Transcription
Welcome back! This is Dr. James Sung, where clinical excellence meets excellent results. Today, we're going to talk about the three-day water fast: clean the brain, reset your energy. Let's get into some of the benefits and what happens during the three days.
Let's get right into it. Benefits include improved immune function, repair of damaged cells, removal of dysfunctional cells and pathogens, reduction of neural inflammation (basically, things like primed glial cells), increased autophagy (which breaks down cells and other pathogens in our system), and decreased autoimmune disease. It also benefits gut flora, resets the gut flora, and increases DNA repair.
Okay, so there's a lot of benefits to a three-day fast. Now, if you want to do the three-day fast, I would suggest consulting a physician, especially if you are insulin-dependent diabetics. If you go on a fast and continue to take your insulin, it's going to be problematic. For people who are menstruating, I suggest not doing a three-day fast during menstruation because it could really deplete you. Hypoglycemics—people who go without eating—can get shaky, irritable, and angry. Those are the people who do not want to do a three-day fast immediately; they need to get into more of a keto-adaptive state before going on a three-day fast.
People who are on a lot of different medications should also be cautious, as medications can change or dosages can change related to how much you're eating and depletion of energy. So just make sure if you have any of these conditions, please consult your physician before going ahead and doing a three-day fast.
Now, let's get into some of the things that happen during a three-day fast. From 8 to 12 hours, you're going to start to deplete your glucose or sugar and your glycogen stores. It will decrease, and you're going to have a bump in hormones called glucagon, human growth hormones, cortisol, and adrenaline. These are the things that will start to bump up your glucose levels. People don't realize that there are hormones that increase glucose in our system as we need it, and there's one hormone called insulin that brings glucose down in our system. So it's really four to one—four hormones to one—in terms of regulating blood sugar.
You will also increase ketones from fats. As you deplete your glucose stores or glycogen stores, your body will start to use fat for fuel and produce something called ketones to fuel your body. You will also start to experience hunger. In the next 18 to 24 hours, you're going to have a further depletion of glycogen stores, and you're going to go through a process called gluconeogenesis. Gluconeogenesis is the process of producing sugar through the liver; it's basically amino acids, acetate, and glycol. You can use that to fuel your body. Your body will have a natural mechanism to fuel itself.
There will be a further increase in autophagy. Autophagy is when you have cellular debris—things that are in your system that are kind of old and broken down—and it will start to clean those things out of our system. It will also start to decrease autoimmunity because a lot of autoimmune conditions are related to food proteins. So if you have things that you're eating and it's causing inflammatory responses, the fact that you're on a fast will start to decrease that autoimmune process.
It will decrease neural inflammation. When your body is used to using glucose, especially in the brain, it can cause some inflammatory processes. When you switch your fuel from glucose to ketones, your brain will start to become a hybrid. It will start to use ketones for fuel rather than glucose, and it will start to decrease inflammation. I have a separate video on this, so I'll link that below.
It will also increase hormones called brain-derived neurotrophic factors and human growth hormones, and you'll start to see ketones in your blood. What you can do is buy a little ketone meter; it's like a glucose test. You just prick your finger, and you can check your level of ketones. In the first 18 to 24 hours, you're going to see 0.5 to maybe 1 in terms of the ketone levels. Now, everyone's different in terms of how fast they can go into ketosis. If you're someone who's very experienced and you do intermittent fasting and you're on a ketogenic diet, you're going to get into ketosis a little bit quicker.
On day two, you're going to continue to increase brain-derived neurotrophic factors as well as growth hormones. You're going to increase autophagy, and this is where the real cleanup starts to occur. On day two, you'll start to break down tau proteins, amyloids, Lewy body alphas, and nucleons, and primed glial cells—all in the brain. These are all related to things like post-traumatic stress, concussions, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and Lewy body dementia. So it starts to break down these aggregates in our brain and clears them out.
There's a process called mitophagy that will start to get rid of inefficient mitochondria in our cells. Mitochondria produce energy (ATP), and you want mitochondria to be very efficient and produce the number of ATPs that they are supposed to. It will start to get rid of things that are damaged and clear them out of our system.
Your insulin resistance starts to come down. For people who are pre-diabetic or diabetic, your insulin resistance—or the problem of not enough glucose transport—will start to break. Insulin resistance will start to improve, and it will decrease fatty liver. The reason is that you're using fat for fuel, and part of that fat will come from the liver. So fatty liver will start to break down, and you can clear fatty liver if it's not too far advanced.
Ninety to ninety-five percent of your energy will start coming from ketones on day two, instead of glucose, because you haven't eaten. Your hunger pains will start to actually subside. For a lot of people, they say, "I don't really feel hungry; I feel actually pretty good."
On day three, there will be continued autophagy and clearance, as well as a reversal of chronic disease. People who have chronic autoimmune disease, chronic fatigue, and a lot of issues with joint pain will start to clear to a certain extent. It will increase your immune function, so your immune function will start to reset and improve, and there will be an improvement in the overall function of the white blood cells. You'll also have increasing stem cells. These stem cells will differentiate into other tissues, so the stem cells will actually help you heal.
Now, the goal of this three-day fast is what we call metabolic flexibility or metabolic switch—the ability for your body to use both glucose and ketones whenever it wants. If you are someone who eats every day—three, four, five, six, seven, or eight times a day—what happens is you're using insulin mostly because you never let the sugar drop. You get this wild fluctuation, with spiking sugar, spiking insulin, dropping sugar, and dropping insulin. So you get this wild swing.
The purpose of a three-day fast, or any type of fasting, is to even out the blood sugar throughout the day. If you eat, let's say, what we call one meal a day, you'll have a spike in insulin, and then you'll have a drop. Your other hormones will kick in, like glucagon, growth hormones, adrenaline, etc., and will stabilize the blood sugar for the rest of the day. So that's what we want: stable blood sugar throughout the day, not this wild fluctuation.
As you do this intermittent fasting or three-day fasting, there will be a lot of health benefits, but the main point here is that it will start to stabilize blood sugar, and your body will become a hybrid. This means that when it has sugar, it will utilize it; if it doesn't have it and you skip a day of eating, then it will start to use ketones as fuel. Your engine becomes more of a hybrid engine rather than a gasoline engine, so it's very important to do that.
Now, when you break your fast, you don't want to just go ahead and say, "All right, I'm just going to eat whatever I want." You want to use things like maybe bone broth or vegetable soup to break your fast, and maybe a small amount of protein. When you're doing the fast, you can use distilled water if you like, or purified water would be best. You can use minerals and sea salt, especially on day two. Maybe 24 to 48 hours in, you want to start to use a little bit of minerals because you might feel a little bit depleted. So you can use minerals or sea salt in your water, and you can drink it. You can also use sparkling water, but not flavored water, because what can happen with flavored water is that you can start to increase hunger pains in our system.
Now, for those people who can't get through a three-day fast, I'm going to show you a method of doing a three-day modified fast in our next video. So we'll talk about how to do it without strictly water for the three days.
All right, so these are all the benefits; this is what happens. I have multiple videos on intermittent fasting, so I'll link those below. What you want to do is, if you ever go through it, comment below and let me know how you felt during the three-day fast and what the benefits of the three-day fast were for you.
Now, when you do a three-day fast, there are wide benefits; however, you have to be careful about some of those conditions that I talked about in the beginning of the video, and you want to consider consulting a physician before doing it.
All right, my name is Dr. Jin Sung, where clinical excellence meets excellent results, and we'll see you guys next week on the healthy side. Have an awesome day!