Fasting Hacks You Need to Know About – With Dave Asprey

Fasting Hacks You Need to Know About – With Dave Asprey

Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:00:00] Welcome to season two of the resetter podcast. So I am so excited about the interviews that we are rolling out to you all this year. We have looked at your reviews. We’ve listened to the people you wanted to meet, to speak with. We have seen the needs of our community as far as information that would benefit your health and your life.

[00:00:22] And we’ve reached out to some of the greatest health thought leaders that we know. So this season, last year was amazing and we are so grateful for all of you that share our in these episodes out. But I got to say this season is going to take it to a whole nother level. So we are rolling out the season with some of the greatest minds and we are just so thankful for all of you who listen and download and share this information.

[00:00:51] And one thing that would be incredibly important for us is let us know who else you want us, me to talk to leave us a review. Let us know who your favorites have been. Let us know who you’d love to hear me talk to, let us know about the information that you need because the resetter podcast is for you.

[00:01:10] This, we do this for you, and it’s important to me. It’s important to Jessica, to my team, that you’re getting the information that makes a difference in your life as hopefully you can probably tell, I like deep conversations. I don’t want to stay surface level. I want to go into the nitty gritty with people.

[00:01:28] I want to get the best information so that that information literally changes your life. So your feedback is massively important to me. So go leave a review. We’d love to hear from you and welcome to season two. I am a woman on a mission that is dedicated to teaching you just how powerful your body was built to be.

[00:01:51] I like to do that by bringing you the latest science, the greatest thought leaders and applicable steps that help you tap into your own internal healing power. The purpose of this podcast is to give you the power back and help you believe in yourself. Again, my name is Dr. Mindy Pelz, and I want to thank you for spending part of your day with me today on the resetter podcast.

[00:02:15] We’ve got Dave Asprey. So. For those of you that don’t know who Dave Asprey is. He is the father of biohacking and he has a new book out called fast this way. And this episode is about all of his science-based hacks for fasting. And I got to tell you, I have spent a lot of time researching, fasting, talking to fasting experts and Dave brought.

[00:02:42] Whole new level to the conversation around fasting. So I am really excited to share this with you guys. There are, if you are into building a fasting lifestyle, there are some incredible hacks you’re going to learn here. Not only is Dave hysterical, and you’re going to find a couple of times he got, put me into some tight, conversational corners and had me laughing, but you’re going to.

[00:03:06] See that the man is definitely built. His knowledge is built around an incredible understanding of the human body. And now we are all blessed to know his fasting hacks to walk the fasting path with him. And it brings me a tremendous amount of joy to bring to you guys, Dave Asprey, and an incredible conversation on fasting.

[00:03:30] Here was my big aha. When I started to look at your book, you open up the book with you going on a four day fast in a cave. And what I didn’t understand was had you fasted prior to that, or did you just get thrown into a cave and started fasting for four days? Cause that sounds like the most brutal way.

[00:03:51] So approach fasting.

[00:03:53] Dave Asprey: [00:03:53] Well, I. Had done some types of fasting. This is after I had discovered a Bulletproof coffee and quite often I would do what I now recognize is intermittent fasting where in the morning. Okay. I’m just doing this, but I hadn’t quite connected the dots, so, Oh wait, you do get autophagy.

[00:04:11] You do get the benefits of fasting. Uh, at least many of them, not the identical ones, but most of the benefits of it. Um, so I, I was doing it, but I still didn’t have the mindset around fasting, uh, that I do now. So we’ll say it was the early days and I had never done a four day fast, certainly like a four day water fast.

[00:04:28] Uh, and I, you know, in, in Peru, when did Iowasca in the late nineties before, uh, before they thought tourists, whatever want to do that, they’re like, Dave, You’re white. I’m like, yeah, I know. But like, like you’re gonna throw up, don’t do this. I want to try and plant medicine because you know, I, I, there’s a rich history here and I would like to explore, so yeah, you fast for a day for that, but it’s different because you know, you’re in a tent and there’s a guy with rattles and stuff.

[00:04:51] So no, I was, I was new to

[00:04:52]Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:04:52] Okay. So what was that experience like? Because we’ve watched a lot of our community go into these long fasts and it can be quite brutal.

[00:05:00] Dave Asprey: [00:05:00] Well, in the book, I talk about a spiritual fast as something that is meaningful and it’s different than the benefits of fasting that a lot of us are looking for.

[00:05:11] So you could say like, I want to fast to improve my gut. I’m going to ask because I don’t want to be old. I don’t remember metabolism to work. Right. I want to be wise as I age, but I don’t want my body to be old. Right. And you, you go through all these different things, but sometimes you’re fasting for spiritual and emotional and psychological awareness and they’re just different things.

[00:05:30] Uh, so I, I went in there and said, look, I have a fear that I’ve identified. Cause I worked through my personal developing work. I’m afraid of being alone and puts, makes me choose to be in bad relationships. That’s not good. I also know because I weighed 300 pounds. I have a fear of being hungry because they told me if you don’t eat six times a day, you’ll go into starvation mode.

[00:05:49] And I know very well because I know what happens. If I don’t eat, I get hypoglycemia. I start yelling at people and it’s like, that’s your fault? And these are real things that affect real people. I know because they affected me. Yep. And as we’re here now, I haven’t had anything yet today we’re recording around five o’clock and it’s just cause I had other stuff to do.

[00:06:10] It’s not costing me to fast today, but there are many times in my life where this would have been, Oh my God, it’s the end of the world. So it was for me feeling like, look, if I have. Uh, a protein bar with me, which I was going to sneak one just in case I need it. Right. And I literally had it in my backpack.

[00:06:28] And at the last minute I left it at the shaman’s house who dropped me off in the desert in the middle of nowhere. And I write about that in, in fastest way, because this idea, is it going to be easy to fast or is it going to be hard to fast? My whole point is do everything you can to set yourself up. To not feel pain.

[00:06:43] So no, you don’t need to go on a four day spiritual fast or, you know, just meditate on hunger and lack and you can do that. And it’s good for you, but it’s not supposed to hurt to fast. And that was the thing here. It’s not like, Oh man, I’m thinking about food all the time. What if we use biology to just turn off the voice in your head?

[00:07:02] The one that I really lived with for four days, so I could get to know it. You can’t control the biology. So the voice won’t even talk to you. And then the FAFSA was like, yeah, I guess I fasted for 24 hours. That was nice.

[00:07:14] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:07:14] Did you break where you at? Where are you able to bring the protein bar into the

[00:07:17] Dave Asprey: [00:07:17] cave with you?

[00:07:18] You know, I could have, but I told myself, you know, I probably would cheat and I know I would have, so at the last minute I just left it on the dining room table and plus protein bars really sucked back then. This was, you know, in 2008,

[00:07:31] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:07:31] Pre PowerBars and tiger milk bar. I used to have a tiger milk bar when I was a kid.

[00:07:36] And I thought that was the most amazing thing.

[00:07:39] Dave Asprey: [00:07:39] Exactly. And you’re like, that’s kind of a candy bar, right? Yeah. And you couldn’t get a low carb protein bar back then. And the protein was not good protein at all. So for me, it was, it was a way of jumping in, but it was also a way of holding myself accountable.

[00:07:51] It’s incredibly easy in it. And this is something you’re your listeners and that, you know, very well, you say you’re going to fast for 24 hours. And then something happens and you don’t, and then you say, Oh, I’m a bad person. I’m weak, but that’s actually not what happened. Right. You want me to walk you through the biology of it?

[00:08:10] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:08:10] Yeah, please. Because this is why I want to start with it because we have hundreds of thousands of people that are trying to get to that three to four day water fast, but the mind holds them back. So please walk us

[00:08:20] Dave Asprey: [00:08:20] through it. So what’s happening here. Is that there is a distributed system of ancient bacteria that run your body and they’re actually in charge.

[00:08:30] And when I say they’re in charge, they’re, they’re embedded in your cells and there’s hundreds to thousands of them that are called mitochondria. You’ve probably heard of them as the power plant or the cells. And I wrote a, a very successful New York times science, monthly bestseller book about mitochondria in the brain, because you can use them to upgrade your brain.

[00:08:46] The problem is that 2 billion years ago, We tell ourselves, Oh, we were these cells and we harness these little bacteria to become our mobile power plants. You could say, that’s true. Now the power plants they’re like, well, 2 billion years ago, we found these floating Petri dishes. And we moved in, we took over and now we have mobile Petri dishes.

[00:09:04] It’s awesome. These people walk around and they do what we tell them to do. And they even convinced themselves that they chose to do what we wanted them to do. So they are actively working to make you do what they want. And just like all life forms, they’re lazy. They do not like to expend more energy than is necessary to get what they want.

