Dr. Jason Fung: Therapeutic Fasting

okay thanks for having me here so this is fantastic so the one of the things about biohacking that's really um very uh you know seductive is that you can make a simple lifestyle change and then you can make such impressive you get some impressive sort of benefits and one of the things in the nutrition space is fasting and this is not a new idea so we're not trying to bring sort of newfangled things to the world what we're trying to do is sort of revive these old ideas that are sort of tried and true and if you look at fasting that's been around for many many years and some very very smart people like benjamin franklin who's on the 100 bill said really the best of all medicines is resting and fasting and to some degree that's true especially in this day and age where we're facing this sort of obesity epidemic type 2 diabetes epidemic so what i'm going to do is talk about i'm going to go through a bit quickly since we're running a little late so we know that there's this large obesity epidemic and it started somewhere around the 1970s you see it had been increasing but there's an inflection point here where the uh rate of obesity really starts to rise and that's sometime in the ninth late 1970s and shortly thereafter what you can see is about 10 years after that in the 80s you can see the steep rise in type 2 diabetes and type 2 diabetes is really no joke because the thing about type 2 diabetes is that it causes a lot of disease and a lot of diseases that we're worried about today so heart attacks strokes also the leading cause of blindness and nerve damage and kidney failure and all kinds of things so if you're trying to live healthy for a long time type 2 diabetes and obesity are really going to work against you and if you look at where our nutrition advice comes from it sort of started in about 1977 when the dietary goals for the united states was released and this was sort of a historic document because prior to that the government never really told people what they should and shouldn't eat your mother told you what you should and shouldn't eat the government really felt they had no business but starting around 1977 they thought it was their business and in their sort of wisdom they got a bunch of scientists together and this is what they decided that we should really eat a lot more carbohydrates so rather than the 40 or 40 50 percent they said well really we should up that to about 55 or 60 percent and decrease fat to about uh 30 so that was what we got so if you grew up in the sort of early 80s like i did what you got was the food pyramid which is this what we should be eating sort of every day and it's been slowly changed so every five years they change it but if you look at the original program what you see on the bottom here what you should be eating every day five to seven servings is bread and pasta and you know rice and polenta so not exactly slimming foods to to most of us thinking about that today but that's what we're told to eat and things like uh you know an egg well you should eat that once a week maybe that's uh full of cholesterol and so on and that's exactly what we did so people always like to blame the obesity epidemic on the people because they say well we told them good advice but they just didn't listen so they got really fat but that's not really true because if you look at what americans ate and canadians we did exactly what they told us so butter way down eggs way down animal meats way down and lots and lots of grains right 40 increase in grains and all this low-fat sugar yeah you're gonna get rid of this you're gonna add more of this so that's sort of exactly what we did we did what they told us to and the result was of course a huge obesity epidemic so the other thing that people never really talk about when they talk about dietary changes from the 1970s to the 2000s is this fact that we're eating a lot more frequently and to some degree they're tied in but on the other hand um you can see that in 1970 so we'll just look at adults but children show the same distribution so if you look at adults they're eating around this is the enhane survey they're eating about three times a day so the big spike here is around two to three times a day breakfast lunch dinner that's the sort of um thing that we're that's the sort of meal pattern that we're eating by [Music] 2004 what you can see that is we're closer to five or six times a day so we're eating a lot more frequently and to some degree it's related to the foods that we eat because if you're eating a lot less butter and eggs and steak if you're not eating steak and eggs in the morning and you're eating a couple of slices of white bread with jam you're gonna get a lot more hungry so then you wind up eating more frequently and then the other thing that we get told all the time is to eat six times a day it's like that advice never came from science nobody ever thought that was a good idea it was just because we were hungry so then we had to eat a muffin at 10 30. but we're eating a lot more frequently and that's one of the really big changes of the last sort of quarter century so this is more recent data from 2015 and which people they did is they gave people a um an app and they measured how frequently they ate so what you can see here is that the 10 of people so the lowest decile which is the ten percent of people who ate the least frequently eight three times a day three point three times a day and the ten percent of people that ate the most frequently ate ten and a half times a day it's like that's you know a big change from sort of the 1970s where there really wasn't a lot of obesity and people were just eating breakfast lunch and dinner now it's sort of breakfast snack lunch snack dinner snack snack snack snack sleep because that's the only way you can get to ten and a half times per day and the the median time of eating was 14 hours 45 minutes which