Fasting at TrueNorth Health Center: Interview with Dr Alan Goldhamer

welcome back to another episode of Christian Natural Health today I'm very pleased to have Dr Alan goldhammer with us Dr goldhammer is an expert in the use

of medically supervised water only fasting he's the founder and director of True North Health Center and has

supervise the fasting and care of more than 25,000 patients uh True North Health is a multi multidisciplinary

practice that includes doctors of medicine osteopathy Chiropractic naturopathy and psychology its

Healthcare Providers treat patients with conditions ranging from high blood pressure to diabetes to autoimmune disorder disorders and Lymphoma the

center is the largest facility in the world specializing in medically supervised water only fasting and a

premier training facility for doctors to gain certification in the supervision of therapeutic fasting Dr goldhammer is a

frequent lecturer author of several books most recently can fasting save your life as well as numerous studies

and case reports published in peer-reviewed journals welcome Dr goldhammer thanks so much for coming for joining thank you for having me with you

yeah absolutely so I'd love to hear some of your backstory how did you become an expert in

fasting well you know I got started really young age I was 16 years old and mostly worried about being a better

basketball player I read some books including Herbert Shelton who said that Health was the result of healthful

living that involved diet sleep exercise and he talked about fasting as a way of

kind of undoing the consequences of dietary excess and it made a lot of sense for me right um it didn't work I

was trying to be a better basketball player than Doug Lyle who was my best friend and uh unfortunately he adopted

the same kind of diet and lifestyle and he's still I'm 65 he still beats my butt every time we play so it didn't work for

the intented purpose it get me interested in this I was also inspired by my uncle who was a medical doctor who

said that um when I mentioned I had an interest in pursuing alternative medicine he said no no nobody in this

family would go to a doctor like that let alone become a doctor like that he said better I should be a communist spy

and my father yeah my father took me aside he said son I don't know anything

about alternative medicine but anything that makes him that angry and mad it can't be bad so you stick to your guns

and good luck to you wow okay so that's an interesting

introduction to it um so for our listeners who might be new to the health benefits of fasting can you give us like

a quick overview of maybe some of the primary mechanisms of how does this how does this help

yeah so fasting is kind of the complete absence of all substances except water and we do it in an environment of rest

to maximize fat and minimize lean tissue loss and there's actually a number of

well demonstrated mechanisms one is weight loss you know yeah people that have extra weight also have what's

called extrav visceral fat yeah so about 10% of excess fat is visceral fat visceral fat is uh hypertrophic it it

gives off inflammatory products it contributes to heart disease diabetes cancer or autoimmune diseases these

diseases that are treated as if they're completely independent envies are actually all tied to the inflammation

associated with visceral fat even though you have to see different doctors to even be diagnosed they're not all

independent unrelated conditions right right right and fasting helps preferentially mobilize visceral fat and

so for a person that loses 10% of their body weight fasting for a couple weeks they would lose 20% of their fat in as

much as 40% of their visceral fat so it's it act visceral fat acts like a tumor and fasting acts like it does with

tumors where you you say you want to fast and lose 10% of your body weight you may lose 50% or 100% of your breast

tumor not necessarily linearly right because the body is breaking things down in inverse order proportion to need so

detoxification is another potential mechanism of fasting people if you do a fat bopsy of people today they have PCB

dioxin pesticide residues heavy metals you'll find all kinds of stuff inside their cells and fasting is able to allow

the mobilization elimination of those mro in fact it's so rapid it can be quite uncomfortable your mouth coats up

and tastes like something crawls in there and dies you have skin rashes you have all kinds of unpleasant symptoms

yet the net total body load uh drop is in fact it's so significant that some

people say don't do it it's too dangerous unless you take their proprietary products then apparently it

makes it safe sure yeah the idea is this is a a biological adaptation the all the

humans that couldn't fast died because from an a bio evolutionary Viewpoint

sometimes spring comes late and if you can't take this bulbous net we have which is our biggest burner of glucose

and figure out an alternative fuel source humans could go about a week without uh fasting like most other

