Why And How Should Women Fast

Felice Gersh, MD

Well, thank you so much. And it’s such a pleasure to join you for your amazing summit. And it’s a topic, as you know, near and dear to my heart because I have totally embraced this concept of nutrition for longevity and fasting mimicking diets for cellular support and all the different functions that we all must have within our bodies to obtain healthy longevity. So my background is I’m an M.D., like you, and I did my residency in OB-GYN and practiced for many years, but I always knew that there was much more to obtaining health for women than just giving pharmaceuticals and doing surgical procedures. So I incorporated what I called my ancillaries very early on in my practice. I had a nutritionist, a psychologist, biofeedback, massage, and Chinese medicine with acupuncture. So I had all of this in my practice going back way to the beginning when I started a few decades ago. And then after I stopped doing obstetrics about, oh my goodness, over like 15 years ago. It seemed like, okay, now I had a void in my my life. I wasn’t doing deliveries. So I went back to school and I did the two-year fellowship in integrative medicine at the University of Arizona School of Medicine and then became one of the very first board certified in integrative medicine OB-GYNs in the world. And then I took many, many courses in functional medicine. And of course, once you get to that point, you never look back except to move forward. Just to give you a push start to keep going forward, because you realize that there are many will say, loopholes that are missing in the conventional medical world. And that’s what I try to fill utilizing lifestyle medicine. And, all of the additional tools that I have herbal medicine and mind-body medicine, and so on. So what happened back, like I said, several years, quite a few years ago, I was approached by someone who was doing a survey and I just am always like a yes person. If somebody has something that they want to ask me, I just say, okay, yes, because otherwise you’re just closing doors. So I was part of a survey that where they were trying to interview about 100-something integrative doctors in the U.S. about issues relating to fasting. I knew nothing about fasting, except I knew I didn’t like it. I like to eat. So I went and I did this interview and there was an ulterior motive that I didn’t know about. In addition to just doing the survey, they were actually looking for a doctor. That would become the point of study that that person would become like the beta group for working with this new product that was being developed at the U.S. school of, you know, what was it? It was the major in the university, it wasn’t actually the medical school. It was the Longevity Institute, of which the director, of course, is Dr. Valter Longo. So I was so fortunate that of all the people that he interviewed, he selected me. And then I went through a series of interviews. I ended up with Valter in his lab, and then I got to be the beta test site. My practice is for the prototype. Yes, that’s the famous Dr. Longo who wrote that book. And so he is one of my idols in life. He basically, interviewed me and he was part of the process of selecting me to do the beta testing for this new development, this fasting mimicking diet. So I got to learn about it and I got to try it myself and utilize it with my patients. And based on feedback from my patients, they made some mild changes, not in efficacy, but in more like palatability. Like, well, they didn’t like a certain product that was a chip. They liked it and they changed it to a cracker, you know. So they made some modifications based on the feedback that I gave. And as well, I just saw what worked and didn’t work with my patients. And it was a beautiful relationship and it’s continued to grow since then. And so I have incorporated what then became the actual product, you know, so became the fasting mimicking diet that was sold as a real tool that everyone who is a candidate, which is most people can access for their health and longevity. And even now reversal of certain disease states. So it’s been a wonderful journey. And that’s why I’m so thrilled to be here with you now, Joseph.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yeah, well, fantastic. I’m going to divide this session into three buckets if you want. Bucket one, I want to ask you why fasting is linked to longevity. If I go do whatever Weight Watchers or I inject Semaglutide or anything else, we don’t talk longevity, we talk weight loss. Why fasting? What seems to be a diet, fasting mimicking diet. Why do we talk about longevity and healthy aging with the fasting mimicking diet? This second bucket is in how to apply the fasting mimicking diet in life.  What do you personally do? It’s very important to interview doctors that do on their body what they preach to their patients. And what has been your experience in the clinic with it? And then finally, you want to talk a little bit about the life cycle of a woman and how women can integrate and which time of their life, the fasting nutrition and in order to give them a better chance at a healthy long life. So on the first side here, we spent 5 minutes in talking about what is the liaison between fasting nutrition with longevity.

