Fasting Space

Open to weight loss is the theme of the day. Want to take this session and really think about turning our mindset from struggling with weight loss, which is something that is so common, and turning that focus toward being open to it. I have talked over the last week or so about the struggle with weight loss. We did a session about if you're struggling, that you're not alone, a lot of weight loss programs and processes, trying to sell people things.

I think this is where it comes from. I'm not really trying to, you know, sell anything. I have a business. Simple. Fasting is a business. I consult with people. I don't mind if people come and consult. But the point of this show, as much as anything, is just a dialog exploring the truth and reality of the body and our collective experience of everyone walking toward better health.

So I don't have any interest in anything that isn't true. And so truth is that the collective experience we're having with weight loss is a struggle for a lot of people. From my perspective, working with people, it's helpful to validate people's experience. People working say it is a struggle, okay. But we don't want that to be our complete focus.

What we have said, as we've been exploring psychology of as we've been trying to get into this very right brain type of thinking through envisioning ourselves as creating, as creative people who are creating the experience that we want to have in our health journey. Create the type of life that we want to be living, creating and shaping the way we're being in the world.

Openness. To me. If I had to pick one word that can move us toward a space out of struggle because while we want to validate struggle, we don't want to create it. Have you ever done that? Have you ever created struggle for yourself? Sometimes we get stuck in habits and patterns of struggle that when we really dial back from it, we can see choices we're making, or at least feeding into a cycle.

A perspective of openness is the type of perspective that can help us get out of habits and cycles that aren't taking us to a better place. Help us open our mind, reassess the way that we're going, and then the ultimate goal that we're going for in a health space is this flow state that we've set, where we have primed our experience and our environment, and we've used what we've described as our limited mental capital, spent it in a way that helps us to open up new ways of being and in that new way of being.

We want that to the greatest extent possible, to be a flow state that is minimizing our struggle. This is how we take a process that can be intense, a fasting process. We're going to dive in to some deeper thoughts on fasting in this session. Something that can be intense, that you see. You could struggle with it and which we validate and say it can be normal to learn, grow, develop and channel that into something that we see.
Okay, openness, fasting, openness on the physical side. We're talking a lot about mental side that we flow into that space without struggle. That's what makes it sustainable. Pat is here. Good morning. Happy start to the week to you. I hope you're doing well. Trauma discussion helpful. Last week death of a family pet is not accepted as trauma and our grief is repressed because it is not acceptable.

Wow, that is deep and man, thank you for bringing that up. We need to be strong enough to say our trauma is real, regardless of if society finds it acceptable or not. Well, I, I certainly appreciate that. And I certainly validate the reality of the trauma of a pet. You know, I'll tell you. So I. I should show you some pictures of my dog.

I had two dogs growing up, and, a golden retriever and then a border collie, and we got, I don't know the exact dates, but, like, let's say that we got our first dog, my golden retriever, when I was six. Probably something like that. I had in in many regards, as I'm sure many people do. I was a very awkward middle schooler.

I did not really have a lot of friends. I had a lot of very, difficult him, lonely experiences. And that dog was my best friend growing up. I loved that dog and, both of our dogs. And then we got another dog as a for us, fun story. We bought it at the grocery store. Some guy was selling the dog in the back of the grocery store.
Had to move and get rid of the dog. And I was like, man, we got to get this dog. And and she's like, okay. So we had two dogs. But when that dog passed, when both of those dogs passes, it was horrible. You know, for me, I did not want and I think I delayed for a long time getting our dog.

I wanted my children to have such a beautiful animal, but I think I was afraid to do it because I didn't want to go through the loss again. You know, as I'm remembering back to my childhood when my dog died and I think I don't even want to go through that again to inform such an attachment with, a friend.
And, and then, yeah, I just totally validate that the trauma discussion last week that that really to me, I wasn't expecting to go there in the session. You know, but I think, you know, asking the most important question, you know, to me, see if you have another, way to phrase it, you know, what is our core intention?
What do we really want? What is our North star? What are we moving toward? What are the things that we really are valuing and striving for in life? And then we kind of sink into that space. And I think, you know, in retrospect, it makes sense that we kind of sunk down into that core space. That's where trauma resides.
So a space of openness, I feel like, okay, we're trying to create that just in the channel in general. And this, session, I feel like we definitely had some openness in that space. That is what will naturally happen. That's what happened in that session the other day. You intentionally create openness, give some space for this sort of thing to, surface.

