The Art of Manliness - Heal the Body With Extended Fasting

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.180 In the last several years, intermittent fasting, only eating for a short window each day,

00:00:15.920 has gotten a lot of attention, particularly for the way it can facilitate weight loss.

00:00:20.200 But as my guest will explain, going longer than a few hours or even a full day without

00:00:24.180 eating also has some striking, potentially life-changing benefits too, and may be able

00:00:29.200 to heal a variety of health issues. Steve Hendricks is the author of The Oldest Cure in the World,

00:00:34.440 Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting. He spends the first part of this conversation

00:00:38.380 offering a thumbnail sketch of the history of extended fasting as a medical treatment.

00:00:42.620 From there, we get into what emerging modern science is showing as to how prolonged fasts

00:00:46.920 lasting days or even weeks can prevent and even cure a variety of diseases, from type 2 diabetes

00:00:52.540 to rheumatoid arthritis. We then talk about fasting's effect on cancer and how it may address mental

00:00:58.000 health issues by offering a metabolic reset. If you're an intermittent faster, you'll be

00:01:02.420 interested to hear why it is you should ideally schedule your eating window for earlier rather

00:01:06.660 than later in the day. We end our conversation with how to get started with extended fasting.

00:01:11.340 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash fast.

00:01:14.500 All right, Steve Hendricks, welcome to the show.

00:01:32.900 It's so very good to be with you, Brett.

00:01:34.780 So you published a book called The Oldest Cure in the World, Adventures in the Art and Science

00:01:40.800 of Fasting. In this book, you take a deep dive into the history and into the science of using

00:01:47.900 fasting as a medical treatment. I'm curious, what was going on in your life where you wanted

00:01:54.000 to take this deep dive?

00:01:56.800 Yeah, I first got interested in fasting about 20 years ago, partly for the same reason a lot

00:02:02.000 of people get into it. I needed to lose weight, but partly because there was some very intriguing

00:02:07.720 research that showed that fasting made animals live longer, nearly twice as long in some cases,

00:02:14.620 and they live those long lives with a lot less disease as well. And the research suggested that

00:02:19.760 we might just be able to live longer and with less disease too if we fasted.

00:02:25.580 So I experimented with fasting and I wrote a bit about this. And about 10 years ago, I was approached

00:02:30.800 by a couple of publishers to write a book about the history and science of fasting. I said no.

00:02:36.420 Frankly, I thought that the history would bore me to death, but mostly, I just didn't think the

00:02:42.380 science was far enough along to make a compelling book about fasting as a medical treatment.

00:02:48.900 What changed was that over the last decade, the science of fasting has just blossomed in the most

00:02:54.500 beautiful way. I also started looking more deeply into the history of fasting, and it turned out to just

00:03:00.520 utterly fascinate me. And I had also, in this time, fasted quite a bit myself. And I'm certain that

00:03:06.760 fasting helped me recover my own health, which had taken a real nosedive in my 40s. I'm 52 now.

00:03:14.480 So a couple of years ago, I finally thought I had enough between the science, the history,

00:03:18.720 and my own experiences to make what I hope turned out to be a compelling book.

00:03:23.480 Well, let's dig into a bit of the history of fasting as medical treatment.

00:03:27.140 You start off talking about human beings have probably been fasting since human beings were

00:03:31.960 human beings, but it was probably unintentional, right? Cavemen maybe went days, weeks without food

00:03:38.160 because they didn't get a hunt or there was a famine. But in the historical record, when do we

00:03:45.660 see humans fasting? I'm intentionally fasting. I'm intentionally abstaining from food. When does

00:03:51.340 that start happening?

00:03:52.000 Yeah. Unfortunately, we don't have much evidence from archaeology, which is really good at showing

00:03:57.560 what people did, what they ate, for example, but not so good at showing what they didn't do,

00:04:03.360 like not eating. So the first strong evidence of intentional fasting shows up shortly after the

00:04:08.820 first writings emerge in various parts of Asia, Africa, Europe. Those first writing fragments date to

00:04:15.320 about 5,000, 6,000 years ago. And once we get fragments long enough to have sentences,

00:04:20.820 fasting shows up pretty quickly and does so all over the place in almost all cultures and religions.

00:04:27.640 Now, it was almost always religious fasting, not fasting for health, although most ancient people

00:04:33.660 wouldn't have made that distinction because they didn't view the body and spirit as separate.

00:04:37.760 But it's pretty safe to say that this fasting, which was quite intentional, was for the spirit

00:04:43.400 and not for health. And it dates, as I say, to the earliest human writing records that we have.

00:04:51.580 Okay. So fasting started off as a spiritual practice. When did we start seeing fasting not

00:04:56.080 just as a spiritual practice, but also as a medical treatment?

00:04:59.400 It really began with the ancient Greeks, specifically the Hippocratic writers 2,400 years ago.

00:05:05.120 There's a body of about 60 texts associated with Hippocrates, who probably wrote very few,

00:05:12.120 if any of them. They're the work of his disciples and family. But whoever wrote them, they're remarkable

00:05:17.500 because they're the first to say, disease isn't caused by supernatural phenomena. It's not caused by

00:05:23.580 evil spirits and so on. Diseases have natural causes that we can try to understand and can sometimes

00:05:29.780 treat. Unfortunately, there was a taboo on dissecting human bodies, so the Hippocratics couldn't 0.98

00:05:35.080 look under the hood and figure out how things worked. They just had no idea. So they concocted

00:05:40.260 all kinds of nutball theories about disease and how to cure it. A few of the Hippocratic writers

00:05:47.720 briefly mentioned fasting, but they just didn't know how to use it. So there's a text called

00:05:53.960 Aphorisms, for example, in which the writer said that spasms and hiccups could be cured either by

00:06:00.640 fasting or by not fasting, specifically overeating. And, you know, the reader sitting there wondering,

00:06:06.780 well, which the hell is it? Do I stuff myself or do I fast? Even so, one or two of the Hippocratic

00:06:13.260 writers were on to something. There's a writer of a text on acute illnesses, things like fevers,

00:06:19.420 colds, who suggested that fasting for a few days to treat those illnesses would be useful,

00:06:25.700 and who also suggested periodic fasts as a kind of reset for the body. But unfortunately,

00:06:33.000 his good advice was mixed up with all the chaos and craziness of early medicine. And fasting,

00:06:38.920 though it got its birth with the ancient Greeks, was never used rigorously or scientifically or,

00:06:43.620 frankly, usefully by the Greeks.

00:06:46.520 When did fasting really start picking up steam as a medical treatment? Was it after the Renaissance?

00:06:52.000 When did that start happening?

