Is Fasting Healthy?

Could fasting be the key to unlocking a healthier, longer life? Join us as we sit down with Megan Ramos, co-author of "Life in the Fasting Lane" and a true testament to the healing powers of fasting. Together, we explore her journey from a type 2 diabetes diagnosis to a life of improved metabolic health, unwrapping the layers of how intermittent fasting can combat chronic conditions and pave the way to wellness. This isn't just about shedding pounds; it's about a profound transformation that touches mental clarity, emotional balance, and the body's innate ability to repair itself.

Megan and I delve into the fascinating science of autophagy, where the body essentially cleans house, and how this process is enhanced through fasting. Our modern eating habits, littered with processed foods and constant snacking, have led us down a path of insulin resistance and metabolic diseases. But there's hope. By revisiting our ancestral dietary patterns, reducing meal frequency, and eliminating processed foods, we can reverse the tide of type 2 diabetes. This conversation isn't just theoretical; it's filled with practical advice and real-world examples that illuminate the path forward.
Tune in for a holistic take on managing diabetes, enhancing gut health, and breaking free from the cycle of bad eating habits.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome back to the Health on Gevity Secret show, and I'm your host, dr Robert Lufkin. Today we embark on a transformative journey with Megan Ramos, who joins us to unravel the profound effects of fasting on health, aging and diabetes management. Megan's own battle with type 2 diabetes was the catalyst for her exploration into fasting, alongside with Dr Jason Fohn, which led to remarkable health improvements and a dedication to preventative medicine. Our discussion traverses the landscape of fasting's potential, revealing its power not only to aid weight loss but also to enhance overall health and stave off disease, offering a beacon of hope for those seeking the path to longevity. As we conclude, we'll dissect the practical applications as well as the staggering benefits of fasting, from shorter daily fasts to more extended therapeutic episodes.

Speaker 1: 1:07

Sharing stories from personal journeys and those of our patients, we illuminate the changes not only in physical health but also in mental clarity and emotional well-being that come with fasting and dietary modifications. The episode wraps up with an exploration of the challenges and psychosocial shifts necessary to alter our relationship with food, emphasizing the irreplaceable value of community support in managing all these chronic conditions and inviting listeners to dive deeper into our own holistic health programs. This week's episode is brought to you by Elle Neutra, maker of the prolonged fasting mimicking diet. I just started using their five-day fasting plan and it's really pretty wild. If you want to try it, use the link in the show notes for 20% off. Please support this podcast by checking out their website and taking a look at their other innovative products.

Speaker 2: 2:14

And now please enjoy this week's episode During this session to have Megan Ramos, who is the co-author of the bestselling book Life in the Fasting Lane. And, megan, such a pleasure to have you here for this meeting.

Speaker 3: 2:30

Oh, thank you so much for having me, steven.

Speaker 2: 2:33

Good, I know we're talking in general about fasting, intermittent fasting, for diabetes type two, but let's begin by telling us how you got into this area in the first place.

Speaker 3: 2:48

Yeah. So from a young age I was very keen on preventative medicine. My mom had a whole bunch of health conditions and they just always treated her symptoms which gave her more health conditions, and nobody took the time to figure out what was causing the initial problem in the first place. So at nine years old I decided I was going to become a preventative medicine pioneer.

Speaker 2: 3:08

Wow, you're cautious.

Speaker 3: 3:12

I did get into nephrology, though, as a young student at 15 and had a summer job doing data entry on some small projects. What I didn't realize at the time was the largest medical research program in the United States and Canada. We were based in Canada, so all in North America, so it was a nephrology program, and I was partnered up with a young physician right out of his presidency, a young man named Dr Jason Fung, and he's a nephrologist, and we worked together in the summertime and I continued to work there throughout the school year. There is a lot of drug studies going on at that program, but there's a lot of lifestyle interventions. They use a lot of the profits to find lifestyle interventions and prospective studies looking at changing diets, including exercise, sleep and stress management. There's this whole clinic dedicated to it outside of the research as well. So I thought this is just a gold mine. It was everything that I wanted to do with my life and work with life-minded people.

Speaker 3: 4:21

Anyways, flash forward 11 years and we have people dropping like flies from type 2 diabetes. When I was 15 and I walked into the only dialysis unit, there was barely any patients. By the time I was 26, there were thousands of people being dialyzed 24-7. So many, in fact, that we were airlifting them to places like Ottawa and Sudbury, which are about a five minute drive from Toronto, and that was largely due to type 2 diabetes, and all I did was watch people die and I thought, oh, you better get your act together, megan. You know you're skinny now, but you had fatty liver. You were told you had fatty liver when you were 12 and PCOS when you were 14. And it seems that everybody's 40th birthday present in my family's type 2 diabetes as well as their first heart attack. If they even make it to 40 without a heart attack, my uncle passed at 36 from his third heart attack. So you know, take some time. Figure out what you want to do with your life because watching people die isn't what you signed up for and get your own health together. So I did everything. I hired the best dietitian in the country, I worked out with a personal trainer and it's very expensive and at the end of it I gained quite a bit of weight and developed type 2 diabetes for my 27th birthday.