[00:09:23] And while they’re bacteria, they aren’t that smart. So they followed the basic algorithm of all life. And this is something, no, I do not have a clinical study that says this. I did study artificial research or sorry, artificial intelligence. And I’ve done a lot of research on distributed systems. I taught at the university of California about how to build these big distributed internet things.

[00:09:44] Our mitochondria are doing that. So what they do is they run a simple set of rules. It’s four rules, and they run these all the time and a cactus run the rules and a zebra runs the rules and all people run these roles. It’s how life continues to exist. It’s the fundamental rules that there’s nothing else you can strip away and nothing else needs to be added.

[00:10:02] And it’s funny cause that’ll fit inside the thought processes of the bacteria. Step one, run away from kill or hide from scary things. Okay, you got to do that over as a tiger eats you and then your species is dead, right? At least if you’re the last one, your species and the bacteria too dumb to know. So, Hey, you gotta gotta play it.

[00:10:19] That was a 10 times more energy goes into fear and stress than it actually needs because you could die. Right. That’s also how the whole coronavirus social media phenomenon also is just becoming such a big stressor. It’s because we have a 10 times more energy towards things that could be a threat, right?

[00:10:34] It does not say isn’t this. Right. But it’s like the energy next up. Famine has killed every single thing that’s alive, at least once in the history of its species. So we’re very worried about famine. So that means these dumb little mitochondria who have no idea. There’s a bag of M and M’s available.

[00:10:50] They’re sitting there going with five times more energy than is necessary. Eat everything. The third thing no mitochondria do. So we have fear. We have food. And what else does all life have to do Mindy in order to stay alive? It’s also an app for it.

[00:11:07] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:11:07] I was going to say it has to procreate, but that’s

[00:11:09] Dave Asprey: [00:11:09] not an F word.

[00:11:12] Oh my God. I was talking fertility. You’re going to make me blush. Oh my goodness. I’m so embarrassed for you. I imagine. But yeah. It’s the other F word, right?

[00:11:27] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:11:27] Oh, I was in the buck. I got a little, I got a little hint,

[00:11:33] Dave Asprey: [00:11:33] but you made me say it, but it’s one of those things where, okay. We all do it. Right. And it’s because he gets three times more energy than it’s probably worth.

[00:11:42] And then you sit there and you scratch your head and go, okay. Is there anything I’ve ever done that I’m ashamed of? That didn’t come from one of those things. No every time you’ve procrastinated. Every time you didn’t take a risk that you wish you would have taken every bad decision you made. I promise you there was fear.

[00:11:57] There was hunger, or there was, that’s a nice pair of legs and I really want to go play with them. And I know I shouldn’t like, like, this is the, the foundations of where shame comes from because these dumb little things, these dumb little mitochondria bacteria are running our. Day-to-day second-by-second decision-making so they’re giving you the urges, right?

[00:12:15] And then you convince yourself, you know, what, you’re not cooking right now is a really good idea. Oh, it’ll be okay if I break my fast and my experience as a fat person. And I get to say that because I weighed 300 pounds. And so if you, if that triggers you, then go to a therapist. So I was fat. I have stretch marks to prove it.

[00:12:31] And if you look at what’s going on in your head, swim sets the cookies in front of, you said today, I will not have the cookie. And then the cookie says, eat me. You say, no, you can say eat me. No. And pretty soon it’s like a two year old pestering. You eat me? No, he may not even know in front of me. Okay. I’ll just have half.

[00:12:47] Right. And at the end of the meeting, we understand like, God, why did I do that? It’s because at the second you picked up the cookie, there was enough pressure on you. And the pressure comes from the voice in your head that is generated by the system and the fact that they can turn down your energy and they’re getting stressed and they’re panicking going, Oh my goodness, we’re going to die because we don’t have enough food.

[00:13:06] And you know, the truth is they are, which is awesome because when they don’t have enough food, they have to take the weak ones. And kill them and replace them with young ones, autophagy, autophagy, right. These are good things, but they don’t want to do do that. They’re just like us. Like, we don’t want to call the herd of the weak ones, you know, no one wants to do it, but by using things like cold exposure, like intermittent fasting, like longer fasts and things like that, you’re just telling them, Hey, You live in an environment where you don’t get to choose.

[00:13:37] And then pretty soon they clean up their act and all of a sudden they’re like, Oh, we actually don’t need the cookie. We were totally wrong. We have enough reserve that the cookie loses its voice. And thank you. The, the big knowledge that’s in fastest way. Right? Is that there’s three different things you can do during a fast, they give you all, or most of the benefits of most kinds of fasts that completely turn off the voice and allow you to experience the benefits of fasting during a busy work day, when you have stuff to do right.

[00:14:09] And this is how if I’m going to do a three or four day fast, this is how I start the first couple of days, because you still get the fast, you just don’t feel the pain during the first few days where it’s rough. So the big three fasting hacks are. The first two are based on ketones. And I’m sure your listeners know about ketosis to a certain point.

[00:14:28] What you might not know though, is that if you’re one of the keto bros, like if you eat a carb, you’re a bad person. Never again,

[00:14:37] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:14:37] we don’t know any keto bros in our world. No,

[00:14:40] Dave Asprey: [00:14:40] we know we don’t know anyone like that. And I, I kind of just, I’m like, I, this is not going to end well, and it actually doesn’t work to always be in ketosis.

[00:14:49] So that’s cycling in and out is, especially for women. It works. It’s true for men and women, but women hit the wall first from that. So. Well, what’s going on there though is a small amount of ketones, less than you get from nutritional ketosis. A level of 0.5 on a little fingerstick. Normally this year in ketosis around one or something.

[00:15:07] Normally you have 0.1 or no, no ketones. So it’s a meaningful level. If you can get up to that level, that turns on a hormone called CCK call a cysto Canin. Uh, or you can just remember it’s the Calvin Klein, hormone CCK, and. When you, uh, when you raised that one that’s, this is Heidi hormone. It makes you feel full.

[00:15:26] So if you use just a tiny blip of ketones, you’re like, Oh, I’m not hungry. And then the hunger hormone ghrelin it also right at about 0.5, the actual numbers are 0.3, 8.48. But I just say 0.5 because it’s easy. And at that level, then your growing levels drop and you’re like, Oh my God, the cookie lost its power.

[00:15:44] It’s not even talking to me. I just don’t want the cookie. My willpower is, is in reserve for something else because you’ve manipulated those things. So one way you can double your ketone production in the morning is the amount of caffeine in two small cups of black coffee. So it’s okay to have coffee during a fast, and there are very few reasons you wouldn’t want to do that.

[00:16:07] Some people say, well, in the mouse studies, the mice only had water. Like mice don’t have espresso machines. It’s okay. But if you look at the, the biology, you’re actually doing something really beneficial because beneficial gut bacteria that thin people have, they eat polyphenols as a food source. So if you give yourself coffee, that’s just coffee, no protein, no sugar.

[00:16:29] What happens is they’re like, Oh, I guess the ones that make you thin will grow because they have food and they’ll, out-compete the ones that make you fat that wanted sugar or in some cases, protein it’s a black coffee is okay. During a fast, I don’t have enough

[00:16:43] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:16:43] even like a three-day water fast it’s it’s part of

[00:16:46] Dave Asprey: [00:16:46] the secret.

[00:16:47] Yes. And you can do that in the morning, do it at lunch. And on day three, you’ll probably want one cup because your cortisol levels are higher. You’re feeling good already. You’re lost your hunger, but if you’re like, man, I’m really feeling some urges. Right. It’s okay to have a cup of coffee, like it it’s okay.

[00:17:01] Right. And you want, might even have some tea that’s okay, too. Just, you know, don’t. Weird creamers in it. Yeah. You

[00:17:08] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:17:08] just made like hundreds of thousands of people. So happy. I ha I cannot tell you how my recenters are gonna love this news. Go ahead and keep going. But this is exciting to

[00:17:18] Dave Asprey: [00:17:18] hear. If, if fasting, you could say at an extreme level, it’s going without calories, but fasting itself is just going without, and you can choose what you go without.

[00:17:26] The keto diet is a fast. It’s a fast from carbs. Like the vegan diet is a fast from animal food, right? You can do all sorts of different types of things where I’m going to selectively go without something for a period of time. And it is a fast and they have different benefits depending on what you allow and what you don’t allow.

[00:17:42] You can fast from social media. It’s a fast you’re going without, and I write about all those different aspects of it in fast, this way. But let’s stick with the other fasting hack for turning off hunger. Okay. The first one was coffee, cause it can double your ketone production. The second one is your I’m gonna sound like a broken record.

[00:18:00] And at this point, if you drink Bulletproof coffee, it is not going to change my life. People have lost a million pounds on the Bulletproof diet, the company’s, this sizable company and all that. So I will tell you though, That the MCT oil that we use and have used for 10 years in it, which is an eight carbon chain MCT oil.