means that if you ate breakfast at 8 a.m somewhere around here you didn't really stop until 10 45 pm so basically you're eating the entire time that you're awake so that fasting period which is this time that you should be allowing your body to sort of digest and to use the energy that you've taken in no longer exists because all you're doing is sort of putting food and putting all these uh nutrients into your body and your body has to somehow deal with that and then of course we wonder why we're getting all fat so one of the ways you can hack this of course is to simply turn back the clock and say look your body really only exists in one of two states if you look at the physiology and that's what we're really going to talk about in the next little bit is the physiology of what happens and your body can only exist in two states you're either putting food in and insulin goes up so insulin is a hormone that tells your body to store food energy and your body stores it as sugar as glycogen or as body fat so you're either in the fed state where you're putting food in your mouth you get you're sending your body instructions to store body fat or you're fasting insulin falls and then you're going to use up some of that energy okay and that's a normal thing that's what you should be doing every single day and that's why you don't die in your sleep like every single night because your body has the ability to pull that energy back out and use it but what it means is that you're either in the fed state or you're in the fasted state and if you're in the fed state you're storing fat if you're in the fasted day you're burning body fat but you can't do both at the same time so if all of a sudden you are always in the fed state you're constantly storing body fat because you've told it to by eating so frequently okay now if you want to hack that you simply turn the reverse and say okay let me spend more time in the fasted state and that's a simple free easy to do thing so again the idea is not new it actually goes back to the very origins of medicine so hippocrates who is considered the father of modern medicine said our food should be our medicine our medicine should be our food but then to eat when you are sick is to feed your sickness and what he means by that is that it's actually instinctive so people think that there's something inherently unhealthy about fasting but of course it's part of a natural cycle of life and that's why you have the word breakfast that's the meal that breaks your fast so that means you should be fasting every single day and what happens when you get sick when you get sick the very first thing you do is stop eating so if you have the flu or you get really sick with something you don't really want to sit down to a buffet dinner you really just can't eat and the body has naturally told you that you need to activate these hormones not store body fat you need to activate your body to fight this infection and so on so it's actually a very healthy state so if you look at the physiology you hear all kinds of people who say really sort of crazy things like oh you got to eat 130 grams of carbs every day to feed your brain it's like well if you go more than 24 hours without eating you know people don't start having seizures right like your body needs 130 grams of carbohydrates to function but it doesn't mean you have to eat it you can take it from your body stores because that's what it is so if you look at the physiology of what happens to our body during that time you can see and this has been all worked out for many years that in the first stage which is the sort of fed state it's all exogenous so the glucose you get is all from your food as you get into stage two what you do is you start to burn glycogen so the amount of you know carbohydrates has gone down very low so four meats four hours after a meal you start using your glycogen which is the stored sugar in the liver as you get to 20 hours 24 hours what you start is you're tapering off the amount of glycogen because that's getting used up and then you start doing gluconeogenesis which is producing the glucose from your own protein and also from your fat because your fat you can take glycerol and turn it into glucose so what you're doing is you're really describing a transition from using carbohydrates or sugar so as you fast so this is physiology of fasting over 30 days of fasting what happens is that you're you stop burning sugar and you start burning body fat the protein you know after this initial little spike goes down so you're not really burning protein and you hear this all the time oh you shouldn't fast you're gonna burn muscle it's like okay well let's think about that for a second you think our body is really just so stupid that we would store body fat as as our food energy but when we actually need it we are going to burn muscle right that doesn't make any sense if that was the case we would never have survived every time we fasted we'd lose muscle and gain fat we'd really be nothing more than little balls of fat walking around the convention center but it doesn't happen what happens of course is that you transition from using sugar to using fat and then your body says well i have tons of this body fat let's just use it no problem but there's other very important hormones that go up when insulin goes down so as you get into this fasted state it's not simply a matter of insulin going down you get this other counter regulatory hormone surge which is the sympathetic nervous system adrenaline growth hormone and cortisol all of these hormones go up so if you're eating all the time you're not getting this so sympathetic nervous system is our fight or flight response so when you activate the sympathetic nervous system you're actually activating the body you're taking the glucose and shoving it into the blood so that you can use it to prepare for action same thing with noradrenaline and also growth