The Intermittent FASTING MISTAKES That Make You GAIN WEIGHT! | Dave Asprey & Lewis Howes

the number one thing fasting or intermittent fasting regularly will do and remember it doesn't have to be a super long one 14 hours can start 16 hours is good we're not talking heavy duty you know living in a cave kind of stuff and that will and how does from all the research that you've done obviously you've tested this for 10 years personally but from the research and the science how does fasting the right way uh play a role in anti-aging in your life and and other people's lives the number one thing fasting or intermittent fasting regularly will do and remember it doesn't have to be a super long one 14 hours can start 16 hours is good we're not talking heavy duty you know living in a cave kind of stuff and that will stop you from having insulin resistance when you have insulin resistance it means that insulin levels go up and your body can't hear them so they go up higher when your insulin is higher you're all cause mortality goes up in other words your chances of dying from every disease you can think of happens what insulin resistance means is that when there's energy in your body your cells are weak enough that they can't make good use of the energy and fasting fixes that problem when sugar goes up in the body it forms something called Advanced glycation end products it basically Cooks your tissues the way onions Brown in a pan and we know this from 30 years of anti-aging research about the effect of excess insulin and sugar in the body fasting will fix that but on top of it there's something called autophagy which is a core part of the recommendations I make which is do whatever it takes to cause your body to turn its protein digestion mechanisms back on you because if it's not busy eating steak and eggs or you know tofu if that's what you're into it'll turn around and go oh there's some extra debris some junk inside the cells outside the cells I can clean that up and if you go a little bit longer it says you know what I've got enough extra enzyme activity here I think I will take out the weak mitochondria these little power plant generators I'll take out the weak ones and replace them with young strong ones and you start upgrading yourself internally because the stuff that would have gone into digesting the food you eat every two hours because that's what someone told you to do in the 70s instead of doing that you're eating the stuff in your body that makes you old and when you control insulin and you control autophagy something very interesting anti-aging wise happens and it's that you actually have younger and more abundant stem cells in your body so intermittent fasting is proven to increase stem cells increases testosterone human growth hormone and a huge swath of anti-aging substances in the body and like it's free yeah it costs less than eating breakfast and what's some of the new research about stem cells or the new developments that have excited you that everyone should know about well I've been pretty public about doing a lot of stem cells I've had my bone marrow taken out twice and you've been trying to convince me to do this for a while I've been considering it I still didn't consider more it'll change your life anyone with old injuries like that I I have just no bodily pain and you you get younger and there's really intriguing your research about stem cells making brains work better especially if you've had a traumatic brain injury which I have had and so you you just get younger and I can't tell you that it was stem cells alone that did this I live you know a bulletproof life and all that but I recently measured my brain's response time this is an automatic response how quickly does the brain respond when a lighter a sound comes on so this isn't a conscious thing and my response time is the average response time for a 20 year old the response time goes down with or goes up with age so you get slower and slower as you age so I have a 20 year old's ability to respond to the environment around me which is pretty remarkable and I truly think that the stem cells helped with that there's also things like arterial flexibility where I have the average flexible arteries of a 24 year old when you just compare and I'm twice as old as that Louis so something is working I think stem cells are a core part of the anti-aging thing what's happening now though is we're able to pull things that are like stem cells out of the blood instead of out of the marrow and that's a lot less painful and then I'm more open to that than the whole the sucking out of my bones yeah it's spinning it up your sleep when you're actually I was awake one time when they did it the second time so wait what's this new what's this new blood drawing stem cell that you're talking about it's still getting regulatory approval but it's called a very small stem-like cells but uh I'll show you the video sometime in that I'm laying on the table the doctor has this thing and he hammers it with a hammer oh no I can't and it goes every time I see that video it's like it's the worst thing ever man yeah you go through a lot of pain to have uh you know let's change the rest of your life it's really weird Lewis it's almost like hunger like you can look at something as pain or just weird and when I really dug into it like there's the strangest feeling in my skeleton but it wasn't pain it was just so outside the universe of anything you would ever or should ever feel that it your body could say it's pain or it could just be like that's different that's weird yeah so I I can say I've I've been through much more painful things than that but the idea that that we could have younger and more stem cells by skipping breakfast is a little bit less money and time than that and that's why it's such an important practice and what's this uh what's this Blood uh stem cell process then it's not it's not available yet but have you tested it what is it there's a very few doctors who are are offering it today and I think it's in a bit of a gray Zone from a regulatory perspective so have you tried it very small stem-like cells of course I've tried it how do you how do you feel about it um well I think it it's hard to say to compare a versus B there's a lot more studies on getting stem cells from your fat or your marrow um there's also people getting stem cells from like placental cords and umbilical cords or placentas and umbilical cords right um they're um I have mixed feelings about that because if you're getting stem cells from eight different people I'm like how how tested was that and that makes all of my friends who do stem cells that way irritated that I would question it maybe it's perfectly good I know a lot of people do it and love it I just in my mind I'm like what do we test for Every Little virus and every little bacteria and I I kind of like the idea of growing my own stem cells but that's not legal in the US anymore it was for a while and that was the most effective so crazy it's coming down we're we're like year one of of an evolution that's happening kind of like cell phones the the first cell phone some some guy in LA in his Mercedes 300D convertible the whole trunk is itself yeah exactly and it was like you know 25 a minute but with stem cells it's come down in price a lot the efficacy is way higher and it's getting better it works better and better every year but it still takes a doctor a lot of time to get the needles in all the right places and understand your joints and but man it's you know a couple hours of relatively minor discomfort but then you're better for decades it's a really big deal Louis and I'll tell you if you fast before you do that procedure you have less insulin resistance you have a working metabolism everything you can do in a hospital whether it's a surgery whether you're getting a car accident whatever everything goes better if you just have a strong metabolism so like what do we all need right now we want more resilience resilience comes from biology the people who are best at taking fat or Sugar Plus air combining them and getting abundant energy those are the people who live the longest have the best life they have more opportunity for greatness because they simply have more electrons bouncing around in their heads to do stuff with and it could power your immune system it could power whatever you're doing in the world but that's the core of everything I've ever done with bulletproof with all the content how do you make yourself better at making energy and it turns out sometimes not eating is part of the equation yeah and I'm curious you know everyone swears by the the lifestyle slash diet that they live by that works for them people who are vegan swear by it and the ones who are super healthy have lots of energy the ones who are vegetarian I feel like vegans just swear they don't even swear by their diet is that just me who does yeah I mean they swear by lots of things because I'm just teasing you guys the the you know the vegetarian diet people who live a vegetarian lifestyle for a long time say that this is best for them people are carnivore diets say it's the best for them keto is there a worst type of diet even though some of these things might work extremely well for particular body types what what is the worst type of diet is the standard American diet and there's three things in it that are just horribly destructive the first one is what sugar sugar sugar is there but I don't think it's as destructive as the other two okay so I'll give an order from the worst to the the best of the worst right so the number one thing that is wrong with the American diet is seed oils these are omega-6 oils and canola corn soybean safflower sunflower all the stuff that's in everything at the restaurant and most packaged Foods at the grocery store unless you know buy from the right company it's full of these oils these are the oils that drive insulin resistance your body takes these oils and they're all plant-based oils and it says hmm I'm going to try to construct the outer layer of my mitochondria my cells these little batteries but I have the wrong ingredients so I'm going to make subpar batteries like if you go to the the knockoff store and you buy the cheap batteries and it lasts a third as long as the good ones that's what happens when you eat a lot of seed oils Americans have about 40 times more of that oil in their systems than they should and it gets built into your tissues and that makes you weak is just not good seed oils oils are bad second thing is industrially raised meat it's full of xenoestrogens these are estrogens that make animals fat on one-third less calories than normal it's also full of antibiotics and it's destroying the soil of the planet right now yeah it also is depleting uh farmlands when we take and we grow corn and soy and Grain and we don't actually put the animal poop back into the soil the way we do on my farm what we're doing is we're sucking all the nutrients out of the soil and we're creating a very very big catastrophe 60 years from now we'll be out of topsoil because we stopped having animals walk around and poop on it the way it works when you're doing a regenerative agriculture kind of thing but worst of all you eat industrial animals they're also full of cortisol and so you do this they mess up your gut bacteria and they're full of glyphosate because it was on the feed and glyphosate disrupts your your gut bacteria your nervous system activity and is tied to cancer so we're getting bad oils oh and those animals because they ate corn and soy they're full of bad oils too so now you're like man the steak tasted good and I had that nice salad dressing that came out of a bottle that was full of crap oils and you think you're being healthy but you're completely wrecking things and this is some of the stuff that I did when I was heavy right and then the third thing would be sugar right you just if you have a ton of sugar it's directly harmful if you do the stuff I'm talking about you can probably have a few grams of sugar and you won't notice that your body can handle it just fine so sugar is not good for you and it is addictive