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Losing weight should't be expensive or complicated. The ideal process would reduce our stress while driving results. Dr. Z weaves together his perspective on physical and mental health and the powerful way that fasting can connect these two spheres of our lives. Let's move toward total wellness and a holistic vision of health and healing. Learn more at SimpleFasting.com
Take a minute or three with me here
this morning.
Float up into space with me for a bit.
Maybe just in your mind.
Picture the earth slowly
rotating on its axis
as it travels around the sun.
Some beautiful jewel hanging
in the vastness of space.
Amongst all the stars we can see.
Out in the vast distance.
Take a 250 mile view
today of health on Earth.
250 miles.
That's the International Space Station
floating up there.
People spend a lot of time.
Sitting in space and looking down.
What a vantage point to just think about
everything that is happening, you know?
Think globally.
Right? Impossible not to do.
Think big picture when you're staring
at the entire earth from space.
Hard not to.
Think in a little bigger picture.
And so this is the question.
Would it change you
if you could actually do it?
It is theoretically possible.
There's rockets in the space
station, is there?
You know, nobody gonna just ship you up.
But it is it is possible.
It could be done.
So if you could actually be there.
And can we just do it in our mind now
because we see.
It in our mind now.
Do you have struggles in health?
This is the sort of space
that I want to lean into.
We have struggles in health.
It can be so frustrating and we can be
stuck in the middle of our process,
our experience.
Can we zoom out a little bit?
Get a bigger picture?
And a vantage point is, say,
could it change you?
I would say it probably could.
I'm going to share a little reading
from an astronaut who did it.
It changed him. What can we learn from it?
I put a video of this gentleman
speaking in the description.
Maybe when you're done here, go watch
the gentleman speak about his experience.
That it changed him to see the earth
from a distance floating in space.
Say, how could it?
This would be my suggestion for today.
Grab a coffee or tea.
Maybe it's fasting space.
Maybe it's not.
Either way, a contemplate of space.
How could taking a much bigger view
of our situation
change life and health
get us out of patterns?
This is maybe one of the biggest things
that I would like to help somebody do.
Are we in patterns
that are not serving us?
How do we break out of them?
Blast out of them.
Blast off, I say.
Fasting to me.
I love lots of metaphors like floating.
I love the sailboat.
I love just the idea
of the wind of the metabolism
blowing us across,
taking us where we need to go.
Not so much work to do with the boat
on the sailboat, maybe hitting the rudder,
grabbing some ropes right?
But like the wind is doing the work.
I love this analogy floating in space.
Picture the astronaut in their suit.
You know there's just a human
being in the universe, right?
Think of the
struggle that we have here on this planet
in so many ways.
And we're dialing in
specifically a struggle to be healthy.
And I think fasting, I think food, it's
two sides of the same coin.
I look down at the planet here
and you see that there are people,
which has been the story of people
for most of human history,
struggling to get enough to eat right,
having a very difficult experience
with poverty and health.
And we have an experience
way on the other side of the.
Spectrum, too much,
I would say, of the wrong kinds
of food, highly processed factory food.
Look at what you know for all of history.
Think of what
this planet has produced for us
healthy natural foods from the earth
that create life and health.
A bit disconnected from that.
Can you feel it from this vantage point?
We're a bit disconnected from it now.
And this is leading to problems
on the other side.
Too many calories, but also a poverty
of nutrition at the same time.
It's like to me,
everything we're trying to do
in a space of health
bring things into balance.
When I sit here,
I look at the earth in this vantage point.
Just think about the incredible balance
that has been struck in this place
for an incredible amount of time.
Everything in balance,
everything in a cycle.
Just think about.
Life here and how long it has existed.
Whatever your views are and the creation
or development of life here,
I mean, it's incredible.
It is incredible.
Everything tuned.
Think of all the parameters
of this machine that is Earth.
Everything interdependent,
everything flowing together.
People. Right?
We're we're part of this system.
We are this system.
We exist here on the earth.