Speaker 3: 5:41

Jason was going through a similar transformation as me, being so frustrated, and conversations that he had with friends led him to start thinking about fasting from a therapeutic lens. And when I had my diagnosis, he was just starting to talk about this within our clinic to your colleagues, to some patients, and I listened to him talk to patients one evening and I went through all of the stages of anger, denial, grief I don't know what the order they are. It all happened really quickly and the next day I did my first fast. Six months later, I lost over 60 pounds. I've maintained an 86 pound weight loss in the last 11 years. I reversed my A1C from 6.4 to 4.6 no more fatty liver and no more PCOS in just six months. So it was the most rewarding thing I ever did. And then, fortunately, we were able to team up to start bringing fasting to diabetic patients to help them reverse their condition.

Speaker 2: 6:43

That's an amazing turnaround and you attributed specifically to the fasting regimen that you used.

Speaker 3: 6:53

A combination of fasting and lifestyle. I was too sick and I was too heavily addicted. I didn't have the good health to even work on healthy habits. I was a 1984 baby, so the formula fed McDonald's is real food to feed your kids. Don't let your kids go for three minutes without eating generation. I often joke that I had insulin resistance coming out of the womb under the 11 pound baby.

Speaker 3: 7:29

There was definitely nutritional stuff that I did that really helped optimize things. But fasting started to give me some energy. Fasting started to show me that light was at the end of the tunnel and so my goal went from I'm going to do my fasting protocol three times a week and on my eating days I'm going to try to have one good meal that week. And that went from having one good meal to only one bad meal, to one bad meal every couple of weeks. So I just didn't even want it anymore. So I attribute fasting to sort of being the tip of the iceberg. You know that really caused the whole transformation and made it capable for me to do so.

Speaker 2: 8:14

That's great. Well, before we go more into the details of the program, let's take a step back and give us your perspective on aging and longevity and how it fits in here in this discussion.

Speaker 3: 8:29

That's really cool, because we started fasting with individuals to help them inverse their type two diabetes and they would come in and say, can fasting help with this or that or all this range of things? And we'd say no, and now I don't know what fasting can't help with From an anti-aging and longevity perspective. I mean, it's just so mind blowing, both sort of at the cellular level and then also, you know, just physically. We see these radical transformations. I've gone into waiting rooms and called in patients that I hadn't seen in a couple of months, or look for the patient and not see them and go back to my exam room and have them chase me down the hall saying Megan, no, I'm here, and I just didn't recognize them.

Speaker 3: 9:18

C-section scars disappearing, all after like 30, 37 years, all those crazy stuff, and we attribute that to autophagy. So autophagy is this cellular recycling phenomenon that even when I was in university no one was talking about it, but in the last 10 years it's become a really hot topic because of all of its great potential in terms of anti-aging, longevity and disease prevention. So when your body, when this physiological state of autophagy is activated in your body, your body will hunt down old and damaged cells proteins and take them apart and put them back together so they function normally again and early research in this shows that there's a lot of potential benefits for disease prevention, especially when it comes to things like neurological conditions. But just anti-aging in general and we're seeing it observationally in their clinic in our coaching program with just the radical changes that our patients are experiencing I mean they're getting better lab markers in their 70s than they had in their 20s. It's just been really wild to see people actually aging backwards and we'll often joke with some of our clients and patients you know it's your birthday and you're younger with all the work you've done, like let's look at a photo of you last year versus this year.

Speaker 3: 10:43

Let's look at your labs last year versus this year. What were you doing in terms of activity? So a lot of that fasting. There's different ways to activate this physiological autophagy phenomenon in the body. A chirogenic diet, so extremely low carbohydrate diet, is a one way. Very intensive exercise is another way. But fasting is a really great lazy way to really turbocharge it. You know, you just enjoy some green tea, some water if you pinch the salt throughout the day. You don't have to go pump a ton of iron at the gym and you don't have to be so micromanaging with your meals and you can experience this extreme amount of autophagy in a relatively short period of time.

Speaker 2: 11:31

Now, that's great. Tell us what's the problem with type two diabetes and insulin and why is it such a growing problem?

Speaker 3: 11:42

Yeah, so we look back to my grandparents. They would be in their 90s if they're still both alive today, and they grew up eating food. My grandfather grew up on a farm, you know, eating food from his own land, not processed in refined foods. They ate three square meals a day, no snacking. My grandmother was my biggest advocate when I started fasting, because everyone else in my family thought I had an eating disorder at the time, and she said, no, it wasn't until we started eating all of the time that we became obese and we started to develop disease.

