Jay Feldman  0:00  
They start to see some negative effects, whether it's lower thyroid, lower testosterone, higher stress hormones, higher blood glucose, especially in the morning, especially fasted, but sometimes you know increased A1C as well. And again, this is adaptive. This is the whole point of our stress systems. It's to say if we're not having good, high-quality fuel that allows us to function optimally, we need to turn down our metabolic rate. That's what lowering T3 does.

Mike Fave  0:24  
If you're frail, by the time you get to 50, 60, 70 years old, I don't think the autophagy is going to matter anymore.

Theresa Piela  0:31  
I'm just confused as to why are we so focused on autophagy? Like you hear about it all the time in the like longevity space, and it seems like the wrong focus.

Jay Feldman  0:43  
It almost sounds a little defensive, like a little combative, as if he's anticipating people pointing out that the thing that he recommended people do, you know, for many years he's now saying is actually causing some negative effects.

Theresa Piela  0:56  
Welcome to the Bioenergetic View. I'm your host Teresa Piella, joined as always by Jay Feldman and Mike Faith. Today we'll be talking about why Thomas Delauer changed his mind about intermittent fasting, which everyone seems to be doing. Whether intermittent fasting actually increases cortisol, whether longer fasts are needed to trigger autophagy, and what to do for optimal cortisol levels, and of course we're gonna close out the show with a success story and a Q and A. If we get there, we'll see what happens. So no, of course, is here. So okay, diving right into around the internet. So Delauer, thanks to you guys again. I am not very well versed in these fitness influencers, but it seems like they're kind of all making the rounds and kind of saying the same thing. And this first video, apparently, he's changed his mind after building a career on fasting and the importance of this rigid way of thinking about nutrition and diet. He's changed his mind, so let's let's start with this.

Thomas Delauer  2:12  
I used to be the biggest advocate of 16 eight fasting every single day, a tight eating window, and genuinely, I believed it was the optimal strategy, but I've changed my approach because the issue with daily 16 eight isn't the fasting itself. I still love fasting; it's what it can do to your cortisol rhythm when you do it every single morning for years and years and years. You're essentially training your body to wake up in a slightly stressed state day after day after day, and over time that flattens your circadian cortisol curve. So let's get into this. Here's what's happening hormonally when you do 16 eight every day. When you wake up, cortisol naturally peaks, and that's the cortisol awakening response. Totally normal. It gives you alertness, it gives you energy, but that peak is supposed to gradually decline through the day. And one of the signals that helps cortisol come down is food. When you eat, especially protein and carbs, which I'm not a big fan of having carbs in the morning, but this is just part of the deal. You signal to your HPA axis that resources are available, so cortisol can kind of stand down. When you skip breakfast every single day, that signal never comes in the morning. So cortisol stays elevated in the morning to keep blood glucose stable through gluconeogenesis, and these are stress-driven processes.

Theresa Piela  3:25  
Okay, Jay. So finally, we're starting to agree on some things here. What was your initial reaction watching him talk about his come to Jesus moment?

Jay Feldman  3:39  
Yeah, no, you're you're right. That was kind of the feeling. Was it was kind of like finally we're recognizing that this is stressful. That not eating is driving up like driving up stress physiologically, and as a result, we see this shift in cortisol rhythm or just general increase in cortisol. And I think that's the first kind of like most important piece when it comes to this sort of an intervention, whether it's intermittent fasting or low carb or keto, which he's a huge advocate of, or at least especially was in the past. He's talked a lot more about potential benefits of carbs recently, but in the past he was, you know, hardcore keto and intermittent fasting. And what's always left out of that recommendation from the get-go is anything about the stress that it causes physiologically, and instead it's all about these downstream outcomes. You know, it's if you fast, then you increase autophagy, which we'll talk about later. You know, you increase fat burning, insulin's lower, glucose is lower, so everything is good, and this is just a tool for burning more fat, losing more weight, reversing insulin resistance, and kind of like full stop. That's it. It's just beneficial. And then often what we see with the people who have been doing those things for a long time and recommending them for a long time is they start to see the outcomes not actually all align with that and. They start to see some negative effects, whether it's lower thyroid, lower testosterone, higher stress hormones, higher blood glucose, especially in the morning, especially fasted, but sometimes you know increased A1C as well. And then they start to dig in a little deeper and recognize that there's a huge stress component to these interventions, and the way that they're getting to so many of the supposedly positive outcomes, whether it's mitochondrial biogenesis or autophagy or mitophagy, and we'll talk a little bit about those. But the way that they're getting to those things is by inducing stress, and then the conversation starts to shift a little bit, and it seems like that's what we're seeing here. We'll also see that he's not saying that the stress is universally bad. He's kind of like recognizing that there's some negatives here, but he's just shifting the approach very slightly, which we'll see. But there are a couple of important things that he's noting here. So for one, it's great that he's recognizing the stress effects, the increase in cortisol. I think that that's a crucial part of the conversation. But then he makes it sound as though yes, this is inducing stress, but it's fine unless you're doing it every single day for years. You know, he's taking like the kind of most extreme example there and saying, oh yeah, well that's that's the problem. Like that's when it's bad. It's totally fine if you know as long as that's not the case. And maybe I'll leave it for the next the the next clip because he then talks about the studies looking at cortisol and fasting. And without giving too much away, I'll at least just say that the exact studies that he's citing are not saying that this takes years. They're saying that it happens after days, like just a few days of intermittent fasting, and you're seeing shifts in cortisol, and just a few weeks, and you're seeing other downstream effects that are clearly negative. So, you know, I think it's almost there's a little bit of like not only cope, but it's kind of like the just a half a step back. It's not fully walking back the perspective. It's just saying, yeah. I never really said that. If you do this way too much, it's bad. So just don't do it way too much, as opposed to actually recognizing the I think the truth of what's actually going on physiologically and the fact that what what you see happen after a longer period of time is still happening in a short period of time, just a little bit less intensely, and that's still a concern. That's still a problem. So, yeah, when he gets into the research, you know, we can like I'll I'll share a little bit more about that. But yeah, at least at the beginning here, we're seeing fasting is stressful, and at the very least, if you do it quote unquote way too much, that's bad.

But as we'll talk about, I think even doing it a little bit has some inherent negatives. Not to say that there's no positives either. Like people obviously have benefits from intermittent fasting. There's mostly benefits due to the gut aspects, gut effects, and also the fact that most people are eating foods that they don't that that aren't necessarily supportive of their physiology or supportive metabolically. And so, if you skip meals and basically avoid some of those bad foods that can lead to some benefits too. But we, as we'll talk about as well, when it comes to fasting, we can get those same benefits without the inherent costs and inherent stress that he's touching on here,

Theresa Piela  8:14  
which I think people will be interested in hearing because no one really wants to fast. I can't think of a single person that wants to give up one of the best things in life, delicious food, but they end up maybe when they're cornered and their health is so compromised. If you're

Jay Feldman  8:28  
dealing with low energy symptoms like chronic cravings and hunger, low energy or fatigue, joint pain, weight gain, digestive symptoms, brain fog, poor sleep, hormonal imbalances, or various low-energy chronic conditions like autoimmune conditions, insulin resistance, high blood pressure, hypothyroidism, or various other chronic health issues, then head over to jfeldmanwellness.com/energy to sign up for the free energy balance mini course, where I'll walk you through the best diet, exercise, and lifestyle strategies to resolve these low-energy symptoms and conditions. These strategies are all centered around how you can maximize your cellular energy. So again, to sign up for the free energy balance mini course, head over to jfeldmanwellness.com/energy.

