Transcription
Fasting can simultaneously wreck your hormones, increase your cortisol, and resolve type 2 diabetes, and reduce the speed of aging. It just depends on whether you're using it in the right way for you. How do you know if you're overdoing fasting? Well, here's the signs in order.
Dave Asprey is a biohacker, fasting expert, and best-selling author. He has helped millions of people lose weight and fix chronic disease, and it starts with butter coffee. How does fasting help with fat loss? It's transformative. Now, I'm gonna do like the douchebag internet influencer thing because I have to. I used to weigh 300 lb, and I'm not on a diet or anything like that. This is what I look like right now. And I am 52 years old. I don't do that to say, "Everybody look at me," but I'm the worst possible case. So if I can do this, it will be easier for you.
It is hard when you start fasting, 'cause you think about food all the time. So one thing is, you could tough it out. That works. Or you could do a good trick. Get a good coffee that doesn't have mold and stuff that makes you tweak. Add some butter. It can be a teaspoon. It could be a tablespoon. And some MCT oil. If you'll just trust me and try that, you will have zero experience of hunger.
What are some things that break a fast? Sugar or protein and most amino acids. As little as one gram of sugar can break a fast metabolically because insulin's going to go up. So you're saying, "Oh, it's just one bite." No, that broke your fast. OMAD, being one meal a day fasting, I don't think it's a great idea.
If someone does fasting in a bulletproof coffee, how quickly can they see results? I've seen people lose up to 21 lbs in 7 days. I had one client lose one pound per day for 75 days straight.
This episode features Dave Asprey, and we're talking about how to lose weight and prevent disease while having butter coffee. P.S. It's fasting. Now, if you're learning from and enjoying these free episodes, please hit the subscribe button because we know that real food is medicine. And by the simple act of subscribing, you can help share the message to millions more people that need to hear the truth.
And now for the episode with Dave Asprey. Dave, welcome. I am super happy to be here, Reena. One of the easiest ways to lose weight and get healthy is through fasting. But when you look online, different experts say different things. Some say do this type of intermittent fasting. Some say do alternate day fasting. And some experts even say that women should never fast. And this could be very confusing. And if you do the wrong type of fast, this can lead to hair loss, weight gain, and even cortisol spikes. So today, Dave Asprey, who is a New York Times bestselling author and a fasting expert, will share what fasting can do for you apart from just autophagy and weight loss, the different fasting lengths that are suitable, especially if you're just starting, and the biggest mistake that you're probably making.
So Dave, my first question, what is the biggest thing that fasting can do in the body? Make you live longer? That's always good. There's that. So fasting can simultaneously wreck your hormones, increase your cortisol, cause your hair to fall out, and resolve type 2 diabetes, improve your performance, uh, make you younger, and reduce the speed of aging. It just depends on whether you're using it in the right way for you. And how do you know if you're using it in the right way for you? Well, um, you've got to set goals. And I wrote the first major book on intermittent fasting that kind of brought it into our consciousness. It was called The Bulletproof Diet, and it sold about a million copies. People lost a ton of weight and had all these other health changes, and it, it really shifted the way we talk about a lot of things like butter. And I wrote Fast This Way, three or four books later, because I noticed a lot of people, men and women, were making this mistake. If something is good, more of it must be better. Like, that's not even true of water. If you drink too much water without salt, you can die. And people die in marathons all the time from something called hyponatremia, which is a lack of, of salt because you drank too much water that washed the salt out of your tissues, and then they didn't work. So fasting, it's, well, who are you? How are you doing today? And if you had, if you were hungover and you had a cold, would you go to the gym and lift heavy and work out? You'd be like, "That would be dumb." Well, so if you're blown out, fasting is a stressor, like exercise.
So how do you know if you're overdoing fasting? Well, here's the signs in order. And depending on if you're a man or a woman, they usually come at different times. Men can overfast for longer without noticing it. But the first sign for men and women, for women, over fasting, it usually hits about 4 weeks, maybe as long as 6 weeks in. And for men, it's usually 6 to 8 weeks or even a little bit longer. The first sign is if you're tracking your sleep with a ring or a band, you're going to notice reductions in your sleep score. You'll have frequent waking at night, and your heart rate variability or morning readiness score will go down. That's your first sign. But you've already learned that fasting makes you feel good. Like, fasting is so good. So the problem is likely you're not doing enough fasting. So maybe you'll just skip two meals that day. I mean, this happens all the time, right? That's why I wrote a second book on this. So once that happens, now you're in trouble because the next thing is, if you're a woman, your monthly cycle is irregular all of a sudden. And if you're a guy, you wake up without a kickstand the way you're used to waking up. And that's because your cortisol levels are going up and up. And if you keep doing it, you're going to start seeing thinning hair in both men and women. And these are signs of high cortisol, right? So how would you know? Well, that's how you know you're doing it. But the first sign is if my sleep isn't very good, uh, then I'm going to have substantial problems with it, right? Okay.
So it sounds like when we talk about fasting, we hear so many different benefits that fasting can produce for people. Maybe we should talk about some of these benefits and then talk about the right way to fast, because that was what your book was about, Fast This Way, and how to make fasting easier. So the, so I have a few benefits here that fasting can provide for people if they do it the right way. The first is healing and preventing chronic disease. How does that work? Well, one of the biggest causes of metabolic disease and many other diseases are symptoms of metabolic disease, it's insulin dysregulation. So fasting can help you to become insulin sensitive again. And you might say, well, what other diseases? Uh, in my longevity book, which is called Superhuman, like, well, there's four things that are likely to kill you. So if you want to live to at least 180, like I do, fully functional the entire time, well, then step one, don't die from dumb things, which would be diabetes. Because if you get diabetes, your chances of dying from the other three go up dramatically. So diabetes is a precursor to heart disease and cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer. So keep your metabolism regulated. And when it comes to fasting, well, if you're tracking your blood sugar, you can tell if you need to do some fasting. You get a continuous glucose monitor. Cost about 100 bucks a month. It goes on the back of your arm. I'm actually not wearing mine. I just took it off and I'm waiting for a refill. So what you'll find is if your blood sugar is regularly high, you need to fast more. But don't fast so much that you're stressed all the time, because that's not going to work either. Okay.
Just a question about the blood sugar and the blood glucose. What is a normal range? Well, if you're into longevity, you want to have a fasting blood sugar, and you wake up in the morning, below 87. And after a meal, depends on what's in the meal. If you're eating something that you think is healthy, like oatmeal, well, it's probably going to go up 40 or 60 points because oatmeal raises your blood sugar kind of like drinking a Coke. Uh, so, uh, but if you're eating, you know, a piece of steak and your blood sugar spikes like that, okay, they're different things. And strangely, different people will have a blood sugar spike differently from different foods. I know people, they eat blueberries, which normally aren't too bad, and it totally blows them out. So then, okay, you know, that's a food you can eat 10 blueberries, not a hundred, like your friend, and have the same blood sugar response. So it's really helpful to track your blood sugar, but that's, uh, that's kind of an advanced technique. But if you have a lot of weight to lose, or you have autoimmune issues, or chronic fatigue, or you're just really not feeling like yourself, you probably have high blood sugar and you probably have insulin sensitivity issues, which means your blood sugar goes up, your body secretes insulin, but your cells don't listen, and you fix that with intermittent fasting. Absolutely. Intermittent fasting, the right way.
