The WORST Intermittent Fasting Mistakes That Lead To WEIGHT GAIN | Dr. Mindy Pelz | Transcription

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Introduction

Intro (00:00)

What are some of the biggest things that people get wrong about fasting? Oh, it's a great first start. The biggest thing is they hook onto one fast and they do it the same way over and over and over again. So once they come to fasting, they go, "Okay, wow, I've got great results. I feel incredible. I'm just skipping breakfast. I'm starting to eat at noon every day." And they just do that for months and months and months and then they get stuck. Why would that repetition be a problem? And is there like a right entry point? Yeah. Because I think if people haven't tried fasting, they probably just think, "Just don't eat." Or, and this will be interesting, there are things that I probably don't consider a fast that you might consider a fast. So let's get into that. Is there one beginner's entry point to fasting? Yeah. You know where the beginner's entry point is? If you really want it to be like smooth, it's with your food. So if you want fasting, that whole world of fasting to become much easier, the first thing is change three ingredients. Change your oils, change your carbs so you're eating more of nature's carbs, less refined carbs and get off any toxic ingredients. If you change those three things, now you're going to metabolically switch over into what we call the fat burning state much quicker. Now you don't have to and a lot of people don't, but if you're asking me, "What's the easiest way to do it?" It's just, let's clean up a little bit of the diet. Now the second step is let's just start pushing your breakfast back like a half hour, an hour and you're going to, what you're going for is you're trying to compress all of your food into one eating window. And if you do those two things, it's kind of like there's a click that happens and all of a sudden it's like, "Oh, you're fasting, it's easier." And it just becomes effortless because it's our natural state. It's the way the body was designed to be. But toxic ingredients, toxic food makes us more insulin resistant. Eating all day is destroying mitochondrial energy. And so we're not able to make that switch as easily, which is why I like to start with the food. Interesting. Okay. So to do a fast well, step one is to reorient your diet to something that isn't causing metabolic damage. I'm not sure. Yeah, inflammatory metabolic damage. So you're looking like, let's use an example, canola oil or like cottonseed oil or some of those more. Basically the oils that everything you eat, unless you are buying whole food and cooking yourself is cooked in.

Understanding Fasting And Its Benefits

What beginner step to fasting speeds up the process of metabolically switching? (02:34)

Okay. So there's Bing, Bing, Bing, that's the answer right there is let's get back to whole foods, foods that are coming out of nature. And if I went into your house and I just swapped out all the oils for avocado oil and olive oil. You'd be, you, you wouldn't notice a taste and it's the same to cook with. And if you're doing that mixed with whole foods and meats, if you eat meats, then now you're actually more congruent with what the human body wants. It's when we get all these fancy ingredients and toxic inflammatory, easy to make ingredients that it makes that metabolic switch so much more difficult, which is why I always say just let's, and it's not like it doesn't have to be rigid. You can be playful about it. Like let me just see what I can do to stop eating so many inflammatory oils. Mindy, there's nothing playful about starving to death. So this is, it's interesting. As you're saying this, I'm like, wow, I'm one of the people that would probably propagate some of the myths and create problems for people because I'm forgetting how hard it was for me to metabolically transition because I did it so long ago. So going back to this framing of, okay, before you want to fast, you want to get things right, my, literally until nine seconds ago when you said that, my instinct would be to tell people, hey, just start lengthening the window between what you eat is. But if I flash back to when I just, when I went low carb, so I didn't even consider fasting, didn't think about fasting. And honestly, I think, you know, 20 plus years ago, when I started all this, I would have thought of fasting as dangerous. And part of the reason I would have thought of fasting as dangerous is going without food, but really it was sugar because I was a sugar burner at the time. It hurt. You know what I mean? Like, so I'll do this frequently when I have a guest on around fasting. So I'm fasted right now. I'm over 19 hours into my fast as we're doing this. And there's no sense of suffering. And don't be wrong, I have a mild sense that I'm hungry. But it's not overwhelming. It's certainly not impairing my cognition. But when I first went low carb, it was so devastating. And I had these terrible headaches. And I remember my wife and I got in this big fight because I was like, if I just eat a cookie, I will feel better. And she was like, then eat the cookie, but stop complaining. Like whatever you're going to do, either get on the other side of this or eat the cookie, but don't not eat the cookie and keep complaining. And so I was like, okay, that's probably pretty good advice. So for somebody who's at the beginning, walk me through, you mentioned it, but let's go a little bit deeper in terms of what is that that clickover that people are looking for? What is metabolic flexibility? What is being a sugar burner? How do we get on the other side of that? Yeah. So it's such a good question. And it's interesting because I'm thinking as you're talking, I'm like, yeah, you know, my advice used to be, hey, the door end of fasting is compressed, the eating window and leave a longer period of time for fasting. But we just saw millions of people on my YouTube channel where they would write in comments and they're like, I can't metabolically switch over. I'm really struggling. So then I started to change. Well, let's start by cleaning up a few things. So they're fasting, but they feel terrible. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

479 What does being a sugar burner actually mean? (06:02)

So and that's the thing is that we need to look at this like a switch. So when you're eating food, you are in a sugar burner state. So what's happening is that your blood sugar is going up and then you stop eating and then the blood sugar starts to come down and usually when it gets to a certain point, you get hungry and so you eat again. And so you're just doing this all day long. But what we're saying when you want to be metabolic, metabolically flexible is we want to keep your blood sugar fairly low so that we can switch you over into this fat burning place. And once you switch over into the fat burner place, there's a whole world of healing, internal healing that is going to happen a lot more than just weight loss. There's a lot more brain like to your point, I love that you show up fasted. I showed up fasted too. And I do it as a performance tool because I know I'm going to get ketones that are going to power up my brain. I know inflammation is going to come down. I know I can get rid of senescent cells. I know I can reboot my immune system. I know I can add more dopamine receptor sites the longer I stay over here. But if I'm over here bringing my blood sugar up all the time, getting this switch becomes like rusty and you just can't get over there. So the suffering happens in that switch. And that's what I'm trying to get people out of because fasting is like sleeping. It is our natural healing state and just because we know sleeping is amazing doesn't mean that everybody can sleep. It's really interesting. So I want people to understand and some people will be, they'll already know a lot about fasting and fair enough. But for people that don't understand, there are actually two fuel sources that your body can use, glucose, sugar. That's where most people spend all their time. And even if you're eating a high protein diet, some of the protein can be turned by your body into glucose. And so most people live their entire lives there in a modern context. But from an evolutionary context, your body would need to be able to go, whoa, there's no food. I can't just keel over and die. And this is the whole point of storing body fat. But I think one thing that people miss is that if you're constantly in taking calories, especially if you're eating a lot of carbohydrates, you may never, and I mean never, switch over into burning your fat. And so your body is just storing. And I remember the first time it hit me that, hold on a second, there are people who they are literally only getting fatter their entire lives. So the fat that they put on when they were nine is still just stored. And it's never been released because you're only going to release that fat if the blood sugar drops to a certain level for an extended period of time and then your insulin becomes low and now the fat can actually be released into the body. That was like startling. And I was like, yeah, oh my God. So what we're trying to do is create a scenario where, and for people that are just listening not watching, we both keep doing this motion with our hands of like clicking over, you're trying to create the setup so that your body will go, Oh, word, I don't have any food coming in, so I need now to switch the machinery, the literal metabolic machinery over to burning ketones instead of glucose. Once you do it, and this is the thing I always try to get people to understand, once you do this, it will change your relationship to hunger. It isn't that you don't feel hunger. Like I'm hungry right now. It's not overwhelming by any means, but I am hungry, but I'm not distracted by it. I'm not. It's not diminishing my performance. And so it goes, hunger goes from this thing of like, it's all consuming. It changes my mood. I can't be productive to yes, I would like to eat, but there's no sense of urgency. So well said, so well said. So I had the same aha moment when I first dove into the science of fasting. It hit me one day. I was like, Oh my God. We have the wrong discussion when it comes to weight loss and food. We're over here looking at the sugar burner system and we're saying, this is the diet that, you know, maybe it's vegan, maybe it's carnivore, maybe it's the HGH diet, maybe it's weight watchers, whatever. We're over here debating the weight loss diet and we've left the whole fat burning system out of the equation. Like how did we get as humans to this point where we have only been looking at food as the possibility for gaining or losing weight? We've missed out a whole metabolism. And I think that's what I want people to understand is this is how your body burns fat. It does not burn fat by manipulating food. It burns fat by manipulating when you eat and how much time you're giving the body a break from whatever food you've chosen. That's how you burn fat. It's really interesting. So when we talk about step one, if you want to get into fasting is actually to change the foods that you intake when you are eating. When I think about some of the fat diets that have happened where people are doing juice cleanses and stuff like that and it ends up not being sustainable, is it, are they, I mean, they must be getting into a fat burning mode just through the sheer reduction of calories.

Increase your fat burning potential (11:22)

But is it causing, is it just that it becomes so hard to switch the metabolism over that it's a very unpleasant thing to go that long without calories because the juice is so high in carbohydrate? Well, so with the calorie conversation, all we've done in reducing calories over here or out exercise or up in our exercise is we change our set point. So let's use an example. Let's say you bring in a thousand calories or let's give it a little more, 1500 calories. Still very low. Very low and you exercise 500. So now you have a delta of a thousand. So in order to keep the weight that you're at, you have to always have around that delta of a thousand calories. What happened with fasting that changed the weight loss game is people got out of that mode and they started to see weight. If I just change the time period, then what happens is I go over here into this fat burning mode and I can be there 19 hours, 20 hours, 36 hours is one of the greatest weight loss fasting lengths. And my body is so smart that what it does is it says, to your point, hey, word, there's no food coming in. So we're going to click over into another fuel source called ketones. And we're going to make this ketone by burning fat. And the only way we can get that is by clicking over. We can't even get that by reducing our carbs down. We can't get that by struggling in a low calorie diet. And every time we're over here trying to manipulate this system, we are only finding ourselves suffering and not being able to sustain those results. Which is why I think the fasting movement took off is all of a sudden people were like, wait a second, over here, there's a whole nother level of health I never knew was possible. And I could never accomplish when I was focused on just the foods I was eating.

The inadequacy of calorie reduction (13:36)

So let me ask then, so I have, I've done a fair amount of fasting. I intermittent fast 365 days a year, which you may tell me is actually not ideal. I vary the length. So on the weekends, it's going to be maybe 14 ish hours, but during the week, it's, you know, 18, 19 hours. But if I'm just doing caloric restriction, so I'll paint a picture. I used to be 60 pounds heavier and I over two years I dieted down and I did what I'll call rabbit starvation. So I was eating virtually no fat, virtually no carbohydrate. It was just literally boiled chicken breast and steamed broccoli. I mean, that was basically my life for two years. And it was miserable. Yeah. It was really miserable. It was still super inflammatory. And but I didn't understand any of that while I was doing it. And now I can control my weight so much easier through fasting. So but why, why would it be that keeping my calories and I was about at about 1500, which is why I made a point of saying that's really low because that was painful for two years. Why would that be so deeply unpleasant? Whereas even doing a punctuated 24, like if I did, it would be if I had to redo it all, even just doing a 24 hour fast once a week probably would have led me to roughly the same results. So why was and I actually don't know the answer to this. Why was one so unpleasant and the other so manageable? Because if I'm burning fat, I must be in ketosis, right? Not necessarily. Not necessarily. And it would have been interesting back then to put a ketone reader on you know, to measure it and see where you're at. When what in that example, what was happening is you were bringing your blood sugar down and then up and then it would go down. And when it would go down, if you ate again, it would you would just it would go back up and then it would go down. Even though I was just eating chicken breast and broccoli. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, broccoli, you know, it's gonna it's got glucose and it has to chicken and to your point protein will will raise will elevate your blood sugar. But you're just going up and down within one system. And again, it would have been really interesting to know your ketone levels because once you click over and you're making ketones, what ketones do is they turn off the hunger hormone and then they also sharpen the brain. And you when you when you think about that, why would the body do that? I mean, this is the way I'm the way my brain thinks is I always go into what is the body trying to do? Well, back in the primal days, when we had to go hunt for food, we needed this alternative fuel source to power us up so that we could we could go and find food. So when keto when you're burning fat and you're getting this ketone rush, hunger gets turned off, mental clarity becomes very, very sync focused and and your muscles start to power up and you become a hunting machine. Because you're supposed to go find food for your survival.

