Transcription
I'm going to share several critical things about prolonged fasting that you need to know. Fasting is very simple, okay? It shouldn't be that hard. Some people overthink it, and those things that are really simple are usually extremely powerful, and that's what fasting is. I mean, it's actually mind-blowing to think that the absence of food, just not eating, can create so many powerful effects. And if you haven't tried it, you should definitely try it.
In order to understand the benefits of fasting, you want to compare it to another subject, and usually a subject that would be the opposite, okay? And that would be snacking. Okay? If you look at what snacking does to the human body, it is absolutely positively devastating. In fact, I think out of all the things that you can do that create a negative influence on your body, snacking is at the top of the list because of what it does to insulin. It's a chronic increase in elevation of insulin, which then leads to just a million other problems. I mean, when you think about it, I guess I'll just pull this up right here real quick. I don't think you can ever heal the body with eating frequent meals, okay? We have this idea that you have to heal the body with food, right? Like food is nourishing. Actually, it might be nourishing, but to really heal, you're better off not eating. Um, this idea that breakfast is the most important meal is a total lie, and I used to promote it before I learned otherwise. What about promoting like bedtime snacks for kids, right? Or after-school snacks? Or this advice that you should never miss a meal, right? Which I have no idea who started that. Well, actually, I do. It's the snack food industry that started that, and for some reason, this snacking food industry just doesn't like me for some reason. I don't know why.
It is so if we look at snacking, snacking actually makes you more hungry because you're eating a small amount of calories and you're stimulating insulin, and that lowers your blood sugar about an hour and a half later. So you're going to stimulate hunger, not stimulate your metabolism, okay? You're going to stimulate hunger when you snack, and it's going to promote more hunger, okay? So, and you're never ever going to fix hypoglycemia by eating these snacks because it just, it keeps that hypoglycemic low blood sugar thing going on and on and on. In fact, it actually slows your metabolism, or shall I say, slows your ability to lose weight because you develop insulin resistance because you have this constant increase of insulin. And also, it's going to promote a need for a nap, okay? Right after you eat, you're going to feel like you need a nap. And you may find that eating does reduce moodiness and grouchiness, but soon after, about an hour later, when your blood sugars have dropped, you're going to revert back to this moodiness.
Now, in history, a lot of great thinkers have commented on fasting and had something to say about fasting. Hippocrates said, "To eat when you are sick is to fuel your illness." Fascinating, right? And then we have the ancient Greek philosophers, right? The great thinkers. Pythagoras, Pythagoras required fasting of his students, okay, so they can think more clearly. Plato, Aristotle were advocates of fasting. Ben Franklin said, "The best of all medicine is rest and fasting." Mark Twain said, "A little starvation can really do more for the average sick person than the best medicine and the best doctors."
And another very interesting point about your fat, okay? Your adipose tissue. Where did it come from? Why did we develop this fat tissue that you hate so much? Well, we developed it from scarcity of food, okay? Food scarcity. And what this fat really is, it's a, it's an efficient way of surviving. It's a way to make your energy very efficient. And when some people express that they have a damaged or slow or ruined metabolism, what they really have is an efficient metabolism because now the body can go with just a little bit of food for long periods of time, and that fat is retained. So fat is all about prolonging fuel. It's all about helping you survive when there's no food. So therein lies the secret to losing fat, okay? Can you do it by adding more food, by eating something? No. You want to mimic why we developed it in the first place. We want to mimic starvation, but not really starvation. I want to actually kind of clarify what I mean by a mimic, okay? The difference between fasting and starvation really has to do with one thing: control. Who's in control? When you're fasting, you're in control. When you're starving, you're usually being controlled by the environment because there's no food. So if we were going to mimic starvation, we're really being in control because we could eat if we want, right? And so the secret to getting rid of your fat really is just to do prolonged fasting, okay? The power of prolonged fasting is just remarkable for your health.
So let's go through the seven critical things that you need to know, okay? The first thing I want to mention is that when you do fasting, you really only want to drink water. You can have tea, you can have some coffee, but you definitely want to take supplements. And the reason is because nowadays people are so deficient in nutrients. So even though when you go through fasting, your body adapts and becomes very efficient at holding nutrients, and the requirement of nutrients is a lot less, you could still have certain deficiencies of both trace minerals, especially, and other things like electrolytes and even the B vitamins. So I recommend taking your supplements. And the two main categories of supplements I would recommend are the electrolytes and the B vitamins. But of course, if you can also do some other ones like vitamin D, vitamin C, that would be important. What you don't want to do is you don't want to do like branched-chain amino acids. You don't want to have little snacks. No, you don't want to do that. And there are some programs that promote that, but I don't recommend that because what you're going to do is you're going to inhibit this very powerful thing that gives you huge benefits, okay, called autophagy.
