Use WATER FASTING To Heal Your Body & AGE IN REVERSE Today! | Alan Goldhamer & Lewis Howes

one of the biggest things that fasting does it's an efficient way of undoing the consequences of dietary excess so people spend a long time accumulating the consequence of dietary excess and they can very rapidly reverse many of those consequences i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness please welcome us you're one of the leading experts on water only fasting and i'm i'm i'm so fascinated by this subject because i've been doing intermittent fasting i've been doing um i've done up to three day no food fast before three and a half days i'm doing a lot of 24-hour fasting and it's been amazing to see the results i'm getting in just the last year testing some of these things so i'm curious what are the insane benefits of water only fasting because you've been doing this for 38 years with over 20 000 patients that have done water only fasting what are the main benefits well you know one of the first things that we look at is that there are certain conditions that are really common today so cardiovascular disease high blood pressure yes diabetes type 2 right autoimmune diseases where the immune system itself is attacking the body rheumatoid arthritis ulcerative colitis ankylosing spondylitis the psoriasis the accident these conditions where it's your own body that's kind of working against you and also certain types of cancer like lymphoma and these conditions that are so common now are really thought to be unmanageable because i mean if you go to a physician with high blood pressure they're going to give you a medication that might be a diuretic or a beta blocker or whatever a combination of medications and they're going to tell you right from the beginning if you do what i tell you you'll never get well really you'll be on these meds for the rest of your life absolutely they're tight you'll never get off these meds you'll be on drugs forever because they know that they're not actually dealing with the reasons that you've developed high blood pressure the root you're dealing with trying to manage the consequence of the root and so our approach is a little different because we're not interested in trying to come up with a pill potion or powder and tell you well that's it just take these drugs and suffer the concept eating the same way keep living the same lifestyle keep lacking sleep being stressed eat all the processed foods and you'll be on these drugs for the rest of you well live normally yeah right normal the way it is today right well two-thirds of people are now overweight or obese yeah so being overweight is normal if you want it doesn't mean it's healthy right you don't necessarily want to be normal if you want to be healthy because normal or average right now is in in trouble and it's in trouble because people are uh under the influence of the pleasure trap yeah there's this hidden force that's undermining people's health and happiness and they don't even realize it in many cases it delayed gratification is the key that is the way in my opinion not living in the instant pleasures of today but how can i uh you know distance myself from it as long as possible to be rewarded in other healthier happier ways the problem i think is though that you are biologically designed for short-term pleasure seeking self-indulgent behavior those hits those dopamine hits absolutely the body the brain rewards the body every time it engages in behavior that favors survival and reproduction and those primary dominant behaviors are feeding behavior and sexual behavior because it's food and sex that are necessary for the species to survive to get enough to eat to not get eaten live long enough to reproduce and that dopamine dopamine-driven short-term response worked great through most of human history but more recently it's become a bit of a trap and it's become a bit of a trap because we've changed our environment from an environment of scarcity where it was really hard to get enough to eat people struggles to abundance and now we live in an environment abundance and these highly processed foods are so appealing because they they play off those ancient mechanisms the salt the sugar the processed nature of it it's just delicious but it's not good for you well you have to override that biology if your goal is to survive long and well yeah not survive unwell which is what we've trained our society to do it's like how can we extend our life on machines that's not a weld of life but how can we be happy healthy fulfilled and then have a quick quicker death right it's like not suffer for as long as possible but live as long happy and healthy and then turn off the lights well we talked about having a good life good hopefully long life but also a good death the death where one night you go to sleep and you don't wake up rather than spending the last 9.6 years unable to talk or move live in some nursing home bed waiting for people to come and change your diaper because you've had a stroke or you've had other debilitating illnesses that prevent you from actually making the last decade or two perhaps the best most enriching time of your life rather than the worst dependent on others around you unable to really function properly and that's the price we pay for short-term pleasures seeking self-indulgent behavior that you know doesn't necessarily cause an immediate problem but definitely causes longer term problems so what are these crazy benefits of water only fasting then what are the main things you've seen people transform of these 20 000 plus cases well one of the biggest things that fasting does it's an efficient way of undoing the consequences of dietary excess so people spend a long time uh accumulating the consequence of dietary excess and they can very rapidly reverse many of those consequences such as what what are the main things you see so the conditions like of they're caused by dietary exercise so high blood pressure for example we did a study with 174 consecutive patients with high blood pressure and 174 people were able to lower their pressure enough to eliminate the need for medications and medications for blood pressure cause chronic cough fatigue impedance and premature death and yet they're routinely used because it's not recognized that blood pressure is a reversible and containable process really fasting is an effective and efficient way of reversing and normalizing blood pressure now the problem is you can't fast forever you have to feed so you also have to learn to eat a health promoting diet in order to sustain those results but in terms of eliminating the risk factors eliminating the need for medication normalizing blood pressure you can do that very predictably with medically supervised water only fasting what does it mean medically supervised when you're just drinking water i mean what do you need why do you need someone there to to watch you is it like testing with your blood sample is it just making sure you're not fatigued in starvation mode we recognize that fasting can be done safely and should be done safely every day by every patient for 12 to 16 hours depending on their goals if they're trying to lose weight or gain weight may depend on the duration but we recommend a period of 16 hours a day of fasting eight hours a day of feeding and by limiting the feeding window as uh people like walter longo and others has pointed out you may be able to induce some of the benefits that happen with long-term fasting cumulatively right and also prevent perhaps some of the overeating and other things that contribute to dietary excess so everybody can and should fast every day in fact everybody does fast every day you're sleeping you're not eating you break it with breakfast in the morning yeah you know it's an interesting process so we're talking about maybe extending that natural period daily so that you aren't necessarily eating three or four hours before you go to sleep may improve your sleep quality may improve digestion may improve your muscle to fat ratios over time and may induce changes that are beneficial the thing that we do in addition is we'll extend that period much longer the problem when you start talking about long-term fasting we're fasting people anywhere from two to forty days on water only is that first you need to make sure that the person is an appropriate candidate for that longer term intervention people that have certain pathology people on medications people who have risk factors may be better off with a different approach than long-term water only fasting so first thing is a history and an examination to make sure there isn't any primary issues with kidney or cardiac function or or medications that would contraindicate fasting what happens to the kidneys or the liver if you're water only fasting so the kidneys and liver are main detoxifying organs in the body and particularly the kidneys if kidney function isn't at least at some minimal level in our clinic we use creatinine levels of 2.0 as an arbitrary marker if kidney function isn't adequate then the rapid detoxification that occurs during fasting where the body mobilizes and eliminates both endogenous and exogenous toxins into the bloodstream and then are processed by the kidneys if the kidney's function is inadequate you could overload the kidney function and create problems there really and so it's very important that people have minimal levels of clearance and that's also the reason we make sure that people have adequate fluid intake and maintain electrolyte balance and hydration so we're monitoring people's electrolytes so to make sure that we don't get into problems with potassium or sodium other things which could become a problem especially in these longer fast when we're going two three four five weeks or longer wow what's the longest someone's been on a water fast with you well in our clinic we limit fasting generally to 40 days we've had a few patients we've had to go a little bit longer than that but there's uh evidence in the literature of patients fasting in medically controlled settings for as long as a year or more so not that we would recommend that is that just someone who's so obese that they're trying to you know get rid of all the complications and shed the weight and all those things there was a lot of work done in the 70s and 80s in treating supreme obesity with long-term fasting but even a thin male say a 70 kilogram male could probably fast somewhere around up to 70 days uh if they're resting uh during the process not that they should necessarily do it could survive but as far as nutrient reserves and adequacy the body is pretty amazing you know the main burner of glucose for humans is our brain is what just thinking or what like cognitive activities the brain we have this ridiculously large brain in humans two and a half times that say of a chimp it's huge and it's our main burner of glucose in fact if it wasn't for our ability to change our brain fuels from sugar to fat we we couldn't have survived as a species the way we have because if we had wandered away from the tropics after a week or so if spring came late yeah we would have died in fact we did yeah the humans that didn't have the ability to change brain from burning sugar to burning fat weren't able to survive we know that because today virtually every human being has this ability to change its brain fuel from sugar which is the normal fuel to burning ketones or beta hydroxybutyric acid in particular right and that would suggest a biological adaptation such an important adaptation that the species had to have it so today humans can wander away from the tropics spring can come late and we can survive despite our very large brain and it's huge burning of glucose because we have this ability to fast all we've done is taken this ancient biological process and applied it in a very unnatural situation and that is a situation of dietary excess no other animals maintain obesity i mean even whales who you think of as kind of fat or nine percent body fat okay really yeah they just hold it on the outside of their they're very they're lean mean machines like all animals do unless they get access to hyper processed foods like humans eat so if you feed human style hyper processed foods to animals they also get fat we add chemicals to our food specifically to induce dopamine stimulation in our brain those those chemicals are salt oil and sugar these are not foods they're food byproducts they're hyper concentrated food byproducts are essentially chemicals we're putting in the food stimulate more dopamine dopamine is the neurochemistry associated with pleasure the more dopamine the more pleasure the more we like the food that's what good tasting food means because it stimulates more dopamine production and the process the consequence of hyper-stimulating our brain with dopamine means we overeat and we become obese and that's why two-thirds of people are overweight is because they fooled their brain with chemicals they put in their feed it works in rats it works with in mice it works in humans put the chemicals in their feed they overeat they get fat then they develop obesity and metabolic syndrome and if you have metabolic syndrome you're more vulnerable to dying from heart disease cancer diabetes and even in viral infectious diseases like covet the higher your metabolic syndrome increases risk of dying from all these things all these downstream consequences what about what about olive oil or avocado oil i hear these good oils these fatty oils are supposed to help you in certain ways is that well you have to be careful when we define these quote good oils there are oils that are more harmful than say olive oil so an oil being less harmful doesn't necessarily mean it's good it's just less bad so oils are all highly processed fractionated foods with nine calories per gram and limited satiety feedback so if we're talking about trying to lose or maintain optimum weight oils would have a disadvantage compared to eating your fat from whole food so i would advocate if putting one avocado i'll eat avocado right now not necessarily process it down remove the fiber a lot of the good components and be left with the oil and the same thing's true with sugar you need carbohydrates as a primary fuel but you eat whole food whether it's fruits or vegetables or starches not necessarily the highly processed hyper processed by-products if your goal is to avoid overeating dietary excess obesity and the disease of dietary excess right what are the three main benefits that you see with pretty much everyone that goes through water only fasting three biggest things that you see whether it be seven or seventy days well you know they look younger is it the clearer skin is it they're burning fat is it that internally their cells are changing what's the three main benefits you see it's hard to different there's so many benefits it'd be hard to say which are the three down but i can talk about some of the benefits that we see certainly you see weight loss you can't help that the laws of physics and thermodynamics say if you don't eat you're going to lose weight we know that weight loss is about a pound a day now that pound of a day only average weight loss is a pound now some of that's water right some of it's protein some of its fiber some of its glycogen and some of its fat and of that fat some of its adipose tissue some of its visceral fat the visceral is what you want to burn right well visceral fat is the one that's most associated with pathology in fact probably shouldn't be very much visceral fat this will that's what happened when the body has no place else to put fuel and so you'll store some additional visceral fat and the higher the visceral fat generally the worse you off are simplistically speaking right and so we just did a study where we took a dexa scanner that has software that allows to do precise whole body composition so not just how much fat and protein there is but how much visceral fat there is internally and externally right exactly so the visceral fat typically you think about uh an apple or strung on the belly and around the organs that internal fat so a lot of visceral fat around the organs as well right that is not good for you yeah that's not thought to be very it's not i mean the belly fat that people see is not good obviously but the stuff that's surrounding all the organs is you don't want to have a lot of that fat right that's correct okay and so the question is what can you do to get rid of it and any type of dieting will cause various types of body changes but the approach that's shown the most effective at mobilizing visceral fat is actually fasting fasting is the mo the highest ratio of visceral fat adipose tissue mobilization for example typical patient in the study might lose 20 percent of their fat but would lose over 50 percent of their visceral fat during a couple weeks of fasting even though they only lose four percent of their lean tissue and what's even more exciting is we look at okay what happens during fasting let's say for example a person loses 10 pounds and we know some of that is water some of it's fiber glycogen some of it's adipose tissue some of this visceral fat then what happens after fasting so you lose 10 pounds you might regain 5 pounds you're going to grain about 2 pounds of glycogen because you have sugar stores in your muscles that will be depleted within a couple days of fasting you're going to rehydrate because there's a little physiological dehydration during fasting you're going to put fiber back into your gut because