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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
Grab a coffee. Will lean in together to some healthy thinking.
Try to pull out some weight loss wisdom.
Go inside to find it. That's where we're going to head today.
Other times in life,
everything we're doing, you know, the eyes looking out.
Trying to find something better. Health, encouragement, anything is out there.
We talked about fasting being a mirror.
We're trying to create a mirror, bounce back, look inside a little bit.
Go inside. When I was writing a title, go Inside, I was thinking of
how cold it is out and I can hear mom yelling. I can go inside, get inside.
Try to get outside to, you know, even in the winter, even if it's cold, there's a lot of wisdom outside. I talk a lot about learning from nature,
trying to get into the rhythm of the seasons, learn from the cycles of this beautiful planet that we get to live on, that we're a part of, and that we want to incorporate ourselves into.
I really believe a human being is the type of thing that just thrives as we connect to the Earth or a part of these cycles. And so that's all good thinking today, though, we're going to be thinking about diving inside.
A weight loss process I mean it happens inside. We're trying to access energy that is inside of us.
That is an internal process.
And so yes, we have to interact with the outside world.
We gotta buy food. We've got to bring it in. We're trying to control that process in the most thoughtful way.
Had a real thoughtful, discussion about that yesterday, portion control and then using that squash as the metaphor with the thick skin,
carving that out, that protective barrier that fasting can do, protecting that interior environment, we can almost, you know, imagine ourself as like a squash mirroring that have that barrier protecting that precious, nutrient rich internal space.
That's what we're trying to do.
I love that thinking of ourself like a humble little squash.
Is like my favorite food.
So today we're going to reflect on it.
Here's a centering quote, for our day, which I was, I came upon yesterday
from Rumi.
Yesterday, I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.
Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
I was really thinking about this a lot.
Yeah, it's a good quote. You know, I think about it.
The perspective that I'm having with it, say, today I am wise. I'm not necessarily feeling super wise.
Maybe you're feeling that way. Like like, oh, is this some self-aggrandizing thing? Just say, oh, I'm, I'm so wise or whatever. It's an aspirational quote. You know, if I were writing it, I would say, today I'm attempting to be wise.
Today I'm seeking wisdom.
And so I am seeking to change myself.
It's very easy these days
to look out, look outward at the world
and say,
you know, boy, I wish this was different.
I would like to change some things.
So often we we think we have the answer to we feel very clever. Like this is saying.
A lot of, teachings, especially in the eastern, you know, traditions, would say we change ourselves first. We can't change other people much as we want to. We try to change. Other people can't really do it.
If there's a way to change other people, perhaps it's by changing ourselves and setting an example, inspiring people. That's where this is going today.
We're moving toward wisdom today,
or at least attempting to do it. So we aren't going to try to change the world. That's like forcing things out there. We aren't going to force anything
going to work, do the work of changing ourselves. This is what a weight loss path is. This is what a health path is. This is what, a personal development of any kind is all the same path.
Trying to change ourselves.
We're going to be looking inward here to do that today.
I like that what I was saying, like weight loss is an internal process. The energy is inside of us. You say, okay, losing weight.
From a certain point of view, you say is not easy. Something very sought after in our culture. Many people want it and many people working hard for it.
And you hear me say a lot.
Any weight loss path? Certainly. Fasting. No exception. We don't want to just say it's easy because it is a struggle to lose weight. And it can be the goal that we are seeking, though, to find an internal process
where we minimize, mitigate,
overcome the struggle. Find a flow state. Flow state is the.
Space where we're moving through a space without struggle. Fasting does have the potential of getting us into that sort of space where we can find a mental space of peace and contentment.
When you can find peace and contentment, satisfaction and meaning
in a space without food.
You can flow through that space. Don't even have to think about it.
We have everything in balance. This is the goal.
We change our experience so that everything is in balance.
Periods of time without food. The fasting space so valuable,
and then periods of time when we're eating. Because of course
we all need healthy nutrition, nutrients to power the body and keep us strong. This is the balance we want.
I often describe a healthy eating and a fasting space.
Two sides of the same coin, but fasting so easily neglected because it's nothing.
It's the nothing that is something. The nothing that could be everything on a path
like we're seeing yesterday. The squash seeds, the most valuable part of the squash, the potential, the future, everything about the squash trying to channel that energy into the seeds for the next generation, seeds like the children of the squash,
channeling all of our energy and resources into the next generation, help them to thrive and flourish.
That's where the value is.
Most people have a squash. They just scoop that stuff out, throw it away. Easy to overlook.
Overlooking the most important part. Fasting. So easy to overlook.
Here's the practice that can bring things into balance. You say, okay, if we're saying a weight loss path, you say that can be difficult, but a people putting a lot of effort into it,
struggling with it.
I make this motion, you see fist struggle.
We're more of the mindset here of like this. We want to let go of the struggle, the practice of changing our self
in a weight loss space, like letting go of the struggle with it. This is how we get into a flow state. This is how fast and can help us open it up.
Just speaking these words right? And when I do that, see what I did? I take a big deep breath. This is showing us the practice of how we flow through a space without stress and struggle. When we're letting go of it,
bad is showing us. Take a deep breath. Let go of the stress. Let go of the struggle.
Let fasting do the work. This is where we can lean into it
as we're diving deeper internally, building a relationship with the body, trusting the body,
coming to learn of the energy and the resources the body has that we don't have to do everything. We don't have to struggle, struggle, struggle.
Body doesn't want us to struggle.
Body has been saving energy for us.
This is what body fat is. This is what extra blood sugar is. If it's building up in the body, the body can store these energy resources for us so that we are able to flow through a space without food. If we encounter it, especially if we encounter it in a bad season.
