 By now, you know that I'm a huge believer in the benefits of intermittent fasting or what I call time-controlled eating. And if you've read my latest book, The Energy Paradox, you know that my newest protocol includes one of the easiest and most effective fasting techniques out there. Because unlike other fasting techniques, it's designed with your whole body and mind. And that means experiencing results that are going to last and benefit your health for years down the line. And the best part? You won't need to restrict your calories or go on a diet. That's right, all the benefits without any of the suffering. So stay tuned because on today's episode I'm going to explain exactly how to master this technique and experience improvements in your energy, metabolic health, weight loss efforts, and so much more. I'll also share the importance of breaking your fast the right way and my trick for getting supercharged results. Okay, let's get started. So let's talk about fasting and what exactly that means. First of all, let's get real. Our ancient ancestors, as you've heard me say, didn't crawl out of their cave asking what's for breakfast. There wasn't any breakfast. There wasn't any storage system for food. And so they had to find breakfast. And if they found break fast at lunch, that's when they started eating. If they found break fast at dinner, that's when they started eating. Or sometimes they could go for days without finding food. Even studies of the hadzas in Tanzania that I write about in the energy paradox, they usually don't eat until 11 o'clock in the morning as their first meal. And often it's out while they're gathering or hunting. So the idea of having breakfast as breakfast early in the morning is actually a novel new concept and actually only came into being during the industrial revolution in the late 1800s when people, men at that time, would go to a factory early. They wouldn't have lunch breaks. There weren't bathroom breaks. They would work for 14 or so hours a day. And so they were sent off to work with a breakfast. And then they would not have their next meal until way after dark. In fact, we'll talk about that in a little bit. That actually mimics what's done in the Ramadan fast. Okay, unfortunately, most of us are now eating up to 16 hours a day. Research by Dr. Sachin Pounder from the Salk Institute in San Diego using apps that people input food on their phone found that the vast majority of us are eating for up to 16 hours a day, and that means there's only about an eight hour maximum downtime of not eating for most of us. One of the things that I stress in the energy paradox is that this actually produces a mitochondrial overload of too much work and too little downtime. And one of the important things to realize is that mitochondria can normally handle one energy source at a time. They can handle carbohydrates in the form of sugar. They can handle protein in the form of amino acids. They can handle fats in the form of free fatty acids. And normally, if we were eating a whole food diet and we were actually eating foods whole, it turns out that the way our digestive process works, usually those components would arrive at different times for processing in our mitochondria. And normally sugars would arrive first, amino acids would arrive later, and fats would arrive much later owing to the way fats are absorbed completely differently than sugars and proteins. But now, thanks to processed foods and ultra processed foods, our food companies have figured out how to make instantly absorbable sugars, proteins, and fats in almost all the foods we eat. And what this does, as I talk about in the energy paradox, is it literally overwhelms your mitochondria with processing all of these foods into energy. And we literally get a mitochondrial traffic jam. And to protect themselves, the mitochondria actually build up a defense along the surface of the cell of increasing the thickness of the cell wall. And I go into wonderful detail how that happens. But the point of all this is we develop what's called insulin resistance. And insulin resistance is our cells, our mitochondria attempt to stop this onslaught. And sadly, about 80% of Americans are now insulin resistant. And what that means in layman's terms is that our mitochondria have lost our metabolic flexibility, the ability to turn on a dime from processing sugars to processing fats, for instance. And that flexibility has actually been tied to almost all great health outcomes. And in the energy paradox, I go into this fascinating experiment done at the NIH where I was a fellow years ago by Dr. DeCabo and a bunch of mice. And I won't bore you with the outcome. But the take-home point, particularly for today's talk, is mice who are allowed continuous access to food over a 24-hour period, and they sleep as well, do not have metabolic flexibility compared to mice who food access is limited in a time-controlled manner, so that they only have access during a certain amount of time during the day. And his research was actually dramatic in showing that if you're just kind of an all-day nibbler, like most of us are, you're going to lack metabolic flexibility, number one. And number two, you're not going to live as long as the mice who had a shorter time period of eating the food, even though they ate the exact same amount of food as the all-day munchers. And that, if you take home nothing from this podcast, is probably the most important fact to remember. This is not about food deprivation, this