The purpose of ketosis (16:41)

So now in this day and age, we don't have that. We can get stay on the couch and get onto our phone and just have door dash bring us food and we don't ever have to leave the sugar burner system. But if we don't, then we never get the healing that's over there. We never get the performance angle that's over there. So on what I would say is in your example, even though it was low glucose, you weren't raising your glucose, you were probably not getting as much of the ketone rush that you could have used. If you had just taken that same diet and compressed it into maybe an eight to 10 hour eating window, now that diet would have probably worked better for you because you would have clicked over into ketosis and felt amazing. And so interesting and you're right. I wish I had had. So when I'm really tracking this, I do fingerprints like constantly. Also I'll wear a continuous glucose monitor, but it exists at least easily back then. But now, so I didn't know about ketosis when I was doing this. So I can't swear. But now that I know ketosis, I can feel it. I know when I click over it. Like I can guess when I hit about .5, I can tell you I'm at about .5. When I hit one, I can get pretty close. I'm usually within like .2 of where I'm at, which is pretty trippy when you think about how it's like, oh, I know this feeling. Yep. Cool. I'm in ketosis. I'm going to guarantee this is like a .5 to a .7 or this is a one to a 1.2. I'm somewhere around there. As it goes higher than that, I can't really track. So anyway, I bring that up because when I was doing rabbit starvation, I never felt that I'm going to call it a sense of relief. I never felt that like I'm okay here.

Rib-ed starvzunetion (18:26)

It was two years of misery to the point where my wife at the end of it pulled me aside and was like, you don't have a personality. And it was because I was just grumpy all the time. And there's no sort of joy in Mudville, which is what when you originally said like, you know, there's there's some playfulness to all this. And I was like, not back then. Yeah. There was no playfulness. It was horrendous. Yeah. And so when I think about people trying to get into this, I imagine if they've ever missed a meal and they're so annoyed and so frustrated, they can't grapple with no, there's really when you click over into fat metabolism, it really does feel very, very different. So okay, let's talk about people then that can't imagine that. How do you help them cross the chasm? We were talking about this before we started rolling. You love somebody. They think fasting is dangerous. Let's start with that. Well, the fasting is dangerous piece is the first thing is you need to get caught up on the current science because the current science is mind blowing. And in the book, I put six different lengths out that are we're all based off science.

Time restricted eating (19:32)

But one of my easiest one to kind of wrap your head around is what we call 16, eight, where they show that if you take all the, let's say you don't work on your food, you're just going to eat the standard Western diet, highly inflammatory, but you eat it in an eight hour eating window, leaving along the 16 hour period where you're not eating, you are literally metabolically immune from insulin going up, glucose going up, high blood pressure, liver damage, cholesterol, you become immune from the damages that that high inflammatory diet has. Okay, that alone is mind blowing to me because let's say you're listening to this and you're like, well, I don't really want to change my food. I've got food addiction issues and I've worked with a lot of people with food addiction that we've been able to help them overcome it by learning how to fast. If you just start to tiptoe your way in, like I'm just saying you can, let's say you're like listening this, you're like, I'm not doing the food changes. Okay. So could I just get you to push your breakfast back a half hour? Now you're, I'm not taking a second to define intermittent fasting or time restricted eating. So people know the difference between what I'll call a water only fast. In fact, walk us through the six stages. I think that's the right place to start. Okay.

Fasting markers. (20:59)

So, and I think the deeper part of that question is what, what is a fasted state? And it's really when that blood sugar comes down enough that it triggers the body to switch. So that's the first thing to know. At 13 hours, we start to see that growth hormone goes up, which is what slows down the aging process helps us burn fat. We also see in men, we see testosterone start to go up 1300% increase in testosterone with just a 15 hour time period, which is insane. We see inflammation CRP goes down, which is an inflammatory blood marker. We'll start to go down. It's all at 13 hours. All at 13 hours. In fact, one of the greatest studies ever done on women was they took a group of women after they had had traditional breast cancer treatment and they had them just fast 13 hours every single day. And they noticed that there was a 64% less reoccurrence of breast cancer in the group that all they did is fast was 13 hours a day. They didn't even change their food. They just fasted. If your mission is achieving excellence, you must support your body. Using AG1. This powerhouse blend is packed with 75 premium vitamins, minerals and whole food sourced ingredients that elevate your immune system, uplift your mood and promote restful sleep. And Athletic Greens is offering our listeners a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Don't miss this opportunity to optimize your health and truly be legendary. So, when we, at that intermittent fasting level is really easy, can be easy. I know if you're listening to this and you're like, it's not easy. I want to come back to how do we make it easy for these people? But that's the destination we're going to is once we get to that first ledge of 13 hours, okay, now metabolically things are changing that or if you can just do that repetitively, which I haven't had a person I haven't been able to get to 13 hours consistently within a matter of weeks, we can get them there. And so now you're there, you're experiencing this. Okay, what else do you want to experience? 17 hours, we stimulate autophagy. The cells start to repel them, repair themselves and old aging cells get you get rid of 24 hours, your whole gut resets and you get intestinal stem cells that come in and repair the whole inner lining of the gut. 36 hours, your body goes and finds that stubborn fat specifically around the belly and it starts to burn that for energy. 48 hours with no food coming in. Now all of a sudden you're getting new dopamine receptor sites. Okay, why are you getting that? Because your brain has got to get motivated to go find food. So you reboot the whole dopamine system and then 72 hours, the whole immune system reboots itself and recycles itself. That's without a drug. That's without a supplement. It's crazy. That's why I'm like this, we have to get this out to the world. This is our door out of chronic disease. We just got to train people how to get over there. And that's that to your point, getting over there is the hardest part. But once you learn how to do it, it's insane. It's insane the miracles that your body will perform. Yeah. So this the pushback on this is a dangerous game fasting. That's the one that really drives me crazy. Because the exact opposite is true. That's right. And if people don't get into things like autophagy, then they're so look, this is hypothesis and I'm certainly not a researcher. But when I look at some of the information like you talk about breast cancer, but just cancer in general, some of the hypotheses that are coming out, some of the early studies that show that you can decrease your likelihood of certain cancers through fasting. It's utterly fascinating and it makes sense if we know that the thing, all of us have cancer cells in our body at any time. Like if you were to take, I would imagine just a blood biopsy, probably enough, you'd be able to detect cancer of certain types. But the immune system is going in identifying these cells and shutting that down. And if you have an immune system that is compromised because you're chronically battering it with highly inflammatory foods, and so the immune system is just working overdrive to keep the inflammation up, because remember, the inflammation is good in certain contexts. Chronic inflammation is bad. So you've got your immune system working overdrive to keep up all this inflammation. And it's not been able to get to all these cells. So autophagy, which we haven't defined yet, probably weren't telling people exactly what autophagy is, so that they understand getting that to turn on ends up being a very big pro health issue. Yeah.

What is autophagy. (25:55)

So autophagy is where the cells realize that there's no nutrients. It's nutrients and blood sugar glucose coming into the cell. So it's like an internal mechanism where the cell goes, huh, nothing's coming in. Okay, we got to make sure A that we're a better version of ourselves. So we need to clean up the inner workings here. So it'll push out viruses. It'll push out bacteria out of the cell and say, hey, you're not serving the cellular energy right now. It will go into old parts, cellular parts and the endoplasmic reticulum and the mitochondria and it's like, hey, we got to clean up our act because we have to be a more efficient cell. The other thing that it does is it'll say, hey, you know what, this cell's going rogue. The cells becoming a cancer cell. This is a senescent zombie cell that's going to start to age you quickly. They're a weak member of the team. And so in this fasted state where no glucose is coming in, no nutrients are coming in, your reliability and we need to get rid of you. And so it gets rid of those cells. So it's like taking the trillions of cells in your body and cleaning them up and clean and getting rid of the ones that are no longer serving you. I don't, again, I don't know a supplement or a medication that can hit a toffee in that way like fasting does. It's just cleans everything up when you get into that atophagy state. It's really profound. Yeah. The fun thing. So my wife is Greek and so I have done my best to learn the Greek language and atophagy is autophagy, which is self-eating, which is pretty interesting to when you think about it that way, that the body actually goes and says, okay, you're not going to feed me cool that I'm going to eat things that are already inside the body, but it has so much without saying cheesy phrases like evolutionary intelligence to what it eats and in what order.

15 hour fast benefits. (27:30)

But one thing that I've heard people say is that one of the thing that gets eaten is the bacteria in your gut, the microbiome, will actually eat the mucosal layer of your intestines and that can be problematic. What say you to that? Is there a problem with that? In the fasted state. Yeah. Oh, I love this question because when you look at the science and I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on PubMed going through all these articles, what's so interesting about the microbiome is in the fasted state, you're right.

PubMed (28:18)

What happens is there's a dramatic shift where bacteria that no longer serve you are being killed off, the whole pH of the system is changing, there's something called geographical relocation where all of a sudden the microbes start to spread out so they're not all clumped together in the fasted state. Do you think they're effectively foraging?

Geographical Relocation (28:41)

Like there's nothing to be found here. That's actually really interesting idea. They probably are. You're probably right. They're like, yeah, I never thought about why are they spreading out. It's because they need to find where the nutrients are. So they instead of being clumped together, they spread out. That's very interesting. So if I was to do a stool test on day three of a fast or let's make it more applicable to the average person, somebody who's intermittent fasting and they've been doing it every day, 15 hours. And on the 30th day, I go in there and I look at the microbiome, it may look as if there was a depletion, but that's okay because we want to create a change. We want to get rid of the microbes that are no longer working for us, which is why what you break your fast with is massively important because if you reintroduce the foods that feed the good microbes, now I think of it like this, you fasted and the microbes are like, okay, like we spread out, there are no nutrients, there's no glucose, like things are changing in here. We got rid of the bad guys. Not sure what to do now. And you come in with a bunch of sauerkrauts and you come in with nuts and seeds and you come in with polyphenols like olives and even like dark chocolate and all of a sudden the good microbes are like, hey, wait, our food, our food is here. It's here we can eat and then the good microbes eat and now you're rebuilding your microbiome. So when we look at gut changes, it's the combination of the fasting window with what you reintroduce food, what foods you reintroduce back in. That's really interesting. So it becomes, oh God, I don't know how the medical community is going to respond to this, but the reason that chemotherapy works is it basically weakens everything. Like it just obliterates your entire immune system, kills off so many cells. But the idea is that a cancer cell is a little bit more vulnerable than everything else. And so you go just far enough to kill the cancer cells, but not so far that you end up killing the healthy cells. So fasting sounds like it might be working in a similar fashion where it weakens everybody. But if you come back with only food that feeds the good guys, now the bad guys never get out of their weakened state and they continue to die off because there's nothing in your reintroduction to bring them back. That's really interesting. So it's like, hey guys, I'm going to weaken you all, but I'm only going to refeed the good guys. That makes a lot of sense. I never thought about that. I was a little maybe more reckless than that with my refeed. Yeah. That's interesting. So okay, so you already hit us with the things that we should be eating. The one in there that I didn't understand because I give criminal amounts of side eye to nuts and seeds. So break me of that myth. Well, so it is a prebiotic. So for starters, it needs to be raw. Let's start with that because nuts and seeds that are pasteurized or dry roasted or dead, it's dead food. So we taste so much better. Yeah, right. Really? I don't know. Really? You don't agree? No, I'm one of my. Madness. One of my favorite things is raw cashew or raw cashew butter. I won't say that it's not nice, but compared to a roasted one. Oh, yeah. No, I can't. I can't. My taste buds can't taste a difference. That's interesting. But what about almonds? Can you taste the difference? Yeah, definitely. Now that is a little grassier. Let's just say it's a little more raw. The best way to eat an almond is sprouted, raw, organic. That has the most amount of nutrients in it. The logical thing is, well, what about the lectins and the oxalates? When you leave those enzymes in there, those lectins and oxalates don't matter anymore because you have the enzyme innately in that sprouted almond that's going to help you break down the lectins and oxalates. The minish, you dry roast it. You've killed that. So now you put it in your body and yeah, the lectins and oxalates are going to be a problem. But I will, to your taste bud question, I will say a sprouted almond is not a culinary taste bud joy that goes on with that. It's not as good. I love roasted almonds. They are absolutely fabulous. And I used to eat a lot of pecans, long time listeners of my show will know that I had to abandon them because they are, I have some sort of dramatic problem with them. And so I ended up getting tremendous amounts of brain fog, finally figured out that it was the pecans who would have known, should have just asked my sister who gets migraines from pecans, didn't put two and two together. I don't get migraines, but massive brain fog. But anyway, the raw ones, I would force myself to eat raw ones because I thought they were better. But the taste profile, my God. Like a roasted pecan is freakishly good. It is a cruel trick that nature has played on me because I find that absolutely fabulous. Did you get a headache with the raw? See? So there's the same thing with dairy. Oh, but it would totally, whether I eat them raw or bake doesn't matter in terms of brain fog. I just don't get headaches. My sister does. Okay. Because it's what we do to food often that makes it now a toxic food for us. So it dairies the same thing. This is an, I don't know why this has to be so controversial. But when you pasteurize dairy, you're killing the probiotic, the good bacteria that's going in, you're killing the enzymes. It is a dead food. When you take that same food and you leave it raw, now when you drink it, you've got the enzymes, you've got the probiotics to break down the lactose that you might be reacting to. Okay. Time out. So are you saying that, because I ended up cutting out dairy, so I would on Sunday, so I have a whole routine Monday through Friday, I'm ultra strict, super clean, whole food. Saturday, I eat whatever the hell I want, including ice cream. Yeah. But on Sundays was the day that I would get the weirdest reaction from my food. So I wouldn't have any problem with my ice cream on Saturday. But on Sunday, by the end of the evening, I would get so internally hot. I don't know how us to explain it. I felt like I was warm, not like you get warm from the outside. I was warm from the inside. I'm like, oh, this feels so weird. I do not like the way this feels. Whenever somebody comes to me with a problem like that, I say, what are you eating a lot of and figure that out? And I'm like, the only thing I'm eating a lot of on Sunday is pizza. And so, but I'm scraping the toppings. I'm not even eating the bread. So I'm like, okay, cheese, pepperoni, olives, like, what is it? And as soon as I cut out the cheese, I was fine. And so I was like, whoa, I'm having a problem with dairy. So are you saying that if I were eating unpasteurized dairy that I would be okay? Yeah. Yeah. That is what I'm saying. And I'd love for you to try it. It exists in America. Oh, yeah. Well, so let's go down that dairy. The raw cheese, cow's dairy is going to have these enzymes in it. Now, when we look at the molecule size of dairy, we have to remember that for our human guts, the best thing that we can digest when it comes to milk is mother's milk. And the molecule size is probably, you know, like the size of my fist. You say that what do you mean? Human? Yeah. Like, yeah, like human milk. Yeah. Is there a business here? I mean, it's weird, like we all feel like it's taboo, but we drink milk from the breast of a cow, but we're weird about drinking milk from the breast of a human. That's, I mean, look, there's maybe some bizarre moral implications, but I'm going to, yeah, I'll ask it. So are we like, if we could get unpasteurized human milk, are we like in a great metabolic position? Incredibly healing. Just talk to those. So high in sugar? Yeah. Well, so you're going to have to, I mean, you'd have to test it on yourself with a monitor or something like that again. High inch, is it high in sugar? And is it causing your problem? That's a whole nother can of worms to go down because what's high in sugar and causing you problems may be different than what's causing me problems based off our microbial differences in our gut. So we can't just say, Oh, any, anything is like a wonderful, like let's just use the milks that this is going to raise your blood sugar for everybody. And this is going to bring it down. There is the nuance of what goes on in your gut bacteria that controls that. So that's the first thing, but I want to go back to your, to your, to your question, which is when we look at human milk, like breast milk, yeah, it has all the immune enhancing capabilities that we don't get in other animal milk. And it's molecule size is easier on our digestive track. So when we look at why so many people are reacting to dairy, cow's dairy, we have to realize that it's this cow's dairy is like this huge molecule size. It's like, you know, let's just for the people listening that aren't visually seen this. It's like a basketball size, whereas mother's milk, human milk is like a tennis ball size. So there's this molecular mismatch that's so hard on our gut. Now in between those is sheep's and goat. And they're a little bit closer to a human mother's milk molecule size, which is why a lot of people can't do cows, but they can do goat. Now if you take the very, very best milk out there outside of mother's milk would be raw goat's milk, because now you've got the enzymes, you've got the probiotic and you have the molecule size and they make that in cheese. And if you could put that on your pizza, it would be a game changer. Okay, so how do we safely get raw goat's milk into our lives? I thought you were going to say mother's milk. No, well, I mean, I'm out talking about it. I have to go now. I'm not going to make a stance on that one. That'll be my next question. But let's start with goat's milk. That seems a little easier to get across the fish. It's in supermarkets all the time. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Have you ever go to air once? What? Yeah, it's going to be in a higher end. Yeah, raw and go to Europe. Is it safe? Yeah. And well, so when you're looking at cheese, remember that cheese has been fermented.

