Middle Age Syndrome Solved: How Fasting Fuels A Healthier, Happier You

Introduction to the Longevity Summit Guest 0:00

Hi everyone. This is Doctor Joseph Antoun, your co-host for the longevity summit. Today I have a very, very, very special guest. You're going to see us both smiling, you know, throughout the episode because we've moved so many people with so much science and stories behind fasting and changed so many people's lives. Doctor Laura, she's just an amazing. I call her an influencer because the doctor, a licensed professional, has to be an influencer first to influence people to change their life through science and through ethical, you know, change within their lifespan to get to the results they want.

And Doctor Laura cornered syndrome I want to call this syndrome that nobody has courted before. You know, as you know, I'm an MD, PhD, and I went to Harvard and Hopkins and I did all the trainings you want to have. I've never heard of the middle aged deficiency syndrome. Mads the doctor, Laura Corner, but probably at home. Are you going to all raise your hands? Matt stands for low energy. Yes. Moodiness, decreased brain function. And this entire cluster correlated with bloat, load, constipation, food intolerances, etc.

lots of us have built age are going to this outbreak through this. And you specialize into helping. And this is actually at the core of functional medicine right before we get a full diabetes diagnosis, before we get full cancer. There's that syndrome of precondition. We're feeling the tiredness. We're feeling aging. We have a lot of inflammation happening. Sub inflammation in the body where most doctors say, well that's okay for your age and that's not okay. And Doctor Laura has specialized into how can we come and find the root cause of this syndrome, and how can we work on the root causes to give you freedom from those symptoms.

And hopefully healthy long life and fasting is at the core of it. So let's start with that. We have a lot of fasting stories, and I know you had a very interesting story, starting with fasting and how you uncovered it and discovered it, and very aggressively you brought it to your followers and your patients. And it's it's leading to amazing results. We love the story, the stories. And if you can tell us this one. Yeah. Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm thrilled to support this project.

I think that what you're doing is so important. I want to let our audience know that I'm a nurse practitioner. I know you call me Doctor Laura, and I know it can feel that way some days. Because because of the breadth of the hugeness of the programs and everything that we that we do over here at Bio Radiant Health.

Discovering Prolonged Fasting and Autophagy 2:25

And I'm a I worked in the Western medicine space for two decades, over 20 years, and retired and completely stepped into functional medicine, functional nutrition. And that story about how fasting ended up in my community is because of you. I was actually creating a similar project to what you're doing right now with this, you know, Longevity Summit. And I interviewed you and you blew my mind in that interview. And I can still remember the moment that I was asking you about intermittent fasting.

And we were talking about improvement of mitochondrial function specifically. And you said to me, Laura, I'm afraid to, you know, tell you that your clients are actually not getting into the autophagy, the autophagy phase with intermittent fasting. They actually have to fast for three days before they hit that. And I remember being stunned thinking, my gosh, everything I've learned has just been flipped upside down on its head. I've been teaching the wrong thing to people. People think that they're getting that benefit from intermittent fasting and they're not.

So that was kind of how it started. And I remember you shared data with me. You shared research studies and you're like, look like this misinformation. People are not getting that benefit of sloughing off the old mitochondria, the cellular debris, the old cells so that they can regenerate and build new cells on day four and five. So that's where kind of I my whole transformation of knowledge started was with you. So first, thank you. But yes, I'm also a really quick start when it comes to learning new health information, especially when it's evidence based.

I will very quickly bring it into my community. So I went to my community and I said, okay, well, I've been teaching the wrong thing here, so you all are not getting the benefit you thought you were, because we have a lot of people coming to me because they want to improve their mitochondria, their cellular health. And we said, well, you're not getting that improvement like we thought with your intermittent fasting, you know, your fasting windows each day of, you know, 12 to 14 to 16 hours. So here's what we're going to do.

And I just asked my community and I said, who wants to do a five day fast with me? I'm going to do it for the first time. I've never successfully done a five day fast in my life. And crazy thing is, we had 250 people out of my. This was my inner circle community. 250 people raised their hand and said, I want to do it with you. So we put them all into a WhatsApp group. We brought in prolonged coaches. We brought in like people who knew a lot more than me about fasting, and we all did it together.

