Master Fasting: Shed Weight & Retain Lean Muscle

Sharon Brack, HHC, AADP, CPT

Thank you so much. I’m excited to be on here with you today.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Do you want to say a few words about yourself before we ask a few questions and focus on the topic at hand?

Sharon Brack, HHC, AADP, CPT

Sure. So I live in sunny Arizona with my husband. We have three teenagers and one very active dog. I’ve been in the health and wellness industry for over 20 years, my own practice for over 50 years, working with one-on-one individuals of all ages, but then also very specialized training, small group, large group, corporate health and wellness. I have years of Nutrigenomics under my belt, and then my main goal is to truly get people results, teach them how to control their blood sugar, and do that without medications. Obviously, sometimes there are cases where you need that, but most of the time in working with people, learning how to control the blood sugar with your diet and your food choices. And the combination of those food choices is essential for being able to travel and not being able to, you know, not having to follow a meal plan every day, but learning how to work with the foods that you love and how to combine them to work and turn into energy the way you need it to be for your lifestyle.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

That’s fantastic. I think what the latest statistics are showing, 73% of us carry a little bit of extra weight and 90% of us have some metabolic disorder. And I think it’s all coming from the lifestyle which you tackle. It comes from muscle loss with aging and aging itself. And I think this is why we’re so excited in this summit to unlock this trio for people and help them age gracefully and stay healthier, longer, and live better lives.

Sharon Brack, HHC, AADP, CPT

That aging gracefully is huge. You know, this whole culture of anti-aging is, you know, I have two teenage daughters and one teenage son is teaching them not to to be against aging, aging undefeated, but learning how to age well with the lifestyle that you want in.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

So let’s tackle the topic at hand. Can you talk to us a little bit about your approach and your experience with blood sugar control and muscle, because these are actually related. And insulin resistance and how fast they can, you know, has a lot of those for your patients or your clients or the companies that you support.

Sharon Brack, HHC, AADP, CPT

Yes. So thankfully, with the help of the controlled glucose monitoring systems, it’s been very helpful to even watch this on those types and you can gather data and actually see where your insulin is spiking. And I have been convinced over years that it’s these spikes in these drops of blood sugar. Right. All day long that just really causes problems and makes our results slow to no results at all. And in fact, like you said, end up burning the very thing that we’re trying to keep and maintain as we age and that’s muscle. So combining the foods is one thing, and that’s something that I always work with my patients on in clients is what are your carb choices? What do you have on your plate in front of you, whether it’s a small snack or a meal, and making sure that those combinations that you’re going to enjoy them, that you’re not feeling like you’re having to be on some diet of some sorts, but they’re the foods that you love within reason, portion control. And then we have protein, fats, and carbs working together for us. 

So when I became introduced to you this Prolon Fasting Food Mimicking Diet, it was fascinating to me because I thought, well, I’m going to hook up to all these systems and see what happens here. I’m going to see my blood sugar is like rolling hills. I don’t want to see them spiking up. And that’s exactly what happened to me and we also tracked our muscles on smart skills and it was fascinating because not only did we not lose muscle, we gained muscle and our water weight went up. Our body fat percentage plummeted. And then outside of that, the energy was wild. We were sleeping better. We were able to regulate our emotions better on down the line. But the first specific, you know, conversation today, I was truly blown away with being able to keep my muscle and during those five days make it more of a mental retreat for me, taking a little bit of time off, some of the heavy lifting during those five days and incorporating it afterward, it put me and my husband and our clients that we’re working with. It put us in a prime state to build muscle on the days and weeks following in between each cycle that we did. If that answers your question a little bit.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

And that might strike some people because you’re saying if I’m in ProLon, the Fasting Mimicking Diet so your body is fasting for five days and then you’re talking about building muscle, not losing muscle. How is that even possible for somebody listening to us today? What is the mechanism that’s allowing ProLon? And ProLon has been patented to protect my lean body mass, actually. So what you’re saying is scientifically very valid with a lot of trials, but can you log this because that’s the secret that has helped us say, okay, counting calories restrictions are not going to work because I mean, it’s difficult to comply and muscle decrease and slow down your metabolic rate and you lose muscle and you say, okay, it was ozempic and wegovy, and others came and they help you lose the weight very fast. But 20 to 30% of the weight loss is from muscle and here comes the fasting mimicking nutrition saying I’m going to be better than both. But explain a little bit to the people listening to us here. How come fasting intervention is protecting your body mass?