[00:18:17] It quadruples ketone production compared to coconut oil, which only raises ketones as much as sleeping for eight hours. So coconut oil not so good. Regular MCT oil doesn’t raise ketones may be more than twice as much. The eight carbon it’s one of the subtypes raises ketones the most. So if you were to put a dollop of butter, Into your black coffee and you were to put some of the C8 MCT oil and yes, I like the Bulletproof stuff cause I created it and all that.

[00:18:43] Um, and then you blend it. That’s really important to blend it. So you’re going to get ketones there, but here’s a secret from the Tibetans. And I love this because the idea for Bulletproof coffee emerged when I was in Silicon Valley, after I came back from Tibet and it had yak butter tea at 18,000 feet elevation now.

[00:19:03] Your body’s job, take air about 30 pounds of air every day and food. However much you eat. Mix them together, make electrons, same electrons that power your iPhone. But when we drink water, what we have to do is we have to use electrons to convert the water from the kind of water we drink into something called exclusion zone water.

[00:19:24] Now, there are all sorts of people who will sell you magic fairy, crystal water, or alkaline water. That it’s not probably a good idea for you, but this is different. There’s research at the university of Washington. And I funded the research, but I didn’t fund it to say, I’d want you to do this or do that.

[00:19:41] It was like an open thing to look at at open biochemistry from Dr. Gerald Pollack has written several books about this. So I consider this to be a real science plus you can see it on a microscope. When you take water and you put it next to butterfat or MCT oil, the structure of the water changes near the oil.

[00:19:58] It’s called a lipid membrane. By the way, every cell in your body is made of lipid membranes. And when you expose that water to 1200 nanometer light, it’s called body heat. And when you do that, it converts the water from the water. We drink into the water that you use to make ATP and to fold proteins. In other words, to perform biological reactions, we changed the water a little bit.

[00:20:19] Well, in Tibet, I watched these people half my size, carry three times the weight I carry at subfreezing temperatures wearing cotton knockoff, Levi’s tennis shoes and a vest. And I’m like wearing parkas and I’m shivering and cold. And these are super humans and for breakfast, yak, butter tea, and like two tablespoons of barley flour.

[00:20:37] I’m like, this is not possible. What they learned. They blend their yak butter tea, and before they could blend, there’s been 10 minutes and I watched them do this with a butter churn, just mixing, mixing, mixing, mixing. Why did they do that? Because they are turning the water into the kind of water your body needs to make energy.

[00:20:56] So you’re fasting. You don’t have extra calories. That’s one of the reasons we get cold when we fast. Right? Well, what if you did the work in the water? So your cells didn’t have to heat up the water and they could directly use the water to fold proteins, to perform autophagy and do other metabolic activity.

[00:21:12] Well, when you blend that little bit of butter, it doesn’t have to be a lot. It can be a tiny bit and you blend the MCT oil and for the ketones, you’re changing the structure of the water. So that during the fast like, Oh, my cells can do their job. Right. And it really changes things. We’re not talking about a lot of calories here.

[00:21:29] It might be a hundred dollars. It might be 50 calories. You’re changing the water in your coffee. And if you put enough MCT oil in there, it has calories, but they cannot be stored as fat. Third-parties have validated no change in insulin levels from drinking Bulletproof coffee, which is very important.

[00:21:42] It’s in fact, that was the change. Um, well, the study that they did to show no one showed no change. There may be someone out there who has a change of, especially if they use tons and tons of butter. But if you’re using normal amounts like that, you’re not putting protein. You’re not putting carbohydrate in there.

[00:21:58] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:21:58] Yup. Okay. And as many cups as you want, you can go throughout

[00:22:02] Dave Asprey: [00:22:02] the day. If you have 4,000 calories of butter and MCT oil during a fast, there are studies that show that over feeding, just too many calories in a day. Um, are, it’s not good for you? That said I did lose weight when I ate 4,500 calories a day for a year when I was experimenting for the Bulletproof diet, I wrote the big book on that in 2014.

[00:22:23] It’s still like a top seller list because it just works so well. It’s bad for you. Don’t do that. But I was trying to prove, I guess I’m supposed to be gaining weight, but how is it if a calories in calories out are the same thing? No, it’s good. Composition, food, timing, fasting, all that. So. What I’m saying here though, is that if you had a cup of Bulletproof coffee in the morning and maybe one at lunch, you will just not give any cares about food and your protein digestion machinery in the liver, pancreatic enzymes, they will continue to do what your body is supposed to when you’re fasting.

[00:22:54] And I’ve validated this in my own deep research, I interviewed SIM land who wrote a book called metabolic autophagy, who says exactly the same thing, even which types of autophagy stay on. So this is a real, genuine fasting hack that works. It’s called Bulletproof proven and fasting and people. A lot of people have done it, so you don’t have to do it.

[00:23:10] But if it’s your first time fasting and you’re afraid of it, or you’re just like, I have such profound cravings, I have a big meeting. Like, how am I going to be a parent at home with a big meeting? And I’ve got me and my zoom shirt and tie and I’m wearing board shorts, but my kids are running around screaming and I’m just trying to focus and I’m hungry.

[00:23:26] Okay. A lot of us aren’t going to perform at our best like that. But if it’s a day where I wanted the benefits, I didn’t want the pain. You can do that and you will get benefits. And this is like 10 years of that. I see people screaming, sums. That’s cheating. That’s yes, it’s cheating. Okay. Fine. Yeah, but I won and I got through it’s.

[00:23:44] Okay.

[00:23:46] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:23:46] Yeah, and, Oh my gosh, you have no idea how my resetter is. This is when this podcast launches because we get questions all the time. What can I drink in a fasted state? And, um, what I’ve been really emphasizing is do your own self science. Look at your blood sugar, do a blood sugar reading, drink your Bulletproof or whatever you want to drink.

[00:24:05] And then half hour later, there you go, look and see where your blood sugars at. So if somebody does what you just said, And their blood sugar goes up. Are they still in a fasted state?

[00:24:16] Dave Asprey: [00:24:16] You are still in the fattest state. If your blood sugar goes up. In fact, what happens in the body whenever your blood sugar drops too low is the body says, Oh, I forgot this.

[00:24:27] It’s an emergency. Have some cortisol and adrenaline, because those two hormones do a great job of liberating glucose from tissues for everyone listening. Right now, if you wake up between three and four in the morning with racing thoughts, what happened is that your body needed enough blood sugar to do the cleaning processes in the brain.

[00:24:48] And it went so low, but I was like, I got this, have some cortisol. And so now your blood sugar is up. The brain’s happy, but you’re not asleep. And then you do this over and over. And I said this earlier, but women tend to have that problem more often and sooner than men, when they start fasting or doing a ketogenic diet, which is one reason it’s important to not fast all the time, that’s starvation, but you know, to, to be yourself, the, the hackers.

[00:25:13] And now this is got to really piss some people off. Okay. If you have a problem with sleep and you’re fasting, some people will tell you if you have less than 50 calories, it’s still a fast or a hundred calories or less than 10 grams of this or that. Well, that depends on what you want to get out of your fast.

[00:25:30] If your intent was to give your gut arrest. And to take nothing in, maybe you just want to have water and salt, right. That that’s okay. But for the vast majority of us, uh, you can have some other things like that. And if you want it to get through the night and sleep and be functional, and you’re not doing a spiritual fast, maybe when you’re just really having a hard time, if you were to take a teaspoon or two.

[00:25:52] Of raw honey, not in hot water, it’s not raw anymore. Raw honey specifically in studies goes to liver glycogen, not muscle glycogen, at least not as much, a very small amount. And then that liver glycogen will be called on by the brain when it needs it, because the liver glycogen, which is the store of carbohydrate in the body, it goes into the brain first.

[00:26:11] So when you do that, now, the brain’s like I got just enough. You might see a slight bump in your blood sugar. When you do that, you can have some cinnamon with it. If you want to blunt that or some chromium. And I talk about, by the way it fastest, it has the list of supplements you can take when you’re fasting something that you can take.

[00:26:24] When you’re fasting ones, I call them the barfy for supplements that are not going to end well, if you take those on a fast, so. When you look at all that though, that might be worth doing, because you’re still fasting. You’re not eating, you’re getting a very nominal amount of calories, but you’re giving the brain what it needs to let you sleep when you’re fasting, which is going to be more benefit than harm.

[00:26:45] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:26:45] Well, we’re going to test that on a, on a, on a hundreds of thousands of people, because that, that is one of the complaints that we get. There’s two major ones from our community. One is I’m not sleeping on the longer, fast. The other one, and I want to dive into, at some point, here is women who are losing their hair or like, so like fasting and fasting, fasting themes, because it keeps their weight where they want.

[00:27:08] But meanwhile, they’re losing their hair and they’re not sleeping. Okay. We’re going to hack that. Let’s hack it. Because that is like three fourths of my community. Yup.

