The WORST Intermittent Fasting Mistakes That Lead To WEIGHT GAIN | Dr. Mindy Pelz

what are some of the biggest things that people get wrong about fasting oh it's a great first start the biggest thing is they hook onto one fast and they do it the same way over and over and over again so once they come to fasting they go okay wow got great results I feel incredible um I'm just skipping breakfast I'm starting to eat at noon every day and they just do that for months and months and months and then they get stuck why would that repetition be a problem and is is there like a right entry point yeah because I think if people haven't tried fasting they probably just think just don't eat or and this this will be interesting uh there are things that I probably don't consider a fast that you might consider a fast yeah so um let's get into that is there one beginner's entry point two fasting yeah you know where The Beginner's entry point is if you really want it to be like Smooth it's with your food so if you want fasting to that whole world of fasting to become much easier the first thing is change three ingredients change your oils change your carbs so you're eating more of Nature's carbs less refined carbs and get off any toxic ingredients if you change those three things now you're going to metabolically switch over into what we call the fat burning State much quicker now you don't have to and a lot of people don't but if you're asking me what's the easiest way door in it's just let's clean up a little bit of the diet now the second step is let's just start pushing your breakfast back like a half hour an hour and you're gonna what you're going for is you're trying to compress all of your food into one eating window and if you do those two things it's kind of like there's a click that happens and all of a sudden it's like oh you're fasting it's easier it's and it just becomes effortless because it's our Natural State it's the way the body was designed to be so but toxic ingredients toxic food makes us more insulin resistant eating all day is destroying mitochondrial energy and so we're not able to make that switch as easily which is why I like to start with the food interesting okay so to do a fast well step one is to reorient your diet to something that isn't causing metabolic damage I'm not sure yeah yeah inflammatory metabolic damage so you're looking like let's use an example um um canola oil or like cottonseed oil or or some of those basically the oils that everything you eat unless unless you are buying Whole Foods yourself is cooked in okay so there's bing bing bing that's the the answer right there is let's get back to Whole Foods foods that are coming out of Nature and if I if I went into your house and I just swapped out all the oils for avocado oil and olive oil you'd be you you wouldn't notice a taste and it's the same to cook with and if you're doing that mixed with Whole Foods and meats if you eat Meats then now you're actually more congruent with what the human body wants it's when we get all these fancy ingredients and toxic inflammatory uh easy to make ingredients that it makes that metabolic switch so much more difficult which is why I always say just let's and it's not like it doesn't have to be rigid you can be playful about it like let me just see what I can do to stop eating so many inflammatory oils Mindy there's nothing playful about starving to death so this is it's interesting I'm as you're saying this I'm like wow I'm one of the people that would probably propagate some of the myths and create problems for people because I'm forgetting how hard it was for me to metabolically transition because I did it so long ago so um going back to this framing of okay before you want to fast you want to get things right my literally until nine seconds ago when you said that my my instinct would be to tell people hey just start lengthening the window between what you eat is yeah but if I flash back to when I just when I went low carb so I didn't even consider fasting didn't think about fasting and honestly I think you know 20 plus years ago when I started all this I would have thought of fasting as dangerous and part of the reason I would have thought of fasting is dangerous is going without food but really it was sugar because I was a sugar burner at the time it hurt you know what I mean like so um I'll do this frequently when I have a guest on around fasting so I'm fasted right now I'm over 19 hours into my fast as we're doing this uh and there's no sense of suffering yeah and don't get me wrong I have a mild sense that I'm hungry yeah but I it's not overwhelming it's certainly not impairing my cognition but when I first went low carb it was so devastating and I had these terrible headaches and I remember my wife and I got in this big fight because uh I was like if I just eat a cookie I will feel better and she was like then eat the cookie but stop complaining like whatever you're gonna do either get on the other side of this or uh eat the cookie but don't not eat the cookie and keep complaining and so I was like okay that's probably pretty good advice so for somebody who's at the beginning walk me through you mentioned it but let's go a little bit deeper in terms of what is that that click over that people are looking for what is metabolic flexibility what is being a sugar burner or how do we get on the other side of that yeah so it's such a good question and it's interesting because I'm thinking as you're talking I'm like yeah you know my advice used to be hey the door end of fasting is compress the eating window and leave a longer period of time for fasting but we just saw millions of people on my YouTube channel where they would write in comments and they're like I can't metabolically switch over I'm really struggling so then I start to change well let's start by cleaning up so do fasting but they feel terrible yeah oh yeah so and that's the thing is that we we need to look at this like a switch so when you're eating food you are in a sugar burner state so what's happening is that your blood sugar is going up and then you stop eating and then the blood sugar starts to come down and usually when it gets to a certain point you get hungry and so you eat again and so you're just doing this all day long but what word saying when you want to be metabolically flexible is we want to keep your blood sugar fairly low so that we can switch you over into this fat burning place and once you switch over into the fat burner place there's a whole world of healing internal healing that is going to happen a lot more than just weight loss there's a lot more brain like to your point I love that you show up fasted I showed up fasted too and I do it as a Performance Tool because I know I'm going to get ketones that are going to power up my brain I know inflammation is going to come down I know I can get rid of senescent cells I know I can reboot my immune system I know I can add more dopamine receptor sites the longer I stay over here but if I'm over here bringing my blood sugar up all the time getting this switch becomes like Rusty and you just can't get over there so the suffering happens in that switch and that's what I'm trying to get people out of because fasting is like sleeping it is our natural healing state feet and just because we know sleeping is amazing doesn't mean that everybody can sleep it's really interesting so uh I want people to understand and some people will be they'll already know a lot about fasting and fair enough but for people that don't understand there are actually two fuel sources that your body can use glucose sugar that's where most people spend all their time and even if you're eating a high protein diet some of the protein can be turned by your body into glucose and so most people live their entire lives there in a modern context but from an evolutionary context your body would need to be able to go whoa there's no food I can't just Keel over and die and this is the whole point of storing body fat but I think one thing that people Miss is that if you're constantly intaking calories uh especially if you're eating a lot of carbohydrates you may never and I mean never switch over into burning your fat and so your body is is just storing and I remember the first time it hit me that hold on a second there are people who they are literally only getting fatter their entire life so the fat that they put on when they were nine is still just stored and it's never been released because you're only going to release that fat if the blood sugar drops to a certain level for an extended period of time and then your insulin becomes low and now the fat can actually be released into the body that was like startling and I was like yeah oh my God so what we're trying to do is create a scenario where and for people that that are just listening not watching we both keep doing this motion with our hands of like clicking over you're trying to create the um the setup so that your body will go oh word I don't have any food coming in so I need now to switch the Machinery the the literal metabolic Machinery over to burning ketones instead of glucose once you do it and this is the thing I always try to get people to understand once you do this it will change your relationship to hunger it isn't that you don't feel hunger like I'm hungry right now it's not overwhelming by any means but I am hungry but I'm not distracted by it I'm not it's not diminishing my performance And So It Goes hunger goes from this thing of like it's all consuming it changes my mood um I can't be productive to uh yes I would like to eat but there's no sense of urgency so well said so well said so I had the same aha moment when I first dove into the science of fasting I it hit me one day I was like oh my God we have the wrong discussion when it comes to weight loss and food we're over here looking at the sugar burner system and we're saying this is the diet that you know maybe it's vegan maybe maybe it's carnivore maybe it's the HGH diet maybe it's Weight Watchers whatever we're over here debating the weight loss diet and we've left the whole fat burning system out of the equation like how did we get as humans to this point where we have only been looking at food as as the possibility for gaining or losing weight we've missed out a whole metabolism and I think that's what I want people to understand is this is how your body Burns fat it does not burn fat by manipulating food it burns fat by manipulating when you eat and how much time you're giving the body a break from whatever food you've chosen that's how you burn fat it's really interesting so when we talk about step one if you want to get into fasting is actually to change the foods that you intake when you are eating when I think about some of the fat diets that have happened where you know people are like doing juice cleanses and stuff like that and ends up not being sustainable is it are they I mean they must be getting into a fat burning mode just through the the sheer reduction of calories but is it causing is it is it just that it becomes so hard to switch the metabolism over that it's a very unpleasant thing to go that long without calories because the juice is so high in carbohydrate well so conversation well we've done in reducing calories over here or out exercise or upping our exercise is we change our set point so let's use an example let's say you bring in a thousand calories or let's let's give it a little more 1500 calories still very low very low and you you exercise 500 so now you have Delta of a thousand so in order to keep the weight that you're at you have to always have around that Delta of a thousand calories what happened with fasting that changed the weight loss game is people got out of that mode and they started to see weight if I just changed the time period Then what happens is I go over here into this fat burning mode and I can be there 19 hours 20 hours 36 hours is one of the greatest weight loss fasting lengths and my body is so smart that what it does is it says to your point hey word there's no food coming in so we're going to click over into another fuel source called ketones and we're going to make this Ketone by burning fat and the only way we can get that is by clicking over we can't even get that by reducing our carbs down we can't get that by you know struggling in a low calorie diet and every time we're over here trying to manipulate this system we are only finding ourselves suffering and not being able to sustain those results which is why I think the fasting movement took off is all of a sudden people were like wait a second over here there's a whole other level of Health I never knew was possible and I could never accomplish when I was focused on just the foods I was eating so let me ask them um so I have I've done a fair amount of fasting I intermittent fast 365 days a year which you may tell me is actually not ideal I vary the length so on the weekends it's going to be maybe 14 ish hours but during the week it's you know 18 19 hours but if I'm just doing caloric restriction so I'll I'll paint a picture I used to be 60 pounds heavier and I over two years I dieted down and I did what I'll call rabbit starvation so I was eating virtually no fat virtually no carbohydrate it was just literally um boiled chicken breasts and steamed broccoli I mean that was basically my life for two years and it was miserable yeah it sounds like really miserable uh it was still super inflammatory and but I didn't understand any of that while I was doing it and now I can control my weight so much easier through fasting so but why why would it be that keeping my calories and I was about at about 1500 which is why I made a point of saying that's really low because that was painful for two years um why would that be so deeply unpleasant whereas even doing a punctuated 24 like if I did it would be if I had to redo it all even just doing a 24-hour fast once a week probably would have led me to roughly the same results absolutely um so why was and I actually don't know the answer to this why was one so unpleasant and the other so manageable because if I'm burning fat I must be in ketosis right not necessarily not not necessarily I mean it would have been interesting back then to put a ketone reader on you you know to measure it and see where you're at yeah when what in that example what was happening is you were bringing your blood sugar down and that up and then it would go down and when it would go down if you ate again it would you would just it would go back up and then it would go down you know I was just eating chicken breast and broccoli oh yeah yeah yeah well broccoli you know it's gonna it's got glucose and it has just chicken and to your point protein will will raise will elevate your blood sugar but you're just going up and down within one system you and again it would have been really interesting to know your Ketone levels because once you click over and you're making ketones what ketones do is they turn off the hunger hormone and then they also sharpen the brain and you when you when you think about that why would the body do that I mean this is the way I'm the way my brain thinks is I always go into what is the body trying to do well back in the Primal days when we had to go hunt for food we needed this alternative fuel source to power us up so that we could we could go and find food so when key to when you're burning fat and you're getting this Ketone Rush hunger gets turned off mental Clarity becomes very very uh focused and and your muscles start to power up and you become a hunting machine because you're supposed to go find food for your survival so now in this day and age we don't have that we can get stay on the couch and get onto our phone and just have doordash bring us food and we don't ever have to leave the sugar burner system but if we don't then we never get the healing that's over there we never get the performance angle that's over there so on what I would say is in your example even though it was low glucose you weren't raising your glucose you were probably not getting as much of the Ketone Rush that you could have used if you had just taken that same diet and compressed it into maybe an eight to ten hour eating window now that diet would have probably worked better for you because you would have clicked over into ketosis