This Is The Best Type Of FAST For YOU

Hello Health Champions. What would be the  best type of fast for you? Well there is no  

simple straight, single answer for that, because  we are all different. People always ask me what's  

the best diet? What's the best exercise?  What's the best supplement? Well it depends  

on you. It depends on what you need. So we are  all unique as our fingerprints there is no one  

just like you and that's called genetic  individuality we all have individual DNA just like  

we can tell these are three different  people but then we also share tendencies  

we can tell these are different people but we  can also tell that they're all humans because  

human DNA has more in common with each  other than we do with a giraffe or a carrot  

so the other aspect we want to consider are  the environment and stress of life events so  

we get our DNA some of our behavior some of our  biology some of our biochemistry is pre-wired  

but then it is adapted it is refined because of  our environment and our life events and our level  

of stress so we all process things differently we  all interpret things differently but before we can  

determine what type of fasting would suit us best  we need to understand we need to ask ourselves  

why are we fasting why are you fasting is it maybe  because you want to accomplish some weight loss  

have you hit a plateau in your weight loss are you  looking to reverse a disease primarily something  

like type 2 diabetes associated with metabolic  syndrome syndrome x which is high blood pressure  

and high blood sugar and insulin resistance or  are you in pretty good health but you'd like to  

maintain and enhance it so you're looking for  things like longevity autophagy and activating  

some survival genes and then once you're clear on  why you're doing it and it could be more than one  

of these things obviously then the question is not  if you should fast it is how much because we're  

all fasting fasting is technically nothing more  than the time period where you're not eating  

so if you go five hours between lunch and dinner  you're just fasting for five hours for most people  

the longest period of fast they have is when they  sleep so for some though if they sleep eight hours  

then their fasting period is like eight hours and  20 minutes because they eat the last thing and the  

first thing of the day but the answer to how much  is you need to do enough and that means enough for  

you to start moving toward your goals at whatever  speed that you have as a goal now faster isn't  

always better and you want to keep in mind that  doing it faster may not be optimal health it might  

be too stressful or too extreme but you want to  do enough to meet your goals in a healthy way so  

if your goal is to lose weight or reduce insulin  resistance or maintain health or create autophagy  

there's going to be different solutions there's  going to be different degrees of doing this if  

you want autophagy you're going to have to have  a little bit longer consecutive fasting periods  

if you want to maintain you probably don't have  to be so strict all the time and if you want to  

lose weight or reduce insulin resistance then you  have to know if you are insulin resistant and if  

that's contributing to your weight let's look at  the example of excess weight and type 2 diabetes  

or insulin resistance and there could be many  different reasons you could get these because  

you're eating wrong it could be that eating wrong  leads to insulin resistance or that you have a  

genetic predisposition you have a tendency to  go toward insulin resistance more than others  

and this could lead to stubborn weight and then  the stubborn weight could have other reasons as  

well could be that you have over years of yo-yo  dieting and starving yourself you've changed  

the set point where even though you're 50  or 100 pounds overweight your body set point  

thinks that's where you need to be so any  time that you eat less your body expends less  

it starts saving if you put less in it could be  due to inflammation maybe from food sensitivities  

maybe leaky gut maybe autoimmunity and it could  be hypothyroid if your thyroid is underperforming  

the thyroid is the metabolic thermostat of  your body so if it starts underperforming  

it's like your whole metabolism goes down a notch  so learning to understand about these will help  

and you also want to start measuring certain  things there's no single measure that will give  

you the complete answer but there are certain  things that you definitely want to measure to  

understand more and while we don't want to focus  all our attention on glucose it is the simplest  

and the single best marker to start with  you can do it yourself you can do it cheaply  

several times a day so let's say that you have  a glucose level of 150 milligrams per deciliter  

that's about not quite but almost twice as high  as you want to be then if you want to measure a1c  

you can see the average blood glucose over a four  month period of time how does that work because  

the hemoglobin a1c is a protein in your blood that  carries oxygen so it swims around with the sugar  

