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Fasting Diets: What to Know Before You Start Intermittent Fasting with Renee Fitton - E85
41 Plays1 month ago
This episode dives into the heart of fasting diets: intermittent fasting, prolonged fasting, and “fasting-mimicking” Get the science and ground rules behind how fasting works, who it’s for, and why it might be a flexible, sustainable path to better energy, metabolic health, and longer vitality. All from a nutrition pro who’s worked with leaders in longevity and helped thousands unlock these benefits step-by-step.
Renee Fitton is a Longevity Dietitian and the Vice President of Growth and B2B Sales at L-Nutra, the makers of Prolon and L-Nutra Health. With a Master’s in Longevity Nutrition, she has guided thousands of individuals through fasting mimicking protocols and leads the educational strategy for a network of nearly 20,000 healthcare practitioners sharing these programs with their patients. Renee is the host of the Longevity Lab podcast and a frequent contributor to health media, with appearances on dozens of podcasts and panels. She has spoken at FNCE, the Berlin Life Summit, London’s Medical Longevity Conference, YPO, DrTalks, and other leading wellness events. Known for translating cutting-edge science into practical strategies, Renee is passionate about helping people live better, longer.
“If we are doing deep cellular cleanup, we're not just helping one system or one mechanism, we're doing a lot.” - Renee Fitton
In this episode you will learn:
- Why the world of nutrition is full of strong beliefs and why clear answers are rare.
- How key nutrition advice comes down to eating mostly whole foods and personalizing for your own needs.
- The science behind different types of fasting, and what actually happens in your body during short and longer fasts.
- The main benefits and targets of intermittent fasting versus prolonged fasting, including fat burning, cell cleanup, and improved lab results.
- Why fasting mimicking may be safer and easier for most people, and how it compares to water-only fasting.
- What to consider before trying fasting, especially around eating history and working with trusted experts.
Resources
- Connect with Renee on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fittonnutrition/
- Listen to Renee’s appearances in the media: https://www.fittonnutrition.com/media
- Learn more about Renee’s offerings: https://www.fittonnutrition.com/
This podcast was produced by the team at Zapods Podcast Agency:
Find the products, practices, and routines discussed on the Alively website:
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Fasting Methods
00:00:00
Speaker
They compared water-only fasting to regular eating to fasting mimicking, and the fasting mimicking actually was even better than water-only fasting in that population. There's actually, again, regeneration of the gut lining with these prolonged fasts.
00:00:19
Speaker
This is the Home of Healthspan podcast, where we profile health and wellness role models, sharing their stories and the tools, practices, and routines they use to live a lively life.
00:00:33
Speaker
Renee, I am personally very excited for this episode, all things fasting, you know, far more about it than I will ever know. And it's a question I've gotten since even before I started a lively people would come because I had started on the fasting journey.
Guest Introduction: A Journey into Nutrition
00:00:49
Speaker
So i'm I'm very much looking forward to what I'm going to learn and what we can share today. But before we do that, how would you describe yourself? Ooh, I would say that i am
00:01:03
Speaker
curious people person. That is going to be my little badge that I'm going to give myself. And I think it's, ah it I give it two parts because I couldn't decide between people person, which is a big part of who I am. I've always been incredibly outgoing, energetic in, in social situations.
00:01:22
Speaker
um But there's a big part of me actually that I would say is almost entirely separate from this outgoing people person, which is this curious person. you know, problem solver, liking to dig into things. And a lot of the time that ends up being, you know, being done alone, solo. So I think that there's, those are the two big parts of, of who I am and make up a lot of what I do and why why I've ended up where I've ended up, both in the realm of nutrition and being kind of that curious person there in the world of entrepreneurship and networking in the people person side of things, And then bringing it all together into my dietetics profession where that nutrition and science pairs with supporting people and helping people
Complexity and Personalization in Nutrition
00:02:08
Speaker
grow. It all kind of like brings all of those pieces together with a bow on top.
00:02:12
Speaker
And I mean, this is a really interesting space to be because there's certain parts on health or wellness and things like smoking. We we don't just don't do it. Right. It's bad.
00:02:24
Speaker
and Exercise. Hey, it's important. Go do it. Nutrition. It's like religion, right? I mean, people have very strong beliefs, but it's not like there's always super, super clear data. So what drew you into this field of nutrition? I mean, I imagine that curiosity was a big part of because like, wow, this is a space to learn so much about.
