Theresa Piela  0:00  
Okay, welcome to the bioenergetic view. I'm your host, Teresa piella, joined, as always, by Jay Feldman and Mike Fave today, we'll be talking about Ray Pete's ideas on the stress response and energy production, the effects of fasting, sharing a follower success story, transitioning out of keto, and then closing out the show with a listener's question about allergies. And I'm so glad you guys pulled these clips. I used to listen to these just to relax. I would just set them, and they would just be running in the background. And I feel like every single time I would glean some something new, something deeper. And same thing happened as I started to go back into these. So to jump into the first one on the stress response, and anyone who hasn't gone through and watched these clips, it's worth it if you're just starting to get interested in Gray's work or wanting to deepen that understanding and really start to integrate into your life, I mean, They're gems. So let's start with this one.

Dr Ray Peat  1:03  
The first thing is that if you're really healthy, you can meet challenges without experiencing something that on cell you would have called stress, for example, if you are not very healthy. Just skipping a meal can put you in really serious stress, but a healthy person stores something like seven or eight ounces of glucose in the form of glycogen in the liver and muscles and brain and since at rest, the muscles can burn primarily fatty acids, your brain is the main thing that consumes glucose. So if you're more or less inactive and relaxed, you can easily go 12 to 15 hours without eating and without having any stress at all.

Theresa Piela  2:09  
Okay, so Jay, I'm gonna make a confession. I've never been able to go, probably during a normal day, while I'm awake. I don't think longer than maybe six hours without starting to notice some stress creeping. Can you talk on that? And maybe I'm not the best example of the healthiest person out there, you know, getting there, but for the average person, being able to go that long, have you seen this? Is that even possible in this day and age?

Jay Feldman  2:37  
Yeah, it's a good question. It's interesting to hear Ray say that, I think for all of us, because I think it's not something that we typically see, either in ourselves or in other people, unless someone's maybe on a low carb diet or doing like fasting, but at that point, you're already in the stress so you're not actually going 12 hours without stress. You're you're definitely in that stress state to begin with. But yeah, I can't say I've seen that. And, you know, maybe, maybe, if someone was in an environment where they had very, very low energy demands, right, they're not moving, not really doing anything, because, as he mentioned, you know, the brain is using glucose, and if you're mentally active, that increases, not to mention same with the rest of all of our organ systems, and the fact that all sorts of external stressors, whether it's like a change of temperature, whether it's cold, whether it's hot, whether we're, you know, getting exposed to something that's psychologically stimulating, or, of course, like for doing any physical activity, all those things increase fuel utilization. So maybe if someone was kind of sitting, not moving and not using much of their brain or body, like, yeah, maybe they could go longer without stress. But I don't know. I've never tested that normally busy, so I've never tried to go that long. But, yeah, I think that was an interesting piece, but it may be something that is important to consider as a possibility, but I think more importantly, kind of thinking about the rest of what he said in this clip, and then also like kind of the meaning of what he's saying in terms of being able to meet greater challenges without stress, being part of the goal, I think, is really important. And even backing up from that, I think understanding the concept of stress is fundamental to understanding health and physiology from the bioenergetic perspective, which I would just basically say means just understanding health and physiology. And he did a good job of touching on that here, and it's important, because if when we talk about stress, especially in the context of low carb diets, or we talk about in terms of different hormetic interventions, I think a lot of people don't understand what that actually means and what the implications are of that, but stress has a very strict definition. This isn't something that we're saying like, Oh, this seems stressful. Or sometimes we'll see. On the comments, it's like, well, if, if you're finding this stressful, then you're just weak, you know? But what we're talking about is not a psychological interpretation of what's going on. What we're talking about is a physiological response to a particular state. And so what that essentially is, what stress essentially is, is the response to an energy deficit. And Ray was kind of touching on that here, but basically, we have on one side what he goes kind of calling the challenge, which is the stressor, the things that are depleting or utilizing energy. And then on the other side we have our energy supply, which is provided by the fuel that we have, assuming we're using it well to produce energy. That's where, you know, glucose and fatty acids largely come in. And so when we have an imbalance there, when there's too much of a of a demand relative to the amount of energy supply, then we end up with stress, and that triggers a stress response that allows our bodies to adapt and deal with this energy deficit. Because when we're talking about energy, we're talking about ATP production, and we literally can't function if there's not enough ATP. So this is a a emergency, essentially, that has to be dealt with, and that's what the stress response is for. That's why it's so fundamental, and that's where we have the stress hormones that come in. And these are, again, by definition, hormones that are responding to this state of stress. And so this includes hormones like glucagon, adrenaline and cortisol, is the primary ones. Estrogen can also fall into that category. Growth Hormone can also fall into that category. But really, the three primary ones are glucagon, epinephrine and cortisol. And so I think that recognizing this balance that our bodies are constantly facing, like we're constantly in this flux of energy production and utilization and recognizing the impact of stress on the rest of our bodies, which is basically that accumulation of stress or increased stress, turns down our metabolic rate as a conservation mechanism, turns down thyroid function, turns down reproductive hormones, and basically breaks down our body's tissues. Understanding that is fundamental, because then what we recognize is that we want to orient ourselves toward a, I wouldn't say, an avoidance of stress, but a minimizing of stress. We don't want, like there's always some amount of stress or some amount of challenges. Some of those can be good challenges, good stressors. Some of them can be harmful ones. But we still want to minimize the amount of stress from those challenges, knowing that some amount is inevitable, and so for most people, eating consistently throughout the day, not waiting 12 hours to eat, but maybe eating every three to five hours is an important way to make sure that we're well fueled, and also recognizing that if we're increasing our fuel utilization with movement or activity or things like that, it'll increase our fuel needs. And so we might need to either eat more or even more frequently, those are some of the basics. As we dig down deeper and start to recognize all of the issues that can drive problems with energy production, we then start to get to part of what Ray was saying at the end, which was basically that if we're in a compromised metabolic state, the smallest thing can trigger stress, just being awake can be triggering stress, whereas, if we're producing energy very efficiently, and we're well fueled, it takes a lot more to push us into that stress state. So in my mind, kind of forgetting the going 12 hours without eating as a specific example or something to strive for, I would more so just use that as a an illustration of this idea that the more efficiently we're producing energy and the better state that we're in, the more that we can handle with the less stress, and that's really what we're aiming for.

Theresa Piela  8:25  
So more about minimizing the optional stressors, or the things that we have control over, making sure we're not letting them get out of hand, but really increasing our ability to handle whatever stress is going to come our way gracefully, because we are so energized that it doesn't really disturb the system as much. And I think a lot of people, maybe, you know, in the wellness world specifically, it's like, okay, you know, just limit stress, calm down, you know, mindfulness. But I love the way Ray frames it as well. Actually, you can actually be this bigger vessel to, you know, not not adapt, but handle things more gracefully. So Mike, when you when you were listening to this clip, and not to over emphasize going 15 hours with without eating, but anything you'd like to add, in regard to Ray, kind of describing, like this core essence of what stress really is

