Burn the Boats. Why Extended Fasting Is the Only Real Way to Lose Fat.

In 1519, Cortes landed in Mexico with 600 men against an empire of millions. His soldiers considered retreat. He burned every ship on the beach. No exit. No fallback. The only way out was through.

That is the decision you make when you stop eating. Not when you eat less. Not when you count calories. Not when you inject a thousand dollar drug that tricks your brain into wanting less food. When you stop entirely.

Your body runs two completely different metabolic programs depending on what happens with food. Some food but not enough triggers the downsizing program. Metabolism drops. Muscle burns. Fat holds. Thyroid output decreases. Cortisol spikes. This is what every diet produces. This is what GLP-1 drugs produce. Caloric restriction is the program that makes you fatter long term.

No food at all triggers the opposite. Fat burns aggressively. Growth hormone surges 300 to 2000 percent. Metabolic rate increases. Autophagy activates. Muscle is preserved. The body says, I need these muscles to hunt. The warehouse doors swing open and the body starts pulling inventory.

In this episode, Connor MacIvor breaks down the science behind both signals, walks through what happens day by day during an extended fast, exposes the GLP-1 trap (up to $192,000 over a decade for a drug that destroys a third of your weight loss as muscle), dismantles the loose skin myth, and explains the refeed protocol that makes extended fasting sustainable.

The pharmaceutical industry has a hundred billion dollar reason to make sure you never learn that your body already had the solution. It was always free. It was always available. You just never burned the boats.

Read the full article: https://thelastaddiction.com/blog/burn-the-boats

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Transcript

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Burn the boats. Why extended fasting is the only real way to lose fat and why GLP one drugs are a thousand dollars a month trap. Got fat? Burn the boats. In 1519, Hernan Cortez landed on the coast of Mexico with 600 men and orders to conquer an empire of millions. His soldiers looked at the odds, looked at each other, and considered retreat. Cortez walked down to the beach and burned every ship. No exit, no fallback. No option to turn around and sail home. This was the only way through. And this decision that you made when you stopped eating, not when you eat less, not when you count calories, not when you inject a thousand dollars a drug that tricks your brain into wanting less food, but when you stop eating entirely, when you burn the boats, when you tell your body there's no food coming, and force it to do what two million years of evolution designed it to do. You unlock the warehouse of fuel strapped to your frame and you burn it. Everything else is a half measure, and half measures are where fat loss goes to die. The two signals. Why your body responds to starvation and fasting in opposite ways. This is the most important thing that you'll read today or maybe hear today. Maybe the most important thing you'll hear this year. Your body runs two completely different programs depending on what happens with food. Not slightly different, but actually opposite. Most people, most doctors, most dietitians, most pharmaceutical companies, and most of the two hundred billion dollar weight loss industry doesn't want you to know this. Or they know it and they don't want you to know it because the most profitable program is the one that keeps you fat, sick, and continuing pain. Signal one. Some food, but not enough. Let's talk somewhat about caloric restriction. You cut your calories from twenty five hundred to twelve hundred calories a day. You're eating less. You're hungry, but you're pushing through. You have willpower. You've downloaded the app. You bought the meal plan. Your body reads the situation. Food exists, but it's scarce. Could be a long famine with intermittent scraps. I need to prepare for maximum survival duration. So it executes the following program. It holds on to fat. Fat is the emergency reserve, and the situation reads as an ongoing emergency with no clear end. The body will sacrifice almost anything before it gives up the actual insurance policy, and in a caloric restricted world, that means it's going to hold on to the fat. It drops your metabolic rate. Thyroid output decreases. You get cold, you get tired, brain fog moves in. Your body is conserving burn rate like a company during layoffs to survive a downturn. It sacrifices muscle. This is the one that actually kills you. Every pound of muscle burns six to seven calories per day just by existing, just by sitting there. The body says, They are still feeding me some protein. I can rebuild later, but right now the muscle is a luxury I can't afford to keep on 1200 calories a day. It is downsizing the engine to match the fuel supply. Now we have another one. Increases cortisol and hunger hormones. Because the body wants you to go find more food. You're in a stress, degraded, miserable state. This is exactly what chronic dieters describe. Cold, hungry, losing muscle, holding fat, exhausted, and being told it's working. It's not working. It's the worst possible metabolic outcome. You're losing the tissue that burns calories and keeping the tissue that stores them. You're training your body to run on less