00:02:46
Speaker
Exactly. And unfortunately, because the world of nutrition is what it is, like you're constantly looking. like You're always learning. i i Honestly, I don't think we will ever get to a point where we know like this is the one way because there isn't a one way. We are human beings, each with our own personal needs. And that differentiation between human beings is what keeps us continuously guessing, you know, what is optimal for each individual. So, so yeah, so that's that part of what, what drew me was, were the questions that I had and the, the never ending questions that I had in this, that's what keeps it kind of fun, but it's also what makes it sometimes very frustrating as well. Yes. And no, I guess I should say.
00:03:29
Speaker
I guess it's a moving target. I saw this pretty funny Instagram video where lady is like sitting down to eat oatmeal and then puts up a clip of Dave Asprey, but like, it's poison. You can't do this. And it's like, okay, then a clip of her eating eggs and somebody else being like, oh my God, the only thing wrong with eggs are the the whites and the yolks. And here's why they're poisoned. Like, okay, then meat and the same thing. And then berries. And it was just like, I give up on you. I just can't have anything.
00:03:54
Speaker
And... it's not a blanket rule, right? Like it's not like, like smoking. i mean, i imagine for an individual, even seasonally, it could change times of life. It could change whatever's going on your needs and what you can't have or shouldn't have may change as well. Is that fair to say?
00:04:15
Speaker
You know, ah over the time I've tried to kind of figure out if there are any kind of religious truths that are are relatively stable across all of the different things opinions. A lot of the time they are opinions and not even necessarily fact-based or evidence-based, but Across most principles of nutrition, there are some through lines. And generally, that's that we want to have whole foods, right? I think the vast majority of people can agree that heavily processed foods and ingredients are just not going to serve you. And so that's one thing that I think, like when you can start to find some of these things that align across disciplines, right?
00:05:00
Speaker
then those are the pieces that you can kind of maybe prioritize over the others. And then the other pieces, when there are such huge deltas in opinions, I mean, there's so many of them, plant-based versus carnivore, seed oils versus beef tallow. I mean, like the world, it is so polarizing. And when I see things like that, that's when in those cases, one, I, of course, I go to the literature. two i go to what what has fueled me, what has served me.
00:05:32
Speaker
And um i also go on like heavily personalized digging into the to the literature on who was this done on? was it Was it male, female, elderly, young? Was it in a specific region? What else were these people doing? What was their socioeconomic status? And so that's where you have to start like really looking at some of that personalization. And by the way, this is not even just nutrition. I mean, you know, you look at um even...
00:06:02
Speaker
Exercise. And i think we we know, know, weight bearing exercise is really, really critical, but there's even some discrepancy in in that world because of the differences between age-based exercise, right? So as we get older, yes, we definitely want to potentially over-prioritize weight bearing exercise.
00:06:24
Speaker
But there's there's discrepancy there too. And that's because of so many of the changes that happen over the course of life. As we have all of these differences in who we are, what makes us up and our genetics, I mean, our environment, the list goes on and on and on. So I guess if I hope that somewhat answers your question or or adds to the ah dialogue.
00:06:46
Speaker
It does. It reminds me, i was there there was an expert recently talking about the ketogenic diet. I forget on which podcast, probably Atiyah. And...
00:06:57
Speaker
was saying there's certain percentages, maybe 20% of people are super responders to it, right? Like it just cures all these symptoms, it makes everything great. There's some percent that it throws off their cholesterol and biomarker and like is it super, super problematic. And then you get this mix in the middle.
00:07:15
Speaker
And so how these studies work, you end up with averages, but no one's actually average. And this is the personalization. There was ah an example, I want to say it was after World War II, where they went to redesign the cockpits of planes.
00:07:31
Speaker
They said, look, you know we're better fed, we're bigger people, we built these cockpits for people of a certain size, let's go redesign it. So they go redesign the height, the width, where the buttons go, everything for the average pilot.
00:07:45
Speaker
And then somebody asked the smart question of, well, how many of these pilots are the average? And they went into the data and there was no one who was average. Exactly. some people may have longer arms, but shorter torsos and all all this. No one was the blended average. So what they learned was they didn't need to redesign a single thing. They needed to design for flexibility.
00:08:06
Speaker
So you could adjust it to the pilot. And I wonder if there's something similar to... dietary changes or dietary testing of, okay, how does this make me feel? How does this impact my blood work or other things?
00:08:21
Speaker
Do you see that? Yes. And there are, there are those things. The problem is, is that either they're quite expensive or they require a lot of time and investment from, from our part, you know, there's, there's a lot of things of food testing that you can do. But generally what you end up having to do is take out a lot of things from your diet and then gradually reintroduce them. And this can take months, you know, and, and it also takes a lot of ah introspection and time thinking about checking in with your body. And, you know, a lot of people just don't really want to give themselves the time There are some tests, of course. you know we can We can test and retest ah various metrics. So for example, if that example that you shared about the ketogenic responders versus non-responders, generally what they're testing there are metrics...