00:06:52.840 Yeah, you're right. Right after the Renaissance. It really was until the birth of a more scientific

00:06:57.920 outlook with the age of reason, so let's say 16th, 17th centuries, that finally sort of threw out all

00:07:04.740 the quackery that was medicine throughout pretty much all of recorded history to that point. But the

00:07:10.960 progress was really slow, so it wasn't really until the early 19th century that you start getting pretty

00:07:16.400 impressive accounts in the U.S. and Europe from doctors who began to notice that when there was,

00:07:21.960 say, an outbreak of typhus or yellow fever, their patients who refused to eat often did better,

00:07:29.240 usually did better, than their patients who ate. They also observed that patients who fasted did better

00:07:35.440 than patients who took their rudimentary medicines and their other crude treatments of the day, which

00:07:40.180 were things like bleeding and, you know, purging people to give them diarrhea and giving them

00:07:44.620 emetics to make them vomit and things like that. These early doctors who turned to fasting at this

00:07:50.760 time were really on to something that could have been deeply helpful to patients because medicine in

00:07:55.980 that era was still almost entirely quackery. Unfortunately, what happened is most other

00:08:01.740 doctors called these fasting doctors quacks. They just could not accept that conventional medicine

00:08:07.080 was, as it in fact was, doing more harm than good, and it was too counterintuitive for them to

00:08:13.640 understand that by not treating the body at all, that by taking away food, the body could heal

00:08:19.500 itself better than the doctors could with their so-called medicines. So conventional doctors kept

00:08:24.580 fasting well off to the margins, which unfortunately is a theme that has continued for the last couple

00:08:29.800 hundred years. And it makes sense why. I mean, you imagine the doctor is thinking, well, you know,

00:08:34.160 I'm here to treat the person. Fasting is like, I just, I'm not doing anything. It's like, why do you even

00:08:38.280 need me? And so I can see why, well, we're not going to do that because that requires me not to

00:08:43.100 use my services. It makes total sense, both from a very, you know, sort of practical economic view

00:08:49.040 and personal view of what you're talking about. The doctors, the doctor has come there to do the

00:08:53.280 healing. So the doctor wants to give a medicine and the patient, frankly, wants to receive a medicine

00:08:58.180 and be cured. But there's also this bigger thing going on where fasting is quite understandably deeply

00:09:05.020 counterintuitive. Everyone knows that food makes you healthy. You eat food, you feel better,

00:09:10.640 you grow up, you grow big and strong. Everyone knows that when you don't eat, you feel like crap, 0.98

00:09:15.800 you feel weak. And to think that this could actually help you, that there are repair mechanisms going

00:09:22.160 on when we stop eating. That's just a very foreign concept to people. And it's very understandable why.

00:09:28.680 So in the 19th century, you had some doctors experimenting with fasting as a medical treatment,

00:09:32.780 but what was happening to in the culture, there was just people, regular folks who were just kind of

00:09:38.480 doing individual experiments on themselves to help them get better. And then fasting also became

00:09:44.140 kind of, sort of like now, it was kind of like a fad, like people were seeing each other doing

00:09:49.720 fasting and I want to see if I can up this guy. And there's this guy you start the book of,

00:09:54.300 Henry S. Tanner. Tell us about this guy and what influence did he have on bringing fasting to the

00:09:59.840 wider culture? Yeah, he is the father of modern fasting for sure. Henry Tanner was what was called

00:10:06.100 an eclectic doctor, which would be something like a naturopath today. And he had experimented

00:10:11.200 on himself with fasting for a few days and also with his patients. In 1877, when he was living in

00:10:18.400 Minneapolis, he fell ill with what was probably a stomach flu. He said he had a rheumatic heart,

00:10:24.300 which is kind of a heart inflammation and something like a nervous breakdown, probably because his wife

00:10:30.160 had just ditched him and his medical practice was tanking. So Tanner decides he's going to fast

00:10:35.520 until he either cures himself or kills himself. And by one account, he didn't care what the outcome

00:10:40.680 was. At the time, men of science thought you couldn't go longer than eight to 10 days without

00:10:46.440 food. But as Tanner approached that supposedly fatal 10th day, he actually found his ailments dropping

00:10:52.800 away one by one. And eventually he felt so good that he, for example, resumed his daily walks. We're

00:10:59.160 talking like 15 or 20 mile walks. He ends up fasting 41 days. Word gets out about his fast and

00:11:06.160 he's widely ridiculed and called a liar. No one can believe that this has happened. So a few years

00:11:11.980 later, when an opportunity arose in 1880 to fast on a public stage in New York City, he took the chance

00:11:18.820 to redeem his reputation. And this fast in New York got enormous public attention, partly because he got

00:11:25.580 involved with a very personal duel of words with a famous New York doctor, a former surgeon general

00:11:31.080 of the United States who said all this fasting stuff with nonsense. And at first, the press and

00:11:35.920 public took that famous doctor's side and ridiculed Tanner too. But eventually, all the big newspapers sent

00:11:41.980 these tag teams of reporters to watch him 24 hours a day and report on him there on the stage of this

00:11:47.780 lecture hall where he fasted and slept and lived in full view of the public, who were just captivated,

00:11:54.520 especially after Tanner passed the supposedly fatal 10th day and was still alive. He was a huge

00:12:01.160 sensation, bigger than the presidential race that year. It was reported on not just in every newspaper

00:12:06.540 in the United States, but in great many newspapers in Europe, Africa, and Asia. He eventually fasted for

00:12:12.800 40 days. The trouble was, unlike in his Minneapolis fast, he didn't have any illnesses to cure in New York.

00:12:20.020 So while he had proved that you could fast for a long time without harm, and that was important,

00:12:24.520 he hadn't proved that fasting could cure anything. Still, the publicity that he got was so substantial

00:12:31.240 that it kicked off the modern interest in fasting, which eventually led people, including scientists,

00:12:38.960 to give fasting a much closer look. And we are still benefiting from that work, that showmanship

00:12:44.480 of Henry Tanner today.

00:12:46.120 Yeah. And you also talked about another guy that popularized fasting in America, a guy named Bernard

00:12:50.280 McFadden. We did a podcast about him a while back ago. That's episode number 624. If you want to check

00:12:56.240 it, this guy's crazy. He's just a crazy guy, but he was like the first fitness influencer. He had this 0.70

00:13:02.820 slogan that I love. It's like, weakness is a crime. Don't be a criminal. But he was really big into

00:13:08.900 fasting, and he helped popularize it. And then throughout the 20th century, fasting was still

00:13:13.780 kind of on the outskirts of traditional medicine. You said now, with the research that we have about

00:13:20.680 fasting, people are starting to take it more serious. Doctors are starting to take it more

00:13:23.440 serious. Let's talk about what some of this research is showing about the benefits of fasting

00:13:28.460 as a medical treatment. So for starters, what does a fast look like to get these benefits? So it sounds

00:13:33.820 like some of the things you've been talking about. This is not just a one-day fast. This is like

00:13:36.840 multiple-day fast, correct? Yeah. Basically speaking, there are two kinds of fasting.