Nutrition And Eating Habits

Raw Dairy (Including Goat's Milk) Can Be Problematic (39:13)

So that's, I mean, look at what a charcuterie, you know, experiences. So then why do they pasteurize the milk before turning into cheese if we're already going to get the fermentation process? It's a great question. But I think pasteurized milk, it became a safety issue for so many years. When you are mass producing large amounts of milk, then you're going to end up having this issue of like, okay, some people are going to react to this bacteria differently than others. So I think that's where it originally came from. But if you go and study the Weston Price Foundation, you know, he's been that whole world under the Weston Price world has been around raw dairy for years. And that raw dairy can be healing. It's just, it's like one of those myths that's perpetuated. So you go and walk into Air One, walk into Whole Foods, well Whole Foods, they have raw goats cheese, but the higher end, really high end health stores and a lot of the farmers' markets have raw goat. It's the taste that's going to be the biggest issue. You might not like the taste. Well, I don't know. That's, so again, my wife is Greek. It's actually from Cyprus or families from Cyprus. And so she introduced me to something called halloumi, which is typically made from goat's milk. And I couldn't love halloumi anymore if I tried. Now the irony is until this conversation, I cut it effectively out of my life because I was worried that it fell into whatever was going on with me getting overly hot when I eat too much cheese. But if goat's milk isn't problematic because I had actually never noticed it with halloumi. And so that might be why that's really, really interesting. Think about it. Think about it from this angle. When the whole world ends, this isn't kind of like a nutritional fad right now, but remember when lactose intolerant was like a thing, everybody would walk around and they'd be like, "Yeah, well, yeah, I just don't hear it." People say they go, "Well, I can't do gluten," which is a whole nother conversation. But I don't hear people walk around and say, "I'm lactose intolerant," but they used to. And then we would give them lactate or lactic enzymes or they were special milk or they'd put the lactose back in. Okay, but wait, we pasteurized this product. We killed all the enzymes. And now we have to add an enzyme back in that we just killed to make it so that some people can digest it. Why don't we just keep it in its raw form? And I feel like this with all food, it's when we start to manipulate food and change it that it becomes unhealthy. Gluten's the same place right now. We're breeding a whole different strain of gluten. But when we just come back to the basics, this is such a big part of my message is we've overcomplicated food. And we just need to come back to how do I get that food in its most natural state where it hasn't been touched by man. And then I pair that with these different fasting windows. I truly believe that is the diet that most humans should be working from. And that's how we end chronic disease. But the minute we think we got to burn out the bacteria and then add some enzymes in or the whole gluten-free world has become this like, you read those ingredients, they're incredibly toxic. The keto world's the same thing. All the low carb foods are now adding toxins back in and we have totally destroyed. Great example with keto is oral wheat just came out with a keto bread. I picked that thing up, I looked at it and I was like, this is just a toxic bomb. So yeah, maybe it won't raise your blood sugar, but it's got toxins in it that's going to make metabolically switching very difficult. Are there certain toxic ingredients people should be on the lookout for? Yeah, except where they keep changing them all the time. So for starters, the bad oil, so in this bread, because it's keto, they wanted to keep the fat content up. So it had canola oil and cottonseed oil. So it's inflammatory and makes you insulin resistant. Now, if they made that same bread with olive oil, now you're in the ballpark. What is the thing that they do to make a bread keto? That's the mass that they're using if it isn't wheat. Yeah, usually they'll do almond or they'll put like urethra tall as a sweetener or stevia as a sweetener, which can also still elevate your blood sugar. So tapioca flour is another big one that they'll add in. But you know, again, this is why I'm a fan of- Tapioca isn't going to spike your blood sugar? Well, exactly, it will, but what they've done is they've removed what we perceive as the grains and they've added in substituting grains. But surely the package will say this has X amount of carbohydrates and if it's above a certain threshold, like even if keto is just a marketing word and it doesn't, I don't know if keto has a medical definition or not from the FDA. Tapioca flour is used in a lot of keto foods. Do you know people that have measured their glucose after eating it?

Measuring Glucose After Eating Different Foods: Baby Carrots & Pecans (44:39)

Not on this particular one because that would be the place to go individually, the end of one. This is where everybody would need to go themselves. I can tell you what I have measured on myself that's a big keto trend is all the cauliflower flowers. So cauliflower pizza, cauliflower chips. They'll say on the packaging grain free and when I measure it on a glucose monitor, it spikes my glucose incredibly high. Interesting. Because of the little white thing called, you just said it. The cauliflower. Jesus. Having a stroke over here. What did I say about fasting doesn't impair your cognition? Maybe it does. So cauliflower, if you just ate raw cauliflower, would it spike you? Well, so there you go. Now we got some fiber in the raw cauliflower, but when we distill it down into an actual flower, FLOUR, different type of flower. Now you've refined it. Anything we've refined, we've now manipulated it and that spikes blood sugar. Okay, interesting. This is why boys and girls at home watching are listening. I'm telling you, CGM's are awesome. Continuous glucose monitor. I'm very insensitive to a certain part of the population that cannot control their obsessions. And so whenever I talk about measuring stuff, inevitably, there are people that are like, "Oh, don't get obsessed with measuring things." I think that's the wrong message. Get control of your mind. Don't allow yourself to fall prey to loops. Like, yes, you don't want to become obsessive. It's very wise, but to something that you've said multiple times, you have to be able to do an N of one. You have to understand how your body responds to certain things. So I'll put pecans and baby carrots on the table for me. I could never have imagined that pecans would create brain fog in me. And I really wouldn't have guessed that baby carrots will spike my blood sugar, my glucose. It's not as bad as ice cream. I don't want to exaggerate. If I eat carrots to satiety, I'll go from say 84, 85 to 115, 120, 125 depending on how hard I go. And so I remember the first time I looked at my data and I was like, "What the hell did I eat that spiked me like that?" I'm like, "That's like a Saturday spike." And I realized it was baby carrots. And I was like, "Whoa." Now I can eat one or two, and I'm not going to see a big move. But again, if I eat them to satiety, I'm going to eat, and these are baby carrots, but I'm going to eat 15. And so I just, I really thought vegetables were a free pass. Barring things like sweet potato or potato or whatever, like I got that roots like that. We're going to spike me, but I really didn't see carrots coming. And so one, carrots are high in sugar already, which I just wasn't thinking about, but it may not spike my wife in the same way that it does me. And so in fact, the difference in how we respond to food between my wife and I is dr-matic. And so that really became the first end of one for us was we could sit side by side, eat the same thing and have wildly different responses. And so measuring this stuff, seeing for yourself what works, what doesn't, I think is really, really important. So anyway, it'd be utterly fascinating to try something like a cauliflower FLOUR and see if that spiked me. Because man, when I look at things like that, I think free pass, if this tastes good, I'm all in. So one of the things that I've really realized in teaching the world fasting is how this food addiction is such a hurdle for so many people.

Food Addiction (48:26)

And I'm going to take it back to the women because I feel like, you know, when Fast Like a Girl came out, what has really shocked me is how many 20 and 30-year-olds women are just have massive eating disorders. And what I'm seeing clinically working with these women, the ones that I'm working with one-on-one is that when we get them changing the calorie counting conversation and we get them doing, instead of counting calories, counting blood sugar, put a CGM on them and say, okay, now go eat. And just eat, usually what I do is I say, go eat whatever you're going to eat. You can count your calories however you want to count them the first couple of weeks. And then send me your glucose map and let's look at this. What we're seeing is that these women that feel like they're in control because they're counting calories, what they're doing is they're getting these glucose spikes that are up and down all day long, which is actually keeping them in the sugar burner state longer. So then I switch that around and I say to your baby carrot example, try baby carrots with some hummus. Try it with some cheese. Now go scan your glucose monitor. Let's look. Let's see what happens. And I would tell you the same thing. What is it when we add a protein or a fat to a carbohydrate, even if that carbohydrate has fiber like a baby carrot, you slow that spike down and you can most likely handle that food better and it's going to help you. If you're not spiking your blood sugar, you're going to be able to switch over into the fat burner, fasted state, so much better. It's really interesting.

Eating Disorders (50:10)

So here's a horrible thing, but I think you're going to drive with this. When I meet a woman, I just assume she either has or has had an eating disorder period. Why? Why is that such a safe assumption? You won't be 100% correct, but man, you're going to be right a lot of the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That breaks my heart and you're probably right. Oh, God, so many, so many things, but I will tell you that the big, big ones that I see. One is that, you know, it's the societal. We're trying to look a certain way. And so we've been taught to look out that that our external, how we look externally is how we get love. It's how we get validation because that's the society that we're living in. And we don't let me push back on this. Yeah, please. And I'm very open, but I, I would say that's you're raging against biology. I'm not society. Tell me more. So when I think about this, and this is, this isn't a free pass to just be, Oh, however we end up being as a society, that's fine because it's born in biology. But I think that when you understand what prompts it, which is nature has reached inside my brain and said, you're going to find these things attractive because there are signs of fertility. Now, of course, there are also, there's a societal layer. So when I was young, the thing that was en vogue was like super skinny, but still large breasts, right? And now it's big butts are like the rage and women that are slightly thicker. But that hasn't changed in, as far as I can tell in my very non scientific, but I would say still accurate assumption that just being a female who is competing for the attention of men and to compete against women who are often their harshest critics with their body. Again, you're the thing that you're actually raging against is a societal layer that is born of an evolutionary drive to find the most fertile and probably high status women or women that confer the most status to you because they are considered the most beautiful. And so when people attack a very worth attacking notion at the level of society, they run into problems because really you have to address that you're getting this biological impulse.