and felt amazing that's so interesting and you're right I wish I had had um so I when I'm really tracking this I do finger Pricks like constantly uh also I'll wear a continuous glucose monitor but they didn't exist at least easily back then um but now so I didn't know about ketosis when I was doing this so I can't swear but now that I know ketosis I can feel it I know when I click over like I can guess when I hit about 0.5 yeah I can tell you I'm at about 0.5 when I hit one I can get pretty close I'm usually within like point two of where I'm at which is pretty trippy when you think about how it's like oh I know this feeling yep cool I'm in ketosis I'm going to guarantee this is like a 0.5 to a point seven or this is a one to a 1.2 I'm somewhere around there um I as it goes higher than that I can't really track so anyway I bring that up because when I was doing rabbit starvation I never felt that am I going to call it a sense of relief I never felt that like I'm okay here it was two years of misery to the point where my wife at the end of it pulled me aside and was like you don't have a personality and it was because I was just grumpy all the time and there's no sort of joy in Mudville which is what when you originally said like you know there's there's some playfulness to all this and I was like not back then yeah there was no playfulness it was horrendous yeah and so when I think about people trying to get into this I imagine if they've ever missed a meal and they're so annoyed and so frustrated they can't grapple with no there's really when you click over into fat metabolism it really does feel very very different yeah so okay let's talk about people then that can't imagine that how do you help them cross the chasm we were talking about this before we started rolling you love somebody uh they think fasting is dangerous let's start with that well the fasting is dangerous piece is the first thing is you need to get caught up on the current science because the current science is is mind-blowing and in the book I put six different lengths out that were all based off science but one of my the easiest one to kind of wrap your head around is what we call 16-8 where they show that if you take all the the let's say you don't work on your food you're just going to eat the standard uh Western diet highly inflammatory but you eat it in an eight hour eating window leaving along this 16 hour period where you're not eating you are literally metabolically immune from insulin going up glucose going up high blood pressure liver damage cholesterol you become immune from the the damages that that high inflammatory diet has okay that alone is mind-blowing to me because let's say you're listening to this and you're like well I don't really want to change my food I've got food addiction issues and I've worked with a lot of people with food addiction that we've been able to help them overcome it by learning how to fast if you just start to tiptoe your way in like I'm just saying you can let's say you're like listening to this you're like I'm not doing the food changes okay so could I just get you to push your breakfast back a half hour now you're I'm not take a second to Define intermittent fasting or time restricted eating so people know the difference between what I'll call a water only fast uh in fact walk us through the six stages I think that's the right place so uh and and I think the a deeper part of that question is what what is a fasted State and it's really when that blood sugar comes down enough that it triggers the body to switch so that's the first thing to know at uh 13 hours we start to see that growth hormone goes up which is what slows down the aging process helps us burn fat we also see in men we see testosterone start to go up 1300 increase in testosterone with just a 15-hour time period which is insane insane we see inflammation CRP goes down which is an inflammatory blood marker will start to go down 13 hours all at 13 hours in fact one of the greatest studies ever done on women was they took a group of women after they had had traditional breast cancer treatment and they had them just fast 13 hours every single day and they noticed that there was a 64 percent less reoccurrence of breast cancer in the group that all they did as fast was 13 hours a day they didn't even change their food they just fasted if your mission is achieving Excellence you must support your body introducing ag-1 this Powerhouse blend is packed with 75 premium vitamins minerals and Whole Foods sourced ingredients that elevate your immune system uplift your mood and promote restful sleep and athletic greens is offering our listeners a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase don't miss this opportunity to optimize your health and truly be legendary so when we at that intermittent fasting level is really easy can be easy I know if you're listening to this and you're like it's not easy and I want to come back to how do we make it easy for these people but that's the destination we're going to is once we get to that first ledge of 13 hours okay now metabolically things are changing that or if you can just do that repetitively which I haven't had a person I haven't been able to get to 13 hours consistently within a matter of weeks we can get them there and so now you're there you're experiencing this okay what else do you want to experience 17 hours we stimulate autophagy the cells start to repel them repair themselves and old aging cells get you get rid of 24 hours your whole gut might resets and you get intestinal stem cell stem cells that come in and repair the whole inner lining of the gut 36 hours your body goes and finds that stubborn fat specifically around the belly and it starts to burn that for energy 48 hours with no food coming in now all of a sudden you're getting new dopamine receptor sites okay why are you getting that because your brain has got to get motivated to go find food so you reboot the whole dopamine system and then 72 hours the whole immune system reboots itself and recycles itself that's that's without a drug that's without a supplement that's crazy that's why I'm like this we have to get to get this out to the world this is our door out of chronic disease we just gotta train people how to get over there and that's then to your point getting over there is the hardest part but once you learn how to do it it's it's insane it's insane the Miracles that your body will perform yeah so this the pushback on um this is a dangerous game fasting that's the one that really uh drives me crazy yeah because the exact opposite is true that's right and if people don't get into things like like autophagy then there so look this is hypothesis and I'm certainly not a researcher but when I look at some of the information like you talk about breast cancer but just cancer in general some of the hypotheses that are coming out some of the early studies that show that you can decrease your likelihood of certain cancers through fasting it's utterly fascinating and it makes sense if we know that the thing all of us have cancer cells in our body at any time like if you were to take uh I would imagine just a blood biopsy probably enough you'd be able to detect cancer of certain types but the immune system is going in identifying these cells and shutting that down and if you have an immune system that is compromised because you're chronically battering it with highly inflammatory foods and so the immune system is just working overdrive to keep the inflammation up because remember the inflammation is good in certain contexts chronic inflammation is bad so you've got your immune system working overdrive to keep up all this inflammation and it's not been able to get to all these cells so autophagy which we haven't defined yet it's probably worth telling people exactly what autophagy is so that they understand getting that to turn on ends up being a very big pro health issue yeah so autophagy is where the cells realize that there's no nutrients it's nutrients and blood sugar glucose coming into the cell so it's like an internal mechanism where the cell goes huh nothing's coming in okay we got to make sure a that we're a better version of ourselves so we need to clean up the inner workings here so it'll push out viruses it'll push out bacteria out of the cell and say hey you're not serving the cellular energy right now it will go into Old Parts Cellular Parts and the endoplasmic reticulum and the mitochondria and it's like hey we got to clean up our act because we have to be of more efficient cell the other thing that it does is it'll say hey you know what this cell's going rogue the cells becoming a cancer cell this is a senescent zombie cell that's going to start to Aid you quickly quickly they're a weak member of the team and so in this fasted state where no glucose is coming in no nutrients are coming in uh you're a liability and we need to get rid of you and so it gets rid of those cells so it's like taking the trillions of cells in your body and cleaning them up and clean and getting rid of the ones that are no longer serving you again I don't know a supplement or a medication that can hit autophagy in that way like fasting does it just cleans everything up when you get into that autophagy State it's really profound yeah the fun thing so my wife is Greek and so I have done my best to learn the Greek language and um autophagy is autophagy which is self-eating which is pretty interesting to when you think about it that way that the body actually goes and says okay you're not going to feed me cool then I'm going to eat things in that are already inside the body but it has so much um without saying cheesy phrases like evolutionary intelligence to what it eats and in what order yep but one thing that I've heard people say is that one other thing that gets eaten is the bacteria in your gut the microbiome will actually eat the mucosal layer of your intestines and then that can be problematic what say you you to that is there a problem with that in the fasted State yeah oh I love this question because when you look at the science and I've spent I mean ridiculous amount of time on PubMed going through all these articles what's so interesting about the microbiome is in the fasted State you're right what happens is though there's a dramatic shift where bacteria that no longer serve you are being die are being killed off the whole pH of the system is changing there's something called geographical relocation where all of a sudden the microbes start to spread out so they're not all clumped together in the fasted effectively foraging like there's nothing to be found here that's actually really interesting idea they probably are you're probably right they're like yeah I never thought about why are they spreading out it's it's because they need to they need to find where the nutrients are so they instead of being clumped together they spread out it's very interesting so if I was to do a stool test on day three of a fast or let's let's make it more applicable to the average person somebody who's intermittent fasting and they've been doing it every day 15 hours and on the 30th day I go in there and I look at the microbiome it may look as if there was a depletion but that's okay because we want to create a change we want to get rid of the microbes that are no longer working for us which is why what you break your fast with is massively important because if you reintroduce the the foods that feed the good microbes now I think of it like this you fasted and the microbes are like okay like we spread out there are no nutrients there's no glucose like things are changing in here we got rid of the bad guys not sure what to do now and you come in with a bunch of sauerkrauts and you come in with nuts and seeds and you come in with polyphenols like olives and even like dark chocolate and all of a sudden the good microbes are like hey wait our food our food is here it's here we can eat and then it the good microbes eat and now you're rebuilding your microbiome so when we look at gut changes it's the combination of the fasting window with what you reintroduce food what foods you reintroduce back in that's really interesting so it it becomes oh God I don't know how the medical community is going to respond to this but uh the reason that um chemotherapy works is it basically weakens everything like it it just obliterates your entire immune system kills off so many cells but the idea is that a cancer cell is a little bit more vulnerable than everything else and so you go just far enough to kill the cancer cells but not so far that you end up killing the healthy cells so fasting sounds like it might be working in a similar fashion where it weakens everybody but if you come back with only food that feeds the good guys now the bad guys never get out of their weakened State and they continue to die off because there's nothing in your reintroduction to bring them back yeah that's really interesting so it's like hey guys I'm going to weaken you all but I'm only going to re-feed the good guys that makes a lot of sense I never thought about that I was a little maybe more Reckless than that with my refeed yeah uh so okay so you already hit us with the things that we should be eating the one in there that I didn't understand because I look I I give criminal amounts of side eye to uh nuts and seeds so break me of that myth well so it is a Prebiotic so for starters it needs to be raw let's start with that because nuts and seeds that are pasteurized or dry roasted or dead it's dead food so it tastes so much better yeah right hold on I don't know really you don't agree no I'm one of my madness one of my favorite things is raw cashew or raw cashew butter I won't say that it's not nice but compared to a roasted one oh yeah no I can't I can't my my taste buds can't taste a difference that's interesting but what about almonds can you taste the difference yeah definitely now that is a little grassier let's just say it's a little more a raw like best way to eat in eat an almond is sprouted raw organic like that has the most amount of nutrients in it and you know the the logical thing is well what about the lectins and the oxalates well when you leave those enzymes in there those lectins and oxalates don't matter anymore because you have the enzyme innately in that sprouted almond that's going to help you break down the lectins and oxalates the Menace you dry roast it you've killed that so now you put it in in your body and yeah the lectins and oxalates are going to be a problem but I will to your taste bud question I will say a sprouted almond is not a culinary taste bud joy that goes on with that it's not not as good like I love roasted almonds they are absolutely fabulous and I used to uh eat a lot of pecans long time listeners in my show will know that I had to abandon them because they are I have some sort of dramatic problem with them yeah um and so I ended up getting tremendous amounts of brain fog finally figured out that it was the pecans who would have known should have just asked my sister who gets migraines from pecans didn't put two and two together I don't get migraines but massive brain fog but anyway the uh raw ones I would force myself to eat raw ones because I thought they were better but the taste profile oh my God like a a roasted pecan is is freakishly good it is a cruel trick that nature has played on me because I find them absolutely fabulous did you get a headache did you get a headache with the raw see so there's this the same thing with dairy oh but it would totally ruin whether I eat them raw or baked doesn't matter in terms of brain fog I just don't get headaches right my sister does okay because that's the it's what we do to food often that makes it now a toxic food for us so it dairies the same thing and this isn't I don't know why this has to be so controversial but when you pasteurize Dairy you're killing the the probiotic the good bacteria that's going in you're killing the enzymes it is a dead food when you take that same food and you leave it raw now when you drink it you've got the enzymes you've got the probiotics to break down the lactose that you might be reacting to okay time out so are you saying that because I ended up cutting out Dairy so I would on Sunday so I have a whole routine Monday through Friday I'm ultra