Body Hacking Expert Dave Asprey Shares How to Fast the Right Way | Health Theory

hey everybody this episode is brought to you by our very own relationship theory subscribe to relationship theory at youtube.com forward slash relationship theory or click the link at the top of the episode description and i will see you there along with my lovely wife you can fast without ever being hungry and without ever suffering and you'll have more energy everybody welcome to another episode of health theory i am here with a multiple pete guest who i always enjoy spending time with dave asprey dave welcome to the show tom i'm so happy to be back and i'm sad i'm not in your living room oh man same um you wrote a book on fasting and i have to say when i picked it up the first question i had was what is he going to talk about that's new in a book on fasting and i was quite surprised with where you went the thing that took me by surprise is this whole notion of there are many ways to fast and walk us through that when you started this did you naturally assume that fasting was just not eating because you've given pretty broad options i did start out with that that perspective but then i started seeing people making mistakes where oh if something's good for you more of it must be better and the same things they do with keto with a vegan diet you know where if if it works i gotta do more more more and it turns out fasting's not like that and no one talks about the spiritual side of fasting oh that's on my list for today to be sure why why is it problematic though to go all in like when i think about autophagy and the cells cleaning themselves up and knowing that that gets kick-started by just not eating why is it problematic to go too hard on a fast well there's a name for overfasting it's called starvation and malnutrition so there's that now do you do you bracket that only by time though so is that like if i was gonna do a three-day fast um i would think that your advice would be go all in but obviously having read the book i know you have a different punch line so um is is it that it becomes problematic as you get into the 7 10 21 day range or do you think that that's actually sub-optimal from the jump you know i'm totally happy to do a three-day fast four-day five-day seven day ten day although when you get to 10 and beyond you probably want to be very experienced or have some medical oversight because your electrolytes are likely to get out of whack and frankly your ability to really detect what's going on your body isn't very good like you're kind of loopy after 10 days of fasting you have like clarity but you're also ungrounded and you're talking about water only fasting um even if you're having tea and coffee and water only fasting is basically a form of self-flagellation i call that hair shirt fasting hair shirt hair shirt so uh monks used to because they were such sinners they would make shirts out of human hair that were super itchy and then they'd wear them all day so the itchiness would remind them of how bad they were in other words it's self-inflicted suffering that you didn't need to do uh so it's okay most everyone has herbal tea in every spiritual tradition ever or just black tea or green tea um so the fact that mice did water fasting is because they didn't have anything else they're mice and so water only fasting is for perfectionists kind of purists you don't have to do that to get the benefits in fact you'll probably get more if you have some polyphenols during your fast all right so let's define some terms here so i've always thought of fasting as you put nothing in your mouth that isn't exactly h2o that anything beyond maybe i recently broadened my stance to include salt just normal tables that's pretty important there's that so walk us through then so if we've got okay at water only becomes problematic roughly around 10 days and i'll say that that seems slightly controversial i've heard people say that you can go farther with supervision but broaden my notion of what a fast is the definition of fasting is simply to go without and you can fast from many things you can fast from masturbation you can fast from porn you can fast from alcohol right you can fast from junk food it's called eating healthier you can fast from carbs it's called the keto diet you can fast from animal products even though it's a bad idea for long periods of time it's called the vegan diet and there's all sorts of things so fasting literally means to go without for a set period of time and all of those things can make you stronger and a lot of people mix up the metabolic and the cognitive and the health benefits of fasting with the self-control benefits and they try to mix them up and the truth of the matter is that you and i are pretty fortunate you know we've had companies have done well and we don't have to worry about getting up driving for an hour in traffic our kids are now staying at home with you know two kids hanging off each arm and just a huge amount of chaos oh and on top of that i'm just going to fast today even though i'm metabolically not really in good shape and what's going to happen is you'll be just like me when i weigh 300 pounds you're going to be hypogly [ __ ] you're going to be hangry you're gonna yell at your kids you're gonna yell at your boss and it's not gonna be a good day and you're gonna say basically f fasting this is stupid it doesn't work but you don't have to do that you don't have to experience pain and hunger to get the benefits of fasting and to go into fasting and after 10 plus years of recommending this in my my writing and 15 years of practicing this what you find out is that there are things that you can do in literature that don't trigger the two things that break a fast what breaks a fast is having sugar or carbohydrate that raises your insulin so if you keep insulin low and your blood glucose won't change much except for based on your adrenal adrenal function um if you do that and you don't eat protein which impacts a whole different set of enzymes you're getting the benefits of fasting and now some people are already up in arms going you can't have 5 000 calories of fat no you would get disaster pants if you did that but you can have small amounts of this and the evidence i have for this is called number one bulletproof protein fasting which has been practiced since 2012 when i wrote about it and this is you eat less than 15 grams of protein during a day but you eat carbs and you eat fat and magically autophagy turns on in studies you can do that so i think we're gonna have to we're gonna have to