What You MUST Eat Before A FAST

Hello Health Champions! Today we're going to talk about what to eat before a fast. And what is a fast? How long is a fast? Well a fast basically is anytime you're not eating. So if you eat every two hours the time period in between is basically a fast. But when we talk about a fast we usually refer to going longer than usual. So anything longer than the usual gap between meals is technically a fast. And for some people the longest time they ever go without eating is when they're sleeping. They eat first thing when they wake up last thing before bed. So they eat during 16 hours and then they don't eat for eight hours. So basically delaying breakfast is a fast for those people and how does the body cope with that. So other people are more adapted to a shorter window. They practice what's called intermittent fasting. So they eat during eight hours and they fast during 16 hours giving the body some time to recover and burn through that food. So that could be that they're eating at noon and eight or it could be they're eating at eight in the morning and four in the afternoon. It doesn't really matter as long as you get a continuous fasting window. But then the question is what happens when you go longer? What sort of fuel does the body use when you're not putting anything in? Where does the body find that energy? And why does that last meal matter or why does it matter even more? What you ate in the week before you go into a longer fast. And of course there's a lot of confusion about what to eat. If you look it up you might find things like you should eat brown rice and baked chicken. You should eat cooked veggies like carrots or broccoli or a tossed salad. And of course you have to have some fresh fruits for dessert. But there's no rationale about why this would be good to prepare you for a fast or if it would. They just buy into the idea that we should eat high carb low fat because they have this fat phobia and then that should get you ready for the fast. And someone else said that you should eat foods high in protein and fiber with complex carbs to fuel you through the fast. Really? As if carbohydrates can fuel a fast. That's kind of missing the point that the benefits of fasting start when you've used up the carbs. So if you load up then you're making it harder on yourself to transition and you're just delaying the benefits of the fast. Someone else said you should have lots and lots of water before a fast. And you should also eat fruits and vegetables because they contain water. You should eat fruits and vegetables to give you carbohydrates and whole grain and fiber because fiber keeps you full. As if you could eat food to get so full that you can carry on a fast longer. That's the opposite of how it works. So water is very important but it's during a fast. It's a continuous thing that you do. There's no way to load up water ahead of time. That's completely missing the point and understanding how the body works. So other people talk about how do you do the fast? Do you only water or can you drink other non-caloric beverages like sparkling water or coffee or tea and things like that. And someone else said that you could have electrolytes on the one hand or if you're really a purest then you should only lick pure pink Himalayan salt. Where did they get this? As if it was some sort of ritual. If the ritual works for you great. If it adds some value but realize that you just have to understand what's happening when you fast, how do you prep for it and then you do what works for your goals. And some people have weight loss goals. Some people have goals to reverse insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes. Other people have religious goals and a lot of people who do it fasting and don't have any of the first reasons they do it for autophagy. Because autophagy is a process in the body that starts to regenerate better. It recycles better. Your boosting immunity, your activating sertuins which are survival genes. So when resources become sparse then the body becomes much much better at using them and that's a really good thing. So autophagy is a big reason. But here's what we really need to understand that everything that normally goes on in the body that uses up resources like breathing and beating your heart and cleaning out your liver and replacing cells and repairing things. All of those reaction continue. Otherwise you would die and those reactions use a lot of energy. So where does the energy come from when you stop eating? Where does the body go to find that energy now? And the answer is that it gradually moves into using fat as a fuel source. And after 24 hours of not having put anything in, then approximately 100% of the energy you make come from body fat. Right? That's of course it's the purpose and if you eat a bunch of carbs then you just delay that transition into using body fat. But is your body used to that? In other words, is your body fat adapted or metabolically flexible? Does it know how to start burning fat when you stop putting carbs in? So if it's not then no problem. Your body will figure it out eventually. It's just going to take a whole lot longer and the biggest issue