Fasting Space

Can you believe it? It is the start of December. We are
heading down the homestretch toward 2026. Are you excited? I am, so excited.
Did you have a good Thanksgiving? I hope so. Did you make it through? Did you have a great experience?
Good morning.
up three, but down eight. Total. So happy. Back on track. Challenge accepted. Love it. All right. So challenge December. Weight loss challenge. That's my theme of the day. If you would like to lose weight in December.
This, is the place I would encourage you to tune in. Stick with me here.
I'll tell you on average, December is the month when, the most people gain the most weight.
holidays a real challenge. And we're heading into, you know, a season. The cold is upon us,
movement levels come down and the good food increases.
And so everything comes together to make it really, really a challenge. So the challenge is real. The challenge to maintain weight, lose weight. Okay. So we are going to combat the challenge with our own challenge. We're going to pull in the opposite direction. We got a lot of forces pulling us over this way. And we're going to say we're going to pull ourselves back in the other direction.
Now anybody coming through says, hey, a challenge that sounds too intense. The whole vibe I'm going for on this channel. Very chill, very relaxed. So if the challenge isn't, you're saying, hey, hang out. Some people can do a challenge. Some people don't have to do it. Sometimes it's enough. I say is just walking along the riverbank, which means like, we're looking at a thing, we're learning about it.
We're hanging around, getting the idea. Maybe that's year December, but if you've been hanging around, you kind of getting the concepts is seeing, where things are going. Then we'll say, okay,
challenge. I'm
fasting space.
I'll just tell you from my vantage point as an internal medicine physician, the most valuable metabolic space that we have in the body. I was a primary care doctor for many years. And what I saw in my practice,
which was very large, thousands of people every month, hundreds of people coming through.
And what I saw say, okay, can we get way out of head of so many of the things that I was trying to help people with the high blood pressure we were talking about the other day, the cholesterol, the blood sugar, the weight,
all these things, when you boil them down, have a metabolic route to them.
And, many things can touch that.
Our food choices, our activity level, of course, involved in this.
But then I came to see our fasting space. Profound additional tool that has been so neglected, in our society. And so I have been on a personal journey myself, moving toward fasting, both personally to do it and understand it, which has been, a great blessing to me personally.
And then expanding the ability,
of this process to help as many people as possible. So, if you're sticking with me here, what you can expect fasting based information and especially practical application. That's what I want to take. Fasting concepts that might sound good, you know, in a paper or that somebody like, you know, plenty of intermittent fasting videos on YouTube, let's say, are like,
just do it.
And it's, so easy and it can just everything will be great. And so, you know, sometimes that can be the case. And I don't want to, undersell it in any way because it is very profound. But the thing that I have found more than anything
is that fasting is a very powerful practice. It can be very intense.
And because it is very powerful and therefore, the way that I always approach it, at least, that I try to do it,
is to approach it in a very thoughtful and gentle way,
not to bring any hype to it, just to see the reality of it that is putting us in this very, very interesting physiologic space.
And also mental emotional space to to drill down right into that center space where it's interfacing. How trained is the body at accessing stored energy out of the body fat?
And then we can mirror that in our life emotionally. What is our relationship with food? Fasting. Giving us a mirror to reflect on this. How much are we using food to deal with emotional stress and boredom and other things?
And how much are we using it for our core, core needs of the body? And then how do we balance this fasting to me, about bringing so many things into balance, physically. Emotionally. So that's where we're going. We are seeing ourselves on a journey, recognizing that a journey of health is a lifelong process.
And when we start seeing it in this bigger fashion, take the pressure off the situation.
And finding joy on the journey. That's what I want the most. Okay, if we're on a journey, we can't develop any kind of mindset that is like, you know what? I'm going to be happy when if when we start saying something like that, that is setting up a lot of bad psychology that actually makes it difficult to get to, the goal of a destination,
we want to be on a lifelong path of health.
So that doesn't have to be a next thing, you know, maybe a coming in. You know, I know I've talked, you know, to so many people, it's always hard to start something new. Maybe you have started many new things in the past and then they don't they don't kind of work out. And then so you say, oh, to invest, you know, my time into something new, to start again.
It always feels like you don't. If you don't do that, then you don't risk being disappointed in something. And so I really I really respect that. That's a big barrier to ever starting something new or changing. But I want to tell you about the path if you're embarking on it now, some people continuing on the path. Anybody new coming in?
Take a big deep breath.
Realize I have a very long term focus. I like to have a long term focus, takes the pressure off things, helps the body more than anything. Ease into a practice. The body strengthens. A big thing I will talk to you about is that fasting is another pathway to bring strength and resilience into the body.
This is something that I really want people, to see. I think in our culture, we have a real misunderstanding of a fasting space. People are told many times in, including, by a medical system, say, oh, you shouldn't fast. Is that not good for the body? Will that, will you be hungry? Could you be weak?
Are you going to be burning up your muscles?
I did a, talk. You see it? A couple of months ago. Fasting can make you strong. And this is what I want more than anything else. If fasting was a pathway to weakness, I tell you, I. I would never personally do it. I have no interest in being weak. I want people strong to see strength and health, vitality flourishing.
These things are all connected. And so fasting, another tool, not the only tool. I talk to you about every good thing, in health, staying active,
and eating the best.
Healthiest, nutritious food, working on our mental health and all of these things that support wellness. That's how you find joy on the journey. We're trying to create
one day.
That is like a beautiful expression of health. I've done a lot of sessions where I've been reading through some more artistic sort of books, where we're talking about
creating things,
and more than anything, I want to help people create a health experience that is a joyful expression of health.
To me, that's a very out of the box that we don't really think of it that way.
A lot of the messaging that is usually given around, you know, a diet path, dieting, like one of the classic, you know, say, ways to lose weight or some exercise program you think about, words might be coming in there like punishing, right. Intense. Like I'm going to just, you know, really hit the gym so hard.
I'm a big, exerciser.
I'm a runner, amongst other things. And, getting psyched up for some cross-country skiing with the snow.
But always that the pathway of exercise also should be a joyful expression. If you are burning yourself out on some exercise process, you can hurt yourself. You're going to be decommissioned if you hurt yourself. Going so more intensely than the body is trained for and emotionally hurt yourself.
Just as much by diving into a process that you're not really, resonating, you know, with your being with the spirit.
So as we're sitting in this space, then say, okay, joy on the journey when you're finding that,
then the days become enjoyable, then the processes, instead of
taking away from our mental health
and building our mental health, that's what we want. Building our capital, the mental capital
we want to be experiencing greater and greater capacity to make the types of decisions that we want that are bringing us along, our journey.
This is one of the things that can make change difficult is like, we've got limited bandwidth up here, and a lot of the reason we get into habits and routines is just to automate a lot of the decisions that we make, so that we don't have to think so much about those, take our limited, attention, to
the decisions, the things that we got to do in our day.
So a big part of the challenge.
Is to prime. We've been going through some psychology texts talking about mental priming effects, about the things that we're encountering, the suggestions that are shaping our assessment of reality, and what is normal.
We're trying to create an environment, the big, movement that we're going toward creating an environment in which it's normal to be feels normal, feels good, feels like a flow state, the space we're trying to get to, a space without struggle where we can just flow in the direction of our goal.
