The Proven Benefits of Prolonged Fasting: 7 Critical Things You Need to Know

i'm going to share several critical things about prolonged fasting that you need to know fasting is very simple okay it shouldn't be that hard some people overthink it and those things that are really simple are usually extremely powerful and that's what fasting is i mean it's actually mind-blowing to think that the absence of food just not eating can create so many powerful effects and if you haven't tried it you should definitely try it in order to understand the benefits of fasting you want to compare it to another subject and usually a subject that would be the opposite okay and that would be snacking okay if you look at what snacking does to the human body it is absolutely positively devastating in fact i think out of all the things that you can do that create a negative influence on your body snacking is at the top of the list because of what it does to insulin it's a chronic increase in elevation of insulin which then leads to just a million other problems i mean when you think about it i guess i'll just pull this up right here real quick i don't think you can ever heal the body with eating frequent meals okay we have this idea that you have to heal the body with food right like food is nourishing actually it might be nourishing but to really heal you're better off not eating um this idea that breakfast is the most important meal is a total lie and i used to promote it before i learned otherwise what about promoting like bedtime snacks for kids right or after school snacks or this advice that you should never miss a meal right which i have no idea who started that well actually i do it's the snack food industry that started that and for some reason this snacking food industry just doesn't like me for some reason i don't know why it is so if we look at snacking snacking actually makes you more hungry because you're eating a small amount of calories and you're stimulating insulin and that lowers your blood sugar about an hour and a half later so you're going to stimulate hunger not stimulate your metabolism okay you're going to stimulate hunger when you snack and it's going to promote more hunger okay so and you're never ever going to fix hypoglycemia by eating these snacks because it just it keeps that hypoglycemic low blood sugar thing going on and on and on in fact it actually slows your metabolism or shall i say slows your ability to lose weight because you develop insulin resistance because you have this constant increase of insulin and also it's going to promote a need for a nap okay right after you eat you're going to feel like you need a nap and you may find that eating does reduce moodiness and grouchiness but soon after about an hour later when your blood sugars are dropped you're going to revert back to this moodiness now in history a lot of great thinkers have commented on fasting and had something to say about fasting hippocrates said to eat when you are sick is to fuel your illness fascinating right and then we have the ancient greek philosophers right the great thinkers pythagoras pythagoras required fasting of his students okay so they can think more clearly plato aristotle were advocates of fasting ben franklin said the best of all medicine is rest and fasting mark twain said a little starvation can really do more for the average sick person than the best medicine and the best doctors and another very interesting point about your fat okay your adipose tissue where did it come from why did we develop this fat tissue that you hate so much well we developed it from scarcity of food okay food scarcity and what this fat really is it's a it's an efficient way of surviving it's a way to make your energy very efficient and when some people express that they have a damaged or slow or ruined metabolism what they really have is an efficient metabolism because now the body can go with just a little bit of food for long periods of time and that fat is retained so fat is all about prolonging fuel it's all about helping you survive when there's no food so therein lies the secret to losing fat okay can you do it by adding more food by eating something no you want to mimic why we developed it in the first place we want to mimic starvation but not really starvation i want to actually kind of clarify what i mean by a mimic okay the difference between fasting and starvation really has to do with one thing control who's in control when you're fasting you're in control when you're starving you're usually being controlled by the environment because there's no food so if we were going to mimic starvation we're really being in control because we could eat if we want right and so the secret to getting rid of your fat really is just to do prolonged fasting okay the power of prolonged fasting is just remarkable for your health so let's go through the seven critical things that you need to know okay the first thing i want to mention is that when you do fasting you really only want to drink water you can have tea you can have some coffee but you definitely want to take supplements and the reason is because nowadays people are so deficient in nutrients so even though when you go through fasting your body adapts and becomes very efficient at holding nutrients and the requirement of nutrients is a lot less you could still have certain deficiencies of both trace minerals especially and other things like electrolytes and even the b vitamins so i recommend taking your supplements and the two main categories of supplements i would recommend are the electrolytes and the b vitamins but of course if you can also do some other ones like vitamin d vitamin c that would be