define then what the biological markers are that were bracketing fasting with so if the loosest definition of fasting is going without but now we as we get into sort of metabolic fasting or dietary fasting there's certain parameters that we're looking for so i've heard people define it as you started that you break a fast with anything that raises your insulin and should you take in something that doesn't raise your insulin then you have not broken your fast and so i'm just curious as one why do people use insulin as the marker is insulin the only marker of a fast or if it if you're not an autophagy it's technically not a fast like what are the the parameters by which you say this still qualifies as a fast it depends on your goals and the type of fast you're looking for right so some people fast for healing the gut right and during that kind of a fast you might want to have just water you probably want to have water plus these colored compounds in tea or coffee because those feed good bacteria they're a prebiotic you might also use one of the three fasting hacks that just turn off the pain of fasting for people just need to get through the day and fast and get healthier along the way is prebiotic fiber so you can do that and what does prebiotic fiber get rid of symptomatically headaches hunger prebiotic fiber feeds the bacteria in your gut so they make less lipopolysaccharide which is a major issue during fasting it also makes sure that you don't starve the gut bacteria and when you do that you turn off hunger and there's multiple studies that show that the soluble fiber that cannot be digested by you that it helps support good gut bacteria so now you're fasting you're not dealing with a large amount of lipopolysaccharides which are bacterial toxins they make when they're stressed in the gut so then like oh wait a minute i had healthier gut bacteria my blood sugar didn't change but the gut bacteria converted this fiber into butyric acid or butyrate which is a ketogenic compound so all of a sudden wow i didn't experience hunger this morning wasn't that great i didn't spend half my morning thinking about muffins and barely make it through the day and i still got my fast in and this idea that you have to feel pain and suffering and just like muscle through it it doesn't work for people who have a lot going on in fact it makes it much harder i don't believe in causing suffering unless there's a hormetic effect and there's no other way to do it okay so let's talk about the goal of a fast so um one so you just talked about healing a gut so there we might have different outcomes that we're looking for basically you'd be resting the gut you even say in the book if you have a gut problem you're trying to heal it the easiest way to heal it is to not have anything in the gut um so that makes a lot of sense so we're not necessarily worried about insulin going up down or indifferent we're not necessarily worried about even calories being present we're worried about having things for the bacteria in your gut to have to work on so that they can just take a break and sort of hit the reset button now if i'm doing a fast where my specific goal is to get into autophagy what can we intake and still have autophagy being present like can i have uh fat in my diet and stay in autophagy or what does that look like you can have moderate amounts of fat in your diet and still stay an autophagy but in the research that i did and in the conversations with other experts it's apparent that having only fat isn't going to affect autophagy now if you have 3 000 calories of fat a caloric excess can inhibit autophagy but no one's ever studied what a fat only caloric excess looks like because no one would actually do that so there's also a lot of things like the fasting mimicking diet that turn on on top of it even though you're eating some stuff and what elements of the fast are they mimicking um well it's a very low calories for five days about 500 calories or so for uh five days and this is based on research from walter longo who's what i'd call him the godfather of fasting and one of the the top fasting experts out there today so they're saying we're turning on autophagy even though we're eating some stuff so you can't even say protein without saying which proteins there's some proteins you can't even digest and maybe those wouldn't affect it so it gets very specific around some amino acids raised insulin a lot more so is you know a few teaspoons of whey protein gonna break a fast more than collagen probably but it depends on your individual response to those ideally though less than 15 grams of protein from all sources is going to maintain your state of autophagy and this goes back to like my first big book in 2014 that data was out there and based on studies so the deal is just have no protein and have no sugar and no carbs you can digest and the fasting processes will work there's one little asterisk to that statement and we're getting relatively technical one of the things that happens when you fast is there's something called fiat it's fasting induced adipose factor and your liver turns this on it says oh i'm fasting um there's no calories i better use this and what is it accelerates fat burning and when you're not fasting it accelerates fat storage unfortunately if you have a lot of bad gut bacteria they're like oh this petri dish is our petri dish so we're going to hack it and the bacteria themselves will make more fasting induced adipose factor than your liver would naturally which means that you lose weight faster when you're fasting but you gain weight faster when you're eating and this is a question that um because they want to make sure that their petri dish doesn't starve and also is a little bacteria i don't have any food let me tell the petri dish to secrete more energy so it can go find food and then i'll get food so they're literally changing your behavior and it it's fascinating that they do this but you can also manipulate them knowing that they do this and so fasting can help you lose weight but if you have good gut bacteria present and you're aware of that fact you can do things like consume that tea those polyphenols that feeds good bacteria called the bacteriodes family so the colored compounds and fruits and vegetables and coffee and tea and chocolate are all prebiotics for good gut bacteria that you cannot buy in a probiotic and so having healthy gut bacteria resolves that problem and the the reality is that you and i are from the perspective of our mitochondria which are the things we're working on mostly in fact most of