Now, the next benefit, apart from the healing, um, is weight loss. People want weight loss. And I would pertain that to saying fat loss, not just weight loss. How does fasting help with fat loss? It's transformative. Now, I'm going to do like the douchebag internet influencer thing because I have to. I used to weigh 300 lb. And I'm not on a diet or anything like that. This is what I look like right now. And I am 52 years old, according to the calendar. I don't even listen to the calendar. I, I identify as being 35 because my lab tests support that. But how is it possible that as a 300 lb computer hacker, I can look like I play water polo and I exercise 20 minutes a week? Because you can get your metabolism working again. And like, I don't do that to say, "Everybody look at me," but I'm the worst possible case. Like, if you saw Jurassic Park 1, I was the fat computer hacker from Jurassic Park 1 at a time in my life. So if I can do this, it will be easier for you. And intermittent fasting does that. And the way you do it for weight loss is you skip breakfast. And if you were to be perfect, you would have your largest meal of the day at 2 p.m. and you'd stop eating when the sun goes down. And well, the problem is, for most people, that doesn't work because we have lives. So it works pretty well. Eat as early as you can for dinner and have lunch. And strangely, the studies show this is a woman, a study of women, which is a harder population to study and less, it's, it's more difficult to lose weight if you're a woman. But even there, a 12-hour fast three times a week starts to show benefits in metabolism and insulin sensitivity. A 12-hour fast? That's so long, dude. You were asleep for 8 hours. Like, if you stopped eating at 8:00 p.m., went to bed at 10:00, woke up 8 hours later, and waited 2 hours to eat, you did a 12-hour fast. Anybody can do that. But what you really want to do is a 16 or 18-hour fast. And for men, we can pretty much do it whenever. But for women, um, it, it turns out that longer fasts are better during the follicular phase, day 1 through 14. And then, uh, when you're ovulating, you want to make sure that you're doing slightly shorter fasts, like 14-hour fasts, or maybe even just having breakfast if that's what you want. Like, there's, there's no moral judgment. And in your luteal phase, uh, 15 to 28ish, depending on how long, um, you are, um, ovulating and all, um, your progesterone level goes up, and you would want substantially shorter fasts. Bottom line is, don't eat after the sun goes down. Wait as long as you can in the morning, and you will lose weight. And some people say, "Oh, this is because you eat less calories, maybe." But I tested this. I ate 4500 calories a day for almost a year without exercising substantially to try and show that I was going to gain less weight than I should. And I lost weight because I was intermittent fasting. So it changes nutrient partitioning. It's not a good idea to overeat calories. And here's the thing. We've been wired since we were, um, since we were little to say, well, if you don't eat six times a day, your, your body will go into starvation mode. That's nonsense. But starvation mode, that's death. Like, that, that actually triggers emotional reactivity to food. So getting over that's a big thing. And then a lot of us, including me, um, will eat when we're lonely. I don't do that anymore, but I used to until I identified that. So my first big book was, "Here's how to lose weight." That's The Bulletproof Diet. And it is hard when you start fasting because you think about food all the time. The average person thinks about food. A third of the thoughts in their head are tacos, tacos, tacos, right? So what do we do about that? Eventually, you learn to just train your body to say, "Well, I'm not going to die if I don't eat for a month. So I'm pretty sure I can skip breakfast and I'll be okay." But it doesn't feel okay at first. So one thing is, you could tough it out. That works. Or you could do a good trick. You could get some of my newest coffee. It's called Danger Coffee. It is mold-free and it has a therapeutic dose of trace minerals in it. But get a good coffee that doesn't have mold and stuff that makes you tweak. Put some MCT oil. And I invented this years ago. It used to be called Bulletproof Coffee, but it doesn't have to be the Bulletproof brand beans, um, in order to use this recipe. So add some butter. It can be a teaspoon. It can be a tablespoon. It needs to be a little bit of butter or ghee and some MCT oil, which is an extract of coconut oil. That combination, when you blend it up, you drink it, you just won't think about food for 4 hours. And it doesn't break a fast. And I've pissed off all kinds of very angry young influencers who actually never had to lose any weight. When I say it doesn't break a fast, there's all kinds of science for that. Um, but if you'll just trust me and try that, you will have zero experience of hunger while you're in the middle of, uh, of just learning how to go without. And I've trained 75,000 people, um, in a fasting challenge on how to go 24 hours without food. And you have that coffee thing in the morning, and you just don't worry about food all day. Like, it's crazy. You have another one at lunch if you really feel like you need it, but your energy never goes down. You don't have cravings, and you're like, "Oh, I've got this." It's, it's very different than like a juice fast, which is not a fast at all. I just call that a, I love diabetes fast.
