The Dr. Hyman Show - Fasting: Hype Or Ultimate Health Hack? with Dave Asprey

Episode Date: January 20, 2021

Fasting: Hype Or Ultimate Health Hack? | This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens, Paleovalley, and Cozy Earth There’s been a lot of buzz about fasting in recent years, but sometimes it can be hard to tell a true health-promoting practice from a trend that lacks any real science behind it. Well I’m here to tell you today that fasting falls into the first category, with plenty of proven benefits to optimize health and slow the symptoms of aging. Fasting also does more than change the physical body. It’s estimated that 30% of our thoughts are about our next meal. That’s a lot of time and energy wrapped up in food, and fasting can help us regain control of ourselves, our minds, and so much more.  On today’s episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy, I’m thrilled to sit down with my good friend and an expert on fasting, Dave Asprey. Dave is the founder and Chairman of Bulletproof 360, a high-performance coffee and food company, and creator of the widely-popular Bulletproof Coffee. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author, host of the Webby award-winning podcast Bulletproof Radio, and has been featured on the Today show, Fox News, Nightline, CNN, and dozens more. Over the last two decades Dave, the “Father of Biohacking”, has worked with world-renowned doctors, researchers, scientists and global mavericks to uncover the latest, most innovative methods, techniques, and products for enhancing mental and physical performance.  This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley, Athletic Greens, and Cozy Earth. Paleovalley is offering 15% off your entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/hyman to check out all their clean Paleo products and take advantage of this deal. Athletic Greens is offering Doctor’s Farmacy listeners a full year supply of their Vitamin D3/K2 Liquid Formula free with your first purchase, plus 5 free travel packs. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hyman to take advantage of this great offer. Cozy Earth is offering Doctor’s Farmacy listeners an incredible 50% off. Just go to cozyearth.com and use the code HYMANPODCAST50 at checkout. Here are more of the details from our interview:  The first fast Dave ever did to confront his fears of being alone and being hungry (7:50) The three F-words that take up a bulk of our time and energy (13:04) How fasting works and how to eliminate the pain of fasting (15:50) How time-restricted eating and other types of fasting support healthy aging and full-body rejuvenation (21:52)     Supporting your body with supplements and electrolytes while fasting (26:16) Special considerations for women regarding fasting (33:48) Creating a sense of emotional safety while fasting (42:14) How our diet drives our emotions and societal divisiveness (46:38) Fasting as an entry point into self-awareness and spirituality (51:00) Breaking the cycle of overconsumption (58:30) Learn more about Dave Asprey at https://daveasprey.com/ and find his new book, Fast This Way, at https://fastthisway.com/. Follow Dave Asprey on Facebook @bulletproofexecutive, on Instagram @dave.asprey, and on Twitter @bulletproofexec.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. When your blood sugar gets really low, your body says, oh, this is kind of an emergency. I need some blood sugar. Good thing I have built-in systems to turn on blood sugar instantly. It's called cortisol and adrenaline. So your body says, I'm crashing. Let me get you some stress hormones right here. And then you get your energy back, but it's fighting energy.

It's stress energy. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. My main goal with diet is to use food as medicine, but even when we eat super well, most of us are missing out on certain essential nutrients. Our soils have become depleted and our digestive tracts just aren't working so great. They're compromised by stress and toxins and they just can't absorb nutrients as efficiently as they should. And that's why I always use, and I recommend to my patients, a multivitamin mineral as nutritional insurance. It covers the basics for all our day-to-day body functions, all the things that we need that our food might be missing. But there are so many

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in your daily wellness routine. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash hyman. Now, so many of my patients ask me how I manage to work multiple jobs, travel frequently, well, not so much anymore, and spend time with my family and still focus on my health. I know it can seem hard to eat well when you got a lot going on,

but the trick is to never let yourself get into a food emergency and to stay stocked up with the right things to support your goals. So recently I discovered Paleo Valley Beef Sticks. I keep these beef sticks at home and at the office so I know that whenever I'm in a food emergency, I have a healthy and delicious option to keep me on track. It's no secret that I have high standards when it comes to what I put in my body and Paleo Valley Beef Sticks checks all the boxes. They're gluten-free, grain-free, dairy-free, soy-free, and non-GMO. Plus, they use 100% grass-fed and grass-finished beef, which not only adds to the flavorful taste, but it also means they're

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Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy with an F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. And if you're confused about all the hubbub about fasting and intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating and this and that, and whether it's good for you or bad for you, what you should do, you better listen up because this conversation is with my good friend, the world's Olympic biohacker, Dave Asprey, who's the founder and chairman of Bulletproof 360, a high-performance coffee and food company. He's the creator of the wildly popular Bulletproof Coffee, which I had a version of when I was in Tibet 40 years ago, which was a very salty, buttery tea, but it worked. He's a three times New York Times bestselling author. He's the host of the Webby Award winning podcast, Bulletproof Radio, and has been featured on the Today Show, Fox News, Nightline, CNN, and lots more fake news channels. Over the last two decades, Dave, the founding father of biohacking, has worked with

many renowned doctors, including me, researchers, scientists, and global mavericks to uncover the latest, most innovative methods, techniques, and products for enhancing mental and physical performance. He has literally spent millions of dollars biohacking his own body with all kinds of gizmos, gadgets, and techniques techniques and tools, many of which I've learned about from Dave. And he's actually been kind of a little secret advisor to me when I want to know what's out there, what's new, what's happening. I call Dave. And in fact, when I got really sick, I did call Dave and he helped me with a lot of great ideas. So I'm so happy to have you on the podcast, Dave, again. Mark, thanks for having me back. I respect and

admire you so much. So anytime I can be of service to you or your show or your audience, it is truly an honor. Well, you are immense. You are a good man. You want good for the world. And I think that's why I love you so much. And we've shared a lot of great experiences together. And I'm excited to talk about your new book, Fast This Way. It's a great book because there's a lot of confusion about fasting. You put a little bit of a different spin on it. You take us on a journey through the world of fasting that's a little bit different with a different angle. I was sort of surprised when I had a look at the book and I saw that it was inspired by a spiritual quest, a vision quest,

which is a powerful ritual that is a Native American ritual and many other cultures have similar ones. And it's got three key aspects, right? Solitude. So you go out by yourself, nature. So you go out in the middle of nowhere in the wilderness and then fasting where you don't eat at all. And the goal is to connect to the deeper purpose and meaning of your life and discover who you are to face your demons. And you were in search of better health. You wanted to know yourself better, and you wanted to achieve a sense of peace. You weren't really looking for a way to lose weight or speed up your metabolism or reverse aging, but it led you to a series of discoveries that actually help you do all of that.