And the funny thing was, I remember you and I were sitting there thinking, when should we do this? And then we were looking at the calendar. We're like, let's do it after Cinco de Mayo. Because if you live in the US, then you know that Cinco de Mayo is this holiday, that we eat a bunch of Mexican food. You know, we go out and drink the service and the beers and eat the tacos, and then the next day you kind of pay for it, right? So that's the 5th of May. From what I understand, it's an American holiday, not an actual Mexican holiday, which is really interesting, but so we decided to start it the day after the the 6th of May, right after Cinco de Mayo.

And and it was fantastic. What was what was your experience of all this? I mean, it was amazing. For the first time, I had live 250 people. We did a lot of group fasting. A lot of people do prolongs together. We've had Max 100 people doing it together with us, and I think it worked perfectly well because they were on WhatsApp. They're getting the education they need. They're getting their their questions answered, and the community was supporting each other. That community support was amazing. So first, it's a testimony to how much people trust you.

But then the cheering that happens after that with the results and the benefits and how they come back and they wanted to do second cycle and the third cycle. And and this is how we started a journey of group fasting with prolonged I mean, it's not even fasting. It's doing prolongs and nourishment that gives you the benefits of fasting. And and the benefits were amazing. So maybe you can tell us some of the benefits and the stories there.

Launching the 250-Person Group Fast 6:32

Yeah. Let me share some of the stories with you. So, you know, I was doing it with them. So I was I had my intention, you know, I was declaring my intentions for this fast. And I wanted to, you know, I wanted to renew my cells. I wanted to create anti-aging and longevity processes in my body. And also, as I started to think about it, I started thinking, okay, when you're fasting, you're releasing. So what else am I declaring that I'm releasing during this process? And I remember asking in the group, what are you releasing?

And you cannot believe what came out of that. People were going to release their self-limiting beliefs. They were going to release their fear, their grief, their self-sabotage, their lack of accountability. They were going to release, you know, anything that wasn't working in their life. They were using that opportunity not to just have a physical, busy experience in the body, but it became an emotional release for people as well. And, I mean, I work with our client group is very dedicated to supporting their gut health and renewing that.

We do parasite cleanses, we do deep, full body detox. We help people get heavy metals and radioactive elements and environmental toxins and mold out of their bodies. And we do it in this very systematic way. And, you know, every once in a while, there's people who get stuck in the process, right? Even though we have a roadmap and we're very careful and intentional and respectful for people's journey, because everybody's on their own journey and their own timeline. And what happens, what works for one person may not work as a effectively for another person.

So you'll always have people in group programs where there's always a few front runners where they can just blow through the protocols. Everything they do works for them. They're feeling amazing. They're releasing weight, they're getting their energy back, their brains feeling better. They're they're eliminating those middle aged deficiency syndrome symptoms. Right. Digestive digestion is getting better. And the other end of the spectrum, you always have these people that are kind of bringing up the rear, and they're like, I can't push as hard, I feel lousy, or I'm dropping my energy or I don't feel good.

And so we teach these people how to slow it down, how to micro dose, how to maybe add in other elements that will help them, like peptides or whatever. And what we noticed with the fast was that those people who were bringing up the rear, they were catching up. So they they did the fast and they had a breakthrough. They had a breakthrough in their ability to detoxify, to balance their gut, to get their energy up, to get their brain online, to feel better. And it was like almost like a leveling of the playing field, if you will, like that.

Fasting was what they needed to get to the next level, and so that was outstanding to see that happen in a group of people. And then on the other side of it, when it was all said and done, we'd all gone through this for five days together. The coaches were in there just supporting people with the scientists. There were so many scientific questions. As you know, I have a very analytical group. They they really ask hard questions. And so your team was really, you know, digging into the data to give all the data and research and to help people understand what their bodies were going through.

But at the end of it, the beauty of it was people were so proud of their accomplishment. It was it brought me to tears to see. For the first time in my life, I've accomplished something. I thought I would never do a fast because it's hard to water fast, right? But with a prolonged fast, it's not hard because you're not starving for five days, you're not losing muscle, you're not feeling lousy, you're actually eating just enough to not turn on those nutrient sensing pathways in all the right, you know, the right categories of food.