Mike Fave  9:19  
in this clip, I don't, I think that people will hear this and they'll they'll assume that Ray was or like they some people may take away and say, oh, you should be able to go 15 hours with without eating, or or 16 hours with eating, or 12 hours without eating, whatever the deal is. But I think that the ray was using this as a way to exemplify a point. And I think this when you look at like Ray's, you have to put this in the context of Ray's overarching hypothesis around stress and around understanding the different fuel sources. So Ray specifically talks about here is you have enough glycogen to last that time frame if you are at rest, right? So basically, what he's saying is that in under a NOR, if you're at rest, under a normal, healthy state, you. Should be able to take your glucose and convert it all the way to ATP through oxidative phosphorylation. So you're using it very efficiently. You're getting a high yield of ATP for that glucose. And if you're at rest, your muscle tissue is not burning through that, then you should be able to supply enough for that timeframe for your brain. So the dynamic here is, when you are unhealthy, you're not effectively taking that glucose and converting it through oxidative phosphorylation appropriately. Maybe you're pushing it more towards lactate. Maybe you're shifting more towards fatty acid oxidation, and then in that circumstance that you're not going to last very long without really heavily relying on stress hormones in that timeframe. So I think this was like a if you are healthy, this is what you can potentially do because how, because of how things are working, because you're using that glucose effectively. But it's not like, Yeah, this is what you should do. Because I think ultimately, if you were to continually do this over time, you'd have a cumulative negative effect of constantly running the system right to the edge of its resources. And as as Jay talked about that, when I think about stress, I think supply and demand. I think it's not like, Oh, I'm stressed out, you know, this, or from this or that. I think more broadly, and you this can create a bucket that covers everything. Is you have a supply and demand problem. And the supply and demand problem is either you don't have enough supply of resource, that could be macronutrient, that could be micronutrient or you have an excessive demand in this circumstance. And this could also be things like sleep and components like this. So you wind up having a circumstance, okay, you're on a low carb diet. You're on a low calorie diet, you're fasting, you are lowering your supply of resource that you can then convert into energy. And then on the upside or on the on the opposite side, on the demand side, you have a circumstance where maybe you're doing excessive exercise, maybe your boss is pissing you off at work, maybe you're having problems in your relationship, you know, maybe there's, there's you're doing cold plunging and stuff like this, where you're really increasing the demand for your energy and acute and also potentially chronic circumstances. And so you have kind of this balance going on where, in this perspective, the goal is to make sure that you have enough supply for your body, and your demand is also managed, and you are effectively taking that supply and converting it into energy. And the this is a supply and demand of energy. I didn't say it out front, but supply and demand of energy overall. So this is the dynamic that we're looking at all together. Now, with that said, what I would say is, I don't think that, like, I think doing this, that having the circumstance where you have this, like, if it's if it's overnight, I think it's a little bit different, right? You have 12 hour fast overnight, and you sleep for what, eight or nine hours, and couple hours before after you eat, and when you wake up to get ready, fine. Like, I'm not saying that you need to absolutely all the time. But it's like if you were to fast across the day from this and with this perspective in mind, I would actually counter to some extent, Dr Pete's point here. I think you would be driving some degree of stress in this, because you would basically have to up regulate glucagon and adrenaline, which he specifically talks about, to release the glucose from glycogen, from your glycogen from your glycogen stores, and particularly in your liver, and the utilization of those hormones is going to it's not an all or nothing, but you have a progressive shift towards pushing fatty acid oxidation, shifting your fuel sources. And as we'll get into other clips here, Dr Pete is basically saying that the driving of fatty acid oxidation is a characteristic feature or state of stress. You know where you're pushing towards that fatty acid oxidation state you are driving towards a stress state. In general, the stress state can be characterized by the fatty acid oxidation, and both adrenaline and glucagon shift you towards that direction, because basically, as you run out of glucose or your supplies start to dwindle, you need to start to throttle your system onto fatty acids, because you have a much larger supply. It's not a couple ounces of fat that you have. You have pounds and pounds and pounds of fat that you can store on your body that will last significantly longer. And then the thing is, when you also shift to those fatty acids, you change mitochondrial dynamics, and you change hormonal dynamics, and all of those are signals say, hey, like we're under stress. We don't have enough supply now, so we're having to dip into our stores, then you have an adaptive down regulation. So I think Dr Pete In this clip was using this as an example of if your health, you could get away with this, because you can effectively use glucose. But cumulatively, I don't think this would be a good idea. And I do think this also pushes you towards stress. Fundamentally, because you have to rely on those hormones to release the substrate, right? You have to rely on glucagon and adrenaline to release the glucose from your glycogen stores. And your as you run out of glycogen stores, you're going to start pushing towards fatty acid oxidation. And the other thing is, from people, inherently, you will feel this response. So say you have a meal about three to four hours later, five hours later, depending on what you ate in that meal. You know, if it's orange juice and skim milk, like, maybe it's an hour later. But if it's, if it's like a, you know, good, hearty meal that has some protein, some carbs, some fats, maybe you're having some steaks and potatoes, some blueberries, some dark chocolate, something like this, you'll. Last quite a bit, quite a while, but you'll hit a certain point and you'll feel that blood sugar drop. And that's where people talk about when they're in the low carb sphere, like, Hey, I don't feel stressed anymore. My blood glucose is flat. And it's like, Yeah, but you're just running on stress all the time, so you're not shifting in and out of hey, I'm replenishing my stores, and then you're hitting, okay, now I'm pulling from my stores as the blood glucose comes down, it's like, no, you're always just pulling from your stores. You're always just breaking down your protein tissue and your fat tissue, or the protein and fats coming in from your diet to supply energy. So I think you would still feel that response. I mean, I can go and I've gone long times without food, with traveling, with working in the hospital, stuff like this. But there's about a three to four hour window, or five hour window where you'll hit that point. It's like, man, like, you get a little bit sweaty, maybe a little bit anxious, and that's the adrenaline kicking in as you start to, you know, your body's like, all right, like, we're running through some of this glycogen, and we need to, we just our blood sugar just came down, we need to bring our blood sugar back up, and that's that adaptive hormone response. Now, after that initial bump, at least in my experience, then I'm kind of stable for quite some time. And then after that, then you kind of get this, like this, like manic state that you hit, and I think that's when you start to hit the cortisol response. And we'll talk about this with the phases of the hormones in some of these next clips that Dr Pete lays out, which I think is quite helpful.

Jay Feldman  16:21  
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Theresa Piela  17:05  
And before we move on, I just wanted to ask you say someone it, you know, they had that beautiful kind of denser meal. They're feeling like it's carrying them. They feel satiated. There's, there's so many mixed ideas about, well, you should just wait until you get that hunger signal to start eating. But in this case, would you argue that by the time someone gets that hunger signal, they're already kind of in that adrenalized state, or maybe on the shifting closer to the where cortisol kicks in? What would you recommend

Mike Fave  17:36  
for me? I typically try to have people preemptively hit that state, like, so they don't get into that spot where it's like, I think you can start to have a little bit of hunger, and that's fine, but when you hit that spot where it's like, boom, the the adrenaline start to hit, and your blood sugar has finally come down. I think, you know, I tend to, especially people who are sick and trying to recover. I'm not really trying to reach that point. I'm trying to have the person have, you know, three or four meals, or three meals in a snack spread across the day by maybe four hours, something like this, so that they are able to as they're they eat. Their blood sugar comes up, it comes back down as it's about to come down, they have their next meal ready to go, so that they can eat again. Because basically, you have this circumstance, and this is something that Jay was touching on with some of the like the stress stuff that people are doing with the you have fasting, you have the cold, plunging, you have all of this type of stuff, right? It's like when we're younger, right, when we're when we're born, and as we grow and as we develop, we have some resiliency. And I think you go and do all these crazy diets and the fasting and the exercise and all sort of stuff, and you really deplete yourself, and you're running on like, Okay, I was healthy, and I can get away with this stuff. In the beginning, I can get away with skipping food for 16 hours. But over time, that starts to deplete your body, right? You start to push more and more into that stress system, and those stress hormones, the adrenaline, the glucagon, these are not benign. They come at a cost. There's damage the tissues. There's damage in the mitochondria from running these things. And Jay and I have both talked about this in other podcasts. And essentially, what winds up happening is when you hit that wall, finally like, and it's different for different people, right? You know, you have some people who are like, resilient. They can run car and war six years, and they they finally crash. And other people, it's a couple months, but they hit that wall, they hit that crashing point. And then the goal with it from there is to, like, stop doing that stuff, but then also start to try to build that resiliency back up by not pushing and driving those stress hormones. That's like, one of the fundamental goals that I'm looking to do with people, is I'm not really trying to push your stress anymore. I'm trying to minimize your stress as much as possible. Now, this doesn't mean you live in a bubble, right? You're going to have stressful events, but it means that you make sure you have the supply, bike, rows, macros, all this type of stuff, and you make sure you're managing your demand if you're crashed and you're fatigued from doing the exercise and not sleeping an internment fast. And whatever, like it is not time to go run a five day bodybuilding split and cold plunge like it's not time for that anymore. Time to chill out on that maybe go for some walks and start to rebuild your micronutrient status, support your hormonal profile, and start to rebuild the diet and go from there. So it's like you're trying to reverse this course and build that resiliency up again. But I also think, and it's something that you may have experienced recently. I experienced recently. I experienced this once I blew my system out, like, I'm pretty sensitive now, a lot of times to to this stuff, and so, yeah, so that would be, those would be my thought processes around, like, with the preemptive these meals, and then kind of tying that into rebuilding resiliency,