creatures sure but the average 70 kilogram male can fast 70 days not not

that you should but you could because our brain converts to burning beta hydroxy butc acid essential fatty acid

rather than sugar and that allows us to use our fat stores and now we can fast all we've done is taking this very

ancient practice and applied it in a very modern situation that's one where

people are sick from dietary excess yeah and so fasting is a useful way of rebooting the system and then of course

you still have to adopt a health promoting diet and lifestyle it's interesting that the Jews and The Janes

the Hindus the Muslims the Christians and the Buddhists don't agree on everything but they all have a tradition

about fasting because it how you feel about yourself and the world around you yeah and so it's not just Moses David

Elijah and Jesus that fasted for 40 days but our patience as well in fact I've had patients say you fast your patients

up to 40 days on water only do you also teach them to part the Red Sea and I tell them it's all in the wrist you know

it's like nice so for the people that are struggling with the detox process what

do you guys I mean it's medically supervised so do you have processes that you incorporate in order to help with that

or to help with some of the herxheimer reaction type die off experience or what does that look like yeah so uh our

patients first of all you recognize not everybody's a candidate for fasting so we're going through a history examine

lab your standard evaluation to make sure first person's a candidate second of all they're in a controlled setting

they're seen twice a day by staff doctors we're using appropriate lab testing in order to monitor their

physiological response to fasting and they're most importantly in a resting State M because if you're more active in

fasting you'll lose more weight but that weight won't be fat it'll be lean tissue so to minimize lean tissue loss and

maximize fat loss and detoxification we have to be in a resting state we have to be in a controlled setting so you're not

driving and going to work and carrying on normal activities right right uh and then we're monitoring patients as I said

twice a day looking at vitals looking at lab to make sure that they're staying in the fasting State and they don't

progress into the starvation mode fasting is when you have laile reserves starvation happens if you deplete those

serves and then you get you die so we don't do that because you know that would mess up our outcome data so we're

we're very careful about we've had 25,000 patients undergo medically supervised fasting in the last 40 years

and you know we have uh we've actually published a fasting safety study showing

that this can be done safely and effectively if it's done according to the protocol yeah and so why choose

water only versus juice medical food something along those lines what what's the medical foods and juice have

tremendous advantages because you you don't need the level of supervision uh they can be done uh safely and

effectively you don't have the dehydration concerns you can use those in conjunction with conventional medications and so that is the dominant

form of fasting that's done and we do some modified fasting at trunorth as well if a person's not a candidate for

water only fasting we'll put them on 600 calories of vegetable juice and broth and do modified version but when water

fasting is appropriate it's more effective uh than the modified fasting it's

dramatically faster and more effective for example if you're trying to break down a lymphoma tumor you can put a

person on months of juice fasting and not see the changes that we see in a few weeks of water fasting if you're trying

to normalize blood pressure um you they're coming in 220 over 120 cap out

on five meds it you will see a much more dramatic effect with water fasting than

you would with modified fasting for people that are not candidates for water fasting that an issue sure for if

somebody doesn't want to water fast and they're willing to be patient many of these conditions will respond to modified fasting and dietary control but

sometimes it takes so long that you know now you've got people on medications for longer period of time they're having

secondary effects so rapidity is definitely an issue also there's some things like taste NE ration more

powerful with fasting if you're trying to get people to enjoy eating healthy foods you put them on a water fast now good foods taste good yeah it takes

longer to neuro adapt a low sodium diet or a lowfat diet on a feeding program than it does on a water fasting program

makesense so it's just a more intense version and mostly the people we see are people they've tried the diets they've

done the modified fasting they're their their their condition is serious enough it's not responding and I'll give you a great example of a paper we recently

published lipoprotein little a as you know is a cardiovascular risk Mark marker for cardiovascular disease Social

Security only or Medicare only pay for one test because it's not changeable no drug reduces it dietary change is of

limited effect yeah but with fasting we were able to demonstrate uh in one

recent case report 40% reduction lipoprotein Lally after a 10day water fast another patient 5day water fast 100