strict uh super clean Whole Food Saturday I eat whatever the hell I want including ice cream yeah but on Sundays was the day that I would get the weirdest reaction from my food so I wouldn't have any problem with my ice cream on Saturday but on Sunday by the end of the evening I would get so internally hot I don't know how to explain it I felt like I was warm not like you get warm from the outside I was worn from the inside I'm like oh this feels so weird I do not like the way this feels whenever somebody comes to me with a problem like that I say what are you eating a lot of and figure that out and I'm like the only thing I'm eating a lot of on Sunday is pizza and so but I'm scraping the toppings I'm not even eating the bread so I'm like okay cheese pepperoni olives like what is it and as soon as I cut out the cheese I was fine so I was like whoa I'm having a problem with dairy so are you saying that if I were eating unpasteurized Dairy that I would be okay yeah yeah that is what I'm saying and I'd love for you to try it it exists yeah in America oh yeah well so let's go down that Dairy the raw cheese cow's Dairy yes is gonna have these enzymes in it now when we look at the molecule size of dairy we have to remember that for our human guts the best thing that we can digest when it comes to milk is mother's milk and the molecule size is probably you know like the size of them what do you mean human yeah like yeah like mother yeah like human milk yeah is there a business here I mean it's weird like we all feel like it's uh taboo but this is a whole another drink milk from the breast of a cow but we're weird about drinking milk from the breast of a human that's I mean look there's maybe some bizarre moral implications but I'm gonna yeah I'll ask it so are we like if we could get unpasteurized human milk are we like in a great metabolic position oh it's incredibly healing just talk to although it's so high in sugar yeah well so so you're gonna have to I mean you'd have to test it on yourself with a monitor or something like that again is it high in sugar and is it causing you a problem that's a whole nother can of worms to go down because what's high in sugar and causing you problems may be different than what's causing me problems based off our microbial differences in our gut so we can't just say oh any anything is like a a wonderful like let's just use the milks that this is going to raise your blood sugar for everybody and and this is going to bring it down there is the Nuance of what goes on in your gut bacteria that controls that so that's the first thing but I want to go back to your to your to your question which is when we look at human milk like breast milk yeah it it has all the immune enhancing capabilities that we don't get in other animal milk and its molecule size is easier on our digestive tract so when we look at why so many people are reacting to Dairy cow's Dairy we have to realize is that it's this cow's Dairy is like this huge molecule size it's like you know let's just for the people listening that aren't visually seeing this it's like a basketball size whereas mother's milk human milk is like a tennis ball size so there's this molecular mismatch that's so hard on our gut now in between those is sheeps and goat and they're a little bit closer to a human mother's milk molecule size which is why a lot of people can't do cows but they can do goat now if you take the very very best milk out there outside of Mother's Milk would be raw goat's milk because now you've got the enzymes you've got the probiotic and you have the molecule size and they make that in cheese and if you could put that on your pizza it would be a game changer okay so how do we safely get raw goat's milk into our lives I thought you're gonna say mother's balcony no well I mean so um it's in supermarkets all the time yeah oh yeah if you ever go to air one what yeah it's gonna be in a higher end yeah raw and you go to Europe safe yeah and well so when you're looking at cheese remember that cheese has been fermented so that's I mean look at what a charcuterie you know experience why do they pasteurize the milk before turning into cheese if we're already gonna get the fermentation process it's a great question well I think pasteurized milk it became a safety issue for so many years when you are mass producing large amounts of milk then you're going to end up having this issue of like okay some people are gonna react to this bacteria differently than others so I think that's where it originally came from but if you go and study the Western price foundation you know he's been that that whole world under the Western price world has been around raw dairy for years and that raw dairy can be healing um it's it just it's like one of those myths that's perpetuated so you go and walk into air one walk into Whole Food well Whole Foods they have raw goat's cheese but the higher end really high-end health stores and a lot of the farmers markets have raw goat it's it's the taste that's going to be the biggest issue you might not like the taste well I don't know that's uh so again my wife is Greek she's actually from Cyprus or families from Cyprus and so she introduced me to something called halloumi which is typically made from goat's milk and I couldn't love halloumi anymore if I tried now the irony is until this conversation I'd cut it effectively out of my life because I was worried that it fell into whatever was going on with me getting overly hot when I eat too much cheese uh but if goat's milk isn't problematic because I had actually never noticed it with halloumi and so that might be why that's really really interesting about think about this from this angle when the whole world ends this isn't kind of like a nutritional fad right now but remember when lactose intolerant was like a thing everybody would walk around and maybe I thought it was Yeah well yeah I just don't hear it and people say they they go well I can't do gluten which is a whole other conversation but I don't hear people walk around and say I'm lactose intolerant um and but they used to and then we would give them lactate or lactic enzymes or there was special milk or they'd put the lactose back in okay but wait we pasteurized this product we killed all the enzymes and now we have to add an enzyme back in that we just killed to be a make it so that some people can digest it why don't we just keep it in its raw form and I feel like this with all food it's when we start to manipulate food and change it that it becomes unhealthy gluten is the same place right now we've we're breeding a whole different strain of of gluten but when we just come back to the basics this is like such a big part of my message is we've over complicated food and we just need to come back to how do I get that food in its most natural state where it hasn't been touched by man and then I pair that with these different fasting windows I truly believe that is the diet that most humans should be working from and that's how we end chronic disease but the minute we think we gotta burn out the bacteria and then add some enzymes in or the whole gluten-free world has become this like you read those ingredients they're incredibly toxic the keto world's the same thing all the low carb foods are now adding toxins back in and we have totally destroyed a great example with keto is Oroweat just came out with a keto bread I picked that thing up I looked at it and I was like this is just a toxic bomb so yeah maybe it won't raise your blood sugar but it's got toxins in it that's going to make metabolically switching very difficult are there certain toxic ingredients people should be on the lookout for yeah except for they keep changing them all the time so you know for starters um any of the the bad oils so in this bread because it's keto they wanted to keep the fat content up so it had canola oil and cotton seed oil so it's inflammatory and makes you insulin resistant now if they made that same bread with olive oil now you're now you're now you're in the bar the ball what is the thing that they do to make a bread keto how are you what what's the the mass that they're using if it isn't uh wheat yeah usually they'll do like almond or the and they'll put like urethra tall as a sweetener or Stevia as a sweetener which can also still elevate your blood sugar so um tapioca flour is another big one that they'll add in um but you know again this is why I'm a fan isn't going to spike your blood sugar well exactly it's it will but they what they've done is they've removed what we perceive as the grains and they've added in substituting grains but surely the the package will say this has x amount of carbohydrates and if it's above a certain threshold like even if keto is just a marketing word and it's it doesn't I don't know if keto has a medical definition or not yeah from the FDA but uh uh tapioca flour is used in a lot of a lot of Keto foods and I know people that have measured their glucose after eating it uh not on this particular one because but that would be the place to go individually the end of one this is where everybody would need to go themselves I can tell you what I have measured on myself um that's a big keto trend is all the cauliflower flowers so cauliflower pizza cauliflower chips those are cons they'll say on the packaging grain free and what I when I measured on a glucose monitor it's it spikes my blood glucose incredibly High interesting because of the um the what what's the little white thing called you just said it um having a stroke over here what did I say about fasting doesn't impair your cognition maybe it does uh so cauliflower uh would if you just ate raw cauliflower would it Spike you well so there you go now we got some Fiber in the raw cauliflower but when we distill it down into an actual flour f-l-o-u-r different type of flower now you've refined it anything we've refined we've now manipulated it and that spikes blood sugar okay interesting this is why boys and girls at home watching or listening I'm telling you cgms are awesome yeah continuous glucose matter um it uh I'm I'm very unsensitive to a certain part of the population that cannot control their obsessions and so whenever I talk about measuring stuff inevitably there are people that are like oh like don't get obsessed with measuring things I I think that's the wrong message get control of your mind don't allow yourself to fall prey to Loops like yes you don't want to become obsessive that's very wise but to something that you've said multiple times you have to be able to do an N of one you have to understand how your body responds to certain things so I'll I'll put pecans and baby carrots on the table for me I could never have imagined that pecans would create brain fog in me and I really wouldn't have guessed that baby carrots will Spike my blood sugar my glucose uh like not it's not as bad as ice cream I don't want to exaggerate but if I eat carrots to satiety I'll go from say 84.85 to 115 120 125 depending on how hard I go and so I remember the first time I looked at my uh data and I was like what the hell did I eat that spiked me like that I'm like that's like a Saturday Spike right and I realized it was baby carrots yeah and I was like whoa now I can eat one or two and I'm not gonna see a big move but if I again if I eat them to satiety I'm gonna eat and these are baby carrots but I'm gonna eat 15 yep and so I just I really thought vegetables were a free pass yeah barring things like sweet potato or potato or whatever like I got that Roots like that we're gonna Spike me but I really didn't see carrots coming and so one carrots are high in sugar already which I just wasn't thinking about but it may not Spike my wife in the same way that it does me and so in fact the difference in how we respond to food between my wife and I is dramatic and so that really became the first n of one for us was we could sit side by side eat the same thing and have wildly different responses and so measuring this stuff seeing for yourself what works what doesn't yeah I think is really really important so anyway it'd be utterly fascinating to try something like a cauliflower f-l-o-u-r uh and see if that spiked me because man when I look at things like that I think free pass if this tastes good I'm all in so one of the things that I've really realized in teaching the world fasting is how how this food addiction is such a hurdle for so many people and I and I'm going to take it back to the women because I feel like you know it's when fast like a girl came out what has really shocked me is how many 20 and 30 year olds women are have are just have massive eating disorders and what I'm seeing clinically working with these women the ones that I'm working with one-on-one is that when we get them changing the calorie counting conversation and we get them doing instead of counting calories counting blood sugar put a CGM on them and say okay now go eat and just eat you usually what I do is I say go eat whatever you're going to eat you can count your calories however you want to count them the first couple of weeks and then send me your glucose map and let's look at this what we're seeing is that these women that feel like they're in control because they're counting calories what they're doing is they're getting these glucose spikes that are up and down all day long which is actually keep keeping them in this sugar burner State longer so then I I switch that around and I say to your baby carrot example try baby carrots with some hummus try it with some cheese now go scan your glucose monitor let's look let's see what happens and I would tell you the same thing what is it when we add a protein or a fat to a carbohydrate even if that carbohydrate has fiber like a like a baby carrot you slow that Spike down and you can most likely handle that food better and it's going to help you if you're not spiking your blood sugar you're going to be able to switch over into the fat burner fasted state so much better um it's really interesting so here's a horrible thing but I think you're gonna jive with this when I meet a woman I just assume sheather has or has had an eating disorder period why why is that such a safe assumption you won't be 100 correct but man yeah you're gonna be right A lot of the time yeah yeah that breaks my heart and and you're probably right uh God so many so many things but I will tell you that the big big ones that I see one is that you know it's the societal we're trying to look a certain way and so we've been taught to look out that our external how we look externally is how we get love it's how we get validation because that's the society that we're living in and will you let me push back on that yeah please and I'm very open but I I would say that's you're raging against biology not Society um tell me more so when I think about this and this is this isn't a free pass to just be oh however we end up being as a society that's fine because it's born to biology but I think that um when you understand what prompts it which is nature has reached inside my brain and said you're going to find these things attractive because they're signs of fertility now of course there are also there's a societal layer so when I was young the thing that was in Vogue was like super skinny but still large breasts right and now it's big butts are like the rage and women that are slightly thicker but that hasn't changed in as far as I can tell in my very non-scientific but I would say still accurate assumption that just being a female who is competing for the attention of men and to compete against women who are often their harshest critics with their body again you're the thing you're actually raging against is a societal layer that is born of an evolutionary drive to find the most fertile and probably high status women or women that confer the most status to you because they are considered the most beautiful um and so when people attack a a very worth attacking notion at the level of society they run into problems because really you have to address that that you're getting this biological impulse and at the risk of going too far afield but I think this is really fascinating um they did a study where they looked at what age group do people find attractive based on their own age and for women there's a four-year span that is glued to their own age so two