The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting by Steve Hendricks

Episode Date: September 3, 2022

The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting by Steve Hendricks A journalist delves into the history, science, and practice of fasting, an ancient cure enjoying a dynamic resurgence. When should we eat, and when shouldn’t we? The answers to these simple questions are not what you might expect. As Steve Hendricks shows in The Oldest Cure in the World, stop eating long enough, and you’ll set in motion cellular repairs that can slow aging and prevent and reverse diseases like diabetes and hypertension. Fasting has improved the lives of people with epilepsy, asthma, and arthritis, and has even protected patients from the worst of chemotherapy’s side effects. But for such an elegant and effective treatment, fasting has had a surprisingly long and fraught history. From the earliest days of humanity and the Greek fathers of medicine through Christianity’s “fasting saints” and a nineteenth-century doctor whose stupendous forty-day fast on a New York City stage inaugurated the modern era of therapeutic fasting, Hendricks takes readers on a rich and comprehensive tour. Threaded throughout are Hendricks’s own adventures in fasting, including a stay at a luxurious fasting clinic in Germany and in a more spartan one closer to home in Northern California. This is a playful, insightful, and persuasive exploration of our bodies and when we should—and should not—feed them.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss are you ready are you ready for the roller's fastest coaster of your brain or whatever that guy said uh in the intro i don't know what that is but you know what guys we put it in the google. I don't know what that is. But you know what, guys? We put it in the Google machine, the smartest people on the planet. And then we go, damn it, let's have those people on the show.

And you know what? We have one here today. We captured one in the wild. We captured. This is a new joke run I'm going to do. This is going to be a callback in the future. We captured him. You know, you ever seen that wildlife of Omaha?

Boy, that dates a whole lot, doesn't it? You know where they go in the wild? They're like, no, the lion in the safari is going across the plains. Yeah, so we captured him in the wild. He has agreed to come on the show, likely against his will or not. I don't know. We'll find out. And he's a brilliant, smart man.

We've checked the interwebs. And that's one of the reasons we do this show, so that we can have someone smarter on the show than me, and it's a very low bar, folks, for me. We all know that. You've been with me 13 years. Tomorrow, we turn 13 years old. Who knew the hell that would happen?

I wasn't sure. I knew it was going to be 10, but still 13. I'm tired. I want to go home. See you. I'm out. Hey, to go home. See you. I'm out. Hey, guys. Welcome.

Welcome. I just want to see how long I can get away with not saying it. Welcome to Chris Foss Show. The Chris Foss Show.com. Maybe after 13 years, I'm tired of saying it. I'm going to quit tomorrow. Fuck this. Anyway, guys, you better make sure and go refer the show to your family, friends, and

relatives because we're going to extortion level now. Tell them to sign up to the show. Go to YouTube.com, Ford Says Chris Voss. Go to Goodreads.com, Ford Says Chris Voss. All those places on the Internet, the big 120,000 LinkedIn group, the big LinkedIn newsletter. This will probably be on tomorrow. Also, go on iTunes. Give us a five-star referral.

I will quit tomorrow, damn it. I uh, iTunes. It gives us a five star referral. So I will quit tomorrow. Damn it. I've had it. I'm enough already. I'm 14. Another like a 14th year. Wait, does this make the show a teenager officially? 12, 13.

Oh my God. The show's a teenager. Boy, there's going to be trouble and it wants the date now. Damn it. I'm going to have to get insurance. Anyway, without further further ado we have a brilliant mind on the show and it's not me we all know that was coming uh the oldest cure in the world adventures in the art and science of fasting just uh this is coming out september 6 2022 my god

we're in sept. Steve Hendricks is on the show with us today. He's going to be talking to us about his amazing book. And guess what? You can pre-order it wherever fine books are sold. But remember, stay out of the alleyway at bookstores. You might get a tetanus shot. Steve Hendricks is a freelance reporter and the author of two

previous books, one of which The Unquiet Grave, The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country, made several best of the year lists. He's written for Harper's, Outside, Slate, and the Washington Post, or as we call it around here, The WAPO. We have many great journalists from The WAPO on the show. Hendricks lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife, a professor of family law, his dog, and a border, or I'm sorry, his dog, A, not and, A, border colony cross. Welcome to the show, Steve.

How are you? Hi. Excuse me, Chris. I'm great. That's quite the intro to live up to. There you go. It's good to be on your adolescent show. You know, my voice cracked at the beginning there, so I kind of went off on a...

You set the standard on the cracking voices. I did a segue tangent that kind of went around the moon a couple times. Well, welcome to the show, Steve. We really appreciate you being here. Give us your dot-coms, those places on the interweb skyweb where people can see you on the interweb. Yeah, it's really simple. It's just my name, stevehendricks.org.

I'm not a big social media guy, so I guess that, you know don't tell my publisher but the best only no only fans nope so uh so if people want to reach me go to my website drop me an email well there's still time don't worry about it all right thanks my only fans by the way folks is uh uh don't don't watch this it will burn out your eyes.com i think that's the name of mine uh anyway guys uh so steve, so Steve, you've written a couple books before. This is your third, I guess. What motivated you to want to write this book?

