Episode 356: The Fasting Reset: How Taking Breaks from Eating Can Reboot Your Health with Dr. Mindy Pelz.

Hi, guys, it's Tony Robbins.

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So you started this whole thing about five years ago or so.

And so you were really doing it because at the beginning, you were kind of doing, like you said, all these little, you know, tips and tricks that you've always done.

And that five pounds, it was really more for like for weight loss than for anything at the time.

It started as that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It started as that.

And it worked.

So you basically started the fast.

What was the first kind of fast that you started with?

The first thing I did was intermittent fasting, which is 13 to 15 hours without food.

So you skip breakfast.

Right.

And did that by itself let let you lose the five pounds?

Pretty much.

Yeah.

I mean, I, it, what it, it did is as I started to intermittent fast, at first, by the way, I was very dubious.

I was like, okay, I'll try this one day.

And then I like, I realized, oh, wait, this, you're supposed to do every day.

And I was like, no way.

Like, I had a whole breakfast plan.

I was a smoothie girl in the morning.

Like, I had a whole health plan around my breakfast.

So it took me probably a couple of months to embrace that I was going to do this not just once.

I was going to do it

every day.

So once I did, the first thing that changed for me is that I stopped crashing at three o'clock in the afternoon.

So my energy shifted.

And then I would say the second thing was I noticed I started to like, when you become a fat burner, the way that you lose weight is totally different.

You lose it like in the places that you want to lose it, like in your belly, like around your, you know, your back and your booty.

I think that was the first thing I noticed.

Like my pants were fitting looser.

I was going down a belt buckle, but I wasn't really seeing it on the scale.

I just felt like I, like there was something shifting my shape.

Right.

And then from there, I started to do less exercise because I was getting injured at knee and hip and all kinds of problems from so much running.

And then I noticed, wait a second, if I don't exercise as much, I actually like I'm still losing weight.

I'm still feeling good.

Like, what was that about?

And then that's kind of launched me into a whole, like, what else could I do with fasting?

Right, right, right.

I mean, this is interesting because, you know, a couple of things that I think about with that is, you know, being in the health industry, right?

I mean, people think it's working out, but the reality is it's about 80%.

I think even more, I think it's even 90% of what you eat.

makes a difference, right?

It's not exercise.

Exercise helps you tone.

It's good for all the other health benefits, benefits like your mood your stress all the other stuff um but if you want to lose actual fat you need to be eating differently yeah so right so but i think it's all psychological people think if i just run faster longer harder yeah it will work and it's actually it's it's myth yeah um

but that's the first thing i wanted to to make a comment on but the other thing i wanted to say is isn't it I mean, I still get stuck in this whole idea that it really is about calories, right?

Because when you shorten the window when you eat, right, it's, you're limiting the amount of calories you're able to eat, right?

So is it, why do you have to start, why do you have to fat, like, you know what I mean?

Like, I feel like it's very confusing.

So, okay, so let me, let me give you an analogy.

So actually, it's not about the calories.

You are eating less calories because what you do is you're shortening your eating window.

We call it a fasting window and an eating window.

So that's happening.

But what we have learned recently is that we hold on to weight because of hormonal issues and one of the big hormones that that causes us to hold on to weight is insulin so when we are eating let's say we're eating let's use weight watchers as an example because I like to pick on them because sometimes I feel like people go in the pre-packaged food and it's full of chemicals, it can be full of sugar, and you're

right.

And you're eating that stuff, but you're not, so you're minimizing your calories, but you're not necessarily minimizing your insulin production.

So if you don't minimize your insulin production, the body says, there's a lot of insulin here.

I'm going to have to go store it somewhere.

So I'm going to go store it in fat.

And

it uses fat as a place of storage.

So you hear this with people who have fatty liver.

You look at them.

Like men, this happens a lot where they look super skinny, but they have this, they're dying of a fatty liver because all their sugar is being stored in fat around the liver so for many people that's what's happening with fat around their belly and other areas so when you fast and you bring insulin down what the body says is okay well i don't have any insulin coming because food's not coming so let me go find that insulin i stored years ago and let me burn that up and let me go find the sugar I stored years ago.

