Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - The Truth About Fasting For Diabetes – With Megan Ramos

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

For full show notes, resources mentioned, and transcripts, go to: www.drmindypelz.com/ep143/. To enroll in Dr. Mindy's Fasting membership, go to: resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. This episode covers the benefits of replacing diabetes medication with fasting to address illness at the root.  Megan Ramos is a clinical educator and expert on therapeutic fasting and low-carbohydrate diets, having guided more than 14,000 people worldwide through The Fasting Method program she co-founded with Dr. Jason Fung. She is the co-author of the New York Times Bestseller Life in the Fasting Lane. Please see our medical disclaimer.

recognize that there are these certain times in the calendar year where it's easier to fast. And there are these certain times that humans have made it more difficult to fast. And that's okay. And it's about finding the balance between the two and then, you know, practicing good meal timing habits during the quote unquote feasting times. Resetters, Dr. Mindy here. And I am on a mission to teach you just how powerful your body was built to be. This podcast is about giving you the power back and help.

helping you believe in yourself again. Let's jump in. On this episode of The Resetter podcast, I bring you Megan Ramos. So hopefully all my fasting fans out there know who Megan Ramos is. She has been really deep in the work with Dr. Jason Fung, who wrote the obesity code and many other beautiful fasting books. And many of them co-authored with Megan. and they have been applying the principles of fasting to a type 2 diabetic community. And what's really interesting in this interview is you're not only going to hear some of the

amazing results they've seen and the application of fasting to patients with type 2 diabetes. But Megan has her own journey. And I didn't realize that before I talked to her on this episode, that she really, in her late 20s, was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and was one of Dr. Fung's first fasting test subjects. So her fasting story is phenomenal and she tells it in the beginning of this episode. And then in the back half of the episode, we really dove into some pretty profound nuance around fasting that many of you are going to be excited to hear. like what do you do if ketones are going up and you're not feeling very good?

She had a really good hack for that. And how does she break her fast? And what does she think about what we need to do around breaking a fast? And maybe one of the most interesting conversations is that what fasting length is she a fan of and why? So really, the history of fasting is told and how it got it. to this modern world is really told in this episode and I'm really excited to bring it to you all. But more importantly, Megan and Dr. Fung have seen the principles of fasting really applied to thousands of people's lives, mostly type 2 diabetics and the results they see is unreal.

So you're going to hear a mixture of great stories with clinical application and some incredible fasting hacks, this will definitely go down as one of the best fasting episodes we've ever done. So I'm those of you that keep asking me, where are more of the fasting episodes? Here you go. Megan Ramos, I flippin' loved this conversation and I hope you do as well. So, okay, here is my first question to you, Megan, that I'm so curious. I know that you were working in Dr. Fung's clinic and that that is a large part of how you all started learning about fasting. But did you know about fasting prior to working in that clinic?

Like, what was your door in to understanding fasting? No, actually. So I started in the nephrology clinic. So Jason's a nephrologist. My background's in nephrology. So kidney disease. I actually started there in I was 15. Jason has been working with the group for about five minutes at that point. And as a young nephrologist on the team, he had to do some research projects. And I was a student that was working with him on those research projects as part of my summer job. And I just really love the program there. And they did a ton of research, really trying to be proactive about slowing down the prevention of kidney disease through lifestyle and pharmaceutical interventions, a combination of them both. And I think they use a lot of the proceeds or proceeds from the pharmaceutical to help

fund a lot of the lifestyle stuff. And I was just really intrigued about preventative medicine from a young age because my mom was so sick. So I had this group, like this really cool opportunity. Jason was a nice guy. It was a large nephrology group. We're actually, our oral group is one of the largest medical research departments of any kind in North America and nephrology. So I just love the whole, you know, let's try to stop disease. Let's try to make people better.

Let's stop trying to slap medications onto the list. And I wasn't saying that anywhere else in medicine. So I just stuck it as hug out there. Like I love the team. All of the doctors have the same perspective. You know, let's help save these people. And you get to no dialysis patients. They come in four to six hours a day, three to four times a week.

I'm, you know, three to five years, typically on average and sometimes longer. I mean, some of these patients that I'm at 15 are still kicking around the dialysis unit today, and they literally watched me grow up. I bet. Yeah. Wow. I can't help a warm relationship. So, you know, kind of in my mid-20s, I was just, I was just heartbroken because it seemed

like all of the interventions we were doing were making individuals sick. So Jason, myself and the nephrology team there, we had this prospective observational study going where we were looking at FGF 23 as a growth hormone as a better predictor of kidney function decline than creatin, which we typically use to help estimate kidney function. And the idea is if, you know, we can detect it earlier, we can prevent it or we can try to prevent it or slow down the progression of it. So we enrolled 2,800 people with very, very mild kidney dysfunction. And it's a three-year study. But we're a year in, and patients were just rapidly declining. Patients were dying from type 2 diabetes. That was the root cause of why they eventually passed.