It's so interesting because I've actually tried that, the bulletproof coffee. Um, and I wanted to ask you more questions about that because does it matter if you use the MCT oil? I use it, just straight up MCT oil. I had a lot of anxiety and heart palpitations from it. Then I was looking at your recipe, and it's a C8 cal, um, caprylic acid, uh, which is very designed for optimized brain function. So I'll let you talk more about bulletproof coffee, exactly what ingredients you have to use, and how does it not break a fast? Well, there are four types of MCT oil on the market. And the C8 MCT oil, and you get this from a bunch of brands. Um, C8 MCT oil is the one that raises ketones the most. And the goal is that if you fast for 3 days, your body will go into fat-burning mode called ketosis, which increases consciousness. A lot of meditative traditions, a lot of meditative traditions will use fasting to put you in this, like, high-performance, high-clarity state. Or you could use this type of oil in your coffee to do it. If you're using just MCT oil in your coffee, I would say, well, which coffee was it? Um, you get anxiety from a lot of coffee because of mold contamination in it. I, I don't drink any coffee that's, uh, untested for mold because it gives me anxiety. My body's sensitive to mold toxins, and there's a lot of it in American coffee. So do you want to put butter in there? Because it slows the absorption of the MCTs, and if you just MCTs, it doesn't taste as good, and it's more likely to upset your stomach. Um, for some women in particular, some guys too, but it's usually women. If your thyroid function is low, when you use the MCT, it wakes your thyroid back up, and you get heart palpitations because you're treating your thyroid, and now you need less thyroid medication. Wow. And so many people have low thyroid and Hashimoto's. I do. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I've had Hashimoto's since I was 26. Although I got rid of the antibodies many times. They sometimes come back, but Wow. I didn't know that. Okay. I thought that Hashimoto's was something that was more prevalent in women, but apparently men can have it as well. So that's a good thing about the bulletproof coffee and fasting can help autoimmune conditions as well. Many, many people have reduced or even resolved their autoimmune conditions on the bulletproof diet. And the bulletproof diet isn't owned by the company Bulletproof. Um, it's, uh, it's a, a book called The Bulletproof Diet. And just to be super clear, I don't work for Bulletproof. I don't have anything to do with that company anymore, but I was the founder. And, um, and when I wrote this, this thing, it was because it makes you feel like you're bulletproof and like I can do anything. I have so much energy. And it turns out food toxins are a major problem. So one reason that you feel good when you're intermittent fasting is that you're eating less toxins. And you're like, "Oh, look at that superfood. That superfood is actually causing your anxiety. You just think it's good for you." And it's funny because all of this response, ultimately, it's about how your body processes the environment around you, which creates an emotional state in you, and it creates an energetic state. And food is one of the variables in the environment that your body processes to try and figure out what's going on out there. And I say your body's processing it because your body does all this stuff before your brain gets any signal of what's going on. And Heavily Meditated is my newest book that's just coming out now, where I talk about what does food do to your consciousness, right? What does our thinking about food do? What does our cravings? What, what do all of those things do? And it's kind of an extension of Fast This Way, which was my big, or my second fasting book. Um, and I wrote Fast This Way because there's actually two kinds of fasts. There's a spiritual fast, and the context for Fast This Way, I fasted in a cave for 4 days. I hired a shaman to drop me off in a cave because I knew that if I didn't eat, I would get hangry and hypoglycemic, and I knew that I actually had a tendency to eat more if I was lonely. So I'm like, I'll be lonely and I'll be hypoglycemic, and there's no one around, so I'll just have to, you know, suck it up and deal with it. And I, I tell the story of fasting in the cave in that book. And it was a really profound experience because I thought I would feel like crap, and after four days, I felt so good that I walked 10 miles and climbed a mountain trying to find the road. Oops. Uh, and I felt great. I hadn't felt better in years because of that clarity, consciousness state that comes from fasting. That's why these ancient traditions, ancient monks and yogis all around the world, um, there's a fasting tradition that's about raising your consciousness, raising the energy in your brain. So there's a spiritual fast, but you're probably not going to want to go to work all day and deal with all your stuff. So you could say, "That's what I'm doing." Or, "This is a functional fast, or a performance fast, or a working fast. Okay, I'm going to go to work today. I don't want to be angry. I don't want to be blown out." And for that, what are the things you can do that make it so you don't suffer while you're fasting and you get the metabolic benefits? That's what Fast This Way is. And then this notion of extending the consciousness side of fasting into a whole book on what are all the things you can do to change your state of your body and of your consciousness so that you can show up the way you want. Uh, and fasting is, it's a tool for consciousness. It's a tool for improving your metabolism. And anytime your metabolism works better, you have more energy. You have more energy, you have more awareness of yourself and the world around you.
As Dave mentions, fasting has so many different benefits like fat loss, healing, and the spiritual side of fasting. So fasting is really important, but what we eat when we break our fast is as important. Now, if you don't know, I have followed a high-fat carnivore lifestyle for the past 5 years. Now, I'm not saying that people need to go zero carb, but for me, this has helped me so much. It's helped me fix my anxiety, depression, low thyroid, or hypothyroidism. It's also helped me lose 25 pounds. I didn't know I had to lose 25 pounds, but I was eating more, and I was eating more butter, and I was eating more red meat. Now, what helped me stay on track this whole time was my team of carnivore doctors because I was very much like you. I had the same questions like cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, how much protein and fat should I eat on a carnivore lifestyle? And that's why I created a private carnivore community completely off social media where you can ask our team of carnivore doctors all of your medical questions. And these are your favorite carnivore doctors that you see on this health podcast. One of the things I love about the community are our monthly challenges. We have challenges like the Lion Diet challenge, dairy-free challenges, and high-fat challenges. And these are all designed to help our members get the best results and also stay on track. So if you want to try carnivore or you would like medical support from our carnivore doctors, just head to go.carnivore.com or try our free 90-day carnivore challenge. P.S. Coffee is included.
I want to talk about how people can start fasting because you mentioned you were away 4-day fast. You were lonely. You were, uh, you said hypoglycemic. It's what happens when your blood sugar crashes. We've all felt it. Like, I'm kind of tired, and then all of a sudden, someone says something that wouldn't set you off, but you get triggered because you don't have enough energy to not be triggered. It's a thing. Absolutely. So how does somebody start fasting if they're just new to this? What are the different stages of fasting? Well, your first goal should be to do something like a 14-hour fast. Like, that's not that hard to do, right? Um, it's, it's actually easy to do. And once you start out, uh, with that, oh, that wasn't so hard. In fact, you might just go after 14 hours, I could just wait another hour. Then you did 15 hours. And your goal is, over the course of 2 or 3 days, to get to an 18-hour fast, which means you have dinner at 5:00, have an early dinner, have as much as you want, doesn't matter. And then, like, okay, what's 18 + 5? It's 23. You have to wait until 11:00 a.m. the next day. Can you have an early dinner and wait till 11:00 to have an early lunch? I'm pretty sure you won't die. And if you go to fastwithdave.com, it's totally free, but I have like a one-week fasting challenge course. Like, I'll just, like, it's, it's just a gift. I just to teach people how to do it, and I take you through at the end of it a one-day fast. So your job to get started is just do a short intermittent fast, early dinner, late breakfast, and then work your way up. And eventually, what's going to happen is you're going to say, you know what, on Monday, I went and I, you know, I had dinner at 5, and then I ate at 10:00. But by Wednesday or Thursday, I say, you know, I had dinner at 5, and then lunchtime came, and I wasn't that hungry. And maybe I used one of the fasting accelerators, like a bulletproof coffee or whatever, at lunchtime. So I just didn't even feel hungry. So, you know what, I'll just wait till five o'clock comes around, and then you have dinner, and you're like, "Oh my god, I just went 24 hours without eating, and I didn't even think about food, and I didn't die." And it's really almost an empowering experience. I've had so many people reach out, uh, going, "I didn't think I could do that, and it wasn't that bad. In fact, it didn't bother me at all." So, we have this big story of fear around fasting, and it's like, seriously, you can handle this.