We come out of it.
We exist in it.
We eat it, we return to it.
The matter that makes up
our bodies was making up some other things
just a little while ago.
And it will be again, just a little bit
more energy pushing us one direction
and we careen off into space
just a little more the other way.
And we burn up in the sun.
Everything for a billion years or five,
you know,
keeps us perfectly in this space.
The space that I want in health
is connecting to this sort of concept.
Everything in balance, the natural way,
the flow of energy
that comes throughout the universe, right
throughout the solar system,
from the sun to the Earth, to us
for our brief moment,
everything in balance
and from this perspective.
It's like two things at once that I see.
It's like, how do we help
bring everything into balance?
How do we help,
you know, in a fasting space?
Always makes me want to think about
how do we help
every person on this planet
to have enough to eat?
How do we use a practice like this
to say no
to the types of foods
that are hurting people?
There's maybe one of the most
powerful things we can say no to.
No to toxic food, right?
Fasting.
Something that can really help with that.
Maybe it's just for a period of time,
like you're traveling
and you see only fast food restaurants
as far as the eye can see,
say, have practiced this.
I don't need
to put any garbage into my body.
I can just fast through this space
until I can find something worthwhile.
Hey. Good morning.
I love this.
Earth is not just a place we are,
but also a place we are.
Feel it of it.
Thank you for sharing that.
That is definitely the vibe.
You know, when you sit up here,
I kind of pretend
in my mind, right,
that I'm really up here looking down.
Maybe this is a type of thing
you can see in a meditation space.
Really just look at it.
And the thing that I was thinking
about yesterday while I was putting
our little scene together,
it's like putting me in a bubble up here.
It's like I'm
the moon floating out somewhere.
I just think, man, this place
has been spinning for a long time,
you know what I mean?
It's been spinning around a lot longer
than I have been here.
And every problem
that I have, every difficulty that I face,
it's just a couple spins on this place
around the sun, and it's like this,
this whole experience, life on earth,
thinking health is so vast, it's so big.
And then we are part of it.
And you just think of the energy
of these giant
processes, this vehicle
that we are sitting on here.
What I see is health.
A big part of health is just reaching
into this a little bit, you know.
Let me show you
the experience that this gentleman had.
I saw this on the platform
for only known as Twitter.
Do you do you still call it a tweet?
Is it a tweet
if it's not Twitter, I don't know.
What do you call it?
Former astronaut
Ron Garin returned from space,
convinced
that humanity is living in enormous lie.
During his 178 day
mission aboard
the International Space Station in 2011.
Nearly six months in orbit,
71 million miles traveled,
spinning around the Earth.
Oh, man.
He experienced the transformative
overview effect,
which I guess many astronauts, indoors
from 250 miles above the Earth,
the planet appeared as a single delicate
blue marble suspended in the void.
No visible borders, nations or divisions.
Political lines vanished.
Pertinent today, Instead, he saw.
A fragile, interconnected biosphere
wrapped in an astonishingly
thin atmosphere, the sole protective layer
sustaining all life
against the deadly vacuum of space.
This perspective shattered
his prior worldview, he observed,
and iridescent, teeming world of life,
but no trace of the global economy
that humans prioritize.
Karen, realize the enormous lie
we perpetuate the illusion
that we are separate from one another,
from nature, from the planet itself.
Our systems treat the Earth's life support
mechanism
the air, the water, the ecosystems
as mere subsidiaries of the economy.
When the orbital view reveals
the opposite truth,
the planet comes first,
then the society, then the economy.
Do you think that's true?
Do you think it's true in your life?
I would say it is true
whether we think it or not.
But,
you know,
we can be so wrapped into the economy and
then and then everything flows out of it.
And that wraps into the politics
and all these things and the fact
that we're here
floating in space on this beautiful
jewel, like he says, like,
how often do we even think of it?
You know,
it's like we just take it for granted.
In his words,
this realization highlighted how crises
like climate change,
deforestation, biodiversity loss stem
from this fundamental
misperception of separation.
