Fasting: Hype Or Ultimate Health Hack?

when your blood sugar gets really low your body says oh this is kind of an emergency i need some blood sugar good thing i have built-in systems to turn on blood sugar instantly it's called cortisol and adrenaline so your body says i'm crashing let me get you some stress hormones right here and then you get your energy back but it's fighting energy it's stress energy [Music] welcome to the doctor's pharmacy i'm dr mark hyman that's pharmacy with an ffar mhcy and if you're confused about all the hubbub about fasting and intermittent fasting and time restricted eating and this and that and whether it's good for you or bad for you what you should do you better listen up because this conversation is with my good friend the world's olympic biohacker dave asprey who's the founder and chairman of bulletproof 360 a high performance coffee and food company he's the creator of the wildly popular bulletproof coffee which i had a version of when i was in in tibet uh 40 years ago which was a very salty buttery tea but it worked uh he's the three times new york times best-selling author he's the host of the webby award-winning podcast bulletproof radio and has been featured on the today show fox news nightline cnn and lots more fake news channels over the last two decades dave the founding father of biohacking has worked with many renowned doctors including me uh researchers scientists and global mavericks to uncover the latest most innovative methods techniques and products for enhancing mental and physical performance he has literally spent millions of dollars bio-hacking his own body with all kinds of gizmos gadgets and techniques and tools many of which i've uh learned about from dave and he's actually been kind of a little secret advisor to me when i want to know what's out there what's new what's happening i called dave and in fact when i got really sick i did call dave and he helped me with a lot of great ideas so i'm so happy to have you on the podcast dave again mark thanks for having me back i i respect and admire you so much so anytime i can be of service to you or your show or your audience it is truly an honor well you are you are immense you are a good man you want good for the world and and i think that's why i love you so much um and we've shared a lot of great experiences together and i'm excited to talk about your new book fast this way and it's a great book because there's a lot of confusion about fasting and you put a little bit of a different spin on it and you take us on a journey uh through the world of fasting that's a little bit different with a different angle and i was sort of surprised when i had a look at the book and i saw that it was inspired by a spiritual quest a vision quest which is a powerful ritual that is a native american ritual and many other cultures have similar ones and it's got three key aspects right solitude so you're go up by yourself nature so you go out in the middle of nowhere in the wilderness and then fasting where you don't eat at all and and the goal is to connect to the deeper purpose and meaning of your life and discover who you are to face your demons and you were in search of better health you wanted to know yourself better and you wanted to achieve a sense of peace you weren't really looking for a way to lose weight or speed up your metabolism or reverse aging but it led you to a series of discoveries that actually help you do all that so start off with telling us about this experience what you learned about yourself when you went away in a cave drinking only water for four days in the middle of arizona [Laughter] well mark i used to weigh 300 pounds and i realized i lost most of the weight in fact it's pretty easy to lose half the weight you want to lose the other half took me 10 years of playing with things to come up with the bulletproof diet and to really understand the nuances and i've been recommending fasting to my followers for 10 years at least intermittent fasting if not longer fast but all of that came about because of my very first fast and this was back in somewhere around 2005. i just felt called to do a vision quest and i said all right i've you know finished my mba i've i've been to nepal and tibet and you know i've i'm back i'm starting uh i've started a new relationship i'm married i have a new baby but i just i need to go connect and i realized i had a couple things to work on one i was actually afraid to be alone and it driven you know some of my relationship behaviors in the past you know dating and just not having great relationships and then i also realized that i was afraid of being hungry as a 300 pound guy i was always hungry and you're told especially if you're you know anywhere over 40 if you don't eat six times a day your body will go into starvation mode right and for me starvation mode meant profound cravings and my brain would turn off and i would act like a jerk so i'm like i better eat like i have to have something and i have ended meetings in my my mid-20s i'm at this company that's gone public and all successful careers taking off anyway guys it's 11 45 i know lunch is at noon i'm ending the meeting right now because i'm so hungry that i'm gonna kill one of you and eat you and i would just walk out of the meeting like i could not at least i didn't believe that i could make it the other 15 minutes because i i was just all over the place so i said all right i'm gonna feel this intensely so i found a shaman she dropped me off in the desert outside sedona and there was no humans and no food for 10 miles in any direction and like all right i'm just going to sit in this cave and i'm going to face it so the book is set up like what happened in each of the days in the cave what happens psychologically and emotionally when you're fasting and what happens biologically and there's lots of knowledge now about the biology of fasting and it's very clear that if you are dealing with high blood sugar you're dealing with pre-diabetes or diabetes which is the number one risk factor for covid and the number one risk factor for all of the other things that tend to kill you when you get old like cardiovascular disease like cancer like alzheimer's get diabetes you have a much greater chance of those so fasting we know the science so i put the science in the book which is necessary but the big thing is how do i actually make it a part of my life because most people who aren't either really sick or on the cutting edge of performance they look at that and go fasting that's the most unappealing thing i've ever heard of number one i like food number two i don't like being hungry so i said i'm gonna write this book pretty much yeah and so you're like you're trying to convince me to do this thing that sucks and the picture that i had of fasting is very different than the reality and i figured out from a computer science ai which is my background uh computer security there's an algorithm that runs in our minds that drives our behavior and it's the same algorithm that all life shares whether it's plants or animals and the first thing that gets all of our attention 10 times more than anything else is anything that's scary you have to run away from you have to hide or basically kill anything that's dangerous so that's why we're also triggered right now there's this floating potential menace that may or may not be on surfaces or anything like like sphere everywhere but there's also all kinds of other things that are fearful so that steals your attention and it steals your energy and then whatever's left over if you don't feel like something's you know that anxiety then the second thing that all life does you eat everything because famines kill most species some of the time so five times more energy goes into what's for lunch than it actually deserves and then especially when you're feeling covered or fall and so like people are feeling guilty about this it's no wonder that if someone puts a cookie in front of you that the cookie's like eat me no and the cookie