is about the timing of when you eat, and perhaps more importantly, the length of time you're not eating. Because one of the things that happens during the time you're not eating, or let's call it the fasting period every 24 hours, during that time you're mitochondria, which quite frankly work really hard and they damage themselves. And many of you have heard about reactive oxygen species or free radicals, or the free radical theory of aging. The long story short is that making energy damages mitochondria and they need down time to repair themselves. The more down time you give them, quite frankly, the more time they have to repair themselves to recover from that onslaught that you do every day by giving them food to work with. So the take home from this part is, within reason the longer we go in the fasted period every 24 hours, the better our mitochondria repair themselves. And the other take home is you can eat the same amount of food, live longer, have better health, as long as you can press that eating window. Now many people ask well I have to have food to keep my energy level up and 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 because it taxes your mitochondria. Okay, so the evidence in animal studies and in human studies is absolutely striking on the benefits of these periods of fasting. And let me share the famous Italian athlete study that I talk about in the book. They took some Italian cyclists and they put them on an eating program. They divided them into two groups. One group, they all ate the same amount of food. They all ate the same food. One group had a 12 hour eating window. And eating window means this is when you start in the morning. This is when you finish in the evening or whenever you eat. The one group of athletes had to have breakfast at eight o'clock in the morning, lunch at one o'clock in the afternoon and they had to finish dinner by eight o'clock at night. So that's a 12 hour eating window. The other group of athletes had breakfast at one o'clock in the afternoon. That was their break fast. They had lunch at four o'clock in the afternoon and then they had to finish dinner by eight o'clock at night. So that was essentially a seven hour eating window. When they looked at their athletic performance, both groups had superb athletic performance. Both groups maintained muscle mass, but the compressed eating window guys, they lost weight. And their insulin like growth factor, IGF-1, which is one of the best markers for longevity and health span, fell. And the folks who were eating in the 12 hour window had no change in weight and no change in insulin like growth factor. Same amount of food just compressing the eating window had all of these benefits, including weight loss. So the other fascinating thing that I write about in the book is that athletes actually perform better in a fasted state than a fed state. Now I'm old enough to remember that after we ate lunch, my mother would not allow my sister and I to go swimming for at least an hour after we ate because the prevailing wisdom was that we would develop cramps and die. And there is some truth to that old wives tale. Digestion takes a huge amount of blood flow and we divert like 30% of all of our blood flow down to our guts during digestion. If you eat, you divert all that blood flow and it's not available to your muscles to use for what their needs. And this has been shown over and over again. And so exercising fasting allows you to get more blood flow to your muscles where they need it. The other thing that's important to realize is if we were starving, if we hadn't eaten in many days and we had to catch that gazelle or antelope, we would actually need a huge amount of burst of power. And so it actually had a survival advantage to be able to rev up our energy while fasting so that we literally wouldn't starve to death. Okay, so there are lots of other benefits to fasting including improved brain health. And one of the obvious takeaways from looking at fasting in whatever form, whether it's multi-day fasting, whether it's intermittent fasting, whether it's time-controlled eating, whether it's two-day fasting, two days a week of reducing calories, which is the true intermittent fasting, whether it's every other day eating. You choose the study, you can find dramatic benefits overall and also into brain function. Okay, let's get into the how. You can pull this off in a doable fashion. One of the problems with most fasting techniques is you get the impression that all you got to do starting tomorrow is start eating your first meal a day at noon and finish up at six o'clock at night and have a six-hour eating window. As I talk about in the energy paradox, about 80% of us are insulin resistant. And strange but true fact, when you have an elevated insulin level, insulin prevents you from mobilizing fat as free fatty acids from your fat cells. It literally blocks the hormone called hormone-sensitive lipase from allowing fat to be released from fat cells. So if you're insulin resistant and you haven't eaten all night and then you try to go from seven to noon without eating under normal circumstances, you would be releasing free fatty acids from your fat cells. They would be used for fuel by all your mitochondria. A few of them would be turned into ketones by your liver. And ketones could be used as an alternative fuel in your brain. Ketones can get into your brain, free fatty acids can't. And you'd be fine making it to noon. But again, 80% of us don't