Speaker 3: 12:17

In this family and going back generations, people didn't have diabetes. They didn't have heart disease, you know. So why, suddenly, are we plagued in more recent generations with it? And a lot of it goes back to these changes, you know, from how my grandmother grew up versus how I grew up. I grew up on processed and refined foods. I grew up being told you need to eat all of the time. And people ask about the genetics. Everybody loves to blame everything on genetics. Okay, clearly there's a genetic predisposition in my family, like many others, to develop type two diabetes. But my grandmother, you know, she was in her 70s. My father, you know, was in his 40s. Why was I in my 20s developing it? So our diets radically, radically changed. So what are these processed and refined foods that we eat? Sugars and fats? They cause the body to produce a lot of this hormone, insulin.

Speaker 3: 13:12

Many people know about insulin and that it has some form of relationship with diabetes. That usually involves people injecting it and I think a lot of people out there think you inject it because you have a deficiency of it. And that's true in tight one diabetes, which is an autoimmune condition where the pancreas doesn't have the ability to produce enough insulin. But what we're having issue with is that our diet, the processing, refined foods that we're eating and the frequency of our eating it's causing our pancreas to produce an abundance of insulin, which ends up building up in our systems and becoming toxic and it creates the state of hyperinsulinemia and that leads to the development of something called insulin resistance, which is synonymous with metabolic syndrome. So metabolic syndrome, the root cause of conditions like type two diabetes, cardiovascular disease. So type two diabetes is actually a disease of too much insulin in the body. The body, the cells, start to develop resistance towards your own insulin levels.

Speaker 3: 14:18

I always like to use this example of one of my favorite singers, adele. I think you have to be living under a rock to not know who Adele is. She's one of the Zillion Grammys. So she had this great album and then she disappeared for a few years. She got married, had a baby and then she came back with this new album and her hit song was called Hello. And again, you'd have to be living under a rock not to hear this song, and so I was so excited when it came out. But then that song everybody was, and it was playing everywhere every elevator, every shopping mall, every store. And one day I got in my car to drive home and this was back before the days of Spotify and everyone listening to Apple CarPlay. But when I was listening to the old school radio, it was on eight of my 12 preset stations and all I wanted to do was scream goodbye, adele. My brain had developed Adele resistance. I couldn't stand her voice, the sound of the song, due to that overexposure.

Speaker 3: 15:24

And that's what our diets, our modern standard North American diets and meal eating habits have done to ourselves. Our cells have been so bombarded with our body's own brand of insulin that it's developed this resistance to it. So we inject this foreign insulin. That's somewhat different, in the hopes that our body will utilize it. But then what happens is we still eat the same foods and we still eat them the same frequency, and when you're diabetic they tell you they even eat more of these foods.

Speaker 3: 15:55

Then your body starts to develop resistance to your insulin injections. So you go from 10 units, next thing you know you're on 100 units. Next thing you know you're on two or three different types of insulin. At the end of the day they put you back on oral medications and we had one patient who was on 440 units of insulin, four oral diabetic drugs, and still had that hemoglobin A1C of 13. And it's just, it's just wild. So you know, we develop resistance, insulin resistance to all of the injections over time. So we've really got to work at treating the root cause. If you develop this insulin resistance at least the type two diabetes by eating too often and eating the wrong foods, then we need to try doing the opposite, which is not the standard of care. But what we've seen clinically is if we do the opposite, we can actually reverse the condition.

Speaker 2: 16:51

And what's the relationship between what you're describing and inflammation?

Speaker 3: 16:56

Yes, so inflammation. Insulin is a huge mass producer of inflammation in the body and body fat. Fat cells are also a huge producer of inflammatory cytokines in the body. So and the foods that we eat, they're also inflammatory in their own unique ways that aren't just an insulin producing as well. So our whole diets are designed to create this huge inflammatory storm within the body. Hormonal responses that create the inflammatory storm and then, you know, helping the body develop body fat that further creates the inflammatory storm.

Speaker 2: 17:39

And what have you found in terms of the effect of stress on this model that we're talking about?

Speaker 3: 17:50

It's huge. It's huge and it's one of the greatest epidemics I think that we have here in North America right now. It doesn't matter All of the good that you do with your diet and lifestyle to stress can magically undo that instantly. I was just sharing. I've gone through some stress in the last year and boy did it do my health in, and I finished off 2022 with just like the worst case of COVID and that I had not been sick with a cold or a sniffle in like a decade with my good health and my good lifestyle. So stress can definitely do a number on it. Stress our primary stress hormone, cortisol, is produced by adrenal glands. It causes this hormonal cascade that is quite detrimental. It causes our glucose levels to go up very high. When stress becomes more long term, then you end up with chronically high glucose and insulin levels, and this in itself can lead to the development of insulin resistance and type two diabetes.