What actually makes someone attractive (52:25)

And at the risk of going too far afield, but I think this is really fascinating, they did a study where they looked at what age group do people find attractive based on their own age and for women, there's a four year span that is glued to their own age. So two years older than them, two years younger than them is their sweet spot of what they find attractive in men. Men, it's a 22 year old female, no matter how old they are. So they could be 14, they find a 22 year old attractive. They could be 85 and they find a 22 year old attractive. And it was one of those that it is brutal. And as somebody who's married to a woman that's only aging in one direction, it's like I fully empathize with her deeply. But at the same time, it was laugh out loud funny to me that that's what nature has done. And it's just ridiculous. So I have so many things I want to say on that. So the first thing is, okay, that would make sense because our attraction is all built around reproducing. Yep. There is that and that would make sense that an older man would find a 22 year old more attractive because it's a fertility thing. Totally makes sense. But when you're looking at what makes a woman, what the woman that's the most fertile is actually her hip to waist ratio, which is the only thing that runs across culture across time is hip to waist ratio. Okay. So I want to throw one other weird thing in here that I think isn't discussed enough and it keeps showing up in a lot of conversations, which is we're also attracted to each other through smell. Yes. And there's a very interesting study that shows when women go on birth control and they meet their spouse, it was done in heterosexual relationships that they have a different smell profile that they're attracted to if they're on the pill, 10 years into the marriage, they try to get pregnant, they get off the pill, all of a sudden the attraction is different. And so I went down a rabbit hole looking at that and I was like, what is the attraction? What is the smell you gravitate towards? And it's for women, it is the one that is going to support her immune system the most because once she's actually pregnant, she's got foreign DNA in her from her husband's sperm. That's crazy. Crazy. So when we look right, so when we look and we tie this all together, I think it's just like the nutrition and fasting conversation, we have misdirected what we think makes somebody attractive, what makes somebody healthy, what diet we need to be on. There's so much going on under the scenes of what attracts you to somebody else, what makes you feel vibrant as a woman. And when I hear that the 20 and 30 year olds and the have all these eating disorders, I just want to say like, okay, everything you've been taught about attraction is wrong. And we've got to start to unwind that so we can come back into these natural patterns that are that we are using subconsciously. It's interesting. So I've never heard the pill thing tied to scent before. I've heard the studies about, okay, ladies, here 12 t-shirts laid out before you smell them and just rank order them. And when they do that, they rank order them in the ones that they find the scent the most appealing is the person with the most genetic variation. So to your point about it would give you, it would certainly give your child the most advantage in terms of a far more robust immune system and then down to the ones that they find the scent least appealing. So if you slip, I can't remember if they actually did this or if this was just somebody's hypothesis, but that you would expect that if one of their siblings were put into that mix, they don't know, they're just smelling the shirt that they would actually rank them the lowest. I remember right, that was part of the study. I didn't know that part of the study. I mean, it would have to be true, right? For that is the hypothesis that that or that is the prediction that that hypothesis makes like that if this is about genetic variability, then the people that would be most like you, like you, your siblings, you would find the least appealing, which is very interesting. But going back to this idea of food addiction, so we women are struggling with it, 20s and 30s, maybe the worst, which is already fascinating.

How a CGM and specific metrics can help control eating behavior (56:56)

But how do you begin to help them break this? Yeah. So this is such a great question. The first is we've got to get them looking at something like a continuous glucose marker. So just get away from calories. Get away from calories. We still want them to feel in control. Is that the idea? Yes, it's a control issue. So I've proven this over and over again with people with severe food addictions and eating disorders is I always say, give me two weeks. Just you can count your calories if you want. If that helps you feel in control, I want you to not look at your scale. If they can, sometimes they just, they have to anyways. But I want your focus for the next two weeks to be on what foods are doing to your glucose. And the name of the game is less spikes. So you just don't want to see those spikes going up and down. So when you get your chart on your meter, you don't want them going up and down six, eight times a day. You want them going up and down maybe twice a day. And when you eat. How tight do you try to control that range? Well, so then you want to see it go down like I don't like it to go above like 120. I'd like to keep, see it hover around that. And then I'd like to see it come down within a half an hour pretty quickly. Do you think about daily averages? Yeah. Like I'd like to see it 95 100 would be really good. Interesting. So that feels high to me. Are you being, are you being overly generous? Because you know what people's limitations are. Yeah, I'm being overly sensible. Okay. Because what I've, what you mean by that? Well, like what I've learned in like teaching the world about glucose and fasting is that what if I say like the 70 to 90 is a, is a perfect range. But if I take a woman who's food addicted has eight glucose spikes that go up to 120, you know, throughout the course of her day. And I say you got to get it to an average of 75. It's too far of a leap. And what we often don't need motivation to start to eat different, we need momentum. And so when we come over here and we say your gold standard is, you know, 1.5 ketones and your gold standard is 75 average of 75 glucose every day. It's, it's the, the, the single mom in the, in the, who's working two jobs that's just trying to make it. And if that's her goal, it's, it's not sense. It's not easy for her to follow. And she's just going to stay in her in a field. Like I can't win. Yeah. This is all lost. And the story I always tell is I during the pandemic, I had a high school principal in South Carolina reach out to me. And she said, she followed me on YouTube and she said, I'm very concerned because we're going back to school and my teachers are freaking out about their immune system. Will you come give a talk to them or like a Zoom talk? So I did. And I talked all about like fancy ways to eat and supplements and how you can improve your immune system, all the many of the things we're talking about right now. And at the end of the conversation, I asked if anybody had a question. This very brave man raises his hand and he said, you know, I hear what you're saying, but if I'm at a grocery store and I'm looking at a nut butter, nut butter that has the right oils compared to the inflammatory ones, that's $8 difference. And I don't have that's $8 I don't have. And then another woman raised her hand and said, I get up at 4.30. I'm at school at five. I worked till five. I come home, have to take care of my kids. The easiest place for me to go is through the McDonald's drive through. I don't know how I can do all these things you're saying. And it hit me in that moment that I had done them a disservice by tricking out much of a conversation like we're having now because if it gets confusing, if food gets confusing, if health gets confusing, we get blocked and we just fall back into our old patterns. With glucose, yes, 70 to 90, somewhere in that average would be amazing. But if your average is 120 and you get down to 110, you are moving in the right direction and that is awesome. So I want to make health approachable for everybody, not just the people who can afford it or the people who can understand it. How do we do this so that everybody can win?

Fasting Journeys And Personal Experiences

Making room for indulgences (and how to compromise if you don't want to cut carbs) (01:01:21)

I'm going to make one sort of last ditch effort on the people that are struggling, they're buying the wrong nut butters, et cetera, et cetera. So at Christmas, I do everything wrong and I love it. It's a two week period where I take a vacation from all of my rules and regulations. So I live my life by a very strict set of rules that I will credit most of my success with my willingness to write down what those things should be and then to actually live by them. But at Christmas, I go completely off the rails. There is literally nothing that is off limits for me. If I want to eat ice cream every day, I will eat ice cream every day. I don't drink alcohol but if I wanted to and not as a hard and fast but very rare because I don't like the way that I feel the next day, not hangover because I don't push it that hard but it just makes my stomach feel gross. I don't know how to explain it. But even if I wanted to have alcohol, for sure, go for it, no problem. So really, really, I'm off the rails at Christmas. But what I have found is that by intermittent fasting, that I can still keep my average glucose. This is eating ice cream. This is eating cookies, bread, whatever I want. I can keep my average glucose in the 75 to 85 range as an average. But I'm going to spike up to like 150, 155. I don't like the way I feel north of 170. So I won't do that. In Christmas, I just don't like the way it feels. I'm going to do some exercise, which is something we haven't talked about yet, which is you want to manage your glucose levels, eat whatever you want and then do air squats. Like you don't have to go to a gym. Literally you're there, you're talking to your kid, they're walking you through homework, whatever. And I get the psychological energy. But if you just did 150 air squats, you will be startled at how much that starts pushing your glucose down. I still to this day, I've done it so many times, I know it works, but I'm still shocked that with a continuous glucose monitor over a 30 to 60 minute period, you can watch your glucose just going down, down, down, down, down, down, because you're doing some minor air squats. Okay, if you do enough of them, they can be pretty tiring, but just doing air squats, you can drive your glucose down. So between intermittent fasting and over Christmas, I'm not crazy. I'm not doing my like 18, 19 hours, but I'm going to do 15, 16 by doing that and air squats. I do a little more than that, but like that sort of general direction, I can keep it 85. And this is not anything fancy. This is the cheapest food you can imagine. So I'm eating all the things I grew up with and people that don't know my story, I did not grow up with money. So I grew up on rice oroni and we didn't eat hamburger helper because that was the expensive stuff. That's how I grew up.

Jorges Story: How I Lost 100 Pounds with Fasting (01:04:25)

Okay. I'm talking boiled hot dogs on the cheapest white bread that you can imagine. I wonder bread. We did not splurge on wonder bread. Okay. So I'm going back to all those like comfort foods from when I was a kid. And with that simple protocol of intermittent fasting and a little bit of big muscle group exercises. I'm able to maintain for the entire two weeks an average of below 85. Yes. And I think that's the goal if we can because again, why that what you just said is will work for people regardless of their socioeconomic resources. So I love that and you were insulin sensitive going into the holiday. That's fair. Very fair. You're not talking about somebody if somebody's listening to this and they're like, Oh my God, I cannot move the needle on weight loss. And I have an extra 50 to 100 pounds to lose. And they do what you just said. They're not going to get an average of 75. And that's so well said. So keep going. Yeah. And so I'll give you a really cool example I had last year. I had a man who was over 300 pounds come to me and ask for my help. I love this story. And he basically said, I asked him, what's your biggest hurdle? Why can't you? He's like, I've tried every diet. I said, what's your biggest hurdle? He's like, I am just food addicted. I'm like, okay. So in my head, I'm like, if I get him to change his foods and he was drinking 12 sodas a day. Oh my God. That was the obvious thing for me to take out. The amount of sugar. The amount of sugar. I had so much to say on that. And but he told me he was food addicted. So I didn't want to just be another person that came in and said, you need to get off your soda. So I said, just eat whatever you're eating. And can you start to move your breakfast back an hour and your first month, the only goal, I don't even want you to touch your food. The only goal is I want to see if you can eat all that food in about a 10 hour, you know, 11 hour eating window. So I need you fasting 13 to 15 hours. And so he did. That's the only advice I gave him. We talked a month later. He had lost 13 pounds in the first month. He was still drinking 12 sodas a day. So then I said, okay, second month, I was like, could you just drink your soda outside the house? So you know, like, if you want to have it at work, great, but in at home, don't eat it. And he said, well, can I drink crystal light? And in my head, I'm thinking, no, you can't drink crystal light. I was like, go for it just because I was like, I don't know what he'll do as glucose. So he just drank a he did his soda outside his house. And second month lost another 10 pounds. Now he's fasting about 15 hours, third month, we added in protein. I still didn't take much away. And I got his eating window down to about an eight hour consistent eating window. And I had him increase protein because when you increase protein, you increase muscle. When you increase muscle, you increase more insulin receptor sites. So third month, he lost another 10 pounds. This went on for up. We've been working now. It's been about six to seven months. He's down a hundred pounds. Wow. And his food preferences have changed because back to the theory that when you start to intermittent fast, you change your microbiome. And when you your microbiome is what's often controlling your taste buds. So when you were saying, well, oh my God, do you, I hate nuts. And I interpret that as, well, you and I have different microbiomes. So I thought I hate nuts is that I think of them as falling into the evil category. Oh, okay. Not I love it. If you tell me that I can eat nuts, I'm going to eat the most nuts. I love them. But that that is really fascinating. I hope people don't blow past that because I would not have believed you until I did it and realize, whoa, the things I actually crave really do. They really are different now. Yeah. And so going back to this idea of the difficulty that you have diminishes tremendously, the longer you stay consistent with this, your microbiome is changing. You become metabolically flexible so you can burn sugar or burn fat. Your microbiome will, whatever you eat a lot of, your microbiome will scream for more. That's right. And so if you're eating bok choy and eggs, like I eat a lot of, then your microbiome screams for bok choy and eggs. And so my microbiome isn't screaming for cookies, cakes, candy, pie because I just don't need it. Right. That's right. But what do you do with the food addicted person? That is dopamine for them. That is joy. And so that's one of the most brutal things about a long fast. Is the lack of dopamine? There's no dopamine. Yeah. You suddenly realize, oh, I eat food like a drug, like even my normal food, my eggs and bok choy give me a dopamine response. That's right. And actually you going to make your eggs and bok choy gives you the dopamine. We're sure. I'm getting dopamine right now thinking about going from my eggs and bok choy. Exactly. So, but, but this is why fasting is so pivotal for that food addiction piece is because now what we can do is we can get you some ketones so that we can calm the hunger down a little bit and we can change your microbiome so we change your taste buds and it's not going to happen overnight. But what we've seen is that over even a couple of weeks to a month, you will start to see the changes happen to people's food preferences. And this guy is a perfect example of it. By five months in, he told me he was completely off a soda. He was completely off crystallite. He wasn't eating his buffalo wings anymore. And I said to him, why? Like how did what happened? And he goes, I don't know. I'm just not craving them. We changed his microbiome first by using the tool of fasting and now all of his food addictions changed and he burned fat so that he could finally release that weight that he will never get gained back again unless he goes back to those food preferences. If your mission is achieving excellence, you must support your body.