Yeah, so I first wrote about fasting about 10 years ago for an article that was published in Harper's Magazine. And it was focusing on this 20-day fast that I took because back then I weighed a lot more than I do now, and I wanted to lose weight. And as I did it, I had explored some of the science around fasting and was frankly astonished, as a lot of people are when they first get into that topic, at just how impressive the science of fasting was, how healing a mechanism fasting could be. But at the time, you know, you write an article like that for a big magazine, a publisher will come to you and say, hey, do you want to write a book? And you know, those books that kind of grow out of magazine articles that should have just stayed magazine articles, because there wasn't enough there.

That's probably what would have happened, I think, if I'd written this fasting book 10 years ago. But in the 10 years since, the science has just blossomed. My own experience with fasting has grown as well. And then I became interested in the history of fasting. And so those three things were what moved me. I thought after letting this ferment for a decade, I thought I had enough to write a decent book. Hi, folks.

Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements if you'd like to hire me, uh, training courses that we offer and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneur ism, uh,

podcasting, corporate stuff, uh, with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as CEO. Uh, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you or anyone that you want to invite me to for your company. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show

and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. Yeah. I mean, I tried, I've tried a lot of diets across my lifetime. People in my audience know this, but you know, I've lost 75 pounds twice using intermittent fasting uh i gained the weight back you know everyone's like well you're doing really work if you're getting the weight back no i gained the weight back after a year and a half of putting my dog through hospice care and cancer and after she died i just quit giving a fuck again um and went back up and wait uh normally i shouldn't have done that. And, you know, that was kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and we're going to try and keep it that way.

But lesson learned. But, you know, being able to go back to that as an intermittent fasting is a thing. So why is intermittent fasting, why do you tout it as the oldest cure in the world? Yeah. So there are two kinds of fasting. There's daily fasting, which is you tout it as the oldest cure in the world? Yeah, so there are two kinds of fasting. There's daily fasting, which is what most people call intermittent fasting. And that's just, as you know, restricting your feeding window to a certain number of hours of the day and fasting the rest of the day. The other kind of fasting is prolonged fasting. And that's those long, usually water-only type fasts where people are fasting for a week, two weeks, two months, three months, ideally under medical supervision if they're going for a long time. But so both of those forms of fasting are useful for various reasons.

But the biggest one is that either way you do it, you will unleash healing mechanisms in your body when you are not eating. See, what happens is our bodies are fixing damage that occurs to them all the time. The problem is they're only doing it at a very low level because most of the time they're very busy processing the nutrients from the food that we eat. Eating and digesting and processing food takes an enormous amount of energy and time of the body. Give your body a break from that, even if it's only for, you know, a portion of the day. And your body is equipped by evolution to undertake these healing processes that, as I say, are happening all the time. But now they're happening at a much, much, much higher rate. And cumulatively, when you do that for, I say, are happening all the time, but now they're happening at a much, much, much higher rate. And cumulatively, when you do that for days, weeks, months, years, whatever,

those repairs that the body is making add up, and scientists believe not only prevent us from getting diseases, but if we have some diseases, can actually help reverse those. Yeah. And you prologue the book with a thing called criminal quackery, fasting for a cure. Talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah. So traditional doctors tend to look at fasting doctors as quacks, sometimes as even criminal quacks, because they feel that they're peddling something that's unscientific. In fact, fasting has hundreds of years, thousands, really, years of practice behind it. And in addition, there are now decades of research behind it. But so the story that I

start the book with is the story of this woman named Yvonneielman, who was an executive secretary out in California. And she came down with follicular lymphoma, which is a form of cancer. Yeah. She was 42. She had a couple of small kids at home. It's a terminal disease. It's a form of cancer for which the medical establishment will tell you, quite understandably, that there's no cure. The good news is most people live a long time, at least a decade, sometimes as much as two decades before they die. Yvonne did not want to die when she was 62. She was familiar with this because that would be, you know, 20 years after her diagnosis when she was 42. She was familiar because she lived in Northern

California with this fasting clinic out there named the True North Health Center. It's in Santa Rosa, about an hour north of San Francisco. And when she got her diagnosis over her doctor's objection, she decides she's going to go to True North and undertake a fast under the supervision of the fasting doctors who run that clinic. And to make a long story short, after about 20 days of fasting, her tumors, follicular lymphoma, affects the lymph nodes, the lymphatic system. And her tumors had been the size of hen's eggs or thereabout. They began to shrink after a couple of weeks of fasting. And by the time she had completed three weeks of water-only fasting, tumors were completely gone.

Holy crap. Yeah. And the interesting thing about this is, or there are a lot of interesting things, but one of them is, you know, you hear these stories all the time. They're just sort of one-offs and anecdotes, and you don't know whether to believe them or not, she had had scans both before and after her fast that tracked this disappearance of these tumors, which then allowed the doctors at True North to publish her case as a series of case studies in the British Medical Journal, which is a very prestigious, very widely read medical journal, basically making the claim that they were able to reverse a form of cancer through fasting. Since then, they followed her up. It's been

eight years. Her lymphoma has not come back. She's cancer-free. Serious. Wow. They have fasted other follicular lymphoma patients with impressive results as well. And they're hoping to eventually be able to put together a more, you know, these are case studies that they've published. These are not randomized controlled trials. They're hoping to be able to get to that level at some point. But, you know, the important thing to know is, is that fasting can reverse many diseases that we are, you know, that most of the medical establishment doesn't know that they can

