Fasting

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(dramatic music)

- [Female] Conventional

medicine didn't really play

much of a role in my

healing and in the end,

actually what healed me, how

I healed myself was through

a combination of eating

really high quality foods

and the combination of not eating at all.

We're looking for the quick fix.

We're looking for that magic

bullet and this is probably

as close to an easy,

simple, free magic bullet

that ever existed.

- [Male] I got more

mobility change in two days

of water fasting than I did

in three weeks of therapy

and my therapist, last

Thursday, my fourth day into it,

he says, "What are you doing?"

(upbeat music)

- The advice we give to cut a few calories

is a complete failure.

- If you compare a population

of people who never dieted

to a population of people who diet,

the dieters end up

weighing significantly more

than the non-dieters

five or 10 years later.

So we need to find new solutions.

- When someone does fasting,

it's very different than when

someone simply cuts calories.

- So when you fast,

you can look at studies

and you will see that

the basal metabolic rate

does not go down nearly as much

as the calorie restriction.

- There's always a sweet

spot for everything.

If you fast for too long, we will say,

if you got out more than say even 10 days,

your metabolism will slow and

that's what happens to people

if they try to cut calories

for a very long period of time.

Their metabolism slows and

when you start re-feeding,

you will regain the weight

and regain it very quickly.

- There's a difference in fat.

The fat that you carry around the waist

is much more dangerous for you.

This study was just published last year.

So if you look at truncal

fat mass calorie restriction

versus alternate daily fasting,

fasting was six times

better at getting rid

of the dangerous fat.

- My plan is to do a seven day fast.

In nine days, I've lost 18 pounds.

- I went seven days and

I've lost 20 pounds.

- I thought no way could I go this far

and not be hungry.

- Lots of people noticed

the past couple days

how thin that I look already.

I'm on day 21 of my 21 day

fast and I've lost 33 pounds.

- Your mind is more clear.

- You're actually gonna be more alert,

you're gonna have more

energy and more time.

- We've been skiing for three

hours and I haven't eaten

for six days and I feel plenty energized.

Woo Hoo!

I feel like I'm almost on

vacation by not eating.

- The ancient Greek mathematician,

Pythagoras, in fact,

he required his students

to fast before they came

into the classroom otherwise he thought

they wouldn't be smart

enough to figure out

what he was doing.

- So my mind feels as

good as it's ever felt.

- When you look at fasting,

it's gonna give you

the ability to do all those

things at a higher level

than you've ever done them before.

- A lot of people ask me,

"How do you stay so fit at 44 years old?"

And I quite simply look

'em in the eye and I say,

fast before fitness is the ticket.

- You're activating your body,

the sympathetic nervous

system, noradrenaline,

and growth hormone all

go up during a fast.

You actually can workout

harder than you've ever done.

- I've always worked

out on an empty stomach

in a fasted state.

- The challenges about

fasting is that there's

a lot of misinformation out there

and there are several different types.

- Whether you are talking

about an overnight fast

or you're talking about a 24 hour fast

or you're talking about a

five day or 10 day or 20 day,

people and journalists

and everybody likes to use

the same word, right?

And this is very confusing

because each turns on

a completely different process.

- This is happening now

in practices like mine

all over the country and in the world,

people learning and hopefully

will all communicate

and one of the beauties

of a film like this

is that it will bring

attention to the whole concept

of fasting 'cause so many

people know nothing about it.

(upbeat music)

- For the last 50 years,

we've told people,

eat six meals a day.

Eat the minute that you get up,

within 30 minutes of getting

up and make sure you eat

a bedtime snack so you don't get hungry.

The problem is when you start

eating the minute you get up

and don't stop eating until

the minute you go to bed,

you're constantly telling your body

to store food energy, right?

And you can either, only either

store it or burn it, right?

You can't do both at once.

- And even now, many personal

trainers and nutritionists

will tell, try to eat something

in every two to three hours

you are awake and if we

are awake for 18 hours,

then that's a long period of eating.

- The whole problem is

eating all the time.

So the very word itself, breakfast,

is the meal that breaks

your fast and it's actually

a very interesting word

because what it means

is that fasting is a

part of everyday life.

It's something you need

to do every single day

because it's the flip side of eating.

It's just the B side of eating.

There's nothing scary about fasting.

So if you fast for 12

hours and eat for 12 hours

or eat for 10 hours and fast

for 14 hours, for example,

you'll stay in balance and guess what?

That's what they did in 1960's America.

You can look back at surveys

and the average number of meals, 1977,

is three meals a day, right?

So I grew up in the 1970's.

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, nothing else.

Snacks?

No.

Guess what?

They're eating white bread.

There's no whole wheat pastas, right?

They're eating Oreo cookies.

They're eating ice cream but

there's very little obesity.

Now you go to 2005 and the

survey, the (inaudible) survey,

which is a large American

survey of a lot of things

including dietary habits,

says that we're eating six times a day.

So, again, look at my son's schedule -

breakfast, mid-morning snack,

lunch, after school snack,

dinner, oh, hey, he's playing soccer,

there's snack between

the halves of soccer,

six times a day, every single day.

So he's giving his body

instructions to store fat

every minute of that waking

day and then we wonder

why is he gaining weight?

Well, there's no mystery.

You're eating all the time.

- We would never even

consider starting to cook

until 7:
30 and we'd usually eat around 8.

- We might get home and eat

at eight or nine o'clock

and have a big meal at

eight or nine o'clock.

- And it was a grazing after

dinner that was going on.

- It's a length of time

that you let your body

kind of burn that food that you've taken.

That's basically it.

You're giving your body time to digest it.

- If you have them continue

their same type of food intake

and about the same number of calories

but you shrink that eating time down,

they will lose weight and

they'll feel satisfied

and they won't feel miserable

because we didn't put them

on a 1,600 calorie diet.

- I've not necessarily eaten well.

I've been overweight,

sometimes up to 200 pounds.

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