We're so fortunate in this, space that we're in this, Gilded Age surrounded by food like most human beings, is struggling to get enough food to feed their family, survive, make it through the lean season. We have this
incredible opportunity here to be present in this moment where our struggle is like, how do we say no? We have so much abundance.
We have to learn to say no.
Fasting is a practice of saying no or setting boundaries of saying it. Here is the line I'm opening up this space. I'm giving my body the opportunity to rest and reset and use the energy that I already have in it.
This is what I say
every diet misses every diet. I'll tell you what to eat, but it doesn't tell you to stop. And this when to stop. How to stop that it's okay to stop. Takes it. Keep eating all these healthy things. Even if you have a healthy diet,
sometimes it's just too much to take you on a weight loss path.
Body
not always share our goals from a certain perspective. Body is not unhappy to have a reserve.
Reserve can come in very handy in a difficult time.
We need to see a weight loss path
is a communication within the body.
Is we can split it out our mind and our body not really separate. We're a mind body, but we can think of it differently. We have our thoughts. We're trying to change the body, which is changing ourselves. That's this quote. Trying to be wise, trying to change our self. So we have a dialog between our mind and body,
fasting, getting into that space where we can actually do it.
Where do you get the energy? You say, where do I get the energy to walk down a weight loss path?
We find that energy inside.
The energy that we want to power our weight loss path,
the actual weight we want to lose. It is the energy. As we're looking inside, we find the energy.
We open up the space to use it and let it flow out.
Want to share, our reading with you today from, this book, which I love so much, the creative act we're talking about
a way of being here on this channel. How do we find a new way of being change our way of being?
Talk about ourselves as a creative being. We're trying to create an experience for ourselves.
A weight loss experience or process where we are flowing through a space without struggle.
This passage from Rick Rubin
is called Look Inward is what we're doing today. Looking inward.
This first section is kind of like a stream of consciousness writing. I think.
It's like noticing
the external world. Maybe he's just sitting. I'm picturing him just sitting in a space, maybe even he's dictating this like, here's what he's noticing externally. And then we'll flip it over
in the second half. Talk about going inside to.
The way we'll take it, especially finding wisdom like we were talking in that section, clues to the weight loss puzzle.
We've got our situation. All of us is in a unique
experience, a unique situation, a unique set of circumstances. But we have the same similar sort of tools that we can use.
All of our health tools, our healthy eating, our movement, the fasting space, our mental health practices.
We use all of these as the tools within our unique circumstance. So let's reflect on this.
Looking outward and looking inward, here is Rick Rubin.
Especially think of this in art with this beautiful reflection here. The sound of water
churning in the distance is audible.
I feel a breeze of what might be warm air, although it's difficult to tell
since my arm senses
a movement as cooling.
Two birds are singing and with my eyes closed.
I've placing them approximately 50 paces behind me and to my right to now a smiling bird. Or at least one with a smaller and higher pitched chirp, enters the soundscape behind me to the left.
From the rhythmic interplay, it seems clear birds are not in conversation. Each is singing its own song.
Notice the sound of a passing vehicle in the distance. Children's voices,
a blur of rhythmic music arrives from the far left.
There's an edge on the left side of my face, just in front of my ear.
A vehicle with a larger, heavier sound passes. A bit of jazz music is making an appearance closer to my position. Only now do I realize I turned that on earlier at a client volume, and it had been inaudible until this moment.
Someone arrives,
I open my eyes, it all goes away.
All right, so that was like his first flow through this kind of meditation space. He's clearly, you know, outside somewhere, just kind of experiencing this state. Interesting.
And then he continues,
it's come to believe that life is a series of external experiences,
and that we must live in outwardly extraordinary life in order to have something to share
the experience of our inner world is often completely overlooked.
If we focus on what is going on inside ourselves
the sensations, emotions, the patterns of our thought, a wealth of material can be found.
I would say, for our purposes here, a wealth of wisdom about our specific situation and how we move forward on our path without struggle.
This is where the clues to the weight loss puzzle are. I say.
The instruction manual. We say we've got our tools, that we can approach the same basic toolset, but how do we use them? How do we put them into practice in intricacy of our own situation? It continues. Our inner world is every bit as interesting, beautiful, and surprising as nature itself. It is, after all, born of nature.
It is nature.
We are nature. We need to start seeing ourselves that way. I say.
When we go inside, we are processing what's going on outside. We are no longer separate. We are connected. We are one.
Yeah, this is the type of thing I really want to help us build here. That's why I'm trying to bring us into this reflection space in a beautiful, natural space.
This is the reflection, the mirroring between the two. We want to learn from nature than we see we are nature. And these things flow back and forth. We use the wisdom and insight we gain, both externally and from our inner reflection, to chart a course in a beautiful, healthy, positive direction.
Rick says ultimately, it doesn't make a difference whether your content, your thinking originates on the inside or the outside.
If a beautiful sort of phrase comes to mind,
or if you see a beautiful sunset, one is not better than the other.
Both are equally beautiful in different ways. It is helpful to consider that there are always more options available to us than we might realize.
To me, I thought those were inspiring and helpful words. Do you ever feel stuck? Do you feel stuck in a process?
We're trying to move in a direction. This is what we have to do on a weight loss path of any kind, whether someone is practicing fasting or they're not practicing fasting, you're going to be flowing in a direction. Obstacles come. This is what it is like to move toward anything of value in life, as in been your experience, trying to move toward anything truly valuable in life is very rarely a straight line.
Don't you wish that it was?
I showed a picture here the other day
that was of this
incredible river, horseshoe bend, I think, in Arizona, of this river that goes all the way around this whole huge curve in this canyon and gets almost back to where it started before it, it goes on its, you know, way.
