5:40
what's the most amount of fat you can lose in five days I wanted to find out because recently I ate 30 eggs a day for a month to bulk and I put on a good chunk of muscle but some fat as well then I went to Belgium for the holidays and put on even more fat the latest diet craze fasting crazy three to five day fast people slept better they felt more energetic throughout the day cellular repair in your body my plan was to do a five day fast move as much as I possibly could and do cold exposure so on Saturday January 7th I got tons of blood tests I snapped my before picture hopped on this machine that measures my body fat and muscle mass and I finished my last bit of food by 1pm so in this video we'll
look at what all this did to my body and blood as well as do a deep dive into how fasting exercise and cold exposure work together to increase fat loss on day one my weight started at 187.2 pounds and right after my meal I got moving right away it being the first day of the fast I really wasn't expecting anything too difficult I ended up walking 29 000 steps or 15 miles and was limping a bit by the end of the day but other than that it wasn't too terrible I would have thought that not eating anything and burning 1400 calories through walking would have made me ravenously hungry but surprisingly I wasn't too bothered by the hunger the morning of the second day I hopped on the treadmill for an hour to bang out
some steps my feet were still tired from the day before so I tried walking backwards for a while after that I did a shoulder workout I was weaker than usual but wasn't feeling terrible later I had the typical waves of hunger that I'd expect from the second day of a fast but like normal it didn't last very long not gonna lie as I was getting ready to go out or feeling a little low energy I was looking at my food and getting hungry but now that I'm out and walking and the sun is shining nicely feel pretty good okay one thing we need to discuss real quick is that the annoying thing about being alive is that they just trade-off between growth and Longevity growth factors like human
growth hormone and igf-1 help you grow muscles lose fat heal your wounds regenerate your cells and even grow new brain cells however studies on mice worms and flies have found that decreasing these beneficial growth factors has them live 50 percent longer there are a number of people in Ecuador who have a genetic defect that makes these growth factors far less effect active in them unsurprisingly they are much smaller than the average Ecuadorian but they are also uniquely protected against diseases like cancer and diabetes even though they have almost double the rate of obesity fasting is known to decrease these growth factors like igf-1 and end of California found that this temporary reduction of igf-1 through
fasting increases your stem cell's ability to regenerate and it strengthens the immune system people don't like to fast then again I think when they do fast they feel a lot better Dr Walter Longo wanted to find a less painful way to provide the many benefits of fasting to people he came up with a diet limited to 725 calories a day that mimics several characteristics of fasting like an increase in ketones a drastic reduction in blood sugar and a reduction in this growth factor igf-1 his randomized trial on 100 patients found this fasting mimicking diet had tons of benefits like reducing blood sugar blood pressure and triglycerides as well as reducing igf-1 and inflammation and it also increased blood stem cells
for me the benefits I was aiming to get from my fast were fat loss a dramatic reduction in insulin a reduction in inflammation a reduction in igf-1 and any blood changes that would indicate that more autophagy was going on autophagy is basically where the body rejuvenates Itself by eliminating and recycling old and damaged parts of cells I've been more than one zero calorie seven day water fast so this time I wanted to see if I could still get similar benefits by mimicking fasting 725 calories was a little bit too much for me so I allowed myself 300 calories a day from the second day I focused on low carb higher protein higher salt snacks but you're probably wondering doesn't that break your fast you could take even
you know even up to like 500 calories in that fasting day and still get the benefits people get very concerned about what breaks a fast to the point that they're wondering whether toothpaste will break a fast the truth is it's not like the moment you eat a calorie all the benefits from fasting stop sure some of the processes that are making fasting beneficial will temporarily slow down if you eat a little bit of something ketones will probably lower and blood sugar and Insulin may go up a little bit however if you eat 250 calories of soup and fish three days into a fast your body will quickly metabolize that small amount of food and quickly get back into a low insulin High Ketone State personally 50
grams of pure carbs is the last thing I would want to have during a fast as I imagine it would make you extra hungry but in this particular Clinic they're giving patients 250 calories of pretty much straight carbs and they still drastically reduce insulin blood sugar and triglycerides and we're producing plenty of ketones so the second day I had 80 calories of salted polycrow a small package of beef jerky and some electrolyte packs for a total of about 270 calories for the day I got in about 34 000 steps and burned about 2 000 calories from walking 17 miles for dinner I got to watch my girlfriend eat this nice pack of sushi I got to lick some of the soy sauce day three was when things got a lot more
fun because my buddy and I headed out to hakone yumoto to hike through the old tokaido road to ashinoko Lake being in nature and being able to chat with my friend made the Long Walk much more enjoyable there are many more times where I felt like I was in this kind of Flow State and not concerned about how tired my legs were or how hungry I was for the most part being on the Move really seemed to silence the hunger okay so it's the third day it's uh 3 P.M and I'm actually feeling pretty great we walked about 10 kilometers so far today but it was mostly uphill and I think it's actually easier than my previous fast I really think just moving the whole time it makes a fast so much easier like when I'm sitting at home
trying to figure out things to do or it gives me way more mental bandwidth to think about just food that I want to eat so I had been taking cold showers but I wanted to step it up a notch by hopping in the Cold Stream in the forest during a hike there's a surprising amount of synergy between fasting exercise and cold exposure 57 degrees baby the call trains your immune system no flu no inflammation depression can't just smell the testosterone as you may be aware many of the benefits that come from fasting stem from the fact that fasting reduces insulin when you fast your blood sugar goes down which causes insulin to go down and by maintaining this low insulin State your Ketone levels increase significantly and both exercise and cold exposure
themselves have been found to increase ketones this may in fact make it easier to stand the cold because of the ketones effects on Brown fat one of the ways cold exposure will help you burn calories is by turning more of our fat into Brown fat different from the usual white fat Brown fat looks Brown because it has far more mitochondria white fat is more like a vat for storing calories but the purpose of this brown fat is to act like a furnace keeping you warm by burning up calories in its mitochondria Dr Benjamin bickman has said that having more of this active Brown fat can increase your daily calorie burn and exposing yourself to the cold will increase the amount of this brown fat
and actually make the brown fat better at burning calories to keep you warm if you're familiar with Wim Hof you'd know that the body can become remarkably good at tolerating cold Wim Hof was instrumental in popularizing the physical and mental benefits of cold exposure but polish scientists followed John romanovsky took the ice bath world record from him by staying in full contact with ice for three hours straight here's him taking an ice bath in negative 55 degree weather in Siberia fasting is the best way to increase ketones and Dr Benjamin bickman has found that when you apply ketones to fat cells it actually increases their ability to burn calories and let ketones turn white fat into Brown fat in mice a ketogenic diet has been found to
increase the size of the mitochondria in the brown fat on the other side of ketones we have insulin to simplify things a bit where ketones tell your fat to burn more calories the hormone insulin tells the fat to just store the calories a sun will block your fat cells from turning into this more productive Brown fat and it will increase the amount of inactive white fat that you have lucky for us exercise and especially fasting will of course lower insulin this is great because Studies have suggested that higher insulin reduces your body's daily calorie burn one in three kids are overweight or obese she'll unveil her biggest program yet a nationwide campaign to combat childhood obesity
give me five ways they're leading a healthier life five jumping jacks eating five new vegetables the bad news for children 12 to 19 years old obesity has increased teens posting YouTube videos complaining they were hungry because of the cap on calories having too much insulin can block the brain from picking up on the signal from the satiety hormone leptin making you hungry and that's what's driving obesity insulin blocks leptin at the brain and makes you hungry so the higher your insulin goes the hungrier you get researchers are actually looking at Cold exposure as a therapeutic strategy for type 2 diabetes because it has beneficial effects on blood sugar and insulin Ray cornice
explained in the 2010 Ted Med talk that a regimen of cold showers and shirtless walks in winter had him lose 30 pounds in six weeks for my lunch I'm having this Olden soup with a bunch of shiratakis probably about 200 grams of Shirataki probably about 50 calories total in here and this beef jerky is 133 calories and then the squid is 45. to wrap up the third day I tried going for a run that night and I actually felt quite energetic and very light at first but after three kilometers I started to get a headache and switch to walking after that I went back to the hotel and did some rounds of sauna and cold plunge usually by this point in a fast the twinge in my stomach really makes it hard to fall asleep but like the day before I was so exhausted this night
that I fell asleep much faster than I usually do when I'm eating this morning I woke up feeling really weird I felt really depleted but kind of hot my skin felt kind of weird this probably because the room was dry but I kind of think I overdid it on the sauna probably not the best thing to do while you're fasting but uh had some salt and electrolytes and now I'm feeling pretty good so I'm gonna try and get a bunch of steps in luckily it's a really nice day today I got in about 10 000 steps and listened to an Andrew huberman podcast before we had to check out of the hotel I learned from that podcast that an important component to burning fat with cold exposure is specifically to shiver shivering causes the release of a compound called sukinate that acts on
your brown fat to increase the brown fats production of heat and calorie burn shivering also triggers the release of adrenaline from neurons that are embedded in the fat this adrenaline causes the fat to be released and burned up this is the protocol that uh that huberman recommended is you get in to water that's basically cold enough to make you shiver for three minutes and then you get out for three minutes and then you get back in for three minutes so something about this makes you shiver a lot more I actually feel pretty good I feel a lot better than a lot more energized than I felt before even after I put my clothes on I was still shivering like a wet Chihuahua as we walk down to skia to
get some miso soup despite not having as much time to walk this day I was once again totally exhausted and ended up being in bed about 11 and a half hours this is the most I've ever slept on a fast foreign with that kind of low blood pressure really depleted feeling so I got up took some salt with electrolytes and before long I was feeling pretty good so I went up and did the cold plunge got some shivering and now I'm back down here and I'm a bit worried about today because my achilles tendon has been killing me since yesterday night the last day we hopped on the train to go back to Tokyo and while I was aiming to max out my steps my Achilles heel was killing me and I was limping along most of the day
it felt better walking on a perfectly flat surface so I went to the gym and did an hour on the treadmill while watching a crappy movie I hit the treadmill for about 90 minutes uh now it's actually a lot worse so I'm gonna go home I had to call it quits after a measly 25 000 steps for the day today I woke up feeling a little depleted but now that I came out and started moving I'm feeling way better on the morning of the final day I limped out another 15 000 steps for a total of 163 000 steps or 79 miles over the five days I took my after picture got my blood drawn again and broke my 121 hour fast at 2PM with a nice big rib eye to be honest eating a proper meal after five days wasn't so much like an amazing burst of pleasure it feels more like a
sense of relief not all that different from finally being able to sit down after walking seven hours a day finally let's take a look at my before and after pictures looks like my gut shrank a decent amount though I doubt all that initial size was fat I may have been extra bloated in the before picture I lost 11.7 pounds or 5.3 kilograms over the five days but what about my blood results was I able to get the fasting benefits I was hoping for despite eating 300 calories well after the fast my insulin was three times less than Baseline CRP a marker of inflammation was 1.8 times less igf this growth factor that we want to produce for better longevity was 1.7 times less than Baseline and finally my white blood
cell count was 1.65 times less than Baseline based on this paper here this production in white blood cells may suggest increased autophagy the body's rejuvenating cell recycling process so it seems like I got all the benefits I was looking for even though I was eating some calories by the way my LDL cholesterol went from 125 to 101 my HDL improved from 40 to 43 and my triglycerides which you generally want to be lower went from 56 all the way down to 39. next up according to the in-body scan my body fat percentage reduced by 2.4 percent meaning I lost five and a half pounds of fat I also lost 4.4 pounds of soft lean mass but that doesn't necessarily mean I lost four pounds of
pure muscle soft lean mass refers to total body protein water and non-bone minerals however please take these specific results with a big grain of salt I don't put too much stock into the accuracy of this in body thing last time I got an inbody scan it said my body fat percentage was six percent when I looked like this here's someone who got a result of six percent body fat on a much more accurate device the dexa scan but unfortunately I don't have access to a dexa scan in Tokyo by the way this study that used a dexa scan on people doing a prolonged fast found that their fat Mass drastically reduced by day six of fasting and while their lean mass was temporarily reduced it returned back to Baseline after five days of repeating
but even after the refeeding they maintain that big reduction in fat Mass so if you're fasting my five tips to you would be to one move as much as you can and stay busy obviously seven hours of walking a day is not realistic at all but every time I got outside and moving I felt a lot more energetic and less hungry when I was sitting down with nothing to focus on was when I was feeling the hungriest the second thing is to get in nature and get plenty of Sun if you can third if you have experience with cold exposure and fasting try combining them but take it slow I found it actually made me feel really energetic it improved my mood and reduced my Hunger for beginners it's probably not good idea fourth you don't
need to impress anyone sure water only fasting is the coolest and surely it has more benefits but if having a hundred calorie miso soup will make it so that you can fast for four days instead of three just eat the soup fifth like usual take your salt and electrolytes whenever I was feeling really low energy or hungry I would take plenty of salt and electrolytes in my water and that had me feeling way better that's why this video sponsor element comes in as mentioned plenty of fasting benefits come from reducing insulin but when you reduce insulin your body will have you pee out more electrolytes so adding electrolytes to your water can really bring your energy levels back up I was drinking
tons of these during my fast at least three a day and I was having the chocolate flavored element in hot water instead of coffee in the morning also since hunger can be tied to a lack of sodium the element packs helped me reduce my fatigue and hunger actually even if I'm not fasting or doing low carb I found element gives me more energy especially when I'm working out element tastes great and my favorite thing is there's no junk in it's just a well-balanced mix of electrolytes sodium potassium magnesium a bit of flavoring and some Stevia there's also an unflavored one if you prefer if you go to drink lmnt.com what I've learned you can get a free sampler pack with any purchase