so that when you eventually eat normally again, and you will, because you're starving, you'll gain the fat back faster than before, on top of having less muscle to burn it. This is the yo-yo. This is the cycle. This is what 95% of diets produce. Caloric restriction is the program that makes you fatter over a longer amount of time. Signal two. Now this is no food at all. This is extended fasting. So you stop eating completely. You supplement in water, of course you have to have water, electrolytes, black coffee if you need it. No calories though. Your body reads that situation really different. No food at all, this is a hunt. I need to be sharp, strong, and mobile to go find or kill something. Completely different optimization. Burns fat aggressively. That's what fat's for. This is the scenario fat was stored to handle. Fuel the switch to ketones and free fatty acids. The warehouse doors swing open and the body starts pulling inventory. Metabolic rate ramps up, you have noreprinephrine and adrenaline increases, you get sharper, not duller. Studies show resting metabolic rate actually increases in the first 48 to 96 hours of fasting. It goes up when you don't eat at all. That's we were never told that. Your body is making you a better hunter, not a slower one. It preserves muscle at all costs. Growth hormone surges 300 to 500%. Some studies show increases to 2,000% during extended fasts. The body says, I need these muscles to chase down that next meal. I can't afford to lose the machinery that keeps this human functional and dangerous. Muscle is no longer a luxury. It's the tool that ends the fast and activates autophagy. Body's cellular recycling program turns on hard. It scans folded cellular structures, precancerous cells, and accumulated debris. It breaks them down and recycles them, the amino acids to maintain the tissues that matter, including muscle. So it's not eating your biceps. It's taking the trash out and using the parts to feed the engine. So read both of these programs again. One makes you weaker, slower, fatter, more dependent, the other one makes you sharper, leaner, stronger, and more self-sufficient. These are triggered by the same event, reduced food. But the presence or absence of any calories is the switch that determines which program you're actually running. Some food says downsize. No food says sharpen up. The single distinction is the difference between losing the war and winning it. You might not have heard this before. I had to dig a lot to get the truth out. Burn the boats. Why complete commitment changes the biology. Cortez didn't tell his men to use fewer ships, he didn't tell them to sail half the fleet home and keep a couple around just in case. He burned them all. Because he understood something that the diet industry has spent 70 years trying to make you forget. Half measures produce the worst outcomes. Full commitment produces the best ones. When you eat 1,200 calories a day, you haven't burned the boats. The boats are right there on the beach. Your body knows it. It's over there on the refrigerator, on the food island. Your body knows that. Your brain knows it, the addiction knows it. You're one bad afternoon and one stressful phone call away, one 8 p.m. craving away from walking back down to the shore and sailing home. And your body is preparing for exactly that by holding fat and burning the muscle. When you eat zero calories, the boats are ash. There's nothing to go back to. Your body accepts the situation, optimizes for it. Fat becomes fuel. Muscle becomes sacred. The metabolic revs up instead of shutting down. You're the Cortez on the beach facing forward with nothing behind you but smoke and ash. This is the biology of commitment. It's not a metaphor. It's a measurable, it's measurable in growth hormone levels, in ketone concentrations, in norepinephrine output, in resting metabolic state. Your body responds to a total commitment with total mobilization. It responds to half measures with metabolic collapse. What happens to your body during extended fast day by day? Hours zero to twenty four of the transition. Glycogen stores in the liver begin to deplete. Blood sugar drops and stabilizes. Insulin falls. The body begins the shift from glucose metabolism to fat metabolism. Hunger comes in waves driven by ghrelin, the hunger hormone. Each wave lasts 15 to 20 minutes, then it passes. The waves come at your usual peak times of eating because ghrelin operates on a conditioned schedule. It's not real hunger. It's a program. By hour 18 to 24, the waves start to weaken. Hours 18, excuse me, 24 to 72 the switch. Ketone production ramps. Liver converts fatty acid to beta hydroxybuterate, which crosses the blood vein barrier and fuels the brain. Mental clarity increases. Growth hormone begins its surge. Autophagy activates and begins scanning for damaged cellular material to recycle. Norphrinephrine rises, energy stabilizes or increases. This is the phase where people say, I thought I would be exhausted, but I feel amazing. You're supposed to feel amazing. Your body is doing what it was designed to do. Days three to seven, deep adaptation. Full ketosis, fax oxidation is the primary energy source. Growth hormone is at 300 to 500% above baseline. Atophagy is running hard, clearing damaged proteins, recycling junk, and beginning to address looser damaged skin tissue. Hunger largely disappears. The ghrelin schedule