Tim Ferriss

So the reason you want to fast for at least 16 hours is to deplete your liver of glycogen.

And so you get that metabolic switching into using ketones.

And that's relevant to mental health because most people will experience a lot more mood stability.

All right.

So that's the first thing, intermittent fasting.

If you want to talk about fasting, we can talk about it because I've done much more extreme versions of that.

But intermittent fasting, I think, is pretty easy in the sense that you don't have to change what you eat.

You're just changing when you eat.

not because i'm trying to intermittent fast just because i don't have time to eat yeah but um so what i mean what are the benefits of it yeah so i'll say a few things the first is what you're discussing like intermittent fasting by default is seems to be super common in

former, like, tier one military.

Like, a lot of my friends, almost all of my friends who are former SEALs or former Marine Force recon, they're just like, oh, yeah, I forgot to eat, and I'm just gonna eat at 5 p.m., right?

And they're not affected by it, which leads me to wonder, like, how much of it is...

cultivated in the course of being in service versus like part of what allowed you to make it through is that type of physiological resistance where you have like a certain degree of stability i don't know so the benefits are and we're still so far from understanding these things well in part because it's very hard to get intermittent fasting you can do but doing extended fasting studies in humans is incredibly difficult for getting ethical approvals from irb and so on but

I'd say the simplest way of describing it is, and we could certainly talk more about this, but if you look at, say, my family and very common neurodegenerative disease,

It's not just tangles and plaques and so on that cause problems.

It's metabolic dysfunction.

So if you have chronically elevated insulin, glucose, et cetera, it's basically an amplifier for any possible problems, and those compound over time as your body just accumulates garbage.

It's a very simple way of putting it.

But if you are developing the metabolic machinery for that switching I was talking about, your body gets better at things like autophagy, mitophagy, sort of cellular self-cleaning.

So your cleanup crew gets better, if that makes sense.