What am I trying to say? The right mix of foods. Right? Yes. And it was the ride that people felt that it boosted their confidence, it boosted their self-esteem. It held them accountable to themselves. And they felt like they could do more and go on. So I will say an unintentional result of that 250% fast was that the Laura Frontera fans became bigger fans. They were like, we're going to stick with you forever because you just helped me have a breakthrough. And really, they did it. They did it. We just did it with them.

We held their hand and we were there. Through it all, thick and thin. The hard, the easy, the celebration, the the fear, every bit of it.

Emotional Release and Community Breakthroughs 10:50

And people just kept going together. It was beautiful. And thank you. Thank you for explaining that experience. What would you attribute it to? I know you, you love the story of not just the metabolic reset with prolonged that people rave about, but also the cellular and the resignation phase and that combination. You know, I always talk about, you know, things in longevity or weight loss. We talk about GLP one, we talk about supplements, the nads. But you always say what's unique about problems that salaries.

Can you talk a little bit about that and how you feel that is expressing itself within your community of pages doing this? Yeah. So at the foundational level, all of our programs, we have cellular health or cellular support built in. Because early on in my functional journey as a patient and then as a clinician, I what was lacking in my protocols and in the protocols that I was building for people was mitochondria support cellular health because I came from that Western background. You know, we compartmentalize everything there.

You have a cardiovascular system, you have a pulmonary system, you have a urologic system, you have a lymphatic system, you have all these different systems. You have a circulatory system, a neurologic system. But we don't really focus on how they all play together. And so at the root, at the absolute root of that is cellular health and cellular communication, I would say. And so when you have a disconnect between all those systems and particularly what we work with is gut nervous system, detox systems, drainage pathways.

This is where most of my programs focus. And when that when those cells are just kind of turned off, you're not able to communicate the the neurological nervous system can't communicate with the hormone system, can't communicate with the with the gut and the immune system. And people don't get well. So at the absolute like basic level, what occurs when you add prolonged fasting? I would say to any program, I can't think of a single functional medicine protocol or program that prolonged couldn't support.

You're going to bring those communication pathways back online because you're going to get get out all those old senescent cells that aren't working very well anymore, that aren't producing, that aren't producing enzymes, hormones, you know, all the different molecules in the body that are required for communication. Once you get those out of the way and new cellular growth occurs, it's like a regrowth, a rebirth in the body. And systems come back online, they start communicating again. So I would say at the absolute basic level, there's nothing we can't help with fasting.

Hopefully that's what you're. Looking for. Now, this is a great testimonial to what you have experienced with the science and with your patients. Do you have specific stories? Specific? Yeah. And how can you link that to Mads as well? Because yeah I do. Yeah. So I think the first thing I want to say is a lot of times, you know, people are in mid protocol with me when we bring in Prolog. They've been with me for months. They're doing, you know, full gut cleansing and parasite cleansing and detoxing.

So one of the biggest questions we get is well do I stay on my protocols or do I stop during Prolog? And so we always tell people to stop, have prolonged be the thing you're doing don't. Because it's five days only right. They can integrate in any yes. It's five days. And we know it was studied specifically without being on other supplements and nutrients. So we don't know how well your body is going to react. If it's kind of busy over here doing, you know, dealing with all the supplements and everything you're bringing in.

And some of those things may even break your fast if they have amino acids or certain ingredients in them. So we tell people to stop all their supplements. And then, of course, we know that if they need some magnesium to have a battle elimination or if they need some digestive enzymes or something like that, that's not going to break their fast or be any problem. But we haven't stopped pretty much everything we're doing. So that's the first thing I just want to share with people is it's okay. I mean, if if you're working with a practitioner who says you can't stop my protocol or you're going to, or none of this is going to work, I will start interviewing other practitioners.

