Dave Asprey on How to FAST the RIGHT WAY and Burn Fat + Heal Inflammation

[Music] dave welcome back to the podcast how you doing today jesse this is the fourth time i've been on your show how can i not be good we love having you on the show always an entertaining information packed inspirational conversation and i gotta say i've read all your books except for one i think you have one called superhuman right yep that's the answer aging book okay that's the one i haven't read i've read everything else but of all the books i've read this one is my favorite oh thanks man that means a lot you've got an early review copy i think it's my best book and what i love about it it's actually surprising because you are such a hacker biohacker and you're such an extreme person but this book's looking at fasting and you actually have not a gentle approach you have an approach out there for everybody but your basic approach you're recommending to people is rather gentle and you're very forgiving so talk about you know where that comes from well having having weighed 300 pounds and gone through this time in my life where like i'm doing everything that i think is supposed to work and i feel like i have the accelerator all the way to the floor and i'm slowing down and you can push harder but there's nowhere else for the pedal to go and well that was before i had kids and so i i look at all these kind of you know keto bros and you know fasting purists and a lot of them don't have a lot going on in their life and when you want to tell someone who's already full you're busy you're you're working hard now you've got you know kids running around the house and you're trying to work and you're trying to exercise and do all the things that you're supposed to be doing taking a rigid approach to fasting doesn't actually work and if you're saying i'm going to do this that's going to make me so healthy unfortunately i wasn't able to function all morning or for a whole day in my life because i want to do this thing to make my life better it's actually counterproductive so i'm like how does someone who was like me you know overweight with great intentions doing their best how did they get started on fasting because oh just drink only water for three days you'll be fine you actually won't be fine you'll be hypoglybitchy you'll yell at your kids uh you'll do stuff you wish you didn't do in your job and you'll want to pay attention and you'll have no brain and this is the reality of of real fasting true fasting when you're doing longer periods and you're having nothing at all it comes with rest they go together and we are not resting but we want the benefits of fasting so this aspect of well i wanted this but i didn't want to give up this how do i make it work and it turns out we know enough about biology that you can do it so this is meant for people whether you're an advanced pastor there's stuff in here but whether someone is look i've never tried intermittent fasting or i tried it once and it sucked because i got really angry at 11 30 and i was tired and cold and i didn't like my life how could i possibly do this several days a week for the next while to get the benefits the answer is you won't because life gets in the way so this is how to fast and do everything else and use the fasting as a way to get more energy instead of get less energy well let's take it right from the top here and talk about somebody who is brand new to fasting what's a gentle approach for them to begin to you know start the practice it would be really easy to write a fasting book and it goes like this step one don't eat for a while step two here's a bunch of science from pubmed that says it's good for you and this is kind of the template for fasting but there's a lot between those things and i didn't want to write that book at all because it's already been written they're actually really good books on the why of fasting and there's enough of that in here that you see that it's a benefit but okay you're that first person and saying okay i know i'm not supposed to eat except they never talk about what you're not supposed to eat the real definition of fasting is going without and you can choose what you go without if you're on the keto diet you're fasting from carbs if you're on a vegan diet for some non-health reason then you might be doing it for health reasons it just doesn't work but you could be a vegan and you're saying okay i'm fasting from animal foods you say i'm not gonna have alcohol you're fasting from alcohol so there's many types of fast even things like you know cold therapy i'm gonna fast from being warm for a little while to make myself stronger like there's just all sorts of things every one of those the commonality is the body thinks you'll die if you take a cold shower and it tells you that's pain run away but then you do it for three days like oh i feel better and then the body thinks you'll die if you don't eat one of the six meals a day you have to go into starvation mode so the way you get started with fasting is just recognize that the body is going to send you a false signal right and there's something called hunger which most people don't experience regularly and there's something called cravings which most people experience regularly and so what's going to happen is you'll get a message and you might even say to yourself wow i'm starving right now it takes two or three months to starve that is the absolute real reality but it feels like you're starving right now so one approach and the approach that's most often visualized for fasting is hey you're just gonna have to man up and just suck it up and and walk it off and just just kind of ignore that there's just one problem it takes willpower and energy to do that right at a time where you're doing a practice that reduces the available energy for you so to rely on willpower when you just turn the power knob down is it kind of a bad strategy you might win some of the time but the rest of the time the donut sitting there at 10 a.m is going to win and then you're going to go god why am i so weak why did i do that no i'm saying this from experience being a 300 pound person who swore i was gonna eat the cookie and there's this inner dialogue that goes through and you convince yourself you know what it's a good idea to have just half the cookie and like there's some reason and since you eating like god why did i do that so the first thing for someone who's brand new to fasting okay here's what you're gonna do have dinner a little bit earlier than normal um you'll sleep better anyway don't have any snacks after dinner and let's say you can do that three or four hours before bedtime you just fasted for four hours you sleep for let's say seven eight hours you got 12 hours of fasting that's the very entry level right it wasn't that hard but now let's say okay i'm going to make it until lunchtime so there's another four hours you just did a 16 hour fast if you just wait till lunch but the odds are that morning if you have weight to lose like i did um or even if you don't have weight to lose but you know your metabolism is metabolism isn't that healthy what do you do and in fastest way i present three fasting hacks one of which has never been written about in the world of fasting and it comes from not a purist point of view that says you can only have water during a fast it comes from what are the benefits of fasting what stops the benefits and what are the things i want to feel while i'm fasting and what i want to feel while i'm fasting is no thoughts about hunger and i want to feel no lack of energy and i still want all the benefits of fasting so how do you create that endpoint so the cost of fasting is very low in terms of your energy but the benefits are as high or nearly as high as if you just did water only and just decided you were going to suck it up so it's that approach that works for everyone and suddenly like wait you mean i saved time on breakfast i saved money on breakfast i didn't suffer as a result i think i can do this and so the first one is okay have dinner a little early and so you can get the fast in and still have normal meal times at noon and at dinner this the other three big fasting hacks in the book the first one is have a cup of black coffee in the morning and the reason for this is really fascinating it turns out there's two hunger hormones that control way more of your thought process than you think and one of them is called ghrelin groans the hunger hormone it turns on hunger and desire for food and the one that makes you feel full and stated is cck or cholecystokinin and if you can bump your ketone levels up just a little bit magically and these are studies that show this this is way less than full on keto mode but just a little bump in ketones will turn down ghrelin and turn up cck so the voice in your head screaming you to eat the muffin or whatever it just shuts up okay and that is liberating the reason coffee works is that coffee has the ability to double ketone production the amount of caffeine in two small cups of coffee so it doesn't take a lot like you know medium or large coffee is gonna it's gonna do just fine and it's also shown that caffeine is a mild mild appetite suppressant so now you've got more energy because you had caffeine and coffee by the way is shown in so many studies to be good for you like google the name of your favorite disease and coffee and look at the science like it's it's the best superfood there is and people say it's addictive i don't know if there was something you did every day and when you stopped doing it you feel bad um you'd be addicted right i'm talking about exercise so in fact coffee is as important as exercise in my book so and if you don't like coffee you can use tea but you just need to get something like matcha like a strong tea and when you do that it's going to suppress that appetite is going to give you energy for beginning fasters that oftentimes isn't enough and then you go to the second fasting hack what i'm very well known for and i'm not here to sell this many many people have tried bulletproof coffee but it works during a fast and i've been writing about this for 10 years people have bought about half a million copies of my books people lost more than a million pounds on the bulletproof diet at this point it is very safe to say that this works i've also talked to several experts in autophagy this idea of when you fast your body breaks down old weak cells and waste products and gets rid of them drinking bulletproof coffee with only specific fats in it no protein no carbs of any form it allows your body to stay in a fasting mode because your insulin doesn't change and because your protein digestion doesn't get turned on so what you do is you take a little bit of butter it can be a lot if you're starving or you're really big but it only needs to be a teaspoon and you take some c8 mct oil the bulletproof brand is brain octane i'm the guy made mct oil famous and you blend that in there and several things happen with bulletproof coffee one is when you blend the butter into the coffee itself it changes