years older than them two years younger than them is their sweet spot of what they find attractive in men men it's a 22 year old female no matter how old they are so they could be 14 they find a 22 year old attractive they could be 85 and they find a 22 year old attractive and and it was one of those that it it is brutal and as somebody who's married to a woman that's only Aging in One Direction it's like I fully empathize with her deeply but at the same time it was laugh out loud funny to me that that's what Nature has done and it's just so so I I have so many things I want to say on that so the first thing is okay that would make sense because EV our attraction is all built around reproducing yep so there is that and that would make sense that an older man would find a 22 year old more attractive because it's a fertility thing totally makes sense but when you're looking at what makes a woman what the woman that's the most fertile is actually her hip to uh waist ratio which is the only thing that runs across culture across time ah yeah his hips away right hip two ways so I want to throw one other weird thing in here that uh I think isn't discussed enough and it keeps showing up in a lot of conversations which is we're also attracted to each other through smell yes and there's a very interesting study that shows when women go on birth control and they meet their spouse it was done in heterosexual relationships that they have a different smell profile that they're attracted to if they're on the pill 10 years into the marriage they try to get pregnant they get off the pill all of a sudden the attraction is different and so I went down a rabbit hole looking at that and I was like what is the attraction what is the smell you gravitate towards and it's for women it is the one that is going to support her immune system the most because once she's actually pregnant she's got foreign DNA in her from her husband's sperm it's crazy crazy so when we look right so when we look and we tie this all together I think it's just like the nutrition and fasting conversation we have Mis directed what we think makes somebody attractive what makes somebody healthy what diet we need to be on We there's so much going on under the scenes of what attracts you to somebody else what makes you you know feel vibrant as a woman and when I hear that the 20 and 30 year olds and the are have all these Eating Disorders I just want to say like okay everything you've been taught about attraction is wrong and we've got to start to unwind that so we can come back into these natural patterns that are that we are using subconsciously it's interesting so I've never heard the uh pill thing tied this scent before yeah I've heard the studies about okay ladies uh here are 12 t-shirts laid out before you uh smell them and just rank order them and when they do that they rank order them in uh the ones that they find the scent the most appealing is the person with the most genetic variation so to your point about it would give you uh it would certainly give your child the most advantage in terms of a a far more robust immune system and then down to the ones that they find uh the scent least appealing so if you slip I can't remember if they actually did this or if this was just somebody's hypothesis but that you would expect that if one of their siblings were put into that mix they don't know they're just smelling the shirt that they would actually rank them the lowest I remember right that was interesting yeah I didn't know that part of the study that I mean it would have to be true right for for that is the hypothesis that that or that is the prediction that that hypothesis makes like that if this is about genetic variability then the people that would be most likely like you your siblings you would find the least appealing which is very interesting but going back to this idea of food addiction so um we women are struggling with it 20s and 30s maybe the worst which is already fascinating but um how do you begin to help them break this yeah so this is such a great question the first is we've got to get them looking at something like a continuous glucose so just get away from calories yes it's a control issue so I I've I've I've proven this over and over again with people with severe food addictions and and eating disorders is I always say give me two weeks just You Can Count Your calories if you want if that helps you feel in control I want you to not look at your scale if they can sometimes they just they have to anyways but I want your focus for the next two weeks to be on what foods are doing to your glucose and the name of the game is less spikes so you just don't want to see those spikes going up and down so when you get your chart on your meter you don't want them going up and down six eight times a day you want them going up and down maybe twice a day and when how tight do you try to control that range uh well so then you want to see it go down like I don't like it to go above like 120. I'd like to see it hover around that and then I'd like to see it come down within a half an hour pretty quickly do you think about daily averages yeah daily average like I'd like to see it 95 100 okay would be really good interesting so that feels High to me are you being are you being overly generous because you know what people's limitations are yeah I'm being over overly sensible okay because what I overly sensible way what do you mean by that well like what I've learned in like teaching the world about glucose and fasting is that when if I say like the 70 to 90 is a is a perfect range but if I take a woman who's food addicted has 8 glucose spikes that go up to 120 you know throughout the course of her day and I say you got to get it to an average of 75. it's too far of a leap and what we often don't need motivation to start to eat different we need momentum and so when we come over here and we say your gold standard is you know 1.5 ketones and your gold standard is 75 an average of 75 glucose every day it's it's the the one the single mom in the in the who's working two jobs that's just trying to make it and if that's her goal it's it's not sense it's not easy for her to follow and she's just going to stay in her she's going to feel like I can't win yeah this is all a loss and the story I always tell is I during the pandemic I had a high school principal in South Carolina reach out to me and she said she followed me on YouTube and she said I'm very concerned because we're going back to school and my teachers are freaking out about their immune system will you come give a talk to them or like a zoom talk so I did and I talked all about like fancy ways to eat and supplements and how you can improve your immune system all the many of the things we're talking about right now and at the end of the conversation I asked if anybody had a question this very brave man raises his hand and he said you know I hear what you're saying but if I'm at a grocery store and I'm looking at a nut butter nut butter that has the right oils compared to the inflammatory ones that's eight dollar difference and I don't have that's eight dollars I don't have and then another woman raised her hand and said I get up at 4 30 I'm at school at five I work till five I come home have to take care of my kids the easiest place for me to go is through the McDonald's drive-through I don't know how I can do all these things you're saying and it hit me in that moment that I had done them a disservice by tricking out much of a conversation like we're having now because if it gets confusing if food gets confusing if Health gets confusing we get blocked and we just fall back into our old patterns with glucose yes 70 to 90 somewhere in that average would be amazing but if your average is 120 and you get down to 110 you are moving in the right direction and that is awesome so I want to make Health approachable for everybody not just the people who can afford it or the people who can understand it how do we do this so that everybody can win I'm going to make one sort of last ditch effort on the people that uh are struggling they're buying the wrong nut Butters etc etc uh so at Christmas I do everything wrong and I love it it's it's a two-week period where I take a vacation from all of my rules and regulations so I live my life by a very strict set of rules that I will credit most of My Success with my willingness to write down what those things should be and then to actually live by them but at Christmas I go completely off the rails there is literally nothing that is off limits for me if I want to eat ice cream every day I will eat ice cream every day I don't drink alcohol but like if I wanted to and not not as a hard and fast but very rare because I don't like the way that I feel the next day not hangover because I don't push it that hard but like it just makes my stomach feel gross I don't know how to explain it but so but even if I wanted to have alcohol for sure go for it no problem so really really I'm off the rails at Christmas but what I have found is that by intermittent fasting that I can still keep my average glucose this is eating ice cream this is eating cookies breads whatever I want I can keep my average glucose in the 75 to 85 range as an average but I'm gonna Spike up to like 150 155 I don't like the way I feel north of 170 so I won't do that even at Christmas I just don't like the way it feels um I'm going to do some exercise which is something we haven't talked about yet which is you want to manage your glucose levels eat whatever you want and then do air squats like you don't have to go to a gym literally you're there you're talking to your kid they're walking you through homework whatever and I get the psychological energy but if you just did 150 air squats you will be startled at how much that starts pushing your glucose down yeah I still to this day I've done it so many times I know it works but I'm still shocked that with A continuous glucose monitor over a 30 to 60 Minute period you can watch your glucose just going down down down down down down yep because you're doing some minor air squats okay if you do enough of them they can be pretty tiring but just doing air squats you can drive your glucose down so between intermittent fasting and over Christmas I'm not crazy I'm not doing my like 18 19 hours but I'm gonna do 15 16. by doing that and air squats I do a little more than that but like that sort of general direction I can keep it 85 yeah and this is not uh anything fancy this is the cheapest food you can imagine so I I'm eating all the things I grew up with and people that don't know my story I did not grow the money so I grew up on you know Rice-A-Roni uh and we we didn't eat Hamburger Helper because that was the expensive stuff that's how I grew up okay I'm talking boiled hot dogs on the cheapest white bread that you can imagine now Wonder Bread we did not splurge on Wonder Bread okay right this is so I'm going back to all those like Comfort foods from when I was a kid and with that simple protocol of intermittent fasting and a little bit of big muscle group exercises I'm able to maintain for the entire two weeks on average of below 85. because again why that what you just said is will work for people regardless of their socioeconomic uh resources so I love that and you were insulin sensitive going into the holidays that's fair so you're not talking about somebody if somebody's listening to this and they're like oh my God I cannot move the needle on weight loss and I have an extra 50 to 100 pounds to lose and they do what you just said they're not going to get an average of 75. and that's so well said so no keep going yeah and and so I I'll give you a really cool example I had last year I had a man who was over 300 pounds come to me and asked for my help I love this story and he basically said I asked him what's your biggest hurdle why can't you he's like I've tried every diet I said what's your bigger biggest hurdle he's like I am just food addicted and I'm like okay so in my head I'm like if I get him to change his foods and he was drinking 12 sodas a day oh my God that was the obvious thing for me to take out the amount of sugar the amount of sugar I had so much to say on that and but he told me he was food addicted so I didn't want to just be another person that came in and said you need to get off your soda so I said just eat whatever you're eating and can you start to move your breakfast back an hour and your first month the only goal I don't even want you to touch your food the only goal is I want to see if you can eat all of that food in about a 10 hour you know 11 hour eating window so I need you fasting 13 to 15 hours and so he did first my I I that's the only advice I gave him we talked a month later he had lost 13 pounds in the first month he was still drinking 12 sodas a day so then I said okay next second month I was like could you just drink your soda outside the house so you know like if you want to have it at work great but in at home don't don't eat it and he said well can I drink Crystal Light and in my head I'm thinking no you can't drink Crystal Light but I was like go for it just because I was like I don't know what I'll do as glucose so he just drank he did his soda outside his house and second month lost another 10 pounds now he's fasting about 15 hours third month we added in protein I still didn't take much away and I got his eating window down to about an eight hour consistent eating window and I had him increase protein because when you increase protein you increase muscle when you increase muscle you increase more insulin receptor sites so third month he lost another 10 pounds this went on for we've been working now it's been about six to seven months he's down a hundred pounds Wow and his his food preferences have changed because back to the theory that when you start to intermittent fast you change your microbiome and when you your microbiome is what's often controlling your taste buds so when you were saying well oh my god do you I hate nuts and I interpret that as well you and I have different microbiomes not that I hate nuts is that I think of them as falling into the evil category oh okay not I love it if you tell me that I can eat nuts I'm gonna eat the most nuts I love them but uh that that is really fascinating I hope people don't blow past that because I would not have believed you until I did it and realized whoa the things I actually crave really do they really are different now yeah and so going back to this idea of the difficulty that you have diminishes tremendously the longer you stay consistent with this your microbiome is changing you become metabolically flexible so you can burn sugar or burn fat your microbiome will whatever you eat a lot of your microbiome will scream for more that's right and so if you're eating bok choy and eggs like I eat a lot of then your microbiome screams for bok choy and eggs that's right and so my microbiome isn't screaming for cookies cakes candy pie because I just don't need it right that's right but what do you do with the food addicted person they that is dopamine for them that is joy and so that's one of the most brutal things about a long fast is the the lack of there's still there's no dopamine yeah you suddenly realize oh I eat food like a drug like even my normal food my eggs and bok choy give me a dopamine response that's right actually you going to make your eggs and bok choy gives you the dopamine for sure so I'm getting dopamine right now thinking about going for my eggs exactly so but but this is why fasting is so pivotal for that food addiction piece is because now what we can do is we can get you some ketones so that we can calm the hunger down a little bit and we can change your microbiome so we change your taste buds and it's not going to happen overnight but what we've seen is that over even a couple of weeks to a month you will start to see the changes happen to people's food preferences and this guy is a perfect example of it by five months in he told me he was completely off of soda he was completely off crystallite he wasn't eating his buffalo wings anymore and I I said to him why like how did what happened and he goes I don't know I'm just not craving them we changed his microbiome first by using the tool of fasting and now all of his food addictions changed