[00:27:17] Dave Asprey: [00:27:17] The hair loss thing is a major problem for men too. And, um, there’s definitely things to do. There’s one other fasting hack that I want to talk about that is new to fast this way.

[00:27:28] And I, I didn’t put that one in the Bulletproof diet book because I didn’t know about it back then. And there are certain types of soluble, prebiotic fibers. These are fibers that your body cannot digest. But your gut bacteria will digest them. They’ll feed the good guys. And those gut bacteria will turn them into butyric acid and propionic acid, which are funny enough fatty acids that are kenogenic.

[00:27:54] So they also turn off hunger hormones, like no one’s business. So if you were to take your cup of black coffee and your dad a tiny bit of butter, you would add some MCT oil, maybe a teaspoon to a tablespoon, and. 10 or 20 grams of soluble fiber and you blend it up. It still tastes like coffee, but you’ll be so full.

[00:28:14] You just won’t even care. You can do that for an intermittent faster, for a longer fast. Now, if the intent is to let your gut bacteria rest. Um, there’s things that happen in your gut bacteria. When they get stressed, they make something called the lipo polysaccharide, which is, or LPs you might’ve seen it called and LPs crosses the blood-brain barrier.

[00:28:31] It’s implicated in all sorts of diseases and it’s implicated in chronic inflammation and your body has systems to protect you from some of it. But when you’re fasting, if you’re feeding the good guys, um, you’re not gonna get that issue in the same way. And. Look, sometimes you might not want to do that during a fast, I find that it works very well during a fast, you still lose the weight.

[00:28:51] You still lose the waterway. You still are getting autophagy, but you’ve taken care of your gut bacteria in a different way. So someone who’s brand new to fasting has never tried it before. If you tried that three fasting hacks from fastest way, like I just described the first day, like, Oh my God, I made it.

[00:29:06] And I skipped breakfast. I had less than a hundred calories. None of the calories affected my blood sugar on my protein. I’m feeling good. And I did it. And maybe the next day you’ll move it around. Right. And, and that’s the idea here.

[00:29:18] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:29:18] It’s a crutch. It’s like a crutch to kind of get you into that state.

[00:29:22] What soluble fiber fiber like any, any, does Bulletproof have a brand that

[00:29:27] Dave Asprey: [00:29:27] you put in approved does have one. I’m not here to sell the Bulletproof brand. It’s the one I formulated it’s called Bulletproof inner fuel and the primary ingredient in most of them, including mine is. Acacia gum, which is a SAP from a tree.

[00:29:38] And I used two other similar things, a hydrolyzed guar gum and larger Rabinow galactan are what they’re called because the studies showed those feed, the good guys, the most, it has a very neutral flavor. So you can put that in and, and it, it. Dissolves instantly. And in it, you just mix it in and it goes away.

[00:29:56] It doesn’t make things slick, thick, and sludgy. It’s not Metamucil that that is a course fiber that’s indigestible fiber. This is a different thing and they call it prebiotic fiber. And when you do that, you’re like, Whoa, things are so different here. And your state changes and your hunger changes and you still got the benefits.

[00:30:13] And what I really recommend people do when they’re starting out, especially with the women who are losing their hair at all. You don’t have to fast every day and yeah. But we know about exercise and over-training and a lot of people do that too. When I weighed 300 pounds, I’m like, this is the most important thing ever.

[00:30:32] I am so done with this. So I went to the gym six days a week, an hour and a half a day, half weights, half cardio. I was on the treadmill with a backpack, 15 degrees walking, really fast. I could lift it. I could max out all, but two of the machines, I still had a 46 inch waist and I weighed 300 pounds after 18 months of that.

[00:30:49] And I was eating. The chicken salad, no chicken and no dressing. And I was on a low fat diet. It just didn’t work. Right. And it was so frustrating, uh, in order to have that happen, but I was over-training right. And I did get more out of immunity. This happens quite a lot. So if you can over-exercise you can also over fast.

[00:31:08] Yes. Yeah. Women hit the wall before men do it is because, and I write there’s a whole chapter for women. Yeah.

[00:31:16] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:31:16] Thank you. I saw that. It’s awesome. Yeah.

[00:31:18] Dave Asprey: [00:31:18] Yeah. Um, it it’s like what you want to do is maybe. I was going to sound really crazy. I have breakfast sometimes, right? I have to do it every day, three to five days a week for women works best.

[00:31:30] And I say this after years of dealing with the Bulletproof community and helping people go where, Oh, wait, my sleep returned. Or what if, when you broke your fast, you weren’t in strike Quito. You know, when you’re having breakfast, don’t have carbs. Carbs are generally bad for breakfast. Have some protein, have some fat and then the next day have only fat.

[00:31:50] Or have nothing. And generally people, yeah. Women do better when they get some fat in the morning, but it’s totally okay to do just a straight water fast, but you probably don’t need to do it every other week, maybe once a month, maybe once every three months. But if your cycle is off or if you’re already stressed emotionally, it is a bad time to fast.

[00:32:14] Also about time to go to the gym and push really hard. And we have that, just do it culture that says, well, I am a strong woman and I have yoga pants. So I’m going to go to the gym. And I noticed has been a horrible day and I’m going to burn off my stress. This is what special forces people do. Okay. I just had a firefight.

[00:32:33] I’m going to go to the gym and I’m going to burn off my extra cortisol. It works for peak cortisol where like there’s a big stress, but one is chronic stress like that. It actually adds to the chronic stress. So fasting and exercise when you’re already depleted. Are not a good idea. You know, it works.

[00:32:49] It’s amazing sleep. And before you go to sleep, have some carbs already. I didn’t say cheesecake, I didn’t say corn syrup. Right. But have some carbs and you’ll be so much better off. And then the next day, when you slept really well, and you’re like feeling centered, even if you gained a little bit of water, weight, that’s okay.

[00:33:06] Um, get a, those spanks or whatever. You’ll be fine. Right. And then, yeah. And just like do your fast that day. Right? What I do is I track my sleep when I talk about sleep and fasting and how they mix in the book. But I’ve traveled talking about sleep for 15 years because I was such a bad sleeper and I am now a really good sleeper.

[00:33:26] And if you have a good sleep tracker, it’ll tell you how stressed are you in the morning? And it’s called a readiness score or your heart rate variability score. If you’re already blown out, maybe you’re on your cycle. Maybe had a big fight. It’s just not a good data fast and you’re going to wake up.

[00:33:41] You’re not going to have the pancakes, but you might have the bacon and it’s okay.

[00:33:45] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:33:45] I think that’s the fear though. People are like, well, if fasting works so well for me, and then I give my self permission to eat, then I’m going to really go off the deep. Bent, and I’m not going to be able to pull myself back in.

[00:33:58] I actually have a funny story around people fasting too much. And this is sort of how my recenter movement started is that I started putting videos out on my YouTube channel on fasting and autophagy and all of the people who had been following Dr. Phone’s obesity code. They had lost a ton of weight with, with fasting and they were one meal a day heads, you know, Doing it all the time hardcore.

[00:34:22] And meanwhile, I was teaching my people how to vary their fast. Yeah. And then they found my channel and they’re like, Oh, you mean, I’m not supposed to do this all the time. And we started teaching them how to vary it. And just like you said, when people went in and out of a fasted state, the hair stopped falling out.

[00:34:38] They were like getting stuck with weight loss, but it is that push it through mentality and people struggle. To be able to eat again, once they feel like fasting is their way into better health,

[00:34:51] Dave Asprey: [00:34:51] I call it that the fascinating trap in the book, and it’s similar to two other traps I’ve experienced in my life.

[00:34:58] And my favorite one is the vegan trap. Hmm. So I was a Ravi again, I’m going to come to up a devout Ravi again. So this was maybe before, before social media actually. So I read some books and I said, all right, it’s gotta be about enzymes are going to do this and actually lost a bunch of weight. And I felt great for the first six weeks.

[00:35:14] But if you do something and you do it with focus and you do it for six weeks and you feel great and you’ve lost weight, you know, it works and it’s now a habit and you will keep doing it. And when it stops working, you’re like, Oh, maybe that wasn’t raw enough. Right?

[00:35:29] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:35:29] Exactly.

[00:35:29] Dave Asprey: [00:35:29] So you double down, double down and you could say, Oh, I’m going to go keto.

[00:35:33] And I hear this, especially from women, but for men too, like, yeah, I went keto. I was so good. I lost all this weight and now I’ve lost half the weight I had to lose. Now I’m stuck. My hair’s falling out. I can’t sleep, but I know that if I just ate six. Grams of carbs instead of 10, I’ll be fine. No. Okay. I have done that too.