You know, you think about, that analogy like, you take, a beach ball at the pool and you push it down to the bottom of the pool. You got to have a lot of work to hold it down there. It wants to come up, but then we repress it and we're keeping it down. But as soon as you like, you open up some space.
You take your hand off the beach bar. Right. You're going to see that thing, pop up is what we want to be, doing in our life. If we say, okay, there is struggle happening, think of struggling to keep that beach ball under the water and like, struggling on our journey toward better health, creating some openness, giving the opportunity to let those deeper things come out so that we can deal with them.

We said in that other session, time doesn't just heal trauma and difficulty. Obstacles that we have don't just go away. There needs to be a process of some kind to either. However, you, consider it, navigate around it, move through it, climb over it. Those are the sorts of analogies and processes that help us move through a space like that.

Openness was kind of the theme of my yesterday was hiking along the Ice Age Trail. Ice Age trail goes all the way across, Wisconsin. And there's a section. It might even be bigger than that. I don't know exactly how big it is, but it's very long trail. So I was out in, the countryside I loved.

We came across this hill and this tree and this big open blue sky, big open field, this beautiful rolling hill. And to me, I was just openness as a mindset just coming to me in that space. You know, you get into a space like that, you know it just to me, it tells me, take a big deep breath.

Big deep breath. One of the, first the first moments of openness. Do you experience that, in your life, if you are in, a space of struggle, a space of stress and tension, doesn't the breathing get shallow and rapid? And that feeds into a cycle of the stress and anxiety magnifies. It is why getting outside, looking to nature, seeing openness, seeing it say, how do I bring that in?

You breathe it in, right? Take a big deep breath. Breathe in this beautiful natural space. That's what start sending that parasympathetic outflow, that calming presence, in our body parts, says that trauma session up to separate my goals from my need for comfort and stay on track. Such a really important thing to focus on. Thank you for sharing that.

So important. These are things. You know, comfort is something good. It's something positive, something that we need, something also that needs to be in balance. And so looking at that line, staying on track, keeping our positive momentum. Eyes on the horizon. Right. We said like we're trying to make it over that hill or walking in that direction keeping our eyes on the prize.
Okay. I wanted to share this quote with you. As we're, diving deeper into openness, I found this quote from Pema I was reading a little bit about this woman is, a Buddhist. Tibetan Buddhist practitioner says, openness doesn't come from resisting our fears, but rather from getting to know them. Well. And I thought this was a really thought provoking, quote, an openness.
Openness isn't like this. This magic state, kind of Pollyanna, like, oh, everything is, perfect. Like, oh, we just embrace openness. All our problems go away or we ignore them. You know, we can. We could think of it that way. Openness isn't blind to everything that is happening. Openness is like eyes wide open and seeing reality, seeing for seeing fear and then seeing it for what it is.

Sometimes we've talked about, my little stone that I say is, a compass and that the way this compass that is helping to guide us can be our fear, that is the resistance that we have to get to. We usually don't fear things that aren't important in some fashion. If something is not a big deal, that it's not important to our journey, like it doesn't really rise up to the emotional level.

Many times we have to get over our fears. Fear of change, fear of something different, fear of facing a traumatic experience, fear of any of these sort of things. And so a practice of openness really is like a practice of like we see the fear, we see the things. I, I haven't gone down that road, I haven't done that.
I haven't addressed that. These are a part of the things that we actually oftentimes need to open up. The space for openness doesn't come from resisting fear. So often that fear is the obstacle that we have to get over. It's like if we are resisting that, that's putting our energy into validating, say this fear is real. This fear is huge.

This fear can't be overcome. Openness, getting a different perspective, a different way of being, opening our mind. Say fear is here. I heard a quote the other day. It was about our darkest thought. This is what the guy was saying. What is your darkest thought? Yikes. It was someone like this. I don't I don't remember, he said. Love your darkest thought.

Bring love to it. Don't fear it. Don't run away from it. Bring love to your darkest thought. Well, I had it. I had trouble listening to it at first when I was listening to it. I like love my darkest thought. Like we want to hate our darkest thought. But then the more I was thinking about it, I was like, oh, is that is that pushing a beach ball under the water when we're we're experiencing hatred.

We think, oh, I hate my darkest thought. How horrible is that? What is pushing the beach ball under the pool and just keeping it there so that it can't come out? What does it mean to love our darkest thought means I don't think it. I don't think they're trying to mean like, oh, let's say that it's good. I'm interpreting it, at least that we are bringing love to that space.

