Fasting Decoded: The Truth About Intermittent And Prolonged Fasting

Introduction to the summit and fasting topic 0:00

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Fasting and Longevity Summit 2.0. Last year we had 55,000 people to watch our summit, and I'm pretty sure we changed thousands of lives there. This year, hopefully we're going to have 75,000 or 100,000. We'll see. I'm Doctor Joseph Anton. I'm the host. I have spent decades of my life in longevity. Started as a physician and turned into prevention and living a healthy long life rather than a sick care system. Where you live is sick and actually, you're not even living long sick.

The US population lost 2.5 years of our lifespan last year. So we're living more a bigger portion of our life sick and and where do they even sooner. Which is unbelievable. Concerning. And in in in in light of spending over three and $4 trillion per year on our health system. Today I'm going to talk to you about a very critical topic is fasting for longevity. What are the types of fasting? Because there's a lot of misconceptions. Some people tell you intermittent fasting is good, some is bad. You study here and you study there.

But on average, most people are convinced it's healthy. But I'll tell you how it's healthy and when it's not healthy.

Intermittent fasting vs prolonged fasting 1:24

And then I'm going to talk to you about the prolonged fasting where the magic happens and why we invented the technology of fasting with nutrition called the fasting mimicking diet. So let's start from a high level perspective. There are two types of fasting. The intermittent fasting states. Intermittent fasting meaning fasting zero hours right after your last meal all the way to two days 48 hours. We call all of that intermittent fasting. When you cross day three and you go longer and you're fast.

We call that periodic or prolonged fasting three and beyond. Why we divide fasting into two major types? Because the first type, the first 48 hours, the first reaction of the body is to say, okay, I'm not eating, I don't have calories, I'm going to go and tap into the reserves. I'm going to do a comparison between the body and intermittent fasting and a company that has no revenues. It's the same way when the body doesn't have calories. It's like a company with no revenues. What do you do if you're if you're the head of this company?

We're just going to say, well, you know, I don't have revenues now. I'm not selling well this month. Let me go and get some money in the bank because I have saved some money in the bank. So first I go to my checking account and the buddy in the first few hours goes to the glycogen. Glycogen are small storage of extra calories in the body, mainly the muscle, some in the liver. And this is where the body goes first, as I was checking accounts, I was the first hours of fasting. Then again, if you have your company and you said, okay, I'm depleting my checking account, let me tap into my savings account.

And the buddy says, okay, after almost a day now saying, let me go and tap into fat, let me go break down the fat that I stored. I turned those into ketones. So the bridge they cut is when you cut the fat, it goes into, small ketone bodies. This is why you say when somebody is fasting, they are in ketosis. It means they already have went through hours and hours of fasting, and now they're tapping. They're breaking down the fat the same way you go and you tap into your savings account. Now, when you start depleting the savings account, what are you going to do?

You're going to go and tell the bank, hey, I need the credit card, or I need a loan, or I need to borrow something because I'm still lacking funds. The same way the buddy goes to deliver an asset. The liver. Liver has some extra calories. Ask the liver to do something. We'll call neo. Gluconeogenesis. Can you dump more calories into the blood? Because we need you. We need you, Mr. Bank. Mr. loaner, Mr. credit card. And this is what happens after they one getting close to day two. Now when you deplete your checking accounts, when you deplete your savings accounts, when the bank is saying, I gave you the money I can give you, now I have to stop.

How the body uses glycogen, fat, and ketones 4:18

What are you going to do? You're in a crisis mode. You're in distress. And the crisis mode. This is the transition from intermittent fasting to prolonged fasting. After day two or day three. And then what do you do if you have a company? And now you depleted all the checking and savings and your loans, you're going to restructure the company. You're going to come in, you're going to gather the team and say, hey, we got to fix everything going wrong to survive another day. We're going to cut unnecessary expenses.

We're going to transition some of the funds from this department to that department, and we're going to fix anything going wrong. And this is what the body tells the cells after day three. Please consume all the debris and the organelles, whatever is left over when the new cell a process we call autophagy cells, IT cells rejuvenate. And this process won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2006. He'd say to you, is the first time we're talking about something impacting every cell in the body, because every cell in the body eats.

And when every cell is fasting, every cell lives on calories. It is impacted, is involved into this fasting process. It's one intervention. It's impacting. We talked we call it upstream intervention and it is impacting the entire body. And look what it's doing to the cells is telling the cell we really need fix, heal, reprogram, practice autophagy. Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016. It's very powerful because this is a miracle of biology. When we say we have a doctor within this is the doctor. With fasting, especially, prolonged fasting awakens the doctor from within.

