Recently my wife, Merily, and I enjoyed a night out at one of my favorite restaurants, VENETO in Salt Lake City. VENETO specializes in using authentic ingredients, including handmade, non-GMO pasta, made from ancient grain shipped in from Italy, allowing Merily and I to indulge in the occasional pasta dish, something we would never touch unless it was glyphosate-free. Plus, friends who are gluten sensitive can eat the pasta served there too (an example for those who travel to Europe and are able to enjoy grains without issue). I love when restaurants behave with integrity, making it easier for us to dine out without ruining our weight loss goals, healthy diet, or adding significantly to our toxic burden.Think you can’t dine out without ruining your healthy diet? Try these biohacks for maintaining your health goals while on the road!
While at VENETO, we were joined by the owners, married couple Amy and Marco. Amy posed such an interesting weight loss question that we immediately recorded my answer on Facebook Live. Her problem is a classic for many Americans who are trying to meet their weight loss goals or maintain their current weight.
Both Marco and Amy had concerns about how to maintain a healthy weight, which seemed to them has become harder as they grow older. A debate had popped up between their differing ideas of HOW to achieve and maintain their desired weight, and I was asked to give my perspective.
Here’s the interesting thing: Marco and Amy were raised to eat very differently. Marco, a native of Italy, approached eating in a more European way. He tended to eat little to nothing for most of the day, and a big meal in the evening. Pasta was a big part of his childhood, and he doesn’t shy away from eating it now. Amy, born and raised in Utah, was convinced that this wasn’t going to be a good method for weight loss. Everything that she learned about achieving a healthy weight involved a restrictive diet, counting calories, watching macronutrients (carbs, fat, protein). Amy eats small meals frequently throughout the day. She has a long list of foods that she completely avoids. So their question for me was, “Who has the better approach to eating?”
Well, Amy, I’m sorry, but this time I have to give Marco the gold star. His approach to eating is a healthier way to eat, and better for weight loss in the long run. In some countries in Europe, this is simply how one eats. For the rest of us, we gave it a name. This style of eating less often is called intermittent fasting, and it’s an effective tool for addressing so many health problems, including excess weight.
It sounds complicated, but intermittent fasting is actually a very simple concept. The idea is to do a short daily fast, only eating during certain hours of the day. So, for example, you might stop all food intake after 8pm, sleep, wake up the next morning, and, except for non-sugary drinks (pure water, organic coffee, tea, etc), you continue the fast until mid-day, or even that evening. Food for that day is consumed between the hours of 2 and 8pm. As you grow accustomed to intermittent fasting, you can push that window of time to be even more compressed. Some prefer to eat earlier in the day instead of the evening hours, i.e. 9AM to 3PM, and that works too. The key is consistency and finding what works for your schedule and lifestyle.
Intermittent fasting is a dietary approach that we see historically and archaeologically all over the world. I personally eat this way, and have coached many of my clients through it, who have experienced tremendous benefits and increase in health and weight loss. The standard American diet has strayed very far from this approach with disastrous results. Chronic inflammation is on the rise, leading to problems like immune disorders, hormone dysfunction, thyroid disease (see our thyroid detox), cancer, and even weight loss resistance. Intermittent fasting1 is known to be a fantastic tool for managing these issues, but here are a few reasons why it’s specifically beneficial for weight loss.
Let’s take a closer look at Amy’s diet, which involved eating small, frequent meals throughout the day. Now, she’s hardly alone in thinking this is the way to lose weight. We’ve been told by our family doctors and health organizations for decades that the way to lose weight is to restrict caloric intake, and to eat smaller meals more often. But ask yourself this: In weight loss, you’re trying to shed excess fat stores. You want your body to burn through its own fat, right? If Amy is eating throughout the day – even if they’re small meals – when is her body getting the opportunity to burn her stored body fat? Your body will use the energy from the food that you eat before it starts tapping into your fat stores. So, if you’re eating frequently throughout the day, there’s no need to burn stored fat for energy. Your body will simply use the energy from the food you eat, and leave its fat stores relatively untouched. Intermittent fasting solves this problem by forcing your body to burn its own fat. In other words, intermittent fasting helps to push your body into ketosis, or fat burning mode, using fat as cellular fuel.
