Transcript:

Welcome, welcome, welcome. It’s just Dr. Pompa today. I shouldn’t say just. It’s only Dr. Pompa today. Maybe that’s not even the best word, but hey, I’ve got a great message for you today, though. We have done so many shows on Health Hunters Radio and Cellular Healing TV about fasting, about ketosis, intermittent fasting, right?

If you’ve followed me for any amount of time, you’ve heard me discuss those topics and even talk about how they’ve transformed not just my life and health but my wife’s as well, which brings me to today’s topic, because there are many people who will say women can’t fast, do ketosis, or even daily intermittent fast, and it’s not good for them, or people who have thyroid, hypothyroid, adrenal issues, shouldn’t fast, shouldn’t daily intermittent fast, do low-carb diets. Can women do low-carb diets, ketosis, fasting, intermittent fasting? Adrenal people? Thyroid people?

The answer is many of them struggle to do it. However, when we look at the ancient cultures, we say, wait a minute, the women did it then, so what’s going on today? All right, so maybe we have more thyroid and adrenal problems, but they’re still women. They were doing it, so can women do these low-carb diets? Can they fast, intermittent fast, do ketosis, all these things?

Look, I think the answer lies in something I call diet variation or feast/famine cycles. I don’t know if you’ve heard me talk about this on some other shows, but even if you did, you may not have related it to this topic that’s so hot right now. I’m telling you, right now, ketosis is hot, and low-carb diets and paleo diets, all of it, right? Intermittent fasting. Gosh, I’ve been doing this for almost six years, but probably most of you just heard about it maybe in the last year or two. I don’t know, but it’s hot right now, but again, I think what people are finding out and why these things get put on the internet is that women do have, oftentimes, more trouble in ketosis. Women do have more trouble fasting or intermittent fasting. Maybe there is truth to it, right?

Of course, thyroid and adrenal people, if y’all could speak up, you would say, well, gosh, I struggle even getting in ketosis. I struggle. I feel worse. This happens. That happens. Fasting? Forget it. Fear not. When you work with many, many doctors, and we work with thousands of patients, we figure out what works, so for you listening, if you’re in that group, this show’s for you. If you’re not in that group, this show’s still for you, because you know everyone in that group, so you’re going to tell them to watch this show and share this show, because this is a show really that—it is transformative for those people in that category that I mentioned, and I’ll tell you what, this is a really fun topic for me, because I’m really passionate about this.

Again, it’s hard to find these things in studies, so it’s not like you can dig around in there, but clinical experience will tell you, and again, some people’s clinical experience will lead to them saying you can’t have a thyroid or adrenal issue and fast, because that’s what they’ve experienced, and I appreciate that. However, there could be, and there is another way.

Let’s start here, maybe just a brief review before I divulge all the answers. What is intermittent fasting? We may have some of you here. Intermittent fasting is eating in a small window during the day, so whether it’s an eight-hour window, you eat all your meals, whether it’s one meal, two meals, or three meals in an eight-hour window, six-hour window, four-hour window. I eat most of my meals in a four-hour window. Also, there are many days a week where I just eat one meal. That’s intermittent fasting, so basically I’ve fasted from the night before.

Let’s say I did my last meal at 6 p.m. I fasted around the clock, right? I didn’t wake up—or I didn’t wake up. Hopefully, I wake up. I didn’t eat breakfast when I woke up, and then maybe my first meal’s at 3, and then my last meal’s at 6 or 7, so I ate in a four-hour window, and I fasted for 20 hours. That’s a daily intermittent fast by definition and past shows and if you go to Cellular Healing TV, I answer the questions like what about my coffee during that time? We have a test on how we test for that if your coffee’s okay. I don’t want to get sucked down into this rabbit hole. I want to stick to the topic, but I have all those answers. Go to my website, drpompa.com and Cell TV, and you’ll find what shows on intermittent fasting.