Karen argues that embracing
this unified, fragile reality,
seeing ourselves
as crew members on Spaceship Earth Central
for collective survival,
an effective global stewardship.
I want to just weave in the thread here
and also like for our health
to be healthy here,
I think this is where I want to go.
The view from space
didn't just change his outlook.
It underscored an urgent call for humanity
to realign priorities
with the undeniable
interconnectedness of our shared home.
I try to stay off social media.
I don't particularly like
even this platform.
How did I end up even looking at it?
Oh, I was looking to to see what people
are saying about political
things that are happening.
And then I saw that
and I was like, well, some good came of it
because I really enjoyed that.
And then I was like, well,
who is this guy?
You know, I don't I see a thing.
I was like, is this real?
Like, I don't even hardly know sometimes.
Why do I look at a social media?
Because you can barely tell
if anything is real.
So I went and looked this guy
up, and I watched some of his videos,
and I put a video of him
speaking in the description of this video.
So if you want, you can go listen to him
basically say these words.
He wrote a couple books about it,
the orbital view, I think one was called
And Hanging in Darkness.
I was having a little bit of jealousy.
I was like, I wouldn't
I wouldn't mind hanging in darkness
and and staring out at this for a while,
you know?
But, we do our best with a little video
and our imagination.
Would it change you
to have that experience?
How can it change us?
Reflecting on it now to, like, really
take some space here
and to see something that we take
for granted so much?
How can we bring that knowledge,
that experience, that perspective
into our life in the most powerful way,
the most grounding way?
I'm not going to rush
to give you an answer to it,
you know, because I think it's a
you know, it's a personal thing.
I think it'll hit everybody,
maybe in a little bit of a different place
depending on the season of life
that you're in
and what your experience is.
What are you struggling with.
But I hope what you find from
this space is a little encouragement.
I put on the little post on the post
sections of the site.
You know, do you ever feel
like you're hanging in darkness?
You know, do you have a dark season?
Does a perspective like this help
to feel the connectedness of things?
Can we lean into a space like that
to help
us overcome struggles that we have?
I'm not checking my phone
for a text message.
I'm checking my phone
to monitor the blood sugar because I'm
running a little experiment
this morning for you.
Fasting space.
Always when I am doing this,
I'm usually fasting in the morning.
I think every live show
I've ever done fasting.
Except for today.
Here I do a show.
How would it change?
And then I'm changing.
I'm running an experiment.
I don't think we can see it on here, but,
I made a real carb
heavy oatmeal, a cup of oatmeal,
an apple, a banana raisin.
So triple fruit,
some cinnamon and pumpkin seeds.
I've had the three
meals, but in different contexts
are just experimenting with it.
In one, I ate the meal
and did nothing and watch the blood sugar
in the next, morning, I ate the meal
and then I got right on the bike,
and I exercised
for 30 minutes on the bike.
And then yesterday I had a keto
oh man day.
I had just a couple eggs in avocado
and and then fasting the rest of the day
till this morning and then fasting.
I got on the bike and I did half an hour
on the bike, then had the oatmeal.
Anybody want to guess
what is the blood sugar
in these different scenarios?
No added sugar, but triple fruit
and a cup of old fashioned oats.
This is what I'm making a video about.
With the continuous glucose monitor.
So we think here is a process.
What I'm saying 250 mile view of Earth.
Change our mind. Change our perspective.
Is this what we're trying to do
in a fasting space?
Maybe a glucose monitor?
Also, the type of thing
that can help you to change this is what,
I am really wanting to dive into
when we think, how do we find balance
like this place, like the Earth, like
all the energy in its proper place?
All right.
My experience so far, I, you know, it was.
I think I know a thing or two
about blood sugar.
I spent a lot of time staring at blood
sugar monitors with people.
But I'm getting a much deeper
understanding, you know, personally
having it on my self and really
dialing into it and really feeling it.
And so I've been thinking a lot of that
thought
along with this sort of thought,
how do we bring things
into balance in the body?