important what you don't want to do is you don't want to do like branch chain amino acids you don't want to have little snacks no you don't want to do that and there are some programs that promote that but i don't recommend that because what you're going to do is you're going to inhibit this very powerful thing that gives you huge benefits okay called autophagy what is that that is a condition it's not a thing it's a condition in your body that basically recycles old damaged proteins okay so fasting is the most potent trigger to autophagy and so autophagy is kind of like self-cleaning it's cleaning up the old dead proteins it's cleaning up pathogens in the body it's stimulating all sorts of genes for long-term survival and longevity it helps to clean up damaged mitochondria which is directly behind the root cause of cancer so this is why prolonged fasting is the best solution to cancer and if you have not seen my videos on two amazing success stories with cancer like stage four cancer i'm gonna put those down below but it's very powerful so autophagy is a condition where you're recycling like damaged protein i'm talking about amyloid plaquing that's involved in alzheimer's talking about the um the damaged protein involved in chronic disease like in your eyes like from diabetes from chronic inflammation and by the way when you start doing prolonged fasting you can just erase any inflammation in the body and it's amazing for autoimmune type conditions as well so we're recycling damaged proteins not just your muscles but proteins involved in the enzymes the all the different metabolic pathways the things that are damaged it cleans all that up so just make sure you do uh your water you know a couple other things like tea and coffee in your supplements but nothing else okay the other thing i want to bring up is the amount of water i would recommend at least two and a half liters of water now there are dry fast and that's a whole different thing but for most of you watching i i don't recommend you do that do a water fast so you're basically drinking a good amount of water what's interesting about doing a fast your body will make its own water out of fat but that's for another video i just recommend you drink enough water and the reason i recommend you drink water is when you start fasting boy you just dump your glycogen okay your stored sugar and you're burning up the sugar first and then with that um is the release of a lot of fluids because you have a tremendous amount of water that's tied in with this stored blood sugar in your muscles and your in your liver so you're going to get rid of a good amount of fluid initially and with that becomes a loss of electrolytes so you want to put back in those electrolytes probably the biggest risk of doing these fast okay is when you're doing them without electrolytes because uh you can create a lot of problems with your heart you can you can faint you can even have heart attacks why because you're you're basically depriving your body of key uh electrolytes and realize that sodium chloride is also part of electrolytes okay so you need salt and other electrolytes if you feel weakness in your muscles that is an indication that you need more salt okay and of course i'm talking about sea salt and electrolytes i'm also talking about potassium magnesium calcium things like that now let's go into number three refeeding this is when you start to eat again now i'm not talking about intermittent fasting right now i'm talking about prolonged fasting when you're fasting 48 72 hours you're fasting five days you're fasting you know 14 days 21 days 30 days whatever and you could do a five day or even a 21 day fast several times to the year and just keep your health at a whole new level the some of the problems with fasting that i want to bring up is like you don't want to do fasting when you're pregnant when you're lactating you don't want to do fasting if you have anorexia however if you have stage four cancer or cancer in general personally i would do prolonged fasting immediately so if you're doing a prolonged fast all right what do you eat coming off the fast well you want to do something healthy of course but you don't want to do a big meal okay and you especially do not want to do something with refined carbs and sugar and the reason is because you're going to create a huge shift of potassium okay out of the cell and 98 of all your potassium should be inside that cell and so in order to store sugar you need potassium so you're going to just suck out this potassium too fast and you're going to end up with a severe imbalance uh of potassium in the blood inside the cell there's going to be this huge imbalance and that can create some dangers so do not do you know just regular foods or refined carbs when you come off this prolonged fast instead do a little bit of salad maybe a little egg just a little bit of something and then wait for a couple hours and then you can maybe have a little bit of nuts and wait for a little bit do a little avocado and gradually kind of come out of this okay you do not want to do a big meal like i did and that was a really good demonstration of what not to do because i just pigged out i ate all this food at this huge meal and oh my goodness did i end up with a serious uh digestive problem tired and i'm like okay i will never do that again in fact i need to have other people learn from my mistakes all right if you're doing a prolonged fast and i'm saying probably 72 hours or longer realize that all these ketones are going to make you pretty acid it's not a bad thing it's just that if you're doing apple cider vinegar and you're adding that you're going to add some more acidity and