuff, don't just think about how hungry you are. So we all have had this where we're, you know, working on some kind of, you know, doing work at work, or if you're doing some kind of, you know, home renovation or something. I did this all the time where I'm like painting, you know, the house or something like that, right? And I'll just power right through because I just wanna get it done and I'm not hungry at all because I'm so busy. I'm so focused on doing the work that I just forgot about it, right? You see this all the time, you know, people who go to the casino and people who play video games, they just get so engrossed. So that's one strategy. The other strategy is to get something like green tea or coffee that you can drink.

• 1:19:46Jason Fung?

  By the time you finish and, you know, a big cup of green tea, the hunger will have passed. But you know that it's gonna pass and that's the point. You know it's not gonna get worse and worse and worse. And and and that's how you do it. What's even more interesting, actually, is if you look at multiple day studies where they fast people for three, four, five days. The ghrelin peaks and then after about two days, it starts going down. So by, you know, day two, day three, as you get to day four, day five, the hunger almost completely disappears. It's actually fascinating if you've never done it. So I've done a few of these four or five day fasts. And it's interesting because there's actually no physical sense of hunger. There's a whole lot of, hey, that slice of pizza looks really good. I really wanna eat it. Right.

• 1:20:31Jason Fung?

  But there's no actual physical hunger. So if I hadn't seen it, which is hard now, of course, with all the advertising and all this sort of stuff. I would have actually, you know, gone and right by and done it. But the point is that the hunger is something that you have to learn how to deal with. It's not impossible because, again, one of the big objections to people with fasting is that nobody can do it. Like, it'll work, sure, if you don't eat, you'll lose weight, but nobody do it. Well, you know, that literally millions of people throughout history have done this. Look at Ramadan, you look at Yom Kippur, you look at Lent. Like, when people say, okay, we're gonna fast together because our strength is in our togetherness, right? You know, it's Good Friday, we're not gonna eat for this amount of time.

• 1:21:16Jason Fung?

  Well, that's, that's how people did it, right? They supported each other, there was no food around, somebody's not frying up, you know, his steak while you're trying to fast. They can cook these, yeah. Exactly. So that's how you do it, right? You get yourself a supportive community. You know, you figure out something that you really love to do that keeps you active during that time. And and that's how you get through it, right? And and and while you do that, of course, your body uses up the body fats, you're gonna lose weight, it's gonna use up the the blood sugar, which is gonna keep you from becoming diabetic. And uh it's insulin is gonna fall, which is going to reduce your risk of cancer in the long term, as well as those other conditions, obesity and type two diabetes, which puts you at such high risk

• 1:22:02Jason Fung?

  of cancer in the first place. So you're doing all kinds of good stuff for your body and it's completely free.

• 1:22:09Lewis Howes?

  You don't have to spend money on it, yes.

• 1:22:12Jason Fung?

  And this is the part that's crazy is because if you think about the number of diseases that you can make better, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, which is the leading cause of blindness, of kidney disease, of amputations. The, the, the, the secret to managing all of these things is not more medicine and surgery. It's less. It's actually within our grasp because fasting is free to every single person on earth. You can do it literally right now and start right now on the path to getting better. It's just a matter of having that knowledge to do it. The people tell you, oh, you can't do it. You can't do it. It's like, that's not true.

• 1:22:57Jason Fung?

  We all used to do it, right? If you think about, you know, you know, a community of like, you know, on Yom Kippur, like millions of Jews around the world are doing it, or Ramadan, millions of Muslims are doing it, or, you know, millions of Catholics are fasting during Good Friday. Like my, my priest used to tell me all the time during Lent, you know, fasting, like that's all he talked about practically. So it's, it's, it's such an incredible tool that we've just sort of forgotten about and yet has more power than almost anything else to prevent all of these diseases. And we don't have to charge anybody anything. We're not trying to sell anybody anything. We're just trying to tell you, yes, you can do it because if you have too much weight

• 1:23:39Jason Fung?

  and it's putting you at risk of this cancer, then let your body burn off that sugar. Let your body burn off that fat.

• 1:23:47Lewis Howes?

  A couple of months ago, I did a four day fast where I just had water and a black coffee a day.

