Health Longevity Secrets
A podcast to transform your health and longevity with evidence-based lifestyle modifications and other tools to prevent and even reverse the most disruptive diseases. We feature topics including longevity, fasting, ketosis, biohacking, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, stroke, cancer, consciousness, and much more so that you can find out the latest proven methods to optimize your life. It’s a mix of interviews, special co-hosts, and solo shows that you’re not going to want to miss. Hit subscribe and get ready to change your life. HLS is hosted by Robert Lufkin MD, a physician/medical school professor and New York Times Bestselling auhtor focusing on the applied science of health and longevity through lifestyle and other tools in order to cultivate consciousness, and live life to the fullest .
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Health Longevity Secrets
Fasting Against Cancer with Dr Katie Deming
The shocking truth about cancer treatment lies in what medical schools aren't teaching doctors. After 20 years as a radiation oncologist, Dr. Katie Deming discovered that cancer might be fundamentally a metabolic condition rather than primarily genetic—an insight that transforms how we approach healing.
Cancer cells predominantly use glucose as fuel through fermentation, even when oxygen is present (the Warburg effect). By eliminating this fuel source through ketogenic diets or extended water fasting, remarkable healing becomes possible. Studies show patients with glioblastoma multiforme living significantly longer on ketogenic diets, but the most profound results come from supervised water fasting.
Beyond targeting cancer cells, extended fasting offers comprehensive healing: resetting metabolism, detoxifying the body, rebalancing the microbiome, and often triggering profound emotional and spiritual experiences. Participants report life-changing insights, unexpected spiritual connections, and a complete reset of their relationship with food and health.
This approach must be professionally supervised—especially the critical refeeding phase—but represents a powerful healing journey that addresses not just the physical manifestation of cancer but its deeper roots. Whether seeking an alternative to conventional treatments or complementary support during traditional therapy, water fasting offers a possible pathway to healing that conventional medicine has overlooked for far too long.
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Bluesky: ...
off and reboot the whole thing. Or we can, or we just start. That's good. Yeah, hey Katie, welcome to the program.
Speaker 2:Hey Robert, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:I'm so excited to get into today the ideas around cancer and fasting and all these things. But before we do, before we get into those particulars, maybe you could say a few words about what do we get wrong today with the way we conceptualize cancer and cancer therapy.
Speaker 2:Sure Well. So my background is I had been a radiation oncologist for 20 years and then left Western medicine. Why are all these chronic conditions diabetes, obesity, neurodegenerative disease, cancer all exponentially rising and what can we do about it? A few things really raised to the forefront for me. One is diet is a huge part of it. Cancer is a metabolic condition and I think you know in medicine I wasn't taught one class, not one class, on nutrition I don't know about you and it's still that way in most medical schools. And yet most of these conditions that we are dealing with, that are, you know, exponentially raising every year, are founded in metabolic principles. And if we could get our diet and nutrition correct we could solve this. And I think the same thing is with cancer.
Speaker 2:I think you know cancer. There are a few things that are going on. You know the story that we've been told in Western medicine, at least in my training, was that it was mainly a genetic condition. But we know that's not true because you know let's just take breast cancer, which was my specialty 95% of my cases were not hereditary, not genetically based, they were sporadic, and so a very small proportion of it is genetic. And also, if it was genetic, we wouldn't be seeing this tremendous rise. There has to be something going on in lifestyle, and so as I started to look at the information and data from Otto Warburg, looking at cancer as a metabolic condition, it made me realize that we really just don't understand cancer in the Western paradigm for what we're treating, we're focused on these DNA damage and really targeting that as the primary treatment.
Speaker 2:But if you understand cancer as a metabolic condition, it opens up so many other ways to address this issue. And oh, by the way, if we start to do dietary changes, we also help with all the other problems that people are having, because often they don't just have one condition. You know. Oftentimes they have insulin resistance or diabetes or they're overweight or they have neurodegenerative disease. And as you start to improve people's diet, they have neurodegenerative disease. And as you start to improve people's diet, you start to improve all these other things as well.
Speaker 2:And the other piece for me is that I really believe that there is a big connection between emotions and illness, and I've found that you can't address the emotions unless you get the diet right and you get people grounded and feeling well in their bodies. So I think it all goes together. But I think in cancer, I don't think that we really in Western medicine understand what cancer is and are not approaching it from a level that you can really solve the problem. That's why, even if we help people get better, we're having more and more people diagnosed with cancer every year and then, by the way, people get sick again. Right, we don't really solve the problem completely. So I think there's a lot of opportunity, which is exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So before we put the DNA basis to bed, I get what you're saying about the fact that in your breast cancer patients and in most cancers they're not strictly hereditary, in other words there aren't specific genes associated with them. And then, compounding that to your other point, the fact that cancer rates in many cancers are increasing now relative to the population. So if this were just a genetic somatic or a germ cell genetic mutation, the rate shouldn't change. So something in the environment is going on. The question, I guess the one remaining piece, about genetic damage is what about the idea that you know it's environmental factor in the environment, through carcinogens of all different types are causing gene damage, so that the genes are damaged and then that causes the cancer and they may be in damage to ways that are not not consistent. How do we know, what's the evidence for that, that gene damage doesn't cause it?
