Unlocking Longevity: Fasting, Autophagy & mTOR

Introduction to Fasting and Longevity 0:00

Welcome back to the Fasting and Longevity Summit. I'm your host, Dr. David Jockers, and I'm excited about our interview today. We're talking about how to tap into your innate intelligence for healthy aging and longevity with fasting. Fasting is an incredible health strategy. It's something I'm extremely passionate about and practice myself. Our guest today is Ben Azadi and Ben is the author of four bestselling books. He wrote the Keto Flex is most recent one, definitely amazing book, the check out the Keto Flex.

He's written several other really good books as well, including The Power of Sleep, which is another phenomenal book for healing and longevity. Ben is the host of a top 15 podcast called the Keto Camp Podcast, which won the Keto Podcast of the year in 2022 by the Metabolic Health Summit. Ben has the fastest growing keto camp YouTube channel with over 150,000 subscribers. He's also big on TikTok he has over 285,000 subscribers there and over 46 million video downloads. So putting out a lot of great content.

Definitely check out his podcast, the Keto Camp Podcast, check him out on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, wherever you're at. Again, it's Keto Camp or Ben Azadi and his book, The Keto Flex. And today we're going to talk about the myths and truths of fasting and really the best practices for putting fasting into place so you can get the anti-aging cell rejuvenating benefits. I know you guys are getting a lot out of this interview. So without further ado, let's jump into it. Well, hey, Ben, always great to talk to another fasting evangelist like myself.

You know, I've seen the healing power of fasting, and I know you have as well.

How Fasting Activates Innate Healing 1:58

And I'm excited about today's talk. I know you had mentioned really trying to discuss how fasting impacts the innate intelligence or how the innate intelligence goes to work when we're fasting. And can you break that down a little bit? What is the innate intelligence and what happens when we start to fast? Yeah, well, I'm grateful to be here with you, David. I love what you're doing. I love this topic of fasting. I do believe it's the best way or one of the best ways to harness that innate intelligence.

So you talk a lot about this, this inner physician. We have the wisdom within the body and there is an inner physician that God built inside of the body that is self-healing and the truth is there is no pill or surgery or anything external that could replace the healing capabilities of this innate intelligence. And for many years, we thought it was just the DNA nucleus running the show. We learned that there's something that communicates with the DNA nucleus, and that is the intelligence. That's the cell membrane.

It's the integrity of that membrane, the cell wall. So fasting removes the interference when we're eating constantly, like the average American is eating 300 grams of carbohydrates plus per day. And that alone is bad. But they're eating it throughout the entire day, pretty much every waking hour, and they're constantly starting that digestive process, number one. And number two is that they're constantly raising glucose and insulin. So they have these blood sugar rollercoaster spikes that eventually leads to leaky gut and insulin resistance, which leads to type two diabetes, which leads to a whole host of other health issues and complications.

So with fasting, it's like nature's reset button. You eliminate the interference, you allow your digestive system to take a break. And I always talk about an analogy to help this make sense. It's like somebody who works a 9 to 5 job. They're let's say they're a corporate worker and they're working their butt off 40, 60 hours a week every single week. And they own a house with the garage. And this garage has compiled all this junk inside of it. But they don't have time. They have no time to clean out that junk because they're constantly working every single week.

But now their boss has given them two weeks off. So they're at home a couple of days into this vacation and they're like, Oh, I have all this time in my hand. Let me venture off to the garage. And they start fixing things, cleaning up this garage, getting rid of this old junk that was sitting around there for years. And now you have this beautiful, functioning, incredible garage and that's essentially what's happening when we fast. The innate intelligence goes to work and it looks for cells that are damaged and inflamed.

It allows the digestive system to take a break and it goes in and repairs it. But when we're constantly eating and starting that digestive process, we don't have time for that. It's like, okay, another project started. We're going to have to work on that project and then we're about to complete that project. Another project has come and you got to keep working on it. So when you fast, you allow your body to reset, recover, and you allow this inner physician to go to work and take care of the junk that needs to be taken care of.

Yeah, that's so well said. And I love that that idea of the inner wisdom within us, the inner physician within us coming to work and healing and repairing our body. Now, a lot of people and I used to think this to growing up my parents we they would have us fast and I didn't start doing this long as a teenager, but it was like one day out of the entire year we would do a fast and it was for spiritual purposes. And I thought that is like the worst thing ever. I thought it was just horrible that I would waste, I would completely waste away.

I have absolutely no energy at all. And like, in a sense, psychologically, I kind of psychologically set myself up for that. And a lot of people have this idea that if they go more than like three or 4 hours without eating, that they're going to have no energy and that they're actually going to lose, they're going to waste away, their muscles are going to waste away, and they're going to feel awful. And so I really want to touch on some of these myths behind fasting. And so what is your bet, your experience been with that?