Theresa Piela  20:39  
yeah, like you guys have mentioned so many times with that cumulative nature of stress, I do notice a lot of the damage I unintentionally did. Can be sneaky if I'm not mindful of, you know, doing the basics, eating really well and regularly, and yeah, I'd like to think that the body is always moving in the direction of repair. But absolutely, I think, you know, learn from, learn from our mistakes. Don't necessarily age yourself faster than you need to, especially if there are other options. And there's, there's,

Jay Feldman  21:10  
I think, like a couple of different scales to look at too, right? We have the long term where, you know, each of us, different extents, did low carbon, fasting and over exercising and crashing ourselves. And there's the long term recovery from that, but there's also short term things, where, if you go through a week of a little worse sleep and, you know, not fueling as consistently, this is something I, you know, will happen sometimes, if I'm like, traveling and I'm not in my normal environment, you know, the first several days, even the first week, like, you know, there's very, you know, it's like, you can get by without really noticing much of a difference. But then that starts to accumulate a little bit, and you start to see, by the end, something that, you know, going a little bit longer between meals might have been something that really barely affected you, and then it starts to affect you more. So I think there's those two scales to keep in mind as well, when someone's thinking about like their recovery path and wanting to build that resilience, is recognizing a it can take a long time to recover from the deep metabolic holes that so many of us dig ourselves into, like quite a long time. And then also, there's, you know, short term fluctuation of the baseline to to be aware of. But I wanted to come back to a couple things that you mentioned, Mike and that question that you had Theresa about, like, kind of preemptively bringing in a meal versus waiting till you hit the stress response versus waiting for hunger. And sometimes those things can be different. Can be like, kind of unclear. And this is part of what Ray was kind of touching on, too. It's like, if you're really sensitive to stress, the difference or in in time between when you start to get hungry and when you get a pretty significant stress response could be basically nothing. It's like, all of a sudden you just get hit with this massive stress response as soon as you're kind of getting hungry for the next meal. And that's when, kind of like you were saying, Mike, especially when someone's metabolically compromised, being aware of this ahead of time and planning ahead and being ready to have your meal, not waiting to get to that point, but kind of having it preemptively, can be really, really valuable. And then, on the flip side, as you start to build out resilience, you want to make sure that you're also not forcing it. And you, you know, often tell people you want to kind of find that hunger like, especially, you know, someone's on this recovery journey, and they're finding that they're gaining weight, like regaining quite a bit of weight, then sometimes what can be happening is they're almost pre empting their stress responses too much, and they're not waiting till they're hungry, and they're kind of overdoing it and eating too frequently or eating too much when they haven't actually waited to continue metabolizing what they have going on. So there's a balance to strike there, and it's going to vary based on where you're at in that kind of metabolic recovery and where you're at in that journey. So I wanted to touch on that, and along with it, this idea of feeling the stress response that you were saying, Mike, where it's like you can feel it. That's something that I think a lot of people don't are not aware of if they haven't thought about it in a couple of ways. One is you could just be under chronic stress, and so you don't actually feel so much when it's hitting you. And so that's one aspect. That's one reason, then the other one being that most people aren't recognizing the impact that this has on their mood, on their thought processes, on their energy. You know, they might start to feel more lethargic, start to feel a little irritable, and not realize that that's because they're starting to dip into the stress, and because their fuel is really a bit depleted. And I think that paying attention to this ends up being really valuable. It's part of why we wanted to touch on it today, is that this is such a fundamental aspect of physiology, but also it ends up being a really helpful tool for guiding you, if you can really tune into that stress. So I wanted to emphasize that. And then the last thing, because you touched on this, Theresa, which was like this idea that of, kind of like meditating the stress away, or when, when we're, you know, in the alternative health space, when the underlying energy. Energetic basis for stress isn't recognized. The thought process is, stress is psychological, and the solution is things like meditation and mindfulness and magnesium, you know, things that calm your nervous system down, but you can add as much of those in as you want. But if you're depleted of fuel and you're not producing energy, well, you're going to be in a chronic state of stress. And sure, you're going to reduce the challenge a little bit by calming your body down and not being like really active and maybe hyperactive, but you're still going to be in that state of stress. And you know, someone who had talked with both Mike and I about this is Les Raymond from the mindful movement podcast. We were both on his podcast, and he was, you know, he mentioned this, where he his entire focus, or largely, like his main focus, was on meditation and mindfulness and the impact of all that. And he was starting to recognize when he was doing these different kind of stressful interventions, the low carb diets and everything, that he couldn't meditate the stress away, like there was something deeper. There's a physiological process going on. And by bringing carbs in and shifting his diet toward a more bioenergetic approach, he actually realized that that was stopping the stress response, and the solution wasn't just throwing more magnesium or meditation at it. And yeah, it's just a good example of that.

Theresa Piela  26:18  
That's an amazing example. Yeah, I think some of the most potent nervous system work is just making sure the body is fueled. And it reminds me of a client who was having really severe panic attacks, and I found out she was having black coffee, followed by celery juice and then a shot of whiskey to calm down. And I, you know, I grabbed my death. You know, it's just one of those moments where I'm thinking, you know, no amount of tapping or mindfulness or humming or shaking or swaying is can counteract, you know, what the system is wisely saying is, Hey, I am, you know, literally starving. I'm, of course, that, you know, the panic attack is going to reflect that, not a lack of meditation. So absolutely, it's like we miss the basics sometimes moving on from that, not so great breakfast. I hope no one else is having that for breakfast. Let's continue with raised clips.

Dr Ray Peat  27:13  
If you're not able to store that much glycogen, and, for example, low thyroid people or people with a history of severe stress aren't able to store very much glycogen, and so when you run out of sugar, whether it's from going all day without eating, or because your liver isn't pretty efficient, then your body tries to increase the available glucose. Normally, just being awake makes enough adrenaline to mobilize as much of the glucose from your stores as you need. But when you run out of that stored sugar, your brain still requires sugar to function properly, and so instead of just increasing the adrenaline more and more when the adrenaline reaches a certain level and can't get the blood sugar up out of your storage, then you turn on the cortisol, and that's the classic stress that can be harmful.

Theresa Piela  28:32  
Okay, Mike, let's break down these stages a little bit, just expand on them so our listeners can maybe find their own experience in it so and assuming that they maybe are eating more regularly, but maybe more common. It's more of a liver issue, there's an endotoxin issue, there's a life stressor issue. Let's, let's walk through this.

