what is the fasting mimicking diet why would you want to do it and there something even better I'm Dr Eric Westman and welcome to my channel where I review and debunk nutritional misinformation online thanks for sending this video it's one about the fasting mimicking diet and what benefits fasting might have and all the different ways you can get the benefits of a fasting type of diet be sure to wait till the end where I give my final thoughts this is a video from Dr Sten eberg now Dr eberg is a functional nutritional and Chiropractic Doctor in the US but he also has a pretty amazing history of being a decathlon Champion so that's pretty heroic level of exercise and activity so we have to always consider if he's talking about his own kind of experience or his Clinic practice kind of experience but he's also a pretty good teacher that I'm seeing here and many of my patients have said you should watch Dr eberg because we have a lot in common I know I've done a few videos about Dr eberg more controversial issues I don't agree with everything he says but that's okay you know those who criticize me for not agreeing with somebody it's not because I'm I'm trying to be difficult I'm just trying to remain scientific so let's see what Dr Sten eberg says about fasting before we dive into today's video I want to invite you to my free webinar Beyond cholesterol the two biggest risk factors for cardiovascular disease if you're confused by cholesterol or feeling pressured by your doctor to take cholesterol medication this webinar is perfect for you discover the crucial facts about why cholesterol isn't the primary concern for cardiovascular disease risk and learn what you should focus on instead to evaluate and lower your risk you can sign up below hello hell Champions today I want to talk about something that's a lot easier than fasting but that can still give you the same benefits as an extended water fast and these benefits include reversing or reducing insulin resistance it is very very powerful for losing weight and you can also create autophagy which is a form of cleansing process in the body you can also start reversing degenerative disease which is associated with a chronic lowgrade inflammation as we see in cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes but also in things like cancer and dementia so fasting can act as a metabolic reset and a cleanse where you start reversing all of these conditions so if you've heard me speak if you if you're one of my patients I don't talk about autophagy a lot and you've probably heard all the other things that are getting better here the insulin resistance gets better when you lower carbohydrates and lower the insulin level insulin resistance will get better and all those other metabolic and inflammatory conditions get better so in this video If you've been following me I'm going to introduce the concept of autophagy and autophagy you know I've thought hasn't really been ready for prime time so to speak a lot of research in animals and and in vitro meaning in test tubes and you it's hard to get outcome data with humans in terms of longevity and autophagy so it's more of a theoretical issue and yet pretty amazing ISS so let's hear and learn what autophagy is so typically fasting means that you only drink water you don't eat anything else and fasting can get you into autophagy that's why we're going through fasting first but we're going to talk about in this video how you can fast and eat at the same time by eating a very specific way you can actually mimic fasting and get the same benefits and if you eat this specific way for five days you can get the same benefits as if you did a threed day water fast so I can see why people come to me confused about fasting it kind of crawls out for a fasting and and your fasting confusion sort of approach well so fasting can mean eating nothing just a water fast means you just eat nothing and if you're going to eat something that is you can have a 24-hour fast which means you eat once a day or a Time delimited window where you eat only a certain time of day and my Approach has been to not focus so much on that arbitrary those time points it's my Approach is to eat when you're hungry and that for most people means you don't eat three meals a day and you drop me you know you don't skip meals you actually just don't eat if you're not hungry so fasting if you think about it fasting really is fat burning you know what I've been teaching for a long time is limiting carbohydrates so that your body accesses its fat store so your body becomes a fat burning machine if you don't eat carbohydrates if you don't eat anything the body becomes a fat burning machine as well except there comes a time when the fat can't provide all the nutrients you need so if you don't eat anything after a while your body starts drawing upon its own protein and this in the weight loss world is thought to be a bad thing because you don't want to lose muscle mass the protein on your body if at all possible you want to just lose the fat on your body but now the so the idea of fasting to get you to fat burning and autophagy we're going to see there are a lot of similarities between fat burning and even ketosis and autophagy so that means you can still get the insulin drop which means you're starting