Let me go burn the stuff that I stored a long time ago.

And that's why it's such an incredible, why it's working so well.

So it's funny that you mentioned Weight Watchers because I'm actually a big fan.

I worked with Weight Watchers many years.

I don't like the chemicals.

No, but no, but that's about packaged food.

But what I liked about weight, what I do still like about Weight Watchers, and I've seen so many people have success on it.

for many reasons.

Number one, it's a point system where it's tracking.

So if people don't know what to, like how much to eat, they don't know what portion control is, they don't know how and what to do, it gives you a guided system, which I thought not only me, it's had from what I've seen, a lot of success over many, many years.

Plus it has that built-in community when you have those meetings and the groups that you, right?

And it keeps you, and it gives you that accountability because you got to weigh in every week.

So let's pick on Jenny Craig if we're going to pick on anybody.

We can pick on another one.

That's fine.

Pick on them.

But I understand that.

That's what I really want people to see.

So I know, I'm teasing you.

But what I was going to say, though, is

I feel like

this is all very psychological, right?

Because people think not eating breakfast, then what?

So like, if you're saying you get good results with that intermittent fasting, which is the eight hour, let's say the eight hour window where you're allowed to eat, right?

Yep.

Because that's what it is.

That's like the basics, right?

Then you can, of course, increase.

Why not just stay there?

Why are you then taking it to all these other types of fasting?

Great idea.

Great idea.

And let me just make one other comment.

What I would encourage your listeners to do is if they are doing Weight Watchers and they love it, just throw in some intermittent fasting and see if you get better results.

Yeah, that's a good idea.

Because

you can take fasting and apply it to any diet.

So you can be paleo, keto, vegetarian, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig.

You can do all that.

So, okay, so at each hour you fast, something different is happening.

So 13 to 15 hours, we get growth hormone spikes and growth hormone will slow the aging process down and will cause your body to start to burn fat.

So we also have seen great studies with 13 to 15 hours brings inflammation down.

There was a New England Journal of Medicine article that came out where they studied, they looked at over 1,500 peer-reviewed journals on intermittent fasting, people doing 13 to 15 hours, and they came out and said all doctors should be using intermittent fasting as their first tool to help chronic disease.

So that 13 to 15 hours is crucial for your body just to go into more of a repair mode.

But with with

weight loss, you're now at 13 hours getting growth hormone.

And growth hormone is stops producing in our body at 30.

So this is why it's harder to lose weight as we get older, one of the reasons.

So now you're accessing growth hormone.

Then at 17 hours, something called autophagy happens.

And autophagy is where the cells have these intelligence inside of them.

And they basically say,

okay, no food's coming.

I can see this.

So I better look within the cell and clean up what's in the cell and eat the toxins inside the bacteria that's inside the cell.

So the cell literally turns within itself and it starts to detoxify.

So a lot of people doing 17 hour fasts now what they're noticing is okay wait you know that that skin condition I had that

that chronic joint pain I had like things that were that symptoms that were

piling on top of each other my body's strangely healing that now

now if you go 24 hours one of the things that happens that we've seen off research is that your intestinal step

the the mucosa mucosal lining in your in your intestinal tract will start to produce stem cells and will repair your whole intestinal tract and make it easier for bacteria to grow that are good.

And some of those bacteria actually speed up your metabolism and help you burn fat.

So each hour, you're getting something more and more.

I mean, I can continue on.

Like, you know, you can even go like 48 hours and your dopamine receptor sites have all been reset.

At 72 hours, you get stem cell production.

So your whole immune system resets.

And if you have any chronic musculoskeletal injuries, those tend to heal.

So each, the longer you go, the more benefit you get.

So this is why I wanted you on the podcast, right?

Because a lot of people are doing fasting and talk about fasting, but you have all these groups of people that you put together and you guys are doing these like five-day fasts together on a regular basis.

And like, you know, I've been taught my whole life, and this is why it's so difficult for me to wrap my head around it, that like you put your body in starvation mode if you don't constantly feed it, right?

