Body Hacking Expert Dave Asprey Shares How to Fast the Right Way | Health Theory

You can

fast

without being hungry and without suffering and you will have more energy. Everyone welcome to another episode of Health Theory. I'm here with a guest of Pete's who I always enjoy spending time with Dave Asprey. Dave, welcome to the show. I'm very happy to be back and I'm sad not to be in your living room. Oh man, same thing. You wrote a book about

fast

ing and I have to say that when I read it, the first question I had was: what is it doing? talking about it is new in a book about fasting and I was quite surprised by where you went.

What took me by surprise is this whole notion that there are many ways to fast and explaining how when you started this, you took it on naturally. that fast was simply not eating because you have given me quite ample options. I started with that perspective, but then I started seeing people making mistakes where, oh, if something is good for you, more must be better and the same things they do with keto with the vegan diet you know where, if it works, I have to do more and more and more and it turns out that fasting is not like that and no one talks about the spiritual side of fasting, oh that's on my list today to be sure why.

However, why is it problematic to go all out when I think about autophagy and cells cleaning themselves and knowing that that starts with just not eating? Why is it problematic to push yourself too hard on a fast? Well, there is a name for more. -Fasting is called hunger and malnutrition, so now you put it in parentheses just for time, so if I were to do a three-day fast, um, I would think your advice would be to go all in, but obviously having read the book, I know that you have a different joke, so does it become problematic as you get into the 7, 10, and 21 day range or do you think that's actually not optimal from the beginning?

You know, I'm totally happy. do a three-day, four-day, five-day, seven-day, ten-day fast, although when you get to ten and beyond you probably want to be very experienced or have some medical supervision because your electrolytes are likely to get out of whack and, frankly, your ability to really detect what's going on in your

body

it's not very good like you're a little crazy after 10 days of fasting you have clarity but you're also ungrounded and you're talking about water only fasting um even if you're having the fast with tea, coffee and just water is basically a form of self-flagellation.

I call that hair shirt, hair shirt, fasting, so the monks used to do it because they were so sinful that they made shirts out of human hair that were very itchy and then wore them. all day so the itch reminds them how bad they were, in other words it's self-inflicted suffering that you didn't need to do so it's okay, most people drink herbal tea in all spiritual traditions or just black tea or green tea, um. so the fact that the mice fasted on water is because they had nothing else, they are mice, so water only fasting is for perfectionists, purist types, you don't have to do that to get the benefits, in fact, yes . you probably get more if you have some polyphenols during your fast, so let's define some terms here, so I've always thought of fasting as not putting anything in your mouth that isn't exactly water and something beyond, maybe I've recently expanded my stance to include salt just normal tablespoons, that's pretty important and attention, so explain it to us, so if we're okay with the water, it only becomes problematic about about 10 days or so and I will say that that seems a little controversial.

I've heard people say that you can go further with supervision, but it expands my notion of what a fast is. The definition of fasting is simply not doing it and you can fast from many things. You can fast from masturbation. You can fast from porn. You can fast from alcohol. Can you fast from garbage? food is called eating

health

ier you can fast on carbs it's called a ketogenic diet you can fast on animal products even though it's a bad idea for long periods of time it's called a vegan diet and there are all kinds of things so fasting literally means going without them for a certain period of time and all those things can make you stronger and many people mix the metabolic, cognitive and

health

benefits of fasting with the benefits of self-control and they try to mix them and the truth of the matter is that you and I are very lucky , you know we've had companies that have done well and we don't have to worry about having to drive for an hour in traffic, our kids now stay home with, you know, two kids. hanging from each arm and a lot of chaos, oh and on top of that, today I'm going to fast even though metabolically I'm not in good shape and what's going to happen is you're going to be like me when I weigh 300 pounds you're going to have hypogia you're going to be hungry you're going to yell at your kids you're going to yell at your boss and it's not going to be a good day and you're going to say Basically, if you fast, this is stupid, it doesn't work, but you don't have to, you don't have to.

You have to experience pain and hunger to get the benefits of fasting and start fasting, and after over 10 years of recommending this in My Writings and 15 years of practicing this what you discover is that there are things you can do in the literature that you can't. They trigger the two things that break a fast. What breaks a fast is consuming sugar or carbohydrates that increase your insulin. If you keep your insulin low and your blood glucose level won't change much except based on your adrenal function, if you do that and don't eat protein, which affects a completely different set of enzymes, you will get the benefits of fasting and Now Some people are already up in arms saying you can't consume 5,000 calories of fat.