Speaker 2:Well, I do think that the toxins in our environment and then also eating a diet that causes inflammation in the body, can lead to DNA damage. So absolutely that there is this lifestyle component where, whether it's physical toxins in the products that we use or the air that we breathe, or, you know, the in the food, the glyphosate, all of that stuff, there's potential that we have we're causing damage with those, with the things that we are bringing into our body. For sure. But the interesting thing is that I really think it comes down to chronic inflammation and oxidative stress, which is basically stressing the mitochondria and basically having deficient or dysfunctional mitochondria to manage all of that oxidative stress that we have going on. So I do think that those things tie in. But this idea that it's a genetic condition, that it's passed down, that I think we've been taught a lot about that and that is important. But then not everyone with a genetic condition gets cancer right, so their lifestyle and what they're exposed to play into the development of cancer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's certainly not, yeah, genetic, it's certainly not genes, hereditary genes and even mutations. I guess people make the argument that gene mutations are present in cancer, as are metabolic abnormalities, but the question is, which are causal? In other words, did the gene therapy cause the metabolism or vice versa? And it sounds, like you of the opinion, and I think the evidence is strong too, that the metabolic abnormalities drive gene mutations, which are present, but they're not primary. What does that mean? Well, if you want to fix the disease, you want to fix what's primary, so you want to fix what's upstream, and if it's metabolism that's the cause, so let's talk about some evidence for that.
Speaker 1:We were talking offline about a recent paper that's in a relatively short line of other papers that shows the advantages of a metabolic intervention for cancer, and this was specifically a, a ketogenic diet, which ketosis is, as our audience knows, is a favorable metabolic state that can be induced with diet or fasting or a number of other things. And, um, this paper was from, uh, thessalonia, greece, I think, and also Thomas Seyfried from Boston was on that. But they, it was a small study, fair enough, a small study, but it showed that that, with a malignant form of brain tumor called glioblastoma multiforme, that the people on the ketogenic diet had a significantly lower recurrence rate than the people who were off the diet. Yeah, any thoughts on that or any thoughts on the study or other studies related previous ones with this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I think that one of the conditions within cancer that we have the most data around the ketogenic diet is glioblastoma multiforme, and so this study basically showed that patients who ate a ketogenic diet had a longer median survival than the patients who were eating kind of more standard diet. And there are other studies. So this is not the only one. There's also another one that's in progress at usc who basically they're using a ketogenic diet during chemotherapy to basically show the benefits of doing a ketogenic diet during therapy. But yeah, this is the one disease condition where you have a very short median survival. For GBM it's less than 12 months typically, and basically you know people who are really motivated, right, so it's got a condition with a poor prognosis. And then if people are motivated that there's been these small they're all small studies but showing that there's a potential benefit that you're basically getting a slowing of disease progression by using a ketogenic diet. And what's interesting about this is that this brings us to something that answers the question that you asked before is it the you know DNA mutation that is causing these problems, or is it the chronic inflammation that maybe is causing the DNA damage? And when I interviewed Thomas Seyfried, one of the things that he said to me was that he really feels like the DNA damage is secondary to the mitochondrial dysfunction.
Speaker 2:And if we go back to the mechanism of understanding cancer as a metabolic condition, the idea is that cancer this comes from Otto Warburg but that cancer primarily uses fermentation as its form of metabolism. And when you do fermentation in the presence of oxygen which cancer cells are, you know you might say that there's a decreased oxygen environment, but generally they're doing fermentation in the presence of oxygen, which our bodies are not designed to do. Right, we normally do fermentation when we hit our lactic threshold and we're exercising or something and really pushing ourselves, but these cells are using it as its primary form of metabolism. And what he said was that when you're doing this form of metabolism, it creates a lot of oxygen radicals when there's presence of oxygen, and so then those oxygen species, those free radicals, then damage the DNA. And he believes that we're chasing the wrong problem, that the DNA damage is the effect of this metabolic dysfunction, of cancer using fermentation as its primary energy source in the presence of oxygen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great point and could you speak for our audience the idea that this ketogenic diet. Why is that a metabolically advantageous intervention for these cancer cells with disordered respiration? Why is?