Sometimes I have to use the analogy here on our lake, like a sailboat,
we want that wind to be blowing us in that direction. And so I'm going to give you two quotes today to try to center this, on our challenge.
Kind of set the sail, set the rudder, set the intention.
And I like this kind of,
juxtaposing two quotes like I've been doing.
Here's the first one from Einstein.
We could do worse. I think
if you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal. Not to people and not to things.
Albert Einstein.
So, I really liked this quote, and I think this is a really, thoughtful thing. If we're embarking on a challenge
and we've said we want joy on the journey we're heading, we want to be,
you know, get a vision of yourself here through December.
We said, we've been on this path. We started the life,
every weekday with 82 days,
till 2026. And we've been stepping forward, getting ready for the holidays, planning it out. And then here we are, 31 now, 31 steps.
Continuing with joy on the journey. And we're thinking, okay, just January 1st.
What is going to bring deep joy, meaning satisfaction to our life and January 1st where we can look back
and be seeing like, hey, I really accomplished something,
a goal going to help that people, okay, we can help people,
but we don't want to source our happiness and people, right? Because, you know, that's going to
as a be a gamble and it'll be a gamble
and and things.
So I just love this because a big connection that I try to make here on the channel,
fasting a process more than anything to me about building a mental and emotional state of peace and contentment. A very, very valuable, space to have something that isn't a big focus in our society or our culture. I often describe, this culture as consumption culture, everything,
focused on more and bigger, better, more expensive, like all these things, a lot of keeping up with people and appearances and these things to me, fasting, taking us out of that, finding inner peace and contentment is what a lot of consumption is.
Trying to do, and that can be with buying things, or it can be with food and energy. That's where we get into the relationship with food that we're going to consume our way to happiness in some fashion. So maybe if we think of this quote like food is another thing, obviously we need it. This is the balance we have to eat.
Fasting is the balance to these things. So we want a happy life. And within that happiness, like Einstein is saying, okay is also peace and contentment and satisfaction.
That should be the goal more than a number on a scale. All right. This is, this is where I try to say. And I try to avoid numbers a lot.
I'm not too big on numbers. Numbers can stress people out. And, you know, I read the song numbers, a few weeks ago. I just love that lyric. There's always a number that can make you feel bad about yourself.
it's a maybe there's a number that can make you feel good about yourself, too, but I want to help us draw back from that.
Our happiness
in life not just come from numbers, okay? We're not trying to set up anything like that. We want to be very, very thoughtful.
Health and especially emotional health, I say, is like the very, top priority.
So pick the goal. Now I picked 5 pounds. Is the goal.
Intentionally,
for a couple reasons. And, you know, you can set a different goal,
as much. But I picked five because most people, when they think, at least in my talking, see what you think
when I talk to many people, how much weight two people want to lose, you know, sometimes they get the number, say, you know, I want 30, I want 40.
Know you have to this big thing. And maybe in the big picture it's it's more okay, but sometimes I bring it all the way down. When I was doing this, I thought about picking one. I say 1 pound weight loss in December, you know, also be perfectly great.
if you can get any amount of weight loss, this is this would be the goal. Sometimes I say one.
When I'm in, in my personal counseling with people one on one, I say, what if you lost 1 pound a month from now
and
you were not stressed out at all about the situation?
You had a good time, and you understood why it happened, and you could replicate that. And and especially if you did it in December
was the most difficult month, to lose weight.
And then you can build off that. So whether it's 1 or 5,
ended up going with five because it's like a little bit of a stretch. I mean, it's a challenge.
You say that, be it just a little over a pound a week, to me that would be pretty great. So this is kind of be like a stretch goal.
Now people can use fasting very intense. You can hit fasting very, very intense. You can lose more than a 5 pounds. In a month. It can be done. But I usually this is kind of the max of what I have people shoot for, because I want more than anything for a process to be joyful and sustainable. And especially if you're new to it.
I don't want people to hit things too hard where they burn out because they absolutely you can burn out. I, define fasting just as a process of openness. And so an openness should be always 100% voluntary, under no coercion or stress of any kind, more like an exploration. And so to me, a,
five is low enough that it's not overwhelming.
Like ten can be very overwhelming. Oh, man. Like for many people it would be,
and five much more than one now where it's like real, you know, one,
you can't really see it. Like, if you were on a sustainable path, like, let's say I'm losing 1 pound in a month.
If it's within margin of error of a scale almost, you know, so like December lost a pound in January a pound, you see.
Well we're getting toward February and then, then we're starting to see it. Yeah. It's it's real because, you know, there's daily fluctuations of these things. And you know, over the course of a year you march that out and you say -12 over a year, you had a 95% of people just with 1 pound in a month. So we can see that's very stable.
And and if you're finding joy on a journey that can be good enough in, in a long term process, even at minus one in a month, be so positive. If it's not stressing you out, it's bringing joy and simplicity, and decreasing stress to life. Okay, that would be perfectly great.
Five more fun a stretch goal. So if you if you really get in, you dial in on it.
Do you find it fun and exciting? The challenge I like the quote.
shoot for the moon and end up in the stars? Okay, so, you know, if you shoot for a five, like we said, we got forces pulling us in one direction with creating some forces pulling us in the other direction.
If you sent out on a minus five goal and you end up
neutral by the end of December, so that would also be a win. So nobody has to feel bad for not,
hitting any target you set for, say, this is tool trying to give us inspiration, an encouragement, a goal to bring happiness, like Einstein says, not a goal, to to bring stress or burden of any kind, if you see what I'm saying.
But if you really are going to dial in on five.
Is it. This is this is a sort of thing. The rudder on the sailboat here. Let's look at this next quote to compare
with Einstein. So this one looked without goals and plans to reach them. You are like a ship that has set sail with no destination.
really love that quote.
That's kind of when I found that one, I was like, oh, this sounds like the type of thing I, say where we're trying to get in the flow with the sailboat, set the rudder in the right direction,
so to me, a goal is like, this is where we're going setting the sailboat in a way we're not.
We're trying to catch the wind and flow in a direction.
So to me, I love these two quotes together.
Say finding the goal and then also the plan. Like if they have a goal but no plan, no functional plan that, works. That can be a very, very frustrating, place.
you know, I definitely want to flow into that place today, say, okay, we've got a challenge.
We can see that we're setting up this, emotional space. Hopefully it's an exciting space and a curious space and exploration that will help us move toward, goal or process,
keep us on track. You know, so many distractions in our holiday space, so much food, so much stuff that maybe isn't, you know, so healthy isn't going to take us in a direction.
Here is something you can hang onto.
A challenge, a goal. Something you can talk about. Say I am on a weight loss challenge, something to keep yourself accountable. If you really want to move toward it, say how am I going to keep myself on track when our sailboat is like we're sailing through? Like,
rough waters,
You say, oh, my family coming over, everybody sending me cookies and things.
You know, this is a real, challenging space. That's a rough waters in our sailboat.
The challenge can keep us on course. If you say, hey, if I really want to hit my goal,
what is the actual path to do it? So let's, dive in and do some thinking about it.
There is not one path, and I think this is a thing that is, can be frustrating for people with a weight loss process of any kind. And and people know this, right? There's different paths to lose weight. Some people say I want to exercise my way to weight loss, which can be done.
