What's up guys, I'm really excited to have on the fasting health expert, Dr. Mindy Pels, joining me today, with over 38 million YouTube views and millions of people learning how to fast heal the body and maintain a healthy weight. Mindy makes fasting easy and doable for nearly everyone, and fasting has certainly had a huge impact on my life. It's something I think most people, if not everybody, should try.
In today's episode, we talk about what you've been getting wrong about fasting, the easiest way to build a fasting lifestyle if you've never done it, or if you've done it but failed before. And Mindy reveals how to make fasting the most effortless thing you can do to maintain your health. If you're loving the show and I hope you are, you'll want to know we've just launched our exclusive Impact Theory subscription service that takes your podcast listening experience to the next level. If you're tired of ads cutting into your favorite episodes at the best part, then we've got you covered.
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I'm Tom Billieu, welcome to Impact Theory. What are some of the biggest things that people get wrong about fasting? It's great for start. The biggest thing is they hook onto one fast and they do it the same way over and over and over again.
So once they come to fasting, they go, okay, wow, I've got great results. I feel incredible. I'm just skipping breakfast. I'm starting to eat at noon every day and they just do that for months and months and months and then they get stuck.
Why would that repetition be a problem? And is there like a right entry point? Yeah. If you haven't tried fasting, they probably just think, just don't eat or and this will be interesting.
There are things that I probably don't consider a fast that you might consider a fast. So let's get into that. Is there one beginner's entry point to fasting? Yeah.
You know where the beginner's entry point is? If you really want it to be like smooth, it's with your food. So if you want fasting to that whole world of fasting to become much easier, the first thing is change three ingredients. Change your oils, change your carbs so you're eating more of nature's carbs, less refined carbs and get off any toxic ingredients.
If you change those three things, now you're going to metabolically switch over into what we call the fat burning state, much quicker. Now you don't have to and a lot of people don't, but if you're asking me what's the easiest way door in, it's just, let's clean up a little bit of the diet. Now the second step is let's just start pushing your breakfast back like a half hour, an hour and you're going to what you're going for is you're trying to compress all of your food into one eating window. And if you do those two things, it's kind of like there's a click that happens and all of a sudden it's like, oh, you're fasting, it's easier.
It's and it just becomes effortless because it's our natural state. It's the way the body was designed to be. So, but toxic ingredients, toxic food makes us more insulin resistant. Eating all day is destroyed in mitochondrial energy.
And so we're not able to make that switch as easily, which is why I like to start with the food. Interesting. Okay. So to do a fast well, step one is to reorient your diet to something that isn't causing metabolic damage.
I'm not sure. Yeah. Yeah. Inflammatory metabolic damage.
So you're looking like, let's use an example, um, canola oil or like cotton seed oil or or some of those. Basically the oils that everything you eat, unless you are buying whole food and it's just coasting. Okay. So there's bing, bing, bing.
That's the answer right there is let's get back to whole foods, foods that are coming out of nature. And if I went into your house and I just swapped out all the oils for avocado oil and olive oil, you'd be, you wouldn't notice a taste and it's the same to cook with. And if you're doing that mixed with whole foods and meats, if you eat meats, then now you're actually more congruent with what the human body wants. It's when we get all these fancy ingredients and toxic inflammatory, easy to make ingredients that it makes that metabolic switch so much more difficult, which is why I always say, let's, and it's not like it doesn't have to be rigid.
You can be playful about it. Like, let me just see what I can do to stop eating so many inflammatory oils. Mindy, there's nothing playful about starving to death. So this is, it's interesting.
I'm, as you're saying this, I'm like, wow, I'm one of the people that would probably propagate some of the myths and create problems for people because I'm forgetting how hard it was for me to metabolically transition. Cause I did it so long ago. So going back to this framing of, okay, before you want to fast, you want to get things right, my literally until nine seconds ago, when you said that my, my instinct would be to tell people, Hey, just start lengthening the window between what you eat is. Yeah.
So I didn't even consider fasting didn't think about fasting. And honestly, I think, you know, 20 plus years ago, when I started all this, I would have thought of fasting as dangerous. And part of the reason I would have thought of fasting as dangerous is going without food, but really it was sugar because I was a sugar burner at the time. It hurt.
You know what I mean? Like, so, I'll do this frequently when I have a guest on around fasting. So I'm fasting right now. I'm over 19 hours into my fast as we're doing this.
And there's no sense of suffering. And don't be wrong, I have a mild sense that I'm hungry, but it's not overwhelming. It's certainly not impairing my cognition. But when I first went low carb, it was so devastating.
And I had these terrible headaches. And I remember my wife and I got in this big fight because I was like, if I just eat a cookie, I will feel better. And she was like, then eat the cookie. But stop complaining.
Like whatever you're going to do, either get on the other side of this or eat the cookie, but don't not eat the cookie and keep complaining. And so I was like, okay, that's probably pretty good advice. So for somebody who's at the beginning, walk me through, you mentioned it, but let's go a little bit deeper in terms of what is that, that click over that people are looking for? What is metabolic flexibility?
What is being a sugar burner? How do we get on the other side of that? Yeah. And then I'm like, I'm thinking as you're talking, I'm like, yeah, you know, my advice used to be, hey, the door into fasting is compressed the eating window and leave a longer period of time for fasting.
But we just saw millions of people on my YouTube channel where they would write in comments and they're like, I can't metabolically switch over. I'm really struggling. So then I start to change. Well, let's start by cleaning up a few things.
So they're fasting, but they feel terrible? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So, and that's the thing is that we need to look at this like a switch.