[00:35:50] That’s called the Atkins diet and I did that a long time, but I lost 50 of my a hundred pounds and the other 50, it took me another 10 years to lose because that’s how complex inflammation and timing and all this stuff is. So. You can do it under the fasting drop. Oh, fasting works. Therefore I’ll do it all the time.

[00:36:05] Few humans can do really well on OMAD all the time. They will. For a while, there’ll be convinced it works cause their life rocks. And then suddenly if you get their labs, their hormones are all over the place. The reason women and men are losing their hair from this. And by the way, I like to think my hair is doing all right.

[00:36:23] I cheated, but that’s a different story. Uh, the, uh, Um, the problem is number one, cortisol. If your cortisol, if you fast or cortisol is going to come up and that’s okay. Cause you’re passing for brief periods of time and, and cortisol and adrenaline are a part of that, but excessive cortisol all the time, you can measure that.

[00:36:40] Right? The other thing though, that’s a major issue that we don’t talk about is thyroid. And when you fast for short periods of time, or you go on a vegan diet with the wrong, the wrong fat content in it, your cells will temporarily upregulate your thyroid function. Then you’re like, Ooh, I feel good. And then your thyroid crashes.

[00:36:56] And if you pull an advanced thyroid panel in, from someone whose hair is falling out and you pull a 24 hour cortisol panel with saliva, you pretty much find out, Oh, look, your cortisol is broken you some salt in the morning. Some adrenal extract and some licorice root and eat some damn breakfast for a couple of weeks until you get back on your feet, you can still have a cup of coffee in the morning.

[00:37:13] I have adrenal dysfunction just don’t go crazy on it because the coffee actually raises cortisol in the morning when you want that. Just don’t have it at night. And. You do that sort of thing. And so thyroid man, I might have to go on some low dose thyroid therapy just until I get my thyroid back. And maybe you should take some iodine during a fast to help support your thyroid.

[00:37:33] Wouldn’t that be amazing? You can absolutely do that. So things like that become Oh, That’s why it’s happening. But the number one reason it’s happening is because we like habits. I’m going to go to the gym every day. You’re gonna, you’re not going to recover ever. I’m going to fast ever to every day, you’re not going to rebuild ever.

[00:37:48] So yes, it sucks. I wanted the same thing every day without thinking about it for the rest of my life, because then I could think about other stuff, but fast, sometimes have breakfast sometimes, but whenever you eat, eat the foods that don’t make you think about food. I talked to a guy just earlier today. I mean, he’s lost a bunch of weight.

[00:38:06] He’s, you know, super bullet proof. He he’s like man, every time eight eggs, I get hungry right afterwards after eat two of your Bulletproof bars, right afterwards, I’m like stop eating eggs. You’re allergic to them. That’s the problem, right? You shouldn’t need to eat a protein bar after breakfast. So that’s for him a trigger food, eggs are common.

[00:38:22] They’re either really good for you. Or if you’re allergic, they’re going to, they’re going to sabotage a fast or just eating without snacking. And there’s a whole set of foods that I allude to and fastest way that were the focus of the Bulletproof diet. They will ruin your ability to survive and thrive without hunger because they make you hungry all the time.

[00:38:43] What are the,

[00:38:44] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:38:44] can you give us a little sneak

[00:38:46] Dave Asprey: [00:38:46] kale? Kills evil. It tastes gross and you want to eat. Kale wants to eat food afterwards. That’s why you always mix it last night. Right. But what’d you have on it?

[00:38:59] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:38:59] Well, I mixed it with other lettuces and I actually make a wicked salad with watermelon radishes, kale and, uh, green apples.

[00:39:07] And then I put a little olive oil and lemon juice. Yeah. A little bit of honey. I do some rock go.

[00:39:14] Dave Asprey: [00:39:14] You can’t eat kale without sugar, or without deep frying it in bad fats or covering it in bacon or something. Here’s what’s going on with kale. Kale is full of something called oxalic acid and it’s a defense compounds.

[00:39:28] And this is why throughout history, no one would eat raw kale, including I am an organic farmer. I have a small organic farm. My pigs spit out raw kale, pigs and humans have the same liver and kidney setup. So why do they do that? Because. The oxalic acid in kale sticks to calcium in your blood. It moves around in the body and it causes inflammation, which tells the body.

[00:39:49] I need to fix the inflammation, which tells the body, Hey, could I have some glucose already? And it goes, I don’t have any glucose here. Let me give you some stress hormones. And then you get some glucose. It sticks in joints. It’s a major cause of kidney stones and people now, because they’re consuming so much, especially raw kale and it’s tied to something called vulvodynia.

[00:40:06] Uh, which is when the crystals forming the labia and, uh, you don’t want that.

[00:40:12] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:40:12] Okay. I’ve actually on our heavy metal test too. I’ve seen people actually their heavy metal load go up. Yes. Yes. And when we try to unpack it, we find out they’re big kale eaters. It’s,

[00:40:24] Dave Asprey: [00:40:24] it’s almost universal of thallium is high.

[00:40:26] You’re eating a lot of the brassica family and in particular kale, which is the highest one. So Ross punch and raw kale are very likely to make you hungry and create mineral deficiencies because of oxalic acid, which is unbelievable. Cause they’re supposed to be so healthy except throughout all of history.

[00:40:41] You know, we, we ate, we wouldn’t eat kale, it was garnish. But when we had spinach, your grandma, what, how does she eat spinach? She, she cooked it. She cooked it. And what did she put on it? Salt. Salt. She didn’t make cream. Spinach is the cream. Spinach is the standard way at your grandma’s. So most grandmas did cream spinach because the calcium would bind to the calcium, uh, or to the oxalate that’s in the spinach.

[00:41:07] And then when you ate it, you wouldn’t suck calcium out of your body and cause the inflammatory reaction. So those are not things to eat raw. The next category of food is phytates. If you’re on a whole foods, diet, Whatever whole foods means I’m not entirely sure. Um, because you don’t eat the skin of the watermelon now, do you?

[00:41:24] But. Whatever, uh, is going on. There is the outer layer of beans and grains contains fight acid, fighting gas is there to keep animals from eating them because when you eat it, you can’t absorb zinc copper or any of the other minerals. And for every gram of plant-based protein, that contains phytic acid, which is almost all of that.

[00:41:41] You need another ground of animal protein just to cancel out the phytic acid. So you can absorb your zinc. So you will have hunger because you don’t have minerals because you ate these incredibly healthy, whole wheat, whatever, you know, it wasn’t healthy. It’s going to cause cravings.

[00:41:53] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:41:53] Okay, Ray setters.

[00:41:55] Let’s talk about your new year’s health goals. So I have been working with people, helping them set goals for over 25 years, and there is an absolute right way to set a new year’s goal and a wrong way to set into your school. And so I decided this year because of COVID because of the, everything going on in the world that we needed to knock it out of the park with our health.

[00:42:19] So I created something called the reset experience and it’s a month long. It’s going to go all January. You can jump in at any time. I am taking you through seven different fast, three different fee styles. You get an 84 page. E-book on all the different ways. I like to fast. There are. Four live calls with me, for workouts, with me, recipes, shopping guide, and an insane community to support you.

[00:42:46] So if you’re ready to hit your goals, join me in the reset experience. So are you, are you a fan then of the carnivore diet,

[00:42:54] Dave Asprey: [00:42:54] you know, on the Bulletproof roadmap, which kind of puts every type of food and you know, not going to cause cravings. Suspect and kryptonite, the carnivore diet is totally green on the Bulletproof diet.

[00:43:06] Anyone can do carnivores, but there’s also the cardboard trap and kind of is just fasting from plants, however you most likely. And Carver people get really mad when I say this. Um, even our friends with some of them, it’s like, you’re most likely going to like it for a month or six weeks. And after that, your gut bacteria will shift.

[00:43:23] And what you end up going to is this really weird diet where it’s got. Grass fed animals. It’s got non-inflammatory non seed oils, cause seed oils, Omega six is trigger hunger and they’re bad for yourselves. And it’s got low inflammatory plants. That’s called the bulk of diet. So, but that’s generally, we’re kind of where people go, but yes, or for four weeks, it’ll change your life because for the first time ever, you’re going without oxalic acid without fighting acid, without mycotoxins from plants, which is another one of the major categories.

[00:43:55] And there’s also lectins, which are a big focus of the Bulletproof diet. Even in 2010. I’m like guys, these things are inflammatory and you might want to just try going without the nightshade family. For me, it fixed the arthritis that runs in my family. I’ve had arthritis diagnosed when I was 14 years old and my knees, I could barely walk around to bed because of joint problems.

[00:44:15] I don’t have joint pain anymore. Because I figured out the food that triggered it. So lectins may cause profound cravings for you. If you had a red bell pepper and you’re hungry afterwards. Well, there you go. Or if you had a red bell pepper and you’re fine. Great. You’re not sensitive. It’s all good. But it’s individualized.

