The INSANE BENEFITS Of Fasting For Weight Loss & PREVENTING Disease! | Dr. Jason Fung

this distinction between chronic caloric restriction and fasting um that I find really interesting and led us for the sake of this discussion assume that we have a person who is willing to endure an unlimited amount of suffering um and you even you've talked a lot about the book Unbroken that you read about World War II people in Japanese concentration camps and they were literally being starved and obviously all of them got lean so what I want to understand is okay fasting seems to have all these tremendous benefits chronic caloric restriction has some but also has like this really damaging psychological component if there was no damaging psychological component would they be equal or is there still some difference it all depends on how you do the caloric restriction so because it's not just about the calories it's about the hormones right so you have to sort of take it not to sort of this two compartment problem you have to take it to like a three compartment problem right there's what's coming in there's what's stored and there's what's being used okay so most people only think of sort of the two compartments and then the storage is sort of left over that's not the way the Body Works if insulin is high your body is going to store calories remember insulin is a nutrient sensor it tells your body that hey energy is coming in you're eating you need to store some of this right and so so you eat breakfast lunch dinner you get somebody on a low calorie diet like if you were on 700 calories a day but I gave you insulin could I make you fat yeah absolutely whoa because think about it this way if you have insulin your body and so if you think about it physiologically if you have insulin your body goes into a storage mode because it's a hormone insulin is a hormone it tells your body food is coming in and even if you don't give food if you just give insulin you're going to switch your body into this mode where it thinks that food is coming in so it's going to store energy so imagine that for example you are a coal you know a coal uh plants right the power plant you get 2 000 tons of coal coming in and you burn 2 000 tons of coal that's fine if you have a storage compartment too so if you're you know if you do a thought experiment say say you have 2 000 tons of coal coming in but you divert the whole thing over to uh or a thousand tons of coal into storage well you only have a thousand left so you're going to feel tired and cold and hungry and you're going to get fat at the same time right that's what's going to happen but it's because of the way that you've diverted off the energy so think about it from a human body standpoint suppose you have 2 000 calories coming in 2 000 calories going out now you artificially inject insulin well you shuttle a thousand calories immediately into body fat and you have a thousand calories left to burn well what's going to happen your your body heat generation is going to go down your heart rate is going to slow you're going to feel tired you're going to feel hungry because you want to get more energy right that's the signal for you to get more energy so that you can get more you can burn more guess what that's exactly what happens when you go on a chronic calorie restricted diet and the the point is that if you do it correctly and you you correct that insulin part of things so that none of it's going into storage and you can't do that with chronic calorie restriction you certainly can but you have to know that you have to do it properly like cutting out processed foods cutting out refined carbohydrates that kind of thing but it all depends on that sort of that sort of toggle in the middle that says how much goes here how much grease here insulin what it does is it tells your body to store fat but it also turns off fat burning remember fat is purely a store of energy it's a store of calories so you're immediately shuttling all your energy into storage and you have nothing left so say you take uh 700 calories that you're pumping people full of insulin so that energy is going to go into into uh storage and 700 is probably the lower limit of what you could really do but your body would then try to subsist on say five six hundred calories of energy you get really hungry because you're you've got no energy coming in you probably wouldn't be able to last very long but you can still gain weight there's a great experiment a few years ago where they actually took the type 2 diabetics and they gave them a lot of insulin so they went from zero units a day to 100 units a day over a span of six months which is a lot and they dropped the number of calories that they ate by 300 okay so they're taking insulin but they're eating less 700 300 calories a day less so over the span of six months on average that group gained 20 pounds 20 pounds by eating 300 calories a day less why because so let's take an example you're eating 2 000 calories you go down to 1700 but the insulin is shuttling 700 of that immediately off to storage so you're gaining body fat now your body can only burn 1 000 calories a day so you feel like crap you feel tired you feel hungry and you're still gaining weight and guess what if you do it wrong which is constantly snacking and eating cutting out all the dietary fat and eating all refined carbohydrates which remember is almost precisely what we told people to do in the 80s and 90s oh I remember it well yeah actually I had a tub of licorice because it was fat free and I would just eat it and eat it I'm like it's fat free what's happening why am I getting fat yeah that was a very confusing time it makes perfect sense from like because but you have to think of that additional step that is what is the body actually doing it's this sort of flip the switch so when you eat your storing body fat what you don't eat when insulin is going down you're going to burn body fat you're actually going to you can't burn body fat if insulin is high it technically we say it inhibits lipolis let's ask then the reverse question so I fully accept that all food is a signaling molecule That's triggering a Some Cascade of hormones I know what to do if I want to store a lot of fat I'm going to eat a lot of processed carbohydrates that are going to remove all my Society mechanisms and it's going to spike my blood glucose like crazy my body's gonna pump a bunch of insulin to make sure that that gets pulled out of the bloodstream I'm going to get fat okay is there a diet that's optimized on the exact opposite side where I'm taking in a very satiating amount of calories but it's dropping my insulin or failing to trigger my insulin is maybe the right way to think of it and therefore I'm eating maybe more than your average bear but I'm actually getting leaner certainly lots of them uh there and the principles are much the same one is you want to avoid sugar because sugar the way that we process fructose is sort of particularly bad and that's why sugar is particularly fattening really and that's that's true if you're a bear you're eating a lot of ripe berries and stuff because you're trying to gain fat and it's also true as anybody knows if you're eating a lot of cookies and brownies you're probably going to gain weight the um the other thing is you can't eat all the time because again it's a cycle between feeding and fasting that's what we're supposed to do if you don't give your body time to burn off all those calories that it's taken in which means the fasting period you're gonna overall gain weight it's like a one-way valve if you go in but don't come out eventually everything just gets bigger same thing that energy cannot come out if your insulin levels are high that's just the way it's designed and it's sort of like you know if you see a tanker you know those tanker trucks on the side of the road sometimes you think oh they'll never run out of fuel because they have all this fuel but they do run out of fuel of course because you can't access that fuel that's in that big container same thing with your body fat right it's locked away if you do not lower your insulin levels you will never have access to those stores of energy once you lower it hey all that energy just comes flowing in and and for people who are who are on Long who have done longer fast and this is what's so interesting about the whole process when you actually do it is that the hunger starts to go down significantly the psychological hunger goes up because people are like oh I really want to eat that but the physical hunger actually tends to go down meaning it's measured by things like ghrelin or whatever so hunger hormones and so on and and people you talk to people and you know I've done it live I know lots of people have done it and they they all say the same thing by day three day four the hunger is almost completely disappeared and why is that well because you're fueling yourself from your body fat stores and therefore you actually have no no need to eat it's it's it's it's an interesting process which people never think about but it's completely physiologic yeah so I've done my longest fast was five days I've done many fasts that are 24 hours to 72 hours I find 72 while not pleasant I find it relatively easy I don't decline in performance but day four and five I do and I'm super curious to know if I am doing something wrong like am I supposed to be supplementing and I'm talking a true water only fast um should I be eating salt should I be taking magnesium like what what is it yeah everybody's different certainly some people salt is probably the main thing people get into trouble with because we're on a relatively high salt diet and then to go to a sort of zero which is water only zero salt is a bit of a transition sometimes so some people find that their pressure blood pressure goes low um and uh that that makes them not feel so good so a lot of people have found better from taking salt either salt and water or just the salt the like a under their tongue even magnesium is another one that that tendo low and some people find it helpful to supplement there as well the other things that people find useful is to take some broth for example which is going to give you it's not a true fast none of these I was gonna say that sounds like cheating to me yeah they're they're sort of like um I call them variants because they're not the water only fast is really a true fast but you can get a lot of the benefits by taking some of these other things and it makes it easier so it's a sort of a trade-off it's sort of like Bulletproof Coffee which is of course not fasting but it's a very very pure sort of fat and therefore it's going to provide a lot of satiety and then that you go through the day maybe it allows you to go long and overall you might wind up positive in terms of uh weight loss and so on so lots of people certainly have found that useful not everybody but certainly it's it's that but water only fast can be more difficult because of the associated electrolyte uh problems your body is supposed to handle it but it doesn't always sure so if we're looking at longevity and we want to prolong life as much as possible and anti-cancer in fact this might be the perfect transition into your uh brilliant synthesis of what's going on from cancer Paradigm 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0 I found that absolutely fascinating in your new book cancer code it was subtle and yet changes everything and if you can just like give a quick sort of thesis on that one two three thing I think that really help people yeah yeah and and you know I'm not the one who made it up I just was the one to sort of explain it sort of in an accessible way and honestly it's It's the Most Fascinating story in medicine today I think is cancer because it's undergone this tremendous change in the last sort of 10 20 years and no one even talks about it and what I talk about is sort of the these modern paradigms of cancer so the way that we look at cancer and the reason they're important is because they determine what sort of treatments we use so the first sort of modern Paradigm of cancer is sort of this cancer is a cell that grows too much so you have breast cancer for example you have a breast cell now something happens to that normal breast cell okay so it starts off as a normal cell but somehow mutates into this breast cancer cell or this lung cancer cell and this lung cancer cell then grows and grows and grows and then it moves around and spreads or this is called metastasis then you die so the first Paradigm is hey this is a cell that grows too much so therefore our treatments are actually ways to kill cells and that's the sort of core of modern oncology is to cut it out which is surgery you can burn it with radiation or you can poison it with chemotherapy chemotherapy is really nothing more than a selective toxin it kills some cells faster than it kills another cell so that's why you have these horrific side effects their hair falls out they nauseated all the stuff you think about with chemotherapy is because the idea of chemotherapy is to kill the cancer slightly faster than you kill the patient that's really it it's a selective toxin but that's the Paradigm and it makes sense from that you know because if it's if it's growing too much then kill it that's basically it now that reaches limits probably by the 60s and by then we're talking about genetics so everybody started to look at genetics and then that's the sort of next huge paradigm shift is that we were trying to understand at a deeper level not we weren't saying that cancer cells didn't grow the question we're trying to ask is why are they growing and so we said well the answer now is that they have genetic mutations that lets them grow too much and sure enough when we looked we found these onko genes and tumor suppressor genes so genes that control growth and when this cell gets a mutation in one of these critical genes then it would grow too much and that made perfect sense so the point of of something like lung cancer and smoking because we know smoking for you know clearly causes lung cancer smoking is not a targeted mutation device it's very non-specific you're just creating damage all over the place so what they said was that this is a random genetic mutation so you're just creating damage in the genome and if you're damaging a lot you're getting a lot of chances to hit this critical growth Gene area and it's going to let cells grow so this was the the genetic Paradigm which really has dominated cancer medicine for the last 50 years and so instead of trying to kill cells this led to new treatments and instead of trying to kill cells we're trying to correct the genes that controlled it and the first few drugs of the sort of genetic Paradigm were just amazing so by the 2000s we were like we are going to cure cancer so we did this whole Human Genome Project we said all we need to do is map out all the genes look at the cancers map out those genes and see what's different we're going to find one or two genetic mutations we're going to find a drug to cure that one or two genetic mutations boom we're going to cure cancer and that was really what we thought at the time it was a time of incredible promise but it didn't work that was like if you look at the number of genetic treatments of cancer that really made a difference you're talking maybe five right in the last 40 years five really good drugs that's not a lot and that's a long way from curing cancer and the problem is when we went back so they did the Human Genome Project then they did this cancer genome Atlas where they mapped out all these genes they took 30 000 cancers mapped out the genes and said what are the one or two critical genetic mutations they didn't find one or two each cancer had like 50 or 100 genetic mutations and and it was crazy because if you had a Cancer Clinic where one patient had lung cancer so patient a had lung cancer patient B had lung cancer patient A's lung cancer had 50 mutations patient B had 50 mutations completely different mutations so how are you going to treat this you can't get 50 drugs for patient a and 50 completely new drugs per patient B it's just impossible and that's why cancer treatment just sort of slowed to an absolute crawl I was just uh you know a huge amount of disappointment um and that sort of spelled the end it wasn't a random genetic mutation so it wasn't that genes weren't mutated it was what is driving these mutations and that sort of spawned this whole next paradigm shift to cancer Paradigm 3 which so few people people talk about and I don't understand why because I I find it endlessly fascinating and what we were trying to do we weren't trying to uh invalidate that these genetic mutations because clearly these genes had mutations what we're trying to understand was once again try and get to that one level deeper of why why are these genes mutating and the totally fascinating answer that they came up with is that it was an evolutionary process not a forward moving evolutionary process it was a backwards evolutionary process towards a more primitive form of our cell which was there from Evolution and what's fast is that if you look at Pathologists like the way that people who look under the the microscope at