Speaker 2:that cancer cells primarily use glucose as their fuel, because when we do what would be considered adaptive respiration, it is through oxidative phosphorylation right, but that's normal. Healthy cells are doing that that have healthy mitochondria and adequate mitochondria. When we either have dysfunctional mitochondria or deficient mitochondria, the cells convert to doing fermentation or glycolysis, and basically the primary fuel source is glucose. We can actually lower levels of glucose through intake of food, because our bodies are designed to do ketosis when we're fasting, and so if you can leverage this and eat a diet that is high in fats and very low in carbohydrates, so the body converts from using glucose to using ketones. It's a way that we can survive. Our bodies are adaptively designed to do that.
Speaker 2:And now we've cut off the primary fuel source for the cancer. You know there's data that says that the cancer cells also use glutamine. So some you know Dr Seyfried talks about press pulse therapy, where they're basically depriving of both glutamine and glucose. But glucose is the primary source, and this is where the idea of the ketogenic diet really came into play, and it started actually with the epilepsy. They saw it, you know, working for epilepsy, and then Thomas Seyfried is really one of the early ones who started using this for cancer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's fascinating. Chris Palmer and Georgia Ede are now using ketogenic diets, taken from epilepsy, for mental illness, schizoaffective disorder, manic depressive disorder and for some not all patients it works. And even now Alzheimer's disease. Dale Bredesen and Heather Sandison are using ketogenic diets for Alzheimer's and again ketogenic diets for Alzheimer's and again, not everyone responds. But it's amazing that anyone responds, you know. But back to your point about this. One form of brain tumor, one form of brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme, has a short, poor prognosis and the people are very motivated. Is that why, and the several studies are being done with ketogenic therapy, with that, do you think this will translate into other cancers other than GBM? Or is it something unique about glioblastoma multiforme?
Speaker 2:No, I mean, actually there's been a study as like a feasibility and safety study with breast cancer and ketogenic diet. And then I think there's also at USC an ongoing trial about ketogenic diet, and actually maybe it's not at USC, I can't remember. I did. I interviewed a radiation oncologist who was involved with this study, but basically they're looking at using ketogenic diet during radiation for breast cancer and the feasibility safety study has already been completed. It's safe, but now they're looking at can you improve outcomes? I mean, I think the thing is this with breast cancer, the outcomes are pretty good. So then the number of patients that are needed and the size of the study and the length of follow-up is so long that it's hard to demonstrate efficacy. Where something like GBM, where you have such a short survival length, it's easier to show benefits. So I think that's why they use this particular disease. But I don't think there's something specifically different about GBM that makes it more conducive to using ketosis than other types of cancer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense Then kind of going on from ketosis then sort of the next level.
Speaker 1:Another way to get into ketosis, other than a ketogenic diet, is actually to to fast and and stop eating altogether, as you said. Then the body automatically begins utilizing fat burning, which produces ketones and you go into ketosis. So you've been looking at not not just ketogenic diets but actually fasting as as cancer treatments or adjunctive treatments, and we should say that just backing up the ketogenic diet is the great thing about it is there's very little downside in it. That, like nobody says, oh, don't do a ketogenic diet because you're going to, you know, have a heart attack, or educated people know that there's there's very little downside, so it could be added on to an existing cancer treatment and not not screw things up, so to speak, and that that's a that's a real plus. So what now about moving on to fasting? So talk about fasting and how does this play into cancer therapy and what are the? You know, if ketogenic diets work, great, why bother fasting? Or what are the trade-offs there?
Speaker 2:Sure, well, and actually Thomas Seyfried would say the way that he recommends people to get into ketosis and to start their ketogenic diet is to do a 72-hour fast, because it's one of the fastest ways that you can get into ketosis. But there are studies around fasting and what's interesting is, when you talk about fasting, there's so many different types of fasting, right. So there's intermittent fasting, time-restricted, then there's like a 24-hour fast, 36-hour fast, 72-hour fast, restricted, then there's like a 24 hour fast, 36 hour fast, 72 hour fast, and then there's prolonged water fasting and all of those have different benefits. And there's actually benefits in all types of fasting for healing cancer, because our bodies, in addition to getting into ketosis and, you know, cutting off the fuel supply of glucose for the cancer, there is also the repair aspect that when we're eating, we are basically causing inflammation within the body and the body is not able to as effectively repair. So if we want repair to be happening, we want to limit our feeding windows, right? So, just like, intermittent fasting is beneficial from that standpoint for someone with cancer, because then you're having periods of repair.
