Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Bite: Joel Greene Breaks Down Fasting

Starting point is 00:00:00 that's really the question what's the right dose what's the right dose of fasting power project family this is a power bite and a power bite is a highlight from a full-length episode that we do not want you to miss links to the full episode are on the podcast show notes along with special perks for all of our beautiful listeners enjoy here's we we've mentioned fasting a few times you know like we do omad sometimes i don't do it all the time but there's there's within like the fitness right now, there's a lot of people that talk about fasting like an elixir of health and it massively increases longevity. And then there's another party of people who will take that content and be like, this is bullshit and this is why fasting might be useful or not. Are there legitimately any benefits to fasting as far as longevity is concerned and maybe with the way that we're looking at fasting you know as a protocol what ways do you think we might be getting it wrong

Starting point is 00:00:50 with how we use it yeah good question um i'm just after what actually really works and to get to that question you have to factor in over time you have to factor in long term because there's this um there's this misconception that things work kind of in a straight line and that's not true of almost anything like almost nothing works in a straight line what you see is most things work fantastically well up front and then there's attenuation down the line. So then workers get down the line. Some things dip under the curve, and then there's negatives down the line.

Starting point is 00:01:33 That's how things actually work. And I don't care what you're talking about. We know that's true with SSRIs. They work fantastic up front, and then later on you've got to take a car full of the things. That's true of most things. And fasting is not excluded from that. I'm just saying that based on my experience over many, many years. So fasting is fantastically beneficial for longevity, for so many things. You know,

Starting point is 00:02:06 it is a great practice. Hey guys, you like cereal. I like cereal. Let's not eat the bad stuff though. That's why we've partnered with Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon has number one, amazing macro, zero grams of sugar, four grams of carbs, 14 grams of protein, and 140 calories per serving. You're not getting all the icky sugar that you get from normal cereal. Magic Spoon is the way to go. That's why we love it and it fits our diet. Andrew, how can people get it? Absolutely. You guys got to head over to magicspoon.com slash power project. You guys will see the variety pack. That's four different flavors and it's really an awesome way to kind of dip your toe into the cereal bowl. So that way you guys can figure out which flavor you like the most. And when you go there, you're actually going to receive $5 off that variety pack. Again, magicspoon.com slash power project links to them

Starting point is 00:02:41 down in the description. Let's get back to the video what what i have seen what i've experienced and what i've seen with other people is that it doesn't work in a straight line so you can see fantastic benefits up front and then there's an attenuation effect as you get a few years into it three four five years and i've seen this pretty consistently with people that i've spoken with and you you start to see kind of a cluster of things. One of those things is suddenly they have trouble dropping fat down the line. Another thing is that their hunger gets dysregulated. Another thing is that their sleep can get dysregulated. And so you see this cluster of things.

Starting point is 00:03:23 So what that speaks to is what's the right dosing? That's really the question. What's the right dose? What's the right dose of fasting? Is it like, yeah, a way of life all the time? Or is it better in sort of strategic doses? That's the main question in my mind of fasting. And then is there a way that we can take fasting, which inherently when we start to break it down and go, why is fasting work?

Starting point is 00:03:46 And we're just talking about, let me ask, we're just talking about like 16 and 20. We're not talking about multiple day fasts currently, right? Right. And I also have found it to be super beneficial just to go, I don't know, six or eight waking hours without food. And that could mean I wake up and eat and then I don't eat again until later on in the evening or it could mean that I wait all the way until the evening and eat twice at three and then again at seven or something like that.

Starting point is 00:04:13 So I've found that to be really beneficial but I understand what you're saying. It kind of sounds like what you're saying is the longer that someone practices fasting, the more likely over a period of time they are to move away from it which would be kind of proof that uh maybe it is causing some of these things that you said like dysregulated uh hunger and i i have noticed some of that in myself to where sometimes i'm like holy

Starting point is 00:04:37 shit this i think this has made me hungrier i think i could be i think i think uh this has almost re-regulated my hunger because i think my hunger was dampened for many years because of the way I was eating. To be a 330-pound power lifter, people are usually surprised that I didn't eat that much. Now I feel like I could enter an eating competition at this point with the way I can eat now. That's good. um that's good yeah what i would offer with that is like where my road has taken me um you know after 40 plus years of doing this stuff is that i approach everything like mixed martial arts like all of these things are techniques and i can use any one of them the question is when do i want to use it that's all like like let's let's say fasting is like calf kicks. Okay.

Starting point is 00:05:27 And the question is, well, hey, are calf kicks good? And the answer is like, yeah, they can be fantastic, but I wouldn't make my whole fight game based on calf kicks. You know? I mean, you might win a fight. I don't know. But, you know, there's times when you might have to throw a punch. You might have to, like, grapple.

Starting point is 00:05:41 You might have to go for an arm lock. And it's really more about, like, carnivore. Is that bad or is that good? it's a great tool it's it's like that's like a that's like a overhand right is keto a great tool yeah that's like a head kick okay so when do you use these things and it's like the answer is you know this thing we're talking about is much more like a fight it's much more like mixed martial arts than it is this it's not a punching bag it's like you, you can go to the punching bag and you just, you just practice that, that Tyson body punch uppercut. You just practice that all the time.

Starting point is 00:06:10 You're really good at that. Okay. But that's not what fights are like. Okay. Fights go wherever they go and you got to be prepared. So, you know, that's, that's the way I approach it. These things are all good. Um, but like you can overdo calf kicks, you know?

