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Fasting Is NOT The Solution To Your Gut Problems
14 Plays4 months ago
Ready to resolve your gas, bloating, constipation, and other digestive problems for good? Watch my free Gut Recovery Masterclass to learn more: https://gutrecoverymethod.com/register
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Hosted by functional health practitioner and longevity author, Christian Yordanov, this podcast is dedicated to helping women struggling with gastrointestinal problems such as gas, bloating, constipation, and other digestive distress.
Whether you have a diagnosis such as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), IBD (inflammatory bowel disease; Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis), SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth), GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) or not, you will benefit from the insights we'll share.
Join us as we explore the intricate connections between gut health and overall well-being, addressing common issues like fatigue, poor sleep, hormonal imbalances, and anxiety.
Learn how stress impacts your digestive system and discover effective strategies to reduce inflammation, improve digestion, and enhance your quality of life.
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Transcript
The Risks of Fasting Over 40
00:00:43
chrisyzen
Okay, today we're going to talk about why fasting is a horrendous idea in pretty much all circumstances that you can think of. so Yeah, it it might ru it might ruffle a few feathers, sure. But when you look at the basic mechanisms, the physiological mechanisms through which we continue to remain alive when not eating food for extended periods of time,
00:01:14
chrisyzen
you will hopefully understand why I do not recommend fasting to my clients and I do not recommend extended you know intermittent fasting type windows like 16 hours, 18 hours, that's preposterous. Most especially for folks over say 40, 45 years of age and for folks that have a health issue that they're trying to resolve. And for folks that are under a lot of stress and for folks that care about extending their longevity, increasing their longevity. So basically, who can fast? Very healthy people.
00:01:59
chrisyzen
and or very young people because they can handle the stress of fasting, which kind of already gives it away, right? If it's so stressful that the ideal candidates are really healthy people, well, what what why would we put ourselves to through stress when we're healthy just because we can handle it? that
Physiological Stress and Tissue Breakdown
00:02:23
chrisyzen
doesn't make any sense right and so let me just break it down a little bit right so
00:02:32
chrisyzen
the physiology that is, right? So the physiological mechanism, when you stop eating food, what happens in the body? but Very, very basically once, I think once people understand what happens, they're like, well, that doesn't sound optimal to to to engage in this um starvation, um sort of physiology. Okay, so here's what happens. Let's say you eat dinner. And you know, it's a nice balanced meal, you have everything in there, carbs, everything. you top up your with the glucose and the the carbohydrates in the meal your liver will top up its glycogen stores which is where you store your um it's it's a quick um it's a it's a kind of intermediary glucose source so the liver can keep your blood sugar stable in between meals and overnight right and with a lot of that
00:03:28
chrisyzen
glucose that it kind of secretes into the bloodstream that's especially when you're sleeping that's just designed to really to feed the brain and keep you alive right because if your blood sugar drops very low like under 70 I start experiencing pretty horrible symptoms of hypoglycemia and eventually you will fall into a coma and then soon after you will die so this is a very important job to have a constant supply of glucose in the you know in in the body in the bloodstream even in very deep ketosis when you're fasting, let's say, you know, several days into it, you're still producing quite significant amounts of glucose every day. Right. So, but here's the thing. So yeah let's let's let's pretend now it's a couple of hours after your last meal. Let's say maybe you go to bed um and it's been a couple of hours you're sleeping. So it's let's say five hours or so.
00:04:25
chrisyzen
into kind of your fast overnight fast. What happens is so the the liver will drip feed the glucose into the bloodstream. And then what happens is when the liver stores of glycogen start to diminish, and they say you can hold about, let's say 100 grams or so of of glycogen in in in like ah an adult liver, if the person is healthy. um And the brain consumes like five grams of glucose per hour, right? But then there's other functions that need glucose and so on. So let's say five hours into it, what happens is,
00:05:03
chrisyzen
As these stores start to diminish, you start to kick into something called gluconeogenesis, where you start to actually, the liver starts to produce glucose. It doesn't just secrete its stores, but it's also producing glucose, right? So um this is facilitated by certain hormones, and some of them are straight up considered stress hormones. Things like cortisol, glucagon, and um so what happens is, the substrate to create that glucose comes from lean tissue right when i say lean tissue we're talking muscle bone
00:05:47
chrisyzen
joints, skin, parts of your organs, right? Depending on the length of the fast, you could even start tapping into parts of the brain. Yeah, you can start to atrophy parts of the brain so that you can turn them into glucose.