Speaker 2: 18:57

Yeah, and so a lot of times when we talk about the mind, people think we're talking about oh, it's all in your head, but in fact, stress and other cognitive factors, stress and other cognitive factors, stress and other cognitive factors, how we appraise situations, how dangerous we think different situations are all those have, as you just described, a direct relationship and a direct effect on the biochemistry and physiology of the body.

Speaker 3: 19:31

Very much so you know it's. We live in this constant state of busyness, you know, like a badge of honor, but it just leads to your sort of demise at the end of the day. So it's important to take care of your. Stress. Helps manage your glucose levels or insulin levels, reduces your risk of developing metabolic syndrome, amongst many other health conditions as well.

Speaker 2: 19:59

Right. So the from the psychological perspective, from the resilience perspective, it's also about helping the body get into the optimal state to allow recovery, to really allow the here, allow the healing process to take effect. When you're on guard and worrying about dangers. It does, it sends the body into a whole different direction.

Speaker 3: 20:26

When we work with a lot of people and they say, you know, I physically feel full but I mentally don't feel like I'm satisfied, for example, that's just one of them and we are just so go, go like nonstop. And so we'll ask these individuals were you eating your meal at your desk? Because they'll say they ate, then they physically feel full, but then they can't start their fast. So it's prohibited, you know, prohibiting them from completing what they need to do for our program, for them to reverse their type two diabetes, for example, because their feedback is yes, I am eating at my desk or I'm sitting at the table scrolling through social media or watching something on YouTube or watching the news on TV while I eat.

Speaker 3: 21:13

And we try to spend a lot of time educating people on you know how your body responds to the sympathetic nervous system response versus the parasympathetic nervous system response. So we've got the sympathetic, the flight or fight stress response. So if you're trying, if you're distracted, watching the news, scrolling through social media, trying to rush to finish that report, your body is going to be in a state where it wants to trap fat, where it wants to spike glucose levels, where you know it's not investing any metabolic resources really into digestion. So we have, you know, this huge epidemic two of irritable bowel syndrome and all different types of GI conditions that are new and rising really rapidly. But thinking about how we eat differently, versus if we're in that parasympathetic state, that rest and digest state where our bodies are relaxed, then we're able to digest food efficiently, assimilate their nutrients much better, see a decrease in their glucose levels and boost in satiation levels.

Speaker 3: 22:22

So, even on a microscopic level, when it comes to stress, we spend so much time with our clients trying to help them. You know, experience this and once they see the big difference, you know once they eat something that normally makes their stomach upset, say an avocado, sometimes when someone's newer to eating more fattier foods. But if they're sitting there and they're present and they're just eating their meal and they feel really good and they're greatly satiated, they can go on with their fast, they feel good On a minor scale. We can show them the impact of stress versus no stress on their physiology and this we often find helps inspire them to try to take control of stress in the larger picture in their life, because it's just truly detrimental to metabolic health, which is just detrimental to aging and longevity as well.

Speaker 2: 23:15

Yes, right, and you know it's interesting. I find that a lot of people are not really clear on when they are relaxing. Now they'll come home and they'll watch on TV either the news or an action movie, and they're sitting in their chair and thinking well, I'm relaxing. But in fact, an action movie or the news can be stressful as well, and so I find people wind up just jumping from one source of stress to another, even when they think that they're not being stressed.

Speaker 3: 23:55

Very much. So you know this is something that I really had to take a hard look at in my own journey. You know we are very multitasking time and society, and you know how many times that I do my hair. You know, without trying to watch some form of educational Materials and podcast recording something like that, how many times you go on a walk, you know, and just think about the air and the trees and how your pups are enjoying it. You know you're on your phones. So just being present, just focusing on one task, get one time and giving it your full attention, that's not something that we do and in our fasting patients so we definitely see it being a big roadblock or and being very counterproductive towards their type two diabetes reversal quest.

Speaker 2: 24:50

Yeah, well, let's get into your program and maybe some of the more specific aspects of it In terms of the intermittent fasting. What do you find is the most Important aspect of that?

Speaker 3: 25:04

So the biggest thing is to cut out snacking. In order to reverse Type two diabetes, at least not to make it worse, we need to minimize the number of times that we are eating in a particular day. There's a reason why my grandparents generation, you know, until the late 70s, wasn't developing type two diabetes. They had breakfast, lunch and dinner. They weren't allowed to have a snack before dinner because I'd ruin their appetite, nor were they allowed to eat after dinner, meant they didn't eat enough broccoli and their meal, so they had to go to bed hungry. You know, we clearly wouldn't be here today If our grandparents didn't survive that, or great grandparents didn't survive that. So you know we have this incredible Retreat, the storage and retrieval mechanism.