And it got to a point halfway through the study where we had to do another enrollment on board to bring back up our sample size because we were losing so many patients. who are really quite healthy, who we would expect to live or not be on dialysis for like another decade or longer. And it was just crazy just to see how all of these lifestyle recommendations that they were getting and their diabetic care was just nose diving them down the toilet. And I started to panic about my own health at that point because I thought to myself, okay, we're doing these interventions in them, but they're already very disease. They're already quite old. So I'm young. Let me do it now. Let me get ahead of this curve so I don't get diabetes heart disease like the

rest of my family. But that did mean no good because within a year I have a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes and I'm a big a ton of weight. So just out of curiosity, how old were you at that time? I got this news for my 27th birthday. Oh my God. Yeah, don't book annual physical. around your birthday. Because you may get a diagnosis. Yeah, it was brutal. But at the same time, too, I was feeling so brokenhearted for these patients. I was kind of at a loss.

I just, you know, when I was 15 and I walked into the dialysis unit, we had a handful of patients. By the time I was 27, you know, we had centers upon centers, just in our group. We were dializing thousands of people around the clock 24-7. We were airlifting them to places like Ottawa from Toronto, which is a five-hour drive. It was just wild, you know, to see diabetes become such an epidemic. And, you know, Jason was seeing it too from a different lens than I was. And he had come, he had some personal discussions.

A friend of his, I believe, she started fasting for spiritual reasons following a divorce. and she had these health benefits from it. And this really sort of spiked Jason's interest to do a bit of a dive into this. Most people don't realize it that Toronto's the most culturally diversity in the entire world. And Jason and I worked in the most niche area. So it wasn't unusual to have someone who practiced different religions like Muslims in Ramadan, or we would have different patients who had always passed on Fridays or, you know, or would fast Mondays and Fridays.

These are very common things. Over 50% of the population of Toronto is immigrated there. So, you know, these are people that until they acclimate to the gluttonous culture that Canada in general has become, they were still bringing these practices or older generations reverting back to them or not getting them up. So we were aware that fasting was a huge part of every major religion. Fasting didn't phase me.

My best friend was Hindu girls. growing up, she fasted on Fridays when she was old enough. But in my culture, like, it was a real foreign thing. Like, you know, McDonald's was Monday, pizza was Tuesday, Wednesday was Chinese food. You know, those were our religious practices. So Jason said, you know, to me when I was telling him about my diabetes diagnosis, you know, this fasting. And I'm first, you know, I had heard rumors around the clinic that he was talking. talking about this. But it just seemed too easy. And then later on that same day, I heard

him giving a talk to some of his patients about fasting. And I decided to just sit in and listen to it. I'm sure as heck beat sitting in traffic on the way home. And everything just kind of clicked. And I went through about a thousand different stages of emotions that evening. I think that's really good for people to hear, though, because it would be easy to look at you like a fasting expert that you are and think it was easy. So like what were those thousand emotions just because I think people don't recognize that they're not alone in that emotional journey. So this can't be true. It can't be wrong. You know, we cannot live in this huge conspiracy theorist, you know, population. Like how could the government of Canada, we're Canadians. They're supposed to be so nice. How could they let this be? How

So do they be lying to us about it? So I went down some dark path, anger at my parents. They're brilliant people. I know they're in law and finance, but why can they figure this out? You know, it's just that so much anger at my professors. Are they brainwashed or are they lying to me or a mix of both, you know, anger at myself? like I sat through years of years of school. And you're just like as a student,

you're just so busy trying to stay up to date on top of the grades, 500 extracurricular activities, a job to finance it all. And you're doing all of these things. And, you know, sometimes things don't make sense. But, you know, you've got this, you're paying thousands of dollars for this expert. There's a world leading expert to tell you,

hey, this is this is the fact. And you just have to sometimes remember. memorize the fact because you don't always have time to fully understand everything in those moments and kind of kicking myself, you know, for not forcing it. You know, I had that, by the way, I had the same feeling when I learned about autophagy and Dr. Osumi's work. I was like, wait a second, this is so simple. If this guy just won the Nobel Prize for this concept of autophagy, why doesn't the world know about it? And, you know, do you, to the conspiracy theory idea, do you feel like it's just, we're so,

there's no financial incentive for people to fast? There is definitely none. And now that I've definitely, like I've pivoted in my career, hung up my nephrology hat in 2015 right before my wedding, I had to make a call, you know, what am I going to do? because I was trying to do both at the same time. Still maintain my nephrology, giving people the wrong advice, but that's what was funded, versus, you know, doing what was right and serving people. And in Canada, that, you know, that's not funded.

It's not public health. It's public health care, but it doesn't, you know, fall under. Wouldn't it save Canada a lot of money if everybody fasted and were able to and started overturning type two diabetes? This is, you know, like I look at Kaiser bias and I think, oh my gosh, Kaiser needs to know because ultimately, and they are already talking about fasting, they're one of the rare few hospitals are because they're trying to save money and save lives. Yeah, it's, you know, I think there's a certain branch in Canada of the sort of government that did reach out to us

at one point because their particular sector was too obese and too diabetic. And they said, you know, fasting is less politics than food. So I'm like, oh, okay. you know, this is, I'm like fourth generation, Trontonian, Canadian, and I, you just sort of the, the lenses, you know, the fog clearing. And like now, now I live in the United States. And you're near me, we're still going to go do lunch here soon. I probably. We should. Yeah, I'm in the Bay area. And it's, it is just, it's, you, I've worked with clients in the U.S., my husband's American, my in in-laws and very close with them they're in the US. You hear and but to physically live live it and just sort of see what's brought in about in the