So start off with telling us about this experience, what you learned about yourself when you went away in a cave drinking only water for four days in the middle of Arizona. Well, Mark, I used to weigh 300 pounds and I realized I'd lost most of the weight. In fact, it's pretty easy to lose half the way you want to lose. The other half took me 10 years of playing with things to come up with a bulletproof diet and to really understand the nuances. And I've been recommending fasting to my followers for 10 years, at least intermittent fasting, if not longer fast. But all of that came about because of my very first fast. And this was back in somewhere around 2005. I just felt called to do a vision quest. And I said, all right, I've finished my MBA. I've been to Nepal and Tibet. And now I'm back. I've started a new relationship. I'm married. I have a new baby, but I need to go connect. And I realized I had a couple things to

work on. One, I was actually afraid to be alone. And it had driven some of my relationship behaviors in the past, dating and just not having great relationships. And then I also realized that I was afraid of being hungry. As a 300 pound guy, I was always hungry. And you're told, especially if you're anywhere over 40, if you don't eat six times a day, your body will go into starvation mode. And for me, starvation mode meant profound cravings and my brain would turn off and I would act like a jerk. So I'm like, I better eat. Like I have to have something. And I have ended meetings in my mid twenties.

I met this company that's gone public and all successful careers taken off. And my guys, it's 1145. I know lunch is at noon. I'm ending the meeting right now because I'm so hungry that I'm going to kill one of you and eat you. And I would just walk out of the meeting. And like, I could not, at least I didn't believe that I could make it the other 15 minutes because I was just all over the place. So I said, all right, I'm going to feel this intensely. So I found a shaman. She dropped me off in the desert outside Sedona and there was no humans and no food for 10 miles in any direction. And I'm like, all right, I'm just going to sit in this cave and I'm going to face it.

So the book is set up like what happened in each of the days in the cave, what happens psychologically and emotionally when you're fasting and what happens biologically. And there's lots of knowledge now about the biology of fasting. And it's very clear that if you are dealing with high blood sugar, you're dealing with prediabetes or diabetes, which is the number one risk factor for COVID and the number one risk factor for all of the other things that tend to kill you when you get old, like cardiovascular disease, like cancer, like Alzheimer's, get diabetes and you have a much greater chance of those. So fasting, we know the science. So I put the science in the book, which is necessary. But the big thing is, how do I actually make it a part of my life? Because most people who aren't either really sick or on the cutting edge of performance, they look at that and go fasting. That's the most unappealing thing I've ever heard of. Number one, I like food. Number two, I don't like being hungry. So I said, I'm going to write the book. Yeah. And so you I like food. Number two, I don't like being hungry. So I said, I'm going to write the book. Yeah. And so you're like, well, you're trying to convince me to do

this thing that sucks. And the picture that I had of fasting is very different than the reality. And I figured out from a computer science AI, which is my background, computer security, there's an algorithm that runs in our minds that drives our behavior. And it's the same algorithm that all life shares, whether it's plants or animals. And the first thing that gets all of our attention 10 times more than anything else is anything that's scary, you have to run away from, you have to hide or basically kill anything that's dangerous. So that's why we're also triggered right now. There's this floating potential menace that may or may not be on surfaces or anything

like, like just fear everywhere. But there's also all kinds of other things that are fearful. So that steals your attention and it steals your energy. And then whatever's left over, if you don't feel like something's, you know, that anxiety, then the second thing that all life does, you eat everything because famines kill most species some of the time. So five times more energy goes into what's for lunch than it actually deserves. And then once we've done those covered or fall, and so like people are feeling guilty about this. It's no wonder that if someone puts a cookie in front of you that the cookie is like, eat me. And you're like, no. And the cookie says, eat me. And you say, no. And eventually it's like arguing with a two-year-old.

You go, okay, I'll just have half the cookie. And then you beat yourself up later and say, I'm a bad person. But the little part of you, these mitochondria that are the ones telling you to eat the cookie, they control your energy. So if they think they're in control and they haven't been trained to just not care about cookie because they know more is coming, then you spend a lot of time. I found a study, Mark, 30% of people's thoughts are about their next meal. What if you could free up 30% of your thoughts to think about being nice to other people or just to watch Breaking Bad over and over? It doesn't matter. It's free time and it's free thoughts that are not yours right now. So if the first one's fear, the second one's food, there's something else all life does to stay alive forever. Mark, can you figure out that one is also an F word? Oh yes. It's a

fornication. Oh Mark, I was thinking fertility, but oh my goodness, I'm really embarrassed. But yeah. Okay. And it could be the other other upward so three times more energy goes into that and now let me ask you this mark have you ever done something that you're ashamed of that wasn't one of those three things eating fleeing fighting well basically fear fear food and the other F word. You know. You all actually have 10 things. But in all seriousness, yeah. Yeah, I might have said inappropriate things here and there in a crowd. I don't know. But usually the inappropriate things in a crowd are coming from fear.

Fear. At the end of the day. For sure. Like you said it because something was triggering you. And that's how, that's the human condition. And what fasting does that's really cool is fasting allows you to say, OK, I'm going to teach my body to not worry so much about food. I'm going to turn off the voice in my head. And from that perspective, it frees up so much energy. And then biologically, it does something else that's magic.

Because when you have enough energy, you're able to emotionally regulate better than otherwise. So you're saying, but Dave, if you fast, you'd have less energy. But the cool thing is when you fast, the mitochondria, the little power plants in the ones that can't make it for four hours without food or for 16 hours or 18 hours, however long you're fasting, the body goes, wait a minute, I guess I should go to the trouble of getting rid of the weak mitochondria and replacing them with strong ones. And so now you've given yourself a power upgrade because now you can generate more power when you do eat. And the only thing that's left is how do we overcome that part of us that says eat the cookie eat the cookie and for that i'm a busy guy i am ceo right now of four companies not

bulletproof i hired a ceo for that but these are upgrade labs and bulletproof media and you know i write books like you do and you know how busy life gets and i'm a dad and I'm a husband. And so with all of these things, I really want my energy to be where I want it to be. And fasting lets you do that, except if you're hungry and distracted and anxious and cold and shaky, which does happen, especially when people start fasting. So over the course of the last 10 years, people have lost a million pounds on the Bulletproof diet, including intermittent fasting. And I've learned a few things from talking with thousands of people about this as well as my own experience. What happens when you fast and you fast the old way? So I'm just going to go two days without food like you would in a cave.