your gut's not going to have had a fiber being added to it you're going to pump up your muscle cells again because you will have depleted a little bit of glucose in order to maintain the glucose the core glucose that your brain needed and you're going to uh theoretically put back on fat but after fasting assuming a person adopts a whole plant food sos free diet what we found was weight comes off weight comes back on but the weight that comes back on is glycogen water fiber and protein not fat fat continues to drop i like yeah so we have we've been able to show and this study will be coming out later this year uh exactly what happens and then we followed people at six weeks brought them back in re-analyzed him and we're able to demonstrate that not only can people lose their fat and visceral fat but they can continue to lose their fat visceral fat even free living eating health protein so the scale will go up some but the fat will not go up that's correct so you gotta you gotta trick your mind and say well i'm not gaining all this weight like you're gaining the necessary weight that your body needs to be stronger so you can have an active lifestyle and all these things but not the fat back keep in mind it's not weight per se uh that's the threat it's excess fat so for example if you work out you might gain 10 or 20 pounds of lean tissue over time that's not necessarily compromising your health just because you quote gained weight now if you sit around in the couch and eat greasy fatty slimy dead decaying flesh and highly processed foods and put on a lot of fat particularly visceral fat gain that same 20 pounds that might be a problem right so we want to be careful not to be thinking just in terms of weight but in terms of body composition okay so the idea is to lower the fat not necessarily lower the muscle though for many people particularly as people age they go through sarcopenia they can lose muscle mass having more muscle mass is thought to be health promoting and protective to a certain extent yeah yeah how often do you do a water only fast and what's your range that you do everybody should do a water only fast every day from 12 to 16 hours 16 hours a day water now then we go into feeding okay eight hour window eight hour window of whole plant food so fruits vegetables grains of foods nuts seeds foods whole foods are you are you vegan i am i don't use animal foods uh in my diet i'm 62 i started on a whole plan for diet at 16. so i've had real opportunity to do it for a lot of years 16. yeah wow that's inspiring yeah well it was out of uh desperation really i wanted to beat my best friend doug lyle in basketball and i couldn't beat him when i practiced and i really worked out of bed i thought if i got you know if i really got healthy maybe i could get an edge and so i read a book it happened to be i heard shelton and he said that health was the result of healthful living it was about diet sleep exercise and then fasting could also be useful and i thought well i'll give that a try this was crazy 40 something years ago 46 years ago and of course it failed because it turned out he adopted the same type of time lifestyle he still just destroys me every time we play i'm hoping though that maybe he'll age out a little quicker once we get into our 80s maybe wow finally you guys are still friends oh yeah we still play yeah and he's yeah he's actually the psychologist at the trainer house amazing oh yeah no we we play yeah every day you know every week we're playing basketball you still can't beat them no okay one day one day one day sometimes it doesn't matter how healthy you are someone just might be a little taller stronger more skilled well i'll give you an example you know i thought you know he's quick he's a really good basketball player and i thought okay he's got some skills i don't have but you know free throws are just practice yeah so i got some coaching and i thought i'm just gonna and i'm shooting 500 free throws a day working hard and i and of course you know he's only playing once a while right and so one day i say hey doc let's uh do a free throw shooting contest okay okay you crush it 48 out of 50 right and i think i got him he it's 19 he misses one and it's 80 in a row oh my goodness which obviously means he's a choke because you know if you can hit 99 out of 100 why don't you just hit 100. that's crazy i know he's well he's a mutant 99 i don't even know anyone's ever done that yeah he's he's uh that's this is the person i've been trying to compete like a mutant i love it um well how so you're saying 16 hours a day everyone should do water on it now you're going to say something very controversial here what about those that love their coffee and water if i'm going to go a three-day water only fast can i add coffee black coffee bulletproof coffee can i can i do this or will it ruin the whole fast well it's not going to ruin the whole fast but here's the thing with caffeine which is a highly addictive nervous system stimulant is it you know it has a 17-hour half-life it affects sleep quality even the coffee and the caffeine that you're consuming early in the day can affect quality sleep it can be really caustic and irritating to the stomach not just the caffeine but the coffee itself so there's a lot of things to question about whether this is really a health promoting habit the other thing is a lot of people are using coffee for its caffeine because they're not getting enough sleep right so if you stop the caffeine you go through like any addict drug withdrawal okay and it can be quite severe but once you get free uh of that you may find that now you're able to get the quality and quantity of sleep you need so the need for using a highly addictive nervous system still maybe reducing weight so um now the fact is it is a plant-based product so there are still some redeeming properties and it's not completely devoid of any uh nutrition but i think that the negatives outweigh the positives from my viewpoint uh for using that type of product as a as a component and have people in your clinic said okay i'm gonna do seven days water but i'm gonna have coffee every day also and are they able to get similar results well we don't use any type of highly addictive drugs with patients when they're when they're fasting so we we have a controlled side okay we're using you know distilled water and control and that's it yeah that's just pure water distilled water seven days that's how we do no food some electrolytes in there or something or no actually electrolytes are recycled efficiently during fasting so we monitor electrolytes but we're not supplementing electrolytes so there's nothing added to the water there's nothing added to the water for five to forty days duration of the of the fast yes we've been able now people say well that is it safe is it safe well we've answered that question because we've done a study we've done an actual fasting safety study where we took all the subjects that went through the process for five years evaluated all of their uh symptoms and adverse events uh documented that and published that in a study that's available on our website and people can look at that and find and it turns out that yes in fact fasting when it's supervised in a controlled setting can be done safely and effectively uh even for periods up to 40 days wow so what's what's the the pattern you use on a monthly but you do 16 hour water only but then are you doing one day a month one day a week or 24 hours 16 hours every day yep and eight hours of feeding and then once a year we'll fast uh a week or two depending on you know really the individual and how they're doing what will you do a week a year if assuming at a week that there's no symptoms that show up from fasting then that's the end of it and i hate fasting you cannot play basketball you have to keep it so it's terrible so it's not something that we would want to wish on somebody uh excessively on the other hand it can be a very effective way of in both helping sick people recover but also i believe in helping healthy people stay that way really i think that the people that may get ultimately the most benefit from fasting are healthy people that use it preventatively that want to stay healthy the difference is that in a person that lives a healthy lifestyle fasting is much less entertaining it's a much less dynamic process people have don't have a lot of the symptoms that people that are sick getting well have because what i've heard you say before is that um you can't really work out while you're doing a water fast even if it's a 24 hour fast is it okay to move some or do you really need the benefits of rest while you're drinking water well we recommend that people limit their routine fasting to 16 hours because the problem is you get beyond 16 hours and you start depleting glycogen stores now you're going to force more gluconeogenesis so i think the goal is in non-supplemented fasting to fast within the bot those reserves maximize fat loss and rest recovery and minimize gluconeogenesis now some people do modified fasting where they can be more active because they're getting 600 calories or 700 calories and so they have a little bit more uh flexibility in terms of the amount of activity they might undergo that's not the approach that we're taking so in our clinic we're using these patients are average two to three weeks as much as 40 days and usually there's a reason they're either a healthy person trying to stay healthy but more likely they have high blood pressure they have diabetes they have autoimmune disease they have lymphoma they want to get well they're willing to do anything even eat well and exercise and go to bed on time right really radical because it's been years or decades of suffering probably or pain or some type of stress we get what i believe are highly motivated people and the best motivation in my experience is pain debility and fear of death that's it that's who's willing to do these you know they say it's really radical because radical does mean radicus or root or cause and we're actually trying to get to the reason why people are getting sick so we're not talking about the leading causes of death we're talking about the actual causes of death the reason people get the heart disease cancer the stroke not treating it after they've developed it thinking that somehow that's going to be the whole answer but actually trying to understand why is it this problem has risen and what can they do to undo the consequences of their dietary excess when you see people do a two to four week fast do you physically see transformation from eczema to no eczema or a minimal exam afterwards or autoimmune disease do you see it drastically changing is it small changes that it's gonna take multiple times over a year or years what do you typically see when you see something it varies you know from patient patient for example we recently published a paper in the british medical journal of a case of a young woman who came in with follicular lymphoma stage which is a type of lift cancer had large palpable tumors involving her upper and lower internally external well you could even feel them extremely large enough those are in the lymph glands so when they're very large you can feel them you can also see them on cat scan she had excisional biopsy it was well documented wow so we ended up fasting her for 21 days and by three weeks of fasting you couldn't feel the two now come on 10 days recovery back to uh her oncologist for ct scans make a long story short this woman was able to completely resolve her stage three follicular lymphoma at a year we had a whole body ct we were able to show that she's completely free of cancer we have a three-year follow-up and the case report and the fault were published in the british medical journal case reports you can you can go onto our website and take a look there it's exquisitely carefully detailed since then including at our clinic right now we have other patients with flickering foam including one gentleman right now is stage four flicker lymphoma who's had preliminarily good results he's on his second fast now we did a previous fast last year we've gotten significant improvement we're now doing another fast only this fast is going to be 40 days and we're hoping that we can get the same kind of clearing resolution and long-term stability once we've published enough case reports in in the form of a cohort we'll be able to then hopefully justify a clinical trial we believe we're going to do real well with this particular type of cancer because our clinical observation is that it consistently is responding now it may not be the same thing when you talk about a solid organ tumor a lung cancer different type of cancer may respond completely differently brain cancer things like that yeah especially brain cancer well brain masses are not um as responsive possibly because of the way the body mobilizes things in fasting and the blood brain barrier and some of the limitations to be able to get access to it so if you can't just say cancer is cancer it's not all the same and you can't say the same person with the same condition is going to respond the same and answer your question some people like her it's really dramatic we're one fast big change but i've also had people where it's the third fast before we see those big clinically significant and i also have people that do everything right and we're still suffering and not responding and we can't always predict who's going to respond who's not going to respond that's part of the research that we're doing is trying to figure out how do you predict who's going to respond the most how long are they going to need to fast when are they done fasting even non-invasive biological markers are not readily available because nobody up till now has been doing much research right with long-term water fasting how much does the belief in your mindset that this fast will heal or help prevent or help you know create more healing for me how much is the mindset the thought process on a daily basis that i'm healing myself this water is cleansing my body whatever the mind is telling versus i don't know if this is going to work and what am i doing this for how much do you believe the mind manipulates the healing process so i think that attitude is very important because it determines action but it's the action you take that determines the outcome so just having good thoughts i don't think is enough to get the job done but if having good thoughts and having a good attitude allows you to be motivated to do what it takes to get well it's critical we typically only work with people that have a good attitude because they wouldn't come to us otherwise we have highly motivated self-selected patients that are willing to do really radical things like eat well exercise sleep and and fast you know the fact is most people are think if they get in a plane in new york and they go all the way to california they will die from starvation over colorado they think those pretzels save their lives right they don't salt in those pretzels it's probably the so we know differently we know that uh the fact is the body is really good at adapting to uh the fasting state particularly appropriate people in a resting state and they can do it safely we've done it over 20 000 times in patients many of them are elderly and ill and yet of the 20 000 people that have walked in 20 000 people have walked out and you know we're really trying to maintain those safety records so of course we try really hard only to work with people that we expect to have an acceptable outcome so someone's not uh coming to your clinic and they want to try this on their own yes what would you say is a good window of time to try on your own at home without medical um you know safety i guess or or someone watching over you what is it is it 24 hours is it three days so i really believe that everybody should try to do this on their own for up to 16 hours every day but consistently do it day after day after day and i think that cumulatively you can safely and effectively get the accumulation from intermittent fasting without putting yourself in a situation where you have to go in have a medical evaluation get a doctor that will be able to establish baseline data and then monitor you through the process and i think what happens particularly for people that are on medications you can really muck yourself up for example let's say you're on steroid medications or you're on anticoagulant medications or you're on uh dysrhythmia medications even a 48 hour period of fasting can be a really complicating factor because you don't fast on medications you don't want to arbitrarily discontinue medications it really is unfortunately a process that's best done with the right people in the in in in so if you're on medicaid so you don't want to stop your medication to fast for two days right and you don't want to fast on medications for two years you want to keep taking medicine and not knowing because those medications that may be okay in a feeding state may be very much more of a problem right after you get into the fasting so our recommendation is fast every day for 16 hours eat clean in those eight hours and then if it's appropriate you know longer term fasting can be considered if people would like to know whether long-term fasting is useful there's a really simple thing that doesn't cost him anything then go on to our website complete registration forms and give me a call i'll talk to him it doesn't cost him anything and if they're where depending where they live we can send