00:09:14
Speaker
that are looking at their lipid metrics, triglycerides, etc. You need typically at least three months pre and post test to really get a sense of whether or not you are a responder or not. And so, you know, if I were to tell you, by the way,
00:09:31
Speaker
I think I can tell you if the ketogenic works for you or not ketogenic diet diet works for you or not, but what I need you to do is follow the ketogenic diet perfectly for three months and I'm going to test you and retest you. like Nobody wants to do that. you know And there are, of course...
00:09:47
Speaker
the hand selected few people like the Peter at Tia's or the Brian Johnson's who are using themselves as the the case study of one and learning what works for them. But then the the problem is, is that the rest of the world is like, oh, that worked.
00:10:03
Speaker
for so-and-so and then trying to apply it to them without doing the work themselves. So, yeah, I mean, i guess like as with anything, if you really, really want that hyper-personalization, you kind of have to, if you want the best of the best, you have to to do the work to get there. And...
00:10:21
Speaker
and I will leave that up to the listeners to decide if that's who they want to be.
Fasting and Eating Disorders: Addressing Concerns
00:10:27
Speaker
Okay. So we've spent the whole first part talking about food.
00:10:32
Speaker
yeah And what I promised was we were going to go do a deep dive on the absence of food, on fasting. And so I do want to get to that. One of our very, very first episodes, i want to say like first five, first 10, we had Abby Langer, a nutritionist fasting.
00:10:47
Speaker
And when I talked about fasting, she said, well, you have an eating disorder. yeah Oh, wow. Okay. maybe Maybe I do. Like, let me let me see if this this is a real thing. But I mean, you work with Dr. Volta Longo, author of The Longevity Diet, L-Nutra, Prolon.
00:11:02
Speaker
The positive benefits that we've seen from fasting... can Can you talk about that for a second? Like when you say fasting, what do we mean? Because there's all sorts of different gradations of is it intermittent daily? Is it certain number of times, days a week? Is it times in a month or a quarter? so How do you look at it?
00:11:26
Speaker
Well, first, let me, i mean, there's so much to unpack here because I feel like I have to make a comment about Abby, what what Abby shared, which, you know, I think a lot of dietitians and I myself am am a registered dietitian. I got my master's degree in health span and longevity nutrition.
00:11:42
Speaker
and became a registered dietitian as well. And I can tell you that my community of registered dietitians definitely do, they have a visceral reaction often with fasting for that specific reason of eating disorders. And that is totally fair, by the way. And so generally, and I wanna put this little caveat that we wouldn't recommend serious fasting protocols for individuals with histories of eating disorders. And we specifically use that as an exclusion criteria.
00:12:10
Speaker
And also what we do is that we, we make sure that people understand why they're doing this. It's not for ultimate thinness. It's for longevity. It's for health span. And it's done in short periods of time for a specific goal and purpose.
00:12:29
Speaker
And as long as somebody understands that, what we've actually seen is improvements in relationships with food and behaviors with food. And so again, this is just another one of those things where we really do have to like kind of unpack things a little bit and not just say like, oh no, this is this is one way and nothing else.
Fasting Types and Their Benefits
00:12:48
Speaker
So um just a quick quick aside on that because I think it's important to talk about, especially as a dietician who is a big believer food.
00:12:56
Speaker
intuitive eating and is very, uh, aware of kind of the, the food, um, the, the issues that the food culture has brought to, to, to all of us.
00:13:07
Speaker
Before we move on, can I just make one PSA? Because I think there's certain listeners who might say, oh, not an MD, not a doctor.
00:13:18
Speaker
I want to listen to them. And every doctor I speaks to says, no, go talk to someone who's actually trained in nutrition, like a registered dietitian, because we got 30 minutes or 45 minutes or zero an hour maybe in all of our four years of med school on nutrition. I actually don't know anything about it, go talk to the person who has a deep knowledge, a deep education in this. And so this is why we're having this conversation and not with someone who got an hour of it in four years. Yeah, exactly. And by the way, I will give, i spend a lot of time with doctors. In fact, I do a lot of nutrition education training. I probably at this point, thousands of doctors on fasting and and fasting mimicking science.
00:13:57
Speaker
And so I want to qualify that there are some doctors out there that have since done the work to get as ah some information, but the vast majority of them have not. And so, you know, definitely ah take take that with a grain of salt and and do your due diligence on where, you know, what what people have been educated in. But now there's incredible movements like the Academy of Lifestyle Medicine, for example, that are doing post- training for physicians on things like nutrition, etc. So just look for some ah some of those additional qualifications. But um yeah we can we can derail so fast, but let's come back to to fasting. Fasting, yes, it's an umbrella term.
