Full transcript of “What Fasting Really Does to Your Body”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 What fasting really does to your body? In 1965, the year I was born, a 27-year-old man in Scotland decided to stop eating. Not for a day, not for a week, for 382 [music] days. No food, just water and supplements under medical supervision, but no food for over a year. I mean, when you tell an average person this, it just blows their mind. They think they're going to be starving to death. That's not what happened, not at all. This individual needed to lose a lot of weight. In fact, they lost 275 lb. And the weight that came off of them was sustained over the years. Now, I'm not going to tell you to fast for a year. All I'm going to recommend is something called intermittent fasting, all right?
0:46 And also some periodic prolonged fasting. I'm going to tell you some additional information and try to convince you to do it because it is probably one of the healthiest things that you can do to your body. We think that food nourishes our body, right? It makes sense, it's logical, and to heal the body we need to nourish it. Not necessarily. There's an environmental mismatch. In other words, the environment that we live in right now is very different than our ancestors' environment. Way back in the day, we did not eat as frequently. We did not have the snacks. In fact, when you walked in the grocery store in the '40s and the '30s, there weren't even snack aisles. Now, we have entire aisles of snack foods. Where we're not just eating too much, we're eating too frequently. And this frequency of eating is literally killing us in so many different ways.
1:33 It's not nourishing our bodies. In fact, to heal various conditions, we have to mimic what our bodies have evolved with, which is intermittent fasting. So, when someone first told me about intermittent fasting, I really thought it was just a fad, and I didn't think anything of it until I started looking at it a little bit closer. In fact, it is probably one of the most important things to get the body healthy that you could possibly do. And so, as soon as you set your body up for an intermittent fasting pattern, so let's say for example, your first meal is going to be at noon, your last meal is going to be at 5:30 or 6:00, and then you're going to fast after that all the way until the next day until lunch, that pattern is 18 hours of fasting in 6 hours of eating. That's your window of
2:20 eating, 6 hours. Because what happens is you are switching your body over into burning your actual stored fat. Which, by the way, an average thin person has about 100,000 calories of fat on their body to survive several months very easily. That's an average thin person. An overweight person can survive a lot longer. But let's just kind of go through this. So, hours 1 to 12 of no eating, your insulin drops. Insulin is the fat-storing hormone. And most people have metabolic disease because they have too much insulin to the point where you can't get the fuel in. So, the nerve cells, for example, start dying and you start getting dementia, and the muscle
3:08 cells of the heart start starving of fuel because of this insulin resistance. So, it creates a lot of problems. Now, there is stored sugar in your liver that kind of feeds your body through the night, but when you fast for the first 12 hours, especially from hour 8 to 12, you start losing some of this glycogen cuz we need to drop it down to then kick into a different fuel, which happens between 12 and 24 hours. Where you start now finally burning, probably for the first time in a long time, fat. To be able to burn fat, we must either fast or not consume carbohydrates. So, ketones are also a source of fuel that we can
3:53 use for our brains. Our brains love it. There's also another condition called autophagy, which is cleaning up the old damaged cells in the body, and you start to recycle them into healthy cells. And so, this is kind of an anti-aging process. It's a healing and repair process. Then, we go from 24 to 48 hours, and we get a lot more cleaning, autophagy, and then we get a spike of growth hormone, which is the anti-aging hormone. It's the fat-burning hormone. You start losing a lot more weight. And then, at 72 hours, okay, 3 days later, if you're doing a prolonged fast, something wild happens. A switch gets turned on. Over a thousand proteins start kicking in. You have all
4:39 these survival things that happen with your immune system, with your brain, especially with your heart. So, this is why it's important to do periodic prolonged fasting, but also regular intermittent fasting. And I'm going to recommend for an average person, maybe 16 hours of fasting, and maybe an 8-hour eating window. Even better than that, 18 hours of fasting in a 6-hour window of eating. That's what I do, and it seems to work really, really well. I have a free download that I want to give to you. This free download is my daily routine and a checklist. This is the routine that I use every day to feel like I'm 18 years old, even though I'm 60 years old. And I want to give it to you for free. And so, there's a little link down below. Click it, and
5:26 definitely download that. All right. So, now let's talk about this compound, spermidine. This has nothing to do with sperm. Okay, spermidine is something they recently discovered. And this compound is really what does the magic when you're fasting. Just realize that there's a couple things that will block this, okay? One is antibiotics, and the other's alcohol. So, now let's move on to this other really important part. The benefit of prolonged fasting occurs when you refeed, but the meal that breaks the fast really determines the benefits, mainly of the stem cells. A stem cell is kind of like a universal cell that can turn into a certain cell and start
6:13 healing the body. You can actually stimulate stem cells by doing prolonged fasting. There's three amino acids: arginine, proline, and ornithine. So, we need these three amino acids in order for you to get the benefits of getting your stem cells. So, the meal that should break this fast should include those amino acids. So, a little bit of egg would be important, little fish, maybe sardines, right? Or animal protein. The way to nullify the results is to have some sugar or chips or refined carbohydrates. You're not going to get the results of that 3-day fast. It's pretty much wasted. Another really important thing about fasting, let's say you eat this meal at 8:00 a.m.