When we say we're trying to get into a flow state,
think of a river like that
doesn't mean that our path is always straight,
but we are not struggling and fighting in a space where,
like a dance between these two paths, we have, as Rick is describing, this external
wisdom that exists outside of us in nature that we see, we see the internal wisdom that we can have through our reflective process
anytime that we're stuck.
This is what I see as the big path we can navigate between those two spaces.
We're getting stuck in our own head, in our own thoughts. We can find a beautiful space like this outside in nature.
See the sky reflected in the water? See the little otter swimming by and the birds coming in. We can gain wisdom and a fresh perspective from that.
And if we are flowing in that direction, and then we're hitting a boundary, then we can go inside and we can reflect and the body
and the mind together.
This mind body being,
it'll serve up the struggle. The body knows what is going on inside the body. The body knows where the energy is. The body knows where the barriers are.
The
So as we get into that mindset, into that space,
we give both the mind and the body the opportunity, the perspective
to share and communicate the experience.
Have you had that experience? Have you had an experience of reflecting, of turning the thoughts inside?
Giving space like, Rick Rubin says, when we turn inside, the thoughts that we have are the opportunity to process the experience that we're having so often in life today.
We.
Do not give ourselves the time or the space to have a reflection,
to ask deep questions like this
when will things balance out?
Takes time and space for things like this to happen.
To bring balance.
We are in a very, very on demand culture.
Very hard to sit in a space
and not get, the results that that we want and expect on the exact time frame that we have. This is the type of question that I think is perfect to ask, though.
When will this thing that I am dealing with balance out, and what does that look like?
This exact process that we're talking through, navigating between the wisdom of nature, the patterns of nature, and then turning inward and reflecting and realizing we are nature. We are part of this beautiful creation
and that interplay flowing through it is how we get to the root of a question like that.
We bring in every good tool that we have into these, experiences. This is what we're doing in December. We're on a weight loss path, a weight loss challenge.
there are time frames that are operating, you know, that are bigger than we want. I put a a video on a channel last maybe even two years ago. Almost. What did I even call it? Something about healing your metabolism.
But I told the other story.
Of how?
I had a serious injury to my foot when I was running. Metabolic healing is the big words on the title heal your metabolism. Patient patience builds success from the fall of 2024.
I I that the thinking I did in that video, telling the story of,
Healing on my foot. I broke my foot in a couple places. I tore all this cartilage. It was a stupid accident.
I'm a big runner. You know, I talk about running on this channel, I am
running. I started running in eighth grade
more seriously. And track and cross-country and
running races and all this stuff is a huge part of my life.
I do love it. And, and that injury was really,
really hard for me. You know, running was a big part of my mental health process, you know, processing stress and couldn't run now. So frustrating. And working in rehab and all these things. So I became a biker for like, I don't know, at least five years rehab. Rehab could not run so much pain in the foot.
it was a long stretch of time where I didn't run and I biked
and then one day,
you know, I was walking. I was like, my foot is feeling fine.
And I did a little jogging and and I didn't have any pain.
And,
and then over the course of a couple months, I built it up. And now now here it's been, you know, whatever. It's been another five years and, and I back I ran my first marathon, you know, and I never thought, I thought I would never run again. I had to talk to ortho doc. They say you probably won't be able to run.
And then healing happened. My foot is like, you know, ostensibly. Fine. Now who knows? You know, ten years from now, I'll be getting older. Maybe it'll. Maybe it'll give me trouble.
Who knows? But.
Healing took place on a longer time frame. This is what I am communicating. I experienced that personally. Healing took place on a longer time frame than I was expecting, and I was not happy about it. I gotta tell you, I was so frustrated, so discouraged,
We bring a lot of expectations to
our process and, a lot of the process when we're going inside is like getting over ourselves, getting over our expectations, and of of what is going to happen and embracing a spirit of openness. Yes. Being open to healing.
Not demanding it, though.
Trying to listen
like Queen of Heaven is saying like, what is the message? What is the communication?
On this path, what I am experiencing now, what is the message? What can I learn? How can I grow? How can I take this obstacle and turn it into something good?
How can we like this? Lean into this space and make it positive? We're often the most brutal, the most judgmental with ourselves.
Absolutely. If if a friend came to you, if a child came to you with a problem, wouldn't she be as kind and compassionate to them as you could?
So I know that when when it's with ourselves, we beat ourselves up, punish ourselves. We were getting into that, space the other day as we were
looking through our processes. How do we make decisions? How do we think we can punish ourselves with regret?
This is how we start to develop negative cycles of thinking and negative habits that keep us stuck in a place. Keep us from moving forward.
And this is what we are super trying to do. This is what we are looking forward on our path here together toward weight loss and better health. Looking at the reality as it actually is. Not trying to sugarcoat anything, or hype anything, but just look at the reality of
the situation, looking inside at the reality of our situation and selves, not trying to change every external thing, but trying to seek after enough wisdom to say it's enough of a task to change my self.
And we can do it and we are doing it. This is the process of doing it.
Dedicated, intentional time. Carving out the time and the space
to say it is a priority for me
to walk my path, to get on the path toward better health and healing, to be open to it.
That's a daily practice every day. We want to be taking that space, that time to say, hey, what are the priorities here in my life?
What do I need to be paying attention to? Where do I need to bring that awareness?
Opening up some space for reflection.
you know, the best, way to get into a thoughtful meditation sort of space, shut the screens off, get get everything electronic out. Maybe if you need a crutch in that space, have on the gentle music. You know, if you if you have the racing thoughts, if you say, oh, I can't really calm this down.
Music is the type of thing that can help you calm down. The nervous system help you to breathe in a slower fashion process. The stress that you're having
in the bigger space, you know the next level, like the next level of fasting. We start in a fasting space doesn't have to be a long period of time,
can be a small, gentle amount of space.