last couple of years too. It is it is totally a business and then there's there's certain larger organizations. We've we've got some insurance pilots and stuff going that are quite interesting and as great people are looking to bring fasting and then there's some other pathways where it's like well it doesn't really matter because it doesn't really cost the insurance. company, anything in the end, whether you're sick or you're not sick. And it's just such a, there's a lot of politics that goes, goes into disease and wellness. I think that's really hard for people to grasp because we want to walk into our doctor's office

and feel like there's only one person in that room that matters and that's me and my doctor's going to give me the best advice. but when you've got financial incentives for doctors to prescribe medications and the information they're receiving is primarily from or largely from pharmaceutical companies, it really taints your view. And I really have to give Jason a lot of credit for being willing to step out of that and say, hey, there's a different way to do this. And what was the, what kind of like feedback did you guys see as you were starting to fast?

and seen results. Did, did, is insurance companies, were they mad? Or, you know, how did that all roll out? We started in Canada. And so it's public health care, which is interesting. But we definitely got blowback. So we first, I had like done a month of it and my A1C dropped down to six and I had lost some weight, but I still looked very sick.

And, you know, my numbers weren't like off the charts, impressive. And it was only a month worth of that. data so no one cared. So Jason and I went to our, you know, team and we're like, we're so excited and let's do this. And Jason had been talking to like the higher powers that be in the nephrology space. And no, you guys are nuts. You're mental. We're not even going to listen to you. But then as I started to come back to life and as I started having, you know, months worth the data. It's just getting better and better. People seeing me not waste away. And then there was some holiday weight loss pool going on in the nephrology department. And I found out that certain

people were betting that I would win and I would just, you know, conquer the challenge. And there's a sustainability part afterwards. And I think I made a few people extra pocket change. There was a pool. They had an office pool on you? That's hysterical. Yeah, no, it was really a wild place. And then as a joke, someone for, you know, making them a little bit richer, gave me a McDonald's gift card, which was really ridiculous.

But on that note, they... What kind of fast length were you doing? Because I know people are going to ask that. Like, what did she do? What was her fasting length to lose all that way? I really kind of changed it up. a lot on the way. My first fast, I'm like, I'm young, I'm motivated, I'm not too sick, I'm going to do seven days and that did not go over well. Just pure water. Just pure water. I felt like totally depleted.

It was it was not good. Didn't know what I was doing coming off of an awful awful diet. So I started for a couple weeks I did about 16, 18 hours, tried to cut out snacking. Then I focus on the 24s for about a month or two, but the snacking part, I was a grazer. I must have been some type of farm animal in the past life, because I was a total grazer. So I knew if I was going to be successful at this, like I wasn't going to band-a-dated out with longer fast. So I put in the time, and even today, that's something that I have to, with the COVID lockdowns, I was in Canada for the first year COVID, and they were locked down for nearly two years for the most part. So it was, it was, it was, It was a little bit difficult.

So the snacking because of COVID is something that I have to go back on. But I spend about a month or two perfecting the 24s and then moving into some combination of 42s and 24s. I would typically- Why 42? Because I wasn't hungry in the morning and it became very easy to fast through the evening. So, you know, I would, for example, you know, I'd eat on Sunday. And then Monday, you know, after eating Saturday and Sunday, I wasn't really hungry anyways.

Mondays were such a busy workday. As long as I stayed properly hydrated, got in my salt, I was good to go. And then, you know, after the crazy work day, that was Monday, which was always, you know, surrender to the pizza day because Mondays are always so crazy. It just was so easy not to eat. I had this crazy, crazy day and I could do other things to de-stress, like go in a walk, taken up some salt bath you go for a massage get my nails done just something else um rather than eat for that decompression and then it was really easy to go to the next day but i'd wake up on the

tuesday in the morning and i just wouldn't be hungry and at the time i was diabetic and my blood sugar levels were high so you know my blood sugar levels are going up because of the dawn affected Don phenomenon, but outside of the normal range. And my body is obviously secreting insulin. It just seemed like eating would be adding fuel to a fire that I'm trying to put out. So, you know, I know young women. I think this is, I think your story is so interesting because there's a lot of concern about fasting for type 2 diabetics.