resets. Inflammation markers drop measurably. Joint pain decrease. Water weight and glycogen bound water are largely gone. The scale shows a dramatic drop, some of which is water, but increasingly real fat loss at half a pound to 0.85 pounds per day, depending on composition and activity level. Almost a pound a day in fat loss every day. Day 7 to 14 and beyond the burn. Sustained flat loss, fat loss at roughly 0.7 to 0.85 pounds per day for someone carrying significant body fat. Muscle is preserved by the growth hormone surge. Energy is stable. Mental clarity is often described as the best of people's lives. Atophagy continues its deep clean. The body is accessing fuel it's been storing for years and converting it to energy, heat, and repair material. This is the state that the diet industry doesn't want you to reach because once you reach it, you don't need their products anymore. You don't need their meal plans. You don't need their apps. You don't need the drugs, you just need to not eat. Loose skin myth, and your body has a built-in solution. So one of the biggest fears people have about major fat loss is the loose skin. And the standard answer from the medical establishment is we'll lose the weight, then pay us fifteen grand for a tummy tuck. Schedule the surgery, plan the recovery, budget the money. That answer exists because the medical establishment does not understand what a toughegy does to loose skin, or because surgery is more profitable than telling people to stop eat. Loose skin is not just stretched out skin. It's composed of damaged collagen fibers, degraded elastin, a thin layer of stubborn subcutaneous fat trapped between the dermis and the muscle fascia. Every single one of those components is protein-based or fat-based. Every single one of them is what exactly autophagy targets. When your body enters deep autophagy during an extended fast, it scans for damaged, dysfunctional, or unnecessary protein structures to disassemble and recycle. Loose skin checks every box. Damaged, yes. The collage collagen is cross-linked and overstretched. The elastin has lost its structural integrity. Structurally necessary, no. The fat underneath it is being burned away. The excess skin envelope serves no purpose. It's scaffolding around a building that's being demolished. Made of recyclable material, yes. It's protein, it's amino acids. The exact raw material the body needs to maintain muscle, repair organs, and support immune function during a fast. Who would have thought? So the body does exactly what it does with all that junk protein during a fast. It breaks the loose skin down, harvests the amino acids, redirects them to maintaining and repairing functional tissue. It's not burning your biceps, it's burning the apron, and it's using the parts to feed the biceps. Fasting is the body's own skin removal surgery. It takes longer than a scalpel and doesn't leave a scar. This is why people lose 100 pounds through extended fasting have dramatically less loose skin than people that lose the same weight through caloric restriction or GLP1 drugs. On a caloric restricted diet, mTOR stays elevated for incoming food. Atophagy stays suppressed. And loose skin never gets recycled. You lose the weight, keep the apron. And then somebody sells you surgery. The skin tightening is not instant. It happens progressively across multiple fasting cycles. Fast for 10 to 14 days, refeed with whole foods, meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, nothing with an ingredient list. The refeed provides new collagen synthesis material, while the previous fast cleared out all the junk, or at least some of it. Then fast again. Each cycle goes deeper. Each cycle tightens more. By the time you reach your goal weight, your skin has been remodeling itself from the inside for months. The GLP1 trap,$1,000 a month to run the wrong program. All of these different GLP1 drugs, you can look them up, the pharmaceutical industry's latest blockbuster category. Projected to be a$100 billion annual market by 2030. Celebrities inject it. Not that that should help us make a good decision. Your neighbor injects it, your doctor recommends it, insurance may or may not cover it. And if it doesn't, well, you're paying$900 to$1,600 per month out of pocket. Here's what the GLP1 receptor and agonists actually do. They slow gastric emptying and act on appetite sensors in the brain. The result is you eat less. Roughly 500 to 700 fewer calories based on the clinical trials. So they make you eat less. That's caloric restriction. That's signal one. And I think that could be a problem. That's the program that burns the muscle, drops the metabolic rate, holds fat preferentially, and produces the wrong long-term outcome. The only difference is that instead of using willpower to eat less, you're using a syringe and paying thousands of dollars a month to have the privilege. The muscle destruction numbers. Step one trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine studied semaglutide at the 2.4 milligram dose in one of these GLP1 agonists. Patient lost per approximately 15% of their body weight over 68 weeks. Sounds impressive when you look at the body composition data. 39% of the weight they lost was lean body mass, not fat. That's muscle, that's organ tissue, metabolically active tissue that burns calories at rest. Another trial, this was the Surmount 1 trial, showed similar results. At the highest