Good Life Project - Fasting: My 7 Days Without Food.

Episode Date: February 1, 2018

Why would anyone stop eating for 7-days?That's what I first thought when I started hearing accounts of longer-term fasting. Insane. Nuts. Dangerous. Then, I started exploring the research. There is a growing interest in, and body of science around, longer-term fasting that is revealing some incredible benefits. Everything ranging from anti-inflammation and pain reduction to weight loss, disease risk reduction, positive epigenetic signaling, immune boosting, mental acuity and more. I got curious, so I decided to run my own experiment.Last week, I fasted for 7-days. I was surprised by what happened on many levels. I detail what I did, why I did it, and the sometimes dramatic ways it affected me in today's podcast. Of course, all the usual precautions apply. It's absolutely not for everyone, it should be done (if at all) in conjunction with a qualified healthcare professional. For a great overview on a scientific/grounded approach to fasting, you might also want to check out The Complete Guide to Fasting.Good Life Science Update. And, on the science side of things, today, we're diving into a cool new study on how sunshine and/or vitamin D3 supplementation might actually be able to do what was once thought impossible - help repair damage to your cardiovascular system that leads to hypertension, stroke and heart attack. And, as always, for those who want to go to the source, here's a link to more about the study.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So ever wonder what might happen if you just kind of stopped eating for seven days? I know, probably not. Well, I did. And I actually did that experiment just a couple of days ago. And some really fascinating things happened during it. And in today's riff, I'm going to share the details of my seven-day fast. Along with that, in today's Good Life Science Update, we've got some really fascinating new research on how sunlight may actually help heal damage done to your cardiovascular system.

That's right, just going out into the sun. So learn how I didn't eat for seven days, and I'm still here talking to you and what sun might do to your cardiovascular system in today's Good Life Update. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk.

So what in the world would lead somebody who lived in the middle of one of the greatest cities in the world, literally could walk out their door 24 hours a day and get almost anything they wanted to eat, what would lead that person to not eat for seven days? Well, that would be me. And that would be the experiment that I just ran, a seven-day fast. I didn't think it was possible. I thought it would be brutally hard. But I wanted to do this because there's been an increasing body of research on fasting and how it helps us. If you look at sort of the history of culture, we were ancestrally spent a lot of time eating and then not eating, fasting for longer windows of time. Even as part of almost every faith-based spiritual tradition, there is an element of fasting to it.

And we kind of knew intuitively that it was healthy. Well, I mean, more ancestrally, it was feast or famine. You know, you would hunt and you would eat, and then you would have nothing for days at a time. So our bodies, it seems, adapted to that. And now there's been a whole bunch of science that's gone on around fasting. And what they know is that there are actually tremendous health benefits done to controlled fasting that range from reduction in inflammation, reduction in all sorts of disease risk, of course, potential weight loss, if that's something you're

doing it for. There's also a process in the body where damaged or precancerous cells effectively die when you fast. And at least my understanding is that from the research that I've done, and from what I've been told from experts who study this stuff on a pretty regular basis. Why did I want to do this? Well, it was for all of those reasons, but it was for me primarily, I was very curious about the anti-inflammatory effect of fasting. When you fast, what happens? When you fast for more than,

especially a couple of days, around day three-ish, what happens is your body sort of burns through the readily available source of energy, your carbs, glucose, glycogen, and then it turns to the fat in your body. And you start to, you're very inefficient at burning that fat at first, but then you become pretty efficient pretty quickly. And I'll share how I know that in the fast that I did. What happens then is your body starts to produce these things called ketones.

And when it does that, ketones are an energy source, but they are also very powerful anti-inflammatory. And I have been curious what that might do to my body because I am 52 years old. I have for a while now experienced some level of joint pain in my body and nothing's really done the trick and I don't want to spend my life on NSAIDs or non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, but things like over-the-counter, you know, like aspirin, Advil, stuff like that. It's just not something that I would prefer to do. So I was really curious whether a seven-day fast would actually have a powerful anti-inflammatory effect in my body. So I set out to do it. I went and I connected with a good friend of mine, also a functional medicine doc, Dr. Frank Lipman, who you have actually heard on

the podcast if you have listened in the past, and we kind of sat down together and made a plan. And I would strongly recommend if you consider doing anything like this, that you in fact do it with some level of deep research and medical supervision. This is not something that you do lightly. The plan was pretty straightforward. My approach was rather than straight water, I would replace, I would have, instead of lunch and dinner every day, I would simply have a cup of bone broth. And that in part was to put just a

touch of flavor and fat into what I was doing, but also replace some electrolytes and some salt, which would keep my system better balanced. Again, I could go into sort of the more detailed chemistry of that, but I want to share more about the experience with you because there are a lot of things that people asked me when they heard I was doing this. And there are a lot of surprises that came to me along the way. So one, first, I wrapped this about three days ago. I went Sunday to Monday. And so I'm now about three days past.

