 Fasting, it does have some value, but not for the things you think. Fasting is terrible for fat loss, but it's good for other things. In today's episode, we're going to cover fasting. All of it. This is a master class. Here we go. Oh, yeah. It's been a minute since we've actually gone on deep on fasting. And has remained one of the most popular and trendy ways of dieting still. I think I don't think a month goes by where I don't hear about a family member, a friend, acquaintance that is now fasting is incorporating some form of fasting into their plan. And still it is always the for the same reasons. It still is never for the reasons that I feel like we've talked about on the show so many times on how we recommend people use it either for their clients. If you're a trainer or for yourself, there's still this trend around it as a great weight loss tool. Yeah. So obviously if you probably know what fasting is, but just to loosely define it's to go without food for a significant portion of time. So typically longer than you would normally go without food. So from breakfast to lunch, that's technically a fast. But when people talk about fasting, it's typically for, you know, six, eight, 10 hours or days without food. And usually they'll drink water. So most fasts are what are considered water fast. The reason why I think fasting is still popular is because it's one rule. Well, no, it doesn't. It restricts calories. We'll get into why it's terrible for that. If you don't eat food, guess what? You lose weight. I know. But it's one rule, right? One, like, like the challenge that people run into with diet is eating a really healthy diet for you that works for you. I mean, it's, it's complex. It requires a journey of exploration. It requires learning. It requires relearning. It requires getting rid of old ideas and concepts. It requires a good relationship with yourself. And it's, it takes time to develop, but people don't want time. They don't want to take time. They want it to happen right now. And the more simple a diet seems in terms of its rules, the more popular it is. If you look at the popularity of diets, you could literally rank them in terms of basic rule. Absolutely. Do you think that's why? That's why, that's why Atkins. The adherence because of the simplicity. Yeah. That's why Atkins crushed up what you're not first. Yes, it was counter to the message, but it was also just don't eat carbs. Oh my God, I could do that. Well, and it's such a paradigm shattering thing for a lot of people to step away from a meal, just that fact alone. Like because it's like so ingrained in culture and society and everything's socially wrapped into us eating food to get yourself sort of out of that, that formula for a minute, you become a bit of an evangelist and it becomes something that it worked for you. So therefore, you know, I think everybody could benefit from it. And also too, I was able to lose weight. And so that's what they focus in on is the losing weight part of it. Yeah, I mean, I think Sal, you're really on to something that it's what makes diets the most popular is less about how healthy or how even successful they are for people, but let more so. It's simplicity. The simplicity of, of it, right? Like I just only eat this, don't eat this and then do whatever you want. It so follows the pattern of your clients, right? Like how many, how many people would hire you and just be like, just tell me what to do or write this day. Like they don't want very few people, not everybody, but very few people hire a trainer and say, I really want to learn how to properly feed myself and exercise correctly. There's a small portion. There's a percentage. But most people are like, I want to do this. I need to do this. I have this thing coming up. Can you get me there? And I'll pay you just tell me. What do I have to push? Yeah, that's the extent of what they want to learn. Now fasting is actually, if you were to consider a diet, right? It's actually probably the oldest or one of the oldest documented quote unquote diets that there is fasting recorded document documentation of fasting goes back as far as 450 or 500 BC. It's present in every major world religion, not just the Abrahamic ones, right? Judaism, Islam and Christianity. It's present in all those. It's also present in Buddhism. It's present in many Eastern religions. It's present even in religions and practices that are not so popular. New ageism even used fasting. So it's got some value for sure. Things that span culture and time, things that are communicated and put into practice in cultures that didn't communicate or trade off with each other. You know that there's some wisdom there. So there's definitely some wisdom around fasting, but again it's been turned into a diet plan. It's typical, right? Modern society will take something with some truth or some wisdom and they'll find a way to turn it into something for fat loss or something like that along those lines. Now I have a really good experience with fasting and I believe that I fall in the category of people who benefited from this practice. So just a little context, I grew up and I started working out for a lot of different reasons, but one of them was I was very insecure. I had some body image issues. I thought I was too skinny. I thought I was too skinny, not strong enough. And so I started working out to try to get bigger, to gain size, to gain weight. And pretty much with like no holds barred, like whatever it took to gain weight and size, I was gained for. And