So when you're eating food, you are in a sugar burner state. So what's happening is that your blood sugar is going up and then you stop eating and then the blood sugar starts to come down. And usually when it gets to a certain point, you get hungry and so you eat again. And so you're just doing this all day long.
But what we're saying when you want to be metabolically flexible is we want to keep your blood sugar fairly low so that we can switch you over into this fat burning place. And once you switch over into the fat burner place, there's a whole world of healing, internal healing that is going to happen a lot more than just weight loss. There's a lot more brain like to your point. I love that you show up fasted.
I should have fasted too. And I do it as a performance tool because I know I'm going to get ketones that are going to power up my brain. I know inflammation is going to come down. I know I can get rid of senescent cells.
I know I can reboot my immune system. I know I can add more dopamine receptor sites the longer I stay over here. But if I'm over here bringing my blood sugar up all the time, getting this switch becomes like rusty and you just can't get over there. So the suffering happens in that switch.
And that's what I'm trying to get people out of because fasting is like sleeping. It is our natural healing state. And just because we know sleeping is amazing doesn't mean that everybody can sleep. It's really interesting.
So I want people to understand and some people will be they'll already know a lot about fasting and fair enough. But for people that don't understand there are actually two fuel sources that your body can use glucose sugar. That's where most people spend all their time. And even if you're eating a high protein diet, some of the protein can be turned by your body into glucose.
And so most people live their entire lives there in a modern context. But from an evolutionary context, your body would need to be able to go, whoa, there's no food. I can't just keel over and die. And this is the whole point of storing body fat.
But I think one thing that people miss is that if you're constantly intakeing calories, especially if you're eating a lot of carbohydrates, you may never and I mean never switch over into burning your fat. And so your body is just storing. And I remember the first time it hit me that hold on a second. There are people who they are literally only getting fattered their entire lives.
So the fat that they put on when they were nine is still just stored and it's never been released because you're only going to release that fat if the blood sugar drops to a certain level for an extended period of time and then your insulin becomes low and now the fat can actually be released into the body. That was like startling and I was like, yeah, oh my God. So what we're trying to do is create a scenario where and for people that are just listening and not watching, we both keep doing this motion with our hands of clicking over. We're trying to create the setup so that your body will go, oh, word, I don't have any food coming in.
So I need now to switch the material metabolic machinery over to burning ketones instead of glucose. Once you do it, and this is the thing I always try to get people to understand, once you do this, it will change your relationship to hunger. It isn't that you don't feel hunger. Like I'm hungry right now.
It's not overwhelming by any means, but I am hungry, but I'm not distracted by it. I'm not. It's not diminishing my performance. And so it goes.
Hunger goes from this thing of like, it's all consuming. It changes my mood. I can't be productive to, yes, I would like to eat, but there's no sense of urgency. So well said.
So well said. So I had the same aha moment when I first dove into the science of fasting. It hit me one day. I was like, oh my God, we have the wrong discussion when it comes to weight loss and food.
We're over here looking at the sugar burner system and we're saying, this is the diet that, you know, maybe it's vegan, maybe it's carnivore, maybe it's the HGH diet, maybe it's weight watchers, whatever. We're over here debating the weight loss diet and we've left the whole fat burning system out of the equation. Like, how did we get as humans to this point where we have only been looking at food as the possibility for gaining or losing weight? We've missed out a whole metabolism.
And I think that's what I want people to understand is this is how your body burns fat. It does not burn fat by manipulating food. It burns fat by manipulating when you eat and how much time you're giving the body a break from whatever food you've chosen. That's how you burn fat.
It's really interesting. So when we talk about step one, if you want to get into fasting is actually to change the foods that you intake when you are eating. When I think about some of the fat diets that have happened where people are doing juice cleanses and stuff like that and ends up not being sustainable, are they, I mean, they must be getting into a fat burning mode just through the sheer reduction of calories. But is it causing, is it just that it becomes so hard to switch the metabolism over that it's a very unpleasant thing to go that long without calories because the juice is so high in carbohydrate?
Well, so with the calorie conversation, all we've done in reducing calories over here or up in our exercise is we change our set point. So let's use an example. Let's say you bring in a thousand calories or let's give it a little more of 1500 calories and still very low. Very low and you exercise 500.
So now you have a delta of a thousand. So in order to keep the weight that you're at, you have to always have around that delta of a thousand calories. What happened with fasting that changed the weight loss game is people got out of that mode and they started to see weight. If I just change the time period, then what happens is I go over here into this fat burning mode and I can be there 19 hours, 20 hours, 36 hours is one of the greatest weight loss fasting lengths.
And my body is so smart that what it does is it says, to your point, hey, word, there's no food coming in. So we're going to click over into another fuel. So there's called ketones and we're going to make this ketone by burning fat. And the only way we can get that is by clicking over.
We can't even get that by reducing our carbs down. We can't get that by struggling in a low calorie diet. And every time we're over here trying to manipulate this system, we are only finding ourselves suffering and not being able to sustain those results, which is why I think the fasting movement took off is all of a sudden people were like, wait a second, over here, there's a whole other level of health I never knew was possible and I could never accomplish when I was focused on just the foods I was eating. So let me ask then, so I have, I've done a fair amount of fasting.
I intermittent fast 365 days a year, which you may tell me is actually not ideal. I vary the length. So on the weekends, it's going to be maybe 14ish hours, but during the week, it's 18, 19 hours. But if I'm just doing caloric restriction, so I'll paint a picture, I used to be 60 pounds heavier and I over two years, I died it down and I did what I'll call rabbit starvation.
So I was eating virtually no fat, virtually no carbohydrate. It was literally boiled chicken breast and steamed broccoli. I mean, that was basically my life for two years. And it was miserable, really miserable.