And it it can especially be done,
if
you have the energy, ambition and desire to do it and you don't get hurt.
You know, I've met a lot of people that maintaining the weight for a long time, the exercise path only they say I gotta keep exercising because I, you know, I don't want to stop eating.
I know a lot of people like that, and that can work for a long time until the motivation fades or the injury happens, and then we're still at this place where it's like the relationship with food has not been dialed into balance, and then it can be a very difficult space.
My preferred pathway say, let me look at all the tools we got the exercise path. Love it. Very good. We got our healthy eating path, something we want our challenge to really dial in on. How do we balance the the very,
very positive aspects and abilities of food to help us connect with other people and enjoy an experience, especially a holiday?
I hope you are able to do that over Thanksgiving like we have to have that and then we have to have like the core nutrition. So that's another dial. And then here's the fasting dial.
So we got these three dials. And really there's like the in other dial of just our whole mental health experience. Sometimes I say maybe the path we need to walk down first dealing with some other, you know, trauma emotional issue.
We did a session, deep session on that the other day. The most important question in weight loss, which might be, you
getting to the deep emotional issues.
Go check that one out. What I see, if I start talking about that and I'll dive off on that the whole time.
The fasting dial is where I have people start, because to me it's the base layer.
It's the most stable.
You want to exercise yourself to weight loss. I'm all for it if that's your calling. Takes a lot of work, a lot of work. A pound, of body fat, 3500 calories in 1 pound of body fat. Body fat is energy for life. It's power for the body. And so often we look at it and we say, I don't like this.
This is not a good thing. We have anger and resentment about it because it can be so difficult to get rid of. We don't look at it from the other side, which is to say that the body cares for us. There's another huge message I want to communicate on the channel. Body is not broken,
even though it can feel that way.
It is contributed by the fact that the medical system labels obesity as a disease creates this
experience of being broken. If someone tells you you're diseased,
that is a that is just you internalize that and and I've just come to see that so many people tried, you know, from the medical, establishment is trying to be thoughtful, don't have any, anger or resentment toward anyone trying to do that, trying to reduce stigma,
around weight issues is something I'm very in favor of.
I very, very much am, to me, the most kind, compassionate and medically accurate and helpful way to do that is to recognize that body fat is a natural part of the body, that the body loves and cares for us. It is encountering more energy than it needs and it has stored that energy to try to help us to take something that is difficult, that it didn't need, and turn it around into a resource that can help protect us and give us energy.
When we've done some sessions, like I did that one The Hidden History of Obesity, about,
we get back into deep history before the industrial revolution. You start to look at the experience of being a human being on this planet. And the great difficulty and how much of our ancestors
struggling on the brink of starvation, like we talked about the Thanksgiving story
pilgrims, you know, people that came in that a large majority of them died in the first year of the starving to death.
And so here we are coming into Thanksgiving, finding the abundance of food. We talk about the incredible abundance of food that we have now in this society. We find immense gratitude that we are not in, such a
difficult situation, at least collectively. Recognize that even in this land, in time of immense abundance, so many people, struggling with food insecurity, even now,
try to open up a space in that fasting space.
To me, fasting about openness, one of the things that it can be open to is just open to this the struggle of our our fellow human beings, both historically and now, right here in our communities.
so as we get into that space.
Fasting space, this would be a pathway to, to really dial in on, the direction that we're going.
Like I was saying, okay, base layer, we're taking all this history, all this context and saying within that, okay, body fat is energy for life.
It's specifically for the times in life where we have run out of other food. And this is the very, very great difficulty, that we have with dieting in our culture.
Dieting.
Tell me your experience be so frustrating for so many people because it sets up some really, really perverse, psychological situations. I describe dieting classic dieting as,
lose weight by continuing to eat all the time.
And when you look at it that way, you start to realize like, oh, like, here's a really difficult situation. We're putting the body and body has stored body fat for us to power the body in the absence of food.
That's the whole thing. So that we don't starve. Like as we get into this deep history body, hasn't it basically an open ended time frame on that body
is you can know it will say body fat for decades
is a what if seven years from now is, you know, when the famine strikes, that's what the body is thinking.
What if a decade from now, the brutal winter is happening and we're going to need this? The body can save it for us.
And then we have the perspective. We say, well, I want this gone now. You know, I want this gone by next month.
And then the way our society approaches that.
Is to say, well, calorie restrict without fasting means food is always coming in, but there's no fasting space. And so the body looks at that
and says, well, this is this doesn't make sense. We're not getting enough calories
to meet our metabolic needs. But there's always food around here. And hormonally that's keeping our insulin level raised. Insulin telling the body you can't access the body fat.
So now the body is in a rock and a hard place. It's like, we're not quite getting enough energy, no fasting space. This is what can
lead our metabolism to slow down. And this is why people can plateau for so long in weight loss processes without losing any weight. And it can be so frustrating and not power levels to say, hey, I've cut my diet way back.
I'm doing this dieting space and it was working, but now it's not working.
And then people bring judgment on themselves. Well, I'm just not doing it good enough. You know, when when in many cases a standard diet can't work in the long term? In many ways.
And the other way it sets up a difficult situation is people love to eat meals, eating meals. One of the most enjoyable things that we do. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving meal or three. You know, like
just the most enjoyable way to connect with friends family
when you're dieting now, it sets up a real problem because it's like you're supposed to be cutting way back your meal, supposed to be smaller, you're always eating less than you want,
and that is a very frustrating space to be in, especially if it's not working because it's like, oh, I'm eating less than I want.
Like we're not really enjoying ourselves as much as we wish we would,
but then you could always be eating less. And here's the real psychological kicker is
you're dieting. You're not having the results. You want. You're not
really enjoying food, then it's not working. And it's like you can always be less. So people end up restricting on the calories harder and harder.
But never fasting,
okay? Fasting creates
so many,
beautiful resolutions to these psychological, processes that says, I gave up on dieting. I'm establishing a lifestyle. This is what I want. This is what I want to share with people, develop a very thoughtful, positive, healthy, happy, content lifestyle. Fasting can be part of that.
Fasting traditionally be viewed. Oh, that is so restrictive.
It's so restrictive that that can't be fun. That can't be enjoyable. I couldn't like that.
When the opposite is the case
for many people, when you learn to do it. Because look at look at the psychology of it. I'm saying you can't be more aggressive than fasting. Like to eat nothing for a period of time, can't get more aggressive than that.
And so actually to practice that, to realize I'm giving this
what are we, 100% on this dial, the fasting dial. There's literally nothing else I could do that is more aggressive than this. That's actually very satisfying,
You see, like you can feel pretty good about that. Like I am giving my body the complete freedom to access the body fat.
And so this is the way I try to have people turn it around and look at it. Don't look at it as restriction and life. Look at it as freedom to the body, giving a gift to the body, giving freedom to the body. Hey body, look at this. You don't have to run all these digestive processes. We're going to give you a break.
Shut down that GI system, turn the resources. You got the energy right there. You've been saving it. And body be like, are you kidding me? Like, okay, we do that, we will. Or shut this down, we'll start accessing the body fat and then the body can release that energy that is like fasting. Read, a love that.