Felice Gersh, MD

Well, it’s so important that you mentioned a fasting mimicking diet because just like all fats are not the same, all carbs are not the same. Well, all fasting is not the same. So like starvation is a type of fasting and that is not ultimately healthy. So we do need to distinguish how is fasting being done to really optimize the body’s innate mechanisms for survival. So it’s really fascinating as I learned about this topic of like programmed cell suicide and autophagy and how these different mechanisms are triggered basically for survival. The body over evolutionary thousands of years has acquired various mechanisms. And what’s interesting is that many of these mechanisms are conserved among different species that are more primitive than humans. That’s why they could do research in these, like primitive things, like types of worms and rodents and so on, because we all kind of have a lot of similarities, and that is the drive for survival. So it turns out that if you simply do starvation where you fast for very long periods of time, your body’s going to try to survive by dramatically slowing energy use. So like slow your metabolism and you’re going to burn whatever you have on hand, like your muscle. That is not useful because you can’t function, you will never be healthy if you have a small supply of muscle. Muscle is very underappreciated for its multiple functions in the body. Besides just helping you to run fast, it’s actually very metabolically involved. It’s like the biggest organ for burning glucose in your body. You’ve got to have muscle. They make little signaling agents called myosin signs that are critical for metabolic health. So preserving muscle is so critical to healthy longevity.

In fact, Sarcopenia doesn’t get talked about enough. It’s the loss of muscle. People talk about osteoporosis, which is a very important thing as well, of course, but muscle is really massively important and people go on very long, fast, or severe caloric restriction. They’re going to lose muscle and their metabolic rate is going to slow. And then if you start eating more food, it’ll rapidly gain fat. You know, so often people, when they look at their body compositions who go through these starvation routines these like starvation diets, and then they start eating again, their body compositions, which is now really replacing the BMI, the body mass index, as really the key factor in what is really a healthy body. It’s not just what your weight is on the scale versus your height, but it’s what is it composed of. How much muscle do you have lean body mass? And that is so critical. You don’t keep that when you do starvation diets. Then what about just an occasional fast? Well, that’s not a starvation diet. And you will you know, it’s a very low calorie. You could lose weight and there can be benefits to that. But you’re not going to trigger these incredible mechanisms that are for survival, that really promote healthy longevity like autophagy. 

So this is how I see it and I’ll explain it if you fast for one or two or now you’re getting to the day three, your body and you know, this is like it’s going to say, hey, there is no food coming. The body is innately a little lazy. It says, okay, I’m just going to wait for some food. You know, just one day has come by. You come and gone for two days. But now you’re getting into like the third day and there’s no food. And you’ve used up all of your storage of glucose called glycogen. And now you know, you’ve only got as fat available or a muscle if you’re not doing things properly. And so your body says, okay, now we have to start throwing crap overboard. You know, we don’t want to have cells that are utilizing our limited energy. You know, that’s the supply that’s available. So crappy cells like senescent old cells that create inflammation and can produce cancer cells in the body, those old yucky cells are going to die. It’s called apoptosis or programmed cell suicide. The body has these innate mechanisms that can trigger them to kill themselves. And these are really cells you want to get rid of. These are not useful cells now, cells that are healthy but are not maybe in tip-top condition. What gets triggered is this process called autophagy. It sounds like eating yourself. So what it is, is that there are these things in cells called Lysosomes. I call them the recycle bins. And so different components in the cell, like organelles, like little structures and so on, they go into this recycle bin, those lysosomes and they get broken down to their elemental components like amino acids, fatty acids, and then they’re reconstructed into new cellular structures. So it’s like I call it spring cleaning in your cells. It’s like just like fixing things up. But your cell then is healthier, it’ll work better and it will be able to survive longer. So everything in your body is going to be like internal rejuvenation out with the yucky old cells, your good cells rejuvenated. This is like a phenomenal function that the body can have, but it never will come into play unless you actually stop putting food in for a few days.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

I remember being I remember attending one of your lectures and it showed that you called it the miracle of biology, tapping into the doctor within, which is that process of the body and the cells fixing themselves to survive a fast. And maybe this is what you’re saying is linking fasting with longevity is that you lose the weight, you lose the fat, you protect the muscle, and then you rejuvenate the cells. This combination that the fasting nutrition is supporting with. And I do remember very well your slide, because we then started using that you were awakening the miracle of biology and celebration of your nation.