It's a natural healing process. Our ancestors thousands of years ago, they did not have food all the day. They were not ordering Uber Eats at 10 p.m.. They had periods of food, especially in the spring and summer, and this is when they started a little bit the extras, both in the in storage and in fat. And then when they go through the winter time, there was a lot of kids where there was no food, migration and snow, etc., etc. and their body knew what to do consume the fat, rejuvenate the cells, and then in the spring you flourish again with nature.

We lost these cycles of fasting and nutrition. We eat all the time today. This is why we keep storing fat, storing fat, storing fat, insulin resistance. With aging, we age and we keep story, and then we develop insulin resistance. And that's the mother of almost a lot of or all of us.

Autophagy, cellular repair, and longevity 7:00

We don't want to say all age related chronic conditions. Diabetes. Now with diabetes type two, cardiovascular health, cancer, a lot of cancers are linked now that our lifestyle, especially nutrition and especially insulin resistance and Alzheimer's, we started calling the diabetes type three. It's intoxicating the brain with insulin resistance, with glucose and with molecules coming into the brain that otherwise should not be absorbed into the body. This is why it's so critical to get into this autophagy, to get into this total body audit and rejuvenation phase.

If you watch a car race, you know the cars are going fast and the engine is getting tired and and there's wires and tears in the, in the wheels and then what the car does, it goes to a pit stop. It stops. The engineers come in. The mechanics, they they look at what's going wrong. They change the wheels, they change the gas, they fix whatever is going wrong. And then the car goes back stronger, longer to the track. We need the same things. We're going at full speed of life, stress, lack of sleep.

Over overeating, concentration of calories, preservatives, conservative things that we're putting in our body from time to time. And we recommend three times per year, 2 to 3 times. If you don't have any health condition, you can do it 2 to 3 times per year. You got to put your body into rest, into a full reset. You get a reset your cells, you get a detox, lose the excess weight, lose the toxins, and then go back stronger, longer. This is the importance of the prolonged fasting. Now you don't want to go for days and days and days.

Some people go extreme for weeks. Then you become depleted. The company that has no funds for a longer period is going to lose some of over some of its own best people. They're going to go and apply to other companies, is going to lose supply, and sales for the next month is going to be in a detrimental to cannot orders its own supply, cannot sell, cannot market well, and then there's a vicious cycle. So it's good to stress and then reseed when the when the CEO restructures the company with his team.

The same way when the body does autophagy. Now you want to bring back food. And then as long as the company evolves into the best, it's best. Wait, this is how the body also rejuvenates even after the fasting with the reseeding period, so that it flushes in the right direction with new cells, with healed cells. So intermittent fasting 0 to 48 hours. Prolonged or periodic fasting three days and onwards. We recommend you stop at day five. The five day fasting is a very, very important reset to the body.

Resetting metabolism. You're losing a lot of weight, which improves, you know, blood pressure, blood sugar, blood cholesterol, etc. and you're rejuvenating the cells. There's nothing in medicine today. There's no pill, there's no, surgery. There's nothing in healthcare. They can rejuvenate the cells of the body like a prolonged fasting. And then you stop at day five, you recede, and you're going now back into the right direction. Hopefully, you reverse the bio. Bio age of the cells is so important.

So important. This autophagy process. You reverse the biological age score of your cells and then your body is younger from the inside and is healing from the inside. If you have diabetes, if you have other chronic conditions, inflammation in the body is trying to heal the weak. Is the doctors from inside to try to heal and try to be biologically younger. Why it's important to stay younger than your age. Fasting or prolonged fasting

Why prolonged fasting needs recovery and reseeding 10:48

is one of the most important intervention, and one of the most proven. One wants to stay younger than your age. Remember this expression I want to stay younger than my age. My chronological age is 50. Let's say, or 55 or 60. I want to be 40. I want to be 35. I want to be 45. I don't want to be equal age to make a logical age or even older. Why? I want to be younger from the inside. Because 90% of us die from one of four diseases and they are age related diseases, right? Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's.

You don't get Alzheimer's at age 22, you didn't develop your type two diabetes and blood sugar started increasing. At age 23, it increased at age 55. You didn't get Alzheimer's. At age 27. You get it at age 70, you didn't get the first cancer of, say, colorectal cancer. You didn't get it at age 22. You get it at age 65 and 60 and 65 and 70 and so on and so forth. You're not going to get your first heart attack at age 27, your first, worry at age 27 is not a heart attack. You're worried about heart attack when you're 55.

And so this is a big concept that medicine ignored this is why medicine still practices care. Medicine ignored. That aging of the cells from the inside is the true sign of health. The unit of measurement of longevity should be your age, your inner age to age from the inside, the age of the cells, the age of your, metabolism. Because the younger you are, the further away you are from your diabetes, your cardiovascular event, your Alzheimer's and your cancer. And one of the best way to stay younger and away from what's going to kill you.