Because that's how you rev up your metabolism.

You eat breakfast first thing in the morning to get your metabolism going.

So this is such a different way of thinking and a different, a totally different thought process that has shown such great results.

So what happens to all that research that talks about putting your body in starvation mode when you don't eat like how do you go five days and not eat?

Like

even an apple like aren't you gonna die i would i would love to come and like walk you through that process because you can't even imagine

i honestly i can't even imagine like even intermittent fasting of just having an eight-hour window to me is so like it's so difficult to even fathom and i'm i'm actually going to be trying it starting monday

um because i'm so i'm so tired of everyone telling me that it's so great for me i have to try it i have to try it somebody'd like bite the bullet but um tell me about this.

What happens?

Yeah, you should definitely try intermittent fasting.

That's usually the easiest door in.

Actually, what I tell people to do is start with pushing your breakfast back an hour.

Just get used to that.

And then once you're comfortable there,

push it back two hours and just slowly work yourself towards an intermittent fasting state.

So you,

you know, we have people, so we have like over 200,000 people that we fast together once a month.

We're actually in it right now.

We're doing, we call it fast training week.

And the whole goal is to- You're fasting right now?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what day are you in right now?

Yeah, I haven't eaten since, well, I'm not doing, some of the people are doing five-day water.

I'm just doing one meal a day this week.

So I'm just eating dinner.

So it's what, one o'clock right now.

I haven't, I didn't eat, I haven't eaten anything yet.

So, and I feel good.

How long are you doing this?

One meal a day?

This week we're doing it five days in a row.

Okay, fine.

But a lot of people do this as their lifestyle.

And some people are just doing water fast right now.

So they're just in our group, we always give people two options and some people take the option of doing the five-day water fast.

So, but here's what here's what I'll tell you is that there's two ways to burn energy.

One is from sugar and one is from fat.

So you have to train yourself.

They call it being metabolically flexible.

And when you train yourself in this fasted lifestyle, this fasting lifestyle, the fasts get easier and easier.

So I would never take somebody like you and just throw you into a three or five day water fast.

Like you would be,

I think you'd be swearing at me.

Swearing would be an understatement.

I don't think they'd be able to find you for, you know, on your body.

I mean, I like, I get nervous if I can't like eat lunch on time, never mind like, you know, not eating for like five days.

I can't even imagine that, you know.

But so here's to go back to the science again, and then I want to talk about how do you build yourself up to a five-day water fast.

The mitochondria of our cells are a powerhouse of our cell.

And they used to think that all disease started in the nucleus.

And now they're like, because of cancer, they're like, actually, disease starts in the mitochondria.

And the mitochondria, you know, your mitochondria are healthy when you can go without food.

So when you're hungry all the time and you can't go without food, your mitochondria are not sustainable on their own.

They're needing that glucose to function.

But once you turn yourself into a fat burner and you're making ketones instead of glucose, those ketones go into

the mitochondria and they start to tell the mitochondria to create more energy.

So there's this weird moment where you'll go, I'm hungry, I don't feel good, I don't feel good.

And if you have a really healthy mitochondrial system, all of a sudden your mitochondria go, okay, we're going to make, we're going to spit out more energy.

And you get this insane energy, insane mental clarity um you the hunger turns off like it's weird you have to experience it to know that you were designed for it but right but sitting in your shoes i was in your shoes i totally get it like i was i can tell you what i had for breakfast like almost every day and i i would carry a bag of snacks around with me because i couldn't go without food Right, right.

So you, you, once I trained myself, now I now can go without food, no problem.

Right.

So it's baby stepping it, basically, like everything else.

You got to baby step it.

So let's go over this.

So intermittent fasting, you say the benefits of intermittent are

go,

and then I want to go from step to step, different types, okay?

So

the benefits of intermittent are, in a few words or less, are, go ahead, doctor.

You get inflammation comes down.

Inflammation.

Yeah.

And the biggest things are inflammation comes down and growth hormone hormone starts to get secreted.

And for some people, they may get a little bit of ketones.