Point drop in lipoprotein lay and now we're doing with K series it water fasting reduces lipoprotein L vegetarian

diet juice fasting don't have the same effect so there's apparently mechanisms that are being kicked in in water

fasting that are more intense or more effective than our modified programs and it does make sense for example when you

go on a water fast there's dramatic increase in beta hydroxy buric acid which becomes the primary source of the brain fuel that is associated with

increased bdnf bdnf is the neurochemical associated with protecting the brain from oxidative damage so you're going to

see a more profound rise in some of these biochemical changes than you would with modified fast sometimes you don't

need more profound changes do the juice fast that's right yeah if you've done that and it's not enough then sometimes

we turn up the heat Dr McDougall used to refers patients with an apology he would apologize to the patient you would say

look at I'm so sorry but your blood pressure is still too high you got to go over to Gold Hammers and good luck to

you you know because he said we were the punishment for patients that didn't get well with diet alone well I'm sure there

were there are quite a few people who are like fasting oh my gosh that's really int oh yeah particularly prolonged fasting seems kind of insane

yeah but again we've been able to show with published safety studies it can be done safely and effective according to

this protocol and the book confast and save your life details the 22 we've published in the peview literature that

show really dramatic effects for example of high blood pressure we have the largest effect size that's ever been

shown in treating hypertension in humans with an average effect size of inary hypertension of over 60 point drop in

systolic blood pressure and that's not even taking into account they start medicated they end up unmedicated we did

a prospective study with our colleagues from the Mayo Clinic recently it was just published and it was 26 of the 27

people were able to completely normalize blood pressure without medication more importantly at one year followup the

majority were still normal tensive without medication and 76% had maintained their weight loss so it shows

that at least highly motivated self- selected people are capable of act not only getting well but they can stay well

by doing dangerous and radical things like eating well and exercising bed on time and eliminating what in fact are

some pretty serious medications hypertensive medications chronic cough fatigue impotence and premature death in

fact the reason why they don't give everybody hypertensive meds because more people will die from the medication than it'll be saved by blood pressure unless

your systolic blood pressure is raised high enough that the death risk from stroke exceeds the death risk from the medications that's benefit sure

absolutely so and you've referenced lymphoma several times so it sounds like

that's kind of the cancer that responds best to this or is there a broad spectrum of cancer well that's the

cancer that you can publish oh interesting because it's well accepted that chemotherapy doesn't not reduce all

cause mortality from lymphoma so it's not considered unethical to treat a lympo lymphoma patient and get them well

interesting if it was a different condition we wouldn't have published in the British medical journal if that same clinical result had been say breast

cancer because there's an accepted standard uh practice of medicine whether it's effective or not is another issue

but if you step outside the standard of practice uh the journals are not going to publish those results because it's

considered unethical to encourage people to engage behaviors that defer them from standard medical care in the case of

lymphoma it was determined because the conventional treatment is so notoriously

ineffective it was not unethical for us to help that patient get well and then once we published the case report then

it opens up the door and we published a case series and now we've had in this case series that we recently published

not only did we have threeyear follow-ups on the original case we had a patient who had failed chemotherapy and

then responded to fasting and then we had had a stage four lymphoma with Mets in the bones that also responded first

to 21 days and then we brought them back and did a 39 day fast we did a 21-day

fast initially because the oncologist was extremely vehemently opposed to fasting but once they saw the fall up CT

scans they said oh you got to go back and do more of that and then we did 39 days and got dramatically more and the

patients continued to improve so now we have a case series published the next step is to do a clinical trial which

will will divide people randomly and half half of them stay on conventional care and get sick and stay sick half of

them will come and do fasting and get well and then over the long term we look and see who's better the people that get well or the people that stay

sick that may be a slight oversimplification sure yeah yeah no absolutely so the point was because

lymphoma was uh unique in uh in the regard that it was kind of accepted that

treatment didn't work very well it wasn't considered outrageous to do this

and now that we've shown that it's actually safe and effective we can sure publish on that more effectively so it's