and he burned fat so that he could finally release that weight that he will never get gain back again unless he goes back to those food preferences if your mission is achieving Excellence you must support your body introducing ag-1 the this Powerhouse blend is packed with 75 premium vitamins minerals and Whole Food sourced ingredients that elevate your immune system uplift your mood and promote restful sleep and athletic greens is offering our listeners a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase don't miss this opportunity to optimize your health and truly be legendary that is the game changer of metabolic Health when we look at only 12 percent of Americans that are metabolically fit we have to stop trying to look at food as the only answer we've got to change the internal environment so the taste buds make different decisions that is going to change our where metabolic Health goes in this country and actually worldwide yeah one thing that really tripped me out was when I learned that I think it's 70 plus percent of the serotonin in your body is produced and stored in the gut yeah I was like what I I was as astonished by that is when I learned that your the vast majority of your immune cells are in the gut yeah and I was like why would that and then I was like oh my God it's the only place that foreign bodies regularly make its way into your body because I always thought about well I get a cut and that's what my immune system is about or I breathe in a virus and that's what my immune system is about bro like the amount of things that you eat is something like two tons a year right that one person consumes like the amount of bacteria viruses fungus foreign bodies like ever all of it right is what you eat yep yeah and I think that's such a good point is that we have gut health is definitely I don't want to say it's making a comeback but it's definitely we have more of an awareness about it but we are just babies and understanding the microbiome We Are We There is so little that we know and we're just coming out of this antibiotic world that we've been living in for so long where we're eating antibiotics in our Meats we're taking antibiotics for everything we're putting antibiotics on our skin I mean we we have really been after killing these bacteria and in that we have destroyed things like serotonin production and that is a nuanced conversation that needs to not be nuanced anymore it needs to come to the surface because you the way you think what you crave your energy the way you sleep all of that is tied into the gut and to your point if you're eating the wrong foods every couple of hours you are destroying everything from your immune system to your neurotransmitter production to your ability to burn fat and so we've got to have a tool that we can start to shift that and that's why fasting because because of its impact on the microbiome is so powerful [Music] yeah man who would have thought like where you literally have to keep eating to stay in a diseased state right which is crazy like if you just stopped and I get it you can't stop forever but you can man if you're obese you can stop for a very long time a very long time see your doctor work with them blah blah blah but do you know the length of the longest fast um there is it's over 300 days I met a man one time this was about five years ago I met a man who was on day 267. and he had totally healed himself now I want to tell you because I met him in person uh there was a smell that came off of him that was UN like a little bit difficult because really yeah because his body washing ah well I'm sure he was I didn't think to ask that I mean we talked about it he wasn't it was a group of doctors and he was sharing with us what his experience had been um the body was just getting rid of the bad I mean that can happen on a three-day water fast you'll smell very differently whoa because your body's getting rid of all all the toxins the all those senescent cells are being destroyed it's a process called apoptosis where those the cells just start to die and then that smell comes off um he had loose skin like you wouldn't believe um the first like he told us that the first 20 or 30 days he had rashes all over his body just moles fall off yeah what because the body just went into this massive repair stage wow I'm not saying we should all fast that long but he it was an incredible healing tool all right well I'm gonna make you take a stance here you're you're morbidly obese like that where we're now in Life or Death Mode and you get past that initial hump and let's say you go because the longest I've ever fasted was five days days four and five were so miserable I was like I'm never doing that again but I I may just be doing something wrong so let's say that he gets to the other side of whatever that hard part is and he's like I feel great I'm losing fat I have no impulse to eat I'm working with my doctor all my vitals are awesome and certainly all my vitals are moving in the right direction um heart uh is looking better EKG my I've had my artery scanned they're getting clear like he's just going in the right direction and so I'm I will make the base assumption in this question that he is working with a medical professional um should anybody that meets that criteria keep fasting or would you be like no no you need to start eating something I think in that space specific scenario now I don't I want to make sure people don't extrapolate that into their own personal scenario yes going fasting when when the guy that we that I saw he had tried everything else nothing was working and so it was a beautiful example of how he stepped out and said okay body let me see what you can do on it on its own and he was working with a doctor he was wearing a glucose monitor he was measuring his ketones he was getting blood work every month that is the pivotal part of the of the yes that I will say that in that scenario it absolutely keep going as long as all the markers are saying that you're staying safe and the healing will continue to happen and that idea I get will upset some people and we'll rock some people's minds what I'm finding is that people are blown away at the Simplicity of a healing tool like fasting and so when you take a chronically ill person and you say all he's got to do is not eat for a certain period of time it's it blows everything we've ever been taught about health care we have been taught Health Care needs to be complicated and what we're saying in this example is you're coming back to the Simplicity of just letting the body heal itself and miracles can happen and we see it all the time but in that scenario you're giving me it's so hard for people to wrap their head around because it's too simple we want help we we've been taught Health should be a little more complicated than that I'm going to push that a little bit further and say one I I am sending love to everybody listening to this you can't imagine how many people that I I love are morbidly obese and I believe you cannot hate that which you love and so man I just really really I'm sending love when I say this but I think part of the reason that people derail on that now that I'm thinking about it is that that means that they could do something about it that they too could fast and so if you're right and they're they're not happy with how they look or feel and maybe even people are telling them they need to lose weight and their argument much like me to my wife about if I eat the cookie I will feel better and this is so unfair uh when the answer is you just have to be willing to do something hard and and it's actually only hard in the beginning right you're you have to be willing to do something hard and so that is not going to resonate emotionally and that's going to make them feel badly about themselves and so it is far and if they're not into to themselves enough to realize oh this feeling I have is actually self-loathing it's me creating the self-loving because I'm not judging them I'm not looking I'm just saying hey you can do something about it so whenever you're writing this what I tell everybody that I love the struggles with this I love you no matter what whether you decide to make a change it it doesn't matter to me you have expressed that you're in distress that you have some sort of pain whether it's psychological about how you look or it's it is real physical pain that you're struggling with because you have such a pro-inflammatory state I love you no matter what I just want to see you happy and this option exists for you whenever you want to go down that path but that if somebody doesn't have the emotional the the self-awareness to realize that that emotion is based on shame that they are taking on themselves that and they may not even understand that that's the what's generating that emotion and so if they could see okay hey this is you you judging you and being in control is always a good thing and now if you're willing to do this you can get a different result and if you decide not to you're not a worse person you're not a better person if you do it you're just in a less inflammatory state which is a whole host of feel-good things that go along with it um but that's my gut is that if you do find pushback on things like that that that's that is um it's emotional difficulty the I always say that fasting's a mirror and you don't know what's going to get reflected back to you tell me more when you take food out of the equation the mind starts squawking at you and it can a lot of things will show up and I can only share like what showed up for me I was I one of the things that a story I probably don't share enough is that my mom taught me to be an emotional food eater and it looked like this oh you had a bad day let me make you a meal and I got a meal and I got Mother's Love and so when I went into my 20s and out into the world I was an emotional eater I used food to soothe myself so when all of a sudden in my 40s I discovered fasting the first time I did a full a full day fast and I was miserable I had no no resources for my misery and so to soothe you know to soothe my misery so what I had to do in that moment is I had to find new ways to get a dopamine rush I had to find new ways to change my state because food is a state changer so I learned music I learned uh going for a walk I learned sitting at the ocean and staring at the ocean I learned calling a friend like I came up with a long list of things that could change my state that gave me a little bit of a dopamine rush so the first thing is when you're in this fasted state pay very close attention to the words that your brain is telling you because that's the work the emotional work that needs to be done now I had to unwind my mom who basically said if you don't eat you're going to feel worse and the longer you don't eat the worse you're going to feel so I had to go into this place of like wait my body can do this wait it she's wrong so I had to un undo mom's impact in my brain which is probably why I love the science of fasting so much is once I understood the science I felt a little more comfortable and that voice quieted down so the way we talk to ourself in the fasted state is the work right there and then the other piece is of all of a sudden you get bloated while you're fasting okay well that a lot happens to a lot of people constipated and Bloated without any food for days there's that's a sign your microbiome is something needs to shift in your microbiome it's the mirror if you get brain fog okay there's toxins in the brain that the body's trying to get rid of you need to think about more healing for the brain so there we can look at the symptoms plus the patterns of thought and now we know what we need to work on if we're willing to take responsibility to your point and that's a hard one because when I realized that I used food for the dopamine that that took some that took me some time to really have a different relationship with food I re it took me about a year or two to really start to unwind that and that and that can be hard and other people might find like I mean this is a really touchy subject but other people might find gosh the extra fat I'm carrying is actually a protective layer for me it holds keeps people separate from me because I don't really want people to get to know me I've seen that happen before or I can say I want to lose weight but then that would be make me attractive and then I'd have to think about dating again and I found that every time I'm in a relationship that I have some a problem and I get hurt there so I'm going to keep the extra weight because I don't want to make it possible so that I can date so I don't get hurt again there's so many pieces to it that to to just choosing your food so when we go into the fasted State all of that reveals itself and if we're willing it's an opportunity for us to go okay this is what I need to take responsibility for this is what I can start to address and to me that is so that is so powerful and and I I say this with love so if these scenarios resonate with people please know like working with a therapist making sure you're being guided through that process but that that's what sits at the other side of learning how to build a fasting lifestyle is you you can finally heal some of these wounds if you're willing to look at them and take responsibility for them wow yeah I I agree with that very aggressively So speaking of it being a mirror and things that are revealed so day four and five for me on a five day fast were miserable I felt like I had the flu I had no energy um I felt really brain foggy so how do I prep myself or what can I do differently in the middle of the fast or leading up to the fast so that I don't get that kind of just it made it I I was like as long as I own a company I can't do this again because it it literally ground to a halt for two days yeah so you know here's what I usually say if you're going to go into a three to five day water fast which why would you do that you are rebooting your immune system so we know that from Walter Longo's research where the old white blood cells will be washed out and new ones will come in so in your example I would say well your immune system was shedding itself and that's why you felt so horrible just like a cold feels horrible because when you have a fever you're burning out an infection and it feels horrible does that mean that it's going to be horrible for everybody or is there no okay and and I bet if you did it again it would be different because that was that was the first time I've done the first time you did it is there then a number of years that can go by where it's now going to be hard again well if you came out of that and you were eating really clean lifestyle and you were fasting and all the different you know maybe you fast 15 hours sometimes you go 19 like today and you were learning how to metabolically switch yes it'll be it would be a lot easier the next time because that first dose is like you're getting rid of all all of the junk so over time these three day water fast four day water fast get easier and easier and they become very reparative in a positive way the example I use a lot is I had a achilles tendon injury I tried everything to heal it I didn't want that Achilles to snap it's that's a brutal injury I everything I tried and finally one day I'm like I'm just gonna throw a five day water fast at it and I just and the way I went about it is in true respect for the intelligence of my body I just said okay I don't I've tried everything I don't know what to do you heel and on the fifth day I felt like a buzz come into my achilles tendon so on day three of a water fast it stem cells systemic stem cells get turned on and these stem cells are going to permeate to your body and they're going to go to areas that need the most repair so now on day five I've had 48 Hours of stem cells and it went right into that ankle I felt this buzz when I brought food back into the equation the buzz was still there for about a month and within about a month's time the the injury was completely healed and it has never ever ever reappeared since that moment hmm so that's an example where the intelligence figured out what it needed to do in your scenario you were shedding you were getting rid of stuff if you had hung in there another you know five six seven days you