Transcript:

Episode 9: What is Diet Variation?

Warren:

Dr. Pompa, I’ve either got to adapt or die this week because of a topic that you’re going to talk about this week with us on Health Hunters, so health hunters, welcome to another episode. We are going to bring some heavy-hitting truth today about adapt or die, and it’s going to tie in with what we discussed over the previous several episodes. Last week, we talked about intermittent fasting for longevity and weight loss, but there’s another layer to this, and we’ll call it adapt or die. The topic in that is what is diet variation? This is something you came up with, Dr. Pompa, when you look at ketosis, intermittent fasting, fasting, water fasting, not eating at all, and this thing of diet variation really came to the forefront of a great show for our listeners today who are looking for another level of truth. Let’s talk about, what is diet variation and why it works on this show.

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, diet variation. Most people listening would say, yeah, that’s just about different foods, and not at all. It’s more about a strategy called feast/famine cycling, where we’re literally forcing the body to adapt, which it’s either adapt or die, as you said, so yeah, it really is a strategy that I happened upon. I’ll tell you a story. This is really where it came from. I started utilizing ketosis as a major tool, and again, ketosis being forcing the cells to use fat as energy. Then, when it burns fat, it makes something called ketones, which the brain loves. It changes DNA. All these amazing things happen with ketones, and you would think, okay, the cells can use two things for energy, sugar or fat, and in this process of ketosis, we’re forcing the cells to burn fat for energy, so it makes sense that you think that everybody, of course, is going to lose weight when they go into ketosis. A few things happen. First of all, certain people don’t even get into ketosis, despite reducing their carbs to even ten grams a day. How can they not get into ketosis? They’ll burn their muscle just to avoid burning fat. That’s how hormonally they’re off, okay? Then, you have the people who get into ketosis, but they just don’t lose weight, or they stop losing weight.

I actually had a client where I said, okay, it’s been three, going on four months, and she was just not keto-adapting or fat-adapting, as we speak it, and of course, she was not losing weight and in some respects getting worse. I said, okay, let’s go back to the diet we had you on originally, which by the way wasn’t working for weight loss, either. She was weight-loss-resistant. It was a diet where we got rid of grains, but we weren’t really paying attention to her carbohydrates. It was just pretty simple. No grains. She went back to that simple diet out of ketosis, and she started losing weight. I was thinking, that’s really odd, because she didn’t lose weight on that diet originally, so I said, okay, you’re probably going to stop losing weight at a certain point, and when we do, we’re going to shift the diet again. That’s what I did, so after a couple months, then we shifted into ketosis. This time, she actually got into ketosis, and she actually got some weight loss out of it again.

Then, I duplicated that with a few other clients, and then I had my doctors, who I train in these strategies, do it, and they all came back with the same feedback. It was, oh, my gosh, this works. Why does it work? I said, well, it has something to do with adaptation. Then, after a while, I interview many scientists and experts on Cellular Healing TV, and one of the scientists whose name is Krista Varady, and she has done a lot of studies. Matter of fact, she wrote a book, actually, called The Alternate Day Fasting, where they basically fast people. The next day, they can eat whatever they want. Then, they fast people. They realized that people that struggle to lose weight, it actually works, right? That was an eye-opener as well, because in the studies we can find that this alternate day, this mixing it up thing actually works.

By the way, the bodybuilders figured this out years ago. They would use carb load days once a week, twice a week, to throw their body off and actually continue to burn fat, so this is a strategy that really some people figured out, but nobody was really doing this clinically. Now, we have a group of doctors around the country doing diet variation, feast/famine cycling clinically with absolutely astounding results.

Warren:

I remember when you brought this to Dr. Joseph Mercola. He was big into—he did a full study with some of our doctors. He did some—using the—what was that machine that measures your glucose?

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, the Dexcom.

Warren:

The Dexcom, and he was having troubles with getting ketosis, regulating glucose and insulin with some of the clients he was working with in this study.

Dr. Pompa:

Actually, yeah. No, Joe doesn’t actually work with clients, but Joe himself actually said to me, maybe you have an answer for this. He said, look, I am—he is strict in ketosis, very, very low carbs, and he said he had a—

Warren:

[00:06:30].