No, you would get disaster pants if you did that, but you can consume small amounts of this and the evidence I have for this is called bulletproof protein number one. fasting which has been practiced since 2012 when I wrote about it and it is that you eat less than 15 grams of protein for a day but you eat carbohydrates and fats and autophagy is magically activated in the studies, you can do that so I think we will have to define then what are the biological markers with which we are bracketing fasting, so if the loosest definition of fasting is to do without it, but now that we enter into a kind of metabolic fasting or dietary fasting, there are certain parameters that we are looking for, so I've heard people define it when you first started, that you break your fast with anything that raises your insulin and if you eat something that doesn't raise your insulin, then you haven't broken your fast.

So I'm curious why people use insulin since the marker is insulin as the only marker of a fast or if it's not autophagy, technically it's not a fast, what are the parameters by which you say? This still qualifies as a fast, it depends on your goals and the type of fast you're looking for, so some people fast to heal the gut and during that type of fast you may want to drink only water, you probably want to. have water plus these colored compounds in tea or coffee because they feed the good bacteria, they are a prebiotic.

You can also use one of the three fasting tricks that just take the pain out of fasting for people who just need to get through the day and fast and get healthier along the way is prebiotic fiber so you can do that and what does it do? prebiotic fiber to get rid of symptomatic headaches? Prebiotic fiber feeds starvation bacteria in the gut so they produce less lipopolysaccharides, which is a major problem during fasting. It also ensures that you don't starve your gut bacteria and when you do that you quench your hunger and there are multiple studies that show that soluble fiber that can't be digested by you helps maintain good gut bacteria, so now that you're fasting you're not dealing with a lot of lipopolysaccharides, which are bacterial toxins that they produce when they're stressed in the gut, so, oh, wait a minute, I had healthier gut bacteria, my blood sugar didn't change, but gut bacteria converted this fiber into butyric acid. or butyrate, which is a ketogenic compound, so all of a sudden, oh, I didn't feel hungry this morning, it wasn't that good, I didn't spend half the morning thinking about muffins and I barely made it through the day and I still got my fast. and this idea that you have to feel pain and suffering and just muscle through it doesn't work for people who have a lot of things to do, in fact it makes it much harder.

I don't believe in causing suffering unless there is a hormetic. effect and there's no other way to do it, so let's talk about the goal of a fast, so you just talked about healing the gut, so we could have different results that we're looking for, you would basically be resting. gut, you even say in the book that if you have a gut problem you're trying to cure it, the easiest way to cure it is to not have anything in your gut, so that makes a lot of sense, so we're not necessarily worried about that. insulin rises down or is indifferent we're not necessarily worried about even calories being present, we're worried about having things that the bacteria in the gut have to work on so they can take a break and hit the reset button Now if I'm doing a fast in which my specific goal is to enter autophagy, what can we ingest and still have autophagy present?

Can I have fat in my diet and remain autophagy? What does it look like if I can have moderate fat? amounts of fat in your diet and still be autophagy, but in the research I've done and in conversations with other

expert

s it's clear that having only fat will not affect autophagy now if you have 3000 calories of fat, a caloric excess. can inhibit autophagy, but no one has ever studied what caloric excess fat looks like because no one would actually do that, so there are also a lot of things, like the fasting-mimicking diet, that kick in even though you're eating some things and What elements of fasting are they imitating well?

It's very low calories for five days, about 500 calories for five days and this is based on research by Walter Longo, who is what I would call the godfather of fasting and one of the best. The fasting

expert

s out there today say, hmm, we're activating autophagy even though we're eating some things, so you can't even say protein without saying what protein, there are some proteins that you can't even digest and maybe That doesn't affect it, so it gets very specific around some amino acids that raise insulin a lot more, so you know a few teaspoons of whey protein will break the fast more than collagen, but it depends on your individual response. to those, ideally, although less than 15.

Grams of protein from all sources will maintain your autophagy state and this goes back to my first big book in 2014 and that data was available and based on studies, so the deal it's just having no protein, no sugar, no carbohydrates that you can digest and the fasting processes will work, there's a little asterisk in that statement and we're getting relatively technical. One of the things that happens when you fast is that there is something called fiat, it is the fat factor induced by fasting and your liver activates it. It's like oh I'm fasting no calories I better use this and what is it it speeds up fat burning and when you're not fasting it speeds up fat storage unfortunately if you have a lot of bad gut bacteria they're like oh this Petri dish.

It's our petri dish, so we're going to modify it and the bacteria themselves will produce more fasting-induced adipose factor than the liver would naturally produce, which means you lose weight faster when you fast but gain weight faster when you eat. and this is a question because they want to make sure that their petri dish doesn't starve and there's also a little bacteria. I do not have food. Let me tell the petri dish to secrete more energy so it can go find food and then. I will get food so that they literally change your behavior and it is fascinating that they do this but you can also manipulate them knowing that they do so fasting can help you lose weight but if you have good gut bacteria present and you are aware of that fact you can doing things like consuming that tea, those polyphenols that feed the good bacteria called the bacteriode family, so the colored compounds, the fruits, the vegetables, the coffee, the tea, and the chocolate are all prebiotics for the good gut bacteria. that you can't buy into a probiotic and therefore having healthy gut bacteria solves that problem and the reality is that you and I are from the perspective of our mitochondria, which are the things that we're primarily working on.

