#1 Fasting Danger You Absolutely MUST Know

Type 2 diabetics need intermittent fasting more  than anyone else. The new level of proof is that you let the results speak for themselves.  If you believe them when they say that intermittent fasting is extreme and dangerous,  you may never take the time to understand what intermittent fasting is.

You may never understand  how incredibly simple and natural it is. Hello, champions. Today we're going to talk about the  number one fasting danger that you have to know because it can affect your health.

We're also  going to talk about the fact that there seems to be a lot of resistance to fasting from mainstream  medicine and dietitians, even though humans have fasted for as long as we've been on the planet,  and the positive evidence for intermittent fasting is growing every day. And I think this somewhat  strange resistance comes down to three things: money, prestige, and human nature. Because as  humans, we don't like to change.

It's so much easier to leave the status quo, to leave things  the way that they are, the way that they've always been, especially if there's prestige at stake and  if there's authority at stake. So if there are millions of people in a big system, in a health  care system, that have earned their way into a lot of recognition and a lot of power, then they don't  want to just give that up willy-nilly and say, 'Oops, I was wrong. You better go do something  else, and I didn't know what I was doing all along.

' And of course, that's not all doctors  and dietitians because there are plenty of them that are coming around. Another big factor,  unfortunately, is that healthy people are really bad for profits. And it's not to say that everyone  involved is evil, but it does say that there's not a lot of incentive for solving root causes  and getting people help if you're going to lose money in the process.

But despite this strange  resistance, the world is still changing at a very fast rate, and we're switching from an old type  of proof, where we required science—and there's nothing wrong with science, we should still  pursue it—but for individuals who are seeking health solutions, there's a higher level of proof  that's called results. So if you read something, if you learn about something, and it makes  sense, and you try it, and you get good results, then that becomes a higher level of truth for you.  So, let me give you an example that I came across from WebMD, where the staff writers of WebMD  came up with an article, and it was medically reviewed by a medical doctor, and they started  out by saying it may help you lose fat.

In fact, in a certain study where people ate one meal a  day, they ended up with less body fat. But then they had to backtrack and make it sound like that  wasn't such a good thing, and they added that in this study, they did not lose significant weight,  and they make that sound like a bad thing when actually, most people are trying to lose fat and  gain muscle, which is exactly what happened here. But then later on, they did have to admit that  intermittent fasting is generally a good way to lose weight, and you could lose anywhere from 7 to  11 lbs in 10 weeks.

And then they further agreed that it can help your metabolism, that in a group  of obese and pre-diabetic people, intermittent fasting would actually lower blood sugar. But then  they continued with something that seemed really strange to me. They said that it worked to improve  metabolism, but in that study, they did something that was more general.

It wasn't as strict as  one meal a day, and they said, therefore, we would have to do more research to find out if one  meal a day would work as well as 18:6 intermittent fasting. No, you don't have to do the research for  that because it's a physiological principle that when you go for a period of time, your insulin  drops, and it's just a matter of degree whether you're fasting for 18 or 24 hours. They're both  intermittent fasting, so they will both work.

But this is typical of how they get so confused  by the details; they don't see the principles or the mechanisms behind what's going on. And then  they start pointing out drawbacks and problems, and they say that one meal a day can be very  difficult to sustain, that intermittent fasting regimens like one meal a day could have a dropout  rate of up to 65%. And we call it a regimen, if you notice, because that sounds really difficult  and really involved, as opposed to just calling it a method or a lifestyle.

But the 65% sounds  pretty good to me because the dropout rate of calorie restriction long-term is near 100%. Very,  very few people can follow through on that. And then they also claim that intermittent fasting  is no easier to follow than calorie restriction, and I would beg to differ.

And probably, if  you look at some of the comments in this video, there would probably be millions of people who  have tried calorie restriction and couldn't get any results or couldn't follow through, and now  they're getting amazing results with intermittent fasting. So, again, the new level of proof is that  you let the results speak for themselves. And then they continue to say that it is no more effective  than calorie restriction.