Are you dressing the gut by eating every two hours? (01:10:35)

Introducing AG1. This powerhouse blend is packed with 75 premium vitamins, minerals and whole food sourced ingredients that elevate your immune system, uplift your mood and promote restful sleep. And Athletic Greens is offering our listeners a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Don't miss this opportunity to optimize your health and truly be legendary. What is the game changer of metabolic health? When we look at only 12% of Americans that are metabolically fit, we have to stop trying to look at food as the only answer. We've got to change the internal environment so that taste buds make different decisions. That is going to change our where metabolic health goes in this country and actually worldwide. Yeah. One thing that really tripped me out was when I learned that I think it's 70 plus percent of the serotonin in your body is produced and stored in the gut. Yeah. I was like, what? I was as astonished by that is when I learned that the vast majority of your immune cells are in the gut. Yeah. And I was like, why would that? And then I was like, oh my God, it's the only place that foreign bodies regularly make its way into your body. Because I always thought about, well, I get a cut and that's what my immune system's about or I breathe in a virus and that's what my immune system's about. Bro, like the amount of things that you eat is something like, you know, like, you know, like two tons a year that one person consumes, like the amount of bacteria, viruses, fungus, foreign bodies, like all of it is what you eat. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's such a good point is that we have, like gut health is definitely, I don't want to say it's making it come back, but it's definitely where we have more of an awareness about it. But we are just babies and understanding the microbiome. We are, we, there is so little that we know and we're just coming out of this antibiotic world that we've been living in for so long where we're eating antibiotics in our meats, we're taking antibiotics for everything, we're putting antibiotics on our skin. I mean, we have really been after killing these bacteria and in that we have destroyed things like serotonin production.

Impact of fasting on the gut (01:12:58)

And that is a nuanced conversation that needs to not be nuanced anymore. It needs to come to the surface because you, the way you think what you crave, your energy, the way you sleep, all of that is tied into the gut. And to your point, if you're eating the wrong foods every couple of hours, you are destroying everything from your immune system to your neurotransmitter production to your ability to burn fat. And so we've got to have a tool that we can start to shift that. And that's why fasting because of its impact on the microbiome is so powerful. Yeah, man. Who would have thought like where you literally have to keep eating to stay in a disease state, which is crazy. Like if you just stopped and I get it, you can't stop forever, but you can, man, if you're obese, you can stop for a very long time, a very long time. So your doctor are working on blah, blah, blah. But do you know the length of the longest fast? There is, it's over 300 days. I met a man one time. This is about five years ago. I met a man who was on day 267. Whoa. And he had totally healed himself. Now I want to tell you, because I met him in person. There was a smell that came off of him that was like a little bit difficult because yeah, because his body was you washing? Well, I'm sure he was. I didn't think to ask that. I mean, we talked about it. He was, it was a group of doctors and he was sharing with us what his experience had been. The body was just getting rid of the bad. I mean, that can happen on a three day water fast. You'll smell very differently. Whoa. Because your body's getting rid of all the toxins that all those senescent cells are being destroyed. It's a process called apoptosis where those, the cells just start to die and then that smell comes off. He had loose skin like you wouldn't believe. The first, like he told us that the first 20 to 30 days he had rashes all over his body. Interesting. His body just fell off. Yeah. What? Because the body just went into this massive repair stage. Wow. I'm not saying we should all fast that long, but it was an incredible healing tool. All right. Well, I'm going to make you take a stance here. You're morbidly obese like that where we're now in life or death mode and you get past that initial hump and let's say you go because the longest I've ever fasted was five days. Four and five were so miserable. I was like, I'm never doing that again, but I may just be doing something wrong. So let's say that he gets to the other side of whatever that hard part is and he's like, I feel great. I'm losing fat. I have no impulse to eat. I'm working with my doctor. All my vitals are awesome. And certainly all my vitals are moving in the right direction. Heart is looking better. EKG. I've had my artery scan. They're getting clear. Like he's just going in the right direction. And so I will make the base assumption in this question that he is working with a medical professional. Should anybody that meets that criteria, keep fasting or would you be like, no, no, no, you need to start eating something? I think in that specific scenario, no, I don't, I want to make sure people don't extrapolate that into their own personal scenario. Right. Yes. So fasting went, went, the guy that we, that I saw, he had tried everything else. Nothing was working. And so it was a beautiful example of how he stepped out and said, okay, body, let me see what you can do on it on its own. And he was working with a doctor. He was wearing a glucose monitor. He was measuring his ketones. He was getting blood work every month. That is the pivotal part of the, of the yes that I will say that in that scenario, it absolutely keep going as long as you, all the markers are saying that you're staying safe and the healing will continue to happen. And that idea I get will upset some people and rocks on people's minds. What I'm finding is that people are blown away at the simplicity of a healing tool like fasting. And so when you take a chronically ill person and you say, all he's got to do is not eat for a certain period of time. It's, it blows everything we've ever been taught about healthcare. We have been taught healthcare needs to be complicated. And what we're saying in this example is you're coming back to the simplicity of just letting the body heal itself and miracles can happen. And we see it all the time, but in that scenario, you're giving me, it's so hard for people to wrap their head around because it's too simple. We want help, we, we've been taught how should be a little more complicated than that. I'm going to push that a little bit further and say, one, I am sending love to everybody listening to this. You can't imagine how many people that I, I love are morbidly obese. And I believe you cannot hate that which you love. And so man, I just really, really, I'm sending love when I say this. But I think part of the reason that people derail on that now that I'm thinking about it is that that means that they could do something about it, that they too could fast.

Addressing personal and emotional difficulties (01:18:08)

And so if you're right and they're, they're not happy with how they look or feel and maybe even people are telling them they need to lose weight and their argument, much like me to my wife about if I eat the cookie, I will feel better. And this is so unfair. When the answer is you just have to be willing to do something hard and, and it's actually only hard in the beginning, right, you're, you have to be willing to do something hard. And so that is not going to resonate emotionally. And that's going to make them feel badly about themselves. And so it is far and if they're not in tune of themselves enough to realize, oh, this feeling I have is actually self-loathing. It's me creating the self-loathing because I'm not judging them. I'm not looking. I'm just saying, Hey, you can do something about it. So whenever you're writing this, what I tell everybody that I love, the struggles with this. I love you no matter what. Whether you decide to make a change, it, it doesn't matter to me. You have expressed that you're in distress, that you have some sort of pain, whether it's psychological about how you look, or it's, it is real physical pain that you're struggling with because you have such a pro inflammatory state. I love you no matter what. I just want to see you happy. And this option exists for you whenever you want to go down that path. But that if somebody doesn't have the emotional, the, the self awareness to realize that that emotion is based on shame that they are taking on themselves, that, and they may not even understand that that's the, what's generating that emotion. And so if they could see, okay, Hey, this is you, you judging you and being in control is always a good thing. And now if you're willing to do this, you can get a different result. And if you decide not to, you're not a worse person. You're not a better person if you do it. You're just in a less inflammatory state, which is a whole host of feel good things that go along with it. But that's my gut is that if you do find pushback on things like that, that that's, that is, it's emotional difficulty. The, I always say that fasting's a mirror and you don't know what's going to get reflected back to you. Tell me more. When you take food out of the equation, the mind starts squawking at you. And it can, a lot of things will show up and I can only share like what showed up for me. I was, I, one of the things that a story I probably don't share enough is that my mom taught me to be an emotional food eater. And it looked like this, oh, you had a bad day. Let me make you a meal. And I got a meal and I got mother's love. And so when I went into my twenties and now into the world, I was an emotional eater. I used food to soothe myself. So when all of a sudden in my forties, I discovered fasting. The first time I did a full, a full day fast and I was miserable, I had no, no resources for my misery. And so to soothe my misery. So what I had to do in that moment is I had to find new ways to get a dopamine rush. I had to find new ways to change my state because food is a state changer. So I learned music. I learned going for a walk. I learned sitting at the ocean and staring at the ocean. I learned calling a friend like I came up with a long list of things that could change my state that gave me a little bit of a dopamine rush. So the first thing is when you're in this fasted state, pay very close attention to the words that your brain is telling you because that's the work, the emotional work that needs to be done. Now I had to unwind my mom who basically said, if you don't eat, you're going to feel worse and the longer you don't eat, the worse you're going to feel. So I had to go into this place of like, wait, my body can do this. Wait, she's wrong. So I had to undo mom's impact in my brain, which is probably why I love the science of fasting so much is once I understood the science, I felt a little more comfortable and that voice quieted down. So the way we talk to ourselves in the fasted state is the work right there. And then the other piece is off all of a sudden you get bloated while you're fasting. Okay, well that happens to a lot of people, constipated and bloated without any food for days. That's a sign your microbiome is something needs to shift in your microbiome. It's the mirror. If you get brain fog, okay, there's toxins in the brain that the body's trying to get rid of, you need to think about more healing for the brain so that we can look at the symptoms plus the patterns of thought and now we know what we need to work on if we're willing to take responsibility to your point. And that's a hard one because when I realized that I used food for the dopamine, that took me some time to really have a different relationship with food. It took me about a year or two to really start to unwind that and that and that can be hard. And other people might find like, I mean, this is a really touchy subject, but other people might find gosh, the extra fat I'm carrying is actually a protective layer for me. It holds keeps people separate from me because I don't really want people to get to know me. I've seen that happen before or I can say I want to lose weight, but then that would be make me attractive and then I'd have to think about dating again. And I found that every time I'm in a relationship that I have some, a problem and I get hurt there. So I'm going to keep the extra weight because I don't want to make it possible so that I can date so I don't get hurt again. There's so many pieces to it that to just choosing your food. So when we go into the fasted state, all of that reveals itself. And if we're willing, it's an opportunity for us to go, okay, this is what I need to take responsibility for. This is what I can start to address. And to me, that is so powerful. And I say this with love. So if these scenarios resonate with people, please know like working with a therapist, making sure you're being guided through that process. But that's what sits at the other side of learning how to build a fasting lifestyle is you can finally heal some of these wounds if you're willing to look at them and take responsibility for them. Wow.

Over time fasting gets easier and shorter fasts (01:24:40)

Yeah, I agree with that very aggressively. So speaking of it being a mirror and things that are revealed. So day four and five for me on a five day fast were miserable. I felt like I had the flu. I had no energy. I felt really brain foggy. So how do I prep myself or what can I do differently in the middle of the fast or leading up to the fast so that I don't get that kind of just it made it. I was like, as long as I own a company, I can't do this again because it literally ground to a halt for two days. Yeah. So, you know, here's what I usually say. If you're going to go into a three to five day water fast, which why would you do that? You are rebooting your immune system. So we know that from Walter Longo's research where the old white blood cells will be washed out and new ones will come in. So in your example, I would say, well, your immune system was shedding itself. And that's why you felt so horrible, just like a cold feels horrible because when you have a fever, you're burning out an infection and it feels horrible. Does that mean that it's going to be horrible for everybody or is there? No. Okay. And I bet if you did it again, it would be different because that was the first time I did it. Is there then a number of years that can go by where it's now going to be hard again? Well, if you came out of that and you were eating really clean lifestyle and you were fasting and all the different, you know, maybe you fast 15 hours, sometimes you go 19 like today and you were learning how to metabolically switch. Yes, it'll be it would be a lot easier the next time because that first dose is like you're getting rid of all of the junk. So over time, these three day water fast, four day water fast, get easier and easier and they become very reparative in a positive way. The example I use a lot is I had a Achilles tendon injury. I tried everything to heal it. I didn't want that Achilles to snap. That's a brutal injury. Everything I tried and finally one day I'm like, I'm just going to throw a five day water fast at it. And I just and the way I went about it is in true respect for the intelligence of my body. I just said, okay, I don't I've tried everything. I don't know what to do. You heal. And on the fifth day, I felt like a buzz come into my Achilles tendon. So on day three of a water fast, it's stem cells, systemic stem cells get turned on. And these stem cells are going to permeate to your body and they're going to go to areas that need the most repair. So now on day five, I've had 48 hours of stem cells and it went right into that ankle. I felt this buzz when I brought food back into the equation, the buzz was still there for about a month and within about a month's time, the injury was completely healed and it has never ever ever reappeared since that moment. So that's an example where the intelligence figured out what it needed to do. In your scenario, you were shedding, you were getting rid of stuff. If you had hung in there another, you know, five, six, seven days, you would have been a totally different person. I've even used those longer fasts for, you know, spiritual insight. I've used it for my business to go, okay, what, you know, I'm trying to figure out next moves. I've used it for book writing. Whenever I need inspiration, I throw a longer fast at it because the noise in our brain gets less and less and less and the downloads that come through you are profound. But to your point, if you're suffering, you may not feel as much of that inspiration, but the more you do it, the more you get rid of the bad and you build the good and it's just an incredible experience. Yeah, it's probably worth trying again. It's been a minute. That was probably four years ago. So be very curious to see if it would go better. There would be other things I would tell you, little hacks and this is like more sophisticated stuff. Like minerals, you should, we always recommend you do minerals. Is minerals code for salt? Yeah, so a sodium magnesium and potassium are the biggies. So that would have helped to mitigate some of the symptoms. And what's the easy way to get that?