00:14:37
Speaker
It covers ah a lot of different types of fasting. And believe it or not, even some of these fasting protocols include food. So it is not what you might think. When we look at the definitions of fasting, there's a lot of different ones and it depends how you're qualifying it. I typically break it up into a few different categories. One is going to be time-based. So how long are you in this quote unquote fasted state? Another one is what are you including or excluding as part of your fasting protocol? Those are going to be probably the two biggest ones that are going to determine how we are defining fasting. And so if we look at time-based, the the big kind of cutoff is two days. And people are always surprised when I say two days, because when we think about um fasting, we usually think about one-day fasts, right? 16-hour fasts, 24-hour fasts. And those all, including a two-day fast, would fall within the category of intermittent fasting.
00:15:42
Speaker
And the reason why we set that cutoff of two days is because at the two day mark, there is an additional kind of big shift that happens when we fast for three days or more. And that's something that we call autophagy or deep cellular cleanup. I like to think of it like a vacuum cleaner for our ourselves. I'm sure many of your listeners who are kind of the optimizers are familiar with autophagy and my autophagy and all of this incredible cellular cleanup. But if you really want to turn that on,
00:16:08
Speaker
There is a misnomer and a misunderstanding that you can do that with intermittent fasting or 24-hour fasting. And unfortunately, you're really not going to like pull the throttle on autophagy until you hit about three days of water-only or fasting mimicking.
00:16:26
Speaker
protocols. So that is category one. And then category two being what you include or what you don't include. Of course, you know, there's water only fasting, which is kind of, I think what people typically think of as the dictionary definition of fasting, either you have something or you do not have something, but there's also, I mean, there's, there's now, you know, proponents of dry fasting where you don't even have water. And then on the other side of the spectrum is fasting mimicking. And this is really, you know, my bread and butter. This is pretty much what I will recommend to the vast majority of my clients and the people that I work with because you get to include nutrition. Now, not just, not just, I'm not talking bone broth or juices or electrolytes. We're talking
00:17:14
Speaker
We're talking We're talking vegetables. We're talking nuts. We're talking breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and even a little dessert because there's a little chocolate typically at the end of a fasting mimicking day. So this is, this is really. real nutrition that you're having while your body is behaving like it is in a fasted state. And so you can see how this would be not just easier, but also safer. And then there's a handful of other benefits that we see when we engage in fasting, mimicking over water only fasting. So that is my very long description of fasting.
00:17:53
Speaker
And incredibly helpful. We spent the first part talking about why you might not want to, right? If you had some unhealthy relationships with food, et cetera, could we talk about why you might want to, especially these two different categories? So, you know, especially intermittent fasting, it seems a lot of people use it just because it's the easiest lever for them for caloric restrictions. You know, some people do it with elimination diets and i say, well, I'm only going to eat these foods and that's how they get the caloric restriction or or whatever it is. But other people do intermittent.
00:18:25
Speaker
And then for the three plus day, there's the autophagy. But I believe there other because it's been used for treatments for all sorts of things. I think where Dr. Longo's research started a lot was autophagy.
00:18:40
Speaker
in conjunction with chemotherapy because you're starving the cancer cells, helping feed the the healthy cells. So can we talk about why you might look at one versus the other and in who who would be looking at it?
00:18:53
Speaker
Yeah, and it's also not necessarily one versus the other. There is worlds where you can do both because um fasting mimicking protocols are generally longer, right? these These prolonged fasting mimicking protocols are usually about five days. There are also short fasting mimicking protocols, but um but typically I will recommend longer fasts that are five days or so in the fasting mimicking category. And then maybe a intermittent fast as well, but typical that is water only, but typically in that category, I will say about 12 hours, right? So you can you can find ways to pair them both, but why would you do one or the other? This is a really important question.
00:19:32
Speaker
um or Or what are the benefits to one versus the other? Intermittent fasting has benefits that are primarily metabolic and weight loss forward. So especially if I have somebody who is looking to lose weight, is looking for that slightly lower calorie, but also fat burning. Because what we see when we go in an intermittent fast, once we hit about 12 hours of fasting,
00:19:57
Speaker
our body has run out of the sugars that we have stored and consumed. And so it has to go look for energy elsewhere. And where does it look? It looks to fat. And so it starts breaking down fat. So fasts of anywhere from 12 plus start to push us into ketosis or fat burning.
Deep Dive into Prolonged Fasting
00:20:18
Speaker
And so that can be helpful even beyond the calorie restriction component and the calorie balance equation. Also, where we're getting our energy from can be helpful for weight loss. And it can also be helpful because we're learning, our body's learning to switch fuel sources from sugar to fat and back and forth.