What is that? That is a condition, it's not a thing, it's a condition in your body that basically recycles old damaged proteins, okay? So fasting is the most potent trigger to autophagy. And so autophagy is kind of like self-cleaning. It's cleaning up the old dead proteins. It's cleaning up pathogens in the body. It's stimulating all sorts of genes for long-term survival and longevity. It helps to clean up damaged mitochondria, which is directly behind the root cause of cancer. So this is why prolonged fasting is the best solution to cancer. And if you have not seen my videos on two amazing success stories with cancer, like stage four cancer, I'm going to put those down below, but it's very powerful. So autophagy is a condition where you're recycling like damaged protein. I'm talking about amyloid plaquing that's involved in Alzheimer's. Talking about the, um, the damaged protein involved in chronic disease, like in your eyes, like from diabetes, from chronic inflammation. And by the way, when you start doing prolonged fasting, you can just erase any inflammation in the body, and it's amazing for autoimmune type conditions as well. So we're recycling damaged proteins, not just your muscles, but proteins involved in the enzymes, all the different metabolic pathways, the things that are damaged. It cleans all that up. So just make sure you do, uh, your water, you know, a couple other things like tea and coffee, and your supplements, but nothing else, okay?
The other thing I want to bring up is the amount of water. I would recommend at least two and a half liters of water. Now, there are dry fasts, and that's a whole different thing, but for most of you watching, I, I don't recommend you do that. Do a water fast. So you're basically drinking a good amount of water. What's interesting about doing a fast, your body will make its own water out of fat, but that's for another video. I just recommend you drink enough water. And the reason I recommend you drink water is when you start fasting, boy, you just dump your glycogen, okay? Your stored sugar, and you're burning up the sugar first. And then with that, um, is the release of a lot of fluids because you have a tremendous amount of water that's tied in with this stored blood sugar in your muscles and your, in your liver. So you're going to get rid of a good amount of fluid initially. And with that becomes a loss of electrolytes. So you want to put back in those electrolytes. Probably the biggest risk of doing these fasts, okay, is when you're doing them without electrolytes because, uh, you can create a lot of problems with your heart. You can, you can faint. You can even have heart attacks. Why? Because you're, you're basically depriving your body of key, uh, electrolytes. And realize that sodium chloride is also part of electrolytes, okay? So you need salt and other electrolytes. If you feel weakness in your muscles, that is an indication that you need more salt, okay? And of course, I'm talking about sea salt and electrolytes. I'm also talking about potassium, magnesium, calcium, things like that.
Now let's go into number three, refeeding. This is when you start to eat again. Now, I'm not talking about intermittent fasting right now. I'm talking about prolonged fasting. When you're fasting 48, 72 hours, you're fasting five days, you're fasting, you know, 14 days, 21 days, 30 days, whatever. And you could do a five-day or even a 21-day fast several times to the year and just keep your health at a whole new level. The, some of the problems with fasting that I want to bring up is like, you don't want to do fasting when you're pregnant. When you're lactating, you don't want to do fasting if you have anorexia. However, if you have stage four cancer or cancer in general, personally, I would do prolonged fasting immediately. So if you're doing a prolonged fast, all right, what do you eat coming off the fast? Well, you want to do something healthy, of course, but you don't want to do a big meal, okay? And you especially do not want to do something with refined carbs and sugar. And the reason is because you're going to create a huge shift of potassium, okay, out of the cell. And 98% of all your potassium should be inside that cell. And so in order to store sugar, you need potassium. So you're going to just suck out this potassium too fast, and you're going to end up with a severe imbalance, uh, of potassium in the blood, inside the cell. There's going to be this huge imbalance, and that can create some dangers. So do not do, you know, just regular foods or refined carbs when you come off this prolonged fast. Instead, do a little bit of salad, maybe a little egg, just a little bit of something, and then wait for a couple of hours, and then you can maybe have a little bit of nuts, and wait for a little bit, do a little avocado, and gradually kind of come out of this, okay? You do not want to do a big meal, like I did. And that was a really good demonstration of what not to do because I just pigged out. I ate all this food at this huge meal, and oh my goodness, did I end up with a serious, uh, digestive problem, tired. And I'm like, okay, I will never do that again. In fact, I need to have other people learn from my mistakes.