reverse. The other important thing to know is fasting, we do know, cannot reverse most forms of cancer. This is an oddity. Fasting can, it seems to be able to retard cancer. It seems almost certainly to be able to help make chemotherapy more effective at destroying cancer cells and at minimizing the side effects of chemotherapy to the chemotherapy patient. So it can do some great things, but I don't want to leave your listeners with the idea that fasting is going to reverse their breast cancer or prostate cancer or pancreatic cancer or whatever. Yeah. Believing in flat earthism is... No, I'm glad you made that distinction because we breast cancer or prostate cancer or, you know, pancreatic cancer or whatever. Yeah. Believing in flat earth is a miss. No, I, I, I'm glad you made that distinction because we don't want to lose people who go, Oh, they're thinking, they're saying that, you know, fasting

will cure cancer. But you know, there is, there is a, some semblance to it because like you say, the body does repair itself. You know, I mean, when you go to sleep at night, your body goes into repair mode and you know, that's when I lose most of you go to sleep at night, your body goes into repair mode. And, you know, that's when I lose most of my weight is at night when it's, you know, it's I'm sleeping, I'm getting up and hitting the restroom a lot at night. But it's, you know, my body's flushing and get ridding and stuff. You know, that's why if you know, I can go to bed at night, especially at 54, be in pain, something's's not working maybe the sewer system isn't working right or i've got all my arms pulled or something and you can go to sleep for a good

eight hours you get that deep beautiful rest and stuff and you wake up and you're you're kind of all you love you feel better until you know two hours later or something 54 um and and so people don't realize the body's always doing that. In fact, my understanding of the body is a lot of times when cancer cells do first come out, or when something comes out, the body will attack them and kill them off. And so the body has the ability to do that. This is science. It's not some sort of quackery, as you put it. Yeah. I mean, you and I, excuse me, sitting here right now, depends on which scientists you talk to, but probably have about five cancer cells floating around.

And it's up to our immune system to do exactly what you're talking about, to come out and zap them. And that's one of the things that you find in various fasting studies, both in the intermittent fasting studies and in the prolonged fasting studies, is that the immune system response is increased. Now, I don't know that there have been any prolonged fasting studies, is that the immune system response is increased. Now, I don't know that there have been any specific fasting studies for immune system response specific to cancer. But the immune system response in general has been studied,

and it has been shown to step up when you give it that time without food, as you're talking about, particularly overnight, to do its job of cleaning up your mess. Yeah. And fixing you. I mean, it's just, you wake up and that's the reason you feel refreshed and you feel good. I mean, there's sometimes I've been really broken and messed up and a good night's sleep, good eight hours, nine hours or something. I wake up and I'm a new human being until I'm not again. 54, man, it's rough. So, you know, the other thing you talk about in your book, because I get this a lot, because I, you know, I'll tell people, hey, you should try intermittent fasting.

I'll see a friend mention, hey, I need to lose some weight. And I'm like, hey, do some intermittent fasting. Work for me. You know, I'm not a consultant or anything on it. I just tell my friends, hey, it works for me. Or they'll call me up and, you know, they're like, hey, I saw you lost all the weight. And, you know, here's what you're doing and they'll be like yeah it seems like some uh late stage modern sort of hocus pocus like you mentioned her at the quackery but you document in your book the history of this i mean like christianity and other religions you know i grew

up in in a cult but and one of their functions was you should have a fast on every Sunday or every one Sunday out of a month. And so, I mean, this has been a part of human history for quite a long time, hasn't it? I mean, it wouldn't be that way unless it worked. It's kind of like coffee. Well, I think yes and no is the short answer. The longer answer is absolutely. Now, is that on the coffee or is that on the fasting? No, I'm just kidding. On the fasting. Yeah, you know, the history of fasting goes back to the earliest writings 3,000 years ago.

It appears in virtually every major religion in the world. The one exception to that, interestingly, is Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrians thought that fasting made you too weak to produce vigorous heirs. Were they the cult that started McDonald's? Is that how that worked? I heard of those guys. They're trouble. They were always trouble.

Yeah. So anyway. Zoro people. Was it the Zoro people? Was it? No. No idea on the McDonald's front. No, but what was the name of the tribe again?

The Zoroastrians. The Zoroastrians. They were in ancient Persia, which is now Iran. Note to self, don't join the... What was it again? The Zoroastrians. Yeah, don't join those guys. Are they still around? Probably not.

They are. Do they have a church in Florida? Is that how it works out? Is it a big pink building? No, Florida, you would think Florida's got a little bit of everything kooky, right? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Do they have a guy who wrote a book called, never mind, I'm not going to pick on Tom Cruise and John Travolta, but they should come out of the closet.

Anyway, jokes aside, so is your book more of a teaching thing on how to do fasting and here's how it works? Or is it more like a historical thing and documenting why it works and the science of it and the practice of it, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah, more the second. It's more about, I wanted to tell a more complete story of fasting than had been told. So in the history, for example, you know, if you read books on fasting now, there's a lot of information out there that's just not quite right. They'll tell you, for instance, that the ancient Greeks fasted, which they did, and they knew what they were doing and that this was a great cure and somehow just humanity lost this over the years. Turns out nothing's further than the truth. They did fast.