says eat me and you say no and eventually it's like arguing with the two-year-old you go okay i'll just have half the cookie and then you beat yourself up later and say i'm a bad person but the little part of you these mitochondria that are the ones telling you to eat the cookie they control your energy so if they think they're in control and they haven't been trained to just not care about cookie because they know more is coming then you spend a lot of time i found a study mark 30 of people's thoughts are about their next meal what if you could free up 30 of your thoughts to think about being nice to other people or just to watch breaking bad over and over it doesn't matter it's free time and it's free thoughts that are not yours right now so if the first one's fear the second one's food there's something else all life does to stay alive forever mark can you figure out that one is also an f-word oh yes it's uh fornication oh mark i was thinking fertility but oh my goodness i'm really embarrassed uh but yeah okay uh and it could be the other awkward so three times more energy goes into that and now let me ask you this mark have you ever done something that you're ashamed of that wasn't one of those three things feeding fleeing fighting well basically fear fear food and the other f word you know you'll actually have ten things but but in all seriousness yeah yeah might have said inappropriate things here and there in a crowd but usually the inappropriate things in a crowd are coming from fear here at the end of the day right like you said it because something was triggering you and that's how that's the human condition and what fasting does that's really cool is fasting allows you to say okay i'm going to teach my body to not worry so much about food i'm going to turn off the voice in my head and from that perspective it frees up so much energy and then biologically it does something else that's magic because when you have enough energy you're able to emotionally regulate better than otherwise so you're saying but dave if you fast you'd have less energy but the cool thing is when you fast the the mitochondria the power plants in your cells the ones that can't make it for four hours without food or for 16 hours or 18 hours however long you're fasting the body goes wait a minute i guess i should go to the trouble of getting rid of the weak mitochondria and replacing them with strong ones and so now you've given yourself a power upgrade because now you can generate more power when you do eat and the only thing that's left is how do we overcome that part of us that says eat the cookie eat the cookie and for that i'm a busy guy i'm ceo right now with four companies not bulletproof i hired a ceo for that but these are upgrade labs and bulletproof media and you know i write books like you do and you know how busy life gets and i'm a dad and i'm a husband right and and so with all of these things i really want my energy to be where i want it to be and fasting lets you do that except if you're hungry and distracted and anxious and cold and shaky which does happen especially people start fasting so over the course of the last 10 years people lost a million pounds on the bulletproof diet including intermittent fasting and i've learned a few things from talking with thousands of people about this as well as my own experience what happens when you fast and you fast the old way so i'm just going to go two days without food like you would in a cave after about two days you start making ketones and ketones are the preferred fuel for the neurons in your brain and if you if you put the neuron in a petri dish with sugar and with ketones it'll eat ketones first because ketones have more energy than sugar so the body's like yeah of course there's parts of your body that really require carbs on a regular basis too so you don't want to be in ketosis all the time but the reason spiritual traditions fast for at least two days much of the time is because clarity comes on and all the energy that's going into digestion stops and you get a power upgrade because now you're burning fat instead of sugar like oh man like i i feel so good i feel so clean and you stop being hungry after two days of fasting but who who can have a job who can have multiple jobs like you and me and like most people listening here and deal with all the crap in the world and being hungry so there are hacks that turn off hunger during fast so you can actually go through a day and skip breakfast and maybe even skip lunch and just not worry about food and take that 30 of thoughts that second f word and just remove it and go oh i guess yeah i could eat lunch i could not eat lunch i'm okay either way no thoughts no willpower involved and so during the week okay how do you do that and that's why fast this way that's why i wrote it because the the first stepping off a cliff to your first even your first intermittent fast it's a little bit scary this is to remove the pain of fasting so we can all be high functioning humans and then on the weekend i teach i do a spiritual fast but here's here's the first hack for cough or for for coffee for fasting it is coffee and just black coffee the amount of caffeine in two small cups of coffee so about a medium-sized large cup of coffee is enough to double ketone production in studies and when you get your ketones up to a very low coffee not not bulletproof coffee just plain coffee plain black coffee or caffeine tablet would do it if you really are into that kind of things which i don't really recommend but it's the caffeine itself not coffee coffee has its own set of powers apart from caffeine and in those studies doubling ketone production is pretty good so let's say that you already slept for eight hours even if you had a snack right before bed which is a bad idea you've got eight hours of fasting which raises ketones a little bit and then you have some coffee with no sugar in it no creamer nothing like that and that alone is enough to help suppress hunger and turn off all the thoughts about food that are distracting to you when you're trying to do it if you can get your ketone levels up to 0.5 which is much less than you know the keto bro you know haven't eaten carbs in a while or you can get up to one or two or higher just 0.5 is shown in studies to turn off the hunger hormone called ghrelin which i know your listeners are familiar with and to turn on cck which is the fullness hormone so the first hack black coffee second hack is make it bulletproof and you put in grass-fed butter or ghee and ghee has no milk protein whatsoever well-made ghee shouldn't trigger milk allergies whether they're lactose or milk protein i'm very sensitive to milk protein i can handle butter just fine and you add the mct oil and this for most people can kick their ketones up to that magic number so then you've got energy from burning fat but because you didn't have any sugar your insulin levels didn't go up and you didn't turn on protein digestion you're still getting the vast majority of the benefits of a fast so if you do this it's easier on the body easier on the mind and it lowers physiological stress and that matters even more for women and so the first one's black coffee second one is bulletproof coffee the third one is prebiotic fiber and this is a type of fiber that cannot be digested by the body so you're not feeding yourself whatsoever but it makes you feel really full and you can have bugs in your gut feeds the good bugs in your gut it helps to crowd out the bad ones and one of the things that happens during a fast is that the bacteria in your gut like we're getting a little stressed here we got no food when we're stressed we make more of those fear compounds remember i said all life practices that run away from kill or hide so the bad guys in your gut when they don't have food they make something called lipopolysaccharides or lps and you're very familiar with this mark because of your medical background but lps crosses the gut barrier and it's a toxin and it creates a state of