but it is way better to eat sugar than it is to eat corn oil but don't do either one don't even know what yeah have sugar every once in a while yeah but don't eat oil and yeah like if if someone said here's a birthday cake you know it's gluten-free I don't do gluten um and they said I made it with canola oil I'd just be like no right but if this I made it with sugar and butter I'd be like all right I'm gonna have some and it's that the sugar okay your body can process that and it's gone the other stuff it sticks and it gets in there and you don't want to do it so the worst diet of all is that one with lots of fried stuff and bad oils but the second worst diet for people who think they're being healthy this isn't gonna be popular but it is the vegan diet why is that there's two things okay I was a devout raw vegan okay I did this for more than a year I mean I have bowls as big as my head full of kale and Blended and mashed and sprouted and I mean I I'm good with rice and beans and everything yeah yeah all that stuff so what happens there is your body doesn't get the essential fats that it needs we are not made out of plant oils and I have I have in my books I talk about the studies that show when you change the type of oil you eat it changes what your body is made of so when you go on a plant-based diet you're getting two things you're getting plant-based oils which are not very compatible with you vegans will get mad at me and say Dave we can convert plant Omega-3s to the good ones yes it takes 45 grams of bad Omega-3s to make one gram of the good ones if your body can do that which it won't be able to do because you're on a plant-based diet and then you get tons of these anti-nutrients from plants that cause cravings when I was raw vegan I was always hungry and I think that that's a very common occurrence and I would say well that's right I'm going to put more coconut oil or eat more you know fresh all these things avocados it didn't matter it's because plants don't want you to eat them and they cover themselves in defense systems that cause Cravings so I talk about the five big categories of things that are causing problems with us right now and many plants that are common on a plant-based diet are not very compatible with humans like oh they have these vitamins like yeah they also stick to the stuff that lines the cartilage in your joints and gives you joint pain or they inhibit your ability to absorb zinc and magnesium and iron and things like that and so what happens is you tell yourself you're doing this to be nice to the animals but what you're doing is you're making sure that the animals will go extinct because everyone's vegan we have no animals and then two generations later we'd all be extinct because we'd have no animals to make soil because you can't grow carrots without animal poop at the end of the day you can do it for 20 years you can do it for 30 years but eventually you have to build that soil back up so what's happening on a plant-based diet is the wrong fats and lots of anti-nutrients and that combination is Kryptonite for people and I've had tens of thousands of former vegans go bulletproof and part of the reason I made the bulletproof diet was because I did harm to myself including additional food allergies and worse hypothyroidism as a result of being vegan and in terms of animal cruelty I calculated deaths per calorie from eating a pound of grass-fed steak every day which is a lot you don't need to do that unless you're on the carnivore side of things which there's an argument for that um but if you do that and the cow is grass-fed and local unless the cow stepped on a frog you kill less than one animal per year in all of your food but if you eat boxes of processed soy nuggets you disrupted the lives of whatever was going to live on that land and whatever the tractor is killed and so the number of deaths per calories is way higher for any grain product and any anything other than basically fresh picked vegetables because of habitat destruction and tractor kills and like I asked to monk this in Tibet I I'm not dogmatic but I want to do what works so I like to minimize suffering I buy from a local farmer eat less meat but make it grass-fed and eat very good fats and if you do that you'll never have a craving during a fast and if you don't believe anything I say you can still be plant-based or vegan and you can still be standard American diet Dave I like my industrial animals you know go screw yourself just do intermittent fasting and you'll still improve it works for any diet out there and I'm happy to share the knowledge enough for sure moved a lot of a lot of information there's 3 000 blog posts and stuff like that but what I want people to do is figure out the foods that are compatible with your biology and if you're one of the small percentage of people I was like you know what a vegetarian works for me I know people it really does they eat some eggs they eat some cheese they eat a substantial amount of butter and magically that really works for them and that's okay right but if it doesn't work for you don't tell yourself it's supposed to work so you'll do it even more that's the mistake that I made before the interview continues if you feel like you're not living your most authentic life not leaning into your purpose and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of I've written a new book called The greatness mindset and I think you're going to love this through powerful stories science back strategies and step-by-step Guidance the greatness mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality make sure to click the link below in the description to get your copy today okay let's get back to this video what are your three best strategies and or practices for fasting that people can practice for the next seven days that is sustainable maintainable and doable and it will also get added benefits yeah I mean I think that the in terms of fasting one make it a habit right so habits are what makes it easy you know tough stuff not so tough right so if you are you know make it a habit to sort of do a 16-hour fast right say my eating window is between this and this do it consistently so that it feels normal to you and therefore when you step outside that you feel a little bit uncomfortable just like that day you don't brush your teeth right it's like you feel a little bit like something's off here because that's a thing right so you do it consistent and I think that's one of the big um uh you know big things uh that happened in the 70s that is they had that 14 hour period of fasting without thinking about it right so it was never onerous because they just did it right it's not like I have to not eat after dinner that's just what I do right it's it's a huge shift in the way you think about things two is uh sort of staying busy so that you don't think about the food and there's you know certain things that you can do and something that that are good and some things that aren't so good so one of the things of course um is trying to avoid the triggers so if you decide okay once a week I'm gonna do a 24 hour fast I'm gonna eat just one meal that day that's fine but then you have to make sure that you schedule something into that period where you would be not eating so you know if if you're doing something else you're not going to eat for me for example for years I would just schedule uh you know I would do writing I would write like my books where I'd do a podcast or something like that so it's easy because if I'm if it's 12 o'clock I need to go do this podcast I'm not thinking about lunch because I'm doing this podcast or like it was a to the library or somewhere where it's quiet then I do some writing I write my blogs right and it's like oh okay well now I'm not missing it anymore right so put it on the schedule and make sure that you have something else that's going to sort of take your mind off that makes it easier for yourself right and that's you know that's the key and then the third thing I think is to really plan ahead of time how you're going to deal with the hunger right because it's a hunger comes you have to have a plan like you can't just show up right what's the best plan that you do or that you recommend for people when they're like they're hungry and they're just like oh I'm emotional I'm having a challenging day or I'm sad or uh and I'm so used to grabbing for the chips the snacks the cookies the Crunchies what's the best practice to keep people's discipline at a high when they feel like all they want to do is Munch yeah there's there's two things if if you're in a place where you can do it um do something active especially outside because of course then you're taking yourself away so going out for a walk or a run is great because exercise like it does two things first of all you can schedule it second of all when you're actually exercising you'll almost never be hungry right like think about the last time you play tennis or basketball or soccer you're so fully into the game you're not thinking boy I'm really hungry like almost never like like it almost you know you almost can't do it right like you you know you've you've done plenty of stuff you never think in the middle of a Game Boy I could really use a burger right you're thinking how am I going to score right or whatever you're doing right so quitting a pickup game of whatever you like to play right does does wonders because you know the hunger is going to go away you're taking the time where you are you know you're in the past you would have taken something so lunch hour for example you're taking that time and three when you make a plan to play a game of tennis with your friend you're not gonna back out you're not going to just say ah forget it I'm gonna go for a pizza because you're gonna let your friend down so that keeps you accountable to yourself so it's like okay so once a week and this is great when people are trying to say lose weight together it's like okay let's figure out what we like to play is it you know yoga is it riding a bicycle is it going for our hike does it go like whatever it is let's do it together and let's do it at a time so that we get through this period right and that's how we help each other right we help each other by doing these sorts of things and of course that's sort of The Secret of uh how people fasted in the past like you think about groups of people now there's all sorts of religious fasting Traditions so around lent for example around Ramadan Yom the poor whatever it is there's there's fasting well literally millions of people are doing it why because they're doing it together it's just a lot easier if your family is not eating you're a lot less likely to eat because it's just the norm so you know doing things together in a supportive group that's that's important like it's it's the way we get things done or we're humans we're social beings right earlier you talked about environment and willpower how does someone develop more willpower or discipline when their environment continually um challenges them to stay disciplined you know maybe they don't have the ability to remove all the sugary Foods or they're working in an office where they can't say hey can we get rid of this stuff uh how does someone with a room full of distractions manage to stay disciplined and have willpower yeah that's a tough one because you know I I don't think um you know a lot of people think obesity or weight gain is about lack of willpower um but again I don't think it is I think it's the change in sort of the Norms that is the eating norms and the environment which is less in the processed food has led to that so if you can't take yourself out of the environment then you really have to look at alternative ways to uh you know again you have to plan for it so if you know that there's going to be something like uh you know in the meeting there's going to be food right and you don't want to eat because you don't want to gain weight then you have to decide what are you going to do to sort of counteract that maybe you're gonna get a t right and then that's all you'll have so at least you'll have something to sip on put