Mike Fave  28:53  
I think one thing I want to talk about before we get into the the like the actual steps going through this, is that ray makes an important point where you talked about hypothyroidism, which would basically be like a, like a low energy state. And this is actually really important, because if this goes hand in hand with what I was talking about before, with the ability to take glucose and run it through oxidative phosphorylation and make a large amount of ATP, it's like 36 ATP on average. So you're you make the ATP from that perspective. So thyroids are directly involved in controlling the fuel utilization at the cell and at the mitochondria. So if thyroid function this type of stuff is low, then you can have a circumstance where you're not using fuel so effectively, maybe you're pushing and you see this in also in type two diabetics, where the glucose gets pushed into lactate production, where you get a much lower net ATP amount per unit of glucose. And so you have a circumstance where, even if you have glucose present, you're just running through it. It's like you're needing instead of getting, you know, instead of getting 1010, miles per gallon, you're getting you. You're getting one mile for 10 gallons, right? It's a switch of how much fuel you need to actually drive the distance you're needing quite a bit more fuel. This is in when people are very stressed, they're going to burn through that fuel very fast. And people are in thyroid state, low thyroid states, or people who have metabolic dysfunction, they run through their fuel and kind of it, or the fuel is not moving appropriately through the mitochondria, and it gets pushed into these different areas. So they have a lack of ATP production, or a lack of ATP at the cellular level. They have a lack of available energy, even if fuel is present in high amounts. And so these are different problems that to consider, because it's not just how a lot of people, I think, in the in this space, they focus, oh, my liver glycogen. Because Ray talks about liver glycogen. And in these states as well, if the liver is is having a difficult time because of thyroid function, or, as you mentioned, Theresa, because of the digestive issues, because those blood supply from the GI tract goes to the liver first, the liver is going to get the first hit from anything coming in from the GI tract, like endotoxin. And then also hormonal imbalance. High levels of estrogen can affect liver metabolism as well. So you can have a circumstance with the livers not working effectively and able to store and supply blood glucose effectively. But you can also have an issue with utilization of fuel sources at their peripheral tissues for glucose, so that you're not using it effectively, creating as much ATP as you need, or you can't produce ATP from it very well, and it gets shunted into different pathways, like you see with diabetes, where it moves down the polyol pathway, the hexosamine biosynthetic pathway, etc. So these are, I think, important pieces to understand. First is that you can have issues at the like kind of your distribution center of the liver, or at the the cells and tissues right the delivery sites for those fuel sources your bloodstream is the highways in between. So this is the this the first piece. Now, if the cells and tissues don't have enough ATP being generated, or you're kind of running out of glucose at your distribution center, you start to up regulate hormones that are kind of backup systems that are like, look like we're having an energy failure here. We're gonna have to dip into reserves. Now the first one is glucagon, right? You can kind of think about it this way. There's there's some overlap, but first you have glucagon. Glucagons job is to release glycogen from storage, but also starts to shunt the system towards running on fatty acids as well, and it also starts to drive the process later on, not initially, of taking amino acids and converting them into glucose, and taking glycerol and converting it into glucose and lactate and whatnot, and converting it back into glucose. So gluco glucagon is essential in this process. Is one of the first steps. As your glycogen starts to deplete, as Dr Pete mentioned, then you start to bring adrenaline on board, and adrenaline starts enhancing the glycogenolysis process of the breakdown of glycogen and then release the free fatty acids from your fat stores. So as you start to switch that dynamic, right? So fatty acid oxidation starts to rise, glucose oxidation starts to come down as glucose starts to decrease. And then after you're kind of into this state for a period of time, then when you start to run out of glycogen, then it's like, All right, we really need to up regulate this process of producing glucose. And then that's where cortisol comes in. It's like, look, we're gonna start breaking down stuff. We're gonna start breaking down our muscle tissue to supply the glucose. And that's why you see this. Even low carb states and keto states in the first three week transition well before the body moves mainly to fatty acids and starts to push ketones as a backup, like the backup to the backup, you start to get this high cortisol peak within the first three week timeframe. And that's basically the body saying, like, we're not all the way over to fatty acids yet, but we still need some glucose, so we're going to start breaking down our muscle tissue, creating this stress response, the strong stress response, in order to supply this fuel that we don't have anymore. And then we up regulate glucose. And then eventually the body's like, All right, well, the carbohydrates aren't coming anytime soon, so we need to make, you know, extensive measures here. And then you force fatty then you like, push most, of the tissues to fatty acid oxidation, and then the brain and the central nervous system cannot run on fatty acids. So what you have to wind up doing is you have to start making ketones, and then the ketones take over a portion of the glucose needs of the central nervous system, but you still have some glucose needs that can't be replaced by ketones. And so basically the body is trying, it's like we trying to, like, lower as much as possible how much glucose it needs to make, as it doesn't have glucose so it doesn't shred its tissues, it doesn't shred itself up with the stress hormones, and it then it forces everything else to fatty acid oxidation, which I think we will talk about here and relatively soon, is not ideal, compared to glucose oxidation as a slowing effect inside the inside the mitochondrial and with mitochondrial respiration across the board. So that's kind of the process. That's how I kind of see this process unfold. And it's also one of the reasons why, like pushing ketosis through driving a lack of carbohydrates, it's considered a starvation mimicking diet, because it is. It's like you're pushing starvation without having the carbohydrates, and you're shifting the system towards the starvation hormonal profile, so as an adaptive response. So if you didn't actually have carbohydrates, you can, you don't shred all your protein tissue. You have this preservation response. And then, you know, you see people in the ketone research, oh, ketone spare muscle. It's like, yeah, they do. That doesn't mean that that's what I want to rely on, though. Is ketones as my fuel source to spare muscle when I can just have glucose, so I don't have to drive these these hormones, because, on top of this, in the ketogenic diet and low carb dieting, which, again, these are the extreme states of not having those carbohydrates, compared to what Ray is saying, We're just a period of time. This is like a long time with no carbohydrates. In these states, you also see down regulation in your thyroid hormone, right? You stop converting t4 into t3 and you start shunting it towards reverse t3 the body says, Hey, we don't really want to have a high metabolism at this point, because it's going to shred through all of our stores. Then you start seeing a change in the hypothalamic pituitary, ovarian and testicular axis, and the body's like, it's ain't, it ain't time for reproduction. So we're going to raise sex hormone binding globulin so we can bind up our sex steroids. And maybe we're going to adjust what's going on with the hypothalamic pituitary, ovarian and testicular axis in terms of production of some of these hormones as well. You see thyroid comes down. You see the gonadal hormones come down, and you start to push towards those, those stress hormones, in a lot of these backup pathways, you're starting to see this shift of, okay, we're in starvation. We're not in an abundant state, and we need to make all these adaptations and kind of run from there. But it's it starts in that cycle and moves down that pathway, and as I see it as like a spectrum of stress response, and there's adaptations along the way to allow you to survive. But as Jay always talks about, is that a pro adaptation, or is that a maladaptation?

Theresa Piela  36:49  
So So Jay, someone that is moving along the spectrum and maybe becoming increasingly more stressed, what are some of the I mean, yeah, we've talked about some of the basic things. But really, if someone is determined to move back towards a place that is not damaging, breaking down their tissues, you know, eating up their thymus gland, where would you where's the first place they they should start? Could start?

Jay Feldman  37:15  
Yeah, it's a great question, because I think Ray talked about the first place, in a roundabout way. You talked about it in this clip, and it was one of the things that was so mind bending, like flip everything on its head when first coming across the bioenergetic perspective. And that was this idea that, I mean, I'm one handy of stress being an energy deficiency, but considering the role of sugar, of glucose in producing energy. A depletion of sugar, or running out of sugar, is a major driver of the stress response. And stress is that a means of providing more sugar, right? He was talking about that as a, you know, releasing sugar. And then one of the other things that stress does is help reduce our reliance on it, so that way we can get by for longer on using more fats and eventually more ketones, like Mike was talking about. But what that means is that one of the most fundamental anti stress things is sugar is carbohydrates. And again, that doesn't necessarily mean white granulated table sugar, but sugar in the form of fruit juices, root vegetables, white rice, whatever it is, and potentially some table sugar as well. But that's one of the most fundamental anti stress substances that we have, is carbohydrates. And speaking of tuning in and feeling the stress response, a lot of people again, when they start to tune in and start to recognize this, and then they're able to notice, okay, I'm in the stress state, and then they have a glass of orange juice, maybe with a little bit of salt. Bit of salt, or, you know, they have a Mexican coke and something with some table sugar in it, and they realize that they feel calmer and that they have better energy and that they're in a better mood, and this, like, amped up, irritable stress feeling goes away. And I think that is when we're talking about first steps like that. Feeling like it's one thing to talk about it, but to feel it, I think, is just monumental. I feel like it's it's so moving, and it's such an important starting place of the recognition of the importance of getting enough fuel, getting enough carbohydrates, especially for turning down the stress response. And so that's, I think, the starting place. And part of what of what is so valuable in this clip. But on top of that, you know, there's so much to be said as far as, like, metabolic recovery from the various like, very intensely stressful things that have turned down our metabolic rate over time and made us more susceptible to stress and less resilient, and really more than anything that comes back to the foundations, the fundamentals that we talk about all the time, like that, those are the things that drive the vast majority of the progress. It's getting enough of the right fuel in getting enough nutrient density, addressing gut health and making sure we're digesting our food well, and we're minimizing endotoxin exposure, avoiding the things that are really hard. Harmful for our metabolism, like polyunsaturated fats and getting enough sleep, addressing psychological stress as well. Of course, that does play an important role here, when it comes to stress, getting enough sunlight, getting some good movement in. I mean, those are by far the biggest needle movers. And then, you know, depending on our individual circumstances, there might be some extra things we need to focus on, but those are the starting places.

