Ep. 5 - Fasting History, Testimonials, The Fasting Cure, Dr. Jason Fung | Bloodwork, Body Composition, Fasting Risks & Fears | Guided Fasting Challenge, Fasting Coaching, Free Intermittent Fasting Plan

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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.

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 and 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.

Everybody, and welcome to the Fasting for Life podcast. My name is Dr. Scott and I am here with my friend and colleague, as always, Tommy Welling. Are you, sir? I'm doing great, Scott. How's it going? Awesome, man. I'm loving this new record time of late on Tuesday, but last week's episode was awesome. A lot of great feedback about you.

Yeah, yeah. We're getting some good feedback and we appreciate all the all the positive comments, suggestions, support along the way and a lot of fun and a lot of people fired up right now.

I love a man, especially with that challenge coming up.

So last episode we talked about the official launch date for the 20/20 Vision Challenge, which is gonna be seven days of guided fasting with us. So it's February 15th. That's the day after Valentine's Day. It's going to run through the twenty. Last week, we also talked about diabetes, some of the research related to that. Some of the organizations to the largest organizations out there in terms of, you know, getting and having a plethora of diabetes information, the pros and cons to go along with that also. And then we talked about the do's and don'ts of your first 24 hour fast, or if you're starting intermittent fasting for the first time, the things you want to do and not to do during your first, first endeavor.

I think you get a few good examples, too, of things. Not the dude in charge. Yeah.

Yeah. Don't eat what I hate. So good advice. Yeah. And you're the one who gave it to me and I still miss. And so they. Yeah. Lesson learned. Recap today's episode. Just where we're gonna be going today is some more information about the challenge and we're gonna go over a couple of testimonials and some real life things that have happened since last recording. And then we're going to talk about fasting from the year 1910. A little bit of history. Yeah, right. And how amazingly relatable and unbelievably similar it is to the same conversations that you and I are having with people with each other on a day to day basis.

It's like society's broken record. Stay tuned. I text you and was like, did we write this? It was unbelievable. I think the verbiage in that, it's just crazy.

We're gonna get into that now. Don't give too much away. So. So I'm excited. Let's do it. Go. So the research, the book itself is called Fasting. I just lost the title. Tell me the fasting cure. There it is. AskDon. Cure by Upton Sinclair. What is so nice when I said that to the other today, what was I mean. I remember what you said in terms of your reaction, but it seemed to be one of surprise.

Yeah. So I recognized the author back from sitting in junior high history class and we talked about the jungle. So a lot of you guys might remember hearing about that. That was Upton Sinclair. He spent a few weeks in the Chicago, I believe it was the meat packing in the history. And then he wrote this huge exposé, became a bestselling novel. It kind of blew the lid off of the meat packing industry and all the inequities in the in the sanitation, in meat packing and the love of the food distribution back from the turn of the century was, you know, it's given the credit for the 1986 federal regulations on on meat pack standards now, which turns out wasn't exactly his point. But Upton Sinclair has written, I think, 100 or more, you know, different works of blowing the lids off of different things, you know, around the turn of the century. So I had no idea that he wrote this book and we started going through it, just seeing so many things that that we've talked about over the last year or things that we picked up on our own little nuggets here or there from different sources. But I mean, it was like it was like somebody just took all of our thoughts and wrote them down one hundred and ten years ago. It's crazy.

You asked me, where did you find this? And I don't know. It just like magically appeared.

I don't know where I came across it, but it was in the last 48 hours and I recognize the name. I said, it's my wife, Forsythia Upton Sinclair. She was why do I know that name? And I said. Yeah. I didn't have the recollection that you did or the experience with, you know, the impact that it had when you read it. I remember you said junior high history class, but I remember the name. And then I just a quick little Google search and I was like, well, wait a minute. And yeah, it's it's just amazing that it's the conversations and the topics. And even since then, you know, this was in 1910. It was kind of a conglomeration of what he'd been experiencing with writing, you know, articles and books and just documents and and letters and, you know, his experience with it and how he found it in all these different things. But then like 40 years later and now we're talking one hundred and ten years later, some of the principles have just been proven over and over and over again. And I mean, it just kind of blew my mind.