the structure of the water in the coffee this is not like quantum crystal structure this is university of washington research by gerald pollock i wrote a blank check or not blank check but a check without a specific protocol in mindset here's 50 000 discover something about water and gerald went out and he said well i know that water in the body changes the body actually when you drink a cup of water it changes by heating up water when it's near a cell membrane cell membranes are little droplets of fat and once the water changes and when i say changes you can see it on a microscope this is not magic water this is oh look there's a little blurry edge there what's that it's called exclusions on water well he found that droplets of butter fat in water create the largest exclusion zone he's ever seen so when you blend it and you have to blend your of coffee and it's already heated you're changing the structure of the water and this matters during fasting because normally when you drink a cup of water you have to heat the water up which means burning some energy and then you can use the water to fold proteins and to make more energy but since you've already structured the water you drink it the body's like oh great i'll just go straight to work on fast burning i don't have to do that on fat burning i don't have to do that first heating step so you don't get cold and you don't have a dip in energy that's why the tibetans drink their yak butter tea which was the inspiration for bulletproof coffee we didn't know this this is new science hasn't even been published yet and i saw the pre-print of the publication from dr polk a couple years after i made the donation to the university so that's a part of it but then the mct oil it raises at least the c8 mct it raises ketones four times more than coconut oil or the cheapest most abundant mct oil so the type of mct you get really matters because the c12 or lauric acid it doesn't do anything special different than corn oil for raising ketones and coconut oil if you have a tablespoon of that it's the same as fasting for eight hours but if you have the c8 mct you get four times more ketones so what you've done now in that little cup of coffee that was creamy and delicious you didn't damage your fast you gave yourself water you can immediately use to generate atp and burn more fat and you gave yourself ketones which trains your cells to become fat-burning machines and if you do this on a regular basis all of the cells in your body like oh i can always burn fat or i can burn carbohydrates or protein or whatever but it's a very different thing and it's pretty cool so let me just jump in here real quick dave so you're saying for somebody who's a total newbie you've said a few different things here you said cutting dinner stopping eating after dinner and maybe eating a little bit earlier uh and then going to bed yep number two having coffee and then number three is having the bulletproof coffee so for the newbie by what you're explaining here it sounds like the bulletproof coffee is gonna be the easiest way to begin fasting so do what you said in step one eat a little earlier don't eat in the morning have a bulletproof coffee and and we got to get to step three though talk about what the third the third aspect is there so if you just do those two most people they sail through a fast and the most magic thing happens 10 a.m comes around 10 30 when everyone is having their morning snack and going to the vending machine or you know the pastries and whatever you look at it and instead of doing what i would always do which is okay i'm just going to take a deep breath maybe i'll have some beef jerky like i'm going to look away you just look like i don't want it the the freedom of just not desiring junk food is really big the first time you feel it i i know that bulletproof coffee does that just from hundreds of thousands of people and then the final thing which is new to the world of fasting and really belongs here is called prebiotic fiber and i wrote about that in superhuman the book that you haven't read because getting soluble fiber that you can't digest but that your good gut bacteria eat it is shown in hundreds of studies to make you live longer and it also causes you to grow a lot more species of good gut bacteria so when bacteria eat prebiotic fiber they make short chain fatty acids that are ketogenic so what that means is you put a scoop or two of prebiotic fiber in and now you have a drink that has no digestible carbohydrates so it doesn't raise your blood sugar at all it doesn't have any protein so it's not causing your liver to start making enzymes for digestion those enzymes can go to fixing your body and soluble fiber like that or prebiotic fiber it dramatically lowers hunger so if you put that in there there is no one on earth with that combination you drink that you're going to be hungry afterwards so now all of a sudden like wait a minute i get the benefits of fasting and i just don't care about food and the first day you do this here's the benefit that is amazing i found a study in fast this way that shows that for the average person this doesn't mean the average obese person is just the average person 15 of the thoughts in their head every day are about what's for my next meal when you turn down ghrelin and you turn up cck you get 15 of the thoughts in your head back because when noon comes around and all your colleagues get up to go to lunch or the kids come and pesky or whatever the deal is now that you're probably working from home um you look oh i guess i could eat okay those are words i have never said in my life when i was obese because it was like okay i got 15 more minutes and then it's taco time and like you're really focused on it so you get that focus back right so those are the big three fasting hacks from fast this way and there's a lot about the mental and and cognitive and the different things from men and women there's a chapter for women but if you just get started with that a slightly earlier dinner and if you fail on that that's okay just wake up replace breakfast with either black coffee bulletproof coffee or bulletproof coffee with soluble fiber or prebiotic fiber the brand that i make is called inner fuel for bulletproof you don't have to buy any of my bulletproof stuff it just works better because i designed it that way so i'm not here to sell you will not change my life if every listener buys bulletproof or doesn't i just made it because i thought it needed to be made and that it matters um the primary ingredients in the soluble prebiotic fiber are basically sap from trees that feed the good guys in your gut there's acacia gum there's guar gum that's hydrolyzed there's larger benegalactin and other ingredients like that but i looked at the most studied ones and i put them together and all that's you know bulletproof inner fuel bulletproof brain octane is the c8 oil and the bulletproof coffee beans don't have toxins in them and i will warn you if you drink a cup of cheap black coffee even if it's from a major chain in the u.s we don't have any laws about the mold toxin level in coffee so when it's illegal to sell coffee in china japan or europe they will send it to the u.s and we'll drink it so if you drink a cup of coffee and then you get a severe sugar craving you have to pee but your bladder's not full and you feel like you want to punch someone it wasn't the coffee it was the stuff that grew on the coffee while it was being processed and if that happens some of the supplements i talk about that you can take during a fast may help you but drinking coffee that makes you hungry isn't a is a bad idea so if you notice that switch to a different coffee so one thing i noticed reading the new book something i hadn't heard you talk about before was the soluble fiber adding that into a bulletproof coffee and you've broken down what that is and and it's not a product i've tried but i'm i'm now curious i'm gonna have to give it a whirl but does it change the taste of the coffee at all or does it does it add something granular in there so when you're sipping your coffee you know it's not not the same most people are used to like a metamucil sawdust kind of fiber when you think about fiber like blah now those are bulk fibers different animal what we're talking about here is something that dissolves into the water it has an extremely neutral taste most people can't tell it's in coffee it might have a if you're a super taster you might find like a very slight shift but it still tastes like a latte and that's important to me like you don't want to ruin your coffee you want the flavor of the coffee to come through so butter is the same fat as milk in fact everyone who's tried bulletproof coffee made properly it's like oh this is surprisingly delicious like i like this when you add inner fuel you usually if you give it to someone they can't tell it's in there and now the fda recommends i think 20 or 30 grams of soluble fiber every day for longevity for health the fdas are always set at minimum to not die of deficiency i now after writing superhuman and measuring my gut bacteria i have the number of species of gut bacteria present that a much younger person has as you age you have less species in your gut and i was able to quadruple the number of species because i started adding that to my bulletproof coffee you can also add it to any meal to make yourself full and this is another thing that's important if you eat a dinner that has stuff that triggers cravings in it when you wake up the next morning the first thought on your mind will be food and you'll have that kind of like a crampy feeling or something like i got to eat right now that means you ate something that wasn't compatible with you but when you add a scoop of this prebiotic fiber to whatever kind of to your salad dressing to whatever sauce it just disappears you can't tell it's in there and you can pour some brain octane on there as well which raises ketones most people sleep better when they do that because they're more satiated and during the fast obviously we're not going to have any food in our system any glucose any sugar but i'm just curious kind of as a side note when you use the brain octane and you do have carbohydrates in your system do you still produce ketones 100 brain octane is the best selling source of exogenous ketones it comes into the body and in one step the body converts it into beta hydroxybutyrate whether or not you just ate a cheesecake and if you take something like a ketone salt or ketone ester both of those require one step of conversion if it's assault your kidneys have to pull out all the metals that are bound to the bhb and if it's an ester your liver has to do the work but brain octane is the most natural form it's found in mother's milk and it doesn't create the load on the liver or the load on the kidneys that come from other sources of exogenous ketones that's one of the reasons that i don't sell other forms of ketones at bulletproof just because i was ready to start selling a ketone salt which is a way to to dramatically raise ketones but a guy