It was still super inflammatory. But I didn't understand any of that while I was doing it. And now I can control my weight so much easier through fasting. So but why?
Why would it be that keeping my calories? And I was about 1500, which is why I made a point of saying that's really low because that was painful for two years. Why would that be so deeply unpleasant? Whereas even doing a punctuated 24, like if I did, it would be, if I had to redo it all, even just doing a 24 hour fast once a week probably would have led me to roughly the same results.
So why was, and I actually don't know the answer to this, why was one so unpleasant and the other so manageable? Because if I'm burning fat, I must be in ketosis, right? Not necessarily, not necessarily. I mean, it would have been interesting back then to put a ketone reader on you, you know, to measure it and see where you're at.
When, when in that example, what was happening is you were bringing your blood sugar down and then up and then it would go down. And when it would go down, if you ate again, it would just, it would go back up and then it would go down. You know I was just eating chicken breast and broccoli. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Well, broccoli, you know, it's got glucose in it. As you check it, and to your point protein will raise, will elevate your blood sugar, but you're just going up and down within one system. You, and again, it would have been really interesting to know your ketone levels because once you click over and you're making ketones, what ketones do is they turn off the hunger hormone and then they also sharpen the brain.
And when you think about that, why would the body do that? I mean, this is the way my brain thinks is I always go into what is the body trying to do? So back in the primal days, when we had to go hunt for food, we needed this alternative fuel source to power us up so that we could go and find food. So when you're burning fat and you're getting this ketone rush, hunger gets turned off, mental clarity becomes very, very focused and your muscles start to power up and you become a hunting machine because you're supposed to go find food for your survival.
So now in this day and age, we don't have that. We can say on the couch and get onto our phone and just have door to ash bring us food and we don't ever have to leave the sugar burner system. But if we don't, then we never get the healing that's over there. We never get the performance angle that's over there.
So on what I would say is in your example, even though it was low glucose, you weren't raising your glucose, you were probably not getting as much of the ketone rush that you could have used if you had just taken that same diet and compressed it into maybe an eight to 10 hour eating window. Now that diet would have probably worked better for you because you would have clicked over into ketosis and felt amazing. So interesting and you're right. I wish I had had.
So I when I'm really tracking this, I do fingerprints like constantly also I'll wear a continuous glucose monitor, but it exists at least easily back then. But now, so I didn't know about ketosis when I was doing this. So I can't swear, but now that I know ketosis, I can feel it. I know when I click over, like I can guess when I hit about .5, I can tell you I'm at about .5 when I hit one, I can get pretty close.
I'm usually within like .2 of where I'm at, which is pretty trippy when you think about how it's like, oh, I know this feeling. Yep, cool. I'm in ketosis. I'm going to guarantee this is like a .5 to .7 or this is a one to a 1.2.
I'm somewhere around there. As it goes higher than that, I can't really track. So anyway, I bring that up because when I was doing rabbit starvation, I never had to get into this. I never felt that, I'm going to call it a sense of relief.
I never felt that like I'm okay here. It was two years of misery to the point where my wife at the end of it pulled me aside and was like, you don't have a personality. And it was because I was just grumpy all the time. And there's no sort of joint mud ville, which is what when you originally said like, you know, there's some playfulness to all this.
And I was like, not back then. There was no playfulness. It was horrendous. And so when I think about people trying to get into this, I imagine if they've ever missed a meal and they're so annoyed and so frustrated, they can't grapple with, no, there's really when you click over into fat metabolism, it really does feel very, very different.
So okay, let's talk about people that can't imagine that. How do you help them cross the chasm? We were talking about this before we started rolling. You love somebody.
They think fasting is dangerous. Let's start with that. Well, the fasting is dangerous piece is the first thing is you need to get caught up on the current science because the current science is mind blowing. And in the book, I put six different lengths out that we're all based off science.
But one of my easiest one to kind of wrap your head around is what we call 16, eight, where they show that if you take all the, let's say you don't work on your food, you're just going to eat the standard Western diet, highly inflammatory, but you eat it in an eight hour eating window, leaving along the 16 hour period where you're not eating, you are literally metabolically immune from insulin going up, glucose going up, high blood pressure, liver damage, cholesterol, you become immune from the damages that that high inflammatory diet has. Okay, that alone is mind blowing to me because let's say you're listening to this and you're like, well, I don't really want to change my food. I've got food addiction issues and I've worked with a lot of people with food addiction that we've been able to help them overcome it by learning how to fast. If you just start to tiptoe your way in, like I'm just saying, you can, let's say you're like listening to this, you're like, I'm not doing the food changes.
Okay. So could I just get you to push your breakfast back a half hour? Now you're, I'm not taking a second to define intermittent fasting or time restricted eating. So people know the difference between what I'll call a water only fast.
In fact, walk us through the six stages. I think that's the right place to start. Okay. So, and I think a deeper part of that question is what, what is a fasted state?
And it's really when that blood sugar comes down enough that it triggers the body to switch. So that's the first thing to know. At 13 hours, we start to see that growth hormone goes up, which is what slows down the aging process, which helps us burn fat. We also see in men, we see testosterone start to go up 1300% increase in testosterone with just a 15 hour time period, which is insane.
We see inflammation CRP goes down, which is an inflammatory blood marker. We'll start to go down. All at 13 hours. In fact, one of the greatest studies ever done on women was they took a group of women after they had had traditional breast cancer treatment and they had them just fast 13 hours every single day.
And they noticed that there was a 64% less reassurance of breast cancer in the group that all they did is fast was 13 hours. They didn't even change their food. They just fasted. So when we, that intermittent fasting level is really easy, can be easy.