that can throw off your ph and you may find that your your pulse rate it's like a very loud pounding pulse rate in your ear that's going to make it difficult to sleep because your ph is off and your breathing might be affected too like like air hunger like can't get enough air so don't just don't do the apple cider vinegar if you're doing a fast longer than 72 hours you may want to do some baking soda just a little bit like a an eighth of a teaspoon in some water and drink that especially if you start having a build-up of like a gout symptom from the uric acid that goes up uric acid is one of the most powerful antioxidants in your blood and it's a normal thing but some people that are predisposed to gout might have a flare-up especially when they are doing this initially okay but normally it's not a situation and number five do the healthy version of the ketogenic diet don't just go back to regular foods because first of all the carbs are going to kind of nullify some of the benefits that you had okay because this this whole goal of doing fasting is to get rid of the bad effects of a high carb diet and a junk food diet so why would you want to go back to that so i would highly recommend combining healthy keto with the intermittent fasting okay number six dawn phenomenon what is that that has to do with your blood sugars going up okay maybe between five in the morning to eight like all of a sudden your blood sugars go up like you didn't eat any sugar where is that sugar coming from well your liver is making sugar okay there's a problem with insulin resistance which is still occurring because it takes a quite a while to get rid of that condition it could take months even up to a year or a little bit longer to fully get rid of that if you have the dawn phenomenon all that means is that you have insulin resistance okay and i wouldn't worry about it too much however if it concerns you i would go for a long walk and just burn off that sugar it's not coming from your diet okay it's just your liver is making the sugar and that's a big difference between consuming sugar all right it's you're not going to have a problem and also that problem is going to go away with time versus some people might think oh fasting is bad because it raised my sugar so i'm going to stop doing that that would be a mistake and so a couple other little things you can do you can probably take berberine or other things like cinnamon to help reduce insulin resistance okay all right number seven knowing when to break your fast now should you just dive right into a prolonged fast well you know what you could you could are you going to feel great maybe not especially if you haven't fasted you're gonna have to go through a period of time where your body adapts and so it might take you several days before you start feeling good so a lot of people do this gradually and they kind of ease into it after doing you know weeks of intermittent fasting so you could just cold turkey just jump right in and do prolonged fasting okay however when you start fasting what you're really doing is you're switching from the glucose fuel to the fat fuel okay and then also the body then has to make new enzymes for ketones okay so your body actually is running on fatty acids as well as ketones especially for your brain your brain can't run in fatty acids it runs on ketones so just think about this you're not going to feel really good in your head when you start doing fasting simply because it takes a while to develop ketones so in the meantime what you could do is take mct oil or you can take ketone supplements and get rid of those symptoms however you may not feel good mentally at first but then you start adapting and your appetite goes away and you feel good that's a really good indication that you've adapted okay so if you're doing this gradual okay there's always going to be a transition phase where you're going to have to go through something that's going to be uncomfortable but just realize push through that like you might have hunger pains you might feel a little bit kind of off but then if you push through that that will go away because your body has is forced to adapt to this new method of burning fuel there's no other shortcuts other than just pushing through that sometimes so at some point going from intermittent fasting to prolonged fasting you're going to have to go through a little bit of this transition it's normal it's not abnormal i'm just letting you know before you go through it so you can not be freaked out about it but when i say don't eat if you're not hungry eat when you're hungry i'm mainly talking about doing intermittent fasting but when we get into prolonged fasting should you eat when you're hungry no actually we're going to just push through that to the other side okay so that's kind of a little bit of a little point i want to bring up now since we're on the topic of fasting i think it'd be very important for you to learn a little bit more about how to speed up the process and that would be how to make insulin more sensitive so you should watch this video right here

Channel: Dr. Eric Berg DC

Views: 3,414,070

Keywords: 7 critical things to know about fasting, prolonged fasting, intermittent fasting, fasting, fasting benefits, benefits of fasting, intermittent fasting benefits, fasting tips, refeeding after fasting, how to do intermittent fasting, how to fast, prolonged fasting tips, prolonged fasting mistakes, dr. berg on prolonged fasting, dr. berg on fasting benefits, dr. eric berg, eric berg, dr. berg, berg, fasting for beginners, common fasting mistakes, prolonged fasting dr berg

Id: 06KgXfwu99c

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 03 2022