Dr. Pompa:

Right, but he was losing muscle, and he definitely wasn’t getting lean. If anything, noticing putting on some weight.

Warren:

A little bit of [00:06:41].

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah. No doubt, there was a shift going on, and I said, oh, the answer’s this. What’s happening is your body reaches a point where insulin goes so low that your body thinks it’s starving. I said, you have to throw some high-carb days at it and remind your body it’s not starving. See, if the body thinks it’s starving, it will hold on to the energy that it’s burning, so if you’re forcing yourselves to just use fat for energy, think about this. It’s going to eventually become very clever and say, okay, wait a minute, if this is the energy that we use, I better start—because it wants to survive at all costs. I better start holding on to this fat. What we notice is, and this happened to me [00:07:23] lower carb, and all of a sudden, I started getting fat right around my waist, right in the belly, right where I make it first. I’m like, oh. Of course, I did what most people did. I went lower carbs, lower carbs, because it worked for me in the beginning. Going into ketosis, I was burning fat like crazy, so I kept going lower and lower, only to realize it wasn’t working, so by throwing in a carb day, it reminds your body that it’s not starving and to go ahead and burn its fuel. That’s the thing. Imagine this, right?

Warren:

First of all, can I say to myself, I’m fat because I’m in ketosis now? Can I use that excuse?

Dr. Pompa:

That you’re fat because you’re in ketosis? I don’t know about that.

Warren:

Yeah, I got fat because I was in ketosis too long. See what I mean? I’m just trying to like—someone who’s not able to lose weight.

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, well, but here’s the thing. The weight loss does stop, and you get some weird things that happen. Look, the body’s so intelligent, it will plug fat cells, even with water, and then you get this dimply fat that looks like cellulite, not attractive at all. That’s one way the innate intelligence says, let’s slow down the burning of this only fuel that we’re burning. The other way is that it blunts insulin receptors, and you know, if you get online and search low carb diets causing insulin resistance, it’s there.

See, people think of that as causing diabetes, insulin resistance. No, it doesn’t do it the same way that a diabetic has insulin resistance. It’s literally doing it from the DNA, sending a signal to the insulin receptors, saying basically, stop burning fat and store fat. We’re going to survive, and it does it from the epigenetics. It does it from the DNA slowing down fat storing, so by throwing in a carb day or two a week, all we’re doing is saying to the body, hey, we have plenty of fuel. Don’t panic. Go ahead and burn it. Two days after a carb day, you look down, and it’s like, my gosh, I’m leaner. How does that work? Like I said, the bodybuilders figured it out, but there’s multiple ways. I’ll give you many strategies of how we’ve advanced this science of diet variation, and coming back, I can definitely give you some more of those, but I want to talk about some studies as well, the prooftext of what I’m saying, so when we come back, let’s hit it.

Warren:

Let’s hear from our sponsors.

We’re coming back in, Dr. Pompa, and I noticed that we have the diet variation side, and we don’t live in the ancient days of old, do we?

Dr. Pompa:

No.

Warren:

Ancient cultures were actually forced into these shifts, whereas today this concept called diet variation isn’t something new. We were forced by feast, famine. That’s what you call feast/famine cycles, environmental cycles, seasonal changes, those sorts of things. Now, bodybuilders happened across it, because they’re always searching for the next way to get lean, the next way to put on muscle, the next way to naturally raise growth hormone or testosterone. However, as we’ve discussed, this is a health hunter strategy. We’re looking back to ancient healing, and now let’s apply that. You’d said you’re going to give us some studies, some good nuggets for the health hunters on the line.

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, I was digging for stuff in the literature. When you realize something clinically works, it’s like, great, what’s some of the supportive literature around it? I was really excited when I found this one study, because it dealt with cancer and cancer prevention, and the title of the study is “Diet Individual Responsiveness in Cancer Prevention,” but in the study, it said this, and I quoted it. Basically, the last half-century has brought stark changes in lifestyle that depart from normal diurnal cycling, meaning that basically we eat two meals—I’m sorry. Diurnal cycling, meaning the way we eat seasonally and periodic fluctuations in food availability, so thus modern times may be characterized as being consistently in a feast environment, as opposed to the old days, where they were forced into different diets, as you said. They were forced in, whether it was environmental changes, lack of food, all of these things. Seasonal changes would force people to change diets. This article was saying, because we’re constantly in a feast environment today, it said, the cellular consequences may be an increase in the risk of several diseases, including cancer, and it went on to basically talk about that in the study, that we today are stuck in feast environment, not forced to change our diet.