cells that is exactly how they describe cancer cells primitive uh undifferentiated like gotta use you use an analogy or a metaphor in the book about a bear and a tutu that I thought oh my God like it lets you conceptualize what this is so perfectly will you walk people through that yeah and the point is that the cancer is actually a reversion to a more primitive form of the cell and it's a sort of like if you have a wild bear you can raise it and teach it to dance and wear a tutu but it's still a wild animal so if you provoke it it'll still kill you like it'll still wear a tutu but it'll still kill you so it reverts to being that wild animal and our cells are very much like that so we came from unicellular organisms so all of us sort of evolved from small bacterias and so on fungi and so on and under the right conditions these cells actually undergo an evolutionary process back towards this more survivalist sort of primitive cell a single-celled organism its primary mandate is to compete with other cells as opposed to a multicellular organism which its mandate is cooperation and they are fundamentally against each other as we move from cellular competition to Cellular cooperation we had to put on all these instructions on top these genetic instructions to suppress all these competitive urges when you cause genetic damage and strip away you damage all these sort of controlling layers what shines through is that competitive nature and then the cells those cancer cells actually behave exactly like unicellular organisms and that's fascinating again because our own immune system has actually identified these cells as foreign cells like there are you know immune cells in our body that identify sort of self our own Cells versus other cells so you avoid Friendly Fire and cancer cells are actually identified intrinsically without being having seen them ever before your own body will identify these as foreign cells and Destroy them and that's really the reason why we don't have cancer sort of uh with 99 of the population because when you suppress the immune system of course you increase your risk significantly of developing these cancers because it's our immune system which is playing that anti-cancer role so what you're trying to do is weed out so our body has these very efficient anticancer mechanisms where we go around and we're hunting down these sort of you know anarchists and stuff trying to these people who are not going to follow the rules who are who are competitors not Cooperators we try and hunt those down and we kill them so that we stay cancer-free it's only at the end of you know only with time uh when stuff falls through or with chronic damage such as with lung uh lung cancer for example the smoking that that you're damaging the genome and those controlling organisms and allowing to shine through which is called an activism which explains a huge amount like that this Theory just explains so much about cancer because if you think about say let's take lung cancer again so you have 50 mutations in patient a 50 different mutations in cancer in in patient B but their lung cancers look exactly the same under the microscope how does that happen like if you have a hundred mutations your cell should look completely different than this other guy cell yet they look precisely the same under the microscope it's because it was the original sort of cell You're simply stripping stuff away you're not adding mutations on you're actually stripping those away and what's fascinating is that the genetic so all this genetic stuff that we've done when you look at the mutations of cancer they're all concentrated in this area which is the the the difference between unicellular and multicellular organisms so they did these studies where they take all the genes and they say let's rank them by evolutionary age so these are the ancient genes these are the recent genes and they put them on and then they say where are the cancer mutations the truth is hitting your career goals is not easy you have to be willing to go the extra mile to stand out and do hard things better than anybody else but there are 10 steps I want to take you through that will 100x your efficiency so you can crush your goals and get back more time into your day you'll not only get control of your time you'll learn how to use that momentum to take on your next big goal to help you do this I've created a list of the 10 most impactful things that any High achiever needs to dominate and you can download it for free by clicking the link in today's description alright my friend back to today's episode they're all clustered right around the point between unicellular and multicellular organisms I'm like that is so interesting so then of course the reason it's important is because now you have if this is an evolutionary problem if these are actually unicellular organisms well now we actually have ways to fight these unicellular organisms and that's our immune system and that's to this sort of explosion and interest in immunotherapy because we're not trying to kill cells with immunotherapy we're not trying to um we're not trying to fix genetic mutations what we're trying to do is treat these cancers like a foreign species like an invasive foreign species and be able to identify them and also bolster our own immune system to attack them but now you're getting a totally different Paradigm because you're the concept of what this disease is it's an evolutionary disease which requires immune system to fight it because that's our own defenses that's fascinating like that's a totally different Paradigm and such an interesting uh way to look at it and it's going to lead to all these new treatments so in the book I talk about immunotherapy we talk about the obscopal effect which is how radiation plus immunotherapy may actually help unearth these things we talk about adaptive therapy where perhaps you don't have to give maximally tolerated doses of chemotherapy because you may not need it it may be more effective to use smaller doses all stems from the understanding of The evolutionary Paradigm of cancer as opposed to the genetic Paradigm of cancer where you would never be able to understand why these treatments that are coming up now are going to be effective man this this is really feels and you talk about sort of the hope this brings in the book and it really does feel hopeful you know because if you've pursued something to a dead end it's like until you have another path to go down it's a pretty ugly place to be one of the things that you outline in the book that I thought was really enlightening is what it is exactly the you talk about the seed in the soil so what is it about our Modern Life that creates this soil that stresses the cell just enough that it is like sort of in scramble mode of whoa I have to I'm constantly looking for this new mutation or stack of mutations it's going to allow me some path through this cigarette smoke this dietary problem this whatever um if you can walk people through what we've sort of done to the soil and please if you can't mention the when you talked about the bomb in in Hiroshima and Nagasaki how they were expecting a certain cancer rate but they didn't get it and why that is so interesting yeah I thought I thought so too thanks this concept is that you need both genetics as well as the environment like both are important I'm not saying one is more important but you have to have a seed which is obviously all the genetic material that you need to become a plant for example but you have to plant it in the right soil so you take a seed you put it in the desert it doesn't grow you put a seed put it in proper soil and give it water it grows so cancer the seed is there in every single one of our cells in not just us but every animal practically that we know has that seed of cancer because cancer of course is our sort of genetic ancestor that that was the unicellular organism from way way back yeah exactly the selfish sort of the unicellular organism but that seed of cancer is there luckily if we prevent it from growing by using the proper soil we can actually prevent it and you look at these things that cause um you know cause cancer they're called carcinogens uh turns out our diet is one of the biggest ones so other than tobacco smoke diet is sort of way up there and when you look at carcinogens there's a specific sort of thing that have to be chronic and they have to be sort of sub-leafly damaging which is the point about Hiroshima that is radiation we know causes cancer for sure so when they drop the atomic bomb they thought man we're going to get a lot of cancers coming down the pipes but it was a single large dose of radiation not a chronic low dose of radiation which does cause a lot of cancer so they did these Atomic uh they did these studies where they followed people for for years and years and there was a little bit of extra cancer but like on on average way less so when they estimate how many months of you know months or years of life lost it was like two months something like that so people these people were living like 82 years and they estimate that that that Atomic radiation maybe cost them like two months of Life way less because we are thinking that these people are going to get you know cancers at age 20 sort of thing and that didn't happen because it wasn't this chronic thing and that the reason it has to be chronic is that cancer is an evolutionary process if you do not have chronic selection pressure you don't get this change if you just change the mutations and you need they're going to be random and they need to occur over time they have to occur continuously because that's the way that selection Pressure Works in an evolution in a population of cells that is if you if you select for certain cells and do it once that's not going to be that effective if you keep selecting for those cells like you only take the the the the cells that are sort of survivalists which are the the sort of more primitive cells then you over time you're going to select the population that's going to have more of those sort of survivalist cells if you have a single event there's no further selection pressure that is uh if you look at you know if you look at evolution of species it's the same thing you can't simply have one event it has to be a continuous selection pressure that produces that change and that's why it has to be a chronic thing so it's tobacco smoking for example you look at viruses so if you have a single terrible virus like hepatitis A which is causes feminent hepatic failure it kills you but it doesn't give you cancer as opposed to Hepatitis B which is a chronic virus it doesn't kill you but it certainly does give you cancer H pylori in the stomach for example a very low-grade chronic infection is what gives you cancer not a single sort of feminine episode of of inflammation that doesn't give you cancer so um you know all of these these sort of things UV light and so on they're all chronic damage and that's part of that soil and diet plays a huge role and the promise of course is that if you look at traditional populations like when they looked at populations that live very simply so very low sugar very natural foods they weren't eating all the time very little obesity so people in Africa that they had studied Dennis Burkett in the 50s and 60s and then in the Inuit people which live in the far north for example they used to say these Expeditions up to the Arctic Circle to find why these these native peoples these Inuit were immune to cancer then of course they became civilized we gave them you know sugar we gave them white flour because they didn't go bad then they got all the same cancers turns out they weren't immune at all it was their environment it was the soil that was so important but the promise is that if you can fix that soil that means you could actually overcome the genetics not in all cases but in many cases especially of these obesity Associated cancers the breast cancer colorectal and so on and that's the sort of really important thing in the sort of take-home message for a lot of people is that the diet actually plays a massive role and by understanding it perhaps you can reduce your risk of cancer and that's where fasting as a way to control your weight as a way to control type 2 diabetes which is a risk factor as those are going to lower the risk factor for obesity which is a big risk factor for those obesity Associated cancers but it's your lifestyle that's going to play a big role not necessarily some drug that's or anything like that so it's all in your own hands it's amazing that that is truly amazing now as one sort of final point on this is is The Chronic stressor is that simply being tipped into growth mode or is it inflammation coupled with the fact that we're tipped into growth mode like what is it specifically about our diet that's causing this perfect soil for mutations over time um that leads to cancer I think they're I think both are are correct so if you have a chronic hyperinsulinemia insulin is a very powerful growth factor uh inflammation as a cause of chronic damage in itself will cause cancer so you look at the disease such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn's colitis these are called the so-called inflammatory bowel diseases there's this chronic inflammation in the bowel and what you get is a super high risk of cancer down the down the line so both inflammation and hyperinsulinemia and obesity all of them are risk factors and this is the important thing is that there's a lot of different things that can contribute to the risk of cancer it's not just that if one is right then the other is wrong I mean both are correct so if you eat foods that are highly inflammatory and a lot of people feel that for example omega-6 seed oils perhaps are in in these big doses that we take perhaps those are highly inflammatory that even if it doesn't cause obesity could be a factor because we know inflammation chronic inflammation can certainly do that so both can be very important we really recommend there's two types of fasting there's there's short-term intermittent fasting which we recommend people do every day that everybody fast every day for between 12 and 16 hours depending on what your target is and that means that you don't eat at least three hours before you go to sleep hopefully going to sleep at a reasonable hour and so that gives you 12 to 16 hours of fasting and eight hour feeding window we recommend that that in that eight hour feeding window that the you know whole natural food diet that you eat excludes all the chemicals in the processed foods and the other stuff and in doing that you get the quantity and quality of nutrients you need and you give yourself a 16 per hour period of fasting every day and cumulatively that's thought to induce changes and and stimulate factors that are that promote healing it also helps minimize overeating and so you know the net effect of that intermittent fasting which virtually everybody can do safely on their own is something we recommend and then periodically we recommend people take a longer period of time to do water only fasting in our Clinic we fast people from 5 to 40 days and so typically faster two three four weeks of time that needs to be done in America only for people that are obese no no not at all in fact most of our patients uh it's high blood pressure diabetes autoimmune diseases lymphoma and we have also healthy people that are just coming in for a shorter period of time like a week the reason we talk about Supervision in that regard is number one not everybody's a good candidate for fasting some people should not be fasting give me something candidates well if people have for example Cranium levels over 2.0 their kidney function isn't adequate putting them on a fast could shut their kidneys down result in kidney failure and death um if they have sorry I've never heard that but why would your kidney shot because when you go on a fast you massively mobilize a detoxification response and the kidneys can only process so much material and if you overload the kidneys you end up with a kidney failure situation and that's you know you've heard recently there's been people that have tried dry fasting and dry fasting particularly puts a heavy load on the kidney and there was a death associated with one of its proponents just because you know you have to have a solute in order for the kidneys to function you have to have a way of getting the material that's mobilized out of the system why does fasting trigger detoxification well if you think about it when you're going on a fast there's nothing for the body to do except mobilize its reserves and in water fasting particularly in a resting state those reserves are predominantly fat in fact we've done a study recently at the True North Health Center where we've used a dexa scanner with a software that allows to do whole body composition we've determined not only is mostly fat mobilized during water only fasting but specifically and preferentially visceral fat so a person might lose say for example 20 of their adipose tissue but they'll lose 50 60 percent of their of their visceral fat which is really exciting much faster than for example being on a a low carbohydrate diet in terms of the ratio