00:20:37
Speaker
What we're also are helping with is insulin sensitivity and blood sugar management and things like that. So people who have some of, ah you know, maybe prediabetes or even type two diabetes, these can be some solutions that we look at there. So that's intermittent fasting benefits.
00:20:56
Speaker
Now, When we go into prolonged fasting, it's not that those are gone because those remain, but that we tack on additional benefits. And they primarily come from that deep cellular cleanup known as autophagy. But the reason why I'm going to list a very large number of benefits in a second is because our cells make up our entire body. And so if we are doing deep cellular cleanup, we're not just helping one system or one mechanism, we're doing a lot.
00:21:26
Speaker
and Not to mention, we're now starting to see some activation of new cells, including stem cell activation with these longer fasts as well. And I have some cool studies that just came out even in humans that are starting to to point to some of this too, showing regeneration of the ability to taste and smell that has been lost with prolonged fasting and specifically fasting mimicking.
00:21:52
Speaker
um But some of the more, i guess, ah exciting for the the general public are going to be things like improvements in biological age metrics, which, by the way, is a aggregation of a large number of metrics.
00:22:09
Speaker
um Improvements in skin health, improvements, of course, in... ah Your metabolic health. So these are ah number, again, of different metrics from blood sugar management to insulin sensitivity to blood pressure to cholesterol to triglycerides, pretty much anything that your doctor is measuring when you go in. We also see some of these cellular benefits in, in granted, I'm going to list a couple of more preclinical things.
00:22:38
Speaker
um For example, there's now been studies in Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, other autoimmune conditions, type 1 diabetes. Those ones are going to be some of our preclinical trials. But now we have some human trials even in IBD. So these are things like Crohn's and colitis.
00:22:59
Speaker
Now there's actually, again, regeneration of the gut lining with these prolonged fasts that you don't even see. they did this This was a cool one where they compared water-only fasting to regular eating to fasting mimicking. And the fasting mimicking actually was even better than water-only fasting in in that population. So anyways, um i i all to say that there's a lot of benefits. Yeah. Like inflammation, you know, yeah I hear, but and when i feel you may have some niggling knee joint or something, and after a day or two, you're like, wow, I just, I feel much better.
00:23:37
Speaker
That's gone away. Can you measure that? so you have that kind of subjective feeling, but do you see and see reactive protein or something like that that you can see that changing? Yeah. Yeah. And so typically what you see with C-reactive protein, at least with the fasting mimicking ah examples, is we see that when it is elevated, it will improve.
00:23:56
Speaker
When it is already at a generally healthy state, it doesn't go lower. And this is actually something that we see across most, if not all metrics, with fasting and fasting mimicking for prolonged periods of time. Because what you're doing, instead of hacking the system with a medication where, like for example, if somebody with healthy blood pressure or blood sugar takes a blood pressure or blood sugar medication, they're gonna drop to unsafe low levels. But when we go into fasting mimicking, we're letting our body do the work. We're letting our body be the incredible scientist and doctor that it is. And it's not going to let us get into an unsafe territory. It's going to have these safeguards. So if you're already at a healthy level for blood pressure and blood sugar, but your inflammation is through the roof, your body is going to be improving that metric. And that's what's super cool. When we look at the data across a large number of people, we see
00:24:51
Speaker
different things come down. So in some of the research that you look at with fasting mimicking, they do something called a post hoc analysis where they look at specific groups where they're like, okay, instead of trying to do this average, coming back to kind of one of our earlier conversations, right? Instead of just doing this average where we're going to kind of see things like even out, let's just pull this group of people that have high blood pressure and see what happened there. Let's go pull the people that have, you know, high hepatic fat and see what happened there. And what's cool is that you see...
00:25:24
Speaker
For example, in the hepatic fat example, individuals with the highest hepatic fat fraction drop 50% even with just three cycles. Like, I mean, insane. And then people who are already fine, they stay stable. And so this is this is just like, I think one of the coolest things about letting, you know, it taking some of these interventions that are less hacky and more just, ah you know, natural to to do the work.
00:25:50
Speaker
May I ask a little more on autophagy? Because I think when how I first came across Perlon back in 2018 or 2019, I think there was an article in Inc. Magazine and was talking about autophagy. And you I had a history of family with some cancer. It's like, oh, like this sounds super important. let me Let me go do this. And that kind of kicked off. I've been doing this for six, seven years now.