Speaker 3: 25:53

You know, several years ago I was in Toronto. I live in San Francisco area now, but when I was in Toronto I was doing an interview with a woman who born, raised, always lives in Dallas her whole life. Very different climate than Toronto for part of the year. So it's minus 40 Back home, celsius or Fahrenheit, same thing at that point is cold and it's going to be that way for weeks, like it was February. We were not going to see the light to sometime in March. So this woman, you know, she asked you think that it was, you know, possible for people to survive in the past. Like, did humans really survive? Fast saying and I'm thinking, okay, you know she's in Dallas and probably has got a garden going all year around, but outside my options today are bark and snow, right, like there's, there's not many options, and it's going to be like that for several, several weeks. And people, how to survive? Right, people inhabited Canada, people made it and lived through the winter times. We have this really great storage and retrieval mechanism. So it's really encouraging people to have faith in our evolutionary design. You know we didn't wake up and have cave men or cave person Covered some refrigerators to go to.

Speaker 3: 27:08

At some point we did start preserving food, but that didn't mean that we didn't go through periods of time every year Link v ones where we didn't have access to food to preserve in the first place. So you know we've had, we've got to rely on these ancient mechanisms. So the best things people can do is to stop stacking. That really helps. Stop adding fuel to the fire. So every time we eat, our bodies add more insulin to our system in response to that food. So we're walking around like we've got this insulin storm in us, like this California fire going you know, forest fire we don't want to be dumping oil or gas, you know, or on that fire, or we want to be putting it out. So every time we have to add more fuel to our food, we're going to be putting it out. So every time you eat, you're adding more.

Speaker 3: 27:55

And sometimes people say, okay, you know, I'm going to eat really low carb foods, because low carb foods don't generate a lot of insulin production in the body, so they'll eat on things like cheese and olives and nuts. You know, throughout the entire day, but for several hours, throughout the entire day, they're constantly adding drips of insulin to their system. If their systems are already full of insulin, they're just going to cause it to overflow, even though the foods that they're eating are not processed and refined. So it's just minimizing the number of times that we're producing insulin a day. Allow ourselves, our bodies, to have a break from insulin production and then, when we come into fasting I'm really, for the metabolic patients, someone with insulin resistance already when we come into fasting, our goal is to suppress the insulin levels down long enough to help facilitate the breaking of the cycle of insulin resistance and the data shows that insulin resistance individuals don't even see their insulin levels fall substantially till about 24 hours into a facet state. So most individuals, up to this point they're not seeing improvements in their blood sugar levels, they're not seeing any fat loss and that's because their insulin is so high. You know we talk about insulin being like the soldiers, that's guarding the fat cells from being emptied and released of the body fat.

Speaker 3: 29:21

So we've got a fast long enough to lower it to enable some of the insulin suppression to get the blood sugar levels to come down, to get the fat cells to start causing us, or enabling us to lose weight in the first place. So most of our patients they'll do three fasts a week that range from 24 to 42 hours. So at the minimum we want to drop their insulin very low at the 24 hour mark and then ideally you want to sustain it for a period of 30, 36 or 42 hours, depending on their comfort level. And that was the standard protocol Jason and I started with and you don't have to do this forever. It's a therapeutic treatment for a reason it's on a diet. It's a therapeutic treatment. So I mean you go to say, chemotherapy, for decades upon decades. You go for a series of treatments and then hopefully you'll get some results that are favorable for you at the end, and that's what we try to do.

Speaker 3: 30:25

And in our first cohort of patients, all of them are off insulin in three weeks, every single patient. Some of these patients at the time have been on insulin longer than I had been alive. We were talking 34 years. I was 27, 28 at the time that we launched this program and I'm nearly 40 now and these patients are still off insulin. I still have relationships with each and every one of them. So it's, you know, it's true reversal of the condition and it's just really incredible. And they're not doing, you know, 336 hour fast a week anymore, but they did that for a period of six to 12 months. And in that six to 12 months what happens is, you know, they might not eat cake every day anymore, for example, but you know, on that holiday, when they have a piece of cake for someone's birthday and a small piece of cake, they'll have a normal glucose response afterwards rather than a diabetic glucose response afterwards. So if we were to give them an oral glucose tolerance test, they would come out as non diabetic at the end of it. So you know, people don't have to fast their pedicly forever, but we encourage them not to snack so not to constantly add insulin to their system, and when they do eat meals, try to be conscientious about those meals.

Speaker 3: 31:45

It's not that you can't ever have certain things Sometimes, we're all human, but you just don't want to be eating them every day. You know the ice cream. My husband likes ice cream. It's never something you're going to find in our freezer on an ongoing basis, but every now and then he'll go out and he'll have a little bit of ice cream. So Jason's a big ice cream fan as well, but it's no longer in his freezer. So it's about really prioritizing real whole foods in the long run, being mindful of glycemic load and insulin load in the long term. But for about six months, you know six to 12 months people can reverse decades worth of disease. It takes 10 to 15 years before your markers on your blood tests even begin to indicate type two diabetes like it develops, for 10 to 15 years before you even get a glimpse that you might have the condition. So in six months, if you pass three times a week, you can reverse you know many years worth of damage.

