Fasting Space

in the middle of a holiday season. Whatever your tradition is, we think a lot about gifts, a lot of gift giving.
Which is a beautiful,
tradition, I say.
But do we think about giving ourselves a gift?
And I want to
just give us a
brief reflection this direction.
Fasting came to me as a gift. This is how I see it.
I
went through an entire medical education. Ever came across fasting as a tool that can bring health?
One day I was given the great privilege of seeing it.
Patient who received health in a fasting space.
And,
on a certain day, it might not even have struck me. But then I just saw the vision and I said, oh, this is a process that can bring health. And then it brought health to my life. And I have seen it bring health to so many people over the last decade and a half.
So fasting is a gift to me.
It's a gift I'm
trying to share,
with as many people as I can.
I want to share it with you today. Here. Fasting is a gift. The thing about fasting is a gift.
think of giving a gift,
a gift of fasting.
It's kind of a paradoxical gift.
It's the type of thing you can't give it to someone else.
It's something you have to do, and it's not something you can buy.
A gift only you can give to yourself. No one else can do it for you.
Opening up space in the body.
It turns out that a food free space,
one of the most powerful metabolic tools that there is.
The two of us, almost completely neglected in our society.
Fairly neglected in the
modern medical practice. And too often you'll see someone say, I'm trying to lose weight. I'm trying to burn through blood sugar. Naturally,
I'm trying to create a calm, centered, centered content space.
Help the blood pressure lower.
Fasting. A gift you have to give to yourself. That type of space.
The body.
Knows how to run itself. When you think for a little bit.
The.
We have this conscious layer.
It's this thin layer on the top of the brain that has all of our consciousness, that we don't think about everything the body does for us. We don't make the blood flow.
Can't even really stop ourselves for breathing for long. We can take a big deep breath and try, but it's going to keep happening.
The body knows what to do. The body is running. You don't have to make your heart beat. It's just happening, right?
Same thing when we're eating food. We eat food. We think we're done now. We just committed the body
to at least 12 hours of work, maybe more.
So we can see as we're looking at how the body is working.
Body knows what to do. Body as processes to handle the routine.
Facts of life. And one of the routine facts that it has to deal with is that every cell in our body needs fuel to run.
In
different ways that that fuel can come to it. Fuel coming to it. Many times when we're eating, okay, that's the big purpose of food. We got secondary purposes of food, right? The emotional connection of the season to me, healthy food,
fasting space, two sides of the same coin
and even a holiday. Some food that we wouldn't really classify as healthy
can serve an emotional connection.
Special treat. Help us connect. It's beautiful. Beautiful in its own place. Fasting another way. Fasting as a gift. Help us balance out things like that so that we can have special,
connection with friends and family.
Bring everything into balance.
Fasting. Definitely a moderating practice in general.
Moderation in general, of course. Beautiful. We've talked about portion control, how to be mindful of that and then fasting. Anything that is pushing literally the scale too far in the other direction. Fasting help give us another tool to push things back in the other direction. Thankfully.
To fasting this open space to let the body do what it knows how to do.
We have this idea I was talking yesterday and the stream that.
Many times we don't trust the body. We think, man, if I don't keep eating, going to run out of energy and this fuel that the cells need, can I disappear?
If you're struggling with a blood sugar problem can be true
in the short term. It's not the normal physiology of the body.
Fasting, opening up a space that is showing us.
In some circumstances. Okay, where is weakness? Where in the body needs healing? Metabolism might need healing. Anybody has trouble in a fasting space at a talk with your medical team about it.
If you take any medications or anything like that,
the normal physiology of the body is that we are not dependent on continuous food intake. We have the storage system should be a seamless transition when the food stops flowing in, the body starts releasing the energy that we need from the storage. This process is actually the process of how we open up.
Healing in the body so that if we're having weakness, fasting is a strengthening program to restore resilience and capacity to the metabolism
so that we do not have,
this situation is fasting strength.
Did the program on that? Fasting can make you strong both physically and mentally.
Brain is always running right. There's another thing we don't control. Can't can't shut this off. Can't just flip a switch.
And the brain is always using energy
brain especially using a lot of sugar energy
suddenly open that up. Your brain is not completely dependent on it though. We're dual fuel system. We start releasing energy from body fat, start getting some ketones into the mix, and what people find
greater mental clarity.