And then here's one of these really weird statements again: even if one  meal a day makes you feel hungrier, it is not likely to result in more weight loss than if you  simply reduced your calories. So they're making it sound as if hunger is the thing that makes you  lose weight, as if hunger is necessary to lose weight when, in fact, hunger results from calorie  restriction, which is the reason they don't work. And the fact that you're not getting hungry on  one meal a day or intermittent fasting is why you get the results.

So there are so many backward  statements in there, and maybe the biggest one is, 'Why don't you simply reduce your calories? ' Well,  if it was that simple, people wouldn't have weight problems, would they? There would be no such  thing as metabolic disease if you could simply reduce the number of calories.

So the fasting  we're talking about is intermittent fasting, and that simply means time-restricted eating. You  can still eat to satisfaction; you can still eat real food, but you do it in a shorter time window.  And usually, this gets described as an extremely restricted time window of 1 hour to 8 hours, as  opposed to the normal feeding window of 12 to 16 hours.

And we have to ask, when did that become  normal? How is that possibly normal in any way? Now, there are animals who need to eat all day  long because they eat very low-density food, such as grass and leaves, and they're called  grazing animals.

They eat all day long, and one such animal is a deer. And this guy hangs  out in my backyard, and everything that we plant, he refers to as 'I Can't Believe It's Not  Lettuce. ' But if you are a human, you don't eat exclusively low-density foods.

If you're a human,  you're an omnivore, and you eat various different kinds of foods. You eat meat and fish and nuts and  seeds and vegetables and tubers and so forth. And most carnivores and omnivores in nature, they eat  once or twice a day.

And therefore, I would make the case that, for humans, being omnivores, the  normal feeding window is somewhere between 1 and 10 hours. Another alleged danger is nutrient  deficiencies associated with fasting. Well, if you fasted for weeks or months, that could be  the case.

But if you just do intermittent fasting, where you eat once or twice a day, and as long  as you eat real food, then you're going to get plenty of nutrients. And as long as you eat  real food, you're eating food that has a higher nutritional density. And real food is high both  in macronutrients, meaning fat, protein, and some carbohydrate, and it's high in micronutrients,  meaning vitamins and minerals.

Another thing we need to understand is one of the primary purposes  of nutrients, the vitamins and minerals, is to help us process through the food that we're eating  and turn it into energy. And if we eat less food, then we actually need fewer nutrients. However,  it is a really good idea that if you fast more than 24 hours, then you want to add electrolytes  because short-term, your body loses electrolytes when you stop eating.

So you want to add back  some sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium. And it's also a really good idea if there are some  trace minerals in there. And I'll put a link down below for my product that has all that.

And the  same goes for fasting and dehydration. If you went more than one day, up to 3, 4 days, then if  you didn't take electrolytes, then you might get a little lightheaded, a little nauseous, a little  tired. So it's not dangerous to just drink water, but you could avoid a lot of discomfort just by  supplementing some minerals.

Very often, we also hear that there's an increased risk of gallstones  when you do intermittent fasting, and there is some truth to that, but we're kind of pointing  in the wrong direction when we're saying that because here's how it works. Whenever you eat, you  produce a hormone called CCK, cholecystokinin, and this stimulates the gallbladder to contract and  squeeze out the bile. And then, if we don't eat, then there is less food, less hormone, and less  contractions.

So now, there could be a tendency for that bile to get stagnant, to be sitting  in the gallbladder, and therefore, to start forming stones. But here's how it really works:  that it's not primarily food but it's fat that stimulates this cholecystokinin. So when we go  for years or decades eating a low-fat diet, then we never properly empty out that gallbladder, and  that's where we get the sludge and the stones as a pre-existing condition.

So it's really the low-fat  diet that's the culprit here. So if you combine the intermittent fasting with a low-carb, high-fat  diet, then you're going to start emptying out that gallbladder and not experience these gallstones.  But here's the problem: the toughest thing there is, is to convince people that it's okay to eat  fat.

We've been told so many years that we should avoid fat, and there is no evidence, there is  no study, there is no properly conducted study, that suggests that low-fat would be a healthy  thing. The 30% recommendation of getting 30% of your calories from fat is completely arbitrary.  So what does 'normal' fat for humans mean?