Theresa Piela  40:24  
So you heard it here. Folks have your your coke and orange juice ready to go as your as your first step out of a chronic stress cycle. But no, really, I think we can all relate to that, that feeling of like a grounded euphoria when we finally have our feed ourselves, and Jada emphasize what you said that tuning in, I think, is underrated in terms of starting to really get a sense of what's working what's not working, the body's always trying to tell you. And I think some people are like, Oh, I'm a sugar addict. I shouldn't feel this happy. It shouldn't be this good. And they shame themselves and they blame themselves and they think something's wrong with them. We it's so warped to think that something that is giving us energy and excitement and a sense of possibility could be harmful. I mean, I'm leaving out like, you know, dangerous hard drugs. But really, if we bring it back to nutrition, and, you know, sugar, honey, maple things like that, a potato, starting to trust that the signal from your body that is trying to confirm that you're moving in the right direction is actually there to help you. It's supposed to be reinforcing your body doesn't want you to suffer, regardless of what the wellness industry is telling you. Mike, anything, anything to add there in terms of what people can be aware of while moving out of this stress state,

Mike Fave  41:41  
I think, well, there's one thing I want to mention. And there's, there are some things I want to address. The funny thing is, I don't think I've ever seen somebody to my experience, right? This is anecdotal who went out of low carb and carnivore and keto is like, yeah, I want to go back. Like, once you add the carbs back in, the vast majority of people are like, I don't think I can go back to that, because there's like, I think when you grow up and you, you get, you get put on a diet, right? Your parents put you on a diet. Like, that's whatever, like, that's just how you eat. Like, you don't question it. And then you go down these dietary spheres, right? You do? You it depends on where you start. Right? First it's, you know, bodybuilding diet, high protein, calories and calories out. Then you go plant based. Then, you know, then it's paleo and carnivore, and you're fasting and and whatever the deal is, right? You like, you go down this rabbit hole, and you start to actually get to see the perceptual shifts. But when you're young, you never get to see the perceptual shifts. You don't get to see how, how does wheat affect my my mental capacity. How does dairy affect my digestion? How does carbohydrates affect my stress response? And then, when you go on these diets, it like forces you to actually see the contrast, because you remove all those things, you take out carbs, you take out these foods, and then in for some in a lot of ways, like you switch them to subs. Like, yeah, things get a lot better. Like for me, dairy and wheat are net negative in my cognitive capacities, like serious negatives for me as an individual. Because there's individual elements here that's important to keep in mind. So when I took them out, it's like, Man, I feel 10 times better. It must be the carbs. It must have been the carbs, even though I changed all these things. And then what happens is, then you add, you know, then you go through that, and you're like, okay, and you're like, kind of burnt out, like you get stressed out, and then you add carbs back in, and it's like, whoa. I feel a lot better. Like, I remember when I was when I started adding carbs back in, especially because it took me a little while to figure out which carbs I tolerated, because I wasn't doing well with starches, and I didn't know what I like when I was first going through this is, like, I didn't know, was it starches? Was it sugar? Is it grains? Is it this? Is it that? Like, you're trying to figure it out, like, it's like, I feel way better with carbs, but, man, I'm bloated. And that's when you're doing all the plantains in college is so bloated with the plantains and the coconut then when I started

Theresa Piela  43:55  
doing, what was that the coconut cookies? I think those were the coconut

Mike Fave  43:59  
cookies and plantains. But I remember I did orange juice, and I was like, Man, I feel way better and I'm not bloated. It's like, this is so, like, you get to this point and you start to see, like, oh, wow, the carbs are actually anti stress, and you don't want to go back. But this ties into the shifts that I want to talk about coming from, like, a stress state, low carb state, fasting state, all this type of stuff. A lot of things have to shift. And I don't think people understand how much has to actually shift. And it's the same thing when you go into keto. A lot of people, it's known, like when you go into keto, the first couple of weeks, you feel like trash, and it's because you have a lot of things. And again, doesn't happen to everybody, but a lot of people, this happens to and that's why there's the Keto flu. Dynamic is even discussed, right? It's discussed in the culture, and it's because a lot of things are shifting beyond just this change you made in your diet, and even in the change you made in your diet, you're shifting a lot of things. It's not just that you took out carbs, took out carbs, processed foods, a lot of irritating plant compounds, different fibers. You shifted and had a higher protein intake. You shifted the types. Fats are using your micronutrient profiles different now, there's a lot of reasons that you can get better, but when you're coming out of it, those things have to reverse. So if you're running primarily on fatty acids in your mitochondria, there's a shift that has to take place in terms of f ADH to NADH ratios, in terms of NADH NAD plus ratios, in terms of priority dehydrogenase activity. For you to start using carbs again, then you have to shift what's going on in terms of the hormonal regulation that sits on top of that, with insulin signaling, with blood glucose, with glucagon, with adrenaline, etc. So there's a shift there, as well as with your thyroid hormones, with your liver function, all of this stuff is changing, not to mention your satiety and your appetite changes. You have a change in the release of some of the GI hormones, like like GLP, one like peptide yy cholecystokinin, because you don't have a crap ton of fat and meat now, so you're not going to be full for like 14 hours. And then then you have the change with your micronutrient balance. When you're on these low carb diets, you're going to largely be dehydrated and not retain your electrolytes because you don't have adequate insulin signaling. So then it's like, do you really need to plow element tea sticks at this point when you add in carbs? Probably not, because you're going to retain the sodium better. And you probably are going to want to add potassium now, because you probably were potassium poor, especially if your carnivore diet. So this stuff has to shift. So you have some micronutrient and hydration balances, maybe you're gonna have to repeat B vitamins take off some iron. And then you also have the shift in microbiome. Because a lot of these diets are very low fiber. And then you basically are just running on meat and bile acid and fatty acid in the colon. And then when you start to add in a bunch of foods, it's like you may not tolerate the foods that you used to tolerate before. So I think it's important that when you're going through these these shifts, you understand that quite a bit is changing, and that as you go through the process, your response that you initially started with will adjust as these these things turn over. So it takes a period of time. I even had a client working with recently. She's on a really low carb diet, really high protein, really high fat. When, when we switched her into a higher carb diet, brought her fat and our protein down. Her blood glucose regulation I was was off, like, it just wasn't right. So it's like, put on a CGM. We'll see where you're at. So we did CGM for two weeks. We saw which foods were really rocking the boat for her. So sour dough, bread was one, white rice was another. Like, these are pretty common culprits. And then, so we kind of switched things around. And then about a month later, she did the CGM for another two weeks, and her blood glucose regulation significantly better, because it took time for her body to transition out of being high high protein, high fat, low carb. So you got to keep these things in mind. I think it's really important to know, like, there's a lot that's changing under the hood that we just you don't see, and you're, oh, it's just carbs and fats. It's like, no, the carbs and fats are fundamental to metabolism. It's like the hormonal systems are geared around your energy intake and then which fuel source you're using in terms of macronutrients. And I think it's really important that people understand this as they start to transition, so that they can make sense of what's going on during their transition process.