6:59 in the morning, and then you eat the exact same meal at 9:00 at night. Both of those meals can have a completely different effect on your body just from the timing alone. What happens in the morning is you're most insulin sensitive. At night, so you're going to have the most insulin resistant. So, what does that mean? It means that your last meal should be an early dinner, okay? As early as you can get, because your body's going to have a completely different effect than you would have if you consumed this earlier. The best way to gain fat on your body is to eat a late-night high-carb dinner and then go to sleep. So, we don't want to do that. What we want to do is have our latest meal as early as possible.
7:45 So, let's say a 5:00 dinner or even a 6:00 dinner. Try to plan more for that. Okay, and then do not eat anything after that meal. The kitchen is closed. There is a fantastic hardcore randomized controlled trial of people doing intermittent fasting, just doing a pattern of 16 hours and an 8-hour eating window. And what they found is the group that did the intermittent fasting, their heart was much much stronger. So, in other words, if you have high blood pressure or a heart problem, you should be doing intermittent fasting. Next question, is there a difference between men and women when they do fasting? With women, you have before menopause, they have menstrual cycles. When they do some
8:32 pretty hardcore intermittent fasting, they lose their menstrual cycle. For those women, I would recommend you cut back on the intensity of that fasting until your period normalizes because your body is getting a signal that, you know what, this is not good for survival, so it's turning it off. Some women can tolerate it, some women can't. It really depends on what's going on inside, but I would adjust the intensity if it affects your menstrual cycle. Now, let's talk about menopause for a second with women because the cortisol starts going up, the estrogen goes down, they have a lot of problems losing weight, so they don't want to do a lot of intermittent fasting and prolonged fasting. But the problem is sometimes they can start losing more muscle. So, I
9:18 would back off and not go that long. You want to be able to feel good on your fasting cycle. So, a couple simple things to do is to start doing weight training. If you consume enough or sufficient animal protein with that exercise together, that is the best way to deal with preventing the loss of muscle. Now, if a female has polycystic ovarian syndrome, this is an abnormal amount of insulin that's creating an abnormal amount of testosterone or androgens. Intermittent fasting and fasting normalizes hormones. In that case, you want to do intermittent fasting. So, if you go to the doctor and get your fasting insulin tested, which I would highly recommend, and it's above five. Okay, let's say
10:03 it's 12, 20, 30, whatever. I would definitely start doing periodic prolonged fasting and then regular intermittent fasting to bring that insulin down because that's abnormal. And that's a little different than what I'm talking about with just trying to lose weight. You want to adjust the intermittent fasting pattern based on how you feel, but if you're trying to correct something, then you want to just do this on a standard regular basis. Now, for men that do prolonged fasting, they could potentially lower their testosterone. That's a factor, especially if they can't get enough protein. So, in this case, it's the same thing. You want to do the correct intermittent fasting ratio and then do a combination of heavyweight training with sufficient amount of protein to maintain your testosterone. When you do prolonged
10:50 fasting, especially if you do like 3 days, 5 days, 7 days, or longer, your body is going to go into this mode where it's going to break down things. And if you're older, your testosterone might come down too far. So, you want to monitor that. So, a lot of people ask me, "What supplements do I recommend?" Now, of course, I'm not biased of my own high-quality supplement line, but if you go to Amazon and type Dr. Berg supplements, you'll find more information. Another question that people have is, "Should I exercise in a fasting window?" The answer is yes. The results will be compounded if you can actually do your workout in a fasted state. Now, what about prolonged fasting? Let's say you're going to fast for 3 days or 5
11:36 days or whatever. Should you do intensive exercise? And the answer is no. I wouldn't do that because really the big benefit of prolonged fasting is repair and healing. And when you add the exercise, it's going to add the stress in there. But for regular intermittent fasting, I would recommend doing exercise in a fasting state. All right, now that you understand a little bit deeper about fasting, I'm going to give you the details of how to do fasting correctly in this video right here. Check it out.
