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R / subscribe so without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the ask me anything episode. Welcome to another edition of ask me anything AMA episode 13. I'm joined again today by my head of research Bob Kaplan in this episode. We talk about a bunch of things. It was supposed to be rapid fire, but we on the first question got so far off the rails and I think it literally took up half the time but it was basically a question about
Day versus three-day water fasts and then that evolved or devolved depending on how you think of it into all things related to fasting. How do you cope with them all the things that you would measure what's happening physiologically the use of exoticness ketones Etc. We then pivoted off to some other topics such as favorite resources that I have for staying up-to-date on information as it relates to Medicine Health longevity, and we talked a little bit about exercise and
Typically how one might craft an exercise program around longevity. I hope you enjoy this episode of am a 13.
Hey everyone. Welcome to another ask me anything or AMA with Peter a TIA Peter. How you doing
doing? Well, Bob. How are you
Livin the dream ready to ask you some
questions. I'm nervous man. You got that look in your eye that says you've got questions to make a
With me or something. Well, we're just going to do a rapid fire and
and see which one
stick. Okay Rapidfire meeting you're going to be on the stopwatch
or yeah, we could do a two-minute drill if you want and then we'll just go over if we need to
defeats the purpose. Okay, go for it. All right
first question any early observations from your new three day per month fasting regimen.
So I guess for folks who maybe aren't familiar. I'll give a bit of background.
For a great deal of time. I would do a seven-day fast once a quarter and around Thanksgiving last year. I decided to try something different which was more frequent fasts that were shorter and so being completely arbitrary. I was like, well if I was fasting seven days every quarter three days a month is almost the same in terms of total aggregate fast time by the way, Bob. This is not going to be a two-minute answered. Just FYI.
So I decided Well, what if I could do three days a month and I think part of the rationale was twofold one. The 7-Day fasts are quite intrusive just in life in general. I've done enough of them that I can pretty much sail through them, but it's seven days of not eating not drinking and I just thought well every time I do one of those I noticed that by about the second day of the fast my glucose levels really start to normalize.
Analyze as in low levels of glucose. My Ketone levels really start to rise. I started to suspect that maybe around day two and day three is when some really interesting metabolic stuff is going on and basically figured well, what if we just did a slightly less extreme version where we got some of the benefit that we got from the 7-Day fast, but maybe not all of it but Revisited that more quickly. So anyway, that was the rationale for it so actually by total coincidence
Enzyme on day one of this month's fast. We're recording this on what is it March 2nd today? So
this is the March fast and when it was your last meal
my last meal was Sunday evening. So I will break the fast Wednesday evening. So now having done one, two, three, maybe four or five of these shorter fasts. They're definitely easier and that's saying even though the longer
it's you get more and more used to them. You have periods during those longer fasts where you're at least for me. I'm just sort of dragging. I'm kind of wearing it. I'm just not my normal self for the three day fast sites seem to skate through them a little bit easier. That's one thing. I think the other thing is my exercise tolerance seems higher because obviously I'm not subjected to the same degree of glycogen depletion. So,
For example, not the today's workout counts because it was actually the first day after having a dinner. So this doesn't really have fasted work out but I suspect I could do the type of work that I did today, which was two hours and super intense. Lots of sled work lots of deadlifts lots of compound movements. I could do that easily through a three day. Whereas in the longer fast. I still try to do those activities each day, but I really have to reduce the volume and I just find that during the three day fast. Nothing really seems to happen. I
I will say this Bob. I have not done a lab test on myself at the end of a three-day. So that's kind of an important thing I still need to do is do a blood test. I have done a blood test on myself after a four-day fast and I was very surprised to see it looked almost identical to the stuff you and I discussed at the end of a seven or eight day fast and again to reiterate for folks what that
Was insolent of course is basically unmeasurable glucose is very low triglycerides. Not that low again because you're probably you've got so much Flux Of triglyceride to free fatty acid going through that. That's basically your substrate for making all those ketones. So must not like my triglycerides were high, but they were about the same as they are when I'm fed uric acid very high free T3, very low reverse T3, very high testosterone.
Very low. Those are sort of a signature findings. I see after a long fast. Oh igf also, very low and again after a four-day fast. They looked almost the same. So I really do need to get around to doing a three-day post-lab. Maybe I'll do it this time. I'll look at my schedule and see if it makes sense. But that would be kind of interesting thing. So kind of a long answer to a simple question and I hope that's if Isis
the seven-day fast that you were doing before you were doing the nothing.