Fasting can be absolutely a gift for our productivity, for our thinking, our focus.
This is how I say we're always trying to merge the physical experience of the body with the emotional experience.
A fasting space can be a gift to our emotional center to find peace and contentment. Without food opens up a space
where we can be more reflective,
where we can think more deeply, clearly, and powerfully.
Maybe as we're heading into 2026.
Maybe that's a gift that you need to give yourself some open space where you can really dig into the deep questions of life.
The deep questions of your life about where you are going and what you believe, and what is truly important to you. What is your North Star? Can we pick one of these beautiful stars out of the sky and say, hey, we are heading toward our guiding light this year powerfully.
Fasting is a powerful practice.
The body knows what to do in that space.
The body knows how to heal the metabolism in that space. If we give it the opportunity and what I say because it's powerful, it's a big gift. We approach it as thoughtfully and gently as possible. We never force anything in a space we open up. Maybe a little bit more each day if we feel called and open to it.
That's how we keep the process ever from feeling overwhelming. From fasting should feel like a gift. I want you to see it that way. Fasting is a gift. It's the ability to set the weight of the body wherever we want it in the long term, because it's powerful. We can lean into it and we can train ourselves how to do it.
What a gift you think of the billions of dollars that are spent trying to force the body into a space. We say, that's what I use this like force it when really the process of doing it, fasting is showing us a different model. Fasting is like this. Fasting is saying, okay, I can let go
of a constant consumption.
Maybe, maybe we need to go like this to receive it. Like we receive a gift, right? Fasting is just being open to it. I tell people, don't force weight loss, but be open to it. Like maybe a position like this singing or weight loss is coming to me. And how does it come to what's happening in a fasting space?
Sometimes we've talked on the channel like, well, fasting is nothing. You talk about it like it's something. Okay, so it's this very interesting space. It's then nothing that something.
And so if we think of it as something then we can receive it like a gift.
It's
a practice. Just like exercise is a practice. Exercise is also a gift. Okay. We got multiple gifts. We got healthy food that nourishes the body. We've got movement, that that empowers our system. And then we have a fasting space just like the other part of it.
Is like medicine for the entire body. Because what we don't realize is that when we are.
Eating all the time, the body is always working. Like I said, you eat something, you've you've taken 12 hours for the GI system. Just working. Working. And if you're eating every 12 hours, at least you know, before bed, right when you wake up, it's like
the system never gets a break. Think what? What would you feel like if you're never able to sleep?
If you never had a rest? You say, oh my gosh, I'm so tired, I'm so worn out. And then what would that do to your ability to do some quality work, quality thinking, if you would? It would diminish the experience.
We talk about giving ourselves a break, meaning giving ourselves ourselves a break, give ourselves a break.
Let the body rest.
Think about the gift of rest
like we see this beautiful
snowy image.
No cars driving around here, right? Lights on in the house. People just gathered
a calm, centered space. This is the idea of fasting. We're opening up a space in the body where the actual processes of the body that are always doing the work behind the scenes, that we so often don't appreciate, we say, hey, body,
you get to take a break here.
You can rest like everything's going to be okay.
Buddy, just take a big deep breath in a fasting space. Get on to some maintenance projects it's been meaning to do. It's like, oh, man, we gotta take care of this stuff. You know, a lot of the damaged proteins in the body, the dysfunctional stuff, it can just build up and be clogging up in the cells. In the session yesterday, if you didn't see it, I burned through this big brushfire out in the country,
fasting, a process of burning through the excess.
If you've got this whole pile of stuff building up and you're so tired you never had a chance to rest all this stuff like it's like we never had a house cleaning in months, and all of a sudden you open it up. What a gift.
Is that space?
Give that gift to your body. That's what I would say. If you want to experience a space where you can lose weight and burn through blood sugar without struggling
with it, practice a fasting space doesn't mean a fasting couldn't be a struggle, or that you couldn't struggle with it. As long as you're not overwhelmed by it. There is a barrier to entry to a fasting process.
That barrier to entry is a hunger experience.
What hunger is showing us,
I think as much as anything, is what is our relationship with food?