So doing the 14-hour fast, if someone's just new and they progress to 18 hours, you can have the bulletproof coffee in the morning. Doesn't break the fast? Is that right? It doesn't break the fast. You want me to explain why? Yeah, please. Okay. There's two things that happen during fasting that define a fast. One is your insulin levels do not rise. A third-party group tested 300 different breakfast options to see what they did to insulin, not to blood sugar, but to insulin. The number one doesn't move insulin at all on that list was butter and MCT oil and coffee. It doesn't change insulin whatsoever. That means, huh, it's almost like you're fasting. And then the second thing is a compound called mTOR. And mTOR is a signaling compound in your body. It causes tissue to grow. So you think, "Oh, that would be good, right?" Well, unless it's cancer. So you want to have mTOR that's high sometimes, like when you lift weights or exercise, and that's low the rest of the time so you don't get old and you don't get cancer and all that stuff. So if you, if you raise mTOR levels during a fast, you broke the fast. Well, it turns out if you have only fat during a fast in normal amounts, you didn't change any of the molecules that are involved in, uh, involved in in a fast. So there you go. It's a fast. And I'd like to say I invented that. I did with MCT and butter. But it was Tibetan yak butter tea that inspired this. And the Tibetans figured out a long time ago, if I drink a little bit of yak butter blended into, uh, into tea, and I'm at very high altitude, like they have more energy that way. And that was the inspiration for it. And it's because of this effect. It doesn't change mTOR. It's like your, your body is, I don't have to worry about food now. Uh, I feel sated, but I didn't get any of the signaling from food that says I need to turn on all of the things that fasting, that breaking a fast would turn on.
Okay, question for you. I'm thinking that people are going to try to make this bulletproof coffee, and they're going to say, "Well, I only have heavy cream. I only have an MCT." So heavy cream, MCT oil, any brand? Heavy cream doesn't work. This drives people crazy, and it drove me crazy, crazy. So heavy cream has intact molecules of cream that have a membrane on them called a milk globule membrane. Now, if you just want to be ketogenic and you're not fasting, heavy cream and you're not allergic to it, heavy cream is delicious in coffee. You should whip it up first, put it on there, like it's amazing. You're just on a keto diet. You're not doing fasting. When you make butter or ghee out of it, you break the membrane. Now the water in the coffee can directly interact with the fat molecules. And I, I funded research at the University of Washington where the top water chemistry biologist in the world, named Dr. Gerald Pollack, uh, figured out that butter and MCT oil, when you expose them to water, especially warm water, i.e., coffee, makes it, structures the water to be the same kind of water that's inside your cells. It's if you drink fresh vegetable juice or or fruit juice, which I don't recommend for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons that works is that's the same structure of water. And there's like quantum fairy water, and that may work, but what I'm talking about is you can see it on a microscope. This is an actual defined physical change in the water. Cream won't do that. Butter or ghee will. And just to be really clear, if you call it bulletproof coffee because that's a trademark, it's, that's a bulletproof beans, uh, and I, I don't have anything to do with them. And if you look at their packaging, you should see it doesn't say mold-free the way it did when I worked there. And, um, I, I noticed some changes in the labeling. Danger Coffee, on the other hand, Danger Coffee says mold-free and it's got a large dose of trace minerals that increase the electrical activity in cells. So you would want to get electrolytes anyway in your coffee. So I recommend Danger Coffee with butter and MCT these days. That's what I drink.
Okay. Well, I'm going to link everything in the description of this episode because again, finding mold-free coffee, a good quality one, is pretty hard. There's going to be a lot of links, I feel, because we're going to talk about other things as well. Danger Coffee will, will absolutely feel different than any other coffee. It's, it's delicious. And, um, the, the trace minerals and electrolytes, you need them when you're fasting because you can lose minerals if you just drink water. So it's an added benefit. And it's called danger because who knows what you might do? Like, it's the good kind of danger because you have so much energy. Like, I could do anything. Like, I might go skiing. I might ask that person out. I might ask for a raise, you know, like, I'm, I'm, I got it today. It is that vibe that I'm looking for, not the whatever angry danger vibe. I think that could be the reason why some people don't feel great on coffee. It's the quality of coffee that matters.
I want to ask, I want to ask about autophagy. Fasting. People love autophagy. Now, is that really a thing that happens when you do a really clean water-only fasting? You can have autophagy during a water fast. You can also have autophagy during a protein fast, right? So eating protein will stop autophagy. One of the things I talk about in, uh, in Fast This Way is doing a protein fast where you eat less than 10 grams of protein per day, which is very hard to do. It's easier just to eat nothing for a day. But if you did do that, you'll still have autophagy. And you can also take supplements that turn on autophagy. Uh, fasting will do it, but you're better off to take supplements while you're fasting. The kind of supplements I'm talking about, you only have to take them two days a month. It's really easy to turn on autophagy. And autophagy is important. In my longevity work, I call senescent cells, which is what you get rid of with autophagy. These are zombie cells. They're basically cells. They got old. They didn't die. They just sit there, and they don't do what they're supposed to do, and they kind of just sit there and make inflammation. And as you age, you get more and more of these that create free radicals. So you might as well get rid of them, and autophagy is how you do it. Fasting works. Senolytic agents, like there's a brand called Qualia Senolytic, that you take two days a month to get rid of this, and there's clinical studies for it. But it's not that hard to get rid of zombie cells. You just need to practice fasting, plus supplements is better. Fasting alone works. Longer fasts are better. Doesn't have to be water only. You'll get plenty of autophagy if you have a little butter, and you won't be hungry.
Okay. So with the autophagy, how long do you have to fast to start getting those benefits? You know, there's various research and various numbers. I think it's highly individualized and it depends what else you're doing. Did you get good sleep? Uh, did you exercise? Did you not exercise? But generally, longer fasts are better, and more than a day and a half is generally recommended for that. But if you do an 18-hour fast and you take some senolytic, just take the right supplements, it's not that hard.
And so, does this differ for men and women? Should women do autophagy fasting or prolonged fasting or extended fasting? If you do an extended fast, it can be exceptionally powerful and healing, depending on what's going on in your body. And you would want to do it during your follicular phase. Don't do it during your luteal phase. And a 72-hour fast can be profound, or a five-day fast. But understand, if you're going to do a five-day fast, you're not going to feel great. Nobody does. After the, the third day, you'll probably feel pretty good, and you'll be like, "I'm like, my brain is so sharp. I have so much clarity." And then you'll say, "I think I'll go to the gym." And like, after 20 steps, like, "What just happened?" So your energy levels aren't as high. And if you're like juggling a, a job, and you have kids, and, you know, stuff to do at home, that can be a lot. So I recommend if you're doing more than three days, especially the first time, like set aside some restorative, recovering, journaling time when you do that, not just, you know, go hardcore. Like, do it on a weekend. Okay? And then for a man, it doesn't really matter. Like, they can just do extended fasting whenever they want. They can, but you can overdo it, right? So if your heart rate variability is low, your recovery score is low, uh, it's not going to be as good. And I see a lot of younger guys, and this is something I would have done when I was younger too, like, "Well, I'm gonna do a five-day fast and I'm gonna lift heavy every day." Um, that's called the fasting equivalent of punching yourself in the face. It, it doesn't make sense. You're going to raise your, your cortisol levels much more than you needed to, and probably break down more muscle than you should. So what you want to do is you want to fast for as long as you're going to fast. If you fast and then exercise and eat right away afterwards, you get the biggest benefits of all. And that's true of men and women.