So I can give you a little bit of post data as well. Okay, let's talk about the big questions and the big awakenings. Hunger. Dude, you must be starving. That's what I heard. To almost anybody who I told, and it wasn't a lot of people I told, but almost to the one they're saying, Are you serious? How are you even upright? You must be doubled over in hunger. Here's the interesting thing about this experience. I was for the first two days. I got pretty hungry.

Actually, the first day was okay because it's not so hard to fast for 24 hours, honestly. So many of us do it. I will occasionally do that unintentionally because I get wrapped up in work and I realize, oh, wow, I ate dinner last night and it's almost dinner today and I haven't eaten. When you come around to day two, it gets kind of tough because you start to really feel the pangs of hunger and you're running out of the readily available source of energy in your body. And you haven't really started effectively converting over to using body fat, by the way, which I have plenty of in my body to last me for very likely weeks of not eating if I really needed to and I knew how to do it right. In that transitional process or

before you made that transition, before your body starts to effectively burn the fat, you don't feel that great and you feel pretty hungry. You get a whole bunch of cravings too. But an interesting thing happens on around day three-ish is that the body starts to kick into the fat burning as a primary substrate for energy mode. And when it does that, the fact that you're now burning something else, you're kicking off ketones in your body, you're starting to have an anti-inflammatory effect in your body, and you haven't had sort of the high carb content substances that very often trigger the chemical releases in your body that lead to

cravings, you're not actually all that hungry. So this was really weird because at about day six, five or six, my wife would say to me, she's like, I can't believe the willpower that you have of being able to not eat. And I said, you know, what's interesting to me is I don't have a lot of willpower and it's not taking a lot of willpower to do this once I got sort of into and past the third day. In fact, I have taken a strength assessment, actually I've taken a number in my past and ranked 25 out of 25 for me is self-regulation. I am not a really good person for organic willpower, especially when it comes to food. But for some reason, the changes in my physiology around day three made it really not too hard.

In fact, a number of times, my wife me sort of sitting on a couch later in the evening watching food TV or scanning my Instagram feed, looking at food accounts. And she's like, what is wrong with you? You're like, doesn't this drive you nuts? And I said, oddly enough, I'm actually fine. I even sat down with a family dinner where, you know, there was great food on the table. And I sat there with a glass of water and a little bit of bone broth and I was completely fine not having it. And this is coming from somebody who actually likes food and is a chocolate fiend and there's chocolate all over the place.

So it was really fascinating to me to be able to experience that shift in satiety and pretty much a reduction or close to an elimination in cravings around day three of day seven. So let's talk about the next big discovery and question. And that is, how did my brain work during seven days of fasting? Here again was another surprise. I had a very heavy week last week while I was fasting. So if you do this in their residential facilities, you can go to and do it. I chose to do it at home, you know, sort of with access to a trusted healthcare provider and a plan in place. And also having done a lot of research on this myself and really understanding what

goes on here, I had to take care of myself. So if you're in a residential facility, very often you're not doing much to sort of tax yourself cognitively. I lived a regular week. I worked. I did all sorts of other things. I actually recorded a couple of interviews for this process. I did a bunch of writing. We were working on new projects and products. In the middle of that, I also was interviewed, one in person and one remotely. They both lasted about 90 minutes. And these were interviews that were important to me to be cognitively there. I needed to do well and be functional. And when I was going to them or preparing for them, I was a little concerned about

how the fasting would affect my brain. Would I be, you know, would it be sort of like on the mark? Would I be able to think intelligently and form ideas and speak? Or would it be a little bit foggy? That was my concern. Would the fast make me foggy? Fascinatingly enough, it did the exact opposite. I came home after the first in-depth interview, and these were both taped. And I was almost shocked by higher than it is normally. I felt like I was dialed in verbally, cognitively. I could form ideas, put together exactly what I wanted, and I felt really on the money in both of these conversations. Same thing when I was interviewing people. I felt like I was completely there.