I know if you're listening to this and you're like, it's not easy. And I want to come back to how do we make it easy for these people? But that's the destination we're going to is once we get to that first ledge of 13 hours, okay, now metabolically things are changing that are if you can just do that repetitively, which I haven't had a person I haven't been able to get to 13 hours consistently within a matter of weeks. We can get them there.
You're experiencing this. Okay. What else do you want to experience? 17 hours we stimulate a toffee.
The cells start to repel them repair themselves and old aging cells get you get rid of 24 hours. Your whole gut resets and you get intestinal stem cells that come in and repair the whole inner lining of the gut 36 hours. Your body goes and finds that stubborn fat specifically around the belly and it starts to burn that for energy 48 hours with no food coming in. Now all of a sudden you're getting new dopamine receptor sites.
Okay. Why are you getting that? Because your brain has got to get motivated to go find food. So you reboot the whole dopamine system.
And then 72 hours the whole immune system reboots itself and recycles itself. That's without a drug. That's without a supplement. That's crazy.
That's why I'm like this. We have to get this out to the world. This is our door out of chronic disease. We just got to train people how to get over there.
And that's that to your point getting over there is the hardest part. But once you learn how to do it, it's it's insane. It's insane the miracles that your body will perform. Yeah.
So this the pushback on this is a dangerous game fasting. That's one that really drives me crazy because the exact opposite is true. That's right. People don't get into things like autophagy.
Then they're so look, this is hypothesis and I'm certainly not a researcher. But when I look at some of the information like you talk about breast cancer, but just cancer in general, some of the hypotheses that are coming out, some of the early studies that show that you can decrease your likelihood of certain cancers through fasting. It's utterly fascinating. And it makes sense if we know that the thing all of us have cancer cells in our body at any time, like if you were to take, I would imagine just a blood biopsy, probably be enough, you'd be able to detect cancer of certain types.
But the immune system is going in identifying these cells and shutting that down. And if you have an immune system that is compromised because you're chronically battering it with highly inflammatory foods, and so the immune system is just working overdrive to keep the inflammation up, because remember the inflammation is good in certain contexts. Chronic inflammation is bad. So you've got your immune system working overdrive to keep up all this inflammation.
And it's not been able to get to all these cells. So autophagy, which we haven't defined yet, probably we're telling people exactly what autophagy is so that they understand getting that to turn on ends up being a very big pro health issue. Yeah. So autophagy is where the cells realize that there's no nutrients.
It's nutrients and blood sugar glucose coming into the cell. So it's like an internal mechanism where the cell goes, huh, nothing's coming in. Okay, we got to make sure A that we're a better version of ourselves. So we need to clean up the inner workings here.
So it'll push out viruses, it'll push out bacteria out of the cell and say, Hey, you're not serving the cellular energy right now. It will go into old parts, cellular parts in the endoplasmic reticulum and the mitochondria and it's like, Hey, we got to clean up our act because we have to be a more efficient cell. The other thing that it does is it'll say, Hey, you know what, the cells going rogue. The cells becoming a cancer cell.
This is a senescent zombie cell that's going to start to age you quickly. They're a weak member of the team. And so in this fasted state where no glucose is coming in, no nutrients are coming in, your liability and we need to get rid of you. And so it gets rid of those cells.
So it's like taking the trillions of cells in your body and cleaning them up and clean and getting rid of the ones that are no longer serving you. Again, I don't know a supplement or a medication that can hit autophagy in that way like fasting does. It's just cleans everything up when you get into that autophagy state. It's really profound.
Yeah. The fun thing. So I have done my best to learn the Greek language and autophagy is autophagy, which is self eating, which is pretty interesting to when you think about it that way that the body actually goes and says, Okay, you're not going to feed me cool. And I'm going to eat things that are already inside the body.
But it has so much without saying cheesy phrases like evolutionary intelligence to what it eats and in what order. But one thing that I've heard people say is that one of the things that gets eaten is the bacteria in your gut, the microbiome will actually eat the mucosal layer of your intestines and that that can be problematic. I can't say you to that. Is there a problem with that?
In the fasted state. Yeah. Oh, I love this question because when you look at the science and I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on PubMed going through all these articles, what's so interesting about the microbiome is in the fasted state, you're right. What happens is there's a dramatic shift where bacteria that no longer serve you are being killed off.
The whole pH of the system is changing. There's something called geographical relocation where all of a sudden the microbes start to spread out so they're not all clumped together in the fasted state. You think they're like effectively foraging? Like there's nothing to be found here.
That's actually really interesting idea. They probably are. You're probably right. I never thought about why are they spreading out.
It's because they need to find where the nutrients are. So they instead of being clumped together, they spread out. It's very interesting. So if I was to do a stool test on day three of a fast, or let's make it more applicable to the average person, somebody who's intermittent fasting and they've been doing it every day, 15 hours, and on the 30th day I go in there and I look at the microbiome, it may look as if there was a depletion, but that's okay because we want to create a change.
We want to get rid of the microbes that are no longer working for us, which is why what you break your fast with is massively important because if you reintroduce the foods that feed the good microbes, now I think of it like this. You fasted and the microbes are like, okay, we spread out. There are no nutrients. There's no glucose.
Things are changing in here. We got rid of the bad guys. Not sure what to do now. You come in with a bunch of sauerkrauts and you come in with nuts and seeds and you come in with polyphenols like olives and even dark chocolate and all of a sudden the good microbes are like, hey, wait, our food, our food is here.
It's here. We can eat and then the good microbes eat and now you're rebuilding your microbiome. So when we look at gut changes, it's the combination of the fasting window with what you reintroduce food, what foods you reintroduce back in. That's really interesting.