in your mouth because you know you need something in there it's just like the way people used to when they stopped smoking they chew gum right because you need something in there to take take away the sort of thing so it's it still takes willpower but it takes a little less because you're still getting something right um or you have to decide okay well how you know you have to decide what am I going to do to sort of uh minimize and maybe I'll step further away from where things are um you know if you're sometimes you have these meetings where you're you know in the auditorium and the food's at the back I'll sit at the front so that it's going to be embarrassing for me to get out and and get some food because it's going to look so bad right uh whereas if you're back you just grab it and then go back to your seat right so so there's there's there's ways but it's really still about trying to figure out how you're going to mitigate those effects um of what you're of what you're trying to do because the Temptations are always going to be there right and and you have to realize the foods are made to be tempting like nobody's trying to make their foods not not appetizing so yeah I feel like it's going to be a chat I mean I feel like there's so many emotions that tied towards the discipline of eating with all the marketing messages with all the stress that people have it feels good to eat and consume it takes away some of the pain it takes away some of the emotional challenges that people face and I you know I I can empathize with parents I'm not a parent so I can't speak into how it might feel having kids who are who maybe are a handful or maybe you have a lot of emotional uh and energy and it's hard to manage that it's hard to manage your job and your relationships and and your own health and so I know a lot of parents probably know what's good for their kids but they maybe give in sometimes because it's just easier to just give them candy and have some things so I understand even though I'm not a parent but I can see how that challenge could come up what can parents do because it seems like parents have a massive uh control on what their kids eat you know yeah until a certain age I think that parents on the one hand there's a lot of challenges there but on the other hand they're very motivated so that's good because they want to do good for their kids right so and I think that's where a lot of um you know a lot of parents have actually made those changes so trying to cut out sugary drinks um cut out some of the snacking because remember back in you know not that long ago it was all about giving snacks um so I had you know my kids are older now but they used to play soccer um at night you know and and it was always like for freaking years it was like oh at halftime we have to give them some juices cookies yeah some oranges yeah slices um why I was always thinking well I was thinking like I played soccer when I was a kid I had so much fun and nobody chased me around trying to give me juice and cookies because water yeah and I probably would have just asked I probably would have preferred to play truthfully right because it was so much fun right um all these games are fun for kids and and so so one is limiting the drink so you know you see water has come back in sort of a big way sparkling water Still Water like you you know 15 20 years ago it was all juices and pop now you see water available everywhere so that's good cutting down the sugar cutting down the the refined Foods so making sure they have good choices and the other thing of course is that if you're again if you're in a situation where you know there's going to be stuff that's tempting is to sort of spoil your appetite right make sure you're eating something good before you go in where there's a lot of stuff that's bad right because if you're full you're going to be less tempted than eating other stuff so if you're going into a place where there's just going to be tons of stuff make sure you have a good dinner first or a good lunch first so that when you're going in you're not like oh cookies chips right and it's like you know so I think parents have already made some of those good changes the thing about the snacks which I thought was strange um was so this always happens actually so my my when my kids used to go on these uh field trips and stuff you know you'd get this letter to the parent and it's like we're going on a field trip to whatever Museum you know they're going to take the bus make sure you pack two snacks for that I was like like why are they not eating lunch or am I not feeding them dinner like which one because there's no other reason that they need a snack and the problem with this and this was just a few years ago is that it's sort of institutionalizes the fact right that you should be eating all the time right but you shouldn't because there's no reason to why would you want somebody remember when you eat you're gonna store energy which is body fat there's no way around it right it's calories especially if these are fine snacks snacks are the worst actually because they tend to be refined carbs because like cookies because they don't spoil right nobody's packing a piece of salmon for snack right it's like a cookie right or a cracker or something right so it institutionalizes the fact two parents and two kids that snacking is a good thing and that you should eat two snacks in between sort of lunch and dinner and it's healthy for you but it's not you really shouldn't because that's the period of time that you should have been using the energy you you ate at lunch so remember like if you wanted an after-school snack in the past in the 70s and I grew up in the 70s your mom would say no you're gonna ruin your dinner right you want a bedtime snack no you should aim or at dinner right and dinner of course was you know the fully cooked meal home cooked meal it was the proteins and the fats and the you know the the good stuff that you're cooking you know that you spent time cooking not the packaged cookie that you put into the you know into the snack box but yeah it's it's trying to get back to those Basics and I feel like we don't we're just we don't have to reinvent the wheel you just have to look back at what we did in the 70s and you'll get your blueprint for what you're supposed to be doing three snacks unprocessed Foods cut the sugar and make sure you have a period of time at night where you're going to use this those calories that you took in during the day one of the insane benefits of water only fasting because you've been doing this for 38 years with over 20 000 patients that have done water only fasting what are the main benefits well you know one of the first things that we look at is that there are certain conditions that are really common today so cardiovascular disease high blood pressure diabetes type two autoimmune diseases where the immune system itself is attacking the body rheumatoid arthritis ulcerative colitis ankles and Spondylitis the psoriasis the eczema these conditions where it's your own body that's kind of working against you and also certain types of cancer like lymphoma and these conditions that are so common now are really thought to be unmanageable because I mean if you go to a physician with high blood pressure they're going to give you a medication that might be a diuretic or a beta block or whatever or a combination of medications and they're going to tell you right from the beginning if you do what I tell you you'll never get well really you'll be on these meds for the rest of your life absolutely you'll never get off these meds you'll be on drugs forever because they know that they're not actually dealing with the reasons that you've developed high blood pressure the root you're dealing with trying to manage the consequence of the roof and so our approach is a little different because we're not interested in trying to come up with a pill potion or powder and tell you well that's it just take these drugs and stuff for the concert keep eating the same way keep living the same lifestyle keep lacking sleep being stressed eat all the processed foods and you'll be on these drugs for the rest well live normally yeah right normal the way it is today right well two-thirds of people are now overweight or obese yeah so being overweight is normal if you want it doesn't mean it's healthy right you don't necessarily want to be normal if you want to be healthy because Normal or average right now is in in trouble and it's in trouble because people are under the influence of a pleasure trap yeah there's this hidden Force that's undermining people's health and happiness and they don't even realize it in many cases your delayed gratification is the key that is the way in my opinion not living in the instant pleasures of today but how can I uh you know distance myself from it as long as possible to be rewarded in other healthier happier ways the problem I think is though that you are biologically designed for short-term pleasure seeking self-indulgent Behavior those hits those dopamine hits absolutely the body the brain rewards the body every time it engages in behavior that favors survival and reproduction and those primary dominant behaviors are feeding behavior and sexual behavior because it's food and sex that are necessary for the species to survive to get enough to eat to not get eaten live long enough to reproduce and that dopamine driven short-term response worked great through most of human history but more recently it's become a bit of a trap and it's become a bit of a trap because we've changed our environment from an environment of scarcity where it was really hard to get enough to eat people to abundance and now we live in an environment abundance and these highly processed foods are so appealing because they they play off those ancient mechanisms this salt the sugar the processed nature of it it's just delicious but it's not good for you well you have to override that biology if your goal is to survive long and well yeah not survive unwell which is what we've trained our society to do it's like how can we extend our life on machines that's not a world of life but how can we be happy healthy fulfilled and then have a quick quicker death right it's like not suffer for as long as possible but live as long happy and healthy and then Turn All the Lights are we talking about having a good life good hopefully long life but also a good death the death where one night you go to sleep and you don't wake up rather than spending the last 9.6 years unable to talk or move like in some nursing home bed waiting for people to come and change your diaper because you've had a stroke or you've had other debilitating illnesses that prevent you from actually making the last decade or two perhaps the best most enriching time of your life rather than the worst depending on others around you unable to really function properly and that's the price we pay for short-term pleasure seeking self-indulgent behavior that you know doesn't necessarily cause an immediate problem but definitely causes longer term problems so what are these crazy benefits of water only fastening there what are the main things you've seen people transform of these 20 000 plus cases one of the biggest thing that fasting does it's an efficient way of undoing the consequences of dietary excess so people spend a long time accumulating the consequence of dietary excess and they can very rapidly reverse many of them consequences such as what what are the main things you see so the conditions like of they're caused by dietary exercise so high blood pressure for example we did a study with 174 consecutive patients with high blood pressure and 174 people were able to lower their pressure enough to eliminate the need for medications the medications for blood pressure cause chronic cough fatigue impotence and premature death and yet they're routinely used because it's not recognized that blood pressure is reversible in containable process really fasting is an effective and efficient way of reversing and normalizing blood pressure now the problem is you can't fast forever you have to feed so you also