would have been a totally different person I've even used those longer fasts for uh you know spiritual Insight I've used it for my business to go okay what you know I have I'm trying to figure out next moves I've used it for book writing um whenever I need inspiration I throw a longer fast at it because the noise in our brain gets less and less and less and the downloads that come through you are are profound but to your point if you're suffering you may not feel as much of that inspiration but the more you do it the more you get rid of the bad and you build the good and it's just an incredible experience yeah it's uh it's probably worth trying again yes it's been a minute that was probably four years ago yep so be very curious to see if it were if it would go better there would be other things I would tell you little hacks and this is like more sophisticated stuff yeah like uh minerals you should we we always recommend you do minerals minerals so uh code for assault yes sodium magnesium and potassium are the biggies so that would have helped to mitigate some of the symptoms and what's the easy way to get that uh just in a packet form like put it in your water and drink it throughout the whole fasting window your whole fasting time so and there's a lot of good products out there um you know the one we love is element and um a lot of our and if you're eating element because that has 10 calories are you breaking your fast uh you're not breaking your fast so what we've noticed in our community is that it will raise blood sugar in a very very small amount of people so you'd have to test you'd have to test it so so that's one the other one that I just tried recently that just made a three-day water fast like uh easy I'm gonna be as as bold as to say easy uh was hydrogen water the hell is hydrogen yeah so hydrogen water what it does is it feeds the microbiome well what is it it's it's where they pull the hydrogen out of water water is H2O they just isolate hydrogen and it repairs there's like over a thousand studies done on hydrogen water and how it changes the microbiome because you isolate out the hydrogen molecule goes in there and it recharges these bacteria it fuels them up and then they work more efficiently so a guy who owns a hydrogen water company told me about it and he said you know try it on your next three day water fast and see if your your appetite changes he both my husband and I my husband's the the biggest critic he anytime I bring anything to him he's like no no I'm like okay we're going to try hydrogen water for three days on the third day we could have kept going we were both like I'm not hungry because we because you're feeding the microbiome hydrogen hydrogen water yeah you're feeding them hydrogen yes that's it yes yes huh so I would love like let's do it with you I'd love to put you on like a three-day fast with hydrogen water and some minerals and see how your experience is interesting yeah like that's intriguing enough to to give it a shot hydrogen water okay that's um that's news to me yeah and we'll definitely have to try that so what are the frequencies that people should be doing this is this once a year once a quarter once a month yeah my belief is twice a year I like people doing a three-day water fast in January and I like when they do it in September and the reason for that is we all do what you did during the holidays yeah and so and then so it's a great reboot and also the cool thing about January is the whole world is focused on health which is great so it makes everything a little bit easier to do you know January 3rd if you're like hey I'm doing a three-day water fast people are like oh awesome I'm doing a juice cleanse and you have this collaborative support so and then September I like it because after the you know if you live in a in the part of the world where you summer is June you know July and August yeah we overdo it so September is a great one too and then and they're anchors but twice a year and then you know just for good health and for getting rid of the senescent cells in the body I think that's a perfect time to be doing those okay and then our shorter fasts something people should do more frequently yeah yeah so I think people should be short fast 13 15 hours on most days not every day um and then you know one day a week I feel like people should stretch a fast so you should try to push her fast to an uncomfortable level and the reason for that is we going back to something you said earlier which is when we push a fast so let's say you you when you said I'm at 19 hours if you had said to me 20 hours 21 hours is about my limit and then I get a little cranky I get a little bit irritable then that's the place you want to go to because it's a hormetic stress and your body is adapting in a positive way you don't want to stay there necessarily on a regular basis but if once a week I can push that fast to discomfort you stay in discomfort for a half hour to an hour now the body's repairing in that discomfort so I like one day a week stretch it five days a week to do kind of what feels like a good Groove and then one day a week to not fast because you gotta keep kind of mixing it up for the body so it never hits that Plateau spot okay uh fasting has so many implications right one implication that we haven't talked about yet is sex hormones so you mentioned earlier um what will happen to a guy's testosterone levels one I'd be curious to know does that taper off like if the effect is strong after you know 13 hours is it still strong at 24 does it start 24 24 to answer that question 24 goes up okay research research goes up to 2 000 percent increase in testosterone that's insane it's insane when you think of everybody who's putting pellets in their bodies and trying to get oats yeah like testosterone pellets to get more together yeah yeah it's like injecting pellets you inject a pellet yeah it goes into I've never heard of this yeah yeah so is that for uh bodybuilding or yeah yeah and then it's slow release of testosterone over time a lot that's more common for women uh I do know a lot of bodybuilders are doing testosterone injections part of patches yeah and there's a sort of topical creams I've heard of injections I've not heard of pellets yeah there's a lot of ways to get hormones into your body yeah we have to remember that sex hormones pulse so they pulse like men you get testosterone every 15 minutes you're just getting a pulse and then another pulse and another pulse women we get a pulse of testosterone just during ovulation and so in that five-day window testosterone comes in a big in in a big way and then testosterone goes away and that's despite sexual appetite yeah yeah perfect part of your cycle yeah it's so that you you you reproduce I mean it's that's why testosterone in a woman comes in in such a huge amount which is mind-blowing when you think about your earlier thing about men being more attracted to 20 year olds women it you know a man's testosterone doesn't have to go down over the course of his life now it does because of environmental reasons and we can get into that insulin resistance and toxicity is is one of them but men can keep their testosterone at a high level even as they age women we it's not so much as we go through menopause our testosterone is going to go down along with estrogen and progesterone so we're not going to have that same desire to reproduce and go and seek out somebody who is younger and Matt if you're in a heterosexual relationship men can keep their testosterone high and you can still find them attractive we just our whole reproductive system changes dramatically because we are not we don't have eggs left so we don't have the same desire our biological need which is a whole nother Rabbit Hole to go down yeah it sounds very fascinating but but back to the 2000 percent at a 24-hour fast for men and what's interesting on the differences between the hormonal differences between men and women is if knowing that research what we can now say is okay men work off of a 24-hour hormonal cycle women work off a 28 day to 30-day hormonal cycle so we're working off at two different Cycles so when we look at a 24-hour fast great a man can throw it in at any point testosterone is your number one hormone you have to drive testosterone will go up into the brain and convert into estrogen so and you have very very very little progesterone progesterone is not a big player for you women we have testosterone estrogen and progesterone and they're all made from the outer cells they're called the fecal cells of the of our ovaries and so when our we put a lifestyle together we've got to think about all three of those we don't have the luxury of just thinking about one when it comes to fasting estrogen loves when you fast estrogen does really well when you bring glucose down when you go into those fasted States and ketones go up estrogen just positive estrogen just thrives we also know that estrogen is necessary going into ovulation so when you're looking at things like infertility and PCOS where we've got this this estrogen imbalance we know if we can get you fasting at that part of your cycle you can reboot that whole estrogen system progesterone back half of a woman cycle completely different she wants glucose to be high and I we have seen this over and over again on the cgms of women that they're eating the same diet and all of a sudden the week before their period they go I don't know why like my glucose I'm doing I doing the same thing my glucose is just going up I'm hungry I crave carbs I want chocolate yeah because that's what what progesterone wants you to do progesterone wants you to bring glucose up progesterone wants you need more serotonin at that moment because you need to bring Gaba up to calm you the week before your period so it's going to make you crave carbs you need you crave chocolate because you need the Magnesium so they're like biological needs of this one sex hormone which is why the behaviors of women typically change that week before our cycle whereas estrogen is like I need glucose to be low so I'm not going to give you hunger symptoms I'm okay if you raise cortisol so if you want to go run a marathon fine go for it I'm going to be fine progesterone's like no I need you to not Spike cortisol I need you to bring glucose up so I want you to sit your butt on the couch and I want you to do nothing and I want you to give me some food that's going to raise cortisol so I can make my appearance okay so I'm gonna need to better understand what are what is estrogen doing what is progesterone doing because they make basically the exact opposite demands of the female I like testosterone I get you're at your most fertile you should desire sex spike in testosterone there we go but I don't know enough about estrogen and progesterone yeah so estrogen comes in the first half of the cycle like day one to about day 10 she usually Peaks around day 12. so we're building estrogen the whole that whole time and day one is when a woman bleeds so that's a question I get asked a lot so that first whole front half is when you're making estrogen and the number one reason of estrogen estrogen has to Peak for an egg to be released that's the whole purpose of estrogen in a reproduction sense but you also have estrogen receptor sites in your brain so estrogen also will stimulate our brain function which is why we're so good at verbally processing this is why typically now where I know we're we're stepping into Muddy Waters here but this is how hormones work is that estrogen makes it so that we can multitask really well we can think about a bazillion different things at the same time you know men don't typically ha the brain doesn't work as much that way because your hormone is testosterone and it that's what you focus on and everything else is great so estrogen is verbal she's cognition she is I call her an extrovert she's she makes you more social so we want to make you more emotional which is what people think it definitely can make you more emotional you have a hot thank you for bringing that up it's a higher level a spectrum of emotions you can tap into it makes us a lot more emotional ask any menopausal woman where her how her emotions are when she's on the other side of menopause a lot of women feel like they're just a little more emotionally stable because they don't have as much estrogen taking them through all that wide range of of emotions that they can get did you see Game of Thrones uh p CS of it my husband would be upset that I'm gonna tell you only parts of it yeah so there's a character in there that I've never it intuitively hit me right just because of all the people that I've met in my life that are in all different phases as far as women go of their reproductive cycle but there's a character I forget her name but she's like the matron matron like way past reproductive years very good at playing the game and just seems above it emotionally like has a really detached I understand human nature I know what it's like to be caught up in the game but I'm not in the game anymore and as you're as I as I think about my own I guess you could call them prejudices about um estrogen and what it's like to interact with women versus it is so different interacting with men and I've been in companies that are um hyper masculinized and I've been in companies that are mixed it's just very very different and when I think about okay evolution is the master here I'm I'm not going to outsmart Evolution if I were going to try to create something from scratch I would just be borrowing From Evolution so there there is a reason that in the fertility phase you need to be able to have this broader range of emotion as as the um significant other of somebody who is you know in that cycle it can at times be very confusing being on the other side of that just to see how this stimulus would have gotten a very different response from you at a different time and so that gets hard to Grapple with uh but then this idea of the the matron sort of being removed from that but having like this real deep wisdom there's lots of theories around uh the grandmother hypothesis and and basically that's how how wisdom is stored and carried cross-generationally which is why women go through menopause but they don't die off because guys have a reason from an evolutionary perspective that's obvious for why they keep living into old age because they can keep reproducing right so the question becomes why do women if they're no longer able to reproduce why keep them around so anyway this idea of wisdom transfer I think is a very it is it is a hypothesis I would not be quick to um disregard so does that feel right so we have this broad range of emotion which I will God how will I hypothesize this certainly an Attunement to emotional needs of kids like you would get why I would need this dial to 11 so that I can get an understanding of everywhere that they would be that I would have deep emotional reaction to their needs their wants or whatever and if that means that I have to myself be more emotional fair enough um but then I don't understand the progesterone and why we would then does that dial that down yeah there I love where your brain's going with this so the first thing I want to say is that then estrogen makes us more emotional if you look at it from a menstrual cycle standpoint it Peaks during ovulation so that we can have we want to have an emotional connection to you so if you want to have sex with us we need to have our emotional heart many for many women that emotional heart needs to be open so that I'm attracted to you because it's way more than just the smell of we talked about way more than the physicality there has to be an oxytocin bonding Connection in order for us to feel motivated to go have sex which is why estrogen does that at her Peak during ovulation which is crazy when you think about that so so we need to have that full emotional Spectrum wide open so that we can have this amazing human connection with you this the part around the menopausal woman and this is something that I don't think gets discussed enough is that many cultures look at menopausal women as the wise Elders now in Western culture we don't look at that we look at it as we're useless like you know we get tossed aside at that point but if you look at Indonesia this is one that I've