After about two days, you start making ketones. And ketones are the preferred fuel for the neurons in your brain. And if you, if you put the neuron in a Petri dish with sugar and with ketones, it'll eat ketones first because ketones have more energy than sugar. So the body's like, yeah, of course there's parts of your body that really require carbs on a regular basis too. So you don't want to be in ketosis all the time, but the reason spiritual traditions

fast for at least two days, much of the time is because clarity comes on and all the time. But the reason spiritual traditions fast for at least two days, much of the time is because clarity comes on and all the energy that's going into digestion stops and you get a power upgrade because now you're burning fat instead of sugar. Like, oh man, like I feel so good. I feel so clean. And you stop being hungry after two days of fasting, but who, who can have a job, who can have multiple jobs like you and me and like most people listening here and deal with all the crap in the world and being hungry? So there are hacks that turn off hunger during fast. So you can actually go through a day and skip breakfast and maybe even skip lunch and just not worry about food and take that 30% of thoughts, that second F word and just remove it and go, Oh, I guess, yeah, I could eat lunch. I could not eat lunch. I'm okay. Either way, no thoughts, no willpower involved. And so during the week, how do you do that?

And that's why fast this way. That's why I wrote it because the first stepping off a cliff to do your first, even your first intermittent fast, it's a little bit scary. This is to remove the pain of fasting so we can all be high functioning humans. And then on the weekend, I teach, I do a spiritual fast, but here's, here's the first hack for coffee or for, for coffee, for fasting. It is coffee and just black coffee. The amount of caffeine in two small cups of coffee. So about a medium size, large cup of coffee is enough to double ketone production in studies. And when you get your ketones up to a very low coffee, not, not bulletproof coffee, just plain coffee, plain black coffee or caffeine tablet would do it. If you really are into that kind of things,

which I don't really recommend, but it's the caffeine itself, not coffee. Coffee has its own set of powers apart from caffeine. And in those studies, doubling ketone production is pretty good. So let's say that you already slept for eight hours, even if you had a snack right before bed, which is a bad idea. You've got eight hours of fasting, which raises ketones a little bit. And then you have some coffee with no sugar in it, no cream or nothing like that. And that alone is enough to help suppress hunger and turn off all the thoughts about food that are distracting to you when you're trying to do it. If you can get your ketone levels up to 0.5, which is much

less than, you know, the keto bro, you know, haven't eaten carbs in a while, or you can get up to one or two or higher, just 0.5 is shown in studies to turn off the hunger hormone called ghrelin, which I know your listeners are familiar with, and to turn on CCK, which is the fullness hormone. So the first hack, black coffee. Second hack is make it bulletproof. And you put in grass-fed butter or ghee, and ghee has no milk protein whatsoever. Well-made ghee shouldn't trigger milk allergies, whether they're lactose or milk protein. I'm very sensitive to milk protein. I can handle butter just fine. And you add the MCT oil.

And this, for most people, can kick their ketones up to that magic number. So then you've got energy from burning fat. But because you didn't have any sugar, your insulin levels didn't go up, and you didn't turn on protein digestion, you're still getting the vast majority of the benefits of a fast. So if you do this, it's easier on the body, easier on the mind, and it lowers physiological stress. And that matters even more for women. And so the first one is black coffee. Psycho one is Bulletproof coffee.

The third one is prebiotic fiber. And this is a type of fiber that cannot be digested by the body. So you're not feeding yourself whatsoever, but it makes you feel really full. And it feeds the good bugs in your gut. Feeds the good bugs in your gut. It helps to crowd out the bad ones. And one of the things that happens during a fast is that the bacteria in your gut,

they're like, we're getting a little stressed here. We got no food. When we're stressed, we make more of those fear compounds. Remember I said all life practices that run away from kill or hide. So the bad guys in your gut, when they don't have food, they make something called lipopolysaccharides or LPS. And you're very familiar with this Mark, because of your medical background, but LPS crosses the gut barrier and it's a toxin and it creates a state of anxiety and hunger and it creates a state of inflammation. So what would happen if you also causes weight gain and diabetes?

Yeah. LPS is really bad. And if you have bad gut bacteria, it's a problem. So what if during a fast you took a prebiotic fiber that actually turned off hunger and fed the good guys and helped to crowd out the bad guys, but you didn't raise your insulin levels. You didn't turn on protein digestion. You just reduced the amount of toxins that were being formed in your gut. Well, what happens is the benefits of fasting without the pain. So now it's possible to do an intermittent fast. And I recommend at least 16 hours up to 18 or more. If you want to, there's many different names for fasting and it's a good thing. Lots of people are popularizing fasting, so they'll put cool brand names on it. And I've done the same thing.

The Bulletproof Intermittent Fast is circa 2011. That was with Bulletproof Coffee. But we know so much more now about fasting than we did back in the early days where you can use any of these three. You can use all three of them together. And then suddenly during the week, you feel better than you did when you had breakfast. And it isn't any cost. There's no pain at all.

And then lunchtime rolls around. And because you're still not that hungry, you make better food choices. Like, you know, I think I'll have the salad instead of the hamburger. And you can really, really just have more control biologically. And those three things matter as well as just understanding the base psychology behind it all. So you're basically talking about a phenomenon we call time-restricted eating and hacks to make it easier, which is giving your body a break from, let's say, after dinner. And by the way, listen, if you have dinner at six o'clock in the evening and you have breakfast at eight, that's a 14-hour fast.

That's the other hack. Have dinner early. Like, who would have thought, right? Have dinner early. If you have dinner at five, you can eat breakfast at nine. That's a 16-hour fast, right? Yeah. So it doesn't have to be as onerous as

it sounds. And what you're saying is that by doing that, you are going to create a whole series of biological changes in your body that doesn't just make you feel better, have more energy, have better focus, but that actually deals with some of the fundamental biology of aging. Now you wrote a book called Superhuman. We had you on the podcast talking about it. But we used to think that, you know, longevity was genetic. You got handed a good deck of cards from your parents or you didn't. But it turns out that a lot of longevity is not determined by our genes, unless you're really lucky and you got those genes like UB Blake or, you know, he's like's like i would live to 100 and something years old he says if i wouldn't know i was gonna live so long i would have taken better care of myself you know he smoked he drank he did all these horrible things

it's just not fair but that's not fair but that's not most of us we have to pay attention but it turns out that what we do in terms of our lifestyle and our diet makes huge impact. And the understanding of fasting or intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating or even longer fast, a day fast or a day fast a week or a three-day fast, they have profound effects in our biology to optimize all the pathways that lead to health and even longevity that help our energy, decrease our risk of disease, and do a whole series of different things. So can you kind of take us down that road of what do we know about the science of this? Because it's really phenomenal.

When you start to look at it, it's like, wow, you know, if you look at fasting or intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating or bulletproof fasting or fasting-mimicking diets or ketogenic diets, they all do the same thing, which is rejuvenate your biology. It's really rejuvenative and regenerative medicine. It is so rejuvenating because, well, there's a lot of pathways that are involved, but one of the most important one that I talked about there is mitochondrial biogenesis. So when you fast, your body will build new, stronger mitochondria. It's really important for aging. As we age, we lose the ability to combine air and food effectively. And a lot of people have heard about intermittent training or high intensity interval training, you know, where you

just exercise really hard for a brief period of time. And then the body's like, oh man, I might have to do that again. I guess I should get strong. So fasting is kind of the same thing, but for the mitochondria in the cells, they go, oh, I might have to skip some meals again. I guess I should get strong. And everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial deficiency unless they're actively managing it. And 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial deficiency, according to research by Frank Schallenberger, who's been on my show. Has he been on yours? He's one of the ozone guys. Yeah. Yeah.