In fact, most of my work revolves around mitochondria, these are ancient bacteria. embedded in our

body

they think they are in charge and they are the ones that drive your hunger, your fear, your cravings, they are the ones that make you know to date people you shouldn't be dating and they drive human desire, in fact, There is an order of operations of them that I described in the book and thisit's the algorithm for all forms of life and that's why they're messing with you and then you have gut bacteria that's also messing with you by secreting their own factors to try to get your body to do what it wants you to do and then for us, too. we're there in our logical cognitive brains, wait a minute, these impulses pull me all over the place and then finally when your energy is lower. and your impulses are high, your ability to manage your emotions goes down, your ability to make good decisions goes down and then you eat the cookie and that's what's annoying, so when I think about all these things working together like this. cacophony of things that happen, you have the mitochondria that push you in one direction, you have the bacteria in your gut that push you and another, you have your own body's response to the lack of food, we have autophagy that is working for us.

We're clearing the cells so we can see how that would speak to longevity, maybe even clarity, but other than autophagy, what are some of the reasons why fasting is so important for people? The number one reason is not autophagy, that's actually kind of nerdy. reason to fast and I say that happily, being a nerd, most people who do intermittent fasting today don't even know what autophagy is and that's fine, what they know is that they fast and they get adequate energy and it's a lot of energy because even If we are following a so-called healthy diet, according to what is bulletproof, the first chapter of the book there are five kinds of toxins created by mother nature that we eat well every day and I think the first one is the first.

A great book on this was about lectins, not all lectins are bad, but these are defense molecules for certain types of foods like grains and bell peppers and things like that, and they make you very hungry and they affect you, and then you look at things like the phyticas. acids that inhibit your ability to absorb minerals there goes your argument for a type of whole grain because they are full of these things that prevent you from consuming zinc there is a problem there and then we have histamine that forms in certain foods and they sit That you it produces severe cravings and then you have oxalic acid which is kale, charred, raw spinach, which I've been warning about for years and then the fifth is the mycotoxins that grow on foods in the field and while they're stored and everything.

Those ones bother you and when you fast you don't get any of that it's like wow I feel so good and it's not the fasting it's that you're not eating things that make you feel bad because you're used to eating every day so that's a hidden side benefit of fasting, yeah, so getting into inflammation and things like that and fasting has such a profound impact on that. What I want to know when we start fasting and we have our energy levels going up because we're not taking in a bunch of things that you know, whether it's just bad food or whether it's the toxins that you're talking about, we're also getting this reduction in inflammation. .

I'm curious what is causing the reduction in inflammation, is it simply the absence? From the toxins that you mentioned or there is something else, there are two important things that happen, one is the absence of toxins and the other is that ketones themselves are anti-inflammatory, deeply anti-inflammatory, so now you're saying wait a minute. I have less inflammation because if I had to guess, I'd say it's probably two-thirds from not eating things that make you weak and one-third from the presence of ketones. Um, the inflammatory stuff, I could be wrong, but that's it. You know a very rough estimate as to why and if you said I was going to eat a super clean diet with no plant toxins, you would feel pretty similar, but you would still have blood sugar swings that you won't get. when you're fasting, usually after a while it stabilizes well, so fasting plays this crazy role when we talk about metabolic diseases which, depending on who you talk to, are everything from cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, as there must be .

Something in common that all of this has working together is insulin. People have referred to Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes. Type 3 of the brain is simply general inflammation of ketone bodies. What is it that operates in all these different diseases? manifestations what's happening there is you're getting a metabolic reset and you're getting a lot of autophagy, you're taking the mitochondria that are weak, they've learned and there's a billion of them, way more than our cells in your body. and they have learned that yes, there is a lot of food on the way. I really don't have to do anything.

It's okay if I'm running with an efficiency of 50, you know, it's good enough for the world I'm in and suddenly, like, I'm in it. a world where I have to be able to be really alert, the body looks around and says, well this sucks, I guess I'll have to kick out all the weak mitochondria and start the expensive process of building new ones that are young and those are the mitochondria that can effectively and efficiently use glucose or ketones and that's what's causing a lot of this, the elimination of senescent cells, but still, if you were to take a water fast and say, hey, I'm going to do 500 milligrams of physitin and 2 grams of quercetin, which are massive synalytic promoters, you'll get more out of them, but now you're not just drinking water quickly, you're using supplements specifically to improve autophagy, and I think so. that the puritanical water-only approach is not advisable, but I do believe that if you are going to do things during a fast, it has to be limited and you have to know what it is and why you are taking it.