How do we bring things into balance
in our experience?
Try to use every tool at our disposal.
Some beautiful thoughts,
realize connectedness in this place.
Realize you think.
Every person here,
I love the way that guy you know said it.
No boundaries, know all the differences.
There's just people here.
And then of course, you know, we zoom in
and there's there is all this conflict
and division, but it's kind of
getting us out of that a little bit.
And just to think about.
How are we being here?
You know, this is what I love
to think about in the fasting space.
What is our way of being?
When we think about the.
Priorities that we have, the consumption
culture, think of the toll that we are
taking on the planets like you just look,
you know, here's the dark side.
Every surface lit up with lights.
And most of that light is coming up with,
The fossil carbon
being sucked out of the earth
to power the lights a little while
and then off into the atmosphere.
And it's going to continue
on its journey.
And if we can see any good from it,
we say, we hope some beautiful
rainforest plants suck it up
and build
their bodies out of it for a while
and try to help get things into balance.
But then we see that
a lot of those forests are being cut down
in order to graze a cattle,
so we can have more hamburgers.
And, you know, those are
the types of things that gets a little,
a little gloomy to me
sometimes I really like there's a quote
when I'm feeling cynical
or gloomy about it.
There's a George Carlin has a code.
It's something like beneath
every cynic is a disappointed optimist.
I love that.
We try to be the most optimistic we can.
If there's a way to me to thread
all these needles together,
every problem that we have of division
and animosity and cycles of violence
that have been spinning around
for thousands of years on our planet and,
you know,
seemingly are continuing to ramp up today.
And the fact that we
we take all of this for granted.
What can one person do
in the vastness of space
who finds themselves conscious
in this moment for a few minutes?
It's like, not too much, right?
But we can take care of ourselves
in this moment.
We can choose to eat
only the healthiest foods that are
flowing from this earth
to us, in the most direct and natural way.
Help to bring our own body into balance.
If our own selves do you believe it?
Or if we really are this place
like does taking care of ourselves?
Does it matter?
Does it help?
You know, like I think it does.
And this is the connection
that I would encourage people to make.
Taking care of ourselves
is taking care of the earth is like one
and the same thing.
You care about global issues.
You care about people around the world.
You care about all of this
coming into balance.
Can we bring ourselves into balance?
Can we show that care and compassion
to ourselves first, and then does it
flow out?
This is what I think as we are
showing that kindness care to ourselves.
Does that also change how our energy,
our tiny little molecule
in this ocean of experience,
does that flow out?
I think it does probably a lot
more than we realize, I think.
And whether that is true or not,
in some philosophical or absolute sense.
You know what?
If you lived your life as if it were true
and it brought meaning and value
to and to you, and wouldn't
that be good and beautiful?
I think the thing I'm
taking away from this process with a blood
sugar monitor is just how impactful
our decisions are, how we move, what
and when we eat, and how we do it.
Make so much difference.
Batting mode says
I'm going with a ten point difference
between oatmeal and oatmeal bike,
and another ten difference
between mad, keto and Normal.
Thank you for participating
and sharing this.
I will leave you hanging in darkness
in a little suspense till you see it.
I will just, I'll give you the
little clue that I was surprised, I think.
I think I would have guessed
your same thing.
It's a tiny bit more.
A tiny bit more. Fascinating.
It is fascinating.
I am fascinated by it.
I've got a few more tests coming
up, a few more tests coming up.
I got to see.
I keep doing more tests,
and then I keep thinking that
if I do more tests,
that I'm not going to get the video done
on Friday, I might, I might not,
but we won't put any timeline on it.
We'll get it out when it is
the right time.
Also, might need to break it
into two videos.
I'm gonna.
I'm taking myself up to drink
a soda compared to the oatmeal.
I really want to know what is drinking
a soda do.
I haven't had a soda in years.
I gotta tell you, I don't do
I was laughing with my kids about it
the other day, and they're saying,
when really was the last time?