And he measures mitochondrial efficiency with a very serious set of oxygen masks and all kinds of stuff. So it's real data. So, okay. Number one, let's fix our mitochondria with fasting. Number two, your pancreas and to a certain extent, your liver makes enzymes and their job is to break down proteins and other food items that you eat. It's also enzymes job to go into the body and fix stuff. So you can only make so many enzymes per day. It's the maximum enzyme production capacity of the body. Well, what if, because you're not eating protein, you're not eating carbs during the fast, what if the pancreas is available to make enzymes for healing the body instead of for digesting food. It will do that. And those two

things work really well for aging. And there's a bunch of other things around AMPK, which caffeine or coffee can help with, sirtuins. And not a lot of people are talking about supplementation during fasting because some supplements break fasting. And since I wrote a lot about anti-aging supplements and all the other technologies and techniques in superhuman, I really got into the science about what supplements should you take when you're fasting and which ones should you not take and tell us, tell us, and this is stuff I haven't seen online. And this is from, you know, combing pub med. And I do a lot of background research when I write a book. So one of the

most important enzymes that I think people should be taking when they fast to accelerate this breakdown of old tissues in the body, break up scar tissue, adhesions is proteolytic enzymes. And the most common one is called seropeptase. And there are other formulas that I mentioned in the book that are essentially, hey, pancreas, now you don't have to do that. And these can break up the stuff that makes your blood sticky, like called thrombin and fibrinogen. And if you do that when you're fasting, you're getting a whole deep tissue work out there that's really powerful. A lot of people who fast also miss out on electrolytes. Good old fashioned salt is

something that's important, especially in the morning when you first wake up some sea salt or Himalayan salt is a good idea as well as magnesium and potassium. So when you add these precious minerals in during a fast, you actually feel much better and you're keeping your body more balanced. Yeah, it's so true. I literally take electrolytes every day. I have a little bottle of a liquid electrolytes and I just squirt it into the water I drink. Tom Brady does it, drink water without electrolytes, which may explain his longevity and health. And I think when people get hydrated, they think, oh, I'm just drinking water. I'm going to be hydrated. But the truth is you want your inside of yourselves to be hydrated.

Yes. The only way to get your inside of your cells hydrated is by having enough electrolytes so if you just drink water without electrolytes you can literally die yes people do that in marathons all the time right they just hydrate with yeah they they dilute their blood so the salt in their blood goes so low that it causes seizures and coma and death. So you need electrolytes. You really do. Afraid of those. And I think for interest cellular hydration, it's a really important strategy that most people don't use. And I think I'm a big fan of that in terms of really dealing with the fundamental hydration status of the body that makes everything else work better. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. By now,

most of you know I'm all about getting an amazing night's sleep. Of course, it's nice to wake up feeling rested and ready for the day, but high quality sleep also does so much heavy lifting when it comes to our health and longevity. Great sleep helps us maintain healthy weight by balancing hormones and blood sugar. It helps us detox our brains. It gives our muscles and organs time to rest and repair. But so many of us don't get enough sleep or the right quality of sleep to allow the body to do all these important things. And that's why I'm always looking for ways

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Pharmacy. One of the things I do is I drink mineral water, which has a substantial amount of electrolytes in it. There's calcium, magnesium, potassium. There's probably less sodium in it, but I get plenty of sodium in my food. And it's funny when you're fasting or when you're not fasting, a little bit of salt when you first wake up takes the load off your adrenal glands. And when you're fasting, it is a state of stress on the body. And it's not a bad stress unless you're already really stressed. In which case I tell you, maybe you want not to fast. If you've got a bad night's sleep, you're jet lagged. It's okay. Have some breakfast, just have some protein and some fat and breakfast. Don't have a lot of carbs and you're going to, you're going to feel better.

So electrolytes help. The other thing is when you do the prebiotic fiber, that means that you have more water sitting in your digestive system longer and it can absorb better. So it turns out having fiber helps you stay hydrated. And if you do fiber and electrolytes together, even during a fast, some people still say, well, wait, you can only have water during a fast because that's what the mice did. And like, yeah, but we're not mice and we have jobs and the mice just sit there and run on a wheel if they feel like it. So what we want to do is get the benefits of fasting and having a caloric surplus during a fast isn't going to work, but we're talking not very much from a calorie perspective and very specific types of calories that your body either doesn't use or doesn't use

in a way that's going to break the fast. So you add your electrolytes, you add your, your digestive enzymes and away from those, the other supplement that I talk about in fast this way, that's really important is activated charcoal. Now we talked about LPS at lipopolysaccharide. Those way before you get into the charcoal, explain what kind of prebiotic fiber you're talking about. Give us an example of some prebiotic fibers that you'd use. There are now a great variety of prebiotic fiber products on the market. And certainly I formulated one for Bulletproof, but the primary ingredient in many of them is acacia gum, which is basically a sap from a tree that is shown in studies to feed the good guys. You can also add a variety of oligosaccharides.

Hydrolyzed guar gum is another one that's out there. And there are literally dozens of formulas that are designed to be prebiotics. And I wrote a lot about these and looked into the anti-aging effects of getting enough of this is called soluble fiber. This is not the chunky sawdust kind of metamucil or psyllium husk. I don't mean those. What I mean is the, the stuff that dissolves in water and you do that and magically you'll probably have healthier poop, but most importantly,

you're changing the ratio of the bacteria in your body. You can also take probiotics with prebiotics and doing that during a fast is okay as well. In fact, at that point, if you eat nothing and then you take the good guy prebiotic and the good guy probiotics, you're crowding out the bad guys pretty effectively. You might as well do that. You were fasting anyway. You didn't have breakfast. It's pretty easy to do. Now, if I do too much fasting or even intermittent or time-restricted eating, I'll tend to lose too much weight, which I probably shouldn't advertise in public. But it makes people jealous, right? Yeah. I mean, and I've worked hard at optimizing my metabolism, so I think I do very well. But are there some people who shouldn't really be doing

this? That it's too much for their system? There's a whole chapter for women in Fast This Way. That's really important because Mark, you and I know this, we probably don't say it enough. Most of the studies that you'll find on PubMed, they were done on young white men. And that's because that's who was in college. And they used college students as guinea pigs. And until about 20 years ago. Being the research. Yeah, exactly.

These guys are cheap. We'll just, you know, they're fodder. And for women, fasting really is different. I have routinely seen women who go on a full ketogenic diet. This is why I've always recommended cyclical keto. That's at the core of the bulletproof thing, cyclical keto with low toxin plants. And when you get that dialed in, it still can be a lot for women. So during certain times in your cycle, you know, it's okay to have breakfast.