of visceral fat mobilization to uh subcutaneous fat and in that fat contains a lot of fat soluble materials and that's where a lot of toxins are stored when those fats are mobilized you get a increasing load pcbs dioxin pesticide residues Etc all these fat soluble nutrients are rapidly mobilized processed and eliminated but you need to have the capacity to actually eliminate materials and most of those materials are eliminated in the urine that's the blood being processed by the kidneys and if you do a fat bopsy on any person you'll find hundreds of different chemicals in various concentrations and if you track back how did those chemicals get in the body where did they come from obviously if people take drugs or they smoke and they drink alcohol and they eat foods from the environment that are polluted that's a 10 potential Source but about 90 percent According to some researchers got there from one behavior and that's eating animal Foods animals biologically concentrate the toxins from their environment so a calorie of animal food could have two to a thousand times the concentration of a given chemical compared to say a plant-based Food calorie and so the consumption of large amounts of animal food potentially exposed people to proportionally higher ratios of these materials and it's also why people on very high animal food diets often have a much more difficult time adapting to the fasting State initially because there's just literally more to process and eliminate but it does and so that's particular I might mention true of refined animal products just like refined plant products have particular problems so I think we need to be clear that it's actually these highly processed foods of any kind that seem to be the biggest sources of concentration of of chemicals it's not necessarily the brown rice that's the main problem that might be the rice syrup or it's the products that the highly concentrated products that result in the largest concentrations of materials on undesirable materials when you fast though the body rapidly mobilizes these materials if you fast and exercise them once you've depleted your glycogen stores after say 24 or 48 Hours the only way the body would get the needed glucose to maintain muscle activity or excess brain activity would be through gluconeogenesis you'd have to break down proteins in order to get that so what happens is if you fast and exercise you actually lose more weight but more of its lean tissue if you fast and rest you you mobilize predominantly fat and specifically and preferentially visceral fat so in addition to making sure a person's a good candidate for fasting with a History exam and lab we also need to make sure they rest during fasting now there's modified fasting when you take a certain amount of calories therefore you have more glucose available you're able to you know minimize gluconeogenesis that's a different process water only fasting though needs to be done resting if you're going to maximize detox preserve lean tissue and maximize fat loss and that we've been able to prove now in a we've actually done this and we've done you know before during after fasting six week follow-ups we've got the data and so we can put a lot of the old wives tales to rest that paper will be published later this year and and I think that'll really make people aware of just why this rest which is so contrain to people trying to maximize weight loss is important with fasting and you know if the goal is to really detoxify the best way to do it is Prep properly before fasting really important people that try to say quit coffee at the same time they're going on a fast really undermine themselves because the caffeine withdrawal is actually quite difficult fasting isn't so difficult if you prep well all of a sudden fasting doesn't even look that hard people go to cooking classes they're interact they go down to the dining room they interact with people even on these long fast two three four five weeks and they're do they do fine but they are resting and so resting in some ways is a little bit harder but it's more effective I say it's harder because you'll detox more you'll feel worse but we don't care how you feel we care how well you get so if you you feel bad and fasting doesn't bother me as long as you get well you'll totally forgive us and so next time you fast you want to make sure you rest during that doesn't mean you can't do some stretching you can't do meditation there's things you can do but they're more passive and then you look at how your recovery is plus fasting you'll find it's really quite fabulous because not only you get rid of the inflammation and the joint pain and some of the chronic injuries but then you recover quickly and we and we're able to demonstrate that quantitatively now as as lean tissue recovers fat continues to go down after fasting so you're losing fat you're losing fat you continue lose fat even though you're regaining quote weight because glycogen water fiber and muscle come back after fasting fat does not what's interesting is you have two pounds of glycogen so you know you're going to get that two pound back you've got fiber that has to go back in the gut unless you're eating an all meat diet then there is no fiber and there's also hydration there's a physiological dehydration with fasting now that's more when you're exercising you dehydrate more so it looks like you're losing more weight but all you're doing is dehydrating why are you dehydrating if you're drinking water it doesn't matter if you're drinking water if it's you hold it in the cells there's a physiological adaptation to fasting where there's a natural dehydration State it's probably part of the conservation mechanism there's a lot of weird things that happen very contrain fasting like for example you know we talked about exercise increasing brain derived neurotrophic factor that preserves the brain and protects the nervous system it also increases in fasting you think about exercise you're vigorously active fasting you're laying on your around and not doing much they both are changing these same things in the same way it's it's really really um non-intuitive but when we look at the science if we look at the data and then we look at the clinical outcomes it's really apparent and now we're tracking people 30 35 years I've got people now that are in their 80s that we started off in their 50s and they all say the same thing including my mother who at 92 had outlived all 50 of her lifelong friends every one of her friends was dead she was alone and she said Alan you need to warn your patient if they're going to do this diet make younger friends so I'm telling people starting right now make younger friends so when you're older and you're still around you know they'll you'll have people to interact with that I mean you know still heartbreaking but good problem to have so talk to me about the longer duration fast so I know that the longest fast is like 280 days or I mean just something absolutely absurd so I knew that it was physiologically possible but I imagined it was more proportional to the amount of body fat that you have but like somebody with a normal BMI um maybe we'll Peg them at something like 15 body fat how long can they fast water right so an a 155 pound 70 kilogram male okay could go 70 days the problem is once you get through fasting you enter a process called starvation and now once you enter starvation there's a relatively short period of time and then you die we don't do that because it would really be bad for our outcome data so we're very careful to avoid that we've had 20 000 walking in 20 000 people walk out we are experts at not letting people enter into starvation the other thing with fasting while we're talking about risks is the refeeding period if you have a long period of fasting and you refeed inappropriately you can get a condition called refeeding syndrome which can be fatal it's a very serious problem where electrolyte balances and all kinds of stuff can occur we've never seen that because we have a very specific refeeding protocol that's followed and we refeed for a period of no less than half the length of the fast in a controlled setting so it is it is important you can also get a condition called post-fasting edema when you get off all the greasy salty processed crap that people are living on and you do a fast all that gets flushed out of the body if you then expose a person to very high concentrations of sodium like in commercial soups or something like that the body will suck that material and fluid up to protect itself from it and that can result in post-fasting edema if you do it slowly you can get back to whatever your normal diet was without that problem but it has to happen over a period of time so there's a refeeding period that's important particularly in this long-term fasting you know in the three day the five day fast for most people that's not going to result in you know as much of it of an issue they may get a belly ache if they eat eat too much food but they're not going to get the very serious consequences as you can see in very long-term fasting now the other concern here is of course medications some medications you don't want to rapidly discontinue anticoagulant medication steroid medications any psychotic medications the rapid withdrawal of those medications can induce a very serious or life-threatening response some medications you want to get off as soon as possible but you don't want to be taking those medications during fasting so medications that might not do that much Dam damage feeding can be very serious fasting even non-sterily anti-inflammatories in common over-the-counter medications in the fasting State strongly contraindicated result in all kinds of Downstream consequences supplementation is included lots of complications in the fasting State whereas you wouldn't necessarily see any problem in the feeding State that's one of the reasons we talk about making sure before a person undertakes a long-term fast they have appropriate History exam and lab remember 99 of patients have no complications with fasting but one percent can have very serious complications important that percentage be identified monitored so you don't end with bad outcomes because that's what gives fasting a bad name is people doing it inappropriately they continue to work they get dehydrated which is one of the main issues with fasting is maintaining adequate hydration and drinking water itself won't assure that in fact drinking too much water can flush your electrolytes out and result in water intoxication so if we do not solve the problem drinking water how do we solve the problem right we solve it by resting maintaining appropriate hydration and allow the natural recycling mechanisms in the body to maintain nutritional status and monitoring people so that we don't get into a depleted State that's why we're monitoring electrolytes that's why we do twice daily examinations on patients so it is a safe and natural adaptation if we remember fasting is a biological adaptation you notice everybody every human can fast we have to be able to fast every human that couldn't fast died because every time spring came late there was no way to sustain this bulbous neural net our massively oversized brain two and a half times the vast of say a chimp chimps don't fast you don't feed a chip in a week or so they're dead they that's why you'll never see chimps wandering away from the tropics they live where the constant year-round supply of food because their brain doesn't change to burning ketones your brain is a bi-fuel brain it changes completely the normal fuel is glucose and that's your main burner of glucose is your brain that's the biggest thing and when the brain goes into fasting state it changes to burning Ketone bodies particularly beta hydroxybutyric acid and it becomes preferentially burning it just runs a tiny little bit of glucose and that's the little bit of gluconeogenesis that continues during fasting unless you're active then of course your muscles burn glucose and now you really start breaking muscle down so um the brain being a biofuel brain had to be that way because otherwise humans when spring came late because we burned so much glucose in our brain we wouldn't have been able to make it and this is the mechanism by which fasting mimicking diets and keto diets play because if you go on a very high fat diet or a high fat high protein diet which some people do and you don't eat carbohydrates this fasting mechanism kicks in so your brain changes over to burning ketones you go into ketosis and it has a hunger blunting effect when you're in a ketotic state you don't feel hunger and as a consequence it helps people that are trying to do short-term weight loss the problem is what's good for short-term weight loss isn't necessarily the same thing that's best for long-term Health stability so in our Clinic we're not a weight loss clinic we're not looking to maximize gross weight on the scale over a short period of time we're interested in fat loss and improving health so we're looking at what does it take not only to live a long life everybody wants to live their full potential but more importantly how do you avoid ability how do you avoid spending the last 79.6 years in debility 16 years in poor health that the average person is doing how do you avoid finding yourself unable to talk or move lying in some nursing home bed waiting for people to change your diaper for the last years or Decades of your life how do you increase healthy life expectancy not just life expectancy the years you live fully functional how do you ensure a good death that means you live your life to your full potential one day you go to sleep you don't wake up because you reached your genetic potential and not become debilitated individual for years and decades where we spend most of our money ineffectively trying to manage illnesses that were caused by poor diet lifestyle choices that's what we're using fasting do is try to help healthy life expectancy and then a whole plant food SOS free diet to sustain it yeah so I think now Now's the Time to get into that so the whole idea of no salt no sugar no oil this was the thing that really pulled me in so we used to joke my last company was a nutrition company and we used to joke if it tastes good spit it out and it was just like it's so many things that taste good are just absolutely terrible for you and but you know that's because people are addicted to the artificial stimulation of these chemicals we've done a study a taste adaptation study we've shown with fasting your actual ability to detect salt and sugar your hedonic response to food actually changes and you can taste vegetables that are naturally high in sodium but most people don't you know like they don't notice it after fasting oh my gosh you think wow this is really amazing and so good food starts to taste good again and sometimes the stuff you used to like is too spicy too salty because your actual Paladin now it can adapt back go back to eating that jerky and stuff eventually you'll get back to you know craving the salt but the point is it's not as hard as people think it's going to be long term because you get to the point you actually would prefer you know know the the beans and Grains and nuts and seeds and these kind of things it's not just discipline you know that drives it except initially and that's where fasting can be helpful it makes that transition quicker you asked about how long do people have to fast well sometimes it only takes a few days of fasting to induce these real inhealthy people to induce these changes that's why people that maybe do a yearly fast of three to five days or seven days finding can be very helpful not just the detoxifying for the three days five days but the effect that it has and how they feel they can overcome their hypertension their diabetes their autoimmune diseases you know glucose and Insulin everybody's interested in glucose and it's particularly insulin it's profoundly affected by fasting fasting is one of the few things you can do to actually reverse insulin resistance you know what another thing that helps with insulin resistance is exercise that's why diabetics you got to get them eating right now is the smile because you're seeing another place where those two things line up it constantly repeats itself in fact that one of the things we did to save time was identify the markers that improve with exercise and then test them in fasting this is like it just saves a whole bunch of time because you know like for example igf-1 insulin growth factor one the lower the igf one the longer the animals live periodic fasting in rats for example you can double their lifespan just by doing periodic fasting like in what duration like just 16. well and remember rats are completely different than people so with rats you can only fast about four days as their potential not like humans which goes 70 days or more uh rats are very short so it's proportionally different time you don't compare days to days but the process of doing say for example every other day eating at living room will add you know significantly to the lifespan of the Rat why well they measured biomarkers and they found out that insulin growth factor goes down and that's associated