have to learn to eat a health promoting diet in order to sustain those results but in terms of eliminating the risk factors eliminating the need for medication normalizing blood pressure you can do that very predictably with medically supervised water only fasting what does it mean medically supervised when you're just drinking water I mean what do you need why do you need someone there to watch you is it like testing your blood sample is it just making sure you're not fatigued starvation mode we recognize that fasting can be done safely and should be done safely every day by every patient for 12 to 16 hours depending on their goals if they're trying to lose weight or gain weight may depend on the duration but we recommend a period of 16 hours a day fasting eight hours a day of feeding and by limiting the feeding window as people like Walter Longo and others has pointed out you may be able to induce some of the benefits that happen with long-term fasting cumulatively right and also prevent perhaps some of the overeating and other things that contribute to dietary excess so everybody can and should fast every day in fact everybody does fast every day when you're sleeping you're not eating and you break it with break fast in the morning you know it's an interesting process so we're talking about maybe extending that natural period daily so that you aren't necessarily eating three or four hours before you go to sleep May improve your Sleep Quality we improve digestion May improve your muscle to Fat ratios over time and may induce changes that are beneficial the thing that we do in addition is we'll extend that period much longer the problem when you start talking about long-term fasting and we're fasting people anywhere from 2 to 40 days on water only is that first you need to make sure that the person is an appropriate candidate for that longer term intervention people that have certain pathology people on medications people have risk factors may be better off with a different approach than long-term water only fasting so first thing is a history and an examination to make sure there isn't any primary issues with kidney or cardiac function or or medications that would contraindicate constants what happens to the kidneys or the liver if you're water only fasting so the kidneys and liver are main detoxifying organs in the body and particularly the kidneys if kidney function I isn't at least at some minimal level in our Clinic we use creatinine levels of 2.0 as an arbitrary marker if the kidney function isn't adequate then the rapid detoxification that occurs during fasting where the body mobilizes and eliminates both and Dodges and has exogenous toxins into the bloodstream and then are processed by the kidneys if the kidneys function is inadequate you could overload the kidney function and create problems there really and so it's very important that people have minimal levels of clearance and that's also the reason we make sure that people have adequate fluid intake and maintain electrolyte balance and hydration so we're monitoring people's electrolytes so to make sure that we don't get into problems with potassium or sodium or other things which could become a problem especially in these longer fast when we're going two three four five weeks or longer wow what's the longest someone's been on a water fast with you well in our Clinic we limit fasting generally to 40 days we've had a few patients we've had to go a little bit longer than that but there's uh evidence in the literature of patients fasting and medically controlled settings for as long as they year or more so not that we would recommend that is that just someone who's so obese that they're trying to you know get rid of all the complications and shed the weight and all those things there was a lot of work done in the 70s and 80s in treating Supreme obesity with long-term fasting but even a thin male say a 70 kilogram male could probably fast somewhere around up to 70 days if they're resting during the process not that they should survive but as far as nutrient reserves and adequacy the body is pretty amazing you know the main burner of glucose for humans is our brain is what just thinking or what like cognitive activities the brain we have this ridiculously large Brain in humans two and a half times that say of a chimp it's huge and it's our main burner of glucose in fact if it wasn't for our ability to change our brain fuels from sugar to Fat we we couldn't have survived as a species the way we have because if we had wandered away from the tropics after a week or so if spring came late yeah we would have died in fact we did yeah the humans that didn't have the ability to change brain from burning sugar to burning fat weren't able to survive we know that because today virtually every human being has this ability to change its brain fuel from sugar which is the normal fuel to burning ketones or beta hydroxybutyric acid in particular right and that would suggest a biological adaptation such an important adaptation that the species had to have it so today humans can wander away from the tropics spring can come late and we can survive despite our very large brain and it's huge burning glucose because we have this ability to fast all we've done is taken this ancient biological process and applied it in a very unnatural situation and that is a situation of dietary excess no other animals maintain obesity I mean even whales who you think of as kind of fat are nine percent body fat okay really yeah they just hold it on the outside of their their Mean Machines like all animals do unless they get access to hyper processed foods like humans eat so if you feed human style hyper processed foods to animals they also get fat we add chemicals to our food specifically to induce dopamine stimulation in our brain those those chemicals are salt oil and sugar these are not Foods they're food byproducts they're hyper concentrated food biparts are essentially chemicals we're putting in the food that stimulate more dopamine dopamine is the neurochemistry associated with pleasure the more dopamine the more pleasure the more we like the food that's what good tasting food needs is it stimulates more dopamine production and the pros the consequence of hyper stimulating our brain with dopamine means we overeat and we become obese and that's why two-thirds of people are overweight is because they fold their brain with chemicals they put in their feed it works in rats it works within mice it works in humans put the chemicals in their feed they overeat they get fat then they develop obesity and metabolic syndrome and if you have metabolic syndrome you're more vulnerable to dying from heart disease cancer diabetes and even in viral infectious diseases like covet the higher your metabolic syndrome increases risk of dying from all these things all these Downstream consequences what about them what about olive oil or avocado oil I hear these good oils these fatty oils are supposed to help you in certain ways is that well you have to be careful when we Define these quote good oils there are oils that are more harmful than say olive oil so an oil being less harmful doesn't necessarily mean it's good it's just less bad so oils are all highly processed fractionated foods with nine calories per gram and eliminates to tidy feedback so if we're talking about trying to lose or maintain Optimum weight oils would have a disadvantage compared to eating your fat from Whole Food so I would Advocate if putty once avocado I'll eat avocado right not necessarily for us to sit down remove the fiber a lot of the good components and be left with the oil and the same thing is true with sugar you need carbohydrates as a primary fuel but you eat whole food whether it's fruits or vegetables or starches not necessarily the highly processed hyper processed byproducts that's right if your goal is to avoid overeating dietary excess obesity and the disease of dietary excess what's the three main benefits you see it's hard to different there's so many benefits it'd be hard to say which are the three don't but I can talk about some of the benefits that we see certainly you see weight loss you can't help that right laws of physics and thermodynamic safety but don't eat you're going to lose weight we know that weight loss is about a pound a day now that pound of a day of water only average weight loss is a pounding now some of that's water right some of it's protein some of its fiber some of its glycogen and some of its fat and of that fat some of its adipose tissue of its visceral fat the visceral is what you want to burn right well visceral fat is the one that's most associated with pathology in fact probably shouldn't be very much visceral fat visceral fats what happen when the body has no place else to put fuel and so you'll store some additional visceral fat and the higher the visceral fat generally the worse you off are simplistically speaking right and so we just did a study where we took a dexa scanner that has software that allows to do precise whole body composition so not just how much fat and protein there is but how much visceral fat there is internally and externally right exactly so the visual fat typically you think about an apple or strong in the belly and around the organs that internal fat so a lot of visceral fat around the organs as well right that is not good for you yeah that's not thought to be very that's not good I mean the belly fat that people see is not good obviously but the stuff that's surrounding all the organs is you don't want to have a lot of that fat right that's correct okay and so the question is what can you do to get rid of it and any type of dieting will cause various types of body changes but the approach that's shown the most effective at mobilizing visceral fat is actually fasting fasting is the mo the highest ratio of visceral fat adipose tissue mobilization for example typical patient in the study might lose 20 percent of their fat that would lose over 50 percent of their visceral fat during a couple weeks of fasting even though they only lose four percent of their lean tissue and what's even more exciting is we look at okay what happens during fasting let's say for example a person loses 10 pounds and we know some of that is water some of it's fiberglycogen some of it's adipose tissue some of this then what happens after fasting so you lose 10 pounds you might regain five pounds right you're gonna grain about two pounds of glycogen because you have sugar stores in your muscles that will be depleted within a couple days of fasting you're going to rehydrate because there's a little physiological dehydration during fasting you can put fiber back into your gut because your gut's not going to have had a fire Ruby added to it you're gonna pump up your muscle cells again because you'll have depleted a little bit of glucose in order to maintain the glucose the core glutes that your brain needed and you're going to uh theoretically put back on fat but after fasting assuming a person adopts a whole plant food SOS free diet what we found was weight comes off weight comes back on but the weight that comes back on is glycogen water fiber and protein not fat fat continues to drop I like it so we have we've been able to show and this study will be coming out later this year uh exactly what happens and then we followed people at six weeks brought them back in reanalyzed them and we're able to demonstrate that not only can people lose their fat in this real fat but they can continue to lose their fat visceral fat even Free Living eating Health proteins so the scale will go up some but the fat will not go up that's correct so you gotta you gotta trick your mind and say well I'm not gaining all this weight like you're gaining the necessary weight that your body needs to be stronger so you can have an active lifestyle and all these things but not the fat back keep in mind it's not weight per se that's the threat it's excess fat so for example if you work out you might gain 10 or 20 pounds of lean tissue over time that's not necessarily compromising your health just because you quote gained weight now if you sit around