them to doctors that are trained in fast supervision near them they can help them go through the process safely and effectively and if they're not a good candidate we can let them know that maybe there's alternatives to water only fasting for those that are healthy not on medication you know younger just trying to optimize your life and test things what do you say 48 hours three days five days what's like okay you can be fine right for three days doing this so that would depend on whether they can rest during the process if they're going to be really active they really would be better off limiting their fasting to 16 hours and then go through feeding now what vulture longo and others do is they have recommendations of calorie limited yes modified fasting where they give people 750 calories for five days and that seems to be able to be done safely it doesn't require the same degree of modification of medications and other things so i would say look at walter longo's book and look at his approach to modified regime yeah i wouldn't recommend our more radical approach our approach is really better than for people that are when we're doing long-term fasting done in the controlled setting got it okay but if i wanted to try it on my own you think two days is fine well i think you should do that 16 hours every day i'm doing that already a whole plant food sos degree diet in the other eight hours and then at some point you should come in take a week off do a fast at true north and let's do a show from you fasting let's show them what they actually the experience in a hopefully healthy industry seven days whatever seems to be appropriate for you we have to figure it can't work out you that is the biggest challenge you'd have to limit yourself to stretching yoga mild activity during your fashion do you work still or you just like i'm just relaxing watching tv all day drinking water well actually we have a pretty active educational program we have people go through three classes a day really videos so it's like i'm in a dorm i'm in a hotel and i'm in a process so you have you have you have a private room but you we have it's like there's a community in the controlled setting you have to get you know what i call brainwashing what everybody else calls education and the idea is to really help fine-tune people's attitudes towards diet sleep exercise and the things that you need to keep doing after you leave so that you can sustain the long-term results and make us look good where is this based we're in santa rosa california it's about an hour north of san francisco okay so people come into this clinic and then they stay for a week to weeks anywhere from a week to some cases as long as a year and they're getting educated every day and you just say here's your food for the day like how many glasses do i get is there like a dessert water or something like we go through 40 at least 40 ounces of water a day 40 ounces of water what is that 40 ounces is about well it depends on the size of your glass tall glasses that's 12 so it's going to at least get four at least four of those enough enough so that you can maintain wait a minute so only four glasses of water minimum of four okay as much water as your thirst indicates really so the idea is we we don't want to make you a you're not a loaded the problem is with if you drink excessively you can flush your electrolytes so you know there is water intoxication that occurs if you just drink obsessively but so we want enough water to maintain normal specific gravity so we're monitoring your blood and your urine and make sure you're in target if you get a little dehydrated we might say well let's get an extra glass of water if you're drinking too much water where electrolytes get a little low we might say let's let's keep it you know keep from getting too carried away so what happens every day i'm getting tested with urine and blood sample or whatever so we our our doctors examine patients at least twice a day so we're taking vitals and evaluating how they're doing we're monitoring blood and urine and um stool also i guess there's no stool after it well you're not going to be passing stool once you stop eating two days ago yeah once you once you empty the bowels because you're not putting because when think about what is stool it's uh undigested fiber circle lineage and some stuff from the liver are mostly bacteria so there's going to be a massive change in bacteria during fasting in fact that's one of the big benefits of fasting is you know you have five pounds of bacteria in your gut right now five pounds of waste a trillion creatures now i'm talking about bacteria not just waste you have a trillion creatures eating drinking and defecating inside you right now they're pooing inside you and what they poo in you depends on what you're feeding is either healthy bacteria or well if you're feeding them a lot of animal products you're going to have much higher tma than people that eat a lot of plant-based trimethylamine well it becomes tmao which is trimethylamine oxidase which irritates animal lining of your vessels and maybe one of the reasons people get more colon cancer and heart disease when they're on high animal product diets then plant eaters that tend to have less if you feed your bacteria soluble fiber like sweet potatoes you're going to get you know vitamin k and fertilizer so right if you want more fertilizer and less toxic waste you want to minimize the highly processed foods and animal foods maximize the whole natural plant foods you get a different flora and that's thought to be protective of your immune system reduce your risk for colon cancer help you resist viral infections maintain better weight there's a lot of stuff that's just coming out now about the changes in the microbiome as a consequence of diet and also fasting we've actually done a study where we looked at stole samples before fasting early fasting and then after recovery looking at the changes in microbiome that occur in fasting so you know there's a lot of interest in what exactly this the body does not to only the thousand different strains of bacteria but what they're giving off right and so lots to learn a lot of the stuff that we're doing now really virgin data because not very many people have had a chance to look at people with long-term water fasting and what happens physiologically what's the minimum i could go to your facility there really is no minimum because some people will fast even just a few days that may be all that's necessary okay so you never know exactly what's ideal to you see how the person responds and some people really aren't good candidates for fasting so they might come to true north but they wouldn't be water fasting we might do a modified feeding regime or just healthy eating exercise appropriate supportive care we also have doctors of chiropractic osteopathy naturopathy acupuncture there's a lot of people have problems that aren't all nutrition-based yeah yeah sometimes they have more mechanical problems so we would approach it from a similar philosophy but not necessarily only fasting right i've heard from dr jason fung that he says fasting has been shown to i don't know if it's reverse or eliminate or really support type 2 diabetes is there a lot more research on this or is this accurate about what you've seen in your your studies yeah well we treat there's two types of diabetes they're the type 1 diabetics that don't make insulin is one type those people would not be good candidates for fasting because insulin is a part of the adaptive process of fasting so a type 1 diabetic or a type 1 and a half diabetic if they're not producing enough insulin can become ketoacidotic get into dehydration it can be really complicated they've got to eat mess so they have to maintain tighter insulin and glucose controls and sometimes would be inherent with water only fasting if they don't make insulin okay type 2 diabetics which is what most diabetics are make enough insulin in fact they make more insulin it's not working and what's the cause of type 2 diabetes insulin resistance and insulin resistance is caused by the diet that makes you fat it's not even just the fat obesity is associated with it but it's the diet that makes you fat that causes insulin resistance which is why our type 2 diabetics long before they've lost all their fat began normalizing their blood sugar levels they may still be overweight but their blood sugar levels come barreling down because they stop the diet that's making them fat in fact some of our patients just in preparing for fasting we have to be really careful with their medication regulation because they start normalizing even before we get started with the fasting just by making the dietary changes so and then once we start fasting blood sugar levels come down insulin levels are normalized after fasting assuming we adopt a whole plant food sos free diet get involved in free salt oil and sugar sos is the international symbol of danger and it stands for salt oil and sugar the chemicals added to food that make people fat sick and miserable it's salt oil and sugar additions to the food that is why people are being fooled fooling their satiety mechanisms getting in the pleasure trap and developing obesity and type 2 diabetes the also known as the sad diet the standard american diet right yeah so sad diet if we uh if we use fasting to normalize insulin function normalize blood sugar levels and then adopt a whole health promoting diet and exercise program we can sustain that and about 80 of our type 2 diabetics will achieve normal sugar levels without medications after a single fast some of those that have more resistance may need to do additional fasting or if you can't get them down to optimum weight within the context of initial fast you may take a little longer for those that are coming in with who are on medications what are the average would you say medications that people are taking who are taking medications and then within three to six months after fasting what is the average that they're taking afterwards so let's talk about high blood pressure first you know people may be on a sim simple diuretic like hydrochlorothiazide or they may be on as many as five medications some of our patients come in capped out on medications 220 over 120. wait wait some of the 20 medications two no five medications capped out with the systolic blood pressure is as much as 220 and diastolics as much as 120. so we see some very severe hypertensive patients but in the study we did of 174 patients 174 patients had pressure low enough to eliminate the need for all medication really the average effect of stage 3 hypertension so people who started 180 or higher on systolic blood pressure their average drop will be 60 points at 60 points plus the fact that they're often baselined on meds they're none of them are on medications if they fast by definition we've eliminated all medications because they're not and they don't need to go back on medications if they're willing to do the diet lifestyle and obviously if they go back to the salty fatty processed food they can eventually develop obesity and interesting so high blood pressure is 100 related to food essential hypertension is not 100 related to food but it's 100 manageable with diet and lifestyle you know you're stressed and overwhelmed exercise stress management also can be an important role for many people but most people believe that you can't reverse high blood pressure you just have to be on medication forever isn't that right people can't reverse hypertension unless they're willing to do diet sleep exercise and lifestyle models then you can reverse it yes you can reverse it in fact you can almost always reverse it we don't see people with essential hypertension that don't normalize their pressure if they're willing to do these types of interventions now if they don't come down usually it's because something's been missed and they actually have secondary hypertension there's nephroscopes there's some kind of other pathology and so we have to do more detailed imaging to find out what is it that was you know been overlooked i would say that at any one time we have an average of about 70 patients undergoing care at the center we have at least 20 hypertensive patients and it would in a any given year we might not have any of those typical patients and won't be able to lower their pressure uh enough to sustain it without medication so these this test you did of i think it said 170 374 patients they all had medication coming in is that right not all of them were medicated all of them were had sustained pressures of 140 or 90 or higher and all of the ones that were medicated were unmedicated by the time they stopped afterwards all of our patients stopped because they can't fast if we don't get them off the meds now sometimes we may have to feed them for a week to be able to wean their meds down because we don't like starting fasting if the person's at 2 20 we're not going to initially start we're going to feed them wean them wind them and then once we get below 160 we can start fasting and then how many weeks of water fasting is that typically until they're completely off the map so it ranges from five to 40 days but the typical hypertensive patient is going to fast somewhere between two and three weeks gotcha now during that time they're going to lose 25 pounds they're going to they're going to let it get younger they're going to feel better yeah you know have energy focus get better because otherwise you know they're going to get really mad at us because fasting is not a lot of fun you have to take time off work you have to rest although it's getting a little bit better you know one big thing that's happened recently is this idea that it's okay for people to you know like work from home because what's happened is a lot of times people could take a couple weeks off to come in and fast but they couldn't stay long enough to properly recover so we couldn't fast them because we need about half the length of fast recovery well now what happens they come in fast but while they're recovering they can work and work because we've got like a really robust wi-fi system that's great and they can work in fact i have one guy he only works fast he comes in once a year he fast he's a writer he writes better when he's fasting and the rest of you eat as much of anything because you're you can get in the zone so much better i i've seen you can stay longer because you're not thinking about i need to go eat i'm going to snack on something i'm you know tired now from eating my my digestive system is using all the energy the energy is focused on creation it can be it can be a lot of us are exhausted but yeah i think that you know uh recovery uh is much it is has been a lot easier now to get people to stay appropriately for recovery because they're not necessarily have to not go away working yeah and uh you know that's a lot of work while they're fasting there oh it depends on how long the fast and who they are some people are doing shorter fast they're going to be fine other people really are better off getting the rest they need because the more brain power you're using to mean burn of glucose you're burning more calories you don't want to burn more excess calories right because if you burn excess calories then you have to mobilize more protein through gluconeogenesis sustain the extra glucose needs so if you're water only fasting how many calories do you want to be burning a day what range is that well when you're water only fasting once you've adapted the fasting process there's around five or six hundred calories of kind of core glucose that's used by the muscles in the brain sugar that's being burned right 500 calories most of your brain activity is converting to burning ketones so most of your burns burning fat but there's still a little bit of glucose that's needed by the brain and for the muscles and so if you are too active and you make your muscles burn more fuel and the only way it can get extra glucose during fasting because your glycogen is already burned up is is breaking down protein and that's the process muscle kinetogenesis exactly you don't want to do that yeah you'd prefer to keep your protein because then you got to back up and if you rest when you fast you do you preserve protein you maximize fat conversion um and then when you recover you pump your muscle cells back up but you don't pump your fat cells back up because you're eating a whole plant food diet so if i want to do a you know a 36 hour fast where i have a dinner let's say on a sunday night and i go through tuesday morning and i just have water no coffee just water you would recommend not working out you'd recommend not working or doing very light relaxing stuff not heavy decision making and in creation mode fasting and resting is the key so always go together so resting looks like what is that on the couch watching some movies and just chilling reading a book or is reading a book too much activity for the brain what is that so an interesting sleeping all day yeah so certainly getting us getting caught up on your sleep deprivation particularly you know if you've been addicted to caffeine it's likely you have some sleep debt and so catching up on sleep may be a good thing um passive activities like we we do a lot of uh video education because we find when people are fasting particularly early phase fasting they may they may uh not want to be uh doing heavy concentration that comes with reading but absorb it a little bit better passively um a little bit of sun a little bit