Fasting and the Ketogenic Diet

Hello you beautiful Kambo people,

Jon here for Planet Kambo. It's a beautiful day, I'm just on the way to the gym and I thought I would make a follow-up video to my fasting video where we can go into a bit more detail about what happens in the body when we fast. I'm rocking the Planet Kambo t-shirt out in public, I thought "why not?", bit of free advertising.

When we fast, and I did touch on this briefly in the previous video, we go into a state called "ketosis" and what ketosis is, is where the body stops using sugar for energy and it switches over so using fat for energy so it's like we have a backup generator inside our bodies for when food is scarce and what happens is there's a metabolic switchover and the body

starts breaking down body fat and it turns it into what's called "ketones". Now ketones are a form of alcohol and your body will use this alcohol for energy instead of sugar so it's quite an amazing thing but we have this this safety mechanism inside of us to stop us starving essentially, which is what our body fat is for. Body fat is stored energy, it's there for times of famine so when we fast our body goes into a state of ketosis and we start breaking down fat

and turning it into ketones and our body runs on these ketones. You can do what's

called a "ketogenic diet" and a ketogenic diet is where we mimic this fasting process by manipulating the different macronutrients in our diet. If you go very, very low carb in your

diet, let's say you eat less than 30 grams of carbs a day, it's different depending on the person, some people can tolerate higher amounts of carbs and stay in ketosis but you

take away those carbohydrates and what's going to happen is your body's going to start to go into ketosis because it doesn't have the sugar for energy so generally a ketogenic diet is very, very low in carbohydrates, it's very high in fat and moderate in protein although the fat and protein you can play with a bit.

My Keto History

I've been in and out of doing ketogenic diets for years now and there are some great benefits and there are some some downsides to it as well. There are some benefits to the ketogenic diet, one is satiation. You get very satiated on the food. Eating high-fat low-carbohydrate food is very, very satiating, it's hard to overeat on a ketogenic diet. When you eat carbohydrates and you eat sugary and starchy foods there's an addictive quality to them and when you eat them you want to eat more and more and more. When you take them away and you eat the

ketogenic foods, you eating high fat and high protein food it's very satiating and we tend not

to overeat. It's really hard to overeat if you eating a proper ketogenic diet. The appetite

suppression is a great benefit and also there is mental clarity. When we're running on ketones we tend to have stable energy, when we're using sugar for energy there's always an up when you eat the sugar and then there's a down. It's peaks and troughs throughout the day based on what you're eating. So you'll eat some carbohydrates you'll get the energy and

then afterwards there's a crash. We're all familiar with the afternoon crash and when you're on a ketogenic diet are you eating ketogenic food you have stable energy. The energy just is

stable throughout the day you don't have these peaks and troughs which is quite a big bonus and something I really like about doing it.

It's a good diet, it feels like you're fasting so your body thinks you're fasting, it's using ketones for energy and with that comes stable energy throughout the day, no peaks and troughs, and appetite suppression. Essentially the ketogenic diet is a fasting mimicking diet but when I fast because I'm already what's called "keto adapted" in that I've already been in ketosis through a diet I can slip into ketosis very easily. If somebody else who's never been in ketosis before, who has never done a ketogenic diet does their first fast, they're going to go through withdrawal they're going to get what's called "keto flu" and this is where the body is still looking for sugar for energy because the metabolic pathways inside them haven't been set up yet for ketosis so if your body's looking for sugar for energy and you take all that sugar away which is what will happen when you fast, you take all the food away, then you're going to feel terrible, you're going to feel really, really awful for a few days until the body starts to produce ketones.

The Keto Flu

When people go on a ketogenic diet there's always an adaptation period and it can be anything from a few days to two weeks and this is again where you take the carbohydrates away and up your dietary fat intake when your body's still looking for carbohydrates for energy because it hasn't switched over yet to being able to use ketones and during this period you can feel pretty awful. For me when I first went keto it lasted a week and then one day you wake up and you feel great but for that week you feel pretty awful. You've got no energy, tired, fatigued, depressed, but then once the body starts producing ketones you feel pretty damn good.

So ketogenic diets give you stable energy, appetite suppression and a generally good feeling. I definitely feel better when I'm ketogenic than when I'm eating sugar but there's some drawbacks to it - athletic performance is one, not everybody finds this but I definitely find this when I take away the carbohydrates my performance in the gym suffers. I'm nowhere near as strong and I don't have as much energy. Some people don't have this problem, some people can be keto and they find that they have just as much energy. But in my experience explosive movements and explosive energy suffer. When you're lifting weights or doing sprinting, this kind of thing, you're gonna suffer unfortunately if you're doing a ketogenic diet but for the average person who doesn't really do that kind of activity a ketogenic diet can be a really good way to live. It's a really nice way of being. You get the reap all the benefits of fasting but while still eating food.

Now I want to talk a little bit about what I've been doing and again I touched on this in the previous video and this is how I do alternate day fasting. What seems to be working really well for me is manipulating my food intake based on my activity and my schedule so today is a feeding day and I'm on the way to the gym. I'm gonna eat a lot of food today because I need it because of my activity so today's a feeding day but then tomorrow I'm going to fast and we're doing a Kambo training. It's day 1 of our September kambo training and I prefer to be in a fasted state. So today when I'm lifting weights in the gym and I'm doing running I'm gonna eat and I'm gonna be in the fed state. Tomorrow through the kambo training I'm going to be fasting and what I've found is when I'm doing any kind of medicine work, if I'm holding space for kambo or if I'm doing it myself or if I'm working with other medicines, working with rapéh, it's much better to be fasted. What I'm doing now is I'm manipulating my food intake based on my activity so I have feeling days where I'm training and doing physical activity and then I have fasting days where I'm in ceremony or I'm working with medicine and this is actually working fantastically well for me.

Most people live in a fed state their whole lives, they never experienced being in a fasted state and actually when you work with medicine being fasted is much, much better. Working

with medicines, when you take them when you're fasted they are completely different, you can really connect with them in a different way and food will block that.

This is something I've found my