They did try to fast for a cure, but most of the time they had no idea what they were doing. They were stumbling around as they were in all the rest of medicine, not figuring things out. So I wanted to tell a fuller and I've hopefully thought a more accurate story than had been told before. And I also really wanted to explore this new science that I had mentioned earlier, because there, you know, there, gosh, I don't know how many of there are dozens of how to fast books and the world didn't really need another how to fast book. You can glean some how to fast lessons from what I'm talking about.

But, but I mostly wanted to explore some of these things that hadn't been explored. And then also I wanted to do some fun first person reporting by going to the world's leading fasting clinics. There's one in Germany I went to. There's this True North Clinic in Northern California that I went to. And so that's what the book is. But it's not like a how-to guide. I'm going to walk you through every day of your fast. And I like that you did this because seriously, that's like one of the biggest things that people throw back at me over fasting. They go, well, you know, I don't know. I'm familiar with the Atkins and whatever the fad diet is of the week and weigh a weight watchers and all these different programs. And I'm like, no, fasting's been around for like, you know,

like you mentioned in the book, back to Greek days, the Greeks did it. Christianity did it. You know, like what I say, just like coffee, you know, there used to be a whole thing where, you know, coffee was like one of the highest-traded things in the world, and for good reason because I'm 54 now. This whole show runs on coffee. To me, there wouldn't be a reason that it's been around for so long. Atkins diet was started in the 80s or 90s or something.

There's all these fad diets. And the beautiful thing about fasting too is it doesn't really cost you anything. There's no program. You don't have to buy a meal plan. I mean, yeah, if you do want help or maybe you want to have some medical help or medical advice, you can go get that.

And I'd recommend that. But for the most part, you don't really need to have, like, you don't have to buy meal plans every month to be sent to your house basically for fasting. Yeah. The daily fasting, the intermittent fasting in particular, it's really simple. You just compress your eating into let's say six or eight hours. If you can, if you can't do that, even compressing it down to say 10 hours or so. Great. That's it. You don't

even have to change what you're eating. Now it's healthier if you eat a healthy diet. Of course, fasting doesn't fix your diet. Don't go to McDonald's. McDonald's fast is not recommended. Neither is the vodka fast. Don't do that. I've tried that fast. The vodka Mountain Dew fast. I met a couple of Lebanese guys at this German clinic who were going into town each night. They would fast German clinic who were going into town each night. They would fast during the day, go into town each night, hit the bar and do like a, I forget what it was, a gin and tonic fast. Yeah. Not recommended. I've tried that fast.

You know, in fact, I'll tell you a funny story. The first time I tried the fast that I got from Presto and Ray Cronise, and it was mostly from pendulet's book on presto um i tried the fast and i i gave up everything except for my mountain dew which i was drinking like 10 plus a day and my vodka at night and uh yeah the first 30 days i thought oh i'm doing really good i might lose a little bit of weight but yeah it was just dumb what I was doing. And after 30 days I went, yeah, it's probably the Mountain Dew and the vodka, but, uh, um, no, I mean, it's, it was really simple. I mean, uh, okay. So what do I drink now that I'm not drinking Mountain Dew anymore? Because I, I am a caffeine junkie. Okay. You replace it with coffee. Okay. Me, you make sure

you don't put coffee or fat in your coffee in the morning. You go to sleep at night. And you know, there was a lot of principles that were really important that I learned, um, in, in kind of mind hacks. Cause there's some mind hacks that I really had to learn. Like, you know, my mom used to do a thing where she would wear us with a candy bar and a soda if we were good at the store, which usually we weren't anyway anyway but my little brother wasn't but uh you know and so we got this reward thing food is reward and so you know you'd be driving around you're like hey i'm kind of hungry yeah i have a big mac ah fuck i did some shit today so let's get a reward you're like that's not a reward you're shoving frankenmeat in your system that has like probably zero nutritional value if you

ever watch supersize me um and uh that's why you're still hungry when you get done eating same thing with chinese food i think i don't know what that's about but uh you know it's really simple i would go to bed hungry you know realizing that we eat for a winter that never comes i think it's cronizer or pendulum quoting. Um, and you're not going to die. Like I would get the shakes, you know, if I didn't eat for a couple hours, I'm like, Oh, Holy crap. I'm going to die. You know, I, I, you know, I've had people tell me that are fasting people. They're like, Chris, at your weight, you could go like a year and not eat and you'll, you'll be fine. You got plenty to

live off baby. And so that was it. Yeah. Uh, you know, uh, your friends were probably exaggerating a little bit there, but yeah, I was three 50 at the time. You might get close to a year, but yeah. I mean, if you are making a change to, you know, you're used to eating all the time, you're used to Mountain Dew, you're used to candy bars, you're used to vodka, whatever it is, any change you make is going to be hard. So it's not exactly, you know, it's not the most level test. Most people who do this, you know, time-restricted feeding windows, this intermittent fasting where you just compress your eating window, actually find that it's way easier. Studies have confirmed that people on these eating windows are either no more hungry than they were when they were eating across 16 hours a day, or they're even less hungry. And a piece of that is because when you compress your eating window, you do burn a little bit.

It's not a ton, but a little bit more fat each night. That releases these ketone bodies, which are the breakdown products of your fat. Ketones suppress hormones. Excuse me, suppress not all your hormones, suppress your hunger hormones. And that may be part of the reason why people feel less hungry. A piece of it also, though, is just when you say, look, I'm going to eat between whatever it is, you know, 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. each day. And that's all I'm doing. Taking it, just setting aside the rest of the day, saying that's off limits.

