So fasting, why on earth would you want to fast in your life? "I like food, I don't wanna starve, I've got money, I gotta a job, so I can eat. So I don't have to fast." I hear some of you say. And I used to share a lot of those same concepts, to be honest with you, but I've played around with fasting now for about 10 years. Some of the benefits of fasting, obviously, weight loss, correcting many kind of different chronic diseases and illnesses in the body, you can research this on your own, and also having clarity of mind, and some people do use it as a spiritual practice. I don't necessarily do that, but some people do. Things like Ramadan, which is a form of fasting. So, it has many, many benefits out there.
I played around with many benefits of fasting. My current record is I've gone four days, which is 96 hours with only water, no other gimmicks. And I ended up dropping about 12 or 14 pounds in that time. And to be honest, for the first couple of days, I was training and still living my life as per normal, if HypnoPunk does have a normal life. And then when the fourth day come I'm like, "I've had enough of this, now it's time to reintroduce food in." And it was a couple of things for me to show self-mastery because back in evolution, in our caveman and cavewoman times, and the way we'd naturally eat back then, and the studies have shown us, is oftentimes would feast for a period of time whenever we killed a lion, or tiger, or bear, or disco [SP], but they'd be periods perhaps days, weeks, even months where there was no food. Perhaps in wintertime where animals would hibernate and it was harder for us to eat. And our body would essentially eat away the fat, then muscle, very, very late in that process fat would always be eaten first.
And if you look at how our physiques have changed since those time, there weren't a lot of fat cavemen and cavewomen walking around with type 2 diabetes. Now, they might have died early because they got attacked by a bear that they were trying to kill so they could eat, but they looked pretty fucking good doing it. And the interesting thing about fasting is this also a lot of people think, "Well, if I'm training and wanna build muscle, or when I fast aren't I gonna eat away all my muscle?" Not at all. Your body's natural process is to fast to eat away the fat because that's its most ready source. But before that, will go through the carbohydrate stores that are inside your body, then it will go through fat, and when it's eliminated all the carbs in your body and all of the fat in your body, then it will go off the muscle.
And the interesting thing about it and we've all got way too much fat that we could literally go months, even if we're in good shape without attacking muscle. And a way to ensure that you do not eat into muscle is it when you're fasting is do some kind of resistance training, whether that be calisthenics, bodyweight exercises, or doing some kind of weight training in the gym, will ensure that your muscles do not dissipate. Now, if you fast and you just don't train the muscle, they wouldn't actually shrink as if you didn't train. If you train a little bit, then you never trained again, your muscles will shrink. But even if you're fasting, if you aren't doing some resistance training, your muscles will be spared, you'll go through your carbohydrate stores, which are usually a couple of days and after that, you will go into your fat stores. And like I said, most of us even if you're in great shape, have enough fat stores to go a couple of months without even touching muscle.
Now, I need to make a disclaimer here, I'm obviously not a medical doctor, I'm not saying that you should fast. I'm just saying you should perhaps investigate and make an informed decision for yourself if it's the right thing to do. And certainly a couple resources I'd recommend to you are "Fasting and Eating for Health," by Joel Fuhrman, MD, which is F-U-H-R-M-A-N, and "The Complete Guide to Fasting," by Jason Fung, MD, F-U-N-G. And there's many studies in both these books that I'll let you do your own due diligence and researching, stop being lazy, don't take my word for it, read this stuff up for yourself. Just take this as a foot in the door to open up your mind to be inspired to look into this.
But oftentimes, when we fast what happens is a lot of people now are suffering from syndrome X or metabolic disorder. And basically, what that is, is they over-secrete insulin too much. They create too much insulin in their body and if your body's got too much insulin, it gets stored as fat. So, you can be training your heart out, but if your body creates too much insulin, even if you're eating what you consider to be healthy, you will gain weight. One way to quickly down regulate your insulin responses to things to stop having them jack up and the only way that's been proven time and time again over hundreds, thousands, millions of years is by fasting. Because every time you eat, even if it's fruit, even if it's salad, even if it's low carb, even if it's what you consider to be healthy food, there is a spike in your insulin. And dependent on how insulin dependent you are or dependent on how big that spike is, and the bigger the spike is, the more insulin is secreted from your body, and the more inclined it is to crash and for you to overeat. Even if it's healthy food.
The only time you're incident doesn't spike is when you don't eat. When you fast, whether that be, and we're gonna go through different protocols, 16 hours, 24 hours, 3 days, 5 days, you're insulin doesn't spike, which means you're not creating any of it in your body, which means you can't be storing any fat. It actually starts to adjust your metabolism that even if you're metabolically resistant to other diets it can, basically, work as a hard reset to your body. An interesting thing that I've encountered, and many people speak of this, and those two books that I quoted earlier talk about this and various forums is, we're so used to eating the three, to five, to six meals a day that are just dogma. By the way, that three meals a day, which is created by someone, or the bodybuilding regime of six meals a day was just created by someone. There's not really any science behind saying eating three times or eating six times a day makes you any leaner, any more muscular, have a fast metabolism. It's just hope law by a lot of supplements out there to make you buy more of their supplements, so you eat a certain way. Three to four meals, three supplements, you go for their supplements. It's a lot of bullshit, basically, when you look through this to sell you more product.
The only thing that's been proven 100% of the time all of the time to make you lose weight is one thing, don't eat. Because when you're not eating, your insulin levels aren't going up, there's no calories being put inside your body. You will lose weight. Now, whether that's just fat, whether that's just water muscle, that's another discussion to perhaps have later, but you will lose weight. The only thing that has been proven time and time again. If you go long enough without eating, you will lose weight, you will lose fat. The current record is over 365 days. I do not have the gentleman's name, but you know what? I'm going to stop this podcast right now, and I'm gonna find the gentleman with the world record for fasting. I'll be right back.
Stay Tuned For Part 2 Next Week...
Always Believe,
Luke Michael Howard CHT
Toronto and Ottawa Clinical Hypnotist