who studied with hans krebs who spent 40 years studying ketosis i was the last guy to interview him before he passed straight up said in my laboratory i am 100 convinced that ketone salts cause mitochondrial damage so i pulled the product before i shipped it wow when was that oh maybe four years ago i'm guessing i'd have i have a poor sense of time in the past but his name was dr veach he was a fan of esther's but there's a whole another group of research that shows that de-esterification creates a heavy load on the liver so if you wanted to source a way to raise your ketones every single day without pushing liver or kidneys beyond what you want them to do every day brain octane is the only game in town as far as i can tell and i'd be very happy to make those other products in fact i synthesized ketone esters it was 40 000 to make a kilo of them way back in 2013 and i just was like nah i don't think it's the right path so there's there's debate on this to be perfectly honest but there's a lot of mlm companies pushing ketone salts when you're fasting for long periods of time your ketone levels tend to go up and up and up as your body starts burning more fat but the trick is when you first start fasting if you're not used to this and you haven't already tried keto and things like that your cells don't know how to burn fat you have these little the mitochondria it's easiest to call them power plants they're actually environmental sensors that make energy hormones and other chemicals that control your body they're sort of the puppet masters they're configured to only eat sugar and a little bit of protein and if you have ketones present over time they're like oh i guess i should reconfigure myself so that i can also burn fat and now you have metabolic flexibility and if you go like keto bro i'm never eating a carb again then they stop having their ability to burn sugar which is not a good idea at least they turn it way down so what i want is cells that can just as easily eat fat as eat carbohydrates and when you do that you have a much more resilient metabolism and you're likely to live longer as a result and you talk about in the book what that would look like is maybe fasting during the week doing intermittent fasting and then saturday and sunday having like a gluten-free waffle with the family and that's kind of how i operate i do intermittent fasting throughout the week and then on weekends i'm i'm open to going out for a nice healthy brunch or making a gluten-free pancake with the family at home and i find that works really well um so again i just want to hammer home the point you're making there about you don't want to just run on fat you want to be able to run on fat and then be able to switch and run on sugar too and that's that's the sweet spot yeah there's something that that's in the book uh i call it the fasting trap but it's i it's a human condition there's a vegan trap that i fell into there's a keto trap that i've definitely experienced and then there's the fasting trap and these traps all work the same way and it goes like this actually there's also an exercise trap now that i think about it i am going to take on a new behavior that i have convinced myself is going to make positive changes i do the behavior and i see the changes so when i was a raw vegan like wow okay i'm really i'm getting a ton of energy now i didn't understand why i was getting energy it wasn't for a good reason but um and the same thing with keto i feel so good same things that are meant in fasting i am never eating breakfast again i feel so much better i'm like my focus is better i mean people are are so amazed at how much better they feel by not having breakfast but then after about four to six weeks you are 100 convinced this is the way why would i ever go back to the crappy thing i did before but then something starts to go wrong because the body doesn't like a steady state it likes cycles and it likes being able to switch in and out so after four to six weeks something isn't quite right and you go oh it's probably because i'm keto but i ate you know 18 grams of carbs i'm gonna go down to 12 grams of carbs i'm going to be even more keto right and then it still isn't working and you're plateaued and you've lost 50 of 100 pounds by the way that happened to me in the 90s i tried the atkins diet couldn't lose the second 50 but the first 50 sure did come off fast so you end up going deeper and deeper following a path that you know works even though it's no longer working and then if you do the vegan thing same thing like why am i cold all the time why am i getting autoimmunity you know why is my bone density going down why did my teeth hurt all that stuff well it's because you did it for too long and with fasting what i find is regularly and this is based on 10 years of interacting with people on the bulletproof diet people doing bulletproof intermittent fasting and women hit the wall first and what it looks like when a woman doesn't break their fasts or break her fasts um often enough and and just says okay first i started skipping breakfast now i'm going down to one meal a day i'm just gonna have dinner because i feel so good i'm losing weight like i i'm liberated i love my brain well the first thing that happens is they wake up in the morning and go i feel like i didn't sleep very well like i kind of feel a bit hungover i wonder what's going on here and then weird i have relatively normal cycles but it's not working right this month and then you get hair thinning and the answer for that is going to sound really straightforward have some breakfast already and have some carbs right you do not have to be in keto to do what i talk about in fast this way it's totally optional you can have carbs every night if you want to and this is about timing and type of food and when you do this especially as a woman if you have weight to lose and you want to do this for long term it really helps to start out doing it three or four days a week so maybe wednesday you know i'm gonna have breakfast but i'm not gonna have cereal i'm going to have protein and i'm going to have fat for breakfast and i'm going to have my carbs at dinner and that helps you with sleep and that also lets the body know oh i'm in an area where there is enough food right so sometimes i go without sometimes i go with but if you convince those little sensors in your body they're not very smart they're bacteria so you convince them that okay i'm in a land where there really isn't enough food because i never get to eat except maybe once a day they start turning on cellular stressors like cortisol and adrenaline and you wake up at three in the morning and you have racing thoughts and you wonder what's going on all that's hackable and the answer is have some breakfast already or have some carbs so for women who want to do this sustainably start out with three or four days a week do the fasting hacks in fastest way because they at least give you energy availability even if it's not carbohydrates and that tends to avoid the wall the wall for men when you over fast say okay i'm just doing one meal a day forever or maybe you know every week i'll do a 48-hour fast and a bunch of 24-hour fasts and it's really common people like i feel so good i i had to buy new pants like this is it well what happens first is sleep quality goes down you and when i did this back when i was testing the limits of the bulletproof diet back in 2010 2011 before i first published it i did three months of one serving of broccoli a day i mean i was very very low carb and what happened was my sleep monitoring stuff showed that i was waking up 12 times a night without knowing it and i would wake up in the morning feeling like i didn't sleep and then predictably for men and this usually starts at six to eight weeks not at the the four to six weeks for women you wake up and you don't have the normal morning kickstand that most guys have in the morning and then so sleep culture goes down hormone changes and then hair thinning so you don't have to just because it's good doesn't mean more is better when i weighed 300 pounds i said i'm going to work out because i know that's going to you know burn extra calories by the way that doesn't work at all but working out is like 10 percent of how you look but what i what i found was that after 18 months of working out six days a week 90 minutes per session half weights half cardio you know wearing a weighted vest walking on the treadmill at an angle and all that kind of stuff um i was over trained and i still weighed 300 pounds so you can say exercise is good but i will tell you heavy exercise every day will wreck your life right and some people especially if you're very young like well dave i can handle a vegan diet i can handle exercise every day and you can also handle a life of pizza and beer and staying out until two every morning it's because you have a lot of energy when you're young but you're burning it up and you actually want to you want to conserve that for all of your life and this is part of the wisdom of fasting that says the right dose is very helpful the wrong dose of too much is no better than too little so we want to be in the goldilocks zone for exercise we want to be there for all of the things that we do in life and even things like cortisol stress hormone it's bad you should have no cortisol people with low cortisol hate their lives because they get sick all the time you need cortisol you just don't need too much or too little so all of these are about setting up cycles and waves in your life where you go to the upper healthy limit and you go to the lower healthy limit and you tell the body you better be strong enough to go within these normal limits and then for brief periods of time you go we're going to blow the limit out and then the body goes oh my god i might have to survive in a world where there's no food for all of 24 hours and then it takes a hard look at itself this is all automated systems and goes which parts of me can't do that oh this tiny fraction of cells they're the weak ones i thought i could let them run because i didn't think they were weak but now that i know the environment might have occasional food shortages i'm just going to go out and execute remove all of these weak cells and i'm going to grow fresh young strong ones and that's that process of autophagy i talked about before and it'll do it for the power plants the mitochondria in the cells and it'll do it for whole cells and it's powerfully anti-aging to do this but if instead you just go into straight up starvation mode it doesn't work in starvation mode it's fine if you do a four day fast under medical supervision you can go 40 50 up to 70 days if you really have a lot of weight to lose or you're dying of some kind of condition but what you want to do here is just show the body that it's not regularly starving but it could happen so it better be ready and those are the key words better be ready because that is the core definition of resilience a resilient human can turn on masses of energy throughout the body in a second's notice at any time and this