I did this for years and years and years. In fact, the first time I heard about fasting from the perspective of it being a diet, because you know we had clients that would sometimes talk about fasting. It wasn't very common. So I knew what it was, but I didn't know, I really like consider it a diet or a way of being for health until I was in my, I want to say mid to late 20s. So at this point I'd already been lifting weights consistently for well over 10 years. I'd been a trainer and a coach for eight years or something like that. So I'd been doing it for a while, still fueled very strongly by insecurities. And I remember reading about something called the warrior diet. This was the first one that I tried. And I remember reading in at the time, it was bodybuilding.com had these forums and people would be like, Oh my God, I only eat once a day and I haven't lost any muscle. And I feel so good and I have all this energy and I'm actually, I feel great. My workouts are better. And you know, the thing that stuck out to me was I haven't lost any muscle. So my fear up into that point and it had been so hammered into my head that I had to eat every two hours. That was a message in the bodybuilding space of the muscle building world was don't go without protein for two more longer than two hours. Otherwise your body's gonna eat away at muscle. I literally believe this. So I would eat every two hours, literally eight to eight meals a day I would have. Now I read this thing about fasting. People are saying they're not losing muscle. I became intrigued and I tested it once. I remember it took a lot of courage for me to not eat all day, right? So I was gonna eat at night. So I remember I started that day off, no food. And I remember going out throughout the whole day and feeling okay. I actually felt okay. Like, oh, this is weird. I'm not like losing my mind. I don't have these crazy hunger pains. I'm not going nuts with cravings. And then I worked out in the late afternoon and I did have a great workout. And then later that night I had a feast. I ate this massive meal and I said, let me try this again. And I did it over and over again. And to my surprise, muscle did not completely melt off my body. I felt good. In fact, I had more energy throughout the day. There's reasons why that happened to me. And what it did for me personally is it broke the chains between me and this insecure attachment to food where no matter where I went, I had to have a protein bar on me or a shake or something because God forbid I went two hours without food. This was gonna be a bad thing. So it was so revealing to me and so transformative from that standpoint that, oh, I don't have to eat every two hours. I don't. It's not gonna... My body's not gonna fall apart and I'm not gonna become the thing that I fear most, which is this skinny kid. So that was really the benefit that I got from it. So like you, I had a very similar experience with it. Now, I did experiment with it later on in my career. So I had already gone through that transition as a trainer where I realized that most people that would hire me, even the ones that I've worked with, I've worked with, I've worked with, I've worked with, I've worked with, I've worked with, I've worked with, I've worked with, I've worked with people that would hire me, even the ones that wanted to lose 30, 40, 50 pounds, were under-consuming nutrients, weren't getting, they were missing fiber, they were missing protein, they were missing healthy fats. Like I'd already piece that together. And so I knew that when I experimented with myself like, oh, this is not for most of my clients already. Like I already, when someone hires me, even the people that I know need to lose weight, this is not something that I want to use as a tool for them. But what I had was the same thing that you had. It was I had this fear of, oh my God, if I'm not feeding myself every couple hours and hitting my protein and take every single day, muscle just falls off my body. That's how I felt and I thought, and it completely shattered my paradigm when I started to fast and incorporate that. And then I realized like, oh, who is this really good for? And I found that there's got to be a lot of clients that are like me. I found that in the bodybuilding space, your bikini, it is full of those people that have, like do not miss a meal, carry their protein bars and shakes everywhere they go or they're Tupperware, right? Like there's a whole industry built around never missing a meal. And those were the people that I found, oh, okay, this is somebody I'm going to help teach that they can break away like I struggled with too. And so that was the first type of client. The second type of client, and this is again through my experience of realizing what I do think was people that had gut issues and helping them kind of reset that because they didn't know where it's coming from or where they're having this bloat or stuff like that. And just putting them on this two-day or three-day fast to completely reset themselves and then slowly reintroduce food was a really cool way to help people have insight to maybe you're eating foods that you have intolerance to and you don't even know it. Let's try and incorporate a fast and see what happens. So it became definitely a tool in my tool belt towards the back half of my career, but those are the only two people that I ever would apply it to. Never would I apply it to somebody who came to me and said, I want to lose weight. Yeah, that was my first