All right, if you're doing a prolonged fast, and I'm saying probably 72 hours or longer, realize that all these ketones are going to make you pretty acid. It's not a bad thing. It's just that if you're doing apple cider vinegar and you're adding that, you're going to add some more acidity, and that can throw off your pH. And you may find that your, your pulse rate, it's like a very loud, pounding pulse rate in your ear, that's going to make it difficult to sleep because your pH is off. And your breathing might be affected too, like, like air hunger, like can't get enough air. So don't just don't do the apple cider vinegar if you're doing a fast longer than 72 hours. You may want to do some baking soda, just a little bit, like an eighth of a teaspoon in some water and drink that, especially if you start having a build-up of like a gout symptom from the uric acid that goes up. Uric acid is one of the most powerful antioxidants in your blood, and it's a normal thing. But some people that are predisposed to gout might have a flare-up, especially when they are doing this initially, okay? But normally, it's not a situation.
And number five, do the healthy version of the ketogenic diet. Don't just go back to regular foods because, first of all, the carbs are going to kind of nullify some of the benefits that you had, okay? Because this, this whole goal of doing fasting is to get rid of the bad effects of a high-carb diet and a junk food diet. So why would you want to go back to that? So I would highly recommend combining healthy keto with the intermittent fasting.
Number six, dawn phenomenon. What is that? That has to do with your blood sugars going up, okay? Maybe between 5:00 AM and 8:00 AM, like all of a sudden your blood sugars go up. Like you didn't eat any sugar. Where is that sugar coming from? Well, your liver is making sugar. There's a problem with insulin resistance, which is still occurring because it takes a quite a while to get rid of that condition. It could take months, even up to a year or a little bit longer to fully get rid of that. If you have the dawn phenomenon, all that means is that you have insulin resistance, okay? And I wouldn't worry about it too much. However, if it concerns you, I would go for a long walk and just burn off that sugar. It's not coming from your diet, okay? It's just your liver is making the sugar, and that's a big difference between consuming sugar. All right, it's, you're not going to have a problem. And also, that problem is going to go away with time. Versus some people might think, "Oh, fasting is bad because it raised my sugar," so I'm going to stop doing that. That would be a mistake. And so a couple other little things you can do, you can probably take berberine or other things like cinnamon to help reduce insulin resistance, okay?
All right, number seven, knowing when to break your fast. Now, should you just dive right into a prolonged fast? Well, you know what? You could. You could. Are you going to feel great? Maybe not, especially if you haven't fasted. You're going to have to go through a period of time where your body adapts. And so it might take you several days before you start feeling good. So a lot of people do this gradually and they kind of ease into it after doing, you know, weeks of intermittent fasting. So you could just cold turkey, just jump right in and do prolonged fasting, okay? However, when you start fasting, what you're really doing is you're switching from the glucose fuel to the fat fuel, okay? And then also the body then has to make new enzymes for ketones, okay? So your body actually is running on fatty acids as well as ketones, especially for your brain. Your brain can't run on fatty acids, it runs on ketones. So just think about this, you're not going to feel really good in your head when you start doing fasting, simply because it takes a while to develop ketones. So in the meantime, what you could do is take MCT oil, or you can take ketone supplements and get rid of those symptoms. However, you may not feel good mentally at first, but then you start adapting, and your appetite goes away, and you feel good. That's a really good indication that you've adapted, okay? So if you're doing this gradual, okay, there's always going to be a transition phase where you're going to have to go through something that's going to be uncomfortable. But just realize, push through that. Like you might have hunger pains, you might feel a little bit kind of off, but then if you push through that, that will go away because your body has is forced to adapt to this new method of burning fuel. There's no other shortcuts other than just pushing through that sometimes. So at some point, going from intermittent fasting to prolonged fasting, you're going to have to go through a little bit of this transition. It's normal. It's not abnormal. I'm just letting you know before you go through it so you can not be freaked out about it. But when I say, "Don't eat if you're not hungry, eat when you're hungry," I'm mainly talking about doing intermittent fasting. But when we get into prolonged fasting, should you eat when you're hungry? No. Actually, we're going to just push through that to the other side, okay? So that's kind of a little bit of a little point I want to bring up.
Now, since we're on the topic of fasting, I think it'd be very important for you to learn a little bit more about how to speed up the process, and that would be how to make insulin more sensitive. So you should watch this video right here.