And this is how fasting dives us into a deep emotional space, because so often the relationship we have with food is about using food as a tool to cope with something, some sort of stress, some sort of trauma, some sort of experience that we've had.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing. You know, that's a real process. The fact that food is able to do it can be very helpful to us,
especially in the short term, but then it can create its own cycle
where we say, well, now this is driving us in a direction where it's driving our blood sugar up, where it's leading us to gain weight, where we wish that we weren't.
Giving ourselves a really deep and powerful gift.
Would be the space that we open up physically with fasting, showing us the metaphor of the mental and emotional space we open up without food so that we can really get to the deepest level of the decisions that we make.
Why are things the way they are? Why do we behave the way we do? The choices we make?
Fasting, giving us that very root level both with food and with anything else. Because you open up a food free space,
maybe you are experiencing hunger, but maybe you're experiencing other things in that space. Then because we experience that hunger, that's the just the first emotion that we see. But then without food that we would normally eat, we make it go away.
All of a sudden now the rest of that space is open
and you say, well, what else is here?
There's some sort of hurting inside that we've buried
that normally would eat through it. For example, we say now it has its own space and that can feel a little unpleasant.
Yeah. I don't know if I want something like that coming out, so maybe the holiday isn't the day for it. Maybe this is just a session to see.
Maybe this is a gift I can get ready to give myself in 2026.
Kind of float through this space as gently as possible
and gear up.
Give our immune system a gift we can really appreciate. Okay. Winter season, respiratory virus season. So I want to give my immune system a gift. Give the immune system a break. If you look at a pathological section
of the
bowel, it's like all these little patches called Pires patches. The immune system can flow into the small bowel.
People don't realize everything that's coming into the body.
Everything we eat, it's sterilized. How is it sterilized? In large measure, it's done by the immune system. So every time we're eating, like the immune system is focused and protecting us from foodborne illness, keeping everything in its place. And when we stop that, when we give space and food, all of a sudden we give the immune system a break, can charge up the immune system.
It can go do other things other than fighting the battle on the
in the GI system.
It can do a lot of other incredible things like going on cancer, seek and destroy mode.
Just really wonderful things rejuvenate the body, immune system, part of the body, and all these things flow together. So in a fasting space, I did a talk earlier this fall
on inflammation
and how inflammation is at the root of most chronic disease.
In a fasting space. It can help to bring down inflammation,
both physically. And then when we're opening up that space, we can do it emotionally. And we saw the stress that chronic stress can feed into inflammation, which flows into disease and insulin resistance.
Okay. But you can't see it.
You can't see that process. But as you open up the space and you get used to it, you can feel it.
You can do a big check in to with a breathing talk a lot about box breathing. If you try to hold, you know, breathe in for four, hold for four, out for four, back for four. Last night I was doing it. I couldn't do it. If you're really ramped up.
See, now I'm chilled out because I can hold it.
But last night I just had to breathe in and out right away.
So that's the check in that you want to do.
One way that you're amping up. And so just breathing through that, opening up the space
the fast and giving us a metaphor or another perspective to see we have benefit from space
everywhere in our life. Basically, we need to open up space from busyness, space from stress, space that is protected for ourself.
Where we can decompress and heal.
We all have too much inflammation and stress.
You can, get some measures, directly of inflammation on blood testing
like can ESR, CRP, chest CRP.
But from my perspective,
testing like that only not really necessary in most situations. Really. What is helpful is not to think too technically about it,
as long as you're not very ill. Say, hey, I'm in an okay place, just say, hey, I want to come in bat inflammation in general, and I want I want to keep things very high level.
Let's just help some good energy flow and feel better. And let's do all the health things that health inflammation, whatever some number is, you know, we just want it lower. That's what I say.
So we're going to give ourself a gift some healthy movement some healthy food, a healthy amount of fasting space that is helping to open up,
a space where we can feel that pressure coming down, feel our energy increasing.
So that'd be a gift. But if you can give yourself a gift of more energy,
training and fasting is like training the body to be a dual fuel system. So what I was describing before the transition between an eating state and a fasting state should be seamless. If anything, you should have more energy in the fasting space and in people who are new to the practice.
So that's the thing that sounds too good to be true, that I know this is just my personal practice now, an experience. If I'm going to go exercise, I'm going to go do some intense thing. I'm going to do some sprinting, some running of any kind, go on a bike ride, run a half marathon.
I want to do that fasting.