in the couch and eat greasy fatty slimy dead decaying flesh and highly processed foods and put on a lot of fat particularly visceral fat gain that same 20 pounds that might be a problem right so we want to be careful not to be thinking just in terms of weight but in terms of body composition okay so the idea is to lower the fat not necessarily lower the muscle fasting is like eating right okay it can do a lot of good for you or a lot of damage and and uh um so I would say that you're starting to see lots of clinical studies and pre-clinical so animal studies and and at a certain point you put it together and you get a good sense for what works and what doesn't work it doesn't mean it's not by no means final but you get a good sense so I would say if you look at the daily type of fast what clearly works and is not associated with any negative effects is 12 hours right 12 hours 12 hours of timer for 20 for 12 hours yeah don't yes I say 8 A.M 8 P.M stop eating at 8pm and no more food until next day 8 am okay okay so that I would say I've never seen a negative study about this so if you eat if you wake up you eat between eight and eight you're good yeah don't eat before 8 A.M don't eat after 8 PM yeah so that's already a very good one um another one it now if you go to 16 hours right say 16 8 you're starting to see lots of benefits but you start seeing lots of problems right what type of problems well first of all gallstone formation right gallbladder operation goes to an uh formation they double between the people they fast for 10 hours the people they fast for 18 hours right really yeah so so just to give you one another one study after study of the study and we've done the same study but um somebody has published before we got a chance to um people skip breakfast most people they go 16 hours will skip breakfast and the breakfast Skippers tend to live less have more cardiovascular disease and more disease in general right okay whatever we break this down so for years I was always eating breakfast because I love breakfast then I heard about intermittent fasting where it's like skip the breakfast and eat at lunch and do the eight hour window right but you tell me now that the studies are showing that those that skip breakfast are living less and having more problems yes than if you eat breakfast and eat within the 12-hour window no if you just eat breakfast breakfast not eating breakfast right you're just eating breakfast what are the studies showing now between not eating breakfast and eating breakfast yeah so the people just keep breakfast they're living shorter with more diseases really it is study after study yesterday it's not one you know it's very consistent it's just for people you know over 60 years old or no no no yeah this is just looking at people did they have breakfast or not uh and then follow you know let's say for 20 years the mortality of those that historically never eat breakfast are there other conditions around that where they were they had just stressed or they were you know didn't have good relationships or they adjust for for most of it but it's possible but my point to to those that say well maybe something else it's not the breakfast keeping yes but but if it's so beneficial to go 16 hours a day of fasting why doesn't at least bring you back to normal life right interesting so why is breakfast so important well nobody knows but it could be that it's setting up the metabolism right it's setting up the metabolism to be in a you know like we were discussing earlier right so if it's affecting the way you burn fat if it's affecting the way your insulin functions Etc et cetera eventually you could be more prone to you know insulin resistance diabetes cardiovascular disease exactly you don't need very much and also the heart right so it could be the Ketone bodies this continuous high level so when you fast this Ketone bodies this is what the word ketogenesis comes from this bra these byproducts of fat are going up in the bloodstream right and and uh and also fatty acids right the fat is themselves and these can can alter the way your heart works in the way your your brain works um so we don't know but it is possible that by having lots of that all the time now the um some of the systems now uh develop problems and uh and uh wow improving them so it's okay if you're doing like um a week-long fast or a three-day fast to obviously skip the food or have less food during breakfast but you're saying skipping breakfast on a consistent basis has proven that's not a good thing yeah I mean obviously nobody nobody did an experiment where they said well let's randomize that 10 000 people and you skip breakfast and you don't and let's wait 30 years right they cannot be done but it's epidemiological study so you know you look at the the databases and you say the breakfast Keepers you know are they doing better or worse than the number of fast Keepers and they're doing consistently worse wow and this is why you want to say okay if you want to do 16 hours talk to a doctor fine it could help you you know do it for a month or two but then find something else yeah find something else because you know it does have a a beneficial effect it can have lots of good could do lots of good things but then eventually uh you don't want to keep it for 20 years yeah so that's that's the the sort of daily uh stuff the uh once you get to alternate day fasting and all that I think it's just crazy stuff you know uh it's just you know I always say I have a difficult time at asking people to go from four coffees to three coffees a day right so when when if you go to someone and say oh no from now on beside that the potential you know long-term problems that we just discussed right so if 16 hours does that what could happen if you don't eat every other day right um but beside that just the feasibility the fact that people are actually going to do this it's just extremely unlucky you're looking at one person out of a hundred maybe they can not eat every other day right right what about one day a month like I'm gonna do a 24 hour fast one day a month is that yeah yeah nobody knows right nobody knows it the problem with that and this is why we I my lab and my group has always focused on this developing this fasting making diet is that in in the one day you you don't quite get into the ketogenic mode right and one day of fasting yeah in one day of fasting so you struggle because most people uh will not view that positively I mean you know tomorrow or next week I I'm not gonna have a day where I don't eat right so it's a struggle and uh and also you don't quite get so you you're hungry uh for that 24 hours and you don't quite get into a fat a starvation response more right yeah that's why we're saying um probably um the system if you look at our history right uh most likely we don't have we can't go back in time but most likely um in the Summers we were we had the job to get fat right uh fill up for winter lots of fruit honey whatever you can get your hands on eat as much as possible and then the the diabetes and pre-diabetes you know the the insulin resistance that then leads to diabetes so insulin doesn't work as well it was probably part of that process of making you store fat put away as much fat as possible so now you know these can be activated any time of the year right because people overeat all year long and so probably not probably what we see now clinically is that when you do let's say five days of a fasting making diet or it could even be water only fasting uh you unlock that you seem to unlock that mode where and this is why the doctor that I was telling you about you see even you see even even using the longevity diet but it's still not quite losing that insulin resistance until it does the fasting making that right that changes and you clearly see the slope of of the the glucose levels curve and and so yeah probably and the fasting mimicking diet is around like three to five hundred calories a day type of thing is that right or no the first image that uh is uh the one for regular people is 1100 calories and day one and then it goes then it goes 800 calories a day two three four five right okay gotcha so it's 800 calories for the last four days capture okay yeah so then then the possibility is considering that you know 70 over 70 percent of Americans are either overweight or obese uh now we're saying if you uh intervened a couple of times a year at least and you remind the system we are not in summer mode uh okay let's go into winter mode Let's go into let's burn these fats because uh um you know we're no longer having to store him um yeah so that that could be the the trick of the the five days versus let's say one day a month interesting which may keep the system um confused and not sure that we reach another phase here is it do we need to go now into a fat burning mode or can we stay in the fat accumulating mode yeah so what's the difference between having the fasting mimicking process of five days 800 to a thousand calories versus water only for five days if I've done it I can tell you the difference I've done it one time with water only for five years and I remember every day of it the pain of it you mean or what yeah it to me it was near torture right and we knew that that was true when we did the that I was telling you about the the clinical trial the first clinical trial in 2009 I think it was here USC and cancer patients and we thought somebody has cancer they're not gonna argue with water only fasting they're gonna do it right right yeah we were sure the oncologists were sure let's go let's do it nobody wanted to do it right uh so this is why we went to the the government and and said uh we would like to develop a fasting mimicking diet you know for for cancer patients that's that's where it comes from right so it comes from from the refusal of cancer patients too and we're like I'm gonna eat no matter what well they do yeah it's just it's a safety issue uh there's lots of things in food that um that are important to maintain high enough glucose level high enough blood pressure um et cetera Etc so once you remove it I think you know people can do what are only fasting but uh probably in a in a specialized Clinic you know right right yeah so if you go to a place it is effective it is a fact if you're in a specialized clinic in your house but watch out though right because again as we were saying earlier um the devil is in detail and if you go long enough right especially if you're extreme and long then the body goes into another response which is Thrifty mode so the body Thrifty mode so it stops burning yeah it keeps the fat let's say you got a couple of weeks without with that food at all the body now has to intervene and say we're going to be in trouble soon enough right so we're going to keep that we're not going to burn this we're not going to burn and so now you could have uh and we know this from long-term conversation studies you could have probably nobody's ever figured out what it is but it's called epigenetic change so there's a switch that turns on it's like okay from now on and maybe for years I'm now in a saving mode I'm going to save energy so now if you and this is why the the technology is so important right so you wanna do all the things that we just uh talked about and don't you want to avoid all the bad things right you don't want to get into Thrifty mode you want to get into the ketogenic mode you want to burn the the start burning the fat keep that long term and avoid the side effects uh you know yeah so all of this uh even though people uh think it oh yeah it's an old thing people who used to do it um you see how uh the the purpose it was not to get to 110 years of age Healthy Back 2000 years ago the purpose if you're lucky is make it to 50 years of age and have children so now everything changed right so now we can't just faster the old ways right right um we have to know we have to be respectful of the tradition and what we learn from all these uh all practices but at the same time we have to bring in the science the clinical trials and say okay how do we where do they match you know what's the common