of gentle stretching a little bit of meditation hopefully pleasant company with other people that are not energy vampires so some good conversations are fine that's nice absolutely that's not draining on the bridge maybe you don't want to be spending all your time watching news about all the worst things that could happen in people's lives but you can watch a couple fun movies have some great conversation be in the sun stretch a little relax but anything beyond that you're saying could be detrimental to the process we actually have a roku channel truenorth health it's a free roku channel people we have a bunch of content on there that we keep adding and so people can go on to the roku channel and watch all of our content i like that um so if i was to do that you're saying anything with if i added physical activity if i trained and did a 24 to 36 hour class you know that wouldn't be what we recommend what we'd recommend first make sure that you're a good candidate right and if you're going to fast you'd rest if you're going to be working out then i would recommend perhaps you look at walter longo's right approach making diet exactly okay 700 500 calories you're going to move a little bit and that's going to burn some of that sugar or it's going to give you some more energy to burn i guess right that's not an area that we've researched so i really can't speak definitively i'd really defer to the guys that are advocating those fasting mimicking programs i know it's inconvenient it's not what people want to hear but there's almost nothing we tell people that they want to hear we tell them what they need to know to get and stay healthy so if you're going to do long-term fasting and you use our protocol you can do it safely and effectively you know it's interesting because i noticed that longo in his book tells people don't do long-term fasting because it can be dangerous but does make a caveat for people fasting at the truman health center because they knows the protocol following that's good that's great what are the the negative effects or potential negative effects of water only fasting well if it's done inappropriately one of the negative effects could be death so there's a process of uh fasting and then if you continue to fast beyond that process it's called starvation and then you die and so that's why we would never do that that would really be bad for our outcome data so we're always very careful to always stick to the fasting where people have labile reserves and don't fasten them so excessively that they become depleted electrolyte depletion uh could result in myocardial problems kidney problems there's a problem if you fast for a long period of time and then too rapidly re-feed a re-feeding syndrome that can occur that can also be you know very make you very sick or could kill you so you know when fasting is done according to these protocols it's safe and effective when it's done excessively like anything could be a very uh dangerous process and particularly for people that are not healthy that are on medications you know that could become you know a significant problem not just the fasting but the complication of manipulating their medications and so if i'm if i'm doing a 24 hour water only fast relaxing what's the feeding process look like after that it's probably okay after 24 hours to get back into normal foods but i'm assuming anything over two three five days there's a different feeding process right probably the most important part of fasting is careful refeeding that's why we do it in in patient setting for half the length of the fast so let's just take for example a 10 day water fast for every 10 days of fasting we would have one day of fresh juices so it might be uh carrots or apple juice watermelon celery the first day the first day first day they have 12 ounces every three or four hours through the first day just juices no fiber so we kind of reactivate the system and then there would be a day of raw fruit and vegetables so they do some fruit and salad materials again very low caloric density get a little bit of fiber introduced then we would introduce more concentrated foods perhaps like steamed vegetables but very softer yeah so yours broccoli and coffee and string beans and kale things like this are relatively easy and then assuming everything is going well we would introduce a day with maybe more starchy vegetables your hubbard squash are butternut kobooch etc in addition to some salad in addition to the other materials and then more complex carbohydrates or whatever is appropriate for that individual so it takes half the length of the fast through careful programmed refeeding when we do that we don't get refeeding syndrome we don't get all the things that people talk about with complication i'll give you another example that can happen people fast for a few days and then they go out and eat say soup in a restaurant that's all salty they can get post-fasting edema where their legs swell up it really freaks them out oh yeah the legs just swells up oh you can get like especially longer term fasting not so much a day yeah gotcha as they do longer turn fast because the body's flushed all this excess salt out of the system but then you'll get this big retention and the fluid will be retained to protect your body from the toxic effect of excess salt and you can get a lot especially in people that have congestive heart failure other types of limitations you can get a lot of really unfortunate secondary side effects we never see those happen using our protocol wow but we hear about that frequently as people are you know well-intentioned misguided things they read something on the internet and you know they're trying to do it and you know i saw there was this thing where you can do your own home appendectomy and and you know they'll talk you through it on it but and i imagine people could do it but they're going to get some bad effects i wouldn't recommend it i don't recommend people do long-term water-only fasting unless they really understand fasting and they've worked with their doctor to make sure they're a good candidate they're appropriately monitored they have some baseline data so they have a good outcome what we don't want is people messing up fasting because it makes fasting look bad and then people get terrified of it and they don't need to be terrified of it it just needs to be done properly so if someone does a seven day fast at your clinic then there's three and a half days of a feeding process strategically before they can get into more eating normally once they've got half the length of the fast refeed most people can then eat a whole plant food sos for their diet fine so fruits vegetables greens legumes nuts and seeds we still would encourage them not to overeat and all that but they wouldn't get the acute reaction to fasting now think about this if you do a 40-day fast okay it's a 20-day recovery man and if you take a 40-day fast and put them on greasy fatty slimy process stuff they're going to be really sick and a lot of people do end up with that try that extreme fasting and then inappropriate refreeze that's the most significant now people will only do that once if they never again no because they'll learn from the hard way so we don't want to do that what um this stuff is fascinating to me what all this uh talk about fasting has made me thirsty i know i got to drink some more water what else do we need to know about fasting at home in a safe way well i don't think that fasting 16 hours a day at home is really a problem for almost anybody i mean almost all patients can do that safely and consistently if they develop symptoms like orthostatic hypertension again they should check with their doctor and they'll if they're on medications we always recommend that they talk to the doctor because just getting healthy that will happen as you start limiting your feeding window may require your physician to reduce the intensity of your medication think about high blood pressure as soon as you get off the greasy fatty salty foods your blood pressure starts to drop if you're taking very powerful medications you can actually get orthostatic hypotension as a consequence of excess meds so what the problems here really aren't fasting and feeding they're as much as managing their medications that people are frequently on right so people that are not on any medications have a lot less problems and complications got it than those that are or have specific health issues and what's the longest you'd recommend someone at home going without being supervised if they're not going to be supervised we recommend 16 hours a day every day no that's it that's it no 24 no well then they should talk to the doc make sure they're a candidate for a longer fast then if they do that make sure they rest i'll give you an example we have some patients right now that can't get to true north health because they're in foreign countries so since the pandemic that they're not allowed to come in so we've been working with a lot of physicians in foreign countries helping people get through their fasting and the doctors will take the history do the exam provide the monitoring and we'll provide support to the doctor it's a service we provide happy to do it but you have to have a doctor willing to provide you you know core support which is you know examine you once a day and make sure that things are going the way they're supposed to go this is a serious thing you shouldn't mess with this you shouldn't try to experiment these things on your own if you go online and you can look at the complications from fasting it's never from people in controlled settings doing it properly it's usually people that they did a thing and and a lot of times it'll work out well so they'll tell others about it but then they they run into a complication it's like anything though you've got to use a little bit of common sense for sure and uh so there are people that have done longer fast they're very successful it's worked out well for them and that's great but you know i see the other side where you know the the complications and so i tend to be a little bit maybe paranoid about your complexity but you know what's the longest fast you've put someone on um longest fast at the true north health center is 44 days but we don't recommend fasting over 40 days there's been a few exceptions where we've really had no choice we needed to complete the process the patient was in right and so we ended up going a little bit longer but we don't recommend it now the guy that i trained with uh alec burton used to fast people as long as 100 days okay but he stopped that now when i trained with him this was uh 40 years ago and these are people that were 100 pounds obese or well no yeah they would have been you know usually 50 60 pounds overweight or more just to have the reserves to go through that i asked him why when i got there he had stopped doing fasting over 40 days and he said oh because of the sleep deprivation i said oh do they have trouble sleeping after 40 days he goes not them me oh wow because he would worry too much about it because what happens is if you keep the fastener for 40 days we don't see that many complications but as you start getting into the 50 60 days a lot of electrolyte balance issues has to be a lot more carefully monitored and so he would he would just have anxiety over everyday stress he just stopped it yeah and so at some point his career he this is because he knew he could go that long without the problems and so there you go and that sounds really long but for these people that we're used to doing even longer fasting processes you know it doesn't seem quite so radical so 40 days is the extreme for us an average fast is two to three weeks in that range and what um so the people that come in with medications how many usually do they have again when they come in little range some people have one or two medications some people have you know a dozen medications or more and then afterwards they're completely off their medications the only exceptions are we will continue to fast some patients on true hormone replacement therapy like thyroid replacement therapy it's sometimes what we'll do is we may have to reduce their dosing but we wouldn't necessarily discontinue somebody that's appropriately on replacement therapy but we would never fast patients for example on steroid medications or uh rhythmic anti-rhythmic medication any coagulant medications the the the even meds you might people might use normally acetaminophen or ibuprofen things that they might be able to take in a feeding state and a fasting state could be very serious in terms of kidney response so drugs can be potentiated medications doesn't go with fasting rest goes with fasting have you ever been on medication i've been really fortunate to be able to avoid the use of medications because remember i got started when i was 16 years old so i've never had a cup of coffee or an alcoholic drink or had take uh medications the exception would be i had uh some dental work done and they use no right so i have had that but i've been very fortunate to avoid uh medications and the drugs the dietary drugs that are commonly used and you don't miss what you don't know right so it's actually you know a little bit easier making good decisions when you don't know what you're giving up so to speak i grew up in a religion where we were taught not to take medication and so it's i've never really used medication maybe i've had an ibuprofen everyone i mean in football maybe i use the ibuprofen every now and then um but luckily i've never really had that i've never been drunk never been high and i feel i feel grateful that i've never really had to take medication and i'm i'm sure i would if i needed to for some reason sure but it's well there are times when drugs and surgery can make the difference between life and of course and that's why mostly they're not used for urgent situations they're used to placate the symptoms of things rather than deal with the reason why those symptoms arise and why do people not just say let me try a different way and let me heal my body first before taking medication why do so many people just go right to medication than changing diet lifestyle sleep we wrote a book about that it's called the pleasure trap exactly and medicine is essentially one version of the pleasure trap because what it does is it's instead of actually doing the hard work to get rid of the cause of the problem you can just make magically the consequences of that problem go away and so that's an example of the pleasure trap it's the same thing why don't people eat a health promoting diet because it's so much easier to drive in and get 2 000 calories of grease and slime without even having to get out of the car you can't even walk all the way to the counter at the fast food because it would be too much effort so they put the drive in and the sales go up 40 i mean you know we are energy conserving pleasure seeking um machines and so we do everything we can to get the most pleasure the least pain with the least effort we talk about the motivational triad in the pleasure trap book motivational triad yeah pleasure seeking pain avoidance and energy conservation and so that's why dietary factors play in they give us the most pleasure for the least effort and you know as simply as quickly as possible because we don't want to put out extra energy and particularly if you're sleep-deprived because you're drinking all that coffee and not getting the quality of food that you need absolutely and you're never eating the right foods you always feel hungry right not only that but the when you eat those refined carbohydrates your blood sugar levels go up so your insulin goes up then your blood sugar goes down now you got plenty of calories on board but your brain thinks you're starving and your brain insane give me more give me more exactly and don't you know waste their time with some of that stuff let's get some something that'll give us the jolt again and it's up and down and up and down all day long the caffeine the refined carbohydrates the sleep deprivation look around you it's what you see and then the long-term consequences is dietary excess metabolic syndrome and then people are dying from heart disease cancer or covet so you never you never drink coffee or caffeine not so far really no teas no caffeinated teas not well i shouldn't say who knows maybe you can't see green tea i don't drink any caffeine i don't use any kind of teas i've had herbal teas though right so peppermint not caffeinated the basic rule on teas is if you can eat the plant you can drink the tea so if it's blueberry leaf or peppermint we don't think we're drinking tea if you're talking about something with caffeine then i wouldn't be using that how has living a cat because up until a few years ago i didn't drink caffeine well i take it back i drank soda growing up but then i cut it out of my diet did you eat chocolate yeah i got you so wow i guess i'm like yeah i guess i'm a caffeine but i wasn't drinking coffee and i wasn't drinking teas and i wasn't drinking soda for a long period of time and it wasn't until a few years ago i started drinking bulletproof coffee um it's more for like the taste i kind of just like it but that's the people about alcohol i don't drink alcohol but yeah i hear you i get the point i just like the wine once a night and i have always felt like i've had so much energy even now when i drink coffee i kind of trick my mind i don't feel like i need it to get energy i kind of just say okay i just like the taste