I have a question. Some people, they do these extended fasts, even 2, 3 days, and then they lose weight during the fast. As soon as they start eating again, they gain the weight back. Why does that happen? Probably because they're eating at night and they're eating the wrong foods. They're usually eating seed oils, omega-6 fats, and they're eating a lot of carbs, or they're eating inflammatory plants. I promise you, if they broke this, if they broke the fast with a ribeye and some guacamole, they're probably not going to gain the weight. It's because they're eating bagels.
All right. So during your eating window, what would you recommend people to eat? Because the bulletproof diet is high-fat, low-carb. Is that right? Not necessarily. The bulletproof diet is a low-toxin, cyclical ketogenic diet. But cyclical ketogenic means you're not always in ketosis. Is that when you want to lose weight or you want high performance? You cut carbs until you're in ketosis, or you use MCT oil to give you ketones even if you are not on a low-carb diet. You can eat sushi and drink a bulletproof coffee with an ounce or two of MCT oil, and you will raise your ketones to the point your brain works again. I've tested this over and over. So you can have carbs and have ketones if you're doing this, but I would call it moderate carb. It's just, there's a very big difference between having McDonald's French fries as your carb and having some white rice with butter. Same amount of carbohydrate, same amount of fat, very different metabolic response. So it comes down to what is it that you're eating? And in The Bulletproof Diet, I go through protein, and I go through fat, and I go through carbs, and all the different categories of food to tell you, these don't have any toxins. These might be causing problems for you, and these are probably causing problems. So it's like, there's innocent foods, there's suspect foods, they're guilty until proven innocent, and then there's basically kryptonite foods you shouldn't eat. And that is totally free. I mean, you can get the book, which is educational, but you can also just go to daveasprey.com and search for, actually, it's daveasprey.com/roadmap, and I'll send it to you for free. Like, I just want people to know, hey, these foods are probably punching you in the kidney. You know, you, you think your spinach and kale are healthy for you? They are not. They're causing cravings. They're causing gut irritation. They're causing kidney stones. They're causing gout. They're causing sore stuff throughout your body. Oh, you thought they were healthy because they're plants? You go into the forest and just grab some plants and eat them, and you'll go to the hospital. Most plants will kill you on the spot. Just because you can eat a plant doesn't mean it's all good. So the bulletproof diet innovation was, let's find the plants that have the most toxins, and let's only eat those if we're starving to death. And it turns out a lot of plant foods, you can eat them in a famine, but if you eat them every day, you're not going to like your life. And that's one of the problems we have in the world today around health. Absolutely. All these plant toxins, and even those ones that you mentioned, the spinach, um, high in oxalates, so that can cause a lot of, um, detrimental effects to our health.
Let's talk about things that we can do to enhance a fast, and we can talk about those foods that you mentioned a little bit later, but, um, things to enhance a fast. How to make fasting easier? We spoke about bulletproof coffee. Uh, what about electrolytes and salt during a fast? Why is that important? Well, everyone who listens at all to food guidelines is deficient in electrolytes, especially sodium. We've been told that sodium is bad for you. Even though throughout history, the first trading routes in the world were for salt traders. H, I guess it was so bad for them that they needed it more than tobacco, which they also would have liked to have. And then they followed it up with tea. So maybe salt is a necessary nutrient. Maybe Romans paid the soldiers in salt for a reason. And it's because the higher your sodium levels, up to eight or even 10 grams a day, the better your cells can make electricity. And raising your sodium intake reduces your insulin insensitivity. You become more insulin sensitive when you have more sodium. So you're fasting, you're trying to fix this problem, and when you have enough salt in your water, the water can hydrate your cells. One of my companies is called Upgrade Labs. We have nine locations in the US. It's a franchise, and we're opening about 21 more, right now. And when clients come in every time for a workout and recovery session, we measure their cell hydration using clinical grade tools. And a huge number of people, like, "But I drink 10 glasses of water a day. I'm a good person." Like, your water had no sodium. It had no electrolytes. So inside your cells, they're little bags made out of fat. And inside them is water full of salt. It's saltwater, just like the ocean level saltwater. So you put this water outside them that doesn't have any salt in it. How's this water going to get in? It's going to dilute the salt. If you dilute the salt in your cells, you die. So the body will not let the water in, and then you have clear pee, and you just wasted electrolyte. It didn't work. So I don't drink water without minerals in it ever. I'm drinking mineral water if I drink, like, sparkly water, or I always put at least sea salt or electrolyte powder in my water, and not the sugar-based electrolytes, the sodium-based ones. And I've done extensive research. And if you're saying this can't be right, the president of the American, let's see, there you go, the president of the American Hypertension Society, whose name is Michael Alderman, by the, I'm remembering this from a talk I gave 20 years ago, so it took me a second. He had a quote. He said, "Well, I'm just not going to look at how much salt people think they ate, which is what all the studies are based on. I'm going to measure the salt in their pee, so I actually know." And after measuring 3,000 people for a couple of years, here's the summary of his study in his own words: "If you want to live longer, eat more salt." This is a guy who's studying high blood pressure, who believes in blood pressure medication, studied what salt actually does, and said, "Eat more salt." Because low salt raises something called renin, an enzyme in the blood that increases cardiovascular risk. So if you're going to be fasting, every time you drink water, there should be some sea salt, and probably like half a teaspoon, not just a little pinch. And you can get electrolyte powder, you're better off to add some potassium. But if you just did a good quality sea salt, or better yet, salt from a mine, you're going to feel so different, and you won't have hunger cravings nearly as much.
How much salt? Um, I do about eight grams a day for my body weight. So about six grams a day. What does that look like in terms of teaspoons, putting it in your water? Um, well, this is between food and everything else. So let me, um, let me figure out what that is. I like to get very specific because I think people don't understand six grams, eight grams. Let's see. Um, you're going to love this. Um, it's about two and a half teaspoons of salt per day, and sometimes three, even four. It's whatever your body wants. So that's the thing. It's quite a lot of salt, and I think it's much more than what people would be doing.
What type of salt? You said high-quality mineral salt. What, what are some good brands? You can get salt mined in the US from Redmond. There's Orik's sea salt. Those are the two most prominent ones. There's also Himalayan salt, but a lot of that comes from Pakistan, where they are mining it with explosives, and I've heard about explosive residues in there that are an issue. So, um, high-end, hand-mined Himalayan salt would be good, but I think you're better off to get either Orik's or Redmond.