I've had the same thought process, especially like during the early days when I got into the health space 2008 or so. And it's still very popular in the fitness space that you will waste away. You're going to eat away at muscle, go into starvation mode. And yeah, let's let's debunk a lot of these myths, you know, with that mindset sometimes your your thoughts could create the reality in the fact. So we want to go into it knowing that fasting is a healing tool. It's definitely a healing space to be in.

And I like to put things in perspective when somebody is afraid of skipping a meal or going at least more than 4 hours without eating something. And I put it into perspective and I talk about this gentleman named Angus Barbieri, who did the Guinness World Record for the longest recorded water fast many, many years ago, a Scotsman. He was 450 pounds. The man was morbidly obese and he was medically supervised and he had water, some electrolytes, coffee, tea and some nutritional use.

Myths About Energy and Muscle Loss 6:38

But essentially he didn't eat for 382 days and he went from a 300 of a 450 pounds, excuse me, on day 1 to 180 pounds on day 382. And his electrolytes look great. Blood work looked right. He felt great. Now he had a lot of weight, a lot of energy on his body, too, to be used for fuel. It's an extreme example, but that goes to show that somebody who's very lean, 10% body fat, has tens of thousands of calories on them. And when you don't eat, you essentially are going to use your body fat. That's exactly what it is.

It's stored energy and the body is very smart. We talked about this innate intelligence already, but we have this incredible human body that was built for for thriving. And when we fast the body is going to raise these counter regulator hormones as insulin drops, these hormones that run counter to insulin increase. So glucagon, human growth hormone, the sympathetic tone essentially is activated. And human growth hormone is one of those hormones that actually preserves muscle. It preserves lean muscle mass.

It actually helps you put the lean muscle mass on. And that's your body's way of protecting your muscle. When you're in a fasted state, your body's going to go or your fat stores, not your muscle. That wouldn't be a very efficient mechanism if we automatically tap into muscle and protein, our ancestors would not have survived. That would have withered it away. So we have amazing process that takes place and there's a lot of research that shows this takes place in a fasted state. There was a one, a study that came out, I believe it's 2013 Science Daily, that showed a 24 hour water fast, resulted in about a 20% increase in human growth hormone and a 1300 percent increase in women.

And the 2,000% was in men after about 24 hours. And that's because the body's preserving the muscle, not eating away at it. Yeah, and that's so important to understand is that you get this HGH release, which again helps you preserve that lean body mass and actually creates an environment that if you do strength training, you actually enhance your strength, enhance your muscle tissue. And it's really powerful. And and going back to that ancestral perspective, you know, when our ancestors didn't have food for, let's say, a day or two, they didn't just lay in their beds.

Instead, they actually, you know, in a sense, hunger was a drive for them to become more creative in their hunting, in their gathering, in whatever the mechanisms they had to, to to access food. Right. And so, so they actually became harder to kill, in a sense. They became stronger, more resilient through that, that experience. And I think all of us have experienced it's like on Thanksgiving, we eat a huge meal. We're bringing in all this potential energy. But then how do we feel? Tired. Right. And and so when we start practicing intermittent fasting, you know, it's it's one of those things you actually start to notice that you have better energy, better mental clarity.

It's it's pretty amazing what happens. What are some of the other myths that you encounter that people have when it comes to practicing fasting? Yeah, and you're exactly right. You know, when you eat a big meal like food coma, that's where the term food coma came from. It takes so much energy from you and resources and blood flow, and now you're using that for digestion. But when you're fasted, that energy's diverted. You talk a lot about that in your book and in your work. Yeah. So another myth would be that men and women should practice fasting the same way.

And that's not true because and we should also classify women in different parts of their life practicing in different ways as well. Like a menstruating women should practice fasting differently than a woman who's post-menopausal, and then a man should practice it differently than a woman because of different hormone fluctuations. We have the same hormones, but we have different fluctuations in those hormones. So men have this 24 hour recycling pattern of hormones, kind of like the sun. Sun comes out, it sets, it rises, it sets 24 hour pattern.

We kind of have a similar pattern with some of our sex hormones and etc.. So cycling women have this 28 day pattern where it's more like the moon that comes out after 28 days.

Women, Hormones, and Fasting Differences 10:39

So they have to do it a little bit different. So week by week that would be a little bit different. Fasting schedule for a menstruating women, for example, the week before the period would be a week. We're probably that menstruating women does not want to practice too much fasting because they want to build progesterone ever healthy monthly cycle. The period starts then that's a good week for the fast to occur and do more aggressive fasting. So there's a big myth that men and women should do it the same.