I don't want to be lugging around a stomach full of food. I don't want all my blood flow heading in to try to digest something while I'm trying to go work my very hardest. Have you ever felt that way is like, oh, then you get like a stomach cramp. You feel like, oh my gosh. I was like, I want my whole being and energy heading in that direction.
So I want people to see fasting as an empowering process.
It is a gift to the body to be able to operate without the burden in that space of having to work on all this food, I'm giving my body a gift in this space. Powerful.
This is how we turn this whole situation inverted
in our relationship with food. Food is empowering. It gives us power. It gives us energy. All right. But fasting also empowering. Realize that we are powerful and we have energy, and we aren't completely dependent on food all the time. And then we can bring all these things into balance, or we have the benefit of all the nutrition that we need.
We have the benefit of this fasting resting space. It is also like a fasting power space in the body,
benefiting our mind and body,
empowering our life.
It's a beautiful gift. If you are looking for another gift to give yourself what I hold up for you, I'm reading this book right now. The mountain is you by
Brianna Waist.
Another book. I got a, personal recommendation for. I read the first two chapters of this yesterday.
It feels like a relatively quick read, especially compared to what I've been reading.
But every page of this book so far.
Is powerful. Powerful.
Perspective. The subtitle of this book, Transforming Self-sabotage into Self-Mastery.
And, the first, pages have not disappointed. So you want to read it along with me? We can dive in on it together. I know personally it's given me a lot of challenging things already. And,
I described fasting as like a mirror,
like fasting, just showing a lot of truth about our relationship with food. And this book, I can tell already, is like a mirror to.
It's just helping us, reflecting back at us the very
truth with what they are clearly trying to get at here.
Problems that we face in our life are not external in general, they are primarily internal. That's a difficult thing to see.
I know for me, like, we always want to blame something. We always want to try to find an excuse for something, when to really give ourselves a gift, get a piece of wisdom like this that we can,
just distill down in our own life what is really true.
About why things are the way they are. If we really want to change, is 2026 going to be the year of change? We're talking about giving ourselves a gift. Fasting can be a gift.
Perspectives that help us to change in a truly powerful and healthy direction. What an incredible gift these are the types of gifts that we can only give to ourselves.
We cannot even really buy them. You can buy a book that can help. But the thought process, something that we have to do,
something that I am resolving to do, I say I'm not really big on New Year's resolutions until we get to New Year's, because New Year's is a day just like any other. And so then I say, well, you know, because any day we can make a resolution, we can say, I am going to change.
And, that can be our new day's resolution any day. So most of the year I think like that, like we don't have to wait. But here we are at New Year's and is kind of the convention. So I say, let's charge ourselves up for an incredible new year. I mean, I'm getting excited about it. 2026 let's hit it.
Let's really hit it.
Maybe write the book myself. Yeah, some sort of thing. Maybe we can all do it together. I would love it. I have I've written a few drafts of different things and different ideas.
And somewhere in the future, simple fasting, this sort of process, finding peace and contentment without food. I do want to weave it into a beautiful and helpful book, but, I don't know if for the time being we'll keep doing it live will keep having a conversation.
Going.
Keep the conversation in the thinking going. This space has been a gift to me. Fasting space. Just open space personally to reflect and just for my own life about what it has meant to me to find the nothing of fasting. That is something that, can be such a powerful tool to,
center ourselves, bring health to the body.
I know I am dialed in and figuring out how do we help more people. We're in the middle of a metabolic health crisis. In.
Well, the world really is everywhere.
I had family member down in Bolivia for a couple weeks, during the fall. And
everybody with type two diabetes, people getting type two diabetes everywhere. The industrial food system touches
diabetes is sure to follow.
Unfortunately.
So in,
Midst of something like that.
What a gift to be able to say. Here is a way to insulate ourselves from that. To pull back from that, say, here is a space where a totally protect the body from these influences, let the body process all this stuff and move forward and health.
I want to share two quotes with you today to center ourselves as we float through, the season.
First one and this, space for Marcus Aurelius.
Give yourself a gift. The present moment.
Like I was saying during Thanksgiving, right? Presents was my word.
For Thanksgiving, let's be present. We want to be present here. Whatever we're doing in our holiday season, whatever our traditions, let's just be fully present,
either just with ourselves. If we aren't able to connect with anyone else, find presents with ourself,
find presents with friends and family.
If that's our situation.