have that ability to mobilize free fatty acids. So it's no wonder that we kind of sputter to a stop. We get hangry. Our brain doesn't work right. Our muscles don't work right. And most people, whenever they start a fasting program, give up because it's just not worth it. They don't feel very well. So instead of dropping calories down to almost nothing or going a whole day without eating, they really want to make this a lot easier for you. So I want to get you to that optimal eating window, which is preferably around six hours. But I want to take you down slowly so that you can slowly get insulin resistance reversed. And I think it's actually easier than you think. And in the energy paradox program, I've actually got a six week period where we change your eating period by one hour every day, rather than just going from I'm eating 16 hours a day to now I'm eating six hours a day. That's not doable for most people. So as I show in the book, let's suppose on Monday, you would normally eat breakfast at seven o'clock in the morning. On the first week, you're going to eat breakfast on Monday at eight o'clock in the morning. Then on Tuesday, we're going to try for nine o'clock in the morning. On Wednesday, we're going to try for 10 o'clock. On Thursday, 11 o'clock. And Friday, we'll try to get to noon. Now, the good news is, let's suppose on the first day, you did fine getting eight o'clock, and you did fine getting to nine o'clock. But getting to 10 o'clock, you kind of sputtered up. That's okay. We'll let you eat at nine 30. And again, we'll just kind of hold at nine o'clock that week. The next week, we'll try again. Oh, and I should say, you get the weekend off. Now, what kind of great program is that? I only ask you to do this five days a week and take the weekend off. Why am I asking you to do that? Because human studies show that compliance with restricting our eating window soars when you don't have to work so hard for two days a week. And that's one of the secrets in my patient population, why people can do this consistently year after year and not just throw up their hands. Where is the sweet spot? Well, it looks from most human studies and even animal studies that six hours is really the sweet spot. There is one human study that four hours of the eating window is great, but it doesn't give you any additional benefit. So for now, we're going to aim to get you down to around six to eight hours as that sweet spot. The other thing that's important in terms of brain health is just like you would get cramps in your legs if you went swimming after you ate. It turns out that your brain needs to get washed during the night of all of its debris and it requires huge amounts of blood flow to do that. And that brain washing time period occurs during deep sleep, which usually occurs early in the sleep cycle. So one of the things that we want to try to do is not eat anything for about three hours before we go to bed. And so if we can finish you up at seven o'clock at night maximum and then go to bed say at 10 o'clock, we're well on our way to allowing increased blood flow to the brain because it's not down digesting your food. Okay, why restrict the eating window instead of going 24 hours completely not eating or even along water fast? Now certainly every religion has a fasting tradition and you name the religion, there's a fasting practice. And certainly there are very interesting benefits to prolonged water fasting. And just in case you didn't know it could be done, the longest on record water fast was 381 days of having only water as nourishment if you will, 381 days. So it can be done. But here's the dangers and I've talked about this before. We store organopesticides, biocides, and heavy metals in our fat cells. And quite frankly while they're in our fat cells, they actually aren't very dangerous. But if we go on a water fast and we rapidly begin to take fat out of our fat cells, those heavy metals and organopesticides are released. And they go to the liver. The liver does have a detoxification system. They're called phase one and phase two detoxification systems. But you can overwhelm these systems with this onslaught. Plus the liver has no ability to detox heavy metals. And so instead the liver releases those heavy metals into bile and says, well, I just throw them down into the gut and they'll be gone. They'll be pooped out. Sadly we reabsorb heavy metals and put them back into circulation. And this was actually discovered by Ray Walford who was a pathologist at UCLA in the doomed biosphere two experiment in the Arizona desert. These individuals were supposed to grow their own food. And long story short, they failed. They lost about 30% of their body weight in six months time. And one of the findings of Ray Walford was that the heavy metals in the volunteers, including him, went skyrocketing high in their bloodstream. And it took over a year for the heavy metals to come down. So the idea of us as modern humans so loaded with toxins and heavy metals going on, even a two or three or five day water fast, unless you're prepared to handle the heavy metal onslaught is really a bad idea. On the other hand, releasing fat slowly from fat cells during only a particular time period during the day is a much, much, much safer way to do it. Now I talk about in the book there are a lot of terms for intermittent fasting. The original intermittent fasting was described as fasting intermittently. And it became popularized as the 5-2 diet where five days during