For example, there are other supplements that I recommend and fast this way that improve the body's ability to do what it does during fasting. I'm talking about proteolytic enzymes like serrapeptase and nanokinase, and what they do is help the body break down waste proteins and scar tissue since the body is already working on that and you give it more enzymes that it needs, that means that your pancreas and your discernment state your liver can produce the enzymes that they need to repair DNA and refold proteins and things like that because some of the cleansing proteins that you've already taken orally, you can also take things like activated charcoal for a fasting and because your gut bacteria get very stressed and produce more of that lipopolysaccharide or lps that we talked about before, if you bind it in the gut, you actually have less inflammation but you feel a lot better, so all you do is water It's like I'm going to put my head down and go through it.

I just don't believe in additional suffering. I would say that anyone who is on a water fast and adds activated charcoal will have better results one hundred percent of the time because it blocks toxins from leaving the body. I know in the book you said that part of the keto flu that people experience when they start fasting or starting a ketogenic diet. The diet is mitigated by taking activated charcoal, for that reason it is interesting. I wish I had known that the first time I did keto, that I had a brutal keto flu, it was terrible, what are some of the others?

Because you offer a lot of different styles of fasting and ways to mitigate some of the difficulties that people may have with fasting, so what are some of the other things that we need to address and how do we address them? One of the biggest concerns out there is that people say that fasting makes me feel sick. well so I'm going to do it every day, you know, I'm going to try this new omad thing where I just eat dinner, so I'm going to do it every day for about a week. This is incredible. I've never heard of that one meal a day, oh crazy yeah, so omad is one meal a day and they say okay that's great, and oh man it's so easy to skip breakfast, lunch, dinner there, you just fasted 24 hours, it's not.

As sexy as I look, I look like I'm angry. I am ketogenic. I'm strong. You're literally skipping two meals, it's not good for you and during the day you might be a little hungry, but there are things you can do. do it if you ate, if you eat the

right

food, you won't be hungry after eating and if you eat the wrong food, which most of us do, at least one or two things are wrong, then an hour late we're like man. I really want to eat, I have sugar cravings. What's going on? And then you have to work at it, so learning how to eat is an important part of not experiencing pain during a fast, but people say okay, I can do a 24-hour fast.

I feel so good, I'm rocking, what's really happening is they're getting a little stressed biologically, they feel good mentally, but their body is saying okay, I'm producing a lot of cortisol and adrenaline

right

now, which I'm using to break down some muscles so I can have enough glucose to keep my brain going because this is not a fat burning body yet, like your metabolism isn't flexible and if you've been eating bad fats for years, it's going away. take some time to fix your mitochondria what is the ideal split for you the ideal split is whatever you do and 16-8 is great but for 16 hours without eating and then I eat everything I want in an eight hour period OR Do you put limitations on the feeding window?

You can eat as much as you want during the twinkie window. You know you can and you will still make a profit. To be completely honest, you will only get more benefits if you eat good things. during the window and that's the other thing, okay, maybe you don't want to go grass fed, just maybe you don't want to eliminate potato chips from your universe. It's okay, intermittent fasting will help everyone, even on a complete shitty diet, whatever you want. You'll be hungrier during your intermittent fast if you eat junk, so you'll have to deal with that and ideally what you eat after you break your fast can have carbs and no carbs, but no sugar, no seeds. oils and eating grass-fed meat or not eating meat and if you follow those basic principles and there are other nuances there, what you find is you feel really good and the next morning you wake up and you're not hungry and they're like oh yeah, not even I want to have breakfast and that's a very liberating thing because if we spend a lot of our thoughts every day on food, food, food and then you're just not hungry, that really changes things, so I want millions of people say I'm going to try this basic I'm not going to worry about getting my diet perfect maybe I'll make some changes but I'm just going to learn how to do intermittent fasting and what not What I want you to do is what much of the fasting community does, where It's all about fasting and you know every month I'm going to fast for a week and what you end up doing is there are people who basically burn out. adrenals, so women see sleep problems as the first sign that they are overdoing it and then they see hormonal problems in their monthly cycle and then they see hair loss and thinning, guys, same thing, but it's usually between two and four weeks for women first. trouble sleeping, then you wake up and there's no support and then it took me a second, it got there, yeah, and after that you can see this too and this is due to excess cortisol because you overdid it and you can see. same thing for being keto for three months straight, that's why I always recommended cycling because I made all these mistakes when I was learning about all this stuff, it was really early and so how can you make this sustainable and the truth is that fasting the same way every day is bad for you because it doesn't give your body the idea of ​​metabolic flexibility.

