Best Time To Fast For Weight Loss & Autophagy

Hello Health Champions.So many people are finding benefit from fasting and they're finding

it so easy to do, but other people are afraid because there's so many strange notions floating

around. So today I want to clarify some of those misconceptions and also talk about

the best length of time to do your fasting. Who needs to do what? First lets just demystify

the whole concept so we can get comfortable about what this really is. When we eat something

that allows us to store something. We use some of the energy for the time being but the excess

we can store. We can store a tiny little bit as carbohydrates and most of it we store

as fat, because it's the most energy dense form of storage. It's the most efficient way

to do it. And the way that we store it whether it's glycogen as sugar ,carbohydrate or whether

we stored it as fat, the mediator is insulin. Insulin is the hormone that allows us to put things

into cells. Now here is the big question. Why would we ever want to do that? So this is kind

of like, you put things you put fat in the body stores. That's sort of like you're putting food in

your pantry. Why would you do that? And the answer is because you plan to use it at some

later point. So then when we don't eat now we can reverse the process and we can burn

that fat we can take that stuff out of the pantry. That doesn't sound so strange that

we put things in so that we can take it out. And for most of human history we've had some

sort of balance in this system. And when you don't eat then insulin goes down. And this

is a very very normal process put in we take out nothing could be more natural. How has this

been working historically? So these guys lived a long long time ago Paleolithic Age hunter-gatherers

And we don't know exactly how often they ate but we do know that they didn't have probably

extensive pantries or freezers or refrigerators They were very limited in how much food they

could store. So on a bad day they probably didn't eat. If they couldn't find food every

day they probably went some time without, and on a good day they probably had one or two

or maybe three meals. And then humans developed some organization, some civilization, agriculture,

societies. So from recorded history up until 1970 we probably ate two to three times not

everyone had the luxury of eating 3 meals, but very very few people would ever more than

three meals. But then in the last forty years or so we've change that. We've gotten the idea that

the three meals are not enough, that we need to add snacks, every two hours we need to put

some extra fuel and we need to top it off and as if that wasn't enough a lot of people

walk around with a sippy cup they have their soda or their sweet tea or some other drink

and we're kind of used to having always having something to eat or drink and then of course

we have the development of all these fancy coffee shops we're almost every beverage sold

in there is a disguised sugar bomb. And what's interesting with a period of the last 40 years to the period before that

is the two things happened. We started eating more frequently and we started eating

more sugar and more processed foods and then we wonder why the rate of obesity and diabetes

shot up like a straight line or even exponentially So while some people think that the idea of fasting

is strange, what's really strange is what we've done in the last 40 years, because now we've

gotten the idea to never ever empty the pantry, right? Eating food is like loading up your body's pantry

and putting things in is a good thing but don't ever take anything out. We've gotten these

ideas that breakfast is the most important meal and while the word breakfast literally

means to break your fast it has come to mean that you eat something as soon as possible

after you get up. And then we tell the kids that you need energy before lunch I have to

have breakfast otherwise you can't perform you won't learn anything so make sure that

you eat breakfast and of course as a result we have these horrible "frankenfoods" of chemicals

and sugar and really nothing useful for the body. And what's really strange is this whole

idea that we would need to eat every 2 to 3 hours. That there would be some health benefit

that we would be better off doing that or that it would be dangerous to not eat every

2 to 3 hours. But what about sleep? Do you have to set the alarm so you can get up in the

middle of the night and eat something? Can you imagine the headlines? "Mass deaths last night

during the power out. Millions of people didn't wake up to their feeding alarm and they starved

to death in the middle of the night." No never happened, right? Because we don't need to eat

every 2 hours there is no health benefit there's tremendous health detriment to eating every

2 to 3 hours. Let's break it down and understand just how simple this is. What is fasting?