• 1:23:57Lewis Howes?

  And it felt incredible. First couple of days was challenging, but by day three, I was like, I'm in the zone. And I felt good. I looked younger. I felt healthier. I was doing it more of like seeing what I could do in my mindset and seeing what it would do for my, you know, kind of cleaning out my system. I just so happened to lose seven and a half pounds. It was burning a lot of excess fat. Um, but I just felt better. I felt more confident. I felt like, oh, I could do something challenging, which gave me more strength in my mind. It was a spiritual experience in a lot of ways.

• 1:24:35Lewis Howes?

  And I'm curious, what are the other myths about fasting that people are afraid of that that you've debunked?

• 1:24:44Jason Fung?

  I mean, uh, the, the, the point about being healthier is one of these things that people think it's super unhealthy for you. It's actually one of the healthiest things you can do, as long as you're, again, not underweight and you're doing it safely, right? You're not on a bunch of medications that need adjustment and that kind of thing. But there's this whole, uh, recent, um, scientific sort of revolution into this process called autophagy, which has been, uh, you know, very, very topical. People have been going crazy on it because in 2016, one of the Nobel Prizes in Medicine was awarded to one of the early researchers. And what it showed is that when you fast, uh, and you turn down these nutrient sensors, then your body actually starts to activate a process called autophagy.

• 1:25:29Jason Fung?

  And autophagy, um, is where your body breaks down these sort of subcellular organelles and just gets rid of them, right? It breaks it down and recycles them. And everybody thinks, well, if you're breaking down stuff, that's bad for you, right? You're breaking down protein, it's bad for you. It's good for you because the first thing you need to do whenever you, uh, want to renovate, for example, so you want to renovate your bathroom. The first thing you gotta do is throw out everything in there, right? That avocado green tub has to go, otherwise you can't put in a new tub, right? It's just the way it is. That's just, uh, so your body works the same way. The first thing you have to do is get rid of the old junky old protein. You gotta break it down.

• 1:26:14Lewis Howes?

  You gotta kill off those cells.

• 1:26:15Jason Fung?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15Lewis Howes?

  You gotta destroy them, rip them off the body and let them, whatever.

• 1:26:19Jason Fung?

  The what you don't need.

• 1:26:21Lewis Howes?

  Flush out your skin or whatever they do, right?

• 1:26:23Jason Fung?

  Exactly. The skin proteins, the connective tissue, all of that goes. And it's not like the body knows what it needs and doesn't need. What happens is that everything starts to go and then the stuff you need, like if you're still exercising, your body's like, hey, I still need those muscles. I'm gonna rebuild that. So that's the key that one of the things that activates during fasting is actually growth hormone. So if you fast for twenty four hours, your growth hormone level is like four times what it is. Really? When you're eating, yeah. And it sounds very strange. Why would growth hormone goes up? Well, it's because of this whole process where you want to break down stuff as soon as you start to eat it. You want to rebuild all of it. So the Nobel Prize in Medicine, which is Dr. Osuni, said this is the body's

• 1:27:04Jason Fung?

  intracellular recycling system. So it's not let's flush out all our old stuff. It's not flush it out and rebuild into new stuff. But if you think about it, that's incredibly powerful because that's the whole process of rejuvenation. Right? Get rid of the old stuff, bring in new stuff. It's like renovating your body, right? So all the cells in your body undergo this process of regeneration that you're not going to get if you are eating all the time. So this is this whole, you know, in, in, in people who are very interested in wellness. A lot of people are looking into this autophagy and so on. And, and, and you get this, this point where you're doing, you know, so you, you've done these longer fasts. It's like, wow, this is, you just feel

• 1:27:46Jason Fung?

  really good about yourself, you know, you're, you're, you're full of energy, right? And, and this is the thing that I thought, thought very strange. When I did my first sort of three or four day fast, it's like, I have a ton of energy, like I could feel like I could do anything. My, my friend who used to work, uh, he's a, he's a doctor. And he worked a lot of nights and stuff. He said, it felt like my brain was like on fire. Like I thought I could do anything and everything faster than I could and better than I could ever do it before. Interestingly, another friend of mine who's a cardiologist, so he's a heart specialist, he says, you know, I used to, he played piano for his whole life. And he says, there's always this piece that I couldn't play. And then as soon as I started fasting, I noticed that I could start to do it. Wow. That's incredible.