It's like I live in a world where there is almost never enough food, so at least you have breakfast once in a while. You know, on Saturday morning, have breakfast with your family and you can have a keto breakfast or you can have gluten-free waffles, whatever you want. You should be able to handle it, just don't eat bad oils and over time, it takes about two years to replace half of your cell membranes, the oil in those membranes, over time you will become more and more metabolically flexible because your cells work better. , but if you keep eating a ton of junk food while doing intermittent fasting, you won't get that. benefit, but you will get a lot of other benefits from fasting, you will still lose weight, you will still have an improved blood sugar profile, but not as good as if you made some dietary changes, so this is something that everyone can do.

What I can do is cheaper and more convenient than what you do in the morning right now, so I don't think we've come full circle on metabolic flexibility before, so metabolic flexibility is that you have on one side that you can burn glucose and then in another. The other is that you can burn ketones, most people, unless they're paying attention, never get into a space where they can burn ketones because they're not creating ketones. Can you give them to people real quick because I want to get back to what an ideal fast looks like? I like to fast this way, but first give people a quick analysis onhow you put your body in a state where it will produce ketones and exactly what ketones are and what happens when your body burns fat instead of sugar, naturally, doesn't happen. if you're consuming carbs in a significant amount and that doesn't happen if you're eating a ton of protein and what happens when you do that is that ketones have more energy than glucose and the neurons in your brain love ketones in fact, all cells in your body do, but some prefer blood glucose, so suddenly you have this feeling of clarity and the natural way to get into ketosis is to fast for about two days for the average person, sometimes three and then the rest.

The body says I have nothing here. I better start burning my fat stores to release some fat from the fat stores and also all the toxins from the fat that it releases, which is why it's good to cleanse them while you're fasting and then your cells understand this and say, "Oh Man, we have to reformat our energy plants because they are used to having only sugar, so it takes metabolic energy to transform and they literally change their form and function so they can consume better." Gordo right, and that takes a while, now you're metabolically flexible, but if you do that all the time forever, your cells are like why would they ever be set up to make glucose?

I live in a sugar-free world, so they're not very good for That's why going in and out of ketosis, fasting sometimes but not other times, and not fasting the same way every day or every week is really powerful. ; you want to keep the body a little bit off balance so it's like you know what. I'm ready to generate energy at any time quickly from any type of fuel and when you do, you can go out and have a bowl of ice cream, hopefully dairy-free and without bad fats, so a coconut-based ice cream with real sugar and all that will happen that your blood sugar will go up and back down and you'll be fine and that's a metabolically flexible person, you do it all the time, you're not going to be metabolically flexible right, but if you're the type who eats ice cream every night, then what's going to happen is you won't know how to burn fat, whatever it is, your body will just burn sugar and it won't work and your blood sugar will go up. always be high, so the idea is that occasionally it's okay to have some carbs.

I don't recommend knowing that ice cream is a major source, but honestly, if you're intermittent fasting, occasionally in ketosis, you should be able to eat some. that's not full of inflammatory things like bad oils and all that and be fine and the evidence is that people whose metabolism works very well can do it and their blood sugar doesn't go crazy, well now if we gave it to someone the quickest way starter kit, you know, kind of a basic week, seems like a good entry point where they're not hungry, they're not going crazy, but they're still getting some benefits, anti-inflammatory. maybe you're in ketosis, they have some autophagy, like, what does that quick start kit look like?

Okay, I'll explain that right here. I'm also going to offer it because I was a teacher for five years. At the University of California I wrote every book I have ever written. I really haven't been a great teacher of the content. I just write them as you should read them when people place fast orders this way and send the receipt to fastthisway.com. I'll teach you this for two weeks, like every morning, and explain how to guide people who are new to fasting through this, ending in a one or two day spiritual fast, so that's the long answer to the question. ask.

This will take me two weeks, but I'll show you. The short answer is: go 12 hours without eating, see if you can do it if you've never done it before. That's not technically intermittent fasting. You're just showing that you have legs and work up to 14 hours without eating. food and that's when you actually start really intermittent fasting and then maybe the next day you have breakfast just a lot of protein a lot of fat no carbs for breakfast right you're taking it easy and then the next day okay I'm out. to do a 16 hour fast and you can use all three fasting tricks because you're hungry when I was 300 pounds, if you told me I'd skip breakfast and lunch, I'd think I'd kill people. around me like I was going to be an idiot and it was true that I ate six or eight times a day because I knew I would go into starvation mode if I didn't and this is all like mental garbage, we've been told, so what End result is this idea where little by little you work your way up and it's okay to do that and some mornings someone will bring you donuts and you'll just break your fast and in the book I explain the psychology. and the biology of why that happens and okay you have the rest of your life to do this that's why it's called a fasting practice and it doesn't have to be perfect and once you get to that 68 someday you're going to sit there. and you'll go, you know what lunchtime is, but I'm actually not that hungry, so I'm going to do it for the first time in my adult life.