That is, by definition, intermittent fasting, and yes, some people with those conditions, and ladies, you may struggle to get what we call fat-adapted, meaning that, when you’re not eating, your body should be utilizing your fat in your body and on your body as the fuel. For many thyroid, adrenal, and women, that becomes a problem, so that’s the topic of the show, but that’s, by definition—okay, ketosis, by definition, it is an extremely low-carb diet, typically getting your carbohydrates under at least 50 a day, and then that forces your cells to use fat as energy. Then, you burn fat and make something called ketones that your brain uses.

That is, by definition, ketosis, and I will tell you, my wife struggled to get in ketosis. I was in it like most people, because we call it keto-adapt or fat-adapt. It takes about two to three weeks, getting your carbs under 50 grams, and then you become fat-adapted, meaning you start burning fat for energy, and you make these ketones that your brain loves, and you feel good, but that takes a couple weeks for most people.

However, many women struggle to get it. It was three months, and my wife is barely making ketones, and we test if you’re in ketosis by measuring blood ketones with a little finger prick. It’s a 60-dollar little meter called Keto dash Mojo, M-O-J-O, keto, K-E-T-O, dash Mojo. Actually, you can get one. That’s getketomojo. I don’t think they have the dash in there, but it’s getketomojo.com, and you can purchase one of the strips. They’re like a dollar for the strips to measure, but anyway, by definition, you have to be above 0.5 beta-hydroxybutyrate. That’s ketone in your blood, and when you are in nutritional ketosis, very healthy place to be, but as you’re going to learn on this show, I disagree with many in that we don’t stay in ketosis. I don’t keep my clients, my doctors don’t keep their clients and patients in those states. That’s part of the solution that I’m going to talk about.

Let me just finish telling my wife’s story. She struggled to get in, three months, and she still wasn’t producing ketones above 0.5, pretty much on average. Some days would be up, and most days were down. Struggling. Definitely not losing fat, not that my wife’s fat. Don’t get me wrong. She definitely expected to get leaner, but it wasn’t happening, so I ended up, after three months, telling her, just go back to the—forget about it for right now, and she did. When she got off ketosis, some things actually, she thought maybe, we’re getting better, so she thought, okay, well, maybe that’s the answer.

What happened was I was experiencing this with some other women that I was working with, and they, too, were struggling, not losing weight, not getting into ketosis. I moved them out of ketosis, and they go, hey, I actually lost weight. On the very diet that they were on before they went into ketosis, all of a sudden, they lost five, eight pounds. What? Why’s that? All right, you’re going to hear when I come back, because I hear the lovely music, what happened and how this applied to part of what I learned when we get back on Health Hunters Radio.

You know, they say that some of the greatest discoveries happen by accident. This one did. With that client that I was telling you about that I took out of ketosis, and she magically lost weight on the very same diet that I had her on before I put her in ketosis, my cellular healing diet, which it’s moderately low-carbohydrate, definitely a very healthy diet, but she definitely wasn’t losing weight on the diet, definitely wasn’t hormonally optimized on that diet, so that’s why I moved her in ketosis, but she struggled there like so many. Moved her out of the diet, and she loses weight, hormonally better.

Hmm. I said to her, well, let’s do this for a couple months, and then I’m going to move you back into ketosis. I have a theory. My theory was that the body went through some adaptation that was positive because we forced it to go through the adaptation by changing her diet, so I move her back into ketosis, and lo and behold, she gets into ketosis, and she actually lost some more fat. It was totally different, her first experience, so I repeated it a few times, and some people would take two, some people three dietary changes, but moving them in and out of different diets, which I later termed diet variation.

What I later found out was that really every culture ever was forced to change their diets periodically and that the diet change was, in fact, causing the body to have to adapt hormonally and even their microbiome. That’s your bacteria that really play a big role in your hormones and how you burn fat for energy, etcetera, so we’re forcing an adaptation, and we’re getting a hormone optimization. That’s why it was working, so when I started realizing that, yeah, we’re probably the only culture in history that really was never made or had, by environmental factors, lack of food, whatever it was, seasonal changes—that we had to change our diet. We can just always eat the same diet.