No way. I'll give up enjoying some specific food. Absolutely. And why should you have to? Like. This is what I say. Fasting is a process that can bring balance to our eating. And this is what we want. We want to be able to enjoy food, has it in its proper place, and have practices that balance this out and especially the fasting practice, without having to work so hard at it.
This is why I consider fasting the base layer, because it does not take any physical work to do, and in fact it frees up a lot of work. Less shopping, less cooking, less cleaning. Okay, in an open space.
And so when you bring down that intensity,
you come to see like, oh, hunger is a hormonal process, controlled in large measure, not genetically, not that we are just programed to be hungry in some certain way, but by our habits and patterns.
And that these can change over time, not instantly, but over the course of weeks to maybe months, depending on the person. That's why we give the body time and space to open up and adapt to it,
to strengthen. You know, if you're never a weightlifter, you're you are a very deconditioned. You don't walk into a gym and pick the biggest weights and just, you know, burn your, self out, pull a muscle, injure yourself.
Just like fasting, say, fasting. Not anything I ever did, not something I am skilled at. You started a small space and open it up and the body will respond over time and grow in its ability to do that. And and we've talked in the past about how to you can dial that down to even tiny increments of minutes over time.
And then of course,
we expand that. So to me, fasting,
most people on average go 12 hours, 10 to 12 hours. Is some someone finished eating dinner at seven at night and, and let's say they don't eat before bed, which I highly recommend. That's the beginning of fasting. Taking out a bedtime snack after dinner is opening up a couple more fasting hours, and then go around till having breakfast at seven to say, well, that is a pretty normal amount of fasting in a day.
And then we say breakfast. Breaking the fast in the morning, say we got 12 hours without food. Body did fine in that space, right? Body knows how to handle that. So the the lowest, barrier to entry to fasting for most people is to extend that fasting interval in the morning. You can extend it on both ends. You know, if you're having a bedtime snack, fasting to start can be just as simple as getting late, eating out of your life, and opening up some more space on the back end.
Maybe that's the easiest. Some would say oh would be very difficult to to change breakfast time, but I've got some late eating, so maybe we we dial that out. Yes. Is taking calories out and yes that matters. That is important. But more important thing calories really to me is like like we've been through this whole, era in health and weight loss.
That is, I would call the calorie era, right? Where everything is calories. Everything is boiled down to numbers. If we had to track a number, though,
I would not choose to track calories. I would choose to track food for hours.
if someone is normally having 12 hours, to me much more important to track like, oh well, now we've gone from 12 to 13 hours and then 13 to 14.
To me, that is a much more, effective thing to track than like, oh, you know, we we knocked out 100 calories here and then 100 calories here. Because what we're really trying to do is change the hormonal environment in the body.
People, people are so dialed in on calories, they don't realize hormones control how calories are processed in the body.
And
we want to change that. Very few ways to do that. The few ways are the things that we're talking about. You can change that through exercise, can change it through our food choices. And then people having appreciated fasting, one of the most powerful ways to actually change the hormonal state in the body, trying to reset things, especially insulin.
So the the big metabolic,
problem in our society today is, is insulin resistance. And one of the big reasons we have that is because we're overloaded on simple processed carbohydrates, and we don't give the body space without food coming in so that it can shut down these processes and come back into balance. So the longer we go without eating, the more we allow the insulin level to drop.
The more we allow insulin resistance to reset. Sometimes this is not really how it works in the body, but it's a useful analogy to kind of get the idea. I think about, you know, I do a lot of gardening sort of stuff and, you know, even with, the gloves on, I've got these calluses on the hand.
Right. So the more work you're doing with your hands, right, the more the calluses you will get. Now,
that's like insulin is doing its work on the cell. And so if we keep hitting the cell with insulin, insulin, insulin, it's like building up a callus. Right. So where the calluses is less sensitive we get that right. And so just like the cell you think oh the insulin is always hitting it.
Building up a callus is sweat sensitive.
But if we were giant gloves and
we got manicures all the time and, you know, we just gave it beautiful space, we never did any work, okay? The calluses would go away. It's like the cell if we give the break to the cell.
So you don't have to do any work now. Like you're not getting flogged with insulin all the time. Those calluses that we're describing are going to go away. And so you start getting that, you start to get out 14, 15, 16 hours. You're starting to get into the space at that point where the body really can drop that insulin level and you can start to reset insulin resistance.
So to me, as we're talking about the challenge, how do we actually walk through a space like this in December. Try to lose 1 pound. Oh in a week.
The starting point
try to get towards 16 hours. So the ways to do that usually looks like an idea of going from three meals in a day to two meals in a day.
So numbers that are important to me, not so much about calories. I say food free hours would be, one great way to track it. The other way to say is just how many times do we eat in a day?
A lot of people eating three, four, five, six, seven times in a day. And so I'd say that would be like meals and snacks. And so this can be even a simpler thing to count as opposed to food free hours, because then it maybe you got to write, okay, what time did I eat? And then we get just how many times did we eat in a day?
Many times in nutrition counseling. In, our modern, understanding people are told, oh, you need to keep eating in order to keep your metabolism going. And we've spent time talking about how we have gotten into this, space.
And maybe we can unpack that if people want me to talk through that, again in the future, let me know.
And we can we can, dive further.
But reducing the number of times we're eating, I tell you, it's very hard to follow
standard recommendations. Keep eating all the time to keep your metabolism going. It's very hard to eat less
when you're eating more times.
Very hard to get fewer calories when you're eating more times. This is how we get into this standard dieting framework, where people eating little bits of all the time, but never as much as they really want, never really satisfied.
That is the schedule, perversely, that creates hunger. So hunger is
in response to meals. This is how the pattern develops. Hunger is about patterns. And what patterns says here. Eating on the same schedule every day has been the most helpful. And I would say I completely agree. And many people experience that. And the reason for that is that hunger is based on patterns.
So a barrier to a fasting process, you say, okay, you're going to open up some fasting space. You feel hunger. That would be the obvious barrier.
And I can't tell anybody that you need to
move toward a fasting space. You won't experience some amount of hunger. Sure, that you will.
I've got a series, and the non live, side of the channel, the regular video channel hunger series, where I talk through a whole bunch of videos
on hunger and, dealing with it.
If you're struggling with hunger, I encourage you go through that series.
But the basic idea is this is that hunger is based on patterns
because we don't appreciate how much work the body does for us in our food processing. You know, we just eat food, we think we're done. But then but the body is like, okay, it tweaks 12 hours on average to process, anything that we eat.
And so
okay, you eat something and body's like, man, we're going to be working for a long time and it's busting all that food up into atomic particles, bringing it into the body, sterilizing it, organizing it, sending it where it needs to go. And it's it's a lot of work to do that. And there's a lot of, you know, to be honest, dangerous chemicals the body uses to bust this stuff up.
Think of, like eating a steak. It's like, you know, just like us, right? So if it can blow a steak into pieces, obviously could blow us into pieces. That's how. That's what is happening when you get a stomach ulcer, right? Body's literally those acids and enzymes are busting a hole in you. And so body has to keep all that stuff very tightly controlled and regulated.