If you’re only eating within a compressed window of time in the day, your body will switch to using its own fat stores as an energy source until you eat. It will tap into the very fat that you’re looking to burn. In addition, over time you become very efficient at burning fat for fuel. This is one of the healthiest ways to promote true and lasting weight loss, and it can help maintain weight once you’ve reached your desired goal.
If you want to age quickly or gain weight, eat sugar and processed carbs throughout the day. I can think of no better way to age yourself2. When you spike glucose levels, it causes oxidative stress to your cells, effectively aging them, speeding up cell death, and sapping you of energy3. Intermittent fasting, or any kind of fast for that matter, has the opposite effect. Growth hormones and testosterone levels rise, stimulating your body to regenerate itself4. In other words you can feel better, look younger, and have more energy by incorporating regular fasting into your lifestyle.
Contrary to popular belief, you can feel full and more satisfied with a lifestyle that includes regular intermittent fasting. To show you how, let’s go back to Amy and Marco’s different approaches to eating. In the video, Amy explains her restricted calorie diet, how she has a long list of foods that she feels are forbidden, and how she felt guilty even indulging in some of the dishes that we ordered at the restaurant. On the other hand, Marco doesn’t worry too much about eating rich foods. His philosophy is that since it’s his only meal of the day, he should enjoy it and eat to fullness. While I would never say that it doesn’t matter what you eat, considering how contaminated the standard American diet is with pesticides, glyphosate, GMOs, unhealthy fats, and more, I will say that you have a lot more freedom in what you eat using intermittent fasting as a tool instead of a highly restrictive diet, which only promises to get more restrictive as weight loss plateaus and your metabolism slows down.
Remember that intermittent fasting is not starvation, nor deprivation. You’re not eating less, you’re eating less often. When you do eat, you eat delicious, healing foods until you feel satisfied. You won’t have to fear healthy fats, grass-fed meats, organic vegetables, or strategic amounts of healthy carbs. You hold off eating to allow your body to burn its own fat, and then eat until you are full. Does that sound like starvation to you?
We talked a little bit about water fasting in the video. Both Marco and Amy have tried water fasts. There are a lot of benefits to doing water5 or bone broth fasts, even mini fasts as with the 5:1:1 Rule, including:
As I indicated in the video, water fasts really come in handy at the start of a multi-step approach to weight loss. They push your body into ketosis, helping you to adapt more quickly. You’d be surprised how easy water fasts are once you get going…they’re not as intimidating as they sound.
I only just touched on diet variation as an additional tool for promoting weight loss, but we dig into the practice in-depth on CHTV Episode 157. It’s important to approach your journey to health and diet change in steps, not only to give your body a chance to adjust in increments along the way, but also to move at a pace that will better ensure changes you make don’t feel so extreme that you get discouraged and stop. Having said that, diet variation in tandem with intermittent fasting has the potential to totally transform health, downregulating inflammation, and helping you to become efficient at both burning fat for energy and burning glucose for energy.
It’s all about having a well-adapted body, able to switch between burning fat and sugar seamlessly. Diet variation most closely resembles how humans ate throughout history with food being plentiful at certain times and scarce during others. The human body is made to handle feast or famine periods and varying foods by season. Contrary to what the markets would have you think, apples for example, don’t grow year round. They’re harvested in the fall and kept warehoused for sale through the year. You wouldn’t believe what gets sprayed onto produce to keep it from rotting.
Combining seasonal eating with feasting and fasting periods is the best way I know to imitate how our ancestors ate. Using these methods, you can become highly adaptable, able to switch from a state of ketosis to burning glucose for fuel with ease. Specific diets like an autoimmune diet can also support specific health situations.
