Ep. 146 – Fasting Strategies & Troubleshooting: How to Revolutionize Your Life with Dr. David Jockers

I am delighted and excited today to welcome Dr. David Jockers as my guest! Dr. Jockers is a doctor of natural medicine. He runs one of the most popular natural health websites, which has gotten over 1 million monthly visitors. His work has been seen on popular media such as the Dr. Oz show and Hallmark Home and Family. Dr. Jockers is the author of the best-selling books The Keto Metabolic Breakthrough and The Fasting Transformation. He is a world-renowned expert in the area of ketosis, fasting, inflammation, and functional nutrition. He is also the host of the popular “Dr. Jockers Functional Nutrition” podcast.

Dr. Jockers was a personal trainer in his early twenties. At the time, he was taking in about 5,500 calories a day from six meals, which he thought he had to do to maintain his muscle mass. Then he developed irritable bowel and he lost about 30 pounds over two years. 

After reading the book, The Maker’s Diet by Jordan Rubin, he felt inspired to make some changes to his diet. He ended up on a grain-free, low-carb diet with lots of fermented foods and grass-fed meats and got a lot better. He noticed that when he skipped breakfast and drank a lot of water, he felt significantly better, and he started re-gaining muscle mass quickly. 

Dr. Jockers has been practicing intermittent fasting for sixteen years now, and it has revolutionized his life! Be sure to stay tuned today to learn more about intermittent fasting, some common fasting mistakes, and some of the lesser-known things you can do with fasting to benefit your health.

“Intermittent fasting is something I’ve been practicing for sixteen years. It revolutionized my life, and I’ve seen it work so well for so many people.”

Dr. David Jockers

IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:

• Dr. Jockers shares his background and explains what brought him to his fasting journey.

• There are several key mechanisms of intermittent fasting that can help you build muscle.

• The benefits of exercising while in a fasted state.

• The amount of protein you need to consume to build lean muscle.

• Dr. Jockers explains what he does to amplify the amount of autophagy taking place in his body.

• Why doing a 24-hour fast every week is realistic.

• Autophagy is a by-product of fasting. Dr. Jockers shares some strategies to boost autophagy.

• Dr. Jockers discusses the benefits of different kinds of exercise and getting enough proper sleep.

• The benefits you can add to fasting with coffee and various herbal teas.

• Dr. Jockers unpacks what detoxing is all about, and emphasizes why it is so important.

• Some common fasting mistakes that people tend to make. And some things you can do to make fasting easier.

• Dr. Jockers shares his thoughts on fasting variations, especially for women.
  
  
  

Connect with Dr. David Jockers

On his website

On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube

Books mentioned:

The Maker’s Diet by Jordan Rubin

Connect with Cynthia Thurlow

• Follow on Twitter, Instagram & LinkedIn

• Check out Cynthia’s website 

• Check Out Dry Farm Wines: www.dryfarmwines.com/cynthiathurlow

About Everyday Wellness Podcast

Welcome to the Everyday Wellness podcast with Cynthia Thurlow! Cynthia is a mom of 2 boys, wife, nurse practitioner, and intermittent fasting and nutrition expert. She has over 20 years experience in emergency medicine and cardiology, but pivoted to focus on food as medicine. She loves to share science-backed practical information to improve your overall well being and is grateful to be interviewing leaders in the health and wellness field.  Her goal with Everyday Wellness is to help her listeners make simple changes to their everyday lives that will result in improved overall wellness and long term health. 

Transcript

Presenter: This is Everyday Wellness, a podcast dedicated to helping you achieve your health, and wellness goals, and provide practical strategies that you can use in your real life. And now, here’s your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow.

Cynthia: Today, I’m delighted and excited to have Dr. David Jockers. He is a Doctor of Natural Medicine and runs one of the most popular natural health websites in drjockers,com, which has gotten over 1 million monthly visitors. Amazing. His work has been seen on popular media such as Dr. Oz, and the Hallmark home and family. He’s also the author of the bestselling book, Keto Metabolic Breakthrough and The Fasting Transformation. He’s a world-renowned expert in the area of ketosis, fasting, inflammation, and functional nutrition and he’s also the host of the popular Dr. Jockers Functional Nutrition Podcast. Welcome. It’s so great to have you on the podcast.

David: Thanks so much, Cynthia. It’s really an honor. I appreciate all the work that you’re doing and also, it’s great to have you on my podcast, as well.

Cynthia: Absolutely. Two fasting experts in one place is really hugely beneficial. I would love for you to talk about what brought you to fasting. I love everyone’s stories as it pertains to utilizing the strategies. Some people have been doing it for far longer than I have. But I always find the background is particularly interesting when listeners are trying to put all this together, your expertise, and what’s brought into this fasting journey?

David: Yeah, absolutely. In my early 20s, I was a personal trainer. I was studying Exercise Nutrition Science. I was eating six meals a day, because I’m thin. I’m an ectomorph.

Cynthia: [laughs]

David: You are as well. We have thin bones, we tend to be narrow shouldered. I wanted to obviously, have the most muscle mass I could. I was eating six meals a day. In fact, in my nutrition course, I think I was 20 years old when I took this nutrition course. We counted up all the calories we ate in a day and I was 5,500 calories. I would have a protein shake before I went to bed, and then I wake up in the morning, and have a big bowl of oatmeal or something like that. I thought I had to do that in order to maintain my muscle mass that I would literally wither away if I didn’t do that. All of a sudden, it caught up with me and I developed irritable bowel. I would have extreme cramping and bloating to the point where I like, there were times where I just had to call in to work or whatever I was doing, because I was just in so much pain, constipation, diarrhea. My gut would just go in and out, like, I would have some good days and then some really bad days and it was just not consistent.