And so the whole digestive process controlled by hormones very tightly,
the body doesn't just keep, you know, acid storage tanks. It makes the stuff on demand.
part of the way it does that okay. Hormones
assessing our eating patterns. And they're saying, oh, we're kind of a person that eats around this time
takes 20 30 minutes.
To make these, hormones and processes.
So body starts that process getting everything ready.
And then when everything's ready, then body says, hey.
We have got this system ready for food processing. This would be an optimal time to eat. That's what the message of hunger is
under most circumstances, unless
you have a blood sugar problem, your blood sugar crashing. Okay, you want to stay far away from that, then, you know, you gotta eat to get that up.
But under most circumstances, the way the physiology is supposed to work in the body, you know, we interpret hunger as like, I'm running short of critical energy.
You have to eat now in order to function and be healthy
when the reality is that, say, I have more, stored energy than I want, there's plenty of energy there. But we just have to create the environment where we can tap in and actually use it.
So when we are feeling hunger is saying, we think you're going to be eating now,
but we can say no, we can say, hey, actually I would like to use some of this stored energy. This is how we're working on the fasting part of our path. Then the body is like, like, well, okay, we'll put these chemicals back away.
And then that, that is the doorway
into the body,
releasing the energy. Say, what is the key that unlocks the metabolism? What is the key that opens up the door to body fat so that we can just use it and we're not fighting against the body. It's like fasting is like that doorway. Or say if there's always food coming in, he is locked.
Body says, we're going to keep that stuff in the cold storage. You start opening up a fasting space. Body is like, oh, we can put the digestive stuff away. I don't have to run that now. This is what I call riding out the fasting wave. Have you ever experienced this? Maybe even without planning for it?
in our society, people not often just going on a fasting path.
It's kind of you got to have a little different mindset to be able to lean into it.
Most people do it accidentally say, oh, I was prevented from doing it. I got busy with 20 different things at work and I was going to eat lunch, but then this meeting and this thing happened and this thing, and then all of a sudden it was 3:00 and then I never ate.
And most people experience something like that
on occasion. And at that point they're no longer hungry. Then you get to 3:00, but you're not hungry because it's not fitting the pattern. If you had not been distracted, if you had not been overwhelmed with 20 different things and you had sat there at noon, you would have gotten hungry. Those hormones came out.
They were there, but other things took priority. And so then what you see in a space like that is like, oh, this very interesting experience. Actually, here I was in a flow state. I was just working where on my mind was on a different level, right outside of time. That's the flow state. We kind of lose our connection with time a little bit.
All these lesser priorities kind of floated away. And that just shows you like, oh, I floated through that space. I didn't actually need the energy. Like if you had not been in that state, you would have eaten lunch and you wouldn't have thought about it.
But actually then the pattern you got out of it, you were fine.
You didn't need the energy after all. And then you're going to get hungry again at dinner. And because then you're going to get back in that pattern. And this is what Pat is going to like, saying a lifestyle where I'm just a person that eats at these times. This is what can totally structure in the process
when we're talking about fasting freedom, right, about giving freedom to the body to access the energy, the other side of that that we're talking about is freedom from hunger.
People say, well, the barrier to access to fasting is feeling hungry. Okay, true. But then the paradox of it is that the process of actually gaining control over hunger, fasting is basically training. The body
we eat at these times is where you say, well, is it a discipline? Is it a regimen? These are words that I don't write.
Resonate with from a standpoint of anything that puts pressure on people.
But when you see it as this is the process that gains control over it, that gives freedom from hunger, that limits hunger,
then you can start to see it as very positive when you realize, oh, I'm not forcing some arbitrary structure on the body and giving my body a scaffolding to operate off of that actually works with the goals that we're having.
So for most people, the way that it works best,
to start fasting is to fast in the morning, as most people say, if I could grab a cup of black coffee, very present and no calories keeps me in a pure fasting space. Caffeine, a natural appetite suppressant, say, hey, I can float through a morning with just coffee and feel pretty pleasant.
I often call,
coffee contentment in a cup.
What we're trying to do in a fasting space, right? More than anything, just find contentment without food or space.
Or at least tolerated. If the goal is contentment, like just to make it through. Let's say I'm not perfectly content, but it's, you know, we are using fasting aids. Coffee. A big fasting aid could be tea, dishwater.
I've got a fasting aides video. Other fasting aides use a crutch. Help train your body in that space. The first time is always the most difficult to open up. Any amount of fasting space. Say someone is like, oh, I have been doing a 1608 for a long time. If you're super new, okay, people say 16 eight is like eight hours of eating 16 hours without food.
It's basically like, you know, a brunch or a lunch and a dinner, depending on when you time it gives, you are eating window of 6 to 8 hours.
That says, I find I can schedule hunger to happen during times I'm most able to tolerate it. This has taken time to build. Yes, exactly. This is the the thing I love that that is really, really a nice practice schedule. The hunger. When can you tolerate it? What are the practices that help you get through it and use it?
That's a training program, just like any athletic process. Hey, I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to train myself to be stronger in this domain. People even understand that. You say, it's like I got to do some work on that area. Here is a different type of work fasting, not a physical work, mental or emotional work that we train ourselves to do, but it is physical in the body to it's just
the body has to do it.
We don't consciously do the work. As we open up the fasting space. The body is doing the process
to say, hey, like, look, we got this fasting space here. We haven't built out the pathways to easily access this energy. And the more we practice it, the more the body will respond. Build out those pathways. So part of the reason that fasting gets easier over time, like Pat says, that that takes time to build.
The practice is that is that the body changes and adapts. It gets better at it, it gets stronger, it gets better able to access the stored energy. So if you think about a weight loss process, you know, what really is it? It's a program of helping the body to get better at accessing the energy. And then by some means, right, we're using that energy.
Either we're exercising it out, exercise, exercise, burn up the energy. We're opening up a space.
The body is always using energy, even just sitting in a room. I always tell people with fasting, you gotta walk before you can run and then you've got to be able to sit before you can walk. So just to sit in a space, body's like a furnace.
It's 98 degrees in here at 70 degrees out here, you know.
it's always running. And we want to be, using that energy.
So as we're setting out, okay, a challenge.
Open up enough space between these dials. I say start with a fasting process. Maybe that's getting to 16 hours.
You know, eating at ten and then six.
Maybe we tighten that up to meals, new insects.
We can keep that process going. The tighter you make the windows between two meals, the more space you open up on the other side. So even with the same amount of calories, you have a more powerful effect by opening up a greater space. And then eventually you can merge that into one meal.
one meal a day, eating doesn't have to be every day could be every day called on that one meal a day eating very, very powerful weight loss process. Opening up more and more space, eating one meal, then you're you're doubling up the effect. Because where you eat less calories in one meal than in two, almost undoubtedly, almost undoubtedly.
But then we're opening up a huge amount of food free space where we're changing the hormonal structure. So those are the two places I have people, work the most. What I call simple fasting is basically those two things can include the very edge of, simple fasting, opening up a whole fasting day. And we can talk about that once you open up like a multi-day fasting.
To me, that heads out of simple fasting. That's like advanced fasting, which also has incredible benefits in the body. But I try to just focus on this simple end, because that's you get the most bang for your buck out of this process.
Once people are in a space where they're like, I can handle some amount of fasting,
that's like the base layer, then we're adding in.