hormone and this is why we don't lose muscle over time when you're doing fasting on a regular basis is because your body actually activates growth hormone and when you eat again your body is going to rebuild all of those proteins that you need so what you're doing in essence when you're fasting is actually something extremely powerful because what you're doing is you're activating the body by switching fuel sources so instead of relying on your food you're relying on your body fat but then you're pumping energy into the system you're getting more energy you're getting so people say oh you can't concentrate that's actually the opposite people actually concentrate better they actually think better they actually move better so we work with a number of elite athletes and i always say to them well think about it for a second if you just ate a huge meal do you think you can you're really sharp well think about thanksgiving when you eat a huge meal do you feel really sharp or do you want to just like sit on the couch afterwards if you are an animal do you really want to be like that lion who just ate or do you want to be like the hungry wolf the hungry wolf is not sluggish lying on the couch right the hungry wolf is activated and the reason is physiology the reason is that sympathetic nervous tone is up noradrenaline's pumped way up and then growth hormone well what you're doing is you're tearing down old proteins in your body and building up new ones so you're actually renovating your body you're rejuvenating the body it's actually a form of anti-aging but it's available to all of us for free if you look at the the science of what happens during this you see that as insulin and glucose go down noradrenaline ketones and fatty acids go up because that's what you want to burn so in fact where do those fatty acids come from comes from your fat that's the only place it can come from because you're not you're not eating so you're putting out fatty acids into the blood so that your liver your kidneys and so on can use it and look at growth hormone so here's uh growth hormone total control is if you're eating three times a day uh it's around you know two and a half jumps up to close to eight with a single day of fasting your growth hormone has gone up like two and a half percent uh sorry two hundred two and a half times and it continues to go up even up to day five or fast so for diseases like osteoporosis and you know sarcopenia and all these sorts of things you actually need that growth hormone and a low growth hormone is going to lead to weak bones and weak muscles and this is the idea that your brain needs the glucose it actually doesn't um because in a normal state in the fed state what you can see is your brain is using all glucose in the fasted state or starvation which is longer than a certain period of time what you're doing is you're using ketones and this is all derived from fat so in fact your body has the ability to not eat that's why we carry body fat it's not there for looks it's there because our body needs it when we don't eat so we can survive but not only survive but if we introduce these regular periods it's going to be healthier for us so the longest the world record for fasting was actually 382 days of fasting this guy was monitored in the 70s he went for more than a year without eating anything and he's monitored by his doctors what they noted was everything was pretty normal looking at the beginning at the end and that's exactly what happens right so his glucose went down but it wasn't too low and it stayed down his calcium was normal his phosphorus was normal uric acid was normal creatinine and urea all of that was normal it's all is electrolytes everybody says oh your electrolytes are going to go out of whack they don't like this guy went 382 days without eating anything and we're worried when we go more than three hours without eating anything somebody's going to tell you all your electrolytes are going to go out of whack you should eat a muffin it's like no you could go another 300 days if you wanted to so if we're talking more specifically about weight loss this is an extremely powerful hack for everybody to use because there's actually two problems with weight loss in the long term and it's not calories calories is uh you know a measure that is not physiologic the body doesn't sense calories it doesn't have calorie receptors it doesn't use calories i don't know anything about calories what the body responds to is hormones and the two things that really derail long-term weight loss are basal metabolic rate and hunger so if you look at basal metabolic rate what happens if you lose weight by cutting a few calories here and there is that your metabolic rate goes down so we know this because they've taken patients uh you know subjects and they've force fed them sort of to gain weight and then measure their metabolic rate what you find is that when you force them to a 10 weight gain so they take these shakes and they tell them okay you have to drink this many shakes until you gain weight after 10 weight gain they are burning 500 calories per day more so their body is actually trying to burn off all that excess calories you're feeding it but when you return them to their initial weight their metabolic rate goes down but then when you lose weight 10 weight loss you're burning about 300 to 400 calories per day less and that's a real problem and we always think that well if you keep that weight off it's just going to go back to normal right so if you're burning 2 000 calories a day normally you lose weight now you're down to 1600 a day that you're burning and then if you keep at it it'll go back to 2000 but it never does and we know that it never does so you can go out to a year and what you see is that their metabolic rate is down but if you look at the hunger signaling that's the other big issue so in um you know when when you don't when you cut calories