my work has around mitochondria these are ancient bacteria embedded in our body they think they're in charge and they're the ones driving your hunger your fear your cravings um they're the ones that make you you know date people you shouldn't be dating and they they drive human desire in fact there's an order of operations from them that i described in the book and this is the algorithm for all life forms and so they're messing with you and then you have gut bacteria that are also messing with you by secreting their own factors to try and get your body to do what they want you to do and then for us we're also in there in our logical cognitive brains going wait a minute i'm getting pulled all over the place by these urges right and then eventually when your energy is lower and your urges are high your ability to manage your emotions goes down the ability to make good decisions goes down and then you eat the cookie and that's the annoying thing so when i think about [Music] all of this stuff sort of working in concert this big cacophony of things happening you've got the mitochondria are pulling you in one direction you've got the bacteria in your gut pulling you and another you have your own body's response to um lack of food we've got autophagy that's working for us we're cleaning up the cells so i could see how that would speak to longevity maybe even clarity but other than autophagy what are some of the reasons that fasting is so important for people the number one reason isn't autophagy that's actually kind of a nerd reason for fasting and i say that happily being a nerd most people who are practicing intermittent fasting today don't even know what autophagy is and that's okay what they know is that they fast and they get energy right and it's a lot of energy because even if we're eating a so-called healthy diet um according to the the bulletproof stuff the first chapter of the book there's five classes of toxins made by mother nature that we're eating every day right and um the first one i think is the first big book about it was lectins not all lectins are bad but these are defense molecules for certain types of foods like grains and bell peppers and things like that and they make you really hungry and they mess with you right and then you look at things like phytic acids that inhibit your ability to absorb minerals there goes the argument for a whole grain kind of thing because they're full of these things that stop you from having zinc there's a problem there and then we have histamine which forms in certain foods and they sit around that gives you just severe cravings and then you have oxalic acid which is kale and charred in raw spinach which i've been warning about for years and then the fifth one is mycotoxins that grow on food in the field and while it's stored and all of those will mess with you and when you fast you get none of those it's like wow i feel so good and it's not the fasting it's that you're not eating stuff that makes you feel bad that you're used to eating every day so that's a a hidden side benefit of fasting yeah so getting into like inflammation and things like that and fasting having such a profound impact on that what i want to know when we start fasting and we're having the our energy levels are going up because we're not in taking a bunch of things that you know whether it's just bad food or whether it's the toxins you're talking about um we also are getting this lowering of inflammation one i'm curious what's causing the lowering of inflammation is it simply the absence of the toxins that you mentioned or is there more to it there's two big things going on one is the absence of toxins the other one is that ketones themselves are anti-inflammatory profoundly anti-inflammatory so now you're saying wait a minute i'm having less inflammation because if i had to guess i'm going to say it's probably two-thirds caused by not eating stuff that makes you weak and one-third caused by the presence of ketones um the inflammatory things i could be wrong but that's you know a very rough estimate of why and if you were to say i'm gonna go on a super clean no plant toxin kind of diet you feel pretty similar but you're still gonna have blood sugar swings that you don't get when you're fasting they generally after a little while it stabilizes okay so we've got fasting playing this insane role when we're talking about metabolic diseases which depending on who you talk to is everything from cancer heart disease alzheimer's like there must be some common thing that this all has working together so is it insulin people have referred to alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes type 3 of the brain is it just inflammation in general from the ketone bodies like what what is it that is operating across all these different um disease manifestations what's going on there is you're getting a metabolic reset and you're getting a lot of autophagy you're taking the the mitochondria that are weak they've learned and there's a quadrillion of them way more than there are cells in your body and they've learned yeah there's lots of food coming i don't really have to do anything it's okay if i'm running at you know 50 efficiency it's good enough for the world i'm in and then suddenly like i'm in a world where i have to be able to really be on my toes the body looks around and says well this sucks i guess i'm gonna have to kick out all the weak mitochondria and go to the expensive process of building fresh new ones that are young and those are the mitochondria that can effectively and efficiently use glucose or ketones and that's what's causing a lot of this it's removal of senescent cells but even then if you were to take a water fast and you would say hey i'm going to do 500 milligrams of facetin and two grams of quercetin which are massive synalytic promoters you're going to get more out of it but now you're not on water only fast you're using supplements in a targeted way to improve autophagy and so i believe that the the puritanical approach of just water isn't advisable but i do think if you're going to do stuff during a fast it's got to be limited and you've got to know what it is and why you're taking it for instance there's other supplements that i recommend in fast this way that improve the body's ability to do what it does during fasting i'm talking about proteolytic enzymes things like serrapeptase and natto kinase and what these do is they help the body to break down waste proteins and scar tissue since the body is already working on that and you give it more of the enzymes it needs that