not that we aren't seeing having experience with other people we just having trouble you know demonstrating it

sure no that makes sense and now it seems fairly well recognized that cancer is mostly a metabolic issue anyway so is

that well certainly there's strong evidence that cancer is a metabolic disease they talk about the involvement

rather than primarily DNA more mitochondrial based I don't know if that's accepted but it's certainly more

discussed and there's you know some wellestablished authors that have published in books and people are

certainly talking about that right yeah and it certainly makes sense that anything that's going to be in the realm of the metabolic disease is going to

respond very well to fasting like diabetes like cardiovascular so tell us some of your favorite uh cardiovascular

success stories you you talked about hypertension but you know cardiovascular disease in general perhaps well you know

the uh as I said for me I like the fact we've got a a a study with 176 consecutive patients

resolving their hypertension is pretty compelling evidence pretty compelling and a prospective study with 26 out of

27 I think is compelling um I can tell you that one of our first uh patients uh

when we became a fully covered medical benefit from one of the big labor unions in California they made it so that

anybody with diabetes or hypertension could come to our clinic and when they made it available they sent the first

patient over who is a hypertensive 220 over 120 CA out on 5 meds diabetic uh uh

A1C of 10 and uh 75 lbs overweight you know kind of classic yeah and they sent

him over but they didn't tell him what the program was so you know he kind of showed up and

he said wait a second you was looking around he said no I don't think this is a mistake and I said look it's not a

mistake you're I got your name on the list you know you're on the list he says well no no I don't think so I said

you're here to get well he goes no that's not me I'm not not sick and I said well you are sick you have hypertension which is 220 over 120

you've got diabetes you're carrying a kagar on in your belly I said you're not only sick you're at risk for dying and

he said well don't we all have to die and you know I mean that's a valid

point true I said but you know you're on $880 a month worth of medications if we get you healthy you won't need the drugs

he said what do I care I don't pay for the drugs my union does oh wow so I'm thinking oh my gosh I'm going to strike

out with my very first referral and I'm thinking about okay diabetic hypertensive tons of meds male what do

we know yeah so I said you know if we get

you healthy we might be able to do something about your little problem and he stood up and I'm thinking uh oh

because this guy's a big guy you know his neck's bigger than my thigh he says well why the hell didn't you just say so

and so you know we got his attention yeah we give him we have to feed him

though he's a triple cheeseburger guy he tells me he eats triple cheeseburgers but if they put lettuce on it he would

take that off and throw it away cuz he doesn't eat rabbit food oh my but we

give him some food he can't he can't eat the food he's trying to eat the food he's like you know I'm thinking he's got an

esophageal tumor he can't swallow the food I said I said it looks like you're having trouble with the food he says what food he said this is not food he

said this is disgusting he said if I had to eat tasteless s like this I'd rather just

die he says why don't you go out to my truck you get my 12 gauge When I'm Not

Looking just shoot me in the head so we check him in he ends up

fasting um loses 50 pounds and 26 days

he fast 26 days he lose 50 pounds he's off his meds and now he's actually able to eat the food and so I'm sitting down

with him I said it looks like you're doing better with the food now he says yeah your damn Chef's finally getting

the hang of it I said the same food he says no no the stuff you gave me when I came in was disgusting he said this is

not bad so 6 months later I see him at a semiannual we're doing blood pressure screening for the UN I said how you

doing he says I'm doing just fine so now I know what you're talking

people about things they care about so we had over a hundred of those union members come through with diabetes hypertension and what I learned was that

you know um what if you have a highly motivated patient it doesn't matter how much they know what their educational

background is this makes sense to people health results from healthful living it's diet it's sleep it's exercise fasting is a

tool to kind of facilitate the process but it's hard if I send him home with a diet sheet and say eat a healthy diet he

wouldn't have lasted a meal sure yeah now after fasting he could actually neuro adapt he could eat healthy foods

he was we call it educated we it's really brainwashing I mean you know we're doing all this intense education while they're vulnerable during fasting

and so they develop the skills necessary to be able to make the diet lifestyle changes and for those people it works