That's not true. And in fasting, unfortunately, it's good and bad. It's become very popular and that's a good thing. People are becoming aware to it because it's not new, it's just nuanced. But with that being so popular, people are saying women should not fast because it wrecks their hormones. And that's like saying women should not exercise because it wrecks their hormones. They're they're saying fasting is a stress. So it's not good for you, especially women. It's the same thing as saying they shouldn't exercise because exercise is the stress.

And you know this, David, it's about staying in that hermetic zone of stress is very important. And you mentioned being harder to kill our ancestors. We want to be harder to kill and stress is how you do that. Your body needs to adapt to that stress. But that's the thing. It needs to adapt. So stress is only bad when your body doesn't adapt, but when it does adapt, you get stronger, you eat healthier, you live longer, you feel better. So I kind of threw in a few myths there, but that's that's the next myth that I would want to cover.

Yeah, I think that's so important. I mean, it's kind of like the principle of overload in fitness. So if you don't train your muscles atrophy or if you train too late, your muscles will atrophy or they won't. You won't get the benefits where you actually have to challenge your muscles in a certain way, where you are challenging them at their peak. In a sense, overloading the the amount of resistance that they can put out in order to then adapt. Right? As long as you have enough nutrients and rest to then get stronger.

It's kind of the same with fasting where, you know, you have to practice it and you've got to, in a sense challenge your metabolic system in a healthy way to just kind of gradually bump it or give it a nudge, give your metabolic system a nudge, and then of course rest, recover, provide the proper nutrients. So that way you can recover and get stronger through the stress like you were talking about. So and that's that's so important. Any other big myths that you're seeing with fasting? Yeah, a lot of people say, you know, the benefits from fasting come from being in a caloric deficit.

That might be one benefit. But there is a big difference between fasting and a calorie deficit or cutting calories, because with simply just cutting calories, for example, let's say somebody is cutting calories, but they're eating throughout the day. They're not getting that digestive reset even though there are calories or cut versus somebody who may cut their calories to the same amount. But with fasting, they do get that digestive reset. So there's a difference there with what it does for the gut.

But I don't like to focus on calories because I think calories are more of a distraction. I think the body is much more sophisticated and complex than just calories in versus calories out. I do think calories matter, but I don't think they're high on the priority list. I think they're more of a distraction than anything else. And I had to do a whole 180 with that because in the beginning I used to teach all about the science of fat loss and teach people how to calculate their total daily energy expenditure and being a deficit in it.

The problem with it is many problems, but one of the main problems is that it works short term and the person thinks, okay, this is working out. Cutting calories does work, Ben's a lighter, David's a liar. But over time, what's going to happen? The metabolism needs to adapt to the energy deficit and then the metabolic slows and lowers, and then you've got to cut your calories more. And if you only cut your calories so much so with fasting, it's not necessarily about eating less. It's about eating less often.

You could still be in a calorie deficit, but the cool thing about doing it with fasting is that you have the counter regulatory hormones that preserve your metabolism and prevent your metabolism from going into this starvation mode. Granted, with excessive fasting, not good, but with the right amount of fasting, you talk about that and adapting to it and then getting the nutrients and enough protein during your eating window, you won't have that issue. The body's very, very smart and there are studies that show the metabolism actually revs up during a fast, not decreases.

And that's because of these counter regulatory hormones. Yeah, that's good. And and what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making as they start to practice intermittent fasting? One of the biggest mistakes is that they think that they don't look at fasting as a muscle, and I do look at it as muscle. You mentioned that as well. So, for example, somebody was a couch potato for ten years and they hear about the amazing benefits of CrossFit or things like Barry's Bootcamp, whatever it is.

And they go, they do a full on 60 minute workout that first day.

Calories vs Fasting and Metabolic Adaptation 15:30

They are going to hurt themselves. They're going to be sore for a week. They're going to feel awful similar with fasting. If you burn a sugar burn or eating every 2 to 3 hours for years and you go and you hear about the benefits of a 24 hour fasting, you say, tomorrow is my day. I'm going to do a 24 hour fast. It's going to look ugly and feel awful because it's a muscle you haven't developed yet. So the big mistake to dove right into fasting, you want to build up that fasting muscle. One of the best ways to do that, and I know you teach the same thing is to get fat adapted, teach your body to burn fat instead of sugar.