Okay. What are some things that break a fast? If people want to be very, like, vigilant, the bulletproof coffee is fine. Fat is fine. What is something that people are going to have that is just going to break it? Sugar or protein and most amino acids. How much sugar and protein? There's some debate about how much sugar and how much protein. Um, I'm not sure if there's even a consensus. Let's see. I think people, they want to know this. Like, if I have a bite of something, is that going to just kick me out of my fasting? Oh, totally. It's going to raise your insulin 100%. So my take is, especially on sugar, don't do it. And I just look for the latest research while we're talking, and it says, as little as one gram of sugar can break a fast metabolically because insulin's going to go up. And if you were to have, like, a squeeze of lemon, which has a trace amount of sugar, that usually doesn't have any effect like that. And certainly, like two grams, this is like a tiny little sprinkle of sugar on your tongue, is going to be a problem. Uh, and so you're saying, "Oh, it's just one bite." No, that broke your fast. So you really, really want to not do it. And if you have one or two grams, you'll probably still be losing some weight, but
It's it's going to change your hormone response, which is not what you want. Okay. And then just to confirm, if you have a Bulletproof Coffee, even if it's like all fat, maybe it's 300 calories. I don't like to talk about calories, but people might think, "Well, that's a lot of calories." Not going to break your fast. Fat has very little or no influence on insulin. Mhm. It has no, no influence on insulin. And you could technically, I don't recommend this, but you could put canola oil and it still wouldn't break a fast. It's just bad for you because it also wrecks your metabolism. So don't, don't do it.
And it doesn't have to be like the Bulletproof brand coffee. The recipe, I mean, many, many people use that recipe now. But it's butter. Grass-fed butter works substantially better than regular butter for a bunch of technical reasons. And C8 MCT oil. Those are the two things. And you can put that in, you know, your favorite coffee. And I'm going to recommend, um, Danger Coffee. But I don't want to, uh, make it appear that I'm representing Bulletproof in any way because I don't think they like that. They have their own path and it's not mine.
I think that if they purchase your book, "Fast This Way," it's going to discuss everything that we're talking about here pertaining to fasting. Again, we're going to talk about heavily meditated in a moment. I do want to ask about fasting mistakes because people want to know, well, what is the biggest mistake that I'm doing that's going to wreck my results? One of them is eating late at night when you break your fast. That's a bad idea. The other one is having that one bite. Because we talked about, you know, one gram of sugar, the tiniest amount can break a fast. Protein is just about as bad. One to two grams of protein can break a fast because protein will raise insulin. Protein will raise mTOR. And so unfortunately, you just can't have anything but water and fat and maybe some coffee or tea or something like that.
Do you think OMADs all the time are a good idea? OMAD being one meal a day fasting. Um, I don't think it's a great idea. And when I popularized intermittent fasting, um, one guy I, I respect greatly, um, Jack Dorsey, uh, from Twitter and Stripe, he got into it very early. I went up to Twitter headquarters to talk about putting in a cafe to to serve the butter and coffee, uh, at Twitter. And he got into, "Well, I just do one meal a day, Monday through Thursday, and I just don't eat Friday, Saturday, Sunday." And it was a rigorous schedule. And pretty soon he started looking lean and gaunt. But I mean, your brain works all the time when you do that. He's running two companies. I get it. Like, so what do you, what do you do? Well, I think you want to look at the stress load you have. Look at your sleep quality. And if you got great sleep last night, do one meal a day. And if not, it's okay to have lunch and dinner. Like have a four-hour fasting window. You'll be okay.
And one thing I recommend that's so controversial: have pancakes on Saturday. They're not gluten pancakes. That's probably not a good idea. But look, if you only ever eat fat and protein, you will become insulin resistant. You need to have some carbs. Your gut bacteria that are the good guys that regulate your blood sugar, called Akkermansia. If you never eat any carbs, they live on the mucus that's supposed to protect your gut lining. Well, when you don't eat any carbs, you can't make any more mucus. And then the Akkermansia, that are good for your metabolism, they will eat your gut lining. And then they're correlated with Parkinson's. So you should have some carbs on occasion. Have them once a week, and you'll have much more successful fasting.
It's so interesting. I hear this, um, opinion around the introduction of carbs or not having carbs or having carbs like once a week or once in a while. What do you think about the carnivore diet? Well, I tested what we now call the carnivore diet when I was looking for the edges of my first big book on fasting, the the Bulletproof Diet book. And I went for many months, actually, on a diet of meat and butter and eggs. I felt amazing. I got leaner. Um, I didn't need much sleep. I started what became a hundred million dollar a year company while I was working full-time as a vice president. Another one, like, I got the boost from it. But after about two months, I started waking up 12 to 20 times a night without remembering that I was waking up. But my sleep monitoring stuff went crazy. I've been tracking my sleep for 17 years. So the, the technology was actually a headband back then. And I was wake up like, "God, I feel like crap, no matter how much I sleep." And I gave myself an allergy to eggs because that thing I talked about with Akkermansia happened. So I love the carnivore diet to get rid of plant toxins that are probably just trashing you. But do the carnivore diet for a couple weeks or a month, and then have carbs that don't contain toxins. So many people get results on the carnivore diet, not because they're avoiding all carbs, because they're avoiding all toxins that usually come with carbs. So if you were to say, "I'm just going to go eat a whole bunch of whatever plants," there's stuff in there that isn't that's good for you and not good for you at the same time. But if you were to have white rice, which is a very low-toxin carb, you're probably not going to have the same negative response as if you had even some healthy fruit, depending on which fruit it is. Some fruit, like kiwi fruit or raspberries, are very high in irritants like oxalates.
Be interesting to see how people feel about that in the comments. Um, so question for you. You were over 300 lbs. So what did, what was the routine and what did you eat and how did you fast to actually lose weight? Cuz I think people would want to look like you, Dave, at your age with abs. What was your routine back then? Well, I was desperate to lose weight. So I went on a low-fat, um, low-calorie, u semi-vegetarian diet, and I worked out six days a week, 90 minutes a day. It was brutal. And I did this for 18 months straight. Didn't matter if I was sick or had other stuff. It was just my top priority. I'm like, "I know exercising and eating less will make me lose weight." It doesn't work. It's a lie. Right. And at the end of that, I definitely had probably damaged my metabolism, raised my cortisol, and I never lost a pound. I still had a 46-inch waist at the beginning and end of doing that. It was really discouraging. So that was my routine. Try what's supposed to work, and it just doesn't work.
So then I, I said, "Oh, maybe I'll go on a," now it's pretty obvious, back then it wasn't, the data wasn't out there as much, but I said, "I'll go on a keto diet." What we now call a keto diet. I lost 50 pounds in 3 months. The other 50 lbs took me 10 years to lose because I would gain 10, lose 20, gain 30. Like, it, it would just yo-yo around all the time. And the reason I felt called to write the Bulletproof Diet was I had to figure out, it's not as simple as protein or fat or carbs. It's which carbs, which protein, which fats, at what time. And if you get that right, you can lose all of the weight and keep it off. And I've kept it off forever. I do not experience substantial hunger ever. I don't have cravings anymore because I learned the difference between cravings and hunger. It's, uh, it's a big difference.