is why the other practices that i mentioned in the book like fasting from heat for brief reads oh you mean i might have to make all the cells in my body turn on heat rapidly the ones that can't do that those are the ones to target and upgrade and same thing oh i might have to actually be able to function without food for 18 hours or 24 hours well the cells that can't do that they're clearly not suitable let's get better ones and what you end up with is a brain that works way better whether or not you eat and you end up with a metabolism that doesn't get massive blood sugar spikes when you do eat carbohydrates you end up without diabetes you end up with a much lower risk of cancer heart disease and what did it cost you to do this okay you didn't have to suffer the way you thought a fast was gonna so there was no energy like oh i had to feel like crap every morning for a long time no that's not real right you didn't have to buy or make breakfast you might use the fasting hacks which are going to cost you a buck or two but i guarantee it was cheaper and faster than what you do now for breakfast right so you save money you save time you got more energy and you're going to live longer and you're not going to die suffering and this is the highest roi thing that's why i wrote a book about it it's so important well dave throughout our chat here you've talked about a number of the different benefits the autophagy and you just named off a bunch of different things cancer and and heart health and you've named a bunch of different stuff but just to make sure we're all on the same page here can you talk about any other major benefits people are gonna get from fasting that we haven't talked about well there are four things most likely to kill you if you just do the math okay and it's not covid it is number one is diabetes the number of people who are dying from diabetes or diabetes complications number two is cardiovascular disease number three is cancer number four is alzheimer's if you can dodge those four bullets the quality of your life in the last 20 years will be very good because you'll know your own name there'll be no tubes no wheelchairs and no diapers okay like people think of getting old that's the picture they have now which is a completely distorted picture of reality the real way healthy people get old is you actually develop wisdom you finally dealt with all of your crap and you have enough energy to help other people with the wisdom that you've accumulated so we need our village elders back and we need them to be healthy and high powered and the people who practice intermittent fasting now however old they are whether they're starting in their 60s or 70s and there's tons of people doing that or whether they're starting as you know 18 year olds and saying i'm going to do this they are the ones who are going to be shining balls of energy and wisdom when they're 80 and 90 and 100. and because the cost of this is less than having breakfast and the energy you have is more than when you had breakfast this is a sustainable practice for decades because it actually works better and it's pleasant well i think a big part of it too is you can talk to people about all the different benefits they're gonna have later in life but it's easy enough for any of us to say you know that won't happen to me or i'm doing this this and this i'm gonna be healthy when i get older but the great thing about fasting is you get the benefits in the moment the energy the mental alertness and you're getting those other benefits that are going to be you know preventing all those diseases down the line as well in fact can we talk about the the f words from the book sure let's get into them all right this is something that came to me after i wrote uh headstrong my those was my like monthly science bestseller list one of the proudest moments in my life was homo deuce and sapiens are some of my favorite books and headstrong was sandwiched between those on the monthly science book and i was like i'm so honored as a as a reasonable author um that that was to me a major honor and that book i talk in detail about exactly where you were just going with that just about all of the different benefits of what happens in your brain and it happens because of mitochondria and after i published the book i finally kind of woke up from a dream like oh i've got it my undergrad degree is in a form of artificial intelligence we call it decision support systems back when i studied and i studied information systems and i spent the first half of my career as a computer hacker figuring out how to manage millions of computers at the same time it's a very similar mindset to managing what happens inside your body so each little unit of energy production and monitoring these mitochondria they have to follow the rules of life because they are bacteria that became a part of our system so if you were to design something that was going to live forever as a species it has to have some behaviors that are very easy to do and very simple because a little bacteria or a mold spore or a frog there isn't a lot of mental processing capacity and it has to be inside a cell so what we're seeing is tiny rules repeated forever here's the tiny rules that drive us and drive everything everything alive whether it's a plant or an animal number one run away from kill or hide from scary things you put 10 times more energy and focus on that even if it just might kill you because you don't know and if something kills a life form then it can't reproduce the species right so that's fear and it gets 10 times more focused your body will stop processing food and focus on using energy and looking around and being reactive and it'll steal your focus the second f word that all life has to do to stay alive is eat everything because food or feeding it's so important famines have killed thing that's ever been alive in much of history so we know without having to think we know in our bones eat the bagel because if you don't the species could die okay you know it's not true but it doesn't matter because the feeling comes from the tissues and then the next f word that all life forms would have to do with staying around forever you read the book you know what it is fertility ah i love it that you didn't just go straight for a four letter f word so nice i know where you're going so it's fertility and that gets about three times more focus than it really needs um in that we want to have love in our lives and we really do feel like if we're not having sex regularly as adults like something's wrong something's deeply wrong and it's because our cells are telling us if you don't make babies then the species will die now all of those are untrue statements most of the time what you're afraid of is not going to kill you okay if it's a tiger yes but if it's your boss yelling at you no right most of the time you feel like you're going to starve but you have a couple months before you starve it doesn't feel that way but you do and if you don't go on that date with that really hot person that you know is bad for you you're not gonna die either it just feels like you're gonna die right so all of these are driving everything we've ever done that we're ashamed of and the benefits of fasting are teaching yourself that it's safe to go without what i discovered and what is is there in fast this way is i had been taught as a young obese person if you don't eat six meals a day you'll go into starvation mode which is death okay and i believe that because that's what all the health experts said uh which is nuts and i also knew that when i was hungry i would get hypoglybitchy like i would yell at the people like i would just get angry and shaky and i would not act in a way that i respected so i was afraid of being a jerk and i was afraid of being hungry and at the same time i realized from other personal development stuff i was afraid of being alone so i hired a shaman and said i want you to drop me off in a cave with no humans and no food for four days and i'm just gonna have to deal with my issues and that isn't the way most people go about their work but for me it's like if i recognize that i have a trigger i'm just going to hold the trigger down until i get done with it and i've since developed other technologies to help remove triggers without having to go feel the pain for four days but i write about that experience both biologically but psychologically emotionally and spiritually because fasting has always been paired with spiritual practices throughout all of history and the reason it's been paired is that when you fast for two days you go into ketosis and when you have those ketones the same ones that come from mct oil when you have those ketones present in your brain you have more energy in the neurons than you normally do and that provides you the extra energy to go within and do the awareness work so what you get as a person of any age who decides you're going to start any form of fasting and there's many fasting things that aren't food um in fast this way you get a sense of peace and a sense of power because what you thought was going to kill you loses its power and you can sit there and say you know i'm perfectly fine sitting at this dinner with a bunch of people eating whatever they're going to eat with nothing on my plate and i'm okay right now they might lose it i i've witnessed that lots of times people you're gonna die are you okay but do you have an eating disorder what's going on you're like no i'm just fasting now like i'm gonna eat tomorrow but it just blows people's minds but the other that fear thing man it drives so much because right now when we're hungry it we trigger fear so all of a sudden we went from our normal hunger which is five times more attention than it deserves now we've got 10 times more attention because we're afraid of being hungry and fasting removes that 10x trigger because you're no longer afraid of being hungry like oh hunger means i guess i should eat in the next while but if i don't eat i'll be okay so then there's a sense of calm and a sense of peace whether or not you've got food and when you turn down that 10x trigger and you turn down that 5x trigger what you end up with is abundant extra capacity in your brain to do what you're actually here to do and what you're here to do is the fourth f word that i haven't mentioned yet all life does this the fourth f word is friend every species on the planet cooperates with other species or with itself that's why we have kombucha that's why we have yogurt that's why we have forests that's why we have herds of deer and that's why we have tribes of people and why we specialize why we support our community why we take care of our elders why we take care of our children why we are wired to help each other now if we're in fear mode and hunger mode it's a lot harder to focus on that fourth f word because it basically gets about a 1 or a 1.5 x attention it's very hard to focus on that when we're afraid so what's going on here is not that we've chosen this priority it's that it is wired into the inner parts of every cell in your