It’s important to work with a trained practitioner to determine what diet strategies will work best for you. In terms of where intermittent fasting fits in with transforming how you eat, one multi-step plan might look like this:
Now, toxins do play a role in weight issues. Build-up of cellular toxins, including heavy metals and other environmental chemicals, drives inflammation, blunts hormone receptivity, and can lead to many chronic disorders, including weight loss resistance. If your toxic burden is high, PompaCore Cellular Detox™ is a key piece of the puzzle. This is why having that coach on your team is so vital. Don’t go it alone!
When it comes to weight loss, controlling a chronic disorder, detoxifying cells, or even maintaining the amazing health that you’ve already achieved, there’s never just one answer, no magic pill or protocol that works for everybody. This is why I advocate so strongly for a Multi-Therapeutic Approach, using both the best in modern science and ancient strategies for restoring cellular function. Weight loss is no different. Often a multi-step process is necessary for real and sustainable results.
Coconut Cream:
In the past, there has been a common theme in the discussion of what health disasters might be inherited from our familial gene pool. The thought process goes something like this: my mom had cancer, and so will I; my whole family has thyroid challenges, and so will I; I come from a family of diabetics, and that will ultimately be my fate—what a bleak outlook.
Thankfully, much research has come to the forefront to disprove these theories, including the science of epigenetics. Your genetics are NOT set in stone. If your mom has diabetes, that may not be your ultimate diagnosis later in life.
We can now free ourselves from the dread that permeates generations who worry about heart disease, diabetes, thyroid challenges, cancer, and weight loss resistance and link these challenges to lousy family genetics. Now we can celebrate a newfound understanding that it is mostly our environment and our mindset that determines our future, NOT our genes.
In recent times, many studies1 are proving this new premise. And the evolving science of epigenetics (the study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression) reveals facts about our gene pool that have never before been discussed. These studies are now handing us the responsibility to care for our bodies and emotions, so unhealthy family genes do not get expressed.
For example, the Human Genome Project started in 1988 to map out genes to lead to some breakthrough studies in healing many incurable illnesses. But what they found was surprising. Not only did we find that human beings possess fewer genes than previously documented, the very genes we thought we knew so much about operated quite differently.
In 1988, John Cairns, a British Molecular Biologist, proved that our environment in which we live and to which we are exposed has everything to do with how our genes express2.
In an article written by Konstatin Eriksen entitled “The Science of Epigenetics: How Our Minds Can Reprogram our Genes”3 in Wake-Up World, he writes the following about Carins amazing discoveries:
“…Cairns took bacteria whose genes did not allow them to produce lactase, the enzyme needed to digest milk sugar, and placed them in petri dishes where the only food present was lactase. Much to his astonishment, all of the petri dishes had been colonized by the bacteria within a few days, and they were eating lactose. The bacterial DNA had changed in response to its environment.
This experiment has been replicated many times, and they have not found a better explanation than this obvious fact – that even primitive organisms can evolve consciously.
So, information flows in both directions, from DNA to proteins and from proteins to DNA, contradicting the ‘central dogma.’ Genes can be activated and de-activated by signals from the environment. The consciousness of the cell is inside the cell’s membrane. Every cell in our bodies has a type of consciousness. Genes change their expression depending on what is happening outside our cells and even outside our bodies…”
Let’s elaborate. All humans share about 99% of the same DNA. We all have the same genes, and that is why we don’t look like rabbits. But since that is so, why do some people get sick and others do not?
The epigenome (a multitude of chemical compounds that tell the genes what to do) can be thought of as the body's software, and the genes act as the hard drive from our parents. We inherit a certain set of genes, and some get turned on or expressed, and some do not.
Gene expression is determined by many factors: our environment or habitat, which may either be healthy or polluted, our lifestyle (junk food, organic food, tons of sugar, healthy fats, to name a few), and our habits (too much alcohol, staying up too late, getting enough sleep and creating a peaceful environment).
A study at Duke University4 took 2 sets of identical twin mice. Researchers separated mice into 2 groups and gave them the same diet and exercise routine; but, one thing was different. One set of identical twin mice were exposed to a carcinogenic chemical called BPA, found abundantly in our environment (often in plastic bottles and personal care products).