Diet variation, just by throwing in a carb day or two a week or even just eating more, is what I call weekly variation, but there’s also monthly variation, and there’s also seasonal. In this article, it was talking about seasonal variation. If you look at the American Indian, they were in ketosis all winter, forced to eat the blubber of animals, the saturated fats, right? This is what they survived on with very little plant, very little carbohydrates, if any, and then, come summertime, of course, they were on a much higher-carbohydrate diet. Hunza people, same thing. They would go from their ketosis in the winter, something they called starvation spring that is still part of their culture today, where they do it because they realize it’s part of what makes them so healthy, where they ran out of meat and fat from the winter, and then they did starvation spring where they were forced to fast. Then, come summertime, the British thought that they were vegetarians, because they would go there in the summer and see all the vegetables and really hardly any meat. Of course they didn’t eat meat. They were so sick of it from the winter.

The point, though, is that when we look at ancient cultures, they did these variations, but if we look at studies—actually, Joe Mercole, you mentioned him. He sent me a study that I thought was great, and the title was “Insulin: Understanding Its Action in Health and Disease,” and he was like, Dan, this is another reason why this diet variation works. He’s right, because when insulin gets too low, one of the things that it actually does is it shuts off something called gluconeogenesis, which means your body can take muscle and break it down into sugar, right? When insulin gets too low, it doesn’t shut that off, so if it gets chronically low, too low for a long time, this article is basically saying that you can take muscle and make sugar, and if we elevate insulin a little bit, and that’s what happened to Joe. He realized that he was wearing this Dexcom that looked at his glucose. He realized, when he ate carbohydrates, he actually got a lower glucose. It’s like, how’s that possible? It’s because the insulin was shutting off his process of gluconeogenesis, so anyway, that article just is another reason why this works, and I thought it was a great article that he shared with me and that I love to share.

Okay, so there’s another study that basically showed intermittent caloric restriction is better for weight loss and metabolic disease and anti-aging, so the cycling of caloric restriction, meaning don’t just try to caloric restrict all the time. If you do it hit and miss, intermittently, it actually, in this study, worked better than just straight caloric restriction, which we are not a fan of, because the body eventually thinks it’s starving. Knowing just that fact, it goes, yeah, that makes sense, so there’s another study done, and I think this one’s really cool. Alternating days, and I’m reading the title. “Alternating Days of Normal Feeding and Fasting Can Enhance Brain Function,” so in this study, it looked at improvements in performance on behavioral tests right for the memory. That’s pretty cool. Learning and memory. That was from that study in 2007. Increased production of new neurons and neuron stem cells, so it’s just—

Warren:

I want to be smarter.

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, right? Yeah, different studies. One was 2012, and one was 2007, but the point is alternating days of normal feeding with fasting, that’s diet variation. Something that I looked at and discovered clinically. We can actually look at these studies, and I go, gosh, why isn’t anybody doing this? The studies are out there. I didn’t do it because I read the studies. I just kind of happened upon it and thought, yeah, the bodybuilders kind of did this, too. Anyway, it really is a neat thing, and I have to share one more why, and then I’ll turn it over to you, because I’m sure you’re going to ask a lot of questions our listeners are asking.

I found this study on mice, and they basically took them from one temperature into another. They put them from hot to cold, etcetera, and basically it forced adaptation. Now, what they noted in this study was these mice, they basically were in a state of weight loss resistance. They couldn’t lose weight despite their diet and how much they exercised them on their little wheels. They were not losing weight. Sounds familiar. A lot of humans we know, right? Anyway, when they forced them in this hot/cold change, they said that they were able to lose weight, and they noticed that the microbiome, their bacteria in their body, changed, and it was due to the forced adaptation, so the microbiome changed, which actually enabled them to lose weight. We know that your gut bacteria plays a role in obesity, whether you’re fat or skinny. Matter of fact, if you take bacteria from a fat person, you can actually become fat. If you take bacteria from a skinny person, you can become skinny. However, that wasn’t this study. This study, they just forced an adaptation, like in diet variation. This was temperature variation, and they changed the microbiome, which ultimately led to weight loss breakthrough.