means your pancreas and discerning state your liver can make the enzymes that they need to make for repairing dna and refolding proteins and things like that because some of the cleanup proteins you've already taken orally you can also take things like activated charcoal during a fast and because your gut bacteria get really stressed and they make more of that lipopolysaccharide or lps we talked about earlier if you bind that in the gut you actually have less inflammation but you feel a lot better so the the water only thing is like i'm just gonna put my head down and go through it i just don't believe in extra suffering i would say anyone on a water fast who adds activated charcoal is going to have better results a hundred percent of the time because it's blocking the toxins from coming out into the body i know in the book you said that part of the keto flu that people experience when they're beginning fasting or beginning a keto diet is mitigated by taking activated charcoal for that reason it's interesting i wish i had known that the first time that i did keto which i had brutal keto flu it was god-awful um what are some of the other because you give many different styles of fasting and ways to mitigate some of the the difficulties that people can have with fasting so what are some of the other things that we need to address and how do we address them one of the biggest concerns there is is people are saying fasting makes me feel good so i'm going to just do it every day they go you know what i'm going to try this new omad thing where i only eat dinner right like i'll do that every day for a week or so this is awesome i've never heard of that one meal a day oh mad yeah so omad is one meal a day and they're saying okay um that's that's great and oh man is really easy skip breakfast skip lunch have dinner there you just did a 24-hour fasted it's not as sexy as it sounds like i'm all mad i'm i'm keto i'm strong it's literally you skip two meals not good for you and uh during the day though you might get a little bit hungry but there's things you can do so if you ate if you eat the right food you won't be hungry after you eat and if you eat the wrong food which most of us do at least one or two things is off then an hour or two later we're like man i really want some food i got a sugar craving what's going on and then you have to work on it so learning how to eat is an important part of not experiencing pain during a fast but people are like okay i can do a 24 hour fast man i feel so good i'm rocking it what's really happening though is they're kind of getting a little bit stressed biologically they're feeling good mentally but their body's saying okay i'm making a lot of cortisol and adrenaline right now which i'm using to break down some muscles so i can have enough glucose to keep my brain running because this isn't a fat-burning body yet like your metabolism isn't flexible and if you've been eating bad fats for years it's going to take a while to fix your mitochondria what's the ideal split for you the ideal split is whatever you'll do and 16-8 is great but for especially 16 hours of not eating and then i eat however much i want in an eight hour window or do you put limitations in the eating window you can eat as much as you want during the window of twinkies uh you know you can and you'll still get benefits to be perfectly honest you'll just get more benefits if you eat good stuff during the window and that's the other thing okay maybe you don't want to go grass-fed only maybe you don't want to eliminate french fries from your universe okay fine intermittent fasting will help everybody even on a complete crap diet however you'll be more hungry during your intermittent fast if you eat crab so you got to deal with that and ideally what you're eating after you break your fast you can have carbs and not have carbs but don't have sugar don't have seed oils and eat grass-fed meat or don't eat meat and if you follow those basic principles and there's other nuances in there what you find is that you feel really good and the next morning you wake up and you're not ravenous and you're like oh yeah i don't even want breakfast and that's a very liberating thing because if we're spending so many of our thoughts every day on food food food and then you just aren't hungry it really changes things so i want millions of people to say i'm going to try this basic thing i'm not going to worry about getting my diet perfect i might make a few changes but i'm just going to learn how to intermittent fast and what i don't want them to do is what a lot of the fasting community does where it's all about the fast and you know every month i'm going to fast for a week and what you end up doing is you get people who become um they basically burn out their adrenals and so women see sleep problems as the first symptom that they're overdoing it and then they see hormonal problems in their monthly cycle and then see hair loss and hair thinning guys same thing but it's usually two to four weeks out for women first is sleep problems then you wake up and there isn't a kickstand and then you it took me a second i got there yeah and then after that you can see her thing as well and this is from excess cortisol because you overdid it and you can see the same thing from just being keto for three months straight right that's why i've always recommended cycling because i made all these mistakes when i was learning about all this stuff it was just very early days and and so how do you make this sustainable and the truth is fasting the same way every day is bad for you because it doesn't lend your body the idea of metabolic flexibility it's like oh i live in a world where there's almost never enough food so have breakfast every now and then at least you know saturday morning have breakfast with your family and you can have a keto breakfast or you can have the gluten-free waffles whatever you want you should be able to handle that just don't eat bad oils and over time it takes about two years to replace half your cell membranes the oil in those membranes over time you'll become more and more metabolically flexible because your cells work better but if while you're intermittent fasting you're still eating a ton of junk food you won't get that benefit but you'll get many other benefits of fasting you're still going to lose weight you're still going to have an improved blood sugar profile but not as good as if you made a few changes in the diet so this is something everyone can do that's cheaper and more convenient than what you do in the morning right now so