Is that the process of openness? That's what I've been thinking. That actually helps us move through some of these difficult spaces to approach our fears, which which is a process of changing things in a way that actually helps us to overcome it. Pat says. Shallow breathing becomes a habit and a default, which I believe contributes to many illnesses.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I really think it does. We did the session, which is one of my favorite, sessions on inflammation and chronic disease and how inflammation is at the root level of so many maladies, especially every sort of metabolic, malady, metabolic and autoimmune sort of process in the body, chronic inflammation causing this. And this is where we start building that connection between our mental and physical selves, because it's hard to see it right away.

You say, well, how does my breathing, how can that be at the root of like an illness? But then you start to see, okay, if if we are in this, habitual state of shallow, rapid breathing and that is the signal to the body, not everything is safe here. Not everything is good. Body is extra vigilant on alert, maybe pumping out more levels of adrenaline.

That is like keeping us in that fight or flight mode, blocking and blunting the parasympathetic outflow, which is telling the body, hey, everything is okay. Living in a chronic state of stress, burning out the adrenal glands, the cortisol, always priming the system loses its natural function. Cortisol. Natural function isn't supposed to be just stress hormone making things bad.

Host has good functions in repairing our body during sleep, but when it's present all the time, that's when we get into this pathological state. That's where disease can develop. So this is where this openness is really going, right? What is what is really the point of being, developing a mindset and a practice of openness where we're seeing open to weight loss, which is great, open to that experience, saying, hey, this is something that can happen here.

We're allowing it into our life much better than struggling and trying to grab it and fight and wrestle with it. This is the big perspective that a fasting space can give us. Fasting is openness. Physically, open space without food is showing us then a template more broadly that opening up space in our life, because weight loss would be just the start or just one potential benefit of having a broader practice of openness opening up that space.

If we just look physically in the body and weight loss, we say as a physical space, open up a fasting space body. Miraculously, I say starts running autophagy protocols. We say we just wanted to open up some space to lose weight. And the body's like, yeah, we'll do that. But here's a bonus. Let's get rid of some of this toxic stuff.

Let's also burn up a lot of these dysfunctional proteins that are accumulating in the cells. Let's find the cells that are broken and damaged and then we'll shut those down, replace them in with a brand new cell, a stem cell. And then the body can call those stem cells in rejuvenate and revitalize the system. You say, hey, that's much bigger than just losing some weight.

Which would we say that would be good enough? You know, a lot of times I say, if I could just lose some weight, this would be good enough. Okay, then that is showing us a mirror physically in the body of the same thing that happens on the mental emotional side, I embrace some openness, say I just want to have like a break from the stress and the anxiety for a little bit, trying to find peace and contentment in life.
I how do I center myself, ground myself in a way that is calm and kind and pleasant, even if it's just for a little while, like a respite. Body's like, oh, you open up that space. Just like there's a bonus on the physical side. Autophagy pathways, then on the mental health side of the body is like, hey, look at this.
Now we have this open space here. Breathing is deepening. Some more space here. Yeah. We can float along in this space for a little while. But it's not just this momentary thing that is like, hey, actually, let's get that parasympathetic flow going. Let's burn up this cortisol that's actually totally reset this system. We can bring the inflammation level down.

And then these two things spiral as we're opening up a mental space where we're getting in that mental flow state. We're not fighting with something. We're having openness. We're bringing love into the difficult spaces so that we can unlock it, let go of trauma and difficulty that is actually giving the body space to reduce that inflammation. As the inflammation is coming down, like we saw in that talk, that's actually changing the function of our immune system.

It's changing the function of the adipose cells. Those are the the fat storage cells. We saw that that these things cycle around through each other. That that when people are stuck in a cycle of gaining weight, the immune system has actually migrated into the adipose cells, causing inflammation is an inflamed state. This is and then that is driving insulin resistance.

And this is whole this whole thing spirals around. And that's the process that flows from weight gain through into the development of type two diabetes. And then lots of other things, fatty liver disease and atherosclerosis and all of this sort of stuff. To see a process of openness. You say, well, that that doesn't seem very medical. That seems like we're out in some other sort of space.

And the more we look into these processes, we see it's it's all the same thing. It's all the same process. We embrace a spirit of openness, and our mental health space is bringing peace and contentment that can flow in and support the physical body in the space in such a powerful way. I'll show you another picture from my yesterday yesterday during the day.