You can absolutely pause anything and come back to it. This isn't like the Western medicine world. When they when we say, get on this medication and never stop it, ever. I mean, definitely pauses or sometimes good for the body. So some some stories of breakthroughs. So, you know, we work with a lot of people that have been to many practitioners and been working through many protocols and the people that come to mind, or the chronic fatigue people, the mast cell people, the fibromyalgia people, and they have not

Cellular Health as the Foundation 15:30

had breakthroughs in their health, big ones, they've had little wins, but not big ones. And so we saw many people have a breakthrough in those areas. So would highly recommend if you have any of those conditions to consider a fast because it can start to have breakthrough. We have people with weight loss, what I would call weight loss resistance, where they're just kind of stuck. They can't lose weight, or maybe while they're detoxing, they're even gaining a little weight because, you know, I always, you know, share with our with our audience that when you're detoxing, if you're detoxing faster than your body can handle, your body is going to dilute those toxins as they come out of the cells and you'll hold on to water weight, right?

That's just physics, right? The solution to pollution is dilution, right? You're going to hold on to water. And so we help people have breakthroughs with that as well. Once they went through the fast they finally released. And they were then able to go back on their detox protocols and get fantastic results. And it kind of was like the trigger to the weight loss. Right. And then they continued to lose weight, especially if they choose other fast, you. Know, and the muscle protection here. Right.

This is a big discussion today with ones with chronic restriction. And then versus prolonged where there's a muscle protection. So let's talk about middle age deficiency. So this is this cluster of symptoms. So we work with a lot of high performing men and women who feel like what's happening in my 50s and 60s, my brain isn't as sharp. I'm losing muscle. My energy isn't lasting throughout the day. I'm more emotional than I ever was. My motivation is kind of waning. I'm not doing my hobbies anymore.

I've got this cluster of digestive things. Maybe it's constipation, or maybe it's bloating, or maybe it's abdominal pain, or belching or some sort of cluster of I just don't feel like foods moving through me the way it should. And then there's a lot of times joint pain or disruptions in skin, you know, skin, skin health altogether. Maybe it's maybe it's dermatitis or psoriasis or acne or just rapid aging of the skin. A lot of people feel like their hair's thinning. It's falling out. So this kind of whole cluster of things that we've normalized in our culture, we say, oh, that's just that's just what getting older is.

And I would argue that it's not what getting older is. That's what we've normalized. And so as it is, we're dealing with what we call sarcopenia, right? We're dealing with decrease in muscle decline, decrease in muscle strength or a muscle decline as we age. And so our community is really trying to preserve muscle every day. They're making sure they get enough protein. They're moving their bodies. A lot of people come to me saying, I need help gaining weight, right? I'm losing my muscle. And so we don't want to do anything that could cause muscle decline when they're really pushing a boulder uphill.

And so that's one of the big concerns about water fasting. It's also one of the big concerns about GLP ones. If you're not using them appropriately, properly or with a really strong workout routine, I would say, and. You know, I and we started eating a lot of doctors saying, well, you lose 20% of your muscle with the GLP ones, but that's fine. That's that's expected. That's fine. You can start getting there. And muscle is an organ of longevity, especially after age 50 to 65. It's so crucial, you know, to preserve link, but it becomes an organ of longevity that.

MADS Symptoms and Muscle Preservation 18:58

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I do believe besides fasting, exercise is also one of the most researched methods of preserving life and decreasing and slowing down the aging process. Those two things, I mean, better than any supplement, better than any. Any by packing, better than anything you can do is moving your body and doing a five day, you know, fasting with out or with food in a way that preserves muscle. Yes, probably the most studied. Definitely. CategoryFiction slash. Fasting. Mimicking diet and exercise.

And it's the movements within exercise. The ability to just keep moving is what you know. Every minute of the day keeps burning and keep burning calories and building the muscle, which is critical at especially after age 65. Oh for sure. So for those outside of a lot of people probably today are raising their eyebrows. They've never heard of mass, but they are saying, wow, this is exactly what I'm experiencing is exactly what I'm feeling. What what would you say to them? How they can reach out to you, how they can think about it?

What what you what are the top 4 or 5 things you would do with them to support them to the process? What are the root causes is very important, like all feeling going through it. But what are the root causes and how you do it? Well, I think one of the most important things to remember is what we just talked about is that your whole body is interconnected, all of these systems. And one of the big mistakes I see is that people get fixated on it's my thyroid, it's my adrenals. It's just my gut, it's my hormones.