We’re learning it’s not such a great idea. We need these adaptations, and when we force them—today we have to force them. Back then, you didn’t. They were forced, but today we have to force ourselves, but when we do, there’s magic that happens hormonally, so I took that lesson and told my wife, go back into ketosis, and lo and behold, it was much easier for her. Matter of fact, I have to say, she’s moved in and out of ketosis many times, and each time, she’s gotten more and more efficient at using her fat for energy, more and more metabolically flexible, meaning now my wife or myself can be out of ketosis for months and within days fat-adapt, keto-adapt, and be in ketosis, which normally would take for her months and me weeks. It now takes days.

We call that metabolic flexibility. It’s a very, very healthy state. However, it takes time even for the healthy person to get there. I learned the best way to get somebody there is forcing these changes, so I talked about how seasonally we change, months like that, changing after months, but let me tell you what else I learned.

Ladies, listen. All right, you would say, if you’re still premenopause, perimenopause, the week before your period or maybe the week of, you have different cravings. Most of you would probably say that it’s probably cravings for chocolate or sugar, whatever it is, carbohydrates, so I had a discussion with my wife and my son’s girlfriend about this, and I thought, you know, that’s a really good point, because what I found myself saying to them is listen to your body. Maybe your body needs those carbohydrates.

Of course, as those words came out of my mouth, I said, well, of course, they do, because you actually need high insulin or at least insulin at a certain level to make hormone conversions. You have to convert estrogen to better estrogens to convert thyroid hormone, so T4 is the stored hormone, but you have to convert it to an active hormone that actually gets in the cell and makes your hair thick and your skin not dry and your energy good and burn fat for energy. Yeah, that’s all T3, but it has to come from T4. That conversion, if it doesn’t happen, you don’t feel good. You have hypothyroid. You’re diagnosed eventually, or at least you go along for many years not being diagnosed, because your blood work’s not off yet, because they don’t know it. They’re measuring things and going, oh, this looks normal in the blood, but meanwhile you’re not making the conversion, or the hormone is not getting in the cell because you’re in toxicity.

Whole other subject. However, here’s the point I want to make. You’re not making the conversion from T4 to T3 because you don’t have enough insulin to make the conversion, because maybe you were on a low-carbohydrate diet for a long time, ketosis, and your insulin drops too low, and therefore you don’t have enough to make the conversion. Okay, so maybe many parts of the month, you’re doing okay but definitely not okay during that week, or maybe you’re struggling through the whole month, but what we found when I decided to try this with other people and my doctor group started trying it, it worked.

What did we do? We started increasing healthy carbs the week before the period or the week of the period, whenever they had the cravings typically, and we pushed up the insulin [00:20:25] carbohydrate to raise the insulin, and they started making better hormone conversions, and what we found out is the rest of the month, it seemed like they were more metabolically adapted, meaning they burned fat more efficiently. They felt better. All of it worked better when we just, for one week of the month, boosted up high carbs. See? Ladies, you can do low-carb diets. However, if you’re in that group of perimenopause, before menopause, premenopause, doing a week of high carbohydrates is also diet variation. It works. Just like the seasonal, moving in and out of ketosis, adding a week of carbohydrates could work magic for your hormones.

All right, let’s take it one step further. Weekly variation. What do I mean? I like to call this concept feast/famine cycles. By the way, even on the monthly, we’re emulating feast/famine. When we take in the high-carb week, that’s feast/famine. We’re reminding also the body that it’s not starving. We’re even giving it permission to utilize its fuel, its fat source, because it says, hey, we have plenty, so let’s actually start burning. I think that’s part of the hormone optimization here as well is just reminding the body it’s not in a starving state, which it can really find.