body and that though they act based on the limited information that's available in your elbow or your liver or your eyeball and it all rolls up and eventually it makes it through our nervous system to our prefrontal cortex the part of our brain responsible logic and there there's seven layers of filters that strip out all kinds of stuff that we never get to see and we can see the teeny tiny tip of what's left but when you do this thing that's in the definition of biohacking when i created the field of it the definition is the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control of your own biology what i'm proposing here is that by intermittent fasting you're changing the environment inside of you biologically which gives you more energy which allows you to change the environment inside of you from your software perspective from your thoughts and your feelings and to sort out hunger versus anger versus fear and to get on top of those and i promise you or someone who's listening to this who's 20 years old you master this yes you have more energy now yes you grew abs yes you like your life better but the other benefit there is you actually own your stuff more quickly and with less work than it would be if you just kept eating whatever you're going to eat six times a day i guess the question i have i want to come back to what we talked about early on having bulletproof coffee as a way to kind of ease into an intermittent fast you talked about the benefits you get doing that but you also talked about what a purist fast would be which is just having water so are there differences in benefits going from a purist fast and you know dealing with the pain other than the psychological you're naturally going to have psychological pain to deal with and push through and work through which is going to help you grow not having doing a purist fast versus you know not having that pain and that that craving other than that is there any physiological differences in the benefits you get when you include the bulletproof coffee versus just going straight on water there are a few and this is a matter of great debate so a lot of the studies on fasting involve mice mice don't have espresso machines they get water so say we prove that a water only fast does this therefore you should water only fast and the people who take that approach i kind of call them the the hair shirt fasters you know what a hair shirt is no there's a weird sect of catholicism sometime 500 years ago monks would weave shirts out of human hair because it was extra itchy and they would wear these itchy shirts all day long because they were bad and they had to suffer and remind themselves of how simple they were and then they would self-flagging whip themselves on their back just like you know i i'm gonna suffer here it is acceptable to choose the hard path however if you're not in a place to do a spiritual fast where you want to do the hard fast to force yourself to do the hard path when you had other things to show up for like your family and your career and the world around you i think it's doing disservice to yourself so a lot of the water fasting stuff is like well that's what the mice did so i'm just gonna do it i just interviewed someone on bulletproof radio who for 30 years has been leading people through water only fasts medically supervised without even salt but they do you know two lab tests a day to make sure your electrolytes are right and i asked them why water only like why wouldn't you take the stuff that would reduce the you know the oozing stuff that comes out of people's skin when you do that because well we don't know what it'll do so we just do it with what we know works now as a biohacker like look i'm going to choose to suffer less and get the results so if you do a water only fast my recommendation and those of many people out there is at least have some electrolytes there's great electrolyte formulas out there there's this element stuff you can just do a pinch of sea salt you can take potassium and talk about different minerals you might want to take during a fast and these are for shorter fasts i mean if you're going to do a very long fast you want to medically monitor it so if you do only water that flies in the face of what just about every spiritual tradition ever is done they always drink at least herbal tea or regular tea during a fast because it seems to make it work better and the reason for that is the polyphenols the colored compounds in colored plants they feed the good guy bacteria called bacteriodes people who are thin have more of those and less firmicuties which is another species more abundant in fat people so since you're not feeding the fermi cuties if you feed some polyphenols to these things they actually like it and you get more of the good guys so there's a benefit to that but on a water only fast it may allow the gut to rest more people are doing a microbiome reset where they want to basically kill off most of the stuff in their gut to allow something else to emerge these are people with cancer and diabetes and people are going to do a long-term water fast um there you wouldn't want to have the prebiotic fiber for instance because you want nothing to grow you're kind of you know just saying we're going to go down to almost no gut bacteria and they're going to reestablish flora so that's an interesting perspective on it but in terms of the benefits of doing a water only intermittent fast versus having coffee the coffee is going to give you better results you'll actually have a more successful fast with more fat burning less hunger more of everything now if you want to go for the bulletproof coffee what you'll find is that it makes it very easy to work your way into fasting because it teaches the body oh there's going to be ketones present therefore you should re-architect yourself to burn fat there are a few people out there who will just stand up and say oh it's not really fasting because it has calories the thing that matters though is is there carbohydrate metabolism no is there protein metabolism no those are the things that break a fast so might you lose weight faster underwater only fast we don't have great evidence either way you might however you might not because your body doesn't go into fat burning mode as quickly so i have just after 10 years of this and with millions of people trying bulletproof i'll tell you that it works i cannot tell you that it works better than water only fasting but i can tell you that you suffer less and that you will very soon learn when you make your bulletproof coffee i actually don't i only need like a teaspoon of mixture he's like i've got it this morning i just don't want it and someone is like i'm just gonna have coffee right almost no one listening is going to say oh i actually today just don't want coffee 90 of people drink coffee coffee is just a well-established superfood and there are people who say oh but coffee's addictive i don't want to be addicted to anything like do you exercise every day they go yeah great what happens if you don't exercise for three days and they say i don't feel as good like then you're addicted to exercise you should stop so that's my take on coffee during fasting you probably want to do it or t at a minimum well let's come back to your story with the shaman and the vision quest let's go back to 2008 you brought that up quickly but this is a time when you did a water only fast so let's come back to that time and talk about where you're at in your life and what made you want to do this well i had been through um i'd stayed in a bad relationship for a lot longer than i should have i had made and lost six million dollars i had struggled with my weight for years and tested every diet out there and really already gotten deep on the biology i had been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome fibromyalgia i had high risk of stroke and heart attack on labs before i was 30. i had arthritis since i was 14. so my biology wasn't working that well but i was pretty pissed off all the time too so i've got some work to do here and as an engineer like why do i make choices that are clearly stupid like there has to be something else going on in there so i did all the stuff that's supposed to work and then i'm like okay i didn't lose the weight you know i'm not happy i tried fame i was 22 23. i sold the first thing ever sold over the internet before it was even called ecommerce i had my picture in entrepreneur magazine double extra large t-shirt you know red pimply face the whole nine yards and that was uh that didn't make me happy to be well known for a brief period and then i made a bunch of money i was 26 and i looked at a friend at this company when we held google's first servers when it was two guys and two computers and this was a company that became worth 36 billion dollars and i was a co-founder of a part of the company and i looked at my friend and said i'll be happy when i have 10 million when i had 6 million dollars at 26. okay that is the biggest douchebag comment i think i've ever made although i've made many and but i felt it was real at the time and many people at the company did too and i'm like wait a minute if i can't be happy with six million dollars fame isn't gonna make me happy money isn't gonna make me happy right so why am i not happy here and i started working on that and that was a much harder thing and that led me to from south america to peru i did ayahuasca with a shaman before uh before ayahuasca was even well known i went down there and they're like you want to do what i said no that that's for local people like dave you're white you'll throw up you won't like it you shouldn't do this and uh and i did it anyway and and i went on this path of like understanding why i would do the things i would do that i didn't choose to do because i kind of thought i was a meat robot and my path has been discovering wow there's a lot going on below the neck here and some of it is biological in fact more than we think but a lot of it is also the software it's our belief systems it's our patterns where oh if this pattern happens in our life it triggers this emotion because our body determined without our permission that something was happening that wasn't real and that was what led me to that awareness and i said all right i know i've got this fear of being alone and i know that the idea of being hungry brings me anxiety because i don't want to be a jerk anymore and because i don't i don't want to go into starvation mode i don't want to be even fatter like i've struggled for years with not being fatter you know every time you kind of hang your head and go i'm gonna have to get out my fat pants again i wonder what i did wrong you know it's so disheartening and i just i wanted to get on top of those emotions because i realized the emotions were driving me more than i thought and by putting myself in a situation that i couldn't escape um that really um that was really pushing my buttons i remember i had a protein bar and i was like i'm just gonna have this just in case i need it and i had it my backpack and right before i i went out there i was like no and i just left it on the kitchen table at the it was something i know very well i would have beaten that thing if i had it what were some of the most profound experiences you had during that four days man you go through these things i i did experience really strong hunger on the second day but i just realized how much fear was driving me there was a time you know in the middle of the night i heard this this rustling and i'm in a cave the cave is called first woman it's shaped like a giant vagina and the local indigenous people for them that's where adam and eve first emerged onto the planet so this is a place that's been used for ceremony for 10 000 years and you know there's blackened walls with suit on them and and so i asked for permission to to be there and it was uh it was strange because having grown up in the desert i know about predators i know about rattlesnakes and you know things like that so i i put a bunch of brush at the entrance to the cave so if something larger wants to come in and this is a way all humans have protected themselves as like an alarm system so i wake up in the middle of the night going oh my god like there's something rustling in there like kind of losing i get on my flashlight and i can't see anything and like you know hearts pounding and i can't go back to sleep and i'm just like worrying worrying worrying and the next night same thing i'm kind of freaking out and finally i figured it out because i put the brush out there a bird a nocturnal bird had started nesting in the brush and it was making noise and i'm like wait a minute i lost my you know what uh twice over a little tiny bird and it was such a metaphor for i'm losing my mind over hunger i'm losing my mind over all these other things i believe to be true that have no basis in reality so this is called a spiritual fast and what i'm doing in fast this way is i'm bringing spirituality back into the practice of fasting and what i decided for the the first time is that i've i put thousands of hours into writing a book because like if you know half a million people are going to read a book and they're all going to use 10 hours to read it that's half a million times whatever that that's 5 million hours i don't know how many life human lifetimes is but that's a lot so if i write a book that wasn't worth their time i'm kind of a mass murderer so i really care about that but then i realized i was a teacher for five years at university of california but i wasn't teaching the books i'd write the textbook but there wasn't like the course to go with it so people buy the book you send me receipt it fast this way and i'm teaching the book for two weeks and i'm leading people through the fasts with hacks we're gonna do a fast without them but the final two days is actually spiritual fast where you can fast for just the morning or you can do a 24 hour or a 48 hour fast if you want to but along the way to do the personal development work that comes with actually sitting with your hunger and actually feeling what's going on and and going within but going within when you have less noise from digestion and more energy from having ketones and when you do that that's when the real awareness happens like what is my relationship with hunger and that's different than my relationship with food maybe you eat because you're bored maybe because you're lonely i actually did both um you know maybe there's no emotional component it's just because you have these intense cravings because you're eating the wrong foods that cause cravings but you become aware of that and you also become aware of you know you feel more grounded you feel more connected with the world around you and those are things that are very precious around fasting i just promise you that if you're intermittent fasting on monday morning and you have a job that's not where you're going monday morning but you still want the fast so it's there's two flavors of fasting and they're both important i want to come back to the cave and you talked about ayahuasca and having that experience beforehand i don't know how many years before oh it's probably five or six years yeah okay that would have i'm assuming been a profoundly spiritual experience along with doing the water fast for four days that being a profoundly spiritual experience so can you kind of compare compare and contrast the two of them and talk about some similarities and differences there are many many different ways to reach altered states and you've read my book game changers where i've interviewed 500 people have done big things in the world what do you guys all agree on one of the the laws that i'm like what if i study meta gurus you know i don't want to follow one guru i want to find what they all agree on and i'll do that because i'm lazy and one of the rules was get out of your head right and fasting is a tried and true way especially on a longer fast for longer than usually 36 hours or so you start just kind of getting a little bit floaty right that's one way to do it but it's relatively gentle unless you're going to do a long fast then you really start if you're meditating and fasting like during a fasting vipassana or some of the practices in caves and all you can go to very deep places ayahuasca it kind of kicks you there really quickly and it's a different place than you go from a spiritual fast you're you know you're using a different agent you're activating dmt in the brain which gets activated when you're born and when you die and so you definitely see stuff that you aren't going to see except during a very intense fast i've also done a lot of holotropic breathing and i've written about that in some of my books some of the places i'll go during the 40 years of zen advanced neurofeedback training that i do um i have seen more you know intense spiritual stuff from neurofeedback and holotropic breathing than i did from ayahuasca or fasting but they're all in that that same quadrant of the map around spiritual practices where you develop awareness of yourself and you probably see stuff that you can't rationally account for and if you are rational about it you just realize the universe is way more interesting than you believed it to be and this is where a lot of cutting-edge neuroscience is going uh and certainly where i'm going with my neuroscience company is that studying human consciousness has been the hardest thing to do because we're immersed in our own consciousness but any of those practices whether it's you know rapid holotropic breathing or other breathing practices fasting plant medicines uh even things like certain drumming circles all of those can take you to a place that is abnormal because frankly normal means average and if you want to be a high performing human being you better be willing to go to a place that's not average so experiencing different abnormal states as long as they're not permanently harmful abnormal states is good likewise try taking an ice bath you'll go to some crazy places sitting in an ice bath for the first time getting a strong signal from your body that says i am going to die and you going shut up you can do three minutes or 20 minutes whatever it is and that's that argument that wrestling between your conscious adult human rational mind and the animal emotional spiritual side of you that says one thing is true and you saying another thing is true the reality is usually somewhere in the middle and so my practice of fasting in a cave my practice of plant medicine my practice of neurofeedback and breathing and all of the things that i've done and i'm very blessed to be friends with some of the leaders in personal development all of those just serve to say there's different layers of awareness that you can have and that being able to tap into those makes you a better human being but denying their existence based on the idea that you've been taught they can't exist that doesn't seem to serve you very well because the the type of creation that i do in the world you know changing the language around health like how many times you would hack your health or upgrade your biology i did that right we really have changed the the level of control that we all believe that we have over ourselves that is now okay to assert control over your body whereas before it was sort of like you just wanted to be thin but but it was more like you were a victim of the food and so we now are way more in charge of ourselves that kind of stuff that's a personal development practice right and now the challenge is you could meditate for two hours a day for the rest of your life i just don't have two hours a day i have companies to run i have kids to be with i have a wife i have friends i have a community i have a farm i maybe instead of meditating i can feed the sheep right so all of those things how do you get the progress in the least amount of energy and time required to continue growing as a human i am 100 certain and why i wrote this book is that when you take up regular intermittent fasting without a spiritual practice you will have a quantum jump in the amount of energy available to you for your brain and you will be you'll have enough energy to be curious and enough energy to explore the boundaries of what you find are true and this is why fasting is so important it's the power that you get and you will just as a natural human being you're curious we all want to come to this next level and this ties back to abraham maslow's hierarchy of needs a lot of people have heard of this and that oh we need food and shelter and safety and love and things like that what almost no one knows and what i didn't know is that right before he died he died at 62 as abraham maslow had written up the final step of the hierarchy of human needs it was for transcendence to be connected to the world around you and the guy who discovered this in his writings is named scott barry kaufman who is a guest on bulletproof radio i think he's at columbia one of the big universities and i believe that this is just part of it we just don't have the power to get to the next level if we eat all the time or if we eat the wrong stuff all the time and that's why intermittent fasting matters because it will give you the power to choose your path to become a better more evolved human being it's that big of a deal and that's why it's worth a book and that's why it's worth the time it takes to read it this is not a book that says step one don't eat step two it's good for you we know these to be true how do you do it how do you do it in a busy life and when you choose to use it as a spiritual practice how do you do that and it's just a different thought process then oh just do something good for you like you tell people to exercise every day it's good for them hey it probably isn't if it's heavy exercise and b only eight percent of people will do it anyway because it's not pleasant i want to make intermittent fasting more pleasant than having breakfast and i think i've done it let's come full circle on the cave story you leave the cave after four days you're by yourself you only have water