introduction. The benefit that I received was the break and the digestive break and realizing that what I was feeling wasn't normal all the time. And it helped to kind of highlight a certain things that were going on with my digestive system like at night and having heartburn, having a lot of this bloat and a lot of things I just would equate to, well, this is just what happens after I eat. And also too, just that same kind of fear that you guys were describing is always having to seek out food because another thing psychologically that I had to work through was that whole hanger factor, which I know is totally like a joke and everybody kind of tends to blame the fact that they're hungry and so it automatically gives them this sort of freedom to be an asshole. And for me, I would use as an excuse and I would lean into that and this helped to kind of teach me going through that natural hunger signal process, it's a natural thing that actually too long enough would go away. Like it would just go away. And a lot of times too, I was dehydrated and so that was a huge factor as well that I kind of sifted through with all that. So anyway, just in terms of like figuring out a lot of this self-reflection and being more introspective, I think that was the biggest value I received. Now it became popular for one reason because people saw that they could lose weight by fasting. That's why it became popular because like I said, it's a very old diet strategy or approach not for weight loss, but just one for many other reasons which we'll get to. But it became popular because it was a simple, not easy, but a simple way to lose weight. So there's just one step, only eat within a four hour window, for example. And then of course it got backed up by scientists and studies that showed that it increased or sped up cell autophagy and reduced inflammation and you had all these blood markers that would improve which we now know are not independent of just being in a calorie deficit. In other words, just eating in a calorie deficit produces the same effects from that standpoint as fasting. So there's really nothing special about fasting from a health, physical I should say, health perspective or even a weight loss perspective. It also did something else psychologically to people that we pieced together as trainers over years which was it gave people the freedom to kind of eat what they want so long as they stayed in that window. And we learned later on one of the reasons why diets failed was people had this weird relationship with food that if you told them you can't have cookies or you can't do these things then they would have this restrict and then binge type of relationship. And they would want a rebel. It was natural for you to want a rebel. This was a very important, this was something that was pieced together really for me with fasting too because I realized how many people had success with just sticking to this and part of that is is because they also gave themselves the freedom of like, I'm not going to tell myself I can't have a cookie or I can't eat this fast food or I can't have this ice cream. I'm just going to say I got to eat in this window. And as long as I just think that I still have the freedom to do these things I want. There's something important there that you need to understand that. That's why other types of diets fail so hard is when you put these restrictions and say I can't, I can't, I can't eventually you want to rebel. That was important to learn that as a coach and a trainer and part of why I flipped the whole diet thing with my clients on its head and said instead of telling my clients they can't do these things let me focus on telling them what I need them to go get and that was a massive shift in my coaching. Yeah. So fasting for fat loss is a terrible approach. By the way, the success rate of fasting for fat loss versus the success rate of any other diet for fat loss is about identical meaning about 90% of the people who lose weight using fasting or veganism or if it fits your macros or whatever, you know, paleo, whatever about 90% of them when they lose weight following a specific quote-unquote diet they gain it back. They gain it back within a year or two and I bet the data would show that the small percentage left over eventually gains it back as well. That's just my own experience. So that's rule number one. That's number one. Why would I want to do a fat loss? We now have the data. It's very clear. It's not more effective than other approaches at all. Now, I would argue that it has the most restrictive diets the ones with the most hard set rules tend to produce the most dysfunctional behaviors that I tend to see. Fasting for fat loss when somebody says I want to lose weight so I'm going to fast almost always in my experience with people results in a restrict binge behavior. Don't eat, don't eat, don't eat. Look at the clock, look at the clock, look at the clock. Time to eat and then they go nuts. And what happens over time and maybe at first you're somewhat aware of this but then you find just what ends up happening what I've seen slowly the eating period becomes you know, okay, I'm eating this much food and then oh, I got to eat more food and then how much can I fit in this eating window and then I can eat whatever I want and then push it and what you're actually doing with that is you're training a behavior you're conditioning yourself to go from nothing to anything nothing to anything and that's what we're constantly battling when we're working with