In the low-carbohydrate diet for too long, even the healthy of us, our body is smart. It wants to hold onto its fat stores because it’s the only energy it has on a really low-carbohydrate diet. Most of the energy’s coming from fat. We call that fat-adapted, right? Ketosis. We’re using fat as the major energy source and think of it logically. Your body’s saying, wait a minute. If this is the only source of fuel I have or the majority of the fuel I have, I’m not going to burn it up like crazy. I’m going to hold onto it, so what we find and I found even, on being on a low-carb ketosis diet for a long time, is I was gaining belly fat and starting to lose some muscle. Not good. What did I do? Like most of you would do, I lowered my carbs, even more, only to find it wasn’t working, and that’s when I started doing a couple of feast days a week. Really? I can cheat?

All right, when we get back, we’re going to talk about weekly diet variation, feast/famine cycles, why it works, how to do it, when we come back.

All right, before I give you the weekly solution here, because that’s really what solved my problem. It wasn’t lowering my carbs more. Quite the opposite. It was reminding my body it wasn’t starving, so let’s talk about that before I give you the answer. You know, this whole thing works because of adaptation.

Here’s probably an example that many of you can relate to, those of you at least that work out. You go to the gym, and when you first start working out, you get results, but then, if you keep doing the same exercises without increasing the intensity or just the same exercises, period, you start to just plateau. You don’t get results anymore. Then, you read about the next thing, the P90X, who knows what it is. Then, you start doing that, and you say, oh, now this is my answer when you start getting results again. Was it the P90X, or was it the change? Then, you’re doing P90X for a while, and you’re stagnant. Then, all of a sudden, someone says, oh, well, this is the next thing, it ‘s the TRX. Then, you start the TRX and think, this is the greatest thing, and you tell all your friends about it. Was it the TRX, or was it the change?

It’s the change. That’s the key. That’s why we can keep marketing new exercise things because people don’t realize, it’s not the thing. It’s not the exercise program. It’s not. It’s the change. Variation creates an adaptation. The body, when it’s forced to adapt, that’s where the magic happens, so when you start working out, your body has to adapt to this. It wants to survive. That’s it’s the only first thing that it wants to do always survives, and so, therefore, it forces adaptation. How it does it is by raising growth hormone and getting the cells more sensitive to your hormones. All these amazing hormonal changes happen. It raises norepinephrine, which is anti-inflammatory, and all these great things. Makes you feel good, too, by the way. That’s why you feel good after exercise, especially when you first start.

Now, all of a sudden, you’re getting stronger, because your body’s adapting, but your body figures it out and goes, okay, we’re not under too much threat here. We’re going to stop that nonsense of hormone optimization, but what if you change it up again? Then, all of a sudden, you’re optimizing your hormones again, so we get it with exercise. Good coaches are always varying exercise programs, intensities, etcetera. Why?

All about adaptation, driving hormone optimization. I said that earlier. Adaptation drives hormone optimization, but with our diet, we miss it. If you’re on the same diet all the time, there’s no adaptation needed, but when you change your diet, even seasonally, your body has to go through a lot of adaptation via hormone optimization, and what if we do it all the time? What if we do it weekly? Same thing. Bodybuilders learned it years ago. There’s nothing new under the sun, and they learned that, if they threw in these feast days or famine days, they would get a hormone optimization, and that’s what we found.

How do we get more metabolically efficient? Ladies, thyroid people, adrenal people, you need more feast days on a low-carbohydrate diet, or we need to do more variation to be more successful at fasting, meaning fat-adapted. When we’re not eating, we need to use our fat, because those of you who struggle to fast, whether it’s a five-day water fast, which I’m leading on my Facebook—go there. It’s drdanielpompa. That’s my fan page, and you’ll see a bunch of videos on fasting. I’m leading about ten thousand people—that’s our goal right now, I think we’re at almost six thousand—through a fast on June 10, and this is maybe dated. These shows are out there for a long time, so that’s 2018, but fear not, we’re having another one October of 2018 and January of 2019, so plenty of time to hop on one of our fasts. We have people from all over the world.