00:13:42.880 There's daily fasting, which a lot of people call intermittent fasting, which is just narrowing

00:13:47.140 your eating window each day. And that has shown very impressive results for preventing diseases we

00:13:52.520 don't yet have. But then what we've mostly been talking about is prolonged fasting, which is fasting

00:13:57.440 for multiple days, even weeks. And that has been shown not just to prevent disease, but in many cases,

00:14:03.100 reverse diseases that we already have. And we're talking about some of our leading killers like

00:14:08.940 cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes or other conditions that are becoming epidemic like

00:14:14.200 irritable bowel syndrome or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So yes, research into such fasts for

00:14:22.260 such conditions has been growing and a few doctors are starting to recommend it.

00:14:27.460 And these are water fasts. You're drinking water, but you're just not eating, correct?

00:14:31.240 For the most part, yes. Fasting doctors in the US fast their patients on water only. In Europe,

00:14:37.880 most fasting doctors use a different form of fasting. It's called a modified fast. And people

00:14:42.980 take about 250 calories a day, mostly in vegetable broths. That's not too many calories that it will

00:14:50.120 bump you out of fasting metabolism, but it is enough calories that it gives you some energy. You're able

00:14:56.120 to do some things like hiking and you can have fewer side effects like headaches and nausea, which some

00:15:02.000 people get on a water only fast if it goes long enough. How long are some of these fasts? So,

00:15:06.700 you know, Henry Tanner went 41 days, like he bested Jesus. What's the longest fast that we know about?

00:15:13.560 Yeah. So you can fast as long as you have the fat stores to live on. So the longest fast on record

00:15:18.680 was a fast of 382 days by a Scotsman in the 1960s who weighed 456 pounds at the start of his fast.

00:15:28.840 He wanted to get down to 180 pounds. And after more than a year of fasting, he did so.

00:15:34.840 So what goes on in the body that allows for an extended fast like that? And sometimes you can not

00:15:39.680 only survive it, but you can thrive like this, you know, Henry Tanner, but other people talk about

00:15:43.880 10 days in their fast, they're feeling great. They can go on hikes. So what is going on physiologically

00:15:48.920 in our body in a prolonged fast that allows for that? Yeah. We survive by living off of our fat,

00:15:55.700 which is technically actually off a breakdown product of our fat that a lot of people are

00:15:59.660 familiar with now called ketone bodies. The body's preferred fuel is glucose. That's the sugar from

00:16:04.840 the carbohydrates in our meals. But when we go without food for long enough, the body will shift its

00:16:10.340 metabolism so that it can run on ketones. And in some respects, the body may even actually run more

00:16:15.620 efficiently on ketones. As it does so, the body turns on, when it gets into this fasting metabolism

00:16:23.180 of ketosis, it also turns on a bunch of repairs. And these are partly responsible for what allows us to

00:16:30.800 thrive while fasting. See, our bodies are these marvelous self-healing machines. They're constantly

00:16:38.040 making repairs all the time in our cells to spare us from disease. But they usually make these repairs

00:16:43.680 only at a very low rate because they're so busy most of the time doing all the other things that

00:16:48.640 make up our lives. And one of the biggest tasks is digesting our food each day, processing the

00:16:54.540 nutrients from that food, and putting the nutrients to work in cells all over our bodies. But when we give

00:17:00.420 our bodies a break from that immense labor, evolution has endowed ourselves with these beautiful

00:17:06.500 mechanisms that take advantage of the rest to ramp up cellular repairs. These are repairs like patching

00:17:13.120 up more damaged or miscopied DNA, which if not fixed could cause disease, and increasing the recycling of

00:17:19.880 cellular parts that have gotten worn out and could also cause disease if not fixed, or increasing the

00:17:25.360 antioxidants in our bodies that wipe out the free radicals that can damage our cells. When these repairs

00:17:31.660 go on during a prolonged fast, we see immediate, very healthy changes. High blood pressure drops and starts

00:17:38.220 to normalize. People who are insensitive to insulin grow more sensitive to it. The repairs that I'm talking

00:17:44.420 about do happen on the daily fasts with the narrowed eating window each day, but they really happen with

00:17:50.940 prolonged fasts of a week or multiple weeks.

00:17:54.180 And this sounds, I mean, again, people hear this, like this sounds counterintuitive. You can go

00:17:58.900 a year without eating and you're okay. Because I think a lot of people might have heard this about

00:18:04.480 this experiment. You talk about it in the book. It's the Minnesota starvation experiment, which

00:18:08.700 happened during World War II. The military just basically wanted to see what would happen if we

00:18:13.460 don't give a lot of food to our soldiers out in the battlefield. And so they took conscientious

00:18:18.780 objectors and there's an experiment on them and didn't feed them. And these guys didn't do very

00:18:24.020 well. So why was it like these guys in the Minnesota starvation experiment, why did they fare so poorly?

00:18:30.360 But that Scotsman guy who went a year without eating, he's okay. What's the difference between the two?

00:18:36.680 Yeah, great question. The problem is that eating half rations, which is what these guys were on,

00:18:41.520 for six months, they were eating 50% of their normal amount of calories each day.

00:18:45.940 And eating half rations is very different metabolically from fasting. So for a start,

00:18:52.260 there's the fact that when you're fasting and living on your own fat, the ketones that are the

00:18:57.320 breakdown product that you're actually using for fuel from the fat suppress hunger. They actually

00:19:02.040 suppress your hunger hormones. What drove these Minnesota starvation experiment people just half

00:19:08.180 crazy. I mean, one of them resorted to taking an ax to chop off some of his fingers in order to get

00:19:13.860 out of the experiment. And then was so confused, he couldn't explain why he thought this was the best

00:19:18.200 way of getting out of the program. But they were just driven half mad by hunger. So when you fast,

00:19:24.260 the irony is eating zero calories as opposed to eating 50% of your calories results in zero hunger.