people is that on off, on off there is no on off when it comes to eating in a healthy way that's sustainable it doesn't work that way it's always on and I don't mean always on in the sense that it's always perfect it's always your diet and it's always your behaviors but fasting for weight loss almost always results in that strange don't eat, eat anything or eat terribly type model and that's just a bad thing to train it also exacerbates what I had seen already in normal clients that were trying to lose weight most people that would come to me were over consuming processed carbohydrates sugars, saturated fats not eating enough protein not getting enough fiber not eating enough vegetables and fruits and getting a good so they were missing all these micro nutrients and in a macro nutrient when you include protein and healthy fats and they were missing those things over consuming the bad foods and then you put them in this constricted window then they had an even harder time getting that fiber, the protein healthy all those things but then and they would just over consume even more to your point of the binging habits of those bad foods so now you've made it like if I gave a client a 12 hour window all day basically to eat all these foods and they were missing all these things that are important and crucial to their overall health and they were missing that and yet struggling with still weight loss and then I say okay now you can only eat in four hours it just made that worse it just made it more difficult for them to hit their protein and take more difficult to be consistent with their fiber and more difficult to hit healthy fats they were just over consuming processed foods look a petite so we okay let me back up okay here's something that data is very clear on with diet a high protein diet one in which you're eating close to a gram of protein per pound of body weight in a normal lean individual so if you're overweight it would be your target weight so just to loosely say it roughly a gram of protein per pound of body weight okay so that the data shows clearly all things being controlled everything else being controlled calories exercise lifestyle everything else the high protein version results in more muscle less fat more satiety meaning less cravings less hunger better insulin levels or blood sugar levels so it's just superior okay so this is a fact across the board doesn't matter if you're vegan carnivore, paleo whatever however you like to eat high protein across the board in studies is just better okay that being said a petite woman who weighs 100 pounds okay so I'm using a a woman a small woman say 120, 130 I'm gonna say 100 I'm gonna say 100 somebody who does not represent the vast majority of people listening right now okay if this woman put her eating window at four hours that means she has to get 100 grams of protein in four hours okay that's hard that would mean she would have to eat 350 36 ounce chicken breast yeah imagine that in a four hour for a 100 pound woman now if you're a 150 pound woman which is average good luck I would have struggled eating 150 grams of protein in four hours now a 200 pound man like forget it you're not gonna hit your protein targets or it's gonna be really hard or what you're gonna do which a lot of people do when they fast like this is they'll eat as much protein as they can they stuff themselves like I gotta get the protein because I only have a four hour eating window then they throw a shake on top of it and now again they're doing that that binge type of thing now you throw on top of it like you said fiber or healthy food good luck trying to hit those targets in that short period of time unless you're actively stuffing yourself so literally think of this for a second starve for 12 hours or however many hours you know that you go on the fast and then cram because I gotta get these protein targets in that four hour window which is by that's one type of fasting I know there's different varieties but that's one of the more popular ones good luck not gonna work what's happening the data shows this is that when they compare fasting to other calorie restricted type models they're very similar although fasting ready for this trends towards muscle loss it tends to trend for this reason for this reason for this exact reason this is probably the main reason of 100% if I'm telling you right now that every single client I can't even think of a client who hired me that was overweight that we needed to get on a a workout plan need to start their diet they were under consuming protein with 12 hours yeah so what in the world would make me think that same client put in a protocol where they only have a four hour window would now all of a sudden hit their protein and take good luck it's hard enough no it's totally it's totally difficult unreasonable and then they but yet you see weight off the scale come down so yeah you restricted calories and temporarily yeah nothing magic yeah the scale window but your metabolism just got slower your body fat percentage probably changed very little if at all because you lost as much muscle as you lost fat so you're in a worse predicament than what you were when you started the fast yeah and and again I think people like it when they compare to other diets because it's simple yeah and by the way they like it initially almost nobody you know two three years later says oh yeah I love it it was great you know they're always like initially yeah in a short window yeah exactly now here's the reasons why