Then over about a two-year period, I ended up losing about 30 pounds. I was trying to eat as much as I could, exercise, and I just started wasting away. Actually, at the time I was going through graduate school, I just started at chiropractic college and I read a book called The Maker’s Diet by Jordan Rubin. In that book, he talked about making a lot of diet changes. There are people in my school, chiropractic school tends to– Certainly, not everybody there’s into health, but tends to gravitate more health-minded people. One of my friends there was into Dr. Mercola, Dr. Mercola’s website. This is back in 2004, 2005. It was this new stuff. Paul Chek. And they were talking about going grain free. I read The Maker’s Diet and he talked about ancient grains and sprouted grains and so. I experimented. I took grains out, I took out–

I was a vegetarian at the time. I started eating grass-fed meat and unfortunately, we had a Whole Foods right next to us. We can get this stuff. We were ordering from US Wellness Meats. I started making these changes. Taking out refined oils, grass-fed meats, reducing grains and sugars. Basically, I went on a lower carb diet. This was like the early advent of the paleo diet. There was no term for the paleo diet. I’d never heard of it at least at that period of time. We called it the healing diet. We went on this healing diet. It’s grain free basically, lots of fermented foods, we had grass-fed meats, things like that. I got a lot better and it was really helping. Then all of a sudden, I noticed when I didn’t eat breakfast and I’d 7 AM classes. It was really common. I would go to school from 7 AM to 5 PM. I lived on campus. I had this gallon water jugs and I would just drink water in the morning. I just noticed I felt a lot better and it was surprising to me, because I always thought I had to eat breakfast. I just felt significantly better when I didn’t do that and I started–

It was interesting, Cynthia, was I actually started really gaining muscle mass back. In fact, I gotten my best physical shape. I was about 24, 25 at this point 2005, 2006 and I gained the weight back, got up to about 165 pounds, which is where I’m at today, felt absolutely amazing. I would fast and drink like a gallon of water between the time I woke up, and noon, and I would typically fast till 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and then all of a sudden, I would get really hungry, and I would eat from 2:30 to 7 o’clock or so. I had this time restricted feeding window. People would ask me, because they saw me gain weight and muscle mass quickly. They were like, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “I’m drinking a gallon of water between the time I wake up and noon. I thought it was the water, because nobody had ever told me about intermittent fasting.” In fact, all my classes, I was taking exercise, physiology courses. I have a Master’s degree in that. My PhD that oversaw my studies. She was always like, “No, no, you always have to eat before you work out.” I was doing fasted workouts. Everything I was doing was flying in the face of the science I was being taught, but I just knew it worked and I just continued doing that. It wasn’t until about 2009 that actually heard the term intermittent fasting and I’m like, “What is that?” I’m like, “Oh, that’s exactly what I’m doing.” I started getting into the literature with that and it’s something I’ve been practicing now for, gosh, 16 years. It absolutely revolutionized my life and I’ve seen it work so well for so many people.

Cynthia: I love hearing how it started with this nutrition piece and then, this intrinsic connection to your body and what resonated. Despite being taught otherwise, I’ve heard statistics that typically in university level teaching that data is usually 20 years behind. Is it any surprise that what I learned in my nursing and Nurse Practitioner programs, despite being in a big teaching institution, it was very aligned with the USDA guidelines, food guide pyramid back when it was before predating my plate, which is now what’s propagated, breakfast being the most important meal a day? But I’m so grateful that you intrinsically resonated with following a path that may not have been as aligned with what you were being taught, but actually helps you heal yourself. I think that’s so critically important. I always share with listeners that I went gluten free when I turned 40, that was my first dipping in the pond. I’d always eaten really healthy. I was the person that was drinking a protein shake, going to the gym at 5 AM and drinking one, heading home before going to see patients in clinic or the hospital.

I remember when I went gluten free, that was the first indication that, “Oh, my gosh, my psoriasis went away that I got after being treated for Lyme, being on antibiotics for six weeks that that was what got the process started for me to make the association that our food is probably the most valuable thing that we put in our bodies or what we’re exposed to can have such a profound impact on how healthy we are otherwise.” But for anyone that’s listening, that’s curious perhaps, doesn’t realize, there’s some really cool mechanisms as they pertain to intermittent fasting that can help you build muscle, I think it’s this misnomer that people believe, you have to be eating six meals a day, you have to be consuming massive amounts of calories to build muscle, and yet, there’re several key mechanisms that are activated while fasted that can actually potentiate muscle growth and I’d love for you to touch on that.

David: Yeah, for sure. I’m a huge fan of fasting and I’m all about maintaining muscle mass. In fact, literally, right before we’re doing this interview, I just had a big upper body workout. I always work out fasted. I just feel the best. Now, I don’t always recommend that for everybody. However, there are great benefits to it like you were talking about. One of the benefits is that, actually, when you’re in a fasted state and your insulin levels are low, you release more human growth hormone. Growth hormone is your quintessential anti-aging hormone. It helps your body, it puts your body into an anabolic state from the perspective that you maintain lean body mass. It turns on fat burning, but at the same time, it helps preserve your lean body, your muscle, your bone tissue. A lot of women as they age, for example, they end up with osteoporosis, osteomalacia, bone loss, and a lot of that’s due to a lack of human growth hormone stimulation. Insulin resistance plays a really big role with that. You really are able to maintain that. Actually, exercising, when you have elevated growth hormone, you just feel amazing. You get just a greater anabolic drive is what it’s called in the literature, where basically, you’re able to create an endocrine environment, a hormonal environment that allows you to put on more muscle mass.

Now, after exercise, it is a really good time to fuel your body. You also need to feast and famine, right? You can’t just fast your way to more muscle. But it’s part of the process. I’ve heard it termed like cocking a slinky, for example. We have this genetic pathway called mTOR, mammalian target of rapamycin, which I’m sure you’ve talked about, your listeners are familiar with. When that’s elevated chronically, we associate it with chronic disease and accelerated aging, but really, it’s molecular signals growth. It’s elevated in kids, for example, because kids are growing fast and for bodybuilders, because they’re really trying to put on a lot of muscle. Now, for the average individual, we want to suppress mTOR the majority of the time, but if want to maintain lean body mass, we actually want to increase it for short bouts of time, short periods of time is really good to increase it. Exercise when you’re in a fasted state for example, so, fasting naturally primes the slinky. You think about a slinky on a step, if you want to push that slinky in and have it project itself up to the next step, you’ve got to really prime it. By priming it I mean pushing down on it. Fasting helps push down on mTOR. Suppresses mTOR, but it also creates an environment, where it’s actually giving that slinky more potential energy. More potential energy for your body to increase and build lean body mass.

Then another thing that does that is exercise. Exercise has a dual effect, where it inhibits mTOR, but also activates mTOR. It’s interesting. It’s naturally catabolic exercise, meaning that’s breaking down tissue. In fact, if you looked at somebody’s c-reactive protein right after they got a big workout in, it would look they had a heart attack, or if they ran a 5k or even a marathon, it’s like a massive heart attack. Of course, we know that that’s artificial. It’s just muscle breakdown process that happens when you exercise intensely, your body clears it up. Your body adapts to the exercise, it creates more greater resilience to it, endogenously produce antioxidants like glutathione increase, things like that that allow your body to adapt to the exercise. But it’s naturally catabolic, but at the same time, we also think about exercise, we think about building muscle. If we’re going to do strength training, we got to really– If I’m going to build my chest, for example, I’ve got to do some chest presses that have a decent amount of weight to really over– It’s called progressive overload. The term is to overload my muscle tissue to where those fibers are pushed to the point, where they’re stressed to the point where they have to adapt and get stronger and bigger. So, that’s basically what happens. We suppress mTOR, but at the same time, we create this massive potential energy. Then, once we fuel our body, giving our body the right nutrients it needs, particularly protein, minerals, B vitamins, lots of different things like that, then we’re going to adapt and get stronger muscles.