and i can go without it and feel fine and i've always felt like i just have energy you know without the coffee or the caffeine maybe i'm getting the caffeine from the chocolate i don't know but what is a life without caffeine done for you well i don't think that you have to have caffeine in order to have high levels of energy it's just a stimulant anytime there's a stimulation there's compensatory depression you're able to get away with it because you don't drink apparently that much and you're healthy and healthy people naturally have high levels of energy right just because you have a lot more energy than other people doesn't mean that you have more energy they just have less maybe you're just the baseline and that's what normal looks like so when you have coffee what do you say with every spike there's a decline what did you say anytime you either some stimulation of the body somewhere down the road there has to be some compensatory depression the bodies always kind of end up balancing itself out really so if you stimulate there will be some compensate compensation later on and what happens when you just take more caffeine and you keep puffing until eventually the system breaks down really right do you feel like you always have high energy um no i at the end of the day i go to sleep and then you wake up and you feel energetic again that's what sleep does and if you don't get enough sleep you don't quite recover and if you don't quite recover day after day eventually you develop fatigue that's what fatigue is is that not getting the quality or quantity of sleep you need you know if you take a healthy person they've done studies with medical students where they put them in a sleep lab and they simulate them just a little bit just a little bit of stimulation not enough to wake them up but to keep them out of non-rem deep sleep within two or three days they've got fibromyalgia symptoms oh my god just the disruption of that normal not getting that non-rem deep sleep caffeine disrupts the quality of sleep so yeah you can keep taking more and more caffeine but eventually that process catches up with you so is the caffeine essentially harmful at any time throughout the day or is it better before a certain time if you're going to drink coffee or tea well it's less bad earlier in the day because the 17-hour half-life has less of an impact 17 hours later than it would oh it's 17 hours at half-life so it's still having an effect the point i'm making even if you drink coffee in the morning it's still affecting you at night really it's just not as much as it would be if you drank it right before you went to sleep and then you know then they tried to grow a cappuccino right right before bed is maybe not the very best idea okay but you know to ask anybody with gastric ulcer disease how do they feel drinking coffee well it irritates the heck out of this okay there's there's two thousand chemicals in coffee it's not just caffeine two thousand so we wanna we like the way it makes it feel it stimulates dopamine we're gonna convince ourselves it's a good thing but you know it's not it's not i don't think so no what are the after someone comes off the fast what are the five foods you would recommend they never eat again well number one on my list would be dairy products i think of all the animal products dairy products uh particularly cheese probably number one is cheese it's like coagulated cow pus you know they allow 750 000 plus cells per cc might as well find a festering wound stick a straw in it and suck oh man it's also full of salt because if you take the salt out of cheese that's why i taste so good though without the salt you wouldn't think so so so now you've got the benefit of an animal food which is biological concentration of all the toxins they give the cows hormones in order to make them make more milk make more productive which passes on isn't it interesting you have little girls now that are menstruating at nine and ten years old as they reach sexual maturity much earlier the same hormones that make the cows uh make more milk also affect humans and particularly you see it well i'm like a foot taller than everyone in my family but i used to only drink milk all day long milk no protein milk milk protein is also highly energetic when it comes to type 1 diabetes in children it's known that in genetically vulnerable kids exposure those proteins can stimulate the immune system to attack the islets of langerhan and the pancreas and may be part of the mechanism in in juvenile onset diabetes we know that people that have eczema psoriasis and autoimmune diseases find that those proteins can aggravate their condition we know that um cheese when you think about talk about saturated fat calories and salt all in one you know package may not be the ideal this is the worst food you're saying i wrote an article that says the title of its nobody needs milk and you can find that on our website it has about six and a half million downloads so i don't know anybody getting any funding from them nobody has right nobody needs no body needs i would argue milk's probably number one as far as the foods that cause the most problem and what you see the biggest change is the quickest just by stopping them animal foods in general have biological concentration issues where animals accumulate materials day after day after week after month so that when you eat it you get its entire lifetime accumulation of maturities if you look at just toxins the pcb docks and pesticides heavy metals etc if you look at a calorie of animal food compared to a calorie of plant foods you could have two to a thousand times the concentration in animal foods compared to plant foods just because of biological concentration right so animal foods in general dairy products in particular then i think number three on my illustrator cheese then milk is that what you're saying or is it cheese and milk in one or is it just dairy is number one is it worth to drown or burn to death which we so yeah i would say cheese just because it's hyper concentrated too it's a high process is milk any of these milk products okay dairy products and then three was animal products in general so meat fish fowl eggs all of it really well any animal food has biological concentration as a concern so we're advocating a whole plant food diet so fruits and vegetables grains legumes nuts and seeds okay um i would argue that next would be refined carbohydrates so your sugars your concentrated sweeteners refined flour products because these are so helpful at getting people fat and helping them develop the disease of dietary excess um can i refine carbs uh then it would be oil including olive oil really yeah all fractionated highly processed fats in the form of water i hear the cases of olive oil are helping with like longevity and all these other things well if what the what you're seeing is some people arguing that oil if it displaces something even more toxic maybe higher up in our list maybe less detrimental i don't think that makes it healthy in my opinion got it and then the last thing would be all oils all oils not all fats of course you're getting fat from whole foods so you're eating your nuts your seeds your avocado your whole foods which contain all the essential fats you need got it but not the but not the fractionated byproducts of whole foods coconut oils olive oils avocado avocado oils all those you think people should eliminate absolutely and then we also get rid of the added salt now sodium is an essential nutrient without which you would die but you get all of the salt you need from your whole plant food diet one of the saltiest well some foods are very rich in salts like your your swiss chard and your tomatoes and your you know that have naturally have a lot of salt but the fact is all vegetables and fruit have some level of sodium and the amount of sodium you need is actually somewhat less than what people are eating on average we get too much salt which contributes to high blood pressure it contributes to edema and think about this salt acid actually has a preservative effect on bacteria this is why you salt meat to try to keep the bacteria down when you eat a very high salt diet it can also potentially affect the microbiome that lives in your gut as well so people on high salt diets may have different microbiome than people that eat a lower sodium intake in the diet now this is where we get some of the most uh aggressive criticism particularly from um modern advocates on a lot of the podcasts they they understand okay oil maybe there's a problem with too much oil okay sugar pretty much as a consensus now sugar may not be good but salt oh no we can't say it because they like their salt it's pink it's it's it's blessed by the guru it's special salted they say well isn't the special salt better than the other salt well sure because it's contaminated with other minerals so it's not as much sodium per volume it's like saying isn't honey better than sugar honey is twice as sweet per unit of as sugar so you use half as much of it so it's therefore half as bad right right okay um basically here's here's how you can do it here's here's a simple tool if you want to look at something and think should i eat it or should i not eat it is it good for me not have a simple way you just get really quiet and go inside yourself close your eyes and think do i really really really really want whatever it is and if the answer is truly yes you know you can't have it you've got nothing because you really really really want it because it's activating the pleasure train it's stimulating it doesn't mean you don't like your food desire everything nobody wakes up and says i think i'll have a carrot what we're out of carrots call up the grocer i don't care wake him up i can't wait till morning okay we're like i'm craving the pizza i'm cutting the ice cream i'm craving the cheese the milkshake whatever it is doesn't mean you don't like eating believe me people that eat a whole plant food diet they like to eat they look forward to eating they enjoy their food it's just like if you're used to very loud rock and roll and you go and start maybe listening to classical moments it doesn't mean you can't enjoy your music anymore but you're just not going to lose your hearing participating in it okay so but there is an adjustment you know and there's an adjustment to that which is why i like fasting because after fasting good foods taste good they taste good people that think it's tasteless disgusting squill they couldn't choke down the disgusting now they eat it's like oh this tastes pretty good yeah it does because the palate changes we actually did a study we actually did a taste adaptation study it's actually going to be coming out this year it we were able to detect minimum threshold to have salt and sugar and show changes after fasting and also a change in the hedonic likiness of salty sugary and salty fatty foods the palette actually changes in people after fasting to where the stuff they used to think they really like maybe now it doesn't have so much appeal and the foods that maybe they weren't that interested in now have a stronger pill because there's actually a change in the palette crazy and what about the five best foods if you could only eat five foods for the rest of your life to live an optimal healthy you know give your body what it needs feel good at the same time in a positive way what would be those five foods well i would say that on the fruit side i particularly like watermelon one of the reason is it tends to be picked ripe so it tends to be well tolerated by people it's a high mineral content fruit it we use it a lot to terminate fasting um it's very rarely is are people allergenically uh inclined towards watermelon that's readily available almost all year long so i'd say watermelon and then berries so any of the berries but particularly blueberries and raspberries and blackberries very nutritious they have a little bit lower glycemic index than maybe some of the other hybridized high sugar fruits that we commonly eat on the on the vegetable side there are some vegetables that are super nutritious like broccoli uh like kale and chard you know your greens the whole class of steamed greens high uh you know two cups of steamed broccoli has as much calcium as a cup of milk [Music] sodium to eat it tastes better with the salt well of course it tastes better because tasting better means more dopamine is produced so you eat you salt it up and your brain goes oh yeah that's good and then you're gonna exactly you're over your knee so then i would say uh let's pick some starchy vegetables like a kombucha squash is certainly one of my favorites or hubbard or butternut some of the squashes again these are low caloric density uh but easily processed readily available organic all year round uh very affordable and can be tolerated by most people even people that maybe can't take grains or beans or other they might be sensitive lectins or they have problems almost everybody can handle starch think about what you can feed infants most of them can tolerate these fruits or melons they can feed avocado as a rich fat rich food might be on that list again you can overdo anything but um you know and then maybe something like walnuts flax seeds that are really high omega-3 fatty acid foods and i think out of that diet uh you could uh get all of the calories vitamins protein nutrients you need except b12 you'd still need to supplement b12 because b12 is only found from bacteria so if you're eating animal foods of course you're getting lots of bacterial contamination lots of feces mixed in there and you're going to need 12 in there but yeah but if you're eating plant-based foods and you're washing and peeling because you don't want worms and parasites you can eventually deplete b12 storms it might take you years but eventually you can so we recommend that vegans supplement a thousand micrograms of ethical balance a day so a small amount of b12 supplement that's the only supplement that we recommend routinely using the other one that commonly comes up if people don't get outside and they're not getting their exercise is vitamin d sometimes d can be an issue best way to get it is the sun but if you can't get out in the sun enough or you live really far north or whatnot then that may be another one supplementation may be necessary wow what about protein powder i don't recommend hyper processed food of any kind including protein powders you know getting enough protein is not the problem it's getting too much protein that causes the kidney disease and the heart disease so especially too much animal protein so even for vegans that are not eating animal products we still want to respect these very concentrated protein foods in the sense that you do need protein essential nutrients 60 70 grams a day depending on your caloric intake and if you ate nothing but brown rice and broccoli you get the quantity and quality of protein you eat if you got your calories sufficiently provided by your brown rice and your broccoli you get about 80 grams of calories of protein on on 2 000 calories of brown rice and broccoli so i don't think we have to worry about getting too much the question is always avoiding excess protein intake now people say but if i increase my animal food intake won't i gain muscle faster and the answer is yes you probably will one higher caloric load because the fat two more anabolic steroids because of the animal protein that you're eating and it's carrying across uh and so just because you get bigger faster doesn't necessarily mean you're getting healthier so i think you can get where you need to go athletically without necessarily having to use animal foods i i know some people that have been on animal only like meat only diets because they've said that there have been many complications from fruits and and vegetables and they are very sick on more of a plant-based diet i don't know if this is extreme cases of individuals or what that is have you seen this where people are only functioning on meat-based diets only and not vegetables and fruits people that have had problems eating anything because they're just their microbiome is so screwed up that the only thing that they seem to not get distressed is animal food but eating an animal food only diet is not in my opinion a long-term sustainable health-promoting approach so it might be for a period of time for a short period of time people can do just about anything they can go on a standard american diet for sometimes years before it kills them right okay so you know if people can eat that right you know you can live 70 80 years on that so but what i find uh is more common is that you have to correct the microbial imbalance fasting so we'll do fasting and then we'll follow it with a rotational whole plant food diet we may not be able to use grains and beans and some of the more highly processed foods but we can usually find foods that people can digest that they can get recover their health on i've never since we don't use animal foods at all at true with health and we've managed to treat tens of thousands of patients i guess it would be pretty rare or maybe those people wouldn't come to us but you know that's not been a problem that we've run into interesting how much waste impoundage is inside the body like of just food waste well think about this time if you take the body and you divide it into two stacks human cells and non-human cells okay protozoa bacteria there's actually more non-human cells right than human cells yeah so your relationship helium cells all