We're talking about giving ourselves a gift. Today I'm presenting the many ways that a fasting space can be a gift. Maybe a fasting space isn't the gift for the holiday. Maybe it's just the idea. Maybe presents is the gift.
For the holiday. And then we can take that through.
take that through to the other days.
Absolutely.
Give ourselves a gift
and check this one out that I think is kind of connected.
Love yourself first
and everything else falls into line.
I'm Lucille Maha.
To me, the fasting space is a loving space.
Love is a word, okay? Thrown around a lot. What does it even mean? Okay.
When we think about having love for something.
Someone was describing her to me. A definition of love.
Is something that you would.
Go through difficulty for something that has meaning and value
is worth
some amount of sacrifice for it. If you love it, that would be the test. If you don't really love something, you wouldn't care. You wouldn't do anything for it. If you don't love it right?
So when we think about loving ourself first, we're thinking about a health path.
What does it mean here? Look at it. We got the street here. We got a health path heading toward the mountain. Right now we say we're going to read the book. The mountain is you.
I'm going to I'm going to read it. I will bring you the insight.
This is the action that we're going through,
the actions that we're taking. We're walking toward the mountain now, that mountain, as we're walking down this street, we're getting toward that mountain there. It's going to look tallest when we get right to the base of it.
And we see there is the obstacle.
You see, it's going to take some work to walk over that or even or even walk around it. Whatever metaphor we want to use, I like the metaphor. The obstacle is the way that we go through it, you know, we go through it, over it, and we use it as a stepping stone to get over it.
The loving action is not always the easy action. I never I didn't call my
little channel here easy fasting. I call it simple fasting because it is very simple. It is profoundly simple.
But not necessarily easy. But what I would say I love the analogy I was using before. If you're trying to get to Chicago, but you're on the road to Minneapolis, you say be easy to keep driving, but it's not taking you to your destination. So even if fasting isn't the easiest path, if it is moving in a direction, if you're trying to lose weight, if you're trying to burn through blood sugar, say, well, that in and of itself say we have to pass through some obstacles.
Like the mountain is not a straight path. This is a journey. This is an adventure.
Fasting.
If you're on the road to Minneapolis and you're trying to get to Chicago, any process
that comes and gets you on the right path, you say that is a gift. This is how fasting is a gift. Have you struggled to lose weight, improve your metabolism? Maybe many, many years? You have struggled to do it.
Here is
the offer.
Could it be a gift for you?
Lean into the body. Realize the immense energy resources the body has.
Start trusting it. Start opening up the space. Allow that energy to flow out. What that looks like is the path. Every day
of moving toward it, meaning a little bit more fasting. Space is still eating and simple fasting. In my view, fasting within a day like opening up more space within a day sometimes looks like just eating two meals in a day, trying to get all the snacks out.
If you need more power than that, dialing those two meals closer together. The closer the two meals come together, the more food free space you open up on the other side, which is more training space for the body to say, how do I operate this system off the stored energy? You say any weight loss path, no matter what it is you say, is about helping the body to mobilize that energy and get it out.
This is what traditional dieting is trying to do by giving us less calories. We're trying to replace those calories with energy in here. Except a traditional diet confuses the body because it's saying, okay, you're telling us that we're supposed to burn this energy that's in here, but always food is coming. And then it keeps coming and it never stops.
I'll have to say every diet tells you what to eat, but never when not to. And so a fasting is what we add to any diet. I don't talk tons about specific food choices. I just tell people don't
eat the processed food if you can at all help it. Eat natural food that comes from an earth in the natural way, like most human beings have done for all of history.
Until people invented factory foods, I just don't eat that stuff and then take that food and add fasting to it and now you start to bring things into balance, because now we're eating healthy, unprocessed food and we're opening up the space. So the the low calorie space, it isn't the meal we eat. Then you get to eat a meal.
You don't have to restrict. That doesn't have to be a baby meal. And then we have all that open space with nothing, and then the body gets nothing there like, oh, nothing. That's when we start accessing the storage system. It's such a it's such a simple observation. But so profound
that when we eat matters.
Did the
show the other day.
Everything matters. I do believe that everything matter.
Everything matters.
And we will be open,
to everything as we are heading into 2026.
Really wonderful to share this space with you. I hope these concepts are a gift to you and whatever you're doing. Wherever are you going in the coming days?
Wish you the very best.
We'll see you back here soon.