I'm just going to say I'm not going until dinner and Then you're really kidding yourself because it's only about four or five more hours until you've had dinner anyway and then you're going to wait a minute. The last time I ate was yesterday, but it wasn't pain. It wasn't suffering, it wasn't struggle, it wasn't struggle, it wasn't pressure, it was just oh okay, I could do that, yeah, I was a little hungry in the afternoon, but I drank a little more water, right? Maybe you used coffee, coffee is good. For you anyway, it's fine, and then no sugar or cream I guess, thanks, no sugar, no cream, no protein, no artificial sweeteners, you can use stevia or monk fruit if you want, but it's definitely not just another Splenda sweet and neutral because they ruin your intestines. bacteria and it's really shocking and you see this look of shock like wow I can't believe it, I thought I was going to die but I didn't, I just did it for 24 hours and like we talked about before, you know, one meal a day, but If the next day you're like yesterday, I'll do it again today and you're still starting to do it, you probably won't feel as good, so the next day go back to 16-8. okay, like slowly working your way up to it and what you're doing is like you go to the gym, you say I haven't worked out in two years, but I'm going to do a full crossfit workout, right, I'm going to do the whole wad. and then the next day you're lying on your back and you're like, "I think I need to go to the hospital." My kidneys are overloaded with protein breakdown.

You know, I hate my life. It's because it's good when you exercise your cells. the way fasting knows that it's okay to just start in a healthy, gentle way and work your way up to this. I can fast for 48 hours and still be totally fine and get my brain working and do interviews like this and I feel great. I can do it too. Eat and I feel great, but before I ate and then I go into a food coma and then you don't feel very good and then you have to have some sugar, that doesn't happen either, but if you just go in and say "I." I'm going to start with a ten day water fast, man you're going to feel like shit and the deal here is that fasting isn't about deprivation and it's not supposed to be about willpower unless you're doing a fast. spiritual and what I would say is do it. fasting in a painless way, which is a big part of the book, or choosing to face the pain and use it as spiritual personal development, practicing the arc of the book when I started this, I was afraid of being hungry, I was afraid of being alone. which was something that came to me through my personal development work.

I thought, oh, I didn't realize this, so I hired a shaman to drop me off in the middle of nowhere, in a cave, no food or people for 10 miles. in any direction and I think I'm going to be here for four days and I'm afraid, you know, I'm quite afraid of this to be completely honest, this is the first time I've done a four day fast and When I came out of there I couldn't believe the energy that I had and in the book I talk about the mental process that you go through the first time you do a fast like that and that is a spiritual practice and that's why At the end of this challenge, I'm running for people, I'm going to say: "Okay, here's the meditation work that you do, understanding the voice in your head because there are three voices in your head that make you do everything you have." Have you ever been embarrassed and it comes from your mitochondria and your gut bacteria and overcoming that and just owning that is amazing, but if you have to own that every day on top of everything else in your life, it's going to be overwhelming and you're going to increase your cortisol and you don't need to do that to get the benefits what are the three voices?

This is the algorithm that runs all of life, it doesn't matter if you are a plant, it doesn't matter if you are a plant, you are a bacteria, which is what drives us, or if you know that you are a deer, and the first rule is to run away, kill or hide from everything, so that's fear and you put 10 times more energy into it than necessary, because from the perspective of creating a life form that will always be around you it must be protected and you protect yourself if it is a plant with hard shells or spikes or toxins. and if it's a bacteria, it uses toxins or other defensive things and if it's a person it thinks it's out of this and the second f-word that gets five times more attention than normal is eat everything because famines kill a lot of things, so now we are afraid and we have proper food and that is why the food becomes so big.

Watch out when you're fasting because your bacteria like eat that, eat that, eat that, eat that, eat that and no, no, and eventually it's like a little kid wears you down and it's okay, you can eat half the cookie. , Johnny, and they say. Why do I eat the cookie? I'm a bad person. No, your mitochondria took over. Alright. And then the third f-word. What else does all of life have to do to make sure it's on earth forever? Tom fucks, baby. Oh me. I was thinking about fertility, but if you want to go straight, I'll go right there.

You're right, so I was actually thinking about the other f-word. I was just trying to get you to say it, so nice, dodge what, um, what's going on? There is something that receives approximately three times more attention than it deserves and your whole life has to do it and this explains everything you have done and that you are ashamed of, like all procrastination, all resistance, not seeing things like that, it is fear, eat everything. the things you shouldn't eat that's the food that goes on that date you know you shouldn't have followed that's the other f-word right and this is in our cells this is not your brain this is your cellular biology that drives you to do it. and the saving grace in all of this and this is towards the end of the book is that there is a fourth f word that all life makes and is a friend and that is why we form communities, why we specialize and we are actually programmed to help. each other, but if they're so wrapped up in hunger and so wrapped up in lack of love and so wrapped up in fear, whether it's from watching too much news or just from their previous programming, that's like oh no yeah yeah you know yeah my boss yells that you are a bad person, no one will love me and you just lose it, so if that happens, we are not there to help other people and if you can turn off the voice of hunger, you will release a lot more energy than you.