Theresa Piela  47:58  
Yeah, I think that's really good to pay attention to and to be gentle with yourself if you're not progressing as fast as you think you should. You know, your body might, like Mike was saying, take some time, especially if the stress load wasn't just the dietary restriction. You know, it's oftentimes. It goes back to early childhood. People don't realize they've been living in, you know, a chronically stressed state for quite some time. Jay, anything to add to this before we move on?

Jay Feldman  48:24  
No, I don't think so we can move on to the next clue.

Dr Ray Peat  48:28  
Okay, and it happens that starvation or radiation or estrogen will all shift our oxidation from sugar to fat, right?

Interviewer  48:42  
Which is why fasting, again, is not a good thing to do, is that you don't advocate fasting, even though, I think a lot of people or new age groups or cultures will say that fasting is a fairly important part of a yearly process.

Dr Ray Peat  48:56  
One of the special problems of fasting, if you've been eating polyunsaturated fats in the past, is that it gives you a pure diet, polyunsaturated fat with a terrific amount of oxidation by products when you go into a starvation state, yeah.

Interviewer  49:17  
Okay, that's, that's the that's the whole point of it. You're going to metabolize the free fat or the metabolize the fats that you have, rather than the sugars during fasting and all those free fatty acids that are liberating, liberated rather going to be very damaging, because,

Dr Ray Peat  49:32  
yep, they specifically spoiled the ability of the enzymes to produce energy free from anything, especially from sugar and the failure to produce energy, is almost exactly the definition of stress. Anything that makes you lack energy is stress. It turns on the whole system of Greece. On such distress.

Theresa Piela  50:03  
Okay, so I am. I'm so glad we ended with that clip, because I think Ray summed up so beautifully where we've been talking about, what we've been talking about here, I want to, I want to understand a little bit more about what's going on with the free fatty acids when someone is in a more stress based state, and their body maybe is shifting into that. I mean, say they had a meal three hours earlier. Could we expect some damage to be happening just as a result of their blood sugar starting to drop? Jay, can you touch on this a little bit?

Jay Feldman  50:37  
Yeah, it's a great question. It's very much a sliding scale. It's it's progressive, and Ray was talking about that, I believe, in some of those earlier clips right where initially there's more of a reliance on the storage glycogen, and we start to shift a little bit into more fats as we shift into the stress state, and as it continues, as the stress becomes deeper, which essentially means, if the response is not enough to resolve the energy deficiency, if we haven't fixed the lack of energy, we need to dig deeper into the stores, deeper into the resources. We need to incur greater amounts of stress hormones and get deeper into the stress hormones like that progression from glucagon to that adrenaline to cortisol. That's how we respond to this lack of energy, so that we can restore adequate function. In that progression, we shift more and more and more away from glucose and more and more toward fats, and so we release more and more fats from the fat stores as free fatty acids, and start to shift the metabolism toward utilizing more fats. And as Ray was talking about here, there's two main issues from that. One is just inherently fat metabolism is less efficient than glucose metabolism. We've talked through this numerous times on especially the energy balance podcast, but also in the bioenergetic view, in a couple of episodes as well. But yeah, fundamentally less efficient there, so we end up producing more or enough energy to deal with energy deficit, but at the cost of more oxidative stress, more reactive oxygen species production and less efficiency there, which again, creates cumulative damage, not to mention the downstream effects of the stress hormones that are necessary for that. So that's part one. But then the second part that Ray's talking about here is in somebody who has consumed a lot of PUFA for most of their lives, which gets stored not only in every single cell you know, as part of the structure, but also in the body fat. When we're releasing fat from the fat stores. If a large amount is PUFA, it's the equivalent of eating a lot of PUFA, eating a lot of these polyunsaturated fats. And there are inherent problems with that, where, as you were saying, they interfere with efficient energy production, especially when they're built in as the structure of the cells, but also they're very susceptible to damage, which increases oxidative stress, which interferes with a lot of the enzymes needed for mitochondrial respiration. So essentially, what we have is it's the equivalent of you've eaten a lot of PUFA in the past, and you have a lot of it stored, and then you don't eat it's like you're just eating a lot of PUFA and then getting very inefficient energy production, on top of the fact that we've already been shifting into the stress state. And so this can be one of the contributors to poor resilience. You know, we're talking about these kind of metabolic holes. We're talking about being able to handle more stressors without negative effects. One of the impacts here is how much proof will we have stored and in the process of recovering from a high PUFA diet, initially, the stress effects are going to be kind of more intense or more severe, because we're getting a lot of PUFA when we get the stress effects and so And with time, as we're eating a very low PUFA diet, and we're slowly again, without excessive stress, but just at baseline, we're slowly releasing fat from the fat stores and exchanging the PUFA for more of the fats that we're eating, which are hopefully more saturated and monounsaturated, this becomes less of an issue where, yes, in a stress state, we're still utilizing more fat, but at least it's not all PUFA, so it's not going to be as bad. But, yeah, it's something to consider, especially in, you know, the first I mean, I want to provide a little caveat here, which some which is that sometimes I think this is used as a bit of an excuse. So I do think we want to be careful with this idea that, you know, if we were on a high PUFA die before we're just going to be having a lot of negative effects for the first six to 12 months, or even the first two to three years on this bioenergetic approach, because we have all this poof of sword and so it's going to take, you know, several years to clear it all out. So some things are just not going to get better during that time. I think we want to be careful with that too, and make sure that this isn't something that prevents us from digging a little deeper and figuring out if there's other things going on. Because sometimes I do think it can become a bit of a scapegoat, but there is, again, some truth to it where this is something that, again, especially early on, especially in the first several months, there's going to be a lot of turnover of those fats, and a lot of exposure to polyunsaturated fats, and it can take several years to fully transition over from high PUFA stores to low PUFA stores. In terms of the body fat, most of the rest of the body it's only three to six months or so, give or take. But yeah, it's definitely something to consider. And again, on a broader sense, as you were saying, A. Really great clip in terms of characterizing stress as a failure to produce energy, or essentially a lack of energy available. And so that, I think is really key.

Theresa Piela  55:10  
Yeah, so for someone that is listening, and maybe they're aware that they have a history of high PUFA intake, and they are intentionally not fasting, not going too far or too long between meals. Would you say, Mike, is that enough to start to replenish the saturated fat and the longer chain or monounsaturated fat stores in the body, and, like, very quote, safely start to deplete the PUFA? Like, are there other ways that someone can do this, or is it just patience and staying well fed.