Theresa Piela  9:13  
Mike, were you at all surprised to see him taking a step back? I know you've been following him for quite. Yeah, I'm

Mike Fave  9:20  
not surprised. Yeah, I I'm not surprised to see him take a step back. He's been like tacitly walking back multiple different dynamics that he previously supported much more strongly. Whether that's full blown ketogenic all the time, whether that's the fasting regimen, these different components. So I'm not surprised by this, and I think that it's good that he's coming out. He's actually acknowledging that there's impacts of fasting on the different hormonal systems. He doesn't direct like he talks mainly about cortisol, but there's also broad effects across the hormonal systems, which include the thyroid system, which include the the sex steroid system. So that's things like the. As well as the estrogens and progestergens in women, so the fasting in general signals a starvation state and then upregulates the hormones that help provide energy or fuel sources when you don't have the exogenous fuel sources coming in. And then when the body recognizes the state, it starts to downregulate metabolism and also starts to alter the sex steroid signaling across the board, whether that's adjusting LH pulsatility and adjusting the cycle, whether that's lowering androgens in men, or whether it's increasing sex hormone binding globulin, which impairs the action of the steroid hormones at the cells. So he doesn't get into all of that, but there's multiple things that happen, and I think fundamentally the most important thing for people to understand, from my perspective, is are there certain benefits to fasting? Yes, there are benefits to fasting. So, as Jay mentioned, is there benefits in terms of adjusting what's going on in the gut microbiome if you're dealing with issues? For example, somebody like Georges Saint Pierre underwent fasting after he was dealing with significant digestive issues, and it's one of the things that he, as mentioned, has helped him out significantly altogether. So if you're dealing with severe digestive issues and you fast, it can actually help. The other thing is people who are dealing with metabolic problems, type two diabetes, pre-diabetes, obesity, etc. Can fasting move the needle on your fasting insulin, on your fasting glucose, on your weight, all this type of stuff. 100% There's no argument that it that it doesn't do those things. It does do those things. However, what you need to get is the full perspective of what the intervention is that you're going to undergo. So that's where we've had this narrative for all these years that there like there's there's not really much talk about the downside. There's just this overwhelming pro perspective of fasting improves all these metabolic markers, and then now it's people are start who have undergone this fasting regimen. Because to be fair for Thomas, like I think he actually lives what he talks about. He, I think he legitimately did the fasting 16 eight for a number of years, and then he's trying to adjust the schedule because he actually ran into issues. And this is him coming out and making a video about the perspective coming from his own experience, so I think that's fair and I think that's fine. But it's just the I think it's people need to have that full perspective. So you can see improvements in what's going on in the GI tract if you have issues. And this is anecdotal. This is something that you see with people in general if they they just don't eat, and if you have digestive issues, you tend to feel a lot better. But then the other pieces, there are improvements in the metabolic markers, but largely when you compare it to caloric restriction or weight loss in general, on average they come out to be about the same. So whether you just lost weight overall or you actually you underwent caloric restriction, the fasting outcomes tend to be roughly the same. There are some improvements in some of the studies on some of the insulin signaling, they look at like HOMIR, which looks at insulin resistance, and essentially you see some improvements there. But it's hard to parse it out because you don't have the exposure to food. So yes, fasting insulin drops when you don't eat. Of course, that's what's supposed to happen. So it's not like you're maintaining a fasting insulin despite eating a normal cadence, which would indicate that insulin resistance is actually improved because you can take in the food process effectively without keeping insulin elevated. So there's some there's benefits there.

There's some caveats around those benefits, and then we have the downside. So I think the full picture is what needs to be understood. And this video still like it tacitly like says, hey, there's this impact on cortisol, but then it's like, oh well. If you just don't do it every day, then you're just gonna have the cortisol bump like four days a week. No big deal. And it, or maybe you won't have the cortisol bump. He doesn't specifically say it's kind of framed in this video that if you if you do it only a couple days a week, you won't have this like extended cortisol curve. But in the studies, you see that impact within like one to two days, so saying like, "Oh, I'm just going to do it four days a week, doesn't actually change that. Yeah, it still happens on the day that you do that fast, especially depending on how long that fast is, which we'll see here in a second how long he recommends. But basically, this is not like even though this is one step in the right direction to acknowledge the impact, it's still like I think not the not a full picture of saying like look like fasting has these negative downsides. It also has potential benefits. So you have to determine are those potential benefits of weight loss and whatever else worth this impact on your hormones? And it goes beyond cortisol, thyroid, steroid hormones, as well as glucocorticoid signaling. So that's the perspective. Now, when I'm thinking about this in terms of a client, there have been people who I have worked with where I put in a 16A window for them, and the reason why I've done that is because they had significant digestive issues, or they're in a circumstance where their their work schedule or their family life and then their eating habits were quite problematic. So we set up three meals a day, and then it just kind of worked out based on how those three meals were organized. That was in roughly an eight to 10 hour eating window, so that they didn't have too many gaps between their meals. So there's things where like you can use as a tool, but then the conversation with that person is, hey, like here's some of the potential downsides of doing this. Just something that I want you to keep in mind, and then kind of run from there. And usually, it's not a long-term strategy. Usually, it's a short-term strategy, given that particular context, and the person understands what the downsides are, and then what it takes to recover from them afterwards, which is shifting the diet and not having these these fasting windows.

Theresa Piela  15:13  
I'd be curious to hear more about that. Maybe we can circle back to that. Would now be a good time to talk about some of the ways that we can get the gut reset benefits without necessarily triggering triggering all of these stress cascades. Jay, is that something you want to touch on now, or maybe we can circle back after the next video?

Jay Feldman  15:33  
Yeah, let's save that because we're going to hear what Thomas recommends, and then we can talk about maybe what we would recommend instead. But there is something else that he talked about, which was how in the morning, and this is an important part. You were starting to touch on it, Mike, but explaining just the super basic physiology of why fasting induces stress, which is pretty straightforward. And so again, it's surprising that there's resistance to this. But our body runs on fuel; it needs that fuel to produce energy or ATP, and when there's a lack of energy at any point, then we upregulate our stress systems to release our stored fuel, so we can use that fuel to produce more energy. And the stress systems also, in addition to just releasing the fuel, they also stimulate the production of energy. Even if there are some problems going on, it'll kind of force that energy production, so we have energy to function. And so when we're fasting, we're skipping a meal, so we're not getting the fuel that we need. And so those stress systems activate to release fuel, and then allow for us to use that for energy. The other thing they do is they tend to shift us from using more carbohydrates toward using more fat, so that we can spare the incredibly important carbohydrates that we need, especially for our nervous system, and not you know break down all of our own muscle tissue and other lean mass to convert into glucose through gluconeogenesis. So that's the purpose of the stress. That's why fasting induces stress. It's a really great mechanism because it allows us to survive when we don't have food immediately available, and that's great. Like we've needed that throughout history. I mean, every animal needs a mechanism like that to some extent. But the question is, what are the downstream effects of that? Is that good for us physiologically, either in the short term or the long term? And how does our body interpret that signal? And so that's what we'll talk about here in a moment, but the other thing is he was mentioning how in the morning eating either protein or carbs will help the cortisol come down, and it was kind of interesting to hear him say that because I don't know exactly where he was coming up from coming up with that. I mean, there's not a ton of research comparing like different fuel sources in the morning and seeing the impacts on cortisol. Sometimes they'll compare different meals to each other, but not compared to fasting. So the research is kind of muddy there, and I think there's just some assumptions built in that maybe it's coming from the idea that both protein and carbohydrates are insulinogenic. They increase insulin, and insulin tends to oppose cortisol, and so which again is a really important concept that most people who are into fasting and low carb diets don't aren't aware of. Which is the fact that insulin and cortisol are in opposition to each other. So if your cortisol is high and you eat something that increases insulin, and especially something that increases blood sugar, it'll lower the cortisol, which again is a super fundamental idea to to recognize. But yeah, I don't know exactly where Thomas was coming up with this idea, and he even mentioned a little bit that he's not a fan of carbohydrates in the morning, which is he didn't explain why. But you know, I would say the morning is a really important time to get carbohydrates because they stimulate insulin better, they raise blood sugar better, which reduces the need for the stress hormones to a greater extent. So it does help to lower the stress hormones. Yeah, I would say that that's that's crucial. And also, we're incredibly insulin sensitive in the morning because we fasted throughout the night, like because we're low on fuel. So even if we do tend to be a little bit more insulin resistant, if we're struggling with that, normally the morning is a time when we do pretty well with carbs, and later in the day would be a time when we have to be a little bit more careful. So, not to say that we would restrict them, but we might need to be careful about you know whole food versus juice or something like that.