You do that in 7 to 14 days. Do some variation of keto, a low carb, high fat. Yet your body's familiar with burning fat instead of sugar. Then you start pairing that with the fasting schedule and you start building up that that window. With fasting, you start extending that window and you're going to notice that you're going to get the results that you're seeking because you didn't go right into it and shock the body, essentially. So that's a big mistake. People just do too much too soon. Yeah, that's super important.

And so you talked about getting fat adapted. Can you expand upon that? And you said you can do it in about seven or 14 days. I know you're a huge advocate of a ketogenic diet. You are the the great podcast keto camp in your book, you know, flex where you teach people really how to do that, how to get into a fat adopted state. Let's talk about the importance of that and how somebody goes about getting into that. Yeah, absolutely. And I do see it as a really important first step for somebody who's burning, only explaining what that means.

The average person, as I mentioned, is consuming 300 grams of carbs plus per day and eating frequently. They're constantly burning sugar and glucose. They're they're in this sugar burning state. And when we think about the 70 trillion cells or so inside of the body, we have two major pathways for energy, sugar or fat. In other words, glucose or ketones. The majority of people in some studies, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, came out with that study in 2018 that said about 88% of American adults are essentially metabolically unhealthy, and I would categorize them as being a sugar burner.

So what we want to do is teach these individuals to switch energy sources, to burn fat and use ketones. And as we how we do that, it's pretty straightforward. We want to gradually decrease our total carbohydrates so that if you are listening to this, watching this, and you are consuming 300 grams of carbs per day, let's gradually decrease that every single day until we lower that under 50 total grams of carbs per day. Some people need to go lower, but we'll say 50 grams of carbs per day. And as you're doing that, you're increasing healthy fats, saturated fats, mono and saturated fats, you're increasing healthy dietary protein as well.

And in about seven or 14 days and keeping your electrolytes up at the same time, which is very important in about 77 to 14 days, your body's going to make that switch. For now, you're burning body fat. Those fatty acids are now being sent to your liver. Your liver is using it and producing ketones. And you talk all about this in your work and in books. David So that is somebody who's fat adapted at that point and you could test, by the way, your blood ketones if it shows 0.5 or higher milli moles per liter, you're essentially in ketosis and you are fat adapted and you can do that in 7 to 14 days.

And once you achieve that, then I would start paring in some fasting schedules with that. So how would you recommend somebody get started with that to get fat adapted like it? Should they start by intermittent fasting? What's kind of like your first steps with that? The first step would be the carbohydrate decrease and then remove the snacking, have your three meals per day and that if you're doing six meals a day. So let's say you're doing three meals and three snacks, stick with just three meals and then every day track your macros in terms of your carbohydrates and keep lowering those carbs.

And so you get to under 50 total grams of carbs per day. I also talk about the two, two, two, two rule, which I got actually from a mutual friend of ours, my mentor Dr. Pompa. And this is a good strategy for a beginner, and you want to hit this rule every day for until you get into ketosis and get fat adapted. So it's two tablespoons of olive oil and avocado oil every day, two tablespoons of grass fed butter or grass fed ghee every single day, two tablespoons of coconut oil or MCT oil every single day.

And then two teaspoons of sea salt every single day.

Getting Fat Adapted with Keto and Electrolytes 19:48

As you lower the carbs, hit that to 2 to 2 rule, and then once you verify that you're in ketosis, then I would maybe eliminate the breakfast and have lunch and dinner. What you're doing like a 68 fast or the opposite way, you could have breakfast and lunch and eliminate the dinner. Whatever works better for your schedule. Yeah, that's great. That's how I teach it as well. I think, you know, that's kind of an easy way to to gradually move into it as your body gets fat adapted. You have less you have less hunger and cravings.

You know, I always say, like I very rarely am actually hungry. Usually I don't actually notice hunger until I start eating. And then my body, same thing. It's eating time, right? Yeah. It's like, okay, yeah, I need I need to get my calories now. And that's when you don't you don't have to think about calories because your body's going to give you the right the right idea as far as how much you need to, to, to consume. And, you know, there are some people that when they start practicing fasting, they have a tendency to overeat a little bit and they might notice symptoms like their energy goes down a lot after they eat or they have digestive issues, things like that.

And so that would be a sign, hey, maybe cut it down just a little bit, right? And so we kind of have to listen to the feedback that your body's getting. Are there any tips that you give as people are reducing the amount of meals they're consuming and and consolidating their their they're eating window and maybe consuming a little bit more calories in their meals because they're only eating maybe two or three times a day. So they're eating a larger amount when they do eat. Are there any tips that you give to help improve digestion, to help improve energy between meals or like right after their meal?