the week you ate normally. But two of the days during the week you ate a limited amount of food, usually five, six hundred calories. And that was intermittent fasting. And I've written about this in all my books. And it works. And in all my books I have a program for doing just that. Then there's time-controlled eating. The original time-controlled eating was done in mice. And you can really control mice. And it was called time-restricted feeding because you'd feed mice on a schedule. And just actually this week a fascinating new paper showing that time-controlled eating in mice, in mice that are genetically predisposed to high blood pressure, if you time-controlled feed mice, lo and behold their blood pressure normalizes. So another huge new benefit of just restricting the time period of eating. And I won't go into why that occurred, but it works. Anybody's welcome to correct me if I'm wrong. But as far as I know, I was the first person to write about time-controlled eating back in 2006 with my first book, Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution. And there's a funny story about that whole chapter. But so I've been doing this for a very long time. I've been teaching my patients this technique for a very long time. And so I can tell you that it works. Now one of the things that I devised for this book, The Energy Paradox, was to introduce the concept of mono meals. Now everybody knows that adherence to one form of diet usually works remarkably well for a limited time period. So for instance, there's a low fat diet or a no fat diet that's popularized by Dr. Joel Furman, who we've had on our podcast. There's a carnivore or Adkins diet, which is mostly high protein. There's a ketogenic diet, which in its traditional form is an 80% fat diet. And all of these systems actually have some pretty doggone good results. And I've conjectured in my previous books on how all these wildly different diets, there's a Duke rice diet, where guess what? All you eat is rice. All these different diets seem to have a beneficial effect. And it can't be because of the individual components of the diet. But I've conjectured, and I think I have some evidence in the book, that all of these diets depend on limiting your calorie choices to primarily carbohydrates, primarily proteins, amino acids, or primarily fats. And when you present your mitochondria with just one energy source to deal with, and primarily one energy source alone, then the mitochondria don't have this incredible traffic jam of cars, trucks, and buses all trying to get on the freeway simultaneously, like we have here in LA. So in the program, what I want people to try is their first meal of the day, their break fast. I like them to try to use a mono meal. And the great thing about a mono meal is that you get to switch back and forth. There's absolutely no rules. In other words, you don't have to eat a low fat diet every day to get the benefits. You don't have to eat a high protein diet every day to get the benefits. For instance, if you, let's talk about carbohydrates for instance. So the first meal of the day, your break fast, you could have millet cereal with low fat almond milk. You could have phonio, F-O-N-I-O, which is a little fine millet that you can cook just like oatmeal and have that as your carbohydrate breakfast. You could have a prebiotic shake and make that your mono meal. You can make sweet potato hash browns and just use a little bit of olive oil or avocado or coconut oil spray on one of the safe no stick pans. And that's a mono meal. Now you could have that any of those on Monday. On Tuesday, you could change to a mono protein meal. So you could have scrambled egg whites or you could have an egg white omelet. Now why just the whites? Because the yolk is mostly fat. And so you'd be re, you'd introduce a new element for your mitochondria in a handle. You could have humanely raised ham or Canadian bacon, which is pretty much pure protein. You could have grass finished jerky, which is pretty much protein. If you're a vegan, you can have hemp protein powder shakes or mix some hemp protein powder in a basil seed pudding, which is absolutely fabulous. And so we have all of these options in the book. Now you're wondering why I haven't mentioned fat yet. If you remember, I told you that most of us, because of insulin resistance, can't use fat right off the bat. We can't make it into energy. So what I ask you to do is don't use a pure fat mono meal until after two weeks into the program, then your insulin resistance will fall and you'll be able to use fat. One of my favorites is you cut an avocado in half, take the pit out, put an egg yolk, which is just the fat in both of those holes, throw it in the broiler or toaster oven, pour some olive oil over it with salt and pepper, and you'll be great. Here's another crazy idea. Get yourself a generous slice of triple cream brie or goat brie or goat cheese and have that as your mono meal. It's mostly pure fat. Vegans, like in the book, get a avocado, take the pit out, stuff it with pitted olives, cut olives, and drizzle it with olive oil. You'll love it. So I've found that if you, early on coming out of your nighttime fast, just give your poor overwork mitochondria that are just recovering one macro to deal with as your first meal, you'll find that the ability to make energy really soars. Now, don't add a pad of butter to your forno oatmeal. Please, that will ruin the effect. Don't soak your Canadian bacon in olive oil. That'll ruin