If you struggle in a fast, it’s because you’re not fat-adapting, meaning you’re not efficient at using fat, so this variation is a way to get there. We learned with a group of doctors that I coach and train that when we throw in these feast days a week, one or two, sometimes three, where we either increase carbs or protein or even just calories, we can actually stimulate the body again in burning fat. Pretty amazing, actually, and then, when we throw in fasting days or famine days—feast/famine, remember?

Now, we have days where we eat just one meal, or maybe we don’t eat at all until the next day. We throw a few of those in, one, two, three a week. We typically start people with one. I call it my five, one, one rule, where we fast intermittently for five days. That’s where you eat maybe an eight-hour window, six-hour window, four-hour window. We started the conversation there. Great. You do that five days a week.

Then, you pick one day where you fast. Maybe you eat just one meal that day, and maybe once you get a little bit more efficient, no meal at all. There’s your famine. Then, we throw a feast day in. They don’t have to be back-to-back. They can be random, and the feast day could be more calories, eat three meals that day. It could be increased protein. You say I don’t do well with carbs. Maybe you don’t. Increase your protein. Double your body weight in grams of protein, so if you’re 150 pounds, try to eat 200, 300 grams of protein. That’s a lot, but it works a couple days a week. That’s it, so increase protein, increase carbs, increase calories. That’s the feast.

Now, let me give you some science. Put two hands in the air, because you’re listening. If you’re driving, don’t do that. Your left hand is going to represent the famine, the fast, okay? Your right hand’s going to represent the feast. You know, two scientific words that happen in each of these phases. Excuse me. In the fasting, the famine state, we have something magical that I’ve talked about in other shows called autophagy that takes place, meaning your body eats the bad cells before it will ever eat good cells, so do you lose protein or muscle when you fast? No. You may lose it, but it’s bad muscle. It’s muscle that’s not recovering and adapting, so we want to lose it, and your body’s too smart to get the good stuff. It eats the bad proteins, and that’s what it uses, those amino acids for healing and repair when you’re fasting. It’ll eat the bad fat. It’ll eat the bad DNA. That’s autophagy.

Here’s the best part. Following autophagy after a state of fasting, even a 16, 18-hour fast—following that autophagy that occurs even in a short fast, but of course, you get more of this in a longer fast—we stimulate stem cells. Why? To replace the cells that it used. Oh, and it replaces it with healthy cells, muscle that recovers. That’s why people put on muscle after extended fasts. Whole other topic. Again, watch my shows on fasting on my website.

The point is that the stem cells raise up. Oh, and they also create a lot of healing, because you got rid of the bad cells, and now you’re creating healthy, good DNA and good cells. Yeah, that’s why a massive—why people heal during fasts very rapidly. Great, so we have these people that just want to fast, fast, fast. That could be too much autophagy and lead to more of a catabolic state, and you end up spiraling down if you do too much of it.

Now, let’s go to the right hand, where I talked about the feasting. Bodybuilders, this is what they do. They put themselves in a feast state constantly so they duplicate cells. They grow muscle. Is that healthy long-term? No. Just like the other side isn’t healthy long-term. However, what if we did it one or two days a week? Now we’re talking. There’s a pathway. We had the autophagy pathway on the left. On the right here, we have what’s called mTOR, and I don’t want to bore you with too much science. This is a fun radio show, but mTOR is a pathway that many people say, well, that’s a bad pathway. That ages you prematurely, so you have your foodies that say, we don’t want high protein. We want really low protein. I could agree with that, but I think, short-term, high protein is actually amazingly healthy. Again, if we look at ancestral tribes, we realize that, when they had it, they ate it. They were getting times of really high protein and times of very low protein, times of a lot of food, times of fasting. They didn’t have food.

We are set up in our DNA to do this feast/famine cycling. It drives adaptation and therefore hormone optimization, therefore healing. All right, let me give you some big tips, some more how-to, and something I call mitochondrial, AKA metabolic fitness when we get back.