with both fasting and exercise another one um leptin which is the the lower the leptin levels is associated with reduced inflammation and now the general theories are that inflammation largely responsible for all kinds of things not just the joint pain but also your heart disease and cancer possibly and kidney issues and so lower left and levels seem to be good leptin levels go down uh with fasting blood pressure or heart rate I already told you largest effect size ever shown treating hypertension in with with testing we have very dramatic and consistent results with that we're doing a study right now with the Mayo Clinic looking at it's a phase one clinical trial of the treatment of high blood pressure using fasting instead of medication the microbial load you have what five pounds of bacteria living in your intestinal tract a thousand strains of different bacteria living creatures eating and pooing inside you right now and what those bacteria pull in you depends on what you feed them and so if you feed um your bacteria soluble fibers which is their from our Viewpoint natural food you get vitamin K and fertilizer but if you feed them animal-based Foods you get completely different byproducts that are associated with increased inflammation so that's why we want to be careful about how much quantity particularly animal protein um the inflammation markers like if you look at il-6 and 10 Alpha and all these different markers they've identified that associate with inflammation they go down with exercise and fasting people that exercise regularly people that fast periodically have lower levels of these inflammatory markers but fasting doesn't just reduce things it also increases things so there's all kinds of markers now that have been identified going up with fasting things that improve and reduce inflammation ghrelin and adiponectin what is that yeah uh it's it's one of these markers that's associated with insulin sensitivity and inflammation ampk down regulates something else called pgc1 Alpha which is associated with increasing mitochondrial biogenesis so the actual energy producing guys that are live in your cells go up with fasting now if we were going to build out the ultimate fasting protocol and in fact what do you do annually I know you're doing doing the the narrowed eating window so maybe a 16-8 or something like that but when do you do a multi-day fast yeah so I I hate fasting yeah it's it's awful because you can't exercise you can't you know play basketball you can't you have to rest it's really awful but it's also very helpful so I do it every year I fast for a week our basic protocol is in healthy people you know that are on healthy diets uh generally have almost no downward symptoms during fasting they don't have hunger they don't have terrible healing crisis they don't get a lot of it's pretty boring frankly so we meditate and we relax and we rest and try to do all the right things and I do it for a week and if at the end of a week perfectly stable no symptoms that's it back to refeeding carefully takes half the length of faster we feed back to the whole plant food SOS free diet and we do that every year and I I just did mine in in November very uneventful very helpful on many levels but not exciting patience much more entertaining because they're coming off animal products they're coming off coffee they're coming off alcohol they're coming off medications they'll have active healing crisis inflammation uh mucous discharge they'll have skin elimination you'll see the lumps and bumps falling off you'll see low back discomfort you'll see headaches you'll see sleep disruption it can be very what I call entertaining and that you just keep going until that resolves are they getting those symptoms though because of the release of toxins like why on Earth would your lower back hurt oh because the kidneys are processing most of these metabolic products and you get what's called visceral somatic referral pain for three to five days and then it goes away the other thing that happens is things mobilizing inverse proportion so in other words you can lose 50 percent of your visceral fat but you only lose 20 of your adipose tissue and only four percent of lean tissue and then the lean tissue comes back with refeeding but the fat doesn't the fat continues to drop if you're doing the SOS diet right so if you go back to your normal eating yeah you can't go back to greasy fatty slimy processed crap and I want to talk more about that SOS program part of the program is to educate people about how to eat we do cooking demos we do lectures we have a whole Roku Channel we've got you know we do all kinds of stuff to what I call brainwash people so that they're prepared to go home and efficiently apply a whole Natural Foods diet get lots of we particularly like vegetable materials so both raw and cooked vegetable materials and these starchy like cupboard squash and butternut squash and kabucha we're not talking about uh you know tater tots and flower products and sugary things and all kinds of artificial processed crap which I bet Whole Foods okay so you're fruits vegetables non-glutinous grains we don't use glutinous grains at all we're using more like when we talk about grains we're talking about quinoa and Millet and rice and you know like you could let's dip into a few things specifically that as somebody who's um dabbled in sort of a plant first approach but never gone vegetarian or vegan um one I've always told people that fruit is nature's candy bar um what what is it about like can I take an unlimited amount of fruit because like if you told me I could eat watermelon apples bananas oranges all day I'm in homie like I don't need anything that's not gonna work so the problem is today's hybridized fruits are very high in sugar and very low in fiber so they're not like the wild apples in Hawaii where they're looking more like vegetables I mean these are and they're perfectly good foods if they're used appropriately so we use whole fruit not fruit juices not dried fruits not processed you know artificial sugars we're talking about your berries your melon ones and we usually have one meal that might have some fruit and two meals that are really more vegetable dominated so they might let's say for example somebody has oatmeal in the morning with some blueberries and maybe some flax seeds ground or some walnuts they have a huge salad with big steamed vegetables at lunch and dinner with enough complex carbohydrates so they don't get too skinny and so the idea is we're looking about 10 percent of calories from protein about 15 to 18 percent of calories from fat with the balance coming from Whole plant food carbohydrate now there's a problem in order to get enough calories on this kind of a diet you have to eat a lot of volume you're talking about several pounds of food a day because you know potatoes rice and beans all have 500 calories a pound not you know 2 000 calories a pound from say nuts or seeds or even higher from animal products so you have to eat or four thousand calories per pound from oil so you we're not pouring olive oil over everything we're just eating Whole Foods there's no salt oil or sugar it's just the salt oil and sugar naturally containing in these Whole Foods diet Salt bad well salt has a couple problems Salt's not bad so sodium chloride is an unnecessary nutrient without which you die you have to have enough sodium in your diet it happens to be that you get all the sodium you need from a large volumes of these whole Natural Foods Just Like You Get Enough carbohydrate you don't have to add sugar and then you get enough essential fatty acids including D cosmiconic acid Etc that you form from your DHA or you form from your omega-3 by eating whole plant foods but the problem with added salt is that it stimulates what's called passive overeating so if you just give an animal its fill to it feels satiated to say rice whatever it'll eat a certain amount and then it feels satiated you salt it they'll eat significantly more people say yeah it tastes better you're eating more because you like it better but you're eating more because the salt the chemicals salt the sodium chloride in higher concentration stimulates dopamine in the brain results in increased intake it affects satiety and so the problem for people trying to lose weight if they're eating salted Foods usually too The Salted foods are are things like flower products that are turned into breads or crackers or cookies that are also hyper concentrated in calories but the salt will allow them to eat more think about bread if you take the salt out of bread it's and and you take out the the sugar it's called matzah well you know it's you know they have to eat it once a year and on Passover and that's it because that's the only time you'll talk nobody's running out buying big boxes of matzo as a routine because it's flour and water it doesn't taste good because any highly fractionated food needs salt oil and sugar or combinations in order to increase flavor that's what chefs are is people that take hyper concentrated foods and add salt oil and sugar to it and deliver it to the palate so it stimulates the brain in the most intense way possible we're saying get away from all that let's um your addict analogy I think is very apt and I want people to burn that into their soul that there are some people that can get away with having some of this stuff and it doesn't become a huge problem though they would almost certainly be better off from a longevity perspective from a feel-good perspective if they went to a totally plant-based SOS diet it but so for someone like me I don't struggle with my weight I don't have an addictive personality I can fast if I want just because I think it's better for me um but I when I think about going to a full plant-based diet sort of forgetting about a pure SOS diet for a second but one of the things that I already eat that I know that I would eat is an avocado like literally the avocado mash it um nothing else added to it I take a raw baby carrot and then I put salt on the avocado it is delicious is it still bad for me though if I am I'm not overweight I don't have a problem overeating it um it at that point does salt still have such a problem that I should be cutting it out of my diet or am I only cutting it out to stop me from passive overeating well I think it's not just passive overeating because salt also is a very powerful preservative which is why it's used you know throughout history to before we had refrigeration and stuff that help food not go bad so people to get sick from eating spoiled meats and other foods and so it is an effective preservative but when you think about the five pounds of bacteria that live in your gut it may not be too good an idea to put too much of a preservative into that gut because it will alter the microflora part of the reason people on meat-based diets have completely different microflora than plant-based diets May impart be because of the higher salt intake that's oftentimes associated with it now let's be clear you know vegan diets can be total crap Sodapop potato chips and other generic terms for highly processed fractionated foods can all be vegan you know Oreo cookies are vegan that doesn't make them healthy it just makes them not have animal food in it so I'm not arguing uh that that vegan foods can't be crappy Foods they certainly can I get in trouble speaking at National vegan conferences explaining to people that is as challenging as meat products can be the vegan processed food products may be worse and that they'd be better off eating the meat and that just gets them all upset because they're being driven from you know moral ethical and spiritual viewpoints and saving the planet and all that stuff I'm not arguing that I'm just arguing I just want patients to live a long and healthy life and not be debilitated and we know that too much animal protein is definitely a detriment so people that are eating large amounts of animal protein have higher problems with kidney disease and cardiovascular disease there's definitely at some point there's too much that needs to be reduced even for people that are going to Advocate animal Foods as a whole natural food now you might ask me can people eat meat and still maintain Optimum weight absolutely because meat isn't a highly fractionated pleasure trap food it's a whole natural the problem with meat is it's very concentrated if you eat too much but you can have problems but it's not the same thing for example as dairy products which are a highly processed animal food that has all the challenges of animal foods but now it has the problems of the salt like try eating your cheese without salt see what it tastes like it's the salt that people really like about it absolutely so that's why this gets very clouded and confusing is that because it's not just meat or it's not just uh plants it's it's really a question of how processed foods are and how do we get away from having so much processed foods and frankly meat itself without salt you know just boils some meat and chew on it a bit and see if that's how appealing it is too you know what I'm saying it's like yeah now I think people get sugar and I think a lot of people so associate salt with heart disease or high blood pressure that they're they can buy those two the one that trips me out and then I'm super interested to get your take on is not bad oils things that everybody considers bad like um you know vegetable oil you know French fries fried oil like that kind of thing but like on a salad like that's the one I want to talk about so olive oil is way less bad than the other was it's omega-9 fatty acid has a different ratio of fatty acids it can be less processed you know theoretical you can squish those olives and extract the oil what does that my friend Tom bilyu here and I have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of one to ten if your answer is anything less than a ten I've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful boring which is what kills most people or possibly scary or even painful now here is the thing achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring building your levels of personal discipline is not easy but let me tell you it pays off in fact I will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline all right I've just released a class from Impact Theory university called how to build Ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things the greatness is going to require of you right click the link on the screen register for this class right now and let's get to work I will see you inside this Workshop from Impact Theory University until then my friends be legendary peace out uh the thing is it's still nine calories a gram of Highly processed fat that begins to peroxidize as you break it down so there's still challenges even with olive oil now would you would I agree that olive oil is less bad than the others oh no question and particularly if it's not heated at high temperature which is the other problem with fats when you you do fried foods and I mean that's a whole nother Cascade of problems I don't think most people are arguing that that's good though most people know that's not but they're going to want to try to preserve well like McDougall says John McDougall says that people love good news about their bad habits and so the arguments are that this is so much less bad that now it makes it good well that's not really true less bad just means less bad it doesn't make it good you don't need to fractionate or process your oils down you can get all the essential fats you need by using your avocado or and minimally processing it okay you mush it or you you chew it up but you don't have to extract the oil out of the cells and increase its concentration remove the fiber remove a lot of the other benefits um the problem with um too much fat in the diet though is that fat is very efficient uh and so as a consequence it's really easy particularly if you're eating refined oils to overeat you know that one tablespoon of olive oil has more calories than the salad so we we aren't really I just drink a little put a little drip but it's so rich we just aren't getting the proportion here that pound of salad has 100 100 calories whereas you know you've got a hundred you know uh more than 100 calories in that in that dressing serving so it's it's more than you think and if you really literally just put a few drops on which you find is you can't taste it there's no reason for it to even be there so if I would say have your your avocado and your carrots just leave leave the salt alone you don't need the extra uh added salt that and you know then you'll be back to a whole natural food diet that's SOS free talk to me about variety because honestly I could eat avocados carrots kale um a really small handful of things a banana maybe an apple you know a couple times a week whatever I get that we can't overdo the you know now sort of bastardized fruit um but how much variety do I need to not be malnutritioned on a vegetarian diet what's surprisingly small amount and particularly if it rotates with the season for example if you ate just 2 000 calories we'll just assume for a second that you were the average you need more than that but if you are the