denominator between all these things you know fasting is kind of a funky State because you're all you're altering so many other things in the physiology but one of the things that happens especially by about the second day of a water only fast um is you really are seeing the impacts of what deep sleep can look like in a in a state that is totally absent food and it's it's very interesting because you're competing with two forces one that's keeping you awake and one that's helping you sleep a lot deeper the one that's keeping you awake is cortisol you have more of it you have more stress hormones when you're fasting because that's the thing from a prehistoric standpoint that would have been going on right fasting would trigger a signal that says go get more food right be alert be focused be alert go get food like we don't want to die and so that's kind of keeping you awake but the flip side of that is the total absence of nutrient is allowing you to get into this amazing sleep and your body temperature is really going down because your body's turning down its metabolism so I actually find uh fasting sleep to be some of the most amazing physiology because I'm watching this plummeting temperature rising heart rate variability falling heart rate all of these really valuable things but a little bit of rising cortisol that can lead to Shorter sleep times but I still feel quite you know rejuvenated by sleep wow okay I want to stay on sleep for a second I need to get the fourth one which I want to close that Loop but do we uh does that hurt us if we nap throughout the day or take a power nap for 20 to 40 minutes is that help our bodies recover more even if we're doing the seven or eight hours of sleep or does that not matter you know it depends I would say naps are not a bad idea provided they don't reduce your drive to sleep later so I just got back from like a a hunting trip last month where just based I mean first of all it was exhausting right you're sort of hiking 10 or 11 miles a day on vertical walls you know carrying a 50 pound pack it's it's all the stuff that is physiologically as taxing as it gets at altitude right so but there was no way you could go to bed like any earlier than 11 and you had to be up by 4 30. really well just because you know you have the most uh the the two times when you're gonna have the best opportunity to to go and stock the animal is in the evening and in the morning so those are the times so you know there was no way I was going to survive a week of that if I didn't carve out an hour and a half to two hours in the middle of day and the day to sleep and I'm normally not a napper but I made it a priority above anything else including practicing you know with my bow and arrow in the middle of the day which I would normally want to do nothing was a higher priority than getting that nap in during the day because I was deficient at night and getting that nap in the day didn't rob me of the ability to sleep at night right you still were passing out right when you got in your pillow absolutely um now let's say we talk about a person who is getting seven and a half or eight hours of quality sleep at night is there any downside to a 20-minute power nap I would say no um but if going any longer than that I would be I would be mindful because you know sleep comes down to balancing basically three things uh the first is cortisol so the the stress hormone cortisol must decline in the evening for you to be able to sleep the second thing is you have to accumulate something called adenosine so adenosine is kind of like this metabolic breakdown product that is core you know corresponds to how much work we do physical work cognitive work so more adenosine makes us more tired that's how caffeine works by the way caffeine blocks the adenosine receptor so it functionally makes you think you have less adenosine and napping reduces adenosine so you want to make sure you don't reduce it too much the third is melatonin by the way which has to go up so good sleep is when melatonin and adenosine go up and cortisol comes down so um I guess to close that out I would say if you are sleeping so short during the middle of the day and this is what I was thinking about on my trip you want to try to replicate a full sleep cycle in your nap which is about 90 minutes so that's why I really said look I'm going to set aside two hours to take a nap in the middle of the day to get to give me one full sleep cycle because I'm clearly being deprived of one during the night time and is there a such a thing as too much sleep if you're getting 10 12 14 hours of sleep every day consistently is that does that affect the body in a negative way really an interesting question by the way and quite a controversial question in the Sleep literature so um there is no question that hyper sleep has been associated with poor outcomes so you know there's a inverse uh sorry a U-shaped curve of mortality with sleep right so people who don't get much sleep have a higher mortality and it's really more of a J curve right so they kind of you know as you get more and more sleep the mortality comes down down but then it does sort of uptick so you get these people who are sleeping a lot and they're actually having worse outcomes than the people that are in the seven and a half to nine range historically that has been explained uh by the fact that people who are sleeping a lot are usually sick and that's why they're sleeping a lot so we're not we're missing we got the arrow of causation wrong we're saying you know are they sick because they're sleeping too much or are they sleeping too much because they're sick right well I think that the majority of the hyper sleepers are hyper sleepers because they're because they are sick there is actually some emerging evidence to suggest that absent that there might be a downside and too much sleep um but again I think for most people most of us are on the other end of that Spectrum which is we're constantly battling the need to get enough and that's either through you know our kids our work our stress our Electronics yeah our food our alcohol you know all the above our travel and is it a negative if you're a kid and you're eating a lot of junk food you're not sleeping you're staying up late because you're whatever playing video games all night but you've got all this energy all day and you're active is there a negative for in your early ages teens early 20s through lacking sleep eating poorly or is there a way to recover in your 20s from the damage you've done on your before 20. yeah it's a good question um I mean certainly you can break it down into sort of the behavioral habit side and you can talk about it through the physiologic lens the good news is before the age of 20 or 30 we are pretty remarkably resilient I mean you're an athlete so you can relate how old are you now Lewis you're 37 37. so you you might not have fully appreciate I'm 47 so I'm a full decade older than you and when I think about 17 to 27 to 30 to 11 to 47. I can really talk about those decades through the lens of resilience like at 17 you could shoot me and I think I'd still get up the next day like you just couldn't right you're Superman yeah you're absolutely Superman and I don't know I I feel like the first observation of not being Superman for me kind of kicked in about 42 ish about five years ago was the first time I was like oh so this is what people talk about right like you can't just go out and crush it every minute of every day and I think that's just one lens which is through the lens of exercise but the same is true of physiology right like or I'll give you another example many of my patients have observed this I've observed this like I was ever a big drinker in college but certainly there were enough occasions in med school or college where I'd go out and drink far more than anyone should and yet somehow the next day I could like get up at six in the morning and go and do whatever I need to do like I remember one night actually being out drinking until three in the morning I mean having so much to drink it was ridiculous and somehow getting up at six in that morning to do a hundred mile bike ride oh my gosh man probably still partially drunk and but but felt fine by about like two hours into the ride today if I had three glasses of wine like the headache I'm gonna have the next day is gonna last me till the middle of the day is that because your body was able to assimilate the glucose into the muscles and it used it for it to its Advantage then and now it's like it's a very good question I really I mean I could I could sort of you know speculate on what it is but I I just think there's an over so there's this thing called homeostasis right which is one of the Hallmarks of Youth and it's one of the Hallmarks of aging and you know it's it's the ability to or it's our lack of homeostasis we lose this ability to get the body back into the zone of Optimal Performance so everything about the human body is very particular for example take pH which is the amount of acidity in our body we're so highly regulated like our body really needs to be at a pH of 7.4 so seven would kill you and 7.6 or 7.7 would kill you and this is a scale that goes from 0 to 14 to put that in perspective wow okay so tiny perturbations will kill you how good is our body at staying in that amazing temperature right you go much below about 94 you're dead you go much above about 104. you're dead how good are we at staying in that range oh I mean good I mean we generally stay within a 1.5 degree band so this homeostasis thing is amazing it gets weaker and weaker as we get older and so your ability to tolerate bad food bad sleep sedentary Behavior more stress all those things it just gets weaker and weaker and weaker and I think it declines non-linearly so again what you experience is a decline between 30 and 40 it's bad 40 to 50. yeah that's worse 50 to 60 you can fall off a cliff is there a way to reverse this I don't think we know I think you can definitely slow the progression of it and uh I know you know what I would say you probably can reverse it right so just as you can clearly reverse diabetes diabetes is a glucose homeostasis problem and it's clearly reversible um but you know so there are probably some variants of this that that are harder to reverse than others uh but but no I I think we can reverse this process uh but it gets it gets harder you know it gets harder as time goes on it gets harder the further the further you are into you know sort of the physiologic Trap what are you doing to reverse it now that you've been experiencing this kind of not maybe a cliff but a dip over the last five years for yourself how are you thinking about it well I sort of had a change of heart um five years ago so actually six years ago 2014 so I sort of hung up my bike which at that so at that point I'd switched from swimming to cycling as sort of my main sport um but I you know at that point a couple of things had happened so one I had become very familiar with a lot of emerging research on excessive cardiovascular training which again is a rich man's problem Ultra marathons Ultra biking Ultra swimming hiking that's that's right that's right so I'd be again very and it's the same sort of curve right where as exercise dose of exercise goes up mortality comes down but it has this little bit of a j where once you start to get into hyper amounts of exercise especially over the age of 40 you're actually driving an increase in mortality now really yes does that mean like running a marathon once a year or is it running a marathon every week yeah great great Point running a marathon once a year probably not increasing your mortality at all um but you know running 40 50 miles a week probably is especially at that age now again this gets to your point about resilience someone in their 20s doing that doesn't seem to have any impact on mortality it really only seems to be an issue if you continue in fact I did an interview with a cardiologist James O'Keefe on my podcast who is you know the world's expert on this and and um it was actually James's work six years ago because I heard him speak at a conference 