You already have enough biological stress. So you want to do your intermittent fasting on days when you're in pretty good shape and you don't want to do it when you're completely wrecked. And there's a benefit if you're not doing it every day, like you get, if you do it three days a week, is that good? I think for women, especially women who have a meaningful amount to lose, or if they are in perimenopause, especially try it three days a week or five days a week, but have breakfast a few times and don't have, you know, a bowl of carby cereal, but have some eggs and, you know, salmon or whatever you like for breakfast. What you're going to find there is that if you do intermittent fasting every single day and your metabolism isn't up for it, it's too much of a stress. And the idea of stress is turn

stress on, recover, turn stress on, recover. But if you just turn stress on and stay that way, after about six weeks, what you'll find is that women hit the wall first and their thyroid goes off and their sex hormones go off. So their cycle becomes irregular. They don't feel as good. And their sleep quality goes down first. Guys take another couple of weeks on that. If they're living a normal, stressful life, like, wait a minute, what happened?

After you're used to it, after you've become trained on this, you can fast pretty much every morning. If you want to me, I do an intermittent fast five days a week, Saturday morning, I have breakfast with the kids and sometimes Sunday morning too. And you know what? Sometimes I even have carbs for breakfast, even though it's not good for me to say it was a Saturday morning, right? I just don't have gluten and corn syrup. Exactly. That's right. But they're almond, coconut flour pancakes that are from my cookbook, Food, What the Heck Should I Eat? Which are really good. You know, I do have that cookbook in the kitchen. My 13-year-old daughter reads it. So yes, Mark, that is a good book. So I want to sort of dig in a little geeky science here with you,

because I think that most people don't realize that all these strategies have a reason that we were designed and exquisitely adapted to starvation. We weren't designed to deal with the amount of abundant food supply we have now, which is about 700 plus calories more a day than we had per person 50 years ago. Where are they going? It's going in all the junk food, processed food. I mean, snacking, that's a whole nother invention that I don't even understand that is just a way to sell more junk that we don't really need to be doing. And so I'm not a big snacking person. If you have to snack, your last meal was broken. That's right. And that's a big part of the message in Fast This this way you've got to eat in

such a way that you don't have cravings and then fasting becomes painless and my kids have learned this you know my my daughter when she was 10 daddy we get to school and right away they start trying to make us have a snack don't the other kids have breakfast i'm not hungry until lunch and like she literally asked me that she was just really genuinely curious and it was cute, but it was also so sad because some of her friends, their parents are vegan and doing their best. Their kids have a green apple for breakfast. No hungry green apples make you, how could you ever focus on a green apple? It's terrible. It's terrible. And so what I was saying was that when you, when you look at our genetic adaptation, it's just starvation. So we have all these biological mechanisms that optimize our biology in the face of scarcity.

Yeah. And we clean up house, we clean garbage. You were mentioning the sort of mitochondrial renewal. You know, there's something people have heard about called autophagy, which is where you eat your own tissues and cells and recycle them. It's just like a recycling plant that gets rid of the garbage and the old stuff. You also have mitophagy, which is a way to recycle and renew mitochondria. And it all happens with the fasting.

And in fact, there's a great book, I'm sure you've heard of it, read years ago called Ending the First Cause of Death. And it's all about this, exactly. And this whole idea that was, I mean, decades ago, because Sid Baker, who was one of my functional medicine mentors, probably the real grandfather of clinical functional medicine, told me about it. And I was like, wow, this is great. It's a little book, a little dense, kind of geeky, but it's just up your alley there, Dave.

And so the idea is that when you do that, all these things happen. You increase your cognitive function because you want to be able to find the next meal. So your mental alertness and acuity improves. Your metabolism increases the fat burning so you can burn off your fat stores. You lose belly fat. You increase muscle mass. You increase bone density. You reduce inflammation. You activate your antioxidant enzymes. You increase stem cell production. So you literally go into a full-on rehab, repair, and remodel. It's like getting your old car and taking it to the body shop and cleaning out all the

junk and putting in new parts. Essentially what happens when you do this kind of eating. So I think for all of us, it's worth thinking about how do we do this? And that's why your book, Fast This Way, is such a great addition to this whole literature because it really guides people on how to do it. I love the subtitle is Fast This Way, Burn Fat, Heal Inflammation, and Eat Like the High-Performing Human You Were Meant to Be. And I think all of us settle for being less than high-performing humans. We all settle for what I call FLC syndrome. That's when

you feel like crap. And we don't often know we feel like crap until we don't. And that's why I encourage people to check this book out fastest way and do what Dave's telling you because it works. And unless you've tried it, unless you've given your body the gift of this experience of learning how to modulate your food intake, to change the timing, the frequency, the quality, the kind of food you eat, to try some of these hacks, you're not going to really know what's available to you. So, sort of like, you know, Dorothy in her ruby red slippers,

she didn't know she could go home all the time with clicking her heels. Or, you know, if you've had an elephant standing on your foot your whole life and the elephant finally gets off, you'll go, oh my God, that's what it feels like to not have an elephant on me. But we just don't know how we can actually feel. So talk about the ways in which you've seen changes in yourself and others who follow this, because it's so important for people to get it. And talk about, once you do that, the various kinds of ways that people are fasting and what you really recommend. Mark, you've talked about the genetics of aging. I mentioned that 300 pounds. I had arthritis when I was 14. I had all the diseases you expect when you're 70, when I was in my 20s. So I did not get that great genetic start. And if I can walk around at 48 with about 10.2, 10.5% body fat,

the New York times says that I'm almost muscular and I don't overreact. You're slacking. You're slacking, Dave. I'm like 7%. I don't know what is going on with you. I know like we're in a competition to get to 180, but like, you know, you got to work on that 3% there, Dave. I'm feeling, I feel like a failure right now. It's, it's one of those things though, where, where that, uh, that idea of fasting as being as important as exercise, maybe more important than exercise. Although I think they're both important. Um, why is it that people are willing to spend an hour a day in a spin class, which is probably creating overtraining anyway, but they're not willing to skip breakfast sometimes.

I think skipping breakfast is easier and it's okay to do both. It's just from a return on investment thing that it's the most important thing that I could think of. Even if you're not committed to changing your diet, even if you're going to eat all the things that you and I know are not real food, fasting can still help. It's just a lot easier and it helps more if you eat the right way. And one of the things that's really behind fasting, Mark, is the idea that fasting is just going without. And in the book, I talk about, okay, let's think through what happens emotionally when

you say you're going to go without something. We have other kinds of fasting that you probably haven't thought of. The keto diet is fasting from carbs. The vegan diet is fasting from animals. I don't know why you'd want to do that if you want to live healthy for a long time, but maybe for a couple of weeks to turn on. That's another podcast. Exactly.