The psychological impact of that, I think, probably plays a role also in making people less hungry. Just having a lot. No, this is just beyond the border. It's hard for some people, but most people say that after two, three, four days of it, it's the easiest form of food restriction that they've ever done. You have to realize you're addicted to sugar. You're addicted to sugar is like in everything. And so I just started drinking coffees, and that fixed my Mountain Dew, Jack.

I mean, I literally cold quit Mountain Dew and went to coffee. And all I was doing in the initial days was I would go to bed. If I was hungry, suck it. I go to bed. I drink like a big glass of water if it was bugging me. And then I would go to bed. I wake up first thing in the morning is a coffee, and I keep drinking coffee until I, you know, I wanted to kill someone. And then usually once I became in, I was at the verge of murderous rage, which is, you know, daily still. And that's Fridays around here. So I would, then I would eat something. And it first started where I just have like a normal meal.

Sometimes it would be bad and go to Taco Bell. I mean, you shouldn't do that. But, you know, I mean, this is my journey. And I was losing like two to three pounds a day. And I was 350, so there was quite a lot to spend off there. And people were shocked. Like women were pissed at me. I started doing a thing where I would post my weight from my weight scale every day on my Facebook as an accountability thing. And I'm like, I'm going to post my weight every day.

So my audience is going to know if I cheat, which is very powerful because sometimes I'd be sitting at home going, I really want to go to McDonald's. And I'm like, my audience will know tomorrow because it's going to show up. They're going to be like, hey, hey, hey, post boy, where's your thing there? But, yeah, I lost 75 pounds, and I've done it twice now. And now I'm at the point where I intermittent fast. I know the game pretty good. I do vegan. I go vegan during a fast.

Not, you know, pick your 500 variation of vegan. It's not full vegan, but go vegan during a fast. Pick your 500 variation of vegan. It's not full vegan, but it's vegan. Let's put it that way. Whatever the hell version it is. But it's largely vegan. I haven't had meat in a while. No, I had a taco the other day, and it was like fake meat from Del Taco.

I cheat. I'll be honest. But no, two to three pounds a day. Women hated the fuck out of me. They were like, I hate you. I don't want to be friends with you anymore. Two to three pounds a day. I've waited my whole life. But no, it works. And it's just your body. You learn that your body can do this. Yeah. Well, any diet can work, right? It's just a matter of calories in and calories out. If you are burning more calories than you're taking in, you're going to lose weight. Now we do burn calories differently. Some people have a high burning metabolism. Some people have a slow metabolism and it sucks to be those people. Sorry, but it's only probably a few

hundred calories a day. It's not like thousands of calories or something that we're talking about. So yeah, one of the ways that the time-restricted eating windows, the intermittent fasting gets you to lose that weight is you're just roping off parts of the day and saying, I'm not eating during those parts of the day. Yeah. And we hate those people with high metabolisms, right? We do hate them, but what are you going to do? So, so anyway, yeah. Like, you know, the one thing that I would say is your, um, your fasting scientists and doctors would tell you, um, go ahead and eat during that window. You know, if you're starving yourself during that window and you're just living on coffee and saying, hold off, hold off, hold off.

One of the things that the new research has turned up is we actually are better at burning fat and making repairs if we stack our calories earlier in the day. You know, most people do intermittent fasting by skipping breakfast and they just hold out and hold out until lunch rolls around at noon and they eat from noon to eight. New research is showing actually we process food way better in the morning and it's way better for our health. Yeah. I hated hearing that. I wasn't a breakfast guy. I was a late night eater. It was absolutely the last thing that I wanted to hear. And when, when people, you know, when the research I was reading was saying, well, you really for maximum health ought to be shifting

your eating window earlier in the day, eating big breakfast and lunch and the small sort of light and early dinner, like even as early as mid-afternoon. I was like, forget that. That's nonsense. I love dinner time. I hate breakfast time. I switched, Chris, and I got to tell you, it was the easiest big switch I've ever made. I used to have an eating window from like 11 in the morning till seven or eight at night. I now have one from eight in the morning till two in the afternoon. It's been great. And I feel miles and miles better. And that's the response that research subjects in these studies have also had. So you're still

doing a 16-8. You just moved it to a different place in the time? Yeah, it's more like an 18-6. I just shifted it earlier. So rather than skipping breakfast, I skip dinner. Or I don't even skip dinner because I still eat dinner. I just eat dinner at 2 in the afternoon. I don't eat it at 5, which most people think 6 or 7 sounds crazy. But it actually, it's been fantastic for my body and the research behind it. You know, I had to try that. One thing I've been struggling with lately is insulin resistance. And, you know, I've been fat for 54 years. So, and I really destroyed my system. And, you know, now we're doing all sorts of gut health stuff and different things to try and make sure that works. And, you know, I probably destroyed my, what my, my, you mentioned earlier, the, the ability, I was doing that joke. But I might try that