But in any case, I would say carbs are incredibly important in the morning for dropping that cortisol and protein. I'd be I wouldn't be as excited about because yes, it does stimulate insulin, but it also stimulates glucagon and further drives gluconeogenesis. And as Thomas Delaura was talking about, part of the reason for the cortisol in the morning is to drive gluconeogenesis, and so consuming protein isn't lowering that process. So anyway, it was just a small piece of what he mentioned that I thought was interesting to touch on.

Theresa Piela  19:43  
I was also curious about that, and I was wondering if he was speaking more anecdotally, just the fact that fueling himself and in a balanced way, and not you know spiking himself with just straight honey or something like that, but having a more balanced meal, maybe he did start to notice that. He felt less cortisol driven, or like kind of keyed up that some people tend to experience if they are prolonging their fast longer than their body wants them to.

Jay Feldman  20:11  
Yep, possibly.

Theresa Piela  20:12  
Just a thought, Mike. Anything to add before we listen to what the studies are showing?

Mike Fave  20:17  
No, I think we can get into the next clip.

Speaker 2  20:19  
Okay.

Speaker 1  20:20  
So if we look at a study in endocrinology metabolism, it looked at intermittent fasting and hormonal rhythms, and it found that fasting powerfully increases cortisol secretion, and it actually, more importantly, alters the timing of the circadian cortisol curve. And then, if we look at another study in Frontiers in Nutrition, it found that even a single day of fasting can increase that cortisol rhythm amplitude. Okay, which is fine. That helps us burn fat. That's good. But imagine doing that every morning for years. You're reprogramming your HPA axis to run hot.

Theresa Piela  20:51  
Okay. So he's waking up. He's like you said, Jay. One step back, but he's aware that this is not ideal. But you're right. There's still this murkiness in terms of well, what's the appropriate dose of stress that we can handle without it shifting the body into a less than ideal state? Is there how would you how do we even go about gaging that?

Jay Feldman  21:14  
Yeah, well, and as you said, there's the murkiness where it's like this is good for burning fat, right? We want to have this cortisol, but daily that's bad. So it's like, which is it? Is this like, is this a good thing or bad thing? Are you saying we don't always want to be burning fat? I mean, what is like? Where are we going with this? And I think it's again, we're still a step outside of I think a really like grounded foundational perspective of this, and still kind of looking at individual pieces and trying to put that picture together, but it's interesting because again, we're getting this narrative, which is if you do it every day, it's bad. If you do this every day for years, it's bad. With the assumption being, if you were doing it every day for a couple weeks, it'd be fine, or a couple months, or if you did it every other day, it'll be fine. Which ends up being basically what he suggests, and yet the research he's citing isn't showing that it's it's showing that immediately once you start fasting, cortisol is higher, and then it was showing studies where even four days of intermittent fasting or time restricted feeding, as they call it in the research, increased cortisol levels and shifted the cortisol rhythm, which is what he's saying is the bad thing. But it only was four days, like it only took four days to do that, and then of course that's not even looking at all of the other research that shows you know as Mike was touching on longer term fasting will lower testosterone, it'll lower t3, which is the active thyroid hormone, and again this is adaptive. This is the whole point of our stress systems. It's to say if we're not having good high quality fuel that allows us to function optimally. We need to turn down our metabolic rate. That's what lowering t3 does. You know, t3 is the active thyroid hormone that regulates our metabolic rate, and we also want to turn down our reproductive capacity by lowering something like testosterone because this isn't an ideal environment for that. So again, it's like an inching in the right direction, but I think still there's still like a an important gap, and it becomes even more clear when we then hear his suggestions.

Mike Fave  23:08  
I want to add here that the idea that cortisol is good because it helps burn fat, I think, is questionable. I mean, even in the paper that he he highlights the line, he shows the line, and basically this is known that increasing HPA axis activity, which is the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which is where you get secretion of cortisol, what you wind up seeing is increased deposition of visceral fat. So, the higher levels of cortisol you have in general, the more likely you are to deposit the fat that or deposit fat into the visceral compartment, which is even worse than if you were to deposit a large amount of body fat into the subcutaneous compartment. There's there's research looking at they have two different groups of people. They have metabolically obese, normal weight people. So these are your skinny fat people, and then they have the metabolically healthy obese people. So these are obese people who have normal metabolic function, and basically the only difference between them is where they deposit their fat tissue. So the skinny fat people deposit their fat tissue in the abdominal cavity, in the liver, in the pancreas, and in the muscle tissue, which directly impairs their insulin signaling, and it's a like a key risk factor or key progression towards diabetes at a certain point where the tissues are saturated with fatty acid metabolites, the insulin signaling just doesn't really work anymore, and you move into full-blown type two diabetes. And all that it takes to rectify that is to remove the fat from that tissue. Whereas with your metabolically healthy obese people, what you find is that their fat storage is in their subcutaneous compartment, and they can expand their subcutaneous compartment, which is a compartment under their skin, to very high levels, and they don't store in the visceral compartment and in the other tissues quite as quite as readily. And one of the key risk factors for this is HPA axis activity. So the higher the activity, the more likely you are to deposit into the visceral compartment. So you can. Say that cortisol is lipolytic, yes, but the known effect of cortisol in terms of like releasing fatty acids is it releases it from the subcutaneous compartment and induces a preferential storage in the visceral compartment. So chronically upregulating this this hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is not an ideal circumstance, and it's not necessarily net beneficial for the weight loss, the stress impact of this is actually what I would say a detrimental impact because the other thing is cortisol also tends to induce the breakdown of lean tissue, and in some of the longer term fasting experiments that people have done, even prominent people who have done fasting like Peter Atia have basically said, "Hey, I lost a lot of lean tissue doing this, so I stopped. So basically, you have that. This is not. This is a suboptimal mechanism to cite as a benefit for the fasting. The real benefit from it is for people who have metabolic dysfunction. It will basically allow them to lose weight and shift some metabolic markers. Or people have digestive issues that it can help to minimize their exposure to these food sources. But to cite cortisols, hey, it's fine that it rises here and there because it helps with fat loss. I think is questionable based on the mechanisms and what we understand around glucocorticoid signaling. And the other thing is, is there's studies so outside of cortisol showing that within a 20 like doing a 24 hour fast, there's a 55% drop in t3. So not only do you see an impact of cortisol within like a day, where the cortisol rhythm is higher in the morning and higher across the day, you also see the T3 levels drop. So this is like this is these are not these things happen very rapidly, and the impact of these things is not great overall. And I think when somebody is has a whole bunch of body weight to lose, and then they lose the body weight, and they see that from fasting. They see this this effect from fasting. It's like, yeah, a lot of your metabolic markers are going to get better. But at a certain point, what winds up happening is when you get you lost a decent amount of body weight, you're pretty lean. Like Thomas Lauer is pretty lean, pretty muscular.

I think it starts actually just become a net negative. Like there's just not like that. This metabolic benefit just isn't really there anymore, and then I also think you see that in people who are doing carnivore and keto and stuff like this with OMAD, where essentially they lose a bunch of weight, they see all these improvements in metabolic function. When they get to this certain this lean point, they've lost a considerable amount of weight. Then they start to run into issues from these things where the stress side of this stuff starts to really rear its head, and it reared its head along the way. It's just that you had metabolic improvements that were happening simultaneously, so they're kind of like there's like a crossover point where it's like okay, like you're really moving towards pure net negative at this point, and you're not really deriving whatever benefit you were achieving before, and then that's where you start to see fasting glucose goes up. Why is fasting glucose going up even though you're not eating, even though you've been fasting for quite some time, well, you're driving gluconeogenesis. So the stress hormones are peaking up enough that it's rising your it's raising your fasting glucose. Why are your glucose levels staying high across the day and your A1C starting to bump up as you're driving that stress cascade? And this is what you see happen, and especially these like hardcore keto, carnivore, OMAD type setups. OMAD being one meal all day. You start to see this shift, and it's like you're just really pushing that stress cascade. And then coming out of that is difficult for a lot of people. And that's the other thing that doesn't get discussed: is that if you do shift towards lowering thyroid function, lowering steroid hormones, upregulating the adrenal axises, and driving these stress pathways, well, then you got to dig yourself out of the hole afterwards, and so that's where it's like as soon as you start actually eating a normal amount of food intake again. Oh, I'm gaining weight, or my blood sugar is my blood sugar regulation is all wonky, or if you like have a really restricted diet, now I have digestive issues that I didn't have before. So again, you want to know what you're getting yourself into. You want to know before you buy what what's the downside of this thing? Is the foundation cracked? Is the does the roof leak? Like you want to know what this is, so you don't get in, and two years later you got to replace the whole roof. This is the these are the things to know. So there's long term bet. There are some benefits. There's not a down. I'm not. There's no negating that. The benefit is not by raising the HPA axis, and in long term, there is there are significant downsides because it drives up the stress process. So there is a trade off. There's a pro and a con to this dynamic, and that's again, I think it comes down to actually knowing that. So it's good that Thomas is describing these things, but it's still like just lay it out flat, man. Just lay it out flat for people, so it's like there's the stress hormone, there's impact on stress hormones, thyroid, and androgens. But if you're holding a bunch of body weight and you have metabolic dysfunction, you could see improvement in some of your markers doing this, and it does drive stress. Just something to for people to know in general.