Hormones And Health

Hydrogen water (to alkalize and increase microbiome) (01:28:52)

Just in a packet form, like put it in your water and drink it throughout the whole fasting window, your whole fasting time. So, and there's a lot of good products out there. You know, the one we love is element and a lot of our. And if you're eating element because that has 10 calories, are you breaking your fast? You're not breaking your fast. What we've noticed in our community is that it will raise blood sugar in a very, very small amount of people. So you'd have to test. You'd have to test it. So, so that's one. The other one that I just tried recently that just made a three day water fast, like easy. I'm going to be as bold as to say easy was hydrogen water. The hell is hydrogen water? So hydrogen water, what it does is it feeds the microbiome. Well, what is it? It's it's where they pull the hydrogen out of water. Waters H2O, they just isolate hydrogen and it repairs. There's like over a thousand studies done on hydrogen water and how it changes the microbiome because you isolate out the hydrogen molecule goes in there and it recharges these bacteria, it fuels them up and then they work more efficiently. So a guy who owns a hydrogen water company told me about it and he said, you know, try it on your next three day water fast and see if your your appetite changes. Both my husband and I, my husband's the biggest critic. He every time I bring anything to him, he's like, no, no, I'm like, okay, we're going to try hydrogen water for three days. On the third day, we could have kept going. We were both like, I'm not hungry because we because you're feeding the microbiome. Hydrogen hydrogen. Hydrogen water. Yeah. You're feeding them hydrogen. Yes. That's it. Yes. Yes. So I would love like, let's do it with you. I'd love to put you on like a three day fast with hydrogen water and some minerals and see how your experience is. Interesting. Yeah. Like that's intriguing enough to give it a shot. Hydrogen water. Okay. That's, that's news to me. Yeah. I would definitely have to try that. So what are the frequencies that people should be doing this? Is this once a year, once a quarter, once a month? Yeah. My belief is twice a year, I like people doing a three day water fast in January and I like when they do it in September. And the reason for that is we all do what you did during the holidays. Go ham. Yeah. And so, and then so it's a great reboot. And also the cool thing about January is the whole world is focused on health, which is great. So it makes everything a little bit easier to do. You know, January third, if you're like, Hey, I'm doing a three day water fast, people are like, Oh, awesome. I'm doing a juice cleanse and you have this collaborative support. So, and then September, I like it because after, you know, if you live in a, in the part of the world where you summer is June, you know, July and August, we overdo it. So September is a great one too. And then, and they're anchors, but twice a year. And then, you know, just for good health and for getting rid of the senescent cells in the body, I think that's a perfect time to be doing those. Okay. And then our shorter fasts, something people should do more frequently. Yeah. So I think people should be short fast, 13, 15 hours on most days, not every day. And then, you know, one day a week, I feel like people should stretch a fast. So you should try to push your fast to an uncomfortable level. And the reason for that is we going back to something you said earlier, which is when we push a fast, so let's say you, you, when you said I met 19 hours, if you had said to me 20 hours, 21 hours is about my limit, and then I get a little cranky, I get a little bit irritable, then that's the place you want to go to because it's a hormetic stress and your body is adapting in a positive way. You don't want to stay there necessarily on a regular basis, but if once a week I can push that fast to discomfort, you stay in discomfort for a half hour to an hour. Now the body's repairing in that discomfort. So I like one day a week to stretch it five days a week to do kind of what feels like a good groove, and then one day a week to not fast because you got to keep kind of mixing it up for the body so it never hits that plateau spot. Okay. Fasting has so many implications. One implication that we haven't talked about yet is sex hormones.

TESTOSTERONE in men AND women. (01:33:10)

So you mentioned earlier what will happen to a guy's testosterone levels. I'm going to be curious to know does that taper off? If the effect is strong after 13 hours, is it still strong at 24? Does it start to diminish? To answer that question, 24 goes up. Based off the research, research goes up to 2,000% increase in testosterone. That's insane. It's insane. When you think of everybody who's putting pellets in their bodies and trying to get pellets, yeah, like testosterone pellets to get more to get. Yeah, it's like injecting pellets. You inject a pellet? Yeah. How have I never heard of this? Yeah. Yeah. So is that for bodybuilding or is that for hormone- Yeah, then it's slow release of testosterone over time. A lot of, that's more common for women. I do know a lot of bodybuilders are doing testosterone injections. I've heard of patches. Yeah. I've heard of topical creams. I've heard of injections. I've not heard of pellets. Yeah. There's a lot of ways to get hormones into your body. We have to remember that sex hormones pulse. So they pulse like men, you get testosterone every 15 minutes. You're just getting a pulse and then another pulse and another pulse. Women, we get a pulse of testosterone just during ovulation. And so in that five-day window, testosterone comes in a big way and then testosterone goes away. And that's the spike sexual appetite?

Why your sexuality genes work against longevity? (01:34:30)

Yeah. Yeah. Perfect part of your cycle. Yeah. So that you reproduce. I mean, that's why testosterone in a woman comes in in such a huge amount, which is mind-blowing when you think about your earlier thing about men being more attracted to 20-year-olds women, a man's testosterone doesn't have to go down over the course of his life. Now it does because of environmental reasons and we can get into that insulin resistance and toxicity is one of them. And men can keep their testosterone at a high level even as they age. Women, it's not so much. As we go through menopause, our testosterone is going to go down along with estrogen and progesterone. So we're not going to have that same desire to reproduce and go and seek out somebody who is younger. And men, if you're in a heterosexual relationship, men can keep their testosterone high and you can still find them attractive. We just, our whole reproductive system changes dramatically because we don't have eggs left. So we don't have the same desire, our biological need, which is a whole other rabbit hole to go down. Yeah.

How should women fast differently -- & why? (01:35:49)

That's very fascinating. But back to the 2000% at a 24-hour fast for men. And what's interesting on the differences between the hormonal differences between men and women is if knowing that research, what we can now say is, okay, men work off of a 24-hour hormonal cycle. Women work off a 28-day to 30-day hormonal cycle. So we're working off at two different cycles. So when we look at a 24-hour fast, great a man can throw it in at any point. Testosterone is your number one hormone you have to drive. Testosterone will go up into the brain and convert into estrogen. So, and you have very, very, very little progesterone. Progesterone is not a big player for you. Women, we have testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone. And they're all made from the outer cells, they're called the thico cells of our ovaries. And so when we put a lifestyle together, we've got to think about all three of those. We don't have the luxury of just thinking about one. When it comes to fasting, estrogen loves when you fast. Estrogen does really well when you bring glucose down. When you go into those fasted states and ketones go up, estrogen just, positive estrogen just thrives. We also know that estrogen is necessary going into ovulation. So when you're looking at things like infertility and PCOS, where we've got this estrogen imbalance, we know if we can get you fasting at that part of your cycle, you can reboot that whole estrogen system. And back half of a woman cycle, completely different. She wants glucose to be high. And we have seen this over and over again on the Cgms of women, that they're eating the same diet. And all of a sudden the week before their period, they go, I don't know why. Like my glucose, I'm doing, I doing the same thing. My glucose is just going up. I'm hungry. I crave carbs. I want chocolate. Yeah. Because that's what what progesterone wants you to do. Progesterone wants you to bring glucose up. Progesterone wants. You need more serotonin at that moment because you need to bring GABA up to calm you the week before your period. So it's going to make you crave carbs. You need, you crave chocolate because you need the magnesium. So they're like biological needs of this one sex hormone, which is why the behaviors of women typically change that week before our cycle. Whereas estrogen's like, I need glucose to be low. So I'm not going to give you hunger symptoms. I'm okay if you raise cortisol. So if you want to go run a marathon, fine, go for it. I'm going to be fine. Progesterone's like, no, I need you to not spike cortisol. I need you to bring glucose up. So I want you to sit your butt on the couch and I want you to do nothing.

Estrogen & Emotional Intelligence. (01:38:33)

And I want you to give me some food that's going to raise cortisol so I can make my appearance. Okay. So I'm going to need to better understand what are, what is estrogen doing? What is progesterone doing? Because they make basically the exact opposite demands of the female. Like testosterone I get, you're at your most fertile. You should desire sex, spike in testosterone. There we go. But I don't know enough about estrogen and progesterone. Yeah. So estrogen comes in the first half of the cycle, like day one to about day 10, she usually peaks around day 12. So we're building estrogen the whole, that whole time. And day one is when a woman bleeds. So that's a question I get asked a lot. So that first whole front half is when you're making estrogen. And the number one reason of estrogen, estrogen has to peak for an egg to be released. That's the whole purpose of estrogen in a reproduction sense. But you also have estrogen receptor sites in your brain. So estrogen also will stimulate our brain function. This is why we're so good at verbally processing. This is why tip, typically now where I know we're, we're, we're stepping into money waters here. And how hormones work is that estrogen makes it so that we can multitask really well. We can think about a bazillion different things at the same time. You know, men don't typically have the brain doesn't work as much that way because your hormone is testosterone. And it, that's what you focus on and everything else is great. So estrogen is verbal. She's cognition. She is, I call her an extrovert. She's, she makes you more social. So we want to make you more emotional, which is what people think. Definitely can make you more emotional. You have what you have a high, thank you for bringing that up. It's a higher level, a spectrum of emotions you can tap into. It makes us a lot more emotional. Ask any menopausal women where her, how her emotions are when she's on the other side of menopause. A lot of women feel like they're just a little more emotionally stable because they don't have as much estrogen taking them through all that wide range of, of emotions that they can get. Did you see Game of Thrones? Pieces of it, my husband would be upset that I'm going to tell you only parts of it. Yeah. So there's a character in there that I've never, it, it intuitively hit me right just because of all the people that I've met in my life that are in all different phases as far as women go of their reproductive cycle. But there's a character, I forget her name, but she's like the matron, matron, like way past reproductive years, very good at playing the game and just seems above it emotionally. Like has a really detached, I understand human nature, I know what it's like to be caught up in the game, but I'm not in the game anymore. And as you're, as I, as I think about my own, I guess you could call them prejudices about estrogen and what it's like to interact with women versus it is so different interacting with men. And I've been in companies that are hyper masculinized and I've been in companies that are mixed. It's just very, very different. And when I think about, okay, evolution is the master here. I'm, I'm not going to outsmart evolution. If I were going to try to create something from scratch, I would just be borrowing from evolution. So there, there is a reason that in the fertility phase, you need to be able to have this broader range of emotion as, as the significant other of somebody who is, you know, in that cycle, it can at times be very confusing being on the other side of that just to see how this stimulus would have gotten a very different response from you at a different time. And so that gets hard to grapple with. But then this idea of the, the matron sort of being removed from that, but having like this real deep wisdom, there's lots of theories around the grandmother hypothesis and, and basically that's how, how wisdom is stored and carried cross generationally, which is why women go through menopause, but they don't die off. Because guys have a reason from an evolutionary perspective that's obvious for why they keep living into old age because they can keep reproducing. Right. So the question becomes why do women, if they're no longer able to reproduce, why keep them around? This idea of wisdom transfer, I think is a very, it is, it is a hypothesis I would not be quick to disregard. So does that feel right? So we have this broad range of emotion, which I will, God, how will I hypothesize this? Certainly an attunement to emotional needs of kids, like you would get why I would need this dial to 11 so that I can get an understanding of everywhere that they would be, that I would have deep emotional reaction to their needs, their wants, their whatever. And if that means that I have to myself be more emotional, fair enough. But then I don't understand the progesterone and why we would then, does that dial that down? Yeah. Oh my God. I love where your brain's going with this. So the first thing I want to say is that the reason estrogen makes us more emotional, if you look at it from a menstrual cycle standpoint, it peaks during ovulation so that we can have, we want to have an emotional connection to you. So if you want to have sex with us, we need to have our emotional heart, many for many women that emotional heart needs to be open so that I'm attracted to you because it's way more than just the smell of we talked about, way more than the physicality. There has to be an oxytocin bonding connection in order for us to feel motivated to go have sex, which is why estrogen does that at her peak during ovulation, which is crazy when you think about that. So, so we need to have that full emotional spectrum wide open so that we can have this amazing human connection with you. The part around the menopausal woman, and this is something that I don't think gets discussed enough is that many cultures look at menopausal women as the wise elders.