As long as we’re in a slight calorie surplus or at least, a breakeven calorie point, and you and I are both not huge on calories in, calories out. I don’t count my calories. I eat till I’m satiated. But the reality is, if you’re restricting your calories and your goal is to build lean body mass, it’s not going to work. You got to eat till you’re satiated. That’s really the key there. You got to eat enough protein as well. Ideally, at least, basically about half a gram per pound of body weight, at least. I weigh 165 pounds right now, I should be eating at least minimum like 80 to 90 grams of protein on a daily basis to build muscle. But I can eat it in a compressed eating window, where I’m eating it and let’s say, two meals in a six-hour window or something like that, or maybe an eight-hour window, or even tightening it up to a four-hour window, and maximize the amount of growth hormone released during my fasting window, which primes the anabolic environment for even greater muscle tissue development. So, it’s really interesting how that all works.

Cynthia: I love that explanation. One of the things that I really emphasize is how protein deficient most of us are. I had Dr. Gabrielle Lyon on last year and it was one of the things that she was really emphasizing was that, most people, women in particular, do a really sometimes, crummy job. They’re getting 40 to 60 grams of protein in a day and it’s really no way to help maintain muscle. One of the things that happens naturally and it accelerates as we get older is something called sarcopenia, which is this muscle loss with aging, which is why strength training is so critical, why getting enough protein in to help break down into amino acids is so critical, the high-quality sleep, stress management are super, super important. For anyone that’s listening, I remind just about everyone, most if not all of us are not eating enough protein, it doesn’t mean that you go from 100 grams to 150 overnight. May be that you eat 10 more grams and you just make a purposeful effort, maybe you’re not having four ounces of steak, maybe at six.

Much to your point, I don’t believe in counting calories. I know sometimes that triggers people in really uncomfortable ways. But I know that you’re very aligned with that principle. When you start eating for satiety, it’s amazing how nourished you feel. I was talking to my teenage boys, who have a never-ending pit. It doesn’t matter how much they eat. They’re always hungry an hour later, and my boys are very active, and I was telling them, “If I sit down and have a good-sized steak, I almost– generally, I can’t finish my meat.” But I remind them that that’s the nourishing good side of feeling satiated, whereas if I sat down and had a bowl of rice or a bowl of pasta, which I never do, but if I did, I would not feel as satiated, and I would continue eating, and I would probably overeat, and I probably wouldn’t register it. Because our body recognizes macronutrients in different ways and that’s why when people are, if they’re aiming to put muscle mass on, or they’re aiming to lean out, or whatever changing their body composition, how critically important that nutrition piece is. I know when I was hospitalized two years ago and I lost 15 pounds, and most of it was my muscle. I remember it was three months off of not doing any fasting whatsoever and then I was slowly cleared to start lifting again. It took me about six months to put 10 pounds of muscle on, but that was with fasting. So, it is possible, even for women.

David: Yeah, for sure. You got to get the calories in. My body really does best on a high-protein diet. I’m typically consuming. I weigh about 165 pounds and what I do is I work out. I actually do weightlifting five days a week. On those days, I’m typically consuming– I’m not counting calories, I’m not counting protein grams, but if I were to count, I’m probably consuming somewhere between 140 to up to 200 grams of protein on those days and I just feel my best when I do that. Now, one day a week, I do 20 to 24 hours. It’s usually closer to 24 hours, where I do basically no protein. I’m basically just drinking water, I usually fast from lunch on Wednesday to lunch on Thursday, and then I do a workout right before that. I go through a period also where I do an extended period of time without the protein. What that does is, it really amplifies the amount of autophagy that’s taking place. Because protein as well as carbohydrates will basically cause an– Carbohydrates cause an increase in insulin, and insulin will reduce your ability to go through autophagy, and then protein will also reduce your ability to go through autophagy.

Autophagy is basically when your body’s breaking down old cellular debris. One of the main mechanisms of autophagy is, you need more amino acids. If you’re getting amino acids from your diet, you don’t need to break them down from inside the cell. I do this on a weekly basis and I feel great. Actually, I feel my best. I get my best heart rate variability scores during my sleep overnight when I do this. That’s why I like to fast from lunch to lunch. When I do it from dinner to dinner, I don’t notice as good of an increase in the heart rate variability. I notice if I have a nice good size lunch, and then fast the rest of the evening, and then in the morning, I’m not even hungry. I might have a little bit of hunger in the evening, like, when my family’s eating dinner, I might just feel it, because I’m used to eating dinner. It’s a conditioned response to ghrelin release, which is your hunger hormone comes out when you’re used to eating a meal. Sometimes, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, this would be nice to eat.” But then I just remind myself, “I’m going to sleep so much better, I’m going to feel great tomorrow,” and I’m able to do it. It’s easy.

Then I usually break my fast at lunch the next day and you know what, very rarely am I actually even hungry when I break my fast. I break my fast after my workout at lunch the next day and that 20 to 24-hour fast really amplifies autophagy. It allows my body to break down all these damaged cells. I replace all these damaged mitochondria, for example, that are in all of my cells returning over bad muscle and replacing it with good muscle tissue, really healing my gut. There’s a rat study that showed that 24-hour fast, you see a significant rise in stem cell production in your intestinal epithelium. Because your intestinal cells are some of the fastest cells to turn over. We literally replace our intestinal lining every three to five days. Stem cells are these young embryonic cells that are incredibly stress resilient. Even on that study, they haven’t actually done the study on humans, they’ve only done it on rats, so, we can’t necessarily fully correlate it to humans.

However, what we can say is that, you’re going to get significant repair and there’s a lot of just case study examples of significant repair in your intestinal epithelium that takes place when you’re doing some like a longer fast. You can certainly do a three or five-day fast, but that’s not something you’re going to be able to do on a weekly basis, unless you’re very overweight. For somebody like you or me, most of the audience doing something like a 20 to 24-hour fasts on a weekly basis is realistic as long as you are consuming a lot of nutrients on your other days, consuming good quality foods and you’re going to get significant health benefits when you do that.

