My Fasting Notes after losing 100 pounds! Yikes! But there's more...

look at that fat [ __ ] no harm in fat shaming i do not care because that [ __ ] is me yes can't i don't even think that was me and my heaviest but uh yeah i wanted to this is like truly embarrassing to share with anybody quite frankly but i want to let you know on the real deal uh when it comes to how [ __ ] uh chunky what a chunky monkey i was uh which isn't a bad thing uh if you're healthy but i definitely was not healthy so i wanted to um share my thoughts on fasting with you guys uh i started down this rabbit hole around like december of 2017 um with prolonged fasting um the prior the previous year i had been on uh intermittent fasting so i wrote notes down i shared them with friends and family it seemed to help a bunch of people fasting is uh definitely more talked about i think i heard kevin smith on his latest podcast uh saying he did 90 some odd hours of uh fasting so i wanted to share with you what i know but let's get the disclaimers out of the way you got to do it i am not a healthcare professional by no means um do your own research consult physicians et cetera et cetera et cetera before making any you know sort of drastic changes to your diet uh you are responsible for your own health okay so here are my notes and what i thought was peculiar and interesting was after the second day of my first prolonged fast so i was doing 16 8 which means you eat for 16 hours of the day and you um you eat during an eight hour window and you fast for 16 hours of the day and that helped me out a lot uh let me give you a recap of how i got that um large uh to begin with i actually had struggled with weight uh a whole bunch up and down i was a calories in calorie app person so i would gain 50 pounds and then using calorie restriction i would get back down but it was yo-yo constantly up and down up and down up and down and then i went vegetarian i was vegetarian for five years what was my diet you say that led me to as a vegetarian get up to 300 pounds well it was carb based right it's just a bunch of carbs carbs carbs sugars uh not saying i was the healthiest vegetarian as like uh i had a lot of cake that was my favorite vegetarian food cake uh so no wonder i got you know sort of that big to begin with getting off of uh the vegetarian diet and reintroducing meat helped satiate me i was no longer perennially hungry throughout the day so that was a big help i lost a little bit of weight there switched to keto then uh so limiting my carbs that helped as well started intermittent fasting and then that just kind of supercharged um everything and then i kind of plateaued and that's when i sort of dug into the whole concept of fasting i was kind of aware of fasting um to begin with but let me get to the point where what got me to start writing these notes down is the interesting thing was on the second day of my fast i wasn't hungry anymore i mean i thought by fasting the hunger would have like this sort of cumulative effect and my appetite would grow as the days went on but by day four i was even like less hungry i felt clear-headed and better than when i you know was doing the calorie restriction down to 1500 calories a day so this confused me and i needed to find out why and if what i was doing was okay so i went down the internet rabbit hole i discovered dr jason fung uh if you don't know him why don't i uh let's see why don't i share that with you guys that's dr jason fung back there and let's uh [Music] bro you didn't see that uh green screen back all right so that's dr jason fung uh he's a brilliant dude um i so when was he he's a nephrologist uh so that's like kidney and hypertension uh specializing in diabetes treatment um so i found talks um as well from um dr uh rhonda patrick you can see here catch a lot of her on the uh joe rogan experience and uh also dr dr walter walter longo uh he's famous for the fasting uh mimicking diet um but uh these are you know uh well-known uh people so you can go down the same rabbit holes i did they're you know all on youtube uh dr walter longo he's in a bunch of documentaries i actually had the privilege to film him for the palo alto longevity prize um uh where he talked about fasting as you know a way to prolong not just good health but uh also longevity um also dr moseley um dr june yoon who i used to work for and dr hunt uh he was the oncologist i interviewed in philly so um you know i had a little bit of background and understanding of fasting and and how it's healthy and we'll get into like autophagy apoptosis things like that um but the sources in clinical studies for the information i'm going to talk about is like publicly available on the web so um what i'm going to discuss i'm not going to reference i might put some youtube links uh in the description below so look for that um but yeah so i guess you know what why don't we talk about uh what started piquing my interest with dr fung because his work with diabetes and uh you know i i knew people who had type 2 diabetes and it sucked um you know i think in the beginning it was basically like a death sentence right so i think fasting has some uh real benefits and um dr fung in particular had some interesting thoughts on why current standards of treatment for diabetes is flat wrong you know i will put the link to that in the um description below but the gist is current type 2 treatment relates to insulin level insulin level when the issue is resistance so treating type 2 with more insulin simply makes the body need more insulin over time leading to eventual predictably devastating results so my belief and my understanding started to change and i started to believe that the real issues of our health um the i believe the underlying issues across many diseases is metabolic syndrome uh inflammation and insulin resistance those three things so for me symptoms are obvious you know i've been overweight so the symptom was obvious in the extra weight around you know the midsection um you know the visceral fat uh for others symptoms