And when you have a lot of stored sugar, you're, let's just, I just want to make sure everybody understands the dawn effect is where the liver is going to pour out that stored sugar in the middle of the night. you wake up and your blood sugar is higher, ketones might be lower. So how do you, but that's what the big concern, that's a part of the big concern with type two diabetics. What, how long did you see when you were fasting? Did you keep seeing spikes of blood sugar as your body was going after those reserves? Yeah, absolutely. And patients do too all of the time. Like I would have patients come in the clinic so concerned. You know, they got a 30 year history of being diabetic, type two diabetic. They got a 15 year,

20 year history of being on insulin and you know they'll be a day and a half into their fast and their blood sugar levels will still be around 180 yeah and it's just like well you are a very sweet individual and I think that people don't realize this with a lot of the diabetic medications um I mean they all have unique group classes and those classes have unique functions they don't all function in the same way. But in the bigger picture of things, it's, you know, imagine you have a really dirty kitchen and you just, you've got company coming over and you don't have time to fully clean the kitchen and do the hard work. So you take all of the rubbish and you put it in your basement. You've got a cleaner kitchen for the company, but your house isn't cleaner. The rubbish is just elsewhere in

the house. And that's what a lot, not all, but a lot of these diet. diabetic medications do is they treat sort of the symptom. It's like, okay, the blood sugar levels are high. I doesn't treat why it's high. Or let's just take the sugar out of the blood and, you know, let's put it elsewhere and cause disease and, you know, turn it into inflammation and all of this awful stuff. So, you know, we, we keep eating. We keep taking our medication. The medication removes it from the blood, but our bodies are no cleaner. They're actually becoming and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier. And eventually it becomes condemned.

This is a toxic hazard. And that's where we really see, like, we have people come in 400, 500 units of insulin, three different types of insulin, oral medications on top of that. Like, it's just well, and it's not working. Like, it is not working. That part is like, to me, that's malpractice. Like, if you keep throwing a solution at a health problem and it's not working, it's It's time to take a different approach.

And again, I want to just applaud what you guys did with type 2 diabetes because you stood up for that. And you said, I'm going to do this differently. What's the most, just so that in case we have any doubters listening to this, what's the most amount of weight you've seen somebody lose and the most dramatic A1C drop? Yeah. So the most amount of weight, someone that is lost that we've tracked, who's been in our program, was around 225 pounds.

How long did that take? So it's, you know, it doesn't take forever, but it does take a couple of years, two and a half years for that particular individual, and they have some health challenges along the bay. So, you know, it's not wild for some people. You know, I've lost 80 pounds in a year. I saw someone on, you know, our group the other day lost 93 pounds and eight months, and sometimes it takes two years.

But you lose it and it's sustainable. And that's a great thing about it because you're fixing the problem, which is great. We've seen A1C's within six months go from undetectable because they are so elevated down into like 5.8 within six months. And then to get it from 5.8 to just, you know, like 5 or 4.9 takes about another six or 12 months, depending on the individual to do. But in six months to get it. you know, from this undetectable range and their glucometers constantly weren't working and CGMs were a bit of a failure on them. But to get it down to 5.8 in six months was pretty fantastic. It's a it's crazy. I mean, nobody gets those kind of numbers with medication, do they?

No, they they, you know, it's just so wild. We published them on a case series that BMJ has been very kind to fasting because we've had so many. issues. So this is probably wild. And I don't know if I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but Jason and I, when we had our clinic in Toronto, we're all online now. But when we had our clinic in Toronto, we had such great data. And we wanted to do a retrospective chart review of our data. So we had to go to a research ethics board, which I had gone to 9,000 times. I mean, it was essentially my job up into that point to execute studies. And I got called in for a review of a chart review.

Like it was just wild. Like these are expedited approvals. Like nobody tells you you can't look at your own charts, analyze the data and potentially share it with the scientific community at large. Nobody tells you can't. Like it was just the fact that they then submitted it for a larger review amongst the ethics board

and then called Jason and I in. And I am very, The only genes that I got, which I know it's attributed both to my genetics and to my lifestyle is that I look quite a bit younger than I actually am. So at the time, you know, I was in my late 20s and I looked like I was in my late teens. And Jason couldn't come to that ethics board. They wanted to come and question us over a chart review, a retrospective chart review. He couldn't go.

So I show up and they're just attacking me. They're trying to get me to throw Jason under the bus. like he's forcing patients to do this he's forcing me to force patients to do this i'm like i'm an equal participant i'm not his employee here um you know i'm doing this myself and i've done it and then eventually you know it got so hostile someone stood up and and ended the meeting and we never got the approval to do a chart review um but you yeah it was wild uh just totally wild so but we've bmj's let us submit some case reports and case series and they've been so kind to publish them. And, you know, we've had patients that have so much better blood glucose control off of all

of those medications. And we're talking 24, 36, 42 hours of fasting. Like, you're not looking at, you know, patients trying to fast for, you know, 21 days. And we've had patients who have now been off of insulin, like our initial pilot after me was eight individuals. Seven of them are still alive. One passed away because he had so much cardiovascular damage and he was in he had stage five kidney disease which is end stage kidney disease before we even started the the fasting and he came off of insulin he was actually our first patient we ever took off insulin but too much damage had already happened and he was quite elderly but the seven living individuals like we started with them on june 5th 2012 you know we're now in the fall of 2022 and they're still off of insulin

it's crazy yeah people you know they'll say well you're just controlling it with fasting i'm like that's not the case i've been human throughout my journey and i've had these very human moments where i've navigated it's been really tough to navigate my relationship with food i'm very proud of where i am now i look at certain quote unquote foods i don't see food i see poison but it took a while to get there because my diet was just so such garbage and i had such a huge issue with emotional and stress eating that I didn't even know. And throughout these learning experiences, when I would retreat to an old habit meal on a stressful day, I would have a normal glucose response.