Cynthia: I think it’s interesting that there’s a great deal of fear about not eating, because we’re an over-nourished culture and that’s a byproduct, again, of this antiquated dogma that we need to be eating every two to three hours, we have to have mini meals, and snacks, and all this other literally garbage. How critically important it is as individuals that we find a system that works for us? I do a 24 hour fast every week, and I usually will couple it with, and I hate the term “feast,” because that gives this connotation that you’re overeating. What I typically do is, I have one day where I don’t really fast. I might have a 12-hour feeding window, and I’ll probably up my protein of three meals instead of two in my window, and then I usually roll into a day of not eating at all, and my whole family thinks it’s hilarious, but I remind them, I’m like, “The one thing you have to think about is autophagy is like your body’s taking out the garbage.”

The only way that our body has the ability to go in and take care of this, because it requires so much energy is to do it while we’re not eating. Much like when we’re sleeping, we have the glymphatic system that is this waste recycling process in our brains that is so critically important and why sleep is so helpful. Let’s pivot a little bit and talk about what are some of the things, what are some of the strategies that we can do that can boost autophagy? So, again, the waste recycling process, we talked about extended fasting, what are some of the other things that we can do that can help boost this incredible byproduct of fasting?

David: Yeah, for sure. The way I think about it is, our body goes through either a building phase or a cleansing phase. I consider autophagy is the main mechanism that’s taking place during the cleansing phase. Building would be really led by the hormone insulin and activated by mTOR. We talked about that as well. Those are building hormones and building pathways of our body. It’s important to build, and it’s important to cleanse, and we need to cycle through those. Now, when we’re young, we’re going to be building a lot. We’re young, we’re kids, we’re growing fast, we’re building. Pregnancy, my wife’s pregnant right now as we speak, that’s a building phase. However, after we get to 25 or so, you know what? We really need to prioritize cleansing. I think about it this to simplify it for people.

The time between your first meal and your last meal of the day is your building phase. If you eat at 7 AM and you finish your dinner at 7 PM, it’s 12 hours. During that period of time, you’re eating meals and you are activating a lot of building mechanisms. Cell division, growth, things like that, fat storage. Then the time between your last meal and your first meal is your cleansing phase. Now, you’re going to start to really allow the liver to detoxify, you’re going to give the gut some rest, allow it to move better, and then also at the same time, you’re going to activate autophagy. As people age, I recommend they do something like a two to one cleansing the building phase, at least a few times a week. That would mean a 16-hour fast with an eight-hour eating window. As opposed to the 12 to 12 where you’re eating from 7 AM to 7 PM, 12-hour window, and then you fast from seven to seven. That’s a one-to-one ratio, okay? Now, my kids do that and they’re in a building phase. For somebody that’s an adult, you don’t need to do that, at least not. It depends on the individual, but you don’t need to do that on a daily basis.

In fact, that’s not going to be healthy. You should be implementing at least a few days a week, where you’re doing something like a 16-hour fast and an eight-hour eating window. Then you can even compress it even further depending on how your body responds to that, where you’re able to do an 18:6. Now, you’re getting three times the amount of cleansing to building. Depending on how your body responds hormonally, how much excess body fat you have, how active you are, how much stress you’re under, how you’re sleeping, you can make alterations in that, but you should really be prioritizing. It’s just really a mental concept to prioritize more time between your last meal and your first meal, then eating throughout the day. That’s where it starts, intermittent fasting. Then what we can do is further suppress or keep insulin down.

Insulin, again, is a building hormone. When insulin is elevated, you’re not going to be able to go through autophagy and cell cleansing. We can do that, when we do eat as well by eating foods that are less insulinogenic, meaning, foods that are not going to produce as much insulin. Typically, it’s going to be a lower carbohydrate diet, ketogenic style template, where we’re consuming higher amounts of fats, high amounts of protein, very low amounts of sugar and starch. We can still consume fiber, if your body responds well to fiber, you can still consume a lot of plant fibers, lot of non-starchy vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus. They’re all very low carbohydrate. You can get plenty of nutrients in vegetables by doing that, there’s even fruits like olives and avocados that are lower in starchy carbohydrates and high in healthy fats. We’re trying to consume a template like that and that’s going to further suppress basically or further suppress insulin and keep autophagy moving even while we’re in our building window, we’re going to get some level of autophagy just because we are keeping our insulin down and we’re going to really turn on autophagy faster when we get into that cleansing window, because our insulin is already suppressed.

Low-carb diet fasting, beyond that exercise is really important. Regular exercise, particularly, when I think about exercise, I break it into two classifications. One is movement. Movement is very anti-inflammatory and very good for your brain, your lymphatic system, and that’s just something at a very low intensity, walking throughout the day, for example. Just staying active throughout the day, walking around, it could be playing with your kids, it could be some light dancing, or some recreational activity. Exercise is something you’re doing at a high intensity. Something that really puts you in a state, where you are in an anaerobic state. You’re breathing heavy, you are in oxygen debt. Now, you’re having to recover and breathe heavy or something that’s really challenging your muscles, so, strength training. You want to do something like that, at least I would say, two to three times a week, where you put your body in this oxygen debt for at least 10 to 15 minutes, at least twice a week and ideally, maybe three or four times a week depending on you. Some people that are under more stress, maybe have more chronic illness, they may not be able to do that, they may even just start with movement. Doing movement regularly and then gradually progressing to where they’re able to do some higher intensity exercise. That’s another way to stimulate autophagy. We already talked about some of the mechanisms there.

Then really prioritizing sleep, you talked about the glymphatic system. That’s really when our brain detoxifies. Sleep is super critical for autophagy, for cleansing. It’s really, again, when we drain our brains, we get rid of just a toxic buildup in our brain. We help reset our neurotransmitter balance during that period of time. It’s a lot of powerful mechanisms that take place in our brain while we’re sleeping. Prioritizing good sleep is super critical. That’s important. Keeping stress under control. If you’re overwhelmed by stress, no amount of fasting is going to help us. Ultimately, we got to keep stress under control. It needs to be a level of stress that we can adapt to. We don’t actually want a period of no stress ever, unless we’re in a really bad state and we need to heal. All of us actually thrive under stress. Once we get to a certain level of health and fitness, we thrive under stress. We need a certain amount of stress, exercise is a stress, for example. But we don’t want to be overwhelmed by stress. Good recovery is critical, keeping stress under control is important to have an environment that sets us up for autophagy.