Yeah. I mean, he he he starts off the book and he goes into where it all came from. He originally wrote a piece for Cosmopolitan magazine. Probably the same one, Cosmo magazine. You know, these days it was huge back then. It's huge now. And for him and for the magazine itself, they had never had a single article, received so much response from from the public. They wrote just dozens and dozens of letters every single day in response to his article. And so his entire idea or it, Tommy? Didn't they ignore a lot of it? At one point, too, did I during did I read that and remember that? Yeah, I think they did from the beginning. And then it got to a certain volume where where they couldn't anymore. I mean, you know, they said, well, we have to address this. And you know, he took a personal responsibility for it in such a way that he he said, well, I'm writing this book partially out of a selfish need because I don't want to respond to every single letter because that's getting so many questions every single day. That's right. So he said about, you know, writing the book and he had been learning so much through the process as we all do. I mean, you and I've been doing this for, you know, six to twelve months now. And there's there's still there's still a learning process to it, which is, you know, it's it's an evolution. And he found the same thing. And he even went into, hey, I wrote a previous book on nutrition. But even though it has a lot of useful information, it wasn't until he had the personal experience with fasting that he understood how incorrect all those commonly held nutrition beliefs were at the time, which is so much of what we've already said and what we've experience.

So literally, you can see me now raising my hand. So this is an audio medium, so this means nothing to the people listening. So I'm just going to pay. He's raising it. Are you? Yes. Thank you. I'm literally sitting here going, yeah, that was me.

You know, thousands of patients over, you know, seven or eight year career nutritional consultations, metabolic testing, you know. You know, body composition, blood work. You mean you name it. Galleries now are so scamp. Yeah. All this stuff.

And it was like until I started doing it. And then, you know, looking at the science and the insulin and all of the things that that that fallen behind. I was like, wow. Yeah.

This and the results speak for themselves. It was working. So just amazing that he even looks at like things that were happening 40 years before his realization, which is just crazy.

Hmm. Yeah. There were other doctors putting forth fasting texts and in the late eighteen hundreds. You know, I'm not sure about before that. They're probably around too. But as far as well documented they were there. And so he's referencing texts from 40 years before he's writing this one saying well I'm not I'm not the inventor of these techniques. I'm just telling you guys about it. And what my experience has been, what I've learned and it's it's an incredible testimony. And he has just pages and pages of of patients and case studies. He's he's not a physician, but other people who were fasting and detailed accounts of their experience.

You made mention of a quote from a book that is directly, you know, kind of a part of my weekly life right now, it's helping some of my close friends and some of my long term patients, some family. And it's the same one of the same conversations that I keep getting is when they come back. To me, after a week or two and they say, yeah, I went to my doctor's appointment and my insulin went from forty six point five down to eight. Well, and what I say is that's fantastic. What did your doctor say? And they say, well, they didn't really know what to say. So they said that I guess just keep doing what you're doing. Or in certain cases it's I'm going to have to release you as a patient because you're not following my guidelines of what we're going to do to manage this condition.

Now, we're talking about diabetics in this situation. But insulin resistance is insulin resistance is just in diabetics cases. The insulin resistance has gotten to a point where it's much more substantial. So in that he's talking about the same things that were happening back then with his conversations that are happening in our conversations now.

So you know what he says in the book. He says, superfluous nutrient is taken into the system and ferments and the body is filled with a greater quantity of poison matter than the organs of elimination can handle. The result is the clogging of these organs and the blood vessels, such as the meaning of headaches, rheumatism, arteriosclerosis, paralysis, apoplexy, which is basically stroke, cirrhosis, et cetera. So everything that we talk about today as far as metabolic syndrome, metabolic diseases, what are those downward spirals, those things that are killing us as a country, as a as a planet and killing the health care system? What are all these things that we can't seem to reverse? But no one's no one's really prescribing a course of treatment that could actually reverse it. They're just craziest thing.

Like we have more medicine and more knowledge and more processes and more procedures and more, you know, trials and more information than ever before. Yet the number one co-morbidity with, you know, diabetes or syndrome exer-, you know, that pathway of disease over lifespan is Arturo sclerosis or heart disease. Right. And more people are having this issue and more people are suffering and more people are having heart attacks than ever before. So it's like, OK, wait a minute. We've known this for how long? And it and it hasn't and it hasn't changed.