I wouldn't have a diabetic. And just so people know, because this is something we don't talk about in the fasting world enough, what's a normal glucose response? So you want your pre-meal glucose level and your two-hour post-meal glucose level to be about the same, you know, or quite close to. You want to make sure within that two hours that the glucose level is coming back down. And then if you do have something a little bit carbly, you might see, you know, within the two hour mark, another little spike up and then it coming back down again within a timely fashion versus diabetics, too. It will take, you know, several hours for their blood sugar levels to come back down.

So they end up running chronically high for hours and hours because there's just too much insulin resistance for their own insulin to do. the job. Yeah, that's crazy. And you know what? It's so interesting that I've, one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had with teaching fasting to the world is how many people will come to like my YouTube channel and they'll tell stories like you just said. The medications they get off, the weight they get off, and then their doctor gets mad. And their doctor doesn't believe it. And especially if you're dealing with a type two diabetic. And so what I started doing, and I know you guys do the same is I started putting the links to all the science. And I started saying, send your doctor here. Like, doctors need to be more educated on this. And I can't, I think people are waking up now.

I do get people asking me like, oh, we're still talking about fasting. That's still a thing. And I'm like, we just got started talking about this. It is a thing. So what are you noticing within the medical community, are more and more medical doctors starting to embrace it? Or are they more, are they still in a place of fear? Yeah, I definitely think so, you know, especially when it comes to perhaps the shorter fast. I was on this call with, it was a private call. It was about a particular patient and an interesting group of physicians involved in this patient's care throughout North America. And it was so, I was expecting, it was my first time. I'm the new expert. to the care team. And I was nervous, like really nervous going in. I used to travel so much

before COVID and being in Toronto that I was used to going heads to head with the likes of people like Steve Finney at like low carb Denver and Brookenridge. And, you know, so I had it. But I'm like, oh, it's been a while, you know, because stupid things shut down the stupid virus to shut down the world. I'm like, it's been a while. And I'm like, I have a feeling I'm going to get eaten alive. I was telling my husband in the morning. And he was like, good luck. And when I jumped in, you know, everybody, they did not want to hear about extended fast. Sure, okay. But, you know, even this, the one guy I thought I was going to get the most resistance from two, 30 hours, 36 hours, 48 hours. Go for it. You know, do it. Amazing. And I thought, okay, this is really cool. And then when

the conversation turned into nutrition, that got a little bit more political. But it was, you know, really about real, the nutrition focus was on real food. It's not, you know, let's them full of cereal, granola, bread, you know, processed and refined grains and other junk food became more about, you know, should we include butter or should we just stick to olive oil? I'm like, honestly, this is such a huge advance in the last 10 years from, you know, where we've been. I'm going to take this whole experience as a win right now. Yes. So no one should give the butter and ingredient.

Right. Exactly. Like, at least we're talking about fat, you know, so we're at least there. Do you feel like there is a benefit that people can get at 36 hours, 48 hours with fasting, that they can't get at 15? And how does somebody decide when to go into that longer fast? Absolutely. I don't think there's incredible health benefits.

of doing 15 hours of fasting or 16 hours of fasting. I mean, there is some for maintenance. So if you're out there and you are a healthy individual metabolically and you want to maintain that good metabolic health, there are benefits of doing, you know, somewhere between 14 and 18 hours of fasting on a regular daily basis. We know that it can help with certain metabolic cancers like breast cancer, certain types of breast cancer. We know that there's still some autophagy that cellular recycling for disease prevention and anti-aging happening. We know there is some hormonal checking, you know, that is occurring.

So there are, I think there are health benefits for healthy individuals to maintain. But when it comes to a lot of us here in North America, like, you're not healthy. One of my last talks before COVID, I was on a panel and Naderie, he said to me, you know, like, about PCOS rates. So I say nowadays, you know, if you're a woman, you have PCOS and it'll proven otherwise. You know, if you're following the standard North American diet, whether you're, you know, 10 years old or 85 years old, you know, it's a problem that you can plague women. So it is, it's complicated, you know, to sort of look at where we are today and say that most people are in good health.

There's a lot of people walking. Oh, yeah. Are thin on the outside, but are fat on the inside. Oh, yeah. When you're doing the hour, like, you know, when someone's got insulin resistance, the insulin's not even really starting to fall until like the 22 to 24 hour mark. So, you know, we've got to get it to fall. We've got to get the topogy happening.

We want to get that happening. We want to suppress the insulin for a longer period of time. We want to help the body become efficient at, you know, having that metabolic flexibility of transitioning. fuel sources. So we find the most, you know, bang for our buck is really sort of between the 24 and the 48 hour space with usually somewhere, you know, we do this 3016 protocol to help people build up their fasting muscles, which is a spin on the omad diet where you vary the meal that you're having. But most people do 36 to 48. I find how often? Two to three times a week.