the effect and so on down the line. Okay, now I know this is a lot to take in at first, but I promise it actually gets easier and the results will be well worth the wait. Plus, the good news is in the book and on our podcast, I'm here every step of the way. And with that said, I want to wrap up by answering some of your most recent fasting questions and they're all great. So we'll try to get it to as many of them as we can. First question comes from Vol Pecht, who left an iTunes review and said, hello, Dr. Gundre, I love all of your podcasts. I just finished Energy Paradox, another great informative book. I'm having difficulty with the first mono meal. I need more simple ideas for protein, carbohydrates and fats as they become introduced. Should the carbohydrate meal be mostly resistant starches? Should it conclude cruciferous veggies or salad if making sweet potato hash browns? Can I use olive oil to prepare them even though it is a fat? I need a little more direction on the specifics. Thank you for changing our lifestyle for the better. So that's a great question. I think I probably addressed a lot of those questions in what I just said. But you can have any primarily carbohydrate source. If you want to have a bunch of roasted Brussels sprouts as your first meal, go right ahead. If you want to have a salad with just a little spray of olive oil on it as your first meal, go right ahead. If you want to have a sweet potato as your mono meal, go right ahead. The really interesting thing about this is you don't have to be really concerned about whether the starches are resistant, whether they're, for instance, if you want to have pressure-cooked basmati rice as your first meal, it'll work just fine. Do I think you ought to have that every day of your life? No, I'm not particularly impressed with the arsenic content of rice, but that's a whole different story. The point is carbohydrates are really easy to get your arm around. You can have popped sorghum for breakfast as your first meal, and quite frankly, my wife often just has popped sorghum as her first meal and works great for her. The sky's the limit in terms of protein. If you want to have primarily three shrimp as your first meal a day, go right ahead. If you want to have a piece of jerky, go right ahead, like I mentioned. So don't obsess as long as the primary ingredient is just one thing, but great question. Second question, for the energy paradox, how long do I wait between my first meal and my next 30 minutes, one hour, two hours? So, the important thing about all the studies, whether they're human studies or mouse studies, is anything goes, quite frankly, during that window of eating. And it really doesn't matter when you eat during that window of eating, and that in a way is very exciting. So if you're a person who wants to do the mono meal at 11 o'clock in the morning and you feel odd that now you're going to have lunch at one, go right ahead. And remember, the second meal can be an absolutely normal meal. If you want to say, I'm going to have my first meal at 11, and I'm not going to have my second meal till four o'clock in the afternoon, that's fine too. The important part is you can actually eat a full day's calories. You don't have to restrict the amount of food you eat. You just have to restrict the time period that you're eating that food in. So the great thing is you really don't have to go on a diet, which is great. This one's from Treza J. Kirby on Instagram. Hi Dr. G. I just finished listening to the Energy Paradox and loved it. For the controlled fasting, can you break fast at 7 a.m. and start fasting at 3 p.m. to 7 a.m.? Throughout the book, you always stress first meal at 12 1 p.m. Would love clarification on this, please. Thanks and advance. So that brings up a really interesting conundrum. So let me address that in one of two ways. First of all, as you know, I talk about the Ramadan fast. And it's what I call eat, pause, eat. During Ramadan, during the holy month of Ramadan, you have to eat breakfast before dawn. And then you don't eat or drink until after dusk. And that actually makes about a 12 hour fasting window. If you then add in sleep, most practitioners of Ramadan are fasting 20 out of 24 hours every day. So they actually have a 20 hour fast. They get all the benefits that ensue from a time-controlled eating window. So as I talk about in the book, there are a lot of people who just do not want to give up breakfast early in the morning. And if you're one of them, please try my eat, pause, eat system. And try to get a 12 hour window between the two meals that you're going to eat during the day. Now to get to your question specifically, when I was designing this program for real people, I worked with my editor and I said, you know, if I was going to do this for real, I'd really like people to start eating at about 7 o'clock in the morning and finish up about 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and then start their fast period. But working with patients, working mothers, families for over 20 years, it was very clear to me that that system is not doable in our society and to have a life. So if you like to do that, you're really doing it a great way and keep up the good work on that. I shouldn't mention that when I write about what I do during the winter, as most of you know, I eat in a two hour window, the OMAD one meal a day, and that window is from 5 to 7 o'clock at night. Now is that the way I would really design it for perfection? No, but my