What Really Happens When We Fast?

Let's talk about what happens on the inside of your body when you're fasting so over here we have a start of a fast and we go 24 hours 48 and 72 so there's a lot of really magical things that happen when you fast our bodies have developed over a long period of time and have adapted to starvation many many times so we have all these unique proteins that get expressed or turned on that have to do with your brain doing better the different parts of your body is surviving better our bodies have not adapted to the frequency of eating like we do now like every three hours so right around 12 hours we get this spike in growth hormone growth hormone is the anti-aging hormone it's the main fat burning hormone it's the hormone involved with healing joints and it's involved with protein synthesis or making different new proteins some people take growth hormone to get injected I don't recommend it but they take it to help heal certain parts of your body but guess what fasting will trigger it automatically so just by the fact that you're fasting you can increase growth hormone and of course exercise will also increase growth hormone as well so it starts about 12 hours and it increases as you go on and on now at about 18 hours you start developing something called autophagy autophagy is an interesting thing that happens with your body where you start recycling old damaged proteins and microbes as well one type of protein would be the advanced glycated end products which basically when you combined glucose with a protein it becomes very sticky so let's say you're on a high carbohydrate diet and that sugar combines with your own protein in your body and that starts to glide Kate or just kind of destroy some of the proteins in your body and then they don't function anymore and they get sticky and they clog things up well guess what your body will start cleaning all that up and turning these damaged proteins into new amino acids where your body can use them amyloid plaquing which occurs in the brain and other parts of the body is a type of protein that can be cleaned up with a toffee gene so it's any type of cellular proteins that are not working anymore in your body autophagy will start cleaning that up and start to renew the tissue and it starts right about 18 hours and it gets more and more and more as you start fasting in about 24 hours and a little bit longer you start to really deplete this glycogen Reserve this storage supply of glucose in your liver so the more that the liver is depleted with glycogen the more you're going to be running on ketones as the alternative fuel and if you have a fatty liver for example your body will start using that fat and turning that into ketones so your body is finally able to start tapping into this stored energy and you're running more and more on ketones which is a superior fuel and because you're running on ketones ketones are an appetite suppressant so your hunger goes away cravings are gone there are antioxidants so you're building up your antioxidant reserve they provide more oxygen so your body is running out more oxygen less co2 then it's more efficient and because ketones are a much more efficient fuel than glucose the thyroid does not have to work as hard and you may find that your t3 is a little bit lower but the thyroid stimulating hormone is normal and all that means is your thyroid is adapting to this new type of fuel now some other cool things that are happening right around 24 hours is that your inflammation is dropping significantly if you wanted to even speed it up more you can add some vitamin D to that and that will really help you so any type of conditions that involve inflammatory states like arthritis bursitis autoimmune type conditions start to improve about 24 hours you start getting more gut healing because the gut now doesn't have to work so frequently with the gallbladder being stimulated and the pancreas stimulating its enzymes the gut finally has a chance to just chill out so if you have this condition called SIBO which there are microbes in the small and testin and they should normally be in the large intestine that starts to become corrective you start increasing stem cell in the gut so your gut starts to heal the heart loves ketones way better than glucose so you start getting improvement in the cardiovascular function and as well as the brain function there's something called BDNF this is a factor that helps make new brain cells so your brain starts to repair at 24 hours as you keep going on you would think you're going to be losing muscle protein but that's not really what happens because your body becomes more efficient and there are certain genes that are sparing proteins so it's not using muscle protein so the efficiency of fuel is much better plus with autophagy you're using the old damaged proteins and giving you new protein so the combination is really good so the amount of nutrition that you really need to run the body is a lot less because the body just dows down and it can run on less amount of nutrients so that's a positive thing now the other thing that happens during autophagy is that you're also cleaning out microbes and fungus and mold and yeast and to kill off those microbes your body develops certain oxidants and you also have antioxidants on the flipside so your body actually makes things like hydrogen peroxide to kill off microbes but it also in the left side makes its own antioxidants to actually protect the body against the oxidation so we have this entire balance it's only when we have lower amounts of antioxidants and higher