What's killing 90% of us is to do the prolonged fasting. Now, prolonged fasting for five days is not, you know, an easy thing to do. It comes with all these benefits that we've talked about, but it also comes with side effects, right? When a CEO of a company has no money, there are problems. Also. Yes, he's going to restructure. Yes. The bank. I found the fat on the trees. But there are also side effects. There are headaches, there is muscle loss. There's fatigue. There's risk of low blood sugar.

So it's a stressful process. And this is why the scientists in 18 universities got together, led by USC and Walter Longer, professor Walter Longo, who's the grandfather of this fasting discipline and the new invention that is called the fasting mimicking day. So all these 18 universities got together and the National Institutes of Health started funding the process of discovering what we call today the fasting mimicking diet. What does that make? It's in nutrition. It's a very precise formulation that researchers have studied at ultra and all these nutrients.

Five-day fasting, biological age, and disease prevention 13:48

The company that manufactures it and researches and all these 18 universities, it's they developed this food, this very precise nutrition formulation, all plant based, healthy, gluten free, soy free, lactose free, so very premium, high quality nutrition. But when it gets into the body, when you eat it, the cells and the blood to not send signals of food. So it's a fasting mimicking diet. You're fasting, you're getting the benefits. You're doing autophagy, cellular rejuvenation. You're resetting your metabolism, you're losing weight.

And actually with the fasting mimicking died, you protect the muscle. This is very important. And so the fasting mimicking diet is a way that allows you to fast for five days for a healthy longevity and without having to starve your body with no calories. It makes fasting compliant easy and more fruitful. It's an enhancement to the fasting experience, so these are the two types of fasting intermittent fasting for weight management resetting the metabolism. And there's multiple ways there's multiple names there.

This those who skip breakfast with all 16 eight days. Those who are 16 eight meaning 12 hours overnight, the fast plus an extra four hours because you skip breakfast and are you going all the way to lunch? We call it 16 hours. Eight hours. So 16 hours, 16 hours of food, I'm sorry, fasting and eight hours of food. There's if you got if you say 24, it means 20 hours of no food. Four hours of food. There are those practicing what we call omad one meal a day. They're just eating one time of day. And so intermittent fasting in general is beneficial.

There's two types of science behind it. Whenever you do observational trial, intermittent fasting, you're just watching people and you study them. When they do integrated fasting, typically the results there are not great. Why? Because people do the wrong intermittent fasting. They're eating at it late at night, and then they skip breakfast. Most of us we like, oh, I wake up in the morning, you know, I'm I don't have a big appetite. But if you research it in-depth so you're not hungry in the morning because you ate later at night and you had a little bit of reflux, and it's giving you a bad taste and you don't want to eat in the morning.

You just say, hey, I'm not a breakfast person. I can easily skip breakfast. A lot of people do that because they have not finished their dinner early at 6 p.m. they have not walked or spent two hours before sleeping. Because believe me, if you do that, you're going to wake up hungry the next day. One of the signs, actually one of the if you want a secret here, one of the signs to be doing the right nutrition and fasting and living healthy long life is to sleep a little bit hungry. I always say sleep on a little bit hungry.

If too much hunger, you can not sleep. Being full and sleeping is wrong because you're taking the calories that you ate at night. Whatever you eat at night, it's doing as a reserve. There's no exercise when you sleep, your heart rate is low, you're not moving. So you're basically. And the hormone, the anabolic hormones are up at night. Growth hormone is up at night and instant a little bit later, early in the morning. So your body is ready to pick up the calories at night. Whatever you eat, the excess goes into fat.

We used to say in the 80s, in the 90s, calorie in calorie. And it's not true. What you eat before sleeping is mainly going to be stopped. What you eat in the morning or during the day is going you have catabolic hormones is going to be spent because you're moving throughout the day.

Side effects of fasting and the fasting mimicking diet 17:24

You're thinking your entire body is active. So when we do observational trial, intermittent fasting people by default, they do intermittent fasting by skipping breakfast a little bit late night eaters, not everyone. I'm not generalizing, but a lot of them. So when you mix the results, the results are not so positive. This is why a lot of people are confused today. Is intermittent fasting good or bad? Well, actually, if you do it late and intermittent fasting, meaning you're eating late at night and then you're skipping breakfast, actually, the results are more negative and positive because there's nothing worse than eating late at night, even skipping breakfast the next day to not, overcompensate to eating late at night.

And therefore the results are mixed. Now, when we do randomized clinical trials, when we come in and intervene and tell people what to do, we tell them, you know, finish your dinner at 6 or 7 or max eight and then stay with that food the next day. So they're doing a front ended intermittent fasting. They're pushing their dinner backwards and they're starting early. And now you have a perfect night's sleep. You didn't store the fat during the night. You start burning fat in the morning because you ate your dinner early, and you continue the fat burning throughout the day because you skipped your morning food.

