Welcome back Kambo warrior, this is Jon for Planet Kambo. In today's video I'm going to talk about fasting. Fasting is something that I've been doing for quite a long time and in this video I'm just going to give you a brief overview of how I fast and then I'm gonna make a subsequent video where I'll go into a bit more detail of how fasting works and what's actually happening in the body when you fast.
I've been doing intermittent fasting for many years, doing away with the old “eating three four or five meals a day” and all of that kind of thing and what I've found is actually you can eat one or two meals a day, eat all your calories or all your food in one or two big meals and you don't notice any difference. Your body will still digest it in the same way, it's just more convenient and you haven't got to worry about cooking and eating all the time so I when I first got got into intermittent fasting I went from doing four meals a day down to two meals a day. I would just skip breakfast and I'd have lunch and dinner. I did that for a long time and then after that I got into doing what's called OMAD which stands for "one meal a day" and then what I would do is I would just fast all day and I'd have this really big dinner and that was very convenient and actually I really liked doing that because when you fast all day not only are you more productive when you're fasting but you really look forward to that evening meal and it really builds up an appreciation of food and not taking it for granted. When we're in a fed state and we're eating all the time you start to take food for granted. Do a 24 hour or longer fast and you'll see you really start to appreciate food.
What I've been doing more recently over the last couple of months is I've been getting into some longer and more intense fasting so I've been doing 48-hour fasts 72-hour fasts and I've done some longer 5 day fasts. The benefits of fasting right off the bat, the main one is you lose weight. It's a really really easy way to lose weight if you feel like you want to drop a few pounds. It's much easier than dieting. Dieting would be where you reduce your calories by a certain amount or your food intake by certain amount every day and then over time you would slowly lose weight. When you fast you drop a lot of food energy very, very quickly so if you fast for three days you've just dropped three days worth of food energy or calories as opposed to doing it when you're dieting that could take you weeks to drop to drop that amount so fasting is a very quick and natural way to lose weight.
Human beings are designed for long periods of fasting, we have a mechanism inside of us that is for survival. Body fat is stored energy, that's literally what it is, it's survival food for when we're in times of famine, so all you're doing essentially when you're fasting is you're simulating a famine and your body will start to burn its body fat for energy. Obviously if you're very lean you can't do long fasts and I'm getting quite lean now so doing a five day fast becomes quite difficult because the leaner you get the more your body starts to think that you're actually starving even though obviously you know you're not, but it starts to think that, so the fasts get more and more difficult but if you're carrying a lot of body fat, fasting for a week, once you get over the initial fast that you do, it's really not that difficult to do and actually it's much easier than dieting.
You're just not hungry when you're fasting, hunger goes out the window once you get into a state called "ketosis" which I will go into in more detail in the next video. Once you're into ketosis you are not hungry and your body is literally turning your body fat into energy and it feels really good. You get what's called the "faster's high". When you're fasting it feels really, really good not to be digesting food all the time. My current routine is I do forty-eight hour fasts. I have a really big meal and then I fast for 48 hours and I feel great.
I sleep better, I've got loads of energy, I've got loads of mental clarity so this feels like a more natural way for a human being to eat. Now I'm not saying you have to do what I'm doing, this is just the way I feel about it. Doing a 48 hour fast, or or minimum of a 24 hour fast where I just eat one meal a day and fast the rest of the time that is really convenient and for me I feel really, really good doing that so essentially you digest all your food and then you're having a break. You're giving your body a break from digesting food and it feels really good to be empty some of the time. We spend all of our lives in this fed state, or most of us do anyway, those people that don't fast, we spend all of our lives literally digesting food. The moment it's digested you eat more and then digest that food, eat more etc. When you get into fasting you're able to go for long periods of time without eating and when you've digested all your food and you're empty your body gets a chance to do some housekeeping which it doesn't get to do when you're eating all the time.
One of the main differences I've noticed is my sleep has improved a lot. I used to like to fast all day and then have a really big dinner or when I was doing two meals a day I'd eat lunch and dinner and I'd really enjoy eating dinner. I'd look forward to it but I wouldn't sleep as well. In the morning I'd wake up with a food hangover which I didn't realise was a food hangover at the time but now I don't do that anymore I realise how much better I feel when I wake up because when you're sleeping at night your body has a lot of work it needs to do, housekeeping and recovery work while do you sleep and when you've got a belly full of food your body needs to use some energy to digest that food and it takes energy away from what the energy it needs to do housekeeping.
I found that by fasting and also by eating earlier in the day when I do eat I feel much better. When I eat my meal now I eat it usually between 11:00 and 13:00 and then I fast and then by the time I go to bed I'm empty. I fast the next day so we're gonna go to bed I'm empty again and my sleep has improved a lot. The only time my sleep isn't as good, and this is what I've noticed as I've lost weight is that as I start to do longer fasts after a couple of days sleeping becomes more difficult because I'm too lean now to be able to do these longer fasts but doing 48-hour fast works really, really well for me. It's really convenient and I love how I feel on it.
I'll make another video where I'll go into some more detail about what's actually happening with fasting but if it's something you've never done before you can start firstly by reducing your meal frequency, so if you're used to eating three or four meals a day reduce it down to two meals a day then reduce that down to one meal a day and once you're doing one meal a day going from one meal a day to then fasting for 48 or 72 hours isn't that difficult because all you're doing is just skipping one meal. When you're eating four meals a day and then trying to go from four meals a day to doing longer fast it's more difficult because your body is expecting food four times a day, but once your body gets used to expecting food once a day then going from that to a longer fast is quite easy.
Talk soon!
Jon