So it becomes, oh God, I don't know how the medical community is going to respond to this, but the reason that chemotherapy works is it basically weakens everything. Like it just obliterates your entire immune system, kills off so many cells, but the idea is that a cancer cell is a little bit more vulnerable than everything else. And so you go just far enough to kill the cancer cells, but not so far that you end up killing the healthy cells. So fasting sounds like it might be working in a similar fashion where it weakens everybody, but if you come back with only food that feeds the good guys, now the bad guys never get out of their weak and stay and they continue to die off because there's nothing in your reintroduction to bring them back.
That's really interesting. So it's like, hey guys, I'm going to weaken you all, but I'm only going to refeed the good guys. That makes a lot of sense. I never thought about that.
I was a little maybe more reckless than that with my refeed. Yeah. That's interesting. So, okay, so you already hit us with the things that we should be eating, the one in there that I didn't understand because I give criminal amounts of side eye to nuts and seeds.
So break me of that myth. Well, so it is a prebiotic. So for starters, it needs to be raw. Let's start with that because nuts and seeds that are pasteurized or dry roasted or dead, it's dead food.
It tastes so much better. Yeah, right. Really? I don't know.
Really? You don't agree? No, I'm not this. What are my favorite things is raw cashew or raw cashew butter?
I won't say that it's not nice, but compared to a roasted one. Oh, yeah. No, I can't. My taste buds can't taste a difference.
That's interesting. What about almonds? Can you taste the difference? Definitely.
Now that is a little grassier. A little more raw, the best way to eat an almond is sprouted, raw organic. That has the most amount of nutrients in it. The logical thing is, what about the lectins and the oxalates?
Well, when you leave those enzymes in there, those lectins and oxalates don't matter anymore because you have the enzyme innately in that sprouted almond that's going to help you break down the lectins and oxalates. The minish, you dry roasted it. You've killed that. So now you put it in your body and yeah, the lectins and oxalates are going to be a problem.
But I will, to your taste bud question, I will say a sprouted almond is not a culinary taste bud joy that goes on with that. It's not a say like. I love roasted almonds. They are absolutely fabulous.
And I used to eat a lot of pecans long time listeners in my show will know that I had to abandon them because they are, I have some sort of dramatic problem with them. And so I ended up getting tremendous amounts of brain fog, finally figured out that it was the pecans who would have known should have just asked my sister who gets migraines from pecans didn't put two and two together. I don't get migraines, but massive brain fog. But anyway, the raw ones, I would force myself to eat raw ones because I thought they were better, but the taste profile, my God, like a roasted pecan is, is freakishly good.
It is a cruel trick that nature is played on me because I find that absolutely fabulous. Did you get a headache? Did you get a headache with the raw? See?
It's the same thing with dairy. Oh, but it would totally, whether I eat them raw or baked doesn't matter in terms of brain fog. I just don't get headaches. My sister does.
Okay. Because that's the, it's what we do to food often that makes it now a toxic food for us. So it dairies the same thing. And this is an, I don't know why this has to be so controversial.
But when you pasteurize dairy, you're killing the probiotic, the good bacteria that's going in, you're killing the enzymes. It is a dead food. When you take that same food and you leave it raw, now when you drink it, you've got the enzymes, you've got the probiotics to break down the lactose that you might be reacting to. Okay, time out.
So are you saying that, cause I ended up cutting out dairy. So I would on Sunday, so I have a whole routine Monday through Friday, I'm ultra strict, super clean, whole food, Saturday, whatever the hell I want including ice cream. But on Sundays was the day that I would get the weirdest reaction from my food. So I wouldn't have any problem with my ice cream on Saturday.
But on Sunday, by the end of the evening, I would get so internally hot. I don't know how to explain it. I felt like I was warm, not like you get warm from the outside. I was warm from the inside.
I'm like, oh, this feels so weird. I do not like the way this feels. Whenever somebody comes to me with a problem like that, I say, what are you eating a lot of? And I'm like the only thing I'm eating a lot of on Sunday is pizza.
And so, but I'm scraping the toppings. I'm not even eating the bread. So I'm like, okay, cheese, pepperoni, olive, like what is it? And as soon as I cut out the cheese, I was fine.
So I was like, whoa, I'm having a problem with dairy. So are you saying that if I were eating unpasteurized dairy that I would be okay? Yeah. That is what I'm saying.
And I'd love for you to try it. It exists in America. Oh, yeah. Well, so let's go down that dairy.
The raw cheese, cows, dairy, is going to have these enzymes in it. Now when we look at the molecule size of dairy, we have to remember that for our human guts, the best thing that we can digest when it comes to milk is mother's milk. And the molecule size is probably like the size of my fist. I'm saying that we mean human?
Yeah. Yeah, like human milk. Yeah. Is there a business here?
I mean, it's weird. We all feel like it's taboo, but we drink milk from the breast of a cow, but we're weird about drinking milk from the breast of a human. That's, I mean, look, there's maybe some bizarre moral implications, but I'm going to, yeah, I'll ask it. So are we like, if we could get unpasteurized human milk, are we like in a great metabolic position?
Oh, it's incredibly healing. Just talk to them. So high in sugar? You're going to have to, I mean, you'd have to test it on yourself with a monitor or something like that again.
High in sugar. And is it causing your problem? That's a whole nother can of worms to go down because what's high in sugar and causing you problems may be different than what's causing me problems based off our microbial differences in our gut. So we can't just say, oh, anything is like a wonderful, like let's just use the milks that this is going to raise your blood sugar for everybody.
And this is going to bring it down. There is the nuance of what goes on in your gut bacteria that controls that. So that's the first thing. But I want to go back to your question, which is when we look at human milk, like breast milk, yeah, it has all the immune enhancing capabilities that we don't get in other animal milk and its molecule size is easier on our digestive tract.