[00:44:30] So you got to find the trigger foods for you in anything fried and bad oils, which is anything at a restaurant that’s fried. Is just going to make you hungry later. That’s how it is. So

[00:44:38] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:44:38] what do you say to vegans? Because this comes up all the time. Like we have in our reset or tried, like, we have fights between the carnivores and the vegans and everybody wants to be right.

[00:44:49] And then you would get like Paul, Saladino his research and his book. And it’s like, Whoa. And what you’re saying, how do we, if we start villainizing. Vegetables then what what’s left to eat?

[00:45:01] Dave Asprey: [00:45:01] Well, what I say to vegans is please don’t reproduce until you have a healthier diet. Because it’s not fair to your children.

[00:45:10] Okay. Now my first book was called the better baby book and it’s resulted in hundreds and hundreds of pregnancies. And it’s what we use to fix my wife’s biology, meiosis medical doctor. So we could have two kids at age 39 and 42 with no IVF and no external drug kind of therapies just by fixing food. She was diagnosed as infertile when I met her.

[00:45:30] So, wow. I will tell you, after 1300 references in that book, please don’t be a vegan. You need certain types of saturated, fat that you simply cannot get. And a bunch of other nutrients, it is simply not sustainable. And it’s also bad for the soil and it’s bad for animals. Also don’t eat industrial animals, cause those are even worse.

[00:45:50] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:45:50] So what do you eat? So

[00:45:50] what

[00:45:51] Dave Asprey: [00:45:51] does that, what give us the meat or nothing. Okay. If it didn’t eat grass and it’s as a cow or a sheep, it’s not okay. Right. The chicken isn’t a great food, but a lot of people eat it, eat organic chicken that didn’t, that at least that ate organic corn and soy, or ideally we’re pastored any worms the way they showed.

[00:46:07] That’s what they eat on my farm. Um, you can eat. Um, vegetables, you just eat the low inflammation, vegetables, and on the carnivore diet thing. And I, I like to tease Paul. I call him James, for some reason I did that once in an interview. So now James, uh, but what’s going on there is, you know, what? Most people handle cooked carrots or raw carrots.

[00:46:26] Pretty well, you can have some of those, right. And if you can’t handle them, don’t things like the old ones, lettuce, celery radishes. And in each of those, if you want to like go out there and say, look, don’t look at there’s this bad thing. And there’s this bad thing in there. Every food that’s from the plant kingdom can be a medicine.

[00:46:46] And all of them have toxins and all of them have beneficial things in them. We have this thing we do, it’s called cooking that we have done throughout all of history to reduce the toxin load and increase the nutrient load. We just suck at cooking cause we do it for flavor instead of biology. Well, there’s another thing we can do now.

[00:47:04] It’s called making supplements. So you can take turmeric extract where you get rid of a bunch of the stuff that was in there and you take the active parts of it that do what you want. And I love that when carnivores are like, you don’t need to take supplements. Like this is great. If you agree that you’re only going to get your toxins from mother nature, then you should get all your nutrients from mother nature.

[00:47:24] Except the toxins we swim in are not from mother nature. You actually need to support your body’s detox pathways and it’s okay to take supplements. In fact, it’s good. It’s just like cooking. It’s a way of extracting nutrients from food and getting it into the body. So some of them are more moderate than others.

[00:47:40] There are some, like Dave said, soluble fiber is good for you. He’s not kind of our, he’s not one of us. I didn’t want to it’s okay guys. Um, what I, what I say to, to both the carnivores and the vegans, this guys. Chill out, neither one of you is living in a way that any humans have lived for multiple generations.

[00:47:58] Both of you can draw your labs. And both of you can say, I am going to transform my view of my labs to say that they’re healthy, even though they’re not, I was a devout devoted, raw vegan until my teeth started breaking. And I got out of immune conditions and it broke my thyroid and my hair was falling out.

[00:48:13] Um, took me a while to figure that one out. Right. And then get this. It takes two years to replace half the cell membranes in your body. And I published that research, I think in 2014 in the Bulletproof diet. So that means if you start eating tomorrow, the kind of fat you’re made out of newsflash it’s grass fed butter, grass fed steak, that’s the fat you’re made of.

[00:48:33] You’re not made out of corn oil. And I mean, was soybean oil. Those are toxic oils, right? You just don’t do those because they’re bad building blocks. Right. You need a very small amount of those things. Grass fed meat has about 2%. Omega six is in it. That’s probably about what you need and you won’t run out of those.

[00:48:51] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:48:51] And what do you, what do you say? Like, so that now we’ve got like theories and this is some of the things that I’ve been trying to help people navigate in my community because we’ve got like Rob Wolf saying, Hey, you know what? Conventional meat is okay to eat. And then you’ve got

[00:49:06] Dave Asprey: [00:49:06] like, okay, I’m just going to say Rob, Rob’s an angry dude.

[00:49:12] Okay. Sorry, Rob. I love you brother. You need to get a therapist if you eat and you tell people that you conventional meat, you are torturing animals. You’re destroying the soil. You’re eating the planet we live on and you’re a bad person. Get a therapist. Okay. There we go.

[00:49:28] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:49:28] You have a strong opinion about that.

[00:49:30] It’s

[00:49:31] Dave Asprey: [00:49:31] obvious. And I can tell you the science too, and what’s going on there is when you feed these animals, the kind of conventional stuff, we feed them. That’s full of glyphosate. Well, you’re getting glyphosate. When you feed them antibiotics, antibiotics, some of them are xenoestrogens and it changes the gut bacteria.

[00:49:48] Oh, by the way, it changes the bacteria on our planet. And it makes all of us less healthy when you eat that because they’re spraying manure full of antibiotics and bad bacteria. That are aggressive in their putting in our water system. It’s becoming a part of our planet, not okay. It shouldn’t take a paleo blogger to tell you that, okay, this is a human, you know, the bubble that we’re all in for coronavirus.

[00:50:10] It’s called the earth. Don’t do that. It’s not okay. Yeah. Now we get into the fatty acids and Rob’s argument is that, Oh, some of the fatty acids in there. Oh, there isn’t that big of a difference, et cetera, et cetera. Except it’s, what’s not in there. That’s important when you eat conventionally raised cows.

[00:50:27] There’s this great mold toxin. And I write a lot about mold toxins, cause they will cause cravings. If you eat, if you drink moldy coffee, you live in a moldy house. You can’t eat enough. You’ll just be hungry all the time. And what they do is they distill a mold toxin called . It’s a Zino estrogen, a thousand times more potent than estrogen.

[00:50:47] Okay. It’s going to give you man boobs, and it’s going to make you delicious by making stripes of fat throughout all of your muscle. And women don’t need a thousand times stronger estrogen either. Neither do men, none of us need that. So they distill it. They make a waxy pellet called zero at all, and they put it in the cow’s ear and it dissolves through the tympanic membrane gets into the bloodstream and the cow gets fat on 30% less food.

[00:51:14] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:51:14] Interesting. Okay.

[00:51:16] Dave Asprey: [00:51:16] And then you eat the cow. So no don’t eat that stuff. They tortured the animal, they destroyed soil, proper cows, eat grass. And then they poop on the ground and the soil gets thicker. I am a small farmer. I do this on my farm. You can see where the pigs and the sheep where I don’t have cows cause they’re feed too much.

[00:51:35] But, um, you can see the plants grow and they thrive. And right next to them on the other side of the fence, the plants are okay. They’re part of the ecosystem. So they’re necessary and to say, just eat conventional stuff that is to say that you don’t care about the long-term effects of the world that you’re going to have to live in.

[00:51:52] If the conventional meat doesn’t kill you, which it won’t just don’t need it though, because you’re going to get mold, toxins, antibiotics, bad fats, to a certain extent. And you’re destroying the environment.

[00:52:02] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:52:02] Yeah. Yeah. I absolutely agree with you. And I find that what happens to people, especially in this era of social media, they’re, they’re just devouring all this information and then they get really confused.

[00:52:15] And then once they’re confused, they’re like, Forget it, I’m not gonna, I’m not going to do this anymore. So one of the things I loved about your book is that you keep saying like emphasizing flexibility and figure out what’s right for you and you have the different stages of fasting. And, um, it’s just brilliant because I would love to see our world get away from one size, fits all, and really go into what feels right for you.

[00:52:41] And especially for women as we start to go through menopause, you talk about your wife. And how she has to fast differently. I just think this has to be a message that gets out to the world.

[00:52:52] Dave Asprey: [00:52:52] It’s a thing where one size fits all. Doesn’t work for diets. It doesn’t work for fasting, but there are core principles.

[00:52:59] Don’t eat stuff that makes you hungry. Yeah.

[00:53:04] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:53:04] You shouldn’t be hungry after that is a key principle that most people don’t know. Yeah.

[00:53:09] Dave Asprey: [00:53:09] And I remember my daughter, she was maybe in second grade and she comes home. She goes, daddy. As soon as you get to school, the teacher tells us we have to have a snack. I’m not hungry.

[00:53:19] Don’t the other kids have breakfast. And then I said, we’ll ask your friends what they eat. And she says, well, my friend, Suzy, I make up the name. She has a green Apple for breakfast. Her mom’s a beacon. And I’m like, well, no wonder she’s hungry. Poor kid. Can’t pay attention in school. But my daughter’s like, can I pretend to eat?

[00:53:34] Cause I’m really not hungry until lunch. I just don’t want food. That means you ate breakfast. And what does she have for breakfast? She has smoked salmon and avocado. They have protein and fat for breakfast. And on rare occasions, some kind of carbs, usually slower, slower, metabolizing carbs, some rice or whatever, but generally, no.

[00:53:49] Do my kids fast. No. Do they skip breakfast? If they want to? Actually, I guess that means they’re in and my son who’s 10. So daddy, I want to feel what it’s like for 24 hours. I’m not going to use any of the hacks because he wanted you. I didn’t encourage him to. And I actually told him, you should try a hack.

[00:54:03] Nope, Nope. And he said, I’m going to show I can do it. And when he was done, he said, you’re right. Fasting is the best spice ever because that food I ate when I was done, fasting was the best food I ever had. And he’s never tried fasting again. And he just wanted to do it. Right. This is natural.

[00:54:16] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:54:16] Yes. Talk a little bit about that, because that is also a key is that it resets and the research that I’ve seen is that it can actually reset your dopamine receptor sites.

[00:54:26] But when you fast, just in it’s like the dopamine fasting from our phone, but it’s even more powerful because it’s food and you’re eating it every day. When you take it out, you actually create a physiological dopamine change in your brain. Th the

[00:54:40] Dave Asprey: [00:54:40] reset you can think of receptor as like a little mouth.

[00:54:43] Right. And it’ll, it’ll open a little bit wider because it’s like I’m hungry now. And that means it will be able to attach to dopamine more easily and you can train your hemoglobin to actually do the same thing with oxygen by just for very brief periods of time. It’s the same concept as fasting, but brief here is time you do special breathing exercises or use equipment that they use at upgrade labs, where you create a hypoxic environment for a minute or two.

[00:55:11] And the body’s like, Oh my God. But when you’re done, your cells are ready. I need to take in oxygen and then they’ve changed their state. So if you do that on an occasional basis, you have more power. And so I think when you fast, occasionally when you do eat, you do use the food better. And the neurotransmitters that come from it change, but there’s something else that gets reset that is not well known in the fasting community.

[00:55:32] I think it’s really important because you have such a big dedicated community here. And this has to do with. Uh, with ghrelin and. This is why when I weighed 300 pounds, when I say I lost a hundred pounds, I’m actually lying. Cause I probably lost 200 pounds because I lost 25 pounds. You gain 35, you lose 35, again, 45, you lose 30 gain 30.

[00:55:54] I guess I only gained 30. I lost five pounds. Ooh, anyone who’s had weight to lose, like serious way to lose has experienced this and some of it, yeah, you can lose water, weight, you know, it goes up and down with your monthly cycle or with how many carbs you have. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about real fat.

[00:56:07] It comes and it goes. The reason for this is that you have a hunger set point and it will be set by ghrelin. Based on your body weight. So in a weight 300 pounds, I had a 300 pounds hunger levels. And then if you fast, by not fast, if you lose weight by lose, by just eating less calories and exercise more of the way that they tell you to do, because they’re mean people, what you end up with is let’s say you get down to 250 pounds.

[00:56:35] I lost 50 pounds and every day like, man, those cookies look good, but I’m going to muscle through this. I’m just not going to do it. Right. And eventually. It comes back. Well, what’s happening there is that your hunger set point stayed where it was. Guess what resets your ghrelin sensitivity to your current body weight?

[00:56:55] Ketones ketones. So as soon as you fast for a day or two, or as soon as you get your ketone levels up magically, now your body says, Oh, let’s make the hunger match your actual body weight instead of making your thin hunger equal your fat body weight. Like everyone who loses weight. If you lose on some dumb diet, like fast for a couple of days afterwards to get your ketone levels up.

[00:57:20] So at least then when you’re done fasting, you’ll be as hungry as you should be. Instead of as hungry as your fat self. How long

[00:57:26] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:57:26] do you, how long do you think you have to do that for? Cause I know we’ll get that question. It’s like, what is that a day? Is it three days? How long will it reset? My, my levels.

[00:57:35] Dave Asprey: [00:57:35] Oh, it’ll reset it permanently. Until you start eating until you gain weight for other reasons. And then your, your ghrelin levels will match your body weight. And, but if you regularly participate in fasting or regularly, add something, I don’t know, to your coffee that raises your ketone levels, then your fat set point.

[00:57:52] Well like, Oh, how are you today? Let’s make your hunger match. Your current body weight. You don’t deal with hunger. So part of fasting is willpower to overcome hunger. Okay. That’s expensive. Well, power takes electrons and it takes effort. Okay. If you set your biology up right, then it’s like, Oh, Yeah, I’m going to do something hard.

[00:58:11] Cause I’m gonna do a spiritual Fest, come one with myself. I’m going to feel my feelings and I so encourage people to, but the rest of the time for God’s sake, like how about you just don’t get distracted by hunger because I thought this study 15 up to 50%, but 15% minimum thoughts that most people have during the day are about what’s for their next meal.

[00:58:30] Really? Yeah. And there’s an actual study reference and fastest way. So. What if you got 15% of your thoughts back every day to think about anything on earth, except for food, you getting back, being a better parent, starting your next company. I dunno. I’m, I’ve my podcast in books and I’m CEO of several companies and I couldn’t do all that and be a dad and a husband and a farmer.

[00:58:55] If I was thinking about food all the time. So you get that back. When you, when you choose to fast is a really powerful.

[00:59:01] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [00:59:01] So, so one of the things that really struck out to me in your book, and I’m hearing it in you right now, is that you feel like when people come over to this fasting lifestyle, it doesn’t have to be hard.

[00:59:13] And that, uh, one of the things I’ve been witnessing is that there’s a hard period, but once you adapt and the body figures out what it’s doing, it seems to click in. And because we’re designed this way, fasting gets easier and easier over time. But what I hear from you is you get the coffee with the MCT oil and the butter and the soluble fiber.

[00:59:34] And you lean on that in the beginning. And maybe people leaning on that and the hard goes away.

[00:59:40] Dave Asprey: [00:59:40] It might take you probably 60, maybe 90 days, depending on your health status, how much weight you have to lose and all that to start having a flexible metabolism, that’s like, Oh, I always have ketones present.

[00:59:52] And the trick for me anyway is when I do eat carbs, I pour some MCT oil on them. So there’s always 0.2 0.3. Ketones in my body. So my cells like, Oh yeah, ketones are a regular source of energy in my diet MCT oil. Can’t be stored as fat. It’s metabolized, almost like a car, but it doesn’t raise blood sugar.

[01:00:10] So if you do that regularly, but as I go, I should always be ready to go into ketosis and they should always be ready. Uh, to eat carbs, right? Because you eat carbs a couple of nights a week or three nights a week, or a lot of women, this is going to sound amazing. They fast in the morning and have carbs at dinner every night.

[01:00:26] And they’re not bad people. Oh my goodness.

[01:00:29] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [01:00:29] That’s that’s actually what I’ve been teaching a lot is that you gotta fast do your fast, and then when you eat, you got to eat. We can’t like be in restriction and for women, we need to be eating more foods that build up our progesterone specialty as we go through menopause.

[01:00:45] So talk a little bit of finish up on that because my community is largely largely women. And I really want women to understand that you can fast and you can eat too. And they’re both healing States for us.

[01:01:00] Dave Asprey: [01:01:00] Um, they really are healing States. And pardon me for one second. I am going to, um, but my other person, no.

[01:01:11] Coming soon. I asked me that question one time, if you would, I get distracted

[01:01:15] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [01:01:15] by women. I love that you included that women need to do it different. But one of the things I’m trying to teach women to do is that it’s okay to eat. It’s okay to fast. It’s okay to eat. And we can have both of those States in a 24 hour period.

[01:01:29] And they will both benefit

[01:01:30] Dave Asprey: [01:01:30] you if you don’t eat. Uh, over time, there’s, there’s a word for that it’s starvation, right? And you don’t need to do that. And one of the things that I would encourage men and women to do is understand something when you see the, the Hollywood star and they’ve got these ripped abs and whether it’s a woman or a man that ripped abs like lean stringy muscle.

