[Music] welcome back to the show great to have you here looking forward to getting into today's topic and that is the five stages of fasting and what exactly is going on inside of your body during that time i think you're going to be pretty amazed at what's happening over the 12 hour 18 hour 24 hour 48 hour and 72 hour time frame so different things happen in the body at different times and if you want to be able to maximize the fat burning the energy the mood the decrease in grogginess the improvement in mitochondria the cellular cleanup for alzheimer's dementia cancer etc you're going to want to understand these specific principles so i just came off of my quarterly functional medicine detox which essentially gives you almost 72 hours for those people in our community those people have done it before you're getting essentially the maximum 72 hour autophagy benefits right there or fasting biggest benefits but there's so much more to it that's why i wanted to do this show specifically for you today so what i did and what many people do they're going on this specific liquid base fast that's why it doesn't have to be complete just water i'm going to share that just a little bit more with you here today but really trying to get into those five phases so what happens though is when you're moving through the different stages different things are happening in your body and that's why if you're not taking advantage of it you might not be able to get those anti-aging wellness weight loss benefits that you're looking for and again someone like me i've met my goal weight a few years back i'm where i want to be so yeah i'll lose a little bit of weight there's no doubt about it during some of these seven-day functional medicine detoxes that i do but i'm able to put that weight back on should i choose to so not really an issue there what i'm looking for are the wellness and anti-aging benefits that compound over time so what i want to do today is i want you to head over to forward slash stephencabral.com1 eight one eight and here's why i'm gonna link up a couple of previous podcasts that i think are essential for you to know more about fasting and to do it properly because you don't wanna just do this willy-nilly as they say you really don't you wanna be able to do it carefully you want to do it in a smart way and i just want to make sure that you maximize your benefits and you minimize your downsides so i think it was just last week if i'm pulling up my show notes here the four types of fast every human should be doing that's the one no doubt about it check out that one after this show so if you didn't listen to episode 1811 we will link that up for you today um and you know what i'll link up all the previous fasting shows as well we have a whole new fasting podcast category dedicated to that because what i really want to do right now is i want to spend our time going through these five stages super essential that you know what is going on with your body and your health remember you can't rely on your doctor you can't rely on even again even the best coaches because they're just not with you all the time you need to know you're about your own health there's just nothing more important without your health you don't have energy without energy you're in a bad mood you're in a low mood you have no ambition you're not moving forward in your life you're not getting the maximum that you can out of this life so stay healthy and you can do that remember there's an answer for everybody and fasting is such a big part of it which is why i've been doing a few shows lately just on fasting so the five stages let's get right into it the first stage is this this is at the 12 hour stage this is the stage that everybody should be getting to except for that small small percentage of people with hypoglycemia and adrenal base tissues okay besides that besides that small percentage of people i used to be part of that so i know that they're there but everybody should be getting in at least a 12-hour fast every single day i talk about that last week on episode 1811. i won't go beyond that today but here's here's the thing 12 hours every single day it's honestly it's so easy even if you stopped eating at seven o'clock at night just go till seven o'clock in the morning the next day because at this point at 12 hours what's going on inside your body well your body overnight started to tap and do what more glucose from the body started to deplete glucose as it needed to and it's also starting to use body fat as much more of a fuel source so i want to clarify this as well we always like to think that our bodies just burning body fat or just burning sugar it doesn't work that way right our glucose we'll call it glucose sugar glycogen i'll just use them all interchangeably today and i'll just state one other caveat here is that your liver which is this organ underneath the right side of your rib cage i wish i had my little model right over there for you uh today but he's out of reach right now but that liver and it's a big organ right it's a big organ in the body but that liver holds at least for most people about 90 grams of stored let's just call it sugar of glycogen that means you have supplies okay so before you ever start making you know producing a lot of ketones and those types of things your body says hey i have this sugar in reserve and that's not a bad thing you're believe me you know your brain is using probably more than half at any given time you're using a lot of glucose as a fuel source now i know a lot of people say but it can use ketones it can i'm not saying that it can't we're going to get to that just a second stay with me so here's the thing your body though starts to use as your body hasn't gotten any food any carbs any protein