And I would argue that underneath all of those things is a deeper cause. What is dysregulated in the hormones? Why is the thyroid not functioning properly? What's happening with your adrenals? Why do you have leaky gut? So it comes down to four root causes that we focus on. The first being chronic hidden I would call infections. And infections could range from bacteria to fungus to parasites, and not just in the gut, but literally anywhere in the body. And people really need to focus on the mandible, the mouth, the sinuses, not just the GI tract. I mean, it's so critical to see a good biologic dentist to get an evaluation here.

I mean, we could go on and on about that. We do a lot of infection clearing in our programs to help people gain traction and start to feel better. The second thing root cause is toxins. And I'm sure you have people on this project on this summit talking about toxins, but they range everywhere from what we're eating to what we're breathing to what we're drinking, to the hygiene body products we're using on our skin, to what we're cleaning our homes with. We have never been exposed to more toxins in any other time in history than right now.

I truly believe it is the massive underlying cause of most neurodegenerative disorders mood disorders, cancers, you know, any chronic inflammatory health condition, we can we can oftentimes lead it right back to toxins. So you must look for toxins. The third thing is nutrient deficiencies. And I mean I have a different take on nutrient deficiencies

Root Causes: Infections, Toxins, Deficiencies, Stress 22:08

than most practitioners. Most people talk about, well, you know, your nutrient deficient because you're eating enough diversity. You're just eating the same thing over and over. Or it's the farming practices. They're depleted, the soils of minerals and nutrients, or you're eating too much processed food. You're not eating enough whole food. Yes, to all of those things. And I would argue that the first two things I just mentioned are creating nutrient deficiencies. So infections are skimming off the top.

They're taking your nutrients from you. Those microbes need to eat too, and they get your nutrients. And number two, those toxins, they're blocking cellular receptor sites. So when we go back to cellular health being the foundation of all healing, think of your cells like having doors and windows that open and close to allow nutrients in toxins. Board up the doors and windows. You block the receptors. You can't get magnesium into the cell. You can't get B vitamins into the cell. You can't get amino acids into the cell so that your mitochondria can make ATP energy and shoot that out to the body to thrive.

So you have to clear those toxins off cellular cellular receptor sites. Guess what does that fasting one of the ways we do that. So so then the fourth thing would be the level of stress and raised cortisol levels in people's bodies these days, along with trapped trauma and unresolved trauma. We just live in a time, and I would say probably everybody from the last several hundred years have lived in a time that's stressful politically, culturally, we're just so fast paste this, this technology age that we're in.

It's really hard on people. It's hard on children, it's hard on adults. There's so much stress. And so in less you address all four of these things, then you're going to keep having weight loss resistance, thyroid disease, hormone issues, you know, adrenal issues. And you're going to cast you're going to have a cascade of building up to cancer, heart disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, you know, all of these degenerative and inflammatory disorders. That's just end stage accumulation of all these things.

And fasting is a solution for that. Well, this is doctor. Thank you. I want to I'm going to call you doctor. Over you. Oh you always I so appreciate you for the wealth of information today. I think the match is an ingenious discovery. You've done it represents a subcategory within functional medicine that focuses on root causes, whether those are toxins or molds or the chronic inflammation. And it's leading to fatigue. We see it all the time now. Most of us are living from food that's full of preservative and artificial and leaky gut, which then increase the inflammation, which just puts us down.

And we didn't talk a lot about the fog, you know, the mental fog and the weakness. Right. And the chronic fatigue. So, you know, I'm really happy with the functional medicine discipline.

Closing Thoughts and How to Connect 24:58

This keeps growing and growing. And now I think we just cross 60,000 functional medicine physician in the US, which is a big record trying to think about root causes of diabetes, of cancer, of Alzheimer's, of chronic inflammation. Appreciate you very much for sharing this information today, for sharing your experience with fasting and longevity and prolon. And I'm pretty sure we're going to do more episodes in the future. We will. We will for sure. So your audience can find me at Laurafrontiero.com, by the way.

So that's like the great frontier with a no. And I'm on Instagram at Laura.Frontiero and shoot me an email through there. I'd love to hear from you. Yes. Appreciate you. Thank you very much.