00:26:12
Speaker
But we can't really measure it, right? So how do we're just kind of going on faith or or can we measure it? We can measure it now, actually. A study was actually just published, I think maybe one week ago. We're super in it. Wow, okay, great timing. Yeah, amazing timing. A study was just published about a week ago on fasting mimicking and autophagy, for example, because we can now measure it. Now, it is like many things, by the way. We're measuring something that's happening in the body that has been associated with autophagy. And so we're looking at a ratio of specific proteins that are either pre-autophagy or post-autophagy.
00:26:53
Speaker
I'm going to butcher this, but I believe it's IC3-2 versus IC3-3. three But don't quote me on that. It's something along those lines. But that's the ratio that we're measuring.
00:27:05
Speaker
And we're typically measuring it in one system. So for example, in in blood, because again, autophagy can happen in any cells across the body. So we we use this as a measure of autophagy. and And this is now generally considered to be the gold standard measure of autophagy in humans.
00:27:24
Speaker
And, um, so yeah, it is, it's difficult to measure. Is it something that right now we have a test that you can take at home and be like, I'm in autophagy. No. And that's why it's critical that if you are trying to activate autophagy, you are not trusting these brands that are going out. I've seen it now on a couple of supplements that are like, take this supplement and autophagy will be turned on. I'm like, Oh, please. No, that's the highly unlikely. And until you show me through at least one of these tests that you can do like in partnership with a university until you, until you do that, I just, I refuse to, I refuse to believe it because autophagy is incredibly difficult to turn on and activate and optimize. Um, so yeah, but you can measure it. Okay. So on that, I I'm really, really curious about,
00:28:18
Speaker
because before I think it was, we we saw it in rats. Like we were able to test it, but we'd probably have to kill the rats to kind of figure it out. And what I kept hearing was they would go on a fast that seemed short, like a 24 hour fast is like a two week fast for us. And they would lose 20% of their body weight. And what that actually meant for us and are their downstream negative effects.
00:28:39
Speaker
from severe caloric restriction for sarcopenia or osteoporosis, other things for this study. And I certainly want to read it now. Can you see when it kicks in? Because they're saying, hey, do we need to fast for two weeks? It like, oh, no, at day three, we kind of see this. And at day four, we see this. And at day five, we see this. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and I'll share it with you. So you can throw it in the show notes so that people can check it out. But what we see is that it's statistically significantly elevated on day three and four, primarily on day four, actually, that's when it's statistically significant, but you know, it's, it's gradually increasing from around that day after the day two mark, which is what we had always kind of suggested and expected, gradually increasing, statistically significant on day four. What I thought was really interesting was they also measured it on day seven. Now, day seven is, of course, once you've already started refeeding. Because in these protocols, they're five-day fasting mimicking protocols. On day seven, they retested. And again, was not statistically significantly elevated, but was still elevated. And so again, it points to what we, you know, a lot of people who talk about autophagy,
00:29:52
Speaker
we'll describe it as kind of this dimmer switch, right? Where it will start at this baseline. It's always kind of happening. Your body's not gonna let you just over run with trash, you know? It's always kind of happening. But then what we see is that when we start in these fasted states, it's kind of like a broken dimmer switch. It doesn't really do too much for a little while. And then all of a sudden it starts gradually increasing over time. And then it gets to the peak.
00:30:16
Speaker
There's only, you know, so much that it can really go. It's not just gonna keep increasing forever. Then once you resume eating, it gradually comes back down, but it doesn't just like drop immediately.
Fasting and Lifestyle Improvements
00:30:28
Speaker
It gradually comes back down. And so there is still some remaining benefits even after you resume regular eating.
00:30:37
Speaker
Can we talk a little bit about the mindset or kind of mindset impact benefits, however you want to describe it, of fasting? And this may be just me trying to justify my own thinking on it. So push back if I'm wrong. But on the the saying, it's an eating disorder with the fasting. And...
00:30:58
Speaker
people saying, oh, you have an unhealthy relationship with food. I tend to disagree. i i say, look, I think society has a really unhealthy relationship with food and the cravings and what you get and feeling, oh I've been eaten in an hour and so I'm hangry. And there's this whole mindset around that. Whereas for me,
00:31:20
Speaker
starting to do fasting realize, oh wait, a lot of this is psychological. Like my body doesn't actually need to eat with that frequency. I I'm actually mentally clear when I'm not, I have more energy when I'm not.
00:31:32
Speaker
And so instead of being trained on the signals from ads for McDonald's or dairy queen on TV, I can listen to my body of, oh, no, I really do need to eat now, or this is really what I'm craving and want versus maybe this is the bad gut microbiota. Say, no, no, no, go eat a bunch of sugar right now because you need to feed me.