For the kfk. So you're doing a week of a ketogenic diet going into the fast and then a week coming out. Are you doing anything different or similar with the three day
fast since January? So for the last two months, I have not been on a full ketogenic diet, but I've been much more low carb than I normally have been at least for the previous four or five years. So I'm not doing a very strict keto but
I'm really not eating any sugar. I'm not eating the hardly any starch the only carbs I'm eating or sort of vegetables and my one little Vice is Fiber One cereal with 27 pounds of fiber in it, which is it's amazing how it does not Spike my blood sugar and I mix it in with like some cashew milk and some yogurt, but that's probably sufficient to exclude me from making too many ketones, but just sort of a slightly more strict dietary restriction probably makes it
So easier for me to slip in and out of this fast
see started last night Sunday night you get glucose and BHB on Monday morning. And what does that look like and maybe relative to what you were doing when you're a full keto not have keto
right, right. I didn't today. I'll probably do my first check tonight. I would expect ketones tonight to be in the neighborhood of point five to one and you may recall I use these two devices one of them seems
I think a little bit more accurate at lower levels, which is the Precision extra the keto Mojo seems to run very high at low levels. I'm also going to be testing out a new breath device for measuring acetone. I don't think it's commercially available yet. But Dom D'Agostino who many listeners will recall having been on the podcast and I might add we're going to have Dom back on to do a follow-up because there's been so many great questions for Dom who is one of the most knowledgeable people.
On this topic. But anyway, I'll be testing a breath acetone device that I think is still sort of in the research phase and looking to see if there's any correlation between that and BHP historically the answer is no historically breath acetone. Testing is not very well correlated with blood BHB testing.
So for that test, I've got a breathalyzer here at home. I think it's called a key tonics and it basically it's acetone and I think it gives you Red yellow.
And green and green means you're in let's say it's probably like the piece trips to the urine strips. It's not giving me an output of a number. It's just basically saying you're in deep ketosis you're in moderate or probably undetectable. Does this new device have anything that's a little more accurate than the stoplight or the traffic
light. It's sitting in the box and one of the people who works with me in the practice has done all the wedding on it including talking with the company, so I have to talk with
Her today to actually get the tutorial on it. So I don't know how quantitative versus qualitative it is, but based on an email. She sent me last week after she did a pretty deep dive into it. I'm going to guess that it's actually somewhat quantitative and hopefully pretty impressive look for me personally. I just like checking my blood. I don't really see some great advantage in and checking breath ketones, but I can understand that there are advantages to it one it too.
Going to be a heck of a lot cheaper because when you're checking in the blood those strips really do get expensive and too. There are people who don't like to poke their fingers. So it's probably more accessible. So and we shouldn't lose sight of what the purpose of this type of testing is, which I think is easy to do. It's basically there is a guidepost and I think frankly it's more helpful during a phase when someone is trying to go through nutritional ketosis than it is during fasting during fasting. It's just kind of a way to gamify it a little bit and look I'm as guilty as the next person because
Always checking my ketones three times a day when I'm fasting but I truthfully don't know that that's that relevant. There's nothing I can do about it per se I will say this one interesting observation that I learned in a fast maybe two years ago was I decided to experiment and consume diet stuff Diet Cokes and Trident sugarless gum and stuff like that. So I wasn't adding any calories to the fast and it could be true to an unrelated, but I'll tell you.
I never forgot the lesson which was I've never had lower ketones and I've never felt more miserable during a fast and that by the way can be sort of the power of suggestion. I think sometimes when your ketones are low, you think you feel crappy. Maybe you don't but the numbers clearly were low that is not subject to a placebo effect, whether I felt good or bad might be but that was a sort of an interesting lesson that came from checking those Ketone levels during the fast was I realized hey there's something about these.
Nutritive sweeteners that might be impairing ketosis or at least impairing some aspect of the fast that is increasing Ketone production. So for people who are trying to get into nutritional ketosis, I think these devices are probably helpful and who knows I mean, I think we're probably within the next few years will see continuous Ketone meters just as we have continuous glucose meters
you throw an insulin to
meaning it continuous
insulin. Yeah monitor.
Well, that's an interesting topic.
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