Speaker 2: 32:49

So if we shift our discussion from reversing diabetes to and what? What you're doing right now or what you would suggest is a good plan or program? I know that I believe that you said that you do 18 hours of fasting. I've gotten into the habit of five days a week doing 16 hours. Can you say what, why you pick 18 hours and what the variable is there?

Speaker 3: 33:20

Well, right now I'm doing 14 hours because I'm doing working on this baby family thing. So there is. We don't want a lot of growth but you do want to permit enough growth and fast things, kind of anti growth. So I'm doing 14 hours. But 1618 is kind of arbitrary depending on an individual's schedule. So up until this point you know where we're hoping to have a baby on Brahmos onboarded soon. I was doing 16 to 18 hours just depending on how my days have been flowed and if there is a day where I just wasn't going to be able to have that, say, lunchtime meal.

Speaker 3: 34:04

I live on the West Coast. My company operations are largely based on the East Coast. Sometimes my lunchtime can get a little bit messy with with meanings and trying to coordinate schedules. So instead of eating in that crazy sympathetic state where I'm just driving my fat storing up and my insulin up and my, you know, having the stress response, I just select to have, you know, a nice cup of tea, you know nice glass of sparkling water and I'll end up doing a 24 hour fast on those days and that's typically how I let my schedule sort of roll when it comes to my eating. For maintenance is what I've done, you know, in the last 11 years and I've maintained some really great weight loss and my metabolic health for the most part, minus some stress, in the last year. So you know, if it's a regular day it's more two meals and if it is a busy day then I'm not going to not going to eat under circumstances where it's not ideal for me to eat. It's certainly not going to allow me to do a 24 hour fast.

Speaker 2: 35:13

And I'm curious in the recovered patients that you've worked with, did you notice any cognitive or emotional benefits from the process?

Speaker 3: 35:25

Yeah, a lot of individuals notice huge improvements in conditions like generalized anxiety disorder, depression. We have had some individuals notice huge improvements with bipolar disease as well. Just better mental clarity, mental focus, reduce stress because their energy is better. They've got more energy, they're able to keep up with their tasks and be more present, and that just being present for people. You get your job done, you're less stressed out, but you also have better relationships and your community thrives when you're able to be more present. So just pretty overwhelming, you know improvements for individuals. You know outside of even their own personal diabetes journey. But improving those markers. Attention deficit disorder is another one where a lot of individuals I was like that, you know you're a certain age. I think they just put many people on Adderall or Viavance.

Speaker 3: 36:28

So I fell in the Viavance category and I felt like I needed it to survive in my early 20s. And then I got to the point where I was just so busy, you know, with work and things are going so well and I had so much energy and I was catching up on you know what felt like years worth of missed living and I was like I'm in my 20s, I need to embrace this now, you know, just really kind of thriving in life. And then I realized I had gone three months without getting my Viavance prescription refilled. So it's just been really neat to see all of those improvements across the board. I do think a lot of it, though, does result in not just fasting, but also positive dietary changes and reducing inflammation on the body and improving gut health. I think all of fasting is one of the many tools in the tool charts that helps improve gut health, and I think that gut health is really, at the end of the day, that leads to improvements in these particular areas.

Speaker 2: 37:32

Yeah, and I think there's a lot of good evidence that shows that what children are fed plays certainly plays a role in attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity and things of that nature. When you do your longer fasts, what do you allow? Just water or other liquids? Or how do you do those longer fasts?

Speaker 3: 38:03

Yeah. So water is ultimately a fasting limit. You can have it flat, mineral sparkling, you can have it at room temperature, you can get cold, you can make it hot, you can get really wild with water on your fasting days. But we also, you know, we encourage people to have some other things that are going to impact their insulin levels very much. So teas, especially herbal teas, can be really great.

Speaker 3: 38:34

Mint tea, peppermint or spearmint, doesn't matter really great appetite suppressant. No caffeine in it either. If you've got a sensitivity you can drink it all day long. Ribos tea, chamomile tea there's so many wonderful, great ones out there. Jason's a huge fan of green tea because it's very strong anti or appetite suppressive properties.

Speaker 3: 38:59

People can have coffee if they can tolerate the caffeine as well, and some people report that it is a great appetite suppressant for them. So we've got water, we've got tea, we've got coffee. We'll encourage patients to have a cup of broth if they do need it to help them get through a fast. We look at things like broth or any fats that they might add to their tea or coffee. We look at them like training meals. If you need it, use it. If you don't need it, don't use it. But if having a tablespoon of fat like butter or ghee in your coffee helps you fast for another 12 hours and by all means do that, or if having a cup of broth you know gets you to fast overnight until the next day at lunch, then absolutely have that cup of broth to use it. So we encourage people not to seek comfort in the fats and in the broth on their fasting days but to use it as tools to help them lengthen the fast when they feel they need assistance.