That often helps the second down, which is
our food choices. Okay. If we are opening up more food free space and we've got all that space locked down. So, hey, I'm just not eating anything in that period. All the decisions are made.
We got our eating window.
It simplifies things so much.
when when we're eating all the time, when there's no
structure or frame to it like that. We could be eating like, you know, a breakfast and then a snack and a snack can happen multiple times, and a lunch and dinner and more snacks and other things. It's like there's so many decision points that you have to make a healthy thing, an unhealthy thing, a tree to something better.
Okay,
think how much simplicity we bring to the process. Say I eat a meal at this time. We gotta make that decision of what we're going to eat. I eat a meal at this time. We make that decision. We basically have to make two decisions. We take our total decisions from like almost infinite, where we could be eating at any point, and we like way shrink it down,
and it's enough to make those specific decisions.
Greatly simplify things, greatly bring the pressure down.
During omad until Thanksgiving. But this week I'm allowing myself two meals and then a meal and a snack and getting back to Omad next week,
avoiding discomfort and frustration. As much as I can see, I really love that process. Fasting can be very flexible. So
the schedule, we say if that's a regimen, say that can definitely serve you.
But it doesn't have to be the same all the time.
You want to lean into things hard or leaning into a nomad process for a while, and you back off around a holiday. Totally a great way to do it. And then here you build it back up,
one meal plus snack, heading back toward home. And this is the balance.
So there's nothing magic about eating at the same time. The main benefit, like we said,
is that it can get you, in a space where the hunger lines up with when we're actually eating. So then we limit the hunger as much as possible as the practice to try to get control of a hunger craving. The other side of it is, the more you experience it as you practice it, you come to just realize what's happening physiologically in the body.
You're like, oh, I think I'm feeling hungry.
You come to reinterpret that? See, I see that there's this hormonal experience happening in the body. Body is kind of trying to run this digestive system. But I've been here before. This will pass. And that feeling, then you can start to see that go through. That feeling is the path you keep energy from flowing in.
You keep the insulin down. And that is another door to entry into the space. Oh, my body will shut this down and will open up access to the body fat. And when you can have that mindset to helps to build mental strength and resilience, realize, okay, I'm here in this space, I can make it through this. And this is giving a gift of openness to the body.
Can I help keep more energy from coming in? Yes. Creating a negative calorie balance is a good thing,
doing it within the can strict of a fasting space is what allows the body. Then without not to get into this restricted space where it might slow the metabolism down in response to the fewer calories. To say, well, we can open the door to the fat storage and then we can use,
that energy.
And so that's what we try to balance in this space. How much of it do we need or want
desire. That's the that's the really the mindset of fasting. Not like, oh, I'm going to be just pushing this on myself. I'm going to struggle it out. But like, how do I open up and give my body this opportunity, give my body a gift?
That's the balance. The more you turn that dial, the stronger the effect.
but the more the dial is turned, the more the intensity. And so that's like increasing their weights. You know, if you're trying to bench press and is like more time on fasting, be like putting more plates on the rack, you got to build up the strength to be able to do that.
So maybe that's what December can be for you in this, space, if you like the idea of the challenge, if you say, I like the idea of moving toward it, say, how can I just slowly increase and that dial
to dialing in on the fasting dial can take so much pressure off in so many other areas.
The decision fatigue of having to make so many other, decisions and choices. Okay, we can take that pressure off by tightening in on that eating window.
Then when we're eating, you don't have to feel restricted in that space. It is not a dieting meal. When you have a nice,
enjoyable, delicious, satisfying meal. And so most people make that a dinner meal because that's when most people are connecting with friends and family.
So try to keep your main eating at the time when you're connecting with the most people like whatever your lifestyle is with people. Most people like the fasting window in the morning because it can be just so warm to just have a coffee, get up, you know, and either if that's by yourself or even if other people are having breakfast, most people don't really care or say, I'm just having a coffee this morning.
And then you can connect in over coffee. So nice. So socially that's like the easiest
dial the eating and then you're getting the most benefit from,
the food, both in the emotional social space and in the physical space.
And that takes the pressure off. We're so far away from this dieting mindset of, like, always restricted little bits, never having enjoyable food experiences.
Even every day. I tell people even something as aggressive as omad where it's like we're going to huge amounts of fasting space every day. You still have a it's not a dieting meal and
big, satisfying meal. Then the middle dial we haven't talked about as much. You know, it's trying to limit our processed carbs, but like, you know, do any kind of low carb meal, you're getting some protein source of veggies not limited on fat content can have, you know, rich, satisfying foods.
Very satisfying. And then you get in a groove of that. Then you see we're bringing balance to our day's enjoyable food experience, powerful fasting space happening, in the same day.
Once you're in a groove like that, you know, then you start adding in the exercise. That's the progression that I have. People go get off the balance with some fasting space first, and then within that structure,
Then we flow into our food choices. We dial in on the healthiest food choices. And then from that space,
now, in that space, I can start gently bringing in some exercise on top of it.
You pair all those things together. Holy cow. Now we are talking about some serious, weight loss power.
Because when we start exercising in that space, the most difficult space to exercise in a fasting space think we're putting all the burden of the metabolism and the exercise onto the storage system. So I tell people, you want to be very, very gentle to do that. I tell people, you gotta sit before you can walk. So you're in a fasting space, you're just sitting around and you're having your coffee.
Once that starts to feel okay, then the next step kind of walking, right? So we're doing some walking.
Now there's no food around. There's nothing else to burn but the storage.
Open up the walking space. Walking level activity. That's where I would,
say,
is,
the place to start with that.
The sky's the limit as far as exercise. You know, the way most people do it in our society
is they they start with the exercise path, and then they try to hit that so hard, and then they reverse things down the other way, and then they're adding some amount of food,
modifications or dieting process and then barely any concept of fasting, really.
in my experience, what I would say the path of least resistance really is to turn that around, dial in an amount of fasting space first. Get more comfortable with that. The goal ultimately would be to be comfortable with it. I will tell you my experience personally, as someone who has been practicing fasting personally for over ten years.
I'm very comfortable with it. I like it and I didn't always feel that way. It was. It was one of the more difficult things, that I've done.
Initially, and especially that was the case because I didn't have, you know, any community or connection of people saying, hey, this is actually okay, you're going to be okay.
I think it really would have helped me if someone to be like, oh, you're gonna you're going to adjust it. You know, six months from now, you're going to be feeling great.
And not that it takes six months to feel better. I mean, a lot of people. What is your experience been if you've never done fasting before and all of a sudden you're doing it a couple weeks, most people, you realize, oh, the energy is higher.
Like I'm feeling better. I'm not. I'm feeling more mental clarity, like there's all these other benefits, but specifically it's the hunger effect. I get through feeling hungry when you've always been told in your life, oh, hunger is bad. Is something bad is happening to you? If it's like you need to listen to your body is telling you you need to eat, then you can feel guilty for not doing it.
And then I'm like, oh, am I doing something bad? You kind of got to do your own work to, get through that and realize now, like,
I can see this is actually giving a gift to the body. This is okay.
Especially as I was saying, I told a story on the channel, before, you know, I was becoming very unhealthy as a medical resident, just, you know, binge eating carbs down in the hospital cafeteria and chronically sleep, sleep deprived.
