Fasting For Longevity

Reframe fasting as a sustainable lifestyle rhythm that can help you feel lighter, sharper, calmer, and healthier—both now and as you age. We will discuss:

•  why metabolic health is central to longevity, 
•  how fasting affects the brain, hormones, and inflammation, 
•  the difference between fasting with and without food, 
•  why juice cleanses, broth fasts, and fasting-mimicking diets can be powerful tools, 
•  and simple fasting practices they can begin immediately for more energy, mental clarity, and easier fat loss. 

Transcript

Hi everyone. So today's podcast we are going to talk about fasting and fasting. And this is going to be so important as it relates both to how we feel and live and move right now, but also how we feel, live and move in the long term. So fasting is very, very much connected to how you're going to move through your day and it's also connected to how you are going to age, whether you will age well or whether you will age in a disease state, which is not what we want for longevity. One thing if you have been part of the Joey Life listening to our podcast, reading our newsletters, participating in our programs, you know that most important is metabolic health. This is science rooted because your metabolic health affects how you move through your day and even more importantly, it affects how you're going to move in years to come.
(01:18)
Metabolic health is intricately connected to brain health, to Alzheimer's, to dementia. There is more and more research coming out about how your metabolism, your ability to switch between glucose and ketones impacts your brain health, your brain being the hungriest organ and your brain being very, very sensitive to deprivation of energy. We also see how our metabolism affects inflammatory markers. Our metabolism affects our body composition, which in turn affects our joints and our cardiovascular health. And so when we look at fasting and feasting, it's very important that we'll realize that this is not just a fad, but it is intricately tied to metabolism, which is a cornerstone of your health. So I am so excited you were here. I am Julia and I am the founder of Jolie and a student always and a very deep dive researcher at the same time. So this is near and dear to my heart because I want to live as long as possible.
(02:46)
I want you to live as long as possible, but to live in health and wholeness. And I want you to enjoy this very day. The moment that we have in front of us is only today. So we want things that are helpful for us now and helpful for us later. So we're going to talk about fasting in two ways. We're going to talk about fasting as fasting by refraining from eating and we're going to talk about fasting with food. But before we do that, we are going to discuss why fast and how we should approach it, particularly if you're a woman listening to this and you're over the age of 40 or you're perimenopausal, because it's very important how you approach fasting to make it a successful beneficial thing for your body as opposed to a harmful endeavor. One of the things that whenever we do anything that's very out of our normal programming, so we're programmed ancient programming here that when food is here, we eat.
(04:01)
This is part of what kept us alive for all these generations. When food was available, we eat. We fasted out of necessity. We didn't fast out of choice. So our natural seed of being is if there's food present, we eat. If we're fasting, it means guess what? There's a famine or we haven't found an animal to eat or there's nothing to forage for. So we are biologically made to eat what's in front of us. So when we in modern life decide to fast to get the benefits that our ancestors naturally got, there are a few loops that we need to jump through. And because we do it intentionally, sometimes we can do it in a way that stresses our body. So one thing I want you to think about is let's talk about language first because the way we perceive something, the way we talk about something is one of the first factors that determines if it's stressful, if it's not stressful to our body.
(05:08)
And so I like to frame fasting as eating windows and non-eating windows because that language does not seem like you're depriving yourself. It doesn't seem stringent. It doesn't seem like, oh, I can mess this up. I'm doing this right. I'm doing this wrong. No. It's simply you're having times when you're eating and you're having times when you're not eating. So I like to use the language eating and non-eating windows. It makes the process of fasting way more fluid and it also makes the barrier to entry wider. So if you are going to dip your toe into the fountain of fasting and you choose to just not eat anything between breakfast and lunch, you are maintaining a non-eating window between breakfast and lunch, which means guess what? You're fasting. You can choose to do a non-eating window between lunch and dinner. Guess what? You're fasting. Your non-eating window might be from dinner to breakfast.
(06:23)
And guess what? That too is a fast. So when we start to think about it as non-eating and eating windows, we have more flexibility in how we can begin to experiment and integrate fasting into our regular life. The other reason that I like to use that language is it doesn't seem like you're depriving yourself of anything. Instead, it seems that you're choosing to eat and to not eat. And that is a natural rhythm in our life. We eat sometimes and we don't eat sometimes. It's not like, "Oh my gosh, I can't eat for the next 16 hours grin and bear it. " No, we're just having eating windows and not eating windows. The other thing that I want you to think about when you're thinking of approaching fasting is it's kind of a tortoise and a hair in my opinion that if you go slower, your body's going to adapt to fasting more easily and it will not perceive it as a stress.
(07:28)
So if you dive straight into say a 16, 18 hour fast, it is very likely that your body is going to perceive that as stress. And for women listening, this is particularly pernicious because when our body perceives at its stress, it ups our cortisol and when it ups our cortisol, not only does it destabilize all of our hormones, but it amplifies problems or perceived problems that we have regarding menopause and perimenopause. And I say perceive because they are real actual problems and there is a space for us to begin to think about sometimes our life choices exacerbate those problems. So let's say our metabolism shifts as we're going into menopause and our body has a propensity to store more than it did when we were younger. If we dive into an 18-hour fast, our cortisol is going to shoot up and that is going to make that from a small problem to a giant problem.