Theresa Piela  29:36  
I was just gonna say if someone if they want to lose a bunch of lean muscle and maybe put on, you know, like a little bit of a beer belly type of a shape. This would be an amazing approach, especially if they stuck with it long term.

Mike Fave  29:50  
Depending on how they structured everything, there's a good chance that chronically under eating and driving HPA axis with this setup could lead to a circumstance where you make it easier. Store visceral fat, and you lose lean muscle tissue over time. Again, that's why you had prominent fasting proponents like Peter Tia reverse course on it, and basically say like, "Hey, like my I'm eating enough protein on resistance training, and I still lost lean tissue doing this this fasting regimen. I think he was doing three day fasts at quarterly or something like this, and then he was doing maybe 16 eight fasting during the during the week, and he still lost lean tissue despite doing things to not have that impact. Which long term, any supposed autophagy benefits, which Dave mentioned, we'll talk about. They, if you're frail, by the time you get to 50, 6070, years old. I don't think the autophagy is going to matter anymore. I think you're going to your your coordination is not going to be as good. You're not going to be as strong, and you're more likely to fall and injure yourself, and then wind up in the hospital with potentially long-term negative outcomes that could include death from getting pneumonia in the hospital, getting another infection in hospital because of frailty alone. That's going to be a larger net negative than the benefit of this supposed autophagy that we don't actually have good data on.

Theresa Piela  31:10  
Jay, before I interrupted you, what were you going to say? I

Jay Feldman  31:14  
was just going to tack on in terms of talking about the like benefits of intermittent fasting, and you know, as you were saying, Mike, there are clear benefits, and most of that's mediated by weight loss. A lot of it's mediated by the gut. But I just wanted to be really clear too that you don't have to intermittent fast to get those benefits. Like you can directly improve your gut health by you know doing direct interventions for that. We can adjust the diet. You can lose the body fat. Like there are other things that you can do to get the same benefits without the stress. So yes, we're acknowledging that a lot of people get benefits on intermittent fasting because that is the experience for a lot of people. But there's an inherent cost to that, and it doesn't have to be that way. And we're also especially trying to highlight what happens to most people long term. And normally in the beginning, people aren't recognizing that they aren't imagining that this is actually going to come back to bite them later on. So hopefully, we can help shortcut that a little bit for people. The other thing I wanted to talk about, Mike, you were talking a lot about visceral fat and the stress hormones, which I think is incredibly important to to note because the stress hormones are the main drivers of the storage of fat as visceral fat, and on top of that, we also have organ fat like liver fat, which is technically not a part of that visceral fat conversation. But you know, we did a whole series on fatty liver before, and what you find in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is that the fat is largely not coming from the diet; it's coming from our own fat stores, and it gets released when our stress hormones are high, which is the case. They're chronically high in insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease. So this is the same pathway that's causing you to store fat in your liver as well. And again, there's always that kind of shifted blame on on it's the fructose, or maybe some other people even would say it's the fat in the diet, but it's really stress hormone driven. And along with that, Mike, you were touching on the fact that you know there's this framing of fat burning as a good thing, as opposed to the recognition that in this case, let's say just looking at fatty liver, not only do you see upregulated stress hormones and increased fat deposition from the fat stores into the liver, but you also see increased fatty acid oxidation. You see more fat burning, which is the thing that's supposed to be good, and yet it's actually one of the main things driving the pathology. And when you introduce drugs or different pharmaceuticals, you know, in the studies to block or reduce the fat burning, it actually improves the state and reduces the fat storage, which I think is again very counterintuitive to people, but doing things to stop this stress cascade is crucial, and this stress cascade is a primary driver of metabolic syndrome in pretty much every chronic condition. So, yeah, I think it's more than questionable the idea that we want to be upregulating fat burning from this. And I think again, we're half a step away from you know first it's like, oh well, maybe the upregulation of fat burning from cortisol every single day isn't good, and hopefully we get to that point where it's like that's never something that is actually good in and of itself. Obviously, there's going to be things that increase cortisol and increase fat burning, and that's okay, but that's in and of itself isn't a good thing. And again, we always have to throw out examples like this, but obviously we understand that you know exercise is a stressor; it'll increase stress hormones, it'll increase fat oxidation, but that doesn't mean those are the things responsible for the benefits of the exercise. And that's the important distinction here that we're also trying to make when it comes to fasting.

Theresa Piela  34:35  
Yeah, really good points, and I think it helps people kind of step back and take a wider view, and not to just hyper focus on this one benefit that's obscuring the actual bigger dynamic of what's unfolding, which is you know part of the part of the the comedy of our wellness space. You know, there's one benefit and people just zoom in and lock in and they forget to really. Think bigger. So yeah, it's it's it's good to to slow down and and question for a little bit, understanding that there's going to be benefits, but is it worth it? And if stress is accumulating in so many other ways, is something like a an intentional fasting window worth it? If people really want to live a long life and and age well and have a body that isn't going to break when they fall down when they're 70 years old,

Jay Feldman  35:30  
yeah. Well, with that, let's hear what we should do instead.

Theresa Piela  35:34  
Let's see. Okay, what should we do instead? Okay,

Speaker 1  35:38  
stop thinking of fasting as a daily habit and think about it of the way that you should think about calories on a weekly basis. I've always thought of calories as look at your total calories over the course of a week, not over the course of a day. Your clock doesn't magically reset at midnight every night, so think about hey, I'm in a deficit or a surplus over the course of a week versus every day. If you do 16-eight fasting every day, that's 112 fasted hours per week, but you're hitting your cortisol with that same stress signal every morning. Now, what if you did three or four fasts per week that were 20 hours or 22 hours? You're looking 80 to 90 fasting hours per week, right? Now, it's slightly less fasting hours, but those longer fasts are where the real magic happens because between 18 and 20 hours, you're getting deeper autophagy, more significant insulin sensitization, and a genuine metabolic reset. So you're actually getting more optimal fasting hours throughout the course of that week. So stop thinking about fasting and calories as daily targets. Think weekly. I'm not contradicting myself here. We're talking about better ways to do things. So stop chronically restricting every morning and programming your cortisol and circadian rhythms to run hot fast, deeper, but less often.

Theresa Piela  36:50  
Deeper, but less often. Okay, so we know exactly what to do now. We can get the benefits lessen the amount of time that we're under this massive stress load. Jay, this is what you're promoting with your clients, right?

Jay Feldman  37:05  
Yes.

