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Unveil The 3 Scientific Wonders Of Fasting

Fasting & Longevity Summit

In general, you know, financially, we don't want to dip into our savings account but when it comes to our overall health and well-being we do want to dip into our fat and start burning fat for fuel. When we burn fat for fuel, it's an amazing energy source for the different cells of our body. However, it's hard to get fatty acids up into the brain for a fuel source for the brain because the blood-brain barrier doesn't allow the fatty acids they are too large of a molecule. So our liver will actually take fatty acids and turn them into something called ketones, which are water-soluble molecules that can cross the blood-brain barrier and can create an energy source for the brain. On top of that, ketones also tell the mitochondria which are basically what produce all the energy within the cells. They tell the mitochondria to do something called uncoupling, which is almost like a wasting of an energy producing heat. And that process actually drives down inflammation and oxidative stress throughout our entire body. They are signaling molecule that tells the body to bring down inflammation and bring down oxidative stress which slows down our aging process and makes us think sharper, clearer, and have better energy throughout the day. So fat burning and ketones are an amazing benefits.

Now, we think about the time period of the fast. We start really revving up fat burning roughly about 14 to 16 hours into the fast and usually takes us about 12 hours to go through, you know, the calories we consumed in our last meal as well as any sort of stored sugar that's in our muscles, in our liver, our glycogen. After we get to that 12-hour mark right around there, we start gradually shifting into burning fat for fuel and that really picks up around that 14 to 16-hour mark. So that's when we're really starting to burn fat and our ketone levels start going up. Now, the second benefit is growth hormone. Growth hormone or HGH is our quintessential anti-aging hormone. Now, a lot of people will go, you know, particularly celebrities and athletes, and they'll spend a lot of money to get growth hormone injections. But you really don't need any sort of injection. In fact, I don't recommend synthetic growth hormone. I recommend growth hormone made by your body's best doctor, which is you. Your physiology, the power god put within you knows exactly what you need at the right time. And when you are doing some sort of time-restricted feeding which is what all of our ancestors did because they didn't have access to food pantries and refrigerators. So they would regularly go, you know, a day without eating. That was not uncommon for our ancestors. That was a very common thing. They would have this major rise in growth hormone. 

And growth hormone, the reason why it's a quintessential anti-aging hormone is it helps us burn fat. It helps us build muscle and actually preserves your lean body tissue. You think about it from an ancestral perspective, when our ancestors didn't have food, if they were like weak and tired and had brain fog and couldn't concentrate and focus and just wanted to lay around, they would die. So what happens? We have this kind of hormonal flux that takes place where we actually get more energized, and more mentally sharp. We feel better. We feel strong. And that gives us the drive to go out and kill something or go out and find food. Go out and hunt or gather so we can feed, right? So we can eat. And so growth hormone will make you feel great when it's elevated. You'll feel sharp, you feel clear. It's great for your immune system, and great for your skin, actually helps regenerate the collagen in your skin. Great for bone tissue. So you start getting a good rise of growth hormone roughly 16 to 20 hours into that fast. Okay. So the key is insulin, which is your fat storage hormone is what we call the antagonist or the opposite, right? The enemy of growth hormone. When insulin's elevated, it's going to bring growth hormone down. When insulin's down because we've been fasting, growth hormone starts going up. So this is where we get these great benefits of growth hormone right in that range. 

Then the third great benefit is autophagy and this is where your body breaks down old damaged cellular organelles. So for example, within all the cells we have lots of mitochondria and mitochondria produce all the energy for the cell, but these mitochondria become damaged. Metabolism creates a lot of oxidative stress and a lot of free radicals. The mitochondria become damaged and now they're no longer very efficient. So a lot of the mitochondria within the cell are kind of sputtering around. They're producing, let's say, 30% of the level of cellular energy ATP that they should be. And yet they're just sitting there continuing to sputter. So when our body undergoes autophagy, it breaks down these less efficient or older. Another term we use is called senescent mitochondria that are aged take the raw materials and recycle them to create new, healthy, strong, stress-resilient mitochondria that are producing energy at 100% of their capacity. So it's like an internal recycling. It's a cleansing and recycling process that takes place within all the cells of your body, particularly the cells that are damaged and older. So your body does that through autophagy and undergoes that. Autophagy is also the way that our body gets rid of viral-infected cells. So all of us have cells in our body that a virus has impacted. And if we don't get rid of those cells, they continue to replicate. When we have the flu or some sort of viral fever it’s because there's been so many cells that have been infected and now these cells are dying and they're releasing all these contaminants and our immune system is activated. It's producing lots and lots of inflammation and we feel terrible. We feel awful.