been researching recently because we're heading to Bali in a few months and how they approach menopause is when a woman has gone a full year without her period is now she becomes the Elder that everybody goes to because they feel like she is wiser she has all the years of history that she can impart upon the the the community she's they consider her more intuitive but to your point she's a little more emotionally stable makes her a great wisdom leader but we don't we don't look at menopausal women like that now I also want to say that people listening to this might be like this we can't be put into boxes like this and I hear a lot of women say that but I want to tell you that I've sat in the trenches with so many women that there are so many women that go yep that's that's how I feel I need emotional connection with you so that makes sense that estrogen would come in I got into menopause I could see very clearly what the you know the in what the people around me needed or I saw how I could support my children and my grandchildren or or younger people at work and but yet we don't talk about this we don't bring this to the surface we sort of push those away um very interesting about the Western Society not embracing that I can actually see what you're saying we certainly have an obsession with trying to remain young well into that I want to focus in on the explanation for getting more emotional as a way to really make sure that I have a connection with you there's something that isn't it does so I often tell people when you're trying to think through something it should feel like a puzzle piece clicking into place when you get it it doesn't feel like a puzzle piece clicking into place could be my ignorance I'm super open to that but just from uh what I know about evolution something feels like there's a missing piece so I I've never thought about this before and helped me um think about this so women are often referred to as having a detective's brain and for men it's very different so it is our our genetic material is very cheap so Siemens easy to produce you're producing millions of it every day and so you try to plant it wherever you can and so guys are just looking for an opportunity and there's a great line and When Harry Met Sally where she's like well what about women you don't find attractive he's like no you sleep with them too and it's like it's funny because it's like yeah like I actually get the sentiment um whereas women it is a very expensive commitment to become pregnant um and so they have to be way more Discerning Discerning about your genetic material Discerning about whether you're going to be around to help provide when they're in a hyper vulnerable state uh so I'm one because it would be very easy for evolution to have said you don't need an emotional connection to have sex I mean guys do not need an emotional connection to have sex um and so then my question becomes okay then why did Evolution need you to have an emotional connection and so it makes sense to me if and this will almost certainly be an oversimplification hormones are usually so multifaceted but this could be a very interesting facet if what is really happening is that nature was like I need a gating mechanism I need a moment where you will reject unworthy suitors and so I'm going to create this moment where you're not going to be receptive to their advances in fact you're going to be way more scrutinous of their emotional availability by um and look I don't know if it if it is exactly like this but I'm I'm going to create a little bit of friction and I'm going to see if the other person will navigate that because basically what you do in that moment is you take men so far out of their orienting mechanisms so far out of their comfort zone that it's I am I'm grapping with an idea I've not thought a lot about so bear with me but it's a bit like taking a man off land into the open ocean and they have to figure out how to swim with you and do your thing and it then feels like a puzzle piece clicking into place when I think about basically Nature has ensured that women take men into a place where I'm gonna find out if you can navigate emotionally because if you can navigate emotionally I can trust you to be here and I can trust you with a child that can't communicate in logic that doesn't exist in any sort of logical realm whatsoever and I need to know that you're going to care for them you're not going to abuse them or me uh that makes sense what do you think about that yeah I think you actually I think it agreed I'm laughing to myself because I'm like I have never gone that deep into a conversation like this around ovulation and again where my brain goes to is why would all three of those hormones need to show up for women during ovulation it is a five day window where estrogen literally as at her highest of the whole month and testosterone's at its highest and you have a little bit of progesterone so what's happening emotionally to a woman is estrogen at his Peak gives this emotional Spectrum so now I can have a deeper connection I love what you said about I can also decide if you're going to be the right one for me to to have a baby with which as much as we don't want to think about that that is how our bodies are built a feminine body is built to procreate that's what we're about built for estrogen is also going to give me incredible mental Clarity so I make the right decision and I'm going to be able to connect with you verbally ready to connect with you so I can have this intimate experience testosterone comes in so I feel like my libido goes up but my motivation and drive also goes up so I'm motivated I'm smart I'm in I've got this incredible like spectrum of emotions and then I've got a little bit of progesterone that makes me very intuitive and calms me this is our super power window and it was designed so that I could connect to another human so that I can have a procreate and keep the species going but in a world where we're not we're having sex all the time we're not using it just as a tool to have a baby we still are seeing some of the patterns of our belief and our attraction and the way we show up because these hormones demand them they're Primal these even though we live in 2023 in this modern world our hormones are still the same hormones that they were back in the Primal days and they have the same influence on our brain we just have so many other distractions right now we may not be we may have fallen asleep to it is that helpful yeah yeah and look I'm sure this is but one slice of what Nature has in mind but it's it's a really interesting exploration and as somebody who uh really wants to see people get along with the opposite sex like the more that we understand where each other are coming from the better I often remind my wife if nobody else that uh don't look at my behaviors and think what they would mean if you were doing them you have to understand what they mean when I do them and likewise I'm not looking at your behaviors and trying to say what would they mean if I were doing them I'm just like okay what do I know about her Baseline what is she like and so what do they mean when she does it do you know her cycle do you know where she is well so this is interesting and she's talked about this so I don't think this will be talking out of school but she hasn't had a cycle in a very long time and so we got her off the pill a while ago and it she just never got her period back she is probably far too lean um that I'm sure is part of it she is a workout fiend um she eats very cleanly and she certainly doesn't try to restrict her calories but if she because her calories so clean it's not easy for her to put on fat so she doesn't need a lot of carbohydrates or anything like that most things that would I think be the maybe more calming things you're talking about um her microbiome can't handle and so she'll have problems there but she's now working with a specialist to try to get it back and I will be shocked if one of the mandates isn't you've got to put on some more fat um I'd be interested too and fast like a girl I show how to go high carb low carb like that's what's someone like in that scenario needs to do I literally pinged her and was like you have to get you on the show I was like I think those will be really interesting because that's the part of the problem is again we're doing the same lifestyle so even if you go to the greatest expert on the planet they're like oh you need to eat more of this this and this you need to do more more of this and and my brain goes yeah but we are meant to cycle our lifestyle with our menstrual cycle and so we need to know to go high carbon low carb we walk people through it what is that cycle yeah so what it looks like is when estrogen's building day one through day 10 we go low carb and we do more fasting to keep ourselves insulin sensitive so that's a per all her heavy workouts amazing during that time we go into ovulation day 11 through day 15. now we actually need to bring glucose up a little bit because you have progesterone sitting there and so progesterone doesn't want you to get glucose too low and you've got got testosterone so testosterone helps us build muscle so I love to see women go into more heavy weights at the time slow heavy reps so that we can build testosterone at that moment so that we are using testosterone in the way that it should be used after you come out of ovulation all those hormones crash you can go into your extreme keto fasting working out but then about day 1920 progesterons coming in and everything has to change you have to bring carbs up you got to bring cortisol down you need to switch your workouts to more recovery more of yoga more hiking you got to say no to more things um I just because of overwhelm because that's what progesterone demands progesterone if you so let's go to your wife in order to make progesterone so that the inner uterine lining sheds so she has a period that week becomes massively pivotal and if she if she doesn't have that if she's not if she's just powering through the same way that's the week that hooks up women and and that's where they're not getting their cycle and the number of women not getting a cycle right now is another huge problem because our Cycles are like a detox it's a shedding of the toxic estrogen so she could be getting enough estrogen to release an egg but she doesn't have enough progesterone to shed the uterine lining and so where's all that estrogen going it's getting stored in tissues that's not good and so many women don't have 20 and 30 40 year olds don't have a cycle and that's a massive problem wow it's crazy what do you what what's causing that I in in the most simple sense it's we're not minding the week before our period we're not changing like forever like my mom's generation they just whatever like they didn't even think about it your mom and even me if I look at I'm 53 and I'm a 23 year old daughter we have mass possibly different stressors like like my 23 I you know went to college did had you know enjoyed myself had fun we didn't have a phone we didn't have social media glyphosate wasn't in the in our in our environment we didn't have uh something that they called generally recognized as safe ingredients there's a hundreds of thousands of ingredients in our foods that are toxic we didn't put on all these beauty products that were destroying our endocrine system I look at my 23 year old daughter and and I feel in a sense very sad about the world that she's growing up in compared to what I grew up in I look at my 83 year old mom and she's never had a hormonal problem because life was so much more simple we are in an evolutionary mismatch women are right now with this modern world and it's destroying things like fertility and our periods and even now we're seeing it in menopause and perimenopause yeah I wish that guys were escaping the problem but I had somebody on the show to talk about phthalates and uh penis size decreasing taint size decreasing and I was just like whoa that is scary uh fertility rates plummeting birth rates plummeting for a whole host of reasons not the least of which is fertility it's really interesting like in some ways you know we're living through this technological Revolution and it's amazing in a thousand different ways and there's no other time that I would rather be alive and then I step back and I go I've struggled profoundly with anxiety and when I trace it back so the biggest change I made my anxiety by a country mile was my diet and so as I changed my diet I was like oh my God I didn't realize like how bad it had gotten from a generalized anxiety perspective where I was just anxious at all times yep at all times and I remember thinking I don't even what what am I anxious about I have no idea it was very frustrating and so tracking that down to diet then makes you a bit of a zealot to like explain to people hey hey like if you've got depression or anxiety I could basically guarantee that some percentage maybe like in my case it's a huge percentage but some percentage of that is going to be related to your diet and your lifestyle sleep and uh all that yeah and so it's like okay there was a time where by default you just couldn't get the problematic chemicals into you in any sort of significant fashion and so there were so many things that we just you you didn't encounter and so you didn't have to think about them we when I was in my 20s you literally never heard of a woman say she didn't wasn't getting her period even in my 30s and when I was in my 30s and everybody was trying to get pregnant there was a handful of women that were struggling to get pregnant so when we look at the trends that are happening we can't say that it's a problem just be you know we can't say infertility is just a new issue we have to say what is the environment that we are living in that is destroying but to your point both women and men's hormones that is making us weight loss resistant that is giving us these incredible mood disorders that's making PCOS the the biggest female hormonal imbalance that that we've got what is the the environment today and that's where chemicals come up that's where physical emotional and chemical uh you know mental chemicals you know we we're exposed to more toxins we we're we're on our phones all day long constantly stimulating our brain um we you know we're physically not moving we're not even getting natural light we are so out of touch with how the human body was designed to be that all these things are showing up and then we give them fancy labels and then we say oh well let's give them fancy tree treatments and I even want to say that we do this in the biohacking world in the health World a little bit which is why I'm just we have to make this simple we've got to go back to our Primal Roots we need sunlight we need good quality food women need rest the week before their periods we we need to go period times without without eating that is how the human body is designed and when you look at I I got this the other day I was remembering that 1987 is when I graduated high school and my sister and I had what we thought was the coolest cord attached to our we are at our own phone line that we got to share oh that was like a big deal and my dad went to Radio Shack and got us the longest cord possible so that we could walk from our bedroom on the phone all the way into the kitchen and still it was like what a great today do not know how cool that was right it was I'm very jealous it's super cool so think about how far we've evolved from that okay but our bodies haven't evolved from that our bodies are the same Primal have the same Primal needs so every single one of these human conditions that are showing up from the mental health to the physical health the first question we need to ask is what is the lifestyle we should be living to bring ourselves Back in Balance with ourselves because the modern world's not doing it it's actually pulling us in the opposite way yeah it's brutal okay so paint a picture for me what how do we we are in this modern world whether we want to be or not so how do people start turning things around how do they get things going in the right direction yeah and I know it's so depressing right I feel like we you know you just hit that moment and you go how are we going to do this as humans I think