wife and I both work, that's when we're home, and so that's the most practical way to have a life while eating one meal a day, because if I didn't have a life then instead of OMAD, I would go mad. So that answers your question. Next question. Hi, Dr. Gundry. I'm easily eating within an eight hour window now. At what point should I stop decreasing my feeding window? Are there other ways to keep things up a notch? Well, human studies appear that a six hour window may have the maximum benefit. So that's six hours of eating and that's 18 hours of not eating. I like the idea of not eating better than fasting, but because part of that time period you're sleeping and you're not fasting when you're sleeping, you're not eating when you're fasting. And it just, to me, makes more psychological sense to call it not eating. There, as I mentioned before, a four hour window doesn't seem to add any additional benefit. To me, it makes a lot of sense to try during the week, during the winter months, to even compress that further to one, two hour eating window, but I don't do that on the weekends. So on the weekends I'm back to eating more to about an eight hour window on the weekends. And there's some probably pretty valid reasons that we shouldn't constantly be in a 22 hour fasting window every day, but that's for another day. From Hanin on Instagram, for those who want to gain weight, is it possible to apply the time controlled eating without losing weight? That's a great question. It turns out that one of the overwhelming benefits of time controlled eating is that you will lose weight. And quite frankly, for most people in America, that would be a wonderful thing. However, I have a lot of very thin patients who I've used this program with. As long as you understand that you can overcompensate with the amount of food you eat during that time period, you can keep the weight on. In my practice, I've found that macadamia nuts are number one easy to overeat and get it into your system. The other thing we've gone to is encouraging almost over consumption of resistant starches. And quite frankly, with some of the really great new pastas that are made out of cassava, you are going to get the mouthfeel of what you're used to with pasta. And I've had some thin people very successfully implement this program and still maintain and even gain weight. But for the most part, it's a great weight loss program. Next question. Do you have any advice for pushing through the hunger pains? Well, first of all, long ago, I used to tell my patients to embrace the hunger and welcome it. But now, thanks to the Chinese study that I talk about in the book, I think the secret is prebiotic fiber. And for those of you who haven't read the book, there was a fascinating Chinese study that it's called the gut-centric theory of hunger and that bacteria in our gut want certain things to eat. And quite frankly, the gut buddies want prebiotic fiber to eat. We can't digest it. It's for them. On the other hand, our gang members, as I talk about, want simple sugar and want saturated fats. And we now know they send messages to our brain to seek out the foods that they want to eat. So in the Chinese study, they took men and put them on either a seven-day or a 14-day water fast. The men were given a hundred calories of prebiotic fiber. They couldn't digest the prebiotic fiber. It was for their gut buddies. And lo and behold, if you fed the gut buddies what they wanted to eat, even on a 14-day water fast, they had absolutely no hunger. And here's the other great news. Prebiotic fiber does not count against you during the fasting period because you're not getting any calories from the prebiotic fiber. The bugs are eating it. So I think it's just one of the most exciting parts of doing fasting properly is give your bugs what they want, and they will actually tell you that you're not hungry. And it's amazing what they actually control. Next question from Tony Caltolano on Instagram. I like to work out in a fast, excuse me, I like to work out in a fasted state first thing in the morning. I wake up and have espresso with MCT oil. I sometimes wait until 2 p.m. to have my one meal of the day. I do this about four times a week. Otherwise, my eating window is 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. I feel great, but people think I'm crazy. Should I eat right after my workout? Well, not necessarily. There are very good studies that show if you want to build muscle, then work out, particularly weight lift, resistance training in a fasted state, and then wait about 20 minutes and have both a carbohydrate and protein meal or shake. And this actually stimulates insulin-like growth factor and moves protein into muscles. On the other hand, quite frankly, I think what you're doing is absolutely great. As you know, I do one meal a day during the winter, five days a week, so we're right on track. And the point is you ought to feel great during this. And the whole point of the energy paradox is to show anyone who'll follow that you will feel great. So Tony, thanks for actually confirming. And no, you're not crazy. You're crazy like a fox. Next from Stephanie Nairitz on Instagram. Is intermittent fasting or fasting in general not as beneficial for women as it is for men? Should women fast differently or not fast at all on certain days, depending on their hormone levels and where they are in their cycle? So first of all, if you have an eating disorder or a tendency to an eating disorder, then absolutely