dose, patients lost 22.5% body weight. DEXA scan showed 33 to 36% of weight loss was lean mass. A 2020-23, 2023 review in JAMA Internal Medicine found that GLP1 drugs consistently produced 25 to 40% lean mass loss, often higher than standard dieting in sedentary patients. Compare that with extended fasting where growth hormone surges 300 to 2,000 percent actively and actively to protect lean tissue, where tophagy preferentially breaks down junk protein and damaged structures before it touches functional muscle, where the body says, I need these muscles instead of I can afford to lose these muscles. Beozimpic face, you've heard this. There's a term circulating in dermatology offices on social media, Ozempic face. Rapid facial fat loss produces sagging hollow cheeks, an aged appearance. Dermatologists report a surge in filler requests from GLP1 patients. So now you're paying$1,000 a month for the drug and$2,000 every six months for fillers to fix what the drug did to your face. Now this happens because GLP1 drugs do not trigger autophagy. There is no cellular recycling, no collagen remodeling. The face loses volume, but the skin doesn't tighten up. It just sags. The same reason that happens everywhere else on the body. The same loose skin problem that fasting addresses naturally, but caloric restriction, including drug-induced caloric restriction, does not. And the weight comes back. The step one extension trial, published in diabetes, obesity, and metabolism, followed patients who stopped semi-glutide. Within one year of discontinuation, they regained approximately two-thirds of the weight they'd lost, 67% gone, and they regained it with less muscle and a lower metabolic rate than when they started. This means the regain will overshoot and they'll end up heavier than before. The Surmount 4 trial showed patients who switched from one of these to placebo regained roughly 50% of the lost weight within 36 weeks. A meta-analysis across all GLP 1 studies found that weight regain after secession averaged 60 to 70% within 12 months. That's not a failure of the patient. That's a feature of the drug. The drug doesn't fix anything, it suppresses appetite while you take it. Stop taking it, appetite comes back. But now you have less muscle, slower metabolism, and a body prime to regain. The pharmaceutical companies know this. The business model depends on it. Norvor, Nodisc and Eli Lilly have explicitly stated in investor calls that these drugs are intended as chronic indefinite medications. Lifetime prescriptions, lifetime revenue. It's a great deal for those shareholders. The side effects they minimize. The STEP trials documented the following rates in semaglitide patients. Nausea, 40 to 44%, vomiting, 24%, diarrhea, 30%, constipation, 24%. So awesome. These are the common ones. The serious ones include these. I'm going to mess it up. Gastroparesis. Stomach paralysis. A 2023 study in JAMA found GLP1 users had 3.5 times higher risk. Some cases persisted even after discontinuing the drug. Pancreatitis, inflammation of the pancreas, FDA back black box warning on all GLP1 drugs. The same JAMA study found nine times higher risk. Bowel obstruction, 4.5 times higher risk. Thyroid tumors, black box warning based on rodent studies showing medullary thyroid carcinoma. Long-term human data is still limited because the drugs haven't existed long enough to know. Gallstones, 26.6%, 2.6% as semi semagliotide patients versus 1.2% on placebo. Suicidal ideation, underactive FDA surveillance, signal unconfirmed but present. The side effects of extended fasting, hunger for the first three days, electrolyte management meant with salt and magnesium, that's a list. The ketone surplus, more energy from nothing than from less. And here's the paradox that breaks everything in the diet industry's ever told you apart. You have more energy available when eating nothing than when you're eating 12,000 calories a day. Follow me on this. When your body switches to full fat oxidation during an extended fast, that's when you're not eating anything, the liver converts fatty acids to ketones, primarily beta-hydroxybutyrate, at a rate that exceeds what the body strictly needs for fuel. This is measurable. Blood ketone levels of 1.5 to 3.0 millimotors per liter are common during extended fasting. That means that's a surplus. The body is overproducing fuel it has access to, because it has access to tens of thousands of calories of stored fat, and the metabolic machinery is running at full capacity with the warehouse doors fully wide open. It's eating your face fat, your belly fat, your thigh fat, your ass fat, your hand fat, your underarm fat. There's so much fat. And most importantly, it's eating that visceral around your organ fat, your liver fat, your heart fat, your lung fat, all of that crap, arterial fat. The soup. Surplus is why fasters report better mental clarity, more energy, sharper focus during a fast than they had while they were eating. This isn't a placebo. It's not a motivational trick, it's chemistry. Ketones are a premium fuel source. Premium, like premium fuel, like the best fuel available. Talking about, I don't know what the best fuel is, but the highest octane fuel. The brain prefers them. They cross the blood-brain barrier efficiently and produce fewer reactive oxygen species than glucose metabolism. You're running on cleaner, more abundant fuel than you were when you were eating