Impact on Mood and Gut Health
00:06:08
chrisyzen
So as you can see, this is a survival mechanism where we start to break down things that are, quote unquote, not not necessarily nice to have, but they're not um important for super immediate survival, right? So your bones, there's a lot of protein in there that can be turned into into glucose. The bones are like 35% collagen, which is protein, which is amino acids, right? So a lot of those amino acids can be turned into glucose or ketones.
00:06:39
chrisyzen
which is um what we also start creating once we get into the the ketosis. But that that takes a few days to get into that, right? So intermittent fasting, you're mostly running on glucose and some fat, right? So what this physiology signals to the body is scarcity. So as I mentioned, it starts to shut down non vital for survival functions. Okay, so that that yeah I don't know if you fasted I hope you haven't to be quite honest with you, but if you've been
00:07:12
chrisyzen
hungry, you know, the hangriness. Yeah, you know, you feel like crappy, you feel like a little bit irritable. That's the stress hormones. That's the cortisol and adrenaline getting you hyped up. um If you've ever tried to sleep on an empty stomach, you know what ah that's like, the adrenaline keeping you awake, the cortisol keeping you awake. You just feel lousy when you're fast. You know, I think younger people, they can still take the the kind of the the horribleness of the soul stress um so they can feel a little bit more manic and and oh I have a lot of energy when I'm fasting it's because you're you high on freaking you're amped up on adrenaline you know so you feel really crappy when you when you don't eat when you fast right and part of the reason why is because you need energy to maintain these higher functions including joy and good mood
00:08:07
chrisyzen
And you know i've also I've also seen myself trying to be productive when i'm kind of not when I'm not eating as much or when I'm fasting. And it's not as good. My brain performance is not as good. right And I've actually seen people that you know they're like um on a podcast or some video presentation and the guy's like, every sentence like um ah and then like 40 minutes into it he's like sorry guys I'm just like im I'm fasting at the moment so my brain is not very good I'm like oh that's why you sound off today because yeah your higher functions higher cognitive functions get shut down during fasting
00:08:48
chrisyzen
Again, because the whole starvation physiology, which is what fasting is, signals scarcity to the body. It's an emergency state where the body's breaking itself down just to stay alive. right so What happens is because the fasting activates this fight or flight survival nervous system, what happens is the stress of that, the cortisol, that actually can ah interfere with gut function. So cortisol can have a disruptive effect.
00:09:20
chrisyzen
as we've covered in a previous episode, on the on the mucus production in the gut, which is a protective layer, on the tight junctions that join our gut epithelial cells together, so that can increase leaky gut, for example. And there's a bunch of other inflammatory, other disruptive processes. that So while some people
Long-term Damage of Fasting
00:09:40
chrisyzen
are getting relief when fasting, it's more than likely, as if you've heard the previous episode episodes up until now, it's more than likely that they're getting a break from a lot of endotoxin getting into into their bloodstream causing a lot of inflammation and horribleness, which is what inflammation running rampant will do.
00:10:00
chrisyzen
So, so they're like, um so in order to do that, so instead of addressing the gut issue and figuring out how what foods are not going to cause them all of this inflammation, they just decide to not eat and to starve because, you know, someone told them it's a good idea and they feel better. So now they think fasting is this amazing thing. OK, but in the long term, it's doing damage, literal damage because these cells are getting broken down so they can be turned into glucose. You're literally degenerating yourself, disintegrating your cells so they can become glucose at the end of the day and some other things. So if you eat a healthy diet, if you eat clean food, fasting is not really and is not really necessary.