Then we can utilize herbs. What’s interesting is, there are certain polyphenols in different plants that help to activate autophagy. For example, green tea has epigallocatechin, EGCG, which helps stimulate autophagy. Coffee has chlorogenic acid, caffeic acid, which helps stimulate autophagy. Both of these things help to activate the mitochondria within our cells and they increase the amount of AMPK. They’re basically a cellular stressor in our system. They’re what we call a hormetic stressor, which is a positive stress. Most people when they think about stress, they think it’s bad. But actually stress, small bouts of stress make us stronger and more resilient. Believe it or not, these plant compounds actually have, they’re actually stressors that our body then adapts to, and part of the way it adapts is it increases the amount of cellular cleaning in autophagy that take place. Drinking coffee in the morning while you fast, as long as you respond well to it and I always caution that, I think about coffee, I think about– it’s a performance enhancement tool. When you drink coffee, you should feel great for the next three or four hours. You should feel amazing. You should have more energy, you should have better brain function. If you feel you’ve got more cravings two hours later, if you feel you get up and then drop if you have more anxiety, you’re not responding well to it. There are certain hacks. For some people, there’s mycotoxins in their coffee or their tea that can be another factor. They may have mold toxins on them, they may be reacting to, they may have too much caffeine.

For me, I can only handle small amounts of caffeine at a time. Now, I can do it for multiple doses. But if I have too much caffeine at once, I don’t feel good. I can usually do about 50 milligrams, which is about the average cup of coffee is somewhere between 100 to 200 milligrams. For me, half to a quarter cup of coffee and that’s about all I can do or else I don’t feel as good. Now, I also add magnesium. Coffee, even though it contains magnesium, it can also deplete a little bit of magnesium. Most of us are going through stages, where we are throughout the day, it’s like hydration, we’re constantly going through magnesium. Nobody’s like magnesium sufficient. You are going throughout the day, just like hydration. You’re going through periods, where you’re well hydrated and dehydrated. At night, when we’re sleeping, we’re breathing out water vapor, wake up in the morning, we’re dehydrated, no matter how much water we drink the day before. You’ve got to rehydrate. It’s same with magnesium. We need to continually be getting magnesium into our system. It’s one of the key supplements that I’ll recommend for people and that can make a big difference. I actually will put that in coffee and that can really help. Then also, actually, a little bit of salts can actually help with coffee and tea, green tea just a little touch of good quality sea salt in there to get a little bit more minerals, that can also be very, very helpful with that.

But in general, if you drink coffee or you drink tea, you should feel really good. Those things are great. There’re other herbs as well, for example, citrus bergamot is another one that helps stimulate autophagy and that’s in Earl Grey tea, for example. You have carvacrol, which is in oregano, basil, thyme, all those Mediterranean herbs, they’re great. They’re rich in carvacrol, pretty sure I’m saying that right, which is really powerful, again. I always recommend when you’re eating food, you should really be able to smell it. It should be aromatic. Oregano, basil, thyme, rosemary, these types of things are great on savory dishes. If you’re making meat, vegetables, great herbs to be able to utilize. They’re also antimicrobial and they’re carminative. Carminatives mean they help to modulate intestinal contractions. They help move things through your intestines more effectively, help limit the amount of gas, bloating, cramping. We want to be utilizing these herbs with our meals. So, that’s fantastic. Turmeric has curcumin. Curcumin studied to have an autophagy enhancing effect and there’s actually over 300 different bioactive compounds in turmeric. Curcumin is just the most well studied. Really, with all these things we’ll isolate one thing, and we’ll do studies on it, and we’ll find that, it has tremendous benefits, but there’s actually other things in there too that are beneficial, which is always interesting.

For example, green tea has theanine, which helps naturally calm you, which naturally relaxes you, and it helps increase GABA production, which is your calming neurotransmitter, but it also has the caffeine in there, and it has epigallocatechin, the EGCG in there, the different polyphenols. You can also find polyphenols like EGCG in chocolate as well. Chocolate has similar effects, theobromine, chocolate has caffeine in it. Smaller amounts than coffee, but caffeine naturally stimulates autophagy. Those are the ones that are coming to mind. Ginger’s another one, has 6-shogaol, which has been studied to increase autophagy. If you’re thinking about different herbs, most of the listeners of your show, I’m sure have heard people talking about things like turmeric, and ginger, and all these great herbs, all those herbs are going to help benefit your ability to get into a state of autophagy. Also, drinking herbal teas during your fasting window is a great natural way to enhance the benefits of fasting. You get a lot more benefits by adding in those herbal teas or if you respond well to coffee, drinking some coffee during your fasting window, as long as you don’t overexcite your system, those can all be really great benefits to it.

Cynthia: There’s so much to unpack there and for all the listeners that know, I’m not a coffee drinker and I married probably the only other non-coffee drinker, that’s an adult. We have ginger green tea and some days, we’ll just actually cut very micro, I’m married to an engineer, micro thin slices of ginger into the green tea and we absolutely love that. That’s part of our ritual in the morning. But you touched on something that, I think it’s a term that’s overused in social media. I know that you and I both understand what detoxification means in the body and why so many people have mucked up systems. There are toxins they’re exposed to and the nutrition or lack thereof that people are consuming, let’s unpack that for a little bit just to reemphasize why this is so important. Why it’s so important to support the detoxification processes that should function optimally in our bodies? Our bodies are designed to function that way, but because of our lifestyle, food choices, etc., really get messed up and misaligned.

David: For sure. Well, we’re always taking in chemicals. More chemicals now than ever before, because we’re taking them in and our air, our water, our food. Most people hear about things like GMOs, pesticides, herbicides. There’re tons of studies out there talking about pesticide and herbicide exposure being linked to cancer, being linked to infertility, whole number of different issues. Certainly, a high-dose exposure can literally turn on cancer almost right away. For certain individuals, a high dose, high blast of radiation, just massive [unintelligible [00:36:40] to the system. But low doses over time also are going to activate abnormal gene production. They’re going to cause DNA damage, massive oxidative stress in the system. We’re being exposed to these things. Not to mention the fact that, there’s heavy metals all over the place. There’re amalgam fillings, silver fillings are loaded with mercury, for example. They used to have a lead in paint. People still are consuming lots of foods out of aluminum cans, for example, aluminum is leaching them. We can go on and on about different exposure tools.

I think the biggest thing that we all have to understand is, we’re all being exposed. I’ve got an air purifier, I’ve got water purifier, which is really smart things to do. I live in more of a country setting out here. That’s also a great health benefit. Not being in urban area, you’re away from a lot of the pollutants, but yet, still I’m being exposed to a lot of things. It’s very important to have a daily habit, daily ritual that helps my body’s detoxification systems. All of our bodies, we’re always trying to eliminate as much of these toxins as possible. You just have to have the right environment. What happens is when we’re eating all day, we are activating more insulin and insulin as I talked about before is a storage hormone. It’s telling the body to store, store, store, store. Shuts down drainage pathways, detoxification systems in our body. They slow down and we’re storing more things. Now, where do we typically store toxins? We typically store them in our fat cells. Fat cells are kind of storage areas for things. If we’re being exposed to a lot of things and we’re constantly turning on insulin, we’re going to end up storing a lot of toxins in our fat.