All right, let’s take a look at this thing from the ground up if you will. One of the things that I do call metabolic fitness or mitochondrial fitness, meaning that we’re going to get your mitochondria—by the way, that’s where you burn fat into energy, and you even burn glucose into energy, through the [00:41:58] cycle and all these energy pathways where we make ATP as energy and feel good, which by the way, this is why most people don’t feel good. Their mitochondria are not working efficiently, and by the way, that’s why we use these fasting times, whether it’s five days, daily, because the autophagy eats away these bad mitochondria. Studies show, even in shorter fasts, even a 24-hour fast, your body will get rid of bad mitochondria, so then, when you replace them with the elevated stem cells, you make new mitochondria that are more efficient, more basically able, fat-adapted, able to use fat as energy.

After a while, your body gets more efficient. I explained, my wife and I, we’ve become very efficient, because we’ve trained via getting rid of the bad ones that aren’t trained to use fat and making new ones that are trained to use fat, so after a while, you can move in and out of this fat-adapted state. It does take time. My wife will tell you, in over two years, she got more and more efficient, but you need this variation to get there, this adaptation driving the hormone optimization, but you have to start somewhere.

The five, one, one is a good place to start weekly, throwing in a feast day where you just eat one meal. It could be 3 o’clock. It could be 6 o’clock. It could be breakfast and then not the rest of the day, whatever you choose, and by the way, your eating window during an intermittent fast, choose whenever. You could eat breakfast if you like. Maybe you eat your first meal at 9 a.m. and your second meal at 1 p.m. and then not the rest of the night, so it doesn’t matter. You choose the window, whatever works for your schedule, makes you feel happy and good.

When you eat one meal, put it anywhere you want, but that’s your famine day. That’s your fast day. Then, I love Saturdays being my feast. Sometimes I’ll even start on Friday night, and if I’m going to eat my big bowl of pasta, man, that’s when I’m going to do it. Then, Saturday, I typically try to eat three meals. Typically, I’m not hungry, but I eat healthier carbs throughout that day. Again, if that’s the day I’m going to eat a pizza, man, I’m going to do it on my feast day. I’m going to remind my body it’s not starving. Okay, so there’s the five, one, one, and then I like to move to a four, two, one, where I throw in two fasting states, right? We’re going to throw in two fasting days a week. I like to make them more random. Maybe it’s Monday/Wednesday, Tuesday/Thursday, whatever. The point is I can increase another fasting day, and then maybe I even just do one day, once you get more efficient, where you don’t eat that day, and then you eat the next. Then, maybe the next day’s your feast day where you’re actually eating three meals, so you want to eat your breakfast that morning. You see? Feast/famine, adaptation. You get it. Okay, metabolic fitness. This is it right here.

Now, we have where we’re going to add three fasting days in. That’s really important because now we’re really pushing it, and definitely, one of those three where we don’t eat at all. Now we’re pushing the body, and then you would add in one. I like to add in at least two days where I’m feasting. Then, it would be then two, three fasting days, then two, so it’s a two, three, two. You could do a three, three, one, where it’s three intermittent fasting regular days, six-hour window as an example, three days of fasting where you do one meal or no meals, and one feast day, but I like the two, three, two as well, where you actually have two feast days. There’s more variation. That is really pushing the window.

Then, we take it a next step further. We’ll do one—five days a month, we will either do a partial fast where we just take in 500 to 800 calories for five days in a row. We don’t want to do the low calories, cut calories, for more than that, because that would lower the metabolism, but if you just do it for five days a month, that’s a lot of great variation, so that’s really good. Those of you who are better, every once in a while, you throw in a five-day water fast like we’re doing here in June with the group, and there is massive autophagy and stem cell production during that, so either a partial fast, AKA fasting mimicking diet—there’s a guy named Valter Longo that coined it that in new studies showing why actually fasting partial, 500 to 800 calories for five days a month, restimulated, regrew pancreatic cells, beta cells that produce insulin in type 1 diabetics. How about that? It was an animal study. However, obviously, we’re seeing amazing results in humans as well, so variation. That’s the key.