Yeah, I like focusing on protein as the main macronutrient with those meals and I would say aim to get about 40 grams of protein at a least two of those meals and you should be in good shape. Protein is so important. The amino acids, essential amino acids, right? There are essential fats, essential amino acids. There's no such thing as essential carbohydrates. Interesting, right? Yeah. Not that we're saying you should never have carbs. I'm just saying they're not essential. The body can manufacture glucose from protein.

In fact, which is super cool. But yeah, focus on protein. And now let's say you're eating more protein, but it's kind of sitting in your gut. That's a sign of low stomach acid and you want to build up a stomach acid. And you could do that with taking some kale supplementation or some apple cider vinegar. So that's the sign that it's more of a problem with breaking down protein if it sits in the gut, if you get more loose stools. And David, you talk about this, if you get more diarrhea, loose stools, that's more of a problem breaking down fat.

And that's where you want to support the liver. And the liver's ability to produce bile. So maybe incorporate more bitters, maybe take an ox bile supplement, maybe do some things like a castor oil pack or coffee animals, but that'll signal more liver support. And one more thing I would recommend keep your electrolytes and your your minerals up, especially during the fast, because as you fast, your body is going to lower insulin, which is a good thing for especially for a lot of people. And as you lower insulin, you release all this extra body weight and you shed extra body weight, which is really good, you're going to feel lighter and look lighter, but the kidneys also will shed some electrolytes, too.

And sometimes if it happens to aggressively, you might get a headache, your energy levels might drop. So just keeping those minerals and electrolytes up during the fasting window is going to be very important. Yeah, I think that's a really important caveat. Most people out there have heard salt is bad and especially if they have a like a tendency towards maybe they have a family history of high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease. A lot of times just preventatively their doctor will put them on a low salt diet.

And a low salt diet can be helpful if you have insulin resistance, because when you have high insulin, you retain sodium. But as you are getting fat adapted and doing intermittent fasting, you're actually getting insulin sensitive and your overall insulin levels go down, which is, like you mentioned, extreme healthiness is what most people out there. You mentioned 88%. You know, so almost nine out of ten people in our study actually need to lower the amount of insulin in their blood when they do that, you start to excrete sodium and that's what you were talking about.

So replacing that, getting the sea salt, you mentioned two teaspoons to teaspoons each day. Right to table. Yeah, two teaspoons. Yeah. Making sure. Salt, yeah. Yep. So making sure you're getting enough of that. Getting enough trace minerals. Right. And there's a lot of good trace mineral rich foods that we both love, that we talk about a lot in our books. And when we're doing that now, we're replacing those. And that's going to help you with energy. A lot of times when people are going through this fat adaptation process and they don't feel good, a lot of it's because they don't have the salts right there.

They're actually electrolyte and sodium deficient. And that will cause a condition called keto flu, right, where you actually feel really awful. And you've probably seen a lot of people experience this. Yeah, exactly. And it really is more of like carbohydrate withdrawal symptoms, but that's exactly what the major cause of it is. It's that dramatic decrease in those electrolytes on day one. Keep the sea salt up, keep the electrolytes and minerals up. And you don't have to go through the suffering.

You don't have to experience the keto flu as long as you do this the right way. Yeah, for sure. And you mentioned protein and getting 40 grams of protein, and I know I'm a huge advocate of that as well. I'm usually eating two meals a day, sometimes three with like a third one, and I'm always getting 40, 50 plus grams of protein in all of my meals. Really helps me feel great, takes away any sort of cravings. I feel really mentally clear, great energy after my meals and I just feel fantastic and I'm stronger now at at 41 than I, you know, ever was really.

Honestly, even in my early twenties, I feel better than ever and really dialing in the protein has been key with that. However, in the longevity world, protein can have a, you know, there's kind of this bad rap. You know, people will look at bodybuilders and they'll say, well, you know, they're they're amplifying this pathway mTOR this kind of growth pathway in the body and they're doing it too much, right? And so how does kind of this sort of nutrition plan

Protein, Digestion, and Supporting Recovery 25:48

where we're prioritizing protein when we're eating, but also we're taking breaks away from food, how does that help us with our mTOR and keeping mTOR under control? It's a great question. And you're right. You know, that is a problem. When we look at bodybuilders, I think I was reading a stat that showed the average bodybuilder lives about 12 years less than the average person and then people blame that on enter and enter this mechanistic target of rapamycin, this anabolic growth pathway. It's very important in spurts, very healthy in spurts.

But when you're constantly in a growth pathway, the sensor this turned on all the time, it's going to signal growth, growth, growth, and sometimes it could signal growth to cells we don't want to grow and duplicate. So that's the problem with too much to the opposite of mentor is autophagy, which is more catabolic and repair. And you get that with exercise, you get that with fasting and autophagy is it's such an incredible process. Again, the innate intelligence going to work and looking for cells that are not working properly and trying to fix those cells.