Theresa Piela  37:06  
Okay, you heard it here. You know where to find Jay if you want to work with him. Okay, let's let's break this down. What what is a better option here? This is clearly not the the best option, and why? I

Jay Feldman  37:21  
mean, first the first thing that jumps out at me here at the end is the "I'm not contradicting myself here" line. You know, we're it almost sounds a little defensive, like a little combative, as if he's anticipating people pointing out that the thing that he recommended people do, you know, for many years he's now saying is actually causing some negative effects, and I think it's you know we've talked about this in other circumstances as well, where people are maybe talking about the benefits of carbohydrates, or you know, Mike, as you were touching on with Peter Atia and his fasting, and it just always goes better if we're if people are upfront about that and why they're changing their mind, and and it's okay to change your mind. I mean, we again. There's caveats there, which is this is part of why it's important that we understand people's reasoning and think about that critically to try to avoid situations like that. But he he obviously like very directly recommended intermittent fasting. I believe daily. I mean, I never followed his his work that closely, so I mean I think he could have just said that he changed his mind or he's shifting his perspective. But again, the the other important note here is it's like such a minor change. We're not starting to say, oh, you know, we know that this fasting day, this fasting is stressful, intermittent fasting is stressful. So let's start to eat breakfast again. It's well, let's just still get the same fasting hours, but just you know, do them do longer periods of fasting, and even just on the surface, like the idea of he's basically saying like, yeah, intermittent fasting is so stressful. Like, imagine doing that every single day. That's so bad for you. It upregulates your HPA axis, your cortisol is thrown off. So instead, do it more intensely, but every other day, like even just logically on the surface, those that doesn't line up, you know. Even if it was the same, even if we were saying just intermittent fast every day, it's like so you're getting this negative impact every other day instead of daily. Like that still sounds bad, but in this case, we're saying also adding in a more intense stress through a longer fast every other day. I don't know where the idea is coming across that this would be better. And in the studies and the studies that are cited within the studies that he's cited here, they look at this. I mean, he was talking about 20 to 22 hour fast. So this is basically like a full day fast, right? We're talking basically 24 hour fasts. There's studies looking at alternate day fasting, where you're fasting for 24 hours every other day, and they show increases in cortisol. I mean, he already talked about how, of course, it increases the day of, but they show that even throughout the cortisol rhythm is disturbed. There's also studies showing that this lowers t3 after. Several weeks, and there's also studies looking at this long term as well for longer than six months. And this is important because a lot of people will say, "Yeah, your body just has to adapt and get used to it, and then the cortisol rises won't keep keep happening, or the t3 will come back to normal. But there are studies looking at alternate day fasting for longer than six months. People were doing it at least for six months, if not longer, and it still shows, you know, way lower t3 and all the other downstream effects that we would anticipate. So I don't see this being better at all. I also, you know, it's I think the idea of looking at this over the course of a week instead of daily is also circumventing like the important physiology of what's happening day to day in terms of deprivation. We talked about it before. There was that influencer who was talking about looking at calories weekly, as if there's no difference in effect if one day you have 4000 calories and another another day you have 1000. Like those things matter, and what that those calories are made up of. Like yes, you're not losing or gaining tons of body fat overnight, but all of these things are providing signals.

That's why, in this case, he's saying that it matters whether the fasting is all is like in three concentrated versions or three longer fasts versus seven shorter fasts. Like you can't equilibrate it based on what happens over the week, and he's what he's suggesting is directly in contradiction to that. So I think that that's just a like a conceptual fallacy that doesn't even align really with what he's suggesting here. And then he was talking about autophagy here, right? Yeah, he was saying you know with longer fast you get even more autophagy. And so just to touch on that briefly, I mean, Mike, you you kind of got into this where it's like we have this this like proxy marker that's supposed to be a good thing, and it's like you've lost lean mass, you've gained body fat, you're weak or whatever. The you know your thyroid's turned down, your testosterone's lower, but at least you triggered more autophagy, so you must be in a better health space. And it's like the conflation of autophagy with health, I think is is insane for so many reasons. I mean, just on the surface, you see increased autophagy in tons of different chronic conditions. So to assume that increased autophagy is generally better, I think, is you know just on the surface like misaligned with the physiology. But then, if you just think a little bit about it, I think it totally falls apart because autophagy is a cleanup process, and that cleanup process is triggered when there are things to clean up, and that happens when there's oxidative damage, when there's physiological stress. It leads to you know damage to proteins and DNA and damage to fats, and those kinds of things end up triggering autophagy. So, when something is directly triggering autophagy through those mechanisms, it's doing it because it's causing stress. And this is the case whether we're talking about fasting or low carb diets, which mimic fasting in a lot of ways, or resveratrol, you know, or a lot of the other kind of hormetic interventions, heavy metals, psychological stress, calorie restriction-like these things-all do increase the signals for autophagy by inducing oxidative stress, by inducing energy depletion, and to to think of this as a benefit, I think, is looking at it backward. You know, you're saying there's this buildup of of oxidative damage and stress over time. So the problem is that the cleanup processes must not be working, as opposed to the other side, which is why, like, maybe we want to address the fact that there's increased oxidative damage and stress, and maybe doing things to continue to increase that isn't the answer or the solution, especially if the autophagy process is already deranged, which does happen with with metabolic problems over time, it reminds me a little bit of the you know people talking about how on the sugar diet, because of the upregulation of FGF 21, you won't lose lean mass because FGF 21 helps to retain muscle mass and reduce like lean tissue breakdown and protein breakdown, and it's like just let's just take a second to look at what triggers FGF 21 in the first place on a low protein diet, and you find that it's it is a protein deficiency. It's the body sensing that there's not enough protein, not enough building blocks to maintain lean mass, so there's you're starting off with this like net negative of protein balance and and lean mass balance, and then you trigger the adaptive response to try to prevent excessive loss of lean mass, and it's like saying yeah I want to I want to maintain lean mass or I want to gain muscle, so increasing FGF 21 is the solution. So I'm going to go on a low protein diet. Like that's what we're saying here. It's I want to increase, like I want to minimize the amount of damaged proteins. Let's say, and so I'm going to damage more proteins to try to trigger more autophagy. Which, yeah. I think it's just a totally backward way of thinking, and we see any like the damaged protein itself already triggers the autophagy. So if there was damaged proteins there sitting around to be cleaned up, the process would already have been triggered.

And normally the limitations are not a lack of signaling; it's that the signaling is interfered with because of a lack of energy, like low ATP will interfere with autophagy. Low thyroid function interfered with mitochondria. You know, those are the kinds of things that'll prevent autophagy from functioning when there's damage. That's why you see accumulation of damaged proteins over time and in chronic disease processes, despite increased signaling for autophagy. It's not because of a lack of signaling; it's because of the underlying metabolic issues. So, yeah, that's that's my autophagy, right? Yeah,

Theresa Piela  45:49  
just it seems kind of funny because stress itself is going to damage the body more, and then we're trying to stress it out even more to then clean it up. It's just total chaos. And Mike, I'm curious from your perspective, what are your thoughts on the idea of okay, fasting every day is stressful, so let's just do longer fasts, make it even more stressful. Have you looked into the research talking about what that that would do long term?

Mike Fave  46:19  
Basically, regardless of whether you do 16 hour, 24 hour fast, or even if you go longer fasting, it's still all stressful. Does like and the the stress gets worse in longer fasts. There's not we don't have good comparison studies right now to say like what's the difference between 24 hours and 16 hours. Like they haven't. I don't think there's a lot of studies that go head to head versus some of the longer ones, but regardless, you still see the same general patterns. And in some of the longer fasting studies, you see potentially worse effects. Like some there's studies I was looking at for fasting a while back. You saw on multi multi day fasts, and you see significant lean mass loss. So regardless, the effects are the same. There's a likely a graded effect across the the longer time frames for the fasting in terms of their impacts on stress hormones, lean tissue loss, etc. So I don't this I think that like trying to frame it as well we're going to do less fast but do them deeper that that's better. I don't think that there's like evidence for that statement, and and especially given that even within the day you would see changes towards the stress pathway. So doing these longer, deeper fasts isn't-it's hard to make a true argument and say that's inherently less stressful than doing 16 eight every day. And even regardless, even regardless that you say if it's less stressful, it's still stressful. We're be talking about on the margin. So I think it's-it's almost like a like it's there's nothing really being said here. There's no there for me. It's like fasting has a stressful impact. Whether you do longer fasts and you do them alternate day, or you do 16 eight every day, there's still going to be a stress impact. There's still going to be impact on thyroid. They see that in the in the studies even within 24 hours. There's still going to be impact on cortisol. They see that even within within days and day to a day with the fasting inside the research, and there's still an impact on sex steroids and whatnot. So all of that still stays the same, whether one is slightly less than the other. It's like I think we're getting to some degree of a moot point here between the different fasting sources because you still see the same impact. And then again, like the benefits, then the claimed benefits of well, if you do these longer fasts, you these deeper fasts, you get these other these these other benefits that are that are just better. The autophagy one, even like even before we get to what Jay was saying about it, the way that they measure it in the studies and the markers that they look at and the research that we have right now, it's not really clear how much autophagy actually goes on across the human body with with the fasting because they basically use a some of the studies that I looked at use a marker from white blood cells to see if the if autophagy was stimulated. So the autophagy benefit, while we see it in some of the animal research and human research, it's it's hard to measure. It's very invasive to actually measure it correctly. So they use these proxy markers, and the data is mixed. So it's not clear you can come out and say, oh, if you fast longer, you're just going to get more autophagy off the bat from the the human research that we have, so that benefit we can kind of table because it's not really clear. And then when we start to talk about the the the metabolic reset, I don't even know what that means. I don't know what the metabolic reset is. It's not like something that you that you can tangibly measure a metabolic reset, so that's not defined. And the last piece we have is insulin sensitization. So for the insulin sensitization, the question is: Are you becoming more insulin sensitive, or do you not have anything stimulating insulin because you are not eating? And I would say, arguably, the insulin levels are dropping because you are not eating. You're not eating. You're not eating carbohydrates. You don't. The insulin signaling is going to drop off. So to claim that that's an improvement in insulin sensitivity is slightly questionable.