it starts to dip in blood sugar and it will start to tap into some of those glycogen reserves in the liver great so we can start to use that to just maintain a normal blood sugar level again it's not going to spike your own blood sugar it's going to maintain a normal level but at the same time start tapping into greater amounts of body fat that's a good thing and small amounts of autophagy will take place a lot of times we think we need to reach a certain number and we'll get to that moment of hours fasted before we get into autophagy it's actually not the case your body is cleaning up it is and if you don't know about autophagy i'll link up at least one show for you today at 1818 but you can always just go to stephencabral.com forward slash podcasts and once you're there there's a search box just scroll a little bit down type in autophagy it's just spelled a-u-t-o p-h-a-g-y autophagy okay autophagy means autophagotosis and that is basically cellular cleanup okay that's how it works your body's going in i always like to say like pac woman or pac-man and cleaning house just getting rid of the garbage juice and it is fuel so we're gonna be talking about that so at 12 hours that's what's happening that's the first stage everyone should be reaching that on a daily basis okay that's important now the next stage is 18 hours most people aren't fasting 18 hours a day nor they should they be every single day not every single day okay but there are specific fast that you can do once a week like my one day reset diet i will link up that show here today again head over to stephencabral.com forward slash 1818 and my team will link up the one day reset diet because you can reach the first three stages just with this every single week just one day a week that's it but what happens at 18 hours cellular cleanup okay cellular cleanup now autophagy begins to kick in what does cellular clean it mean well bacteria um amino acids that shouldn't be there [Music] all sorts of because i want to say cellular waste so here's the thing without getting too deep into cellular biology your body is turning over red blood cells every 120 days maximum inside your body okay what happens is they go through something called cellular apoptosis that means inside of the cell there is programmed cell death okay now that's not a bad thing because there has to be a breakdown stage we talked about this on a previous podcast as well about ampk and mtor okay i'll be getting into more of that in just a moment but what happens is the body has a anabolic stage building up that's mtor and then it has more of a catabolic stage breaking down that's uh the apk so ampk sorry so what happens during that is that there is a cleanup stage where the body begins to say oh not building up right now i'm actually breaking things down cleaning up that's not a bad thing but what happens is when these cells go through apoptosis and i can actually see it under a microscope what happens is all of that needs to be cleaned up needs to be removed from the body that's part of normal normal cellular process so this is what's happening also that 18 hour mark the body actually begins and this is a really nice process as well this is just the beginning stages but the body will begin to go through mitochondrial apoptosis getting rid of the weak mitochondria inside of the cell those are remember those mitochondria i love referring to it high school biology as the powerhouses okay we need those for energy we need those for uh what we will call uh atp production right adenosine triphosphate and that's really important as well so we need that for cellular energy so those work with glucose works with oxygen well what happens though it doesn't happen until a little bit later we start to break down the weak ones now the interesting thing is over time the more we fast actually can create something called mitochondrial biogenesis and that is the making of new healthy mitochondria and that allows us now to deal with what do you think to deal with the state that we're moving into next and that's at 24 hours so the third stage is 24 hours this is what i call so every stage has i give i give it a name so at 12 hours it's the depleting the glucose reserve stage so we haven't depleted them fully yet not at all but we're depleting them out of the liver glycogen reserves 18 hours the stage i call it is the cellular cleanup stage we begin to clean house inside of the body get rid of that old cellular debris that's floating around in the interstitial fluid meaning like between the healthy cells the interstitial mole is what we call it clean that up so all the good nutrients can come in and get rid of the waste remember every you have what 30 trillion cells in your body they all create waste get rid of that waste clean it up remember if you don't have more food coming in there's not more waste being created so we get to take that time and get rid of the old waste that's always being created for the body that's why fasting is so powerful at 24 hours i call it mass scale autophagy at this point autophagy has fully kicked in this is really important that means cellular cleanup is fully kicked in but also this is important ampk has now overtaken mtor activity that means ampk is uh on the increase and that mtor is on the decline so the body now is becoming more catabolic less anabolic that's not a bad thing it's a bad thing if you're a bodybuilder and you're always looking to put on muscle mass there's no doubt about it believe me i know there's all sorts of different theories out there i'll tell you right now some of the bodybuilders i know used to wake up during the middle of the night and have a protein shake and uh although i don't think it's that healthy for you that's for sure uh you are able