those related components is really important right and your diet largely determines how they function and what that balance is but how much i guess how much so i guess it would depend on who who you're talking about uh but if you if you think about uh the typical transit time and what total food is there can be several pounds of material that accumulate that are passing through the body but most of the materials that i'm concerned about is inside the cells and that is what otherwise into the blood is processed by the kidneys and is eliminated in the urine and that's why it's necessary to maintain adequate hydration and fasting so you have a solute which is also why dry fasting could potentially be much more dangerous what is dry fat dry fasting is where you fast but no water no water no food no wonder some people advocate in fact one of the general used to advocate that passed away from it recently but anyway so peop they'll go up to a week or more and the thing is it can be fatal because you can shut the kidneys down and get dehydrated we don't advocate dry fasting we believe it's important that there be a solute available in the form of water so that there's something for the body to put the material in that it's trying to get rid of in a pathway for it to eliminate yeah so dry fasting is now is advocated online if you look online and people are utilizing it but as i said some people have suffered the consequences already from following that man and when you start a water fast how long does it take until you stop going to the bathroom number two what would depend on what you've eaten before the fast your autonomic nervous system that controls your movements but most people actually have bowel movements usually after you stop eating usually once once those initial bowel activity after 48 72 hours stops you may not see something maybe till day 20 if enough material can accumulate you might have another little movement and then bowel movements start again after a few days once you get functioning so there can be bowel activity even deep into a fast depending on what's being slushed because the toxins are finally coming out huh yeah there's there's all kinds of materials that take various times to pass but if you have people that eat well before the fast and have a bowel movement before fasting often there won't be bowel activity until recovery time and what about your thoughts on um now that i'm thinking about this what is it called where it's uh the water you shoot the water up the enema yes yeah the water animal that's it turning yourself into a ball laundry now what is that what are the positives and negatives of that before fast to kind of like get the stuff out yeah the positives are that if you have some elect collected material and you flush those out they don't turn into a brick over the time that they might be sitting around there in fasting the the way to solve that though is just eat properly before the fast which is what we do and then when you the residual material would just be some vegetable celluloses and you're not going to have you know big chunks of dead became flesh turning into bricks got it and so the the the disadvantage of doing too much with enemas is that you can debilitate the colon and then the bowels become sluggish because you're over stimulating the autonomic nervous system so we don't advocate routine use of of that therapy although you know there are circumstances where post-fast and clonic might be necessary because you have somebody that has neurological problems with their colon or whatever got it mostly the idea of flushing yourself out is a misnomer because the toxins aren't in your stool toxins are in your blood and they show up in your urine the stool there's a tunnel that goes from your mouth down to the throat and there's a hole at the end called the anus so digestion is shoving stuff in one hole and then pushing it out the other right it's not unless it gets absorbed into the body through the intestinal mucosa that gets in the body you swallow something it's not in your body it's in a tunnel going through your body but these things that are coming out if it absorbs into the cells it has to be very small to get through the intestinal mucosa unless you have gut leakage which comes from free radicals which comes from eating oils or cheese or smoking or drinking alcohol comes from that that's what causes the inflammation that causes the leakage or the whitening of those cells that allows proteins to be absorbed that the immune system reacts to and then your immune system reacts to your own cells so if you don't have the free radicals the smoking the drinking the cheese the oil you tend not to get gut leakage wow and so a person like yourself that maybe doesn't drink and smoke doesn't have much gut leakage may eat the thing and not notice much of a problem give that to a person with a permeable membrane oh my gosh a single meal is enough to flare up their autoimmune condition wow this is fascinating stuff what is the the science that you've seen over the last 38 years what's the newer science you've seen in research that really excites you of what's possible with fasting moving forward well in the past the research was really more anecdotal it was clinical research where patients with sicknesses got well right and we saw that and it was exciting but we couldn't explain why they got well but now particularly people like t colin campbell from cornell university author of whole and the china study have done some massive epidemiological studying showing general dietary trends he has a new book that's out the future of nutrition which is really a brilliant book and dr campbell's really one of my heroes because he's really swam against the tide so to speak and then most recently walter longo from usc he's a really brilliant scientist who's done a great job in supporting particularly intermittent fasting and doing research looking both at animal and human studies kind of what's going on in the body and what's changing in the body and so that research has been really exciting and i've talked to dr longo and we're hoping to do some collaborative studies comparing the intermittent and the long-term fasting and he's just been a wonderful guy and he has colleagues like matson and others that have done just fabulous research we did a project with luigi fontana from washington university and that hasn't been published yet but we've been looking at gut microbiome changes in work that we did with him and are the director of research at the true earth health center is tasha myers who's originally from columbia university doing kind of basic science research he really got excited about human subjects research and she's come in and brought in other researchers that we have at true north and so we're really excited about the stuff that we we've done that we're doing we've got a couple papers in the pipeline right now we're doing a uh next year we'll be doing a phase three clinical trial with one of our colleagues at the mayo clinic looking at uh not just the treatment of high blood pressure but long-term follow-up in the biomarkers that change and so this study we're just completing it was the first one we've had formalized follow-up data okay showing that people can not only get well in a contained setting but you can get them free living and they can sustain those results and continue to make progress it's exciting because we were criticized early on they said well it won't work and they say well it works but it'll only work as long as you have them in a controlled setting and now they're going to have to explain how is that these people can be free five ten years later yeah i'm seeing patients now in my practice that are 35 years later wow so i'm seeing people now they're in their 80s that i treated in their 50s and you know in fact um one of the uh one of my patients when she was 92 this is my mother turned 92 she realized she'd outlived all 52 of her lifelong friends so everybody she'd known and grown up with every one of her friends was dead and she was socially pretty isolated at this point she said alan you need to warn your patients all right if they do this diet make younger friends right and she said much younger not just a little younger because even by the time they were in their eighties most of her friends weren't you know functionally crazy 20 years 30 years ago so if you're going to do this you have to be prepared for the fact that you know the people that you know that aren't doing it are going to pay the price and that's where you see the big differences in the last 20 years of life because instead of finding yourself unable to talk or move along in that nursing home that you can still be functional and vital you know dr lyle and i see it we're in our 60s now playing basketball with people in their 40s they're already starting to show aging outside even when you're running around you're feeling like especially in basketball you can really see it you know it starts to show up earlier they're winded well they show in terms of uh capacity to recover you know you think about what what happens to a guy in his mid-30s in the nba he's considered like an old guy well wait a second now you could be in your 30s and still have the skill set maybe even still have the quickness but what you don't have is the rapidity of recovery so the guys that are playing late into their careers it's because they're able to recover from injuries how are they doing and that's because usually they live a healthier diet last night if you look at game changers and other movies and looking at some of these competitive athletes many of these people that are adopting plant-based sets they may not be the biggest but they tend to be able to do sustain the longest duration because they're able to recover and i think that's the big difference with aging is people's recovery rates tends to slow and particularly in a professional sporting environment we have you know 82 games this season like in the nba or now i guess it's 70 something you know that's a really challenging burden is to recover from the inevitable injuries that occur from playing at that level and i think that if people adopt plant-based diets not only do they have higher endurance potential but they have better recovery potential and they can be sustainable for much longer and it's even more relevant for the weekend warrior that's not necessarily a professional athlete but that you know just wants to be able to continue to function in their 40s 50s 60s and hopefully 70s wow what's the cost for someone to go to your clinic for a week well we're at 501c3 nonprofit research facility so our costs are much lower than most places it's 159 a night for a private room sharebank includes everything we do so feeding fasting twice daily all the water you want all the water what else are they going through re-feeding and all the things yeah sure so we have a much more affordable uh model because we don't have the pressures that other people do generate return and stockholders and we don't advertise how are you guys making money to we have a we have staff that work really hard we're really productive and efficient we're booked fully several months in advance and we have you know low cost per patient uh overhead so we've designed it so that we can keep it affordable wow do you have people uh funding or donations we do have that fund our research side we absolutely have some very generous people a lot of people like for example we're one of the charities on amazon through amazon smile so if they pick us they don't ha they made a half a percent we have people like mama says and leafside and well your world where they offer sos free versions of their food and they'll make a donation to the foundation for people that identify us as a source of their uh thing we have um all of the people that stay at true north health any proceeds from the operation of true north health clinic go to the truth of health foundation and so the foundation is largely funded by the fact that we run a really efficient operation right and there's a small margin that helps fund the research wow and then some patients have been very generous in supporting our research directly where do you see your life being right now if you weren't into fasting where would you be well when i was 16 i met dr gerald bennett and he told me that his job doing this kind of work he had the best job in the whole world because the patients did all the work the body did all the healing and all he had to do was take credit for the good results and i thought then that's the job for me and the reason we're focused on this research is because that's the way to compellingly convince people that health really does result from healthful living and we want to learn how to do it better how to do it more effectively um i i have i live in the best place in the world i have the best job in ho we live in santa rosa because we thought that would be the best place to live we're doing the work that we're doing right now because we thought that would be the most fun the most challenging um i can't really think of anything i'd rather be doing than what i'm doing right now where do you think you would be in your body if you weren't practicing what you're preaching i think i'd be just like everybody else overweight developing diseases of dietary excess probably be working on my first heart attack or you know other things just like everybody else you know i don't think there's anything special about me except that i got started earlier and so i never developed bad habits so it's been easier and also i live at the true north health center where it's really easy to eat healthy every day we have about 20 of our staff that live at the trumpet health center or in our adjacent apartment building and i notice they maintain a high degree of health they don't have sick time i'll tell you what there's nothing better for an employer i've got 70 employees than having people that aren't sick and debilitated and missing work and right and not functioning at their full potential and and making healthy food available to our employees allowing them to fast as part of their benefit package guess what we have people that have been with us 30 years or more working every day i can show you 30 years history where they're not fit out as a consequence of illness because they're staying healthy prevention's a lot better than treatment it is is everyone there plant-based who works well all the only food that we offer is plant-based so those that live there have no choice they might have some fish every now and then or something who knows they're sneaking off and hiding people that are living and eating at the center that's what their choices are yeah so whatever they do in their first life is their personal life so every so every day you have people coming in and also weaning off or eating food as well or as if they come in for a set time and then it's like feeding time well most patients come in and feed down into the fasting stage some people if they've done a really good job before they get they can get to work pretty quickly and everybody goes through a refeeding period of half length of the fast but many people are never fasting they're coming for feeding or therapy or other things too so we've had 20 000 people undergo fast we might have had almost twice that many patients come through the clinic wow so we've had we see you know 1200 new admissions a year so we're processing a lot of people we have a dozen clinicians you know one of the things that we have since the pandemic that's been really interesting is we developed a telemedicine practice so we took our doctors our attendings and we made them available online so that people can go through zoom and call in and ask their questions and have a doctor at their disposal affordably that's not an idiot that's used to people getting well that can give them a second opinion yeah that thing is really taken off and of course i like it because the proceeds from that all go to the trump health foundation so it fund our research but now we're able to service the whole world so a lot of our particularly foreign patients that we're already working with are able to access us efficiently through our they just go to our website and they click on the on the phone coaching service and so now we can service people with this kind of advice remotely without them even having to come to the center because a lot of times it's just they just need good advice they just how much is the call with someone on your in your team it's 95 for a 20-minute consult and it's all electronics so they go online they fill out the registration forms online we have all their health history information they email us their lab it all can be reviewed and then we can work with their local doctor if they need something we can refer them to a place that may be closer because you know true northeast in california is great but not everybody lives in california yeah there are people that live in all the other states of course and we have doctors that we've trained through our residency training program we have doctors that come and train with us as like from texas a m or from uh the naturopath or the chiropractors will come in and train uh a part of our residency program and then they go into practice sure sure we can refer to them people that maybe need a local doctor right and uh the website is where we can do this um we have two websites it's healthpromoting.com which is our main website healthpromoting.promoting.com is a simple way to get there