So I don't know how long were we hiking? We were out in the morning all the way through the afternoon. We had kind of a picnic lunch, which was great out on the trail, and then in the evening was able to get together with some friends. There we go. So here, you know, I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin.

I don't know if you're familiar with Madison. We got, lakes all over the place, and then this is, I guess you can't really call that, skyline ish. The downtown, you know, is, on this isthmus in between the lakes. So everything's jammed in between these two lakes. This is, so we had a fire.

We got together, had a fire on the shore of Picnic Point, which which is this little peninsula just juts out into the lake. And then you can look across the lake at the Capitol and, it's really a beautiful space to have a fire and just, look at the look at the city. We were, just telling stories.
Just kind of an open space. Tell the stories. Was the intention. And, this is the sort of thing that was dialing me in the openness again, I was like, man, it was just reaffirming me, as like, I'm going to talk about openness tomorrow. It's like walking through these open fields and then here, like a lake.
Also, here's kind of an openness, open space and then to get together with a bunch of friends and say, hey, let's intentionally just share, like, what is happening in life, what you know, what is important to you can be on any, anything. And the stories, you know, that that come up, that's like giving space for the beach ball.
I mean, in a group of people of, you know, people who have had, you know, a lot of traumatic things happen, family members who are dying and, and so many things, difficulty in their life, struggling, struggling with depression and anxiety. And, you know, in that space, I was thinking, oh, this is like community as medicine. Like, here we are in a space and it's allowing people into this space of openness, like we were saying, where the important things can rise up and they can be shared.

And I think, I think there's something about that sharing the difficulty is like allowing it to come out and to how would you say it to, and we are when we are sharing it with other people who are traveling on this journey, we are we all have that sort of thing. Somehow. That is part of the process of how we heal from things.

I think finding acceptance. You know, I've been thinking, I was thinking a lot about this word acceptance too. And the relationship, okay, openness. And then acceptance and and what really does that word mean. Because I often will use the word acceptance. That's to say like we there's there are things that we shouldn't accept. It's important to have boundaries.

It's important to say, you know, this is something in my life that is not serving anymore. We anymore. We don't have to just accept everything. Like here is a line, but then acceptance. Also, there are things that we can't change and a process of acceptance is very close or part of, to me, that place of openness. Let's dial in again on that quote that will help us.

Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears, but rather from getting to know them. Yeah, that's a that's a difficult, space as I'm thinking through it. Okay. Certain things we have to accept that we can't change many things that we can change. At least we can change our relationship to it, change our relationship and experience to the difficulty of the things that have happened.

And maybe acceptance is part of that openness where we come to accept this is something that happened, this is a reality. This is the way something is openness, not not resisting it anymore, not resisting the fear, the darkness, bringing love to it. That's a process of acceptance that could be a very powerful step on the journey. As we move toward it.

Are there practices in your life? This is what I thought I would ask. Are there practices in your life that you feel are leading you toward, greater openness, things that you have found value from? This would be something to reflect on. I give you my top three, the, And not a secret. These are the things that we talk about.

The first being, journaling. I think journaling is super open practice. Do you keep a journal? Is that something you find value from? How do you use it? You know, a journal to me I've described on the channel is like becoming your own therapist. If you don't like that term, it doesn't have to be like that. But a good therapist reflecting back, your experience to you so that you can kind of get out of your own head, see it from a different perspective, and we're seeing things from a different perspective, helps us be a little more open about it.

Okay. We're out of our own space. So Journal it's an open space is a blank page if you don't have a journaling practice, if you like the idea of openness, say, how do I cultivate more openness in my life that would help me move toward the obstacle, identify the fear. See whether this fear is just a mental construct that is trying to prevent my growth and development and progress.

Many times it is fear we fear the obstacle. You can start writing a journal dish very simply. If you don't do it. It seems so simple. You say, well, how does just writing down something about my day going to help me that kept just that simple thought, kept me from writing in a journal for many years. You can just start like, you know, today I did this and today I did that.

And that's like a very easy way to start. But what you'll probably see as you get used to the flow of it, that's like letting your hands off the beach bar. Things will come up. You start writing. I would encourage you to say, like, we went into that session the other day where we float, answering the most important question, what do I really want?

Trying to develop the intention can help you to see what is this paper? Then you read it again by walking in the direction of that. When you see it outside, you see the journal. You say, hey, am I walking in this direction or not? And then you can start doing the work. And this kind of how do you build a map of your life?