And so a lot of times, though, we'll get back to balance, but they'll still be a remnant of the viral load. There'll still be a certain amount of virus that's kind of lying, lurking in certain areas of the body. When we're under stress again and we're not sleeping well or we haven't eaten well, it will peak. And now all of a sudden it will start to replicate and we'll have more and more symptoms. This is common with a lot of different viruses like, for example, Cytomegalovirus (CMV) and Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). Both of those are associated with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Hashimoto's, Thyroiditis, different symptoms like that, and different conditions. So there's a lot of conditions, cancers, a lot of cancer’s there's a viral component. They're lying dormant in your body. You may not notice, and you may not feel like you have the flu but you still need to get rid of these viral-infected cells. And that's what happens with autophagy. Our body really is able to get rid of these viral-infected cells. And in a sense, it's like an internal cleansing and healing process. So when does autophagy really start to spike? Around 20 hours. 20 hours into the fast we start getting a major rise in that autophagy. And so this is why I'm a huge fan on a daily basis with your intermittent fasting schedule. You want to do roughly 16, certainly 14 hours. I like on a daily basis for sure. Meaning you finish dinner at 7 p.m., and you don't eat again until 9 a.m. the next day, right? For most people, that's very, very doable. You just hydrate in the morning and that will extend your stomach and you won't feel the cravings or the hunger. And that actually shuts down hunger hormones and you feel satiated. And so it's easier to fast when you do that. So go 14 hours for sure and that's pretty easy.

Then we can get into that fat-burning mode by pushing it out to about 16 hours and eating at an eight hour eating window. That's a great range to do on a regular basis. You may want to push it into, let's say, 18, 16 to 18 hours to get a little bit more growth hormone. And you don't need to do that every day. But let's say you do it once or twice a week. That's fantastic. And then autophagy one day a week you extend your fasts go between 20 and 24 hours. Like a lunch-to-lunch fast. Dinner to dinner fast. If you do that, your body's going to really do some deep cellular healing, clean and repair a lot of things in your body, and reduce the aging process. I mean, over the course of a year, if you're doing that every single week, you're going to be like an entirely new cellular being. So it's an extremely powerful healing strategy that's ancestral. All of our ancestors did this. They just didn't do it intentionally, necessarily, in some religious cultures they did. Typically they just did it because they didn't have food available. And so they did it out of necessity but now we need to be more intentional about it and intentionally go out about this process. 

So do this when you consume your meals, consume enough calories, eating a lot when you do eat 30 grams of protein, 30 grams of fat or more, and get sufficient quantities of calories when you are eating, that's important. That's why we call it feast-or-famine cycle.. It's not just a low calorie diet. When we eat, we want to eat a lot. We want to eat a good amount of calories, and a good amount of protein to drive all the protein synthesis that we need for healthy muscles and a healthy body. But when we're in that fasting zone. When we're in the period of time when we've decided we're going to fast, we fast. We stick with that and try to get the best benefits of fat-burning growth hormone and autophagy. Now for some individuals, we’ll also recommend like one day a week where you're eating even larger amounts of calories in a larger eating window, maybe a 12-hour eating window one day a week where we call it a feast day. And so in some cases, especially if you don't want to lose any weight, that can be really, really beneficial because it resets all your hormones. And then you go back into your intermittent fasting, including your one-day week where you're doing like a 20 to 24-hour fast, and now you're getting the best benefits of the feast-or-famine cycle. So hopefully, guys got a lot out of this right here and the training that we did today, be sure to subscribe. So that way you get access to all of the future videos. Share this with somebody that you know and that you care about. Be blessed everybody. Will see you in future training.

<h6>David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS</h6>
Hey, Dr. David Jockers here. Today we're talking about the top three reasons to do intermittent fasting. Number one is fat burning. When your body, see at normally your body's either burning sugar or burning fat. If we're continually eating, particularly if we're eating higher amounts of carbohydrates, then our body is going to be focused on burning sugar as its kind of primary fuel. And it will also burn fat but to a lesser extent. When we start going for a longer period of time without food then our blood sugar starts to drop. We start using up sugar that's in our liver, that's in our muscles. We call that glycogen stored sugar. We use that for energy and then once that gets to a certain threshold our body says, okay, we need to start burning our fat. Our fat is, you know, like our bank reserve, right? So we're now dipping into our savings account.

https://d1tnc8rqovg0h0.cloudfront.net/2024+Summits/Fasting+%26+Longevity+Summit/Transcripts/2023_Fasting_+Mini+Talk+Day+1+Transcript+File.pdf

Dr. David Jockers is a doctor of natural medicine and runs one of the most popular natural health websites in DrJockers.com which has gotten over 1 million monthly visitors, and his work has been seen on popular media such as the Dr Oz show and Hallmark Home and Family.
Dr Jockers is the author of the best-selling books, “The Keto Metabolic Breakthrough” by Victory Belt publishing and “The Fasting Transformation.” He is a world-renowned expert in the area of metabolic health, fasting, brain health, inflammation and functional nutrition. 
He is also the host of the popular Dr Jockers Functional Nutrition podcast which has been consistently ranked among the top 50 health and fitness podcasts and has been the #1 ranked nutrition podcast in the world. 
Dr Jockers lives in Canton, Georgia with his wife Angel and his twin boys David &amp; Joshua and his daughters Joyful &amp; Shine.

Unveil The 3 Scientific Wonders Of Fasting

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

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David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS