Why Fasting Is MORE Important than Diet

You know , boy , my viewpoint , intermittent fasting has gone from all the way over here to all the way over here .

At one time when someone mentioned fasting , I'm like , what is that gonna do ?

Fasting ?

It's not gonna help you .

And then when I started looking into it , I'm like , wow , fasting is the most important thing you can do for your health out of all the things .

And I want to talk about why that is , I mean , if you look at fasting from a scale of what can a person do to create more health .

It's right at the top of the list .

It's more important than what you eat .

It's more important than exercise .

I mean , when you think about the survival mechanism in our bodies , right ?

We have developed some serious biochemistry relating to preventing dying from starvation , preventing uh being frozen to death , also preventing being eaten by lions by running away .

So we have this fasting , we have cold therapy .

We have exercise that tends to mimic how our bodies develop these survival mechanisms .

So when you do fasting , you directly trigger all these amazing survival genes .

And this involves pretty much every part of your body , every part of your body starts to improve .

I mean , if you compare the environment that we used to be in , which is not frequent eating to the environment .

Now , which is grazing all day long , you can see the problem .

I mean , today is the day after Christmas .

Ok .

Now , yesterday there is food available all day long and it wasn't unhealthy food , but it was just a lot of food and I grazed pretty much all day long .

And I can tell you , I don't feel very good .

I don't feel good when I eat in a constant way .

So when you start fasting , you know , the first thing you do is you give up your snacks and then the second thing you do is you tend to let that breakfast go away .

You go as long as you can until you can get to that first meal , which is roughly maybe lunchtime and then you wait until dinner and then you eat and then you don't snack .

And yes , you can have coffee .

You can have tea , you can drink liquids , just make sure it's not like juice or sodas or anything sweet or anything of any calories .

Now , typically everyone fasts when they're sleeping .

Right .

Uh , why would you want to mess up the whole fasting by eating breakfast ?

Many people are not hungry in the morning unless they eat a little something and then they'll be hungry an hour and a half .

So eating does cause you to be hungry .

But if you don't give into that and you start fasting , you start to repair your pancreas .

The pancreas has taken a beating from all this frequent eating , all the carbohydrates .

So the little cells that regulate insulin called the beta cells are really the cell that gets hammered the most when we eat a lot of carbs and we eat very frequently .

And so it's pumping out all this insulin all the time and rarely does anyone actually test the insulin .

They look at the blood sugar and basically 10 to 2030 years , your blood sugar could be normal .

But in the background , you have this massive insulin spike , ok ?

But you don't really test that over time , your body starts developing something called insulin resistance .

Insulin resistance is a situation where the receptors are going to protect you against this excess amount of insulin and carbohydrate .

It's a protective survival mechanism .

So even though you're eating a lot of carbs , everything looks normal .

Unless you check this insulin situation .

And then over time when this pancreas gets exhausted , it can no longer compensate .

So your insulin production starts going down and insulin keeps the blood sugar lower .

So now we don't have that control .

So now the blood sugar has no choice but to start going up .

So we start getting prediabetes and then diabetes , which is a high level of sugar in the blood because we now have so much insulin resistance and your beta cells in the pancreas are so tired , they just can't work anymore .

Well , guess what ?

Fasting starts to repair and protect the beta cell .

The beta cell starts to heal and insulin starts to become more sensitive .

So you have less insulin resistance , which is gonna help everything .

So , because you're not eating so darn frequently , your digestive system finally has a chance to relax in between eating .

I mean , most people are eating so frequently , just think about how much work that digestive system has to work .

But when you do immuno fasting , finally , the system has a chance to not work so hard , you will also have an antidepressant effect .

Your mood is going to be elevated .

So roughly , I'm talking about a pattern of eating that is a 18 hour window of fasting .

So the first meal might be at 12 , the second meal might be at six .

There's also a large amount of people who also go to one meal a day .

Now , this is not necessarily just to focus on reducing calories , but it is very difficult to consume the same calories from three meals to one meal .

What you're actually doing too is you're not slowing your metabolism .

You are correcting a slowed metabolism , which really at the heart of that is insulin resistance .

Ok .

So now that you're at one meal a day , what's going to happen next is your inflammation is gonna go way down , all of these inflammatory conditions start to be improved .

Your body actually makes antioxidants .

It's called endogenous from within a production of antioxidants .

So when you fast , your body starts making more antioxidants to help counter the oxidative stress .

You see , if you think about oxidative stress , all the things that you know , from radiation to pollution , junk foods , it all produces a lot of free radical damage .

Well , if you have enough antioxidants , you can counter that .

And the microbes in your digestion , which has a huge influence over your immune system start to thrive and you get more microbes .

So your microbes do better when you don't feed them so often .

And having this diversified microbiome , you get all sorts of improvements definitely in the cognitive function .

There's something called brain derived neurotrophic factor that would be like miracle grow for your brain now and then a lot of people add um prolonged fasting , ok , here and there .

And that produces even bigger benefits in prolonged fasting .

Like let's say you fast for two days , you're gonna strengthen .

Ay , ay is the recycling of old damage proteins , viruses , pathogens in your cell , your body cleans those up and recycles them into healthy tissue , which is pretty wild .

And even in the guts of your cells , you have these mitochondria , which is the key for energy production for so many things that are related to disease .

You can actually start to repair and clean out the damaged mitochondria which also can trigger cancer and getting rid of those and build new mitochondria .

So the term for that is called mitochondrial biogenesis .

And then some people fast longer for like 72 hours .

And when you start doing that , you really start to strengthen this uh stimulation of stem cells , especially for your immune system .

So a lot of people do prolonged fasting to get rid of cancer .

In fact , it is one of the best things you can do .

So in this video , I just wanted to touch on the real reason why you should be doing fasting and the amazing benefits .

There's a lot of details on how to do it .

Um For that information , you should watch this video right here .