fabulously that's that's terrific because so many of the people that we as naturopath see they're already the

people that have self- selected they're the people that are highly motivated and they're willing to do all the stuff and so those protocols work great but as you

say there's a population where they're not there and you have to meet them where they're at with whatever their

motivation point is so it sounds like you've probably found good Gotten Good at figuring out what people's motivation

is likely to be what we do is we actually we just take the credit what happens is it's the doctors in the field

that send us their most motivated patients so many doctors maybe only have a handful of highly motivated patients

but they'll send those to us then the patient does all the work the body does all the healing then we take credit for

it it's a great job but in our practice we have maybe 80 P people there but

they're all somebody else's most motivated patients and then they're able to go back to that doctor and get

ongoing support so we get all the credit we have all the fun but the doctor actually does all the work does all the

extra work with the exception of when you get referrals from unions where you don't necessarily get the most motivated

but that's why it's a lot harder I rather have my naturopath and medical doctor uh affiliate doctors referring

because they kind of get the patient all motivated and educated and then they're able to provide ongoing support when we have Union patients we have a tele

medicine practice as well where we'll provide remote support to people that don't have the benefit of having a local

uh doctor that can help them and that does uh help make make up for for some of it uh you know just people need so

much support and education because they live in a world designed to make them fat sick and miserable and not to help

them stay healthy or get healthy and so there's a tremendous amount of motivation and effort that's needed to

live in this world and still adopt Health promoting habits so back to the idea of Cravings changing how long does

that typically take on average do you notice that people well it takes we know from the literature it takes about 30

days on a healthy diet to adopt to a low salt diet but it takes almost 90 days to adapt to a low fat diet to where the

satiation mechanisms keeping with fasting it's much quicker we actually did a taste neuro adaptation study where

we looked at minimum threshold of sugar and salt and we're able to prove that within the context of short-term fasting

that actually changes Good Foods start to taste uh good and so it's days or

weeks rather than uh weeks or months and it's hard to get people to comply with if you say to a patient look I want you

e this diet it's going to taste like C you are going to hate it it's disgusting

tasteless s but you just keep eating it for 3 months and eventually you you'll get to like it that's not going to

happen but if you can get a person to a Fast and Now Foods start to taste good oh your chance of adherence is a lot

better sure absolutely and so you said days are weeks so for some people like maybe a three to five day fast might be

enough for them to have their taste buds change some some people even the intermittent fasting is enough to start

the the process of Shifting the the pallette so when they go on their their prolon or they do their juices they

start to notice changes certainly in in that 3 to 5 to 10 day water fast you're going to see significant changes now

there are some people it takes longer and you know there's biological differences between people and also

different degrees of addiction sure it's like how long does it quit you know think about smoking when people go on uh

fasting smoking by the second or third day there's no more biological Cravings right so it's way quicker than feeding

where it might go on for weeks right yeah um and so for most of our smokers they're shocked at how easy it is to

quit compared to how hard it was when they were when they were free living same thing with alcohol you know

alcoholics go through a much more rapid detoxification process in fasting um so

but it does vary there are some people they're they're you know quicker and easier than others so the people who

come to you you've mentioned the 40-day fast several times what kind of variation do you have is it I I assume

it's patient specific to say how long would be appropriate based on what you on okay so it's going to range anywhere

from 5 to 40 days now 40 days is only 1 or 2% of the population most of the P FAS are between 1 and 3 weeks got it so

typical patients say would say there you have a hypertensive patient on a

diuretic medication their blood pressure is 160 over 110 they're on a one or two

medications that person you're going to have a few days to wean them off their medications they're going to fast for a couple weeks on average maybe as much as