might show up as like an a1c or blood glucose test high igf-1 is also an uh indicator of bad health uh with increased risk for things like breast cancer so we've known for many years that inflammation is a marker for chronic diseases and an indicator for longevity as well so um a break from food may help uh in that regard so you know some history too because fasting has a sort of like preconceived notion you know i still want when i told people that i was doing fasting i was doing these prolonged fasts i started with a five day fast people were scared of that i went to a seven day fast um friends and family were uh hesitant about that i did a two-weeker a couple times and then i did a 30-day water fast um and you know just the response i got was always um cautious and skeptical um so there are some taboos when it comes to fasting um but it is becoming more accepting uh this was definitely brought up several times by scientists competing in the political longevity prize you should um uh check them out they're associated with the nih now i believe they took over it was started by and funded by dr june yoon though there's a history extending back thousands of years so it makes sense from a human biological standpoint food resources were scarce and cavemen didn't have access to a grocery store you might have heard you know this thought process so they would they could and did go weeks without food um gandhi famously performed extended fasts spartans only ate one meal a day you might have heard of the spartan diet or omad one meal a day greeks um like hippocrates fasted for mental clarity and animals instinctively do it when they're ill to heal so um you know there was even a record uh i believe it was like 382 straight days from nob's 400 pound scotsman he was monitored by physicians and took supplements during this time because it was you know his weight was exceptional and the duration of this fast was exceptional so don't try anything like this on your own obviously um okay so i don't think anyone is making the argument to reset our physiology back to caveman days but rather trying to better understand how our body was designed through a hundred thousand plus years of human evolution and the millions of years of cellular evolution so it was only in the last what like 50 or so years that our nutrition has changed and began to become more processed and available it certainly helped us to devote brain resources to other fronts and perhaps got us to a point where we may now better understand what we got right and what we got wrong as far as food and i think of the movie idiocracy right and imagine how darwin would view the higher rate of procreation among poorer less developed populations so my takeaway is that more and more healthcare professionals are better understanding how our bodies were originally designed and see fasting not the extreme ones as an effective alternative prescription for many diseases and really a possible tool for longevity so how we store and use energy i think is an important topic so food is broken down for energy and stored in two ways either glycogen uh or fat glycogen is readily available it's held in the in the liver and used most often but has a limited supply okay let me repeat that so glycogen is readily available held in the liver and used most often but a limited supply so stored fat is in much greater supply right you know you can feel it i can still feel even though i've lost a little bit of weight by the way fyi um that picture i was probably having around 300 pounds down to like 178 ish uh right now uh and uh the last 30 some odd pounds is uh strictly due due to like a 5-2 fast and i'll talk more about the different types of fasts later on so stored fat to recap is in much greater supply but it's accessed only when glycogen levels are depleted so most readily available when you eat all that stuff gets stored as glycogen in the liver and it gets used and it's used more often your body waits for it um and your fat gets used as fuel uh only when it's uh your glycogen levels are depleted and that takes about 12 to 24 hours assuming you're not in taking more of it during that time so any form of consistent carbohydrate sugar intake essentially deprives your body the chance to burn stored fat for energy you will not access stored fat until your glycogen levels are depleted so it's not a bad thing for normal people but for someone like me who struggled and had a bunch of stored fat or someone who is insulin resistant perhaps not so good so the way we have been taught to eat over the last 50 years is wrong we never give our bodies a chance to use that fat uh for energy yet our body has been designed really to do so so all right now we know kind of a little background in history um here's why i think i felt better fasting than with any other quote unquote diet um first study show fasting doesn't affect your basal metabolic rate like it would in calorie restrictions so for instance eating 20 percent less each day which is what i did and then which is how i lost weight before is not equivalent to eating for four days and fasting for one okay so even though both equate to the same amount of weekly calories in a daily calorie restricted state baseline metabolism will decline so in essence if i go from 2500 calories to 1500 calories a day to lose weight and then go back to 2000 i'd eventually gain the weight back since my body will now think i have a daily excess of 500 calories due to the metabolic change so what's interesting is the scotsman who fasted for 300 days 380 plus days didn't gain the 200 pounds he lost back so hunger was not a big factor since ghrelin appetite hormone is suppressed once the body turns to fat for energy if you were curious about that if you're a cave person and your food supply runs out the last thing it would do is shut down your one advantage over the beasts your intelligence your brain so your basal metabolic rate remains the same in a fasting um environment uh in fact the adrenal response may increase because you would sort of