00:10:46
chrisyzen
So like I already mentioned, it's an additional stressor. So if you're already um stressed out because of a health condition, because of your work life, family schedule and and other demands, because of other stuff, whatever it is so fasting is just adding another stress on an already burdened system so that's not good then the other thing going back to the signal of scarcity when the body is given being given signals of starvation and scarcity it lowers its metabolic rate and this is kind of goes back to it lowers a lot of
00:11:21
chrisyzen
functions that are, you know, quote unquote, nice to have. That includes having hair, right? So ah symptoms of hypothyroidism or hypo met hypo hypometabolism or low metabolism include things like hair loss and depression and stuff like that, right? So this metabolic rate reduction then can make you predispose you to health problems in general, just the lower metabolic rate in general does that, but also it can make you prone to gaining more weight
00:12:00
chrisyzen
that's why the research has found that intermittent fasting is not um is not more effective than you so intermittent fasting without the caloric deficit is not magical it doesn't actually make you lose weight you still need to reduce the calories and and the the reason intermittent fasting helps is because it's very difficult to shovel three full meals in a snack or two in like an eight hour period,
Misconceptions and Consequences for Women
00:12:35
chrisyzen
right? So the research has found that
00:12:38
chrisyzen
if you don't do a caloric deficit you will probably not lose weight and if you do interestingly it's very likely a lot of that weight to be lean muscle bone and other tissue like precious tissue especially for women especially for women kind of in their 40s 50s 60s plus because bone, we know how much of a higher risk osteoporosis is for women, right? So anything like fasting, putting yourself into the stress, the starvation physiology is just
00:13:16
chrisyzen
going to be detrimental in the long term and here's the thing at least with muscle mass you can kind of see if you're losing muscle mass from an intervention but with bone it's very very difficult because very few of my clients are actually going and they're getting like bone scans and MRIs and other kind of bone density scanning procedures. Very, very few of my clients are actually doing that, right? So often time when you figure out you've got you've got all this bone you've lost is, you know,
00:13:50
chrisyzen
When the unthinkable happens like you break a freaking hip or something like that or you fracture a Spinal vertebrae or something like that. So these are things that are invisible. They're under the surface and this is why I I kind of am doing this what I'm doing is because we need to make more women aware of this issue because I The problem with the most symptoms when the symptom arises is there's been an undercurrent of dysfunction degeneration
00:14:24
chrisyzen
an imbalance for multiple months, years, and and in many cases, decades in in things like atherosclerotic plaques and um and so on and so forth, right? So very, very pernicious. And this is why I'm really, really, it really grinds my gears because this mainstream bullshit is making a lot of people's health worse with these horrible things. and And the worst part is when you get a little bit of relief, like in the case if you have a gut problem and you stop eating, yeah, okay, you're not feeding the endotoxin producing bacteria, but why don't we just address the problem, figure out what's going on in the gut and then create a program that the person can then follow to restore their gut health and that they don't have to starve themselves just to feel better, you know?
00:15:12
chrisyzen
It was like one lady, she commented on one of my Instagram reels about fasting, that it's harmful. And she started going on about how good it is and how, how it's like, you should go. should She tells me, you should try a fast. And I was doing fasting like in 2018, right? Before it was so kind of mainstream and whatever. And, um you know, she's like, um you know was oh you You should just try to fast for a couple of days, see how how good you feel and how good your brain feels and stuff like that. i'm like i already My brain already feels good. I already feel good.
00:15:53
chrisyzen
Right. And then so here's the thing. I went to her Instagram profile and like the first two lines were like that she's super into vegetables and veggie cooking and big into baking. I'm thinking to myself, um yeah, that's a lot of fiber, you know. So you're probably that's why you feel so good. I thought to myself I didn't recommend there's no point in like people will only agree with you if they already agree with you There's no point in like arguing um Over like a few comments where i've I've written a whole freaking chapter, you know in my book on longevity on my fasting is so bad enough and
00:16:30
chrisyzen
delved into the research you know for like and a couple of months as I was writing the book. you know so if i don't yeah know I can't convince you with like a comment, that's why I have to write a book about this kind of stuff and have a podcast. but you know This is the kind of stuff and these folks unfortunately are kind of they're lining up for these interventions and these diets like keto and low carb and this other stuff that is really being pushed up to the the top of the list in the mainstream and come a few years time
00:17:09
chrisyzen
they're gonna be having health problems and then they're gonna be wondering oh did i maybe i should fast more maybe i need to do more maybe i'm eating way too many carbs and you know maybe i need to compress my intermittent fasting window even more and or maybe i need to go like oh no 10 day water fast and not eat anything. um Maybe I'm not doing it right. I need to do more of this. So this is kind of the pernicious part when an intervention gives you a little bit of relief upfront and then the horrible degeneration starts to kind of build up as an undercurrent, you know, like but again, bone loss.
00:17:48
chrisyzen
this is
Hormonal Imbalances
00:17:49
chrisyzen
really difficult to to kind of catch and um there's so much in our bones in terms of minerals in terms of again amino acids and ah like think about 35% of bone is collagen and some of that collagen can be used for many purposes including for glucose if you have to survive so Yeah, this is really, really terrible, terrible um and for long-term health, right? um What else? I think, you know what? Oh yeah, there was a couple more things. So the other thing is cortisol. but court So again, when when you're fasting, your cortisol is always elevated, your stress hormones are elevated. But here's the other thing, cortisol and testosterone, they kind of oppose each other.