i don't think um we closed the loop on metabolic flexibility before so metabolic flexibility being um that you've got on one hand you can burn the glucose and then on the other that you can burn ketones most people unless they're paying attention never get into a space where they can burn ketones because they're not creating ketones can you give people really fast because i want to get back to what an ideal fast looks like according to fast this way but first give people a quick breakdown about how you put your body in a state where it will produce ketones and exactly what they are ketones are what happens when your body burns fat instead of sugar naturally it doesn't happen if you're consuming carbohydrates in any meaningful amount and it doesn't happen if you're eating a ton of protein and what happens when you do that is ketones have more energy in them than glucose does and the neurons in your brain love ketones in fact all the cells in your body do but some of them prefer blood glucose so all of a sudden you get this feeling of clarity and the natural way to get into ketosis is you fast for about two days for the average person sometimes three and then the body says i got nothing here i better start burning my fat stores so it liberates some fat from the fat stores and all the toxins from the fat it liberates as well which is why it's good to mop them up while you're fasting and then your cells get get this and they go oh man we've got to reformat our power plants because they're used to only having sugar so it takes metabolic energy to transform and they literally change their shape and function so that they're better at consuming fat right and that takes a while now you're metabolically flexible but if you do that all the time forever your cells are like why would i ever be configured to do glucose i live in a world with no sugar so they aren't very good at that which is why cycling in and out of ketosis fasting some of the time but not other times and not fasting the same way every day or every week is really powerful you want to keep the body a little bit off balance so it's like you know what i'm ready to make energy at any time rapidly from any type of fuel and when you do that you can actually go out and have a bowl of hopefully dairy free ice cream without bad fats in it so a coconut-based ice cream and with real sugar and everything and it'll happen your blood sugar will go up and come right back down and you'll be fine and that's a metabolically flexible person you do it all the time you won't be metabolically flexible right but if you're the guy who has ice cream every single night well then what's going to happen is you're not going to know how to burn fat whatsoever your body's going to be only sugar burning and it's it's not going to work and your blood sugar will always be high so the idea is occasionally it's okay to have some carbs i don't recommend you know ice cream is a major source but honestly if you're intermittent fasting you're occasionally in ketosis you ought to be able to eat a treat that isn't full of inflammatory stuff like bad oils and all and be just fine and the evidence is that people whose metabolisms work really well they can do it and their blood sugar doesn't go bonkers okay now if we were going to give somebody the fastest way starter kit um you know sort of a what is a basic week look like what is what is a good entry point where they're not hangry they're not going crazy but they're still getting some benefits anti-inflammatory they're maybe in uh you know ketosis they've got some autophagy going on like what does that starter kit fast look like all right i'm going to to explain that right here i'm also going to offer um because i was a teacher for five years at the university of california i raised every book i've written i haven't really been a great teacher of the content i just write them like you should read it when people order fast this way and send the receipt to fastthisway.com um i will teach you this over two weeks like every morning explaining walking people through this who are new to fasting ending in a one or two day spiritual fast so that's the long answer to the question is this gonna take me two weeks but i'll show you the short answer is that do 12 hours without food see if you can do that if you've never done it before that's not really technically an intermittent fast you're just showing yourself you've got legs and you work yourself up to 14 hours without food and that's when you're really starting a real intermittent fast and then you maybe the next day you have breakfast just lots of protein lots of fat no carbs for breakfast right you're taking it easy and then the next day okay i'm gonna do a 16 hour fast and you may use all three of the fasting hacks because you're ravenous when i was 300 pounds if you told me i was gonna skip breakfast and lunch i'm like i will kill the people around me like i will be such a jerk and it was true i ate six or eight times a day because i knew i'd go into starvation mode if i didn't and all this like mental garbage we've been told so what you end up with is this idea where you're slowly gonna work your way up and it's okay to do that and some mornings someone's gonna bring in donuts and you're just gonna break your fast and in the book i explain the psychology and the biology of why that happens and it's just it's okay right you have the rest of your life to to do this that's why it's called a fasting practice and it doesn't have to be perfect and once you get up to that 68 one day you're going to sit there and go you know what it's lunchtime but i'm actually not that hungry so i am going to for the first time in my adult life i am going to just say i'm not going to dinner and then you're really kind of tricking yourself because it's only like four or five more hours until you've had dinner anyway and then you're going wait a minute the last time i ate was dinner yesterday but it wasn't pain it wasn't suffering it wasn't struggle it wasn't strife it wasn't pushing it was just oh okay i could do that i was a little hungry in the afternoon but i drank some extra water right maybe you did use coffee coffee's good for you anyway right it's okay and then no sugar or cream i'm assuming thank you no sugar no cream no protein no artificial sweetener either you can use stevia or monk fruit if you want to but definitely not nutris weed or splenda because those wreck your gut bacteria and it it's really shocking and you see this look at wonder like wow i can't believe i i thought i would die right but i didn't i just did 