You know, Pat said, during that session, you know, everybody's situations, traumas, difficulty is unique, takes its own space and time, to, to deal with. How do you get a unique blueprint or map for your experience? To me, the journal is how you build it. You write out your human experience with what you are trying to do within the context of your own situation.

The life you have lived, the experiences for good or bad that you have had. Journal helps you map that out to me. The other side of that then, is the meditation space is the reflection. Somewhere, somewhere I have an image. I probably couldn't find it live. Maybe I'll try to find it. I'll make a note. There's like progress that we can make.
I have to see it. But it was just. It was on the value of reflection, of taking time. Oh, it was like learning from experience. That's what it was. It showed a picture of learning from experience with, like, a little bar. And then it was like reflecting on experience, big bar, the reflection on the experience. Like if we have an experience and we just bury it, maybe we we aren't necessarily going to grow or progressed so much from that to then take the space, the openness.

You have to have openness to have a reflection. That's what is taking us toward the meditation space. I think that's where we went toward the end of that trauma session. Is how do you open up a space to actually be able to reflect and move forward through a space? Journal is like the start. Get the map out shows you.

Here's the fear. You'll write it down. I don't think I could ever do that. I feel intimidated by this and that. Okay, then you open up the meditation space where it's like actually say this is a priority in my life to overcome this and move toward it. If you've never done it, it would be very difficult, just like we say, okay, if you never practice fasting, that's the physical side of openness.

I, I have used, food as an emotional and physical crutch in my body for a long time. My body has not built out the strength to do it. That's why you have to be very thoughtful and gentle. You give yourself much space to be able to open up. This is in the in the openness. The body is like, oh, there's more openness happening here.

I need to strengthen physically means build out the metabolic pathways to bring energy around in the body where it needs to go. Same sort of process mirrored in the mental side opening up some space here. Well, Patty says, I've always had all these distractions here, haven't had to deal with this processing of these sorts of things. Do you see how the fasting is mirroring the mental experience that you're you're diving into in a new meditation practice?

You're trying to expand that practice. Be thoughtful, gentle. You know, the first times I tried to meditate, I'm no master at it. Literally within 20s of sitting down in a room, I'm like, jittery and like, you know, feeling anxious. It's like, am I going to just sit here and do nothing? Seems completely pointless. I've got lists of things to do, like because I got a lot of work to do in that space takes.

You got to open up the space thoughtfully, gently, and then that just bring us to fasting. Fasting. Be the other, you know, major practice of opening. Someone says, I got a lot of dark thoughts is, I hear what you're saying, bring love into the dark thoughts and dark places. I don't know if I'm ready for that. Maybe I just I'm going to leave that there.

Okay? You don't have to dive right in. Maybe fasting, physically developing that process in the body is some work you can do, because we've seen how these things flow together. We're really one body. It's just a construct to think of our physical health. Our mental health is the same thing. It's a construct to say all the mind in the body, we're a mind body, you know, we need a word that is just one, one thing, a being.

That's what a being is. It's a mind and a body can't really separate them. Sometimes helpful to separate it, just to think about it. So by focusing on our physical health, by opening up fasting space, that is strength in the body. And that openness is a pattern that as you're building, that ability can spill over into you, helping you address some of these deeper issues so you can do both at the same time.

You could do it the other way. Say, I'm not ready to practice. A fasting space seems very intense. Maybe the better place to start for someone to say, I'm just going to get out that journal and start writing that experience. See, openness is like no rules. I did a session I don't remember when it was, no rules in weight loss.

You know, there are not a rigid and dogmatic processes. They say, oh, you have to do it this way. Openness is giving us a totally different blueprint, say open to weight loss, open to health and healing, just openness in general. I think when you open up a space with the processes like we're describing here, journal meditation, fasting space, an idea of openness that is eyes wide open, not pretending the problems don't exist.

Getting to know our fear. Like that quote said, bringing love and openness to it. That process will guide you, it will guide you, and you can flow into that kind of space. And, and, you know, find the way, like we saying, everybody's path is unique, but the tools that we use some very common tools can help us to get there.
So I thought here I would just give a little bigger, blueprint or discussion or my thoughts of the day on that fasting process. So this is where trying to do open to weight loss. If you are say, hey, I'm open to it, I'm not going to struggle with it. What does it look like? Perhaps more tangibly, use of fasting practice to dial into it.
What does it really look like? I spend a lot of time just trying to focus on these mental, emotional realities so that we can flow through that. To me, that's the biggest part. Then what does it look like? Okay, a fasting space. What do I mean by that really? Just to make sure that we're all clear and open space without food.
To me that means calorie free and ideally artificial sweetener free. So passing a space through a space voluntarily. So say fasting isn't really you were prevented from eating. Now if you are not stressed by it, if it happens, then it's not a big deal. But I don't at all mean someone who is not prepared for it, someone who is an intentional about it.