It is about the adaptation. When you force change, feast/famine, magic, Warren. People are debating on what diet is best. I’m saying, forget the debate. They’re all good. The magic is in the change, forcing adaptation. That’s the key.

Warren:

Forcing positive adaptation. That makes sense, because we can look at the negative effects of over-carb-eating, right? That makes us fat. We can look at the negative effects of overconsuming alcohol, fatty liver, a big belly. Your body adapts to all those things. If we have too much fast, our body starts storing fat and adipose tissue, so let’s get back after a word from our sponsors and keep digging into this. Then, what I’m going to ask is, what carbs do we eat, and how do we do this, Dr. Pompa?

As we move through this topic of diet variation, it seems to me, Dr. Pompa, that the body loves to adapt, and in our genetics, even down to the microbiome level, our bugs also adapt to these things, and when you do the right things within what nature designed our bodies to do and that sort of adaptation to feast and famine cycles, eating fat, eating carbs, things happen positively. Our bodies adapt well. We get leaner. We have longevity. We live—hey, look, just like we talked last week on the show about the lady who lived 127 years old, and she just had this intermittent fasting type diet, but when we do the wrong things, which many of us in this world are doing—we find a diet, and we just run with it. It works for the first several months, and then it winds up not working anymore, and we just blame the diet. We’re always shifting and looking for blame. That’s what we do as humans, right?

The way to break through some of those excuses is this show. We’re teaching the folks that are really looking for real solutions what this idea of varying your diet, what it looks like and how it can help them, you just said, with fat-burning, with energy, with brain function. These are all the things that, again, I think, on the last three shows, we keep coming back to all of the things that people want and aren’t finding, and that’s why we’re looking and searching and seeking for these answers, Dr. Pompa, so as we move through this, the questions I have is, what type of carbs are acceptable? I know that, when you’re looking at the Native Americans here in America, they ate gourds and wolfberries and prickly pear and these lower glycemic but higher-carbohydrate foods. Do we still have to follow that when we have our carb day, or what kind of foods do we need to eat, and how does this work? What is the strategy?

Dr. Pompa:

I think that we deal with clients, and our doctors deal with different patients that really struggle with certain foods, so I always say, eat healthy carbohydrates. Those you mentioned are all healthy carbohydrates, but the ones you tolerate, too, right? Some people can eat wheat. Some people can’t, right? Believe me. In some of these studies, in Krista Varady’s studies, they went back to eating pizza on alternate days.

Warren:

I like that.

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, right? Now, again, the average—some people cannot do that, right? The point isn’t even as much as what carbs you eat as it is eat carbs. For healthy people, no doubt, they want to eat healthy carbs. There was a diet that was done. There was an article that was just released in February of 2017. The fasting mimicking diet, which is basically a partial fast. They did this. They took people from eight hundred to about a thousand calories five days a month, so it’s a partial fast, and they basically—it’s low-protein, low-carb, and high-fat. That’s what they did. Twenty-five days of eating whatever they wanted, so they could eat pizzas, milkshakes, and yet here’s what they found. Beta cells in the pancreas regenerated. Five days of this partial fast a month had that much of an impact. That was a study that was just released.

Look, I would’ve said, wait a minute. Imagine the results if they would have did a diet that was healthy for the other 25 days instead of back to the standard American diet, so the point is, more important than the foods is the variation, and that’s hard for people to accept, because we’ve been focused on what diet, what foods, eat more fruits and vegetables, and yet these studies are saying, wait a minute. The more important thing is forcing variation that we’re not getting in today’s diets, so remarkable. Now, again, I’m a proponent of eating good things. I am.

Warren:

Yeah, you are.