anxiety and hunger and it creates a state of inflammation so what would happen it also causes weight gain in diabetes lps is really bad and if you have bad gut bacteria it's a problem so what if during a fast you took a prebiotic fiber that actually turned off hunger and fed the good guys and helped to crowd out the bad guys but you didn't raise your insulin levels you didn't turn on protein digestion you just reduce the amount of toxins that were being formed in your gut well what happens is the benefits of fasting without the pain so now it's possible to do an intermittent fast and i recommend at least 16 hours up to 18 or more if you want to there's many different names for fasting and it's a good thing lots of people are popularizing fasting so they'll put your cool brand names on it and i've done the same thing the bulletproof intermittent fast circa 2011 that was with bulletproof coffee but we know so much more now about fasting than we did back in the early days where you can use any of these three you can use all three of them together and then suddenly during the week you feel better than you did when you had breakfast and it isn't any cost there's no pain at all and then lunch time rolls around and because you're still not that hungry you make better food choices you know i think i'll have the salad instead of you know the hamburger and you can really really just have more control biologically and those three things matter as well as just understanding the base psychology behind it all so you're basically talking about a phenomena we call time-restricted eating and hacks to make it easier which is giving your body a break from let's say after dinner and by the way listen if you have dinner at six o'clock in the evening and you have breakfast at eight that's a 14 hour fast that's the other hack have dinner early like who would have thought right dinner early if you have dinner if you have dinner at five you can eat breakfast at nine that's a 16 hour fast right yeah so it doesn't have to be as onerous as it sounds and what you're saying is that by doing that you're going to create a whole series of biological changes in your body that doesn't just make you feel better have more energy have better focus but that actually deals with some of the fundamental biology of aging now you wrote a book called superhuman we had you on the podcast talking about it but we used to think that you know longevity was genetic you got handed a good deck of cards from your parents or you did but it turns out that a lot of longevity is not determined by our genes unless you're really lucky and you got those genes like yubi blake or you know he's like i would live to 100 and something years old he says if i wouldn't knowing i was gonna live so long i would have taken better care of myself you know he smoked he drank he did all his heart it's just not fair but that's not fair but that's not most of us we have to pay attention but it turns out that what we do in terms of our lifestyle and our diet makes huge impact and the understanding of fasting or intermittent fasting or time restricted eating or even longer fast a day fast or day a day fast a week or three day fast they have profound effects in our biology to optimize all the pathways that lead to health and even longevity that help our energy decrease our risk of disease and do a whole series of different things so can you kind of take us down that road of what do we know about the science of this because it's it's really phenomenal when you start to look at it wow you know if you look at fasting or intermittent fasting or time restricted eating or bulletproof vesting or fasting mimicking diets or ketogenic diets they all they all do the same thing which is rejuvenate your biology it's really rejuvenative and regenerative medicine it is so rejuvenating because well geez there's a lot of pathways that are involved but one of the most important one that i talked about there is mitochondrial biogenesis so when you fast your body will build new stronger mitochondria it's really important for aging as we age we lose the ability to combine air and food effectively and a lot of people have heard about intermittent training or high intensity interval training you know where you just exercise really hard for a brief period of time and then the body's like oh man i might have to do that again i guess that should get strong so fasting is kind of the same thing but for the mitochondria in the cells they go i might have to skip some meals again i guess i should get strong and everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial deficiency unless they're actively managing it and 48 of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial deficiency according to research by frank schallenberger who's been on my show has he been on yours um he's one of those ozone guys yeah yeah yeah and he measures mitochondrial efficiency with a very serious set of you know oxygen masks and all kinds of stuff so it's real data so okay number one let's fix our mitochondria with fasting number two your pancreas and to a certain extent your liver makes enzymes and their job is to break down proteins and other food items that you eat it's also enzymes job to go into the body and fix stuff so you can only make so many enzymes per day it's the maximum enzyme production capacity of the body well what if because you're not eating protein you're not eating carbs during the fast what if the pancreas is available to make enzymes for healing the body instead of for digesting food it will do that and those two things work really well for aging and there's a bunch of other things around ampk which caffeine or coffee can help with sirtuins and not a lot of people are talking about supplementation during fasting because some supplements break fasting and since i wrote a lot about anti-aging supplements and all the other technologies and techniques in superhuman i really got into the science about what supplements should you take when you're fasting and which ones should you not take and tell us tell us this is stuff i haven't seen online and that this is from you know combing pubmed and i do a lot of background research when i write a book so one of the most important enzymes that i think people should be taking when they fast to accelerate this breakdown of old tissues in the body break up scar tissue adhesions is proteolytic enzymes and the most common one is called serrapeptase and there are other formulas that i mentioned in the book that are essentially hey pancreas now you don't have to do that and these can break up the stuff that makes your blood sticky um like called thrombin and fibrinogen and if you do that when you're fasting you're getting a whole deep tissue workout there that's really powerful a lot of people who fast also miss out on electrolytes good old-fashioned salt is something that's important especially in the morning when you first wake up some sea salt or himalayan salt is a good idea as well as magnesium and potassium so when you add these precious minerals in during a fast you actually feel much better and you're keeping your body more balanced yeah it's so true i literally take electrolytes every day i have a little bottle of liquid electrolytes and i just squirt into the water i drink tom brady does it drink water without electrolytes which may explain his longevity and health and i think when people get hydrated they think oh i'm just drinking water i'm going to be hydrated but the truth is you want your inside of your cells to be hydrated yes the only way to get your inside of yourselves hydrated is by having enough electrolytes so if you just drink water without electrolytes you can literally die yes people do that in marathons all the time marathons right they they yeah they they dilute their blood so the salt in their blood goes so low that it causes seizures and coma and death so you need electrolytes you really do afraid of those and i think i think for interest cellular hydration it it's a really important