So when we look at why so many people are reacting to dairy, cow's dairy, we have to realize that it's this cow's dairy is like this huge molecule size. It's like, you know, let's just for the people listening that aren't visually seen this. It's like a basketball size, whereas mother's milk, human milk is like a tennis ball size. So there's this molecular mismatch that's so hard on our gut.
Now in between those is sheep's and goat. They're a little bit closer to a human mother's milk molecule size, which is why a lot of people can't do cows, but they can do goat. Now if you take the very, very best milk out there outside of mother's milk would be raw goat's milk because now you've got the enzymes, you've got the probiotic and you have the molecule size and they make that in cheese. And if you can put that on your pizza, it would be a game changer.
Okay. So how do we safely get raw goat's milk into our lives? I think you're going to say mother's milk. No, I mean, so I'm out talking.
I have to go now. I'm not going to make a stance on that one. That'll be my next question. Let's start with goat's milk.
That seems a little easier to get across the fish. It's in supermarkets all the time. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
If you ever go to air once, yeah, it's going to be in a higher end. Yeah. Raw and go to Europe. Safe.
Yeah. And well, so when you're looking at cheese, remember that cheese has been fermented. So that's, I mean, look at what a charcuterie, you know, experiences. So why they pasteurize the milk before turning into cheese if we're already going to get the fermentation process?
It's a great question. But I think pasteurized milk, it became a safety issue for so many years. When you are mass producing large amounts of milk, then you're going to end up having this issue of like, okay, some people are going to react to this bacteria differently than others. So I think that's where it originally came from.
But if you go and study the Weston Price Foundation, you know, he's been that whole world under the Weston Price world has been around raw dairy for years and that raw dairy can be healing. It's just, it's like one of those myths that's perpetuated. So you go and walk into air one, walk into whole food. Well, whole foods, they have raw goats cheese, but the higher end, really high end health stores and a lot of the farmers markets have raw goat.
It's the taste that's going to be the biggest issue. You might not like the taste. Let's talk about the most powerful force in wealth building compounding. There's a reason that people have talked about this forever.
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She's actually from Cyprus, her family's from Cyprus. So she introduced me to something called halloumi, which is typically made from goat's milk. I couldn't love halloumi anymore if I tried. Now, the irony is, until this conversation, I cut it effectively out of my life because I was worried that it fell into whatever was going on with me getting overly hot when I eat too much cheese.
But if goat's milk isn't problematic, because I'd actually never noticed it with halloumi. And so that might be why. That's really, really interesting. Think about this from this angle.
When the whole world, and this isn't kind of like a nutritional fad right now, but remember when lactose intolerant was like a thing. Everybody would walk around and they'd be like, yeah, I just don't hear it. People say they go, I can't do gluten, which is a whole other conversation. I don't hear people walk around and say, I'm lactose intolerant, but they used to.
And then we would give them lactate or lactate enzymes or they were special milk or they'd put the lactose back in. Okay, but wait, we pasteurized this product. We killed all the enzymes. And now we have to add an enzyme back in that we just killed to make it so that some people can digest it.
Why don't we just keep it in its raw form? And I feel like this with all food. It's when we start to manipulate food and change it, that it becomes unhealthy, gluten's the same place right now. We're breeding a whole different strain of gluten.
But when we just come back to the basics, this is like such a big part of my message is we've overcomplicated food and we just need to come back to how do I get that food in its most natural state where it hasn't been touched by man. And then I pair that with these different fasting windows. I truly believe that is the diet that most humans should be working from. And that's how we end chronic disease.
But the minute we think we got to burn out the bacteria and then add some enzymes in or the whole gluten free world has become this like you read those ingredients, they're incredibly toxic. The keto world's the same thing. All the low carb foods are now adding toxins back in. And we have totally destroyed a great example with keto is or a week just came out with a keto bread.
I picked that thing up. I looked at it and I was like, this is just a toxic bomb. So yeah, maybe it won't raise your blood sugar, but it's got toxins in it that's going to make metabolically switching very difficult. Are there certain toxic ingredients people should be on the lookout for?
Yeah, except where they keep changing them all the time. So for starters, any of the bad oils. So in this bread, because it's keto, they wanted to keep the fat content up. So it had canola oil and cotton seed oil.
So it's inflammatory and makes you insulin resistant. Now if they made that same bread with olive oil. Now you're now you're now you're in the bar. What is the thing that they do to make a bread keto?
How are you what's the mass that they're using if it isn't wheat? Yeah, usually they'll do like almond or the and they'll put like urethra tall as a sweetener or stevia as a sweetener, which can also still elevate your blood sugar. So tapioca flour is another big one that they'll add in. But you know, again, this is why I'm a fan of.
I'm going to spike your blood sugar. Well, exactly. It's it will. But they what they've done is they've removed what we perceive as the grains and they've added in substituting grains, but surely the package will say this has X amount of carbohydrates.
And if it's above a certain threshold, like even if keto is just a marketing word and it doesn't I don't know if you know has a medical definition or not from the FDA, but tapioca flour is used in a lot a lot of keto foods and a lot of people that have measured their glucose after eating it. Not on this particular one because I but that would be the place to go individually, the end of one. This is where everybody would need to go themselves. I can tell you what I have measured on myself.
That's a big keto trend is all the cauliflower flowers. So cauliflower pizza, cauliflower chips, those are they'll say on the packaging grain free. And what I when I measured on a glucose monitor, it's it spikes my blood glucose incredibly high. Interesting because of the what's the little white thing called you just said it.
The cauliflower. I'm a stroke. I wasn't saying about fasting. It doesn't impair your cognition.