And if it has determined a cell is not functioning at all, this isn't zombie cell. It all sent a signal to get rid of the cell altogether via a pop ptosis and then go another step and create a stem cell, which is amazing. All of this is happening during a fast. So with the protein, if you're having your right amount of protein during your eating window and then you're going and pairing that with a fast schedule, you're getting a proper balance now of mature growth and spurts and that autophagy catabolic repair.

So that is the magic we it's it's a delicate dance between both these pathways mTOR and autophagy they have an inverted relationship self enter is activated, autophagy is deactivated and vice versa. So we don't want too much autophagy and too much fasting and we don't want too much entering, too much growth. That's where pairing a intermittent fasting schedule with a feasting schedule with enough protein is where the magic happens. Yeah, great explanation. And I think that's, you know, that's the advantage of the way that I teach you.

The way that you teach it in your Keto Flex book is we are getting the benefits of both because there's a lot of people in the longevity space that really, really prioritize autophagy. And I totally understand why autophagy is an amazing mechanism and most people in our society are autophagy deficient, meaning their body is not undergoing this, this process of cellular healing and repair. And so most people need to prioritize that for a certain period of time. But too much autophagy is just as bad as too much enter your body wastes away.

And we know that as people age a big condition, they deal with his sarcopenia where they lose muscle tissue, bone tissue. And if we are overdoing the autophagy, we're wasting our system away. And I think one of the most important things we can do is build lean body tissue and then do everything we can to keep it and to keep it functioning at a really high level. And I think what you're talking about there, words like this feast, famine cycle. Right. And I know you call it keto flex where we're undergoing this period of autophagy and also periods where we are elevating mTOR so we can build, maintain muscle mass.

I think that really works perfectly with giving us kind of what our goals are, which is to have great health, great, you know, great, great functioning brain, lean body tissue so we can pick up our grant, our, you know, great, great grandchildren when we're 94 years old. Right. And, you know, do all the things we want to do and live into our nineties without any medications. Yeah, that is the ultimate goal right there. And the balance is very, very important. We the problem is this and I was guilty of this when I first started to get into fasting in 2013.

You feel so good when you fast. At least I do. And you fall in love with it. You hear about all the benefits of autophagy and what it does for the guy and for fat loss and for the brain and body. And f and and you want more and more is not necessarily better. Right? So you got to balance it out. Feast, famine, cycling. David, you nailed it, right? That is what our cells are hardwired to do and how to how ourselves thrive. There is a time to fast. And when we fast, we fast, there is a time to feast.

And when we feast, we feast, we get enough protein, healthy food. It's important to balance out both. And I don't know, I ask you this question, David, with fasting being so popular, I have found in my community I'm telling more people to feast versus before I was telling them more. So too fast. Have you found the same thing? Yeah, I think that is important. A lot of like you said, a lot of people will go overboard with this. I mean, I did, too. I remember, you know, I felt so good. I was doing 224 hour fasts a week and I felt great.

Like brain function. I felt like the best diet I had ever felt. I felt so good. And I did this for, I don't know, a year and a half. And I was kind of in my second year of doing this and I'm like, I like it with my workouts towards into my workouts. I was just feeling really fatigued, taking, having to take longer periods of time between sets. And I'm like, I don't feel like I'm maximizing my strength potential. And I stopped doing that and I only do it once a week now, which I think for me works perfectly.

124 hour fast a week. In fact, I just did it from lunch Wednesday to lunch Thursday, finish it with a workout and I actually am exercising. I'm working out more and feeling amazing, recovering better. My sleep scores are better. I've added like £7 of muscle feeling really, really good. So I think all of us, you do feel so good when you get fat, adapt. And I think that's something that the listener really misunderstand when you practice this. The right way, you're going to feel good and sometimes you're going to press into it because you're feeling so good and you know you got it.

Balancing mTOR, Autophagy, and Feast-Famine Cycling 31:28

You always have to have a radar and be listening to the messages your body's giving you and experiment with different things. I think that's important to understand that perhaps there was a certain approach that you took that that helped you feel great, but you might need a tinker. It doesn't mean like a radical change, but even just kind of small changes and constant listening to the feedback that your body is giving you to really, you know, find the best approach for you, at least at this period of time in your life.

I know like, for example, when we had we have babies, so my wife and I were done having children now, but we had four children, four and five and a half years, including twins in the beginning. And I was working out seven days a week when we first started. And with the twins, it was like I was getting like four or 5 hours of sleep at night and it was not good sleep. And I just was so overtrained and I was feeling inflamed all the time, having trouble focusing, concentrating, just massive fatigue at times.