strategy that most people don't use and i think i'm a big fan of that in terms of really dealing with the fundamental hydration status of the body that makes everything else work better hi everyone hope you're enjoying the episode before we continue we have a quick message from dr mark hyman about his new company pharmacy and their first product the 10-day reset hey it's dr hyman do you have flc what's flc it's when you feel like crap it's a problem that so many people suffer from and often have no idea that it's not normal or that you can fix it i mean you know the feeling it's when you're super sluggish your digestion's off you can't think clearly or you have brain fog or you just feel run down can you relate i know most people can't but the real question is what the heck do we do about it well i hate to break the news but there's no magic bullet flc isn't caused by one single thing so there's not one single solution however there is a systems-based approach a way to tackle the multiple root factors that contribute to flc and i call that system the 10-day reset the 10-day reset combines food key lifestyle habits and targeted supplements to address flc straight on it's a protocol that i've used with thousands of my community members to help them get their health back on track it's not a magic bullet it's not a quick fix it's a system that works if you want to learn more and get your health back on track click on the button below or visit getpharmacy.com that's get pharmacy within ffarmacy.com now back to this week's episode one of the things i do is i drink mineral water which has a substantial amount of electrolytes in it there's calcium magnesium potassium there's probably less sodium in it but i get plenty of sodium in my food and it's funny when you're fasting or when you're not fasting a little bit of salt when you first wake up takes the load off your adrenal glands and when you're fasting it is a state of stress on the body and it's not a bad stress unless you're already really stressed in which case i tell you maybe you want not to fast if you've got a bad night's sleep you're jet lagged it's okay have some breakfast just have some protein and some fat and breakfast don't have a lot of carbs and you're going to you're going to feel better so electrolytes help the other thing is when you do the prebiotic fiber that means that you have more water sitting in your digestive system longer and it can absorb better so it turns out having fiber helps you stay hydrated and if you do fiber and electrolytes together even during a fast some people still say well wait you could only have water during a fast because that's what the mice did i'm like yeah but we're not mice and we have jobs and the mice just sit there and run on a wheel if they feel like it so what we want to do is get the benefits of fasting and having a caloric surplus during a fast isn't going to work but we're talking not very much from a calorie perspective and very specific types of calories that your body either doesn't use or doesn't use in a way that's going to break the fast so you add your electrolytes you add your your digestive enzymes and away from those the other supplement that i talk about in fast this way that's really important is activated charcoal now we talked about lps at lipopolysaccharide those wait before you get into the charcoal explain what kind of prebiotic fiber you're talking about give us an example of some prebiotic fibers that you'd use there are now a great variety of prebiotic fiber products on the market and certainly i formulated one for bulletproof but the primary ingredient in many of them is acacia gum which is basically a sap from a tree that is shown in studies to feed the good guys you can also add a variety of oligosaccharides hydrolyzed guar gum is another one that's out there and there are literally dozens of formulas that are designed to be prebiotics and i wrote a lot about these and looked into the anti-aging effects of getting enough of this is called soluble fiber this is not the the chunky sawdust kind of you know metamucil or psyllium husk i don't mean those what i mean is the stuff that dissolves in water and you do that and magically you'll probably have healthier poop but most importantly you're changing the ratio of the bacteria in your body you can also take probiotics with prebiotics and doing that during a fast is okay as well in fact at that point you're you if you eat nothing and then you take the good guy prebiotic and the good guy probiotics you're crowding out the bad guys pretty effectively you might as well do that you were fasting anyway you didn't have breakfast it's pretty easy to do now if i if i do too much fasting or inter even intermittent or time restricted eating i'll tend to lose too much weight which i probably shouldn't advertise in public but i think so it makes people jealous right yeah i mean i and i you know i've worked hard at optimizing my metabolism so i think i i do very well but uh are there some people who shouldn't really be doing this um that it's it's too much for their system there's a whole chapter for women in fast this way that's really important because mark you and i know this we probably don't say it enough most of the studies that you'll find on pubmed they were done on young white men and that's because that's who was in college and they used college students as guinea pigs and until about 20 years ago doing their research yeah exactly like these guys are cheap we'll just you know they're fodder and for women fasting really is different i have routinely seen women who go on a full ketogenic diet this is why i've always recommended cyclical keto that's at the core of the bulletproof things sickle keto with low toxin plants and when you get that dialed in it still can be a lot for women so during certain times in your cycle you know it's okay to have breakfast you already have enough biological stress so you want to do your intermittent fasting on days when you're in pretty good shape and you don't want to do it when you're completely wrecked if you're not doing it every day like you get if you do it three days a week is that good i think for women especially women who have a meaningful amount to lose or if they are in perimenopause especially try it three days a week or five days a week but have breakfast a few times and don't have you know a bowl of carby cereal but have some eggs and you know salmon or whatever you like for breakfast what you're going to find there is that if you do intermittent fasting every single day and your metabolism isn't up for it it's too much of a stress and the idea of stress is turn stress on recover turn stress on recover but if you just turn stress on and stay that way after about six weeks what you'll find is that women hit the wall first and their thyroid goes off and their sex hormones go off so their cycle becomes irregular they don't feel as good and their sleep quality goes down first guys take another couple weeks on that if they're living a normal stressful life like wait a minute what happened after you're used to it after you've become trained on this you can fast pretty much every morning if you want to me i do an intermittent fast five days a week saturday morning i have breakfast with the kids and sometimes sunday morning too and you know what sometimes they even have carbs for breakfast even though it's not good for me it was a saturday morning right i just don't have gluten and corn syrup that's right but they're almond coconut flour pancakes that are from my cookbook food what the heck should i eat which are really good you know i do have that cookbook in the kitchen my 13 year old daughter reads it so yes mark uh that that is a good book so so i went i want to sort of dig in a little geeky signs here with you because i think that most people don't realize that all these strategies have a reason that we were designed and exquisitely adapted to starvation we weren't designed to deal with the amount of abundant food supply we have now which