This is where we see positive results from intermittent fasting. We see pro longevity results with intermittent fasting. When you do a front ended intermittent fasting. What I'm saying here is very important because even a lot of doctors are confused. Is fasting. Should I tell my patients to do intermittent fasting? Should I tell them or dietitians or nurse practitioners? They're all interested. They're reading the benefits of fasting. Therefore every for positive article there's one negative article and they're confused.

And I'm here trying to clear the confusion for everyone. If you eat your dinner early, you practice intermittent fasting by sleeping great overnight, not eating food overnight, and then adding extra hours after that to continue to the burn. This is where intermittent fasting helps you lose a lot of weight and improve longevity. So the max longevity benefit we recommend you just do that 12 to 14 instead of 16 because we believe breakfast is not bad. So a lot of people ask me, how come you're asking me to do breakfast and to do intermittent fasting?

Well, this is what the centenarians do. This is one of the biggest secrets that we uncovered from people living 100 and beyond. They eat the dinner early. Most centenarians are not watching late night movies. Then they're staying up late. They actually sleep very early. They have their dinner at 5 p.m. at 6 p.m. max at 7 p.m.. Then there's 1 or 2 three hours before they sleep, and then they still have their breakfast the next day. So they actually practice 12 to 14 hours of intermittent fasting and still had breakfast in the morning.

This is very much pro longevity because you see all the positive factors came together. We we had we had dinner, but early dinner, we didn't sleep on a full stomach. So our body and the biological age of the organ, the biological clock of the organs, is not interfered with.

Intermittent fasting timing, breakfast, and longevity 20:36

They didn't start calories overnight. Did it increase insulin resistance by stocking those calories? And the next day they still eight in the morning. Because guess what? We need food throughout the day. People always ask me and they ask the standards. I would come people, first of all, to Longo. You know, he's the author of the Longevity Guidebook. If you want to read about all this that I'm or what I'm talking about in a concise, precise way, go read the Longevity Diet book by Professor Walter Longo.

And it's the most scientific evidence behind where we're talking about morality people, they don't understand it or not. They don't. It's it's they're confused about whether breakfast is good or bad. Well, breakfast is actually very important because it gives you the calories in the morning that you need so much. Your heart is pumping faster in the morning because you're walking, going to your job, cooking at home, breakfast, going to the gym, whatever you're doing, your muscles are active. Your brain is the most active in the morning as you work, as you cater for your kids, etc.

whatever you do in life. So there is a demand for calories in the morning. You want to supplement that demand. Now breakfast becomes bad. If you ate at 10 p.m. and you still ate at 6 a.m. or seven and you're just in a constant eating mode. And of course, then you're over stacking calories, you know more and more so than the night that in the morning. But then this is an oversupply of food. And this is where a little bit it becomes less diet. So a big mistake by a lot of, nonscientific theories in the 90s.

And the 2000 saying, oh, you should not eat breakfast and you should eat every six, or it's the opposite, eat every six hours. These are not the right recommendation. The right recommendation is eat your dinner early. A lot of time for your body to rejuvenate overnight, to sleep well, to start spending the calories, and then when you need it in the morning, just have your breakfast in the morning. So this is I just, took a little bit of time to help you understand all the theories and the science behind intermittent fasting.

Now, intermittent fasting will not get you into autophagy. You know, one of the biggest misconceptions out there is that, oh, I do intermittent fasting because I heard it rejuvenates my cells and I will live healthy, long life. Well, you might live a healthy, long life because you are losing weight. You're improving your metabolism. Very important for inflammation, very important for blood pressure. It's very important for blood sugar. It's actually an amazing intervention. If you do it right, the 12 to 14 hours circadian fasting, the overnight fast that we've talked about, but it doesn't stress you enough to get to cellular rejuvenation.

You got to go to 2 or 3 days of fasting to get there. Remember the company with no revenues. If you know, if you have a delay a few hours in revenues, they're going to go and restructure the company. You're just going to wait for it. Your bank account drops a little bit. That's intermittent fasting. Your fat drops a little bit.

Common misconceptions and final takeaways 23:30

It's healthy to do it every day the right way. But it's not going to stress enough the company or the body to rejuvenate the stress of other things. And reversing the biological age of the cells comes after three or more days of fasting. This is why the fasting mimicking diet comes here and it helps you go through that process in a healthy and and and the less side effects and it enhances. It's a funded fast. There's macronutrients is microalgae is coming to the body to help the cells rejuvenate and grow back healthy.

Hopefully this summarizes the types of fasting, the benefits of fasting and how to do fasting. Right. And I'll see you in the next episode.