and you lose weight your hunger goes up so you can measure a hormone called gorelin the higher it is the more hungry you are and the new england journal of medicine what you find is that after initial weight loss the hunger goes up and it stays up even after a year so these are the two physiologic responses to weight loss you're going to lower the amount of calories that you're burning and then you're going to get really really hungry and this is not because they're weak-willed this is just physiology this is what we know happens when you tell people to cut 500 calories a day it never works for these two reasons okay because if you cut 500 calories a day then you burn 400 less you're not getting anywhere then your body is going to tell you to eat eat eat eat so it's not a failure of willpower that these people are eating they're actually physically more hungry and if you can't deal with these two issues you are not going to be able to keep that weight off because being hungry all the time is no fun it's sort of one of our most primal instincts so you have to respect that so how are you going to deal with a lower basal metabolic rate well what happens during fasting so instead of eating six times a day what if you eat like zero times for four days what happens to your metabolic rate well if you think about the physiology we know that adrenaline goes up sympathetic tone goes up so your body's gonna burn more energy not less and that's exactly what we find so after four days this is the weight the weight is steadily coming down this is the resting energy equivalent it goes up and the vo2 which is a measure of how much uh metabolism is going on it goes off in fact after four days your metabolic rate is actually 10 higher than when you started so everybody tells you oh if you don't eat your you'll go into starvation mode your metabolic rate will shut down well that doesn't happen because if it did we wouldn't be here if you think about it if we're cavemen for example and you don't eat then you start to shut down well it's going to be even harder to get food so then you're going to not eat and then you're going to shut down your body again we'd all be dead the body's not that stupid what it does is it simply shifts its fuel sources and then pumps you full of energy so that you can go out and hunt so you actually have more energy at the end of that four days than when you started if you look at studies of alternate daily fasting it's the same thing this is the resting metabolic rate 60 it starts at 6 600 and ends at 6 300 but it's not statistically significant so there's not a big change even after 22 days of alternate daily fasting and what you see is that you've gone from burning carbohydrates burning sugar to burning fat well that's exactly what you want to do is burn fat so this is the effect on metabolic rate so again another study from 2016 where they compared calorie restrictions the standard advice cut a few calories a day cut 400 500 calories a day eat 10 times a day what happens is that you will drop you'll burn 76 calories a day less and if you use alternate daily fasting instead you'll burn 29 less so it's a significant difference so less than 50 you know 40 percent of that but it's actually not statistically significant the p-value of 0.41 means that there's actually no statistical difference between the beginning and the end and this is after 32 weeks of alternate daily fasting and this is a huge advantage if you're burning three 400 calories a day less naturally that's a huge advantage when you're trying to lose weight and the other problem is hunger so again everybody says when you're fasting you're gonna get so hungry that you're not gonna be able to control yourself you'll be forced to stuff a couple of krispy kreme donuts in your mouth well that doesn't happen so this is gorelin so that's the hunger hormone and what you see is that when you fast you fast somebody for 24 hours so they get this little spike of gorilla at breakfast lunch and dinner so you get hungry at breakfast lunch and dinner but what happens to you when you don't eat lunch say you're busy you work through lunch what happens do you just get more and more hungry until you stuff a muffin in not really what happens is that after a while your gorelin just goes right back down to baseline so you miss lunch there's 12 o'clock you're hungry at one o'clock you're hungry at four o'clock it's as if you ate you're no different in terms of hunger if you ate or you didn't eat why because again your body is just not that stupid right if you didn't eat you'll take that energy that you needed from your fat stores you've basically made a meal of your own fat and that's it and we've all done this we've all been busy where we went right through lunch and by four o'clock it's like oh okay well did i eat did i not eat can't can't remember same thing with dinner you don't eat guess what it just goes right back down to baseline yeah you're gonna be hungry for a couple hours because it's high here and then it's gonna go back to baseline nothing happens even over multiple days of fasting what you see is that up and down see you start here you go up and down but what's really interesting is that as you go for two three four days of fasting gorelin actually starts to drift downwards the hunger actually starts to disappear during fasting and that's as your body gets used to using your own body fat it just says hey why do i need to eat i'm getting all i need from the body fat and that's perfect because now you're dealing with the two actual issues that derail weight loss which is metabolic rate and hunger and people say oh women the women can't do it well this is the breakdown between men and women this is guerrella so the hunger you see okay well men get this little spike but women get this huge spike so if you're trying to control hunger then women are going to benefit a lot more than men from intermittent