Now, when we start to do intermittent fasting, that’s the best way to suppress insulin. Low-carb diets will get insulin down, exercise gets insulin down. Then fasting, we have very low states of insulin. When insulin goes down, we’re able to start to detoxify. Now, we could talk about system wide detoxification, like, activating our lymphatic system, our liver, our kidneys, our gut. We need to be sweeping things out, we should be moving our bowels at least once, if not two to three, maybe even four times a day depending on how much food we’re consuming in order to really get toxins out of our gut, which is a great way to detoxify. We also can detoxify through breathing, believe it or not. Respiration is actually where we move most of the toxins out on a daily basis. Good breathing habits, super important exercise obviously helps increase the amount of breathing and so, we’re pushing out more toxins when we do that. Sweating, so, whether it’s through exercise or being in a sauna, infrared sauna, for example, great way to flush out more toxins and you got to pee your way to good health. I always tell clients that, I’m like, “You got to make sure you’re peeing your way to good health.” Typically, I have them drinking a lot of water and they’re like, “This is great. I feel so much better, but I’ve got to go to the bathroom every hour.” I’m like, “That’s actually, a good sign.” Honestly, if you can go two hours without having to pee, it’s a sign you’re not drinking enough water. Other than at night while you’re sleeping, but during the day, you should be urinating every two hours or so and that’s good. That means you’re sweeping things out through your system. That’s all important.

Now, what’s cool about fasting is, it really helps activate intracellular detoxification. Because as important as a system wide detoxification is where we’re talking about all these major organ systems, the colon, the liver, the kidneys, respiratory system, how these things are all moving toxins out. We are going to accumulate toxins inside of ourselves as well and we’re also going to have a lot of oxidative stress that damages and creates dysfunctional components of our cell. We’ve got to turn that over and that’s where fasting really comes in. It creates an environment with low insulin. When we have low insulin, it turns on key signaling pathways that then go in and break down old damaged mitochondria, old damaged cellular organelles, and take that trash out. At the same time, repair and create newer, healthier mitochondria, new healthy Golgi apparatus, endoplasmic reticulum, all these protein components of the cell that are critical for cellular energy production and all the key components of what a cell does on a moment-to-moment basis. We’re repairing it, we’re creating a new, young, healthy, vibrant cell, basically from the inside out. That’s actually very energy conserving to do that. If we have to kill an old cell and replace it with a new stem cell, it’s actually more energy demanding.

Our body as long as the cell is at a level, like, the components in there are at a degree where the body says, “Okay, this cell can still be repaired.” Then it’s going to go in and try to repair it. Once it gets to the point where the cell is so damaged and what we call senescent, so old and decayed, okay, it’s still functioning and doing things just these things are not good. For example, immune cells that are senescent create more inflammation. They drive up inflammation, they damage and attack normal tissue. Autoimmunity is very much linked to an overabundance of senescent immune cells. We have these senescent dysfunctional cells, we either have a choice. Let’s repair them from the inside out or let’s get rid of them and create new stem cells to replace them. Fasting creates the environment, where we’re able to do that. If we’re eating throughout the day, we’re never in an environment where we’re able to do that. We can never heal and detoxify from the cellular level. So, we just continue to build up all these damaged dysfunctional cells and dysfunctional cellular debris until all of a sudden, we just feel awful and our system start to shut down.

You look at things like Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, these neurodegenerative conditions. Our brain is outside of our sex organs. Outside of our ovaries and our testes, the brain is the most mitochondrial rich organ of our body. There’s something like 10,000 mitochondria per cell of our brain, as opposed to our muscle cells, which are about thousand mitochondria per cell. Our liver is, I think, around 3,000 and our heart is about 5,000 mitochondria per cell. The more that these cells depend on mitochondria, those are the cells that when we don’t activate autophagy and repair these mitochondria, those are the areas that are oftentimes the ones that are going to we’re going to notice the symptoms. When we’re younger, when we don’t have good repair mechanisms and our brain starts to build up these dysfunctional cells, the senescent cells, we notice it as things like depression, anxiety, brain fog, just poor mental clarity, poor memory. Then over time, we continue to build these cells up, and we end up with memory loss, cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s along the way. For Parkinson’s, people start to notice maybe tremors or just a slowness in moving. These are all the early onset symptoms. But by that point, there’s just been a massive overload of senescent neuronal cells that are built up in the brain.

Cynthia: It gets really important and especially, telling given the climate that we are living in right now and I’m not referring to the pandemic, I’m just talking about the metabolic inflexibility, metabolic disease, there was a recent research article that I read that talked about how our brains, especially our brains beyond middle age, so, 60s, 70s and beyond when this is when we typically will see people developing a lot of these neurodegenerative diseases are really made in our 30s, 40s, and 50s. If you’re listening and you’re in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, it is so critically important to be taking care of your brain and being mindful of your brain. That could be as simple as avoiding insulin resistance. It could be as simple as fasting, even if you’re not doing it every single day, just making better food choices. Now, I want to pivot just a little bit. There’re two other areas I want to touch on based on feedback from listeners and followers on social media, things that people wanted me to ask you about. What are some of the common fasting mistakes you see with your own clients or in your social media content? Because I’m sure you get lots of questions or questions that people will ask after your podcast episodes. What are the most common things you see people doing incorrectly?

David: Yeah, it’s a good question. I would say it’s actually changed over the years. I would say, right now, biggest mistake is people think it’s an all or none process. You either fast every single day, you do intermittent fasting every day or you’re a failure, basically. That’s not the case. If you feel great doing it, doing a 16-hour fast, 18-hour fast every day, great. Do it every day, until all of a sudden, you notice you’re not feeling great. That’s fine. And especially, most men can do that and get away with it. What I find is that, the thin, lean, very active, high-achieving female, during her menstrual cycle, they tend to really struggle that. That’s because their body is really sensitive. They have a certain threshold for how much body fat they can have. Once they get under that threshold, then the bodies are shutting down fertility hormones. When your estrogen goes down, you’re not going to feel good as a woman. Your progesterone, when those things go down, you’re not going to feel good. You could lose your hair, for example, feel depressed, really lethargic, lose your sex drive, all these different things that we don’t want to experience. That’s because the body’s starting to go into hibernation mode. Because again, it thinks it’s in a time of famine and you need to hunker down. It’s really important that you’re not thinking about fasting from that perspective.