And my son remembered once we did a
a century ride in Door County, Wisconsin,
and we were at like mile 90,
and I was pretty tired
and we stopped at an ice cream shop.
And I don't really do ice cream either.
And so everybody's getting ice cream.
And then my son was like,
look, they've got a cherry soda.
You should drink a cherry soda.
If you're ever going to do it,
you should do it.
So I drank a cherry soda.
That must have been like four years ago.
And it perked me up for about five miles.
And then I crashed and I felt worse.
And I was like,
I wish I had never done that.
So, I'm not really excited about it,
but I kind of do it
because I just really am curious
how high does the blood sugar go?
I really want to know now, so we'll do it
once while I've got the monitor on,
and I'm going to do a late popcorn
because I'm also curious,
where is the blood sugar
go with popcorn late.
And what is the blood sugar
look like overnight?
This has also been
another fascinating thing to watch.
Where does the blood sugar go overnight
depending on what we do.
Very fascinating.
I don't know, I just sit here
and I watch, you know, this little,
you know, I think, you know, computer
generated something.
I don't know that this is a real image
in any way.
I downloaded it from a stock video
site, you know, but it's just
it's just beautiful.
Can you imagine sitting up in actual space
and actually watching
the real Earth spin around from up there
and you're flying 20,000
or whatever miles an hour around it,
and you can just see it
as just so incredible as I'm sitting here
just thinking about it.
I've done a lot of thinking, you know,
historically, just about gratitude.
I sit here and look at it.
I think, how much gratitude
when can we have, can we bring like
just kind of a gratitude meditation
or reflection into our life?
Gratitude studied in the lab.
I've seen different papers,
functional MRI and other sorts of things.
This is a grounding practice.
This is the sort of thing
helping us keep in that parasympathetic,
state, helping
to keep the hormonal structure balanced.
This is, you know, what is so fascinating
to me about the glucose process?
Say what we eat matters
and also what we think matters.
And so I really encourage us today, from
this vantage point, lean into gratitude.
I think gratitude.
You know, can change us.
I think it can,
Put us into the state of mind,
can slow down the decision making,
you know?
Do you ever feel this way in health,
with food, with things?
It's like, man, like we see something,
react, see something, react.
We start getting in
a more contemplative space.
Maybe we can frame our day in this way.
This is going to be like even a day
focused on gratitude.
What does it look like to walk this earth
in this day?
With everything that I have to do,
everywhere that I'm going?
bringing that gratitude.
Like I was saying,
okay, gratitude in our day.
Especially gratitude with food.
Want to bring the gratitude
right down into our eating space?
Gratitude in a fasting space.
There is totally a grounding thought,
right?
Most people you know, in our society,
our culture, consumption, culture,
it is saying fasting,
restriction, fasting, avoid fasting.
Negative.
Okay, finding gratitude for fasting,
the fact that it's something
that the body can do,
the fact that health can come through it,
the fact that actually practicing it
and learning it can come to feel good
and help us to feel lighter, like,
whoa, you know,
that blood sugar can be burned up in it,
and that the hormonal space
can be grounded
with our insulin coming down like this is,
you know, kind of incredible.
So you're wanting to lean
into some fasting space.
Leaning into gratitude for it can help you
come to appreciate it on a deeper level.
I'm not going to sit here
and say that I like feeling hungry
any more than anyone else does,
but then you take a breath
and you find gratitude for it,
and you realize
this is a feeling of the body
coming into balance for a period of time
if you need it, not pushing yourself
into a space that feels stressful,
not doing it
as any sort of punishing thing,
and never using it
if you don't need to use it, you know
someone is underweight or malnourished.
You know you don't need fasting.
I say we're heading off into a zone there.
Fasting is a tool
to accomplish a metabolic purpose.
So fasting, gratitude there
and then gratitude
in eating like this is a practice
many people have.
Take a moment before we're eating.
Have a moment of gratitude for it.
Just realize here is like
if anything in the world is sacred, right?
