Benefits of Fasting for Weight Loss

On this point of fasting, so if you have someone come to you

and they're, you know,

they have that physique where there's a bit more of that protruding belly fat, you

said that fasting is a much better approach than just sort of a calorie

restriction. I was looking at some studies

that said research shows that

calorie deficits of any kind can reduce visceral fat, but fasting will give it an

edge because of the insulin sensitivity stuff that you talked about as well.

What kind of fast should one be doing?

Because there's so many different names for these fasts.

People do these forty-day water fasts, and they do intermittent fasting.

It's a great question. So there are many, many different types of fasting.

Depending on your goal, on

what do you want for that particular patient.

So if a patient is just simply looking to reduce

his visceral fat, then I start with twelve/twelve, which

means twelve hours you don't eat anything, you just

drink liquids with no calories in it, and then twelve hours is

your feeding period. We start with that, and we do that for

about two to three weeks, then we quickly move to eighteen/six.

Eighteen/six means six hours you get to eat.

Eighteen hours, it's only

water, black tea, black coffee, green tea,

no calories. Eighteen/six. Eighteen/six.

And then that's one type of fasting.

Now, if a patient is very overweight, a patient has diabetes and your

goal is to reverse the diabetes, the patient needs to lose sixty

pounds, then those patients have a special type of

need.

For them, I will take them to a

forty-eight-hour fast once a week.

Sometimes I'll go to a three-day water fast every nine

days.

Every nine days, you will do OMAD. OMAD means one

meal a day only, every day for nine days,

and then you're gonna give me a three-day water fast.

Is the same advice applicable to women?

Because obviously they're contending with a variety of hormone fluctuations

and estrogen, and I know that the, the, the female body

responds differently to these kinds of stresses like fasts.

I've been asked that question so many times from patients as well.

Most of the women can actually handle it.

The only women that cannot are those who are trying to become

pregnant

or, or they have, um, uh, or they're already pregnant.

But I, I think that women are not that different when it comes to the

fasting

programs. So in my experience, I've been able to get women to

fast. I just finished a fast on one lady just

now for seventy-two days.

Seventy-two days. She was

terribly overweight. She had diabetes. She had hypertension.

She had hyperlipidemia.

She was having hip replacements, knee replacements, joint

problems. She had skin problems. And we fasted her for seventy-two

days.

What did she have in those seventy da- two days in terms of drinks, electrolytes,

coffee? What, what was she-

Great question. So she would have black tea, black coffee,

water,

and in the water once a day, I tell her to put some electrolytes in

there. So there's an electrolyte called LMNT,

or sometimes I just

tell them to go buy some Celtic Salt and put half a teaspoon in

there, and once a day you take that.

If you get cravings and you feel really, really hungry,

take some MCT oil, a teaspoon, and put it in your water,

and you can drink that as well.

I think it's worth saying that probably you shouldn't try this at

home, ladies and

gentlemen, because obviously medical supervision

is cri- critical here.

But in the case of that lady, what was the before and after of that

seventy-two-day fast?

So diabetes, gone. Blood pressure,

normalized.

Weight loss, tremendous weight loss.

I mean, I think she lost about fifty-five, sixty pounds.

Wow.

Okay? And not only did she lose all that weight, yes, all that weight from

her belly was gone, but even her face, under the arms.

So when you lose weight in a fasting program, it's very different from losing

weight when you are restricting calories.

You actually retract your,

your skin, so you get real changes in your

entire body. These pa-- I had one patient

that fasted for a hundred and

eighty-three days

under supervision. Okay. So he went from

four hundred pounds to two hundred and ten pounds.

And when he walked into the office, you would not recognize

that he's just lost all

this weight because he did not look like

skin on top of bones and then having to have surgery to remove

all

that excess skin.

Fasting is a totally different physiology.