3 weeks and they'll recover it takes half the length of fast recover that patient might be with us a month or might be with us three weeks uh somebody

that has you know FC lymphoma might be with us six weeks uh depending on how significant the problems a lot of it

depends on how long does it take them to get off their meds because you don't fast people on medication so you have to wean them off their medication first now

fortunately for blood pressure for diabetes just changing the diet I mean you start seeing rapid changes right and

for a lot of our patients it's just they have a persistent enough problem they've been working with an naturopath and most

of them just get well just doing outpa care but once in a while somebody a more persistent problem and then they'll send

them in and we'll do the fasting to kind of knock the rest of it out jump start the rest of it absolutely and so you

mentioned that fasting is inappropriate for everybody so what are some of the contraindications for a medically supervised fast like sure well clearly

people that are pregnant or lactating are not going to want to fast you fast when you're lactating you're going to lose your milk production if you have anorex nervosa you may want to fast but

that's not going to be a good thing if you have cardiac instability of atrial fibrillation you've had a recent PE

myocardial infarction uh anything that has you in an coagulant therapy you wouldn't just discontinue that because

you could throw a PE or have a stroke and you don't fast on those medications because medications can become greatly

potentiated during fasting so even things you might be able to get away with feeding you wouldn't do water fasting including herbs and supplements

and other things that would normally be tolerated in the feeding state may not be at all tolerated in the fasting state

if a person has kidney dysfunction where their craty is over 2.0 we're not going to do water fasting because because the

kidneys are an essential part of the detoxification process if you have too much kidney dysfunction um you would

overload that situation and you create uh bad outcome data um if you have uh people that are um on medications that

you can't safely with throw on highd do steroids or whatever you can't just stop the steroids and then start the fast you

have to wean them down uh even neuros meds you know you you got to be careful as you wean those down you can

eventually get people stable and off of them uh as they talk about in the anatomy of an epidemic you know these

serotone Inhibitors deactivate the D2 receptors in the brain and and then when they try to get off them you get acute

anxiety and depression because you're addicted to that response so you have to do that gradually uh so there's a lot of

people that are not great candidates for fasting and that's why we offer a consultive Services where people can

without any cost go on fill out their forms we review their medical history talk to them about is is this even appropriate for them and if so Point

them in the direction of a doctor that can be of help to them making that transition so this is a lot of work I

mean this is not for people that are looking for Quick Fix You Know magic pill potion stuff this is the people

that are serious about getting healthy yeah yeah absolutely so for listeners who are like all right I'm on board uh

but obviously the long-term water fast is not going to be appropriate for somebody might want to do a little bit of fasting on their own but they haven't

done it before do you have any advice for how to begin okay I think everybody should fast on their own at home for 12

to 16 hours every day so that means they should not be eating 3 to 4 hours before they get to bed at night and if they're

trying to lose weight they might extend that by doing some exercise in the morning before they have breakfast that

could give them up to 16 hours of fasting every day day after day after day after day after day cumulatively

that has a huge effect now if they want to extend that that they going to want to work with their medical doctor their

naturopath or chiropractor somebody that can review their History exam in lab make sure they're appropriate candidate

get appropriate baseline lab make sure they're in a resting state and make Provisions for appropriate refeeding

because too rapid a recovery uh to feeding after fasting can lead to post-fasting edem or refeeding syndrome

it can be a very serious problem so if you're going to do a longer fast make sure you're you're the right person and

you're doing it right right uh we review all of that both for the patient and for physicians in our book can fasting save

your life it's written at a relatively high level so a physician would have the resources to evaluate what kind of

screening needs to be done what are they worried about if they go through that book they'll have a good idea of how to help their patients through that process

but I I wouldn't recommend people do long-term water fasting without having gone through the process of History exam

lab and monitoring right yeah absolutely and then so modified fasting like Dr Longo recommends you know may be able to

be done more safely uh for people on their own and so you know you can follow his protocols uh when it comes to

intermittent fasting uh for people that have the benefit of naturopathic Physicians they are usually well vered

in all of the different Alternatives that are available for outpatient um care for for water fasting though that's

really something that's going to be done for for most people best done on an impatient setting where they can get the

kind of Rest In Medical supervision that they need sure yeah and you alluded to the challenge of reintroducing food on

the other end so for some people that like let's say for the the patients that come to you and do the longer term water fast and then you slowly reintroduce the