is about 700 plus calories more a day than we had per person 50 years ago right uh where is it going it's going in all the junk food processed food i mean snacking that's a whole nother invention that i don't even understand that is just a way to sell more junk that we don't really need to be doing and so i i'm not a big snacking person if you if you if you have to snack your last meal was broken right that's right and that's a big part of of the message and fast this way you've got to eat in such a way that you don't have cravings and then fasting becomes painless my kids have learned this you know my my daughter when she was 10. daddy we get to school and right away they start trying to make us have a snack don't the other kids have breakfast i'm not hungry until lunch and like she literally asked me that she was just really genuinely curious and it was so cute but it's also so sad because some of her friends their parents are vegan and doing their best their kids have a green apple for breakfast you know hungry green apples make you how could you ever focus on a green apple it's terrible it's terrible and so what i was saying was that when you when you look at our genetic adaptation it's to starvation so we have all these biological mechanisms that optimize our biology in the face of scarcity yeah and and we clean up house we clean garbage you were mentioning the sort of mitochondrial renewal you know there there's something people have heard about called autophagy which is where you eat your own tissues and cells and recycle them it's just like a recycling plant that gets rid of the garbage and the old stuff you also have mitophagy which is a way to recycle and renew mitochondria and it all happens with the fasting and and in fact there's a great book i'm sure you've heard of it that i read years ago called ending the first cause of death and it's all about it's all about this exactly and this whole idea that was i mean decades ago because sid baker was one of my functional medicine mentors probably the real grandfather of clinical functional medicine uh told me about it and i was like wow this is great it's a little book a little dense kind of geeky but it's just up your up your up your absolutely there dave and so the idea is that when you when you do that all these things happen you you increase your cognitive function because you want to be able to find the next meal so your mental alertness and acuity improves yes your metabolism increases the fat burning so you can burn off your fat stores you you lose belly fat you increase muscle mass you increase bone density you reduce inflammation you activate your antioxidant enzymes you increase stem cell production so you literally go into a full full-on rehab repair and remodel it's like it's like getting your old car taken to the body shop and cleaning out all the junk and putting in new parts essentially what happens when you do this kind of eating so i think for all of us it's worth thinking about how do we do this and that's why your book fast this way is such a great addition to this whole literature because it really guides people on how to do it i love the the subtitles fastest way burn fat heal inflammation and eat like the high performing human you were meant to be and i think i think all of us settle for being less than high performing humans we all settle for what i call flc syndrome that's when you feel like crap and we don't often know we feel like crap until we don't and that's why i encourage people to check this book out fastest way and do what dave's telling you because it works and unless you've tried it unless you've given your body the gift of this experience of learning how to modulate your food intake to change the timing the frequency the quality the kind of food you eat to try some of these hacks you're not going to really know what's available to you so like you know dorothy and her ruby red slippers she didn't know she could go home all the time with clicking her heels or you know if you've had an elephant standing on your foot your whole life and the elephant finally gets off you'll go oh my god that's what it feels like to not have an elephant on me but we just don't know how how we can actually feel so talk about the ways in which you've seen changes in yourself and others who follow this because it's it's so important for people to get it and and talk about uh once you do that the various kinds of ways that people are fasting and what you really recommend mark you've talked about the the genetics of aging i mentioned that 300 pounds i had arthritis when i was 14. i had all the diseases you expect when you're 70 when i was in my 20s so i did not get that great genetic start and if i can walk around at 48 with about 10.2 10.5 body fat the new york times says that i'm almost muscular and i don't over you're slacking you're you're slacking dave i'm i'm like seven percent i don't know what is going on with you i know like we're in a competition to get to 180 but like you know you got to work on that three percent there i'm i'm feeling i feel like a failure right now it's it's one of those things though where where that that idea of fasting as being as important as exercise may be more important than exercise although i think they're both important why is it that people are willing to spend an hour a day in a spin class which is probably creating over training anyway um but they're not willing to skip breakfast sometimes i think skipping breakfast is easier and it's okay to do both it's just from a return on investment thing that it's the most important thing that that i could think of even if you're not committed to changing your diet even if you're going to eat all the things that you and i know are not real food fasting can still help it's just a lot easier and it helps more if you eat the right way and one of the things that's really behind fasting mark is the idea that fasting is just going without and in the book i talk about okay let's think through what happens emotionally when you say you're going to go without something we have other kinds of fasting that you probably haven't thought of the keto diet is fasting from carbs the vegan diet is fasting from animals i don't know why you'd want to do that if you want to live healthy for a long time but maybe for a couple weeks to turn on that's another podcast exactly but and hey go peegan there you go the uh the the thing that's also happening you fast from substances that's called you know addiction or sobriety you know addiction treatment or sobriety and we have fasting from people it's called solitude and we have fasting from the the at the end of the book i actually tell people try fasting from hate right i asked about fasting from sex or at least porn for a brief period of time because your body feels like you're you're gonna die if you don't have sex freaking like you're not going to die if you don't have sex for a couple weeks you're not going to die if you don't have food for a month but you feel like you're going to die if you don't have food for a brief period we're talking about skipping breakfast but the body is like no so that's the thing how do you create a sense of safety when you're going without something that you think you need that you feel like you need but you know you don't need and just by doing that for brief periods of time it's just like lifting weights it's just like exercise but it's exercise for your emotional body it's exercise for your spiritual body it's exercise for your physical body including those subcellular things that you just talked about and when we change our mindset to fasting is just exercise we can do exercise right and you might feel like you're gonna die on the treadmill but you know you won't and you do it anyway every day so it we're just going to normalize fasting and also acknowledge mark there are a lot less painful than my workouts my trainer i was like no more reps please yeah he makes me do he makes me do push-ups with bands you know you put like a oh that's so