to produce you're in a state of higher mtor you're in a state of higher anabolism when you're taking in more of those amino acids there's no doubt about it i just did a podcast on this if you want the if you want the skinny on that if you want more of the details on that let's see if i can find it real quick and if not again i don't want to link up a million podcasts for you uh but you can even just go into stephencabral.com forward slash podcast and type in um uh ampk or mtor as well and i'm sure you'll be able to find it there and uh i can't find it right now but we'll link it up again at 18 18 for you and that's on ampk and that is on mtor that's extremely important because again if you are not properly using fasting uh it can lead potentially to cancer and that's really really important to look at that but so exercise as well and i know not a lot of people do this during their fasting and that's okay but if you were to exercise during that 24 hours of the fast or right after that let's say like day two on the detox you can actually begin to increase autophagy at a greater scale this is seen in initial research right now in mice but most likely it's going to apply to humans there's no doubt about that so calorics restriction with exercise is showing is if not gone overboard again not don't go overboard this isn't every single day but it actually can increase mitochondrial biogenesis the creation of more mitochondria as well as greater cellular cleanup which is helping those white blood cells do clean house okay this is also at this stage at 24 hours when misfolded proteins that can cause and lead to or at least linked to alzheimer's can be yet to can be cleaned up as well so that's why again um i talked about this in episode 1811 for a weekly 24 hour fast i highly recommend it for me honestly it's as easy as going sunday night dinner with my family to monday night dinner with my family and then all day during the day i'm just doing my uh dns shakes or i'm just doing water herbal tea your choice honestly it depends on how strong your body is how it feels and and what's right for you so if you're looking to preserve a little bit more if you're looking to give your liver a little bit more detox support you'll use the dns shakes um those are just daily nutritional support shakes in just one scoop at breakfast lunch and mid-afternoon until dinner lots of water as well or you're just doing water fast whatever works for you for that one day but again that's on 1811. all right really important so that 24 hours is what i call mass scale autophagy you're getting an autophagy at a much greater degree now at 48 hours it's two days without food all right two days without food i call this the body surges forward for life stage now here's why i say that because mtor is fully down regulated okay so mtor is down regulated ketones are being produced at a greater level now if they haven't already because typically at two days for most people not everyone by two days to definitely three days glycogen reserves have been depleted so the body instead of rapidly breaking down uh muscle tissue actually i shouldn't let me just correct one thing i just in a moment i'll talk about that but what's happening is the liver glycogen so your sugar stores have been depleted now the liver is starting to produce more ketones ketones are being used for brain fuel and body fuel and at this point uh a lot of people like to say well you become more fat adapted remember your fat adapted even when you're not producing ketones i just want to make that perfectly clear your body is producing using more fat than anything else overnight as long as your blood sugar levels are stable or lower than essentially a hundred at night so again you're always fat adapted please don't think that you are not that is marketing gimmick you're always fat adapted unless you have blood sugar dysregulation and when blood sugar is high yes then you're not going to be fat adapted but again you just want to again healthy people who don't have type 2 diabetes are fat adapted that's just just the way that it is your body works with glucose and it works with the anaerobic part of the body sorry anaerobic with glucose and aerobic more with oxygen and body fat burning and that's normal like that's your body's tapping into both and using both fuel sources during the day but at this point now your body's saying okay we're in a stage right now where we need to create what we'll say is a backup fuel source and that's ketones and your body can survive on it no doubt about it potential body aches potential headaches potential grogginess and brain fog as your body is switching from being able to use the last of its glycogen to now having to switch over to glucose we also see at this point probably the lowest peak getting towards the lowest peak in insulin and when this happens once you make it past that they call it sometimes the keto flu stage you're actually able to then get a lot of the anti-inflammatory benefits that may benefit you in terms of let's say immune dysregulation autoimmune issues etc again not providing any medical advice any treatment plans here or cures but once you're at the two day mark like after well at dinner time uh let's say your second day of let's say our functional medicine detox uh you're already there so this is also you're going to get a surge that's why i call the surge for life you're getting the surge of ketones but you're getting a surge of growth hormone so natural growth hormone is being produced to a greater level at this point and we're doing that um because the body is producing more of the hunger hormone gorelin so the body's saying okay we're hungry right now it's been two days we need to be able to get out there and find food we need we're