okay we also have a site for the foundation it's called fasting.org and fasting.org is just a fast and compendium website of the research on fasting ours and other people is readily available and it's new so that's a newly launched site right particularly for people interested in fasting for people interested in our uh content our articles our roku channel or true north tv all that freely available everything's easy to get to you just go to healthpromoting.com and it's all right there i love this you've got a book also that you wrote wrote this is about 15 years ago you did this you're dead ahead of the time you were way ahead of the curve on the pleasure trail the pleasure trap mastering the hidden force that undermines health and happiness and what is that hidden force that hidden force is the artificial stimulation of dopamine that comes from in the case of diet highly processed foods and so it's the sugar oil and salt that makes people fat sick and miserable and we talk about why it's difficult to make changes this is a really disturbing book because it doesn't tell you what you want to hear it tells you what you need to know to get to get and stay healthy it tells you why it's hard to make changes and why people are so resistant to it but it gives you a clear strategy to do so successfully including the use of fasting and you have uh one of the keywords on the cover you have medications drugs alcohol tobacco but the top of the list is sex is sex a bad thing sex is a good thing it's necessary for our species to survive if it wasn't for the ability to engage in sexual reproduction our species wouldn't have made it and it's food and sex that are the natural normal stimulants of dopamine okay so that's and it's only food and sex that naturally cause those powerful stimulation but the problem is we figured out a way to fool that with drugs with highly processed foods so we stimulate dopamine just like you naturally get from sex with things like drugs for example if you smoke cocaine you get 10 times as much dopamine released as if you have an orgasm 10 times as much dopamine is secreted people say well i gotta get on cocaine the problem is it's an artificial stimulation and it can lead to addiction and so the problem is yes very powerful very addictive the normal stimulation of dopamine good the artificial stimulation of dopamine is the pleasure trap what is the artificial if you're getting 10 times the amount of what you're supposed to get what does that do to the body well what it does is the brain it's it's like the hallmark of addiction is you'll continue to do something not just to feel good but when you stop doing it you feel really bad the hallmark of like you said anytime there's a stimulus there's expression we talk a lot about this there's actually a chart in the book that explains this hyper normal stimulation whether it whether it's from um drug behavior or a drug-like behavior which comes from the chemicals added to food sugar salt now these concepts that we talked about when we wrote this book are now becoming much more acceptable you're finding other books that are coming out they're talking about you know the drug like effects of sugar and and that and so i feel really gratified that these ideas that were expressed so clearly by dr lyle the principal author of this book are now being reflected uh more in the mainstream and i and i you know we went back through this recently chef aj did a professional audio version of it and it's great and so for people that don't like to read they can listen to it yes and i listened to it and i actually got more out of the same book listening to it because you process information differently and one of the things that i really got was that this content was really sharply right on even though it was written as you mentioned some years ago and what's interesting is the sales of the pleasure trap now are actually better now than they were back then because now communication is a lot broader right and so what i used to talk to public lectures to 100 people or 500 people now these podcasts were doing like i did that show with rich roll and i think there's almost 2 million people that have listened to it crazy so that would have been 500 years of talking all right right exactly so now this this invention of the podcast which i think is relatively recent yeah has changed the way people like me that have really radical concepts can communicate with much broader audiences it's beautiful i love i love our show and our ability to spread these messages you also have a pleasure trap test that people can take a number of questions and assess to see how healthy of a lifestyle they have or how duped they are by pleasures of food and all these different it gives them a sense of how hard they're going to have to work you know if you were like you you're going to score quite high because you never got exposed to the drugs and the other things those things weigh quite heavily right and the reason they weigh heavily is because they have a major effect on people and so people that didn't do that can get away with a whole lot other things without it necessarily showing up so you had you can have some of the cheese and oils it may not catch up as much but also remember a lot of it depends on genetics how long you're going to live is largely determined by genetics and luck you know you were lucky to have good genes you're lucky to have been exposed to an adventist background that maybe minimized your exposure to some of the evil influences sure um but how well you're going to live is going to determine why what you put in your mouth and how you live your life and so what we have to focus on is whatever genes you have and whatever use and abuse has occurred from here on out you have to take responsibility to control your diet and lifestyle and if you want to have a good chance of having a good life and a good death now is the time to get focused and that's what we're trying to share with people is what can you do to have not just a good life but to also make the last part of your life an even richer part of it in the first part yeah i i've heard too many stories and i've seen it i'm starting to see it more with people that i know and family members who are extended family members who are struggling and who are unhealthy and there's not really a return point it's not really a way to go back to healthy maybe there is but they're not making the choices and the actions necessary in order to start helping themselves and it's almost sometimes where it's too late right can you ever reverse something if it's or too late in my practice it's amazing how forgiving the body is really i see people i remember when i was in australia i was going to osteopathic college and i was studying with dr burton at his what was called the arcadia health center he did a lot of fasting and i would see people coming in thinking no way you know i thought if this one comes good like oh really i don't believe it i'll believe it i said like chronic chronic like can't walk they're like stiff they're ob all these things you see the tumors drop off the energy come back the cognitive i'll give you an example we published a paper recently on a gentleman who was in his eighties that they thought was uh going through cognitive decline uh and dementia you also had atrial fibrillation hypertension diabetes and all we did was unwind his medications clean up his diet and he woke up because it turned out he didn't have dementia he had polypharmacy he was excess drugs causing cognitive decline causing me to be slower and memorable it looked like alzheimer's but it was actually and as soon as the medications cleared his system he was like oh woke back up sharp got normalized his as atrial fibrillation he got off his meds he normalized his blood pressure interesting one of the reviewers in the case report that we submitted to the medical journal said wow what an amazing result but what made you guys think it was the drugs oh wow so just getting people off their medications appropriately right can sometimes make a huge difference because it turns out some people are on too much medication some people are on the wrong medications and almost everybody's on medications is the consequence of poor dietary choices so if you're willing to correct the dietary choices the need for medications can be mitigated what does medication do to the brain the body when you take one medication it depends on what medications if you look any medication just go look up the side effects the three pages in uh in the text or listen to any ad on the television about all the channels about the side effects in a loving beautiful way side effects those are effects they're just effects you don't like those are that what medications do to the body sometimes they do it in a more powerful way that you don't find convenient so we call them side effects but they're all physiological effects of medications you think most people um what's your percentage of people that you think could get off medication if they lived a healthier lifestyle with fasting and proper nutrition well if we talk about the people that we treat the people with high blood pressure diabetes autoimmune diseases lymphoma most of those people are going to be able to achieve levels without the use of medication but even those people that might require some pharmaceutical medications will function better on a healthy diet lifestyle a lot of the side effects from the medications are complicated by the poor diet lifestyle choices people are making right and yet if you go on to the websites of some of the medical societies they'll tell you we we can't cure high blood pressure because we don't know what causes it so just take the drugs and don't ask too many questions so you know it's not really true drugs cause chronic cough fatigue impotence and death that's why they don't give everybody blood pressure medication sixty percent of people have high blood pressure by the time they reach retirement age why don't they just put it in the public water stream for that but because the negative effects of the medication outweigh the positive effects for everybody except those with the highest levels of hypertension so don't underestimate the negative effects that medications including commonly used over-the-counter medications can have on people right right any medication this has been fascinating i want to make sure people get your book the pleasure trap mastering the hidden force that undermines health and happiness i want to make sure they check out your website health is it health promoting or healthy promoting health promoting healthpromoting.com and also fasting.org if you want to learn more about fasting check out true north are you getting more on social media now yourself or what i've done is gone on people like yourself that have been kind enough to ask me to come on and share my radical message yes i really don't know too much about the nuances of social media social media but uh you know i'm confident that the people that like you that know what they're doing are getting the message out there you go uh well healthpromoting.com and learn more schedule a call check out the center i might have to i might send my mom over to your place and send it there for a week or two i think you should come experience a short fast and go through that process yourself i think three days maybe hey let's let's take it a day at a time and see how you hold up okay it might be very entertaining for your viewers i know maybe i could do three days because then i have to do what a day and a half of feeding right yeah a little bit three to five days maybe i could do that um it could be interesting i'll be down i'll be down to test it out so if you're if you're well if you're bringing me in i'm down to check it out um this is a question i ask everyone at the end called the three truths so i'd like you to imagine you live as long as you want to live but it's eventually your last day and you've accomplished all of your wildest dreams you've lived your life the way you want to live it you have the relationships and you're helping people you're educating everything you want to do you do it but for whatever reason you've got to take all of your messages with you to the next place wherever you're going next and no one has access to your book this interview content your information anymore but you get to leave behind three lessons that you would share with the world this is all we would have to remember your information by what would you say are those three truths for you so health is the result of healthful living healthful living involves diet sleep and exercise and fasting can be very helpful at undoing the consequences of dietary excess there you go say one more time the first one health is the health is the result of healthful living yes that healthful living involves a healthy diet sleep and exercise and that fasting can help undo the consequences of dietary excess i love it i want to acknowledge you uh dr alan goldhamer for for being radical and taking chances to see these transformations and people that really have nowhere else to go and for doing it for 38 years now and now showing up and sharing your message online and putting it out there more i hope you do more content like this i think more people need to be willing to try things even if it's a two day a three day or even just 16 hours to see the results they get by trying a little bit and then pushing the boundaries for their own health and happiness so i acknowledge you for showing up for four decades doing this for being the example for leading the way for getting out research that backs these things so people are more educated and can see case studies and results peer-reviewed results things like that so i acknowledge you for constantly showing up and being a healing force to the for the world thank you it's inspiring uh my final question is what's your definition of greatness where people are doing uh what they want to do and in the way they want to do it there you go appreciate it very much thank you if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here what does snacking do to our body or brain uh our digestion system when we're every couple hours putting something in our mouth what even if it's a few nuts or a fruit or a protein bar like what is that doing to our brain in our digestive system yeah and this is the big thing that i've had and uh you know i talk about this in the obesity code is because our body really um exists in sort of one of two states you're either in the fed state or you're in the fasted state okay so when you're in the fed state you're eating insulin is going up and as insulin goes up its job like it's normal job is to tell your body to store those calories okay so you can store it as glycogen which is sugar or it can store it as body fat but that's the point so you lunch or dinner there's way more calories in that meal than you can use right at that point so you want to store that so when you don't eat which is any time you don't eat is called fasting so when you fast that means your insulin is going to drop and that's the signal for your body to now start pulling those calories out of storage right and that's the reason you don't die in your sleep every single night is because we have the ability to hold some of those calories in storage so in the fed state insulin goes up you're storing calories or body fat in the fasted state you're not eating your insulins dropping and you're using calories so you're one or the other you can't do both at the same time so if now you say okay what i'm eating i'm storing i'm not using calories is that right every time i store i'm not burning body fat you're not burning body fat because you're putting in sugar for example uh and that sugar is going to signal that hey sugar's coming in use the sugar that's coming in don't burn anything off my body yeah exactly keep on store all that stored fat keep it just keep piling it on right exactly so the only way that you can actually use the body fat is to let the insulin fall and not eat so if you are now eating constantly so the minute you get up somebody tells you oh you have to eat you can't skip breakfast and then you have to snack all day long so now if you look at studies the average duration of how long people eat for is about 14 hours and 45 minutes that's the average so if you start eating at 8am you don't stop till 10 45 pm that's on average that's the average 14 hours you mean a 14 hour span of eating from the start to finish right you may not be eating every moment but you're eating every few hours within a 14-hour window it takes about four hours for you to switch over into the fasted state so the point is that before where you'd eat breakfast lunch dinner and by six o'clock you're done you know boom you're you know now you shift into using those calories and your mom would you say oh you need time to digest right that's what she sort of said but the point was that you need to start using those calories that you stored up during your meal times and that was the secret that they could stay relatively slim now if you're eating constantly then you never give your body a chance to switch over into that fasted state and start using those calories the problem of course is that insulin stays high which tends to keep your body storing calories your body so the high insulin for example blocks fat burning you can't burn your fat stores because your body is like the instructions that i'm getting is to store energy not use energy i want to keep my stored