to reverse insulin resistance you can also initiate autophagy which means that when protein is scarce then the body gets really really good it starts upregulating the recycling processes because it starts going into every little corner every nook and cranny to find these residue of protein and this could be bacteria it could be virus it could be damaged cells misfolded proteins any sort of junk that when you stop eating protein when your protein goes really really low in the diet now the body has to go out and find these things so it acts like a very powerful cleanup and just like fasting it can provide weight loss but it's not so much even the weight you lose during the fast but it's that you start cleansing you start reversing and it's a metabolic reset that helps you lose weight in the future and it also provides a great cleanse you know there's a lot of jargon I'm hearing that it doesn't occur in in my world but like cleansing things like that autophagy is basically your body auto meaning self fagy eat eating yourself meaning cleaning up recycling I think is a great word to describe autophagy Auto Fiji eating the self so it's recycling meaning if you don't eat anything for a few days and you don't have protein coming in the diet your body has to recycle the protein in fact it's recycling amino acids and protein all the time and the idea here is that it's going to allow your body to recycle the protein even better if you don't eat much protein at all although there's a balance because in the old days doctors would hospitalize people who are heavy and not feed them anything they would do total just water fasts but people will start losing their muscle mass after you did that too long so there's a balance you don't want to not eat protein so long that you then start taking down your muscle and not being able to replace it so if you've ever seen some people who've had weight loss surgery they just don't look healthy because they've lost a lot of muscle mass possibly to explain why they they don't look as healthy as before it's hard to intake lots of protein after you had weight loss surgery so the idea is reduce the protein intake by fasting or or by just reducing the protein then your body will do more autophagy and this is supposed to be better healthier and that cleans up the cells meaning it kills the cancer cells and the proteins that are not going to be working properly and so that's the theory behind it and the idea of it not being ready for prime time means I'm waiting for studies that show in humans the benefits of autophagy and and even what I why would I recommend something different than what I already recommend so what's the incremental benefit beyond what I teach which is keep the carbs low eat you know mainly meat protein chicken poultry eggs shellfish and fish it turns out that what I teach is very similar to what you're here so let me just comment on strict fasting I'm not opposed to that in any way I just want you to keep your options open and if you have trouble with extended water fasting then this would really be something to look into now water fasting it works for a lot of people and if you're one of those who can do it without much discomfort or maybe you even enjoy it then by all means keep doing it and and I would just say in a clinical population I'm a little more cautious so if you're on medications for diabetes high blood pressure really any medication then you don't want to do total strict fasting without any food at all without medical supervision to help you get off the medicines basically and but even then I have to kind of say that we don't have large scale I meaning lots of people in studies showing fasting total fasting over a long period of time so when people do it I kind of passively say well you know if you need to do it to break a plateau or reverse diabetes maybe but you want to do it under medical supervision if you're in a clinical population but still keep your options open just to kind of try things out and get some variety but the biggest reason to look into this mimicking diet is that a lot of people have trouble fasting with just water because we're all different and can be things like genetic differences it could be differences in our gut Flora because the bacteria in our gut they provide a lot of signaling about inflammation about Hunger about insulin resistance so we're not all the same and there are some people who don't do very well when they try a water fast they might go 16 hours okay but beyond that they start feeling weak they start feeling really really hungry to the point where they don't function really well they might get Li headed or dizzy or nauseous so in other words it they're just not doing that well on a water fast and if you want to eat the specific way to still get fasting benefits then the rules are very simple the first rule is that you eat less than 50% of your normal calories and the second rule is equally important and that's that you keep your protein between 15 and 20 grams per day and 15 would be if you're a smaller person and 20 would be if you're a little bit bigger and the only other rule is that I believe that low carb will work better there are a lot of people who do this without going specifically low carb and it's still works but it's easier and