is that you're going to be miserable in the time being. It's going to give you a lot of discomfort until your body gets adapted. So eventually your body is going to start burning fat because it wants to survive. But the more you can prepare it to do that, the more comfortable that transition will be. And of course you want to be nice to yourself. So how do you prepare your metabolism to burn fat? Well first we have to understand what happens when the body burns fat and what body fat is because body fat is stored as triglycerides. Almost all dietary fat including animal fat and plant fat is triglycerides. And fat is not all fat. People think of this as fat. We hear it's nine calories per gram etc. But that's just not how it works. And there's very very few people who are aware of this and how the body burns through this fat and where we get a little bit of carbohydrate. So a triglyceride has a glyceride or glycerol backbone. And then it has three fatty acids which are pure fat. So these wiggly things are fat and this backbone is not. But this is stored together. When we break this apart we can use the fatty acids for energy as burning fat. But this glycerol backbone we can put two glycerols together and make a glucose molecule. So there's three carbons in glycerol. There's six carbons in glucose. And this is a beautiful thing because now we get fat but we along with the fat we have stored a little bit of something that can turn into glucose. So fatty acid here has about 16 to 18 carbons. These squiggly things at every angle, every bend there's a carbon. And the way we store it, the way animal store it is on average with 16 to 18 carbons. And that size fatty acid weighs about 270 grams per mole. And mole is just a really big number. Don't worry about it. But we have three of those fatty acids. So in one mole of triglycerides, one mole really large number of these molecules we have 810 grams of fatty acids. We know that fat has nine calories per gram. So once we burn through that we have 7300 calories. But then we also have the glycerin glycerol. and that is 92 grams per one mole of triglycerides. This is going to turn into glucose, which has four calories per gram, so that gives us 370 calories. So now we add up 370 plus 7300. We get 7670 and we divide to see 370 divided by 7670 is about 5%. So we can make 5% of energy from glucose out of the stored body fat and out of dietary fat too. The fat is 7300 calories, which is 95% of the energy. So when we're fasting, once we're using almost all or close to 100% of energy from body fat, then we get into a steady state where body just keeps doing what it's doing. And that is it's a stable line of about 95% of our energy from fat and approximately 5% of our energy from carbohydrate from glucose. And we probably burn like a half a percent or 1% of protein if we go long enough, but the body doesn't want to use the protein. So it makes a bunch of growth hormone to spare that protein so that we have the protein to preserve the muscles so we can go and work still. So the way you really prepare the way you eat before a fast is to eat macros that give you a metabolism similar to what you're going to be doing when you're fasting. It's not rocket science. And come to think of it, I think there's a diet that's kind of like that. I've heard about that when you eat really low carbohydrates and really high fat. I think they say that it should only be about 5% of calories from carbohydrate. What's that called? Oh, that's right. The ketogenic diet. And that's where you eat about 5% of your calories from carbs, 20% from protein and about 75% from fat. And when you eat that way, you're very close to mimicking the metabolism of fasting. It's not exactly like that because when you're fasting, you're getting 5% from the glycerol, but if you're eating a little bit of carbs, which you can, it's not a bad idea at all, then you're getting the 5% of carbs plus what you're getting from glycerol. So it's not exactly that, but it's really, really close. The basic principles of fat burning and metabolic flexibility are there. And also your dietary protein, these 20% a lot of that is going to go to building tissue, but the excess that doesn't fit or that you eat extra is going to become glucose. So you're going to have a little bit more. And if we look at that, it would look something like where you're starting off and you're almost at the level of 95. And then after the meal, as you process through the meals, you're using up a little bit of glycogen. And then while you're using glycogen, your body is switching to fat burning, so your fat goes up. And then you're right back at this 95%. And your carbs again, you're going to be a little bit higher than 5%, which is not a problem. Don't be terrified of it. Just realize how much you need. And then as you're using up the glycogen, as that's running out and becoming less available, carb burning goes down. And now you're back down to the 5%. So this would be when you have eaten in the fed state, so as you're processing through the food, you're still going to be close to 95 because you eat mostly fat. Then you're using up some glycogen. And then you are using gluconeogenesis. And of