Fasting never pushed to a level that is longer than you want want to have it. Fasting should feel like a curiosity, like an exploration, like a gift to the body. Never, a punishment or a restriction. If you're getting into that sort of space. I always tell people, just stop. No need to push into that space. So I tell people like you do, just five minutes, you know, you can start there.
And then as you build it and you're building that trust with the body, you say, oh, I see we can open up this space further. Now we're getting to a couple more hours. You know, the kind of standard called intermittent fasting that people would talk about,
say, 16 to 18 hours in a day without food. A big chunk of that is just sleeping and then opening up another space, maybe a bigger space in the evening without food, maybe a bigger space in the morning.
That's kind of what I say is like level one. We're trying to get to first base. You know, we're trying to get to that first step.
Just opening up as much space as you need. Some people
opening up 16 to 18 hours, of food. Free space usually looks like eating two meals in a day, like a lunch dinner or a brunch dinner, something like that.
That sort of space.
People often experience slow, steady weight loss over time.
And by slow, you know, it's variable.
I would say some people do lose a lot of weight, quickly even doing that. But that's not the majority. That's like the tail on one side. You know, everything in life on a bell curve. And some people will be out on one tail, some people out on the other. Most people kind of in the middle.
I try I really like the other saying, the secret to happiness in life is low expectations. I really do love that.
When you have low expectations, it can keep us from being disappointed. It helps to keep us grounded. It keeps us in a thoughtful space where we say we're not overwhelmed with pressure.
So much pressure in a weight loss space, and we want to stay far away from that. To keep our expectations lower helps us
widen our our time perspective. So if we're on a journey of health,
to me that is a lifelong process. We're trying to develop a way of being in the world that is flowing through a space without struggle so that it can become a long term process, like years and years.
Like so many times, people are looking for a diet, people looking for something. They want to lose weight quickly. They buy. Three months from now, I want the problem solved.
I'll tell you, you can make a lot of progress in three months. Huge amounts of progress. Absolutely. And a fasting practice, the intensity of it can be dialed in very significantly is a very, very powerful practice.
But I try to help everybody do, though, bringing expectations way down. So you take the pressure off so that you give yourself the space and opportunity to learn how to do it thoughtfully,
without cranking up the intensity. For a level where you could ever feel overwhelmed because you can feel overwhelming, with it,
you want to train yourself up in it and practice it so that you build a strong and solid foundation,
and then you build off of that practice as needed.
So I tell people, sometimes I tell people,
which I still go back and forth. Sometimes they should I do it, I tell people, what if you lost 1 pound in a month
and I still keep with it because I like it most people. I tell people, what if you lost 1 pound in a month?
Most people see what your perspective is.
Most people will be disappointed to hear that. They'd be like, are you kidding? Or am I going to come, to your weight loss consulting? I don't want to lose 1 pound, in a month. I want to lose ten.
Okay? I'm very open to try to help someone, you know, lose as much weight as they want. But just as a thought exercise, I say this is a very interesting place to start.
To just say 1 pound
the national data and losing weight is that
Some series say only 3% of people who go on a weight loss path actually weigh less by three years.
And there's a lot of people who experience a lot of round tripping where they go on some weight loss process that was not sustainable for them, and they lose weight initially, and then plateau and then regain weight.
So I say as a thought experiment,
what if you lost 1 pound
wasn't big and flashy,
almost hard to see within a margin of error of the scale, but it's something that was sustainable and you weren't stressed and you actually felt better. You say, I can stick with that, and then it was one, two, three, four. And we're stepping through time and and everything keeps going in a good direction.
And then you say, well, I can stick with that then see then there's no next thing. The thing I really want for people is to realize, hey, if you found a fasting space, if you found a process that you can follow through a space and it's not so much of a struggle for you, like whatever level you're at with it, that's a space that you can sit in that's like an okay space to be, even if it's a space where you're not moving that much.
By practicing it, you're building a foundation of a practice, then that the, you know, the sky is the limit with it, and then you can increase the intensity
as you feel called to do it.
As you feel like the body strengthens. You know, I have a session on here. Fasting can make you strong in a number of different ways, especially fasting combined with exercise, putting the exercise in a hormonal environment that supports muscle growth. Amazingly,
but then specifically also our mental strength,
physical mental strength, the actual strength that we don't appreciate of training the body to access the energy that is stored within it.
When we when we do not have a practice of giving the body space to access stored energy, then it's not very good at doing it. Those systems atrophy. And so a fasting practice is a training process, training the body to be running off that stored energy so the body gets better and better at releasing it.
Then there doesn't have to be a next thing. Then we are on a path and we are on a practice that, just like any other pathway of health we can dive into over time, we can dial into an exercise path more and more as we build up strength. If we have the desire and we feel called to do it, you absolutely can do that.
Exercise. Working best for weight loss. When we put it in a beautiful fasting space where we're not running the system off of the food, we're not trying to burn off the food energy. We're trying to get to a deeper level. We're trying to clear out the food. You know, a lot of exercise. Your way to weight loss programs combined with diet is like, we keep eating and then we keep exercising and we're burning through all the food, but we aren't getting down to that storage layer.
That's why I like to start with a fasting space. Teach the body to handle a fasting space. Then when we add in other health practices like the exercise and it's like we're already have cleared out all that food, instead of having the exercise to burn through all the food and then exercise more to have to burn down into that base layer, we've already cleared that out.
This is how we take so much pressure off. I say let fasting do the work. We don't have to work so hard at it.
This is how we get to a much more grounded, stable foundation
where we can start to flow through it,
not having to struggle with an exercise through a space. So much work, just being able to open up an amount that feels good, that we feel called to the saying, hey, this is giving me energy. I'm moving my body.
I'm feeling good, is keeping the positive energy flowing. Not like, oh, I have to punish myself with it.