Like here would be a part of something
that you might start
to consider using that word.
Here is something from the earth is coming
into the body becoming a part of me.
Wow. You know, that is a precious,
thing.
Have a lot of gratitude for it.
If you are spending enough
care and concern to be taking time,
maybe offering a blessing
for food, having gratitude for it.
This is the sort of thing
you're going to want
that to be some good stuff,
you know what I mean?
Hard to get a microwave burrito
and then like, you know, you could,
but it's like, okay, it's like, but
can we really at least when we can, maybe
we're in a busy day and some prepared
thing is the only thing that works fine.
We can still have gratitude for it, but
it's like going to bring in the thought,
I want to really get the freshest,
healthiest, most natural,
highest quality stuff
and bring the nourishment into the body.
These are the things we're trying
to bring into balance.
Food and fasting.
Bring the energy into balance.
It's an interesting reflection,
I guess, things that are coming to my mind
the the last couple of days are doing
these experiments.
I'm a big I'm love exercise
do many different
exercise
of running and hiking and biking
and historically in the pre
pre fasting time
I would always have a practice eat
and then exercise.
And I would have you know I'd get up, I'd
have an orange juice, I'd have a banana,
I'd give things, you know, 20, 30 minutes
just kind of get the carbs on board.
You know, you kind of feel that
going in the morning and then go exercise.
And as I learned that a lot of elite
athletes will train fasting,
at least sometimes to train
the other side of the system,
try to be a dual fuel system.
Fascinating.
I thought, like,
have you experienced this in your life?
Energy crashes in the afternoon?
Feeling
hungry, needing energy
to be able to think and keep going.
I say like, well, it would be pretty nice.
Like because I was kind of a formula
de eater for most of my life until my 30s.
Sometime when I learned about fasting.
It was a fascinating experience
then to switch over,
to try to exercise in a fasting state.
At first, with never having done it,
I found very difficult
to actually unpleasant.
Definitely
you can feel the energy going down.
I remember the first time
I got on my bike,
I got a road bike on a trainer
down in my basement.
I get on the bike fasting in the morning
pretty soon after waking up,
just trying to turn the pedals over.
I was like, oh, pretty lightheaded even.
I was like by six weeks
it was about six weeks of working
at it, slowly easing into it.
Then I could exercise a lot harder
in the fasting state.
That was my experience
a lot more pleasantly,
and I think almost every type of exercise
I've done since then,
I at least start out fasting
at least feels better.
I'm not going to say that it's the optimal
thing
to set some endurance,
you know, world record or anything.
I do the century ride,
I'll start eating some snack bars
into the thing, and I think it,
I think it helps.
I did one fasting century just to do it.
Amazing to do.
But it wasn't a record time or anything.
It was slow, but it felt good.
So yesterday, to load up a giant oatmeal
with triple fruit and pumpkin seeds,
you know, and then get on the bike,
it wasn't really my vibe.
That's what I'll share about that
expression experience so far.
You know, it could be done,
I suppose you get used to it.
But you know, today,
getting up and getting on the bike
this morning,
I was like, oh, that felt good.
I was like, oh, this, this is,
this is the way I exercise now.
All right.
Well it's beautiful.
It's beautiful sharing the space,
I love it.
I hope you have a beautiful day.
Take some of these thoughts.
Big picture
view of Earth floating in space.
Think of the thoughts
that we encountered in this space.
The connectedness, the groundedness.
Just the view that we can,
can just see things in a way
without all the division
and conflict for a while,
and that we can take
that sort of perspective,
bring it into our life
and our experience, show
love, kindness, compassion to ourself
also in how we are treating ourselves
with our health decisions.
Use these things to try to flow through
difficulties and challenges that we have.
And then through that process, hopefully
so we can share that experience more
broadly with, everybody we encounter
and stay optimistic despite of difficulty.
I will look forward to connecting with you
again.
I'll be back here tomorrow.
We take another step forward in health
together.
Be well everybody.