fasting, internet and fasting is not for you. If you have an addictive personality, then intermittent fasting is not for you. If you are pregnant, actually I take that back, if you are trying to get pregnant, then intermittent fasting is not for you. And otherwise, even if you're pregnant or just having a regular monthly cycle, intermittent fasting works just as well for women as it does for men. But those are the provisos that you really need to take into consideration. I have a number of women who practice intermittent fasting and thrive with that. So with those provisos, don't be afraid of it. Next question, how does the fasting technique in the energy paradox compare two techniques you've recommended in previous books? How do I know which one is right for me? Well, as I've written about in all of my books, all of them have a discussion in these various forms of instituting, intermittent fasting, whether it's the 5-2 diet, whether it's the time-controlled eating that I talk about in all my books, whether it's the fasting-mimicking diet that's been popularized by my friend, Walter Longo, where you eat a pure vegan diet for five days in a row once a month. And his program, as shown in animals and in humans, mimics the effect of having a limited time window of eating as if you were doing it the entire month. And so there's lots of ways to skin a cat. In this book, I wanted to really concentrate on getting people to a point where they could easily time control their eating window. And the whole purpose of the book is not only to convince you that it's a good idea, which it is, but to hold your hand and get you to a point where this becomes a doable, non-suffering, enjoyable thing to do and you take the weekend off. The great thing about this, you can combine this with, say, a fasting-mimicking diet and have one of the weeks where you're only eating a vegan diet. And as you know, I have recipes in the longevity paradox and in the plant paradox to do just that. We have a five-day fasting-mimicking diet plan in both of those books. So you can mix and match. The purpose of the energy paradox was to really get you the tool to make time-controlled eating enjoyable and doable. And have you not fall flat on your face like so many people do. Next, from Lacey Wilson on Instagram. I've seen some practitioners say fasting can negatively affect hormones and thyroid function. Is that possible? Well, actually, since I follow thyroid hormones, both free T3 and free T4 and TSH and reverse T3, in all my patients every three months, I can tell you one of the big benefits of intermittent fasting is improving thyroid function and improving thyroid delivery to the brain. We see a number of people whose TSH, thyroid-simulating hormone, comes down and down and down during intermittent fasting, which is a great sign. It means your brain says, man, I've got so much thyroid hormone. I don't need to ask for anything more. We also see a number of people have a fall in free T3. And that once again means your body is just this incredible energy-efficient producer. And it doesn't need the stimulation of T3 to do it. So please, this is all over the internet. This is actual patient data for over 20 years. And it does not affect your thyroid hormones. Interestingly, in that Italian athlete study I mentioned, the total testosterone of the time-controlled athletes actually went down, but their free testosterone, which is the active form of testosterone, didn't change. So no, it does not negatively impact your hormone levels. It actually dramatically improves thyroid function. From Erica Gede on Instagram, is it safe to do time-restricted eating while pregnant? Yeah, actually, it is very safe to do that. And one of the exciting things that is coming out of not only rat and mouse studies, but also human studies, is that time-restricted eating dramatically improves your gut microbiome to a much more friendly, anti-inflammatory microbiome. And one of the things that, while you're pregnant, you want to do is you want your microbiome to benefit your baby's microbiome. We now know you have a microbiome in your placenta. We now know your baby has bacteria while they're developing. So you want to give your baby the best possible combination of gut buddies. And intermittent fasting is one of the best ways to do it. Okay, so that's it. It's time for the review of the week. This week's review comes from Jarnale Singh on YouTube who says, thank you, Dr. Gundry. Press 10s together. I have been following you since you first published the plant paradox. I am 37 years old and I got psoriasis from the age of 23. Since I have started following your diet protocols, my psoriasis has dramatically decreased and it's continuously improving. I greatly appreciate your work and wisdom which you are spreading around the globe. I never miss any of your podcasts and YouTube videos. Well, that's a wonderful day here at Jarnale. Thanks so much for your kind words. You know, it's reviews like this that makes a huge difference in how many people we can teach and reach with our message about diet, nutrition and health, which is why you listening to this right now can play a major role in helping other people across the globe transform their health and energy all by rating and leaving your comment or question us on iTunes. You know, I can't wait to read your review soon because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you. We'll see you next week. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you.