But, and hey, go pegan. There you go. The, uh, uh, the, the thing that's also happening, you fast from substances that's called, you know, addiction or sobriety, you know, addiction treatment or sobriety. And we have fasting from people it's called solitude. And we have fasting from the, the, the end of the book, I actually tell people try fasting from hate, right? I'll start with fasting from sex or at least porn for a brief period of time. Cause your body feels like you're, you're going to die. If you don't have sex frequently, you're not going to die. If you don't have sex for a couple of weeks, you're not going to die.

If you don't have food for a month, but you feel like you're going to die. If you don't have food for a brief period, we're talking about skipping breakfast, but the body's like, no. So that's the thing. How do you create a sense of safety when you're going without something that you think you need, that you feel like you need, but you know you don't need? And just by doing that for brief periods of time, it's just like lifting weights.

It's just like exercise, but it's exercise for your emotional body. It's exercise for your spiritual body. It's exercise for your physical body, including those subcellular things that you just talked about. And when we change our mindset to fasting as just exercise, we can do exercise, right? And you might feel like you're going to die on the treadmill, but you know, you won't, and you do it anyway, every day. So we're just going to normalize fasting and also acknowledge, Mark, there are a lot less painful than my workouts.

My trainer, I was like, no more reps, please. Yeah. He makes me do pushups with bands. You know, you put like a. Oh, that's so cool. I love bands. I'm like, holy cow. Well, I mean, you are looking a little bit bigger in the shoulders there.

So all that Tom Brady stuff seems like it's working. Yes, it is. There was something else. I know I'm not exactly answering your question, but you mentioned Tom Brady. The other part of his longevity, he figured out, like I did, that nightshades, the lectin problem with nightshades for me, but not for everyone, for about a third of people. Man, those things cause cravings like no one's business. If you give me nightshades like potatoes or a bell plant, bell plants, bell peppers or eggplants, man, I want to eat sugar like no one's business. Right. So you got to find the foods that don't trigger. Can you give up tomatoes? I just can't give up tomatoes.

Yeah. I'll still eat some fresh tomatoes. I just take out the seeds and you peel them. And this is it was a core part of tomato off the vine in the garden and a hot August summer day. Well, you have a garden experience. I live in an organic farm. And that's something that I also would encourage people to fast from junk food and industrial meat and things like that. Now there's a fast I can get behind fast from industrial food. I love that. It's a real type of fast.

You say, look, I'm going to go without because there are people, in fact, a great many people listening right now. They're going, you mean I can't have Skittles? I can't have Reese's peanut butter cups. I can't have Cheetos or whatever thing is. Well, you can have them. I'm telling you that fast from them because your body feels like you're going to die if you don't have those.

And the side effect of a fast like that, Mark, is as you all know, it builds soil. And we have pigs, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and a great number of vegetables growing on my organic farm. I feed my local community and I'm building soil like no one's business. We recovered a five acre gravel pit using animal manure and turned it back into fertile soil. And we're restoring the forest on a part of the property. When you choose to do that kind of a fast,

you can still eat, but you're giving back to the planet. And the work you've been doing lately on food policy and all that stuff, that is also a part of the fasting world. You are choosing to go without the things that make you weak, even though there's a part of your body that wants you to eat those. And you are becoming master of that part of your body.

And when you're master of that part of the body, the side effect is you're nicer to everyone around you because you're eating better food. Like everybody wins when you do this. It's so important. Wait, wait, wait. I don't want to just pass by that. You just said something that's highly profound because in the middle of this incredibly divisive world. I mean, I was born 60 years ago. And, yeah, they were Democrats,

Republicans, and there were certainly divisions in society and there was segregationists and there was hate. But the level of divisiveness, the level of reactivity, the level of hatred. I mean, I post a picture of me with now president-elect Biden talking about how we can start to build bridges and have conversations and we don't have to agree. We can, you know, have deep conversations, even if we don't have the same worldview without hating each other. And I mean, and there was just the most incredible blowback that I just could not believe. And all this projection of hatred on me and saying I was for vaccine mandates and mask, I mean, mask mandates, stuff I never even, I was just talking about love and let's all be friends and let's disagree, but let's disagree nicely. Let's not

vilify and hate. And I was like, whoa. And what really is clear, and David Perlmutter's work and his son Austin in their latest book brainwash really talked about this that our diet our modern industrial diet has literally hijacked our brain and activated the amygdala which is the fight or flight attack defend victim part of our brain. And so we are operating in a highly activated way in which our frontal lobe becomes disconnected from our amygdala. Our frontal lobe is the adult in the room. It's our executive functioning. It's the one who doesn't do the stupid thing, even though he thinks about doing it, right? Instead, it's like Dennis the Menace. And when I think about what I'm not doing, what I'm going to do, I've already done it.

You know, and I think this is such an important thing. You said that it changes the quality of our behavior, our emotions, our relationships, our fear, our anger, our hostility. These are things that are killing us society now. And it just breaks my heart. Me too. I interviewed Dr. Vivek Murthy,

former US Surgeon General. He wrote a book saying in his time as Surgeon General, the number one epidemic that he came across that was causing the most problem wasn't viral at all. It was connectedness. He said, we have a profound state of loneliness and disconnection in people, and that's what's making us sick and we have to fix it. So then a week after he comes out on the podcast, he gets named by Biden to Biden's to co-chair his coronavirus task force. This is a guy who values connection and connectivity and will value those things so that our policies might say, it's kind of important we don't turn on that epidemic when we're trying to turn off another one. And I said, hey, congratulations, we got a guy who cares about what we care about on a panel. Man, the amount of people saying exactly what you heard, just

projecting all this hate. Here's what's going on, Mark, to take it back to fasting. If you don't have a healthy metabolism, your blood sugar can crash. And if you do something like eat MSG, which as you well know, as you've written about is hidden in so many foods under fake names. And when you eat MSG, it causes hypoglycemia. When your blood sugar gets really low, your body says, Oh, this is kind of an emergency. I need some blood sugar. Good thing. I have built in systems to turn on blood sugar instantly. It's called cortisol and adrenaline.

So your body says, I'm crashing. Let me get you some stress hormones right here. And then you get your energy back, but it's fighting energy. It's stress energy. And then you see someone post about, hey, could we have more connection and empathy and kindness? And they're like, you're a bad man. Well, there's a connection directly to food. There really is. And it really is by fasting. You train your body to do that.