• 1:28:29Jason Fung?

  Right? And, and, and the doctors, when I talk to the doctors, they actually instantly see the logic of what I'm talking about because they know the physiology, what happens in the human body. Because what I'm talking about, which is what, all the stuff we know about medical physiology is in contrast to all this stuff that people tell you about fasting, which is, oh, you can't do it, and it's dangerous, and it's really bad for you. Whereas the opposite is true, right? It's actually part of a natural cycle, right? It's feeding and fasting, feeding and fasting, right? You don't feed all the time, you don't fast all the time. But we've gone so far into that one thing. So, yeah, I mean, this, this whole point of, um, etophagy is very, very interesting and very topical. Uh, if you look at studies of longevity, for example, in, in animals, the only thing

• 1:29:14Jason Fung?

  that really, um, makes people, makes animals in the lab live longer is caloric restriction. And so even almost a hundred years ago, people were talking about it and saying, well, you can try and restrict your calories, but if you do that day after day after day, it's really hard. So fasting may be a better way to go, which is something they figured out sort of ages ago, because if you look back, that's how people thought of fasting, that people called it a cleanse, uh, detoxification, uh, you know, reawakening, spiritual, you know, purification, that kind of thing. Right? There's this whole sense of rebirth and something super healthy for you, which got turned in

• 1:29:56Jason Fung?

  the eighties into something really bad for you. Right? It's strange how, how things work, but without any sort of scientific evidence, and as we've become as a nation more overweight, it becomes even more important. And, and, and that's just one of these sort of fascinating things. So, um, you know, it's not like something I just made up. It's like literally the oldest dietary intervention.

• 1:30:21Jason Fung?

  In the books, right? I'm just rediscovering this and trying to tell people, hey, there's a lot of good medical science that tells you this is actually something that is applicable to what we're seeing today in our healthcare. And you can do something like you don't need your doctor, you don't need your dietitian. You can do something about it right now for no money, right? And there's the sciences all there, right? Imagine how much money you could save as a society if we got rid of this problem. And it's like, oh, my God, like the, the, it's mind blowing.

• 1:30:58Lewis Howes?

  Well, I think that's part of the issue is, uh, the reason it's not popular, I guess, is because businesses make a lot of money on medicine, businesses make a lot of money on selling more food, not selling less food. And therefore people want to make more money. And so they have to market their products, they have to market their medicines, they have to market their foods to try to sell more of it, not to say, oh, just have a few of these, just have a couple of cookies a day. No, they want to sell boxes of cookies, right? It's not like they gotta make money. As in their mind, this is a business to be run and we need to sell more, more. It means more people need to eat sugar, refined sugar, breads, all these things, uh,

• 1:31:39Lewis Howes?

  refined oils, refined meats, refined fats, all these things you said that are horrible for us to eat. The company's making them in order for them to survive financially, they need to sell more of these things to us, which is a a challenge.

• 1:31:54Jason Fung?

  It's, it's a real problem because if you look at, say, you know, the doctors and the dietitians, you go to conferences, they're sponsored by Calogs and, you know, the breakfast makers and so on. It's crazy. I was watching the show the other day, one of these, uh, you know, um, TLC shows with like these very heavy women. Anyway, they're trying to lose weight and they're taking these protein shakes. I'm thinking, and, and they couldn't drink it. It was horrible stuff. They tasted really bad, so they spit it out. I'm thinking, somebody's just trying to make a buck on you because you should just drink water. Let your body use the fat and use the protein from your own body. Why would you want to drink two of these protein shakes a day? Except that somebody wants to sell it to you, right?

• 1:32:38Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:32:39Jason Fung?

  You're being played here. You're drinking this horrible, horrible tasting stuff and they're spitting it out. They couldn't take it. It's like, oh, this, the whole thing is so sad because it's like, if you knew, you could simply take nothing at all and be far healthier and save yourself a lot of money. It's, it's a sad, sad sort of state of affairs that we get into.

• 1:33:02Lewis Howes?