because I've had to do longer fast now to break through an insulin resistance point. Now there's like 10 pounds and then I've got to do a longer fast, you know, a day or, or more. um and that gets really harder a lot of people don't realize about fasting too is sometimes you're not really hungry you're just dehydrated that was important thing i learned you just need some water you don't need you don't need a big mac need some water man you're killing yourself you know people don't drink enough water especially they're drinking like these pops all the time and you know i mean every now and then i'll have like an energy drink and that thing will dehydrate the crap out of me you know one of those carbonated ones and i think the rock stars with the no sugar like i had one last night and i

mostly do it for the taurine and stuff and and it's it's kind of a fun hit, but man, that carbonation will screw me up and dehydrate me. And I'm like, wow. Yeah, they're diuretic. I mean, stay away from those if you can. Is that what it is? Okay. So, yeah, on your insulin thing, you might be happy to know that that's one of the most studied effects of these early time-restricted eating windows. Apparently, our bodies were made to be less insulin-resistant in the morning and early

afternoon. Really? Yeah. So there are these fascinating studies where you take groups of people, you feed them the exact same meal at 7 in the morning and the exact same meal at 7 at night. 7 in the morning, process it just fine. 7 at night, some of these normal, more or less healthy people will start testing pre-diabetic. You do the exact same thing to pre-diabetics with these meals at morning and night. And at the

nighttime meal, they'll test full-fledged diabetic. Some of them will stay testing diabetic all the way until the next morning. The, the, the sugar stays in their blood so much and their insulin is so poor at opening up the cells and letting the sugar out of the blood into the cells. So insulin resistance, if that's a problem for you, is one of the main reasons to do a early time-restricted feeding window to shift that window. I might try that. Do you have like eggs in the morning, some protein, eat some lighter. I'm full on vegan. So, so no eggs. I just eat, you know, I just eat plants and it's, you know,

I have a salad every day. I have a big salad. We start my day with a huge salad and then I do a big bowl of oats and then it's, you know, curries and stews and, you know, I might like that better. Cause there's, you know, when I wake up during the day, there's a lot of pressure and, uh, you know, I might like that better because there's, you know, when I wake up during the day, there's a lot of pressure and, you know, sometimes I want to murder everyone, you know, nine to five. So like everyone.

Pretty much everyone. Like all of us. Except for you. I mean, all of us feel that way. Yeah, it's basically. I mean, if you go online and read the news, you pretty much want to murder everybody. But, you know, that's what the judge says no more murdering evidently uh so and then he'll take the ankle bracelet off but

uh you know i might try that i didn't even know about this version so but it's good you put this history down so people have it and they have the data for it and you know it's it's it's your biology man it's the same thing with it's and here's the other funny it. And, you know, it's your biology, man. It's the same thing with, and here's the other funny thing. I don't know if you studied this or you can tell me right or wrong in it, but I won't lose weight if I get six hours. You know, what's that chemical in the body that you've got to have that's stress-related? Cortisol?

Cortisol, yeah. So if I don't get six, eight hours of sleep, not only will people get murdered, um, but I won't lose weight as much. It's it, I've got to have that full eight hours. I've got to have that deep, you know, drool drool. I wake up in like half my bed is, is a floated and drool. Um, I've got to have those dead sleeps that are like movies and stuff. And I've got a great sleepy bed that warms and cools and it keeps me, it's got an AI that keeps me at the right temperature that I sleep my deepest. And so plug, um, and, uh, yeah, the, if I get that as the hours of sleep, baby, I'm

getting on that scale in the morning and that thing's going down. Yeah. It's, it's not my field, but what I know about it, absolutely. There's research to support it. If you don't get enough sleep, it interrupts the fat burning process. And we do, you know, to oversimplify a little bit, our body can be in fat making mode, which is what it's in most of the day, packing on fat from the food we eat.

Fat burning mode happens mostly at night when we sleep. So, you know, you can ramp it up a little bit with exercise, but not by, you know, crazy amounts. So you do do most of your fat burning when you sleep. The other thing to know is your fat burning mode doesn't start until six hours after your last food. And it doesn't ramp up into overdrive until another six hours. So 12 hours after your last food. So people who are eating 15 hours a day, and then, you know, they get nine hours without food overnight before they have their first food of the next morning. They're only hitting, you know, they get six hours into their nine hours without food. They're only getting

three hours of, you know, fat burning, and they're never reaching that next stage after 12 hours, where they're getting that overdrive fast burn, excuse me, fat burn. So if you can go at least 12 hours and better still 13 or 14 or 15 or 16, you're getting a lot more hours of fat burn, and you're getting into that overdrive fat burn. And one other little interesting thing about that is the fat burning mode coincides with your body's repair mode. So the more time you go, you're not just burning fat, you're repairing the damage over the day to your cells, to your DNA, to other things that would turn into disease. There you go. You know, I'll tell you something that's funny too, is I started a weird habit

during COVID and I think it was anxiety and worry and it just exhibited itself. And I started sleeping only four hours at a time. And what I would do is I would sleep for four and I wake up and then somewhere in the middle of the day i take a four hour nap get the rest of the eight hours because i can't go more than two days they are or someone will die um and uh i mean just talk to my judge uh so that's a joke people uh don't talk to my judge it's bad enough already. I'm in deep. But no, I mean, I do not become a nice person if I don't get eight hours of sleep. I can go a day, but by the second day, I go zombie ish. So what's interesting is, is, and I still do it every now and then since COVID. But I'll sleep for four hours.