Yeah, amazing. It's pretty cool. I find now that fasting is becoming a lot more popular. I don't know if you found this, but in 2016, myself and our colleague, Dr. Nadia Pataguana, on our team, she was the third person to join our team after Jason and I started. And she's like, it's a year of fasting burnout. It was the first year that we saw more of the public at large be really intrigued by fasting. We started to see very positive spins on it in the news. It started popping up on magazines,

you know, the checkout. And it's in our human nature. Okay, one day of fasting is good for us. Then if we fast for 365 days, it's better for us. So we saw these people trying to do five-day fast after five-day fast every single week. And their objective was to do it for like six months. And they were crashed and burned for so, like a whole variety of reasons, physiological, psychological, and it just wasn't, it wasn't good. We were about to, you know, rip out our hair. And we found, too, with some people, an alternate daily approach, like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday was just challenging logistically. So, and this is something I wish I did back in my own journey, too, was sort of the 248 hour fast a week. And I think we talked about this when you were so kind to be a guest in our community,

it's an incredible fasting regimen for so many wonderful health benefits that I know you've taught to your community. Yeah, I love the 48 hour. There's so many neurochemical shifts that happen. That's my favorite length. It's amazing for all those. And then something that from just like the clinical execution side of things, it's so easy for people to do. Yes.

Like it is just so easy. And for those who have communities that they eat with and that evening meal is, you know, very sacred, it's only twice a week where they're abstaining from that meal or they're trying to sit there, you know, with their water or their cup of broth and, you know, muddle their way through while individuals are eating or for the caregivers out there who are the cooks, you know, it's only two meals they're trying to do prep and cooking with on fasting days. And it's just such an effective fasting strategy for getting results, reversing diabetes, losing weight, proving metabolic markers in general. It's undeniable. I mean, to your point about you were nervous going in front of those experts, I was, I keep saying like, bring me any,

anybody who opposes fasting, bring them to me. I'll take them on in any debate because you look at the science and then you see how many fasting wins are. There are. It's just. hard, it's undeniable. You can't second guess those results. So have you heard of the thrifty gene hypothesis? No, I haven't. Okay, so I found this when I was doing research for Fast Like a Girl, and it is the hypothesis that went way back in the primal days, the cave person days, that one of the genes that was able to keep people alive were people that were able to go, long periods without food. So they had a genetic predisposition to being able to go for harsh winters and long times. So those are the ones that are survived. So that ones that didn't

have this gene, they died back then. So that gene has continued on through, you know, the generation, you know, thousands and thousands of years. And we still have that gene inside of us. So one of the beliefs, one of the research is that diabetes is happening because we're going against our own genetic desire. What do you think of that? No, I mean, it makes a ton of sense that it's happening. And I think it's, you know, something like diabetes is our body's way of knowing, or letting us know that we're doing something that's harmful to it.

And that we need to correct course. And if you think of type 2 diabetes is a dietary illness. And so you eat processed and refined, you know, carbs and fats, You get these huge spikes of insulin or then just the chronic stimulus of insulin through, you know, snacking and eating all day long. You know, why can't we reverse it by doing the opposite? And we clearly have thrive. I was a few years back. I was doing a, it was like a newspaper interview for some outlet in Texas.

And this woman, you know, born, raised, Texan probably saw snow on some vacations. But, you know, we were joking that it was minus 40 in Toronto that morning. And she was, you know, like living it up at like 85 degrees. I was going to say she was out by her pool. You know, she was going to giving me the question about, you know, this new fad. And I'm just looking out the window. And I'm like, lady, like, you know, if this was an earlier human times, like my options today would be bark and snow. And it's Toronto's.

It's going to be this way until the spring. You know, we still get snow in March sometimes, even in April every now and then. And then, sure, June, July, August, it's, you know, 80 to 100 degrees. And there's plants and whatnot and animals that are out of a hibernation and all this kind of great stuff. But, you know, this is a pressure's climate. Yeah, do you think then, this is a question that I've had in my mind for so long. So do you think then that we're meant to go into longer? fast in the winter? Like, do you think there's a seasonal variation that we should look at with our

fasting? I do. You know, we encourage the people that we work with to vary it up, you know, sort of with the seasons, or at least, you know, sort of with the holidays. Like, if you kind of want to use them as a guiding marker, like, through a lot of major religious practices, too, there's a feast and then there's a fast, or there's a fast, and then there's a feast and then there's a fast. So kind of rolling with the season. So right now September, this fall, you know, going into the holiday season, trying to do a lot of fasting. This is a time to do a bit of fasting, which kind of goes against what animals are doing right now

in terms of hibernating, but just really trying to plan the fasting kind of around the feasting schedule and teaching people to go through these ebbs and flows. So it's a little bit more different than, you know, sort of probably seasonal shifts. we would have done as a species, but just trying to, you know, recognize that there are these certain times in the calendar year where it's easier to fast and there are these certain times that humans have made it more difficult to fast. And that's okay. And it's about finding the balance between the two and then, you know, practicing good meal timing habits during the quote unquote feasting times. But, you know, really getting a balance of both. And, you know, the summertime,

perhaps is not the best time to do a lot of fasting. But then, you know, as we start, you to get into the fall. It's not too bad because we're not going to be depleted. The harvest is going to be there for us nowadays throughout the winter and there's these holidays that are going to be coming that are going to be feasting time. So we kind of do the opposite with some, you know, harvest time fasting. Yeah, I've thought about that a lot. Like if we're truly trying to go back to mimicking what our primal ancestors did, then we would eat less in the winter and we'd eat more in the summer because that's what nature is provided for us. Do you feel like what you break your fast with matters?