average guy weren't working out didn't use your brain that much and you only needed 2 000 calories a day just which is the RDA average um my guess is you probably burn 3 000 calories a day or more but if 2 000 calories a day if you ate um 2 000 calories of just say brown rice and broccoli that was it your entire diet you would get all the vitamins minerals uh protein essential amino acids you get about 80 grams of protein out of that and uh you know three cups of rice uh four cups of broccoli it would be a boring diet but you would get everything except B12 that you need you know and that is one thing on these plant-based diets if you really aren't getting the fecal contamination associated with animal Foods you do need to get a source of B12 it only comes from bacteria and we use recommend a thousand micrograms of methylcobalamin a day and that'll meet virtually everybody's needs so that is an issue you have to get out in the sun to get enough vitamin D because you're not drinking your vitamin D fortified milk because you have to actually make it in the sun or supplement it if necessary so um fortunately you can avoid most of the other pills and potions and powders because these large volumes of plant-based foods have high degree of nutrition and particularly when you emphasize the green vegetable materials the raw and cook greens and your broccoli and chard and kale these are really nutrient-rich Foods very low in caloric density but you do have to eat a lot and so that's that's one of the downsides a lot more eating and chewing the good news is though you have normal micro floor to feed your gut so you're not getting TMA which becomes tmao which is so dominant in the meat uh gut Flora um you're getting uh all of the micronutrients that you need you get the fiber you have satiety you're getting enough hydration because you get a lot of water content from these water content rich foods in addition to whatever water you're drinking but you do you do and you don't have the chronic constipation which means you don't get the fissures and the uh hemorrhoids and you're not having the varicose veins and the prolapsed uteruses and the ptosis and the Diverticulitis and all the other conditions that come from a very low fiber diet and this is one of the challenges for people even though they're trying to eat healthy but using an animal Rich diet unless they get enough fiber in they're not feeding the micro floor in their gut that's why colitis patients has so much trouble literally that microflor ends up having to eat the the coating of the intestinal tract you know because it's it's going to survive just like you want to survive you feed it soluble fibers you get a different balance so even if you're going to do a meat in the diet you better get enough vegetables in addition so that you know you you get the fiber and the nutrients and the materials that you need I've never noticed the mental Clarity thing that people talk a lot about so I think I would have if I were going from poor diet to fasting then I think because you're getting rid of the brain fog that you can get from especially a high high carb diet especially if you're getting a lot of sugar but you said that you like to do interviews and things in a fasted State because you're you think you're clear sharper faster I do yeah you know I this is you bring up a great point it's this biochemical individuality and I think we hear you know ketones are great so I need to be in ketosis to feel great but everyone operates at a different level I just find for me personally everything is easier if you took exogenous ketones would you get the same mental Clarity is it the lack of something or the presence of ketones such an awesome question I think it's the presence of the ketones personally have you tried exogenous I have yeah I've noticed that I mean the Jack your ketone's right up which I would love to get back to because a lot of people are chasing ketones for fat loss which I don't think is ideal but for the mental benefits I think the presence of ketones has a lot of potential how often do you take them I only take them when I travel like and sometimes before bed when you take them when you travel for what reason because I believe that traveling is stressful in the body in a way that the ionizing radiation whatever your this sounds totally woo-woo I know but the Wi-Fi in the airplanes uh the recycle there I usually just feel tired more tired than I normally would considering it's just like an hour flight or two hour or whatever so I like to take them before because part of the reason why ketones are so exciting to me is how they affect our Gene signaling and protect our DNA and affect it you know we talked I've never heard it protects DNA yeah through the through the sirtuin enzymes and it's a big long fancy word the histone D acetylase Inhibitors the hdax these are common targets for various chemotherapy drugs they're hot they're upregulated when we fast when we exercise and when we're in ketosis and maybe perhaps when we take drugs like metformin or rapamyosin so these are molecular switches that not only affect our body's preference for which fuel we utilize glucose ketones fats Etc but they affect they're like affect stress response Pathways and including autophagy and and others so yeah if you're traveling if you're sitting if you're going to be in a stressful environment if your occupation this is a big one for a lot of people working at a hair salon or if they're cleaning homes for example cleaning apartment complexes whatever exposed to chemicals I think ketones offer a lot of benefit in that regard because you're helping the stress response Pathways that's so interesting I've never heard about this before so um you're saying if I'm in a diet induced or fast induced um ketogenic state am I up I'm up regulating the things that de-excite that stress pathway or is it that being in the ketogenic state is sort of a rest and digest parasympathetic place yeah that's a deep that's a deep question we could get into it so a lot of because it's counterintuitive because right now if you look at my stress response hormones I'm 24 25 hours into a fast my adrenaline my noradrenaline my cortisol are significantly probably higher compared to if I just was eating a normal day right so logic would suggest that fasting is stressful but what we see that's the hormonal side of the stress response and then we have the autonomic kind of central nervous system side of the stress response what we see is parasympathetic tone and heart rate variability which is HRV a lot of people you measure it with your ring that you use to order ring this is a proxy over autonomics nervous system and that increases in favoring more of resilience so my heart rate variability is going to go up in a fast correct interesting I've never tested that yeah it's a wonderful I mean I think that's the best biomarker people should use and look if you're brand new to this and you fast it might decrease try transiently but over time it's going to improve so like if I don't need anything tonight when I wake up my heart rate variability over the evening time and first morning will be significantly higher compared to if I had were to have had two meals per day right and so I think that's a good biomarker and then you know because there's so many people that say well it's just about energy balance calories and calories out and there's really intelligent people that speak to that and I could agree that you can get results doing that bodybuilders do that Define results short-term body composition changes maybe at the expense of slowing down your resting metabolic rate because if we think about what our resting metabolic rate metabolism is adrenaline or adrenaline thyroid hormone and dieting prolonged calorie restriction tanks that and so I think if people again I'm not a fan of calorie counting by the way but I just throw it out there because you know there's some reasonably smart people that think that ketosis is stupid it's all about energy balance why do they think ketosis is stupid because some of the controlled feeding studies in metabolic Wards show that there's really no difference in terms of fat loss between energy equated differences in macronutrients so if you have someone that's eating three let's just make it simple a thousand calories a day they're a small person and all of that is maybe it's on a high carb diet 1000 calories a day from a high fat low carb diet ketogenic diet in two weeks in a metabolic word study maybe there's not much difference in fat loss so they say see guys this it doesn't matter it's just energy and energy out and yeah I'm not really totally concerned about fat loss is the best proxy of Health number one number two these are short duration studies in a controlled environment people are not living their normal life well let's this this is really interesting to me and I'm in that wonderfully dangerous place if I know enough to get myself into trouble um so let's be nice and inflammatory uh if if they're just equal why is ketones stupid or why is ketogenic stupid because I don't get a downside me neither because individuals will say you're eliminating a major food group carbohydrates fiber and they'll say it's restrictive think it comes down to trade-off and what are your goals if I'm trying to optimize testosterone if I'm trying to put on as much muscle as possible bench press deadlift squat power lift as much as possible I'm not going to give a crap about the ketogenic diet right because those are short-term goals presumably but wouldn't you still be really cognizant of what form the calories come in because I get the the one thing about the um a calorie is a calorie that makes me super tense is your cells are made of the food that you take in and so let's just take trans fats as an example where the physical structure of the fat molecule is I'll call it damaged it's rigid so if you're taking rigid fat into your cell membranes and your cells theoretically become more brittle is that a fair assessment I agree so that's where like that all seems to break down like I definitively do not have all the answers in no uncertain terms I'm ignorant to far more than I'm not ignorant to I just don't quite understand the veracity with which people say you can completely disregard the constituent parts of the food I'm not like forget ketogenics whatever sure I'm not going to bat for keto or against it I'm just saying it would seem to me that there's more than just the collimatory reading of a food item that we need to take into consideration in 100 agreement with you and not only you know are our cells liver cells brain cells Etc made up of the molecules that you mentioned the macromolecules micromolecules Etc but different food and different macromolecules and different nutrients in food affect signaling Pathways gene expression microbiome composition so there's a it's not just food can't be relegated to you know carbide carbs fats proteins DNA protein water we need to look at these other things so I but they don't talk about that and so I've tried to have an open mind and try to get the perspective of the calorie counting people because these are seemingly logic logic logical people phds or MDS so I'm like what is it that I'm missing and most of the pundits and people promoting this idea will refer to a Dr Hobbs I believe is his name at University of Kansas Kansas State something in there where he did a study on himself an end of one experiment in 2011 I believe it's the twinkie diet the twinkie guy yeah and it made a lot of yeah everybody's he died okay so one dude when I say I love your approach yeah you you absolutely have to be open-minded and the last thing I want to do is be dogmatic because you just like I'm not interested in being right I'm interested in having the right answer um this one though this one feels like a religious argument where it it would seem that the people that say this are interested in being right clearly there's just so much at play um it just seems weird to get like so super caught up in that you can get lean on a Twinkie for sure I think you're gonna have a whole host of other problems it would seem absolutely and that's why that study hasn't been replicated and it speaks to what you were just alluding to I mean yeah you can get lean to in various things but is being lean the absence of fat the pr the presence of health does that equate Health we know many bodybuilders who are very lean six percent body fat after a competition they have a congestive heart failure heart attack or die so it's not that you know body fat OBS can have problems and challenges and is linked with inflammation and where your body fat sits is a big deal but that's where I think it gives people power because it's not just about your diet it's about your sleep your relationships your Stress Management you know your mindset exercise your kid in rhythms there's all these things and if you you know just relegate food to just calories you miss all that but it brings back to what you were saying it's not about being right you know and I think people and I've learned this myself I've had to have an open mind like because I read negative ketogenic diet studies because I want to challenge my own beliefs so I don't I'm not in this Echo chamber I talk about those negative ketogenic diet studies and when I'm reading it I'm trying to have remove my bias it's very hard as human beings our mind is wired to be very biased we're constantly when we watch videos like this or read books we're trying to confirm what we already believe you know what I mean and so we need to kind of remove ourselves from that a little bit and and realize that's how we're wired and we're set up that way but it doesn't mean we have to be that way yeah it's really interesting so aha there's no question that we all have that bias and I will definitely lump myself in there but if your obsession is like for instance if your obsession is longevity or feeling good or whatever it's like you can pretty easily get out of your own way on that and then just steer by what makes something feel good or not feel good one of the things that at least on a ketogenic diet that I find so interesting is it changes your relationship to hunger I can fast for I intermittent fast every day my averages call it 20 hours a day so every day I'm you know I'm fasting roughly 20 hours a day but when I look at like what the primary driver for me in terms of wanting to be open to something is to have an even better effect so if somebody said no no if you eat Twinkies you're going to feel even better A rad then I'll I will try it one that sounds a lot more fun and then two you can see like where you've Fallen something but where do you live in terms of diet are you always keto are you sometimes keto you've talked about seasonal eating like how sort of do you structure your day-to-day living it's an awesome question I think everyone needs to think about what their unique goals are so for me trying to optimize brain function that's just my primary goal and then when I exercise I want to optimize my physical performance like if I'm going to do a lot of volume I will have carbohydrates so I guess you could call it like a targeted cyclical ketogenic style diet if I'm sitting here traveling I've been sitting all day I'm going to go on an airplane in an hour or two after this you know I don't need carbs for that I don't need sweet potatoes I don't need butternut squash so it's mostly a fasted low calorie type day so yeah I mean my Approach is just you know have the carbohydrate commensurate with the activity so if you're not doing much activity you probably don't need a lot of carbs and so uh when I think about like managing the microbiome and trying to get as much diversity I I will eat things that um regard like let's say that I never worked out I would still bring in things like berries or maybe even the occasional piece of fruit or something just to to try to introduce as much variety as I can I'm talking color so that we're you know getting micronutrient variety as well just making sure that I have a robust microbiome that has a lot of different diversity um do you think that's does that make sense um if somebody doesn't have an increased need for carbohydrate is there still a reason for diversity of microbiome to eat rice or vegetables or fruits or berries it's a beautiful question five years ago I would have said absolutely but that's and that's why I was hesitant to even go keto in the first place did a lot of research into you know how different foods and overall food diversity affects diversity here in a microbiome and so we know that I thought that was the most important thing and some research out of UCLA recently showed that actually ketones May influence those different strains acronymsium mucinophilia fecal bacterium presidency eye these are common strains that are kind of like these keystone species that influence the diversity and really when we talk about when people are chasing and I understand where you're coming from but so everyone understands the context why is microbiome diversity healthy it translates into stability stability in any ecosystem is resilient right it can take little small hits how do you over how do you circumvent this practically