fasting if you look at cravings so the data on cravings is this if you have cravings for sweets or high fat or junk food or whatever you can compare two diets a low-calorie diet like 1200 calories versus a very low calorie diet so basically very little like a couple hundred calories a day and what you see is that if you measure how much cravings they get so a lot of people say oh i you know sugar i should crave sugar and i'm addicted to chocolate and this kind of stuff well a low-calorie diet cutting a few calories does nothing for your cravings but if you go and just eat nothing at all your cravings actually disappear right and it's really just for the parents out there you know it's like if your child has an itch you don't say oh you should scratch it but a little less it's like no you don't scratch it that's what happens to cravings too so over 12 weeks the cravings the general cravings or whatever you want to look at virtually disappear by the time you you follow these low-calorie diets or fasting is the sort of ultimate in that but even as you start to eat again those cravings don't come back for like at least six weeks and then they start their way up so if you were to do this on a regular basis you could control some of these cravings again that derail weight loss effort because people want to eat bread and they want to eat sugar and they want to eat pizza and they want to eat all this sort of stuff so again if you look at gorelin and all studies like clinical studies like real people doing this what you find just focus on this box because there's a very busy slide is that if you look at gorelin which is the hunger hormone how hungry you are with daily calorie restriction it goes up with calorie restriction but it doesn't go up with alternate daily fasting that is if you cut a 500 calories a day like they told you you're gonna get hungry if you do the fasting you won't get hungry because you've changed the hormone so that in that time that you're not eating you're feeding yourself through your body fat it's just like a bear just like during hibernation and here's the myth oh you're going to burn muscle oh you're going to burn muscle well here's the study this is real people doing it here's the fat mass okay so day 70 of alternate daily fasting the fat mass goes down 43 kilos to 38 fat free mass or your lean weight goes from 51.4 to 51.9 you actually added lean mass so for all those people all you're going to burn muscle you're going to burn muscle you don't you're gaining muscle this is that study where you're comparing calorie restriction to alternate daily fasting so again you can look at two things one is the truncal fat mass so that's the fat that you carry around the the waste it's much more dangerous from a health standpoint than fat that you carry anywhere else calorie restriction goes down by 0.3 alternate daily fasting goes down by 1.8 it's like six times better at getting rid of the really dangerous fat for type 2 diabetes if you look at lean mass because this is what they say oh yeah you're fasting you're gonna lose weight but it's all gonna be muscle it's snow okay so this is percentage lean mass calorie restriction goes up by 0.5 and alternate daily fasting goes up by 2.2 in other words preserving lean mass is like four times better with fasting than to calorie restriction so the question is why are we doing this why do we tell everybody to do calorie restriction you should never ever not eat it's like why why don't you let your body just use that body fat because that's what's going to make us healthy that's what's going to get rid of the type 2 diabetes that's giving us heart attack strokes and cancer and it's free it's available to all of you and used by people like hippocrates and benjamin franklin this is the i'm just going to skip this for time's sake um so this is the other thing that people say well you know it's great and everything but people won't do it you know it's like okay but you know that it's part of almost every major religion in the world so literally the buddhists do it the muslims do it the catholics the christians the jewish people literally billions of people around the world do this on a regular basis and have been doing this for the last two three thousand years you know that right before you say that yeah nobody can do it that literally millions of people do it so yes you can do it you just it's not fun i'm not saying it's super fun or anything but if you're trying to hack your body to be healthy to lose weight to get rid of your type 2 diabetes you can do it it's just a matter of doing it other people say well it doesn't work you know it's like well we have studies that does work and obviously if you if you don't eat you are going to lose it this is just to show that females get the same rate of weight loss as males for all those people that say oh women should never fast it doesn't work it's like where do you think what do you think is going to happen if you don't eat you're going to lose weight i'm going to skip this for time's sake and then this this myth that you need and you need to eat to concentrate it's like i hear this all the time because we've done it in our idm program for several thousand people and people say oh you know i have a really stressful job or i have you know have to concentrate i can't fast it's like this is what happens when you eat a big meal when you don't eat you actually work from a mental standpoint at a much higher level and this is one of the reasons that the people in silicon valley in particular have embraced the fasting so much is because it allows your brain to work at a higher level and people who do this say wow i can think really clearly it's like yeah that's because your noradrenaline is up your your your sympathetic tone is up you're being activated you're pumping energy into the system and your brain is able to to think more clearly and in silicon valley of course the difference