Sharon Brack, HHC, AADP, CPT

It’s protecting you because it’s rehauling, I believe, the body’s way of utilizing insulin. And when we do that, we get into these phases where our body rejuvenates faster and is able to then turn over our cells and create like we were talking about earlier. The mature cells are behaving like almost like they’re they’re going through puberty again. Right. And it is fascinating the way that your cells can actually become more useful then and again, it’s not so much that we are anti-aging, but we’re teaching our body how to age well. And obviously, the portion control comes in after that. And we have to talk about that, especially here in our Western culture. But at the same time, what I think our body is doing is we are really learning how to use insulin as energy and as a helper versus something that’s just managing our poor behavior.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

And like you said, the rejuvenation is key on day three to day five where autophagy and it won the Nobel Prize in Medicine is an amazing phenomenon of getting the cells a little bit biologically younger. And this is one of the major pillars of this summit is to help people understand that if you cross two days of fasting or three days. As of day three, the body’s saying, hey, I depleted my reserves. Now I’m going to tell the cells every cell to rejuvenate, to survive. That rejuvenation is what taking the body temporarily backward in biological age is improving muscle and then there’s one secret which you and I were talking about before this call is is that fasting is a stress. It’s like really intermittent exercise or stress exercise. That stress pushes the growth hormone, and that growth hormone tells the muscle to grow on top of the rejuvenation. And that’s turning out to be magical and is very valuable for everyone listening to us. Why we’re focusing on the muscle because if you don’t maintain muscle, your metabolic rate will slow down. Anything you’re going to eat after is going to be picked up back in fat. And this is why most people say, you know, I try so many things. I don’t lose the weight or I have a stubborn fat and I’m not getting out of it. And it’s because of the muscle is the engine of the burn. And if you don’t preserve that, you’re just doing yoyo diets and going for a vicious cycle of building fat at the expense of muscle within every cycle.

Sharon Brack, HHC, AADP, CPT

Yes. And your body is smart. It picks up on the fact that you’re doing that. You know, these hardcore, you know, diets that you lose, you end up losing more muscle and water and then it goes into like almost a storage phase. Then everything you put in your body after that is going to store it as fat because it’s like, you know, I don’t know what Sharon’s going to do down the line here in one month, so I’m going to keep this and hold on to it. But one major thing I would think that we should also make sure that we’re making note of is that way that this that ProLon, this Fasting Mimicking in general is fighting inflammation in our body, and inflammation is a core root of so many things. And it just for instance, one client that just finished it, a chronic hip pain years and years went to year rounds of PT, professional athlete so you know been aging well because they have they like the activity side of things they know what they’re doing with their health and wellness, but they could not get rid of this hip pain until the first cycle of ProLon. Hip pain is completely gone. And I’m convinced it’s lowered inflammation to the level that there was regrowth with that autophagy in the collagen and just new cells, new blood flow to that area. And now that client is back doing, you know, pickleball and tennis that they thought they were going to have to give up in their fifties, no longer.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Sharon, now, do you have fasting integrated as part of your recommendation in your practice? Can you tell us a little bit about how some of the listeners as as potential consumers could benefit? But also we have listeners who are practitioners themselves, the nutritionists, doctors, and best practitioners chiros. How do you do fasting and how do you use it in your clinic?

Sharon Brack, HHC, AADP, CPT

Yes. So 99% of my clients, there’s only a very small percentage of clients that I don’t recommend it for. That would be probably eating disorder clients that have other types of things going on. And then obviously, youth, if they are under 16 years old, I typically don’t recommend it for them. But the majority of my clients, like I said, 99% of those fallen into that range where I would say, listen, let’s run some lab work before and after and I build it into a program. And I said, we’re going to do lab work before we’re going to do a five-day fasting and make sure they’re completely set up for that and make sure that they have those five days marked out. It’s kind of hard to find five days in there, but once you identify five days where you can do this, you are golden. Your soul is that the system itself makes it. You don’t have to think about your food for the whole week, which makes it help you, which helps you focus on, you know, what you’re doing and getting through that week. And then obviously the transition, which is very important out of it as well, but not difficult. Like I said, things are this is essential and very important but none of this is really difficult at all. 

