Transcription
There are seven levels of fasting, and your doctor has probably never mentioned six of them. Each level unlocks a different healing mode inside different organs. Level one talks to your pancreas. Level three heals your liver. Level five floods your body of a hormone that makes 18-year-olds look and feel the way they do. And level six, the one that I was thinking about not putting in this lesson because in this level six, it's the exact metabolic environment that cancer cells cannot survive in. And that's not me being dramatic. There's a 2014 USC study and 2022 Cancer Discovery paper that I'm going to walk you through in a second.
Unfortunately, most people never get past level two, which means most of them never burn the fat they're trying to burn. They never heal the liver they're trying to heal, and never touch the immune system reset that nature literally built in your biology. And stay with me because by the end of this lesson, you'll know exactly which level you're at, what you're missing, and how to climb to the next level without fighting your body.
Now, before we dive in, we need to throw out the word fasting. Fasting isn't starvation. Fasting isn't punishment. Fasting is a signal. Every hour you go without food, your body reads that signal and changes what it's doing. Which genes are turned on and turned off, which hormones are flowing, which cells are getting repaired, and which cells are getting recycled. We are hardwired for fasting. For a very long time, human beings did not eat three meals a day with snacks in between. You see, our bodies are built for cycles of feasting and cycles of famine. The reason fasting might feel hard for you isn't because it's bad for you. It's because you've been signaling a feast to your body for so long, it's forgotten about the quiet part, the healing part, the fasting part. But here's the good news. It remembers fast.
Level one is the 12-hour fast. The organ that gets the biggest benefit here is your pancreas. This is what I call the entry-level fast, the beginner fast. You eat dinner at 8:00 p.m., you go to bed, and then you have your breakfast at 8:00 a.m. the next morning. Technically, you've done it. You've fasted for 12 hours. Every time you eat, your pancreas produces insulin into your bloodstream to take the glucose from the meal you've eaten out of the bloodstream into your cells. Then that goes into your liver cells, muscle cells, and then whatever is excess gets stored as body fat. You physically cannot burn fat in this state. Doesn't matter how hard you work out or how low of calories you're eating. When insulin gets produced, you are storing fat.
Okay, 12 hours after you've eaten, insulin now drops in the body. Your pancreas is producing a lot less insulin. Which means you're now tapping into your sugar reserves for fuel, your glycogen stores in your liver and muscle cells. And as we go through the different levels here, you're going to see why that's important for fat loss, belly fat, and visceral fat. This process gets started at that 12-hour mark, a level one fast. So, if you're already doing that, congratulations. The second thing happening at that level one is that you've completed digestion. So, now energy that was used for digesting that last meal is completed, and blood flow is now being diverted, redirected to the brain. So, you should experience focus and clarity.
Level two is the 16-hour fast. This healing mode activates your cells. Somewhere between 14 and 16, and in some cases 17 hours of a fast, your cells are now running low on sugar, which is a good thing. And a sensor inside all of your cells turns on and wakes up. And it says, "Hey, we're not getting food energy. We need to find energy from somewhere." So, it activates, it enhances a process: autophagy. Autophagy means eat thyself. It's a self-cleansing, self-cleaning process that your cells do all the time to get rid of the junk. It's like your refrigerator that has expired groceries. If you let them just sit there after their expiration date, that's going to be a disgusting, diseased environment. Your cells also have expiration dates. Autophagy is the process that gets ramped up during 16 hours of a fast that cleans out those expired cells. A Japanese scientist named Yoshinori Ohsumi figured out how this works, and in 2016 they gave him a Nobel Prize for it. That's how big of a deal this process is. It's kind of like Pac-Man going within your cells, looking for damaged cells and mitochondria proteins, and getting rid of it, eating it for fuel. At the 16-hour mark of a fast, this level two, you start to ramp up that autophagy. Now, it's not a deep clean. It's where the cleaning starts. As you go deeper into the levels, you get a deeper cleaning of that autophagy. And when you get that, here's what you're going to notice: clear skin, less puffiness, and sharper mornings. And if level two is already doing this, you're about to find out what level three does to your liver.