And I gained a lot of weight and see, I had so much struggle to lose that, which was so frustrating because I was running half marathons. I was so, so active.
And I did that from multiple years. Extremely high physical activity. But but then eating enough, you know, to balance it out and never fasting is a very hard to lose body fat in that way.
Not impossible for a period of time, but very difficult. And when I finally dialed in on the fasting, I learned the fasting. I started doing it.
That's what, that's what turned it around for me. And I was like, oh, we have gotta help people see this.
How people see it. But like Pat says, like no one realizes I'm doing this.
See, that's that's the thing. Fasting, a personal path, especially when you have your eating lined up so that your,
the times that you are eating are with a social connection. And these things like nobody has to know, nobody has to be,
judging it. You don't have to justify it. You don't have to,
broadcast it.
I kind of like that,
idea the most. It's just takes the pressure off, you know, fasting to me, a very personal path.
It's it's about us. It's our relationship, both with our body and with food. It
doesn't matter what other people think. It doesn't matter if other people think this is a good idea or not. It's like, is this bringing, benefit to my life? Is this helping to bring my eating into a place that I feel good about, that I'm enjoying and it's balancing out the health?
Do I see every day or taking a step toward the goal? And it can be just a tiny step each day. And, so if we're trying to lose a pound a week, you know, a little bit more than a pound a week in the next 31 days. And we say, well, a couple of those days are like Christmas holidays.
So we try to make those kind of preservation days. We say, you know, are there
29 opportunities to lose weight and a couple to like maintain, you know, or something. Right. You know, paths can go like this. You say probably going to go up, swing a little bit over a couple holidays, that's fine. But then we use a fasting space on the other side like here is a dip.
And then it was like a positive and then a dip. That's sort of a thing that is mirroring the intensity of the fasting we're, bringing toward it,
just recognizing, okay, that's the path over the next 31 days so that we can have our little party on New Year's, and say, hey, I just gave this a really
great,
effort.
And then here's been the experience. And to be honest, whatever happens, somebody gained weight over the course of December. It's okay. The challenge doesn't work. Nobody judging themselves. Look, we're all having a human experience here. We're on a journey
and we're going to learn from it. One of the puzzles I did, a section, session the other day,
clues to the weight loss puzzle.
we're all trying to solve our individual experience,
our way of being in the world
that,
that helps us to flow through this experience in a healthy and positive way. So we learn for it, from it. Whatever happens. What I hope you learn, and what I'll do my best to help you learn. I'm going to be here, every week.
Day
is like a here's a way where I flowed through a space and I had a great time. I had great connections with family and food and bounce it out in a way where I lost weight through it, going toward my goal. And so then we're starting 2026. Most people,
wake up?
And she Marie first and then like, oh God, like we gotta dive in on a New Year's resolution,
And then and they don't know what they're going to do. And they go online and they start searching and maybe they join a gym, which most people are going to be burned out on by March is just how it honestly works.
some small part don't. And they stick with it and and bless them. And I want every good thing for them. But we so we're going to be in a totally different place. Be like, I've been hanging out with doctor Z and fasting space and look at this experience we had in December. It's been totally different than other Decembers.
I enjoyed food, I didn't stress about it and would balance it out. I've already lost weight and then I'm going to be dialing in. I got a stack of books that are like, really going to get us in a great mindset for making 2026 awesome. And that's what I, that's what I want. We're going to build on it.
So whether you know, one of my favorite quotes preservation is progress. You float through December. Neutral. Totally fine. How much fun is it going to be though? Would you like to get to January 1st? You'd be like, I lost weight in December and I had a good time as like, we're going to be locked and loaded to just really rocket in.
January and beyond for sure.
have a family member that is, nursing instructor. She would be worried about an eating disorder. Yeah, that is like a real situation. And I have interacted literally with hundreds and hundreds of people who are in a situation like that. And I've interacted on the other side of it with the nursing instructor. You know, you know, when I was at the university, at hundreds and hundreds of, people in my weight management practice, specifically, I still have that in my personal consulting practice, which is smaller now,
And, and then my primary care practice, thousands of patients I had
so I getting people on a fasting path and, and the number of times it circles back around from health care practitioners is saying, oh, the fasting, this is not good. You can't have a person doing that. And it always comes from a good place.
It comes from a place of being thoughtful because eating disorders are real. You know, I given a lot of talks on fasting, different conferences, different places.
And so just within that space,
eating disorder is prevalent in society of many different kinds anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder. These are are very, very difficult, situations,
especially anorexia. There'll be someone in the audience who has suffered and struggled with that and
to come to a talk, someone is talking and tell people to be fasting.
Someone who has struggled with anorexia can be very, very difficult. People feel very, very passionately to, I don't want to hear this. It's not the message for them.
There is not a one size fits all eating program for every human being on this planet. Fasting is just a tool. It is a metabolic physiologic tool that can help people in a certain situation.
The time when it is appropriate to lean into it and use it is if there is too much, you know, more energy in the system than someone is. Say, I want access to this energy in my own body. How do I do it? The primary way actually to do it is through fasting, because the body is saving that energy for us in order to power our body and life.
When we encounter periods without food, we're in this incredible abundance where we don't have any
absence of food. And and we say we have thankfulness, for that. But when it when it is out of balance, when you say, okay, this excess energy that I have is leading to negative physiologic consequences in the body, including fatty liver disease and cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and orthopedic problems and all these other things.
Say, I would like to use some of this energy, let it fulfill its natural purpose, power. My body and life. That's how you get rid of it. Fasting. The doorway that to walk through to get it. That is often the path of least resistance like I was describing. Much easier than
exercising your way through all the eating and then exercising more through the energy stores.
Got to do so much work. Try to take the pressure off that first by creating a hormonal physiologic calorie environment where we can de pressure that whole situation. Then when you exercise, then that exercise, it doesn't have to work through all the meals and all the other stuff, then it can
boost and enrich, this
fasting based process.
That is a way to do it. But you see, this is what is so interesting to me is like fasting. So simple as I call it. So simple. Like, literally, you can describe the whole process in one sentence,
which is one of the first videos I put on the channel, and no idea. Maybe I still don't, but no idea what I was doing at all.
I just say one sentence weight loss plan. Let's see. Can I even remember the exact words? Just eat two meals a day in a 6 to 8 hour window and see if that's good enough, right? That's the sentence. You can just do that. You don't even have to know anything about it. Eat two meals in a 6 to 8 hour window and see if it's good enough, and it might be good enough.
If it was good enough
to do that, say I'm just okay. Two meals each. One of those words I thought a ton about just I say just because it's like
that's taking the pressure off. It's not commanding anybody is just saying, just do this. It's like kind of softening it. That's what I want
eat to me, a fasting process and say, how do you learn a fast you like is focusing on eating all right.
This is what is the paradox. We're not focusing on going so long without eating. No. The focus is
we're eating at noon and then we're eating again at six. It's like and think how good these meals are going to be. You see, we're focused on eating when we focus on it. That's a mindfulness practice. So I'm going to be enjoying it
we're not stuck in some space where we're restricting so much or say.
I'm deprived or I'm just have openness and I'm enjoying food at these times.