cool i love bands like i'm like holy cow well i mean you are looking a little bit bigger in the shoulders there so all that tom brady stuff seems like it's working yes it is there was something else i know i'm not exactly answering questions but you mentioned tom brady the other part of his longevity he figured out like i did that night shades the lectin problem with nightshades for me but not for everyone for about a third of people man those things cause cravings like no one's business if you give me nightshades like potatoes or a bell plant bill plants bell peppers or eggplants man i want to eat sugar like no one's business right so you got to find the foods that don't trigger can you give up tomatoes i i just can't give up tomatoes yeah i'll still eat some fresh tomatoes i just take out the seeds and you peel them and this is it it was like tomato off the vine in the garden and a hot august summer day well you have a garden mask i live in an organic farm and that's something that that i also would encourage people to fast from junk food and industrial meat and things like that um now there's a fast i can get behind fast from industrial food i love that it's a real type of fast you say look i'm going to go without because there are people in fact a great many people listening right now they're going you mean i i can't have skittles i can't have reese's peanut butter cups i can't have cheetos or whatever thing is well you can have them i'm telling you that fast from them because your body feels like you're going to die if you don't have those and the side effect of a fast like that mark is as you all know it builds soil and we have pigs sheep turkeys chickens and a great number of vegetables growing on my organic farm i feed my local community and i'm building soil like no one's business we recovered a five-acre gravel pit using animal manure and turned it back into fertile soil and we're restoring the forests on a part of the property wow when you choose to do that kind of a fast you can still eat but you're giving back to the planet and the the work you've been doing lately on food policy and all that stuff that is also a part of the fasting world you are choosing to go without the things that make you weak even though there's a part of your body that wants you to eat those and you are becoming master of that part of your body and when you're master that part of the body the side effect is you're nicer to everyone around you because you're eating better food like everybody wins when you do this it's so important wait wait wait i don't want to just pass by that you just send something that's highly profound because in the middle of this incredibly divisive world i mean i was born 60 years ago and yeah they were democrats republicans and there were certainly divisions in society and there was segregationists and there was hate and but the level of divisiveness the level of reactivity the level of hatred i mean i post a picture of me with uh now president-elect biden talking about how we can start to build bridges and have conversations and we don't have to agree we can you know have deep conversations even if we don't have the same world view without hating each other and i mean and there was just the most incredible blowback that i just could not believe and all this projection of hatred on me and saying i was for vaccine mandates and mass i mean mass maintenance stuff i never even i was just talking about love and let's let's all be friends and let's let's disagree but let's disagree nicely let's not vilify and hate and i was like whoa and and what really is clear and david promoter's work and his son austin in their latest book brainwash really talked about this that our diet our modern industrial diet has literally hijacked our brain and activated the amygdala which is the fight-or-flight attack defend victim part of our brain and so we are operating in a highly activated way in which our frontal lobe becomes disconnected from our amygdala our frontal lobe is the adult in the room it's our executive functioning it's the one who doesn't do the stupid thing even though he thinks about doing it right well he said it's like dennis diminis and when i when i think about what i'm uh not doing what i'm gonna do i've already done it you know again i think yeah i think this is such an important thing you said that it changes the quality of our behavior our emotions our relationships our fear our anger our hostility these are things that are killing a society now and i i just it just breaks my heart me too i i interviewed dr vivek murthy former u.s surgeon general he wrote a book saying in his time as surgeon general the number one epidemic that he came across that was causing the most problem wasn't viral at all it was connectedness he said we have a profound state of loneliness and disconnection in people and that's what's making us sick and we have to fix it so then a week after he comes out on the podcast he gets named by biden to biden's to co-chair his coronavirus task force this is a guy who values connection and connectivity and will value those things so that our policies might say it's kind of important we don't turn on that epidemic when we're trying to turn off another one so but and okay that's and i said hey congratulations we got a guy who cares about what we care about on a panel man the amount of people saying exactly what you heard just projecting all this hate here's what's going on mark to take it back to fasting okay if you don't have a healthy metabolism your blood sugar can crash and if you do something like eat msg which as you well know as you've written about is hidden in so many foods under fake names and when you eat msg it causes hypoglycemia when your blood sugar gets really low your body says oh this is kind of an emergency i need some blood sugar good thing i have built-in systems to turn on blood sugar instantly it's called cortisol and adrenaline so your body says i'm crashing let me get you some stress hormones right here and then you get your energy back but it's fighting energy it's stress energy and then you see someone post about hey could we have more connection and empathy and kindness and they're like you're a bad man well there's a connection directly to food there really is yes it really is by fasting you train your body to do that and by fasting from crappy foods you actually have more control of who you are and you can show up as the person that you want to be instead of the person you are when you're hungry because i don't know about you but hypoglybicity is a very real word for me at least it used to be yeah that what is that icd-9 going to see 10 code 103 4.2 is that it it's a clear medical diagnosis hypoglycemia that's very funny now you you sort of we're sort of kind of skirting around the edges of this but but in your book you talk about how fasting can be a powerful entry point into honesty and in control of ourselves yeah what do you mean by that well there's two kinds of fast there's fasting for health and you can do this intermittent fast with the hacks you do during the week and there's another kind of fast which i call a spiritual fast and these tend to be for at least 24 hours a little bit longer where you actually sit with what's going on in in your feelings you journal so what i'm doing for people who order fast this way and send me the receipt at fastthisway.com i'm taking them through a two-week i'm calling it a fasting challenge but it's really a fasting course where as an author i feel like i haven't done my full job because i'm also a teacher i taught at the university of california for five years so i'm actually teaching people what's in the book for two weeks and we're gonna all together thousands of people at the same time practice intermittent fasting with the hacks without the hacks but for the last two days of this two week challenge we're going to do a spiritual fast i'm actually going to get you a fasting journal and you're going to be able to sit there and say all right i'm