fasting has some value it has tremendous value for detachment okay this is why it's present in every spiritual religion yeah this is the purpose of it all religions this is the point now why would fasting and detachment from food like why would that be valuable well one of them is what we talked about I gotta eat all the time if I don't eat oh my god I'm gonna feel crappy or I'm gonna lose muscle that helped me practice a detachment from this thing that I felt chained to but then there's also this like okay I'm not eating for breakfast lunch or dinner or I'm not eating when I'm stressed out or I'm not eating when I'm watching TV what do I do with myself what do I do with my feelings what do I how do I handle the situation and what do I reveal about myself when I take away the most commonly used you know method of medication which is food everybody medecates with food so now that I don't have that what's coming up for me how do I feel what's happening and then when you go back to eating again there are things that tend to be revealed to you by the way if you have we didn't say this in the beginning let's say this right now if you have a history of eating disorders where you restrict yourself anything that even resembles bulimia or anorexia already off the table run from fast thing methodologies as fast as you can almost always will put you back into your eating disorder yeah okay well now that kinda ruins what I was gonna say but I was gonna equate fasting in terms of like stepping away from it from the detachment part of it is meditation and then what that the benefits with that in terms of like stimulus and just constantly inundating your senses with all of the stimulus all the time and now with blue light and all these other sort of distractions out there yeah the height hype up your stress levels this can also have that physiological effect by stepping away from food for a bit well this also brings us to the next one which is comparing the difference between like short fast and long fast and this does bring up the example where I would allow a client who is trying to say lose 50 pounds and she's like I hear what you guys say I have some things I wanna detach I've abused food in the past and I definitely wanna be somebody who and I wanna use it for the meditative purposes like you know do you think I could use I would allow a client like once a month to do a single day fast 24 hours right for that purpose we're not doing this because it's going to speed up our results in your fat loss journey but I do see the benefits of going for an entire day restricting from food detaching from food so that you can focus on meditating and realize that you don't need to reach for that thing all the time you're totally okay going 24 hours and not eating and I think there's a lot of value for that reason and that would be the only way I would let that client who is trying to lose 50 pounds because I would need the other 29 days of the month focused on hitting your macro targets and your micro targets because most people trying to lose weight struggle with doing that and I would want most of our time focusing on getting that with okay once a month we can interrupt our diet plan or our month or our routine to do this complete fast so that we can look at other aspects work inward in our life if you want to use fasting for what it's valuable for then all your fasting needs to be a long fast okay what does that mean long long is subjective it needs to be a fast that challenges you okay so if skipping breakfast is a big challenge for you then that would be your fast that would be the way you would attach from something that you're you're so tied to right if fasting for breakfast and lunch is a challenge for you then that would be your fast many people probably I would say could start with a 24 hour fast but you could go pretty damn long you know people can fast for a week without food by the way make sure you're not underweight if you attempt a fast that's longer than 24 or 48 hours because then you can run into some trouble but otherwise you could go for a long time and so the question is should I fast okay you've made the points not for weight loss I get it that makes a lot of sense it's good for detachment reasons or spiritual reasons or self reflection you know type reasons then how long should I fast you want to challenge yourself that's what brings out the value in the fast is you know obviously you don't eat when you sleep well that doesn't challenge you so that but even though that's technically a fast right so it's like okay what's a length of time that I feel like I'm gonna be able to reap some of the benefits the detachment the reflection the I'm not reaching for food because I can't so I gotta deal with my feelings right now or it's lunchtime okay I always typically go get that thing and now I'm not going to what does that feel like how do I feel how is that causing my emotions to change am I more productive am I less productive what is this bringing it up for me you know that's the that's kind of how you want to view the whole thing but a successful fast or one that's gonna benefit you in that way is one that challenges you and so the length of time is dependent on that for the individual now people always ask how to prepare for a fast I do want to comment just as we get into preparing the groups of people that are most successful with fast people who tend to be able to stick to it and repeat it or people who do it for religious reasons there's your there's your clue right