Extended Fasts - Top 5 Reasons | Jason Fung

this week we're going to go over five reasons why you might consider adding an extended fast for weight loss and stick around to the end where i'm going to share with you linda's story where she was able to lose 112 pounds but even better she's been able to keep it off for the last three years and it's coming right up [Music] there's no formal definition of what an extended fast is however i define it as anything longer than 24 hours so at 24 hours you're eating one meal a day if you drop that i call that extended fasting and there's several really good reasons why you might consider adding this as a trial number one you might like it extended fasting is just another tool in your tool belt that is there's lots of different ways to lose weight if you have a lot of weight to lose in a short period of time there's something important coming up it's after the holidays you gain a lot of weight you want to lose it you have a wedding coming up you want to look good you can use this because it's a tool but if you've never used it before you're not going to know how so it's important to keep that from getting rusty also it makes the shorter fast look easy because if you're doing two three day fast all of a sudden that 24 hour fast doesn't look so bad number two it's much more powerful than those shorter fast because it's more time and you can extend it to as long as you like that's one of the key advantages of fasting because if you follow a diet say the atkins diet and you're very strict and you fall back inside and not working you can't be more atkins than atkins however with extended fasting you can just keep going day after day after day there's no upper limit to how long you can fast for in fact the longest fast world record was over 380 days and this was medically supervised and yes he did fine was able to maintain that weight off so it gives you as much power as you want as opposed to some diets and even shorter fats where they're limited in how powerful they can be number three you're using the sleeping time to your advantage and what i mean is this when we're sleeping you've got eight hours where you're not eating so that's fasting by definition if you go the full day without eating and then tack on another eight hours well you're getting that eight hours of fat burning almost for free because you're just sleeping so you're adding up those eight hours eight hours eight hours each time and that's all burning fat because the great thing is that when you wake up the next day your body has almost completely reset in fact you generally don't feel any more hungry the day after not eating than any other regular day because your body has totally reset itself number four hunger it tends to go down over time and if it keeps going down over time then that's going to make it easier for you because you're still burning the same amount of calories the other thing is not only that hunger decreases but your metabolic rate tends to stay up and we've covered this in previous videos when you're not eating your body actually increases the amount of energy that is burning because your counter regulatory hormones that is things like the sympathetic tone and noradrenaline tend to go up and therefore you are going to have good energy your hunger is going to go down and you'll be burning fat which is a tremendous advantage and number five it's more effective because you're spending more time in fat burning mode again we covered this in the five stages of intermittent fasting and what happens of course is that as you don't eat your body goes through a very stereotyped response you start off by using your glucose in the blood which is great if you have high blood glucose like type 2 diabetics then it's going to burn through its stores of glycogen then it's going to go through this period of gluconeogenesis which is protein burning which sounds bad but you're really just getting rid of old cells and what happens of course is that the protein gets turned into glucose and then you go into fat burning mode and sometimes that can take 18 hours sometimes 20 hours depending on where you started from but during those extended fast all that time is being spent in the fat burning mode because staying in that sort of fat burning mode and that stage five of intermittent fasting can sometimes be much more efficient at burning body fat so it can be in fact much more effective than five days of one meal a day for example if you do a five day fast it may be much much more effective than those five and perhaps it may not even be that much more difficult so the other thing is just to be aware of how long you should do it for there's no upper limit but generally we say five days seven days is probably the maximum we would recommend once you get above that you start to risk other things such as refeeding syndrome which is a very low risk at five to ten days but as you go above that it certainly can go up and the other thing to remember is that the longer the fast the gentlers that you have to break it so to be very careful when you're breaking it at five to ten days you're not going to be in terrible danger but again remember always be safe during fasting so this is linda and she was a member of the fastingmethod.com for five years and she's been able to lose a total of a hundred and twelve pounds and this is her story she said that she started in 2019 when she was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes well because of that she got the encouragement to go and she joined the fasting method very quickly in less than three months she was actually able to reverse that and also normalize her blood pressure all without medications and that all happened within the first 30 pounds she went and got some coaching as well as joined the fasting method community and over the next year lost an additional 82 pounds she paused for a little while to maintain focus on other things but then she was always wanting to lose the rest of the weight so this time she really focused and lost the rest of the what she attributes her success to is really some of the uh education that we provide at the fastingmethod.com prior to this she would always be told by medical professionals and fitness experts and the media that it's all about calories and calories out it's all about willpower but in fact we teach people that it's not about willpower it's really about understanding your hormones and also setting up a system where you're going to succeed and that system isn't just willpower it's about having the right people to provide you support it's about having a community to support you it's about being able to talk to people about fasting it's about using these different tools such as intermittent fasting such as extended fasting rather than focusing purely on calories it didn't work everybody knows it everybody's tried it it doesn't work and ultimately it wrecks your metabolism and through the fastingmethod.com she not only got the right education she was able to learn the science behind weight loss and getting cutting-edge information that's really the same information that i give to medical specialists in lectures and very importantly she was able to get the guidance and she was able to get the support from the community and with the coaching to implement that new material and that's really what made the difference and she says without it she would still be in the cycle of weight loss and weight gain so one of those big tips is to really get that support because it's not about just knowing how to lose weight it's about having those automatic systems it's about having the right environment and having the right emotional support and that's all things that we try to provide at the fastingmethod.com thanks for watching everybody i hope you learned something if you want to learn more about fasting maybe check out this next video and i'll see you next week

Channel: Jason Fung

Views: 131,543

Keywords: intermittent fasting, jason fung, intermittent fasting benefits, weight loss, intermittent fasting tips, fasting explained, how long to fast, intermittent fasting results, intermittent fasting for beginners

Id: UKYse-SxSv4

Length: 9min 27sec (567 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 13 2022