actually going to go for 24 36 even 48 hours without food but i'm going to do it mindfully i'm going to reduce distractions in my life and i'm going to be hungry and i'm going to say wow how many times am i actually thinking about food do i really want to snap at my kids or am i getting even more angry at the news that i shouldn't be watching during a spiritual fast anyway all of those things so we can gain awareness of ourselves and the cool thing is because you're fasting you have extra ketones present and you have more energy to think about it and this is why all the great spiritual traditions include fasting because that little boost to the neurons is a boost that you can use for self-awareness and that's why fasting is so powerful it puts you back in charge of you instead of letting these automated life systems like is that is that scary take my attention is that food take my attention is that a nice pair of legs take my attention right you're supposed to own all of that and you can own all of that and it doesn't have to be painful to get there and the reason most of us haven't taken on fasting and the reason it terrified me in fact i was offended when someone told me i should fast when i weighed 300 pounds because i'm like i would die it would be terrible all of that fear it's not real the fear is real but the reality is very different and the more we can help ourselves live in reality the more control we have of our energy that energy goes to the prefrontal cortex which allows us to catch those negative thoughts before they turn into negative behavior and the challenge in the book at the end is look just spend two hours fasting from hate maybe spend a whole day where you don't say one hateful thing you don't think one hateful thing and that is really challenging i took electrodes up to my head and spent time meditating a lot of time meditating to get to that point where i can do that and even then you'll see these things sneak in but just a regular short practice of that allows you to remember the kind of person that you're capable of being instead of the kind of person you are when you're constantly triggered by industrial foods by industrial news sources and basically by a world that really isn't set up to let you be who you're supposed to be it's true we live in a world that's constantly going after our amygdala yeah that's because the amygdala's easiest to trigger it makes you buy stuff and for those and for those of you who really think there's free will i encourage you to watch a documentary called the social dilemma and really pay attention to it because what's really happened is that we have been psychographically mapped in ways that algorithms target our innermost fears insecurities and weaknesses to drive our behavior in ways that are invisible to us that we think are free will but actually aren't and you know when you talk about fasting i just want to drop in for the last few minutes into the spiritual context of fasting because it always in the past was a spiritual practice it was a way to remove the distractions of the outside world to go inward to find peace stillness to become awake in different ways to things that really matter and you know this year has been rough i mean this year has been just so rough like i think all of us want to take either reset button hit reboot defrag you know and just do a do-over on 2020. i mean covid politics the economy social distancing i mean fire i mean you know just the the the heartbreak of of what's happening in the world right now is is real and it's tough and the divisiveness the conflict and i think you know it wears on all of us it wears under our nervous system and the fastest way is a beautiful doorway into using your biology to help unhook from some of that and you talk about a lot of practices not just dietary in the book and i really encourage people to get it fastest way burn fat heal inflammation eat like the high performing human you were meant to be i love it it's really good i think it's one of your best books yet dave thank you but but i i want to kind of drop in because i've been feeling this personally i've just been feeling like holy crap what a year i need a i need a break time out and so i i've decided uh which is really tough for me because i do you know like you i have five six companies i do so many different things have practice i gotta interrupt you for a second you're one of the most giving guys that i know like i know all the because we're friends i know all the stuff you do that you never talk about to give back and you you run 100 miles an hour helping people and you always have just to put that on the table thank you i appreciate that so i feel after 30 years that i'm giving myself permission to take the month of december off awesome and it's a little terrifying and it's going and as we're talking i realize it's going to be a month of fasting and and i've already committed to you know a really clean diet which i mostly do anyway to no coffee to sorry dave okay i thought we were friends it's fine to do that yeah no alcohol no email that's going to be the hardest one i think i'm highly addicted to the email no news i'll talk to people on video conferencing or phone i'm not doing zoom conferences i'm literally just going to drop into being instead of doing i'm going to be in nature i'm going to be in my body i'm going to be with friends in a socially appropriate way and distance way i'm going to do spiritual practices that help me fast from the things that are really disturbing my happiness and my ability to believe yeah yeah and i think i'm pretty good at managing it almost the time but i i'm like wait a minute you know i remember you know being 25 and being completely unencumbered from all of that you know there was none of that and when when i was 25 i remember my 20s traveling there was no cell phone there was no internet yeah you know you had postcards you had letters you could write right you wouldn't make a phone call because it was ten dollars a minute to talk to anybody in the states if i was in some other country you were just in the experience of life and and i just i'm craving that again and i think i wish we didn't even have to describe it as fasting because all of a sudden we we've been in this in this over consumptive world not just over consuming food but over consuming information and news and and in ways that aren't volitional like our news feed and our social media feed aren't really our will they're being fed to us by algorithms that are trying to manipulate us in real ways that are highly documented it's not just a conspiracy theory i mean just watch the social dilemma or watch the great hack and you'll see what i'm talking about and so you know as you're talking i'm really inspired um that you've written about this i'm really inspired that you're talking about these issues because so many of us need to reset and to reboot and to rewire ourselves and food i think is the easiest doorway to retrain your brain to retrain your biology to reawaken to the things that really matter in life and to the beauty and just to drop in uh and i think i think this is really a gift in a way in a weird way of this moment it's all causing us to reevaluate our lives and to see what matters what's important what do we care about and how do we how do we break this cycle and and re-human ourselves there's a word that most of us use on a daily basis and it's a word i've been fasting from for the past 15 years and the word is need when you need something it means if you don't get it you'll die but when you tell yourself i need to go to the store no you could have had the groceries delivered you could have fasted or you could have asked a friend but you didn't think of those things because you told your amygdala that you needed it and so many of us have gone from i need to check my email i need to do this i need to do blah blah i need to watch the news i need blah blah none of those needs are real and when you sometimes i really need to pee that's real i don't know that's