Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny—sometimes Colorado! Today is January 5th, 2024. It's hard to believe it's already the New Year. I want to make a quick video because I get asked a lot about this topic, and I figured I’d just do a video to talk about how I think about it and what I do.
Many of you know that I'm a big proponent of intermittent fasting and fasting in general. I'm not exactly a huge proponent or a paragon of health, I should say, and I certainly need to improve my exercise, sleep, and diet. However, one of the things I do with some degree of regularity is extended fasts, and I find it helps me in many different dimensions. It really helps my digestion, lowers a lot of inflammation, and my labs look a lot better. I tend to lose a little bit of weight, but extended fasts aren’t super good for that.
People often ask about my regimen. Currently, the last meal I had was Monday night, and it is now Friday, so I am on day four of an extended water fast. I typically go for about a week; the longest I’ve ever done was two weeks, which was very hard. It does some things to you mentally—you start watching videos of people cooking steaks with butter and things like that. Generally speaking, I kind of have it down to a science for myself, and I wanted to share my regimen for those who are curious. Just as a disclaimer, this is not medical advice. I’m not a nutritionist or a doctor; this is just what works for me, and you guys ask all the time, so I figured I’d mention it.
First off, if you want to learn how to fast, there is a doctor named Dr. Jason Fung. He’s a nephrologist who got really tired of treating diabetics who were close to death's door, and he wanted to find more effective ways for them to lose weight and improve their health. So, he started prescribing intermittent and extended fasting. Through years of trial and error and reading literature, he put together a pretty good curriculum and wrote a nifty book. It’s ten bucks on Kindle, and that’s a doctor’s recommendation on how to do things.
There are dozens of guides floating around, and everybody seems to have strong opinions. The science goes either one way or the other. It is clear, though, that when you switch over from a glucose-based metabolism to a ketone-based metabolism and start operating on ketones principally, you get a lot of cognitive benefits. You’re just a lot faster; your brain works better. When you’re on an extended fast, you also notice your vision gets better, your hearing improves, and your taste and smell get significantly better because your body wants food.
During the fast, there’s a transition that occurs when you go from a glucose to a ketone-based fuel source. You’re burning your fat, and if you’re not careful, you’ll get keto flu. The first thing I do is take these fasting salts. I have the old version, but these are the latest and greatest. Basically, I take about nine capsules a day—three at each meal time: some at breakfast, some at lunchtime, and some in the afternoon before I go to bed. These provide you with all the salts you need to avoid refeeding syndrome, and they also help a lot with headaches and lethargy.
The other thing I do is drink a lot of water. You drink your daily allowance and usually a little more, and I augment that with teas like matcha green tea. Occasionally, I’ll drink some coffee, although I’m trying to cut that down a little bit. When I first started, one of the things that people always had differing opinions on was how to break a fast, especially if you do a week. I’m going until Tuesday next week, so the question is: what am I going to eat? I could never find a definitive answer, so I had to do a little trial and error.
The first thing is to avoid really solid foods. I usually start with something like yogurt, where you have more protein than sugar. Keep the sugars down under 20 to 30 grams per day if you can get away with it to kind of stay in ketosis and gradually get out. I eat some yogurt to restart my metabolism, and generally speaking, you kind of roll into a slow-carb diet. This is something that Tim Ferriss thought a lot about and wrote about in his "4-Hour Body."
There are some really good options, like grilled chicken with red pepper. These are slow carbs, which take a while to digest. They’re not refined, and generally speaking, they don’t spike your insulin. They’ll keep you roughly in ketosis or a little bit out, but you’ll have a mixed metabolism from that. I tend to mix these with a probiotic drink. This won’t get you into ketosis because it has too much sugar, but there’s kombucha and other things. Generally speaking, you want to reset your microbiome and get that going. Slow carbs and green leafy vegetables provide a lot of prebiotics and fiber to reset things, feeding the new bacteria you’re bringing in from both the yogurt and the probiotic drink. I do that for a few days post-fast, and generally speaking, everything gets reset.
What are the benefits? Well, I notice that I lose a lot of water weight. I’ve lost over 10 pounds, about eight of which is water, and I’m starting to chip away at the fat. I have a light exercise regimen that I do—about 30 minutes of cardio, nothing significant. I don’t do any weightlifting while doing extended fasts. What I’ve noticed is that the ratio of muscle loss to fat loss, because I have a scale that can tell me that, is generally about 2 to 1—two pounds of fat for every pound of muscle that tends to deteriorate. You will lose muscle on an extended fast; there’s no way around it. Your body needs that for gluconeogenesis, among other things. Your brain still runs on a little bit of glucose; you can’t completely get off of it.
