 Let's talk about the three worst fasting trims. All right, fasting is the health trend to juror no doubt, and that's why there's a lot of misinformation out there about this ancient health practice and a cornerstone of almost every religion to achieve enlightenment. Everyone is talking about it, but not everyone knows the dangerous side effects if you don't fast correctly. Don't get me wrong, fasting is one of the keys to longevity and vitality, but you need to know how to do it properly in order to reap the maximum benefits. So today I'm going to address the top three fasting trends to avoid at all costs and what you can do instead. All right, number one, cutting your window of eating too drastically. If you read any of my books, my favorite way to fast is intermittent fasting or time-controlled eating. Now that basically says that we're going to shorten the period of time during the day that we consume our food. That's intermittent fasting. Time-controlled eating means we shorten that window preferably down to about six to eight hours a day. So I talk about a lot in unlocking the keto code. Unfortunately, if you're eating, used to eating, 12 to 16 hours every day, and the average American, believe it or not, eats 16 hours a day, literally from the minute they get up to the minute they go to bed. And as I show in my last two books, most of us are insulin resistant and metabolically inflexible. That means when you stop eating normally, you should be able to, instead of using glucose as a fuel, sure, use free fatty acids, fat as a fuel. But the vast majority of us can't do that. And when we stop eating, within a few hours, our glucose stores fall dramatically. That could be compensated by using fat as a fuel, but most of us can't use fat as a fuel. So we crash. We get headachey. We get grouchy. We get dizzy. We get worse. And that's why so many people fail at time-restricted eating. Now as I talk about in my last few books, what I want you to do, if you want to do this, is gradually decrease the amount of time that you eat your food. So, for instance, if you eat breakfast at 7 o'clock in the morning, this next week, let's eat breakfast at 8 o'clock in the morning. I just want you to wait one more hour. Accomplish that. Take the weekend off. The next week, we'll do 9 o'clock in the morning. That's just one more hour. Gradually work your way out to about a 6 to 8 hour eating window. That means eat breakfast at 11 o'clock in the morning, finish dinner at 7 o'clock at night. That's an 8-hour window. Want to compress it to 6? Eat breakfast at noon, finish dinner at 6 o'clock. Fantastic health benefits, but you don't jump off a 10-story building to do that. I've seen it fail so many times. Just avoid that at all costs. All right. How about a prolonged water fast? Now, of course, this is the most well-known, historically speaking approach to fasting. Even Jesus is said to have done it for 40 days and 40 nights. And almost all great religions have some form of prolonged water fasting. There's clearly benefits in ancient times to water fasting, but not so fast, excuse the pun. Most of us store our heavy metals and organo-pesticides in our fat cells. So when we stop eating anything for a continued period of time, we release not only fat from our fat cells, but those heavy metals and organo-pesticides. We have a horrible detoxification system in our liver to eliminate these problems. In fact, Ray Wolford, the famous UCLA professor who was the doctor on the Biosphere 2 experiments in the Arizona desert, documented in that group of people who literally starved for six months. Their levels of heavy metals and organo-pesticides went up dramatically and remained dramatically high for a year following re-eating. That's because they put them into their bloodstream and they couldn't get rid of them. So right now for Americans, water fasting is dangerous because of that fact. Now if you want to do that, understanding the risks, you want to absorb those heavy metals and organo-pesticides by taking chlorella tablets and activated charcoal. That will bind those heavy metals and prevent them from being reabsorbed into your system, but you don't need a prolonged water fast. Instead, time-controlled intermittent fasting will have just as good an effect, or as my friend and colleague Dr. Walter Longo has shown, a fasting-mimicking diet which uses a five-day low-calorie vegan fast once a month has been shown to duplicate the ability of a water fast in terms of health benefits without the danger of the heavy metal and organo-pesticide release. So a lot better and safer ways than a water fast. Alright, and the drum roll please for the worst fasting mistake that I have seen, the fruit fasting detox diet. Most of you have heard of this. It's basically all you do is for three to seven days, drink or eat lots and lots of fruit, lots and lots of fruit juices. I know it's touted to clean out your system, help you lose weight, and reset your digestive system. But I think this is actually the worst idea. Just remember, fruit is loaded with fructose, fruit sugar. Fructose is the best way to cause uric acid to increase in our blood, which causes gout and kidney stones and high blood pressure and diabetes. I've had several patients recently go on these fasts for fun as an experiment, and we looked at their blood work before and after, and they were shocked, every one of them, to look at their triglyceride numbers go sky high, to look at their liver enzymes go sky high. These were liver detox diets, and yet their liver enzymes got worse. Their uric acid levels went sky high, and one of them, doing it for a month, became a diabetic. So please, you do not need a fruit detox. This is the worst way, in my opinion, to toxify your diet. If you want to do a vegan fast, like I write about in all my books, you're going to be much better off and much safer. Now, I highly recommend that you check out chapter 5 in my new book, Unlocking the Keto Code, for the latest studies on the most effective fasting practices. So, that's it for now. We'll see you next week. In fact, the evidence is that it's exactly the opposite. Eating constantly, eating multiple small meals a day, as I show in the Energy Paradox, is one of the best ways to deplete your energy.