I think it's unless you have an autoimmune disease unless you have severe gastrointestinal dysfunction when you have a berry or Rosemary or Ginger I think it's best to eat what's in season in your environment do I have a randomized in the environment I live in or in the environment ancestrally that I came from I think it's a combination of the two I think if you can keep in mind your genetics and context but also your local environment if we take your microbiome now and then put you in Africa it's going to be different absolutely because the water the bugs you're exposed to the people you're in contact with so I but your genes are not going to change so I think it's it's melding the two I think you have to the only diet that humans could eat before the Advent of electricity gas refrigeration and so forth was what was available to them locally and here we have and I'm not picking on green juice or whatever but let's say in January where there's no vegetables growing in Wisconsin you're having a celery juice because it's healthy how healthy really is that because we know that hibernating animals for example their microbiome composition and diversity changes with the season so is it is it the food is it the seasons there's long story short there's a lot of crosstalk between our microbiome and our own tissues and so their Community communicating to us and we're communicating to them and so I think getting back to the Practical takeaway from this whole conversation is we need to understand the food that we eat is in being absorbed by us but it's being utilized and absorbed by those gut bacteria as well and we need to as many of your guests have talked about keep that in mind because I think that relationship is is fairly important and studies show that and we know that kids that get antibiotics in the first year of Life tend to be have more autoimmune and allergies and even obesity later and just not being birthed through our mother's vagina as opposed to being delivered C-section lack of breastfeeding there's so many different things but you know is the dearth or the lack of fiber going to negate the might health of the microbiome again five years ago when I said absolutely now I'm like all these people are thriving on me only diets you know if we think the microbiome imbalances are triggering autoimmunity yet these people are reversing autoimmunity through a meat only diet yeah let's talk about that so carnivore diet um pretty interesting are I hear a lot about people doing beef only which is interesting and so when my wife first started having crazy microbiome issues basically unintentionally she just was going towards like what makes her feel okay she gravitated towards a wildly predominantly beef diet are there people that have tried it that are saying uh I can't do it with beef but I can do it with chicken or organ meat or like is there sort of variety in that or is beef the one that people consider the safest of the carnivore diets I think that's where people are leaning at least the conversations that I had and I'm not an expert in this space I thought it was a dumbest thing people could do ever because I had my head so wrapped around this whole microbiome story and I thought how are you going to get the fiber how are we gonna get the short chain fatty acids all of this but then I I listened to the comments on my YouTube videos I read direct messages on my Instagram and I'm just blown away through these people are lying or they're telling me the truth and I really believe them have you tried it uh personally yeah so I've been doing it for the past three months and now right now no so that's the thing where it's a little bit different so so we do we have backyard chicken so we do eggs turkey eggs chicken eggs turkey is that considered carnivore yeah I think any Animal product is considered Carnival okay interesting what blood markers are you watching um sleep sleep scores heart rate variability body temperature blood glucose and ketones my hemoglobin A1c increased by five tenths of a point so it went from greased which is surprising to me yeah 4.8 to 5.3 but everything else I mean Iron ferritin increased which I was probably expecting eating more red meat things like that a word at all about cholesterol no because my triglycerides are historically low um that's the only one you worry about well I worry about cholesterol when triglycerides and glucose and liver enzymes are out of whack so your liver tends to take the brunt of metabolic burden first it's a key metabolic sittingly Hub and so if your liver enzymes start to rise your glucose is rising your hemoglobin A1c is rising then in your triglycerides are increased then I'm I'm more concerned about what's going on with your LDL cholesterol and you know and your low hgl but without that context I'm not totally worried about it and the thing that people don't really realize is like your body can convert protein via gluconeogenesis to glucose there's certain cells and tissues red blood cells the neuron various central nervous system cells within our brain that need absolutely need glucose they can't use fats or ketones protein can be back converted as can liberating stored body fat the body fat is you know you have your triglycerides and on you know your triglyceride on top of that is glycerol and when you liberate that for free fatty acids to make ketones that glycerol gets converted to make glucose so a lot of people think you need to have carbs to raise glucose for obligate glucose utilizing cells but that glycerol backbone gets shunted right into that cycle yeah it's interesting Tom I I don't know what the solution is for people should they go carnivore should they not I think if you have digestive issues it's worth a shot and it sounds so polarizing controversial but you know in functional medicine we've been talking about this for a while we you know people like Jeff Bland and Sid Baker Mark Hyman an Elimination Diet which was essentially just basically plain old white rice and lamb that was it like that's almost carnivore in the sense obviously you're if you overdo the white rice you're going to negate some of that but it was really eliminating all the variables that could affect the immune system man I'm really interested in this one that's the kind of thing I like to eat um like if you told me that I could have hamburger and eggs I'm done like I don't need anything other than that and because I don't struggle like I could eat a very what most people call boring diet just because it's the same thing over and over and over I'd be very fine with that like you said five years ago you'd give a very different answer five years ago I would have said yes in fact for uh accidental period probably of about six months I was like vegetables are unimportant you don't need them and I felt like money I was absolutely fine I would it was it a true carnivore diet it must have been pretty close like it would have been um beef eggs cheese probably some lettuce and pickles that would sneak in on Burgers occasion but obviously I don't eat the bun I don't have ketchup or anything like that so it would have been real real close yeah I mean so the question is you know is are you going to make your microbiome more resilient or not people should try various diets and see what works for them and I think a lot of people get stuck in this regimented thing where and it can backfire on them too they're carnivore so then when berries come in season when people might watch this towards the end of summer blueberry is gonna be in full swing does that mean you totally avoid blueberries because there's I believe I'm not one of these people that think plants are bad I think blueberries the anthocyanidins and the various and you know antioxidants have a lot of benefit to your microbiome into your body in general but then when you start to identify that you're a carnivore or a keto or you're vegan then you close yourself down a little bit and so I think in your case you don't have any major health issues that I'm aware of you know that you've talked about so I would just continue what you're doing but maybe in the winter probably the best time to go carnivore I'm going to say you and here's I don't have I have one health issue and that is I'm dying so the only real question I care about in every healthier episode I do is how do I live forever like if you're steering by how you feel which is essentially what I do I just don't know what its impact is on Longevity if a carnivore diet like if somebody could tell me no no a thousand percent if you do a carnivore diet you're going to live to 150. I'd be all over the carnivore diet all day every day I wouldn't even think about it I'd never touch another blueberry in my life like I would just eat it um but it's it's that big question mark about longevity that winds me up well let me pose this question to you how could a diet be negatively affecting your Longevity if it makes you feel better it makes you sleep better if it improves your heart rate variability if it makes you stronger if it makes you recover better how could it slow down your longevity I mean or affect longevity in a negative way I don't know maybe I'm not thinking about this through properly but it doesn't make sense to me [Music] that's interesting this is so interesting man like yeah look I I love the experimentation I love the open mind really be looking for new things in fact to that point what is something that you're excited about now totally improving I get it you're not the expert you're not like putting your your chip on the roulette wheel but like what's something that's Cutting Edge right now that's got you really excited you know I think the the ability to manipulate mtor has been very excited so we kind of talked about mtor's kind of the gas pedal on our cells to grow and you know one of the reasons that you fast one of the main benefits of fasting prolongly is affecting glucose insulin mitochondrial function that we introduced the show on but it it drops them towards to the floor and we know that chronic mtor overexpression is linked with premature aging diseases so I think the ability through drugs through exercise and through fasting protocols to manipulate this critical energy sensor called mtor is super fascinating so I think you know right now in 2019 a lot of people are micro dosing psilocybin and LSD I personally experiment with that fairly often I think in two years people are going to be micro dosing rapamycin people are going to be microdosing versus mtor Inhibitors to to like they're like called calorie restriction mimetics so we're kind of manipulating the physiologic effects people already with rapamycin it's a very few you mentioned the other one I'm blanking on right now like metformin metformin I don't I take berberine interesting so the one thing like when the camera stopped rolling yeah the one thing a lot of people are like yeah with it is is that thousand percent I'm talking about doctors yeah where I'm like all right then like it's one of those it is only my fear of the unknown where it's like if something seems too good to be true it probably is and I don't know what kind because they've been giving it to diabetics and cancer patients for a long time long time so uh I don't know what kind of Studies have come out based on that but it metformin is probably one of the safest drugs you could take um it's actually very poorly absorbed here's what's really cool so I've you know studied the microbiome forever I'm very curious about how these drugs work like it's only 33 or something like that is absorbed how is it working it's affecting your microbiome it's affecting the gut hormones and your bugs so very safe the only thing you might need to add more of would be B12 and folate because it reportedly does affect methylation and or absorption but that's a very safe drug I I I'm not I wouldn't be ashamed to take say that I take it I don't I take berberine so I do that 500 milligrams of berberine hydrochloride same thing meant to slow mtor yeah well it it affects am I don't want to get complex into the biochemistry but you have kind of a yin yang you have M towards growth ampk is breakdown okay you know one's either good or bad they just are uh berberine and Metformin increase ampk amp gives a switch just like in terms of switch they're different knobs so it's breaking down what crap inside ourselves okay so this is a little bit like autophagy ampk and mtor are the key cellular switches that ultimately guide autophagy and govern whether or not we're going to tear down break down you know average proteins dysfunctional proteins aggregated proteins dysfunctional organelles we kind of talked about how our cells are like little homes inside our appliances those appliances become dysfunctional and that's where autophagy self-digest comes in and so you have a bad furnace autophagy and will help to clear that a bad furnace in your cell would be a mitochondria Golgi apparati endoplasmic reticulum there's all these different compartments it's even speculated that the ability to break down fat and glycogen store glucose is autophagy mediated even recovering from exercise this is what's so cool so when we feel sore after workout how do you think our body recovers from that it's via autophagy and breaking down those damaged proteins so that we can rebuild them so that they're stronger for our next workout so I like to throw that in there because when people hear autophagy they think fasting but that's just one knob on this autophagy wheel exercise there's a ton of data showing that exercise enhances autophagy because you're causing your body to dig deep and break down glycogen for that workout wow that makes sense all right I'm going to put you to the test for a second so hiding behind the screen door number one is somebody I'm not going to tell you anything about them I'm not going to tell you if they're a man or woman overweight ripped whatever but you have to tell them how to eat for longevity and feeling good how should they eat I would say Sally or Joe look I don't know what your health issues are I don't know what you're experiencing but we're going to get you off anything that comes in a box bag or a can so no processed food no processed food I want you to go to a farmer that's within a 50 mile radius of you ask them what you can buy that's in season and and buy the animal products that you feel comfortable consuming I don't really care so much as what you eat and how much I want you eating at the same time every day whatever that is so influencing the Circadian rhythm so there's a lot of new research studies where they're controlling how many calories people are eating the same amount of calories but if they force it into a confined window it changes this mtour expression and not just a defined window but the same defined window every day you hit on the head exactly so if you're if you're going to intermittent fast great then eat from say you know noon to six or two to eight it doesn't matter but just try to be consistent just like we should try to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time you know we hear a lot about toxic blue light well when we eat and food in general affects our circadian biology we have molecular clocks in our gut and our muscle and our brain and our pancreas everywhere food in trains that clock too that's really interesting I haven't heard that before um is there a number of hours before going to bed that somebody should be cognizant of having their last meal so eating earlier is generally better so you don't and it's tough to be social too because here we are talking about food but relationships are so key and you know you know when you go out to dinner sometimes you're out to 10 or 11 eating late I generally advise people to kind of cut things off by 7 PM which can be tough for whatever you know if the person didn't have any concerns about a social life what would be the ideal window I mean me personally I would say 10 to 4 10 a.m to four and it's controversial to talk about this because a lot of people are skipping breakfast and lunch and just having dinner if that's working for you keep doing it I don't ever want someone to change what's working for them just upon research that I tell them but there's some research from University of I believe it's Arkansas one in Alabama as well that they're looking at ETF which is early time restricted feeding so if you look at this umbrella of intermittent fasting within that or different protocols alternate day fasting the 5 2 16 8 where you're fasting like you fast for 24. basically yeah 20 hours a day within that is this time restricted feeding bubble and they are having subjects eat earlier in the day so they started eating at eight and cutting off at two and that was it and what they showed is there was a dramatic increase in autophagy just by doing that changes in hormones changes in glucose insulin but we always think well if autophagy's good and more is better but if we think it overweight people their fat cells have higher levels of autophagy occurring it's a compensatory mechanism because if you were to it sounds weird but if you were to biopsy someone who's morbidly obese and you look at their fat tissue there's a lot of necrosis and like literally tissues are dying