Well, if you eat real food, you're going to eat meat,  fish, vegetables, nuts, and seeds, just like your ancestors did tens of thousands of years ago.  I'm not talking about your grandpa, two or three generations back, but way, way back. And you also  stop processed foods and sugar and grain because your ancestors didn't have any of that.

And we  assume for an average-sized person, you need 2,000 calories. If you need 3,000, then you up these  numbers a little bit. What you would find, most likely, is that your protein consumption would be  somewhere between 15 and 25% of your calories.

And this is true even of a person doing carnivore,  eating nothing but meat because all meat comes with fat. And if a steak has about 20% fat and  20% protein, then that's by weight. By calories, the protein is going to fall between 15 and 25%. 

And that would mean that we eat about 75 to 125 grams of protein. And again, that's not 75 to 125  grams of meat; it is of all the protein in all the foods that we eat. So you could eat a pound  of beef and get somewhere around 100 grams of protein.

And if you eat like that, you'd probably  end up somewhere between 25 and 150 grams of carbohydrates. And I made this range kind of wide  for a reason, just to sort of cover all bases. If you're insulin-resistant, if you're obese, if  you're type 2 diabetic, pre-diabetic, and you're trying to change that, you want to be on the lower  end of that, somewhere around 25 grams.

And your vegetables would be primarily leafy greens  and non-starchy vegetables like cauliflower and broccoli and asparagus. However, if you are  insulin-sensitive, if you are lean, and especially if you're active, now you could include some other  things. You could include some tubers, maybe some beans.

You could eat some sweet potato, and it  would probably be okay, all the way up to 150 grams of carbs per day. But keep in mind, this is  half of the standard recommendations that include a bunch of grain and processed foods and sugar.  So, percentage-wise, that would put us between 5% and 30% of calories from carbohydrates.

And the 5%  would be a ketogenic diet or near ketogenic diet, and the 30% would be at the very high end but  which is still half of the standard guidelines. And what that means now is that the rest becomes  fat. So, by definition, now we are consuming between 45 and 80% of our calories from fat, which  means anywhere from 100 to 178 grams of fat per day.

And this would be a whole food, real food,  either low-carb, high-fat diet or a moderate-carb, moderate-fat diet. And I think 45% fat is  moderate. I think 80% is high, and I think that is totally healthy and perfectly natural for humans  to eat, as long as you eat real food.

And if you start eating that way, you will dramatically  reduce your risk of gallstones. Another thing we often hear is that if you do intermittent fasting,  you will have a loss of muscle mass. And there are several different levels to this misconception. 

The first is the notion that the brain only uses glucose for energy. 100% of the brain's energy  has to come from glucose, and that is just plain false. It is wrong.

But we still, to this day,  hear it everywhere we look. We are told that if you don't eat carbohydrates, then it's dangerous.  You can't focus.

Your brain won't get any energy, and so forth. But if you think about it, if that  was true, if we would perish just because we went without carbohydrate for a little bit, then the  human race wouldn't be here anymore. So the fact is that when you fast for any length of time, more  than 24 hours, you get into a state of ketosis, and now the ketones become a backup or even a  preferred fuel for the brain.

So after a couple of days, your brain is running on 75% ketones and  25% glucose. But the body still would like to have a little bit of glucose, so the body takes care  of that through something called gluconeogenesis, making glucose from something other than  carbohydrate. And now we have something called glycerin.

So the body, during a  fast, runs almost exclusively on fat, but the fat is stored in a very ingenious way.  So we have these things called triglycerides, which means that we have three fatty acids,  and they're not swimming around by themselves; they're hooked together in a triglyceride. So  we have something called glycerin or glycerol, and this thing, we can take it apart.

We can't  make glucose from the fat itself, but once we hook these fat molecules off and burn them for fuel,  we're left over with this glycerin, and that one can be turned into glucose. So in every gram of  fat stored on the body, about 5% of the calories can be turned back into sugar, into glucose. And  this is where the body actually gets its glucose during a fast or during a very low-carb diet. 

But the detractors, they claim that it comes from protein because that's another way that we  can have gluconeogenesis. So when we eat excess protein, we use part of it to make body tissues,  to make skin and bones and hair and muscles, but the excess gets converted into glucose through  gluconeogenesis. We burn it for energy.

