The greatest discovery in my life

[Objectivist]

I haven't seen the video but I see that it has fasting in the title so I guess it is about fasting to lose weight.

But from what I understand, losing weight and being fit is a psychological thing. People who are overweight are so because they can not stop eating junk and drinking soda juices.

I mean, yes, you can lose weight by fasting, but you first have to decide to stay away from junk food because you can not fast indefinitely but you can eat healthy food indefinitely, that is if you overcome the psychological problems that are making you gorge on comfort food.

Actually, it is not all about losing weight but about why our modern diet is incompatible with our physiology.  Weight loss is just a side benefit.  I started doing it because I was having major gastrointestinal disease.  Terrible heartburn, terrible bloating, gout, pain in my joints.  In short I was suffering from the very metabolic syndrome he talks about.  I had a huge belly.  I craved sugar and carbs constantly.  I'm sure I was pre-diabetic.  

He talks a lot about the role of gut bacteria and how they are affected by diet.  He talks about the role of vitamin K2.  He talks about hormones.  He talks about the effect that what we eat has on our dna.  I recommend that you watch.  He's not selling anything.  He's offering his research as a cardiologist for 35 years.  He's not talking about not eating anything for months or weeks.  He's talking about eating whole foods, eating one to two meals a day in a six hour window.  He's talking about getting rid of refined sugars and carbohydrates.  

I'm down to one meal a day, not because anyone said to but because I'm just not hungry and I no longer eat when I'm not hungry.  I usually don't get hungry until noon or one o'clock.  I eat about a thousand calories in my breakfast and if I'm hungry again in that 6 hour window, I eat, usually a salad or a piece of grilled fish or chicken.  But I'm usually not since I've been doing this for a year now.  I can now go on a ten mile bike ride and not feel the slightest bit hungry afterward because I've developed metabolic flexibility.  

intermittent fasting increases testosterone by 180 percent.  It increases growth hormone by up to 300%.  

This has changed my life and I just wanted to share it with anyone who's interested, that's all.

Here's a summary that someone made and posted in the comments.  It's long but there is a lot of information in this talk:

[color=var(--yt-spec-text-primary)]• Common wisdom is that fasting makes you tired and scatterbrained
1. Sugar and caffeine seems to temporarily give us energy, but that’s just because we are sugar junkies
2. There’s no measure of “energy” in the human body; it’s all in the mind
3. When we cut sugar we may feel tired, but that’s because we’re experiencing withdrawal from our addiction

• Our mind has interfered with our body and tells us we need to eat at certain times even if we don’t feel hungry
1. Messages from the media, our social circles, our family
2. It isn’t biologically necessary to eat X times per day

• Humans are 2.5 million years old
1. Our bodies are adapted to that ancestral environment in which agriculture didn’t exist
2. In the last 200 years we’ve developed industrialized, processed foods
3. Vegetable and seed oils are extremely processed and found in everything
4. Our bodies don’t know how to respond to these processed foods that haven’t existed for 99.9% of our evolution

• Our Paleolithic ancestors ate around once a day, and during the day to avoid predators
1. Our body is made to fast and to feast
2. If your energy went down the longer you went without eating, we would have just crawled into our caves and died
3. We fast when we’re sick because eating is dangerous; it takes a large proportion of the calories you ingest to metabolize those calories

• Biochemistry of fasting
1. In first 12 hours, all glycogen in your blood will be soaked up
2. You have enough protein in your body to last 40 days; a human body contains 15,000 calories
3. Your blood sugar doesn’t drop easily; you can fast for two weeks and your blood sugar will barely go down
4. Gluconeogenesis begins: protein gets turned into glucose to maintain blood sugar level
5. During next 12 hours, ketosis begins

• Fats begin to be utilized only once insulin levels drop below a certain level
1. As long as insulin remains high, ketosis cannot begin
2. Fats get converted into triglycerides and fatty acids
3. In liver, fatty acids get converted into ketones
4. Ketones can be utilized by every cell in the body including the brain
5. We’re told that brain can only use glucose, but that’s wrong; the brain can utilize ketones
6. After a 7-day fast, up to 70% of brain utilization is made up of ketones

• Ketosis starts after 18 hours
1. You’ll feel fine
2. After the third 12 hours, ketones go even higher
3. After 3 days, ketone levels are quite high
4. By day 5, you’ll have a lot of ketones
5. You can measure ketone level in urine
6. If you have a low carb diet, you'll go into ketogenesis much faster

• What prevents us from going into ketosis?
1. Insulin prevents it; we have to drop insulin levels to burn fat
2. To lower insulin, you must use fasting diet
3. You can’t lose weight if your insulin remains high
4. Mortality is also higher, as well as inflammation, strokes, Alzheimer’s
5. Fasting brings your insulin level down effectively