like need to go out and hunt for food um now the other thing to consider is type 2 diabetes is a fairly recent phenomena coinciding i believe with um the the advent of processed carbohydrates and snacking um fasting has shown the ability um how can i put this so okay fasting has shown the ability to decrease insulin resistance um like in extreme cases people may need bariatric surgery you know the stomach stapling and it's 95 usually successful in returning diabetes markers to normal range fasting provides the same level of results there's um a sort of secondary effect that can uh decrease high blood pressure as fasting lowers uh triglycerides and ldl cholesterol by up to 30 percent uh i actually was on high blood pressure medicine i was so you know large um and uh through fasting um i was able to get off the meds so thank goodness for that and i believe many age-related diseases can be linked to increased inflammation and fasting improves c-reactive protein markers studies have shown fasting to protect against the accumulation of proteins in the brain responsible for alzheimer's and it may have other cognitive effects i mean a byproduct is during that first initial week fasting is i read dr fung's 300 page book in like a few hours that's totally unusual for me i mean i take like an hour to read one article i barely read so i mean subtitles no english but uh autophagy sorry this earpiece keeps on like dragging and stuff so okay autophagy let's talk about autophagy you might want to know about that autophagy is uh essentially cellular self-eating uh it's also kind of the new buzzword won the 2016 nobel prize in physiology and medicine for his work on uh autophagy so essentially here's what it is after glycogen levels are depleted and gluconeogenesis is completed 12 to 24 hours typically autophagy and increased apoptosis which is programmed cell death occurs so your body is um also preferential and in a fasted state will start to break down old degenerated cells um damage organelles and has a tendency to eat marked cells you know like the pre-cancerous type so the second you introduce protein or carbohydrates mtor activates and autophagy stops so all the good stuff that was happening all this cleaning stops so theoretically you can take on fat calories and still incur autophagy um but you know that's now i'm going off on a tangent but prolonged fasting also promotes uh telomere growth which is a biomarker for longevity that's why it's brought up a lot uh in regards to aging uh and it makes sense now that animals don't want to eat when they're sick right they want to regenerate so um you know high density areas of centenarians come from places like okinawa latin america um prisoners of war they had drastically different diets those groups but for one reason or another like religion had fasting in common i'm inclined to see fasting as a stressor similar to exercise you know sort of breaking and rebuilding stronger so um let's talk about the different types of fasting uh fasting options you have um you don't have to abstain from eating for five days or do the 30 day water fast like i did um you can eat once every 24 hours once again the spartan diet or omad one meal a day which is sort of what i do in combination with the 5-2 16-8 is it is a good introductory type intermittent fast or time-restricted eating where you only eat during an eight hour window twenty and four is a step up you can guess you fast for 20 hours you eat for four four hour window there's the one one it's an altered alternate day so one day with food and then another day followed by another day of under 500 um calories hopefully nutritious and then there's the five two where the two fasting days of your choice could be consecutive it could be you know separated um but those days you eat under 500 calories it sort of tricks your brain into thinking that you're in a fast state that's also kind of part of what dr walter longo does with this fasting mimicking diet but i think he goes into the actual specific types of food um to enhance its effects um but all have shown the same impact on insulin resistance cholesterol high blood pressure and inflammation so however there there are no concrete answers as to like autophagy results with the different types of fast with the shorter intermittent type vests there might be some sort of like cumulative effect and you maybe could once again theoretically incorporate times of only fat calories to activate autophagy um autophagy i just bit my inner uh mouth uh does that count as breaking the fast because i think i just drew blood i'm just kidding but let's see by being in um like theoretically so what i'm thinking is by being in a constant state of ketosis through like high fat low carb you can hypothetically lessen the time to ghrelin suppression um which is another um thing to point out if you're worried about feeling hungry all the time um and it could also like sort of like decrease the time to get to autophagy if your body is used to the keto uh you know being in ketosis um so that might be a way around not having to do prolonged fats but um you know you could do a combination combining a ketogenic type diet and intermittent fasting um they kind of uh seem to supplement each other and have increasingly beneficial effects so um that being said fasting just don't think of it as a diet it's not a diet you just occasionally buy whatever method you choose don't eat whatever diet you are on um i know that it seems typical that one of the pushbacks is oh you're going to lose a lot of protein muscle loss because of fasting to me is a myth although there is some protein lost through gluconeogenesis why would the body store energy as fat if it's intended to use muscle as fuel right so studies have shown that in a daily calorie restricted diet versus intermittent fasting lean body mass actually increased increased in those that fasted and did a better job of like skin tightening which i would want but anyways um probably more exciting to me though was um sort of thinking about the and