00:19:31.500 So it's a much easier thing to maintain. But there's more than that. If you're eating as the men were in 0.81

00:19:38.460 the Minnesota experiment, even if it's just half rations, your body doesn't go into the repair

00:19:43.540 mode that it goes into when fasting, your body still has enough work to do processing those half

00:19:50.160 rations, that it doesn't have time to make all of these repairs. So you don't get fixes to your DNA,

00:19:55.820 you don't get a decrease in high blood pressure, an increase in insulin sensitivity, or a decrease in

00:20:01.060 body wide inflammation the way fasters do. So you might say that half rations is all pain and little gain,

00:20:07.760 whereas fasting is something like the opposite. So you mentioned some of the conditions that can

00:20:12.940 be treated by fasting. I'd like to go more detail about this. Let's talk about metabolic conditions

00:20:17.660 like type 2 diabetes. This is increasing significantly in the West and other countries that are starting

00:20:23.820 like a Western-type diet. So what happens in an extended fast that can help treat things like type 2

00:20:29.260 diabetes and things like that? Yeah, so scientists are still figuring out the mechanisms.

00:20:34.240 We know that fasting clinics report reversing as many as 80% of their type 2 diabetes cases with

00:20:41.140 prolonged water-only fasts, and a very large proportion of cases of other metabolic diseases

00:20:48.080 like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which hurts us by smothering the liver in fat and is becoming

00:20:53.340 epidemic. What we know so far is that when we fast, our bodies have this knack for burning a lot of the

00:21:00.900 most harmful fat first. The fat that seems to do us the most harm seems to be the visceral fat,

00:21:07.580 the belly fat, which is behind diseases like fatty liver. During a fast, we burn off way more visceral

00:21:14.640 fat than we do the other less harmful fat. Scientists also think that fasting does a great job of getting

00:21:21.020 rid of the fat inside of our muscle cells and inside of our liver cells, and this is the kind of fat that

00:21:27.080 causes type 2 diabetes. We often think of diabetes as a sugar disease, and in a way it is, but the

00:21:33.300 research is clear that the inability to tolerate sugar is much more of a symptom of diabetes and

00:21:39.060 not the cause. The cause is the fat inside our cells that makes the cell's insulin receptors

00:21:44.940 malfunction. So when insulin comes knocking at the cellular door and says, hey, let the sugar in,

00:21:50.820 that's insulin's job to move sugar out of our arteries and into the cells, the cells can't hear

00:21:56.780 insulin knocking at the door. So the sugar stays in our arteries where it dings them up, causes them to

00:22:01.880 harden, which leads to strokes, heart attacks, dementia, a bunch of other awful stuff. But once

00:22:07.380 you get rid of the extra fat in the cells, as happens on a fast, the cells become much more sensitive to

00:22:14.100 insulin, which is then able to move the sugar from our arteries into the cells. There are

00:22:20.320 undoubtedly other mechanisms at play, but one of the frustrations of fasting is as beautiful as the

00:22:27.160 science is that has blossomed in the last decade or two, we just don't know anywhere near as much

00:22:33.320 about it as we would hope to. Many, many, many mechanisms remain to be discovered, and that

00:22:38.300 includes for diseases like type 2 diabetes. So one thing that doctors have noticed with anyone who does

00:22:44.740 a prolonged fast is that their blood pressure drops. What's going on that allows blood pressure

00:22:50.680 drop during a fast? Yeah. So we have excellent studies going back 20 years that show fasting,

00:22:57.080 and just about every case that's ever been looked at lowers high blood pressure. One of the fascinating

00:23:02.120 things is if your blood pressure is normal, it doesn't lower it. So it appears to only be treating

00:23:07.460 disease. I mean, it'll lower your blood pressure a little, but not to a completely unhealthy

00:23:12.260 level or anything. It's not like you keep fasting, your blood pressure just drops out the bottom and

00:23:17.140 you die or anything. I don't think scientists really know why fasting has this effect. What they do know

00:23:23.720 is that the greatest drop in hypertension ever reported in the peer-reviewed scientific literature

00:23:28.960 came not from pills, came not from a conventional procedure, but from fasting for 10 days at a fasting

00:23:35.840 clinic. And in that study, the average drop in high blood pressure was 37 over 13 points,

00:23:41.660 which is like double or triple what most blood pressure pills can achieve. And the best news is the

00:23:47.780 sickest patients, those with the worst stage 3 hypertension, got a drop in their systolic pressure, which

00:23:54.700 is the top number in a blood pressure reading, of 60 points, 6-0. That is just off the charts. Conventional

00:24:02.560 medicine can't touch it. Unfortunately, we don't have, you know, much more data than that, but that's still

00:24:09.480 enough to go on. Even if you don't know the mechanisms behind it, right? You have, you know,

00:24:15.340 getting the cure, one would think would be great because most medical organizations will tell you

00:24:21.480 they don't have a cure for high blood pressure. And yet, despite this research having been in the

00:24:26.920 scientific literature for two decades and with follow-up studies and so on confirming these results,

00:24:32.580 most doctors who are dealing with hypertensive patients know nothing about it and do not suggest

00:24:38.280 that their patients look into it, which is quite a pity. Another contributing factor to cardiovascular

00:24:43.260 diseases like lipids, so cholesterol, triglycerides, what does fasting do to that stuff?

00:24:48.680 Does fantastic things for them. Again, both daily fasting and prolonged fasting. You find studies

00:24:55.920 where people are having their, you know, triglycerides and cholesterol drop 10, 20, 30, sometimes even 40 or 50

00:25:02.800 points. Sometimes when you do a prolonged fast, your triglycerides in particular, I think it is,

00:25:08.960 certainly some of your lipids will rise, which originally led some doctors to be concerned.

00:25:14.840 The rise appears to be temporary. It rises because you are mobilizing all your fat, your lipids,

00:25:21.440 your stored cholesterol, and so on. That gets into your blood. And after a few weeks, you know, after the

00:25:26.340 fast, it goes away and you end up quite usually with lower lipid readings than you had before.

00:25:32.800 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:25:41.740 And now back to the show.

00:25:43.880 So there's a lot of people out there that have autoimmune diseases, I think lupus,

00:25:48.260 rheumatoid arthritis, and this is a debilitating condition where you're basically your body's

00:25:52.340 attacking itself. Your body's immune system is attacking your body. And the treatment for this

00:25:57.440 is sort of, you can manage symptoms often, but then there's research that shows that fasting,

00:26:02.900 prolonged fasting can help with even autoimmune disease. Can you walk us through some of the

00:26:06.360 research and patient stories on that?

00:26:08.520 Yeah, you're right. The, you know, autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, as you

00:26:12.880 mentioned, ulcerative colitis, lupus, psoriasis, these diseases where the body is attacking itself,

00:26:18.080 the body seemed to calm down and the attacks lessen and sometimes even go away completely

00:26:23.580 when people do prolonged fasts. The best studied of these conditions is RA, rheumatoid arthritis.