Now you can do the work necessary to reduce fear and make sure that you are managing love in your life and suddenly you are a better person than you were before and that is why fasting is so important because it has the power to give you the energy to overcome the other words that bother you daily and it's not because we're bad people, it's a separate operating system meant to keep you alive, it's not trying to hurt you, it just makes you do stupid things all the time and the Fasting is one way out of that trap is that the reason why this is such a time-honored tradition for spiritual traditions to use fasting or is there something else, what were all the things that we learned or discovered in the cave there are two reasons why spiritual fasting works and I actually reference a lot of different fasting practices from around the world in the book that are all spiritual traditions, one of them is that when the neurons in your brain get ketones from By fasting, You actually think better, you have more energy to think and become aware.

The food tastes better. The colors are brighter. Get this, this energy is like wow, I like this and if you take that energy and you turn it inward, you become aware of what's happening there in a way that you normally wouldn't and I think that's part of it and the The other part is that you know you have to feel hungry and have willpower to overcome the hunger for about two days and it's about showing yourself who's in charge and that's a spiritual practice in itself, but it's the clarity that comes. and with that clarity you can do deep work.

I want to talk about that growth part. So you said in the cave. You know by doing an extended fast like that you're creating the space to do the deep work or you have the energy. do the workdeep what was the deep work like what was that and I mean what you talk about in the books? I don't think I'm going to leave school here, but what made you want to do spiritual work? quick um and then you know what you found that you got along, I had lost a lot of weight but I recognized that I still had uh you know, afraid of being hungry because when your metabolism doesn't work when you're as fat as me, if you don't have food, you brain stops working.

I had a great career in Silicon Valley. You know, it's very cognitively demanding but interesting and fascinating, and you're in a meeting and you like my brain. It doesn't work like I'm trying to think of right now and I don't have anything like the accelerator is all the way to the floor and I'm slowing down. I can push hard but no matter how hard I try, it doesn't match. I want it to not be a question of willpower or morality, it is a biological question, so you are afraid of being hungry because you don't want to be disabled, right?

And I had that and I recognized that I had that I didn't know what to do about it. I said it, well I'm just going to face it and one thing that happens when you face your fears, they lose their power, so for me in the cave it's like there's no one around. Like showing myself that I'm actually still safe. Without food, I'm still safe without company, right? and then being able to go, you know how cool, I'm not going to die and that penetrates your body, it's not. During the day you're sitting there thinking you're walking I was sitting there thinking and saying you know what, okay, I'm just going to walk, I'd walk through the little canyon where I was, you know, I pile up rocks I had a little journal and I really feel, but you know, you think about all the things you've done, uh, that man, I wish I hadn't done that, now I understand what drove me to do that and you really gain knowledge and you feel much more connected to the world around you and, like most, yes I'm going to fast, I'll get my metabolism up, I'll get younger, I'll lose weight and I'll get abs and you get all these benefits, you actually have no distractions when you're fasting so if you remove all the distractions from your world and you do some of the other things that I talk about briefly in the book, you'll know that fasting sex is a very powerful practice that increases your testosterone if you're a man if you're a woman it's probably not beneficial um there's other things towards the end of the book like hate fasting like trying to go four hours without thinking a bad thought about another person and then going 24 hours it's very difficult to do that and you realize during that time.

I can't believe how often I'm sending crap to people I didn't know I was doing. It costs you. to send dirt to them you have to make the electrons do that and it doesn't do anything for you so you can do without a lot of different things but when you have the clarity and the time to sit in a cave why am I thinking about this? right now like why is it pushing my buttons why did that pop up for me right now and then you look into it like oh my gosh I've never thought about it that way and this was once I had ketone clarity right? ?

I had no tickets anywhere, I had no food in front of me to challenge me and I could say oh I'm really hungry and then I wonder why I'm thinking I know there's no food here and who's thinking that because it's not me and then you You realize that there is actually a separate consciousness that is driving my biology and I mean you can see the effect of that consciousness using neurofeedback and it's all one of the things that I do with my neurofeedback company. 40 years of zen and it's wow. There's this whole thing that's like making me worry about things that I know aren't a threat and making me worry about food when I know I'm not going to starve.

I wonder: wait, why what? and then you start to really get involved. there and you, when you end a spiritual fast like that, you can develop a sense of empathy first, like I feel the pain that I felt, I feel the pain of others when they are hungry, and then the level beyond that in the spiritual . Teaching teachings is a sense of compassion where instead of having to feel the pain of others, you can see the pain and feel an open heart towards them and know that you want to serve without assimilating it and the end state, which is the most difficult to develop.