Now it's the broken record. It's society's broken record. But the thing about it is what we were talking about before with regard to just human nature. We we tend to think that we are the smartest. We have the best technology and the best knowledge of any group of people who is ever alive. So basically, we get into the habit of thinking we have it more figured out than to people before us. But as we can see here, we're talking about the same things over a century ago. That's not always the case.

Yeah. And there's there's two main things you mentioned there, too, like two things about fasting. You know, that people fear or too dangerous, so to speak. And these are, again, conversations that we have with people on a day to day basis.

Yeah. Right. Right. From in the first few pages of the book, he says there are two dangers to be feared during fasting. He said the first is fear, which we've talked about before. Right. He says no one should begin to fast until he has read up on the subject, convinced himself that is it. It is the thing to do. And if possible, he should have with someone with him who has already had the experience, a guide, basically. He should not have about him his terrified aunts and cousins who are who are doom and gloom. Chicken Little telling him that the sky is falling and that he's wasting away because he's not. He's finally getting healthy. And they don't understand it because they're not experiencing it. They've never done it. They are fearful.

And fear. I mean, that's a whole nother conversation, but that's why one of the things that we talk about in the in the in the outline of kind of how we're delivering this information and what we're trying to do is, you know, mindset and motivation. So is your mind in the right place to do this? And mine was that day that you told me to stop eating.

And now, obviously, it wasn't just that direct, you know, instruction. It was like, just stop. It was OK. This is what I did.

This is what you're gonna do over the next two weeks. And that's what we want to do with the challenge, too, is we want to give you a place that's not surrounded by terrified aunts and cousins, but people that are with you of like mind that are willing to do that. Go through the transformation process together. And that's why I was successful, because you were there, you know, kind of lead me along the way.

Yeah, I used several several resources, doctor funds, book, the obesity code, a couple of other books after that. Those were my resource, my person who had already been to the other side and that was that. And and then I was that that person for you. We're going to be, you know, that person for everyone who's in the challenge. That that's the purpose of the challenge. Absolutely. The second fear that he he mentioned there was breaking the fast. He he goes into exactly what you were talking about on last week's episode about what not to do. Don't just jump in and eat like crazy. Don't eat like you've been fasting for a day or a week or however long it's been. Jump back in slowly. Give your time. Give you give yourself a little bit of time to to adjust, take it slow and then, you know, ease back and you'll feel it. You'll you'll feel your way through it.

And this was one of the big things that, you know, he was talking about so many years ago was his schedule, his stress, his work, his food, all of the things that we hear from people today when we when we do, you know, feedback or we ask for it, we ask people questions or we have conversations about fasting.

And after we get through the initial fear of, oh, you're starving yourself and all those fun comments, once you get through that stuff, you really get down to the root, the or the underlying, you know, issue at hand, which is that people just don't know like they don't know that it's a possibility and they don't know the benefit. And that's why we talked about benefits on a couple episodes ago. There's so many benefits to it. And one is, you know, that's just the underlying process of giving your body a break. You know, sometimes. And he didn't do. Sinclair didn't do long, fast. He just did them consistently over a time period. And then he talks about his wife and how she got better. And it's the same thing with the woman who went from a forty six point five to an eight point nine doing one meal a day. She just does one meal a day. She's lost 50 pounds. She's off all her medications. And it was just the consistency over time. Undoing the lifestyle, which I can't even fathom was similar back then as it is to now. Like with all your awesome and inputs and just social media and constant distraction and addiction to our phones and coffee and food and caffeine and just all the write off, like back then it was it was different stressors, but it was still the same conversation.

Apparently the same brain, the same end result, you know, which is we all get distracted and bored. And in in customary habit, if we're in a growing you know, he was in the middle of the industrial revolution there. So in a growing economy, access to a lot of food, probably just like we have today, which is one of the biggest things, is that families and people were.

I'm no historian. There's probably other than geography and possibly spelling, those are two of my weakest things. But it was that time in the district where people were moving away from the distant farm and the family farm into the hubs and spending a lot of time away from the family and working. And stress levels were going up and they're away from their families. And yeah, the just the abundance was clearly there. So the indulgence began. And especially if you came from money back then, you had the ability to have, you know, cakes and pies and breads. And it was a whole ordeal. Like you had seven and ten course meals. You know, dinner started at 2:00. Like what? You know, so it's just it's just crazy to see the parallels between the two.