This is something that like exercise. There are some people that metabolically, they’re really resilient, and they can exercise every single day, and feel great. Other people and it can change depending on what else is going on your season. When I was 26, 27, I was exercising every single day and I felt great. I had healed my irritable bowel, felt fantastic. I was doing that every day, felt great. Then we had twin boys, and I wasn’t getting much sleep, and I thought I could do that, and completely tanked. Depending on your sleep, your stress, that’s going to help you understand how much stress you can handle. Fasting is a stressor. It’s a stressor on the body, because the body needs to create energy, whether it’s taking it from your own body fat, from amino acids within the cells going through that process of autophagy or getting it from your diet, it needs to continually produce energy. You may start, like, for a lot of people, I will start them with a 12-hour fast between their last meal and their first meal. Get really good at that and then I’ll bump it up to about 14 hours. I find that 14 hours is pretty easy, because if you just start your day with drinking water, we’re all dehydrated when we first wake up. Hydrate well and that naturally suppresses hunger. For most people, they notice, then go to about that 14-hour mark and then they start noticing the hunger. Oh, yeah, 14 hours and I eat my meals and a 10-hour window shouldn’t be an issue.

Then what we’ll try to do is really prime the system and it will stress the system to up go up to about 16 hours, but only doing it two days a week, nonconsecutive days. For example, a Monday and a Friday. That way, you’ve got recovery time in between, because it is going to be a stressor on your body until you get acclimated to it, until you build up the metabolic machinery to use your own body fat to get amino acids from your cells. This is a process. You got to train your body and body knows how to do it. But if it hasn’t been used to doing it, it doesn’t have the machinery to do it. You train it by going into that environment, for a short period of time, the body starts to acclimate to get better at handling that stressor and it gets better at it. Then over time, it becomes easier. We’ll do it two days a week. If the person feels good in that, we might go to three times a week, like, every other day, for example. If they still feel great, we can experiment doing it maybe five days a week or six days a week. For most females, unless they’re very overweight, usually I’ll hold it to about five or six days a week and then do one day a week, where it’s more of a 12 to 14-hour fast like what you’re doing.

Then eating three really good meals throughout the day, getting a good amount of calories, good amount of protein there, that feast day or whatever you want to call it, and that tends to work really, really well. Again, going through this feast famine cycling process, so, I’ll say, that’s one of the big mistakes. Then outside of that moving your bowels. If people are not moving their bowels in the morning when they first get up, fasting is going to be a lot harder. Your colon is most active between 6 AM and 9 AM. You naturally have peristalsis, which is muscle contractions going on in your gut between that period of time. Your vagus nerve is your key nerve, parasympathetic nerve, its cranial nerve comes down from your brain, goes all the way down in your heart, your lungs, your gut. In fact, vagus is actually Latin for wanderer. It’s the longest nerve in the body, longest cranial nerve for sure. It goes all the way down into the gut and stimulates the gut contractions.

Now, the vagus nerve is also a parasympathetic nerve. Meaning that, it helps activate a relaxation response in our body and it can become more active when we do things to help facilitate a relaxation response. There are several ways we can do it. Deep breathing, for example, is a way to help stimulate the vagus nerve, drinking water actually, just moving the palate that way helps stimulate the vagus nerve. There are other strategies as well that aren’t necessarily relaxing, like singing loud, for example, and gargling, but we need some vagus nerve activation in order to really do that. I’ll tell people, start your day drink water warm, lemon water. For example, warm water is actually the best ways to stimulate the vagus nerve. Warm water is a great way to get your colon moving. Herbal teas, you can just do warm lemon water, whatever you want to do, coffee, all those things can help with, again, getting that peristalsis.

But moving the bowels in the morning is so critical. If you do not do that, you’re going to end up with basically putrefaction. The feces is going to putrefy because it’s sitting in the colon for a long period of time. You should move everything out of your system within at the max 24-hour period. If I ate dinner last night and finished dinner by 7 PM, the waste from that should be out of my body by 7 PM tonight. If it’s not, it’s putrefying, we’re releasing tremendous amounts of chemical compounds, toxic compounds, we’re creating a breeding ground for pathogens, bad bacteria, microorganisms, and we’re amplifying the stress response in our system. We’re actually creating more stress, more inflammation in our body and that can also trigger cravings. I know if I don’t clear my bowels well, I find it a lot harder to fast and now, a lot of people do. Starting your day hydrating, deep breathing, getting the warm water in really powerful ways. You can also actually help activate the vagus nerve by massaging right behind your jaw and your ear in this area.

My friend, Jodi Cohen, I don’t know if you know her, but she’s an essential oils expert. She actually has a parasympathetic– Her company is Vibrant Blue Oils. Yeah, you familiar with that? She has a parasympathetic blend. I believe it’s lime and clove. She says, “Just put that in and massage.” I got this idea from her. This area right here and I’ve been doing that with my wife, because when especially, when women get pregnant, especially as they enter into that third trimester, everything’s like so compressed. [crosstalk] It can be hard. Vagus nerve activation can really help, but that’s going to help relax you, it’s going to help calm you, and at the same time move the bowels, going to really make fasting easier. Outside of that, consuming enough trace mineral rich foods, not consuming– Staying away obviously from processed foods, eating real Whole Foods, and particularly, trace mineral rich foods, because when your insulin is lower, you excrete more sodium.

The typical average Americans on high-carbohydrate diets, they have high insulin. For those individuals, they’re retaining sodium and that can be a contributor to high blood pressure, a lot of different issues. But when you fast and ideally make the diet changes like you talk about Cynthia, starting to go more lower carb. Then your insulin is going to go down and now, you start to excrete more sodium and more minerals. You actually need more. You need to replace those. You can get them from real foods, celery, cucumbers, dark green leafy vegetables, very rich in trace minerals including sodium, grass-fed meats, wild-caught fish, seaweed a great source, avocados, olives. These are all great foods that are nutrient dense, rich in trace minerals. And salt your foods. Use a good quality sea salt or a Himalayan or Redmond’s Real Salt, something like that. You don’t have to oversalt it, but just salt it to your taste. Don’t be afraid of salt. That’s super important as well.

For some individuals just taking a little bit of salt in their water also, while they’re fasting can make a huge difference. I’ve seen that for a lot of people, make a really big difference. They have less brain fog, they feel more energetic while they’re fasting, it’s easier for them to fast longer. If you’re trace mineral deficient or if you excreted too much sodium, especially if you’re trying to practice like I was talking about drinking a lot of water, which drinking a lot of water can really help move the bowels. If you’re having trouble there, drinking 24 or 32 ounces of water in the first hour, hour and a half will definitely help you move your bowels, but it can also drain some of your minerals. Taking a little bit of salt with that can help. So, anyways, those are probably the biggest things that I’m seeing that would be beneficial for people.