three times a day. On caloric restriction or GLP1 drugs, this never happens. You're still eating, insulin stays elevated enough to suppress ketogenesis, the body never switches fuel sources, you never enter nutritional ketosis. You just get enough energy from the reduced food intake to function, but you never get the surplus. You're running on fumes from a cracked open door instead of running on overflow from a warehouse that has its doors wide open. This is the energy advantage of fasting that no drugs replicate. Ozimpic can't produce ketones. WeGovi cannot open the warehouse doors. Manjaro can't deliver the mental clarity that comes from a brain running on beta-hydroxybutyrate instead of glucose spikes and crashes. These drugs reduce your food intake. Fasting changes your fuel source entirely. One leaves you tired, foggy, and running on less, the other gives you more energy you've had before. From your own body, produced for free, available 24 hours a day. The body is not rationing during a fast, it's feasting on itself. The fat is the buffet. The ketones are the proof that the fire is burning hot and clean. Here's a cost comparison chart I put up. I'll go through this, and it should make you a little irritated. So in the three different columns I put metric, then I put what these GLP1 drugs cost, and then the cost of extended fasting. Metric monthly cost for GLP1, 900 to 1600. Fasting costs you nothing. Annual cost$10,800 to$20,000 approximately. Extended fasting, nothing. 10-year cost,$108,000,$192,000 for the drugs. Extended fasting, of course, nothing. Lean mass loss. 25 to 40% of weight loss you get on GLP1 drugs. Extended fasting minimal. That's lean mass loss. Metabolic rate declines proportionately for the GLP1. Preserved or increased with the extended fasting. For autophagy, GLP1, none's demonstrated. Significant autophagy, 24 to 72 hours. Skin tightening, none. You get the osempic face. Progressive with each cycle with extended fasting, so there's a benefit. Weight regain after stopping, 60 to 70% weight regain within 12 months of the GLP1 secession. Metabolic reset persists with the fasting. Duration required is a lifetime of the GLP1 Doug. Periodic and finite for the fasting. Side effects, nausea, vomiting, pancreatic, pancreate, pancreatitis, gastroparesis, thyroid risk, and that's what happens, the side effects from the GLP1. And for fasting, you get hunger days one to three. And you're going to get bitten by hunger at many times during a longer fast, but fight it out, ride the wave. The ghrelin surge lasts for 15-20 minutes, you're back to it. Ketone energy surplus, you don't get any of that with the GLP1. 1.5 to 3.0 millimotors per liter, cleaner fuel, mental clarity. Pharmaceutical dependency, yeah, of course, that's by design with the GLP1. You don't get any of that with fasting. Exact strategy, none be gained when you stop. And with the fasting, metabolic flexibility is learned. Now, if you've never not eaten for a while, it's going to be a treat. But I think you'll see from the research. What I do is I write these blog posts, I try to dive all in, I read everything I can on it, the good and the bad, everybody talking about it. And I try to parse out what I believe is the truth. So you're looking at a product that costs up to$190,000,$2,000 to use for a decade, destroys a third of the weight loss's muscle, doesn't trigger autophagy, doesn't cause any cleaning up of the crap we have stored in us, doesn't tighten skin, produces weight regain in two-thirds of users who stop, carries risks of stomach paralysis and pancreatitis, and needs to be taken for life, versus not eating, which doesn't cost you anything, which preserves muscle, which triggers autophagy, which tightens skin, which teaches metabolic flexibility, which actually has an exit strategy, which your body was designed to do. Oh, and let's talk about addiction for a moment. That's what this whole site's about. If you're addicted to the food that they have, the uh the processed food, flour, sugars, carbohydrates, yeah. Yeah, fasting can fix that. So if you're angry, you should be. GLP1 market is projected at 100 billion by 2030. Money comes from people who are just never told their body already had that solution. They were never told to burn the boats. So the lie we were all told, the lie is that fasting is dangerous. It causes extreme muscle loss, it depletes mineral reserves. You need to eat six small meals a day to keep your metabolism running. That breakfast is the most important meal of the day. These claims are propped up by three pillars, and none of them are science. So the food industry, eight trillion dollars globally, every meal you skip is revenue they lose. I don't know if you remember the high gas prices before the high gas prices now. Uh some CEO of some company, I believe it was, came up with an idea, said, you know what, why don't we uh we all don't gas up one day a week with a particular gas station? Maybe it was mobile, I forgot which one it was. But that was the attack plan. If the whole world would have done it, they would have readjusted gas prices, they would have had to. Because just one day of everybody not fueling up by a particular fuel provider, apparently that's a big deal. Well, if you're not eating, if everybody starts to fast, you can you see the waves created from that? If everybody didn't eat for two or three days a week, that would crush