energy for when there's a time that there's no food the problem of course is that there's never a time there's no food right every day is the same same thing right 14 hours of eating and no time of not eating and that's the point so now if you understand the problem you can say well how am i going to change this well it's simple increase the amount of time that you're not eating and that's all intermittent fasting is if you eat one meal a day for example or if you within a eight-hour window or a four-hour window or whatever what you're doing is you're simply allowing your body to use the calories that have been stored which is body fat predominantly but that is precisely the reason you carry body fat like that body fat is not there for looks is there for you to use right and that's the whole point what's so bad about using it if you don't eat you're gonna burn it well so again go back to the 70s and everybody says oh you can't fast you can't fast well you know they're eating breakfast lunch dinner and if you're a naughty boy you got sent to bed without dinner so you went from 12 o'clock to 8 a.m 20 hours you look good the next day you're like a clean you got a six-pack it's burning fast exactly and nobody died nothing bad happens right there was nothing wrong with that and hopefully you learned your lesson too right and and that's the whole point is that there's nothing wrong it's a natural part of our human physiology if we couldn't survive without eating like we would not be here today because when we were cavemen and cave women they didn't have food every day yeah exactly they couldn't they there might be a stretch of three four five days where there was no food and therefore they had to survive on their own body fat which they did and that was the whole point so let's let our body you know use it because that's the most natural thing to do what's the process for you your day-to-day life do you eat one meal a day two meals a day do you fast every month for a day are you always doing intermittent fasting is there a downside to intermittent fasting what's your process yeah i usually do a lot of sort of i rarely eat breakfast and i'll tell you that it didn't come i mean i started this in medical school and that was mostly because i really wanted to just roll out of bed and go like you know i'd wake up literally like five minutes before i left before you know i brushed my teeth put on some clothes and rolled out the door i was you know it's just a it's just that the way i was right and so i i don't eat breakfast now because again people say you have to eat breakfast you have to eat but there's actually nothing magical about breakfast if you don't eat breakfast what's gonna happen well my body which is now burning fat because i've had eight hours of sleep it's gone into sort of fat burning mode because that's the storage form of calories or it's burning sugar um it's just gonna keep doing it right there's nothing wrong with it so um so a lot of times i try and confine myself to sort of an eating window of sort of six to eight hours and then once in a while when i get very busy i will do a 24 hour fast which is a one meal a day and then every so often i'll do a longer fast and the longer fasts are actually not as bad as you might think but they really disrupt your schedule sort of socially it's it's a tough one because a lot of our socialization happens at meals so i often have dinner with my family for example and doing those longer fasts is really really disruptive to that sort of thing which is why when you look at traditional societies like if you look at say you know during major religions for example there would be a period of fasting that's sort of universal so you know everyone's doing it so no one's feeling exactly expressed when they smell the food and they're like exactly so if you're if it's like good friday or during lent or during ramadan for muslims or you know during yom kippur for jews or whatever everybody's fasting so it's actually terrifically easy because you're not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there whereas nowadays if you fast and i've done this it's just really hard to do it's not physically it's not hard but it's hard and i do it mostly um you know when i when i've gained a bit of weight usually after the holidays and after a vacation i will sort of schedule a uh longer fast right after because i know uh that i can lose that weight very quickly but that means i can enjoy myself like a couple years ago i went on a cruise and really ate too much just a lot i had a lot and i knew it then i could feel it in my pants were tight and stuff so i did sort of a three or four day fast and i'll tell you by the next week i was back to my normal weight well that's great because a week and but i got to enjoy the whole week prior where i really didn't look at what i was eating or how often i was eating or anything i was like this is my vacation i'm doing this but at the same time i know hey i've got this next you know after this week the week after you know very little to eat and and and it gives you a great tool to use if you need it right yeah it's almost like either every day don't indulge and balance and create a schedule where you're only eating in a certain window of time whether it be four six eight hours which i'm hearing is kind of the uh which would be a great standard to have between four and eight hours of a feeding time is that right yeah yeah i mean if you want to lose weight you can do very well of course with a sort of standard 70s style sort of 8 a.m to 6 p.m which in a 14-hour fast every single night remember they're doing for 12 to 14 hours say every single night without even thinking about it like that's a secret because they don't even think about that that's just a period of time that they're not eating right but now of course the the the traditions are different you can eat anywhere you want you can eat in the theater you can eat at your desk in a car like in the 70s stuff like that didn't exist you didn't eat in a meeting in a board room for example now you go to a meeting in a boardroom when there's food everywhere donuts there's donuts and cookies right somebody's ordered a plate of bagels or something like that right it's like well why we're having a meeting here right so that's the uh that's the thing so you could do very well with that kind of you know eight hour eating window for 10 hour eating window you can do very well with it but if you're not doing well then you can extend it and that's the beauty of it you could extend it as much as you want right so if you think about fasting you could go three days you could go five days you could go 30 days people do that all the time but no food no food yeah so if you look if you think about fasting so the what the amount of energy that you need so a pound of fat has 3 500 calories roughly if you need about 1800 calories so that's for like a regular person not like an athlete or somebody's working out a lot it takes about half a pound of fat per day so if you're dealing with a lot of obese people like 100 pounds overweight you could go 200 days you know if you want to lose 100 pounds you could go 200 days without eating before you go and survive and survive exactly and be okay exactly be perfectly fine because this is a very efficient fat is an efficient store of calories right it's very efficient that's why we developed this it's to keep you alive when there's no food around exactly so use it does it affect your digestive system does it mess with your metabolism if you don't eat after a certain amount of time yeah and what happens when you start eating again does that affect your again your stomach your intestines your colon your metabolism what's affected there and this is the interesting part is that everybody thinks that fasting is like the worst thing you could do when you actually look at the science of what happens during fasting it's actually one of the best things you can do for yourself from both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint assuming of course you're not malnourished right i mean i'm assuming if you're the average american who's you know 10 20 30 pounds overweight then this is something that actually has a lot of benefits so there's a lot of sort of myths around it one is that you're going to burn a lot of muscle and the truth is that you don't i mean when you you know if your body your body stores energy as body fat so people say oh you're going to burn muscle it's like well you've got to think that our body is so stupid that it stores energy as fat but the minute you need it it starts burning muscle right like why would our body be so stupid and if it were so stupid how did we survive right and it's like you know if you say firewood all wint for the winter and then as soon as it gets cold you chop up your sofa and throw it into the fire like why would you be so stupid right our body's just the same it's not that so you know and i know and everybody knows that the way that you build muscle is that you exercise right so if you have uh you know lift heavy weights then your muscles become stronger it doesn't become stronger because you eat right that thing does nothing for building muscle like otherwise we'd be you know the strongest nation on earth right but we're not we're the fattest nation on earth so that's the whole problem right i mean you're confusing two completely different things um there is a point during fasting where there is a little bit of protein breakdown and that's where people get very confused and say well you're burning muscle but you're not protein is not the same as muscle so our body has all kinds of protein including all the connective tissue like the skin and stuff that holds stuff in place and some of that is often burned off so for example when you look at those shows where people get surgery and they lose 150 pounds they get all this flappy skin that's not excess fat that's excess protein so that's you know it's functional tissue that you've never used up so we actually see very little of that problem when people fast because there's a small period of time where they're actually using up the protein your body will maintain its musculature based on what exercise and stuff you're using um so another big myth so muscle burning is one thing the other big big myth is people talk about as starvation mode or metabolic rate so metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body uses in a day the number of calories you burn in a day and this is what we see if you simply cut calories so this is a standard medical advice cut 500 calories a day and you'll lose a pound of fat a week what happens of course is that you cut 500 calories a day uh and then your body quickly reduces the amount of calories it uses by about 500 calories so now you're actually not losing any weight that's what happens all the time because why does this stop why does it stop burning those calories well it stops burning calories by reducing its metabolic rate so the metabolic rate is the energy that your body uses to say generate body heat your liver your kidney your heart and so on we've known this for 100 years that if you simply restrict the number of calories but keep the foods very similar what happens is that your body is going to start using less so because it doesn't like running a deficit right it's just like if you normally make a hundred thousand dollars a year and you spend a hundred thousand dollars a year now you make 50 000 you don't keep spending 100 right it's it's you're gonna you're gonna get thrown into jail but so you reduce your expenditure same as the body so it's getting less so it's gonna use less and that's the natural reaction it's it's it's important because it's a survival response it cannot do anything different the difference like so it's almost like you need to be extreme in your use yeah in order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you but if you just do a little bit i'm going to eat a little bit less today it's not going to do that much it doesn't work and and people assume that if you go to zero which is fasting say you fast for a full day you have zero calories you don't die right because what happens is completely different now you've lowered your insulin so you're changing the hormonal profile of the body and as you do that you're now switching fuel sources so instead of using food as your fuel you're switching it into body fat just like those hybrid carbs where you go from gas to electric right so it's using food and then boom it goes okay i have no food coming in i need to switch over now into body fat and then it goes whoa i have like 500 000 calories of body fat here so why do i need to cut cut it down and the point is that it doesn't because assuming if you have no body fat of course it's a problem but for people who have adequate stores of body fat which is most of us and truthfully most people do it for weight loss too much body fat then what happens is that there's so much there why wouldn't you use it because it's a fuel source that's all it is that's the way you have to look at the body fat if you're eating all the time you can never use your body fat because your your insulin's here your insulin's high you're using food then you get hungry so you eat some more right you have a snack you have a low-fat muffin you stay here there's you can only burn food all that stuff over there those 500 000 calories of body fat are completely inaccessible for your body so if you simply dial it down like this and say okay instead of 2000 calories i'm going to eat 1500 but i'm going to eat 10 times a day keeping myself here now you only have 1500 coming in you can only burn 1500 you can't access that if you go to zero you go boom and then your body burns the full 2000. so they did a study for example where they took people and fasted them for four days and measured how many calories they're using they also measure their vo2 which as you know is something that it's a measure of how much cellular work your body is doing and what they found so they measured the metabolic rate at time zero then they measured it at four days of zero food and they were burning ten percent more calories than they were per day than they were when they were eating the vo2 was 10 higher you're doing more work your body is actually not shutting down it's revving itself up and again there's a good physiologic reason for that and we know that when insulin goes down when you switch yourself into this sort of uh you know mode that you're burning fat other hormones go up including your sympathetic nervous system which is your noradrenaline so you're actually pumping your body up the reason for that is sort of again it's a survival response so imagine again or cave been and it's winter and there's no food so if you don't eat for two days and you get weaker you're never gone again you're gonna die because every day is gonna be harder you're gonna circle the drain so our body's just not that stupid right so what they do is that your body says okay there's no food coming in boom i'm going to switch you over to body fat and then i'm going to pump you up so that you have energy you go out there you go kill that woolly mammoth you're focused you're clear exactly and that's that's the reason that we actually pump ourselves up and the constant the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say well i i have to eat because i have to concentrate it's like your is actually much higher when you don't eat think about when you had a huge thanksgiving meal well were you really sharp or did you really want to just lie down on the sofa and watch some football right you don't have any sort of focus but if you think about animals it's the same thing lions they just eat they're just like lounging around but if you're the hungry wolf that is not that is a very dangerous animal because he's focused he's ready to kill you same thing for us our level of concentration our mental ability mental agility goes up significantly when we're hungry like if you think oh you're hungry for this hungry for that that doesn't mean you're falling down lethargic it means you're focused so it's interesting because there's this book a few years ago called unbroken which is a biography of this fellow who got who went to a prisoner of war camp in world war ii japan he was talking about starvation and he they were literally starving like there's they'd eat like almost nothing for the full day and he's talking about how his his uh his uh other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feat so one guy was reading a book entirely from memory another guy learned all of norwegian in a week and he so the guy says this is simply the mental clarity of starvation so it was incredible it's like it was so widespread everybody was starving and they'd see these incredible feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time because your mental ability is ramped up to such a high degree and then you know in the ancient greece the ancient mathematician pythagoras he would require his students to fast i usually get about 40 to 60 grams of soluble fiber day which is way more than most people and it's going to make sure that everything goes out pretty much no matter what you eat the way you want it to but most importantly it suppresses hunger and it gives you good gut bacteria

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 537,380

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

Id: xpxVxLqLYNo

Length: 130min 20sec (7820 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021