foods and you send them on their way yes what kinds of instructions do they have on the other end of how to maintain this

well they're going to be at the facility half the length of the f so a 20-day fast they will be under direct

supervision for 10 days it takes half the length of fast to get back to an unrestricted whole plant food SOS free

diet so we're trying to get everybody eating a whole plant food SOS free diet anyway and so during that recovery

period where we start with juices and then go with raw fruits and vegetables and then steam vegetables and starchy vegetables and that that gradual

recovery yeah that's done in an inpatient setting okay that's done if they're doing it at home with in

conjunction with their doctor that's done before they go back to work and before they're engaging all that activity so half the length of the fast

is a general rule some people can be a little bit quicker some people take a little bit more but generally that's a pretty good rule so if you have a two-e

fast you got to plan another week of recovery feeding yeah okay and then on the other end though in terms of people

who are just trying to maintain this they could you see them a year later and hopefully they've managed to maintain

the benefits that they've gotten this is just what kinds of instructions like is there what's it sounds like you're

vegetarian based primarily so we're recommending a whole plant food diet so fruits vegetables grains legums nuts and

seeds Okay and free of added SOS SOS is the international symbol of danger and

it stands for the chemicals that pull the satiety mechanisms in your brain and lead you to overeating which leads to

the fat and the visceral fat and the disease and that's salt oil and sugar so we're eating a whole plant food diet

that's free of salt added salt oil and sugar so no meat fish foul eggs diry products oil salt and sugar basically

anything that gives you Joy or Comfort we're going to remove well that's a good selling point nice and with in instructions in

terms of like reintroducing exercise activity I'm assuming like during the fast they not doing a lot what kind of

process do you have for them to reintroduce activity on the other end by the time were're half the length of the

fast recovery they begin gradual recovery of activity now depending on how conditioned they are or deconditioned so we start with walking

hiking biking swimming stretching we like a variety of activity of possible so I I mean I wish I practice what I

preach I play basketball I play basketball vigorously four times a week I should be doing more a variety of

stuff but we recommend some walking some hiking some biking some swimming some dancing some you know so that we don't

get overuse injuries and we don't get difficulties so that depends on the

individual and again sometimes people have debilities that they have to compensate you know maybe they've had

some degenerative knees they're not going to be running but they might be able to do a a stationary bike or they

might be able to do you know other types of things but the idea is a variety of things that build flexibility strength balance and aerobic conditioning and

exercise is really important if you don't use it you really do lose it there's only a few things that matter diet we recommend a whole plant food

diet exercise we recommend a variety of activities and sleep so we recommend

people get enough sleep they can wake spontaneously feeling refreshed and that's going to be seven eight hours of

sleep it's not going to be four hours of sleep and take a bunch of coffee to get by yeah seriously and so if you do the diet sleep and exercise then we

recommend fasting every day for 12 to 16 hours and then maybe occasionally you do a longer fast and we actually think that

the people that get the most benefit of fasting are actually healthy people using shorter fasting preventatively and

we actually did a study where we looked at cardiometabolic changes in sick people and they were profound but

proportionately they were actually more profound and healthy people even than the sick people and that maybe who gets

the best benefit of the occasional 5 10 day fast is the healthy person that's using it before they fall apart and

instead of waiting until they're in trouble yeah absolutely makes sense so what have I not asked you that you want

to make sure you leave with our audience well you've asked me a pretty broad range but you know the big concept

is health results from healthful living focus on Healthy Living if fasting might be helpful to help facilitate you read

our book can fasting save your life and give us a call if you want a free phone conversation with me to tell help you

decide whether or not that might be appropriate for you yep and so how would people find your number website all of

that where where can they learn more they go to trunorth health.com uh they will get more information than they

probably want we also offer a lot of educational materials we offer our lectures that we stream at the at the

center we we do that that's free it's not monetized we have a Roku Channel that's not monetized where they can get

access to our recorded materials our written materials we have two great books the pleasure trap our original

book and confast and save your life awesome well I will link to all of that in the show notes and thank you Dr

goldhammer this has been great it's my pleasure

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