there's a lot of immune cells so if you didn't know anything about autophagy and you looked at adipocytes in obesity you would think autophagy's bad because it's up regulated right and so I just want people to understand and certain cancers utilize autophagy upregulation to avert the immune system to help it so it's interesting so it's not this clear some it's good or bad it's contextualized and tissue specific and sometimes more is not better so that a lot of people are doing hey I did a 24-hour fast let's just roll it out to 96 hours 72 hours what are your goals why are you doing this sometimes more is not better I want to live forever that's the real truth um it's probably a long shot but anything that I can do to feel better perform better look better I'm certainly going to be down with so what is what are the lifestyle changes that somebody should make if they really want to look good feel good for a very very long time yeah we see we're seeing now longevity is really spiking so what you feel is what so many people are feeling because we've been through so many one-hit things first it was you know fat oh well you know what we don't want eating fat we're going to have you on all these other kind of fats we're going to have you on vegetable and canola and sunflower and safflower and we find out that these are so inflammatory but that by the time you put them in your cart they're already rancid that's interesting I never hear people talk about that so explain what is so problematic about those on the Shelf it's very simple it's very simple the containers in which they're held they are clear a lot of them and light gets through oxidizes the oil and it becomes literally rancid and rancid oils mean inflammation so when we're talking about aging anti-aging all of that that's one of the Premier easy things the basic premise of the choices that we can make is the oils that we use we're going to go on to Coconut oils different kind of oils healthier oils Time Magazine had on their cover eat your butter so we keep going through those Corrections and we did the same thing with sugars oh sweeteners we can't we can't do regular sugar it's not good for us so let's do the pink yellow and blue packets then it's stop let's not do that let's go on to these type of sugars let's go on to more monk fruit Stevia things like that another big course correction same thing meat and potatoes let's go from meat and potatoes let's go from that to all meat well that's not working let's go to all juice well that's not working let's go to more paleo well that's not perfect let's go to paleo-ish okay well let's go to keto that's almost right now what about keto 2.0 or kind of Keto and what is kinda keto what kind of Keto is taking the basic principles of Keto and basically with keto the problem is that people aren't getting enough fiber because of the carbohydrate allowance which is about you know five percent of the the diet is is carbohydrates that's not enough for people to be able to explore carbohydrates in the way that they should so they become constipated and irritable they're the two things that we see with people who stay on keto for a long period of time so I sit on keto for nine months um it was awesome I felt wonderful my relationship with food completely changed but I didn't at all um I didn't have constipation or anything I didn't have any trouble my bowel movements were money but I did notice my muscle mass was going down I just felt softer I was trying to keep my carbs essentially at zero yeah um and I go back and forth I'm saying all of this because I go back and forth on fiber and it's important so right now I get fiber because I do I have some vegetable matter I have some nuts but I probably get 70 of my calories from red meat just to really trigger people um doesn't trigger me because for some people it works I started telling you about these mid course Corrections because I start I've seen everything in nutrition and I can sit here and tell you honestly for the first time I'm seeing some really positive things in nutrition we're starting to get it right when you understand ancestral medicine and ancestral nutritions right we really do work better with some foods and then there's also environment that you have to consider and that's the environment that you put yourself in and you stay in because that has different effects on the body and how you digest how you metabolize all of that but there are foods that tend to work best with our body and that's when I went into a whole dive and started really exploring these Foods I thought why doesn't anyone know this you know that's why I wrote nine books why doesn't anyone know this why doesn't anyone know that these Foods really do juice us up so what I loved about paleo is it broke down each food category and it said Hey listen if you want proteins these are the best proteins red meats work really well for some people they really do it depends on the amount of inflammation that you have in your body it has to do with prostaglandins it has to do with so many inflammatory markers in your body but some people are able to eat more red meat than others and also with with paleo it breaks down vegetables so you know energy vegetables versus fibrous type of vegetables how much you should have of that fats here here are the good fats so that's what I really gravitated towards that because it basically just broke down the macros and said these are really good proteins these are really good fibrous vegetables these are really good energy vegetables and your energy vegetables should really match what your needs are so it's not a matter of you know carbohydrates are terrible for you they're inherently bad they're not inherently bad you just have to match your energy you have to match the amount of energy that your body needs to really fuel itself and to really drive and that's the key and so you know keto the same thing with fats we most people when they started keto they were 50 to 75 percent fat that works great for some people it doesn't for others it provides a level of discomfort what I care about and what matters to me and what matters for longevity is that we're getting these foods that our body recognizes we're getting these foods that our body understands we're getting these foods that our body drives off of now the the template in which it falls I believe it's very similar for us but how much that you should have and the balance that's right for you it now that's where it gets a little bit different and that's where personal play has to come in and that's where a lot of these diets provide awesome guidelines awesome guidelines but you have to know how to read your body okay so before we go into the individual stuff you gave a great high level over view now let's dive in so getting back to the initial question of what is the the ideal for somebody that wants to extend their high level performance what is the sort of perfect diet I get that that the truth is you have to try it for yourself and that there's massive amounts of variability but it'd be great to just pick that sort of middle person right in the bell curve smack in the middle um what is their what are actual things that they should be getting at the grocery store yeah so the highest quality that you can afford that's normal food what do you mean by high quality high quality so if you can get organic get organic you can get pasture raised you know get past your race you can get grass-fed Meats awesome I firmly believe that most of us operate really well off of meat Okay so I also find that a lot of people in terms of protein operate really well when they put a lot of fish in there instead of red meat so if you're thinking how do I build this plate kellyanne just tell me how I build this damn plate you want to have protein like you said go to the grocery store buy some really good proteins that work for your body get them get them as as healthy as you can as you can because quality actually does matter try to balance that plate out make sure you have some fibrous vegetables what are those it's the green stuff I don't care if you juice it I don't care if you chop it I don't care what you do you know so we talk about quality of food and you know what can they do should they only eat organic if you saw what I saw and you saw what really what people were really eating I'm not worrying about a chicken carcass that's not perfect all the time if you can get people to eat in Balance get as best quality as you can get in balance and it makes such a such a big difference all right so I want to really pinpoint this notion of balance So when you say balance you're talking protein fat carbohydrate like yeah so so yeah because a lot of it's very off kilter some people work operate fantastic on 50 fat and then other people can operate on 25 it depends this is why with keto I'm just saying when people were on have been on keto after a while we start hearing well it's not perfect for a lot of people a lot of women look and I know people are going to write and say are you kidding me I got these results I got these results for some people when you're at a starting point where you need to lose a lot of weight it gets the weight off it makes the skin look a lot of better A lot better but it's a matter of finding that balance somewhere between paleo somewhere between keto so you have so we go into a more weight maintenance and not diets but more weight maintenance and more into longevity and more into sustainable diets what's sustainable for you is different for other people that's the whole key and that's what people want right now this is what I'm hearing over and over again they want to they want to look at things and approach things very different people are looking at things for the first time I think more spiritually more spiritually in their food and that's why we're talking so much about plant-based everything now it has to do with spirituality people are feeling good on plant-based foods and that's why the keto-ish or the keto 2.0 they're adding more plants they're adding more opportunity for people to eat more vegetables and things is keto becoming a buzzword though so I was fat phobic for a very long time and I had massive inflammation as a result I wasn't eating carbs but I was eating protein probably 85 of my calories I got from protein I was trying to keep carbs as close to zero as possible trying to keep fat as close to zero as possible I basically lived in rabbit starvation absolute atrocious for the joints it got me lean as hell I looked awesome but I did not feel great so I finally um I encountered Dom degasino Peter ratia they're like look you need to be consuming fat they started talking about ketogenics and when they were talking about it it was all about you take a blood test and there are either ketones in your bloodstream or there are not so if you're going to Define keto 2.0 so if keto 1.0 were defined by ketones in your bloodstream what's keto 2.0 it's mid fat and fiber fat so use quantity of fat so you still think fat before carbs however it's different now because there's the the ratio has now changed where you can have more carbohydrates so just think about it like that it's really it's really allowing more fiber through allowing more carbohydrates so people consist they feel like they can sustain longer and that's the key so whenever you have comfort in eating the results are far greater so it's a it's about allowing the body to experience Comfort if we see a younger generation coming in and their tolerance for things like uh you know I remember just driving myself trying different diets and bodybuilding and body and weights and you know doing shows and competitions and how lean a mind can I see this am I ripped and it's very different now so now what they want to see is they want to they want to have more peace they want to feel more fulfilled it's much more about loving themselves we're starting to really change all that that pain gain thing and we're going more towards you know let's feel better all the way around let's feel better let's have joy let's feel better somehow this word Joy has captured people and they actually want to experience more joy and not as much of the grind it's interesting and that certainly brings up stress so uh what's the role to stress when we think about longevity how detrimental how does that impact us what do we do to solve some of the problems that it creates yeah so that is the entrepreneurial's Dilemma yes okay and that's funny because when we start achieving greatness and more greatness and we start really achieving all of these things sometimes life doesn't get easier on our bodies and and we really start experiencing more stress than we did before and we have to figure out how to manage it because I can tell you stress will take you down every time everyone has stress in their life and somehow and that's what I realized in talking with all these people that everyone has some kind of stress and stress damages cells and so I know that you went through a really stressful period that manifested in losing Consciousness on a flight which is uh sounds uh terrifying yes what have you done to rebuild from that like what are you doing now to de-stress is it about Joy is it about uh meditation Forest bathing like what are the things that you're actually doing that are somewhat prescriptive that people could follow if they're trying to to bring their stress down for me I think a lot of my stress had to do with not having boundaries I was boundary deficient I was boundary deficient in so many areas of my life I look back and even when I look back if I look at pictures or selfies it's like how did you not see that coming you looked burnt out you were burnt out so I was on this plane uh and I remember the woman sitting next to me she was in the middle of putting a cookie in her mouth I'm not kidding and I turned to her and I said hey my name is kellyanne I'm not feeling well I'm on not on any medications but I'm probably going to pass that you're gonna have to get me help that was the last thing I remember next thing I was in The Galley of the plane with all the airline the airline stewardess and such putting ice and packing ice everywhere and I was going in and out of Consciousness and all I heard was is there a doctor on board is there a medical professional on board and I'm laughing in the back saying yeah right here but you know so there was a gentleman on the plane that was a doctor that was going to his class reunion he happened to be on that flight and at the end of all of it and he sat with me the whole time they made sure I had hydration was checking my pulse all of this the Andy said kellyanne you do realize you're burnt out right you have to do something you're burned out the problem is Tom is that we become very numb we go through life day after day we numb down numb down numb down and we somehow we have to stop and we have to say how am I feeling how do I feel because it's that disconnection I'm going to get woo-woo here it's that disconnection from The Source from our source and understanding where our power really comes from and really connecting and understanding that we're going to get walloped if we do not stay present because that that's when our body really manifests and holds on to all that stress that stress is tough and it's tough on the body how do you stay centered how do you find that alignment like what do you do on a daily basis or a weekly or you know whatever your Cadence is well for one thing exercise is very important kind of exercise I do all kind of exercises different kind I do limbic type of exercises so it's exercises that allow my body to breathe and to move I do yoga I do dance I do a lot of dance I do weights I like to really move my body and then I like to be still so you have to get into meditation and understanding breathing and just finding that time to absolutely reconnect with yourself because we're losing a connection to ourselves and if I had really realized this I had to learn this through going through this myself so many of the patients that I saw I realize now that's what they that's what they were going through they were disconnected and they stopped feeling they were just getting through the day and you know getting through this and getting through this and getting through this and after a while it comes back and your body gets the ultimate Revenge your body will get revenge why do you call it Revenge out of curiosity yeah I call it Revenge because your body starts giving you signals and you you can get sick for me my revenge was I got extremely exhausted and passed out on a plane and my my body was saying how many times do we have to tell you because your body does give you signs and and signals so how do people listen for that what are they listening for how does it manifest like what was it now looking back leading up to that moment because you had a real sense of presence to be able to say I know where this is going what was it leading up to that that if it were to happen again that you would catch it much earlier oh my gosh first of all I I when I looked at my eyes and a lot of these these pictures they were sunken in my eyes lost their life my skin had a got very stolen and didn't have Vibrance to it and I was proud of myself on