What is the difference between cravings and hunger? I think people want to know that. Well, this bridges us into the, the whole consciousness discussion, which is a big focus of "Heavily Meditated." I mentioned, oh, a third of our thoughts are about food every day. And there's a sense, some people call it intuition, but there's also something called interoception. And this is how does your body sense its internal state? And so an example of that would be like, I feel nausea, or I feel hunger, or I notice like a little bit of extra energy, or I can feel my heart pounding. So having interoception is really important. And that'll tell you the difference. A craving feels like, "If I don't eat something soon, I'm going to die." And it's, it's a high-pressure situation. Most people think that's hunger because it's all you've ever felt. It was all I ever felt, right? And it comes from nutrient deficiencies and blood sugar swings and all sorts of things and just eating food that's highly addictive. Hunger is a gentle knowing, like, "You know what? My body would like some food, and I know that I am safe and I'll be fine if I don't have food for a long time, but now would be a good time, and I could take it or leave it. But if it's there, I'll take it, but I don't need it so much that I'm going to eat, you know, the Arby's or whatever stuff you didn't want to eat, right?" Not to pick on Arby's. I'm sure that they're not. Subway would be even worse. Gross. So like, I don't, I don't eat any fast food ever, but I'm just like, "Gh." So that's the difference.
And part of this is that so much of what we have in our food is wrapped up in our mitochondria. And fasting trains your mitochondria to chill out. So the way your mitochondria process reality. There's, and this is all from "Heavily Meditated." There's a third of a second window where your mitochondria and your body decide what reality is, and then they send you an emotion about reality to control what you do. So it's a separate intelligence inside your body. And the first thing it pays attention to is safety. And these are all F-words. So it's like, fear is something potentially dangerous. And it's probably nine times more energy goes into that than is really necessary because if a tiger eats you, it's game over. So you're constantly vigilant. And your cells are doing that before you could think. It has nothing to do with your desires, your consciousness, your morality. It's literally your operating system in your body doing this like scary, scary. Okay, fear. Next one is food. Eat everything. So this is what bacteria do because you are based on bacteria. I am based on bacteria. All humans are. So they're processing reality for us. Because if you and I had to think about every little thing in the world around us and decide when to breathe, when our heart should beat, and when to tighten a sphincter somewhere in an aorta or something, we would never pay attention to anything. So your body is doing all this stuff for you, but it's also trying to keep you from starving to death and getting eaten by something. So fear of food. There's another thing that all life has to do to stay on Earth for multiple generations. It's also an F-word. Do you know that one? Fear of food and multiple generations. All life has to do. Can't have kids without it. Fertility. There you go. I, I knew that you weren't going to say the other F-word, but yeah, it's fear, food, fertility, right? So in order, your body is processing reality. It's like, "Do I need to run away from it? Can I eat it? And can I hump it?" This is what all life does. Whether you're a dog, whether you're a tree, they do it in different ways in trees, but they have their own process for that. And whether you're a human, before your brain ever gets even a, a knowing that something happens, it's a very fast process. The fact is, your body is craving food because your mitochondria, it's like a Labrador. Like, it, it's a big dog. And some dogs, like, they'll get up on the counter and they'll eat all the food and they're like, all over the place. And other dogs will sit there with a piece of popcorn on their nose until you tell them. You just train your nervous system to be the dog with the popcorn on its nose because, oh, you'll be fine if you just wait. And fasting trains you to do that. And it also helps with consciousness. So you have fear, food, fertility, and then you have friend, which means you have a community around you. All life is wired to support other life. And then after a friend, uh, we have forgiveness, which is how you let go of grudges. So when you start on a path of biohacking, which includes intermittent fasting, eventually you go, "I have so much energy, I want to live longer. Like, I like this." So you end up starting with a goal of maybe losing weight, and now you want to live longer. So you become a longevity person. And you say, "I want to be happy. I don't just want to have energy. I don't want to be angry and miserable all the time." So you become a consciousness person. And that's why "Heavily Meditated" is an important book because I go through the reset process that you can run against your mom if she kept putting food on your plate and made you eat it when you didn't want to, because I promise you, that's part of what you are unconsciously doing with food. Has nothing to do with your conscious brain. This is in your operating system. You, you cannot see it. It is invisible. It just feels like it's true, and it's not real. It's, it's so true.
Um, it's so interesting that when I was looking at that book, "Heavily Meditated," there's all these truths that were coming out around past trauma, past experience affecting your behavior today. You mentioned the reset process. What does that involve from a high level for somebody to understand how their triggers can affect their, um, inability to lose weight, inability to heal today? How does it affect it? Triggers are something that your nervous system does to keep you safe. So at some point in your life, whether it's when you were really little or an adult, your nervous system, before your brain was even engaged, it's like, "Oh, I am not safe right now. What does it look and feel like when I'm not safe right now?" And if that happens, it's going to say, "Next time that situation arises, feel unsafe. Like, feel stress." And what does stress do? It raises cortisol. What does high cortisol do? It gives you a belly. It, it disregulates your insulin, right? So it turns out learning to chill out would be really good, or learning to just not have triggers in the first place. So most meditation practices are going to teach you, "Notice these emotions and the feelings coming in. Do not be reactive. Just notice." I'm like, "That's a lot of work, man." Like, I've done this in monasteries all over the world. Like, it's so much work. But okay, we'll do it. Right? At a certain point, like, "What if my body would just stop doing that and the voice in my head would shut up, and it wouldn't make me think about tacos? It wouldn't make me think I was unsafe when I wasn't unsafe?" So the reset process, I developed this over 10 years with more than a thousand CEOs coming through, gluing electrodes to their heads and teaching them how to turn off triggers forever consciously. And the reset process is the result of that. And I'm giving away this, it's $16,000 to come and spend five days with my neuroscience team in a, in a mansion, like this is a brain upgraded place. And instead of going to 40 years of Zen, you could read "Heavily Meditated" and just sit down with a journal in a quiet time and do the reset process. And what it does, you find a specific thing that pushes your buttons, and then you let it go permanently and forever. So the next time it doesn't push any buttons. That'll get rid of cravings unless they're physiological cravings at that point. Figure out why that's happening. And that's usually because you're eating the wrong stuff. I think people don't invest the time enough in something. So the, the resources and the information in "Heavily Meditated," people don't think about, um, this kind of information, like past trauma, past triggers, past everything that is in your body creating all your experiences in today's world.
I wanted to ask you about the breathwork because that was quite fascinating. It's just more than there's different breathworks that you can do to calm yourself down. Can you explain some of them? Sure. "Heavily Meditated" is a book about all of the techniques and technologies and methods to change your state so that you can reprogram yourself and so that you can be in a flow state, in a state of forgiveness or happiness or high performance, uh, or just a, a place of peace. And some of the techniques are different types of meditation, but most of these are things that accelerate or in some cases even can replace meditation. And it turns out breathwork can replace meditation. So five minutes of breathwork does more for your brain state than five minutes of just meditating. And if you do breathwork and meditation, it's even better. But if you just did breathwork with no meditation, you get great benefits. So there's kind of three buckets of breathwork methods in "Heavily Meditated." And one of them is calming breathwork. The most common one of these is called the box breath. This is, oh, four or five seconds in, like, and then you hold for four or five seconds, and then you do five seconds out, and then you hold empty for four or five seconds. Now, if you do that several times, what most people who've never done breathwork will experience is that when your lungs are empty, you start feeling a panic response, right? And you're like, "Wait a minute. I, I know I'm not going to die for at least two minutes if I don't have air. Why do I feel like after three seconds of having empty lungs?" Like, well, it's because your body is going straight into fear, right? Because it, you've never paid attention to that. And so there's nothing wrong that it's doing that, but you can train it to be calm. And it turns out that pattern of breathing will drop you into a parasympathetic rest or reset mode. And the Navy Seals use it to get out of that after, you know, they, they do a mission or something. If you wanted to accelerate it even more, you could breathe in for four seconds and breathe out for eight seconds. Having an out breath that's twice as long as your in breath is another way of creating peacefulness and calm. Wow.