However, that doesn't always happen. The excess protein  always gets turned into fuel, but the body protein does not. The muscles don't break down and turn  into glucose because the body really doesn't want to do that.

The body wants to keep the muscles to  move us around so we can go hunt during a fast, during a period without food. And the brilliant  mechanism here is that there's a hormone called human growth hormone that is muscle-sparing.  It makes sure that the body doesn't break down muscle, but it keeps the muscle and uses the  glycerol for energy.

And the longer a fast goes, the higher the levels of this muscle-sparing  human growth hormone. And very often, we hear that the body stores carbohydrate as glycogen,  and this is true. But most people think of it as the only source of stored carbohydrate, and we  can store about 1,500 calories worth of glycogen, of carbohydrate, in the form of glycogen. 

But if you have a very overweight person, somebody weighing around 400 lb, and they  have upwards of 200 or 200-plus pounds of fat, they have a million calories stored as fat, as  triglycerides. And out of that million calories, 50,000 calories would be stored as glycerol  that can turn into glucose. So that really is a form of carbohydrate storage that is many, many  times greater than the glycogen.

So, is there any truth to the claims that you will lose muscle with  intermittent fasting? Well, it depends on how long you go. So if you're doing a 16:8, meaning you  eat during eight hours and you fast for 16, or you eat one meal a day, then there's no problem at  all because you're still going to eat real food.

You're still going to supply the body the protein  it needs. If you go 3 to 5 days, there's still no problem because during those 3 to 5 days, your  body is going to dramatically increase the amount of growth hormone, like we talked about. That's  muscle-sparing, so you will not lose muscle during that time.

In fact, if you recall the study, they  even admitted that there were some people that lost body fat but increased muscle mass during  that time. But what if you go a whole lot longer than that? What if you go months or several months  or even a year?

Well, the record to date is 382 days. It was a Scotsman called Angus Barbieri. He  checked into a hospital and said, 'Hey, I need to lose this weight.

I want you to help me fast. '  And they never intended for it to go that long, but he felt so good and got such great results  that he convinced them to just keep going until he had reached his goal weight. So during  that time, he mostly ate tea, coffee, water, and some multivitamins.

Now, I'm not suggesting  that this is a healthy thing to do. I don't know if he increased his lifespan or shortened it,  but it just goes to show how adaptive the body is. When he started out, he was 456 lb, over 200  kilos, and when he started eating again, he was 180 lb or 82 kilos.

So after this long fast, he  dropped 60% of his body weight, and he was down to 40% of his original body weight. So when you  go that long, when you lose that much weight, you will absolutely have some muscle loss. But  that's not a bad thing because when you're down to 40% of your weight, you don't need so much muscle  to move you around.

Even if a person is morbidly obese, he's still going to have some muscle just  to carry around that weight. And interestingly, unlike all the participants of The Biggest Loser,  after 5 years, he had only marginally gained some weight. He was still in his ideal range.

And  here's perhaps the biggest detractor from fasting: the risk of hypoglycemia. Now, this can happen  for a couple of different reasons. The first one is temporary because if you have trained your body  to depend on frequent meals and on carbohydrates, and you stop that, then your body is going to have  a temporary tough time.

It doesn't know where to get the energy. It's going to have a lesser supply  of the food that it's used to, and therefore, you're going to feel bad for a few days. But very,  very quickly, especially if you train your body to eat real food, your body will learn how to  get the energy from it.

So within 3 to 5 days, you should be fine again. The other reason  is type 2 diabetes. And here's where they say it's so dangerous because if you're a type 2  diabetic and you start doing intermittent fasting, you can have dangerous bouts of hypoglycemia,  of extremely low blood sugar.

And this is true, but not for all type 2 diabetics, only the  ones who take medication. Because if you take medication to lower your blood sugar to counteract  the excess carbohydrates you've been eating, and now you stop eating for a period of time, that  insulin is going to drive that glucose too far down. But it's very tragic that they try to scare  type 2 diabetics away from fasting without giving them the full explanation because type 2 diabetics  need intermittent fasting more than anyone else.