it works better if you do low carbon so it's very interesting to see these ranges or or cut points when I teach someone to change their food to become a fat burner to to get nutritional ketosis I don't really tell people how many calories to have and I limit the carbohydrates and give people a list of foods to choose from it turns out the range of protein that people eat is is quite large the range of fat fat that people eat is quite large I don't tell people to have a certain amount and the beauty of that is that you can eat the food you like in the quantity you like and in some people it limits the protein and some people will add protein in to meet a macro or I've been told I need x amount of protein every day you know my trainer tells me and or or My dietitian and so that would violate the rules of of getting autophagy if you're pushing protein over a certain level and kind of advocates for the idea of let your body figure out the protein and most people after they follow a low carb keto diet for a number of years realize that they just don't eat a whole lot compared to before it's it's like your body becomes more efficient and you're eating less protein over time and you're eating fewer calories automatically compared to before and the low carb nature basically is to keep the insulin really low and that has a number of other benefits including the idea of reducing inflammation so interesting let's see how Dr eberg formulates a program based on the fasting mimicking diet so let me give you an example of what I did for one day out of these five days so I started with a soup and salad and there was 50 gr of lettuce Zer gram of fat I had 50 gram of tomatoes 25 gram of cucumber 50 gram of bell pepper and 25 gram of onion and so far they're basically just Trace Amounts of fat in here but then of course you want some good fat some extra virgin olive oil on that salad so I had two tablespoons of that and I also had some soup that you can make make your own and I did for some of the days but this particular day I just bought a vegetable soup from a store and that had 2.3 grams of fat in it so we add that all up it's about 30 grams of fat for that first meal and then we look at the protein and again we I picked food that are very very low in protein so so far we basically just have Trace Amounts of protein which is the whole point of this diet and then the soup had a little bit more at 4 and 1/2 so all in all it was 6 and 1/2 gram of protein in this first meal and then when we look at the carbs here they're all very low they have half a gram or one gram until we get to the soup because that had some carrots and a few other vegetables in it that had a little bit of carbohydrate but it's not that critical to keep the carbohydrates super low and we'll come back and talk a little bit more about that as well so all in all there was 20 grams of carbs in that meal and the calories again very very low until we get to the olive oil and then a little bit more for the soup but that entire meal had about 380 calories well so I'm assuming that you don't do all that on your own at home I mean you can and my Approach is not to have to have you calculate all these things the main point here is that he he cut the protein out of the food and had it in fat for the calories and it was largely the the salad being the vegetables and the the leafy greens I don't typically use grams for measurements I'll I'll use volume as a typical you know one cup of leafy green one cup of a non-starchy vegetable meaning about a fistful so that you don't have to have a scale but I I I like the way he's detailing this let's see what he ate the rest of the day and then I made a little stir fry and you can spice these up any way you like I think with this one I had salt and pepper and some Curry and I cooked it in olive oil as well so we have the leak and onion and cauliflower and then I had some asparagus some avocado and some sweet potato on the side and again if you're really trying to go low carb then you can cut out the sweet potato and do something else do more asparagus or more avocado and then of course I cooked this in some extra virgin olive oil again and when it comes to Fat we see that all of these vegetables have very close to zero until we get to avocado which has 6.9 gram the sweet potato has a fraction and the extra virgin olive oil is pure fat so that's 28 grams again just like the first meal if we add that all up that's 36 G and the protein is again very low that's what we're choosing on purpose the cauliflower is a little bit higher but that's because there's a lot of cauliflower there 200 gram and that's kind of the foundation for that stir fry and the rest of them have less than 1 g of protein when we add it all up we get 8.4 GS and the carbs are going to be a little bit higher here we have a few grams in each thing that we're eating and all in all it ends up at 32.3 G and now when we add this all up we see that the leaks have 15 The Onion has 29 the cauliflower 45 asparagus 7 avocado 70 sweet potato 69 and the olive oil again has 256 calories for a total of 4.86 and when we add this all up we take the soup and the salad that I just gave you and then the stir fry and vegetables we get the totals to be 66 G of fat 15 g of protein 52 G of carbs and 867 calories