what's it like coming back into society after that point and how are you a different person well the first thing that happened i was lit up with energy like crazy levels of energy and during this fast i had a cell phone this was before smartphones were a thing um you know there was no instagram uh and so what would i do is every morning i would turn on my phone for a minute and text the shaman and say i'm okay and she'd text back if there was anything that i needed you know to do or like if something weird had happened like oh there's a nuclear war or something i have to come pick you up so i usually didn't receive anything but she uh she said okay i'll come pick you up and i'm gonna pick up another person who's passing in a different cave somewhere and i said oh don't worry i can just walk and it's it's several miles the other cave like i can just walk and she's like i don't think you should i'm like no i'm i'm ready and i was just like just a ball of energy so i had a canteen full of water and i put on my backpack it's not that heavy there's no food in there it's just a backpack uh and a jacket and i start walking okay now i thought i knew which mountain i was heading for i was wrong so i'm like there's weird there's no trail up here i just can't find her so i climb to the top of a mountain and i get there and there's no cave there where i thought there would be like oh man this isn't good and my phone's almost out of battery so i'm you know i'm sort of texting going where are you guys and she's like great now you're lost in the desert you know this is fantastic so i ended up oh i think i can see a road over there so i just cross-country through the desert you know rattlesnakes and whatever else cactus and um zero lack of energy zero fear as even zero dehydration i still had water left and i was i haven't grown up without so like you know at a certain point you run out of water in the desert it's gonna suck but i'm just i'm i've just so much energy it's hard to explain okay how is it that i can walk like 10 miles in the heat without any food for four days like i was blowing myself out of the water right and then come back and you know have some sort of a meal i don't think i even remember how i broke the fast it was probably some sort of a juice thing or something i just have no recollection uh and then you know the next day it's you know drive to the airport and start to go back but it does take a couple days um where you're just like wow i i i remember the feeling of energy and power that i had you know remember sort of the spiritual experiences any time you do intense personal development whether it's ayahuasca whether it's like the neurofeedback path that is my favorite whether it's even a heavy-duty holotropic experience it usually takes two to four days to ground yourself back in reality like i remember one time as i was developing the 40 years of zen uh work i had spent seven days doing really intense deep neurofeedback work i went to all these crazy spiritual places and i started a new job the next day so i come into work and i'm like only halfway in reality and one of the uh the people i was starting to work with she comes up she goes do you meditate actually yeah i do why she goes you have this look in your eyes like my guru from india and i was like oh my god like what do my eyes look like like i'm not trying to do that i don't want to be a guru but i was just like so altered it like took my brain a couple days and i felt similar to that after fasting and like it's okay if you're gonna go to somewhere strange and that's not what you normally do it's okay to adjust when you come back but what i did find when i came back is that that feeling of i'm gonna die if i don't eat it was gone because i realized i showed my cells that they weren't going to die if they didn't eat and i'd lost crazy amounts of weight when i was doing that which wasn't my intent at all it just naturally happened but my metabolism worked better like my eyes were brighter it was it was really good it was it was good for my relationship at home too you know i had a about a one year old um during that time and it was uh it was it was just a generally good thing i think everything in my life got better after that well speaking of kids when it comes to fasting can kids ever fast and if they can at what age would would you say it's safe younger children shouldn't fast but you shouldn't force them to eat either so they are very self-guided i learned as a parent that every time my kids said i don't want that food they were right now it's different if your kids say i only want to eat their french fries but if i'd serve them the foods that they liked you know here's some grass-fed steak here's some broccoli like i don't want the broccoli tonight daddy and if i'd say shut up and eat your broccoli i'm like oh that's funny all of us felt like crap the next morning because that broccoli actually wasn't good it had you know it's called alternarium brassica it's the type of mold that grows on brassica family and all of us slept poorly and like didn't feel good and the kids were cranky and we all wanted dessert which means we oh we ate a food toxin they knew so kids have a really good self-guidance that also could be like candy candy candy but if you teach your kids not to eat candy and you teach your kids they don't get to pick what the food is and you put out food that they normally eat and they don't want to eat it like okay that's fine my daughter is 13. she's like daddy i really don't like having breakfast like i just don't like when i'm home i don't want to have i don't eat anything until noon and i'm like that's great you don't have to right but if she did when she was six i'd say let's wait a couple hours and you can have something but because we are wired as parents to feel as if our children are us our energy field is actually extended out and our children are a part of our energy field it's stronger for for mothers but it's also there for dads and we're holding them in our energy right so when we feel like our children might be starving what's that about the survival of the species okay that's in there and every parent on earth will take their last bite of food and give it to their kid if it's actual starvation so when we feel our children might be starving we do what the stereotypical parents do oh here eat eat eat and it sets our children up for failure so what i do in my house is hey guys um this is i guess when they were younger they don't do it anymore but my son's like daddy i'm not going to eat this i just don't want to eat this tonight and it was whatever the broccoli was or whatever this wasn't a case of the broccoli was good it was just you know asserting control uh and i said oh that's awesome alan you've decided to join me in an intermittent fast we won't starve to death for about 60 days so we can just put the food back in the fridge and we both won't eat and then he looks at me and then he eats his dinner right so that you're not going to starve if you don't get the candy is a big thing also don't feed your kids candy anyway but should you force a kid to fast never if a child is curious about fasting i think it's fine for them to do it and i relay the story in the book my son was probably nine at the time um he's eleven now maybe even eight but we've been talking about fasting a lot and i said i'm in a fast for a couple days and he'd seen me do it a few times and he said daddy i've decided i want to try fasting for 24 hours and i said really okay you know you're not allowed to fast regularly because you're too young for that you want your body to know that we live in a land of abundance and that it's safe to grow and you know become as strong as it possibly can be because there's no limitation on resources but yeah you can fast and i said you might want to have a little bit of black coffee make kids drink coffee they always have because coffee is good for you and kids metabolize caffeine quite well they just you know they get half a cup in the morning that's fine and so you might have some coffee because it'll it'll make it so you're less hungry and he goes no i actually want to feel the fast so that i know what it's like so i don't want to try any of the fasting hacks i'm just going to i'm just going to do it and he did it and you know it was a great act of willpower for him but he was showing himself who was in charge and it was amazing when he finally broke his fast he says daddy you're right fasting really is the best spice this is the best meal i've ever had and since then he hasn't wanted to fast every now and then they'll say i don't want breakfast that's fine right so we don't force them to eat but we don't encourage them to fast we don't allow them to fast the same is true for teenagers like if a teenager wants to intermittent fast several times a week that's fine but you need to have a protein breakfast the other days if you're working out that day you know if they're in track or whatever then they eat a protein and fat breakfast and they're not allowed to go out and exercise a lot because a lot of teenagers especially girls they'll get to that like oh you know i'm just not gonna eat very much i'm gonna do all things i do and they're not they don't have the wiring to be aware of their state to realize oh i'm acting the way i'm acting and i can't focus because i either don't have the right nutrients or because i'm not eating enough so i think it's important that um you don't um overencourage that and that my kids if they want to intermittent fast every day i'd say no but if they want intermittent fast three four days a week fine but my kids are now 11 and 13 and they're getting that point and when they were younger no way you guys eat you guys eat lunch and dinner and usually breakfast the other thing about kids they do not need to eat six times a day they might need to eat four times a day they might need to eat three times a day and my daughter came home from first or second grade and she said dave no not dave she said daddy as soon as i get to school the teachers start talking about our snack and we get there and then all the other kids are hungry but i don't even want to eat don't the other kids have breakfast and i said well anna go ask them what they have for breakfast and she comes back she says oh my my vegan friend has a green apple for breakfast i'm like if you had a green apple would you be hungry and she goes yes and i said well there you go they're eating the wrong breakfast so then they feel like they need to eat two hours later and she says i wish the teacher wouldn't make me eat a snack because i really don't want the snack i'm full until lunch so she would like fake eating a snack that she didn't want okay this is what happens you feed children enough of the right fats and the right protein what you have for breakfast smoked salmon from costco wild caught smoked salmon which is good and avocados right or bacon and eggs right or other things like that that are rich in fat and rich in protein and then there's they're satiated and as a parent what this does for you jesse you