Mike Fave  55:42  
I think there's a couple strategies that I personally think are helpful to implement. One thing is that the muscles do burn fatty acids, right? So the muscles are clearing fatty acids at rest. So if you do help, if you increase your lean muscle tissue, you have a higher amount of lean muscle tissue, I do think you have bored yourself some protection from polyunsaturated fatty acids, because your muscle tissue can burn through the polyunsaturated fatty acids. But on top of that, you can incorporate, and this is the recommendation from Dr Pete, and then even Chris master John talks about this as well, having adequate vitamin E present to actually protect yourself from when you're liberating the polyunsaturated fats they can one of the things that Dr P talks about here is they get converted into lipid peroxidation products, and the lipid peroxidation products poison the enzymes, multiple enzymes throughout the body, but as well as damage the lining of the vasculature, they attach to proteins, so there's a lot of damage that gets done from them. And minimizing lipid peroxidation via the use of something like Vitamin E can be very helpful. So I actually would say vitamin E, adequate vitamin C, adequate amino acid status between glutamine, glycine and cysteine, such you can produce glutathione and make sure co Q, 10 status and some of the plant polyphenols, all of those things combined together with your mineral balance, making sure that's dialed in so that the antioxidant systems across the board are working well to help you clear out the liver peroxides during this timeframe and prevent the liver peroxidation from starting in and of itself. So you have this piece. The other thing is the polyunsaturated vats, besides creating lipid peroxides, can create eicosanoids, right? So you have the prostaglandins, leukotrienes, these are the inflammatory mediators. So you can block, and this is something that came out of bioengetics view. This came directly from Dr Pete. You can block cycle oxygenase and lipoxy oxygenase, which is the enzymes that take the polyunsaturated fats and convert them into the inflammatory mediators. And the way that you could do this is you can use aspirin, and you can also use, there's other herbal compounds, like Boswellia blocks lipoxy oxygenase. So you'd be able to block both cycle oxygen, like oxygenase, and then manage the the antioxidant status through those, those mechanisms I talked about before, while you're increasing your lean muscle tissue. Now this doesn't have to be very stressful to do it, but you can set up an appropriately like an appropriate workout routine, so that you provide some stimulus on the muscle tissue to at least maintain it, if not develop some muscle tissue in this timeframe. Even, like, for people that I work with, who are, you know, they're not used to working out, and they're, they're, they're in a pretty weak state. They lost quite a bit of muscle tissue from fasting and stuff like this. But go to the gym, or you can get bands or dumbbells, and you can just, you can just create, like, leave nice, big rest periods between the sets, and you just stimulate the muscle, you know, eight to 10 reps, 12 reps, something like this, and you hit the major muscle groups. You don't have to squat and dead lift and do very heavy lifts. You just need to stimulate the muscle tissue enough so you're not excessively stressing yourself out, but you have the tension applied to the muscle to develop some of the muscle tissues. I use things like this in these circumstances, especially if somebody is looking to, you know, they're trying to lose weight in this process as well. Having a higher muscle mass, having a higher lean mass at the end of a weight loss process is extremely helpful. Such you know, you don't wind up in the state where you just took ozempic, you lost a large portion your lean muscle tissue, and now you have to eat like 1400 calories a day just to maintain your body weight, because you have no you have a very low resting metabolic rate from the hormonal effects and the loss of lean muscle tissue. Now, on top of this, you can provide saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids in this timeframe, and those can be helpful to start to replete the tissues the fatty acid stores, as well as the membranes and the phospholipid components inside the body, with those fatty acids, and take out some of the polyunsaturated fatty acids. Now, you can't get rid of all the polyunsaturated fatty acids in the membranes and in phospholipid pools, because the body controls some of those genetically. But you can actually decrease the amount of those to an extent. So you shift the types of fats. You prevent the their the lipid peroxidation process, and you allow yourself to be protected from it. You increase your lean muscle tissue so that you can start to like burn through those through the muscle, through the muscle tissue. And on top of that, you block the conversion to inflammatory mediators. These are some of the ways that I think are helpful. The last one I want to mention here is that burning fatty acids, in general, as a primary substrate, like a primary fuel source, where you're forcing ketosis and stuff like this, is worse in this, in dynamic to some extent, because if your tissues and your membranes and your mitochondria are loaded on polyunsaturated fats, and then you start to run primarily on fatty acids, you can increase the reactive oxygen species production, which is bad, because the ROS can hit the polyunsaturated fatty acids in the membranes and basically cause them to degrade and create damage altogether. And some of the benefits, the benefits that we see in quotations from things like DHA, which is a long chain Omega three polyunsaturated fatty acid, is that it gets converted into lipid peroxidation products, and those lipid peroxidation products trigger strong antioxidant defenses. So it's like it's seen as this, this insult to the system, and then the system trying to mop it up. So we really don't want to have circumstances where we're driving where we're creating these liver peroxidation products and fatty acid oxidation overall, will impair antioxidant status by increasing mitochondrial ROS and on top of that, it can impair the production of glutathione because it can lower pentose phosphate pathway activity and then production NADPH, which recycles glutathione and thyrodoxin. So you want to make sure that you are oxidizing carbohydrates effectively. You don't want to force fatty acid oxidation if you are loaded up on on these, on these polyunsaturated fatty acids. You want to have a higher lean muscle tissue. These types of things, I think, are protective over the long term, and can be quite helpful if you have gone like, went through a state where you gained a bunch of body fat, largely of like, probably seed oil or something like this, over time. Those are the strategies that I look at, and something I want to mirror that Jay talked about that's really, really important, is you don't need to wait four years, or whatever the time frame is to see results. You're not going to magically get better when you're depleted of PUFA four years later, you should be seeing results over time. Progressively, you should start to feel better when you start to add carbs and change the diet within a couple of weeks to a month, right? And then you should see progression from there. It shouldn't be like, oh, yeah, you know, because this was something on the repeat forum, there's this idea that was floated around that, yeah, just takes four years. Once I'm depleted of PUFA, high unsaturated fats, I'm gonna get better, and I don't need to worry about anything. Meantime, I'm gaining the weight. Now it's no big deal. So it's gonna come off once the PUFA comes off out of my tissues. And that's not a good mentality to have. It's the same thing you see, like the low vitamin A stuff. Yeah, it just takes years to deplete vitamin A I'm still having symptoms. Once I'm fully depleted, I'll just be better. And it's like you should be seeing progress and how you feel relatively quickly. It you shouldn't be this, this, this detox ideas, that you're going to get a herx reaction, you're going to detox first, and then, if that's happening for weeks and months onward, that that's still the detox. I don't think that's the case. I think more times than not, it's that the thing ain't working. That's the most important piece of your mind. If you go and run an anti microbial, and you run it for a week, and you don't feel good when you do that, fine. Herx. Herx reaction, detox reactions, if you're chelating, whatever the thing is, okay, fine, the context is important. So it's not that it's always false, but in these circumstances where it's like, Okay, I've been doing this diet for like, six months now, and I don't feel any better at all. So okay, then you we have to look at what you're doing and say, like, Is there things in there that aren't working for you? And then make those adjustments. And I think that's super important, that you are constantly making adjustments on the fly, and you don't come to a perspective of, this is a theory. This is correct. I'm only going to do this and then I wait this extended time frame to see the result. It's like you should be auto regulating along the way, super important. And I don't think you people won't get health outcomes if they don't auto regulate along the way,

Theresa Piela  1:04:01  
and in a way that feels curious and relaxed, right? Because someone could auto regulate from the perspective of, you know, being terrified. And, you know, they're tracking everything, and they're running around their house, and they just feel insane. You know, we want to carry the mindset that, you know, this is a we're in it for the long run, you know, approaching things really systematically not changing too much, changing variables in a way that are trackable. Which, Mike, I know you talk about that a ton. So yeah,

Mike Fave  1:04:28  
the perceive, think act model, that's the way to do under, at least from my perspective, that you undergo the auto regulation, which is like a hypothesis testing model. Absolutely.

Theresa Piela  1:04:39  
Jay, anything to add here? Well, until we or as we shift forward,

Jay Feldman  1:04:45  
I definitely agree with with what you guys are saying here and these sorts of strategies to consider and what we want to see, as far as the progression, the fact that we don't want to just blame something on, you know, not having detoxed all the PUFA yet. If we're, if we're, you know, implementing some things, and we're feeling good in some ways and not good in others, we want to consider why that is, again, address it systematically and and, and you know that being said too, when people are coming from a rough date, that doesn't mean that everything's going to get better in a month, or that it's necessarily going to be simple and straightforward. Like, there can be a lot of complexity here, but we want to make sure we're considering that, that we're actually addressing those things, as opposed to just assuming that it's going to get better, because the proof will be cleared or, you know, in some of these other spheres that Mike was mentioning, you know, because the vitamin A will all be cleared in a couple years, and then it'll all be better. So, yeah, some important points. And yeah, I think well covered, it's good to

Theresa Piela  1:05:45  
hold on to hope too. You know, I think people tell themselves that, like, you know, that's why I'm feeling terrible. But yeah, like both of you have discussed there might be other reasons, and we don't need to make excuses if the body is saying that, you know, maybe it's not the right path forward, or there's some other things that need to be looked at. Okay, shifting to the success story when I'm not I can't read this name, but this, uh, can either of you read this?