total so now let's just look at the macros on how many per of the calories come from fat protein and carbohydrates so we see that 69% of calories come from fat so if you look and compare this to General guidelines or to how people eat for the most part this is still a high-fat diet the protein of course is extremely low and that's where we want to keep it well and so compared to what I typically teach or what you might follow is you're basically just dropping the protein the the the the eggs the the steak all of that uh to get the protein down the the thought is that the less protein you eat during this 3 to 5 day period the more your body body will recycle its own protein that's the theory anyway 10% would be the absolute top 10% of calories from fat but seven is better if you can get there because again that's the main thing that drives this autophagy now the carbohydrates at 24% are a little bit higher than I would typically recommend because on a ketogenic diet you want to be around 5% on a low carb diet you want to be probably around 10 to 15% so this is a little bit higher but it's not a problem because the calories are so much lower overall because you're eating so much less food then you're still going to get the autophagy and you're still going to be in ketosis now the main challenge in selecting food for this fasting mimicking diet is going to be to find foods that are low enough in protein and a lot of the things that you normally eat will be too high in protein so you can't just eat less of the stuff you usually eat and we want to understand that normally protein is very very important and we want to eat a moderate a significant amount of high quality protein every day on an ongoing basis to rebuild our bodies but the point of this is to mimic fasting and if we keep the protein super low for a few days then it's not going to do any harm so I don't know I I haven't seen any outcome measure so what Dr eberg doing is doing here is he's taking the idea that really low protein creates autophagy so here we'll have a diet that has very low protein well but where's the measurement of autophagy so it's taking the theoretical world into the human world without really any recapit red doent this may or may not cause autophagy we have we seen any data yet that says it improves it other than there's a low protein so what's fascinating is most people need to eat less compared to the typical you know Western World kind of just gluttony that is happening most people eat way too much so if if you need a mindset changed to think that I need to intermittent fast so I will only eat one meal a day and by gosh I'm going to do that because it's called intermittent fasting great because then you're eating less to me this seems like the same thing where basically by cutting out the protein now I haven't heard if there's any hunger during these days or not but again you might be able to power through that thinking I'm getting oophagy so if you need to tell yourself that you're doing something a mindset to to power through something I don't think that's such a great idea unless there's some proof some some evidence that you're actually getting autophagy and and the autophagy isn't any better than just not eating carbohydrates and here's where we're going to get into the idea of ketosis having ketones around does a lot of interesting things it is an anti-inflammatory sort of hormone actually and and it actually May stimulate autophagy but you know the keto diet is the last thing that's studied these days and and in the clinical use of it is way ahead of research there was a recent randomized trial of what we did 15 years ago so the anyway there's a lag behind the science and even in with autophagy my suspicion is that you get autophagy by just not eating the carbohydrates and eating less and yes you'll be eating less protein but you don't have to starve yourself with protein for a day or two in order to eat less protein you're just eating less automatically so I'd really like to see a comparison sort of study using a low carb keto diet with any of these other fasting mimicking sorts of things years ago when I went to my the my first conference on a keto diet it was in Brooklyn at Sunni downstate and there was the the old researchers Dr Ali Owen came and George Cahill these are these are doctors and researchers who were doing work in the 60s and Ali Owen Professor Owen got up and said well a keto diet really is fed fasting and I I had to think I was very new to this whole low carb idea trying to learn as much as I could and I've tried to learn from scientists from academics who've done research studies and I'll always remember that so a low carb keto diet is fed fasting and and basically that's what's Happening Here by cutting the the calories down and the mimicking the the fasting well you get fasting with a keto diet fed fasting so is there more autophagy even if you keep the carbs low and have ketosis around compared to other sort of macro profiles well we don't know and the fasting mimicking diet has been researched and promoted by someone who otherwise thinks plant based diets are the best so they haven't it hasn't occurred to them to study diets that have animal Source food in it so that's just the way the science works I'm afraid so the things