Speaker 2:But there are studies of looking at shorter fasts, like so from 48 to 72 hours or I guess. Actually there's couples different studies One from Dr Walter Longo in cell metabolism in 2014,. It looked at 48 to 72 hour fast for people who were getting chemotherapy and basically it showed reduced and this is a cell metasomal. So this is not a clinical trial. The next one I'm going to talk about is a clinical trial but basically they looked at sensitization of um to chemotherapy with fasting and they found that it reduced tumor growth in models for breast cancer, melanoma and glioma. It lowers glucose, which we know is the fuel source for the cancer. It also um lowers IGF and it basically helps protect the healthy cells, um, from the damage related to the chemotherapy. And so basically this was like one of the early studies that was done looking at the potential of fasting with chemotherapy. And then there was a clinical trial by Dorff et al in 2016 and looked at testing shorter fast, 24 to 72 hours around chemotherapy for breast, ovarian and lung cancers and they showed reduced side effects, improved quality of life, with some evidence of enhanced tumor cell death, although hard to know like clinical results just on that study. So there's some studies there looking at benefits of shorter, like you know, or I guess you would say longer than just like the time restricted each day, like 24 to 72 hour fast with chemo, and so for people who are having chemo, there can definitely be a benefit of fasting around that for both, maybe enhancement of the tumor response to the chemotherapy and also diminished side effects related to treatment.
Speaker 2:But in my practice, what has really opened up for and really I was not intentionally looking for this, I was not intentionally heading out into the prolonged water fasting space, but that is where I found myself because I have a mentor who teaches healing in ancient ways ways and he had told me and a big part of my practice is around water, because we are bodies of water, right, 99.9% of our molecules in our body are water and then we're 70% water by volume. And he basically explained to me you know, in ancient times they would do prolonged water fasting and prolonged water fasting, like at least nine days, will get you some shrinkage of tumors and if you go out 30 or up to 40 days, but at least 30 days, you can make cancer go away completely. And when I first heard this I thought he was crazy. I thought this is just how could someone go nine days? And then, when he said 30 days, I just was like this just seems totally like undoable. I just didn't even know that that was a thing.
Speaker 2:But I had one client do a 17 day water fast and she had breast cancer that had spread to her brain. It was her two new positive, which is a type of breast cancer that's a little bit more aggressive and tends to spread to the brain, and she had radiosurgery, which as a radiologist you're probably aware of this. But when you give radiosurgery into a brain tumor, what happens is that on the scan at three months after you actually see that things are a little bit bigger. There's maybe a little bit of inflammation and swelling and then some necrosis or dead tissue around where the tumor is, and then over time you'll start to see things go down in size but it never goes away completely. So if you were to see someone who had radiosurgery, the three-month scan, the area would look a little bit bigger and actually there'd be this like kind of dead tissue around it and then it would get smaller over time but never go away.
Speaker 2:And what happened with this client was she did a 17 day water fast. We did a lot of other things, so we changed her diet. We, you know, did some emotional work as well. But the big thing was the water fast. And when she had her three months scan and she went in to see the neurosurgeon, the neurosurgeon was totally confused because he's like it's gone. And she was like, well, it's supposed to be gone, right? And he said, no, you don't understand. Like that's not what radio surgery does, like it doesn't go away. But I can send you these images side by side of her brain MRI. She had, you know, clearly, a tumor. And then the next scan it's completely clean. There's no necrosis, there is literally no residual of any kind of tumor. And now she's a year out, had just had her MRI at a year and still totally clear. So that was my first experience of this where my mind was kind of blown.
Speaker 2:And then my second client who did a 14-day water fast. She had metastatic breast cancer, but she had breast cancer come back in the breast and they were recommending a mastectomy. And so I said to her I said well, if it's stage four, why do they want to do a mastectomy? You know, I mean it's not going to cure you of the cancer and it's a pretty radical surgery for your body. And so I asked her if her surgeon would give her a couple months to do some things and we could work on it. So she did a 14-day water fast Again, we changed her diet, we did emotional work as well, and when she went back in to get her mammogram for pre-op for the surgery, it was gone and she didn't require a mastectomy.
Speaker 2:So those were my first two patients that did water fasting, and it caught my attention. I was like, okay, I'm paying attention, and so then I started looking around. Okay, who's doing this? You know what's the data, and really most of the data comes out of the work of Dr Alan Goldhammer, who is affiliate. He founded True North Fasting Center in Northern California and they have case reports. So they are not fasting for cancer and they are fasting for health and weight loss and they're plant based. So they have some case reports, though, of people who had particularly there's some lymphoma case reports of showing lymphoma going away after 21 day water fast. And then they also have safety studies. So they've fasted 25,000 people water only fast over many years, and so they have a lot of studies around safety. There was a study published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine showing it was 2015 that they had like 768 patients, who averaged at least 10 days of water fasting, and that it's safe to do this.
Speaker 2:So what I started to do initially was I was like, okay, well, fasting is not my thing, so I'm going to refer to these other centers that do water fasting because I'm seeing the benefits.