10 years ago we became friends I you know it's one of those things I'm sure you've experienced this where you hear something and you don't want it to be true so you basically come up with all the reasons you're gonna poke holes in it until you find the evidence the other way yeah yeah yeah and eventually it became very difficult to ignore that this hyper amount of exercise was counterproductive this so that's one piece of the the change six years ago it's probably bad that I just committed to doing the marathon next year yesterday that's all right though you'll be fine I just think don't do one a month yeah exactly um and then and then I think the second thing was I realized like it was sort of funny but I realized like my Prime was so far behind me that I needed to think about like what what was what was I doing this in service of right like um and not that I needed anyone other than myself to do these things because I'm very self-motivated so I don't like but just as a joke one day I asked my wife I said hey do you know what my PR is for 20K Like Bike Run or Swim yeah bike on a 20K bike on the time trial and I was like this is my wife she hears me talk about this stuff all the time I have spreadsheets and models and data and I analyze my power data every single day and I'm trying to break the record for San Diego like I'm really so switched on to this she'll probably get it within a minute she'll guess what my PR is within a minute she was off by 20 minutes meaning she wasn't even in the zip code so I was like huh that's funny like it's like literally the most important person in my life couldn't care less about this and what I realized was you know I need to start thinking about a different sport which is the sport of longevity so what does it mean to be a kick-ass hundred year old and so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction called the centenarian Olympics so how do you train to kick ass at a hundred should you get there and of course everywhere along the way so that now dominates my landscape of training which means I don't you know care about how fast I can you know ride a 40 kilometer time trial because that doesn't quite fit into what a centenarian needs to be able to do what is your mindset going into a 40 mile bike then or some type of experience is it more the joy of it so I don't I don't I don't train no my training is very specific but now it is fundamentally organized around four pillars um so the pillars being stability strength uh mitochondrial or aerobic efficiency and anaerobic performance and so each of those then has a super layer detail approach and I still ride my bike four hours a week so it's a fraction of what I used to do and it's now very much geared to a certain energy system and a type of training um what was the fourth one stability strength mitochondria and mitochondrial efficiency or aerobic efficiency and then the fourth and final one is anaerobic performance so you focus on those four metrics now now on a day-to-day basis yeah yeah those those four pillars sort of make up the training program which is then in service of something that I invite every patient to Define for themselves which is because you will have a different you know set of variables for me potentially but you know my Centenary Olympics has you know 18 events in it you know like I want to be able to pull myself out of a pool that you know where there's a one foot gap between the water and the curb like lift myself up I want to be able to hop over a three foot fence I want to be able to walk three miles in an hour I want to be able to carry two 10 pound bags up four flights of stairs I want to be able to goblet squat 30 pounds because that's about the weight of a kid I want to be able to get up off the floor without using my hands so I could rattle off all of my 18 things and you would say Peter those seem really easy and you'd be right as a 37 year old stud but the point is as a search a lot of them aren't easy at most 60 worlds couldn't do this if their life depended on it and I have yet to meet but maybe one person in their 80s or 90s who can and so that's the aspiration is to get to that level in your 80s or 90s how do you work that backwards to inform your training in your 60s in your 50s and in your 40s and it's actually very hard and as I'm getting into you know I'm three years away from 40 what should someone in my age range be thinking about when they're you know I'm healthy I feel good you know maybe have some aches and pains here and there when I'm training hard or something but for the most part I feel amazing what should I be thinking about moving forward so that I continue to feel amazing and have the ability to do these things so I don't I think it's never too late to at least become familiar with what these ideas mean and it doesn't mean that you have to go whole hog and devote yourself to this like I've obviously made a very conscious choice that I don't go to swim meets I don't go to bike races like I don't train for those things anymore and a big part of that is just time you know there are only 168 hours in a week and you know I have a very clear set of priorities and I'm willing to set aside 10 to 12 hours a week for exercise which by many people's standards is still quite a lot but probably by the standards that you exercise and certainly by the standards that I used to exercise I've never exercised so little in my life so I have to be very efficient with every one of those minutes and that means I'm laser focused on the four principles of that in your case I think it comes down to saying okay how much time do you want to vote devote to the long game how much time do you want to devote to the short game another way to think about this would be investing if you're looking at an Investment Portfolio you might say how much do I want to put both time and money so the actual capital I set aside but also the amount of time I spend deliberating over it into my retirement account versus how much do I want to invest as a day trader for short-term gains for you know money that I'm going to be using in the near term that's maybe even supplementing my income today so you could have totally different strategies for that and that's totally fine so I'm just in the category where I'm only thinking about long-term permanent capital and so um so that's the first question is you have to decide how do you want to do that and it might be that you say you know Peter at 37 I just want to focus on running a marathon I've always wanted to do an Iron Man so I'm going to go and do that and you know I want to climb Mount Everest and that's going to require like you might have a whole bunch of these bucket list things and truthfully I would say do them now because it's only going to get harder because you're not going to do it later yeah yeah I mean I don't think you're going to want to do it later so get those things out of the way what is part of this 45 day process is it multiple days of fasting throughout is it certain foods is it what is the process like well 45 Day program and there's no really long fast in the book I mean they're no longer than a day and a half but because it's meeting people where they are so some people are have been fasting they're ready for the challenges people are like I'm a standard American diet person I've been a couch potato for 30 years I need help so we can kind of meet all their needs but I think it really speaks to the fact that we have to talk about lifestyle we have to talk about are you getting good out good sleep are you managing your stress and that's not five minutes of meditation once a week and how many of us think that that you know check the box that's what's done it and it's really talking to people about anti-inflammatory nutrition unfortunately most of the foods that proliferate in the processed food industry are highly inflammatory and I'm talking about like gluten and dairy I always get you know the side eye from people like no not dairy sometimes in certain instances sometimes grains process sugars alcohol alcohol is a big one if you're having it consistently I don't know I think uh Andrew huberman just did a whole you know breakdown master class on alcohol for the brain and the body and he was essentially like there is no benefit you know there's only bad things that can come from that not even like oh what about a little bit of wine every now and then and the Resveratrol that's in the wine but he's like it doesn't outweigh the the alcohol itself having a little bit in that Resveratrol whatever so I think um I've never been drunk in my life or high and I'll have like maybe like a bathe on Ice a couple times a year it's like sip on but I'm like yeah I just feel like there is no added value yeah you know try to find something fast during that time right you'll get a lot more value for your body with that well and it's interesting because I feel like more and more people in the health and wellness space are either no longer drinking and never had problems with it but just choose not to drink and when I go to these events like I was an event in New York this past weekend and most of it on all of us don't drink and so you know I think it's a very personal decision I know for women north of 40 all of a sudden you know they get hot flashes they don't I mean who makes good choices when you've had too much to drink you're not going to make good choices personally or with nutrition because you're going to Crave You Know The Salty sweet junk and your body processes alcohol as a toxin so you know it's one of those things that I'm glad that more and more experts and obviously Dr huberman is absolutely brilliant and I'm so glad that he's using his platform to help educate people because I think we've been convinced otherwise for a long period of time sure and certainly for me you know being you know former ER nurse in inner city Baltimore and you know working with thousands and thousands of patients like having those hard discussions about does alcohol serve you you know and I think that's an important a really important Point yeah and I get it you know there's people that they like their alcohol they like their wine they you know all these things I get it their tequila their shots that like going to the bar and having fun and I just think I mean it's kind of like with me with sugar like I love sugar but I know it's not good for me it doesn't do good things to my body so I try to have days where I don't have any and then I have some and I'm like okay I'm just gonna enjoy this but I know this is not benefiting me this is not giving me any nutritional value it's not helping my brain my digestion my heart none of that um it might bring me some joy in the moment right just like alcohol might for people but you got to understand the risks and obviously like just being in moderation is you know the best thing but I think you know what do you think is worse sugar or alcohol I think it's I think it depends on on the susceptibility of the individual um I I I don't drink alcohol anymore but I was always someone that didn't drink a whole lot um so that wasn't a problem but I think processed sugars because we start people so young I mean think about what we do with children's birthday parties and every sporting event that you know you're constantly dulling out sugar we get people addicted really early on um I would imagine that processed sugars are in are really in almost everything and so I think that is a greater issue but I would be remiss if I said um you know I personally have been impacted by alcoholism with a family member and so for me alcoholism holds a special spot in the I recognize a lot of people um and it's not just alcohol it could be any it could be food addiction it could be so many other things that it's it's people have uncomfortable feelings that they aren't comfortable processing or acknowledging and so that might be why they choose to you know numb it a little bit Yeah correct yeah and so no judgment yeah of course at least sympathetic to all that but I would say processed sugars for sure and what if uh what if someone's never fasted before what do they need to