in the blood during its lifetime which is about  four months and during that time the more sugar  

is in the blood the more sugar sticks to the  hemoglobin so now we can measure a percentage  

of hemoglobin a1c that has sugar on it and 10  would not be a great number that's a diabetic  

number you want to be some around half of that but  most people only get glucose measured some people  

also get a1c but these don't tell us the whole  story we also want to measure insulin and why is  

that because insulin fasting insulin being as high  as 30 means that the body is working really really  

hard to bring that glucose down so even though  the glucose levels are twice what they should be  

the body is working almost 10 times harder it's  using 10 times more insulin than it should and  

it still isn't getting the glucose down this  is called type 2 diabetes this is massive  

insulin resistance and one more marker that we can  use is called HOMA-IR homeostatic model assessment  

of insulin resistance it's not perfect but it's  very simple and inexpensive all you do is you  

take the glucose times the insulin divided by a  constant of 405. and in this case you get around  

it to 11. and this number should be around 1.  so this is a much better marker than just the  

glucose because it tells us how much insulin is  the body using in an effort to bring this down  

now let's say that you get some measurements  and you find something like this now what well  

first you want to make some lifestyle changes and  then go measure again so what are those changes  

first thing you want to do is you cut sugar white  flour and processed foods that's the foundation  

if you have any metabolic problems that's a  no-brainer the sugar is half glucose half fructose  

the fructose is almost as toxic to the liver as  alcohol and if you eat plenty of that it creates  

fatty liver fatty liver is insulin resistant  and then anything you eat that will increase  

glucose and insulin will perpetuate the condition  so the fructose in the sugar is the worst but  

then half of that is glucose that raises blood  sugar and insulin white flour is pure glucose  

and processed food is high glucose for the most  part but also some toxins and some seed oils with  

two high levels of omega-6s that also promote  insulin resistance and if you make those changes  

for some people that's enough you're eating  whole food and your body went back to balance  

for most people though especially if it's been  going on a while that is probably not enough so  

step two would be to reduce your carbohydrates  you bring them for maybe two three hundred grams  

of carbs down under 70 because your carbohydrate  intolerant your body can't handle carbohydrates if  

that does the trick great if not you go a little  bit lower if you get your carbs your net carbs  

down under 30 and that means you take the total  amount of carbs you subtract the fiber and then  

you have the glucose left that your body  can metabolize now you're probably being  

keto meaning your carbs are so low the body has  to make some alternative brain fuel called ketones  

and for some people that's 30 grams for some  people it's even lower and if you do that and  

it brings you to metabolic health then you may  not have to do a whole lot more but this brings  

us to the topic of this video that if it doesn't  do the trick or if you're looking for additional  

benefit now what you want to do is eat shorter and  that means that you compress your feeding window  

you eat your meals during a shorter period of time  during the day so for some people they might only  

have eight hours of fasting because that's how  long they sleep now if you just compress that  

window a little bit the feeding window you could  end up with 12 hours of fasting 12 hours of eating  

then you move it a little further once your  body is used to that and you eat all your  

meals in an eight hour period and that could be  two or three meals depending on your preference  

if that does the trick great if not go down  to six hour feeding window and it's not as  

hard as it sounds once you start implementing  these changes getting metabolically adapted  

and changing some some pathways and some habits  in your body then two meals within six hours is  

easy then the question is once you've done this  is that enough well let's go back and check  

remember this we found this the first time now we  have applied our changes for two to three months  

and we go back and check and lo and behold  our glucose is down from a diabetic level  

to a healthy level of about 85. our a1c is into  a healthy level of 5.3 so if we just based our  

diagnosis our understanding on glucose short term  and long term then we would think that we have  

solved the problem and we would not understand  why do we still have stubborn weight why do we  

still have these different issues until we measure  insulin and again this is not the whole answer but  

it's one more step toward understanding  and if we measure that and it's still 25  

which happens quite a bit then we are still  very insulin resistance and if we measure the  