is that they're they're competing based on their brain power right so they're all you know all these little computer geniuses they're all trying to get the next best thing and you know that little edge in mental performance can be the difference of millions of dollars so they do this because this is what gives them an edge if you read books there is a book called unbroken by lauren hillebrand which is a story about prisoners of war american prisoners of war in japan in world war ii so these people are literally starving they get very little to eat and what's interesting is that when you read the biography they talk about how their fellow prisoners are doing these absolutely incredible feats of mental uh you know capacity so one guy is reading books from entirely from memory and another one learn norwegian in a week and what he says is that wow this is just the astonishing mental clarity of starvation i thought wow that's really interesting that people who actually do this have actually noticed that huge improvement in mental function and we see it in our in our clients all the time they say well it's like a fog lifted i can really focus now on what i'm doing so if you're looking to hack your way into sort of a higher level fasting is a great way to do that so not only just the physical side of things but the mental side of things and that's again free why won't you do it uh there's another myth here of anorexia that oh you're gonna cause eating disorders first of all eating disorders are psychological disorders where people think they're fat but they're actually sort of very thin and it is a real issue it's a big issue people have died from it of course and it's all a matter of context right so if you're um treating a 16 year old girl with anxiety problems who weighs 80 pounds then no you don't want to be fasting but if you're 60 years old male and have type 2 diabetes then fasting might just save your life so it's a totally different context you have to use it it's a very powerful weapon but don't use it in the wrong context right and that's not what biohacking is about it's about getting optimal human performance from a simple lifestyle change but these are powerful tools don't use it in the wrong context and then this myth that you cause hypoglycemia so oh you're going to go hypoglycemic you're going to have a seizure it's like that doesn't happen your body is able to deal with it so here's a study where they took patients and they actually fasted them for about 30 days then they gave him a big whack of insulin just to see what would happen and they drove their sugars down to 227 which is extremely low it's like 1.2 or something like that and and mo for most people they would actually have seizures at this level but they were actually completely fine all of them were asymptomatic that's because your brain is actually working mostly on those ketones so if you're using ketones and your blood glucose is low it doesn't matter because you're using ketones anyway so these people actually felt completely normal and this was the same study there are a few concerns so dawn phenomenon is one where your blood sugars can go up slightly during fasting and this is very interesting and it's other than knowing about it it's not a big concern but some people notice especially type 2 diabetics and so on that when they don't eat their blood glucose goes up and they're always concerned and i'm always like well it's because of the counter regulatory surge so if your blood glucose goes up and you didn't eat where do you think that that that sugar came from well it could only have come from your own body your body is actually liberating that sugar for you to use so don't worry about it because you're just burning it it was in there anyway but it's actually trying to get it out and that's those counter regulatory hormone surges and then the other concern is refeeding syndrome which again is a real concern if you are not if you are not sort of well nourished so this is seen in people who are starving and people who have very low you know body fat those are people who shouldn't be fasting anyway at least not for extended periods of time just remember that 12 to 14 hours of fasting is a regular amount of fasting that's what everybody should be doing because that's the word breakfast the meal that breaks your fast so if you stop eating at eight and don't eat too late that's 12 hours but that's normal that's what should be done every day and these people who don't have enough energy what can happen is that as you eat insulin as you start to eat again the insulin goes up and the phosphorous goes down the potassium goes down can actually cause heart problems but the major risks for that are these these issues of people who are basically you know anorexic alcoholic cancer patients people who shouldn't be doing this anyway so again just remember that this is a powerful tool and you want to use it in the right context it's just like a knife right a very useful tool but you can also cut yourself so make sure you know what you're doing if you're going to apply it make sure you talk to your physicians but there's so many advantages to using fasting in this way because it's a simple um thing everybody can understand it so you can have diets like the ketogenic diet it's like eat this eat this don't eat this don't eat this don't eat this sometimes eat this it's very complicated for people this is not that this is just don't eat for a period of time let your body burn off that body fat it's free it's convenient because you're going to save a lot of time right you're not you don't have to buy food you don't have to cook food you don't have to eat food so it's going to give you a lot of time back in the day and it's a way to simplify our life it's also very flexible and that what you can do is you can do it sometimes and not do it sometimes so if you want to you know it's the holidays or it's a