So fasting really a thoughtful, intentional space without food that we are using for a specific positive purpose. Most people have about 12 hours in our society, where they are not eating. And you know, from if people were done eating at seven at night, they're eating breakfast at seven. We say, well, there is a 12 hour window that most people would accept is pretty normal.

And then some people have less simple people eating much later. Some people have breakfast earlier and so maybe some people only getting nine hours of open space in a day where we're not eating. And so to me, fasting, you know, if you ask, the average person even is interested in fasting or so-called intermittent fasting. Well, that is like 16 eight or it's omad meaning like, okay, you can either eat 16.

Food free hours or just eat once in a day, maybe open up something like 23 hours. And we kind of get clocked into these kind of two tracks. To me, it's a whole spectrum and it's much less intense just to say, hey, this is like this process of openness just means we're opening up more space in. Sometimes I say, could just be one hour, sometimes I just break it down for someone.

Could be even five minutes. Like, if something is overwhelming, we can break it down into the smallest, parts and move toward it slowly. It does. Fasting on liquids counts. Yeah, it depends on what the liquid is from my perspective. For example, you'll hear, a whole genre of fasting be like juice fasting, for example. And I think there can be a lot of benefit to that.

There's people classically say, I'm gonna juice up salary and carrots and apple or something like this or something like that, and have only juice go through a space that's a type of fasting. No solid food. That is not the type of pure fasting that I really support and advocate. If someone is, going for weight loss can be many benefits to that.

It's not wrong. It can work even for weight loss. Someone doing juice fasting, you're getting a lot of nutrients in there, and you can mix or match some of that on a pure, level, on the very base. What I try to encourage people is make, make liquids in fasting, like a black coffee, a tea, a sparkling water, maybe a little like a lemon or lime in, something, but pretty much like, just calorie free.

Everything free. That's the completely open space, the the difficulty that we, get into metabolically in the body that I think people have in appreciated is that our metabolism is dynamic. And the main thing that, controls it is our hormones. And especially insulin. Insulin is like a big switch, and it is flipping us, in the body between, modes that are running off of food and modes that are running off of stored energy.
When you are juice fasting, you're putting sugar, amongst other things, into the body. It's you taste sweetness. One of the main purposes of sweetness is it is the thing that is telling the pancreas, sugar is coming. You're going to have to crank up the insulin and insulin, amongst other, effects in the body, blacks, access to the body fat.

And so if you see the the purpose of what we're trying to do in a fasting space is to create openness in the body and openness and meaning, we don't appreciate how much work the body does for us when we're eating food like we eat something, we're done. We just go on with our life, okay? You just committed the body to 12 hours of work to bust up all this stuff in new atomic particles.

Sterilize, organize. Like it's just a huge process, a space of openness in the body. This is how you really think about fasting is like a resting space for the body. We can think of fasting. We are getting into this part. Powers asking the other day like, how do I anchor myself to nothing? Like fasting is nothing. Okay? It's a period of space.

It's openness. Openness is nothing. But it's also like a canvas. Like, is there an open space or is like the where it's a very real thing. It's the only time, the only opportunity where the body says it gets to take a break. I think if we say, think you're really tired, like I was tired after I was walking all day yesterday.
Felt so good just to sit and rest. So the resting is nothing, rest is nothing. But then it's also like a really welcome thing after you've done a bunch of work. That's why I talk about fasting is like giving a gift to the body. When body is always working, body's like it never gets a break. If we're eating every 12 hours at least all the time.

Digestive system really never getting to fully shut down. So open some space. Allow the GI system to shut down. Pancreas a part of the GI system. If no sugar is coming in, for example, we can shut down the insulin production, allow the blood sugar to drop, allow the counter regulatory hormones to come out, and those other hormones that have crazy names that you don't have to know are the hormones that actually say, hey, let's grab the energy now.

Sugar coming down. Hey, look, the insulin has gotten out of the way. Now we can get into the body fat. This is the hormones that. Come on, grab the energy from the body fat and release it. So in the pure space, you don't want to interrupt that. That would be like we're trying to meditate. A very difficult thing to do.