Yeah, it is. It's.

I don't know, it's it's it's unreal how how similar it was back then to the way it is today. You keep going with the book and you just keep you keep feeling like you can read it like it was written today.

Yeah. And, you know, and just like you mentioned Dr. Fong earlier. You know, the amazing thing about seeing it from the other side is that he was treating patients for a couple of decades. And, you know, to get our hands on those resources and I'm not talking about his book, but the 40 pages of research in the back of the book. You know, I thought I was almost done with the book and I was because I didn't realize that the back of it was just research after research, after research after research. And, you know, just picking a few out here in there, you know, the parallels to, again, the same mirror image of what it was back then.

So the point of this is to say there's there's another way in simply incorporating fasting into your daily life. You can see immediate changes. I mean, I'm talking like immediate, like within 24 to 48 hours, you will feel different.

Yeah. Like if you've ever had a successful eat less, move more, kind of dropped 500 calories. And then you stuck with it religiously. I mean, just you were strict a week or two later and you said, wow, you don't down five, six, seven pounds and I'm feeling better. I noticed by my closers are fitting looser. I'm just I'm breathing easier. I'm sleeping better. That that's in a matter of hours to a day or two in a fast instead of a week or two or even longer. Yeah. And many people who are gonna be listening are at a point where that week or two isn't doing anything on that. Eat less, move more because it's just there's there's too much insulin resistance over too long of a time. It's no longer effective.

So this is interestingly, there was a challenge that I know of that was done in the month of January. And it was an abstinence from sugar that was derived from sugar made from sugar. Sugar.

You know, anything to do with anything that ended in OSCE glucose for those sucrose, any of it, remove all of it. So all the starchy carbs, all of this stuff. And I was invited to be a part of the group. And I know the docs that run this group and now are absolutely amazing in the field of functional medicine, hormones, thyroid, you know, really allowing the body to heal from a natural perspective.

There were quite a few people, you know, because you get the notifications.

And I was seeing people commenting and saying, well, yeah, then no sugar for, you know, it's been 30 days and I've lost no weight. And I'm really struggling with my cravings and I've put on eight pounds. And, you know, there's absolutely a ton of successes. Do not get me wrong. There's a ton of successes for people removing the processed foods and the sugar from their diet. But there are a lot of people saying the opposite. And they're like, yeah, I quit two weeks in because I just wasn't seeing the change. And that's the power of fasting is that it's not starvation, it's short term restriction allowing the body to rebound as quickly as possible. And it's just amazing. Like I didn't believe it.

And then after my first 24 hours, like, whoa, like just crazy. So where you have it, what were you down in those first 24 hours of my first ever fast?

I don't know if you're gonna eat. I think, you know, this thing you just sent me up here, I don't know if everyone else is gonna believe me, but it was over seven pounds. I was down about six point two at first 24 hours. So I believe it. Yeah. You believe me? Yeah. But yeah. So suddenly I almost didn't believe the scale at the time. But I believe you. And water, of course, diaries. This all the flushing out. Yeah, absolutely. It was not seven pounds of fat but. Oh no, no, no. But we'll talk about, you know, that process in phase two liver detox and all that stuff.

I'm sure at some point in the future, because you can't keep me away from the research side of things because I'm at heart a nerd never try to. Yeah. Well, you're you're guilty as well. So where are we taking this and why? It's really, you know, turning this challenge on the 15th is we we wanted to do this earlier. Just been full transparency. Well, I got to a challenge. Just keep on Barlow-Stewart challenge. Just get people on board. We've talked about this for a while. So everything is coming to a culmination point now where the New Year's resolutions are over. People have failed. They're getting back to just kind of giving in. They're not as strict. They're not as diligent. Now, there are that subset of people out there that are super successful that on the ninety five percent plan, that they are unbelievably strict. They never miss a calorie or macro or workout. But for me and for a lot of. People like yourself, that's not sustainable. So the challenge is going to set you up for immediate success. You're gonna have resources and templates. Never mind. Daily action steps, daily video trainings. There's gonna be feedback where we're gonna ask you to fill out some surveys and quizzes and and really get to the underlying, you know, why you want to do this. And in seven days, we should be able to get you to a point and help you get to the point in terms of mental clarity and decision making to say, OK. This is what I'm going to do from here on out. And in those seven days, you should see enough results where you're like, OK.