In these open-hearted Buddhist practices is equanimity, which is where you can be completely calm and at peace no matter what is happening inside or outside of you, and that is the kind of thing that can develop if you sit in the cave for days because It's like, wow, I had all this junk in my mind that I didn't know was there because I had nothing else to do but unpack it and we're too busy to do that, but I would say I skipped the fasting runs. I ate breakfast and had more energy and am better metabolically until I sat somewhere for several days in intense personal development, but when most people hear fasting, all they hear is that I will starve, then die, and then quit blank and no, this is about more energy and this is about more clarity and less wasted time and less pain in your life, yes, and to hear you describe the way that people refuse to see how even today the medical establishment conventional think about fasting and how it's considered so extravagant and you know that people immediately get well, you're going to get anorexia and it's such a strange reaction and when you think about those three F's and the fear that seems to be driving the perception of people about this Do you have any magic phrase or idea that you can give to people who are really resistant to try it?

You can fast without being hungry and without suffering and you will have more energy, but when I was, you really know. Heavy still, I was eating super healthy, what I thought was healthy, you know, low fat, low calorie stuff, but I was still working on it and if you told me I had to fast, I would say no, I'm not going to fast. do it. I'm going to go into starvation mode and it's going to suck and then I won't be able to do my job and you know, I'll act like an idiot and all that, that message sounds really strong for everyone who has extra pounds and then has this desire to fast, but Then you feel like a failure because your body's automated system wants you to eat and you don't know how to deal with it, so the deal is I'll put you in charge, that's what. happening here and that's why all the bad things you think about fasting will not happen.

What will happen is that you will save time and you will feel better than today and you will never be hungry. and then, well, I'm going to try this once. I think you are full of nonsense and it almost always starts with a fasting gimmick. There is a reason why several hundred million cups of bulletproof coffee have been drunk and people have lost a million pounds on bulletproof coffee. The diet is because when they had that fat in the morning they were intermittent fasting they just didn't feel hungry and for the first time in their lives when it was time for lunch they thought I guess I could eat instead of like I used to. being that it's like what's for lunch what's for lunch tacos you know that whole voice just shuts up and oh my gosh it's so liberating yeah it really changes your relationship with hunger that was the thing I could never get people to understand. about ketosis specifically and it's not that you're not hungry, it's that it doesn't control you, which is very, very different, it's because there are two things that we confuse, one is the craving and the other is hunger and hunger is the sensation .

You know it's time to eat soon but it might wait a while and a craving is that if I don't eat now someone is going to die either me or someone else and most people eat in such a way that they always experience cravings and have never experienced simply hunger without craving. I was like that one hundred percent and when you clean up the things that cause cravings, like, wow, the lunch experience is so different, so for someone who's new, they're in that space where they just can't imagine where people can, I mean, they can buy the book on Amazon and all the normal places, but where can they interact with you and really get the help they need to try it.

Order the book wherever you want. to order books and send me a receipt there is a little upload form at fastthisway.com uh and I will sign you up for two weeks of training where I will guide you this is what you are going to do today this is what we are going to do tomorrow and you will do it in a community of thousands and thousands of people sharing your results because having other people doing it with you is really motivating, so when you feel like you know, maybe I'll just take a bite of the donut and like it.

I'll post about this later. I don't think I want to tell people about the donut. I'll skip the donut, so it's a little extra willpower, but honestly, if you're doing this the right way, you'll probably win. I don't need willpower and I just want to show that I heard you right guys, believe me man, fasting is a game changer, read the book, it's very interesting, it's a unique take on all this and as always Dave is taking people by the hand by showing them exactly what they need to do. They have about a dozen companies that will help you in one way or another.

So be sure to check this man out and talk about things that will help you in one way or another if you have. Don't be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends will be legendary, take care. Thank you. How do you know when it's time to break up? Having children will ruin your dreams. Why can't you control that ugly jealousy? When do you know? If it's time to move or leave, these are just some of the no-holds-barred, no-nonsense conversations we'll be tackling on the new Relationship Theory YouTube channel along with my wife, the lovely and talented Lisa Bill, you'll bring our 20 years of experience Juggling our business aspirations while maintaining a strong relationship through all the obstacles that have punched us in the gut and hit us over the head on a daily basis, it's just as difficult to maintain a relationship as it is to build a successful company, maybe even harder. difficult but it's worth it, it's certainly more worth it than building a business and if you can't maintain a healthy relationship then there's no way you can thrive in your business environment, there's absolutely no way we're thriving now but it wasn't always that way for us. , we had to deal with family pressure, financial struggles and an endless stream of obstacles and just when you think one problem has been solved, ten more will hit you and let me tell you.

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