Approaching Hormones in Different Cultures (01:44:44)

Now in Western culture, we don't look at that. We look at it as we're useless, like, you know, we get tossed aside at that point. But if you look at Indonesia, this is one that I've been researching recently because we're heading to Bali in a few months. And how they approach menopause is when a woman has gone a full year without her period is now she becomes the elder that everybody goes to because they feel like she is wiser. She has all the years of history that she can impart upon the community. They consider her more intuitive, but to your point, she's a little more emotionally stable, makes her a great wisdom leader. But we don't we don't look at menopausal women like that. Now, I also want to say that people listening to this might be like this, we can't be put into boxes like this. And I hear a lot of women say that, but I want to tell you that I've sat in the trenches with so many women that there are so many women that go, yep, that's how I feel. I need emotional connection with you. So that makes sense that estrogen would come in. I got into menopause. I could see very clearly what the, you know, the, what the people around me needed or I saw how I could support my children and my grandchildren or younger people at work. And but yet we don't talk about this. We don't bring this to the surface. We sort of push those away. It's very interesting about the Western society not embracing that. I can actually see what you're saying. We certainly have an obsession with trying to remain young. Yeah. Well, into that, I want to focus in on the explanation for getting more emotional as a way to really make sure that I have a connection with you. There's something that isn't, so I often tell people when you're trying to think through something, it should feel like a puzzle piece clicking into place when you get it. It doesn't feel like a puzzle piece clicking into place. Could be my ignorance. I'm super open to that. But just from what I know about evolution, something feels like there's a missing piece. So I've never thought about this before and helped me think about this. So women are often referred to as having a detective's brain. And for men, it's very different. So our genetic material is very cheap. So Siemens, easy to produce. You're producing millions of it every day. And so you try to plant it wherever you can. And so guys are just looking for an opportunity. And there's a great line in when Harry met Sally where she's like, "Well, what about women? You don't find attractive." He's like, "No, you sleep with them too." And it's funny because it's like, "Yeah, I actually get the sentiment." Whereas women, it is a very expensive commitment to become pregnant. And so they have to be way more discerning. Discerning about your genetic material, discerning about whether you're going to be around to help provide when they're in a hyper-vulnerable state. So I'm one because it would be very easy for evolution to have said, "You don't need an emotional connection to FSX. I mean, guys do not need an emotional connection to FSX." And so then my question becomes, "Okay, then why did evolution need you to have an emotional connection?" And so it makes sense to me if, and this will almost certainly be an oversimplification, hormones are usually so multifaceted, but this could be a very interesting facet if what is really happening is that nature was like, "I need a gating mechanism. I need a moment where you will reject unworthy suitors." And so I'm going to create this moment where you're not going to be receptive to their advances. In fact, you're going to be way more scrutiny of their emotional availability by, "Look, I don't know if it is exactly like this, but I'm going to create a little bit of friction and I'm going to see if the other person will navigate that." Because basically what you do in that moment is you take men so far out of their orienting mechanisms so far out of their comfort zone that it's, "I'm grabbing with an idea I've not thought a lot about so bear with me." But it's a bit like taking a manned off land into the open ocean and they have to figure out how to swim with you and do your thing. And it then feels like a puzzle piece clicking into place when I think about basically nature has ensured that women take men into a place where I'm going to find out if you can navigate emotionally. Because if you can navigate emotionally, I can trust you to be here and I can trust you with a child that can't communicate in logic, that doesn't exist in any sort of logical realm, whatsoever. And I need to know that you're going to care for them, you're not going to abuse them or me. That makes sense. What do you think about that? I think you actually, I think it agreed. I'm laughing to myself because I'm like, "I have never gone that deep into a conversation like this around ovulation." And again, where my brain goes to is why would all three of those hormones need to show up for women during ovulation? It is a five-day window where estrogen literally as at her highest of the whole month and test ostrum's at its highest and you have a little bit of progesterum. So what's happening emotionally to a woman is estrogen at his peak gives this emotional spectrum. So now I can have a deeper connection. I love what you said about, I can also decide if you're going to be the right one for me to have a baby with, which as much as we don't want to think about that, that is how our bodies are built, a feminine body is built to procreate. That's what we're built for. It's also going to give me incredible mental clarity so I make the right decision and I'm going to be able to connect with you, verbally ready to connect with you so I can have this intimate experience. Test ostrum comes in so I feel like my libido goes up but my motivation and drive also goes up. So I'm motivated, I'm smart, I've got this incredible spectrum of emotions and then I've got a little bit of progesterum that makes me very intuitive and calms me. This is our superpower window and it was designed so that I could connect to another human so that I can have a procreate and keep the species going. But in a world where we're not, we're having sex all the time, we're not using it just as a tool to have a baby, we still are seeing some of the patterns of our belief and our traction and the way we show up because these hormones demand them, they're primal. These, even though we live in 2023 in this modern world, our hormones are still the same hormones that they were back in the primal days and they have the same influence on our brain. We just have so many other distractions right now we may not be, we may have fallen asleep to it. Is that helpful? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And look, I'm sure this is but one slice of what nature has in mind but it's a really interesting exploration and as somebody who really wants to see people get along with the opposite sex, like the more that we understand where each other are coming from, the better. I often remind my wife, if nobody else, that don't look at my behaviors and think what they would mean if you were doing them. You have to understand what they mean when I do them. And likewise, I'm not looking at your behaviors and trying to say what would they mean if I were doing them? I'm just like, okay, what do I know about her baseline? What does she like? And so what do they mean when she does it? Do you know her cycle? Do you know where she is in her cycle?

Lifestyle Modifications And Mental Health

The Menstrual Cycle Lifestyle (01:52:52)

Well, so this is interesting and she's talked about this. So I don't think this will be talking out of school, but she hasn't had a cycle in a very long time. And so we got her off the pill a while ago and she just never got her period back. She is probably far too lean. That I'm sure is part of it. She is a workout fiend. She eats very cleanly and she certainly doesn't try to restrict her calories. But if she, because her calorie is so clean, it's not easy for her to put on fat. So she doesn't need a lot of carbohydrates or anything like that. Most things that would, I think, be the maybe more calming things you're talking about, her microbiome can't handle. And so she'll have problems there. But she's now working with a specialist to try to get it back. And I will be shocked if one of the mandates isn't you've got to put on some more fat. I'd be interested too. In FAST like a girl, I show how to go high carb, low carb. That's what someone like in that scenario needs to do. I literally pain drum was like, you have to get you on the show. I was like, I think this will be really interesting because that's part of the problem is again, we're doing the same lifestyle. So even if you go to the greatest expert on the planet, they're like, oh, you need to eat more of this, this, this, and this. You need to do more of this. My brain goes, yeah, but we are meant to cycle our lifestyle with our menstrual cycle. And so we need to know to go high carb and low carb. One people through it. What is that cycle? Yeah. So what it looks like is when estrogen's building day one through day 10, we go low carb and we do more fasting to keep ourselves insulin sensitive. So that's a perfect all her heavy workouts. Amazing during that time. We go into ovulation day 11 through day 15. Now we actually need to bring glucose up a little bit because you have progesterone sitting there. And so progesterone doesn't want you to get glucose too low and you've got testosterone. So testosterone helps us build muscle. So I love to see women go into more heavy weights at the time, slow heavy reps so that we can build testosterone at that moment so that we are using testosterone in the way that it should be used. Once you come out of ovulation, all those hormones crash, you can go into your extreme keto fasting working out, but then about day 19, 20 progesterones coming in and everything has to change. You have to bring carbs up. You got to bring cortisol down. You need to switch your workouts to more recovery, more of yoga, more hiking. You got to say no to more things. I just because of overwhelm because that's what progesterone demands progesterone. So let's go to your wife in order to make progesterone so that the inner uterine lining sheds so she has a period that week becomes massively pivotal. And if she doesn't have that, if she's just powering through the same way, that's the week that hooks up women and that's where they're not getting their cycle. And the number of women not getting a cycle right now is another huge problem because our cycles are like a detox. It's a shedding of the toxic estrogen. So she could be getting enough estrogen to release an egg, but she doesn't have enough progesterone to shed the uterine lining. And so where's all that estrogen going? It's getting stored in tissues. That's not good. And so many women don't have 20 and 30, 40 year olds don't have a cycle. And that's a massive problem.

Stressors in this modern world (01:56:25)

Wow. It's crazy. What are you, what's causing it? And the most simple sense, it's we're not minding the week before our period. We're not changing that. People weren't like forever, like my mom's generation, they just, whatever, like they didn't even think about it, but they all had their fear. Your mom and even me, if I look at, I'm 53 and I have a 23 year old daughter, we have massively different stressors. Like at like my 23, I, you know, went to college, did, had, you know, enjoyed myself, had fun. We didn't have a phone. We didn't have social media. Life of fate wasn't in our, in our environment. We didn't have something that they call generally recognized as safe ingredients. There's hundreds of thousands of ingredients in our foods that are toxic. We didn't put on all these beauty products that were destroying our endocrine system. I look at my 23 year old daughter and I feel in a sense very sad about the world that she's growing up in compared to what I grew up in. I look at my 83 year old mom and she's never had a hormonal problem because life was so much more simple. We are in an evolutionary mismatch. Women are right now with this modern world and it's destroying things like fertility and our periods and even now we're seeing it in menopause and perimenopause. Yeah, I wish that guys were escaping the problem, but I had somebody on the show to talk about thalates and penicized decreasing, taint-sized decreasing. And I was just like, whoa, that is scary. Fertility rates, plummeting, birth rates, plummeting for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is fertility. It's really interesting.

The biggest lifestyle change to ease anxiety and depression (01:58:09)

Like in some ways, you know, we're living through this technological revolution and it's amazing in a thousand different ways and there's no other time that I would rather be alive. And then I step back and I go, I've struggled profoundly with anxiety and when I trace it back, so the biggest change I made in my anxiety by a country mile was my diet. And so as I changed my diet, I was like, oh my God, I didn't realize like how bad it had gotten from a generalized anxiety perspective where I was just anxious at all times. At all times. And I remember thinking, I don't even, what am I anxious about? I have no idea. It was very frustrating and so tracking that down to diet then makes you a bit of a zealot to like explain to people, hey, hey, hey, like if you've got depression or anxiety, I could basically guarantee that some percentage, maybe like in my case, it's a huge percentage, but some percentage of that is going to be related to your diet and your lifestyle, sleep and not all that. And so it's like, okay, there was a time where by default you just couldn't get the problematic chemicals into you in any sort of significant fashion. And so there were so many things that we just, you, you didn't encounter and so you didn't have to think about them. When I was in my 20s, you literally never heard of a woman say she didn't, wasn't getting her period. Even in my 30s and when I was in my 30s and everybody was trying to get pregnant, there was a handful of women that were struggling to get pregnant. So when we look at the trends that are happening, we can't say that it's a problem just be, you know, we can't say infertility is just a new issue. We have to say what is the environment that we are living in that is destroying, but to your point, both women and men's hormones, that is making us weight loss resistant, that is giving us these incredible mood disorders that's making PCOS the biggest female hormonal imbalance that we've got. What is the environment today and that's where chemicals come up? That's where physical emotional and chemical, you know, mental chemicals, you know, we were exposed to more toxins. We were on our phones all day long, constantly stimulating our brain. We, you know, we're physically not moving. We're not even getting natural light. We are so out of touch with how the human body was designed to be that all these things are showing up. We give them fancy labels and then we say, oh, well, let's give them fancy treatments. And I even want to say that we do this in the biohacking world and the health world a little bit, which is why I'm just, we have to make this simple. We've got to go back to our primal roots. We need sunlight. We need good quality food. Women need rest the week before their periods. We need to go period times without, without eating. That is how the human body is designed. And when you look at, I, I got this the other day. I was remembering that 1987 is when I graduated high school. And my sister and I had what we thought was the coolest cord attached to our, we are at our own phone line that we got to share. Whoa. That was like a big deal. And my dad went to Radio Shack and got us the longest cord possible so that we could walk from our bedroom on the phone all the way into the kitchen. And still, it was like, what a great. Can't today do not know how cool that was. Right? It was super cool. It was super cool. So think about how far we've evolved from that. Okay.