Speaker 2:But this was not really my area of expertise initially. But the problem was, when I sent them to these facilities, most of them are plant-based diets, so they're no oils, no salt, and plant-based, lots of fruits, lots of legumes, all of which are not good for someone with cancer, and so they would fast, but then they would refeed on like fruit juices and rice and beans, and I I just was like this is not right. So that's actually what then led me into now looking at, okay, how do I create a fasting program, prolonged water fasting for people who are healing cancer that refeeds them in a way that is appropriate for them and basically, you know, helping their microbiome. You know, after you've reset it, we don't want to give a bunch of fruit juices, you know, to feed those bacteria. So, anyway, that's what led me into this, and then I can talk about okay, what happens, why is water fasting so special for cancer, what's happening there, but that's really what led me into it.
Speaker 1:No, yeah, I'd love to get more into that. Just for our audience. If we're comparing a ketogenic diet versus water fasting, a ketogenic diet or you even starting with a low carb diet and then the lower and lower carb it becomes a ketogenic diet. This is it requires commitment by the patient. I mean, you know you substitute steak instead of milkshake or something like that, but it's more easily accessible. I think it requires a lower level of commitment than a water fast. The water fast, you're all in right, it's every day a water fast and um. So the question I guess I would ask is then we know the ketogenic diet, um, at least there's.
Speaker 1:There's some preliminary evidence and and there's theoretical evidence of the benefits for cancer and and some of these early studies, like with glioblastoma multiforme and and others that are coming out showing the benefits of ketosis. So what evidence is there on the fasting that? Could we just achieve that same thing with just going on to a well-regulated ketogenic diet? Or what's the additional benefit of the water fast? And maybe we'll be getting into this, because it's almost a spiritual journey. You know, if you're water fasting, you're going to change the way you think about things, because every day you're going to be thinking about that, whereas a ketogenic diet is, you know, I've been doing it for for years and it's it's, you know. You get used to it after a while and it's it's not a big commitment as a, as a fast is. A fast is almost a, a spiritual quest, and that may, that may be a role anyway. So pick any of the above.
Speaker 2:Well. So the way that I mean, I think it all goes hand in hand, because If I do a water fast I'm then resetting someone, helping them reset their microbiome, helping them reset themselves metabolically, and so then the diet that we refeed them on and then have them moving forward is really important. And I don't specifically say ketogenic because in the cancer space therapeutic ketosis is very strict criteria of a glucose less than 65, a ketones greater than four, a GKI less than two. That is hard for people to maintain long-term and I don't know actually if that level of ketosis long-term is super healthy for our bodies. Of course we're designed to be in ketosis, but that specific definition is very strict to be able to achieve those constraints.
Speaker 2:But the thing that I see different as a ketogenic diet from water fasting, is that ketogenic diet cuts off the fuel supply and it can kind of stop cancer in its tracks, so it's a good way to stop things or to slow things down. What is so interesting about a prolonged water fast? So I'm not talking about a short water fast of like up to like 72 hours, I'm talking about when we get out to like nine days, you know, 14 days, 21 days, 30 days what happens is that once you get to about six or seven days, the body recognizes there is no food coming in and it prioritizes diseased tissue and foreign proteins to use as its fuel because it wants to protect its vital organs. Right, it's not going to go after the brain, it's not going to go after the heart. You are going to lose some lean muscle mass, but your body is going to preferentially start to use the tissues that are diseased in the body for fuel. And so what happens is is that once you get into that level of autophagy, the body actually is healing itself by eating the disease tissue, which is very different than just a ketogenic diet, which is holding things at bay. And that's really what I'm seeing. And you need to get at least two. That's why my mentor said nine days at least for cancer, because it takes to about six to seven days, depending on the person, to get into that level of autophagy where we start to eat the diseased tissue. And the further out you get, the more potential benefit that you have there.
Speaker 2:And you know I, when I first started fasting, you know that's why my first client was 17 and 14 days, because, honestly, I was nervous, I was like I don't. I mean 30 days just sounds. It just sounded crazy to me. But now that I'm doing it, what I see is that our bodies are really designed to do this right, like this is. You know, in all the ancient religions and ancient texts they talk about fasting. Jesus went into the desert for 40 days, you know, buddha sat under the tree. It's like like we're designed to do this and it's really incredible because you know one thing that people say oh, with cancer.
Speaker 2:You know, people are underweight. You don't want them losing weight, but even people who are maybe what you would consider thin can do this, like I just had a client who she started at 135 and five, six and she did 30 days and, yes, her weight came down low into, like the you know, 104, I think. But what's interesting is they gain it back. So every person that I've fasted has gained it back within four to six weeks, like within five pounds of what they started, as Now, if someone wants to lose weight, they can keep it off, right, but most of my clients are not.