get enough interruptions from children because they don't have filters if the interruption is can i have candy can i have candy can i have candy i'm hungry hungry hungry hungry man it's exhausting for parents it's exhausting for kids and when you feed them right they don't do that so it's more about the right food and permission to skip a meal but not regularly skipping a meal long answer but i think it's a really important nuance for parents definitely important and earlier dave you quickly touched on differences when it comes to fasting between men and women is there any further depth you want to go into on that and special considerations because i know you talk about in the book how a lot of the research is actually done on men so with your experience what have you found can help women along the way well only about 25 to 35 of studies of fasting even account for women and the reason for this is that throughout most of medical research the cheapest human guinea pigs are college freshmen and college freshmen were predominantly white dudes now it's shifted there's actually more women in college than men but because we'd experiment on them you pay them 10 bucks and they'll do anything you want so they would run these crazy things on men and the research on women definitely shows that they are less resilient to fasting than men but that it's profoundly good for them and this goes in fact there's a whole chapter in the book focusing just on the research for women and the hormone changes and one of the biggest things for women is when you're right in the middle of your cycle you're menstruating you already have a biological stressor right now your body is working on rebuilding tissues you are unlikely to get the results from fasting on those days then being kind to yourself having protein having fat having some carbohydrates later in the day which is going to give you the energy and the building blocks your body needs to rebuild the lining of your uterus and if instead you're saying i'm just going to fast why does it not work now but it worked other times it's because women have times of the month when they're highly focused and high performance and they have times of the month where they're less performant and olympic athletes i've interviewed on the show talk about this i'm saying oh i know that if i have a competition during my cycle i'm less likely to win because my body's busy on doing other stuff right so the same goes for fasting so fasting during menstruation is usually not a good idea even the day after or if you're going to do it a shorter intermittent fast or ideally doing it with bulletproof coffee so at least you've got the ketones in the body you've got some building blocks you've taken a load off but you're still allowing the protein digestion and repair systems to work so that that's the biggest thing for women and also just don't over fast guys can fast more than women and get away with it and actually benefit from it and so for women especially if you have weight to lose start out three or four days a week doing intermittent fasting and start out with the fasting hacks and over time as your body becomes stronger and leaner and your mitochondria become better at burning fat you might say oh i'm gonna do it five days a week but it's okay to have breakfast like you do on weekends breakfast does not mean the denny's grand slam with all the bad fats and all that and way back in the day when i was fat i'd be super clean during the week but i knew we had to have a cheat meal every day and tim ferriss who i respect a lot has been on my show a few times you know in the four hour body he talks about kind of having a cheat day what i found over many cheat days as a younger person was that the cravings and the inflammation that those would induce that they lasted for several days and caused way more suffering that was worth so now the cheat day might be i eat a lot more carbs right but these are carbs that are not going to leave a residue of inflammation i don't eat bad fats i don't eat you know chicken mcnuggets on a cheat day that would be ridiculous so you still keep it clean but you're having a lot more carbs and it's very enjoyable delicious food and that's an important thing for women even more important than men you know when when you do uh when you're not fasting it's okay to have carbs if you want to be in keto do it for a week or two and then go out allow the parts of your body that need carbs to do it reduce the biological stress and then go back in it's the cycles instead of just like i'm going to push and never stop pushing so that that's the biggest finding in the chapter for women great important we covered that too and dave i know you got to go but i want to cover one last thing before before we hang up here and that is somebody who is say starting out you know they're still relatively new into this they're doing the bulletproof coffee in the morning skipping breakfast but they're ready for the next step what are some of the supplements or adjuncts somebody can incorporate after you know they get going on this a little bit and they're ready ready to evolve a little bit you know some people are still stuck in that water only fasting and they say you shouldn't take any supplements during a fast but that doesn't make sense because you're fasting for a reason and if you have supplements that can give you the results you want better than fasting alone i think we kind of have an obligation to do that one of the really magic supplements during fasting that you read about it in fast this way is activated charcoal it's been used for thousands of years for detoxing any kind of gi thing one of the reasons that you feel really uncomfortable when you first start fasting is that the gut bacteria have nothing to eat now remember those four f words you run away from kill or hide from scary things you're a gut bacteria you can't run away you can't hide so you start making something called lipopolysaccharide this is your chemical defense system that says i'm stressed there's not enough food i'm gonna kill everything around me so i can get the food and that compound lps is well known to induce inflammation even in the brain it crosses the blood-brain barrier crosses the gut very easily well if you take activated charcoal it absorbs all the lps so it doesn't go into your body so you can take that during a fast has no calories but it absorbs the gut toxins and it really reduces cravings and makes you feel better another one of the supplements that i write about that's i think really powerful during a fast is proteolytic enzymes and i talk about a few different formulas in the book but one of the more commonly known ones is serrapeptase which is the enzyme that silkworms use to break down silk and when you take cyropeptase it actually increases the enzyme capacity of the body to break down scar tissue and other things during the process of autophagy so you can take one or for me i take about 10 of the very high strength and that's a very mega dose of that but i do that actually every night when i'm fasting and i have for a long time because the benefits over time of keeping immune molecules down in the body keeping scar tissue down removing adhesions in the body it's very powerful over time but during a fast it's even more powerful those are two of the basic examples but there's a list of safe supplements and a list of supplements i call the barfi iv that you ought not to take during a fast unless you want to taste them again coming back to lps really quick is this something the bacteria over time are going to produce less of if you're into fasting regularly or is charcoal something that you're probably going to need to incorporate long term the studies that i wrote about in superhuman show that charcoal actually in uh lengthens lifespan in animals by about 15 percent it reduces cardiovascular risk over time so charcoal is something that you take away from medication and away from other vitamins but it has a very powerful long-term effects so i think it's one of those very cheap very beneficial supplements that you might want to take regularly as you fix your gut bacteria especially if you're using the prebiotic fiber fasting hack that i talk about um you will change the ratio of good guys to bad guys so you'll make less lps just from having a healthy gut biome you can do that without fasting but fasting with prebiotic fiber well you didn't feed anything to the bad guys and you fed this up to the good guys so you'll more rapidly shift the balance of bacteria in the gut and you'll gain more beneficial species by just having the right substrate for them to grow on so ideally you'll make less lps but if you have really bad gas and you have lots of gi issues the way i used to then you'll find you have more lipopolysaccharide therefore you have more inflammation throughout the body and you do want to manage that in all the ways we talked about all right dave thank you so much for your time like i said at the beginning fastest way loved the book my favorite book of yours i've writ i've read to this point um other than listeners getting a copy how can they connect with you well get a copy and send your receipt through the website fastthisway.com i'm going to be leading more than 10 000 people in a community through two weeks of me teaching you what's in the book for free i just want to do this because if i'm going to spend thousands of hours writing the book and i don't follow through and teach it i feel like i'm not you know i'm not following through on on my belief in how powerful this is so i would be honored to be able to teach people this and lead them through something else with fasting we didn't talk much about is doing it in community whether it's with family or friends makes it a lot easier and more fun so having 10 000 people sharing their experience at the same time is going to be really powerful and this is just me wanting to share it's fastthisway.com just send in your receipt i'll get you enrolled and the fasting challenge starts a couple days after the book comes out on the 19th comes back to the fourth f again friend and uh yeah that that sounds like a great thing and i'm sure you're gonna have a great response from all your your audience and i'm excited for you and dave i thank you so much for coming back on the show always a pleasure and wishing you all the best thank you jesse appreciate the interview thank you you

Channel: Jesse Chappus

Views: 131,435

Rating: 4.8811326 out of 5

Keywords: Dave Asprey, Jesse Chappus, Fast This Way, The Ultimate Health Podcast, health, wellness, interview, fast, fasting, intermittent fasting, time restricted eating, TRE, activated charcoal, autophagy, ayahuasca, plant medicine, biohacking, Bulletproof, Bulletproof Coffee, coffee, exogenous ketones, fasting hacks, fat, focus, holotropic breathing, keto, ketosis, ketogenic, diet, kids fasting, women fasting, metabolic flexibility, The Bulletproof Diet, water fasts, the fasting trap, spirituality

Id: beVWdxqJSGM

Length: 84min 47sec (5087 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021