And you also mentioned different brain waves. Um, I think people don't understand delta, theta, beta, alpha. What are the brain waves and how does it affect our energy, mood, and performance? It's pretty easy to understand them. Most people understand like a deep bass, you know, your drums and your tubs and all that stuff. And then you get up into the kind of the lower vocal tones, and then the mid-range, and then like the really high thing that my voice will never do. So, okay, those are different sound waves. Well, your brain does the same thing, but with electricity. So the very low base, that's delta. This is when you're asleep, and your body's making growth hormone, fixing your metabolism, and all. And then above that is theta. And this is dreaming. This is where intuition, creativity, daydreams, they all come from. And then above that is alpha, where you're relaxed and alert and kind of peaceful. And then above that is beta, where you're like, "Okay, I'm ready to go. Like, let's, let's go. Like, let's, let's fight. Let's achieve. Let's race. Like, let's pick up heavy things. Like, let, let's go do things." And above that is a kind of mystical state called gamma, that usually only happens in advanced meditators. And the focus of 40 Years of Zen has been how do I turn gamma on in people in a way that's not supposed to be possible, but we do it, and people have profound experiences when they can turn on gamma. So the, the set of teachings in "Heavily Meditated" is how do I help you choose which brain state you're in. But it's not enough to say, "Well, I'm in, you know, an alpha relaxed brain state." That's like saying, "I played a song in C note or C chord." Well, what song was it, right? So number one is, where are you on this low to high spectrum? And then, is your brain making a beautiful melody, or is it chaos? Because you can have some pretty ugly acid jazz at a certain frequency, and you might not like that unless you're into that, right? So how do you make your brain so it's peaceful and orderly? But most importantly, how do you make it so you get to control what your brain does instead of something outside of you controlling it, whether it's Instagram, uh, whether it's, you know, your mother-in-law yelling at you, or like, whatever, uh, or whether it's a taco sitting in front of you like, "Oh my god, look at my whole, my whole brain got disregulated because I'm having a food craving and all I can do is think about it. The cookie is yelling at me." You can be in charge of your brain entirely, and it creates an incredible amount of peace, but it also creates an incredible amount of free energy in your body and in your brain. When you have free energy, it goes into willpower. So then if someone puts the cookie out there and the cookie succeeds at yelling at you, at least you have self-control to say, "I'm not going to eat the cookie right now." But if your blood sugar is low and you have a disregulated nervous system and you're thinking about your mother-in-law, you will eat the cookie, and then you'll think you're a bad person. You're not. Your mitochondria got the best of you. It happens to all of us.
That describes so many people. They can't control themselves around food and cookies and carbs and sugars. Um, so how can they purchase your book? "Heavily Meditated" is it available for pre-order right now? Yes, you can order "Heavily Meditated" anywhere you like to order books. Um, bonus punch, going into bookstore. And if you go to my website, daveaspbury.com, and if you go to daveasper.com/heavilymeditated, it's probably even better, but just go there, there'll be a link. And there's some free bonuses for people who want to pick up a copy right now. Perfect.
Final question for you. If somebody does all these fasting methods and protocols, Bulletproof Coffee, how quickly can they get results, like for example, weight loss? Well, I have seen people lose up to 21 pounds in seven days. I had one client, well, I'll tell you why in a minute. I had one client lose one pound per day for 75 days straight. It's not that impressive. If you lose 21 pounds in seven days, you know what that means? You got a whole lot of water in your body. You add inflammation and you add glycogen storage because most low-carb diets, you're going to lose 7 to 10 pounds depending on your starting weight. But if you're fat, you'll lose that because your body is storing carbohydrate and you need 2 grams of water for every gram of carbohydrate stored in your tissues. So you're just basically dropping water weight and like, "Oh, look, I lost weight." That's the thing. So people who lose that much, like 20 pounds, that is a big loss. It's not typical. Most people will lose 7 to 10, sometimes 14 pounds in in a week, the first week. And after that, it's harder. But you can usually lose 3 lbs of fat, four pounds of fat a week. But you got to do what's in the book. If you're eating bad fats and cheap-ass plant proteins, it doesn't work. The quality of protein and quality of fat and the timing of your meals really matter. And saying, "Oh, I just cheated once and had a cupcake and you didn't get results that week." It's because you cheated once and had a cupcake. You got to do what it says. And it doesn't have to be the Bulletproof brand of beans anymore. They, you read the label on what, what's in them or not in them. Um, I highly recommend Danger Coffee because, well, listen, I'm going to leave all the links for you. Dave, like when I go on your website, it's absolutely incredible. Every part of health, longevity, you have the answer for. And it's really, um, simple. It makes sense. And, you know, I think that you've helped so many people with the work that you do. And the, uh, book coming out is just very exciting as an extension of the mind. I kind of likened it to fasting of the mind. I wasn't sure what you felt about that, but it's, I like that. It's like we talk about fasting of the body, but fasting of the mind and clarity and reprogramming yourself to be a better you. Dave, thank you so much for your time. This has been incredible. If people want to find you more, should they just go to your website? Go to daveasper.com. Follow me on Instagram or TikTok, wherever you like to do that. I put out a lot of content. And Reena, thank you for your kind words. I've interviewed 1,250 top experts on my show. So I learned all this in my 20s from my elders. People in their 80s taught me what is now biohacking when I was 25 and desperate. So it's an honor to be able to pass it on. It's an honor to hear from you. Well, thank you so much, Dave. And I'm sure that we're going to see you and hear from you very soon. All right. Thank you for joining me today on this episode with Dave Asprey. If you'd like to know more information about the Bulletproof Coffee and how to start fasting the right way and get Dave Asprey's books, simply go to the description of this episode. Click on "Get Faster Fasting Results." Open that up, and you'll see all the information there. Now, if you're learning from and enjoying these free episodes, please hit the subscribe button. You can also find me on Instagram and on X under the name of The Primal Podcast. And if you love this episode, you'll enjoy another episode I did with Dr. Yvonne Burkhard. We spoke about the worst environmental toxins lurking in your home that are causing things like cancer, infertility, and impacting your hormones. Dr. Burkott will talk about the 20 main products that are personal care products that you're currently using right now that are affecting your hormones, but most importantly, what to use instead. Finally, thank you for your interest in root cause healing, and I'll see you next.