Level three, the 24-hour fast. Healing mode is your liver. If you've ever had a doctor mention to you the words fatty liver disease, or even increased liver enzymes like ALT, AST, and GGT, then this is the level you needed yesterday. About one in three American adults have fat physically wedged inside their liver right now, and most have no idea. And the fastest way to clear that liver isn't exercise. It isn't a special diet. It's giving your liver nothing to do for 24 hours. Around hour 18 of your fast, your liver runs out of stored sugar. It's called your glycogen stores. So, it does what livers have been doing for a very long time. It switches the fuel source. It starts pulling fat out of storage and converting it into ketones. Ketones are a clean burning fuel for your brain, your cells, your mitochondria. It actually helps your mitochondria produce 400% more energy. There's a reason why people who get to this level three report this weirdly like calm focus. It's because they never met their brains on ketones before. And here's the thing you might not expect. Around the 20-hour mark of this fast, even around the 22-hour mark of the fast, you get less hungry, not more. Because your body is feeding from its fat cells. And that's where it's producing those ketones. And if you do experience any hunger during any of these levels, understand that that hunger hormone ghrelin, it's pulsatile. All hormones go up and down. So, if you do experience hunger maybe 17 hours in or other times during the fast, just distract yourself. Drink some water. After 10, maybe 30 minutes, your hunger will go away.
Now, just doing this level three, a 24-hour fast once a week, it gives your liver a full reset for 24 hours and it helps complete that cellular cleanup process within your liver cells. Now, the next 12 hours after this is where things get really interesting. So, at this point, level one, two, and three, your pancreas has a break, your cells are scrubbing themselves, and your liver has stopped burning sugar, and it's starting to melt fat. This is where most fasting content stops at, 16 or 18 or 24 hours. You're good, no need to do anything else. But, the next four levels are where the biology stops being normal and starts being something that humans alive today have literally never experienced in their own bodies.
Level four, the 36-hour fast. This is an immune system reset. At 36 hours, something measurably happens that you would never feel from the inside. Your inflammation drops off a cliff. There's a protein in your blood called C-reactive protein. It's a thermometer for inflammation. Higher CRP basically means everything you don't want. Higher risk of cardiovascular disease and metabolic dysfunction. Also, dementia, autoimmune flare-ups, everything. In studies on alternate-day fasting, CRP drops significantly after 36 hours of fasting. Some studies show reductions in the range of 13% in just a few weeks of cycling these longer fasts. But, the real story is what 36 hours of fasting does to your white blood cells. Your immune system is constantly running on a sort of background patrol. Billions of cells circulating, looking for threats, getting tired, and accumulating damage. At 36 hours, your body looks at the exhausted patrol and starts pulling the broken units offline. So, old immune cells, dysfunctional immune cells, cells that have been firing off inflammatory signals for no reason, your body marks them, tags them for recycling. This is the level where autoimmune research is getting pretty interesting. There are case studies on rheumatoid arthritis patients reporting joint pain reductions after periodic 36-hour fasts. Studies on MS, multiple sclerosis. Studies on lupus. Now, none of these are cures. I want to be very clear about that. But, the pattern keeps showing up. When you give the immune system a few days of quiet, it stops attacking things it shouldn't be attacking. And the part that always gets me is the Buchinger Wilhelmi Clinic in Germany. They published a study in 2019 in PLOS One. 1,422 patients. Fast ranging from 4 to 21 days. And 84% of patients with a pre-existing health complaint reported improvements during the fast. 84%. 84 out of 1,400 people and less than 1% of them had adverse effects. That's a better safety profile than something like ibuprofen. If the immune system is the bouncer at the door of your body, level four is the night it finally clocks out, takes a shower, and comes back to work tomorrow knowing who actually belongs there.