24 hours and as we talked about earlier that's you know one meal a day but if the next day you're like i did yesterday i'm gonna do it again today and you're still just getting into it you're probably not gonna feel as good right so the next day go back to 16-8 right like slowly work up to it and what you're doing it's like you go to the gym say i haven't worked out in two years but i'm gonna go do a full crossfit workout right i'm gonna do the full wad and then the next day you're laying on your back and you're like i think i have to go to the hospital my kidneys are overloaded with protein breakdown you know i hate my life it's because it's okay when you're exercising yourselves the way fasting knows it's okay to just get started in a healthy gentle way and work yourself up to this i can fast for 48 hours and still be totally fine and and have my brain work and do interviews like this and i feel great i can also eat and feel great but before i'd eat and then i get the food coma and then you don't feel very good and then you gotta have some sugar that doesn't happen either but if you just go all in and say i'm gonna start with a 10 day water fast man you're gonna feel like crap and the deal here is fasting is not about deprivation and it's not supposed to be about willpower unless you're doing a spiritual fast and what i would say is do fasting in a painless way which is a big part of the book or choose to face the pain and use it as a spiritual personal development practice the arc of the book when i first started this i was afraid of being hungry i was afraid of being alone which was something i came up with through my personal development work i'm like oh i didn't realize this so i hired a shaman to drop me off in the middle of nowhere in a cave there's no food and there's no people for 10 miles in any direction and i'm like i'm going to be here for four days and i'm scared you know i'm pretty scared of this to be perfectly honest it's the first time i've done a four-day fast and when i got out of there i couldn't believe the energy i had and i talk in in the book about you know the the mental process you go through the first time you do a fast like that and that is a spiritual practice and that's why at the end of this this challenge i'm running for people i am going to say all right here's the meditation work that you do here's understanding the voice in your head because there's these three voices in your head that make you do everything you've ever been ashamed of and they're coming from mitochondria and gut bacteria and getting on top of that and just owning that that's awesome but if you have to own it every day on top of everything else in your life it's gonna be overwhelming and it's going to raise your cortisol and you don't need to do that to get the benefits what are the three voices this is the algorithm that all life runs it doesn't matter if you're a plant it doesn't matter if you're a bacteria which is what's powering us or whether you know you're a deer and the first rule is run away from kill or hide from everything so that's fear and you put 10 times more energy on that than is necessary right because from the perspective of making a life form that will always be around it should protect itself and you protect yourself if you're a plant with hard shells or spikes or toxins and if you're a bacteria use toxins or other defense things and if you're a person you think you're out of it and the second f word which gets about five times more attention than normal is eat everything because famines kill lots of things so now we have fear and we have food right and that's why food gets so much attention when you're fasting because your bacteria like eat that eat that eat that eat that eat that no no no and eventually it's like a little kid wearing you down and okay fine you can have half the cookie johnny and they're like why did i eat the cookie i'm such a bad person no your mitochondria got the best of you it's okay and then the third f word what else does all life have to do to make sure it's on the earth forever tom fornicate baby oh i was thinking fertility but if you want to just go straight to that i'll go right there you're correct so i actually was thinking of the other f word i was just trying to get you to say it so nice dodge what um what's going there that gets about three times more attention than it deserves right and all life has to do it and this explains everything you've ever done that you're ashamed of like all procrastination all resistance all not seeing things like that's fear right eating all the stuff you shouldn't eat that's food going on that date you know you shouldn't have gone on that is the other f word right and this is in our cells this is not your brain this is your cellular biology driving you to do it and the saving grace in all of this and this is towards the end of the book is that there is a fourth f word that all life does and it's friend and this is why we form communities why we specialize and we're actually wired to help each other right but if you're so wrapped up in hunger and so wrapped up in lack of love and so wrapped up in fear whether it's from watching too much news or just your old programming that's like oh no if if you know if my boss yells you're a bad person no one will love me and you just lose it so if those are going on we aren't there to help other people and if you can turn off the hunger voice it frees up so much more energy that you can now do the work necessary to turn down the fear and to make sure that you're managing the love in your life and all of a sudden you're a better person than you were before and this is why fasting is so important because it has the power to give you the energy to overcome the other f words that are messing with you on a daily basis and it's not because we're bad people it's a separate operating system meant to keep you alive it's not trying to harm you it just makes you do stupid stuff all the time and fasting is a way out of that trap is that the reason that this is uh such a time-honored tradition for spiritual traditions to use fasting or is there something more was there what were all the things that you learned or discovered in the cave there are two reasons that spiritual fasting works and i actually reference a bunch of different fasting practices from around the world in the book that are all spiritual traditions one of them is that when the neurons in your brain get ketones from fasting you actually think better you have more energy for thinking and for awareness food tastes better colors are brighter right and you're aware of sensations in your body in the world around you it's like someone went from black and white to color tv so so you get this this energy is like wow i like this and if you take that energy and you turn it inwards you become aware of what's going on in there in a way that you normally wouldn't be and i believe that's a part of it and the other part of it is you know you do have to to feel the hunger and have willpower to overcome the hunger for two days or so and it's about showing yourself who's in charge right and that is a spiritual practice in and of itself but it's the the clarity that comes and with that clarity you can do deep work i want to talk about that growing part so you said in the cave you know doing a extended fast like that you're creating the space to do the deep work or you have the energy to do the deep work what was the deep work like what was it that and i mean you talk about in the books i don't think i'm going out of school here but what was it that drew you to wanting to do a spiritual fast um and then you know what what did you encounter that you've taken with you well i'd i'd lost a lot of weight but i reckon i still had you know a fear of being hungry because when your metabolism doesn't work when you're as fat as i was if you don't have food your brain stops working i had a great career in silicon valley you know very cognitively demanding but interesting and fascinating and you're in a meeting and like my brain won't work like i'm trying to think right now and i got nothing like the accelerator's all the way to the floor and i'm slowing down i can push hard but it doesn't matter how much i try doesn't match i want it's not a willpower or a moral issue it's a biological issue so you become afraid of being hungry because you don't want to be disabled right and i had that and i recognized i had that i didn't know what to do about it i said well i'm just gonna you know face it and one thing that happens when you face your fears they lose their power so for me in the cave i'm like there's no one around like showing myself i'm actually still safe with no food i'm i'm still safe with no companionship right and then to be able to go you know what great i'm not gonna die and that soaks into your body it's not just a day you're just sitting there thinking you walking around i sat there i'd think and say you know what okay i'm just gonna go walk i'd walk up the little canyon where i was you know i stack up rocks i had a little journal uh and and just really feel but you know you you think about all the stuff you've done uh that man i wish i hadn't done that like now i understand what was driving me to do that and you really you gain insight and and you you feel way more connected uh to the world around you and like most like yeah i'm going to fast i'm going to have my metabolism i'm going to get younger i'm going to lose weight and we get absolutely benefits like actually you have no distractions when you're fasting so if you remove all the distractions from your world and you do some of the other things that i talk about in the book briefly you know fasting from sex is a very powerful practice that raises your testosterone if you're a man if you're a woman it probably isn't beneficial um there's other things towards the end of the book like fasting from hate like try to go four hours without thinking one bad thought about another person and then go 24 hours it is remarkably difficult to do that and you become aware during that time i cannot believe how often i'm like sending dirt towards people that i didn't know i was doing it costs you to send them dirt you got to make the electrons do that and it gives it does nothing for you right so you can go without many different things but when you have the clarity and the time to sit in a cave like why am i thinking about this right now like why is it pushing my buttons why did that show up for me right now and then you you dig on it like oh my god i've never thought about it like that and this is once i had the clarity of ketones right i had zero inputs anywhere i had no food in front of me to to challenge me and i could say oh i'm really hungry and then i'm like why am i thinking that i know there's no food here like who's thinking that because it's not me and then you realize oh there actually is a separate consciousness that's driving my biology and i i mean you can see the effect of that consciousness using neurofeedback and all it's one of the things i do with my neurofeedback company 40 years of zen and it's wow there's this whole thing that's like making me worry about stuff that i know isn't a threat and it's making me worry about food when i know i'm not going to starve i'm like wait why what and then you start really getting in there and you when you're done with a spiritual fast like that you can develop a sense of first empathy like i i feel the pain that i felt i feel the pain of others when they're hungry right and then the level beyond that in spiritual teaching teachings is a sense of compassion where instead of having to feel everyone else's pain you can see the pain and you feel open-heartedness towards them and you want to serve without taking it in and the final state which is the hardest one to develop in these open-hearted buddhist practices is equanimity which is where you can be completely common at peace no matter what's happening inside or outside of you and and that's the kind of things that can develop when you sit in the cave for days because you're like wow i had all this garbage in my mind that i didn't know was in there because i had nothing else to do but unpack it and we're just too busy to do that but i would say the fasting runs from i skipped breakfast and i had more energy and i'm better off metabolically all the way up to i sat somewhere for several days in intense personal development but when most people hear fasting all they hear is i'll starve therefore i'll die and then they blank out to it and no this is about more energy and it's about more clarity and less time wasted and less pain in your life yeah hearing you describe the way people push back seeing how even today sort of the mainstream medical establishment thinks of fasting and how it's considered so sort of outlandish and you know people immediately go to well you're gonna give people anorexia and it's such a bizarre reaction and when you think about those three f's and and the fear that seems to be driving people's perception of this do you have like a magic phrase or idea that you can give to people that are really resistant