Just like back in 1910, R-Ariz, like I'm in. This is what I'm doing. That's what we want from you guys is to be the guy. I see it. I understand it. And now I'm ready to do it.

Absolutely. Yeah. You know, as far as the accountability goes, if you think about it, accountability is one of those things where we get started on a track. It's it's so easy to veer off course. Life comes up. Things happen. That stuff comes up in a way, especially if you're you're doing this on your own again. We're we're that person with you helping you. On the other side. So we will help you be accountable every step along the way. And that's what's going to help you see results.

Hundred percent in that support group. You know, it's going to allow you to express concerns.

And, you know, one first rule of fasting, if you listen to the earlier episodes, is we don't talk about fasting. And the second rule of fasting is.

We don't talk about fasting so often, it's on the podcast. You're just on the bike as if you guys are listening. We talk a lot about fasting. But again, this fits any lifestyle paleo low carb macros, reverse stop, whatever you're doing, adding fasting and give me a really powerful tool.

And we really want. It's not really about the fasting itself on the seven day challenge. It's about the process of getting your mind right and getting the the perception of what it is that you want to accomplish. And then within those seven days, seeing that short term response and being like, wow, I feel different. I see this. This is easier than I expected. We'll help you work through all of those, you know, initial fears and things like that and just be, you know, hopefully.

We'll have some, just like you and I have had our personal experiences, but also the people that we've been helping.

You know, we'll have some amazing results to the point where, you know, a lot of people ask, well, what can I expect? Well, you can expect better energy, better sleep, better digestion. You know, all these different things are going to happen. And one thing that was mentioned way back in is the last thing I'll say is that I want to go down another rabbit hole. But from the book, he said he's like, you can expect a pound a day for a longer extended fast.

And I've done a couple of seven days and I know that. Yeah. I mean, seven days it's about seven pounds, you know, and there's a little bit of a regaining. It's not about the weight, but the expectation is that you're going to see the change. And boom, it's going to clicking and brands. OK, I got this.

I can do it. So the fact that you can go and fuel the next step of the journey and that's that's so important.

Control, simplicity and control. Those are two things that you said to me very early on that have just stuck with me. So as you wrap up this episode, we are ironing out the final steps. We've got about 10 days before the challenge launches. So how do you guys get engaged? So what we want you to do today, right when you get off this or as you're listening to continue speak, go to Facebook, log in, go to our Facebook page, fasting for life. Right. Search fasting for life. The fasting for five 'scuse me at the fasting for life. I was forget the day and I like how it accentuates everything. So add the fasting for life. You'll see our blue and orange logo.

Like the page. It's right in the middle of the page. Some of you guys out there like, OK. Facebook is a little foreign to me. Get on Facebook right in the middle. The pages of menu bar click like.

And then that will put you and there's a little menu next to it to follow that will give you the notifications of when we drop the link to sign up for the challenge. We haven't dropped it yet. And that's done by design. So when we do drop it, I want everybody to know that they can get it and get in because there is limited space in the group. And just the feedback that I'm getting from a lot of people is that, you know, everybody's been asking me when this is going to happen. I feel like back in June. But, you know, it really just in the last six weeks. So go to the Facebook page, be fasting for life, click like follow us. That way you get the notification. And then the last thing is go to the Web site and download the vast icon.

Yes. Actually, everyone who's gotten the fast out guide, you will be automatically given all the updated links whenever you link stronk on Facebook. So get the fast start guide. Start your preparation now and you'll automatically be included on all the next steps for the challenge.

That's a really good point. So you missed a step there. So yeah, if you've already downloaded fast our guide, then you will get the notification of when the challenge link drops.

So should be really clear about that. Thank you for that clarification. That is not my strong suit, so I appreciate that.

All right. As we wrap this episode up, anything else? Some. No. Excited. Awesome, man. Can't wait, it's 10 days away, so everybody. You know what to do. And we will talk to you next week. See you. Have a good night.

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