• As your blood sugar drops, your body will become sensitive to insulin again
1. Your body will start learning to produce less insulin in response to meals
2. Eating after a fast is metabolized completely differently versus non fasting meals; insulin response will be much lower
3. One day of fasting will give you benefits for days
4. You keep burning fat even when you start eating again

• Other benefits
1. The body increases your metabolic rate and epinephrine levels go up to motivate you to seek food
2. You feel more alert, more motivated, more focused
3. Body starts producing growth hormone that stimulates generation of new brain cells
4. The tiniest vial of human growth hormone costs $400
5. A two day fast produces a 2,000% increase in growth hormone, which makes skin look better, grows muscle

• Autophagy
1. Starts after 24 hrs and peaks at 3 days
2. When you are nutrient deficient, M2 levels go low, triggering autophagy
3. Autophagy is when excess cells and intracelular organelles get recycled and broken down for energy
4. Produces energy while also cleaning out cellular membranes
5. Cells don’t die, they just go into recycling mode
6. When you do eat, those organelles get replaced first, essentially rejuvenating your cells which makes them younger and healthier and more resistant to disease
7. Autophagy is like a reset switch, stimulating bone marrow to produce more stem cells
8. Stem cells cost tons of money, and are much more effective when produced naturally than injected
9. Fasting is like getting a stem cell transplant
10. Stem cells go into organs and replenish cells that have died

• No industry will support fasting because there’s no money to be made, only lost

• Stem cell mobilization
1. You need a 3 day fast to get the benefits
2. You must prepare yourself psychologically and arrange your environment to do it

• Cancer
1. If you do a 7-day fast, your lifetime likelihood of getting cancer goes down by 70% or more
2. Chemotherapy is much more effective, with fewer side effects, after 36 hour fast
3. By strengthening your normal cells, you make it easier to target cancer cells
4. It’s seen as unethical to have cancer patients fast, when doing so would make the symptoms much less severe
5. Trays of food get forced on patients when they’re not hungry, leading to problems like aspiration
6. Cancer will be treated in the future with adjunctive fasting

• Autoimmune diseases
1. If you get a flare up, fast for 3 days
2. It makes the bowels totally quiet, where many autoimmune diseases start, giving gut a chance to heal

• Alzheimer’s
1. Don’t feed granny for 3 days if she has dementia, just give her plenty of water, and the fog will go away

• 3 day water fast
1. You’ll pee a lot, which means you need to drink more water
2. Electrolytes will be conserved by kidney very well, plus sodium and potassium
3. If you get cramps, put a pinch of salt in water
4. Hunger comes and goes in waves according to circadian rhythm; pay attention and drink water and it will go away
5. No one continues to be hungry all day long; you may feel cravings if you’re addicted to sugar
6. After 2nd day, most ppl feel great with plenty of energy

• Intermittent fasting
1. If you just want to be healthy eat once a day OR twice per day in a 6-8 hour window
2. Lunch at 1pm and dinner at 6pm
3. You’ll have a little ketosis and autophagy on a daily basis, burning glycogen and fat
4. Once a week, extend the fast by skipping an evening meal
5. Immunity will get better because stem cells have kicked in
6. 36 hours is the magic number
7. Some do a 7-day fast every 6 months

• Fasting activates antioxidants in your body
1. Vitamin D has no antioxidant effect itself; it activates genes that are antioxidant
2. Almost everyone is Vitamin D deficient; it’s important to check it and supplement it
3. Activates DNA repair mechanisms
4. Makes telomeres less short, lengthening your lifespan

• What to eat
1. No processed foods
2. Fruits are overrated; eat fruits with low glycemic index: watermelon, apples, peaches, plums, apricots
3. Almost everyone is Omega 3 deficient
4. Meditation also lengthens your telomere
5. What you eat every day changes your genetic expression
6. High protein diet increases cancer risk; you don’t need much protein, just 50 grams per day, which you can get as part of your normal diet

• Melatonin from sleep
1. Prevents cancer and also activates anti-aging mechanism

• Sugar is a poison
1. It’s not found in nature, totally processed

• If you can slow down again, you avoid all the ailments and diseases and conditions
1. Fasting is the way to slow down aging
2. There have been 100,000 generations in human evolution; only 600 of those have been since agricultural revolution; only 10 have been since Industrial Revolution

• First thing to do to fast is minimize carbs and cut out all processed and artificial foods
1. When you start eating again, drink bone broth to avoid phosphate deficiency
2. Don’t buy ready made bone broth; make it yourself

• High glucose levels won’t hurt you long term, but high insulin levels will


• You have to take control over your own life
⁃ No doctor is going to fix this for you

• Group of Rhesus monkeys were give restricted diet of 30% fewer calories, and another group given a standard American diet
1. First group had longer lifespans, less cardiovascular disease
2. But another study restricted feedings and limited processed foods and saw even better results; caloric restriction by itself isn’t enough
3. It’s no longer “calories in, calories out”; it’s about the hormonal responses and timing of the calories and how your body responds to them[/color]
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