to get them to try it you can fast without ever being hungry and without ever suffering and you'll have more energy but when i was you know really heavy still i was eating super healthy what i thought was healthy you know low-fat low-calorie stuff but i was still working on it and if you told me i had to fast i'd be like no like i'm not gonna i'll go into starvation mode and it's gonna suck and then i won't be able to do my job and you know i'll act like a jerk and all that stuff that message is playing super loud for everyone who's got extra pounds and then they have this desire to fast but then you feel like a failure because the automated system in your body wants you to eat and you don't know how to deal with it so the deal is i'm going to put you in charge that that's what's going on here and so all of the bad things that you think about fasting won't happen what's going to happen is you're going to save time and you're going to feel better than you do today and you'll never be hungry and then like okay i'm going to try this once i think you're full of crap and they almost always start with a fasting hack there's a reason that there's been several hundred million cups of bulletproof coffee and people lost a million pounds on the bulletproof diet it's because when they had that fat in the morning they were intermittent fasting they just didn't feel hungry and for the first time in their lives when lunch time came around they're like i guess i could eat instead of the way i used to be which is like what's for lunch what's for lunch tacos you know that whole voice it just shuts up and oh my god it's so liberating yeah it really does change your relationship to hunger that was the thing that i could never quite get people to understand about ketosis specifically and it's not like you're not hungry it's that it doesn't have a grip on you which is very very different it's because there's two things that we confuse one is a craving and the other is hunger and hunger is the sense that you know what it's time to eat sometime soon but i could wait a while and a craving is if i don't eat right now someone's gonna die whether it's me or someone else and most people eat in such a way that they always experience cravings and they've never experienced just hunger without a craving i was like that a hundred percent and when you clean out the stuff that's causing the cravings like wow the experience of lunch is so different so for somebody that's new they're in that space where they just can't imagine where can people um i mean they can buy the book at amazon and all the normal places but where the where can they engage with you and um really get the help that they need to give this a shot order the book wherever you like to order books and send me a receipt there's a little upload form on fastthisway.com and i will register you for two weeks of training where i walk you through here's what you're gonna do today here's what you're gonna do tomorrow and you're gonna do it in a community of thousands and thousands of people sharing your results because having other people doing it with you is really motivational so when you feel like you know maybe i'll just have one bite of the donut and like i'm going to post about this later i don't think i want to tell people about the donut i'll skip the doughnuts so it's a little bit of extra willpower there but honestly if you're doing this the right way you probably won't need the willpower and i just want to teach that i hear it all right guys trust me man fasting is a game changer read the book it's very interesting it's a very unique take on all of this and as always dave is taking people by the hand showing them exactly what they need to do he's got like a dozen companies that'll help you in one way or another so be sure to check this man out and speaking of things that will help you in one way or another if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you all right how do you know when it's time to break up will having kids ruin your dreams why can't you control that ugly jealousy when do you know if it's time to move in or get the hell out these are just a few of the no holds barred no bs conversations we'll tackle on the new youtube channel relationship theory along with my wife the lovely and talented lisa bill you will bring our 20 years of experience juggling our entrepreneurial aspirations while maintaining a strong relationship through all the obstacles that have smacked us in the gut walloped us upside the head on a daily basis it's just as hard to maintain a relationship as it is to build a successful company maybe even harder but it is well worth it certainly more worth it than building a company and if you can't maintain a healthy relationship then there's no way you're going to be able to thrive in your business environment it's absolutely impossible we might be thriving now but it wasn't always the case for us we had to deal with family pressure financial struggles and a never-ending stream of obstacles and just when you think one problem has been solved 10 others are going to slam right into you and let me tell you if you can't deal with the inevitable struggles that are coming your way there's no way that you're going to stay together like most of our success we've gotten to where we are by making a lot of mistakes and learning along the way and now through relationship theory we're sharing everything that we've learned lisa and i will tell you that if you want to stay together you better open up or shut up we'll also share some secrets on how to keep the sexual spark alive and practical tools to help you stop fighting for anyone that wants to improve their relationship or get ready to have one this show is for you so if you want to level up on your relationship game boys and girls you need to watch and subscribe to relationship theory at youtube.com forward slash relationship theory or click the link at the top of the episode description take care and be legendary thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential you

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 534,226

Rating: 4.8525753 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Dave Asprey, Health Theory, HT, fasting, how to fast, bulletproof, bulletproof coffee, different ways to fast, problems of hardcore fasting, hardcore fasting, problems while fasting, start fasting, what defines a fast, what is a fast, how do I fast, gut healing, healing my gut, heal your gut, autophagy

Id: iGwAM7HyC6s

Length: 48min 53sec (2933 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020