What was the result? In the mice exposed to BPA, it turned ON a gene called the agouti gene. The agouti gene predisposes one to obesity, thyroid, and cardiovascular disease. The exposed mice became obese, their fur turned an unhealthy color of yellow, and they produced offspring that were obese from birth.
The study's positive outcome was they were able to turn off the agouti gene with the addition of certain nutrients that turned on their capabilities of methylation. When this occurred, even though the mice were still exposed to BPA, the next generation of mice did not inherit the turned on agouti gene.
We must increase our methylation capabilities to help protect our cells from a polluted environment. Methylation is the process by which the body turns stress hormones on and off. If you have methyl group depletion, the body will have more toxins and inflammation to turn on bad genes.
In a previous article, I wrote about methylation, saying this: “…a researcher and doctor named Dr. Alan Vinitsky theorized that due to the importance of methylation…and its multiple functions, there must be a prioritization of the valuable methyl groups (used) in many life-sustaining functions. There is a hierarchy of importance…and survival is always at the top… if methyl groups are lacking, your body will use them first to adapt to stress…and if there are a lack of methyl groups, (other) needs are not met, and new problems arise such as DNA damage (cancer) or gene’s susceptibility to (turn on bad genes)…”
The product I often use to increase methylation is called MoRS by Systemic Formulas. In the same article discussing methylation, I wrote, “The methylation cycle is very complex, with many rate-limiting factors that can cause depletion. MoRS is the only product I know of currently that addresses all of them. Using certain active forms of methyl donors utilized in the cell without being converted to another form, such as 5 methyltetrahydrofolates, is important because many people genetically do not have enzymes to make the conversion (known as the MTHFR genetic SNP) and are predisposed to methyl depletion. These individuals are more prone to toxic build-up, and need to take the correct product with the active forms of the B vitamins such as MoRS…”
MoRS is an important product to increase methylation I use for my clients. We can only protect ourselves so much from our environment. And when we are inadvertently exposed to daily chemical stressors or silver amalgam fillings in our mouth (heavy metals damage methylation capabilities), we can take MoRS as an insurance policy. Our cells count on methylation for proper function, and we want to do everything possible to keep them healthy and thriving.
Brilliant biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton, author of “Biology of Belief,” discusses how day-to-day thoughts and attitudes can change gene expression. In an article based on my interview with Dr. Lipton, I wrote, “…(Dr. Lipton concludes that) our bad thoughts have the ability to create inflammation and our good thoughts can reduce inflammation. In fact, our brain is the chemist: it creates the chemistry of our blood. When we are in love, we release oxytocin and dopamine (“feel good” neurotransmitters) that create a feeling of immense well-being and stability.
Conversely, when we have angry, worried thoughts that create fear and anger, those stress chemicals cause inflammation. It shuts down the growth of cells; in other words, fear and anger kill cells! Cells only see the picture you have in your mind; they don’t have the ability to see the real world.
So the chemistry of the blood changes with the pictures in mind. As it views this picture, the brain creates certain neurochemicals consistent with the picture, thus turning it into biology.
(When) the mind misinterprets the world, our cells don’t know it is not true, and fear shuts down all cellular protection. And in this state of fear and anger, when we have an infection, our cells can’t protect themselves, and stress shuts down our immune system to conserve energy. Every day, as we bath ourselves in stress, it systematically shuts down our protective forces…”
The stunning conclusion is that negative belief systems, self-talk, unconscious limiting beliefs, and low esteem can turn into bad genes. I suggest reading Dr. Lipton’s “Biology of Belief” and following his suggestions on turning around unhealthy thought patterns.
The study of epigenetics is exciting and motivating. Unfortunately, the conventional world is not fully embracing this science (yet anyway). Many docs still believe you get cancer because your parents had cancer. But now we know that few diseases are purely genetic, meaning a complete chromosome error. I am talking about thyroid disease, diabetes, weight loss resistance, etc., is that we can look to the science of epigenetics for answers. The discussion we need to have is how to turn these bad genes off.