If you’re not doing it right, generally the ratio is a little worse—like 50/50, one pound of fat for a pound of muscle. There are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat, so no matter how good you are at it, your basal metabolic rate and activity are only so high. The best you can hope for is probably half a pound to 0.75 pounds of fat per day, depending on your size when you get started. So, it’s not particularly appealing for weight loss.
There is a modified diet that combines the best of fasting with the best of not losing muscle. It’s called a protein-sparing modified fast, created by the Cleveland Clinic in the 1970s for type 2 diabetics. Basically, you eat around 1,500 to 2,000 calories of high protein and a few other things, keeping fats low and no sugars. It keeps you in a fasting state and emulates an extended fast, but you have exogenous protein, so you don’t lose muscle. This allows you to stay in the fast for a long period of time. Some people have done this for months. Companies like Ideal Protein sell products that are along these lines, but it came out of the medical community and typically needs to be somewhat supervised because there are some things that can go wrong.
For those of you who ask, that’s what I do. I love the mental benefits and the GI reset; it really prevents all the inflammation. I wear an Oura ring on my right hand that tells me how my sleep is doing, and it’s gotten considerably better over the last six months, so that’s a big win. One of the things I noticed right off the bat is that this used to not easily come off, and now it does. It shows you that the inflammation is way down, the water retention is way down, and I just feel better. It makes your skin a little healthier, among other things.
So, that’s my fast. Again, I’m not a doctor or a nutritional expert; this is just what I do, and it works for me. A lot of people now do intermittent fasting and extended fasting, and there are many people in the Cardano community who swear by it. I get asked all the time, and some people even message me and say, “Hey, are you going to do a New Year fast?” I said absolutely; I’ve got to reset and get things going after Christmas. I think I probably gained 15 pounds, and I’ll lose it all in January.
There are plenty of things you can do coming out of a fast, using it as a way to bootstrap a different lifestyle—either a ketogenic diet, a slow-carb diet, or protein-sparing—especially if your goals are to lose a lot of weight. Some people like to combine fasting with meditative retreats or spiritual experiences because it puts you in a state where you’re a little more open and creative, and you’re more reactive to altered states of consciousness, which are typically connected to the mystical and spiritual.
If you’re interested, I’d highly recommend you read Dr. Fung’s book; he can take you through it. There are all kinds of groups you can join and spend time with. Of course, before you do anything, go see a physician because it’s not indicated for everyone, especially people who have insulin issues. However, it is something that has been with the human race for many thousands of years. Every religion has a fasting tradition. In fact, the Greeks wrote about fasting for cognitive enhancement with the cult of Pythagoras over 2,000 years ago, so it’s been with us for quite some time as a society, and it’s kind of part of the fabric of humanity.
As a final note, a lot of people ask how long you can fast and what the longest fast is. I love this question. They say, “Oh, I don’t know, a month, and then you die,” or “two months, or three months.” It turns out the longest fast was over 380 days—about 382 days. The gentleman who did it was Angus Barbieri. This is a picture of Angus, a big guy who started at about 400 pounds and kept going until he was under 200. It was a medically supervised fast done in Scotland, and the physician wrote a paper about it. Eventually, Angus was doxxed years later, so the paper didn’t reference his name, but they later connected it.
You can see what Angus’s pants used to be and where he’s at now. He came in every week, and they’d take labs. They basically said they’d tell him when he had to stop, and when he got to his goal weight, he stopped. This is a pretty extreme example of how long things can go, so a week’s not so bad in the context of 382 days. Again, I don’t really recommend it. Your ability to do an extended fast is directly connected to your fat reserves. You’ll notice in the picture on the left that Angus is not a small man; he’s quite corpulent. If you don’t have excess fat, it’s quite dangerous to do extended fasts because the only thing your body can eat is your organs and muscles.
You see pictures of people who were in death camps in Cambodia or the Holocaust, and they just have no musculature, whereas Angus didn’t lose that because he was principally on a fat diet. The better way of going about this is replicating the effects of a fast, which is why they have a protein-sparing modified fast. If you’re curious about that, I highly recommend this link to get started. It is from the Cleveland Clinic, a great organization that explains what to know about the protein-sparing modified fast diet. It walks you through how it works, what you do, and the compositions of the foods you can eat. I’ll post a link here from the Cleveland Clinic, and if you’re curious about that, I recommend talking to a dietitian.
All of them should be fairly aware of it, and a great way to get started with a protein-sparing modified fast diet is to start with an extended fast for a few days and then roll into it as you reintroduce food. This tends to reduce a lot of inflammation as well. In any event, cut out the sugars. Thank you, everybody, for listening. I hope this was educational. At least you know what I do. You don’t have to do what I do, but I get asked about it a lot, so I figured I’d make a video. Happy New Year, and we’ll get back to regularly scheduled programming next week. Cheers!
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