Two meals. The most important number in weight loss to me is to if we can get to two meals, that's the base layer. To me, two meals a day should be the base layer of eating for our society instead of three. Plus is not working well, for people.
Just need two meals. Like meals was such an important word because it's not snacks. Like, you know, if one of the meals is a snack. Okay, you see what I'm saying? But it's like most people, like, try snacking in a way to weight loss like that is
really difficult. Really difficult to do. Always eating, but never as much as you want.
Always. The hormones are like, well, we could be eating anytime and so like you can get hungry all the time, but very hard. So when we say, okay, two meals, keeping all the eating concentrated in a regimen where everything lines up in the body and the body understands, okay, we got this big window going to become an 18 hours.
We're not going to be eating. We don't need to ramp anything up. You know.
Very nice space to be in.
And then the ending,
phrase is like, see if that's good enough. It's like this. More pressure is being taken off.
It gives the opportunity that that's the only thing you have to do if if a two meal a day, 16, eight sort of regimen, you just switched into that. If that's enough to help people slowly, sustainably lose weight.
I've had many patients who
are over ten years, and it's the only thing they ever did, and they slowly lost weight over time
and that was fine. And then you say, if it's not good enough, it's like, well, you can work on it. You know, you can increase the intensity as desired and tolerated. Have a goal getting into some omad sort of space that will increase that.
So one sentence, we can literally say one sentence that encompasses most of an effective fasting based weight loss plan, you know, but then we can also sit here for an hour or probably 2 or 3. And really dive in on it. And to me, this is the the beauty of it is like the profound nature of it is it's so simple that it can be encompassed in one sentence, yet it's so profound that it gets into this very, very deep, physiologic, emotional space that actually does have the power and ability really to change our life,
to change food.
So central to our life, so central to our emotional and physical experience and fasting, getting right down into the very core of it,
you're not going to really find a more profound space to analyze, and our experience,
our emotional relationship with food and our physiologic ability to access body fat
fasting, heading right to the root. That's why we can talk for hours about it every day.
I'll tell you, you know, I,
I was personally so nervous, you know, a year and whatever ago I launched the live show. I was like, can I talk about fasting every week? I could do a show. And I was like, yeah, like the more shows that I did, the longer my list of things to talk about God. And then finally I was like, oh shit.
And you got to get some of these ideas out as like, let's do it every day. And then you realize, like, okay, we can talk about it every day because it's the to me, it's the most important,
physiologic thing.
Not the least of which is because it's free. Nothing to sell anybody. People save money by practicing fasting.
I think about the incredible amount amount of money people spend on dieting programs and things. And that's why I've done some videos, you know, lose weight for free,
lose weight with nothing. Just with this open space. So this is what we're going to do in December. I'm going to sit in this space for the fasting space is in the body.
I'm trying to mirror the show with the experience fasting space, just openness
in this sort of space. Here we'll connect
daily. We'll dial in on the fasting space. We're moving toward the challenge,
opening up enough space, 1 pound in a week, going to basically get us toward that space. So divide that by seven. A seventh of a pound in a day
is what we're going to be doing.
So we want up,
pattern in our day where we're losing a seventh of a pound, opening up the fasting space, giving the body access to that energy. When we're eating, we want to be thoughtful and conscientious. About those choices. And then when we're in good space with that, to open up some movement,
all these things enriching our mental health,
so that we can
be enjoying the process.
You find balance in all those things. You're finding joy in one day, feeling content with it. That's how we really, dial into, a space where, say, hey, I can stick with this, and you get in a groove with it, and it's feeling, good. Then, we see. Okay, we can stick with that. It can be a lifelong process.
We don't we can be off the treadmill of having to look for the next thing. The next thing? We're just going to sink into it.
Okay, so that all came out of Pat's, thought about. Okay, a family member, somebody's not on board. We could probably do a whole show, on this,
health professionals who are not on board,
family who not on board.
See? Okay, we went through we did the one sentence. So simple, but also profound and deep and the the deep and profound nature of it
is harder to communicate than just the one sentence. You know, you can say the one sentence. Here's what it is a very simple potential weight loss path. Just eat twice in a day and see if that's good enough.
Okay, that's a very superficial layer. It touches on an eating disorder area because there are people who okay, you don't need someone with anorexia. You don't need to tell them that fasting works okay. But so inappropriately applied
the very worst possible
way to use fasting is someone in an eating disorder space. Have to be so thankful to anyone in that space.
We want to thoughtfully use fasting, very appropriately applied. And then what we want to be doing. Also helping to show people who are interacting in this space, health care professionals who say, they say, well, I interact with people with an eating disorder inappropriately applying fasting. Okay, we have to see there's a balance to everything in life. I feel very strongly that we need to help people
with an eating disorder protect them from inappropriately applied fasting, but it would be a great, great tragedy.
It is, in fact, a great tragedy of our time that
compassion for people in one situation is causing harm to a vastly larger amount of people who are suffering with metabolic, dysfunction and don't know how to lose weight. That one of the very most profound and powerful tools, a fasting space that can be practiced and trained to a space where the difficulty becomes very low and in fact, just becomes empowering.
I mean,
I couldn't imagine not being able to do it now. I feel so much better, with it. Such a joy and benefit to my life. Couldn't imagine not knowing about it. I would I would be in bad shape, I know I was in bad shape, and then this, process, has been such a blessing to me and so many people.
So we're going to lean into that,
space
together, especially through December here. We're going to navigate the holiday. We're going to be diving as deep as I can, take us finish out our beautiful psychology book that I was going really getting into the way, the mind works, helping us to load in the most pleasant, thoughtful weight loss space.
We just need little steps. Right? Little steps gonna take us there. That's when I like the five. See how the five works for you? Let's, make a little mental note. Everybody with me here. Where are you at? If you want, in the mindset, how close do you come to? Minus five over the, month? We're just learning from it.
Really gonna love having you with me and these,
days start our days out centered in a really thoughtful, powerful space. You know, my experience, at the university, running a large weight management,
program.
I get scheduled in these slots, you know, every 20 minutes or so,
and,
One at a time, a person is like. And I can only see people max every three months. So I get one opportunity, 20 minutes with a person
to try to share enough,
ideas of weight loss and say that by the time I see them back in three months, like it'll be better. And I felt like, like, there has got to be a better way to do this.
I was like, really? What people need is like, we just need so much more time to dial in
the mindset. And I was like, I wish I could work with people every day. This is where I'm we're going towards with this channel. Like, because, like every day we should be priming ourselves every day, learning and deepening our appreciation and understanding.
So that we can dive deeper and practice and and you know, because it's not easy. And I tell people always is not easy fasting. I didn't call this process easy fasting. I call it simple fasting.
Simple but not always easy. But the goal is to make it as easy as possible. The way to make it as easy as possible is to approach it thoughtfully, gently, learn, and practice so that we grow in our ability to do that.
That's what we've been doing, every day for the rest of December. Hopefully that gets us to minus five and beyond or whatever it is.
Whatever the answer is, we're going to learn from it. Grow. And having this mindset now is going to set us up for really, really good things in 2026.
Really nice to have you here.
I hope you all have a great day. And I'll be back here tomorrow with, more thinking,
stepping together toward 2026 together. Have a great day, everybody.