the food conglomerate, that part of the world. Again, you cure cancer, actually find a cure for a type of cancer. All the money that's earned as the renew of that type of cancer to try to solve it or try to keep people alive while they have it, it just crushes that economy. So be wary. Anyway, so USD food pyramid was a so the food industry, eight trillion dollars globally. Every meal you skip is revenue they lose. The six small meals recommendation, listen to this, was invented by food manufacturers and adopted by dietitians, educated by curricula funded by food companies, curriculum that was funded by food companies. USDA food pyramid was a grain industry lobbying document, not a health document. The caloric restriction model, which is harmful and which people conflate with fasting, caloric restriction and fasting are metabolically opposite. The fact that most doctors don't know this is not a reflection of the science. It's a reflection of the approximately 20 hours of nutrition education that physicians receive across eight years of medical school. That's it, 20 hours. The pharmaceutical industry, which is now has now a$100 billion reason to make sure you never learn that fasting does what their drugs can't. Osimpic cannot trigger autophagy, Wagovi cannot preserve muscle through growth hormone, Manjaro cannot tighten loose skin, but they can charge you a thousand a month to run the Ron Metabolic Program and call it medicine. The physicians who actually study physiology, Jason Fung, Peter Atia, Walter Longo, Stephen Pinney, all acknowledge Thomas DeLauer, there's a lot of good folks in this group. They all acknowledge extended fasting as a legitimate and powerful metabolic tool. They're not the majority yet, but they're right. The refeed protocol, how to fast correctly for the long haul. If somebody does not want to fast for 30 or 40 days straight, you don't have to. The protocol works for most people. Carrying significant fat is in cycles. So you fast at different time frames. Maybe three to five days, maybe five to six, maybe one. Maybe starting with missing that first meal is going to be the most important for you. Because if you've never gone without missing a meal, again. And I've I, as I have laden throughout this site, The Last Addiction, there's a lot of warnings. You'll see them pop up on every page. Before you skip a meal, you want to talk to your doctor. Before you don't eat that candy bar you're driven to, you want to talk to your doctor. You want to get their permission. Because to do this without a doctor's permission is apparently a horrible thing. So you need to make that happen. This is my opinion. Everything here is my opinion. Now, last for 10 to 14 days, refeed to three to five, hold foods only, meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, cheese. Nothing with an ingredient list. If it has a label, it was manufactured. Cheese can be argued by some, but fish, meat, eggs, some vegetables. That's probably a good place to start. Manufactured food is engineered to make you more eat more of it. And meat doesn't have a marketing department, at least nowhere near as big as the food conglomerates. Then you resume fasting, and then you repeat until the visible fat you have on your frame or you get to the size you want. Now, you go too far with this? Yeah, if you get bodybuilder on stage link, 3%, where you're pitching your little bit of skin, you see every striation of every muscle. Yeah, there's not a lot left in there, folks. And the stuff you have left on that kind of body, it's it's you're but you're gonna start, you're gonna create problems with yourself. But 10%, 14% body fit body fat, yeah, I think we're good with that. But again, ask your doctor. Refeeds serve specific purposes. They reset leptin, the sciate, the satiety hormone that drops during extended fasting. They provide raw material for new collagen synthesis, which works in concert with the autophagy from the previous fast to remodel the skin. They replenish micronutrient scores, they prevent the psychological burnout, they can come from very long, unbroken fasts. Now, the key to the refeeds is use whole foods only. Don't go out and slam down a pizza or a box of donuts. We're trying to get away from that. That's the point. If you've able to go a few days without eating any food, you realize and feel better. You realize your body actually has the perfect fuel source contained inside of it, and that's that stored body fat. And if you were lucky enough to have added all that fat over time, you have a great time, a great long time of being able to do a nice long fast if that's what you want, if that's what your doctor blesses, if that's what your doctor's gonna be able to say it's okay for you to do. But people that are super lean, that have never had the enjoyment of fasting, I mean, part of me kind of wishes they they did. I mean, it's it's really something to go that longer period of time without food. When you refeed, respect yourself enough not to screw it up and to eat gently and eat the right things and eat whole foods. And if you go on these longer fasts, bone broth, chicken broth, the natural kind, that's where you should start for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, depending on how long you go. If you start blasting out food, you can kill yourself. So you've got to be careful with that, all right? Don't forget your body's been shut