And then the same thing, like choosing healthy foods and
a big barrier with a dietary practice, you say, okay, we could have an exercise path to weight loss, a healthy eating path to weight loss.
Fasting, coming in, supporting these other things so much can be such a,
Such a harmful process.
Can be so much pressure that we put on ourselves
through any sort of pathway, be it an exercise pathway, be it a dietary pathway. So if we are.
You know, so, so often, so many people are not aware of a fasting path. We're not aware of the option. We think that a diet of some kind, that healthy eating means, like I was saying before every diet to tell you what to eat, you know, according to that plan.
But no, diets just tell you to stop
as like that's the missing ingredient in pretty much every diet
that
we don't have the balance to it. That's why I described fasting as like a filter. We can filter any dietary perspective through it.
Take whatever foods you like,
try to pick the healthiest, unprocessed foods and then filter them through this fasting practices. How you bring the whole thing into balance.
So I'm going to switching in on a diet. You know, you buy some beautiful diet book, a Whole30 book or a diet book or just pick pick your thing, plant based eating or a carnivore diet.
Paleo. You know, we can just sit here and list every different type of diet
and you say, well, I'm going to be eating, you know, all of these foods. And then and then it starts when we're only focusing on that path. It can start to be overwhelming because then it's like, well, I've got to find the special, you know, low carb, diet compliant breakfast.
And then I've got to have all the snacks that are, compatible with this, and I've got to find a lunch that is here, and I can't go out to eat there. And so I've got to be making this, and then I've got to cook dinner for people. And then what if you know, your partner or friend when you eat with doesn't want to do that, it's like, you've got kids, and then you're cooking a meal for the kids and for you as like, we can get into this diet space like that, where it can get really overwhelming.
Fasting is a process that can come into that, just like it's bringing simplicity to an exercise path where it's clearing out the pressure. Not so much work to do to have to
exercise through all that food and then exercise down into the base layer. We clear that out. We can have that same sort of concept with our diet, pick any dietary perspective you like, and then add fasting to it.
All of a sudden you've taken so much pressure off when you realize, hey, I don't have to have like five meals worth of food, you know, three meals and two diet compliant snacks. Realize, because so much of the nutrition counseling that is given in our world,
it tells people you have to keep consuming all the time to keep the metabolism going.
And this creates really an untenable long term process where we have so much work to do. We have to keep exercising and burn through all the calories. We keep eating, and we have to be doing so much work of shopping, cooking, cleaning, organizing. All this stuff to keep all the healthy meals together. So, so, and even as I'm saying it, you see how I talk about it.
I start speaking with rapid speech and and seeing it. And then I just want to take a big, deep breath about all that. You know, I like,
oh, man. See it's stressful. I've I've worked with thousands of people helping people lose weight. You know, the stress comes to me. I have people, you know, experience with it. And in my own I've been through cycles with that of, you know, when I got out of my residency training, that was a very unhealthy time.
I spent multiple years, stress eating mac and cheese in the hospital basement. You know, and all this stress gained a lot of weight. So I'm going to try to do that. You know, I went through diet books and all these things. And, you know, I tried in the midst of my busy schedule, I'm going to, you know, make six salads and put them all in Tupperware and have them in the fridge.
And, you know, all this stuff and doing all the shopping on Sunday, trying to have everything lined up and then
eating and consumption and like, this cycle is over. I couldn't stick with that process. I couldn't do it. That's why it was such a blessing just to my own personal life.
When I encountered fasting for the first time, I saw a patient have healing come to them just totally randomly.
They had to fast for a medical procedure,
and it kind of just came to me in a way of like this patient was on huge amounts of insulin, so, oh, we got to cut the medicine back. Can't be taking so much insulin when
you're going in for the colon. And Skippy. Right. And I can be eating. You don't need all the medicine.
And I'm like oh very interesting. I just start to see it like we do this all the time. I done this, you know, hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of times how people with type two diabetes scale back their medicine for a fasting space.
This patient
coming back to me in clinic after the procedure, this is the first one of the first videos on the channel. I want to tell the whole story.
The way that story went, though, with this patient after the procedure, didn't need any insulin.
The first patient I saw that day before I saw that patient, was this really devout Hindu woman who practice fasting as part of her spiritual tradition.
I never met anybody like this, to be honest, I didn't. I'm not part of any spiritual tradition and practice fasting. I was I was just telling her kind of, you know, nicely. I was like, that sounds terrible.
I wouldn't I wouldn't want to do fasting. She'd fast for a whole day every Tuesday with her practice. She would fast. She's like, no, it's my favorite day of the week. Like, are you kidding me? Like, you have got to be kidding me. But she's like, but then look at this person. She's 50 years old. She's in the pinnacle of health.
Get perfect weight and blood pressure, no metabolic problems at all, you know. And then I'm going to talk with this other guy is very overweight with type two diabetes, huge amounts of insulin. And then he opens up a fasting space.
I was like, look at this. You just open up this fasting space for a day, you didn't need any insulin.
And then look at this woman. She just does this every week. Like, what if you just did that every week, just took a little holiday, didn't have to jab yourself six times. You know, with insulin you think, well, that would be pretty nice.
And then, any, any day. Great. That patient one fasting day a week, that's where she started.
That's a very intense way to start. I would never have anyone start that way now unless they really wanted to. I wouldn't stop anybody. But you don't have to started a whole fasting days. That's very intense. Now. Now I help people step very gently into it. But I didn't know anything at that time. And I was like, and people can do it.
People get a colonoscopy, you have to do it. You just do it, you know? And I was like, look, you don't even have to do the prep. You know, that's the worst part. Like just have a fasting space, stay hydrated, burn through the sugar naturally. This is how you bring the system back in the balance. You can see it so clearly when someone has a very bad blood sugar problem, because all of a sudden you open that space.