00:31:53
Speaker
And so do you see that actually get people to a healthier relationship with food? Because it's it I don't know, for me, it it's almost freeing.
00:32:04
Speaker
if If you had to miss a meal, if something's going on, like, ah oh, okay, I can do this. Like, it's it's not the end of the world. I'll just eat a little later. It's it's fine. Exactly. And you you hit the nail on the head. And in fact, this has been studied. There's been surveys done with individuals who have completed five-day fasting mimicking protocols. Granted, I'm going to speak specifically to fasting mimicking because that's where the study was done. um And we see that over 80% report a better relationship with food, less sugar cravings, all of these, you know, adjustments in their, their relationship with food. And we, you know, we can't say for certain why this happens, right? Because it is kind of a subjective assessment, but
00:32:48
Speaker
As you experienced, I have done, you know, a fasting mimicking protocol about 16 times now. I can tell you from my personal experience that what you're doing over the course of a five-day fasting mimicking protocol is really connecting internally, thinking about, wow, oh, wow, I just went to the kitchen for the third time today.
00:33:09
Speaker
for what? Like, I don't even need, I don't even need anything. Like it was just like this, this, this thing. And then, you know, or, or like you just, you just have one of your, your lunch soups and then you're immediately thinking about something else that you could have, even though you, you just ate. And it's like, because you are in this protocol for that five day period, you're constantly checking in and you realize how frequently our brain and our mind is consumed with these thoughts and around food and nutrition. And so just even that awareness of that piece, and also the important coming back to regular nutrition come day six, that combination of those two pieces side by side is really, really powerful.
00:33:55
Speaker
Now, Another thing that's really powerful about these five-day fasting mimicking protocols is that they are five days and there's a completion and therefore there is a celebration. And that celebration, that victory, that moment of pride is also incredibly motivational for people to start thinking about other things that they can do to to make themselves feel good like this, right? And so this is actually something that was studied. There was a a really cool clinical trial that was published less than, I mean, probably about six months ago now.
00:34:27
Speaker
They found in individuals with type 2 diabetes who had completed and about 12 cycles of fasting mimicking over the course of a year compared to people with type 2 diabetes that had done healthy nutrition, right? So they're doing everyday healthy nutrition for that same period of time.
00:34:43
Speaker
The group that did the fasting mimicking without being prompted, self-initiated, an additional four hours of physical activity a week. And the group that did the everyday healthy nutrition change actually decreased their physical activity by six hours a week.
00:35:00
Speaker
And when we look at that, we're like, what, how did this happen? Right? The researchers suggest that It is a combination of things. One being the individuals who are doing the fasting mimicking feel lighter and stronger because we know that with fasting mimicking, muscle is being protected. This is a really important ah qualifier of fasting mimicking over water-only fasting, for example, but also...
00:35:25
Speaker
what we see in everyday calorie restrictive diets, especially when they're protein deficient, which oftentimes happens in calorie restricted programs. And especially when they're not paired with muscle um and and weight bearing exercise, people lose muscle. So sure, maybe they feel lighter.
00:35:41
Speaker
which they did. the The regular nutrition diet did lose weight, but they did not protect muscle like the fasting mimicking group. So lighter, stronger is a big part. Completion with a five-day program. Yay, I did it. Motivated. Unlike every single day going and being like, I guess I have to have this salad again. i guess I have to do this again. like i don't even want to think about anything else that I could do. Right. So the five day component of it is a really big one. It leaves 25 other days to be like, what else can I do? And so all of those things kind of combined really are what we assume are these really big motivators to make other changes, even outside of nutrition alone. But
00:36:28
Speaker
We know that even in the nutrition realm, there's also other changes being made just naturally and intrinsically uninitiated. Yeah, that's that's really intriguing.
00:36:39
Speaker
It reminds me, Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit. He talked about he had gotten in this habit in the afternoon of eating a cookie and he saw his waistline changing. And he's like, well, I'm writing this on habits. Like maybe this isn't the best habit. What should I do?
00:36:52
Speaker
And he realized it was just like this lull that he kind of got bored. And so he would just walk around the office and go start a conversation. And that plugged the hole. So it was it wasn't he was hungry. It wasn't he needed the calories. as his brain It was just i was bored. And that's what we filled. And i think for a lot of people, especially if you grew up before smartphones and social media, the fear of boredom, it got filled by, okay, I'll go grab something from the kitchen. Now I think a lot of people just pick up their phone and they they put junk into their mind instead of their body. Or both at the same time. That's that's a big problem that we're facing today is that we are constantly mindlessly eating. And so we're highly over consuming because we're never checking in.