Speaker 2: 40:01

I see so the longer, the longer fast, the three day and longer. I'm hearing that that's like an early step in the treatment of the diabetic. Are there benefits or reasons to do those longer fasts for healthy people?

Speaker 3: 40:24

Well, anyone with metabolic syndrome can benefit from it. So people will say to me I might be overweight, I have a belly, but I don't know if I'm overweight, but I don't have high-tech diabetes, but you still have insulin resistance. Or we work with a lot of women who are quite slender but have severe PCOFs. They have a lot of insulin resistance. Or there's quite slender type 2 diabetics as well that worry about fasting and weight loss, but their body composition is not so good. So, even though they visually look slender, we call them TOEFI. So then, on the outside, but fat on the inside, they have a lot of this visceral abdominal fat. So pretty much anyone that falls under the metabolic health spectrum can benefit from doing some of these longer fasts. But individuals who are just healthy, like someone like myself nowadays I well, under different circumstances, when not trying to conceive, I would periodically do some longer fasts just to help induce some of that autophagy. So I thought of it more as a cleanse, essentially a reset.

Speaker 3: 41:41

Prior to COVID, I was on the road. All of the time I come home, I do three days of clinic, I go out on the road and I'd be in Amsterdam, I'd be in Zurich, I'd be, you know, in Texas I'd be all over the place all of the time. So you're eating out, you think you're ordering good foods, but there's rancid oils that they throw on the grill not necessarily the most organic or highest quality foods as well. So your body does accumulate inflammation from this and I would do these fasts periodically throughout the year just to help reset. So some people will like to do like a fast, say every Friday, or fast every Monday, as part of ongoing maintenance. I was someone who was more elect to choose like a few days, you know, like five or seven days, and take a therapeutic approach for a week, and I would do that seasonally, like we clean out our homes seasonally, and my business partner, jason Dr Fong he does it once a year He'll do a five to seven day fast.

Speaker 2: 42:51

Okay, so I know you coach patients and you're both trying to create the program by having them do the fasting, but you're also addressing bad eating habits as well. What's the biggest resistance you find in people? What's the greatest difficulty you encounter in this process? And then, what do you have you found effective in overcoming them?

Speaker 3: 43:25

Yeah, I think a lot of it comes back to stress. In our book Life in the Fasting Lane, we had a third author, her name's Eve Mayer, and she wrote in one section about how, the moment it dawned on her that food was her best friend, she celebrated every success of food. She consoled every failure, every bump in the road to food. When she was bored, she hung out with food. Food was her best friend and she had to mourn that and she had to figure out what it was that she could do to bring herself comfort or fulfillment that wasn't food related.

Speaker 3: 44:04

How do you feel at void, especially when you have such a lifelong connection to food? And even I learned it from a young age too. My dad was a trial lawyer, so grumpy to the stereotype, so dad would come home from court and he'd be really grumpy and mom would give him pasta, bread, chocolate, milk and dad would be really happy for an hour and then he'd go to sleep, and so I learned that that's how one coaxes with stress from a young age. So what we hear from a lot of our clients and patients is this deeply emotional relationship with food, and food is their best friend. And with making changes there's a lot of voids and it's not even like our best friends are eggs or they're sardines or avocados. There are a lot of this processing refined junk that's available that doesn't serve our metabolic health goals or longevity goals very well. A lot of inflammation producing foods, so it's counterproductive. So then we have them and we only feel good for a few minutes, but then physiologically we feel very worse, sometimes for even days after consuming these foods. So our biggest struggle is trying to help people turn away from that.

Speaker 3: 45:26

And when you get individuals now that are coming through the program in my age group, like we never grew up eating well, we didn't grow up eating home cooked meals. We don't even know what these foods tasted like. I didn't eat my first Brussels sprout till I was 31. These were just not foods that we had. I ate so many McNugget happy meals that the lady called me baby doll and didn't have to take my order at McDonald's. So we have this full generation that doesn't even know what real food is. So someone like myself I had to go through this period of time where I just wasn't liking food and now I could be in Brussels sprouts the last four days in a row. To be quite honest, I just love them. I'd have them over French fries any day of the week and that's just totally wild.