(08:39)
And so I want you to think about if you're in that menopausal window that you need to be more gentle with your body when making these shifts so that it doesn't spike cortisol and therefore amplify all the symptoms of menopause. We don't want to do that. So that's why we don't look for deprivation and we use terms like eating and non-eating windows. So now that you know there's an openness in the approach that there's a way that you can maintain eating and non-eating window no matter how small it is. So this practice of fasting is available to you. So that's the first thing to know. The second is why do it? Why do it? And the primary reasons that we want to fast is to create more insulin sensitivity. We want to fast to create metabolic flexibility and we want to fast for gut health.
(09:49)
So when we talk about insulin sensitivity, we want our body ideally to be hypersensitive to insulin. So it is very responsive. And to do that, we need to have periods where our blood sugar is on the low normal side so that insulin levels are on the low side. Think of insulin as a barking dog. You don't want your dog barking all the time. It is going to drive you crazy and you're going to start ignoring your doggy. You want your dog to kind of bark every so often. So you know if he's barking, okay, he's telling you something important. You need to sit up and listen. So we want insulin to be released to tell ourselves, "Hey, there's more energy. There's more circulating glucose than needed. Please store this in our fat cells." But if we are constantly outputting insulin because we are constantly eating, we are the barking dog that is incessant.
(10:55)
So insulin is coming to the cells and saying, "Hey, let in this extra energy." And your cells are so tired of the sparking, so tired of insulin knocking that it ignores it. And then your glucose levels go up, your A1C goes up, this is how we see it. You become prediabetic, you might become diabetic and your blood glucose as it rises your insulin sensitivity drops because there's more and more circulating insulin and you in the process endure the toxicity of elevated sugar. So what does elevated sugar do to us? It harms our blood vessels, our capillaries, it harms our liver, it harms our skin, it harms our mitochondria. It does damage serious damage to our body. So we don't want that. And so we fast so that we maintain insulin sensitivity and so that we have periods where there isn't much sugar. We have periods where our body can disinflame.
(12:07)
We have periods where our body can clear out toxins. We have periods where our blood vessels are operating in a very healthy environment instead of a sticky, gooey environment. So that's one reason. The other reason we fast or we have eating and non-eating windows is to create metabolic flexibility. So our bodies can easily burn sugar, glucose, and our body can easily create ketones, which is another form of energy. We want our body to be able to do that seamlessly and we want our brain to have periods of burning of living feeding off of ketones because it's very, very, very protective against Alheimer's and dementia and we don't want that. So we want metabolic flexibility and the only way that we're going to develop that and maintain it is by having times when we're eating and times when we're not so that our body has to A, tap into fat storage and B, create ketones to be used.
(13:26)
The other reason that we have eating and non-eating windows is for gut health. So your gut, whenever you put something in your mouth, guess what? It works. So there's no such thing as, "Oh, I just ate a little bit," or, "Oh, it was just the bite." Any bite that goes in your mouth, your body has to break down and make it into usable molecules. Therefore, your gut has to be active. And if we want our gut to heal, your gut needs downtime. It needs downtime at night, but it also needs downtime during the day and we do that by having non-eating windows. So those are some of the reasons why we fast. We fast for energy. These are the positives. We fast for optimal brain health. We fast for excellent body composition because we're storing fat and drawing down from fat storing, drawing down. We're not creating a on- way street of storage and we're creating greater hormonal balance because insulin is balanced.
(14:30)
It helps all your other hormones to balance out. And so now you know the why. So let's talk about the fasting without food. So fasting without food in its very simplest form is choosing not to eat between your meals. So let's say you have three meals a day, you're having your three meals a day and you're choosing not to eat between those three meals a day. So you're not having snacks, you're not having a bite of this, you're not having to nibble that. You are choosing to have three times a day that you eat and the rest is your non-eating window. This is a completely valid and extremely beneficial way to practice fasting. This is not like a wimpy way. This is a hundred percent valid and highly sustainable way to practice fasting. And remember, the tortoise wins the race. So you can do it that way.
(15:30)
Another way you can do it is your fasting window between your dinner and your breakfast. Start out at 10 hours, push it to 12. If 12 hours feels good, you can stay at 12. If you think you want to go a bit more, try 13, try 14. I generally don't recommend going over 14. People do do it, but I generally don't recommend it because in terms of being an expert in longevity and women's health, I always want to avoid excess stress on the body. And fasting more than 14 hours, your body will perceive a stress. And I like to look at stress as we each have a stress allotment that our body can handle without it interfering in our mental health, our biological health, our physiological health. When we exceed what that bucket can hold, we start causing problem. And considering our modern life is so full of stressors of challenges, whether that's with children, with yourself, with relationships, with economics, with jobs, with world affairs, there's a lot of stress.