It is the period where you don't eat. So assuming that you sleep at all most people would get several hours

of fasting and if you have your late-night snack and you eat first thing in the morning

you probably still yet somewhere around eight hours or in the neighborhood of that. And

if you don't have that late night snack but you eat your dinner at 7 then you get 12 hours

if you have dinner a little earlier you have 14 hours and this is how humans have created

balance by having 12 to 14 hours for most of human history and that's how a lot of these

problems are avoided. Then what a lot of people find when they need to reverse the process

is that there's really not much need to eat breakfast so if you skip that and have your first

meal at noon and dinner at eight, you have 16 hours if you have dinner a little earlier you have

18 hours so it's not really that strange and what most people find is that this is not

even just easy but it's so easy that they don't understand why they would ever not do

it or why they would start having three meals or snacks or anything like that. So let's talk

about fat storing versus fat burning and how we get back to balance there, because if

you look at the obesity epidemic it's obvious we've spent a lot more time in fat storing

than we have in fat burning so the red above the line here is fat storing and the green

below is fat-burning so if you go to bed on a full stomach then you're going to have to

process that food that food is going to be put into storage so most of the time you sleeping

you still in fat storing then you get a few hours before waking up where you have some

fat burning but then as soon as you wake up you start eating your breakfast and you mid-morning

snack and your lunch and so on and for most of the day again you're in fat storing. You're

putting stuff in the pantry. You're never taking anything out so throughout the day you might

have a few minutes at best where you do some fat-burning but most people won't even get

to that point especially not if they're eating high carb and high sugar. Now if you dropped down to two

meals a day and you skipped breakfast it might look something like this that the first part

of sleep is probably still some fat storing but then instead of just eating as soon as

you get up now you get all those extra hours of fat burning in the morning and because

you're not eating so many meals throughout the day you actually get some fat burning

in during the day as well so you have more of a balance between fat storing and fat burning

you're allowing your body to clean out the pantry you put energy in to use, so now you're

using it instead of just adding more and more and more. And what if you do an extended fast?

What if you go a couple of days or even longer? Well you basically keep burning fat for the duration

that you don't eat, right? This seems really really simple but it's very very powerful

that the more time you go without eating the more fat gets burned. And as an additional

benefit of course the longer you go without food the longer you allow your insulin to

drop so it's not just about the weight, but it's also about the health benefits, about reversing

type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. The longer you go the more powerful the effect.

Then how long do you go? Well that depends on your goal and your situation and your DNA and

so forth but basically if your goal is weight loss it's going to depend on how stubborn

your weight is. Have you reached a plateau or do you just want it to happen faster?

And the same exact thing holds true for insulin resistance because it's basically the same

mechanism this weight is put there in the first place by insulin and if you have stubborn

weight you have stubborn insulin And other reasons to do fasting can be degenerative

disease if you want to reverse that.

If you have met your goals but you want to do some prevention or if you want more

longevity or if you just want to increase your health span. So much of the time we

talked about living longer but what's the point of living to 90 if the last 40 years

are riddled with disease and suffering. What if you could live to ninety or a hundred and

a hundred and twenty and be healthy and enjoy that virtually all of that time. Let's go over some examples for weight loss and the

vast majority of people somewhere 60 70 80 per-cent will get good results if they shrink

their feeding window down to six or eight hours which means their fasting window gets

to be 16 to 18 hours. Most people will get pretty good results and if you're one of those

people then just do that and be consistent and you'll develop a very good lifestyle that

works for you but if that doesn't work for you if you have stubborn weight, if you hit a

plateau if you needed to happen faster then you got to do more. It's as simple as that. So now

the next step is one meal a day which means you eat once a day or if you go further than

that then we're talkin maybe 42 or 48 hours and it's not as hard as people make it out to

be because if you start off with 16:8 or 18:6, and your body gets used to it, then it's not

that difficult to have dinner one day and then just to skip the whole next day just

make it till bedtime the next day go to bed and when you wake up you've fasted 36 hours.

