Ep. 36 - How often can I do a 48-hour fast? | Weight Fluctuations & Volatility, Energy Changes, Neural Plasticity | Weekend Warriors, Compliance, Religious Fasting | Customized Intermittent Fasting Plans

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Hello, I'm Dr. Scott Watier, and I'm Tommy Welling, and you're listening to the Fasting for Life podcast, and this podcast is about using fasting as a tool to regain your health, achieve ultimate wellness and live the life you truly deserve.

Each episode is a short conversation on a single topic with immediate, actionable steps. We cover everything from fat loss on health and wellness to the science of lifestyle design.

We started fasting for life because of how fasting has transformed our lives, and we hope to share the tools that we have learned along the way.

Hey, everyone, welcome to the Fasting for Life podcast. My name is Dr. Scott Watier. I'm here, as always, with my good friend and colleague, Tommy Welling. Good evening, sir. Hey, how are you, Scott? Doing awesome. We got a question that we're going to dive in tonight that I think is going to be extremely relatable to a lot of people came in through one of our news that are emails that we got that goes out when you all sign up for our Fast Start guide on our website.

And it spawned a really good conversation between you and I. So I'm excited to kind of dive in.

Yeah, me too. You know, a lot of the questions that come through as we go through and figure out what the best way is to answer them, we we start to realize, like, this is probably on a lot of people's minds. So maybe we should put the answer out to everybody. Maybe everybody can benefit from.

Yeah, these are some of the things that you and I talked a lot about in the beginning, too, and how we've kind of figured out how to put together plans and get people results and the algorithm and the math behind it, but also the real life application, which tends to be the more troublesome part. Yeah. Which is have it the day to day, the week to week. So the original question was how often? Let me get it. Get it right here. How many times a month it is. Is it OK to do a 48 hour fast? So when I first read that my first response was, well, all the time I just do forty eight after forty eight after forty eight, which would be my purgatory. Right. This is my least favorite time. But really it's based on, you know. The individual's goals and kind of where they're at.

Yeah, and, you know, to add to that, you know, it's also going to come into play. What does your schedule look like? What are your priorities? What's your what's your overall goal, like you said. But how does that kind of fit into to the time frames that you could be using? Is that the best way to go about it? Because like they say, there's there's many different ways to skin a cat. So there's a lot of different fasting and eating windows, right?

Yeah. And how much weight do you want to lose? Are you at your maintenance weight trying to optimize body fat? Are you trying to you do have more weight to lose 50, 60, 80 pounds. So what's your experience level with fasting? Because I wouldn't just hop off, dive right into a forty eight. I mean, most people could probably be fine with it, but you might want to plan accordingly and listen to some of the older episodes and download the Fast Start guide because it'll give you some tips and tricks on how, what not to do. But, you know, so there's a lot of different dynamics there. So it was interesting that the conversation started with that question. And my response was kind of all of the things that we've been discussing just now, you know, goals, lifestyle, timing, how much weight, experience, et cetera, et cetera. But it also opened the conversation up to a few other things, too.

Yeah. And the first thing that came to mind to me was I wonder what her experiences with fasting, because like you said, if you just kind of jumped into a forty eight, I think it's easy for a lot of people to get discouraged if they jump into maybe a forty eight or seventy two or even longer, just really gung ho, which is great. You know, you're ready to get some results and you're ready to kind of dive right in. But if you don't plan for it, you've been eating too high carbohydrates beforehand and you don't break the fast kind of smoothly after when it's over that can kind of discourage you from the next one. So it can kind of be a little demotivating if you don't do it with with the proper planning.

So it's like, all right, I did this. I'll do this once every six months. It's not really a enjoyable strategy, but yeah, I kind of want to do this forever. Well, we always joke like fasting is not a punishment for what you did or or reparations for what you did or, you know, suffering for what you're going to do in terms of, let's say, a weekend habit, which is something that we want to I want to talk about is a lot of people that that we come in contact with and have conversations with talk about, you know, the fluctuation due to the weekend or the fluctuation when they're, you know, during the workweek versus the weekend.

Right. And, yeah, you know, it's it's a common kind of understanding or living being in in the fitness world, the weight loss world that, like a couple of days of indulgence on the weekends can really mess up.

You know, you work your whole week to get there. You get some progress or maybe a whole month, and then the weekends keep setting you back. Yeah. So if you've got that last 10 pounds to lose and you're kind of fluctuating, well, the better question that you just looked at me were like, well, why? What's the motivation to have that be your habit cycle when there's better ways to do it?

Yeah, when you start seeing these big fluctuations, like you mentioned, going from weekday to weekend, you know, going from Friday to Monday, you know, she mentioned a big fluctuation there, which she said on a good week she could be down and she could see plus ten pounds going from Friday to Monday. So, you know, and especially for for a smaller female frame like that, that's a lot. That's a that's a high percentage gain. And I'd find that very demotivating, you know, personally to be seeing that kind of volatility on the scale.