So here's what we need to understand: that if  we start out with the standard American diet, it's called SAD, then it's lots of processed  foods, lots of carbohydrate, low-fat yogurts, lots of soda. Now we get high blood glucose, high  blood sugar. And then, because of that high blood sugar, the body starts increasing its production  of insulin.

And if we keep that up for any length of time, like 10 or 20 years, now that high level  of insulin results in chronic insulin resistance. And the progressed form of insulin resistance  is called type 2 diabetes. And now they say, insulin resistance is when insulin doesn't work  anymore.

So now the body makes more and more insulin, but eventually, it doesn't work the way  it used to. So insulin resistance now contributes to ever-higher blood sugar. And once we finally  abuse the system to the point where it breaks, when we are so carbohydrate-intolerant that  the insulin doesn't work, now the conclusion in the medical field is that now we have to add  something to help the body process this glucose.

And the first one is called metformin, and that's  not a terrible idea. That's a relatively benign medication that helps the cell become more  insulin-sensitive. But when that doesn't work, and they go to the next step, that means that  they add additional exogenous insulin, insulin from the outside.

And now we're really adding  insult to injury because the problem is that the insulin was already too high, and now we're  adding more. So we're increasing their obesity, we're increasing their insulin resistance, we're  making their metabolic disease worse. So now, something comes along called intermittent fasting. 

And intermittent fasting means that you eat less, or you don't eat at all during a period of time,  which means that your blood glucose goes down. And when your blood glucose goes down during  that time, you are more insulin-sensitive. That means your insulin resistance, your degree  of insulin resistance, goes down.

And now, when your blood sugar is lower and you're less  insulin-resistant, but you are on metformin and exogenous insulin, now you become hypoglycemic.  And this could reach dangerous levels. So now, they conclude that the problem is intermittent  fasting.

That even though this is the solution for metabolic disease and type 2 diabetes, they say  this is the thing that you need to stop because you're on insulin. Well, why don't we reduce or  eliminate the insulin so that the intermittent fasting can start solving the problem? It is  not the intermittent fasting that is causing the extreme hypoglycemia.

That extreme low blood  sugar can only happen if you artificially suppress that blood sugar from the outside. And related  to that temporary, not-so-serious, non-medicated, slight hypoglycemia, we also have loss of energy  and focus. But again, this is temporary because your body just hasn't learned to make energy yet. 

In fact, this same article that we were looking at before says the following about energy: that  intermittent fasting can actually make you feel more alert because during fasting, your body  makes a chemical called orexin-A that increases your attention, your energy levels. So this brings  us to the only real number one fasting danger that you have to be aware of. And the danger is that  you buy into and you believe in this resistance and these scare tactics from the detractors,  from people who feel threatened by people getting healthy.

If you buy into the idea that we  should eat low-fat, high-carb diets full of grain and low-fat yogurt; if you buy into the idea of  calories in, calories out as the only thing that matters in diet; and if you buy into eating three  meals a day plus snacks and topping off your blood sugar all the time; if you buy into the fact that  the brain needs carbs; and if you believe them when they say that intermittent fasting is extreme  and dangerous, that it is rigorous and difficult, then you may never take the time to understand  what intermittent fasting is. You may never understand how incredibly simple and natural it  is. So here's how crazy simple it is: you do three things.

You eat real food. Number two, you eat if  you're hungry. Number three, don't eat if you're not hungry.

And if you follow these three steps,  then completely spontaneously, you will develop a new way of life where you will be eating one  to three times per day, and you will probably fit these meals within a 1 to 10-hour window. One  example could be three meals a day where you eat at 8:00 a. m.

, you eat at 1:00 p. m. , and you eat  again at 6:00 p.

m. That doesn't seem so extreme and rigorous now, does it? And that would be that  you fast for 14 hours and you eat during 10 hours.

That is one version of intermittent fasting.  Or, if you want to do it a little stricter and you have some metabolic disease to turn around,  you could eat two meals a day, one at 1:00 p. m.

and one at 7:00 p. m. That would give you 18 hours  of fasting and six hours of eating.

And then, for some people, they just feel really good doing one  meal a day. And no, you do not get particularly hungry doing that either. If you enjoyed this  video, you're going to love that one.

And if you truly want to master health by understanding how  the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications  so you never miss a life-saving video.