(16:51)
There might be stress just getting to work. There are innumerable stresses. So what we can control, we control. And when we can choose to not put excess stress on our body, we choose not to. So there's some space in our bucket for the stresses that come to us that we don't get to choose. So that's my approach there. So that's why I don't really suggest you go more than 14 hours. So that's another way of fasting is having that window and making it bigger and bigger and bigger, longer and longer and longer. The other way you can do it is choosing certain days when you fast. So for a while my practice was I would eat regularly on four days a week and three days a week I would mainly consume bone broth. That was my way of fasting, which actually fits into our fasting with food, but bone broth is so low in calories that it very much feels like fasting by just not eating.
(18:02)
You can do a full fast where you're only drinking water. I generally only recommend that for a day and my approach to health and wellness is additive. So I'd rather do something like fast a day with bone broth because not only am I fasting, but I'm also healing my gut. I'm lowering inflammation. I'm building my tissues through the collagen and the protein and amino acids. I'm building my immunity. So I'd much rather experience the benefits of fasting, which you'll get when you're fast with broth and have the additive effects of what I'm fasting with. So I will say that as much as you can maximize the value of what you do for your health, the more bang for your buck you get and the more money you have in your wellness bank. So that's fasting without food. Now, fasting with food comes in different ways.
(19:06)
Fascinating food comes with the broth cleanse. It comes with the juice cleanse, which was I'm a fan of the juice cleanse. I'm a fan of a low sugar juice cleanse and that's kind of how we approach it at Julie, not a high sugar where you're just drinking tons of fruit juice, but you're drinking mainly vegetable juice. That's a way of fasting with food. It gives you hydration. It gives you something to have during the day, but you're still experiencing a dramatic calorie deficit, which allows you to reap the benefits of fasting because your body is going to have to really dig into your fat stores, your body's going to need to create ketones, your gut is going to get the opportunity to rest and your insulin levels are going to be low. The other way that we fast with food is we do fat soup cleanses or the soups chosen are mainly vegetable-based and broth-based soups very low in caloric content and those you can do for a day.
(20:11)
There's a time where once a month I would do a one-day fast and for me it was a juice cleanse and I would do that once a month. It felt great. I felt like it was a time for me to deeply hydrate. It was also a time to support all my detoxification pathways, it was great. The other way you can fast with food is through something like a fasting mimicking diet, like our deep reset where your food that you're eating is designed in such a way to allow your body to go into ketosis, which is kind of the fasting stage so that you can reap metabolic benefits. The benefit of fasting with food is that when you have food, you are able to fast for longer. So a typical juice cleanse is one, two, or three days a broth cleanse, unless we're doing it for medicinal reasons is generally one day.
(21:15)
With fasting with food, we can go five days. We can do a deep reset for five days, fast, reap a huge number of benefits and not feel deprived, not upset our hormones, not upset our life. We'll have the energy to live, we'll have the energy to take care of our responsibilities, but we still will be in a state where our body's creating ketones, where our liver is detoxing, where inflammation is going rapidly downward. And the cool thing about the fasting mimicking diets, the deep reset, that type of fasting is that five days allows for such a deep metabolic reset that the benefits of that type of fast keep coming afterwards. So a month after the deep reset, you are still benefiting from the changes that happen during the deep reset. So two months afterwards, you're still getting the benefit from that. And so for someone who's doing that type of fast, I generally recommend it seasonally.
(22:32)
If you eat a super clean diet, let's say you're eating Jolly all the time, you have lots of fruits and vegetables, zero process food, all that kind of stuff, then maybe once every six months, once a year. When you're first starting, like when I went through my health transformation, I did a fast for three days every month and I needed it and I felt great afterwards. And then there was a time where it was like it wasn't like giving me the same benefit, shall I say. I didn't feel the same benefit because my body had detoxed. And so while it was helpful, it wasn't as helpful. And so instead of doing it once a month, then I speece it out to once every two months and then once a season, which is kind of where I am right now. So that is how you fast with food, but I encourage you to take something from the podcast and decide to implement it into your life.
(23:29)
If I were you, I would really, really focus on that window between the end of dinner and breakfast and in choosing one non-eating window during the day. If you do those two things, you are going to see an immediate change in your cognitive health. You're going to see a change in your body composition over the next month of doing that in a positive way. You will see a change in your inflammation and it will be really, really remarkable how different you will feel with just those two changes. I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, please reach out and contact us at thejolife.com. I'm Julia. You can contact me at juliathejolielife.com and please share this, please follow us, please reach out to us and help us transform the world for good. I hope you enjoyed this podcast, the Jolie Life Podcast. And if this podcast helped you in any way, I invite you to share it with your friends and your family and whoever you come across that you think might be helped for this podcast.
(24:47)
I would love to hear your comments and you can contact me at julia@thejulielife.com. And please follow us on Instagram, the Jolie Life. Our website is thejolife.com and it would be lovely if you would subscribe and if you would rate this podcast and go back and share this with someone. Let the ripple effect happen. Let the Jolie life be the beautiful life that keeps on giving. By beauties, lots of love.