Yeah, absolutely. So we we always go back to you could do as many forty eight hour fast as you want. They're safe. They're effective. Typically for me, it's that transition from glucose to ketone where I don't enjoy some of the feelings, the hunger pains. And, you know, if I'm sometimes that energy, yeah. The energy ebbs and flows. And so that's really a hard window to do. So being more consistent would say rather than doing an intermittent Monday through Friday and then just kind of doing whatever on the weekends would be more of like be more structured with it. So do more of a twenty four hour or one meal a day, one meal a day, and then just make a couple small tweaks to the weekend plans. Right. So instead of, you know, I don't know, we don't know the details of the indulgence, but for a ten pound. I mean, it's it's definitely a different pattern than the week, right? Sure. So, you know, make a couple of different swaps, make an understanding that during the week you'll do one meal a day and on the weekend you'll do more of like a skip breakfast. Right. Or eat breakfast and lunch. Don't eat dinner, those types of things. And, you know, you can always there's always like some other avenues you can go off of that. But is that pattern that you're living or that has been kind of predominant that up and down every week like that, like you said, super frustrating. So let's change it. Let's make a plan.

Yeah. And I think, you know, if I was going to speculate here, I'm thinking maybe during the week, it's it's ultra strict. It might be Akito. It might be a very low carb and it might be some some pretty heavier fasting during the week, even where you have super low calorie. And then all of a sudden the weekend comes and there might be who knows, maybe the meals. Yeah, each day there might be some appetizers, some restaurant meals and maybe there's some some restaurant drinks involved, too, which which, as we've discussed before, can be just ultra high calorie. And I could see that doing causing a big swing like this.

Right. And that's the whole thing is being in a deficit is key. But if you're on maintenance, then you want to maintain. Right. So if you're keep getting stuck at that five to 10 pound mark or five day pound mark, you're going to have to do a little bit more work to get below the goal and then be OK with the three to four to five pound fluctuations week to week.

Yeah, that's why when we're, you know, taking people through the process and like, you know, it's never look at the day to day you can because it's a good metric to to learn what your body is doing. But really looking at the week to week average. So it would be, you know, making a couple of small changes to the decisions, but also maybe not being as strict during the week, which could lead to less cravings and less stuff on the weekends.

Yeah, yeah. That that's a good that's a good point. Maybe there's a rubber band effect there where you feel like you're missing out all during the week and then you kind of make up for it, which which we see that when we talk to a lot of people who've started fasting when their experience was for religious purposes or something else, it wasn't necessarily weight loss purposes. But then when they came off of that fast, even if it was a longer, fast, and they said I felt great and I lost a lot of weight, but then when I came off of it, they kind of binged just kind of subconsciously not worrying about maintaining their results because they weren't really planning for those results. But you can keep them, but it might take a little bit of conscious effort to not just re re intake all those calories that that you you were in a deficit for.

Yeah. And really, it's doing it for three to four weeks at a time. There's all that talk and discussion about twenty one, twenty eight days habit and then the neurological plasticity of your brain actually changing during that time where the hard wiring literally will change. Right. So like you're changing your physiology positively by by making it twenty that twenty one or twenty eight day mark. And you know, if you can do it, make those small changes and you stick to the changes. Right. I'm not talking about Welling every piece of food. Right. And being like, you know. Yeah. That, that's strict, especially in a situation where you've got five or ten to lose and you're, you know, relatively healthy. You don't have any metabolic disease or anything like that. So it's like, OK, well, yeah, change the plan up and then typically you'll see if you can stick to it, your body will respond in that, you know, the the the habits will change. And that's kind of what we want is, you know, the habit forming that leads to the result rather than the reactive forming like that reactive change. I kind of get a crash diet. Oh, I'm going to start again on Monday like we get it. We got to move away from that. Right. For most people that that we talked to.

Yeah. That kind of mentality always leads to more volatility and and bigger swings between when you're kind of on the wagon, off the wagon. And, you know, we we this should be life. It shouldn't be just perfect compliance and then just completely giving it all back. We should we should be able to find a balance. It's life. But, you know, there was one more point in her question here, and it said that she hadn't gone longer than a 60 hour fast. So she was considering should I try a seventy two? Should would would that be the magic bullet? Would would that be what I need to get these last few pounds off? But I don't really think that that's that that's the best solution. What do you think?

I mean, I like new challenges, so when we when I started fasting and by the way, speaking from personal experience with this whole conversation tonight, like anecdotally, like this has lived it, then it struggled with it for a long time, got down to my set point number, and then it would go back up or we get to a point for an event and then come back up.

We go on vacation and come back up. I go to a wedding and come back up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to a 30 day challenge, to a weight loss reset, to a twenty one day fix, whatever. And then it would come back. Right. So, you know, not necessarily speaking about the underlying insulin resistance, which is the real problem that we want to address with fasting. But pushing the out the window, May 10, you may tend to kind of swing you even farther because you'll have more of a glycogen depletion at that 72 hour mark. Right.