Cynthia: No, that’s so helpful on so many levels. A good friend of mine, who’s a physician said recently, “We don’t acknowledge how critically important it is for babies to poop and sleep.” The same applies to adults that we don’t realize how– If you can do those two things regularly, sleep well and poop every day, you’re going to feel like a completely different person.

David: For sure. Yeah. I could have mentioned sleep, too. That’s so critical as well.

Cynthia: Well, it’s interesting because on many levels, I always say, “if you have trouble sleeping, don’t add intermittent fasting,” because it’s another hormetic stressor. If you’re already sleeping well, and you add an intermittent fasting, and your sleep goes down, then we have to dial things back. But I always think about sleep as a barometer of how well you’re responding to your day-to-day existence, but also the fasting mechanisms. I want to touch on one last area. Before that, we’re going to do one quick commercial break.

The other question that I was getting was, what are your thoughts on fasting variations, especially as it pertains to women? I know we touched on this a little bit, but I know when we’re looking at cycling women, women, who are still in their fertility years, and I would say, anyone that’s south of 40 years old, because in our 40s, where really our eggs are as old as we are and that’s the prime season for perimenopause. But we’re looking at women still in their really fertile years, looking at their menstrual cycle, looking at when they should ideally be fasting versus when they should back off from fasting, what is your philosophy here? I know in your book you’ve got a lot of great information. But I know that our listeners would definitely appreciate getting your input as well.

David: Yeah, for sure. If you’re a woman, you’re going through your menstrual cycle, it is a really good idea to chart your menstrual cycle. That just gives you a lot of biofeedback on your own health. It’s a really good idea to get familiar with. Day one is your first day of menstruation. Typically, day 14 is your day of ovulation, where the egg drops, most fertile in that period of time. Understanding that, those two things is critical. But the week before you menstruate, there’s a big hormonal flux that takes place and you need more free hormones. What happens is, when you have– We want to establish a baseline of pretty good insulin sensitivity to begin with. Low-carb dieting, so, somebody that’s really insulin resistant, this doesn’t apply as much too, because they’re already insulin resistant. However, once you’ve been doing some of these protocols, exercising, eating well, if you’re a lean, typically, a lean female, that’s health conscious, you’re probably fairly well insulin sensitive. If that’s the case, then doing too much fasting is going to lower your insulin too much and you’re not going to get the amount of free estrogen, progesterone, the different hormonal flux that you need to really menstruate and to ovulate effectively.

There are certain times where we need higher amounts of insulin in order to activate more free hormones. The week before you menstruate is one of those weeks. That’s the week that most women notice more cravings, for example. There’s a reason for that. Body is giving you signals. That’s super important. During that period of time, I don’t recommend– Other than maybe a 12 to 14-hour fasts, I think that’s fine. It’s also a good time to eat more carbohydrates, healthy carbohydrates ideally, like sweet potatoes, carrots, beets, all your root vegetables that are nutrient dense. That’s a great time. Fruit, lots of berries, oranges, apples. Getting a lot of nutrients during that period of time, a lot of antioxidants, lot of phytonutrients that are in those things, and the carbohydrate stimulation as well is really good. More protein as well can be really good. You can dial back the fat a little bit during that window. Then also, right before ovulation is a good idea, too. Somewhere around day 12 or so, good time to throw in a high carb day with healthy carbs again. I’m not talking about eating a bunch of French fries.

Cynthia: [laughs]

David: Good sources, good nutrient-dense sources, day 12 through 15 or so, typically, I’m recommending a little bit more of that. Now, once you start menstruating, that’s actually a good time to go back into fasting and low carb. That’s when you can start to dial down inflammation. You’re already shedding and so, you’ve gone through that. Now, the blood is coming out and you can start to enhance the healing process by going low carb and doing more intermittent fasting or if you want to do an extended fast, that’s typically a good time to do it. That’s going to help reduce unwanted menstrual symptoms. The cramping, all that kind of stuff. A lot of women notice that they when they’re doing intermittent fasting, lower carb, during that period of time, they just have less of the symptoms that take place during that menstrual cycle, when they start to bleed. That can be really helpful there, too.

Typically, and then, right after ovulation, again, somewhere around let’s say day 16, day 17, good period of time at right after ovulation to go back to doing intermittent fasting for a week. Then, right at that end of your cycle, so you’re not last week before you start menstruating, so again, now, going back to more carbs. That’s a great way to do it on the regular 28-day cycle to where you’re getting the benefits of both. You’re maintaining really good insulin sensitivity by doing your intermittent fasting and low-carb diet for roughly about somewhere on 20 of those days, but then, you’re also implementing feasting, some higher carb days to activate the hormones and get enough free hormones during roughly about eight days out of the month or eight days out of the 28-day cycle to get the right release those fertility hormones.

Cynthia: Yeah, and my philosophies are very aligned with what you just shared. I think that that if women are able to at least the five to seven days preceding when their menstrual cycle starts, if they make those changes, they’re not fasting, they’re upping their carbohydrates, they oftentimes will tell me that they feel so much better. Their PMS is improved, they’re sleeping better, they’re not having GI disturbances, a lot of times when they get loose bowels before preceding their menstrual cycle. I want to make sure that people go out and purchase your book, which I think is a really great compilation. It’s really easy to read. You’ve got great research in there. Tell the listeners how to connect with you. You have incredible podcasts and resources on your website. How to connect with you, where’s the best place to reach you on social media? I’m not sure where you’re most active. I’m not sure if you’re more on Instagram, or more on Twitter, or a little bit of Facebook, but let everyone know how to connect with you how to get your book?

David: Yeah, for sure. My website’s drjockers.com. You could find a link for my book there or just go on Amazon, type in The Fasting Transformation or type in my name, and you’ll find my book. I also have another book, the Keto Metabolic Breakthrough, which is another book really teaching people how to get keto adapted, how to get fat adapted, and then how to carb cycle appropriately, some of the things we talked about today. Anyways, those are my main books that are out there. Then, yeah, I’ve got a great podcast of Dr. Jockers Functional Nutrition Podcast. I’m most active on Facebook and YouTube as well, and then, also on Instagram. So, just look me up @drdavidjockers on those sites.

Cynthia: Well, thank you, again for your time and good luck, you mentioned your wife is imminently getting ready to have your fourth child and so, it’s an exciting time for you all.

David: Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, absolutely. We’re going to do a homebirth. It’s going to be amazing. So, we’re super excited about it to meet our little baby girl.

Cynthia: Awesome.

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