let me pull it up right here um the other health benefits specif specifically um there it is specifically dealing with um chemotherapy so these behind me are um from a documentary um i pulled it um it's not my work dna uh strands from the heart liver and muscle tissues um so you can see um three of those and the one uh at the top that is uh expression from no days of fasting of the heart liver and muscle cells and um the second one is day is an expression from day two from two days of fasting um and what the scientists are trying to show is that these cells what it's conveying to them is it's it's changing into a protected straight uh state and um and you can see at the very bottom it's an expression from two days of fasting from a healthy cell versus a cancerous cell so you can see how how different these cells have reacted depending on the state of their uh nutritional intake ie fasting so essentially cancer cells apparently hate the invite the low glucose low igf-1 grown growth factor environment of a fasted state which may potentiate the the chemotherapy effects and mitigate its side effects so it sounds sort of counterintuitive right to tell a patient undergoing chemotherapy therapy not to get nutritious meals before treatment but many studies are showing otherwise [Music] it's interesting because fasting may help may keyword may help chemotherapy patients mitigate side effects associated with treatment sort of by encouraging vital cells into this protected state and conversely cancerous cells pushing them into an unprotected state so um you know that being said it's not you know fasting is something you should take seriously that's why i gave the disclaimer in the beginning you know there are potential problems i mean people with a bmi of 18 and a half or under that doesn't really make sense because you don't have a lot of stored fat right people who are already on insulin medication you know in a fasted state you're changing your insulin resistance and if you're on insulin medication you got to be aware that that could be a problem um potential electrolyte deficiencies and extended fasts of longer than 14 days that's why usually people supplement with like multivitamins himalayan pink salt puts potentially like additional magnesium and and and potassium um i can tell you when i was on my 30-day fast by like the second or third week i did start to feel faint and i fainted a couple of times and uh reintroducing salt just taking maybe like you know just a little pinch of salt throughout the day rectified it it was no longer fainting um another thing that you got to be aware of is re-feeding too quickly from uh these long extended fasts that can definitely lead to some uh issues but speaking of re-feeding people seem to recommend refeeding slowly with um like vegetables and fruit like watermelon and that sounds counter-intuitive to me if you're fasting you've already exhausted your glycogen supplies your body is using fat for food why would you want to confuse it by introducing like watermelon which i've heard a lot of which has you know sugar it's i mean it just doesn't make sense so how i've broken my face is i start off with uh drinking broth the longer it is the longer i do this broth process this intermediate reintroducing of food this refeeding of food then i go to eggs hard-boiled you know and then i'll introduce more fats so re-feeding slowly is definitely recommended and my um inclination i gravitate towards re-feeding with fats and maybe some greens but whatever uh and then the biggest other problem is compliance right it ain't gonna work if you don't do it so uh a lot of people struggle with the mental aspect of what i'm not eating but i'm telling you i mean by the the first time i ever did it by the third day i was not hungry and i was amazed like the second day i was not hungry and uh and and i was amazed so let's put this background away um most prescribed extended fast i believe are like no longer than 14 days if you know there are some facilities that assist you and monitor you um and actually prescribe these longer fasts like dr jason fung um and uh usually not done unless in anything but like uh extreme cases uh longer than that i would classify as extreme fasting like the 30 days or 40 days um the point is the average human body has enough stored fat reserves energy reserves to last you 40 days so if you're you know thinking about like two three dares or intermittent fasting don't i mean once again do your own research but that's not something to worry about as far as supplements i couldn't find any real definitive answers most professionals and fasting clinics have shown no impactful drops in nutrition levels uh nutrient levels as the body self-regulates excuse me they don't usually prescribe any supplements but for these you know longer fast past 14 days some people argue that you might want to supplement or your choice of water determines the need to supplement um you know i think the recommendation is you want to drink distilled water to avoid contaminants and toxins and fluoride um but then you do lose like the magnesium and the potassium and the chloride so thus the suggestion to add these um if you are gonna do some sort of like extended um extended fast so um i guess final word is there's still a lot of information uh yet to be studied um still might be a controversial topic more research to be made questions to to ask but at this point from people a thousand times smarter than me uh it all seems like the conclusion is fasting seems like a promising and relatively safe way to promote your health and don't forget fasting is free what more can you ask right so anyways i hope you got some information maybe got the ball rolling i'll put some links in the description below blah blah blah erase that image of me when i was like a thousand pounds from your brain and i wave my bye bye

Channel: Michael Merto

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Id: 28SkjZRqEYw

Length: 30min 46sec (1846 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020