Speaker 2:You know, if they're doing these low carbohydrate diets, sometimes the weight keeping the weight on is hard and so they're worried about, you know losing too much weight. So I think the real difference between ketogenic diet is like you're holding things back. You're reducing the inflammation, you're helping from causing additional. You know problems from inflammation in the body, but you're helping from causing additional. You know problems from inflammation in the body, but you're not really healing that cancer. Water fasting is a way that allows your body to heal the cancer and get rid of those cells yeah and um.
Speaker 1:All cancers are similar in the sense they have unregulated cell growth and the tendency to metastasize, and you know the various hallmarks of them. But also cancers are also very different. You know different cell types and everything. Do you think this, this strategy, applies to all cancers equally, or are there certain types that are more would more benefit from a water fasting approach?
Speaker 2:a water fasting approach. Well, I, I do think that there's probably variable um response rates and there are things, so you know. What's interesting, though, is because they're not a lot of people doing this for cancer. We don't have a lot of data right, so it's a lot of case reports, but you know, at true north they'll say you know cancers that are really fast growing. You don't want to use something like water fasting because maybe you don't have time to do that.
Speaker 2:I don't know if that's true. And then there's some, you know, like I've heard some people say in some spaces, like maybe with triple negative breast cancer, there's not the same response. But the truth is is that I've fasted people with triple negative breast cancer and had a response. So I I think there's not enough data at this point for us to say, from different standpoints, you know, whether there's a benefit, and I think also, like leukemias fall into a different category than solid tumors. So I don't know what to say about something like a leukemia, whether or not there would be benefit fasting, because my practice is really around solid tumors and so I don't have enough experience in that space to say it. But I think that you know this is one of the things I'm collecting data on all of this because there's nobody else doing it in this way specifically for cancer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I realized if the field is really evolving and this is very, very early work. You've mentioned different timeframes, like your mentor was saying, oh, you got to do at least nine days. You mentioned somebody did 30 days, somebody did, oh, 17 or something. How do you decide how long a given patient is? Is it different lengths for different cancer or the state of their cancer or what goes into that process?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So my practice is really varied because I have people who are doing conventional chemotherapy and then they have me helping with other aspects, like the diet and emotions and looking at root cause, and then I have people who don't want to do any of those things and want to heal a hundred percent naturally. If someone is wanting to heal in a natural way, I would say you go as long as you can. I would get someone as close to 30 days as I could. I think that you need that if you're really trying to heal it naturally without conventional therapy. But I have quite a few people who maybe they've done chemotherapy and then they want to detox their body and they want to clean themselves out and also, you know, get any last cells that may be left behind after they've had conventional therapy, and then I might do like 14 days, you know, to like really clean them out, but they don't have to go all the way out to 30. So and some of it also is dependent on they need to rest.
Speaker 2:When they fast, like you, if you don't rest, then you're just starving. So we need to get them into a rested state, which means they're not working, they're not driving, they're not riding in a car, going anywhere, they're maybe walking in their yard, but they're not going on walks. They're really resting for this period and that determines how long a lot of people can fast, because can they get out of work and you have to be out of work the duration of the fast plus half of the time of the fast in refeeding. So if you take a 30 day water fast, the refeeding period is like two weeks. So that would require six weeks. You might be able to go back to work after, like you know, 10 days of refeeding or something. But basically you have the time of the fast plus the refeeding and that really, you know, for a lot of people, realistically it's hard to take that time off and rest.
Speaker 1:And what does that look like for someone, because it's really a big commitment time wise now, and just lifestyle wise making it happen. What does that look like as far as, and how do you support them in your program on the spiritual side, I mean, if someone's gonna, I mean, think about it. If someone stops working for two weeks and they don't, they don't exercise, they don't go on walks, they, they just sit, I mean that's a lot of net of Netflix, right? Or what do?
Speaker 2:you recommend?
Speaker 1:What is the program on the spiritual side, because I know you're really dialed into that and that seems like that could be a big lever in. This is maybe even as important as the fasting itself. You know, it's a chance for a true spiritual awakening. What do they do in this process then?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it is really. It's fasting from life, you know. So I have them off screens. They can have two hours of screen time per day, but generally I tell them to get off social media altogether, make it a social media fast and the if they do watch things it's, you know, like comedy or something that's light, nothing that's like really heavy while they're fasting. So they can have two hours of screen time.