Have you guys experimented with that at all? Yeah, of course. So we find that once people become pretty seasoned fasters, for the most part, they can break their fast with whatever they like. And even people who are brand new to fasting, sometimes they can and sometimes they can. And I don't usually try to discourage people unless there's a very known reason why we would want to avoid any type of issue whatsoever. But if people are not terribly concerned about it, we try to say, okay, you know,

like let's stick to the real, you know, the real foods, you know, prioritizing some good proteins, some good healthy fats. If the individual eats fiber, non-starchy source, we don't want to spike the insulin right after ending a fast. So, and a lot of the time. So easing in a little bit? You feel like easing in? Yeah, it's kind of,

maybe longer fast. Yeah, it's not even, like every now and then someone will start with the 36 or 42 and they'll have some GI issues. Usually in those cases, we do find it's nuts or eggs. And those are things that I think are quick and easy for people to go to. And, you know, think of something like eggs or, you know, a good quality egg. Like, we've got some really great duck eggs upstairs. I know Mike's duck.

you know, from the neighborhood. And, you know, like they're, they're wonderful. So people say, oh, this is great. You know, I can, I'm breaking my fast. I can cook these in less than five minutes. There's one pan kind of, you know, meal. But those things can be a little bit difficult for people to digest. So, yeah, the first, the first three-day water fast I did, I broke it with scrambled

eggs. And then I just wanted to fall asleep. And I was like, I was, like, you could just tell my body was like, whoa, what did you just give me. And then after that, I experimented with like bone broth and things like that and did a much better approach. But it is interesting what you're saying about eggs. Do you feel like there's a microbiome change that happens with fasting? Because some of the research around that is really intriguing. Yeah, absolutely. I definitely do. I'll say I'm not as up to date on the research as I would have liked to be. But it is just pretty wild. We do see a lot of dumping too that can't

a gastric dumping. Well, someone is sometimes doing a fast. And these are people that are very symptomatic of like leaky gut and a lot of gut dysbiosis in general. And sometimes we'll take these individuals and just do straight bone broth and collagen fasting with them as compared to regular fasting. And we find that slow it down. Yeah, what do you see?

What do you see when you say you see the, like how would somebody know if they were dumping? It's like a ton. a ton of loose stools and a lot of drastic distress that can't necessarily be explained by big insulin falls. You know, maybe they've been doing a woman's been doing a ketogenic diet, a six-year-old woman's been doing a ketogenic diet for a few months. Real genetic diet, maybe a carnivore approach to a diet, very consistent with it. Their glucose levels are exceptionally stable. You know, their insulin, circulating insulin's not insanely high. But they've, they've had gut issues.

They've had a history of lots of antibiotic use in the past and others, like, steroid use for certain conditions. And they just, they're really struggling with the gut dysbiosis. And then finally, things seem to start to settle. Yes. We use the bone broth just to kind of help expedite the process. We found that to be good. Yeah, I found that, too, that bone broth can be a really good if you're, like, having a lot of adverse reactions. So have you seen people not do well in ketosis?

Like they either are detoxing a lot or they're, you know, mentally, like ketones should create GABA and should calm us. But sometimes when we throw somebody goes into ketosis, they start to really get edgy and irritable. And there's a lot of like detox reactions that I've seen. And I've been trying to figure out exactly what the body's doing. Have you guys seen that? Not too much till the ketone level start to get sort of, um,

you know, north of like five or six. And then people complain at the mental fog and the headaches and the lethargy and just the overall feelings of unwell. You know, with a lot of the patients we worked with in individuals, we've really focused a lot on the diabetic individual and they're so sick. You know, they've got 10,000 other conditions. They're used to feeling so awful that it hasn't really come up when they've not. necessarily been in the same. They don't notice it as much. What do you think is a good ketone level for a typical,

like we get this a lot of like, what's the number I'm shooting for? What do you feel like ketones should be at that is like a sweet spot? And where would you say, hey, this is a danger spot? I have asked this question a lot. So during a fast, you know, we really like to cap people kind of at like five with a fast or upwards of seven. But, you know, we let people know that I ketones are insulinogenic. You know, seven is not necessarily better for them. I do know individuals who have developed diabetic ketoacidosis with ketones of 5.6 and 5.7, even in the absence of abnormally high blood sugar levels.

We're talking like ICU hospitalizations. And usually between 5 and 7, most people don't, you know, feel fabulous at that point. So we try to buffer them. around, you know, once they started creeping up at five, and then we tell people to cut off their fast at seven. Do you give them, do you ever give them like a bone broth at that point and see if it kind of temporarily brings it down from that escalating number? Yeah, and it will often do it. So when the, when they start to notice, the ketones are, okay, we're getting to six here or perhaps not feeling the best. Well, actually, bone broth is a great thing to, to recommend.