And I realized I'm way overdoing it. I'm not recovering well enough. I need to dial down the exercise. So if we're under extreme amount of stress, we might feel good when we're fasting. And then all of a sudden we had a really stressful season of our life. We might need to dial it back a little bit because again, fasting is a stressor. And so the more stress we're under, you know, we can only handle so much amount of stress on our system. We might need to dial it back. We might be overtraining. So we always have to watch for feedback from that.

And you're right, in our communities, we tend to we tend to get people that start this. They have a great experience with it. And that's one of the reasons why they love following us and they keep pressing into it because they're hearing about all these great benefits and they in some cases, they're doing too much of it. It's exactly what I did. And because you're right, you feel so good, but you got to listen to the body like you did. David You felt inflamed and yeah, seven days a week, getting 4 to 5 hours of sleep.

Of course you're not going to be able to recover and adapt to those stressors. One of the things I personally use and what I teach my students is a good gauge to know if you're fasting too much or not. Number one, like you said, pay attention to the clues and the signals your body's giving you. Number two, I like looking at heart rate variability as a good gauge to see if my nervous system is to challenge right. I love. I have your ring. I think you do too, right? Yeah. Yeah. So when I see my heart rate variability tank I know that I applied too much stress.

It could have been mental stress. It could have been too much of a fast physical stress. And that's a day for me not to apply a lot of stress. So it'll be more of a feast day, more light activity versus a heavy training session. So I look at HIV, but if I see my HIV increase or, you know, hit baseline for me around 65 issues like my baseline this morning I woke up and it was 72. So it was actually a little bit higher than my baseline. So today I did a good workout in a fasted stay at the sprints.

I did some bench press because I saw that and I felt good and I use that as good gauge. But if I were to saw my HIV tank to like 42 and I would have probably felt off as a result, I wouldn't have done the same workout or the same fasting schedule. Yeah. So you're getting that feedback. And again, not only can you just listen to your body, but also you can actually look at your heart rate variability like you were talking about. The aura rings a great, great instrument to use, just a ring that you wear at night and will actually track your deep sleep, your REM sleep.

It will look at your ear heart rate variability like you mentioned, which is kind of like the gap between the heartbeats. And a lot of people think, well, it's that gap between the heartbeats, the space between R.P should be the same all the time. It's actually not true. You're you're adaptability and resilience. One way to measure that is the heart rate variability actually should be very variable, should be should be highly variable. And that's a sign of better adaptation. It's really interesting.

Yeah, exactly. And it's such a good gauge, right. If we think about the nervous system and even when you study this in school, right, the nervous system is so important. There's two primary branches, that sympathetic branch, which is that fight or flight, very important in spurts, just like m door and then the parasympathetic more rest digest, very important in spurts. A lot of people, including myself, was I was I was locked into sympathetic and I was doing a lot of fasting. I was I had a CrossFit gym.

I owned several years ago and that's not good. And it needs to be balanced with more parasympathetic. And that heart rate variability is giving you that gauge, that score. If you are adapting to the stressors, everybody's going to have a different average and a different baseline. So don't compare. You know, I shouldn't compare my HIV to David's and vice versa. But you find your your average your baseline for maybe seven days and then you work on building it up over time. And if you have days where it's tanked, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing, by the way, because you could have done a good workout and then it lower the RV.

But if that's a day for recovery, then over time it actually could pull it back up because of that stressor. So look at it as a gauge and pay attention to your body. And those are going to give you some good clues as to whether or not you're fasting too much or you're in a good, sweet spot. Yeah, a really good point. What are your top recovery strategy is for people to practice are. Oh, good question. Number one is my favorite supplement in the world called vitamin G. This supplement is anti inflammatory helps with oxytocin and GABA.

I mean, I found studies that show vitamin G lowers A-1 C lowers blood pressure. I looked at some of Dr. Joe Dispenza his work and he's done some brain scans and he's seen 1200 chemical reactions take place when participants take vitamin D. So Vitamin G you can't get at Amazon or your supplement store. It's the practice of gratitude. And it it really acts like a vitamin A supplement because it's so anti-inflammatory and it's going to put you in a parasympathetic state soon as you feel gratitude, not a checklist, meaning don't treat it like a checklist.

You probably won't get the same benefits. But feeling the gratefulness, feeling the gratitude. What an amazing way to instantly put your body into a recovery

Avoiding Overdoing Fasting and Using HRV 37:28

parasympathetic state. So some simple ways to do it. If you have trouble digesting food as sit there and look at your food, think about all the things that went into getting that food right in front of you. The animals that fed off the earth, the transportation, the company that was delivered to your house, how we got there, like all the moving parts for you to feed and on that food and to thrive in your life and feel that gratitude like that puts you in a parasympathetic state and actually helps with digestion.