I'll wake up and I'll be energized. And I'll have actually gained a pound or two. And then I will do part of my day. And then maybe after a bunch of podcasts like we've done today, I'll go take a four-hour nap and get my eight hours in over a 24-hour period, right? You know what's funny? I'll lose three pounds, two to three pounds in that four hours. And that four hours will be my drool REM sleep. Like, that's the crazy dreams.

I'll wake up, the pillows, I'll float in a bed. Anytime I wake up and I've been drooling, I know that I'm going to hit the scale. I know that's gross, people, but I'm sorry I'm just giving you the science on it. But I'll wake up, I going to hit the scale. I know that's gross, people, but I'm sorry. I'm just giving you the science on it. But I'll wake up. I'll get on that scale. And that sucker, I'll be like, oh, it's 3,000, 4 hours, which isn't the truth of it. But it's just how powerful it is, I guess.

I don't know what point I'm trying to make. Yeah, I'm going to say that no clue why that happens. But, boy, you're going to make an interesting test subject. Aren't I, though? You just need to volunteer for the right study. Hang on on i'm getting phone calls from the drool pillow people um the uh yeah it's a wonder i don't have like one of those boats on my pillow no it's seriously like the deep sleep i've got this uh bed called the eight sleep and it tracks my rem and somehow i know it's very creepily when I'm in the deepest sleep and you can track it and correlate it with my weight loss. And it's pretty interesting, but I'm going to try

this morning thing because I keep getting stuck after 75 pounds. I'm kind of stuck and I, and I'll get unstuck. I'll go like a 20 hour fast and I'll get unstuck and then I'll lose 10 pounds and then I'm stuck again. And then there's like a range I'm kind of playing in for a while. Yeah. I think, I think one key to getting unstuck, maybe this will work for you. Maybe not, maybe for your listeners, but you know, what, what the scientists will tell you is don't approach this as a diet. Just approach this as the way you eat. If you're thinking I'm only going to do this for three months, why bother?

Because at the end of the three months, you're going to be happy with whatever weight you've taken off. Three months later, it's all or most of it's going to be back on. If you make this just, this is the way I eat, day in, day out, year after year, it works for an awful lot of people. I would totally agree with you and second that motion. I think we carried it. The thing is too, is the older you get, the less you can do this stupid stuff, the drinking, the partying, the eating at McDonald's. I had to give up drinking several years ago. I mean, I was fine drinking, had a good time. It was a nice sugar juice. But you start to feel the effects on your body after two or three days. And I think one of the things that happened to me with fasting and going vegan-ese, my version, was my body was like, okay, well, we really enjoy this. And I learned about gut health and how important the whole sewer system is to your system and actually they've we've had authors

on that talked about how the sewer system in your gut actually affects your brain and and and things in your brain uh and you know it you're you're you're all it affects your whole body you know it's you're just like you're either a walking junk pond of crap that you've thrown into it or you've given your body nutrients that go, thank you. And your body, you know, you know, this from being a vegan, your body will thank you. Your body will be like, Hey, we're going to make you feel really good today. And you're going to be, you know, like one thing I tell people when I fast is I'm really alert. You know, it's that whole thing of, you know, the lion who hasn't eaten for a couple of days, you know, he's jacked

up so he can do things. And I go through my day, like I'm sharp as hell, you know, the lion who hasn't eaten for a couple of days, you know, he's jacked up so he can think. And I go through my day like I'm sharp as hell, you know, sometimes I might be too sharp, but that could be the coffee. It could be the coffee jitters. But no, you get really focused. You can I can see better. But yeah, the older I get, the more my body is like thanking me. It's just like, hey, man, we could be friends finally after all these years. Yeah, it's amazing what you could get away with when you were young.

Unfortunately, what the research is showing is we didn't really get away with that. So, you know, what we now know is diseases like cancer, for example, they take 10 or 20 years to show up. You know, you don't like, you know, get breast cancer or prostate cancer or whatever it is. And it's just that you weren't living right for the past 18 months or something. It tends to be from, and we now know that the vast majority of cancers are almost certainly caused by our lifestyle, chiefly by our diet, what we eat, what we drink, whether we smoke, things like that. And so, yeah, those things build. And eventually those same sort of forces are what, you know, lead to cardiovascular disease or dementia or, you know, any number of horrors. So, you know, yeah, me too. I didn't treat my body as well as I should have 10 or 15, 20 years ago.

I feel fantastic treating it better now, but I'm sure that there's some price that's going to have to be paid eventually for those years of mistreatment. That's the other reason I'm eating well. I'm trying to make up for lost time. But so far, the only stupidity or fuck, I fucked a joke. So far, the only disease I've gotten is the disease of stupidity for anyone who knows me.

As evidenced by your... Yeah, as evidenced by butchering the joke before it came out. Damn it, I had set up. Anything more you want to tease out, Steve, on your book? No, I would just... The one thing that I would say is that prolonged fasting needs to be done under medical supervision for most people. However, the research has shown that daily fasting, this intermittent fasting, narrowing your feeding window, and if you can, moving it earlier in the day. If you can't, at least stacking your calories as much as you can earlier in the day, even if your window isn't entirely earlier. That virtually everyone can do. Unless you've got some really rare disease

or something that requires you to eat food every hour and a half, you can do time-restricted feeding. The research shows that it's safe. Scientists and doctors recommend it. It would be just a clean, easy, cheap, as you said, thing for people to do to up their health just a bit. And as you mentioned, you know, what's funny to me is people, the cheap and easy part of it, like you said, I think that's the reason people kind of give it the queer eye. They're like, but it's not costing me anything, so it can't be real. That's certainly what doctors and pharmaceutical companies say. It's one of the reasons actually why it's not accepted by the medical establishment.