00:26:31.300 There were a few pilot trials back in the 1980s that found when people with RA fasted,

00:26:37.240 their neutrophils calmed down. Now neutrophils are normally good things. They're white blood cells

00:26:42.700 that kill harmful bacteria. But in RA, they turn on the body, they attack the linings of the joints,

00:26:48.700 which lead to these really nasty, inflamed, often deformed, very painful joints. So finding this

00:26:55.460 mechanism and finding benefit from fasting, there was a more rigorous, randomized controlled trial

00:27:01.660 that was set up. Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of clinical research, a very good

00:27:06.700 trial. In that trial, a bunch of people with RA fasted for a week and then they ate a plant-based

00:27:12.700 diet for a year. Now the background for this is that we don't have a cure for RA. We've got

00:27:19.340 drugs with pretty terrible side effects that can slightly slow the progression of the disease, but

00:27:24.540 nothing that can reverse it. In this fasting trial though, both during the fast and then afterward on

00:27:31.300 the plant diet, the volunteers showed remarkable improvements. They had less inflammation, less pain,

00:27:37.460 less morning stiffness, better ability to grip things, and on and on. The control group who didn't fast

00:27:44.100 didn't improve at all. In fact, they got worse. Now this study was so convincing that in 1990, its

00:27:50.580 results were published in The Lancet, which is one of the world's most prestigious medical journals.

00:27:56.980 Now again, remember, we've got no conventional treatment that can reverse this disease,

00:28:01.440 and here the researchers had shown that fasting reversed it, but the medical establishment simply

00:28:07.260 couldn't accept it. They just roundly rejected it, forgot all about it if they ever paid attention to

00:28:13.020 it at all. To me, that's the real quackery, even though they were calling fasting quackery. The more

00:28:20.680 scientific approach would have been for the rheumatologists to heed the science presented in this very good

00:28:26.500 trial and advise their RA patients who've got nothing else to go to a fasting clinic.

00:28:32.480 So another area you explore how fasting can be used as treatment is cancer. And you start off the

00:28:39.320 book with the story about a woman who got diagnosed with cancer, and then she decides to go to this

00:28:44.680 fasting clinic in Northern California. And when I first started reading the story, I'm like, oh my gosh,

00:28:49.620 this sounds like Steve McQueen when he had cancer, trying all these treatments that ended up

00:28:54.500 probably speeding up his death. But this woman, cancer started going into remission when she started 1.00

00:28:59.460 this extended fast. So tell us about that experience and what the research is showing about fasting and

00:29:05.100 cancer.

00:29:06.340 Yeah, so this woman had follicular lymphoma, which is a cancer that attacks the lymphatic system.

00:29:12.320 And your note of caution is right, and I'll get to why we should be cautious in a moment. But in her

00:29:18.120 particular case, she went and fasted for, I believe it ended up being about three weeks at this fasting

00:29:24.040 clinic, and her tumors disappeared. She had some very good scans and so on that were done before

00:29:30.460 she went to fast and after she went to fast that could verify that these tumors went away. Now,

00:29:36.520 follicular lymphoma is a weird cancer. It's very slow developing. It can come and go. There are often

00:29:43.040 spontaneous remissions where the cancer looks like it's gone away, and a year later, two years later,

00:29:49.000 it comes back. Well, years past, her cancer never came back. So the doctors and researchers at this

00:29:55.040 clinic wrote up her case for a very important medical journal called the British Medical Journal

00:30:00.860 Case Reports, and it was published. When her cancer still didn't come back years later, they published

00:30:06.620 another study showing that it hadn't come back. It's now been eight years. I talked with her a few

00:30:13.000 months ago. She is still cancer-free. Now, so we think that fasting can, in fact, entirely eliminate

00:30:21.320 follicular lymphoma, at least in some patients. There are also very credible anecdotal reports. These

00:30:27.920 aren't published in the peer-reviewed literature, but they're credible, and they suggest that fasting

00:30:32.240 can slow or even reverse other cancers. But here's the catch. Temporarily, all right? The problem is that

00:30:40.400 cancer is crafty. It almost always finds a way around the hurdles that fasting throws up.

00:30:46.460 So most people, if they've got cancer and they go to fast, they may get some good result from a

00:30:51.820 little while, but they're probably going to end up dead if that's all that they're relying on.

00:30:56.660 We have no evidence that fasting can reverse the great majority of cancers in humans, though it's

00:31:02.380 possible we will find some more because we do have evidence that it can reverse certain cancers,

00:31:07.480 in lab animals. But it's really hit and miss, like fasting can completely retard, eliminate one form 1.00

00:31:16.340 of leukemia in mice, but not another form of leukemia in mice, and scientists don't really know why.

00:31:23.380 What they're excited about and where they think fasting's real promise seems to lie for cancer

00:31:27.960 is in using it as an adjunct to conventional treatments like chemotherapy. Because scientists

00:31:34.020 have found that prolonged fasting does indeed weaken some cancers, and it does this by starving them of

00:31:40.240 their preferred fuel, which is glucose, which obviously is gone during a fast. Fasting also

00:31:46.180 tamps down on the growth factors that cancer hijacks to divide and spread. And fasting also ramps up the

00:31:53.640 body's immune cells that attack cancer. So that's all really good news. Now, at the same time,

00:31:59.400 when a cancer patient fasts for just a few days, their healthy cells go into a protect and repair

00:32:05.900 mode. They kind of hunker down and they lick their wounds. So when cancer patients fast and then get

00:32:11.980 chemo or radiation, their healthy cells do a better job at repelling the devastating effects of those

00:32:18.080 treatments. So their cells either aren't as badly hurt, or do a better job at quickly fixing whatever

00:32:24.500 damage it is that they suffer from those treatments. The result, and this is the headline here for chemo

00:32:30.960 and radiation patients, is that they have far less nausea when they fast a few days around their

00:32:36.100 treatment. They have far less vomiting, less diarrhea, fewer headaches, less fatigue. That is just huge.

00:32:43.360 But the final piece of it, which may be even better, scientists are still trying to figure this piece

00:32:48.740 out, is that during the fast, the patient's cancer cells, unlike the healthy cells, which are hunkering

00:32:54.640 down, the cancer cells pay no attention to the fast and they continue with their single-minded mission

00:33:00.040 to grow at all costs. They just keep gobbling up any and all inputs, including the chemo. Because the

00:33:05.880 fast has already weakened the cancer, the chemo may kill more of the cancer cells. And since the healthy

00:33:11.980 cells are better protected and the cancer cells are more vulnerable, doctors should be able to give

00:33:17.860 higher doses of chemo to kill even more cancer without killing the patient. And that, at least,

00:33:24.800 is what happens in mice. And we have trials underway now to see if the same will hold true in humans.

00:33:31.260 So again, this is a prolonged fast. I think the way you described it, when chemo patients do

00:33:35.080 try to combine fasting with the chemotherapy, they might do like a 36-hour fast before their chemo

00:33:41.000 treatment and then like another 24 hours after the treatment, correct?