If they have a blood sugar monitor and you can watch the sugar come down in real time, well, now we are getting into some really powerful space. That's what I saw.
Then I was like, here is a process that has been totally missed. Like, we get that exercise can burn down blood sugar and we get that if we eat low carb, healthy foods, not so much sugar.
Be there to start with. But here is a natural process. Open space. Just burn through the blood sugar. Let the body's natural processes burn through the energy. That's good for people with diabetes. It's good for people without diabetes to to keep from getting it. Like if you're developing insulin resistance, say, are you giving your body a space without food where that blood sugar can be burned down and where we can reset that insulin resistance naturally?
If you're in a situation, in your life, you've gained weight. You used to be at a certain weight. Now it's higher. Now you would like it to go back. The process of gaining weight, just, broadly is a process of developing insulin resistance. So a lot of people don't know. Do I have insulin resistance or not?
Well, you know, have you gained weight, especially abdominal weight? Is the pathway, that insulin resistance is developing?
did have my favorite talk. I think that we did, that talk on inflammation and chronic, disease development. I really liked that talk.
And what we saw in there is that the information that is developing in the body,
through chronic stress, amongst other things, is what is driving the insulin resistance.
And that happens in different ways in different parts of the body. So fascinating. We become insulin resistant in the muscle differently. Then we become insulin resistant in the liver
differently than we become insulin resistant in the body. Fat itself.
what we can see then is that this is the way that the body is trying to handle the situation and help us.
And this is what is so hard to get the mind around in it. It took me honestly quite a while. You tell me that metabolic disease is about the body trying to help us. It is, but it's a hard message, both to understand and then to accept and to see. But the more I've leaned into it, we have a perspective in our culture that the body is broken, that obesity, we even call it a disease, and certainly we call type two diabetes is a disease.
And I won't argue about it. But from a different point of view.
It is a very powerful message. Absolutely. And from a different point of view, when you come to see, okay, the body is not broken.
Our society in large measure is broken in a lot of ways. Because we have broken our connection to nature. We are not running our bodily systems in the way they were designed to run, and there are consequences to that.
And so many times what we perceive as a disease is a message from the body that the body is trying to send, say, hey, things are out of balance.
And when the body knows what to do with it, also the body knows where energy is and it is trying to use the tools that it has to both handle too much energy.
The easiest to see with blood sugar we see blood sugar is energy. Body fat is energy too. But blood sugar is like highly reactive energy. It's it's instantly available.
And therefore our blood sugar reacts with things. And this is why diabetes cause elevated blood sugar. Because so many problems in the body.
Body tries to tightly control our blood sugar
because it will react with things. One of the things that reacts with his blood vessels and too much sugar in the blood vessels will damage the blood vessels and pretty much every downstream problem of diabetes is related to damage to blood vessels in some fashion
to body is trying to control that.
It's actually using insulin resistance to shape where that energy flows. And as the liver is filling up, that's kind of the first step.
And it's becoming insulin resistant and muscle. You try to soak up sugar into the muscle. And as becoming insulin resistant, the purpose of that is to shunt, the sugar into the body fat, where it can be safely collected and held.
And this process is, is how we start gaining weight through insulin. Resistance to the body is trying to protect us. It can't just get rid of the energy.
And from a body's perspective, you think, why would it want to? You know, most of human history, we have spent this time trying to get enough food to stay alive. Everything in the body is built to be radically efficient.
Like not just a little efficient. Like to take every potential possible scrap of energy that comes in and save it and use it to the greatest extent possible.
Now the body is dealing with a very difficult situation. Saying, so much abundance is here, so much energy is here that it's actually damaging to the body. We have to find a way to save it because we'll probably need it in the future. What if we did? What if the famine struck seven years from now? What if the brutal winter was a decade from now?
We can still survive because we stored this resource for us. So the body is trying to balance these two things.
Balance the short term impacts
of too much energy in the system in a way that doesn't harm us in the short term, and in a way that preserves that and conserves the energy as much as possible and stores it and saves it for us so that we don't die in the future during a difficult stretch.
Can you can you see the situation that the body is trying to navigate? It's so much bigger than we, that we often perceive. And then we come into that situation from our perspective and we say we rigidly define health only as a person who has a BMI of, you know, such and such, you know, if your BMI is 25 or whatever, we say, okay, you can be healthy if you if your BMI is higher.
Now we say, oh, now you are dizzy. It's like, Holy cow, I want to step so far back from that. The medical system has that framework because it's trying to be thoughtful to people. Obviously, the majority of people in our society today, adults, even kids now too. I don't know if it's the majority of kids, but so many people struggling to keep metabolism in balance, keep weight in a good place, people trying to be compassionate and not stigmatizing people by saying like,
see, I like that.
Is there not something wrong with you or that we bring guilt into it as well? I completely agree with that. Part of it has no place, in any of this discussion.
But then we're labeling something that a disease, then that isn't true, and we're missing the bigger perspective of it. And the part to me, that is really empowering. The message that I want to share with people the most is that as you really get into the physiology of the body, understand what the body is trying to do, and that it's trying to communicate to us, and that the body knows where the energy is and when we give space to open it up.
The key part that we're missing,
just this open space, is a huge gift to the body.
Body knows how to organize this, that we can run the whole system in reverse. Just like I was describing the sequence where insulin resistance develops.
If the body fasting space body can start unwinding, that whole process,
we saw any inflammation talk that we can bring the inflammation down. We can start to unwind chronic stress that can flow backwards.
The insulin resistance can go away. And we can start releasing that stored energy first from the body fat.
This is how it is literally empowering the the power that we need to make a change, the power to make it through a fasting space. The power to lose weight is within inside of us.