Dr. Pompa:

When we combine the two of eating healthy carbohydrates but fluctuating the diet, forcing this hormonal change that we know takes place, because you have to understand that to adapt, the body raises up growth hormone, so when you switch diets, we see this growth hormone rise. We see a change in the microbiome. We see all of these really cool adaptations occur, because you switched and forced diet. Look, everybody goes through this process. Think about this. They go into a vegetarian diet, and they say, man, I’m a vegetarian, because I became a vegetarian, and all these things changed. They are now, years later, still a vegetarian, actually creating deficiencies. Paleo people, I can pick on you. I went paleo, and man, my arthritis got better. All of these things got better, but now they’re eating too much protein, driving inflammation. I can go down the list and pick on every diet, so maybe, just maybe, it’s not the diet that we should be arguing, but it’s really the adaptation through diet variation that is the magic, and maybe there’s a part for all the diets. When we look at ancient cultures, they all ate these different diets, but they were all forced into adaptation and change. That’s what we’re missing.

Warren:

Yeah, and I think there’s all kinds of psychological benefits we talked about on the brain, because I’m thinking about cultures that really failed. They’re the ones that definitely didn’t follow variation. Once a bunch of abundance came, they threw out the baby with the bathwater, if you will, and they forgot about the baby, which was their culture and how they adapted and how they ate. Then, so the tribal people that were following the leaders, say, in Rome, and they just start eating. You saw pictures. They became obese, and that became a part of their culture, whereas the rest of them were skinny and leaner and had more energy, so it’s an important thing to put out there for our listeners to hear, because this could literally—you make a change in your life, and it’s going to affect your family, right? I always come back to, what are the unintended consequences, both positive and negative, of any behavior? As an incentive, when you change your diet, you could literally be changing the world, because you’re shifting your microbiome into a positive direction. You’re setting an example for your family. I always come back to that, because cultures fall apart when there’s this overabundance mentality as far as food is concerned and feasting, so I know we’re—

Dr. Pompa:

[00:25:28] society right now.

Warren:

Obesity’s on the rise, right? It’s raising. It’s getting worse. I forget the statistics, but it’s like one in three are obese now. It’s not good. Don’t quote me on that and put it in the show notes and comments. You’re wrong, Warren. It’s actually one in five, but I know that like 75 percent of America’s overweight, right around there. Joe just did a talk at our last doctor training event, and he threw those statistics down, so we’re getting sicker and sicker as a race, and here’s an answer. You don’t have to hunt any longer. The research is here, and we just need inspired to make those changes, and we need some real practical ways of implementing it. What I’m hearing from you, Dr. Pompa, is you just need to start varying your diet, which makes so much sense for other reasons, meaning we all have leaky gut today because of our culture and glyphosate and some of those other things that we’ll get into later. When you have a leaky gut, and that’ll be another show, if you’re not varying your diet, you’re creating little proteins that are crossing your gut and causing inflammation and autoimmune and all kinds of issues, so that also could be a major benefit that’s unforeseen with this diet variation, varying your foods even within it.

Dr. Pompa:

Let me give people some reasons to choose diet variation, right? Not fat-adapting, meaning you’re struggling going into ketosis. We use variation to break through. I gave that example. Not losing weight, period. Diet variation. You’ve got to make switches either weekly, monthly, and again, we can give people very clear examples on how to do this. What I call skinny fat, when you’re losing perhaps weight, but you’re losing muscle and getting fat in the wrong places. I call it skinny fat. Diet variation. If you want to gain muscle—so the bodybuilders are doing this, right? They want to actually gain muscle and stay lean. Diet variation. No energy, period. Diet variation works for this. Hormone conditions, especially thyroid conditions. We utilize diet variation where we have to force up insulin, drop insulin. It works, and then, looking at these studies, cancer. When I had a meeting with a gentleman—his name is Thomas Seyfried. He wrote a book called Cancer As a Metabolic Disease, and we can put that in our resources here. Fantastic book. I’ve interviewed him a couple of times on Cellular Healing TV. We got into a conversation with other scientists and doctors, and I was talking about this. He said, Dr. Pompa’s right. I call it pulse pressure and how we move in and out of fasts and diets, and we’re seeing this for cancer. This is new stuff. It works. When we get back, let’s give you some actual examples of what we’re doing.

Warren:

[00:28:19], Dr. Pompa. We’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

To change the title, Dr. Pompa, if you adapt, you actually survive when you’re doing the right things. If you adapt doing the wrong things, you could die, but we’re talking about—

Dr. Pompa:

Adapt and survive.