We live in an instant gratification society, and most patients want instant results. But we have to remember that it took generations and one’s own lifetime to turn bad genes on, and it will take time and commitment to get them turned off. It’s easy to blame our parent's and grandparent’s genes, but it most probably was their lifestyle, diet, environment, and thoughts that created an unfavorable gene pool.
Another well-known study followed 2 identical twin females. One got cancer, and the other did not. Again, they were able to trace it back to huge variances in their lifestyle and environment. We have to keep in mind that we need to change our environments and remain as toxin and stress-free as possible.
The TIME article, “How Exercise Can Change your DNA,”5 explained that certain types of high-intensity exercise would affect enhancer genes (genes involving carbohydrate metabolism). This has to do with how muscles use energy to burn fat. So, with high-intensity exercise, we can turn on genes that make us efficient fat burners, turn up our metabolism and make better use of insulin—another reason why exercise positively affects diabetes.
In the research study referred to in the article, it is so difficult to study exercise because so many variables affect our genes. How do we know which exercise is affecting the genes? In the study, participants exercised only one way; on a bike using either the right or the left leg, they were able to isolate what genes were turned on.
If we want to lose weight, high-intensity exercise (or burst training) can turn the genes that make us better fat burners and help us utilize insulin more effectively.
Watch my video on burst training and get your heart rate up to 80% maximum. When you do burst training, exercise hard for at least 30 seconds to 2 minutes, then take 1-2 minutes to recover and repeat that cycle at least 3-4 times. I suggest bursting 2-4 times per week, always allowing adequate recovery time.
Obviously, it is pretty impossible to live in a chemical-free, stress-free environment. But again, MoRS helps to turn on methyl groups that determine how we adapt to stress, activate positive stress responses, and increase methylation. If we are properly methylated, we can normally respond to stress and adapt. Disease boils down to the ability or inability to adapt to stress: when we don’t adapt, we turn on bad genes.
What about your toxic bucket? We all have different sized “toxic buckets,” meaning that we have different abilities to tolerate stress and handle toxic exposure, much of which is determined by our methylation capabilities.
If you picture a bucket with stressors inside, they either accumulate or get cleared away. But chemical stressors tend to bio-accumulate in this bucket, and with any extra stress or toxic exposure, the bucket overflows. We need to empty our toxic buckets that can turn off our bad DNA. PompaCore Cellular Detox™ will help to empty chemical stressors from the bucket.
One thing is definite: we must detoxify our cells. I am not talking about a colon cleanse or a liver cleanse, although there is nothing wrong with doing those cleanses. I am referring to is a process called PompaCore Cellular Detox™.
Please read my article about the 5R’s of PompaCore Cellular Detox and Healing™. R2 is Regenerating the Cellular Membrane. We now know that it is the cell membrane that turns genes on and off. In fact, it is the cell membrane that holds the intelligence.
The cell membrane looks at your environment, determining whether it is good or bad, and then changes the way genes are expressed. On the outside of each cell, attached to the cell membrane, are different hormone receptors. If they sense toxins, this registers, and it changes the nucleus of the cell, thus affecting the genome.
My 5R’s of PompaCore Cellular Detox and Healing™ are a roadmap for fixing cellular dysfunction. We have many different support products to change each part of the cell called core cellular products. And if you read these articles (R1, R2, R3, R4, and R5) explaining my 5R’s, you can understand how to fix your genome.
I recently implemented a very comprehensive 3-month program to detoxify cells called the PompaCore Cellular Detox™ program. It not only provides 3 months of the best nutritional and herbal support possible, but it educates you through a series of articles and videos that are unparalleled. It is well worth your investigation.
You can change your gene expression, but you have to change your environment, clean out your toxic bucket and empty your stressors. Only then will you start to adapt better to any stress (physical, chemical, or emotional). Eventually, you can start to control your DNA. High-intensity exercise, a healthy diet, and taking cellular support products will help you reach this goal over time. If you do, in a year from now, your gene expression could be quite different.