You'll have the water get released because the hormones aren't acting on the kidneys and the insulin slow. So you're not retaining the water anymore. You'll get the glycogen cleared out of your liver and you'll see the scale drop. But if you're not cognizant of what to do after the longer fast, then you might just go back into the same pattern and it might create a bigger swing. Right. So I don't know if pushing the window in this situation would be necessary. I would think stay a little bit more consistent with your windows and the decisions on the weekends first. Now again.

I want to do a seven day just because it sounded cool, like I'm cool if you want to do it once or twice, but like you said, it's not going to necessarily be the magic bullet. Like, what's the mindset and what's the why behind it?

Yeah, it's almost like that 70 to being a bigger peak might create a larger valley like you're like you're saying so strictly strychnine that that week, that day to day and that week to week and kind of lowering the volatility is is the overall goal here.

I think that we're we're we're looking for and that just works better for me, like no matter.

And I appreciate this question so much because the conversation can go so many different directions. But it's a question we get a lot is I've been doing I have how do I extend my fast? Is it the right thing to do at this time? Depends on the situation. Right. But anyone can do 48 hour fast, right? Like longest recorded fast was three hundred and eighty, eighty two days.

About eighty four days. I can never remember that number. And the guy was perfectly fine throughout the whole process. Right. Like obviously he had a lot of weight to lose but so you can push the envelope and it's completely safe and there's, you know, spiritual aspects to it and health aspects to it and reset autophagy and all these positive benefits. But you know, like you said and we've we've kind of said a couple of times now in different ways, is creating that positive feedback loop or that positive consistency, which gets the long term change, which gets you to your goal of maintenance, which, you know, then it's all about living the life and letting the plan kind of dictate. You've got all the information, you've got control of the situation. You're not going to have those big fluctuations anymore. That's really where we want to, where we want to, where we want to be. And that's where the body wants to be to it wants to be in balance. It wants to be in homeostasis. So I think really taking that approach would be a better place to start. But again, just a really cool conversation and it kind of hit home for me and you. That's why we really felt it would be a good, good, good thing to talk about. I'm one of the episodes. It's probably relatable to a lot of people.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think I think the last line of her, her question was also really relatable. She said, I keep going from good to bad each week, from good to bad each week. I mean, there's there's a lot in that in that sentence right there. And I think it'll be good to to kind of, you know, to kind of separate out the emotional part of that going from good to bad and that kind of self judgment and and really gain control over it as a decision, as a personal decision of what you're looking for, what what is your overall goal and and what are the decisions that you're making from day to day and week to week? Because if they're not consistent with your goals and maybe you haven't anchored a strong enough Y to those goals, or maybe you're just, you know, something else is holding you back there. So I'd encourage you to to reflect on that.

And you could just be completely content where you're at. Right. So that's fine, too. If you don't have any other health concerns or any issues, that's OK. But yeah, just pushing the window or doing multiple fast, that not is not necessarily the answer. So I think that was really kind of a good way to to wrap it up there. Tell me. And I'm going to I'm going to put this out there. I don't we didn't discuss this, but one of the questions we get a lot are related to these types of conversations, and we want there to be a lot of customization and conversation around it. This is one of the goals of starting this podcast was to get this information out to people of how transformational it's been for us and now the people that we're helping with it. It's been just incredible from all across the world to just really cool, cool stuff to two patients recently have both broken the seventy pound weight loss mark in about a year. Both reversed their diabetes like just crazy, incredible transformations and testimonials with the power of the fasting for life method.

So we actually have been working Tommy has been working extremely hard. I'll give you the credit here on creating the customizable plan. So they're coming. So when we get questions like this, we want to be able to provide an answer that's sustainable but also personalized, not just, oh, go start fasting. Right. Which is a great place for a lot of people to start. Right. But when you get into these different situations, we we find that there needs to be that customization. So the plan is coming. I've seen the beta. It blew me away. It floored me. Then I saw, like, the second version and I was like even more flawed. So I'm first in line for one of the new customized plans because we've done these for the different challenges and experiences in the past. But super exciting. And I think, you know, this is a good jumping off point. As I'm sitting here talking through this with you. I'm like, man, this is why the plans are so important, because once you have the plan, then you can. Live your life and your life doesn't become the plan, you get to experience and regain control and have that simplicity.

And interestingly enough, this question came off of the email about control and simplicity. Right. Kind of full circle here. I know kind of little little thirty thousand footer just went off in the clouds for a second. But the plan is coming. It's incredible. So go to the website, Deforesting for Life Dotcom. If you sign up and download the Fast Start guide, then that gets you into our Outer Circle, right? You'll be on our list. You'll know when those plans are coming. And I mean, I'm super excited about Tommy. So any any last thoughts here before we wrap up?

No, I'm super excited, too. I mean, we've been putting a lot of work into it, and I think it's going to be really awesome for a lot of folks. Cool. Awesome, Coco. All right. Thank you, sir. And we'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Bye.

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