And if anything, I felt like the fasting did not in any way create fog. It amplified acuity. I described this to another friend of mine who's sort of in the world of health and research. And one of the things she said was that she's seen some research on this that shows that in fact, when you fast for more than a couple of days, it also sends a signal to your brain, your physiology, that it needs to be very sharp because you need to be able to go out and hunt and have a very high level of attentiveness. And that kind of makes sense to me. So cognitively, it seemed to actually, if anything, only help rather than hurt, which was another

really big surprise for me. Another question, could I exercise while I was doing this? Turns out, yes. I didn't do it at a very high pace, very deliberately, because I was sort of prescribed beforehand to sort of move my body, but not super intensely, because it would mess a bit with what I was trying to do, and potentially lead to a bit of fatigue or cravings later. So I did it on a fairly regular basis at a sort of a medium slash mild pace. But I remember being at the gym. I actually don't love gyms, but it's winter in New York, so I go inside. And very often I start out my workout with about 15 minutes on a rowing air commuter. And I got 15 minutes in and I felt great.

So I just did it more. So a really interesting thing was that it seemed not to really hurt my ability to exercise as well. What about sleep? Did it mess with that at all? Here's where it gets interesting. My answer is yes, it actually did, at least for me. I don't have a really clear reason why. But the theory is that what it did for me was I would wake up,

I'll often wake up, you know, somewhere around four or five hours into sleep for a quick, you know, in the middle of the night, rest and break, and then go back to sleep. And I had more trouble going back to sleep after I woke up and I found that I was slightly more agitated. And I think what was happening was that I would drink a lot of water during the day while fasting. But while sleeping, I would essentially have a four-hour window where I was in a fasting state but not getting fluids. And when I woke up from that, I was not in as good a psychological or physiological state. I felt a bit agitated. So it definitely made it a bit harder to go back to sleep. So I would sometimes

end up playing some kind of audio to help me drop back into sleep. So it definitely made it a bit harder to go back to sleep. So I would sometimes end up playing some kind of audio to help me drop back into sleep. So that was an interesting discovery as well. I did feel like it got better over time, over the seven day duration of the fast. Okay, now you may be wondering about the two big things here, pain and weight loss. What did it do with regard to those things? Big things is what it did. In regard to physical pain, to joint pain, ketones can have a pretty dramatic anti-inflammatory effect in the body. And what I found was at about day three, four, when I started to switch over and the level of ketones in my body elevated pretty seriously, a lot of the sort of longer term joint pain that I have experienced in my life either completely went away or was very substantially diminished. It kind of blew

my mind because I've done all sorts of other things from complementary medicine to all sorts of other stuff to taking pills to things like this. Nothing's ever really done much to touch it, at least for more than a very short amount of time. I'm now three days post-fast and I'm still good. My question is how long the effect will last. And some of the experiments I'll be running will be sort of modified nutrition and potentially shorter term, you know, would a 24 or 36 hour weekly fast help sustain this effect? But I'm really encouraged by the fact that it had such a strong effect on anti-inflammatory effect in my body. By the way, the way that I know where the ketones are and when they really kicked in at a high level in my body is that I was actually monitoring my

ketones in my blood during the seven-day fast. There are three ways to do it as a sort of everyday person. You can do it in your urine using little keto strips. You can do it in your breath or you can do it in your blood. I was doing the urine-based one. And what I found was that as soon as I really started getting to ketosis, it was completely misrepresenting my level, showing that I had no ketosis at a time where my blood ketones showed very high levels of ketones in my blood. So I switched entirely. I stopped using that and switched entirely to measuring blood, which you can do with a simple little device that you can get online for not a lot of money and do it at home in a matter of a minute. So really fascinating anti-inflammatory and pain

reduction effect in my body, which I was hopeful for, but not expecting and thrilled that it happened. Okay. Now that final thing that so many people have asked me about after not eating for seven days, what did it do to my weight? In seven days, I dropped 14 pounds, which kind of blew my mind was not the primary reason that I did it at all. I have the weight to lose. So there's nothing unsound about it. But I was very, very surprised. Now, of course, 14 pounds is not 14 pounds of true body weight. There is a significant amount of that is going to be fluids and water. And that will return to me as it should, as my body sort of rebalances and recalibrates.

But I'm now three days post and I'm still 12 pounds down. So I imagine another two, three pounds of fluid weight, water weight will eventually return to me and rebalance over the next couple of days. But still 10 pounds down of actual body tissue. Pretty fascinating. I did not do scans or body comp measurements to figure out how much of that weight was muscle versus fat. But from the research that I have done, the way that I did the fast should be pretty muscle sparing, meaning that the vast majority should have come from the burning of fat as a primary fuel for survival. So really fascinating experiment. I'm now sort of, you know, trying to figure out how, what are the experiments that I will run moving forward to see if I can sustain and build on these really powerful results. And I'm very encouraged. One last thing as I wrap