a real need okay there you go i'll give you that um so there are some real needs but the vast majority of things are and i would even go so far say well mark we could get you a catheter you don't really need to be it's just the best path so let's let's just wet my pants so those are the the things that where fasting lets you address one of the things we really think we need and lets you go you know what i thought i needed that but it was a want and when we replace the word need with the word choose or the word want it is incredibly relaxing and it makes you feel safe and it's part of what you get when you just skip breakfast maybe eat dinner a little bit earlier and do some of these other practices you realize that you want a lot of things that you think you need and when you sort those out your anxiety levels go down anytime anxiety goes down kindness goes up it's beautiful yeah and i think this beautiful way to say it you know when when you refocus on the things that matter your kindness goes up and the toxicity of our own minds and our own bodies goes down in the world around us i mean i think it's in this world all we can do is is actually you know focus on ourselves and what we can do to to really live in integrity and i think the more we do that the better we can be agents of change in the world and it reminds me of a story of gandhi who once had a mother bring her child to see gandhi and the child just loved sugar and ate candy all the time and she said to gandhi would you please tell my son to stop eating so much candy it's not good for him and gandhi goes come back in a week the mother comes back in a week and and he says to little boy you know i think it's good that you probably stopped candy and she said to him why did you tell me to come back in a week why couldn't you have told me that last week he said well i was eating candy last week i had to stop eating candy you know what i think that's integrity right there it's it's just about integrity and i think if we can focus on our own integrity in our lives and come in alignment with who we are what we want to be how to be the high performing human that we were meant to be and i i think you mean high performing not just in you know life and as an athlete but spiritually emotionally physically mentally relationally as a human being in the community of life that's what that's exactly what i mean and there's actually a fourth f word that all life does after those first four words it's friend and even maslow's hierarchy of needs his final need that he didn't get to publish before he died i just did a podcast on this was for transcendence so when we get the baseline stuff out of the way what's left is we are meant we are wired we are built from the cells up to be kind to one another and if there's too much emphasis on those first three f words there's not enough room for kindness and that's what we're getting back to right now so your reset you're going to do is a perfect example of that kind of spiritual fast so fasting is just going without and it clearly food is a low-hanging fruit but you can go through the kinds of stuff that you think you need and when you do it for brief periods you might realize that your life changes in a massively massively beneficial way and the way the change manifests is in happiness but it also manifests in changing the world around you because when you're nice to people they get happier too and it has a very big amplified effect we only need a few people to really step up like that and then all the people around them are like wait what's going on here right i haven't seen someone be level in a while maybe i could be a little bit more like so this will spread and it has to spread because that's what humans are wired to do and if there's anything that you're a little anxious or stressed about giving up that's probably the thing you need to give up the most yeah that was why for me it was loneliness i'm like i'm gonna sit in a cave and feel lonely because i'm so stressed about you know what if i didn't realize that was pushing me the way it was and it's that realization of how much power these things have that we haven't thought about and like you said you're going to fast from social media you'll realize how much power it has that you didn't give it that it took so yeah i mean that that's not a huge one for me email like yeah i can give up alcohol caffeine sugar processed food i mean that's easy i can do yoga every day meditate no that's all easy for me giving up email that starts to make me really anxious and and i honestly dave i didn't really even think about it because i was planning my trip and my journey for the for this month of december and until we started talking i'm like what are those things that i'm really not willing to give up and i thought email i'm like no i'm going to announce it on my podcast that i'm giving up email for a month i'm going to email you and see if you answer you realize that right yeah it's i'm going to have an autoresponder talk to my assistant i'll be back in a month if you get anything important email me again in a month i promise you mark if it's really important you're going to get a text message or a phone call from your assistant that's how it works but it doesn't feel like it works that way this is going to be so good i'm so excited for you and i just uh you know dave you are you're one of the few people who's out there in this space who really is seeking the world for those things that will enhance the quality of our lives at all levels physically emotionally spiritually mentally and you really have no ego in the fight i i i think it's a really rare quality in people yeah and you've really done a lot of work to to overcome some of the sort of spiritual emotional challenges and you've been very successful and done in a way that's just with love and it's just it's just beautiful to see thanks mark you didn't know me when i was younger i was pretty much a journalist just being really good you were eating jerk inducing foods i also had managed because i was a computer hacker i had managed to pretty much erase my identity to just be like you you couldn't find anything about me online i was very happy to be anonymous and to be well known as not thought it's actually work for me like i'm not in this to get known i'm willing to be known because i think i can help there's no benefit to it it kind of sucks yeah well i thank you dave and i encourage everybody to learn about fasting this way from dave's book fastest way burn fat heal inflammation eat like the high performing human you were meant to be you can look look it up at fastthisway.com fastestway.com his website for the book it's just fabulous uh it will add a lot to your life uh in terms of the quality of your energy your mood your focus your well-being add years to your life and actually it just might make you happier and kinder which wouldn't be a for all bad thing for all of us including me so thank you dave for inspiring me to go even deeper on my fast and to rethink fasting to not mean taking away but actually adding you are most welcome mark you're an amazing human being and uh i'm so looking forward to meeting the mark that comes out after december i may never come out that sort of worries me i'm like okay i'm never coming back anyway uh great to have you on the podcast again dave if you all love this podcast please share with everybody on the universe because everybody needs to hear this podcast if you have fasted or tried it or have any experiences we'd love to hear from you leave a comment subscribe wherever you get your podcast and of course we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy you

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 68,228

Rating: 4.8880124 out of 5

Keywords: dave asprey, fasting, skipping breakfast, health hack, longevity, optimal health, intermittent fasting, mark hyman, nutrition, health podcast, the doctor's farmacy

Id: vTR3vPor_2U

Length: 63min 20sec (3800 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021