In that study, they went back to their regular diet. Now, they didn’t lose much weight on the study, but the autophagy and the stem cells grew back some beta cells in the pancreas, so this isn’t just about weight loss. This is about health, so I believe the magic is the variation. There’s a gal I interviewed, a scientist—her name is Kristin Verde, and she called it the every other day fast, and it worked better compared to all these other diets. What was it? It’s what I’m talking about. It was one day where it was basically eating one meal and the next day eating what you wanted. Next day one meal, next day what you wanted, every other day. Feast/famine. Feast/famine. It works.

Okay, so I think we can take it to the next level, monthly and seasonally, but again, this is how we get these hormone, thyroid, adrenal, women. The variation is needed. Let me give you an example, because I talked a little bit of science, not too much, but here’s an example of what’s going on. If you’re in the woods in a cabin in the heart of winter in Alaska, you have a stack of wood as your fuel source, all right? It’s keeping you warm, and you’re at a nice, even pace here for the winter to survive. All of a sudden, it gets much colder, and you look at your wood pile and go, oh, crap, it’s running low. Are you going to burn more wood and keep your nice little cabin at 75 degrees, 70 degrees? I don’t think so. I think you’re going to go, you know, I’m going to burn less and be happy at 60 degrees, because I’ve got to last. I’ve got to survive.

See, that’s what your body starts to do when you’re lowering your carbohydrates, and this is why it starts to fail. It happened to me, right? I started getting skinny fat, and your body’s looking at the only fuel it has, going, uh-oh, what if we don’t make it? What if we need more? What if we run out of fuel like the pile of wood? It starts burning less fat, just like you would burn less wood. Your metabolism is essentially slowing down, right?

Then, what it will do—it says, well, I don’t want to use the sugar that I have stored in my muscles and my liver, because if I have to run from a lion, I want to keep that, so it only has one other choice, and it’s going to start breaking some muscle down and keeping your belly fat. It’s a nice, safe fuel that it can use very efficiently with very little energy. Anyway, it opts for that, not breaking down the protein or muscle called gluconeogenesis—I mean, I’m sorry, it opts for that as opposed to wants to hold your fat, just like you want to hold your wood so you survive the winter.

Then, what if your friend shows up, this guy that knows you, and he says, oh, my gosh, checking on you, and drops off a massive, big load of wood, right? What are you going to do? Oh, man, you’re going to burn it right back up to 70-something degrees and start burning more wood, because now you have plenty. Okay, that’s the feast day. Someone just dropped off more wood and reminded you, we have plenty. Now, all of a sudden, you start burning. That’s what your body does. After these feast days weekly, what you’re going to notice is, two days after a feast day, your body starts revving up the fuel. Your temperature goes up. You start burning your fat again, because it knows it can. You’re reminding the body it’s okay. It’s not starving. It’s going to make the winter.

That’s pretty much what’s happening, and there’s a lot of science around that and what we think is happening, but ultimately it’s all about survival, folks, and all we’re doing is reminding our body it’s not starving, whether you’re doing monthly feast times, a week, which help hormone conversion, pop up the insulin, and reminds the body it’s not starving, so it taps into that fuel source again, whether it’s daily—weekly, I should say—where we’re throwing in one or two days a week.

It’s different for everybody, how many feast days you need, and I’m going to repeat this. Some of you do better with high protein, because when we look at—remember the right hand and the left hand? The right hand over here, the mTOR pathway that bodybuilders like, three things stimulate it, increased calories, increased protein, increased carbs. Oh, the autophagy state on the left hand? Three things stimulate it. Decreased carbohydrates, ketosis, would stimulate autophagy, decreased calories—that’s the partial fasting—or just fasting, no calories, or even low protein stimulates the autophagy.

Opposites. That is the feast/famine cycles. It has an answer, ladies, thyroid people, adrenal people, people struggling to lose weight. There’s the answer. It’s diet variation. Watch some of my videos on drpompa.com for more. Look for articles. Great show. Thank you. Share it.