course, when you're using the body fat, only then all of this is gluconeogenesis. This 5% glucose is coming from a source other than glucose. And that's really all there is to it. If you want to prepare for a fast, and you know that this is what's happening when you are in a fast, you're burning only body fat, 95% fat, 5% calories, then the foods you eat to prepare should be similar, which is a low carb or a ketogenic diet. And of course, if you are carb dependent, then you want to go a little bit longer on a low carb diet to become fat adapted before you try this. Again, you could go cold turkey, just jump into the fast, and your body will figure out how to burn fat, but you're kind of miserable in the process. So on the last video I did on fasting, I had a viewer ask a question that they really believed in it, but they were asking what about those people who get physically ill when they go more than three to four hours without a meal. And when people hear about that, they hear physically ill, something must be seriously wrong. They're thinking, does that person have a disease? Is there a condition, a name condition? They must have something. And the answer is no, they don't. But chances are someone would want to make up a disease. So here's one I made up. It's called idiopathic energy peeniosis syndrome. So idiopathic means they don't know what caused it, which is most disease. Energy, of course, is what it sounds like. Peenia is lack of something. Oasis is a condition and syndrome is something to add to make it sound more interesting. So this is a lack of energy, a condition that causes lack of energy that we can't figure out, and then we add syndrome to it. But of course, there is no such thing. We just have to understand how does the body normally make energy? So the number one reason people would get physically ill is that they trained their bodies to depend on carbohydrate. So as soon as you cut that carb out, as soon as you don't top off the carbs and your blood sugar every two to three to four hours, the body has no idea what to do and they get sick. So of course, the degree of illness differs between different people and some people have a harder time with it. But all you really have to do is to untrain the body. And this is going to take a different amount of time for different people, but your body knows what to do. You have an innate intelligence that has the ability to adapt. So if you stop depending on glucose and you train it into more of a low carb high fat diet, then gradually your body will learn to use fat. And the second reason that people get physically ill is usually doesn't happen after three to four hours, but as you go in longer fasting, what happens is that you can lose fluids and electrolytes. And how does that happen? Well, as you stop eating carbs, your body initially has a certain amount of glycogen stored, which binds water. As you stop eating carbs, your body is going to use the carbs in the glycogen. And as you use it up, there's nothing to hold that water in because the glycogen acts like a sponge. And now there's no sponge. The water is released. So you lose fluid, but fluid and electrolytes follow each other. So as you're losing fluid, you're also going to lose some electrolytes. And some people get in trouble because they're losing electrolytes and now they're just drinking more and more water. But with doing that, they're just flushing out more electrolytes. So you need to take them together. The second reason is that as you cut back on carbs, as you go into fasting eating no carbs, your insulin will drop. And high insulin levels will tend to cause the kidneys to reabsorb more sodium. So as your insulin drops, your kidneys reabsorb less, which means you're losing sodium. And we just said that sodium and electrolytes go with water. So as you're losing sodium, you're losing more water. So if you want to try fasting or if you have tried fasting and you want a game changer, and this has been reported to me by many, many people is then you want an electrolyte powder. You want a complete setup of electrolytes. But you also want some trace minerals because electrolytes, that's like the four or five minerals that we need in large quantities that relate mostly to the fluid balance, but we also use trace minerals. We have about 70 of those that we need in tiny, tiny amounts, and those also get lost with the loss of fluid, and they're super, super important long-term. Most people are deficient as it is. But then if you really want a game changer, then you also want to have something in that product with some metabolic support, something that can help you regulate blood sugar, and even better if there's something that helps you with healing. Because you put your body in a fasting state, which is essentially a healing state. Now, if you can improve conditions to support the body a little extra, then you can get even more out of that fasting. So I made a product just like that. It's called ULIGHT, and you can go to uvexia.com to try it out, or you can just click the link below. If you enjoy this video, you're going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications. You never miss a life-saving video.