this, I'm coming off the fast. A number of people have asked, well, what did you do? Did you just sit down and have a pizza and a piece of cake? And I was like, no. My plan worked out in advance was to start with a very sort of mild soup-based or green juice-based things without any sort of sweet stuff. I still have not had any kind of sugar or treats or chocolate, which for a long time I thought ran in my blood. And we'll slowly add bits of that in, but very likely maintain a bit of a different nutrition profile to see how long I can sustain these effects. I hope you found that interesting. I'm going to be doing more experiments and as always if you i will include a link also in the show notes to uh some resources that were super helpful in learning a lot more

about this and if you were considering doing something like this of as always do not just jump into this this is unique to me and make sure that you work with a qualified healthcare professional in figuring out and monitoring how to do this safely and intelligently if it's something that you're going to do. Now, I'm really excited to also head into our science segment today and share a bit of research on how sunlight may actually help fix damage in our cardiovascular systems, which we all have to some extent. Mayday, mayday all have to some extent. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, Flight risk. the Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. And we're back with today's Good Life Science update. For those new to the podcast, these are short little briefs where I share my geekery around science. I'm constantly scouring research on health, well-being, living a good life, the way we interact with people, all sorts of stuff like that,

to bring you interesting, cool stuff that may just help you live better in the world. As always, I will include a link to the actual study report in the show notes for those fellow geeks who want to actually go deeper into the science, the research, and see the methodologies and protocols. Today is a pretty fascinating new study that comes out of researchers at Ohio University on vitamin D3. Now, vitamin D3, we've probably all heard, or you may or may not have heard, but it's been in the news a fair amount over the last decade. Vitamin D, we're told, is really important in bone, preventing bone loss and bone density. That's generally been the conversation. There's been some broader conversation also around its effect in the body for general health, anti-inflammation, well-being, immunity.

But really a lot of it is take your vitamin D because it's really important for bone. But here's the interesting thing. Increasingly, there's research that's showing that vitamin D3 is actually critically important for our cardiovascular system. What happens over time in pretty much all of us is that we end up with damage in our cardiovascular system. What happens over time in pretty much all of us is that we end up with damage in our cardiovascular system. What is our cardiovascular system? You know, it's that thing, the heart and the blood vessels, the stuff that provides life to us. It is critically important. And over time, just through very often lifestyle choices and genetics, we end up caused through damage to the walls of the vessels of the system, to the endothelial cells within the walls of that system.

And there hasn't been a whole lot that is super effective at fixing that damage. Well, it turns out that researchers, Professor Malinsky and his team, did a study that's been published in the International Journal of Nanomedicine, where they actually used nanosensors, which are these miniature, miniature, miniature sensors to be able to actually see how vitamin D3 affects individual endothelial cells within vessels. And what they realized, what they discovered, and this was a big discovery because nobody really figured this out before, was that vitamin D3 actually is a trigger for the release of

something called NO or nitric oxide. Now, nitric oxide is what's called a signaling molecule that helps to regulate how blood moves through these vessels. It also helps in stopping... Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th... Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet-black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Atherosclerosis and clotting. So D3 interacted with NO and led to a reduction in damage, in the damage that is done to the cardiovascular system just through oxidation over life.

We rust inside, our vessels rust inside, they accumulate stuff inside. And the D3 was able to actually trigger changes on the lining of these vessels that repair damage. This is really big because, at least to my knowledge and the research that I've seen, it's been really hard to find anything that will actually repair damage to these vessels,

having an effect on hypertension, on the risk for heart attack, even diabetes and clogged arteries. So this is pretty huge. Now, what does that mean for us? What does that mean for you? That means that you can deal with this in one of two ways, either supplementation through D3, which is very inexpensive and readily available over the counter. As always, don't start taking anything just because I said it. There's research that says it might be helpful. Always consult with

your healthcare provider before making any changes. But there's another source, which is sunlight. Our body naturally creates D by being in the sun. So one of the theories actually about why we have become, so many people have actually become very deficient in D is that we are indoors so much these days and so many more of us wear sunscreen on a regular basis when it's sunny outside too, which is great. That has its benefits, but at the same time, it may be impacting our production of vitamin D. And vitamin D, increasingly, we're finding is hyper-important in all sorts of bodily functions. And now we're seeing may be critically important in repairing damage done to our cardiovascular system. It's another sort of a piece of evidence to either supplement or make sure

that you are getting actually enough sunlight in your life. Yes, there's too much, but there's also sunlight deficiency. So something to think about. As always, we will link to the study in the show notes so you can dive in and see what the details are yourself. Hope you found this valuable and see what the details are yourself. Hope you found this valuable and enjoyable. As always, it's fun hanging out with you.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Hey, thanks so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we've included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share the Good Life Project love with friends, because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet-black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th... Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot if we need him! Y'all need a pilot?