Master the Art of Weight Loss with Intermittent Fasting

Mindy Pelz, DC

Dr. Mindy here. And on this video, we’re going to talk about weight loss. And I really want you guys to understand this, because so many of you come to fasting to lose weight. A lot of you get great results and some of you get stuck. So on this video, I’m going to show you seven really simple strategies to maximize your weight loss efforts with intermittent fasting, specifically. We’re going to start off this concept of maximizing weight loss, accelerating weight loss with fasting, with two really key principles. First, is called metabolic flexibility. You have two energy systems. One is where your body will make energy from the foods you eat. The other one is your body will make energy from the fat it burns. When you look at these two energy systems, we call this one a sugar burner, and this one a fat burner. Now, when you first hear that, it makes perfect sense to think, well, if I want to lose weight, I just want to be a fat burner all the time. And a lot of you are discovering that, that once you switch over into fat-burning mode, you start dropping weight. So you just want to stay over there. But that is not how you lose weight permanently. If you want to lose weight permanently, you’re going to need to switch in and out of these two states. And I’ll show you and talk about how we do that in a moment. Okay. So, that’s a key principle.

Second key principle is that fat is literally saving your life. So think of fat, instead of always villainizing it and saying mean things to yourself when you look at your fat. Look at the areas that you have extra weight and say, “Okay, that was a way that my body needed to store toxins. It needed to store extra hormones, it needed to store extra sugar. And thank God it put it around my belly and it didn’t put it around my liver.” So that’s the mindset we need to look at. So as we start to drop weight with fasting, we’ve got to open up the detox pathways so the body knows how to get rid of this excess. So the second principle I want you to keep in mind is you’ve got to open up your detox pathways. Okay. With those two principles out of the way, let’s go to seven things you can do. So first, if you want to improve metabolic flexibility, you’re going to need to vary your fasts. So we’ve got to get you going in and out of these sugar burner fat-burning states more often. So this is where one day at 15 hours of fasting is great. The next day you want to go to 24 hours, then maybe the next day you don’t fast. And then the next day you do a 17-hour fast, and then the following day you do a 24-hour fast. This in and out of fasting is what is going to unstick your metabolism and make you able to go in and out of sugar burner, fat burner very efficiently. How you know, you have great metabolic flexibility are two really key things. One is to ask yourself, can you go without food? If you’re struggling without food, then you’re still, your body still trying to get over here to the fat burner. So we need to make sure that you can go without food. The second way to look is to go look at your blood work that your doctor did. What is your level of hemoglobin A1C? That is a big predictor because hemoglobin A1C will show you three months of glucose and insulin and how you’ve been managing this sugar burner system. If your A1C is really high. It means you’ve been more in the sugar-burner place and less in the fat-burning place so watch that number. We want it under five for great metabolic health. Second tip. Tip number two is that we want you to make sure that you stay away from the three worst foods you could ever eat, and will destroy your metabolism quicker than or any other habit in your life. Food number one, bad oils. I’ve done videos on that. Food number two is foods that are high in refined flour and sugars. I’ve done videos on that. And food number three is anything packed with toxins. So get to know your ingredients. Come back to nature’s food. Get away from the processed foods. And you’re going to find be going in and out of these two states much easier. Okay. 

Tip number three, we’re now going to move into opening your detox pathways. So the first thing, we love fasting for weight loss. It’s phenomenal but there are other hacks we can use to accelerate our weight loss efforts that will not only get our metabolism working well but open these detox pathways up. And one of those ways is just walking. It is just pure movement. If you want to go running, great. If you want to go walking, fine. But when you walk in a forward direction, what you’re doing is you’re calming your lizard brain down that part of the brain that is always looking to keep you safe. When you move in a forward direction, you calm that amygdala down. 

When that calms down, cortisol comes down. When cortisol comes down, you are going to lose weight a lot easier. So make sure you’re moving on a daily basis. Second thing, make sure you’re sweating. Did you know that your skin actually produces testosterone? And you’ve got to make sure that you sweat on a regular basis so that we can not only mobilize toxins, but we can make sure that your body’s making some key hormones, like testosterone. So sweating a couple of times a week. If you’re not sweating, let’s make sure that we can find some new ways for you to sweat. Like using an infrared sauna. But you want to make sure that you’re sweating as many days out of the week as you possibly can. Every day wouldn’t be the end of the world. 

Okay, tip number three. You got to hydrate. Our body does not do well when it’s in a dehydrated state. It will raise cortisol. Now, when we’re fasting, that’s pretty easy. But if you have a busy life like I do, what ends up happening is I often forget, Oh, I got to go drink water. I want you guys drinking water on a regular basis. So there is no magic number to the water intake that you should that you should be doing. But if you put that element mineral powder in your water and you take like a big container like this is one of the containers that I use on a regular basis. I try to get 2 to 3 of these a day. When you do that on a regular basis, you’re now supporting your kidneys. You’re hydrating your gut. And you’re going to make the exit of those toxins coming out of fat much more efficient and the body’s not going to hold on to weight like it used to. Number six is bowel movement. You have got to have a normal bowel movement. I’d rather you have diarrhea instead of constipation. But when you’re constipated, what ends up happening is that you hold those toxins inside. So you’re doing all this incredible fasting, but it’s those toxins are not getting out. So we need to make sure that you’re having daily bowel movements. I have done a whole video on constipation. So make sure that you go and watch that video. Okay. Last thing, tip number seven is sleep. This is so vitally important for your weight loss efforts. You’ve got to be getting good-quality sleep. Now, what is good quality sleep? Well, this is where it comes in handy because we can see how long we’re sleeping. But it’s the deep sleep that’s the most important. You want to be somewhere between 1 to 2 hours of deep sleep because that’s where the brain detoxifies. 

This is the organ that’s going to control everything from the head down. So if this gets toxic and this gets toxic, you are going to struggle to lose weight. So when we’re sleeping, what we’re doing is we’re allowing our brain to reboot itself. We’re getting the detoxification of the lymphatic system around our brain. We’re detoxifying efficiently so that the brain works better the next day. So those are my seven tips. They’re very simple, I hope, and they’re incredibly effective. I feel like I’ve answered almost every question I possibly could on fasting. And one of the things I know you guys struggle with is where you either hit plateaus with weight loss or you start gaining weight or just want to make sure that you are speeding the weight loss process up. It would be easier for me to give you some fancy tricks but we’ve got to get to the fundamentals. And those seven things are the fundamentals.