there that's the real value like people you know Islam people who practice Islam do this every year every single in fact they do a fast it's what is it sun up to sun down they don't even drink they don't even allow fluids and yet a large chunk of them is successful at doing it because they're doing it for spiritual reasons there's also a culture behind it so you have support with the people around you you've highlighted vegans before vegans that have the most you're fasting from meat to say the ones that do it for animal to save animals they're the ones that are successful people who do it for a diet they fail right so so how do you prepare for a fast well there's nothing special you need to do with your diet this is where this is where people who sell fasting kits tend to profit right they're like oh you know take our fasting preparation supplements or take these pills during your fast or here's your your fasting breaking you know program that you need to do you know so they surround this his fasting is like how do you make money off by the way if you're one of those people who's listening to this and you drink BCAAs during your fast because you're you're trying to not lose muscle you're not fast you're doing it the wrong way you're again you are the person who I want to fast completely because you have the same silly fear that I had all the time I'm going like oh god if I don't eat for 24 hours muscles are going to fall off of me so if you're wanting to do fasting for purposes like that and detachment then you don't need to fast okay or some supplement that someone tried to sell you that this is how you should do a fast all you need is water that's it just drink some water all day long and add some electrolytes I'll say that definitely add some sodium because going without food will deplete your body electrolytes and you may find that'll help with the shaky kind of feeling headaches the low blood pressure all that stuff actually makes a big difference literally put like we work with a company called Element put that in your water that'll make a big difference alright so how to prepare for a fast the way you prepare is you set your intention you prepare your mind you prepare your psyche or your spirit however you want to look at it and you say to yourself Wednesday for example I'm going to fast my intention is to deal with my feelings instead of medicating myself with food or my intention is to reflect on how I am as a partner or as a parent or as a you know as somebody's child or as a friend my intention is to go without to deal with my negative feelings whatever it is that's how you prepare for a fast is you go into it with an intention now the intention may change just like anytime you do something that's pro-growth something might reveal itself but having the intention really adds value and meaning to the thing you're about to do if you don't do it if you don't go in with some kind of intention you actually run the risk of falling into the oh I feel smaller oh I think I'm losing weight uh oh this you fall into you may fall into that trap you may say to yourself I'm doing this for the right reasons but then you may find that you lost five pounds of water weight you feel smaller not as bloated oh I like this this is this is why you're going to fight all the noise in your head that's telling you to go back to food and it's going to help to kind of resolve a lot of this comfortableness that you're feeling so to place your mind somewhere where it's very focused you know even if it's journaling you know just having gratitude and kind of writing things down you're grateful for something that's like really directed and focused will really help through that process I do have a small you know minor food tip going in too a mistake I've seen happen when people are going into their first like 24 hour fast is they decide to have their last meal like the last supper like you know they go super busy like the four people that we have yes and so they go so common carb heavy ice cream candy treat like they go all out on that it just makes them feel more shitty yeah it actually will make the fast more difficult I've found and by the way I know that speaking from experience like I've done that I've gone and like had the big burger fries like an ice cream meal before cravings are like exponential yes they actually makes the cravings that much more difficult over the next 24 hours versus doing a good whole food healthy high fat high protein type of meal that's minimal carbohydrates or none going into your last meal you'll actually have an easier time in my opinion going through that 24 hours and if you go like oh this is my last meal and I'm going to go all out yeah and that's if you want I think that's a healthy approach because you're going so here's the thing so what Adam's talking about if you're doing this to make the fast easier okay that's fine but that's not quite as valuable as the following I'm going into this fast with intention I want to stop self medicating with food or I want to stop hating myself if you go into the fast with that intention you're not going to lead into the fast with a massive meal because the intention has nothing to do with the fact that I'm eating not eating it's more like I'm going to deal with this thing that's fine to do that because you want to make the fast easier but the truth is if you go in with a true intention you're not going in like it's your last hurrah better get this last pizza meal in before I go into my fast it probably won't