Speaker 2:Um, they, I do encourage them to do a little bit of like rebounding. So many of my clients will have like a little rebounder, like one of those trampolines and they can just hold on to like a counter next to it. Or, um, some of them have like a railing so that they're getting that lymphatic movement. So I do have them moving every day. They do stretching. If they have a rebounder, they'll use the rebounder. They'll do dry brushing because, as you have, you know, the body starts detoxing the toxins because the toxins are stored in our fats. Basically, you want to move that right. So they're, you know, but the activities that they're doing are very gentle. They're, you know, sitting in coloring, they're reading, they're, you know, journaling, spending a lot of time just like sitting and in quiet, you know, and it's uncomfortable because we're so used to being busy. And actually that's one of the things that I found most surprising for people is that the hardest part is the doing nothing. They're like, well, tell me how to organize my day around doing nothing, and I was like, no, this is part of the challenge for you is just to like actually be comfortable doing nothing and not having me have to tell you what that looks like. But I was doing this individually, like I would fast people individually, but because it's grown and then also I had my full practice, I was like I need to find a way to do this where I could condense the time, and so I started doing it as a group, so at noon every day, that's are healing their body naturally and willing to go to the extremes of doing a prolonged water fast.
Speaker 2:Bringing them together has been just really profound and so beautiful because the things are common that come up like between you know, the first three days are hard because they're just hungry. Once they get past the first three days, then on day four they start detoxing, right, because once you go into ketosis we start dumping fat and when you dump fat you're basically dumping the toxins from the fat into your bloodstream and it causes physical symptoms like pain, back pain, low back pain, legs, hips, anything that you maybe have an area of arthritis. All of those things start hurting from like day four to day seven. And when they have each other they're like, oh, it's going to be fine, you're going to get past that. Because we have people like right now I have in my group. I have two who are on day six of refeeding after a 30-day fast, and then I have someone who just started today on her first day, and then I have people at 21 days and 14 days. So we've got this full spectrum.
Speaker 2:And when they get to see other people at other phases and then hearing how they've made it through it, there's a sense of safety and a sense of like real camaraderie and community and they they're rooting for each other. And when one has a hard day, cause it's like a roller coaster, you know you feel terrible one day and the next day, and when I say terrible, it's mostly emotional, like they'll feel like just emotionally exhausted or maybe they didn't sleep, cause that's another detoxing symptom, and so you know, when they're down, the other people are up and so they kind of buoy each other, which has just been beautiful. And then they, you know, they share with each other. And the spiritual aspect of it has been a real surprise for me, because I didn't start doing this to help them have a spiritual awakening Although I know that consciousness plays into healing, because that's like the foundation of my practice is that healing comes from higher consciousness.
Speaker 2:And the things that are happening are, you know, really surprising and beautiful. Like you know, people in the group waking up in the middle of the night and hearing a voice say get a pen. And then they go get a pen and they write down this message. That's like literally words from God, like for them or for the group.
Speaker 2:And you know, just the other day, one of the clients you know she was not at all someone who would be getting messages or anything. She started out the fast really afraid, like fear was her biggest thing related to her cancer. And then she's been getting these beautiful messages. And then just last week I had another woman join the fasting group and she was grieving because her husband had died about six months ago. And the one woman was like your husband came to me last night and he told her, like all these things and he told her that she needed to go look in this drawer for something. And, sure enough, the other client found that in this drawer the thing that he was talking about and just I mean I didn't go in thinking this was going to happen, but it just has been really unbelievable. The spiritual awakenings and connections that are happening with the group it's been just such a privilege for me to participate in and, you know, hold the container for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it seems like you're doing I mean you're doing so many great things. It seems like an opportunity to really expand that spiritual process you know through. I mean I've talked before about this on the podcast. I attended a like a meditation retreat down in Mexico with a guy, joe Dispenza, who does these deep meditation things, but it was seven days and it was like 12 hours a day and we're meditating all the time. But you got into very deep places. But it's almost like your program would really fit nicely as you develop it more and more and get with a, with an intensive spiritual journey, meditation journey, that while they're sitting there for all day long and they're not going to work, they're not looking at their screens having or even things to read, you know like, ok, we're going to read this, you know, but it's so exciting what you're doing. It's so many, so many possibilities and this can be done from anywhere, anywhere in the world. Right To be clear, they don't have to travel to you to do it.
Speaker 1:And that's remote and do they get blood work done? Is that will they have to? They'll have to. You'll help them get access to that and how often do they do blood work or that sort of thing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they do blood work once a week and unless and then if there's anything like electrolyte imbalances or something we might check more often, but usually once a week, and then they're checking their vitals every day and you know, then I go over those with them. But yeah, that's basically vitals every day and then lab work once a week.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, and and what? What is the cost of ballpark? Because this is not covered by insurance, right, this is by it's out of pocket cash expense. And yeah and yeah. How affordable is it? Or is it comparable to other programs?
Speaker 2:And that yeah, how affordable is it? Or is it comparable to other programs? Yeah, so it's $700 a week, which is comparable to other fasting. It's cheaper than an in-house fasting where you're paying for lodging and stuff, but it's $700 a week and that includes the supervision through me, with the group calls. But then we also have a nutritionist and chef who is teaching them how to eat after the fast. So we're, basically, and then we have, you know, someone who comes in and does visualizations with them. I have a mindset coach who's working with them. I have a meditation instructor who trained with Dr Joe, who does meditations with them. So we're doing all of those things and actually most of the other programs are not doing those things and we're really focused on healing. So all of the people, all of these you know, different experts that I have coming in are really teaching them about how do you heal cancer specifically, you know, in a holistic way.