Warren:

Adapting and surviving, and let’s get into the meat and potatoes of this. There’s plenty of evidence at this point of why we need to do this. You even brought up how Thomas Seyfried uses this, some of these strategies, even for cancer prevention and remission, so I want to know some examples of what we do daily, how I do it weekly, monthly, the seasonal variation to really supercharge our listeners with some things that they can implement starting this week.

Dr. Pompa:

Absolutely. Seasonal is—we start there. It’s pretty easy, right? I just came out of ketosis. I was in ketosis all winter, and remarkably, when I went back in ketosis in the late fall, I gained muscle and got even leaner. This miraculous change happened, and then I went through ketosis all winter, and again, I practice something on a weekly basis called my five, one, one roll, which I’m going to give you that example in a minute, but seasonally then I just in the last month came out of ketosis, and now I’m in—it’s kind of hard for me. It’s really hard for me. I have to get very clever with carbohydrates, because I’m still intermittent fasting, where I’m eating my first meal late in the afternoon and then dinner around six or seven as my second meal, so I have to literally add in things like sweet potatoes, yams, brown rice, wild rice. I have to get very creative. I have to eat more blueberries on my first meal and adding fruits back into my diet. It’s really hard, but anyway, I’m trying to get my carbohydrates up.

Warren:

It sounds delicious to me, but you know.

Dr. Pompa:

It becomes hard when you eat mostly fats and stuff during the winter. You get used to certain things. Anyway, so now I’m adding those things into my diet, and I put on five pounds of muscle again. It was this odd thing. It just happened, and it happened because of the dietary change. I’m about a hundred to 150 carbs, probably more around a hundred, as opposed to where I was probably 30 a day, so forced it up a bit. Still a low-carb diet, by the way, according to American standards, by any means, but it’s just hard for me to get above that, and I’m not opposed to getting people up to 150, two hundred. The point is, though, I seasonally changed, and then, in the fall, I will go back in, and I will even fast for a few days. I did a partial fast leading into this where I fasted for a week.

Warren:

Would everybody benefit from—you’re more of a Northern—you might have been a Southern Italian, so I would say that you didn’t have harsh winters where you had to adapt and eat a bunch of fat, but what if someone has African origin, and they didn’t have the winter where they’re just consuming a bunch of fat and throwing in ketosis? Would they naturally get there anyway, even in those environments, because I’m—

Dr. Pompa:

No, even in those environments, the foods are forced to change based on just availability often.

Warren:

Carbs kind of naturally went down even—

Dr. Pompa:

Absolutely, and think about it. In the very north, things changed because of the sun patterns. They have times of sun, etcetera, so many reasons, but every culture—the Eskimos would go from high-fat diets. The moment things would change, and they could get other foods, of course, they massively would change their diet, just—I always say just because they were so sick of eating blubber at that point, but yeah, so obviously forced to change, every society. I think, when you look at equatorial areas, they had, again, different reasons why they would change their diet, because they didn’t have as many even seasonal changes, but it might—

Warren:

Variation of animals, obviously. They wouldn’t have some of that involved.

Dr. Pompa:

Anyway, let me—because I don’t run out of time.

Warren:

Okay, let’s do it.

Dr. Pompa:

Let me give—that’s seasonal, but let me give—I said monthly variation, so oftentimes I cited the study where they took five days a month and just put them on a partial fast or caloric restriction, about 500 to a thousand calories of a higher-fat diet for five days of the month. Actually, my wife and my son’s girlfriend basically said to me one day in the kitchen—we were on the subject of around their period time, they crave carbohydrates and chocolates, and one of them, and I don’t recall, basically was like, well, maybe we should just give into that, and I said, yeah, you’re right, you should. That’s a good point, so then I ran with that point, because I had a client whose hair was just falling out. She had been in ketosis, so I said, look, go take one seven days, one week a month, and let’s go high-carb. She did it. Transformed her thyroid. Her hair was falling out because her thyroid was struggling. She was struggling converting T4 to T3 because of low carb, low insulin.

Warren:

Oh, my God.

Dr. Pompa:

Made the change. Transformed. What did I do? I was on my Tuesday call. I said, okay, doctors, this is what I found in two clients, because I did it with another one, and it worked. They started doing it. Feedback? Extraordinary, right? It’s like, oh, my God, this works. Then, we literally, after we discovered that—it was probably a few months later that that study came out in February, talking about five days a month, so I’m like, doesn’t that happen every time?