00:37:32
Speaker
I mean, in, you know, like Thich Nhat Hanh, that's, that's the whole thing. If you're eating a peach, just eat the peach, right? Like just be there and it, the mindless eating, i can go on a whole, ten right? I read a whole book on this, but the the idea of presence, this is our only life. And so please be there while you're eating this gift of whether an animal sacrificed its life or these plants that were grown from the energy of the sun, like enjoy it and appreciate it and sit with that. And I know I'm not always good at it, but.
00:37:58
Speaker
It's hard. It's shockingly difficult. i'm I'm sure in your writing of mindfulness, you spent some time looking at the intuitive eating principles and and the the kind of foundation that they've built there. But it is, in my opinion, I have tried.
00:38:16
Speaker
pretty much every single diet that there is. I, I, I'm a tester. I like, I use myself as a case study of one all of the time. So I've tried them all. And the hardest one, honestly, was intuitive eating and just like truly being free, letting yourself have whatever you want, but having to check in, stop, be check in before, during, and after every single meal uninterrupted. That was the hardest one.
00:38:43
Speaker
It's ah sitting with our own thoughts. it's It's a difficult, difficult task, but it's a journey of a life.
Conclusion and Resources
00:38:50
Speaker
Renee, this has been amazing. a I have certainly learned a lot. I hope our listeners did as well. This is a topic, as you touched on, like this study just came out last week. yeah We'll need to stay in touch and and bring in more as we learn more. yeah But thank you. Before we sign off, where can listeners learn more more about you, what you're doing with all Nutri and Prolon, all the things?
00:39:12
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you're interested to connect with me, check me out on Instagram, probably the fastest way to connect with me these days at Fitton Nutrition. That's F-I-T-T-O-N Nutrition. If you're curious to do fasting mimicking in the easiest way possible, There are ah pre-made five-day kits that will bring you everything that you need for that five-day period. um They are through Prolon or another company called L Nutra Health. Prolon, check them out at prolonlife, P-R-O-L-O-N life.com. And L Nutra is more of the medical division. Let's say you have type 2 diabetes, for example, metabolic syndrome. You want physician oversight.
00:39:50
Speaker
They have that. So L-N-U-T-R-A health.com. And if I could do a little plug on both of those, I mean, these aren't fly-by-night businesses. These are built up by Dr. Volter Longo ah based on the research he's seen in supporting cancer patients on chemo and everything with these. And as I understand it, the the profits are used to fund more research in this area as well. Is all that fair to say?
00:40:16
Speaker
All of that is very fair to say. a large number of the profits go actually to two different verticals. um One to to USC, which is ah the the kind of research vertical, the University of Southern California. and Also to a nonprofit called Create Cures, which is using fasting mimicking protocols in individuals with ah severe or late stage conditions, including cancer, but also ah severe autoimmune, among others, and leveraging these tools in those individuals.
00:40:48
Speaker
with dietitian support, biochemists, all the wonderful support there. So those are those are two additional avenues where those profits will go. But yes, as you mentioned, I will i'll call it it out because it deserves to be said. Prolon was founded, yes, by Dr. Walter Longo and founded off of about... 30 years of research, about $40 million dollars in and NIH funding of of that research. There are now over 47 clinical trials in this with this specific protocol in fasting mimicking alone.
00:41:22
Speaker
hundred patents. I mean, this is this is really heavily science-backed and something that You know, in a world where as we kind of started off with, it's hard to know what to trust.
00:41:34
Speaker
I think this is one of those few protocols where we we do have so much research and so much support to guide us in the right direction across so many different verticals too.
00:41:47
Speaker
And one other lesson thing, if you love the data, obviously what Renee is said, there's a ton of data there. If you love the stories, I think the Facebook community, there's there's some really good stories of people sharing as they go on their journey and here's round number one and what it's done for their lives. So it's ah it's a great story that has both that yeah I would just say.
00:42:08
Speaker
The number of testimonials that have brought tears to my eyes are like pretty significant. So it's, it's, it's amazing. And, and I hope that if your listeners are curious, all you have to do is commit five days. I mean, you can do anything for five days, especially when it's fully delivered to your door made easy. I mean, just give it a shot. And I think you'll, you'll be quite surprised at what you see.
00:42:32
Speaker
And once you do, i think you'll expand the universe of what you think you can do. It will give you a a level of confidence after that first one. I've just seen it over and over. yeah Well, Renee, this has been incredible. Thank you. I could just keep going, but I'm going stop here.
00:42:47
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Such a pleasure. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of the Home of Healthspan podcast. And remember, you can always find the products, practices, and routines mentioned by today's guests, as well as many other healthspan role models on Alively.com.
00:43:03
Speaker
Enjoy a lively day.