that's that's I've hit that moment several times like how is this going to map out for humans if we don't make some personal changes and to your point um you know for starters let's go back to the basics so of course I'm going to leave with fasting we've got to learn the art of fasting so you might not be a three-day water person but fast person but could you be a 13 hour a day I can train anybody to do that we've seen it over and over again we got to go back to the Simplicity of food could you just focus on foods that don't have a label just just ask yourself did man make this food or did did Earth make this food and can I go back to just the simple way of eating where I'm eating fruits vegetables Meats if you eat Meats if you don't then do the legumes and get away from the refined processed carbohydrates and and chemicals that that's it we're not counting macros we're not even putting a CGM on you third thing could I start to get natural light like could I get up with the sunrise where there's red light red light is going to stimulate a different hormonal production in me could I get out in the middle of the day we have serotonin receptor sites in our eyes and see full spectrum light without sunglasses on just 20 minutes could I just go for a walk and get some full sun in the middle of the day you can wear a hat if you're worried about the the getting too much on your skin and at the end of the day could I walk the dogs at Sunset so my eyes see red lights so I can change my whole melatonin system and I can improve my serotonin system and then what how am I moving am I you know movement cortisol is meant to make us move so when I have a stressful moment can I get instead of sitting in a chair could I just get up and go and and move my body so that I'm using cortisol much like we talked about using glucose with the squats how often am I moving moving my body around and then am I prior prioritizing sleep am I trying I don't think we need to get seven to nine consistent hours of sleep in fact most of the experts I've spoken with don't feel like you need it all in one chunk what yeah that's a whole nother I can I can go down that rabbit hole if you want yeah but we need to at least be going to bed we're designed to go to bed about two hours after the sun goes down that's when our body starts to repair so am I getting to bed at a fairly decent time trying to get seven hours and then waking up with the sunrise these are Primal basic needs of the human body that we're not even tending to so let's just start there before we get into the conversation of this super biohack or this Super Supplement or this amazing medication let's just go back to our foundational roots and then let's see what happens and my experience has been most everything clears out and people get their health back on track and health becomes fun again all right let's go a little bit into the Weeds on diet so we're going to be doing the Sleep getting sun exposure we're going to be moving around all that diet is going to be a huge component of that you've already talked about don't eat things with a label basically so don't eat processed foods so we'll chalk that up already I know you were a vegan for 10 years uh you were not a vegan now do you do you have a take like was it just not right for you not right in general what's the yeah so um I was a vegan when I had chronic fatigue syndrome and prior to that I was eating really really like high really bad diet so it was a good shift anytime you shifted the diet the first time it's usually if for the positive it's usually a good shift in the body adapts well the problem with veganism is you're not getting enough amino acids and you need amino acids to make hormones and you need it to make neurotransmitters and you need it to build muscle so if you're on a vegan diet you have to make sure you supplement with an amino acid that's that's the one supplement situation I'll say yeah you're going to need to go in that door but the second problem with veganism is that most people Elevate their carbs so now they're become so glucose challenged um they're and they become insulin resistant so you're going to need to make sure you're pairing your carbs with a fat you need to make sure you're getting enough protein um we I mean there's so much more chemistry that's needed in a vegan diet so why it didn't work for me is I was just eating carbs and so I was just gaining weight I was just getting more and more insulin resistant and I was not sleeping and I was had brain fog and I literally thank God I would listen to my own intuition I just woke up one day and was like this isn't working I don't love this body I'm living in now and I changed and I started to eat meat and and I dropped immediately dropped 20 pounds within a couple of months of eating meat whoa so it was it was and my shocking because the stuff you were eating while it didn't have animal protein it still was I'm sure high in sugar it's high in sugar it was carbide I was eating carbs all day yeah yeah so it's just spiking all the time so so now I have met a lot of people who do vegan vegetarian and they're like it's working for me if it's working for you amazing stay with that it might be that for right now that's what your body does I encourage you to know what your glucose and insulin levels are I encourage everybody to get a a yearly measurement of hemoglobin A1c which really tells us how much those red blood cells can carry oxygen to the tissues of our body so and that's impacted by glucose for those that don't know gets gummed up and can really slow it down exactly so is your number below five yeah before below is that optimal uh 4.5 is optimal is 3.5 even better than 4.5 the studies that I've seen is yes if you want to slow aging down if you get it closer into the four under four three points there's such a thing as too low that's a great question I'm not sure I'm sure there is there's you can definitely take it to the extreme but I've I mean I just I've only seen 3.5 in one human that I've I've watched looked at thousands of blood tests 3.5 is not easy to get to got it because you would challenge accepted yeah yeah oh I haven't had it checked in years and no I don't remember the last time but uh my for the last 12 years of my life probably I've been very diligent my fat was too low for a long time but I haven't been eating carbo in fact God I stopped eating carbohydrates in any regular amount two decades ago do you eat fruit I do but I treat it like a candy bar so you're doing meat and vegetables primarily I do eggs meat and vegetables primarily so and you know so it'd be interesting to see what your hemoglobin A1c is um you and but then fasting how if you're fasting 19 hours most day yeah so I tracked my intermittent fasting like it was a religion for 18 months and over that 18-month period it averaged 17 and a half hours a day including Christmas day weekends everything so on the days during a normal weekday I'm gonna be pushing it into the 18 19 hour range 20 hours uh is definitely not unusual for me at all um so yeah so there's a there's a perfect example I'd be curious what your hemoglobin A1c is uh my guess if I had to guess right now based off what you just told me is it's probably about 4.5 given everything you're doing now what you're doing most people can't do so I push back on that so hard what I'm doing most people don't do because they have a mental barrier that stops them from getting through the first clickover it's me with the cookie and trust me I'm empathetic I get it uh but yeah most people because you care about how you feel and how you think better than than any then that and I've got a whole thing around discipline so if it's like my goals make demands and then I do whatever my goals demand and at the time that I went low carb I believed that for fat loss because I was putting on fat I mean I was in my mid-20s and all of a sudden I was putting on fat and I was eating less than I'd ever eaten before but I thought that the game was to go low fat and so the reason was I just I had up my carb intake massively trying to avoid fat not realizing that now I'm just spiking my glucose all day uh and so I was super confused so I thought for longevity and for fat loss I had to go low carb now longevity is still a question mark can who knows I could drop dead tonight but from a being able to control my body composition bulletproof like and and I am very uh I I know just enough to be arrogant in my beliefs and I am utterly convinced if somebody will only eat what I give them meaning they they because I get it they're they're microbiome will scream out for things they shouldn't eat in their discipline may be too low but if they only eat what I eat I am convinced with 100 certainty that I can control anybody's body composition period end of a story like nobody escapes it I don't care what disease you have whatever um I I am just convinced that I can do that I would a thousand percent agree with you that if everybody did exactly what you did that we would we would end chronic disease getting people to do what you do is I I'm not sure I have a lot of admiration for what you're saying I love this idea that your your goals create demands I love your your intensity around discipline I'm not sure we're going to get humans to that point ever oh I can agree with you we won't the UN For Better or Worse what I have found is the ideas that I live by are a filtering mechanism and most people either think it's just crazy and stupid and why would you ever do that uh or they love it but they can't Implement and they certainly can't maintain which I feel this is where now I have ideas and I really want people to try them but now all my arrogance around diet goes away like getting people to so this company's called impact Theory because I have a theory on how to impact people at scale which is the ideas that I live by first of all they're Timeless they are not my ideas uh they've been around forever and if you can get these ideas into somebody when they're young oh agreed then moving forward everything is not easy but it's easier but trying to get adults I I ballpark it at two percent everybody that's made it this far into this episode congratulations you're part of the two percent yeah right like you'll take these ideas and you will do something none of us are perfect but you'll take these ideas and you'll deploy them unfortunately 98 of the world they they might get as far as spiritual entertainment and so they hear these empowering ideas and they're like wow that's amazing I wish I could basically um and they don't deploy them with any consistency and so I became obsessed with how do you get the 98 and that's why we make video games now uh that that actually is quite brilliant um we'll see if it works yeah yeah because the way the way I approach this topic like I would love like my vision of the world is everybody would do the way you're doing it now for women there would be some Nuance around changing up that week before a woman's cycle because she needs more carbohydrates during that time um but I also see that all the humans suffering from the mental to the physical right now is self-inflicted and it's because we're not we're not a taking responsibility like we mentioned but we're not really making a one-to-one relationship that when I pick up a candy bar it tastes so good I feel so good in that moment but it makes the depression worse tomorrow yep we are not making that connection and that is a major problem and so this is why I like this idea of how can I give that person a little bit of momentum how can I just have them have a different experience with that candy bar and maybe the experiences through a sea Jam like we've talked about and now they're like oh my God I was just eating it and I felt good I didn't realize that that was what's going on or maybe I tack on some fasting and they go like we said earlier oh my God I feel so much better in a fasted State wait I don't feel so good with that candy bar like we've got to change their experience with this poor lifestyle and once that changes and they see that a healthy lifestyle is a gift not a not a not a um you know not a threat not something that's like taking pleasure away it's actually giving them pleasure and that's what I think you're getting is like you're like I love this lifestyle because I operate at my best in it why would I go to this other lifestyle that most people are living but they're over there look listening to you and seeing that that's deprivation so we have to show them that there are massive mental cons and physical consequences to that and this actually is the gift and once they get there now they can build some momentum and they can go okay wait you know what I do think a little bit better when I eat an apple wait a second I do I can go down a notch on my belt loop because I threw a 13-hour fast at it wait a second I started to eat you know more of these raw foods that we're talking about and I noticed that my bowel movements changed that's the education that will move that person slowly over to Lifestyle being the hero of the day and they can see that it's absolutely not deprivation is a complete gift and the example that I always use is I had a friend who I've been gluten free forever and I had a friend who our our daughters were doing the same Sport and you know when your kids are in sports together you're on the sidelines and practices and talking to each other for hours and days and one day she looked at me and she goes you know after several years of being here with you Mindy I watch how you eat and I gotta say you don't look deprived and I would probably say the same thing to you when you say that you probably don't feel deprived and the reason we don't feel deprived is because we feel so on our game mentally and physically that there would be no other idea of why we would do it different why would we do it different because this feels amazing but we got to take people from that place over to feeling the benefits of a lifestyle that would serve them and that Gap is where our work is so if you do it through a video game amazing I'm trying to do it through like a just letting them know that their body can perform differently and then do it through fasting let me show you a tool that's free that you can start to make this shift and now we've got momentum okay let me show you what else we can do let me show you like that guy Todd you know the guy who lost over 300 pounds it was so amazing to be like okay Todd now you're gonna add in this food and he would just come back to me like okay what's next this is working tell me what's next so I don't want to give up on Humanity but I also want them to have a different experience with their body and that's what I hear in in your in what you're doing is you just have a completely different experience so people can't relate because they're like I don't have that experience in my body I am very glad that you are offering people the ability to learn more about that experience because it really is life-changing where can people follow along with you learn from you yeah well you YouTube's my is my passion project um two videos new videos every week go out there thousands of videos um are there on all kinds of fasting topics so that's probably the best place to search for your name yeah sir Dr Mindy Pell is on YouTube the forget it you can go to my website and everything's there um that I'm doing where I'm kind of everywhere right now so I'm pretty easy to find I love it all right guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace click here now to learn how to reverse your age with water fasting and they all say the same thing including my mother who at 92 had outlived all 50 of her lifelong friends every one of her friends was dead she was alone and she said Alan you need to warn your patients if they're going to do this diet make younger friends

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 1,290,920

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Mindy Pelz, Fast Like a Girl, Health Theory, Conversations with Tom, health tips, fasting, intermittent fasting, weight gain, dr mindy pelz, weight loss, healing, holistic doctor, diet tips, dr jason fung, how to fast, how to intermittent fast

Id: yOA90aWZlkk

Length: 139min 21sec (8361 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2023