understand as a as a potential effects that will happen with fasting whether it be a 16 hours 24 hours or two days what what do people need to know before they do their first fast yeah I mean I usually have kind of a graduated perspective like first you stop snacking like it really is that simple so if someone is you know really starting from a place where they've been eating a standard American diet they're not physically active I'm like we need to teach you to stop snacking because I promise you're not going to get hungry in between because we're going to teach you how to balance your Macros so you're going to have more protein with your meal so that you can get from breakfast to lunch and lunch and dinner and you're going to eventually get to a position where you can go from dinner to breakfast now that freaks everyone out without having chips at night or something right so it's so challenging when you're so used to it you have dinner and you just want to have a couple you know some chips or something something a cookie or whatever it is before you go to bed yeah and you and I think you have to replace that habit with something else like tea right even if I have a lot of people that have herbal tea at night time they take a walk with their dogs they call you know a friend maybe they've got a friend who's fasting with them so it starts with no snacking restructuring those macros and then really the next step is going from dinner to breakfast but I think it's it's you have to kind of get yourself out of that headspace like think very clearly about why are you choosing to fast is it because you want to get healthier you know I can't tell you how many people I meet and were like I was told I had pre-diabetes that was a powerful impetus to shake things up sure or you know I've got young children at home or I've got a loved one I have to take care of and so all of a sudden you know people's priorities shift it's like I have to take care of me because other people depend on me so getting very clear about your intentions because that's what you're going to need to reflect on when you are considering what the options will be so for a lot of people that evening snacking and I think the last two and a half years in particular people have just been stressed and they don't know how to deal with the stress and so stress eating has really become a huge issue but I always remind people that we become less insulin sensitive as the day goes on so you would be better off having an early breakfast than eating late at night you know that that that three hour window before bed is really important and so understanding to not eat at night right that that insulin sensitivity is lowered at night time and so you know that late night eating can really derail even if you're doing all the right things so when someone's new to fasting those are usually the first three things that we talk about and then I say listen baby steps we go from 12 hours to 12 and a half if you need a break we do that then we go to 13 and so really saying to people like you are eventually going to get to a point but also explain to them that if you are primarily using glucose as your primary primary fuel source you are it's going to take you longer to become fat adopted to where your body is your insulin levels are alone if they can go in and free up these fatty acids to fuel the body and so saying it could take four six eight weeks for that to happen depending on how metabolically flexible someone is I mean some people are like a duck to water it's two weeks easy no big deal but more often than not that's not the case and just helping people understand that everyone's an individual some people it's you know you take two steps forward and four back it's all okay it's part of the process we want this to be sustainable yes and there's no benefit to White knuckling it with fasting like some people White Knuckle everything they do and I'm like that is not the way to live no it's not and it's not sustainable no what's the lifestyle approach you have now after these last few years of of testing it and trying it and having case studies of other women how do you live your life moving forward personally yeah is it a fasting once a week is it every other day what's your style yeah I would say I'm I'm very intuitive so depending on you know how hungry am I did I lift that day what was my sleep like did my aura ring bark at me and tell me my sleep scores in the toilet maybe that's not the day to push you know push the fasting envelope and push you know doing a heavy workout so I tend to really listen to my body but the consistent things are I don't eat after six o'clock at night ideally really I do much better having an earlier feeding window that that works for me it might not work for someone else um I really focus in on sleep I eat a lot of protein I always say I'm carnivore-ish I like vegetables I do eat carbs but I carb cycle and that's worked really well for me I don't drink alcohol and there's no judgment for those that do I just know it was the only thing that gave me hot flashes and messed up my sleep and my sleep like on the hierarchy of important sleep is so high up there that to me I'm like it's not worth it to have a martini every six months it just isn't sure so for me what about sugar what's your sugar intake like I I'll be honest with you my my advice in life is dark chocolate that's my only but that's really like the one thing and so I have a little bit of dark chocolate every day but it most of the time it's sweetened with stevia and you know I have I I don't have it on today but I usually wear continuous glucose monitor kind of episodically and so for me it's like that's my one advice like I don't eat dairy I don't eat grains I don't eat glue I don't eat gluten and I haven't for a long time no bread no cereals no pastries no I don't I don't really love that stuff but my dark chocolate is my thing I wish I wish I had that disease where I didn't love yeah no but I think for me it's like like you mentioned the the cost benefit I don't feel good when I eat those things and I put an autoimmune disease into remission when I went gluten-free so we had a lot of immune disease I did I had two and so yeah and so once you get leaky gut that kind of opens up that it's like once you have one you're more prone to others and for me I was like you know I have to get get myself together and so for 11 years I've been gluten free wow so you eliminated certain foods we're like let's try this and then it started to heal yeah and they're like well why go back on now right yeah and so for me it's it you know it's funny like on vacation will people say oh we have gluten-free bread mine I have a piece of gluten-free bread but I also recognize it sets up that I get that dopamine head I'm like let's get more exactly it's so hard to have one yeah and that's why and so my my kind of mindset now is it used to be moderation not deprivation but if you can't moderate you eliminate and so that's kind of how I think like each one of us has to decide I know I don't have moderation any yeah it's either all in or all out right and but you recognize that about yourself that's really what's so important so challenging I would love to get to the point where I could be like okay you know once or twice a week I can have a small like Taste of ice cream not like a whole bucket of ice cream or something you know but it's like once you have a little bit it's so hard to trick your brain that you don't desire this so much bring a drug on your tongue and it tastes it just rush your whole body it's quesomorphine so it's actually and it's interesting even Peter attia loves ice cream yeah so my husband actually came home one day and said I was listening to Peter ratia and even he has a weakness for ice cream he said so I don't feel quite so bad yeah yeah but ice cream in our house not that I eat it but like that is their crack of course yeah is there an ice cream that you could eat that's good for you like a protein ice cream that has no sugar or something you could probably make it I mean if I want to taste it right the same but you know I just try to get them like all Deans which is this organic ice cream and sure then I feel like okay and I'm like listen guys when the half gallon is gone it's gone and so the teenagers will sneak downstairs and they'll eat it I mean they'll literally just eat it out of the carton and they'll do it to one another so that the one teenager will try to eat it so the other one can't eat it then my husband yeah the teenage days when I had eight eight Dr Peppers a day in the summer and you know just ice cream all night yeah and they're impervious like my 17 year old six feet tall and the six-pack and yeah always ridiculous plays football and you can eat anything you want that's crazy um so you're kind of like an intuitive person right now you'll fast are you doing intermittent fasting every other day how does that work I do I would say I fast most days so it could be 14 it could be 18 hours uh I can tell you when I came out from the East Coast I'd you know we had a 90 minute ground delay in Denver and so when I got to the hotel I remember saying to my husband I was like normally I wouldn't eat this much food this late in the day but I'm like I ordered a double burger I ordered hard-boiled eggs and I just ate this massive meal um so for me I think a lot of it is based on like what's going on with my schedule I fast every day but sometimes I fast only 12 or 13 hours it only depends on what's going on and then you focus on the protein intake how do I get my protein in and usually when you eat a lot of protein you don't feel as hungry correct that's the thing when we have carbs we need more carbs right and so I always say when you break your fast protein and healthy fats or protein and carbs it's never carbs naked you know use the term you know naked carbs meaning you don't just sit down and eat a bowl of chips you want to have a steak or a piece of chicken or a piece of fish or some egg and you could have some carbs with that correct but eat the meat or the protein first yep so that's the first thing we should do once we break the fast whether it's 14 hours or 24 hours is have protein first right and I think the other thing is that some people and I'm certainly guilty of this if I do a longer fast the longer the fast the lighter the meal when you break your fast so when I have when I used to do longer fast I would have bone broth because if I sat down I need a meal my stomach was like no like like a four or five day fast right that I had to have very light meals you know my shoes salad soup and there are people that are definitely more sensitive to when they break their fast so I always say if you get digestive distress or you don't feel good lighter meal break it with something light and then eat a more substantial meal later what's the worst foods to eat after you fast oh um I I would say you know just sitting down and eating a bunch of processed carbs like don't sit down and have a bowl of ice cream you know you're going to spike your blood sugar all right spike your insulin I would say the processed carbs um you know if you sat down and had some rice and had some chicken I mean that would be fine but I would say you know most of the processed foods because your appetite and satiety cues are not going to be cooked in you know and I'm sure you probably have had experts have talked about this but the Bliss point in the processed food industry hijacks your brain chemistry so you don't realize you know you can eat two bags of Cheetos and you don't feel it no you don't it's crazy right and it's designed to be that way well I'll tell you three foods that actually harm the body's Health defenses and including the immune system by ratcheting it up inflammation and then lowering the defensive properties but also harm to your DNA also harm your microbiome also blunt and stun your stem cells

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 54,139

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation

Id: ecHlzruKI7E

Length: 96min 20sec (5780 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2023