And by fasting from crappy foods, you actually have more control of who you are and you can show up as the person that you want to be instead of the person you are when you're hungry. Cause I don't know about you, but hypoglycemic is a very real word for me. At least it used to be. Yeah. What is that? I see the nine going to see-C-10 code 1034.2. Is that it? It's a clear medical diagnosis. Hypoglycemic. That's very funny. We're sort of kind of skirting around the edges of this, but in your book, you talk about how fasting can be a powerful entry point into honesty and control of ourselves. What do you mean by that? Well, there's two kinds of fast. There's fasting for health, and you can do this intermittent fast

with the hacks you do during the week. And there's another kind of fast, which I call a spiritual fast. And these tend to be for at least 24 hours, a little bit longer, where you actually sit with what's going on in your feelings. You journal. So what I'm doing for people who order Fast This Way and send me the receipt at FastThisWay.com, I'm taking them through a two-week, I'm calling it a fasting challenge, but it's really a fasting course. Where as an author, I feel like I haven't done my full job because I'm also a teacher. I taught at the University of California for five years. So I'm actually teaching people what's in the book for two weeks. And we're going to all together, thousands of people at the same time, practice intermittent fasting with the hacks, without the hacks. But for the last two days of this two-week challenge, we're going to do a spiritual fast. I'm actually going to get you

a fasting journal and you're going to be able to sit there and say, all right, I'm actually going to go for 24, 36, even 48 hours without food, but I'm going to do it mindfully. I'm going to reduce distractions in my life and I'm going to be hungry. And I'm going to say, wow, how many times am I actually thinking about food? Do I really want to snap at my kids or am I getting even more angry at the news that I shouldn't be watching during a spiritual fast anyway? All of those things so we can gain awareness of ourselves. And the cool thing is because you're fasting, you have extra ketones present and you have more energy to think about it. And this is why all the great spiritual traditions include fasting,

because that little boost to the neurons is a boost that you can use for self-awareness. And that's why fasting is so powerful. It puts you back in charge of you instead of letting these automated life systems like, is that scary? Take my attention. Is that food? Take my attention. why fasting is so powerful. It puts you back in charge of you instead of letting these automated life systems like, is that scary? Take my attention. Is that food? Take my attention. Is that a nice pair of legs? Take my attention. You're supposed to own all of that and you can own all of that. And it doesn't have to be painful to get there. And the reason most of us haven't taken on fasting and the reason it terrified me, in fact, I was offended when someone told me I should fast when I weighed 300 pounds, because I'm like, I would die. It would

be terrible. All of that fear, it's not real. The fear is real, but the reality is very different. And the more we can help ourselves live in reality, the more control we have of our energy, that energy goes to the prefrontal cortex, which allows us to catch those negative thoughts before they turn into negative behavior. And the challenge in the book at the end is look, just spend two hours fasting from hate. Maybe spend a whole day where you don't say one hateful thing. You don't think one hateful thing. And that is really challenging. I took electrodes up to my head and spent time meditating a lot of time meditating to get to that point where I can do that. And even then you'll see these things sneak in.

But just a regular short practice of that allows you to remember the kind of person that you're capable of being instead of the kind of person you are when you're constantly triggered by industrial foods, by industrial news sources, and basically by a world that really isn't set up to let you be who you're supposed to be. It's true. We live in a world that's constantly going after our amygdala. Yeah. It's because the amygdala is easiest to trigger. It makes you buy stuff. And for those of you who really think there's free will, I encourage you to watch a documentary called The Social Dilemma and really pay attention to it because what's really happened is that we have been psychographically mapped in ways that algorithms target our innermost fears, insecurities, and weaknesses to drive our behavior in ways that are invisible to us, that we think are free will, but actually

aren't. And, you know, when you talk about fasting, I just want to drop in for the last few minutes into the spiritual context of fasting, because it always in the past was a spiritual practice. It was a way to remove the distractions of the outside world, to go inward, to find peace, stillness, to become awake in different ways, to things that really matter. And, you know, this year has been rough. I mean, this year has been just so rough. Like, I think all of us want to take the reset button, hit reboot, defrag, you know, and just do a do over on 2020. I mean, COVID, politics, the economy, social distancing, I mean, fire. I mean, you know, just the heartbreak of what's happening in the world

right now is real and it's tough and the divisiveness, the conflict. And I think, you know, it wears on all of us. It wears on our nervous system. And the fastest way is a beautiful doorway into using your biology to help unhook from some of that. And you talk about a lot of practices, not just dietary in the book. And I really encourage people to get it fastest way, burn fat, heal inflammation, eat like the high performing human you were meant to be. I love it. It's really good. I think it's one of your best books yet, Dave. Thank you. But, but I, but I, I want to kind of drop in because I've been feeling this personally. I've just been feeling like, Holy crap, what a year I need a, I need a break time out. And so I I've decided, which is really tough for me. Cause I do, you know, like you, I have five, six companies.

I do so many different things, have practices. I got to interrupt you for a second. You're one of the most giving guys that I know. Like I know all the, cause we're friends. I know all the stuff you do that you never talk about to give back and you're, you run a hundred miles an hour helping people and you always have just to put that on the table. Thank you. I appreciate that. So I feel after 30 years that I'm giving myself permission to take the month of December off. Awesome. And it's a little

terrifying and it's going, and as we're talking, I realized it's going to be a month of fasting and I've already committed to, you know, a really clean diet, which I mostly do anyway, to no coffee, to, sorry, Dave. Okay. I thought we were friends. No, it's fine to do that. Yeah. No alcohol, no email. That's going to be the hardest one. I think I'm highly addicted to email. No news. I'll talk to people on video conferencing or phone. I'm not doing zoom conferences. I'm literally just going to drop into being instead of doing, I'm going to be in nature. I'm going to be in my body. I'm going to be with friends in a socially appropriate way and distance way. I'm going to do spiritual practices that help me fast from the things that are really disturbing my happiness and my ability to really, yeah. And I think I'm pretty good at managing it all most of the time, but I'm like, wait a minute. I remember

being 25 and being completely unencumbered from all of that. There was none of that. And when I was 25, I remember my 20s traveling, there was no cell phone. There was no internet. You had postcards. You had letters you could write. You wouldn't make a phone call because it was $10 a minute to talk to anybody in the States if I was in some other country. You were just in the experience of life. And I just, I'm craving that again. And I think, I wish we didn't even have to describe it as fasting because all of a sudden we've been in this over-consumptive world, not just over-consuming food, but over-consuming information and news and in ways that aren't volitional. Like our news feed and our social

media feed aren't really our will. They're being fed to us by algorithms that are trying to manipulate us in real ways that are highly documented. It's not just a conspiracy theory. I mean, just watch the social dilemma or watch the great hack and you'll see what I'm talking about. And so, you know, as you're talking, I'm really inspired that you've written about this. I'm really inspired that you're talking about these issues because so many of us need to reset and to reboot and to rewire ourselves. And food, I think is the easiest doorway to retrain your brain, to retrain your biology,

to reawaken to the things that really matter in life and to the beauty and just to drop in. And I think this is really a gift in a weird way of this moment. It's all causing us to re-evaluate our lives and to see what matters, what's important, what do we care about, and how do we break this cycle and re-human ourselves? There's a word that most of us use on a daily basis. And it's a word I've been fasting from for the past 15 years. And the word is need. When you need something, it means if you don't get it, you'll die. But when you tell yourself, I need to go to the store. No, you could have had the groceries delivered. You could have

fasted or you could have asked a groceries delivered. You could have fasted, or you could have asked a friend, but you didn't think of those things because you told your amygdala that you needed it. And so many of us have gone to a point where I need to check my email. I need to do this. I need to do blah, blah. I need to watch the news. I need blah, blah. None of those needs are real. And when you- Sometimes I really need to pee. That's real. I got a lot. That's a real need. Okay. There you go. I'll give you that. So there are some real needs, but the vast majority of things are, and I would even go so far as say, well, Mark, we could get you a catheter.