Level five is the 48-hour fast. This supports your muscle and hormone. If you've ever told you're fasting for two days, the first thing you're going to say is you're going to lose all your muscle. And it sounds reasonable. No food in, the body's got to pull fuel from somewhere. So, let's eat the biceps, right? Wrong. The exact opposite happens. And the mechanism is one of the most surprising hormonal responses in your body. At around 48 hours in a true fast, your pituitary gland, the master gland at the base of your brain, does something almost unbelievable. It dumps human growth hormone into your bloodstream. Not a small bump, but a flood of it. In a published human study from the Intermountain Medical Center, growth hormone increased an average of 1,300% in women and 2,000% in men by the 24-hour mark of a fast. And by 48 hours, you're looking at an increase up to five times the normal level. Some subjects in the literature have shown 1,250% increases over baseline. That is, to be clear, more growth hormone than bodybuilders are willing to risk a federal charge for. And look, the reason why this matters so much, growth hormone's number one priority during a fast is to protect your lean tissue. It tells your body to burn the fat, leave the muscle alone. It's the reason why fasting builds the type of body that exercise doesn't. So, you're losing fat with a built-in muscle guard installed. There's another player here that's called norepinephrine. It rises during fasting and it does two things. It cranks up your metabolism and it focuses your brain. This is why people on a two-day fast describe clarity and focus that they can't explain. It's because you're running on the exact hormonal cocktail your ancestors used to stay alive to go out there and hunt and kill. And your body, hardwired the way that it is, doesn't understand that you're doing this fast because you watched my video on YouTube and you're doing it for health benefits. It automatically goes into this process. So, it floods your body of these amazing hormones so you're energized, focused, and alert to go out there and hunt and kill. Obviously, you're not going to do that. You're just going to feel great and crush your day.
Now, level six, and this is the one I've been building up to. This is the one where you need to pay close attention because it's the level where a lot of researchers say is the entire point of fasting. Now, before we get to level six, I want to share one thing that made deep fasting dramatically easier for me and many of my students because honestly, the hardest part of fasting is that brutal transition window when your body hasn't fully switched into fat burning mode yet and the cravings, the brain fog, irritability, and energy crashes hit. That's where most people quit, not because fasting doesn't work, but because their metabolism never fully made that switch. That's exactly why I started using and telling my students to use MyoScience Fasting Berberine Accelerator. You see, berberine activates the same AMPK pathway your body naturally turns on during fasting, helping you shift into fat burning mode much faster and efficiently with less hunger, better energy, fewer cravings, and more stable blood sugar. Once I added this, fasting felt like a breeze. So, if you struggle with belly fat, constant snacking, sugar cravings, or even energy crashes, this can make a huge difference. Right now, my audience gets 20% off and a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there's no risk in trying it. And this only costs about $1 a day. So, click the first link in the description box below if you want to get it or scan the QR code on the screen. Once you get there, you'll see this page, the MyoScience Fasting Accelerator. You'll scroll down, you'll add to your cart, and the coupon code is automatically applied for 20% off. And real quick, you'll also see creatine if you scroll to the right here on the checkout page. It's this right here, their micronized creatine called Crea Vitalis. I highly recommend adding that to the cart as well to support the fasting. It doesn't break the fast, but it supports muscle mass, energy, and brain function during fasting. And if you add their vitamin D, you'll unlock free shipping on your entire order. Look, once your body starts to learn how to burn fat efficiently again, everything gets easier. Click the first link in the description box below or scan the QR code on the screen. Use that coupon code listed below, get 20% off.
Okay, level six, the five-day fast. Healing mode? Your entire body. At 72 hours of a fast, your body crosses the line. By day five, you're past every previous level combined. Here's what we know. Researcher Dr. Valter Longo from USC. He spent two decades studying what happens to cancer cells in a low glucose, low IGF environment. IGF-1 is a growth factor that in too much abundance is also one of the most aggressive growth signals for cancer cells. Fasting drops it. In 2014, Longo's team published a paper in the journal Stem Cell. The title was a mouthful, but the finding was this: In both mice and phase one human clinical trial, prolonged fasting cycles of two to four days lowered white blood cell counts. And then, when patients refed, their bodies generated entirely new immune cells from stem cells. They called it the first natural intervention ever shown to trigger stem cell regeneration of an entire whole organ system, which means old immune cells out, new immune cells in. Like a factory reset to install new equipment and then get back online. You see, healthy cells have metabolic flexibility. They could use sugar for fuel. When sugar gets low, they run on ketones. No problem. But cancer cells, by definition, do not have that flexibility. They are stuck in sugar burning mode. There's a phenomenon named after the scientist who discovered it almost 100 years ago. Otto Warburg was his name, and it's called the Warburg effect, and it describes exactly this, that cancer cells are sugar addicts. They can't pivot. When you fast for 5 days, glucose drops, insulin drops, IGF-1 drops, and the metabolic environment shifts to where healthy cells are now thriving and damaged cells, maybe even pre-cancerous cells, your body is getting rid of it. In other words, good cells get stronger, bad cells don't adapt. In 2022, a paper came out of the journal Cancer Discovery, a real journal, real human patients, real oncologists involved, showing that a 5-day fasting mimicking diet used alongside standard cancer treatment was safe and reshaped anti-tumor immunity in patients undergoing chemotherapy. The treatment simply worked better, and the side effects were lower. This is the level where fasting stops being a weight loss tool and starts becoming something you have to take seriously as one of the most powerful biological interventions a human being has free access to. 5 days once a quarter or at the very minimum once a year. I started doing this back in 2018. It's been a game-changer for my health. Now, I do recommend if you're new to this, do it under guidance. Do it with medical supervision or work with your healthcare practitioner, especially if you're on medication. And all of this, by the way, none of this, I should say, is medical advice. You know, make sure you talk to your doctor before making any of these changes.