that you can't eat are all animal products because while they are nutritious they are too high in protein for this diet and this includes bone broth so a lot of people love to have broth when they're fasting but there is lot of protein a single serving a single cup of bone broth could have 8 to 10 grams of protein so you're like over half of your protein allowance in a single cup now you can use vegetable broth or chicken broth or beef broth for your soups but not bone broth you also want to stay away from legumes you don't want to have beans or lentils or peas or anything like that because they're too high in protein you also want to avoid eggs and dairy and you also can't have any nuts or seeds all of these foods will make it very difficult to keep your protein low enough remember this is a a specific sort of fasting get all the benefits for something you would only do for a short period of time those are all foods that I I think you should eat in general and and it kind of concerns me that the idea is that you would get get benefits of not having any protein to clean up the house really fast rather than just like easing into eating lower protein and you can clean the house a little bit every day so the the but you know it doesn't surprise me today's world would come up with a five-day program to give you fasting of course you have to purchase it and and you know we can clean the house really quick and then and then what go back to eating a typ typical American diet wait a minute so and then the other thing is do you have to clean up the mess of the typical American diet with the fasting mimicking diet that you really didn't need because you don't eat the typical American foods so interesting to I'm not even sure you need to do this sort of fasting mimicking diet but here's what you can eat you can eat leafy greens and you could have a lot of those almost unlimited basically you can also eat lots of non-starchy vegetables and and you can't eat unlimited but you could have a lot you can also have some tubers and these are great for your soups you could have some sweet potato some rudaba some celery roots some parsnip Etc and you can have some but you don't want to overdo it because they do have some starch and some calories and then I would recommend that you have extra virgin olive oil for most of your fat and most of your calories so that still means you're going to limit it quite a bit you could have probably four to five tablespoons a day but you need to stay under that 50% of your normal calories and there's lots of resources to figure out different recipes you can just go online and search and hopefully you've watched enough of my videos that you know what real and good food is so that you know what to avoid if these recipes contain something that you don't want to have and there's one more way that you can do this and that's to buy a prepackaged kit a fasting mimicking diet kit it's extremely convenient it will cost you about $200 which in my opinion is a lot of money for what you're getting but on the other hand you're not going to spend money on any other food for five days however I would not recommend that you get this kit unless you absolutely have to if you know anything about cooking if you have some time to figure this out yourself then I feel that you're going to be better off because this kit has no vegetables other than a few dried up pieces in the soup mixes there is a lot of starch in these soup mixes for thickener and it mostly consists of soup mixes and various forms of crackers and food bars and a lot of these food bars are sweetened with chory root which is a natural thing but you're getting a lot of it at one time and for anyone who has a little bit of disbiosis and maybe a little bit of small intestine bacterial overgrowth you're going to get very bloated from eating this way now the big question is does it work and yes absolutely they have spent a lot of time in formulating it and getting all of the numbers the grams and the macros together so it's very convenient and the advantage is you don't have to measure you don't have to cook and you minimize the risk of straying outside of the guidelines and it will get you into ketosis it will get you into autophagy even though it has a lot more carbohydrate than what I was showing you so yeah you know as a a general philosophy the fmd kit the fasting mimicking diet program it's it's something you do just once a month which you know just I I can't not tell people that you know every day matters and you know what what you put in your car for fuel you don't put dirty gas in there and then then just clean it up you know once a month so it it it's a to me a little bit of a stretch to think that you would help people much by selling something that they do three to five days a month without well you recommend other things I suppose but you're not actually teaching what to do the rest of the time so why not do something that is you know a reasonable lifestyle change that has automatic reduction in calories and protein and one way to do that is a low carb keto diet one that I teach is a simple system simple means sustainable and in the long run so you know I'm still I suppose the point of this video was not to convince you to do the fasting mimicking diet it was how to do