Mike Fave  1:06:12  
I don't even know what language

Theresa Piela  1:06:15  
that is. This follower shared when I was strict keto, I was doing the extreme thing of binging and even eating stuff out of the trash can when I tried to throw away the binge food from the previous night or day, telling myself the binge was over because I wanted to stop. It was real bad at times. Eating mix now, which I'm assuming is, you know, eating carbs again for two, about two months in a healthy way, has given me a way healthier relationship with foods and sweets. Now, I still crave sweet stuff non stop, I'll admit, but I just plow down a few bananas and apples and I am good. I do still have ice cream and candy at times, but it's like a quarter it quarter with my previous amount. Even today, I had some ice cream, as I was craving it like mad for the past three days, and I ate 200 grams, and I felt I had too much, as it was just too sweet. Laugh out loud. I also really look forward to my meals as I make bang and wok based dishes with the rice or udon noodles. At times it's so good, but as much as it tastes like heaven, I stop myself whenever I feel about 80% full or so. So this this comment actually reminds me of our discussion on food obsession and what happens when we're in a really stressed state. And what I love about this comment is that they're actually they're existing in a way that no longer feels totally hijacked by food, or, you know, feeling feeling like they need to binge or can't control themselves. Jay, is this something that you see commonly with clients, as they start to eat in a more balanced way, that things actually start to taste, maybe too sweet when their glycogen stores are full, or they maybe even lose certain cravings for foods that in the past, they couldn't

Unknown Speaker  1:08:02  
help but lose it around.

Jay Feldman  1:08:06  
Yeah, absolutely. And it's, again, a concept that I think is really foreign unless you've experienced it, or until you've experienced it. And I know it was for me too, because if you would have told me that there would have been a point where you know I was going to not continue to eat the brownies because they tasted too sweet, like I just didn't want to keep eating them, that, you know, I wouldn't have believed that, like I could just eat an entire pan of them and keep going, you know, back in the day, back when I wasn't feeling myself well, and I was binging and all of that. And I have seen the same thing with clients right where, you know, they would grab the Haagen Das, and they would go and sit by the couch, and they would finish the whole thing, and wouldn't even think twice about it, you know. And the idea of stopping was just not, it was just wasn't at the cards. And then all of a sudden, like, unintentionally, they go for the same habit. They grab the Haagen Das, and they go and sit at the couch, and they get, you know, a third of the way in, and they're like, oh, I don't actually want this anymore. Like, it's a little too sweet. Or just, like, I don't, I don't want it, and they put it back. And that's such, again, such a foreign concept to people who have just lived their lives undernourished, and, you know, in a lot of the stress states that we've been talking about and, and so, yeah, that's, that's what we're looking for, like, that's obviously a really good sign. And so many people who feel like they have food addiction or especially sugar or carb or fruit addictions, are really just depleted, right? They're they're really just dealing with chronic deficiencies, essentially. And when you resolve those and provide the fuel that we need, it's, you know, incredibly your your body's hunger signals actually calibrate really well, and Davis doesn't happen anymore, and so and as he was saying, it doesn't mean you don't have any cravings for carbs, but, you know, the cravings are different. They're not it's not so overwhelming. But also, there's a point where it actually gets satisfied by providing the fuel that you need. Need, right? Not by binging on something that's not healthy for you. So, yeah, I made a pretty something I see really often with clients, something I definitely experienced myself as well. And really glad to hear that this person's experienced that, because it's, it completely changed. It's like life changing. And it really, it really is, yeah,

Theresa Piela  1:10:17  
and the self trust, right? Knowing that they can exist and not feel like they're binging or eating out of the trash, because, you know, the people I've spoken to that deal with, like, really serious binges, and they think it's something wrong with them, and they're still under the impression that something is wrong with them psychologically, when, like, you were saying, Jay, it's Oh, their bodies haven't probably starved for years, and they're operating under misconceptions about what the body needs or what it should thrive on. Mike, you're smiling anything to anything you want to chime in with.

Mike Fave  1:10:48  
I'm just having flashbacks to college, when we had Baker J, who would just make like we would be in hardcore and keto. We were doing workouts and stuff like this, and we were fasting and everything. And then the weekend would come because Jay was gonna make some keto type dessert thing that, like, had some carbs we could break our fast, or, like, get out of our keto days. But I'm just laughing. I'm remembering the coconut flour cookies and the banana bread and whatever else we made in those points of time, and also being obsessed with food at that point, like, just, we were just couldn't wait until it's like, oh man, I can't wait till Wednesday so I can stuff my face with blueberries, because now, until then, I have to fast, and I can't have any carbs and this type of stuff. And it's like, all the food noise. Now it's just gone. There's no food noise. I'm not at a point where I'm like, Man, I'm really craving this. It's like, it almost, for me, is to a point like, oh, like, Okay, I gotta eat. Like, I'm if you just get to that where you're not, I don't crave carbs, I don't crave salt. I'm not craving sugar. Like, you I have clients too. They're like, you know, I used to go, I used to look at desserts. And I was like, man, like, I have to fight myself. It's now. I was like, I don't even look people like, I don't even look anymore. It's like, it's a yes, because you have certain cravings, right? You have cravings right? You have cravings for sugar, you have cravings for salt, you have cravings for fat, you have craving for protein. People, you have thirst as well. It's like when you meet your cravings. And I think this is also what separates things from an addiction. When you meet your craving, this is part of it, right? There's other things. But you meet your cravings, you're sated. It's like, I am not sitting here, like, Man, I'm jonesing for that pineapple juice later. It's like, okay, I'm gonna, I gotta eat again, you know? I'm gonna get eat again soon. Like, maybe I'm getting a little bit hungry, but that's it. And then I don't see cake or cookies or candy or whatever, and it's like, Man, I gotta have that bag of sour patch. I can't control myself. It like, completely goes out. It's like, Yeah, I'm gonna have some, you know, I'll have some dry goji berries. Maybe I'll some papaya for this meal. I have a little bit of juice, and I'm good to go like I'm you're not. You're not in this constant state. And I think again, once you give your body the resources and supplies that you need, it takes what it needs, and it goes from there. It's not this gluttonous machine that continues to just plow everything more and more and more in. I think we get this conflated perspective, because a you have the carnivore community, in the Keto community, where it's like, oh, you're a carb addict. Oh, you're just a whiny baby if you want to have more carbs, like you hear this from those fears over and over again, this like shaming process, and then on top of that, then they show pictures in their videos. It's like, fries and and a donut, and it's like, this is not what anybody's advocating. Is good food. Yeah, you are going to have like for those types of foods, they are engineered so that you crave them. They are filled with a variety of components, flavor additives, combinations of sugars and fats and stuff like this, so they create a high desire for those foods with very low satiety. But that's not the same thing when you're using some of the whole some of the whole foods. So I think this is really important to keep in perspective. And I, and I a lot of people are surprised when you switch over and you're like, Huh? I looked at a donut yesterday and I scoffed. And it's like, yeah. Like, once you have some good quality fruit and carbs and stuff like this, and your your diet is like, chocolate and mac nuts. I knew it was coming. It's like, Yeah, you don't, you don't really have a craving for the donut anymore. Just, it just goes away, like disappears.

Theresa Piela  1:14:10  
And people listening don't have to take our word for it. I think the experience of it and realizing, okay, there is some the body can balance itself out. And yeah, things really do feel a lot, feel, feel a lot more in tune when there's there aren't those maniacal cravings anymore because of starvation. All right, guys, let's close this one out here. Mike, where can people find you?

Mike Fave  1:14:35  
They can find me here on the bioenergetic view, as well as on my own YouTube channel, my faith and my website.

Theresa Piela  1:14:40  
Mikefabe.com, awesome. Jay. What about you?

Jay Feldman  1:14:45  
Yeah, listeners can head over to my website. Jay Feldman, wellness.com for tons of free resources. And of course, they can find me here on my YouTube channel and also on other social media, Instagram and everywhere

Theresa Piela  1:14:56  
else, awesome. And you can find me at livingroots wellness.com Com, living roots wellness on Instagram, and also my app, tapping with T. All right, everyone, thanks for tuning in today. We'll see you for the next one. You.