The beauty of this is that that fasting period includes two nights so you've slept twice in that period

And if you're used to not having breakfast then you just go another 6 hours to lunch and you

have 42 hours. If you want to you can now just have the evening meal and you have forty-eight

hours. It's not as hard as it sounds and the fasting that last more than 24 hours that's

not something most people have to do all the time if you do once in awhile that's going

to break up that plateau it's going to break up that stubborn pattern and it's really going

to make things happen faster for the vast majority of people. But another interesting

thing happens to people is once they get past that 42 up to 48 hour mark they find that

the worst has passed that they're not as hungry as they used to be the kind of getting in

the groove they're getting the flow of things their minds are brightening and their periods

of hunger are less and shorter so it's not as hard as people think to go from that 48

hours and just do one more night and now you're at 3 days and then you can just basically

go as long as you feel good. As long as you're comfortable. As long as you're clear minded.

As long as you have some energy. Don't go run marathons or anything silly like that but

just for daily life, people find that they can usually extend it a few extra day so maybe

go 3 to 7 days and if you hit a point where you feel hey I've had enough then you eat

something. The only thing to make sure of is to drink plenty of fluids and take some salt

and minerals because you will be losing a little bit extra of that. And if your goal is to reverse insulin

resistance and type 2 diabetes then the exact same reasoning holds true there because if

you have stubborn weight then you have stubborn insulin so the mechanism is exactly the same.

But there are even more reasons to fast such as degenerative disease because the longer

you go with fasting the more autophagy you get. And autophagy literally means " self eating"

When you're fasting your body get energy from the fat. You're burning fat. The longer you go the

more fat burn but the most precious resource beyond energy is protein because protein is

used for building blocks and enzymes and hormones and your body constantly have cells wear out

so your body has to make new ones and if you're not eating protein the body has to find it

somewhere. So protein becomes very very precious and where can you find protein in the body

well muscles is the obvious choice but the body doesn't want to spend muscles. It needs

those to do the work. So it up-regulates the cleaning crew, the recycling crew. It puts more

people on cleaning duty and that goes out and clean every nook and cranny in the body

looking for debris and waste materials and dead cells and virus and bacteria. So in essence

you're up-regulating not just the cleaning crew but your immune system and you can take care of

sagging skin and all sorts of dead cell and waste that the body doesn't need. It gets better

at finding those things and as a result now we have results with arthritis and diabetes

and blood pressure and even think like auto immunity. Something like multiple sclerosis

The brain and nervous system has a very poor cleanup and repair. And autophagy is

really the only thing that's going to significantly improve the ability to repair the brain and

the nervous system. That is also very powerful after a traumatic brain injury. The first thing

you want to do if you get a concussion is to stop eating because that autophagy is

going to help clean up the damage and there's even evidence that periods

of fasting and autophagy can help reduce and even reverse cancer at least certain kinds

There are so many benefits to fasting that it's a great idea to do it even just for

maintenance so now we're doing it for prevention for longevity etcetera like we talked about

And now I would suggest that you do a combination of 16: to OMAD. Somewhere in that range. You eat

once a day, twice a day, 3 times a day. If you have a tendency to lose a lot of weight, too

easily. If you don't want to lose weight, then don't do so much of the OMAD. You do more

of the 16:8. If you tend to put on weight if you have stubborn weight then you do more

of the OMAD and less of the 16:8. I have a hard time keeping weight on if I do OMAD,

if I do one meal a day, for any length of time I just tend to keep losing weight

cuz it's hard to eat that much food in one sitting. I don't feel bad but I get thinner

than I want to be. And if you get 16 to 24 hours of fasting on a regular basis you're

going to get a fair amount of autophagy but you're not going to get massive amounts

of autophagy. So that's why I suggest you do a 42 hour fast once or twice a month depending

on how you feel how much weight whatever what your goals are like we talked about what feels

right for you and like I said you just skip a whole day and then you skip breakfast the

next day and you're at 42 hours and now when you gone 42 hours instead of 16 you have

exponentially increased your autophagy. But then I also believe that there are benefits to going a little

bit longer once in awhile. I think now you can get into deep, deep autophagy levels where

you could maybe prevent cancer or reverse early stages of cancer there's some research

that indicate that might be the case and about every 3 months or so maybe two to four times

a year maybe once a year, You do a little bit longer fast and I would suggest go in at least

three days I would go 3 to 4 days for myself and if you feel good and you want to

go longer than that's fine too. If you enjoyed this video you'll love that one, and if you really

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