It's suppressed. It's locked away. It's stored away in a way that isn't immediately accessible.
It's basically
waiting for an almost indefinite period of time until we give it the space to release it. This is what I talk about, about the struggle, about a struggle to lose weight, and that the actual path of struggling as a path of letting go of it.
Fasting is nothing. There's nothing actually to do other than the mental work of doing nothing.
This is the thing we are doers, right? We think about doing versus being. And we're in a culture that is almost 100% doer. I mean, maybe that's, you know, we're here in America. America is a country of doers. And it's great.
Okay. But like also, we're a country that's stressed out and not completely healthy. And so it's like we need to bring things into balance.
To say, yes, we need to be doers. We need to, you know, find to be driven.
But also we need to bring things into balance in the process of bringing it into balance is a process of letting go.
Yeah, mental work, of doing nothing. It's a trick. Right. And we've talked a lot in here about the connection that fasting is sitting in this fascinating intersection between our physical and mental health. It's giving us a mirror and a reflection between both of these worlds to see when we're trying to open up space without food
is also opening up a mental space without distraction.
In our society, we don't have much space without distraction these days. Social media 24 over seven news. Like everything, it is distraction, attention, culture. To say attention is the new currency, right? So
and then so much stress. We're all just like swimming in this ocean of stress.
So many times we use food to cope with that. We've described on the channel food is the acceptable drug of our society, right.
And and it's effective. And and we talk about comfort food and especially we're going through a holiday season. So much food like this. Say you eat some delicious treat writing. Don't you feel better? It works. I never say it. It isn't an effective treatment in the short term,
you're feeling really bad.
You can, you can eat something.
You almost undoubtedly feel better in the short term, but then we say, is that's a crutch, right? It's a crutch emotionally through a situation. And you say, I'm gonna open up a fasting space that's like setting a crutch down, and it's showing us a mirror. It's showing us so a reflection, just like meditation. And we get into that space.
Meditation is the mental parallel on the other side.
Meditation. The space to open up mentally fast and doing the same thing. We're taking away all the crutches both physically and mentally.
That can be
an intense space, a difficult space. That's why these are practices. That's why we don't bring any judgment.
On ourselves in any fashion. Like you don't start as an expert and we don't start as a master at any of these things. And I'm certainly not, in in that position. I'm not trying to say I am building my experience, to the best I can. We are on a path here, especially like, that's what I like about the life we're all learning and growing and developing in these practices together.
And we can support each other, as we walk toward better, health together. Are you going to open up a fasting space? You don't have to do a fasting and a meditation together. You can open up a fasting space and go to work. And, you know, that's just fine. But the idea is the same
putting down a crutch that helps you an emotionally get through a space,
that's a difficult thing to do.
But this is what is showing the path. All you have to do is let go. And I'm to say that like, oh, it's just easy. No, no, no, all you have to do is let go. But that is the challenge, right? That is the practice.
See, I'm taking a deep breath here. That's the way to do it. When has to let go of something that you've held onto so tightly for a long time.
That's a trick.
Taking a deep breath is how you start to do it. Say, I'm going to flow through this space. I can do it. I'm going to flow through this space without food,
and it's going to be okay.
Do as if you feel called to do it. So I see it. I want insulin resistance gone. I want a weight problem going in the other direction.
You see how this can be so empowering. You see it. The energy is inside of me. You have space to let the energy flow out. Don't have to do anything other than practice opening up.
Letting the energy flow out.
There can be barriers to that. Try to give you every tool to address them. Barrier number one
feeling hungry and so much conditioning. In our culture we've been told can't feel hungry, bad feeling. Don't want to do it.
You might run out of energy. Do you see the irony? Right? Keep an eye on the blood sugar this time, especially taking medicines.
Anybody taking any medicine before you do fasting, look at my disclaimers on every video. Take, a thoughtful conversation chair, medical team.
But if you are
experiencing more energy in the body, that's more weight than you want. You see, there's body fat. Here is energy to power the system. But I want you to see so empowering. You're not broken. There's not a problem here.
Body is working to keep things into balance.
Yeah. Where we have a medication focus. Medications are incredible.
I'm not opposed to medications, medications, pharmaceutical companies, they do great things for people. We have to keep that into balance.
But when the entire focus that that is what medicine becomes, then health is only that path.
We want to use that to the extent it is helpful. But of course, the optimal path,
the thing that is better is not needing them in the first place.
And this is the space
it is the most incredibly powerful to me is that
by the incredible opportunity of doing nothing,
to just open our mind a little bit, by doing nothing, you can set yourself on a path of potentially not needing so many things. No, not having okay. By not consuming. Look what an open fasting space is.
We're creating an intentional space where we're not consuming.
That that practice can open up enough space to bring enough health and healing into the body that we also don't have to consume pharmaceuticals, potentially. See how it goes.
The early part of my medical practice, for those who don't know, as primary care doctor, 16 years,
who can even comprehend the number of prescriptions that I wrote for people for metabolic conditions,
I'm sure just tens of thousands.
I mean,
hundreds of thousands, probably thousands of patients for a decade and a half.
But the experience that I had, okay, the first, I don't know if it was third, first, third of the career. Let's say you're nothing about fasting. Just know the process. Oh, people develop metabolic dysfunction in our society and you give them metformin and losartan. And you know, and we just we start the cycle
like, wait a second. Like this isn't the normal physiology of the body.
This isn't the normal state.
Then I learned about fasting. I started telling the beautiful story here. I saw it bring healing. I met people who practiced fasting, experiencing incredible health and flourishing. I was like, I want my patients to be like you. You know, total health, need no medicine of any kind, like just healthy and well, like, well, you're in this state fasting, helping you to do it.