HOMA-IR we see that it's come down to 5.2 less  than half of what it was we've come a long way  

but we're still very insulin resistant this number  is supposed to be around 1. so we want to realize  

that before there was type 2 diabetes and insulin  resistance now we have fixed the type 2 diabetes  

but we still have insulin resistance we're  controlling the damaging effects of high glucose  

by controlling how much carbs we put in and  our time period of eating our window of feeding  

but we still have a long way to go we're still  metabolically very unhealthy and this could  

account for a lot of residual problems like  stubborn weight one thing we can add that you  

can do for yourself is to measure ketones just  like the glucose with a simple finger prick  

you can measure glucose and with a different stick  you can measure the ketones ketones are a marker  

of fat burning if your ketones are very very low  you're probably not burning fat very effectively  

and if you are producing a good amount  of ketones but you're not losing any  

weight then you're probably not burning  the fat off your body most of that fat  

is probably burned only from the food that you're  eating another great marker is triglycerides and  

VLDL you have to do a blood test for those  VLDL stands for very low density lipoprotein  

and it is a carrier it delivers triglyceride  to the tissues and if the tissues are healthy  

and metabolically flexible and accept fuel then  they're going to take the triglycerides and use  

up the fuel but if you're insulin resistant if  your cells are resistant to insulin and fuel  

then there's no place for these triglycerides or  VLDL to go so they're going to hang around and the  

levels stay high and how are we doing now on our  checklist well we stop the sugar the white flour  

and the processed food so most of the eating wrong  issue is handled what about insulin resistance no  

we measured it insulin is high HOMA-IR is high  it's still an issue what about stubborn weight  

well it's up to you if you reach your ideal weight  or if you are steadily losing at least some weight  

then you're okay if you're not losing any weight  then there's a problem and it could be set point  

inflammation or hypothyroid do we know not really  we would have to dig deeper we'd have to spend  

some more time we'd have to learn more and do  some trial and error but at least we know more  

than we did and we know a little bit more about  what it isn't so if you need some additional  

leverage against insulin resistance you have some  insulin resistance tools just like a carpenter  

has his tools and the first one would be to reduce  sugar the second would be to reduce carbohydrates  

because both of those promote insulin resistance  so you reduce them the third thing is to increase  

fasting to prolong your fasting period  because if lowering carbs reduces insulin  

and that's a good thing then fasting is better  because fasting is zero carbs none at all and  

even protein and fat trigger a little tiny  bit of insulin but when you're fasting you're  

getting none of that the fourth thing you want  to keep in mind is be patient give it some time  

and this is one of the biggest problems because  when people get really excited and motivated and  

they start this health and weight loss  campaign now they're very impatient and  

that could be all right for some people but for  others it's like growing grass you can't hurry it  

it's going to take the time it takes and if  your body is stubborn and you have a plateau  

for three months that might be okay you might need  to fix some things you might need to heal your gut  

and your thyroid and reduce some inflammation  and all these different things before you see  

the results but if you've gone for a good bit like  several months and nothing seems to happen now you  

need to get a little more aggressive and one way  that you can be a little more aggressive is to  

increase your fasting some more so if you were  doing 18 hours of fasting the next step would  

be one meal a day and if that works great if not  then you would have to step it up and do one meal  

every other day and I've had some people who were  just totally stuck even doing keto one meal a day  

nothing really happened but once they went to one  meal every other day now the fasting period went  

from 20 plus to 40 plus hours and what happens  then is every time you don't eat for the time  

period you don't eat your insulin will drop so  going from 20 to 40 is a huge difference but also  

when you're not eating for that long your body  is absolutely forced to start using some fat  

from the body for fuel but here's  the problem there is a balance  

fasting is kind of self-limiting because you can't  go forever if there was only benefits with not  

eating then let's just never eat again but we also  have to provide some nutrients and some fuels and  

some resources and building materials for the body  so there's this trade-off and one way that we can  

help that trade-off a little bit is with  something called fasting mimicking and this is  