And yes, you could use a marker like a home IR to measure insulin sensitivity, but you have to be careful. The formula for home IR takes your fasting blood glucose value, divides it by 405 and multiplies it by your insulin value. So if your insulin value gets lower because you're not eating, you can see an improvement in your home IR. But that's a that's kind of a more abstract metric of your insulin sensitivity. So I would say, yeah, you can see improvements in that. But is it because the cells are now responding to insulin better, or is just insulin lower because you don't have anything that's signaling insulin production? And in early fasting without significant weight loss yet, I would argue that it is likely just a lack of function of not eating. And then as you lose weight, whether you're like whether you're fasting or not, as body fat comes down, as the fatty acid metabolites, ceramides, diglycerils are cleared from the from the muscle tissue, from the liver tissue, from the pancreas. Insulin sensitivity will be improved. Whether you did that with exercise, whether you do that with fasting, whether you do that with calorie restriction, whether you do that with medication, all of them are going to improve insulin sensitivity because you are clearing out the fatty acid metabolites and the dysfunction of the cell that is actually driving the insulin resistance in the first place. So it's it's like it's not this magical thing that fasting does. It's like any intervention that removes this these blocks on the system is going to improve insulin sensitivity, but early on in fasting, within the first couple days, you see insulin levels drop. It's just because you're not eating. It's not because you've lost a significant amount of weight and cleared this stuff, cleared all of these these metabolites out fully yet. So that's so the the this deeper fasting perspective for me doesn't like nothing has really changed. There's still a stress with it. It's arguable whether it provides these benefits or that it's less stressful than the other regimen. And it, I don't know. It just seems like this like half step into recognizing that fasting is somewhat stressful. And I just I'm curious to see the next video. Well, maybe we should just do fasting like once a week, so that we have six days where stress is low, and then we have one day where we have this stress, and we'll give our bodies more time to recover, and then kind of go from there. Instead of again, let's just like put the cards out on the table. When you do fasting, you'll lose weight. You have gut issues. It'll help to resolve it. That'll improve your metabolic markers. But there's these these there's potential side effects from fasting that involve the different stress pathways. The autophagy piece we don't really fully know yet. We don't have good data on it. Requires a lot of invasive testing to actually see what's going on autophagy across the body, relying on proxy metrics and the data is mixed. So like I'm not going to sit here and claim like that is the benefit. I so that would be, I think, a fair perspective or a fair take on this. Obviously, I have a bias towards I think fasting is stressful, but in general, that would I think is like a relatively objective take on what we know right now in terms of how this stuff works.

Theresa Piela  53:16  
And you even mentioned some interventions that if people are interested in autophagy and mitophagy that are less stressful. The most classic one probably being exercise that comes with a lot of benefits, assuming that people aren't overdoing it. Is are there other ways that we can support the body to clean up without hijacking the stress systems, Jay. What would what would you recommend? Or one thing I want to mention,

Mike Fave  53:44  
Teresa, before

Speaker 1  53:45  
you

Mike Fave  53:45  
pass the baton to Jay, is that the benefits there is not even from the exercise piece that I was mentioning. Isn't even from autophagy. The benefit there is that when you undergo different forms of exercise. So in some of these examples, it's just like like cardio exercise, what happens with that is that it's not it's not the upregulation of autophagy; it's the elimination of the metabolites that are in support in the cell that are impairing insulin signaling and cellular metabolism. The exercise helps the cell to process and clear those things out. It's not even driving autophagy that does that, so that's that's really what you're seeing is that when what happens is when you have the if you have the pink, there's the key tissues where you see what's called ectopic lipid distribution or deposition is the heart, the pancreas, the liver, and then the muscle tissue, and then visceral. The visceral tissue is it's not it's kind not really ectopic, but kind of. It's not like in these different. You do get fat storage there, but it's not in those organs. But essentially, that's where you get this the fat stored that drives this metabolic dysfunction. And what winds up happening is the exercise, caloric restriction, fasting basically remove the pressure on the system. Because you're not dumping in more substrate when the system can't handle it, and then it's allowing the system to clear it out. That's really the benefit. That's outside of autophagy. That's just removing the block and it the the fat. It's not even that like you can see fat inside the tissues, but you get certain fatty acid metabolites. The main ones being ceramides and diglycerides or diglycerols, those directly block insulin signaling. They directly impair the cell's ability to respond to to insulin. And as as soon as they're removed, the insulin signaling in a lot in a decent portion of studies drastically improves. And then in you can see in some of the studies that pancreatic fat content because you don't really want that much fat in your pancreas. Your pancreas isn't really supposed to store large volumes of fat. It's really supposed to be in the other tissue. As soon as that starts to drop, you start to see insulin production, beta cell function improve drastically. As long as beta cells haven't, there's a paper that I was looking at the other day. As long as beta cells haven't actually like completely declined. If the person loses enough weight and clears the fat out of the pancreas and liver, they can put diabetes in complete remission just from clearing that out in a certain in certain types of diabetes, like type two diabetes specifically. So that's more what that's more what I'm referring to with those other strategies, and they're not to drive autophagy. It's really just to remove some of the blocks the on metabolism and on insulin signaling.

Theresa Piela  56:28  
So, would you argue that our focus on autophagy is not the right way to think about helping the body clear things? We want to think more about like almost like this like healthier, less stressful cellular detox that's happening when we're moving or eating eating foods in a maybe not overeating foods, eating the amount of calories we need or a slight deficit. I'm I'm just confused as to why are we so focused on autophagy? Like you hear about it all the time in the like longevity space, and it seems like the wrong focus.

Mike Fave  57:08  
Well, I mean, there's animal models that show these, like in C. elegans or in yeasts and stuff like this. When you upregulate some of these different pathways, you see changes in lifespan. So it started there, and then it's been extrapolated out to other animal models, mice, primates, and then also to humans. And so then there's this focus on it. But as far as like actual tangible, immediate metabolic outcomes and improvements, it's not like the autophagy is not really the focus again, because in humans we don't have as much data on it, and then well, there's differences in metabolism and what goes on in these other models when you start to induce some of these pathways and how they're induced and what's actually going on compared to what actually happens with humans. So we don't have good human data on it. It's difficult to actually test to see these markers moving, and there's just extrapolation of this coming from some of these other these other models that may or may not be applicable to humans, and I think that's where you see this focus. And it's large because oh, if you take if you take C. elegans and you you upregulate autophagy and you upregulate sirtuins, whatever, it lives X percentage longer. And then it's like oh, so we do the same things in humans, then it will be the same. That's a very large logical leap, and I think that's where this stuff is actually originating from. And then the like other stuff that happens with fasting, like the insulin sensitivity improvements and whatnot, get thrown in there. Man, I think for my focus, insulin insulin sensitivity, clearing out excess body fat and improving overall metabolic markers in that sense, like that would be the thing to focus on, and then also weighing that against what's going on with the the hormonal systems, the thyroid system, the glucocorticoids, the androgens, the estrogens, progestogens, etc. Like what's going on with the the cycle for a woman? Those things are like the the downsides and the potential metabolic improvements from clearing these things out is the upsides, and the question is how is there a strategy that you can implement that doesn't drive the same level of stress but still clears these things out? And the question, the answer is yes, there are strategies that you can do that drastically improve things without necessarily having to go to deeper fasting regimens with a focus on autophagy that you know again like is a is a question right now.