things like that in my body I always kept it you know kind of uh very fit and like a ballerina very smooth and I just started gaining that cortisol Tire I had all the signs of exhaustion and the thing is is I I lost my I lost my Lust For Life in the same way that I have now or that I had before that I because I just I was and I wasn't even aware and that's the thing I talk to patients that have been in marriages and and they they became really ill staying in relationships that were that were not serving them and it wasn't until they got out of the situation they didn't realize they didn't realize how bad they felt they didn't realize how that every day hit of you know leaking your power and leaking your energy that every day hit every how it affected them and it really does and you just have to stay attuned and just ask yourself how you feel and you'll notice things like you know gosh how tired am I do I have achy joints I mean look at my skin let me see my eyes so I still feel vibrant do I still have you know Lust For Life how do you feel like stopping and asking that question is a really important question to ask and we don't we just we just go through it we go through it and and you know I had to learn and I would never allow that to happen again I would never say yes to as many things as I said yes to I would never allow people that were not well intended in my life again I would never Pummel through work to make other people happy instead of myself I would never put any other Mission besides a mission that will serve me and those you know that I love I would never put that before anything else and a lot of a lot of everything in life I'm really finding out it does have to do with the six six inches between your ears it's a mindset thing you know that's interesting so I'm interested in this concept of reset which I know know you also talk about from a true just diet and bodily perspective but talk to me about it from a mindset perspective how do you reset what are you doing um when you're dancing is there anything conscious going on there or is that just sort of realigning yourself through Rhythm and movement or in meditation is it a an awareness like a mindfulness practice like what what are what are you doing mindset-wise yeah it's understanding that we are not just Skin and Bones we're atoms and molecules we have a megahertz our cells communicate this unbelievable life that we have inside of us and understanding this big ball of energy and saying you know what I want to harness that energy want to harness it and I don't want to leak it I want to keep it in that's the understanding and then when I go into meditation or I go into dance or anything like that I'm visually picturing what I want I call it my own television show it's in my mind it's locked in here and it's strong and that is one of the biggest differences that I've ever made in my life is really pulling things towards me and understanding how possible this really is it has been life-changing for me life changing I need to understand more about that so okay the process is you're sitting there you're finding physical Stillness every day I find physical Stillness it has got to be habitual this will only work if you do it on a regular basis and it can take three four minutes a day sit down Pull up your own TV show you see you everything you want you desire everything everything that's for your greater good everything that you that that is your purpose you see it as if it's happening and I picture myself telling someone else all of these amazing things about my physical my personal life my business life all of it as if it is already there so my body is working and functioning in that modem as if it's already there and funny enough how people show up to make and realize all of those things that you're putting in your in your mind and you're you're just locking it in your mind and it's not about well if I go sit and meditate you know underneath this tree every day I'm going to pull everything towards me I want you to know that is not one part of my body that would ever do that to think that that's all I need to do to do to make things happen you have to take action you have to take action but there's a certain there's a certain thing that happens in your mind in your cells in your body when you really concentrate and you focus on that and then you go so there's the metaphysical and then there's the physical and you want to be able to capture and really work in both worlds because that's where the magic really happens really capturing capturing your your future by demanding it demand it demand what you want demand it within yourself and then you go and you get it and it's it's funny because I'll go up to people and it's very natural for me now to ask for what I want it's because I'm putting I'm locking it in my body in my physiology I walk like you have to assume the position assume the position of your day and I tell myself this and I start my day like a tiger I want to be a tiger that's it what does that mean so what are the attributes so attributes of a tiger is someone who's Fearless someone who's bolded because one of the things that I've learned is I sat on the bed through my my Swiss training I sat on the bed of a lot of people who were dying you know what they had Tom regrets that is what you hear so often what are some common ones that's actually really interesting it's really interesting and here's the biggest thing that they regret a lot of people they were they were wealthy a lot of these people and they regretted that they did not spend more time with their children and the other big one was that they regretted that they didn't go for it that they had at all any fear in going for anything that they wanted it's interesting that that's successful people saying that I think there's something very interesting to take away from that in terms of having success in one area of your life first of all I think a lot of people think oh if I had financial success that I would stop and retire and it does not work like that like being successful answers yesterday's problem it certainly does not answer today or tomorrow's problem you still have that desperate thirst for meaning and purpose and does not go live and to feed your energy yeah it doesn't even I I think it doesn't even get tainted at all I think it's in your DNA and you have to respect and honor your DNA and who you are a lot of us are very Mission based because it's that mission in you that just drives you you know I have my missions I have my anger I have it in my head and everything is leading leading leading leading to that you know to that overall mission and again I can't imagine any level of success that you know is in front of me that would stop me from wanting to be that person that tiger and I'm not saying it's not good to you know stop ask yourself slow down I'm not saying any of that but what I'm saying is I honor my DNA I honor the fact that my friends growing up were reading Cosmo magazine and I was reading the diabetes journal with Mary Tyler Moore on the cover I honor everything you know all of those things I honor that you know there's parts of me that are different than a lot of other people in terms of this drive that I have you know respecting and honor and that drive but at the same time not burning out over that drive yeah that that's an interesting dichotomy for somebody who found themselves pushing so hard saying yes to everything that they end up having an episode to still be able to get on the other side of that and say okay I've got the awareness now I know what I'm looking out for I know this has to be Mission based but at the same time I'm not giving up that drive I still want to be the tiger I still want to have a level I have to be see there's certain things I think that are more destructive than anything else not honoring who you really are that is so destructive to the body every day living or being something that you really don't want to be living in a way that you don't want to live and I'll tell you that's again it stems back from the experience of listening to people dying and saying I'm not no I'm not doing that I'm going to express everything don't you feel like you want to live your life and like squeeze every bit of potential that you have very much so and when I see other people I would have squeeze it out of them I want to squeeze it out of them so I feel like my job and my role is to wake people up in that sense I want to pull people out of the tunnel I've been through us the tunnel is feeling aimless and dark and lost and not sure you're not sure and you're numb I'm telling you how do you get them out of that you make them become aware and re-engage with themselves then you see someone really on fire you know the purpose is the key all the money all of this and all of that all of this and that it's great to have the security it's great to have that security ain't going to make you happy you know it's just not it's just not it's not it's not enough it's not enough and your body you know your body has has this intelligence it's very interesting how the body works and the innate intelligence that it has and the signs and the signals that it gives you throughout your life just what you're interested in and you know I was told by a college professor years ago you'll know what you want to do where do you go when you go in a bookstore a library where do you where's your attention where did you where and it was always the same for me it was always those damn Health books it would drive people crazy going to the beach they'd flip open their novels I always sit there with my health stuff I mean it was obvious but you have to pay attention to all these things about yourself and I am seeing that now more than ever people really being who they are it's just not worth it just be a tiger go for it go for whatever don't be don't be embarrassed don't be shy don't whatever it is and I just have a belief that you know I'm gonna say whatever I'm supposed to say and I'm not going to get wired about it I'm happy to be here happy to dispel any information or anything that I can get anyone that's going to help you just I'm going to be a tiger about it you know well speaking of information that will help uh let's come to the gut for a second so gut health obviously a huge part of what you do bone broth healing the gut how many people start sort of with a gut based struggle and then what's the protocol to help them get out of that yeah so I would say most people come in with a gut based struggle and we see a lot of autoimmune problems we see a lot of people with bloating constipation skin rashes achy joints these these are all signs and symptomologies of somebody who who likely has a gut that needs healing and so bone broth I love because it has this Perfect Blend of nutrition so there's amino acids which are upbuilding and you've got some minerals that come out and we're also deficient in minerals and so many of the things that go on with us are really because we're lower in minerals so is there a difference between doing bone broth and just cracking the bone open and eating the marrow would you get a different um nutritional intake you may get a little different because you're going to get more Glycine and glycine is really helpful for so many things and we find that it's more hydrating to the body but you know this just that bone marrow I could eat that till the cows come home a bone marrow is so good for you I mean you have to think about like this and this is why I love bone broth for gut healing if you get a sunburn you reach for Aloe Vera you put it on because it soothes and it heals the skin well bone broth the gelatin cook collagen the bone broth that does the same thing for your gut it heals and it seals the gut and it works so you've got the collagen in there the collagen which is the gelatin which is so good for the gut you've got minerals in there you've got great protein in there you've got amino acids in there and the research also shows us one of the things that we know that helps prevent a cold and the duration of a cold are these soups they're really helpful for the immune system so you know there's a lot of benefits to it and I put it in programs and weight loss programs and things over the years with intermittent fasting to help people get even more benefits compounded benefits but anything that does any one thing that does this many things I love yeah we really have some people that are even angelical about bone broth here on staff it was a big part of Lisa's recovery it was super super impactful for her is there a big nutrient difference between making it yourself from Whole bones and getting powdered it's whole bones is better okay pattern is pretty close I mean there's some really good powders on the market right now same thing with the Frozen broth that's really easy there's tons of good Frozen broth that you can buy anywhere now that's really good and you just put hot water over the bag it comes in a bag you put hot water over it you put it in the pot and you can have it very quickly there's pressure cookers now that you can make bone broth in you can cook it quicker but it's that simmering for a long period of time letting all that good stuff come into the into that broth and it really is very healing for people I think the word that comes to mind when I think of bone broth is restorative is there any gut issue where you don't recommend bone broth because oh man the one thing I've learned with what my wife has been through is that healing gut issues is so complicated people don't know that how complicated it can be and well it's not only complicated but it takes a long time and you have to be patient have to understand that that 20 plus feeds of intestines that are going through that it's a long narrow tube and you've got you know so many microbes in your body and you want them to work for you and it gets you've got more microbes these these bugs in your body than you do actual cells in your body so you want to nurture them you want to nurture that soil and you want to really make that soil so that so that every 21 days when you have that cellular turnover you're getting that it's healthy healthy healthy healthy soil as you possibly can so you can really heal that gut at the same time sealing everything up it does take time but let me tell you Tom when it happens bam the magic happens skin looks so much better your healing capacity is so much higher you feel so much more energized again longevity oh my gosh I am telling you that is my core anti-aging regimen that is you have to have foundational Beauty if you decide that you want to do all the other things fine great I'm not opposed to that I understand what it feels like to advance an age I understand what that feels like and you have to do what makes you happy but I don't care what you do all that other stuff would be cosmetic you know adjustments yes you know all the stuff and that's okay do all the stuff but you have to realize foundational beauty is where are real effervescence comes from we know for a fact that we start losing collagen at about age 20 we start losing it little by little by little and the collagen is like it's like Nature's glue it holds us up it holds us together and again for longevity for looking young collagen it tends to be very helpful so I throw collagen shake and you know whenever I can I love collagen because it's for me it's it's one of those I used to experiment with all these shakes especially during my bodybuilding phase you competed in bodybuilding oh I was I was fierce figure competitor or actual bodybuilder oh it was an actual bodybuilder wow how big were you um well I was lean so my whole thing bodybuilding is like a whole another thing oh I used to go to Arnold Classics every year I used to like you know that would be my masterminds with those people like like the Arnold I worked out and like I do everything else I became the tiger so I started working out instead of just enjoying working out like a normal person I was like how far can I fly because that's the question I always ask myself how far can I fly I want to read a book or want to write a book do I write one no I have five books with Wiley publishing two with rodale three with penguin random hat whatever I have to see how far how far can I fly that's how I live my life but again getting back to the reason why I'm sitting in this chair was the the latest book and stuff it's how do I do that and be that and not burn out that's the question every thought that we have creates correlating chemistry in our bodies instantaneously it's happening 24 7 always will never stop but that's the part of medicine in the last couple of generations there's been the separation between mind and body

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 1,030,087

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Jason Fung, The Obesity Code, The Cancer Code, Dr. Alan Goldhamer, True North Health, Mike Mutzel, High Intensity Health, Health Theory, Conversations with Tom, health tips, fasting, intermittent fasting, weight loss, losing weight, diet, keto diet, avoid cancer, starve cancer, how to fast for weight loss

Id: nVLv3JsdBAk

Length: 137min 33sec (8253 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2023