  What would you say are the top four or five benefits of fasting then? If we had to recap that part of it, what would you say are the, the top five? I'm hearing it's free. That's one of them.

• 1:33:12Jason Fung?

  Yeah, so it's free. That's a huge thing. It's, it, you really, you can add it to any diet because remember that it does not tell you what to eat when you're eating. It only tells you what, the period of time that you're not eating. So whether you're a vegetarian or carnivore or paleo or keto or whatever you want to be, even if you want to eat fast food all day, it doesn't tell you you can't eat fast food. It tells you that during this period of time, don't eat. So you can add it to any diet, which is incredible because now we're pulling on a completely different lever. That is, if you think about weight loss and nutrition in general, there's two levers, right? We always think of the what you're eating, right? Eat more vegetables. That's great. But what if you don't like vegetables, right? Well, that lever doesn't work, right?

• 1:33:57Jason Fung?

  So here's a completely different lever you're talking about. Well, there's this other thing I can do to lose weight or get healthier, right? So you can add it to any diet. Um, it's, it's completely flexible. That is to say, you can do it whenever you want or if you don't want. So if it's Christmas and you do not want to fast for these few days, then you don't have to. If they decide to fast longer after Christmas, then sure, you can do that. That's completely up to you. It's not like you're locked in. You know, the fourth thing is that it's very simple. So if you look at a lot of diets, that is to say, uh, say you're on a paleo diet. It's a great diet, right? But it's like, this is paleo and this is paleo and this is not paleo, right?

• 1:34:41Jason Fung?

  It's complex or keto or whatever you want to be. So it's very difficult for some people to understand. And I've tried to explain sort of these differences because they'll always get confused. And you always get the, is this keto or is this paleo or whatever? Whereas fasting is very simple. It's like you can drink water and tea and herbal tea, say, that's it. Everything else you can't eat, right? So it's very simple to explain to somebody. It makes it very easy for them to follow. Cause it's very black and white. If you ate a peanut, that's not fasting, right? Yes, it's not a big deal, but at the same time, that's not fasting. And then the other thing is that it's powerful, right? Cause if you, if you follow any type of a diet,

• 1:35:25Jason Fung?

  there's always a natural limit. So say here you want to lose weight. And so you say, I'm gonna do a keto diet or a paleo diet or a vegetarian diet. So you do a vegetarian diet and you lose a, you know, a few pounds, but not as much as you want. Well, you can't go more vegetarian than vegetarian.

• 1:35:40Lewis Howes?

  You're already doing it.

• 1:35:41Jason Fung?

  Exactly. So what else are you gonna do? There's nowhere else you're, or you can't go more keto or you can't go more paleo. Whereas there's no actual upper limit to what you can do in terms of fasting. And it's powerful because you're eating zero, which means that it is by definition for weight loss, the most powerful diet there is. Like absolutely, you cannot lose more than that.

• 1:36:06Lewis Howes?

  If you put cal- any calories in your body, no matter what diet you're on, you're not gonna lose as much as if you had zero calories.

• 1:36:12Jason Fung?

  Exactly. So that's the whole thing. It is the most powerful diet. It's the, the, the, the most powerful weapon you have.

• 1:36:21Jason Fung?

  But it's, it's, it's like, okay, well, why would you not want it? Right? If you have a lot of work to do, you want the best tool. That's it, right? This is the best tool. And somehow we said, don't ever use this, right? It's like, why? If you use it, you'll actually get all these other benefits. So it's free, it's available, it's simple. You know, you can do it with any diet and it's powerful. And you actually don't have to stop. You can actually keep going. You can, you know, do a seven day fast and take a little break, do another seven day fast. And, and, and, and you can't go lower than zero. There's no way. It is possible physiologically to go less than zero. So it is the most powerful diet. So there's so many benefits. And yet for, for years, I'll tell you, when I started using it with, with patients in about,

• 1:37:05Jason Fung?

  about seven or eight, seven years ago, maybe it was like the stuff we saw was just incredible. People were like coming off their medications, they were reversing their type two diabetes, they're losing weight. It's like, you know, all from this simple intervention that is literally the oldest one in the book.

• 1:37:22Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.