Speaker 3: 46:19

So it's how do you feel that void? And that's a lot of hard work. And it's so habitual too that I was talking to a client the other day and there was a very stressful situation. She's a single mom and a caregiver for her declining mother and her mother wasn't doing well and without thinking she leaned into the cookies. So how do we break that? How do we get in front of that? Because it just keeps the ball rolling backwards. So our relationship and trying to help people stop the habitual mindless going for it in that emotionally heightened state and helping them seek comfort. Now, when I'm really stressed out, all I wanted was a cup of like a warm cup of tea in a bath, but it took a lot of work to make sure that it wasn't a McNugget Happy Meal or a Dom Nose Pizza. So it's doing that type of work that we find to be the most challenging in our community.

Speaker 2: 47:19

Yeah, and of course these early childhood associations conditioned associations relationships are so strong and very difficult to break so there needs to be a process to develop new associations. And what I find is people really maybe make an effort and then it doesn't happen as quickly as they expect or want and then they give up and they don't realize that. You know, you spent your whole life making those childhood, strengthening those childhood associations, so it's gonna take a while to develop new habits and you just have to have patience and engage in that process and have good support in making that happen.

Speaker 3: 48:18

We're a society full of perfectionists, for various reasons, I know. And when I was like that, when I was younger and I remember really tripping hard, falling pretty flat, you know with, because if you weren't perfection, then you ended up failing massively. And when you're a kid it's not so consequential. But in my early 20s I experienced my first consequences of this perfectionist mentality and my father said to me you know, it's not how you fall down that defines you, it's how you pick yourself back up. And so when I got diagnosed with type two diabetes, I was someone I'm like I'm gonna fast a thousand days, I'm gonna reverse this. Now I am never, ever, ever gonna have another piece of pizza in my life like I'm just done All very unrealistic self-talk. And I said to myself okay, you know, this is really. You know what James Clear says showing up and being 1% better. I'm making sure that you celebrate that or I'm never a failure, always a lesson, you know. So when I did, you know, sort of mindlessly, end up eating something that wasn't a food I wanted to have in my routine anymore. Okay, what made me reactive? You know what made me go to that food? What can I set up in my environment next time to help me, you know, be cognizant of that and redirect me, and so not dwelling on the negative. And so we see a lot of people wanna go 100 miles per hour right off the bat to not be able to be perfect and then sort of going the extreme opposite because they feel so down on themselves. So reminding people that this is not a linear journey and there's gonna be plateaus and sticky spots around the way, and that's why I think community is so important.

Speaker 3: 50:12

That's largely what we built with our business at a fasting method. We do our coaching, but really the community, you know, I didn't have anyone when I was going through this. I had Jason, but he had never struggled with weight and illness like I did and I could, you know, talk to him 24 seven and bedded him or anybody nuts. He couldn't have been my only community and I was just really fortunate that. You know, once I started to get to a place of good health, we started doing this with patients. My patients became my community and I saw them all day long, every day. So I was totally immersed in this community. But where they struggled was leaving the clinic and I was always there. And when they left the clinic, they didn't have that community. So that's what we've tried so hard with the fasting method to do.

Speaker 2: 50:58

Yeah Well, this has been such a fascinating and informative conversation, Meg, and I really appreciate all the information and that you're bringing to the table here, and I think most importantly, it's just to demonstrate the power that we have in our behavior and our choices and that you're able to, through this process, reverse some serious illness, and I think that in and of itself is encouraging to everybody watching and listening and also our recognition that there is a strong mind-body connection here in terms of what works and how we overcome. Community is important, support is important, and so you wanna have some like a comprehensive approach to whether it's diabetes or any other chronic physical condition, that it's a comprehensive program that you wanna find a way to put together in order to have success. So I really appreciate all the anecdotes and suggestions that you've made.

Speaker 3: 52:15

Thank you, steven. I appreciate our discussions today as well. I'll say our psychologists on our team is definitely the busiest one. It's the biggest one in the United States, but there's a huge mind-body connection there and it's just so great to be a student of it every day at work. I love showing up, helping people get better and learning, so I appreciate having the opportunity to share my learning with you all today.

Speaker 2: 52:42

Yeah well, thank you so much, and how can people reach you or find out what you're doing? What's your website?

Speaker 3: 52:49

Yeah, our website is thefastingmethodcom. All of our information, books, blog posts, community coaching, all of our social stuff you can find everything over there.

Speaker 2: 53:03

Thanks again, Megan.

Speaker 4: 53:05

Thank you. Can I start? It's already recording. Oh sorry. This is for general information and educational purposes only, and it's not intended to constitute or substitute for medical advice or counseling, the practice of medicine or the provision of healthcare, or diagnosis or treatment, or the creation of a physician patient or a clinical relationship. The use of this information is at their own user's risk. If you find this to be on the value, please hit that like button to subscribe to support the work that we do on this channel, and we take your suggestions and advice very seriously, so please let us know what you'd like to see on this channel. Thanks for watching and we hope to see you next time. I'm gonna keep saying that that's good, it's great to see you. I think that's very good. You like it. You wanna do it one more time? Is that good? I think that's good. I love it. You need to say it through recording. I love it.