Maybe it does. So cauliflower, what if you just ate raw cauliflower? Would it spike you? Well, so there you go.
Now we got some fiber in the raw cauliflower, but when we distill it down into an actual flower, F L O U R different type of flower. Now you've refined it. Anything we've refined, we've now manipulated it and that spikes blood sugar. Okay, interesting.
This is why boys and girls at home watching are listening. I'm telling you, CGM's are awesome. Continuous glucose matter. It I'm very insensitive to a certain part of the population that cannot control their obsessions.
And so whenever I talk about measuring stuff inevitably, there are people that are like, Oh, like don't get obsessed with measuring things. I think that's the wrong message. Get control of your mind. Don't allow yourself to fall prey to loops.
Like, yes, you don't want to become obsessive. That's very wise. But to something that you've said multiple times, you have to be able to do an N of one. You have to understand how your body responses are and things.
So I'll put pecans and baby carrots on the table for me. I could never have imagined that pecans would create brain fog in me. And I really wouldn't have guessed that baby carrots will spike my blood sugar, my glucose. Like, no, it's not as bad as ice cream.
I don't want to exaggerate. But if I eat carrots to satiety, I'll go from say 84, 85 to 115, 120, 125, depending on how hard I go. And so I remember the first time I looked at my data and I was like, what the hell did I eat that spike me like that? I'm like, that's like a Saturday spike.
And I realized it was baby carrots. And I was like, whoa, now I can eat one or two. I'm not going to see a big move. But again, if I eat them to satiety, I'm going to eat and these are baby carrots, but I'm going to eat 15.
And so I just, I really thought vegetables were free pass. Barring things like sweet potato or potato or whatever. Like I got that roots like that were going to spike me, but I really didn't see carrots coming. And so one, carrots are high in sugar already, which I just wasn't thinking about.
But it may not spike my wife in the same way that it does me. And so in fact, the difference in how we respond to food between my wife and I is dramatic. And so that really became the first end of one for us was we could sit side by side, eat the same thing and have wildly different responses. And so measuring the stuff, seeing for yourself what works, what doesn't, I think is really, really important.
So anyway, be utterly fascinating to try something like a cauliflower F-L-O-U-R and see if that spiked me because man, when I look at things like that, I think free pass, if this tastes good, I'm all in. So one of the things that I've really realized in teaching the world fasting is how this food addiction is such a hurdle for so many people. And I'm going to take it back to the women because I feel like it's when fascica girl came out, what has really shocked me is how many 20 and 30 year olds women are just have massive eating disorders. And what I'm seeing clinically working with these women, the ones that I'm working with one on one is that when we get them changing the calorie counting conversation and we get them doing instead of counting calories, counting blood sugar, put a CGM on them and say, okay, now go eat.
And just eat, usually what I do is I say, go eat whatever you're going to eat. You can count your calories however you want to count them the first couple of weeks and then send me your glucose map and let's look at this. What we're seeing is that these women that feel like they're in control because they're counting calories, what they're doing is they're getting these glucose spikes that are up and down all day long, which is actually keeping them in the sugar burner state longer. So then I switch that around and I say to your baby carrot example, try baby carrots with some hummus, try it with some cheese.
Now go scan your glucose monitor. Let's look, let's see what happens. And I would tell you the same thing. What is it when we add a protein or a fat to a carbohydrate, even if that carbohydrate has fiber like a baby carrot, you slow that spike down and you can most likely handle that food better and it's going to help you.
If you're not spiking your blood sugar, you're going to be able to switch over into the fat burner, fasted state so much better. It's really interesting. So here's a horrible thing, but I think you're going to drive with this. When I meet a woman, I just assume she has or has had a needing disorder period.
Why is that such a safe assumption? You won't be 100% correct, but man, you're going to be right. I'll walk the time. Yeah, yeah.
That breaks my heart and you're probably right. I got so many, so many things, but I will tell you that the big, big ones that I see. One is that it's the societal. We're trying to look a certain way.
And so we've been taught to look out that our external, how we look externally is how we get love, is how we get validation because that's the society that we're living in. We want to push back on that. Yeah, please. I'm very open, but I would say that's you're raging against biology, not society.
Tell me more. So when I think about this, and this isn't a free pass to just be like, oh, however, we end up being as a society, that's fine because it's born of biology. But I think that when you understand what prompts it, which is nature has reached inside my brain and said, you're going to find these things attractive because there are signs of fertility. Now, of course, there are also, there's a societal layer.
So when I was young, the thing that was en vogue was like super skinny, but still large breasts, right? And now it's big butts are like the rage and women that are slightly thicker. But that hasn't changed in as far as I can tell in my very non-scientific, but I would say still accurate assumption that just being a female who is competing for the attention of men and to compete against women who are often their harshest critics with their body. Again, the thing that you're actually raging against is a societal layer that is born of an evolutionary drive to find the most fertile and probably high status women or women that confer the most status to you because they are considered the most beautiful.
And so when people attack a very worth attacking notion at the level of society, they run into problems because really you have to address that you're getting this biological impulse. And at the risk of going too far afield, I think this is really fascinating. They did a study where they looked at what age group do people find attractive based on their own age? And for women, there's a four year span that is glued to their own age.
So two years older than them, two years younger than them is their sweet spot of what they find attractive in men. Men, it's a 22 year old female, no matter how old they are. So they could be 14, they find a 22 year old attractive. They could be 85 and they find a 22 year old attractive.
And it was one of those that it is brutal. And as somebody who's married to a woman that's only aging in one direction, it's like I fully empathize with her deeply. But at the same time, it was laugh out loud funny to me that that's what nature has done. And it's just so I'm so many things I want to say that.