[01:01:57] The way they do that, is they fast for a day or two before the shirt’s off or that shoot, they take diuretics to drop all of the water out of the body and they feel like crap and they look that way for the shot. And then they go and they usually eat a bunch of cheeseburgers. Okay. That is not how healthy people look.

[01:02:15] It has never been how healthy people look and it is especially not how healthy women look, what your body does. If you’re in your fertile years, is it storing your omega-threes, especially DHA on your butt? And on your hips and your first baby is going to benefit from that the most. If you choose to have kids and it’s supposed to be there.

[01:02:34] And if the body is getting a signal from the environment that there isn’t enough food or enough healthy fat to do that, it will mess with your hormones because it doesn’t want you to get pregnant because there’s a famine, which means you could die, which means your stress hormones will be high. Yeah. So you got to give it enough food and enough nutrients with enough to send the signal that says you are safe.

[01:02:53] Because if you’re like most animals, there’s a pretty good chance. You’re going to get pregnant. Even if you’re not planning to your body, doesn’t know you’re not planning to, and it feels unsafe if you are on such a low calorie or such a low energy density or just low nutrient diet, or you’re fasting all the time.

[01:03:10] It’s like, man, this is not a time. So let me actually turn this off. And I’ve interviewed athletes, female athletes. We’re like, Oh, it was great. I went into ketosis. I want an event and I didn’t have to deal with it my period for a year. And I’m like, do you know what you’re doing? Your biology don’t do that.

[01:03:26] Not if you want to live a long time,

[01:03:31] you’re sending a signal from the environment into your body that says, look, there we are. I’m going to I’m in a place of abundance. It doesn’t mean I always have abundance, but it means I never starved so much that I’m starting to break myself down in a way that’s unhealthy. And so look. You look at the food and you say, is this food going to serve me?

[01:03:49] And so you eat it. And if you say, you know, that food is gonna taste really good, but I know I’m going to be hungry and have a hangover afterwards. It’s not going to serve me over time. You start to look at something like a McNugget and you stop seeing it as food. Like that actually, isn’t what works for me.

[01:04:05] It’s not compatible. I can’t put this battery in this device because they don’t fit. So that will happen. And it’s going to take you about five years, but the question is, will this food serve me? And it serves you blood providing energy and providing nutrition and by being free of stuff that messes with you.

[01:04:21] And that’s why you don’t do the conventional meat. It’s full of stuff that messes with you. Don’t do vegetables that cause inflammation, they mess with you. And not all vegetables messed with everyone the same way, but there’s general rules and algorithms to follow for that. And I share that stuff in fast this way, because.

[01:04:37] It’s how you think about food and how you tell yourself that you’re safe. When you go without, you can go without companionship. I was afraid of loneliness. So I fast in a cave for four days to show me something I’m not going to die. If I’m alone, I’m actually going to have to feel my feelings, think about my thoughts and all that.

[01:04:51] Right. And you’re going to be able to sit at a table and people are eating there. Their mirror neurons are gonna, they’re gonna see you and they’re going to feel hungry for you. And you’d send them love and you’re like, look, guys, I’m fasting right now. It’s not because I have an eating disorder I’m asked right now because it makes me feel good.

[01:05:07] And I’m going to have a very healthy meal tomorrow. And it’s just okay. But if you’re not okay with it, you’ve got to do your inner work and being part of fastest way is the inner work, not the biologist. You’re fasting. We understand that guys like skip a meal every now and then it’s good for you there.

[01:05:21] There’s a whole book on fasting.

[01:05:23] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [01:05:23] I love it. Okay. Last thing I want to finish up with five rapid fire questions for you. This has been great. And I really appreciate you taking the time. And my community is just going to, it’s going to devour this information cause you brought a whole new slant to fasting.

[01:05:36] Okay. What? You have an amazing podcast. You’ve been doing it. Well, I don’t know, 20, 30 years

[01:05:43] Dave Asprey: [01:05:43] podcasts were invented.

[01:05:45] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [01:05:45] Right? Okay. Who’s this year, let’s start with this year. Who’s the most interesting person you’ve interviewed and

[01:05:50] Dave Asprey: [01:05:50] why, how man this year it’s been a long year. Wow. We’ve had like 40 something guests and I don’t remember dates very well.

[01:06:00] So I’m going to go probably really recently. Um, I interviewed someone named Lisa Wimberger. Who talked about neurosculpting and how there’s meditation techniques to turn on specific parts of the brain in specific orders. So that people who oftentimes have a hard time with meditation are able to meditate.

[01:06:21] And it’s tied directly to the vagal nerve, which is something that’s heavily influenced by what you eat and when you eat. So I think that there’s going to be a lot of awareness now about how. Hey, if you’re already fasting, maybe a meditation that chills you out even more. Isn’t what you need. Maybe you need a meditation to wake up a little bit and we’ve kind of meditation to put you to sleep.

[01:06:40] Maybe it’s not what you need. So that, that was a fascinating interview. And certainly I’ve had interviews with. Um, so many amazing people, including, uh, Dr. Fung. I think I’ve got his new book here, the cancer code. That was also one of my favorite interviews. Like, Hey, this is the book for cancer. Just read this book.

[01:06:56] It’s got what you need. So picking ones hard. Yeah. Okay.

[01:07:00] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [01:07:00] Well right now we’re in this crazy pandemic. If you, we have a lot of people influencing where, where this pandemic is heading. If you could talk to any of those influencers, And, uh, really helped them see a different way. Who would that be? And what would you say?

[01:07:18] Dave Asprey: [01:07:18] I think I’ve already talked to him. Uh, Dr. Vivec Murphy was on Bulletproof radio and Biden named him as co-chair of the Corona virus task force. He was a former us surgeon general and we connected so well. And the reason I had him on my show was he hadn’t been named yet, but he wrote a book after his time as surgeon general, about an epidemic.

[01:07:37] And the epidemic that he wrote about was about connection and the lack of connection. And he said it’s causing is costing more, it’s causing more pain, causing more, more problems than anything else. And if we could just get people reconnected to each other, most of our problems would go away. And to hear that message.

[01:07:55] Uh, and to be able to say, wow, we’ve got a guy who knows the cost of disconnectedness. Who’s now setting coronavirus policy going forward. I’m pretty excited because he’s a good human being who cares about that side of it. Um, the other, the other thing I would say is focus on your inner mask. Your inner mask happens.

[01:08:12] It’s called your immune system, your metabolism donate fried stuff. Take your vitamin D take your zinc and live your life.

[01:08:18] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [01:08:18] Yes. Awesome. I love it. Okay. What’s the biggest failure you’ve had. And what did you learn from

[01:08:24] Dave Asprey: [01:08:24] it? Oh, God, I’ve had so many failures. The biggest one, one of the big ones happened when I was 26.

[01:08:31] I was in Silicon Valley. I made $6 million and I was 26 years old. It was awesome. Wow. Lost it. When I was 28. It was not awesome. Yeah. What I learned from it, this is going to sound like such a douchey thing to say. I looked at a friend at the company would also made stupid amounts of money. And I said, I’ll be happy when I make 10 million.

[01:08:53] So, what I learned is that money doesn’t make, I was just going to

[01:08:57] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [01:08:57] say, that’s the lesson you learned from losing it?

[01:09:00] Dave Asprey: [01:09:00] Yep. I wasn’t happy when I had it. So you don’t get happy. You don’t get happy from getting things and you get happy from serving people.

[01:09:08] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [01:09:08] Yeah. Agreed. Okay. Last question. If you had one message for the world that you could just implant in everybody’s brain, what would that message be?

[01:09:17] Dave Asprey: [01:09:17] It would be something that I share often as with the entrepreneurs, but I’ll share it with everyone it’s that people want to help. I talked about those three F words in our interview earlier. Fear food, your favorite one, you’re

[01:09:28] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [01:09:28] gonna make me say it again.

[01:09:30] Dave Asprey: [01:09:30] Fertility. And there was a fourth one and the first three are actually kind of tied to, to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

[01:09:39] Um, but before he died, Maslow, didn’t publish his next part of the hierarchy. And I interviewed someone recently who studied everything Maslow ever wrote. He was about to publish something that said the final thing on the hierarchy of needs is transcendence. And this ties into the fourth F-word after you do those other things, all life forms have friends.

[01:10:02] So bacteria work together to make yogurt or biofilms and trees make up forests and people make tribes and we make community and we are wired to do that. And the implication for that, the advice for everyone would be people want to help you. If only you will ask them and to be willing to receive the help the world is full of people want to help.

[01:10:22] You just don’t see it. Oh,

[01:10:24] Dr. Mindy Pelz: [01:10:24] amazing. I love that. Well, we’re going to help you by doing a book study on fastest way. So thank you. I really, I really appreciate the book. I appreciate you taking the time and you’re just, you are a icon in the health influencing world. So thank you. This has been really delightful and keep changing the world.

[01:10:44] Appreciate it.