00:18:35
chrisyzen
So it it's been shown in the intermittent fasting research that it lowers um testosterone. And so testosterone protects against various hormones in the body that are harmful when they're rampant like ah estrogen and um cortisol and so on, right? So testosterone, I don't think many women know this but actually women produce a lot more testosterone than estrogen right so you need very tiny amounts of estrogen but there's a lot of things that are estrogenic in the environment and so if you lower your testosterone through let's say fasting or other kind of you know mainstream health advice that's harmful then
00:19:20
chrisyzen
It does not, it's ah because it's protective against cortisol and um testosterone, you those hormones, even in the same concentration that they were before we started, can become more deleterious, more harmful to you. right So testosterone is very important for women as well as for men. These this sex hormones, they're it's the kind of miss mislabeled. They're not really necessarily sex hormones and you know testosterone is the male hormone, estrogen is the female hormone. It's not really the case
00:19:58
chrisyzen
if anything progesterone is the female hormone um and you know this whole big topic for another time but ah They have functions in so many different places in the body, you know, the brain and so on and so forth. So it's really deleterious, anything that lowers these protective hormones, be that progesterone or testosterone and so on. Okay. So, and that's what fasting does. And the other thing, interestingly, this was a ah study in men. So not only did their testosterone and other protective hormones like DHEA and whatever else ah get lowered, but
00:20:35
chrisyzen
their testicles shrank. right So it's again, because it's fertility testicle ah testicle size, how much semen you produce, or you know yeah in terms of like women, the the gonads, the ovaries. um they Because reproduction is a higher function, right it's not immediate survival that it's related to, that is one of the first things to start getting reduced. So it's very clear that fasting starvation causes this. Therefore, it's not a strategy that is conducive to optimal health, right? the It's not about whether a person wants to, ah you can't say
00:21:21
chrisyzen
But I don't want to have kids or I've already had kids and so this doesn't concern me. The point is that it's it's diminishing these higher things that are very much required. right you You cannot expect to have a lot of longevity and optimal health if a lot of these other things are not working well. So if you're not thinking well, it's clear that you're not optimally healthy. And if you're not optimally healthy, you're not going to have very good longevity, right for example. so these it's not that they're we We may or may not want these things. You may not want you may not want to be fertile you know into your 60s and continue having a freaking period in into your 70s. But the fact is that
00:22:06
chrisyzen
If you did, if a woman continued to be fertile in her sixties, that's an indication of very good health, right? That's the point. And when you're very when your health is very good, your longevity by extension is increased, right? So whether or not we want to be fertile at that age is completely completely sort of beyond the scope of what we're talking about here. The point is that interventions like fasting ah um that cause all the stress, metabolic rate reduction, loss of lean mass, lowering of protective hormones, um the this takes away from health.
00:22:50
chrisyzen
it takes away from health.
Alternatives to Fasting
00:22:52
chrisyzen
In spite of any short term benefits accrued, like let's say from reducing endotoxin in the gut and so on, giving the gut a break from highly inflammatory foods, the longer term picture is a lot of degeneration, destruction of lean, precious lean in tissue. Okay. So I think I beat that horse well into the ground here. So I'm going to wrap this one up. I hope that helps you to understand how, how this whole thing works and what, what's the rationale behind my
00:23:30
chrisyzen
I'm not just trying to be contrarian just to kind of get, you know, listens and views and clicks and whatever, you know. I genuinely care about people improving the state of the world. That's my mission here, the health of, you know, other people. And this, if you understand it the way I do, you would never fast ever, ever again, really. um Yeah, so that's kind of that's kind of it. you know And remember, if you if you have a gut problem and fasting seems to help you, there's clearly something that needs to be investigated there, right? And there's a lot that can be done to investigate, address the issue and create a diet plan that doesn't cause all this horribleness when you're eating. So you can eat, so you can have your cake and eat it too.
00:24:22
chrisyzen
But the the the key is to understand that and really understand that if this is unaddressed if if this remains unaddressed, it only can get worse in time. but This doesn't spontaneously improve the body. does not spontaneously improve its function unless we invest in ourselves. And sometimes that means we need someone, an expert to help guide us.
Seeking Expert Guidance
00:24:52
chrisyzen
So if you think you're ready to work with someone like that,
00:24:56
chrisyzen
ah You can click the link down below, watch my masterclass, understand a little bit about my methodology, how that all works. And if you want to take the next step, you'll have an opportunity then to to book a call with me and we can discuss your situation and I'll help you create a winning plan for you with that. Okay. So thank you so much for tuning into today's episode and I'll see you on the next one.