So the first thing is, okay, that would make sense because our attraction is all built around reproducing. So there is that and that would make sense that an older man would find a 22 year old more attractive because it's a fertility thing, totally makes sense. But when you're looking at what makes a woman, the woman that's the most fertile is actually her hip to waist ratio, which is the only thing that runs across culture across time. Yeah.
Is it to a hip to waist ratio? So I want to throw one other weird thing in here that I think isn't discussed enough and it keeps showing up in a lot of conversations, which is we're also attracted to each other through smell. Yes. And there's a very interesting study that shows when women go on birth control and they meet their spouse, it was done in heterosexual relationships that they have a different smell profile that they're attracted to if they're on the pill.
Ten years into the marriage, they try to get pregnant, they get off the pill. All of a sudden the attraction is different. And so I went down a rabbit hole looking at that and I was like, what is the attraction? What is the smell you gravitate towards?
And it's for women, it is the one that is going to support her immune system the most. Because once she's actually pregnant, she's got foreign DNA in her from her husband's home. Crazy. Crazy.
So when we look at we tie this all together, I think it's just like the nutrition and fasting conversation. We have misdirected what we think makes somebody attractive, what makes somebody healthy, what diet we need to be on. There's so much going on under the scenes of what attracts you to somebody else, what makes you feel vibrant as a woman. And when I hear that the 20 and 30 year olds and the have all these eating disorders, I just want to say like, okay, everything you've been taught about attraction is wrong.
And we've got to start to unwind that so we can come back into these natural patterns that we are using subconsciously. It's interesting. So I've never heard the pill thing tied to scent before. I've heard the studies about, okay, ladies, here are 12 t-shirts laid out before you.
Smell them and just rank order them. And when they do that, they rank order them in the ones that they find the scent the most appealing is the person with the most genetic variation. So to your point about it would give you, it would certainly give your child the most advantage in terms of a far more robust immune system and then down to the ones that they find the scent least appealing. So if you slip, I can't remember if they actually did this or if this was just somebody's hypothesis, but that you would expect that if one of their siblings were put into that mix, they don't know, they're just smelling the shirt, that they would actually rank them the lowest.
I remember I thought that was part of the study. I didn't know that part of the study. That's fascinating. Yeah.
I mean, it would have to be true, right? For that is the hypothesis that that, or that is the prediction that that hypothesis makes, like that if this is about genetic variability, then the people that would be most like you, your siblings, you would find the least appealing, which is very interesting. But going back to this idea of food addiction, so we women are struggling with it 20s and 30s, maybe the worst, which is already fascinating. But how do you begin to help them break this?
Yeah. So this is such a great question. The first is we've got to get them looking at something like a continuous glucose monitor. So just get away from calories.
Get away from calories. We still want them to feel in control. Yes, it's a control issue. So I've proven this over and over again with people with severe food addictions and eating disorders is I always say, give me two weeks.
Just you can count your calories if you want. If that helps you feel in control, I want you to not look at your scale. If they can, sometimes they just, they have to anyways, but I want your focus for the next two weeks to be on what foods are doing to your glucose. And the name of the game is less spikes.
So you just don't want to see those spikes going up and down. So when you get your chart on your meter, you don't want them going up and down six, eight times a day. You want them going up and down maybe twice a day. How tight do you try to control that range?
Well, so then you want to see it go down like, I don't like it to go above like 120. I'd like to keep it, cover around that. And I'd like to see it come down within a half an hour pretty quickly. Do you think about daily averages?
Yeah. I'd like to see it 95 100 would be really good. Interesting. So that feels high to me.
Are you being overly generous because you know what people's limitations are? Yeah, I'm being overly sensible because what I've learned in like teaching the world about glucose and fasting is that if I say like the 70 to 90 is a perfect range. But if I take a woman who's food addicted has eight glucose spikes that go up to 120, you know, throughout the course of her day, and I say you got to get it to an average of 75. It's too far of a leap.
And what we often don't need motivation to start to eat different, we need momentum. And so when we come over here and we say your gold standard is, you know, 1.5 ketones and your gold standard is 75 average of 75 glucose every day. It's the single mom in the in the who's working two jobs that's just trying to make it. And if that's her goal, it's it's not sense.
It's not easy for her to follow. And she's just going to say in her to feel like I can't win. Yeah. This is all I and the story I always tell is I during the pandemic, I had a high school principal in South Carolina reach out to me.
And she said, she followed me on YouTube and she said, I'm very concerned because we're going back to school and my teachers are freaking out about their immune system. Will you come give a talk to them or like a zoom talk? So I did. And I talked all about like fancy ways to eat and supplements and how you can improve your immune system.
All the many of the things we're talking about right now. And at the end of the conversation, I asked him anybody had a question. He's very brave man raises his hand and he said, you know, I hear what you're saying, but if I'm at a grocery store and I'm looking at a nut butter that has the right oils compared to the inflammatory ones, that's $8 difference. And I don't have that's $8 I don't have.
And then another woman raised her hand and said, I get up at 4 30. I'm at school at five. I worked till five. I come home, have to take care of my kids.
The easiest place for me to go is through the McDonald's drive through. I don't know how I can do all these things. You're saying. And it hit me in that moment that I'd done them a disservice by tricking out much of a conversation like we're having now because if it gets confusing, a food gets confusing, if health gets confusing, we get blocked and we just fall back into our old patterns with glucose.
Yes, 70 to 90 somewhere in that average would be amazing. But if your average is 120 and you get down to 110, you are moving in the right direction and that is awesome. So I want to make health approachable for everybody, not just the people who can afford it or the people who can understand it. How do we do this so that everybody can win?