vacation and you don't want to fast then don't you can always do it later so that's a huge advantage but you can use it to any diet right because this is not about your diet you're trying to hack your way of eating but that this doesn't tell you what to eat it only specifies the periods of time that you're not eating so they work together if you fix your diet you know eating uh you know cutting out the sugar cutting out the refined grains cutting you know trying to eat whole foods that's great but fasting doesn't tell you anything about that fasting is complementary to that and tells you there's a period of time where you really just shouldn't eat anything so whether it's you know you don't eat meat or wheat or nuts or you don't have time you don't have money you're traveling you don't cook it doesn't matter because you can still fast you can still use this sort of bio hacking and it gives you sort of unlimited power that is if you are 400 pounds and we have people who are 400 pounds you need something really really powerful well you can just keep fasting you can just keep letting your body use use up that fact you can do it as long as you need to to get healthy and that's the whole point it's not something that sort of maxes out at all i lost 10 pounds and that's it well it's great if you only had 10 pounds to lose if you had 200 pounds to lose then you know you're sort of out of luck so it gives you a lot of power and that's what mark twain you know another very well read uh you know very smart fellow said a little starvation can actually do more for the average sick man than the best medicines and the best doctors and that's very interesting because we're not talking here about oh you know let's get this expensive medication and this expensive procedure because it's gonna you know make us live an extra three days it's like no this is something that you do on an on an ongoing basis to stay healthy for your life and if you have type 2 diabetes this is um elliot jocelyn so he's the most famous sort of diabetes specialist in the history of the world sort of thing he was at harvard medical school he basically founded the entire sort of uh floor and he said that temporary periods of under nutrition are helpful in the treatment of diabetes will be acknowledged by all after these two years of experience with fasting he wrote this in 1916. that was more than a hundred years ago the most famous diabetologist in the history of the world knew a hundred years ago that you could actually just let your body burn off all that sugar and you won't have type 2 diabetes anymore after two years of doing it he thought it was so obvious that everybody's going to know this and yet here we are in 2016 with a huge epidemic of type 2 diabetes which will give you heart attacks which will give you cancer which will make you blind which will give you uh kidney failure if you damage your nerves we could have taken care of it all if we had listened in 1916. so the point is that can we cure type 2 diabetes without sort of you know all these associated medical problems and do it without any drugs without any surgery and really at no cost taking really control of the health back into your own hands and the answer is yes absolutely that's all you need to do is understand the physiology understand what we're trying to do and now you have the power to get rid of type 2 diabetes to lose weight take care of all these metabolic problems that are now making us sick and that really is the ultimate in biohacking thank you thank you jason thank you so much we had a couple of questions that came through the app uh do you want to just take a look here um one came specifics of alternate daily fasting practice how many three meals a day uh zero meals the next day do you what time yeah there's there's really no um set schedules you can do whatever you like and so alternate daily fasting so there's several sort of popular schedules so the six a daily 16 hour fast is very popular so that's sort of an eight-hour eating window so it's also called time restricted eating so you'll eat for say eight hours of the day you'll eat from say 10 a.m to 6 p.m and then outside of that you're gonna fast for 16 hours so remember 12 to 14 hours is sort of the what used to be normal so you're really just pushing that a little bit and then alternate daily fasting is sort of a 24-hour fast and that that is for example breakfast to breakfast or lunch to lunch so if i eat breakfast today i won't eat again until breakfast the next tomorrow so that's a 24-hour fast and you might do that two to three times a week and that's called alternate daily fasting and some people call that one meal a day and again you can do it every day if you want but the a popular schedule is to do that maybe two to three times a week okay we have another one of can kids intermittent fast well remember that kids are supposed to be intermittent fasting 12 to 14 hours that's standard everybody should be doing this yeah everybody should be doing that okay but nobody is um so but you really don't want to go past sort of 20 hours for kids for breastfeeding for pregnancy because those are periods of growth so your body actually should be growing so a kid for example a child an infant is six seven pounds they have to grow to like 150 pounds or whatever so they have to actually pack on the math so you really shouldn't be going longer than about 16 20 hours just because the risk of malnutrition is higher in those situations but they should be you know cutting out the snacks they should be cutting out the sugar cutting out the refined grains eating whole foods and really having that 12 to 14 hour fast every day okay thank you so much perfect all right

Channel: Biohacker Summit

Views: 50,601

Rating: 4.9209809 out of 5

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Id: NLv5jZF7HYo

Length: 44min 9sec (2649 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020