Felice Gersh, MD

It is. And you get this with the fasting mimicking diet. That’s like the amazing thing that if you just do like occasional days of fasting, that this will not happen. And we now know that the longer every cell in your body lives, the greater the potential. Now, nobody can prove, like with humans, they may be done studies in other animals, but in humans doing an actual longevity study to see length of life is very difficult. But in terms of functional life, in terms of having the cells be better functioning, this is really key. And then like you said, you’ve got to preserve your lean body mass, your muscle. So what has been shown is that when you do a fasting mimicking diet, you burn the yucky fat, the visceral fat, the fat in your liver, the fat around your internal organs, the belly fat, the fat that creates chronic states of inflammation in the body that gets somehow miraculously used up first as an energy source while you’re preserving your lean body mass like your muscle and your tissues in your body. Which you don’t want to use them as your energy source. They’re vital for longevity and quality of life in every respect. So this is what happens when you have a short multi-day fest, not just the occasional day of fasting. 

So here’s the thing, though. Nobody wants to stop eating for several days in a row and just drink water. You can maybe get a patient to do that once, but they’re not going to keep doing it. That’s where the miracle of the fasting mimicking diet came. And the idea that you can have an I labeled that, I think, you know, this stealth food that you’re eating food that flies under the radar like invisible to the nutrients sensors in the brain. So the brain is like the control center and it has the ability to know, are you eating? Not eating, Are you sleeping? Is there sunlight? So it has all these different sensors and there are nutrient sensors and they’re mostly triggered by protein, you know, So there’s this whole thing, you know, and Antoun would have to, like, get into the, you know, the nitty gritty, but there’s science involved in this. So there are sensors in the brain. And if you can you can construct a diet, which is what they did in the lab. And it took, you know, millions of dollars, many, many years to come up with this formulation of how to eat food that flies under the radar of the nutrient sensors so that your body will trigger these vital life-preserving mechanisms like autophagy and apoptosis. It will trigger them. Yet you’re still getting the pleasure and the health benefits of actually consuming food for the five days that the fasting mimicking diet will go through.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

And this has helped us understand the connect, between fasting, nutrition, and longevity. Now, I know you have been one of the first proponents of the fasting tradition in fasting in general, then the proper way. For women’s health since you’re a women’s health expert. How do you apply all this to a woman’s life cycle? Because you know, the twenties are different than the forties with women. They’re different than the fifties and then the sixties and seventies. And when women should fast, when they should not fast you know with pregnancy and in lactation. So can you tell us a little bit of how you apply this at your clinic I know you do it yourself and in general within women’s health and women’s care.

Felice Gersh, MD

Well, women face many times in their lives when they have metabolic challenges. And so there are many, many times when we really can utilize the fasting mimicking diet to really create great results. So one of the issues is when women are now living in this society, a very high percentage are living with the standard American diet. You know, it’s a very unhealthy diet filled with chemical oils and processed foods. So that’s what it contains, you know, chemicals and like wheat that has been milled down and all the nutrients taken out. And so it’s what you eat. It’s also what you don’t eat. They’re not eating whole foods, the plant-based diet that has a whole array of the colors of the rainbow with lots of fiber, polyphenols, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals. They’re lacking in the vital nutrients that they need to run the machinery of their cells. And as well, they’re putting toxicants into their bodies by consuming all of these chemicals that are embedded in our food nowadays. So it’s like just a terrible scenario and it’s leading to a wide array of metabolic problems in women that are often manifesting as menstrual dysfunction. And so I look at the menstrual cycle the way now actually the American College of OBGYN has finally came out and said the menstrual cycle is a vital sign of health for reproductive-age women. 

So it’s a sign, it’s a gigantic red flag when the menstrual cycle is abnormal. And that could mean so many things. It could be irregular, it could be too heavy, it could be too prolonged. They can have menstrual cramps. You know, they can have a panic loss. And, of course, infertility comes along with that. You can’t be fertile if you’re not ovulating and having normal function of your ovaries. So many women in their reproductive years are facing so many challenges of this sort. 

And I have found that utilizing the fasting mimicking diet has been very beneficial. For example, if you give it and I always do it in women who have menstrual cycles, if I can, if they’re very irregular, you have no cycle to really work with. But when possible, I do it after ovulation in what’s called the luteal phase. And there was a flurry of research done a couple of decades or so ago that was funded by the NIH that actually showed this, that if you fast in the time that is called the follicular phase that is preceding ovulation, depending on the weight of the woman, the type of fasting, the number of days, you can either stop the ovulation from happening altogether because nature says, oh, guess what? If there’s no food, maybe this isn’t a good time to get pregnant. So if you deplete the body of nutrients prior to ovulation, that ovulation just maybe for gone for that particular cycle or you may have an ovulation. But what they showed is that it wasn’t as good. You didn’t get the same spike of the hormones like the estradiol and LH that precede and trigger ovulation. They were like muted. So I really would not want to do it before the ovulation would occur. 

But afterward, what they showed and this is so fascinating that it increased heart rate variability, it increased the vagal tone or parasympathetic output. So we have in our bodies this nervous nervous system component called the autonomic nervous system. And it has two parts, the baseline, which would be where you are most of the time, which is called parasympathetic. When that happens, you’re in like a calm state, your blood vessels are dilated, your heart rate is not fast, and your digestion is optimal, like your motility. If your gut is working just fine. But then there’s the sympathetic, which is what happens when you’re in a stressed state, and then everything goes the opposite direction. Your heartbeat goes up, your arteries constrict, your peristalsis, your motility, and your gut slows down. So you’re more prone to digestive problems, GERD reflux and constipation and, you know, bloating and all these miserable things that happen to the digestive tract when things aren’t working right. And that happens when you have a lot of stress. And the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system is activated. Well, it turns out that when they did fasting in the luteal phase, it increased the activity of the vagus nerve, which is what regulates the parasympathetic or we’ll say the calming side of the autonomic nervous system. 

So, women who had PMS felt better, they slept better. So like, this is like amazing. You know, it’s not a pharmacy protocol. You’re not giving an SSRI, an antidepressant, or something. You’re triggering the innate mechanisms that are in the body to actually increase vagal tone and calmness and all the health benefits that come from that. So I thought that was just so fascinating. And then in terms of like menstrual cramps, well, menstrual cramps mean that there’s too much inflammation. So cramping is a normal thing, but it should just be very mild. It shouldn’t be like severe. And cramping is triggered when you have inflammatory prostaglandins that are produced inside the uterine cavity that trigger the muscle to actually contract. It’s like a mini, mini mini version of labor that happens every month to help the body push out the dying uterine lining that needs to be expelled from the body. But when you have too much inflammation, then you get this overproduction of these pro-inflammatory products that trigger too much of these cramping. And also as well, you often will have nutrient deficiencies like magnesium, which is essential for calming the muscle of the uterus down as well. So by incorporating a fasting mimicking diet, I can lower the level of body weight inflammation and by including like food as medicine, by incorporating a really healthy plant-based diet like, for example, nuts and seeds have a lot of magnesium in them and you know, whole grains have a lot of the B vitamins that are so important by incorporating the magical we call them polyphenols. These like I call the magic sauce of plants actually add tremendous health benefits. By incorporating all this, I can eliminate or dramatically reduce menstrual cramping. 

And when you get all of these things put together, the menstrual cycle can become regular. So it’s and then, of course, fertility is enhanced. 

So by incorporating this healthy diet, food, food as medicine, along with the fasting mimicking diet in women of reproductive age will say from 20 to 45. In that sort of range, I can do dramatic transformations in their menstrual cycles and all the different suffering that they’re enduring. And simultaneously, what am I doing? Often their body weight will come down. You know, they lose the belly fat and they maintain their lean body mass and then they feel so good, the self-esteem dramatically increases. And what’s also amazing and I don’t think there are any published data yet on this, but because the gut is improved in so many ways, the gut microbiome is improved, detoxification pathways begin, of course, in what may be not to everyone, of course, but I’m telling you it’s they begin in the gut and they include the liver and the liver becomes healthier. So by having all of these things improve, you end up having better skin. So like the skin will look better, like their brain feels better, like they feel like more clarity. I find in my own patients that what they call this is so prevalent brain fog is like lifted. They feel so much better. And then when they feel so much better, they want to start exercising and they have joy in life. So it’s like an amazing transformation that occurs. 

And I tell people, let’s be realistic in the timeline. Give me a year. You know, we Americans think everything should be like instantaneous. But no, I say this is a process. Your body has to heal. You have to improve your gut microbiome, you have to reduce inflammation, you’ve got to improve all these things. It’s going to take time. But till the reproductive age, women benefit tremendously. Then when you look at the women that transitioning into menopause, that is a huge metabolic hit to women. The loss of ovarian, hormonal production, progesterone, and estradiol has tremendous metabolic effects and metabolism is the creation, distribution, and storage utilization of energy. This is like critical to everything in life is having the proper regulation of energy in the body’s metabolism. And this really goes offline. It becomes very dysregulated in women as they are transitioning into the menopausal state. And I wish I could change the word menopause because it doesn’t do justice. Once again, it’s about ovarian aging and, senescence of the ovaries, and it’s a process. It’s not like crossing the finish line. And this process can start. I mean, it starts like you could say the day you’re born. But in terms of really accelerating like a decade before that final period, and remember, women say, I don’t have a uterus, somebody did a hysterectomy on me. Does that mean I don’t go through menopause? Of course, you go through ovarian aging, you know, if you have your ovaries, but you don’t have a uterus, of course, because the period, just like I said, the menstrual cycle is a vital sign of health. The same thing. Menopause is not about losing your period. It’s about losing your hormones. And the period is a manifestation of losing your hormones. So we have to think of it differently because these the loss of these hormones and I’ve changed the name, they’re not sex hormones, they’re life hormones, but they’re so important for so many functions in the body. So this group of women, they innately starts having higher cholesterol. They start putting on belly fat, they start having insulin resistance, the skin,

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

The skin.

Felice Gersh, MD

Yes. The skin goes through rapid aging and it’s it’s really not a pleasant time to go through. And I’m a big person on a doctor that believes in giving what the body needs. And if the body is insufficiently making hormones, I believe in giving them back. But no matter what I do with giving hormones, guess what? I can give back a set of 21-year-old ovaries that are working in pristine condition. I am not capable of doing that, so I can supplement with hormones, but I cannot recreate a healthy set of ovaries. So I need additional tools in my therapeutic toolbox. And that’s where nutrition, exercise, stress reduction, and fasting-mimicking diets. I do the whole gamut. You know, I don’t just do one thing, but this is the fasting-mimicking diet is such a wonderful tool for helping women to maintain metabolic health and keeping their inflammation down, keeping that healthy fat from depositing, maintaining proper gut function, and so on. And the whole gamut of all the health issues that are that are benefited by doing fasting, mimicking diet. So every woman who is a candidate, which is once again most women who are in this will say like from 40 up through like, say, 60 up to even 65. So we’re talking about the transition and into menopause. It’s not like, well, once you know, your ovaries have stopped working, everything’s good. No, not at all. It’s just it’s like for the rest of your life, you’re going to be in a state of metabolic challenge. And so I view a lot of the diseases of aging in a little different light. I think of them not in terms of how many critical years, you know, how many years have you achieved in life, but you know, your chronological age, but rather how many deficiencies have you accumulated? And it starts with hormonal deficiencies and that lead to nutritional deficiencies, loss of muscle, and loss of proper emotions. Like you lose your happiness. Women with the onset of menopausal transitioning, they have doubled the incidence of depression and anxiety and they have sleep problems. So then you have sleep deprivation. And, you know, without adequate sleep, nothing in the body can work properly. So by incorporating all of these tools, lifestyle plus hormones, and part of my lifestyle toolbox is the fasting mimicking diet. You can help women to really change the trajectory that you can. You can, like I call it defying nature. You know, that’s what we’re trying to do. I know menopause is natural, so it’s a lot of other bad stuff like tsunamis and earthquakes and tornadoes. Just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s good. So I don’t mind actually saying I am happy to defy nature, to defy aging, to defy, you know, senescence of all the consequences of the body. So, you know, this.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

In a natural way. That’s the beauty. Defying nature and enhance nature. That’s the key factor when we see nature failing because of age. And that because of nature  re-enhancing aging in nature with a natural cake of healthy nutrition.

Felice Gersh, MD

Absolutely. Always. That’s what I do. I try to incorporate the tools to utilize the innate abilities of the body to heal itself. You know, that’s why I want to trigger what the body can do. I don’t want to put in if I don’t have to, you know, foreign agents that were never naturally in the body. I only want to use things that are innately healthy, like the proper food and working with the rhythms of the body, circadian rhythm. And I think of it as food and fasting is part of a rhythm of the body as well know it’s really everything in the body is about rhythms. You know, in women there are lunar rhythms. That’s the 28-day menstrual cycle, the circadian rhythm, the 24-hour rotation of Earth on its axis. There are seasonal rhythms and to me, there are feeding and fasting rhythms. And it’s part of the beauty of nature. And by utilizing what is natural, we can really promote tremendous healthy longevity at every stage of life.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Dr. Gersh, to finish up. If people are wondering how to access the fasting mimicking diet, how many times you give it to a woman, say, going through the 40 to the 60 or 65, and I know you do it yourself. There’s nothing better than a doctor testifying on what they accept to do on their body. Can you talk a little bit through those?

Felice Gersh, MD

Absolutely. So like a tool, I will utilize it specifically for what the patient’s needs are. So if I have a patient who is significantly overweight, she has obvious metabolic dysfunction, evidenced by inflammatory markers that are elevated, and high lipids. She has pre-diabetes. Typically, I do have patients who are who are full-blown diabetics, but not that many, because we are very interventional. I try to prevent disease so that maybe they have insulin resistance, they have pre-diabetes. I will put them on the fasting-mimicking diet regimen such that they’re going to do it a minimum of four months in a row. And if they really are in more, let’s say advanced metabolic dysfunction, I’ll say to do it six months in a row. And then, you know, I advocate for the diet that Valter Longo advocates and you advocate for, which is, you know, primarily plant-based with just a little bit of animal protein. Healthy fish is very good or just a little bit of animal, I call it. I’ve named it myself before I knew about the longevity diet, I called it vegan plus, you know, So it’s primarily plant-based, but a little bit of animal. And that’s, you know, the type of guys that I represent.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

And when you see four months in a row, I think five days a month is.

Felice Gersh, MD

Oh, yeah.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Over, over the period of four months, a total of 20 days the entire year.

Felice Gersh, MD

Yes. So to be clear, this is a five-day program. The fasting mimicking diet is only five days. So when I say like four months or six months, it’s only five days out of the 31-day month. Right. 

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

And you recommend they do it after the ovulation. So at a day like 15, 16 of the cycle onwards.

Felice Gersh, MD

Absolutely. Or you know, Right. If I can, if they have regular cycles then I try to usually. So if you figure that ovulation occurs like you know around day 13, 14, so right like around day 15, 16, that would be perfect because then they’re getting all the benefits for their luteal phase. And if they have like if they’re post-menopausal or they have like totally random cycles, we can just do the best we can. Most of those women will be on I’ll give them some progesterone because I want to induce regular bleeds because we don’t want to have them not have regular withdrawal bleeding. And so then I can actually time it based on when I’m giving them the progesterone. So it would be when they’re on the progesterone that would precede the induced bleeding like the the induced period that I would help them to have. So that is, you know, the way that I would do it. Now, for someone that is already like, say they’re just this is not a typical patient not to begin with, but say they’ve been my patient for a while and now they are in a very healthy state, then it’s just about every once, every four months, every three months. So it would be three or four times a year. And I find that basically I’m I’m trying to do it every third month because it’s only five days. It’s like so simple. I mean, everyone does it differently. Some people like to do it over the weekend because they say, you know, I just find it so know better to do it over the weekend. For me, that’s the opposite. I’d like to do it Monday through Friday because when I’m working, which I do every day, sometimes seven days a week, but mostly I go to the office and see patients Monday through Friday. I’m so busy, I’m not even thinking of food. So for me, that is like the week is over. You know, I start, it’s Monday. Before I know it, it’s Friday and then I get to do my little re-feeding, which is, you know, very gentle. 

When I go back to eating my normal food. And what I have found, this is my anecdotal kind of history. But by day five, I always feel like I’m like that person from awakening the movie. But not that I started with dementia but by the time I get to day five, my brain was super functioning. Like I feel like I’ve completed many more circuits in my brain like my synapses are just super, supercharged. I mean, it’s like, amazing. I feel so like super focused by day five and it’s six. It really feels like you’re like your brain is going through like a real weight awakening, which you know, as you know, I just find it tremendously beneficial. I feel so good when I get like from days four and five. It’s like I feel on I’m on top of the world and I don’t feel like I’m low and the other days I feel normal, but then I feel like supercharged on day four and five and so do my patients. I know this is anecdotal stuff, but it’s really it’s so replicated, even though I don’t even tell people like, you know, expect this, I don’t want to like, give them preconceived notions. I say, how do you feel? And they say, you know, I feel like my brain is like supercharged, amazing. You know, when I get to day four and five and so it’s got something to that.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

The rejuvenation happens fast and you can feel it. We just published an article showing even skin changes. Women gained the two most. I mean, they talk about skin glow, and skin hydration, but the two-three statistic is significant. The report they gave was confidence and happiness. And this is the emotional factor that you’re talking about. I actually, I know in 2 seconds whether somebody has done the fived day, we’re talking about the ProLon is the name of the product has done the five-day prolonged fasting mimicking diet or not just and day six they’re talking to me and they’re talking about it was good you know felt okay I know that they have cheated or that completed it. But if they do the full five days, they’re raving about the experience because you change your relationship with food, and you feel great and amazing. You talk about clarity and the mental fog and the energy, and then you see their skin changes and obviously, they lose a lot of fat, so their body changes. And those who are resilient enough to do the five-day fasting, you can they can tell you about it. They tell you their story, you know, with it. So with that, I would go ahead.

Felice Gersh, MD

Now, I was just going to say that occasionally I’ll come across someone who and this is like an end of one, right? I’m just one person, but I’ll come across someone. Maybe I haven’t seen them in ten years and they’ll say, Oh, Dr. Gersh, like you look younger than you did ten years ago. And it’s like, well, I live with me. I don’t really know. But they say, oh, definitely. And it’s like, Well, I didn’t do anything, you know, except, oh, you know.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

ProLon.

Felice Gersh, MD

Aging weapon perhaps, you know. So, yeah, I really do think there’s something to that. Absolutely. Because I am not in any place in the body that isn’t being rejuvenated.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

For confidentiality reasons, I’m not going to mention them. But in most Hollywood, are A-listers, that’s their biggest secret for for looking young and staying long young. And you know, stay on the set. So with this, I would I want to thank you today. It was an unbelievable session. You know, women’s health is a priority. Were very dedicated to it. I think there’s an amazing role for fasting and longevity throughout women’s life cycle. Thank you for everything you do for women’s health and appreciate your time today. Again, hopefully, we change somebody’s life with this session.

Felice Gersh, MD

Well, it’s my pleasure. And I’m sure that everything that you’re doing is changing so many lives. I mean, that’s our goal. Like we began in the beginning, our mission is to improve lives. Thank you so much for allowing me to share my personal experiences with your audience.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Appreciate you.