00:33:44.500 Pretty close. They tend to be 48 to 72-hour fasts before the treatment and then 24 hours

00:33:51.500 after the treatment. And there's a very prominent researcher at the University of Southern California

00:33:56.800 named Walter Longo, who has come up with a fasting-mimicking diet for people who are scared

00:34:02.580 of fasting or don't want to fast that gives you a few calories. It's 200 or 300 calories a day,

00:34:07.820 very specially calibrated so that if you want to have a little bit of food to see you through that,

00:34:13.560 you can do that. So it's fasting. We're fasting-mimicking diets for a few days before and

00:34:17.820 one day after.

00:34:18.920 And is the research ramping up on this with fasting and cancer?

00:34:22.800 Yeah, it's huge. Now, the catch is, so Longo, who I think is a fantastic researcher,

00:34:28.660 he's really just done some of the most amazing work. When he was trying to put his trials together,

00:34:34.920 he found that oncologists and patients were extremely reluctant to fast. I mean, you can

00:34:41.020 understand this. People who, many of them, most of them probably have no experience with fasting

00:34:46.020 and they're, you know, saddled with cancer, which is horrible. And then they're told they're doing

00:34:50.900 chemotherapy, which is all the worse. And then you ask them to fast on top of it, they just completely

00:34:56.840 freaked out. And so he had a very hard time convincing oncologists and patients to go along,

00:35:02.140 which is why I think wisely he came up with the fasting-mimicking diet. The catch is this,

00:35:07.420 you can make a lot more money off a fasting-mimicking diet, a product that you can sell

00:35:11.920 for a couple of hundred bucks for, you know, four days or so, than you can off just telling people

00:35:17.420 not to eat. So almost all the research into fasting and cancer treatment is going into actually

00:35:25.200 fasting-mimicking diets and cancer treatment because the company that's, you know, behind the diet

00:35:30.780 wants to do that research. Fasting clinics don't have a lot of extra money. They're not doing this

00:35:36.020 kind of research, even though they are doing a little bit of research. So there's a shortage,

00:35:40.960 I think, of actual research into actual fasting for cancer. And, you know, knock wood,

00:35:46.440 that will be remedied someday.

00:35:48.060 So you mentioned that fasting has been shown, or prolonged fasts have been shown to help us live

00:35:53.320 longer. What's going on there?

00:35:55.420 Yeah. So when we fast, the biomarkers for longevity move in the right direction, often in a big way.

00:36:02.060 Some of these biomarkers are ones that we've talked about, like lower blood pressure, greater insulin

00:36:06.760 sensitivity, and so on. But some of the markers are quite specific to longevity. There's a gene called

00:36:13.440 SIRT1 that's sometimes called the longevity gene because of several things that it does, like making

00:36:19.700 more antioxidants or protecting our telomeres, which are the protective tips that keep the ends of our

00:36:25.820 DNA from unraveling, like the plastic tips on the ends of our shoelaces. In one study, when volunteers

00:36:32.600 ate for just four days in a daily fasting pattern, in this case, they were eating for six hours a day

00:36:39.020 in the morning and early afternoon, and then fasting for the other 18 hours, the activity of SIRT1

00:36:45.080 increased by 10%, which is an astonishing gain for just four days of changing not a thing about what

00:36:52.460 they ate, only when they ate. Even bigger was an increase in the recycling of worn-out cellular parts.

00:37:00.380 That process, which some of your listeners probably know, is called autophagy, which protects us from

00:37:05.160 disease. One marker for autophagy in this four-day study increased by 22%. That is just simply astounding.

00:37:13.680 Again, not a single change to their diet, only a change in when they ate the same foods that they

00:37:19.820 would have eaten otherwise. So, scientists believe that increases in these kinds of markers will

00:37:25.880 eventually translate into longer life. They will result in less disease, and they shouldn't result

00:37:31.460 in more longevity, though, of course, it would take, you know, a 120-year study for us to verify that.

00:37:36.900 So, it's partly speculation, but it's really well-grounded speculation.

00:37:40.620 So, we've been talking about extended fasting's effect on our physiology. It could be autoimmune

00:37:47.520 diseases, diabetes, cancers. What does the research say about extended fasting and mental health?

00:37:54.040 Yeah, this is another area where we need far more research, but what we do know is extremely

00:37:58.260 intriguing. The best work on this was done clinically by a Russian psychiatrist named Yuri Nikolaev

00:38:04.560 between about 1948 and 1990. Nikolaev decided that the barbaric treatments of the day, things like

00:38:12.180 electroshocks, were more harmful to mental patients than helpful. And he had grown up fasting now and

00:38:18.920 then, so he decided to give this a try on his patients at the large mental hospital in Moscow where he

00:38:25.100 worked. And the results were spectacular. We're talking hardcore schizophrenics, institutionalized

00:38:32.020 people who were very severely deranged, who seemed to be beyond all help, often recovered with fasts of

00:38:39.840 about three weeks. Nikolaev ended up fasting about 10,000 patients, and many of them, I think the

00:38:46.420 majority, became completely normal and resumed healthy, happy lives. And he maintained their remissions

00:38:52.980 by having them eat a vegetarian diet and doing periodic maintenance fasts of a few days here and there.

00:38:59.940 Now, he didn't have the research to say why fasting helped them. And even today, we don't have a ton

00:39:06.480 more, but we do know a few things. For example, one of the ketones that's burned for fuel and fasting,

00:39:13.100 it's called BHB, beta-hydroxybutyrate. This ketone increases something called brain-derived

00:39:19.660 neurotrophic factor, BDNF. BDNF is important for our brains because it grows new neurons, it maintains

00:39:26.860 existing neurons, and it forms new synapses between neurons. So when we fast, we get all these benefits

00:39:33.820 in our brain. Fasting also increases the amount of feel-good hormones we have circulating, like

00:39:40.720 endorphins, and what might be called feel-good neurotransmitters, like serotonin and endocannabinoids,

00:39:48.460 which is like your body's own cannabis. So we have a few details, they're all very encouraging,

00:39:54.180 but we are a very long way from understanding all of this.

00:39:57.900 Yeah, and you provide stories. These are all, again, you got to be clear, these are anecdotal

00:40:01.000 stories from doctors who were treating patients with mental health problems. Like I think there

00:40:06.000 was one, there was a woman who was just severely depressed and she didn't want to eat. And the 0.99

00:40:09.800 doctor was like, okay, well, just don't force her to eat, just give her water. And she basically 0.96

00:40:14.340 started this unintended extended fast and a week or two weeks into it, like she started feeling better

00:40:20.320 and she was fine after that.

00:40:23.300 You're right. And these are just anecdotes. It's a good thing to remember. These are not

00:40:29.240 randomized controlled trials. However, when the weight of the anecdotes piles up over 150 years

00:40:36.780 of fasting doctors recording what they've seen and patient after patient, for instance,

00:40:41.960 in mental institutions who refuse to eat, get better, it should, to the scientifically-minded

00:40:48.780 researcher or doctor, pique their interest in, well, I don't know, this is really strange,

00:40:56.060 but why don't we put it to the test and try a trial and see what happens? Unfortunately,

00:41:01.540 it is so counterintuitive that that sort of scientific part of the doctor's and scientist's

00:41:06.940 brain just goes out the window. They can't even see the evidence before their eyes. But it is

00:41:12.620 important to note, as you say, these are anecdotes. There could be something else going on there,

00:41:17.380 but it seems awfully likely to be the case that it is the fasting that is bringing about these changes.

00:41:23.140 Well, in the section on fasting, it reminded me of a recent podcast we did with Dr. Chris Palmer.

00:41:28.960 He is a Harvard psychiatrist. He just came out with a new book where he lays out his theory that

00:41:33.880 all mental illness, whether it's depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, addiction, the underlying

00:41:40.880 cause is a metabolism issue. And so it made me think that fasting helps improve our metabolism

00:41:47.980 because it just basically allows our metabolism to reset. So maybe that's what's going on with

00:41:53.400 fasting and mental illness. It's just helping our metabolism improve.

00:41:57.120 Yeah. Palmer's theory is certainly provocative and interesting. It's certainly possible. I mean,

00:42:03.020 our psychology is so complicated. I mean, your metabolism can be great,

00:42:07.300 but if, you know, I don't know, you live in a war zone or something, you may well be depressed.

00:42:12.820 You know, I have found one of the problems that I had for most of my adult life was clinical

00:42:18.560 depression. And I had been on antidepressants for a quarter of a century. And I thought, well,

00:42:25.760 gosh, wouldn't it be interesting if I tried going off my antidepressants? Now, for the previous

00:42:30.580 25 years, anytime I had done that, I would last about three or four months and I would completely

00:42:36.660 crash. It was just, you know, grim times. This time, however, when I tried it, I didn't crash.

00:42:43.140 It's been almost four years now that I've been off antidepressants, the longest that I have

00:42:48.100 ever been off antidepressants before. And I do think it has a great deal to do with exactly what

00:42:53.720 you're saying. Some metabolic reset that we don't yet understand that happened in my fast.

00:42:58.320 And then that I maintained, and this is another important part, by changing my diet to a far

00:43:04.320 healthier diet. Because you have to ask yourself, well, look, if the condition gets better when we

00:43:09.460 take the food away, is it possible that there's something in the food itself that might be causing

00:43:15.380 this illness? And researchers like Christopher Palmer, who you mentioned, are on the forefront of

00:43:21.960 trying to look at what these nutritional contaminants, for lack of a better word, are,

00:43:28.120 is that throws off our nutrition and throws off our metabolism and contributes to, for some of us,

00:43:34.760 our mental illness.

00:43:36.180 You also mentioned that when we eat, when we do eat, can have a big impact on our health.

00:43:41.900 Talk more about the research there, like how the time we eat can either be detrimental or help us.

00:43:46.600 Yeah, this is really new and really exciting research, just in the last decade, some of it

00:43:52.580 just in the last couple of years. And to summarize it, scientists have found two very important

00:43:58.580 things. The first is that our bodies make more repairs during our overnight fasts, right? We all

00:44:04.620 fast overnight. It's just a question of how long. Well, our bodies make more repairs during those fasts

00:44:10.220 when we fast for at least 12 hours each night, which of course then means limiting our eating

00:44:15.840 to no more than 12 hours a day. These repairs increase dramatically if we limit our eating even

00:44:22.440 further, cutting our eating window down to eight or even six hours a day. That's why you see so many

00:44:28.100 people these days following, say, a 16-8 eating pattern, where they're eating for eight hours a day

00:44:33.980 and fasting the other 16. I mean, actually, most of them are probably doing it to lose weight,

00:44:38.400 but a bunch of them are doing it because they're aware that it steps up our repairs.

00:44:43.500 The second big recent finding, and this one almost nobody knows about, is that our eating window is

00:44:49.540 far healthier if we put it in the morning and early afternoon. See, most people who practice daily

00:44:55.560 fasting do, as I did when I first started it, they skip breakfast. They want to eat dinner, so they start

00:45:02.200 eating around 11 a.m. or noon, and they knock off after dinner maybe around seven o'clock. That's the way I

00:45:07.300 did it for a couple of years. But it turns out that our circadian rhythms have hardwired us to process

00:45:14.300 food most efficiently in the morning and early afternoon, and we get worse and worse at it as

00:45:19.920 the day goes on. By nighttime, we're frankly pretty terrible at processing nutrients. So when we eat

00:45:25.980 later in the day or at night, nutrients linger in places where they shouldn't, and our overnight

00:45:32.680 repairs become interrupted, and there seems to be just nothing we can do to change this circadian rhythm

00:45:39.220 that governs all of these processes. So from these two findings, researchers think that the healthiest

00:45:46.060 eating window, the one that will maximize our literally vital overnight repairs that our bodies

00:45:52.220 make each night, is a window that starts about an hour or two after we wake up and continues for about

00:45:58.500 six hours. So for many people, that would be something like an eating window from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.

00:46:06.000 Now, I know that that sounds crazy, and believe me, I hated hearing this news because I just loved

00:46:12.040 eating late. I nearly always skipped or skimped on breakfast, and I did not want to try this, but I

00:46:18.180 wanted to follow the science, and so I experimented. And as I describe in the book, I actually found it was a

00:46:23.600 surprisingly easy change to make, as if my body had kind of been waiting for me to be eating in sync

00:46:30.260 with its circadian rhythms for half a century, and, you know, hooray, I finally got around to it and had

00:46:35.200 more energy and many other benefits. But I will say this, of course, most people want to eat dinner.

00:46:42.040 Most people with their work schedules will need to eat dinner. And for these folks, scientists think

00:46:46.100 there may be a compromise. Scientists say that you can probably get a lot of the same health benefits of

00:46:52.300 eating in an early window if you just take the great majority of your food each day in that early

00:46:57.780 window. So doing most of your eating before mid-afternoon and then trying to keep your dinner

00:47:02.900 early and light. So it turns out that the adage coined in the last century to eat breakfast like

00:47:09.820 a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper was actually good advice.

00:47:16.440 So people who are listening to the show about this extended, prolonged fast and think,

00:47:20.440 I might want to try that. Is this something you need to do under medical supervision?

00:47:25.840 Yeah. So fasting doctors have mixed opinions on how long people can safely fast without medical

00:47:32.480 supervision. And we don't have great research to say, so we're really reliant on the fasting

00:47:36.800 doctor's clinical experience. Some of them say if you're in good health, you've got no diagnosed

00:47:42.320 conditions, you don't suspect any illnesses, you're on no medications or supplements, you can safely

00:47:48.600 fast on your own for up to a week. Other fasting doctors say, well, there are some people out there

00:47:54.360 with very rare disorders. People, for example, who can't process the byproducts of the fat that

00:48:00.400 they'll burn during a fast. And these people could end up in a coma or even die. Now they're really few

00:48:07.260 and far between, but they do exist. So some doctors think that no one should fast on their own

00:48:12.280 for more than about a day. Now, where all doctors agree is they say that if you do have a medical

00:48:19.240 condition, you're taking some meds or something like that, you should never fast without medical

00:48:24.140 supervision. And I think they're wise to say that because lots of things can happen to people who

00:48:29.760 aren't in great health when they fast. Even if you're healthy, none of the doctors recommends fasting

00:48:34.540 on your own for more than a week. Because even healthy people can run into trouble on a fast,

00:48:39.220 and an experienced fasting doctor should be examining you physically each day, checking your

00:48:45.000 pulse and things like that, testing your blood and urine periodically, and doing other things that

00:48:49.960 will help the doctor spot trouble signs that may come up. Those are all the caveats. So that said,

00:48:57.860 if you are in fact healthy, you're not on meds, you can just stop eating and see how it goes. But there

00:49:03.420 are a couple of things you need to be aware of, and I'll just try to very briefly mention them.

00:49:07.640 The first is that you have to drink lots of water to stay hydrated, like half a gallon or more a day.

00:49:14.460 And the second is you need to be aware that the greatest danger of prolonged fasting isn't what

00:49:19.700 people usually think it is. It's not usually, you know, damage to your heart or your liver or

00:49:23.960 something. It's fainting. Because when you fast, as we discussed, your blood pressure will drop.

00:49:29.300 That usually starts about a day or two into the fast. And if you stand up too quickly,

00:49:33.620 your blood may not stand up with you and get to your head quickly enough, and you can faint.

00:49:39.540 Very simple remedy. Fasting doctors advise that you just pump your legs before you stand up to

00:49:44.800 get the blood flowing. Then you stand up in stages, but just be ready on a moment's notice to sit right

00:49:52.340 back down if you feel lightheaded. You do that. Most people, almost everyone, is safe on a week-long

00:49:58.420 fast who are healthy. Should you do this on a vacation or like a week-long week? Let's say

00:50:03.080 you want to do like a three-day fast. Would it be good the first time you do it like on an extended

00:50:06.740 three-day weekend? Yeah, so it's highly variable. That's the way I would do it. I would try doing

00:50:12.820 it at a time where I can rest and I don't have to work. Some people, when they fast, they get more

00:50:17.860 energy. You know, writers, artists, composers talk about, you know, creating their whatever it is

00:50:24.040 they're creating and just a flurry during their fasts. If you have that kind of response to a

00:50:28.920 fast, heck, you may, you know, just do it during the work week. However, a lot of people feel extremely

00:50:35.820 tired, exhausted, you know, just the whole sort of catalog of being worn out. For those people,

00:50:41.920 I think you'll want to do it on a weekend. You know, part of the answer is it depends on why you're

00:50:46.580 trying to fast. If you're trying to fast just because you're interested in seeing how it goes,

00:50:51.080 or you want to get some of these repair and maintenance benefits, but you don't have an

00:50:55.540 illness or something, you may not need rest as badly as someone who's actually trying to cure an

00:51:01.420 illness. So, if that's you, fasting doctors recommend resting the body in order to give your

00:51:07.620 body, you know, if you're not moving around, your body has fewer functions to attend to. The theory is

00:51:13.520 it can attend to those repairs more. So, you know, depends on why you want to do that fast.

00:51:18.980 What does your fasting protocol look like right now?

00:51:21.640 So, I do a daily fast every day at just my normal eating pattern where I eat from most days about

00:51:27.780 eight in the morning till oh, two, three in the afternoon. And I'm flexible about it. I will,

00:51:33.520 you know, if we're having friends over for dinner or something, I'll eat at the normal dinner time.

00:51:37.700 And then I do a prolonged fast about every six months of approximately a week on my own at home.

00:51:44.400 And every so often, I want to, I don't want to fast for more than a week on my own because I don't think

00:51:50.800 it's especially safe. And so, every so often, I want to go to a fasting clinic and maybe try fasting

00:51:57.100 for a couple weeks. But that would be about every, say, two, three years. See, as I mentioned, my health

00:52:03.320 was terrible in my 40s. And I do credit fasting and my dietary change with helping me get my health

00:52:09.580 back. But it's only been, you know, two, three, at most four years that I've really started to feel

00:52:14.880 healthy. And I feel that the fasting, or at least I should say, I hope that the fasting, and I think

00:52:20.600 the research supports this hypothesis, at least, will help me maintain these gains. I sort of still

00:52:27.000 see myself as a recovering sick person and not a fully healthy person. If I were in perfect health,

00:52:33.100 I would probably only do a prolonged fast once a year for about a week, call it good, and then just

00:52:38.480 do my daily fasting. Well, Steve, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn

00:52:42.520 more about the book and your work? Thanks. My website is probably the best place. And that's just my

00:52:47.540 name, stevehendricks.org. The book is a narrative about fasting. It's not a how-to, though you can

00:52:55.400 get a lot of how-to information out of it. But to help people who want even more how-to than is in

00:53:00.440 the book, on my website, there is a frequently asked questions page. And people have, I think,

00:53:05.000 found that pretty helpful. They're, gosh, I don't know, 10,000 words of answers to the most common

00:53:10.160 questions I get about how to fast, mostly. So those would be the places to start.

00:53:15.700 All right. Well, Steve Hendricks, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:53:17.960 It's been great, Brett. Thank you so much.

00:53:20.680 My guest today was Steve Hendricks. He's the author of the book, The Oldest Cure in the World. It's

00:53:24.260 available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at

00:53:27.760 his website, stevehendricks.org. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash fast,

00:53:32.300 where you find links to resources, where you delve deeper into this topic.

00:53:41.840 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at

00:53:45.760 artofmanliess.com. And while you're there, sign up for our newsletter,

00:53:48.960 artofmanliess.com slash newsletter. Get the daily update or the weekly digest,

00:53:53.040 and it's completely free. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one

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00:53:59.620 that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who would

00:54:03.800 think we get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time,

00:54:08.180 this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've

00:54:12.880 heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - January 09, 2023

Heal the Body With Extended Fasting

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