Speaker 1:So yeah, that's sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 2:No, you're okay.
Speaker 1:And you mentioned other programs with fasting, but they, they, they don't specifically deal with cancer and many of them are plant based and that brings issues, when refeeding with a plant based diet will be high carb and other things that would not necessarily be beneficial to a cancer patient.
Speaker 1:So so yours is is sort of unique that way, and and maybe lastly, we we talked a little bit offline too about the, the idea that what, what people can experience from a, from a spiritual, spiritual journey as well as a medical journey like this, is that everybody. It was such a beautiful point, I just wanted to bring it back and maybe you could speak to it. It was something along the lines of that everyone has the potential to heal themselves through this process. They may or may not be cured of their cancer, but everyone can heal, and that's something that Western medicine doesn't necessarily look at all the time. It's either a you know win-lose game oh, you know the Mets came back blah, blah, blah, blah blah, but your process is a healing process that it sounds like everyone potentially will benefit from and they may help their cancer too in the process radiation and you know, if I harm someone, there was a lot of risks associated, right.
Speaker 2:So there's potential benefit of that treatment, but then there's also these risks of the toxicity. And the one beautiful thing about water fasting is that when it's done, supervised and it is I think I just want to say that that one thing is for people to know this is not safe to do on your own. So there's a quote by Socrates that says any fool can fast, but only the wise man can break a fast. And that's because refeeding is the most dangerous part of a prolonged water fast. If you go past five days, there's this risk of refeeding syndrome which can cause all kinds of very catastrophic events, and they're related to electrolyte shifts intracellularly, from extracellular to intracellular, when you start introducing food. So if you don't know how to do this, you can get yourself into big trouble really fast. So I just want to say that but as long as you're doing it with someone who knows how to refeed properly and you're supervised properly, water fasting is like a win-win. I mean the goal is to make the cancer go away, to have the body use autophagy, to heal the cancer and use that diseased tissue as fuel. But even if that doesn't happen, you've now reset the microbiome, you've reset the body metabolically, you've cleaned out the toxins right. So lifetimes of toxins are stored in our fats, so it's a huge benefit to detox those physical toxins. And then the other thing that happens is that you have emotional release and so emotional toxins, things that have been stored in our body, stored in our body, and so a fasting is such a beautiful way to reset our body back to the way that it was designed and clear ourselves out, and this is not just beneficial for cancer. So I mean, this is one of the things that I'm working on. Right now is this summer I'm going to do at least 14 days myself because I'm watching this and just absolutely taken with what our bodies can do and the beauty that can be created, and I'm not sick.
Speaker 2:So I know that there's beneficial or benefits for anyone to do this, but specifically with cancer, if the cancer doesn't go away, the person is going to be better off from having had this experience, and that's really what I'm hearing from the clients is they're like I could have never imagined what this was going to bring for me, and just also, you're really motivated to get your products clean, to eat well, after you've done this work to clean yourself out.
Speaker 2:So people are motivated and then it's easier to go into eating. Well, because all of those cravings that come from the bacteria in your gut that are craving the sugar and stuff, that all goes away if you get rid of them right. And then we teach them how to eat fermented foods and the things replenish their microbiome with things that naturally occur and the things were naturally designed to eat. So I think it's like nothing but a win. You know and that's that's really why I dove head in headfirst into this is because, absolutely, there's so much healing that happens in addition to what can happen with the cancer yeah, that's such a great concept about doing this for people without cancer as a spiritual journey, like you're doing yourself, resetting for 14 days.
Speaker 1:Maybe we can do an episode of this podcast in the middle of your 14 day thing, if you'll grant us 45 minutes of your precious screen time for that day. I love it. We could talk more about that and the idea of, yeah, making it available to everybody, not just cancer patients. But of course, cancer patients are special and you know they have a lot to gain from this. Well, katie, this has been so much fun. Is there anything we didn't talk about today that you wanted to get into this episode?
Speaker 2:No, I think we covered a lot of ground, so thank you so much for talking to me about this.
Speaker 1:This is great. Maybe share it with people again. We'll put it in the show notes Again the best way for people to reach you and find out more about your program.
Speaker 2:So my website is katiedemmingcom.
Speaker 1:Well, that's easy and I'm on social media katydemmingmd so you can find me on all the platforms. Well again, katie, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate you spending time with us today and thank you for all the great work you're doing.
Speaker 2:No, thank you so much for having me. It's my pleasure.