Warren:

The universe [00:34:19].

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, so that’s monthly variation. Now, let’s talk about weekly variation, some things we do. Write this down. Five, one, one. Simple. Five days of ketosis or what I call my cellular healing diet. We’ll say low-carb diet, utilizing intermittent fasting, which we’ve talked about on past shows. One day where you just go dinner to dinner, 24-hour fast, right? Then, one day of a feast, where you eat higher carbs, eat more, maybe even eat three times that day as opposed to two.

Warren:

Isn’t that the day to celebrate?

Dr. Pompa:

Absolutely, so I do that. On my Saturday or Sunday, it’s a feast day. I try to eat three meals that day. I eat definitely higher carbs, and I do one day—typically, for me, it’s two days, where I do dinner to dinner, and then the other days where I’m doing normal ketosis. Okay, so that’s one example.

Warren:

That’s on that day—that’s when I’m going to drink my wine from [00:35:16] Wines, so we’ll put that company down below. It’s keto-friendly.

Dr. Pompa:

There’s a four, two, one, or three, two, two, where you’re doing four days of ketosis or cellular healing diet with intermittent fasting, two days of fasting—that’s typically what I do—and one or two days of feast, so again, varying it even more, and then this is one that I like to call mitochondrial fitness where we really put the pressure to adapt the mitochondria, because bad cells don’t adapt. Good ones do. That’s what we want. Three, three, one, Follow me. Three days of intermittent fasting, say, Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. Three days of fasting, so on Monday and Friday, I do dinner to dinner. On Wednesday, I do a 42-hour fast. I did that yesterday, so I don’t eat all day, and then I don’t eat until maybe 12 or one the following day. Forty-two hour fast. Man, you want to take people who can’t lose weight. Insulin resistance. You watch what happens on this. I’m doing this most of the time. Monday and Friday, dinner to dinner. Wednesday, I go 42 hours without eating. Then, one or two days a week, I feast, and that typically will fall on my weekends, so I’m telling you, this is where the magic lies, so again, clinically, we see this, but we have studies to back it as well. It works, Warren.

Warren:

Just go to those. We’ll go through them real quick, and people can relisten to this and download us on iTunes, but the five, one, one, five days of the cellular healing diet, and we can put that in the show notes, too, or ketosis, ketogenic-type diet, one day of 24-hour fasting, one day of feast, which I love. Up the carbs, proteins, calories, and a dry glass of dry—I can’t even say that. I want to say dry, warm. Dry, warm [00:37:15].

Dr. Pompa:

Dry, warm [00:37:16]. We should have Todd White as a guest on our show, talking about wine, because that’s a whole subject.

Warren:

People love that, and then the four, two, one, which is four days of the cellular healing diet or ketogenic-type intermittent fasting, two days of the 24-hour fast per week, and then one or two feast days, the high-carb days, which is better for weight loss resistance, and in the mitochondrial fitness, this is really shocking the body and making it adapt. The three, three, one, which is three days of 16- to 20-hour intermittent fasting, say, Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday, three days of fasting, one fast for 42 hours and two fasts for 24 hours. This is really shocking the body. Then, Mondays—so that was it, actually, and then one feast day.

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, and one feast day.

Warren:

Then, a monthly variation strategy that you mentioned a couple times is seven days, so you did that—so you do one week of the five, one, one, one week of the three—I’m just losing my notes here.

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, one week a month of high carbs. Simple as that.

Warren:

One week of the three, three, one. We could do one of the four, two, one, or even a three, two, two, just adapting it, and then do seven days where we’re just eating carbs all week, and so that would be a monthly variation.

Dr. Pompa:

It works.

Warren:

You brought the heat on this one.

Dr. Pompa:

It works, man. I just gave them magic. I’m telling you, it’s not the diet, the foods that we’re eating, as much as it this variation. It works.

Warren:

That’s awesome. Guys, have a great rest of your week, and remember, bring us some of your information in the show notes, comments, and let us know some other great health hunter topics you want us to find for you. Blessings. Have a great rest of your week. Bye-bye.