I was like, well, I want something like that for all, everybody. I want everybody to have an option to experience health like that.
Powerful, where you just don't need anything. That's the option that, that I want people to be able to take. We need to have systems and processes to help as many people as possible find powerful health information like that.
Then we will need so much medicine. Then every other thing, all the biotechnology, the incredible, you know, research that is being done, save it for everybody that needs it. Plenty of things going to need it. But like let's get to the root level, try to help as many people find as much health as possible. So we need all that other stuff less than the availability.
Be there for people who really need every other good thing.
This is the path that I want to inspire you to take me into a fasting space. If you feel called to do it, if it's appropriate for you to do it, then I do it.
I got the video. I try to, I think, linked on every single video.
Top reasons to avoid fasting. The main one is it's just you don't want to do it. It's okay. You don't want to do it. Don't do it. Fasting. Completely voluntary, open, gentle process. That's what I want. Never punishing yourself. Somebody who is in a bad emotional state with food. Okay. That's reason number two not to do it.
Struggling with an eating disorder. Someone is not overweight. In a lot of times. You know, I've given lots of talks to to big audience, 100 people about fasting. Invariably because eating disorder is so common in our society, no matter where you talk, someone in the, audience struggling with an eating disorder, binge eating, you know, on one side, anorexia, bulimia on another.
You don't need to tell someone with anorexia that fasting help you lose weight. Okay? It's obvious, help them. But look at that situation so inappropriately applied. So want to be exceptionally thoughtful about our fasting practice? Fasting is a very powerful tool to help someone lose weight.
Very powerful tool to help someone get at the intersection of our physical and emotional health, so that we can have space to process our relationship with food, our dependance on it.
And how are we using food? Are we using it as a social tool to connect with friends and family? A wonderful thing to do?
Are we using it as a primary conduit to bring nutrition and life and vitality into our body? Perfect. That is the true purpose of food. Are we using it as an emotional crutch to deal with difficult emotional space?
One of the most common ways we use food in the society, but not healthy now. Fasting. Giving us an opportunity to reflect on that like a quote that we're looking at today. If we want to change ourselves, fasting, giving the opportunity to get into that space and look at it
and what how am I using food here? What is the relationship?
How is this helping me on my path? Or is it a barrier on the path?
This is why we want to be so thoughtful about a fasting process. We don't want to push it too hard. We want to build the practice slowly and thoughtfully over time so that it can be a long term, sustainable process
that we can build and grow into. Just like we are talking yesterday in that beautiful session about the squash and the seeds and about the future and the potential that it just like all the energy of the squash going into the seeds, that that's where the value we said this is a metaphor for our fasting practice, that by doing the mental work,
diving in on the
the mental and emotional work to help get into
the really the core of our being that we are planting seeds of health. As you're practicing fasting, I want you to think of it that way. Can feel like each day, right? We have a big goal. We say, I want to lose 30 pounds. I want to, you know, do some big process, okay?
Each day, you know, you wish you can take a bigger step in each day's have just one 3 pounds a day with me and then we can just we can solve this so fast.
And so then we have to bring it down and realize, okay, within each day we can only take one step here and each day is how we have to live in the present. We have to ground ourselves. Like I was saying before, about bringing our expectations into line with reality, so that we can take the most powerful step that we can take in this day.
Because
we can only live in the present. We can only live in this day. But this day is enough. It's enough to take one step in a day.
And that is the actual powerful process. When I say I want to bring people's expectations down,
that to me also is a process that actually builds the power of it, the power.
Just like in finance, we talk about the power of compounding. Right? Want compound interest building
financial resources over time, talk about building fasting wealth that we are planting seeds for the future.
When we do that step in this day, planting the seed that's doing the hard work, opening up the space for fasting to release that energy, and then making the healthy food choice in our eating window.
When we are eating, then we are planting more seeds of health. And as we're doing that, that's like tending a garden of health. That is how we step forward day by day. And then that builds month by month. We're building this practice into something very, very strong. Very solid. Cannot be stopped. That's what I say. You have a mindset to lose weight.
You start opening up a fasting space. You have to be incredibly thoughtful and intentional to do that. You drill down into this deep space where we're bringing our emotions into alignment with the physiologic processes of the body, and we start dedicated, stepping forward every day on that path, giving ourselves grace along the way, realizing you never have to be perfect,
looking forward to holidays and good food.
See, this is the this is the structure that brings freedom. Okay? So many diets, so rigid, people feeling trapped. I can never eat as much as I want. You know, this is why people blow up on diets. They get to a holiday, it explodes, they say, and then people feel like they're off track and then it spirals like this.
So we are completely unwinding that process,
getting down to a very root stable relationship with food and our understanding of a process that helps us walk forward and we can join our holidays. We can eat foods that we want even if they aren't perfectly healthy. We say we have powerful tools and a powerful path and practice that we're walking on
that can bring everything into balance.
How are they eating? No problem, enjoy it. And it's perfect. You don't have to intentionally overdo things to the point where it is causing distress in any fashion. We we talked about that yesterday. I'm going to put out, a little video on the video side of the channel clip about that today.
But we have eating not restricted from eating any good thing that you want.
And then we put all of that then fasting especially for the boring day, the non holiday. Now eating is how we connect with people is like our most enjoyable thing. We have that the boring day like the most days, most days, boring days right? Go to work, do your stuff. All of this okay. We can open up that space, bring everything, into balance.
Really beautiful to share this space with you. I hope you have an incredible day. I hope it is filled with encouragement and joy and a powerful move toward, better health.
I hope, these thoughts looking inward,
and finding that inner wisdom that we have from the body, communicating about our situation. I hope that is powering you through an incredible, enjoyable, and relaxing weekend.
And I will see you back here on Monday. Have a great one, everybody.