having higher levels of growth hormone let's keep the muscle mass preserved as we're producing more ketones and as we're tapping into more and more body fat stores let's make sure we're not losing that muscle mass as well all right that's 48 hours and the last stage here at 72 hours we're only doing five stages um at 72 hours things change okay so at three days that's why you know three days is the maximum i like without it being medically supervised okay so three days here is what's going on i called survival mode kicks in so we had the initial drop in mtor which is the anabolism and that's so cellular cleanup can take place no problem at all we have the initial surge of growth hormone we're using ketones at this point but at this point the body actually switches it says okay we're now in serious lack of food we've depleted our glycogen levels we're doing our best to control blood sugar low blood sugar for most people we're using ketones as a fuel source as a backup fuel source autophagy has already been doing its job and now we're trying to survive because there's no real calories coming in so what do we do well the body actually says we need to preserve muscle mass or this person is going to be stripping their metabolism very quickly they're going to be losing lots of muscle mass quickly because the muscle in your body actually contains what amino acids which are needed for life but also it contains glycogen so in order to really stop that process there's a bunch of things that take place but what happens is this there's something called pka that's called uh protein kinase basically is what we're uh using it for short c amp or c amp uh dependent prone protein kinase so what's happening now is that along with igf-1 are starting to decrease okay so that's insulin growth like factor one uh just think of it as growth hormone and what we actually have now is mtor is being signaled to increase so all of a sudden the body's going from its ampk catabolic stage breaking the body down cleaning houston now saying okay yeah we're going to continue to clean house but we're going to increase mtor because we need some anabolism here which means we need to keep the body building up we can't lose all of our muscle mass because if we do no strength uh hormones are going to start to decrease bad thing happens in the body because it's hard to get that muscle mass back osteoporosis when you start to lose bone mass etc so mtor actually switches back on after three days to a greater degree this is also why because it's in direct correlation with your hunger hormone gorelin you actually then start to feel less hungry after three days of fasting and a lot of people feel this when they've gone keto etc but again it doesn't mean that you want to do this all the time it just means that this is how the body works and it actually works really well so what happens well now you're not feeling as hungry mtor has started to kick in on its own gorilla levels may be decreasing that hunger hormone may be decreasing for a lot of people i've done a long term fast i've talked about that on last week's show as well you can tune in for that and at this point when we're reducing basically at three days igf-1 so growth hormone and we're reducing pka the protein kinase we are improving the body's stress resistance and we are moving into a regeneration stage of what are called stem cells or the um hematopoietic stem cells and i just two fridays ago talked about this on my friday review about what is this key to rejuvenating the body like what is the fountain of youth well they're looking at it right now it's like what happens when they put in the stem cells from young mice into older mice what happened was we started to see rejuvenation across the body it's these stem cells if they're undifferentiated or actually moving towards parts of the body to rejuvenate it that goes for organs it goes for all sorts of different cells in the body pretty amazing research now our body does that automatically at that three days so this is why again you don't want to do this all the time i recommend it quarterly some people might do it monthly but if you can get to a three-day fast again it's not for everyone you have to start with 12 hours then 18 hours how'd you do then let's say sunday night to monday night like i do once a week 24 hours how are you doing okay then can you get to this stage because you can see here again it's not for everyone you have to you have to ease into it but if you can do it the results can be absolutely astounding so this is exactly what happens to your body scientifically when you are fasting so this is also something that our ihps and other people can use to say like your body says or your family says you're going three days with just these uh detox shakes or these specific things and you say yes and here's why this is exactly what's happening so again if this show's helpful and and someone wants to know the science behind it and how you can really stave off a lot of these degenerative based issues things like alzheimer's et cetera you have to under no you have to understand it's like your body knows how to do this we live in a world of mass consumption sometimes we need to take a break from that and if we do the results can be pretty fantastic so hopefully the show was helpful if it was please do feel free to share it with anyone else you believe it could surf and all of the show notes all the previous shows the different links will be at stephencabral.com forward slash one eight one eight that's where everything will be and if you want to check out the specific quarterly detox that i just did and i do every 12 weeks you can go to equidot life that's e-q-u-i dot l-i-f-e forward slash detox for more information take care everyone