So I run lab work typically before and then we do the five days of ProLon and out of that what we do is we stick to some very clean eating out of the out of ProLon people understand we make yes lists the carbs that they enjoy obviously less processed better, we make lists of the proteins that they enjoy. We’ll make lists of the healthy fats they enjoy. And then that makes it so that they don’t have to be on a specific meal plan with me after that, they can choose from those lists of carbs, fats, and protein within the right portion size based upon their activity level, on their lifestyle. How tall they are? How fast their metabolism is? There are so many things that play into that. And then a month later we redo the lab work and then they’re set up also at that time to do their second cycle. I usually recommend four cycles in a row. That does depend upon the client, but most of my clients will do a four-month, five-day, one-month work at a time. So basically 20 days of cycling over four months of fasting, which is not very many at all. And each time they do it, they get better and better and even different results than they do the first time around. So I usually do that and then I incorporate obviously into those programs. I’ll do food shopping tours or if they need specific sit down, what’s working, what’s not working? Let’s find foods in here that are making sure we’re controlling your blood sugar. Because like I said earlier, what this is doing is just reteaching your body how to use insulin for energy and for the right reasons versus just, you know, trying to maintain and fix all the things that we’re doing with our, you know, Starbucks, Frappuccinos and this and the mismanagement of food. 

So it’s been, you know, something that over the four months, 4 to 6 months usually is what I have a client for. It gives them the confidence to know what they’re doing. My goal is not to have a client for life. Honestly, if I have a client coming back to me month after month after month, I’m not giving them the confidence or the knowledge to go out and know what they’re doing when they’re on a family vacation or they jump into a barbecue at a friend’s house or, you know, they have a huge, significant life change, whether with family or job. My goal is to give them the confidence that they know how to do this and then they don’t have to listen to all the noise that comes out every year. On the newest fad diets and the newest pills and shots and weight loss programs. They will know for life how to manage their blood sugars, how to keep building lean muscle, how to keep, you know, biologically reversing their clock, aging well. And this system has been essential in the last year of helping me teach my clients how to do that and then launching them out to know it. And then, you know, they’ll come back to me here and there for Refreshers, what’s new, what’s going on with the new products? But other than that, they know what they’re doing, which that for me is the greatest, the greatest thing that I can provide to my client.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Sharon, as a functional nutritionist. And I know that discipline dietitians, and nutritionists for the last 20 years, it has been a frustrating 20 years for them because we see obesity on the rise. We see diabetes on the rise. They are trying to do the right thing with their clients. And there’s like the circle of learned helplessness, right? We try, we try, we try to put them on healthy diets and then they default. Then they get by the weight and then they go back and then and then they end up in the hands of pharma, in the hands of, you know, pills every day. Do you feel fasting is giving you a different if a fresh breath of air, a new way of getting effectiveness? That is really unlocking the dilemma completely.

Sharon Brack, HHC, AADP, CPT

I mean, results speak and results, healthy results, not just weight loss, right? Anyone eats, anybody can go out and cut carbs and most people, I should say, can cut carbs and lose weight. But they’re losing the wrong type of weight, which is a bummer when I put them on my scale and I say, okay. So you went low carb, high fat, high protein for the last two weeks and you lost 10 pounds, but eight of it was muscle. And that is just discouraging because now you have to get back on track of how are you going to build that muscle back. And it doesn’t really teach them how to eat. That does nothing but teach them, you know, cycling this unhealthy cycling. So, you know, back to your question on what it’s doing. But the muscle piece of it is something that, it has changed my practice and the way that I recommend because like we were saying results talk and not just weight loss, but the right type of weight loss. And then when they’re mental capacity is there for it as well. It’s like not just a skill that’s saying good things, but how they’re feeling, how they’re able to go about their day with better energy for whatever lifestyle they have. And that to me is what has gotten the compliance and the engagement that I’ve been looking for in the past 15 years of my practice.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Thank you for all of that incredible information. What do you recommend for your patients or your clients to do between the ProLon cycle?