Starting point is 00:06:23 So yeah. So that's how I look at it. Yeah. And something also interesting with like fasting nowadays, and I don't know if you mentioned this to me over the phone or something recently, but like nowadays I'll still look at it like fasting, but I just had a protein shake with some like coffee and there's like some,

Starting point is 00:06:38 there's some heavy cream with coffee, but I'm not going to eat again until probably this evening. But I, even though that's calories i'm still looking that as like a fast you know what i mean um and technically i had calories so a lot of people be like that's not fasting but i don't necessarily need to like there are some days where i won't have something in the morning but i'll have something like that or i'll have a protein shake throughout the day and the the thing that happened with me over the years is just my

Starting point is 00:07:03 hunger is not as voracious as it was where where if I would get hungry, I would have to fucking respond or else on my mood would get it like I'd get annoyed or whatever. I'm not controlled by that anymore, but I can intermittently eat whenever I want and just be perfectly OK. It's like I have better signals of how much I should eat and when I should eat. And it's it's very auto regulated. Like, I don't count anymore. But it's very just intuitive. Yeah, let's talk about that for a second. Because you hit on something pretty fascinating. So, where I'm at now with this, and what I put in the book was that, let's break fasting down.

Starting point is 00:07:34 And why does fasting work? So, we start to break fasting down. We go, well, you know, you get autophagy, you get ubiquination. So, you get the breakdown of stuff that has to go in the trash, kind of keeps things clean. Okay, that's good. You get the signal pathways activated. You get the sirtuins activated. You get AMPK activated.

Starting point is 00:07:54 Okay, you know, that's good. And you start to just break fasting down into its concomitant mechanisms. And you go, okay, well, can we activate those apart from fasting and yeah wow wait actually we can so one of the best ways is through the gut so we can manipulate the bacteria in the gut to to produce the phytobacteria to produce bacteria that really help those things that help those pathways turn on, that help, and you just keep making your list,

Starting point is 00:08:29 like HDAC inhibition, that just means that we're making better copies of DNA so we can make proteins. Okay, well, we can do that with bifidobacteria. You know, in the gut, you can do it. And you just keep going down this list, and it's like, wow, yeah. So there seems to be probably a pretty good case that we can activate a lot of these same pathways before fasting so that we don't have to fast as long.

Starting point is 00:08:50 And then on top of that, when we turn to the insulin side of the equation and we go, well, let's keep going. What's another reason fasting works? What's another reason fasting works? Well, one reason seems to be that you get this cessation or pause in signals down the IGF-1-IIS pathway. So when you look at glucose transport and when you look at what gets turned on when cells bring glucose in, you have the metabolic pathway, and that sort of uses mTOR as kind of a throttle. So in the metabolic pathway, mTOR works like the accelerator. It's like, back off on the gas or we need more gas, okay?

Starting point is 00:09:50 The other side of the equation is a pathway, the MAPK pathway theory, that has probably pretty good reason to believe that the more signals down that pathway, the faster you age. And if you just look at the signal pathways in bringing glucose in the cell, it kind of makes a lot of sense. It makes a ton of sense. So fasting kind of turns that off, gives us a little break. Okay. The other thing is that fasting also helps replete acromancia okay so acromancia is the other half of the commensal bacteria equation it's the one we need to keep the gut lining working the way it should and very difficult to feed through food you can but it's tough but fasting repletes acromancia so acromancia doesn't like dietary

Starting point is 00:10:20 protein um the best way to understand it is your mouth makes saliva and that saliva has glycoproteins or proteins in it and you have bacteria in your mouth and that's what they feed on so acromantia feeds on saliva secreted in the gut and it likes that but when you have like too much protein in the diet you're activating these growth signal pathways okay and you're advantaging other kinds of bacteria that prefer their nitrogen from the diet okay so there's a lot of things to think about here but it seems to be complementary that when you are spinning up the phytobacteria that helps acromantia and if you do it before a fast then you fast you're spinning up acromantia and you have this balance of things that you can make a really good case is optimal then the other side of the equation becomes so

Starting point is 00:11:09 when you're fasting you're ceasing you're ceasing for the most part the production of insulin okay that's not bad you know periodically the other side of that equation is certain types of fibers tend to potentiate insulin sensitivity. So you have all these helper hormones around insulin. Insulin doesn't do its job alone. You have the incretin proteins, which is GIP, GLP-1. You have adiponectin. So you

Starting point is 00:11:36 have these other hormones, the family of insulin hormones, that help insulin do its thing. And so you can make this case, and I tried to make it in the book, I hope I made it a good case, and I tried to make it in the book, I hope I made it a good case, that there's this way of eating that takes all the benefits of fasting and makes it better. You know, you get insulin sensitization through fibers prior to fasting.

Starting point is 00:11:58 You get this pre-activation of signal pathways before fasting. And I think that there's a proof of it. I'll probably have you guys try it which is if you do it you get hungrier way way faster hunger is sort of one of your indicators that you've been fasting okay what you see like when most people start fasting initially is they don't get that hungry they're like i'm kind of good feel pretty good you know you have them start doing fibers a day before like man i man, I'm starving. What time? What time? What time are we eating? We were going to do, we were going to do a, a 2024. Let's just dial that back.

Starting point is 00:12:29 Let's eat at lunch. Yeah. You see it pretty fast. Okay.

Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Bite: Joel Greene Breaks Down Fasting

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