down. You've digested nothing. So your gut microflora, it's probably in a great shape, but you're gonna you're gonna cause yourself big problems if you just start loading up on food because you think you're starving. You gotta pull back from that whole mindset. You gotta respect yourself enough to only put the good food in to rebuild it after you've done any kind of fasting. Always. That's always the case. The biggest mistakes I ever made with fasting, after I go a few days, I get excited and I say, you know what, I did a great job. I deserve to go out there and have this crap. And I put it in, and yeah, it goes through me and it hurts. It hurts like somebody beat me up with a baseball bat. You go too far and you break it that way, you're gonna end up killing yourself, as I said. The key is that the refeeds use whole foods only. No processed carbohydrates, no ingredient lists, no food that was designed in a lab to override your safety signals. You're refueling, you're not relapsing. And there's a difference, and you need to know it before you start. So if you have visible fat on your body, you're carrying fuel. Extended fasting is the process of using that fuel. Your body has every mechanism it needs to do this safely and effectively. It evolved over two million years of feast and famine cycles to do exactly this. The idea that skipping meals for a few weeks is dangerous for someone with tens of thousands of calories of stored energy isn't medicine, it's marketing. Electrolytes. It's important. The one thing you need to manage. The mineral depletion claim does have a grain of truth, and managing is simple. When insulin drops during fasting, our kidneys excrete more water and electrolytes with it. And three minerals are the ones that matter. Sodium. You put salt in your water in my coffee, I put a quarter teaspoon of some good sea salt in there. Redmond's? I forgot. Anyway, it's good stuff. So fat in your water, your coffee, whatever you're drinking, Himalayan salt, sea salt, whatever you have, a quarter to half a teaspoon per liter is fine. You'll feel the difference immediately if you're low. Lightheadedness and fatigue during a fast are almost always sodium, not calories. Potassium. Potassium chloride, salt substitute, no salt. You remember no salt, that's it. That's potassium. Don't overdo it. You know, be weary, see what it has. Thousand to two thousand milligrams a day, but just make sure you're not rushing all this in because you'll you'll leak out the other end of it if you have too much of any one of these things. Got to be gentle with it. And again, doctor's permission, doctor's prescription, all that. Magnesium, my magnesium glycinate or citrate, three to four hundred milligrams a day, prevents crap, supports sleep. Again, doctor's recommendation, this is what I do. So this is the entire supplement stat for an extended fast. Salt, potassium, magnesium. Cost per day about 15 cents. And if you want a GLP one drug, that's 33 to 53 bucks a day, and it still runs the wrong program. The mineral depletion argument against fasting is like saying driving is dangerous because your gas tank gets empty. Yes, you can refuel, but that's not an argument against driving. So again, for them to say you're going to deplete all your minerals, well, yeah, you're also going to deplete the fuel in your car. You just fill up again. Same thing with minerals, just keep it topped off, you're fine. The reason this works, because you break the addiction. I talked a little bit about it before. So here's the part that nobody in the pharmaceutical space will ever tell you. Because it eliminates the need for their product entirely. Caloric restriction, including GLP1 induced caloric restriction, keeps you addicted to food. You're still eating, you're still tasting, you're still triggering insulin, ghrelin, and dopamine. You think, well, you know, I got 300 calories I could have. I really love Doritos and I miss them. So I'm going to go eat 300 calories of Doritos. You're not helping. Now, you're still fat, you're still tasting, so you're still triggering insulin, ghrelin, and dopamine. And all those hunger and reward pathways stay active, but they're unsatisfied because you're not eating in the volume you used to. You're trying to restrict your calories. It's like telling an alcoholic to have, you know, you can have one beer a day or one shot of whiskey, but that never breaks the cycle, right? You just suffer inside of it. Extended fasting, it breaks that cycle. So by day three to four, today, while I'm recording this video, I'm on day three, and I'm I'm gonna go a while. I'm gonna go longer than I've ever gone. I've done 14 days before, so that's my plan right now, and I'm relaxing into it, so and I'm working on my happiness. Day three to four, hunger largely disappears because ghrelin stops spiking on its conditioned mealtime schedule. Yesterday night. Yesterday night was tough, but very hard, but I muscled through it. Now today feels a lot easier. Today feels good. And hopefully that's how it's going to continue through the rest part of the fast. If I start getting cramps, I'm deficient in some mineral that I haven't been taking enough of. So I just make those adjustments and I just continue. My body is eating the best meals it it can right now. I'm high in ketones, and I my energy is up, my eyesight is sharp, and I'm ready to fight, ready to fight the bear so I can eat it.