Sharon Brack, HHC, AADP, CPT

Yes. So transitioning out, I really love the one-day resets for you know people will go out they’ll enjoy their weekend. They should, they can go out and they can enjoy food. But I think what we need to do then is we put on some guardrails and we say, let’s build these lists of healthy carbs that you like. The less processed the better. Let’s make sure that we’re using portion control with them. I usually have them mark it out as if you can hold it in your hands. And this works, you know, for my six-seven offensive linemen, their hands are ginormous, right? So we teach them about portion control and I make sure that they understand how to use their carbs because carbs are your number one source of energy. And right now carbs are like, oh, carbs are making me fat. Carbs are not making us fat. It’s the fact that we overeat them and we don’t know how to combine them with our protein and fat to control our blood sugar. So in the five days that we’re on ProLon, I’m frontloading them with lots of information and counseling on the transition out of this. What are your first meals going to look like? Two eggs and a side of we have like, you know, whether it’s even some diced roasted potatoes and vegetables on the side. And then you have your carbs, your fat, and your protein in the same meal, in your stomach, working at the same time together. Some of my clients actually like to do intermittent fasting coming out of it. They’re all, we listen to a lot of podcasts during those five days too that I give them and so they say what should I do, depending upon their lifestyle. If they’re not working out super heavy 5 a.m. in the morning, we can do some intermittent fasting in between, but it goes back to just clean and simple eating and that’s what makes us so relatable and so doable is that there’s not some sort of food system that you have to follow in those three weeks. You get to go back to the foods that you love, but now you understand how to utilize them better. Don’t just run out the door with a banana, but grab that banana. Maybe think of grabbing that banana and eating a handful of nuts and seeds with that. So then you have your protein, carbs, and fat together and then the light bulb starts coming on because that now that food, that banana will take you so much farther into your day than just on its own.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

That was a great information. Talking about muscle and intermittent fasting or ProLon fasting. Have you experienced intermittent fasting with muscle protection or muscle loss?

Sharon Brack, HHC, AADP, CPT

It has to be done consistently, yeah. I think a lot of people think intermittent fasting, it’s very trendy, it’s very right, it’s very yuppy to Intermittent fast. I think a lot of people don’t understand that either and they’ll do that Monday through Thursday, you know, to correct their behavior from the weekend so that they can, you know, do whatever they want on the weekend. And I really encourage people not to do that. That actually works against you. I would just rather them go to more balanced eating if they’re going off track on the weekends and using cheat days. I would rather them have some sort of treat every single day versus a whole cheat weekend or cheat days, right? So intermittent fasting, though, for those people who really do it consistently and I’m talking like 30 days in a row, not really having days in there where you’re, you know, three or four days, where are you? You’re just eating whenever you want, but you really keep it within that eight-hour window of their window is open to eat, say, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., or however usually like 3 hours before you go to bed on that, you’re done eating. So whatever that window looks like for you but I’ll do like an open eight-hour window. And I have found fantastic results on continuing the benefits of what just happened when you cycled with ProLon and then you just now are you understand okay I’m eating between the hours of 11 and seven or eight, eight or 10 to 6 p.m. and then you’re utilizing your combinations of foods together. I also, like I was saying, I really love the one-day reset step ProLon has to get you back on track as well because sometimes it’s a mental boost to your week. Mondays are a perfect day for that whatever day.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

One day reset. A lot of people, what is a one-day reset? For those listening it’s a one-day fasting mimicking diet it’s not for rejuvenation and autophagy but it’s actually for recorrecting just from a pure calorie intake and premium food and cleansing the body on that one day.

Sharon Brack, HHC, AADP, CPT

Yeah, it’s so much here that you’re, you know, and obviously, you’re doing good things for your body. But it’s also that moment where you’re like, I’m back on track and sometimes we just need something like that where you don’t have to think about it. It’s all right here in this box, you take it to work with you, and you don’t have to think about what’s happening that day with food, which then clears your plate for so many other things. If you’re not having to think about, you know, what am I having for breakfast? A lot of times people are eating breakfast and thinking about already what they’re having for lunch and already thinking about it or it’s exhausting. It’s so nice just to have this all completely done. The convenience of it is incredible.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Fantastic. Well, Sharon, appreciate you very, very much. Any final thoughts before we depart here and any final conclusion for the listeners?

Sharon Brack, HHC, AADP, CPT

Yes. I mean, if you’re looking for, you know, continuing to build and maintain your lean muscle, which helps us feel good in our clothes and our skin, and then you’re also looking for lowering your inflammation. Then this fasting mimicking is exactly what you’re looking for.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Will, appreciate it very much. Thank you for your time today.

Sharon Brack, HHC, AADP, CPT

You’re welcome.