Then we have level seven, the seven-day fast. The healing mode is your identity. Level seven isn't really about a seventh day, it's about who you become when you've done it. By the end of a seven-day fast, almost every system we've spoken about already is operating at full intensity. Stem cells are activating, inflammation has collapsed, all the immune cells are out, growth hormone is sustained, and your liver has been clean for days. And somewhere around day five and day six, something changes psychologically that you can't really get any other way. You realize you were never as hungry as you thought. You realize the constant chatter your brain made about food was a habit, not a need. You realize you are not fragile. You realize the body you've been driving around your whole life is capable of doing things you never asked it to do. That's the actual point of level seven, not the days, the identity shift. People who've done a seven-day fast, even once in their life, describe a relationship with food afterward that the average person doesn't have. They eat when they're hungry, they stop when they're full. The constant low-level fixation gets quiet, because you can't be controlled by something you've already mastered. And you might think, "How can someone go without food for seven days?" Well, here's a crazy stat, the Guinness World Record for the longest recorded fast is 382 days from a Scotsman named Angus Barbieri. He went 382 days without food. Now, he was obese, he had a lot of fuel on his body to eat during that time. He went from 450 lb on day one to 170 lb on day 382. He was medically supervised. All he had was coffee, tea, some nutritional yeast, and a multivitamin, and he transformed his health. I'm not telling you to fast for a year, but hopefully this inspired you do some level of fasting. Whether you're on level one, go to level three. If you've done level three, go to the next level.
And look, before you go, the most important thing for you to do before you increase your levels is to become more of a fat burner, to achieve metabolic flexibility. That's why I wrote this brand new book. It's coming out July 21st, but you could pre-order it right now and get some free bonuses like some free chapters, which will teach you how to get your body in a low insulin fat burning state, which makes these fast more effective, and it also makes it easier. So, if you want to get this, go to ketoflexbook.com or scan the QR code on the screen. When you pre-order it today on either Kindle or hardcover or even Audible and Spotify, and I narrated those audios myself, you'll be automatically sent those bonuses. Read the book. It's going to be incredible for your level of expansion here with your fasting. It also has fat burning recipes, and it has a way for you to customize your approach, men versus women, women who are in their cycling years versus women who are postmenopausal. So, get the book. And also, drop a comment down below for those watching on YouTube, and let me know what level you're currently at. What's the highest level you've achieved? And tell me what level you're trying to hit by the end of this year. I read all the comments, and I respond to as many as I can. And if you got even one piece of new information from this video, share it with somebody you know, because their bodies have these same levels, too. They just don't know it yet. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. And if you enjoyed this lesson, I just published a video on this natural Ozempic alternative that costs $2 a day, and it works way better for fat loss and satiety than these GLP-1 drugs. You're going to want to watch this video. Here's a clip from that video. Then click the video on the screen coming up in a few seconds, and I'll see you in the next lesson.
>> I kept thinking, there's no way something this simple does what these studies are claiming, and the numbers stopped me cold. [music] It cuts cravings. It keeps you full for hours longer than carbs and fat. It stabilizes your blood sugar between meals. It protects the one thing that determines whether your metabolism works in your 40s, 50s, and