happen if you have the right intention going into the fast now the last question the second question people ask is always how to get out of a fast well the simple answer is to eat again but you know these same people make the same mistake that I just said if you come out with a huge meal expect explosive diarrhea that's just what's going to happen first-hand account if you do that your digestive system essentially turned off during the fast and it'll turn on and it'll vacate very quickly if you consume too much all at once I recommend having a small meal that's easily digestible like a broth or a soup just something that's easily digestible that you normally can eat I feel okay let's go to well it's got a nice sodium in it too so high in sodium it's got a little some protein in there it's a broth it's just not a heavy easy most people don't have any intolerances to like a chicken rice noodle yeah rice noodle chicken broth type of meal it's very very satisfying digest really really well but also keep in mind that you're already doing this even if you're doing it for like detachment reasons for other things it's always a great opportunity this is why I like to still include this in my routine you know now is that to really highlight how foods how foods are affecting you and so you're slow I like to slowly introduce different food groups to see like oh that's interesting that food like doesn't agree with me as well as I thought it did you know and you'll become you're hyper sensitive after you fast like that and so it helps people that are trying to become we talk on the show all the time to become aware of like how foods affect your mood your energy well guess what after a fast those signals are louder than they ever are and so if you were going to go into or come out of a fast and you're part of your intentions are I really want to make a better relationship with food and get better connected the guys always talk about you know pay attention after you eat like your stool and your mood and your hair and your skin like I don't know I don't notice any of that stuff I don't know now is the time become better connected to those things and this is a great way to do that after you come that fast you slowly introduce different food groups especially the ones that are on that list of like you know most likely to be a problematic for people and pay attention to how they affect you you will know the alarm will be much louder now than what it was say two weeks ago yeah now if you did like a 24-hour fast or a 48-hour fast you're probably not going to lose any muscle it's unlikely that you'll lose muscle but you will lose weight on the scale that is water weight okay expect to gain it back when you go back to eating normal do not become attached to the scale during and after fasting unless you want to trigger yourself really should be no reason for you to weigh at all don't weigh yourself before or after just leave it because what you'll notice is a swing of five to eight pounds that can depending on the person feel exciting or scary and then either relieving or scary so don't weigh yourself it's a terrible terrible strategy also people ask should I or could I work out during the fast you know I if I was doing a 24-hour this is me personally right if I do a 24-hour fast I typically can work out like I normally do anything longer than that my workouts are reduced in intensity but here's the main message that I want to give people when they're fasting when you're fasting and you're doing it for the right reasons it has nothing to do with fitness fat loss muscle building so don't work out don't worry about working out that's not the priority I don't like to and I don't like to recommend to it because of what you just said if the reason is not for fat loss or building muscle or any of those purposes which it shouldn't be then working out or not working out has no it isn't relevant at all so why so why and you don't have any fuel for that workout anyways so why and you're not eating any calories so it's like why just instead use that opportunity that all the time you're going to get back you know the thing that I think is always fascinating that and never fails to like realize like wow how much time humans spend around thinking about food prepping food and eating food and now all of a sudden you have like hours of your day you get back immediately use that for other reasons to work inward to spend time with your family do something that you haven't done that you've been meaning to do like this is not the time for me to go train at all yeah and by the way fasting can be applied to anything you feel attached to any worldly thing so you can fast from electronics you can fast if you have a bad relationship with exercise from exercising for a little while you can fast from of course alcohol or other substances so this detachment practice extends itself beyond just food and there's tremendous value in detaching and reshaping your relationship to things that you may feel chained to so again fasting for the right reasons great for the wrong reasons absolute terrible strategy look if you love the show head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out all of our free health and fitness guides we have a ton of them on there and they can help you with your health and fitness goals you can also find all of us on Instagram Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump Justin I'm on Instagram at Mind Pump to Stefano and Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam