The Ultimate Guide to Dry Fasting - Combining The Carnivore Diet - Scorch Protocol - Part 1

Welcome back to the Dry Fasting Club. I'm Janik Wolf and boy, do I have a treat for you today? I know it's been a while, but this is going to be a multi-part series called the Ultimate Guide to Dry Fasting, the Bioenergetics and Carnivore Edition. So this is going to be a really crazy, very in-depth, very detailed guide that walks you through what to expect on a dry fast. I'll have a little bit of deep dives on certain parts and it's going to probably be the best guide out there right now for healing chronic illness. As always, make sure that you keep in mind the disclaimer, dry fasting can be dangerous and shouldn't be performed unless you have a medical professional that is advising you. All the information that I provide here is from personal experience and most of the details here that I talk about are much deeper explained in articles and protocols on the Dry Fasting Club website. Highly recommend you check that out. This is an examination of this common therapeutic diet and how it relates to dry fasting. Pairing a low-carb diet with dry fasting is your fastest ticket to dealing with a hundred different symptoms that you get with chronic illness. If you don't know what's going on with you and you don't want to spend a year getting medical tests and being ghastly, this is the fastest way to symptom resolution for most people. The fastest way to harness deep ketosis. Just remember this is symptom resolution, not final healing. Getting true healing requires you to nail the refeed for stem cell regeneration and to nail the refeed you require a carbohydrate-based diet. That's where bioenergetics come into play. You also need to give yourself time and grace. The closer you are in your recovery the deeper you'll understand this statement. A doubt regular doctors will ever be able to comprehend and promote this strategy because it's the equivalent of holding fire in one hand and ice in the other. It's too much to handle for the average person. This is going to scare a lot of you. Have an open mind and follow along to learn the deepest secrets of dry fasting and stem cell regeneration. The secrets similar to the fountain of youth because your health is the most important part of living a youthful and happy life. Everyone's dry fasting experience will be different. The amount of possibilities and complications is immense, hence the disclaimer. The same way no two people will react identically to diet changes, medication and other therapeutic interventions. This is a guide that goes deeper and should work for more people than any other dry fasting guide. Still, dry fasting should be done with a medical professional and this information here should only be treated as entertainment. Good luck on your healing journey. What is dry fasting? This form of fasting involves abstaining from both food and water for a set period. Unlike other fasting methods, dry fasting also restricts water intake, which intensifies the body's cleansing and healing processes. We'll dive deeper into the differences between soft and hard when we reach the understanding dry fasting section. So the two main types are soft dry fasting, which is while no food or water is consumed, minimal water exposure like brushing teeth or taking a shower is allowed and then we have dry fasting, hard to dry fasting, no food, no water and no exposure to water in any form whatsoever. And because this protocol focuses on the carnivore diet as the first step, we have the carnivore diet overview. The carnivore diet is an eating plan where the diet is restricted to animal products exclusively, primarily meat, fish, eggs and some dairy. The rationale behind the diet includes simplicity in food choices and potential benefits in managing inflammation, weight loss and mental health. Okay, so the carnivore diet is simply the king of the low carb diets. It asks that you eat as little carbs as possible, often close to zero grams. Does it mean it's the best low carb diet? Maybe, maybe not. It simply means that it is the most powerful one. The one that gives the quickest results. The goal of low carb diets is to get into fat adaptation and harness the power of deep continual ketosis. There are hundreds of variations of low carb dieting. This is simply the strongest and simplest version. What other low carb diets are there? Well, you've got the basic keto diet that aims to have around 50 grams of carbs per day. There's paleo diets, Mediterranean diets and even ketovor ones. And ketovor is a mix of keto and carnivore, so think of it more of a balanced carnivore approach that maintains some fiber intake. The type of carnivore diet I talk about here is one that still includes non-star chief vegetables. So when I say carnivore, you can imagine me saying ketovor, just transpose it. Things like spinach, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, bell peppers, asparagus, Brussels sprouts, cucumber, celery, you get the picture. The idea is not to speedrun the destruction of your microbiome. We're already getting a little bit of that during the fasting, so let's not nuke it completely with the diet. That's why I like the idea of keeping some fiber in there. Moving on to the synergy of carnivore diet and dry fasting. Both practices aim at reducing or eliminating dietary elements that might cause inflammation or digestive issues, with dry fasting taking this a step further by also eliminating water intake for a period, focusing the body's resources on repair and rejuvenation. Okay, so it is common understanding at this point that successfully fat adapted carnivore dieters have a very easy time dry fasting, compared to people who are on higher carb diets. This is a point of a lot of debate, and the debate is around what is the best diet to do before you fast. Although I admit that there is a time and place for this diet and synergizing it with dry fasting, it is not ultimately the best when all things are considered, but things change drastically when you're dealing with an illness that is not being cured through conventional medicine. This is when a carnivore diet shines. It is a powerful strategy and sometimes the best one, depending on your health symptoms. Many people are on low carb diets because they are unable to deal with certain health complications. And this diet has allowed them to function. However, my goal with the rehabilitation of your health focuses on bringing you back to real health, which includes eating a mixed diet without any negative symptoms. This is the ultimate end goal, a balanced diet. Don't you agree? There are a lot of reasons why you might want to consider combining the carnivore diet with dry fasting. This section is going to dissect the popular views from a more advanced perspective. Keep in mind that these views are not a one-size-fits-all, but it comes pretty close. Part one is why combine the carnivore diet with dry fasting? Wait loss. Dry fasting can significantly reduce calorie intake, promoting fat loss, combining it with the carnivore diet, which is naturally low in carbohydrates, can enhance fat utilization. Okay, so the problem with trying to oversimplify the concept of weight loss as eating less carbs is that it only works while your thyroid is functioning correctly. But over time, weight loss stalls, and suddenly you realize you've plateaued. Then keeping weight off gets harder and harder. Yes, initially, this is the most powerful weight loss tool. However, refeeding incorrectly will bring back all the weight. And there are striking similarities between both carnivore and fasting when it comes to weight regain when you come off of the treatment. It's very common to see people balloon and regain their weight right back, and then the excuses come with the most popular one being, "Carbs are bad for you." Or my favorite, "I'm just a carb addict." This self-defeating attitude is not the right approach. With this guide, hopefully, I'll arm you with some tools to fight it back. Why combine the carnivore diet with dry fasting? Part 2. Detoxification. Without food or water, the body is forced to recycle and repair at a cellular level. The carnivore diet might reduce the toxic load by eliminating potentially harmful plant compounds, but the real magic is the removal of processed foods. Okay. This is a powerful statement, and a concept that people like to talk about without fully understanding it. There are definitely benefits to eliminating processed junk food from the diet when you get to simplify it down to something like a carnivore one. Obviously, unless you're a dirty carnivore type, a dirty carnivore type eating hot dogs and other processed meats. So, the same idea is mirrored in fasting, except in this case, you eat nothing, so you have no chance of consuming harmful additives from processed food and even whole foods. For example, Even meat can be filled with pesticides and additives that the animals are fed during their growth. That's why grass fed is best, but if you can't find any regular beef works too. However, let's look at the alternative. While ketosis does provide higher levels of autophagy, which can help with detoxification, hydration is still an important part and factor of this whole detoxification. There is an element of dehydration that comes with dry fasting, and also with the carnivore diet. And this is not beneficial to the liver. However, increased bile formation and secretion do keep things moving well and can actually form a sort of cleansing of the intestines due to the soap-like effect, a soap-like cleaning effect that comes from good bile flow, think of it like soap running down your digestive system. We also have to remember that bile detoxification also comes from fiber binding to the bile, which helps eliminate it, allowing us a potential way for toxic bile to be cleared. It also helps in removing excess cholesterol, and I know a lot of you listening have high cholesterol. It makes sense to eat fiber. If you don't tolerate it, that means you have issues that need to be fixed, often surrounding digestive health and digestive motility. So don't throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to fiber, just because it makes you feel bad. Remember, fasting will help, especially if you're worried that your microbiome is contaminated. Why combine the carnivore diet with dry fasting part three mental clarity? There is a powerful synergy here. Many report improved focus and cognitive function during fasting, possibly due to increased ketone production. The carnivore diet, which also has an element of mental clarity to it, induces ketosis, and together with fasting, really amplifies the effect. Okay, so it's well researched that ketosis is an important tool to help with mental issues. What does ketosis do? It gives us enhanced energy supply, though ketones serve as an efficient alternative fuel, improving cognitive function. It gives us reduced inflammation, so ketosis might even lower brain inflammation, which is linked to various neurological disorders. ketosis is neuroprotective, they increase the production of BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotropic factor, and that supports neuron health and neuron growth, and ketones have the ability to stabilize our blood sugar. It helps in avoiding glucose spikes, which can lead to more consistent brain function, like a more even keel. Now on the topic of mental clarity, there's an article called, "Pilot study shows ketogenic diet improves severe mental illness." What we have to keep in mind here is that even though the ketogenic diet has all these miraculous results, it is still a backup generator sort of diet. It does not address the root cause of the problem. In this case, patients are suffering from brain-focused diseases, aka mental illness. If ketosis is what is helping, it means the brain is not running properly on a regular glucose-filled diet. This means there's insulin resistance, probably cellular resistance, and bad thyroid hormone utilization. You can go on the backup generator diet, aka ketogenic, but I need people to realize one crucial thing. What happens when the backup generator fails? What happens when your symptoms start to regress, but you're already on the ketogenic diet, the diet that was supposed to be your fail-safe. The point is that while you can use this diet as an emergency therapeutic, you can't just stop there. You must use this time to build back better. Not the New World Order Vibes, anybody? There's even a study that came out of the USSR called Fasting Treatment of Schizophrenia, controlled fasting treatment of schizophrenia, which is pretty cool, and it shows us this synergy for mental clarity between dry fasting and the carnivore diet, so now we're on the fasting part. 10,000 patients were pulled in this study. It's pretty amazing, showing how powerful fasting and ketosis are for mental illness. No wonder the carnivore diet helps so much by giving a more stable energy source, especially when the initial one is corrupted. It's very important to catch and read between the lines. During this study, most patients relapsed afterward. Even though there were improvements that we can assume lasted indefinitely, think of it like little improvements in general that continued on, but the overall sense of it, there was an aspect of relapse when they stopped. This is often seen with the dry fasting as well. This leads to a very vicious cycle that I've seen many fasters fall into. I see the same thing repeating with many die hard, fully committed carnivore dieters. You become addicted to that which was supposed to save you. Your savior has turned into your vice. The key thing that you should be doing is harnessing the period of reduced inflammation, heightened cortisol and lowered cellular resistance, to make the changes necessary and to allow the stem cells to do their magic. If you fall into the trap chasing the fasting high, you can bet that you will eventually run out of gas. The key to healing mental illness is initial bursts of fasting, followed by long term focus on rebuilding with stem cells, diet, time, hormone therapy if necessary, and antiviral medications, and the antiviral medications come down to. The immune system and dealing with all those pesky reactivated viral complications. Permanental illnesses you need to get to the root cause, which is often dysfunctional glucose metabolism in the brain, or hypometabolism in the brain. Very highly correlated to insulin resistance. There's a reason why Alzheimer's is sometimes referred to as type 3 diabetes. Think about that one. One last thing I want to touch on, I wrote an article a few years ago about a research paper exploring fasting and even water restriction as helping with epilepsy. Drawing the distinction that they accidentally noticed a pattern where dehydration, aka subtype of dry fasting, had very positive effects on epilepsy. They just didn't understand the connection of dehydration to increased ketones in the blood and therefore ketosis. Unfortunately, this is not a good long-term solution, but it shows you the power of dry fasting and dehydration. Anyways, you can read more about it on the blog article. Why combine the carnivore diet with dry fasting, part 4, autophagy? Both practices of carnivore dieting and dry fasting promote autophagy, the body's way of cleaning out damaged cells, which can lead to longevity and disease prevention. This is the holy grail of endogenous antibiotic, antifungal and antiviral therapy all rolled into one. Kind of like the backup generator for our immune system. The same way ketosis is the backup generator for our glucose metabolism. Okay, let's dissect this. Autophagy is one of the key reasons people want to be in deep ketosis. There is a link between deep ketosis and higher levels of autophagy. The highest autophagy is obtained from a multiple-day fast and even higher when dry fasting. Autophagy can be viewed as your attempt to induce very aggressive levels of natural antibiotic, antifungal and antiviral therapy. This is achieved through lysosomal activity, because your normal immune system gets suppressed the deeper you go on a fast. By normal immune system, I mean things like lymphocytes like T&B cells and even natural killer cells or NK cells, but don't worry, lots of them are just retreating to the spleen and bone marrow. Some papers show that it actually strengthens your immune system in the long run through things like reprogramming of the cells. There's a caveat here. With going to hypothyroid from doing too many fasts and having a negative effect, so keep that in mind and it relates to energy and the immune system. Back to autophagy. Even with the immune system suppressed, your internal cells are burning components through lysosomal activity on the fast. This doesn't produce heat, but it restructures your cells. A true waste recycling system. Autophagy is great, but keep in mind that many pathogens, things like viruses, have co-evolved ways to hijack or evade regular autophagy and your immune system, but super strong autophagy and especially hyper-osmotic autophagy is not something they have co-evolved with and you get this type of autophagy only with dry fasting, louder for the people in the back, only with dry fasting. So pairing a carnivore diet with fasting pairs two methodologies that achieve elevated autophagy. The idea is that together, this makes our autophagy even more powerful. While I don't agree that it increases peak autophagy more than coming from a higher metabolic state, meaning a high carb diet will most likely help you achieve higher rates of peak autophagy during the fast. But total autophagy will be much larger for those that synergize a ketogenic diet with fasting. However, there is a point of diminishing returns. You can't eat carnivore and fast forever. You will burn out your adrenals and thyroid eventually. Let's dive back into autophagy mechanisms and quickly touch on them. We've discovered that autophagy at least the most basic form of autophagy requires lysosomes, which are kind of like an acidic molecule sac or vacuole. And that tries to gobble up amino acids and other junk that's often deemed faulty in the body. Side note, sometimes autophagy does eat up valuable parts too and that's when people call it things like muscle protein breakdown. To all the gym bros listening to this, oh no, muscle protein breakdown. There are other types of autophagy that are still being explored. An acidic environment is a scenario that lets acidic lysosomes function much better. You get this acidic scenario from both fasting and a carnivore diet. Pairing them together is super powerful. But what do you get when you go into acidic overdrive? You get a pH balancing attempt by the body. This releases lots of alkaline minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium into the blood. Not as much sodium because our aldosterone hormone skyrockets during a dry fast. So that's a big difference between water and dry during water you may actually lose a lot more sodium. In fact, in one of my blog articles, the science behind how a one day dry fast is equivalent to a three day water fast, I show a study that measured autophagy levels in the brains of rats, being water fasted, being dry fasted, and being just water restricted. Dry fasting autophagy levels in the brain skyrocketed after 24 hours while it took about 72 hours for similar effects on water fasted rats, not mice. This gives extra evidence to the theory thrown around that dry fasting is three times as powerful as water fasting. The problem that people don't realize is that it's also more dangerous because it induces severe dehydration that needs to be carefully managed, carefully prepped for, and carefully refed. But if you do read my article about zebra finches and fat burn to water conversion, you'll see that we do the body does adapt and it does produce a portion of your endogenous water that helps you continue the fast. Why combine the carnivore diet with dry fasting part five disease prevention? There's anecdotal and some scientific evidence suggesting benefits in managing or preventing diseases and especially conditions like type two diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and certain cancers due to the combined effects of fasting and an animal-based diet. Alright, let's dissect it. We often see carnivores in ketogenic dieters lay claim that it healed their type two diabetes. Now, we know that type one diabetes is a result of basically burning out the pancreas beta cells that produce insulin, so your body can't produce it. This requires injecting insulin daily. Type two diabetes, however, usually means your insulin resistant and probably have high levels of insulin floating in your blood. It's just not getting into the cells properly. Low carb dieters, that might be you, and even fasters believe that since their A1C levels have dropped after being on the diet for quite some time, they have essentially cured their type two diabetes. This is in fact very wrong and tons of doctors don't even understand this. It's pretty sad. The equivalent of putting a bandaid over a leak. Did you actually fix the leak? While it is a temporary solution that is fantastic and helps, it's not a permanent solution. You might be saying, "Oh, I'll just stay on this diet forever." My answer is similar to what I said earlier. This diet, this is a body backup generator type diet. Don't overplay with it because there's no backup generator to the backup generator if things go wrong. Even though insulin resistance is a root cause, there are a lot of other diseases that you may have in mind when dry fasting. Some people take it as far as to fast when they feel sick. Something like, "I'm sick, so maybe I'll try to beat it through a fast." This is not the best choice. For acute infections, it's always better to let your body handle it, then clean up the mess afterwards with fasting. You don't want to be dealing with a suppressed immune system during an active infection. There are stories of people swearing their cold-disappeared quicker while fasting, but from a scientific point of view, this is not optimal and puts you at risk of complications, especially if, for some reason, you have to break the fast in the middle of the acute infection, and suddenly you've lost your acidic lysosomal protection, and your immune system is still rebooting. Uh-oh. A lot of people fast for cancer prevention or healing of cancer, it's very common. There's lots of theories around this and a lot of miraculous stories around cancer and fasting. While I do not recommend dry fasting for cancer, a lot of the strategies in the scorch protocol work hand-in-hand with water fasting too, something that I am much more comfortable recommending if you are someone looking into fasting and cancer. Remember, even Thomas Seafried, if you say that, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, agrees that cancer, so Thomas Seafried also agrees that cancer is a metabolic disease. The part that he's completely lost on is that it's not about choosing a ketogenic diet to live your life on, but rather that you need your body to relearn how to utilize glucose properly. Your body needs to fix itself and learn how to use carbs. Choosing to eliminate carbs forever is not a long-term solution, and I've seen this time and time again with people spinning their wheels with this keto mindset. I used to be one of you. So you're here in the background, one of us, one of us. It's not the final solution. Don't become one of the millions of people that get stuck on that diet and then progressively worsen. Why combine the carnivore diet with dry fasting parts six, metabolic advantages? So, impact on insulin sensitivity. The carnivore diet's low carbohydrate nature combined with fasting can dramatically improve insulin sensitivity, helping manage or prevent diabetes. All right, we'll dissect this very common misconception. We have to dive even deeper into insulin sensitivity. So buckle up. There's this misconception that fasting and a carnivore diet makes you less insulin resistant. I know we just talked about this, but we're going to go a little deeper. Hence, it must make you more insulin sensitive. What does this mean? Being insulin sensitive means that your cells are using insulin properly. Insulin shuttles glucose into cells for energy. Have you ever noticed that type one diabetics are usually very skinny? If they don't inject themselves the exact dose of insulin, and therefore they under-medicate themselves, they won't be utilizing their glucose properly. A little off tangent, but this leads to higher blood glucose levels, which often leads to heart complications. Now, we can argue that insulin resistance is one of the root causes of most illnesses. And most people looking into the carnivore diet are already dealing with a form of illness, often manifesting itself through things like fatigue and weight gain as some of the first symptoms. Naturally, allowing the body to adapt to burning fat and running on ketones makes sense and is going to make you feel 100 times better than your previous diet that had all of that pesky glucose. Now, back to insulin resistance and sensitivity. When you fast or eat low carb, you immediately start lowering your glycogen stores throughout the body. Naturally, you will respond better to carbohydrates afterwards because they're going into glucose starved cells. Think of it like a big deflated balloon. But then you spend a few days eating carbs and feeling great. Does this mean you healed your insulin resistance? No, it means you starved your cells of glucose and created a temporary insulin sensitivity effect. There's room in the balloon to fill up on glucose. The problem is that you've probably also become more insulin resistant because of low carbs and fasting. Remember the deflated balloon analogy? The longer you are in a deflated balloon state, the plastic casing of the balloon also slowly starts to shrink. This means that your glucose absorption maximum drops, bit by bit, the longer you are in a carb depleted state from fasting or low carb dieting. And the more it drops, the worse you will feel when you suddenly eat any type of glucose, any type of carb. The solution, the solution is actually here in the scorch protocol and it revolves around a few key strategies, one of them being to make sure you refeed with carbohydrates. That's just a super oversimplification, but a damn near important one. Something I tell everyone that I talk to or consult with, treat yourself as a type 2 diabetic when you exit the fast. The high cortisol state makes you extremely insulin resistant. The beauty of the fast is that it gives you a cellular reset. And with the power of the stem cells and detox mechanisms, you create the perfect environment for your body to bounce back from insulin resistance. It still won't be easy, but you need to rehabilitate your ability to utilize carbs. At the same time, you will also be building back your thyroid health, which requires carbohydrates as a signaling mechanism to increase metabolism, skip the carbs and permanently slow down your metabolism in the refeed. Why combine the carnivore diet with dry fasting parts 7? That burning. In the absence of dietary glucose, the body burns fat for energy, which is enhanced by the carnivore diet's focus on fatty meats. Alright, this is pretty simple, pretty straightforward, but fat burning in itself is a super interesting concept. A lot of people come into the carnivore fasting world to lose weight and get shredded. We're all vain in this way, you are, I am. So I know you know what I'm talking about, but it's important to keep this in mind. Dry fasting should never be done to lose weight. Losing weight should be viewed as a bonus by fat people and as a curse for skinny people. However, do keep in mind that skinny, hard gainers often have an overactive metabolism, which can be dialed back in through fasting. Hard to understand because you automatically worry about your body not having enough fat to fast, whereas a bit of extended fasting followed by a higher fat diet is a very quick way to gain weight. The idea is to suppress your thyroid a little bit and not let it rebound by avoiding carbohydrates in the refeed. If this is a light bulb moment for you, you're welcome. A dry fast burns fat like nothing else. The reason is that it has all the benefits of regular fasting, which come with increased fat burning the longer you do it. Obviously up to a maximum duh, but it incorporates dehydration, which is like adding an additional source of fat burning. Think of it like pouring gasoline on a fire. The body realizes it's getting dehydrated. An internal mechanism of creating metabolic water is fat burning, so it gets activated. You'll notice that high energy metabolisms that are glucose centered, so a regular kind of diet, with a healthy thyroid, these people get dehydrated pretty quickly. That guy you know who's super athletic and energetic, yes, his body needs more water than yours. Even patients on higher thyroid medications get dehydrated much quicker. Shout out to all my synthroiders. Ew, monotee for therapy, no thanks. Now we know that there was a study done on zebra finches, I write about it. That showed full body hydration for those that dry fast. Better hydration, in fact, compared to the control birds. Where was this water coming from if the birds had no food and no water? The birds were dropping fats so quickly, and it was providing hydration to the rest of the tissues. This is one of the reasons we say that a dry fast is three times more powerful than a water fast. Because the ketone levels spike on day one, amazing. That's how much extra power and lack of water adds to the fasting scenario, and with it, fat burn. Now the carnivore diet is also known as a fat burner. If you consume mostly fats, the body must now adapt. For some, it can take a month. For others, it can take much more. It's commonly cited as three months being the average for true fat adaptation. If the body adapts to fat, things happen. For example, the liver may enlarge to accommodate to the increased need for bile acids. Some good adaptations, some bad ones. Still, as long as your thyroid and metabolism are healthy, you will shed pounds on the carnivore diet. Initially, the biggest weight loss is from water weight, which is a whole other topic to discuss. A low-carb diet, though, has trouble holding on to electrolytes, a mix of glycogen, dehydration, and pH balance. That's why most carnivore teachers speak about high levels of electrolyte and salt supplementation. They literally tell you to salt to taste. Some even lick salt rocks the way mountain goats do. It doesn't mean that salt is inherently good for you, but rather it means that sometimes it may be context specific, especially to the diet and your health. The issue with both of these things, and even pairing them together, so the carnivore diet and dry fasting, or fat loss, is that you will often regain a lot of it after the fast. The body attempts to bring itself back to balance. The term or theory here is called the set weight point theory. The body does everything it can to return to the set weight point. If your goal is to move it lower, it becomes your job to chip away at it slowly and carefully, and that requires smart, refeeding. You can't just wing it. If you're interested in this theory, let me throw you an even cooler deep dive curve ball. You can do gravity sensing cellular components. I don't remember if they're called gravitons or something like that. In essence, the more weight you want to lose, you'll need to carry extra weight, think weighted vests or rucking. Something about the cells being able to sense it, so as you start shedding pounds, and they realize, oh wow, we've just lost a lot of weight. Let's slow down the metabolism and try and gain it back. When next time we eat, you trick those cells by actually carrying more weight. Overall my recommendation for true weight loss is not carnivore or fasting, even though there are powerful tools. But it is a high energy diet with a focus on adrenal and thyroid health. Once you master this, you can skip suppers and throw in a weekly 36 hour fast, and the fat will fly off. Keep low carb diets and fasting as a therapeutic approach to diseases. I combine the carnivore diet with dry fasting, part 8, historical context, or like ancestral practices, basically. Fasting, especially dry fasting, has roots in various cultures as a method of cleansing, healing, or spiritual practice. Historically humans occasionally faced periods without water, suggesting an evolutionary adaptation to these conditions. Alright, let's dissect this. I don't really touch too much on the spiritual part here, though. I do think it's a very important part. There's a lot to talk about here, and as I continue writing my book on dry fasting and expanding on it, there's very detailed sections about spirituality, psychedelics, and how to harness them to fix your mind, body connection, and especially in resetting your hypothalamus and that whole HPA access connection. So dissecting the ancestral practices, yes, without a doubt, we had less sugar in our foods in the past. And that's like one of the biggest arguments that are being used to promote the carnivore diet. However, I'm pretty sure that in the last 1000 years, we really thrived due to agriculture. And thriving is context specific, depends on who you talk to, and what their definition of thriving is. Some people think it's more like muscular and like physical thriving versus mental thriving and development and technology and moving our society forward. Still, we get these arguments that seek validation among people like the Inuit people. That's like a big carnivore talking point. Just listen to yourselves. If you have to make claims based on the Inuit, you've probably already lost the thread. Humans are species of adaptation. You can adapt to many types of diets, but we thrive in balance. Balance of nutrients, balance of vitamins, balance of foods. If we can compare ourselves to the past, we can see that there have definitely been periods of starvation and winter. And this correlates to fasting and being stuck, maybe eating jerky and hunting meat when there's not even a piece of grass. To be seen, we can also look to nature and hibernating animals. They are basically fasting. And this state of hibernation is often called torpor, it's a scientific term. You need your metabolism to slow down drastically while in torpor to make everything work. A very informational video about torpor and diet can be found here, it's called the emergence diet, get out of torpor. So what is this basic, this, they dive research into torpor tell us? Well, it basically says that the way to slow down and enter torpor, so prepare for hibernation, you want to eat specific fats, and especially those in insects and nuts. This includes a lot of mono unsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. You also want to eat a lot of sugars when they mix with those fats and usually it comes from fruits, because they're late in the summer or in the fall, but it seems to require, there's this requirement between the fructose and the mono unsaturated and polyunsaturated fats to mix together to create the perfect storm. Because fructose by itself does not induce torpor, in fact, it gets you out of it. So what to eat to get out of torpor, I think lots of carbs. You can also think potatoes and casava root, so like these starchy carbs work collagen. So think gelatin as well. Both gelatin and carbohydrates are pro thyroid health, their pro insulin sensitivity, which is a critical component of getting out of torpor and speeding up the metabolism. I have two papers here that I highly recommend you look into. There's so many that could list, but very important one is one called the effect of dietary composition on fasting induced changes in serum thyroid hormones and thyroid tropin. And the present data suggests that one dietary carbohydrate is an important factor in reversing the fall in serum T3 caused by fasting. This paper should be enough to convince you that you should be refeeding with carbohydrates. And here's another study called the carbohydrate feeding increases total body and specific tissue, 353 triiodiodothyroidine neogenesis in the rat. Triiodothyroidine is basically T3. And the study basically the glucose fed rat in contrast to the chow fed animal has a higher serum total T3 concentration and an increase in the hepatic, so the liver content of T4 Diodinase type one activity, and that means that the enzymes that actually convert T4 to T3 are highly much more increased in the glucose fed rat. Thus glucose feeding has a unique effect on T3 metabolism. And if you are someone that doesn't know what the difference is between T4 and T3, T4 is the storage hormone of energy and T3 is the active hormone. The more T3 you have, the more energy you will have. I think it's quite clear that a vast majority of our ancestors lived in the tropics also at some point with abundant access to fruit. I know you've probably thought about this before. Carbohydrates have an intrinsic pull that makes us love them. There's a reason we love them, but it's easy to demonize this and say that it's just as bad as cocaine. The problem is that you are demonizing them because you're eating too much hyper processed low nutrient sugar and the increased metabolism is burning through your mineral and vitamin stores. I'm not even going to talk about viral stresses, infections, insulin resistance that I'll play a role into this. Nutrient rich foods like seafood, milk, and eggs are important sources of nutrients to pair with your carbs so that you're not just eating hyper processed sugars with nothing in them. Another problem is that you're consuming horrible fats and chemicals. This is a recipe for a disaster. If you never get out of torpor, you can expect your body to slowly shut down and shave off vital pieces as it works on conserving more and more energy. If there is an energy deficit in the body, the body will cut services. The same way doge is cutting wasteful spending in the US government, your body will cut activities it deems wasteful. Eventually, you get skin problems because your immune system gets cut down. Now you have this rash that won't go away some eczema. You gain weight very quickly and get fatigued because your thyroid stops working so hard and your metabolism slows down to conserve energy and then you start to get sick. A lot. If you're already on a carnivore diet and this happens to you, what are you going to do? The answer will lie in doing your best to rehabilitate your thyroid system and glucose tolerance. Hopefully, it won't be too late. Why combine the carnivore diet with dry fasting part 9? Simplicity. We're getting there. Both the carnivore diet and dry fasting simplified dietary choices, potentially leading to less decision fatigue and a clearer focus on health goals. We already talked about simplicity a little bit but we're reiterating here. As humans, we strive for simplicity. We also try and find patterns that can help us optimize and simplify. Fasting in the carnivore diet are very aggressive simplifications of returning our health. Or a basic approach to dealing with modern chemicals and toxins in too much processed sugar. Coming to think of it, I guess the ultimate simplification would be to ignore everything and just stuff your face with processed food. But that is a one way ticket to health problems. To oversimplify the carnivore diet and fasting can lead you down the wrong path, though. Unfortunately, that's the truth. I still oversimplify things but you need to understand that there is an importance of the five pillars to health, fasting, thyroid, adrenals, bioenergetics and the thymus. To simplify this down to as simple as possible, you have the carnivore diet to stabilize your health and prepare for an extended fast, then you have dry fasting, then you have refeeding with carbohydrates and a vegetarian diet low in fat. There's also an advanced version that includes mindfulness and psychedelics but we are not there and that's out of scope right now. As complicated as you think this is, to me, this is the minimum oversimplification of how to return you to full health. If you are sitting there right now thinking, yeah, right, I just see others eating whole foods and being healthy, yes, if you are healthy and eat a healthy balanced diet, your mantra should probably be, don't fix what isn't broken. But if you're reading this, you're most likely already broken. Don't worry, it's possible to fix it. Keep reading the scorched protocol. Why combine the carnivore diet with dry fasting part 10, potential for rapid health improvement? For those looking for quick noticeable changes in health parameters like weight, inflammation or mental clarity, this combination might offer accelerated results. Without an inkling of a doubt, dry fasting provides the fastest health improvements in the world. Actually, maybe thyroid hormones do, but still, let's focus. The most natural and quickest way to feel a difference is dry fasting. At least three days, but five is the magic number. The carnivore diet can be pretty extreme and quick too, as long as you fat adapt quickly. This is why these methodologies are gaining in popularity so quickly, the fast results. The problem is that it takes a while for the negative effects to accumulate. You might think yourself, that's fine, I'll just do it for a little bit and then stop. Good, if you can hold yourself to that, that's great. But the problem is that often the benefits don't last forever and your back craving improvement. You fall into this push and pull type of relationship, almost like drug seeking behavior. You need your fasting hit. I need to feel that mental clarity. I need to remove more and more carbs. Maybe you even get to a point where you need to remove black pepper because of those extra 0.5 grams of carbs that I might be adding to your diet. Like there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that looking for the shortest path to your destination is almost always too good to be true. Harness this diet and fasting as a therapeutic, but don't turn it into an addiction. And our last point of why we would combine them. Self experimentation. In a world where many seek personal health hacks combining these practices offers a unique approach to self optimization. It's a very unfortunate that we can't truly outsource our health. Wouldn't it be nice if a doctor could actually heal you instead of just pumping you with drugs and treating you like a guinea pig? Wouldn't it be nice if he treated you like a human being and not a statistic? We've got enough worries and enough time being spent on work and life that also taking care of your health may just seem impossible. But you have to. You have to take control of your health. It's not enough to just go to the gym and take a multivitamin. To put it into perspective, even millionaires and billionaires get chronic illness and cancer. If it gets very severe, they start to realize how generic a lot of the treatment are. You get treated as a number. The millionaires throw money at the problem and often realize it's not enough. Doctors are unable to give you more than a dozen minutes of their time. You start to realize what works for someone else might not work for you. You realize health is extremely personal and unique to you. From past trauma to past eating habits to underlying conditions, two genetics and more. Self-experimentation is a must. You will never reach 100% health without self-experimentation or finding the right help in dishing out a lot of money for personalized treatments. And this is why I am a staunch libertarian and I do not believe in censorship. Because I believe in self-experimentation and if you are someone that has fallen into this world, this chaotic world of chronic illness, this chaotic world of gaslighting doctors, this chaotic world of no-true solution to your problems, then you should appreciate that self-experimentation is a must. And you should also be on the side of free speech and limited censorship so that we at least have the liberty of attempting to self-feel. Thank you and that is it for today. The next section is going to be all about a focus on dry fasting, understanding a lot of the dry fasting mechanisms and what to expect on a fast. So the section is going to be called understanding dry fasting and how to prepare for a dry fast. That'll be the deep dive. Stick around for that. If you are looking for someone on one help, check out the website. I do like to put people into these weekly groups. So if you get to have a chat with me, I can probably fit you into one of the groups based on your situation, your demographic, like just where you would vibe the best and I'll put you into a weekly group that you don't have to pay for. Check out the Discord group and make sure to check out the website at dryfastinclub.com. Good luck on your healing journey.