Theresa Piela  59:26  
Okay, yeah, thank you, thank you. Because I've always wondered that it seems like we just are so hyper focused and then we get lost. Jay, did you want to touch on mitophagy a little bit and and ways to do that in a less stressful way.

Jay Feldman  59:43  
Yeah, and again, I mean, I think I'm glad that you're asking these questions, Teresa, because it's. I think sometimes the like it's easy to get lost. It gets technical, and and you know, especially when we're talking about like research between different organisms, and there's major conflation that happens. Where it's like there was lifespan extension and there was increased autophagy, so the autophagy must have caused it. And if they block the autophagy, that led to worse outcomes. So it must be the autophagy, and because of that, anything that increases autophagy must be good. And it requires like picking all of these assumptions apart because there's just major, major conflation going on where it's like, just as a brief example, you know, they say, okay, well, calorie restriction extends lifespan. Let's say in rodents, and so anything else that the calorie restriction did as a as a as an outcome must have been a good thing, like autophagy. But then when you break apart the study, it wasn't that the calorie restriction actually extended lifespan. It was that the rodents they compared it to were fed ad libitum, so they just had a shorter lifespan. So what we're assuming was leading to a benefit wasn't actually leading to a benefit at all. Or what an alternative finding, which again, depending on the research, there's so much of this. It wasn't actually about the calorie restriction. If they ate the same number of calories as the control animals, but they just had methionine restriction. Then they had the same benefits, and so yes, along with the calorie restriction, you had all these other pathways being activated. But it wasn't about that. It was just as long as the methionine wasn't there in excess, then you have the same benefits for lifespan extension. So you have all these people restricting calories when really wasn't about the calories at all, and then again taking the research where they block autophagy, it's like you could block any number of important pathways and see negative effects, and does mean that that pathway was responsible for the benefits. It just means that it's an important pathway in general. So you you just have like it gets very murky, and there's a lot of assumptions that get built upon, you know, over decades of research, and they're just citing the conclusion of a prior study, and it it just gets really messy. But then again, we've gotten to this point where it's like this assumption that autophagy is good, and then this other assumption that anything that increases autophagy is good. And another example I was thinking about that maybe will help drive this home a little better is if we think about like heavy metal detoxification. So if we want to say like detoxifying heavy metals is a good thing, I think that's fair. In the same way that it's like cleaning up damaged proteins is a good thing. That's what autophagy does. Like that's that's a good thing. And if somebody has like excess heavy metals or excess damaged proteins, then and they also have impairments in that detox pathway, then that's a bad thing, right? We want to be able to clear those out. Well, one of the ways that you can stimulate heavy metal detox is by exposing yourself to heavy metals. If you get exposed to mercury, if you take in mercury, our body recognizes that that's toxic, that's bad, and it upregulates the pathways to clear it. So someone might say, "Well, if you have heavy metal, like heavy metal issues, if you have accumulated heavy metals, you need to stimulate your detox pathways by, you know, taking a supplement with some arsenic and and mercury in there. And this is actually something that has been suggested by certain hormesis researchers that heavy metals are actually beneficial because they stimulate these detox pathways, and so that's what people are saying with autophagy. It's like you, over time, when someone's unhealthy and they're aging, you see increased damaged proteins, and oftentimes you see that the detoxification pathways aren't working optimally, so let's damage more proteins to get that pathway working better and clear out the damaged proteins that are already there.

Like those two things aren't adding up at all, and so the idea of trying to increase autophagy with fasting is that it's saying let's damage more proteins and induce more oxidative stress and energy depletion so that we clear them out better. So that's really I think where the the disconnect is with people is is not recognizing those details, and I and I think it's also it's also why it's important not like to understand the mechanisms, and obviously sometimes we dig into those a little bit, and it's like here you know we spent an hour talking about what's going on mechanistically with fasting, and someone might say, "Well, I fast and I feel better, so why does any of that matter? Like, stop, stop with all the science and the research and the physiology. And it's like, "Well, this is we're doing this to try to help prevent you from making a mistake based on some short-term benefit or based on some endpoint that's seen in the research for increasing autophagy and trying to help people from getting swept up in that, and and yeah, I think it's like really pervasive when it comes to this idea of just wanting to increase autophagy and that leading to improvements in lifespan or health.

Mike Fave  1:04:33  
Yeah, and even I would say too, if somebody said I fast and I feel better, like I've I've had clients tell me that like I feel better when I when I do the fast, it's like okay, so maybe don't do a three-day fast. If you're like, let's just go like just adjust it a little bit. Make sure you have enough protein. Make sure you're getting resistance training. You're eating well, and you're in the window that you eat, and don't have this like very long fasting on a regular basis. Like do that first step and see if you. Can accrue the benefits, or some people say, "Well, I don't really like eating in the morning. So, okay, what if you just had some fruit in the morning, and then you had started and had your first meal, and after you had lunch at 12, then you ate again at four, and you ate again at eight. So you you still have like the morning, you still going till 12, and you just have fruit because you get better mental clarity. Whatever the thing is, a lot of people experience that with sugar diet or fruit till noon, or whatever these different diets are, and then afterwards, like just make sure then for the rest of the day that you're eating enough, you're eating adequate micronutrients, adequate protein, and then you keep track of what's going on with your body composition because it's like, look, I'm not. You don't deny to anybody like you feel better doing that. It's like fair game, but there are potential downsides to doing this, so a let's offset them, and then b if that's your decision here, like here's what to look at on a on a continual basis. Here's what to check in on and see how things are going, and here's the things that you can look out for in terms of symptoms that that you may run into long term, because that's the other thing that I don't think people fully understand with some of this stuff is that there's an initial effect, there's a medium effect, and then there's a long-term effect, and it depends on what context you're coming from. If you're coming from a circumstance where you have significant metabolic dysfunction, digest fish use, and you have a lot of weight to lose, and you go fasting, it's like, man, I feel so much better, and then you are also eating like a pretty poor diet. It's like, of course you will. I'm no one. No one is going to argue that. But the question, the thing is, like, what happens when you get to these other stages? What happens in these time frames after this initial period of time of this particular benefit? Are you accruing any types of problems in this initial phase, even though you feel better overall? Those are the things to consider. So it's like, if you have the full picture, then you can you can make a rational, logical decision and put strategies in place to help minimize downsides long term for the intervention that you're deciding to run, and then and then go from there. That for me, that's my goal. It's not for me to like and tell somebody that they have to do things this way because it's the only way to do it. There's multiple ways. There's hundreds of ways to skin the cat with some of this stuff, but the biggest thing is like you understand when you're making a decision, what are the pros and the cons on either side, so you can make a decision that doesn't lead to a long-term negative outcome. And that's a from seeing hundreds and hundreds of clients have this particular problem. B doing it myself and going through this myself, and then see looking through the research papers and being like, "Man, I wish I knew this before, before I did all this stuff. I wouldn't have these have these problems if I didn't do that stuff before. I would say half of my own health problems were self-induced by hooking on to some particular little reductionistic pathway, and there's all these benefits, and then adjusting my lifestyle to try to optimize things, and then getting a negative outcome because I didn't have the full picture when I made the decision. For me, that's what I think. You know, everyone's adults; they make their own choices.