You don't really need to pee. It's just the best path. So let's, let's go. I just wet my pants. So those are the things that were fasting lets you address. One of the things that we really think we need and lets you go, you know what? I thought I needed that, but it was a want. And when we replace the word need with the word choose or the word want, it is incredibly relaxing and it makes you feel safe.

And it's part of what you get when you just skip breakfast, maybe eat dinner a little bit earlier and do some of these other practices. You realize that you want a lot of things that you think you need. And when you sort those out, your anxiety levels go down. Anytime anxiety goes down, kindness goes up. It's beautiful. Yeah. And I think this beautiful way to say it, you know, when you refocus on the things that matter, your kindness goes up and the toxicity of our own minds and our own bodies goes down in the world around us. I mean, I think it's in this world, all we can do is, is actually, you know, focus on ourselves and what we can do to, to really live in integrity. And I think the more we do that, the better we can be agents of change in the world. And it reminds me of a story of Gandhi, who once had a mother bring her child to see Gandhi, and the child just loved sugar and

ate candy all the time. And she said to Gandhi, would you please tell my son to stop eating so much candy? It's not good for him. And Gandhi goes, come back in a week. Mother comes back in a week. And, and he says to the little boy, you know, I think it's good that you probably stopped candy. And she said to him, why did you tell me to come back in a week? Why couldn't you have told me that last week? He says, well, I was eating candy last week. I had to stop eating candy. That's integrity right there. It's just about integrity. And I think if we can focus on our own integrity in our lives and come in alignment with who we are and what we want to be, how to be the high performing human that we were meant to be. And I think you mean high performing, not just in life and as an athlete, but spiritually, emotionally,

physically, mentally, relationally, as a human being in the community of life. That's what you mean. Exactly what I mean. And there's actually a fourth F word that all life does after those first four words, it's friend. And even Maslow's hierarchy of needs, his final need that he didn't get to publish before he died. I just did a podcast on this was for transcendence. So when we get the baseline stuff out of the way, what's left is we are meant, we are wired, we are built from the cells up to be kind to one another. And if there's too much emphasis on those first three F words, there's not enough room for kindness. And that's what we're getting back to right now. So your reset

you're going to do is a perfect example of that kind of spiritual fast. So fasting is just going without. And clearly food is a low-hanging fruit. But you can go without all kinds of stuff that you think you need. And when you do it for brief periods, you might realize that your life changes in a massively, massively beneficial way. And the way the change manifests is in happiness. But it also manifests in changing the world around you. Because when you're nice to people, they get happier too. And it has a very big amplified effect. We only need a few people to really step up like that. And then all the people around them are like, wait, what's going

on here? I haven't seen someone be level in a while. Maybe I could be a little bit more level. So this will spread and it has to spread because that's what humans are wired to do. And if there's anything that you're a little anxious or stressed about giving up, that's probably the thing you need to give up the most. Yeah. That was why for me, it was loneliness. I'm like, I'm going to sit in a cave and feel lonely because I'm so stressed about, you know, what if I didn't realize that was pushing me the way it was. And it's that realization of how much power these things have that we haven't thought about. And like you said, you're going to fast from social media. You'll realize how much power it has that you didn't give it, that it took. So, yeah, I mean, that's not a huge one for me. Email, like, yeah, I can give up alcohol, caffeine, sugar, processed food. I mean,

that's easy. I can do yoga every day, meditate. No, that's all easy for me. Giving up email, that starts to make me really anxious. And I honestly, Dave, I didn't really even think about it because I was planning my trip and my journey for this month of December. And until we started talking, I'm like, well, what are those things that I'm really not willing to give up? And I thought email. I'm like, no, I'm going to announce it on my podcast that I'm giving up email for a month. I'm going to email you and see if you answer. I'm like, no, I'm going to announce it on my podcast that I'm giving up email for a month. I'm going to email you and see if you answer. You realize that, right? I'm going to have an autoresponder. I said, talk to my assistant. I'll be back in a month. If you have anything important, email me again in a month.

I promise you, Mark, if it's really important, you're going to get a text message or a phone call from your assistant. That's how it works. But it doesn't feel like it works that way. This is going to be so good. I'm so excited for you. And, and I just, uh, you know, Dave, you are, you are one of the few people who's out there in this space who really is seeking the world for those things that will enhance the quality of our lives at all levels, physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally. And you really have no ego in the fight. I think it's a really rare quality in people. And you've really done a lot of work to overcome some of the sort of spiritual and emotional challenges. And you've been very successful and done in a way that's just with love. And it's just beautiful to see. Thanks, Mark. You didn't know me when I was younger. I was pretty much a jerk. Just to be really clear. You were eating jerk inducing foods.

I also had managed because I was a computer hacker. I had managed to pretty much erase my identity to just be like, you couldn't find anything about me online. I was very happy to be anonymous and to be well known as an author. It's actually worked for me. Like I'm not in this to get known. I'm willing to be known because I think I can help. There's no benefit to it. It kind of sucks. Yeah. Well, I thank you, Dave. And I encourage everybody to learn about fasting this way from Dave's book, fastest way, burn

fat, heal inflammation, eat like the high performing human you were meant to be. You can look, look it up at fast this wayay.com, FastThisWay.com, his website for the book. It's just fabulous. It will add a lot to your life in terms of the quality of your energy, your mood, your focus, your well-being, add years to your life. And actually, it just might make you happier and kinder, which wouldn't be a bad thing for all of us, including me. So thank you, Dave, for inspiring me to go even deeper on my fast and to rethink fasting to not mean taking away, but actually adding. You are most welcome, Mark. You're an amazing human being, and I'm so looking forward to meeting the mark that comes out after December.

I may never come out. That's what worries me. I'm like, okay, I'm never coming back. Anyway, great to have you on the podcast again, Dave. If you all love this podcast, please share it with everybody on the universe because everybody needs to hear this podcast. If you have fasted or tried it or have any experiences we'd love to hear from you, leave a comment, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, we'll see you next time

on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter.

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and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger, longer. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor

or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.