But we didn't silence the phone. And people keep texting us. You could never meditate, I never could. What if you're trying to meditate? You. The phone keeps going off. Ding ding, you know, and then you read it. I mean, you're not going to get into a flow state of a meditation that way. The parallel mentally in the body would be like, you're trying to practice fasting and then you keep drinking carrot juice.

And so like always that you're tasting it is like you're always giving yourself that emotional thing. You want something, some people can get their thing. I met people who have juice, fasted for long periods of time. You can get into a groove with it, but it's not getting to that pure physiology in the body. So like I said, I love the quote, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

If you can juice fast your way to to better health, I encourage you to do it. I mean, do it if that's a compromise and you say, hey, this works for my body and my situation. Not wrong. I can tell you no rules for weight loss. There's just things that serve you and things that don't. And you can experiment with these things and it's totally fine to do.

And you can do, some of it for a while and, and then don't. But I always give people the, the counseling, the base layer is to try to just stick with, calorie free liquids. Very important. You say this fasting on liquids count. Okay. Staying hydrated for fasting makes things so much easier. I've talked, over the years with many, many people who fast for a Ramadan, for example, which my, understanding is primarily a dry fasting people not eating or drinking.

That's the thing that people like the least about it. And as I've talked with people, if we have, people of, Muslim background are happy to share your experience with it, as I've talked with people about it, the lack of drinking, anything during the day is like the, the most, unpleasant part of it.
Get very thirsty, dry fasting. Have. You know, this is something I don't really advocate. Because especially people, older, compromised, kidney function, other things you can, you can run into trouble with that. Hydration does keep it safe. Absolutely. Hydration keeps, fasting safe in many different ways. Dry fasting much more intense. Has certain physiologic benefits to me.

Not worth it because we're trying to create a space that is pleasant. As I've talked with people, fasting for Ramadan, like the goal isn't necessarily to have it be pleasant. My goal, just to help people lose weight is to make it as pleasant as possible. And staying hydrated is, a key way to do that. A lot of what we experience as hunger is actually thirst.

And so as we're staying hydrated, makes it way easier to make it through that sort of, space. Yeah. Some powdered creamer in the coffee when fasting. So this is another this is the exact sort of thing. It isn't. The pure fasting state in a powdered creamer might be getting a few carbs, get some fat sort of stuff in there.
But like, if it works like it's not like you can't do it. And especially something like creamer that's more fats has much less insulin, stimulation then than putting sugar in it. So someone's like, I want cream, at least a cream or a sugar. Something in the coffee. I'll be like, well, creamer better than sugar for sure. So if you're doing a fasting space and you got a little bit of creamer in there and you're accomplishing every good thing, you want, and you feel good and you like it and and you're getting it, your weight is going in the space that you want it.

You don't have to stop doing it. It's totally fine. That's in the same sort of zone as like a juice fasting. Some people have say to me, well, doesn't fasting only work because I eat less? And isn't it fine to just eat less? And you know, when that be good enough? I was like, it could be good enough.

And if it is good enough for you, you never did any fasting and you were in great health like I would. I would never say anything. You know, people come in to my primary care clinic and their their weight is normal and they're active and healthy is like, you don't you don't have to do it. Now, if people have an open mind, there's other benefits to it.

You have a reset. I mean, from time to time, anybody, even if you don't need to lose weight, can benefit, if nothing else, from training at space to flow into that mental health space. You know, we we have not appreciated that. Okay. A lot of benefit to be had in our whole being from this practice. But a lot of people not in that space, right?

A lot of people are like, well, I would really like to lose some more weight. And and I do struggle with it to some degree. And so if people are in a space where you say, hey, this is not optimal, I'm not moving toward my goal as much as possible. This is a spot where I say, okay, they're actually physiologically in the body is a big, big difference between a tiny bit and nothing.

Nothing is such an exclusive state. You know, it's very hard to get to nothing. Fasting to me, is nothing like to truly get to it. It is that nothingness, that pure open space. And so don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You don't have to have perfection if it's getting you where you go. But if you're not getting where you're going and you say, do I need to really dial in on the pure essence of it to totally open up the space?
That's why I'd say if if juice fasting is the crutch that is getting you there, okay, but if it's not getting you there, then realize, okay, maybe that was a step in the direction you've brought yourself to that level. You've used the creamer in the coffee, right? You know, for that, say, hey, I've opened up this space. I got the creamer in the coffee.

Here's the situation you want to avoid. If you are getting a little bit of something, can that trigger this negative metabolic adaptation? So I did some sessions in that last year. We can talk more about it. Metabolism is dynamic. One of the main problems that I think develops in our, you know, dieting and weight loss landscape is people dial in processes that slow the metabolism over time and makes it more difficult.
One of those processes is calorie restriction. Without fasting, where calories are coming in and they're sending the message to the body like, hey, this is not the time to burn body fat because we have this energy here, but then there's not really that much energy. And so can you see that this is putting us in kind of a rock and a hard place where it's like we can't really access the body fat because sugar's coming in or some other sort of food.

There's hormones there and people can respond differently to this. So I think some people go, you know, bullet proof coffee, like, you know, more fat, maybe coconut oil, butter stuff in it or this thing. I'm still getting, some fats in here that are satiating and people lose weight. You can watch videos on Bulletproof Coffee or not just a little powdered creamer, but like, a lot of fat, a couple hundred calories.
It's like, that's like a liquid super low carb. You know, keto type of breakfast, you know, and people lose weight doing a keto sort of diet. And so that can be something you go for. But then if we're always sending the messages to the body, you know, one of the fun sort of things that I have like to say a lot is like, every standard diet tells you what to eat, but never to stop.

You know, it's like whatever type of book you read, I say, I eat this, eat this, eat this, but never stop. And so that's you can go to that same place with, with ultra low carb eating too. You say, well, I'm just I'm not getting any carbs. Not that it can't work, but it's like fasting is giving us a mindset like, oh, there's a difference between 200 calories in a bulletproof coffee and, like zero calories.

And then there, there can be a more subtle difference between 10 or 20 calories of a little powder sweetener. They say, can that really matter versus zero? Let's say, well, it couldn't. You know, there's just there's no studies. I've never seen any kind of medical nutrition study on the metabolic difference. I would I would love a study like this.

The metabolic differences between 20 calories and zero over a space. I did show in some of the videos that I did last year. These studies, that the National Institute of Health did and all the participants in The Biggest Loser show, have you seen that has been on NBC and other, stations where where people who are very overweight are put on extreme diet and exercise protocols in general, their their calorie restriction without fasting.

And they show, okay, people losing huge amounts of weight over these processes, but they're showing their metabolism is slowing down during the process. And then, NIH did a follow up studies, which I linked in some of these videos. So people gain all the weight back, because in there they stopped doing the process. Now the metabolism is much slower and they go back even to, a normal calorie intake, not severely restricted.

And then they start putting the weight back on the other side of that is that over time, see, these things are dynamic. They come in, they slow over time, people, the metabolism will come back into some sort of balance. We have had discussions in the past. People say, oh, I've experienced something like that. Most people who have gone through a cycle of dieting have experienced, you know, a cycle weight loss, plateau regain, you know, end up in a worse place.

People say, oh, my metabolism is damaged, is like broken. And a big message I want to give to people is space of openness. From a fasting can help to heal. That is a resetting of it. And you can move forward from that, heal from that reset, especially in the short term. A fasting space about openness is about releasing energy from the body.

You can have increase in the metabolism, get things going again, and then everything in balance, long term fasting, heading out past ten days. And you look then, then your head back down again because the body's saying, oh man, we have not had energy in here in a long time. Body is interested in keeping us alive. Body will conserve energy.

So I want to show people these the metabolism is dynamic and flexible. We can interact with it in ways that we can use to move us forward. So what if it was the case? This is the point I'm trying to get to with your question, but if it was the case that a little bit of creamer is triggering some of that negative adaptation space where the body is hormonally getting in, this space is saying, oh, we got a little bit of calories here, is kind of taking us out of a fat burning space, a quick run off the creamer, but then no other energy comes, and it's kind of putting us in a tight little

spot. So I give everybody the pure advice calorie free nothingness is the pure state. And then you can go from there. You can experiment with it. You think, what can I get away with? You know, like if you can get away with some, little something in there doesn't seem to matter. You're accomplishing everything. You want. You're loving it.

Like, don't stress about it, but just have it in the back of the mind, like, is. Is this something that I can work on? You know, I've said, you know, maybe a couple days of the week, leave the powdered creamer out and then a couple other days you have it and that would be a start, you know, a way to move toward greater openness just to the level, that gets you, what you want.

That was some nice thinking on openness. I hope these, thoughts are, helpful. I wish you all the very best. Have a good one.