it with real food and I like that idea the Dr eberg saying that you don't need to purchase a kit like this you can do it on your own within certain rules problem when you reduce calories like that is it's fraught with Hunger for many people it's uncomfortable and so I teach people to eat when they're hungry and if you eat less that's great and my hunch is that most of these benefits are are going to be found to be present on a keto diet it's just the research hasn't shown hasn't examined that area with light yet but all of these things in with ketosis theoretically will improve so if we compare what I did which my macros again were 69% fat 7% protein and 24% carbohydrate in their kit you're going to get only 37% fat and you're going to get 10% protein it's going to vary a little bit day by day but it'll be between 7 and 10% but the carbohydrates will be over 50% and most of that is going to be various forms of starch and soup thickeners so yeah so it's interesting Dr E doesn't say why so wter Longo and the group that came up with the fasting mimicking diet are those are the they're the plant-based focused people and so it would not make sense to them to give fat they plant-based folks think would rather have you reduce fat and eat more carbs as a method of being healthy it works for some people not everyone an alternate way is to not worry about the fat but worry about the carbs a lot but that's why the macros were so different Dr Dr eberg is not so worried about ultra low fat where the people the research group that came out with this kit are worried about the fat so will absolutely work it's very precise and pre-planned but I believe if you have the ability and the patience to cook I think that by eating a lot of salads and getting a lot of fiber you can drop that carbohydrate component and get some good fat you can get tons more fiber and you get a lot more bulk to keep you full and again if you do great on a 3-day water fast then there may not be any reason to try this but if you have trouble going longer than one day on a water fast then this would definitely be something that could help you and you can do this about once a quarter if you're just maintaining if you just trying to prevent diseases get some good autophagy and some prevention built in or if you're reversing a condition like type 2 diabetes or any condition associated with insulin resistance then you can probably do more maybe as often as once a month but here's another way to look at it also that even if you just do this once a quarter or twice a year it's pretty easy once you get the hang of it to just throw in maybe one or two days here and there so instead instead of eating your usual stuff you just back off a little bit maybe one day a week maybe two days every month whatever suits your needs and whatever you feel good about well so let's just step back the idea of of fasting mimicking diet is because fasting has certain benefits which means not eating if you think about it your body when you eat a meal it's actually a stress you Marshall resources to digest the food that you bring in you actually have to fight bacteria that get through into the bloodstream and so if when you don't eat or when you fast just drink water your body can push its resources or allocate its resources to these areas of cleaning up the body called autophagy not not being overstressed so that it's applying the immune system to its own cells that's called autoimmune imunity there are all sorts of things that can start healing when you fast not eating however if you fast too long your body starts basically eating its protein taking it down turning it into glucose to supply glucose in your body and so muscle mass can be a problem with using weight loss surgery using these gp1s the and even the munaro the second generation anti obesity medicines can cause muscle wasting and I have to imagine I mean there's just it's not autophagy that where the muscle is being lost it's because people really aren't eating much at all so what balance is it to how much protein should you have and and and some days should you just not have any protein but the rest of the time eat whatever you want I don't know I think the the human research is as you see is kind of all over the place and and the outcome studies really that are necessary to show that this all matters are a reduction in the cardiovascular disease a reduction in cancers making people live longer well these studies haven't been done and so again I I'm thinking eating for autophagy is not ready for prime time there are a lot of kind of gimmicks here that make you think you're doing better or or maybe make you think it's okay to eat less well I think that's a fine thing over time and I I'm just not persuaded that you have to be doing this other than staying away from junk Foods cut out the sugars Ultra processed food stay away from lots of starch and you know the level of evidence here just isn't high enough for me to be able to say like prescribing a prescription drug that you ought to do this that's just my perspective hope that's helpful be sure to like subscribe ring the notification Bell so you don't miss out on further content and I have new videos coming out Wednesdays and Fridays now if you 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