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So extended fast uh battlefield. This is the boat burning moment at the biological level. Your body stops looking for the ships on the beach because there are no ships. It faces forward and does the only thing it can do. It burns all the fuel that it's carrying, and it does it efficiently, powerfully, and with full metabolic commitment. Food tastes good for 12 minutes, lean feels good every minute of the day. It's not a fair fight. It only feels like one because the food hit is loud and immediate, and the lean state is quiet and constant. So burn the boats. I thought of this when I was putting this post together a few days ago. The best way to lose body fat is to stop eating until the fat that you want to get off you is used. The second best way doesn't exist. Everything else is a slower, more complicated, less the first, less effective version of the same metabolic process with more room for failure, more cost, more side effects, more dependency. GLP1 drugs are boat, a very expensive boat. They give you the option to sail home at any time, and your body knows it, so it runs the repeat program. The retreat program, excuse me. Downside, hold fat, burn muscle, survive. Fasting is that fire on the beach. It tells you your body, it tells your body there's no retreat, no fallback, no half measure. So the body runs the war program, burn fat, shape it up, protect the weapons, and move forward. You have visible fat on your body, that fat is fuel. It's stored energy, it's there to be used. Most of us just never get to access it. It is the warehouse that you've been walking past for years while buying food you didn't need. The door to that warehouse has always been unlocked. The key has always been in your pocket, you just never turn to it because somebody told you it was dangerous to go in there. Somebody who was probably selling you something. Stop eating, burn the boats, use the fuel. The last addiction end when you decide it does. Not when a drug suppresses it, not when a meal plan changes it, not when an app tracks it. When you decide. When the boats are burning and the only way out is through. That's the reckoning, that is the way. Here's some FAQs. Frequently asked questions, will I lose muscle during an extended fast? Your body surges growth hormone 300 to 2,000 percent during extended fasting, especially to preserve lean tissue. It preferentially breaks down damaged proteins, junk cellular material, and loose skin collagen before ever touching functional muscle. At higher body body fat percentages, your body has abundant fuel and minimal minimal reason to catabolize working muscle. The muscle loss myth comes from conflating fasting with caloric restriction, which is muscle wasting. Is fasting, isn't fast, isn't fasting not just starving yourself? Starvation occurs when the body has exhausted its fat reserves and begins breaking down vital tissue to survive. If you have visible fat on your body, you're not starving. You're using stored fuel. The distinction is critical. Fasting is voluntary, controlled, and occurs while energy reserves exist. Starvation is involuntary and occurs when reserves are depleted. A 300-pound person fasting is not starving. They're finally accessing the energy that they have been carrying. While GRP1 drugs are worse than just eating less on my own, they produce the same metabolic result as caloric restriction, reduced food intake with continued eating, but add pharmaceutical side effects. 40% nausea rate, gastoparesis, gastroparesis risk, pre pre pancreatitis risk, thyroid concerns, cost$916,$100 a month to do this to you, and pharmaceutical dependency, 60 to 80% weight regain within 12 months of stopping. Metabolic program is identical to dining. The price tag risks are worse. How do I handle hunger during a fast? Yeah. Good question. So hunger during a fast is driven by ghrelin, which spikes on your conditioned mealtime schedule. So let's say you're a grazer. Eat all day long. But you have three or four specifically large meals. Usually you're going to have a little hum of it, but when those meal times hit, that's when that ghrelin's going to rise. It's going to wait 15 to 20 minutes and it's going to calm down again. If you're a grazer like cattle and you're constantly eating because you're constantly around food all day long, breaking that addiction is going to be a little bit tougher. But when you quit eating, you're still going to have to deal with that ghrelin at the larger meal times during the day. It's a wave. You write it out, the wave goes down, hits the beach, it's nice and flat and calm for a while. Go do something else. Now, uh fasting is the body's own skin tightening protocol. Oh, what about major having loose skin after a major weight loss? Loose skin is compromised composed of damaged collagen, degraded elastin, and traps subcutaneous fat. All of these are protein-based or fat-based structures that autophagy targets during extended fasting. Body breaks down the excess skin tissue, harvests the amino acids, and uses them to maintain functional muscle and organ. Fasting is the body's own skin tightening protocol. It's progressive across multiple fasting cycles and dramatically more effective than caloric restriction, which suppresses autophagy and leaves the loose skin intact. For somebody carrying significant body fat, a 10 to 14 fast day fast followed by three to five day whole food refeed repeated in cycles, highly effective and it's sustainable. Some people fast for 30 or more days in a single stretch. The length depends on your experience level, how much fat you're carrying, your comfort with electrolyte management. Start with 72 to experience the hunger reset and ketone transition, then extend from there. Talk to your doctor before you do anything. Is fasting safe for a person with scenario of body fat? Manage electrolytes and no contraindicating medical conditions. And that's type 1 contradicting medical conditions. So type 1 diabetes, active eating disorder under treatment, pregnancy, extended fasting is psychologically well supported for everybody not in those categories. But you got to talk to your doctor. Your body did evolve to do this. The real safety question should be directed at the alternative. Is it safe to inject a drug with a 44% nausea rate? Nine times increased pancreatic risk, and a black box warning for thyroid tumors? Every intervention has a risk profile. The risk profile of fasting for someone with stored fat and stored fuel is remarkably low. But talk to your doctor. All right, remember before you skip the next donut, consult your physician before you pass on that candy bar, get your doctor's permission before you say no to the drive-thru. Yeah, all of that medical disclaimer. I'm Connor with Honor. Thanks for watching. Thelasaddiction.com. We'll see you at the next one. Take care.