The primal recipe for health (02:01:45)

But our bodies haven't evolved from that. Our bodies are the same primal, have the same primal needs. So every single one of these human conditions that are showing up from the mental health to the physical health, the first question we need to ask is what is the lifestyle we should be living to bring ourselves back in balance with ourselves? Because the modern world's not doing it. It's actually pulling us in the opposite way. Yeah, it's brutal. Okay. So paint a picture for me. What, how do we, we are in this modern world, whether we want to be or not. So how do people start turning things around? How do they get things going in the right direction? Yeah. And I know it's so depressing, right? I feel like we, you know, you just hit that moment and you go, how are we going to do this as humans? I think that's, that's, I've hit that moment several times. Like how is this going to map out for humans if we don't make some personal changes? And to your point, you know, for starters, let's go back to the basics. So of course I'm going to leave with fasting. We've got to learn the art of fasting. So you might not be a three day water person, but fast person, but could you be a 13 hour a day? I can train anybody to do that. We've seen it over and over again. We got to go back to the simplicity of food. Could you just focus on foods that don't have a label? Just just ask yourself, did man make this food or did, did the earth make this food? And can I go back to just the simple way of eating where I'm eating fruits, vegetables, meats, if you eat meats, if you don't, then do the legumes and get away from the refined processed carbohydrates and, and chemicals. That's it. We're not counting macros. We're not even putting a CGM on you. Third thing, could I start to get natural light? Like could I get up with the sunrise where there's red light, red light's going to stimulate a different hormonal production in me. Could I get out in the middle of the day? We have serotonin receptor sites in our eyes and see full spectrum light without sunglasses on just 20 minutes. Could I just go for a walk and get some full sun in the middle of the day? You can wear a hat if you're worried about the getting too much on your skin. And at the end of the day, could I walk the dogs at sunset? So my eyes see red light so that I can change my whole melatonin system and I can improve my serotonin system. And then what, how am I moving? Am I, you know, movement cortisol is meant to make us move. So when I have a stressful moment, can I get instead of sitting in a chair? Could I just get up and go and, and move my body so that I'm using cortisol much like we talked about using glucose with the squats? How often am I moving, moving my body around? And then am I prioritizing sleep? Am I trying? I don't think we need to get seven to nine consistent hours of sleep. In fact, most of the experts I've spoken with don't feel like you need it all in one chunk. What? Yeah, that's a whole other I can, I can go down that rabbit hole if you want. Yeah, but we need to at least be going to bed. We're designed to go to bed about two hours after the sun goes down. That's when our body starts to repair. So am I getting to bed at a fairly decent time trying to get seven hours and then waking up with the sunrise? These are primal basic needs of the human body that we're not even tending to. So let's just start there before we get into the conversation of this super biohack or this super supplement or this amazing medication. Let's just go back to our foundational roots and then let's see what happens. And my experience has been most everything clears out and people get their health back on track and health becomes fun again. All right, let's go a little bit into the weeds on diet. So we're going to be doing the sleep, getting sun exposure. We're going to be moving around. All that diet is going to be a huge component of that. You've already talked about don't eat things with a label. Basically, so don't eat processed foods. So we'll chalk that up already.

Was being a vegan right for Mindy? (02:05:48)

I know you were a vegan for 10 years. You were not a vegan now. Do you have a take? Was it just not right for you, not right in general? What's the... Yeah, so I was a vegan when I had chronic fatigue syndrome and prior to that I was eating really, really like high, really bad diet. So it was a good shift. Anytime you shift the diet the first time, it's usually for the positive. It's usually a good shift and the body adapts well. The problem with veganism is you're not getting enough amino acids and you need amino acids to make hormones and you need it to make neurotransmitters and you need it to build muscle. So if you're on a vegan diet, you have to make sure you supplement with amino acid. That's the one supplement situation I'll say, "Yeah, you're going to need to go in that door." But the second problem with veganism is that most people elevate their carbs so now they're become so glucose challenged and they become insulin resistant. So you're going to need to make sure you're pairing your carbs with a fat. You need to make sure you're getting enough protein. I mean, there's so much more chemistry that's needed in a vegan diet. So why it didn't work for me as I was just eating carbs and so I was just gaining weight, I was just getting more and more insulin resistant and I was not sleeping and I was had brain fog and I literally, "Thank God, I listened to my own intuition." I just woke up one day and was like, "This isn't working. I don't love this body I'm living in." Now, and I changed and I started to eat meat and I dropped, immediately dropped 20 pounds within a couple of months of eating meat. So it was, and my- That's shocking because this stuff you were eating while it didn't have animal protein it still was, I'm sure high in sugar. It was high in sugar. It was carb, I was eating carbs all day. Yeah. So it's just spiking all the time.

How to determine if being a vegan or having higher carbs is right for you? (02:07:41)

So, now I have met a lot of people who do vegan, vegetarian and they're like, "It's working for me." If it's working for you, amazing. Stay with that. It might be that for right now, that's what your body does. I encourage you to know what your glucose and insulin levels are. I encourage everybody to get a yearly measurement of hemoglobin A1c, which really tells us how much those red blood cells can carry oxygen to the tissues of our body. So- And that's impacted by glucose for those that don't know, gets gummed up and can really slow it down. Exactly. And you want a number below five? Yeah, below five. Is that optimal? 4.5 is optimal. Is 3.5 even better than 4.5? The studies that I've seen is yes, if you want to slow aging down, if you get it closer into the four under four 3.5. Is there such a thing as too low? That's a great question. I'm not sure. I'm sure there is. You can definitely take it to the extreme, but I've only seen 3.5 in one human that I've watched, looked at thousands of blood tests, 3.5. It's not easy to get to. Got it. Because you would- Challenge accepted. Yeah. Oh, excellent. Would you like to hear this? I haven't had my- I haven't had it checked in years. I know I don't remember the last time, but my- for the last 12 years of my life, probably, I've been very diligent. My fat was too low for a long time, but I haven't been eating carb- in fact, God, I stopped eating carbohydrates in any regular amount two decades ago. Do you eat fruit? I do, but I treat it like a candy bar. Mm. So you're doing meat and vegetables primarily? I do eggs, meat, and vegetables primarily. So it'd be interesting to see what your hemoglobin A1C is.

Adopting Intermittent Fasting And Healthy Practices

What's the protocol for Mindy's intermittent fasting? (02:09:33)

But then fasting, how- if you're fasting 19 hours most day? Yeah, so I tracked my intermittent fasting like it was a religion for 18 months. And over that 18 month period, it averaged 17 and a half hours a day, including Christmas day, weekends, everything. So on the days- during a normal weekday, I'm going to be pushing it into the 18, 19 hour range, 20 hours is definitely not unusual for me at all. So yeah. So there's a perfect example. I'd be curious what your hemoglobin A1C is. My guess, if I had to guess right now based off what you just told me is it's probably about 4.5. Given everything you're doing, now what you're doing, most people can't do. Oh, I push back on this so hard. What I'm doing, most people don't do because they have a mental barrier that stops them from getting through the first clickover. It's me with the cookie. And trust me, I'm empathetic. I get it. But yeah, most people- Because you care about how you feel and how you think better than any- That and I've got a whole thing around discipline. So if it's like, my goals make demands and then I do whatever my goals demand. And at the time that I went low carb, I believed that for fat loss, because I was putting on fat, I mean, I was in my mid 20s. And all of a sudden I was putting on fat and I was eating less than I'd ever eaten before. But I thought that the game was to go low fat. And so the reason was I had up my carb intake massively, trying to avoid fat, not realizing that now I'm just spiking my glucose all day. And so I was super confused. So I thought for longevity and for fat loss, I had to go low carb. Now longevity is still a question mark, who knows? I could drop dead tonight. But from being able to control my body composition, bulletproof. And I am very, I know just enough to be arrogant in my beliefs.

The ideas I live by are a filtering mechanism (02:11:34)

And I am utterly convinced if somebody will only eat what I give them, meaning they, because I get it, their microbiome will scream out for things they should need and their discipline may be too low. But if they only eat what I eat, I am convinced with 100% certainty that I can control anybody's body composition. Period, end of story, like nobody escapes it. I don't care what disease you have, whatever. I am just convinced that I can do that. I would a thousand percent agree with you that if everybody did exactly what you did, that we would end chronic disease. Getting people to do what you do is, I'm not sure, I have a lot of admiration for what you're saying. I love this idea that your goals create demands. I love your intensity around discipline. I'm not sure we're going to get humans to that point ever. Oh, I can agree with you. We won't. For better or worse, what I have found is the ideas that I live by are a filtering mechanism. And most people either think it's just crazy and stupid and why would you ever do that? Or they love it, but they can't implement and they certainly can't maintain, which I feel this is where now I have ideas and I really want people to try them. But now all my arrogance around diet goes away. Getting people to, so this company is called the impact theory because I have a theory on how to impact people at scale, which is the ideas that I live by. First of all, they're timeless. They are not my ideas. They've been around forever. And if you can get these ideas into somebody when they're young, then moving forward, everything is not easy, but it's easier. But trying to get adults, I ballpark it at two percent. The reality that's made it this far into this episode, congratulations. You're part of the two percent. Yeah, right. You'll take these ideas and you will do something. None of us are perfect, but you'll take these ideas and you'll deploy them. Unfortunately, 98 percent of the world, they might get as far as spiritual entertainment. And so they hear these empowering ideas and they're like, wow, that's amazing. I wish I could basically. And they don't deploy them with any consistency. And so I became obsessed with how do you get the 98 percent? And that's why we make video games now. That actually is quite brilliant. We'll see if it works. Yeah. Yeah, because the way I approach this topic, like I would love, like my vision of the world is everybody would do the way you're doing it. Now for women, there would be some nuance around changing up that week before a woman's cycle because she needs more carbohydrates during that time. But I also see that all the human suffering from the mental to the physical right now is self-inflicted. And it's because we're not taking responsibility like we mentioned, but we're not really making a one-to-one relationship that when I pick up a candy bar, it tastes so good. I feel so good in that moment, but it makes the depression worse tomorrow. We are not making that connection and that is a major problem. And so this is why I like this idea of how can I give that person a little bit of momentum? How can I just have them have a different experience with that candy bar? And maybe the experience is through a C-Gamp like we've talked about. And now they're like, "Oh my God, I was just eating it and I felt good. I didn't realize that that was what's going on." Or maybe I tack on some fasting and they go, "Like we said earlier, oh my God, I feel so much better in a fasted state." Wait, I don't feel so good with that candy bar. Like we've got to change their experience with this poor lifestyle. And once that changes and they see that a healthy lifestyle is a gift, not a threat, not something that is taking pleasure away, it's actually giving them pleasure.

Lifestyle gives you pleasure, not the other way around (02:15:31)

And that's what I think you're getting is like, you're like, "I love this lifestyle because I operate at my best in it. Why would I go to this other lifestyle that most people are living?" But they're over there listening to you and seeing that that's deprivation. So we have to show them that there are massive mental, physical consequences to that. And this actually is the gift. Once they get there, now they can build some momentum and they can go, "Okay, wait, you know what? I do think a little bit better when I eat an apple." Wait a second. I do, I can go down a notch on my belt loop because I threw a 13-hour fast at it. Wait a second. I started to eat more of these raw foods that we're talking about and I noticed that my bowel movements changed. That's the education that will move that person slowly over to lifestyle being the hero of the day and they can see that it's absolutely not deprivation, it is a complete gift. And the example that I always use is I had a friend who, I've been gluten free forever and I had a friend who, our daughters were doing the same sport and when your kids are in sports together, you're on the sidelines and practices of talking to each other for hours and days. And one day she looked at me and she goes, "You know, after several years of being here with you, Mindy, I watch how you eat and I got to say you don't look deprived." And I would probably say the same thing to you when you say that, you probably don't feel deprived. And the reason we don't feel deprived is because we feel so on our game mentally and physically that there would be no other idea of why we would do it different. Why would we do it different because this feels amazing? But we got to take people from that place over to feeling the benefits of a lifestyle that would serve them. And that gap is where our work is. So if you do it through a video game, amazing. I'm trying to do it through like A, just letting them know that their body can perform differently and then do it through fasting. Let me show you a tool that's free that you can start to make this shift. And now we've got momentum. Okay, let me show you what else we can do. Let me show you like that guy Todd, you know, the guy who lost over 300 pounds, it was so amazing to be like, "Okay, Todd, now you're going to add in this food." And he would just come back to me and be like, "Okay, what's next? This is working. This is what we're going to do next." So I don't want to give up on humanity, but I also want them to have a different experience with their body. And that's what I hear in what you're doing is you just have a completely different experience so people can't relate because they're like, "I don't have that experience in my body." I am very glad that you are offering people the ability to learn more about that experience because it really is life changing. Where can people follow along with you, learn from you? Well, YouTube is my passion project. Two new videos every week go out there. Thousands of videos are there on all kinds of fasting topics. So that's probably the best place to live in.

Contact Information

How to find Dr. Mindy (02:18:43)

Just search for your name. Yeah, so Dr. Mindy Pels on YouTube, forget it. You can go to my website and everything's there that I'm doing. I'm kind of everywhere right now, so I'm pretty easy to find. I love it. All right, guys. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Click here now to learn how to reverse your age with water fasting. And they all say the same thing, including my mother, who at 92 had outlived all 50 of her life alone friends. Every one of her friends was dead. She was alone and she said, "Allen, you need to warn your patients if they're going to do this diet. Make younger friends."