And we'll sometimes ask people to do some physical activity, even if it is just, you know, doing push-ups off the side of their counter, like really managing their muscles. And, you know, driving those ketones down and spiking that glucose a little bit in the fasted state. And that can sometimes rescue a fast. I went to the gym once my ketones were 7.1. I was going through some mycotoxin issues that I didn't know at the time. and I was struggling with some adrenal problems, and I just was not doing the whole gluconeogenesis thing in the liver. So my ketones were shooting up.

I felt awful, but I would sometimes do a workout to drop them down to 4.5. And then I would start to feel really good, but it was the only way I was really able to liberate glucose in that particular state. So even I had to kind of put a pause on my fasting and focus on timership. meeting for about a year to figure to detox from the mycotoxin issue at the time but um i would i would rely heavily before i would put all the puzzle pieces together to do that physical activity so you not even encourage some individuals like just do laundry right like if you you know if you're feeling fine but just tired just do you know do laundry moving it you're engaging muscles you're bending

up and down you're squatting without even realizing it um and that's often enough just to blunt the ketones down and to have people start to feel better again. Yeah. Oh my God. That's such a good idea because you do see people when they go into ketosis. I always say ketones are healing. So the body's going to start to go into this amplified healing state. But a fever is healing too. So, you know, fevers don't feel good and sometimes ketones don't feel good either. So, you know about finding the right range, right range of body temperature, the right range of glucose, the right range of insulin, too much or too little of anything, you know, can be bad for you. So too little insulin's bad, too much insulin's bad, too little water's bad, too much water's bad.

I mean, it really goes with that homeostasis. Yeah. And, you know, in the diet world, I feel like we want to know, give me the magic bullet. Tell me the magic diet. Tell me the magic fast. And I'll just do it. And what I hear in everything you're saying and what I know you guys believe in and we teach is you got to find your path.

And you got to vary it. Because if we're going to go back to the primal example, they didn't have consistency with food and their fasting length. They did whatever they could get. So that's how our bodies are designed. And we really want the magic bullet as humans. It's really interesting like that. Everyone wants like a gray, you know, a black or white,

do this or do that. one standardized protocol. And it's just, it's not how, you know, we're meant to function. And we've got to, we've got to roll with the ebbs and flows. There's certain things, you know, when we tell people the mindset, strong crush it, you know, and the mindset's not necessarily there. Let's work on the meal timing. Let's work on the food quality.

And then we do see this kind of ebb and flow with the different seasons and different patterns in eatings we observe here in North America too. you. And, you know, if you do that and you're consistent at least about doing that, then you're going to end the year always in so much better health than you were at the beginning. So true. So true. Well, we're out of time, but I got to tell you, like, I could sit and have this conversation with you, like for hours. So let me finish up with, I always end it with this question because when we went into 2022, there was so much, like, frustration around the, the pandemic and people would lost sight of a key nutrient, which is gratitude.

And so do you have a gratitude practice? And if so, what is it? And what are you grateful for this year? So I do have a gratitude journal that I use every evening before bed. It's my husband's job to clean up the kitchen if we've had dinner. And I do my little daily stoic reading at the night instead of the morning. and I have a gratitude journal where this, you know, five things I'm grateful for. And it's a bit of a manifestation journal, too, because I'm working on developing a family.

And I guess, you know, this year I have weird amount in gratitude for all of the health hurdles that I've had because it's really enabled me to take control of my health. You know, I enjoy being a continuous student of this and always learning. but I wouldn't be here where I am today. And I think right before we started recording, I was telling you, you know, I had PCOS. I started cycling right before my 10th birthday. I thought, you know, when you're younger, you think you have all of the time in the world. I met my husband at 30.

We got married in my early 30s. He lived in the U.S. Like there was, we were immigrating. Life was really hectic. And, you know, oh, I'm 38 and I want to have kids. And, you know, so it's just like, okay, you know, I don't have the egg reserves. but because of my lifestyle, my egg quality is very good. So good.

Yeah. And so, you know, it's where we have to go through a little bit of hoops right now because we want to plan not just for this year, but for future years and in growing our family. So we're trying to be proactive. But I am just so, so grateful because if I didn't learn everything that I did over these last few years, I probably would not have good egg quality. And my reserves would be even more diminished than they are.

they even still existed at this particular stage. So I'm just feeling really grateful for that. You know, quantity might not be there, but quality is there. And that's what really matters at the end of the day. Yeah. And like I told you, it only takes one. And I really do believe what you just said is gold is that sometimes our biggest health hurdles actually end up becoming our biggest assets down the road.

So this was amazing. And again, we're going to bring you back. And you and I are going to go do lunch. So I'm going to make sure that that happens now that you live in my town. And just thank you and thank Jason for just all the amazing work you guys did. I mean, you really paved the way for people to see fasting. And we're just really grateful for you. How do people find you and what you all are up to?

Yeah. So all of the infos over on our website, the fasting method.com. So all kinds of free resources, link to social, link to podcast. and then as well as some of our, you know, coaching and community paid resources too. So everything will be up on that website. So check it out. And thank you so much, Mindy, for having me on. I look forward to connecting with you.

Yes. It's so great to have a true fasting friend in my neighborhood. You know what we're going to do is when we get together, we're going to eat. And then we're going to like take a picture and be like, you can be a fasting expert and eat too. You got to be having you, right? I love it. I love it. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode.

I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.