And then bread before bed is another really good time to practice vitamin G because the subconscious mind is really highly impressionable. So vitamin D, number one, I have some more, but I don't know if you wanted to add to that. David No, I love that. I mean, vitamin G, just that gratitude. If you could bottle that up, that would blockbuster, you know, that would be the the the single best drug that that firm pharma has ever created. Ever, right. Yes. So when you can't bottle it up and it's free and.

It's free and you can choose to choose it at any. Time, you choose it at any time, and you can't overdose. There's no upper limit. So that's number one. Number two would be something that's very important for health, is to live a life on purpose. With your purpose, find out what your highest values are. I know Dr. John Demartini is somebody that I freaking loved. Have you studied Dr. John Demartini? Yeah, I have. Yeah, I've heard of him. Yep. Yeah, he's incredible. He talks so much about your highest values and the Greeks call it your telos.

And there's a whole study on this called Teleology, the study of purpose and highest values. And when you are living in congruent with what's important to you, you are in a healing state. And so many people are doing things because it's what's expected of them. That's an inflammatory states very hard to feel happy and healthy when you're doing things that you're not designed to do. So finding a life of purpose is very important. I know that's outside the scope of this conversation, but I had to throw that in there.

But some practical things in terms of like biohacking, red light therapy, big fan of red light therapy. I've got a panel here. I've got two panels upstairs. So, yeah, photobiomodulation again, more is not better. Find a good sweet spot for red light therapy grounding, which could also be called vitamin G, which is simply your bare feet on the sand, the dirt, the grass on earth. Essentially, just grounding is really important. It's like taking a handful of antioxidants. I utilize a PEMF map which is similar to the benefits of grounding as well.

Funny movies, things that get oxytocin going, great for recovery and sleep, quality, deep sleep and REM sleep like I aim to get at least an hour and a half of each each night are very important for recovery. Yeah, really great strategies. I also like just you know if you have a family significant other a pet just cuddling getting that oxytocin release super powerful really helps you heal and recover getting out in the sun you know you mentioned red light and infrared. I know for me, I feel best when when I'm getting like 30 minutes of good quality sun on a daily basis just helps so much.

So I that's another great strategy some people will do you know infrared sauna. I think that's fantastic. I do it from time to time as well. You can overdo that as well, especially if you've got it really cranked up and really hot. Yeah. And same with with with cold plungers, cold showers, things like that. I think it's very helpful. It's something I practice but again can be overdone, you know, and we have a society where, you know, there are some people that are

Recovery Strategies and Closing Thoughts 40:48

that it's it's interesting because in our society, some people are very adverse to doing anything that's uncomfortable. And then there's other people that are like, oh, it's uncomfortable. Give me more. Right? And so it's like, got to find the right balance. Yeah. So true. It's just an important point in the biohacking space. It's the latter, right? Give me more. Give me more. Yeah. We asked the average cold plunge coach or whatever you want to call them. Breathwork coaches who do a lot of cold plunging.

You ask them, All right, how long should I do it for? And they're going to tell you that most of them want to take 3 minutes. And that is not the right answer. Like somebody who's really challenged with their mitochondria and their health. Yeah, should not do 3 minutes. Right David. They think they should do 30 seconds and then build their way up. I think the most important thing to ask yourself is how did you feel the rest of the day after that sauna, after that red light, after that cold plunge out from that fast, after that workout, whatever it was, if you felt better and more energized, you found a good rhythm.

You found a good length, a good duration. But if you feel more depleted, you did too much. Yeah. Amazing, amazing interview. Amazing stuff. Really great tips. Ben, this has been awesome, guys. Check out his book, Keto Flex and also his podcast, Keto Camp. Really, really good stuff that he's putting out. Ben, any any last words, inspiration here for our audience? Yeah, I know. Thank you, David. I've been a huge fan of your work for so many years, and it's an honor to call you a friend. I love what you're doing with the summit so important.

My last bit of advice would be, you know, believe the body was built to be self-healing. It really is. And if you believe your create that fact. But if believe it wasn't, you're also right. Choose where you want to put your energy into and what where you put your energy into expand. So faith and fear both demand for you to believe in something you cannot see. You choose. The choice is yours. So I encourage you to choose faith and believe that your body is built to be self. Healing and fasting is one of the ways to harness that self-healing mechanism.

Love that. Ben Azadi, thank you so much. You're an inspiration.