Wait a minute. This free thing, you just let the body heal itself? Well, that's not medicine by the medical establishment. Wait a minute. It's a free thing. You just let the body heal itself. Well, that's not medicine. What the hell is that? You can't make any money off that. Right. Yeah.

It's, you know, I mean, there's so many people that use between depression, drugs, you know, all sorts of ailments that they do. And then nowadays, you know, if you watch the drug commercials, the one drug causes ailments that you've got to take another drug to fix those ailments that probably give you another side effect. And there are people that have gone on fast and not only quit being diabetics. I think if they're type 2 diabetes, they can have that potential to either manage it better or go off and not be diabetic anymore. Um, and it's so great. Like my friend, he is one of my best friends I play with all the time on video games. Um, he, you know, he's got to lose some weight. He's in the military and they have, you know, they're like, Hey, you better get in shape boy. Um, and so, uh, he, uh, just went on a diet using my little game plan. I think he's still eating a little bad and he's drinking some booze.

But, you know, he's going to go do the journey. But he's lost, like, I think in a week he lost 10 pounds. And he's like, wow, this is good. And you feel great too. There's a real difference. You don't notice it until you fast because when you're constantly digesting food and you're just like, oh, my God, you're just like tired. You're like, why am I so tired?

I need sugar. And then once you start fasting and you get on healthy foods, you feel great and you're not in a lethargic mode. Like, what's wrong with me? You don't need that sugar, Jack. You do need coffee. Yeah. sugar jack you need coffee so put yeah even if uh you don't change your diet you find a lot of people just you know they're eating the standard american diet they're eating at mcdonald's they're eating crispy cream they get in this narrower feeding window they start to feel a little bit

better they're not perfect because they're still eating crap right however what they find is that this narrowed feeding window and this feeling of more energy gives them the oomph that they were lacking to then work on some of those other things. Well, maybe I'll, you know, a little less Taco Bell, maybe I'll do a little more salad or something. And so the motivation to, you know, if you dump everything on everyone at once, okay, you got to become vegan, you got to sleep right, you got to exercise, you got to eat within six hours a day. It's too much. But what a lot of people find is you put your feeding window in this narrower time, you gain a little bit more energy that may help you with some of those other goals.

Yeah, there you go. And one of the things I'll tease out here to recommend to people, a lot of what we eat is for taste. Like my mom has this thing that she does where she'll put the chocolate in her mouth and taste it. And she, you know, she probably deserves some of it or she'll put like a donut in her mouth and then she'll, she gets the taste and she spits it out, which is really, really weird. But you know, my mom's great. Uh, but you know, one thing I realized, I think I might've gotten this espresso is we eat for taste. So you're eating that Big Mac, you're eating that Mountain Dew, you're doing that for that taste. And so what I learned about being vegan, veganese, people get upset with me,

they write me later and go, there's 50 of our versions of veganese, and those are the ones that are approved. I don't know, what the fuck. But, you know, don't get me started on the people who think that fish is still vegan. That's some bullshit right there. Yeah, we're vegan, but we don't eat fish. That's still meat, motherfucker. It's in the dictionary. Shut up.

Anyway, whatever. I'm not judging you. I was just doing jokes. But, you know, the thing about that is I segued to the joke and then I lost the thing. What did I leave on before I segued? Well, you taste and we eat for oh yeah so we would taste so one thing i learned about being a vegan veganese is if you can create really great taste you know and cook maybe get some good cookbooks and stuff for different things you can make salads taste amazing like i make crazy sounds i have a salad every day.

It's a big old thing. It's got a spinach, which doesn't always taste the best when you eat it on its own. I'll eat broccoli. But if you throw in some avocado. Oh, you throw in some avocado, some fresh tomatoes. I throw in sprouts. There's a whole mess of crap that goes into my thing. Chia seeds.

There's all sorts of stuff that goes into my thing. Chia seeds. Like there's, there's all sorts of stuff that goes into my salad. It's like a, it's, it's like a giant meal you need in a restaurant when I get done, but there's so much stuff in there, but it's all fresh and healthy. And maybe I throw in a big Mac on top of the salad or something. No,

I don't do that. Anyways, it's been wonderful to have on the show, Steve. We really appreciate you coming by. Great to be with you. Thank you. There you go.

Give us your plug so we can find you on the interwebs, please. Yeah, so the book is called The Oldest Cure in the World, Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting, and you can find links to it and me at stevehendricks.org. There you go. There you go. Order up the books, guys. It comes out September 6th in about six more, six or five or six more days.

If you're watching this show 10 years from now on YouTube like you people do, don't tell me it's not whatever the oldest cure in the world article might need something to eat now coffee the oldest cure in the world

Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting by Steve Hendricks, get it wherever fine books are sold you'll see all the books we're reading and reviewing on thatgoodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss. YouTube as well. Go to Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, all those places that we're at. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. Try fasting, and we'll see you guys next time.