amount of accidents that we get this thing called oxidative stress which things start breaking down but when you're doing fasting you're getting a nice balance of more antioxidants and your body is starting to heal now when you get to 48 hours you really start to stimulate the stem cells these are undifferentiated cells in other words they're cells that don't have a purpose so they can turn into this tissue or that tissue depending on what the body needs so you start to stimulate the stem cell and get more healing and more repair more anti-aging you also get decrease risks of certain types of cancer you get shrinkage of certain tumors you start making more mitochondria now if you push it and go up to 72 hours you get even more stimulation of stem cells okay in better immune function but when you actually get into 72 hours or greater I recommend you do that as a periodic thing simply because a lot of people going into this have nutritional deficiencies in there if you jump in too fast you can get a little bit dizzy you can have some side effects so you want to gradually do this over a period of time but those are some general things that happen when you're fasting I recommend doing intermittent fasting on a regular basis okay and probably a good average pattern of doing this would be doing 18 hours of fasting with a six-hour window so you would eat and then wait to six hours later and then eat and then fast for 18 hours this would be a really good pattern to follow and then you can actually make it more strict over time depending on how you do then what you can do is periodic prolong fasting to achieve additional health benefits whether it's for your immune system because you have an autoimmune problem or you just want to look younger with your skin or you want more brain cells you want a better heart function better gut function or let's say you have cancer and you want to improve that because one thing that fasting will do is it will increase your resistance to stress and even if someone's on chemotherapy it will actually help the body's resistance against chemicals and poisons which is quite remarkable make sure you take your minerals during fasting so I know a lot of people recommend just doing either water fast you're just drinking water or a dry fast where you're not drinking anything I recommend doing a water fast with nutrients just because if you are deficient you can have problems so you want you minerals you want your B vitamins and you want your salt very important right around 8 o'clock in the morning you have the spike in cortisol and if cortisol spikes sometimes that can cause your body to make more glucose and you can have higher blood sugars and it happens with a lot of people with blood sugar issues nothing to worry about that will improve over time but if you just add exercise in the morning that will burn off some of that extra sugar and if you're fasting it's not coming from your diet it's just coming from your liver making glucose making a little too much because maybe the cortisol is too high okay so just wanted to point it out and I have videos on that I put a link down below it's called a dawn phenomena now if your LDL so called bad cholesterol which is not really bad low density lipoprotein is increased the reason for this especially if you're not consuming or any type of significant carbohydrates and you're doing fasting this is increased from a different reason think about one of the purposes of LDL it's to deliver cholesterol to different tissues right well think about all the things that are happening when your body is fasting you are going through a major healing process and cholesterol is the raw material for your cell membranes for your brain to make hormones to make vitamin D to make bile 40% of all the cholesterol in your body is there to supply the membrane of your cells which is essential to protect the cell and allow for things to go in and out of the cell so maybe one of the reasons why your body might need the cholesterol to be transported through this carrier protein is healing the cellular membranes or it could be that it needs to have the raw material to make more hormones I would not worry about that if you are concerned there are various tests that you could do to determine what's happening to this cholesterol isn't doing damage or not but I would not worry about it but anyway I wanted to create a video just to kind of show you what happens to the inside of your body when you're fasting thanks for watching so if you want more knowledge on how to create a healthy body subscribe now and get daily notifications

Channel: Dr. Eric Berg DC

Views: 6,253,835

Keywords: intermittent fasting, fasting, fasting side effects, fasting effects to the body, effects of fasting, effects of fasting on body, intermittent fasting benefits, benefits of fasting, fasting benefits, fasting effects, fasting effects on the brain, prolonged fasting, fasting dr berg, what happens when we fast, autophagy, fasting autophagy, dr berg, dr eric berg, eric berg, dr berg fasting, dr berg intermittent fasting

Id: vhmtoAYVRSo

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/sepib0]

Very informative. Thanks!

[u/Captain-Popcorn]

Thanks for posting. Very interesting! Adding to my collection of good IF videos.

I had heard that autophagy is pretty light up to 24 hours for IF fasters, but picks up significantly after that. This video says it kicks in at 18 hours. Curious where that info comes from and if it's substantiated. I also saw a special that said a non-faster needed to go 72 hours to see significant autophagy benefit.