hugely misunderstood because  there's a lot of fasting people  

who are sort of purists they say if i'm going to  do it I'm going to do it right I'm going to do it  

all the way they feel like fasting mimicking is  is cheating or not doing it all the way but that's  

really kind of missing the point so when you're  doing fasting mimicking the whole idea is to keep  

your proteins and your calories low less than 500  calories a day and less than 18 grams of protein  

that's for a small to average size person if  you're a little bit larger you might get away with  

about 50 percent more than that but the key is  to keep the protein low because autophagy drives  

this process and it increases growth hormone  and protein is one of the most sensitive  

indicators for autophagy so anytime protein goes  up you shut down the autophagy and a lot of that  

growth hormone and there's lots of prepared  programs there's expensive packages you can buy  

but it's really not that complicated just eat  a bunch of vegetables you can have big salads  

you could have steamed vegetables you can cook  a vegetable soup just don't use a whole bunch  

of bone broth because bone broth  is high in protein so if you use it  

read the labels and measure how much so you don't  overdo it and typically with fasting mimicking  

they tell you to do it two days a week and then to  eat normally whatever that is for five days a week  

and it's not that that is the way to do it but  it's presented as a way that people can wrap  

their heads around it feels attainable for a lot  of people and if they can get more people to do it  

then there's good benefit to that but you can  use it as much or as little as you like to meet  

your needs you could do it every other day you  can do it three days a week whatever you like  

but what i would suggest here though is that once  you understand these principles now you can start  

combining these yourself and see how they work for  you so let's say that you did one meal a day on  

alternate days and then you did fasting mimicking  on the other days that's a whole lot easier  

than doing one meal every other day and here are  the benefits first of all it's easier because you  

get to eat something on the days off so to speak  and the other part is you also get to maintain  

some nutrients you get to feed yourself you  get some satisfaction and you're providing  

some vitamins and most importantly minerals  vegetables plants non-starchy vegetables are  

very high in the minerals that you tend to lose on  a very low carb or a fasting diet but like i said  

in the beginning there are some people who don't  have a weight problem they don't have a health  

issue they feel pretty good they just want to make  sure it stays that way that's called maintenance  

and it's still a really good idea to monitor even  if you have gotten all your blood work to the  

level that you want you want to monitor so that  you can see if it changes because if this insulin  

starts creeping up because you slip a little bit  on your diet or simply because you get older you  

might be less active your muscle mass might reduce  you don't want to let 10 15 20 years pass you want  

to check this yearly or at least every other year  and that is the way that you can maintain this so  

for most people what maintaining means if  you have learned a low carb and intermittent  

fasting lifestyle and that works for you then  you could eat one meal a day you could eat  

two meals a day or you could even eat three meals  a day in a shorter time period something like  

eight to ten hours but if you've had some  metabolic problems in the past chances are  

you want to go with a little bit shorter time  period such as one meal a day or maybe two meals  

in about six to eight hours this is what  i do most of the time and it's just what i  

feel like and what's convenient and then we get  to the topic of autophagy longevity immunity  

survival genes fighting cancer and this is where  fasting can be very very powerful but for most  

people it's not something you want to do all the  time autophagy typically is sort of flatlined  

and it just barely starts rising at about 18 hours  so this is not an on off switch like people often  

ask when does it start again it's different for  different people it's difficult to measure but it  

is a mechanism that kicks in when we don't eat for  a longer period of time so nothing really happens  

for about 18 hours and then it slowly starts  climbing and then it increases strongly  

for about three to five days so if you do three to  five day of fasting you will probably get about as  

much benefit from autophagy and growth hormone  as you will get but if you're in maintenance  

then I don't believe that more is better if you  have a condition if you have cancer you need to  

talk to someone who's an expert in that area who  can advise you but if you're just maintaining  

i think that a good rate is about two to  four times a year I currently probably do  

twice a year but it's not like  on the dot every six months it's  

depends on on what my life looks like and  when i can fit it in and when I feel like  

fitting it in if you enjoyed this video you're  going to love that one and if you truly want  

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