They get to decide what works for them and what they want to do best, and I respect that entirely. But just be informed on what the potential outcomes are before you do the thing that you're going to do, such you can say like, okay, this is what I need to look out for. This is this is the potential benefits. These are potential cons. This is what happens at these different time points, so that you don't come back down the line a year later in the comments section say, man, my gut is so messed up after carnivore. I have all these histamine problems. I can't digest any foods. What do I do? Because like it's the easiest thing is to not even get there. Don't even get there. You don't want to be there. It's the bad place to be. It's better just not do it in the first place. And you can still have your steaks and your animal-based foods, but maybe keep some fibers in there and some carbohydrates in there, so that you don't run into some of these longer-term problems down the road, and and then and then adjust. So for me, that's that's how I think about this stuff. That's how I present it with with people that I work with, and then that's the you know I think that's the fundamental goal in general for the content. Is like here's the here's the perspective as much as I understand and know that I can provide you, so you can make your own decisions and and understand what you're getting yourself into.

Theresa Piela  1:09:06  
Absolutely, and I like I like the context of fine tuning and adjusting given where someone is at, because most people are probably not satisfied or happy with where they're at, and they'd like to eat freely, but maybe their body, yeah, they feel incredibly fatigued or even sick if they eat breakfast. So I like, I love the reminder that we can think about supporting the body right now with a long term goal of continuing to move towards greater function and health. And if that means having fruit in the morning and doing like a pseudo fast until noon, like you said, that could be a great way to mitigate what would otherwise be a very stressful, you know, a stressful fast, just supporting the body a little bit without overburdening the digestive tract. All the all the things that we can fine tune, tweak.

Mike Fave  1:09:58  
Yeah, you need you don't need to take the full. You can take a bunch of small steps to move to a place, and then you can see at each step how you feel, and then determine what's going to work best for you instead of having to like go from zero to 60 real fast. That also creates problem in my experience. You start if you're fasting, you're not eating anything, and then all of a sudden you're eating one meal a day, and then now you go to four meals a day. You doubled your caloric intake right away. It's like a lot of people are going to run into problems with that from a digestive standpoint. Maybe potential rapid weight gain because things in the body are going to take time to shift. So I'd say a gradual evolutionary process, rather than like a revolutionary adjustment, tends to go better, tends to have a better outcome, and I think works better for people because you don't have to overhaul your whole lifestyle from what you're doing. You just make a a shift, see how it goes. Make another shift, see how it goes, and you do it in a sequential fashion so that you can and you can avoid the fear-based thinking and such. You can move there in a progressive way and adjust as you go to what works for you. Because that's the other thing is a lot of people I think have fear out of moving out of these different camps because if you eat, if you don't fast, if you don't restrict carbs, if you don't, you know, if you don't always run a deficit, you're gonna run in, you're gonna get fat, you're gonna get diabetic, you're gonna have fatty liver, you're gonna all of these different dynamics, and I think part of it is that you have to see that oh, if you have carbs, like you're not going to be a diabetic, you're not going to get fatty liver, you're not going to run to these problems, and there these interventions are reversible. So you can take one step, and if you don't like that step, you can either take another step in another direction, or you can always step back. It's not really a big deal for for most of these things. That's another reason why I think going in a sequential fashion is is better.

Theresa Piela  1:11:40  
And it really, it really does come down to the small steps. People often think, you know, they need to overhaul their life, like you mentioned. When really, it's like the daily, consistent, basic, boring things that actually move the needle. I mean, not boring, but yeah, it's not fancy or trendy. And the fitness influencers are definitely not talking about some of the most basic things, Jay. Do you have anything to add here?

Jay Feldman  1:12:08  
Yeah, I just wanted to to tack on. You know, Mike, you were making a good point. Like, if somebody is saying like, "Well, I feel better with fasting, on one hand, yes, like we can. There are ways that we can adjust it to reduce the stress, but also the first thing I'm thinking, if someone comes to me saying that and they're saying, "I started fasting because I had joint pain and I had bloating and low energy and brain fog, and now all those things are a lot better, or my autoimmune condition is better managed, I think an important piece, and again, part of why we want to touch on the physiology here is that means something. That indicates something about our physiology that we can then take, you know, really important steps to resolve. And first and foremost, like the biggest thing is likely there's some major endotoxin issues, some major digestive issues, and we can improve that by at least at first just really reducing foods that feed bacteria, you know, reducing the fermentable foods, and that can lead to major, major relief. And for some people, we might have to be really careful about the types of foods that fall into that category, and it can vary from individual to individual. But we can get those same benefits, and you can feel just as good while eating. And I think that's an important barometer too. You know, when someone's coming from low carb or they're coming from fasting, we should be feeling just as good, you know, if you had a lot of relief from inflammatory symptoms and things like that. We should be feeling just as good while eating throughout the day and eating carbs. And if we don't, that tells us that there's either an issue metabolizing the carbs or really often some gut issues. And of course, we want to feel that good and then also have the underlying, like long term benefits as well of not having downregulated thyroid activity and not having downregulated reproductive activity, and those are all absolutely things that we can do. And and it's just, you know, oftentimes in the middle there's a little bit of trial and error, and also just you know a little bit of of building that understanding, a little bit of experimentation, and then sometimes there's also, you know, the direct addressing of the microbiome, whether it's with different antimicrobials or supporting bile flow or you know whatever issues there might be. So I just wanted to throw that out there. If somebody is looking for some some next steps here, and yeah, if they are feeling a lot better with fasting, and keep in mind that the goal, like that's that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just telling us some important information. It's a really important indicator.

Theresa Piela  1:14:27  
Yeah, and I can personally attest that when I was trying to transition off of carnivore, bod maps and fibers were so problematic. But then finding that you know I still wanted to add carbs back in, I knew how important it was. I was craving it. I needed the energy, and finding a middle ground with meat and rice, and letting that be kind of my stepping stone to then build up my FODMAP tolerance while getting my microbiome back in a better, better state. So yeah, there are ways to do it that you can just. Work with what the body's telling you and adjust, like you both are saying. Adjust accordingly. Listen and give it time. Speaking of time, we are running out of time, so we are going to close the show with a success story win from Chinpaklava. Chin Chinpaklavo. Chinpaklavo. Listen to me. I did the vegan OMAD diet, no meat whatsoever, only plants. Almost went crazy. I did it like three months after recovering from that extreme diet. I tried strict carnivore, only butter, eggs, and meat. I almost died. I just did it for a month. I'll never again try one of these extreme diets. Now I understand that we need balance in our diets. I am slowly recovering from those two almost fatal mistakes. Now I eat everything, as long as it's whole food, still lean, and I'm 48 years old. No more crazy, stupid fad diets. Like everything in life, we need balance. Yes, we do, and I'm glad that you know. Sometimes it does take contrast, doing the extremes, to come back to a place of realizing that there is somewhere in the middle that feels better, works better, lines up with our physiology, lines up with our intuition. It doesn't have to be more stress and more forcing to get what we're all after, which is probably more energy, more time to do things we love, more time to create and connect and help people. Mike, anything to comment on here?

Mike Fave  1:16:35  
No, I agree with you 100% Teresa.

Theresa Piela  1:16:39  
Jay, any wise words for Chick Blackblom?

Jay Feldman  1:16:45  
No, I'm with you too, Teresa. I mean, I think it's yeah. I you know, of course, this was a little bit relevant here with having tried Omad and Carnivore and and a lot of the kind of extreme approaches, and I'm glad that this was something that didn't last that long for this person because, as each of us have experienced and done personally, sometimes when things aren't working well, but we're really bought into what is supposed to do, you end up doubling down and doing that again and again, and normally digging the hole deeper. So, yeah, I'm glad that that this person was able to listen to their body and and get out before it got too bad.

Theresa Piela  1:17:23  
Likewise, well, let's wrap it up here, Mike. Where can people find you?

Mike Fave  1:17:30  
They can find me at my YouTube channel, Mike Fave, as well as at my website, mikefave.com.

Theresa Piela  1:17:36  
Jay,

Jay Feldman  1:17:37  
my website is jfeldmanwellness.com, and on YouTube, Jay Feldman Wellness, and other social media, also J Feldman Wellness or at J F Wellness.

Theresa Piela  1:17:47  
Awesome! And I'm switching over to Teresapiella.com. Also at Teresapiella on Living Roots. Actually, on Instagram, no more Living Roots Wellness that has died. And if you have been following me for the tapping videos. Those are all up on my website, and we'll have an app back up by the end of the summer. Fingers crossed! Awesome. Thanks for tuning in, everyone. We will see you for the next episode.